0715-24 NY Times Crossword 15 Jul 24, Monday

Bill’s time: 4m 16s

Bill’s errors: 0

Today’s Wiki-est Amazonian Googlies

Across

1 Environmentalist Thunberg : GRETA

Greta Thunberg is an environmental activist from Sweden who came to national attention in her homeland when she was just 15 years old. In 2018, she went on strike from school and paraded with placards in front of the Swedish parliament to pressure the government to take stronger action to address climate change. She then took part in demonstrations across Europe, and became a regular speaker at such events. She addressed the 2019 UN Climate Action Summit at the UN headquarters, opting to sail to New York from Sweden, rather than fly. When she was named “Time” Person of the Year in 2019 at 16 years old, Thunberg was the youngest person ever to be so honored.

6 Concluding musical passage : CODA

In music, a coda is primarily a passage that brings a movement to a conclusion. “Coda” is Italian for “tail”.

14 Diameter halves : RADII

“Radius” (plural “radii”) is a Latin word, as one might expect, a word meaning “spoke of a wheel”. Makes sense, huh?

16 ___ in a blue moon : ONCE

As there is a full moon once every four weeks, approximately monthly, there are usually twelve full moons in any given year. However, every 2-3 years, depending on the phase of the moon at the beginning of the calendar year, there may be a thirteenth full moon. The “extra” full moon is called a “blue” moon, although no one seems to really know why the term “blue” is used, as far as I can tell. Which of the thirteen full moons that is designated as the blue moon varies depending on tradition. My favorite definition is from the Farmer’s Almanac. It states that as each of the seasons normally has three full moons (one for each calendar month), then the season with four full moons is designated as “special”, then the third (and not the fourth) full moon in that “special” season is the blue moon. Complicated, huh?

20 Rep.’s opponent : DEM

The modern-day Democratic Party was founded in 1828, when supporters of Andrew Jackson broke away from the former Democratic-Republican Party during the presidency of John Quincy Adams. That date makes the Democratic Party the oldest voter-based political party in the world. Andrew Jackson became the first Democratic US president, in 1829.

21 Surgery souvenir : SCAR

A souvenir is a memento, a token of remembrance. We imported “souvenir” from French, in which language it has the same meaning. The term comes from the Latin “subvenire” meaning “to come to mind”, or literally “to come up”.

26 Drink with tapioca pearls : BOBA TEA

Bubble tea, sometimes called “boba tea”, is a tea-based drink from Taiwan. The “bubbles” are chewy tapioca balls that are usually added to the drink.

The cassava plant is a woody shrub native to South America grown largely for its carbohydrate-rich tubers. In fact, cassava is the third largest food source of carbohydrates (for humans) in the world. Ordinarily, that carbohydrate is extracted from the plant and dried as flour, and is known as tapioca.

35 Supposed sighting in the Scottish Highlands : LOCH NESS MONSTER

Scotland’s Loch Ness is famous for its fabled “monster”, referred to affectionately as “Nessie”. The loch is the second-largest lake in the country (Loch Lomond is the largest). Loch Ness takes its name from the River Ness that flows from the loch’s northern end.

42 Palindromic boy’s name : OTTO

The three most famous palindromes in English have to be:

• Able was I ere I saw Elba
• A man, a plan, a canal, Panama!
• Madam, I’m Adam

One of my favorite terms is “Aibohphobia”, although it doesn’t appear in the dictionary and is a joke term. “Aibohphobia” is a great way to describe a fear of palindromes, by creating a palindrome out of the suffix “-phobia”.

43 Desert or tundra : BIOME

I tend to think of “biome” as another word for “ecosystem”.

Tundra is an ecosystem that is treeless, or very nearly so. There are three types of tundra. Arctic and Antarctic tundra can’t support the growth of trees as the ground is pretty much frozen. Alpine tundra cannot support tree-growth due to high altitude.

45 Melancholy feeling : SADNESS

Melancholy is a dejection, depression of spirits. Melancholia was one of the body’s four basic substances of medieval science, the so-called four humors. All diseases were caused by these four substances getting out of balance. The four humors were:

• Black bile (melancholia)
• Yellow bile (cholera)
• Phlegm (phlegma)
• Blood (sanguis)

48 Ben & Jerry’s ice cream flavor with bananas and walnuts : CHUNKY MONKEY

Chunky Monkey is a Ben and Jerry’s flavor of ice cream that consists of banana ice cream with fudge chunks and walnuts mixed in.

56 Pond organism : ALGA

Algae are similar to terrestrial plants in that they use photosynthesis to create sugars from light and carbon dioxide, but they differ in that they have simpler anatomies, and for example lack roots.

57 Colorful marine creature … or a phonetic hint to the circled letters in 17-, 23-, 35- and 48-Across : SEA ANEMONE

The name “anemone” means “daughter of the wind” in Greek, and at one time it was believed that the wind was what actually caused the flower to bloom. The sea anemone is named for the terrestrial plant even though the sea anemone isn’t a plant at all. It is a predatory animal found on the ocean floor.

62 Scrabble pieces : TILES

The game of Scrabble has been around since 1938, and is the invention of an architect named Alfred Mosher Butts. Butts was born on April 13th, and we now celebrate National Scrabble Day on April 13th each year in his honor.

Down

1 Crossword diagram : GRID

Arthur Wynne is generally credited with the invention of what we now know as a crossword puzzle. Wynne was born in Liverpool, England and emigrated to the US when he was 19-years-old. He worked as a journalist and was living in Cedar Grove, New Jersey in 1913 when he introduced a “Word-Cross Puzzle” in his page of puzzles written for the “New York World”. The first book of crossword puzzles was published by Shuster & Shuster, in 1924. The collection of puzzles was a huge hit, and crosswords were elevated to the level of “a craze” in 1924 and 1925.

2 Marathon, e.g. : RACE

The marathon commemorates the legendary messenger-run by Pheidippides from the site of the Battle of Marathon back to Athens, and is run over 26 miles and 385 yards. The first modern Olympic marathon races were run over a distance that approximated the length of the modern-day Marathon-Athens highway, although the actual length of the race varied from games to games. For the 1908 Olympics in London, a course starting at Windsor Castle and ending in front of the Royal Box at White City Stadium was defined. That course was 26 miles and 385 yards, the standard length now used at all Olympic Games. Organizers of subsequent games continued to vary the length of the race, until a decision was made in 1921 to adopt the distance used in London in 1908.

4 Altoids container : TIN

Altoids breath mints have been around since 1780, when they were introduced in Britain. The famous tin in which Altoids are sold is often reused for other purposes. The most famous use is as a container for a mini-survival kit.

6 Country with a maple leaf on its flag : CANADA

The current design of the Canadian National Flag, known as “the Maple Leaf”, has been in place since 1965. The design made its first appearance on February 15th of that year, and so that date is celebrated annually as National Flag of Canada Day.

7 Egg-producing organ : OVARY

The ovaries are the female reproductive organs. Most female vertebrates have two ovaries. However, only the left ovary develops in female birds, with the right remaining vestigial.

11 Marie of Versailles : ANTOINETTE

Marie Antoinette was the wife of Louis XVI, the last king of France. Marie Antoinette was the fifteenth of sixteen children born to the Empress Maria Theresa of Austria. The marriage to Louis, her second cousin once removed, was arranged while the two were very young. The prospective bride was “handed over” to the French at a border crossing in 1770 and two weeks later she was married to the future king. Marie Antoinette was just 14 years of age at the time, and Louis only a year her senior. Both Louis and Marie Antoinette were doomed to lose their heads courtesy of the guillotine during the French Revolution.

Versailles is a city located just 10 miles from the center of Paris. It is famous as home to the magnificent Palace of Versailles. The palace started out as a hunting lodge built in the village of Versailles in 1624, built for Louis XIII. Louis XIII extended the lodge into a full-blown château, but it was Louis XIV who expanded it into one of the largest palaces on the planet. Louis XIV moved the royal court from Paris to Versailles starting in 1678.

13 Conical home : TEPEE

A tepee (also written as “tipi” and “teepee”) is a cone-shaped tent traditionally made from animal hides that is used by the Great Plains Native Americans. A wigwam is a completely different structure and is often a misnomer for a tepee. A wigwam is a domed structure built by Native Americans in the West and Southwest, intended to be a more permanent dwelling. The wigwam can also be covered with hides but more often was covered with grass, reeds, brush or cloth.

22 Descendant : SCION

“Scion” comes from the old French word “sion” or “cion”, meaning “a shoot or a twig”. In botanical terms today, a scion is used in grafting two compatible plants together. In grafting, one plant is selected for its root system (the “rootstock”), and the other plant is selected for its stems, leaves and fruit (the “scion”). The term scion migrated naturally into the world of family history. A scion is simply a descendant, a son or a daughter and therefore a branching point in the family tree.

23 Bills and coins : CASH

Our word “cash” comes from the Middle French “caisse” meaning “money box”.

25 Voice between soprano and tenor : ALTO

The voice types soprano, alto, tenor and bass can be abbreviated to the initialism “SATB”.

28 Barbecue option for a vegetarian : BOCA BURGER

The Boca Burger first hit grocery store shelves in 1979 (marketed as the “Sun Burger”), making it one of the first veggie burgers to be mass produced. They are soy-based meat alternatives.

31 Cable channel that airs “Family Feud” reruns : GSN

Game Show Network (GSN)

“Family Feud” is an American game show that has been remade in countries all over the world. We even have a version in Ireland, one that we call “Family Fortunes”.

34 Super Mario ___ : BROS

“Super Mario” is a series of video games created by Nintendo that features the character Mario, and his adventures in the Mushroom Kingdom.

48 Tourney winner : CHAMP

“Tourney” is another word for “tournament”. “Tourney” comes from the Old French word “tornei” meaning “contest of armed men”, from “tornoier” meaning “to joust, jilt”.

49 Like Swiss cheese : HOLEY

“Swiss cheese” is a relatively generic term for a type of cheese produced in various countries and not necessarily in Switzerland. What they all have in common though, is a resemblance to the original Swiss Emmental cheese.

50 NASCAR circuits, geometrically : OVALS

The acronym “NASCAR” stands for the National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing. The association is actually a privately held company that was founded in 1948 and is headquartered in Daytona Beach, Florida. NASCAR is very, very popular and commands the second-largest television audience of any professional sport in America, second only to football.

53 Hindu festival of colors : HOLI

Holi is a Hindu festival, one celebrated in spring, that is also known as the Festival of Colours.

54 Half of the digits in binary code : ONES

We use a base-ten numbering system, with ten digits (0 – 9). The binary system, or base-two, uses just two digits (0 & 1). The binary system is used at a fundamental level in computing, because the number 0 and 1 can be represented by microcircuits being switched “on” or “off”.