Day: August 5, 2024

Bill’s time: 5m 04s

Bill’s errors: 0

Today’s Wiki-est Amazonian Googlies

Across

1 “Gimme! Gimme! Gimme!” band : ABBA

“Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Midnight)” is a 1979 hit for the Swedish group ABBA. The album and single version released generally around the world is 4:48 in length. The single version released in North America was edited down drastically to 3:36.

5 Actor Driver : ADAM

Adam Driver is an actor perhaps best known to TV audiences for playing Adam Sackler on the show “Girls” that airs on HBO. Driver’s movie career got a huge boost in 2015 when he played villain Kylo Ren in “Star Wars: The Force Awakens”.

15 Rich vein of ore : LODE

A lode is a metal ore deposit that’s found between two layers of rock or in a fissure. The mother lode is the principal deposit in a mine, usually of gold or silver. “Mother lode” is probably a translation of “veta madre”, an expression used in mining in Mexico.

29 Number of U.S. states without any straight borders : ONE

That would be Hawaii …

30 Fish-and-chips fish : COD

In Britain and Ireland, the most common fish that is used in traditional “fish and chips” is Atlantic cod. Cod has been overfished all over the world, and is now considered to be an endangered species by many international bodies. Confrontations over fishing rights in the North Atlantic led to conflicts called “the Cod Wars” between Iceland and the UK in the 1950s and the 1970s, with fishing fleets being protected by naval vessels and even shots being fired.

31 Tennis champion Swiatek : IGA

Iga Swiatek is a professional tennis player, and the first from Poland to win a major singles title (the French Open in 2020).

32 Appliance at a hotel breakfast bar : WAFFLE IRON

Waffle irons have been around since the 1300s, in the Low Countries. The original version comprised two iron plates connected by a hinge, and two wooden handles. The plates were often cast with a pattern that left an image on the waffle. The waffles were baked in the iron over a fire in a hearth.

37 Tree of the tropics : PALM

Palms are perennial flowering plants that take many forms, some as shrubs and some as vines, for example. Some take on a tree-like shape, with a woody stem topped by a crown of leaves. Such palms are usually referred to as “palm trees”. The coco de mer palm tree has the largest seeds of any plant on the planet. We are more familiar with the coconut palm tree, which has the second-largest plant seeds known.

44 San Jose-to-Sacramento dir. : NNE

San Jose is the third-largest city in California and is located at the heart of Silicon Valley. The city was founded by the Spanish in 1777 and named El Pueblo de San José de Guadalupe. Under Spanish and Mexican rule, the territory of Alta California had its capital in Monterey. When California was made a US state, San Jose was named as the first capital, in 1850. Subsequently, the state legislature met in Vallejo in 1852, Benicia in 1853, and finally settled in Sacramento.

Sacramento, California’s state capital, was named for the Sacramento River. The river was named by a Spanish explorer, who called it “Rio de los Sacramentos”. This translates as “River of the Blessed Sacrament”.

45 “Survivor” shelter : HUT

The reality show “Survivor” is based on a Swedish television series created in 1997 called “Expedition Robinson”. The American “Survivor” is widely considered as the leading reality TV show. It was the first highly-rated reality TV offering to become very profitable.

46 Nickname for a Bronx-born U.S. congresswoman : AOC

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is a politician who is often referred to by her initials “AOC”. A Democrat, she was first elected to the US House of Representatives in 2018, representing part of the Bronx, Queens and Rikers Island in New York City. When she took office in 2019 at the age of 29, AOC became the youngest woman ever to serve in Congress.

54 Where Nissan and Nintendo are headquartered : JAPAN

Nissan Motors was founded in Tokyo in 1911 as Kwaishinsha Motor Car Works. The first car produced was called the DAT, an acronym formed from the family names of the investors Kenjiro Den, Rokuro Aoyama and Meitaro Takeuchi. In 1931, the company introduced the Datson line of small cars, with the model name coming from “son of DAT”. “Datson” was changed to “Datsun” two years later. Earlier, in 1928, the company started using the name “Nihon Sangyo”, with “Nissan” used as an abbreviation on the Tokyo Stock Exchange. The “Nissan” name was formally adopted in 1934.

Nintendo is a Japanese company, and one of the largest manufacturers of video games in the world. It was founded way back in 1889 and originally made hanafuda cards, Japanese playing cards. The name “Nintendo” translates as “leave luck to heaven”.

56 Legendary stoner? : MEDUSA

In Greek mythology, Medusa was one of the monstrous female creatures known as Gorgons. According to one version of the Medusa myth, she was once a beautiful woman. She incurred the wrath of Athena who turned her lovely hair into serpents and made her face hideously ugly. Anyone who gazed directly at the transformed Medusa would turn into stone. She was eventually killed by the hero Perseus, who beheaded her. He carried Medusa’s head and used its powers as a weapon, before giving it to the goddess Athena to place on her shield. One myth holds that as Perseus was flying over Egypt with Medusa’s severed head, drops of her blood fell to the ground and formed asps.

57 Credit card industry pioneer … or a hint to 18-, 32- and 42-Across : DINERS CLUB

Diners Club International (DCI) is a charge card company that today belongs to Discover Financial. The company was started in 1950 as a “club of diners” who were free to use their card at 27 participating restaurants and who would then settle their account at the end of each month.

62 The “Iliad” and the “Odyssey,” for two : EPICS

“Iliad” is an epic poem by the Greek poet Homer that tells the story of the ten-year siege of “Ilium” (i.e. “Troy”) during the Trojan war. “The Odyssey”, also attributed to Homer, is sometimes described as a sequel to “Iliad”.

“Odyssey” is one of two epic poems from ancient Greece that are attributed to Homer. It is largely a sequel to Homer’s other epic “Iliad”. “Odyssey” centers on the heroic figure Odysseus, and his adventures on his journey home to Greece following the fall of Troy. We now use the term “odyssey” to describe any long series of adventures.

65 Foamy coffee order : LATTE

The term “latte” is an abbreviation of the Italian “caffelatte” meaning “coffee (and) milk”. Note that in the correct spelling of “latte”, the Italian word for milk; there is no accent over the “e”. An accent is often added by mistake when we use the word in English, perhaps meaning to suggest that the word is French.

67 Guitarist Anastasio of Phish : TREY

Phish is a rock-and-roll band that formed at the University of Vermont in 1983. After a hiatus from 2004 until 2009, the band is going strong to this day. There has been a “Phish Food” flavor of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream since 1997.

Down

2 American frontiersman Daniel : BOONE

Daniel Boone was a pioneer and folk hero. For frontiersman Boone, the frontier was what we now call the state of Kentucky. He led the building of the Wilderness Road through the famous Cumberland Gap in the Appalachians, a route subsequently taken by hundreds of thousands of migrants into Kentucky. Boone fought in the Revolutionary War with distinction, and after the war returned to Kentucky and got himself into land speculation. He became mired in debt, forcing him to emigrate to Missouri to settle down on land that was at that time owned by the French. It was there that he spent the last decades of his life.

3 Caesar’s “Veni, vidi, vici” is a famous one : BOAST

The oft-quoted statement “Veni, vidi, vici” (“I came, I saw, I conquered”) is believed by many to have been written by Julius Caesar. The words date back to 47 BCE and refer to the short war between Rome and Pharnaces II of Pontus.

4 Book of maps : ATLAS

The famous Flemish geographer Gerardus Mercator published his first collection of maps in 1578. Mercator’s collection contained a frontispiece with an image of Atlas the Titan from Greek mythology holding up the world on his shoulders. That image gave us our term “atlas” that is used for a book of maps.

6 Anonymous Jane or John : DOE

Though the English court system does not use the term today, “John Doe” first appeared as the “name of a person unknown” in England in 1659, along with the similar “Richard Roe”. An unknown female is referred to as “Jane Doe ”, and the equivalent to Richard Roe is Jane Roe (as in Roe v. Wade, for example). Variants of “John Doe” used outside of the courts are “Joe Blow” and “John Q. Public”.

10 “Rolling in the Deep” singer : ADELE

“Rolling in the Deep” is a 2010 song by Adele that she released on her incredibly successful album “21”. The single was Adele’s first #1 in the US.

11 Forlorn : SAD

Someone described as forlorn appears sad and lonely because he or she has been deserted or abandoned.

19 Big name in cameras : NIKON

The Japanese company Nikon was founded in 1917 with the merger of three manufacturers of various optical devices. After the merger, Nikon’s main output was lenses (including the first lenses for Canon cameras, before Canon made its own). During the war, Nikon sales grew rapidly as the company focused on (pun!) equipment for the military including periscopes and bomb sights.

27 Arctic home : IGLOO

The Inuit word for “house” is “iglu”, which we usually write as “igloo”. The Greenlandic (yes, that’s a language) word for “house” is very similar, namely “igdlo”. The walls of igloos are tremendous insulators, due to the air pockets in the blocks of snow.

30 Snake charmers’ snakes : COBRAS

Snake charmers don’t actually hypnotize their cobras, but they do train them. The snake is trained to “follow” the movement of the end of the pungi, the instrument that the charmer uses in the act. The snake presents no danger to the charmer or the audience, as it is typically defanged or has it’s mouth partially stitched up so that only the tongue can be moved in and out. Not a very nice practice …

32 “___ Get Away?” (Southwest Airlines slogan) : WANNA

Southwest Airlines (SWA) is the world’s largest low-cost passenger airline. I’ve always admired the Southwest operation and found that the company knows how to keep costs under control while maintaining a high level of customer service. One strategy the company used for decades was only to operate Boeing 737 aircraft, which kept maintenance and operating costs to a minimum. Southwest has over 700 Boeing 737s in service, with each plane making about six flights per day.

35 ___ Schwarz (toy retailer) : FAO

FAO Schwarz was perhaps the most famous, and certainly the oldest, toy store in the United States. The FAO Schwarz outlet on Fifth Avenue in New York City closed in 2015. This store was famously used in several Hollywood movies. For example, it was home to the Walking Piano that Tom Hanks played in the movie “Big”.

36 Caviar : ROE

Caviar is the roe of a large fish that has been salted and seasoned, and especially the roe of a sturgeon. Beluga caviar comes from the beluga sturgeon, which is found primarily in the Caspian Sea. It is the most expensive type of caviar in the world. 8 ounces of US-farmed beluga caviar can be purchased through Amazon.com for just over $850, in case you’re feeling peckish …

37 Feline foot : PAW

A feline is a member of the cat family, the “felidae”. The Latin word for “cat” is “feles”.

42 Inflection points : CUSPS

A cusp is a point, a pointed end of some structure. For example, the top of a cone is a cusp, as are the two pointed ends of a crescent.

43 Robotic vacuum cleaners : ROOMBAS

The Roomba vacuum cleaner is a cool-looking device that navigates its way around a room by itself, picking up dirt as it goes. Like I said, it’s cool-looking, but I am not sure how effective it is …

45 Funeral vehicle : HEARSE

We use the term “hearse” for a vehicle used to transport a dead body to the place of burial. The original meaning, still used sometimes today, is for a framework hanging over a coffin that holds candles.

48 Last-resort button in a cockpit : EJECT

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the original “cockpit” was a “pit” used for fighting “cocks”. The term was then applied nautically, as the name for the compartment below decks used as living quarters by midshipmen. The cockpit of a boat today, usually on a smaller vessel, is a sunken area towards the stern in which sits the helmsman and others (who can fit!). The usage extended to aircraft in the 1910s and to cars in the 1930s.

53 Word with Double or Planet : DAILY …

The “Daily Planet” is the fictional newspaper for which Clark Kent and Lois Lane work in the “Superman” universe. Clark and Lois’ editor-in-chief is Perry White.

57 Marina ___ Rey, Calif. : DEL

Marina del Rey is a coastal community in California located within the borders of the City of Los Angeles. Marina del Rey is home to the world’s largest harbor for small craft, with a capacity for 5,300 boats.