1109-24 NY Times Crossword 9 Nov 24, Saturday

Today’s Wiki-est Amazonian Googlies

Across

15 Certain cats : TOMS

A group of cats can be referred to as a clowder or a glaring. A male cat is a tom or tomcat, and a neutered male is a gib. An unaltered female cat is a queen, and a spayed female might be referred to informally as a molly. A young cat is a kitten.

17 Actress Shawkat who played Maeby on “Arrested Development” : ALIA

Alia Shawkat is an actor who might be best known for playing Maeby Fünke on the sitcom “Arrested Development”. She is best friends with fellow actor Elliot Page (formerly Ellen Page), whom Shawkat met while filming the 2009 movie “Whip It”.

19 Making a car payment, dusting the living room, scheduling a doctor’s appointment, etc. : ADULTING

“Adulting” is an informal, tongue-in-cheek term used, mainly by millennials, to describe the act of doing the mundane things that adults are expected to do. Those things can range from doing the laundry to having a job.

21 Sea shrunk by Soviet siphoning : ARAL

The Aral Sea is a great example of how humankind can have a devastating effect on the environment. In the early sixties the Aral Sea covered 68,000 square miles of Central Asia. Soviet irrigation projects drained the lake to such an extent that today the total area is less than 7,000 square miles, with 90% of the lake now completely dry. Sad …

24 Place for a mind or a ball : GUTTER

In ten-pin bowling, a gutterball is one that ends up in one of the gutters (channels) on either side of each lane.

25 Antacid brand : ROLAIDS

The Rolaids brand of antacid was invented in the late twenties. The “Rolaids” name came from the fact that the original packaging was a foil “roll”. The product has a tagline: Rolaids—that’s how you spell relief. That slogan dates back to a 1970s TV campaign:

How do you spell relief?
R-O-L-A-I-D-S

36 Work whose first installment spanned 352 pages and ended with “ant,” in brief : OED

The first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) was published in installments between 1884 and 1928. It was edited by James Murray and a team of lexicographers and linguists, who worked to collect and document the history and usage of English words from the earliest known written sources.

37 Guinness of “The Bridge on the River Kwai” : ALEC

Sir Alec Guinness played many great roles over a long and distinguished career, but nowadays is best remembered (sadly, I think) for playing the original Obi-Wan Kenobi in “Star Wars”. He won his only Best Actor Oscar for playing Colonel Nicholson in the marvelous 1957 WWII movie “The Bridge on the River Kwai”. Guinness did himself serve during the Second World War, in the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve. He commanded a landing craft during the Allied invasion of Sicily in 1943.

The river referred to in the movie “The Bridge on the River Kwai” is actually called the Khwae Yai River, and is in western Thailand. The original novel by Pierre Boulle, “The Bridge Over the River Kwai”, was published in French in 1952, and the wonderful movie released in 1957. Both tell the story of the construction of part of the Burma Railway and a bridge over the river, using prisoners of war as laborers. The film stars William Holden, Alec Guinness and Jack Hawkins.

39 Fish in the flounder family : HALIBUT

Halibuts are flatfish. The common name “halibut” comes from the earlier terms “hali” (holy) and “butte” (flatfish). The adjective “holy” is a reference to the popularity of halibut as a replacement for meat on holy days in the Roman Catholic calendar.

Flounder are flatfish that are typically found lying on the bottom of estuaries and coastal lagoons. Just after it hatches, a young flounder has eyes on either side of its brain. As the fish matures, one of these eyes migrates to the other side of its body. The adult flounder then has two eyes which face up as the fish lies camouflaged on the ocean floor.

41 Like i, say : NON-REAL

An imaginary number is a number which is a multiple of the square root of “-1”. A complex number is the sum of a real number and an imaginary number. The use of the term “imaginary number” started in the 1600s as back then it was believed that multiples of the square root of “-1” had no practical use. However, I am reliably informed that such numbers are now found useful in science and engineering circles.

43 Professor Xavier’s students, e.g. : MUTANTS

The X-Men are a team of superheroes created by Stan Lee for Marvel Comics. Nowadays, the X-Men are perhaps best known as the subject of a series of movies, with Hugh Jackman playing Wolverine and Patrick Stewart playing Professor Xavier (or simply “Professor X”). Some very respected actors have also played the villains whom the X-Men have to battle. For example, the enemy called Magneto is portrayed by veteran Shakespearean actor Sir Ian McKellen.

48 Purchase on an island? : GAS

The gas pump was actually around before there were cars on the road. The first gas pump was the invention of one Sylvanus Bowser from Fort Wayne, Indiana. His first pump was designed to pump kerosene for lamps and stoves, and was introduced in 1885. As automobiles became popular, he modified the design to pump gasoline. He introduced the Self-Measuring Gasoline Storage Pump in 1905. He marketed his devices all around the world, and in some parts the name “bowser” is still used sometimes to refer to fuel pumps, and indeed some fuel tankers.

49 Character name in “The Last of the Mohicans” and “Downton Abbey” : CORA

“The Last of the Mohicans” is an 1826 novel by James Fenimore Cooper. It is the second in a series of five novels that comprise the “Leatherstocking Tales”. All five titles are:

• “The Deerslayer” (1841)
• “The Last of the Mohicans” (1826)
• “The Pathfinder” (1840)
• “The Pioneers” (1823)
• “The Prairie” (1827)

In the incredibly successful period drama “Downton Abbey”, the patriarch of the family living at Downton is Robert Crawley, the Earl of Grantham or Lord Grantham. The character is played by Hugh Bonneville. Lord Grantham married American Cora Levinson (played by Elizabeth McGovern). Lord and Lady Grantham had three daughters, and no sons. The lack of a male heir implied that the Grantham estate would pass to a male cousin, and out of the immediate family. The Grantham daughters are Lady Mary (played by Michelle Dockery), Lady Edith (played by Laura Carmichael) and Lady Sybil (played by Jessica Brown Findlay). Lady Sybil had the audacity to marry the family chauffeur, who was an Irish nationalist. The shame of it all …

53 Falsify, in a way : COOK

Cook the books, for example.

60 Unit equivalent to one-thousandth of an inch : MIL

The thickness unit known as a “mil” here in the US is usually referred to as a “thou” on the other side of the Atlantic. A “mil” is actually one “thousandth” of an inch. So, I vote for “thou” …

Down

2 Mononymous baseball star who played 28 seasons professionally : ICHIRO

Ichiro Suzuki holds quite a few batting records, including the single-season record for base hits (262) and a record-breaking streak of 10 consecutive 200-hit seasons. He is a huge celebrity in his native-Japan. His agent says that if you address fan mail to “Ichiro Suzuki, Japan”, he’ll get your letter …

6 Sin/cos : TAN

The most familiar trigonometric functions are sine, cosine and tangent (abbreviated to “sin, cos and tan”). Each of these is a ratio: a ratio of two sides of a right-angled triangle. The “reciprocal” of these three functions are cosecant, secant and cotangent. The reciprocal functions are simply the inverted ratios, the inverted sine, cosine and tangent. These inverted ratios should not be confused with the “inverse” trigonometric functions e.g. arcsine, arccosine and arctangent. These inverse functions are the reverse of the sine, cosine and tangent.

7 Letters before a handle : AKA

Also known as (aka)

8 “King Lear” part : REGAN

In William Shakespeare’s “King Lear”, Regan is the king’s second daughter. Regan vies with her older sister for influence over her father, and for the attention of Edmund, illegitimate son of the Earl of Gloucester.

15 Spill : TATTLE

Something described as tattletale is revealing, it gives away a secret. The term is a combination of “tattle” and “tale”, and is probably patterned on the similar word “telltale”. “To tattle” means “to tell secrets”, and the noun “tattletale” applies to someone who tells secrets and informs.

26 Greek island south of Naxos : IOS

The Cyclades are a group of islands in the Aegean Sea lying southeast of the Greek mainland. There are about 200 islands in the group, almost all of which are the peaks of a submerged mountain range. Included in the Cyclades are the islands of Ios, Milos, Mykonos, Naxos and Santorini.

27 Accord alternative : ALTIMA

Nissan has been making the Altima since 1993. In 2007, the company started to produce a hybrid version, Nissan’s first foray into the hybrid market and a successful one by all accounts. Altima hybrids are even used as police cruisers by the New York Police Department.

Honda started manufacturing the Accord model in Marysville, Ohio in 1982, making the Accord the first Japanese car to be produced in the US. The Accord was the best-selling Japanese car in America from 1982 to 1997, and 1989 was the first import to become the best-selling car in the US.

29 What “tutti” means on scores : ALL

“Tutti” (singular “tutto”) are pieces of music performed by all the artists in a group, as opposed to “soli” (singular “solo”). “Tutto” is the Italian word for “all”.

31 Producer of black-and-white footage? : PANDACAM

Pandas have a particularly short mating season, lasting only a few days per year. The zookeepers at San Diego Zoo like to give the pandas some well-deserved privacy during this time, so the popular Internet “PandaCam” is shut down for about a week.

32 Indian dish of potatoes and cauliflower : ALOO GOBI

Aloo gobi is a very tasty vegetarian dish in Indian cuisine made from potatoes and cauliflower, flavored with traditional Indian spices. “Aloo” translates to “potato” and “gobi” to “cauliflower”.

42 Middle ___ : EAR

The middle ear is the portion of the ear immediately behind the eardrum. The middle ear contains three small bones called the ossicles, the three smallest bones in the human body. The ossicles’ job is to transmit sound from the outer ear to the inner ear. The shape of the bones gives rise to their names: the hammer (malleus), anvil (incus) and stirrup (stapes).

45 Like scents and stencils : TRACED

A stencil is a sheet of impervious material with perforations in the shape of letters or a design. The stencil is placed over a surface to be printed and then the printing medium is applied, so that the medium only attaches to the surface beneath the perforations.

46 “___ Lot” : ‘SALEM’S

Stephen King’s “’Salem’s Lot” was published in 1975, his second novel. It belongs to the horror genre, so you won’t catch me reading it. The title refers to the Maine town of Jerusalem’s Lot, or ‘Salem’s Lot for short. There’s an interesting story about the actual publication of the first edition. The intended price of $8.95 was changed at the last minute to $7.95, but not all the price changes were made before release. A few copies “escaped” with the dust cover marked $8.95, and they are now worth a lot of money. Go check your bookshelves …

48 Creatures in God’s third plague in Exodus : GNATS

According to the biblical Book of Exodus, God inflicted ten plagues on Egypt to persuade the Pharaoh to release the Israelites from bondage. For example, the first was the changing of water in the Nile to blood, the eighth was a plague of locusts that consumed all the Egyptian crops, and the tenth was the death of firstborn sons.

51 Musical counterpart of pizzicato : ARCO

“Arco” is a musical direction instructing a string player to return to normal bowing technique after a passage played using some other technique (perhaps pizzicato).

“Pizzicato” is an Italian term meaning “plucked, pinched”. It is used as a musical direction on a score, instructing the player of a stringed instrument to pluck the strings instead of using the bow.

57 1975 TV debut, in brief : SNL

NBC first aired a form of “Saturday Night Live” (SNL) in 1975 under the title “NBC’s Saturday Night”. The show was actually created to give Johnny Carson some time off from “The Tonight Show”. Back then “The Tonight Show” had a weekend episode, and Carson convinced NBC to pull the Saturday or Sunday recordings off the air and hold them for subsequent weeknights in which Carson needed a break. NBC turned to Lorne Michaels and asked him to put together a variety show to fill the vacant slot, and he came up with what we now call “Saturday Night Live”.