1024-25 NY Times Crossword 24 Oct 25, Friday

Bill’s time: 17m 50s

Bill’s errors: 0

Today’s Wiki-est Amazonian Googlies

Across

6A Where the monster and Frankenstein cross paths, in “Frankenstein” : ALPS

Mary Shelley’s Gothic novel has the full title of “Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus”. The subtitle underscores one of the themes of the book, i.e. a warning about the expansion into the Industrial Revolution.

15A Opener for an aerial act : PARACHUTE

The term “parachute” was coined by Frenchman François Blanchard, from “para-” meaning “defense against” and “chute” meaning “a fall”.

17A Fictional sidekick on a donkey : PANZA

Sancho Panza is Don Quixote’s squire, and a character who spouts out humorous comments called “sanchismos”.

24A Key of “Spring” in Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons”: Abbr. : E MAJ

“The Four Seasons” is the most famous work by Italian Baroque composer Antonio Vivaldi. It is a collection of four violin concerti that evoke the seasons of the year. Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons” is a favorite choice for background music in elevators and elevators. Personally, my favorite use of the piece is as a backdrop to the 1981 romantic comedy film “The Four Seasons”, starring Alan Alda and Carol Burnett.

28A About 9% of the earth’s total surface area : ASIA

Most of the world’s population lives in Asia (60%), and Asia is the largest continent in terms of landmass (30% of the world). Asia also has the highest population density (246 people per square mile), and the most populous city on the continent is Shanghai, China.

29A Site once promoted with the slogan “A place for friends” : MYSPACE

MySpace is a US-based social network platform that launched in 2003, and became the largest social networking site in the world by 2005. In at least one month in 2006, MySpace received more visitors than Yahoo! and Google. The popularity of MySpace started to wane in 2009, when Facebook took over as number-one in social networking.

37A Snarky reply to a question that starts “Can I …?” : I DON’T KNOW, CAN YOU?

“Snark” is a term that was coined by Lewis Carroll in his fabulous 1876 nonsense poem “The Hunting of the Snark”. Somehow, the term “snarky” came to mean “irritable, short-tempered” in the early 1900s, and from there “snark” became “sarcastic rhetoric” at the beginning of the 21st century.

40A Sight you can hardly believe : MIRAGE

A mirage occurs when light rays are bent by passing from cold air to warmer air. The most often cited mirage is a “lake” seen in a desert, which is actually the blue of the sky and not water at all. The word “mirage” comes to us via French from the Latin “mirare” meaning “to look at in wonder”. “Mirage” has the same root as our words “admire” and “mirror”.

41A Thai money : BAHT

The baht is the currency of Thailand. One baht is subdivided into 100 satang.

42A Returns home? : IRS

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) was set up during the Civil War to raise money to cover war expenses. Prior to the introduction of income tax in 1862, the government was funded by levies on trade and property.

43A Spread followers : BETTORS

The point spread is the number of points offered to equalize the chances in a wager on a sports event. The team that is perceived as more likely to lose is given “free” points before the game starts, and the person backing the winning team wins only when his/her team scores more than the losing team, including the point spread.

45A Film director Nicolas : ROEG

Nicolas Roeg is a film director from England with quite the pedigree when it comes to association with great movies. He contributed to 1962’s “Lawrence of Arabia”, and he himself directed noted films like “Walkabout” (1972), “Don’t Look Now” (1973) and “The Man Who Fell to Earth” (1976).

48A Groups of assistants in some old offices : STENO POOLS

Stenography is the process of writing in shorthand. The term comes from the Greek “steno” (narrow) and “graphe” (writing). A stenographer might be a court reporter, or a person provided captions accompanying a live television broadcast.

53A Number discovered in the 1500s : ETHER

Ether is a number, something that “numbs”.

60A Clarence ___, “The Wire” mayor : ROYCE

I didn’t watch the HBO series called “The Wire” when it first aired. We ended up buying all five series on DVD and we watched the whole thing several years ago. It is a great drama series, and I thoroughly recommend it.

61A Bobblehead, e.g. : TCHOTCHKE

“Tchotchke” is a slang term meaning “cheap, showy trinket”. It came into English from a Slavic source via Yiddish.

Bobblehead dolls are those little toys with big heads that bobble around if tapped, while the body remains still. They’re often given to ticket buyers at sports events as a promotion.

62A Ezra who co-founded Vox : KLEIN

Ezra Klein is a journalist and blogger who writes for “The Washington Post”, “Bloomberg” and “MSNBC”. Klein’s contribution at “The Washington Post” is the most-read blog that the paper publishes.

“Vox” is a news and opinion website that was founded by former “Washington Post” journalist Ezra Klein in 2014. “Vox” is Latin for “voice”.

64A Zen riddle : KOAN

The concept of koan appears in the Zen Buddhist tradition. A koan is a story, question or perhaps a statement that is used as an aid to meditation. It often takes the form of a problem or riddle that has no logical solution and is intended to help the meditator break free of reason and develop intuition.

Down

1D One side of a consumer “war” : PEPSI

“Cola Wars” is a phrase used to describe the competing marketing campaigns of Coca-Cola and PepsiCo. Coke is winning …

3D Characters in “The Lord of the Rings” : RUNES

A rune is a character in an alphabet that is believed to have mysterious powers. In Norse mythology, the runic alphabet was said to have a divine origin.

4D Condition formally known as atopic dermatitis : ECZEMA

Eczema is a form of dermatitis. The term “eczema” comes from the Greek for “to boil over”.

6D Mental health org. : APA

American Psychiatric Association (APA)

8D Spinning ring, informally? : PR TEAM

We use the term “spin” to describe an attempt to influence media reporters, with the term “spin doctor” describing a public relations person who is spouting such “spin”. Apparently, the use of “spin” in this context was popularized during the Reagan administration, when White House Chief of Staff Donald Regan was known informally as the “Director of Spin Control”.

10D It’s on the right in the second row : THREE-PIN

In ten-pin bowling, the pins are arranged in a triangular arrangement. The pin at the front is the 1-pin. The pins at the back are number 7 through 10, from left to right.

13D “___ Blues” (Beatles song) : YER

“Yer Blues” is a John Lennon song, credited to Lennon and McCartney, that is a track on “The White Album”, recorded in 1968. Lennon recorded the song while the band was on retreat in Rishikesh, India, and while he was “trying to reach God and feeling suicidal”.

16D Derivative of sin : COS

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.

25D “Bloody” queen : MARY I

Mary I was Queen of England and Ireland from 1553 to 1558. She was the only surviving child from the marriage of King Henry VIII and his first wife, Catherine of Aragon. Unlike her father, Mary adhered to her Roman Catholic faith and was noted for her brutal persecution of Protestants during her reign. She had almost three hundred religious dissenters burned at the stake, resulting in her gaining the nickname “Bloody Mary”. Roman Catholic rule was reversed after she died, when her half-sister Elizabeth I succeeded to the throne.

27D Figure in Michelangelo’s “The Last Judgment” : JESUS

“The Last Judgment” is a fresco by Michelangelo that he painted on the altar wall of the Sistine Chapel. Michelangelo took four years to complete the work, and began painting it twenty-five years after finishing the Sistine Chapel’s ceiling.

31D Kind of bar that’s hard to pass : LIMBO

The limbo dance originated on the island of Trinidad in the Caribbean. The name “limbo” is an alteration of our word “limber”, which isn’t surprising given what one has to do to get under that bar!

32D It comes with a parting of the ways : ADIEU

“Adieu” is French for “goodbye, farewell”, from “à Dieu” meaning “to God” The plural of “adieu” is “adieux”.

33D Houston and New Orleans : PORTS

The city of Houston (sometimes “H-Town”) was named for General Sam Houston, who served as President of the Republic of Texas and then as Governor after Texas was annexed as a US state in 1845. As the city is home to the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center, Houston was officially given the nickname “Space City” in 1967.

The city of New Orleans, Louisiana has the nickname “The Big Easy”. This name might come from the early 1900s when musicians found it relatively “easy” to find work there. The city is also known by the acronym NOLA, standing for New Orleans (NO), Louisiana (LA).

49D Actress Alexander of “Get Out” : ERIKA

Erika Alexander is the actress who played Pam Tucker, a cousin that came to live with the Huxtable household in “The Cosby Show”. Alexander also won many awards for playing Maxine Shaw on the Fox sitcom “Living Single”.

“Get Out” is a 2017 horror film written and directed by Jordan Peele. I don’t do horror, but I do hear that this one is well made …

51D Saint ___ (Caribbean isle) : LUCIA

The Caribbean island nation of Saint Lucia has a population of less than 200,000. Remarkably, it has produced two Nobel Laureates: economist Arthur Lewis and poet Derek Walcott.

54D Small songbird : TIT

The birds known as chickadees or titmice in North America, are usually called simply “tits” in the rest of the English-speaking world.

56D Scoreboard tally: Abbr. : PTS

Back in the mid-1600s, a tally was a stick marked with notches that tracked how much one owed or paid. The term “tally” came from the Latin “talea” meaning “stick, rod”. The act of “scoring” the stick with notches gave rise to our word “score” for the number in a tally.