Category: Alexander Liebeskind

Bill’s time: 5m 16s

Bill’s errors: 0

Today’s Wiki-est Amazonian Googlies

Across

1 Baby’s lightweight garment with snaps : ONESIE

A onesie is a baby’s one-piece bodysuit, and is a common gift at a baby shower.

7 Baby’s dribble catcher : BIB

The word “bib” comes from the Latin “bibere” meaning “to drink”, as does our word “imbibe”. So, maybe a bib is less about spilling the food, and more about soaking up the booze …

10 Bottom-row PC key : CTRL

The Control (CTRL) key on a PC keyboard is used to modify the function of other keys. For example, pressing CTRL+C copies a selection to the clipboard, and CTRL+V pastes the contents of the clipboard to a location defined by the cursor. Control keys were introduced on teletypewriters to generate “control characters”, which are non-printing characters that instruct a computer to do something like print a page, ring a bell etc.

14 Kind of cuisine with kimchi : KOREAN

Kimchi is a traditional dish from Korea. It is made from fermented vegetables, and is pretty strong stuff …

17 Two-ingredient drink order : RUM AND COKE

The cocktail known as a Cuba libre is basically a rum and Coke, although the traditional recipe also calls for a splash of lime juice.

19 Convent residents : NUNS

A convent is a community devoted to religious life, and especially a community of nuns. The term “convent” ultimately comes from the Latin “com” (with, together) and “venire” (to come).

20 Med school subj. : ANAT

Anatomy (anat.)

22 2016 Denzel Washington/Viola Davis film whose title refers to real and metaphorical barriers : FENCES

“Fences” is a 2016 drama film starring and directed by Denzel Washington. The movie’s screenplay was written by August Wilson, and is based on his own Pulitzer Prize-winning 1985 play of the same name. Viola Davis plays opposite Washington in a performance that earned her that season’s Best Supporting Actress Oscar.

Denzel Washington is an actor from Mount Vernon, just outside New York City. Washington’s big break came with a TV role, playing Dr. Philip Chandler on “St. Elsewhere” from 1982 to 1988.

Actress Viola Davis is probably best known on the small screen for playing the lead in the drama “How to Get Away with Murder”. On the big screen, I’d say that her most famous role is the starring role in the 2011 film “The Help”. Davis is one of the few EGOT winners (Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, Tony) and is the only African-American to have won the Triple Crown of Acting (a competitive Oscar, Emmy and Tony).

27 Meryl with eight Golden Globes : STREEP

Meryl Streep has had more Academy Award nominations and more Golden Globe nominations than any other actor, which is both a tribute to her talent and the respect she has earned in the industry. I am not a huge fan of her earlier works but some of her recent movies are now on my list of all-time favorites. I recommend “Mamma Mia!” (you’ll either love it or hate it!), “Julie & Julia”, “It’s Complicated” and ”Hope Springs”.

31 ___ Suárez, tennis star with eight Grand Slam doubles titles : PAOLA

Paola Suárez is a retired professional tennis player from Argentina. She was a remarkable women’s doubles player, winning eight Grand Slam titles, all of them with Spanish player Virginia Ruano Pascual.

32 Grp. with many Mideast members : OPEC

The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) controls a significant portion of the world’s oil supply. OPEC member countries account for around 44% of global oil production and 73% of the world’s oil reserves.

34 Atlanta-based network : TBS

The tbs cable television station started out in 1967 as a local broadcast TV station in Atlanta. The station’s first call letters were WJRJ-TV, and this was changed to WTCG in 1970 when it was acquired by Ted Turner (the TCG stood for Turner Communications Group). In 1976, Turner started distributing WTCG via satellite making its programming available in other parts of the country. WTCG was only the second channel to transmit via satellite, following HBO. The difference was that WTCG was broadcast without requiring a premium subscription. The station’s call sign was changed again in 1979 to WTBS, with “TBS” standing for Turner Broadcasting System. In 1981, the channel adopted the moniker “Superstation WTBS”.

41 China’s Mao ___-tung : TSE

Mao Zedong (also “Mao Tse-tung”) was born on December 16, 1893 in the Hunan Province of China. As Mao was the son of a peasant farmer, his prospects for education were limited. Indeed he left school at age 13 to work on the family farm but did eventually get to secondary school in Changsha, the provincial capital. In the years following, Mao continued his education in Beijing and actually turned down an opportunity to study in France.

43 “___-daisy!” : OOPSY

“Upsy-daisy” is an interjection sometimes used when lifting up a child. It’s “baby talk”, words of reassurance.

44 Regional flora and fauna : BIOTA

The fauna (plural “faunae”) is the animal life of a particular region, and the flora (plural “florae”) is that region’s plant life. The term “fauna” comes from the Roman goddess of earth and fertility who was called Fauna. Flora was the Roman goddess of plants, flowers and fertility.

47 “If wishes were ___, beggars would ride” : HORSES

According to the 16th-century proverb and nursery rhyme:

If wishes were horses, beggars would ride:
If turnips were watches, I’d wear one by my side,:
If, Ifs and Ands were pots and pans,
There’d be no work for tinkers’ hands.

The suggestion is that there’s not much point in wishing, and that results are achieved by taking action.

51 “… and the ___ to know the difference” (end of the Serenity Prayer) : WISDOM

The Serenity Prayer is a widely used prayer in many different traditions. It first appeared in print in the 1930s. A common wording is:

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
the courage to change the things I can,
and the wisdom to know the difference.

53 Pageant accessory : SASH

The oldest beauty pageant still operating in the US is the Miss America contest. The Miss America beauty pageant started out as a marketing ploy in the early twenties to attract tourists to the Atlantic City boardwalk after Labor Day. Today, contestants must be between 17 and 24 years of age. Before those limits were introduced, Marian Bergeron won the 1933 title at only 15 years of age.

57 Tennis great Arthur : ASHE

The great American tennis player Arthur Ashe spent the last years of his life writing his memoir called “Days of Grace”. He finished the manuscript just a few days before he passed away, dying from AIDS caused by a tainted blood transfusion.

62 Bit of body ink : TAT

According to a 2019 survey, about 30% of Americans have at least one tattoo, and the tattoo industry is estimated to be worth over $1 billion in the United States alone. Me? Not into pain, so one of the 70% …

65 H or η, in the Greek alphabet : ETA

Eta is the seventh letter of the Greek alphabet, and is a forerunner of our Latin character “H”. Originally denoting a consonant, eta was used as a long vowel in Ancient Greek.

66 One whose property is being held as debt security : LIENEE

A lien is a right that one has to retain or secure someone’s property until a debt is paid. When an individual takes out a car loan, for example, the lending bank is usually a lien holder. The bank releases the lien on the car when the loan is paid in full.

Down

1 Pod vegetable in gumbo : OKRA

Gumbo is a type of stew or soup that originated in Louisiana. The primary ingredient can be meat or fish, but to be true gumbo it must include the “holy trinity” of vegetables, namely celery, bell peppers and onion. Okra used to be a requirement but this is no longer the case. Okra gave the dish its name as the vernacular word for the African vegetable is “okingumbo”, from the Bantu language spoken by many of the slaves brought to America.

3 ___ Franklin (gospel-singing sister of Aretha) : ERMA

Erma Franklin was an R&B and gospel singer. She was the elder sister of Aretha Franklin. Erma toured with Aretha for a while, and even recorded backup vocals on her sister’s big hit “Respect”.

5 Writer Fleming : IAN

The character James Bond was the creation of writer Ian Fleming. Fleming “stole” the James Bond name from an American ornithologist. The number “007” was “stolen” from the real-life, 16th-century English spy named John Dee. Dee would sign his reports to Queen Elizabeth I with a stylized “007” to indicate that the reports were for “her eyes only”. There’s an entertaining miniseries that aired on BBC America called “Fleming: The Man Who Would Be Bond” that details Ian Fleming’s military career, and draws some nice parallels between Fleming’s experiences and aspirations and those of his hero James Bond. Recommended …

12 Zellweger who played Judy Garland in 2019’s “Judy” : RENEE

Renée Zellweger’s big break came with the 1996 movie “Jerry Maguire”. A few years later, Zellweger followed that up with a string of successes in “Bridget Jones’ Diary” (2001), “Chicago” (2002) and “Cold Mountain” (2003). My wife and I love watching her play Bridget Jones, and as someone coming from Britain and Ireland, I have to say that Zellweger does a remarkable job with the accent. She worked hard to perfect that accent, and of course she had a voice coach. She also went “undercover” and worked as a temp in an office for three weeks fine-tuning her skills.

The 2019 movie “Judy” is a biopic about singer and actress Judy Garland. The film is an adaptation of the 2005 Peter Quilter play “End of the Rainbow”. “Judy” focuses on the last year of Garland’s life, with Renée Zellweger in the title role.

13 Glasgow gal : LASS

Glasgow is the largest city in Scotland and sits on the River Clyde. Back in the Victorian Era, Glasgow earned a reputation for excellence in shipbuilding and was known as “Second City of the British Empire”. Glasgow shipyards were the birthplaces of such famous vessels as the Lusitania, the Queen Mary and the Queen Elizabeth. People from Glasgow are known as Glaswegians.

18 Counterpart of trans, in gender identity terminology : CIS

The term “cisgender” is used as the opposite of “transgender”. Cisgender people have a gender identity that matches the sex they were assigned at birth. A transgender person is someone with a gender identity that is different from that assigned at birth.

25 Caboose’s location : REAR

The word “caboose” originally came from Middle Dutch and was the word for a ship’s galley. When the last car in a train in North America was given a stove for the comfort of the crew, it took on the name “caboose”. The term has also become slang for a person’s backside.

26 Poet Gertrude : STEIN

Gertrude Stein was a great American writer who spent most of her life in France. Gertrude Stein met Alice B. Toklas in Paris in 1907, and the two were life partners until Stein died in 1946. Cleverly, Stein published her own memoir in 1933 but called the book “The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas”. It was to become Stein’s best selling title.

29 Thorny sources of pride for a gardener : ROSE BUSHES

Believe it or not, roses don’t have any thorns as such. Thorns are derived from shoots, spines are derived from leaves, and prickles are derived from the epidermis. The rose’s defensive barbs are in fact prickles.

32 Atlantic or Pacific : OCEAN

The earliest known mention of the name “Atlantic”, for the world’s second-largest ocean, was in ancient Greece. The Greeks called said ocean “the Sea of Atlas” or “Atlantis thalassa”.

The Pacific Ocean was given its name by the Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan. When Magellan sailed into the ocean on his 1521 circumnavigation of the globe, he encountered favorable winds and so called it “Mar Pacifico” meaning “peaceful sea”.

33 Scholastic book fair org. : PTA

Parent-Teacher Association (PTA)

35 Big audio equipment brand : BOSE

Bose Corporation specializes in audio equipment, including headphones, speakers, and sound systems. The company was founded in 1964 by Dr. Amar G. Bose, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Bose Corp. started as a research project in psychoacoustics, the study of how humans perceive sound.

38 Frisbee sport : ULTIMATE

Ultimate is a team sport that is similar to football or rugby in that the goal is to get a flying disc into an endzone or goal area. The sport used to be called “Ultimate Frisbee”, but the “Frisbee” was dropped as it is a registered trademark.

45 Use a tab key, say : INDENT

Like most features on our computer keyboards, the tab key is a hangover from the days of typewriters. When using a typewriter, making entries into a table was very tedious, involving lots of tapping on the spacebar and backspace key. So, a lever was added to typewriters that allowed the operator to “jump” across the page to positions that could be set by hand. Later this was simplified to a tab key which could be depressed, causing the carriage to jump to the next tab stop in much the same way that the modern tab key works on a computer.

46 Artist and musician Yoko : ONO

Yoko Ono is an avant-garde artist. She met her future husband John Lennon for the first time while she was preparing her conceptual art exhibit called “Hammer a Nail”. Visitors were encouraged to hammer in a nail into a wooden board, creating the artwork. Lennon wanted to hammer in the first nail, but Ono stopped him as the exhibition had not yet opened. Apparently Ono relented when Lennon paid her an imaginary five shillings to hammer an imaginary nail into the wood.

47 What French fries fry in : HOT OIL

French fries are called “chips” back in Ireland where I grew up. And what we call “chips” in the US are known as “crisps” in Britain and Ireland. In France, French fries are known as “pommes frites” (fried potatoes).

48 Staircase part : RISER

The riser is the vertical part of a step in a flight of stairs.

49 Environmental activist 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.

56 Park name in London and Chicago : HYDE

Hyde Park is one of the largest parks in central London. A famous element in Hyde Park is Speakers’ Corner, which is located in the northeast corner of the park. Speakers’ Corner was the site of the infamous Tyburn gallows that was used for public executions in centuries past. Today, Speakers’ Corner is a site for public speech and debate, and a center for public protest. Some say that the tradition of allowing free speech at the site dates back to the condemned man being allowed to say his final words prior to execution at the Tyburn gallows.

Hyde Park is a Chicago neighborhood located on the shores of Lake Michigan. The area is home to the University of Chicago, and is also home to former US President Barack Obama.