1106-17 NY Times Crossword Answers 6 Nov 2017, Monday

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Constructed by: Max Lauring & Benjamin Lauring
Edited by: Will Shortz

Today’s Theme: Part Animal

PART of each themed answer today includes an ANIMAL, and the other PART of the answer is a body part:

  • 48A. Like a centaur or faun … or a hint to the answer to each of this puzzle’s starred clues : PART ANIMAL
  • 15A. *Out-of-vogue hairstyle akin to a mullet : RATTAIL
  • 27A. *Condition with feet turned inward : PIGEON TOES
  • 32A. *How a tot rides on someone’s shoulders : PIGGYBACK
  • 37A. *Two ones, in dice : SNAKE EYES
  • 60A. *Signs of a much-used book : DOG-EARS
  • 17D. *Foolish sort : HAREBRAIN
  • 22D. *Really something, with “the” : BEE’S KNEES

Bill’s time: 5m 49s

Bill’s errors: 0

Today’s Wiki-est Amazonian Googlies

Across

13. Yale student, informally : ELI

Elihu Yale was a wealthy merchant born in Boston in 1649. Yale worked for the British East India Company, and for many years served as governor of a settlement at Madras (now Chennai) in India. After India, Yale took over his father’s estate near Wrexham in Wales. It was while resident in Wrexham that Yale responded to a request for financial support for the Collegiate School of Connecticut in 1701. He sent the school a donation, which was used to erect a new building in New Haven that was named “Yale” in his honor. In 1718, the whole school was renamed to “Yale College”. To this day, students of Yale are nicknamed “Elis”, again honoring Elihu.

14. Sea, to Debussy : MER

“La Mer” is a lovely group of three symphonic sketches for orchestra by the French composer Claude Debussy. Listen to it, and you can feel yourself at the ocean. “La Mer” is French for “The Sea”.

Claude Debussy is one of my favorite composers, one who epitomises the Romantic Era and Impressionist Movement in music. One of my favorite CDs is a collection of some “lighter” Debussy pieces called “Debussy for Daydreaming”, and what an evocative collection it is. Included are “Syrinx”, “Maid with the Flaxen Hair”, “Rêverie” and everyone’s favorite, “Clair de Lune”.

15. *Out-of-vogue hairstyle akin to a mullet : RATTAIL

A mullet haircut is one that is short at the front and sides, and is long in the back.

16. What “compares 2 U” in a 1990 #1 Sinead O’Connor hit : NOTHING

Sinéad O’Connor is a singer-songwriter from Dublin, a somewhat outspoken and controversial character. My sister-in-law was in the same class as her in high school, and she tells me that Sinéad stood out among her peers even back then.

18. Ctrl-___-Del : ALT

Control-Alt-Delete is a keyboard command on IBM PC compatible systems used for a soft reboot, or more recently to bring up the task manager in the Windows operating system. Bill Gates tells us that the command was originally just a device to be used during development and was never meant to “go live”. He once said that “Ctrl+Alt+Del” was a mistake, and that he would have preferred a dedicated key on the keyboard that carried out the same function.

19. When doubled, an African fly : TSE

Tsetse flies live on the blood of vertebrate mammals. The name “tsetse” comes from Tswana, a language of southern Africa, and translates simply as “fly”. Tsetse flies are famous for being carriers of the disease known as “sleeping sickness”. Sleeping sickness is caused by a parasite which is passed onto humans when the tsetse fly bites into human skin tissue. If one considers all the diseases transmitted by the insect, then the tsetse fly is responsible for a staggering quarter of a million deaths each year.

20. Diatribe : TIRADE

The term “tirade” describes a long and vehement speech, and is a word that came into English from French. “Tirade” can have the same meaning in French, but is also the word for “volley”. So, a tirade is a “volley” of words.

A diatribe is a bitter discourse. The term comes from the Greek “diatribein” meaning “to wear away”.

23. Like a G.I. cleaning up after a meal, maybe : ON KP

KP is a US military slang term that stands for either “kitchen police” or “kitchen patrol”.

30. Nobel laureate Wiesel : ELIE

Elie Wiesel was a holocaust survivor, and is best known for his book “Night” that tells of his experiences in Auschwitz and Buchenwald. Wiesel was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986.

36. Gooey road cover : TAR

The terms “tarmac” and “macadam” are short for “tarmacadam”. In the 1800s, Scotsman John Loudon McAdam developed a style of road known as “macadam”. Macadam had a top-layer of crushed stone and gravel laid over larger stones. The macadam also had a convex cross-section so that water tended to drain to the sides. In 1901, a significant improvement was made by English engineer Edgar Purnell Hooley who introduced tar into the macadam, improving the resistance to water damage and practically eliminating dust. The “tar-penetration macadam” is the basis of what we now call tarmac.

37. *Two ones, in dice : SNAKE EYES

“Snake eyes” is the slang term for a roll of two dice in which one pip turns up on each die.

43. Monsoon events : RAINS

The term “monsoon” was first used in India in the days of the British Raj, when it was used to describe the seasonal winds that brought rain from the Bay of Bengal and the Arabian Sea from June to September. “Monsoon” is derived from the Portuguese “monção”, which in turn comes from the Arabic “mawsim” meaning “season”.

47. Nashville’s home: Abbr. : TENN

The Tennessee city of Nashville was founded in 1779 near a stockade in the Cumberland River valley called Fort Nashborough. Both the settlement and the fort were named for General Francis Nash, a war hero who died in combat during the American Revolution.

48. Like a centaur or faun … or a hint to the answer to each of this puzzle’s starred clues : PART ANIMAL

A centaur is a creature from Greek mythology, a creature with the upper body of a human and lower body of a horse.

Fauns are regarded as the Roman mythological equivalent of the Greek satyrs, but fauns were half-man and half-goat and much more “carefree” in personality than their Hellenic cousins. In the modern age we are quite familiar with Mr. Tumnus, the faun-like character encountered by the children entering the world of Narnia in C. S. Lewis’s “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe”.

50. Washington’s ___ Sound : PUGET

George Vancouver was a British explorer, and an officer in the Royal Navy. As well as exploring the coast of Australia, he is best known for his travels along the northwest coast of North America. The city of Vancouver was named in his honor. Travelling with him on his American voyage was a lieutenant Peter Puget, and in his honor, Vancouver named the waters south of the Tacoma Narrows “Puget’s Sound”. Nowadays, the name “Puget Sound” describes an area much greater than Vancouver had envisioned.

53. Transoceanic alliance since 1949 : NATO

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was founded not long after WWII in 1949 and is headquartered in Brussels, Belgium. The first NATO Secretary General was Lord Ismay, Winston Churchill’s chief military assistant during WWII. Famously, Lord Ismay said the goal of NATO was “to keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down.”

54. Nike competitor : REEBOK

The brand name Reebok was adopted as the new company name for Foster Shoes of the UK in 1960. The name Reebok (more commonly “Rhebok”) is an Afrikaans word for an antelope, and comes from the term “roe buck”.

56. Western tribe member : UTE

The Ute is a group of Native American tribes that now resides in Utah and Colorado. The Ute were not a unified people as such, but rather a loose association of nomadic groups. The word “Ute” means “Land of the Sun”, and “Ute” also gave us the state name “Utah”.

60. *Signs of a much-used book : DOG-EARS

The folded-down corner of the page of a book, a temporary placeholder, is known as a “dog-ear”. I suppose that’s because it looks like the ear of a dog …

62. Suffix with nectar or elephant : -INE

A nectarine is a cultivar of peach. It is noted for its smooth skin, as opposed to the fuzzy skin of the traditional peach.

65. Psychedelic drug, briefly : LSD

LSD (known colloquially as “acid”) is short for lysergic acid diethylamide. A Swiss chemist called Albert Hofmann first synthesized LSD in 1938 in a research project looking for medically efficacious ergot alkaloids. It wasn’t until some five years later when Hofmann ingested some of the drug accidentally that its psychedelic properties were discovered. Trippy, man …

66. The “L” of L.A.P.D. : LOS

The Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) is the third largest local law enforcement agency in the country, after New York PD and Chicago PD. Among other things, LAPD is famous for creating the first Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) team in the US, in 1965.

67. Sierra ___ (African land) : LEONE

The Republic of Sierra Leone is a country in West Africa that lies on the Atlantic Coast. The capital city of Freetown was originally set up as a colony to house the “Black Poor” of London, England. These people were mainly freed British slaves of Caribbean descent who were living a miserable life in the run-down parts of London. Perhaps to help the impoverished souls, perhaps to rid the streets of “a problem”, three ships were chartered in 1787 to transport a group of blacks, with some whites, to a piece of land purchased in Sierra Leone. Those who made the voyage were granted British citizenship and protection. The descendants of these immigrants, and others who made the journey over the next 60 years, make up the ethnic group that’s today called the Sierra Leone Creole.

Down

3. City planner’s map : PLAT

A plat is a map showing actual and planned features, so a town might have a plat showing existing and intended buildings.

4. Inventor dubbed “The Wizard of Menlo Park” : EDISON

Thomas Alva Edison (TAE) was nicknamed “The Wizard of Menlo Park” by a newspaper reporter, a name that stuck. He was indeed a wizard, in the sense that he was such a prolific inventor. The Menlo Park part of the moniker recognizes the location of his first research lab, in Menlo Park, New Jersey.

5. Feature of the word “psalm” or “pterodactyl” : SILENT P

The Greek word “psalmoi” originally meant “songs sung to a harp”, and gave us the word “psalms”. In the Jewish and Western Christian traditions, the Book of Psalms contains 150 individual psalms, divided into five sections.

Pterodactyls were flying reptiles, the fossilised remains of which have been found mainly in limestone deposits in Bavaria, Germany. Now extinct, pterodactyls lived in the late Jurassic Period, around 150 million years ago.

7. Race of people in “The Time Machine” : ELOI

In the 1895 novel by H. G. Wells called “The Time Machine”, there are two races that the hero encounter in his travels into the future. The Eloi are the “beautiful people” who live on the planet’s surface. The Morlocks are a race of cannibals living underground who use the Eloi as food.

8. The “N” of TNT : NITRO

“TNT” is an abbreviation for trinitrotoluene. Trinitrotoluene was first produced in 1863 by the German chemist Joseph Wilbrand, who developed it for use as a yellow dye. TNT is relatively difficult to detonate so it was on the market as a dye for some years before its more explosive properties were discovered.

9. “Star Wars” queen : AMIDALA

In the “Star Wars” universe, Padmé Amidala is the Queen of the planet Naboo. Played very ably by Natalie Portman, Padmé becomes the secret wife of Anakin Skywalker, later revealed to be Darth Vader. As such, Padmé is also the mother of Luke Skywalker and his sister, Princess Leia Organa.

11. Unit of work : ERG

An erg is a unit of mechanical work or energy. It is a small unit, as there are 10 million ergs in one joule. it has been suggested that an erg is about the amount of energy required for a mosquito to take off. The term comes from “ergon”, the Greek word for work.

12. “Heads or tails!” : CALL IT!

The two sides of a coin are known as the “obverse” and the “reverse”. The obverse is commonly referred to as “heads”, as it often depicts someone’s head. The reverse is commonly called “tails”, as it is the opposite of “heads”.

22. *Really something, with “the” : BEE’S KNEES

There was a whole series of phrases involving animals that developed in the 1920s, all designed to indicate a superlative. Some are still around today, such as “the cat’s pajamas” and “the bee’s knees”. Others didn’t last too long, e.g. “the eel’s ankle” and “the snake’s hip”.

24. Japanese pond swimmer : KOI

Koi are fish that are also called Japanese carp. Koi have been bred for decorative purposes and there are now some very brightly colored examples found in Japanese water gardens.

28. Andy’s boy on “The Andy Griffith Show” : OPIE

Opie Taylor is the character played by Ron Howard on “The Andy Griffith Show”. Opie lives with widowed father Andy Taylor (played by Andy Griffith) and his great-aunt Beatrice “Aunt Bee” Taylor (played by Frances Bavier). Ron Howard first played the role in 1960 in the pilot show, when he was just 5 years old. Howard sure has come a long way since playing Opie Taylor. He has directed some fabulous movies including favorites of mine like “Apollo 13”, “A Beautiful Mind” and “The Da Vinci Code”.

29. Driller in R.O.T.C., maybe: Abbr. : SGT

The Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) is a training program for officers based in colleges all around the US. The ROTC program was established in 1862 when as a condition of receiving a land-grant to create colleges, the federal government required that military tactics be part of a new school’s curriculum.

37. Fuel additive brand : STP

STP is a brand name for automotive lubricants and additives. The name STP comes from “Scientifically Treated Petroleum”.

38. Those getting excited when thinking? : NEURONS

A nerve cell is more correctly called a neuron. The branched projections that receive electrochemical signals from other neurons are known as dendrites. The long nerve fiber that conducts signals away from the neuron is known as the axon. A neuron that has no definite axon is referred to as “apolar” or “nonpolar”. In apolar neurons the nerve impulses radiate in all directions.

40. Team with the most World Series victories (27) : YANKEES

The New York Yankees baseball team has the nickname “the Bronx Bombers”. The nickname reflects where the team plays (the Bronx) and the team’s reputation for hitting (bombers). The New York Yankees were the first team to retire a uniform number, doing so on July 4, 1939. That day they retired the number 4 in honor of Lou Gehrig.

42. Layered Austrian pastry : STRUDEL

Strudel is a layered pastry that is usually sweet. The word “strudel” means “whirlpool, eddy” in German.

45. It is “full of genius, full of the divinity,” per Henry David Thoreau : NATURE

Henry David Thoreau is a personal hero of mine. Thoreau is best known for his book called “Walden” published in 1854. The book outlines his philosophy of life and details his experiences living in a cabin near Walden Pond just outside Concord, Massachusetts.

55. Miscellany : OLIO

“Olio” is a term meaning a hodgepodge or a mixture, coming from the mixed stew of the same name. The stew in turn takes its name from the Spanish “olla”, the clay pot used for cooking.

57. Frozen waffle brand : EGGO

Eggo is the brand name of a line of frozen waffles made by Kellogg’s. When they were introduced in the 1930s, the name “Eggo” was chosen to promote the “egginess” of the batter. “Eggo” replaced “Froffles”, the original name chosen by melding “frozen” and “waffles”.

59. Chick-___-A : FIL

Chick-fil-A is a chain of fast food restaurants that was founded in 1946 in Georgia. The corporation has a culture that is heavily influenced by the founder’s evangelical Christian faith. As such, Chick-fil-A is one of the only fast food or retail chain of stores that closes for business on Sunday. Chick-fil-A also made the headlines a while back due to the company’s stated opposition to same-sex marriage.

61. Suffix with Caesar : -EAN

The story that Julius Caesar was born via a Caesarean section seems be unfounded. Although such procedures were indeed carried out in Ancient Rome, there are no reports of the mother surviving (and Julius Caesar’s mother did raise her child).

Complete List of Clues/Answers

Across

1. Deals with a problem : COPES
6. What X equals in Roman numerals : TEN
9. Mature, as wine : AGE
12. Polite plea to a parent : COULD I?
13. Yale student, informally : ELI
14. Sea, to Debussy : MER
15. *Out-of-vogue hairstyle akin to a mullet : RATTAIL
16. What “compares 2 U” in a 1990 #1 Sinead O’Connor hit : NOTHING
18. Ctrl-___-Del : ALT
19. When doubled, an African fly : TSE
20. Diatribe : TIRADE
21. Thick piece of concrete : SLAB
23. Like a G.I. cleaning up after a meal, maybe : ON KP
25. Speak grandly : ORATE
27. *Condition with feet turned inward : PIGEON TOES
30. Nobel laureate Wiesel : ELIE
31. Almost vertical, as a slope : STEEP
32. *How a tot rides on someone’s shoulders : PIGGYBACK
34. Nurse, as a drink : SIP
36. Gooey road cover : TAR
37. *Two ones, in dice : SNAKE EYES
43. Monsoon events : RAINS
47. Nashville’s home: Abbr. : TENN
48. Like a centaur or faun … or a hint to the answer to each of this puzzle’s starred clues : PART ANIMAL
50. Washington’s ___ Sound : PUGET
52. Drug cop : NARC
53. Transoceanic alliance since 1949 : NATO
54. Nike competitor : REEBOK
56. Western tribe member : UTE
58. Acorn, for one : NUT
59. On the market, as a house : FOR SALE
60. *Signs of a much-used book : DOG-EARS
62. Suffix with nectar or elephant : -INE
63. Fib : LIE
64. Have the attention of : ENGAGE
65. Psychedelic drug, briefly : LSD
66. The “L” of L.A.P.D. : LOS
67. Sierra ___ (African land) : LEONE

Down

1. Summer vacation lodging : COTTAGE
2. Result of three strikes : OUT
3. City planner’s map : PLAT
4. Inventor dubbed “The Wizard of Menlo Park” : EDISON
5. Feature of the word “psalm” or “pterodactyl” : SILENT P
6. Camping stake : TENT PEG
7. Race of people in “The Time Machine” : ELOI
8. The “N” of TNT : NITRO
9. “Star Wars” queen : AMIDALA
10. Hereditary : GENETIC
11. Unit of work : ERG
12. “Heads or tails!” : CALL IT!
15. Speaks with a hoarse voice : RASPS
17. *Foolish sort : HAREBRAIN
22. *Really something, with “the” : BEE’S KNEES
24. Japanese pond swimmer : KOI
26. “There’s a mouse!” : EEK!
28. Andy’s boy on “The Andy Griffith Show” : OPIE
29. Driller in R.O.T.C., maybe: Abbr. : SGT
33. Knitting material : YARN
35. Dynamism : PEP
37. Fuel additive brand : STP
38. Those getting excited when thinking? : NEURONS
39. Made irate : ANGERED
40. Team with the most World Series victories (27) : YANKEES
41. Historical period : ERA
42. Layered Austrian pastry : STRUDEL
44. Humble response to “How do you do it all?” : I MANAGE
45. It is “full of genius, full of the divinity,” per Henry David Thoreau : NATURE
46. Vegas machines : SLOTS
49. Start of a play : ACT ONE
51. Kids’ batting game : T-BALL
55. Miscellany : OLIO
57. Frozen waffle brand : EGGO
59. Chick-___-A : FIL
61. Suffix with Caesar : -EAN