Category: Brendan Emmett Quigley

The name’s William Ernest Butler, but please call me Bill. I grew up in Ireland, but now live out here in the San Francisco Bay Area. I’m retired now, from technology businesses that took our family all over the world. I answer all emails, so please feel free to email me at bill@paxient.com, or leave a comment below.

If you are working on the New York Times crossword in any other publication, you are working on the syndicated puzzle. Here is a link to my answers to today’s SYNDICATED New York Times crossword. To find any solution other than today’s, enter the crossword number (e.g. 1225, 0107) in the “Search the Blog” box above.

This is my solution to the crossword published in the New York Times today …

COMPLETION TIME: 8m 28s
THEME: BEAKFAST! … breakfast items appear in the theme answers e.g. TOAST-MISTRESS, PANCAKE MAKEUP
ANSWERS I MISSED: 0

TODAY’S WIKI-EST, AMAZONIAN GOOGLIES
Across
1: BOB: Despite all Bob Dole’s success in the world of politics, he is remembered by many as the VP candidate who lost to Walter Mondale (and Jimmy Carter) and the presidential candidate who lost to incumbent Bill Clinton. The man is a true war hero. He joined up in 1942 and fought with the Army’s 10th Mountain Division in Italy. In 1945 he was hit by machine gun fire in his right arm and back, so badly injured that his comrades could only dose him up with morphine, write “M” on his forehead with his own blood (so that another, fatal dose of morphine would not be administered) and continue fighting the battle. Dole had to wait nine hours to be evacuated from the battlefield, and wait another three years before being discharged from hospital back in the States.

9 MCCOY: This idiom originated back in Scotland, where the expression was “the real McKay” meaning the real deal, as it does to day. When the expression migrated to Ireland it mutated into “the real McCoy”, and from Ireland it crossed intact across the Atlantic to America.

15 MOXIE: Back as far as 1876, Moxie was a brand name of a “medicine” peddled with the claim that it “built up your nerve”. In 1924, Moxie was registered as a trademark for a bitter, non-alcoholic beverage (no more claims of nerve-building). And we’ve used the term “moxie” ever since …

22 SONIA: Sonia Braga achieved fame in here native Brazil playing the title role in the movie “Gabriela”. There followed roles in American films such as “Kiss of the Spider Woman” and  “The Milagro Beanfield War“. She has also played in the Portuguese version of “Desperate Housewives”.

23 PFUI: Nowadays we use the spelling “phooey”. Phooey came into English via Yiddish from the original German word pfui, a vocal gesture expressing rejection.

28 EMS: Emergency Medical Services.

29 SHAMUS: Shamus is a slang term for policeman or a private inestigator. The experts don’t seem so sure, but there is no doubt in my mind that the term derives from the Irish name Seamus (James in English). Sure, aren’t cops always from the Auld Sod?

36 HIGH FALUTIN’: The expression “high falutin'” dates back to the mid-1800s. some suggest that it may be a mutation from “high flying”, as high falutin’ of course means “haughty” or “pretentious”.

42 SHARK: “Jaws” is about the only “creature from the deep” movie that I’ll watch, and it is excellent. If you haven’t read the Peter Benchley book, put it on your list. Great reading for the summer, sitting by the beach …

47 BOZ: Charles Dickens used the pen-name Boz early in his career. He had already established himself as the most famous novelist of the Victorian Era when he came to visit America in 1842. He was honored by 3,000 of New York’s elite at a “Boz Ball” in the Park Theater.

49 TIMBAL: The timbal is most often associated with Brazil and/or Cuba. The timbal comes in varying sizes, is slightly conical in shape and made of wood or metal with a nylon head.

58 ARLO: Arlo Guthrie is the son of Woody Guthrie. Both father and son are renowned for their singing of protest songs about social injustice. He is most famous for his epic “Alice’s Restaurant Massacree“, a song that lasts a full 18m and 34s. In the song, Guthrie tells how he was rejected for service in the Vietnam War after being drafted, based on his criminal record. He had one incident on his record, a Thanksgiving Day arrest from littering and being a public nuisance when he was 18-years-old.

60 SAJAK: Pat Sajak took over the hosting of “Wheel of Fortune” back in 1983, and has been doing the job ever since. He had a short run as a talk show host in 1989/1990, but has subbed quite often for Larry King and Regis Philbin.

67 ONO: Yoko Ono was born into a prosperous Japanese family, and is actually a descendant of one of the Emperors of Japan. Her father moved around the world for work, so she lived the first few years of her life in San Francisco. The family returned to Japan, then moved onto New York, Hanoi and back to Japan just before WWII. Yoko was in Tokyo during the great fire-bombing of 1945. Immediately after the war, the family was far from prosperous. While her father was in a concentration camp in Vietnam, Yoko’s mother had to resort to begging and bartering to feed her children. But, when her father returned, life started to return to normal. Yoko got to attend university, the first woman to be accepted into the philosophy program of Gakushuin Univeristy.

68 ENOLA: As we all know, the Enola Gay was the B-29 that dropped the first atomic bomb. Enola Gay was the name of the pilot’s mother, Col. Paul W. Tibbets, Jr.

70 OTT: I don’t think Mel Ott took steroids! At 5′ 9″ he weighed just 170 lb.. Yet he was the first National League player to hit over 500 home runs. Ott died in a car accident in New Orleans in 1958, at age 49 years.

Down
2 OTERI: Cheri Oteri was the SNL cast member that appeared with Will Farrell as a pair of Spartan Cheerleaders.

3 BACON’S REBELLION: Nathaniel Bacon led an uprising in 1676 in the Virginia Colony. It was remarkable in that poor whites and blacks united in opposition to the ruling class. The rebels were trying to drive Native Americans from Virginia.

8 SERIN: Serins form a whole group of small finches, that includes canaries.

9 MIR: Mir was a very successful project, with the station still holding the record for the longest continuous manned presence in space, at just under ten years. Towards the end of its life, however, the years began to take their toll. There was a dangerous fire, multiple system failures, and a collision with a resupply ship. The Russian commitment to the International Space Station drained funds for repairs, so the station was allowed to reenter the Earth’s atmosphere in 2001.

37 FREI: The German word for “free”, as in the tragic phrase “Arbeit macht frei” placed at the entrances to many Nazi concentration camps. Literally the phrase means “work makes free”, but more colloquially “work liberates”. Pretty cynical …

39 NEZ: The Nez Perce tribe of the Pacific Northwest call themselves the Nimiipuu, meaning “The Real People”. The name Nez Perce means “pierced nose” in French, a name applied in error to the Nimiipuu, instead of the neighboring Chinook tribe that practiced nose piercing.

41 IBM: The origin of the nickname “Big Blue” seems to have been lost in the mists of time. But, the IMB logo is blue, almost every mainframe they produced was painted blue. I remember visiting IBM on business a few times in my career, and we were encouraged to wear whites shirts and blue suits to “fit in” with our client’s culture.

56 CANTO: Ezra Pound was an American poet who spent much of his life wandering the world, spending years in each of London, Paris, and Italy. In Italy, his work and sympathies for Mussolini’s regime led to his arrest at the end of the war. His major work was the epic, albeit incomplete “The Cantos“. The poem is divided into 120 sections, each known as a canto.

61 JANE: Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote a whole series of “Tarzan” novels, in which the love interest was an American from Baltimore, called Jane Porter. The most celebrated screen portrayal of Jane was by Maureen O’Sullivan who played opposite Johnny Weissmuller.

66 SPY: “Spy vs Spy” is a comic strip that has run in “Mad” magazine continuously since 1961. It was drawn by Antonio Prohias, a refugee from Cuba. The early storyline was very fitting for the times, a statement about the futility of the arms race, detente and the Cold War.