1030-24 NY Times Crossword 30 Oct 24, Wednesday

Constructed by: Josh M. Kaufmann
Edited by: Joel Fagliano

Today’s Reveal Answer: Beetlejuice

Themed answers include THREE sets of circled letters that together sound like “BEETLEJUICE”:

  • 29D Ghoulish character who appears after someone follows the instructions at 17- and 59-Across : BEETLEJUICE
  • 30A Popular music genre from Nigeria : AFROBEAT (giving “BEAT-”)
  • 37A Overly lenient : INDULGENT (giving “-ULGE-”)
  • 49A Naught, nil, nada : GOOSE EGG (giving “-OOSE”)
  • 17A With 59-Across, instructions for the sets of circled letters : PUT THEM TOGETHER …
  • 59A See 17-Across : … SAY IT THREE TIMES

Bill’s time: 7m 54s

Bill’s errors: 0

Today’s Wiki-est Amazonian Googlies

Across

1 Wrap on a roll : SARAN

What’s known as plastic wrap in America, we call cling-film in Ireland. The brand name “Saran” is often used generically in the US, while “Glad” wrap is common down under. Plastic wrap was one of those unintended inventions, a byproduct of a development program to create a hard plastic cover for cars.

10 Actor Stonestreet of “Modern Family” : ERIC

Actor Eric Stonestreet is best-known for playing Cameron Tucker on the hit comedy show “Modern Family”. Stonestreet is openly straight, but plays the gay partner of the character Mitchell Pritchett. Pritchett is played by openly-gay actor Jesse Tyler Ferguson. Ferguson jokingly describes Stonestreet as being “gay for pay”.

15 Foxtrot preceder : ECHO

The NATO phonetic alphabet is also called the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) phonetic alphabet. Alfa, Bravo, Charlie … X-ray, Yankee, Zulu.

21 The “lava” in a lava lamp : WAX

The lava lamp was invented in 1960 by a British man, Edward Craven-Walker. The “lava” is a mixture of wax and carbon tetrachloride, floating in a water/glycerol mix. The wax reduces in density as it picks up heat from the incandescent bulb in the lamp’s base. The wax rises, cools, and then sinks to the bottom of the liquid only to be heated again.

22 Member of Tarzan’s tribe : APE

In the stories by Edgar Rice Burroughs, Tarzan of the Apes was actually Englishman John Clayton, Viscount Greystoke.

23 Kristen of “Palm Royale” : WIIG

Kristen Wiig is a comic actress who appears on “Saturday Night Live”. She also made an appearance on the first season of Spike TV’s quirky “The Joe Schmo Show”, playing “Dr. Pat”. More recently, she co-wrote and starred in the 2011 hit film “Bridesmaids”, and co-starred in the 2016 reboot of “Ghostbusters”.

28 Li’l ___ : ABNER

“Li’l Abner” was created and drawn by Al Capp for over 43 years starting in 1934. Al Capp stopped producing the strip in 1977, largely due to illness (he died from emphysema two years later). As the strip finished up, he went so far as to apologize to his long-standing fans, saying that he should have stopped 3-4 years earlier as he felt that the quality of his work had gone down in those latter years. The title character’s full name is “Li’l Abner Yokum”. Despite being referred to as “Li’l”, Abner is 6’ 3” tall.

32 Symbols of electrical resistance : OMEGAS

The unit of electrical resistance is the ohm (with the symbol omega) named after German physicist Georg Simon Ohm. Ohm was the guy who established experimentally that the amount of current flowing through a circuit is directly proportional to the voltage applied, (V=IR) a relationship that every school kid knows as Ohm’s Law.

33 “The People’s Princess” : DIANA

Just after Diana, Princess of Wales died in a car accident, then Prime Minister Tony Blair addressed the nation. In so doing, he described her as “the People’s Princess”. That description resonated with many, and is still used today when referring to “Lady Di”.

42 Carbon compound : ENOL

An enol is an alkene with a hydroxyl group, and so is part-alkene and part-alcohol. The term “enol”, therefore, is a portmanteau of “alkene” and “alcohol”.

43 Certain Disney princess-inspired Halloween costumes : ELSAS

I don’t think that Elsa, the Snow Queen, is on the official list of Disney princesses.

“Frozen” is a 2013 animated feature from Walt Disney Studios that is based on the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale “The Snow Queen”. The film is all about the exploits of Princess Anna, the younger sister of Elsa, Snow Queen of Arendelle. Elsa was originally intended to be a villain, a malicious and power-hungry character. By the final version of the film, Elsa had transformed from a one-dimensional villain into a fully fleshed-out protagonist.

47 Oft-repeated saying : MANTRA

A mantra is a word that is used as a focus for the mind while meditating. The term is Sanskrit in origin, and is now used figuratively in English to describe any oft-repeated word or phrase.

49 Naught, nil, nada : GOOSE EGG (giving “-OOSE”)

The use of the phrase “goose egg” to mean “zero” is baseball slang that dates back to the 1860s. The etymology is as expected: the numeral zero and a goose egg are both large and round.

52 City at the confluence of the Rhône and Saône : LYON

The city of Lyon in France is sometimes known as “Lyons” in English. It is the second-largest metropolitan area in the country, after Paris, and is located just to the north of the confluence of the Rhône and Saône Rivers.

67 Hurdles for some bio majors : MCATS

Medical College Admission Test (MCAT)

Down

3 401(k) alternative : ROTH IRA

Roth Individual Retirement Accounts (Roth IRAs) were introduced in 1997 under a bill sponsored by Senator William Roth of Delaware, hence the name.

5 Classic soda brand : NEHI

The Nehi cola brand has a name that sounds like “knee-high”, a measure of a small stature. Back in the mid-1900’s the Chero-Cola company, which owned the brand, went for a slightly different twist on “knee-high” in advertising. The logo for Nehi was an image of a seated woman’s stockinged legs, with her skirt pulled up to her knees to hint at “knee-high”.

6 Dream stage : REM

“REM” is an acronym standing for “rapid eye movement”. REM sleep takes up 20-25% of the sleeping hours and is the period associated with one’s most vivid dreams.

7 Spooky mo. : OCT

All Saints’ Day is November 1st each year. The day before All Saints’ Day is All Hallows’ Eve, better known by the Scottish term “Halloween”.

24 “___ were a rich man …” : IF I

“If I Were a Rich Man” is a wonderful song from the 1964 musical “Fiddler on the Roof”. The musical is based on stories about “Tevye the Dairyman” by Yiddish author Sholem Aleichem. The song’s title is inspired by a specific Sholem Aleichem monologue entitled “If I Were a Rothschild”, a reference to the wealthy Rothschild family

26 Louisiana Acadian : CAJUN

The great explorer Verrazzano gave the name “Arcadia” to the coastal land that stretched from north of present day Virginia right up the North American continent to Nova Scotia. The name Arcadia was chosen as it was also the name for a part of Greece that had been viewed as idyllic from the days of classical antiquity. The “Arcadia” name quickly evolved into the word “Acadia” that was used locally here in North America. Much of Acadia was settled by the French in the 1600s, and then in 1710 Acadia was conquered by the British. There followed the French and Indian War after which there was a mass migration of French Acadians, often via the French colony of Saint-Domingue (present-day Haiti) to the French colony of Louisiana. The local dialectic pronunciation of the word “Acadian” was “Cajun”, giving the name to the ethnic group for which Louisiana has been home for about 300 years.

27 Study of the ear : OTOLOGY

Otology is a branch of medicine dealing with the ear. The prefix “oto-” means “pertaining to the ear”.

29 Ghoulish character who appears after someone follows the instructions at 17- and 59-Across : BEETLEJUICE

“Beetlejuice” is a 1988 comedy-horror film directed by Tim Burton and starring Michael Keaton in the title role. Beetlejuice is an underworld character who tries to scare away the new inhabitants of a house that is haunted by the ghosts of a deceased couple (played by Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis).

35 Home with a dome : IGLOO

The Inuit word for “house” is “iglu”, which we usually write as “igloo”. The Greenlandic (yes, that’s a language) word for “house” is very similar, namely “igdlo”. The walls of igloos are tremendous insulators, due to the air pockets in the blocks of snow.

38 Agcy. that carries out the Controlled Substances Act : DEA

An initiative of President Richard Nixon, the Controlled Substances Act (CSA) was signed into law in 1970. The CSA combined existing federal drug laws, expanded the scope of federal drug law and also expanded the power of federal law enforcement agencies.

45 Garland, Barr, Sessions, etc., for short : AGS

Attorneys General (AGs) head up the Department of Justice (DOJ). When the office of the Attorney General was created in 1789 it was a part-time job, with no departmental support. The Department of Justice came into being in 1870.

50 Fairy tale opener : ONCE …

The stock phrase “Once upon a time …” has been used in various forms as the start of a narrative at least since 1380. The stock phrase at the end of stories such as folktales is often “and they all lived happily ever after”. The earlier version of this ending was “happily until their deaths”.

52 Lindsay with a cameo in 2024’s “Mean Girls” : LOHAN

“Mean Girls” is a teen comedy movie released in 2004 starring Lindsay Lohan. Tina Fey also puts in an appearance, which really isn’t surprising as Fey wrote the screenplay.

The 2024 musical film “Mean Girls” is based on the 2017 stage musical, and in turn on the 2004 movie, all of the same name. Tina Fey wrote both of the screenplays, as well as the book accompanying the musical.

56 11,000+-foot peak in southern Italy : ETNA

Italy is home to three active volcanoes:

  • Stromboli (in the Tyrrhenian Sea, off the north coast of Sicily)
  • Vesuvius (overlooking Naples)
  • Etna (on the island of Sicily)

Sometimes the list can include Vulcano, a volcanic island located a few miles north of Sicily, which last erupted in the late 1880s.

58 Web programmer’s code : HTML

The initialism “HTML” stands for HyperText Markup Language. HTML is the language used to write most Internet web pages (including this one).

60 Apple devices run on it : IOS

iOS is what Apple now calls its mobile operating system. Previously, it was known as iPhone OS.

62 Chicago trains : ELS

The Chicago “L” is the second largest rapid transit system in the US, with the New York City Subway being the largest. The “L” is also the second oldest, again with the New York City Subway system having the honor of being around the longest. Note that the official nickname for the system is the “L” (originally short for “elevated railroad”), although the term “El” is also in common use (especially in crosswords as “ELS”). The L is managed by the Chicago Transit Authority (CTA).

63 W.W. II arena : ETO

European Theater of Operations (ETO)

64 “Last four digits” fig. : SSN

So often, we are asked for “the last four digits” of our Social Security Numbers (SSNs).

Complete List of Clues/Answers

Across

1 Wrap on a roll : SARAN
6 Like flushed cheeks : ROSY
10 Actor Stonestreet of “Modern Family” : ERIC
14 “Throw me ___!” : A BONE
15 Foxtrot preceder : ECHO
16 Prefix with space : AERO-
17 With 59-Across, instructions for the sets of circled letters : PUT THEM TOGETHER …
20 Head liner? : HAIR
21 The “lava” in a lava lamp : WAX
22 Member of Tarzan’s tribe : APE
23 Kristen of “Palm Royale” : WIIG
25 Calculator symbol on a MacBook, e.g. : ICON
28 Li’l ___ : ABNER
30 Popular music genre from Nigeria : AFROBEAT (giving “BEAT-”)
32 Symbols of electrical resistance : OMEGAS
33 “The People’s Princess” : DIANA
34 Connect : JOIN
36 Contractor’s assessment: Abbr. : EST
37 Overly lenient : INDULGENT (giving “-ULGE-”)
40 ___ in Charlie : C AS
42 Carbon compound : ENOL
43 Certain Disney princess-inspired Halloween costumes : ELSAS
47 Oft-repeated saying : MANTRA
49 Naught, nil, nada : GOOSE EGG (giving “-OOSE”)
51 Belittle : ABASE
52 City at the confluence of the Rhône and Saône : LYON
53 Crack jokes : JEST
54 “Any given Sunday” org. : NFL
55 Start of some art movement names : NEO-
57 Bud : CHUM
59 See 17-Across : … SAY IT THREE TIMES
65 Thereabouts : OR SO
66 What lives in a hole in the wall? : NAIL
67 Hurdles for some bio majors : MCATS
68 Takes home : NETS
69 Common connections : ANDS
70 Gave false romantic hope : LED ON

Down

1 Sentimental sort : SAP
2 Father of, in Arabic : ABU
3 401(k) alternative : ROTH IRA
4 29-Down and others : ANTAGONISTS
5 Classic soda brand : NEHI
6 Dream stage : REM
7 Spooky mo. : OCT
8 Presented : SHOWN
9 Mat class? : YOGA
10 Dig in : EAT
11 Puts back on a wall : REHANGS
12 Words that might follow “This is not a drill” : … I REPEAT
13 Tubes used in sediment sample collecting : CORERS
18 Lake with a spooky-sounding name : ERIE
19 Checkup : EXAM
23 Hunk of gum : WAD
24 “___ were a rich man …” : IF I
26 Louisiana Acadian : CAJUN
27 Study of the ear : OTOLOGY
29 Ghoulish character who appears after someone follows the instructions at 17- and 59-Across : BEETLEJUICE
31 Moratorium : BAN
32 Lone index finger, symbolically : ONE
35 Home with a dome : IGLOO
38 Agcy. that carries out the Controlled Substances Act : DEA
39 Original console for the Super Mario games, for short : NES
40 Cost of a ride, say : CAB FARE
41 Data cruncher : ANALYST
44 Appear angry : SEEM MAD
45 Garland, Barr, Sessions, etc., for short : AGS
46 Army rank: Abbr. : SGT
47 Rock singer Shirley : MANSON
48 Pay to stay : RENT
50 Fairy tale opener : ONCE …
52 Lindsay with a cameo in 2024’s “Mean Girls” : LOHAN
56 11,000+-foot peak in southern Italy : ETNA
58 Web programmer’s code : HTML
60 Apple devices run on it : IOS
61 Cleanse (of) : RID
62 Chicago trains : ELS
63 W.W. II arena : ETO
64 “Last four digits” fig. : SSN