Category: Taylor Johnson

Bill’s time: 12m 11s

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Today’s Wiki-est Amazonian Googlies

Across

1 “Pretty Little Liars” author Shepard : SARA

“Pretty Little Liars” is a mystery drama TV series aimed at teens. It is based on a series of novels penned by Sara Shepard. The original show spawned a whole franchise of TV series, including “Pretty Dirty Secrets”, “Ravenswood”, “Pretty Little Liars: The Perfectionists” and “Pretty Little Liars: Original Sin”.

18 Holly genus : ILEX

Ilex, commonly known as holly, is a genus of hundreds of species of flowering plants. The holly used for Christmas decoration is Ilex aquifolium. The wood from the holly bush was once a favorite for construction of Scottish bagpipes, until dense tropical woods became readily available.

22 Jazz trumpeter Jones : THAD

Thad Jones was a jazz trumpeter and bandleader from Pontiac, Michigan. Thad came from a very musical family. His older brother was Hank Jones the jazz pianist, and his younger brother was Elvin Jones the jazz drummer.

23 Spiny reptile that, despite its name, is actually a lizard : HORNY TOAD

Horny toads (also called “horned toads”) aren’t toads at all. “Horny toad” is a familiar name for the desert horned lizard, a species of lizard native to the western US. It does look somewhat like a toad though, as it has a very flat and wide body.

24 The Flyers, on a scoreboard : PHI

The Philadelphia Flyers hockey team was founded in 1967. The team’s name was chosen using a “name-the-team” fan contest.

25 Famed recipient of a lesser blessing : ESAU

According to the Bible’s Book of Genesis, Esau was the elder twin brother of Jacob, and son of Isaac and Rebekah. Esau sold his birthright, which entitled him to a double portion of his father’s inheritance, for a bowl of lentil stew because he was hungry and didn’t want to wait for his brother to cook food.

27 “Eww, enough!” : TMI!

Too much information! (TMI!)

31 Some Reichstag votes : NEINS

The German parliament is known as the “Bundestag”, and has been since its founding in 1949. The Bundestag meets in the magnificent Reichstag building in Berlin.

40 “TiK ToK” creator : KESHA

“Kesha” (formerly “Ke$ha”) is the stage name used by singer Kesha Rose Sebert.

45 Soldier of Sauron : ORC

In J. R. R. Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings”, Sauron is the actual “Lord of the Rings”. Sauron was the Dark Lord Morgoth’s trusted lieutenant.

47 Cubism-inspired style : DECO

Art Deco is a style of design and architecture of the 1920s that actually had its roots in Belgium and then spread throughout Europe before arriving in North America. Celebrated examples of Art Deco architecture are the magnificent Chrysler Building in New York City completed in 1930, and the GE Building that sits in the middle of New York City’s Rockefeller Center with the address of “30 Rock”.

In the art movement known as Cubism, objects that are the subject of a painting are broken up and reassembled in an abstract form. The pioneers of the Cubist movement were Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque.

55 Spice derived from the inner bark of a tropical tree : CINNAMON

“True” cinnamon sticks are taken from the inner bark of the Cinnamomum verum tree. However, a lot of cinnamon sticks are also sold that come from a related species of tree, and these are more correctly referred to as “cassia”.

58 Antagonist in a 1604 play … or a 1992 animated movie : IAGO

In William Shakespeare’s “Othello”, Iago is the villain of the piece. At one point he readily admits this, saying “Thus do I ever make my fool my purse”. Here he is claiming to make money out of making fools of others. In this case, he takes money from Roderigo, who believes that Iago will help him bed Othello’s wife Desdemona.

In the 1992 Disney feature “Aladdin”, there is a parrot called Iago. Iago is voiced by the comic Gilbert Gottfried.

Down

1 0, for 180° : SINE

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.

2 Bit of salty language? : AHOY THERE!

“Ahoy!” is a nautical term used to signal a vessel. When the telephone was invented by Alexander Graham Bell, he suggested that “ahoy” be used as a standard greeting when answering a call. However, Thomas Edison came up with “hello”, and we’ve been using that ever since.

3 Some announcements from the Fed : RATE HIKES

The Federal Reserve System is more usually known simply as “the Fed”, and is the central banking system of the US. It was introduced in 1913 in response to a number of financial panics at the beginning of the 20th century. The original role for the Fed was to act as a lender of last resort, in case there was a run on a bank. This can happen as most of the money that is deposited by customers in a bank is reinvested by that bank, so it has very little liquid cash available. If too many customers look for their money at one time, then the bank can be short of cash and this can start a “run”. The Fed’s responsibilities have broadened since those early days …

4 Cosmetics brand owned by Estée Lauder : AVEDA

Horst Rechelbacher was traveling in India in 1970 when he was introduced to the Hindu science of longevity called Ayurveda, which inspired him to set up his own company of skin and hair care products that he called Aveda. The company opened its doors in 1978 and is based in Blaine, Minnesota.

5 Organ piece : STOP

A stop is a component of a pipe organ that admits a flow of air to a specific set of organ pipes. The organ player can allow air to flow, or can “stop” it (hence the name “stop”). Stops are classified according to the group of pipes that are controlled, with stops often being named for the sounds imitated by those pipes. So, for example, there are flute stops, string stops and reed stops.

6 KenKen entries: Abbr. : NOS

KenKen is an arithmetic and logic puzzle invented quite recently, in 2004 by a Japanese math teacher named Tetsuya Miyamoto. “Ken” is the Japanese word for “cleverness”.

8 Minos or Midas : RULER

Minos was the King of Crete in Greek mythology, and the son of Zeus and Europa. Minos had an elaborate labyrinth built under the island that was designed by the architect Daedalus and his son Icarus (who famously died trying to escape from the island by “flying” away). In the labyrinth, King Minos kept the Minotaur, a dreadful creature with the head of a bull on the body of a man.

King Midas of Greek mythology might be termed an alchemist as he had the power to turn everything he touched into gold i.e. the Midas touch. That power became a curse, as everything he touched turned to gold, including his food and drink, and even his children.

9 Member of la famille : ENFANT

In French, “un enfant” (a male child) is “petit”, and “une enfant” (a female child) is “petite” (small).

10 Fan base added to the O.E.D. in 2023 : SWIFTIES

A swiftie is a fan of singer Taylor Swift. In 2017, the singer trademarked the term “Swifties”. She has also trademarked the term “Swiftmas”.

11 Oral vaccine target : POLIO

Jonas Salk was an American medical researcher who developed the first safe polio vaccine. In the fifties, especially after the 1952 epidemic, polio was the biggest health fear in the US. It killed thousands and left even more with disabilities, and most of the victims were children. The situation was dire and the authorities immediately quarantined the family of any polio victim. That quarantine was so strict that in many cases the families were not even permitted to attend the funeral of a family member who died from the disease.

15 Warm-up pieces : ETUDES

An étude is a short instrumental composition that is usually quite hard to play and is intended to help the performer master a particular technique. “Étude” is the French word for “study”. Études are commonly performed on the piano.

24 Half a half-bushel : PECK

A peck is a dry measure of volume equal to a quarter of a bushel. The term can be used figuratively to mean a considerable quantity in general, as in the phrase “a peck of trouble”.

In the imperial system of weights and measures, a bushel is a unit of dry volume made up of 4 pecks. In the US system, a bushel is a dry volume of 8 gallons. We have used the term “bushel” to mean “large quantity” since the 14th century.

30 Winter forecast : SLEET

Apparently, “sleet” is a term used to describe two different weather conditions. One is a shower of ice pellets that are smaller than hail, and the second is a mixture of rain and snow, with the snow melting as it falls.

33 Comedian Aparna who wrote “Unreliable Narrator” : NANCHERLA

Aparna Nancherla is a comedian and actress from Washington, D.C. She plays Grace Ramaswamy on the Comedy Central sitcom “Corporate”.

34 Do a certain veterinary job : SPAY

Our verb “to spay”, meaning “to surgically remove the ovaries of” (an animal), comes from an old Anglo-French word “espeier” meaning “to cut with a sword”.

38 West Coast political hub, familiarly : SAC

Sacramento, California’s state capital, was named for the Sacramento River. The river was named by a Spanish explorer, who called it “Rio de los Sacramentos”. This translates as “River of the Blessed Sacrament”.

41 What an integral can compute : AREA

Remember doing calculus at school, and all those derivatives and integrals? Well, you probably also remember that an integral calculates the area under a curve (for example), and a derivative calculates the slope of a tangent at a particular point on a curve.

52 Color of a proverbial French beast : NOIRE

“Bête noire” translates from French as “black beast”, and is used in English to describe something or someone that is disliked.

54 Chichi : ARTSY

Someone or something described as chichi is showily trendy and pretentious. “Chichi” is a French noun meaning “airs, fuss”.

56 Like the coats of many terriers : WIRY

Most terrier breeds of dog originated in Britain and Ireland. They were developed as working dogs, with the job of controlling populations of rats, rabbits and foxes by rooting them out above and below the ground. The name “terrier” comes via Middle French from the Latin “terra” meaning “earth”, a reflection of the breed’s habit of burrowing into the earth looking for its prey.

57 Free-roaming residents of Japan’s Nara Park : DEER

The Japanese city of Nara, located not far from Kyoto, was the nation’s capital from 710 to 784 CE.

60 Beat decisively, in video game lingo : PWN

“To pwn” is online gamer-speak for “to own, defeat easily”. It’s likely that “pwn” evolved from “own” as it is a common typo caused by the close proximity of the o- and p-keys on a computer keyboard. “Pwn” is pronounced like “pone”.