Tag: Organic fertilizer crossword clue

Bill’s time: 9m 30s

Bill’s errors: 0

Today’s Wiki-est Amazonian Googlies

Across

1A City with a view of Mount Vesuvius : NAPLES

Naples (“Napoli” in Italian) is the third largest city in Italy. The name “Napoli” comes from the city’s Ancient Greek name, which translates as “New City”. That’s a bit of a paradox as today Naples is one of the oldest continuously-inhabited cities in the world.

Mount Vesuvius is on the Bay of Naples, just over five miles from the city of Naples. The most famous of the volcano’s eruptions took place in AD 79, the one which destroyed the Roman cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum. Today, Vesuvius is considered to be one of the most dangerous volcanoes in the world, largely because it is at the center of the most densely populated volcanic region in the world, with 3 million people living nearby.

7A Minuscule, in cutesy lingo : TEENSY-WEENSY

Lingo is specialized vocabulary. Journalese and legalese would be good examples.

13A “Seinfeld” role : ELAINE

The character Elaine Benes, unlike the other lead characters (Jerry, Kramer and George), did not appear in the pilot episode of “Seinfeld”. NBC executives specified the addition of a female lead when they picked up the show citing that the situation was too “male-centric”.

15A Hand-held communication device : WALKIE-TALKIE

The more formal name for a walkie-talkie is “handheld transceiver”. It is a handheld, two-way radio, and a device first developed for military use during WWII by Motorola (although others developed similar designs soon after). The first walkie-talkie was portable, but large. It was back-mounted and was carried around the battlefield by a radio officer.

17A Dangers in “The Hurt Locker,” for short : IEDS

Improvised explosive device (IED)

The 2008 movie “The Hurt Locker” is a disturbing drama about a US Army Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) team on the front lines during the Iraq War. The film appears to be very realistic, and was filmed in Jordan just a few miles from the Iraqi border. The screenplay was written by Mark Boal, a journalist who was embedded with an EOD team in 2004. “The Hurt Locker” won six Academy Awards, including Best Director for Kathryn Bigelow, the first woman to be so honored.

18A Longtime portrayer of TV’s Captain Pierce : ALDA

Hawkeye Pierce is the lead character in the “M*A*S*H” novel, movie and TV series. Hawkeye was portrayed by Donald Sutherland in the film, and then by Alan Alda in the television show. Pierce is the only character appearing in all 250 episodes of the groundbreaking TV series.

28A Microdosing substance : LSD

Psychedelic microdosing is the practice of taking extremely low doses of psychedelic drugs in order to promote creativity and well-being. Drugs commonly used are lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) and psilocybin (found in “magic mushrooms”). Hmm …

31A Simpson née Bouvier : MARGE

Marge Simpson is the matriarch of the family in “The Simpsons” animated sitcom. She is voiced by actress Julie Kavner, who is also well known for playing Brenda Morgenstern in the TV show “Rhoda” in the seventies.

33A Tick-borne affliction, informally : LYME

Lyme disease is an infectious disease that is becoming more and more common. The condition takes its name from the town of Lyme, Connecticut where several cases were diagnosed in 1975. Humans catch the disease when bitten by infected ticks. If caught early enough, the disease is usually treated successfully with antibiotics.

39A Marinara tomato : ROMA

The Roma tomato isn’t considered an heirloom variety but it is very popular with home gardeners, especially those gardeners that don’t have a lot of space. It is a bush type (as opposed to vine type) and needs very little room to provide a lot of tomatoes.

Italians use the term “marinara” not for a sauce, but in the name of a recipe that includes a tomato-based sauce. For example, “spaghetti alla marinara” would be a spaghetti dish, served “mariner’s style”. The tomato sauce that we call “marinara” is called “salsa di pomodoro” in Italy.

49A Turner of rock : TINA

“Tina Turner” was the stage name used by Anna Mae Bullock, the “Queen of Rock ‘n’ Roll”. Turner always loved Europe and moved there in the eighties, splitting her time between her homes in England, France and Switzerland.

50A Video surveillance letters : CCTV

Closed-circuit television (CCTV)

51A “I Am ___,” onetime reality TV spinoff : CAIT

“I Am Cait” is a documentary series that follows Caitlyn Jenner after she changed her gender and identification from Bruce Jenner.

55A Region of South Dakota : BADLANDS

Badlands may be “bad lands” for agriculture (hence the name), but they can be beautiful. A badlands is an extensive area from which the topsoil has been eroded by wind and water, leaving exposed rock and very little vegetation. One of the most beautiful badlands in the US is preserved for the nation as South Dakota’s Badlands National Park.

59A Nursery rhyme character known as Lille Trille in Denmark : HUMPTY DUMPTY

Humpty Dumpty is a character in a nursery rhyme. He is usually depicted as an egg, although that isn’t specifically called out in the original rhyme:

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
All the king’s horses and all the king’s men
Couldn’t put Humpty together again.

62A Creator of Heffalumps and Woozles : AA MILNE

Alan Alexander (A.A.) Milne was an English author who is best known for his delightful “Winnie-the-Pooh” series of books. He had only one son, Christopher Robin Milne, born in 1920. The young Milne was the inspiration for the Christopher Robin character in the Winnie-the-Pooh stories. Winnie-the-Pooh was named after Christopher Robin’s real teddy bear, one he called Winnie, who in turn was named after a Canadian black bear called Winnie that the Milnes would visit in London Zoo. The original Winnie teddy bear is on display at the main branch of the New York Public Library in New York.

63A Current measure : AMPERE

The unit of electric current is the ampere, which is abbreviated correctly to “A” rather than “amp”. It is named after French physicist André-Marie Ampère, one of the main scientists responsible for the discovery of electromagnetism.

Down

3D Mom, dad and sis, but not bro : PALINDROMES

The three most famous palindromes in English have to be:

• Able was I ere I saw Elba
• A man, a plan, a canal, Panama!
• Madam, I’m Adam

One of my favorite terms is “Aibohphobia”, although it doesn’t appear in the dictionary and is a joke term. “Aibohphobia” is a great way to describe a fear of palindromes, by creating a palindrome out of the suffix “-phobia”.

5D City WNW of Tulsa : ENID

Enid, Oklahoma takes its name from the old railroad station around which the city developed. Back in 1889, that train stop was called Skeleton Station. An official who didn’t like the name changed it to Enid Station, using a character from Alfred Lord Tennyson’s “Idylls of the King”. Maybe if he hadn’t changed the name, the city of Enid would now be called Skeleton, Oklahoma! Enid has the nickname “Queen Wheat City” because it has a huge capacity for storing grain, the third largest grain storage capacity in the world.

7D Material with a coarse weave : TWEED

Tweed is a rough woolen fabric that is very much associated with Scotland in the UK, and with County Donegal in Ireland. The cloth was originally called “tweel”, the Scots word for “twill”. Apparently a London merchant misinterpreted some handwriting in the early 1800s and assumed the fabric was called “tweed”, a reference to the Scottish River Tweed, and the name stuck …

8D Long hyphen : EN-DASH

In typography, there are em dashes and en dashes. The em dash is about the width of an “m” character, and an en dash about half that, the width of an “n’ character. An en dash is used, for example, to separate numbers designating a range, as in 5-10 years. The em dash seems to be going out of style, and indeed the application I am using to write this paragraph won’t let me show you one!

10D Grandma, in Gloucester : NAN

Gloucester is a city in South West England that lies close to the Welsh border. It is the county seat of Gloucestershire. Fans of “Harry Potter” might want to visit the magnificent Gloucester Cathedral. Its cloisters were used in two “Harry Potter” movies as corridors of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.

19D Antiracist movement since 2013, for short : BLM

The Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement started in 2013 after George Zimmerman was acquitted in the shooting death of African-American youth Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida. Three civil rights activists, Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi, originated the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter.

20D Dance pioneer Duncan : ISADORA

Isadora Duncan was an American dancer who is regarded as the inventor of American modern dance. Duncan emphasised the torso in her moves, a break from the balletic tradition of moving from the feet. She left the US when she was 22 years old and moved to Europe around 1900, and from there emigrated to the Soviet Union. Duncan had a tragic passing. She loved to travel in open automobiles while wearing a long, flowing scarf. One day her scarf got wrapped around the spokes and axle of the car in which she was traveling, and that broke her neck.

22D Leonhard who helped develop calculus : EULER

Leonhard Euler was a brilliant Swiss mathematician and physicist, and a pioneer in the fields of logarithms and graph theory. Euler’s eyesight deteriorated during his working life, and he eventually became almost totally blind.

24D Archangel in “Paradise Lost” : URIEL

Uriel is one of the archangels in the Jewish and Christian traditions. He makes a few notable appearances in literature: in John Milton’s epic poem “Paradise Lost” and in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s poem “Uriel”.

“Paradise Lost” is an epic poem written by Englishman John Milton. It is indeed an epic work, published originally in ten volumes with over ten thousand lines of verse. The “paradise” that is “lost” is the Garden of Eden, from which Adam and Eve were expelled by God in the “Fall of Man”.

26D Something one might slice : TEE SHOT

A slice in golf doesn’t head straight down the fairway, but instead turns off to the right (if you’re a right-handed golfer).

29D Graycoat in the Civil War : REB

During the Civil War, the personification of the Southern states was “Johnny Reb”. The northern equivalent was “Billy Yank”.

30D Briny : SEA

The briny is the sea, with “brine” meaning “salty water”. The term “briny” was originally used for “tears”.

32D Organic fertilizer : GUANO

Guano is the droppings of seabirds, bats and seals. It is prized as fertilizer as it doesn’t really smell, and contains high levels of phosphorus and nitrogen. The word “guano” means “seabird droppings” in the Quechua language spoken in the Andes region of South America.

34D Casaba, e.g. : MELON

A casaba is a type of honeydew melon that ripens relatively late in the season, and so is classed as a winter melon. The casaba takes its name from the Turkish city of Kasaba, from where the fruit was imported into America in the late 1800s.

37D Plethora : LOT

“Plethora” is such a lovely word, I think. It means “a lot of”, and usually in the sense of “too much”. This usage dates back to about 1700, and before that “plethora” was a word used in the medical field to describe an “excess of bodily fluid”.

38D Courtroom figs. : DAS

District attorney (DA)

42D Dune buggy, e.g., in brief : ATV

All-terrain vehicle (ATV)

46D Time for a trip to the laundromat : WASHDAY

If you go looking for a laundromat in the UK or Ireland, folks will likely know what you’re talking about. However, the local name for such a facility is “launderette” or sometimes “laundrette”.

49D Alternative to Gain : TIDE

Tide is a laundry detergent that has been made by Procter & Gamble since 1946. Back then, Tide was marketed as “America’s Washday Favorite”.

52D Youngest of the Brontë sisters : ANNE

Anne was the youngest of the three sisters in the literary Brontë family. Her older sisters wrote novels that are more recognized, but Anne’s two novels do have a following. “Agnes Grey” is based on her own experiences working as a governess. Her other novel, “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall” is written as a long letter from a young man describing the events leading up to his first meeting with his wife-to-be. Anne Brontë’s writing career was cut short in 1849, when she died of pulmonary tuberculosis, at only 29 years of age.

54D Philosopher David who wrote “A Treatise of Human Nature” : HUME

David Hume was a philosopher and historian from Scotland. One of his greatest works is the massive “The History of England”, which was published in six volumes from 1754 to 1762. The massive tome covers the nation’s history from the Roman conquest of Britain led by Julius Caesar in 55 BCE, up to the Glorious Revolution of 1688 that removed King James II from the throne and replaced him with William III and Mary II.

57D Noncombat region, in brief : DMZ

A demilitarized zone (DMZ) is usually a border between two countries where military activity is banned according to some treaty between interested parties. The most famous DMZ today has to be the buffer zone between North and South Korea. The Korean DMZ snakes right across the Korean peninsula near the 38th parallel. The centerline of the DMZ is where the front was when the ceasefire came into effect in 1953 after the Korean War. According to the armistice signed, all troops had to move back 2,000 meters from the front line on both sides, creating the DMZ that is in place today. Paradoxically perhaps, the areas on either side of the DMZ form the most heavily militarized border in the world.

58D Cheney of politics : LIZ

Liz Cheney is the eldest daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney. She was elected to the US House of Representatives in 2016, representing the state of Wyoming’s single seat. Her father held that same seat for ten years. Liz Cheney lost a primary race by a landslide in 2022, after she served as Vice Chair of the House January 6 Committee.

61D “__ Blues” (song on the Beatles’ “White Album”) : YER

“Yer Blues” is a John Lennon song, credited to Lennon and McCartney, that is a track on “The White Album”, recorded in 1968. Lennon recorded the song while the band was on retreat in Rishikesh, India, and while he was “trying to reach God and feeling suicidal”.