Tag: Post-punk sort crossword clue

Bill’s time: 15m 31s

Bill’s errors: 0

Today’s Wiki-est Amazonian Googlies

Across

6 Scepter topper : ORB

A scepter (“sceptre” in Britain and Ireland) is a ceremonial staff, one often held by a monarch.

9 It’s just the wurst! : BRAT

“Wurst” is simply a German word meaning “sausage”.

13 Northernmost land in the Inner Hebrides : ISLE OF SKYE

The Isle of Skye is off the northwest coast of Scotland in the Inner Hebrides. It is the second largest island in the country, and has been linked to the mainland by a road bridge since 1995. I’ve never been there, but I hear the views are spectacular.

The Hebrides are a group of islands just off the west coast of Scotland. They are divided into two main groups: the Inner and Outer Hebrides.

19 Piece of sensitive info, for short : SSN

Social Security number (SSN)

20 Average : MEAN

In a set of numbers, the mean is the average value of those numbers. The median is the numeric value at which half the numbers have a lower value, and half the numbers a higher value. The mode is the value that appears most often in the whole set of numbers.

21 Name that sounds like two of its letters : ELLY

“Elly” sounds like “LE”.

22 Garden figure : GNOME

In English folklore, the fairy’s anti-hero is the diminutive gnome, an evil ugly character. Although the charastics of gnomes vary in folklore, typically they are described as diminutive humanoids who live underground. Over the centuries, the gnome has become more lovable. We now have garden gnomes, and even the Travelocity Gnome.

35 Browser button : HOME

A web browser is a piece of software used to access the World Wide Web. The first web browser was called “WorldWideWeb” and was invented in 1990 by Tim Berners-Lee, the man who created the World Wide Web. The browser known as Mosaic came out in 1993, and it was this browser that drove so much interest in the World Wide Web, and indeed in the Internet in general. Marc Andreessen led the team that created Mosaic, and he then set up his own company called Netscape. Netscape created the Netscape Navigator browser that further popularized the use of the Web starting in 1994. Microsoft responded by introducing Internet Explorer in 1995, which sparked the so-called “browser war”, a war that Microsoft clearly won. As Netscape floundered, the company launched the open-source Mozilla project which eventually led to the Firefox browser. Apple then came out with it’s own Safari browser in 2003. Google’s Chrome browser, introduced in 2008, is by far the most popular way to view the Web today.

36 Bedouins, e.g. : ARABS

Bedouin tribes are Arab ethnic groups that predominantly live in the Middle East, in desert areas. Bedouin tribes tend to be nomadic, not settling permanently in one location.

37 Post-punk sort : GOTH

The goth subculture developed from the gothic rock scene in the early eighties, and is a derivative of the punk music movement. It started in England and spread to many countries around the globe. The term “goth” comes from the Eastern Germanic tribe called the Goths.

39 Classic Disney character who never speaks : PLUTO

Pluto is Mickey Mouse’s pet dog, as well as a star in his own right. Pluto is an unusual Disney character in that he is portrayed basically as a dog as opposed to a “humanized” version of a dog, as are the other Disney characters.

40 It can come as a relief : CAMEO

Cameo is a method of carving, often the carving of a gemstone or a piece of jewelry. The resulting image is in relief (sits proud of the background), whereas an engraved image would be produced by the similar carving method known as intaglio. Nowadays, the term “cameo” is used for any piece of oval-shaped jewelry that contains the image of a head, usually in profile (maybe even a photograph).

41 In-N-Out Burger’s “Animal Style” burgers and fries, e.g. : SECRET MENU ITEMS

Apparently, some fast-food restaurants maintain a “secret” menu of unadvertised selections that customers hear about on the grapevine.

46 Part of a church chorus : AMEN!

The word “amen” translates as “so be it”. “Amen” is said to be of Hebrew origin, but it is also likely to be influenced by Aramaic and Arabic.

47 Theravada or Mahayana vis-à-vis Buddhism : SECT

The Buddhist tradition has two major branches. The Theravada is “the School of the Elders”, and the Mahayana is “the Great Vehicle”. The Theravada is the older of the two schools, whereas the Mahayana split from the Theravada around the 1st century CE.

49 Japanese assent : HAI

The word “yes” translates into “oui” in French, “ja” in German, and “hai” in Japanese.

58 Streaks on the side of a wineglass : LEGS

While tasting wine, one might note rivulets slowly descending along the inside of the glass after swirling. These rivulets are referred to as “legs”, and often indicate that a wine is “full-bodied”.

59 Word that becomes its own synonym if you change its first letter to WI : SLY

“Wily” is a synonym of “sly”.

Down

1 Gluttons : PIGS

A glutton is a person who eats and drinks to excess, with the term “glutton” deriving from the Latin “gluttire” meaning “to swallow”.

5 G, in a C major scale : SOL

The sol-fa syllables are: do, re, mi, fa, sol, la & ti.

6 West African food staple : OKRA

The plant known as okra is mainly grown for its edible green pods. The pods are said to resemble “ladies’ fingers”, which is an alternative name for the plant. Okra is known as “ngombo” in Bantu, a name that might give us the word “gumbo”, the name for the name of the southern Louisiana stew that includes okra as a key ingredient.

7 “Star Trek” actress Jeri : RYAN

Jeri Ryan’s most famous role is the de-assimilated Borg known as Seven of Nine on “Star Trek: Voyager”. I haven’t seen that show, but I know Ryan from a supporting role on the legal drama “Shark”, playing opposite James Woods. She also plays Ronnie Cooke on “Boston Public”.

8 Big ___ : BEN

“Big Ben” is the name commonly used for the large bell in the Clock Tower (“Elizabeth Tower” since 2012) of the Palace of Westminster (aka “Houses of Parliament”). Big Ben’s official name is the Great Bell, and there is some debate about the origins of the nickname. It may be named after Sir Benjamin Hall who supervised the bell’s installation, or perhaps the English heavyweight champion of the day Benjamin Caunt. Big Ben fell silent in 2017 to make way for four years of maintenance and repair work to the clock’s mechanism and the tower.

18 Dr. for kids : SEUSS

“Dr. Seuss” was the pen name of Theodor Seuss Geisel. Geisel first used the pen name while studying at Dartmouth College and at the University of Oxford. Back then, he pronounced “Seuss” as it would be in German, i.e. rhyming with “voice”. After his books found success in the US, he went with the pronunciation being used widely by the public, quite happy to have a name that rhymes with “Mother Goose”.

23 Daughter of Styx : NIKE

Nike was the Greek goddess of victory, and was often referred to as “the Winged Goddess of Victory”. The athletic shoe company Nike uses the “Nike swoosh” as its logo, a logo that is inspired by the goddess’ wing.

In Greek mythology, Styx was the daughter of Oceanus and Tethys, and the mother of Zelus, Nike, Kratos and Bia (aka Eos).

29 Eponym for a mathematical pattern identified centuries earlier in India : FIBONACCI

Leonardo of Pisa was a famous and respected Italian mathematician, also known as simply “Fibonacci”. He is remembered for writing about a number sequence (although he didn’t “discover” it) that later was given the name “Fibonacci sequence”. He wrote about the series of numbers in his book called “Liber Abaci”, a celebrated work that introduced Arabic numerals (i.e. 0-9) to the Western world.

36 Range for a viola : ALTO

The viola looks like and is played like a violin, but is slightly larger. It is referred to as the middle voice in the violin family, lying between the violin and the cello.

37 Box-office revenue : GATE

The term “box office” may date back to Shakespearean times. In those days long past, patrons would deposit fees for seeing theater performances in boxes. The full boxes would be collected and placed in an office called, imaginatively enough, the “box office”.

39 Mostaccioli relative : PENNE

Cylindrical pasta is known in general as “penne”, and there are many variants. For example, ziti is a particularly large and long tube with square-cut ends. “Penne” is the plural of “penna”, the Italian for “feather, quill”.

40 Lead-in to male or female : CIS-

The term “cisgender” is now used as the opposite of “transgender”. Cisgender people have a gender identity that matches the sex they were assigned at birth.

42 Kind of monkey : RHESUS

The rhesus macaque is also known as the rhesus monkey. As it is widely available and is close to humans anatomically and physically, the rhesus macaque has been used in scientific research for decades. The rhesus monkey was used in the development of rabies, smallpox and polio vaccines, and it also gave its name to the rhesus factor that is used in blood-typing. It was also rhesus monkeys that were launched into space by the US and Soviet space programs. Humans and macaques share about 93% of their DNA and had a common ancestor about 25 million years ago.

43 Hwy. through Fargo and St. Paul : US-TEN

US Route 10 is a highway that used to run from Detroit, Michigan to Seattle, Washington. Dating back to 1926, interstates have replaced some of its length, so that now US-10 runs from Bay City, Michigan to West Fargo, North Dakota. There’s a ferry service connecting Ludington, Michigan to Manitowoc, Wisconsin across Lake Michigan. That ferry service is an officially designated section of US-10.

48 “Our ___ always lasts longer than the happiness of those we ___”: Heraclitus : ENVY

Heraclitus of Ephesus was an ancient Greek philosopher from Ionia. He was sometimes referred to as “Heraclitus the Obscure”. That ancient epithet is borne out today by the fact that only one of his works survives, and even them only in fragmented form. That work is “On Nature”, and comprises three discourses about the universe, politics and ethics, and theology. Why politics and ethics were grouped into one discourse is beyond me …

51 Composer Stravinsky : IGOR

Composer Igor Stravinsky’s most famous works were completed relatively early in his career, when he was quite young. His three ballets “The Firebird”, “Petrushka” and “The Rite of Spring” were published in 1910-1913, when Stravinsky was in his early thirties.

52 Love of the game? : NIL

In tennis the score of zero is designated as “love”. Some people believe that this usage originates from the French “l’oeuf” (meaning “the egg”). The idea is that the written character “0” looks like an egg.

53 Their sales were surpassed again by phonograph records in 2020 : CDS

The compact disc (CD) was developed jointly by Philips and Sony as a medium for storing and playing sound recordings. When the first commercial CD was introduced back in 1982, a CD’s storage capacity was far greater than the amount of data that could be stored on the hard drive of personal computers available at that time.

Famously, Thomas Edison invented the phonograph in 1877, which was a device that recorded sound onto wax phonograph cylinders. The flat disc phonograph record was developed by Emile Berliner, a German-born American inventor. Berliner called his flat disc record player a “gramophone”, and started selling Berliner Gramophone records in 1894.

54 Inits. near New York’s Flushing Bay : LGA

Fiorello La Guardia was the Mayor of New York from 1934 to 1945, racking up three full terms in office. The famous airport that bears La Guardia’s name was built at his urging, stemming from an incident that took place while he was in office. He was taking a TWA flight to “New York” and was outraged when the plane landed at Newark Airport, in the state of New Jersey. The Mayor demanded that the flight take off again and land at a small airport in Brooklyn. A gaggle of press reporters joined him on the short hop and he gave them a story, urging New Yorkers to support the construction of a new commercial airport within the city’s limits. The new airport, in Queens, opened in 1939 as New York Municipal, often called “LaGuardia” as a nickname. The airport was officially relabeled as “LaGuardia” (LGA) in 1947.

Flushing Bay is a tidal embankment in New York City that takes its name from the town of Flushing. Flushing was settled in 1645 by the Dutch and was named for the port of Vlissingen in the southwest Netherlands. “Flushing” is the English name for the Dutch port.

55 Jeremy ___, first Asian-American N.B.A. champion : LIN

Jeremy Lin is a professional basketball player who was raised in the city of Palo Alto in the San Francisco Bay Area. Lin is the first American of Chinese descent to play in the NBA.