0809-24 NY Times Crossword 9 Aug 24, Friday - NYXCrossword.com (2024)

Today’s Wiki-est Amazonian Googlies

Across

1 Listing on a résumé : SKILL

A résumé is a summary of a person’s job experience and education and is used as a tool by a job seeker. In many countries, a résumé is equivalent to a curriculum vitae. “Résumé” is the French word for “summary”.

6 Bad news from a maître d’ : WAIT

The full title of a maître d’ is “maître d’hôtel”, which means “master of the hotel”.

14 The Black Keys and the White Stripes, e.g. : INDIE BANDS

The Black Keys are a rock band, a duo from Akron, Ohio. Dan Auerbach on guitar, along with Patrick Carney on drums, formed the Black Keys in 2001.

The White Stripes were a rock duo from Detroit that were together from 1997 to 2011. The duo was made up of Meg and Jack White, who were married from 1996 to 2000. Prior to the couple tying the knot, Jack’s family name was Gillis. Gillis took the unusual step of taking his wife’s family name when they married.

18 Music magazine since 1985 : SPIN

“Spin” is a music magazine founded in 1985 by Bob Guccione, Jr. Bob is the eldest son of “Penthouse” founder Bob Guccione. “Spin” abandoned its print edition in 2012 and now only exists as a webzine.

19 Short elevations? : HTS

Height (ht.)

20 T, for one : MODEL

The Ford Model T was the first really affordable car that was offered for sale, and it was produced from 1908 to 1927. It was the Model T that ushered in the era of assembly line production, which greatly cut down the cost of manufacture. Its engine was designed to run on petrol, kerosene or ethanol. Ford stated in 1909 that “Any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants so long as it is black”. In actual fact, from 1908 through 1913, the Model T wasn’t available in black, and only gray, green, blue and red. The “black only” strategy applied from 1914.

21 Sparkly collectible : GEODE

A geode is a rock in which there is a cavity that is lined or filled with crystal formations. The crystals inside a geode form when mineral-rich water seeps into a cavity in a rock, leaving behind dissolved minerals that gradually build up over time. Some of the largest geodes ever discovered have been as big as a room and can take millions of years to form.

29 Email ancestor : TELEX

Telex grew out of the world of the telegraph. What telex brought to telegraphy was the ability to route messages. Instead of having to talk to an operator to route a particular message to the intended party, the user of a telex could route the message directly to another telex machine by way of a rotary dial, one very similar to that on a telephone.

33 Where you can find ME : US MAP

Maine (ME)

36 Subway fare : FOOTLONGS

The SUBWAY chain of fast food restaurants is the largest single-brand restaurant in the world. I’m a big fan of SUBWAY sandwiches, especially the toasted ones …

41 Sources of some political gaffes : HOT MICS

One of my favorite hot-mic moments took place in 2005, when Paris and London were vying to host the 2012 Olympics. French President Jacques Chirac compared Paris and London in that context while chatting with Russian President Vladimir Putin and German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder. Chirac said, over a hot mic:

The only thing that they have ever done for European agriculture is mad cow disease … You cannot trust people who have such bad cuisine.

43 Middle word of a Stowe title : TOM’S

Harriet Beecher Stowe’s most famous and most successful work is “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”. It was also her first novel. Her second was published in 1856, i.e. “Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp”.

45 What awakens Godzilla from the ocean, informally : H-BOMB

The first successful detonation of a hydrogen bomb (H-bomb) was in a test (H-test) codenamed “Ivy Mike”. The test was conducted by the US on an atoll in the Pacific Ocean named Enewetak.

47 “Les ___” : MIZ

The 1980 musical “Les Misérables” is an adaptation of the 1862 novel of the same name by Victor Hugo. The show opened in London in 1985, and is the longest running musical in the history of London’s West End. My wife and I saw “Les Miz” in the Queen’s Theatre in London many years ago, but were only able to get tickets in the very back row. The theater seating is very steep, so the back row of the balcony is extremely high over the stage. One of the big events in the storyline is the building of a street barricade over which the rebels fight. At the height we were seated we could see the stagehands behind the barricade, sitting drinking co*ke, even smoking cigarettes. On cue, the stagehands would get up and catch a dropped rifle, or an actor who had been shot. It was pretty comical. I didn’t really enjoy the show that much, to be honest. Some great songs, but the musical version of the storyline just didn’t seem to hang together for me.

50 Japanese noodles : UDON

Udon noodles are made from wheat-flour and are very popular in Japanese cuisines such as tempura.

51 Rodeo event : BARREL RACE

Barrel racing is an event featured in rodeos. Competitors on horses race around barrels in a cloverleaf pattern, each trying to complete the course in the fastest time. The event tends to be confined to male and female youths, and to women riders.

55 You are, on the Yucatán : ERES

The Yucatán Peninsula is located in southeastern Mexico, where it separates the Gulf of Mexico to the northwest from the Caribbean Sea to the southeast.

57 “Why don’t sheep shrink when it ___?”: George Carlin : RAINS

George Carlin was a groundbreaking, stand-up comic from Manhattan, New York. Carlin’s best-known routine was his “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television” that featured a list of words that would be considered offensive in some circles. Carlin was arrested and charged with obscenity after performing the routine in 1972 in Milwaukee. The judge hearing the case upheld Carlin’s right to perform the routine, but the controversy didn’t stop there. Someone complained about hearing the routine in a radio broadcast, which led to the US Supreme Court upholding the right of the FCC to prohibit broadcasts that might be deemed obscene when children were likely to be in the audience.

Down

6 Marvel’s Maximoff : WANDA

The Scarlet Witch is a superhero in Marvel Comics Universe who first appears in print in 1964. The alter ego of mutant Wanda Marya Maximoff, the Scarlet Witch regularly joins the Avengers team of superheroes. On the big screen, she is portrayed by Elizabeth Olsen.

7 Entry fee for some clubs? : ANTE

The suit in a deck of cards that we refer to as “clubs” comes from the standard French deck. In French, the suit is known as “trèfles” meaning “clovers”, as the club icon resembles a clover leaf. Our name “clubs” comes from the Italian-Spanish standard deck, in which the equivalent suit is “Bastoni”, meaning “batons”.

21 co*cktail vessel : GLASS TUMBLER

A tumbler is a glass. Back in the 1660s a tumbler was a glass with a rounded or pointed base so that it could not be put down without spilling its contents, as it would “tumble” over. The idea was that one had to drink up before putting the glass down.

25 Double ___ (cookie descriptor) : STUF

Double Stuf Oreos were introduced in 1975, and have twice the normal amount of white cream filling as the original cookie. Nabisco really went big in 2013, introducing the Mega Stuf Oreo that has even more white cream filling.

26 Replacement for the Spanish colonial real : PESO

The peso is used in many Spanish-speaking countries around the world. The coin originated in Spain where the word “peso” means “weight”. The original peso was what we know in English as a “piece of eight”, a silver coin of a specific weight that had a nominal value of eight “reales”.

28 They might fall off a shelf : BERGS

An iceberg is a large piece of freshwater ice that is floating freely after having broken away from a glacier or ice shelf. Our use of “iceberg” comes from the Dutch word for the same phenomenon “ijsberg”, which translates literally as “ice mountain”.

31 Fiasco : MESS

Back in the mid-1800s, “fiasco” was theater slang meaning “failure in performance”. The meaning morphed soon after into any kind of failure or flop. The term evolved from the Italian “far fiasco”, a phrase that had the same meaning in Italian theater, but translated literally as “make a bottle”. It turns out that “fiasco” and “flask” both derive from the Latin “flasco” meaning “bottle”.

32 Meiji and Taisho, in Japanese history : ERAS

The Meiji period in Japan ran from 1868 to 1912, with “meiji” translating as “enlightened rule”.

41 ___ cuisine : HAUTE

“Haute cuisine”, literally “high cooking” in French, is the name given to skillfully and elegantly prepared food, especially if it is in the French style.

43 Line drawn after an early wrong guess in hangman : TORSO

The word-guessing game Hangman seems to have been played first in Victorian England. At one time it was known as “Birds, Beasts and Fishes” as the words to be guessed had to be types of animal.

49 A statue of him was one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World : ZEUS

The full list of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World is:

• the Great Pyramid at Giza, Egypt
• the Hanging Gardens of Babylon
• the Statue of Zeus at Olympia, Greece
• the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus
• the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus
• the Colossus of Rhodes
• the Lighthouse at Alexandria, Egypt