0211-23 NY Times Crossword 11 Feb 23, Saturday

Constructed by: Sam Ezersky
Edited by: Will Shortz

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Bill’s time: 20m 04s

Bill’s errors: 0

Today’s Wiki-est Amazonian Googlies

Across

1 Those out for blood? : VAMPIRES

Legends about vampires were particularly common in Eastern Europe and in the Balkans in particular. The superstition was that vampires could be killed using a wooden stake, with the preferred type of wood varying from place to place. Superstition also defines where the body should be pierced. Most often, the stake was driven through the heart, but Russians and northern Germans went for the mouth, and northeastern Serbs for the stomach.

9 Geographical anagram of BOGOTA : TOBAGO

Trinidad and Tobago is a republic in the southern Caribbean that largely comprises the two main islands of Trinidad and Tobago. Something related to Trinidad is Trinidadian.

Bogotá is the capital city of Colombia. Noted for having many libraries and universities, Bogotá is sometimes referred to as “The Athens of South America”.

18 What Minnesota and Michigan are part of, but not Missouri : BIG TEN CONFERENCE

The Big Ten is the nation’s oldest Division I college athletic conference. It was founded in 1896, and earned the name “Big Nine” in 1899 when Iowa and Indiana joined to bring the number of teams in the conference to nine. The conference name was changed to the Big Ten after Michigan rejoined in 1917. Right after WWII, the University of Chicago dropped out so the conference became known as the Big Nine again until 1949. The official designation of “Big Ten” was adopted in 1987 when the conference (once again with a complement of ten teams) registered as a not-for-profit corporation. It was decided to keep the official name of Big Ten when Penn State joined in 1990 bringing the number of schools to the level of eleven. The number of schools in the conference continues to evolve, but that “Big Ten” moniker persists.

20 Writing of Horace : EPODE

An epode is a lyric poem made up of couplets in which the first line is long, and the second line much shorter. The form was invented by the Greek poet Archilochus, and was most famously used by the Roman poet Horace.

21 It has a ring of 12 gold stars on a blue background, for short : EU FLAG

The European Union (EU) flag features a circle of twelve yellow stars on a blue background. The number of stars is not related to the number of states in the European Union, nor has it ever been. The number of stars in the design was the subject of much debate prior to its adoption in 1955 by the Council of Europe. Twelve was a deliberate choice, as at that time there was no political connotation, and twelve was considered to be a symbol of unity.

22 Nas’s third studio album, after “Illmatic” and “It Was Written” : I AM…

Rapper Nas used to go by an earlier stage name “Nasty Nas”, and before that by his real name “Nasir bin Olu Dara Jones”. Nas released his first album “Illmatic” in 1994, and inventively titled his fifth studio album “Stillmatic”, released in 2001.

25 Chucklehead : SIMP

“Simp” is slang describing a simple or foolish person. Not nice …

26 Obergefell v. ___, landmark Supreme Court decision of 2015 : HODGES

Obergefell v. Hodges is the 2015 case in which the US Supreme Court ruled that same-sex couples have the fundamental right to marry. Famously, President Obama had the White House illuminated in rainbow colors on the night of the ruling.

39 Reference work in the public domain that’s updated weekly : CIA WORLD FACTBOOK

“The World Factbook” is a publication produced by the CIA. It is intended primarily for use by government employees but, as it is in the public domain, it is now used by just about anyone. The first edition of “Factbook” came out in 1962 and, as it was classified, it had limited distribution. It was decided to make “Factbook” public in 1975, and it has been freely available on the World Wide Web since 1994.

42 K, for Kay : KARAT

A karat (also “carat”, the spelling outside of North America) is a measure of the purity of gold alloys, with 24-karat representing pure gold.

Kay Jewelers is perhaps the most famous store brand owned by Sterling Jewelers. Sterling is the largest fine jewelry chain in the country, with the company’s main competitor being Zale Corporation.

56 Stiletto feature : HAFT

The haft of a weapon is its handle or hilt.

The stiletto knife was developed in Italy, and is a knife intended for thrusting and stabbing as opposed to slashing and cutting. The term “stiletto” comes from the Latin “stilus”, which was a thin pointed writing instrument used in ancient Rome to engrave wax or clay tablets. And, there are also stiletto heels on some women’s shoes, heels that are long and thin.

58 Train workers? : MENTOR

A mentor is a trusted teacher or counselor. The term “mentor” comes from Homer’s “Odyssey” in which there is a character named Mentor. He is a friend of Odysseus, although he is a relatively ineffective old man. The goddess Athena takes on Mentor’s appearance in order to guide Odysseus’s young son Telemachus through difficult times.

59 Wheat variety for a grain bowl : FARRO

The three hulled wheat species known as spelt, emmer and einkorn are referred to collectively as “farro”.

60 Web master, with “the” : … AMAZING SPIDER-MAN

Spider-Man is a creation of Stan Lee and Steve Ditko, and first appeared in comics in 1962. He was a somewhat groundbreaking character in that his alter ego was a teenage high school student (Peter Parker), which marked the first time that a young person featured front and center as the superhero.

63 Colon’s place, familiarly : LOWER GI

The gastrointestinal (GI) tract is a tube by which humans and other animals deliver food to the digestive organs, and dispose of solid wastes.

64 It begins “Blessed is the man that walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly” : PSALM ONE

The Greek word “psalmoi” originally meant “songs sung to a harp”, and gave us the word “psalms”. In the Jewish and Western Christian traditions, the Book of Psalms contains 150 individual psalms, divided into five sections.

66 Pipit lookalikes : SKYLARKS

Pipits are small birds found almost everywhere on the globe, except the driest of deserts, the wettest of rainforests and Antarctica.

Down

2 Unlikely trait for a beekeeper : APIPHOBIA

An apiary is an area where bees are kept, apiculture is beekeeping, and an apiphobe has a fear of bees. The Latin word for “bee” is “apis”.

3 Snickers alternative : MR GOODBAR

The Hershey’s candy bar called Mr. Goodbar has been around since 1925. If you buy one today, you’ll read the description “made with chocolate and peanuts”. That wording is very deliberate as when Hershey changed the formula to save money in 2008, the FDA ruled that the cheaper formulation could not be described as “milk chocolate”, hence the single word “chocolate”.

Snickers is a candy bar made by Mars. When I was growing up in Ireland, the same candy bar was sold as a Marathon. The name was changed in Europe to Snickers in 1990. 75% of the world’s Snickers bars are made in the Mars factory in Waco, Texas.

4 Pluto, famously : PET DOG

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.

7 Host : EMCEE

The term “emcee” comes from “MC”, an initialism used for a Master or Mistress of Ceremonies.

8 Capital known as Keijo before the 1940s : SEOUL

Seoul is the capital city of South Korea. The Seoul National Capital Area is home to over 25 million people and is the second largest metropolitan area in the world, second only to Tokyo, Japan.

9 Bit of nonstick cookware : TEFLON PAN

Teflon is a brand name for the polymer called PTFE (polytetrafluoroethylene). Teflon is used as a coating for nonstick pans, a lubricant in machinery and as a graft material in surgery. Dupont discovered PTFE in 1938, and registered Teflon as a trademark in 1945.

10 Expanse on a Spanish explorer’s map : OCEANO

In Spanish, “el océano” (the ocean) contains lots of “agua” (water).

11 “Star Trek” species : BORG

The cyborgs known as the Borg first showed up in the “Star Trek” universe as the villains in the movie “Star Trek: First Contact”, and then spread to other “Star Trek” productions. “Cyborg” is an abbreviation for “cybernetic organism”, a being that is made up of both organic and synthetic parts.

13 Spirits that come in bottles : GENII

“Genii” is an accepted plural of two related words: “genius” and “genie”.

The “genie” in the bottle takes his or her name from “djinn”. “Djinns” were various spirits considered lesser than angels, with people exhibiting unsavory characteristics said to be possessed by djinn. When the book “The Thousand and One Nights” was translated into French, the word “djinn” was transformed into the existing word “génie”, because of the similarity in sound and the related spiritual meaning. This “génie” from the Arabian tale became confused with the Latin-derived “genius”, a guardian spirit thought to be assigned to each person at birth. Purely as a result of that mistranslation the word genie has come to mean the “djinn” that pops out of the bottle. A little hard to follow, I know, but still quite interesting …

14 Razor name? : OCCAM

Ockham’s (also “Occam’s”) razor is a principle in philosophy and science that basically states that the simplest explanation is usually the correct one. This explanation is a corollary to the more exact statement of the principle, that one shouldn’t needlessly use assumptions in explaining something. The principle is referred to as “lex parsimoniae” in Latin, or “the law of parsimony”. Parsimony is being thrifty with money or resources. The principle was developed by 14th-century logician and Franciscan Friar William of Ockham (or “Occam” in Latin). The principle is dubbed a “razor” as it is used as a philosophical tool used to cut out absurd and spurious reasoning in an argument.

17 Biodegradable bag material : HEMP

Hemp, also known as “cannabis”, is a hardy, fast-growing plant that has many uses mainly due to the strength of the fibers in the plant’s stalks. Hemp is used to make rope, paper and textiles. The term “hemp” is sometimes reserved for varieties of the plant grown for non-drug use.

19 Rams home? : NFL

The Los Angeles Rams are the only franchise to have won NFL championships in three different cities, i.e. Cleveland (1945), Los Angeles (1951 & 2021) and St. Louis (1999). The Rams were based in Cleveland from 1936 to 1945, in Los Angeles from 1946 to 1994, in St. Louis from 1995 to 2015, and returned to Los Angeles in 2016.

25 Person who comes across as toplofty : SNOB

Back in the 1780s, a snob was a shoemaker or a shoemaker’s apprentice. By the end of the 18th century the word “snob” was being used by students at Cambridge University in England to refer to all local merchants and people of the town. The term evolved to mean one who copies those who are his or her social superior (and not in a good way). From there it wasn’t a big leap for “snob” to include anyone who emphasized their superior social standing and not just those who aspired to rank. Nowadays a snob is anyone who looks down on those considered to be of inferior standing.

27 Achievements for Jennifer Hudson and Whoopi Goldberg, in brief : EGOTS

The acronym “EGOT” stands for “Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, Tony”, and is a reference to performers who have won all four awards.

Jennifer Hudson is a singer and actress who had her career breakthrough by appearing as a finalist in 2004 on the show “American Idol”. She is the youngest woman to win the “grand slam” of show business (EGOT: Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, Tony). Hudson went through a very difficult period in 2008 when her mother, her older sister and her nephew were shot dead by her brother-in-law.

Whoopi Goldberg’s real name is Caryn Elaine Johnson. Goldberg is multi-talented, and is one of a very short list of entertainers to have won all four major showbiz awards:

• an Oscar (for “Ghost”)
• an Emmy (two, for “The View”)
• a Grammy (for “Thoroughly Modern Millie”, as a producer)
• a Tony (also for producing “Thoroughly Modern Millie”)

29 Winning by a basket, say : UP TWO

That would be basketball.

33 Org. with guidelines : CDC

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is based in Atlanta, Georgia. The CDC started out life during WWII as the Office of National Defense Malaria Control Activities. The CDC worries about much more than malaria these days …

34 Where the coxswain sits : AFT

The coxswain of a boat is one in charge of steering and navigation. The word “coxswain” is shortened to “cox”, particularly when used for the person steering and calling out the stroke in a competition rowing boat.

48 Drug trade? : PHARMA

“Big Pharma” is a nickname for the pharmaceutical industry. The monker comes from the acronym for the lobbying group for the industry, the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA).

49 ___ stage (concept in psychosexual development) : ANAL

According to Freudian psychology, we have an instinctive sexual appetite that develops in five phases, named for the erogenous zones that are the source of the drive in each phase. They are:

1. the oral stage (~ 0-2 years)
2. the anal stage (~ 1-3 years)
3. the phallic stage (~ 3-6 years)
4. the latency stage (~ 6 years – puberty)
5. the genital stage ( ~ puberty – adult life)

I’m not so sure …

50 Where “talofa” and “tofa” mean “hello” and “goodbye” : SAMOA

The official name for the South Pacific nation formerly known as Western Samoa is the Independent State of Samoa. Samoa is the western part of the island group, with American Samoa lying to the southeast. The whole group of islands used to be known as Navigators Island, a name given by European explorers in recognition of the seafaring skills of the native Samoans.

53 Sides of a square, maybe: Abbr. : STS

Street (st.)

54 Longtime name in baseball cards : TOPPS

Topps was a relaunch of an older company called American Leaf Tobacco, with the Topps name used from 1938. The earlier company was in trouble because it could not get supplies of its Turkish tobacco, so it moved into another chewy industry, making bubblegum. Nowadays, Topps is known for including (mainly) sports-themed trading cards in the packs of gum.

61 End of a series in Canada : ZED

The letter zed has been around since about 1400, and derives from the Greek letter zeta. The spelling and pronunciation “zee”, used in America today, first popped up in the 1670s. The spelling and pronunciation “zed” is still used in Britain and Ireland.

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Complete List of Clues/Answers

Across

1 Those out for blood? : VAMPIRES
9 Geographical anagram of BOGOTA : TOBAGO
15 “Supposedly” : I PRESUME
16 Sustainable engineering field, informally : ECOTECH
18 What Minnesota and Michigan are part of, but not Missouri : BIG TEN CONFERENCE
20 Writing of Horace : EPODE
21 It has a ring of 12 gold stars on a blue background, for short : EU FLAG
22 Nas’s third studio album, after “Illmatic” and “It Was Written” : I AM…
23 “Ah” follower : … CHOO!
24 Get in trouble, perhaps : TELL ON
25 Chucklehead : SIMP
26 Obergefell v. ___, landmark Supreme Court decision of 2015 : HODGES
28 Article go-with : NOUN
30 Go back : EBB
31 What a motorist often screws up? : GAS CAP
35 Stations : POSTS
39 Reference work in the public domain that’s updated weekly : CIA WORLD FACTBOOK
42 K, for Kay : KARAT
43 Flash sale come-on : ACT NOW!
44 CBS series with a “Most Wanted” spinoff : FBI
45 “My!” : I SAY!
47 Hit list : TOP TEN
49 Lead-in to ed. or prof. : ASST …
52 Broad views : VISTAS
56 Stiletto feature : HAFT
57 Many people do this on January 1 : NAP
58 Train workers? : MENTOR
59 Wheat variety for a grain bowl : FARRO
60 Web master, with “the” : … AMAZING SPIDER-MAN
63 Colon’s place, familiarly : LOWER GI
64 It begins “Blessed is the man that walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly” : PSALM ONE
65 “Nevertheless …” : AND YET …
66 Pipit lookalikes : SKYLARKS

Down

1 Emotional assessment of one’s surroundings, in lingo : VIBE CHECK
2 Unlikely trait for a beekeeper : APIPHOBIA
3 Snickers alternative : MR GOODBAR
4 Pluto, famously : PET DOG
5 “Ah” follower : … I SEE
6 With 55-Down, gamble : RUN …
7 Host : EMCEE
8 Capital known as Keijo before the 1940s : SEOUL
9 Bit of nonstick cookware : TEFLON PAN
10 Expanse on a Spanish explorer’s map : OCEANO
11 “Star Trek” species : BORG
12 Greatly enjoyed, with “up” : ATE …
13 Spirits that come in bottles : GENII
14 Razor name? : OCCAM
17 Biodegradable bag material : HEMP
19 Rams home? : NFL
24 “A Life for the ___” (Mikhail Glinka opera) : TSAR
25 Person who comes across as toplofty : SNOB
27 Achievements for Jennifer Hudson and Whoopi Goldberg, in brief : EGOTS
29 Winning by a basket, say : UP TWO
32 Bringing down the house : SLAYING IT
33 Org. with guidelines : CDC
34 Where the coxswain sits : AFT
36 Some lightweight protection : SOFT ARMOR
37 “In all honesty …” : TO BE FRANK …
38 Range on a cosmetics chart : SKIN TONES
40 “___ … what?” : WAIT
41 Destinations for many retiring soldiers : COTS
46 Get recompense for : AVENGE
48 Drug trade? : PHARMA
49 ___ stage (concept in psychosexual development) : ANAL
50 Where “talofa” and “tofa” mean “hello” and “goodbye” : SAMOA
51 Induce : SPAWN
53 Sides of a square, maybe: Abbr. : STS
54 Longtime name in baseball cards : TOPPS
55 See 6-Down : … A RISK
58 Like swampland : MIRY
59 Cut down : FELL
61 End of a series in Canada : ZED
62 “What a ___!” : DAY

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