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Constructed by: Nate McLean

Edited by: Patti Varol

Today’s Reveal Answer: Eye to Eye

Themed answers start and end with a letter “I”:

• 54A *How like-minded people see, or a phonetic hint for the answers to the starred clues? : EYE TO EYE

• 18A *Tablet choice : IPAD MINI
• 23A *Silent film based on a Leoncavallo opera : I PAGLIACCI
• 36A *Destination for a day trip from Naples : ISLE OF CAPRI
• 49A *Lionel Messi’s MLS team : INTER MIAMI

Read on, or jump to …
… a complete list of answers

Bill’s time: 6m 50s

Bill’s errors: 0

Today’s Wiki-est Amazonian Googlies

Across

1A Japanese beer brand : ASAHI

Asahi is a Japanese beer, and the name of the brewery that produces it. “Asahi” is Japanese for “morning sun”. Asahi introduced a “dry beer” in 1987, igniting a craze that rocketed the brewery to the number one spot in terms of beer production in Japan, with Kirin close behind.

6A Pet adoption org. : SPCA

Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (SPCA)

10A Exec concerned with network security : CTO

Chief technology officer (CTO)

13A Piccata ingredient : LEMON

The dish named “piccata” originated in Italy, with the traditional meat used being veal. Whatever meat is used is sliced and flattened with a tenderizer, seasoned, dredged in flour and browned in a pan. The juices from the pan are the base for the sauce, to which are added lemon juice, white wine, shallots, capers and butter.

14A “Celebration” band __ & the Gang : KOOL

“Celebration” is a 1980 song by the band Kool & the Gang. There are conflicting stories about what inspired the group’s co-founder Ronald Bell to write the song. One is that he got the idea while reading a passage in the Quran, about angels celebrating and singing praises. Another is that the lyrics were inspired by the band’s hit from the year before, “Ladies’ Night”, i.e. “This is your night tonight, come on, let’s all celebrate.”

15A Magic spell : HEX

“Hexen” is a German word meaning “to practice witchcraft”. The use of the word “hex” in English started with the Pennsylvania Dutch in the early 1800s.

16A Inner selves, in Jungian psychology : ANIMAS

The concepts of anima and animus are found in the Carl Jung school of analytical psychology. The idea is that within each male there resides a feminine inner personality called the anima, and within each female there is a male inner personality known as the animus.

18A *Tablet choice : IPAD MINI

The iPad mini is a line of smaller iPads that was introduced by Apple in 2012. The mini has a screen size of 7.9 inches, whereas the regular iPad’s screen is 9.7 inches.

22A Poker-faced : STOIC

Zeno of Citium was a Greek philosopher famous for teaching at the Stoa Poikile, the “Painted Porch”, located on the north side of the Ancient Agora of Athens. Because of the location of his classes, his philosophy became known as stoicism (from “stoa”, the word for “porch”). We get our adjective “stoic”, meaning “indifferent to pleasure or pain”, from the same root.

23A *Silent film based on a Leoncavallo opera : I PAGLIACCI

Early 20th-century filmmakers frequently adapted famous operas for the silent screen. Ruggero Leoncavallo’s 1892 “Pagliacci” (The Clowns) was a popular subject. The tragic story of the murderous clown Canio resonated so well with audiences that several silent adaptations were produced long before the advent of “the talkies”.

31A Panang curry cuisine : THAI

Phanaeng (or Panang) is a type of Thai curry that is typically thicker, sweeter, and less spicy than other Thai curries.

35A Oklahoma athlete : SOONER

The University of Oklahoma was founded in 1890 in the city of Norman, as the Norman Territorial University. The school’s sports teams are called the “Sooners”, from the state of Oklahoma’s nickname.

The 1889 Indian Appropriations Act officially opened up the so-called Unassigned Lands, land in Oklahoma on which no Native American tribes had settled. Once the Act was signed, those lands became available for settlement. Those people who settled the same lands illegally, prior to the date specified, were termed “Sooners” as their situation was defined in the “sooner clause” of the Act. “Sooner State” is now a nickname for Oklahoma.

36A *Destination for a day trip from Naples : ISLE OF CAPRI

The island of Capri off the coast of Southern Italy has been a tourist resort since the days of ancient Rome. Capri is home to the famous Blue Grotto, a sea cave that is illuminated with sunlight that’s colored blue as it passes through the seawater into the cave.

39A DraftKings user, e.g. : BETTOR

DraftKings and FanDuel are companies offering fantasy sports games and leagues.

46A Architect Saarinen : EERO

Eero Saarinen was a Finnish American architect who was renowned in this country for his unique designs for public buildings such as the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, Dulles International Airport Terminal, and the TWA building at JFK. The list of his lesser-known, but still impressive, works includes several buildings erected on academic campuses. For example, the Chapel and Kresge Auditorium on the MIT campus, the Emma Hartman Noyes House at Vassar College, the Law School building at the University of Chicago, and Yale’s David S. Ingalls Rink.

47A Old Testament scribe : EZRA

Ezra the Scribe, also called “Ezra the Priest”, is the central character in the Book of Ezra in the Hebrew Bible.

48A Pet pest : FLEA

An endoparasite is one that lives inside the host, an example being a parasitic worm. Parasites living outside the host, such as fleas and lice, are known as ectoparasites.

49A *Lionel Messi’s MLS team : INTER MIAMI

The professional soccer club Inter Miami CF joined the MLS league as an expansion franchise in 2020, having been established in 2018. The club’s president and co-owner is former soccer star David Beckham. One of Inter Miami’s big signings is Lionel Messi, who joined in 2023.

51A “The Trial” novelist Kafka : FRANZ

“The Trial” (“Der Prozess”, in the original German) is a dystopian novel written by Czech writer Franz Kafka in 1914 and 1915. It tells the nightmarish story of Josef K., a bank cashier arrested and prosecuted by an inaccessible authority for an unspecified crime. Kafka never finished the manuscript and instructed his close friend Max Brod to burn the work along with all his unpublished papers after his death in 1924. Brod defied the author’s final wishes, and published the novel the following year.

53A Notary imprint : SEAL

A notary public is a public officer licensed to perform specific legal actions in non-contentious legal matters. The main duties are to administer oaths, take affidavits and witness the execution of documents.

57A Vin in the “Fast & Furious” franchise : DIESEL

Vin Diesel is the stage name of actor Mark Sinclair Vincent. He was born in New York City with his twin brother Paul. The twins never knew their father, and their mother is an astrologer. Vincent was given the nickname of “Diesel” by his friends early in his life, as he was said to have a bottomless supply of energy.

“The Fast and the Furious” is a series of action movies about street racing and car heists. The original 2001 film spawned several sequels, making it Universal Pictures’ most successful franchise of all time.

62A Nautilus captain : NEMO

The Jules Verne sci-fi novel “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea” was first published in 1869-1870 as a serial in a French magazine. The star of the novel (to me) is Captain Nemo’s magnificent submarine called the Nautilus. The “20,000 leagues” in the title is the distance traveled by the Nautilus underwater, and not a depth. 20,000 leagues is about twice the circumference of the Earth.

65A Garden with forbidden fruit : EDEN

In the Christian tradition, the “fall of man” took place in the Garden of Eden when Adam and Eve succumbed to the temptation of eating from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. This went against the bidding of God, and was at the urging of the serpent. As a result, Adam and Eve were banished from Eden to prevent them from becoming immortal by eating from the tree of life. The first humans had transitioned from a state of innocent obedience to a state of guilty disobedience.

66A Drum kit drum : SNARE

Snare drums are so called because they have a set of wire strands (snares) stretching across the bottom surface of the drum. When the drum is struck, the snares vibrate against the bottom drumhead producing a unique sound.

Down

1D Banned Books Week org. : ALA

The American Library Association (ALA) promotes libraries not only in the US, but internationally. The organization was founded in 1876, making it the oldest library association in the world.

Librarian and activist Judith Krug launched Banned Books Week in 1982 in response to a surge in challenges to literature in schools and bookstores. Many such challenges are pretty bizarre. For instance, Dr. Seuss’s “Hop on Pop” was once targeted for “encouraging violence against fathers”.

6D Slalom, say : SKI

“Slalom” is an anglicized version of the Norwegian word “slalam” that translates as “skiing race”. There is a longer version of the traditional slalom that is called giant slalom.

7D Genre for many an Attenborough documentary, in brief : POP SCI

Popular science (pop sci)

The fascinating Sir David Attenborough is a British broadcaster and naturalist, and the younger brother of actor Richard Attenborough. I’ve known him from British television for almost all of my life, but he has become recognizable over here in the US more recently due to his appearance and narration in the television series “Life On Earth”, “The Living Planet”, “The Blue Planet”, “Life” and “Planet Earth”. However, US versions of David Attenborough shows tend to be voiced-over by American personalities, so some recordings of “Planet Earth” feature the voice of Sigourney Weaver, and “Life” features the voice of Oprah Winfrey.

8D Raccoon relative : COATI

The coati is a member of the raccoon family that is native to Central and South America, but can also be found in the southwest of the United States. You can read online, everywhere, that it is also known as the Brazilian aardvark. Not true. A 17-year-old student inserted the name into a Wikipedia article about the coati in 2008, resulting in the term being used everywhere: tons of websites, newspapers, academic books on natural history, and even this blog (said he, shamed).

9D Canadian shoe brand : ALDO

ALDO is a chain of shoe stores that was founded in Montreal in 1972 by Moroccan-born Canadian Aldo Bensadoun. Bensadoun is the son of a retailer of shoes in Morocco and France, and the grandchild of a cobbler. A man with shoe leather in his blood …

10D Home of the Mayan temple El Castillo : CHICHEN ITZA

The giant step-pyramid known as El Castillo at Chichen Itza is probably the most famous example of Mayan ceremonial architecture. Chichén Itzá is a Mayan ruin located in the Mexican state of Yucatán. It is the second-most visited archaeological site in the country (after the ancient city of Teotihuacan). Chichén Itzá has seen a surge in the number of visitors since the development of nearby Cancún as a tourist destination.

12D Commercial lead-in to Clean : OXI-

OxiClean is a bleaching agent and cleaner that was famously marketed using infomercials that featured the late Billy Mays.

19D Spanish term of endearment : MI AMOR

“Tú eres mi amor” is Spanish for “you are my love”.

21D Early search engine : YAHOO!

Jerry Yang and David Filo called their company “Yahoo!” for two reasons. Firstly, a Yahoo is a rude unsophisticated brute from Jonathan Swift’s “Gulliver’s Travels”. Secondly, Yahoo stands for “Yet another Hierarchical Officious Oracle”.

26D Where toe beans are found : CAT FEET

The squishy, pink pads on the bottom of a cat’s paws are known as digital pads. More casually, they are referred to as toe beans.

28D Minecraft mineral : ORE

Minecraft is a video game that was released in 2011. Apparently, it is the most popular video game of all time, with well over 200 million units sold.

34D Low-quality A.I.-generated content : SLOP

First we had “spam”: junk email that cluttered our inboxes. Now we have “slop”, a flood of low-quality, unsolicited, or nonsensical AI-generated content that clutters the whole of the modern Internet.

37D E.B. White’s “__ Little” : STUART

“Stuart Little” is a children’s novel published in 1945. Penned by E. B. White, it was his first book for children. The title character is a human boy from New York City who is just two inches tall and who looks like a mouse. That’s unlike the title character in the 1999 film “Stuart Little”, as he is an adopted mouse.

39D One to share a matching bracelet with, informally : BFF

Best friend forever (BFF)

40D Unagi roll fish : EEL

“Unagi” is the Japanese term for ”freshwater eel”, and “anago” is the term for “saltwater eel”.

44D __ chi: martial art : TAI

More correctly called “t‘ai chi ch‘uan”, which translates to “supreme ultimate fist”, tai chi is a martial art that is mostly practiced to improve overall health and increase longevity.

46D Biological catalyst : ENZYME

The names of enzymes usually include the suffix “-ase”. Enzymes are basically catalysts, chemicals that act to increase the rate of a particular chemical reaction. For example, starches will break down into sugars over time, especially under the right conditions. However, in the presence of the enzyme amylase (found in saliva) this production of sugar happens very, very quickly.

47D Fashion designer Fisher : EILEEN

The Eileen Fisher fashion brand is known for using regular folks to model its clothes in print advertising.

49D “__ a nap!” : I NEED

So do I …

54D Actress Longoria : EVA

Eva Longoria is a fashion model and actress who had a regular role on TV’s “Desperate Housewives”, playing Gabrielle Solis. Her travel and food show “Eva Longoria: Searching for Mexico” premiered on CNN in 2023. In 2013, she earned a master’s degree in Chicano Studies from California State University, Northridge, attending night classes in person after wrapping daytime recording on the “Desperate Housewives” set. Her academic thesis focused on the value of Latinas in STEM careers.

58D __ salt : SEA

The lobbyists have done their shameful job when it comes to the labeling of “sea salt”. In the US, sea salt doesn’t even have to come from the sea. The argument is that all salt came from the sea if you look back far enough. The politics of food; don’t get me started …