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Constructed by: Kelly Morenus

Edited by: Patti Varol

Today’s Reveal Answer: Back-to-Back

Themed answers comprise two parts, the first of which can precede “BACK”, and the second of which can follow “BACK”:

• 58A Consecutive, or an apt description of the first and second parts of 17-, 25-, 38-, 40-, and 49-Across : BACK-TO-BACK

• 17A Attraction in a neighborhood park : PLAYGROUND (playback & background)
• 25A Illuminating item in an emergency kit : FLASHLIGHT (flashback & backlight)
• 38A Phone history list : CALL LOG (callback & backlog)
• 40A Fail to show up for : BLOW OFF (blowback & back off)
• 49A Outing for two couples : DOUBLE DATE (double back & backdate)

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

Bill’s time: 5m 40s

Bill’s errors: 0

Today’s Wiki-est Amazonian Googlies

Across

1A Magic: The Gathering fan’s collection : CARDS

Magic: The Gathering is a card game, one played with a deck of themed cards. It is a relatively recent invention by a math professor named Richard Garfield. It was introduced to the public in 1993, and has a large following today.

10A Slugger Sammy : SOSA

Sammy Sosa was firmly in the public eye in 1998 when he and Mark McGwire were vying to be the first to surpass the home run record held by Roger Maris. McGwire fell out of public favor due to stories of steroid abuse (stories which he later admitted were true) while Sosa fell out of favor when he was found to be using a corked bat in a 2003 game.

14A Capital of Ghana : ACCRA

Accra sits on Ghana’s coast and is a major seaport as well as the country’s capital city. The name “Accra” comes from a local word “Nkran” meaning “ants”, a name chosen because of the large number of anthills found in the area when the city was founded.

15A Yemen neighbor : OMAN

The Oman-Yemen border runs in NW-SE directions for just over 180 miles. One end of the border is the tripoint with Saudi Arabia, and the other end is at the Arabian Sea coast.

16A Birds associated with wisdom : OWLS

The Greek goddess Athena (sometimes “Athene”) is often associated with wisdom, among other attributes. In many representations, Athena is depicted with an owl sitting on her head. It is this linkage of the owl with the goddess of wisdom that led to today’s perception of the owl as being “wise”. Athena’s Roman counterpart was Minerva.

22A Lobby group for seniors : AARP

AARP is the official name now for the interest group that used to be called “The American Association of Retired Persons”. The name change reflects the current focus of the group on all Americans aged 50 or over, as opposed to just people who have retired. The AARP was founded by Dr. Ethel Percy Andrus in 1958 and is a successor to the National Retired Teachers Association, also founded by Andrus over ten years earlier.

25A Illuminating item in an emergency kit : FLASHLIGHT (flashback & backlight)

Americans and British use the word “torch” to describe a portable, flaming stick. When the first handheld electric lights hit the market in the 1890s, British consumers purchased “electric torches”, eventually dropping the “electric” altogether. American marketers abandoned “torch” in favor of “flash light”, a literal description of how early zinc-carbon batteries were so weak that users had to trigger a brief pulse of light and then immediately shut the device off to let the power source recover before flashing it again. Americans have stuck with “flashlight”, and the British with “torch”. Indeed, if you purchase a smartphone made for the British market, it will have a “torch” function, differing from our American “flashlight” mode.

43A Argentine author Jorge __ Borges : LUIS

Jorge Luis Borges was an Argentine writer and poet from Buenos Aires. By the time Borges was in his early thirties, he was published many times. However, he had not achieved sufficient success to support himself as a writer, and so started a career as a public lecturer. Around this time, Borges garnered more attention through his speaking, but also started to lose his sight. He was to become completely blind in his late fifties. It has been suggested that this progressive blindness gave him a particularly unique writing style, one that was to bring him a lot of celebrity and respect. One of Borges’ more famous quotations is, “I have always imagined that paradise will be a kind of library”.

45A Italian town with a namesake coast : AMALFI

Amalfi, Italy is a coastal town on the Gulf of Salerno located about 30 miles southeast of Naples. The town gives its name to the popular tourist destination known as the Amalfi Coast.

46A “Go Birds!” NFL team : EAGLES

The Philadelphia Eagles were established in 1933 and joined the National Football League as a replacement for the bankrupt Frankford Yellow Jackets, also from Philadelphia. The “Eagle” name was inspired by the Blue Eagle insignia that was used by companies who were in compliance with the National Industrial Recovery Act that was central to President Roosevelt’s New Deal Program.

48A Iron alloy : STEEL

Steel is an alloy that is composed mainly of iron, with a small percentage of carbon.

53A Literary governess Jane : EYRE

“Jane Eyre” is a classic 1847 novel by Charlotte Brontë, published under the pseudonym “Currer Bell”. It’s a coming-of-age tale in which the title character endures a harsh childhood and education before becoming a governess at Thornfield Hall. Jane falls in love with her brooding employer, Mr. Rochester, but there’s a rocky road to travel before the couple finally get to the altar.

57A Actor Estrada : ERIK

Actor Erik Estrada’s big break came with the movie “Airport 1975”, in which he played the doomed flight engineer of a Boeing 747. A couple of years later, Estrada began a six-year gig, co-starring on the television show “CHiPs” as motorcycle police officer Poncherello.

64A Country singer Lovett : LYLE

As well as being famous in his own right, country singer Lyle Lovett is known for his 1993 marriage to actress Julia Roberts. The pair had a whirlwind romance lasting just three weeks before they eloped and were wed. The marriage itself was also relatively whirlwind, lasting less than two years.

65A Shrek, for one : OGRE

Cartoonist William Steig chose the name “Shrek” for the protagonist of his 1990 children’s picture book, as he wanted a moniker that reflected the character’s appearance and behavior: a repulsive, fire-breathing monster who revels in his own hideousness. “Shrek” comes from the German “Schreck” and Yiddish “shrek,” both of which translate to “fright, terror”. When DreamWorks adapted the story into the celebrated 2001 animated film, they softened the character into a misunderstood, swamp-dwelling grump.

66A Nintendo’s The Legend of __ : ZELDA

“The Legend of Zelda” is a whole series of video games. First released in 1986, I hear that it is very successful …

68A Some small dogs : TOYS

The toy group of dogs is made up of the smallest breeds. The smallest of the small toys are sometimes called teacup breeds.

Down

2D Knee surgery target, for short : ACL

The anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) is one of the stabilizing bands of tissue connecting the human thighbone to the shinbone. The term “cruciate” comes from the Latin “crux” meaning cross, which describes how the anterior and posterior cruciate ligaments intersect to form an “X” shape inside the center of the knee joint.

3D Color TV pioneer : RCA

RCA, or the Radio Corporation of America, played a significant role in the history of television as a pioneer in the industry. RCA developed and introduced the first electronic television system in 1939 at the New York World’s Fair. RCA also created the NTSC (National Television System Committee) broadcast standard, which was adopted in the United States in 1953 for analog television broadcasting. Additionally, RCA produced the first color television sets in 1954.

5D Mint family herb : SAGE

The herb known as sage takes its name from the Latin “salvere”, meaning “to heal”. Medieval apothecaries relied on it as a primary ingredient in herbal vinegars meant to ward off the bubonic plague. Today, sage is far more likely to cure a bland Thanksgiving stuffing than a deadly infectious disease.

6D Fuss : HOOPLA

The word “hoopla” means “boisterous excitement”. The term probably comes from “houp-là”, something the French say instead of “upsy-daisy”. Then again, “upsy-daisy” probably isn’t something said very often here in the US …

18D Gridiron official : REF

We never used the word “gridiron” when I was growing up in Ireland (meaning a grill used for cooking food over an open fire). So, maybe I am excused for taking two decades living in the US to work out that a football field gridiron is so called because the layout of yard lines over the field looks like a gridiron used in cooking.

21D Ski races with gates : SLALOMS

“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.

22D Pet welfare org. : ASPCA

American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA)

30D Dishy memoir : TELL-ALL

To dish the dirt is to talk about someone or something without regard to veracity. The phrase comes from “dish” (in the sense of dishing out food) and “dirt” (in the sense of negative information). To be dishy is to be given to gossip.

33D Cheek colorer : ROUGE

Although the cosmetic called rouge (also “blush”) uses the French word for “red”, modern “rouge” might be brown, pink or perhaps orange. Contemporary rouge is usually a talcum-based, colored powder.

35D Like moth-eaten clothing : HOLEY

The larvae of several types of moth are noted for eating fabrics made from natural fibers such as wool or cotton. Many people store woolens in cedar chests believing that the scent of the wood prevents a moth infestation. In fact, the only known effective repellent is the naphthalene found in mothballs, which might be a health concern for humans. One way to kill moth larvae in fabric is to freeze the garment for several days at a temperature below -8 degrees Celsius.

39D __ the lily: add unnecessary decor : GILD

To gild is to coat with gold. The phrase “to gild the lily” means to add unnecessary ornamentation, to try to improve something that is already ideal.

52D First responder: Abbr. : EMT

Emergency medical technician (EMT)

58D Droid : BOT

A bot is a computer program designed to imitate human behavior. It might crawl around the Web doing searches for example, or it might participate in discussions in chat rooms by giving pre-programmed responses. It might also act as a competitor in a computer game.

“Droid” is short for “android” and is used to describe a robot that resembles a human. The Latin word “androides” was used in English in the 18th century to mean “like a man”. Science fiction writers introduced us to “android” in the late 1880s.

61D “__ Baba and the Forty Thieves” : ALI

There is some controversy about the story “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves” in that it has been suggested it was not part of the original collection of Arabic tales called “One Thousand and One Nights”. The suggestion is that the Ali Baba tale was added by one of the European translators of the collection.

62D Public health agcy. : 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 …

63D Dennings of “WandaVision” : KAT

Kat Dennings is the stage name of actress Katherine Litwack, who is noted today for her co-starring role on CBS’s sitcom “2 Broke Girls”. On the big screen, she plays the somewhat humorous character Dr. Darcy Lewis in the “Thor” series of films. Dennings is an avid blogger, and you can check out her video blog on YouTube.

“WandaVision” is a TV miniseries featuring characters from Marvel Comics. The title characters are Wanda Maximoff (aka Scarlet Witch) played by Elizabeth Olsen and Vision played by Paul Bettany. I am by no means a fan of screen adaptations of comic characters, but I might take a look at “WandaVision”. Wanda and Vision are living in suburbia, trying to conceal their superhero identities. Each episode progresses the storyline through several decades, using situations encountered in TV shows of the day. Episodes use the format of shows such as:

• The Dick Van Dyke Show
• I Love Lucy
• Bewitched
• I Dream of Jeannie
• The Brady Bunch
• Good Times
• The Mary Tyler Moore Show
• Full House
• Malcolm in the Middle
• Modern Family

Sounds very intriguing …