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Constructed by: Janice Luttrell

Edited by: Patti Varol

Today’s Reveal Answer: Follow Suit

Themed answers each end in a word that often FOLLOWS “SUIT”:

• 57A Do the same, and what the ends of 17-, 25-, and 42-Across can do : FOLLOW SUIT

• 17A “Just act naturally!” : BE YOURSELF! (suit yourself)
• 25A Vietnam War film directed by Stanley Kubrick : FULL METAL JACKET (suit jacket)
• 42A Quickly resolved legal matter : OPEN-AND-SHUT CASE (suitcase)

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

Bill’s time: 4m 38s

Bill’s errors: 0

Today’s Wiki-est Amazonian Googlies

Across

1A Dot-__: online businesses : COMS

A dot-com is a company that primarily makes its money by providing products and services using its online presence.

5A Capital of South Korea : SEOUL

Seoul is the capital city of South Korea. The Seoul National Capital Area is home to over 25 million people and is one of the largest metropolitan areas in the world.

15A Inner circle : CADRE

A cadre is, most commonly, a group of experienced personnel at the core of a larger organization that the small group trains or heavily influences. “Cadre” is a French word meaning “frame”. We use it in the sense that a cadre is a group that provides a “framework” for the larger organization.

19A AirPods holders : EARS

AirPods are Apple’s line of Bluetooth earbuds. When AirPods were introduced in 2016, the market reacted with some skepticism. The left and right AirPods are not connected by any wire, so there was concern that individual earbuds could fall out of the ear, and possibly get lost. Another concern was Apple’s stated intent to abandon the wired headphone socket on new iPhone models. That was then, and this is now …

20A Chocolaty treats that may have walnuts : BROWNIES

Apparently, the first brownies were created for the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893. The recipe was developed by a pastry chef at the city’s Palmer House Hotel. The idea was to produce a cake-like dessert that was small enough and dainty enough to be eaten by ladies as part of a boxed lunch.

23A Baby bear : CUB

Bear cubs enter the world very vulnerable, born blind, hairless, and weighing less than a single pound. This makes them roughly 1/500th the size of their mother, representing one of the most extreme birth-weight-to-adult ratios of any placental mammal. The mother nurses them in the safety of the winter den, transforming her fat reserves into milk that allows the cubs to emerge months later fully furred and walking.

25A Vietnam War film directed by Stanley Kubrick : FULL METAL JACKET

Stanley Kubrick’s 1987 classic war film “Full Metal Jacket” takes its name from the “full metal jacket” bullet that is used by infantry riflemen. The film is set largely in Vietnam and, somewhat bizarrely I think, all those bombed-out urban scenes in the ruined city of Hue were shot on a disused building site in London!

34A Second-string players : B-TEAM

We’ve been using the phrases “first string” and “second string” in athletics since the mid-19th century. The expressions come from archery, in which a competitor would carry a second bowstring in case the first broke.

38A Safari park roarer : LION

The modern safari park originated in 1966 with the opening of Longleat Safari Park in Wiltshire, England, marking the first drive-through wildlife reserve outside of Africa. I’ve been through both the park and the house several times. It’s a fun day out …

39A Gloomy __: pessimistic sort : GUS

The original Gloomy Gus was a pessimistic character in newspaper comics in the early 1900s, who was introduced to the public by illustrator Frederick Burr Opper.

40A Comedian Wyatt : CENAC

Wyatt Cenac is a comedian and writer from New York City who was raised in Dallas. Cenac worked for three years as a writer for the TV show “King of the Hill” before joining “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart” as writer and correspondent.

47A Part of FTW and BTW : THE

“FTW” is an initialism abbreviating “for the win”, a phrase meaning “being great, sure to succeed”.

By the way (BTW)

51A Morton who plays Circe in “The Odyssey” : SAMANTHA

Samantha Morton is an English actress who earned her first Academy Award nomination for a role in which she never spoke a single word, playing the mute laundress Hattie in the 1999 film “Sweet and Lowdown”.

61A Prefix with skeleton : ENDO-

An animal with an endoskeleton has a supporting skeleton inside its body. So, we humans have an endoskeleton. A turtle, on the other hand, has both an endoskeleton and an exoskeleton, its outer shell.

Down

1D Salad with bacon and eggs : COBB

Robert H. Cobb owned the Brown Derby chain of restaurants. One of his regular customers was the famous Sid Grauman, who ran Grauman’s Chinese Theater. Late one night, Grauman asked for a snack, and Cobb came up with a chopped salad simply made from ingredients he happened to have in the refrigerator. Grauman liked it so much that he continued to request it, and the Cobb salad was born.

2D “Back to you,” in radio lingo : OVER

In radiotelephony, the word “OVER” is used to indicate the end of a transmission from one party, handing over the airwaves to another party to respond.

3D BLT spread : MAYO

Mayonnaise originated in the town of Mahon in Menorca, a Mediterranean island belonging to Spain. The Spanish called the sauce “salsa mahonesa” after the town, and this morphed into the French word “mayonnaise” that we use in English today.

8D Address that often starts with “www” : URL

Uniform resource locator (URL)

In essence, the World Wide Web (WWW) is a vast collection of documents that is accessible using the Internet, with each document containing hyperlinks that point to other documents in the collection. So the “Web” is different from the Internet, although the terms are often used interchangeably. The Web is a collection of documents, and the Internet is a global network of computers on which the documents reside. The Web was effectively the invention of British computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee. The key to Berners-Lee’s invention was bringing together two technologies that already existed: hypertext and the Internet. I, for one, am very grateful …

10D Montreal’s province : QUEBEC

Québec is the largest province in Canada, and the only one with French as its sole official language. The name “Québec” comes from an Algonquin word “kebec” meaning “where the river narrows”. This refers to the area around Quebec City where the St. Lawrence River narrows as it flows through a gap lined by steep cliffs. The province has voted twice in referenda asking whether or not Quebec should become an independent country, once in 1980, and again in 1995. The 1995 result was 49% in favor of sovereignty, up from 40% in 1980.

11D Eurasian border river : URAL

The Ural River rises in the Ural Mountains in Russia and flows for half its length through Russian territory until it crosses the border into Kazakhstan, finally emptying into the Caspian Sea. It is the third-longest river in Europe, after the Volga and Danube. The Ural is often cited as defining a long stretch of the border between Europe and Asia, although the exact position of that border is open to debate.

18D E pluribus __ : UNUM

From 1776, “E pluribus unum” was the unofficial motto of the United States. The phrase translates from Latin as “Out of many, one”. It was pushed aside in 1956 when an Act of Congress designated “In God We Trust” as the country’s official motto. “In God We Trust” had appeared on US coins since 1864, but was only introduced on paper currency in 1957.

22D Singer Lambert : ADAM

Singer Adam Lambert is one of the successes to come out of the “American Idol” machine. After hitting the big time, Lambert started a collaboration with Brian May and Roger Taylor, performing as Queen + Adam Lambert.

24D Laundry whitener : BLEACH

The name “bleach” applies to any chemical used to remove color or stains from a fabric. The most common version that we encounter is probably liquid bleach, a dilute solution of sodium hypochlorite.

25D North Dakota city : FARGO

Fargo, North Dakota is the biggest city in the state. The original name for the city was Centralia, when it was a stopping point for steamboats that traveled the Red River in the late 19th century. The town really grew with the arrival of the Northern Pacific Railway, so the name “Fargo” was adopted in honor of one of the railroad company’s directors, William Fargo (of Wells Fargo Express fame).

28D Govt.-issued investments : T-BONDS

A Treasury note (T-note) is a government debt that matures in 1-10 years. A T-note has a coupon (interest) payment made every six months. The T-note is purchased at a discount to face value, and at the date of maturity can be redeemed at that face value. A Treasury bill (T-bill) is a similar financial vehicle, but it matures in one year or less, and a T-bond matures in 20-30 years.

29D Book of maps : ATLAS

The term “atlas” was first applied to a collection of maps in Gerardus Mercator’s posthumous 1595 publication, but the namesake wasn’t the Titan of Greek myth. Mercator dedicated the work to King Atlas of Mauretania, a legendary North African philosopher and astronomer he revered as the world’s first master geographer. The original frontispiece of Mercator’s collection featured this mortal king examining a globe with a pair of dividers. This image was later replaced by the familiar scene of Atlas the Titan straining under the weight of the heavens. This shift occurred as later publishers realized that a muscle-bound deity provided a much more dramatic, and marketable, visual for the cover.

30D Knightley of “Bend It Like Beckham” : KEIRA

English actress Keira Knightley had her big break in the movies when she co-starred in 2002’s “Bend It Like Beckham”. Knightley played one of my favorite movie roles, Elizabeth Bennet in 2005’s “Pride and Prejudice”, although that isn’t the best adaptation of Austen’s novel in my humble opinion …

“Bend It Like Beckham” is a 2002 British-Indian movie that centers on a young Punjabi Sikh living in London who loves soccer, but is forbidden to play by her parents. The two leads in the film are Parminder Nagra and Keira Knightley. Nagra went on to play Dr. Neela Rasgotra in the TV medical drama “ER”, and Knightley went on to a remarkably successful Hollywood career.

31D Furry “Star Wars” creatures : EWOKS

The Ewoks are creatures that live on the moon of Endor in the “Star Wars” universe. First appearing in “Star Wars Episode VI: Return of the Jedi”, they’re the cute and cuddly little guys that look like teddy bears.

38D Officially permitted to drive, say : LICENSED

It took me years to stop using the term “driving licence” (and that spelling is correct) after I moved to the US. That’s what we call a driver’s license back in Ireland.

43D Big name in milk chocolate : NESTLE

Nestlé is a Swiss multinational food and drink processing conglomerate corporation. Founded in 1866 by Henri Nestlé, it began by producing infant formula, which was instrumental in saving the life of a neighbor’s child. Today, Nestlé is the world’s largest food company.

48D South Asian silk dress : SARI

The item of clothing called a “sari” (also “saree”) is a strip of cloth, as one might imagine, unusual perhaps in that it is unstitched along the whole of its length. The strip of cloth can range from four to nine meters long (that’s a lot of material!). The sari is usually wrapped around the waist, then draped over the shoulder leaving the midriff bare. I must say, it can be a beautiful item of clothing.

50D Barking marine mammal : SEAL

Male seals are called bulls, females are cows, and babies are pups. A group of seals comprising one or two males, with several females and their offspring, is known as a harem.

52D French greeting : ALLO

In France, the greeting “allô” is used almost exclusively when answering the telephone, rather than as standard in-person. The word is a direct adaptation of the English “hello”, but unlike English speakers who use their version everywhere, French speakers rely on “bonjour” or “salut” face-to-face.