LA Times Crossword Answers 21 Apr 15, Tuesday

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CROSSWORD SETTER: John Lampkin
THEME: Bathroom Sequence … we get a sequence of activities, commonly performed in a BATHROOM, by using the first word in each themed answer:

57D. Appropriate room for the sequence comprised of the starts of 18-, 27-, 47- and 59-Across BATH

18A. Controversial coal-extraction process STRIP MINING
27A. Buy lots of presents for SHOWER WITH GIFTS
47A. Wry wit DRY SENSE OF HUMOR
59A. Opera house section DRESS CIRCLE

BILL BUTLER’S COMPLETION TIME: 5m 32s
ANSWERS I MISSED: 0

Today’s Wiki-est, Amazonian Googlies
Across

4. Chocolate syrup choice BOSCO
Bosco Chocolate Syrup is produced in New Jersey, and first hit store shelves in 1928.

16. “America by Heart” author Sarah PALIN
“America by Heart: Reflections on Family, Faith and Flag” is the second book by Sarah Palin, released in 2010 following the success of “Going Rogue: An American Life” that was published the prior year.

17. Good name for a tree-lined street ELM
The most common street name in the US is “Second Street”. “First Street” comes in only at number three, and this is because many cities and towns forego the use of “First” and instead go with “Main” or something more historical in nature. “Elm Street” appears on the list at number fifteen.

18. Controversial coal-extraction process STRIP MINING
Strip mining is a process used to mine minerals that are relatively close to the surface. A long strip of overlying soil and rock is first removed, and then the ore beneath is excavated. Once each long strip has been excavated then the overlying soil and rock is redeposited. Strip mining wouldn’t be most environmentally friendly practice …

23. __-Loompa: fictional chocolate factory worker OOMPA
The Oompa-Loompas are characters in the Roald Dahl book “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory”, and indeed in the sequel story “Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator”. Willy Wonka came across the Oompa-Loompas on an isolated island in the Atlantic and invited them to work in his factory in order to escape those hunting them on the island. Right before Dahl’s book was first published, he was intending to call the Oompa-Loompas the “Whipple-Scrumpets”.

33. “2001” computer HAL
In Arthur C. Clarke’s “Space Odyssey” (famously adapted for the big screen as “2001: A Space Odyssey”) the computer system that went rogue was called HAL 9000, or simply “HAL”. HAL stands for Heuristically programmed ALgorithmic computer. Even though, Clarke denied it, there’s a good argument that can be made that the acronym HAL is a veiled reference to IBM, the big player in the world of computing at the time of the novel’s publication (1968). The acronym HAL is just a one-letter shift from the initials “IBM”.

35. Monica of tennis SELES
Monica Seles has a Hungarian name as she was born to Hungarian parents in former Yugoslavia. Seles was the World No. 1 professional tennis player in 1991 and 1992 before being forced from the sport when she was stabbed by a spectator at a match in 1993. She did return to the game two years later, but never achieved the same level of success.

36. Allowed to ripen, as cheddar AGED
Cheddar cheese takes its name from the English village of Cheddar in Somerset. Over 50% of the cheese sold in the UK is cheddar. Here in the US cheddar is the second most popular cheese sold, behind Mozzarella.

42. Rose (up) on hind legs, to a cowhand RARED
Horses “rear up” on their hind legs. I think that the term “rare up” is used as well, for the same meaning, but I think that it might be slang.

46. Doctor’s org. AMA
American Medical Association (AMA)

51. “¿Qué __?” PASA
In Spanish, “que pasa?” literally translates as “what’s happening?” but is used to mean “how are things going with you?”

52. Jazz singer Krall DIANA
Diana Krall is a jazz singer and piano player from Nanaimo, British Columbia. Krall is married to English rock musician Elvis Costello.

56. Some Balkanites SERBS
Serbs are an ethnic group native to the Balkans in southeastern Europe. Although Serbs exist as a minority group in many countries in the region, they are the majority ethnic group in Serbia, in Montenegro and in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

59. Opera house section DRESS CIRCLE
I believe that the original dress circle in a theater was the curved section of seating at the front of the first gallery above the ground-floor seats. The seats in the dress circle were reserved for members of the audience in evening dress, hence the name. I always seem to get directed to the Jeans and Dishevelled Shirt Circle …

62. Kit __: candy bar KAT
I grew up eating Kit Kat bars as a kid, as the chocolate confection has been around since the thirties. Kit Kats didn’t hit the shelves in the US until the seventies. I’ve seen new varieties of Kit Kat over in the UK, such as an orange-flavored version, but haven’t seen anything like that over here.

63. Everglades wader EGRET
The Everglades are a tropical wetlands that cover much of southern Florida. The area was named “River Glades” by a British surveyor in 1773, and is suggested that poor transcription of the word “river” led to the use of “ever”. The southern 20% of the Everglades is a protected region that we know as Everglades National Park. The park is the third largest National Park in the lower 48 states, after Death Valley NP (the largest) and Yellowstone NP.

65. H-like letter ETA
Eta is the seventh letter of the Greek alphabet, and is a forerunner of our Latin character “H”. Originally denoting a consonant, eta was used as a long vowel in Ancient Greek.

68. “Give __ thoughts no tongue”: “Hamlet” THY
In William Shakespeare’s play “Hamlet”, Polonius gives some fatherly advice to his son Laertes before the young man heads off to France. Included among the numerous pearls of wisdom is the oft-quoted “Neither a borrower nor a lender be”.

Give thy thoughts no tongue,
Nor any unproportioned thought his act.
Be thou familiar but by no means vulgar.
Those friends thou hast, and their adoption tried,
Grapple them unto thy soul with hoops of steel,
But do not dull thy palm with entertainment
Of each new-hatched, unfledged comrade. Beware
Of entrance to a quarrel, but being in,
Bear ’t that th’ opposèd may beware of thee.
Give every man thy ear but few thy voice.
Take each man’s censure but reserve thy judgment.
Costly thy habit as thy purse can buy,
But not expressed in fancy—rich, not gaudy,
For the apparel oft proclaims the man,
And they in France of the best rank and station
Are of a most select and generous chief in that.
Neither a borrower nor a lender be,
For loan oft loses both itself and friend,
And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry.
This above all: to thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.

Down
1. Bit of heckling JEER
The original use of the verb “to heckle” was to mean questioning severely, and for many years was associated with the public questioning of parliamentary candidates in Scotland. In more recent times, the meaning has evolved into questioning that is less polite and that is directed at standup comics.

2. Aptly named fruit UGLI
The ugli fruit is a hybrid of an orange and a tangerine, first discovered growing wild in Jamaica where most ugli fruit comes from today.

3. Horseplay TOMFOOLERY
In Middle English, in the middle of the 14th century, a mentally deficient man would be called a Thom Foole, sort of a nickname. We retain the name today in our word “tomfoolery” meaning “clowning around”.

5. Autumn mo. OCT
Looking back a thousand years or so, it was common for people to think of just two seasons: summer and winter. The concept of four seasons really only gained popularity in the 1600s. The terms “summer” and “winter” have persisted for many centuries, whereas the seasons we now call “spring” and “fall” have had varying names. Spring replaced “Lent” and “prime-temps”, and “fall” replaced “harvest” and “autumn”. The use of “spring” and “fall” comes from the notion of leaves “springing into existence” and “falling to the ground”.

9. Literary postscripts EPILOGS
Our word “epilog”, meaning an addition at the end of a play or other literary work, ultimately comes from Greek. “Epi-” is a prefix signifying “in addition”, and “logos” is the noun for “a speech”.

11. “Chocolat” actress Lena OLIN
The lovely Lena Olin is a Swedish actress, clearly someone who had acting in her blood. Her mother was the actress Britta Holmberg and her father the actor and director Stig Olin. Olin had a very successful career in Sweden, often working with the great Ingmar Bergman. Olin’s breakthrough international and English-speaking role was playing opposite Daniel Day-Lewis in “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” released in 1988. Way back in 1974, the lovely Miss Olin was crowned Miss Scandinavia in a beauty pageant for Nordic women held in Helsinki, Finland.

The movie “Chocolat” released in 2000 is a big screen adaption of the novel of the same name by Joanne Harris. “Chocolat” tells the story of a young mother with a six-year-old daughter who opens up a chocolate shop in a French village. The mother is played by the talented Juliette Binoche.

12. Royal flush card KING
The poker hand called a royal flush is the highest-ranking hand possible. It consists of a run of 10, Jack, Queen, King and Ace, with all in the same suit.

25. AFB truant AWOL
An airman might go absent without leave (AWOL) from an Air Force base (AFB).

“Truant” is such a lovely word. We have been using it to describe someone who wanders from an appointed place since the mid-1400s. Prior to that a truant was a beggar or a vagabond.

28. Helga’s Viking husband, in comics HAGAR
“Hagar the Horrible” is a comic strip that was created by the late Dik Browne and is now drawn by his son, Chris Browne. “Hagar the Terrible” (not “Horrible”) was the nickname given to Dik by his sons.

32. Astronomical red giant S STAR
Red giants are very large stars with a relatively low mass. The atmosphere of a red giant is also very inflated and extends a long way into space so the surface of that atmosphere that we see is relatively cool, which gives it a red color. Stars are classified by their spectral characteristics, basically the color of the light they emit. As such, red giants are classified as M stars. Cool red giants are of a color beyond the usual range, and are classified as S stars.

40. Old audio system HI-FI
Hi-fi systems were introduced in the late forties, and is audio equipment designed to give a much higher quality reproduction of sound than cheaper systems available up to that point. “Hi-fi” stands for “high fidelity”.

45. Sci-fi weapons PHASERS
A MASER is a device that was around long before LASERs came into the public consciousness. A MASER (Microwave Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation) is similar to a LASER, but microwaves are emitted rather than light waves. When the storyline for “Star Trek” was being developed, the writers introduced a weapon called a “phaser”, with the name “phaser” derived from PHoton mASER.

48. Tiny fraction of a min. NSEC
“Nanosecond” is more correctly abbreviated to “ns”, and really is a tiny amount of time: one billionth of a second.

55. Kathryn of “Law & Order: C.I.” ERBE
The actress Kathryn Erbe is best known for playing Det. Alexandra Eames on the TV show “Law & Order: Criminal Intent”. Paradoxically perhaps, Erbe’s other noted role is as Shirley Bellinger in the HBO series “Oz”, a death row inmate.

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For the sake of completion, here is a full listing of all the answers:
Across
1. Stick (out) JUT
4. Chocolate syrup choice BOSCO
9. Call to mind EVOKE
14. Self-image EGO
15. Chipmunk’s morsel ACORN
16. “America by Heart” author Sarah PALIN
17. Good name for a tree-lined street ELM
18. Controversial coal-extraction process STRIP MINING
20. Long gun RIFLE
22. Really mad BOILING
23. __-Loompa: fictional chocolate factory worker OOMPA
26. Bagpiper, often SCOT
27. Buy lots of presents for SHOWER WITH GIFTS
33. “2001” computer HAL
34. Cinematic shootout time NOON
35. Monica of tennis SELES
36. Allowed to ripen, as cheddar AGED
38. Kind of card or drive FLASH
41. Senate slot SEAT
42. Rose (up) on hind legs, to a cowhand RARED
44. Beat to a froth WHIP
46. Doctor’s org. AMA
47. Wry wit DRY SENSE OF HUMOR
51. “¿Qué __?” PASA
52. Jazz singer Krall DIANA
53. Curse-inflicting stare EVIL EYE
56. Some Balkanites SERBS
59. Opera house section DRESS CIRCLE
62. Kit __: candy bar KAT
63. Everglades wader EGRET
64. Pro basketball player, briefly NBAER
65. H-like letter ETA
66. “Think again!” NOT SO!
67. Decent chaps GENTS
68. “Give __ thoughts no tongue”: “Hamlet” THY

Down
1. Bit of heckling JEER
2. Aptly named fruit UGLI
3. Horseplay TOMFOOLERY
4. Infielders BASEMEN
5. Autumn mo. OCT
6. Fraternity counterpart: Abbr. SOR
7. Nursery bed CRIB
8. Like some military housing ON-POST
9. Literary postscripts EPILOGS
10. Makeup tables VANITIES
11. “Chocolat” actress Lena OLIN
12. Royal flush card KING
13. Second lang., for some ENG
19. Wisc. neighbor MICH
21. Stuck-in-the-mud gear LOW
24. University VIP PROF
25. AFB truant AWOL
27. Broken pottery piece SHARD
28. Helga’s Viking husband, in comics HAGAR
29. Extremely impressed IN AWE
30. Bargain hunter’s mecca FLEA MARKET
31. Spanish “I love you” TE AMO
32. Astronomical red giant S STAR
37. More than dislikes DESPISES
39. Not barefoot SHOD
40. Old audio system HI-FI
43. Includes in the poker game DEALS TO
45. Sci-fi weapons PHASERS
48. Tiny fraction of a min. NSEC
49. Adage SAYING
50. One in Paris UNE
53. Therefore ERGO
54. Opposite of hor. VERT
55. Kathryn of “Law & Order: C.I.” ERBE
57. Appropriate room for the sequence comprised of the starts of 18-, 27-, 47- and 59-Across BATH
58. Legal suspension STAY
59. Family room DEN
60. Soda container CAN
61. Do-over on the court LET

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