LA Times Crossword 20 Mar 21, Saturday

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Constructed by: Stella Zawistowski
Edited by: Rich Norris

Today’s Theme: None

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

Bill’s time: 9m 39s

Bill’s errors: 0

Today’s Wiki-est Amazonian Googlies

Across

1 Garbage delivery vehicle? : SPAMBOT

Spambots are nasty little computer programs that send out spam emails and messages, often from fake accounts. This blog gets about 300 spam comments a day that I have to delete, almost all of which are written by spambots.

8 World Chess Champion Carlsen : MAGNUS

Magnus Carlsen is a chess grandmaster from Norway who first became World Chess Champion in 2013. Carlsen achieved world no. 1 ranking for the first time in 2010 when he was just 19 years of age, making him the youngest player ever to be so honored.

14 Susan Ruttan’s “L.A. Law” role : ROXANNE

Actress Susan Ruttan is best known for playing law firm secretary Roxanne Melman on the legal drama “LA Law” in the eighties and nineties.

21 “Who __?”: New Orleans Saints chant : DAT

The entire community of fans of the New Orleans Saints are sometimes referred to as the “Who Dat Nation”. The name comes from a popular chant heard at a Saints game:

Who dat?
Who dat?
Who dat say dey gonna beat dem Saints?

26 Beginning of an apology : MEA …

Many Roman Catholics are very familiar with the Latin phrase “mea culpa” meaning “my fault”, as it is used in the Latin Mass. The additional term “mea maxima culpa” translates as “my most grievous fault”.

27 One Pillar Pagoda city : HANOI

The One Pillar Pagoda is a remarkable structure in Hanoi, Vietnam that serves as a Buddhist temple. The pagoda is built over water and sits on just one central pillar. The original structure was built in 1049 CE.

28 Riding a Segway, say : ON WHEELS

The Segway PT is a self-balancing two-wheel electric vehicle introduced to the world in 2001 by American inventor Dean Kamen.

38 “Absentia” co-star __ Katic : STANA

Stana Katic is a Canadian-American actress who is perhaps best known for playing homicide detective Kate Beckett on the crime series “Castle”. After “CastleA” ended its run, Katic took the lead role of FBI Agent Emily Byrne on the thriller show “Absentia”.

47 Big name in portable illumination : MAGLITE

Maglite is a brand of flashlight. Many Maglite models are extremely sturdy and have been used as defensive weapons, serving as makeshift batons.

48 Bond first bought by FDR in 1941 : SERIES E

Series E Savings Bonds were introduced in 1941, just before the start of WWII, as “defense bonds”. After the attack on Pearl Harbor they became known as “war bonds”. The first Series E bond was sold to President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

52 New York natives : ONEIDAS

The Oneida people originally lived in the area that is now Central New York. The Oneida were one of the five founding nations of the Iroquois Confederacy, also known as the Five Nations (the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga and Seneca).

53 Emergency sorting systems : TRIAGES

Triage is the process of prioritizing patients for treatment, especially on the battlefield. The term “triage” is French and means “sorting”.

54 Tubular pastries : CANNOLI

Cannoli (singular “connolo”) are Italian sweet pastries that originated in Sicily. Cannoli are made by filling tubes of fried pastry dough with a creamy filling that usually contains ricotta cheese. “Cannolo” is Italian for “little tube”.

55 Fruit in some Chinese New Year customs : ORANGES

One of the traditional foods served at Chinese New Year is the orange, particularly the mandarin orange. The Chinese word for “orange” sounds very like the word for “success”. And, the spelling of the Chinese word for “tangerine” contains the character meaning “luck”.

57 Innocently charming : WINSOME

“Winsome” is such a lovely-sounding word, with a lovely meaning. Someone described as winsome has a childlike charm and innocence.

Down

1 Quinceañera honoree: Abbr. : SRTA

“Quinceañera” is a celebration of a girl’s fifteenth birthday, and is an event common in many parts of Latin America.

3 “Beverly Hills Cop” cop Foley : AXEL

“Beverly Hills Cop” is a fun 1984 action comedy movie starring Eddie Murphy as Detroit cop Axel Foley who heads to Beverly Hills to solve the murder of a friend. The film was the biggest hit of 1984 at the box office, and spawned two sequels.

4 All thumbs : MALADROIT

The French for “to the right” is “à droit”, from which we get our word “adroit”. The original meaning of “adroit” was “rightly, properly”, but it has come to mean dexterous and skillful. Someone described as “maladroit” is unskilled and awkward.

5 Less than 2% have this type : B-NEGATIVE

Here is an approximate distribution of blood types across the US population:

• O-positive: 38 percent
• O-negative: 7 percent
• A-positive: 34 percent
• A-negative: 6 percent
• B-positive: 9 percent
• B-negative: 2 percent
• AB-positive: 3 percent
• AB-negative: 1 percent

7 Rizzoli and Isles creator Gerritsen : TESS

“Rizzoli & Isles” is a detective drama that is inspired by the “Maura Isles/Jane Rizzoli” series of novels by Tess Gerritsen. In the show, Angie Harmon plays detective Jane Rizzoli and Sasha Alexander plays medical examiner Dr. Maura Isles.

8 Popular ’90s dance : MACARENA

“Macarena” is a dance song in Spanish that was a huge hit worldwide for Los Del Río in 1995-1996.

10 Beau __ : GESTE

“Beau geste” (plural “beaux gestes”) is a French term meaning “noble deed”, or literally “beautiful gesture”.

11 Physics Nobelist the year after Albert : NIELS

Niels Bohr was a Danish physicist who won his 1922 Nobel Prize for his work on quantum mechanics and atomic structure. Later in his life, Bohr was part of the team working on the Manhattan Project that developed the first atomic bomb. Niels Bohr and Albert Einstein had a series of public debates and disputes in the twenties and thirties. Although the two respected each other very highly, they held very different views on quantum theory, different views on the laws of physics at the atomic level. The passage of time has shown that Bohr won out in those debates.

23 Homemade knife : SHIV

“Shiv” is a slang term describing a weapon crudely fashioned to resemble a knife. Mostly we hear of shivs that have been fashioned by prison inmates to do harm to others.

30 Tallinn natives : ESTONIANS

Tallinn is the largest city in the former Soviet Socialist Republic (SSR) of Estonia, and is now the nation’s capital. Tallinn is sometimes referred to as the Silicon Valley of Europe, and indeed it was in Tallinn that the video chat service Skype was developed. It is also home to NATO’s Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence that is sponsored by several NATO members, including the US.

31 Too many to name, for short : ET AL

“Et alii” (et al.) is the equivalent of “et cetera” (etc.), with “et cetera” being used in place of a list of objects, and “et alii” used for a list of names.

36 Umlaut lookalike : DIERESIS

The umlaut and the dieresis are diacritical marks that look identical, as they comprise two dots placed over a letter. However, each serves a different purpose in phonology. An example of a dieresis is found in the English word “naïve”, where it tells us to pronounce the letter I separately from the preceding letter A.

40 Shepherd formerly of “The View” : SHERRI

Sherri Shepherd is a comedian and television personality who is best known by many as one of the co-hosts of the ABC daytime talk show “The View”. I remember Shepherd playing a police officer who was partnered with Robert Barone on the sitcom “Everybody Loves Raymond”.

41 Coll. QB, stereotypically : BMOC

Big Man On Campus (BMOC)

42 Turner and Wachowski : LANAS

Lana Turner started work as a Hollywood actress at a very young age, signing up with MGM at only sixteen. Early in her career she earned the nickname “The Sweater Girl” after wearing a pretty tight sweater in the film “They Won’t Forget”, which was her film debut. She married eight times, to seven different husbands, the first of which was bandleader Artie Shaw. Shaw and Turner eloped and married on their very first date, when the young actress was just nineteen years old. After divorcing Shaw she married restaurateur Steve Crane, but had the marriage annulled when she found out that Crane was still married to his first wife. The two had a daughter together, and so remarried when Crane’s divorce was finalized. Cheryl Crane was the daughter from the marriage to Joseph and she lived with Turner after her parents split up. When Cheryl was 14-years-old, her mother was romantically involved with a shady character named Johnny Stompanato. One evening Cheryl found her mother engaged in a violent argument with Stompanato, and Cheryl became so scared that she pulled out a gun and killed him in what was deemed to be justifiable homicide. Turner’s last marriage was to a nightclub hypnotist named Ronald Pellar, and that union lasted just six months as Pellar disappeared one day with a lot of Turner’s money and jewelry. Years later Turner said, “My goal was to have one husband and seven children, but it turned out to be the other way around.”

Lana and Lilly Wachowski, referred to collectively as “the Wachowskis”, are a film and television directing team. Perhaps most famously, the Wachowskis wrote and directed the two sequels in “The Matrix” trilogy of movies. Both Wachoskis were born male; Lana was named Larry, and Lilly was Andy.

44 Pancakes served with sour cream : BLINI

A blintz (also “blintze” and “blin”, plural “blini”) is a thin pancake similar to a crêpe, although unlike a crêpe, a blintz may contain yeast.

49 Eleven’s favorite breakfast brand, in “Stranger Things” : EGGO

Eggo is a line of frozen waffles and related products made by Kellogg’s. When they were introduced in the 1930s, the name “Eggo” was chosen to promote the “egginess” of the batter. “Eggo” replaced “Froffles”, the original name chosen by melding “frozen” and “waffles”.

“Stranger Things” is a sci-fi horror TV show made for Netflix that aired its first season in 2016. I don’t do horror, and so haven’t seen it …

51 Ancient being? : ESSE

“Esse” is the Latin for “to be”. “Sum” means “I am”, “est” means “he, she is”, and “erat” means “he, she was”.