LA Times Crossword 5 Aug 26, Wednesday

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Constructed by: Avery Katz & Aaron Gee

Edited by: Patti Varol

Today’s Reveal Answer: Double-Check

Themed answers are common phrases reinterpreted as FIRST LESSONS for professionals cited in the corresponding clues:

• 18A First lesson in “How To DJ”? : START FROM SCRATCH
• 26A First lesson in “Plumbing: A Beginner’s Guide”? : TAKE THE PLUNGE
• 47A First lesson in “Sport Climbing and You”? : LEARN THE ROPES
• 61A First lesson in “A Handbook of Competitive Eating”? : STEP UP TO THE PLATE

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

Bill’s time: 7m 58s

Bill’s errors: 0

Today’s Wiki-est Amazonian Googlies

Across

10A Golden Arches sandwich : MCRIB

The McDonald’s McRib sandwich is based on a pork patty. There isn’t any pork rib in the patty though. It is primarily made up of pork shoulder meat.

17A Family, in Hawaiian : OHANA

The Hawaiian word “ʻohana”, meaning “family”, stems from (pun!) “ʻohā”, which describes the root or corm of the taro plant. Because taro is considered the spiritual and dietary staple of traditional Hawaiian culture, “ohana” implies that all extended relatives grow and flourish from the exact same root system. The term became extremely popular after the release of the 2002 Disney film “Lilo & Stitch”, which used the mantra “ʻohana means family, and family means nobody gets left behind, or forgotten”.

21A Summer shirts : TANK TOPS

“Tank top” is another one of those terms that always catches me out, as it has a different meaning on each side of the Atlantic. In the US, a tank top is a sleeveless shirt, something we would call a “vest” back in Ireland (and the US “vest” is what we call a “waistcoat”). A tank top in Ireland is a sleeveless sweater, which further adds to the confusion. The name “tank top” is derived from “tank suit”, an old name for a woman’s one-piece bathing suit. The use of “tank” for the bathing suit came from “swimming tank”, an obsolete term used in the 1920s for a swimming pool.

23A Antlered grazer : ELK

The elk (also “wapiti”) is one of the largest species of deer in the world, with only the moose being bigger. Early European settlers were familiar with the smaller red deer back in their homelands, so when they saw the “huge” wapiti they assumed it was a moose, and incorrectly gave it the European name for a moose, namely “elk”. The more correct name for the beast is “wapiti”, which means “white rump” in Shawnee. It’s all very confusing …

32A Rights org. : ACLU

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) was established in 1920 by a group of activists, including Helen Keller and Roger Baldwin, to defend the Bill of Rights during the post-WWI First Red Scare. The organization rose to national prominence in 1925 when it represented defendant John Scopes in the “Monkey Trial”, a landmark case centered on the teaching of evolution in schools.

36A Mexican state on the Gulf of California : SONORA

Sonora is the state in Mexico that lies just south of Arizona and New Mexico. It is the second-largest state in the country, after Chihuahua.

The Gulf of California is also known as the Sea of Cortez. It is the body of water that separates the peninsula of Baja California from the Mexican mainland.

39A Some jeans : LEES

The Lee company that is famous for making jeans was formed in 1889 by one Henry David Lee in Salina, Kansas.

41A Lute in Hindi cinema : SITAR

The sitar has been around since the Middle Ages. It is a stringed instrument that is played by plucking, and is used most often in Hindustani classical music. A key feature of the sitar is its set of sympathetic strings, which are not plucked but resonate in response to the main strings, contributing to its rich, shimmering sound. In the West we have been exposed to the instrument largely through the performances of Ravi Shankar and some music by George Harrison of the Beatles, a onetime student of Shankar.

44A 2022 Super Bowl winners : RAMS

Super Bowl LVI was played at the end of the 2021 season between the Cincinnati Bengals and the LA Rams. The Rams had home team advantage as the game was played at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, California. The Rams emerged victorious, winning 23-20. Apparently, the Super Bowl LVI broadcast was the second-most watched in the history of the NFL.

47A First lesson in “Sport Climbing and You”? : LEARN THE ROPES

Sport climbing is a specialized discipline of rock climbing that relies on permanent, pre-drilled expansion bolts for safety rather than requiring the climber to place their own removable gear on the way up. The use of permanent gear in clean rock is controversial, especially with the “clean climbing” community who try to avoid damaging the rock face.

50A Like Death Valley : ARID

Death Valley is a spectacular desert valley in California that is part of the Mojave Desert. Badwater Basin in Death Valley is the lowest point in North America, sitting at 282 feet below sea level. Remarkably, Badwater Basin is located just 84 miles from Mount Whitney, the highest point in the contiguous United States.

51A Coconut __ : OIL

Palm oil and coconut oil are two vegetable oils that aren’t very good for our health. Both are high in saturated fat.

52A Poke bowl protein : AHI

Poke is a Native Hawaiian dish featuring diced raw fish. “Poke” is a Hawaiian word meaning “to slice”.

55A Home exercise bike brand : PELOTON

Peloton is a New York-based company that manufactures exercise equipment, and also provides fitness classes. Those classes are streamed to touch screens incorporated into the equipment itself. Participation in the classes requires a subscription.

In military terms, a platoon is a subdivision of a company-sized unit, and is usually divided into squads or sections. The term “platoon” arose in the 1630s from the French “peloton”. “Peloton” translates literally as “little ball”, and is used to this day to mean “agglomeration”. “Peloton” gives rise to our word “pellet”. Also, we use the Modern French “peloton” in English now to refer to the main body (agglomeration) of riders in a bicycle race.

59A Natural disaster, legally : ACT OF GOD

“Act of God” is a legal term describing a natural event for which no individual can be held accountable, one that is outside human control.

61A First lesson in “A Handbook of Competitive Eating”? : STEP UP TO THE PLATE

Participants in a competitive eating contest are known as “gurgitators”.

67A Scottish lids : TAMS

A tam o’shanter is a man’s cap worn traditionally by Scotsmen. “Tams” were originally all blue (and called “blue bonnets”) but as more dyes became readily available they became more colorful. The name of the cap comes from the title character of the Robert Burns poem “Tam o’ Shanter”. A pom-pom adorning a tam is known as a toorie.

68A High-protein grain : SPELT

Spelt (also “dinkel wheat”) is a wheat species that has been around for thousands of years. Once a staple in the human diet, it was largely replaced by bread wheat. Spelt is seeing a revival in recent years, as its growth is less dependent on artificial fertilizers.

Down

4D Winery keepsake : CORK

We might instinctively sniff the cork, to judge the wine’s quality, but that’s not actually the point. The ritual is primarily meant to check for “cork taint”: a chemical compound called TCA that makes wine smell like damp cardboard or a musty basement, causing the wine to be “corked”.

6D Ice dweller off the coast of Greenland : HARP SEAL

The harp seal owes its name to the U-shaped marking on the backs of adults of the species. Early Europeans thought the mark resembled the classical stringed instrument. Others interpret the mark differently, resulting in the alternate name of “saddleback seal”.

7D Actress Mireille : ENOS

Mireille Enos is an actress from Kansas City. She is perhaps best known for her TV work, playing Sarah Linden on “The Killing” and for playing twins Kathy and JoDean Marquart on “Big Love”. Enos is married to actor Alan Ruck, who I mainly remember playing Cameron Frye in the great movie “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off”.

9D “You are my fire / The one __”: “I Want It That Way” opening lyrics : DESIRE

“I Want It That Way” is a signature song for the boy band Backstreet Boys. It was released in 1999, as the lead single from their album “Millennium”.

10D Cherries atop Black Forest cake : MORELLOS

The morello is a tart, late-ripening cherry that has a dark, blackish-red skin and juice. The cultivar’s name is an Italian word meaning “blackish”. The morello is generally considered too sour for fresh eating, but it is used in cherry liqueurs, and the world-famous Black Forest gateau.

13D Cuzco civilization : INCA

Cusco (also “Cuzco”) is a city in the southeast of Peru. Historically, Cusco was the historic capital of the Inca Empire, and was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1983.

14D Thai currency whose symbol was once used to represent Bitcoin : BAHT

The baht is the currency of Thailand. It utilizes the symbol “฿”, a character that gained unexpected popularity during the infancy of cryptocurrency. When Bitcoin launched in 2009, it co-opted the existing baht symbol because it closely resembled a traditional dollar sign superimposed over a capital “B”. The co-opted use persisted for nearly a decade until a dedicated, double-strikethrough Bitcoin symbol (₿) was finally approved and added to the global Unicode Standard in 2017.

20D Dice game : CRAPS

If one considers earlier versions of craps, then the game has been around for a very long time and probably dates back to the Crusades. It may have been derived from an old English game called “hazard” also played with two dice, which was mentioned in Geoffrey Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales” from the 1300s. The American version of the game came here courtesy of the French and first took root in New Orleans where it was given the name “crapaud”, a French word meaning “toad”.

26D Guitar peg, e.g. : TUNER

Tuning pegs are used to tighten and loosen strings on many musical instruments in order to change their pitch.

27D Like the rice terraces of the Philippine Cordilleras : TIERED

The Rice Terraces of the Philippine Cordilleras is a collection of rice terraces on the island of Luzon that was declared a World Heritage Site in 1995. They were constructed by the indigenous Ifugao people using primitive hand tools to maximize the limited arable land for cultivation. Reportedly, the manipulation of the landscape is so extensive that if the individual mud and stone retaining walls were placed end-to-end, they would encircle half the globe.

28D Bushels and pecks : UNITS

In the imperial system of weights and measures, a bushel is a unit of dry volume made up of 4 pecks. In the US system, a bushel is a dry volume of 8 gallons. We have used the term “bushel” to mean “large quantity” since the 14th century.

A peck is a dry measure of volume equal to a quarter of a bushel. The term can be used figuratively to mean a considerable quantity in general, as in the phrase “a peck of trouble”.

31D Wyatt of Tombstone : EARP

Wyatt Earp is famous as one of the participants in the gunfight at the O.K. Corral. Earp was a city policeman in Wichita, Kansas and also in Dodge City, Kansas. Earp was also deputy sheriff in Tombstone, Arizona where the O.K. Corral gunfight took place. Years later, Earp joined the Alaska Gold Rush and with a partner built and operated the Dexter Saloon in Nome.

The Arizona town of Tombstone built up around a mine that was owned by one Ed Schieffelin. Schieffelin had been told by US soldiers stationed in the area that the only stone (ore sample) he would find in the area was his tombstone. Regardless, he did file a claim, and it was centered on the grave site of one of his men who had been killed by Apaches. Schieffelin filed papers under the name “the Tombstone claim”.

32D Biblical brother : ABEL

In the story of Cain and Abel in the Book of Genesis, Cain murders his brother Abel. Subsequently, God asks Cain, “Where is Abel thy brother?” Cain replies, “I do not know. Am I my brother’s keeper?”

34D Pixar film about a young sea monster : LUCA

“Luca” is a 2021 Pixar animated film. The title character is a sea monster boy who can take the form of a human while on land.

38D Unfold, as a protein : DENATURE

To denature a protein is to physically unravel its complex, three-dimensional shape, usually by applying an external “stress”, maybe excessive heat or harsh acids. A readily observed example of protein denaturing occurs every time we fry an egg. As a raw egg hits a hot pan, thermal energy forces the tightly folded albumin proteins in the clear egg white to rapidly unfold and tangle with one another. The result is a translucent, runny liquid transforming into a firm, opaque solid.

43D Sharpen on a leather belt : STROP

A strop is a strip of leather used to sharpen a razor, and “to strop” is to sharpen a razor using the strop.

49D Gets married by Elvis, perhaps : ELOPES

Las Vegas is known as the Marriage Capital of the World due to the incredibly high number of weddings that take place there. Historically, the marriage “frenzy” started when it became relatively easy to get a marriage license, and when wedding ceremonies could be performed for a nominal fee.

52D Tequila plant : AGAVE

Tequila is a spirit made from the blue agave. The drink takes its name from the city of Tequila, located about 40 miles northwest of Guadalajara.

54D Namely : ID EST

“Id est” is Latin for “that is”, and is often abbreviated to “i.e.” when used in English.

55D Trident-shaped letters : PSIS

A trident is a spear with three prongs. The term “trident” comes from the Latin adjective “tridentem” meaning “three-pronged, three-toothed”. “Tridentem” comes from “tri-” (three) and “dens” (tooth).

56D __ A Sketch : ETCH

Etch A Sketch was introduced in 1960. The toy was developed in France by inventor André Cassagnes, who initially named it “L’Écran Magique” (The Magic Screen).

57D Skywalker raised on Alderaan : LEIA

The full name of the character played by Carrie Fisher in the “Star Wars” series of films is Princess Leia Organa of Alderaan, and later Leia Organa Solo. Leia is the twin sister of Luke Skywalker, and the daughter of Anakin Skywalker (aka “Darth Vader”) and Padmé Amidala. Leia is raised by her adoptive parents Bail and Breha Organa. She eventually marries Han Solo.

58D Pointed column : OP-ED

“Op-ed” is an abbreviation for “opposite the editorial page”. Op-eds started in the “New York World” in 1921 when the page opposite the editorials was used for articles written by a named guest writer, someone independent of the editorial board.

62D Lisbon greeting : OLA

Lisbon (“Lisboa” in Portuguese) is the capital of Portugal. It is the westernmost capital city in continental Europe, and indeed is the westernmost large city on the continent. Lisbon is also the oldest city in Western Europe, and was founded hundreds of years before London, Paris and Rome.