Category: Kyle Dolan

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Constructed by: Kyle Dolan

Edited by: Patti Varol

Today’s Theme: None

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

Bill’s time: 11m 35s

Bill’s errors: 0

Today’s Wiki-est Amazonian Googlies

Across

15A Evidence that may not be fully reliable : ANECDATA

The portmanteau “anecdata” is used to describe information derived from personal stories rather than scientific study. The term has Greek and Latin roots, coming from the Greek “anekdota” meaning “things unpublished”, and the Latin “data” meaning “things given”.

16A Mottled : CALICO

Domestic cats with a white coat and patches of brown and black are called calico cats in this country. Back in Ireland, and the rest of the world I think, such cats are called tortoiseshell-and-white. “Calico” is not a breed of cat, but rather a coloring.

17A Mud slingers? : BARISTAS

A barista is a person who serves coffee in a coffee shop. “Barista” is Italian for “bartender”.

19A Deuce follower : AD IN

In tennis, if the score reaches deuce (i.e. when both players have scored three points), then the first player to win two points in a row wins the game. The player who wins the point immediately after deuce is said to have the advantage. If the player with the advantage wins the next point then that’s two in a row and that player wins the game. If the person with the advantage loses the next point, then advantage is lost and the players return to deuce and try again. The player calling out the score announces “ad in”, or more formally “advantage in”, if he/she has the advantage. If the score announcer’s opponent has the advantage, then the announcement is “ad out” or “advantage out”. Follow all of that …?

23A Pacific nation whose national sport is rugby : TONGA

The Kingdom of Tonga is made up of 176 islands in the South Pacific, 52 of which are inhabited and scattered over an area of 270,000 square miles. Tonga was given the name Friendly Islands in 1773 when Captain James Cook first landed there, a reference to the warm reception given to the visitors. The nation’s capital is the city of Nukuʻalofa on the island of Tongatapu.

32A Day on 10-Down : SOL
[10D Destination of NASA’s Escapade mission : MARS]

A solar day is the time taken for a planet to rotate completely about its axis so the sun reappears in the same position in the sky. A solar day on Earth is 24 hours. A solar day on Mars is just over 24 hours, and is referred to as a “sol”.

39A Beer and skittles : LIFE OF RILEY

The phrase “life of Riley” dates back to at least 1919. It may have originated in a song from the 1880s about a man named O’Riley and how he became rich and lived an easy life.

42A Org. preceded by the Cipher Bureau : NSA

The NSA traces its roots to the Cipher Bureau, the nation’s first peacetime code-breaking unit. It was established in 1917 and also known as the “Black Chamber”. Secretary of State Henry Stimson famously shuttered the bureau in 1929, asserting that “Gentlemen do not read each other’s mail”, which is a tad ironic given the agency’s massive modern scale. Today, the NSA is the largest employer of mathematicians in the United States.

46A Country whose motto was “Workers of the world, unite!” : USSR

“The Communist Manifesto” written in 1848 by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels contains the phrase “Proletarians of all countries, unite!” (“Proletarier aller Länder vereinigt Euch!” in German). This evolved into the English saying “Workers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains!” The words “Workers of all lands, unite“ are written on Karl Marx’s headstone in Highgate Cemetery in London.

52A Rafael with a Golden Slam : NADAL

Rafael Nadal is considered one of the greatest tennis players of all time, and he has some superstitions that help him focus on winning. For example, he has a unique pre-match ritual in which he arranges his water bottles in a very specific way. He always places them in a straight line with the labels facing the court, and he adjusts them so that they are perfectly aligned.

A Golden Slam is the ultimate tennis achievement, when a player wins all four Grand Slam titles and an Olympic gold medal within a single calendar year. A related achievement is the Career Golden Slam.

60A Nickname for the Southern city whose motto is “Resurgens” : HOTLANTA

“Hotlanta” is a nickname for the Georgia capital, Atlanta, blending “hot” and “Atlanta” and reflecting the city’s notorious hot and humid summers. More positively, the moniker is used to highlight Atlanta’s “hot” music culture, with the term popularized by the Allman Brothers’ 1971 song “Hot ‘Lanta”.

The city of Atlanta has the Latin motto “Resurgens”, meaning “Rising Again”. This is a reference to the city’s recovery after “the burning of Atlanta” in 1864, during the Civil War. It was formally adopted into the city seal in 1887, paired with the image of a phoenix emerging from flames, a symbol of immortality and rebirth.

62A Iroquois nation : ONEIDA

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

63A “Farewell, mes amis!” : A BIENTOT!

The French farewell “À bientôt” translates literally as “at well soon”, but is used to mean “see you soon”.

Down

1D High-intensity exercise method : TABATA

The Tabata regimen of high-intensity interval training is named for Dr. Izumi Tabata, who published a 1996 study at the National Institute of Fitness and Sports in Tokyo. The protocol was designed for the Japanese National Speed Skating Team, requiring eight sets of maximum effort, 20 seconds of work followed by 10 seconds of rest, packed into a four-minute cycle.

2D Dish whose name means “eel bowl” : UNADON

“Unadon” is the Japanese word for “eel bowl”. “Unadon” is actually a contraction of “unagi no kabayaki” (grilled eel) and “donburi” (rice bowl dish).

3D Sheep from Spain : MERINO

The merino breed of sheep is prized for the soft quality of its wool.

4D Running with a mic, maybe : MCING

The term “emcee” comes from “MC”, an initialism used for a Master or Mistress of Ceremonies.

7D Jazz venue : UTAH

The Utah Jazz professional basketball team moved to Salt Lake City in 1979. As one might guess from the name, the team originated in New Orleans, but only played there for five seasons. New Orleans was a tough place to be based because venues were hard to come by, and Mardi Gras forced the team to play on the road for a whole month.

8D Pho herb : BASIL

Traditionally, basil is considered “the king of herbs”. In fact, the herb’s name comes from the Greek “basileus” meaning “king”.

Pho (pronounced “fuh”) is a noodle soup from Vietnam that is a popular street food, and the nation’s unofficial national dish. It is often ordered with a side of hanh dam, pickled white onions.

9D Feast of St. Francis of Assisi mo. : OCT

Francis of Assisi was a Catholic friar and preacher who founded the Franciscan order. Because he is honored for his love of animals and nature, many churches hold ceremonies to bless animals on the feast day of Saint Francis, October 4th, every year.

10D Destination of NASA’s Escapade mission : MARS

NASA’s ESCAPADE mission launched in 2025. Its full name is “Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers”, and uses twin spacecraft nicknamed “Blue” and “Gold”. The main goal of ESCAPADE is to understand how solar winds strip away the Martian atmosphere.

33D Defensive coordinator who helped the Steelers win the Super Bowl in 2006 and 2009 : LEBEAU

Dick LeBeau is a former NFL player and coach. Most of his playing career was with the Detroit Lions, and most of coaching years were with the Cincinnati Bengals and Pittsburgh Steelers. LeBeau also made it into the movies. He and former NFL player Pat Studstill were stunt doubles for Michael Caine and Cliff Robertson respectively in the 1970 film “Too Late the Hero”. Director Robert Aldrich hired footballers as the scene in question called for running in 98-degree heat in the Philippines.

35D Pic file : GIF

The Graphic Interchange Format (GIF) is an image format developed in the 1980s by CompuServe (remember CompuServe?). GIF images are compressed, reducing the file size, but without losing information. So, the original image can be reconstructed perfectly from the compressed GIF version. But, and it’s a big but, GIF images use only 256 individual colors. This means that GIF is a relatively poor choice of compression for color photographs, while it is usually fine for logos with large blocks of single colors.

37D Pop duo __ & AJ : ALY

Pop musicians sisters Alyson and Amanda Michalka perform as “Aly & AJ”. For a few years, the duo renamed themselves to “78violet”, but went back to the original in 2015.

39D Dish often served “al forno” : LASAGNE

“Lasagna” was originally the name of a cooking pot, but the term came to mean a dish that was cooked in it. “Lasagna” also became the name of the flat noodle used in the dish. If you order lasagna on the other side of the Atlantic, you’ll notice the “lasagne” spelling, the plural of “lasagna”. The plural is used as there is more than one layer of pasta in the dish.

In Italian cuisine, a dish prepared “al forno” has been baked in an oven. The term translates as “to the oven”.

43D Worship of entities known as kami : SHINTO

In the Shinto tradition, “kami” are the divine spirits or natural forces that are venerated. The term “kami” translates as “superior, that which is above”. The faithful believe that there are an uncountable number of kami, ranging from geographical landmarks like Mount Fuji to ancestral spirits.

47D Pi, for one : RATIO

The ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter is a mathematical constant, which we denote with the Greek letter pi (π). Approximate values for the pi that are often used in calculations are 22/7 and 3.1415926. If you count the letters in each word of the mnemonic “How I wish I could calculate pi easily”, the sequence gives you the first eight digits of the value of pi, i.e. 3.1415926.

55D Capital city of Hyogo Prefecture : KOBE

Kobe is a port city on the island of Honshu in Japan. Here in North America, the city of Kobe is perhaps most famous for its beef. And yes, basketball star Kobe Bryant was named after that very same beef.

61D Greta of “The Morning Show” : LEE

Actress Greta Lee is perhaps best known to TV audiences for playing Stella Bak, a news division president on “The Morning Show”. She was nominated for a Best Actress Golden Globe for her performance in the 2023 romantic drama film “Past Lives”.

“The Morning Show” is a powerful drama TV series that is based on the 2013 book “Top of the Morning: Inside the Cutthroat World of Morning TV” by CNN’s Brian Stelter. The show stars Jennifer Aniston and Reese Witherspoon as two anchors for “The Morning Show”, one very experienced, and one new to the job. Steve Carell plays a former anchor who is ousted due to a sexual misconduct scandal.