Tag: House of cards? crossword clue

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Constructed by: Jeff Stillman

Edited by: Patti Varol

Today’s Reveal Answer: See How They Run

Themed answers all RUN:

• 56A “Three Blind Mice” line, or what can be said of 20-, 29-, and 46-Across : SEE HOW THEY RUN

• 20A Output of the Republican and Democratic National Conventions : PARTY NOMINEES
• 29A Hose that may have a seam up the back : NYLON STOCKINGS
• 46A Common conveyances between suburbs and cities : COMMUTER TRAINS

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

Bill’s time: 5m 37s

Bill’s errors: 0

Today’s Wiki-est Amazonian Googlies

Across

15A Division d’une nation : ETAT

In French, an “état” (state) is a “division d’une nation” (division of a nation).

16A Simpson kid who plays the sax : LISA

Lisa Simpson is Bart’s younger sister on TV’s “The Simpsons”. One of her hobbies is playing the baritone saxophone. Her soulful saxophone solos were performed by Terry Harrington for the first 29 seasons of the show. He was a member of the legendary Wrecking Crew, a group of LA-based session musicians who played on numerous studio recordings in the sixties and seventies.

17A Small egg : OVULE

As we all remember from botany class (don’t we?), an ovule is a small structure in many plants that develops into the seed after fertilization.

18A Claptrap : BOSH

Our word “bosh” meaning “nonsense” came into English via a well-defined route. It was first used in the novel “Ayesha, the Maid of Kars” written by J. J. Morier in 1905, and is a Turkish word that literally translates as “empty”.

“Claptrap” these days means nonsense talk. It was originally a term used on the stage meaning a trick to attract applause, hence the name “clap trap”.

20A Output of the Republican and Democratic National Conventions : PARTY NOMINEES

Modern national conventions are largely ceremonial, with the presidential nominee predetermined by primaries and caucuses. The last time one required multiple ballots to select a nominee was in 1952 for the Democrats (Adlai Stevenson) and 1948 for the Republicans (Thomas Dewey).

23A Punk musician Vicious : SID

Sid Vicious was a famous English musician and the best-known member of the seventies punk rock group called the Sex Pistols. In 1978, Vicious woke up out of a drugged stupor in his hotel room in New York, to find his girlfriend stabbed to death in the bathroom. Vicious was charged with the murder, and ten days later sliced his wrist in a suicide attempt. Vicious made bail a few months later and at a celebratory party his own mother supplied him with heroin on which Vicious overdosed and died, at the age of 21.

26A Apple mobile platform : IOS

iOS is what Apple now calls its mobile operating system. For the first three years of its existence, the operating system was known as “iPhone OS”. Apple was only able to rebrand it as “iOS” in 2010 after licensing the name from Cisco, which had been using the “IOS” trademark for the operating system on its routers since the 1980s.

29A Hose that may have a seam up the back : NYLON STOCKINGS

The polymer known as “nylon” was developed by Dupont in the 1930s. The first application for the new product was as bristles in toothbrushes, in 1938. The second application became more famous. The first stockings made from nylon were produced in 1940, and since then stockings have been known as “nylons”. The polymer was developed as a replacement for silk, which was in short supply during WWII.

33A Ramen mushroom : ENOKI

Enokitake (also known as “enoki”) are long and thin white mushrooms often added to soups or salads.

44A Instruction on a Wonderland cake : EAT ME

In Lewis Carroll’s “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland”, Alice follows the white rabbit down a rabbit hole and finds a bottle labeled “DRINK ME”. When she drinks the contents, it causes her to shrink. She also sees a cake adorned with the words “EAT ME” written using currants, and when she eats the cake she grows so big she finds it hard to stand up. After eating the cake, she utters the words, “Curiouser and curiouser”.

46A Common conveyances between suburbs and cities : COMMUTER TRAINS

Our verb “to commute”, meaning “to go back and forth to work”, ultimately derives from the Latin “commutare”, meaning “to often change”. Back in the late 1800s, a “commutation ticket” was a season pass, so named because it allowed one to “change” one kind of payment into another. Quite interesting …

51A Twice tre : SEI

In Italian, “tre” (three) is “metà di sei” (half of six).

52A Pt. of USNA : NAV

The United States Naval Academy (USNA) is located in Annapolis, Maryland. It was founded in 1845 and educates officers for both the US Navy and the US Marine Corps. The motto of the USNA is “Ex Scientia Tridens”, which translates as “From Knowledge, Sea Power”.

54A Flamenco shout : OLE!

Flamenco is a style of Spanish music and dance. The origin of the word “flamenco” isn’t clearly understood, but the explanation that seems most credible to me is that it comes from Flanders in Northern Europe. Given that “flamenco” is the Spanish word for “Flemish” and Flanders is home to the Flemish people it makes perfect sense, doesn’t it?

56A “Three Blind Mice” line, or what can be said of 20-, 29-, and 46-Across : SEE HOW THEY RUN

Three blind mice. Three blind mice.
See how they run. See how they run.
They all ran after the farmer’s wife,
Who cut off their tails with a carving knife,
Did you ever see such a sight in your life,
As three blind mice?

62A World’s largest furniture retailer : IKEA

The IKEA furniture chain was founded by Ingvar Kamprad in 1943, when he was just 17-years-old. IKEA is an acronym standing for Ingvar Kamprad Elmtaryd Agunnaryd (don’t forget now!). Elmtaryd was the name of the farm where Ingvar Kamprad grew up, and Agunnaryd is his home parish in Sweden.

64A Radio switch letters : AM/FM

In telecommunications, a radio signal is transmitted using a sinusoidal carrier wave. Information is transmitted using this carrier wave in two main ways, by varying (modulating) the instantaneous amplitude (signal strength) of the carrier wave, and by modulating the instantaneous frequency of the carrier wave. The former is referred to as an AM signal (“amplitude modulation”), and the latter as an FM signal (“frequency modulation”).

65A Cousin of a gull : TERN

Terns are a family of seabirds. They are similar to gulls, but are more slender and more lightly built. Many species of tern are known for their long-distance migrations, with the Arctic tern migrating so far that it is believed to see more daylight in a year than any other animal.

Down

4D Sidewalk ice melter : SALT

Halite is the mineral form of sodium chloride, and is also known as “rock salt”. It is used to melt ice, as salt water has a lower freezing point than pure water. Adding salt to icy sidewalks can therefore cause any ice to melt (as long as the ambient temperature isn’t too low). A mixture of halite and ice can also be used to cool things below the freezing point of water, perhaps to make ice cream.

5D “Big” name in the Coen brothers’ filmography : LEBOWSKI

“The Big Lebowski” is a 1998 comedy directed by Joel and Ethan Coen, and starring Jeff Bridges in the title role. The film’s script is loosely based on the Raymond Chandler novel “The Big Sleep”. I thought “The Big Lebowski” was just “okay” though …

10D Cairo-based carrier from 1982 to 2021 : AIR SINAI

Air Sinai was a Cairo-based airline owned by Egyptair. It was set up in 1982 to provide flights between Egypt and Israel, which was a requirement of the 1979 Egypt-Israel peace treaty. The name “Air Sinai” was chosen as “Egyptair” was considered too controversial for flights into Israel at the time. Egyptair planes started regular service using its own planes in 2021, and Air Sinai ceased to exist.

12D Actress Gadot : GAL

Before becoming a Hollywood star, Gal Gadot served two years of mandatory military service in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) as a combat fitness instructor. She has shared that her military training helped prepare her for the physical demands of her action roles. Gadot also won the Miss Israel pageant in 2004 and represented her country in the Miss Universe competition that same year.

14D Reed who directed three “Ant-Man” films : PEYTON

Director Peyton Reed was at the helm on comedy hits like “Bring It On” (2000) and “The Break Up” (2006). He also directed the three films in the “Ant-Man” franchise, starting in 2015. Reed is also quite the musician. He plays drums for the Cardinal Family Singers, a band whose instrumental “Tilting Scale” appears on the soundtrack of the “Ant-Man and the Wasp”.

22D Edmonton CFL team : ELKS

The Edmonton Elks Canadian football team was founded back in 1949 as the Edmonton Eskimos. The team abandoned the offensive “Eskimos” name in 2020, and adopted the “Elks” name in 2021.

27D Shrek, for one : OGRE

In the 2001 animated feature “Shrek”, the title character is voiced by Mike Myers. Before Myers was cast, the role was originally given to Chris Farley. After Farley’s death in 1997, before the required dialogue was complete, Myers took over the role..

28D Phased-out fast planes, for short : SSTS

The most famous supersonic transport (SST) is the retired Concorde. Concorde was developed and produced under an Anglo-French treaty by France’s Aérospatiale and the UK’s British Aircraft Corporation (BAC). Concordes were mainly operated by Air France and British Airways, with both companies buying the planes with substantial subsidies from the French and British governments. The final Concorde flight was a British Airways plane that landed in the UK on 26 November 2003.

31D Princeton athlete : TIGER

When Princeton are playing in a game, one might hear a cheer known as the locomotive, i.e. “Rah rah rah! Tiger, tiger, tiger! Sis, sis, sis, boom, boom, boom, ah!” This cheer is sometimes referred to as “Sis Boom Ah!” Supposedly, the cheer dates back to 1861 when the Seventh New York Regiment came through Princeton on a train. The soldiers were shouting out their “rocket” cheer, ““ssss-boom-ahhh!”

32D Hong Kong’s Bank of China Tower architect : IM PEI

The Bank of China Tower (often “BOC Tower”) is a spectacular structure in Hong Kong that was designed by I. M. Pei. Opened in 1990, the BOC Tower was the tallest building in Hong Kong at that time, and was also the first building constructed outside of North America to reach a height of over 1,000 feet.

35D Sarge’s charges : PFCS

Private first class (PFC)

37D Like Muenster and Monterey Jack : SEMI-SOFT

Muenster is an American cheese, not to be confused with Munster cheese which is from the department called Vosges in the northeast of France. The American cheese is named for the German city of Münster (also “Muenster”) in the northwest of the country, a city that doesn’t actually have a local cheese named for it.

What we now call Monterey Jack cheese was originally made by Franciscan friars in Monterey, California in the 19th century. In the 1800s, a powerful landowner called David Jack started to make the same cheese as the friars in his own dairy, and marketed it as “Jack’s Cheese” and later “Monterey Jack”.

39D Spot for a bowler to hang : HAT STAND

The bowler hat is so called because it was originally designed, in 1849, by the London hat-makers Thomas and William Bowler. The Bowlers created it as an alternative for the top hats then worn by gamekeepers. The gamekeepers needed a tight-fitting hat with a low and rounded crown so that it would stay on their heads as they rode by horseback through woodland with low-hanging branches.

40D Detroit beer baron Bernhard : STROH

Bernard Stroh was the son of a German brewer. Bernard immigrated to the US in 1848 and set up his own brewery in 1850 in Detroit. Years later, the Stroh Brewing Company introduced a European process called fire-brewing. This results in higher temperatures at a crucial stage in the brewing process, supposedly bringing out flavor. Apparently, Stroh’s is the only mainstream American beer that still uses this process.

45D Some French Impressionist works : MANETS

Édouard Manet was a French painter whose works are mainly classified as Realist and Impressionist. Manet was friends with Impressionists masters like Edgar Degas, Claude Monet and Pierre-Auguste Renoir and greatly influenced the Impressionist movement. The list of Manet’s marvelous paintings includes “Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe”, “Le Repose”, and “A Bar at the Folies-Bergère”.

47D Island in French Polynesia : TAHITI

Tahiti is the most populous island in French Polynesia, which is located in the central Southern Pacific. Although Captain Cook landed in Tahiti in 1769, he wasn’t the first European to do so. However, Cook’s visit was the most significant in that it heralded a whole spate of European visitors, who brought with them prostitution, venereal disease and alcohol. Included among the subsequent visitors was the famous HMS Bounty under the charge of Captain Bligh.

French Polynesia (Polynésie française) is a vast overseas territory of France that is located in the South Pacific Ocean. It comprises 118 islands and atolls dispersed over 1,609 square miles, the most populous being Tahiti.

50D Artificial water channel : SLUICE

A sluice is a water channel with a gate at its head that is used to control the amount of water flowing.

57D Patron saint of sailors : ELMO

Saint Elmo is the patron saint of sailors. More formally referred to as Erasmus of Formia, St. Elmo is perhaps venerated by sailors as tradition tells us that he continued preaching despite the ground beside him being struck by a thunderbolt. Sailors started to pray to him when in danger of storms and lightning. He lends his name to the electrostatic weather phenomenon (often seen at sea) known as St. Elmo’s fire. The “fire” is actually a plasma discharge caused by air ionizing at the end of a pointed object (like the mast of a ship), something often observed during electrical storms.

60D __ chi: martial art : TAI

More correctly called “t‘ai chi ch‘uan”, which translates to “supreme ultimate fist”, tai chi is a martial art that is mostly practiced to improve overall health and increase longevity.

61D Meditation sounds : OMS

“Om” is a sacred mystic word from the Hindu tradition. It is sometimes used as a mantra, a focus for the mind in meditation.