The term “dime”, used for a 10-cent coin, comes from the Old French word “disme” meaning “tenth part”. Regulus is a multiple star and what we see as one entity is actually made up of four stars rotating around a common center of mass.
Regulus is the brightest star in the constellation of Leo. The term “emcee” comes from “MC”, an initialism used for a Master or Mistress of Ceremonies. 33 Emcee during a power outage? : HOST IN THE DARK (from “shot in the dark”) 25 With 81-Across, flashy basketball play : ALLEY-…Īn alley-oop is a play in basketball in which one player lobs the ball close to the basket for a teammate who usually scores with a slam dunk. The “Spumante” was dropped in a marketing attempt at rebranding associated with a reduction in the amount of residual sugar in the wine. The wine used to be called Asti Spumante, and it had a very bad reputation as a “poor man’s champagne”. 24 Sparkling Italian wine : ASTIĪsti is a sparkling white wine from the Piedmont region of Italy, and is named for the town of Asti around which the wine is produced. The blocks were originally sold under the name “Automatic Binding Bricks” but I think “Lego” is easier to remember! The name “Lego” comes from the Danish term “leg godt” meaning “play well”. The company was founded by a carpenter called Ole Kirk Christiansen in 1934 and the now-famous plastic interlocking blocks were introduced in 1949. Lego is manufactured by the Lego Group, a privately held company headquartered in Billund, Denmark. 22 Facial feature of a Lego man? : SQUARE CHIN (from “square inch”) Flora was the Roman goddess of plants, flowers and fertility. The term “fauna” comes from the Roman goddess of earth and fertility who was called Fauna. The fauna is the animal life of a particular region, and the flora is that region’s plant life.
The Oldsmobile Alero was the last car made by General Motors under the Oldsmobile brand. The word “grub” has been used in this sense since way back in the 1600s, and is possibly derived from birds eating grubs. The larvae of stag beetles are commonly known as grubs, and the pupa known as the chrysalis. A lot of subjectivity in what is "good fill."Īn incredible middle region of the puzzle, and I might have given this the POW! if it had come out a few years earlier.Today’s Wiki-est Amazonian Googlies Across You know who's saying that? THE OLDS! (I don't know that when applied to parents, but it is a term I sometimes hear for people who technology has left behind). This is just personal opinion - I like TRUE DAT a lot, as I hear it all the time among adults, and I use it myself, but I can see some NYT readers scowling, saying "kids these days!" I'm not a fan of BESTIE, as it has too much of a pre-adolescent, cutesy feel to it. And then you cross ANDRE GIDE and HUSH MONEY through it all, without using a single gluey entry? That central region is just beautiful. It's impressive enough to get TOUCHED ON right through the stack of revealers, but it's a great feat to work in the colorful HOT DIGGETY and POP UP STORE. I also appreciated Andrew's choice of long fill. It's a simple matter to make a grid with NO, OZ, DRE, and WHO sitting outside the grid, but it's much more difficult to do it so that every interior word looks normal: DROVES looks like ROVES, ROPED looks like OPED, etc. It also felt a little strange that the doctors are outside the borders, not crossing borders.īut I did really like the way Andrew made the grid look perfectly normal (without those outside letters). I've seen several of the "letters outside the grid" in the past year, and two friends of mine both made DOCTORS WITHOUT BORDERS crosswords (independently!), so those factors muted the impact of today's puzzle for me. Awesome, memorable execution of the revealer. It would have been even cooler if Andrew could have gotten them exactly atop each other (instead of stairstepping them) but try filling around just the *DWB* pattern, much less the rest of the sets of letters. What a cool triple-stack revealer in DOCTORS / WITHOUT / BORDERS! Three medium-length words chunked cleanly atop each other right in the middle of the puzzle is pretty darn cool.
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