Thursday February 5, 2009 Alan P. Olschwang

Theme: Irrational Rationale

20A: Start of George Bernard Shaw quote: NOTHING IS EVER

38A: Part 2 of quote: ACCOMPLISHED BY A

56A: End of quote: REASONABLE MAN

Do you consider this as a REASONABLE quote? George Bernard Shaw was an activist, so this quote may be his excuse for any excesses he may commit. Here is a site with more of his quotes (and there are a lot of them).

The quote does encourage audacity and creativity, right? I wasted some valuable time at upper right corner this morning. Wrote down WENT instead of PART for 10A: Split, thinking the clue is a past tense. The down fills today seem to be a bit harder than across ones.

For those whose paper does not carry TMS Sunday puzzle, here is another TMS syndication puzzle. Hope you are interested. Argyle will blog this puzzle on Sunday.

Across:

14A: Kosher: LEGIT. "Not kosher" is TREF.

15A: Aces, sometimes: ONES: When playing Black Jack, ACES may count as one or eleven.

19A: Loan letters: MTGE (Mortgage). Someone mentioned the other day that HMO stands for "Homeowners Insurance" in real estate term. A rare bright spot on the housing market, the pending home sales index is up. The prices might be way down.

23A: Charlotte-to-Raleigh dir.: ENE. Got the answer from down fills. Had no idea of the exact direction.

24A: Nat. interest watchdog: CIA. Wasn't Obama supposed to nominate someone new for the CIA director post? How come the head is still Michael Hayden?

25A: Strauss opera: SALOME. I forgot. Faintly remembered "Dance of the Seven Veils" though. The opera was based on a play by Oscar Wilde. SALOME was the daughter of Herodias and stepdaughter of Herod Antipas and it was she who asked for the head of John the Baptist on a platter. Dictionary says SALOME is Hebrew for "peace". Is it related to "shalom" then?

28A: Painted ponies: PINTOS. I don't understand this clue? Why "Painted"? I adore Michael Learns to Rock's "Paint my Love", though I don't think my love will be "a picture of thousands sunsets".

35A: A.E.C. successor: NRC. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, created in 1975.

37A: Prince Valiant's son: ARN. He is getting old in the comic strip, too. NYTanonimo just blogged this enty at her Barry Silk post. She also mentioned that LETT is an archaic word for Latvian, yet our editor keeps using "Riga resident" for LETT. I don't know. Whatever, I will just LETT it be.

43A: Brit's raincoat: MAC

50A: "Seinfeld" gal: ELAINE

64A: Burnsian hillside: BRAE. I did not know "Burnsian" refers to Robert Burns. Thought it might be a Scottish town. Interesting origin: BRAE is rooted in Old Norse word "Bra" meaning eyebrow. I don't really know what a BRAE is. This picture came up when I googled the word.

66A: Fertilizer ingredient: NITER. "Gunpowder ingredient" as well.

67A: Comic Martin: MULL. Easy answer. But I've never heard of Martin MULL before.

Down:

2D: Detroit dud: LEMON. Poor Detroit, hit so hard by the recession, and the Lions, and an unfaithful mayor.

3D: Striped gem: AGATE. It's not a previous gem, isn't it? I only know marbles are made of AGATE.

5D: Impassivity: STOICISM. Stoic was founded by Zeno, Zeno of Citium. Not the paradox guy Zeno of ELEA, our crossword stalwart.

10D: __ Sue Martin: PAMELA. Not a familiar actress to me. What movie is she famous for?

11D: Old navigation instrument: ASTROLABE. No idea. Looks complicated. The word starts with ASTRO. Has to be related with stars then.

12D: Fix, in a way: RIG

22D: Anatomical duct: VAS. Latin for "vessel". Plural is vasa. Unknown to me. I've never heard of the sperm transporting tube "VAS deferens" either.

26D: Martin and Pickford: MARYS. MARY Martin was an Tony-winning actress. MARY Pickford was an Oscar-winning Canadian actress. Both were strangers to me.

28D: PGA member: PRO. Quite true.

34D: Of an insurance job: ACTUARIAL. Only knew actuary.

36D: Little angel: CHERUB. This is the famous Vanity Fair magazine cover when the author used CHERUB to describe Scarlett Johansson.

40D: Aubergine: EGGPLANT. Nightshade vegetable. I like the purple slim ones on the right.

49D: Irish playwright: O'CASEY (Seán). Another guess. He wrote "The Plough and the Stars".

54D: Actress Claire: DANES. She played Meryl Streep's daughter in "The Hours".

58D: Scottish headland: NESS. Or "Famous T-man Eliot". Kevin Costner is great in "The Untouchables".

C.C & Argyle

Wednesday February 4, 2009 Adele Mann

Theme: "No" Songs For You

17A: 1986 hit by Heart: NOTHIN' AT ALL

41A: 1963 hit by the Orlons: NOT ME

65A: 1984 hit by Berlin: NO MORE WORDS

11D: 1966 hit by the Beatles: NOWHERE MAN

30D: 1981 hit by Elton John: NOBODY WINS

I have never heard of The Orlons or the Heart bands. And the only Berlin song I am familiar is "Take My Breath Away". Nevertheless, all the theme answers are very easy to obtain.

Excellent theme. I also love Annie Lennox's No More "I Love You's". The video is a bit weird, but the song is beautiful.

I think this is the 4th or 5th time I saw WEN in a TMS puzzle. Every time it's clued as "Sebaceous cyst". Where is the creativity? The WEN Ho Lee nuclear espionage scandal is well known, right? I heard of it when I still lived in China.

I just mentioned two days ago that I wanted WEN clued as "Chinese Premier __ Jiabao". And yesterday someone threw a shoe at him when he was delivering a speech in Cambridge. That despicable protester is completely ignorant of China and the democracy movement there. He has no idea what kind of positive role WEN played during Tiananmen Square Incident. He has no knowledge of how WEN handled the Sichuan earthquake disaster. WEN is the most well respected Chinese leader inside and outside China, among us Chinese.

Across:

1A: Spill the beans: BLAB. Reminds of yesterday's ONAN (Judah's son). He "spills his seeds" on the ground. Might be a waste, but sure not a sin to me. Just learned Onanism from Barry G /Lemonade yesterday.

5A: Japanese entertainer: GEISHA. Here is a modern day GEISHA. The same article says there are now only 1,000 GEISHA left in Japan (compared with 80,000 in 1928) and they are not allowed to marry. “Memoirs of a GEISHA" is a fascinating read.

39A: River of Hamburg: ELBE. Literally "river". Wikipedia says "ELBE was recorded by Ptolemy as Albis, Germanic for "river". Here is the map again. It originates in Czech and flows northwest across German to the North Sea.

44A: Infamous Helmsley: LEONA. The "Queen of Mean". She left millions of trust fund for her dog Trouble when she died. The Helmsley Foundation is the No. 1 charitable giver in 2008 though. Total $5.2 billion commitment. Mayor Bloomberg is the biggest living doner. Strange that the Gates did not make the list.

56A: Legendary archer: TELL. Or "Spill the beans" again.

68A: Barnyard layer: HEN. It's also "Female lobster/octopus/salmon".

70A: Brightest star in Lyra: VEGA. Here is the diagram. Wikipedia says "VEGA was the first star, other than the Sun, to have its photograph taken and the first to have its spectrum photographed" (1850).

Down:

6D: Hurler's stat: ERA. Louis mentioned several days ago about Cleveland's saying "If a Feller has a Lemon He-gan Waynn". I thought that's a great line. Bob Lemon, Jim Hegan or Early Wynn were obscure to me. But Bob Feller is a big potato, HOFer. I thought his name "Feller" could be a great misleading clue. "Feller's start" for ERA sounds good to me.

37D: Pianist Thelonious: MONK. His middle name is Sphere, one of the most influential jazz greats of the 50's and 60's, according to Seattle John.

45D: Fact book: ALMANAC. I wonder how much this original book costs in this condition. Does anyone collect first edition books? I traded my first edition "Godfather" (1969) for some baseball cards several years ago.

50D: City near Rawalpindi: LAHORE. Here is the map. LAHORE is the second-largest city in Pakistan after Karachi. I got the answer, but did not really know where Rawalpindi is. Wikipedia says it's the military headquarters of the Pakistan Armed Forces and and also served as the nation's capital while Islamabad (10th largest city in Pakistan) was being constructed in the 1960s.

55D: Geneva's lake: LEMAN. Here is the name origin. LPGA holds its Evian Masters every year on the southern shore of Lac LEMAN. The golf course looks breathtaking on TV. Big purse, second only to US Open I think.

61D: Three-spot: TREY. No idea. It's always clued as "Low card".

Boomer bowled a 300 last night, his 5th perfect game.

C.C.