Wednesday, June 26, 2012 Don Gagliardo & C.C. Burnikel

Theme: By Golly! It's a Wednesday Puzzle! By Steve

A nice fun puzzle from the Dynamic Duo. Prefixing the first word of the theme answers with "By" gives you four variations of what are usually lumped together as "OMG" moments in today-speak.

The unifier at 45D ties everything together nicely, and gives me something to work with for the theme title of the blog (phew!).

Or a late-breaking news story: Jiminy Cricket! George Jetson's gummed up the works on the Jupiter Probe!

20A. Cause a major snafu : GUM UP THE WORKS. SNAFU is such a great acronym, and no, the F does not stand for "fouled". This is military slang, they don't fool around.

32A. Spacely Space Sprockets employee : GEORGE JETSON. Hero of the Hanna-Barbera classic series.

41A. Pioneer 10 or Voyager 1 : JUPITER PROBE.

57A. Umbrella-carrying Disney character : JIMINY CRICKET. Disney and Hanna-Barbera in one theme!

and the reveal:

45D. This puzzle's title, based on the starts of 20-, 32-, 41- and 57-Across : BYLINES

A lot of fun stuff to look at today. Let's get started!

Across:

1. Bombards with junk email : SPAMS. This is commonly-understood now but I don't know how junk email got be called spam. Anyone?

6. Bk. after Proverbs : ECCL. Always, always have to wait for the crosses with the Bible Study questions. Thank goodness we don't have to remember how to spell Ecclesiastes.

10. Lingering effect : ECHO

14. Colorado snowboarding mecca : ASPEN. Yodelers here strive for a 10A!

15. Laze : LOLL

16. Phenom : WHIZ.

17. Davis of "Commander in Chief" : GEENA. She'd have been able to defend herself pretty handily with a bow and arrow rather than rely on the Secret Service. She was a semi-finalist in the US Archery Olympic Qualifying competition in 1999.

18. Un-PC purchase? : iMAC. Funny, I was in the Apple store today picking up an iPad. The sales assistant scanned the bar code with his iPhone, swiped my credit card with his iPhone, I signed the sales receipt on his iPhone with my fingertip and when I got home an email copy of the receipt was waiting for me - on my Dell Laptop, Windows XP.

19. Grain that's rolled : OATS

23. Educator LeShan : EDA. What's her Shortz Factor?

24. Wear a long face : POUT

25. Kicked out : OUSTED. You're allowed to POUT when this happens.

28. 2011 PGA Player of the Year Luke : DONALD. Men's golf WHIZ.

30. Barrister's deg. : L.L.D. Doctor of Law.

31. Clinch, in slang : ICE, as in ice the deal, or put the game on ice.

36. Part of PGA: Abbr. : ASSN. Luke Donald, a Professional Golfer, is a member of this association.

39. Rating from Moody's : AAA. Not a sore-throat exam.

40. Elusive : EELY. Could also be a Yale undergrad trying to hide after a sporting defeat at the hands of Harvard.

46. Shipping magnate Onassis : ARI. Poor Aristotle lost two-thirds of his name because of us cruciverbalists.

47. Benz- finish : ENE. I wanted wax, clear coat and tire dressing after a car wash.

48. Quaint love letter opener : MY DEAR. Really? I hope this intro didn't go on to say what Rhett Butler was warming up to!

52. Dollar deal? : RENTAL. I use Avis for my car hire needs. I like seeing my name up in lights on the board when you go to pick up the car. I know there's 100 names up in lights, but it's the little things that makes the road warrior world tolerable.

54. Make better : HEAL

56. Flagstaff-to-Tucson dir. : S.S.E. Here's a question for CC and Don - we all know the three-letter abbreviations now, but we never see the "South by South East" or "SbSE" for the finer intervals. "North by North West" was a well-known movie - isn't that a good enough reason for allowing NbNW?

60. Pop star : IDOL

62. Pop : SODA, I'm flying to the Midwest tomorrow - isn't there some code I have to know when I'm ordering a soda in Ohio?

63. Gullible : NAIVE

64. Ear piece : LOBE

65. Works on the road : TARS

66. Chair designer Charles : EAMES. Austin Powers probably furnished his office with these.

67. Light beer ad word : LESS. Hopefully referring to "filling" and not "calories" or "carbs", otherwise we'll be having words with Messrs. Busch, Coors and Miller.

68. Persian for "king" : SHAH. Really? I never knew!

69. Bar shot : SNORT. Or, in my world, a bar-joke laugh from my friend Heidi when she's had a couple of snorts. She snorts.

Down:

1. Went south, in a way : SAGGED. Never happened to me. Moving on.

2. Bogus : PSEUDO

3. Theoretical proto-person : APEMAN. I loved this, I had the A and E and was trying to see how AMOEBA-MAN could be contracted to fit.

4. Item in a diner host's stack : MENU. Food! Finally!

5. "Made from the Best Stuff on Earth" drink brand : SNAPPLE. I like the Scottish soda IRN-BRU tag line "Made from Girders". It looks and tastes like it could easily have been brewed from left-overs from the Forth Bridge.

6. Yale of Yale : ELIHU. I'm sure only his mother called him Elihu, and only when he'd forgotten to do his homework.

7. Night sky streaker : COMET.

8. Tiger's weapon : CLAW. Tiger's Wife's Weapon: 9-Iron

9. "Hey Lover" rapper : LL COOL J. Fantastic! When I was filling in the grid I kept looking sideways at how this was shaping up - then it all came clear

10. Furry sci-fi critters : EWOKS

11. Chew out : CHASTISE. Somehow I'd rather be chastised than chewed out.

12. Googler's success : HIT. See 8D alternative clue/answer

13. Parts of lbs. : ozs. Sixteen ounces make a pound. Why, I have no idea. It's a perfectly good random number. Just like fourteen pounds make a stone. Oh, and twenty ounces make a pint in the UK, not sixteen as here.

21. Big fuss : TO-DO

22. Not minding one's manners : RUDE

26. Green sci. : ECOL. I saw a headline in the LA Times a couple of years ago saying "Ecology is the new hot major for UC students" which rather made me chuckle.

27. Turn down : DENY

29. Lambs: Lat. : AGNI. This took crosses, French culinary references for "agneau" and realizing Agnus Dei school is down the street and I roughly know what it means. A lot of work for four letters!

30. Jet giant : LEAR. But they're little jets! I'm going in a little one tomorrow, I've got a 45 minute hop from Cleveland to Dayton, but it's a Canadair, not a Lear.

33. Hard to come by : RARE. Like room to spread out on a Canadair Regional Jet.

34. Reason for braces, perhaps : GAP. Not the store, although a GAP store in London may well sell braces, you just wouldn't put 'em on your teeth.

35. Ready to drive : TEED. The first tee is a moment of joy in any Luke Donald wannabe's Sunday morning. The ball is teed up, the scorecard is blank, the green fairway beckons invitingly - and then you slice your drive out onto the street, just like I did last weekend (and most weekends before that).

36. Cracked a little : AJAR

37. "You betcha!" : SURE. Fargo-soundtrack subtitle.

38. Damage control efforts, imagewise : SPIN JOBS

42. Sports group : TEAM

43. Joins up : ENLISTS

44. Epps of "House" : OMAR. One day I'll finally remember as I'm confidently writing in OMER that I'm WRONG!

49. Alaska native : ESKIMO

50. Love letter sign-off : AS EVER. This sounds like a cop-out to me. If I got a letter starting "MY DEAR" and ending "AS EVER" I'd be wondering where the romance went.

51. Take back to the lab : RE-TEST

53. Mah-jongg pieces : TILES. I'll tell you all a story one day about how I got to play Mah-jongg one afternoon in Beijing during the last Olympic Games with three locals who had never seen a European before, let alone one who actually knew how to play.

54. Many-headed monster : HYDRA

55. PayPal funds : eCASH. or E-CASH, I wasn't sure how to punctuate this one.

58. Wordsmith Webster : NOAH. Where would be be without the Webster's Dictionary? Well, we'd be stuck with the Oxford English Dictionary and never able to say "color", "neighbor", "winningest" or "dude".

59. James of "The Godfather" : CAAN. Sonny Corleone portrayer. It still gives me the willies when Michael lays the "You have to answer for Santino" line on Carlo, you just know his day isn't going to end well.

60. Below par : ILL. Unless you're Luke Donald, then you're feeling pretty good about yourself.

61. One may be fawning : DOE. Awwww!

Answer grid.

That's about all I've got. A quick fact-check and I'm off to the airport for a day in Dayton. Have a great Wednesday!

Steve

Note from C.C. & Don:

Don came up with this theme. We only have 4 theme entries, but they all have 13 or 12 letters. So we had to start with Row 4 and the three J's in the theme answers gave up trouble while filling this grid. LL COOL J (9D) was locked in from the very start, so was BYLINES of course.