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Bill’s time: 20m 49s

Bill’s errors: 0

Today’s Wiki-est Amazonian Googlies

Across

1A Dad’s pop, perhaps : CREAM SODA

Cream soda is a carbonated soft drink that is flavored with vanilla. There is a suggestion that the name “cream soda” was chosen as the taste is reminiscent of an ice cream soda. I’m not so sure …

Dad’s root beer was developed by Ely Klapman and Barney Berns in 1937, and was given the name “Dad’s” in honor of Klapman’s father who used to make root beer for his family at home.

15A One might be used to launch promotional materials : AIR CANNON

T-shirts can be shot out of an air cannon, perhaps at a sports game.

19A Like the eyes of an American coot : RED

The coot is a water bird in the rail family. It looks as though it is bald because of its markings, but the head is actually covered with feathers. As a result, a person might be described as “bald as a coot”, meaning that the person has no hair at all.

20A Be prepared to take a weight off someone’s shoulders? : SPOT

People at the gym who are doing weight-training will often “spot” for each other. This means that the person who is “spotting” assists in the lift, allowing the lifter to work with more weight than usual.

22A Said who’s who or what’s what? : IDED

Identity document (ID)

26A Turnovers, but not crumpets : STAT

I do love a nice crumpet. They are made from flour and yeast, with baking soda added to make the characteristic holes in the surface. Served hot, with butter melted into the holes, nothing better …

34A Soprano Fleming : RENEE

Renée Fleming is a marvelous soprano from Indiana, Pennsylvania. Famous for her appearances in opera houses and concert halls all over the world, Fleming is also noted for her willingness to bring her craft to the masses. She was a guest on “Sesame Street” singing “counting lyrics” to an aria from “Rigoletto”, and she has appeared a few times on Garrison Keillor’s “A Prairie Home Companion”.

40A Hooter : OWL

Owls have 14 vertebrae in their necks (compared to our 7). The extra bones in the neck, along with other adaptations, allow owls to rotate the head and neck about 270 degrees.

43A ___ Ewbank, Hall-of-Fame football coach : WEEB

Weeb Ewbank was a football coach mostly known for coaching the Baltimore Colts and the New York Jets in the fifties, sixties and seventies. He won two NFL championships with the Colts (1958, 1959), and one AFL championship with the Jets (1968).

46A Margaret featured in “Outstanding: A Comedy Revolution” : CHO

Margaret Cho is a Korean American comedian and actress who was born in San Francisco in 1968. As well as performing as a comedian, Cho has also had a successful acting career, appearing in films such as “Face/Off”, “Bam Bam and Celeste”, as well as TV shows such as “Drop Dead Diva” and “30 Rock.”

47A Punch : BRIO

“Brio” is borrowed from Italian, in which language the term means “vigor and vivacity”. “Con brio” is a musical direction often found on a score, instructing the musicians to play “with energy, vigor”.

48A State-sponsored “wealth redistribution” scheme : LOTTO

Originally, lotto was a type of card game, with “lotto” being the Italian for “lot, destiny”. We’ve used “lotto” to mean a gambling game since the late 1700s.

58A Natural resource seen in arboretums? : ORE

The word “ore” is hidden within the word “arboretum”.

59A Blushing matter : ROUGE

Although the cosmetic called rouge (also “blush”) uses the French word for “red”, modern “rouge” might be brown, pink or perhaps orange. Contemporary rouge is usually a talcum-based, colored powder.

Down

1D Destination for a day trip from Sorrento : CAPRI

The island of Capri off the coast of Southern Italy has been a tourist resort since the days of ancient Rome. Capri is home to the famous Blue Grotto, a sea cave that is illuminated with sunlight that’s colored blue as it passes through the seawater into the cave.

Sorrento is a small town on the Italian coast that sits on a peninsula overlooking the Bay of Naples. It is an extremely popular tourist destination. The island of Capri lies off the western tip of the Sorrento Peninsula.

6D Website with a “Submit a Rumor” tab : SNOPES

Snopes.com is the place to go if you want to check the validity or history of an urban legend or Internet rumor. The site was launched in 1995 by Californians Barbara and David Mikkelson.

9D Fire ___ : ANT

Fire ants are stinging ants, and many species are known as red ants. Most stinging ants bite their prey and then spray acid on the wound. The fire ant, however, bites to hold on and then injects an alkaloid venom from its abdomen, creating a burning sensation in humans who have been nipped.

11D Like Belmont’s Big Sandy, among Triple Crown racetracks : WIDEST

Belmont Park is a horse racing track located just outside New York City in Elmont. The facility is home to the celebrated Belmont Stakes, the third race in the season that makes up the Triple Crown of Thoroughbred Racing. The track is named for one of the original investors, financier and horse breeder August Belmont Jr.

The US Triple Crown horse races are, in order through the year:

1. The Kentucky Derby
2. The Preakness Stakes
3. The Belmont Stakes

14D One of a noted quintet : GREAT LAKE

Here is a list of the Great Lakes by area (in square miles)

1. Lake Superior (31,700)
2. Lake Huron (23,000)
3. Lake Michigan (22,300)
4. Lake Erie (9,910)
5. Lake Ontario (7,340)

The Great Lakes are the largest group of freshwater lakes on the planet. Lake Superior is the second largest lake in the world (after the Caspian Sea). Lake Michigan is the largest lake in the world that lies entirely within one country.

21D Small storage units : BYTES

In the world of computing, a bit is the basic unit of information. It has a value of 0 or 1. A “byte” is a small collection of “bits” (usually 8), the number of bits needed to uniquely identify a character of text. The prefix mega- stands for 10 to the power of 6, so a megabyte (meg) is 1,000,000 bytes. The prefix giga- means 10 to the power of 9, and so a gigabyte (gig) is 1,000,000,000 bytes. Well, those are the SI definitions of megabyte and gigabyte. The purists still use 2 to the power of 20 for a megabyte (i.e. 1,048,576), and 2 to the power of 30 for a gigabyte.

31D Fair weather followers : SNOWBIRDS

Snowbirds are people from Canada and the northern US who head south for the winter, to places like Florida and California.

33D Chillaxing, more formally : AT LEISURE

“Chillax” is a slang term meaning “chill and relax”. Who’da thunk it …?

49D Moment of high spirits? : TOAST

The tradition of toasting someone probably dates back to the reign of Charles II, when the practice was to drink a glass of wine to the health of a beautiful or favored woman. In those days, spiced toast was added to beverages to add flavor, so the use of the word “toast” was an indicator that the lady’s beauty would enhance the wine. Very charming, I must say …

51D “Got it” : ROGER

The term “roger”, meaning “yes” or “acknowledged”, comes from the world of radiotelephony. The British military used a phonetic alphabet in the fifties that included “Roger” to represent the letter “R”. As such, it became customary to say “Roger” when acknowledging a message, with R (Roger) standing for “received”.

52D Rijeka native : CROAT

The Republic of Croatia is a Balkan country. The Croats declared independence from Yugoslavia in 1991. Croatia became a member of NATO in 2009, and a member of the European Union in 2013.

57D Shakehand or penhold, in table tennis : GRIP

Ping-Pong is called table tennis in the UK, where the sport originated in the 1880s. Table tennis started as an after-dinner activity among the elite, and was called “wiff-waff”. To play the game, books were stacked in the center of a table as a “net”, two more books served as “rackets” and the ball used was actually a golf ball. The game evolved over time with the rackets being upgraded to the lids of cigar boxes and the ball becoming a champagne cork (how snooty is that?). Eventually the game was produced commercially, and the sound of the ball hitting the racket was deemed to be a “ping” and a “pong”, giving the sport its alternative name. The name “Ping-Pong” was trademarked in Britain in 1901, and eventually sold to Parker Brothers in the US.