Thursday, June 15, 2023, August Miller

 Today's constructor is August Miller, a Maine dairy farmer who is making his 11th appearance on the Corner, and is also an NYT puzzle veteran (sorry I couldn't find the name of his dog). Today he asks us the question* ...

Well the answer to that is obvious - it was our august constructor himself!   Which of course leads to the further question ...

Where did he move it? ......

... and it will delight some that August has cleverly inserted slices of the stuff sans circles in the following theme clues ...

17A. *Fruit pastry: APRICOT TART.  Here's a recipe ...

Apricot Tart

28A. *"Star Wars" role for Oscar Isaac: POE DAMERON.  I've fallen out of touch with this franchise, but apparently it's still going on in a galaxy far, far away.  It seems that POE is a pretty intense guy and after reviewing several action videos I decided on this picture instead ...

Poe Dameron

And here's POE's favorite cheese ...

Edam Cheese

42A. *Array in some wine bars: CAFE TABLES.

Some suggested pairings for FETA cheese.

54A. *Unwanted color fluctuations, in digital photography: CHROMA NOISE.  DNK CHROMA NOISE.  Here's the ultimate guide digital photography noise reduction.  Suffice it to say that adding romano cheese to your digital photos is not going help with this problem.

Pecorino Romano was a staple in the diet for the legionaries of ancient Rome. Today, it is still made according to the original recipe and is one of Italy's oldest cheeses.  The name "pecorino" simply means "ovine" or "of sheep" in Italian.  Here are a few Pecorino Romano recipes.

Pecorino Romano

Just two weeks ago we had a puzzle about pastas.  The following option didn't make the cut, but the reveal seems to indicate that Patti has a fondness for Italian cuisine, with just a touch of Greek and Dutch tossed in for good measure ...

33A. Ravioli option, and what the answers to the starred clues literally have?: CHEESE FILLING.

Here's the grid ...
 

Here's the rest ...

Across:

1. Kitten chorus: MEWS.  MEWS could also be clued as "Stables converted to residences"  ...

Horbury Mews
Notting Hill, London

5. Flirt with a new hobby: DABBLE.  I've flirted with many hobbies over the years.  I'm currently DABBLING with cruciverbalism.

11. Sandwich initials: BLT.

14. Pianist Gilels: EMIL.  EMIL Grigoryevich Gilels (19 October 1916 – 14 October 1985) was a Russian pianist. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest pianists of all time.  Gilels is universally admired for his superb technical control and burnished tone. His repertoire ranged from Baroque to late Romantic and 20th century classical composers.  Here he plays the Alexander Siloti transcription of Bach's Prelude in B Minor ...

15. Disinfectant brand: CLOROX.

16. __ de parfum: EAU.  Here's a good reason for Google to integrate a scratch and sniff app into Blogger.

17. [Theme clue]

19. Space race?: ETS.

20. Stan Musial's nickname: THE MAN.  Stanley Frank Musial (born Stanislaw Franciszek Musial; November 21, 1920 – January 19, 2013), nicknamed "Stan the Man", was an American baseball outfielder and first baseman. Widely considered to be one of the greatest and most consistent hitters in baseball history, Musial spent 22 seasons in Major League Baseball (MLB), playing for the St. Louis Cardinals, from 1941 to 1944 and from 1946 to 1963, before becoming a first-ballot inductee into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1969.

Stan "The Man" Musial

21. Tile type: CERAMIC.  I don't recommend CERAMIC tile for floors in kitchens, as the hard surface is sure to break any glass or ceramic kitchen ware dropped on it. 

Ceramic tiles were widely used in decorative applications dating back to the ancient world, e.g. this fragment of a 5th Century floor mosaic from Antioch:

Striding lion, birds, and crops
Baltimore Museum of Art

 While we tend to think of tiles as flat-surfaced, they may also be cast in bas-relief, such as these tiles mounted on an oak plank, depicting the  Evangelists Matheus, Marcus, Lucas, and Iohanni created at the Moravian Pottery and Tile Works in Doylestown, PA ...

Ceramic
Tiles

23. Noodles that may be topped with chashu: RAMEN.  Chashu is Japanese pork belly.  Here's a recipe for Ramen Pork Chashu.

Ramen Pork Chashu

24. Be in arrears: OWE.

26. Colleague of Sonia and Ketanji: ELENA.  Elena Kagan is one of the 4 women Supreme Court Justices and a colleague of Sonia Sotomayor, Amy Coney Barrett, and Katanji Brown Jackson:

Elena Kagan

27. Great Basin people: UTES.  The UTE people are the oldest residents of Colorado, inhabiting the mountains and vast areas of Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, Eastern Nevada, Northern New Mexico and Arizona. According to tribal history handed down from generation to generation, their people have lived here since the beginning of time.

Members of the Southern Ute Indian Tribe

28. [Theme clue]

30. Start of an early Grafton title: B IS.  B Is for Burglar is a mystery novel by American writer Sue Grafton. It was published in 1985 by Henry Holt and Company as the second novel in her "Alphabet" series of mystery novels.  The plot centers around the efforts of Kinsey Millhone, a private eye based in Santa Teresa, California, to locate a missing person. Critical reception was positive, and it won the 1986 Anthony Award and Shamus Award.  Here's the first edition cover ...

31. Mental fog: HAZE.

32. __-Mex cuisine: TEX.

33. [Theme reveal]

38. Light touch: PAT.

39. "That works": OKAY.

40. Organic lip balm brand:  EOS.  Hand up if you had OPI?  Here's the EOS Strawberry Sorbet flavor

EOS Strawberry Sorbet Flavor

When EOS is in the clue we now have three possibilities.

42. [Theme clue]

46. John Irving title character: GARP.  The World According to Garp is John Irving's fourth novel, about a man, born out of wedlock to a feminist leader, who grows up to be a writer. Published in 1978, the book was a bestseller for several years. It was a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction in 1979, and its first paperback edition won the Award the following year.  It was also the basis for this film starring Robin Williams, John Lithgow, Glenn Close. and assorted other stars you know ...

47. Less amiable: ICIER.

48. Letters between names: AKA.

49. "__ and Bess": PORGY.  I know it's almost Summertime,  but I've already played that aria at least twice, and it ain't necessarily the whole story (lyrics) ...

50. Superficial: CURSORY.

52. Expired: LAPSED.

53. Self-conscious query: AM I.

54. [Theme clue]

57. Homey hole: DEN.

58. Big name in single-serve coffee makers: KEURIG.  Not my cup of tea.

59. Durian feature: ODOR.  Apparently an acquired ODOR.  Maybe a scratch and sniff feature for Blogger isn't be such a good idea after all.

Durian Fruit

60. Filmmaker Lee: ANG.  Ang Lee OBS (born October 23, 1954) is a Taiwanese filmmaker. Born in Pingtung County of southern Taiwan, Lee was educated in Taiwan and later in the United States. As a filmmaker Lee's work is known for its emotional charge and exploration of repressed, hidden emotions. His work seems pretty eclectic, and includes Brokeback Mountain and Life of Pi for which Lee won Oscars, and also Sense and Sensibility based on the Austen novel.  Teri and I streamed Life of Pi on Prime just before I finished this review.  It's a hauntingly beautiful, remarkable film, which I highly recommend ...

61. Lively Brazilian dances: SAMBAS.  I doubt that it gets any livelier than this (straight from Ohio) ...

62. Swampy areas: FENS. And now for a little change of pace ...  on this side of the Pond they're called bogs or marshes, but on the other side they're found In the Fen Country, the title of a beautiful tone poem by Ralph Vaughan Williams:

Down:

1. Barbecue supply: MEAT RUB.  Also called a DRY RUB.  Here's a recipe for for seasoning that crossword favorite, Carne Asada ...

Carne Asada Dry Rub

2. Stressed: EMPHATIC.

3. Deer fencing material: WIRE MESH.  We use a  BLACK PLASTIC MESH,  which comes in 300' x 7.5' rolls which were enough for an 80' x 50' x 8' enclosure around our vegetable garden.  It also requires posts and gates and is user installable.  The black color makes it almost transparent to passers by in the street out front. The downside is that rabbits can chew through it and we ended up having to install 18" of chicken wire all around the perimeter.  The chicken wire didn't keep out ground hogs, but we dealt with them on a need to know basis ...

C-Flex Plastic Fencing

4. Covers in goo: SLIMES.  The Ghostbusters were slimed by a blob of ectoplasm called the Slimer ...

5. Glue trap brand: DCON.  Rumor has it that PETA doesn't like them.

6. Secondary RPG character: ALT.  In role-playing games (RPGs), an alternate character, often referred to in slang as ALT, alt char, or less commonly multi, is a character in addition to one's "primary" or "main" player character. Here are the rules.

7. Droid: BOT.  Since the Star Wars space operas we tend to think of Droids or BOTS as human-like machines.  Computer scientists extend the term machine to include anything automated, including "intelligent" software programs, such as the currently much-hyped chatGPT and its ilk.  Here is a very accessible article on this topic from the journal IEEE Spectrum by pioneering robotics engineer named Rodney Brooks, entitled Just Calm Down About GPT-4 Already.

8. Prepared (oneself), as for a shock: BRACED.  BRACE  yourself - there are 26 more clues to go.

9. Oral tradition: LORE.  Many equate the terms "oral tradition" and "LORE" with fables.  Some  of these "fables" may have had their origins in stories about real events from eons past. No "unbiased" observer was taking notes on all the details at the time, so we don't know how much of them to believe.  But parts of some of them may be true.

10. Very: EXTREMELY.

11. High-end wheels, informally: BEEMER.  Formally, automobiles manufactured by the Bayerische Motoren Werke AG, (BMW), a multinational manufacturer of luxury vehicles and motorcycles headquartered in Munich, Bavaria, Germany. The company was founded in 1916 as a manufacturer of aircraft engines, which it produced from 1917 to 1918 and again from 1933 to 1945.

12. Spanglish speaker, often: LATINO.  Also LATINA and LATINX.

13. "Under the __ Sun": Frances Mayes memoir set in Italy: TUSCAN.  Under the Tuscan Sun: At Home in Italy is a 1996 memoir by American author Frances Mayes. It was adapted by director Audrey Wells for the 2003 film Under the Tuscan Sun, starring Diane Lane. We streamed this comedy recently and really enjoyed it.  If you like Italy, I think you'll like this film.  Here's a trailer ...

18. "__ you not?": CAN.

22. Soccer Hall of Famer Lalas: ALEXI.  Not to be confused with ALEXA, Google's Android BOT,  Panayotis Alexander Lalas (Greek: Αλέξης Λάλας; born June 1, 1970) is an American retired soccer player who played mostly as a defender. Lalas is best known for his participation with the United States men's national soccer team in the 1994 FIFA World Cup, where he was a standout player on the team with his distinctive long beard and hair. After the World Cup, Lalas went on to become the first American in Italy's Serie A as a member of Calcio Padova.  He was elected to the National Soccer Hall of Fame in 2006.  He is also in the Michigan Sports Hall of Fame.

Alexi Lalas

24. Goo: OOZE.  See 4D.

25. Fairies and sprites, quaintly: WEE FOLK.  I think these folks are definitely fables. But then have you heard about Homo floresiensis?

28. Fare for one who's carbo-loading: PASTA.  For more about PASTA see Dr Ed's puzzle from June 1, 2023.

29. Country record?: ATLAS.  Nice misdirection.  I really I had my heart on playing a soulful country song.  Sittin' on Top of the World (from the 2003 film Cold Mountain) is really old timey music (but it is very soulful and sad) and I decided to play it instead ...

31. Basking spots for cold-blooded pets: HEAT ROCKS.  All about Hot Rocks and Reptiles.  This article seems to imply that your reptiles could become addicted to heat rocks and withhold their affections.

34. Foil alternatives: EPEES.

35. Maker of SEKTION kitchen cabinets: IKEA.  It was the K that gave it away.

36. Lunar hemisphere visible from Earth: NEARSIDE.  Looks like August might have missed a few ...

37. Eats a ton of: GORGES ON.

41. Classic Porsches: SPYDERS.  Why are convertibles called Spyders?

Porche 550 Spyder

42. Noisy bug: CICADA.  I was disappointed the last time they visited.  It's not likely I'll be disappointed again.

43. Shrewdness: ACUMEN.

44. Process after glazing: FIRING.  There have been many books written on this subject.  The process has to take into account a lot of factors, the two most important being the firing cycle and the atmosphere in the kiln.  The follow graph shows the kiln temperature rise and fall over time, which can be controlled either manually or via a computer.  Potters use temperature only as a rough guide to where they are in the firing cycle.  They use the deformation of specially formulated clay pyrometric cones (observed through spy holes) to measure the exact amount of heat work (a factor of both temperature and time) needed to melt the glazes.  The following firing cycle shows a kiln fired to "Cone 10", approximately 1300 deg. C (the high point on the graph below).  Once the "firing cone" has bent it is important to slow the cooling of the kiln for several hours until all of the non-shiny matt glazes have matured.  Note also that the temperature rise at the beginning and the fall at the end should not be too rapid so as to prevent the clay body from cracking. 
 

The kiln's atmosphere depends on whether it is being fired with electricity or a fossil fuel such as wood, coal, oil, or gas.  Electric kilns are said to have an oxidizing atmosphere as there is no carbon or hydrogen in the kiln to interact with the glazes (not very interesting).  Fuel fired kilns have a reducing atmosphere, with abundant carbon gases and hydrogen, which can interact with the glazes to reduce the amount of oxygen in the glaze colorants like iron and copper oxides.  Reduction fired glazes tend to be much more interesting, producing glazes like the celadon greens and copper reds (sang de boeuf) first developed by the Chinese in the 12th Century.

45. Distillate used as an aftershave: BAY RUM.  BAY RUM is a type of cologne and aftershave lotion.  It is a distillate that was originally made in Saint Thomas, and probably other West Indian islands, from rum and the leaves and/or berries of the West Indian bay tree, Pimenta racemosa.

46. Vanish just like *that*: GO POOF.  Like the Slimer in Ghost Busters.

49. Unfavorable review: PAN.

51. Seehorn of "Better Call Saul": RHEA.  Better Call Saul is an American legal crime drama television series created by Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould for AMC. It is a spin-off from Gilligan's previous series, Breaking Bad (2008–2013), to which it serves as both a prequel and sequel. Better Call Saul premiered on AMC on February 8, 2015, and concluded on August 15, 2022, after six seasons consisting of 63 episodes.  Saul Goodman was played by Robert Odenkirk and Rhea Seehorn played Kim Wexler, Saul's colleague and love interest.  Here she gives some tips on how to negotiate like a pro ...

52. Doesn't keep up: LAGS.

55. Sphere atop a wizard's staff, e.g.: ORB.  The ORB and a staff called the SCEPTRE are also symbols of the British Monarchy.  These symbols were celebrated with Sir William Walton's Orb and Sceptre March during the Coronation of Elizabeth II in 1953 ...

56. Soccer star Hamm: MIA.  Mariel Margaret Hamm-Garciaparra (née Hamm; born March 17, 1972) is an American former professional soccer player, two-time Olympic gold medalist and two-time FIFA Women's World Cup champion. Hailed as a soccer icon, she played as a forward for the United States women's national soccer team from 1987 to 2004. Hamm was the face of the Women's United Soccer Association (WUSA), the first professional women's soccer league in the United States, where she played for the Washington Freedom from 2001 to 2003.

Mia Hamm

Cheers,
Bill

As always, thanks to Teri for proof reading, for her constructive criticism.

waseeley

* oh yes, and with special thanks to Dr. Spencer Johnson