12/15/24 - Art Heist 🖼️

Art Heist by David Kwong

19A | Fertilizer compound

POTASH

Potash refers to a salt compound that contains potassium. The name is a literal one: in the Middle Ages people would soak wood ashes in iron pots (a process known as "leaching"), then boil the mixture to evaporate the water. What remained was a crystalline, potassium-rich substance they called "pot-ash."

It wasn't until 1807 that British chemist Humphrey Davy isolated a brand new element from potash, which he named "potassium" in reference to its source.

42A | Downhill event

SLALOM

Fans of the Winter Olympics likely recognize "slalom" as the races in which skiers navigate a winding downhill course while whipping around poles planted in the ground. (Since 1992, the Summer Olympics have featured a water-based version of this event: canoe slalom.)

As a noun, "slalom" entered the English language in 1921 from the Norwegian slalåm: sla (meaning "slope") + lam (meaning "trail").

48A | Niçoise salad need

TUNA

There is much debate re: which ingredients comprise a traditional salade niçoise, but most sources agree that at the very least one should consist of tomatoes, olives, hard-boiled egg, and tuna (or anchovies) dressed simply with olive oil.

The dish originated in the 1800s in Nice, France – Niçoise being a French adjective meaning "in the style of Nice," the largest city in the French Riviera (Côte d'Azur).

👉 BONUS BIT: Nice (pronounced "niece") traces its founding back to 350 BC when a group of Greek who settled in the area named it in honor of Nike, their goddess of victory.

50A | Role for Jay Silverheels

TONTO

Jay Silverheels (born Harold Jay Smith) was a full-blooded Mohawk who grew up on Canada's Six Nations reserve and first gained acclaim as an indoor lacrosse player in the 1930s, a sport in which he earned the nickname that would later become his stage name.

From 1937 to 1974, Silverheels racked up 101 appearances in films and television series, but his only real taste of fame came as a result of his time spent atop the horse Scout in the role of the Tonto, the Lone Ranger's faithful companion across 200+ TV episodes and two movie sequels.

56A | Nobelist Bohr

NIELS

Danish physicist Niels Bohr (1885-1962) was the first person to propose an accurate model of the atom as containing a dense nucleus of positively-charged particles (protons) orbited by negatively-charged particles (electrons).

Bohr was the recipient of the 1922 Nobel Prize in Physics, an honor also bestowed on his son Aage in 1975, thereby making the Bohrs one of six father-son pairs to have won the award. (Niels's father Christian had been nominated twice.)

109A | Connecticut coastal town near Stamford

DARIEN

Darien, CT – a town of just over 20,000 situated on Long Island Sound – served as the cinematic stand-in for the fictional community of Stepford in both the 1975 and 2004 film adaptions of Ira Levin's classic satirical novel, The Stepford Wives.

11D | Salinger's "For ___ – With Love and Squalor"

ESME

"For Esme - With Love and Squalor" is a J.D. Salinger short story first published in the April 8, 1950 edition of The New Yorker and later included in the collection Nine Stories (1953).

The title is a reference to a request made by a 13-year-old-girl (Esme) to the nameless American narrator (Sergeant X) – a writer-turned-soldier stationed in England during World War II:

“I’d be extremely flattered if you’d write a story exclusively for me sometime. I’m an avid reader.”

I told her I certainly would, if I could. I said that I wasn’t terribly prolific.

“It doesn’t have to be terribly prolific! Just so that isn’t childish and silly.” She reflected. “I prefer stories about squalor.”

“About what?” I said, leaning forward.

“Squalor. I’m extremely interested in squalor.”

18D | '60s campus activist grp.

SDS

Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) was a leftist organization founded in 1960 at the University of Michigan that grew to establish chapters on over 300 college campuses across the United States.

Espousing anti-war and free speech principles that promoted the desire for a more participatory democracy, the group rose to prominence largely on account of its protests against the Vietnam War before fracturing at the end of the decade, with more radical, militant-minded sects (such as the Weather Underground) grabbing the spotlight in its wake.

The SDS's founding document, a 25,000+ word manifesto known as the Port Huron Statement, begins by evoking the immortal opening sentence of the preamble to the U.S Constitution:

We are people of this generation, bred in at least modest comfort, housed now in universities, looking uncomfortably to the world we inherit.

(Despite his claims to the contrary, Jeff "The Dude" Lebowski was not a co-author.)

59D | ___ Clan, iconic hip-hop group of the 1990s

WUTANG

The hip hop collective known as the Wu-Tang Clan emerged from Staten Island, NY, with the genre-defining debut album, 1993's Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers). Taking its name from the title of a Hong Kong martial arts film (Shaolin and Wu Tang), the group's mythology borrows heavily from Eastern philosophy, while their lyrics depict street life in vivid detail.

In its original incarnation, the Clan consisted of 9 members: Ghostface Killah, GZA, Inspectah Deck, Masta Killa, Method Man, Ol' Dirty Bastard (ODB), Raekwon, RZA, and U-God.

👉 BONUS BIT: Actor/comedian Donald Glover performs music under the alter ego "Childish Gambino," a moniker he obtained from the Wu-Tang Name Generator.

76D | Plunder, archaically

REAVE

Reave, a now obsolete Middle English word meaning to rob or take away by force, is closely related to a word we still use today: "bereave" – a term employed when someone is deprived of a loved one, typically as the result of death.

85D | Bergen's dummy Mortimer

SNERD

Mortimer Snerd often played second fiddle to celebrity ventriloquist Edgar Bergen's primary dummy Charlie McCarthy, but then again, so did Edgar's human daughter – Murphy Brown actress Candice Bergen. According to her memoir, Candice was left out of her father's will entirely, while Charlie received an inheritance of $10,000.

120D | Male turkey

TOM

As set forth in a popular myth, Benjamin Franklin began calling male turkeys "toms" in reference to Thomas Jefferson, an act of retaliation owing to his fellow founding father's refusal to endorse the turkey as the national bird of the newly formed United States.

While it is true that Franklin opposed America's adoption of the bald eagle as its representative (calling it "a Bird of bad moral Character"), the rest of the story is pure fiction.

A male turkey, like a male cat, is known as a "tom" – an appellation that can be traced back to the British novel The Life and Adventures of a Cat, a 1760 work starring "Tom the Cat."