Woah! I’ve been so election-obsessed that I hadn’t heard this. How sad.
Yma was very hit or miss. I mean, her voice was always a hit, but her music was not, for me. I thought too many songs were ruined by additions like strings and horns, 50’s Hollywood Bowl movie musical backing, or worse (70’s swing, gak!), very dated and tedious for me to listen to, no matter how amazing her voice is.
Her best album, IMO is Voice of the Xtabay. I don’t cringe when I listen to most of it, anyway. One of my favorite songs on it is “Chuncho” which I played often on my radio show, always perfectly segueing it into Lene Lovich’s “Bird Song.”* My other favorite song on that album is “Llulla Mak’Ta” but I couldn’t find a video for it.
Heh. Crossword puzzles are rather difficult to construct. Short (three- and four-letter) words using common letters are essential filler when piecing together more complicated words in the opposite direction.
If you do a lot of crosswords, you’ll see a number of odd-words-with-common-letters cropping up with unusual frequency. LEI, for example, or OBOE or UVEA or OTOE or ILEA or whatnot. Proper names are also fair game; thus this thread.
[Or wait; am I whooshed? I note your clue of “clue”.]
Estes Kefauver, Adlai’s running mate. Without him, we’d be stuck with Estes Park, Colorado.
The thing is, Adlai actually ran twice, with two different running mates–John Sparkman in 1952, and Estes Kefauver in 1956. Poor Sparkman is the forgotten man. If your answer is “John”, there are a million better clues.
But not if I were writing puzzles. My clue would be “Adlai’s running mate”, and the answer would be “John”. I’m telling you, it would freak people out.
Remembered another one: Dictator [Idi] Amin. (Although you sometimes get the last name.)
Vowels are the key in some of these words. Especially if they start/end with one. Hence the name in the OP. My computer dictionary lists just 2 words that start with “Y” and end with a vowel. If you wanted a consonant in the middle, it’s “Singer Sumac” for the clue.
I also see “Baseball player Moises” the most often of the Alou family.
It’s all a mixture, you know, a, um, oleo? olla? olio? Something like that.
However much I like her music, her name is no place for a crossword puzzle just because some crossword writer needed some unlikely combination of letters to make a puzzle. The vast majority of people who get this clue are simply those who have done previous versions of this puzzle that have the same answer, worded differently, perhaps. It’s not really a true puzzle, but a question of, “How many times have you done this particular puzzle?”
Yeah, her name will live forever, but not because anybody who does crosswords would otherwise know who she is.
