The name-dropping February 25 crossword

[Thomps2525]

Julian Lim has had 25 crossword puzzles published so far, more on Saturday than any other day. Many of his puzzles, including today's, have no theme. What today's puzzle does have is an unusually high number of proper names:

Airline to Eliat: ELAL
Conn of Grease: DIDI
Yes! singer Jason: MRAZ
Poet friend of author Ernest: EZRA
Name on many bars: HERSHEYS
Best actress after Field: SPACEK
Urquhart Castle's loch: NESS
Toon pursuing l'amour: LEPEW
Mad Men actor John: SLATTERY
___ Men: one-hit wonders of 2000: BAHA
"For unto us a child is born" source: ISAIAH
2008-09 Japanese prime minister Taro ___: ASO
Anthem For Doomed Youth poet Wilfred ___: OWEN
#3 on the 2016 Forbes "World's 100 Most Powerful Women" list: YELLEN

Ernest is novelist Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) and Ezra is poet Ezra Pound (1885-1972). Pepe LePew is the amorous French-speaking skunk in the Looney Tunes cartoons. The Baha Men's hit was Who Let The Dogs Out, one of many songs that I never wanted to hear a second time after I heard them for the first time. Janet Yellen succeeded Ben Bernanke as head of the United States Federal Reserve in January 2014. She is the first woman to hold that position and was ranked by Forbes as the world's third most powerful woman in 2016. German chancellor Angela Merkel topped the list and Hillary Clinton was second. The entire list can be seen at

https://www.forbes.com/power-women/

"Pepper with punch" is JALAPENO and "Target of a whacking" is PINATA. Both of those are wrong. The words are "jalapeño" and "piñata." In the Spanish language, the N with a tilde (Ñ) is a distinct letter, separate from the N. "Many a group vacation photo, in slang" is WEFIE. A "selfie" is "a photograph that one has taken of oneself, typically one taken with a smartphone or webcam and shared via social media." The word first appeared on an Australian news site in 2002 but didn't become common until 2012. The Oxford English Dictionary chose "selfie" as its 2013 "word of the year." But "wefie"? I had never heard that one before. I was surprised to discover that Samsung Electronics Company trademarked the word on April 3, 2014. It's a horrible word, one I hope never catches on -- but Samsung certainly must know that "wefie," despite the trademark, is going to be used as a generic term in the same way that people use Coke for cola, Xerox for photocopy, Band-Aids for bandages and Q-Tips for cotton swabs.

"Rule broken by deities" is IBEFOREE. In elementary school, we learned the rhyme "I before E except after C, or when sounded like Ā as in 'neighbor' or 'weigh.'" We were taught that it was a rule. However, it is not a good rule -- there are far too many exceptions. Among them: ancient, beige, protein, heir, veil, science, their, eight, height, weight, forfeit, foreign, leisure, sovereign, either, neither, rein, weird, skein, species, heinous and reimburse.

So "I before E" is not always valid. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go show my dreidel and my kaleidoscope to my atheistic neighbor and hope we aren't bothered by poltergeists. I'm not forseeing any problems.