Akon is an r&b singer whose real name is Allaune Thiam. He's Muslim but I have no idea what "Akon" means---and Akon won't say. His hits include Lonely, Locked Up, Don't Matter and I Wanna Love You. Laff-A-Lympics was a 1977 Saturday morning cartoon show which featured dozens of Hanna-Barbera characters competing in Olympics-style events.
The Random House Puzzle Makers Handbook has several suggestions for "polishing" a puzzle. Among them: don't use a lot of words ending with S, change frequently occurring letters to less common letters, eliminate abbreviations and partial phrases, and avoid foreign words and variant spellings. Today's New York Times puzzle includes NYS (for New York State), OSH (as in Oshkosh), AAHED (as the past tense of AAH, which isn't really a verb), and FRAIDSO (a colloquialism). The puzzle maker settled for those four answers instead of making an effort to come up with legitimate words. Sloppy!
