Tuesday, January 9, 2024

Eating a calendar can be time-consuming. (But with a clock, you'll have seconds.)

Pure love for this puzzle and a future contender in next year's POY; I'll certainly jot this date down. Follow the sun, words to live by, my personal Dao. And for Solomon following the sun was literally going North Up. Did you see the movie? It didn't get much attention, if I remember, due to off-camera controversies by the lead actor, but it was powerfully moving and beautifully shot. Loved Went Kaboom, Sat in the Fridge -- there was a lot of daring derring-do and playfulness in word choices and cluing. I Robot and Ibex. the cluing for for Chili Oil & Octopi, for Edison & Hound Dog. Magical. The only shadow that crossed the sun for me was the earworm of the theme song from "Happy Days" as soon as it became clear the circles were days of the week. Not even Hound Dog or Norah can shake it out. I'm gonna have a gin fizz or two. I'm shouting OK OK! Take it off the juke! And also, I'm not quite comfortable, and I suspect Mr. Wagner isn't either, from his notes, with TUESDAY hinting phonetically at the circled letters. TWOs DAY just doesn't make as much sense as TWO DAYS, which might have better been clued to yield TODAY'S, as in "Today's broadcast has been brought to you by..." to yield the phonetic clue of two days. But maybe that was impossible. I just sense in Mr. Wagner's longish explanation a little ruefulness. I'm just so taken with this puzzle, its liveliness and unexpected turns. It seems so much more advanced than a TUESDAY puzzle (another reason it's today's puzzle).

Anyone can say they’ve had stuff that sat in the fridge… A houseguest intervieWED me about our fancy “long term compost” system. I explained: it’s comMON to get overenTHUsiastic about planting the garden. You start the seeds, tend, transplant, tend some more, weed, mulch, water, tend all season. Only to find you have a tSUNami of, say, cabbage. So you give some away to FRIends, and make colcannon, stir fry, slaw… anything you can think of with cabbage as a constiTUEnt. Once SATed with these dishes by eating them for (way more than two) days, the leftovers get stored. They then occupy space until their ultimate fate is revealed: the compost pile!

Are we so delicate that we start gasping and have a nervous breakdown or an attack of the vapors when a fill is a common plural version of a creature that couldn't care less about what we call it? We have all heard "octopi" and know that it isn't the academically accepted plural version of octopus, but cacti and nuclei have made OCTOPI seem intuitively correct. Let's give Adam a break on this one and not knock such an elegantly constructed puzzle by insisting on how highly educated we are when it comes to the plural suffix for octopus. OK?

Fun puzzle, smooth solve, but at the risk of sounding like a crackpot, the plural of our eight legged friends is not octopi, which is adding a Latin ending to a Greek word. Either octopuses or octopodes would be more correct, although admittedly, neither has the correct number of letters.

I hope "octopi" never appears in another puzzle so we don't have to read the same complaining comments every time. I swear, when I first read the comments last night, over 50% of them complained about the spelling, which does exist, and has appeared as a crossword answer god knows how many times.

I got the theme pretty quickly but boy was the rest of this puzzle a challenge for me! I usually breeze through the Tuesday crossword. I suppose being an Australian a lot of the American-focussed fill was completely lost on me (NOLITA, MIKA, STPETE, SIXER, EDISON and AISHA). Also KMARTS are very much still a huge deal in Aus, there's over 300 stores across the country.

I believe it’s fine to say OCTOPI, or even OCTOPODES. OCTOPUSES is correct but sounds awkward to me. I think it’s lovely when we get new words from a mistake. <a href="https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/the-many-plurals-of-octopus-octopi-octopuses-octopodes#:~:text=The" target="_blank">https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/the-many-plurals-of-octopus-octopi-octopuses-octopodes#:~:text=The</a>%20current%20champion%20in%20the,octopi%2C%20octopuses%2C%20and%20octopodes.

I like the octopus plurality singularity that we can’t escape. Reminds me of the Oxford comma drama. But you really can’t have a complete octopus plurality discussion without Ogden Nash: The Octopus' Tell me, O Octopus, I begs, Is those things arms, or is they legs? I marvel at thee, Octopus If I were thou, I'd call me Us. Ogden Nash

Mr. Wagner, come again? -- so you see a decomposing pepper in the crisper and, boom, there it is, the SAT IN THE FRIDGE you've been looking for. It really blows my mind. Not in a million years would my brain have clicked that way. I'm in awe. Thank you for sharing a bit of your process and for this lovely TUESDAY puzzle. I had a great time solving it and being inspired by it to take a listen again to The Beatles' "I'll Follow The Sun." It had been a long time since I'd heard it. <a href="https://youtu.be/28d_A_NuJ7A?feature=shared" target="_blank">https://youtu.be/28d_A_NuJ7A?feature=shared</a>

As much as I detest OCTOPI as a plural for OCTOPus, and as invalid as its etymology is, and even though I correct my students when they use this abomination in a paper, like many words of faulty pseudo-latin origin, it has entered the English lexicon, so I reluctantly deem it a valid crossword answer, even though it is like unto fingernails, or maybe actually nails, on a chalkboard to me. But my students still can't use it. FYI, the allowed plurals, depending on context, are: OCTOPuses, OCTOPodes, and OCTOPods.

Seeing OCTOPI for the plural of OCTOPUS makes me die a little inside.

My favorite part of the puzzle was its spark. Spark coming from the three spanning theme answers that have never appeared in the NYT or in any of the major crossword venues, for that matter. And, by definition, their clues are first-timers as well. Lovely answers – BOCCE, BIFF, I ROBOT, CHILI OIL, HOUND DOG – added to the bounce. But the liveliest, the best spark for me, was another never-in-a-major-crossword answer, not to mention the embodiment of spark: WENT KABOOM. A fabulous addition to crossword’s family of answers. That one drew a smile and a big “Hah!” Sweet when a puzzle shimmers like this one does, when it’s “not just another crossword puzzle”. Thank you, Adam, for making it!

Struggled a bit for the obvious reasons, but any puzzle that includes WENTKABOOM gets an extra five points for sheer panache. You people are great, which bears repeating, any day of the week. So glad to have Sam as part of the team. Thanks so much for the FUN.

I want a hippopotamus for Christmas Only a hippopotamus will do No crocodiles, or rhinoceroseses I only like hippopotamuseses And hippopotamuses like me too.

This is one of my favorite nyt crossword puzzles in the last year. I adored the clues and their solutions. Very original and unique. I'm glad you finally completed your construction Adam. I look forward to many many more puzzles in the next year or two.... thank you Adam's Dad for the suggestion and to you for taking on his challenge.

I only showed up today because I anticipated an octopi kerfuffle. Those are rare events, so I try not to miss them.

Of course, you’ll remember my tap dancing partner was none other than Otto the Octopus, albeit during the final curtain of his career. Alas, often he would quit, mid-number, with a sort of urchin-like roll, stage-left, and retire to his “cave” (as he called it). He didn’t have the legs, anymore. (I’ll show myself out.) cc: emu handler

(He dons his prescriptivist hat.) Whither the Octopodes? (He removes his prescriptivist hat.) (straightforward, but elegant, theme)

It's a common mistake, but the plural of Octopus is Octopuses, not Octopi.

I happen to be vacationing in St. Pete today. That was a fun coincidence! Sadly, there hasn’t been much sunshine during my stay this week. Wah wah

Your bell pepper did not rot in vain. That was a really fun theme!

I seem to be with the group of non-US solvers who didn't like this puzzle. I found it to be , to quote a word used by Sam in her first paragraph, "soulless." Too many sports clues slowed me down, even if LEW Alcindor was a gimme. I thought the theme was just blah. WENT KABOOM? SAT IN THE FRIDGE? Gimme a break. Yeah, I got them, but not impressed. Couldn't wait until the last entry was filled in. Yes, I finished it without having to look anything up. I know that for most of you, your mileage varied. This puzzle left me on empty. And now I've told you how I really feel.

Bold move presenting OCTOPI to a room full of word nerds. Also DAO just undid years of training my brain that “it’s T, not D”

I must admit I didn't understand the revealer or the theme and had to read Sam's column for enlightenment. My best guess at the theme after solving was that this was a Tuesday puzzle, which is why TUESDAY appears in full rather than in abbreviated form, highlighted by circled letters. Oh well.

This was impossibly hard in places for a foreigner like me. I quickly switched on Autocheck, and ended up actually revealing two answers, because I was hopelessly stuck. The mix of trivia, and words and expressions obscure to a person like me (due to my age and Polish life experience) was very unpleasant. I hope US solvers had more fun than I did today.

Chili today, hot tamale. Where was I? Oh yeah - nice Tuesday puzzle and pretty smooth solve for the most part. Today instead of going through all the acrosses and then the downs, I just went section by section top to bottom. And then... one wrong square. Re-typed all the O's to make sure I hadn't entered a zero, and then reviewed all the answers one at a time. And... turned out that it was just an old spelling blank on my part. I always get mixed up on CHILI vs. CHILE and that turned out to be the problem. Of course EON didn't work for the across clue, but it is a word, so had to really focus on everything before it dawned on me. First answer history search today was inspired by current events. Will just say that neither RAINYNIGHT nor INGEORGIA has ever been a part of any puzzle answer. And in fact neither of those strings is even in the Xword Info word lists. Same is true for ALLOVERTHEWORLD - which is a 15 letter answer. Did have a couple of interesting puzzle finds. I'll put those in replies. ..

Why can't I ever remember the name of the group that did this song: Saturday in the fridge I think it was the Fourth of July Saturday in the fridge I think it was the Fourth of July People dancing, people flirting A man drinking ice t Swearing octopi's wrong

I had just gotten finished muttering “Well, there’s no TUE” when, lo and behold, there was TUESDAY. A tip of the hat for a fun little theme.

C'mon, I feel like we all know what OCTOPI means and can predict it as a six letter answer to such clues, regardless of etymological gray area. Language evolves naturally, not according to rules. Let's be linguistic descriptivists, not ever-annoyed prescriptivists. That said, I recognize asking an audience of crossworders to avoid pedantry (I include myself here!) is an excerise in futility. Or should I say NO HOPE?

Now that I'm in the zone, my days are not complete without solving the puzzle and visiting Wordplay (and sending the pic of the completed puzzle to one of my favorite humans, my almost 15 year old son). Mostly, I'm fascinated by the different parts of my brain that I activate when I solve! I can be insanely slow, but I always try to keep pondering...and then some days I zip right through. This one was slightly challenging for me for a Tuesday, but I loved it and figuring out the theme was essential to my solve. It's extra FUN for me when that happens for some reason. There's something sort of rhythmic about today's puzzle: maybe it's DANCE and HOUNDDOG but I'm feeling the opposite of NOHOPE as I head off to (Zoom) UNI to teach an online MBA class tonight. Cheers from Boston!

Note to self (yet again!): I SHALL not write in any answer in dark ink without first checking at least one crossing letter -- not even on a TUESDAY, which I assumed would be easy, only it wasn't all that easy. I wrote in "I SWEAR" for the "formal words of commitment" without even noticing the awkward CW leading off 3D, and ended up with a very messy grid that I could have easily avoided. My other write-over, which SAT IN THE grid longer, was DID It for "finished off". But who was this SOLOMON tORT-something-or-other who wrote "Twelve Years a Slave"? How could I possibly not have heard of him? It took me a long time to fix the error. A well-crafted puzzle with a cute (if ungrammatical) revealer. Even when you're only speaking phonetically, I think you mean TWO DAYS, not TWOS DAY. But it doesn't matter. It was a fun puzzle and it was pretty crunchy for a Tuesday. Which I always regard as a feature and not a bug.

Yesterday I was able to finish a crossword in under 10 minutes without a single hint! New milestone for me. . Today is quite different but has been equally rewarding in its own way. When clues and answers are obscure for me, I take the time to research the topic. So I was excited to learn about NOLITA and I am adding it to my to-do list for my first-ever NYC trip in 2025. . Also, Earth is blocking my view of Venus.

Here for the OCTOPI comments :P

A Tuesday puzzle with a TUESDAY revealer. Nice! There was no weak sauce in this week-themed puzzle, and it was a fun puzzle overall, although the SW corner was little gnarly with so many unlikely letter combinations (e.g. GNOTE, KMART, STPETE). My favorite entry was WENTKABOOM, and I’m always pleased to see a Philly reference, especially to my Seventy-SIXERs.

Finally a puzzle that makes sense! This was definitely one of the more enjoyable, straightforward puzzles.

Perfect theme for a TUESDAY puzzle, although I found it more difficult than Tuesday level, but it’s been like that for quite a while now.

The plural of octopus is octopuses not octopi.

Wow. What a clever move, printing the clues in teensy-weensy type and making the puzzle grid MUCH BIGGER! I mean, WHAT A PEOPLE-PLEASER! So very helpful to those of us with vision issues! THANKS A MILLION!!! Now I know what folks meant yesterday about the 'new format.' It was really exciting to enter the solution IN GREAT BIG HONKIN' LETTERS!! and look at all that nice doodling space! Brilliant idea. Please convey our thanks to the _(make your own choice from the available nouns in the puzzle)_ who conceived this improvement in solver-experience. Oh, the puzzle. TUES (twos) DAY. Two Abbrs per themer line. It's a Reveal that....seems BIFF-worthy. That was so much fun that I need to go to the dentist to prolong the sensational experience... AAAAAAAAHHHHHH-LOHA, mes amis.

Cripes. Outside of the US that was a really tough one. So much general knowledge including really obscure things like "molcajete". The bottom left particularly just seemed to be a mass of interconnecting impossibles: G-Note, St. Pete, AMC, Kmart (what in god's name is a 'big box store'?), Octopi. Had to look up a fair few.

I must have needed some of the octopi’s neural wiring today. Too many clues I didn’t have any background knowledge on. Not my favorite Tuesday solve but I can see that it was clever!

Like sand through the hourglass I was all ready to flow through this early week treat effortlessly but the "unable to be recalled" proper names slowed things down. Since the flowers all leaned toward the window it was a "heliotrope bouquet". Nicely done and thanks.

Excellent grid. Very satisfying.

Good puzzle but according to my friend the marine biologist the plural of octopus is octopuses. (41D) also, it's better because it's harder because most people think it's octopi.

I thought for sure the theme was "Tuesday's Gone" as in the song by Lynyrd Skynyrd. It's the only day of the week not circled. heh "..Tuesday's gone, with the wind..."

AISHA and SOLOMON NORTHUP have no place in a Tuesday puzzle. ROTO is also questionable.

For once, Norah not Etta.

Liked the theme, clever to include two in each word. Seemed hard for a Tues, if we could elide some of those proper nouns off future puzzles I'd appreciate it.

Thanks Adam Wagner. This was lots of fun. Of course I knew there would be a to do over OCTUPI, but I think it was fair game, since one does hear it used occasionally. The theme was such fun, and I loved hearing how it came about. You made me smile on a dreary day. 😃

“Octopi” is not the correct word for multiple octopuses. It is “octopuses” as it is not a Latin word and would not use “i” to denote a plural. The most “correct” form would be octopods but it is not the most widely used.