Maybe not that impressive, but this is my first Friday without any lookups! And a decent time too! This will be a good day.
@Veronika I often find that a Friday or Saturday can turn on as few as two answers that I just can't get and that prevent me from uncovering everything else. If I don't run into those, I can finish it in a good time, even if it's not that easy. And this one was not *that* easy -- I thought a SETTEE was a boat -- so you got a clean solve on what I would say was a reasonably tough puzzle.
@Veronika How is that NOT impressive?! Congratulations 🥳 . . . . Are emus impressive?
Back when I lived in Egypt, I had a brief romance with a young lady whose family cultivated and exported dates. As she showed me around the farm, she explained the difficulty of the trade: that not very many trees can grow the fruit, that it can sometimes take a decade for them to bear, and still many of those, inferior in size and production, and that harvesting was year-round, as the trees weren't guaranteed to yield at the same time. As we walked along, she would point out which seedling would grow to bear fruit and which would not. Seeing no difference in their appearances, I asked how she could know this at such an early growth stage. She said she was a palm reader. (I'll show myself out.) cc: emu handler
@Steven ATTA way to GROUP DATES. !!!! !!!! !!!! A little something for the Egyptian emus.
@Steven How many dates did you have with her? And did she practice yoga? Maybe the Palm Dog pose?
"The head baker is inspecting!" "Oh no, we're toast!" ("We knead to stop loafing around!")
@Mike It's the yeast we can do.
@Mike Yes, stop milling around and rise to the occasion.
This was a well constructed puzzle but the entries overall seemed too easy for a Friday. That said, I'm relieved to see a different *way* to clue ATTA. I also liked the fact that two "dating" entries line up nicely next to each other in the NE: SOFT LAUNCH (as originally clued) and I NEED SPACE. And three's company when you throw in a GROUP DATE.
1 hour 35 minutes last night. 13 minutes tonight 😳 Friday PR for me. What a difference a day makes!! Happy weekend everyone. Thanks for the great puzzle Sarah Sinclair and Rafael Musa.
@Striker Man, you ain't whislin' Dixie. Finished this one in, for me, a crisp 31 min whereas I cried uncle and settled for a blue star yesterday. Some puzzles are evil in their presentation, depending on the solver.
That fun “off-key” clue has given me a new image to use when preparing to sing a gnarly piece of polyphony, or getting ready to blast through a fiddle tune at top speed: “I’m not off-key, I’m HOT-WIRING this!”
@Cat Lady Margaret I am so stealing that. That, plus STAR WARS, were my favorite sets of clues/answers.
As a WoW player, I have to say I got a little frustrated that 1D wasn't MMO, but RPG. It's definitely a bit of a confusing answer - WoW and FF XIV are both MMORPGS, with the MMO really being the thing they have in common and a fine way to define them, but 'RPG' alone is a totally different genre. Most of the FF franchise are RPGs, but none of the WoW games are RPGs, so technically the one thing that WoW and FF should have in common is the MMO part and not the RPG bit. That said, this is probably me being finicky or overly fussy about the answer; I didn't actually have too much of a problem figuring it out.
@Evan Did… did you just try to convince people World of Warcraft isn’t an RPG? The entry does not say Warcraft. If it did, you would have a point that that’s an RTS game. But WoW is very clearly delineated as an MMORPG, which is certainly a subset of RPGs, just like almost all Final Fantasy games are turn-based RPGs. Only two of the mainline Final Fantasy entries are MMOs compared to 14 RPGs, so it would be an odd choice to describe MMO over something like Star Wars: The Old Republic or Elder Scrolls Online.
I enjoyed this puzzle despite its having lots of pop culture references with which I was unfamiliar and which I had to glean via the crosses. I did enjoy Show of Force for STARWARS. I found one detail in the puzzle particularly humbling (perhaps even embarrassing). Despite being a former English major and lover of Shakespeare who reads Hamlet once a year, and despite being a moderately serious birder, I was totally unaware that the handsaw that Hamlet could tell from a hawk was in fact a heron, and not a woodworking tool. Given the complete dissimilarity between a tool and a bird, I thought Hamlet’s pride in the achievement was further evidence of his questionable mental state, sort of like being able to identify an elephant or a whale on a cognitive test. That sense survives, even if a handsaw is in fact a heron, because even a devoted non-birder would be hard put to confuse a hawk and a heron.
Random thoughts: • Rafael so far has gravitated toward two days, having seven Fridays and three Sundays. Don’t know what Sarah gravitates toward yet, but what a lovely leap, going from her Monday debut to this Friday! • My two favorite answers were SOFT LAUNCH and ENEMY TURF, both appearing for the first time in a NYT puzzle, and my favorite clue was the most-clever [Starts off-key?] for HOTWIRED. • It was sweet to see the classic dook NOONE and I smiled at seeing the abutting DEFER and PELT, the former sorta a silly slangy definition of the latter. • This grid design allowed for 14 long answers (eight or more letters), which made for a fun solve. • Lovely PuzzPair© of TUBER and CROP. Much to enjoy! Thank you, Sarah and Rafael, and hoping for an encore!
@Lewis I agree that HOTWIRED was a good one. I have been to a soft opening before but hadn’t heard of a SOFTLAUNCH (though it makes sense). Having been married 40 years, I am unfamiliar with it in the romance-revealing sense. In fact, the whole telegraphing-things-on-social-media is foreign to me. In my day, the only issue was when to tell the ‘rents.
@Lewis Re: HOTWIRED, I got carried away in a game of pretend with my granddaughter a few years ago, and had our favorite "naughty little brother" character hot-wire a car and go get ice cream. I had to fess up to mom and dad in case that crept into her vocabulary.
Hmmm, I have always assumed a different meaning from Hamlet’s “I know a hawk from a handsaw”. A hawk is a mason’s tool, a flat metal plate with a handle underneath for carrying mortar (also called a mortarboard). A handsaw is a flat metal plate with a handle on one end and serrations on one edge for sawing wood. So I’ve learned something. L
@LarryF Yes. TIL that there are Herons that look quite different from the Great Blue Heron with long, bent neck and extremely long legs that I associated with the name. The web has many images of Night Herons that might be mistaken for hawks in flight in the right light.
@LarryF The mistake is not yours, it is the scholars' who did not know what a hawk was, so decided it mut be something else—a heron! Who is crazy in this one?
@LarryF Per OED that definition of 'hawk' as masonry tool did not become extant until 1700, well after Shakespeare's time.
Deb, Aretha is ALWAYS the best
Friday Personal Best for me! Very nice, smooth puzzle!
I enjoyed this - but I had to look a fair bit of trivia, since there was a lot of it, and it was mostly unknown to me. I knew bugle only as an instrument or newspaper title, and I am not an unhealthy snack person (hard to believe I suppose but I don't really like chips and such, I much prefer nuts. Lidl - that's a major European supermarket chain - offers great value Californian pistachios. So much tastier than any industrial snack, and actually healthy) so I only very vaguely recall FRITOS. And there was more of this arcane stuff, but by now I have grown to accept I will almost always have to look up NYT puzzle trivia - it is too alien to me, and my memory is not what it used to be.
@Andrzej That you can solve the puzzle to the point that you only have to look up trivia is very impressive to me.
Some of the stuff I learn from these puzzles is fascinating. I just did an archived Sunday puzzle from 2022 and I learned that nonkosher things are TREF. Why did I find it so interesting? Well, in Polish we have the adjective "trefny," which means something along the lines of suspicious, bad, off, illegal. I never thought about the etymology of that word, but having learned of TREF i researched the origins of "trefny." It is indeed a loan word from Yiddish, and via Yiddish from Hebrew. The cruel history of this part of Europe wiped out almost all material traces of Jewish heritage, which for centuries was a huge part of Polish culture. I am glad at least some of that lost world lives on in our language.
Fun puzzle. I had been doing the "Easy Mode" Fridays, but I find that I prefer the challenge of the regular clues, even if I have to look some things up. That's how you learn, right?
Wish I hadn't had the GREAT IDEA to immediately and confidently place brilliant for the "That's genius" clue in the Northwest! 😆 And when part of my brain said, "HeathieJ, maybe you should remove the word brilliant and see what happens because you can't figure anything else out up here and that 'Show of Force' clue simply must relate to Star Wars," I replied, "HeathieJ, you NERD! I know what I'm doing!" About 10 minutes later, I finally caved... And then that final corner fell into place quite handily! I still finished in about half my average time, which is exciting, but keep in mind my average time is very long. I definitely solved this one more smoothly than Thursday's but I found both very enjoyable!! It's always interesting to me in these comments how some people find a puzzle so easy and others find it so hard and vice versa. I think that's so nice! How boring it would be if all of our brains worked the same! And thanks to Deb for the great videos in the column! Love the eclectic mix of Aretha Franklin and Monty Python!! ❤️
Someone please tell me where Sam E. got that Letterboxed t-shirt he's wearing in the photo. I'm a stickler for the game! Ah, yes, the puzzle. I have no idea how I solved it but I did. It was one of those that had chunks of white squares that linger until suddenly there were none left. Hearty laughs and ahas at "Everybody's opposite" (NO ONE) and "Bugles alternative" (FRITOS.) Genius! I'm only vaguely aware of Bugles but I am quite familiar with The Buggles, the ones whose video was the first ever to air on MTV, which in turn was the first to air a reality t.v. show, The Real World, way before there was ever a The Bachelor and GROUP DATES. <a href="https://youtu.be/W8r-tXRLazs?feature=shared" target="_blank">https://youtu.be/W8r-tXRLazs?feature=shared</a> (Video Killed The Radio Star, the video that LAUNCHed MTV.) Thank you Sarah and Rafa for gifting me a great puzzling experience. May The Constructor Force be forever with you!
@sotto voce I laughed when I saw Sam E's shirt and couldn't help wondering if that was planned or just the shirt he happened to be wearing when he got the beanie. And what else is he wearing? Crossword shorts and sudoku socks?
@sotto voce There is a store where people can buy Games-related merch. I didn't see that T shirt, though. I generally use a tablet to access the Games page on a browser, but I can't find the store this way. I picked up my phone, opened the NYT app, tapped the Sections icon, tapped "More in Games" and then scrolled ALL the way down to the bottom of the resulting page. One of the options is "Shop the Games Collection". Plenty of cool things to buy!
Don’t you hate when you (hypothetically) type in, say… DEtER, knowing it’s just as likely to be DEFER, but you’ll check back later, hypothetically, if it doesn’t work? And then get the “at least one square is off…” and, hypothetically, look at the grid, wonder about SOtTLAUNCH, but because it’s written vertically, you, hypothetically, do not notice the *very* letter you originally questioned? That has never happened to me. Liked this puzzle very much. I’m sorry for those less perfect than I who had to hunt for silly mistakes. Happy Friday all!
@CC It’s never ever happened to me either. And I’m not speaking as a person who read the clue, gave DEtER a 50/50 chance vs. DEFER, allowed that the best way to proceed was to leave the middle letter square blank, then typed in DEtER anyway because it was easier than the (enormously energy-expending in having to lift my thumb one millimeter over an empty square) alternative. I’m also not the person who promptly forgot that the ‘t’ in DEtER had been provisional and subsequently fumed irritably that SOtT LAUNCH was a really dumb marketing term. Nope, not I. I’d never, etc. Happy Friday to you, too, oh fellow paragon of perfection [grin].
Just a bit past 1,000 puzzles, it’s clear to me that Friday is generally my favorite day. Just enough challenge to wake me up, while Thursday trickery, Saturday obscurity, and Sunday volumes can sometimes make me want to go back to sleep. This was a great example as notches everywhere and the entire southeast quadrant took a while to gel for me, but it was well worth persisting.
You say tuber, I say taproot - let’s call the whole thing a turnip.
@JohnWM One of these things is not like the other. Thought the first one had died, so surprised to see them turn up together.
A Friday personal best. Felt like a Puzzledog Millionaire — like every clue was plucked from stuff I just knew. Enjoyed reading more about the Bee hats — definitely time to start knitting one!
A Friday crossword that I can finish without lookups is a rare beast. Of course, most of the people posting have said it was an especially easy one.... darn it! Since there was no theme, it was the clever clues that made this puzzle fun. Coincidentally, while doing this crossword, I was watching Stephen Colbert... he did a bit where he named the seven stages of grief as: DENIAL ANGER POPPING SOUND COLD DRAFT OH CRAP, WINDOW! HOLD ON TO SOMETHING! AHHHHHHH! So when I got to that clue I was quite amused. :)
@Janine it was still pretty challenging even if it was on the easier side. I had the same reaction reading the comments about an “easy” Saturday i solved earlier this month. Congrats on the solve!
To the delightfully fetching Susan with whom I shared a flight from BOS to LGA: I hope you “Beed” beyond the Panagram, Wordled in one, and made all the right Connections. Alas, I was too engrossed in Sudoku numbers when I should’ve asked for yours.
@Jake May I recommend you also post this in the Spelling Bee and Wordle and Connections forums? Who knows, maybe she's on one of those. Despite the NYT Games not including tennis, it could lead to a *match*point! Good luck!
@deb "...the second is more of a hobby. Kind of like the difference between table tennis and Ping-Pong." Low-key Will reference?
@RI guy Very low-key :). He’s the one who taught me the difference.
"The answer to the clue “The ‘handsaw’ in Hamlet’s ‘I know a hawk from a handsaw’” is HERON. “Handsaw” may have been a corruption of “heronsaw” or “harnsa,” the East Anglian word for HERON." This flight of fancy may be the scholars' take, but I disagree. I read the clue to my husband, and he immediately said they're both tools. A handsaw is obvious, and a hawk is a tool used in plastering, a flat metal plate with a handle on the underside. Up in the ivory tower, they may not know a hawk from a heron, but I would trust that Shakespeare did, and so did Hamlet. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawk_(plasterer" target="_blank">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawk_(plasterer</a>%27s_tool)
@dutchiris Both takes are likely correct for someone as brilliant with wordplay as Shakespeare. The birds for the nobles in the audience and the tools for the groundlings.
The wee furry beastie BB notes with an ARF of delight (and some egotism) that the RCA logo was, for many years, a pup almost as adorable as she: small terrier, head cocked, drawn to "His Master's Voice" emerging from the gramophone's horn. Her human agrees that today's is a fine puzzle. The Hamlet "handsaw" is often recognized and played as a synechdoche: the cockscomb of a rooster and thereby a euphemism for the cuckoldry of Hamlet's father. (Caution! Only when the wind is in the west.) I've never run across the heron thing outside the OED, but then, these are still early days. I'll check my RSC edition of the combined works (very highly recommended for its erudition; not horribly expensive) and report back. Thanks for the fun, my NYT friends.
Forget the puzzle, there's a SPELLING BEE BEANIE?!?!
@Holland Oats And a Wordle beanie too! Check them out here. <a href="https://www.ravelry.com/designers/sarah-sinclair" target="_blank">https://www.ravelry.com/designers/sarah-sinclair</a>
Won me over with the clue for PUSHOVERS. GROUP DATE cried out for a non-“Bachelor” clue (“Band gig?”). But overall a breezy puzzle that was fun to solve.
@Puzzlemucker Breezy - yes, fun to solve - yes, too easy for a Friday - YES.
@Puzzlemucker As I mentioned yesterday, I am deep into 2006 Friday puzzles. Today’s bore no resemblance in terms of difficulty to any of those. One of my fastest Fridays ever!
Has been a great week of puzzling for me - no pbs, but really nice flows. I know there are still 2 days to go - hopefully I can keep the momentum! Today’s was no exception, thanks Sarah and Rafael!
So many fun and clever clues in this one! Really enjoyed it.
Re the Hamlet quotation. My OED gives the 'heronshaw' (=heron) derivation but remarks frustratingly, with no further elucidation, that 'Other conjectures taking hawk in a different sense from the bird have also been made'. At first sight this might be a glancing reference to the plastering tool which some below have suggested: but when I look up 'hawk' it does give this as a sub-definition but the first instance of its use as such is dated 1700 which is of course much too late for Hamlet.
Solved it unaided, but it took me 30 minutes of hard work. In other words, a solid Friday puzzle. Nice fill and some clever cluing. Don't quite understand "Many a humanitarian effort, in brief" for NGO. How is an organization an effort? "Group behind many a humanitarian effort, in brief" would make more sense to me. But maybe I'm missing something. In any case, a fine Friday puzzle.
Had trouble in the SE because I watch too little TV and movies. I assumed that the Frozen character was Elsa because she must have been in the crossword several dozen times in the last couple of years. I had no clue who ATTA is and a GROUP DATE is a weird concept. Pokémon cards, holographic or otherwise, will probably remain a mystery to me. Some great clues. As a sometime caver in my slimmer and bendier days I'm not sure about Deb's distinction. I went to plenty of places where the getting in was the easy part and the getting out was harder. I should probably be thankful that I wouldn't even make it in, these days.
@Andrew It seems you don’t have kids, particularly sons. We drowned in Pokémon cards and even after my son grew up, we found them in odd places like under the sofa cushions. Brings back some fun memories.
Hmm. A "hacksaw" is a HERON. That is a new one on me. I imagine the Penguin Shakespeare of "Hamlet" had the definition, but it was really Long Ago--1964/5. And a 'hoot' is a YELL? No, it's not. If I YELLED, it would call way too much attention from too many folks; therefore I would hoot-- a much quieter and simpler way to achieve my aim. We've gotta dice these things finely. Read the Constructor Notes and am no wiser on some counts... SOFT LAUNCH, the back of someone's head, what?? 58A I actually saw some of "Bachelor" (or was it 'Tarts on Parade'?)... really smart way to find your first Ex, I'd say. Better way to find a mate: do post-flood clean-up and see who sticks. Fave: 27D....Walter Matthau shouting, "EN-TaaaaH!" Much to his comedic partner's ire. LOL Great start to the day!
@Mean Old Lady when I yell, there is no debate as to whether I was hooting!
Some fun, fresh cluing, but if the editors think this is Friday-level, I need to find a new source for crosswords. I am working my way through the archives, and a puzzle like today would've been a Tuesday or Wednesday 6-7 years ago.
@Jake Yes - I began working my way through the archives, from earliest on up, not long ago. I'm doing just the Thursday - Sunday puzzles, and I definitely find them more challenging. At first I put it off to forgotten knowledge of then-current events and pop culture, but I think it's more than that.
@Amy I’m finding the same to be true. I think they are trying to widen their audience. At least there are still plenty of puzzles in the archive to get through.
Late last night, I was wondering about Edy's and Dreyer's, so I looked them up. Joseph Edy was a candy maker, and William Dreyer made ice cream, and they became business partners in 1928. A year later, they invented rocky road. I'd say that's grounds for sainthood! (At the time, van/choc/straw was all you could get.) Many years later, the company introduced cookies and cream. Hooray for science! And Oreos.
@Grant Wow, I love this! Almost as much as I love ice cream! These days, I try not to indulge very often... But hey, it's Friday, it's positively balmy out -- at least for January in NYC -- the birds are even chirping. I may even have to opt for cookies 'n cream, in homage to the crossword and Dreyers. 🍨 I'll feed the emus, too: 🍦
@Grant Cookies 'n Cream are my go-to, but it's rare that I crave ice cream. I always say I didn't inherit the ice cream gene that runs through four generations in my family -- grandmother, mother, brother, and niece. If they had an ice cream shop, there would be none left to sell to customers. My father wants my mother to go on more frequent walks with him but can't get her interested in it. I said, "Don't invite her on a walk. Ask her if she'd like to accompany you on foot to the Häagen-Dazs store two blocks down the road!"
First time I've ever been able to finish a Friday with no help. It took me awhile with several breaks but very satisfying! Thanks
@Eric You bonny banks and BRAEs didn't come to mind? How did you get that short entry past the EMU Guards? Emus missed it!
@Eric By happy coincidence, I watched Simon Schama's "History of Britain" last week, which started off with Skara BRAE, mostly wondering why early Brits would settle in such a remote and desolate place as Orkney.
I don’t know if there is a better place to ask this, but where are the new sudokus?! I always do them before bed while breasting my infant and they’re still not up. (At least on the app…)
@Jordyn on the app..scroll right of spelling bee
@Paul Thank you, but I should have been more clear - the sudoku page still shows yesterday’s puzzles and I desperately want to complete today’s. 11 hours later and they’re still not up - I assumed the daily posting was automated so I’m shocked they can go this long without being posted.
7 stages of grief? Not 5? Kubler-Ross is rolling over in her grave, which might be the 6th stage.
@David Lundy there’s (apparently, I googled after completing the puzzle) an expanded model that adds some nuance: EKR’s model is Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, and Acceptance. The seven-stage model is Shock and denial; Pain and guilt; Anger and bargaining; Depression; The upward turn; Reconstruction and working through; and Acceptance and hope. I make no assessments of the relative merits of either conceptual system, just sharing that it wasn’t made up solely for this puzzle! Plus, 5 stages of grief is better enough known that it's really an earlier-in-the-week clue :-)
@David Lundy “rolling over in her grave, which might be the 6th stage” There’s also leaping into the grave: Witness Hamlet; Laertes.
Smooth solve with some interesting side trips. Thanks for the discussions below on HERON. My paternal grandmother called a couch a *davenport*. Many thanks.
@John My granny called it a 'davenport' as well! But what makes a sofa a divan? How is a davenport different from a couch? Or a sofa? A SETTEE is smaller--meant for two (perhaps courting) individuals. I have no idea how to differentiate. Maybe it's like soda, pop, soft drink, and cola?
@John and MOL My grandmother had a davenport in her sun porch, where she would sit and do crossword puzzles, with her trusty dictionary by her side.
You say tuber, I say tap root, let’s call the whole thing a turnip.
Great puzzle thanks! I also would love to have someone knit me that nifty gold-star streak hat. TIL SETTEES. I had SETTlES (lowercase L) for the longest time thinking "couches" is like "tables", which I think still doesn't make sense. Is there a term for when you try every letter in the alphabet for the final unknown box until you get it? There should be. Like, "today I ____ until I got the E in settees."
@Sammy It's "ran the alphabet." Get used to it! Tried and true. Welcome. You've really never seen a SETTEE?
Great Friday puzzle Sarah and Rafael. BETALAUNCH at 11D was my final correction. Nice to see our UNSUNGHEROs acknowledged too.
Loved this puzzle! Fun, fresh fill and really solid construction. Probably easier than an average Friday as it got me my best Friday solve time yet, but I'm not complaining.
Fun, breezy puzzle! Ballet dancers are having a moment in the NYT Crossword, huh? Those pointe shoes are very popular of late! I have to say, it's news to me that SOFT LAUNCH supposedly originated with social media. Language meaning in tech certainly changes at a much faster rate than the culture at large, but that term was a thing long before social media was even a twinkle in Zuckerberg's eye. 😂 A beta or soft launch of software... A restaurant or other venue having a soft opening... (Deb stated in her column "the original referred to announcing a new relationship on social media".) Emus, please don't mind my standing on point on my soapbox this morning!
@G I only know of the SOFT LAUNCH in the business sense, as it was clued. Usually it's a limited release of an indie movie. I would never have gotten that in a social media sense.
G, I'm reasonably sure Deb's "the original" refers to the original clue submitted by the constructors, not which use of the term SOFT LAUNCH was the earlier one. see also original use of emu
Fun puzzle, but I was stymied for the longest in the SE corner by my fervent belief that the one true Bugles alternative is Funyuns.
@Deb Had to be something with corn!
Ugh, I was so close to a perfect solve! I had bases instead of oases and could never figure out what was wrong! Great puzzle, thanks for the mental workout :)
Princess in "A Bug's Life"? Got it. ATTA way to go. !!!! !!!!
Another WednesdayFriday. I look forward to wasting hours and hours trying to figure Thur-Sat out....this one should really have been published earlier in the week....
@Eddie I totally agree. Finished in 13:13, which is closer to what my Wednesday times were before NYT decided to switch us all to easy mode.