Thanks for solving, everyone! Excited to see all the personal best times. Your guess is as good as mine as to why this ended up as a Tuesday puzzle instead of a Monday, but I hope you enjoyed it all the same.
@Nate Don't you love it when a plan comes together!
I don't think I have your email address anymore but every time I see your byline I feel like I should drop you a line to say hello! I don't think I've seen you since the Castle days but it's always a joy to do your puzzles :)
@Nate , I always ask what day a constructor had in mind for the puzzle when most comments think it is wrong, and that has never been answered. Thanks for answering it early and saving me the trouble. And thanks for such a fun puzzle.
Something tells me the choice of theme answers was no COINKYDINK. cc: emu handler
Yesterday was my first time finishing the crossword legitimately, not even needing to peek at the blog, and now I've done it 2 days in a row, and both under 10 minutes. Maybe it's just my week.
What a wierd set of memories this puzzle brought up. In my grade school days we would do a different rhyme instead of eenie meeney… It went: Inca binka bottle of ink Cork fell out, you stink Not because you’re dirty, not because you’re clean. But just because you kissed a girl behind a maga-zine. And whoever got “zine” was IT!
@Peabody I knew a variation of this one too! Maybe it's a Chicago thing :)
That small skating arena is so dinky-rink. (No ifs, ands, or lutz about it!)
@Mike I truly admire all skating tricks, some more than others, but it figures that I would never Axel Lutz—makes me edgy just to think of it, almost throws me into a death spiral. Is there free skating at the kinky little rink or do you have to pay? (Wanna borrow my skates, Emu? ⛸️⛸️)
Mike, I am gonna jump at the chance to let you slide today. But forewarned is forearmed, you are skating on thin ice.
Random thoughts: • This is four NYT puzzles in four months for Nate – rare these days – three Tuesdays and one Monday. It’s plain to see why the NYT team likes his early week puzzles. This is junk-free, with mostly everyday words, but for interest, also a few easily-crossed not-so-common entries, like ALTRUIST and ASSYMETRIC. • Lovely to see DOG crossing WAGS, and the PuzzPair© of COIL and SLINKY DOG. • @John Ezra – this grid is full of answers perfectly suited to one of your stream-of-consciousness wondrous ramblings. Please please please! • This is a tight theme. You know it’s a tight theme when @Steven from Salt Lake City hasn’t posted a scroll of alternate answers (though the one he did post was prime!). • Props to Nate for coming up with this idea in the first place and thinking it worth making into a puzzle. Yes it is! • Beautiful to see INKED at 49D crossing two INKS. • I eat a lot of tofu, but have never had or heard of STINKY TOFU. Wikiipedia says it is said to smell like rotten garbage or smelly feet (see ODORS, YUCKY, and perhaps AGONY). So, I will not be seeking it out. (Maybe it’s good – let me know!) Nate, this was a springy bouncy jaunty creation. Thank you so much for making it!
@Lewis Thanks, friend for the shout-out: I tried to do a stream-of-consciousness surf ride on this puzzle, because it did seem that its fill with its echoes and rhymes is perfectly suited to it, but found myself in one dead end after another, going "Think! Think!"
@Lewis stinky tofu is an acquired taste for sure, but certainly worth trying at least once if you're a tofu fan. Enjoy!
Fun puzzle, but more like a Monday than a Tuesday!
🙃 "Sacré bleu!" Dare I think he Nate, constructor Filled his ink key With emoji clues - No, that'd be hinky. Nate's grid filled quick, So I'll have a drinky Some bread and cheese (Nothing too stinky!) Lo and behold: No Mondelēz dinkies!* Nate could've pushed it With toxic twinkies! I salute Nate with a wine-stained pinky! I hope that intel ain't too kinky (If the boots fit . . .😉😉) *that odious spackle-filled four-letter snack puck
A nice but fun easy puzzle. This will help new players gain confidence which is fantastic! I'm saving this puzzle as a newb friendly recommendation for sure.
@Ben F It made me happy that I could finally solve one with only time of needing outside help. It doesn’t give me much confidence though as usually they are far beyond me even being able to figure out the words from hints. :) I need to acquire and remember a lot more random information.
Breezy Tuesday and fastest ever for me at 6:14. I liked ILK showing up after it being in Monday Connections (and after thinking I had no idea what that word was)!
My best friend in high school used to say RINKY-DINK! She and I lost touch after going to different colleges and I always regretted that. Thank you for this Proustian madeleine, Nate. I managed to misspell first TUSc, then ASYMeETRIC, so I had to SULK through some flyspecking, but I loved this FuNKY, sPuNKY theme.
Welcome back, Mr. Cardin, and thank you for this lively romp. Sheer fun all the way through. I'm a bit woozy now, with K's and Y's dancing before my eyes. But since music cures everything... In honor of PUNK ROCKERS everywhere, I considered posting the Ramones, but instead, I'm skipping over to post-punk since it's more my cup of tea. Here's Joy Division with "Love Will Tear us Apart" <a href="https://youtu.be/674KGKRQBPE?feature=shared" target="_blank">https://youtu.be/674KGKRQBPE?feature=shared</a>
@sotto voce You’ve got me roaming YouTube and listening to Cure and Psychedelic Furs and, of course, New Order, even though it feels a bit disrespectful to the memory of Ian Curtis.
It was fun, a little Dr.Seuss-ian, and super quick.
I flew through that but what fun. Not a PB (my typing speeds are definitely slowing) but who’s counting? The rhyming scheme made me smile. I hadn’t heard of STINKY TOFU but @browncoat gives an excellent description further down the comments. One to miss I think. I (mis)spent my teen years as a punk; I’ll go with the angry, anti-establishment vibe, but I saw enough bands to question ‘musician’. Most of the ones I remember couldn’t hold a tune if they tried. I include the Sex Pistols in there. They were nowhere near as ‘tuneful’ live. I believe my early onset deafness can be attributed to too many gigs where screaming into the mic was ‘music’. Happy days.
What a fun puzzle!! So breezy and enjoyable! Interesting to hear that the NYT editors pick the day the puzzle runs (and not the crossword constructor). PB of 2:57. Not sure I'll ever be able to beat that on a Tuesday... Shrinky dinks didn't make it into the puzzle (anyone else old enough to remember those?) but I'm having fun reminiscing about those times we almost burned the house down melting plastic in the oven -_-
@Sparky 2:57 is an amazing time. I counted the white squares. There are 187. A time of 2:57 means you filled them in at an average rate of .94 seconds per square. If I did not have to read or think, I might be able to fill in random letters at that rate, but to come up with the specific correct letters that fast is amazing. Here's a problem for any probability experts out there. What is the expected number of correct cells filled in if one types in random letters in a grid of 187 white squares. Show your work. Emus? We don't need no stinky emus.
A Tuesday PB for me - and faster than my Monday PB as well! It solved like butter. I enjoyed it quite a bit.
Aww...Sharon, Lois, and Bram. Thanks for that indelibly warm sonic memory of my Canadian childhood.
Oh happy day when Nate provides us with a very fun puzzle and so many solvers achieve a PB! I, too, had a record Tuesday solve that made me feel quite special until I realized that I probably couldn’t even read all the clues, much less enter answers, in the time it took some posters to solve the entire puzzle. This made me miss Theresa from NY who used to post short, pithy assessments along with the most amazing solve times. Theresa, I haven’t seen you here for a while. I hope you’re alive and well and still solving at superhuman rates. Hello to everyone else!
Fun puzzle. Can't recall a bigger turning point in any solve than I had with this one once I tumbled to the theme. Not quite a record time but close. And... brought me back to a fond memory from early childhood and a couple of 15 letter answer searches. You can give away your age by letting me know if you recognize either of these. WINKYDINKANDYOU ALLOFUSTOGETHER Neither one has ever been in a puzzle, nor is even in the Xword Info lists. (even the string of letters 'WINKY' was never part of any answer until today). Can't wait to see if anyone gets that. ..
@Rich in Atlanta I read through all the comments this morning to see if anyone would remember Winky Dink, as it was one of those childhood memories that resides in a dusty old trunk upstairs. Sue enough, the last comment (so far) was the one I was looking for. Thanks Rich, for letting me know that the population of Geezerhood is at least two!
I'm not complaining, but it was mighty like a Monday puzzle—and I did love all that INK (WINK WINK). Fun, Nate Cardin, and thank you for some very clever clues! (Watch out for traffic, Mr. Emu, we'd hate to lose you) 🚘
Solved with one hand while eating my lunch and still got a Tuesday PB - but an enjoyable fair dinky, er, dinkum puzzle
My first under 4 on a Tuesday, on the app. I rarely get under 4s on Monday so this was special! Fun cute theme.
What a fun puzzle, and especially what fun being able to agree that it was super easy. Certainly makes a change. Also fun to hear from Nate early on in the comments. Great start to my day.
Super fun, quick puzzle. A new PB for me. I was kind of hoping there would turn out to be a PacMan theme. Blinky, Pinky, Inky and Clyde. That would have made it perfect.
maybe it’s just me but I found this one went far smoother than the average tuesday puzzle! I finished it 7 minutes faster than my average.
A fun, cute solve and my fastest Tuesday thus far!
A quick, fun romp! Nice one, Nate, and thanks!
I saw this sign in a stinky tofu eatery in China: "Smells smelly, tastes tasty." True words, those.
quick note, please don't promote body language "experts". it's a pseudo science, disproven again and again. or rather there hasn't been any proof. but due to promotion, regular prople or even officials, like police, will believe and wrongly confront eg "liars", escalating needlessly. same as horoscopes, this doesn't need an even bigger audience.
@Nick Can you explain exactly what you are referring to?
@Nick I agree, and I was dismayed to see that in today’s mini. Also rather amused that “staring without blinking” supposedly means the person is lying whereas other body language “experts” say looking around and not meeting somebody’s eyes means lying.
@Nick Calling it a science is definitely a stretch, but it can still be useful. We have lots of con artists in Atlanta who will come right up to you on the street. After you've heard the same story almost verbatim a few times it becomes obvious, but sometimes they hit you with a new pitch, so you have to be on guard. If someone stops to talk to me on the street and is looking at me with that unblinking gaze it definitely makes me a lot more wary, because most (not all, but most) of them do that. Maybe with a given individual that's just a personal quirk, but I'm not going to ignore it. And if I'm speaking to someone, maybe asking them to clarify something or questioning a remark and their hand goes to the back of their head, there's a good chance I just made them feel defensive. It's not proof, but I do notice it, and maybe dial things back a notch.
I never understand why an app with perfectly fine UI suddenly changes. Anyway. To the devs: can you please at least put the completion times back on the crossword tiles on the Home Screen?
@Sammy My “new” app interface shows the completion time under the yellow box/star in the blue box: Star Completion time Day of the week Does your app look different?
@Browncoat mine just says "Congrats" and the day of the week. iPhone
This puzzle would have been perfect if only Nate had been KATE! K-K-K-Katie! Oh, K! Katydid. What other K-oddities are there? The end of the Appalachian Trail! (Is 'Kashmir' in any way related to "cashmere'?) The King who united the islands of Hawaii. Words like Kapu, Kaneohe, KoleKole, Kauai, Kukui nuts The Great Kiskadee (not being recognized as a bird by the NYT, apparently.) Okay, okay, okay! I just don't have much else to say, but I enjoyed the puzzle. For one awful minute I thought PhysDau had beaten me to the finish line, but fortunately she did not know the 'artists' colony in New Mexico, so I win the race. (This is nearly like the scene in Nova where the old lioness must slink away into the savannah and the younger just sits there and licks her paws....)
Curse my beautiful fingernails! I rarely do anything fancy with my nails and generally keep them short but I had a fancy thing to attend this weekend and so they are a bit long and beautifully clunky now, which kept me from a personal best (for any day) by almost a minute. I don't know how people who always have their nails done handle practical life things so gracefully. Ah well! I'M OK! Fun and breezy puzzle! But I'd not heard of STINKY TOFU or SLINKY DOG before, so they must not exist and shouldn't have been in here! (WINKY FACE! WINKY FACE! I jest!) I really hadn't, but they were all but filled in by the time I came back to them, so no problem there. EASY AS made me a little :-( though... it reminded me of the time when I got a B+ in an EASY A college class. It was jazz dance in my final semester.... Jazz dance, for Pete's sake! Jazz dance kept me from graduating summa cum laude! Even an A-minus would have gotten me there. I wouldn't say I'm in AGONY over it still, but it certainly is a nagging decades-long occasional bitterness. Wish I could have taken underwater basket weaving instead but alas, I needed the Phys-ed credit. Well, my fancy nails and I better end this SAGA and get back to work. Thanks for a really nice puzzle, Nate!
@HeathieJ My last semester EASY A was tennis. I would have to dig out my transcript to remember my grade. The ”Toy Story” movies are actually pretty funny. I was 30-something when I saw the first one and thoroughly enjoyed it.
@HeathieJ I have fond memories of my EASYA(S) course in college in the 70’s. It was a psychology course (one of my two majors) entitled “Human Sexuality”. It had such a huge enrollment that they had to hold it in the largest music auditorium at my small New England liberal arts college in MA. There was no attendance requirement and only two multiple choice tests to take. There were no assigned textbooks, but there were evening movie showings to illustrate certain aspects of these behaviors in popular films. Memorable class for sure, I did get an “A” , by the way….
For months now, Tuesdays have been easier for me than Mondays. I’m not sure when this changed or what it says about me - but my average for Tuesdays is now lower than the average for Mondays. 🤷♀️. Anyways - this one was a breeze - easily a personal best, but also cute, clever, fun. Thanx PC Nate Cardin for the nice experience.
Fun, fast, and refreshing. Just a few seconds above a PR time even with my fumble fingers. I'm not familiar with STINKY TOFU, is that a popular food item?
@Janine So after living in China for a while, the only way I can describe the experience of walking down the street and coming across the smell of stinky tofu is to compare it to this (something I do not recommend you try at home): cook a lot of Cayenne pepper in a skillet on something to the point where it begins to char and the kitchen fills with a smog of overwhelming vapors that settle at the roof of your mouth and flood your every breath with an inescapable intensity. The pungent smell of stinky tofu isn’t spicy but pervades (overloads?) your senses in the same way as the cayenne. It is one of the most common smells at a street market in China. I’ve had ‘never again’ versions and ‘not bad’ versions and some that were actually quite tasty — some people will tell you it, it doesn’t taste like it smells and that is definitely true depending on the chef. Here’s a really good article: <a href="https://roadsandkingdoms.com/2019/stinky-tofu-in-shaoxing" target="_blank">https://roadsandkingdoms.com/2019/stinky-tofu-in-shaoxing</a>/
Nothing hinky about this smooth romp. Many thanks.
@John I must have been typing while your comment came through. I even had "romp" in there at first, but changed it to "solve" before I posted.
The musicians this puzzle reminded me about are the Ramones. “Sheena is a PUNK ROCKER.”
SLYLY presaged by the clinky flutes a few days ago? A charming, fun puzzle, nothing hinky. Me thinky I now need a Twinkie and a drinky-poo. And a song <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SfvrrSOkJ3o" target="_blank">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SfvrrSOkJ3o</a>
Close to a new personal record for me! Very enjoyable, beginner-friendly fill. ALTRUIST and PUNKROCKER were favorites.
@Anushka I love this take! It definitely felt more like trivia so I would totally recommend it to a beginner. (Those were also my favorite entries.)
So much KY! Went as smooth as silk!
@Edith Cavell Wow, are you back from the dead? and were emus involved?
First time commenting, first Tuesday under 7, and first time feeling like a Tuesday is a Monday…
Speed dates determine compatibility? Dunno; but it sounds like a far cry from logic. Better, a date at a chess match…I missed by a Tuesday p. b. time by a few (25) seconds while shaving a chunk of time off my solve average. Easier than Monday? And how and with distinction. The theme reminded me of this Durante ditty from ‘33. Harry James orchestra backs up the schnozz. <a href="https://youtu.be/6YCOIMkvFt8?si=3ondvicNeOxPOAj6" target="_blank">https://youtu.be/6YCOIMkvFt8?si=3ondvicNeOxPOAj6</a> And this beaut of a ballad, from Johnny Mathis, closes out the twofer Tuesday. This Erroll Garner composition became Johnny’s signature number. <a href="https://youtu.be/0gfYChjh9ak?si=BLDgrGGf64hQBP91" target="_blank">https://youtu.be/0gfYChjh9ak?si=BLDgrGGf64hQBP91</a> With A WINK And A Nod, Bru
A number of comments that this was a "Monday puzzle", not a "Tuesday puzzle". I have always considered them to be interchangeable: two days of easy puzzles before the harder end of the week. I do know the difference and what to expect on Wed, Thu, Fri, Sat and Sun. What is supposed to be the difference between Monday and Tuesday?
@Chrisinroch If you go by my stats, about half a minute. There's a panel of test solvers who help determine where the puzzles should be slotted, and they usually get it right. My increase in average difficulty between Monday and Tuesday puzzles tells me that there's an ever so slight increase in difficulty between the two days. It's not that they're intrinsically different, but rather they just may play a little harder on Tuesdays than on Mondays. The difference between Tuesdays and Wednesdays, and between Wednesdays and Thursdays is considerably greater (at least for me), but there's just a slight increase again between Thursdays and Fridays, as we go from tricky to themeless. The jump between Fridays and Saturdays is again more substantial (four minutes), and there's another substantial jump from Saturdays to Sundays, but of course this is because of the size, not the difficulty level.
@Steve L Thanks for your explanation. I do the puzzles every day but I don't track my times; just go by a feeling of how I did. I'd call myself a casual participant. I see why I wouldn't pick up on the slight increase in difficulty between Monday and Tuesday, but do see the more obvious differences in the other days. Saturday is always the hardest for me.
Thank you for the Sharon, Lois and Bram reference—and video—Sam! An absolute treasure from my childhood. And I love seeing them pop up from time to time even now, on social media, singing their old songs!
Definitely a puzzle to be done in INK.
I was surprised that I tied my PB on this one. Alas, my phone typing skills have not kept up, else I would have beaten it. Thanks for a breezy puzzle, Nate Cardin. I needed this, since my little old dog isn’t doing so well.
@Lena wow! I don't think I could type random letters into the app that fast! I also had my best Tuesday time, at 8:28. Congrats
@Lena Wow! I thought my 4:34 was pretty good!
Definitely a PB time for a Tuesday, and only 20 seconds off my Monday PB time. And I loved it! I get equal enjoyment out of slowly picking my way through a tough Sunday (Thursdays are my real bête noire, and I can’t say I always enjoy them) and flying through a Monday or Tuesday, and today was just good fun. The proliferation of Ys gave this one a particularly upbeat, almost sPUNKY feel, IMO.
New Tuesday PB! Completed the grid and came to the column to locate my one typo - realized too late there was something off about EATEd lol. Lots of L’s and U’s in this one - nice variety of clueing with no Oreos, Japanese beer, or names/proper nouns I’m not familiar with, which made this a refreshing and enjoyable solve during my commute. Thanks Nate! Picturing an emu in knee-high latex platform boots.
What fun! Thank you, Nate Cardin. There's something innately juvenile about words containing -inky that makes me smile. Winky Dink. Stinky Pinky. Shrinky Tinky. OK, I'll stop now.