Saturday, April 27, 2024

This is one of the most boring crosswords I've ever started. So many obtuse and uninteresting answers that I'm gonna go do something else more interesting....like defrost my freezer.

A streak is an albatross. Mine has been around my neck for 1279 days but now I am free at last.

Just wondering if the hordes who have been lambasting Joel Fagliano for several weeks now are going to inundate this column with praise for editing what is, undoubtedly, a pitch-perfect Saturday crossword. I am *not* holding my breath 😉, but for the record, this was an awesome bit of cruciverbalistic magic, and Joel definitely deserves some of the credit, along with Rich Norris for his 188th (!!!) NYTimes puzzle.

Didn’t enjoy this one at all, and book on CD?!

Feels like a lot of the tougher crosswords at the moment are tough because the clues are ambiguous - lots of possible answers and no real hint as to which should be right - rather than clever. I’m getting through them ok, but finding them laborious. This one in particular just felt like obscure solutions with tenuous clues, rather than the sort that make you mutter aloud when you realise you’ve been led up the proverbial garden path by clever phrasing. This was more like being led out into a field without a map.

BOOKONCD? Really? How bout you CD’s nuts

Nope. Did not enjoy this one at all. So much so that in over 3,000 xwords I’ve done from the NYT it’s the first time I come to the comment section to say how much I did not enjoy it.

Long time since I was so far off the constructor's/editor's wavelength. Nothing easy about this one for me, but made it through.

It's been a long time since there's been a puzzle with such a high percentage of clues whose answers I did not care one bit about. It's really hard to do a puzzle when they evolve things that I find unbelievably tedious. I got disgusted after a few minutes and decided to reveal the entire puzzle rather than waste my time.

Solid, solid puzzle. Classic feel. And by classic, I don’t mean old-fashioned; I mean high quality. Clues that make you think for a good number of beats, but when their answers suddenly hit you, you realize that they’re eminently fair. A panoply of answers from many areas: Sports, geography, the arts, marketing, food, science. A lovely flowing grid with a soaring 18 longs (answers of eight letters or more), including 12 ten-letter answers! This allows for many of those precious solving moments where the addition of one more cross rings the bell and brings the “Aha!”. Freshness, where a quarter of the answers have appeared four times or less in the 80-year-old Times puzzle, including eight first-timers, my favorites being SQUEE, SQUIRCLE, and LOCAL PAPER. So much skill built in, skill that comes through talent and experience (30 years of making puzzles). And sweet serendipities, such as EMIT crossing a backward “emit”, and the terrific PuzzPair© cross of PERK and EXTRA EXTRA. High quality all around. Just a lovely Saturday puzzle. Thank you, Rich, for bringing class to Crosslandia for so long, and for a most splendid outing!

Nice, solid themeless to start off the weekend. Seeing all the complaints/criticism has left me scratching my head. I came here anticipating a positive reaction from the group, perhaps even some complaints about this being too easy for a Saturday. Crossword difficulty can be weirdly personalized. More often than not, if a puzzle strikes me as especially hard, I’ll find that sentiment echoed in the Wordplay column/comments — but occasionally, I’ll slog through a grid and go way over my personal average, yet encounter a breezy comments section full of merry solvers. I guess I just don’t get the folks who find a puzzle unusually challenging and are so quick to criticize *the puzzle* (often along with the constructor, the editor, and their extended families), and label it “not fun”, full of “obscure trivia”, etc. For me, the high degree of variability in puzzle difficulty is an essential part of what keeps me coming to the NYT crossword ever single morning. Yeah, some days will inevitably leave you feeling like you’ve been beaten over the head with the OED (and/or Brittanica/wikipedia)…but would you really want to have it any other way?

Way too tough. This didn’t feel fun, it was a chore. Even after turning on AutoCheck it was ridiculously esoteric. Bleh.

Toughest puzzle for me in a long time. The only section that came (relatively) easily was the SW. Usually, when I have trouble filling a grid, I have numerous erasures at the end, but with this one, my only erasure was to replace CLing with CLUMP. I guess that's because I just had no ideas for a while for so many clues. The beauty of this puzzle was that when I finished, other than the few unknowables that I eventually got from the crosses and a little educated guessing, (WALTHER PPK, SQUEE, LOME, NOT CRICKET, ALONE, SQUIRCLE), everything made sense. There weren't any that made me think, "Well, that was a stretch." This worked my brain in a way that many puzzles don't, so I have to thank Rich Norris for a great workout.

"I can assemble your staircase quickly." "Yeah, step on it!" ("I'll rise to the occasion.")

Well I liked it. It was hard but that’s to be expected. My first toehold was in the NE: I knew that I knew Bond’s pistol and it finally came to me, my dad and brother talking about his WALTHER PPK. From there I chipped away at it slowly but surely. I think people have been quite uncivil lately when a puzzle drops that they don’t like. Considering the time and effort it takes to make these things, I really think that’s NOT CRICKET.

I'm close to 80 and have been doing NY Times crosswords since the 1970s. I have never enjoyed them less than I have the past months. I enjoy using my own wits - and not Google's - to solve them. I'm also wondering if constructors are using more sophisticated methods to create the puzzles - eg, AI. I realize a lot of people don't feel this way, but for me, the glow is fading away.

Well beyond my abilities. Even Google couldn't save me. Napoleon had his Waterloo, Custer had is Last Stand, Lincoln had "My American Cousin". I had the NYT April 27th puzzle. Oh well, I'm still a pretty good speler.

This one had me at SQUIRCLE. I admit it I’m a sucker for words that merge into a funny sounding combo that’s perfectly descriptive, e.g. spork. Today’s puzzle was another one that seemed daunting to me, but which fell together fairly quickly after I got WALTHERPPK, which I pulled from the recesses of my brain from having read the Bond books 50 years ago.

I thought this one was going to be a breeze when LOCAL PAPER came to me immediately and delivered me the entire northwest. But then I ran into WALTHER PPK and the downfall began. Sometimes hard is just hard and not fun, and that's what today's puzzle was for me. I'd have preferred the clue, "Reading for SOME who'd rather not read," when CDs are involved because that's a vanishing medium. But as I often say, at least I can look forward to a new puzzle tomorrow

Maybe the comments were broken for the first half hour, but I loved this puzzle. Nice long answers, very little short fill. A good mental workout!

This one was so hard I could never have finished it without the Hub, who knew what Bond packed and a couple of others that righted some wrongs to set me on my way. (He insists he could never do a puzzle, and I think I'll leave him in his state of "ignorance." It means I get to be the smart one once in a while.) When I was still in the opaque glass brain state, I wrote in 53A and took it out so many times it finally felt NOT CRICKET. SQUIRCLE seemed really weirdISH until it gave me SQUEE, and I thought, Oh sure, SQUEE. I say that all the time, doesn't everyone? About that Manx, I was disappointed when GAEL muscled its way in, but at least the NE was done, and at last, the whole puzzle. Nearly jumped out of my skin when the music blasted. No nits? Okay Rich Norris, you had your fun, and to be honest so did I—big time actually. Thanks, but try not to get too much tougher, or I'm going to need more than a DOOR KEEPER.

I haven't gotten very far in this puzzle today but I already object to it! The only possible way to answer the question "How many people put together IKEA furniture" is, "With a copious amount of tears, tremendous anxiety, the dropping of numerous f-bombs, and the breakdown of formerly dear relationships -- all resulting in a serious existential crisis and lifelong avoidance of all things Swedish!" But that wouldn't fit in the puzzle so therefore it's a terrible puzzle and incorrect and inaccurate and all the other terrible things! Come on, NYT, do better! 😂 (For reals, I can't even look at Swedish fish anymore, let alone enjoy those tasty little treats, without a serious head twitch! 😂)

Reading Rich Norris’ bona fides led me to the decision to bite my tongue. I’m a mere solver whose ability to handle late-week puzzles is finally trending upward. Additionally, I imagine lots of entries were left in by Joel out of deference. Perhaps a few modern entries were thrown in so the cobweb load would be relieved. So instead of complaining, I will go do that oh-so-common activity of driving to the post office for CLEARTAPE. If it’s not there, I guess I’ll listen to some BOOKSONCD and call it a day. 🤷🏽‍♀️

Finished without pleasure.

Truly enjoyable challenge - satisfying start to the weekend - much appreciated.

SOHO is not an acronym, it's a portmanteau. Still, a great puzzle worthy of a Saturday.

I don’t think SOHO (acronymic shopping mecca) is technically an acronym since the Os do not stand for separate words. I originally guessed IKEA for this one since that actually is an acronym which threw me off for a while. Also I agree with the consensus here. This was particularly tricky even for a Saturday puzzle. More like an old NYT puzzle in that you couldn’t really guess on the hard ones if you didn’t know the trivia.

This was wasn’t for me. Hope others enjoyed it more.

Book on CD is just BS

What a challenge! Thought Bond's gun might be my streak-breaker. That's a nasty bunch of consonants to push through when you don't know the trivia! Great puzzle, thanks.

Coxes sit in the back of the boat, not the front. You might say they lead the crew, or head the crew, but only in one sense as they are last across the line.

Whew! A good, tough puzzle, nicely made and clued. I had a few knowns int he NW, worked around counterclockwise and quickley filled in the short answers int he center section. It didn't propagate right away, though. I knew WALTHER but not the following three letters. I did enter PPK from the crosses, but assumed I had errors in the NE and would have to go back to correct something. But then I filled in the last square and was surprise, pleasantly so, to get the happy music. Overall, I was surprised to finish in a little under my usually Saturday average, not that I race thought puzzles. For the first few minutes, I thought it was going to take longer. I have a friend, a wildlife rehabilitator, who, whenever she would see a cute picture of an animal on Facebook, would exclaim SQUEEEE! in the comments. She hasn't done this in a few years, but I recognized SQUEEEEE! from her comments. I had assumed it was an expression only she used. TIL it is a more generally known expression. I love learning stuff I didn't already know from puzzles!

I don’t know why I knew the Bond gun, but glad I did because it was the only gimme here for me!

Didn't enjoy this puzzle at all. What's the joy in having to look up answers? (WALTHERPPK? LOME?). The Isle of Man clue is emblematic of my recent frustrations: yes, people of Gaelic origin live on the Isle of Man, but since many more live in Ireland and Scotland, you are left scrambling around to find a really obscure answer. If the clue fits 10% of the answer, it's not a good clue.

Naturally, any puzzle that has NOT CRICKET and KENT in it is going to get my vote. Other than that it felt pretty tough for me. A cartoonist, ice cream vendor, gas station and what I might buy in a US post office? Yikes. As for Mr Bond’s weapon of choice? Not the foggiest. I was genuinely surprised to get the happy music. I do have one nit; An 18A is a Manx, not a GAEL. The clue/answer isn’t technically wrong, but, knowing several IOM born people, while they would acknowledge Gaelic cultural association, they term themselves the former, never the latter. That grumble aside, an interesting Saturday with a good brain workout.

Hard puzzle, but "like the old days", as many folks seem to want. Rich Norris is a master at the craft. Good to see him back.

That was tough but fun. Did I complete it without a little bit of nefarious research? Well.... "ish". :)

I knew it was door _ eeper, but the last letter eluded me: peeper? Like a peephole? Not very upscale, unless one of the perks of such a place is an in-house voyeur who, for a premium, will give you the uncommon feeling of knowing you're being watched. And who knows about the perverse tastes of those who live in the penthouses (or who subscribe to Penthouse; I debated MAGS vs APTS as the answer there, and had LSD as blotter initials for a long time, which gave me Door Seepers, but seepage, even more than voyeurism, struck me as a bit too reverse upscale). Don't get me started on Door Beepers. Daring, even in this benign instance, to have NEGRO in a puzzle, considering how heightened everything is out there right now and how a single jarring note can set people off into paroxysms of outrage. I pray it will not happen here. One thing I love is how the long verticals echo the other side's meaning, column for column; CLEAR TAPE goes with TALK SENSE; the DOORKEEPER lets you in, STEP BY STEP; when something is priced AT A PREMIUM, it's EXTRA -- EXTRA on top of its usual price. Maybe the same is true of the horizontal ones: a case could be made that DOPE SHEET is a kind of LOCAL PAPER; anything that's BIMETALLIC is by definition impure, and anything impure, according to some British pills, is NOT CRICKET. But what does a CHORUS LINE find itself IN, OVER TIME? Probably in a bad mood, I gather, from what the door peeper at Radio City Music Hall told me.

I never thought of a regatta being for anything other than sailing ships and was sure this was wrong. It seems like every time I intend to trot huffily over here to the comments and complain, I first Google the word and, well look there, I did not know that. I got the whole thing (a worthy struggle) with no lookups. If we all knew all the trivia and obscure words, it wouldn't be a crossword Puzzle, it would be a crossword Fill-in. Some days the puzzle falls into place and some days we have to wrestle with it and don't win. Just my 2 cents.

To the many folks who are complaining that today's puzzle was too hard/challenging/vexing . . . . Go back into the NYTXW archives and pick a puzzle from 20 years ago (or longer). Those were quantum levels tougher than what we get today. (Or else I've just gotten *so* much smarter in my old age!)

I'm a day late and $10 short. This is the hardest puzzle I have done in the past three decades, or should I say not done because I had to do a lot of lookups and tryouts and word checks and even Square fills which I never do. And even when I filled in the words, I could not get into this constructor 's brain . I didn't have aha moments, only oops and sheeses.. it's just one of those things, not the constructor's fault. Not my fault. It's a mercifully rare, interesting attribute of the process of crossword solving.

Rather odd to have NOT CRICKET in the puzzle tonight after today's article about Kristi Noem's defense of her shooting of her dog, Cricket. Definitely NOT CRICKET, regardless of which side of the Atlantic you're on. <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/26/us/politics/kristi-noem-dog-killing.html" target="_blank">https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/26/us/politics/kristi-noem-dog-killing.html</a>

Not cricket doesn’t refer to the game’s governance but the expectation that players will abide by the rules without them being enforced. For example, a player who is bowled out or caught fair and square should walk before the umpire tells them to. A player who catches a ball that has touched the ground as they catch it shouldn’t claim the catch and so on. Not playing fair and not owning up is what we mean when we say we say something just isn’t cricket. Playing like that is frowned upon and nobody likes a player who does it. Bad form. I’ve never heard an Isle of Man resident refer to themselves as Gaels, given hardly any actually are. You were right with Manx.

This was one of those puzzles that had me in despair on the first pass, but after a few words emerged in the SW everything started to fall into place, STEP BY STEP, and in the end I had fun with it. I thought it was fair throughout. I’m a 70-year-old man, perhaps the least likely demographic to use ADORBS or SQUEE, but even I have heard them in the wild (or in dialogue) enough times to have them leap to mind after a cross or two. And age helped me remember that I could trust my car to the man who wears the star. That ear worm will be around for a few hours. The portmanteau SQUIRCLE was new, but that’s where the fun comes in, and it is inferable as soon as you see IRCLE emerging. WALTHER isn’t too obscure as a pistol brand, even if you’re not a Bond fan, and the initials for the model came were part of down entries that were nice and long, giving multiple starting points for guessing them.

I was feeling thick as a brick but have been comforted and made to smile now that I know Rich Norris's background. This puzzle set me in the presence of a bona fide cruciverbalist, a magna cum laude wordsmith, making it easier to humbly accept having been put in my place. I managed one-third of the grid without auto-check and then *still* had to wrangle with it. But now that I know who I was up against, I'm feeling appeased by having at least blue-starred the game. I shake your hand after your win, Mr. Norris, and smile as I thank you for reminding me that I'm still a novice after three and a half years of crosswords. I will keep on keeping on. In the meantime, it's been an honor, sir.

Good puzzle, but I have a major nit to pick on 47D. Since the last T-Top was from 2002, it's time to retire this clue or at least qualify it with a "former".

Enjoyed the puzzle. Thanks to the Nintendo 64 and its Goldeneye game for WALTHER PPK (I originally had PPg, but I suppose that would be a paint gun). Thanks to Matt Parker's YouTube channel for SQUIRCLE. I got BIMETALLIC early, but I was thinking of alloys instead of Euros and toonies. Mad LIBS and REEBOK were probably luckier guesses than I deserved. I held on to tOutSHEETS and TEXAs_STAR for way too long (in my defense, all the local Texaco stations got sold to Shell during the Texaco-Chevron merger).

Having gone to college in the 70's the answer to 39 Across, "Blotter letters" was a gimme. LSD was the obvious answer--until it wasn't.

Funny how trivia can make or break you. Bond's pistol was my entry solve.

I’ve been trying to submit a play by play magnum opus, but the emus seem to be having none of it and are doing the emu- equivalent of trying to stare at me until I stop talking. So I will try to keep it short: This was a great Saturday puzzle, challenging but fair. One of those puzzles when the answers that frustrated me along the way (DOORKEEPER, BOOKONCD, SQUIRCLE, SQUEE) turn out, in retrospect, to be completely reasonable. Just because a word or phrase is unfamiliar (DOORKEEPER), unexpected (BOOKONCD), or even patently annoying in a twee-millennial-blogger sort of way (SQUEE) doesn’t mean it’s not fair game for a constructor. Thanks Rich for the master class.