31D is wrong. Freddy Mercury of Queen was born in Zanzibar. First error I’ve found in more than 3,500 games.
@Scott Klein I was thinking the same thing but from what I can find online it looks like Queen wasn’t technically a headliner at Live Aid, they just stole the show with a stellar performance. I’m interested to see if anyone else knows for sure.
@Scott Klein Was the group billed as "Freddie Mercury and Queen"? (Spoiler: they weren't.) If not, Mercury wasn't a headliner. <a href="https://archive.org/details/live-aid-1985_202312" target="_blank">https://archive.org/details/live-aid-1985_202312</a>
If you don't tune your piano, it will sound dis-chord-ant. (And you'll get into treble.)
@Mike Temper, temper. On what do you bass your remarks? I hope the emus like the tenor of these remarks.
@Mike The key to that pun is in plain black and white, and it's really sharp. When he rents out the piano to pay his vet bills, it's always fur Elise.
Trying (and failing) to not be disappointed that 16 across was not “koolaidman” as I originally hoped.
@Bree Underrated comment 10/10 OHYEAH
@Bree Bit early for Christmas, going down the kool-aid rabbit hole... <a href="https://youtu.be/L0r6ocwGnMg?si=3m-DZg06baLHwwZ2" target="_blank">https://youtu.be/L0r6ocwGnMg?si=3m-DZg06baLHwwZ2</a> lol
@Bree In my first pass, I thought 16A was a clever clue for 'Marie Kondo'. ("Pitch" as in "toss out".) The Kool-Aid Man is waaaay more clever! And now I, too, am disappointed... @KandB Agree! And I see what you did there. 😂
[shrug] I'll be the voice of dissent - this was so much harder than yesterday. Gave up and started revealing instead of looking up, too much trivia and foreign words intersecting each other in NW and SW. On the plus side, TIL lynx is a valid plural and chalet isn't a ski lodge.
@SN funnily I found much easier than yesterday… 😃 Some click, some don’t.
@SN LYNX, like deer, can be singular or plural. There are a few singular team names out there (Heat, Avalanche); I wonder which the LYNX consider themselves?
Too many abbreviations, American specific / trivia in general for me to enjoy this one personally. Ah well Shout out to Pho-Nomenal though. Fantastic name for a Pho restaurant.
When I finally took out the 20th Century Perry and replaced him with the 21st Century Perry, what was shaping up to be The LONGEST DAY—I DONT GET IT, suddenly ITT was here IT IS. There were some tricks and traps and some puzzlers that should have been obvious but weren't to me (TAZ—who else? EXGI—well yes! SCAD—I thought they only came in bunches, but they had to start somewhere). Thank you, Rich Norris. Easy to see you're a real pro at this and know how to construct a puzzle that will be both easy and tough, all at the same time. I wouldn't say I'm in ECSTASY, but I sure had a lot of fun!
Do real people use abbreviations like MTGS, or is it just crosswordese? Also, SKEDS? I can see how that derives from "schedules", but is it something people really say?
@Andrzej Yes. I've written "mtg" lots of times, especially in calendars. I've probably written "mtgs" in notes. I'd say "sked" is more verbal slang, not terribly common. If I were writing it down, I would write sched, but younger people might use sked.
@Andrzej I learn SKEDS for schedules in the 80’s while working for United Press International reading the wires. Since those were actual printouts on a roll of paper, the shorthand was helpful to save space. In an age when everything has an abbreviation in the interest of time, I have to imagine it’s still in use.
That NW corner is just a beast. Had to cheat on the opera to get it...
@Eric I know a guy whose last name is Prahl, and although I know he's not the subject of an opera, I put it in because I had mistakenly put ERAT for 15A, and was then wondering what weird abbreviation was going to fit in 1A (_PCS). I had even thought of PACS, but wasn't sure they were that old. But then when PACT dawned on me, it all clicked and I remembered the famous Christmas special for 2D.
@J-J Cote Yup, also had ERAT in from the beginning and had the same thought when I finally got PACS. I guess it's Super PACS that are the relatively new invention.
Rich is the King of NYT Saturdays, having published more by far than any other constructor, 120. (Number two is Byron Walden, with 69.) He is as skilled and tricky as ever. This puzzle had a bounty of clues that could beget several or many answers, thus delaying fill-ins without crosses. I love puzzles like this, because when you do get one of those answers correctly, it comes with an “Ah!” and sometimes even an “Aha!” But it’s a delicate dance, making a puzzle like this, because you need just the right amount of toeholds. Too many, and the puzzle loses its Saturday toughness. Too few, and the puzzle becomes no-fun-frustrating. For me, Rich and the editors nailed it. So many times, I went from being stalled, to having an answer ping out in my brain, which led to a mini-splat-fill, followed by another stall. As more filled in, the answering pace quickened, leading to a marvelous crescendo to the finish. Just what I want on Saturday. This puzzle was never boring. It brought me into the zone where the world disappears except for the box and I’m in that place I love, chipping away and uncovering – ECSTACY. Thank you so much for making this, Rich!
@Lewis I second your point that too few toeholds make a puzzle frustrating. I don’t always try Newsday’s Saturday Stumper, but sometimes when I do, it seems like *every* clue is turned up to maximum opacity, and I can’t get anything anywhere. It makes me realize just how much I rely on letter patterns to get answers that I don’t know.
@Lewis exactly exactly exactly. The ‘begetting of many answers clues’… when there are multiple in a single section I sometimes have to do a little research on my answers to see if there are any angles I may have missed on any one of them. It helps keep me out of no-fun-frustration land. Someone had questioned what I had to look up a couple of Saturdays ago and I didn’t articulate why I needed to look up things that were gettable. Your read on this puzzle helped!
Anyone else get hung up on “Nancy” as the Drew of many lines? Just me? OK. (It felt a little off to me, too. But I told myself there were lots of sentences in those books!) Ah well. Despite feeling like I was IN A STUPOR for most of the puzzle, I guess I had a SCAD of fun. Just one, though.
@Heidi That was my first guess, seemingly confirmed by LYNX. But CARE TO ELABORATE had me correcting it to CAREY.
@Heidi "Drew of many lines"was the only I regret here. Mr. Norris could have done justice to this pioneer feminist literary sleuth with a clever quote clue such as "It's a _____ thing, you wouldn't understand" I started reading her when I was about eight which was in early 1940s and she had already starred in a slew of books and movies.
Am I alone in putting KOOLAIDMAN for professional pitcher?
@Loufus I had ADVERTISER for a long while but yours is far better!
@Loufus You may be alone, but I love this. So much.
I was so hoping "Professional pitcher?" Would be "Kool-Aid Man", since it fit, but PIANO TUNER was pretty good, too.
@Mojo Wow that would be a GREAT answer. Seriously. Someone should use that, stat. /Oh Yeah!
Oof, a toughie over here, with what felt like a SCAD of US centric stuff. Took me forever to find a way in, NYT trivia is definitely finding a niche in my brain though; I got KNICKS and MET straight off. Go me. No idea on the poem unsurprisingly. Interesting article that Caitlin linked to. London and other large cities here used to get lethal fogs known as peasoupers; a toxic mix of household wood/coal smoke with a million chemicals from industrial chimneys. Not so much LITTLE CAT FEET as lethal lion paws. 1000s died every year until the Clean Air Bill was introduced I think in the early 1960’s. Not so poetic as the SF fog. I too immediately thought Freddie, but he was one member of a four piece so not technically a headliner. SADE was the next obvious one for me. I’ve bored you all with this tale before; but I ran a pub during that time. We rigged up tv screens in the bar and played the whole thing live (yes I got a music license). What a day.
@Helen Wright Hey! You never bore me - always happy to hear more about your pub. I never heard of a music license for a pub, but then again, I never ran one, LOL. But after hearing about TV reception licenses in the UK, it does not surprise me.
In my family we've change that poem to "The thunder rolls in ON LITTLE CAT FEET". How can a ten-pound animal without hooves make that much noise--on carpet?! (Usually at 3AM....)
@Adina Our boy Kato weighs in at 15 lbs and sounds like he’s wearing combat boots when he runs around the house at 3am. We use the expression ONLITTLECATFEET for him constantly, but not in his presence, as he is not partial to sarcasm. A good weekend for me, coming in at just over 50% of my average on both days. Not gloating, just praising the constructors for such excellent puzzles! 😁
My first thought for the "going concern" in 58D was UTI - I had to look up ETD after the solve to figure out the connection!
@Adam Interesting, and reading your comment made me check where ETD was in my completed grid to see the clue. I must have just gotten it from the crosses and not really thought about the meaning, so I looked it up too. And it makes sense. I need to remember to go through the whole puzzle carefully after getting my gold star, so I don’t miss anything that’s good to store in my memory. Thanks for the reminder.
31. Down says the only headliner for Live Aid 1985 born in Africa - However Freddie Mercury, born in Tanzania, is another headliner apart from the answer.
@Luke came here to say this as well. He was born in Zanzibar.
@Luke Great catch on Freddy Mercury. One pedantic point, though. His birth in Zanzibar predated the formation of Tanzania.
@Paul Turner Oops, Freddie. Nothing worse than being pedantic and wrong!
Dear lord. I did 90% in 15-20 minutes. Then I came back to those 9 or so squares in the North West and went to work for another hour 🥵 Toughest section I’ve faced in a while. If my little daughter didn’t need a chest to nap on, no way I wouldnta cheated. But, with the little buzz saw snoring on me, i figured, why not tough it out?
@Striker Oh man. Enjoy every millisecond of that. Our baby girl just turned 32. I can still feel her sleeping on my chest & shoulder. There is no feeling in the world more content and at one with existence than your child sleeping in your arms.
Holy cow! What did we ever do to YOU, Rich? There had to be some kind of insult or snub--that much is clear; CARE TO ELABORATE? I was buoyed (prematurely) by getting the NW corner rather handily....well, except for the WNBA team. Then ITT and TAZ were wonderfully helpful! BIARRITZ fit to a T. (Pause for a bit of preening...) So much for that little triumph.... My German comes in handy, and 48D was very helpful, especially once I gave up Perry COMO. (Yeah, being old is hell.) The West-Central section was really, really hard. ECHELON is a word familiar to me, but how its use in English relates to its meaning in French is a mystery. Maybe 'rung' as in step on a ladder? Fave/Not Fave: "Sticks figure" for YOKEL. Are we really still picking on the so-called 'Hill-Billy' contingent? And yet, clever clue for a tricky entry. I'm a descendant of 'mountain folk'--two families headed by 'Ministers of the Gospel' who lived in places named Flowery Branch and Ellijay and Hiawassee.
@Mean Old Lady I reluctantly wrote in YOKEL. I wish crossword puzzles would stop perpetuating that stereotype.
@Mean Old Lady I had Biarritz as well. So proud of myself…..not. I enjoy your comments
@Mean Old Lady I winced a bit at that clue/answer, too. Descended from mountain folk in North Georgia as well, farmers and ministers. When I first came north in my 20s, I was surprised at the assumptions made about me, personally. And about how segregated the lives were of many white liberals I met who talked a good game. Coming from Atlanta, that just seemed plain weird. OK, rant over.
This was a Saturday? No way! I did it in 43:43 probably my bestest evah since starting the NYT puzzles in 1967! Maybe cause '43 is my birth year? I never hit a "dinger" but I know one when I see one. Mr. Norris, you hit this one outta the park!
Toughest puzzle for me in a long time, and by a huge margin. For a direct comparison, this took me 38 minutes longer than yesterday, and a full hour longer than Thursday. That said, my last 30-40 minutes today were spent staring at just a handful of blank squares. A few thoughts before I move on with my life: - I am very hesitant to cry “Natick!”, being much quicker to assume that it’s just me…but I’d be curious to hear what others think about AMAHL / AMAT - SKEDS…is that a Briticism? First time I’ve seen that in my life. I won’t call the crossing with SKEDA a Natick (as Skeda isn’t obscure, even if I didn’t personally know it)…but that spot was absolutely brutal for me. - It’s wild to read several comments from folks who found this normal-to-easy for a Saturday, and others who felt “on the same wavelength” as the constructor…having just spent 61 minutes on it myself (and ultimately googling “Menotti”) and feeling as far from a constructor’s wavelength as I have in recent memory. As my mother always said: the Saturday crossword is like a box of chocolates, you never know what you’re going to get. And that’s what makes it great!
@Man and 2 dogs You’ve been doing these a while, haven’t you? This is the 70th time that AMAHL has been in the puzzle. It was last here in June. It’s always clued to the Gian Carlo Menotti opera, though some clues omit Menotti’s name. I know next to nothing about either the opera or the composer, but the answer is a gimme for me.
@Man and 2 dogs I didn't think I'd ever seen Amahl before (what a weird collection of letters) but Eric's post would seem to indicate otherwise. Guess I'll keep on ignoring it and getting it from "crosses". I've definitely seen skeda before, although it's a rather wince-inducing slang spelling to me (maybe not as annoying as Les Miz though). The Latin stuff was vaguely familiar. Skeda? Did you mean Leda? /Lez Emuz
I was quite pleased that I knew a pop singer at 55D straight away. Oh well .
suejean, I suspect only a limited demographic will immediately grasp the humor in your post. Emus will not get it.
@suejean I'm guessing a lot us who are in the second half of the game immediately wrote Como. Luckily Katy Perry's name has been splashed in the news so frequently I knew it once I got to The Longest Day. It might be fun to see a puzzle entirely geared toward folks over 50 followed by a puzzle targeting people under 25. I wonder which group would struggle more.
@EmptyJ People in their late 30s might have the hardest time with those age-targeted puzzles (myself included!)
I've become a bit of a sudoku addict, and IMNSHO, there are two kinds of "hard" sudokus--those that allow you to solve with incomplete information and those that basically require you to list all the options for almost every square to unlock the puzzle. I prefer those that allow you to solve with incomplete information. Hard crosswords are similar in many ways, I think. This puzzle, for me, was a delight, because of the way a couple of crosses opened up long or at first unknown answers that appeared at first impenetrable. It offered me constant moments of "Oh, that must be....." and the answer was always perfectly logical and often quite witty. Just wonderful. Thanks Rich!
Some of you may find this interesting... XwordInfo, the site crammed with facts, figures, and more regarding the NYT crossword, announced today that it has a new page -- Oldest Known NYT Constructors -- based on their ages when they made their last puzzles. (The site has long had a page based on the youngest constructors.) The oldest constructor on this new page is Bernice Gordon, who, in 2014, collaborated on a puzzle at age 100. Her collaborator? David Steinberg, who was 17 at the time. Should you be interested in taking a look-see at this new page, here's the link: <a href="https://www.xwordinfo.com/Oldest" target="_blank">https://www.xwordinfo.com/Oldest</a> .
@Lewis Thanks. That gives me some hope.
This was much easier than yesterday's puzzle. I'd have swapped the two. Just my extremely humble opinion. Anyway, any puzzle that mentions cats is fine by me! I'm one of those miserable cat ladies who apparently run the country. (I accept bribes in the form of books, ice cream, and gift cards to Pet Smart.)
@Katie It's always funny how subjective these are, this was the toughest one in a while for me. I found Friday's tougher than normal, but doable on my own, then this one added another ten minutes on top of yesterday's already high solve time. And that was after finally giving in and looking up a couple hints because I was so stuck!
@Katie And here I thought it was white guys, young and old, with Ivy League diplomas, that run the world.
@Katie Speaking on who runs the country, there was an interesting panel concerning why there aren't more white male voices being heard any more. The panel consisted of J. D. Vance, Lindsey Graham, Ted Cruz, Charlie Kirk, Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, Rick Scott, Ron DeSantis, Rubert Murdock, Charles Grassley, Sam Alito, Brett Kavanaugh, Elon Musk, and Mark Zuckerburg.
After finishing Friday under the wire (so hard!) I opened Saturday with trepidation. Getting "ONLITTLECATFEET" right away gave me quite a mood boost and the joy to keep puzzling away. Pure delight.
WhenI worked at a Dairy Queen, the icees were called Mister Misty's.
Pretty hard, but a speedy solving in the end. The whole top half was a mystery to me for a little while. Wee cat paws was probably my breakthrough. Yeah, Friday was arguably harder. Nice puzzle though. Intimidating at first, as I suppose it should be. /Tiny emu feet
Same experience for me. Felt like I was going nowhere until I solved in less than average time.
I'd just like to say as a lifetime NYC resident and die hard Knicks fan. How dare you remind me! Haha
@Erick Yes, but it solved so quickly and easily. 😭 I had a heart-wrenching flashback while filling it in, though!!
A merciful, but chewy Saturday! About 10 seconds in I plopped in CARETOELABORATE. Today, it was a go-with-yer-gut vibe. Saw the clue, didn’t know, looked around the room, and Boom! Throw it at the wall and see if it sticks. The crucivibing was real! Thank you Rich!
When I saw the constructor's name, I girded myself for a struggle. To my surprise, I got this one in 25 minutes, without any assistance. Feel like I've been on the right wavelengths this whole week. Liked that "Foggy" appeared in 12D and "Illinois" in 47A, nicely resonating with Sandburg's ONLITTLECATFEET. Immediately (and wrongly) entered THROUGHPUT instead of ACCESSTIME for 5A. This lasted until the gimme (for me) of METS at 13D, who have moved from the Polo Grounds to Shea Stadium to Citi Field since their debut in 1962. (Of course, the METS have played in many more than three stadiums, but let's call the missing adjective "home" in the clue a misdirect.) This puzzle had a bit of a Continental feel to it, with BITTE and the several reference to France. Fortunately, I knew ECHELON, and got STTROPEZ from the Z in TAZ. Will need to review CIE. Briefly had UNICODE instead of TAXCODE, and UDON instead of SOBA, but these got fixed quickly. Seemed like a very solid Saturday puzzle, as I'd expect from this constructor. Not a fan of SKEDS or THERAP, but so much else to like in this grid.
@Xword Junkie THERAP had me second and third guessing CAREY which I had plugged in on the first pass. badRAP exponentially made more sense.
I managed somehow to type an O in the square that should have held the second A in ELABORATE, making it impossible to see IN A STUPOR for a few minutes. Otherwise, it was a breezy solving experience. I wish I could say the same about Rich Norris’ 1990s puzzles. For a while, it felt like every Saturday puzzle I solved in the archives was one of his, and they all seemed pretty tough.
People begging for a tough Saturday got their wish. IDONTGETIT was my personal mantra. So, still not Saturday level, and I feel as those my mental chops were broke. Well done, Sir, and welcome back for another puzzle creation.
Rats! I was so proud of myself knowing ONLITTLECATSFEET right off the bat. But misremembered it with the S; it was too long so I deleted it, only to later see I was (almost) right all along. Still solved quite briskly and probably would have gotten a PB if not for that small delay. Over too soon! Enjoy your Caturday everyone!
So many factual clues and answers known or easily filled in using the crosses made this seem like a very unSaturday Saturday to me. Yet there was also some tricky stuff. All in all very fun to solve. Do they still teach the Carl Sanburg poem in elementary school, I wonder? I think that must have been a gimme for people of a certain age.
@Vaer I am 70 and every time we have fog here that first line is in my head.
Drew CAREY, PIANO TUNER, CARESS and bunch other answers came so easily that I thought it was a super easy Saturday but I was wrong wrong. There were tough spots all around for me so it took work to get it done but I enjoyed it for the most part. I had Tom for TAZ for a while and correcting helped a lot. I had to do some plugging on the Latin and the German crosses (ending with the Latin) but I got it done.
Sade was not the only African-born headliner at Live Aid. Freddy Mercury was born in Tanzania (I suppose you could argue that Queen was the headline act rather than Mercury himself...)
ONLITTLECATFEET gave me one of those joyous slightly shivery thrills that one's brain works perfectly. . It is one of the few lines from poems in my memory bank for over 70 years, poet is Carl Sandburg, Whole sentence is THE FOG COMES IN... . I actually remembered it as fog CREEPS in, and, although it is certainly pretentious to edit a famous poet, I like that verb better! Great puzzle.
Great puzzle, and interested to see the shout-out to "Doubt". It's not the most action-packed film but the acting on all fronts is amazing. Highly recommended.
@Esmerelda Agree Doubt is a great film. Loved this puzzle until the last letter fill, skeds seems forced.
Who here actually says "SKEDS"? I could accept "scheds" but skeds? Really? Maybe I'm just getting old...
Remi, I don't hear a difference between saying SKEDS and saying "scheds." Do you? N.B. We're all getting old.
@Remi I agree 100%. That one was a far stretch for me.
I'm definitely not in the "It was easier than Friday club," and that's okay. It felt about the same as yesterday to me and landed around the same time—but in the very end today, it was down to one little square... and I just didn't know what it was. It was the crossing of A?AHL and A?AT. I tried a couple options that sounded right and then I realized that at that point, just guessing at answers was no more solving without (my definition of) helps than looking it up, so I looked it! The rest was completely clean though and I feel pretty proud of that... but I save my huzzahs for totally clean! 😊 So yeah, it was hard for me but I enjoyed it a lot! Definitely more than a single SCAD! Loved PIANO TUNER! I guess that "You can tune a piano but you can't tuna fish" is too long for a crossword answer, but it would be fun. At least for me! Oooh, maybe with a rebus! The CARE TO ELABORATE took longer than it should have for me because I kept seeing the ABO and thinking it would be aBOUt... like, "Tell me about it." Now that one wouldn't work but there were a surprising number of variations that did. Only thing I was sure of in the NE was LYNX, being a proper Minnesotan! Oh, and putting bad RAP there had to be untangled but I've gotten much better at ripping stuff out when it doesn't serve. Anyhow, lots of fun and a good workout for me! I'll remember you next time AMAHL and AMAT!!! Watch your backs!! 😉 Cheers to the weekend!!
@HeathieJ My last letter was the cross of AMAT with AMAHL. I, too, probably dithered myself around there too much to consider this a clean win, but I had pretty much given up on even that much. Everyone from Minnesota is going to hate me...I blanked on LYNX. It wasn't until I got the X from TAXCODE before it finally occurred to me. The only team in Minnesota to actually win much over the past two decades, and I couldn't remember them. I had to work real hard to figure out 58D (ETD) even though it's common in crosswords. I'm often on the lookout for ETD and ETA, but they tripped me up by cluing it as "Going concern". I wanted it to be LTD (or INC) early on. Tough one. Happy I finished, but the end was not a victory march, 'twas a cold and 'twas a broken Hallelujah.
What a relief. During most of yesterday’s puzzle I was seriously worried about impending dementia—it took me almost twice as long as usual and required (I estimate) a few hundred passes through all the clues, several lookups, and ten or twelve uses of the "Check Puzzle" option. Just made me feel like my brain was broken. Today? Ten minutes under my usual Saturday time (much less than half of yesterday's time), and felt like smooth sailing all the way. I guess I don't need to call the neurologist on Monday.
@Melissa I'd love to hear your neurologist's response if you made an appointment because "I couldn't do a NYT Friday crossword". Probably be the biggest laugh they got all day.
Rich Norris is such a pro, and his puzzles are a delight to solve. I only started solving in 2016, so my experience with his older work is from solving in the archives. He has quickly become a favorite. While not as tricky as some of his earlier puzzles, this was still fun. I immediately plunked in NANCY at 3D, which worked with CAn you ELABORATE until it didn't. [Professional pitcher?] for PIANO TUNER was a favorite. Great clue for PHO.
@Nancy J. There was a point in my trek through the archives — late 1990s, maybe — where it seemed like every other Saturday puzzle was by Rich Norris with his most devilish clueing.
Completed, found it easier than Friday, but I must confess that crosswordise is not a language. SKEDS even if said (certainly not anywhere I have been) would not be spelt that way. :( Otherwise better than yesterday in pretty much every way.
@Ιασων Sked(s) is American slang, spelled according to American pronunciation.
@Ιασων It’s interesting to me that you wrote that crosswordese is *not* a language. I think exactly the opposite. Your example - SKEDS, I wouldn’t know *anywhere* else, but in Crosswordia, I get some crosses and suss out what word *may* be used to express a shortened form of agenda. It might be why those answers rarely bother me. I’m just learning a new word of the language. I’m not arguing your point, just find it interesting the number of different perspectives we find here. (But either way, I’m gonna remember SKEDS because dollars to doughnuts, it’ll make its way back into a puzzle!)
@Ιασων Definitely not a language. The 'alternate spelling' sorts of clues always feel cheap and forced.
Thank you, Mr. Norris, for easing up a Saturday grid while still keeping it crunchy. And thank you for my LOL moment for that TREE entry. I'm kind of proud that, as a childless lady who has a grown niece, hence no reason to attend children's plays, the answer came to me immediately. (Gosh, I think the last time I watched a children's play might have been in the movie "Love, Actually.") Finally, though I absolutely love Sade, it's Freddie Mercury I adore, as everyone here already knows. I wouldn't be me if I passed up on the opportunity to post a Queen video here — except that today, as my civic duty to the youngsters in this forum, I post their full set from the Live Aid concert. If you have 21 minutes to spare in your lives, please watch and be as mesmerized as 75,000 at Wembley and 1.9 billion glued to t.v. sets worldwide were. (Also worth noting is the full-on presence and participation of the concert-goers. No cellphones back then. And Freddie had them ALL wrapped around his little finger.) Enjoy! <a href="https://youtu.be/_9pfbgpYDsk?feature=shared" target="_blank">https://youtu.be/_9pfbgpYDsk?feature=shared</a>
@sotto voce We recently finished watching “Six Feet Under,” which we missed when it ran on HBO. In an episode from either the last or next-to-last season, the foster son of one of the main characters plays an elm tree in his school’s musical about biodiversity. The lines the character has to sing are horribly funny. I expect that helped me get TREE in the puzzle.
@sotto voce -- My first thought wasn't TREE for the lowly part in the play, but STAR (now that I think about it, it's a pretty dumb answer, but oh I was so sure of it!). A bit after I erased it, STAR showed up in the SE. Hah! That's what they call a malapop (a term originated by Andrea Carla Michaels), when you mis-guess an answer and it shows up later elsewhere in the grid. I can't remember the last time that happened to me.
Freddy Mercury was born in Africa, but he was born a British subject in a British protectorate, and perhaps that is why the constructor of the clue did not consider him “African-born”. Sade Adu was born in Nigeria to a Nigerian father and English mother so I assume she was a Nigerian citizen at birth. Whether the constructor of the clue realized that Sade performed at Live Aid as the band Sade and not as a solo artist is another question, as not all members of Sade are African-born. Regardless it’s a poorly written clue that appears to have been lifted straight out of Wikipedia without much thought. And yes, you-know-who, I realize this issue has been discussed but it’s Saturday and I’ve got a little time on my hands so I’m adding my two cents. Emus be darned.
@Floridaworder That’s an insanely fine hair you’re splitting.
I'm perplexed by all the comments saying this was easier than Friday. I found this Saturday 1000% harder than Friday's. dead language crossing opera, rare military abbreviation crossing foreign language, weird abbreviation crossing Greek mythology??? Yesterday's had mostly ordinary words. The progression from Friday seemed right to me.
@Sarah you and me both, 100%. Having observed plenty of instances where my own perception of a puzzle’s challenge diverged sharply from that of others (in both directions), I’ve eventually come to appreciate that calibrating puzzle difficulty for a reasonably diverse group has gotta be extremely hard (basically impossible), unless you’re going for super easy or diabolical.
Drew CAREY quickly led to PACS and PACTS and AMAT (which, as with ETUI, I know only from x-words). Like others I found this puzzle far easier than Friday’s. But can someone s’il vous plaît explain 6D CIE and 58D ETD?
@Minuteman "cie" is the French abbreviation for "compagnie," equivalent to the English "co." ETD is estimated time of departure, if you're concerned about when you're going.
@Minuteman "Cie." means company in French, like “Inc.” in English. ETD is the estimated time of departure or the estimated time of delivery. (There really are Emus. Don't be fooled.)
@Minuteman apparently Cie is an abbreviation for compagnie (company) -- I speak decent French and I never heard of that abbrev.
SKEDS? Had me very stuck in the bottom right for a long time. Questioning if KNICKS and ICEES really were correct. Got half done very quickly but took a while to get through the long entries. Enjoyable.
@Robin Seemed pretty sketch to me.
“please” and “can you” before CARE TO ELABORATE. Certainly slowed down the NW corner. Do emus elaborate? Can they? Do they even care to?
This one presented a decent challenge but was not as despair inducing at the outset as the Friday puzzle. I was slowed a bit by trying tamiflu instead of ANTIFLU, but caught the mistake pretty quickly. I briefly considered Como for Perry, but held off and got KATY when I recalled the KNICKS as NBA finals losers. I liked seeing foggy as a clue in a puzzle that also had ONLITTLECATFEET as one of its long answers. The fog comes in on little cat feet. It sits looking over harbor and city on silent haunches and then moves on.
@Marshall Walthew Antiflu kind of bothered me; seemed like a made up term. /E-mu A-choo