For me, this was a great example of the sort of puzzle that seems extremely hard on Pass 1 (very few confident answers), but gets progressively easier the more times you give it a spin. Really satisfying solve.
Ah, a language quirk puzzle, which I love, and Brad is so good at pulling these out of the ether. Let me remind you of his last two puzzles (spoiler alert if you haven’t done them): • 6/19/24 – He finds “a + b” clues that perfectly match their answers. Such as: [Wait + see] for STOPWATCH, and [Hit + run] for SLAPDASH. • 3/6/24 – Like today, he plays with alphabet letter sounds. Two of the theme answers: [Nicholson and Nicklaus, e.g.?] for ONE EYED JACKS (each has one "i"), and [Søren Kierkegaard and Chris Isaak, i.e.] for DOUBLE AGENTS (that is, double-a gents). Wow! Today, when I uncovered my first theme answer (EMMY AWARDS), my jaw actually dropped a bit at how marvelous it worked with its clue. I equally marveled at the other theme clues/answers. When I marvel through a puzzle, it has more than done its job. Another theme plus: freshness. Three of the theme answers are NYT debuts, and the other two have only appeared once in the Times puzzle. That’s a popping theme! On top of that were lovely serendipities: • Five palindromes (ABBA, EYE, HEH, GAG, DAD). • Six four-letter semordnilaps (BOON, OGRE, TATS, GNUS, YARD, TANG). • Speaking of which, a lovely Golden Age of Movies meld with ERROL (Flynn) and its semordnilap “Lorre”. Keep ‘em coming, Brad, please. Your puzzles charm. Thank you for a splendid outing today!
@Lewis Not to mention that we have ABBA with nary a reference to the Swedish pop group. !!! !!! !!!
I never remember which constructors make which puzzles. Heck, I seldom even remember the puzzles themselves even a day later -- unless I've made some sort of notation in some sort of running list I keep. So thanks for reminding me, Lewis, how many recent puzzles that I really loved were constructed by Brad Wiegman -- all of them different and all of them clever.
Let’s give the constructor props both for his clever puzzle and amusing comment.
I’m still not great at late-week puzzles, so won’t trust myself to rate the puzzle. But the constructor’s note gave me a laugh. Excellent self-deprecation. 🙂
Top of the Order was penciled in "At Bat" not "Abbot" originally. Been watching a lot of baseball lately.
I sure did lose a ton of time (time can weigh heavily, you see) thinking that 42D ["That'll show you'] was SEEHERE. After all, not only could I not name the longest river in Spain, I wasn't entirely sure there *was* a river in Spain. I mean if the rain falls mainly on the plain, then the water would just be absorbed, rather than moving en masse.
@Francis After four-and-a-half years of daily crossword solving, I finally know my Arno from my EBRO.
@Francis Be glad you were not asked to spell out another Spanish river, the Guadalquivir 😉 .
Lovely puzzle. Streak hit 1000 today. Solving each day has become an essential part of my identity.
Re 15A (IRAN) - by coincidence, an email newsletter I received today included a link to a video created by the Getty Museum for an exhibit from a couple of years back titled "Persia: Ancient Iran and the Classical World." The video shows a virtual reconstruction of Persepolis as it was at the height of the Persian empire. Five minutes long, and utterly fascinating: - <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oO0FT_YnMno" target="_blank">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oO0FT_YnMno</a>
Hey, Deb! My mom could crack walnuts in her hand, too! She would put two in her hands or hand, and squish. We kids tried to do it; occasionally it would happen, but Mom had the magic. (She's 103 now, and those hands don't crack anything anymore, but the memories of us all sitting around the table cracking and eating while she was getting ready to bake are priceless!)
@Mar in PA Sadly, like our sad former president, I have small mitts. But I learned to squish two of them in two hands and crush the living daylights out of those unforgiving nuts. Hey-Donald probably paid someone to do it and then later claim that he had cracked more nuts than anyone in recorded history.
Well, one of my oldest friends, EMMY, is only called that because her name is Mary Ellen. ME. So, the NW opened this puppy up right away! Some great ones. ENIGMA, BOYTOY, DAD… Smooth but fun! Thank you!
CCNY, Your nice story of your friend reminded me of a long-ago friend’s tabby cat called Casey (for Kitty Cat). (Now that I think about it, maybe that’s more common than I imagine, but hers was the only one I’ve met.)
@CCNY Yet another M*A*S*H reference: Hawkeye is dying to know what BJ's initials stand for. Eventually, it comes out that he was named for his parents, Bea and Jay. With respect to Deb, the official beverage of the NYTXW is NEHI, not ICED TEA.
I was able to call up Woody’s last name immediately— resigned to the fact that information has a permanent home in my brain but I can’t remember my neighbor’s fiancé’s name to save my life. I’ve met him MANY times. Maybe I’ll start calling him BOYD.
@Shelby Drink Your Juice I experience the same phenomenon and always have. :( The truly trivial sticks in there while nothing important does. Why would I remember the last name of a character on a show I barely liked or watched? /Emu Whatshernameagain? /At least I can't remember Kirstie's last name on the abysmal Veronica's Closet /Wait, was it Chase /Omigod it was. Aieeeeeeeeeee!!!
Neato, looked bleak, then just did random fills here and there and before you know it I had finished my yard of iced tea and had begun versifying, ABBA style! At the bar, Errol Garner on piano, she sipped her iced tea and I got to my Tang, and asked her, "Is what you're wearing what they call a camisole?" "Oh behave," she replied, "I got it at Bootie NoNo, down at the mall in the bargain bin they had marked 'Any Old Thang.'" Aargh, it's getting late and I can see where this one is going already, and I don't have the heart to jot it all down. Any-hoo, this was a charming puzzle, diagonally bookended with patoot and bootie -- so there! And other combos: squat & gym rat, no-no and so-so, genes & gametes...and most of all, the wonderous mind to come up with those themers: RUmmy, my particular fave. Fun and saucy, too. Show me the boy toys and I'll show you the Norsemen. And weird that army ants are suddenly showing up, but that's how army ants are: first you see one, then you see another, and before you know it they've taken over the world and have made all humans their slaves, toiling away in vast potato chip factories and candy mills. Like E. O. Wilson meets Rod Serling...
This is how a theme is done! Yesterday's novice constructor should take many, many notes. Yeah maybe overall this puzzle was too easy, but it was well made and the theme didn't lie there like a dead fish furtively planted on a child's hook. It held together, consistent and coherent. It was clever. It wasn't arbitrary. Each answer was different and satisfying and fresh. It was fun! Enjoyed this one. Thanks. /emus live to play another day
Playing with words and letters to come up with a fun Thursday puzzle and theme. I thought the difficulty level was just fine for a Thursday.
Back when I lived in the woods of piedmont North Carolina we had a stand of walnut trees.* One season I gathered up all the hundreds of walnuts to try harvesting them. They come off the tree covered by a thick, rubbery, green rind, like mean little tennis balls. After letting them dry out for a while you run them over with your car repeatedly to start trying to remove that rind. Getting to where you have the shells we see at the store is a hard process. Getting the shells open without getting little bits in with the nut meats is a hard process. They are truly hard nuts to crack! I never tried again. * Walnuts send a hormone out from their roots that causes other plants to stop growing, chemical warfare. So they grow in groves that have no understory to speak of.
@David Connell Did you not also have near-permanently-dyed fingers from handling the hulls? Hickory nuts are (seemingly) more user-friendly, until you try to extract the nut-meats....
@David Connell Indeed, wild black walnuts are *very* hard nuts to crack. My implement of choice is a NEOLITH (really!), an approximately 6000-year-old black flint hammerstone I stumbled across while walking along the margin of a plowed field in Essex, U.K. Crafted from a flint nodule taken from the local chalk formation, this was someone's go-to tool in Neolithic England. A modern option that works well is to slowly squeeze the nuts in a heavy vise until the shells succumb to the pressure. In any case, forget using a typical nutcracker. An additional caution regarding that "thick, rubbery green rind"---when bruised or cut it exudes a "juice" that will stain your skin (and everything else) yellow-brown. The stain will last for a week or more---unless you are willing to remove several layers of skin! These husks were traditionally used to dye cloth in various shades of yellow-brown.
ANY OLD THING was worth the price of admission. I laughed out loud. But I expected to have another guffaw at an answer that didn't turn out to be what I expected. I hadn't looked at the number of letters so that I thought RUMMY would be ARE YOU DRUNK? instead of ARE YOU GAME? ARE YOU DRUNK? has the same number of letters as ANY OLD THING and therefore could have replaced GEOLOCATION -- a much less delicious answer. But this is a cute theme -- and the apt cluing (looking at you, "SAY WHAT?") makes it very deftly executed. This is a puzzle I'd give to newbie solvers to introduce them to a puzzle based on wordplay. Easy enough that they'll almost certainly solve it; amusing enough that they'll want to come back for more puzzles in the future. Liked it a lot.
Isn't IDYL spelled with two Ls? That and ORphEus made me think there was a rebus in the themed answers, initially. In the end and quite unusually, I figured out the theme on my own and it helped me complete the puzzle - phonetic themes are almost always beyond me. Also, I was not on the constructor's wavelength, so I needed lookups for some trivia (why would you call your team HEELS of all things? Isn't being a heel a bad thing?) and Americanisms (PATOOT? I think I may have heard patootie before, but I had no idea what it meant) to get the crosses going for the other answers. It certainly was not the easiest Thursday puzzle I have solved - today's time was 23+ minutes, and I've had Thursday solves half as long before.
Also, as a video gamer I balked at the idea of an OGRE being a troll lookalike. In fantasy games, the ones I know anyway, they are different creatures. Apparently in folklore there is little distinction though so I suppose the clue is correct.
@Andrzej HEELS is short for Tar HEELS. North Carolina is known as the Tar Heel state. All US states have nicknames, often found on their license plates. Here's a link to the Wikipedia entry on Tar heel, if you're interested. It's a bit much for me to summarize. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tar_Heel" target="_blank">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tar_Heel</a> IDYL can be spelled either way.
Question: were there xwords before there was a TSA? How did that work? Like, empty spaces awaiting a federal agency? Is there a fine or a punishment for publishing a puzzle without a reference thereto? Also: note the recurrence of ARMYANT. Another bit of evidence for my theory of the origin of these constructions …
@Clem Somewhat to my surprise, the first of appearance of TSA in a crossword was in 2007. And... it's been an answer 150 times since then. Not sure I understand what your reference to ARMYANT means. ..
Fun but fast. Nice clue for ENIGMA [Tough nut to crack]. The constructor note made me laugh.
I concur with Deb's question: Do trolls and ogres really look alike? If you click on her links to images, they really don't. As a kid, I had a bunch of troll dolls like the one she pictured and I made little outfits for them. Still have them somewhere in storage. But I guess we needed a new clue for OGRE since it appears frequently. Fun puzzle today!
@lhwp That was my reaction, too. I guess any of us who played with those cute toys -- from my childhood in the 70's through to the animated movies they keep churning out, as recently as last year -- are going to have a tough time with that comparison! Perhaps the similarity works better with a Grimm's version of a troll -- or how I picture any given online nag thus characterized-! ... I too used to make outfits for my trolls! Also for those koala bears with the pinchy arms -- remember those?? <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/70s/comments/1c1qnbr/koala_clips_were_a_thing" target="_blank">https://www.reddit.com/r/70s/comments/1c1qnbr/koala_clips_were_a_thing</a>/
@lhwp Gosh, I am older, and plastic troll dolls did not exist for me, but an old illustration of Billy Goat Gruff I do remember ( I think the book had been around for two generations). That ogre looked mean, ugly and big, very much like my conception of an ogre.
Not a PB, but well under my average. It wasn’t the workout I usually expect from a Thursday.
Some of us like to think that solving puzzles, in addition to being fun, keeps us sharp. So, I should be able to pinpoint the puzzle I’m thinking of that also used a “sound out the letters” idea. Right? Except it involved leaving those letters out. Of the clue. (Maybe) One of the themers was the name of a female opera singer? Actor? Greek goddess? It was a year ago. Maybe. If anyone can remember what or… Wait, wait, it was “no RSE goddess”. Found it, 11/2/23. And now I see that theme is really different from today’s after all. Well, I hope you all enjoyed my ESSAY QUESTION. Are there EMMY AWARDS for convoluted bad memory? I guess ANY OLD THING will satisfy me!
This week of Thursdays. I got the theme answers all right without lookups!! So surely, if I look at any other comments they will say today was too easy of a Thursday. And yknow what?! I don’t give a rats flying patootie. Great puzzle! Thanks for the fun. I also just got through ICED TEA on 3/16/21 which was also a great puzzle with an awesome theme. Have a great Thursday everyone! Make it a wonderful day!
I can't say whether the puzzle was easy or hard—I did it on AUTO PILOT, but it must have been easy. I just plugged in ANY OLD THING, because I was listening to speeches while I solved. There were a lot of things that just slid in and they were right. SO THERE! Good job, Brad Wiegmann! (Now back to the convention.)
For those of you wondering about 37D - a 'yard' of ale is a measure of beer, chiefly British, and the object of the exercise is to down this as quickly as possible. The record is 11 seconds, allegedly by Bob Hawke when at Oxford on a Rhodes scholarship 20-some years before he became Prime Minister of Australia. (My own PB was about 40 seconds - not unlike my NYT crossword solving time in that it is about 3 times slower than a decent time.)
@Andrew A meter of vodka is a thing in Poland - you lay out shot after shot on a meter-long board and gulp them down. My PB is 21 seconds. Easy, really. On a good day you can even drive yourself home after the exercise. Yeah I just made that up. In reality it's two meters. So I lied again. Any length of vodka is not a thing, in Poland anyway.
@Andrew Not entirely correct. While drinking it in one go is the overall aim. The actual skill in drinking a YARD is not to have it all burp in your face! Therefore careful turning of the glass while drinking ensures even airflow to the bulb at the end and avoiding a sudden in rush of air and a dousing in beer.
@Andrew Thanks for the Bob Hawke trivia! Very fitting for our old PM who now is the co-founder of a brewery making very popular beer over here.
Fun puzzle. Typical slow start for me, but catching on to the theme was a big turning point and I actually ended up a bit under my Thursday average time. Puzzle finds today were inspired by a search for GNUS. Figured there had to be some homonym tricks there somewhere and... yep - more than a couple of times. One of the puzzles was a Sunday from September 3, 2006 by Lee Glickstein and Ben Tausig with the title: "Triple Play". Some theme answers in that one: KNOWSFOURGNUS BAREINNMINED MEATBUYCHANTS BORNETWOLOOS CZECHBIMALE YULEBEEMIST Don't recall seeing anything quite like that before. Here's the Xword Info link: <a href="https://www.xwordinfo.com/Crossword?date=9/3/2006&g=23&d=A" target="_blank">https://www.xwordinfo.com/Crossword?date=9/3/2006&g=23&d=A</a> I'll shut up now. ..
What's that, Lassie? TIMMY's in the well? OMG, I hope there are no ARMY ANTS down there. Very easy going puzzle. Looking forward to Wordplayers' alternate entries. (No pressure, CLM)
@Vaer: Ha, nope! I thought about “see you later” or “see you tomorrow”, but what are the options? CUMIN CURSED CUDDLY Gave up.
I really enjoyed this whole fill. The theme answers felt like a Sunday in their conceit. Very pleasant company while nursing a baby at all hours. Thank you!
I got the trick early on because I started in the SE....The RU for 59A was mostly in place after a few entries. I ended up with my brain kind of twisted around (or maybe I'm just staying up too late and then waking up too early so that I can catch up via YouTube.) The clues on this one were hilarious at times...and I was pleased to see 'Robin Hood' in the grid. Just wonderful, Brad Wiegmann! Thanks for the lovely Thursday morning treat! I needed a pick-me-up because I discovered that the deer had visited in the night, devouring portulaca, violets, and sundry plants (but leaving all the weeds)... I had to send the solar-powered high-frequency sensor/repeller, and the deer were quick to discover that they were free to trespass at will.
Persepolis and Zanzibar in the same puzzle? What's not to like, at least for a history geek? Actually, 62A was confusing to me, as I remembered it being the other way around. You see, the Sultan of Oman moved his capital from Muscat to Tanzania, because that was the hub of the East African slave trade. Sure, it's thousands of miles away and not even on the Arabian Peninsula, but I guess you can do that sort of thing when you're the Sultan. Tanzania became an independent Sultanate in 1861 (after the slave trade was ended) and was promptly swallowed up by the British and the Germans. So technically 62A is correct as clued, but it's more of a re-branding than anything else. Doesn't matter anyway; Zanzibar is part of Tanzania now.
@Grant "The Sultan of Oman lives in Zanzibar now. That's just where he lives" --- Bill Wurtz, "history of the entire world, I guess" <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xuCn8ux2gbs&t=3s" target="_blank">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xuCn8ux2gbs&t=3s</a>
Shouldn't Tricky Clues be reserved for tricky clues? Telling us that a 3-letter answer about baggage is TSA, yet no mention of ORFEO, GOT TO me. I mean, TSA is in every other crossword.
Viola, Ideally, "Tricky Clues" teaches newer solvers about ... tricks in clues. The TSA clue was included to teach that "for short" in a clue may signal that the answer is an abbreviation. The section is not called "Answers you may not know from the clues." (If there were such a section, how would the columnists decide which clues and answers to include? Your gimme may be my no-know, and vice versa.)
Most of the puzzle was smooth and painless, but I got stuck in the NE corner. I had GEOLOCATION and GOTat, but nothing else. I finally cracked it with the crossing of ABBA and ABBOT, which allowed me to remember Woody's last name and fix my mistake with BOYTOY. I'm glad Deb explained 7D DAD in the column, I got it with crosses but was stumped by the clue. The constructor's notes made me laugh, and wonder if the entire puzzle and theme was constructed around ANY OLD THING. 😆
Did anyone else think 59A was going to be ARE YOU drunk?
@ad absurdum Yes, actually. (Meet me for a shot, maybe halfway, in Kalamazoo?)
I don't think I've ever watched Lassie, but I always ask my dog if TIMMYs in the well when she barks for apparently no reason. Fun solve!
I caught on to the trick relatively quickly (at GEOLOCATION) and it made the solve much faster than it might otherwise have been. I went to all the theme clues and entered the words that mimicked the bolded letter pairs, which in turn made the full theme answers apparent. With such a big foothold, the rest of the puzzle fell quickly, despite some tricky clueing. My favorites were top of the order for ABBOTT and tootsie treat for PEDI (naturally I filled in roll first).
Very neat theme and a couple of the clues were so tough that I got the answers through crossers and had to read this article to work them out (eye and abbot). Excellent puzzle
I hated this puzzle, and then I loved this puzzle!! I worked at it for awhile, ignoring the themes and plonking in words as best I could, sure that half of them were wrong. I felt hopelessly stuck, until i took a break and came back to it, and suddenly not only was i solving more clues, I suddenly got the theme, opening up most of the rest of the board! I got stuck again on the NE corner, bc I’ve never seen cheers and i don’t know basketball. My husband gave me ANDONE(he’s done this for me before too but for some reason it won’t stick in my brain), I looked up BOYD, and getting BOYTOY got everything else for me. I really liked the clue for ABBA, especially as i filled it in confidently on the first pass, then kept erasing and re-entering it throughout the rest of the solve as I wavered in my opinion, so it was nice to have been right about it Last to fall was PIANO/NONO, as I had typed NOgO at first and never realized to go back and correct Thanks for a fun Thursday!!
Cute. Pretty easy to spot the theme. Nice answers.
Tough southwest corner, but cute theme
Nice and easy 15 minutes, liked the theme
8:14 woot. Theme filled up a ton of the grid once it clicked
Fun puzzle! You can give me more of these NEminute. Thanks, Brad!
Brad Weigmann, wow-mann. RUserious right neow. Fantabulous puzzle! I got my IONU
Fun and pretty easy. Once I got the theme, the answers filled themselves in, but they were satisfying. Loved BOY TOY, liked DAD, did not love PATOOT or ON AUTO. Thanks!
Tough one for a Brit today; took me longer than usual. Main issue for the longest time was tOYbOY - knew it couldn’t be right but the crossing letters suggested it was until my wife, having had books published in the US and having gone through the editing process for them, set me straight. Otherwise maybe a couple too many trivia clues; I found the tricksy ones satisfying so no complaints there.
@Phil Funny, I was thinking of the British quiz show, Mastermind, and not the American board game. PEG???
So… Will Keanu Reeves take any old role? (pretty close together on the grid for a duo-neo). [Tootsie treat?] took too long to roll over for me - fun clue. Maybe a [Tootsie roll] is a skateboard? And for our columnist: Do trolls and ogres really… any(old)thing?
What a clever theme! My favorite clue was one I never actually solved: the George Bushes.
Two sticking points for me: First, I assumed that the [Blue reef fish] was a TuNa. This got cleared up relatively easily. But, what's a TANG??? Second area of difficulty was the whole NE-corner. Having E_E, I was sure that [What doesn't look the best naked?] was EwE, with an amusing pun on "you". And is [Woody]'s last name common knowledge for anyone? It took a while, but I eventually stumbled upon BOYTOY, and everything fell into place.
@The X-Phile A TANG is a gorgeous reef fish. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paracanthurus" target="_blank">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paracanthurus</a> I'm with you on BOYD. I had to guess the D because between actors and team sports, I'm just not going to know it. Luckily, only the D looked good there.