At least I’m confident I googled less in solving this than the author did in creating it lol
@Clem 1. Do you imagine that at any point in the history of crosswords, constructors did not research the correctness of their clues and answers, even before there was Google? 2. Would it have been better if they didn’t?
I don’t know if it was just me, but this puzzle seemed to have ATON of fairly esoteric general knowledge questions. I’m sure there will be quite a few complaints. I actually looked up ELLIE Bamber, the first time I’ve had to resort to Google in quite some time, and after that it did come together. Not my favorite puzzle, although I did learn some things.
What a brilliant piece of work this puzzle is. Easy fills made opaque by witty cluing, with so many AHAH moments I was laughing by the time I finished it. I started by just dropping in wild some stabs at what I thought might work, like SAMOVAR and DONTMOVEAMUSCLE and they were almost always right, which helped a lot with crosses. By the time I got to "Cream alternative," I was ready for her. I'll admit I needed a bit of fill help—I knew my husband was likely to know at least one, because he's an encyclopedia of off-the-beaten path words (at least my path): PSILOCYBIN; I had to confirm a couple of spellings and find at least one actress. Recently, I had read an article about Leonora Carrington, and there she was! Talk about MIINDMELDS! Katie Hoody, you are a genius. More puzzles, please!
@dutchiris I disagree. I finished without any help and I don't want to see another puzzle from this constructor again. It wasn't brilliant. It was just hard through obscurity. (Cue the usual suspects to tell us that there's no such thing as obscure in crosswords.) Sometimes very hard is very fun in these crosswords. This was very much not one of those times. For me. ____________________ Jesse Goldberg 8/28/2024 for Puzzle of the Decade (emu filler)
Had almost nothing after the first pass, and then it slowly came together. Finished in 44:44, which is not something to brag about, but it does look neat! For a long time, I didn't notice the first accent on bébé, and was looking for a Spanish word. Which inspired to following Ode to Crosswords, hope you enjoy :) Tricky clues and lots of punning, from constructors all too cunning Keep the scary world at bay with your puzzle of the day Yes, you'll have to know some sports (and the really boring sorts) US states and Asian mountains, music bands and Trevi fountains. Learn some Spanish, learn some French know that reek's the same as stench Memorize some German stuff, as for Russian, nyet's enough Know your Shakespeare, know your Plath, some biology and math Have an atlas at the ready, golden stars are pretty heady Run the alphabet when stuck, or write in ink and show your pluck Google things and don't feel bad it's your game, as someone said
@Turing 44:49 for me. Five seconds too slow to earn that pretty 44:44. Still, I'm happy to brag about it.
@Turing Cool! But "bad" and "said"?
@Turing @Turing Loving that your poetic ode has reaped the most(?) recommends of all of the many comments today.
This went beyond hard and tipped into mean. 14 proper nouns, many of them obscure (although oddly I got ZYNGA without much trouble). I decided early on I wasn’t bothering with the gold star. One of the least enjoyable solves I can remember. Two other things: - I’ve said this before but no one calls Kansas State University KSU. It’s referred to as K-State. - As a native Floridian and day one Tampa Bay Lightning fan, I can tell you their arena was originally named the Ice Palace, and it was built first. Cluing that entry with a Russian building instead was… a choice.
@Jamie And as so often, questionable clues could so easily be done differently, like "University in northeast Ohio" for KSU (Kent State).
@Jamie Of course, you're right that people in the know always refer to the school as K-State, but on scoreboards where there is generally only three or four spaces given for each team, the school from Manhattan (KS not NY!) is often abbreviated as KSU. I just went to ESPN for confirmation and saw that the fifth-seed team from KSU defeated FAIR(field) in the NCAA Women's Tournament, 85-41. Go State!
I really enjoyed this puzzle. Something about it was just right for me difficulty-wise. I just kept circling and circling and eventually the top opened up for me but it took me longer than usual to feel like I was actually getting somewhere.
I haven’t had this much difficulty since I started doing the NYT crossword, over 2 years ago. There were simply too many names and words that I didn’t know and clues I couldn’t hammer out, even with some lookups. And even some things I thought I knew (Arizona Wildcats), I didn’t. Oh, well. It’s good to be humbled.
Usually when I successfully gold star a Saturday, I’m very proud of myself until I read the comments saying how easy it was and the quality of puzzles have diminished to cater to the devolution of todays youth (blah blah blah). But not today! Guess playing Words With Friends for the past 15 years paid off finally!
@Pcraves Best comment award goes to you!
I started out with DADA and DECO without a hitch, but as the solve progressed, I felt like I was taking a general knowledge test and unabashedly decided it would be an open book one. After I plugged in some unknowns, I was off to the races and able to enjoy the puzzle. There was much to learn and I can only hope I'll remember an ounce of it. Very instructive puzzle! And the rest, spanners and misdirects, were great fun. For today's musical accompaniment, I offer a Beatles tune, the chorus of which includes "Jai Guru DEVA Om" – <a href="https://youtu.be/90M60PzmxEE?si=gR_hPHyjdRA-3HeX" target="_blank">https://youtu.be/90M60PzmxEE?si=gR_hPHyjdRA-3HeX</a> Thank you, Ms. Hoody, for a top-notch puzzle and the beautiful words about your mom. Your tribute to her with DAISIES in the grid is quite touching. No doubt she'd be very proud!
@sotto voce I started with DADA too, but unfortunately I thought it was the answer to 1D, so it took me a while to sort that corner out!
@sotto voce Same start for me. I very rarely begin by filling in 1 A and 1 D to start and wondered, “this is a Saturday?” But, then, moved on and, yeah, a good Saturday. Some long, well-worn idioms to help tease out unknowns. (Heh, like another commenter, I did think that TWINS was a clever nod to a rivalry in a hereditary monarchy until I got here and saw (d’oh) MLB.) At the end, I had to search to change an “i” to a “y” in PSILOCYBIN to get the CONGRATs screen. Very satisfying. (The puzzle, that is.)
Re: 1A: Dada was not a style but a movement, a rebellion against the political and economic system that had produced colonialism, industrial exploitation of workers and consumers, and destructive wars. An artistic style is a set of design criteria that can be reduced to a set of descriptive or prescriptive rules. Dada was by its very nature a rejection of all rules, and those who rejected it did so because of its anarchistic nature.
Fact Boy, Right. DADA was a movement, not a style. But DADA also refers to the art produced in the movement, so what words other than [Style of ...] would have the puzzle use in a clue to describe [...Duchamp's so-called 'readymades]?
Maybe it’s just been a difficult week, but like others I felt there was a much higher share of general knowledge questions than usual in this puzzle. Yes, I was able to figure out the long crosses, and there were a few clever clues - but overall, I found it a joyless slog.
What a gorgeous grid design, that palette of black squares. It has enough play in it to not be boring, and yet it’s not so random as to be un-noticeable. Pairs of blocks, half horizontal and half vertical, truly, a CONTROLLED CHAOS, and I wonder if that answer amidst this design is no accident. This was a faith solve for me, where I kept running into no-knows, but kept telling myself that the constructor and NYT team put it together fairly, and that if I stuck with it, there would be a happy ending. It turned out to be a Jenga solve, where the puzzle stood firm for a period, firmly fighting me even as I chipped away plugging answers in. Then, suddenly, it fell in a massive heap after I filled one of the spanners. Bam! Bam! Bam! A thrilling maxi-splat. Along the way, shimmering beauty in those four spanners, the frisson of pop (five NYT debuts, four once-befores, and three twice-befores), and lovely cluing, including the sing-song [Snicker bit] for HEH, and the uber-misdirecting [Royal adversary] for TWIN. A splendid Saturday. Thank you so much for this, Katie, and may there be more to come!
I thought this one was going to be a massive fail, but then it was solved. I didn't figure out what kind of "sitting" was being done in 57D until after I had finished. And I didn't notice the two ICEs until I read the notes. This was definitely a Saturday for me.
@Liz B I’m still stumped on the kind of sitting in 57D. I got the answer, but I can’t come up with a satisfying explanation. Care to enlighten?
@Liz B I’m still stumped on the kind of sitting in 57D. I got the answer, but I can’t come up with a satisfying explanation. Care to enlighten? Update: As soon as I sent this, I got it! Reminds me of the Shel Silverstein poem: Mrs. McTwitter was the baby-sitter I think she’s a little bit crazy. She thinks a baby-sitter’s supposed To sit upon the baby. 😄
MINDMELDS, PSILOCYBIN, and DRAGONCON Loved it. My inner nerd was happy with these.
Yes. Ohgod, yes. This was the Saturday puzzle I needed. KSU, thy name nearly became my puzzle Waterloo today.
Amen, Sam. It's nice for a change to have a non-trick puzzle with challenges in both language and knowledge. CONTROLLED CHAOS and MIND MELDS indeed. SMILE!
I really got a kick out of this one. Good cluing, and I had to go through four spellings of psilo—psylo—the mushroom thing.
Wow. I have no idea how I completed this with no lookups. I knew RAISA but nothing else so the rest was a series of total guesses that eventually coalesced into making sense. In other words, my favorite kind of Saturday puzzle! A workout!
OK this was a great one. How do I know? Because when I finished it, I was impressed with myself!
Wowza that was a work-out! Don't let the haters get you down, Katie. I'd like to thank Jethro Tull for introducing me to the term samovar. Around the same time, someone else may have introduced me to psilocybin, but I can't say for sure. Thank you for forcing everyone to spell psilocybin, Katie! Heh Heh Heh.
I enjoyed what little of this puzzle I was not forced to reveal by not being smart and informed enough 🤣 I think I knew one of the names in this grid 🤪. Being well educated and reasonably well read in Poland doesn't really translate well into American culture, at all. It's funny how lost I feel in these puzzles, sometimes, but of course it's on me. Especially on Saturday I don't mind being completely destroyed by a crossword.
@Andrzej Stop it! You are clearly both very intelligent and well informed. I'm sure there are plenty of Americans who found this puzzle to be really difficult, and I am one of them! This one pretty much beat me up. So many look-ups.
@Andrzej I think I came out of the womb knowing my enemy, and that its name was Math. But I think I have you bested by my failure to pass the first semester of typing in high school. I would not have graduated at 16 if I had not had a semester of band, also a disaster (I did not know how to play an alto clarinet, the only instrument not already claimed, and had the naive idea that someone would teach me how). The worst moment came a during band practice, where, as usual, I held the mouthpiece in my mouth, hoping that everyone would assume I was actually blowing into it. When there were several bars of background doodle-doodle-doodle, everyone turned to look at me, waiting for the bridge I was supposed to play. Mortifying. Fortunately, the kind bandmaster gave me a B-, which made up for the typing failure, but there was an unspoken agreement that I wouldn't be coming back.
@Andrzej I did more lookups than I ever have on this one today. It was hard. A lot of little-known names and facts. I had very few give me's today
@dutchiris Did you encounter a thing called “New Math” in school? I did, in 4th grade (1962ish) and it was completely different from the multiplication tables and algorithms we had learned up to that point. It made no sense in that context, and I think the school dropped it the next year. But the concept behind it could have made a difference to many of us who grew up hating math. Understanding the principles behind mathematical operations, rather than just memorizing times tables or formulas would have made a lot of difference.
@Andrzej Andrzej, I sometimes scan the puzzle comments solely to discover whether you may have scattered a few of your pearls among them. Today was a jackpot! Thank you for them always.
This is exactly what I hope for in a Saturday morning puzzle. Lots of unknowns that have to be teased out, ambiguous clues, and overall great fill. Thanks, Katie, I needed that.
No lookups, but man did I have to work for it. One of the toughest Saturdays in recent memory!
Glorious! Answers that were so much fun I smiled typing them in! CONTROLLED CHAOS? MINDMELD? PSILOCYBIN? TICKING TIME BOMB? ICE PALACE? Felt like I was a toddler in a ball pit. But the balls were words. And there weren’t germs everywhere. And…never mind. It was just super-duper fun. Hope something lovely happens today for each and every one of you!
ICE PALACE: that must be the place where the ICE RAIN happens? CONTROLLED CHAOS: better than the other kind? PSILOCYBIN: a gimme, though not a user. Think this grid would make a good themed puzzle involving dominoes, bacilli, or boxcars.
To all those complaining about the amount of trivia: Cmon this is a Saturday puzzle. I didn’t know almost any of the trivia when I started but got almost everything on crosses—admittedly with a lot of time and guesswork but that’s part of the fun. My only lookup was Oscar WILDE and I would have been able to go through the alphabet to get the D if only I had spelled PSILOCYBIN correctly. If a puzzle only has things you immediately know in it then it’s not much of a puzzle is it?
@SP I'm with you 100%. Seems some people feel that a puzzle is for showing off what you already know, rather learning new things. That's fine. But I wish they would word their gripes as subjective experiences rather than objective truth. This puzzle was hard for me, and I enjoyed it thoroughly.
Fantastic! Top to bottom the best puzzle I’ve seen in a long while. Such a fun, challenging solve. The past and the present colliding on so many levels. Really nice work. Thank you!
This was a challenging and enjoyable puzzle. I did like "way-out fun" and "angled for attention." It was also nice to see samovar again. It's been a while. Have a wonderful, solution-filled weekend and may the "Madness of March" just be on the basketball courts.
@Min I stared at MA_E for “Way-out fun” forever… literally had to run through the entire alphabet until I got it! And then of course it was like, “Duh!”. A great puzzle
Best puzzle in a long, long time. Was genuinely worried for most of it. With all of the conference movement recently I didn’t think twice about the KEN wildcats, but when i was hopelessly stuck the big 12 part of that clue finally clicked, which got me to muscle, then the whole answer, then controlled chaos, then it was just some mop-up. Bravo!
So many mini themes! Raisa crossing with samovar and ice palace, mind melds and psilocybin, dada and deco, Wilde, ode, and I Too, and more! What a treat.
This is the hardest puzzle I’ve done in a while. Actually I gave up. I couldn’t crack the SW. I just couldn’t give up swish (cry before a shot) for SMILE. ShEDS for SEEDS was at least a real word. Like I sad. I just couldn’t give up swish. That said. I thought the puzzle was a little too heavy on proper nouns. But now realizing the intricacy of the grid design. (Not sure why I didn’t notice it before). I think I would have been much for forgiving about anything, even a bunch of trash fill, given the ‘uniqueness?’ Of this grid design. I like Saturdays that humble me. The joy is in the struggle.
@Weak a little more salt in the gravy, perhaps.
@Weak To be clear. I wasn’t saying this puzzle has trash fill. I was trying to say I would have ‘allowed’ a bunch of BAH, MOO, TSK, EKE given what I assume, would be a very hard grid design to fill. (At least HEH had a fun clue) I still think too heavy on the proper nouns, but at least during solve, I would have said to myself “I get it bro. You gots to make tradeoffs to make this grid work”. Versus what I actually thought during the solve, “another name? C’mon bro”
Really enjoyed this one. I thought the obscure trivia was pretty much all gettable via crosses. I also have never heard of ELLIE Bamber or ESSIE Davis or LEONORA Carrington, but they were easy enough to figure out once some crosses fell into place. #MakeSaturdaysHardAgain
@Gabrielle I agree completely.
I feel extremely proud of myself for solving this unaided. A good half of it I just plugged right in and found myself right time and time again, I slowed down a bit in the lower third, even though ZYNGA was a gimmie. But somehow I kept going and it all filled itself in. Even some of the tricky crossings that I found, logic and educated guessing saved the day. Or is it diem or dies. 😉 In the end, I had to find one error, where I had put ETAL instead of ITAL crossing the magic mushroom. But I found it easily in list view on my phone. I thought it was pretty tough, but very fun and lively. I enjoyed the long answers a lot. Really had to dig deep in my brain to remember that Netflix used to be about DVD rentals. Probably wouldn't have without a few helpful crosses. Really appreciated the inclusion of the Langston Hughes poem, ITOO. Loved seeing MINDMELDS, even if it didn't involve Spock or Sarek, whose mind meld with Captain Picard is one of my dearest Star Trek TNG memories. Dang, Patrick Stewart is amazing! I also really liked GAWK for overlook at 5A. Anyhow, I liked it! And I do feel very proud of myself for this one. Huzzah!
Serious question: is there a reason why I should have known that the letter crossing PSILOC_BIN and Z_NGA is a Y? It could have been A, E, I, O, U, or Y as far as I can tell. Since Z_NGA is a made-up word, you could even argue that it could have been H, K, or T.
@BB They created FarmVille (and later Mafia Wars), the bane of Facebook users around the world back in 2010. So if you were on the platform around that time their name was ubiquitous.
@BB That square was my final challenge as well. I knew the pronunciation of the mushroom compound, and something about ZiNGA looked wrong. I finally looked up the company name ZYNGA, and then PSILOCYBIN appeared along with the completion star. ZYNGA was once in my brain back around 2011 or so, but long since forgotten.
@BB I never heard of them either. I was fairly confident about the Y though. It was everything else that gave me the heebie jeebies. ____________________ Jesse Goldberg 8/28/2024 for Puzzle of the Decade (emu filler)
@BB If you're not familiar with either word (or at least the spellings thereof), no, but isn't that true of pretty much any cross? Sometimes it comes down to either running through the alphabet or looking things up. Especially if names are involved.
@BB I originally had ZENGA, but l figured (correctly, as it turned out) that I might have to revisit it, since I didn’t readily know the psychedelic drug. And as soon as I looked at the two together, the Y came to me. I think that both these answers could qualify as niche, as only a certain portion of the populace pays attention to the owners of online games, and similarly, only a niche group of pharmacology wonks and acidheads are likely to know the name of the drug. I suspect most of the complaints will be about that crossing today.
@BB It seemed to me that many of the answers were especially hard to spell, with the two or three vowels a seeming possibility. And with psilocybin, we even have a "y", which, from my recall could have been the third letter or the seventh letter, or both, or neither.
@BB I had to run the AEIOUY string of vowels to get the music. Better than having to run the whole alphabet, I suppose. Still finished under my Saturday average.
@BB Come on, people. There's nothing obscure about psilocybin. It's been all over the news, as it's being studied as a treatment for depression. And as for "made up" brand names, so are Google, Xerox, Kodak, and plenty more. Just because you don't know something doesn't mean other people don't and doesn't mean it's not fair game for a puzzle. I can't understand why people complain about things they personally don't know being included in a puzzle, especially a Saturday. Psilocybin and Zynga were both gimmes for me. And I'm not a "pharmacology wonk" or "acidhead." But I had no idea about Leonora Carrington, Ellie Bamber, Antoinette of Bourbon, Essie Davis, Dragoncon, or Raisa Gorbachev, and yet I still solved the puzzle without looking anything up. And I've only been solving since last August. Lots of logic, as well as trial and error. What rule is there that says solvers should never have to run the alphabet? Why not if that's what it takes to learn something you didn't know before??? If crosswords were only filled with answers I knew, I would get bored and stop doing them. Staving off Alzheimer's one obscure answer at a time.
@BB Serious answer: Many genera of mushrooms contain "cybe" in their names. From the Greek for "head" or "swelling", when rendered in English. The psychoactive compound is named for the genus of mushrooms that most commonly contains it. From Wikipedia: The genus name Psilocybe is a compound of the Greek elements ψιλός (psilós) "bare" / "naked" and κύβη (kúbe) "head" / "swelling", giving the meaning "bare-headed" (i.e. bald) referring to the mushroom's detachable pellicle (loose skin over the cap), which can resemble a bald pate.
@BB Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake is a wonderful read about the amazing world of fungi and how they’ve shaped the evolution of life on earth. And continue to be crucial today. The chapter on psilocybin is especially mind blowing!
@BB I had an “i” too. Because WILDE and DEVA was a Natick for me, and I ran through the alphabet without finding a cross, I finally had to look up WILDE and then flyspeck until I found my spelling mistake with ZINGA
Wow, how the d_vil did I finish this one. That was hard. I knew hardly anything in the puzzle. I guess this means it was constructed well and I made some decent guesses. Yikes. Still a tough and scary one for me. As we've learned, the really long answers are often surprisingly accepting hunch fodder. And yet in the end it didn't take all that long. Strange. Really not looking forward to seeing others say how easy it was. ;) ____________________ Jesse Goldberg 8/28/2024 for Puzzle of the Decade (emu filler)
Got it done but, oh my!, that was Nattick City and I’m the mayor. I much prefer language- as opposed to trivia-based crosswords.
i had luTES for KITES. Plenty of other natick crosses for me include; WILDE/DEVA, SAMOVAR/RAISA, LEONORA/RENO. It was a brutal puzzle to solve but i really enjoyed getting the long ones, which were surprisingly quite attainable with some perseverance!
First time through the acrosses I had exactly one answer I was confident of, and it was only 3 letters. First time through the downs, not much more. Second time through the acrosses, answers began to fall all over the place. It was kind of a transcendent experience, having just a few letters in a row or column suddenly come into focus as a complete answer, over and over again. Had to jump away to attend a Zoom work thing (it was great, actually) but just now was able to come back and finish. Delightful puzzle. Delightful column. And delightful comments so far. Do I keep reading down or stop? Tis a quandary.
Lost my streak. There were just too many squares that I couldn't come up with the right vowel. I looked all over and finally decided I didn't deserve the star and did a puzzle reveal. I had GMeN rather than GMAN. Never notice that ITeL wasn't right. Not my night.
@Francis I knew I would be revealing stuff about halfway into my across pass 🤪 There was just so much stuff I didn't know I thought my usual method of looking stuff up would go beyond what even I consider fair - looking up half the grid is cheating even for me 😆. I the end I revealed something like a third of the answers 😜 In my book you always deserve a star BTW!! ⭐
Your mom would have been over the moon. Great puzzle. Thank you.
This is beyond unbalanced and not fun. Make it solvable by actually challenging the solvers instead of centering the entire grid on whether or not you know a bunch of random googled trivia. 20+ random proper nouns, foreign terms, and some of the driest riddles I've ever seen in a crossword. Several unfriendly crosses. The long quote fill-ins were fine. 30D/45D/53A is just plain inexcusable.
@Michael 45D is inexcusable?!? “Way out fun” for MAZE? that was so clever. Was this a typo? I do agree about 53A You know ZYNGA or you don’t. Fortunately I knew it Although the response one usually gets is “you can get it from the crosses”. Not sure if that is true in this case
@Michael, wow. Just wow. I get it; you didn't like the puzzle. But why do you think anyone wants to hear your peevish rant? I personally found this puzzle fair, fun, and just challenging enough. If you expect to just race through filling in easy, trite answers, what is the point of a crossword? I do crosswords to keep my brain alert and to learn new words, history, and trivia. Why do you do them?
@Michael - "Random googled trivia" = Things I didn't know.
@Michael I guess I solved an unsolvable puzzle!
@Michael I just love how you phrase your criticism as objective truth rather than a subjective opinion! /s
@Michael I used to sometimes feel this way when I was less experienced at solving crossword puzzles. Free your mind, & the rest will follow (today's puzzle includes a 'supplement' that some claim may help with that 😎)
A good ol’ Saturday challenge is one thing - a slog through proper noun after proper noun, when you can practically feel the strain of the constructor’s contortions, is quite another.
@AGW I knew almost none of the proper nouns this week, but was able to get enough of each with the crosses to work them out.
Throwback to the difficult Saturdays of old, which I usually didn't even bother trying to solve. p.s. I'm not complaining.
Very difficult, very highbrow puzzle, at least in the fill. At first I thought this was a streak killer, but again, not giving up saw me through. This was a true Saturday satisfier.
Hats off to Katie Hoody--this was a really fun puzzle today! Oddly enough, I immediately got ZYNGA, SAMOVAR, PSILOCYBIN and some others in the SE corner, but I struggled with others that were more straightforward, like DENTS (and especially KITES). 😄 Thanks for a fun Saturday morning! Looking forward to seeing more from Katie! 😀
Happily went over my average solve time. What a great puzzle...thought I might have to resort to Google but persistence carried the day. Many thanks for the fine effort by this constructor!
Although Raisa came to me straight away, I hadn't thought about her in a while. Different time, different world. Nice puzzle.
@Esmerelda She was my only gimme among all the proper names today 🤪
@Esmerelda Anyone that didn’t consider RAISA a gimme, is too young for me to trust. Although thinking about it, I don’t think I know how to spell her husband’s first name.
Somehow I convinced myself that [Royal adversary] was TWIN because of king and queen bed size and completely missed the baseball reference
@Calypso same!! I never ever know sports clues.
@Calypso My brain went even further afield to The Man in the Iron Mask.
Psilocybin and Leonora Carrington, far out
I thought this wasn't impossible and mostly an appropriate difficulty, but by the time I got to the SW, I had to give up and look some things up. KITES was a really rough crossing: * Lots of things have strings * If you didn't know the sports team (or, like me, had the misleading idea of "Arizona Wildcats"), half the letters of the alphabet could substitute for K * The abbreviation could be many different letters, with "PC" having multiple meanings also * If you didn't know the British actress, it could reasonably be ELLIE or aLLIE (or oLLIE?) * The herbarium item seemed like SEEDS but could maybe also be rEEDS, with 46D being a collective noun or weird plural
JJ, I agree that lots of things have strings, and I also did not know which Wildcats we were looking or the first name of the British actress. But I did get 3D, 47D and 56A from the clues, and went with a vowel for the first letter of the PC clue (51A) after having the other two from the crosses. With _ I T _ _ in place, KITES became clear to me, and that introduced me to ELLIE, confirmed the very likely SEEDS, and seeded KSU. A perfectly fair Saturday exercise IMO.
@JJ The SW corner was the toughest part for me, too. That was a great way to clue KITES, and until I got that, I was stuck.