My drama coach just made such a scene. (He had acts to grind.)
@Mike Whereas my drama coach had a tendency to chew the scenery, and it's really hard getting the teeth marks out...
@Mike My drama coach was a 1960 STUDEbaker Hawk. She drove everyone mad with desire, and you ask why CANTILEVER alone?
@Mike Props to you, Mike. Without you, it'd be curtains.
@Mike Glad you didn't let him wear you down. You can't be upstaged!
Anyone else confidently slap in TEE for [Culture center?]? Et tu, emu.
@Lewis No, but I had tau there for a bit, making this puzzle harder than it should have been.
Lewis, Absolutely. And it stayed there so long, that even when I had removed it to enter SILENTP, my inner grumbler mumbled “can’t believe they have two ‘how it’s spelled’ clues in a single puzzle”. Doy.
@Lewis 🙋♀️! Came here to say that! But then the grid is filled except for a bunch of white…surrounding those three letters. …
@Lewis I did count the letters in culture and consider that possibility. But I held off and let the crosses fill in that answer.
@Lewis Yes! And felt very clever about.
@Lewis Absolutely did that, and I never get the "spelled out letter" answers, so I was pretty happy. And of course I missed the SILENT P for a good while.
@Lewis 🙋♀️ Me too. I had tee, incorrectly, and took way too long to get SILENTP, just like @Grant said.
Wow what a tough one! Persistence paid off, no amount of googling helped (I try not to outright cheat with google but kind of indirectly look around for clues). A great brain bender, no ifs ands or buts!
Hardest Friday in a while. 25 minutes. Usually I can just keep cycling through the across and down clues until I'm done, but had to resort to zone defense on this one. A lot of good misdirects
Having woken up in the middle of the night again, I opened the puzzle and proceeded with my first across and down pass. The result? Six answers, and I'm sort of sure about one of them 🤣 It's not looking like I will be able to make any progress with this one. I know almost none of the trivia entries, and the clues are nowhere near my wavelength. It's quite amazing how stumped I seem to be at the moment, actually. And it's not even Saturday! Maybe I'll be back with an update later.
@Andrzej it’s a challenging one…just keep chipping away. Less trivia than you think.
@Andrzej I found it to be extremely challenging for a Friday or for any day. I completed it cleanly, but much slower than usual, and with very little filled in, and low confidence level for many answers, the first time through.
Andrzej, Give it another shot later. There isn't much trivia, but the idioms may give you fits. Good luck!
@Andrzej I just finished and it was a very tough Friday for me too. There are more gettable answers than at first glance but it definitely involved out of the box thinking
Finished now with several lookups and more reveals. This was my least enjoyable solve in quite some time: maybe since the art heist Sunday abomination last year? I should have abandonned it after the first pass. INSIDE DOPE and CLAM DIP were cruel for me. Never heard the former idiom, and I have no idea what the latter is about: do you make clams into a dip or does some particular dip go with clams? Of course my background is to blame. Polish clams are not edible, and the ones I had in Belgium and France neither came with a dip (a white wine sauce was most common) nor were they mushed into a dip. Also... What's a cookout? I've encountered the word many times in these puzzles but I only just realized I don't know what it means. It sounds like people come together to cook communally? Is that it? HOPSTEP, and crossing ELSTON, too... Yeesh. What's a shuffleboard? Of course I'm intimately familiar with Shanghai's M50 district - who isn't??? I could go on listing more unknows... Also, I really did not enjoy the clueing in this one. Rarely will a puzzle annoy me with how its clues are worded but this one did. Meh. Case in point - A model way to work: CATWALK. So you randomly throw together several words that sort of have something to do with what a catwalk is and consider it a witty clue? C'mon... I should write down the name of the constructor to spare myself similar grief in the future.
@JayTee Thank you. That sounds really nice. I haven't heard of anything like a cookout in Poland, either at present or historically. Potluck-like events I am more familiar with: for example, a huge summer potluck had apparently been a regular event at the housing estate we moved into several years ago. Recently there were attempts to revive the tradition, moderately successfully. I only went once - I'm not really good at socializing with people who effectively are strangers.
@JayTee I know what a catwalk is, although I never thought about the etymology. I like your theory :) I only now realized that catwalk may be used as a verb... This puts the clue in a different light, I suppose. My complaint had to do with my understanding it as a noun, only. Still, this particular constructor uses misdirection in a way I find obnoxious rather than enjoyably tricky. The smug, minimalist author note does nothing to improve my image of him.
@Andrzej Spoiler Alert: Skip to avoid Don't just up and leave and call it a day.
@dutchiris I'm glad you loved the puzzle, I really am, and I appreciate your faith in me and in my potential for growth. However, I am adamant about my personal aversion to this puzzle and I will not be swayed. There was just something I did not like about the clues. When solving, I sometimes imagine the constructor at work - for example, I will see them smiling, happy that they thought of a novel, fun way to clue something mundane. The image of the constructor that formed in my head today was one of a person smirking at the prospect of the pain inflicted on solvers. I can see the guy bent over the half-constructed grid like Frankenstein over his monster, putting bits together, twisting them to the accompaniament of evil laughs. The smug author note fits very well with this image. Not all hard puzzles inspire negative emotions in me. For example, Lewis's grids are impossibly difficult for me, but I don't mind them: Lewis is a true wordsmith, with language skills beyond any I will ever have, and it shows, but without any of that aura of smugness. Today was completely different, for me.
@Human /virtual fistbump @Hobby Gardener But this is completely different! On this board I'm not interacting in real time with a group of random people. Here, largely shrouded by anonimity, I'm conversing online with other cruciverbalists, and ones interested in this particular kind of conversation. There is no bad music in the background, mosquitoes are not feeding on me, nobody offers me their horrible, dry cake, I don't have to pretened to be interested in whatever it is somebody is saying, I don't need to awkwardly stand there when somebody I barely know tries to introduce me to their kids I have no idea how to talk to, etc. I am very good at socializing, but only with people I have a lot in common with :D Also, the term "stranger" doesn't really mean the same online as it does in real life, does it? Online we all wear a mask, and the mask is the only thing anybody ever sees. In a way, all people we meet online will always remain strangers. However, we can feel an affinity to the persona of an online interlocutor, and in a comunity such as this, those personas feel familiar to me. In real life, proper strangers are appreciably different from people we know intimately, and thus their strangeness is more tangible. That's my take, anyway. (Maybe nothing I have ever said here about me is true?)
Andrzej, Maybe just don't do puzzles in the middle of the night?
@Andrzej Keep in mind that the clues are often rewritten by the editors, so it's hard to tell whether the constructor was actually responsible for the clues that you disliked. Like you, I had almost nothing after a pass! In cases like this I resort to googling the simple trivia but this puzzle actually doesn't have that much of that!
@adrian! I appreciate your taking the time to reply to my series of critical posts, and I respect you for it: you have much more grace than I do. The man I see behind your comment seems nothing like the cartoon villain I imagined while solving. Still, I stand by my personal opinion of the puzzle, and seeing your byline by a future one will make me think twice about attempting to solve it. You may interpret that as a compliment - some of the constructors most beloved of the veterans of this community are the ones whose work I enjoy least. You're in good company, and I'm just a slightly grumpy, opinionated Polish guy who is better at rants than solving challenging puzzles. That being said, knowing at least one of the clues I deeply disliked today was meaningful to you makes me dislike it a little less. @Barry Ancona When I wake up at 3 or 4 AM, I first try to go back to sleep. Often I realize that nothing will come of it. I can't get up, because then the dog would get up, too, and the general ruckus would wake my hard-working wife, who needs her sleep. I can't start reading a book, either, because I don't want to turn on the bedside lamp. So I do the only thing that's viable - I solve the puzzle on my phone. At this stage I'm wide awake, and my head is probably in a better state than any time during the following day. @Bob I know, and I usually mention that in my comments. Today, however, the quantity and consistency of all I disliked implied one person was responsible.
@dutchiris I enjoy meeting new people and getting to know something about them - I realized that when I was almost 40, and it changed my life. It improved my empathy, taught me better understanding of the needs of others - also those completely unlike me. I like chatting with servers, random people who I share a table with (happens quite often at restaurants in Germany, where we sometimes go on holiday), my climbing partner over 20 years my junior, the various climbers at my favorite gym, security guards at our housing estate and at work, foreign exchange students, etc. What I'm hopeless at it is following the social conventions of weddings, team-building events, those pot lucks I wrote about above, black tie dinners, etc. under such circumstances I just shut down. It's probably down to my contrariness and general nonchalance, or maybe undiagnosed autism 🤣. I've been working at my faculty for 20 years now and I've never met with any of the people there outside work, and none of them know who my wife is 🤣.
I apologize to everyone for this especially tricky Friday, designed entirely I’m sure to give me anxiety about hitting the streak benchmark of 2000! Persistence paid off, but slower than my average (which is not a problem, just unusual). I’ve kept this streak going somehow through pandemic, cardiac arrest, and a variety of other crises; I wasn’t going to let some fanciful wordplay do me in!
@Jannicut That’s an amazing streak. Congrats!
@Jannicut Congratulations! Your streak is astounding, but even more so is how you've stuck with it through thick and thin. I'm truly impressed!
@Jannicut WOW. What else is there to say, except WOW!
Jannicut, Congratulations. And no apology necessary. In fact, could you please work up a similar level of anxiety for less-round-number milestones in the days and weeks ahead? Because this tricky puzzle was fun! :)
@Jannicut, Congratulations! Man, you picked a hard one to reach 2000 with! Well done!
@Jannicut That cardiac arrest must have come at a ‘convenient’ time, puzzle solving wise. Pandemic. I think it was easy for people to keep the streak. Heart attack. I think you are alone on that one. Congrats on the puzzle streak and, you know, surviving at life…staying alive streak, as it were. Crazy story
@Jannicut Amazing!!! Congratulations! 🎉
After my first pass, I had only a handful of answers filled in, and I wasn't entirely sure of quite a few. I actually looked at the top of my puzzle to make sure it was a NYT puzzle and that it was, in fact, Friday. And I did that twice. This came together like a puzzle from the archives. Slow, fill in, erase, sometimes put back in, etc. until it miraculously came together. A perfect Friday.
Like many others I found this one tough, well slower than my Friday average, but that made getting it cleanly all the more satisfying. I don’t think there were any ‘unfair’ clues when crosses were used.
Yes! Y e s ! A Friday like Fridays used to be, and I’m positively giddy. Adrian, you made my day before I even started my coffee. What a treat to have a puzzle that threw up some resistance—and what fantastic, fresh and spunky fill. Jazz lover that I am, I know Charles Mingus very well, but with B _ _ in place, I filled in BOw, even though Mingus is known for his finger technique. (HOw STEP? Well, maybe…?) Because if you haven’t heard Charles Mingus’s visceral, poignant BOwing, you should. Here he is with Duke Ellington in Fleurette Africaine from the Money Jungle. Listen for that haunting sound of his arco. <a href="https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=uN8DPwUMa_U" target="_blank">https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=uN8DPwUMa_U</a>
@Sam Lyons I agree. Not that "bowing" was his specialty, BOP certainly was not. He came after bop, and while he admired bop musicians like Charlie Parker, he only did bop sections of music as a contrast to the meat of what he was doing.
This is a puzzle with my favourite kind of theme, and the theme is a feeling - of cautiously finding my way through a darkened maze in which the master architect has placed just enough dusty light switches to allow you to find your way, and appreciate and learn about the interesting, hidden artwork. (This positive buzz of course means I didn’t find it quite as hard or obscure as some of the 25+ year-old ones in the archive. But still lots of brow-furrowing.) Great Friday!
@JohnWM Nice description of the kind of crossword puzzle I like best.
Being sad, especially in these times, is nothing to be ashamed of. Keanu is sad? So am I.
@dutchiris And I hardly ever bring this up, or refer to it in any way, but I'm sad, too.
In early week puzzles, the leap from clue to answer is often instantaneous. Later in the week, you get The Gap, where the answers don’t slap down, where the art is in creating clues that don’t give the answer away but are close enough to where a cross or a riddle-crack will make them click. Adrian is so good at making these type clues, clues that make a puzzle opaque at first, then openings start happening. He is also so good at designing and filling a grid. Today we have a Times debut design that allows for 16 bigs, and man, does he take advantage of them – BONE MARROW, FIRST WORDS, I’VE GOT EARS, NOT ONE MORE, REGULAR JOE, SLOPPY KISS (all these are Times answer debuts!), not to mention UP AND LEAVE, and CALL IT A DAY. And may I bring your attention to the four-stacks in the NE and SW. You almost always see junk in four-stack crosses – it is expected, actually. But today, not a tinge of ugliness. Actually, look at all the answers in this super-low 66-word grid – ugliness be gone. Wow! Beauty in the box today, showcasing the art and science of puzzle-making, and creating, for me at least, a most splendid outing. Thank you so much for this, Adrian!
@Lewis I love how you can break a puzzle down and analyze it.
A gold star is not enough of a reward for those completing this puzzle. Maybe the Times can throw in a free Tesla?
@Dave Maybe second prize, for those who didn't finish, *two* Teslas! Be sure you solve your puzzles, or you might be saddled with a Tesla.
@Dave Can they make mine a Hyundai Ioniq?
A tough one, and only the thought of continuing my streak kept me going. Even then, far too many lookups for comfort. But hey, tomorrow is another day, as they say.
From the comments I see mixed responses to today’s puzzle- I am firmly in the “loved it” column. Lots to help solve the clues I didn’t know by themselves, slow burn in some corners - but enough crossover to get there. I’d take these puzzles any day over contrived themes and rebus’. I guess I am just a simple soul at heart. Thanks for a satisfying solve!
20A: Picture the baby, surrounded by the eager family. Baby speaks their first words: “Mile…Stone…” Baby may grow up to be a crossword constructor.
@Cat Lady Margaret I tried first tooth , first steps… Oreo pie saved me
Steady straightforward satisfying solve. I must be getting better at this...
I'm going to claim my five hundred words of reminiscing because I'm an old man. And I like to think about things changing. Elston Howard. I instantly knew that because, and I'm ashamed to say this, but he was one of the very few black men on the Yankees (which I rooted for because they won all the time and I grew up in an area far away from any actual home team--I do expect several centuries of purgatory for that). So he stood out. And he was a great player. I didn't get to see him often (or ever?) but he was a starter on the Yankees, and that was *way* more than good enough for me. Respect. I wasn't quite sentient when the color barrier was broken. But the demographics of baseball have changed enormously *twice* over my lifetime. Of course I do realize that had the USA actually lived up to its ideals, there wouldn't have been a need for the Negro Leagues (feels funny calling it that), and I would have known of a lot of other terrific black players in my early days.
@Francis I spent my early years in Spencer, New York and rooted for the Yankees because they were from New York (and because they always won). I have several ELSTON Howard baseball cards that I got from packs of Topps baseball cards which are what I spent my entire meager ten cent allowance on every week back in the early sixties. I still have them and hope to pass them on to my grandson, if he ever shows any interest in baseball, on NATIONALTV or otherwise. It was nice to see ELSTON in the puzzle today, not just for the reasons you’ve so eloquently set out, but because he was one of the very few answers I felt confident in after my first pass through this tough Friday.
@Francis ELSTON was a gimme to me, too. I became a Yankees fan in the mid-60s, and those guys are permanently etched in my brain. Thanks for the reminder that ELSTON was a groundbreaker. We sometimes forget those pioneers. But I also happen to be re-reading Jim Bouton's baseball classic "Ball Four!" right now, and Mr Howard plays a small but memorable role in that book and its reception.
@Francis ELSTON was a gimme for me as well. As a young child my Dad took my younger brother and me to see the Yankees play the Twins in Mpls. We sat behind the Yankees dugout. Elston at the plate pops a foul high into the clear blue sky. Davey and I watched the long arc of the baseball soaring high above us. Seemed to take forever, but eventually it started down, coming right to us! Transfixed we saw our Dad reach up his right hand and pluck the ball barehanded out of the ether at the last possible second. OUR DAD!!! Baseball at its best. Dad gave the ball to 6 yr old Davey who kept it safe until he passed away. I inherited it from him and still have and cherish the memory it evokes. Thank you, Elston Howard!
@Francis This is one of my favorite threads in memory. I'll be checking back later hoping to see more replies. Thanks @Francis and everyone who shared a memory.
@Francis I’m an old Red Sox fan who remembers Elston Howard mainly because he lined a single to right field with two outs in the bottom of the ninth inning to break up a no hitter by rookie pitcher Billy Rohr in early April of 1967. It was Rohr’s first major league game, and he was never that good again. Howard got traded to the Sox later that season and redeemed himself (from a Boston point of view) by making a great leaping catch and tag at home plate for the final out in a crucial game against the Tigers in Detroit. These plays are indelibly etched In my memory because they were featured in “The Impossible Dream,” a commemorative LP celebrating the season that I got for Christmas in 1967 and listened to about a thousand times. All of which is to say that ELSTON was a gimme for me too. And yes, he was a great player.
@Francis @all Thanks for sharing your memories. Makes me misty eyed. Like Bill Bean says in "Money Ball", "How can you not be romantic about baseball."
I had nada after my first pass through the acrosses. Well that’s not true, I did have TADA. Never mind, I thought. The downs are usually easier. And they were. Marginally. I chipped away very slowly, but the NW proved very stubborn and I despaired of completing the puzzle without a lookup or two. I’m going to blame my sluggish thinking on the fact that I was solving while half watching the exciting first game of the NBA finals on national tv. Whatever the case, I finally gave up and went to bed, the first time I failed to complete the puzzle in one sitting in awhile. In the morning, an answer that should have been obvious to me, NATIONALTV for big game medium, suddenly became glaringly obvious, and the rest of the puzzle fell into place. Doh! At that point I went from frustrated by this puzzle to enchanted. The SW with BONEMARROW, UPANDLEAVE, CANTILEVER, and SLOPPYKISS all being crossed by SILENTP was some real DEVILRY.
@Marshall Walthew That SILENTP answer bugged me for ages. I had the TP from the crosses - there is no word, however contrived, that ends in TP (unless it's something to do with a Halloween prank and they wouldn't do that twice, would they?) - I've done something wrong and I can't find it - definitely one of those annoying, eat-at-you answers. Loved every minute of it.
@Marshall Walthew I was mis-directed into thinking of wild animals, but NATIONAL ZOO did not fit. And "big games" are increasingly shown on streaming services these days. NBC has been running Premier League matches on Peacock (usually the one I want to watch) and several NASCAR races are exclusively on Amazon Prime this season.
This Friday puzzle was as tough as a Saturday for me.
Today's puzzle is rated Very Hard, with a median solve time of 20:24 and the median solver 48% slower than average. I am happy to say I beat that, but not my own Friday average. For me, this puzzle hearkened back to the days when I more consistently had to go slowly, wound up with more white space than filled-in space after the first pass, wound up with more white space than filled-in space after the second pass, and the dreaded feeling that maybe I might not finish this one. (Although these days, I have the confidence that although it will take longer, I will eventually get everything.) Of course, a lot of people say that in the past, puzzles were consistently harder, but I also think I'm a better solver than I was, say, 10 years ago. The reason for this extra difficulty seemed to be vagueness of clues. For example, I saw [New ___] and thought it was most likely AGER, but it didn't have to be. After all, the puzzle comes out of another "New (four letters)." So many clues seemed like they could have been various things, or nothing came to mind at all. My strategy, then and now, is to put in any factually based gimmes (ANN, SAC) and strong guesses (OPAL, ODOR), and try to get a foothold somewhere. This time, it was the SE, and from there, I managed to circle around the puzzle until all was done.
@Steve L At this point, I consider myself a pretty strong solver; nowadays, my (early-week) speed times are curtailed by my poor typing skills. But who are all these people who completed this one in less than 21 min.? They scare me. Like you there were very few gimmes, and short--ANN, SOAP, RAVI. But there were a lot of guesses, many of which turned out to be correct--it was just finding out the right combination of them to make sense. If I had been doing this in pencil-n-paper, by the end, it would have been in gray shreds of graphite and rubber. But I'd like to focus on one entry, 30D: I didn't know the way from Sioux Falls to Sioux City, but it had to be in the form [N/S/E/W][N/S][E/W]. 64 possibilities, no more. Couldn't remember Balboa's name, but could have either an 'N' or an 'S' in the middle. Never saw "John Wick" (I think he's a comic book character, right?), but once I got _ADK_ _ _U, I figured it was "Keanu," and he was SAD, not mAD. At that point the second letter of 30D had to be S as well. Guessed at ANY. And no idea what goes on in the M50 district, but what ever it was, I'm pretty sure it doesn't end in NW. Hence, SSE. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0hiUuL5uTKc" target="_blank">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0hiUuL5uTKc</a>
@Bill Try again. Maybe look at a compass rose! Only 8. Each of NE, SE, SW and NW has just two modifiers. No such thing as NSE, for example.
@Steve L I'm amazed I didn't find this too difficult, given that I've never yet figured out a rebus theme. Sometimes it just depends on what you know, like MINGUS and RAVI.
@Steve L I had a similar experience except I forced it. Also ended in the SE and had similar high- confidence words. Wish I had given it more time.
Disappointed beyond words with "inside dope"
@Sean Why? Yes it was hard to get, but figures can be numbers and numbers that are shown only to the privileged few would reasonably be the inside dope, meaning info that is shared only with those on the inside or in the inner circle, or something like that.
Wow! I finished this one pretty quickly. Whenever I finish a puzzle quickly without hints, I come here to ensure that I haven’t mastered the puzzle but instead easily finished an easy one. Without fail, the majority of comments are “easy for a….” Until today! I’m sorry everyone else isn’t as good as me. I know how you feel. :-) I’ll resume my puzzle mediocrity tomorrow.
@James Out of curiosity, what constitutes “pretty quickly “ for you? My Friday average is 21m34s and today took 30m57s. My fastest Friday is 7m43s so I’d guess today was very much at the top of my range.
DEVILRY, indeed! Dang, that was a toughie for me! After my first full round through, everything had to eventually be stripped out except, ANN at 1A, ATTA at 17A, LSD at 34A, and ANY at 33D. While I'm not overall proud of that, I am proud that I knew it was LSD right away. Tricked me in a lot of places, but not there. Huzzah! Having no experience with LSD outside of the NYT crossword, I've come to recognize that trips rarely mean anything but drugs, usually LSD. This probably makes me just better than a rookie solver now. Anyhow, it was a good and entertaining puzzle, though crazy slow going for me. Enjoyed it—and I got 'er done! No SADKEANU here!
Feel the need to add to the posts from the folks who liked this one to help balance out the board a bit. Personally, I was pleasantly surprised to be challenged again on a Friday. I found the last handful of Friday puzzles to be fun enough but lacking the level of difficulty Friday's deserve. Finished it clean about 7 minutes above my average. I thought that was perfect. The clueing was misleading and creative; I have no idea where people are getting "dark" from, but to each their own. Anyway, thanks for the tough but fun Friday, Adrian. For me, it was a great start to the day.
@EmptyJ That’s exactly how I feel. The last few Fridays have been nice puzzles which ran on the wrong day imo. This morning’s puzzle feels just right.
I was NOT on the same brain wavelength as this crossword maker. This is one of the few crosswords where I defaulted to checking it as I went… usually I only do that if I can’t figure out my mistake, so for me this was super hard. Inside Dope…? I still don’t get it.
That was a tough one , I was concerned that I might not finish but plugged away and got it done. I got a bit hung up on sloppy kiss/silentp. I was sure that it had to be sloppy kiss but couldn't work out what word ended in tp until I finally saw it. We need more challenging puzzles like this one on a consistent basis.
I enjoyed the Mingus clue, although it unaccountably took to me longer to come up with BOP than it should have, because my mind was stubbornly fixated on the instrument on which he was a virtuoso, the bass, even though that clearly didn’t fit. Mingus was a towering figure, both figuratively and literally in the history of jazz, and though he could be hard on his bandmates because he was a perfectionist, he fostered the careers of many fine jazz musicians, including Eric Dolphy and Mal Waldron. Iconoclastic until the end, in his last months he embarked on one of the oddest musical collaborations ever, as he worked with another iconic North American musician, the great singer/songwriter, Joni Mitchell. Other jazz musicians had scorned her earlier attempts to infuse her music with jazz elements, but Mingus, recognizing a sympathetic talent, by all accounts, took her under his wing. The resulting album he inspired, Mingus, while not one of Joni’s most beloved efforts, is complex and fascinating music. It is worth a listen just for Joni’s version of what is perhaps Mingus’s signature tune, Goodbye Pork Pie Hat, a tribute to saxaphonist Lester Young, to which Joni authored some respectful lyrics. Anyone interested in exploring the work of Charles Mingus would do well to start with perhaps his most accessible record, simply titled Ah Um.
@Marshall Walthew Thanks for the listening suggestion. I’m not a huge jazz fan, and while we have some Coltrane, Miles Davis and Bill Evans, I know next to nothing about Mingus’s music.
This was a perfect Friday puzzle. Seemed impenetrable at first but worked my way through methodically. Great words, GREAT clueing. Thank you!
@Diana I felt the same way! Although it definitely could have passed for a Saturday, too.
I do almost nothing but watch NBA basketball. No one ever describes a point guard (or anyone else) using a hop step. Here are some terms I'd choose for a point guard's crafty maneuver before that, although admittedly many are not seven letters: CROSSOVER, STEPBACK, BEHINDTHEBACKPASS, EUROSTEP, EURO, GOINGTHROUGHTHEFIVEHOLE, PASSFAKE, WRONGFOOT (verb), BOUNCEPASS, HESI, and I'll think of some more once I've recovered from my fainting at this terrible clue.
@Asher B. I am glad, then, that I don’t much follow broadcasts of NBA basketball - with HO? STEP, HOP made more sense with BOP than any other option.
@Asher B. I would never suggest that anyone knows more about NBA basketball than yourself. Truly you are a titan in that respect, and I bow to that. But these are a few references to college basketball highlights from a desultory search of a mainstream media outlet: 2019 ESPN "DeJulius finishes the steal with a smooth hop-step layup" 2019 ESPN "Nate Pierre-Louis splits defenders with a huge hop-step to lay it in for Temple." 2024 ESPN "Kevin McCullar makes a nice hop step in the paint and gets the and-1 layup to go." 2024 ESPN "Blake Hinson's hop step earns him two at the basket" So, I hope that you can accept that when you go to the hole with "No one ever describes a point guard (or anyone else) using a hop step" you've gotten reeeeeeeejected.
I’ve been an avid basketball fan since the 80s. I’m a fantasy nerd, a season ticket holder, been to finals games and even played for many years. To those who struggled with hop-step, I can confirm, it’s pretty obscure. I know what it is, but I rarely hear it used. Eurostep, for example, would seemingly be much more tricky but it is much more common. Your struggle is real.
Started on this last night. No SOAP. Had another go early this morning. NAH So decided to do something productive with my day (i.e., billable) and took a break this afternoon from working and, TADA!, the brain finally showed up. It's a funny old life. A proper challenge and, please, keep stacking them up Adrian. Nice one.
@John Carson No soap, radio.
A perfect Friday grid. Elston Howard and Charles Mingus. 'I've got ears', 'silent p', Shanghai, pho, there's a lot going on ! Nice one.
Damn! I fall for that SILENT letter trick every time! Great puzzle.
Of all the entries today, the one that bugged me was CLAM DIP: I mean, why would you bring a seafood appetizer to a seafood cookout? Isn't clam dip the thing you'd take--along with the chapati and the oreo pie--to *tomorrow's* social gathering, made with the leftovers from *yesterday's* clam bake? I haven't been to a clam bake in years, not since the annual ones my godparents would host, often in our back yard (we had a swimming pool), but I remember being served MUGSful of steamy clam broth. At the time I found it disgusting; now, what I wouldn't give to taste it again! Speaking of clam bakes, heard about the one Hernán and His Boys had in Darien, right after he pushed Vasco off the cliff?: <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44481/on-first-looking-into-chapmans-homer" target="_blank">https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44481/on-first-looking-into-chapmans-homer</a>
@Bill I think that’s fair. Since I don’t eat seafood l, I thought it was something you dipped clams into. But reading about it, it’s made from clams and you dip other things into it, so you’re right I don’t think you would take it to a seafood cookout
Bill, I would not bring CLAM DIP to a seafood cookout, but I might rethink the clue to refer to a seafood bowlful one might take to a cookout.
@Bill Well! No wonder he was "silent" upon the peak in Darien!
@Bill A bowl of CLAM DIP on a hot summer day ranks up there with gas station sushi. I had some by mistake once, thinking it was French onion dip, and nearly hurled.
@Bill Thanks for this! What I was thinking but so much better said. Partially filled, I struggled with being one square short of CrAbboil or possibly CLAMstew; tried to see if ChowDer would at all work with the crosses... What a strange, strange clue! But I love the story of your long-ago clambakes. They sound like ones from my childhood, too! These days, we try to get a ticket to the Allen's Neck Meeting annual clambake, going strong since 1888. This is a lovely write-up from the 125th year, back in 2014: <a href="https://www.friendsjournal.org/allens-neck-meeting-clambake" target="_blank">https://www.friendsjournal.org/allens-neck-meeting-clambake</a>/
I really enjoy Friday puzzles, and Adrian Johnson is one of my favourite constructors. I found this one considerably tougher than his usual puzzle, but I still thoroughly enjoyed it. Clever cluing, pleasing and lively stacks, and a nice mix of (for me) gimmes and brain busters.
Not my fastest Friday by a long shot, but fun nonetheless. The NE corner might have been the most challenging, where I tried FIRST stepS and the fortunately too-long I can hear you at 18A. Of the many fun answers, I especially liked UP AND LEAVE and SLOPPY KISS. (It’s entirely possible that I hold the world’s record for the sloppiest kiss.) Knowing about the SAD KEANU meme almost offset having no idea about Shanghai’s ART SCENE. Mr. Johnson, I can’t think of a puzzle of yours that I haven’t enjoyed. Keep up the great work!
@Eric Hougland It was a really great puzzle, lots of great surprises when suddenly I'd see an answer going in a completely different direction. And when you're stuck, that's exciting. Moreover, I seem to be pretty non-overlapped in terms of life experience. Shanghai, and its art scene, is extremely exotic for me. I've only seen Keanu Reeves in one movie, and have been able to avoid him since. Chapati? Atta? Pho recipes? Just not this mid-western boy's home turf. The one anchor for my whole puzzle, and thank you Mr. Johnson for 39D. Elston Howard was one of my first pre-teen baseball heroes. and I *knew* I couldn't change any of those letters, even when I was tempted by "Elsten".
I wonder, what sort or art scene may there be in a country without freedom of expression?
@Eric Hougland I got SLOPPY KISS in right away, but then doubted it when I tried to make CrAwDad cross with some kind of cARROt—or possibly yARROW—that might flavor pho. When my husband and I got Covid after my brilliant idea to go on an Alaska cruise, we ate nothing but pho for a week because it was the quickest you could get anything with DoorDash in Sammamish. Well, you know how folks lost their sense of smell with Covid? The opposite befell me. Since my husband is not a vegetarian, he ordered pho with meat—probably cooked with BONE MARROW. Ugh. The smell became so odious to me, I’d lock up hubs in the kitchen with his pho with all the windows open, while I escaped upstairs with mine. After a few of days, I couldn’t even order my veggie pho. Finished out Covid on saltines. Haven’t had pho since.
@Francis Oh, dang, that was brilliant, pho sho.
@clue by four I'm not talking about the art scene of Chinese people, but the art scene in China itself. People go to jail for images of Winnie the Pooh for god's sake! Meaningful, artistic protest is only possible for Chinese people abroad, like AI Wei Wei, who was forced into exile.
"Perfect" as verb vs noun are not homophones, they are homographs / heteronyms. Homophone means "same sound", that is, same pronunciation. Wikipedia has a nice Venn diagram with all these terms.
Yes, if the Times had a copy editor to back up the Wordplay columnists, "homophone" would have been changed to "homograph" (precise) or "homonym" (homograph and/or homophone). Instead, we have emus, and crowd-sourced editing. -30-
Idk as a basketball fan HOPSTEP really annoyed me. I used STUTTER because stutter and euro are what commentary usually prefers over hop as the compound word. Just shows what being too into the jargon can do to you in a crossword I guess. That obviously wrecked me for a lonnnggggg time today.
@Josh No one in the history of basketball has said "hop step." I just made a list above of some possible terms but this ain't one of them. Tell me the last time you heard Mike Breen say "And Kyrie with the hop step!"
Proudly got REGULAR JOE and FIRSTWORDS on my first go around. Quickly followed by CATWALK and OREOPIE leading to SADKEANU. So was feeling pretty good... little did I know. The rest was a beast! A hard puzzle! But I’m not complaining :)
Absolute nightmare. I just finished it now, in the waiting room of the vet, with my stupid incontinent cat. I probably would have enjoyed this any other week, but between work and this STUPID CAT I have been so stressed. I was in no mood for a challenge, no matter how skillfully constructed. I'd like to see more puzzles of this difficulty, just not as much as I'd like to see my cat stop peeing.
@Katie I'm so sorry your cat is not well. I hope she doesn't read this comment. Give him/her a hug from me.
@Katie It makes me sad to read comments like this - such a lack of care and compassion for your cat that has a medical condition. I really wish the best for your cat .
@Katie I don't know how old your cat is, but I'm finding that taking care of elderly pets is extraordinarily demanding.
Very satisfying puzzle. SE gave me trouble but fell into place once I gave up on INSIDE DATA.
I got “Bop“ for Charles Mingus‘s specialty because jazz, soul jazz, and bass didn’t fit. But anyone who knows jazz knows this is a poor clue and frankly disrespectful to Mingus. Bop is a subgenre of jazz, and it is not the subgenre that Mingus “specialized“ in.
I surly do hope that people at least aren't calling this the easiest puzzle they've ever seen. Because at my normal solve time for a Friday, I still had a scandalous number of white spaces. And by 1.5x my normal time I still had a nasty little SE corner that ended up having two or three bad entries, and it took till 2x normal to figure that out. Even so, I had to scan for errors, and found a couple more, but still no joy. Finally I ran the alphabet on the P in the cross of BOP and HOPSTEP, neither of which I'm particularly up on. So I got by, but just barely.
@Francis Lolwut? This was the easiest Friday ever. Not :D
Whew (again). Relieved to see that for once I'm not the only who really struggled with this. Had to look up some things and... cheat just a bit, but managed to get through it. Seven debut answers and six more that only appeared once previously. That's... pretty fresh. Puzzle find today is one of the most unusual I've ever encountered. I'll put that in a reply. ...
@Rich in Atlanta As threatened: A Sunday from May 6, 1979 by Anthony B. Canning with the title: "Good Mixers." No hint at the theme trick beyond that title. Hard to describe, but will just say that the answers were actually a few words that overlapped with each other. One example: "Balboa, Porter, lover, Gardner" VASCOLEANDERLE So the implied answers were VASCO, COLE, LEANDER and ERLE A couple of other examples: "Minuit, Seton, nobleman, Foster" PETERNESTEPHEN "Held, Hale, Gide, Uncle" ANNATHANDREMUS "Shepherd, Howe, Arthur, general" ABELIASHERMAN And there were more. Will confess that there are more than a couple of theme answers that I still don't entirely grasp. Here's the Xword Info link: <a href="https://www.xwordinfo.com/PS?date=5/6/1979&g=84&d=A" target="_blank">https://www.xwordinfo.com/PS?date=5/6/1979&g=84&d=A</a> I am done. ...
It was nice to have a fair amount commenters who found this quite tough, so often not the case. I liked the variety of entries, and didn’t mind getting help with some unknowns.
Now that was *not* a "themeless Wednesday" puzzle! Quite a workout for me. No errors or assistance, but took me almost 40 minutes. What DEVILRY in this grid: DOIN, SADKEANU (new to me), LAB (not TEE for "Culture center?"), NATIONALTV, SILENTP, TUDE. OPAL took me a bit---and why isn't Outback capitalized? "Litter pickup area?" for NAPE is cute, but the singular NAPE doesn't seem right to me. I mean, a litter doesn't have a NAPE. But, whatever. I've never played shuffleboard---is SHOVES rather than SLIDES a standard usage? Amazing fill in the grid. Another competitor for a puzzle of the year. I hope we get a lot more Friday and Saturday puzzles like this one.
@Xword Junkie Now, really. You know the dog or cat can only pick up one of her litter at a time--by the NAPE of the baby's neck. For the "Culture center" I wanted a SMEAR on the AGAR, but No.
@ MOL Yes, each kitten (or puppy) has a "pickup area", that being its NAPE. And I understand that "litter" is a (collective) singular noun. So the clue and answer are correctly paired. But still I find them jarring. That's all.
@Xword Junkie I have it on the authority of the Aussie sitting across from me that Antipodeans don't capitalize "outback."
@John Deal Thanks. I see that outback could refer to a type of terrain as well as to a geographical region. But Outback is never used by Aussies, as a place name? Interesting. The clue is fine in any case. Now I'm waiting for someone to tell me that disks in shuffleboard are indeed "shoved" and not "slid". ;-)
@Xword Junkie I thought shuffleboard used pushes. Feeling like I ought to go try the game now though
@Xword Junkie Because it’s not a Subaru?
@Xword Junkie But seriously, would you write “the Jungle”? “The Desert”? “The Mountains”?
@Steve L C'mon now. Of course I wouldn't write the Desert. But there are many deserts. Would you write the Great Plains? I would. Is not the Outback in Australia a unique region, like the Great Plains? Thinking that "outback" should be capitalized strikes me as quite reasonable---even if it turns out to be mistaken.
@Xword Junkie SLIDES, exactly. I was SAD when I had to rip it out! (How does one effect any strategy if one SHOVES the disc down the board??) A favorite photo of myself was taken from the far end of a shuffleboard game -- arm crooked about to slide forward and lit from above by a low-hanging lamp -- in the bowels of the now-defunct Fat Cat in the West Village. I did a mental check of that picture before filling in... the incorrect answer!