Sigh looks like I need to repost this since the emus ate it the first time. Sorry if it posts twice. HecK I WIsh I had thought of this theme and that’s quite a compLIMEnt. It didn’t take ME LONg but I’d awarD A TEn to it. I hope it doesn’t elicit frustration nOR ANGEr in other commentators, nor inCUR RANTs. It made me delightfulLY CHEErful!
"You can't make this tropical fruit smoothie by yourself?" "It takes two to mango." (I go bananas for these puns.)
@Mike I'll try to buy an acai mai tai. Sigh. Passion fruit didn't work. Goodnight, Mrs. Calabash, wherever you are. <a href="https://tinyurl.com/53dv6va6" target="_blank">https://tinyurl.com/53dv6va6</a>
@Mike In other words, you need a pear. I won't cherry-pick any other puns, and I'll leave the apple-ause to you.
@Mike Puns about fruits should only appear in season; please try to stay currant.
I was wandering around the puzzle FRUITLESSLY until I got the revealer. Then the clever themers became clear in a trice. I like it when the revealer unlocks a puzzle like that. Lots of good clues and very little filler. An all around winner. And for me a bonus — my law school alma mater (UPENN) showed up.
@Marshall Walthew just wondering, does Philadelphia really make good cheesesteak sandwiches?
@Marshall Walthew Marshall=-- I would say exactly the same about my solving experience, except I would fill in the parenthetical with a different law school alma mater (30-across instead of 37-down), handily cross-referenced in the puzzle.
Really a plum of a puzzle. And a perfect example of one that would have stopped me cold two years ago. Before I became aware of Anything-Can-Happen-Thursday, I would have quite with it about 25% filled, and no hope of figuring out anything else. As it was, I stumbled around badly until I finally got enough crosses for FRUITLESS_ _ . Even without the last two letters I now knew the trick, and instead of pounding my head against the wall with the clue, I looked for partly formed fruit names. Once found, then the clue was useful. A lot of fun, I thought. I wasn't especially speedy, and I thought once or twice that I was Going Down. In the end I didn't immediately get the happy music. I had mADD instead of SADD, in the extreme south west. But in the end, I had no raisin to grape.
Yeah, thumbs down for PROBLEM ONE. Otherwise, a nice puzzle.
@Jim Agreed, that isn't a thing. I've heard of "problem child", but never "problem one".
@Jim Ditto SELF COMMAND over self control
@Jim I tried googling it and came up with nothing. Even google’s loathsome AI says “The phrase ‘problem one’ is too vague. To provide a helpful response more context is needed.”
@Jim It feels like PR-speak, along the lines of "Here at Acme, your safety is Job One." But my Google search only turned up one meme: "Problem one: you're completely bald." That doesn't seem like enough to conclude that it's in the language.
🐶🐯🦙 The cute puppy, kitten, and ALPACA (and only them) are here for some positivity. (Speaking of cats: the river TIGRIS is Tygrys in Polish, which means tiger 🐅). Now for my impressions: My effort to solve this unaided was fruitless, and not only because of the countless abbreviations, all of which I ended up looking up, except for PTA. Can you imagine my reaction when I saw the two clues about US school referencing each other? 🤬 That NW corner... "Be up" solving to BAT must be a baseball thing? I have no idea who or what a tax PREPARER is. I only resolved that area with reveals (I only look up proper names, abbreviations and trivia; for regular, unknown words I use reveals, resigning to getting a blue star). I've seen so many terms for a grandmother in these puzzles, but grammy... That's a first. The misdirection in that clue defeated me. Street urchin: GAMIN. That looks like a letter salad to me. I googled some other stuff, too. UTe is a German name familiar to me. I've never seen UTA before, IIRC. ASTI and REM were among my few gimmes. Once I got crosses with all the lookups, I understood the theme. It was fine I suppose, but by that stage I was too annoyed by the fill to appreciate the Thursday gimmick.
@Andrzej Don't worry about injecting positivity. On behalf of the vast majority of us on this forum, I saw it too late to fight for your honor yesterday, not that you need help, we heart you just the way you are!! 😁
@Andrzej Not sure if you need explanations or were just venting. In case it's the former: In baseball, when the player's turn to bat arrives, he is said to "be up". A "tax preparer" is one employed by a business that helps you complete and file your tax returns but who has only minimal training and is not a professionally qualified accountant. "Gamin" is a French word that has infiltrated English over many years. It usually refers to a child or teen who presents with a surface innocence but often has a hidden sophistication or sardonic attitude. The stereotypical gamine would be Audrey Hepburn in /Roman Holiday/. Hope this isn't redundant.
@Andrzej O disappointed again. Thursdays are supposed to be tricky and hard, so I never let them spoil my mood although this one broke my easy streak for this week. That's a Thursday for you. These puzzles are hard in the USA too.
@Andrzej UTA Hagen was a famous Broadway actress in the mid-20th century, but was also very well known for teaching her craft at an acting studio in NYC. When I lived in Greenwich Village in the late 70s, I passed it every day on the way to work. She was probably better known in NYC than in the rest of the country, not to mention other countries, but she was originally from Germany, so the name is genuine. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uta_Hagen" target="_blank">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uta_Hagen</a>
A year ago I would have given up on this puzzle after the first pass. It took me well over an hour but it's a nice feeling to get it with no lookups. I do wish the theme red herrings (top earners, roman gods, etc) were related in some way to the clue but that's probably asking too much. Nice puzzle!
@Scott, that would have added the chef’s kiss! “Copier cartridge components for the C-suite.” Fishing equipment for Mars and Pluto.”
I'm a little sadd because I thought it was MADD. But apparently yeah, Students Against Drunk Driving -- they've recently changed their name -- same acronym but it now stands for Students Against Destructive Decisions. The clue for the Magi has one article too many. I like a good PORE-over LATTE! There's a woman here in town who sneers at hearts -- too easy -- and goes for roses, Mickey Mouse, various Pokemon, Guernica, Mona Lisa... Well. Time to fruitlessly caste for eels in the Tigris.
@John Ezra SADD= Campus organization to quell pessimists. Students Against Debbie Downers. :)
I went to Yale, and no one ever mentioned UPenn. The only rival people cared about was Harvard. :-)
@Bob The constucter's bio mentions a stint at UPenn. So of course, UPenn is on his mind. I always thought of the school as Penn, so I put Brown in at first.
@Bob That is the principal rivalry but there are 7 (I think!) in the Ivy League, so any two can be called rivals.
In sports there is a particular concept of a "rival". For example Michigan and Ohio State are definitely rivals but Purdue and Ohio State are not. A fan would never say all teams that play each other are rivals. But this is a crossword puzzle not a sports article bla bla bla... Whatevs.
While the theme was interesting, the clues are far too heavily weighted towards domain-knowledge and often refer to words and phrases which nobody actually uses. Overall, just felt quite inelegant.
The constructor is my hero because this puzzle is sublime. Well done, Ben! Did you notice the clue that tests our powers of observation? 14A [“Where the the Magi journeyed from” ]
@Anita SUB LIME. I love it!
@Anita The Magi journeyed afar from the East, but the The Magi journeyed somewhat less far from Anatolia, accompanied by a temporally displaced Mufasa [sic] Kemal Atatürk.
Great trick! [P.R. piece] for PUERTO - excellent! I had a little trouble parsing PROBLEM ONE at first and assumed it was a foreign word I didn't know. The first thing I thought of after reading the revealer: Tom and Ruth went riding As fast as fast could be. Tom hit a bump at ninety And drove on Ruthlessly.
@Nancy J. Yes I originally had PROBLEMONE rhyming with Persephone… 😅
Congratulations on your solo debut, Ben! A fun and clever puzzle.
Brutal. A mix of things I didn’t know and other things I didn’t know. Somehow got there in the end.
EELS are increasingly endangered. OPALs can no longer be found in the hot springs of Australia. Sparkling wine has vanished from the shelves of ASTI. NYTimes puzzle constructors are clearly to blame. They grab all they can as soon as they hit the market. HAve AT me, if you wish. It won't EAT AT me. I'm here sipping on my ICEE. (Somewhere UTA Hagen is performing for the UTES.)
EELS on the ELS? Someone IM-ED me with a pic. Ernie ELS is SADD that his time as a crossword clue is off the MAP.
Used to hate these “puzzle” puzzles; now I enjoy them more than any others. Always a gritty mental test for me and always a joy when I can figure out the trick. All that would make this a worthwhile puzzle, but the fact that each of the theme answers make actual words really blows my mind. It’s why NYT is worth the subscription. That and the fact that I know I’m supporting a newspaper that publishes sort of everything I’m AGAINST, generally speaking. And that’s something worth supporting and worth reading. Wish more people understood this.
@John Peil lol. I’ve subscribed to National Review for decades. I think it’s a lost art, figuring out what the other side could possibly be up to.
@John Peil AGAINST? What? Israel? Zohran Mamdani? IMHO, not enough Pete Buttigieg.
I breezed through this puzzle so quickly!!! Unfortunately, I only came up with two words, so started over. I don't remember where I was in fills when I finally said OK, whatever fits, sense doesn't matter, and started to make a little progress. After I got a couple of answers that made me smirk a bit (e.g., the P in P.R. was for PUERTO), and then FRUITLESSLY emerged so the MANGO popped out, I even started to feel a little cocky. Plowed on, but a still blank squares refused to budge, and in the end, I had to come to the column to get Deb's help. (Thank you, Deb) She said LEMON, so I searched and fixed it, only to be stopped cold again. Oh. A typo. Just what I needed. The puzzle had rewards that were hard won and made it a worthy Thursday challenge, and in the end it was fun. I liked it, and wound up feeling a little less GRAVE(R). Thank you, Ben. See you next time.
I rode upon my motorbike With PEARs in back of me. I hit a bump at 95 And drove on FRUITLESSLY. Aside from that, anyplace the MANGO, there go I. Thank you berry much, very zaftig, Mister Zimmer.
This was incredibly difficult. I think this is better as a Saturday crossword
@Gabriela O I needed seventeen cheats. It could have made a not quite so horrid Saturday or a rather difficult Friday. I was not clever enough to figure out what 'fruitlessly' meant, and am glad for the wordplay explanation.
@Gabriela O Thursdays can be as hard as Saturday. Saturday solvers are generally expecting hard themeless, if this ran on a Saturday we would have more heart attacks and threats to cancel subscriptions than the editors could deal with.
Hi, I'm late to the comments but I have opinions. :) There is much to dislike here for me. I found it a mediocre Thursday. 1. Foremost, the otherwise good theme idea and revealer were underserved by the implemented clues and answers. They were boring and unclever. 2. Self-command, really? 3. Leg armor, really? 4. SADD, really? I assume a relation to MADD but c'mon. 5. Problem one, really? What the deuce. What even is that. 6. So much dreary sports; purported Yale rivalry, obscure quarterback stats, some dude named Vlad... 7. So tired of direction filler like SSE. 8. Dross was good; nice to see. Entirely apart from this particular puzzle, I've noticed an alarming behavior with the web interface. I turn on the timer only once in a very rare time, but I've noticed that it keeps updating long after the puzzle is complete. If I go back to review the thing later in the day, I see numbers like 4:45 and, still later, 5:14 when the game took nowhere near that to complete. (I'm using a mobile Firefox variant.)
@B SADD is Students Against Drunk Driving—it was a popular student-led group at high schools in the 80s, maybe 90s
Everyone knows that we have the best elks here in Michigan, much better than Idaho. Everyone is saying it. Beautiful elks. We even know how to pluralize them correctly. If you look at the Great Seal of the State of Michigan, you might think that there are two elks depicted on it, but you would be mistaken--one of them is a moose, although I doubt there are many meese left in Michigan nowadays. Maybe in the U.P. You'll also notice that there are three--count 'em, three!--Latin mottos on the Seal: the official one reads "Si quæris peninsulam amœmam (duasve), stulte, circumspice," Which translates to "if you seek a pleasant peninsula (or two), just look around you, dummy!"
@Bill It's sad about the moose. When I first moved to the Minnesota North Shore the roads all the way to the Canadian border and beyond had warning signs to be wary of moose. I saw one on the the main road out of Thunder Bay, and I've seen a few along the Gunflint Trail. But it's getting rarer and rarer, and all the warning signs have come down.
@Bill I saw some moose on Isle Royale. Which is Michigan. Very up close and personal too. Walked right up on them accidentally.
Did anybody else notice the double “the “ in 14A’s clue? “Where the the Magi journeyed from.” Reminded me of that old optical trick on two lines: “Paris in the / the spring.” Almost thought it was intentional. Possibly an editing snafu for “the three Magi”? I believe this may be the first typo I’ve ever caught in the NYT.
@Antony OMG you're right! Heads should roll!
@Antony Serves me right: a typo when pointing out a typo. Should have written: The first typo I’ve spotted in a clue to the NYT crossword puzzle. There are typos galore in the paper, and someone even more waspish and dedicated than me posts them regularly, as many surely know. (@nyttypos) I also noticed after writing my comment that several other people had noticed the typo.
@Antony LOL, my eyes ran right over it. I tend to see what should be there, maybe because so many of my friends don’t proofread their IMs. I liked that misdirect as I tried EAST and then WEST.
@Antony only now that you mentioned it. Cool. 😎 Thanks
@Antony - Muphry’s Law (sic) is a variant of Murphy’s Law, stating that any time a person posts about a grammar or spelling error, the post must inevitably contain a grammar or spelling error.
@Antony I caught that too! I’m shocked I tell you! Shocked! 🫢
@Antony et alii I think they stopped hiriing proof-readers and to a large extent, copy editors. I didn't notice the typo (probably a missing 'r') and I misread the '50D Fiends'....Friends of folklore (yikes, too many to name!)
Congratulations on your solo NYT debut, Mr. Zimmer! I review several puzzles each week for Diary of a Crossword Fiend (including those that Brendan Emmett Quigley offers on his website). Just earlier this week, I wrote that I wondered if I would ever again see a crossword puzzle theme that was helpful to completing the puzzle (as opposed to a theme that simply unites varied answers). I’m glad I didn’t have to wait long. Once I got the revealer, understanding the trick here helped me quickly get RO(MAN GO)DS and PROB(LEM ON)E. Thanks for the fun!
@Eric Hougland And thanks, Deb, for the nice explanation of the theme.
@Eric Hougland I went to BEQ's website, but can't figure out how to get the puzzles that he offers. Can you help? TIA
A delicious puzzle. A theme that's never been done before, never even been thought of before, I'm quite sure, beautifully conceived and beautifully executed. The on-point and original revealer is central to the solve: I wonder if any solver would pick up on the trick if the revealer weren't there. Which is the mark of a super-great revealer. I'm glad that FRUITLESSLY is placed mid-grid. That meant that I could use the revealer to help solve the last two themers. I felt much more involved than I did at 17A, where, looking at TOP EARNERS, all I could do was scratch my head and say "What on earth?" And the cluing throughout the puzzle is first-rate. The importantly situated BUMP and BAT, placed at 1A and 1D, are not at all apparent at first glance. LONG I fooled me yet again. And PUERTO is terrific. Loved this puzzle!
ALPACAS again, eh!? Pretty suspicious, if you ask me!! Wonder if our favorite alpaca farmer has anything to say for herself!? Hmmm!? 😏 Fun puzzle, but a bit tough for me, which was fun!. Enjoyed it a lot... Almost as much as I enjoyed that mango I ate in the sea that I mentioned a while back when I was in Utila!! 😍
@HeathieJ You got it. The Alpaca Farmers are giving the NYT kickbacks.
@HeathieJ Emus ate my reply here twice now :( They are no fun.
@HeathieJ alpacas are definitely the cutest of these highly suspicious infiltrators!
@HeathieJ No wonder that EELS are endangered. The NYTimes keeps gobbling them up!
@HeathieJ my sister wanted to be an alpaca farmer! I’m still waiting for her to finally get them. She bought a 20+ acre farm in Georgia and relocated from California with their 26 chickens, 8 goats, 2 horses and a llama!!🦙 I’m sure the alpacas will arrive soon 🙏🏼😍
No rebuses. Now nobody will have anything to complain about.
@Jay I mean, there are all the conspiracies abounding... Big Rebus is going to have to work harder to keep up!!
@Jay I saved the day, no worries!
Patting myself on the back. First Thursday puzzle I've solved in a while, not because it was easy, but because I refused to give in too easily. Great fun, and now I'm ready to face the day.
most puzzles i'm one of those folks that learns of the theme by reading wordplay. in this puzzle, though, the theme was evident to me and was useful in figuring out the answer problemone. i had prob at the front and the e at the end and maybe another letter or two. so i was reduced to figuring out what fruit would fit in those five letters. in this case i didn't figure out problemone until reading wordplay. variety is good, i guess.
@pollyq I don't feel that PROBLEM ONE is in-the-language the way the others are, but that may just be me. Sometimes, a word or phrase is used within a certain group that I never interact with, and that might be the case here. But I see I'm not the only one who had a bit of a problem with PROBLEM ONE.
@pollyq my take on your comment is that you are not much prone to shouting. more soto voce, as it were. ymmv.
@pollyq Living in Italy as I do, I took "problemone" to be Italian for "big problem". ("Problemino" is "little problem"; "problema" is just plain "problem".) Over here we can augment or diminish anything with the stroke of a suffix!
A delightful lady from Texas once told me that for years she believed the Magi were firemen because they came from afar. I sussed it out when I got TOPEARNERS entirely from crosses and tried to parse the clue to that answer. SELF COMMAND seems an unusual phrase to me, GAMIN resides somewhere in my subconscious and I don’t think I’ve ever said PROBLEM ONE but I’m not complaining, I enjoyed the early morning challenge in my hotel room in Devon today.
@Roger Shouldn't it be GAMINE?
Really enjoyable puzzle! Not at all related, but had Beethoven Sonata No. 22 playing in the background this AM, and got the NYT victory music right as the coda was wrapping up. Apparently both in F Major, as it was the most bizarre yet joyful duet! Happy Thursday all.
@James, I love this! ❤️
@James Of course your comment made me look it up. Spot on. <a href="https://tinyurl.com/3v42h78r" target="_blank">https://tinyurl.com/3v42h78r</a>
I knew GAMIN because when I was young I worked as a copy boy at a local newspaper. One of the reporters was always giving me a hard time (purely in jest). He loved arcane insults, and one day he referred to me as an "insolent gamin". I had to look it up.
I feel there must be a Tom Swiftie lurking in these entries. Like: “Mars and Pluto are my favorite Rods” said Tom, fruitlessly. But funnier? “I can think of a few office holders that need to be IMed” said Tom, fruitlessly.
@Cat Lady Margaret This would make an interesting cipher, especially if reach fruit had some specific extra meaning.
Fun puzzle, but it somehow took me forever. I’m better at 5:30 in the morning, with a cup of coffee and the doggo waiting for me to finish so he can get in his first walk and then help me pick the strawberries and tomatoes. (He does the requisite barking and chasing after squirrels.)
@kkseattle I loved your post 😍. I can feel your and the doggo's joy 🤩 And it's so cool you still have strawberries! I have very fond childhood memories of picking them in my grandmother's allotment, and in my aunt's and uncle's orchard. In Poland strawberries are considered our national fruit, but they are available only from the end of May to the beginning of July. They are sold in kobiałka, a kind of square, wooden basket. Most Polish households have one somewhere, waiting for late spring. You take an empty one to the farmer's market and get another one with 2 kg of strawberries. Thus the delicate fruit is not transfered from container to container, which would overly bruise it. The Wikipedia article on kobiałka is in Polish only, but I link it for the picture: <a href="https://pl.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kobia%C5%82ka_(pojemnik" target="_blank">https://pl.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kobia%C5%82ka_(pojemnik</a>)
@kkseattle Quite the helpful dog. I would imagine your having to do the picking *and* the barking and chasing would be burdensome.
Compelled to give this one a big thumbs down.
too many stretches for me. I'm sore.
Finally noticing what impeachment had to do with chatting online made finishing this puzzle fun.
Pretty quick, but with a neat theme and interesting clues.
Had no idea what I was doing. When I finally had enough letters that I thought the answer could be Roman Gods I was able to move ahead. It was like trying to sort things in a closet with the light off. I could hang letters in there that felt like they made sense.
@Gina D I love your imagery although it makes me want to go shopping. Did you end up liking the puzzle in the end? It was a fun one for me!
Really clever theme and once I got the peach I went hunting fruits in the others. Well done really enjoyed it
Ugh. US school rivalries. Tax PREPARER? SELF COMMAND? UNREP? Not my favourite puzzle and not just because of EPILOG.
@Robin UN REP was terrible. Kept thinking it was UN VIP and took me forever to find a workaround.
@Robin I thought, surely. that the rival school to YALE was going to be HARVARD. But the crosses led to UPENN, so I went with the flow. TAX PREPARER is quite ordinary in the USA, but UNREP seemed a bit disrespectful. It was HALF-ASSED. I hate the spelling of EPILOG. It's much better as EPILOGUE. SELF-COMMAND is meh.
@Robin When I was a kid back in the dinosaur age, we spelled all those words with "ue," i.e. epilogue, catalogue, dialogue. I don't know when it changed, but I still have trouble with them without their endings, and Brooklynese is my first language.
@Robin Living in NYC, the first thing that came to mind was "UN [censored]". People hate them because they abuse their diplomatic immunity to constantly ignore local traffic laws and whatnot.
[Wide rides for the Chicago White Sox?] Great puzzle!! Whether or not you agree with the sentiment, you gotta admit that "Eat the rich" is a much catchier slogan than "Blend the top earners into copier cartridge toner". EELS
ad absurdum, At least my counterfeit American money is green.
I was surprised that 66-across made it into the puzzle. I used the word on which that answer is based in a comment a few days ago when I mentioned the name of a manufacturer of a particularly large type of warehouse fan. The company's name is three words: the first one is "Big," the second word has three letters, and the last word is "Fans." That comment got bumped. Not a big deal...just thought the inconstancy was weird.
@Bruce The moderation treating us like little kids in a 19th century Catholic orphanage is ridlculous. Three of my comments did not appear today, who knows why? The "system" is opaque on top of all of its other faults.
@Bruce I'm surprised that 15A got in.
@Bruce, I am sure the NYT uses an automated comment moderation plugin across the entire NYTimes.com platform—news and opinion pieces as well as the games. Those typically have a list of words/phrases to block automatically. At least for the first pass, and there may be a moderation team who reviews the blocks (or maybe not).
WAY too much of this puzzle needs hints. It makes sense if you already know the solutions but trying to get through it without help is a nightmare. I did it, and it took forever, but wow that was not at all satisfying.
I needed a lot of help with this one. I had so many false starts: never for GODNO, class for CASTE, nets instead of EELS. I just made it harder for myself and got very confused. It's good for me to remember that we don't all make the same connections in our heads. It all made perfect sense once I had finally completed it, but some of the US specific clues (schools, sports etc) made it difficult to just guess a letter. I am still in awe of anyone who can compile these crosswords (any day of the week). Wakes my brain up every morning.
I can’t stand this puzzle.
Problemone? I know, I know, hilariously remove the fruit and it becomes probe. But shouldn't the word with the embedded fruit mean something standing alone? What am I missing (other than an enjoyable puzzle with which to start the day)?
@Margaret Sometimes I am the problem one…maybe?
@Margaret All I could come up with is that it’s the first question to be answered on a math test. I did an Internet search for the phrase and got one link to some song I’d never heard of from 2012, but otherwise nothing seemed to match that phrase.
@Margaret I understood PROBLEM ONE to mean "the big, obvious problem that threatens to derail our plans." "Before we institute our re-organization, we have to confront PROBLEM ONE."
@Margaret Agreed. Problem one was way too clunky. This one needed another few weeks of work.
@Margaret So it's a rare case where everyone agrees. This one should have been sent back to cook, as @BR indicated. Surprising to find the constructor is so experienced when his or her first puzzle is so whelming.
I really have a problem with PROBLEM ONE. It's simply not a thing people say. If it had appeared elsewhere in the puzzle, I'd have been fine with it. But as part of the theme, it falls completely flat. I did enjoy seeing SOOTHSAYERS, though. Forsooth, it was my favorite entry!
@Katie- take out LEMON and the answer is PROBE, as explained in the theme entry; FRUITLESSLY L
@Katie Yes normally with themes like this the answer should be sort of “in the vernacular” so to speak and this isn’t. I even tried googling it and it didn’t pop up. I sort of imagine it’s analogous to “Job One” which is more common. Still, for tight themes like this I tend not to sweat the small stuff and I can at least imagine someone saying it. Didn’t bother me as much as it did others.
@Katie I agree with you. That thematic fill at 58A fit faster than the NW corner for me, but “problem one” is not a thing anyone says, so including it in an otherwise well-constructed puzzle was a tiny bit of cheating. Enough so to be worth your comment.
@Katie I agree that "problem number one" is far more likely, but I for one have encountered enough corporate-speak and techie-speak (like @Hanson and @Larry F) to have no argument with PROBLEM ONE. Well a different anti-jargon argument maybe but then again, I'm always extolling the flexibility of English so I'd better be consistent.
@Katie You can't erase me. I exist as a person.
I thought today’s puzzle was peachy keen. I had no problem with PROBLEMONE. I thought it fit in just fine with the theme, and indeed, it is a phrase I use. I am surprised that many are unfamiliar with it. The phrase is used when a hare-brained scheme with multitudinous and obvious problems is proposed. The most glaring oversight is problem one.
I had never heard of Rivian before this puzzle. It wasn't even vaguely familiar. Today on my way home from the office, I followed a Rivian half the way home! I considered following him all the way to his home to let him know how exciting it was for me, but I thought that might be a little extreme to share my love of puzzles. Now, it's fair to wonder if maybe I just hadn't noticed seeing one before, but especially since II've been doing the puzzles, I pay more attention to car names because of how often they show up. Rivian didn't even ring a bell! It also felt like the second thing I actually manifested for myself today. The first caused someone to be sick, which was really unfortunate, and I like the person a lot, so I feel bad, but it did get me out of a meeting that I didn't really want to go to. I promise in the future to only use my powers for good!! Still, everything's coming up roses for ole HeathieJ today! Har! I'm so glad I'm not the PROBLEMONE today!! Hehe! And also here to proclaim that I had no PROBLEM with PROBLEMONE. It sounds very normal to me. NOCAP! Har!!
@HeathieJ Watching CNBC once in a while will make you aware of Rivian and other young companies. Might even catch them at the IPO.
Somehow convinced myself that "FORGETM" was a short for "aw, forget 'em" ... because it's Thursday. Lol. But then remembered SADD! Fun puzzle!
@Leontion Exactly my ending as well.
@Leontion I had that as well 🤣 Great minds and all… 😉
@Leontion I was trying to fit MADD there.