It was bad enough that my father had once lived in Tulare, California, the eponym of tularemia. Then, without thinking, I married a woman from Lyme, Connecticut. On an unrelated note, is a doctor who is ready for an emergency an oncallogist?
@Eddie Good to see you here!!
'Butter from a farm' was brilliant :) 'Came unglued' was also a nice misdirect- I had EMDASH and also assumed TAPE was the second part of the answer (somehow related to stickiness) - took ages figuring out the first 3 letters.
@Rahul for sure! WEmTAPE looked clearly wrong, and at the end with the dreaded “almost” warning, I was pretty sure that’s where my problem was. But like you, I thought something with TAPE seemed most logical - like some shorter way of saying “needed TAPE”. I was also pretty sure that an endash was the same thing as a hyphen, so I wasn’t even considering that. Eventually I just ran the alphabet and boom. But what the hell is “WEN TAPE” I kept saying to myself. Until if finally clicked 😂😂😂
Constructor extraordinaire Paolo Pasco, who is also a world class solver (winner of two American Crossword Puzzle Tournaments), debuted on Jeopardy yesterday … and won! His victory included an unforgettable lightning-quick streak of answers in an anagram category, truly a “How does he do that” moment. His demeanor – calm, warm, and a twinkle in his eye – makes him a terrific representative for Crosslandia on this iconic show. WTG, Paolo, and I’ll be cheering you on!
@Lewis Got home a little late last night- Jeopardy had been on about 5 minutes. Looked at the TV and told my wife, Hey that’s Paolo Pasco. She looked at me strangely wondering how I would know a random Jeopardy contestant. You’re right. I could not believe how fast he nailed those anagram answers. Very impressive Double Jeopardy round. And he had some stiff competition from the contestant to his right. Looking forward to this evening.
@Lewis I saw the Anagram category and was enjoying the episode so much!...when Bang, NBC went to Breaking News...and never went back to the game, as the taling heads continued to rehash the tragedy. At that point, though, the other contestants had lost points and did not look like they were likely to surge back. Hope to see this afternoon's show. (Jeopardy! Is a "day-time" show here.)
@Lewis: thanks for the reminder (I’m not a regular). Geez, his instantaneous anagram production was amazing! I’d still be sitting here 20 minutes later working on the first one.
@Mean Old Lady You can find pirated videos of Jeopardy (and Wheel of Fortune) on Youtube almost every day. They come up about 4 pm ET and stay up for 12 hours. We usually watch these, as we can do it on our own schedule, and there are way fewer commercials!
Great rebus puzzle. Had some smooth going fill to start cracking the issue. Loved seeing Euler be mentioned. Thank you, come again!
@Red Carpet. I stayed in the Hotel Euler in Basel, Switzerland eons ago because it’s so close tp the Bank for International Settlements. What other country would name a hotel for a mathematician? That’s the only reason I knew the answer.
@Red Carpet "Someday we're going to learn about Euler's Circles." "Great! Venn?" (I know they're not exactly the same, but how many chances do you get?)
Loved the clue for RAM! Guess if the rebus worked both ways, Gia would be DOUBLING DOWN. ARE NOT not clued as a playground retort? What brave new world is this? This can't have slipped by Will Shortz! Will Shortz: CAN TOO! Re all those playground retorts, I have the feeling all the xword editors and constructors had less than idyllic childhoods, where any recess was a danger zone of antagonisms and skirmishes, retorts and rebuttals, provocations and posturing. For me, it was more like: "Share my apple?" and "Help you up?" and hopscotch, paper airplanes, learning to whistle, playing tag, telling jokes. Occasionally somebody fell off the slide. It really wasn't like that, was it? WAS TOO!
@john ezra thank you, finally understood the clue-answer
@john ezra Recess on the playground was a war zone when I was a kid. The twins, LLoyd and Boyd, were terrifying, especially Boyd, who often went ballistic with a big smile on is face. Mary Jo could hang by he heels (her heels!) from the pull-up bar, and once I got trapped when the bell rang and a kid named Claude corralled me and planted my first kiss on my eight-year-old kisser. You never knew what was going to happen, but somehow everyone survived.
@john ezra Where did YOU grow up? Holy CATS! Sounds like Portlandia to me.
Two of my favorite daffynishuns: BUTTER: goat. BUTTRESS: female goat.
Deb didn't mention it, but you can also enter both letters into the rebus squares without the slash between them. I didn't add the slash because it would have looked weird for the down answers, and my answers were accepted that way. Pretty easy theme for a Thursday. Seemed more appropriate for a Wednesday to me.
@Beth in Greenbelt The slash works, too. (As always, people are also reporting that one letter works, too,) With makes more sense across, without makes more sense down.
@Beth in Greenbelt I got the Rebus with 1D, so this went fast for me. Less than half my usual 18 min time for Thursday.
I'm fascinated by the furore over EN DASH. I got it from crosses myself and never gave it another thought. Apparently in theory the matter of dashes is as complicated in Polish as it is in English. I just checked professional Polish websites, and I learned to my surprise that they recognize three types of dashes: 1. The longest one is called myślnik (literally, one related to thinking) or pauza (pause), and it - your em dash - is used in the middle of a sentence, eg. I did not cry — in fact, I laughed! 2. The półpauza (half-pause), your en dash, is slightly shorter than the myślnik, and it's used to denote number ranges, eg. 2023–2025 has so far been my period of activity on the NYT crossword comment board. 3. Finally, dywiz (a word meaning roughly the divider), also known as łącznik (the one who joins), is your hyphen, and it is used to connect words, like in a double-barrel surname, eg. Kowalska-Nowak. Now, in practice, no normal Polish person makes any sort of distinction between the three types of dashes. Almost everybody uses dywiz in all contexts and to perform the functions of all of the dashes - probably simply because it's easiest to enter on a standard keyboard. I was not taught about different dashes at school, despite having great teachers. That must have been because in the 80s and 90s we only studied cursive writing, not typing. Actually, despite 2 decades of publishing papers, I only learned about there being 3 rather than just 2 dashes today.
Also - and this must drive purists crazy! - we commonly refer to dywiz/łącznik (hyphen) as myślnik (em dash). Myślnik was the only name for a dash I was taught in school - in class it was also called kreska, which literally means short line.
@Andrzej I just love our three dashes since I found out about them in the late 90s. I have authored some programming texts and my publisher included their style guide,which explained when they use them, and the use of blanks with them
@Andrzej I was in school starting in the 50s and through the 60s and no teacher ever even mentioned the kinds of dashes. I learned about them on the job as a sci-tech copywriter. The number of things we learn on the job is amazing. If you didn't work in publishing, it's not surprising that these kinds of dashes would not occur to you. The em dash—the longest one—is used to set off something that is not-quite parenthetical but the en dash signifies some kind of opposing relationship or a range (e.g., red–green or 3–8).
@Andrzej I also have published. At a very advanced age I finally learned about e(n/m)dashes. My children taught me about a scientific word processing program called LaTeX. It has every feature imaginable for typesetting manuscripts. Since it is user developed, folks have made many additions to its features. It had the em dash and en dash characters for me to learn about. It even has fonts for writing with Mayan cartouches. I hope that never shows up in crossword puzzles.
Enjoyed this... Seemed easy for a Thursday (but no complaints!). Got the gimmick very easily, and clues were all reasonable, no super-cryptic words or phrases; crosses got me the stuff I didn't know. Nice job.
Consensus today on the RAM clue: E P I CP UNNING R A I S E
Random thoughts: • The puzzle echoes yesterday’s rhyming theme answers (like TATERSTATER), and ISADORA echoes Monday’s alternating vowel/consonant theme. • And isn’t the sing-song ISADORA a gorgeous name? • Lovely contradictory PuzzPair© of ALOHA and SHOO. • I don’t remember seeing a rebus used like this before, as a “double header” horizontally and as usual vertically. Does anyone? If this is a new rebus variant, high props to Gia for originality – brava! • NAN could have been grouped with mom, dad, and sis, in the PALINDROME clue. • Punning “butter” to mean “one that butts” in clues hasn’t been done in the Times puzzle since 2018, but long-time solvers know to watch out for that trick, which has shown up often in Crosslandia over the years. • Lovely touch of delicious in MELON, ROMA, and ICES. Gia, my brain not only had fun filling in your puzzle, but it loved these little side trips your puzzle triggered as well. Thank you!
I did a Thursday with a rebus with no help except I could not remember A. A. Milne’s initials. 🤦🏻♀️🤷🏻♀️ This was such a fun puzzle and better than my average. Thanks so much, Gia!
Way to go, @Terry! 🏅
@Terry Congratulations! Whenever the crosses give me AA{something} I assume it's either aardvark or aaron or A. A. Milne.
@Terry If you can’t remember those initials, you can just run the alphabet until you hit on the right ones.
@Terry Great job! i was celebrating no help and pretty fast too! I got the AA and that gave me the writer as I knew it was not Aaron, the only other name I know that starts with two A's.
To the folks wondering about ENDASH, my iPad with its case-keyboard will make three different lengths of dashes: a hyphen (-), an en-dash (–), and an em-dash (—). And none of these are an underscore (_); they all show up at the middle-of-letter level. Hope these come through when my comment is printed. They worked while I was typing it.
@Dave S I got them by typing hyphen alone, ALT-hyphen, and ALT-Shift-hyphen.
@Dave S They will also show up from the regular onscreen keyboard. Hit the 123 key, then hold your finger on the hyphen until the others show up (same for iPhone); Mac is hyphen (-), Option-hyphen (–), or Option-Shift-hyphen (—).
How long is this "add three family members" campaign going to last? Please add an "opt out" option.
@Earthling yes - the banner on top is most vexing.
@Earthling Or at least a way to close the banner!
@Earthling Download uBlock Origin - it allows to remove any component of a website, including that obnoxious banner. I did it in my Firefox browser on Windows.
@Earthling I added Dad, sis, mom, but not bro!
@Earthling Sooner or later someone will notice that you can gift three individual subscriptions for the same OR LESS, and the scam will be laughed off the screen (or so we can hope.)
The rebus entries make more sense if you don't enter the slash.... Which I didn't, and was accepted. Revealer implies that that first square is used twice, so no need to enter the slash.
My time was 48% less than my average, but I'm not complaining. You know why I'm not complaining? Because somewhere down the road I'm probably gonna do a Thursday puzzle and be 48% slower than average.
I would argue that ENDASH is even a more correct answer than em-dash. One of the (more obscure) uses of an en-dash is in place of the expected hyphen in a compound adjective where one of the parts is a two-word phrase. e.g. Pulitzer Prize–winning novel
I really enjoy rebus crosswords and this one was no exception! However, I did ponder for a while what was the best way to enter the theme answers. I ultimately decided to put them in without the / because I preferred the way it looked for the down answers and it worked fine. ‐ – — practicing my dashes... I just discovered how to enter them on my phone! 😄
I had a lot of fun racing through this one. In before the usual rebus backlash in the comments to say that I love puzzles like this, with just a [TW]EENSY but of [RD]AZZLE! 🤪
@Matt Make that "a [TW]EENSY bit of [RD]AZZLE" 🙄
Well, I really hope my very enthusiastic post about listening to Stacy Abrams speak tonight eventually shows up. I thought it was relevant because she was in the puzzle the other day, and I mentioned that I was going to listen to her speak this week. I wrote that comment before I did the puzzle because I assumed the Thursday puzzle would take me a good long time. Instead it was my second fastest Thursday ever. To sum up about Stacey Abrams, she was even better than I could have possibly imagined and I was already a big fan. If you ever have the opportunity, give her a listen! The show that I watched with her in it was in Minnesota Public Radio program called Talking Volumes. If you can catch it online, I highly recommend it. Incredible!! 😍😍 To sum up about the puzzle, well, I really like rebus puzzles... This one was a little more apparent than usual. I also really love EmDASHES, Even though it wasn't the right answer, they're just so elegant!! It was nice puzzle overall, but not quite what I've come to expect on a Thursday. I also seem to have a thing about APEs being used disparagingly in puzzles... I've mentioned before that I hate when they clue APE as an imitate or mimic... Well I find myself really disliking today's WENTAPE too... Not only cuz I wanted it to be emdash. Like, apes are actually pretty cool. I dunno. I didn't know I had the sensitivity until I started doing the puzzles, but I feel like they kind of get a bum wrap out here.
@HeathieJ a bum RAP
@HeathieJ, Glad to hear about your experience seeing Stacey Abrams live. It’s always nice to see someone live whom you’ve admired for a long time.
If you've never done a rebus, this puzzle would make an excellent introduction.
Did anyone else notice what the answers from Sunday’s crossword, “Edmonton N.H.L. player”, and today’s crossword, “Leonhard who helped develop calculus”, have in common? Or am I the only one who has too much time on his hands?
@Strudel Dad Didn’t connect the two until reading this. Brilliant! (I suspect many folks mispronounce EULER.)
@Strudel Dad It’s a little-known fact that Leonhard played hockey in his spare time.
@Strudel Dad at the university where I work, the Math department has (or at least had in the 90s) an intramural ice hockey team called the Eulers 🤓 (I love a clever punny name). My wife was excited to learn that one of her academic heroes made it into the puzzle today 😊
hold on a sec. the EN DASH is the short one...width of an "n." no? the EM DASH is the long one...width of an "m." no? isnt this misclued? oppositely clued, even?? can someone help me before ive gone and WENTAPE?? otherwise fun thursday.
@Matt +100, this drove me nuts this morning
@Matt Clue “long hyphen” is not wrong. 3 different things. Hyphen is shorter than an en dash (which is shorter than an em dash). But an en dash is still a long hyphen.
@Matt The em dash stepped in when semicolons came to be considered snooty. l I like the way an em dash looks on the page, signaling a further thought, a buddy of the one that precedes it and a stronger connection than the don on top of the above the line comma anyway.
When the radio blares Em+En I dash as far away as I can! Arrgh!
This puzzle worked really well. Great job on the grid and especially the rebuses. Thanks Gia!
I found the theme well thought out but quite obvious - perhaps not tricky enough for a proper Thursday? The fill offered resistance in places, but probably only because I'm neither American nor a native English speaker. I had no idea what a Graycoat might be or why it would solve to REB. That was unfortunate as the cross of the first letter of REB was the answer to a clue I did not understand, either - I don't know what a blowout is. That in turn crossed with another unknown, of EULER. My best guesses around there were jEB (I thought Graycoat might be a guy's name), jOlT, and ElLER. When I did not get my gold star upon completion of the grid, I realised my mistakes had to have been there. In the end I only resolved that with lookups, learning what a Graycoat was in the process. Elsewhere I was confused by TEE SHOT. No wonder - I still know nothing about golf, and have zero motivation to change that. I didn't understand Lush/SOT either - I got the answer from crosses but had to look up what it and the clue meant. Drunkard... OK. CAIT looks like a random letter salad to me. I never watched Seinfeld but I learned ELAINE from Curb Your Enthusiasm. In a non-touristy region of Jamaica my wife and I trekked through the jungle with a local guide (just the two of us and Francis the guide) to visit a cave where bats lived. Once inside we only had a torch (a proper one, not electric) for a light and we walked on meters of GUANO. It was an amazing experience.
@Andrzej Briefly, during the US Civil War, the Confederate soldiers, or Rebs, wore gray uniforms.
@Andrzej Was that you on that cave tour!!! It's a very small world.
@Andrzej let e = 2.718... (a transcendental number) and i = square root of -1 and π = Circumference/diameter of a circle Euler showed that if you multiple i time pi and raise e to that power, the result is -1. e**(i*π) = -1 I thought as a lover of math, you'd like to know that.
@Andrzej I loved Seinfeld, but could never stomach Curb your Enthusiasm! But we did love Jamaica!! Sounds like you and your wife had an amazing visit there!! We were only there off of a cruise and visited Bob Marley's compound.... Definitely touristy but it was.... very fun! 😏 But we have plenty of banana plants and other fruits at our second home in Utila.
@Andrzej I thought Graycoat might be a guy's name. It's possible, I guess. The guy who WENTAPE was Greystoke.
@Andrzej EEWWWW
I love the smell of rebuses (rebii?) in the morning.
Pretty easy for a Thursday but reasonably enjoyable. Butter from a farm was a nice misdirect, could have used more clues like that
[Zaphod Beeblebrox and the pushmi-pullyu, for two] Very entertaining puzzle! But I thought today was Leonhard Euler's Day Off! Hot take: I didn't mispronounce Euler's last name, he did. Woah, woah, woah, woah, Badlands DOUBLE HEADERS
I don't think it would have made the puzzle easier, because it was a very easy puzzle, especially for a Thursday rebus, but why can't they put those italicized clues in the .pdf tree hugger edition? Seems to me it's simply a matter of changing the font for a particular clue. Just wondering. It was nevertheless one of my fastest Thursdays ever.
@Times Rita and @Michael It really doesn't matter. When something won't solve easily you alert on it and catch on quickly. Poof! On Sundays I look back at the computer and circle the numbers of the italicized clues if I can't figure out which are the tricksy ones, but for week-day puzzles, it hardly matters.
Fun variant on the Thursday rebus. I enjoyed it. Not every puzzle, even on Thursday, has to be super hard. I caught onto the trick very quickly, as I did 1D as soon as I knew I needed a cross for the ["Seinfeld" role]. NEWT was the quickest way to confirm ELAINE and we were rolling. We don't always see rebuses that require the letters to be in a set sequence, but it was obviously a key feature here. Favorite clues? Probably 16A or 47A. Thanks!
@Jack McCullough Ohhh. I'm a little ashamed to say I only just now got 47A! And now it's my favorite clue in this fun puzzle! I actually ran the vowels on that one, not quite seeing either answer. I guess the caffeine hasn't fully percolated in my brain yet, because I couldn't think past the first meaning until I revisited 47A to see what you liked. Thanks!!
Got the trick from the onset, and whizzed on through. I think it would be a good one for those who dislike or fear the dreaded rebus. Peace to you all this Thursday.
A staple in one's public relations first aid kit WEM TAPE Yes, that's too arcane. "wem" was tickling at the edges of my brain, so I google-confirmed the meaning: wem - archaic: a moral stain As a child, I read books from my grandmother's childhood, so circa 1900. Lots of odd old words floating about my head!
@Linda Jo That got me too until I realized, “Oh, ‘WENT APE!’” + TIL ENDASH. Good fun Rebus puzzle.
Carlin was NOT the first host of "Saturday Night Live". The show was titled "NBC Saturday Night". ABC had a show that premiered 4 months before, starring Howard Cosell, called "Saturday Night Live". The ABC show didn't last long, but the NBC show didn't change names until season 3. Picky. Yes. But the NYT should have its facts straight. This is my single favorite trivia question.
@Steve Hoog That is an interesting bit of trivia, but I think it's OK to refer to shows before the name change as the new name.
@Steve Hoog It was still the same show though. So the clue is not technically incorrect.
Today I realised that 3 of the 4 main Seinfeld characters have 6 letter names 😁 Confidently put in Kramer and muddled that corner initially lol. Also very confidently put in Dr. Suess for 62A and stuck with him for an unnecessarily long time 🙄. A bit of a brain fart morning for me with what was a fun, straightforward puzzle overall!!
@Divs I already had the E in there (after first putting EFT in the margin) but the Seinfeld clue gave it away--as it happens, that is my name! Even if your guess for 62A was correct, it would have been in error, because it's SEUSS. (I loved his earlier books, like _Horton Hatches the Egg_, but the later ones were Meh and Ugh, IMHO.)
SS BB MM UU HH TT Clever theme and an enjoyable workout. Typical slow start for me and I was appropriately puzzled early on. But... catching on to the theme was the huge turning point and that's always a great touch for a Thursday. I'll put today's puzzle find in a reply. ...
@Rich in Atlanta As promised: a Sunday from July 31, 1983 by Jim Modney with the title "Sounds familiar." One theme clue and answer example: "Frenzied regattas on the Shannon?" WILDIRISHROWS And some other theme answers: KNIGHTTIMES BRAKINGPOINTS MALEORDER GROSSPROPHET NEWYEARSDAZE REIGNWARE Here's that Xword Info link: <a href="https://www.xwordinfo.com/PS?date=7/31/1983&g=61&d=D" target="_blank">https://www.xwordinfo.com/PS?date=7/31/1983&g=61&d=D</a> ....
People who hate rebuses, sure, they won't like it, but let's not judge it by the standards of people who were never going to like it. I thought it was very generous for a rebus. I bet it was someone's first time figuring out a themed rebus without looking up the trick. DOUBLE HEADER is a straightforwarf fill for its clue, and that plus enough crosses is plenty for the themed entries. For anyone who was stumped, my number one tip is just don't let yourself be bogged down, skip confusing or italicized clues and simply don't worry about them until you have more fill and can start guessing at the tricks.
@DK Very good tip. I skipped all the italicized clues until the end this time. Unlike many who reported they figured out the theme quickly, I finally figured it out 5 minutes before the end of my solve.
@DK I filled "WALKIE" and "RAZZLE," and problems with "NEW" (amphibian) and "BAR" (entertainer) taught me the trick.
Clobbered my PB for Thursday. I normally dislike rebuseses(!) but this one rocked!
ENDASH V emdash…. Did not slow me down. I just thought I had been getting it wrong all these years and moved right along. Wouldn’t be the first time. In London to visit friends. Going to see the virtual ABBA show. I’m just a medium grade ABBA fan. I am really intrigued by the whole hologram thing. This will be either groundbreaking or just a footnote in performance arts. I wanna say I was there. The rolling transit strikes are taking a lot of the fun out of this. The hip kids are using the pay-as-you-go e-bikes. With a combined age of 152 we’re going to stick to busses and black cabs and the Tube – depending on what’s available.
@Kevin D. PPS — the bus strike has been mostly called off, whew!
@Kevin D Re combined age of 152: insufficient data. Just how many of you are there? A bunch of teenagers or a couple of pensioners? Inquiring minds want to know.
(From my font designer days) EM dash - a dash with its length equal to the width of a small “m” letter. (Alt-0150) EN dash - a dash with its length equal to the width of a small “n” letter. (usually half the width of an EM dash). (Alt-0151). There are width variations recently but in the classic font design - such rules apply (Helvetica, Garamond and so on). “minus” is shorter than both EN and EM dashes. Usage: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dash" target="_blank">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dash</a>
@Cristian WHAT??? I've been using en dashes for minuses since time out of mind. Do you mean the minus is longer than a standard dash but smaller than an en-dash? What does a minus look like comparatively?
"Butter from a farm" for RAM made my morning. Don't recall seeing it before, but my guess is that it has appeared previously. Like yesterday, I saw the theme very early, with W/TALKIE. This made the puzzle extremely simple for me, but I enjoyed it nonetheless. The thematic content seemed a bit on the light side, but some of the non-thematic entries were quite interesting: BADLANDS, AAMILNE, NASTYHABITS.
Gosh, a lot of Comments are in already! (What now? This does not usually presage good news...) Another "italicized clues" puzzle that I solved without needing the extra leg up. I was suspicious at 7D and confirmed with 15A. Voila! I've never heard of the "reality TV spin-off"...aren't I the lucky one?! (It doesn't sound correct to say ARE NOT I....) BOWS are recurved; ARCS are just curved. But okay. There *are* other varieties of paste tomatoes, but it's hard to beat ROMAs! They also work well as sliced tomatoes and the vines bear heavily. Along with Celebrity and Moskvitch (which I used to get from Johnny's Selected Seeds) I grew them annually....short season in NE Ohio. Those were the days... Oh, the puzzle. Wonderful fun!
@Mean Old Lady So, after the Flood, that was a "rainarc" that signified God's covenant with His creations? ;-)
@Mean Old Lady my neighbor has a lot of luck with Early Girl. And it's my good luck as well. Alas the season is almost past.
@Mean Old Lady It amuses me that far more comments are about the EN/EM DASH than about the rebus. I had no idea there were so many print editors here.
@Mean Old Lady Archery longbows and flatbows are arcs (curves).
Btw, "bosko" means "heavenly" or "in a manner typical of a god" in Polish.
Yay! I PR’d! I’ve been at this long enough those are few and far between. Little bit of R/DAZZLE goes a long way—thanks for the fast, fun solve, Ms. Bosco!
Interestingly, for me personally, something can be "teeny-weeny" or "teensy" but not "teensy-weensy". (Obligatory disclaimer -- I know it's valid, I know others do use it, it's just not in my idiolect.). So I happily filled in TEENSY and forgot it was italicized ... but because the app accepts either letter, it's the only non-rebused rebus. Oops. I only noticed that after I was done... Also, WENTAPE was one of the last entries for me because I had W__TAPE and my brain parsed it as something-tape, and I could not for the life of me think of a valid prefix/pre-word with three letters. And I figured the four letter fabric had to be TWEED but I'd forgotten that one clue, so for a while had [WE] rebused, meaning WWENTAPE ... and when I corrected it to "wen tape" I got music before I could put the rebus in the right place. Yes I know the trick for that, I just assumed I had another mistake too...
Sorry, gimmicky rebus not worth the time or effort. Especially since the ad banner across the top still eats up too much screen RE. I did send a msg to the puzzle people but never heard back & still have to scroll back & forth. I am outa here.
@jp inframan I usually solve on my phone, so I haven't encountered this, but the Nuke Anything extension would probably be useful for this. It allows you to remove individual elements of a web page from your display. You can even use it to read articles behind paywalls; you delete the parts or images you've already read on the frozen screen, and the next section becomes visible. Normally I wouldn't advocate doing something like this, but when the Times screws up the crossword experience for paid subscribers for the sake of an ad placement I think it's egregious enough to merit it.
Nasty habits I must condone No one knows what I do when I'm all alone Nasty habits I'm so ashamed But we must not let that stop our little game For the youngs, Danny Elfman was in a band called Oingo Boingo before he created the theme music for "The Simpsons."
Hmm, Oingo Boingo would have fit perfectly in yesterday's theme; much better than LIVER SLIVER. Why am I just now thinking of that?
@Grant the reason I got this answer on the first pass! 🤩🎸🎶 But I still think of myself as young—Danny Elfman is just old, man! 😂 [NB, that's an em, not a en, dash.]