"I want to read every single one of that author's works!" "You're such an oeuvre-achiever." (But what a novel idea!)
@Mike If you want to go on a ram-page, you're certainly entitled to. I get that way myself. I've gone so crazy about one author. I've read more of his stuff than you can shake a stick at, much less a spear.
@Mike I feel the opusite.
@Mike If you like punny authors, you might want to peruse the Xanth series by Piers Anthony. As the series developed, he started to incorporate reader-submitted puns (with credits given in an epilogue).
Just wanted to share my joy in getting 100 yellow stars in a row, having started doing NYT crosswords about 4 years ago! Hailing from Dalyan, a small resort town in the south of Turkiye 🤗
@Kerem Congratulations! I assume that English is not your first language. I’m impressed by all the people living outside the USA who solve these puzzles — especially those for whom English is a second or third language.
@Kerem Congratulations on your exciting accomplishment! Well-earned joy worth celebrating!🥳😊
@Kerem WELL DONE! So admire non-mother tongue folks wrestling this stuff down... especially end-of-week, and puzzles with a high volume of culturally specific references. Bravo!
Wow. Some amazing clueing. 49A has to be in the running for clue by of the year.
@Chris Yes. 49A is masterpiece, or at least masterpiece adjacent.
@Chris came here to say CREASED was just brilliant but you already beat me to it.
Fully agree. Magnificent misdirect !
Excellent puzzle. Tough but fair. The clue for DELETEDSCENES is the best in a long time. 10/10.
@George I am impressed! I think just the other day I commented I didn't think I'd ever seen a score higher than 9.5. You have high standards, but awfully good taste.
@George Yes, but a little weird. I mean who takes IN the trash? Where I live, we always take OUT the trash.
@all I get angry and annoyed way too easily to watch anything I hate. You may have noticed how passionate I get about stuff that mildly irks me. Can you imagine how mad I get when I really hate something? 🤣. I can't stand the mediocrity of Polish football so I never watch the games of my wife's favorite team, and I don't care enough about good football to watch Champions League with her, either. If I stick around during a match, I always end up making stvpid comments and spoiling my wife's fun 🫤 @ Eric Hougland For me Mad Men were your Suits, but for a very short time. I hated almost every of the miserable characters and the pain they inflicted on others. After a few episodes I realized how the show was getting me down and I just stopped watching it. Also, I started watching Game of Thrones with my wife. I hated everything about it: the gratuitous violence and nudity, the horrible dialogs, the boring sets, the cliche characters portrayed by hammy actors... By the end of season two I could no longer take it. My wife lasted a season or two longer. She's read all the books though. I tried, too, but it was all written so poorly, and everything was so terribly drawn out and boring I abandoned it in disgust after a hundred pages or so.
I tried twice to post a civil reply but the emus won't let me... So here it is as below a picture of Lucyfer the puppy: <a href="https://imgur.com/a/1nr25RY" target="_blank">https://imgur.com/a/1nr25RY</a>
And now my post appeared... The software and moderation here really are a joke.
Some easy spots but some harder ones, and a lot of very clever clues—CREASED, SPEEDGUN, HATEWATCJ, OEUVRE, DELETEDSCENES, HELDSERVE all stellar in my opinion. I enjoyed it!
This was a wow, with spark in answer, sweet resistance bringing sweet reward, clues whose answers couldn’t be immediately slapped down, and clues brimming with wordplay. I’ll focus on that last point, as wordplay hits my happy button. Today’s puzzle had it all: • Simple one-trick-pony wordplay, such as [Didn’t get broken] for HELD SERVE. “Oh, *that* kind of ‘broken’!” Hah! • Double play, as with [Takes in the trash?] for DELETED SCENES. “Oh, noun-‘takes’, not verb-‘takes’, not to mention a new meaning for the full phrase ‘takes in the trash’”. Mwah! • World-class wordplay – [In need of an evening out?] for CREASED. Playing on “evening”, playing on “evening out”, playing on “in need of an evening out”, which brings up loneliness, perhaps, or being cocooned for too long, and deftly misdirects the mind from the actual meaning of this clue. OMG! Clue jackpot! Deep bow. You wowed me, Larry, with a satisfying solve flecked with a fiesta of humor and play. Thank you, sir, and more please!
I can’t get over how good the clueing is in this one. Delightful solve. Well done, Larry Snyder!
Fun, witty cluing. Had HELD NERVE before HELD SERVE and that tripped me up for a while.
We’ve been saying OEUVRE around the house lately, just to sound fancy. I had no idea how to spell it.
49A [In need of an evening out] is a real knee-slapper.
I had “held nerve” instead of HELD SERVE as I know nothing about tennis and was thinking, darkly, of a hostage scenario or some sort of situation when one might break. Liked the crossing of FERRETS and WEASELED. Happy weekend to all~
@Becky In tennis, a player is expected to win most of the games he or she serves. When the opposing player wins, it's called a break. The number of breaks in a set usually determines who wins the set. That's why traditionally, one has to win a set by two games. (Nowadays, a tiebreaker is usually played, in which the serve is split evenly. The tiebreaker only has to be won by two points.)
time for my end-of-week quibble: "cipro" is an abbreviation. the name of the antibiotic is "ciprofloxacin." that abbreviated fill was required should have been indicated or implied in the clue.
@Matt forgot to mention i looooooooved this puzzle. 49A may be my favorite clue since i started these puzzles 9 months ago. brilliant!
@Matt The clue certainly could have used a "commonly" or "informally". Though with five letters I would suspect it would have to be a shortening of some kind. Are there any common antibiotics with five letters for their full name?
@Matt CIPRO is the brand name, and as such, is a complete word.
@Matt True, but "Cipro" is also a brand name for ciprofloxacin.
@Matt Also, it's Friday, and we seldom get modifiers on the weekend. Early week, sure, need the modifier. For my part, as an RN, even having taken it (more than a decade ago), it was not a drug I had to handle or deal with very often. Usually just had to write the name down when taking a history. I remembered it after getting enough crosses to jog my memory (retired almost 12 years ago).
@Matt Cipro is the brand name for ciprofloxacin Fun fact: your local county likely stocks hundreds or thousands of 1000-ct bottles of ciprofloxacin and other antidotes in case of a bioterrorism attack! Not so fun fact: all that Cipro gets regularly thrown away when it inevitably expires. Signed, a pharmacist who has thrown away a LOT of Cipro
Very enjoyable clueing here. I particularly liked 15A [Stream with a lot of shade?] HATE WATCH and 33A [Takes in the trash?] DELETED SCENES. With the latter, it took me a bit to realize that “takes” was not a verb. I lost a little time with 22A FERRETS, assuming that the answer would be another bird species. Falcon worked so well (until it didn’t). Speaking of ferrets — if you’re old enough to remember Rudy Giuliani, and you’ve never heard his ferret rant, it’s worth looking for on YouTube. Thanks for the fun, Mr. Snyder!
@Eric Hougland My turn to pick a nit: I thought geese came on GAGGLES, no? Flocks are for birds in general, along with sheep and goats. I think a fairer analogy would have been GAGGLE:GEESE / _____:FERRETS.
@Eric Hougland Oops. Yes, my version of the analogy clue would have been much easier, seeing as it gave away the answer. 😁
Lots of great cluing here. Some favorites: [The works?] for OEUVRE, [Takes in the trash?] for DELETED SCENES and of course, [In need of an evening out?] for CREASED. I checked xwordinfo to see if that clue for CREASED had ever been used before, and it's a debut. The only other clue that was a misdirect was [Iron-deficient?].
In the entire corpus of Icelandic literature, there are only two Eddas. The so-called Elder Edda is a 16th-century anthology of short poems dating back to the 9th century; the Younger Edda is a poetic — a manual for would-be poets — written by Snorri Sturluson ca. 1200 AD. Obviously, "edda" is not a genre. A saga is a lengthy prose narrative not unlike a novel. A saga is not an edda and vice versa.
Fact Boy, I saw EDDA and the clue and started counting. I wasn't far into the count when you posted.
@Fact Boy Sturluson also being the presumptive author of several sagas.
LINT ROLLER - PAH! Those are for sissies.
@Cat Lady Margaret three cats in this household and I wear the cat hairs proudly…somebody once asked: what makes you think it’s okay for you to wear black? PAH!
@Cat Lady Margaret I always had one on hand for foolish guests who wore black clothes (or, to be honest, any other color of clothes) when they came to visit and carelessly sat down on our couch. Some really crazy people actually invited one or ours to sit in their lap. (Heavy purring was supposed to be the payoff.) "Oh dear, look what's happened. Here, let me help you." All stickiness on sheet after sheet of the roller paper instantly disappeared, but we felt we should make the gesture, and despite all the cat hair, everyone kept coming back and they loved our cats.
You sure the trump EPA is measuring AQI in 2025?
@Jared Well, not measuring so much as making them up completely.
@Jared Absolutely. Nobody wants to breath Canadian wildfire smoke when they're playing a round at Bedminster. And now that the EPA is no longer obsessed with tree equity...
Very satisfying crossword. Loved “Takes in the trash”!
The SE corner was much harder for me than the rest of the puzzle - I looked up CIPRO (how was I supposed to know *that*?) but I still struggled even though I correctly guessed the cruelly clued EPA, and ELENA was a gimme (I haven't read anything of hers but I've seen reviews in The Guardian - which is how I knew I wouldn't probably enjoy her oeuvre). Speaking of OEUVRE - I wanted some version of OpUs(__???) there. My mind just won't come to terms with the spelling of the French word. In Polish we just use our own term for it - twórczość. That's a spelling I get 🤣. (Tworzyć means to create. Twór [tvoor] is the result of creation. Twórca [tvoortsa] is one who creates, and Stwórca is one of the terms for Christian god: a non-divine creator would never be called stwórca) The "evening out" clue was kinda brilliant, but I only understood it after crosses revealed the answer. I also only got the "broken" clue once I was only missing a single letter from the solution. Doh. I actually watch tennis! Elsewhere I had to look up the crossing of the network and mascot. I suppose MR RED was gettable when you already had _RRED there, but I only remembered AbC as an American tv channel (how many Polish networks do *you* know or how many would you remember a month or two after I told you their names?). BRRED looked weird and I just couldn't be bothered to deal with an annoying crossing of trivia, so in stead of dealing with it on my own I asked google for help.
@Andrzej I had opuses for a bit, but thought that surely cannot be right.
@Andrzej How are you supposed to know that???? Maybe you're not, but after 9/11 there were a number of instances of Antrax spores being sent to various places and people in the US. People died. Here's the beginning of the Wikipedia article. The 2001 anthrax attacks, also known as Amerithrax (a portmanteau of "America" and "anthrax", from its FBI case name),[1] occurred in the United States over the course of several weeks beginning on September 18, 2001, one week after the September 11 attacks. Letters containing anthrax spores were mailed to several news media offices and to senators Tom Daschle and Patrick Leahy, killing five people and infecting seventeen others. Capitol police officers and staffers working for Senator Russ Feingold were exposed as well.
@Andrzej ive told you before and ill tell you again, but this time in the most vanilla way possible to mollify the emus: you wont catch any of us here trying to solve the warsaw times friday crossword puzzle. your windmill tilting remains admirable. but you bring this pain on yourself, my friend. me not knowing polish tv station names should be no balm for your suffering.
@Andrzej Cipro came to me first only because I think I have had it, or it has been discussed, in my sinus-infection past. But yes, that corner was tough.
@Andrzej I’d forgotten about the anthrax attacks that Vaer mentioned, and like you had no idea what antibiotic is used to treat an anthrax infection. But I know that CIPROfloxacine is a commonly prescribed antibiotic, and after getting one or two letters, it seemed like the obvious answer. I too had ABC as The Walking Dead network (though in hindsight I should have known better, not that I have ever seen that show). It was weird for this non-sportsball fan to be rescued by an MLB mascot. (And no, I can’t name a single Polish TV network.)
@Andrzej Welp, once you've had a reaction to an antibiotic or two, which consists of a rash that covers your entire body for weeks, you tend to pay more attention to what doctors are prescribing you. So lucky you, not to have to worry about that.
Now that was my kind of crossword puzzle! Enjoyed immensely. Nice job,
If only we had listened to Al Gore ...
@Teresa Then you wouldn't have ended up in Berlin??
@Teresa Right? We'd have wind and solar farms everywhere, and Federal electric car mandates, and pipelines closed down. Oh wait, we did do all those things...
Completed with no shade at all! LOVED completing this one.
Now THIS is a crossword. Not easy by any measure, but brilliantly clever clueing that allows any solver to get there with enough grit and crossing. What a joy.
This was a great puzzle, worthy of a Friday. I love it when the first couple of words you think of when you read a clue don't fit, so you have to work around that word and maybe snag a couple of letters on intersecting clues, and then the answer reveals itself and it makes total sense.
@Steve Yes, that's really cool. I also like it when an answer is a compound word, like "lighthouse"...a lot of times I can get one or the other part of the world with some certainly while still not knowing the other part. Gaining crosses. I'm amazed at how much better I am if I have a letter in an answer--best of it's the first one, less good if it's the last one, but still almost any of them seemed to jog my memory enormously. I wonder if that's true of most everyone.
Nice to see the old EDDA again—it's been a while. All in all, an entertaining puzzle, with a few clues that had me stalled, e.g., "In need of any evening out?" That one had my brow CREASED, because I am so in need of one. . Thank you, Larry. Just tricky enough for a Friday.
Initial response to 49A: ME!!!!! Later, more rational response: “Although it’s still Thursday, it’s unlikely that the Friday puzzle has five exclamation points in it.”
Great Friday . I nominate the " evening out " - ie Creased - for clue of the year . Can anyone help me with the origin of Bowdlerize ?? I got CENSOR from the crosses but never heard of that word. TGIF .
@Cathy Parrish <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Family_Shakespeare" target="_blank">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Family_Shakespeare</a>
@Cathy Parrish In the old days someone would have replied with a lmgtfy.com link. :) Bowdler was an a___le who censored Shakespeare and other works, apparently with his sister. Incidentally it seems lmgtfy has messed up their DNS, repointing to a .app domain but causing browser cert errors with their main one...
@Cathy Parrish TIL something ! Thank you @Arun and @B !
Today I learned that a group of Ferrets is called a "Business of Ferrets". Love it. It's right up there with a" Parliament of Owls". Or a "Colony of Weasels" which in todays puzzle coincidently crosses the "Business of Ferrets"
“Didn't get broken” at 32D was impossible for me (HELDSERVE), especially combined with "Hogwash!" at 31A (PAH).
@Elizabeth Connors This was the last one I got -- only by going through all possibilities
Good puzzle. SE was tough. Not sure why.
@kkseattle Agreed almost half my time was spent in the SE corner.
@kkseattle for me the SE was tricky because HELD SERVE (never heard the term, and even with most of the letters filled in, I still didn't get it) was crossed with multiple tricky (to me) words or clues: ALPO, CREASED, REV UP, DELETED SCENES. At least I did know ELENA! Something that helped in that corner was that BANANA PEEL was easy. :-)
@kkseattle Same! I was pretty certain about BANANAPEEL, but got my brain stuck on GROOMED for "Put together" for quite a while, which made me question the entire corner for far too long. HELDSERVE was the last to fall for me thanks to CREASING finally clicking. Quite a workout.
“LEASER” sounds like a word someone would say if they didn’t know the correct word, “lessor.”
@Dave Agreed. I've been in the real estate business for 30 years and have never heard the term "leaser" used in that way. Not even sure if I've heard it used at all. I've never hear the expression "pah" either.
@Dave--totally agree, and totally a lame clue that the editors apparently accepted just to make the clues fit. Not even sure it's a word, but, if so, no one uses it.
LEASER was so obscure the editors couldn't decide how to clue it, as we discovered here yesterday: <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/shared/comment/773mgi0008u?rsrc=cshare&smid=url-share" target="_blank">https://www.nytimes.com/shared/comment/773mgi0008u?rsrc=cshare&smid=url-share</a>
@Dave Totally outside the language, but if thinking of a person paying rent as a “renter,” maybe person with a lease paying rent as a “leaser” is a thing? (If the NYT had asked me to edit their crossword puzzles, I would not have allowed it, but there it is.)
@Dave It can be either the person who owns the property or the person paying him to use it. It's a perfect choice for obfuscation.
I totally appreciate Deb's ode to brevity in her column entry. It's something I struggle with in all my correspondence. Saying a complex thought in one word is an art. "I am sorry to have made such a long speech, but I did not have time to write a shorter one". - Winston Churchill
I was never going to solve a crossword with "held serve" as an answer, so I don't feel so bad about today.
I'm sure I would have had more trouble coming up with that answer had my children, and my wife before them, not worked at the U.S. Open.
@Jeff Z, If it were HELDNERVE on the other hand?
I usually click through the first few across clues, and the first one I filled in was FERRETS (I have them as pets so I knew that a group of them is a business) and then the intersecting down answer was WEASELED - and there was no mention of this play on words in the puzzle info
Coincidentally, I just dropped my daughter off at our local comic con to display her INNERGEEK! Loved that clue. I have a thing for collective nouns (and sometimes making them up) but did not know that FERRETS make a business! Love that!! I'm picturing them having a serious meeting in bowties. Fun clues. I had DELETEDemailS first, and was stumped on CREASED. Well done!
No rebuses. No missing letters. No theme. So is this puzzle CHIC or SWILL?
@Barry Ancona CHIC, definitely. I would never use SWILL to describe a NYT puzzle. Although come to think of it that ultra-hard Saturday a couple of months ago really riled me up.
Who AM I to question how you spend your ALONE TIME? If you want to HATEWATCH the MEGHAN and Harry show, be my guest. Great cluing today, but apparently I've been reading "Bowdlerize" wrong my whole life. I honestly thought it meant to parody something, a la Weird Al Yankovich. TIL there was a Dr. Bowdler who released CENSORed versions of Shakespeare.
More like this one, please! I enjoyed the wordplay, it required some thinking - CREASED, for example. And there was no reliance on silly trivia. Bravo!
Commenting on the Mini Puzzle today. Joel’s tongue twitter clue made me stop,think,laugh. Fun one today. Thanks Joel F.
@Laura Oh, that reminds me. I didn't finish it last night! Thanks.
I for one found this puzzle to be quite enjoyable. Gave me plenty of resistance, but never left me stuck, at least not for very long. I just loved several clue/answer pairs. HELDSERVE is ingenious, and CREASED was beautiful, and though I've never heard of a BROHUG, it certainly made sense. And I think I learned how to spell OEUVRE here, which as I understand it is Spanish for "eggs".** **I don't really, but I thought it was kind of funny. I couldn't actually remember the Spanish word, but it's in the same ball park, letter-wise.
@Francis you are looking for huevos 🥚🍳
@Francis emus ate my response. It’s huevos in Spanish. 🥚🍳
@Francis I think you may be confusing Spanish and French. The French word for “egg” is “oeuf.”
Typical tough Friday for me, but ended up being an enjoyable workout, with more than a few things finally dawning on me with some crosses. Puzzle find today was inspired by 25a (ALGORE). A Sunday from January 19, 1997 by B. Klahn with the title: "Presidential Punditry." Clue and answer that got me there: "Mathematical rules governing the Vice President's macarena?" ALGORERHYTHMS And some other theme answers: CHELSEAGRAMMAR DIRECTLYTOYALE DISSEDHILLARY And there were a couple of others. Here's that Xword Info link: <a href="https://www.xwordinfo.com/Crossword?date=1/19/1997&g=78&d=A" target="_blank">https://www.xwordinfo.com/Crossword?date=1/19/1997&g=78&d=A</a> I'm done. ...
@Rich in Atlanta How about Hillbilly Clinton?
Ron, PAH was discussed here yesterday. Here's a link: <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/shared/comment/773vk90008q?rsrc=cshare&smid=url-share" target="_blank">https://www.nytimes.com/shared/comment/773vk90008q?rsrc=cshare&smid=url-share</a>
@Ron Bravenec WSJ had a PAH clue a couple of weeks ago which didn’t sit well with my sister; I myself am fine with PAH, so I don’t get the PAH hatred.
Well, wheelhouses are apparently lining up for many of you. For me, not so much. So the "trivia" plus the diabolical clueing made this a hard won puzzle. Almost not complaining, as it was a real work out. Took 1h 26m to complete unaided. I'm actually surprised i got the gold star.
@Renegator same here! But we persevered
This was a fine Friday puzzle for me, tougher than usual, I am always happy to say (if it's true). The phrase "Who am I TO question?" does not ring a bell with me, since I have never read or heard that phrase without some more words afterwards. And I dunno, claiming that PAH means "Hogwash!" seems going out on a limb here. (I associate "pah" with something French people often say, as if to pronounce "pah" but with no vowel sound, just an exhalation. And if I had to translate it, I'd say it means "Gee, I don't know about that," not as strong as "Hogwash!".)
@Dan The phrase "Who am I TO question?" can occur at the end of its context, not just the beginning. "It seemed weird that Sally asked for gummy bears on her pizza ... then again, it's her pizza, who am I TO question?" I think the intended use of "pah" is closer to "bah" -- an expression of disdain/dismissal. (I say as someone who doesn't spend time around French people so isn't familiar with the usage you describe)
Dan, Re: PAH See quotations here -- as clued -- from William Shakespeare and Washington Irving! <a href="https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/pah" target="_blank">https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/pah</a>
@Dan Interjections are weird. They sound natural in speech but look bonkers in text.
@Dan Also known as the French mouth fart.
My favorite Friday puzzle since March 21
Tough to follow a Lewis post, so I'll just say this was a good puzzle, hard but not killer hard, and I enjoyed it. Holds the line, takes in the trash, and evening out were all top notch stuff. This was a good time. And it continues the somewhat exasperating trend of making the upper left the hardest part of the puzzle. :(
Are folks just worn out from Commenting on yesterday's puzzle? Because there were 844 there when I was up around 2 a.m. for the Spelling Bee. Woof! In "Own Worst Enemy" category, I have 21A, where I failed to cross the T and nearly had a stroke trying to make that i work. Nice, au courant puzzle. Instructional, even. I am left with several questions: Do FERRETS actually gather in groups? Is IRONING actually considered "evening out"?? Why didn't I know precisely how to spell OEUVRE??? Nearly had OEUF on my face.
@Mean Old Lady Not only do ferrets actually get together in groups but, as I learned today, those groups are actually called "a business." Isn't that great? From Google: The Book of St. Albans, published in 1486, listed "besynes" as the proper term for a group of ferrets, and over time, this Middle English word transformed into the modern "business." This name aptly captures the nature of ferrets, known for their active and playful behavior.
I was going smoothly, making good Friday progress, until I hit the wall in the SE. OUCH! Especially annoying because BANANA PEEL, SPEED GUN, EPA, and ELENA were all gimmes for me. I didn't know CIPRO (I'm sure I'm not alone in that!), and I had GRasPED for "Put together". And that got me from seeing the beautiful (but tricky!) combo of OEUVRE and CREASED for the longest time. Favorite clue: "Takes in the trash?" Normally I take the trash OUT. I don't need more trash in my ABODE. OOF! I've got a headache now. I think I'll lie down.
Waiting for Steve L and/or Barry Ancona to report that this puzzle was "very hard". If I'm wrong about this, I will feel doubly defeated.
@The X-Phile I did remember that everybody was trying to get their hands on CIPRO when the Anthrax letters were going around, in late 2001.
I was making record time and then sat in the SE corner for quite a while, foiled by “evening.” 🤦🏼♀️ Clever cluing, and a fun puzzle, thank you!!