So yesterday, everyone was going on about REUNE, ETERNE and NEONATE...all good words, unknown to some, disliked by others, and claimed to not be a word by a few. (And yes, if it's in the dictionary, it's a word. And if it's a word, it's good to be in the puzzle. That's how it goes.) Anyway, today's obvious clunker to anyone who follows the sport is MINOR TEAM. Certainly, these two words together as a pairing exists, at least sporadically, since if you do a search, you'll find examples on the internet, although none of the ones I saw were by professionals. And this is because it's not what teams like the Syracuse Mets are called. They're called "minor-league teams." This distinction is important; one is the normal term, and one is the term a few people who don't know the normal terminology have occasionally used. (I base my opinion on the fact that I watch or listen to at least 150 games a year, and no one well-versed in the proper lingo says it...I've literally never heard it on a baseball broadcast.) Does it work in a crossword? Sure, most people (Americans, that is) will be able to figure it out. But it is still very clunky.
@Steve L, my thoughts exactly! I can see chords being called major or minor but baseball teams? On the other hand I enjoyed this puzzle, its rather no-nonsense cluing, and the interesting fill that he was forced to employ to keep up those spinning NOs.
@Steve L For me, today's clunker was KAYO
@Steve L I was sure it was farm team, and when it didn't fit I was mystified until I got some crosses.
@Steve L I'll take a non-idoimatic -- but plausible -- phrase if it makes for a clever theme and good fill elsewhere.
@Steve L MINOR TEAM is infinitely better than REUNES. (I did try to fit farm team at first)
I agree with others that MINORTEAM is awkwardly clunky. But is nobody else bothered by DUNZO?!?! I hate, abhor, revile, and detest it!
@Grumpy 'Tis an outrage. A crime against humanity.
@Grumpy DUNZO was the last answer for me. I've heard of donezo, but not this.
@Grumpy DUNZO - an apt description for this puzzle.
@Grumpy - it’s a funny thing. I typed DUNZO in without hesitation… and spent almost 10 mins looking for an error before realizing BUSOM isn’t how you spell it, buddy.
@Grumpy Not crazy about DUNZO but I can live with it. It's not the worst. It's just MEH.
@Grumpy it's don't know that's how I would have thought to spell it but it's been a slang word (not that I would use it) for some time. In Parks and Rec, one of the characters had a "dunzo list" ("it means you and i are done") in 2011.
Well, this grid was not just thrown together. It is one high quality piece of work. Not only are the shaded squares symmetrical, but each theme ZO is paired with an OZ vertically, and each theme ON is paired with a NO horizontally. Those 24 shaded squares, each with a letter that had to be there, greatly restrict the words that can go in the grid, especially since six of those shaded squares contain Z’s, and that the grid is so cleanly filled, well, wow! That is, this puzzle was designed and filled by a pro. I love the playfulness of CURLICUES and the silliness of DUNZO. I like that ANY is symmetrical with EN-E. And I love the serendipity that six words in the grid end with the “er” sound (AGER, YELPER, ALTER, MINOR , SOLAR, UBER). I imagine that one day Jeremy was thinking about how an N is a flipped Z, and his constructor mind started pondering, “What can I do with this?” And what a piece of beauty came out. Thank you for making this, Jeremy!
@Lewis I loved it. Before I saw the theme, I thought it was OZ for “Wicked For Good” which is being early released today!💚💖
Time to play "What's going to be the entry that launches a thousand complaints?" Yesterday it was REUNE, which apparently is an invalid word, we've decided. Followed closely by ETERNE and NEONATE. That made for fascinating reading. And reading. And reading. I'm betting on KAYO. ("What? We just spell words any old way now?") But it could be DUNZO ("I've never heard that, ever.") Or MINORTEAM, because it's nearly impossible, even for the sake of enjoying a puzzle, for the human mind to make the immense journey from "minor league team" to "minor team". ("Said nobody ever.") Or maybe they'll be a surprise complaint. YURI? OZARK? Only time will tell.
@Francis "kayo" it is indeed, at least for me! Phonetically spell both letters or neither, but not just ONE of a duo. Phew, I do feel better now! 😂
@Francis BTW, I wrote the OP with tongue in cheek. I don't mind any of these. I didn't mind REUNE. It's a puzzle. We're supposed to stretch our minds a little. That's what used to be fun about it.
@Francis I would love to know what’s wrong with Yuri 😄
@Francis I vote for DUNZO. Never heard it, never saw it, never want to. Your other candidates--KAYO, YURI, and OZARK--were all well-known to me.
@Francis Ah, the joys of being Polish. I got MINOR TEAM from crosses, exclusively. When I first saw its clue, I shrugged, sighed and moved on. When the entry revealed itself, I didn't give it another thought (or even a first one, really).
@Francis Let's not be cheap here--KAYO (KO) is entirely contrived, as MINORTEAM (Minor League Team). I love it when people complain about "complainers" as if that needs to be pointed out in a novel way every other puzzle. It is an open forum--people can cheer and jeer. The crossword today was okay if not clunky. You may move along at your leisure.
@Francis I liked REUNE (sociology term), ETERNE (used in poems), AND NEONATE (medical term). KAYO and DUNZO are meh. I understand why some folks hate MINORTEAM because it diminishes the importance of the farm teams but it's not terrible. I've seen a lot worse. I see a lot of complaints about OREO and EMU. I will BOLO to find my worst word yet.
@CCH I'll see your Lucille Bluthe quotes and raise you a Tom Haverford quote. Dunzo! :) <a href="https://youtu.be/acLp0S3K6mk?si=9O1f4CCbIhorF0_2" target="_blank">https://youtu.be/acLp0S3K6mk?si=9O1f4CCbIhorF0_2</a>
@Francis okay for OK, or spelling out letter sounds (cee, dee, zee, etc.) seems exactly the same to me, and those happen almost daily. (BOY, getting autocorrect not to replace the letter sounds was fun.)
Minor team? That’s inventing something which doesn’t exist. Minor League Team exists. But minor team? Not a thing.
@Paul I was composing mine while you were sending yours. I spent a little more time getting specific. But we apparently had the same thought.
@Paul I had AFFILIATE in first pass until I did the crosses.
@Paul But we do have the concept of "major" and "minor". A major contributor gives a million dollars. A minor contributor gives ten dollars. A major city has a population of several million. A minor city has a population of 300,000. A major team is the Los Angeles Dodgers. A minor team is the Pittsburg Pirates (sadly). And a team that is in a minor league system is absolutely, undeniably, inarguably less than (minor) compared to the MLB team which is affiliated with the minor league team.
@Paul By this puzzle: MINOR TEAM == MINOR LEAGUE TEAM FOUR STOP == FOUR WAY STOP DEEP FISHING == DEEP SEA FISHING BAD BEARS == BAD NEWS BEARS ...etc
"Can you find your top?" "Not at the present momentum, but I'll still give it a whirl." (No spun intended.)
@Mike You might need a spin doctor to cure the wobbles. Precession precedes progression. Perilous prognosis.
@Mike Dreidle throw you off balance. If you must get to the bottom of this, slow down and try a CURLICUE instead.
@Mike I can't believe you've already lost your toy! That top was exspinsive!
I’m relatively new to these puzzles and this forum (for example I only recently figured out what all this talk of emus was about) and I enjoy sharing clever clues and themes with my non-X-worder (but mean Wordler) wife. She usually just shakes her head. Tonight she’s recuperating from yesterday’s knee replacement so I sat up in bed next to her to do the new puzzle. Looking over at my screen, she asked, “What’s a NOTUS?” (Rhymes with POTUS.) I was happy to be able to reply, “That, my dear, is a dook.” BTW, she quickly came up with the Egyptian ONION from just the spoken clue while I was drawing a blank. TIL the expression DUNZO and have no problem with it, but MINOR TEAMS is beyond the pale. Overall, fun puzzle, clever theme.
@Bay Area Native My only problem with DUNZO is that another spelling of it featured at least once in previous NYT puzzles. DONEZO, maybe? It always irritates me when alternate spellings of the same thing appear in NYT crossworda, especially against the background of the Spelling Bee word list not including perfectly fine vocabulary. Also, my experience as a native Polish speaker plays a role. "Alternative spellings" just aren't a thing in our language.
I wish the answer to 63 across had been “lasagna.” It would have shown ancient Egypt in a whole new light.
Almost nailed it by myself! It doesn’t happen very often, especially with Wednesday puzzles (English isn’t my first language). But this one was pretty fun! Or I actually got some experience after solving over 800 puzzles😄 Bottom left corner was too tricky for me, tho, had to use some Google, but it’s still a huge win for me! Thanks a lot, Jeremy!
@Sergio Theodore I had to do a look-up in the bottom left too. I still feel that I am making progress, as I sailed through the rest of it, except for KAYO.
Hoo BOY. Over 200 Comments already, and I am here to say some of the same things, I imagine...not that it takes much imagination to "get" that. The MINORS. Double A. Triple A. Let me be the zillionth solver to roll my eyes and utter snappy sayings like JEEZ LOUISE. But wait! There's more! YELP, by the way, earned a black eye by paying people for submitting fake laudatory reviews of restaurants (especially crumby greasy spoon eateries) so sensible people don't use YELP for anything. And if Kristi Noem is around, dogs that are YELPERS are askin' for it. You'd just hope she doesn't have an UZI. But the prize goes to 11D. DUNZO. dunzo DuNzO dUnZo Any way you look at it, this is an absolute stinker. And when you add the fact that I use the little line to cross the Z, which you learn in math so as not to mix it up with the numeral 2, it doesn't even work for the theme. Bah.
@Mean Old Lady DUNZO is something I say occasionally, but I've never had cause to spell it, until today. DONEZO is an alternative, I guess. I'm still wondering how BAE came to be spelled that way. I blame social media.
CURLICUES is a nice extra, as the rotating NO makes a curlicue moving around the grid. See here for fun graphs of epicycloids: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epicycloid" target="_blank">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epicycloid</a> (“why’d she have to bring math into it?”)
@Cat Lady Margaret We know you've got our number.
Cat Lady Margaret, As the stage manager whispered out of the side of his mouth to the actor playing the Wizard just before their first big scene: “You’re OZ.”
"Oh," said I around 15A, "it's OZ at different angles, because of Wicked 2 coming out." Then I got to the revealers...
@Isabeau I briefly thought the same. As far as I'm concerned, the best thing about the movie coming out is that Jeff Golblum and Michelle Yeoh are making the talk show rounds to promote it. No shade intended on fans of the book and movies, they're just not for me.
@Isabeau I pictured a tornado 🌪️ of OZ too!! Great minds and all… 😉
Well, by way of this delightful puzzle, which i enjoyed the heck out of, i learned that conductor Seiji Ozawa died last year. I type these words as a small ode to him. My mom gave me an LP of his version of Dvorak's New World symphony, with the San Francisco orchestra, when i was a teenager. I would sometimes lay on the couch and just listen, like you would in a concert hall, but getting up partway to turn the record over and then slip back into the musicdreamspace. Often when i played an album i would prop the jacket up in front of the turntable, like in a record shop, as the now playing selection. Over the years, i must have spent several hours gazing at the cover photo of Mr Ozawa looking past the Golden Gate Bridge like an explorer, a man finding a new world. I only know him from that photo and the music he guided other musicians to make. Thank you, Jeremy Newton, for inspiring me to dig out that record and play it again.
@Kelp I’m definitely a fan of his music too. And he had a certain twinkle in his eye too. He will be missed.
@Kelp I listened to the Dvorak's New World Symphony over and over when I was a kid. It wasn't Ozawa's version (he came later). What a piece of music! Ozawa was with the San Francisco Symphony when I lived in the Bay Area, but I never got the chance to hear him.
@Kelp A moving tribute. Thanks for sharing.
@Kelp Our HS band was large (100 kids) and that was one of the concert pieces we played.Quite altered, of course, as we had no strings. Clarinets got most of the violin parts....and that was my instrument. It was a great experience
How paradoxical to have NO spinning in a NO SPIN theme. Just shows how hard it is to get a straight answer these days.
I had a heckuva time trying to place lasagna in 63A.
@Linda Jo I wondered briefly how long ago baklava had been invented.
@Linda Jo LOL. There is a description of some burials during the Black Plague that talked about people stacked like lasagna in the earth.
@Linda Jo LOL thanks for that! I already had -NION in place when I got to that clue, so it presented no alternative visions... but this thread of comments is worth the whole rest of the puzzle!
Right. So I solved this without lookups in Tuesday time, wondering why the clueing was so straightforward for a Wednesday. If that was my experience, I can only imagine how easy this must have been for veteran American solvers. As for the theme - I'll check the column in a moment, but beyond the themed squares involving OZ and ON, I have no idea what it was about: I don't see how the shaded squares relate to the revealers, especially the NO SPIN one 🤷🏽. Is it as simple as TURN ON involving the shaded ONs of the themed entries? Anyway, the puzzle inspired me to finally check why on Earth oz is short for ounce and lb for pound. Apparently the etymology is ultimately ancient Roman, and the symbols arrived in English via Romance languages. That's... So weird.
Madre de dios! So there was something more to the theme after all. I would not have been able to figure it out on my own. But why work so hard to implement such a complex concept into a grid as straightforwardly clued as this? Wasn't it a wasted effort? I mean, I did not get it, at all, but I still solved the puzzle extremely quickly.
@Andrzej Facinating.
@Andrzej @Francis I'd love to sit with you two guys at a bar and just listen to the back-and-forth. I'd be a non-contributor as I wouldn't want to interrupt the flow.
That was considerably easier than Monday and Tuesday. I see what Mr Shortz is doing; scrambling the grids to keep us on our toes. Got the theme immediately, filled as fast as I could type, which is a rare easy run through for me. KAYO the only meh filler for me, the rest was fun. Special thanks to @Vaer for reminding me of the sublime Dawn Penn. That’s back on my Spotify most played list.
@Helen Wright Enjoyed that one too. Dunzo was a new one on me though and I've been having a party with the NYT crossword archive over the years. Like you pulled a face at Kayo and moved swiftly on
@Helen Wright When I was reading about the song on Wikipedia, I was surprised by how many versions and covers of it were out there. Also have been wracking my brain trying to remember how/when I first heard it.
@Helen Wright I remembered. It's part of the sound track for the 1995 indie movie Party Girl, which stars a young Parker Posey and is set in the 90s NYC downtown scene. It's a very charming and fun little movie and I recommend it if you can find.
As a mathematician, I find the grid geometry and theme here simply *brilliant*. It perfectly portrays an index-3 vector field in a neighborhood of an isolated singularity (located at the center of the grid). Viewing the ON at the eastern edge of the grid as a vector starting at the O and terminating at the N, this vector perfectly rotates CCW precisely three times as we travel CCW around the (approximate) circle formed by the shaded entries. The ON on the eastern edge rotates one full cycle to become the ON in the NW, rotates another full cycle to become the ON in the SW, and rotates once more to return to its original orientation on the eastern margin. Three complete CCW (positive in mathematics) rotations happening in the course of one CCW rotation around the grid. Index +3, perfectly portrayed! Will need to save this one for the next time I teach a course that discusses indices of vector fields. Brilliant! (Solved it in about 11 minutes, without realizing at all just how beautiful it was. Glad I took a second look afterwards.)
@Xword Junkie I think Andrzej already pointed this out…JK Andrzej
@Xword Junkie I had noticed some of the symmetries, but not the 3-way symmetry within the square grid! Brilliant.
For anyone who doesn't know Tom Holland he's an incredibly talented actor who played Spiderman among other things. But my favorite clip of him is from Lip Sync Battle - it is hilarious and he is a *phenomenal* dancer - he actually started in ballet. I can watch this over and over: (2 minutes in) (you will see why it has 34M views) <a href="https://youtu.be/jPCJIB1f7jk?si=LwRz2iJ69hOrycVh" target="_blank">https://youtu.be/jPCJIB1f7jk?si=LwRz2iJ69hOrycVh</a> Not to be confused with Tom Hollander who tells a very amusing anecdote about being confused with Tom Holland at about 9 Minutes in <a href="https://youtu.be/z_c4JHOIoSc?si=nr7yw1hTebG1b8jP" target="_blank">https://youtu.be/z_c4JHOIoSc?si=nr7yw1hTebG1b8jP</a>
@Lpr brilliant!! Absolutely loved that!!!
@Lpr I know Tom Hollander from White Lotus (loved that and him in it) BTW, did you know you can share YouTube links cued precisely to the point in the video you wish to share? After you click the "Share" button, in the pop-up you can click a "Start at..." box
@Bill in Yokohama ooh did not know- excellent tip! 👍👍👍
@Lpr Thanks for the reminder, i've seen and loved that battle clip several times. In the same vein, here's a clip of comedian Robert (Peep Show) Webb, who may not have studied movement at all. Drag dance playlist! <a href="https://youtu.be/5Lz6k5Zg2wA?si=s1JzOAoiBeTJ46N3" target="_blank">https://youtu.be/5Lz6k5Zg2wA?si=s1JzOAoiBeTJ46N3</a>
MINOR TEAM is fine, KAYO is not. Spelling out letters is iffy, but doing it inconsistently In an acronym? Such a stretch. The theme, i didn't care for. Maybe I could have noticed it sooner but it didn't really affect the solving at all and at the end I wasn't even interested enough to try and understand it.
@Max Right? Either KO or KAYOH.
@Max I’m pretty sure your dislike of KAYO is just your lack of familiarity with it. It’s a legitimate phonetic spelling of KO, and if you search for “kayo definition,” you’ll find plenty of dictionary and other support for it. It’s actually quite common in boxing sportswriting. As such, you’ll also find it used in branding. MINOR TEAM is just the opposite. The correct phrase is “minor league team,” or informally, “farm team.” Saying MINOR TEAM would make it clear you are a total baseball outsider. It’s just not a normal term.
@Max Kayo is a verb. It's even in the Oxford Learner's Dictionary, which tends not to feature unusual items.
All the dislike for DUNZO, but from another angle, is it all that bad? DUNNO… (Oh no! Oh no! There’s a hole in the ONOZE layer!)
I see a lot of people are complaining about MINOR TEAM, even some who complained about yesterday's complaints. It seems to me that the problem isn't with the answer, but with the clue. Instead of "The Syracuse Mets vis-à-vis the New York Mets" which should be MINOR league TEAM, it should simply have been clued "Teams like the New York Mets". (When was the last time they did something "major"?) Just kidding, Mets' fans. I still celebrate Bobby Bonilla Day.
@The X-Phile July 1. We all do. The gift that keeps on giving. IYKYK.
Yet another thought on MINOR TEAM: Since the clue asks us to contrast two teams, shouldn’t it be MINORER TEAM? But I really came here to complain about GOLDEN AGER. Why is every name people use for us so smarmy? I think we need to take a lesson from the LGBTQ folk. They took possession of the insult “queer” and made it their own. I would much rather be a GEEZER than a senior citizen, elder, golden ager, or other condescending tag.
Hmm…I guess one’s appreciation for this puzzle depends on how much you are willing to tolerate borderline fill for an unusually contortionist theme. DUNZO, KAYO and MINORTEAM have already been DISSECTED, and personally I wasn’t fond of the SW with the OZAWA and YADIG cross and the questionable clueing of BOY. Taken separately I would certainly ignore any of the them, taken together they definitely give me pause. I’m usually the first one to give extra points for cleverness and level of difficulty, and as Lewis mentioned this is a very complex theme to put together and was done well within the constraints. But I found it somehow dissatisfying. both easy and hard at the same time since the theme gave away a lot of the solve which would have been arcane to me otherwise. So I’ll leave the final grade to you all and for me just say I think this was a well crafted, quality puzzle that I just personally didn’t enjoy very much. It happens.
Shouldn't it be "YES"SPIN? And I'm sorry, but "KAYO" just feels gross.
@Nowah KAYO took me entirely too long, I gotta say
I'm just the tiniest bit tired of shaded squares and circles in squares and circles in shaded squares. Or maybe I'm just tired. I did like ORZO crossing CRETE. And today's earworm is brought to you by Dawn Penn and the NO, NO, NOs. <a href="https://youtu.be/y9wdyHiUagY?si=eAii37e9eR9DvfOD" target="_blank">https://youtu.be/y9wdyHiUagY?si=eAii37e9eR9DvfOD</a>
@Vaer Basically, you're shading shading 😃
@Vaer That song is a great way to start my day. Thanks!
@Vaer How could I have forgotten this song?! Reggae at its best. ‘Tell the people’ indeed. Thank you.
@Vaer Well, you obviously need a good Thursday rebus puzzle.
(An aside to Wordplay regulars…) EZRA (as in John) crossed by ASSET? Why, indeed he is in these here parts. EZRA next to GEMS? Why, indeed, he comes out with them non-stop.
@Lewis Well said, and seconded.
"I am the great and powerful NO!" But more seriously, we need to reach out to that lonely, unpaired 7th Z.
@John Carson You could argue it has a weaker relationship with the O of ZORA. A chemist would know what to call that. Some sort of covalence.
I buried this somewhere in the middle of a long post, but enough folk are in a snit over KAYO that it bears repeating: KAYO [sic] has been around at least 112 years, so just deal with it, *OKAY*? <a href="https://greensdictofslang.com/entry/6flmrtq" target="_blank">https://greensdictofslang.com/entry/6flmrtq</a>
@Bill It's a little dated, so there seems to be a dichotomy of those who know it from when its use was more frequent, and those who adamantly insist it's not a thing. It's a thing. It may be a dated thing, but it's still a thing.
minor theme? get it? like MINORTEAM? kinda iffy...sorta uninteresting? bueller...bueller...anyone?
Good puzzle. On the easy side for Wednesday, I flew through most of it quick. I did get hung up a little in bottom left, just because I originally had BITS instead of MEGS and don't know anything about the Boston Symphony. And the other clues in that area are sort of ambiguous multi word phrases like YA DIG and SO DO I.
KAYO displeased me. Otherwise, I was DUNZO in record time. Didn't get the theme until I read the notes but I did notice the unusually high number of Z-containing words.
@Sebastian Don't feel bad. It was quick for me as well and I still don't get the theme!
@Sebastian Loved those Zs.
I thought for sure this was going to be another “Wicked” themed puzzle, with the premier of the second film happening this weekend… I was surprised when my OZ pattern shifted to NO in the NE corner, and then continued to incorporate “N” instead of “Z” elsewhere. This one was interesting, and because my brain was stuck in OZ, I missed the trick until the revealer. Ah well. TIL that Egyptians buried ONIONs with their dead…maybe it will come up in pub trivia someday 😅
@kit I still pictured OZ spinning like a tornado 🌪️. OZ➡️ON➡️ZO➡️NO
MLB farm teams are never referred to as a "minor team." "Minor league team" or "farm team" or "Triple-A affiliate" but never "minor" team. The NATO alphabet does NOT begin with alfa, but with ALPHA as in....ALPHABET, the Greek word for the letter A.
@Scott ALPHA was the proposed spelling in 1947. Since 1949 it's been ALFA. You can see the history of the international agreements here: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NATO_phonetic_alphabet" target="_blank">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NATO_phonetic_alphabet</a>
This is an interesting rabbit hole, by the way. Not all the words and their spellings were agreed upon until 1956. The US military does use ALPHA rather than the international spelling.
Dunzo? In what language? Is this contemporary slang? It certainly cost me a gold star as well as a personal record. More than that, I would like to know the origin.
@Ettagale it’s just slang for done. I first heard it around 2005 but don’t really know when/where it started.
@Ettagale The language is English. The answer is in the clue where they use 2 slang words meaning the same thing. Also, the across clues (and the theme), made it exceedingly easy to get whether you know the word or not. Perhaps that gold star wasn't merited this time?
Ettagale, To Hitch's point, which of the five crossing answers did you not know? I do not use DUNZO in speech or writing, and I'm not sure I've ever heard or seen it, but the five crosses made the answer quite clear.
Wow! Loved this! So much fun. Got through quickly, for me and did mot have to look up names because of crossings. Thank you, Jeremy for a delightful puzzle! Y’all have a wonderful Wednesday!
I totally thought this had to do with The Wizard of OZ (OZ spinning like a tornado).🌪️ Especially in light of Wicked 2 being released next week. Clever theme, sort of on the easy side. No issue with MINOR TEAM. We went to Spring Training in AZ and watched Will Klein when played in the Minors for the KC Royals. Fun times!
@Jacqui J I thought the same re Wicked!
I think of this one as the ounce bounce
@Petrol … or a three- quarter pounder
As others have said, KAYO and DUNZO are problematic and shouldn’t have been included. I also had a problem with BOY as the answer to that clue. The theme didn’t click for me while playing but was helpful in getting some letters on the board, so that’s nice I guess. Overall not a bad puzzle at all and actually quite enjoyable. Just a few little kinks to work out but, hey, that’s what editorial is for. Happy Wednesday!
@D What's wrong with BOY? Both BOY and man can be used as interjections: "Man, that was hard." "BOY, I'm excited!"
@D a lot of people are having issues with BOY and DUNZO but I'm not seeing the issue. But I wholeheartedly agree with KAYO.
A fairly quick solve for me…about 40% under my average time. Count me among those who had no problem with KAYO, something I’ve seen a few times in sports sections. (Also, it’s appeared 35 times in the crossword.) However, I did have a significant problem with MINOR TEAM. I’ve read…and written…a great deal about baseball and I’ve never seen it before (and it has never appeared in a crossword before today). I’m surprised it got past the editors. Farm team. Farm club. Minor league team. Sure…but minor team, no.
Oh... and one more puzzle find of course. A Sunday from November 29, 1987 by Bert H. Kruse with the title: "Not so fast!" Some clue and answer examples: "Ordinary" AMBLEOFTHEMILL "Dakota site of Presidential busts" MTMOSEYMORE "Chicago airport control center" OTORTOISETOWER "Popular intercity transport" STBERNARDBUS And some other theme answers: POKYPUDDING SLOTHSLAYER Here's that link: <a href="https://www.xwordinfo.com/PS?date=11/29/1987&g=100&d=A" target="_blank">https://www.xwordinfo.com/PS?date=11/29/1987&g=100&d=A</a> ...
A pretty fast Wednesday for me. I'm not sure I get the theme. Okay, OZ can be rotated to look like other letter combinations. And?
@Dan Yep, that's about the size of it. ON, OZ, NO, and ZO. You're really not missing anything.
@Dan I pictured it spinning like a tornado…as in the Wizard of Oz…
Loved how ON flipped in so or ZO many ways. This was very clever. Forgive me, but I did like seeing ZO in my puzzle because that's Mamdani's nickname.
I attended the ACPT in Stamford for 10 years. That was before everything went digital. I learned then it was important to use lower case letters when solving, since they're faster to write and the puzzles there are all timed. I no longer solve for speed but still print the puzzle, and still use lower case letters. So even though I flew through this puzzle, it took me a little extra time to understand the theme, which happened right after I got the first revealer. Definitely a lightweight theme, IMO, Ozempic notwithstanding. The letters Z and N only work with this theme if you type them or use upper case letters to fill in the grid on paper.
When I was a small child, I would describe a loud dog as "barfy": "barf" being a portmanteau of "bark" and "arf." I considered BARFERS for 23A, as it might be a way of reviewing a restaurant. *** *** *** The wording of 61A expects a comparative adjective--now, in Latin "minor" is comparative, of "parvus" (but from a different root.) But in English, it's usually an absolute adjective--"The song is in a minor key"--or a noun--"I took a minor in music theory." Are the Syracuse Mets a minorer team? *** *** *** My surname contains several fricatives and suibilants which can be easily confused over the phone. When spelling out our name, my mother would habitually use the Adam-Baker-Charlie alphabet to clarify; I have learned to follow suit, but have trained myself to use the NATO alphabet. However, I still use "Zebra." *** *** *** People have been having problems with kayos for at least 112 years: <a href="https://greensdictofslang.com/entry/6flmrtq" target="_blank">https://greensdictofslang.com/entry/6flmrtq</a> *** *** *** I caught on to the 90° rotational shift early on, but had no idea where we going with it. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V9_TMj8GB6s&list=RDV9_TMj8GB6s&start_radio=1" target="_blank">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V9_TMj8GB6s&list=RDV9_TMj8GB6s&start_radio=1</a> (What the emus might say to the first paragraph of this comment.)
@Bill Per John Candy, Barf is short for Barfolomew. (I can;t believe they're making a sequel without him.)
And, yet another puzzle find. Once again, a trick that I don't recall encountering before. Pretty amazing piece of construction. Anyway - a Sunday from February 26, 1995 by Fred Piscop with the title "Every Tom, Dick and Harry." Five 21 letter grid-spanning theme entries in that one and all of them with exactly the same clue: "Tom, Dick and Harry." And those answers: THUMBVANDYKEANDMORGAN SEAVERMARTINANDTRUMAN MIXBUTTONANDBELAFONTE SAWYERCAVETTANDCHAPIN ARNOLDCLARKANDHOUDINI Here's that link: <a href="https://www.xwordinfo.com/Crossword?date=2/26/1995&g=59&d=A" target="_blank">https://www.xwordinfo.com/Crossword?date=2/26/1995&g=59&d=A</a> I just can't imagine what it would take to come up with an idea like that and then come up with 5 equal length answers to fit the trick. Just amazing. ...
Pretty breezy and mostly fun, but KAYO and DUNZO are gross. Also MINOR TEAM makes sense in context but isn't really a phrase. Bit forced overall