Kvetchy Kvaddle

The climactic transformation into cartoon fonts was an unexpected and welcome surprise treat.

5D “Get a closer shot” is flat out wrong. A pan is a shot where the camera moves horizontally around the axis on which it is mounted - left to right or right to left, but never closer or farther. The cinematic move in which the camera physically gets closer would be a dolly shot. A zoom is a shot in which the focal length of the lens changes dynamically during the shot, resulting in a portion of the image getting larger, which can have the effect of simulating the camera getting closer to the subject without the camera physically moving in relation to the subject. Of course, a dolly and a zoom can be combined in a single shot, which can have the effect of either intensifying the sense of increasing closeness, or counteracting it (the so-called dolly-counter-zoom made famous by Hitchcock in Vertigo, among many others.) TL:dr - A camera shot can appear to get closer to its subject using either a dolly or a zoom, or both. But never a pan (unless, of course, that pan is combined with a dolly or a zoom, a technique that was rather common in films of the Sixties and Seventies, but tends to look awkward and unsophisticated to modern eyes.) This is a rare slip up by the usually spot on NYT crossword editorial team.

I’ve also always found the Zelda games use of rupees as currency to be jarringly mundane for such otherwise imaginative examples of world building. Come to think of it, the choice of the name Zelda struck me as surprisingly mundane as well. I assume both words must sound more exotic to native Japanese speakers.

Everything else struck me as fair, but not thrum. I’m 59 years old, was an English major as an undergrad, am reasonably well-read and -spoken, and I’m almost positive I have never once in my life come across thrum used as a synonym for strum. It probably wouldn’t have been so frustrating if the far more commonly used word strum didn’t fit one letter shy of perfectly in its place. If not, I would have at least had a fighting chance of realizing something was amiss. As it is, I could have worked the puzzle for the entirety of this new year and never completed it without finally having given up and coming here to see what I was missing. I still contend that the dictionaries are wrong on this one. Hey, who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes?