Bob
Anacortes, Washington
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Anacortes, Washington
I'm old, I drove a cab for a living while I was floundering around after grad school, I don't have a single ride-share app, and I still tried "Lyft" first.
Great puzzle, Tracy. I wonder how hard you had to work to get the Beatles' song positioned at 64A.
Another example of why I love crosswords. For "hyena" I had "Hausa" at first, because I vaguely remembered that it's a subsaharan language, and might therefore be the people who speak it, and those folks might be matriarchal. Wild guess, way wrong. But it turns out that it IS a language and the people who speak it, and that they USED to be martriarchal. Words and things. So beautiful. And now I know that hyenas are matriarchal!
@D You mean "jibe," In fact, you did "jive" the constructor. Delicious puzzle. Perfect for Monday.
"Fall or fell" strikes me as one of the tightest pieces of cluing I've ever seen.
Caitlin, on the Games crossword page on my pc, the featured picture of Dolly Parton was directly beneath the blank grid. For me, that was an unfortunate spoiler, which made the solve of a great puzzle a little less fun. Maybe picture selectors or page designers could take the issue into account in the future. Small matter. Food for thought. Thanks.
Speaking of "creative names," "Dear Abby" yesterday featured a letter from a frustrated friend of a soon-to-be-mother who liked the sounds of the words "chlamydia," "bidet," and "chalet," and thought they'd be nice names for her daughter. The friend wanted to steer her away from them, but the mother's family was supportive.
As to FauxPoohs and other WTP underbrush, see Frederick Crews' book of essays The Pooh Perplex, one of the great satires of academic literary criticism.
Scot crossing Clyde was nice too. Great puzzle.
When you've had too much whiskey in Rye, there's generally a bathroom on the right.
@Barry Ancona No point, really. I just like these little redundancies that the evolution of the language has coughed up. Three of the classics in the same puzzle is kind of cool. I guy I know once told me he had just recovered from the avian bird flu.
@john ezra Since I first read that Kooser poem, it has always reminded me of Billy Collins' "A Portrait of the Reader with a Bowl of Cereal."
Has anybody commented that "pan pan" (paella pan) and "desert desert" (Sahara Desert) are both in this excellent puzzle? Haven't seen "the the people" (the hoi polloi) for a while.
@Francis In any case, Gladly the Cross-eyed Bear was looking on.
My best Friday time ever. Really enjoyed solving this one, and thought the "vacant lot" clue was genius. I also thought the forum moderator missed disapproving a certain much-responded-to post. Differences of opinion, likes, dislikes--great. Crude to the nth and worse that gratuitously unpleasant? Spare us, please. And, really folks, if you simply ignore the whiners and attack dogs, their posts won't piggyback to the top of reader picks on your responses where they then dominate what otherwise can be a very worthwhile conversation. There are some very smart, knowledgeable, and creative people here who make the day more interesting, and I say, let 'em prevail.
One of the lucky things about living on the west coast and doing the puzzle on the morning of the day it's dated is that I can go immediately to abundant "Reader's Picks," where the complaints about the puzzle itself don't show up very often and where things are happiest when Mike is number one (viz today, as of this writing). By way of complaint, I would like to say that the complaints about complainers and about putative braggarts are--to me--as annoying as the complaints about the puzzle and the putative bragging (I did today's in 14 minutes with no lookups and loved the experience). And the fact that the complainers about complaints and putative braggarts also recommend the posts of complainers about complaints and putative braggarts means that complaining rises to the top. How 'bout we keep complaints in the minority, where they actually exist?
It's so interesting how this crossword business goes. I found today's puzzle to be an utter breeze: nearly my best time, a lot of fun, and awe-inspiring in it's wordplay. Yet there are so many reactions that differ from mine. To me, this is a perfect illustration of the genius of the Latin maxim "de gustibus non est disputandum." Alas (accompanied by a sigh), so much breath could be saved . . . The most interesting part of the comments section from where I sit were the side excursions into the history of the Jews. One has some reading to do.
If you love palindromes and haven't read Roger Angell's essay "Aonmosni," you'll be well-rewarded if you track it down.
@Anita In one of the great Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee episodes, Jerry Seinfeld asks Carvey how he responds when people walk up to him on the street and beg him to reprise HW. "Not gonna do it," says Carvey.
@Nick So what does this mean apropos of your screed? I'm as not a Jew as you could find on the planet, and my first two fills were bnai (without the apostrophe, allowable according to the odd conventions of xwordworld, as opposed to "maam" in the Spelling Bee) and Eli. And do you think Francophones are over-represented, or Trekkies, perhaps? And you want to beef about product placement in the NYT? Check out the frequency of a certain salt brand in the food and cooking section recipes. I mean, salt! Maybe next it'll be a brand of air.
Oh, joy. Another pursed-lips, knit-brow, commenter-leading-life-as-a-scold controversy. Let's take this approach to crossword puzzles (!) further. The humans/dogs relationship has evolved into a travesty, complete with the giant, money grubbing industries associated with that particular disorder. So, no more dog breed clues! And don't get me started on the fashion industry, that cesspit of exploitation labor, wasted resources, and crucified fragile egos. So, no more A-line skirt clues! Oh, and outdoor domestic cats kill more than half a billion songbirds a year in the US alone. Let's quite with the Manx and Burmese clues. Go, Seahawks!
@Becca, v cute! BTW, the problem was that I DIDN'T go to the column. I try to avoid hints, and go to the column after I've finished the puzzle. The picture was on the puzzle page itself, where they have teasers for columns. I saw the picture and thought, "uh oh," and, sure enough, ran almost immediately into the clue for the long lower-right entry.
I think They Might Be Giants (1971) is a better film than Vincent Canby thought it was. What's not to like about Joanne Woodward and George C. Scott chewing the scenery together? Plus its a nice addition to the Sherlock Holmes pastiche genre, the best of which, to my mind, is Billy Wilder's The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes. TMBG also alludes to Saturday crosswords, though, as I recall, it was the Times of London's, not Canby's paper's. (I suspect you'll get more pleasure out of the movie if you ignore Scott's "British accent.")
@Stephanie Of course. But for the elderly, a charmingly evocative 1971 movie full of wonderful now-dead actors resonates a bit more than a semi-passe 80s boy band. Try the movie if you haven't seen it.
@Steve I do indeed.
@Michael B. It's a beaut. My favorite is still "exercising" demons. This continues to get by copy editors at respectable periodicals. One of life's little pleasures.
A bunch of restaurants in Manhattan serve crab louis, not to mention those in the "outer"( speaking of provincial) boroughs. But, hey, New Yorkers, the very center of the universe is way up in the left hand corner of our great nation!
Barry, you probably were at Three Crabs, now defunct (actually now reclaimed as a center for salmon habitat restoration). From me youth o'er the span of years to emerging old age, I ate at the Three Crabs dozens of times, more often than not the louis/louie. What's not to like about ice-cold picked crab with olives, eggs, tomatoes and greens with any kind of red dressing? Throw in a decent baguette and a good white Pinot and you've got something. From my front window, I can see the dock from which you took your Orcas ferry. If you're going to be in the neighborhood again, look me up. Sounds like you've been here more than once.
@Andrzej When charcuterie (in your sense of the word) is served with cheese, farinaceous tidbits, and condiments, it's traditionally called a charcuterie board. Using the word to mean the board has come into usage over time. Try Mount Saint Michael in Cornwall for a less hyped experience. It's a virtual duplicate. And while you're there, check out the Tate Modern in St. Ives. Altogether, Cornwall is one of my favorite places on the planet.
@CalGal Simplified Employee Pension [Plan]
Thanks for the Weird Al link. I've been running into an engaging solecism today: Sam Darnold has finally overcome his (perceived) tendency to perform poorly in big games, and therefore has exercised his demons. I picture him ("his," actually) walking his two very badly behaved dogs.
@Ιασων I'm having an old friend for dinner.
@Steve L Pretty much agree with you, except it seems a little unfair to me to include the LA Times. Their Sunday puzzle complications are often quite elegant, and often funnier than the Grey Lady allows herself to be. And, simply as an aside, Tina Brown may have been my favorite New Yorker editor, if for no other reason than she introduced a delightful cryptic to the mix! And let me suggest once again to ignore the whiners. Replies to them simply drives their comments to the top of the picks where they take up space where they're unlikely to be otherwise.
@Tricia109 No offense intended. I was replying originally with a little irony because, as far down the pike as I am, I know the difference between old (!) movies and 80s bands with adaptive staying power. And there is no truer Latin motto than "de gustibus non est disputandum." (Plus I'll take the pro-Wiki side of the debate any day.)
@CRTH If "deposed" means "had her head cut off."
@Steven M. Ask the lawyers about moot court.
@sotto voce I usually start in the lower-right corner for just this reason. And I solve on a desktop. As a dyed-in-the-wool newsprint-and-pen guy for decades, I still feel old-school even online because I have a cord-attached QWERTY keyboard in front of me. It helped this time, for sure. Plus fewer typing errors in general. And I can see the puzzle.
And let us not forget the controversy when Burma became Myanmar.
@Heidi Fiedler I'm not sure I understand your comment. "Harrow" is a noun and a verb, as is "torment." Harrowing someone is the same as tormenting someone. Doesn't the clue "[to] Torment" mean "[to] harrow"?
Moss Hart's autobiography, Act One, is delicious.
@Mike You keep this up, somebody be inclined to beat the crepe out of you.
@Marshall Walthew My favorite of his is About Grace, which seldom gets attention. If you haven't read it, give it a try.
@Cindy NOAA describes Puget Sound as the Pacific waters south of the southern entrance to the Swinomish Channel (Slough), east of the western end of Deception Pass, and south of the northern entrance of Admiralty Inlet. "Salish Sea" is informal nomenclature. It would be more accurate, from a cartographer's point of view, to say that Orcas (which doesn't refer to the whales) Island is in the Strait of Georgia. I don't think the The Strait of Juan de Fuca is in Puget Sound in anyone's mind, so Puget Sound would have to be discontinuous for Orcas Island to be in it. However, we now have "Gulf of America," so who cares what the cartographers think, I guess. Here, north of both Seattle and Puget Sound, Anacortesans look out the window and see the Pacific Ocean, which makes most of us up here very happy.
@Mean Old Lady Thumbs up. Smiley face.
@Bob T. Much of the time, they don't simply say "kosher salt," they say "kosher salt, such as Diamond Crystal."
@SP So now I have another late-in-life regret, like not finding suspenders sooner, or just getting around to making bagels. Why have I not heard this joke before? Where has it been all my life? Well, it's going to get a workout now! And it's the only clean British royal family joke I know.
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