J-J Cote
Lunenburg, MA
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Lunenburg, MA
@Rachel118 Very difficult. Such a joy.
@Alex Too many Hs? Wha? I don't think I've ever seen anybody complain about the abundance of a letter before. I see 16 of them, and out of 358 white squares (if I counted correctly) that's about one out of every 22 squares, which hardly seems disproportionate. Or am I completely misunderstanding what you're saying?
@Eric I don't see it as awkward at all. You spell out the word, but the letters that are in the subset RING get doubled. The adjacent letters have nothing to do with it, and it's a fine coincidence that one of them is also an R. Requires the solver to be alert.
@Cat Lady Margaret FOUND A BIG STATUE NAMED OZYMANDIAS VERY EGOTISTICAL NOT SO PROUD NOW EH (my second try submitting this, maybe the first one got eaten by a bunch of big flightless birds?)
@Stephen The Massachusetts town of Native is pretty obscure if you're not from around here, but the only Eudora I can think of is Welty, and I considered that one a gimme.
Rowers don't have paddles, they have oars. (Unless there's some wordplay here that I'm missing.) Didn't slow me down, though.
I saw what was going on pretty quickly, but didn't catch on to how the answers were suppose to be entered, so I initially had all the downs in normally with half of the acrosses mangled. I eventually swapped the pairs of letters, but not before getting slowed down by the first letter of 24A, since I'd never heard of the director and I thought maybe it was directed by the star, whose name shares a couple of letters (and 24D was an obscure enough pun that I wasn't getting it). Tough to flyspeck when some of the words are doing the wiggle-waggle. I eventually resorted to looking up the movie, and came in just a bit over average. I would have gotten it by running the alphabet on that one letter if I'd swapped the braided words first. I expect some people will be hating on this later on. As always happens.
@Steven M. Not a Natick at all. Once you get a few letters, AZALEAS is obvious, and hardly obscure. And though he may not be as well known as Beethoven, the composer of Carmen is quite famous.
@Barry Ancona Yeah, I agree, there's bound to be a bunch of hating on this, but none if it will come from me. I did struggle a bit, particularly in the northeast, but I came in at a little over 2/3 of my Thursday average. I'm rather proud of the fact that my initial toehold was the crossing of 15A and 6D, neither one a novice-level clue. I didn't see anyone mention it in yesterday's comments, but you might want to check out Seth Meyers's tongue in chee love letter to the NYT Games: <a href="https://youtu.be/4hi1LO_3EJg?t=547" target="_blank">https://youtu.be/4hi1LO_3EJg?t=547</a>
@john ezra For the kind of fires Red Adair worked on, water was not useful. He put them out with explosives.
@RichardZ <a href="https://www.lesmis.com" target="_blank">https://www.lesmis.com</a>/
I never knew those things were called brads, I just know them as "brass fasteners". I just know a brad as a little nail without much of a head, but the Internet says the word can refer to either.
Will Shortz had a stroke?! Am I the only one who just learned this? (He delivered a brief message about it on NPR, he's in rehab and said he's making progress.)
@Stephen Pooh, Piglet and friends live in the Hundred Acre Wood, as one example.
@Fact Boy You're certainly not wrong about it being a possessive adjective, and some dictionaries label it a "determiner". But the definition of "pronoun" is not always so narrow and literal, and some dictionaries do in fact call it a pronoun.
@Lin Fun fact: my best friend was given his APGAR score by Ginny Apgar herself (in 1961).
Balsa may seem flimsy, but the model aircraft crowd seeks out the lightest pieces. There's plenty that is much harder, but still floats and is light enough to easily carry. And bear in mind that a modern alternative is styrofoam. Wrap the lightweight core in fiberglass, and it doesn't matter how flimsy it is. Quick and easy puzzle today, around half my Thursday average even using my phone, but the point today was more that it was a holiday themed puzzle than a tricksy Thursday puzzle. And no, you didn't *need* to understand the theme to solve it, this one worked the other way, where you solve it, then look at the shaded squares and say "Huh?", then "Oh!" and smile.
Starting to look grim when I got all the way to 33A before coming up with anything, but then it went pretty smoothly. Nice fill, but they always end up putting an OREO in there somewhere, amirite? ;-)
I need to clean my laptop screen -- I initially read 64A as "Certain risqué massage", and thought, whoa, where is this headed?
@Peri I'd call a, b, c, x, and y variables in that context. But X (along with I, V, L, C, D, and M) are numerals.
@Asher Things don't have to be words to appear in a crossword puzzle. 43A is definitely not a word, nor is 51A,13D or 39D. But 12D is a slang tern that has multiple references on the web (though I was unfamiliar with it), and 59A shows up in regular old dictionaries.
@B People have been using software assist for constructing puzzles for decades at this point.
@M Estados, actually. Which translates to states.
About five minutes faster than my average, even though I dozed off for some unknown amount of time with the puzzle about 20% complete (maybe just seconds, who knows?). I got PRAGENCIES and FLUSTRAIN on the crosses, and after the music played I stared nonplussed at the two of them for quite a while before I managed to parse them. (FLUST RAIN? FLUS TRAIN? What the...?) I almost googled them, which probably wouldn't have helped. Let me express my admiration to the constructor for not just coming up with four pairs of entries that could share clues, and not just pairs where one of them contains an emotion, but in all four cases pairs that have a total of 20 letters. Well done!
Yeah, that was hard. Real hard. I liked it!
@Steve L The thumb is a finger. It fings quite well, in fact. Mine is finging right now.
@NYC Traveler The term was also widely used to describe how DJT grabbed the FIFA Peace Prize medal.
I woke up this morning to find that I had paused the puzzle last night with slightly more than my Saturday average time (it was late, and I'd had a busy day), with all squares filled in, and knowing where the problem was but unable to fix it. PUSTFNI was clearly wrong, and even though I had already considered AYN, it took a rested brain to give up on PUNKART. It was an enjoyable grind (no sarcasm) getting through this one.
Well, I got stuck for a while, thinking that maybe you would "pour on" after not digging any more (whatever that might mean), and also that the offerings at a restaurant where you could bring your pet might be rather limited...
@Ken W.Yep, I ran the alphabet on that one because I was pretty confident about the rest of the grid. Pretty surprised when the music played. TAIO?
I just stopped by to see if people were up in arms about the Latin word endings. I'll toss in that people very often mispronounce them as well: alumni really ought to rhyme with free, and alumnae with fry, but I usually hear them the other way around.
@Esmerelda My friend who grew up in upstate New York literally within easy walking distance of the Canadian border, something like an hour from Montreal, had never heard of poutine, and didn't believe that it existed when I described it. She finally had to admit it was real when we found it on a menu. In British Columbia. At a Dairy Queen. And she didn't care for it.
@FR How often has "pariedolia" appeared in the NYT puzzle? (Not a swastika. Not even close.)
@MB I don't mind the word, but I'm not a fan of the clue. To me, WHOA means slow down, and WOAH is an expression of wonderment or amazement. It's more a variant of WOW.
@Graham AAAAHHH! Don't you understand? My whole life pivots around my precious NYT puzzle streak! Some people are elated or freak out based on whether the DJIA rises or falls on a given day, but my mood (and that of everyone within earshot or glaring range) depends on whether my average time for the day goes up or down! If it goes down, I'm a genius! If it goes up, it's the worst puzzle ever!
@Alan Young Close -- it's For The Win. (afaik)
@Hugh I came to Wordplay just to see if anyone had mentioned this. It's *possible* to have headphones with a jack on the end of the cable, but I've never seen it, and they wouldn't be very useful. Or as replay points out, you could have an extension cable. But I agree, the audio jack is the hole in the stereo (or these days the phone), that you plug the cable into.
Wham, bam, I was just in the right groove for this one. Beat my Saturday PR by more than a minute!
I found this to be a breeze, which is what I'm often looking for when I go to the coast: as an avid FAR Part 103 pilot, I heartily approve of 24D!
Very enjoyable, very much in my wheelhouse, and though the SE and NW seemed like they were going to be tough, they in fact fell right into place. Not a Saturday PB for me, but I attribute that to the time it took to fill in the extra row! ;-)
@Felicia And don't forget "it"! ;-)
@Hardroch So there are two musical items here where I remember exactly when they made their way into my head. "Turkey in the Straw" was the melody used in one of the songs of an operetta I was in when I was in fifth grade ("Roundup on the Moon"), with non-offensive lyrics, and apparently the melody predates minstrel shows (and it's what I associate with ice cream trucks). Meanwhile, many years ago when I was first doing the puzzle (in college, way back in the Maleska days), I was doing it with my friend John who had had a more intensive Catholic upbringing that I had (his high school teachers had been nuns). I was unfamiliar with Latin hymns, but he quickly caught onto the clue "Dies ____" (4 letters). When I was puzzled by the answer IRAE, he hummed the melody, but as he was a heavy-metal guitarist, he hummed it as if it were from that genre, which to be honest, it fits quite well, I mean, "Day of Wrath", c'mon...
Unlike Sam, I thought this was straightforward and not difficult for a Tuesday at all. Well under my average, though a bit too slow for a PR. I can try to blame that on the fact that it's oversized (16 rows), but the truth is that I stumbled when SHORT wouldn't work for 6D (I had watched a Jiminy Glick video immediately before doing the puzzle).
The thing that's interesting here is that there happen to be four words for "pants" that all have about the same number of letters, each with a U in the middle. Bravo to the constructor for realizing this! JODHPURS was a cinch for me, but I learned the word from my father, who was born during the Harding administration. I tend to associate them with one particular person, who I won't mention, because I don't want someone bringing up Godwin's Law. The amusing sad thing is that it was TROUSERS that I got stuck on, trying for a couple of minutes to somehow jam CARPENTERS in there, even though that didn't really make any sense
@Beth in Greenbelt Yep PRIcE was the one thing I needed to fix (well, other than fixing my rebus entries). A quick flyspecking pass turned up the very suspicious HACE.
@K. H. Lines on a page are an image. Not an image of your head, or or your brain, or of your... mental... but an image nonetheless. The G does stand for "-gram", after all. and it's not a definition, it's a crossword puzzle clue, involving a bit of wordplay, and thus the question mark.
@Steve L Rebus is too heavy a lift for the Mini. It's largely for people who consider the Crossword too intimidating.
No complaints from me, just a fine puzzle that went down smoothly. Yeah, a bit of a Natick in the southwest, but my first guess was an M and that completed the puzzle. Then I paused and scratched my head at the theme, rechecked the title, and came here to confirm that it was themeless. Yep, OK, I didn't miss anything, all good.
@Ian Hookham That was my initial thought as well, but I looked it up, and he got the name when he was part of the vaudeville act, prior to when he went into the military and got replaced by Zeppo.
Fun! I only had to fix one square (I had entered HIGHFIVE before figuring out the theme, and hesitated before realizing the F goes to D (I never - ahem - worried much about that end of the scale when I was in school)), and then I was pretty proud of myself for tying my Thursday best time until I noticed that the grid was one square narrower than usual.