Stephen W
Glasgow, Scotland
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Glasgow, Scotland
@Steve L This is astonishingly condescending. It's pretty clear from the comments that many of the people who found this a tedious solve a) are regular solvers, b) did actually complete it. I'm a regular solver, and I completed it - it took about an hour, and I found it largely unenjoyable. I agree that calling the setters lazy (as some unhappy commenters have done) is rude and unhelpful, but implying that commenters are befuddled newbs is equally rude and unhelpful.
Rather an unpleasant slog. As others have said, the NW corner was a quagmire of obscurity. MUNSHI and SNEES in particular were very unfair
The only major stumbling block here as a non-USian was never having heard of a five dollar bill being referred to as either fin OR abe. I guess they're both fairly old slang?
I know people get zesty when you talk about the relative difficulty of Monday puzzles, but I do think this was one of the trickier solves, with ULTA and LEMMA being a bit more obscure than one might normally expect on a Monday (I didn't know either). Still, a fun puzzle!
A decent puzzle over-all, so take this gripe with a grain of salt - but I'm really not keen on answers like BIGMESS. While a perfectly valid phrasing, it's not really a *specific* phrase in its own right, so there's no "a-ha!" moment when you get it right. The NYT format seems quite prone to this, so maybe it's just to be expected, but I feel like good clueing / answering should give a satisfying click when solved.
Was gunning for a 5 minute solve, but got tangled up in ORLON! I agree with other commenters that Gen Z are mostly not really kids any more. Similar thinking has people going on about "entitled millennials" when many of us are in our 40s...
A good, solid Saturday puzzle, even if I will always struggle to remember it's YEUN and not YUEN
I'm not sure what age the folk kvetching about TONY ORLANDO, TOM WAITS, and BARBARA EDEN are, but as an elder millennial these didn't bother me at all. Troy McClure previously appeared in the celebrity telethon "Let's Save Tony Orlando's House" on the Simpsons, Tom Waits was releasing albums well into the 21st century, and I Dream of Jeannie was being repeated into the early 2000s. No, my issue is with TWPS! A relatively obscure type of national subdivision, compounded with an unguessable abbreviation, naticked with a type of wine I'd never heard of. By comparison, IRVING BERLIN was a gimme!
@Caroline as mentioned elsewhere, I think our "narked" (meaning mildly annoyed) is different from their "narced" (meaning to inform or snitch). Didn't bother me in the crossword tho, it did say Var!
Grindingly hard, but mostly fair? STLEO & EMEND and ARI & RECTO tripped me up (no matter how many times this crossword uses "verso" and "recto" as clues / answers, I will never remember them), and MENOMOSSO I only got from the crosses, but otherwise cluing was good and it felt satisfying to complete
Fun theme, good puzzle! Got stuck trying to work HELENOFTROY into the middle (thinking "a rebus? On a *Wednesday*?"), but I was getting my epics mixed up
@lucky13 I'm assuming it's short for direction, but I'm not sure I've ever seen the abbreviation before. I was totally lost (hah!) too, that area had too many naticks for me (didn't know the salsa, didn't remember what solfege meant)
@Mean Old Lady I disagree - it's tenuous for several reasons. Firstly, tho I'm aware of the 4H club due to references in US pop culture, it's only ever referred to as 4H, not FOUR H. Also, one-eyed jacks, double agents, and three wise men are significantly more well known concepts, which would lead the solver to assume the fourth themed answer would be similarly well known. Finally, as is mentioned upthread, the theme is a bit tortured - I only clocked the progression of the answers (1-2-3-4) after I'd solved the puzzle, because "ONE", "DOUBLE", "THREE" is a clumsy progression. Not a bad puzzle over all, but the theme was inelegantly deployed
@Maverator I did exactly the same. I think the idea behind the rebus is interesting, but the execution was unsatisfying - entering (NO)(NO) makes sense for the vertical answers, but it's really pushing it to infer that (NO)(NO) horizontally should be interpreted as (YES)
@Glenn Weinberg People from all over the world solve this crossword, so it's perfectly reasonable to critique it based on what one can reasonably describe as general knowledge or common parlance in the English speaking world. SCHMEAR, ELSTON, and MUNSHI are all relatively obscure, and having them cross over each other would seem gruelling to many.
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