Bob
NY
I FEVER: [makes people camp outside the Apple store?]
I solved the whole thing without getting the theme, even though I knew from the title that it had to do with Pig Latin. Even after reading the explanations, I'm not sure I really get it. If you had told me it was a themeless puzzle, I'd have believed it. Maybe it's because I was too old when I first encountered Pig Latin. 😅 Not my cup of tea. Or OJ or au lait...
I wanted [Enterprise enterprise] to be something like BOLDLY GO (where no man has gone before). 🖖
I went to Yale, and no one ever mentioned UPenn. The only rival people cared about was Harvard. :-)
Today I learned that PASEO is recognized as an English word. I knew it from Spanish and saw that it fit, but I resisted it until proven overwhelmingly by the crosses because the clue did not suggest the answer would be a foreign word. So I looked it up in Merriam-Webster, and there it is! Another of the many Spanish loanwords English. Loved the puzzle, by the way, especially DANCING WITH THE TSARS.
@SusanEM me too, but now that I know that numbers are allowed, I suppose one could enter C2H4. 🤓
@Josh, I had never heard of contronyms, mentioned in the article for RAVEL, so I looked it up, and one of the examples is "to dust", which can mean either to remove dust, such as while cleaning the bookshelf, or to add dust, for example while looking for fingerprints. Primed with that, I initially had a surely mistaken but also ambiguous and hilarious reading of your comment. :-)
You don't need to be a Lego aficionado to know MINIFIGs: you just need to have kids. At least that was my experience! 🙂
At the very end I was stuck with TEXTBOT / TRAYS, but the latter didn't make sense for [Looks below the surface?] (I originally had DRAGS for that one, but overrode it when I found ACHY). I thought TEXT BOT made sense, as in software used by scammers to send text messages asking people to "enter" their information. I just couldn't see the answer until I approached the end of the alphabet: TEXT BOA? Nope TEXT BOB? Nope TEXT BOD? Nope TEXT BOG? Nope TEXT BOO? Nope TEXT BOP? Nope TEXT BOW? Nope TEXT BOX? Facepalm
Was I the only one who thought that baseball was the "obvious" topic for "perfectly pitched" and that therefore the question mark in [Perfectly pitched?] meant it was about something else, such as music? My first try was TUNED.
"Perfect" as verb vs noun are not homophones, they are homographs / heteronyms. Homophone means "same sound", that is, same pronunciation. Wikipedia has a nice Venn diagram with all these terms.
@Reuben I was completely stumped by that one. I checked everything twice after filling in the puzzle, but never thought of the alternate spelling, and had never heard of the wafer brand, so I had to give up and look at the answer key. :-(
@Steven M. Amazing! I couldn't enter the answers on the phone that fast even if I had them perfectly memorized.
I thought for a moment that [Reds' fandom?] might be COMMUNISTS. It has the right number of letters!
I had the feeling that I had never heard of JAMAISVU before, even though I know I must have...
The only city I could think of was Portland, but it would only fit as PORTLANDOR or maybe PORTLANDIA. It wasn't until I did a buch of the crosses that I realized it was Bend and had a good CHORTLE.
I felt so sure that [Cardinal point?] would be PAPALCONCLAVE until the crosses convinced me otherwise...
LOL, it shows my ignorance of birding that I didn't realize that the full answers to the theme clues were actual bird names. I thought they were only puns that ended with a (relatively generic) bird name. That is, I knew hawks, but not Cooper's hawks, crows, but not American crows, parrots, but not Amazon parrots...
I immediately saw ARTISTIC LICENSE, which has the right number of letters, but later dropped the whole thing after I saw that some of the crosses on the left didn't work with it. By the time I had found CREATIVE, I had some crosses on the right that were wrong, so I never thought of LICENSE again until the very end! (Which finally allowed me to get those crosses right.) So close, yet so far away!
@Petrol Don't forget about rappers, a favorite topic of puzzle constructors but my personal kryptonite.
For a moment there I thought that the amswer to [Where the sidewalk ends] was BURB...
INOT had me confused for a moment; I was wondering if untying ties is something that's practiced in occupational therapy...
@Francis I did enter ARTS immediately, but I get you, I'm often befuddled by clues where the answer is an extremely broad category based on very specific examples. I'm thinking [Nelson Mandela and Charlie Chaplin] where the answer is EARTHLINGS. (OK, I just made that one up. :-) I also did enter AROSE at first for 9A, but in "pencil" because it felt iffy.
@Steven M. I was OK with MIASMA, but BLEDSOE / PIMLICO was an absolute Natick for me. I had to look them up.
The TRAFFIC JAM clue was unnecessarily cryptic when seen in the NYT app or website, because it shows three slices of road on a single line: |X:X:X:X| |X:X:X:X| |X:X:X:X| For the print version, it was laid out like this, which makes more sense: |X:X:X:X| |X:X:X:X| |X:X:X:X|
@Jane Wheelaghan LUCHADORA is literally Spanish for "(female) fighter/wrestler".
@Andrzej Keep in mind that the clues are often rewritten by the editors, so it's hard to tell whether the constructor was actually responsible for the clues that you disliked. Like you, I had almost nothing after a pass! In cases like this I resort to googling the simple trivia but this puzzle actually doesn't have that much of that!
@Steven M.I made the same mistake plus AiR for Aer Lingus, resulting in the even weirder MOfABLiFEAST!
As a former Harvard postdoc, I had no trouble solving the puzzle but did not get the theme until I read this column. :-) GELID was not a problem for me because I was familiar with "gélido", which I think is not as uncommon in Spanish as gelid is in English, and also has the benefit of sounding similar to "hielo", which is Spanish for ice, since they share the same Latin root.
I had TAG for [Besmirch], thinking of graffiti, but then wondered what on Earth is a "gag bag"? Not that I had ever heard of rag bags, either... I take it that this was no coincidence but the editors were sitting on it waiting for a heat wave? :-) The crossing of MAMACASS with TERRACHIPS was a Natick for me. Had to Google those.
Shouldn't the clue for NOLA [The Big Easy] allude to the fact that it is an acronym? Even though NOLA was the first answer that occurred to me, I thought it couldn't be right, so I looked fruitlessly for other ideas, such as *FILM (there's one with that title from 1986, but maybe too obscurefor a Tuesday).
@abelsey There was also SERVER NOT FOUND yesterday. Not exactly the same, but related.
@Ciarán It's amazing how much the time depends on being on the same "wavelength" as the constructors. For me, this one took 25% more than the average Saturday! But no complaints; I enjoyed the puzzle.
When I finally filled in 33A, I was initially surprised that GET SHOT would be the answer. I mean, one would "see red" (blood), but it seemed unbecoming a NYT crossword to have such a "triggering" answer! /facepalm
@Grumpy K Street is arguably a world-(in)famous street. I know of some notable streets in London and Paris and I'm not British or French.
I spent an embarrassing amount of time trying to figure out what's a ZTAGENAME.
ERLENMEYERFLASK was a gimme for me, but I couldn't fit it in until I had the theme figured out. I had never heard of CHEYENNEMOUNTAIN, which was the last of the theme words I could fill in. But curiously enough, the one that made me decide that there definitely must be a rebus was POPEYES. Admittedly not as highbrow as EYEOFNEWT! What really killed my NE was that I had confused buckeye for HAWKEYE. Got stuck until I read the column which had CHEW, leading to a real facepalm moment...
The RIPA/AERO intersection felt like a Natick to me.
I liked the theme and was able to figure it out quickly from the revealer, but got stuck with some of the other clues, some of which I thought were inaccurate. I agree with the criticism already made of PERP, DVR and ZORK; another one that I thought iffy is TONYAWARD, which I'd say is a theater award, not a music award (even though it has categories for musical theater). I thought the Juno Awards fit, given the crosses I had then, but I'm not sure if anyone has heard of them in the US! 🙂 I liked the ALIBABA clue, for which I had initially put *ISHMAEL (famous for mentioning his name in the opening line of Moby Dick, of course).
@TholosTB I don't know anything about the song, but I'd expect 24K to be more plausible because it seems a likely allusion to pure (24-karat) gold. On the other hand, I also never heard of 1- or 2-set games, and my naive guess there was that 1SET would be more likely because it prevents ties.
@Andrzej This time people can legitimately complain about TRIVIA in the puzzle! :-)
Even after solving the whole puzzle, I did not understand what was going on with the starred clues until I read the explanation here. For the first starred clue that I solved, STAND TRIAL, I thought "of course, money changes everything if you stand trial, since you can afford good lawyers!". But the same logic did not apply to the others. :-)
The sales tax in NYC is 8.875%, although that's after adding up the state and local taxes.
@Norman The Wikipedia article about the game cites an article that suggests that it may date to the 1930s!
@Andrzej Everyone has their own "rules" for how to solve the crossword, so it depends on how you approach it. For me personally, the trivia questions are more of a fun research side project; I don't use the reveal option or websites that specifically focus on crossword answers, but rather use Wikipedia, or sometimes Google (trying to ignore hits from crossword sites that may pop up). For example, I found the MAMACASS answer by hopping through Wikipedia articles, learning other things along the way. That said, I do agree that crossing this nickname with a relatively obscure American brand was not great. I'm American and eat chips, and still didn't recognize the brand until I saw a photo and realized that the packet design does look vaguely familiar...
@Andrzej Good thing you haven't meet the Aussies (sorry, Australians)! There's even a Wikipedia article about it titled "Diminutives in Australian English" with a delightful list of examples.
@Seb APSE is not trivia; it's crosswordese (in fact it'sthe very first example listed on the Wikipedia article on crosswordese). I get the feeling that it appears rougly every other week in the NYT crossword. Like someone else said, it's like learning a new language.
@Nick My theory after living in several cities: in every big city, people say "their" drivers are a-holes, but they say it with a tinge of pride ("you do what you have to do to survive this place!"), while drivers from other cities are considered idiots.
@Nathan It's in the dictionary and thesaurus, so fair game in my opinion. <a href="https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/suer" target="_blank">https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/suer</a> and <a href="https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/plaintiff" target="_blank">https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/plaintiff</a> I also thought of "plaintiff" etc. first, but given that the answer has to have four letters, you have to scrape the bottom of the barrel for synonyms, or solve the cross words for more clues.
@replay Thinking more abstractly, perhaps one could say that the sine function "produces a wave" when plotted. A bit of stretch, I know...