N.E. Body

Apparently the movie isn’t TWOLOSERS.

You know you’re in for a rough ride when you get just one answer on the first pass through the puzzle, and it’s in Latin, and you spell it wrong.

I don’t know anything about the Bible, but it’s always ESAU.

Lots of “ok, I guess that sort of fits” instead of “oh, that’s clever.”

I’ll have to disagree with Guinness on the mammal with the most names. It’s clearly humans.

51A “unwelcome sight in musical chairs” would work well for the frequently used answer SRO.

Thursday was a breeze, but these last two days have been brutal. Could we take a break from regional brand names please.

24D “Brief missions” really ought to be PANTYRAIDS

I don’t mind a rebus now and again. Or an obscure clue that can only be figured out from the crosses. Or a trick like a box that’s read differently across and down. Seems a bit cruel to have them all simultaneously, though. Oh well, Thursday. If that novel *were* titled O Pioneers Bang, it would probably be good for sales.

You know you’re in for a ride when one of the only words you get on the first pass is REGNANT.

I really wanted “cheat sheets” to be something like MOTEL BED.

I wasted a long, long time trying to figure out how I ended up with the nonsense word SLUE. Ah well.

9/10. The themed entries were great. IZZATSO and YHEAR were very lame.

I really wanted “Sharp, in a way” to be FANGY.

That was fun. I’ll take a sneaky trick that you can think your way through over a bunch of “know it or don’t” trivia every time.

I spent a while wondering who Tonya Ward was.

Fun gimmick, but I could have done without the GUNLAP/ADIN/ADUE intersection.

There’s an episode of Cheers when Cliff appears on Jeopardy and bets it all on “Who are three people who have never been in my kitchen?” Today’s puzzle feels like that.

A stately OAK grew in the middle of my puzzle and set things awry.

Clues like 10 across are deeply unsatisfying. Almost every organization has eligibility requirements. The only way to get the answer is by filling in the crosses. I think of excessively vague clues like this as ‘clavins’ after Cliff Clavin’s “who are three people who have never been in my kitchen?”

When I get stuck, it’s almost always somewhere other than the ‘tricky clues’. Today it was at the YEP/PITT intersection, where I had an S instead of a P. SITT doesn’t mean anything to me, but neither did PITT until I gave up and looked it up.

I think this was unsatisfying because understanding the gimmick was unnecessary to solving the puzzle. With a rebus or most other gimmicks, you have to figure out the trick in order to make the crossing clues make sense. Here, all you had to do was recognize the repeating pattern of letters in each of the three rows. If you didn’t get why it was what it was, it didn’t matter to solving the rest of the puzzle.

It seems inevitable that a puzzle built around the works of a single author will be trivial for fans of that author and difficult for others. I wouldn’t call it unfair, but it doesn’t seem like good practice.

The Wordle Bot is having a laugh at me today. Apparently I’m below average in both skill and luck, yet still solved it faster than average. Must have been due to charm or good looks.

Solved mostly by brute force, then came to the comments to figure out how the clues relate to the answers. Not my favourite.

EARLAP, my eye. (With apologies to Cheech Marin)

Regarding 27A. Have you not heard? It was my understanding that everyone had heard.

That was even rougher than yesterday. The rebus trick wasn’t too tough to puzzle out, but the rest was a natick party.

I had a wide variety of four letter words ready for “exclamation of exasperation”, several starting with C. But CMON wasn’t one of them. Also wasted a long time trying to make ING fit in 33D, as in “running dog.”

That C+ felt about right, considering how long it took me to get it. James Joyce, Bert Lahr, and the Beastie Boys walk into a bar together…

SOFT A is a new one to me. I’d have said the vowel sounds in father are a short O and a schwa.

I spent forever trying to make ICQ work for “I.M. Innovator”.

14A reminded me of OMNI magazine. As a teenager, much of my allowance went to OMNI, Asimov’s, Analog, F&SF, etc.

That was far, far easier than yesterday.

Today learned that LIV Golf is a sports league, not a model of Volkswagen.

Surprisingly smooth sailing. The crosses gave me ENGINES in 23D, which obviously connected to 1A’s clue, which made the wormhole trick clear.

Last week most puzzles were unusually hard. This week most of them are unusually easy. Or maybe I was just slower than usual last week and smarter now.

The only Rathskeller I know is a notoriously cheap and dirty student bar just off the University of Toronto campus. I cannot work out how to fit ‘Labatt 50’ in this space.

I filled in 15D from the crosses and stared at the answer for a while, convinced it meant that one who was at the back of the race was the END ‘ORSE.

That was brutal. So many wrong guesses to undo. ATLAS and GLOBE instead of USMAP REI instead of KOA SAG and LAY instead of PAY BRIECHEESE instead of BRIOCHEBUN OAK instead of ELM NOSYMPATHY instead of NOONECARES GLADTOHELP instead of GLADTODOIT I was my own worst enemy.

I’ve been doing these long enough to recognize and laugh at crosswordisms like SEISM and SRO, but it seems cruel to lead a Tuesday puzzle with them.

Fun gimmick. My only real complaint is that between the font style and size, that letter in 8D could have been from at least three different alphabets. But maybe that was the point.