david dell
poughkeepsie, ny
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poughkeepsie, ny
Good puzzle, not baht at all. The derivative of sin could be the last judgement, and while a natterer may nay say, surely those who can cancan can.
I blame it on Uri Geller's spoon bending. Which was a waste of his gifts on "boon spending"
My favorite dessert is upside down cake - this was sweet and chewy - perfect to solve our Wednesday evening munchies.
@Mike Absolutely agree. Bocci is plain wrong and coupled with a bad clue for "no, sir" spoiled a very clever puzzle.
I thought the broey and soapy combo was, to use bridge slang, throwing a loser on a loser. A weak link on a long bra chain of solid satisfying Saturday puzzles from Sam.
You don't have to be a race car driver to solve puzzles. They needn't be scored by time as much as the pleasure of untwisting clues and discovering the mind of the puzzle maker without reading ahead. A solid challenge involves testing the nuances of English and making intuitional leaps from mere hints to the right answer. Esoteric references to little known people or books is a sign of weakness either in the clues or in finding a way to put letters in the space. As much as I have loved Asimov over the decades I never came across ABA. Why is this acceptable when there are so many clever ways to suggest ABA as an answer? Why use "accouterment" as an acceptable spelling for educated readers? Nor are queens normally noted for sashes accept in beauty pageants (in which case a better word would be "adornment"). Why should the editors allow rarefied entries like Bon "Iver" when a little effort would come up with a different solution to that area. The constructor may want to include a nod to a personal favorite, but I find that a poor excuse for clueless clueing.
Truly pleasurable. The double "o"s made some clues easy to solve but the "h" s led to lots of oohs! Evoo was new to me. For those who found it too easy, bravo! I say it's easy to make it harder with obscurantist clues, but that might come at the cost of the graceful cleverness so manifest in this puzzle.
@Stephen Maybe Bon Iver was as well known to some as Led Zeppelin or the Doors, Pink Floyd, or iron butterfly, or smashing pumpkins or James or or Bon Jovi or Springsteen or TVOTR or countless other groups in diferent decades, but if a five letter clue had been referring to Peter Ivers? Your point on sports is exactly the same point I am making (though I usually know the baseball answers)- the best crosswords for the NYT are not built around fan trivia, nor should they be age biased. They are built around a common language and culture and test the ability to think rather than the ability to look things up. Is that too much to hope for?
Respectfully disagree that we should have guessed the black squares would hold invisible letters when it could just as easily be solved by rebuses. The revealer seems more like a lame horse.
Solved it perfectly using 3 letter rebus capability with the first two letters added in for the down clues and not shared by the across, this seems perfectly in tune with the revealer, but was disallowed as a solution. A good challenging puzzle with unfair scoring. Tell me how I'm wrong...
A shame you threw shade on Hayley Mills the original "twins" on the Parent Trap. Lindsay Lohan had lots of screamingly funny roles besides this remake.
@Francis It's obvious if you get it, but hard to see if you don't. Preposterous? I don't think so.
Like many others, never watched Friends, so got no benefits...had to take a siesta. Not that hard to solve despite the grid. Good cluing kept it enjoyable.
@Isabeau those are common mis-spellings rather than dialect. NYT puzzles should not exploit such errors to spare constructors the effort of finding good solutions.
A good puzzle, spoiled by solving online and filling in rebus answers for the ice clues as in many past puzzles ...only to have the system reject the solution. Frustrating to look for errors that weren't there. The NYT needs to be consistent in any puzzle when rebus is needed or allow the rebus as an acceptable solution if it does the job.
we solved the puzzle and put the rebuses where they made sense: adding stop and go at the end of each red and green. I do not see how that is not recognized as a solution. What's the "standard" since this does not fit the "usual"?
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