Paul
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Did not love it. I think it was technically interesting...But i think the mechanics of solving it sucked the life out of it. Meaning...that having to search the clue list to find which Across had a word needed for a Down just was tedious and wasnt any fun. If it was possible to circle or highlight the relevant artists and squares which were needed in other parts of the puzzle it would have lower the "arrrrrghghhhh this is annoying" factor.
It’s truly astonishing that the NYT looks at its puzzle solvers who don’t use print as second class citizens. It’s still ridiculous that you can’t get the weekly variety puzzles…even in PDF on the apps or web. This puzzle’s problems are just a symptom of that. Print is going away…they better get used to it.
This is the moment when i found out that it’s not easy to find the Equal sign on my phone keyboard.
Since the topic of the day is Kit Kats....if you havent had them frozen..you're missing out. Here's the recipe... Take 4 Kit Kats....put them in the freezer....wait.
104 Across He literally jumped the shark on "Happy Days" The answer is wrong.... The answer the puzzle wants is "Fonz" But he isnt Fonz...He's "The Fonz" or "Fonzie" The Hague The Bronx The Fonz That's how it works.
There are those who thought the Dorothy Parker quote in martinis was too racy for this space. I’m not one of them. …… I like to have a Martini, Two at the very most. After three I’m under the table, After four I’m under my host.
Here’s something I don’t understand….I get that people may not like a certain style of puzzle because it just isn’t fun to them…Such ias it is with the weekly hate on rebuses. What I don’t understand is them then complaining that it hurt their solve time. Don’t they do the puzzle for fun? Wouldn’t more time solving mean more time with something they like? Isn’t that why we’re given an average on the stats page? Because we’re competing with ourselves and sometimes we’re better than average and sometimes worse? Conceptually….wouldnt the satisfaction of solving be greater after working through a harder slog? Isn’t the whole reason a person does the NYT puzzle is because it’s hard? There are certainly easier puzzles out there is someone wants a fast solve.
Fantastic! I think this puzzle has a few layers of fun.... If you know the headlines because you just kinda know the dates...And immediately know what the topic has to be...That's one of the levels of fun. A second is that you can solve them and theyre are just kinda fun things to learn. And then there is Headless Body in Topless Bar...and really...There aint nothing better than that.
Minor team? That’s inventing something which doesn’t exist. Minor League Team exists. But minor team? Not a thing.
@Times Rita I actually think people here are ok with others not loving a certain puzzle. You'll find that when the complaints come across as non-productive that they get the most push back. Things such as... "I hate this puzzle so im cancelling my subscription" What are you 12? Ya wanna cancel...Cancel...Why go find the boards and then rage quit. "This isnt a crossword..." Fill in the blank what the complaint is...Rebuses...Missing letters...Not being symmetrical...whatever... The NYT are a premier company in the business...You may not like the format...BUT we can most certainly assure you its a crossword. "I dont know this word so the NYT shouldnt use it" Its hard to take anyone seriously with some of the words they dont like. etc. But actual discussion of the puzzle and its merits is in general appreciated here...Every puzzle cant be everyone's favorite...and statistically...one of the puzzles is going to be someone's least favorite. It happens over 365 days a year...decades on end.
@KFC it can take a while to be able to do the whole week. Some of it is learning basic crossword puzzle words and knowledge. Some of it is living life and learning things. Some of it is getting a feel for solving a puzzle and developing that skill…such as being able to tell when the answer is meant as a pun or a very broad definition of a word. Keep at it…it gets easier and will be rewarding.
meh. I got to the end...counted the number of rebus boxes...realized I had 5 and not 4...and guessed maybe my "NC" was just a "C". This puzzle left me feeling apathetic.
The letter “Z” priZe. Nicely done. Make me put in the whole alphabet to figure out why PRICE isn’t VALUE…precise definitions notwithstanding l.
@Steve L yeah….i know I CAN get them online at another site. But why should I have to pay for another subscription when the NYT is already laying out the puzzles and charging me for puzzle access. Even if the NYT had a surcharge for the variety puzzles….Let’s call it $5…They could put the PDFS online and make some money and make their loyal customers happy. A while back when they were taking down the variety puzzles I wrote a complaint to the times support email. They literally told me that I could get the puzzles in print….It was the most stupid and arrogant email. The level of management incompetence which let that decision happen is astonishing.
This is a philosophical rhetorical question...so it may be a little longwinded. In recent history, I've noticed complaints about too much "trivia" in some puzzles. Im not really sure what that means. Aren't crossword puzzles all trivia? Where's the line between things one is assumed to know vs things one may not know? And if one doesn't know it, does that make it trivia? As an example...there are dozens of European rivers which have shown up in crossword puzzles over the years...Some of the easiest are the Thames, the Seine, and the Danube....But there are dozens after than which a person will be less likely to know off the top of their head. Or is the real issue with "trivia" really about pop culture and age? If youre of a certain age you'll more likely know an answer...and if youre not of that age you might not. If the question was "Mondale's running mate?"...You might get an answer immediately...or a few seconds of forget with an easy fill with a few letters...or you might get Who is Mondale? It just seems to me that every inch of a crossword puzzle is trivia...and the question then becomes...How broad is your knowledge? AND do you want to expand that knowledge for the next puzzle?
@Tim Shaindlin sure it’s correct. The clue is “result of a lead off walk”. So “one on” is a potential result of a lead off walk. Or a lead off hit….or even a dropped 3rd strike. I think there are 9 ways to reach first. Nowhere does it mention extra innings or say “the only result of a lead off wall”
If you’ve come here to complain about “nocap” Don’t. It’s just an age gap thing. There are plenty of words the younguns don’t know because they were slang in your generation and aren’t used anymore… At some point those who know today’s slang won’t know the next generation’s slang…And it will happen sooner than they think. No cap.
@Jonathan uncandy valley is that section of the neighborhood who thought it was acceptable to give out apples at Halloween.
I think egocentric model may be one the more enjoyable answers in a long long while.
@Barry Ancona take your self-righteousness and shove it
@Pat Whitney I’m pretty sure it’s Chevy Chase
Nice twist on A.M.A. My age is showing. But I act immature…so I got that going for me.
I thought it was interesting and a good challenge. I can feel the rebus haters misdirected anger bubbling up at a distance.
@Barry take your self-righteousness and shove it
Here is Will himself on today’s NPR puzzle segment announcing his own stroke and recovery. I’m sure I speak for everyone here on the board….except for that one guy in Natick…Get well soon. <a href="https://www.npr.org/series/4473090/sunday-puzzle" target="_blank">https://www.npr.org/series/4473090/sunday-puzzle</a>
Man…that north east corner was a beast…but I’ll take it…a win is a win.
@Ayushi Gupta all of the theme clues continue down at the end of the line.
@Tim Lexvold nah…it’s about right. Sometimes puzzles just speak to you and are personally easier. There is always the chance that a whole other batch of people feel it’s too hard.
Across the universe tonight you can hear the sound of rebus haters heads explode.
There seem to be a few people surprised by “servo”…and yet they are ubiquitous. Many teenagers will know them as the steering motors on remote control cars. But they’re everywhere…really a servo is just a “small” motor which does a little linear task…and tends to be interchangeable with the phrase “small motor” pretty often. The eject motor on your dvd player is a servo. The motor which dumps the ice in your refrigerator ice tray is a servo. The motor which closes the rear hatch on your SUV is a servo. One might make the case the the motor which opens elevator doors or the door at a supermarket is a servo. It’s a pretty subjective definition….depending on who made the item the servo is being used upon.
@Fact Boy Sort of. Although technically true....For more than 100 years people used the power of a lightbulb to mean brightness....Which is how people viewed a 60, 75, and 100 watt bulb. When someone used to look at a fixture and put in a bulb with a larger number...The thought was almost always to getting more light in the room...and not power consumption....well unless the point was being made about some miserly person working in too dark a room in a movie or something. When we switched over to LED the boxes continues to have watts prominently displayed with the subscript describing the light equal to whatever bulb's brightness it was.....and thus power usage was being dismissed....AND the lumens were typically hidden on the spec panel on the side of the box. Dont even get me started on color temperature in kelvins. (sadly....too many people cannot differentiate between the different colors of light....AND it really matters for how nice or terrible your room will look)
@kkseattle forget the beef adobo…tell me more about this beef ice cream.
So cruel…it’s sitting right there in front of your face…You keep going over the phrase in your head…and yet the answer doesn’t present itself…and then it does All Your Eggs.
@Dave Munger oh it’s much worse than that… People claim their streak is broken 15 hours before the next puzzle is released and the software clock cares. Which means one of two things 1)They just gave up and didn’t come back a few times to see if new eyes will help the solve or 2)They hit the show answer button as though some evil force made them do it. It’s right up there with people saying the puzzle is too hard because there are words they didn’t know. If people want to know every word before they attempt a puzzle they should try the Wordsearch. If you ask any longtime solver of the puzzle they will tell you that it’s specifically fun because there were things they didn’t know and had to figure it all out. There will even be puzzle they didn’t love…but with 365 puzzles a year; that’s ok. It’s not about the solution…it’s about the journey.
@Steven M. You’ve never heard the expression “from rags to riches”? It’s the name of a lot of books…and a To y Bennet song.
I’m surprised at how relatively easy and doable people found this puzzle. Most of it, yes, i t zoomed night through. BUT I found that tiny bottom left corner near impossible. It felt like every clue could have been a pun even though there was no sign of it. Or it felt like the words there were much more exotic than the rest of the puzzle. I thought those 8 words were going to be a streak killer and I got to the answer only by staring for a long time and some luck.
People loved this? Really? Meh. The whole puzzle created to create one single line oddity?
@Mark It seems to bother you alot.
@Sue there are lots of crossword words which don’t make the spelling bee. Conceptually it comes down to words which are more common so that the spelling bee solver has a decent opportunity figure out the words. Crosswords can have harder and more rare words since there are acrosses and downs which give hints…and the clues themselves. Of course wayyyyy too often there are words in the spelling bee I’ve never even heard of…let alone have a snowball’s chance in hell of figuring out.
@Barry Ancona there was a point in time…let’s call it 1993…and if you had a PC with Win 3.1 this is the game you’d play after you go bored of your 1000th game of solitaire.
@Sonja yeah…I stumbled into the solution and did it quite fast…and still have no idea what I solved.
@Steve C. Just do enough puzzles and you learn about a bunch of things which fit the definition of weasel…thread winding tools…politicians…the raw materials for fur coats. Now you know what a stoat is.
Brilliant The trees were relatively obvious and I was quick to realize they were the key. But even then I wondered if there was something about being able to see the Forest. Until it was solved…I didn’t see it coming.
@dismal valley yeah…been there…thought it was seethed…thought it was seethe…thought it was irate…Its See Red as Emily Litella would say…nevermind
@Edward oddly enough Antarctica is a desert. Because it’s so cold there it doesn’t rain. Just like we typically thing of a rainforest as a tropical place like the Amazon…a rainforest can be more northern…It’s just about the amount of rainfall…Alaska actually has a rainforest.
@Jon a streak is a personal thing. I don’t think it’s an accident that our names on the chat board don’t have our steaks. Let me add some thoughts to the mix… What if you were out of radio range for a few days? What if you solve with paper and pen? And your streak is never officially recorded? What if you think the puzzle is correct and never compare to the answer key? What if you think the NYT software is wrong and not permitting a solve? What if someone looks over your shoulder and gives an answer? Or what if you do the whole thing with someone? What if there are multiple answers which work perfectly well and yet the software accepts one? What if the people on the board think the NYT official answer is wrong? I think this is all about fun…it’s not a contest for others. It’s not to get a raise at work. It’s just your personal account of how you do every day. You get to decide the level of precision you want to keep in your head and whether or not it’s a streak.
@Jonathan Baldwin although the Lego company likes the idea of using Lego as an adjective to modify “Lego bricks” that doesn’t particularly address how people actually use the word Lego which is as a noun and is singular and plural as they see fit.
@Larry the delay from black and white to color was obviously about money…certainly the cameras cost more…But there was a secondary issue with shows already in production. To get a good black and white image for people at home the costumes and sets and makeup weren’t black and white. They were an array of weird colors designed to look good when filmed in black and white. And then when they got to color there were issues that the studio lights would cause costumes and such to show up wrong to the home viewer. One of the regularly commented issues with this is Kirk’s uniform color on Star Trek. Sometimes it was green. Sometimes gold. There were also issues when they switched from standard definition to high definition broadcasts. All of the sets for things like news shows and morning shows had to be rebuilt. They had been originally built for low def. In high def you could see all of the flaws and scuff marks and everything which was imperfect in those old sets.
@Richard Let's dwell on a specific character...Kermit the Frog. Kermit began his life as tadpole working on Sam and Friends in 1955...building a cult following... Then he moved on to commercials after that gig ran its course. <a href="https://youtu.be/JCO-enxhk_Q?si=GMgfrXWvU9qO7L_7" target="_blank">https://youtu.be/JCO-enxhk_Q?si=GMgfrXWvU9qO7L_7</a> Having stablized his finances with commercials he was able to move on the volunteer work with the Public Broadcasting System...and Sesame Street where he spent time as a roving reporter. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uWE3uF9u9-g" target="_blank">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uWE3uF9u9-g</a> And then finally he hit the big time with The Muppet Show and The Muppet Movie(s) His career was doing fine until the ugly antics and breakup with his interspecies paramour...a real pig. In recent years, he's become a lobbyist against French cuisine...something about frog's legs. BUT AT NO TIME WERE HE OR HIS COMPANIONS NOT MUPPETS.