Dave S
Vienna, VA
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Vienna, VA
When I got the idea of the trick, I just treated the letter U as a pocket holding the thing in the clue, and it worked fine. No elaborate rebus-entry required. I guess it was a kind of rebus, but I just thought of it as a cool Thursday twist.
A nice one. I liked it a lot.
I liked this one very much. I figured out generally what was happening fairly early on, and got the gold star, but I didn’t get exactly what was happening off the grid until I glanced at Deb’s column. I didn’t need to see her depiction of the secret words, but I had a big “Aha!” moment in the second paragraph of “ Today’s Theme.” And I appreciated the little dig at my local paper, the Washington Post, which I recently ditched after 30+ years when it went all billionaire-class on us. Thanks for a cool Thursday puzzle, Mr. Caprera!
When I read the clue for 27A, I instantly thought of the title of Paul Simon’s 1965 song, “A Simple Desultory Philippic (or How I Was Robert McNamara'd into Submission).” It showed up on Simon and Garfunkel’s third album. I was in the seventh grade and learning to play guitar. I was just about to be old enough to understand much of Paul’s sarcastic TIRADE, and I find little phrases from that song popping into my head 60 years later. Funny how the memory works.
I don’t quite get why some folks are saying rebuses should’ve been accepted. If a grade is inflated, it’s not listed as a C that should actually be a D or something. It’s a D that’s inflated to a C. One letter. Just like in the (slightly Thursday-weird) answers today.
@Darian I like Saturdays because I always learn new things. Ms. TIG Notaro would really not be considered a “bad comic,” but if you didn’t know her before, you do after finishing this puzzle. So you learned something new.
@Bob The word “ism” appears as an entry in both the Merriam Webster and Oxford Dictionary apps. It is defined in Webster’s as “a distinctive doctrine, cause, or theory.” So yes, it is a word.
Would somebody please tell Sam Ezersky that RIATA is a perfectly reasonable Spelling Bee word? He keeps okaying the yogurt and cucumber sauce that is close to it, but ignoring this fine word. (Actually, I think we’ve all been telling him this for years.)
@ABC I usually refrain from posting negative comments when I don’t love a puzzle, but the errors you’ve pointed out are significant in this one. Things seemed to have been crammed into it to make the trick work, whether or not they were legit words. CRES was particularly annoying to me. I’ve never seen that abbreviation in any sheet music in 65 years of reading music.
@Ken W. Indeed. I saw no animation whatsoever.
To the folks wondering about ENDASH, my iPad with its case-keyboard will make three different lengths of dashes: a hyphen (-), an en-dash (–), and an em-dash (—). And none of these are an underscore (_); they all show up at the middle-of-letter level. Hope these come through when my comment is printed. They worked while I was typing it.
@Dave K. I mean, it’s a Tuesday, right? We aren’t going to start that “too easy” thing for a Tuesday puzzle, are we?
@Eli Edwards I thought the use of ONE for one of the square squares was a stroke of genius.
@Jordan I beg to differ. SMILIES would be the proper plural form of SMILY, with a single Y vowel after the L. With an -EY ending, SMILEYS is correct.
A good, hard Saturday puzzle. I liked all the off-center clues. It took me almost 20% longer than my Saturday average. More of these, please!
@Craig Nevill-Manning I first put DULLES, found it didn’t fit, grudgingly entered REAGAN, then was very relieved to see that the answer was SEATAC. I’m still quite annoyed at the Congress that dared to rename our local airport, Washington National, for a president who didn’t respect or like DC at all.
It’s so late that nobody’s going to see this comment, but… I really don’t get the string of objections to things that I got pretty easily. Long HALL made perfect sense to me, once I recalled from my distant youth that the Electric Light Orchestra had a hit record called “Mr. Blue Sky.” When I finally worked out the SW corner, I instantly realized that ATOB was to be parsed as “A to B,” because I’ve been doing NYT crosswords for many years and see that kind of thing all the time. BAR CRAWL seemed obvious to me once I got enough crosses. Etc., etc. Was it too easy for a Wednesday? Too hard? Who knows? Your mileage may vary. I thought it was a pretty solid puzzle.
My NYT Crossword streak is at 2,271 days. I think today is a good day to break it. I stand with the tech union in opposition to their corporate bosses. I’ll see you folks once again when the strike is settled.
Thank you, Deb. I started doing these puzzles in the Times on a regular basis in the fall of 2017. Your guidance got me used to all the idiosyncrasies of the NYT puzzle week. I came to appreciate rebuses and weird Thursdays because you showed me how to like them. Best wishes in your non-NYT life!
Wow! A reverse rebus! I had LEFT OUT and WENT UP, but I didn’t get the happy gold star. Then I took those two rebuses out of the last two squares, and there it was. I never got the success signal for taking out letters before today! Cool!
Hardest Saturday I’ve done in many months. Maybe in several years. Over an hour slower than my average. Whew!
@Clem Webster’s says that err means to make a mistake (definition 1). Sounds a lot like going wrong to me.
@Sue It’s always frustrating when a word is fine in the crossword but doesn’t make the Spring Bee list. Hard to explain. It’s as if the various puzzle editors never talk to each other or something.
@SP I don’t know, 111,800 miles seems like an awfully long way to travel by oneself.
@SP I agree with you. SNACK seemed so out of tune that I avoided it for a long time, thinking there’s no way the editors would let such a demeaning term through. It definitely hit me in the “eww” spot.
In fact, Amy, I don’t think OLLA is in Sam Ezersky’s Spelling Bee list. I think I tried it once in the past couple weeks to no avail. (OLLAS would probably not be, because the letter S is generally avoided.)
Very nice one! I didn’t truly understand the gimmick until I filled in my very last squares, which were the squares. The gold star appeared at the exact moment the light bulb went on in my brain. Thanks, Alexander Liebeskind!
Today’s mini features the slang phrase of the week. I won’t spoil it, but it’s there, really, truly, honestly.
@sonnel I actually thought New Jersey was a brilliant clue. And the last letter of CALF was actually the last box I filled in, and then only by running through the alphabet. But then I sort of slapped my forehead and chuckled at it.
@Ronda An A LISTER is a celebrity who always gets the best table in a restaurant, the best parking lot, the best everything. Because they’re mega-famous. (An “inflation” of blister.)
This was just elegant. I figured out what the trick must be about halfway through my solve, but I nervously awaited the moment I filled in the last square to see if my method had worked (entering I/O in a rebus square). When the happy screen popped up, I was elated. An excellent puzzle!
@Dave S Never mind. Reading is fundamental. It came after it AND before it. I’ll go back to my corner now.
When I got the theme (from reading Wordplay, actually), I actually chuckled out loud. A very neat Tuesday puzzle!
@Joe I think that’s part of @TMD’s joke.
@Leontion BIG KAHUNA messed me up for the longest time until I fixed it with the guidance of the crosses in that area.
Wow. One of the hardest (for me) in many months. I had ZARFS and just couldn’t believe it for the longest time. Then it turned out my error was elsewhere in the grid. Took me about twice as long as my Saturday average.
@Heidi I have the same feeling. This was not at all easy for me; it ended up taking me almost exactly my average Saturday time. Then I come to the comments and see that it should’ve taken me no time at all. My mistake is often coming to this thread and reading the comments, actually.
@Cat Lady Margaret I wrote it out on some staff paper and hummed the tune to a lot of different rhythms. It can be done. Not an obvious melody, but interesting.
@Shari Coats I was wondering a similar thing this morning: what is it about some puzzles that seems to make some people so angry? I completely get that not every puzzle is everybody’s cup of tea, but the tone of some of the critical comments is often needlessly harsh. In my humble opinion…
@Laura Stratton It took me seven minutes more than my average Saturday, so my experience was different from yours.
@Michael If these crossword puzzles only contained words and references I already know, then I would learn nothing from them. I am always baffled at complaints on the order of “this is not a real thing.” Such complaints seem always to omit the necessary last two words: “to me.”
@HeathieJ I agree. After doing these puzzles for several years, I’ve gotten used to the need to figure out how “this particular puzzle” works on any given day. It’s challenging, but it doesn’t ever make me mad. I’m sorry so many other folks get so upset about these rebus puzzles and other (Thursday?) tricks.
@David I was a ham radio operator starting in the eighth grade, in 1966, so all these initialisms are almost like native speech to me. (In North Carolina, as a matter of fact!)
This one took me 74% longer than my Friday average. I usually finish these the night before publication date. I finished this one abbot 4:30 PM. A real bear of a Friday.
@Heidi You must have an error somewhere else. The iPhone app liked it when I took letters out of those two squares.
@Bill in Yokohama Today’s mini puzzle.
Seems that there’s a lot of frustration with this one. For some reason, I was able to finish it about 19 minutes faster than my Sunday average, with no lookups. Crosses were my friend today. I didn’t know the theater in Chicago, nor the Asimov or Binchey novels. I’m not bragging, just curious why my experience is so often different from everybody else’s. Usually it’s in the other direction—puzzles that others zip through take me forever and drive me to the internet. Strange.
@Dave S I got them by typing hyphen alone, ALT-hyphen, and ALT-Shift-hyphen.
@R You don’t hang around New York Times crossword land much, do you?