Dan
The DMV
I enjoyed SHTETL. I like it when an answer makes you think you've made a mistake somewhere.
Hole-y moly. That's one of the best Mondays I've ever seen. It was a delight to solve and the amount of skill that went into constructing it is mind-boggling. And a bonus point for "That's Putting It Nicely." A . Bravo!
Flashy puzzle. That's an impressive feat to arrange all those animal crossings. I really enjoyed this one. Thanks!
CATDOM? Really? I'll allow it because the theme answers were so clever but...CATDOM?
"Make rent" was a ripping good pun!
Wonderful idea for a crossword. I really enjoyed the themed answers for this one.
Personally, I don't share the frustration about proper names as clues. Crosswords are one of the places where my predeliction for trivia has value.
I really enjoyed this one. It felt challenging without being brain-busting. Though to be fair, I do enjoy a good brain-bust. For me, my favorite part was reaching deep into my brain to remember that female mice are called DOES. I'm pretty sure I learned that from a crossword in the first place!
Echoes bounce off walls, which an alleyway has. Not a bowling reference.
I've never encountered SOPOR as a noun before, only soporific as an adjective. Apparently, in addition to being a regular noun, it was also a brand name for methaqualone, also known as Quaalude.
Nice to see one of my favorite poets, Frank O'Hara, in this puzzle. O'Hara's poems mix lyricism with a dotty, mercurial conversationalism which is the hallmark of the New York School. To my knowledge, "Morning" is the only one of his poems to mention crosswords, which is weird because his poems often have such a sitting-at-the-kitchen-table-doing-the-Sunday-puzzle-in-pen sort of vibe to them. Anyway, here's "Morning." I've got to tell you how I love you always I think of it on grey mornings with death in my mouth the tea is never hot enough then and the cigarette dry the maroon robe chills me I need you and look out the window at the noiseless snow At night on the dock the buses glow like clouds and I am lonely thinking of flutes I miss you always when I go to the beach the sand is wet with tears that seem mine although I never weep and hold you in my heart with a very real humor you'd be proud of the parking lot is crowded and I stand rattling my keys the car is empty as a bicycle what are you doing now where did you eat your lunch and were there lots of anchovies it is difficult to think of you without me in the sentence you depress me when you are alone Last night the stars were numerous and today snow is their calling card I'll not be cordial there is nothing that distracts me music is only a crossword puzzle do you know how it is when you are the only passenger if there is a place further from me I beg you do not go
@Andrzej The Saint Louis Cardinals are a baseball team, colloquially known as the Cards. STL is the way the city name is abbreviated when reporting game scores. It is an extremely tricky clue, especially because while the team is known as the Cards, I do not recall ever seeing a single player referred to as a "Card." As far as I know, the abbreviation is used to refer to the team, in the plural, but a single player would be a "Cardinal."
ASST for [Quick second?] is a great clue.
Tricky puzzle. I had "patina" for LAMINA which tripped me up for a long while. I was too delighted with the possibility of the anagrams patina and PINATA starting from the same square.
To anyone worried about the use of "etude" to refer to some of Bach's compositions, I urge you to 1) Look up the dictionary definition of etude to see how flexible it is 2) Google "Bach etudes" to see how widespread the usage is 3) Write me a 500 word essay on descriptivism vs prescriptivism in linguistics. Due on my desk Monday morning. -Mr. D
@Steve L They also sang: Rubber Duckie, joy of joys When I squeeze you, you make noise Rubber Duckie, you're my very best friend it's true
Woo. That was a toughie. Lots of tricky cluing, e.g. [Card letters] and [Carrier letters] together were a double misdirection since neither had to do with the mail. [Testament to human nature] along with the Biblical fill in the blank had me going in the wrong direction as well. Glad I stuck with it!
Fun puzzle. I jammed through it close to my personal best. I enjoy the constructor's notes because they give an insight into the mind(s) that created the puzzle. This one was interesting because the challenge, apparently, was less to fill the grid, than to find a way to trick a grid-filling program into doing something unusual. Purists may have a problem with this but as long as it's a tasty puzzle, I care how it got made.
In the '96 primaries, my friends and I got a kick out of all the LAMAR! signs, which we would pronounce as "Lamar Factorial." Twenty years later when Jeb began his campaign, the group chat lit up with nostalgic mirth. Has anyone whose political brand is just their name plus an exclamation point ever won a party's nomination, let alone the presidency?
I have a friend who is a trivia master. We both do the nyt crossword and he reliably solves it faster than I do because of this knowledge. Until today, I didn't realize he was cheating by knowing things. I will tell him he needs to forget it all do he can do the crossword the way it was intended.
"Evidence of an injury" had me filling in SCAR and then getting stuck with that corner for a good 10 minutes before I figured out what was wrong. Everything else was smooth sailing.
@Hardroch Agreed. As the beleaguered potentate of a small African country, I live in terror of the possibility that someone might discover what I think about crosswords, which is why I go by the nom de poste Dan from Alexandria.
@Steven M. The proto-Indo-European root word of "tinct" means "to soak," from whence it came to mean "to dye," which is how it enters the English language as "tincture" in the 15th c. and gets shortened to "tinct" in the 16th, which is where we get Queen Gertrude pleading: O Hamlet, speak no more! Thou turn’st my eyes into my very soul, And there I see such black and grainèd spots As will not leave their tinct. Kind of neat that INS and TINCT cross. What's the color of an entree? INSTINCT.
@Derek K I think this is my favorite comment I have ever read in the Times. Juvenile, petty, and 100 percent how I felt about that clue.
I appreciated this one tonight, when I was trying to keep my mind off the front page news. But now I don't have a Friday to do tomorrow and I'm still gonna be in ostrich mode. Anyone have a suggestion for a good archive puzzle?
Really clever theme answers here. perfect Monday puzzle.
Very clever. Took me until I got the revealer from crosses to be able to solve the themed clues.
Icecapades and STARSONICE have the same number of letters, to my consternation. Been puzzling about "Supreme leader?" = ROSS. Can anyone help me out?
@Neil Bellinson Seems pretty close to be. I'm not sure what your concern is.
@Felicia "Ave" is the imperative form of the verb "avere," which means "to be well." So while it was used as a greeting, it literally means "farewell."
EMBELLISH instead of EMBROIDER had me tripped up for a while. This puzzle felt hard not when I was done I was 12 minutes under my average (but then, I have so far to fall...)
This was a delightful puzzle. Lots of aha moments for me: "Frontier figure," "Padded piece of paper," for two), and most importantly, a poetry reference! In the West we learn almost nothing about haiku, especially not about the fact that they were the center of one of the richest poetic cultures ever to exist. In Basho's time, haiku masters (tenja, or "graders") would hold contests that would have 10s of thousands of entrants. In bars, tenja would be paid to score haiku for groups of friends: everyone would throw money into the pot, the judge would give points to each poem along with witty commentary, and the pot would be split proportionally to the points awarded. The practice was so widespread and occasionally contentious that the authorities considered banning it as a form of gambling. Remember that Edo, the capital city, was one of -- if not the -- most populous cities in the world in the 17th century, with almost a million inhabitants. Basho ("Banana Tree"), in fact, was not always known as Basho. His first nom de plume was Tosei ("Green Peach"), and he made his money as a haiku judge until he grew disallusioned with the competitive vibe of Edo's haiku culture and retired to the country and renamed himself after the Japanese banana tree that grew outside his front door. Nowadays, those of us with a penchant for pithy, surprising turns of phrase have to content ourselves with crosswords. Padded piece of paper, perhaps? Resume.
@john ezra I remembered Laocoon & Sons deaths from translating the Aeneid in Latin class a million years ago (thanks for the memories, Ms. Farshtey!). Was puzzled for a bit because I thought the answer should be SEASNAKES but that wasn't enough letters. To my mind, sea serpents are fictional creatures rebuild sea snakes exist, and in my mind's eye the scene was very real. Blame Virgil for being such a vivid writer, I guess!
@dan My thought about it was, just as many (most?) people still call X "Twitter," many people still call reposts "retweets."
I found this one very easy -- solved it in under half my usual time. The clues were very amusing. Sometimes the joy is in solving the clues but sometimes it's also in reading them.
Nice puzzle. Felt almost like a Thursday to me the way the lightbulb went on after I figured out the theme.
@Jeremy Here's my thought. When it comes to generic categories, it wouldn't make much sense to invent the name for a genre before there are any examples of it. That means that genres are named retroactively, after there are enough examples to demonstrate the existence of the general category, and are thus intended to be applied retroactively to works that retrospectively fulfill the generic conventions. Genre is always an anachronism. A good example of this would be the novel. When literature critics discuss whether the Tale of Genii or Don Quixote is the first novel, the question is about whether they demonstrate the features of the genre, not about whether Lady Murasaki or Miguel de Cervantes knew the term "novel." Is E.T.A. Hoffman's bizarre textual experiment The Adventures of Tomcat Murr postmodern? How about Sterne's Tristram Shandy? Well, not historically, no, but generically? Perhaps! The genre has to start somewhere, and that start is almost certainly *before* the word for the genre exists.
@Ann Very nice catch! As if constructing a puzzle wasn't hard enough!
@Mike As a pun-hater, I'm giving you the finger.
@Aaron I had "lets lie" as well. "Malama" didn't *seem* right to me, but it wasn't until I had filled in the whole puzzle and didn't get the victory music that I knew I needed to go back and give it a second look.
Not my favorite puzzle, clue for clue, but an absolutely astounding feat of gridsmanship. I figured out it was quantum early when I realized NAE/NAW SET/NET and PAT/PET were too many clues of that kind, that close, to be a coincidence. But it never occurred to me to think about where the answers were placed in the puzzle. Must've taken ages to think of all through. Bravo!
Boy was I on the same wavelength as the constructor. It took maybe 5 seconds to come up with QUOTATIONMARKS and then I did all the rest of the theme clues just as fast, except for DASHEDHOPES, which I had to figure out from the crosses (the hopes part anyway, the dashed was also obvious to me). Still didn't make my PB, though. After that flying start, the rest was still a challenge. Fun puzzle.
@Bill If I understand correctly, a person can't be *anything*-normative since it's a term that applies to a culture's tendency to explicitly or implicitly designate certain identities as normal and then define all other identities by their distance from that norm. Most cultures, at large, are heteronormative. The culture in a gay bar may be homonormative in that a man there is presumed to be gay (or at least curious) unless stating otherwise. I imagine you know this. I just like talking about language so thanks for giving me an opportunity :)
@Jody Yep. Bad clue. Thematically appropriate that the street signs say "Eye Street," though.
@Matthew in WeHo And I suppose we can't call Don Quixote a novel because Cervantes wouldn't have recognized the word either? Bach is, very famously, the composer of short works intended to teach students, which we would, today, call etudes. The clue is fine as is, but for the pedants, I suppose Beethoven or Berlioz would have suffixed, although neither is half as famous for writing etudes (whatever he called them) than Bach.
@William James I solved every puzzle this week under my average time. This one took me 19 minutes, which is fast for me, although of course there are people who can do it much faster. The puzzles did *feel* hard. They required more guesswork, filling in stray letters I suspected were correct from context etc. Right up until the final letter of this puzzle, I wasn't sure if I was completely on the wrong path. But I suspect perhaps the absence of people complaining about the puzzles being too easy was due to a gentle admonishment in the column earlier this week that crosswords are games and games are supposed to be fun. I think the implicit message was, if it's not fun, stop doing it. I've spent over an hour on a crossword, but only because I anticipated, and received, a sense of accomplishment from sticking it out. If you're not getting that, what's the point?
Really enjoyable Sunday, and as icing on the cake, I can now add Squeezy to my daily puzzle rounds. Fun little game.
Bottom right corner gave me no end of trouble. The clue for SYN is the trickiest clue I can remember, and I had "lounge" for "a place to chill" for a long while, which puzzled me because I ended up with "please no." A challenging puzzle but mostly fair.
I found this one an exceptionally easy Friday. It's my new best time! My fave was RUNNYNOSE and I enjoy learning new stuff from the crossword so the banned books clue was fun.
@Marty I guess that means you've never seen the Stephen Spielberg movie "Catch Mr If You Can," which is a shame, it's a fantastic movie and kiting is a really important part of the plot. Inuit is, and always has been, plural. Just a you wouldn't expect DEERS or MOOSES, you wouldn't expect INUITS.