Solverado
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Byron Walden is a master. Really, what else is there to say? Thank you for the Saturday puzzle I’ve been waiting for, Byron.
I didn’t realize Psycho wasn’t given a R rating till the 80’s. Hitchcock once said that he filmed Psycho in black and white not because he wanted it to be an art film, but because he knew that red blood flowing down the drain in the shower scene wouldn’t get past the censors. He was right, the blood wasn’t questioned. Instead, the censors got hung up on the camera showing the inside of the toilet bowl when the torn up note gets flushed, something that had never been shown before in mainstream movies or TV. A different time.
@JM I know, wasn’t it wonderful?
@Lucy We spell both the noun and the verb as ‘practice’ in the U.S.
@Bruce Yes, the existing format mimics natural, real-life human conversation with people just organically joining in. It’s a big reason to participate in the forum in the first place.
Brilliantly constructed — and a great solve. I really, really enjoyed it. I got tripped up at the end by the NW corner for the silliest of reasons. I had AftER for [In line with], which gave me PROUDtAtAS, a nod to the multilingual among us, I thought. Then I wracked my brain for The ECONO_IFT, seriously considering ECONOgIFT for awhile, even though… I subscribe to it. Did I mention I’m sleep-deprived today? Again, a brilliant Tuesday. Thanks, Kevin.
@Andrzej Curious take. Historically, some of the most potent art came from places where speech was dangerous. When overt expression gets you silenced, artists get fluent in subtext. Constraints don’t kill art, they refine it.
A Byron Walden Saturday followed by a (masked) Sam Ezersky Sunday. Sometimes the gods just smile on us.
Pretty quick, but with a neat theme and interesting clues.
Very ingenious, if quick. I still have coffee in my cup!
@Ms. Billie M. Spaight The “sphere of expertise” photo? How on earth so?
I don’t know what it says about me that I confidently plonked in nuDIE RUN for 55A and needed crosses to add on basic articles of clothing. Very smooth sailing otherwise. The clueing was a little bit less straightforward than recent Fridays, however, which was very welcome and made for a more interesting solve. BESTRONG is what I believe used to be called a dook.
Believe me when I say that after a long day, BUsK A ROUGE made sense, although in a “huh?”, head-scratching sort of way. BUsK is a pretty rare word when used as a transitive verb. As in, “He busked him al so swiþe Boþe squier and kniȝt” level of rare. And so I took a minute to figure out the theme, and then the penny dropped. Phew. I was prompted to read the constructor’s notes after reading one of the comments, and it’s only now I find out that Andre Braugher died almost two years ago! What a devastating loss. I always perked up to see his name in the credits; such talent on the screen, with warmth, intellect, and easy good humor that came just shining through. Rest in peace, Mr. Braugher.
Very good puzzle, great fill, impressively little glue. But, editors, is there a link to the Saturday puzzle?
Quick but fun. It felt like it had a few good PECANS, though, to make it crunchy for a Tuesday. Thanks, Eric.
No turkey, this Monday puzzle.
Simeon Seigel never ever disappoints. Excellent Thursday.
@Steven M. Both ELON and SAL Khan are definitely crosswordese. INUK is general geography though, and ULTA stores are ubiquitous. I had a typo tonight, DULES IT OUT. And subsequently I got to find out that DULES sounds the same as DUELS, and — on a third Labor Day beer — it’s hard to catch when flyspecking the down clues.
I thought 44D was a rebus. I tried to fit MY HUSBAND into the first square of _DID. The cross? _4KMAGMYHUSBANDC? Sure, why not.
@Heidi Petrichor is a good one. You may already know rhis: It sounds like a word straight from classical Greece but it was actually coined by a couple of Australian researchers maybe 50 years ago. There’s chemistry behind it. The smell comes from a compound called geosmin, a bicyclic alcohol made by soil-dwelling microbes and blue-green algae. Humans are freakishly good at detecting it, down to about 5 parts per trillion. Evolution hardwired us to sniff out water like bloodhounds. If you’ve been to Australia, it makes a lot of sense.
@Andrzej To say that the output of 1.4 billion people has no artistic value is incredibly dismissive. Ai Weiwei is a dissident, yes, but he’s just one name. Have you been to China? I have. You don’t have to be a fan of the communist regime to see the incredible richness of the nation’s artistic culture. Look beyond Ai Weiwei. Look at Cao Fei or Xu Bing. Subtlety doesn’t mean silence. Just because something isn’t protest art in block caps or a cartoon political meme doesn’t mean it’s not speaking volumes.
@MC It’s not a complaint against the constructors to note that the editors ran a Friday puzzle on a Saturday. Again.
A nifty idea, sure, but good lord, all those 3-letter entries…
Good puzzle. Tough but fair. Had to dig deep for VASCO Balboa, though it’s not a name I should’ve forgotten since he was the first European to lay eyes on the ocean I see from my backyard. And he only did it half a millennium ago.
@BJ Unfortunately, yes. Fortunately, though, in my case, only once.
@Francis I’ve been surprised at @Steven M’s not always finishing a puzzle, too. I’m a pretty speedy solver (sub-10 today, had to chase down 2 typos) and by the time I had got my average Saturday times to about 20 minutes, finishing any NYT puzzle was a question of when, not if, because I had a couple years’ worth of them under my belt, plus some archives. Which makes me think that Steven is naturally a super quick thinker who, after some more experience, will be matchless at this.
@Barry Ancona There’s an art class exercise where you draw an object (an old slouchy Converse sneaker for my first one) without looking at your hand and without ever lifting your pencil from paper. What you get is a line drawing using one continuous line. Not one straight line, but definitely one line.
Happy to see a rebus to spice up a Sunday puzzle. I’m frequently foiled by TV clues because I don’t have a head for names, so I was unfamiliar with _ yra Phillips and not 100% sure about Brendan Fraser. Pair that with not having Popeye’s dawn on me for the longest time, and that Erlen Meyer flask was a doozy to put together. A fine puzzle. Would have liked a little more chewiness (came in just under 20 min even though we’re all watching a game and I’m on my 3rd beer).
@Patricia Henry We all almost end up hating Shakespeare after slogging through Romeo and Juliet in high school and yet so few seem to learn what ‘wherefore’ means. It’s always boggled my mind.
@Mean Old Lady Thanks, and likewise!
@Channing Congrats, and just ignore the 22A-hat comment above you.
@dutchiris Never in the wild, but it was in one of the puzzles in the last year (?) or so, and my brain offered it up somehow.
Really good puzzle. Very fresh fill and a fun theme. CLOTHESLINE felt a bit dad-jokey but I liked the follow-through. And FBOMB made me sit up, which isn’t a bad thing on a Monday.
@Eric Hougland Yes, it’s basically the impact of raindrops aerosolizing the spores of dying Streptomyces in the soil. The smell can be bottled, literally.
@Andrzej Interesting, I thought that take on the Warsaw Uprising went out of circulation around 1989.
As others noted, not a difficult grid. I was initially not impressed with the theme until I finished solving and saw the animation. The idea and the design are actually pretty ingenious. My family called them BLINKERS. I never knew anyone called them turn signals until driver’s ed. We kids would get in the cars on the school driving range and say BLINKERS, and the teacher would correct us: “Turn signals.”
@Danny ‘Mama’ is most likely more common as the baby’s first word because, statistically, more languages (at least among countries that publish research on developmental milestones) have their word for ‘mom’ begin with ‘m’ than there are languages whose word for ‘dad’ begin with a ‘d’ (there’s a lot of competition from tatas, papas, babas, etc. out there). Also, since in most cultures the majority of babies still likely spend more time with mom than dad, they see ‘mama’ modeled for them much more often. Plus it’s likely easier for a baby to notice and try to mimic the mechanics of ‘mama’ vs. ‘dada’ since the lip movement the adult is demonstrating is more overt than their tongue position. As for whether ‘m’ or ‘d’ is more difficult to produce by a mouth starting ab ovo, some speech pathologists say that ‘d’ comes more naturally to infants because it mimics the tongue position they produce when self-soothing with a sucking sound/motion, whereas ‘m’ requires more lip control that’s not acquired by them early on for other reasons. This only holds true for babies, of course. If an adult is relearning speech, for example after a stroke, ‘m’ may be easier to learn than ‘d’ as you posited.
@Danny Ahh, ok, I gotcha. You’re saying that the baby’s spontaneous making of the ‘mama’ sound was instrumental in human language creation. I like that theory. Now, I do entirely place on your shoulders the responsibility for leading me down another anthropolinguistic rabbit hole I’m about to enter in 3… 2…
@SBK Look at the clue for 13A. It’s a quote from him.
@DocP I read Oliver Sacks’ Hallucinations recently and I remember his conclusion that both déjà vu and jamais vu may be experienced as part of temporal lobe epilepsy, but that for some people they may also come as part of their migraine aura? Not sure I remember the latter part correctly. I don’t have the book handy.
@Mean Old Lady I could picture him, but needed 5 crosses before his last name popped into my head. Is how does he pronounce it, do you know? I think that before the show “Frasier” came around and became so popular, I would have pronounced Fraser as Fra-zer. But TV’s “Frasier” tricked us all into seeing that i after the s even if it isn’t there.
@Paul Freshman philosophy? I’m guessing C+, graded on the curve?
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