Bruce
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I miss the rebus puzzles...the real ones, without the circles to indicate where the rebus goes, accompanied by shaded squares that spell out exactly what the rebus is. The ones where each rebus was different. The ones that required some real effort to crack...but that feeling when you did crack it, and the puzzle started to yield, was wonderful. Those were my favorites, but I think they're gone for good now, and I don't know of any other source for them now. I liked the puzzles that outrageously broke the rules, like the one that had the answer's direction turn ninety degrees halfway through, or the one that had answers that continued outside the grid. Those usually were beyond me, but not always, and conquering one was a thrill. The NYT had become so leery of rebus puzzles that you seldom see them anymore, and when you do see them they're like this one...spoon-feeding the solutions while holding the solver's hand and murmuring encouragement. I'm waiting to see the gold star given out just for participation. Thursday puzzles don't have to be dumbed down like this. Seeing a few outraged and frustrated rants in the comments section is a sign that you're doing it right.
@Ιασων "Algorithms" are named after him, too.
One of my faster Fridays. It orobably would have been faster if the puzzle hadn't sent me on a Wikipedia side trip that involved the entire article on Roald Dahl, several articles about planes that he either flew or shot down, his wife, Patricia Neal, who was the actor in "The Day the Earth Stood Still" who spoke the line "Gort...Klaatu, Barada, Nikto" (which, incidentally, stuck in one of my neighbor's head to the point that he has the phrase in brass letters across the front of his house), and Romanichal vardos (Dahl owned one that was used as a playhouse for his kids, and later as a writing room). I briefly and reflexively made a mental note to read more Dahl to my boys before remembering...oh yeah...they're middle-aged men now. I really enjoyed this puzzle. I am usually very cautious about filling in long entries without a lot of crosses, but i did so several times today. Really fun cluing, and very rewarding to figure out.
I'm sure there's a subset of solvers here that knew both MATINS and LATTO. I'm not in it, though, which left me having to go ask Google...my only lookup for this puzzle.
ON TILT has also become a chess term. One of my sons is a chess player. It's kind of his default activity. In circumstances where a lot of people would be on social media, he will have his phone out to play chess with someone somewhere in the world. He's decent at it; he's ranked somewhat to the right of the middle of the bell curve. Weirdly, he has never played a single game of chess using a physical board, and doesn't particularly want to He described to me a game where he was playing someone who was ranked considerably higher than him. My son made a move that blew a hole in his opponent's strategy, causing him to make a series of angry, ill-considered moves. My son won, but he then had to look at the guy text enraged accusations that he'd cheated, because nobody with my son's ranking could possibly have beaten him fairly. That guy was ON TILT.
If the clue had been "Io or Luna" as the puzzle was titled, it would have been even more difficult, but it was actually "Io or luna." ...no capitalization of the final word, so not a reference to our moon. At one point thought that both words might start with a lower-case "L." I was only dimly aware of the existence of the game FORTNITE, and I've never heard of an "Io" moth, so it took a lot to get my mind to relinquish its death grip on MOon. What an amazing and clever misdirect.
I didn't know that a "pip" was anything but a seed. I never saw "Fame," "Hustle and Flow," or "High School Musical." I think I encountered "gas up" once in a previous NYT puzzle, but never in the wild. I didn't know the singer or the song. I had "noxious" initially instead of NOISOME. For "X" I initially had the Greek letter rather than the Roman numeral. I don't use emojis...I can see the point of them when they help make clear the intent of something that might be misinterpreted otherwise, but otherwise they seem like something a girl in middle school would fall back on, so I use words instead. I struggled, I backed off and redid answers quite a bit, I finished with one of my slowest times ever for a Wednesday, but I didn't look up a thing, so I'm not complaining.
@slightlycrazy It wasn't a rebus puzzle, so no insertion of blocks of letters was involved. You almost certainly did something wrong. Try looking at the answers for each clue.
I didn't initially think I could do this one. Instead of getting some traction and starting to fill in crosses, I was all over the grid, filling in the few answers that I was relatively sure of. I reconciled myself to many lookups and a long solve time. Eventually I just put it aside for maybe 20 minutes and just went down some unrelated internet rabbit holes, which helped. I came back, made a few leaps of faith, and it started to fill in. One of the weirder moments towards the end was looking at what I was expecting to be the text from some industrial workplace placard and having some obscure part of my brain unexpectedly suggest to me that it was really a caution against bear-poking. Riiight... I thought sure, why not, I'll try it...I'll be removing it again in a few seconds, but I'll try it...and less than a minute later I got the music. One of my faster Friday solves, and I didn't look up a thing.
@Laura Stratton "Clever and tricky" is why many of us show up. There's lots of other places where you can find standard, predictable puzzles.
At one point I had to reassure myself that the author Zane Gray was never the king of England. I mean, nine days is a brief reign, but you'll still expect someone to notice immediately that something was amiss.
@Fact Boy It is. You engage your whole self. You turn yourself around.
I think crossword solvers must have better access to the hive mind than the average non-solver. For instance, during the pandemic lockdown, I both started doing the NYT crossword and made some serious effort to improve my bread baking, and I can't think of any external prompt that pushed me in those directions. Today I immediately entered TAMPA as soon as I saw the clue. I know almost nothing about football. My only explanation is an unconscious tap into the hive mind.
If "No Cap" has been around long enough to make it into my memory then I can probably assume that nobody uses it anymore. It's kind of like viewing a distant star...by the time the light reaches you, you're looking at the distant past. I really had to stretch for this one. My knowledge of current pop culture is thin and I know very little about sports, but I managed it via the crosses and dredging the dustiest corners of my memory. But I got the whole thing, including the theme, with no lookups. DONNY was my last entry. I last thought about that guy maybe forty years ago.
I always thought that jump kicks were mostly flashy. Once you're airborne, your path is fixed by the laws of physics, and your opponent can take advantage of that. I spoke to a black belt once who described the entirety of a bout which resulted in him winning a tournament in a single sentence. The description was: "He leapt into the air...so I hit him."
Lots of names in this one because of the theme, which necessitated some easy clues to make it doable by most solvers from the crosses. For me, though, it was easy, save for a couple of places where it was impossible. I nudged it through with a couple of lookups, stole the gold star, and put it behind me. I did end up reading the Wikipedia article on Norma Talmadge. Her whole family seemed to have the kind of persistance to succeed, despite multiple setbacks, that only poverty can produce. Amazingly, like Greta Garbo, she was able to walk away from it when she'd had enough.
@Francis I don't remember if it was in a tiny paper cupcake liner or not. I do remember my father, still in his twenties, talking to me while we were waiting in line...he was telling me about how lucky I was that this vaccine existed now, and how many people had been crippled or killed by polio, which made me determined to get through the ordeal, despite my fear of the needle. And then...the sugar cube.
@Matt I would never criticize someone because they found a puzzle too difficult to solve. That's happened to me many times, especially with Saturday puzzles. I look up whatever I must and finish them, but I know they're not clean solves. What I have an issue with is seeing a difficult puzzle labeled as "bad," when in fact it's just too difficult for that individual. The implication is that the Times needs to dumb down their more difficult puzzles. I appreciate that high bar, and I hope it never gets lowered.
@Matt Looking at the column before you've solved the puzzle is bound to reveal some answers anyway.
The only place I've ever seen TEHEE is in the New York Times crossword. It must be common somewhere, no doubt, but it's outside my experience. It seems bizarre to pronounce "te" with a long "e." I also have to wonder where the word came from in the first place, because I've never heard a laugh that actually sounded like that...but then again, onomatopoeic words tend to vary wildly. Just look at all the words for what a rooster sounds like from various cultures, for instance. This took me a bit over an hour. Neither East Coast convenience stores nor prep schools have ever been part of my day-to-day existence.
@Bruce I just wanted to add that this was absolutely a top-tier Thursday puzzle. It linitially left me confused and a little frustrated, but when it started coming together it made me feel like a genius for eventually working it out...but the real genius was the constructor. Very, very nice job.
@Joe Sure. You have to lean forward, shade your eyes with one hand, and place the other hand on your hip when you use it, though.
@Sangla Looking at your error in a comment, realizing there's no way to edit it, and writing a second comment to correct the first one is kind of a rite of passage here. Welcome to the club.
@Hanna In my experience diacritical marks are just omitted in NYT puzzles, without any further alteration. Sometimes it isn't, strictly peaking, correct, but that's how it's done.
@Francis PUTTEES were a gimme to me. I used to get around mainly by bicycle, and used something similar to keep my right trouser leg away from the oily chain. I once wore actual puttees in a movie back when I semi-regularly got work as an extra. They were accompanied by a khaki uniform, boots, a WWI-style helmet, and a gigantic heavy bolt-action rifle. No ammo, of course.
They were boxes, but italicized. The boxes, the actual symbols for them, were italicized, and there were ten of them. I could stop wracking my brain for alternate ways of describing a series of parallelograms. The moment I realized that I knew there was hope.
@Peter My apologies in advance, but "relatively unique" makes me wince a little. Either something is unique, or it isn't. "Unique" means one-of-a-kind, but it's rapidly becoming just a synonym for "unusual." Yes, I know the specific meaning of words tends to blur when their definition is assumed from context, but I hate to see that happen.
@Petrol I read somewhere that the least technological, most isolated cultures tend to have the most complicated languages, but that they get simplified as more contacts and interrelationships are established. The mechanism is this: as outside contacts are made with groups close to you whose language is related, a simplified pidgin language develops from common elements, and with increased contact, intermarriage, etc., the simpler version gradually replaces the two more complicated ones. I read that some Native American tribe has a language whose terms and grammer change completely if you're talking about your dead ancestors. I once lived close to a reservation in Arizona, and commented to someone that it would be interesting to take a course offered locally and learn their language. I was told that the return on that effort would be low, because it would enable me to speak to only a small group of people to whom I would always be an outsider anyway, that the language was difficult to learn, and that if I learned that language as spoken in one part of the reservation I would always be laughed at by those in the other half.
@Nancy It wasn't a rebus puzzle. I know because I really tried to make it a rebus puzzle. For instance, I put in YES as a rebus, but still had "yes" spelled out in the slanted, aka "biased" portion, because I took the second "yes" to be the confirmation of the first one. Yeah, it was fairly tortured logic, but I thought it was correct. And I spent maybe another fifteen minutes wracking my brain and flyspecking the puzzle before I removed all the rebuses and got the music.
My inner three-year-old expected flaming, spinning graphics along with the San Jose Strut. Even better, they could have had the full Jerry Lee Lewis song stand in for the usual music. (I'm easily amused, though. I and a friend of mine once walked in to a small country store in Alabama planning to buy a few fireworks, but ended up buying out their entire stock and making multiple trips back to the car with boxes and bags. The best one was one of the largest ones...it malfunctioned, and what was supposed to be a display lasting several minutes went up in a huge ball of flame and a deafening explosion that set off every car alarm for blocks.) Had this been published on a Thursday, I also would have expected that none of the answers that crossed the "balls" would have made any sense until they "rotated" into place.
@JJJJ I saw "Mini," and my first thought was "I bet it's the car." I did wait for a few crosses to confirm it, though.
@Tim Your sadness isn't irrational at all. In the nineties I had an English co-worker who would go back to visit every year or so. She spoke about about England had become a little more American each time she visited. She finished, after a pause, by saying: "Lorries...they're driving lorries now..." It saddens me to know that the England that my grandmother knew no longer really exists. Part of that is the passage of time, yes, but part of it is the ubiquitous American influence via movies and the internet. I used to chat online with a woman in Australia. She commented on the resentment some there hold against Americans. I responded: "Why? Our arrogance? Our steamroller culture that flattens everything in its path?" She replied: "Yes, and yes."
@SBK I was surprised by the sudden obsolescence of typewriters, phonograph records, road maps, and incandescent light bulbs, and I never forsaw a time when a land-line phone wouldn't be found in almost every house in the US. But the idea that anyone over the age of five would need instructions in order to read an "analog clock" (formerly just known as a "clock") just dumbfounds me.
@R.S. I'm sure TIANA is a gimme for many people, but not so much when your kids are now two men in their mid-to-late thirties. I've never seen that movie (don't even know it's title), and I've never seen "Frozen," either. FONDANT was, however, a gimme for me.
Hearing that particular Christmas song makes me picture a Hallmark greeting card with a big-eyed Margaret Keane illustration of the kid in question, and it also makes me want to smash something against a brick wall.
@MmmmHmm Tried to leave a link to a site for a company that sells "adobe" bricks, but it didn't work. Traditiomal adobe is made in the form of bricks, so yes, a house built from them would be a brick house. If you don't accept that, there's companies that manufacturer fired bricks that are referred to as "adobe."
@Vaer Nitrogen makes smaller bubbles (I have no idea why, but it does). It changes the quality of the head...it's a softer foam, and it seems to last longer. It makes it a little like "crema" on top of espresso. I especially like it with stout.
@John Carson I seem to be alone in thinking this, but to me the clue seems to be close enough to be acceptable. If your car won't start, one of the first things to check is if you've "got a spark." Unless you've got a diesel, your engine won't start without SPARKPLUGS.
Per the large drum mentioned in the mini: the bongos I know are small...approximately the sized of coffee cans.
@Francis On a full-sized keyboard, between the essential "typewriter" keys and the ten-key numeric pad, are the group of keys you use to move around a document..."home," "page up," "page down," "insert," "delete," and "END." I use it fairly often, but I guess not nearly as often as the alphanumeric keys, so it''s valid.
@BillIv I initially read this as "glutenous guests." Still kind of works.
@Merlin I take a pill which contains both vitamins and minerals, but, even though it's not technically correct, I just call it a "multivitamin." I suspect most people do..."vitamin/mineral supplement" is kind of a mouthful.
@Tim A lot of us in North America first encountered "shag" in the Austin Powers movies, and it doesn't carry the same shock value that it does to you. It's just something we associate with that character. I heard it used by Rod Stewart in a Terry Gross interview on NPR...It sailed right through, where most similar terms would have been censored. The clue was actually more shocking than the answer to my sensibilities.
A question mark at the end of a clue doesn't necessarily indicate a pun. It just means there's some kind of wordplay involved.
@Strudel Dad "Expresso" coffee.
@Lewis If you're not a mathematician you missed your calling.
@HEK Sort of. He did put that on his business card, and he did make it into a national chain. But he didn't start the first one; the brothers Richard and Maurice McDonald were responsible for that. Ray Kroc, who at the time was a salesman for the milkshake machines they used, talked them into being their franchising agent, and eventually bought the whole company, except the original location, which by the terms of the contract continued to be owned and operated by the McDonald brothers...they had made a great deal of money from the deal, but they wished to continue running the place. It was their brainchild, after all Kroc regretted that; his ego could not accept that he had this one location that wasn't his. So he set up another McDonald's close by that took enough of their business away that they eventually folded.
@Barry Ancona I'm still missing it, I guess. The clue is "U.F.O.-watching organization." The answer is SETI. They don't search for, or watch, UFOs. It's not their mission.
@Mean Old Lady RANDO had an indication in the clue ("informally") that the answer wasn't standard English and probably slang.
I had iRMA instead of ERMA. Given how many times that clue has been used, and especially given that I remember Erma Bombeck, you would think I would have known better. It took me nearly as long to find that mistake as it took to solve the rest of the puzzle.