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So many people have written in to complain about the puzzle's unreadability. To me this is a bit weird. It's perfectly readable on a normal laptop, as well, of course, as in news print. Are they complaining about its appearance on a phone-size screen? This is a large-scale Sunday puzzle! Phones have other primary uses—their suitability for crosswords is iffy at best.
@Sarah It was a hard puzzle to be sure. (Took me much longer than usual to complete!) But my view is that the "not-quite-right" clues are deliberately meant to misdirect, requiring one to reread them and rethink what they could mean. The ambiguities of language come to the fore, which I find to be a good thing.
@BamBam Good points, though you will hear the phrase "an Armani suit" quite frequently in casual conversation, so ....
Fantastic ingenuity on this one! Or should I say enginuity?
@Mike Sure! Don't you know the children's round song, "Oar, oar, oar you're boat"?
@RozzieGrandma "Whoa" makes sense to me because it follows the conventional spelling of many other words ... e.g., WHAT WHERE WHEN WHY etc. If I have ever seen "woah" anywhere but in this puzzle, I cannot recall it. I'd be curious to know what NYT editors would do with the word if they saw it in an article.
Haven't read all the comments to see if others pointed out that there are nine hidden "T"s in the puzzle. Is there something thematic going on, to do with the "nineties"?
This puzzle is a small masterpiece. Very impressive debut!
Mr. Potato Head? Really? It took me forever to finish this not-too-hard puzzle, because the theme was so … weird? Goofy? In any case, not the least bit intuitive. Hard to remember a toy that I played with almost never—if at all—when I was a wee one. I am wondering why that brown blob in the middle is supposed to remind one of a potato. Such regular angular potatoes are not a thing in nature. And what's with the interruptions of what should be a solid shape? Oh well—there's always next Thursday's puzzle to look forward to. Please, though, don't tie it to Slinkies or Barbies or Yo-Yos or Nerf balls! The puzzle's assymetry is also a bit of a
@Steve L Thank you. I sit corrected!
@jf Agreed. And how about "AAAs"?!
@Barry Ancona Quite so! And after all, Jonathan, it's a Saturday puzzle! Admittedly this one took me the longest time I can remember. (And I had to use Google for some fact-retrieval -- which I try to avoid doing as much as possible. In this case, I rationalize, getting unstuck outranks blank-stare frustration.)
@mmm Sorry -- not a debut at all! But really good!
@Rob D Yes, clever in a way. But in another way (seen from another angle), a desperation entry that would very rarely be uttered by anyone. Sigh. I guess I'm a curmudgeon.
@Paul Did you mean that the theme is NE--noying?
@jp inframan Huh? You think ALL the NYT puzzles are getting worse? Thursday puzzles are almost invariably enriched by some gimmick or another. That's the challenge, which many of us prize. This one was as tricky as they come, but the construction was admirable. (Or so it seemed to me.)
@Glizzy Gobbler True, it's not a movie. But it is a dark fantasy! (Fantasy being a genre of fiction.)
@Bill I'm with you on the nitpick. Older folks like me were taught that the fifth scale degree was "SOL"—not "SO." The ambiguity made the puzzle's theme harder for me to embrace 100%. I guess this is a "two-fer": I just remembered that in the song "DO-RE-MI" from "The Sound of Music," the syllable is treated as a homophone for "Sew." And now that I think about it, I see that the elision between "SOL" and "LA" (the next solfege syllable) makes its pronunciation work both ways! Oh well, summon Roseanne Roseannadanna: NEVER MIND!
"Sap" = Sentimental Sort Really? This is pretty bad clueing in my book, even with a question mark.
@Jeanie K I suppose the can be seen as arcs if you think of them as parts of a circle that have been cut out. But I agree that this is forced.
@Keaton The answer plays with the common phrase (an) "emotional wreck." Hope this helps.
@Stephen, Totally agree about TCM vs. TMC. The Movie Channel has no real following, while Turner Classic Movies is an indispensable component of high-quality cable for film buffs!
@Anna You have good points, but do you really want to attribute a "pervasive idea" to those of us who found the puzzle un-fun, or (say) annoying? I have nothing against Mario or Princess Peach, and all those games, and of course they are no longer "niche" matters. Nonetheless, I just don't really know much about all that, so the puzzle left me indifferent at best (despite the clever construction and clueing).
@Xword Junkie I hesitate to call"Empaling" a "variant." OED tells us that that alternate spelling of the word is now obsolete. (And so it certainly seems to me.)
@Mimi Why not keep one's options open? Thursday puzzles can be fun, if you want a bit of a brain-teasing challenge. Just being aware of that going in can help a lot !
OMNOMNOM? Had to look it up, and then realized it's a contemporary equivalent to Yum Yum. Is it really the case (as one source asserts) that the phrase originated with Cookie Monster on Sesame Street?
@David Pearce Please go easy on capital letters ... they're tough on the eyes so early in the morning!
@Keaton Oops! I guess it ought to be "emotional wrecks"? (Kind of a stretch, but ....)
@Keaton You're most welcome. (BTW, I'm an scholar of silent films and their music, and you have one of the immortal names of that era!)
CASABLANCA: While it's surely one of the most frequently *quoted* of classic Hollywood films, does that make it the most "quotable"? That's incorrect syntax, in my view. By the way, here are a few other classics whose lines are quoted all the time: THE WIZARD OF OZ: "... we're not in Kansas anymore." // "Toto, too!" // "There's no place like home." ALL ABOUT EVE: "It's going to be a bumpy night." JAWS: "We're going to need a bigger boat." E.T.: "I'll be right here." THE GODFATHER: "Leave the gun. Take the cannoli." (Among others.) THE GODFATHER PART III: "Just when I was out, they pull me back in." PSYCHO: "A boy's best friend is his mother." [Not really quoted as such that much, but it's such a wicked line! ;-)] BABE: "That's do, pig." etc etc etc
@Mean Old Lady Could be clued as "Jane Austen's character"!
@dutchiris I am sure I have never heard nor seen that sentence! The common construction would be "The people rose up ..."
Where is "gest" used? It's "geste" --- n'est-ce pas?
@Jake Isn't "choppiness" part of the point, given the pairing of the Across answrers, across divisions? (I.e., the answers are chopped in two?)
@angel I don't understand the ... acronym?
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