Mark Smith

@Andrzej Age-related, no doubt. Some of us who were of age to be drafted during the Vietnam conflict will probably always remember “Draft Dodger Rag” from Phil Ochs. I immediately filled in his name. Never heard of Puth before today.

@Nancy J. I still haven’t figured out how the Eiffel Tower is “rod shaped.”

@Eric Hougland I also just entered the U and thought I might get away with it. I just considered the down items to be in a pocket and therefore out of sight.

@Pani Korunova I’m American and I also found those same clues a bit too esoteric.

@Leontion Thank you for the explanation since I had a similar confusion over that combination. Evidently, I need to get out more often.

@Andrzej Definitely agree with your assessment of TED TALKs. To me, they appear to be a sales pitch for something, but I’m never quite sure what I’m supposed to be buying.

@Matt Some of us inside the US are still outside the media and sports bubble.

@Wayne Harrison I agree, but I also believe the original definition in Heinlein’s “Stranger in a Strange Land” should be how the word is used. Unfortunately, it has been co-opted and corrupted into popular parlance and no longer retains that meaning. I seem to have that problem with a lot of definitions. For example, the common phrase “to pull oneself up by one’s bootstraps” was a sarcastic phrase depicted in a political cartoon as something that would be impossible, but has become a desirable characteristic. And don’t get me started on the meaning of “eke.”

@Kathlene If we want to include women receiving votes for a major party nomination, Margaret Chase Smith predates Shirley Chisholm. She did not secure the Republican Party nomination. The first woman actually on the ballot for President was Victoria Woodhull in 1872 (yes, before women could vote) on the Equal Rights Party, which would not be considered a “major” party.

@Teresa And in Canada, the one dollar coin is a loonie because of the depiction of a loon on it. A two dollar coin is a twoonie, probably because Canadians have an interesting sense of humor.

@B What I found for kale as slang for cash was that it originated in 1902. I recall encountering it in that context is some gangster novel from the 1930s…possibly a Perry Mason novel, since I read a lot of those from that time period.

@Andrzej There’s an idea for a puzzle - what word did I type that was mangled by Autocorrect into something else. At one point, I worked with a gentleman whose last name was “Hamiter.” When I typed his name, autocorrect came up with “hamster.” Considering he was about six feet five inches tall, that did not fit at all…

@Teresa Not a library section, one who might be expected to be a frequent library user. An autodidact is self-taught, so the library would be one place to go for “lessons.”

@Apurv I also thought that End Game was the last of that sequence, so I looked it up. Apparently, Spider-Man: Far from Home was a part of the Infinity Saga and was released after End Game. It would have to be included as a part of the series in order for there to be 23 movies in it (End Game was number 22). In looking it up, I also found there are a LOT of people obsessed with the MCU. Sometimes a little scary

@Elyse and that’s just limiting oneself to states. The United States of America also includes various territories (Guam, American Samoa, Puerto Rico, and others), which are often ignored but still a part of our country. Including them makes the directional bias even greater.

@Pani Korunova Side note: a decade ago, Ari Shapiro was the London correspondent for NPR. He also sings with the band Pink Martini.

@Walj I was told (North Carolina is NASCAR country) that the area in which race cars get quick service was initially an actual pit or trench that would allow access to the underside of the car. That tended to go away with the advent of efficient hoists and jacks.

@Nora I did re-read the clue again (a few times). It still reads as though ENDS is the word to combine. Using BOOK is a logical deduction, but not dictated by the clue’s directions.

@Dan Agreed. I would have preferred it clued as “Outlet supply”

@T At the risk of inciting an irrelevant discussion, I find A&W much superior to Barq’s.

@Steven M. Same issue for me. Took a few minutes of staring at every square to finally figure out “it” referred to “tag.”

@Times Rita Do it the other way - translate SASSON into English. Depending on the translation program, you will get “happiness,” “joy,” or maybe “rejoicing.” Just as there are multiple words in English that could be taken to mean the same thing, other languages do the same.

@Andrzej If it helps, I grew up in the US and now reside there. I had never heard of CARAMEL DELITE until today.

@Helen Wright Something I know only because I looked it up, a BOX SOCIAL is apparently a gathering at which box lunches are auctioned off as a fund raiser. Never heard the term before, nor have I ever encountered or heard of such an event. I probably need to get out more

@Divs You should read some Pauline Kael reviews while you’re doing the looking up. She had a way with the language.

@Jane Wheelaghan Just to clarify, Six Flags Magic Mountain is in Southern California. The first Six Flags park to open was in Texas…Six Flags Over Texas in Arlington, TX, in 1961. My family went there when I was a child in 1963. Quite a spectacle for an eight-year-old from a small farming town.

@Jane Wheelaghan In case you haven’t already looked it up for yourself, TCBY is a US nationwide chain of stores selling soft-serve frozen yogurt. It started in Little Rock, Arkansas, in the early 1980s and quickly expanded franchise operations across most of the country. (I was living in Little Rock at the time and had met the gentleman who started the company,) The abbreviation originally meant “This Can’t Be Yogurt,” but a competing chain named “I Can’t Believe It’s Yogurt,” which had been in existence a few years, sued over copyright infringement. The abbreviation meaning was changed to “The Country’s Best Yogurt.”

@Rahul Forensics as crime-related science is a bit narrow in definition. Forensics is a legal term related to examining evidence and drawing conclusions. Forensic accounting is examining financial records to find evidence of criminal activity (e.g., fraud), while forensic art and reconstruction is related to the process of developing an image or representation of an individual from available evidence, my favorite example of which is sculpted models of persons based on skeletal data. There are other applications of the term in the legal world. So, a bit broader than just laboratory testing.

@Petrol I know a lot of people who were in the US Navy that refer to any toilet anywhere as the “head,” regardless of whether it is on land, ship, or airplane. This has been appropriated by non-Navy people, as well, so I had no quarrel with the clue.

@Bill in Yokohama Only real problem I had was an error somewhere in the puzzle (failed to get the successful completion indicators when the grid was filled). Normally in that situation, I scan the across and down answers to see which entries don’t appear to be actual words. With almost none of the down answers being real words, it took me a while to work out where the mistake was.

@Nora The NYT crossword app on my iPad shows my best Sunday time as 4 minutes. I have never completed one in less than about 12 minutes, so I’m pretty sure the app is confused (or deranged). While I do not concentrate on maximum completion speed - with only one NYT crossword a day, one should savor it - the fact that I have been doing crosswords for about 60 years means they generally go quickly. Practice, you know. If you must keep score, the app says I took 8 minutes and 44 seconds on this one. However, see above comment about possible schizophrenia in the app.

@Joseph Having worked environmental issues most of my life, I knew the name of the aquifer immediately. Could not remember how to sort all the a’s and l’s.

@SrBruno If you’re using the app for the crossword, investigate the archives. Saturday puzzles a decade or more ago were more difficult by a lot.

@David Pearce The other Curie daughter, Eve, was a journalist and writer. Her husband was the UN representative that accepted the Nobel Peace Prize for the creation of UNICEF. Imagine being the underachiever in the family because you didn’t win a Nobel Prize.

@Matt I learned ADNOUN through studying old journalism and linguistic papers from the time of the American Revolution (ill-fated idea of contributing to Colonial Williamsburg academic research…I quickly exceeded my limitations). It appears to have been in use sometime in the late 1700s and faded away not too long afterward. Today, it is considered archaic. So, unless your grammar classes were a few hundred years ago, you probably never saw that word in class. We called adjectives used as nouns, “nouns.”

@pnk My orals were in defense of my dissertation at the end of grad school. The sequence was (1) course work, (2) qualifying exam, (3) presentation of research topic, (4) preparing dissertation, (5) oral defense of the dissertation, and (6) corrections, edits, or additions to the dissertation based on the orals.

@Reuben I actually was semi-excited to see ROENTGENS defined correctly as a unit of x-ray exposure, since the unit only applies to ionization per volume of air (defined as “exposure”) and not dose (defined as absorbed energy). Unfortunately, the system of units was updated years ago and there is no longer an official unit of exposure.

@Tom My architect friend tells me that a porch has to have a roof and open sides to be called a porch.

@John By far. I spent an inordinate amount of time trying to make Nile fit in five spaces.

@Andrzej When I was in school in a small US town in the ‘70s, the experience didn’t resemble today’s offerings, either. Many things offered to our son (he graduated high school in 2006) made me jealous of the experience.

@Andrzej On the other hand, having spent a number of years in a military band, PARADEREST was obvious to me. Never heard of PERETTI.

@Oikofuge I also hadn’t heard the term, but looked up its usage. Appears to date from around 1655, according to one source. Doesn’t say whether it has ever been used since then.

@Margaret All I could come up with is that it’s the first question to be answered on a math test. I did an Internet search for the phrase and got one link to some song I’d never heard of from 2012, but otherwise nothing seemed to match that phrase.

@Ms. Billie M. Spaight And, not particularly related, AK is Alaska, which is often confused for the postal code for Arkansas.

@Bruce In the sense of “rapidly depart without explanation,” the phrase appears to be mostly used in entertainment in the 1940s. Previously, it had been used in the sense of “take medicine” a few hundred years before. Seems to have disappeared quickly in the 1950s.

@Matt According to my Star Wars geek friend, “Ren” was the title of the ruler of the Knights of Ren, a group that supported the dark side of the force. So, perhaps it wasn’t actually a name, but an honorific, as in Kylo the Ren. However, that is WAY too obscure for the 95+% of the population that are not graduate students in Star Wars mythology. Concur with the judge’s decision to allow the clue.