Ettagale
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I want to offer for a tremendous thank you to the authors of the Sunday puzzle for the lift it gave me. When I watch that Zamboni zoom around and clean up the ice, I was totally cheered at a time when I really needed it. On Thanksgiving day, I had the misfortune of falling and smashing my wrist. This is a painful and long recovery, especially at my advanced age. Doing the puzzle has always been a highlight of my day and never more so than now.
@Times Rita Do not despair, whatever your age. I doubt you are older than I am, and I worked my way through this puzzle without knowing many of the sources. There was something about the crosses that let me fill it in bit by bit and there I was, eight minutes under my average time. Not a record for me but very satisfying.
I confidently entered pula for the word for money in Botswana, because it is the word for rain in Botswana. Nothing is more precious in Botswana than rain, not the diamonds, so it was made the name of the money when the country gained its independence.
Dunzo? In what language? Is this contemporary slang? It certainly cost me a gold star as well as a personal record. More than that, I would like to know the origin.
Looks as if I am going to be the first one to ask the question, with the rebus appearing Wednesday this week, what devilish plans do you have for us on Thursday? I agree that this was quite easy, as rebi go, once I figured out how to shoehorn in “his eminence,” not just “eminence,” I was off and running. I can’t seem to paste in my Strands results today. It was a lovely puzzle. Makes one want to take a tour of the subject matter.
I la la- ed my way through today’s puzzle in my average ten minutes but wish I could spell Malala’s last name without waiting for the crosses. It would have speeded me up quite a lot. I apologize to her. I also wish there was a place to comment about Strands other than here. No spoilers from me, but I found today’s puzzle, which I whipped right through,quite unappetizing. The fact that I knew all the answers and got the spanagram immediately doesn’t mean I enjoyed it. I suspect that makes me an old fogey.
@Beubs I can confirm that CSNY is correct. My late partner photographed Woodstock and captured that very brief moment when the four of them were together.
I was amazed to be able to complete this puzzle without having seen the show Friends, or having read Harry Potter, drunk Gatorade or knowing anything about the football team. Clearly, it was all in the crosses. I almost felt as if I were cheating.
I thought the answer of “good enough” for “recently dated” referred to the date stamps on food meaning it’s still good enough to eat.
I was so over my longest time to say nothing of my average time that some cruel person (or bot?) put a snail drawing next to my completion time. I had never noticed anything like that before. I really didn’t need a confirmation of my ineptitude. I’m willing to blame it on an oral extraction today. That wasn’t fun either.
Crossing a word in Spanish with an archaic or obscure word made it impossible for me to finish this puzzle without poking through the alphabet to finish. Even after I got it, I didn’t actually “get it.”
Glacially slow for me, way over my average. I was stumped by so many parts of this puzzle. Does anyone else consider Kiva to be esoteric or have I missed something well known ? I looked it up and now I know what it is, but it was just one of many words that could not be figured out by the crosses. The puzzle just felt clunky. I never got into a flow with it. That’s why I’m only writing this on Sunday!
I was about to ask for an explanation of Randb when I said it out loud and understood what it meant. It still stopped me from completing the puzzle on my own, very annoying for a Tuesday. Even if I had known the two names cited, I would not have related them to rhythm and blues.
Scary clown also describes the new page layout for the puzzles page. People who do the Times puzzles don’t need a layout that looks as if it is intended to entice slow learners. This reminds me of the misguided attempts by Coca-Cola to introduce another version. I’m sure those of you of a certain age remember the “new Coke.” Let’s return to the classic version of the page and get rid of this “colorful “design.
When I started this puzzle, my first pass was pitiful and I didn’t think there was a chance in a million I would figure it out Although I was way over my time, I did work it out and it was a very satisfactory experience. I had a leg up with Dar es Salaam, i’ve traveled widely in Africa and written about it as well, so that was an easy one for me was an easy one for me, but everything else was an effort. I think I could feel my little grey cells getting a real workout.
Am I the only person who knows that there are real programs called Celebrity Jeopardy? It is not just a skit on Saturday Night Live. I I don’t recommend watching them, but they do exist.
@Grant I knew about pangolins because , tragically, they are the most trafficked species. Just like the misguided people who use rhino horn in their folk medicine, they are poached because their scales are made of keratin.
@Josh I always work my way across starting at the top left corner, no matter how many or how few answers I put in. Even if I’m not sure, I take a stab, because I find just seeing the letters in the grid helps me find the other answers. After one pass, I start doing the down clues, and it’s at that point that I see some of my first across guesses were wrong, and I move on from there. This really helps with the late in the week puzzles, when it seems as if you don’t know anything!
@Jessica I’m not a new solver and I almost never notice the themes or the gimmicks. They only become known to me when I read the word play column. It doesn’t take away from my enjoyment of working on the puzzles and making my way through the more difficult ones during the week. It’s such a great exercise for your brain. There is a saying that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to master anything. I don’t think it takes anywhere near that amount of time with the puzzles. Part of it is getting in tune with the style of the New York Times puzzles. Even though there are many constructors with many different ways of making puzzles, there are some repetitions that often give me a hook into a puzzle. They’re like old friends, giving you a little boost now and then.
@JonathanT I tried to use booby in a scrabble game I was doing with my mother, and she absolutely refused to accept it. Bowing to her advanced age (90s at the time), I acquiesced.
I want to thank those who responded to my plea for help with the ridiculous “nickname “that comes up every time I open my puzzle page. I have learned that this relates to Apple, requiring a nickname, according to my phone’s settings page. Not only is it required, but it is only a name of their choosing. This is certainly AI gone mad. Or anyone who is in charge of Apple these days, if it is an actual person. A friend directed me to the New York Times app, on its own, and by entering the puzzle that way, I avoid the nickname.
This is a comment about today’s Wordle. Without spoiling anyone’s fun, there is an M word in this game that poses the question: Just how far afield is reasonable for this particular game? I object to this one even though I did get it, entirely by omission. As the saying goes, when you eliminate the impossible, you are left with the improbable.
Regarding 49D, an ascot is not a scarf. It is an elegant substitute for a tie, but it is definitely not a scarf. On the Strands front, I found today’s puzzle the most difficult ever. If this puzzle had an escalating series of difficulty such as the crossword, this would be a Friday for sure.
Is there a place to find an explanation for the words in the Strands puzzle? I ask this because today’s puzzle includes made up words that I have never seen before and I would like to know what they mean. I worked out the last word just by trying out every single combination of the five letters.
@Linda Jo Thanks very much. I still find it astonishing that I have never heard of them. I’m not a big make up buyer, but I am aware of product names. I looked them up online after I sent my note (bad me, should have done that first) and I see that their products seem to be of Korean origin. I’ve used Korean products and they’re excellent so I may just not have noticed the brand name.
Three quibbles: Seepy, mentioned by others and rejected by my AutoCorrect Kalea, also rejected, and intercepting with seepy made this a stopper for me Ocher being defined as a desert color. There is a wide range of tones within the ocher but any desert I have crossed, including hundreds of miles of the Sahara, were beige and nothing but.
Can you please restore the bar graphic that showed my current score, my average score, and my best score? I do not like the new set up.
This was one of those puzzles that made me wish I could see the neurons or whatever they are moving about in my brain. Yesterday, I could hardly crack this puzzle. I struggled and struggled, and then set it aside. One does have to sleep after all. Evidently sleep is what it needed, because today when I went back to it, it simply flowed. Things just made themselves evident, after a few erasures, if one can call it an erasure on an iPhone. Great, great fun. Very satisfactory.
Regarding today’s Strands,could someone please explain the theme? I did the puzzle without ever seeing how the answers fit the theme. This was the first one of this new puzzle category that I did not just sail through, picking out the answers one after the other. I would rank it as a Saturday puzzle on the crossword scale of difficulty.
There were two spanagrams today. I assume it was inadvertent.
What does the photograph of a wedgie. represent? It is certainly not a pump. That would be a shoe with a closed toe and a heel.
I’m definitely going to be an outlier here based on the comments I’ve read. I did not like this puzzle, even though I nearly had a personal best. I whizzed through it without having any idea where it was going. On the other hand, I would like to give a shout out for today’s Strands , which was fabulous. It took me quite a while to get the spanagram. I try to get that first before I put in any of the other answers. It’s a little personal challenge.
If only I had not misread a clue and turned “revered star” into “reversed star,” leading me to put in “rats” instead of “idol”! It would not have given me a personal best, but it would have given me a complete puzzle without having to ask what I had done wrong. Gotta wear those reading glasses.
@IL I agree entirely. My solving time was ridiculously faster than my usual for Thursday. I had more trouble with Strands than with this puzzle!
@Katie At the bottom of the page, you’ll find the records for your best time average time and slowest time. There’s a little graphic as well.
@Jhamje I put “booby “into a Scrabble game I was playing with my mother, and she refused to accept it, never having heard of either the red foot or the blue foot boobies. Considering her age at the time, somewhere in the 90s, I just gave in and moved on , but I knew in my heart of hearts, it was a real bird.
@kilaueabart Absolutely, the longest I ever spent on a Monday puzzle and still had to look something up. Some of it was my fault: I tried to squeeze prenup into a space that turned out to be “brief” because I spelled it as pre-up. I wrote noobs for newbs. But what finished me off was a “Sephora rival.” I have never heard of or seen the word Ulta anywhere. Is this regional?
@Bill I do believe Wisconsin was successful in banning the sale of yellow margarine in order to protect its butter production. Forcing the makers of margarine to turn out a white product was intended to make it look unappetizing.
@Eric Hoagland Seven minutes! It took me that long, only a couple of minutes shorter than it takes me to do a Monday puzzle.
Is there a Strands chat group? I finished today’s puzzle and still have no idea what it means or how the words hang together.
Rooibos! I knew this one right away, because I lived in South Africa for a year, but I still couldn’t quite bring myself to write in the answer until I had some of the crosses. I’m all for learning (or deducing) foreign words, but this one was way off the charts.
@CaptainQuahog Absolutely. It covers more territory. I’m one of those people who try to do the spanagram first, as an extra challenge. In this puzzle you would be confused if you got the “other” one first and it didn’t come up yellow.
This is off subject, because it is a Spelling Bee gripe. Two days ago, a word appeared on the word list that is a proper noun. I complained about this to the powers that be, and I got back a robotic answer that the rules indicated no proper nouns are allowed. Does this mean that — no spoiler alert needed here.— a brand-name, a well-known store, the name of a famous stained glass maker, is acceptable? If you’ve done the spelling bee from Wednesday, then you know which name I mean.
@Jill Thank you so much for the link. The irrationality of our weights and measure system never seemed so clear!
@John Carson I don’t seem to be able to paste my results in anymore, even though I am following the same instructions I was given the first time I asked about this. I got the spanagram first and that just unleashed everything else.
@April B. That story was the only reason I knew how to spell her name, not that it helped with this puzzle. With puzzles like this, I just go with the flow, putting in whatever I can, not worrying that Las Vegas doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the clue. I finished in my average time, but I can’t say I was happy.
@Steve L I did check a dictionary before I made my comment, wanting to be sure I wasn’t off the mark. Then you found other dictionaries that did call it a scarf. Potato potato!
This is a day late, but I had to post that I just received my first Queen bee rating from the spelling bee. I am so often just made by the odd words that turn up, often with prefixes or suffixes that I don’t consider to be real words, even if they are in the dictionary, but this was all on my own.
@Ettagale Sorry, there were several typos in that comment. Please excuse it and blame it on my excitement!
@Barry Ancona Now I’m puzzled because I don’t know what DOOK is. And yes, of course, you are right. I would not have known their genre. I thought of that just after I pushed the submit button.