Laura Whitaker
Washington DC
So happy to have a challenging puzzle. I can’t remember the last time I thought “oh wow I’m going to need to Google something to fix this, I’ve got NOTHING for two quadrants!” But confidence that the editors and constructors wouldn’t do us dirty kept me at it, and it was completed lookup-free though my coffee was cold by then. THANK YOU. THANK YOU. Please more like this on Fridays and Saturdays.
@Cathall “Get the joke, or don’t get the joke. There is no try.” - Gandalf
@Mean Old Lady next time I drive across the Potomac on the highway I pledge that I SHALL ALLOW A MOTORIST TO ENTER MY LANE AND USE THE PHRASE “VERGE IN, YEAH” as I tootle through the Commonwealth. That will manifest an actual usage and I hope will make you smile :-)
@Ken Burk I can’t parse the boot/accessory divide, but surely a [cowgirl’s boot] can withstand your critique? The cowgirl can possess a boot (cowboy boot or other) and not find herself totally erased, no?
@Lewis fun! Here are a few with my notes: HARPYEAGLE (I am a birder and would love to travel to Central or South America and see one of these) CANARYEGG (must be tiny!) ROTARYENGINE (I have a wisp of a Monty Python line teasing my memory about this one) EASYELEGANCE (think Lauren Bacall or Gwyneth Paltrow) EMERGENCYEXIT (what I’m using now to keep this activity from consuming my entire morning)
Many condolences, Deb, on the passing of your father. Your beautifully-written tribute, and the many lovely notes in this feed from others who have lost parents (esp those parents who onboarded us to crosswords!) is bringing tears to my eyes too. I count myself among those whose dad did the crossword and got me hooked too, with joy at the wordplay, the infinite possibilities of language and nuance, and the thrill of the solve. I miss him … an oddity is that when I do the rare pen-to-ink xword (say, in an in-flight magazine), my fill is structured capital letters, a little cramped and not really like I usually write — but an awful lot like dad’s penmanship.
@Barry Ancona I’ll see you in Mauna Kea/Loa!
@Rachel the word [Lines] in the clue indicates its plural … ergo AXES :-)
@Janine many condolences on your loss. It sounds like your mother’s legacy will truly live on as you stay mentally engaged via puzzles at the same time you mourn. Hang in there 💚
@Esmerelda your explanation is very understandable but the tragedy is that “hone in” has incorrectly become the broadly used expression when it should be HOME IN. The word “hone” is kinda related (you’re sharpening something literally or figuratively, so it’s getting closer to what is ideal and what you want) but the correct “home in” refers to getting closer to home (and therefore your target) as exemplified by a “homing pigeon” or “homing beacon”. The (mis)use of “hone in” has gotten so widespread that it even infected your logic on that clue :-( Anyway, now you know! 💫
@BonnieS I would have loved the animated army too but the best I can offer is 🐜🐜🐜🐜🐜🐜🐜🐜🐜🐜
An excellent Tuesday puzzle constructed by a college classmate! Encountered in the wild! And a reminder to make my next platelet donation appointment (O poditive if you’re wondering)! What a morning.
@Nancy enjoyed reading your journey with respect to 43A … though as I’m on my own journey to read through a multi-book (55!) backlog this year, I think that TEXTBOG might actually be a handy term for me!
@B fwiw I really enjoy using “posts up” — it carries more agency and intentionality to say “I’ll post up at the Starbucks while you wrap up your work then we can head out” versus “I’ll hang out at SBUX” … the latter sounds like you are loitering idly, whereas the former suggests that you’ve established a mini-residency and may even have pulled out a laptop charger to really get in gear. So I hope you’ll reconsider the BAD RAP you’ve given that term 😎
@Robert Schwartz your historical context is useful … but using “stereotype” in the clue allows us to quickly go to the most cartoonish portrayals which must (by pirate law!) involve the phrase “avast ye scurvy dogs” QED or walk the plank 🏴☠️
@scott the usual phrase would be “Where to begin?” … so the altered version “Square to to begin” helps us to map the letters “SQU” to phrases that typically start with a W (or (WH)
@Judith Nelson … but (if I may Commentersplain) OLIO is *not* what your Dad would have been complaining about with regard to food rationing etc,; rather, that would have been OLEO!
@John Jardin is also the Spanish word for garden, so you’re just off by one Romance language there 💐
@Dakota the correct entry at 107D is ESPY which means … well, to have eyes on. It’s a version of “spy” in the sense of “I spy with my little eye ____”
This felt hard but somehow I vibed with it and came in under 10min. I immediately intuited “how to grin” and was saying (unironically) OH JOY not too long after. Only the German philosopher was unknown, but that was no barrier as he was run down by a fuel-efficient car in the crossing!
Knowing who mayors are in other cities always seems like a stretch, but I respect it because mayors have really hard jobs and should have high-ish profiles. This goes double for us in DC where we don’t elect anyone more “senior”! Mr ADRIAN Fenty was an energetic and innovative mayor … which meant that invariably he drew the enmity of established DC political machines and got turfed out after a single term. Glad he made an appearance in the clues!
An entry in this puzzle made me a little sad as it’s a byproduct of, essentially, animal cruelty. I hope that our society eventually makes it to the point where that entry can be clued to reflect the inhumanity that goes into producing this (utterly unnecessary) “delicacy.” Relatedly, OCTOPI are intelligent and emotional, and I never knew they had three hearts?!? All the more reason to leave them in puzzles and off plates. A great puzzle today - fast but clever.
@Seymour B Moore That is to say, you really got it in GEAR?
@John Carson I enjoyed the fact that all of the answers work as everyday lower-case words which also happen to fit the theme 🪨
Funny how sometimes a puzzle that stymies others can land right in your sweet spot. Every pop culture reference was a gimme (except for Naomi which I got on crosses). I just this weekend happened to go down a Diana Rigg internet rabbit-hole due to her appearance on S1 of All Creatures Great and Small, which led to her Wikipedia page reminding me that she was in GoT and then I went to Amazon prime and got through about 25 minutes of her first episode of The Avengers. I can confidently state that whatever the vibe was for that era of TV, it doesn’t work anymore, yeesh!!
@Rob I think an argument can be made that “Three-in-one” *IS* a number followed by a hyphen … I mean “three” is a number, ne c’est pas?
@The X-Phile but **in the clue** it literally says “(twice!)” To me this makes it clear that it’s to be treated differently, ie applying the trick 2x
@Helen Wright may your dental recovery and future procedures be EASEd by more fun puzzles from the other side of the SEA. (And pics of groundhogs ofc)
Loved having to shove and pick and puzzle my way through this one, hooray to the crossword creators! And here in DC, where we do not have a VOTE in Congress, last weekend I saw a yellow summer tanager, just not her RED mate 💛❤️
Two things I noted: Fixating on the upcoming election, I felt that the answers APPRENTICE and STAY IN LINE were dog-whistling to potential voter/solvers … And separately, there are some anagram-adjacent connections between the constructor’s name (Malaika Hana) and HANA Mandlikova which just struck me as fun. A nice Friday!
@Ldc puzzles can engage multiple parts of our brains, tiger!
@Avatar while I kind of agree with this take, I’ve always used a “rule” that when limited to 3 letters, AAH is more “eek!” while AHH is more “niiice…” 😘
@Tyler S 8-yo me loved it! Somehow on a road trip my younger brother and I, typically deprived of all the pleasures of unhealthy youth (sugared cereal, soda pop, fast food) inveigled our way to buying two cans of Crush: one grape, one orange. They came chunking down the chute of the vending machine, cold and then sweating in the summer heat of wherever we were driving (maybe Nevada? Utah? Anyway!) We proceeded to drink them and then rode *the wildest sugar high*, shriek-laughing at everything and bouncing around the back seat for about 100 miles. My parents may have regretted giving us those quarters and carte blanche, but my brother and I still remember that episode gleefully 🤪
@JohnWM almost stood up and applauded in my dining room 👏👏
@Katie POT LIQUOR?
@Grant Monitor Lizards and their friends Komodo Dragons are not to be messed with. Remember when Phil Bronfman got bitten by the latter at the SF Zoo? Classic! I was at the KD enclosure at the National Zoo years ago and a little kid was raptly watching one slowly walk around and he finally asked his mom, cautiously, “does it … breathe fire?” She replied “no” but I caught his eye and silently nodded with a wink. His eyes went so wide. 👀
@Ioana come on, don’t you remember the wacky scene with Frances McDormand in headscarf evading the Republican Guard?
@Michelle your cats all have handy Xwordese names! 😻
@Nancy agree it’s an engaging puzzle! INERT is a reference to certain elements (eg Argon) that are chemically unlikely to create bonds with other atoms, aka “unlikely to join”
@Steve L I didn’t fall for the Saab trap because I was aware, as you’ve described, that it’s a defunct brand. Ah, but I loved my Saab, while it lasted :’-( As for “informal” car references, I think it’s just because it’s a shortening of the full name Alfa Romeo. Like calling a Mercedes “a Benz”.
@yankeefan 100% your interpretation is correct. One doesn’t spend the night at a PITSTOP … maybe a truck stop?
@Helen Wright sorry about your tumble! You may be comforted to know that the dish is correctly spelled FLAUTAS (aka “flutes”) and as such should not evoke flatulence and thus ruin your appetite 💨
@Mike he was born in Virginia which was decidedly a colony at the time of his birth!
@Chris surely some long explainer by ESPN can provide details, but my understanding is that the outsized $$$ available to college (“amateur”) teams is super-concentrated in a few conferences, and the biggest of all is the Big 10 (which has like 15 schools in it … ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ). So some of the heaviest hitters from the erstwhile Pac 12 chased that payday to the “Big 10” and there weren’t enough Pacific Coast teams left for a viable league, and hence Stanford and Cal ended up in a league headlined by UVA and Clemson and Duke.
@Jeff Z Agree. Runts are *not* for kids, Runts are to be held by the (adult) purchaser and consumed until the splitting sugar headache reminds you why you don’t eat them, then the remaining Runts end up at the bottom of your backpack. Repeat every 2-3 years to reinforce the learning.
@Mean Old Lady eh, there are mentions in wild (eg Ariana Grande’s signature high pony)
@Iona yes! Reminded me of the “payoff” (defined generously) to many of my dad’s excruciating shaggy dog jokes. 🫠
@Nick the multiplication doesn’t turn corners … it just involves the 2 digits that are part of the clue (either across or down) which multiply to produce the # indicated by the clue (eg 3x4=23 for 37A).
@Henry Su nothing against Esai, but I would commend to your attention – even if you are not typically a comics movie fan – – the recent (2018, 2023) Spider-Man animated movies featuring Miles MORALES. They are charming and dazzling! They also showcase excellent voice acting by Mahershala ALI, another frequent X-word answer 👍
@RozzieGrandma I rely on a blend of flavor profile and container size! But I don’t read too much into it … sometimes a cinnamon stick is just a cinnamon stick