Dan
Orange County, NY
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Orange County, NY
Fun puzzle but LINE should have been accepted IMO
Please consider never allowing ROWR in crossword ever again. Thanks.
The test solvers were wrong, this should have stayed a Wednesday. The theme clues were relatively easy but the fill was too broad a culture/generational mix for a Tuesday, IMO. In addition to the quasi-error everyone else is pointing out, having Dua LIPA and HEYYA in the same puzzle as NINA Simone and Frank ZAPPA is challenging. YEETS and TROLL ARMY with PATSY and SCARAB? Crossing one of Shakespeare's lesser known works with an obscure Polish athlete from the 1960s? This puzzle was all over the place. Not a bad thing, or even a hard puzzle, but not a Tuesday.
Yet another example of a theme so obscure and artsy that it's basically useless to the vast majority of solvers. If it's way easier to just complete the puzzle without trying to suss out the theme, it's not a good theme, IMO.
What a miserable slog. Calling an ice rink an "ICEARENA" should be a CLASSA felony.
I don't think it was a wavelength thing, Deb. Even for a Friday, this puzzle had a significant amount of what I call "adversarial clues." It was fun until it wasn't.
@jo must be exhausting to be this sensitive and prone to offense.
Great puzzle, Kevin! And I can't wait to see what your wife came up with tomorrow!
Another Thursday, another overwrought theme puzzle. Even the fill was bad. STETTED, NOODGE, COSEC, URANO. YIKES
Loved it, and at under 23 minutes this was one of my fastest Thursday solves ever. More from Kareem please!
One of those puzzles where the theme is so obscure that it's much easier to just finish the puzzle than it is to figure out what the constructor intended.
The editors are slipping. 9D and 2D were extremely arcane. No fewer than 16 proper nouns, plus at least five entries in different languages. Nothing in the 67A clue indicated it was an acronym. 41D doesn't work as a clue without a period/dot being included in it (when's the last time you went to a website that didn't include a dot or period before the top level domain?). It wasn't even particularly hard, there were just many conventions that were completely ignored. Just a hot mess of a puzzle.
Extremely tedious. I'd rather have a rebus puzzle than whatever this monstrosity is.
@jennie they're promoting Pips, which is their newest game and domino-based.
Extremely difficult south central/east with bad clueing. A PARER is not electronic and should therefore not be referred to as a "gizmo." That section ruined what was otherwise a fun puzzle. And the symmetrical grid layout had nothing to do with the puzzle...
@TLC ahh so now it's off limits to make puns using another language in a crossword. Lemme just jot that down in my ever expanding PC guidebook.. the expense to that language! Think about the expense!
"ETAIL" is so bad. Please retire it.
Major issue here with 33D and I expect a full correction tomorrow. "Any of Scar's underlings in The Lion King" solves to HYENA. While Zazu initially served Mufasa and remained loyal to him, he was taken prisoner by Scar and made to do Scar's bidding. I would therefore argue that Zazu was Scar's underling. Zazu was an African red-billed hornbill. I'm shocked and appalled by this error, frankly.
This was a lot of fun, but also without a doubt the horniest crossword I've ever played..
15A "'To' words" us such a thoroughly bad clue in an already tricky area of the grid. Didn't mind the theme as much as some others but 27A was absolutely a stretch.
Fun and clever, much enjoyed after tackling some really crunchy Saturday's earlier this month!
Thanks for sharing Deb, he sounds like a 41D!
Great puzzle, thank you!!
This is a clever but half-baked theme that needed some more polish before being published.
I think James Watt would have taken exception to being called "British," as would most people from Scotland.
30D clue was horrendous lol
@Nancy the dots are "stays" as in "STAYEDUPWITHABOOK." A stay is a kind of fastener that holds fabric, leather or other materials together. Whoops ^ just realized this is actually wrong.. I guess the border is curled as in CURLEDUPWITHABOOK. Bit of a stretch IMO.
@Steve L Steve L, the defender of ETAIL. Heroic.
One thing I appreciated about Deb is that she never - or rarely - put the word "rebus" in a puzzle column where the puzzle in question did not contain a rebus. If I'm stuck on a puzzle I often search for the word in the accompanying column to determine if there is a rebus. Easy way to get that information without getting any other hints. Hopefully her colleagues follow suit.
@Nancy the dots are "stays" as in "STAYEDUPWITHABOOK." A stay is a kind of fastener that holds fabric, leather or other materials together.
@Francis perhaps it’s a favorite target because in its most extreme or comical iterations, such as in OP’s comment, PC is deserving of the ridicule it attracts. Paul also wrote several epistles rebuking the first century church for wide variety of transgressions. Do you think they were offended by these missives? Some were, probably. It didn’t stop him from saying what needed to be said. I’m not anti-PC. I’m anti- people policing or trying to control other’s speech, and sometimes I feel it’s necessary to call out extreme examples of PC. It’s also curious to me that your ending sentence can and does apply to people who overly apply PC - they’re trying to silence those they don’t agree with. Lastly, while there may no legal consequences for not being PC (yet - you should look into new free speech laws in Canada and the UK), there very much are social consequences that can be every bit as damaging as legal ones. OP’s comment was ridiculous and I called it out as such.
Can you tell your Connections colleague Wyna that "Louse Up" is not a thing.
Finished it in a personal record time (12:10) but had to read Wordplay to get the trick.
The comments section for Saturday's puzzle is closed but can I just say it was one of the worst puzzle experiences I've ever had... So many proper nouns and obscure trivia. I'm still at a loss for how 33A "Solid red ball" equals THREE. There was an abnormal amount of open-ended quote and "say" or "maybe" clues where you have to be on the constructor's exact wavelength to know what he's getting at. Overall the cluing just felt more mean-spirited than clever, like the constructors and editors wanted people to be frustrated. I'm all for crunchy, hard fill, especially in a themeless, but that was an absolute slog. 9D Salty drink = SEA? I understand bodies of water are sometimes called "the drink," but the phrase doesn't work without the word "the." 21D They cover top stories = INSULATIONS? Every story in a building is insulated. INSULATIONS isn't even a word. I've largely stopped commenting with criticisms but for my own sanity I had to register some protest here, that was atrocious.
At a loss for 72A. Also, it's a Tuesday, why they trying to be weird with it?
This theme was tortured and overwrought, even for a Thursday. I think constructors sometimes go so far down their own rabbit holes that the ridiculous seems reasonable.
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