Han Wudi

@AcidBurn the only thing that’s unfair to legal Americans is the fact that you would even deign to speak for the rest of us.

@Lyla I’m sorry to continue stoking a fire that most of us feel is completely out of place, but since others have provided the link to NYT’s coverage of the historic protests, I’ll just add that, if it seems to you as if said coverage was not prominent enough, consider that it was competing against news of a politically motivated assassination (and the ensuing, ongoing manhunt) in the United States, as well as what could be the beginning phases of *the* major war in the Middle East — the one we’ve been fearing for decades. So, no, it’s not like the NYT didn’t want you to know about the protests. Yesterday was just that crazy, eventful, and depressing a day in the annals.

@Barry Ancona I’m OK with SIDEEFFECTS myself; even if the letter X is indeed pronounced “eks” (unless you’re Aphrodite, as Sunday’s puzzle reminded us), “FX” is a well-established way to abbreviate “effects” (see: SFX, VFX). Between that and the confusion “EFFECS” would have created, I have to side with Tarun on this one. I was a bit more encumbered by FLIER, tbh. I’m very used to the “flyer” spelling — for those who fly (“frequent flyer” > “frequent flier”) but *especially* for leaflets. I’m glad I’m not the only one, as both Merriam-Webster and Wikipedia agree that the mainline spelling for the synonym of leaflets is “flyer.” That said, I’ll readily admit I’m a complete wafer ignoramus (never had a NILLA in my life), and most people probably had zero issue with that particular square. Fun puzzle! Great start to the week.

@BamBam No. A crossword appearance does not amount to an endorsement (who here is a fan of death by asp?) Moreover, if crosswords are to cater to everyone’s slightest sensitivities, they would have exactly two possible answers to choose from (if that). I’m as big an Amazon detractor as anyone, but this overzealous censorship is not constructive in the slightest. Purging words from our minds lessens us as critical thinkers.

@RP “Before I would haue granted to that Act. But thou preferr'st thy Life, before thine Honor. And seeing thou do'st, I here diuorce my selfe, Both from thy Table Henry, and thy Bed, Vntill that Act of Parliament be repeal'd, Whereby my Sonne is dis-inherited.” -Shakespeare (famously not American), early 1590s.

@Seb yeah. Great crossword, but I didn’t like this clue. The clue would normally point to the fact you should answer as if you were somewhere the other language is spoken (e.g., “Rice, in Cadíz” or “Key paella ingredient, to a Valencian”), if not do the code switching itself (“Ingrediente en paella”). To me, 5-letter “Spanish rice” could only be BOMBA (unless you’re being cruel and do SENIA or BAHIA). Even if the clue is relieved of its duty to be consistent with its analogues (and at least a little oblique), the lack of quotation marks is misleading, and in the wrong way. Spanish rice is rice from Spain; Spanish “rice” is arroz. That said, I overindulged a fit of pedantry (and I only take license because this is the Crossword comments section), so I’ll wash that out with my opinion of the rest of the puzzle. Outside the NE corner, it was a blast to solve. Maybe it’s the percussive orchestra of Ks, but there was a chaotic energy to it that made me feel like I was reading a Murakami novel. Who else could enlist MOONROCKS, Swedish currency, Kurosawa, KINKS, and KARATEKID all to get behind a Bruno Mars theme? Mr. Matz, obviously.

@Steven M. Confidence goes a long way in crossword solving. It doesn’t take being twice as smart to halve your average solve time when you just become more confident enough: confident that your wild guesses will be mostly helpful, and that you can walk them back if they’re wrong. I was lacking in confidence and broke my modest streak. The thorn in my side was the area you called out. Of course, as soon as I started checking my answers, I took a stab at guessing “ERDA,” and the thing mostly fell into place at that point. This just gives me more confidence that I can stick around and defend my streak next time it’s ambushed by Norse gods and girl scouts. Great puzzle. Love me a crossword with good tree trivia.

@Paul R I‘m not sure these are quite natick territory. ZARA is the biggest fast-fashion retailer in the world (bigger than H&M). ULTA is an NYT-crossword mainstay; people complain about it often — 'often' being the operative word. I‘ve you come to expect it every time there‘s a 4-letter thing about beauty/cosmetic stores. Much like you come to expect ENO any time Brian/electronic clues three squares. Or NENE at the slightest mention of Hawaii and birds in the same clue.

@Nathan I’m thinking of Brian ENO and how overlooked the poor thing must be feeling.

@SJS while I fully enjoyed this crossword (more than any in the past week, tbh) and that particular clue didn’t slow me down much, I completely agree with you. A clue should have a special bond with the answer it points to, no matter how oblique. The relationship between “Again?” and UGH is no more special than the relationship between anything that may cause mild-to-moderate displeasure and any number of paralinguistic expressions denoting disgust.

@Matt it’s not that Penn State is obscure; it’s that many people know it as Penn State and not PSU. In fact, their communications guidelines actively discourage the use of “PSU.”

@Dan not getting your point. Italics, circled letters, and “look here” are all very frequent elements on a Sunday grid.

@Bill in Yokohama that does seem to be the case more often than not. As to honor/honour, both spellings were used interchangeably before the 1700s, when the Brits decided to stick with honour. Shakespeare used both! (see the above quote, which he wrote in a fit of folksiness, I suppose)

@Justin my trouble zone was just below yours! (The grid’s Mid-Atlantic, if you will). I was insistent in taking “Forte” to mean strength/bailiwick and stubbornly kept trying to make the whole thing work around that. It also took me a while to realize the freight barge in question wasn’t “ship” but SCOW. Anyway, figuring out that tiny area added probably 5-7 extra minutes to my otherwise reasonable solve time. Looking back, I’m surprised the NE didn’t give me more trouble. SEEGER crossing LATEEN and SAGET was a lot to ask of us! Great, fun puzzle overall.

@M I mean this respectfully: if you’re looking for a game that’s light on trivia, I suggest sudoku instead of the Sunday crossword puzzle. Crosswords are *all* trivia. Unfortunately it’s impossible for a crossword maker to only use trivia that everyone will find accessible but challenging. I understand your frustration, and it is true that this one drew from very disparate sources of pop culture, but I don’t think it was unreasonably heavy on the Naticks (obscure-to-nearly-everyone proper names).

@Steven M. I did Sunday and this one back to back; totally agree this was refreshing after a tough weekend! My solve time was nowhere near as good as yours (and only slightly less than my Monday average), but it’s always great when Mondays are thoughtful/thematic without resorting to frustrating gimmickry.

@Allen the only way I could sympathize with the tone and severity of your comment is is “paralegals” didn’t sound like “pair o’legals” *at all*. I shouldn’t think of the latter when I heard the former unless so prompted. While they don’t sound *exactly* alike —and happily for this crossword— they do sound close enough to one another to be evocative without prompting. If you don’t hear it, then you’re going out of your way to find fault with things.

@Mr Dave which makes it a busy day for the “natick police” police, keeping us all safe by enforcing crossword satisfaction. I can make coffee to go with those donuts. It was a tough Sunday. People will groan. It happens.

@Barry Ancona it’s been pointed out by more than one person (unfamiliar with REEM, ROSAMUND, and PSU as an alternative name for Penn State), that Rosalind, Reel, and PSI have registered as perfectly reasonable guesses. In their defense, note that PSU is a much less common way of referring to Penn State (one, in fact, discouraged by the institution itself), and that many schools’ names end in “Institute.” I didn’t have trouble with this corner myself (luckily Rosamund jumped to mind much more readily than Rosalind), but crossing two rather obscure authors’ names so that more than one guess seems possible is the very definition of natick — I’m a bit baffled at the pushback against the complaints. One can regard this puzzle highly while accepting the fact that some proper-name crosses were intractable to more than a few people.

@Steve L the Ohtani analogy isn’t a home run, sorry to say… If there is a Major League Crossword out there, and crossword newbies are looking up the pros’ solve times, of course it’ll inspire them to hear that crossword-Ohtani can be devilishly fast. The Comments section is not that. On paper, everyone’s on equal footing. I know some people are regulars on here, but y’all don’t have a special badge or anything to tell newbies that you’re “a pro” and ought to be seen as a source of inspiration. To them, the 30-year-veteran is just another username — one who can apparently solve the puzzle 10x faster. Without context, the novice has no reason to assume the other person is no smarter than them and has just been playing for much longer. Without more context than a bunch of impressive times in the comments, the novice may be left assuming, “Maybe I’m just not smart enough to be hanging around these cats.” And, look, this is not to say, “Never post your time or you’ll hurt someone’s feelings.” No one’s trying to silence anyone else here. If someone’s happy with their time, by all means post it; but if your motivation isn’t to tell people how much better you are than them, then give some context or understand that some people may think you’re simply bragging for the sake of bragging.

@Barry Ancona good thing we didn’t call ham “pork loaf” or bacon “pork strips” then!

@Andrzej I was thinking the same — and I’ve spent most of my life in the States. Not once in my life have I heard the expression BONES UP ON, had never heard of JUG BANDS, and only knew of Lincoln’s headgear as a TOPHAT, sans STOVE. None of this is the constructor’s fault by any means, but curiously, almost every time there’s a high concentration of these rather endemic expressions, there’s also baseball trivia. Again, not a fault with the puzzle per se, but clearly you and I are not its intended audience. And I can forgive the NYT for indulging regional interests every now and then. I’m not the kind of person who LOSES IT when the timer threatens to meaningfully affect my average solve time, but between my knowledge gaps in Americana, my biblical ignorance, and a general disconnection with the theme, my solve was a MESS. No biggie — sometimes there’s a Friday or Saturday that fits too well with my hobbies and interests, to the point where I feel bad with people who don’t share them. It’s ok to be on the other side of the epistemic coin now and then.

@Ace oh, please. Don’t pretend you don’t know what she meant by “interesting” (insightful) or that one can reply to a comment without necessarily finding it insightful (like I to yours).

@Steven M. I think the definitions appear contradictory because people tend to read “moot” as qualifying the worthiness of the discussion, when the word simply refers to the multiplicity of viewpoints around a topic (whether or not it is worth discussing them). The first definition of moot seems to indicate something is worth discussing (it’s a moot point = it’s debatable) and definition 2 seems to indicate a debate is worthless (it’s a moot point = it makes no difference at this point). Definition 1 (the one we Americans are not used to) is the more traditional one; ‘moot’ evolved from words that referred to meetings or assemblies. Again, the whole point is that some matter remains unsettled. For some reason, we chose to give it the connotation that the debate goes on *after the relevance of the topic has passed* (which is not something carried from its etymology), but the core point, the commonality with the first definition, is that multiple viewpoints remain in contention.

@Nick agreed. I would normally err on the side of taking these terms hyper-literally — i.e., Lords are indeed members of parliament; and U.S. senators, as people who are part of Congress, are congresspeople. And it bothers me that this isn’t common usage, but the fact is that it isn’t. No one refers to Senators as congressmen, and Lords are very purposely referred to as *Lords* of Parliament to distinguish them from mere *Members.* As I said, though, it’s established usage, but it’s ugly. The fact that House representatives go by “congressperson” but senators don’t is why some people think that a bill “passed by Congress” may still need the Senate’s approval, as if they were completely separate bodies. The general public’s handle on civic matters is tenuous enough as is, and imprecise nomenclature makes it worse. But that’s just the way things are. Groaning that Lords are technically members of the institution called Parliament, or that Senators are people who belong to Congress, is as futile as insisting that Quebecois are technically “Latin Americans” (a term coined by the French to contrast the broader Romance-speaking New World with the Anglo-Saxon colonies).

@a.t. I meant to say (if the theme really didn’t work at all), I shouldn’t readily think of the former (paralegals) if I heard the latter (pair o’legals). Which obviously isn’t so; it really would take an aggressive lack of imagination for me to think this theme “unworkable.”

@Kyle Some folks on here, especially those who are *really* good at crosswords, have a difficult time accepting that a clue they themselves understood may still be unintuitive to most other people, much less that this might be because the clue just isn’t good. CDs and vinyl records have their flatness and circular shape in common. That’s it. That doesn’t mean that a comparison that’s valid for one (like with a platter) is valid for the other one. The smaller size (and proportionately much bigger hole in the middle) make the comparison quite a stretch for a CD.

@Darren leaving aside the question of whether it’s reasonable to expect oblique clues / “stretchy” synonyms on a Friday/Saturday puzzle (and I think the answer is yes): Using “diverts” as in “AMUSES” is absolutely, 100% NOT a stretch. In the most literal sense, “divert” means to change the course/bearing/orientation of something; in this case, someone’s attention (away from serious thought and toward entertainment). To “amuse,” in a similarly literal sense, means to stupefy or to cause someone to be lost in thought. Again, the implication here is the person being amused is being distracted from utilitarian trains of thought. Both words have been used to denote entertainment since at least the mid-1600s; “amuse” does not have the advantage here. Note that even “entertain,” in the strict literal sense, simply means to keep/hold together. Yet again, the implication that you’re holding someone’s attention in a mirthful or lighthearted spirit is attested since the mid-1600s.

@Jordan the Titanic was hardly a “global” event, and Greta Garbo was named the fifth greatest actress of the century by the AFI. The only goalpost here is the word “obscure.” Establishing that the passage of time alone does not make something “obscure” was a very relevant point to this conversation. There is no widely accepted definition of the word “obscure” under which one of the most renowned Hollywood stars of all time would fall, and not enough decades have passed since her heyday to change this.

@M. Great clarification, but —small note— but you mean the highest *volcano* in Europe. The highest mountain in mainland Europe (or any Europe) is Mount Elbrus, which has a ~6,400 ft advantage over Teide.

@JD same here, friend. The rest of the puzzle was wonderfully well-oiled, but those two proper (and, frankly, somewhat esoteric) names in parallel made the SW corner an overall disruption to the flow and overall quality of the crossword. Especially because “year” in Spain is *not* ANO; it’s “año.” We all know what ANO is, and it‘s definitely not a span of time.

@Francis (and Steve) sigh. Guys, it’s ok to admit an answer was clumsy (or, yes!, objectionable). That does not amount to conceding that the overall puzzle was bad. Heck, it does not even amount to an endorsement of the complainer’s negativity! Yes, I also don’t like it when people post complaints that are not counterbalanced by a compliment (or even so much as an acknowledgment of the constructor’s effort) when the crossword was good. And I like that the community will jump to keep the complainer honest. But that does not mean that *no complaint is ever valid*. Darren happens to be right. It doesn’t matter that such a thing as “CBS Radio” existed or that not every crossword answer can be neatly put in sentence form. The indisputable fact is that, at no point during Colbert’s employment at CBS has the channel employed the label “CBS TV” at all. And these are companies that actually do spend millions coming up with names and trademarking them. Does it mean the term (made up as it is) is flat-out unacceptable? No, but it’s *certainly* quite open to dispute. If CBSTV is unobjectionable, then it’s unreasonable to complain if the answer to “peddler of Word” is MICROSOFTAPPS, or if “Japanese multimedia giant” clues SONYCOMPANY. Microsoft peddles apps, Sony is a company, and CBS is a TV station, but that doesn’t mean it’s unobjectionable for constructors to freely make up terms without letting us know *in the clue* that they’re asking for more than the known name.

@SP agreed. Given the inevitability of some crossword glue like OBOE, ENO, AVA, ANI, ORA, SSN, ETE, ETC., it’s nice when the constructor goes out of their way to teach us a new fact about the old answer while keeping it tractable. Anyone who needs to use those answers but doesn’t give us “Wind instrument in orchestra” “Electronic music pioneer Brian” “Singer DiFranco” “Director Duvernay” “Rita from entertainment” “Gov’t ID” “One of the four seasons, in French” “List ender” Is at least making an effort to leave their personal imprint on the entire grid and not just the long/theme answers.

@Andrzej I’d first guessed OCCITANIA but was afraid it could also be LANGUEDOC, until I got LEIGH Bardugo, who was of no help making me realize I *still* had the wrong French region (until NOAM set me straight). :) Like Francis, I’d never heard ALOP, either; otherwise, I found this puzzle nice and tameable for a Saturday (compared to the absolute bear of a Friday this week). JACKDIDDLYSQUAT didn’t bother me much; redundancy-wise, “a tad bit” (or even “a little bit”) aren’t much better!