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This puzzle set a personal record for the most time spent after finishing the puzzle staring at it trying to figure out what the theme was.
It's so strange to see FEDERAL GRANTS clued as "funding sources for many labs" this week, as opposed to last week. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) is the biggest funder of medical research in the world, and it is thanks to their support that many of the largest medical breakthroughs in the past several decades in cancer treatment, infectious disease, and other areas have happened. NIH grant funding is crucial. Right now, ALL evaluation for ALL new NIH grants has stopped. The sessions to discuss which grants should be funded have been canceled indefinitely and are not being re-scheduled. Job offers at NIH itself have been rescinded. Even if things get up and running again once a new Health and Human Services Secretary is named, some of this halting may take a long time to recover from, if at all. And if Kennedy gets confirmed as the new HHS Secretary, it's not clear whether there will be ANY grant funding moving forward at all in crucial areas where medical advances have to be made. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) are also being hampered. As of this week, they are not reporting the number of flu cases, for example, so nobody knows whether the national rates are going up or down. This is a very scary time for all of us.
The intersection of MENOMOSSO IGOTTAJET (which I had as IGOTToJET) HAJIS STAVE and TARO was a few too many Naticks for me.
Speaking as a dermatologist, ECZEMA and atopic dermatitis are not synonymous! Atopic dermatitis is a type of eczema, but it's not the only type. This is like cluing REPTILES as "animals formally known as snakes." I'm also not crazy about cluing ETHER as a "number." I guess it depends on what your definition of a numbing agent, but most people would use that term to mean a local anesthetic like lidocaine, which makes your surgical site numb but you're still awake. ETHER knocks you out and makes you unconscious. I guess an unconscious person is numb, but that's an atypical way of thinking about that term IMO.
Lots to love here! -10 theme answers (5 are across and 5 that are down) -all of the theme answers are still words with or without the x/o -the symmetry of taking away the X yet adding the O Great work!
I've never gotten ONE on Wordle, but it's ironic that you get labeled with "Genius" if you get the Wordle answer right with your first guess. In the balance between luck and skill in solving Wordle, getting it right on the first guess is 100% luck and 0% being a genius.
Nothing wrong with a hard puzzle, but this one was way, way beyond a typical Saturday NYT puzzle. I spent over 2 and a half times as long as my average. This is too much for me. This passed "This is fun" many, many minutes ago, and I ended up well into "This is annoying" territory. Joel, please stop making the Saturday puzzles so hard. Some may welcome this change, but I think the comments are showing that things have gone too far in the hard direction.
The extra layer of having the hidden letters spell out PASSAGES was a perfect capper to a fun puzzle. A "chef's kiss" for Dan Caprera!
Great puzzle, but with five long Latin phrases and other answers like OLLAS , I'm not sure I understand how this ended up on a Monday.
It took me a while to figure out that the "beans and salsa" associated with a MARACA had nothing to do with eating food. The beans are the things inside the MARACA that rattle, and salsa is the style of dance music (for which, apparently, there are specific "salsa MARACAS." Very clever clue!
Much more like a Saturday than a Friday IMO. Too many proper nouns all bunched together at the bottom. DAN, ARTUR, CERES, and RUDI are 4 of 6 consecutive down answers in that area, and they are all essentially unguessable. I had no clue about the MANGA factlet, so 5 of the 6 consecutive answers were blanks for me, and the Across answers in that area could have been many things. (eg, "Kitchen gizmo"? Really? Something that vague is a Saturday clue, not a Friday one IMO.). I personally found the bottom part of the puzzle very frustrating.
I thought this was very silly in the best possible way! I loved it!
The best OREO clue in a very long time!
I have been a board-certified dermatologist for over 25 years. Perhaps "DERMA" is common in other countries, but I have never, ever seen or heard the dermis being called, "DERMA." The word, "DERMA," obviously exists but from poking around the internet, it looks like its heyday was back in the 1800s. I think the puzzle would have been better off cluing this answer differently (or scrapping it altogether).
"It’s got “I should know this” trivia." Not in my book. OOHAAHPOINT, EMILE and SLOANE, etc are not "I should know this" trivia. There are a lot of proper nouns in this puzzle.
I can not tell you how much I appreciate that the theme answers still make legitimate words by themselves (TAKEI, TONYA, etc)! It's one of my pet peeves when the answers are things like FONEINGROCKZALL (which is an actual NYT crossword theme answer from 2020).
Oof, that was hard. But very satisfying to complete!
A fair amount of unguessable proper nouns here, like AUDRE LORD, MES as clued, Sony's PSP, MONTERO, along with relatively obscure words like AKEE. I beat my Friday average, but I can see how some might really struggle.
@Jamie If you are, like me, of that age where you played Minesweeper incessantly at one point in life but haven't thought about it for at least 15 years, this puzzle was incredible. When I first saw the board with the 1's and 2's listed, I didn't make the connection to Minesweeper, but once I did and understood I had to enter MINE in the right places, all these memories that I didn't really know that I had of late nights playing this game came rushing into my head. The closest comparison I've had to a similar sensation came from a production of Thornton Wilder's play Our Town in a small theater, directed by the great David Cromer. At one point, one of the characters asks to go back to her childhood, and she gets transported back to the kitchen of her childhood home, where her mother is frying bacon. In this production, the actress playing her mother is frying actual bacon, and you hear the grease spitting and you can smell the aroma of bacon cooking as it fills up the room. As an adult, I never cook slabs of bacon, but my mom did for weekend breakfasts when I was little, and the smell and sound of bacon cooking opened up an association and a memory that I didn't know I had. So, for me, this is the puzzle of the year. Especially because Aidan is a college student, who presumably isn't of that age where Minesweeper has a hazy nostalgia. Aidan, I can't wait to see what you come up with next.
I found this to be a bit tougher than some Robyn Weintraub Fridays, but as I was doing the puzzle, I was impressed by how her cluing lets you zero in on the right answer extremely quickly, even for longer and unhackneyed entries like GHOST STORIES and ALL STAR CAST for me. Getting to those answers in less adept hands might have been a struggle, but not with Robyn as the constructor. What others call "too easy," I would describe as a tribute to Robyn's skill.
A perfect Tuesday puzzle. Very clear theme but not one that's overdone, with clues at the Tuesday level. Great job, Peter Gorman!
Got hung up by having SEXTET instead of SESTET and not having heard of LAY as a type of ballad. So I couldn't get to EYES as the last part of HEARTEYES.
I had never heard of "wash on Monday" until today, although apparently it's a thing going back at least until the 1800s. That's my "Today I Learned" for today's crossword!
I liked the theme, which I thought was very cute and clever. I didn't like cluing MAIN as the ocean, which I never heard of before and doesn't seem like a Tuesday clue, and was right next to APPA, which I never heard of before either.
Deb, thank you for mentioning Daniel Naroditsky's passing. I really enjoyed his chess columns from 2022, although I am guessing they didn't have enough clicks to become a long-term addition to the puzzle family. But they were very clever and very well-written. Here's the first one, with links to the others: <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/13/crosswords/chess/chess-replay-you-versus-frumkin.html" target="_blank">https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/13/crosswords/chess/chess-replay-you-versus-frumkin.html</a> and here's a nice story about him: <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/12/crosswords/chess-columnist-naroditsky.html" target="_blank">https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/12/crosswords/chess-columnist-naroditsky.html</a>
Sam Corbin's comment about "NOODGE (pronounced like "book")" was very confusing to me. She means just the vowel sound, correct? For some reason, I just was not on the constructor's wavelength at all. It didn't help that GREEN and GO both start with G, with GO only adding one more letter to that G. Didn't love STETTED or GET UP STEAM or URANO or XINGOUT or DATS or that the clue for TRAFFIC SIGNAL explicitly says, "stop and go"; why give it all away like that? Didn't like that the duplication of UP in ATEITUP and WOKENUP were only four down clues apart. NOEND and its clue, "unceasingly," seem like they don't completely match in terms of parts of speech. This was my longest Thursday time in quite a while.
Is EDUMACATE a well-known word? This is the first time I can think of where I've never heard of a theme answer before.
I enjoyed this puzzle, but Deb's comments make it sound like she thought that this was easier than most Fridays, and I did not find that to be the case.
When I started the puzzle, I thought the theme answers were puns made up by the constructor on a nautical theme. I went through the puzzle, thinking, "Boy, these aren't funny at all." Eventually, the light bulb went on. A great puzzle that was also one where I learned a lot! Who could ask for more?
Great puzzle! I wonder if this was easier to solve on paper. It was hard to keep track of the dark squares in my head.
This was a very fine puzzle, but it was a tough one for me. Much more like a Saturday than a Friday in terms of trickiness. I spent way too long trying to figure out what PARKAS had to do with "things that might be down for a ski trip," until the lightbulb went off. That was an excellent clue. I was also unfamiliar with a lot more things than on a typical Friday for me. I've never heard of KINPIRA, ESSENE, or Alan PATON, nor had I heard of Hassock or chalcocyanite in the clues. None of this is a criticism of the puzzle, but it makes me nervous for what Saturday will bring!
Caitlin, thank you for the link about the last edition of the Momma comic strip. I didn't know that story, and I found it very moving.
I liked the puzzle, but I'm still trying to figure out: - how the EIFFEL TOWER is rod-shaped - whether PLASM is a suffix (Proto- is definitely a prefix; is anything after a prefix automatically a suffix?) - whether the potential confusion that PARTY SUB could mean party (food) substitute (ie, soup or sandwich) was intentional or not
@Dan Your comment as of right now is the most highly recommended of all the comments, so a lot of people agree with you. It's striking that the replies are mostly of the "don't be so sensitive" vein, though. I personally don't feel that posting of times in the 5-minute range on a Friday is encouraging. I have been doing the puzzles for many years. I'm not a novice. But I will never do the puzzle in 5 minutes. Steve L's comment that everyone can solve a puzzle in 5-6 minutes if they try hard enough is not very helpful. I guess he thinks I am just stupid. Maybe my education is not enough, maybe my intelligence is not enough, maybe I'm just not enough. I will never be able to do that. I like to think we have a little community here. Surely, the people who are posting 5-minute times know that they are significantly better than most solvers. It's as if we were in the financial section and everyone started giving specific numbers about how much money they made in the stock market this year. Of course, we're allowed to do so, it's a free country. But I'm not sure that announcing that you made more money than most other people is helping to create a community.
@Jake G I think Mike does it because people like it. He gets a lot of upvotes. I don't think it's more complicated than that.
I really, really struggled with the SW quadrant. I’ve never heard of ALOO GOBI, PANDA CAM, or RENT ROLL, which were back-to-back-to-back.
Clever puzzle, but I didn't really love that there was a single rebus square that was symmetrically placed along the "ring" arc. The "ring" squares all have a circle in them, which I assume represents the ring itself. Maybe the "bottle" square could have been designated by something other than a circle, or maybe it could have been two vertical squares, or something.
It's been great to start out the week with three very nice Monday puzzles.
Isaac, I don't think the Monday puzzles are a challenge for constructors because they have a hard time lowering themselves to earth, so to speak. I think it's more that they can't get out of a tricky place in the grid by having an obscure-ish answer, and also that it's hard to come up with straightforward clues on answers that come up over and over again in crosswords that don't seem trite.
I had ILLBEDAMNED rather than ILLBEDARNED, then I spent way too much time trying to figure out what a CMEME was.
I thought this was harder than most Wednesdays, with answers like VANCE and MASSE. A fun, apt puzzle, nevertheless! I think RESPECT is a bit different than FONDNESS/PASSION/LOVE/ROMANCE but YMMV.
Please stop with all the Pips references!
Is NANCY DREW a "cover girl" because she's on book covers, or is there some other use of "cover" that I'm not thinking of? If it's book covers, I would have preferred a different theme clue/answer pair, because "cover girl" is referring to magazine covers, and book covers are not that much different. Other pairs like ELLE WOODS and "sister-in-law" use different meanings in the clue and the answer. Although I think the clue should have been "sister in law," without the hyphens.
@Sam Lyons Very straightforward (TOMORROW is the only answer for the last theme row, and that kind of gives the theme away), but that's okay. It's never the constructor's fault if the puzzle's on the wrong day. I really liked the puzzle.
I thought "Events at which to release one's inner geek" would be CROSSWORD PUZZLE TOURNAMENTS!
If you have to clue something as "Big name in archery," that's a signal that maybe you need to re-work that part of the puzzle.