kieran

Argh! After fixing two typos, could NOT figure out why no music after such a satisfying, challenging puzzle. Resorted to “check all” and found I had BAKEPAN instead of CAKEPAN (possibly because my first try at that space was BAKERY before realizing that was not enough letters. But the BAKE stayed even though BAB made no sense at 7A — I guess I thought it was some new slang I didn’t know. It was a BLAST anyway.

Argh. Bottom right sector is where I needed more help, I’m an Old and I don’t know much Lady Gaga. Didn’t help that I had RHEA for 58D (had the R from LAIRS 56A) for the longest time — because there IS an actress RHEA Perlman and a jazz singer RHEA Carter, believe it or not — but I knew 67A just *had* to be JASON, not JASOE… which left me grrring & trying RONA & finding out there is an Israeli visual artist named Rona Perlman, but she’s not an actress, and the only Rona Carter Google could find for me is a psychology professor in Michigan… Finally I added “jazz” to “Rona Carter” and found RON Carter and then realized… the clue is plural, the answer must be too, so RONS it is. What a BEASTly natick to get hung up on.

I got it, including the SUNK COST FALLACY, but I was a little annoyed about 59A because I had ICE_RINK for the longest time, even tried filling in the space with a D thinking it might be some kind of odd wordplay — ICED RINK or ICE DRINK? — but finally got it was ICE ARENA from the down crossings. I don’t really follow ice skating much, but I could swear that place is not usually called an ARENA.

39A “Raises, as a sensitive subject” solves to BROACHES, not BROACHED as the column said. Of course that would have violated the rule of parallel tenses between clue and answer.

I was not happy with ITEM for “thing on a docket” because, asa retired lawyer, I think of dockets as being filled with cases; agendas (agendae?) are filled with items. In general, once I realized the import of the revealer, the missing letters outside the grid became obvious. But on 55D, I didn’t even realize until I saw the animation that it was one of the theme entries, because, depending on what restaurants you go to, a waiter might very well pull out a CHAI.

This Sunday’s puzzle has to rank as one of the most frustrating I’ve tried to solve in YEARS. I just COULD NOT get the hang of the theme entries even though I quickly realized that they all seemed one letter short of what I b wanted to put in the space. Once I understood the alternate letters, I was expecting I could enter both letters in a space — separated by a slash, just like the words in the clues. No such luck, but it took me awhile to figure out I hadn’t gotten the answers wrong, I had the right letters, but the app would only accept them if one, the other, or both letters were entered in the space *with no other characters*. The way the clues were structured I b wasn’t expecting that requirement.

Argh. My first natick in awhile. I had “loo” for “L.A.P.D. head” (thinking of the navy/mariner definition of “head”) 63D, not realizing there was a campus (Student) equivalent to MADD to fill in 68A, and forgetting that it didn’t actually make sense for the bathroom at the Los Angeles (California, USA) Police Department to be referred to in the NYT puzzle by a Britishism.

My music on this was thwarted in the southwest by not knowing singer BRET Michaels (I put in BREE, there is an actress by that name) and since I first had the Pelley Cooper … network as CNN, not CBS (wasn’t thinking of 60 Minutes, which my old brain still associates with Mike Wallace, Morley Safer, Ed Bradley, et al, and I think of Anderson Cooper first as “Mr. CNN”), the “Flight components” answer was really not coming together. Finally had to read comments to get that corner, STEP by STEP.