Paul Turner
Chicago
“There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year-old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.” —John Rogers
@Tim V. But when someone goes to the trouble of honoring you with a puzzle theme based on your initials you have to cut them some slack.
There is a connection I don’t believe anyone has commented on between TURING TEST and CHESS BOXING. I recall from a biography of Alan Turing that he and a friend used to play what they called “Around the House Chess.” After each move, a player had to jump up and run out the door. The other player had to complete his move before the first circled the house and returned to his seat. That sounds like more fun. A crossword equivalent might be good for me.
This is obnoxiously pedantic, but we all love trivia so I hope to be forgiven. 35A is correct for Russia, but Bulgaria had a tsar until 1946. The last Tsar of the Bulgarians, Simeon II, was deposed while still a child, but is still alive and even served as prime minister for a time.
@spurious I’m going to argue the other side of this issue to make a point about clues that look like trivia on their face but can also be considered tests of general background knowledge and logical inference. Sitcoms about family-owned small businesses are common and often feature a business name, like “Cheers” or “Bob’s Burgers.” The clue’s use of the term corner store, which is a little uncommon, suggests the deliberate avoidance of a more common synonym. There are a few of these, like mini-mart (used elsewhere in the puzzle) or bodega (but this is in Canada, not New York). Convenience store is such a synonym, one widely used throughout the English-speaking world. I wouldn’t have guessed it without crossings, but the clues providing the C and the V were fair and after that CONVENIENCE jumped out. That left four letters, with a good chance of being a name, possibly a possessive. We know the family is Korean, which has a small set of surnames, the most common being Kim, which is often in the news. KIM’S CONVENIENCE offers the charm of alliteration. Crossings confirm it. I know this is long, but I offer it only as an example of something I see all the time, apparent trivia that offers a fighting chance even when one lacks particular knowledge. A smattering of general knowledge, broad but shallow, can carry the day. Being old helps. And it seems to me that the constructors and editors are sensitive to accusations of too much trivia and try not to be tricky with these.
I’ve been on a nice no lookups spree, which ended hard with this puzzle. I sure didn’t “race through it.” However, this one made me think about one of the knacks that comes with crossword experience. I now find myself recognizing probable partial answers to long entries earlier and more often than I used to. Just in the extreme NE, I had something ISLANDS, BARBIE something, and something MARLIN long before I could figure out any of these in their entireties, leading to crosses that moved me along.
NOONE was a gimme for me, but I thought it too obscure for most. Few outside the profession have even heard of Roderick Noone, although among the cognoscenti he is regarded as having been perhaps the world’s greatest juggler.
I’m in the thumbs-up crowd on this. I love puzzles that seem impenetrable at first and then somehow yield in below average time. While tons of spanners dazzle, and I certainly don’t object to them, grids like this one with many fresh mid-length entries seem a little underrepresented on Fridays and Saturdays, the days when tough clueing adds to the fun. Working the stair steps is especially enjoyable for those of us whose minds have had years to accumulate SAT words and odd trivia but need at least one letter most of the time to dig for them. So more of these, please.
@Helen Wright Why the gecko’s accent? Science tells us that Americans will buy anything as long as the pitch is delivered in a British accent. Any British accent. (They’re all kind of the same to us, whether we’re watching East Enders or The Queen.)
@Sofia I wasn’t bummed at all by OCTOPI. Octopus is itself a sort of made-up word, having been adapted from Greek into scientific Neo-Latin during a mania for categorizing and then having crawled into English, so why not a made-up plural? The best that can be said for octopodes is that as a made-up plural it is more consistent with other Greek to Latin to English adaptations. Big deal. I have never once in my life heard octopodes said out loud in the wild, making it a nonstarter in my book. I’ll bet that anyone who loves words enough to be here with us is familiar with the whole octopuses-octopi-octopodes conversation and perhaps bored by it. I’m more likely to use octopuses, but OCTOPI has a respectable history, appears often in print, is more fun to say, fills six squares when you have six squares to fill, and is easier to find rhymes for when composing doggerel. English is full of words and spellings based on misunderstandings, and we like it that way. Being bummed by OCTOPI strikes me as a little like being bummed by OHIDUNNO because Oh I don’t know would be more proper.
@Nancy J. I don’t consider myself particularly judgmental, but how can anyone watch that conveyor belt without making assumptions about the lives of the shoppers ahead of us in line? Nor do I consider myself particularly self-conscious, but I too sometimes want to make excuses to the person behind me. “It’s for a party. Don’t judge me.”
Great fun, this puzzle brings back so many memories. For decades the only crosswords I did were in in-flight magazines. I was a lawyer back then, operating under time constraints: the puzzle could only be worked on before we were allowed to take our enormous old laptop computers out and after we were instructed to put them away. Gotta get those billable hours! But at least I had the lawyer’s habit of carrying both red and black pens, so I could start in red and overwrite mistakes in black, if necessary. (It was always necessary.) Unfortunately, I was flying so much I was often stuck with a puzzle I’d already done, but at least frequency sometimes scored me upgrades, and in First a kind flight attendant might swap a used magazine for a fresh copy. How I hated prior cruciverbalists! I’m not sure which I minded more, the competent or the incompetent. Those days are gone forever, and now the nice folks here deliver fresh puzzles every day that don’t require a cab ride to O’Hare.
@Ted W Fifty years ago I had a college roommate who used the phrase “dropped trou” with surprising frequency when describing the hijinks he and his prep school mates engaged in. Evidently they found “mooning” hilarious. Assuming he is still alive, he stands as a counter example to your assertion.
@Jeff Z Of course you’re getting better. You’re getting better, I’m getting better, we’re all getting better. You do a few thousand of these puzzles and you find that you know more stuff than you used to. And not just tricksy crossword stuff: more words, more expressions, more history, more pop culture. You’re harder to fool, too. You’re wise to constructors and their ways. You understand the English language better and have a smattering of facts about some other languages too. (What consonants can a Chinese syllable end with?) Your inferences are sharper; your guesses are more accurate; partial answers jump out at you in ways you once couldn’t have imagined. It struck me the other day that I cannot remember the last time I had to resort to Google to complete a crossword. Believe me, I’m not saying that to brag. I’ve always thought that crosswords were there to enjoy any way you wanted and that look-ups could be part of the fun. But they became fewer until they disappeared. By saying this I’ve almost guaranteed I’ll find a couple of blank squares staring me in the face tomorrow, but no matter. Often if I stare back long enough something happens in a part of my brain I lack conscious access to. Old dogs do learn new tricks. Omniscience sneaks up on you. (Well, not quite.) Maybe the puzzles are getting easier — I’m staying out of that. But we’re getting better, darn it, and don’t you forget it.
The worst vice of Sunday puzzles, IMHO, is tedium. Who has time for Sunday acreage combined with Friday difficulty? And even when not that tough Sunday can turn into a slog by the end, completed more than anything else out of obedience to the same superego watchdog that makes us read boring books to their finish and eat every last lima bean. So puzzles like this one offer relief almost as much as delight. This was good fun from start to finish, and if that came at the cost of a tiny bit of suboptimal fill, who cares? I enjoyed it all the way through and still have plenty of time to get out and enjoy the morning sunshine.
The NW cleared up nicely when my brain flipped on and said to me, “I know cheetahs are fast, but …”
@Paul Turner Oops, Freddie. Nothing worse than being pedantic and wrong!
This was one of those puzzles that had me in despair on the first pass, but after a few words emerged in the SW everything started to fall into place, STEP BY STEP, and in the end I had fun with it. I thought it was fair throughout. I’m a 70-year-old man, perhaps the least likely demographic to use ADORBS or SQUEE, but even I have heard them in the wild (or in dialogue) enough times to have them leap to mind after a cross or two. And age helped me remember that I could trust my car to the man who wears the star. That ear worm will be around for a few hours. The portmanteau SQUIRCLE was new, but that’s where the fun comes in, and it is inferable as soon as you see IRCLE emerging. WALTHER isn’t too obscure as a pistol brand, even if you’re not a Bond fan, and the initials for the model came were part of down entries that were nice and long, giving multiple starting points for guessing them.
Sam, a “salami cap” is the mound shaped slice at the end that you share with the dog.
Interesting how divided opinions are on this one. I found it lots of fun, daunting on the first pass but coming together in less than average time with several clever discoveries along the way. I have a question, though, not especially related to this puzzle. I’m making more spelling errors these days, including words I’m thoroughly familiar with. For example, I filled in LEBeNON on the first try. Am I just getting old? Or is it because I’ve outsourced most spelling to the computer and only have to be close? That’s made me a very fast typist, but I get my comeuppance in crosswords. Would I be getting even worse if it wasn’t for the crossword?
I had fun with this one but it took a long time. The NW was giving me fits because I instantly decided 21D [“Don’t embarrass me!”] was BE GOOD, which a parent might say, instead of BE COOL, more of an adolescent friend request . That enabled IDIOCY and BLIND DATES and on from there. Funny how things can fall into place quickly after even a small fix.
@John L. I don’t believe we are allowed to construct windmills anymore.
I did it. I did it without lookups. And I did it in record time, by which I mean I cannot remember ever taking such a long time to complete a Friday puzzle. Whoo-hoo! So many brilliant misdirects. When I’m stymied I usually follow the close-it-and-come-back-later technique. But today I stared and stared and stared and stared until something popped into my head, then stared some more waiting for another, over and over. It’s a good thing I’m retired.
A “rule” I have come to rely on is that when a clue calls for what looks like hopelessly obscure trivia for most people, the answer will be the most (or only) obvious one. For example, of the ten unmentioned months of the Islamic calendar, 1A is the one most of us know, not the nine we don’t. And the 48A beaver coin almost has to be from a North American political jurisdiction with a name 15 letters long. That almost forces it to end in TERRITORY (no one says Alberta Province). Indian could work, but not too many beavers in Oklahoma; I wanted Youkon, but the spelling was DICEY. I realize that what I’m saying is pretty obvious, but I just want to make the point that the Gray Lady tends to play fair even on Friday and Saturday. Great puzzle.
@Phil It is spelled both ways depending upon whether it is being used as a unit of weight or a measure of purity.
I had a good time and a good time with this one. Funny how sometimes the odd bits of knowledge found in a puzzle just happen to be some of one’s own odd bits.
@NMarie Should constructors avoid using the names of bad people or avoid allowing the names of good people to cross the bad? I don’t think they should labor under that restriction. We read, write, and talk about bad people all the time in real life, sometimes mentioning them in the same sentences with the good. Imposing such a burden would be especially onerous because we do not always agree on the good and the bad. For example, a strong case can be made against 43D (WILSON), although I won’t do so here, but his resting place made for an excellent clue. On the crossing issue, 32A was great in part because the subject’s first name is likely to be on the edge of memory for many of us, not too easy but not too obscure: “Oh right, I think it’s an M name, but what? Margaret, no, Marilyn, no …” Perfect, and all the more because the name MARIAN inspired me, as usual, to sing as much as I can remember of “Madam Librarian,” which amuses the dog. I gave zero thought to 21D except insofar as the A I’d filled in helped me think of it. To conclude, at long last, I would argue that the enjoyment of crossword puzzles is affected more by repetitiveness than anything else, which often can’t be helped, but it would be worse if we demanded that entries be policed for proper names or chance crossings with unpleasant associations for some. I’d rather leave our constructors and editors a wider field of operation even if it means I sometimes say to myself, “That guy was a real rat!”
@Steve L I am, on the other hand, suited for American Idle.
@Peter UTNE READER was (and perhaps still is) a magazine that I recall as aimed at being a hip, liberal Readers Digest. I subscribed a long time ago, so that helped me in the SE. I enjoyed this puzzle, but I wouldn’t be sorry never to see WE’RE SO DEAD again.
I love that crossword puzzles give you full credit for a right answer arrived at by faulty reasoning, unlike my old algebra teacher with her insistence that we show our work. I got 43A correct with STAYMAN on a totally bogus theory. I suspected Apple of being a hidden capital and was primed as a result to think of consumer electronics. Looking at some of the crossings, I figured that if Apple made the Walkman back in the day, perhaps it also made a less portable (and less popular) version it called the Stayman. That worked out, so it was only when reading about the tricky clues that I remembered it was Sony, of course, that produced the former, a once ubiquitous, now largely forgotten, portable music player.
Several people having personal best times today reminds me of something I’ve noticed lately: I almost never have a personal best anymore and I’m seldom above average. I wonder if that’s true for everyone who’s been at this for many years. I’m not especially speed oriented, but I do notice my time, especially on Mondays, and I was only a few seconds off today. But with thousands of puzzles behind you, the chances of beating an old record become remote. By the same token, with average times inflated by struggling newbie years, one has far more below average days than above. It makes me think of Lake Wobegon, where all of the children are above average.
@PrincessApricot I will add my vote from the USA side that AMUSEMENT ARCADE is not redundant. This specialized meaning of arcade may be the only one many younger people grow up with, but shopping arcades are still common in many cities here, especially as locations for small shops, sometimes on multiple levels, in passages through downtown office buildings. I believe the meaning is even older and more general than that. It’s like the word hockey: one meaning has swallowed up the others in most people’s vocabularies where I live, and I doubt I ever say ice hockey, but I wouldn’t label it redundant.
@Vj I thought it was to RETIRE. Maybe that’s because my academic friends are all my age.
I try to avoid lookups if I can, and lately I’ve been pretty good about it, but today’s excellent puzzle led me to an unintentional lookup. 13D had too many squares for Judy, but it made me wonder what Judy Davis might be up to these days. So I paused to check, and it turns out one of the things she’s up to is not being related to fellow Australian actress ESSIE Davis. Crosswords often stimulate curiosity, so this isn’t my first unintentional lookup, and I’ll bet that’s true for others.
A few years from now, I’ll bet puzzlers working through the archives will smirk at TERABYTE defined as [Extra-large storage unit]. “Ha!” they’ll say. “That’s the memory in my granny’s out-of-date iPhone.”
@Jane Wheelaghan Righty-tighty lefty-loosey is such a useful mnemonic that I would have expected it to be common throughout the English-speaking world. I’ve heard it all my life, and even at a ripe old age I still find myself invoking it (silently) to get my bearings when reaching under and around in a hidden space to loosen a nut or tighten a screw.
@JB The SW was the toughest for me as well, still largely blank when the rest was done, so I was surprised when Deb’s column, tracing her efforts to solve, showed that as the only place she could get a toehold.
@Nancy J. I hope we have to wait forever for a cross. I shudder to imagine the offspring of an ENT and an orc.
@abelsey At least we are still allowed to call Biden 46. I fear the day when 45-47 (…?) sues a newspaper for failing to acknowledge him as the true 46 who was fraudulently denied his rightful place in the Old White House during his second term.
@Nancy I love xkcd, but one thing I never thought it would do is make me tear up. Check out No. 3172 from about a week ago.
@Steve L I respectfully disagree. It’s Saturday, and we should expect (even hope for) some words that we encounter rarely but that are not unreasonably specialized or esoteric. A stupa is a type of structure, like a pagoda or a minaret, that we have a good chance of having read about or even seen without belonging to any particular faith. Puttees have a much longer history than just World War I. They’re both the kind of words that few will get right off the bat, but that will trigger an almost forgotten memory in the back reaches of many minds after several crosses. And isn’t that exactly what we want? If it doesn’t trigger it this time it will next time, and next time we watch All Quiet on the Western Front or Paths of Glory we’ll know what to call those wrappings on the soldiers’ legs. It’s all good.
Count me in among those who found this tough and fun. I had a remarkably hard time with one of the easiest entries, 32 down, because my brain insisted on interpreting “theme” to mean musical theme, and so I racked it trying to recall what song is to “Rosemary’s Baby” as “Tubular Bells” is to “The Exorcist”.
Question: Isn’t it always cheating just a tiny bit to solve using the app, because if you fill in all the squares but hear no music you get a mulligan of sorts? Today was my fastest Saturday ever, out of perhaps 300, but I was wrong in the first letter of 27A and D. There was even a bit of trial and error in fixing the mistake, working off the theory that the slang term would be a repurposing of an actual English word and the initial letter of the snack would be one that can begin a Japanese syllable. So hurrah! I heard the music and I got my record. But had I, for example, done the puzzle in an in-flight magazine, the next passenger, perhaps someone Japanese, might have glanced disappointedly at the already completed puzzle and thought, “That goofball didn’t even know what mochi is.” Of course the object of the game is fun and however one solves is fine, but can I really pat myself on the back without embarrassment?
Like so many others, I loved this puzzle. It was great fun figuring out the mystery. This was especially welcome for a Sunday. All too often Sundays are just overgrown Wednesdays that take too long. I enjoy the comforting not-too-easy, not-too-hard nature of Wednesdays, but 15x15 is just right for that. The big grid can be a dull slog faced like that other Sunday duty, mowing the lawn. Sundays need something to add interest without making them too challenging. I don’t think I could face an overgrown Saturday every week. This puzzle hit the sweet spot.
@Mean Old Lady I agree that ANTECEDENTS should be clear. But occasionally, in skilled hands, omitting the antecedent is an effective technique. For example, Wolf Hall is a brilliant and absorbing novel. I was briefly confused by Mantel’s use of he or him without an antecedent, but quickly realized that it always referred to Cromwell. It somehow added a sense of first-person narrative to a work not formally written as one, encouraging readers to feel as if they were experiencing events with Cromwell. It provided an example of the way artists who know the rules sometimes break the rules to great effect.
@Joe P And palm has the same number as AQUA. We were given many chances to go confidently wrong, which of course is what we crave.
I enjoyed the puzzle too, and found myself imagining a version that added the DEL key, but with the meta twist that although the crossing words would each include the letter sequence DEL, the square would have to be left blank to get credit. That would get the 2026 comments off to a hot start.
Robyn is right about this being on the easy side but I found my share of obstacles. The last to fall was TMINUSZERO, and it shouldn’t have been. I wanted to fill in ARTS and DAME but didn’t like the TM combination that resulted. Ideally, the TM sequence should have caused a flashback to elementary school, sitting in the gym with all the other students watching the school’s one small television during the historic Mercury countdowns. There were always delays. You could count on endlessly hearing T MINUS something and holding from Walter Cronkite or Jules Bergman. Unfortunately, the flashback didn’t occur until after I got into the ACID.
If you realized that each down answer was missing its first two letters, but failed to realize that the author was considerately spotting you those letters in the clues, it became a puzzle of average Thursday difficulty.