C-64
PDX
I liked CUETIPS next to QSCORE.
Another vote for Meh here. I thought we were dealing with the "Two roads" poem and filled in the theme answers thinking "there's a horse involved in that one?" For what it's worth, I attended school in New Hampshire in the 1980s and recognize only the most famous lines of these two poems. Feel free to clutch your pearls.
I caused myself some trouble by mixing up nephrology with phrenology. 😂
Maybe the comments were broken for the first half hour, but I loved this puzzle. Nice long answers, very little short fill. A good mental workout!
@Marshall Walthew So your family has experience wITH ACAdemia, then?
@Charles Nelson Reilly In my experience, AMANA appears in crossword puzzles much more frequently than in kitchens. Yoga pose = ASANA
Fun! I also had jAMbOREES and was scratching my head because the crossings were weird, but I don't think I would have ever fixed it without using Check Puzzle.
Nice puzzle! Powers of Ten, 1977 <a href="https://youtu.be/0fKBhvDjuy0?si=9UOMrZaJYmKflkjS" target="_blank">https://youtu.be/0fKBhvDjuy0?si=9UOMrZaJYmKflkjS</a> I play this for students anytime we're doing scientific notation or negative exponents.
A tough one for me in the NE corner, partly because I had gREenSALAD, which didn't really fit the clue, and ENSILo. (I'm sure that the Amazon oCHODOT must be version 8 in Mexico.) I put the puzzle away for a while, then came back and said "Okay, this has to be LAO and this has to be ROOTS" and finally got LALA and was able to proceed from there.
I think someone else used these exact words, but I felt that the clues were tough but fair. Whatever trivia there was, I either knew it or could eventually get it from partial crosses. (My luckiest moment was sniffing out that Brick Fest Live must be a Lego event.) I don't do Mon & Tue (& usually Wed) puzzles, for two reasons. Primarily, they're boring for me because they aren't challenging. A secondary reason is that they make me worse at solving harder puzzles. When I stick to Thu/Fri/Sat puzzles, I am always ready for subtleties and misdirection. That's just me. I promise that I am not trying to put down people who didn't like this puzzle. But I'm here for tricky clues, interesting fill, and rebuses.
Even after solving everything and understanding the trick, I had to mutter "grade equality? great equality? grade ache wallet ee?" before getting 62A. I can see how others would like this puzzle, but it was a slog that I didn't particularly enjoy.
@Nancy I noticed a space between o' and clock, which helped me parse the clue as "two of a clock" or "two things a clock has".
I just thought they were ESCape keys until I got to the revealer. I like rebuses even when they don't have a strong reason for existing, so this puzzle is fine with me.
I recall learning waftaroms from a visual dictionary of esoteric terms; the flying sweat droplets that show someone is nervous are called plewds.
@William James IMHO it's not difficult to come up with a country at the center of the world stage with notable regime changes in 1918 and 1933.
@Nancy I know that you love to hate puzzles that include anything you haven't heard of, but I am singing the national anthems this Friday when the Vancouver Canadians visit the Hillsboro 57-Downs. I'll give Barley a fist bump for you. Son of the pitcher? It's minor league baseball. The pitchers are all 20-24 years old. (Last night's post became an emu snack.)
I completed this puzzle during the third inning of the Hillsboro Hops game. :)
I did have trouble getting started at the top -- SPIN and BREATH MINTS were the first two answers I filled in -- but finished in 7:32, after Thursday's 7:24. If you struggle with late-week puzzles, keep practicing. LET ME EXPLAIN! Ten years ago this would have been IMPOSSIBLE, but now it's easy for me to earn A PLUSES. (Thank you for letting me brag about my times; I've had a tough week and needed to hype myself.)
With my history in test prep, I liked seeing ETS clued as Educational Testing Service instead of extraterrestrials.
5 minutes and 37 seconds? Thanks for the Tuesday puzzle! E M U
@Chet If only you had Internet access and could search the phrase before ranting about it here.
A fun solve with some nice misdirection. "Dirty film" made me think twice. :)
@Andrzej "I thought BsAT was some exam for nannies." 😂
I got ANT without any crossings because I know that, based on estimates and rounding and such, the combined biomass of ants and humans is roughly the same. (I researched this when writing a lesson on scientific notation.) <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-29281253" target="_blank">https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-29281253</a>
Loved it! This was an excellent Thursday puzzle. 👍
What I enjoyed most about this puzzle was the sheer number of tricky clues and unusual answers. It was a battle of wits the entire time (15 minutes) before I clicked Check Puzzle to find my errors. (I don't care about streaks.) I had MoLto and then MoLtE instead of MILLE and couldn't see why a LEo would be a scented accessory. 🙄 I also didn't know HA_A, so 10D wasn't happening either. I'm mad at myself for also making the BERLi/HiP error. I've watched a *lot* of Batman reruns but don't recall this villain. But you know the candy conversation hearts that say things like "LUV U" and "KISS ME"? Well, I remember in the 1970s they said "HEP CAT". 😻
@Matt The puzzle notes, which you may not have seen, say that each gray square is to be filled by a numerical digit. (Not multiple digits.) Refactor so you don't have 10 involved.
Kinda felt green painty, with entries such as LADDER RUNGS, UPTAKES, SOAR TO, LOAN TO...
@Marshall Walthew I had to use Check Puzzle repeatedly to get the triple rebus. I understood the phrase but stumbled on the execution. E/G/G ? EGG/EGG/EGG ? Oops, the third one needs an s. EGGS/EGGS/EGGS ? Let me really think about what 4D and 5D could be... Oh, okay.
Nice stacks of 9s and 10s! The three-letter entries were scarce and also clustered near the center.
Taking a flyer on 5D made me realize that I don't really know how to spell GENEALOGY.
@Evan Fortunately for me, I asked for a Moscow Mule type of drink this evening and the server mentioned Tito's by name.
@Marshall Walthew No fair! Mrs. C-64 and I tried having a picnic lunch on the steps and were told by a policeman, in English, "NO EATING."
That's a flat adverb, not an adjective. I learned about these from this Merriam-Webster vid: <a href="https://www.merriam-webster.com/video/drive-safe-in-praise-of-flat-adverbs" target="_blank">https://www.merriam-webster.com/video/drive-safe-in-praise-of-flat-adverbs</a>
Fun theme and cluing today! 65D was a gimme because I attended the Women's Euro soccer/football tournament in Nederland in 2017. (The big loser was my Achilles tendon while I was running for a train to see Danmark v Österreich.)
@Michael I might have had similar feelings (although without using words like worst and witless) ten years ago when I seriously started getting into the NYT crossword. I solved this puzzle in 11.6 minutes.
I liked it. The wave and tilt graphics looked fine to me in the Android app, but the curls looked like a filmstrip or the edges you tear off a printout from your pre-1990's dot matrix printer. The lines also looked fine but I thought they would be a musical staff, like (STAFFED) AN EVENT or somesuch.
I learned it as PEDIDDLE from the books of sniglets in the 1980s. Sniglets are words that don't exist but should. (Examples: the one weird green potato chip in a bag is a "charp", the wire holding down a Champagne cork is a "pifflesquit", and jockeying for space on a shared armrest is "elbonics".)
I was on the road early this morning listening to Neil Young & Crazy Horse's Rust Never Sleeps, featuring THRASHER. <a href="https://youtu.be/HOgSTD7Kjrw?si=RiD7rRfzoXkC3WmV" target="_blank">https://youtu.be/HOgSTD7Kjrw?si=RiD7rRfzoXkC3WmV</a>
Hey, I'm singing the national anthems on Friday when the Vancouver Canadians visit the Hillsboro 57-Downs! 🇨🇦🇺🇸
A fun romp with a nice array of 9, 10, 11 letter entries.
@RozzieGrandma As a disinterested observer, I think it's completely unnecessary to point out a word choice error that's buried a dozen replies deep. As Merriam-Webster says, "Still, use of the "not interested" and "no longer interested" senses of disinterested will incur the disapproval of some who may not fully appreciate the history of this word or the subtleties of its present use."
@B I noticed the isolated squares in threes that are hugging AMA, STS, HER, OVA. This helped me see that this grid is very close to having 90° symmetry instead of the usual 180°, with only the two isolated squares above the D and below the B in QDOBA spoiling it. And there are only 30 black squares in total, which is relatively low. It's an unusual grid, and I found it interesting.
@Eric Hougland Ha, I started with SeGAL but knew I'd probably need to edit.
I knew JAKE because it's in the multi-pangram puzzle from August 10 2016, which was recommended in the comments for the most recent Saturday puzzle. Finished in 8:10, 2:13 faster than average.
Great puzzle! This was a real challenge to get started, which is unusual for me. I finally got going in the SE corner; the clue at 40D for _ENS__ didn't really seem to work for sENSei, so I worked on the crosses before filling in that one. 😅 45A, tho. 😻
ARGOT had its heyday between 2002-2004, when it appeared in the puzzle a whopping fourteen times. It has appeared roughly once per year since then.