Melissa M
Irvine, CA
16
Comments
-0.090
Avg Sentiment
2
Positive
10
Neutral
4
Negative
Irvine, CA
In my Californian dialect, “forties” is pronounced kind of like “four Ds” and so it doesn’t quite work here =). But by the point I read the WW2 clue, I’d already gotten the top two TTTT rows. Now that I had the gimmick, once I saw “TANGO” in the bottom right, I knew what the answer was. What really tripped me up was “NENES”; I thought it’d be niños/niñas.
I got everything except for JADA; I had to look that answer up. Good thing, too, because I’ve never heard of BASENJI. I figured out the UT rebus when I noticed that AUTOPSY would work in the top left then the UTURN matching ASTRONAUT sealed that the puzzle was playing games. That made the answer to the state name obviously UTAH. This led to me marking the UT of SPROUTS and YOUTH by applying Utah’s shape, solving those areas’ dilemmas. I don’t mind rebuses when they become obvious from context like this. Another one that worked well was the triple “BOX” rebus some months ago.
I parsed “Pitching staff?” as referring to a music staff and music pitch, so I kept thinking it was some Italian word (compare words like “tremolo”). But nope, it was yet another meaning of “pitch”: to hawk. AD AGENCY.
@Helen Wright I’m glad they programmed it to allow empty, a space, or rebus “BLANK” for those tiles, because each solver would think of different ways to enter it. This is the first Thursday I’ve solved without having to look something up, so I guess it was easier than normal. I had no idea who made Scrabble, so when I got “BUTTS”, i was rather skeptical!
Interestingly, ARIZONA was the first answer I filled in. The question mark on “Tombstone setting?” had me immediately think of alternate meanings of “Tombstone”, and I knew that it was in Arizona. Then with that Z, the middle down had to be OOZES IN. The rest of the middle came quickly. I don’t know anything about punk rock, so RAMONE’s E was the last square I filled in. ARIES made no sense but it wasn’t ARIAS…
“I’m blue \ If I was green I would die” When it’s really just “I’m blue \ da ba dee da boo dah” or similar.
@Jillian I was hesitant to fill this in, because I didn’t know what “to be” (ephemeral kind of “to be”) is in Catalan. I guess it’s the same in both Spanish and Catalan in this case, according to Google Translate.
@Merrick These puzzles have everything from Bible references (ESAU here) to computer programming (a recent puzzle but I can’t remember it). I figure it’s impossible for any single person to solve them all without references.
@Mean Old Lady it could’ve been many other clues instead, like “Language of the British Isles”, which “English” and “Gaelic” are too long for. “Irish” would be a potential guess to trip people up, but would get eliminated, leaving “Welsh”.
Hi…. There seems to be a bug in the iPad NYT crossword app where it “runs hot”: it consumes 100% CPU, causing the iPad battery to drain quickly and make the iPad get quite warm. Could this information be sent to your programmers? The NYT crossword—and not other games like Wordle and Spelling Bee in the same app—is by far the most battery-draining app on my iDevices. It uses much more battery power than watching streaming video! Thanks~ 💜
Hi…. I don’t know how else I could get someone at NYT to see this. There are two annoying bugs in the iPad version of the Games app that would be nice if fixed. 1. While in the crossword, the app runs at 100% CPU, draining battery and heating up the iPad. It drains faster than watching streaming video does. 2. Usually, when I complete a Down entry, the clue does not gray out. The Across clues gray out correctly, though. I’m on the latest app and iOS versions.
@Matt I managed to get “Chick Corea” from crossings and was like… “who?”.
@Niall I know three different forms: “catty-corner”, “kitty-corner”, and “cater-corner”. I say “cater-corner”, personally.
@HeathieJ Cater-corner is the original form, with “cater” originally meaning “four” from Latin (compare Spanish “cuatro”). Easy to see how it got corrupted into catty then kitty, with cater not existing elsewhere in English.
@FC I’m embarrassed to say that ISLAND was the first clue I filled in. =^-^= There are five colors of mana in Magic: white, green, blue, black, red. Casting spells requires drawing mana from land, and each color comes from a particular land card: plains, forest, island, swamp, mountain. As this is the basic resource of Magic, these five cards are in (almost) every deck.
@Billy I had “TLD” (“top-level domain”) thinking they meant atypical TLDs like .ninja and .xxx.
All 16 comments loaded