Kimble

Meet James ENSOR Belgium's famous painter Dig him up and shake his hand Appreciate the man --They Might Be Giants, 1994 <a href="https://youtu.be/NA0FJ3akfUs" target="_blank">https://youtu.be/NA0FJ3akfUs</a> Fun puzzle, although the Ensor/tabouret intersection would've been tricky without this lovely song.

I knew GUIDO Van Rossum -- I was writing some Python code for fun earlier today. None of the long clues came easily to me. OPEN MRI and SEACREST got the SE and SW started, although I had bORA BORA for a long time. araBIc MOVIES, strangely enough, didn't work. Neither did barBIE MOVIES. I was thinking of "Death Comes for the Archbishop" instead of "Death Be Not Proud," so SONNET didn't come to mind. stroh and tiltED as vibe guesses for PABST and SKEWED only slowed things down even more. But wait, there's more! I went from hOrsES to DOGIES to pOnIES and then back to DOGIES. OREO "had" to be the onetime treat, but that meant the Dodgers' foes had to be aRi or maybe aRz -- iR_ was nonsensical. Finally, with no clue what was going on with 3D (it wasn't tInyfeET), I did an alphabet run -- and got my dunce's tune (© Raymond Holt) on S. Those clues make sense in retrospect, anyway. My time was just over twice my average, but it did extend my streak to 600. Phew!

A combination of a college logic course and too much time on bulletin boards made this breezy for me -- much closer to my Sunday PB than my Sunday average. Furthermore, someone who often pops up in my social media feeds goes by "post malone ergo propter malone" -- that's the main reason I remember the spelling of "propter." IZZATSO and YHEAR sound fine in my dialect (urban South with large doses of General American); make of that what you will.

My biggest problem was AREYOUaslEep for 6D, which wasn't obviously wrong next to TANKINI. I deleted the wrong one first and guessed keatS for the poet, because why not? I've never read anything by Rilke, but I have good memories of him. A friend of mine got on Jeopardy! and answered a $2000 clue on him correctly. (Now that I double-check it, the clue was basically "This 20th century German wrote 'Sonnets to Orpheus.' Maybe I should've known that after all!) With control of the board, she picked Sonnets for $800 which had the second Daily Double. She bet everything, got John Milton right, took the lead, and eventually knocked off a longtime champ. (We won't talk about her second game.)

Enjoyed the puzzle. Thanks to the Nintendo 64 and its Goldeneye game for WALTHER PPK (I originally had PPg, but I suppose that would be a paint gun). Thanks to Matt Parker's YouTube channel for SQUIRCLE. I got BIMETALLIC early, but I was thinking of alloys instead of Euros and toonies. Mad LIBS and REEBOK were probably luckier guesses than I deserved. I held on to tOutSHEETS and TEXAs_STAR for way too long (in my defense, all the local Texaco stations got sold to Shell during the Texaco-Chevron merger).

As a Nashvillian, I perked up when I saw [Music City Miracle...]. However, I first filled in STADIUMS, then FOOTBALL, then PLAYOFFS before deleting it all, putting it in the [Kinkajou's cousin] pile, and working on the down clues. I think it took getting BEEF LO MEIN near the very end before figuring out the right answer. (That required getting POMELO from the crosses and reverse engineering the theme because I had SCAM for 10A and couldn't get 11D from that.) Very enjoyable regardless!

I was almost certain ZARFS was why I wasn't getting my gold star, but it turns out it was the INTrOACTS and rATTLED intersection. Also, having WH____ for the Marriott property for a long time made me misread W HOTEL once I got it from the crosses. I learned of them because they used to have a record label (W Records, naturally enough) that released one of my favorite Japanese Breakfast songs, "Essentially."

I thought I was "saving" the CAMO, PORE, CAST, etc. from the Before clues and didn't truly get it until I got to 104A. It makes a lot more sense now. A typo on the very last row kept my time above average. Highly pedantic note: Apollo missions and later programs officially used Arabic numerals; launch vehicles used Roman numerals. For example, "Apollo 11 was launched on a Saturn V rocket." A majority of the crewed mission patches did prominently use Roman numerals (VII, IX, X, XII, XIII, XVII), but they aren't official. (The Apollo 15 patch has a moonscape background with an XV semi-hidden among the craters.)

This puzzle was humbling for me -- arC, Over, yokoono, landOWNER, cLoseENCOUNTER, mArrIed, fee, and wAwaS (although that was more desperate than the others) were wrong guesses that kept things painful, while feldspar and headhunters were just guesses that didn't have enough letters. All in all, it took longer than Thursday and Friday combined and four times longer than my Saturday best. Phew. No complaints about the puzzle, though. Thanks for the workout, Shaun!

I probably won't be the first to say that locks are also the wishbone-shaped things on the edges of boats that you can stick your oars in. I probably won't be the first to say that I got a Friday personal best, either. The trivia just might've been on my wavelength thought; the only clue that seemed notably too easy to me was [Dorm buddy]. An enjoyable puzzle, at any rate!

Embarrassed to miss the possibility of Schrödinger-ness for every possible clue except the (M/N)ET. Missed the revealers, too. I'll blame it on a combination of not having a day off since last Monday and being old. (Further evidence: Yesterday took about three times longer than average for me.) Also, is it a coincidence that Parker Higgins (@xor on social media) came up with the X OR Y list?

I don't have a good way to check this, but I'm *pretty* sure this was the first time that I got my best time of the week on Saturday. Monday was about 45 seconds above average because I did it on my phone while visiting family instead of my computer; as a result, it was about 15 seconds slower than today. As far as the stuff I can verify goes, this was exactly 1/4 the time of Friday's and slightly longer than 3/4 of my previous Saturday PB. It's also faster than my Thursday and Friday PB -- or at least the true Friday PB, since I had a glitch while solving one day and got credited with a 4:17 time. I'm pretty good, but not *that* good! Don't construe this as criticism of the puzzle, of course -- after seeing Caitlin's comment re: sources for THAT DOG DON'T HUNT, I have no complaints at all.

120A was very tricky if you had just seen Zoltan Mamdani's latest video and were reminded that the capital of Uganda is Kampala. (It was ENTEBBE until 1962, but I wasn't born then.) I even rejected ROOSTER and HOBBY, which were the first things I thought of on, and convinced myself that the OBIEs were actually Clios.

50D: Lindsey got married at the end of 2024 and now uses her married last name of Heaps. Is it part of the NYT Style Guide to use maiden names for activities that happened before they were married? Or is this a tiny nit in a puzzle I enjoyed?