Ned S
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Iowa City, IA
No one who drove a car with a CD player would ever have called it a CD DRIVE. A CD "DRIVE" is something you'd have found in a computer--except even that would be a misnomer, because that drive would have been a CD-ROM or DVD-ROM drive (or later, a CD/DVD-RW drive). A CD DRIVE was never really a thing.
Former water polo player here. I don't think I understand how "sink or swim" relates to WATER POLO. Barring a medical emergency, there is no sinking involved, so it doesn't really make sense to make a punny clue using that phrase just because the sport happens to take place in a medium where things have been known to sink. It'd be like using an ice cube pun as the basis for a clue for hockey. Yes there is ice, but there are no cubes involved in any way. And no - before you ask - I am not fun at parties.
@Boris When you place an aerator in a fish tank, what do you see? You see bubbles. When you place an aerator on a water faucet, what do you see roiling in the glass beneath it? You see bubbles. Your mistake is thinking a clue requires a direct match with its corresponding answer in all circumstances, when no such standard exists. If aerating ever makes liquids bubbly (spoiler: yep), then that's more than good enough for crossword cluing purposes.
@jp inframan "ADORBS" is an eminently common expression, and the fact that you have not encountered it it does not in any way make it illegitimate (or even questionable) as crossword fill. Slang has always been fair game in the NYT xword. Similarly, your quibble about ETTA James does nothing to diminish the legitimacy of that cluing choice. It doesn't matter one bit whether she was primarily considered a jazz singer; if she sang any jazz whatsoever--particularly in as prominent a way as she did--then she can fairly be referred to as a "jazz singer." If you do a cursory Google search, you will find that all the top results describe James as a singer who specialized in multiple genres--and all of them list Jazz among those genres. Therefore your contention that only the NYT considers her a jazz musician is demonstrably false.
This is a heck of a solid debut. I thought the theme was rather nifty, and the fill was clean . Not the most challenging thursday, but it was a fun one nevertheless Hats off to you Mr Guzman!
Overall I liked this puzzle, but I have a minor gripe. I will grudgingly concede that legato can be used as a noun as clued, but I can't imagine many realistic contexts in which someone would use the word LEGATOS. You would never say a piece of music contains several LEGATOS, or that a composer is know for his copious use of LEGATOS. You would say a piece has multiple legato passages or movements, or that a composer makes frequent use of legato. I guess some amount of crosswordese is to be expected in themed puzzles, but I'm using my challenge on this one.
@Fifitrixiebelle I'm not sure understand this flavor of public closed-mindedness, but at any rate it's yucky.
UPPISH is new (or perhaps, perhaps more accurately, old) to me, but I applaud it as fair fill for a tough puzzle. What I can't abide is SNOOZEALARM. Snooze is a button *on* an alarm that makes the alarm (temporarily) stop alarming. It would be like saying "safety gun" or "silencer gun" (the fact that fire-arms were most readily analogous to me might be emblematic of how I feel about al-arms).
@Francis I've been justly called pedantic on many occasions, but I humbly bow to you, my lord. Surely you do not dispute that "24/7/365" and "all day every day" are two common colloquial expressions whose meanings, if not identical, are interchangeable enough to pass muster for crossword clueing?
@Andrzej it's not an "other" meaning; bias means "slant," whether it's referring to the communicaton of info (i.e., opinions), the orientation of muscle fibers in a steak, the stripes in a power tie, or any of a number of other senses in which that meaning could be aptly applied.
@Francis the clue explains that it's a phonetic suggestion of the theme.
Excellent puzzle. Tough, clever, and fun.
@Andrzej when you have a lack of objectivity, you lean (albeit pro a ly figuratively) in one direction or another. Bias does not signify "non-objectivity," it signifies lean/slant in a particular direction. It's all the same meaning, but a different sense (i.e., figurative vs. literal). The same is true for the words "slant" and "lean." Their meanings are not complicated, but their sense (literal vs. figurative) can vary according to context and/or the intentions of the speaker. Consider: person with a bias might very well lean, in the most literal sense, toward his preference.
This was amazing. Put it in the Puzzle Pantheon.
As far as I'm aware, the expression "cannon fodder" refers to the targets of cannons, rather than the projectiles with which to load them. "Fodder" means "food," so "cannon fodder" would refer to that which the cannon eats, so to speak. It's an expression most widely used to refer to soldiers on the front lines whose job it was essentially to absorb cannon fire (read: die) while the rear ranks advanced. In a more oblique sense it's used to refer to something you're willing to sacrifice in order to achieve a larger goal. In the case of a TSHIRT cannon, the shirt is not the target, it's the projectile. No one is eating, no one's dying, nothing's being sacrificed. I have a hard time believing that clue made it past the editors.
@PETROL "YUTZ" is definitely a thing, but it may not be wholly accurate to call it Yiddish. Best I can tell, It's Americanized pseudo-Yiddish.
@Casey So you're saying it was a difficult puzzle. How indecent of them.
@R.J. Smith I hereby nominate your eminently groan-worthy comment for a Nobel Prize in Irony. (Emus love irony)
I liked the puzzle, but here's a nit: to say an ash "goes down in flames" is tenuous. I WILL CONCEDE: Ashes "go down," yes, but only in the sense that nearly everything else on earth does. To the extent that it does, I'd wager it does so no more often (nor distinctively, nor dramatically, nor necessarily) than the average solid or liquid matter that has ever existed within earth's atmosphere. To put it another way, downward movement is nowhere close to necessary nor sufficient for establishing a definition of an ash. Nor would one ever consider mentioning such motion in any sensible definition. I get that crossword clues are not intended to establish an obvious or unmistakable 1:1 correlation between a clue and its answer, but i will die on the hill of saying a clue needs to winnow the field of possible answers further than (checks notes) **99.9% of all solids and liquids that have ever existed on or near earth or any other planet.** If you response is to point out that I haven't mentioned the fact that ashes are, in fact, associated with fire. Of course, but by the present standard, it would be just as well to clue ASH with "fire sale," because ash is often sold on the open market. Or with "fire bug" because ashes can certainly bug people. Or with "fire blanket," because a coat of ash can form a blanket over surrounding areas. But all of those clues would be terrible, and so is this one.
I don't understand the half-helix clue. Can someone please clarify? I'm no expert on genetics, but as I've understood it, a DNA STRAND is a full double helix, half of which would be an RNA strand.
@N. Totally agree with you, but I would go a step further, because there's no such thing as baked french fries. It's right there in the name. If you bake potato oieces cut in the shape of fries you're not going to end up with french fries, you're going to end up with mushy julienned potato sticks. If you buy frozen French friesintended to be baked at home by consumers, they've still been fried prior to their placement in a bag/freezer. Donuts are fried. A baked donut is an altogether different pastry.
@Anonymous i don't think it's about the noises, I think it's supposed to be about the fact that it's two chores that are effectively incompatible because it would be difficult to do them at the same time. Like you, I didn't quite get it. That's not what "dissonant" means in a literal sense, and any good editor or English teacher would uncap a red pen upon seeing it used so loosely in a figurative sense. I'm willing to offer a bit of forgiveness to the constructor, because I can't imagine how difficult it would have been to come up with enough theme answers. Still, this one was absolutely a stretch in my book.
@Sam F A sawbuck is an X-shaped wooden stand people put logs on to hold them still for purposes of sawing. It's also archaic slang for a $10 bill, I assume because because sawbucks are the shape of an X like the Roman numeral for 10, and because the word "buck" denotes American paper money. If I'm not mistaken, saw bones is another archaic slang term used to refer to a surgeon.
Hard puzzles are hard. emu block emu block
@Steven Seisms and spasms refer to different things. Does your internet not have any dictionaries in it? . . . ((Emu shield))
Lots of people routinely say things that are incorrect, or which are technically correct but weirdly redundant, or which are not used widely enough to be fair-game fill for an NYT crossword. Emu block
@Ned S sorry my copy editor is on vacation
@Barry Ancona Sometimes you are condescending to a startling degree. This is one of those times.
A pair of perhapses make for a particularly putrid post. I wish emus were copy editors
@BAuskern given that a SYNAPSE is an empty space, I surely wouldn't call it a "piece" of anything.
@Petrol I agree. i didn't like the weirdly vague translation of POSTMORTEM. I suppose a death does qualify as "an event," and I suppose there are metaphorical deaths that merit analysis without being, you know, actual deaths? Still, I found the clue unjustifiably oblique, especially for a Monday. They might as well have gone with: "something one or more living beings might do, or not do, after somehing happens, or doesn't happen, depending upon circumstances."
@SP my grandmother's name was Gene, short for Genevieve. Perhaps the fact that this constructors middle name is Louise might offer a clue. While it is possible, typically men don't have the middle name Louise. Given that you are from wherever you are from, perhaps you don't know that.
@Charles This is not an index. Please consider talking about what you're talking about, rather than hinting a clue number and making people double back to the grid chasing a wild goose to see to see what you're on about.
@Darren you said "slop" twice. Looks like you should hire a new editor, too.
@Francis i'm not sure what a mansplaining box is, but i guess I'm glad i didn't quite open it? When I first finished the puzzle and googled "half of a DNA molexule" for more insight, the Ai doohickey told me "yes, half of a DNA double helix is a DNA STRAND" (not what I asked but I have to assume that bot had seen several questions about it already as a result of this puzzle and knew how to frame the answer. That surprised me, of course. After reading your reply, I became even more perplexed. I went back to Google and this time just asked for "RNA structure." What I got back seemed to confirm what I had already believed - to wit, that DNA molecules are double-helical, while RNA strands are a single helix ( i.e, what you get when you "unzip" a DNA molecule). Neither structure seems as though it could be aptly described as a "half of a... helix." So I still don't understand the clue--perhaps even less so now. Given that DNA is a double helix -- and even if I grant that half a DNA double helix is called a "DNA STRAND" (and not, as I still suspect, an "RNA strand" )--where does the "half of a...helix" part come in? Whatever it is most accurately called, it would still not be "half of a helix," right? it would be half of a *double* helix, which would be... wait for it... a handsome helix unto itself. He
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