Mark
Hong Kong this month
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Hong Kong this month
Tough for me (6:41 over my Friday average) but very enjoyable and I completed it with no lookups. This also marks day 1000 of my current streak. I may take a little break now 😊 Mark
@Andrzej Your wife has it exactly right. Nice work on her part! I am always so impressed with your solving. Amazing! Thanks too for sharing your experiences and insights with us here. Mark
Hi Sam Corbin 😊 The hand is a unit of measure of a horse’s height. I’m reasonably sure that’s what the clue is referring to. <a href="https://equineworld.co.uk/about-horses/horse-height-measurement/measuring-a-horses-height" target="_blank">https://equineworld.co.uk/about-horses/horse-height-measurement/measuring-a-horses-height</a> Mark
@John “Never” is a long time and I have certainly heard and used HOLESOUT to refer to the final putt on a golf hole.
Re: 49D: I’ve mentioned this before, but I’ll say it again: the material used to make roads, sidewalks, etc is “concrete” of which cement is an ingredient. So we do not TROWEL cement, but the concrete that it’s an essential part of. Fun puzzle and I really enjoyed the revealer! And in a nod to Sam, I am the father of 2 Jewish daughters so my instinctive answer for 30A was BatMITZVAH 🤣
Well I, for one, instinctively entered HONG for 41A. Go figure!
@Fungase I am amazed at how you and others can finish these so quickly! Well done!! My best time (for a simple Monday) is 7:30 and I felt like I typed it in nonstop. My best Wednesday is 16:42 and today’s was 26:47. Average is 42:41. I guess I’m just slow 😝 That said, my streak is now 1,215 🤣 Mark
@David Pearce My Merriam-Webster app shows “milestone” as one word, and that agrees with how I’ve seen it. So o think the clue is OK. Mark
@Deb Amlen From the column: “Maybe you knew about BAIDU. Maybe you’ve even used it, if you read Mandarin.” I knew about it, having lived in Hong Kong for seven years, but I didn’t use it. My friends there use it, so this was a gimme for me. But I write here now to point out that Mandarin is a spoken dialect, not a written language. It’s the “official” dialect of mainland China, though there are also many other local dialects. Cantonese is used in Hong Kong and in parts of nearby Guangdong province. Mandarin is also referred to as Putonghua (“common language”). The written language is just called Chinese although the mainland uses a “simplified” form whereas HK and Taiwan use “traditional” Chinese. It’s not phonetic so the written character offers no clue to pronunciation in any dialect. But far-flung Chinese can read each other’s writing though they may not understand a word spoken by the other. Mark
In addition to the meaning cited by Sam, CALVE is also used to describe the action of an iceberg breaking off a glacier or larger iceberg. Another form of giving birth 😊
@Shari Coats A runway’s identifying number is its magnetic bearing (direction), rounded to the nearest 10, with the last digit removed. So a runway that’s oriented at 93° magnetic will be runway 9. The number used for the same surface in the opposite direction is 27. Letters (L, C, and R for left, centre, and right) are added for multiple runways oriented the same. This system helps pilots easily choose the best runway for the prevailing wind (it’s best and safest to take off and land into the wind … this minimises ground speed and hence the length needed) and one can quickly confirm by checking the aircraft heading when aligned. Mark
@Petrol My note here has nothing to do with today’s puzzle, but when I saw your location, I had to reply. In June 1970, at the age of 15, I spent a month with family friends in Ferney-Voltaire and I have nothing but fond memories of it. Cycled all around, discerned the French signage using my newly learnt Latin skills, and overall had a wonderful time. One of my assigned tasks was to ride into town each morning and fetch a baguette, which cost 1 franc. Thanks for rekindling the memory!! Mark
Slightly off-tooic, but as a pilot and weather geek, I need to point out that the clue for 12A in the Mini [Precipitates freezing rain] is incorrect for the answer SLEET. Freezing rain is supercooled (liquid state below 0°C) water that freezes instantly on contact with objects such as airplane wings, power lines, tree limbs, roads, and the ground. It’s what causes ice storms and their damage. Sleet is water drops that freeze high in the atmosphere forming small pellets. The distinction is important. Sleet is relatively harmless but freezing rain causes widespread damage and can be lethal to airplanes without sufficient ice protection. So-called “clear ice” can form extremely quickly and will cause the wing to lose significant lift, possibly resulting in an aerodynamic stall and loss of control. Pilots’ two biggest fears are thunderstorms and clear ice.
@Okanaganer Deb may have said that, but today the words came from Sam Corbin, the wonderful and talented author of early-week columns. Just FYI! Mark
As if we needed additional evidence of my impairment, when I saw SCOOPEDUP, I took the O..V segments to be some variant of “Hoover” (the vacuum cleaner, not the US president), especially because 8D ends in ER 😝 Spent too much time around Brits for whom “hoover” is a verb … Staring at the grid post-solve per Sam’s suggestion got me to the ice cream cones. Quick but fun one today. Thanks! Mark
I must respectfully disagree with Caitlin’s statement that ASCII is” the internet’s character encoding format for text data.” 7-bit ASCII can only encode upper- and lower-case Latin characters, decimal digits, some punctuation, and 31 “control” characters. It has no coding for ñ and ö, for example, and none whatsoever for Japanese (Hiragana and Katakana), Chinese, Thai, Arabic, etc. The Internet’s default character coding is UTF-8, a compact and efficient form of Unicode, that also happens to be ASCII-compatible. (That is, unmodified ASCII can be carried unambiguously in UTF-8.) Use of UTF-8 (or any other Unicode variant) allows encoding and storage of characters from most if not all languages on the planet. Handling UTF-8 (or any Unicode variant) in software requires some extra care because characters are no longer equivalent to 8-bit “bytes.” Python 3 supports it natively. Mark
Great puzzle! Enjoyed very much. But another quibble: “ROGER” (5D) in radio communications means only that the person saying it -received- the prior message. It doesn’t indicate comprehension, compliance, agreement, or anything beyond reception. So “understood” isn’t an accurate clue. Mark (pilot and occasional user of “roger” 😊)
@Oikofuge This is tangent on my part, to be sure, but I also distinguish between wh and plain w, and your comment made me think of another modern pronunciation annoyance: the addition of an H sound to “str” (pronouncing “street” as “shtreet,” for example). This seems to be a thing among younger folks (say, below about age 40) and it’s very common now even among professional speakers such as news reporters. And it drives me nuts! Please, folks, str has no H sound!! End of rant 🤣 Mark
@NewsNerd I provided exactly the same feedback using the link provided in the new “me” section. The bars should all use the same scale so it’s easy to see relative differences. I also suggested that they can show this week, average, and best simultaneously in the new format. No need to have the toggles. Glad to see others agree so perhaps they’ll change it. Mark
@Mike R Agreed. PRE as it is customarily used serves no useful function here since “recorded” is by definition completed in the past 🤣 Kind of like “preboarding” as used by airline ground personnel. Yes, those of you who wish to board before you board may approach the gate now. Mark
@Andrzej LIE refers to the position of the ball on the turf. A bad lie, where the ball may be deep in the grass, or otherwise difficult to hit, is challenging at least for a duffer like me 😊 Mark
Started this on Thursday evening and got through all but the SW. Completely stumped. Decided to put it aside and then came back to it this morning, and finished that section in less than 2 minutes. The “come back to it later” tactic works pretty much every time for me! Amazing. My time was under my average but that’s nothing to boast about. Fun puzzle, no lookups, and got the music on first attempt.
@Paul It’s not “fourth.” It’s “home” and that fits. Mark
@Chil “The runs scored each inning sum to the total for the game.” Reasonable? Mark
@Jane “I forgot my wallet so I was in a jam (bind) when the bill came. “
@Steven M. SNAP is short for “snapshot,” a now little-used term from the 50s-60s that means “casual photograph taken with a handheld camera.” I’d consider it synonymous with today’s “pic.”
@Pani Korunova I too started with fAA for the same reason but the F just wasn’t working so I engaged “crossword mode:” any other possibility for the meaning of towers? Aha: tow-ers, things that tow, and AAA fits that. Mark
@Xword Junkie “Lowest mean elevation” and “flattest” are not synonymous, to me anyway. Flattest suggests least variation of elevation across an area. I have no idea which state is flattest but I can’t see how the state with lowest mean elevation is automatically flattest. Just my .02! Mark
@Air I’m American and I had DUI too. I think DWI is much less common, even in the US
This is #1100 in my streak and I was able to do it with no lookups and got the music on the first attempt. A sharp contrast to yesterday’s 🤣 Nice theme and clues though I needed crosses to help me with the themers. Thanks!!
@jules But a “lead off walk” as commonly used can also refer to the first batter in any inning reaching first base via a walk, not just the first batter in the lineup. Mark
@Andrzej Regarding LTR, my first thought was that few outside the US will have any chance at this. Conversely (and sadly), few Americans will know about A4 🤨 Mark
@Mike As another data point, I’m now age 70 and have never heard of CHARLIXCX. But I breezed through this one in well under half my average Friday time with no lookups. Streak preserved at 1497 😝 Which isn’t to say I didn’t struggle a bit. Took me a while to recall J’accuse and I wasn’t familiar with the dog treat and the Nintendo avatars, amongst others. As a result, the NE was the last to fall. But for me this was much easier than either Wednesday’s or Thursday’s puzzles this week. Mark
Regarding 18A, it’s that only in the northern hemisphere. The same celestial event is in a different season below the equator. For this reason I prefer to refer to it as the September Equinox. Just my .02. (I’d also add that in my experience the season mentioned is known primarily as “autumn” outside the U.S.) Mark
@Ann You’re not alone. Meteorologists also refer to June-July-August as “summer” in the Northern Hemisphere, based on temperature … and the other seasons are adjusted from their astronomical periods also. Mark
@Pezhead Crack me up!! 😆😆🤣🤣 Mark
@Mark Cousins Sam, my apologies. I missed that you posted a link. Sorry for the noise from my side! And thanks as always for your great columns. Mark
@Geoff Offermann As Caitlin mentions in the column, a clock as a gift is bad form in Chinese culture as they believe it’s a message to the recipient that their demise is at hand. (In some/many Western cultures, giving someone a knife is similarly bad. This is worked around by including a coin with the gift; the recipient returns the coin to the giver and therefore has purchased the knife, not received it as a gift.) (And I steadfastly refuse to use “gift” as a verb!! Yuck!!!) 4 in Mandarin sounds like the word for “death” in the same language so it’s considered an unlucky number. It has a similar connotation in Cantonese, Japanese, and Korean. Mark
@SBK in TO DOWNTOAT resonated with me immediately. I take it to mean “very precise” … exactly as clued. I’ve not heard “done” to a T before. But perhaps that’s a thing also. I’m quite sure the DOWN expression is common. Mark
@Steven M. I’m also a musician (classical piano, tuba, euphonium) and I know my chords (C7 is C-E-G-Bb, etc) but I’ve not heard TETRAD before either. It makes sense though, as a 3-note chord is a triad (not the Hong Kong gangs haha). Learnt something! Fun puzzle for me for sure. Mark
Enjoyed it! And finished in less than half of Tuesday’s time, even after losing some minutes to flyspecking in order to find and correct BUMPSETSPIcE. Overall a rather normal Wednesday for me. I admit that PRATE was a total guess. Mark
@Anand My numbers are almost exactly the same! Average 66, today 31. No lookups and got the music on the first try. I’m working to get the average below one hour but it’s tough due to long history. 1980 puzzles solved and current streak is 1251 😝 Fun one today! Mark
@Sam: For those of us who’ve spent much time around Brits, BEERMAT is natural. But right, it’s not commonly heard in the US. Thanks as always for your enjoyable and insightful columns!! Mark
@Stephen Do you mean that you solved today’s puzzle in 7 minutes 58 seconds? I am an experienced solver with a current streak of 1399 and my MONDAY PB is 7:30, which is about as fast I can type. My Friday PB is 25:34 and today’s time was 50:10. Amazing … Mark
@Andrzej I’m always so impressed with your ability to tackle these puzzles and solve them!! It’s “shortstop”, one word, and it’s the name of a defensive position in baseball. The shortstop plays between second and third base and so is “off base” although he/she may need to cover second base depending on the situation. Mark
@Deb mentions that pi is the “mathematical constant that is used to help calculate the area of a circle.” Well, yes, but it is strictly defined as the ratio of the circle’s circumference to its diameter. Pi is necessary to calculate the area enclosed by a circle but its definition is the ratio mentioned above. 😊 Like others have described here, today’s time was a PB for me. I had read earlier today that Einstein was born on this day and Hawking was a good guess. Music on first attempt and no lookups. Felt more like Monday to me …
@Laura Stratton Agreed. The loop of a padlock is its shackle. This is looped through a hasp on the item to be secured. Hasp: a slotted hinged metal plate that forms part of a fastening for a door or lid and is fitted over a metal loop and secured by a pin or padlock (from Google)
@Divs I believed you meant that you were not “fazed” by YAMA 😊
@SuzyQ My understanding is that the phone keypad layout was deliberately reversed so that proficient adding machine operators wouldn’t “dial” faster than the system could handle. Behind the scenes, DTMF (dual-tone multi-frequency, aka TOUCHTONE) was/is an analogue audio signalling system used over comparatively low-bandwidth sometimes noisy lines, so don’t press those buttons too quickly 😊 Mark
@The X-Phile I assume you meant “you’re” …