William Kash
Chicago IL
66
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Chicago IL
NEEDN'T is "quaint"? Oof. Tell me I'm old without telling me I'm old.
No. Just no. Way too twee and smug imo.
@Ricky Ricardo In modern parlance, someone who simply reads comments in a chat without participating by posting themselves is known as a "lurker".
@Called Here in Chicago, it's dese and dose. As well as Da Bears.
More self-satisfied cuteness trying to pass itself as clever. No thanks.
@Steve L As Joni Mitchell wrote: "They paved paradise/And put up a parking lot".
@Kenny B. There are a lot of twee comments posted here. It gets very cliquish sometimes, like a self-involved high school club.
Bah, yep; gah, okay, hah, sure. Pah? Nope.
Growing up in the Chicago area, 39 A would be SCARF. Don't know if that's regional or maybe generational thing.
LDRS? Oh c'mon.
The clue for ADDY was really poor. Surely there was a better alternative.
Bar crawl; no. Pub crawl; yes.
BZZT? Just no.
AREA is only volume divide by height for a few vanishingly small regular solids. It doesn't work for spheres or cones, just to provide a few examples.
@CrispinG You must be too young to remember Agnew's "[n]attering nabobs of negativism", a phrase crafted by the great William Safire.
I'm in agreement with Asher's assessment below. Too many "Look at how clever I am" puzzles instead of solid constructions. I solved today's well under my average but still had to read the column to understand the gimmick. Could be I've entered into aged curmudgeoness (curmudgeality?), but I am not a fan.
I strongly disagree with Sean's take on the cluing for 41A. How anyone was expected to deduce that it referred to "Rhode" Island is beyond me.
In what world does "several" = AFEW?
I have never heard of Coby as a nickname for (I presume) Jacoby. That seems like an extreme stretch in cluing.
@David Hancock Diana Ross & the Supremes.
@Charles In addition, the fact that one rebus required whole words while the others didn't was inconsistent, and to me confusing.
@Remi What about the expressed equivalent power of explosives, especially nuclear weapons? Because that is the most common usage of kiloton/megaton.
Tater TOTs can also be baked, in fact that's how I usually prepare them.
@Joe P. You should have met my youngest brother who after becoming bipedal did not favor wearing a diaper and would remove them but was not yet potty trained and so...well, I'll leave that to your imagination.
@JD Feels a bit made up to me. "Steno" is much more common.
@Cindy I wonder if there's a (mis)reading equivalent term to mondegreen. I do this all the time too.
@archaeoprof My father went there similarly after his Korean War era service, so I and my brother followed on for the same reason.
@Karen Take advantage of the archives. I'm working backwards, currently in 2016, and am finding most Friday and Saturday puzzles to be a challenge. As were those for many of the years between then and now.
I guess I'm in the minority, but I find the cluing of 41A too pedantically twee. Surely there were less convoluted hints available.
With regards to the cluing for 22 across, regular season games begin with a runner on second base in extra innings. So not "every" inning starts with no one on.
@Grant He also gained fame (or maybe notoriety, depending on one's views) earlier as the defense lawyer for Leopold and Loeb, which fact I'm guessing KK would find even more obscure.
LI'L OL’ ME No. Just no.
I knew I took Latin in high school for a reason! (Well, other than my fascination with all things Roman.)
So, what exactly is a Forty Niner examining? A potential gold panning site? Seems to be a very iffy clue at best.
@brasticstack Think baseball (outfield) practice.
@Paula The symmetry lies about a line drawn from the upmost left box to the lowest right box. If you fold the puzzle on that line, the pattern overlaps. Traditionally, puzzles are symmetric around the center square; if you rotate the pattern 180° around the pattern the pattern remains the same.
Why was the cluing for 111D so unnecessarily clunky? Just ick.
@Mark P Canniest is an anagram of instance, so the clue also serves as an example, ie, an "instance".
The YOUNG AT HEART construction is a bridge too far IMO. Someone was trying too hard with that.
@Jake Agreed. "Ah me" or "Oh my", but "Oh me" is definitely forced.
@R.J. Smith One might even go so far as to call it twee. Smugly twee at that.
My mother almost always made sure I never left the house in my teens without having $5 or so in carfare. CABFARE hung me up for a bit.
Back in my drinking days, I used to get SOUSED on the SAUCE.
Imo there's a pretty strong distinction between SASS and guff. The first carries a connotation of rebellious defiance while the second is more obfuscatory. But maybe that's just my age showing, as I know in modern parlance SASS is viewed as a (mostly) positive refusal to conform (although again I'm a boomer, so maybe I'm missing some subtleties.)
Wrt 110A, Wrigley Field (Cubs) and Rate Field (White Sox) are only about 8 miles apart as the crow flies. In Fact, one can travel between them on the (CTA) Red Line.
None of the field days I experienced while in school involved sports events. Museums, yes; movies, a couple of times; military bases, once or twice (I recall all the food at Naval Station Great Lakes specifically). But nope; no sports. Maybe it's different elsewhere.
@maya and ant I'm guessing it's a forced expression for subtraction; if so, "Take away" would have been a better clue, as in 5 take away 3 is 2, or alternatively 5 less 3 is 2.
@Behind a book How many attorneys lack expansive egos? I would guess that fraction to be well south of 50%.
@Bill My first encounter with agar was (if I recall correctly) in 7th grade science when we used it to make a growth medium for bacteria in a Petri dish. It was a powder in one of those huge brown chemical supply bottles from some scientific supply companies, although I can't recall which one. This was during Tricky Dick's first term, so ancient history now.
@Nicola Just look at the streets revealed in the excavation of Pompei. How can the constructor & editor both get a clue so wrong?