Ιασων
Munich, Germany
93
Comments
0.183
Avg Sentiment
27
Positive
52
Neutral
14
Negative
Munich, Germany
Very nice puzzle. Felt fresh. Maybe being up at an ungodly hour helps 😀 Being anti fascist is not left wing. Did wonder whether FLY and FLYING off the same F was fair play but the gold star came before I could conclude. Only got the airline thing upon looking at the solved puzzle. Have a good evening/night/morning/day
I think that settles the difficulty issue. Sometimes they do offer a particularly chewy one. It doesn’t mean that they haven’t evolved but this one was a Saturday to remember. TSAPRE for non USAians was a leap. I spent a long time in the top left. Started with CANOE went to Kayak/skull, experimented Salon instead of SCALP (gave the L for the brilliant LORETTA) and of course not knowing WAZOO SWIFT took a while to land. in the end it was solved by pure perseverance Thanks to the setter and editors
@john ezra the last paragraph has made me start the day with a smile. Thank you very much.
@Francis I’m guessing that many people here mistake civility for affirmation. If all that we are supposed to say here is how great the puzzle is and how fabulous the setters are then this is a fan club not a comments section. Saying you don’t like something isn’t rude nor an insult. I know people work very hard and enthusiastically to generate and edit these puzzles but we can also have opinions about that work. After all we do pay. The interactions here are almost always very civil and at worst people seem to get irked by something that can be looked up in a dictionary. It’s a good space and a good space should be inclusive.
🎶🍾🎈OREO is back. Since civility is required and should be expected we can now use 4/4/26-1A as code in the comments when necessary. (One of those dates that works even in the backwards US format) I‘m wondering whether the setter‘s location close to CERN is connected to the BETATRON answer. Nice puzzle. Not hard rather interesting.
For all the “too easy” folks here’s a slightly different view. I preface that I solved it in an average time (just below). DWADE is esoteric. MARTIN Gardner is not universally known. I’ve flown in DFW but it is not a no brainer — other airports are available. BAMA is sports trivia for a game only played in the US and not even first league trivia. As CLE would be. Metro was a car in the UK but it was made by Leyland which doesn’t fit. Blitzed doesn’t mean drunk anywhere. If anything it reminds one of the weather or war. PARD is not a word, and ‘over well’ only possibly describes 🍳 in the US. So for the rest of us where all of these had to be deduced rather than being taken as ‘gimmes’ this was a decent Saturday.
CRASHBLOSSOM made it a Saturday. No complaints on difficulty. A great puzzle.
@Getting Better or eating OREOs
DCON/CHOCULA was absolutely a natick for me. Too UScentric. I don’t think I have used the expression to HASH anything OUT but that seemed as a reasonably old Americanism. The rest of the puzzle was a reasonable Tuesday.
ADP and TESS were unknowns so the bottom left used up a lot of time. The rest was elegant and very much Thursday level for me. The trick and the double use came relatively quickly and brought a smile Thanks
I saw pong paddles in the grid art and remained perplexed until I read the column. The puzzle itself was solved with the normal early week effort. A pleasant morning. Thanks
@Francis if you were Be8 you’d be a bottleneck in nucleosynthesis and making the sun glow. But if you were the doubly magic Ni56 (also all alphas) you’d also decay (somewhat slower 7.7 days) but you’d be powering Supernovae and producing almost all the iron in the universe.
Should’ve kept it for April 1st 2030
@Andrzej α are helium nuclei, γ are photons, and β are electrons. So a betatron is a machine that makes electrons go very fast by making them go round and round in magnetic fields.
@Chris I don’t see how the other letters work as a name.
@Bill in Yokohama this is the kind of detective work I come to the comments section for 👏👍🙂
I was fairly sure that bu**ers wouldn’t be ok in the NYT but then again … The bow tie clue was particularly obtuse for those who call them Farfalle The American handball clue was a bit esoteric. Adidas competitor proper answer is PUMA <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dassler_brothers_feud" target="_blank">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dassler_brothers_feud</a> A very good Thursday
After yesterday’s well stated and, I felt, well received plea for civility they FLIP us THE BIRD 🤣🤣 Nice puzzle. Could have been brilliant if the birds worked both ways for the down clues (with different answers for the same clue obviously). I guess just too hard to set. Nice puzzle. Thursday difficulty due to the trick. Thanks
@Erk I agree that it sounds awful.
@Andrzej I spent almost half my time at the bottom of the puzzle. Not being sure of AC/DC and for some reason thinking that OLGA was Onur didn’t help. Perseverance paid off in the end.
Fine puzzle, double rebus. I enjoyed the work out. Average time. But there’s nothing nuclear about it. I must be missing something.
The E in DIRE REMY was naticky given my ignorance of rap and extinct North American fauna. A normal Tuesday morning puzzle. Thanks.
@Nancy incoherent light has many colours in it and the waves of light can have their crests pretty much all over the place. Coherent light has a very very limited colour spread and all the crests are synchronised to arrive to you at the same ‘phase’ An analogy with coherent speech and incoherent mumbling may help.
@Hanson why ask an impersonal hunk of chips when a pleasant interaction may arise from asking a human (even if it is mediated by chips).
@john ezra lemon squares is brilliant 🤣
@Barry Ancona 🤣🤣 you’re 💪ing … it was not gentle … it was a very decent Saturday.
I felt that calling the CRIMEA a land is pussyfooting. If the NYT games team doesn’t want to enter into geopolitics peninsula is available in the dictionary. An excellent Saturday. It took some time for the top of the puzzle to come together. BOGEY was a favourite and PRAGENCY was cute.
@Andrzej half my average time but I’m generally quite a slow solver so when it falls into place it really appears to be super fast by my standards. I found the challenges were just things I didn’t know. Crossword factoids aren’t really my thing. I forget them promptly. What’s a CHIA pet? It keeps appearing but I’ve never bothered to find out nor to recall it. Rap artists, pretty much anything from current movies etc is all new to me every time it appears.
@Barry Ancona according to <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/spotlight/daily-crossword-column" target="_blank">https://www.nytimes.com/spotlight/daily-crossword-column</a> Deb Amlen is still writing wordplay 😀 I guess they are still catching up
On one of my early visits to the US I was confronted with the word ACCLIMATE and was quite confused. I subsequently realized I would have to acclimatize to much more than I had anticipated.
HIPHIPHUR… is making a comeback 49A lights up 57D
@Francis so you made me go check 😀. Even though the sun only burns hydrogen in its core, so only 1/125th of its volume is at play, humans still win. On the surface of the earth the sun provides ~1000 watts per square meter for half the day. Humans at 100 Watts all day but with a surface area of ~ 2 sq.m. lose the surface game. I’d nitpick on your one use of ‘energy’ and whether the sun is ‘hot’ but this is dictionary corner and they don’t like us 😀
Υμνος has no SILENTN I certainly don’t pronounce hymn him
@Tim Fossil Fuels fits but doesn’t work for the down clues. The answers aren’t required to be exclusive 😀
@Andrzej I was wondering how you’d react to the equation and the RADIANS :) I’m not musical and not fond of puns so I’d say it was a Wednesday that won’t be remembered fondly. It was certainly solvable with normal Wednesday effort. A decent puzzle.
Why do people solve puzzles they don’t like?
@Matt indeed … possibly a better phrasing would have been “why do people finish puzzles they don’t like ?” 🤔🙂
@Bill in Yokohama 👏👏👏
@Jake G given the discussion below and assuming the setters are neither astronomers nor work for NIST then the comment is about the calendar year. In that case it’s either 365 or 366. <a href="https://aa.usno.navy.mil/faq/asa_glossary#year" target="_blank">https://aa.usno.navy.mil/faq/asa_glossary#year</a>
What Barry said re stuff we don’t know about 👍
From the archives: In the Sunday 23rd June 2002 puzzle the clue “Crumb” solves to ORT Can someone explain it to me please By the way if you want a super puzzle try it.
@Barry Ancona two different stats at play. Individual solves faster than average should be the norm and indeed a variation of order 10-20% is not significant. The 1-2 σ width of the distribution is approximately that (at least it is for me). The difference in times for the population of all solvers can be significantly more precise even on a daily basis. Everyone’s right :)
@Steve L it’s a Monday
@Barry Ancona 👏👏👏 reply of the year
@Paul Turner the minis I do in bursts of a few at a time. Midi I’ve never even tried. Possibly I’m not that into puzzles 🙂
a TURDUCKEN sounds obscene … although I guess that it must a culinary achievement to get them all done just right. I was unfamiliar with the concept and thus I ended up spending too much time considering the fall of standards at the NYTimes when scatological answers can make their way into the puzzle.
@Francis the extent to which the one body problem is unsolvable depends on your take on the zero body problem…. And thus the logical order should be inverted 0, 1, 2, many 😀 No discord sown
@Francis chemists can only be embarrassed by other chemists. Your quip works in the abstract. We do routinely compute approximations to the 1, 2, and n-body problems. So it really depends on whether by solve you mean get a gold star. That, as I’m fairly sure you already know, only exists in mathematics. The rest of us just move along to the next question.