Francis
Grand Marais, MN
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Grand Marais, MN
I think of all the carping that goes on in this forum, the most annoying one sniffing that "puzzles are just too simple now". I know, I know, I'm a neophyte solver, but I think it's true that *constantly* being told that something is easy when one is failing at it. One of the things I *never* did as a chemistry professor is blithely over and over again how easy chemistry is, just because it was easy for me. And I think it would have antagonized students had I done so. It would have come across as arrogant. If I follow others in simply giving up on this forum, it'll be because my blood pressure just gets too high when the "too easy" complaints come out.
I would bet there is some solver out there who, like me a few months ago, had never successfully completed a Friday with no lookups or help, who came to this comment board triumphantly Only to find it full of posts about how "easy" it was. Don't listen to them, excited person. A Friday is a Friday and gold star is a gold star. Stay excited. Stay enthused.
Nice job, Rena! I hope this puzzle gets the enthusiastic reception it deserves, but there is a subset of crossworders who typically don't react well to any kind of trick--rebuses, non-linear answers, etc. If there are boobirds here, remember it's nothing personal--many just hate anything out of the ordinary. I've been thinking about just avoiding Thursday comments for a while, until my blood pressure is within normal limits again. I think I'll start today. But, once again, wanted to congratulate you, Rena, and good luck with whatever is next.
Good puzzle. Very good puzzle. But it did have its ups and downs
I just loved [Spanish uncle?] as NOMAS. The longer it takes for me to get it, the more rewarding it is. That's just inspired cluing. Really liked the rest of the puzzle, too. I've never heard of CANOEPOLO, but I would assume it's very tough on the horses, trying to maintain their balance in the canoe with a rider on their back. Marvelous animals, those horses. I wish I was a horse.
I really can't believe all these "it was soooooo easy" posts. I thought the body of the puzzle was easier than normal. BUT the clues to the four-letter word were brutal. I finally cracked it with the X in square four. I had the T, but thought it was ducT, because of "end of the road". It was not al all easy for me. This, for me, was a classical example of more than half my time finding one or two letters. Clever, but I really didn't enjoy it very much. Maybe I'm just grumpy because someone sold my country to someone else.
Seems like DENALI appears a lot these days. Viva le Résistance!!!
I enjoyed this puzzle right up to the time I got to the comments. I was happy when I figured out the embedded clues. I thought that was quite ingenious, especially given the word within a word within a word all made sense. Then I hit the A in the cross of HAKE and MATRYOSHKADOLLS. I wish I had a solution for the balance between the "too easy" people who would seemingly want the puzzles to be unsolvable by 90% of solvers. I try not to complain when puzzles are too difficult for me. I wish others wouldn't complain when they are too easy for them.
It's days like today I'm really glad I took up this hobby. What a great puzzle! What a great feeling to have solved this puzzle! So I'm enjoying today, because we're ever unsure of the morrow.
I assume it's going to come at some point. Some cynic, someone who can't see silver linings, who struggles to conjure rainbow colored unicorns, someone who makes you question the whole concept of "soul"... someone *entirely* unlike me... will point out that HR departments are not there to help the employees, they're there to protect the company from a lawsuit from an employee. Of course I would never take such a perverse, scornful view.
@John Yes, other than for billionaires like Musk, federal grants as originally designed are gone. Just like compassion, critical thinking, understanding, willingness to consider the feelings of others. All gone. Remember when the safety net was for poor people, not billionaires?
@Sam There's a lot of things that are news to people who don't listen to public radio.
Being able to get LUDOVICOEINAUDI purely from crosses may be my proudest achievement in puzzle-solving yet.
@Maude OMG. Can't we even have crosswords that aren't attacked by the right? We're all familiar when something heinous like CISGENDER crops up. But what was it this time? How have progressives ruined your world? How have these words made your life not worth living, encroached on your freedoms? I just can't stand this kind of thing much longer.
@Lorne Eckersley I'm an American and I'm in a bad mood with all things, too, for the same reason as you. However... taking it out on the constructor is classless. I do not think of Canada as classless, and yet here you are. Any time I see someone talking about the constructor's "ego", or their unwillingness to let anyone solve their "precious" puzzles, I just want to scream, "Heal thyself!"
Great puzzle from someone who is younger than most of my dental crowns.
@Jake G 🤷♀️ But I can tell you if that if Mike stopped indulging himself in this way, this forum would be a far poorer place.
YES! Greenland is Danish. Sing it out to all the heavens above and the earth below and the water over there somewhere. Why some of us think we should put our grubby paws on it, I'll never understand.
I post this sort of general comment once in a while when I expect a deluge of "too easy" complaints. Looks like it's coming tonight. I swear I'm starting to get a stomach ache when a puzzle is coming fairly quickly because I know we're in for "these puzzles aren't like the old days...". If you, for the very first time solved a Friday puzzle cleanly according to your personal definition of "clean", then congratulate yourself and be happy. Don't let all those who sniff at "too easy" Friday puzzles ruin it for you. A Friday is a Friday. Some are harder than others.
I use the crossword to octopi my time now that I'm retired. (Before that I was really kraken the whip.) (I'm auditioning to be the opening act of the Mike from Munster Show.)
Pardon my all too often back-to-back posts, but I wanted to say after having read the comments my appreciation for the ski slopes in this puzzle is sky high. I loved the Green bunny slope progressing the final double black diamond, straight down. Just terrific imagery. Stand up and take a bow, Mr. Proulx and Mr. Martinovic. I am heartily applauding.
My vote is for very enjoyable and quite the challenge. I was way over my recent Saturday times, More about that below... There were several times when after several minutes of my lasar-like focus, nothing would come up to resolve a region with an embarrassing number of blank squares. Then I'd widen my vision, and see that I had three other regions just like that. So I was fully prepared for a total flame out. But, gradually things came to me, as these seem to do. And sometimes things leave us. My rascally little Schipperke mix "puppy" died today. She was almost 16. I'm not doing this for sympathy. I just want to put a little message out in the digital world that will likely be there for a long, long time: "Holly, I loved you. You were a great little girl and I'll miss you every day."
I used to love books but now they are defective. If I touch the page with fingers together and widen the distance between my fingers, the print doesn't get larger. Anybody else notice that? How long have books lacked that feature?
@Peter A PAWPAW is a fruit designed purely to make people put "banana" into crossword puzzles.
@Barry Ancona Well, I was coming here to say that it was a definite challenge for me. I was genuinely alarmed about how many entries I couldn't quite get to work, and even when I realized the dark squares had letters in them, it took me a while to quite fit things together. So, hat's off the you and all those for whom it required little thought, and was far from a challenge.
@Mikey Parmar (I'm going to presume this is a real post.) Do you regularly do the NYT cross words? Do you generally get them? If this is your first one, are you aware that Saturday is considered the most difficult of all days? First, I gotta tell you, there are plenty of people on this forum who've taken the MCAT and worked with rocket launchers or their equivalent, so you're not really flashing any eyebrow raising credentials. And a lot of us, myself most definitely included, are often stumped. Why you think you are so special is a mystery to me. Second, I have no idea why experience in rocket launchers would automatically make you a world class puzzler. Completely different skills. To even think they would supplement each other may be a sign that you might not know as much as you think you know.
My opinion is that this is a fun, funny puzzle with a lot of puns that Andrzej will hate. In other words, a perfect Sunday.
I'm afraid to look. Do we *finally* have a Thursday puzzle that isn't going to incite a riot? Or is the *lack* or trickiness going to create a "too easy" backlash? We're a very hard lot to please.
@Red Carpet May I edit that to "I'm just not experienced enough...yet"? I don't know how many times I failed at Thursday-Saturday before they finally opened up for me.
BIG sigh of relief on 46A ["My life is over"] At that point I had IMxUxxED. My first guess was not IMRUINED. For a minute I thought the NYT had completely become unravelled after yesterday's "screws" and "nails".
I gotta say I especially loved Deb's intro today, concerning attitudes towards puzzling.
@Paul I don't know if you are new here, but you touched a live wire. The puzzle pros here really hate when a poster diminishes the effort of the constructor. And I agree with them. 100% You can make valid complaints about the puzzle all you want, and you might not get pushback. But outright accusations of the constructors methods or intent is highly offensive.
Please allow me the reverie of taking a mind's eye trip to NAIAD, the tiny moon of Neptune which is barreling along just barely over the top of Neptune's clouds. Naiad is only about 30,000 miles from Neptune (compare the 240,000 mile distance between the earth and the moon), and the view of the planet from it must be one of the most awe-inspiring views in the entire solar system.The massive and gorgeous blue Neptune taking up a stunning amount of Naiad's sky. I hope to visit there one day.
@Justin Boy, do I know exactly what you mean. I can barely suppress my fury. We are now a part of the reconstituted Soviet Union.
Ok, for all of those of you who only see the gloom and doom side of me--I have a story that is coming close to warming the cockles of my heart. Whatever those are. I looked out the window onto my back yard a couple of weeks ago, and I saw a deer. That's not really that unusual, but this deer was in the process of delivering a fawn. So I got to see the little guy's first attempts at walking, his first feeding. Since then, the mother and her fawn have come back to the yard several times. The mother munches on our hostas, and the little one runs back and forth in the yard, sometimes kicking up his back paws. In my more pensive moments, I like to think of this as a metaphor the universe is playing out to try to cheer me up. Renewed birth. Rising up from the ugliness. That kind of thing. I don't know if it'll work or not, but it does make me feel there's hope, somehow.
To me it's nearly incomprehensible to even approach creating a crossword puzzle. But to then do so with the requirement that all the "A"s in the puzzle make one giant "A".... ...it just beggars belief. I've never used "beggars belief" before, but it seems just the perfect words for this moment. My belief is beggared. That doesn't sound quite as cool, somehow.
@Steve L My complaint is that you guys complain they are too easy. Must be tough standing at the top of Mt. Crossword.
No, no, no, no, no. A thousand times no. I will not tolerate yet *another* constructor who could quite easily be my grandchild, or great grandchild. It just isn't right that such a terrific puzzle is produced by someone who is decades younger than my crowns. I won't stand for it any more.
Here's a thought to cheer you long-time solvers eager, AGOG even, for a chewy Sunday puzzle: It *may* be that because of your perseverance in the comments, they decided to leave the circles out today for the tricky squares, just to make it a touch harder. If so, well done!
@Petrol Permit me to introduce you to my childhood hero, the late, great Roger Maris. Roger Maris was a quiet, shy kid from North Dakota and northern Minnesota. He was an astonishing ball player--power hitter, and less known for his rocket arm from right field. He only played for the Yankees a few years, once of which he topped Babe Ruth's season home run total of 60, although Maris played 162 games in that season, but Ruth only 154. He failed to hit 61 home runs in his first 154 games. He was widely hated in New York, because he was not press savvy like Mickey Mantle, Yogi Berra, Whitey Ford, and others of the Yankees from that era. The press thought he was surly, and to an extent he was. But it was mostly misunderstanding. His story is brilliantly told in the HBO movie 61*. He died very young, 51, from non-Hodgkin lymphoma. Thankfully, Yankee fans accepted him as time went on. And yet, he's *not*, I repeat NOT, in the Baseball Hall of Fame. He had a single season home run record that stood for 37 years. Before the steroid era. This is, in my opinion, the second most embarrassing omission in Major League baseball, right after ignoring the Negro leagues for decades, even though the Negro Leagues were every bit as good as the Major Leagues. I saw him once at an old-timers exhibition game at an All-Star Game in the early 80s. He must have been diagnosed about that time. Sorry, I get a little nostalgic, a little verbose when it comes to my guy, Roger Maris.
@Barry Ancona Ah, Minnesota! The source of all things bright and beautiful. And the Somalis and the Hmong are a welcome, hardworking addition to the excellence of this state, other opinions to the contrary.
@Puzzlemucker Nicely expressed. I, too, felt a stomach lurch when I resolved FEDERALGRANT. They used to be a tool for science, for social research, for something other than making sure billionaires are not suffering too much. We taxpayers need to reduce their suffering from the mass of all that money and all that responsibility for "job making" and all that effort it takes to ignore everyone besides themselves. Sorry, I'm doing it again. I truly wish I could stifle my horror and indignation at what this place has become.
Really a plum of a puzzle. And a perfect example of one that would have stopped me cold two years ago. Before I became aware of Anything-Can-Happen-Thursday, I would have quite with it about 25% filled, and no hope of figuring out anything else. As it was, I stumbled around badly until I finally got enough crosses for FRUITLESS_ _ . Even without the last two letters I now knew the trick, and instead of pounding my head against the wall with the clue, I looked for partly formed fruit names. Once found, then the clue was useful. A lot of fun, I thought. I wasn't especially speedy, and I thought once or twice that I was Going Down. In the end I didn't immediately get the happy music. I had mADD instead of SADD, in the extreme south west. But in the end, I had no raisin to grape.
So everyone is going to say how easy a Wednesday puzzle that I couldn't finish was, right? I blame the constructors for knowing things I don't know, and using them. I blame the editors for cluing "purple boba", when I don't have any idea what "boba" is. I suppose it's only known by the fancy-schmancy New York City people who are so cosmopolitan and who hate all us mid-westerners, and don't want us to be able to solve their puzzles. I think the constructor is a horrible, horrible person for knowing that Tao Terrence was a mathematician. Or is it Terrence Tao? It's completely unfair for such a thing to happen to me on a Wednesday. How is anyone supposed to know that? By reading, and learning and all that silly stuff? That's totally bonkers. Everybody's awful. The constructor, the editors, the programers, the NYT legal team, the reporters, the paper boys, the editors (yeah, they're so horrible they need a second-call out). I hope every one of them loses their jobs, and never get another chance. That'll teach them to hurt my pride. My self-esteem is dear to me, and it's not right for me to have to suffer the humiliation of not getting an early week puzzle. Yeah, and to all those people yesterday who screamed about how hard the Tuesday was, I'm sorry I chided you. You were 100% right. If someone can't solve a puzzle, it's everyone else's fault. 😭 <-- This is me. I hope you're all happy.
@Andrew Sigh. We are all very impressed with your solving ability.
This was a delight. I was really struggling with MEYERS, trying to smash the name into four letters. I felt a tremendous weight fall from my shoulders when I realized EYE made a ton of sense. I think it's pretty rare to have only a single rebus, isn't it? I like it a lot. I suspect there is a tsunami brewing, though, which will make curb my enthusiasm about the whole affair.
Might I request we lighten up on the "too easy" hyperbole? I mean, this is a creation by a human being, who undoubtedly spend a lot of time one it, who is almost certainly reading the comments. Sorry, Kevin, for the reception you're getting here from some. I am actually embarrassed for the forum.
@Steve L I take it you have a beef with TIP ROAST? That's really not all that rare.
Inspiring story from a constructor caps off a fun puzzle. Brain healing seems special to me, somehow. I don't know how many times I read 4D until I finally noticed there was only one "t" in "sigmatism"
TIL that female llamas respond very much like the female humans I used to ask out in high school.