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German rapid transit system / WED 11-14-18 / Mag for docs / Muse featured in Xanadu / Hypothetical body in the solar system beyond Nepture / Western flick in old parlance / Govt org dating from 1930s
Wednesday, November 14, 2018
Constructor: Sam Trabucco
Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium (3:45)
Theme answers:
- B FLAT MAJOR (16A: Key for five Mozart piano concertos)
- BE YOURSELF (22A: "Just act natural!")
- BEA ARTHUR (34A: "The Golden Girls" actress)
- BEAR TRACKS (47A: Worrisome sign around a campsite)
The Berlin U-Bahn ([uː.baːn]; short for Untergrundbahn, "underground railway") is a rapid transit railway in Berlin, the capital city of Germany, and a major part of the city's public transport system. Together with the S-Bahn, a network of suburban train lines, and a tram network that operates mostly in the eastern parts of the city, it serves as the main means of transport in the capital. (WIKIpedia)
• • •
(and here's his puzzle website—a huge trove of free goodness just waiting for you)
JAMES BEARD > GROW A BEARD. If NYT puzzles had titles (which they should) then the title could've carried the burden of theme indication and that last themer could've been something more interesting. The lack of titles really does limit puzzling possibilities. It's an invisible deficiency, but a deficiency nonetheless. All tournament puzzles have titles. Sunday puzzles have titles. WSJ puzzles have titles. Because they are fun and (more importantly) useful. They liberate your grid, or at least give you more options for realizing your theme idea.
Know your crosswordese: OATER! (29D: Western flick in old parlance) It is another word for a western (movie). I know this because I do crosswords (though I have occasionally heard the word in the wild) (though I also watch a ton of TCM and I'm not sure if that counts as "the wild"). OATER is an anagram of another important piece of crosswordese, which is also in this puzzle: ERATO. They are both anagrams of ORATE, which is a normal word that humans use, so no need to go into it here. As for ERATO, I'm not sure this clue is so great (45A: Muse featured in "Xanadu"). The muse that's "featured" in "Xanadu" is Terpsichore (the 'real' name of the main character, Kira, played by Olivia Newton-John—please subscribe to my "Xanadu" podcast and newsletter, I have so much more to say about that ridiculous movie, which somehow costars Gene Kelly (!) and yet features truly terrible dance numbers)
[Seriously, what is this!?!?]
Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld
[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]
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81 comments:
Woo hoo! Tied my Wednesday record - and slightly more than half of yesterdays time. Entertaining as well.
Easy-medium. Cute concept with some fine long downs. Liked it.
Relatively easy for a Wednesday for me. Never noticed the circles adding a letter progressively nor did I miss them. The main problem for me was the northeast. I had ScARFED for SNARFED and bigSTaR for ALISTER, the two of which gave me plenty of pause. One would think that I should know A-Lister by now, given that it appears regularly in crosswords. And I just can’t get used to SNARFED. It was “scarfed” where I came from. Oh well. Still enjoyed the puzzle.
Rex, were you having Manhattans tonight when you wrote your last paragraph? Just wondering...
Pretty cool theme. i agree with @jae. Think about it, though, without BEA ARTHUR, this puzzle isn't possible. I would have liked this more without the circles, but even with the circles, it’s a nifty idea. I disagree that GROW A BEARD is anemic. It feels much more like a Thing t me than “eat a sandwich.” (Ladies – fwiw, you absolutely will not grow a beard if you shave. For twenty years, I’ve beaten back this persistent werewolf vibe at my jawline.)
Part of the fun here in Rexworld is his links. Most days I don’t have time to watch them; I’m too busy designing avatars. Hah. Z’s right – insomnia and all that.) But today’s Gene Kelly one is funny. Rex – I’ll see your Xanadu dance and raise you one.
Painful reminder of my hostessing days with RESEAT. The first thing people do when you say, Here we are is look around for a better table. They don’t realize that you’ve taken them here so that you space out the load for waiters. Now they want to move to a table with a waiter who has just been seated with a large party. So you move them at their insistence and then they complain that it’s taking too long for their waiter to take their drink order.
Paired with BEER HAT, don’t be THAT GUY is funny. I do like THAT GUY. It’s so in the language. Look, I don’t wanna be That Guy - I know the line is really long [smiles at the fourteen people waiting behind him] - but I think this yellow bell pepper is on sale for 99 cents, and you rang it up for 1.49. Can someone go check?…
Are you okay?
This fun puzzle has a remarkable 13 NYT debut entries, including some that I'm surprised haven't shown up before, such as JOB FAIR, THAT GUY, and THIS IS WAR, and the one that gave me the biggest smile of the solve -- RIBBITS! For some reason, that word shot me back into my childhood.
Having the anagrammed neighboring names was a nice touch, along with lovely clues for BOTTLE and MALWARE, and there's a backward A MAJ very close to the B FLAT MAJOR (it would have been sweet if the former was just below the latter).
Since my 20s, I've been THAT GUY, the one with the on-again off-again beard, though I've worn it now for some five years, and maybe it's here to stay. But then again...
Slowed down briefly when I threw in DEAN and EDNA for the names at 15- and 18-across.
I didn’t like this. The theme was cute but the fill? Way too many abbreviations: PJS, MIB, FRO, MTA, GWB, RTE, STR, SSA. Y.U.C.K!
And both TNUT and IRAIL?? And OATER needs to be put to out to pasture, permanently.
Try this: consider introducing a friend to the pleasure of crossword puzzles by using today’s as an example. They are bound to look at this fill and give you a “are you kidding” look.
And the puzzle begins with a really insulting clue: JAMA (or any peer-reviewed scientific/medical Journal) is not a “mag”!! You won’t find them at the check-out of your local supermarket!
Wow! That flowed nice and easy. I’m not going to read any other comments and just believe I’m one smart cookie. BTW, I had a beard from 1967 to 2000.
Anyone do the mini puzz today?
Spoiler alert!
I don't get it...the 2 down clue is Coke or Pepsi and the answer is ADOS which is soda spelled backward. Say what? What am I missing?
Didn't anyone else like the crossing of WIKI and KIWIS?
@ LMS 3:50 AM
There's also BEA Benaderet, who was not only the proprietor of the Shady Rest Hotel on "Petticoat Junction" but was also the voice of Betty Rubble on "The Flintstones" in addition to about a thousand other things.
Best BEA Arthur quote: "I've done everything in show business except rodeo and porn."
If we're collecting bad music videos, there's always this: Indian Superman and Spiderwoman
Definitely easier than yesterday.
Really loved THAT GUY. Unfortunately, it was right next to the contemptible I MEAN NO. I guess with fourteen seven-letter words one was bound to be a dud. And nearby is BAES, which I think of as the puzzle-scrapper. If you need to use BAE or BAES, just scrap the whole puzzle.
Hidden Figures was a rare joy.
Excellent theme makes up for the shaky fill.
@Rex: UBAHN isn’t just in Berlin. I know there’s one in Munich, for instance.
@AnnieD -- 7A clue is "What an ad blocker blocks ... or a tricky hint to understanding 2-Down", and its answer punnily and perfectly describes 2D.
Now I do. Thanks.
@John Hnedak: I also noted that cross and yes, liked it.
It would have been fun to have BEA Taylor and the recurring Opie in the puzzle.
Wow. Lots of fun to be had today. The revealer gave me a genuine smile and sets my mood for a good day. Great puzzle Sam!
Thank you @ Lewis re: all of those debut answers. I did notice but did not look up any of them. My vote for "clues of the week" goes to the one for bottle. Ribbits! Yes!
@ LMS, I've been behind That Guy at the store as well. I've even offered to pay the extra 51 cents for him just to move things along.
I'm feeling rather smug because I thought of Coleridge rather than Olivia Newton-John for Xanadu.
Wonderful Wednesday! Hey, that's a phrase we don't hear very often.
Random thought about "at large" - Is there another way the word Large can be used with this meaning besides the way it's clued today?
Take a look at the answer to 7A
PC
It crosses “pop up”. Pop being another word for soda
In contrast to quite a few here, I enjoyed the puzzle overall but did not care one bit for the "theme." ( And I expected Rex to loathe it.). Cmon... Grow... T-TI-TIR-TIRE-TIRED? H-HA-HAI-HAIR? A P-PA-PAI-PAIR? I could go on but it's difficult to type that pattern on an iPad. The theme is like asking me to eat a green paint sandwich as far as I'm concerned.
I’m gonna need a link to this podcast/newsletter about the greatest bad movie of all time.
Great puzzle!!! And I am right in the middle!!!
Did... did Rex not get the theme?
It's no-shave November, to raise awareness of something or other... cancer I think.
Hence, GROW A BEARD.
I mean, it's not super clever or anything, but putting JAMES BEARD as the ultimate answer would have defeated the purpose.
I was expecting someone to mention No Shave November, which is A Thing. Participants are supposed to let their facial hair grow and donate the money they save on shaving products to cancer research, so a good a timely theme.
Like all the fresh stuff in this one. A guest at our summer resort on a pond in NH said "something" was keeping him awake all night and he had never heard such a thing and was it dangerous and so on, and we had to explain that it was a bullfrog, or perhaps several bullfrogs, which he was reluctant to believe. RIBBIT indeed.
I couldn't get that nice little jingle when you complete a puzzle until I came here and found, after much scrutiny, that ALISTAR (Will Smith) wasn't my "much sought after celeb" and that AXED wasn't quite right for "struck (out)". BEARpRintS instead of BEARTRACKS held me up a bit, as did RIBBeTs and ScARFED (@Brookboy), but otherwise breezed through this one and thoroughly enjoyed it. And the write-up, having just trimmed my beard, among other reasons.
@Rex, your "EAT A SANDWICH' made me laugh out loud.
This was sweeet. I'm liking all the puzzles this week and this one made me smile throughout the solve.
Watching your Xanadu video made me laugh, watching @Loren's video made me laugh and groan and watching @JOHN X's video made me laugh, groan and cry. Thanks, guys, I needed a jump start to my Wed.
I remember when PHAT was all the rage. I also remember when every single surfer dude couldn't start or end a sentence without the word "Bitchin."
Since @Loren started it, I'm going to add my THAT GUY experiences. It's never the 99 cents vs the 1.49, (that's reserved for little ladies). It's always wait till the groceries are all bagged up in plastic because the dude can't be bothered to bring his own reusable bags. Take his time finding his wallet. Insert his ATM card with the wrong number. Pull out 12 more cards that don't work either; fish around for cash and the needed pennies and at the end add an Oh...I forgot the charcoal.
Love me some YO YO MA sitting pretty on top of lovely BEA ARTHUR.
Not sure what a BEER HAT looks like but I can imagine a Bud Lite or two precariously perched on a FRO.
I liked the GROW A BEARD reveal because it could also apply to a DAME. Remember the "bearded ladies" at the circus? I always thought they were fake but they're not.
This was fun, Sam. I always enjoy your puzzles.
Hey All !
This was 7 mini puzs such together. All the corners, upper and lower middles, and the center. Surprised Rex didn't RAIL about that.
Nice puz overall, should've swapped the TuesPuz with this one.
I've had a goatee forever, the reason being I cut the hell out of my chin when I shave it. :-) Have to shave the rest and keep goatee trimmed for the job. Would love to stop shaving.
OH JOY clued sarcastically was fun. RIBBIT also neat.
5 F's, all in the North.
TYRANT BAES
RooMonster
DarrinV
@lms, perhaps you’ve never been in a place where 51 cents can make a difference in how much you can afford. Plus it’s the supermarket’s fault, not That Guy’s.
Our beloved lady of Mayberry spells her name Bee.
Xanadu is the 80s on crack. I relived the entire decade in that 7 minute clip. And Rex, much of the 80s elicited the question you asked: "Seriously, what is this!?!?"
In general I fail to see the fun in word ladders, but the fill and the revealer tickled me enough that I really enjoyed this. Rex is wrong about “eating a sandwich”. My first job out of college was as a print media buyer for medical advertisers so JAMA was an easy start. I agree that the puzzle played easy, but I spent some time imagining clothing that covered my feet (Spats?) before I got to PJS. MALWARE was a surprise. THATGUY was cute. It could be a good name for a sitcom a la Marlo Thomas. Of course I’d never watch it.
So what kind of STaR was the "much-sought-after celeb" (15D)? You see, I had aXED instead of EXED for "struck out"(33A), and never thought to question it since STAR looked so...right. When ALI STAR came in, I looked at it in utter bafflement. Who she? A DOOK of the first order, since I never once thought of A-LISTER.
This was where I spent all my time and used (but to no avail) all my gray cells. This is where I had my epic Wednesday fail. I have nothing to say about the rest of this very meh puzzle which I found duller than dull.
@annie D - e-mail me and I'll explain the mini
Just figured out. Pretty good cluing.
@thfenn (8:54) -- Glad to know I'm not the only one who had ALI STAR/ AXED. Now I feel just a little less stupid.
I'm surprised at how many of y'all really enjoyed this puzzle. I wouldn't have predicted it. Seems like I'm the outlier today.
B BE BEA BEAR BEARD BEARDX. The puz idea kinda grows on U. What's BRB in that there other guest puz#2, btw? Hunk of ingrown beard hair? Guest grid does have 5 U's and PEE, tho, sooo … ok.
staff weeject pick: STR. honorable remote mention to GWB & BRB, tho. Ooooh … is BRB maybe shorthand for "I shall return anon"?
Primo 7-stacks in the corners. Primo weeject stack in the middle.
fave stack fillins: JOBFAIR. PLANETX. THATGUY. ATLARGE. SNARFED. YAY.
Admirable ow de speration: IRAIL.
Reckon I'd also go with sawppin this puz to Tuesday and the TuesPuz to today. The gods of YAREN would insist.
Thanx for the fun, Mr. Trabucco. Fairly eazy-E, but got a bit hairy, in spots.
Masked & Anonymo3Us
**gruntz**
@John Hnedak, yeah, that was PHAT.
My big problem was frog orthography; we've got D-Rings, so why not a d-NUT? Reason prevailed, so I fixed it, but after calling an I-beam a RAIL, I figured maybe when it comes to letter-named objects, anything goes.
@pabloinnh -- donate the cost of shaving for a month? That would be about 57 cents, unless it's the month when I have to buy a new pack of blade cartridges, which only comes every 3 years or so. I grew a beard for the Red Sox once, but then they lost, so I'm not doing it again.
By the way, start a beard would have fit the clue and the concept better -- few of us can grow a beard in one day--but it would have been too many letters, so OK.
The first three sets of circles are all pronounced 'bee,' so I figured that would be the theme -- kind of disappointed when I got to the BEAR.
@Suzie Q, I thought of Coleridge too -- only because I've never heard of that movie until now. His poem is actually called "Kubla Khan," though, I think. And I don't think the woman wailing for her demon lover is a muse.
@Rex, you need to travel more. Or read novels, or something, U-BAHN ought to be a gimme.
@SusieQ - the idiom "living large" uses the same sense of the word "large" as the phrase "at large" = unrestrained, free from the constraints of law or custom or budget. "Large" hasn't been used in that sense freely since the days of Shakespeare, but those two frozen idioms keep the dictionary compilers busy.
It came into English from French.
Large is also the name of the longest note in music notation, equal to 8 whole notes and also called maxima. Also obsolete.
Very flat puz for me.
If it wasn't for the theme (directly affecting me, hah) I would give it a D. (Had no idea about no-shaving November but you can count me out for a have-to-shave December).
The fill was ok, pity the clueing was so unimaginative (exceptions: 26A, 47A and 40D).
Rabbits near a pond? Silly me..
Am here, the party can finally start!
Almost DNF due to -RATO and UT- Natick. Just gave up and cycled through the alphabet til I got the music. Shouldn’t 35D have included (informal) in the clue? Sloppy cluing WS. I expect better.
Really thought the theme was impressive since the growing words were each stand-alone. B. BE. BEA (never heard of her). BEAR. BEARD.
Like OFL it helped me figure out the last three quickly.
Does anyone out there really say "snarfed"? Seriously, educate me. Maybe it's a regional thing. Have ALWAYS said "scarfed". Fill me in, please.
@Hungry Mother...I'm beginning to believe you are not at Mother at all...unless it was a hormonal thing
@QuasiMojo - Don’t be THAT GUY. When the 59 center has an Apple Watch and drives a Tesla it’s okay to be a little irked.
@smalltowndoc - Don’t be THAT GUY. “Mag” in the clue is just a signifier of an abbreviation, acronym, or initialism.
I don’t often disagree with Rex, but he is wrong, Wrong, WRONG about puzzle titles. I feel about titles the way he feels about notes. I don’t look at them. Why would anyone think a spoiler at the top of puzzle is a good thing, Sure, they make the constructor’s job easier, but sussing out the theme is part of the solving fun. If you need the title to suss out the theme you have a DNF. Bah. HumBug.
@David Schinnerer - I have only ever seen SNARFED in the NYTX. I don’t think I’ve ever seen ScARFED in a NYTX. I’m with you, ScARFED is a thing and SNARFED is not. Still, I dutifully put in the “correct” answer.
It's Xanadu the poem, not the musical.
Easy & fun
@David S., 10:51AM -- The Official M&A Help Desk Dictionary says …
"scarf 3 |skärf|
verb [ with obj. ] informal
eat or drink (something) hungrily or enthusiastically: he scarfed down the waffles."
"snarf |snärf|
verb [ with obj. ] informal
eat or drink quickly or greedily: they snarfed up frozen yogurt."
Sooo … yep and yep. M&A slight preference, to answer the puzclue woulda been SCARFED, fwiw.
Interestinly, it also says …
"scarf 2 |skärf|
verb [ with obj. ]
1 join the ends of (two pieces of timber or metal) by beveling or notching them so that they fit over or into each other.
2 make an incision in the blubber of (a whale)."
… Ergo, "Scarfed up a bunch of blubber" can mean different stuff to different folks.
In M&A msg#1, "sawppin" shoulda been "swappin". In-ad-vertantly swapped my swappin letters, a bit.
M&A Help Desk & Blubber Scarfer
"Not plannin to brb"
Feeling a little less stupid myself, thanks.
So..., I was going to point out that Rex’s use of quote marks in the Xanadu paragraph suggests he’s joshing us and knows the difference between the movie and the poem. But what poem? Coleridge never mentions ERATO nor Terpsichore. Is there some other poem? The closest I could find is that ERATO figures in the 2007 musical based on the 1980 movie. Who knew there was a 2007 musical? Anyway, I found nothing to suggest that ERATO is a character in any Xanadu poem.
Fun breeze of a puzzle. Second fastest Wednesday for me, and came in between my average Monday and Tuesday time, which feels about right. 16A, even if you don't know the keys of Mozart concertos (which I don't), you can still get a majority of the fill in. It's gotta be something flat major/minor or something sharp/major minor if it's a long answer. Only the former fits, so -FLATM--OR. I'd argue that it's maybe a bit too much of a gimme for a long clue like that.
The only places I got tangle up in are IRAIL (which I have never heard of) and it took me about a minute or so for my brain to remember JAMA (which is especially dumb, as a good friend of mine worked for them.) I needed those letters to open up the NW corner for me. So, basically, minus that brain fart in the NW, this should have been a record Wednesday for me.
Overall, a nice, smooth solve, no major hiccups, but maybe more a Tuesday, at best.
@Z it’s never “okay to be irked.” Patience is a virtue. :) You’re right about Xanadu, though.
So I was even slower today than yesterday because I outsmarted myself in a couple of ways. I had @Nancy's ALI STaR for a while but luckily re-read 15D's clue, did see the DOOK and changed aXED to EXED, a rare DNF dodge for me.
But my main problem, after having the idea planted by 16A's B FLAT MAJOR, was that I thought this was a musical growth theme, where the FLAT scales start with B (one flat scale), BE (two flat scale), etc. all the way to BEAd and BEADG. Because you could go up to 7 flats and there's no reason to stop with just 5, my idea of the theme would have been a dumb one. But that didn't keep me from splatzing in BEAd at 47A. And when GROW A BEARD showed up, I didn't immediately go back and EX[ED] out the errant "d". But I eventually got the theme earworm out of my head and finished with no errors. YAY.
OH yeah, I, too, was taken by surprise by MALWARE (hi @Hartley70!) and plopped MALaria in there. It wasn't until I got TEED, ironically, that I fixed all that.
Thanks, Sam Trabucco, for a fun Wednesday. I like it.
GROW A BEARD...eat a sandwich...watch paint dry.... I'm with @Nancy, unable to get excited by the theme. For me, the FINER points of the puzzle were the trio of Downs in the SW corner.
Beginning of an ode to Greek yogurt: O, FAGE...
@M&A
That's the best job title I've seen. Literal LOL. How your brain works is amazing.
@David Schinnerer
@Hungry Mother is neither a Mother (well, biologically, don't know IRL, Har), a woman, nor probably Hungry.
PHAT RIBBIT. Har. Remember the Budweiser commercial with the three frogs(toads?)? Bud...Weis...errrr.
RooMonster
Har, @M&A, BRB, could be short for B’rer RIBBIT! But Google BEARs out your “return anon” theory.
Sign in a country store:
We don't know where Mom is but we have Pop on ice.
A midget seer is arrested for fraud during a seance but subsequently escapes.
The police bulletin reads "Small medium at large."
Found NE to be pretty tough
Heck, as long as we are sharing videos - the incomparable Dale Bozzio and Missing Persons. It's everything I love about the eighties.
@QuasiMojo - What kind of PC nonsense is this. Now I’m irked that I can’t be irked.*
@Peter P - I wasted precious picoseconds, maybe even nanoseconds, at BF before my “Oh, -LATM- - OR” D’Oh moment. Not much better than IN A/B/C/D/E/F/G as fill goes, and Rex complains about GROW A BEARD. Still, the MAJOR/MINOR, you don’t actually need to know anything about the work, trick wasn’t obvious to me for several years of solving. I imagine it stymieing newer solvers distracted by the “how the heck am I supposed to know that” of excessive clue detail.
*I just know someone will take this exchange seriously. Don’t.
@Z - I'm pretty much a newbie solver-just started doing these things regularly about three months ago (the times Rex posts seem just incomprehensible to me. My fastest Monday is a hair under 5, but avg 8:50, and this one I finished in 10 and change, avg 16:30 for Wed). It's just that I grew up with a lot of music, including playing it, so it seemed obvious to me that the answer had to be of that form. I didn't even consider forms that included an introductory phrase like "IN." With 4D and 13D (ETE and AGASSI) filling in the AT, I knew my hunch was right.
What key does a Steinway grand play in when it’s dropped into a mine shaft and hits the bottom?
A flat miner.
Emmanuelle and her mom show their ‘stuff’.
BÉART RACKS
I liked this one a lot. I had bigSTAR, then ALLSTAR before I finally parsed ALISTER correctly.
Hidden Figures is excellent, especially if you were around at the dawn of the space age. I know enough math to be impressed by the math whizzes in the movie. Jim Parsons (Sheldon in BBT) has a relatively small role.
I haven't heard of an IRAIL. Not I'm my book of rolled steel shapes. There's an I-beam, a crane rail and a choo-choo rail, but no I-rail.
And - am I the only one who looked at 45A "Muse featured in Xanadu" and plopped in LOREN???? She deserves a place in one of these puzzles.
@Monty boy I-beams are used as permanent supports for the trolleys used to move machinery, in which case they may be referred to as I-rails by those who move the machinery. Mist<>vapor, JAMA<>magazine
All of these are examples of how knowing a lot about a subject disrupts the crossword solve.
PC
The Fireball this week is a Patrick Berry and it is good. Very Very Very Good. Puzzle of the Year type good.
I'm surprised no one complained about 19A, FALSE IDOL.... doesn't an idol have to be false? if it weren't false, it wouldn't be an idol... what the Bible prohibits is the worship of idols, or of false gods...
Ah I see on the mini. Thanks guys for your help with that. Much appreciated!
RESEAT AIMS
BEYOURSELF, and don’t GROWABEARD,
IMEANIT and I’MHERE to tell you why:
The FINER BAES will find you RITE weird;
IMEANNO one wants to be THATGUY.
--- JANELLE “PHAT JAMA” AGASSI
@spacey will be sure to enjoy BFLATMAJOR, IRAIL, UBAHN, TNUT and perhaps even MIB and MAB. And your PJS could be your JAMAs. So there’s some of your fill.
Gotta think that the anagram clues for LANA and ALAN came straight from Will.
JANELLE Monae gets plenty of airplay on 89.3 The Current from MN Public Radio. Stream it if you like.
There are so many options with JANELLE, LANA, ELLA, INGA, (BEAARTHUR?), and MARGE, but at the top of the list of yeah BAES is this blog’s own @TEEDmn.
Mixed feelings on the quality here. Don’t know if I’m wrong or RITE.
Finished lickety split with no erasures. I got the gimmick early in the game and SNARFED the grid RITE after that. There were only a few MARGE-inal issues with the fill. So how could IRAIL against THATGUY who placed ALAN on top of LANA? YAY to Sam Trabuco for one of the FINER Wednesday puzzles.
"Add a letter?" I'll give you add-a-letter: BFLATMAJOR (yikes, a RMK featured as a theme answer!!), ALISTER, PLANETX (crossing EXED: eww!), IRAIL (ridiculous, even if there IS such a thing), UBAHN, and TNUT, which probably fastens the IRAIL. SIX, in a single grid! WHAT is with all these add-a-letters? STOP!
This one with yesterday's have to be the worst tandem in history. The theme, complete with circles (OHJOY!), is ho-hum; the revealer only minorly cute. And, you saw it coming. As to the fill, beside the above list there's a top-line acronym-fest (JAMA, PJS) and a bucketful of "weejects:" ETE, way overused, STR...oh, the hell with listing 'em all. Here's a novel idea: use REAL WORDS in your grid. Ever hear of those?
It's been a while since the inimitable ELLA wore the DOD sash; she dons it today. Honorable mention to INGA Swenson. Double-bogey--and that's only because IAM in a good mood.
Not a speed-solver, but this was easiest, fastest solve of the week, including theme. Virtually solved itself.
A bit surprised to see two FAIRs right next to each other leading off, as well as FAIRy queen as clue for MAB. Liked MIB and MAB as a pair, RIBBIT on its own, and nicely clued MALWARE.
Interesting quintet of gals: LANA, JANELLE, BEA, INGA, and MARGE.
Enjoyed the smooth sailing.
How could I miss ELLA?!
Could be @Spacey's puzzle of the year! Just add a letter and, poof!
What an easy, smooth week so far compared wih last week. Couldn't BEAR another one. Not even MARGEinally.
Well, IMHERE, but not all here yet. Still sniffling. Acccccchhhhhoooo!
Diana, LIW
A FAIRly prosaic puzzle with kind of an add-a-letter word ladder which didn't cause anyone any pain and had a dual-purpose revealer both completing the series and describing the theme. OK.
Seriously @Spacey - what is wrong with B FLAT MAJOR or ALISTER or even IRAIL assuming there is such a thing? These are terms people use, ie "words". No? Furthermore, whatever a constructor's motivation, if she wants to have a musical key as an answer, it has to be a letter followed by a description. I just want to know why these always rub you the wrong way.
For awhile I had a mustache, then was clean-shaven, then grew a BEARD, then was clean-shaven again, and now sport a goatee, or rather, a Van Dyke, admittedly to camouflage a creeping jowliness in my appearance (blush). Stuff you undoubtedly aren't interested in.
Puzzle was fine for a Wednesday.
@rainy: They are jarring to the solver. I will give 'em this: they're not quite as bad as SILENTH or HARDC. But man, TNUT has been in so often you could build a car with 'em all. A car with a TTOP. I sorta relent for TBALL, because what's cuter than a 5-year-old swinging at one of those? But generally, I think those letter-adds occur when the constructor has a square left over, and it's the only way he can EKE out a grid. When's the last time you saw a letter-add in a PB1 grid? My point.
@annied thank you! Googled this mystified by the answer. At least the fill made it solvable. Upon further reflection I think it’s the “ pop UP” that gives it meaning, “soda” can be read bottom to top, or “up”. Meh. With you. :)
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