.png)
Outdated postal abbr / THU 10-17-19 / Grimalkin / Rowdy concertgoer maybe / Big name in small planes / Cybermemo / 1980s Pontiac sports car
Thursday, October 17, 2019
WARNING / ALERT / IMPORTANT NOTICE: If you are solving in the newspaper, then your puzzle is different from everyone else's. Please go back in time and enjoy the write-up I did for your puzzle LAST MONTH, thank you. (Everyone who downloads the puzzle or solves in the app, keep reading)
***
Constructor: Randolph Ross
Relative difficulty: untimed, on paper, but I'm gonna say "Easy-Medium"
THEME: joined at the hip — clues are ALLCAPS words or names that have something in common and have been run together, overlapping at last letter of first word and first letter of last word. Each word; these clues visually represent familiar two-word phrases where the first word means (roughly) "joined" and the second word is whatever kind of thing the clue words are. So:
Theme answers:
- SPLICED GENES (20A: WILDERAYBURN) (Gene WILDER + Gene RAYBURN (an old talk show host))
- ATTACHED HOUSES (22: HACIENDADOBE) (can a hacienda not be made out of adobe? These "houses" don't seem distinct enough from one another)
- COMBINED FORCES (43A: MILITIARMY) (militia + army)
- UNITED STATES (48A: UTAHAWAII) (state of Utah, state of Hawaii)
Marlena Evans is a fictional character on the NBC daytime drama, Days of Our Lives, a long-running serial about working life in the fictional town of Salem. She has been played by actress Deidre Hall since 1976, but the character was absent from the show from 1987 to March 1991 and again from January 2009 to September 2011. Marlena was created by scriptwriter Pat Falken Smith and executive producer Betty Corday, and has become one of Days of our Lives' most well-known characters. Hall made her debut on the soap on June 21, 1976, currently making her the second longest running actress on the serial, surpassed only by Suzanne Rogers (Maggie). (wikipedia)
• • •
 |
| ALAN HALE |
Five things:
- 3D: Ticket category (ADULT) — I got PAYS then PLACID then ran the Downs coming off of PLACID and got them all right ... except this one. I wrote in AISLE.
- 34A: Grimalkin (CRONE) — Grim what now? If I've seen this word before, I forgot it ("this word" = "grimalkin" — I *have* heard of CRONE!). Cool word. Storing it away.
- 54A: Locker room shower? (ESPN) — old cluing trick, where "shower" means "entity that shows something" (as opposed to "descending moisture") (P.S. congrats to the Washington Nationals on their first trip to the World Series—I assume their locker room was showered with champagne after Game 4 of the NLCS)
- 7A: Deg. for an animator (BFA) — kinda hate "degree" clues because who knows? I always have to leave the first square blank on this one, as it could easily be MFA (the deg. I'm actually more familiar with).
- 58A: K'ung Fu ___ (Confucius) (TSE) — really enjoying* the "anagrams of EST" mini theme going on there at the bottom of the grid: quartETS over SET over TSE (crossing D'ESTE!). Really... something (*not actually enjoying)
[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]
Save And Share :
74 comments:
I always thought a Grimaldi next was a cat that hung around a witchy woman, not the woman herself. Learned something.
Gene Rayburn was the host on the Match Game. Yes, a lot of "talk" on it but more of a game show. Plenty of tv channels "show" locker rooms. How have I missed 40 years of Days of our Lives? Having seen Wonder Woman I'd have to disagree with the clue as written. Do you think the clue was supposed to be Hacienda Abode? I've never heard of a house called an adobe. An annoying computer thing, you bet!
Gimmicky boring puzzle. This is proving to be a lousy week of NYT puzzles.
Once again, this is not the puzzle that appears in the paper.
I’m all afuss about this puzzle. It has a lot of really, rally bad ideas. Initialisms crossing initialisms, abbreviations crossing abbreviations, a partial crossing a partial, an obscure car crossing a foreign word. Worst offenders – in no particular order:
QED/ESPN/APB
DHS/PTS
ON TV/KTS
FIERO/FINI
DESTE/TSE
BFA and URL crossing FRIEDMAN
RCA/RFD
Additionally, it was much too easy for a Thursday. Felt like a fairly easy Wednesday.
And yet, I kinda liked it because the theme was nifty.
We had "grimalkin" as a clue just last month, so I was a little surprised Rex claimed not to have seen it. It turns out that was the day when we had different puzzles online versus in the paper, so Rex possibly never saw it.
this was the puzzle that ran on the print edition the day they ran two separate puzzles... good to see that they couldn't be bothered to run a new one...
I didn't get this puzzle. I had a lot of trouble with the one in the print edition and turned to you, Rex, to explain it to me. Anyone?
What was that? Atrocious fill. After I had gone through every part of the puzzle as much as I thought I could, I had about six answers. Then I grokked the theme and everything eventual fell. Much to my shock I was golden in 24:06.
I have nothing to add to Rex about how bad the fill was. A bunch of names no one should now and abbreviations and partials that are obscure.
I won't begin to tell you what big ones I thought Elvis had. SIDE BURNS...Oh, OK.
So the theme answers were pretty easy to get and then you fill my eastern section with names, names, names. Pffft. When I was on maternity leave I watched "Days of our Lives" ...that was...yeah...about 40 years ago. Is MARLENA still alive? GAL GADOT? Gee...I had the ADOT and was thinking maybe Brigitte or something. Grimalkin is a CRONE? I thought it was a cat.
This just felt old. I did like the theme answers and I thought they were clever but jeez louise even your cars are past their prime.
Here's looking at you, Friday. Cross fingers.
Well, I breezed through this puzzle in no time flat. Now I learn from Rex it should have taken much longer as I ought to have been slowed down by outrage along the way for all the lousy fill. Sorry, Rex. I wasn't offended by any of it.
Once again, I have the Other Puzzle -- the one not being discussed today. I could go back and post on last month's blog -- the one that discusses the Doug Peterson puzzle that I got in the paper edition today. But I won't -- no one will bother to go back and read my comment. Suffice it to say that I loved this puzzle -- with the one, glaring exception of the ridiculous 21A.
Naticked at ALANHALE and GALGADOT.
Yo, the SE was tough. I finally remembered CESSNA and it fell into place. Much faster than normal.
I wonder if 22 across was meant to be
HACIENABODE rather than HACIENDADOBE
Which is better?
The one in the paper was a nice rebus puzzle. Anyone know the date Rex carved this one up?
Well, this explains why I never get it when Rex complains about some theme being used ten years ago in a different paper. I apparently solved this exact puzzle three weeks ago, and I have no memory of having seen the theme before. Apparently the only thing that stuck, at least consciously, was 'grimalkin'. Subconsciously, perhaps a lot more and that was why it felt so easy.
The themers were kinda fun, easy to get, but fun. I barely notice fill much of the time but I tried to figure out what Rex would especially hate here and I was about 50% right. I liked some of the misdirects even if they’re familiar (e.g., French bean) to long-time solvers. Oh, I say “Cosmic!” quite often.
This was so easy that it was almost insulting.
I did like lead foot and also love the word grimalkin but could have sworn it was a cat as others have said.
I have done R. Ross puzzles that I enjoyed but this was not one of them. Wasted Thursday.
I did both puzzles last month. Was wondering why The Peterson puzzle in the paper seemed stale. Oh, because I solve it a month ago. I have a BEQ to start and an AVCX to finish, so not going to bother with the Ross puzzle again because, as I vaguely recall, what Rex said.
For @Nancy. There was a period in the late 80’s where the car rule was “change the station whenever Collins or Seger are played.” There were times when the only options were NPR or the country music stations.
Game show, talk show? Yeah, there's a difference.
This was way too easy for a Thursday, and I think Anon@8:18 up there is probably correct.
Overall, meh.
Think you could make the captcha even more dark and out of focus?
Victim of insomnia here so was grareful for something to do at 2:30 am. Gene Wilder made me think of fellow Detroit native Gilda Radner. Still miss her.
FWE (finished with an error) at the crossing of D'ESTE and TSE. I guessed an O where it should have been an E.
No rebus, no quip, so no complaints here. Thursday is "Anything can happen day". No reason to be upset.
A grimalkin is a cat.
No, a grimalkin is a CRONE.
Stop, you're both right. It's two, two, two old things in one.*
From Webster's II New College Dictionary (hardcover):
1. An old female cat.
2. A shrewish old woman.
BTW, spellcheck dislikes "grimalkin"
*Apologies to Certs
@kitshef: Grimalkin seems familiar to you because it was this puzzle that was run, so Rex probably didn't see it...but you did, evidently. You just did the puzzle again...no wonder it seemed easy to you. LOL
My dad was a rural mail carrier...he started his route (pronounced ROWT) in the 50s or early 60s. I remember him saying Rural Free Delivery, but after a time, he only called it "The Route" and that he was a rural mail carrier. I don't think the mail needed RFD in the address, and since I grew up in a rather rural place, I only took the RFD from Mayberry RFD to mean that it was rural. There were a lot of small towns in my area and they all had their own mail service. The RFD people were by and large farmers or people living outside the city/town limits, aka the "country." We used to go visit people out in the country or talked about people who lived in the country. We city folk (all 20,000 of us) were a hoity toity bunch.
I have zero idea who GAL GADOT is. Only got the name from the crosses and was sure it was wrong.
Rex's take on "shower" makes me wonder who the shower was of the champagne shower in the locker room last night? Who was the shower of the shower?
Ugh, the Proper Noun Parade was out in full force today. I had to look up about five just to get unstuck, and I usually try to keep it to one or two at the most. There were definitely some Naticks in there, at least for a younger solver like me. Woof.
Odd mix of super easy for a Thursday (themers and several other longer answers) and "how the hell am I supposed to know that" short answers. Several should have been natick spots for me that I just guessed right on (not intuited, but all out guessed).
On the rare occasion my father would allow my mother to drive us kids into the city by herself (90 miles of highway), he would always something about her having a LEAD FOOT and that we would need to remind her to slow down.
I had punniest before CORNIEST. I like my answer better. :)
This puzzle normalizes dad jokes, which is not okay.
QED: Last evening, my teenage daughter was a little out of sorts. I said, "Did you hear what happened to the origami shop? ... It folded." [Patronizing eye-roll]. "Which is weird because business was increasing." [Conciliatory smile, small change in breathing pattern suggesting laughter]. "Get it? In-creasing?" "Yes." As I remember the story, we parted on good terms, just like in the commercials.
So is Rex really an English professor or does he just play one ONTV?
When the slightly Elizabethanized Greymalkin appears in the Act 1 Scene 1of Macbeth and Rex claims never to have heard of the word you have to wonder.
DESTE crossed with TSE is particularly terrible.
I had the same reaction to the NE corner -- wracked my brain trying to figure out "--TV" thinking it was going to be an abbreviation like "SCTV" or "CCTV". Kept wanting to put "CNTV" for "Canadian TV" even though I was pretty sure neither of those shows were Canadian. Completing that corner was not an "ah-ha" moment so much as "ye gods".
Anonymous@8:18am: HACIENDADOBE is correct. "Hacienda" and "adobe" are two words that both mean a kind of house. "Haciena" is not anything that I'm aware of, except for a typo for "hacienda".
JB129: It happened again.
I think 8:18 just accidentally omitted the First "D".
Haciendadobe was a sticking point for me.
A) Adobe is a building material, not a house.
B) I was expecting Casas for houses.
@barbiebarbie - Yes, I too thought that grimalkin was a witch’s cat-familiar. I believe I got this impression from a note on the Folger’s Library edition of MacBeth, glossing its usage in the first witches’ scene.
Only know Grimalkin as one of the yachts that sank during the 78 Fastnet race
Same whining as many above, but I enjoyed @birchbark’s brief family tale.
@Birchbark
Good one!
Medium. Reasonably clever, liked it, but I agree with Rex on the fill.
The gimmicks were clever enough but the fill disappointed a little bit.
Yesterday's ALAN HALE is tomorrow's GAL GADOT.
Actually his name is Alan hale jr
@oopsydeb - me too for punNIEST at first.
BFA for an animator????? who're you kidding??????? it's been years since anyone *drew* a cartoon. these days it's all done with software, so a BSEE or BSCS or a programming 'certificate' from some store front fly-by-night coding 'school'.
Thanks for the tip of the hat to the Nats, Rex. They've been big fun in the DC area (at least since May 23, when they were 19-31). First WS for DC since 1933 so the populace is jazzed big time.
Richardf8 10:21 - Definition of adobe. 1 : a brick or building material of sun-dried earth and straw. 2 : a structure made of adobe bricks. 3 : a heavy clay used in making adobe bricks broadly : alluvial or playa clay in desert or arid regions.
Note definition 2.
@Nancy....You haven't missed much of anything. Todays Randolph Ross puzzle is a clunker. I usually like him but this was pretty ho hum bad.
@Rex mentioned that the NYT gets about 500 entries per month. I don't know why Will chooses some of the ones he does or what exactly tickles his fancy but lately the ones he publishes just seem to miss barco.
Wow, the themers really tended to cuddle up to each other, today. Was kinda cold last night, I'd grant.
Theme mcguffin was neat, and was kindasorta a reversi-version of a puz that was borne on the 4th of July. fave: SPLICEDGENES.
The fillins were halfway decent, for a Thurs-level solvequest … but but … the name game got awful intense in the crossin zone of FRIEDMAN/ALANHALE/GEORG/MARLENA/GALGADOT/PERES. The nanosecond meter tended to spin a bit, in that puzpart.
Plus, for some reason I couldn't think of CONSULATE for way too long … real oddly, wanted CONSULARY. Bad brain. Bad bad.
staff weeject pick: BFA. har. The museum curators get more respect -- their go-to degree answer is usually MFA. Lowly ["mickey mouse"?] animators only get yer lower-level BFA degree.
Best Ow de Speration a la Runt = UNARM/AFUSS.
Thanx, Mr. Ross. Congratz on gettin them two outings for the same puz.
Nice write-up, @RP. Enjoyed the five bullet items.
Masked & Anonym8Us
**gruntz**
Naticked at the actors cross. GAY GADOT seemed a more plausible name and ALAN HAYE also made sense to me.
I think Grimalkin is an old Maleska clue that seems to be making an unfortunate comeback.
Was going to make same comment. Alan Hale sr. (The skipper's father) was an actor in his own right
Chicken Adobe is a very popular and easy recipe. You'll probably feel a little full after eating it though.
Combine forces? Marlena's not into it if it's not worthwhile.
Adobe meaning a building made of adobe seems to be a legitimate 2nd or 3rd definition of adobe. Clue is good. I like it slightly better than abode, but can understand others liking abode.
UNARM is defined in many places as to deprive of arms or armour but most references are archaic. But unarmed still means without arms or armour. So maybe the clue should add an "old style" at the end.
I actually thought the fill was pretty good. Too many names, yes. The abbreviations did not bother me even though one caused an error I missed. Had nUDGE and when nFA filled in, I didn't bother to think twice. Should have. Very few unfair crosses and and lots of nice words considering the grid layout. DESTE TSE the only really bad one. And they only cross at the final E and knowing TSE did not seem unusual for a Thursday puzzle. The longer fill is good.
I am a bit mystified by dad jokes. Are all puns and quips suppose to be bad? Does youth not like puns? Or only oft repeated ones? I once made up a series of nonsensical jokes based the oldest of old jokes.
Why did the fireman cross the road?
To hold his pants up.
My son, the artist, loved them.
My son, the nuclear sub engineer, appreciated them. Few others saw any humor in them.
@David 9:12 Go blue and you won’t have to worry about those nasty Capchas again.
Liked this one a lot. Had a little trouble at 22A where partner had HOmes at the end and I had ATTACHED at the beginning and was wondering what was going to fill in that extra hole betwixt the two. ALAN HALE and SEDER set us straight. He also had nUDGE at 7D, never heard of a nFA so BUDGE it is, easy fix.
Agree it was a little too easy, but I’ll take it.
The paper puzzle was a fun rebus, a bit on the easy side. I was looking forward to Rex’s critique and everyone’s comments, but alas ...
This is really annoying. What is the problem with publishing it correctly? How about giving correct clue to find the mistaken one? No not “last month” sept 17 is not this one. Yes I went back to try to
See. Can’t be hard to put in the url. Not nice.
Connection?
I thought it was a fine little Thurs rebus, a bit on the easy side. I was looking forward to the critique and comments.
I thought it was a fine little Thurs rebus, a bit on the easy side. I was looking forward to the critique and comments.
Why am I continually invited to talk to myself? If I can’t post, can you at least take down the goddam fucking (to get a moderator’s attention) reply box with my screen name on it?
If I can comment ONLY anonymously, so be it
If I must remain anonymous, OK
This was easy until I came back up to the NW. Everything above SPLICED was blank except for ICECAPS and I had to chisel away at everything else. PLACID should have been easy enough but "calm" and "serene" and what I almost splatzed in, "smooth" were all I could come up with, you bet.
I was missing the first two letters of 22A and wanted deTACHEDHOUSES. This didn't work with the theme, of course, but ATTACHED HOUSES isn't how those are described around here. Duplex, townhome, twin home, sure thing.
7D, I had nUDGE for "move a little bit" for a long time. So this led me to wonder if, re: 7A, animators had an Nth degree.
Did not know the grimalkin = CRONE. I had forgotten the cat definition and I was picturing a grimalkin as something like Golem or some sort of orc or goblin. Thus, CRO__ remained blank until I could bring ALAN HALE to mind. FRIEDMAN - is Rex thinking that Thomas Friedman's claim to fame is as a physicist? Tom would get a chuckle out of that, I think, as the NYT columnist who specializes in all things to do with the Middle East.
I think I would have rather re-solved Doug Peterson's puzzle from last month but this did give me a bit of struggle so thanks, Randolph Ross.
As a water skier, when I see "Not having so much as a ripple," I think "glassy." And it fit, and even the L worked. So that held me up for a while.
Interesting the people haven't heard of GAL GADOT. Besides starting in several hugely popular movies, she has been very newsworthy due to her Israeli heritage.
My first reaction to “Elvis had big ones.” He had more than one?!?
SIDEBURNS aside, this is one of the CORNIEST crossword puzzles I’ve seen in a while. A dad joke in search of an audience.
However, there was nothing funny about FRIEDMAN, ALANHALE, and GEORG running side by side, a condition that one could DIAGNOSE only as a classic case of Propernounitis. Add the pairings of AFLAC/FIERO, and MARLENA/GALGADOT plus a whole row of DEBS/TSE/CESSNA as evidence that there is an epidemic going on. And just who does Ms. GALGA DOT think she is anyway?
I’ve heard of attached garages but not ATTACHEDHOUSES. Liked LEADFOOT and GRIMALKIN but otherwise, especially for a Thursday puzzle, I was just not all that much INTO IT.
Hey All !
URANUSATURN - One world. Maybe?
Reading Rex, it turns out this was a LAME puz. Hmm, I seemed to rather like it. No reason to make A FUSS about it.
Fell into the FWE/DNF traps that some of y'all had, nFA/nUDGE, DESTo/TSo. Had a couple writeovers, PAnS-PAYS (thinking PAnS out), gig-SET, UNIsonSTATES (wherever the hell that came from), Rrn-RFD (off the N of UNIson, thinking Rural Route Number.)
Liked the theme idea. Cool to have long Stacked themers. Odd grid, with lots of open space. I cut Randolph slack on the dreck, as all those long-uns make being dreck free pretty much impossible. Nothing I would call all out (@M&A) ow-de-speration.
DEBS was a far out clue, however. Not INTO IT. QED. :-)
Agree with the name bomb in NE, but I managed to have word recognition kick in with GEORG, MARLENA and FRIEDMAN. (No Oxford comma there, even though I think it works better than not having it.)
FINI
RooMonster
DarrinV
So many words (both clues and fills) that I have literally never heard of in my entire life until today. I guess you learn something new every day! Or in this case, many things.
Budge and mudge mean the same thing, while bfa/mfa are both legitimate degrees for animators. This puzzle is literally unsolvable without guessing.
Did this online in the Heathrow waiting area for buses, sorry, coaches, after an all-nighter across the pond. This, as OFL would say, slowed me way down, because tired, no coffee, etc. Also, at least for me, because I invariably mess something up as far as across vs. down when trying to type something in. This is why I have a printer.
Once the theme kicked in it was fill in the blanks, so I thought a little too easy for a Thursday, which makes it a Thursdecito. Old trivia is my wheelhouse, your mileage will undoubtedly vary.
@albatross shell--I think this all has to do with fathers and sons, as I tried to explain yesterday. I'm thankful that this situation still obtains with my own son.
Budge vs mudge. Bfa vs. mfa. Beep vs. meep.
See what I mean about b's and m's?
I deny the existence of "mudge". Spellcheck is my source.
Mudge might mean budge in Scotland, but I don't think it's in common usage anywhere else.
Agree that this was pretty easy for Thursday. I liked it. I surprised myself when after putting in _FA at 7A that I was somehow able to come up with ALAN HALE off the A.
I’m currently designing a new water system near Lake PLACID, so 1A was fresh in my brain.
Spoiler Alert! (sort of) – If you haven’t seen “El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie”.
Jessie drives Badger’s yellow Fiero that Skinny Pete calls a clown car that no self-respecting outlaw would get caught dead driving, making it a perfect getaway car. Fiero gets a pass from me due to timeliness.
To all of the above ADOBE “experts”:
The ADOBE House was a typical structure used as a house style that was built by the Pueblo, Zuni and Hopi tribes of the Southwest cultural group who inhabited the desert climates of New Mexico, Arizona, and Texas. The ADOBE Houses varied in size, were often terraced and multi-storey with access via a doorway or entry through the roof by ladder. Each ADOBE unit is home to one family, like a modern apartment. The whole structure, which can contain dozens of units, is often home to an entire extended clan. ADOBE houses are good homes to build in a warm, dry climate where adobe can be easily mixed and dried. These are homes for farming people who have no need to move their village to a new location. In fact, some Pueblo people have been living in the same ADOBE house complex, such as Sky City, for dozens of generations.
GOT INTOIT
ALANHALE USEd to be ONTV –
ON my old RCA TV SET.
The CAST’S ETHOS you could SEE.
Was IT the CORNIEST? YOUBET!
--- MARLENA FRIEDMAN
Was the fill all that bad? There’s a lot of nice long down answers. I wish the clue for FRIEDMAN was a bit Kinky-er; he was in town recently.
I have flown some CESSNAs and Pipers. Twin engine four-seater the biggest.
Elvis didn’t always have big ones. SIDEBURNS that is.
When run all together this looks like a foe for Godzilla, but GALGADOT in a yeah baby runaway.
Good enough for me. And no stupid Thurs-puz gimmicks.
I wasn't super-impressed with this one. Theme was ridiculously easy to get, and so what? Nothing catchy, except maybe the first one. The fill, too, was replete with crapola. UNARM is a real word (go figure), that is used by 0.001% of the people. The rest of us say "disarm." I would like to disarm constructors of that particular weapon. Or even UNARM. Whatever.
Had a bit of a glitch finishing up in the SE (I was in a hurry to be done with it) by writing in RKO, the old movie studio, which oldsters may recall had a logo that sent out lightning-bolt flashes from a radio tower. Everything else was easy. GALGADOT, in all her full-named glory, is DOD. Bogey.
Good one, if a little easy. No rebus - a plus.
Conjoined words/names. Cool. It took a while for me to sort out the first themer as I initially thought that WILDER and RAYBURN were the name of genes in a DNA molecule. As soon as I thought that, it clicked that these were two TV personalities. Bit of an aha.
Aside from the plethora of proper names, I had no problem with the fill, and thought the puzzle was well put together. UNARMed is a word, so I think UNARM must be a word as well even if I don't often use it.
A friend of mine owned a FIERO. Nifty little car when it ran, which it frequently didn't.
Had this one pretty well DIAGNOSEd. Theme? YOU BET; PPPs? GOT'm; Fill? Not nearly as bad as Rex says.
So why would I make a bit of A FUSS? Alas, CUKE is why. It wasn't clued as a name variation. Might have finished cleanly except for a cheat on that one. (More my fault than the clue's. It was, after all, clued as a "veggie".)
Good puzzle; liked it.
Shouldn't the chicken dish be chicken adobo?
Post a Comment