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I forgot a title when I first posted this / THU 6-27-13 / I wonder if anyone noticed / Crap, the URL totally gives it away
Thursday, June 27, 2013
Constructor: Sean Dobbin
Relative difficulty: Easy
Word of the Day: ABBY (Women's soccer star Wambach) —
Mary Abigail "Abby" Wambach (born June 2, 1980) is an American professional soccer player, coach, two-time Olympic gold medalist, and the 2012 FIFA World Player of the Year. She currently plays for Western New York Flash in the National Women's Soccer League and for the US Women's National Soccer Team. She played college soccer for the University of Florida, where she was a member of a national university championship team and was recognized as a three-time All-American. A five-time winner of the U.S. Soccer Athlete of the Year award, she has been a regular on the U.S. women's national team since 2003. Wambach, a forward, currently stands as the highest all-time goal scorer for the USA Women's National Soccer Team, and holds the world record for international goals for both female and male soccer players with 160 goals. [Wikipedia]
• • •
(I had to give a shout-out to soccer and to women's sports in general, both of which can get short shrift in American sports coverage. Plus, the world record thing just happened.)Theme answers (with spacing and punctuation for extra illumination!):
- GIANT'S QUID
- CARDINAL'S IN
- TIGER'S TRIPE (In my .puz, this clue lacks a question mark. Is this just an online error? How does it look in the paper?)
- PIRATE'S HIP
Bullets:
- AL MARSALA — Kinda sounds like a ballplayer as well, doesn't it? "Pinch-hitting for New York... playing right field... Al Marsala."
- IRANI — I believe I've heard or read Merl Reagle claim that he'd never use this in one of his puzzles because the term is IRANIAN. Any thoughts? At the very least, this is a tired entry. The constructor hemmed himself in a bit by placing black squares that force an I???I entry.
- NSYNC — These guys were a thing that happened. Bye bye bye.
- ATTU — An island that could be part of a Monday vowel-change theme if only ITTU, OTTU, and UTTU were things.
- RUBIK — Have you seen the X-Cube? Pretty cool. I've memorized how to solve the regular cube several times and keep managing to forget.
- ALL IS WELL / DIAGNOSIS — An optimistic pair of consecutive Down answers.
- SPAT OUT — Alternatively, a tipster at an OTB in a health club.
In closing, the first two theme entries evoked bad memories of 2010 and 2012, respectively. The third is my girlfriend's favored team as well as Rex's, and I'm sure they don't care to recall the end of 2012's season either. As for the fourth team, well, I'm just going to leave this here.
Oh yeah, and this book is pretty good.
Save And Share :
93 comments:
How dare you label this as easy! Are you trying to lower my inflated sense of self!?
Enjoyed the theme Mr. Dobbin. Thanks for the puzzle
Easy for me too. Liked the theme but I'm looking for something a bit tougher/trickier on Thurs. This would have made for a pretty good medium Wed.
Erasures: LINE for LANE and ONE A for DONE.
Really wanted STUD for 1a.
Stuff I only knew from crosswords: NES, SASE, ERIN, ATTU.
And, thanks Tyler although I don't get the tipster OTB thing?
Probably my fastest Thursday ever, so I give it an easy. Got the idea with GIANT'S QUID. Usually Thursdays have trickier stuff than this, so it had almost a Tuesday feel. Agree it should have put up more of a fight.
No idea about the stated saint's day for 24A but if it's a crossword puzzle and it's a 5 letter month in Spanish, it's ENERO even though there are four alternatives. Live near PLANO so 36A was a gimme. Needed every cross for ABBY and BEATLE - not in my wheelhouse.
A few easily fixed writeovers - MAMA, ADAGES.
But solid all told. No "Illinois cager's #1 song" here, to extend the theme a bit.
Thanks, Mr. Dobbin.
Laughed into my bourbon at @retired_chemist's Bulls joke. Nicely done.
Easy puzzle but well-executed. Really enjoyable solve.
Thurs if you don't know baseball teams!
Had to squeeze out every answer (Is that a Squeeze Play, Tyler?)
Loved the puzzle in the end and loved the write up, what I could understand of it!
Some problems with proGNOSIS, idIOMS/AXIOMS and total mess up on the bottom...thought the Penguin might be DEnIrO, (never realized how many letters he and DEVITO have in common! But now I can picture DEVITO as the Penguin, tho I spent ten minutes trying to come up with Burgess Meredith's name!
Plus "out" was AslEep, inre/ATTN...so messiest bottom ever
(Insert baby diaper joke here)
Unhip enough not to know SLADE and I thought DAKAR had two Ks...
Plus I had SKYCAp (too much flying yesterday)
Spent twelve hours trying to fly back from Minneapolis, (where RUTS is how they say ROOTS).
TWO airport clues (Sea-TAC, OHARE)
Anyway, thank god for you, Tyler, or I'd not have known Dan had arrived. Would have loved to have watched that lunch...how cool that you two are so close!
1. Best post title/link ever.
2. I'm going to go with easy-medium for me on this one. For whatever reason, the South took forever to come together for me. I also didn't help myself by coming up with GIANTSQUAD and sticking with it for a while (until the fill above that came together, and it was obvious that there's no such cuisine as THAA). No, I don't know what a GIANTSQUAD would be. I briefly envisioned Andre the Giant and the Brute Squad from The Princess Bride. Even so, one of the easier Thursdays I can recall.
3. I feel sheepish not catching that all the teams were baseball teams until reading the writeup. That makes the theme that much more elegant, in my opinion (especially considering that the cluing just pointed to teams without regard to sport).
4. I'm embarrassed that I correctly guessed NSYNC without the benefit of a single cross.
5. 2010 and 2012 were fantastic baseball years. Not as fantastic as 1991 (I'm a Minneapolis kid permanently migrated - as far as anything's permanent - to San Francisco), but fantastic nonetheless. This is really the only flaw in an otherwise good writeup.
6. Is there any way Al Marsala could be anything other than a pinch hitter? That's not a starter's name. Not since the 1930s, anyway.
@ACME: I hope thinking DAKAR had two Ks (hey, more baseball!) wasn't a residual crossover from recollection of Drakkar Noir, a cologne so vile that even my high-school self refused to drown myself in it in the '80s.
@chefbea - Did you ever try the MUFFIN recipe I sent to you? Made a double batch today for the Coconut Cup.
Not on the easy side for me, I'd rate it medium/difficult, but it's been a long day.
Jon helped me with the team names, it took the two of us, but we got her done.
Fearful of Friday, as always.
Tyler, nice writeup, and you are right about the theme: some things are majorly difficult to describe without using an example. For example, like trying to define the word irony. Oops, I used an example...that's ironic.
Thursday often gives me fits, but this one filled in real quick. My last answer to fall, believe it or not, was GIANTSQUID even though I totally understood the theme. I had GIANTS---- and didn't know ERIQ, ATTU, or LUNDEN, and the only phrase I could think of was GIANTSTEPS. (Maybe he "pounds" his foot as he steps?) Just could not think of putting a Q in there! I guess that's the Q that should have been in IRANI.
ALMARSALA/LEO cross was my final piece.Everthing else dropped in but I had to think that through.I did not know wkere we were going with the GIANTSQUID until the CARDINALS dropped IN.I don't want to say this was super easy but-Who pulled the sword from the stone? on a thursday?
Confidently slapped in STUD muffin at 1A and refused to give it up for a long time. Loved the baseball theme. I'm an old Expos fan from way back and still rue the day they left. It all went downhill when that Toronto team arrived. Stupid Blue Jays!
Got the theme right away so the first half of the theme answers were easy. I had a little trouble with QUID and lots of trouble coming up with TRIPE. It is probably just happenstance, but the TIGERS have lost the World Series to all of the other teams in the puzzle. Sigh.
Hand up for trouble in the south. ABSENT/SUPERB took an unseemly long time to appear for some reason.
One BEATLE, two OLINS and the entire band for NSYNC. That's a demerit in my book. LEO without his RRN - must feel like getting a KNEE to the BRAN muffin.
@Milford - I've changed my mind, Ypsi Gypsy.
Easy Thursday that I DNF - drat! I had idIOMS/EdE/SPiT OUT. I really don't know the difference between AXIOMS and idIOMS, but I guess the EdE should have tipped me off. And SPiT OUT and SPAT OUT both feel past tense.
Anyhoo, fun theme and wordplay, especially liked GIANT'S QUID.
SASE always makes me think of the PBS show "Zoom" when they sang the Boston address at the end.
@Z - you have officially piqued my interest in ABC beer! Have to check it out with hubby soon. Another K grad making craft beer - what class was I missing out on?
I've heard of "chicken Marsala," but never AL MARSALA. Speaking of cooking, I once had a student named Suzanne Dente. Her father was a caterer whose name was (wait for it) Al Dente. Truth.
I loved the puzzle -- clever and fun.
I wonder about the clue/definition for SNAFU 48 across, which is given as "total mess". I believe it originally was defined as "one part (big or small) of an annoyingly wide-spread systemic mess". Perhaps? But nowadays, it has evolved a bit away from its origins, and I hear it often used as merely a small glitch in a bigger system. As well as a larger glitch.
39. across, "AKA" may appear on rap sheets but it can be a thorn in the language for people who are known by other names (professional names, show biz names, or situations involving the recently divorced) that the term is always only seen, short-sightedly, as having a bad connotation in the eyes of crossword puzzles.
I too wanted stud at 1A, but it never got in due to BRAGS.
On the one hand, the clues say "ballplayer," which does mean baseball, I think -- no one ever calls a football or basketball player that. So that made it pretty easy to get the theme answers, even without crosses. On the other hand, the theme answers were the only connection between different sections of the grid - so if you didn't get them (e.g. because you don't know the team names), you were in trouble.
@Glimmerglass, I agree -- if anything, ALla MARSALA.
@jae, it's a SPA TOUT. And @retired_chemist, the "reyes" are the 3 Kings, whose day is 6 ENERO. It's a much bigger holiday in the Spanish-speaking world; while Northern European types historically went with St. Nicholas's day, one month earlier.
As for 49A, it's actually an ADAGE, and not an AXIOM, so my writeover was justified.
Mom - you got me!! I always do that. Yikes. I also write "peak" for "peek."
I love, love, love themes that mess around with parsing. This one was tight and elegant! I’m not a baseball watcher, so this was not easy for me, at all. Spot on Thursday. Once I saw the trick (GIANT’S QUID), I got the rest, and it helped a little, but this one put up a fight.
Tyler- thanks for the write up. I didn’t notice the ALL IS WELL right next to DIAGNOSIS, even though I was just at the doctor yesterday. With TITANic restraint, I won’t give the reason/details of my visit; when I’m doing a seminar on business etiquette and am at the part about topics to avoid during small talk, there’s a place when I pause, tell everyone to look at me and listen carefully . . . “Nobody. Cares. About. Your. Thyroid. Medication.”
From yesterday - @Sandy K – I vote “I don’t GIVE a damn,” too. There was a big flap about that word being uttered on screen back in 1939.
@retired_chemist – you get the award for the absolute best copycat themer, even if yours was the NBA. Excellent. Nothing can come close to that gem! Michigan large cat’s pet rabbit? Illinois ursine relative?
I pulled LUNDEN early on out of nowhere – maybe because Paula Zahn was on my radar screen?
Great clues for KNEE, SERF, and NOSE.
Like @jae – “line” before LANE (noting that less should be fewer if I’m in front of a class being all snarkily prescriptive)
-“nods” before NAPS
-“doth” before DOST
-“Leon” before ERIN (don’t tell my kids)
- tried various spellings to fit “Pesci” for DEVITO, even though I recently saw DEVITO on Inside the Actor’s Studio. What a great show that is.
With the clue for ERES TU, my mind went straight to the screen, and I kept revisiting La Cage aux Folles. Wrong decade, too.
@Acme – Burgess Meredith was brilliant. In any role. Of course I loved him in Rocky, too. II.
Speaking of sports movies, tonight at the club, I have to BRAG (surprise, surprise) – I get to shake the hand of the subject of the greatest sports movie of all time. Yes, Daniel “Rudy” Ruettiger will be there. I’m so excited. Actually before his event, another star will be there for a tea. She’s a Charleston, WV native, and I’ve heard she’s still extremely nice and normal and not stuck-up at all. I’ve said here before that I’m someone who is ridiculously impressed with anyone I’ve seen on screen, even a newscaster. I just can’t help it. At the ACPT, I was even star-struck just to meet all the constructors. And editors. (Does brown noser have a hyphen. . .?)
Also wanted STUD muffin. And the Bull's joke is very funny! This was a little too easy for a Thursday IMHO, and the baseball thing didnt do much for me. On to Friday!
Are the yIANTS a team I asked?
How is a SQUID a pound I asked?
How many write overs could I have for 58D I asked?
I ask you: How can an easy puzzle be so hard? Wait was not that a Three Dog Night song…..
I can not carp I knew all the teams, the theme is a good one and I want a BMW DAKAR. Please note that MINIS, BEATLE and DAKAR form a motor vehicle theme… TIGAR trucks are… never mind.
⚾⚾⚾ (3 Baseballs) A triple for Sean.
Yes, easy for a Thursday, but tons of fun!
Only writeovers were idIOMS before AXIOMS and ERIc before ERIQ.
For a nanosecond I considered angelSQUID thinking it a strange creature similar to the sharkray.
Great puzzle, great write up! Thanks to Sean & Tyler!
I too had STUD muffin at first! Wish it had been true. Not a big baseball fan, but still liked the puzzle. Great write up, Tyler!
Just because the theme answers are all professional baseball teams, doesn’t mean that this is a cheesy sports puzzle.
On the contrary, the clever wordplay developed by using four teams as the base word that then spins each one’s ending “S” into a witty pairing, like GIANTS QUID AKA GIANT SQUID, plays SUPERB(ly) in the land of Sean Dobbin.
While the other three theme entries don’t quite reach the same level of adroitness as for the San Francisco team, they all seem acceptably witty enough for a Times Thursday offering.
Fill-wise, the fun began early as the puzzle’s second entry asked us for Erno RUBIK, that noted ‘80’s craze creator, which gave a K to help mold the clever SKYCAM, that kicked in the A that completed Sea-TAC, that reminds all who have landed there of the fantastic views of Mt. Rainier from the airport.
There was a wonderful bit of clever cluing that likely slowed down a few solvers, “Apple grower?”, that was looking for BEATLE, Apple being the record label founded by the BEATLE(s).
And, further down the grid comes the clue “One doing the lord’s work” and, surprise, it’s not that missionary who knocked on your door last week it’s a lowly SERF, toiling in the gardens of the lord of the manor.
But, it’s time to keep the peace by keeping the ANDEAN vicunãs ATBAY since they SPATOUT at ARTHUR who was so upset that he threatened to use his new found sword to turn them into a tasty “Llama(sic) Scallopini AL MARSALA” and, though that got a RISE out of the FELLAS, who rose from their NAPS chanting ERES TU, “you are” DONE, the Sons of ERIN finally soothed the SNAFU with a soulful rendition of “Danny Boy” and ALLISWELL.
(And, if there is any puzzle entry I missed, my apologies.)
Thanks for a fun one, Sean Dobbin!
Fun puzzle and great write up. Had to google a few things.
@Glimmerglass I agree. have made and eaten chicken marsalla a lot and never heard it as alamarsala.
@chefwen - what muffin recipe?
Just wanted to support @Jberg: 'Time is money' is an adage, not an AXIOM, and most certainly not an IDIOM.
One would never find Chicken al Marsala on a menu. One would find Pollo ALMARSALA on one.
@jberg -- A riff on the theme. Of course. Head slap. Thanks.
Nice write-up @Tyler- and NO, there was no ? at 45A in the paper either. LOL at AL MARSALA.
I know the baseball teams by their city, not their state, so that took me a while. But enjoyed the theme when it was DONE!
@Acme and @Milford- I messed up with the same SNAFU at idIOMS and SPit OUT cuz of EdE instead of EXE.
@lms- You got it! We've come a Looong way since 1939. The D word wouldn't bat an eyelash now- eg. Have you ever seen Game of Thrones? Anything goes! And my young nieces put that on for me...YIKES!
@JenCT- from last night- I don't know how to embed, but when you google 'Carol Burnett does'...the GWTW parody comes up. They called it "Went with the Wind". Got the longest laugh!
Agree ADAGES is a better answer to the 49A clue. AXIOM doesn't really fit.
So, Tyler, you did it in less than three minutes?!!! That's what we want to hear! You da man! Though it took me, a mere mortal, a good deal longer, I enjoyed the hell out of it. Funny, huh?
Most of the puzzle was easy since I'm a baseball fan, but the north with its three proper nouns running down held me up for quite a while. Finally getting TITANS opened it up a bit.
Was hard to elicit SQUID without the Q, U, or D. Ran the alphabet on 6D and tried ERIC, ERIK, ERIL, and ERIN, but rejected the Q outright as preposterous. Who names their kid ERIQ? (Oh - I see now: he's an actor so he named himself that. What a twit.)
Still, an enjoyable puzzle.
Agree with the easy rating but I did have my Idiot Moment. I tried CEO for the Obama clue and got so tied in to the Executive Officer idea that I was going to come here asking what an L.E.O. was. Lead? Leftist? Loveable? Lameduck? Sigh... and finally, I came to my stellar senses.
Minnesota ballplayer's do-rag securer?
Liked the double long downers. Tho, 11-D got me lookin for a hidden planets subtheme.
Fave clue: "Apple grower?"
Fave weejects: ERS and ELS. Honorable shout out to EXE. Is EFF kinda like an EX-E?
Fave new false identity: The Unknown Comic.
Fave fillin: SPATOUT. Shows some class.
I keep forgetting that Apple was the Beatles' record label. Whenever I hear the words APPLE and BEATLE together, I always associate them with the recent ad campaign that Mac ran for their computers. Stupid corporate advertising, making me think of their products over important historical information!
Filed under stuff I didn't know: ATTU, LUNDEN, and the fact that Justin Timberlake and J.C. Chasez were former Mouseketeers.
As others have pointed out, there was no "?" in the clue for TIGER'S TRIPE in the paper version either. A rare error for the NYT, I guess. I didn't even notice it though because the theme was so easy to figure out, once I got GIANT'S QUID, I just looked at the beginning of the clue to determine which MLB team they wanted, then filled in the crosses from there.
Last thing: Only two days ago I found out from Will Shortz himself that SNES (Super Nintendo Entertainment System) is not an acceptable entry for the NYT. Yet there's NES in the southwest corner. C'mon, NYT. SNES was just as big as the original, and way better to boot. Who's with me to start a campaign to make SNES a good piece of fill for the NYT puzzle? Tyler, you in? (Good write-up, too.)
Clever and witty! But not easy for me - it took a long time before I was DONE, in part because ideas for answers were ABSENT (Interjection? Obama a man?, a dad?) and also because I made it tough on myself with mistakes it took me a while to recognize.
Probably because I started the puzzle at the airport (on my way from MSN to O'HARE, no less), SKYCAM became SKYCAp (Hi, @acme!) between clue and grid, making the cricket player end with -SpAN. And the misspelled KWaN made SNAFU right above it very apt.
Themewise, I had all of the teams but didn't catch on to the trick until the PIRATESHIP. Then it was fun to go back and complete the others. I especially loved TIGERSTRIPE.
I didn't mind the extended puzzling-out session - made the flight fly by.
@syndy - You wouldn't believe how long I resisted ARTHUR . I wondered if he'd had some other name as a youth.
Doing this on an iPad and not knowing whether this was baseball or football (GIANTS), on a very late commuter train out of NYC after a loooong day did not make this too easy.
Adages for axioms gave me atoll for islet and that's when I lost connection to the puzzle and the internet. Not a big fan of iPad solving ...
Particularly liked NW and NMW.
@Tyler: dude. Nice completion time. Woulda been right up with U, if I hadn't gone off lookin for the hidden planets subtheme. Lost precious nanoseconds.
p.s.
Typo in first message. Shoulda been "Shows some crass", of course.
T.U.C. wannabe
Loved the puzzle and the write-up. Tyler is a good writer.
Medium for me since baseball is not my strong suit. I got the theme quickly at Giant's quid; it helped to have lived in England. I did have some trouble in the NW because I read 1D as "crowns".
Some other trouble areas: tried so hard to think of Heath Ledger's name instead of DeVito, but of course he was the Joker. In the SE, having ER-- at 64A, is though Sons of Eros?
In the Netherlands we celebrate St. Nicolaas, December 5/6, but many people know Jan. 6, Drie Koningen. It's when you get rid of the christmas tree.
Fun theme. Picked up on it right away and flew through most of the puzzle. Liked that the theme worked on two levels: baseball teams and the shifting-S phrases. A few big slowdowns though made this a med-challenging Thurs.
First in the BEATLE, ATTU, ERIQ area. When 'apple' is used in a clue I don't get fooled into thinking fruit anymore. But I went right into computer terms for 5A and never thought about music. Was trying to squeeze WOSNIAK in for a split second.
Had idIOMS for AXIOMS initially. Seemed a bit off but the crosses confirmed it. Hate when that happens.
Major natick at the IVES and ERESTU crossing. No idea.
@Chris - I'm sure you've heard SNAFU is an acronym for "Situation Normal All Fu***d Up. In that sense it would be a total mess.
Forgot to mention earlier I met Joan Lunden once at a restaurant when we were living in Greenwich, Ct.
Re BEATLEs => Apple: when Jobs and Wozniak formed the company and wanted to use the name Apple, they ran into legal objections from the Beatles. So the Steves' Apple promised that it would stay out of the music business--forever.
When the Macintosh was created, it came with several warning sounds, some of which were a bit musical. In a fit of whimsy, they named one of the sounds Sosumi. So sue me!
Of course when they created Itunes, the legal battle went into high gear.
Nice Thursday puzzle. Nice write up,Tyler.
damnit! just realized i did have one wrong square: PIRATE SHOP...
I blame Dave Eggers!
BMW doesn"t make MoNIS?! #tipoff
Medium for me as I forgot Mr. La Salle spelled his name with a Q and a few other speed bumps. I like the theme and the execution.
Trying to think of one for my favorite team, YANKEES . . .
Considering today is Thursday I left 15A blank thinking ARTHUR was incorrect.
What’s so bad about picking your 30D (reminds me of that scene from Caddyshack)?
AXIOMS or IDIOMS? EXE saved me
LINE before LANE and R AND D before SALES
No EELS?!
New York ball player's outhouse?
YANKEE(S)H*TTER
I enjoyed this one, although I'm chagrined it took an eternity for 16A to dawn on me. My nephew shares Barack Obama's birthday, and my husband's is August 1, so you'd think I'd know my LEOs.
One vernacular quibble, however, with 65A: I appreciate trying to avoid Ernie ELS, as even this newcomer to crosswords has run into him more than once. But "trains in Chicago"--ELS?
Sean . . . obviously you're not a Chicagoan.
The El is the system generally. You take the El down to the ballpark (or up, depending on whether you're a Cubs or a Sox fan). You might take one or more lines. The trains might be running slow.
And it's true, they are "elevated trains," but a reference to "Els" would brand you as a non-native speaker. It would be as crazy as someone in LA directing a driver to take "101" up to Camarillo, when everybody knows it's "the 101."
Am I being Chicago-centric? Sure--why not? BLACKHAWKS WIN!
Thanks for a fun puzzle.
Decent puzzle, though I don't think it belongs on Thursday.
@Glimmerglass et al - It's the pollo that makes it pollo AL MARSALA.
BTW - Does Will Shortz know about this puzzle??
I asked above if Will Shortz knew of this puzzle because the four theme answers are direct answers to his Sunday NPR on-air challenge to find words which become new words when the first letter is moved to the end, as in aide - idea or gelatin - elating.
Note: (1) The deadline for answers to the challenge was 3 PM Thursday.
(2) Words beginning with "S" are the cheapest to use this operation on (stop - pots, spit - pits, etc.)
(3) SQUID - QUIDS only works with a little imagination - "For every one of your QUIDS I can come up with a QUO!)
(4) STRIPE takes the challenge one step further: STRIPE - TRIPES - RIPEST. (Yes, imagination required to justify TRIPES.)
I didn't ask for this name.
I'm not as clued in as Tyler but in relative terms this was fairly easy but fun for me. I was done by the 7th. Funny how the mind works. At 46D I had super before getting the final letter b when filled in absent. Thought to myself that
Super B didn't sound right. Was not til later when looking at it again that I actually read it as superb.
Gotta go. I'm up. On the bus to Des Moines tonight. Weird eh?
@Rob C
But Rob, we can't assume that acronyms always accurately express their meanings -- if that were true then every time anyone typed "LOL" it would be accompanied by an actual peal of laughter. Of course that's IMHO.
Gee, an easy [no googling] Thursday and no gimmicks, rebuses, etc. Well, I did look up the exact spelling of ENERO. The toughest words were NYSNC and ALMARSALA [especially if you start a16 cEO instead of LEO. After all, Obama IS a Ceo.] But the problem eventually corrected itself.
The dogs I sit with on Thursdays helped with the easy words: Like RUTS [they do a lot of rutting], OHARE [Oh hair of the dog etc.], CANS [ some of their food comes in them] and LANE [most of them know me by name.] They're not good with the foreign language fill.
@retired chemist -- bravo!
@tyler -- nice to know that others also like to look for neighbors in the puzzle, like ALL IS WELL/DIAGNOSIS
My hardest section was due north, not knowing any of the downs aside from THAI and ERS, or any of the acrosses at first, nor squid. It worked out with time.
A neighbors I like from this puzzle, aside from Tyler's find, is the GIANT SQUID SKYCAM.
@Carola--
I also resisted Arthur, because I remembered that he had a different name in the movie "The Sword in the Stone", referenced in the clue. (Quotes, not italics like the novel.)
Couldn't remember the name...turns out it was Wart, which wouldn't have fit.
Also had trouble getting ALMARSALA, as I didn't realize Pollo was Italian as well as Spanish and got hung up trying to think of a Spanish term, something about over arroz, rice.
Hi everyone,
Thanks for all the comments! How lucky am I to be treated to a Hinman writeup? Thanks, Tyler!
I have lots of interesting stuff to say about this puzzle, but I'll limit myself to just a few:
1. I constructed the thing, and it still took me just over 9 minutes to solve.
2. More than half of these clues are mine or have been only lightly retouched, which is a much better rate than my first NYT puzzle!
3. I think I learned today that a sports-team-related theme might automatically push a puzzle at least one day later in the week than some think is appropriate (I'm cool with it, though).
Thanks, Rex, for this blog, where I lurk daily. Enjoy your vacation! :)
Sean D.
Midday report of relative difficulty (see my 8/1/2009 post for an explanation of my method and my 10/15/2012 post for an explanation of a tweak to my method):
All solvers (median solve time, average for day of week, ratio, percentile, rating)
Thu 13:25, 16:47, 0.80, 15%, Easy
Top 100 solvers
Thu 8:25, 9:37, 0.87, 23%, Easy-Medium
Very late and very tired, so my apologies for not having read the comments.
I come from a different world on this one. I thought it a)exceptionally difficult and b)poorly built. The North is, to me, the poster child; proper name along side an Aleutian island, with a Q to boot is a pretty good candidate for Natick City.
18A Oceanus and Hyperion? Hello, Big Gene!
Quote from Emily Dickinson? Hello, Big Gene!
DAKAR? Ditto.
Theme could have been interesting, if it had taken me under an hour to complete. The clues overwhelmingly felt like Saturday, e.g. Obama's sign. Really?
Got it all right in the end but this was NO FUN. Sorry, Sean. Nothing personal.
@Chris - I agree that every word, acronym, abbreviation, term, etc... doesn't always express it's literal meaning. But any accurate or "in the language" interpretation is a fair clue. SNAFU is clued per its "classic" meaning so its perfectly fine.
This week's relative difficulty ratings. See my 8/1/2009 post for an explanation and my 10/15/2012 post for an explanation of a tweak I've made to my method. In a nutshell, the higher the ratio, the higher this week's median solve time is relative to the average for the corresponding day of the week.
All solvers (this week's median solve time, average for day of week, ratio, percentile, rating)
Mon 5:42, 6:12, 0.92, 13%, Easy
Tue 9:21, 8:19, 1.13, 78%, Medium-Challenging
Wed 10:54, 9:44, 1.12, 78%, Medium-Challenging
Thu 13:25, 16:47, 0.80, 15%, Easy
Top 100 solvers
Mon 3:27, 3:49, 0.91, 6%, Easy
Tue 5:39, 4:57, 1.14, 83%, Challenging
Wed 6:22, 5:38, 1.13, 81%, Challenging
Thu 8:25, 9:37, 0.87, 23%, Easy-Medium
Well, hey, y'all -- I'm pretty light on workin them there magic spells, but I do some pretty lean and mean card tricks.
Magic & Anonymo5Us
Nice Tuesday.
Was thrown off by Michigan Tigers. Was thinking its the Missouri Tigers or LSU Tigers. I was thinking football, not baseball for some reason, even though all the other answers were baseball teams(Cardinals, Giants, Pirates. I never think of Michigan having a baseball team, even though Detroit is a great team and leads the American League Central Division. When I think of Michigan I think football- Spartans and Wolverines. Maybe because I'm a new Big 10 fan after Nebraska joined the division. It was a fun puzzle.
Bob Miller
Well, what can we do? Apparently, nothing. We just do a LOT of scrolling down. I can't believe anyone is stupid enough to fall for this "spellcaster" crap, let alone all of the above. I'm guessing that the last several thousand words were all typed by the same person...the "spellcaster" himself. Dude, take it someplace else. PLEASE. As one of the tennis buff(y)s said in Trading Places:
Nobody wants your drugs here, "Louie."
And now today. Is this Thursday already? Feels more like a Tuesday. Those two should have been switched, IMHO. Easy peasy. I had just a bit of a pause figuring out DIAGNOSIS to help put the SW together, otherwise ALLISWELL.
I liked this one, though I agree with @Glimmerglass et al that it's just "chicken Marsala." That's what it's called; I know because it's a frequently featured dish at the buffet where I am a regular (we get bogo comps, why not?).
We've come almost full circle on the Penguin bit; I'm looking forward to a Burgess Meredith sighting in tomorrow's grid. And his archfoe appears, slightly disguised with an S in the middle, at 5d. I don't recognize the constructor's name; if a debut, this is a pretty solid one.
I was not going to comment because of all the crap above @spacecraft. I decided I would add my two cents though.
I found this puzzle to be easy. I am not a sports fan but I do know some of the team names. And as some one pointed out, they were all clued as ballplayers so that translated into baseball.
Chicken marsala is pollo al marsala in Italian. Since the clue was ......pollo, the answer should reflect that language also.
I agree with @retired_chemist that 49A is an adage not an AXIOM.
@jackj: even though you will not read this, thanks for explaining 5A. I completed it but I didn't "get" it (an idiom).
@mac: my family celebrated Sankt Nikolaus on Dec 6 and also Tre Kigs and Jan 6. And we also took down the Christmas tree on that date and still do so.
It was a good puzzle. Thank you Mr. Dobbin.
This one put up a bit of a fight for me. I thought the fill was better than the theme, actually. GIANTSQUID is kind of forced, and PIRATESHIP is weak. I thought that Emily Dickinson's food was FISH, and that Oceanus and Hyperion were some type of stars. Eventually sorted those out, and the rest was just pretty solid.
I wonder if Ernie ELS has ever ridden Chicago's ELS?
I do not read the "spellcasters" posts. Waste of time, but I do wonder how they get in here.
So why again is it that we mere mortals must have to prove on a daily that we are not robots while the robots themselves who've posted ad nauseum above seemingly get a pass on the same process? (Or are we living the plot of some grade B movie in which the machines have already taken control?)
Must agree this was quite easy for a Thursday, especially for a baseball fan with a British background. Only writeover was SKYCAM for SCORER. ALMARSALA was not obvious but its crosses were.
Hmm, captcha appears to be an oxymoron: lienews.
Pleased to see some Syndi comments. Considering all the "junk mail" it's a wonder any of us stuck it out. I wonder if there is a way someone at Blog Central could just delete them? We Syndis would sure appreciate not having to scroll through the thicket which seems to come after the real-time puzzlers posting.
As for this puzzle, it didn't play easy for this "don't follow sports" person. Got the idea when I finally decided someone is really named ERIQ, but still had to painfully extract each team name from the crosses. Throw in some lesser known geography and a foreign dish and ....well I did almost solve it, but only by using the "which letter seems to fit here" method. Ended up,with only the idIOM error. What the heck is an EXE?
Now to try to prove I'm not a robot!
Sure, easy for you - SITID (Seems Impossible 'Til It's Done) for me. Of course I contributed to the level of difficulty with some well-placed mistakes, you know, just to make it interesting. But finish I did with the final "aha" moment coming at ERIQ. With 170 comments preceding me I figured the spammers had breached the walls, and so they had, but it was well worth it to scroll by then to get to the Syndi-comments. You guys rock!
@DMG - .EXE is a file extension for an executable file (but I have no idea what that means).
@Bob Miller - I don't believe I've seen you here before, so welcome! Don't let @NM Robin's remark about "...all the crap above @spacecraft" put you off - I don't think it was directed at you.
"170 comments? On a Thursday?" I thought. And now I know why. I've seen fewer cranks in the Old Farmer's Almanac classifieds. (Not to mention more literate ones.) Oh, well. Good puzzles the last two days. ALLISWELL is... well, any minute now I will be playing Chicago's fifth album, let's put it that way.
Happy August, Syndiland. If the Perseids throw fireballs at us as they did near the end of the shower last year, I for one will be a happy... "starwatcher," I guess, is the best word. (I can't call myself an "amateur astronomer" anymore; not when I don't see stars for much of the year... but I have been one, and amateur astronomers, one and all, despise the term "stargazer." Jack Horkheimer was an aberration.)
@DMGrandma: EXE would be ".exe", an executable computer file. And that's ALL I can tell you about it!
Only 98 spellcaster posts? Wimps couldn't get to 100 I guess. I've been getting these in my inbox for awhile now, I didn't realize they were (mostly?) for the same day. Makes me so happy to do the captcha every day.
42!
@Z - I guess the spellcasters are now spamming in syndie-time, too. By your count, the last two puts them at 100 (but at least I didn't get the first 98 in my email like you did).
Favorite stack:
BEATLE
ARTHUR*
*(scroll to :52 in)
[b][/b]
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