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Resort near venice / TUE 5-24-16 / African antelope with curvy horns / William Pilgrim father / Luminescent larvae
Tuesday, May 24, 2016
Constructor: Jonathan Gersch
Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium
THEME: TAPS (71A: Bugle tune ... or what one does to 1-, 18-, 35-, 43- and 62-Across)
Theme answers:
- KEGS (1A: Frat party staples)
- PHONE LINES (18A: "Open" things for a call-in show)
- SHOULDERS (35A: Places for shawls)
- RESOURCES (43A: Coal and natural gas)
- MAPLE TREES (62A: Syrup comes from them)
William Brewster (1568 – 10 April 1644) was an English official and Mayflower passenger in 1620. In Plymouth Colony, by virtue of his education and existing stature with those immigrating from the Netherlands, Brewster, a separatist, became a regular preacher and the leader of the community. (wikipedia)
• • •
The fill had some strong points (DAEDALUS!! SAY WHAT?!), but was also heavy on the unpleasantness. Why on god's green would you *highlight* the fact that your grid has terrible abbrs. in it by giving them the same clue (N.C.A.A. part: Abbr.), as if their presence here were some kind of *feature*. There is no redeeming ATH, there is no redeeming ASSOC, and trying to tie them together with the same clue is like throwing water on an oil fire. If you need ATH or ASSOC, you quietly clue them (separately!) and move on. Imagine how "fun" it would be if you cross-referenced SSW and NNE ... [I'm waiting while you do this] ... yes, cluing ASSOC and ATH this way is precisely *that* much fun, possibly less. Grid shape means that there's a ton of 4- and 5-letter stuff, so no surprise that there's a lot of the old gang ("I, TINA"!), but it leaned toward the UGLY side in many places. ETTU, EZEK? I had maybe one wrong turn in this one: wrote in SUPT instead of SUPE (45D: Apartment building V.I.P., for short). My answer was correct. Just not correct for this puzzle.
Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld
[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]
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52 comments:
On same wavelength as @Rex about @Jonathan Gersch's Tuesday puzzle. Always fun to see @EZIO_PINZA in full ... he was a Metropolitan Opera star who branched out into Broadway by creating the male romantic lead role in "South Pacific."
Today marks the 75th birthday of a Minnesota-born musical icon. Interested @Rex-ites may solve "The Answers My Friend ...", constructed with @Robert Mark, to find out who.
What I liked best about this puzzle were some stellar answers: DAEDALUS, SAYWHAT, SOPUP, ZEPPO, and BOGUS. I also liked that backward CAMUS crossing the French word, and the backward PANS to counter the RAVED. There was a high double-letter count (17), but not remarkably high (over 20, which hasn't happened in many months). There were no clues that had spark for me, and I always hope for a couple on Tuesday. Also, I'm not one who ever says/writes SKED or SUPE (maybe I'll say "super", though).
At some point in the puzzle, I wondered if young people know what PHONELINES are. In this smartphone era, in any case, we have a new relevant and prevalent use for the word TAP.
Fun solve. Just enough thinking to make it worthwhile.
Rex – I disagree on your plural take. I liked to have a symmetrical entry for TAPS. Also cool that since the song TAPS ends in s, all the themers are plural. I actually thought it was neat. Surprise, surprise.
I hadn’t planned to talk about my weekend, but SAY WHAT and AARP sharing the grid…. I was in NC this weekend at our “family reunion." The quotes are there because it's a pretty small affair, and there are lots of other people there, too, so, well, it's a loosier goosier family reunion. We're not so organized. No t-shirts bragging I SURVIVED THE MUSE FAMILY REUNION 2016, no group shots that take 25 minutes to pull off and even then Aunt LaVerne has her eyes closed in every picture….. Anyway, this one got really weird really fast because so many people were getting on up there if you know what I mean. It started when my third cousin-in-law, Jan, told me she had had a nice conversation with Maggie. Maggie who hadn't even arrived yet. Jan had actually been talking to my Aunt Kattie. But Jan couldn't hear so it didn't really matter. Kattie/Maggie thought she had been talking to my second cousin Joan, who also had not arrived yet. The mistaken identities weren’t an issue because neither person could make out what the other was saying. I can only imagine what that conversation was like.
The icing on the cake was when Joan later cornered me and said that Mom had told her that I had started training beagles on our farm and that she had a cool device to tell me about. Where do you even start with this? What kind of device would Joan, Joan with no dogs, have that would help train beagles? What does beagle training even look like? I can't imagine what Mom actually had said to Joan. I just told Joan that Mom had recently taken to telling big lies just to stir things up. We were all every concerned. Joan nodded, satisfied.
On a similar note, I had a funny conversation with my daughter recently:
Bigmama is in Dollywood right now with a group from the church. They took a bus.
Silence. Then, She’s at an amusement park? With senior citizens? Riding rides?
I guess so - she’s with her group The Golden Disciples.
And they’re actually at Dollywood? On rollercoasters? Are they wearing matching t-shirts? Following around someone with a flag?
I dunno. Maybe.
Well, it turns out they just went to Pigeon Forge but not actually the amusement park. But get this - they stopped at a rest stop en route back to North Carolina. When they got back on the bus and did a head count, they were missing two people. After a search of the facilities, the two were not to be found anywhere. Luckily, someone’s cell phone rang, and it turns out that the two women had boarded the wrong bus and were already thirty miles down the road headed to Kentucky. Yep. Sitting there chatting with the senior citizens on that bus, oblivious to the fact that they were among strangers. SAY WHAT?
Anyway… nice Tuesday fare. DAEDALUS was a woe, but it went right in lickety split because the crosses were all fair.
Had a pretty good time with this. Loved DAEDALUS, EGON, ZEPPO, and most of all, GLOWWORMS.
On the other hand, ATH, SKED, EZEK and SUPE are the things you use out of desperation, and if you have that much desperation consider starting anew.
Not sure how EZIOPINZA winds up in a Tuesday puzzle, but overall very easy – solved ‘across only’ which fails more often than not on Monday, never mind Tuesday. Almost failed in the S, where cHImp led to TOSSup and Elm, with 67A looking ridiculous. RHINO saved the day.
Normally I'm in bed by midnight, but occasionally I find myself still up when midnight approaches. On those nights I think "may as well wait up and catch @Rex's blog". This is almost a guarantee that @Rex won't post until the following morning.
Might it have worked better to stress the awkwardness with the clue What he or she does...? What she or he does...? Worthy review.
Fun easy puzzle. Never heard of Daedalus...thought it might be WOD.
Osso bucco again???
After all the comments about FORCE FEEDing on Saturday, I couldn't help but think of Wierd Al's "EAT IT" today,
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ZcJjMnHoIBI
I used to be be a SIZE TWO but as I have become older and fatter, I progressed to SIZE zero.
SIZE double zero is the new SIZE TWO. Maybe the constructors ran out of names that included Zs.
I got SPAS before TAPS and with SHOULDERS in the puzzle I thought of all the spots of the body that are amenable to massage. The EYE from yesterday might be tricky.
Basically this one was an instafill except for ZiPPO before ZEPPO until my French saved me.
How could about what surrounds the HOLE when I just discover the Donut Plant in Brooklyn and felt like I'd died and gone to heaven. Who knew that an avicado toast version would be tastier than the samosa version or that a mole donut could be sweet? Blueberry was my son's favorite and the creme brûlée was mine. Might not fit into a SIZE TWO anymore,
@Loren...great story!!!
I'll nitpick here about the "Petite dress spec" clue -- petite is a whole separate size category on its own, so you have size 2 in petite as well as say size 14. It's denoted often by a P next to the size number. This is not a good clue. Ask any woman.
Easy and boring, mostly because of the clues -- e.g. "Throw at = TOSS TO. I'd have gone with the partial, "___ __ and fro all night." And SEPIAS? EZIO PINZA was about the only interesting part; I knew who he was, but not that he had that particular role. Once you've got the Z, though, there are few alternatives. So my only real problem was BRadford before BREWSTER.
I did like seeing LAI again, after a totally different clue the other day.
For me, though, the revealer ended the boredom. At last it all made sense! And I certainly had not thought of it -- in fact, I had not been completely sure which answers were themers. I mean KEGS, but also thinking maybe some of the long downs.
@Loren, I just retired, so thanks for giving me the foretaste of what lies ahead!
Seldom wear them, but I thought when you wanted to loosen neckwear you usually don't UNTIE them entirely, you just, well, loosen them.
We land firmly on @lms's side on the TAPS plural thing. Thought Rex's argument was strained and the theme worked just fine, thank you. Can't argue with him on the fill however.
Learned today where DAEDALUS originates. Gotta love GLOWWORMS in a puzzle. EZIOPINZA was the punch line in a Martin and Lewis routine in which they'd argue about Jerry not knowing show tunes.
I'm with George B., in that I liked seeing EZIO PINZA in full, too. Usually, you either get just EZIO or just PINZA. Mary Martin wrote an autobiography back in the '70s, called MY HEART BELONGS, in which she confessed that her knees buckled every time EZIO kissed her on stage during "South Pacific" -- that she was overwhelmingly attracted to him, and that the feeling never went away during God-knows-how-many performances. Because I had taken her book as a Full Selection of one of the book clubs I was running, I was invited to the party her publisher gave for her. She was the most natural, unaffected celeb I had ever met -- just charming in her aw-shucks small-town Texas way. Her book was just great. For anyone who has a love of musical theater during its Golden Age, I can't recommend this book strongly enough. The other two Selections I remember from my days of running Entertainment Arts Book Club are A.E Hotchner's bio of Doris Day (evidently this "virginal" movie star was hotter than a pistol in real life); and THE MOON'S A BALLOON, David Niven's witty, gossipy, anecdotal autobiography which is exceptionally well-written and wasn't ghosted. That I still remember these books more than 40 years later means they were uncommonly good and I recommend them all to those with an interest in the entertainment field.
Oh, yes, and the puzzle. Not bad for a Tuesday. Very pleasant.
I have no problem with things being plural. A person can tap a keg, a person taps a keg or a person taps multiple kegs. While taps kegs may not sound the best, I don't see a problem with it, especially for a crossword puzzle, where often times "normal" words and sayings are thrown out the window in order to stump the solver.
As for me, this puzzle was pretty easy, with the exception of top center. I had RAtED instead of RAVED, which killed me on VIOL, which then allowed me to have remO instead of LIDO, and since I didn't know DAEDALUS, the hole thing sunk my time for an extra 4 minutes. Meh, it happens.
Oh, I almost forgot. Re 21D -- speak for yourself, Jonathan. I would substitute the word "apprehensively" for "eagerly" in the clue. There has never been a time in my entire life -- including when I was a "schoolkid -- when I looked forward to SNOW. SNOW is cold and wet and exceedingly slippery. In NYC, SNOW is not white. Within the first 47-and-a-half minutes, SNOW is gray. Within the first 752 minutes, SNOW is black. By the next day, SNOW is ice. Unless, of course, it's slush. What's the point of having a SNOW Day, if you don't want to go and play in the SNOW. I remember my first summer at Camp Pinecliffe. We had three campers from Houston in the bunk. They said to me: "We're so jealous. We've never even seen SNOW." Age 10, I was, but without missing a beat I replied: "You can have all of mine."
Hey All !
If only my life was as interesting and exciting as @Lorens... I have to live vicariously through her!
Thought puz was fairly easy, except maybe DAEDALUS and EZIO PINZA. Actually had a K for the L in DAEDALUS, sorta Natick there, with an obscure-ish God and a foreign phrase, so my by-now-famous one letter DNF. Only had one writeover, Erase-EAT IT.
Looking for the pangram after the Z's and J X in NE corner, but no F or Q. (Odd side note: I've found a lot of puzs missing an F. Kind of an orphan letter, like M&A's U. Maybe I'll start counting them...)
Overall, good TuesPuz fare.
SNAP!
RooMonster
DarrinV
Oh I wish I was a GLOW WORM,
A GLOW WORM's never glum
'cause how can you be grumpy
when the sun shines out your bum....
I'm not sure what else I can add...Oh, lots of names in this one.
I'm still working on @Rex's ATH AND ASSOC but I'm not sure it's printable.
EZIO PINZA was in the puzzle? Briefly thought I was riding the bus to Kentucky (is that anything like taking a ferry ride with Charon?) then realized I never even saw the clue last night as I solved. I barely broke 10 minutes but I'm pretty sure I nodded off mid-solve, so challenging time on an easy puzzle.
OSSO Buco and SKED have been regulars across multiple puzzles this week At least I've seen OSSO Buco in the wild. I've never seen SKED anywhere but xworld. Theme was decent, longer non-themers are pretty good, short fill is ughly.
Medium for me. Pretty good Tues. I agree with @lms on the theme plus there were some nice long downs, liked it.
WOE - BREWSTER
Just in case you wanted to know what your kids and grandkids are talking about, woes can also mean:
"Your woes are your best, most trusted friends. Urban Dictionary claims it stands for Working on Excellence, because “the squad you run with everyday should be working on excellence.” My friend Lamar, however, told me that woes are the friends you’re so close to that you can share your woes with, and I believe Lamar over Urban Dictionary any day. If you knew Lamar you’d agree with me so just trust me on this one." From a post by Erika Heidewald on Smosh.com titled "6 Words That Didn't Really Exist Before Drake".
I think I'm with Lamar on this one.
@lms (7:01) -- Your family reunion -- and your hilarious description of it -- absolutely cracked me up. It simply HAS to be a movie! And only you can be the screenwriter. But who should direct? My first two choices -- Preston Sturges and Nora Ephron -- are unfortunately both dead. The "Best Marigold Hotel" director? Nah. Too broad, and also too mawkish. Anyone have any ideas? LET'S FIND @LOREN A DIRECTOR AND GOOSE HER INTO WRITING THE SCREENPLAY. What a family!
Have to agree with the not too sparkling but with a few gems opinion. Plenty of themers, though, and I am
happy with "taps".
Daedalus is beautiful. Nice that "taps" is in the Kegs corresponding space.
Forget the puzzle. Forget the review. They were fine. The real reason to be here today is to read @Loren's post. The family reunion and Bigmama's bus adventure are priceless. My husband's grandmother from NC was also called Bigmama and the name always tickles me when mentioned. I think I'll pass on that moniker when the time comes, however. It won't play well in CT.
@Gill I. Thanks for the giggle of a ditty!
Growing up in NYC, I never heard anyone refer to a superintendent as a "supe." The much-used shortened form is "super." Supe seems invented for convenience. What's next? Butch short for butcher? Wait for waitress? Auth for author? etc., etc.
Puzzle was okay, but @Loren's story made my day.
@Rex, what you didn't notice is that these are all different *kinds* of TAPS:
SHOULDERS: Literal;
PHONE LINES: Mechanical (or used to be, anyway)
RESOURCES: Metaphorical
MAPLE TREES: Agricultural
Loved all the stories above, especially @Loren's.
It took me 18 minutes, long for a Tuesday. But part of that was because I was interrupted by a visiting grandson who wanted to play peek-a-boo so I used the puzzle section to cover my face.
Two great male singer crossword answers from the same era: Mario Lanza and today's EZIO PINZA. they died within two years of each other albeit the former at a much younger age. Would like to see both -and maybe Julius LaRosa in the same puzzle.
I thought the theme and fill here were fine, and liked having the revealer the last word of the puzzle. I liked sneaking KEGS in as another theme answer although it produced my only regret: the other four were all different forms of tapping. KEG is too much like MAPLE TREES to be considered different. As @lms avatar pointed out, Fred Astaire or Gene Kelly would have rounded out the quintet.
I thought this leaned toward the medium side for a Tuesday, which is good but, it had little or no 65a (snap). Plus, I agree with Rex and the other bloggers about the incorrectness of Supe, petite dress size and loosen neckwear as untieing because you don't. You add to that the dull theme of the tap and you have reached the point where you hope tomorrow's puzzle will be better. Kudos for Daedalus though.
@L Amen! Petite in women's clothing simply means short. SIZE TWO comes in petite, regular and tall.
Because of the super-generic theme and the ugly short-fill, this one just felt REALLY soulless.
Rex ...
Blahblahblah, you sound like Miss Durr my 7th grade English teacher, Lighten up.
I thought the revealer was a surprise and perfectly placed.
@Z As a former missionary to Papua New Guinea, I had to run radio SKEDs daily to communicate with dozens of people living in remote areas. SKED was a very real part of my life for years, as in "could you run the 4pm SKED for me today?"
It is sorta neat, to play TAPS at the end of the puz. Them 8 U's are kinda real neat, too.
Gritty litter of weejects, today …
* Real words: AXE. BOO. LOT. ODD.
* Real words in other languages: AHI. EIN. LAI. UNE. (LAI means lots of stuff, dependin on the lingo.)
* Other: ATH. NNE. Altho, ATH does mean "embitter" in Albanian. Also, "next", in Scottish Gaelic.
fave weeject: Gotta go with LAI. It has such a rich international olio of meanings. Including "whatever", in Latvian.
Theme is pretty solid, with several different TAP(S) meanings. Feel like TAPdancing got snubbed, tho.
Didn't know what was up with the themers, until I got to the reveal. Wasn't quite sure which ones were the themers, even. Was sure rootin for GLOWWORMS, tho.
Fun, fairly easy solve. Thanx, Mr. Gersch.
Masked & Anonymo8Us
**gruntz**
Surprised to see an easy-medium rating. 3:50, three seconds faster than yesterday. And when I'm going at my max speed I rarely clue into the theme.
Generally found it inoffensive, but not as well-done as Monday's.
@Nancy - Big OMG here. The punch line in the Martin/Lewis joke of which I spoke was Lewis singing (to the tune of "I'm as corny as Kansas in August") in a mock Mary Martin falsetto: "I'm so horny for EZIO PINZA". I was a teenager when I saw the routine and of course would not have known the back story of Martin's weakness for EZIO - hence I never really "got" the joke. Nearly sixty years later your post cleared it up. Har! Good one Deano and Jerry.
The theme answers were "huhs" (autocorrect tried to make that "hugs" which most likely have elicited some "huhs?" from all y'all) while I was solving but the revealer tied it all together cleverly, I thought, so a nice Tuesday for me. Thanks, JG.
I'm with @Lewis on SKED. Maybe people who text use that term but since I send perhaps two texts a year (usually to remind a particularly absent-minded friend who doesn't answer her phone that we have a date) I'm not likely to add it to my SchEDule.
@Nancy Anderson - I'm curious whether you worked with any Brits and if so, did they call a SKED a ShED?
Liked the theme but agree about rest of puzzle with Rex.
However--DNF at SUPE--so I feel I finished because SUPT is only abbreviation I would accept. Sorry. Go to NYC to confirm.
Thanks JG.
@M&A, at least the New York Botanical Gardens doesn't shun TAP danicing, or at least a subgenre that I labeled "Grunge TAP".
@Nancy Anderson - I have no doubt that SKED is legit. You also give new meaning to seeing crosswordese "in the wild." Nevertheless, it is not an abbreviation I've ever seen anywhere but crosswords, making its appearance in 3-5 various puzzles in the past week more than a little excessive. Of note is that I spent 8 years scheduling schools (bringing together teachers, classrooms, students, and course requests) so one would imagine that if SKED was even a little common I might have run across it.
As for SUPE doubters, it is common enough in education. Districts are run by "superintendents." When people kvetch about them we call them "the SUPE." Basic English spelling here. "Sup" rhymes with "up." If you want the long vowel sound add a silent E at the end, making SUPE a homophone of "soup." "Sup't." would be the abbreviation and would be pronounced with 5 syllables.
I have never seen sked written in the wild but heard it often enough. Sched(ule) and sked are homophones in the US English so, on second thought, I am not sure I even heard it in the wild.
what does "I'd like to buy a no (an o), Pat" mean?????
@Elenore Benzoni - Pat Sajak is the host of Wheel of Fortune. If you're not familiar with the show, it is "Hangman" where you can pick consonants and win the money show on a spun wheel, but a player has to have earned money in order to buy a vowel (I know, I know. "Everyone" know Wheel of Fortune. Except, of course, those who don't). Pat Sajak and Vanna White are the all possible names that could lead to ANA, ANE, ANI, ANO, or ANU.
Did it in no time on Wednesday before the very easy Wednesday. Two really simple ones in a row, opposed to last week.
SKED gives me the creeps, that is all.
@Elenore Benzoni - it is a reference to a popular television game show called Wheel of Fortune. It is like a game of Hangman, where contestants guess letters and try to solve the puzzle. They win money when they guess consonants in the puzzle, but they have to pay for (buy) vowels, such as "an o".
SOPUP RESOURCES
SAYWHAT you WANNA about UNE UGLY SIZETWO,
it’s UNWISE not to EATIT, OHGEE, YETI ETTU!
---ENNIS “ZEPPO” DAEDALUS
Seemed themeless until the very end. TAPS. SAYWHAT? Oh yeah, like MAPLETREES. And one TAPS a SIZETWO? Sure, but it’s not a themer.
ISPY a SIZETWO yeah baby in ALEXA Vega. OK, by now she’s probably a four.
Saw REDD Foxx live in Vegas c. 1987; hilariously blue.
@Nancy – Milton Berle said, “I knew Doris Day before she was a virgin.”
INALL, I WANNA say I liked this more than OFL. Any comment from me will not be SNIDE.
Found this a bit easier than yesterday, though paused for spelling of DAEDALUS and getting BREWSTER, who was key to the SW, a slow-down area.
Theme is fine, but RESOURCES, being more generic or abstract, seems just a bit out of LINE with the other things one taps that are more specific and concrete.
Still, all INALL, a solid enough Tuesday.
I completely agree with @Nancy Anderson that SKED is legitimate radio operator shorthand. I’ve seen, heard and used it many times in that context. But I would also acknowledge that’s a pretty niche usage for a Tuesday puzzle. Would anyone but a radio op be familiar with it?
And l second @Z on SUPE; it’s very common ed-speak, and anyone who spends time around school staffers is likely to have heard it.
Have to say I loved the long downs. And the theme was perfectly reasonable for a Tuesday puzzle. But if 71A had not been clued as a revealer, would anyone have noticed it? I didn’t, until I came here, ‘cause my grid was already filled in before I ever got to that clue. Overall, a pretty easy puzzle, with just a very few entertaining entries to liven it up.
Highlights:
Shine little GLOWWORM, glimmer, glimmer is now an earworm.
KEGS and RAVED - could lead to something UGLY.
LMS's family stories. Reminded me of a friend's brother who "forgot" his kids at a highway rest stop on a long family reunion trip. Oops. When he got to his destination, his kids had called to request a lift.
@Mohair's punchline to @Nancy's Mary Martin story.
I always smile inwardly when someone talks about "kids these days." Do they know phone lines? Of course! They even know one-horse open sleighs. Chimney sweeps (who do still exist). Blacksmiths. Dial tones. Telegraphs. Pony Express. Knights in shining armor. Carbon copies. Raindrops on roses. Whiskers on kittens. WANNA bet?
Diana, Lady-in-Waiting for Crosswords
@Rainy from yesterday - Yes, it was surpriosing to discover Chefba's last name - Neck of the woods... Wonder if she has trouble with the TSAs at the airport.
Diana,LIW
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