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Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium (Easy except for one answer...)
THEME: none
Word of the Day: LAKE VIEW TERRACE (11D: Los Angeles suburb next to San Fernando) —
Lake View Terrace is a suburban district in the north east quadrant of the San Fernando Valley region of the City of Los Angeles, California. // Surrounding areas include the Angeles National Forest, Little Tujunga Canyon, Big Tujunga Canyon, Hansen Dam, Kagel Canyon, and a portion of the Verdugo Mountains. The community lies adjacent to the communities of Sylmar, San Fernando, Shadow Hills, Sunland, Sun Valley, and Pacoima. The area shares the 91342 ZIP code with Sylmar. Lake View Terrace is accessed by the Foothill Freeway (Interstate 210) and the major thoroughfares of which include, Foothill Boulevard, Glenoaks Boulevard, Van Nuys Boulevard and Osborne Street. // The community is middle-class and ethnically mixed, including Latinos, African-Americans, Whites and Asians. // The area hosts a large equestrian community, and is one of the few remaining residential areas in the City of Los Angeles that has private homes zoned for horsekeeping. Lake View Terrace gained international notoriety as the location of the beating of Rodney King by officers of the Los Angeles Police Department in 1991. (wikipedia)
• • •
Otherwise, as I say, this was very easy, very clean. [Genesis grandson] I had as ESAU at first because, *every man is someone's grandson*, but fixing that wasn't hard. AGGRESSOR NATION (3D: Hostile territory?) took a while to come together because it's not a very common phrase. I mean, it's far more common than LAKE VIEW TERRACE, and far more acceptable, but when I had AGGRESSORN___ I actually thought I might have an error somewhere. Having GIST for MEAT (39A: Most important part) didn't help. But again, surrounding material was easy enough that I didn't stay stuck for long. Had FIRE EXIT (?) before FIRE LANE (15A: No-parking area in a parking lot) and never quite got me head around the tense of REAWOKEN (17A: Brought out of hibernation). Luckily, there is no band called ELA, so ELO it was. ETONITES had to transform to ETONIANS (49A: Some Kings' Scholars), but all other things just slid neatly into place. The end.
[screenshot courtesy of Andrew Ries]
Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld
P.S. this was pretty cool:
@Patrick Berry's Friday puzzle was a treat, and @Rex's review hit many of the high points. If only Britain, or the Supreme Court, or the Congress, had been listening to the Beatles' DON'T_LET_ME_DOWN.
ReplyDeleteROBERT_PRESTON in "The Music Man" brought back memories of the very first big-screen musical I ever saw, at Radio City Music Hall in midtown Manhattan. That initial entry was enough to GET_BY, and I did so appreciate seeing SALINE ...
It's been a week and a half since the Minnesota Crossword Tournament, and those of you who missed it can pick up a packet of ten puzzles by clicking here. The price is only $5, and it goes to a good cause.
Can you print these puzzles out? Also, are they extremely hard? Thank you!
DeleteVery smooth, very easy, but not very zippy.
ReplyDeleteEVA Green was excellent in the Daniel Craig remake of Casino Royale.
My initial thought about E. R. was Europa Regina, but apparently that wasn't the deal. It did get me a correct answer.
Liked it in a meh sorta way.
Medium for me, quite a bit under average, but nowhere near record time. I wanted AGGRESSIONATION at first, so I thought we were dealing with some sort of conjoined word theme, but as soon as I got to DONTLETMEDOWN, I quickly fixed it. Guessed that ETONIANS was correct, and I did not like STERNE and ROBERTPRESTON, as those were a little out of my league.
ReplyDeleteNothing was severely hard, but it took a while for the puzzle to come together for me. While I certainly did not hate the puzzle, I didn't exactly enjoy it either.
My first run through yielded precious little so the "pass the puzzle" game was brought into play. Little by little we chipped away and finished without a lookup. Pretty rare for me on a Friday. Spelling 9D Lou did not help, neither did Jon filling in Oprah off the O at 23D. What possessed him to do that I'll never know. He wouldn't watch a movie with Oprah in it for love nor money. I'm still frowning over REAWOKEN, really Patrick?
ReplyDeleteGotta give my partner ESTONIANS, LONGEST and AMSTEL, that pretty much wrapped that corner.
Fun times. Thank you Patrick.
Yeah, it WAS pretty easy! I had Lakeview Terrace burned in my brain for all the reasons Rec stated. The rest was just a matter of figuring out the very clever clues.
ReplyDeleteWow...this was easy enough for me that I actually had to slow myself down so I could finish it over coffee. Very uncharacteristic for me. And that's in spite of the many PPPs I didn't know.
ReplyDeleteOnly writeovers were stirsUP (never heard BREWSUP), and iVy where greens grow on a screen.
Having seen The Music Man about 500 times at least made 33a a gimme.
Agree about LAKEVIEWTERRACE. Totally legit for an LAT puzzle, but it is incomprehensibly random.
Remember those stories I mentioned that puzzles evoke, thus making them great puzzles?? Here goes...
Dr. Kildare, in our family, is one of the movies my parents made starring us kids. Rather than send pics to the family in Portugal, my folks would make elaborate movies. Originally titled The Medic, we soon redubbed it Dr. Kildare. My brother was the doctor, my sister the distraught mother. I was the nurse. It was quite twisted, looking back on it now... My brother (6 years my elder) was told he had to kiss the nurse at the end of the operation...we had to do multiple takes, and Dad finally settled for his cheek getting to within 3 inches of mine, where neither of us were grimacing.
Those movies are among the few vivid memories I have of my Dad, who died when I was 9.
(Needless to say, those were Super 8 movies. No sound, and we had a giant light rack for best quality indoors. We even had a Kalart editing/splicing machine... We would watch the movie on a tiny screen, cutting and pasting the film, leaving untold hours on the dining room floor. I can smell the glue that it used for splicing the film. I sorta wish I had the outtakes now...
But boy...that whole process really made it seem like Hollywood.
It was pretty funny, after a long hiatus from film-making, to get my mom on the camcorder, since it took her a long time to realize that the movies were now Talkies!!!)
Thanks, Mr. Berry, for a good but over-too-soon Friday, and for the memories.
The YULELOG is a longstanding tradition in our family. My mom makes the Julia Child version, but puts her own flair on it. My job is to make the meringue mushrooms. It's always a huge hit.
Very easy Friday for me. I usually sweat a bit more, but maybe visiting New England has kept me cool.
ReplyDeletePretty easy after googling a bit. Thanks Rex for including the article from Ann Hathaway on yesterday's puzzle
ReplyDeleteWow. Anne Hathaway and I have something in common! Daily visit to Rex Parker Does the NYT crossword!
ReplyDeleteLets give cheers to Patrick Berry for another reason: his clueing is spot on. I have the illusion that we're on the same wave length but I know it's just his excellent way of writing clues. I used to feel this way about Manny Nosowsky: anyone remember him?
ReplyDeleteAlso cheers to PB for avoiding the plague of proper names that have been cluttering up the Times puzzles. I at least can forgive him Lakeview Terrace, which was gettable through those crosses.
With no fill-in-the-blanks to start me, I entered with "stirs up." I think next I sniffed around looking for other gimmes and put in "casava" (sic) crossing "Passover." Sheesh. So I thought the "I'm counting on you" clue would YIELD something ending with UP. DON'T SCREW THIS UP was too long.
ReplyDeleteI, too, had "reawaken" first right under "fire zone." So trusting PB that 11D would be at least inferable, I finally changed it to FIRE LANE and REAWOKEN. I tell you, these verbs wake, woke, awake, awoke, awoken – what a free-for-all out there in Grammar Rule Land.
Fwiw, I've heard that firefighters will just break your car windows to get the hose through if you have a sense of entitlement and have parked in a fire lane to run in to grab some brie. People who park where they're not supposed to ANNOY the bejeezus out of me. WORMS.
Wondering if my spelling partner in crime, @jae, spelled those flowers "astors" first, too.
I liked the little message – BRA, DON'T LET ME DOWN. SAG. Sigh.
I agree that LAKE VIEW TERRACE is obscure, but I'll take it for the clean crosses, especially for the NAYSAYS right next to this NOVEMBER. We'll just have to see.
It was funny to see SALINE today. Talk about rubbing salt in the SAL wound.
Rex – Cool post by Anne Hathaway.
Rex PS – you circled that this wasn't a pangram. I know they do nothing for you, and I have to admit there must be something to your instincts. Patrick Berry, as far as I can tell, has never had a pangram in the NYT.
constructors who've done a pangram
In fact, he doesn't even appear in the top 100 list of high scrabble count constructors.
highest scrabble averages
I'll never forget PB's little pangram joke. This one had every letter but E. A tour de force, that one.
Well, this must have been fairly easy (for a Friday) because I made considerable progress while still working on my first cup of coffee. I typically wait until I'm deep into my second cup before attempting a Friday puzzle -- to do otherwise is usually an exercise in futility -- but I was so excited to see PB's name on the byline that I just couldn't wait to jump in. And I wasn't disappointed. Maybe not PB's very best, but even a pretty-good PB is better than most.
ReplyDeleteI don't agree with OFL's gripe regarding LAKEVIEWTERRACE. Sure, it's a "marginal US suburb," and not many folks would be expected to know (and remember) it. I certainly didn't. But I enjoyed it as a different kind of problem: LAKEVIEW and TERRACE are common to the names of suburban areas everywhere, so the problem to be solved involved piecing it together by inference rather than retrieving it from memory. So yeah, it's a "puzzle sinker" (or "stinker"?) if you think of it as a trivia/memory problem, but I enjoyed it as an inference problem.
My own gripe was in the trivia/memory-test department. Both STERNE and OLMOS were WOEs to me, as was ROBERTPRESTON, so I wound up at the end with ROBERTP-E-TON crossing STE-NE and OLMO-. So this turned into an inference problem, to which the R and S were fairly obvious solutions. Still, they felt like guesses, and I don't like guessing.
I had one other error, but it was stupid and I don't want to talk about it.
Hi Anne! Loved you in Princess Diaries!
ReplyDeleteRelatively easy, groan-free Friday. LAKEVIEWTERRACE was the kind of word, though I didn't know it, was easily inferrable because the three three words were pretty straight ahead town-like words, and though putting all three of them together at once didn't happen right away, I got each one separately with just a letter or two. Then once I got the whole thing, it provided much needed clues for the rest on that side.
The biggest story for me was LEGALPAD. I had the three crosses sparsely filled in and couldn't remember ROBERTPRESTON's first name to save my life (getting old, not enough coffee, etc)...but once I got the -AD from LEGALPAD, PASSEDTHETIME and DONTLETMEDOWN fell immediately. Not sure why, they just filled themselves in almost literally. That helped with AGGRESSORNATION (had AGGREsiveNATION), got the R for Robert and bang, the whole puzzle got really easy.
I didn't match my best time but I was close.
OLMOS was the only freakish outlier for me. I made the mistake of think Drip chamber contents was plural and that assumption stood for way too long. I also had ETONIteS. I'm a big CASABA melon fan but it tool a while because the melon's outside is not that yellow...so I was thinking in the citrus family for a while.
Oh...just one nit: NAYSAYS. No. Which makes me a naysayer...but at what point in me being a naysayer does anyone say that I naysaid? or naysayed. Could someone please use this in a sentence?
Another smooth Patrick Berry, but way too easy for a Friday. Finished this thing before Mrs. M. rolled out of bed, I'll catch hell. The three thirteens stacked in the middle literally filled on sight (how old am I with a gimme at ROBERT PRESTON?) and laid the puzzle BARE.
ReplyDelete@Rex - Anne Hathaway in the fan base? And dropping your name no less! That is pretty cool. On the other hand, complaining about LAKEVIEW TERRACE isn't cool at all. My calendar says Friday, we're talking movie title - and infamy from the Rodney King beating. Spent my whole life in the east but know the name LAKEVIEW TERRACE well - perfectly valid entry.
While the rest of the world remembers PRESTON as the hustling "Music Man" I always think of him playing the same type of hustler as the inter-galactic pilot recruiter in "The Last Starfighter." He stole the movie. It's a matter of taste I guess.
Not at all surprised that Patrick Berry never even thinks about pangrams. Thanks for posting that Rex.
Always happy to see Patrick Berry on Friday. Means I have a fighting chance. Thought I'd hear a comment regarding the out of season YULELOG and EGGNOG answers.
ReplyDeletePatrick Berry's puzzles are always a breath of fresh air, but this one felt more like a breeze. Count me in among those who instantly knew Robert Preston, Edward James Olmos, Laurence Sterne, Lakeview Terrace. My only quibble (and perhaps nibble) is Brie for "party spread." Brie melts but I would not classify it as a spread. But then I can't afford it anyway.
ReplyDeleteVery easy, very enjoyable. I love a puzzle with WoEs that you can figure out either from crosses or inference.
ReplyDeleteTwo awkward things: BREWSUP and REAWOKEN. Everything else, just plain nice.
Loved the clue for BELL.
LAKEVIEW TERRACE is saved by the movie, which is recent enough to have come to mind quickly.
Anne Hathaway's wrong-handed writing is considerably neater than my normal writing. You can see she fell for the AH/OH trap and had trouble with 16A just like @Rex did.
Very easy as this has become a very easy week for NYT.
ReplyDeleteHello @LMS--FIRE zoNE before FIRE LANE slowed me a bit.
Fortunately I filled in ROBERT PRESTON but it seems it would make the puzzle quite a bit tougher if you did not get it right away.
Did not like the cluing for LADLES but I did enjoy the cluing for BLADES and BELL.
As an aside I just did George Barany's "A Piece Of Our Mind". Go to his site and see if you also enjoy it!
As usual thanks to PB
This was super easy for me, 9:30 to finish a theme less Friday is fast for me, I had a similar experience to @rex and had etonites before Etonians. Got to Lakeview Terrace after having most of the crosses. I liked the mini winter theme Yule Log, Eggnog, Sled , a little winter in Summer. Kind of a bummer I finished so quickly, I like to savor the mastery that Mr Berry brings.
ReplyDeleteOnce again, PB1 delivers a puzzle with low count (66), numerous loooooong answers stacked and/or intersecting one another and somehow zero junky short fill as a result. Astonishing.
ReplyDeleteAs for LAKEVIEWTERRACE, I'd much rather see that in a puzzle than yet another appearance of Syosset or a 5-letter Minneapolis suburb starting with E. And, come on, did anyone actually not get it? Every single crossing letter is pretty straightforward. To me, yesterday's OHYES/POLIS was worse.
Love the Anne Hathaway post. No way I can write that well with my left hand.
The sweet and smooth, and the rocky. Alternating attention between PB and Brexit vote fallout.
ReplyDeleteJust heard that Bernie's supporting Hillary. This following Trump's invitation for Bern to join him! And Bernie supporter vows now to support Trump!! What a world.
@Tita - Thanks for the home movie memories. My dad also - BIG lights, squinting eyes, silly behaviors. What was it with the kissing siblings shots? Icky. I always squirmed.
I'm shocked, shocked that this was both a Friday and a PB1 puzzle. Much too easy, and not all that interesting. Very meh.
ReplyDeleteI've promised to tell you all about my Verizon woes and the rest of the sturm und drang that's accompanied it. But I'm much too drained right now. I've changed my phone and Internet provider from Verizon to RCN and gotten a cell phone (which I never even wanted.) Now my building Intercom system, which comes through the phone, no longer works. It's one thing after another. I'm sleeping very badly. I'm drinking too much. When I can tell my story with some degree of humor, I'll tell it. It might not be until 2036 though.
I'm meeting Aketi today at the boathouse in Central Park. She's promised to give me a hug and buy me a drink. I need both...badly.
Lane view terrace is much better trust me.....
ReplyDeleteWhen I see the name Patrick Berry I know I'm going to finish and enjoy doing it. We just seem to be on the same page. Robert Preston was a gimme for me and broke open the grid.
ReplyDeleteI have to disagree with the thoughts on Lakeview Terrace. It is one of the hottest areas of LA for real estate right now. I had a much bigger problem with REAWOKEN. The clue just doesn't convey the being "awakened" (IMHO the better answer I put in). other than that a pretty solid puzzle.
ReplyDeleteI didn't know LAKEVIEWTERRACE from a hole in the ground, but I didn't need to. I got it easily from all the ACROSS items. What's the problem?
ReplyDeleteI don't know my time, but this was a classic Berry solve for me, Nothing, Nothing, Nothing, NE solved, Nothing, SW solved, Nothing Nothing, SE solved, Nothing, Nothing, Middle filled in, Done. Low end on the PPP (just 15 out 66) but what was here was mostly Outhouse not Wheelhouse for me. ENOS, URAL, ELO, AMSTEL, NOVEMBER, and ANG I knew. Everything else I recognized once filled, but they were all an exercise in cross-solving.
ReplyDeleteI have to wonder if the original LAKEVIEW TERRACE clue was the movie. The suburb clue is just such an exercise in randomness that I find it hard to believe it was the original.
As expected - a fine Friday.
I really never thought I would say MEH to a Patrick Berry puzzle - EVER...I just did.
ReplyDeleteI remember the one @Loren is showing, and it was brilliant. I know, you can't be brilliant every time but I couldn't work up one single smile or AHA or OOOH or nada. I like that @Tita told us a wonderful story and that it evoked some sweet memories...I'm still looking for something here...you know, to talk about like trying to do this left-handed or having met ROBERT PRESTON face to face. I could tell you a story about WORMS...I've had them all, but I won't
@Nancy...a drink at the Boathouse with @Aketi...sounds like a romance novel!
Two puzzles, really LAKEVIEWTERRACE ROBERTPRESTON zone and all else. I hear LAKEVIEWTERRACE can be seen from NATICK, on a clear day.
ReplyDeleteNot the best PB puzzle, for the reasons stated by OFL.
ReplyDeleteIt took me forever to remember ROBERT PRESTON. And though I grew up in Los Angeles (and on a block with horses, too), LAKEVIEW TERRACE simply did not exist in my day. There wasn't much north of Van Nuys, though the West Valley had many new developments thanks to the San Diego Freeway. Heck, I'm so old that I remember driving (well, being driven) up Sepulveda and through the tunnel under Mulholland Drive. That was how you got to Sylmar and the Ridge Route to Bakersfield. Going south on Sepulveda was how we got to the airport, and to Redondo Beach where I had an aunt, uncle, and cousin.
I found the SW the easy part. ETONIANS was a guess, though I always think of people from that school going to Oxford, and Kings' is in Cambridge (and well worth a visit, too). In the SE, I had "loams" before WORMS. And it took me a while to remember that E.R. stands for Elizabeth REGINA. Her Majesty's a pretty nice gal, but she doesn't have a lot to say.
I never do across-only, but I do start with the acrosses until I get one, then work the crosses from there. This time I completely drew a blank until BELL at 19A. But after that it all went fast, except for the common stirS UP error (and also LAID open), and lOaMS before WORMS). And, from sheer stupidity, Root before RIND as the source of lemon oil.
ReplyDeleteI did somehow remember, once I had LAKEV, that there was probably a LAKEVIEW TERRACE. I was wrong (should be LAKE VIEW), but the two names are crosswordily equibalent, so that was OK.
Characteristics of the papacy of Pius IX are even more obscure than the name of a suburb of LA with a population of 15,000 (less than half that of Natick!), but both are very gettable from the crosses. Fun, satisfying puzzle.
46D is clued incorrectly. Ang Lee was nominated. Michel Hazanavisius won for "Artist".
ReplyDeleteA great puzzle. Made me think a little harder, all aha's, no groans. I could see where some would find it easy but freight train, trial run, worms, and yule log weren't the first places I went with those clues. I'm a northern California and never heard of Lake View Terrace, but if you know the California cliche code words (here's an l and an ie, probably some half dried up manmade lake, so lake view) it was just a matter of a few more crosses to get terrace. A friend once theorized that all California developments were named after the thing that was destroyed to build it (rolling hills, thousand oaks, etc.) It was hilarious until I realized it was true!
ReplyDeleteA pleasure park of a grid, through which I enjoyed an uninterrupted ramble, from the REGINA-DINED intersection around to the WORMS, lingering a bit at the unknown-to-me LAKEVIEW TERRACE.
ReplyDelete@Loren, I love your BRA entreaty. Whenever SAG appears in the grid, I smile over a memory - the mom of a friend of mine and her equally aging gal pals would gather on summer days at the beach, calling themselves the SAGS - Sun and Gossip Society.
I got off on the wrong foot by thinking of Don King as the boxing producer/promoter, which gave me TRAIN as the first word of 15d. Rats to that! It slowed me down.
ReplyDeleteLike most everyone, ROBERTPRESTON was my "Open Sesame" magic word. From that point on the puzzle moved to the Friday easy category, but still retained its Patrick Berry quality.
My DNF error was REAWaKEN because ELO vs ELa meant nothing to me.
@Tita, just checking, do you sprinkle a tiny smidge of real Dutch cocoa powder on the cap of your mushrooms? I think it makes them even lovelier. I haven't made a Buche de Noel since my Dutch friend and co-baker moved away, but the mushrooms were always my favorite part.
Way too easy for a Friday. Finished in half my usual time and not even the hint of a temptation to Google.
ReplyDeleteVery snappy puzzle by PB. Definitely easy for a Friday, but still enjoyable. A run-of-the-mill Berry puzzle is still way better than most other offerings.
ReplyDelete@jae: If you thought EVA was good in Casino Royale, you should check her out in Bernardo Bertolucci's The Dreamers, opposite Michael Pitt. SPECTACULAR! Its available on Netflix.
Alas, our lovely EVA sacrificed herself for mankind on last Sunday's final episode of Showtime's Penny Dreadful.The series is not being renewed for a fourth season. Fans will miss the show and the lovely Vanessa Ives.
Speaking of lovely women it was interesting to learn that the beautiful Anne Hathaway is a budding cruciverbalist. I've been a huge fan since first seeing her in Havoc, but her performance in Love and Other Drugs opposite Jake Gyllenhaal was her crowning glory up till this point. Lets just say I love her entire body of work! ;>)
@LMS: Thanks for my daily chuckles, and yes, we will break your windows if necessary. But only if pushing your vehicle out of the way with a 30 ton fire truck is not a feasible option!
@Maruchka Re: The Brexit. Liquidated my position in the Royal Bank Of Scotland last week. My RBS-S shares had a nice 6.6% annual dividend, but I had a feeling Britain was gonna bail on the EU. Surprisingly, as of a few minutes ago, that stock is holding up much better than I would have imagined. I'll most likely buy back in when a floor appears obvious.
@Nancy: So sorry to hear of all your trials and tribulations with Verizon. I've had nothing short of a wonderful business experience with them. They provide my internet service, cell phone, land line and DirectTV, all in a cost effective bundled package. I find their tech support to be superior, and I've never had a problem that they didn't resolve to my satisfaction. There's and old saying. Sometimes its "Better to live with the ills you know,than fly to others you know not of." You may find yourself regretting the switch to another provider, but I hope it works out for you. Whatever you do, don't stop drinking! No need to make irrational decisions when you're under stress, right?
Rule Britannia!
"Still more majestic shalt thou rise,
More dreadful from each foreign stroke,
As the loud blast that tears the skies
Serves but to root thy native oak."
Hail SCOTUS!
Go Tigers!
@nancy -- You're already telling the story with humor.
ReplyDeleteEveryone takes for granted how clean PB's grids are. No one has even mentioned it yet, and it's the first thing people clamor about. This is spotless; gorgeous. I know that if I stick with Patrick's puzzles I'll eventually solve them because they are eminently fair. When I saw that REGINA, LAKEVIEWTERRACE, and STERNE weren't in my wheelhouse, I had faith that the crosses would reveal them (and they did). I also know that in a PB puzzle there will be clever cluing, and this didn't disappoint (BELL, LEGALPAD, BLADES, DINED).
I come into Patrick's puzzle knowing it's going to be like a glass of expensive wine, and he has yet to disappoint. This was another PBJ (Patrick Berry joint) to revel in.
Solid and enjoyable puzzle as usual from Mr. Berry who led me down many wrong garden paths until I reached the solution.
ReplyDeleteDiscarded answers included STIRS UP (1D), PATTER (19D), YULE FIR (7A), FAIRVIEW TERRACE 11D), PATE (43A), ETONITES (48A), and TRIAL USE (45A) So, for me, this was not easy, though I did manage to finish it google free.
Biggest hurdle: the mysterious conglomeration of letters that kept appearing for 15D. Felt very good to finally see the FREIGHT TRAINS coming.
Set a personal best for Friday puzzles on this one at 9:44. Over 12 minutes under my average. Supremely easy. I got LAKEVIEWTERRACE off the LA__V. Never even been there. Nothing here raised any eyebrows for me. Whee!
ReplyDelete@Beaglelovr - The clue for 46D is correct. Michael Hazanavisius won in 2011, awarded in the calendar year 2012. I'm guessing I won't be the first to post this.
ReplyDeleteLaurence STERNE's book, "The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy" was a big waste of time. When I'm brushing my teeth in the morning, I often PASSED THE TIME by reading a classic book. "Tristram" took well over seven months, five minutes at a time, did not deliver the out-loud laughs that some on-line reviewers experienced and it turns out [spoiler alert] the whole thing was written as a pun punchline. If I hadn't been reading it on my precious iPad, I would have thrown the book across the room! I enjoyed James Joyce's "Ulysses" ten times more and that isn't saying much. I hope I have dissuaded everyone else from ever considering reading such tripe. My current tome, Dickens' "Bleak House" is ever so much more entertaining.
ReplyDeleteBut STERNE was a gimme at least!
I thought "Boxing ring producer" as a clue for BELL was great.
I had the NE at the end of 26A and started thinking of how ether used to be delivered as an anaesthetic and I was NEAR TO putting in "ethaNE" before I caught myself.
And there was my brief flirtation with "steno" PAD at 2D, but mostly this was a typical Friday puzzle. I must say that LAKE VIEW TERRACE sounds more like a cul-de-sac street than a suburb but it was easy enough with crosses.
@Nancy, good luck drowning your tech sorrows and I look forward to hearing more of the story in your inimitable style.
Rex, the Anne Hathaway shout-out is SO cool! WTG!
ReplyDeleteLong strings running across and down made this Friday's puzzle relatively easy. Got to it later than usual due to watching the grass try to grow in moderate drought conditions. Heard of "trouble brewing" but not "brews up"...eggnog rendered "stirs up" moot. Fun puzzle all around. Agreed...Congress, Supreme Court, UK...as we jostle along the road to oblivion led by the lethal combo of ignorance and arrogance, Mother Earth yawns.
ReplyDeleteGod, I hate it when Anne Hathaway gives me a shout out on Facebook. It's embarrassing.
ReplyDeleteGet a life, Anne!!!
Hey All !
ReplyDeleteWide open spacey PB1 puz. Three Across 13's, with a 13 Down the center, and two 15's on the sides, and only dreck seems to be REAWOKWN and BREWS UP. Not too shabby...
I have a themeless awaiting review by Will. Fully expect a rejection. I just got a rejection from Will on a 15x themed I sent in. Get ready for the reason: he said it was too similar to a theme he put in the NYT in June 2015. And after the couple of repeaters we had this week...
Oh well, going for a personal rejection goal.. well on my way!
:-)
Only ONE MAN
RooMonster
DarrinV
Wonderful puzzle, although on the easy side. Always happy to complete a Friday after a one box DNF of Thursday. I saw Robert Preston and Barbara Cook in The Music Man on Broadway - my first live show.
ReplyDeleteI like Berry so much that my wife bought me a book of his puzzles - not crosswords, more like what he does in the Sunday Times magazine. I was surprised and disappointed that I couldn't solve some of them - much more pop culture than he includes in the Times! There was a group called "Smashing Pumpkins"??
@Teedman, I just read your review of "Tristram Shandy". Quelle horreur! I read it in college and adored it. It was my absolute favorite book for quite a few years after. I still have my copy and just might read it again under the sun umbrella. I hope we can still be friends.
ReplyDeleteI believe it's Teed MN, possibly related to Leonard Nimoy, right?? Definitely not on the suburb of Mpls side!!
DeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteJust heard on Facebook from a friend I have not seen not talked to in 30 years, give or take. I asked after her brother, who went to university with me. He is now living in Natick, MA!
ReplyDeleteI'm traveling again so no time for comments. Wednesday is the only puzzle I've actually missed. Today was a breeze compared to Thursday's POLIS/OHYES whack a vowels.
ReplyDeleteI find it very ironic to hear anyone complain about an L.A. suburb after all the New York centric trivia I've had to fill in over the years.
Judging from the Anne Hathaway reference our host is as star struck as anyone. Personally I prefer the comments of your run of the mill experienced solvers. Then again I resemble that remark.
If miss Hathaway really wants help with her NYTP she should go to xwordinfo and pay her twenty bucks.
I'm still intimidated by Friday and Saturday puzzles, but they're slowly becoming more doable - though I'd never describe one as "easy". Maybe one day. My current goal is to finish with minimal googling. I did have to goggle some of the PPP today, but no problems otherwise. I'm always slow on Fridays and Saturdays.
ReplyDeleteAh, yes, @Chaos (12:14), but you're not a copper wire customer, are you? You're royalty; I'm roadkill. I didn't leave Verizon willingly or happily. They simply left me to twist, twist slowly in the wind for 10 days. I was very suspicious of their behavior, but until I switched to RCN to get my Internet connection back, I couldn't Google to see if my suspicions were correct. When I had my Internet again, the very first thing I Googled was this: "Verizon cuts off copper customers." And this is what I found:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/bruce-kushnick/verizon-is-killing-the-co_b_7562660.html
It's beyond shocking. They're being investigated for criminal fraud by the NY Atty Gen'l, and I have already asked for a complaint form, which the A/G office is sending me. The link I've provided shows Verizon's internal memoranda -- something like the 60 Minutes expose of the tobacco companies. For anyone who's interested, I've been a Verizon customer at the same number and under my own name since 1971. Under my parents' names, I've had that number since about 1956. (I've always lived on the UES of Manhattan; you can keep your number if you stay in the same neighborhood.)
I didn't leave Verizon, @Chaos. Verizon left me. They also (bleeped) me over outrageously. I'm furious and, who knows, maybe you'll see me on 60 Minutes in the near future. Meanwhile READ THIS LINK!
P.S. I had a lovely afternoon with Aketi today at the Boathouse. She plied me with food and libation and cheered me up immeasurably. I appreciate it very much indeed.
Fairly easy puzzle for me on the solving day that I usually dread. I did get FIRE LANE possibly because my brother was a firefighter before he retired last year. We are still grateful to his buddies from the first fire house where he worked enabling us to scatter our parents ashes on the hill behind the house that we grew up per our father's request. The spot where Dad wanted the ashes to be scattered is only accessible by a FIRE road which is only one LANE in width. Only fire vehicles are allowed to drive on the road so they lent us a vehicle to take the entire family up ithe hill that would have been too challenging for some of our older relatives to walk.
ReplyDeleteAs for Nancy, I now have proof that she actually now owns and carries a cell phone. Neither of us had GIN AND TONICS nor spiked EGGNOG, but I do confess that we did imbibe on a glorious summer afternoon at the Boathouse. After listening to a fuller version of Nancy's Verizon story I actually now appreciate AT&T.
@Hartley70, okay, my lips twitched once or twice at the Shandy family's apparent issues with their "man parts" and uncle Toby and his constant whistling of "Lillibulero" but I still feel totally robbed by the ending!
ReplyDeleteI hope you still find it enjoyable after the gap of years. I know some of my favorites have lost their luster due to my changing tastes.
STERNE is paraphrased in the final words sung by Aaron Burr in "Hamilton":
ReplyDeleteNow I'm the villain in your history
I was too young and blind to see
I should've known
The world was wide enough for Hamilton and me.
Lin-Manuel Miranda writes, "Much later in life, Burr read Laurence Sterne's novel 'Tristam Shandy'. The book has a scene wherein somebody catches an annoying fly but decides not to kill it, saying, 'This world surely is wide enough to hold both thee and me.' Burr reportedly said, 'Had I read Sterne more and Voltaire less, I should have known the world was wide enough for Hamilton and me.' If he was joking, it was a wicked joke. But sometimes the jokes we choose to tell are the ones in which we reveal ourselves. The notion of the world being wide enough for all of us is a heartbreaker, because it's true. So I took out the Sterne and the Voltaire and kept the heartbreaker."
(This one's for you, Mrs. Shakespeare, and musical theater fans everywhere.)
Is it proper to call Lake View Terrace a Los Angeles suburb when it is in fact part of Los Angeles? Not whining about the clue, just asking. I would not call my leafy neighborhood in Brooklyn a New York City suburb, but maybe they do things differently on the West Coast.
ReplyDeleteI guess no one remembers (or heard of) Shakespeare's witches brewing (up) toil and trouble.
ReplyDeleteAs others mentioned had no idea about Lakeview Terrace but the crosses made it almost brain dead easy. Wasn't even a challenging inference with a few of the crosses. Many (most) of my crossword completions are attributable to inference for a gimme crosses.
Tough for me. But Saturdays are tough for me.
ReplyDeleteOh, we've got trouble! Trouble right here in LAKEVIEWTERRACE! Yeah, but crosses helped a lot, and inference filled in the blanks. A gigantic assist was supplied by ROBERTPRESTON, an actor who was simply born to play Harold Hill; there's no other way to put it. Kinda like, you-know-who was born to construct crosswords. A bit daunting at first view, but easy enough for a Friday, despite some clever cluing. I'd say "smooth," but for REAWOKEN and NEARTO. Wow, REAWOKEN gets a spellcheck redline! Oh well, immunity reigns. Eagle.
ReplyDeleteYIELD, PREY, LIE
ReplyDeleteEVA SAT and LAID her WARES BARE,
PASSEDTIME with some BANTER around,
“Have a ONEMAN TRIALRUN, if you care”,
she said, “be GENTLE and DONTLETMEDOWN.”
--- REGINA AMSTEL ASTERS
Vintage Berry. Smooth, fun to do, and they DONTLETMEDOWN. That, and the other long downs and acrosses opened up the whole puzzle.
ReplyDeleteI don't remember LAKEVIEWTERRACE, but it almost filled itself in as a natural once LAKEV___ came into VIEW.
The SW was the last to go, with ETONIANS and LONGEST, though this is NEAR to the shortest time I've spent on a Friday puzzle, and I enjoyed every minute.
Thank you Mr. Berry.
A PB1 puz always seems to satisfy, no exception today. First thing I thought of when BREWSUP filled in was Shakespeare’s witches. The YULELOG EGGNOG thing did make me wonder about a seasonal hiccup.
ReplyDeleteWhy are folks from Tallinn Kings Scholars? Har. Need another strategically placed S for that.
EVA Green may be my favorite Daniel Craig era Bond girl. Yeah baby.
I may be hoisting an AMSTEL or some other BREWSUP tonight as softball playoffs begin.
LAKEVIEWTERRACE or not, only ONEMAN puts together a puz like today’s. Berry good.
I always enjoy Patrick Berry’s puzzles, and this was no exception. I do agree with some of the nits already mentioned, but will not re-pick them.
ReplyDeleteI did not know LAKEVIEWTERRACE, but I do know of (too many) places with names like Lake Forest Hills, Lake View Park, Lake Forest Park, Rock Forest Hills, Forest Rock Hills, Park View Hills, and Forest Hills Terrace. So in spite of being dauntingly long, the correct answer was pretty easy to guess. Only a few crosses were needed to reveal which three component words were required. How long, I wonder, before we run out of new place names?
This was a smooth, easy puzzle which I should have zipped through (got two of the middle long answers off of only a couple letters), but for the life of me ROBERT PRESTON wouldn't come, and I know that musical, loved him in it, but just couldn't get his name, at first. I had to get the three long downs before his name came, and after that, typical Berry with deft cluing and, in my opinion, zippy answers.
ReplyDeleteI have heard of Tristram Shandy, but haven't read it. There seem to be varying opinions about the book. Should I? The discussion has REAWOKEN (yep, red line @Spacy) my interest.
Nice to have a good Friday puzzle.
What I love about PB is that if I keep at his puzzles, they will get filled in. Hooray on a Friday. And I learned something about UPS. Two boys and a bike - and $100.
ReplyDelete@Rainy et. al. - Read Tristram Shandy in college (lit major). Should say I read PART of TS. A strange hodge podge of types (fonts), languages, stories, Shak., myths, all in one long and often tedious book. Glad I haven't given over 7 months to it. (Hi Teedmn, stick with Sedaris.) Even told my prof., who was one of my favorites, that I simply couldn't finish it. Hey - I had places to go, people to see.
The only part of the actual story I remember was when a chamber pot froze over, and the young owner of said pot was told to p*** out of the window. Pick it up in your local library before buying a copy. See if you like it. I mean, some people like lutefisk. Others prefer BRIE.
Clever that ROBERTPRESTON creates trouble (1-D) in River City. With a capital T, that rhymes with P, that stands for pool!
Diana, Lady-in-Waiting for Crosswords
@D,LIW, what you said:
ReplyDelete"What I love about his puzzles, if I keep at it, they will eventually be filled in."
Yes, exactly.
D,LIW:
ReplyDeleteSorry, my quoting wasn't exact, but I think the gist of it was.
@Lefty - got the MEAT, and gist, of your comment. Just did another PB in an anthology - same experience. Slow and steady. The answers will come.
ReplyDeleteLady Di
@Burma Shave: the book and movie, "YIELD, PREY, LIE" would have YIELDEd a whole different trajectory from "Eat, Pray, Love" for Elizabeth Gilbert, interesting to contemplate.
ReplyDelete@Diana, LIW, thanks for seconding my Shandy opinion. @Hartley70 never got back to me as to whether TS by STERNE stood up to her earlier rosy opinion, but I'm with you on DS over TS, any day.
@Nightowl, not quite catching the Spock tie-in with my nom-de-blog; all I can tell you is that I don't have pointy ears, although I hope I can come across as logical on occasion.
Are you looking for free Instagram Likes?
ReplyDeleteDid you know you can get them AUTOMATICALLY & TOTALLY FOR FREE by getting an account on Add Me Fast?