A mix of wonderful and godawful. On the one hand, DUMPSTER FIRE—nice (32A: Unmitigated disaster, in slang). On the other hand, no one wants to see ETERNE and OID and KIP and AT IT and ECU and ACAN and EEE. Like, ever. I solved this upon waking *and* it was out of my wheelhouse (in several places); neither one of those facts was conducive to smooth solving. Every trick clue got me. I actually finished the puzzle thinking that LABEOUF was a word for some strange type of Muslim, and *baffled* they hadn't used the actor in the clue. Yes. It was *that* kind of solve. And then, later, the SE was a total, let's say, DUMPSTER FIRE for me. Couldn't get into it at all. Blanked on Nash's field of mathematics (GEEE-OMETRY!?); couldn't remember which one "cosmology" was, the universe one or the beauty school one; couldn't make sense of 67A: Went door to door? (SIDE-SWIPED) until the bitter, bitter end because it crossed LUTES (???) DO LOOP (???) and ELI (??????). I like the SIDE-SWIPED clue, but I've never heard of ELI (as clued—63D: "My God!," as cried by Jesus), never heard of "Theorobos" (thought he might be a LUTER) and never ever heard of DO LOOP (47D: Bit of computer programming executed repeatedly), which was the one answer that was the biggest problem because of its prime, corner-rounding position. I dropped ETERNE and STAYED easy, but without DO LOOP, the SE was unenterable. I should've gotten ARI for the Cardinal home when STL didn't fit. I just wasn't firing on all cylinders.
Anyway, I forget the rest of the puzzle, but it seemed fine. Oh, and the big big problem, beyond DO LOOP, for me, was that I couldn't get MALL (51A: D.C. tourist destination). Two issues. One, thought it would be abbr., like "D.C."; and two, I think of destinations as actual places (museums, monuments, etc.), not just a giant strip of land. "Does D.C. have a MOMA?" was an actual question I asked myself.
I was cruising through the puzzle thinking, "Easiest Friday ever!" But the southeast was my downfall as well. I actually knew GAME THEORY but couldn't get the other two long answers at all, and got hung up on many of those unhelpful Downs like DO LOOP and LUTES. Having spent a lot more time in church than watching sports, it was not ELI but ARI that stumped me. "Eli, Eli, lama sabacthani?" = "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me to try to figure out in what city a team called the Cardinals plays?"
The cross of VITRUVIANMAN and TITRATOR got me. I had an E where I needed an I, and I absolutely couldn't find my mistake as VETRUVIAN MAN and TETRATOR still seem prettty reasonable.
@rex -- I asked myself that MOMA question as well.
NOONE is a magnificent DOOK (which is a Gridiom). That's two dooks in two days.
Five or six words out of my wheelhouse (including the two 12s) made this the kind of puzzle I had to chip away at, but that's crossword work my brain likes. I was thinking VITRUVIANMAN was going to be peTRUVIANMAN, and that was a holdup for a while. Also working against me was that my brain fights so hard against learning Book of Mormon prophets. I did love the clues for LABEOUF and SIDESWIPE, and the answers SETOFPIPES, DUMPSTERFIRE, and GAMETHEORY. And it was cool to see the TIDES going out.
After the recent Wikileaks revelations about the possibility of having your TV or cell spying on you (IN STEREO!), the question ARE WE ALONE takes on more meaning, I'm afraid.
For a puzzle that started very easy this turned out to be something of a challenge. I got 1A on first guess. The top half filled in quickly with the exception of LABEOUF. That went in off the crosses and I also thought it was a word until I goggled it after solving. Things were going fine until VITRUVIAN stopped me in my tracks. I had to start all over in the bottom half. I don't know where I've heard the term GAME THEORY but it certainly wasn't in the NYTXP. It's funny how the most intimidating clue in the SE corner turned out to be the gimmie. STE, AT IT, and REBATES got the SW going. INIGO and DOLOOP were unknowns. 43 minutes to a clean grid with no cheating made this a good Friday in spite of the bad ese.
Well I had my own private little dumpster fire this morning. I distractedly put in “disaster fire” and never went back to notice I had copied part of the clue. That gave me “figures” that were traded in Chicago and well, a big mess.
I almost never use “Natick” because everyone seems to throw the word around willy nilly. From Rex’s FAQs - "If you include a proper noun in your grid that you cannot reasonably expect more than 1/4 of the solving public to have heard of, you must cross that noun with reasonably common words and phrases or very common names." So the INIGO/COIT cross got me. Take your pick on which proper noun is the obscure one. At least for me.
I also mixed my music metaphors and bestowed a “set of chops” on my gifted singer. Dumb.
Another goof – trying to fit in “ephemeral” for ETHEREAL. Dumb again. And I was feeling pretty smart with “ephemeral” even though it doesn’t really mean “light.”
And those LUTES – a “theorbo” is a kind of lute? Thanks, ROUT, for that cross.
For 17A, I immediately moved on, thinking there was no way in hell I would know any kind of blah-blah-ntric theory pioneer. Then I calmed down and looked at the word again. Oh. Ok. COPERNICUS. Bam. But that clue had me questioning GAME THEORY even though I think we’ve kinda created a No-Word-in-Grid-That’s-in-a-Clue rule. (@Trudy Morgan-Cole - my first thought was "chaos theory," but it didn't fit.)
First thought for 65A was “What’s your sign?” I liked the COPERNICUS, ETOILE, ALARMED, ARE WE ALONE? How can you think there’s NO ONE else out there? I read once that some smart guy who said that if any of these UFO sightings were actually real, then those guys sure found us uninteresting. Hmm. Wonder what these Martians could have observed. A Noh play? Mime? DMV waiting room? Gwyneth Paltrow? Wonder what could make’em decide to hang around to get to know us better. I might offer them Rice Krispy treats and a couple of The Onion articles. Maybe show them Remember the Titans. Explain that not all the leaders on our planet are TIT RATORs.
@Lewis from yesterday – best of luck and, well, what @jackj said.
Because I spent my youth as a weirdo learning about "high" culture like poetry, music and art rather than memorizing batting averages and pop lyrics like my coevals, most people think I'm an insufferable snob rather than a trivia expert if I should tip my hand in a weak moment. So it's nice occasionally to be rewarded by easily solving a puzzle like this by knowing what a theorbo is and who Vitruvius and Indigo Jones were, for example. One of the many downsides of such knowledge, of course, is you have to suppress cringes when people call Leonardo by his last name when most of the world calls Italian Renaissance painters by their first names (do we say Buonarotti"?). So I'm really sorry if some of you had to struggle today with obscure clues, but try to remember me a bit fondly the next time the latest rap music singer is crossed by a hockey player.
My comment must have gotten eaten after clicking "publish"...still learning how to participate! Needed husband's help for TOR. Wanted ephemereal also, and thought MOMA for a moment. Knew INIGO, GAME THEORY and COPERNICUS, but no idea on shia...confused at first with chia. Kept trying Jalapeno which made NE even harder. And my brain wanted DUMPSTERDIVE and it took awhile to get those "little gray cells" to come up with FIRE. No idea on SVETLANA. ARE WE ALONE?? not likely with all those new planets! Happy Friday when I can finish without a google!
This pen and ink drawing was his exploration of the theories about human proportions set forth by ancient Roman architect Vitruvius. In his treatise De Architectura, Vitruvius wrote, "For if a man be placed flat on his back, with his hands and feet extended, and a pair of compasses centered at his navel, the fingers and toes of his two hands and feet will touch the circumference of a circle described therefrom. And just as the human body yields a circular outline, so too a square figure may be found from it."
Nice workout. I learned a lot today. Did not know INIGO (I always think MontoyaYoukilledmyfatherPreparetodie), PRIAM, SVETLANA or that Theorbos are LUTES and Leonardo's amazing drawing is a VITRUVIANMAN -- but all were gettable via crosses.
DOLOOP is super familiar to me, but not in its original meaning. I hear it used a lot in the context of a problem that seems to circle back on itself -- a sense of going-nowhere futility akin to a hamster on a wheel.
Does SIDESWIPED have to mean door-to-door, or can it be any collision involving the side of one vehicle, like a front-to-side? Thankfully, I am not an expert on car crashes.
Special thanks to @Rex for the US3 video. I still listen to that early '90s album, which was my backdoor entrance into the jazz on which it's based. Only later did I learn that the fabulous piano line was Herbie Hancock's from "Cantaloupe Island" some 30 years prior.
I just scanned an article in Huffington Post on DUMPSTERFIRE. It seems to have been spread on sports talk shows. Although I love sports, I never tune in to the talk shows. Cretinous clientele.
The clue for LABEOUF was wicked.
@Nancy reminded us of COPERNICUS a few days ago with her poem about heliocentricity.
People don't talk about COIT Tower much anymore. Its frescoes have been restored and it still draws a decent crowd. But the Crookedest Street is now the darling of our tourists. It's so clogged that the Board of Supervisors is talking about charging admission.
Finally a puzzle I can sink my teeth into and savor! I loved seeing Copernicus (and recalling @Nancy's clever poem) and Vitruvian Man. I stumbled a bit in the SE as well because I have never heard of DOLOOP either. I had DELETE for an embarrassing long time. I wonder if it comes from "Loop the Loop"?
My only quibble today is the clumsy and silly ass clue for Shia LaBoeuf. Why bring in religion to that celebrity fill? I wonder if that was a Shortzian edit. It seemed too tacky for the constructor. Shia is one of those "actors" whose appeal I could never fathom.
Anyway, I am delighted that we had a solid, intelligent puzzle to end the week on (with tomorrow's hopefully just as good.)
Pretty much completely in my wheelhouse today, for some of the same reasons it was hard for @Rex. Understood the Shia clue immediately. Know John Nash and cosmology. DOLOOP went right in. MALL went right in. I liked ETERNE, especially symmetric to ETOILE.
Very good overall. You work COPERNICUS, VITRUVIAN MAN, GAME THEORY, ITALIAN ICE, DUMPSTER FIRE, HABANERO, TITRATOR into your grid, and you have won me over, and I'll overlook your SEEN AT and OLEO.
Could easily have Naticked at INIG? Jones crossing C?IT Tower, but felt fairly comfortable with the O.
@LMS I know you'll pooh pooh it, but your comments remind me of Dave Barry, funniest writer on the planet. Got the puzzle but I have to keep hitting the "check puzzle" button to finish. Coupon, maison, canal, MOMA, anyone?
A THEORBO is a big lute. Imagine if a lute and a giraffe got together. It's found in a small subset of classical music (17th century, shading a little into the 18th). Most classical music people don't know what one is. You have to dig deeper into Baroque music enthusiasts. In the US, imagine connoisseur communities in our older cities and a few receptive music departments in college towns. This is obscure AF--even within the professional field--and I hated seeing it in the puzzle.
Despite my earning a DNF this was was a very enjoyable solving experience. Wonderful two 3x10 across stacks at the top and bottom. Had LEvI instead of LEVI at 11A and BOcS at 18A. So I had vAcANERO at 13D. Sounded like the name of a GM truck. Other than that a big natik at the intersection of INIGO and COIT.
Breezed through the NW and started getting worried. It seems I can never maintain an early momentum on a Friday or Saturday puzzle and that was the case today. The puzzle I submitted had 6 wrong letters. Some cascos were
@Trudy Morgan-Cole - Nice lead-off. Just as an FYI that you shouldn't care about, the NFL Cardinals have played in Chicago, St. Louis, and Phoenix. The baseball Cardinals are in St. Louis and have STL on their caps. All of this trivial trivia has been used in crosswords clues.
@Lewis - The Herman's Hermits lead singer opened a Vietnamese Noodle joint, NOONE's PHO TOOP. The DOLOOP soup is to die for.
@Muse - Like @Sir Hillary, I have Covent Garden architect filed right next to Princess Bride swordsman, so I got INIGO off the I (@dolgo - you got autouncorrected).
I grokked the "not a muslim" clue immediately, but had no idea what the vowel order could be. A constipated vowel movement, as it were. The vowels loosened up with the crosses.
My biggest slow down, though, was the SW. SVETLANA. The VIT of VITRUVIAN MAN, edgE before NOSE, the gender of a house, what descriptor would fit for Kant. Yikes! I resorted to running the alphabet for the second letter of E--ICI--. Got to T, threw down ETHICIST, and finally the corner fell, preventing an ignoble Friday DNF.
damn...I always have to tousle with myself on a for-me-easy Friday. On the one hand, I want more of a struggle. On the other hand, it makes me feel oh so smart, and then add sprinkles atop that feeling when Rex calls it anything more than Easy..
Looking back over the grid, I can't explain why I found it easy...I not only didn't know, but flat out never heard of SVETLANA, TIT RATOR (wink emoji, @lms), LABOUEF, LEHI...
I guess knowing DOLOOP and popping in AREWEALONE off the last E helped me avoid the pitfalls others had there. Lots of great wrong answers today...DUMPSTERdIne, whatsyoursign,
I have been to COIT Tower, or been in its vicinity enough, to know it immediately. It really stands out...hard to miss.
Agree about the MALL not being a destination. My MALL story... We met our Alabaman friends in DC. Heir kid was a toddler. Mom was a strict disciplinarian. The kid was quite rambunctious. And when I say rambunctious, I mean out-of-control. We were walking on the MALL when the skies suddenly lowered, and massive lightning flashes and thunderclaps started. Devon just wouldnt heed his momma, and continued to run in several directions at once. She yelled out, trying to be heard over the storm... "Devon...do you want momma to hit you or lightning?" Little Devon, having never experienced a lightning strike, but having three years experience with mamma, quickly chose lightning.
First 3 entries were in a row, STE TOR EEE and I sensed an @Rex meltdown. Then I stared for 2-3 minutes. Nothing. Ok, let me try ACAN, AGAS, NOSE (if that didn't work I'm going to hair), ATIT and PICNICS. Somehow all correct. 20 minutes later it was all over. This is the kind of puzzle I like, seems initially impossible and then little by little it all goes in. Only really bad casco was cArrerRa before HABANERO, wondering how one Porsche could be hotter than the next. Then I realized that's not how you spell carrera. COPERNICUS and V-MAN look cool in the grid. @Dolgo, one persons hockey playing rapper is another's heliocentric pioneer mathematician, I guess. You're not a weirdo.
Loved the challenge of this one with 80% easy and the NE very tricky and time consuming. DNF with a Natick at LEvI / vABANERO and that entire area was a veritable mess. Never heard of DUMPSTER FIRE so I went with DUMPSTER modE originally. I was real proud that I sussed VITRUVIAN MAN and TITRATOR. Favorite clue was for PICNICS. Thanks PF.
DO LOOP is pretty weak. It was the standard iteration construct in Fortran but the term has been out of favor in any programming languages since the 70's. Even though Fortran was my first language it took me quite a while to see that answer. Also, cosmology deals with the structure of the universe rather than questions such as ARE WE ALONE.
@Brett, me too for VeTRUVIAN over VITRUVIAN. I was chugging along to maybe not a record time, but close to it. Searching for my mistake took me almost as long as completing the rest of the puzzle did.
I agree with others about the nice long answers, especially DUMPSTER FIRE. I also liked the liveliness of SET OF PIPES. Seemed to me that there were a lot of science-related answers, with GAME THEORY, TITRATOR, COPERNICUS, and ARE WE ALONE. Nice for some people, I suppose, but not necessarily my cuppa.
This was I thought a beautifully constructed puzzle with the triple 10 stacks in the NW and SE full of fun words and phrases. Liked them all - SET OF PIPES, ITALIAN ICE and GAME THEORY in particular. Not to mention the two neat 12s in the center. Fun to fill in each of the eight long answers. Made the same DNF mistake as @Brett because TeTRATOR looked so plausible and had no idea how to spell VeTRUVIAN. If I was Jeff Chen I would have made this my POW.
ROFLOL @ Loren on Martians. One of the first literary ETs wasn't very impressed... Micromégas I think the story is the origin of "there's no intelligent life down there."
I blew through this like Wednesday. Was baffled by the Shia clue until the L went in to finish. Great puzzle, but I wish there had been more difficulty in the clues for the short and medium-length answers. And COPERNICUS. Giveaway clue.
{Chili peppers that go on and on and on...} HABANERO ETERNE
For this old programmer, DOLOOP was my first thought, even though I've programmed in many different languages. I thought this was going to be a very tought Friday until I was done in a fast time for me.
This was very easy in the NW, once I changed SET OF LUNGS (which I wrote in very dark ink because I was so sure) to SET OF PIPES. But then it got very hard -- especially since I've never heard of Shia LABOEUF (or was it LABOEUF Shia?). I read Rex's comment, but I forget. I thought I was losing my mind with that set of letters for a religious sect (I thought) that I'd never heard of. And I've never heard the expression DUMPSTER FIRE. I thought 11A was LEvI, not LEHI and I initially thought 40A was CfO, though I didn't write the F in. I do think I successfully finished this, except I forgot to check the INIGO?/COIT? cross -- but I'll lose this comment if I go back to look. It could be INIGA/CAIT just as well, so I might have a DNF. Hope not.
There are some proper names that I feel I should know, and VETRUVIAN MAN falls into that category. But I didn't know it. And PRIAM took some crosses before it jogged back into my always foggy memory.
Mime and puppetry are ARTS? You sure could have fooled me.
There was some tricky and clever cluing in this: SERIF; SIDESWIPED; LA CASA; PICNICS; OLEO. And ARE WE ALONE was a very nice answer. But I didn't love this puzzle -- too many names, and often in the most inconvenient places.
The clue for cosmology is wrong though; cosmology is the study of the early universe, how things evolved from the Big Bang to galaxies and so forth. Nothing to do with the question of whether there's life out in space. That would be astrobiology.
Oops. Looking at the answers, I see that while my INIGO/COIT was right, my VeTRUVIAN MAN/TeTRATOR was wrong. (Thanks, @Brett, 6:25). Therefore I DNF. I suppose all the chemists on this blog (there sure seem to be a lot of them) will be shocked, shocked at TeTRATOR, but for me, it was as unknown and unknowable as VITRUVIAN MAN.
I have not gone back to check but pretty sure that the reading for 'my God' is Eli (Hebrew) in one of the gospels and 'Eloi" (Aramaic) in another of the gospels. I loved for and fell for the misdirection of the Shia clue. I never can remember the three different clues for Inigo but usually have a spider sense that tells me when Inigo is the answer. I first had gate theory before game theory----possibly confusing it with the gate theory for pain. I was also lost on the 'mall' answer and had to google Priam and theorbos to finally arrive at the answer. Fun puzzle!
I wasn't fooled by the LABEOUF trickery, but struggled with vowel placement. I wanted it to be spelled like Le Boeuf (French for "the beef"), but that gets three of the four vowels wrong.
This puzzle covered a broad range of knowledge, and mixed in neat stuff like DUMPSTERFIRE and AREWEALONE? Nicely done.
The puzz moved from medium to challenging for us because we wanted to squeeze miaCASA at 55a, didn't know Mr. LABEOUF, and thought like many of you that MALL needed to be abbreviated. Also live in Lehigh county and had to deal with the Mormons misspelling their Prophet's name.
DOLOOP! Haven't used that term since I coded in something called BCD (Binary Coded Decimal) for an NCR machine in the 1960's, thanks for the memory. Anybody else wonder if there is any shoe width other than EEE or EEEE? Jalapeno before HABANERO, anyone else?
@Muse - Blame the natick on INIGO. Blame the Martians leaving on Paltrow.
@Mama - In a puzzle past an answer was DO OK and thus appeared in the puzzle as DOOK. Enough people asked "what the hell is a DOOK", unable to parse it as DO OK, that "it's a DOOK" became a term for being unable to parse a grid entry properly. NOONE is not only a DOOK in that many people have trouble parsing it as NO ONE, but in fact Peter NOONE (of Herman's Hermits) publicly took joy in appearing in the NYTimes Xword Puzzle.
Just last week when the kerfuffle started with SHIA, I said "why not clue it as the LA BEOUF?" But then the only one who reads me anyway is Gwyneth Paltrow. Started off with my SET OF PIPES singing at the top of my lungs. I was enjoying this puzzle. Came to a halt in the bottom west coast because I'm not up on my SVETLANA's nor my TITRATOR. Could not get L'Uomo out of my head. Dang, it's VITRUVIAL. Then came to another halt with John Nash and Theorbos and misreading 65A as question of cosmotology. Had to take a break. It's amazing how you can get your brain to do a euey, uey, youee when you get up and walk around and drink some more for about a minute and then a voila pops in. It took one little letter at a time to finally get the correct answers, but I did it. I did check with Google to see what kind of philosophy Immanuel Kant was up to. Epistemology didn't fit. I think I severely lack it. @Dolgo. I feel your pain....It's hard being smart.
I adored this puzzle. It felt fun and intelligent.
The clues for SIDESWIPED and Shia were terrific.
The letter V was my bete noire today. While there was plenty I had to suss out with crosses (hi, SVETLANA!) I ended up with 2 letter V errors. I decided on LEvI, never having seen "The Book of Mormon" and thinking there might be a pepper that rhymed with HABANERO and started with V. Add to my reasoning that LEHI sounded like a college cheer to me or an ancient brand of soda.
That second V in VITRUVIAN stumped me because an L sounded better but a D worked with the casco MOdE as the cross. Annoying, but I had no excuse for my ignorance here, since I am well acquainted with the drawing.
Shout out to INIGO, LUTES, COPERNICUS, TITRATOR, GAMETHEORY and too many other favorites to name. There's a special place in my heart for AREWEALONE because I think about that all the time. My short answer is NO!
Very easy top, and then I got hopelessly stuck at the bottom until I looked up "theorbos". Never, ever saw that word before. After that it was a breeze. I let do loop fill itself in, or I would have a problem with that too.
Nice work-out, though. Relaxed on a snowy CT morning.
After roaring aloud at Trudy-Morgan Cole’s lead-off comment on the tricky clue for ELI, the urge to post took hold and it’s time to find out if I remember how.
Especially when, at first blush, I’m left wondering, “Where has all the memory gone, long time passing.” But, on cue, the old brain matter spits out SVETLANA, GAMETHEORY and COPERNICUS but refuses to play fair when looking for VITRUVIANMAN.
Undeterred, the crosses provided the answer and a Wikipedia peek shows a picture of the old boy, arms stretched and flapping, looking for all the world like an aged Army recruit doing jumping jacks, (no relation), and then it’s back to solving the Polish Pawel’s polished puzzle.
Where favorite poster LMS cries Natick on INIGO/COIT, I fondly remember my first visit to San Francisco, seeing the COIT Tower looming ahead through the fog and going to the top only to learn that I couldn’t see a thing through the pea-soupiness of the day. Doh!
No matter, remembering that the funds to pay for the wonderful art deco Tower came from an eccentric 19th century cigar smoking San Franciscan lady who chased after fires big and small, saved my day and brought a glimmer of hope on the memory front.
And, finally, ELI came back to mind as I finished up in the Northeast corner and mused at the clever inclusion of the Prophet LEHI, thinking, if you drop the “H”, LEHI is an anagram of ELI. Clever, Pawel, clever.
(But, I must also note that BOB(S) won’t be your uncle when you clue it as such, instead of the more acceptable BOBbers, one of which always floated my fishing line.)
Forgot to mention the nice touch of including Inigo Jones in the puzzle as I just read that he was the first I think to apply Vitruvian principles to London architecture.
A fine puzzle except for NE I just wouldn't let jalapeño go for way too long Took forever I do quibble that an Italian ice is an alternative to Gelato In that regard so is frozen swamp water
I never think about Gwyneth Paltrow-- any more than I imagine she thinks about me. But I feel I may be missing something here. Can you tell me, @Loren, @Mohair and @GILL, what exactly it is about her that would make Martians take one look at her and go back to their own planet? Now that I am thinking about her, I would consider her to be, cosmologically speaking, completely inoffensive. Can someone enlighten me, please?
@Mordechai Beizer, closest I ever came to coding in FORTAN in my about thirty years of programming was maintaining a FORTRAN compiler (written in I don't remember what), in the late 60's. I confess, when all I had for 47D was the D, I came up empty. Thought, "subroutine"? "Macro"? ??? But with another letter, DO LOOP popped in. DO WHILE and DO UNTIL would be examples of DO LOOPS. I coded in proprietary stuff that IBM used. There were "bits of code" that reiterated until some test was true or false, and I thought we called them DO DO LOOPS. But the fact that I couldn't remember the term may mean that I hadn't used it since the days of pocket protectors.
Hey All ! Well, puz is kicking my butt. I have the upper diagonal half filled in, but tons of white space taunting me in the lower diagonal area. Rex says Medium...
Apologies if this was said already, as 60 posts as I write this... Wanted 37D to be A REAL PISSANT.
@Nancy - Google Gwyneth and get ready for an adventure in women's health, diet, living, and God knows what other advice. Martians surely have enough problems of their own.
Very easy for me except for the SW. I could picture the da Leonardo drawing but had no idea what it was called and VITRUVIAN is not exactly inferable. So I needed a bunch of crosses and some luck...I knew TITRATOR and guessed right on SVETLANA who was a WOE.
Add me to the fans of the NW and SE stacks and the two 12s, liked it!
Was amazed at what I was able to work out,including dollop (see, even my autocorrect doesn't accept doloop) and ashamed of what I had to Google, Svetlana, Lehi, Loewe and had an e for the i in titrator. Still, a good romp and lots to be proud of getting.
Insprired guessing got me very close - but no cigar. Two crosses from victory, which sounds like a bad movie. I shall not reveal how much I did not know here. The DO LOOP gimme I shall consider a small victory.
Despite the crap fill, I had a blast saving this one. But, more important, Rex you once more hit it out of the park with your choice of music videos! I can still remember the first time I heard Cantaloup (Flip Fantasia,) driving my brand new 1993 Honda Civic across the Vincent Thomas Bridge listening to the Kevin and Bean Show on KROQ. Thanks for the blast from the past with a song that never fails to delight.
Shout-out to @Tita for her MALL story, which made my day.
Friday tough, and yet I finished though LABEOUF came 100% on crosses. I've been to COIT Tower many a time as have my children. Used to park downtown on a Sunday, walk to Chinatown for some dim sum, and on up through North Beach to the top of the hill to see the murals and admire the view. Down Telegraph Hill via the wooden steps, then walk (or in later years take an historic streetcar) back to 3d and Market.
TOR was a sneaky clue, wasn't it? After all, a raptor might very well perch on a tor. But I assume there is a Toronto team called the Raptors. Ah, they play in the NBA. I never used to watch b-ball, but what with the Warriors and all, I now follow them at least.
Some good stuff here: SET OF PIPES, SIDE SWIPED, and, of course, DUMPSTER FIRE. But, what's up with that flat out Natick, and don't tell me you don't know what cross I'm talking about.
COPERNICUS was a scientist who ran into some push back for espousing an inconvenient theory which seemed true in his mind. I guess we all live our lives under the scrutiny of historical retrospect.
Stuff I amazinly knew, that I wouldn'ta thought I did: COIT. PRIAM [almost spelt it PREAM, tho]. DOLOOP [har! Fortan!] TITRATOR [h.s. chem class!]. ETERNE [Better clue: {Seabird eaten by a double-E major??}.]
Stuff I thought I knew, but sorta really didn't: VITRUVIANMAN. TOR. KIP. ECU. HABANERO. TOR gets honorable extra-mention, becuz it confused M&A's butt clean off. TOR to m&e was a "rocky peak", which is a fine home for a raptor's nest -- no day-um "Abbr." necessary. Post-solve, when the precious nanoseconds were out of harm's way, I figured out that the clue was thinkin TORonto, of course.
Stuff I coulda gone to the grave fairly happily not knowin: INIGO. ETOILE.
Desperation artistic flare award-winner: OID. staff weeject pick: COO. Fake Abbr. news, again! Was that there constructioneer/Shortzmeister tryin to rack up a grid-span of Abbrs. today?! Drove their STETOREEECOO, right down main street. Don't make me come down there, fellas.
Primo misdirect, on the LABEOUF clue, as soo elo-quaintly discussed by @RP. @RP: Sounds like U wanna get lotsa bed rest, and then recovery time & coffee, before suitin up for yer next big crossword tourney. Need to shake the cobwebs off, dude. Do some push-ups.
Thanx for the feisty fun, Mr. Fludzinski. Any puz with a DUMPSTERFIRE goin is plenty ok by m&e.
Svetlana Alexievich interviewed many Russians to gain perspectives on the country that is passing. Imagine a Slavic Studs Terkel who has exerted a tremendous effort to find accounts of Stalin times through recent decades.
I beat this puzzle, but it was almost a ROUT. I could have written @Rex's comments on the SE - that was my bete noire today. Except I took a @Gill I break and came back to finally see SIDESWIPED, which wiped up all of my little errors.
My fave problem was caused by the way my puzzle printed out. My paper version had the clue for 40A as:
"Second-in-comma nd at a corp."
I got COO in place, but I continued to think of it as something to do with a URL - I got a laugh when I finally saw that COO was next in line after the CeO.
Poor Gwyneth - she has gone a bit goofy - perhaps instead of the UFOs turning around, they made their home with her.
Thanks, Pawel, for a fine Friday struggle that I succeeded at by a NOSE.
p.s. M&A semi-auto-correct dept: FORTRAN, not "fortan". First programmin lingo M&A ever learned, btw. Had to punch up cards, hand the deck in at a window, and get yer printout back the next day. Woulda driven insta-grat millennial kids straight to coo-coo ville.
yo, @Tita: har. Did yer mall story's last intriguin line mean that lil Devon *actually* took a lightnin strike? Which of the obvious choices was he thereafter referred to by? ... 1. Devo. 2. Dev on fire. [Or, variant: Devster Fire.] 3. s'Mall Stain. 4. Devolt. 5. Devonshire creamed. 5.5. Devonchar creamed. 6. Dev Off. 7. Dev Out. 8. Sparky.
I had the F and a couple others that made ACLUSTERFUC* fit perfectly instead of DUMPSTERFIRE. I knew that couldn't be right but it's a much better and way more common answer than DUMPSTERFIRE imo! At least it helped me fill in the middle.
Interesting. In Matthew's Passion Narrative, Jesus uses the word ELI. In Mark's, He uses the word ELOI. (NAB version.) I didn't know that, and sheesh, I teach a Bible Study class! So, apologies to Pawel and Will for my thoughts when filling in ELI :-)
Geez, I enjoyed this. INIGO was first answer in - I like English gardens. I knew it was --LOOP, needed crosses for first two letters. I was also in the dark on theorbos and TITRATOR while I struggled with HABANERO.
Last one in was LABEOUF. I had no idea on the initial letter in LEHI so that cross was an incorrect guess. Like Rex, I never once thought of the actor Shia and, because of the way the realization cracked me up once I got here, I'm calling that the Clue of the Year, thus far. Thanks, Pawel Fludzinski! May you someday be famous enough that your glorious 15 letter name can occupy the squares in a NY Times puzzle.
For computer nerds, DO LOOP was very nearly a gimme. When I saw the clue, my very first thought was "FOR LOOP?" which obviously didn't fit, so DO LOOP was the next reasonable guess.
@Ted, @Mordechai: in addition to Fortran, you'll find that DO LOOP is still a term of art in Visual Basic and SAS. While "do-while loop" is more common in everyday speech, DO LOOP is a legit answer in its own right IMHO.
This was a very smooth fill for me, just a bunch of random stuff I happened to know. But I completely misread the Shia clue as Muslim who isn't a Shia, so I made that one tricky for myself. OLEO took me forever.
Was easy for me at the beginning as well. Got VITRUVIAN MAN and LABEOUF right way which helped until I got to the dreaded SE corner. For some reason couldn't think of ELI so put DAD in that clue as my first thought though I figured that was probably wrong. Fun Puzzle overall
@Disbelievers in the "cosmology" clue - I suggest that a quick peek at Wikipedia before posting may have relieved you of your notion that the only cosmology is physical cosmology.
@Anonymous/mama - @anon10:21 provided a nice explanation. They did omit that GOAT was the original DOOK (that's GO AT, not goat as in animals or G.O.A.T as in greatest of all time) and might still make an occasional appearance amongst the commentariat's gridioms (itself a recent addition to the gridiom list). Rex has an FAQ page which includes some of his gridioms, but none of the commentariat created gridioms:
Malapop - A wrong answer that later appears as a correct answer in the puzzle. RRN - Random Roman Numeral - i.e. any Roman numeral RCD - Random Compass Direction POC - Plurals of Convenience - Using plurals to manipulate grid formation Pewit/Eyepit - Oddly obscure answers that once appeared PPP - Pop Culture, Prouct Names and Proper Nouns DOOK Natick - pronounced nay-dick - see Rex's FAQs Ese - Sort for Crosswordese - Shortish words with useful letters extending the words use in crosswords long beyond their use in the wild. Yma Sumac, Yoko Ono, Brian Eno, etc. etc. In the Wild - How words are used outside Crossworld I know I'm missing some.
I haven't checked, either, but the variation may be caused by different translations. Growing up always going to church on Easter, I recall it as "Eli." Those were the days when Protestant churches used the old KJV. I was about 10 when the RSV came out. Now, as you all probably know, there exist a bewildering variety of versions.
Couldn't resist Googling "Eli, Eli" . . etc. My online Bible source says that among major contemporary versions the NIV is the only one to transliterate the Aramaic as "Eloi." I guess that's a pretty popular one, though.
PS My guess is that most versions transliterate the Greek of the NT, rather than trying to recover the "original" Aramaic. I find myself wondering why you would want to do that. Apparently the Evangelist wanted to preserve Christ's words as they were passed down from those who actually heard them. And whoever wrote Matthew might not have known Aramaic anyway.
For whoever is interested I've taken the time to score this puzzle using the xwordinfo lists. I came up with a very unimpressive 32. However between a third to half of the score is accounted for by just 7 words. These were OLEO, STE, EEE, LEA, ARTS, OLE, and NIL. If you take these out of the equation the score drops to an impressive 14. Of the 70 total words 37 of them have made Shortz era appearances in only the single digits. This was a really good example of interesting and unusual entries being traded off for the shop-worn. A couple of cluing triumphs were ARI and ELI. Of the 258 times ELI has appeared this is only the third time it's been clued using the Cardinals. ELI has a list of 405 clues this is only the second time it's been clued as "My God." That's why I score those as 3 and 1 respectively. LUTES also scored a 1 because it's clue was so unique and unprecedented. I even checked the LUTE list and there's no sign of theorbos, that word doesn't even show up in my Webster's. As a reference on the score the better late week puzzles will get down into the mid-teens on their overall score. This one just had too much common material mixed in but a good puzzle never the less.
@dolgo, traditionally Matthew was believed to be the apostle, who spoke Aramaic just as Jesus and the others did. His Gospel in Aramaic was prized among the Syrian Christians who also spoke the language. Obviously Mark, whose name suggests he may have been Roman, also spoke and wrote Greek, as most Romans did (indeed, it would be surprising if Jesus knew no Greek, because he grew up near Caesarea, where the soldiers and officials spoke Greek). And from the beginning the Church recognized that Luke was of Greek origin and wrote his Gospel and Acts in that language.
John is the interesting case. He was an old man when he wrote the Fourth Gospel. My assumption is he spent 50 years preaching in Greek speaking parts of the Roman Empire (the islands and also Asia Minor) and if he did not write his Gospel he dictated it to a follower who was an eloquent writer. Read John and it is hard not to believe he was looking back on the days when he was the youngest of the 12, just a teenager really, whom Jesus loved most, and he wrote his Gospel in part to make it clear that along with his brother (who was martyred early) and the older Peter, he was part of the innermost circle around Jesus. No one who reads John can doubt it was written by an old man who had read other Gospels and wanted to set the record straight before he died.
@M&A... Har indeed! I vote for 5. Has some real class, that.
Rest assured everyone, lightning didn't comply, and to this day, now 24-year old Devon continues to think that being struck must surely be better than facing his mom. He's smart, creative, and tells me I'm his favorite aunt. (See what I mean about smart?)
(We did all successfully get out of the storm unsparked -my second fave.) Oh - thUmbs Up for Devster Fire- real topical!
You could never fathom the appeal of Shia LaBoeuf!! Why, his charisma cuts across generations and genders! It proves that you can be an absolute zero and still be successful.
I'm a programmer and I've never heard anyone say "do loop" before. There's a "do while" loop, but do loop? Maybe it's a term in a language that I don't know.
Got super hung up on COSTUMER -- just couldn't see it -- I am a Tony award-winning "Costume Designer" and on Broadway I work with a "wardrobe" team of "wardrobe supervisors" and "dressers". We also have "star dressers" and the antiquated "wardrobe mistress". THERE ARE NO COSTUMERS BACKSTAGE ON BROADWAY. You'll have to go to a TV or film set to find one. They do a similar job to Broadway dressers, but the terms are not interchangeable.
Sure, the SE was my downfall, but this clue was a huge roadblock for me.
COPERNICUS and the VITRUVIANMAN ENTREAT, of their FUTURES, with an ETHICIST in class: “GAMETHEORY and DOLOOP ROUTs CAN MOVE in a TITRATOR and ETHEREALly coexist as AGAS.”
--- SVETLANA LACASA-LABEOUF
this DUMPSTERFIRE of a stream of unconsciousness brought to you by . . .by . . . Hey close that TAPPER!
The SE was a bit sticky, but other than that this was surprisingly easy. But then, COPERNICUS, VITRUVIAN MAN, INIGO (Jones), and THEORBOS all relate to the early modern period, and I wrote a book on that. The best-known painting of Mary Wroth, the first English woman novelist, shows her with a theorbo (or at least a giant LUTE).
Wow, you guys--even OFL--surprise me. With NO(t)ONE but two gigantic gimmes at COPERNICUS and VITRUVIANMAN, I conquered this one in a ROUT. AREWEALONE alone is worth the price of admission, although there is some roughness in the fill. Particularly distressing is the uber-awkward partial SEENAT. (I did, once, and his daughter Natalie too).
I did have a bit of a tussle with the bizarre spelling of Mr. LEBEOUF's name, but it is what the crosses say it is. No other problems of note; easy-peasy--for a Friday. I can't believe an apparently well-educated person like OFL wouldn't know the classic DaVinci drawing, or Jesus' oft-quoted death plaint.
with NOONE else to compete, I am pleased to award the DOD title to one of the most courageous women in history: that teenage Xena STE Joan. I thought the term for 30-across was "dresser." Maybe that's too old-fashioned a term for today's theater. Despite stuff like EEE and another entry that's fast becoming overused: ATIT, I liked it enough to give it a birdie.
Found it exceptionally impenetrable at first, but was not angered enough to walk away. Kept working and with slow success found it enjoyable and fair. Rewarding to solve.
Of all the places to have a w/o, the one hole must be the worst. After a quick run through the NW, I was looking at__CKOS and filled it in with waCKOS. Shoulda tried a few more downs first. Remember that 4 letter Utah city that’s not Orem? LEHI is back in eponym form.
My first programming was also in FORTRAN; punch cards, etc. Yeah, I’m a dinosaur. Heard both DOLOOP and GAMETHEORY on MPR yesterday. GAMETHEORY was used in the context of using a reverse auction to get people off a plane instead of brute force. Forget why DOLOOP.
From wiki: SVETLANA Yuryevna Zakharova is a prima ballerina with the Bolshoi Ballet and an ÉTOILE of the La Scala Theatre Ballet. Yeah baby (not from wiki).
A LOTT of great answers here. The FUTURE’S looking good for Pawel.
1A evoked a memory which brought a smile. Back when I was cool, I was at a friend's house when he made a comment about the new dual exhausts on Lonnie's '55 Ford, to wit, "Boy, Lonnie's got great pipes!" His mother commented, "I didn't even know Lonnie could sing". Maybe you had to be there, but that kicked off my solve which went swimmingly until I misspelled VeTRUVIAN and took way too long to see TITRATOR, and I a former chemist.
Not bragging, but I had no trouble in the SE, and enjoyed the romp through the grid. Slowdowns: CfO before COO, and figuring that the non-Muslin Shia was a sect. Anyway, I've seen the name LeBOEUF before, so the actual answer was entered with a shrug.
I'd hate to be called INIGO, but I thought for sure that @Burma Shave would have used that it in a poem (IN I GO).
@Spacey - yesterday I attempted to depict a "jog" in a road, and it was great, believe me, but when posted it came out looking insipid. Sorry.
@rain forest - INIGO was that close, along with SVETLANA, AREWEALONE and ATIT and TITRATOR and COIT with "us" rhyming with "avoid us", you get the idea. Almost STAYED with it.
Aside from this puzzle being a giant Natick for me, I "overheard" DOLOOP yesterday in a Futurelander's misposted comment. Wondered what he/she was referring to, and searched yesterday's offering for DOLOOP in the answers or clues. So a dnf gimme.
Yes, I know the drawing by da Vinci, but didn't know the name. rrrr
Never heard of DUMPSTERFIRE, LABEOUF (the actor), hAD Testtube instead of TITRATOR for quite a while, which made a mess of the SW.
Diana, Lady-in-Waiting for Crosswords, and enlightenment
“SVETLANA, AREWEALONE? They SEEM to avoid us, I’m a TITRATOR, so a LOTT ATIT I ENTREAT you to show.” “I’m ALARMED that you STAYED so long with no COIT us.” So when I MOVEd to TAPPER I cried, “OLE! INIGO!”
Starting with SETOFPIPES, there seemed to be a lot of musical clues in this Good Friday puzzle
INSTEREO, LUTES, and LOEWE. Peter NOONE, the BOBS, INIGO girls. DO LOOP music The rapper FUTUREs. The 90s white rapper ITALIAN ICE. A touch of REBA at 42D.
If you PANIC (you might) MOVE A GAS then you'd have to WIPEd your SIDES.
Late to this party (the state paper here in Arkansas publishes long after the Times runs them) but just want to sympathize with you, Rex. And add that "ethicist" would be far down the list for me for Immanuel Kant.
A long time ago, I was solving this puzzle and got stuck at an unguessable (to me) crossing: N. C. WYETH crossing NATICK at the "N"—I knew WYETH but forgot his initials, and NATICK ... is a suburb of Boston that I had no hope of knowing. It was clued as someplace the Boston Marathon runs through (???). Anyway, NATICK— the more obscure name in that crossing—became shorthand for an unguessable cross, esp. where the cross involves two proper nouns, neither of which is exceedingly well known. NATICK took hold as crossword slang, and the term can now be both noun ("I had a NATICK in the SW corner...") or verb ("I got NATICKED by 50A / 34D!")
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i/ˈʃaɪ.ə ləˈbʌf/; born June 11, 1986) is an American actor, performance artist, and filmmaker. He became known among younger audiences as Louis Stevens in the Disney Channel series Even Stevens, a role for which LaBeouf received a Young Artist Award nomination in 2001 and won a Daytime Emmy Award in 2003. He made his film debut in Holes (2003), based on the novel of the same name by Louis Sachar. In 2004, he made his directorial debut with the short film Let's Love Hate and later directed a short film titled Maniac (2011), starring American rappers Cage and Kid Cudi. // In 2007, LaBeouf starred in the commercially successful films Disturbia and Surf's Up. The same year he was cast in Michael Bay's science fiction film Transformers as Sam Witwicky, the main protagonist of the series. Despite mixed reviews, Transformers was a box office success and one of the highest-grossing films of 2007. LaBeouf later appeared in its sequels Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (2009) and Transformers: Dark of the Moon (2011), both also box office successes. In 2008, he played Henry "Mutt Williams" Jones III in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, the fourth film in the Indiana Jones franchise. His other films include Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps (2010), Lawless (2012), The Company You Keep (2012), Nymphomaniac (2013) and Fury (2014). Since 2014, LaBeouf has pursued a variety of public performance art projects with LaBeouf, Rönkkö & Turner. (wikipedia)
123 comments:
I was cruising through the puzzle thinking, "Easiest Friday ever!" But the southeast was my downfall as well. I actually knew GAME THEORY but couldn't get the other two long answers at all, and got hung up on many of those unhelpful Downs like DO LOOP and LUTES. Having spent a lot more time in church than watching sports, it was not ELI but ARI that stumped me. "Eli, Eli, lama sabacthani?" = "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me to try to figure out in what city a team called the Cardinals plays?"
The cross of VITRUVIANMAN and TITRATOR got me. I had an E where I needed an I, and I absolutely couldn't find my mistake as VETRUVIAN MAN and TETRATOR still seem prettty reasonable.
@rex -- I asked myself that MOMA question as well.
NOONE is a magnificent DOOK (which is a Gridiom). That's two dooks in two days.
Five or six words out of my wheelhouse (including the two 12s) made this the kind of puzzle I had to chip away at, but that's crossword work my brain likes. I was thinking VITRUVIANMAN was going to be peTRUVIANMAN, and that was a holdup for a while. Also working against me was that my brain fights so hard against learning Book of Mormon prophets. I did love the clues for LABEOUF and SIDESWIPE, and the answers SETOFPIPES, DUMPSTERFIRE, and GAMETHEORY. And it was cool to see the TIDES going out.
After the recent Wikileaks revelations about the possibility of having your TV or cell spying on you (IN STEREO!), the question ARE WE ALONE takes on more meaning, I'm afraid.
For a puzzle that started very easy this turned out to be something of a challenge. I got 1A on first guess. The top half filled in quickly with the exception of LABEOUF. That went in off the crosses and I also thought it was a word until I goggled it after solving. Things were going fine until VITRUVIAN stopped me in my tracks. I had to start all over in the bottom half. I don't know where I've heard the term GAME THEORY but it certainly wasn't in the NYTXP. It's funny how the most intimidating clue in the SE corner turned out to be the gimmie. STE, AT IT, and REBATES got the SW going. INIGO and DOLOOP were unknowns. 43 minutes to a clean grid with no cheating made this a good Friday in spite of the bad ese.
Well I had my own private little dumpster fire this morning. I distractedly put in “disaster fire” and never went back to notice I had copied part of the clue. That gave me “figures” that were traded in Chicago and well, a big mess.
I almost never use “Natick” because everyone seems to throw the word around willy nilly. From Rex’s FAQs - "If you include a proper noun in your grid that you cannot reasonably expect more than 1/4 of the solving public to have heard of, you must cross that noun with reasonably common words and phrases or very common names." So the INIGO/COIT cross got me. Take your pick on which proper noun is the obscure one. At least for me.
I also mixed my music metaphors and bestowed a “set of chops” on my gifted singer. Dumb.
Another goof – trying to fit in “ephemeral” for ETHEREAL. Dumb again. And I was feeling pretty smart with “ephemeral” even though it doesn’t really mean “light.”
And those LUTES – a “theorbo” is a kind of lute? Thanks, ROUT, for that cross.
For 17A, I immediately moved on, thinking there was no way in hell I would know any kind of blah-blah-ntric theory pioneer. Then I calmed down and looked at the word again. Oh. Ok. COPERNICUS. Bam. But that clue had me questioning GAME THEORY even though I think we’ve kinda created a No-Word-in-Grid-That’s-in-a-Clue rule. (@Trudy Morgan-Cole - my first thought was "chaos theory," but it didn't fit.)
First thought for 65A was “What’s your sign?” I liked the COPERNICUS, ETOILE, ALARMED, ARE WE ALONE? How can you think there’s NO ONE else out there? I read once that some smart guy who said that if any of these UFO sightings were actually real, then those guys sure found us uninteresting. Hmm. Wonder what these Martians could have observed. A Noh play? Mime? DMV waiting room? Gwyneth Paltrow? Wonder what could make’em decide to hang around to get to know us better. I might offer them Rice Krispy treats and a couple of The Onion articles. Maybe show them Remember the Titans. Explain that not all the leaders on our planet are TIT RATORs.
@Lewis from yesterday – best of luck and, well, what @jackj said.
Because I spent my youth as a weirdo learning about "high" culture like poetry, music and art rather than memorizing batting averages and pop lyrics like my coevals, most people think I'm an insufferable snob rather than a trivia expert if I should tip my hand in a weak moment. So it's nice occasionally to be rewarded by easily solving a puzzle like this by knowing what a theorbo is and who Vitruvius and Indigo Jones were, for example.
One of the many downsides of such knowledge, of course, is you have to suppress cringes when people call Leonardo by his last name when most of the world calls Italian Renaissance painters by their first names (do we say Buonarotti"?).
So I'm really sorry if some of you had to struggle today with obscure clues, but try to remember me a bit fondly the next time the latest rap music singer is crossed by a hockey player.
My comment must have gotten eaten after clicking "publish"...still learning how to participate!
Needed husband's help for TOR. Wanted ephemereal also, and thought MOMA for a moment. Knew INIGO, GAME THEORY and COPERNICUS, but no idea on shia...confused at first with chia. Kept trying Jalapeno which made NE even harder. And my brain wanted DUMPSTERDIVE and it took awhile to get those "little gray cells" to come up with FIRE. No idea on SVETLANA. ARE WE ALONE?? not likely with all those new planets! Happy Friday when I can finish without a google!
This pen and ink drawing was his exploration of the theories about human proportions set forth by ancient Roman architect Vitruvius. In his treatise De Architectura, Vitruvius wrote, "For if a man be placed flat on his back, with his hands and feet extended, and a pair of compasses centered at his navel, the fingers and toes of his two hands and feet will touch the circumference of a circle described therefrom. And just as the human body yields a circular outline, so too a square figure may be found from it."
A fine Friday puzzle.
@LMS, genuine LOL @ "Gwynrth Paltrow." You, like @ Lewis, are one of the treasures of this blog.
Nice workout. I learned a lot today. Did not know INIGO (I always think MontoyaYoukilledmyfatherPreparetodie), PRIAM, SVETLANA or that Theorbos are LUTES and Leonardo's amazing drawing is a VITRUVIANMAN -- but all were gettable via crosses.
DOLOOP is super familiar to me, but not in its original meaning. I hear it used a lot in the context of a problem that seems to circle back on itself -- a sense of going-nowhere futility akin to a hamster on a wheel.
Does SIDESWIPED have to mean door-to-door, or can it be any collision involving the side of one vehicle, like a front-to-side? Thankfully, I am not an expert on car crashes.
Special thanks to @Rex for the US3 video. I still listen to that early '90s album, which was my backdoor entrance into the jazz on which it's based. Only later did I learn that the fabulous piano line was Herbie Hancock's from "Cantaloupe Island" some 30 years prior.
I just scanned an article in Huffington Post on DUMPSTERFIRE. It seems to have been spread on sports talk shows. Although I love sports, I never tune in to the talk shows. Cretinous clientele.
The clue for LABEOUF was wicked.
@Nancy reminded us of COPERNICUS a few days ago with her poem about heliocentricity.
People don't talk about COIT Tower much anymore. Its frescoes have been restored and it still draws a decent crowd. But the Crookedest Street is now the darling of our tourists. It's so clogged that the Board of Supervisors is talking about charging admission.
An OK Friday, but not much charm.
In 1978, Parliament had a song called "Aqua Boogie (Psycho Alpha Disco Beta Bio Aqua Doloop)." I salute you, George Clinton
Ditto! Took forever to find this one.
Finally a puzzle I can sink my teeth into and savor! I loved seeing Copernicus (and recalling @Nancy's clever poem) and Vitruvian Man. I stumbled a bit in the SE as well because I have never heard of DOLOOP either. I had DELETE for an embarrassing long time. I wonder if it comes from "Loop the Loop"?
My only quibble today is the clumsy and silly ass clue for Shia LaBoeuf. Why bring in religion to that celebrity fill? I wonder if that was a Shortzian edit. It seemed too tacky for the constructor. Shia is one of those "actors" whose appeal I could never fathom.
Anyway, I am delighted that we had a solid, intelligent puzzle to end the week on (with tomorrow's hopefully just as good.)
Pretty much completely in my wheelhouse today, for some of the same reasons it was hard for @Rex. Understood the Shia clue immediately. Know John Nash and cosmology. DOLOOP went right in. MALL went right in. I liked ETERNE, especially symmetric to ETOILE.
Very good overall. You work COPERNICUS, VITRUVIAN MAN, GAME THEORY, ITALIAN ICE, DUMPSTER FIRE, HABANERO, TITRATOR into your grid, and you have won me over, and I'll overlook your SEEN AT and OLEO.
Could easily have Naticked at INIG? Jones crossing C?IT Tower, but felt fairly comfortable with the O.
@LMS I know you'll pooh pooh it, but your comments remind me of Dave Barry, funniest writer on the planet. Got the puzzle but I have to keep hitting the "check puzzle" button to finish. Coupon, maison, canal, MOMA, anyone?
A THEORBO is a big lute. Imagine if a lute and a giraffe got together. It's found in a small subset of classical music (17th century, shading a little into the 18th). Most classical music people don't know what one is. You have to dig deeper into Baroque music enthusiasts. In the US, imagine connoisseur communities in our older cities and a few receptive music departments in college towns. This is obscure AF--even within the professional field--and I hated seeing it in the puzzle.
Despite my earning a DNF this was was a very enjoyable solving experience. Wonderful two 3x10 across stacks at the top and bottom. Had LEvI instead of LEVI at 11A and BOcS at 18A. So I had vAcANERO at 13D. Sounded like the name of a GM truck.
Other than that a big natik at the intersection of INIGO and COIT.
Breezed through the NW and started getting worried. It seems I can never maintain an early momentum on a Friday or Saturday puzzle and that was the case today. The puzzle I submitted had 6 wrong letters. Some cascos were
57A. {Vanquish} BEAT-->ROUT
36D. {Certain chemistry lab apparatus} TESTTUBE-->TITRATOR
55A. {The house of Versace?} MAISON-->LACASA
41A. {Leonardo da Vinci drawing featuring superimposed body positions} VITRUDIANMAN-->VITRUVIANMAN (DNF) (I could picture the drawing)
33D. {Affect} MOVE from MO_E MODE-->MOVE (DNF)
11A. {Prophet in the Book of Mormon} LEVI-->LEHI (DNF)
32A. {Unmitigated disaster, in slang} DUMPSTERTIME-->DUMPSTERDINE-->DUMPSTERFIRE (DNF)
13D. {Cayenne's hotter cousin} VATANENO-->HABANERO (really wanted jAlApEnO) (DNF)
18A. {Fishing floats} POTS-->BOBS (DNF)
11D. {Shia who's not a Muslim} LAPEOUD-->LABEOUF (DNF) The OUD looked right because of mahmoud
Detail are at the dumpster fire
And about the ninth hour Jesus cried out with a loud voice, saying, “ELI, ELI, lema sabachthani?” that is, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
Like Rex, I had a hell of a time cracking the southeast.
As a programmer I can safely say that DO LOOP is a weak answer. It's like saying a mechanic uses HEX NUT. It's not really a thing people say.
WHILE LOOP, yes. DO WHILE even. FOR loop, sure.
@Trudy Morgan-Cole - Nice lead-off. Just as an FYI that you shouldn't care about, the NFL Cardinals have played in Chicago, St. Louis, and Phoenix. The baseball Cardinals are in St. Louis and have STL on their caps. All of this trivial trivia has been used in crosswords clues.
@Lewis - The Herman's Hermits lead singer opened a Vietnamese Noodle joint, NOONE's PHO TOOP. The DOLOOP soup is to die for.
@Muse - Like @Sir Hillary, I have Covent Garden architect filed right next to Princess Bride swordsman, so I got INIGO off the I (@dolgo - you got autouncorrected).
I grokked the "not a muslim" clue immediately, but had no idea what the vowel order could be. A constipated vowel movement, as it were. The vowels loosened up with the crosses.
My biggest slow down, though, was the SW. SVETLANA. The VIT of VITRUVIAN MAN, edgE before NOSE, the gender of a house, what descriptor would fit for Kant. Yikes! I resorted to running the alphabet for the second letter of E--ICI--. Got to T, threw down ETHICIST, and finally the corner fell, preventing an ignoble Friday DNF.
I breezed through this in 13:13
I just got everything right away. What I didn't know I guessed and what I guessed I got right.
Speaking of the MALL, this got a big laugh from me.
ps ....and Levi, and sou, and testtube, and STL...
damn...I always have to tousle with myself on a for-me-easy Friday. On the one hand, I want more of a struggle. On the other hand, it makes me feel oh so smart, and then add sprinkles atop that feeling when Rex calls it anything more than Easy..
Looking back over the grid, I can't explain why I found it easy...I not only didn't know, but flat out never heard of SVETLANA, TIT RATOR (wink emoji, @lms), LABOUEF, LEHI...
I guess knowing DOLOOP and popping in AREWEALONE off the last E helped me avoid the pitfalls others had there.
Lots of great wrong answers today...DUMPSTERdIne, whatsyoursign,
I have been to COIT Tower, or been in its vicinity enough, to know it immediately. It really stands out...hard to miss.
Agree about the MALL not being a destination.
My MALL story...
We met our Alabaman friends in DC. Heir kid was a toddler. Mom was a strict disciplinarian. The kid was quite rambunctious. And when I say rambunctious, I mean out-of-control.
We were walking on the MALL when the skies suddenly lowered, and massive lightning flashes and thunderclaps started.
Devon just wouldnt heed his momma, and continued to run in several directions at once.
She yelled out, trying to be heard over the storm...
"Devon...do you want momma to hit you or lightning?"
Little Devon, having never experienced a lightning strike, but having three years experience with mamma, quickly chose lightning.
Total Natick for me at TIDES/DOLOOP. I had TIRES/ROLOOP, which seemed perfectly reasonable to me. Sigh.
First 3 entries were in a row, STE TOR EEE and I sensed an @Rex meltdown. Then I stared for 2-3 minutes. Nothing. Ok, let me try ACAN, AGAS, NOSE (if that didn't work I'm going to hair), ATIT and PICNICS. Somehow all correct. 20 minutes later it was all over. This is the kind of puzzle I like, seems initially impossible and then little by little it all goes in. Only really bad casco was cArrerRa before HABANERO, wondering how one Porsche could be hotter than the next. Then I realized that's not how you spell carrera. COPERNICUS and V-MAN look cool in the grid.
@Dolgo, one persons hockey playing rapper is another's heliocentric pioneer mathematician, I guess. You're not a weirdo.
Loved the challenge of this one with 80% easy and the NE very tricky and time consuming.
DNF with a Natick at LEvI / vABANERO and that entire area was a veritable mess.
Never heard of DUMPSTER FIRE so I went with DUMPSTER modE originally. I was real proud that I sussed VITRUVIAN MAN and TITRATOR.
Favorite clue was for PICNICS.
Thanks PF.
I used the Aramaic: "Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?"[Ελωι Ελωι λεμα σαβαχθανι]
How does one pronounce doloop?
DO LOOP is pretty weak. It was the standard iteration construct in Fortran but the term has been out of favor in any programming languages since the 70's. Even though Fortran was my first language it took me quite a while to see that answer. Also, cosmology deals with the structure of the universe rather than questions such as ARE WE ALONE.
Inigo Jones, not Indigo
Eloi, Eloi lama sabachthani, is how I remember it. Lord, Lord, why have you forsaken me?
I suppose ELI is an alternative spelling.
Back later.
@Brett, me too for VeTRUVIAN over VITRUVIAN. I was chugging along to maybe not a record time, but close to it. Searching for my mistake took me almost as long as completing the rest of the puzzle did.
I agree with others about the nice long answers, especially DUMPSTER FIRE. I also liked the liveliness of SET OF PIPES. Seemed to me that there were a lot of science-related answers, with GAME THEORY, TITRATOR, COPERNICUS, and ARE WE ALONE. Nice for some people, I suppose, but not necessarily my cuppa.
This was I thought a beautifully constructed puzzle with the triple 10 stacks in the NW and SE full of fun words and phrases. Liked them all - SET OF PIPES, ITALIAN ICE and GAME THEORY in particular. Not to mention the two neat 12s in the center. Fun to fill in each of the eight long answers. Made the same DNF mistake as @Brett because TeTRATOR looked so plausible and had no idea how to spell VeTRUVIAN. If I was Jeff Chen I would have made this my POW.
ROFLOL @ Loren on Martians. One of the first literary ETs wasn't very impressed... Micromégas I think the story is the origin of "there's no intelligent life down there."
I blew through this like Wednesday. Was baffled by the Shia clue until the L went in to finish. Great puzzle, but I wish there had been more difficulty in the clues for the short and medium-length answers. And COPERNICUS. Giveaway clue.
{Chili peppers that go on and on and on...} HABANERO ETERNE
For this old programmer, DOLOOP was my first thought, even though I've programmed in many different languages. I thought this was going to be a very tought Friday until I was done in a fast time for me.
This was very easy in the NW, once I changed SET OF LUNGS (which I wrote in very dark ink because I was so sure) to SET OF PIPES. But then it got very hard -- especially since I've never heard of Shia LABOEUF (or was it LABOEUF Shia?). I read Rex's comment, but I forget. I thought I was losing my mind with that set of letters for a religious sect (I thought) that I'd never heard of. And I've never heard the expression DUMPSTER FIRE. I thought 11A was LEvI, not LEHI and I initially thought 40A was CfO, though I didn't write the F in. I do think I successfully finished this, except I forgot to check the INIGO?/COIT? cross -- but I'll lose this comment if I go back to look. It could be INIGA/CAIT just as well, so I might have a DNF. Hope not.
There are some proper names that I feel I should know, and VETRUVIAN MAN falls into that category. But I didn't know it. And PRIAM took some crosses before it jogged back into my always foggy memory.
Mime and puppetry are ARTS? You sure could have fooled me.
There was some tricky and clever cluing in this: SERIF; SIDESWIPED; LA CASA; PICNICS; OLEO. And ARE WE ALONE was a very nice answer. But I didn't love this puzzle -- too many names, and often in the most inconvenient places.
The clue for cosmology is wrong though; cosmology is the study of the early universe, how things evolved from the Big Bang to galaxies and so forth. Nothing to do with the question of whether there's life out in space. That would be astrobiology.
Oops. Looking at the answers, I see that while my INIGO/COIT was right, my VeTRUVIAN MAN/TeTRATOR was wrong. (Thanks, @Brett, 6:25). Therefore I DNF. I suppose all the chemists on this blog (there sure seem to be a lot of them) will be shocked, shocked at TeTRATOR, but for me, it was as unknown and unknowable as VITRUVIAN MAN.
I have not gone back to check but pretty sure that the reading for 'my God' is Eli (Hebrew) in one of the gospels and 'Eloi" (Aramaic) in another of the gospels. I loved for and fell for the misdirection of the Shia clue. I never can remember the three different clues for Inigo but usually have a spider sense that tells me when Inigo is the answer. I first had gate theory before game theory----possibly confusing it with the gate theory for pain. I was also lost on the 'mall' answer and had to google Priam and theorbos to finally arrive at the answer. Fun puzzle!
I wasn't fooled by the LABEOUF trickery, but struggled with vowel placement. I wanted it to be spelled like Le Boeuf (French for "the beef"), but that gets three of the four vowels wrong.
Me too, or it would have been my best Friday ever.
Really easy Friday for me. Ever time Rex thinks it's hard it's a piece of cake for me, and vice versa.
Thanks, @mathgent and @Quasi for the COPERNICUS shoutouts.
@Tita (8:53) -- Your MALL story is hysterical. Made even funnier by your "heir kid" typo.
Sorry what's a DOOK?
Marna
This puzzle covered a broad range of knowledge, and mixed in neat stuff like DUMPSTERFIRE and AREWEALONE? Nicely done.
The puzz moved from medium to challenging for us because we wanted to squeeze miaCASA at 55a, didn't know Mr. LABEOUF, and thought like many of you that MALL needed to be abbreviated. Also live in Lehigh county and had to deal with the Mormons misspelling their Prophet's name.
DOLOOP! Haven't used that term since I coded in something called BCD (Binary Coded Decimal) for an NCR machine in the 1960's, thanks for the memory. Anybody else wonder if there is any shoe width other than EEE or EEEE? Jalapeno before HABANERO, anyone else?
@Muse - Blame the natick on INIGO. Blame the Martians leaving on Paltrow.
@Mama - In a puzzle past an answer was DO OK and thus appeared in the puzzle as DOOK. Enough people asked "what the hell is a DOOK", unable to parse it as DO OK, that "it's a DOOK" became a term for being unable to parse a grid entry properly. NOONE is not only a DOOK in that many people have trouble parsing it as NO ONE, but in fact Peter NOONE (of Herman's Hermits) publicly took joy in appearing in the NYTimes Xword Puzzle.
Just last week when the kerfuffle started with SHIA, I said "why not clue it as the LA BEOUF?" But then the only one who reads me anyway is Gwyneth Paltrow.
Started off with my SET OF PIPES singing at the top of my lungs. I was enjoying this puzzle. Came to a halt in the bottom west coast because I'm not up on my SVETLANA's nor my TITRATOR. Could not get L'Uomo out of my head. Dang, it's VITRUVIAL. Then came to another halt with John Nash and Theorbos and misreading 65A as question of cosmotology.
Had to take a break. It's amazing how you can get your brain to do a euey, uey, youee when you get up and walk around and drink some more for about a minute and then a voila pops in. It took one little letter at a time to finally get the correct answers, but I did it. I did check with Google to see what kind of philosophy Immanuel Kant was up to. Epistemology didn't fit. I think I severely lack it.
@Dolgo. I feel your pain....It's hard being smart.
I adored this puzzle. It felt fun and intelligent.
The clues for SIDESWIPED and Shia were terrific.
The letter V was my bete noire today. While there was plenty I had to suss out with crosses (hi, SVETLANA!) I ended up with 2 letter V errors. I decided on LEvI, never having seen "The Book of Mormon" and thinking there might be a pepper that rhymed with HABANERO and started with V. Add to my reasoning that LEHI sounded like a college cheer to me or an ancient brand of soda.
That second V in VITRUVIAN stumped me because an L sounded better but a D worked with the casco MOdE as the cross. Annoying, but I had no excuse for my ignorance here, since I am well acquainted with the drawing.
Shout out to INIGO, LUTES, COPERNICUS, TITRATOR, GAMETHEORY and too many other favorites to name. There's a special place in my heart for AREWEALONE because I think about that all the time. My short answer is NO!
Very easy top, and then I got hopelessly stuck at the bottom until I looked up "theorbos". Never, ever saw that word before. After that it was a breeze. I let do loop fill itself in, or I would have a problem with that too.
Nice work-out, though. Relaxed on a snowy CT morning.
Right on, Dolgo!
Why did the Fortran programmer die in the shower? He read the shampoo directions, Lather, rinse, repeat, and got stuck in the DOLOOP.
How is a human appendage an OID?
After roaring aloud at Trudy-Morgan Cole’s lead-off comment on the tricky clue for ELI, the urge to post took hold and it’s time to find out if I remember how.
Especially when, at first blush, I’m left wondering, “Where has all the memory gone, long time passing.” But, on cue, the old brain matter spits out SVETLANA, GAMETHEORY and COPERNICUS but refuses to play fair when looking for VITRUVIANMAN.
Undeterred, the crosses provided the answer and a Wikipedia peek shows a picture of the old boy, arms stretched and flapping, looking for all the world like an aged Army recruit doing jumping jacks, (no relation), and then it’s back to solving the Polish Pawel’s polished puzzle.
Where favorite poster LMS cries Natick on INIGO/COIT, I fondly remember my first visit to San Francisco, seeing the COIT Tower looming ahead through the fog and going to the top only to learn that I couldn’t see a thing through the pea-soupiness of the day. Doh!
No matter, remembering that the funds to pay for the wonderful art deco Tower came from an eccentric 19th century cigar smoking San Franciscan lady who chased after fires big and small, saved my day and brought a glimmer of hope on the memory front.
And, finally, ELI came back to mind as I finished up in the Northeast corner and mused at the clever inclusion of the Prophet LEHI, thinking, if you drop the “H”, LEHI is an anagram of ELI. Clever, Pawel, clever.
(But, I must also note that BOB(S) won’t be your uncle when you clue it as such, instead of the more acceptable BOBbers, one of which always floated my fishing line.)
Nice puzzle, Mr. Fludzinski!
Oid as in humanoid.
Forgot to mention the nice touch of including Inigo Jones in the puzzle as I just read that he was the first I think to apply Vitruvian principles to London architecture.
A fine puzzle except for NE
I just wouldn't let jalapeño go for way too long
Took forever
I do quibble that an Italian ice is an alternative to Gelato
In that regard so is frozen swamp water
I never think about Gwyneth Paltrow-- any more than I imagine she thinks about me. But I feel I may be missing something here. Can you tell me, @Loren, @Mohair and @GILL, what exactly it is about her that would make Martians take one look at her and go back to their own planet? Now that I am thinking about her, I would consider her to be, cosmologically speaking, completely inoffensive. Can someone enlighten me, please?
@Mordechai Beizer, closest I ever came to coding in FORTAN in my about thirty years of programming was maintaining a FORTRAN compiler (written in I don't remember what), in the late 60's. I confess, when all I had for 47D was the D, I came up empty. Thought, "subroutine"? "Macro"? ??? But with another letter, DO LOOP popped in. DO WHILE and DO UNTIL would be examples of DO LOOPS. I coded in proprietary stuff that IBM used. There were "bits of code" that reiterated until some test was true or false, and I thought we called them DO DO LOOPS. But the fact that I couldn't remember the term may mean that I hadn't used it since the days of pocket protectors.
Hey All !
Well, puz is kicking my butt. I have the upper diagonal half filled in, but tons of white space taunting me in the lower diagonal area. Rex says Medium...
Apologies if this was said already, as 60 posts as I write this...
Wanted 37D to be A REAL PISSANT.
Puz SEEMS to go TO TEN
RooMonster
DarrinV
@Nancy - Google Gwyneth and get ready for an adventure in women's health, diet, living, and God knows what other advice. Martians surely have enough problems of their own.
Very easy for me except for the SW. I could picture the da Leonardo drawing but had no idea what it was called and VITRUVIAN is not exactly inferable. So I needed a bunch of crosses and some luck...I knew TITRATOR and guessed right on SVETLANA who was a WOE.
Add me to the fans of the NW and SE stacks and the two 12s, liked it!
Humanoid !!
@Nancy. She eats and poops tofu.
Was amazed at what I was able to work out,including dollop (see, even my autocorrect doesn't accept doloop) and ashamed of what I had to Google, Svetlana, Lehi, Loewe and had an e for the i in titrator. Still, a good romp and lots to be proud of getting.
Insprired guessing got me very close - but no cigar. Two crosses from victory, which sounds like a bad movie. I shall not reveal how much I did not know here. The DO LOOP gimme I shall consider a small victory.
I had TITRATeR for a while, which sounds very naughty.
And has anyone used the word OLEO outside of a crossword in the last forty years?
Only missed the "I" in vitru... crossing with titrat... everything else pretty simple.
Despite the crap fill, I had a blast saving this one. But, more important, Rex you once more hit it out of the park with your choice of music videos! I can still remember the first time I heard Cantaloup (Flip Fantasia,) driving my brand new 1993 Honda Civic across the Vincent Thomas Bridge listening to the Kevin and Bean Show on KROQ. Thanks for the blast from the past with a song that never fails to delight.
Shout-out to @Tita for her MALL story, which made my day.
Friday tough, and yet I finished though LABEOUF came 100% on crosses. I've been to COIT Tower many a time as have my children. Used to park downtown on a Sunday, walk to Chinatown for some dim sum, and on up through North Beach to the top of the hill to see the murals and admire the view. Down Telegraph Hill via the wooden steps, then walk (or in later years take an historic streetcar) back to 3d and Market.
TOR was a sneaky clue, wasn't it? After all, a raptor might very well perch on a tor. But I assume there is a Toronto team called the Raptors. Ah, they play in the NBA. I never used to watch b-ball, but what with the Warriors and all, I now follow them at least.
This had too many proper nouns for me, so not much fun solving it. Which I didn't.
Thank you to Dr. Google for helping me through an acute bout of LABEOUF which included painful TITRATOR aches and VITRUVIAN spasms.
Found myself praying that the answer to 63 down wouldn't be DAD.
dmsilev is right. COSMOLOGY isn't about answering any of the really big questions about the universe.
Some good stuff here: SET OF PIPES, SIDE SWIPED, and, of course, DUMPSTER FIRE. But, what's up with that flat out Natick, and don't tell me you don't know what cross I'm talking about.
COPERNICUS was a scientist who ran into some push back for espousing an inconvenient theory which seemed true in his mind. I guess we all live our lives under the scrutiny of historical retrospect.
Fun solvequest -- finished ok, but not sure how.
Stuff I amazinly knew, that I wouldn'ta thought I did: COIT. PRIAM [almost spelt it PREAM, tho]. DOLOOP [har! Fortan!] TITRATOR [h.s. chem class!]. ETERNE [Better clue: {Seabird eaten by a double-E major??}.]
Stuff I thought I knew, but sorta really didn't: VITRUVIANMAN. TOR. KIP. ECU. HABANERO.
TOR gets honorable extra-mention, becuz it confused M&A's butt clean off. TOR to m&e was a "rocky peak", which is a fine home for a raptor's nest -- no day-um "Abbr." necessary. Post-solve, when the precious nanoseconds were out of harm's way, I figured out that the clue was thinkin TORonto, of course.
Stuff I coulda gone to the grave fairly happily not knowin: INIGO. ETOILE.
Desperation artistic flare award-winner: OID.
staff weeject pick: COO. Fake Abbr. news, again! Was that there constructioneer/Shortzmeister tryin to rack up a grid-span of Abbrs. today?! Drove their STETOREEECOO, right down main street. Don't make me come down there, fellas.
Primo misdirect, on the LABEOUF clue, as soo elo-quaintly discussed by @RP.
@RP: Sounds like U wanna get lotsa bed rest, and then recovery time & coffee, before suitin up for yer next big crossword tourney. Need to shake the cobwebs off, dude. Do some push-ups.
Thanx for the feisty fun, Mr. Fludzinski. Any puz with a DUMPSTERFIRE goin is plenty ok by m&e.
Masked & Anonymo5Us
"Hold the HABA, NERO"
**gruntz**
Suffice it to say that the SW was my dumpster fire. I still smell like smoke. Until then, though, a fine Friday puzzle.
Thanks for your enlightening me re "casco" yesterday.
Svetlana Alexievich interviewed many Russians to gain perspectives on the country that is passing. Imagine a Slavic Studs Terkel who has exerted a tremendous effort to find accounts of Stalin times through recent decades.
I beat this puzzle, but it was almost a ROUT. I could have written @Rex's comments on the SE - that was my bete noire today. Except I took a @Gill I break and came back to finally see SIDESWIPED, which wiped up all of my little errors.
My fave problem was caused by the way my puzzle printed out. My paper version had the clue for 40A as:
"Second-in-comma
nd at a corp."
I got COO in place, but I continued to think of it as something to do with a URL - I got a laugh when I finally saw that COO was next in line after the CeO.
Poor Gwyneth - she has gone a bit goofy - perhaps instead of the UFOs turning around, they made their home with her.
Thanks, Pawel, for a fine Friday struggle that I succeeded at by a NOSE.
p.s.
M&A semi-auto-correct dept:
FORTRAN, not "fortan". First programmin lingo M&A ever learned, btw. Had to punch up cards, hand the deck in at a window, and get yer printout back the next day. Woulda driven insta-grat millennial kids straight to coo-coo ville.
yo, @Tita: har. Did yer mall story's last intriguin line mean that lil Devon *actually* took a lightnin strike? Which of the obvious choices was he thereafter referred to by? ...
1. Devo.
2. Dev on fire. [Or, variant: Devster Fire.]
3. s'Mall Stain.
4. Devolt.
5. Devonshire creamed.
5.5. Devonchar creamed.
6. Dev Off.
7. Dev Out.
8. Sparky.
M&Also
I had the F and a couple others that made ACLUSTERFUC* fit perfectly instead of DUMPSTERFIRE. I knew that couldn't be right but it's a much better and way more common answer than DUMPSTERFIRE imo! At least it helped me fill in the middle.
Interesting. In Matthew's Passion Narrative, Jesus uses the word ELI. In Mark's, He uses the word ELOI. (NAB version.) I didn't know that, and sheesh, I teach a Bible Study class! So, apologies to Pawel and Will for my thoughts when filling in ELI :-)
Geez, I enjoyed this. INIGO was first answer in - I like English gardens. I knew it was --LOOP, needed crosses for first two letters. I was also in the dark on theorbos and TITRATOR while I struggled with HABANERO.
Last one in was LABEOUF. I had no idea on the initial letter in LEHI so that cross was an incorrect guess. Like Rex, I never once thought of the actor Shia and, because of the way the realization cracked me up once I got here, I'm calling that the Clue of the Year, thus far. Thanks, Pawel Fludzinski! May you someday be famous enough that your glorious 15 letter name can occupy the squares in a NY Times puzzle.
Finished! Well, after 5 Googs and wrong letters...
Had to look up TAPPER, SVETLANA, LOEWE, LUTES, and VITRUVIANMAN. I know the daVinci drawing, but never knew the name!
Didn't anyone else want wALL for MALL? Apparently, NO ONE so far. Even though PRIAw looks odd. Had DOstOP-DOsOOP. sEA for LEA. Ugh.
So a toughie for me. PPP that isn't known in my world. Plus, OLEO. The nerve! OLE!
RooMonster
Liked the puzzle. Pretty much what @Rex said. Except MALL fell in place for me.
Great clues for SIDESWIPED and LABEOUF. I can never remember the Mormon prophets.
But I do remember DO LOOPS from the days of pounding out punchcards for FORTRAN programs.
Three cheers for Pawel F.
For computer nerds, DO LOOP was very nearly a gimme. When I saw the clue, my very first thought was "FOR LOOP?" which obviously didn't fit, so DO LOOP was the next reasonable guess.
@Ted, @Mordechai: in addition to Fortran, you'll find that DO LOOP is still a term of art in Visual Basic and SAS. While "do-while loop" is more common in everyday speech, DO LOOP is a legit answer in its own right IMHO.
I struggled with this one but after the smoke cleared I had only one error. Yes, a dnf, but I lacked confidence in a number of my answers:
TAPPER/KIP
VITRUVIAN/TITRATOR
DOLOOK/LOTT
LABEOUF/LEHI
@Z - loved your 'constipated vowel movement'
@anon - thanks for the DOOK explanation
@crane Poole - I like how you put it, 'inspired guessing' - that was me today
Enjoyed this puzzle muchly.
This was a very smooth fill for me, just a bunch of random stuff I happened to know. But I completely misread the Shia clue as Muslim who isn't a Shia, so I made that one tricky for myself. OLEO took me forever.
Was easy for me at the beginning as well. Got VITRUVIAN MAN and LABEOUF right way which helped until I got to the dreaded SE corner. For some reason couldn't think of ELI so put DAD in that clue as my first thought though I figured that was probably wrong. Fun Puzzle overall
@Disbelievers in the "cosmology" clue - I suggest that a quick peek at Wikipedia before posting may have relieved you of your notion that the only cosmology is physical cosmology.
@Anonymous/mama - @anon10:21 provided a nice explanation. They did omit that GOAT was the original DOOK (that's GO AT, not goat as in animals or G.O.A.T as in greatest of all time) and might still make an occasional appearance amongst the commentariat's gridioms (itself a recent addition to the gridiom list). Rex has an FAQ page which includes some of his gridioms, but none of the commentariat created gridioms:
Malapop - A wrong answer that later appears as a correct answer in the puzzle.
RRN - Random Roman Numeral - i.e. any Roman numeral
RCD - Random Compass Direction
POC - Plurals of Convenience - Using plurals to manipulate grid formation
Pewit/Eyepit - Oddly obscure answers that once appeared
PPP - Pop Culture, Prouct Names and Proper Nouns
DOOK
Natick - pronounced nay-dick - see Rex's FAQs
Ese - Sort for Crosswordese - Shortish words with useful letters extending the words use in crosswords long beyond their use in the wild. Yma Sumac, Yoko Ono, Brian Eno, etc. etc.
In the Wild - How words are used outside Crossworld
I know I'm missing some.
@Ted -- I don't see your problem with DO LOOP. Have you ever programmed in FORTRAN?
INTEGER i, j
10 i = 0
20 DO 40 i = 1, 5
30 i = i + 1
40 CONTINUE
50. PRINT *, ' I is now", i
Extra credit: what now comes out on the print screen?
Oops, the above was a nonsensical DO LOOP. But what the heck ... ;-)
Thanks, @Moly (again!)
I haven't checked, either, but the variation may be caused by different translations. Growing up always going to church on Easter, I recall it as "Eli." Those were the days when Protestant churches used the old KJV. I was about 10 when the RSV came out. Now, as you all probably know, there exist a bewildering variety of versions.
@ Dolgo: Don't you just hate it when you pump up your own tires and then type Indigo? ; )
Couldn't resist Googling "Eli, Eli" . . etc. My online Bible source says that among major contemporary versions the NIV is the only one to transliterate the Aramaic as "Eloi." I guess that's a pretty popular one, though.
Z,
Dor you evercite a source besides wikipedia? It's not all that great.
And it's cosmology entry is proof enough.
Hesiod
PS My guess is that most versions transliterate the Greek of the NT, rather than trying to recover the "original" Aramaic. I find myself wondering why you would want to do that. Apparently the Evangelist wanted to preserve Christ's words as they were passed down from those who actually heard them. And whoever wrote Matthew might not have known Aramaic anyway.
I agree. Wikipedia is a handy first source, but you can't depend on it. Remember, anyone can edit the articles.
For whoever is interested I've taken the time to score this puzzle using the xwordinfo lists. I came up with a very unimpressive 32. However between a third to half of the score is accounted for by just 7 words. These were OLEO, STE, EEE, LEA, ARTS, OLE, and NIL. If you take these out of the equation the score drops to an impressive 14. Of the 70 total words 37 of them have made Shortz era appearances in only the single digits. This was a really good example of interesting and unusual entries being traded off for the shop-worn. A couple of cluing triumphs were ARI and ELI. Of the 258 times ELI has appeared this is only the third time it's been clued using the Cardinals. ELI has a list of 405 clues this is only the second time it's been clued as "My God." That's why I score those as 3 and 1 respectively. LUTES also scored a 1 because it's clue was so unique and unprecedented. I even checked the LUTE list and there's no sign of theorbos, that word doesn't even show up in my Webster's. As a reference on the score the better late week puzzles will get down into the mid-teens on their overall score. This one just had too much common material mixed in but a good puzzle never the less.
For whoever is interested I've taken the time to score this post, and the result is: WTF?
@dolgo, traditionally Matthew was believed to be the apostle, who spoke Aramaic just as Jesus and the others did. His Gospel in Aramaic was prized among the Syrian Christians who also spoke the language. Obviously Mark, whose name suggests he may have been Roman, also spoke and wrote Greek, as most Romans did (indeed, it would be surprising if Jesus knew no Greek, because he grew up near Caesarea, where the soldiers and officials spoke Greek). And from the beginning the Church recognized that Luke was of Greek origin and wrote his Gospel and Acts in that language.
John is the interesting case. He was an old man when he wrote the Fourth Gospel. My assumption is he spent 50 years preaching in Greek speaking parts of the Roman Empire (the islands and also Asia Minor) and if he did not write his Gospel he dictated it to a follower who was an eloquent writer. Read John and it is hard not to believe he was looking back on the days when he was the youngest of the 12, just a teenager really, whom Jesus loved most, and he wrote his Gospel in part to make it clear that along with his brother (who was martyred early) and the older Peter, he was part of the innermost circle around Jesus. No one who reads John can doubt it was written by an old man who had read other Gospels and wanted to set the record straight before he died.
Ugh Canadians...had Shia Lebeouf as Leboeuf, which would be the standard spelling if everyone spoke the queen's French.
Really Rex? Cosmology vs cosmetology? TGIF.
@M&A...
Har indeed!
I vote for 5. Has some real class, that.
Rest assured everyone, lightning didn't comply, and to this day, now 24-year old Devon continues to think that being struck must surely be better than facing his mom.
He's smart, creative, and tells me I'm his favorite aunt. (See what I mean about smart?)
(We did all successfully get out of the storm unsparked -my second fave.)
Oh - thUmbs Up for Devster Fire- real topical!
You could never fathom the appeal of Shia LaBoeuf!! Why, his charisma cuts across generations and genders! It proves that you can be an absolute zero and still be successful.
I'm a programmer and I've never heard anyone say "do loop" before. There's a "do while" loop, but do loop? Maybe it's a term in a language that I don't know.
Got super hung up on COSTUMER -- just couldn't see it -- I am a Tony award-winning "Costume Designer" and on Broadway I work with a "wardrobe" team of "wardrobe supervisors" and "dressers". We also have "star dressers" and the antiquated "wardrobe mistress". THERE ARE NO COSTUMERS BACKSTAGE ON BROADWAY. You'll have to go to a TV or film set to find one. They do a similar job to Broadway dressers, but the terms are not interchangeable.
Sure, the SE was my downfall, but this clue was a huge roadblock for me.
To Roo Monster: Having served in Vietnam, I wanted wall for mall. Alas,
the wall is now forgotten. Perhaps it
is better so.
ARTS INSTEREO
COPERNICUS and the VITRUVIANMAN
ENTREAT, of their FUTURES, with an ETHICIST in class:
“GAMETHEORY and DOLOOP ROUTs CAN
MOVE in a TITRATOR and ETHEREALly coexist as AGAS.”
--- SVETLANA LACASA-LABEOUF
this DUMPSTERFIRE of a stream of unconsciousness brought to you by . . .by . . . Hey close that TAPPER!
The SE was a bit sticky, but other than that this was surprisingly easy. But then, COPERNICUS, VITRUVIAN MAN, INIGO (Jones), and THEORBOS all relate to the early modern period, and I wrote a book on that. The best-known painting of Mary Wroth, the first English woman novelist, shows her with a theorbo (or at least a giant LUTE).
Wow, you guys--even OFL--surprise me. With NO(t)ONE but two gigantic gimmes at COPERNICUS and VITRUVIANMAN, I conquered this one in a ROUT. AREWEALONE alone is worth the price of admission, although there is some roughness in the fill. Particularly distressing is the uber-awkward partial SEENAT. (I did, once, and his daughter Natalie too).
I did have a bit of a tussle with the bizarre spelling of Mr. LEBEOUF's name, but it is what the crosses say it is. No other problems of note; easy-peasy--for a Friday. I can't believe an apparently well-educated person like OFL wouldn't know the classic DaVinci drawing, or Jesus' oft-quoted death plaint.
with NOONE else to compete, I am pleased to award the DOD title to one of the most courageous women in history: that teenage Xena STE Joan. I thought the term for 30-across was "dresser." Maybe that's too old-fashioned a term for today's theater. Despite stuff like EEE and another entry that's fast becoming overused: ATIT, I liked it enough to give it a birdie.
Found it exceptionally impenetrable at first, but was not angered enough to walk away. Kept working and with slow success found it enjoyable and fair. Rewarding to solve.
Of all the places to have a w/o, the one hole must be the worst. After a quick run through the NW, I was looking at__CKOS and filled it in with waCKOS. Shoulda tried a few more downs first. Remember that 4 letter Utah city that’s not Orem? LEHI is back in eponym form.
My first programming was also in FORTRAN; punch cards, etc. Yeah, I’m a dinosaur.
Heard both DOLOOP and GAMETHEORY on MPR yesterday. GAMETHEORY was used in the context of using a reverse auction to get people off a plane instead of brute force. Forget why DOLOOP.
From wiki: SVETLANA Yuryevna Zakharova is a prima ballerina with the Bolshoi Ballet and an ÉTOILE of the La Scala Theatre Ballet. Yeah baby (not from wiki).
A LOTT of great answers here. The FUTURE’S looking good for Pawel.
1A evoked a memory which brought a smile. Back when I was cool, I was at a friend's house when he made a comment about the new dual exhausts on Lonnie's '55 Ford, to wit, "Boy, Lonnie's got great pipes!" His mother commented, "I didn't even know Lonnie could sing". Maybe you had to be there, but that kicked off my solve which went swimmingly until I misspelled VeTRUVIAN and took way too long to see TITRATOR, and I a former chemist.
Not bragging, but I had no trouble in the SE, and enjoyed the romp through the grid. Slowdowns: CfO before COO, and figuring that the non-Muslin Shia was a sect. Anyway, I've seen the name LeBOEUF before, so the actual answer was entered with a shrug.
I'd hate to be called INIGO, but I thought for sure that @Burma Shave would have used that it in a poem (IN I GO).
@Spacey - yesterday I attempted to depict a "jog" in a road, and it was great, believe me, but when posted it came out looking insipid. Sorry.
@rain forest - INIGO was that close, along with SVETLANA, AREWEALONE and ATIT and TITRATOR and COIT with "us" rhyming with "avoid us", you get the idea. Almost STAYED with it.
Aside from this puzzle being a giant Natick for me, I "overheard" DOLOOP yesterday in a Futurelander's misposted comment. Wondered what he/she was referring to, and searched yesterday's offering for DOLOOP in the answers or clues. So a dnf gimme.
Yes, I know the drawing by da Vinci, but didn't know the name. rrrr
Never heard of DUMPSTERFIRE, LABEOUF (the actor), hAD Testtube instead of TITRATOR for quite a while, which made a mess of the SW.
Diana, Lady-in-Waiting for Crosswords, and enlightenment
By popular demand:
BOB’S SIGN
“SVETLANA, AREWEALONE? They SEEM to avoid us,
I’m a TITRATOR, so a LOTT ATIT I ENTREAT you to show.”
“I’m ALARMED that you STAYED so long with no COIT us.”
So when I MOVEd to TAPPER I cried, “OLE! INIGO!”
--- ARI LOEWE
Starting with SETOFPIPES, there seemed to be a lot of musical clues in this Good Friday puzzle
INSTEREO, LUTES, and LOEWE.
Peter NOONE, the BOBS, INIGO girls. DO LOOP music
The rapper FUTUREs. The 90s white rapper ITALIAN ICE. A touch of REBA at 42D.
If you PANIC (you might) MOVE A GAS then you'd have to WIPEd your SIDES.
@BS - Way to go. You never disappoint.
BS123, at rainy's ENTREATy: Ribaldry at its finest.
Late to the game today. Will make it short.
Pretty easy until SE, particularly at VITRUVIANMAN/TITRATOR cross. Naticked with an "e" instead of an "I".
Liked it a LOTT.
To the Cosmos: Meant SW, not SE.
Cosmos reporting in. Knew @BS would rise (sic) to the occasion and answer the gauntlet.
@Lefty - knew it was the SW - been there, did it too.
Lady Di
Late to this party (the state paper here in Arkansas publishes long after the Times runs them) but just want to sympathize with you, Rex. And add that "ethicist" would be far down the list for me for Immanuel Kant.
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