Relative difficulty: Challenging (a hilarious and arduous 8:03)
THEME: GO OVER THE EDGE (58A: Flip out ... or a hint to eight answers in this puzzle) — the letters "GO" can be found (or imagined, I guess) "over the edge" (i.e. outside the bounds) of this puzzle Theme answers:
TAKES TWO TO TAN(GO) (20A: "No one can get in a fight by himself," informally) ("informally"? Is that clue phrase "formal"???)
"(GO)OD NIGHT, IRENE"(32A: Classic song with the lyric "I'll see you in my dreams")
CARMEN SAN DIE(GO) (42A: World traveler since 1985)
(GO)LD TEETH (5D: Some expensive dental work)
(GO)SLINGS (13D: Babies in a pond) (*in*!!!!!!!????)
"CHICA(GO)" (55D: Second-longest-running Broadway musical ever (after "Phantom of the Opera")
AGES A(GO) (57D: A very long time back)
(GO)LF GAME (47A: What's honed on the range?)
Word of the Day: Sir William OSLER (69A: Sir William ___, medical pioneer) —
Sir William Osler, 1st Baronet, FRSFRCP (/ˈɒzlər/; July 12, 1849 – December 29, 1919) was a Canadian physician and one of the four founding professors of Johns Hopkins Hospital. Osler created the first residency program for specialty training of physicians, and he was the first to bring medical students out of the lecture hall for bedside clinical training.[He has frequently been described as the Father of Modern Medicine and one of the "greatest diagnosticians ever to wield a stethoscope".Osler was a person of many interests, who in addition to being a physician, was a bibliophile, historian, author, and renowned practical joker. One of his achievements was the founding of the History of Medicine Society (previously section) of the Royal Society of Medicine, London. (wikipedia)
• • •
I know I keep harping on "pleasure" and maybe it's the overexposure to Marie Kondo but I don't think it's too much to ask of a crossword puzzle that it spark joy! Spark it! Spark, you stupid puzzle! Seriously, though, what is going on here, and also what year is it? I felt like I was in the dungeon of some crossword sadist circa 1944. I guess CARMEN SAN DIE(GO) didn't exist back then, but "(GO)OD NIGHT, IRENE" sure did, and maybe that's when "kids" (??) drew LOTS (??) (5A: Things kids sometimes draw). I could not have been less on a puzzle's wavelength than I was on this one's. Every clue felt like pulling teeth. Well, not all. Good ol' ECO. But WIND is [Air condition?]?. By what alchemy? ATBAT is just *a* stat? And not even a stat, but a "datum" (come on, what are you doing with this lingo, man?) (61A: Diamond datum). And NTS? NTS? NTS? What ... what? What are those? I see they've appeared in the grid before. But not for four years. Let's commit to at least four more. And then there's the clue for AC/DC (14A: Band with a slash in its name), which ... OK, I guess when you type it out, you use a "slash," but ... it's not a slash:
[Otto kinda looks like the guitarist Slash, which really brings this whole AC/DC clue full circle]
But the real problem here, the thing that caused me the most pain and exhaustion, is the theme. Where to start? It seems like a not bad idea, in theory. I've definitely (many times) seen themes based on answers running over the edge of the grid—parts of answers, or letter strings that form words, or whatever, that you have to imagine. Fine, whatever. It's been done, but why not do it again, if you can do it well? And I guess that's kind of the ground-zero problem here. Is the revealer good enough to justify this? Gotta say No. I have never heard someone say "I'm going to GO OVER THE EDGE!" It's just ... in the Uncanny Valley of phrases. Like, it's phrase-like, but it's not current or on-the-money or good. Defensible, but it does not snap. So odd is it, to my ear, that I had GO OVER THE ... and still had no idea. OVER THE TOP? MOON? HEDGE? Oh my GOD was that movie title a pun!?!?!? I am laughing so hard right now. You are watching me discover a 13-year-old pun in real time. Wow. I took my daughter to see that in the theater in 2006. Wow. Wow. OK. Nice. Annnnnyway, the placement of the GOs was interesting, by which I mean ridiculous. You've got the nice symmetrical long Acrosses, good, good, and then ... bleeping chaos!? It's like someone's just throwing wet socks at you. No, I don't know why I chose that metaphor, it just came to me, and it feels right. Where are the other "GO"s? Who can say? They aren't symmetrical. They are all over the map. How do you even know? Discovering them was painful and dreary, and honestly at the end, I didn't even know if I'd found them all. I was going to make SLINGS the Word of the Day (seriously), because I figured it was some olde-timey term for baby frogs or something (?). (GO)SLINGS are not *in* ponds, they are *on* them. Unless they drowned and sank, which is terribly sad, like this puzzle.
Honestly, I thought "CHICA" was a musical and I thought SLINGS were young frogs and I thought maybe LD TEETH glowed in your mouth? Instead of "AHA!" I kept emitting more of a low groan of unsureness. Also, I kept having to endure stuff like ORDO (!?) and ECU. Ideas have to be executed well. The best ideas are useless—ruined—when the execution is poor. The end.
Another Rex challenging, me easy. I left sling waiting to see if I get the “you completed however at least one is wrong, mild oath”. I wish there was an option to mute the daing oath.
Often the second puzzle of the evening for me is, Why does Rex hate a puzzle that I liked just fine? I'm not that much older than he is, but I was delighted when I figured out how to put my first guess GOODNIGHT IRENE into the space correctly (I figured out the trick when I hit CARMEN SANDIEGO); the phrase GO OVER THE EDGE sounds find to me; etc.. I know sometimes Rex acknowledges, without bitterness, "Sometimes this puzzle just wasn't in my wheelhouse," and I am at a loss (sometimes) to understand why he then (sometimes) argues that it shouldn't be in anyone else's wheelhouse either. Because the clue to LOTS was clunky? I enjoyed the idea that I couldn't predict where the other protruding GO's would be on the grid (although I note that there are two apiece on each side). So tonight he didn't convince me to be retroactively disappointed in what I enjoyed while solving.
Medium. Fortunately I held off putting in a rebus until I hit the reveal and realized I didn’t have to. Unfortunately @Rex I didn’t see SLINGS and CHICA as theme entries until I visited Xwordinfo, so I agree with his symmetry issues.
At one point in this puzzle I said "go f--- yourself", so clearly didn't spark joy for me. I hadn't reasoned out goslings at all. I remained puzzled and irritated until I read the blog.
It took a while to think outside the box, but I figured it out in the lower Southeast corner with AGES AGO. I remembered that this was done before. Would you call it edgy?
Golly. Second day going that I loved a puzzle that Rex wished he had chosen to forgo solving. Perhaps my ego was stroked because I got this rather quickly, and Rex's was gone because of his (for him) slow agony. Gosh.
You could tell Rex was going out of his gourd when you got a good look at his writeup and saw he missed a gobsmackingly gorgeous chance to post a Go-Gos song., "We Got the Beat" perhaps.
When I was in high school[mid-nineties], it was a running joke that Cats was the longest running musical, and now somehow it is 4th? That just offends my sensibilities.
Think outside the box puzzles are not my thing but I managed to have some fun with this one. I left unfinished theme entries all over the grid until I got down to the SW corner and the lightbulb finally went off.
Along the way I had to overcome an UNUM/ORDO write over and an OSTER/OSLER one as well. Those were before I got the theme. After that point I still mustered a SANTIA/SANDIE write over at the end of 42A. Between that and thinking of cooking as opposed to needlework for 31D gave me one last little mess to clean up.
A little over average time and enjoyment for a Thursday.
When the solve begins to bog down, my mantra is: trust the puzzle. Ok, bogging occurred so I scrambled to find some symmetry, and continued to scramble until I no longer trusted the puzzle. Looking for "GO" in all the wrong places made me feel a bit tawdry. Perhaps, that's on me.
I always confuse Sir William OSLER with Tim the Ostler from that classic romantic poem The Highwayman. Spoiler alert: Tim tips those dirty Redcoats and the tryst with Bess the Landlord's red-lipped daughter turns into a date with a tragic destiny. Moment of silence!
Pretty certain more people have read a book written by ECO, than those ppl. who have actually toured ECU. I hear Quito was once a lovely colonial city. I hope it still is. Google tells me that is a UNESCO Heritage Site, sits near two active volcanoes, and is very picturesque. Perhaps, I should GO.
@LMS, your wont wasn't wasted on me. Cant doesn't suit you.
NTS refers to Windows NT (http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_NT) -- an outrageous clue. I used this OS when it was called that in the 90s and I still can't believe this is the intended answer.
Have to agree that this was beastly hard, asymmetry of GOs notwithstanding. I figured it out early on with TANGO, but count me among those who accepted SLINGS and CHICA for way too long. If all the GOs had been at the bottom and the right, this could have been really dastardly ‘cause then all the go-less entries might could have stood alone.
I like it when Thursday funny business isn’t symmetrical. Ups the ante.
The thing I focused on post solve was simply the idea of OVER THE EDGE. It was actually the GO part that kept niggling. For me, if you’re over the edge, someone pushed or sent you there. You’re not there of your own volition, so GO felt funny. If it’s your own idea and you’re heading there on purpose, you cross the line. But that doesn’t have the “flip out” meaning. I sat there whispering phrases to myself, scenarios where I have flipped out, trying on Man I really went over the edge last night when I couldn’t find my recorded Bachelor episode. and I changed my mind. It does work. I guess you can get there with no one’s help; you just slip into flip-out zone and can’t help it.
Before I had gotten the GO part, I wanted “twitches” for the “jerks” clue and was thinking rebus. Well-played.
I had actually written in “good” TEETH. Had to erase that when GOOD NIGHT IRENE fell.
@Mike in Mountain View – I counted 17. Bravo!
@Larry – if you took that “wont” as some kind of “won’t” joke, it wasn’t. No disrespect meant there, buddy!
My own personal malaprop – it takes two to tangle. I used to think that was the phrase. Tangle as in fight. Makes sense, right?
“Foams” FROTHS - Yesterday a student came in right after the tardy bell explaining, I thought/heard, That new substitute teacher thought I was drooling. I was in the middle of explaining something, and he’s a good kid, so I continued the explanation with the vague spectacle of this confrontation kinda floating around in my brain-picture periphery. Funny all the thoughts you can have while multi-tasking. Wondering why 1) any student would be in the hall drooling and 2) why a teacher would confront him about this. You see someone drooling, and you turn away to allow the poor guy his dignity; you don’t get all mad and stuff and confront him. Well, maybe an angry wife confronting a drooling husband on a beach in the south of France - sure. But you see a perfectly healthy 10th grader drooling, and you don’t lead with I’m going to write you up. Turns out he had actually said juuling. He wasn’t (possibly one of the ten kids left in our building who do not juul), but I couldn’t let the drool deal go. Kept surreptitiously offering him little napkins, signaling for him to wipe the side of his mouth. He was quite a good sport about the whole thing. But I’mma get him a little bib this weekend at Walmart.
Morton – I agree with @Patrick O’Connor and @Mike in Mountain View that this was fun and challenging. The thing I appreciated the most, though, was mulling over the phrase GO OVER THE EDGE.
OK, a choppy solve but not all that unpleasant. Had to GO around the grid and place imaginary GOs everywhere to find them all; at one point came up with Egggo as a frozen waffle. Oddly, my hangup was GOLF GAME, which I thought was honed on a COURSE, then OK, yeah a DRIVING range.
Too tough for me. Ended up Googling to get some purchase. I figured out the GO OVER THE EDGE, but had so many mistakes that little else made sense. Not being all that familiar with U.S. automobile models, I had JEan and never saw JEEP, even though aDITMENU didn't make a lot of sense, and I'd never heard of an nC LAB.
Had I started at that NW corner long enough, I might have sussed it out. But the SW really did me in. If I never see a reference to an English translation of (Der) Erlkönig again it will be too soon. Sources variously translate it as "Elf King", "Erlking", "Erl-king", and who knows what else. "Elf" is the one lodged in my tiny brain, so I just didn't see ERL. Having "carAT" at 61A sent me further down the rabbit hole. So, I missed even GLOBAL, which is a good word.
All that to say, hats off to M.J. Mendelson for constructing a clean, low-PPP (that's an unofficial estimate), very challenging puzzle. I'm glad that it appealed (for a change) to those who were up to it.
It took me too long to discover the theme, but when I did it went very quickly. I haven’t thought about Windows NT for quite a while, but it was a major operating system used by many businesses back in the day. Vefry clever puzzle requiring some cleverness from the solver. What more can we ask?
Ah, yes, one other thing. I didn't realise that the correct way to spell AC/DC was "AC lightning bolt DC". But I did find it ironic that the guitarist, Slash (Saul Hudson) actually plays for the rival band, Guns N' Roses, whose music I prefer slightly to AC/DC's. The dream rock band, to me, would be to combine the best players of the two bands, but let Axl Rose (another favourite of crosswords) do most of the singing.
I occasionally have felt I should point out that not everyone who does crossword puzzles is not of Rex's ago or background or any other grouping you like. I am, I suspect, a great deal older thant RP and sometimes find my find myself totally adrift amidst popular culture references which I can only solve by resorting to web searches.
I am also not naturally attuned to gimmicks so sometimes I flounder quite a bit over some clever trickery. Strangely enough I caught on to the over the edge thing fairly early, although I was only able to come to a successful conclusion by applying that awareness to one down word where the crosses seemed to make sense but it all didn't add up.
Cool it Rex. Someday, with any luck, you will be so old that you as to say "What is that in reference to!"
I thought it was a clever puzzle. When I realized the missing GOs I thought it was GO OFF THE WALL which didn’t fit but I did get the theme after. I missed a couple of theme answers since I also didn’t realize Chicago was a theme clue.
GOOVER is a DOOK! And... REAR is a logical followup to yesterday's ARSE.
@rex -- Two places I respectfully disagree with you. One, sure, maybe "I'm going to go over the edge" sounds awkward, but "He's going to go over the edge", as in "He's going to go over the edge when he sees that new dent in his car" sounds very in the language, IMO. And two, if the GO's were symmetrical, the puzzle would have been too easy. The thought actually passed through my mind before I read your review that I was grateful that they were asymmetrical. I did love your wet socks analogy, however.
Sometimes when I'm trying to come up with themes for making a puzzle -- something I find very difficult -- I try to find a reveal or a gimmick that will allow letters to go outside the grid. One such puzzle that is still seared in my brain is the brilliant DOCTORS WITHOUT BORDERS puzzle of 1/7/16 by Andrew J. Reis. Me, I flounder and flounder to come up with a good justification for creating this type of puzzle. And here, today, Morton does GO OVER THE EDGE -- so perfectly perfect and obvious. Such a delicious morsel of low hanging fruit that has just been waiting for some constructor to see and pluck -- and great credit for Morton to be the first to do so. Bravo, sir.
I disagree with Rex about the puzzle, but man was that a great post. “The Uncanny Valley of Phrases” and “someone’s throwing wet socks at you” are worth the price of admission all by themselves.
Easyish here since I knew something was up at TAKES TWO TO TAN(GO), although I waited to write GO off the edge until I got to CARMEN SAN DIE(GO). The lack of symmetry was a feature, not a bug, since this would have been too easy if the GOs had been symmetrical. Only a minor issue with (GO)SLING but I knew I needed another one off the top edge, so I wasted precious few nanoseconds finding it.
@LMS and Rex - I think the issue with the reveal is that it either the infinitive or present tense, neither of which is a very common usage of the phrase. I hear the phrase either as past tense (She went OVER THE EDGE) or present indicative* (I am GOing OVER THE EDGE), never (to) GO OVER THE EDGE or (I) GO OVER THE EDGE. Yeah, we can make it work, but it’s a little tenuous.
@jae - “early stroke detection” suggests racing against a quick finish. (@not jae - this is a reply to a comment from late yesterday)
*Is “present indicative” correct? It has been awhile but Uncle Google seems to agree.
Really a bunch of stinkers this week - just no fun to attempt to solve. We all need to band together and encourage Rex to come out of his shell and tell us how he really feels about these puzzles !
Would have been fine except the very first theme answer messed me up because of being “go” -less in both directions (goslings/two to tango cross). Gave me a misconception about how the whole thing was going to work.
Maybe I’m a glutton for punishment but I really enjoyed this puzzle even though I have never heard of Carmen San Diego and nearly had a DNF thanks to her or is it a him? Or a place? A globe-trotting soccer player?
JEAN for ever — until Jeep creeped in. TOON before Trio. MAI TAI before Zombie. Never had either. YEAS before Ayes. I also really wanted “Tilde Was You” before “Goodnight Irene.”
TMI moment. I have two Gold Teeth.
Am amazed @Nancy saw the original production of My Fair Lady. And also that Chicago has surpassed Cats? I saw both and loved the former, loathed the latter. I walked out of Phantom.
Rex, “in” and “on” can both be used. Back in the day, which is your point anyway, we used to say “I live IN 62nd Street.” Not “ON.” Just as we said “I am IN line.” Rather than “On Line.” Now that has a completely new meaning. As does AWEsome.
Finally got the GO gimmick and then it was just a matter of tracking them down. No problem with GOODNIGHTIRENE, it's one of the most iconic folk songs. Agree that GOSLINGS are on the pond and not in it, I wanted polliwogs, but it didn't fit.
I'm very happy that this was not my first Thursday ever, and my sympathy extends to those who haven't had any experience with this kind of puzzle. I've seen this trick before. If I hadn't, I may have ended my crossword career with this one. Instead, I thought it was lots of fun.
I got LDTEETH and SLINGS because of CHICA. (It's still on Bway...and, spoiler alert, it's awful. Word on the street is that they keep running it because it's a cash cow...but the production is tired, soulless, and well, awful).
Initially, I got the problem right away with TAKESTWOTOTA_, but wanted to put in a rebus there. But when I saw __NIGHTIRENE, I knew a rebus NGO wasn't right, and that the GO was off the grid. From there the solve was easy.
Like Rex, I didn't like the revealer. I also don't care for TAKESTWOTOTANgo without "IT" preceding it (which is a NOUN, btw). Baseball has stats, not data/datum.
There were a lot of places that were Monday easy in the puzzle.
It’s fascinating to come here every day and watch this guy hate on a puzzle (unless the constructor is a friend). I have no idea why he he continues to review what he considers to be a an average puzzle at best but I hope he keeps it up. The meltdowns are fun to watch.
Man I wish I was as erudite as Rex !! I thoroughly enjoyed this puzzle and found it quite easy despite my lacking a PHD in Crossword Puzzle Construction. As usual, Rex has (go)ne over the edge with his criticism of a clever theme. Were a few clues dated? I suppose so. Had the puzzle been constructed by a female or included multiple references to the LGBT community or some social justice cause indoctrinating young minds at the University I am CERTAIN the review would have been sterling !! Keep up the good work Rex. You never fail to let me down.
Very nice puzzle. Not too tough to realize the 'go' gimmick. Last one I found was 'goslings', having convinced myself that 'slings' was an answer. As for Rex's dislike of the puzzle, that's the norm, and the reason we keep coming back to his kingdom. If he was bland and nice, who would follow him?
Fantastic puzzle. Learning that there's a reveal had me focused on the south, which was unproductive. I had GOOVERTHE and then added line, which felt arbitrary. Were the letters GO missing from some entries? That led me to AGESA and SLINGS (and the only reason I know of the word gosling is from the rum).
EDGE, tho, is much closer to flipping out. And the reveal us perfect, the 8 missing GOs are all "over the edge." Went around the puzzle, got tango, got goodnight, got the others. With seven of the right missing GOs accounted for, I was stuck at LFGACE, having incorrectly entered ACMETER instead of AMMETER.
A fun one, hitting the just-right-challenging spot for me. Early on, I wasn't sure what to do with ...TAN[GO]; I thought it might turn the corner to the G of EGG, but no, there wasn't space for the O. A pleasing level of consternation ensued. I pressed on, waiting to see what might develop. Only when I got down to CHICA[GO] did I understand; then I completed the reveal, CARMEN SANDIEGO, and AGES AGO before heading around to the GO's that go before. Loved seeing GOOD NIGHT, IRENE. Wondered about GOod TEETH before GOLD; last in, and so rewarding, the GO that explained the SLINGS. Wonderful! (And count me with those who prefer asymmetry when it comes to rebuses - much more fun to rassle with.)
Thank you, Morton J. Mendelson. I really enjoyed matching wits with you here.
I didn't have too much trouble with the GOs, but the SW corner was just brutal for me. Thane and Osler crossing legato? Sheesh, that's more like Saturday level fill in my book.
Although I grew up with The Weavers and owned all their albums, I confidently plunked down toNIGHT IRENE at 32A -- thus not seeing the terrific rebus for an additional couple of minutes. Sorry, IRENE!! You were always a "good girl" and I apologize for besmirching your good name and questioning your virtue. I really do know that you went home that night. Pete, Ronnie, Lee, and Fred all said [GO]ODNIGHT to you -- and I believe they all left. And we know that it takes at least TWO TO TAN[GO].
(I have no idea what LD TEETH are (5D), but the clue makes clear I can't afford them -- whatever they are.)
The revealer is perfect. Absolutely perfect. A puzzle with great construction and quite a bit of humor. I loved it.
We could ask that it be clued as "Bygone Windows systems", as the New Technology OS from Redmond hasn't been new since 1993. Or avoid it entirely... referring to systems metonymously that way was just never a thing.
@Ken R @8:42 - You win the internet today (sadly, in my mind only, most likely). Thank you for saying what I've been thinking, but haven't been able to formulate as clearly and concisely as you did. I breezed through this Thursday, actually beat OFL's time for maybe the second time ever.
On the subject of constructors, it would be helpful to see a statistic on the percentages of submissions by gender before concluding that the editors are biased in their selection process. Want more female or other under-represented constructors? I see that several constructors have offered to reach out to female or LGBTQ constructors to help get them going or improve their game. That's the right way to address the issue.
All you need is one answer that dates back to pre-Rex days and he goes "over the edge." Never heard of that phrase? Give me a break. Totally unwarranted criticism in my book of a clever Thursday effort. Hard, yes. Didn't finish as never saw JEEP since had RIB going down and thought maybe ICET had a "slash." Yes, that's what it's called!
Re: Wrangler. 1A being the natural starting place, I see this clue, think to myself "what day is it? Oh yeah, Thursday, so this will be the second or third association that leaps to mind". And voila, JEEP. Besides, one never wears a JEAN.
Totally with Rex on the "in" controversy of 15D... so baffled was I even after having solved the puzzle, that's what brought me here in hope of enlightenment. Then a groan.
This one put me in a sour mood. I couldn't wait to count up my 8 GO's and go. Best part was reading about @Rex's wet socks and thinking SLINGS was some olde-timey term for baby frogs. And then I read @Loren and her drooling student story and I'm in a better mood. Yes, talk about not being on this puzzles wavelength. So much didn't make sense. LOTS are something kids draw? I know where it's going but I thought what a dumb way to clue LOTS. NTS? ORDO? Where did Unum GO? And then I finally get to TAKES TWO TO TAN. OK, I thought, there's a GO lurking somewhere. For 13D I just couldn't get pollywog out of my head. Toss that idea because I had the SLI and thought SLINGOGS are babies in a pond? What am I missing? SLINGOGS? Had to Goog that unheard of ORDO at 24D. I had the NIGHT at 32A and the dim light bulb went on. Oh...GO and I thought right to hell. So I figured out the GO. I wish I was happy. I've seen the word CARMEN SAN DIEGO but have absolutely no idea why or where. Had Evita in the Broadway slot but after painful entries around that area emerged, I finally put in CHICA. I thought that was cute. Didn't even fill in the last GO. I like CHICA. You could add an ita and banana and Rita Moreno can dance and sing for everybody. @Quasi...I saw Cats in the early 1980's and I loved it. I remember Betty Buckley singing "Memory" and thinking she sounded better than Barbra Streisand. Maybe it's the reason I enjoyed it so much. I mean I only knew her from "Eight is Enough" and along she comes and belts out this song and the whole audience is mesmerized. I liked it better than "Hair." Hah. Oh, the other thing I didn't like was JAB at 1D. I wanted Dig to be something I liked and I also agree that when you're going to TANGO you need an IT in front.
@Dorothy Biggs (8:34) -- I haven't seen the latest Broadway production of CHICA that you skewer so convincingly, but I did see it onstage quite a while back in one of its many, many incarnations. (Joel Gray was in it.) I was underwhelmed by it then -- thought the book was sketchy and weak and I didn't really care about any of the characters. Decades later I saw the movie (Renee, Richard, Queen L) and I was bowled over by it. All the loose ends had been tied together, all the characters had been given some depth, and the book was strong and compelling. I'm a Musical Theater buff and have always felt that just about every stage production of a musical is vastly superior to just about every film version. CHICAGO is the exception that proves the rule. If you haven't seen the movie, Dorothy, I recommend that you do.
Had JEAN for way too long, then EVITA, but stumbled onto/into corrections. Agree shoulda been “on” pond insteada “in”, then I’da swum right to GOSLINGS. Looked too long for GO in NW. Fun Thurs.
Brutishly hard, which I am fine with. I didn't help myself with unum for ORDO and carAT for ATBAT. Very nice misdirection on both of those clues. No problem with the theme or the revealer, although dropping "It" from TAKESTWOTOTANGO seems like a cheat. In fact, I initially thought the revealer might be "lose it" which is more common than GOOVERTHEEDGE.
But ultimately, the puzzle felt too oldish for me to enjoy it very much. SAWS from Poor Richard? Kids drawing LOTS? IRE as a verb (legit, but does anyone use it that way)? A pipe STEM? An AMMETER? IDARESAY, is it 1952?
And some of the shortcuts are really ugly -- SATEENS, MASC, NTS (total bulls--t), ECU(ador), ORDO, ONME (again, no IT's). These collectively elicit an [yesterday 55D] from me.
I'm a big AC/DC fan, so that was fun. In keeping with the mini Scottish theme today, the Young brothers were born in Glasgow (although neither was a THANE, and I doubt they said SYNE) before their parents emigrated to Australia. @merican -- Axl Rose toured with the band when Brian Johnston was unable to sing. Wonderful sly comment from @Anon 8:28AM -- yeah, I wouldn't call anyone in the band a singer-songwriter.
My wife and I actually met Brian Johnston in 1989 at the Raleigh-Durham airport. Nicest guy, and yes, he was wearing a tweed cap. We were on a layover heading to Hilton Head for our honeymoon, and he was on his way to a Rock Against Drugs (remember that campaign?) golf outing somewhere. I asked him who had the best GOLFGAME, and he told me Huey Lewis and Tommy Lee (from Mötley Crüe) were both good players. Probably my favorite celebrity encounter of all time (not that I've had very many) because he was so willing to engage with us and was so nice.
Put me in the I loved it camp. Saw trick at "...two to tango." "Slings" had me going for awhile, but since I knew there had to be another "go" "goslings" fell. Really a fun workout. Thanks, Mr. Mendelson.
The final irritation for this one for me was that "go" additions were not accepted as rebuses/rebi online so I kept reviewing and reviewing and reviewing ... but then thought to remove the "go" before getting my congrats. I suppose "over the edge" was meant to be taken literally? As if "NT" wasN'T frustrating enough.
Was I the only one who did this? I thought the theme was "goes over the edge" with the "go" off the edge. then, since I knew there were 8 of these, there was nowhere to go with 47 across for golf. I'm a coal guy, I saw honed on the range and my mind instantly went home to the Mesabi Range, where all kinds of mining tools came to mind that need to be honed. that southwest corner became the biggest train wreck in 45 years of doing these puzzles.
Like @Loren, I noticed that TAKES TWO TO TANgle would fit the clue better than TANGO, so I thought I might be looking at an NGLE rebus. Or maybe NGLE one direction, and NGO the other. Well, once I had that ngo in my head, I wanted to find some way to make 13D into a rebused 'polliwogs.' The letters weren't right, I couldn't do it -- I thought there might be some other word for PRAMS, but it couldn't really end with a P.
Meanwhile, for some reason I wanted the song to be "Irene, GOODNIGHT IRENE" which wouldn't fit, so I kept it open, thinking there might be another song with that lyric. (The Leadbelly version has the lyric as "I'll kiss you in my dreams" which helped keep my doubt going.) (I've hear him singing a lot more verses than he does in the linked version, but that was all I could find). Anyway, CARMEN SANDIEGO made it clear, and then it was just a matter of finding the GOs going down. Lots of fun -- I'm firmly in the 'don't make gimmicks symmetrical' camp.
@Quasi, "Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego" is an educational program for kids, seeking to teach them geography. Once you know it, you see it referred to everywhere, but it's probably easy not to notice if you don't know it.
As for Windows NT, the answer is simple: Will Shortz probably accepted this puzzle 20 years ago. There's not much PPP, but what there is doesn't rule out that hypothesis.
The hardest answer for me to get is OARS for rows. Uggh. I had the ARS, and wanted wARS.
With yesterday’s lively discussion of how offensive the term ARSE is to the British in mind, I confidently threw in ASSES instead of TWITS for 7D on the theory that the NYT crossword is on some sort of roll for how many people it can offend in one week. Thankfully I realized my mistake early on.
QuasiModo and others: I don't think the question has yet been answered. Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego was a television children's game show (I think broadcast on PBS) shown in the 1990s. It was based on a video game.
I like non-symmetry, so I liked this puzzle for that and other reasons. I don't remember how, but I discovered the theme early on. One of the few Thursday puzzles I solved needing no help.
Hey All ! Was missing the last GO from (outside) the grid, so was toying with the Revealer as being (GO)ES OVER THE EDGE, as in GOplural. Toughest spot for me was that SW corner. The ole brain just couldn't see (GO)LF GAME from ___AME. Plus, never ever would've gotten ERL. I could've stared at that for AGES and nothing. Then also with carAT for ATBAT equaled chaos. Had to Goog ERL, and LEGATO, as musical terms are not my forte. Finally found the (GO)LF GAME, then GLOBAL, then FROTHS, and finished. But, (isn't there always a But?) had a DNF with fEED/fAB/dCLAB. Don't ask. :-)
Another early hold-up was cache for STASH. And unum for ORDO, but did resist whipping out a dollar bill to cheat with.
When first reading Revealer clue, thought the eight themers would be backwards. Then thought about them turning right. Saw the trick at CARMEN SAN DIE(GO). Almost fell into the "What kind of musical is CHICA?" trap, but realized it needed the GO. Same with (GO)SLINGS.
So a pretty cool puz. This TWIT thinks so, anyway. :-)
Lived in Ecuador in the early 80’s, not in the garden spot but Guayaquil. Great experience. Quito is beautiful, but scary to get to by road or air. Now the coastal area has become a sailing & boating Mecca for retirees.
Great Thursday puzzle. I love you, Rex, but some days -- like today -- you're full of it. Your criteria for a good puzzle gets skewed when you're overly concerned about your speed solving. A slow time for you does not mean it's a bad puzzle for everyone else. Which is not to say that the fill was always great, but hell, everything was inferable. I figured early on it was "takes two to tango" but couldn't see how the answer worked until much, much later when I finally got the hint clue. Then everything fell quickly into place except the SE, where I misremembered Carmen Sandiego as Carmen Santiago, another slowdown for which I can only blame myself.
@LMS: I always love your comments, and today’s story struck home. I retired from teaching 6 yrs ago, so “juuling” was not something I was familiar with. However I have found many a student (usually a water polo or crew athlete after a 5 am practice) with head flat on the desk, DROOLING. Since I know my lessons were electrifying, (you could measure with an AMMETER!- there, I’ve connected to the puzzle) I would assume the poor kid needed sleep more than Latin, so I’d leave him there, sometimes long after the bell, with a stack of tissues and a note for his next teacher. Btw, just how long does it take you to find all those brilliant avatars? They never fail to aMUSE.
Liked this clever puzzle. Loved The Weavers reference. But the best thing was that "Goslings" reminded me of the Three Stooges episode where Curly tells Moe, "We're in Goslow," and Moe replies, "You idiot! That says 'Go Slow!'"
Vexing puzzle. Probably took me five minutes just to see what the trick was, and what a slog it was for me to locate all the partialy unwritten entries--especially since THANE, SYNE and ORDO were not even in my vocab.
Like Rex, I looked at SLING and thought it was like a clutch of frog eggs or something. GOSLING was horrendous and waaaay too hard of a word to be truncating like that.
I enjoyed the puzzle. The funniest thing I have heard all week is Michael's expectation that a puzzle (or anything else, probably) would give him joy, when I suspect the only joy he knows is complaining about NYT puzzles.
And, by the way, if goslings only made contact with the water's surface Rex would be correct. But they don't. Parts of them, like the feet, are in the water. Not on it. A pedant should know that.
I agree with loved Rex's column, but also loved the puzzle too. Tried TAKESTWOTOTANGO. Too long. Got CHICA. HUH? AHA. Got it. Then got GOOVERTHELINE WHICH Cchanged to EDGE. Gone over the edge or goes over the edge seem more natural, but go is good perfectly accurate, unless you do the nitwit nitpick that the Go's in front come over the line. Ducks are in the pond even when floating and more certainly when they are swimming. ON works too, but nitwitty nitpicks. I was looking up definitions of sling when slap to the forehead. I deserved and enjoyed it. Looking for Go's at every edge was fun. For me, at least.
Come on, this is a great rebus. And I appreciate that the themers are not symmetrical. Made it harder and more fun to track down the flipped-out GOs. Caught on to the theme fairly early with TAKES TWO TO TAN(GO) and the rest was happy hunting. Had OVER THE LINE before OVER THE EDGE (which is better and totally in the language).
My only complaint is that “it” is not a NOUN. It’s a PRONOUN! Hard to believe that the NYT would make such a mistake.
I have to agree with OFL regarding the lack of joy in solving this one. I know it's Thursday, and that there will be some "trick" but placing answers outside of the grid bothers me almost as much as rebus (which I always understood to be a sort of puzzle involving pictures and symbols to spell out puns.) Not a fun day for me. Also, too, the "NT" in Windows NT stood for New Technology...in 1993...
What tripped me up terribly was the first themer I found was takes two to tango and I thought the go literally went over the edge, like downward, becasue I had the g there from egg. so I put an o at the end of 30A and filled in the go for carmen sandiego with the g at the end of 51A and the o at the end of 56A...and then got completely lost in the fill. Took forEVER to unstick myself, nearly an hour to complete.
I had a really good time with this despite wasting time trying to make a rebus work when I saw GOODNIGHTIRENE and CARMENSANDIEGO. Once I understood where the GOs went, I still had fun finding the more obscure themers. I stuck with GOoDTEETH way too long. BTW implants are way more expensive in my neck of the woods. I never did catch the GO of SLINGS because only tadpoles felt right. GOOVERTHEEDGE worked as soon as I made it a mental negative as in “Don’t...” All this and it still came in on an average Thursday time. Nice one!
Alt revealers: 1. GO OFF THE GRID. Some wise commenter already stumbled on this one. Nice. 2. GO OUT OF BOUNDS. Great for an avid golfer like @RP? 3. GO OFF THE DEEP END. Seems a bit imprecise. 4. GO OUT ON A LIMB. yep. Didn't think so. 5. GO AGAINST THE GRAIN. nah. 6. GO ALL OUT. Succinct and sweet. See also GO MISSING and GO NO GO. 7. GO ALONG FOR THE RIDE. har 8. GO INTO ORBIT. NASA-friendly. 9. GO JUMP IN THE LAKE. Kinda like if the grid is an island surrounded by water. 10. GO OFF KILTER. For Scottish puzfans. 11. GO ON ONES MERRY WAY. M&A knows how much @RP treasures "ONES" in his revealers. 12. GO OVER THE WALL. Topical. 13. GO TO THE ENDS OF THE EARTH. Maybe. Maybe not. 14. GO TO THE TOILET. Grrross. 15. GOT A GO NOW. I've no idea what I'm talkin about, anymore. ***16. GO TO A BETTER PLACE.*** Surely that's gotta be yer winner -- considerin how much @RP gushed over the inside contents of the puzgrid?
I had PRO in the margins, before 36-Across, also. M&A wants some extra credit, on that.
I love it when you have an experience, like Rex did in his write-up, where something that happened AGES A[GO] suddenly creates a gestalt in your brain. My favorite of these happened long ago, when I was in my 20s. I was working for a newspaper and reading some copy that had come in as a press release about Pushkin's play Boris Godunov being staged at some local venue. I suddenly realized that the name Boris Badenov, the Rocky and Bullwinkle villain, was a play on the tsar who is the subject of that play. I was so excited by this discovery that I still remember it lo, these many years later.
I had to get down to CHICA[GO] and AGES A[GO] before I realized the GOs weren't in the crossing answers. My first discovery was in the NE with TAN[GO} crossing SLIngoGS. I thought SLIngoGS were relatives of polliwogs, which definitely fit the clue "Babies in a pond". Thus fixated on larva, tadpoles, roe, etc., I never figured out GOSLINGS when I went looking for my MISSing GO. I swear I looked at the beginning and end of every EDGE answer but I must not have. I ended dropping the last GO in front of the WOE to me 69A, making the medical pioneer [GO]OSLER (which is close to a gosling, or so I comforted myself).
I like the platypus clue that had me enter PEE as its starting point before the EGG cracked. The annoying S. Amer. Land abbr. was urU before the pipe part had to be STEM, not STuM. The delivery door started out in the "back". I briefly had _FlAME in at 47A as something honed on the (kitchen) range. Gah.
Mr. Mendelson, I like your puzzle and it was a great Thursday theme.
Some ambivalence about this one. I liked the theme, for the most part; it was fun to suss out and I thought it was kind of fun to figure out where the GOs would be. However, GO OVER THE EDGE is not really in-the-language for me. I wanted GO OFF THE EDGE and wondered why I had an extra space.
But I agree with Rex, there is some seriously bad fill here. NTS actually made me (briefly, and irrationally) angry: the reference is so dated, it was clearly a desperation stretch .. especially in the plural! Then there's ERL MASC ECU, blech. And yes the clue for LOTS is bizarre
I had CARAT for AT BAT for too long (certainly that misdirect was intended -- so you got me, constructor). Needed the crosses to get OSLER too.
@M&A Top 5 of your all time posts, that one! People looking at me as I actually LOLed in the airport!
@Anon 12:55 SAWS, as in adages, wise tales, humdingers. Like "You can't get there from here." (Hopefully they're not referring to Actual SAWS for sale!) Har.
Oh and thanks everyone who explained to this Luddite who Carmen Sandiego is. Not having a TV is a big deficit as far as the puzzle goes these days. Plus the last kids’ show I remember seeing was “ZOOM.”
I LOVED this puzzle. I was going to come here without subjecting myself to Rexie first, but took a quick gander. Sigh.
This was everything I want on a Thursday: a clever theme; clues that led to sensible responses that had to be erased and replaced; a giggle here or there. I caught on when evItA crashed and burned. The cross words yielded C-ICA and I know enough about long-running Broadway musicals to plug in the H and GO overboard. At first, I expected the GO to wrap around the top (GOobers for Jerks?) but ——EDGE appeared and killed that idea. Great fun.
Yikes! Wickedly difficult (at least for me). It made for a tough Thursday morning romp! Thanks very much, Mr. Mendelson, for the effort you put into constructing this one. Whew! Tough, but appreciated. Thanks again!
@Loren, I indeed thought you were goofing on the importance of the apostrophe in the won't/wont mash-up, and I was goofing in response to the can't/cant mash-up. Can't imagine anything short of honesty to come from you. We're good, as always.
I'm generally with you about not liking this puzzle, but I have no complaints about GO OVER THE EDGE itself as a phrase. I mean, Poison uses that phrase in "Life Loves a Tragedy," and they're a lot more recent than GOODNIGHT IRENE (or even AC/DC).
I think I'd have liked this one more if I were solving on paper. Or if there were more symmetry between the placement of the theme answers, so I'd have a better chance of grasping where the grid was broken.
A pronoun acts looks and quacks like a noun. It is not a noun only for a quirky definition that defines it as not a noun instead of a subset of nouns. They apparently get paid for their versatlity. Regular nouns are onlr what they actually are and work for free. Yet some may call the
Sorry. I pushed publish instead of preview. If my post gets by the approval system, the point I was getting to was that the clue for NOUN was What you may call it? Is the "may" with the possible plural "you" Enough of an out to call the clue correct? Or is this a nitwit nitpick?
The goslings "on" a pond crowd are just wrong. They swim, which means their feet and bottom bits are under water. One does not need to be completely submerged to be "in" a body of water -- if I say that I'm "in the pool," that does not necessarily mean that I'm completely under water. Are wading birds "on the pond" as well?
@LMS, my sister will definitely appreciate your juuling/drooling story. I have to confess that I did have one class in grad school that was too early in the morning when I routinely ended up drooling on my desk. The professor was great. I just didn’t get enough sleep.
@M&A, that was an impressive list. The only additions I could come up with aren’t polite.
The thing about 32a is that there's a popular standard with that lyric that's actually titled --wait for it-- I'LL SEE YOU IN MY DREAMS. It's the damn title of the song, and the song has been recorded by many many artists, and it's at least as famous as GOODNIGHT IRENE. That bit of asinine clue-age made me hate this puzzle from the, ahem, get-go.
I thought it was quite a lot of fun figuring out where all the 'go's went and which way. It was great to recall Goodnight Irene (I'm 87 now) and I've never heard of Carmen Sandiego--but Google told me. Marie
Liked this one very much! One clue that has appeared before, but always annoys me is Goethe's "The ____ King." Goethe wrote "Erlkonig" (umlaut omitted). If one wishes to obtain "erl", then IMHO one must write "Goethe's Der ____Konig." (with the umlaut..) The apt three letter answer for "The ___ King." is an ENGLISH word, "elf."
I really enjoyed this puzzle! I'm on the younger side of solvers but didn't have trouble with the themers. I found them much easier than the fill, where I'll agree with Rex that I felt out of sync on some of the clue giving... needed some help to break the N and NE parts of the puzzle, but overall enjoyed the theme and having to find where the GOs were.
Ben, Geese and goslings sit on the water. Wading birds stand in the water. What is wrong with you? Ever play baseball? Runners on base are referred to as ducks on the pond.
Finished this in Rex + 6:19, and came here expecting a scathing review. I was not disappointed. Needed a good laugh and Rex obliged me. Hand way up for thinking there must have been a musical about a Spanish-speaking girl called CHICA and also that SLINGS was old-fashioned speak for some pond-dwelling spawn or other.
I like that you were annoyed by this puzzle; I felt the same way for most of it. The worst was the kids drawing... LOTS? Really? That seems like a biblical phrase to me, and I don’t think the Bible ever talked about kids doing that. Harrumph...
And can I just say I’m gobsmacked that you have a Velocity Girl song in this post? I feel like I’m one of 100 people who remember they existed.
At last a puzzle I hated that Rex also hated. Usually I come here looking for a write-up that matches my sympathies, but often don’t find it. Thank goodness for today though. I have little patience for Thursdays as is, and when I pass a certain point where nothing is making sense and I know it’s because some stupid stunt is going on... well with this one I just threw in the towel and filled the puzzle with nonsense so I could call it “done”. Bah. I haven’t left a puzzle unsolved for years but looking forward to it with this. Bring on Friday please.
At last a puzzle I hated that Rex also hated. Usually I come here looking for a write-up that matches my sympathies, but often don’t find it. Thank goodness for today though. I have little patience for Thursdays as is, and when I pass a certain point where nothing is making sense and I know it’s because some stupid stunt is going on... well with this one I just threw in the towel and filled the puzzle with nonsense so I could call it “done”. Bah. I haven’t left a puzzle unsolved for years but looking forward to it with this. Bring on Friday please.
I am a little late on this but I got pissed with this puzzle. But I realized it was my own fault. I thought the clue for “world traveler” was “ Carmen Sandiago” (instead of “Sandiego”). So, I thought “ago” was to be a rebus throughout. Shot myself after completing most of the puzzle and finally understood the theme clue. Even after all that I agree with Rex on the overall dated theme clues, and the week ones, to boot. I drawing LOTS from this one.
Got the aha early. Started to write in TAKESTWOTO...uh-oh, only three spaces left, need five. For a moment I was convinced I had to insert the NUMBER 2, but no--SNOWY was in. So I left it and tried to solve the dental thing: Bingo! GOLDTEETH, and it was "GO [think] outside the box!" From then on the solve, despite NTS and ERL, was a pop. No, a crackle. No--a snap.
This was fun. Who says the extras HAVE to be symmetrical? That would be icing on an already rich cake. Clues were definitely of the late-week variety, yet somehow I plowed through them. Hand up for sticking GO in front of SLINGS to complete the solve; an extra aha! as a lagniappe. I have heard GOOVERTHEEDGE before, so the phrase was fine with me. I do not recognize this name, so if a debut, this is very promising. IDARESAY a little cleaning of the short fill would be in order, but otherwise: birdie. In lieu of a name of a (non-toon) female, I'll award the DOD to Reese Witherspoon, star of the film CHICAGO.
How large is the intersection of bloggers who complain that most NYT xwords are too easy and that the tough ones are unfair or ugly? I loved the creativity and the challenge even though: DNF when I couldn't give up my Lees in 1A and also had to confirm 'legato' via Google before I'd give up 'carat'. Also, I had stove or 'where the buffalo roam' for range, never the golf range. Dang, should have found 'froths' and 'global' to clean up SW. Great mis-directs got me! What a Thursday should be!
Once I figured out how JAB could be "dig, in a way" (duh), and that there was no rebus afoot, this turned out to be "medium". I tried hard to see the rebus in 20 A, but it took GOOD NIGHT IRENE to see that the "GO"s went over the edge.
The revealer confirmed that for me, and the fact that there were a total of 8 themers made this a search and rescue operation. Without that mention of how many there were, I doubt I'd have got GOSLINGS or GOLD TEETH. CHICAGO seemed obvious, and GOLF GAME was excellent.
I never played the CARMEN SANDIEGO game, but it made me think of @Ron Diego. Wonder how he's doing?
Fun puzzle to suss out, and, @Spacey, aren't you thinking about Renee Zellwegger as the star in CHICAGO?
This Tricky Thursday was...uh...tricky and tough. Theme and revealer are good as GOLD [TEETH?].
GOOD NIGHT IRENE and TANGO first showed the edgy GO gimmick. GOLF GAME and GOSLING were last of the eight to appear. CARMEN SAN DIEGO was an unknown, though she (or it) rings a distant bell.
In the SW, cleverly clued misdirects of the GOLF GAME and AT BAT, and the barely recalled ERL-King, slowed things down considerably. The time was worth it.
I assumed SLINGS were some type of tiny aquatic creature, so I couldn't find the last GO. TWITS don't seem very a-holish to me, so I thought Gotwits was a new SLaNG word for an arse. I settled on GO MANAGE, which I thought was very green painterly.
@rainy: you are right; my bad. Indeed, a special re-awarding of the sash to RZ. I have no idea why my post came out "anonymous," but I see my trademarks saved the ID day.
and: hooray for the apparent retirement of the captcha police!!
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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144 comments:
Another Rex challenging, me easy. I left sling waiting to see if I get the “you completed however at least one is wrong, mild oath”. I wish there was an option to mute the daing oath.
Often the second puzzle of the evening for me is, Why does Rex hate a puzzle that I liked just fine? I'm not that much older than he is, but I was delighted when I figured out how to put my first guess GOODNIGHT IRENE into the space correctly (I figured out the trick when I hit CARMEN SANDIEGO); the phrase GO OVER THE EDGE sounds find to me; etc.. I know sometimes Rex acknowledges, without bitterness, "Sometimes this puzzle just wasn't in my wheelhouse," and I am at a loss (sometimes) to understand why he then (sometimes) argues that it shouldn't be in anyone else's wheelhouse either. Because the clue to LOTS was clunky? I enjoyed the idea that I couldn't predict where the other protruding GO's would be on the grid (although I note that there are two apiece on each side). So tonight he didn't convince me to be retroactively disappointed in what I enjoyed while solving.
Medium. Fortunately I held off putting in a rebus until I hit the reveal and realized I didn’t have to. Unfortunately @Rex I didn’t see SLINGS and CHICA as theme entries until I visited Xwordinfo, so I agree with his symmetry issues.
Liked it more than Rex did, but...
At one point in this puzzle I said "go f--- yourself", so clearly didn't spark joy for me. I hadn't reasoned out goslings at all. I remained puzzled and irritated until I read the blog.
It took a while to think outside the box, but I figured it out in the lower Southeast corner with AGES AGO. I remembered that this was done before. Would you call it edgy?
Golly. Second day going that I loved a puzzle that Rex wished he had chosen to forgo solving. Perhaps my ego was stroked because I got this rather quickly, and Rex's was gone because of his (for him) slow agony. Gosh.
You could tell Rex was going out of his gourd when you got a good look at his writeup and saw he missed a gobsmackingly gorgeous chance to post a Go-Gos song., "We Got the Beat" perhaps.
Go figure.
Oddly, I felt the same about CHICA and SLINGS. Had to count three times to find all eight over the edge GOs.
When I was in high school[mid-nineties], it was a running joke that Cats was the longest running musical, and now somehow it is 4th? That just offends my sensibilities.
Think outside the box puzzles are not my thing but I managed to have some fun with this one. I left unfinished theme entries all over the grid until I got down to the SW corner and the lightbulb finally went off.
Along the way I had to overcome an UNUM/ORDO write over and an OSTER/OSLER one as well. Those were before I got the theme. After that point I still mustered a SANTIA/SANDIE write over at the end of 42A. Between that and thinking of cooking as opposed to needlework for 31D gave me one last little mess to clean up.
A little over average time and enjoyment for a Thursday.
When the solve begins to bog down, my mantra is: trust the puzzle. Ok, bogging occurred so I scrambled to find some symmetry, and continued to scramble until I no longer trusted the puzzle. Looking for "GO" in all the wrong places made me feel a bit tawdry. Perhaps, that's on me.
I always confuse Sir William OSLER with Tim the Ostler from that classic romantic poem The Highwayman. Spoiler alert: Tim tips those dirty Redcoats and the tryst with Bess the Landlord's red-lipped daughter turns into a date with a tragic destiny. Moment of silence!
Pretty certain more people have read a book written by ECO, than those ppl. who have actually toured ECU. I hear Quito was once a lovely colonial city. I hope it still is. Google tells me that is a UNESCO Heritage Site, sits near two active volcanoes, and is very picturesque. Perhaps, I should GO.
@LMS, your wont wasn't wasted on me. Cant doesn't suit you.
NTS refers to Windows NT (http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_NT) -- an outrageous clue. I used this OS when it was called that in the 90s and I still can't believe this is the intended answer.
@Larry - My daughter leaves for four days in Quito tomorrow. I’ll let you know what she has to say about it next week.
The across themers were easy, but I wrote them in as Rebuses (rebi?) and took awhile to clue into the downs. I agree with Rex, ugh.
Have to agree that this was beastly hard, asymmetry of GOs notwithstanding. I figured it out early on with TANGO, but count me among those who accepted SLINGS and CHICA for way too long. If all the GOs had been at the bottom and the right, this could have been really dastardly ‘cause then all the go-less entries might could have stood alone.
I like it when Thursday funny business isn’t symmetrical. Ups the ante.
The thing I focused on post solve was simply the idea of OVER THE EDGE. It was actually the GO part that kept niggling. For me, if you’re over the edge, someone pushed or sent you there. You’re not there of your own volition, so GO felt funny. If it’s your own idea and you’re heading there on purpose, you cross the line. But that doesn’t have the “flip out” meaning. I sat there whispering phrases to myself, scenarios where I have flipped out, trying on Man I really went over the edge last night when I couldn’t find my recorded Bachelor episode. and I changed my mind. It does work. I guess you can get there with no one’s help; you just slip into flip-out zone and can’t help it.
Before I had gotten the GO part, I wanted “twitches” for the “jerks” clue and was thinking rebus. Well-played.
I had actually written in “good” TEETH. Had to erase that when GOOD NIGHT IRENE fell.
@Mike in Mountain View – I counted 17. Bravo!
@Larry – if you took that “wont” as some kind of “won’t” joke, it wasn’t. No disrespect meant there, buddy!
My own personal malaprop – it takes two to tangle. I used to think that was the phrase. Tangle as in fight. Makes sense, right?
“Foams” FROTHS - Yesterday a student came in right after the tardy bell explaining, I thought/heard, That new substitute teacher thought I was drooling. I was in the middle of explaining something, and he’s a good kid, so I continued the explanation with the vague spectacle of this confrontation kinda floating around in my brain-picture periphery. Funny all the thoughts you can have while multi-tasking. Wondering why 1) any student would be in the hall drooling and 2) why a teacher would confront him about this. You see someone drooling, and you turn away to allow the poor guy his dignity; you don’t get all mad and stuff and confront him. Well, maybe an angry wife confronting a drooling husband on a beach in the south of France - sure. But you see a perfectly healthy 10th grader drooling, and you don’t lead with I’m going to write you up. Turns out he had actually said juuling. He wasn’t (possibly one of the ten kids left in our building who do not juul), but I couldn’t let the drool deal go. Kept surreptitiously offering him little napkins, signaling for him to wipe the side of his mouth. He was quite a good sport about the whole thing. But I’mma get him a little bib this weekend at Walmart.
Morton – I agree with @Patrick O’Connor and @Mike in Mountain View that this was fun and challenging. The thing I appreciated the most, though, was mulling over the phrase GO OVER THE EDGE.
Didn’t hate it as much as Rex but I DARE SAY, this felt like a chore. Having “Elf” for ERL made the SW corner super tough for me.
OK, a choppy solve but not all that unpleasant. Had to GO around the grid and place imaginary GOs everywhere to find them all; at one point came up with Egggo as a frozen waffle. Oddly, my hangup was GOLF GAME, which I thought was honed on a COURSE, then OK, yeah a DRIVING range.
Too tough for me. Ended up Googling to get some purchase. I figured out the GO OVER THE EDGE, but had so many mistakes that little else made sense. Not being all that familiar with U.S. automobile models, I had JEan and never saw JEEP, even though aDITMENU didn't make a lot of sense, and I'd never heard of an nC LAB.
Had I started at that NW corner long enough, I might have sussed it out. But the SW really did me in. If I never see a reference to an English translation of (Der) Erlkönig again it will be too soon. Sources variously translate it as "Elf King", "Erlking", "Erl-king", and who knows what else. "Elf" is the one lodged in my tiny brain, so I just didn't see ERL. Having "carAT" at 61A sent me further down the rabbit hole. So, I missed even GLOBAL, which is a good word.
All that to say, hats off to M.J. Mendelson for constructing a clean, low-PPP (that's an unofficial estimate), very challenging puzzle. I'm glad that it appealed (for a change) to those who were up to it.
It took me too long to discover the theme, but when I did it went very quickly. I haven’t thought about Windows NT for quite a while, but it was a major operating system used by many businesses back in the day. Vefry clever puzzle requiring some cleverness from the solver. What more can we ask?
Ah, yes, one other thing. I didn't realise that the correct way to spell AC/DC was "AC lightning bolt DC". But I did find it ironic that the guitarist, Slash (Saul Hudson) actually plays for the rival band, Guns N' Roses, whose music I prefer slightly to AC/DC's. The dream rock band, to me, would be to combine the best players of the two bands, but let Axl Rose (another favourite of crosswords) do most of the singing.
[Ducks]
I occasionally have felt I should point out that not everyone who does crossword puzzles is not of Rex's ago or background or any other grouping you like. I am, I suspect, a great deal older thant RP and sometimes find my find myself totally adrift amidst popular culture references which I can only solve by resorting to web searches.
I am also not naturally attuned to gimmicks so sometimes I flounder quite a bit over some clever trickery. Strangely enough I caught on to the over the edge thing fairly early, although I was only able to come to a successful conclusion by applying that awareness to one down word where the crosses seemed to make sense but it all didn't add up.
Cool it Rex. Someday, with any luck, you will be so old that you as to say "What is that in reference to!"
AmandaPup
I thought it was a clever puzzle. When I realized the missing GOs I thought it was GO OFF THE WALL which didn’t fit but I did get the theme after. I missed a couple of theme answers since I also didn’t realize Chicago was a theme clue.
GOOVER is a DOOK! And... REAR is a logical followup to yesterday's ARSE.
@rex -- Two places I respectfully disagree with you. One, sure, maybe "I'm going to go over the edge" sounds awkward, but "He's going to go over the edge", as in "He's going to go over the edge when he sees that new dent in his car" sounds very in the language, IMO. And two, if the GO's were symmetrical, the puzzle would have been too easy. The thought actually passed through my mind before I read your review that I was grateful that they were asymmetrical. I did love your wet socks analogy, however.
Sometimes when I'm trying to come up with themes for making a puzzle -- something I find very difficult -- I try to find a reveal or a gimmick that will allow letters to go outside the grid. One such puzzle that is still seared in my brain is the brilliant DOCTORS WITHOUT BORDERS puzzle of 1/7/16 by Andrew J. Reis. Me, I flounder and flounder to come up with a good justification for creating this type of puzzle. And here, today, Morton does GO OVER THE EDGE -- so perfectly perfect and obvious. Such a delicious morsel of low hanging fruit that has just been waiting for some constructor to see and pluck -- and great credit for Morton to be the first to do so. Bravo, sir.
I loved this puzzle!
Thank you--
I disagree with Rex about the puzzle, but man was that a great post. “The Uncanny Valley of Phrases” and “someone’s throwing wet socks at you” are worth the price of admission all by themselves.
Easyish here since I knew something was up at TAKES TWO TO TAN(GO), although I waited to write GO off the edge until I got to CARMEN SAN DIE(GO). The lack of symmetry was a feature, not a bug, since this would have been too easy if the GOs had been symmetrical. Only a minor issue with (GO)SLING but I knew I needed another one off the top edge, so I wasted precious few nanoseconds finding it.
@LMS and Rex - I think the issue with the reveal is that it either the infinitive or present tense, neither of which is a very common usage of the phrase. I hear the phrase either as past tense (She went OVER THE EDGE) or present indicative* (I am GOing OVER THE EDGE), never (to) GO OVER THE EDGE or (I) GO OVER THE EDGE. Yeah, we can make it work, but it’s a little tenuous.
@jae - “early stroke detection” suggests racing against a quick finish. (@not jae - this is a reply to a comment from late yesterday)
*Is “present indicative” correct? It has been awhile but Uncle Google seems to agree.
Really a bunch of stinkers this week - just no fun to attempt to solve. We all need to band together and encourage Rex to come out of his shell and tell us how he really feels about these puzzles !
Would have been fine except the very first theme answer messed me up because of being “go” -less in both directions (goslings/two to tango cross). Gave me a misconception about how the whole thing was going to work.
Maybe I’m a glutton for punishment but I really enjoyed this puzzle even though I have never heard of Carmen San Diego and nearly had a DNF thanks to her or is it a him? Or a place? A globe-trotting soccer player?
JEAN for ever — until Jeep creeped in. TOON before Trio. MAI TAI before Zombie. Never had either. YEAS before Ayes. I also really wanted “Tilde Was You” before “Goodnight Irene.”
TMI moment. I have two Gold Teeth.
Am amazed @Nancy saw the original production of My Fair Lady. And also that Chicago has surpassed Cats? I saw both and loved the former, loathed the latter. I walked out of Phantom.
Rex, “in” and “on” can both be used. Back in the day, which is your point anyway, we used to say “I live IN 62nd Street.” Not “ON.” Just as we said “I am IN line.” Rather than “On Line.” Now that has a completely new meaning. As does AWEsome.
Don't cry for me, but I had the I and A of CHICA(GO), and confidently threw in EVITA. Anyone else?
- Pete
C’mon guys - “Chica” the musical??? Are you serious? When you’re down at the bottom and you know “Go”’s are missing?
Finally got the GO gimmick and then it was just a matter of tracking them down. No problem with GOODNIGHTIRENE, it's one of the most iconic folk songs. Agree that GOSLINGS are on the pond and not in it, I wanted polliwogs, but it didn't fit.
I'm very happy that this was not my first Thursday ever, and my sympathy extends to those who haven't had any experience with this kind of puzzle. I've seen this trick before. If I hadn't, I may have ended my crossword career with this one. Instead, I thought it was lots of fun.
Well done, MJM. Good on ya.
Challenging and fun and satisfying to solve. Primo Thursday Puzz.
I think AC-DC is the correct notation.
I knew "der" was MASC, but I so wanted AMpMETER.
I got LDTEETH and SLINGS because of CHICA. (It's still on Bway...and, spoiler alert, it's awful. Word on the street is that they keep running it because it's a cash cow...but the production is tired, soulless, and well, awful).
Initially, I got the problem right away with TAKESTWOTOTA_, but wanted to put in a rebus there. But when I saw __NIGHTIRENE, I knew a rebus NGO wasn't right, and that the GO was off the grid. From there the solve was easy.
Like Rex, I didn't like the revealer. I also don't care for TAKESTWOTOTANgo without "IT" preceding it (which is a NOUN, btw). Baseball has stats, not data/datum.
There were a lot of places that were Monday easy in the puzzle.
It’s fascinating to come here every day and watch this guy hate on a puzzle (unless the constructor is a friend). I have no idea why he he continues to review what he considers to be a an average puzzle at best but I hope he keeps it up. The meltdowns are fun to watch.
How is the revealer NOT “go off the grid”??!?
Man I wish I was as erudite as Rex !! I thoroughly enjoyed this puzzle and found it quite easy despite my lacking a PHD in Crossword Puzzle Construction. As usual, Rex has (go)ne over the edge with his criticism of a clever theme. Were a few clues dated? I suppose so. Had the puzzle been constructed by a female or included multiple references to the LGBT community or some social justice cause indoctrinating young minds at the University I am CERTAIN the review would have been sterling !! Keep up the good work Rex. You never fail to let me down.
Very nice puzzle. Not too tough to realize the 'go' gimmick. Last one I found was 'goslings', having convinced myself that 'slings' was an answer.
As for Rex's dislike of the puzzle, that's the norm, and the reason we keep coming back to his kingdom. If he was bland and nice, who would follow him?
@Anonymous 8:28 -- I suspect you're making a joke, but here's a link to the official AC/DC website.
It seems that dual rated AC/DC circuit breakers use a slash.
But AC-DC converters -- i.e., those that convert alternating current to direct current -- are often, if not usually, hyphenated.
Actually it's AC[thunder]DC.
Closest to that is AC/DC
Fantastic puzzle. Learning that there's a reveal had me focused on the south, which was unproductive. I had GOOVERTHE and then added line, which felt arbitrary. Were the letters GO missing from some entries? That led me to AGESA and SLINGS (and the only reason I know of the word gosling is from the rum).
EDGE, tho, is much closer to flipping out. And the reveal us perfect, the 8 missing GOs are all "over the edge." Went around the puzzle, got tango, got goodnight, got the others. With seven of the right missing GOs accounted for, I was stuck at LFGACE, having incorrectly entered ACMETER instead of AMMETER.
Fantastic puzzle, thank you Morton (and Will).
A fun one, hitting the just-right-challenging spot for me. Early on, I wasn't sure what to do with ...TAN[GO]; I thought it might turn the corner to the G of EGG, but no, there wasn't space for the O. A pleasing level of consternation ensued. I pressed on, waiting to see what might develop. Only when I got down to CHICA[GO] did I understand; then I completed the reveal, CARMEN SANDIEGO, and AGES AGO before heading around to the GO's that go before. Loved seeing GOOD NIGHT, IRENE. Wondered about GOod TEETH before GOLD; last in, and so rewarding, the GO that explained the SLINGS. Wonderful! (And count me with those who prefer asymmetry when it comes to rebuses - much more fun to rassle with.)
Thank you, Morton J. Mendelson. I really enjoyed matching wits with you here.
Thank you for this post - it makes me feel almost as good, as this puzzle did bad.
I didn't have too much trouble with the GOs, but the SW corner was just brutal for me. Thane and Osler crossing legato? Sheesh, that's more like Saturday level fill in my book.
Yep, that's exactly what I did too!
But the first word of your over the edge response was off the grid ...
Although I grew up with The Weavers and owned all their albums, I confidently plunked down toNIGHT IRENE at 32A -- thus not seeing the terrific rebus for an additional couple of minutes. Sorry, IRENE!! You were always a "good girl" and I apologize for besmirching your good name and questioning your virtue. I really do know that you went home that night. Pete, Ronnie, Lee, and Fred all said [GO]ODNIGHT to you -- and I believe they all left. And we know that it takes at least TWO TO TAN[GO].
(I have no idea what LD TEETH are (5D), but the clue makes clear I can't afford them -- whatever they are.)
The revealer is perfect. Absolutely perfect. A puzzle with great construction and quite a bit of humor. I loved it.
Yes, precisely. Arduous, not enjoyable in the least.
GOLD TEETH!!!!!!!!! Duh.
We could ask that it be clued as "Bygone Windows systems", as the New Technology OS from Redmond hasn't been new since 1993. Or avoid it entirely... referring to systems metonymously that way was just never a thing.
@Ken R @8:42 - You win the internet today (sadly, in my mind only, most likely). Thank you for saying what I've been thinking, but haven't been able to formulate as clearly and concisely as you did. I breezed through this Thursday, actually beat OFL's time for maybe the second time ever.
On the subject of constructors, it would be helpful to see a statistic on the percentages of submissions by gender before concluding that the editors are biased in their selection process. Want more female or other under-represented constructors? I see that several constructors have offered to reach out to female or LGBTQ constructors to help get them going or improve their game. That's the right way to address the issue.
All you need is one answer that dates back to pre-Rex days and he goes "over the edge." Never heard of that phrase? Give me a break. Totally unwarranted criticism in my book of a clever Thursday effort. Hard, yes. Didn't finish as never saw JEEP since had RIB going down and thought maybe ICET had a "slash." Yes, that's what it's called!
Re: Wrangler. 1A being the natural starting place, I see this clue, think to myself "what day is it? Oh yeah, Thursday, so this will be the second or third association that leaps to mind". And voila, JEEP. Besides, one never wears a JEAN.
Totally with Rex on the "in" controversy of 15D... so baffled was I even after having solved the puzzle, that's what brought me here in hope of enlightenment. Then a groan.
This is what Thursdays are all about!
A complete disaster, from start to finish. A task, a chore, an errand at best.
... oh, and you've never heard of Carmen SanDiego? Where in the world have you been?!
This one put me in a sour mood. I couldn't wait to count up my 8 GO's and go. Best part was reading about @Rex's wet socks and thinking SLINGS was some olde-timey term for baby frogs. And then I read @Loren and her drooling student story and I'm in a better mood.
Yes, talk about not being on this puzzles wavelength. So much didn't make sense. LOTS are something kids draw? I know where it's going but I thought what a dumb way to clue LOTS. NTS? ORDO? Where did Unum GO? And then I finally get to TAKES TWO TO TAN. OK, I thought, there's a GO lurking somewhere. For 13D I just couldn't get pollywog out of my head. Toss that idea because I had the SLI and thought SLINGOGS are babies in a pond? What am I missing? SLINGOGS?
Had to Goog that unheard of ORDO at 24D. I had the NIGHT at 32A and the dim light bulb went on. Oh...GO and I thought right to hell. So I figured out the GO. I wish I was happy.
I've seen the word CARMEN SAN DIEGO but have absolutely no idea why or where. Had Evita in the Broadway slot but after painful entries around that area emerged, I finally put in CHICA. I thought that was cute. Didn't even fill in the last GO. I like CHICA. You could add an ita and banana and Rita Moreno can dance and sing for everybody.
@Quasi...I saw Cats in the early 1980's and I loved it. I remember Betty Buckley singing "Memory" and thinking she sounded better than Barbra Streisand. Maybe it's the reason I enjoyed it so much. I mean I only knew her from "Eight is Enough" and along she comes and belts out this song and the whole audience is mesmerized. I liked it better than "Hair." Hah.
Oh, the other thing I didn't like was JAB at 1D. I wanted Dig to be something I liked and I also agree that when you're going to TANGO you need an IT in front.
Babies in a pond? I thought geese floated, so that would be babies on a pond...
Who are these children who scheme and run wild?
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://m.youtube.com/watch%3Fv%3DIyqaxs1_J2U&ved=2ahUKEwiK2Y778angAhWPnoMKHZpvBE4QwqsBMAZ6BAgJEDE&usg=AOvVaw38mRUton4tXdhKqNY5141I
@Dorothy Biggs (8:34) -- I haven't seen the latest Broadway production of CHICA that you skewer so convincingly, but I did see it onstage quite a while back in one of its many, many incarnations. (Joel Gray was in it.) I was underwhelmed by it then -- thought the book was sketchy and weak and I didn't really care about any of the characters. Decades later I saw the movie (Renee, Richard, Queen L) and I was bowled over by it. All the loose ends had been tied together, all the characters had been given some depth, and the book was strong and compelling. I'm a Musical Theater buff and have always felt that just about every stage production of a musical is vastly superior to just about every film version. CHICAGO is the exception that proves the rule. If you haven't seen the movie, Dorothy, I recommend that you do.
Had JEAN for way too long, then EVITA, but stumbled onto/into corrections. Agree shoulda been “on” pond insteada “in”, then I’da swum right to GOSLINGS. Looked too long for GO in NW. Fun Thurs.
Because it's NOT
Brutishly hard, which I am fine with. I didn't help myself with unum for ORDO and carAT for ATBAT. Very nice misdirection on both of those clues. No problem with the theme or the revealer, although dropping "It" from TAKESTWOTOTANGO seems like a cheat. In fact, I initially thought the revealer might be "lose it" which is more common than GOOVERTHEEDGE.
But ultimately, the puzzle felt too oldish for me to enjoy it very much. SAWS from Poor Richard? Kids drawing LOTS? IRE as a verb (legit, but does anyone use it that way)? A pipe STEM? An AMMETER? IDARESAY, is it 1952?
And some of the shortcuts are really ugly -- SATEENS, MASC, NTS (total bulls--t), ECU(ador), ORDO, ONME (again, no IT's). These collectively elicit an [yesterday 55D] from me.
I'm a big AC/DC fan, so that was fun. In keeping with the mini Scottish theme today, the Young brothers were born in Glasgow (although neither was a THANE, and I doubt they said SYNE) before their parents emigrated to Australia. @merican -- Axl Rose toured with the band when Brian Johnston was unable to sing. Wonderful sly comment from @Anon 8:28AM -- yeah, I wouldn't call anyone in the band a singer-songwriter.
My wife and I actually met Brian Johnston in 1989 at the Raleigh-Durham airport. Nicest guy, and yes, he was wearing a tweed cap. We were on a layover heading to Hilton Head for our honeymoon, and he was on his way to a Rock Against Drugs (remember that campaign?) golf outing somewhere. I asked him who had the best GOLFGAME, and he told me Huey Lewis and Tommy Lee (from Mötley Crüe) were both good players. Probably my favorite celebrity encounter of all time (not that I've had very many) because he was so willing to engage with us and was so nice.
Googling shows (using ducks, not goslings)
"ducks in a pond" - 235,000 results
"ducks on a pond" - 139,000 results
I wouldn't think "in" is "wrong".
Put me in the I loved it camp. Saw trick at "...two to tango." "Slings" had me going for awhile, but since I knew there had to be another "go" "goslings" fell. Really a fun workout. Thanks, Mr. Mendelson.
The final irritation for this one for me was that "go" additions were not accepted as rebuses/rebi online so I kept reviewing and reviewing and reviewing ... but then thought to remove the "go" before getting my congrats. I suppose "over the edge" was meant to be taken literally? As if "NT" wasN'T frustrating enough.
Thanks for the info. The IN/ON whining is silly.
Was I the only one who did this? I thought the theme was "goes over the edge" with the "go" off the edge. then, since I knew there were 8 of these, there was nowhere to go with 47 across for golf. I'm a coal guy, I saw honed on the range and my mind instantly went home to the Mesabi Range, where all kinds of mining tools came to mind that need to be honed. that southwest corner became the biggest train wreck in 45 years of doing these puzzles.
Just wondering. Why doesn't GOOVERTHEEDGE go over the west edge of the grid?
Liked the concept. NTS ruined it.
Like @Loren, I noticed that TAKES TWO TO TANgle would fit the clue better than TANGO, so I thought I might be looking at an NGLE rebus. Or maybe NGLE one direction, and NGO the other. Well, once I had that ngo in my head, I wanted to find some way to make 13D into a rebused 'polliwogs.' The letters weren't right, I couldn't do it -- I thought there might be some other word for PRAMS, but it couldn't really end with a P.
Meanwhile, for some reason I wanted the song to be "Irene, GOODNIGHT IRENE" which wouldn't fit, so I kept it open, thinking there might be another song with that lyric. (The Leadbelly version has the lyric as "I'll kiss you in my dreams" which helped keep my doubt going.) (I've hear him singing a lot more verses than he does in the linked version, but that was all I could find). Anyway, CARMEN SANDIEGO made it clear, and then it was just a matter of finding the GOs going down. Lots of fun -- I'm firmly in the 'don't make gimmicks symmetrical' camp.
@Quasi, "Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego" is an educational program for kids, seeking to teach them geography. Once you know it, you see it referred to everywhere, but it's probably easy not to notice if you don't know it.
As for Windows NT, the answer is simple: Will Shortz probably accepted this puzzle 20 years ago. There's not much PPP, but what there is doesn't rule out that hypothesis.
The hardest answer for me to get is OARS for rows. Uggh. I had the ARS, and wanted wARS.
With yesterday’s lively discussion of how offensive the term ARSE is to the British in mind, I confidently threw in ASSES instead of TWITS for 7D on the theory that the NYT crossword is on some sort of roll for how many people it can offend in one week. Thankfully I realized my mistake early on.
QuasiModo and others: I don't think the question has yet been answered. Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego was a television children's game show (I think broadcast on PBS) shown in the 1990s. It was based on a video game.
I like non-symmetry, so I liked this puzzle for that and other reasons. I don't remember how, but I discovered the theme early on. One of the few Thursday puzzles I solved needing no help.
They’re AC/DC switch-hitters . . .
Hey All !
Was missing the last GO from (outside) the grid, so was toying with the Revealer as being (GO)ES OVER THE EDGE, as in GOplural. Toughest spot for me was that SW corner. The ole brain just couldn't see (GO)LF GAME from ___AME. Plus, never ever would've gotten ERL. I could've stared at that for AGES and nothing. Then also with carAT for ATBAT equaled chaos. Had to Goog ERL, and LEGATO, as musical terms are not my forte. Finally found the (GO)LF GAME, then GLOBAL, then FROTHS, and finished. But, (isn't there always a But?) had a DNF with fEED/fAB/dCLAB. Don't ask. :-)
Another early hold-up was cache for STASH. And unum for ORDO, but did resist whipping out a dollar bill to cheat with.
When first reading Revealer clue, thought the eight themers would be backwards. Then thought about them turning right. Saw the trick at CARMEN SAN DIE(GO). Almost fell into the "What kind of musical is CHICA?" trap, but realized it needed the GO. Same with (GO)SLINGS.
So a pretty cool puz. This TWIT thinks so, anyway. :-)
HAMS and EGGs
RooMonster
DarrinV
Lived in Ecuador in the early 80’s, not in the garden spot but Guayaquil. Great experience. Quito is beautiful, but scary to get to by road or air. Now the coastal area has become a sailing & boating Mecca for retirees.
OMG......I had an easier time than Rex, with Goldteeth the 8th and final themer for me.
Great Thursday puzzle.
I love you, Rex, but some days -- like today -- you're full of it. Your criteria for a good puzzle gets skewed when you're overly concerned about your speed solving. A slow time for you does not mean it's a bad puzzle for everyone else. Which is not to say that the fill was always great, but hell, everything was inferable. I figured early on it was "takes two to tango" but couldn't see how the answer worked until much, much later when I finally got the hint clue. Then everything fell quickly into place except the SE, where I misremembered Carmen Sandiego as Carmen Santiago, another slowdown for which I can only blame myself.
"goslings in a pond" - 89
"goslings on a pond" - 3570
Or, as Leadbelly sang before the Weavers, "Good night Irene, I get you in my dreams."
@LMS: I always love your comments, and today’s story struck home. I retired from teaching 6 yrs ago, so “juuling” was not something I was familiar with. However I have found many a student (usually a water polo or crew athlete after a 5 am practice) with head flat on the desk, DROOLING. Since I know my lessons were electrifying, (you could measure with an AMMETER!- there, I’ve connected to the puzzle) I would assume the poor kid needed sleep more than Latin, so I’d leave him there, sometimes long after the bell, with a stack of tissues and a note for his next teacher.
Btw, just how long does it take you to find all those brilliant avatars? They never fail to aMUSE.
Liked this clever puzzle. Loved The Weavers reference. But the best thing was that "Goslings" reminded me of the Three Stooges episode where Curly tells Moe, "We're in Goslow," and Moe replies, "You idiot! That says 'Go Slow!'"
As a suburban teenage punk in the 80s, going over the edge was definitely something to aspire to... no problem for me with that phrase.
Vexing puzzle. Probably took me five minutes just to see what the trick was, and what a slog it was for me to locate all the partialy unwritten entries--especially since THANE, SYNE and ORDO were not even in my vocab.
Like Rex, I looked at SLING and thought it was like a clutch of frog eggs or something. GOSLING was horrendous and waaaay too hard of a word to be truncating like that.
Glad it's over.
I enjoyed the puzzle. The funniest thing I have heard all week is Michael's expectation that a puzzle (or anything else, probably) would give him joy, when I suspect the only joy he knows is complaining about NYT puzzles.
And, by the way, if goslings only made contact with the water's surface Rex would be correct. But they don't. Parts of them, like the feet, are in the water. Not on it. A pedant should know that.
I agree with loved Rex's column, but also loved the puzzle too. Tried TAKESTWOTOTANGO. Too long. Got CHICA. HUH? AHA. Got it. Then got GOOVERTHELINE WHICH Cchanged to EDGE. Gone over the edge or goes over the edge seem more natural, but go is good perfectly accurate, unless you do the nitwit nitpick that the Go's in front come over the line. Ducks are in the pond even when floating and more certainly when they are swimming. ON works too, but nitwitty nitpicks. I was looking up definitions of sling when slap to the forehead. I deserved and enjoyed it. Looking for Go's at every edge was fun. For me, at least.
I liked this a lot & it kept me going for awhile - which is always a good thing. Thank you! (got the theme right away, but didn't know "GOslings"
Come on, this is a great rebus. And I appreciate that the themers are not symmetrical. Made it harder and more fun to track down the flipped-out GOs. Caught on to the theme fairly early with TAKES TWO TO TAN(GO) and the rest was happy hunting. Had OVER THE LINE before OVER THE EDGE (which is better and totally in the language).
My only complaint is that “it” is not a NOUN. It’s a PRONOUN! Hard to believe that the NYT would make such a mistake.
Otherwise bravo to Mr. Mendelson.
I have to agree with OFL regarding the lack of joy in solving this one. I know it's Thursday, and that there will be some "trick" but placing answers outside of the grid bothers me almost as much as rebus (which I always understood to be a sort of puzzle involving pictures and symbols to spell out puns.) Not a fun day for me. Also, too, the "NT" in Windows NT stood for New Technology...in 1993...
@E.Buzz, You wrote--They’re AC/DC switch-hitters . . .
To whom does "they" refer?
What tripped me up terribly was the first themer I found was takes two to tango and I thought the go literally went over the edge, like downward, becasue I had the g there from egg. so I put an o at the end of 30A and filled in the go for carmen sandiego with the g at the end of 51A and the o at the end of 56A...and then got completely lost in the fill. Took forEVER to unstick myself, nearly an hour to complete.
Can someone explain SAWS please?
I had a really good time with this despite wasting time trying to make a rebus work when I saw GOODNIGHTIRENE and CARMENSANDIEGO. Once I understood where the GOs went, I still had fun finding the more obscure themers. I stuck with GOoDTEETH way too long. BTW implants are way more expensive in my neck of the woods. I never did catch the GO of SLINGS because only tadpoles felt right. GOOVERTHEEDGE worked as soon as I made it a mental negative as in “Don’t...”
All this and it still came in on an average Thursday time. Nice one!
@E. Buzz Miller, ROFLMAO!!!
Loved it!
I liked this ThursPuz just fine, but …
Must. help. @RP. like. theme. better.
Alt revealers:
1. GO OFF THE GRID. Some wise commenter already stumbled on this one. Nice.
2. GO OUT OF BOUNDS. Great for an avid golfer like @RP?
3. GO OFF THE DEEP END. Seems a bit imprecise.
4. GO OUT ON A LIMB. yep. Didn't think so.
5. GO AGAINST THE GRAIN. nah.
6. GO ALL OUT. Succinct and sweet. See also GO MISSING and GO NO GO.
7. GO ALONG FOR THE RIDE. har
8. GO INTO ORBIT. NASA-friendly.
9. GO JUMP IN THE LAKE. Kinda like if the grid is an island surrounded by water.
10. GO OFF KILTER. For Scottish puzfans.
11. GO ON ONES MERRY WAY. M&A knows how much @RP treasures "ONES" in his revealers.
12. GO OVER THE WALL. Topical.
13. GO TO THE ENDS OF THE EARTH. Maybe. Maybe not.
14. GO TO THE TOILET. Grrross.
15. GOT A GO NOW. I've no idea what I'm talkin about, anymore.
***16. GO TO A BETTER PLACE.*** Surely that's gotta be yer winner -- considerin how much @RP gushed over the inside contents of the puzgrid?
I had PRO in the margins, before 36-Across, also. M&A wants some extra credit, on that.
staff weeject pick: ECU. Better clue: {ECO friendlier??}.
Thanx for the fun, Mr. Mendelson.
Masked & Anonymo3Us
**gruntz**
Where do you keep your goslings?
In the pond.
You gotta problem wit dat?
I love it when you have an experience, like Rex did in his write-up, where something that happened AGES A[GO] suddenly creates a gestalt in your brain. My favorite of these happened long ago, when I was in my 20s. I was working for a newspaper and reading some copy that had come in as a press release about Pushkin's play Boris Godunov being staged at some local venue. I suddenly realized that the name Boris Badenov, the Rocky and Bullwinkle villain, was a play on the tsar who is the subject of that play. I was so excited by this discovery that I still remember it lo, these many years later.
I had to get down to CHICA[GO] and AGES A[GO] before I realized the GOs weren't in the crossing answers. My first discovery was in the NE with TAN[GO} crossing SLIngoGS. I thought SLIngoGS were relatives of polliwogs, which definitely fit the clue "Babies in a pond". Thus fixated on larva, tadpoles, roe, etc., I never figured out GOSLINGS when I went looking for my MISSing GO. I swear I looked at the beginning and end of every EDGE answer but I must not have. I ended dropping the last GO in front of the WOE to me 69A, making the medical pioneer [GO]OSLER (which is close to a gosling, or so I comforted myself).
I like the platypus clue that had me enter PEE as its starting point before the EGG cracked. The annoying S. Amer. Land abbr. was urU before the pipe part had to be STEM, not STuM. The delivery door started out in the "back". I briefly had _FlAME in at 47A as something honed on the (kitchen) range. Gah.
Mr. Mendelson, I like your puzzle and it was a great Thursday theme.
Some ambivalence about this one. I liked the theme, for the most part; it was fun to suss out and I thought it was kind of fun to figure out where the GOs would be. However, GO OVER THE EDGE is not really in-the-language for me. I wanted GO OFF THE EDGE and wondered why I had an extra space.
But I agree with Rex, there is some seriously bad fill here. NTS actually made me (briefly, and irrationally) angry: the reference is so dated, it was clearly a desperation stretch .. especially in the plural! Then there's ERL MASC ECU, blech. And yes the clue for LOTS is bizarre
I had CARAT for AT BAT for too long (certainly that misdirect was intended -- so you got me, constructor). Needed the crosses to get OSLER too.
@M&A
Top 5 of your all time posts, that one! People looking at me as I actually LOLed in the airport!
@Anon 12:55
SAWS, as in adages, wise tales, humdingers. Like "You can't get there from here." (Hopefully they're not referring to Actual SAWS for sale!) Har.
RooMonster
@ Anon 12:55, “saws” means adages. Well-worn sayings.
Oh and thanks everyone who explained to this Luddite who Carmen Sandiego is. Not having a TV is a big deficit as far as the puzzle goes these days. Plus the last kids’ show I remember seeing was “ZOOM.”
I LOVED this puzzle. I was going to come here without subjecting myself to Rexie first, but took a quick gander. Sigh.
This was everything I want on a Thursday: a clever theme; clues that led to sensible responses that had to be erased and replaced; a giggle here or there. I caught on when evItA crashed and burned. The cross words yielded C-ICA and I know enough about long-running Broadway musicals to plug in the H and GO overboard. At first, I expected the GO to wrap around the top (GOobers for Jerks?) but ——EDGE appeared and killed that idea. Great fun.
Pretty darned clever, in my opinion. Thanks, MJM.
Yikes! Wickedly difficult (at least for me). It made for a tough Thursday morning romp! Thanks very much, Mr. Mendelson, for the effort you put into constructing this one. Whew! Tough, but appreciated. Thanks again!
@Loren, I indeed thought you were goofing on the importance of the apostrophe in the won't/wont mash-up, and I was goofing in response to the can't/cant mash-up. Can't imagine anything short of honesty to come from you. We're good, as always.
@Doug Freeman, good catch on the "GO off the grid"!
I'm generally with you about not liking this puzzle, but I have no complaints about GO OVER THE EDGE itself as a phrase. I mean, Poison uses that phrase in "Life Loves a Tragedy," and they're a lot more recent than GOODNIGHT IRENE (or even AC/DC).
I think I'd have liked this one more if I were solving on paper. Or if there were more symmetry between the placement of the theme answers, so I'd have a better chance of grasping where the grid was broken.
@Mary McCarty - a compassionate teacher! Yay!
And I’m deeply grateful that you got my avatar. Seriously.
A pronoun acts looks and quacks like a noun.
It is not a noun only for a quirky definition that defines it as not a noun instead of a subset of nouns. They apparently get paid for their versatlity. Regular nouns are onlr what they actually are and work for free. Yet some may call the
The grid was broken?
But not enough letters.
Sorry. I pushed publish instead of preview. If my post gets by the approval system, the point I was getting to was that the clue for NOUN was What you may call it?
Is the "may" with the possible plural "you"
Enough of an out to call the clue correct?
Or is this a nitwit nitpick?
@american in paris - surely Guns/Roses.
The goslings "on" a pond crowd are just wrong. They swim, which means their feet and bottom bits are under water. One does not need to be completely submerged to be "in" a body of water -- if I say that I'm "in the pool," that does not necessarily mean that I'm completely under water. Are wading birds "on the pond" as well?
Anon 10:02 You swim on a pool or in?
@LMS, my sister will definitely appreciate your juuling/drooling story. I have to confess that I did have one class in grad school that was too early in the morning when I routinely ended up drooling on my desk. The professor was great. I just didn’t get enough sleep.
@M&A, that was an impressive list. The only additions I could come up with aren’t polite.
The thing about 32a is that there's a popular standard with that lyric that's actually titled --wait for it-- I'LL SEE YOU IN MY DREAMS. It's the damn title of the song, and the song has been recorded by many many artists, and it's at least as famous as GOODNIGHT IRENE. That bit of asinine clue-age made me hate this puzzle from the, ahem, get-go.
I thought it was quite a lot of fun figuring out where all the 'go's went and which way. It was great to recall Goodnight Irene (I'm 87 now) and I've never heard of Carmen Sandiego--but Google told me. Marie
Liked this one very much! One clue that has appeared before, but always annoys me is Goethe's "The ____ King." Goethe wrote "Erlkonig" (umlaut omitted). If one wishes to obtain "erl", then IMHO one must write "Goethe's Der ____Konig." (with the umlaut..) The apt three letter answer for "The ___ King." is an ENGLISH word, "elf."
But really nice, fun, puzzle!
I really enjoyed this puzzle! I'm on the younger side of solvers but didn't have trouble with the themers. I found them much easier than the fill, where I'll agree with Rex that I felt out of sync on some of the clue giving... needed some help to break the N and NE parts of the puzzle, but overall enjoyed the theme and having to find where the GOs were.
Ben,
Geese and goslings sit on the water. Wading birds stand in the water. What is wrong with you?
Ever play baseball? Runners on base are referred to as ducks on the pond.
I had Evita too, took me a while to give up on that one. Had toddie for zombie and jean for jeep.
Loved it.
Finished this in Rex + 6:19, and came here expecting a scathing review. I was not disappointed. Needed a good laugh and Rex obliged me. Hand way up for thinking there must have been a musical about a Spanish-speaking girl called CHICA and also that SLINGS was old-fashioned speak for some pond-dwelling spawn or other.
I like that you were annoyed by this puzzle; I felt the same way for most of it. The worst was the kids drawing... LOTS? Really? That seems like a biblical phrase to me, and I don’t think the Bible ever talked about kids doing that. Harrumph...
And can I just say I’m gobsmacked that you have a Velocity Girl song in this post? I feel like I’m one of 100 people who remember they existed.
I totally agree with Rex. This puzzle reveals a sadistic side of the constructor. In a sense Mr Mendelson went over the edge, and made a monster.
At last a puzzle I hated that Rex also hated. Usually I come here looking for a write-up that matches my sympathies, but often don’t find it. Thank goodness for today though. I have little patience for Thursdays as is, and when I pass a certain point where nothing is making sense and I know it’s because some stupid stunt is going on... well with this one I just threw in the towel and filled the puzzle with nonsense so I could call it “done”. Bah. I haven’t left a puzzle unsolved for years but looking forward to it with this. Bring on Friday please.
At last a puzzle I hated that Rex also hated. Usually I come here looking for a write-up that matches my sympathies, but often don’t find it. Thank goodness for today though. I have little patience for Thursdays as is, and when I pass a certain point where nothing is making sense and I know it’s because some stupid stunt is going on... well with this one I just threw in the towel and filled the puzzle with nonsense so I could call it “done”. Bah. I haven’t left a puzzle unsolved for years but looking forward to it with this. Bring on Friday please.
I am a little late on this but I got pissed with this puzzle. But I realized it was my own fault. I thought the clue for “world traveler” was “ Carmen Sandiago” (instead of “Sandiego”). So, I thought “ago” was to be a rebus throughout. Shot myself after completing most of the puzzle and finally understood the theme clue. Even after all that I agree with Rex on the overall dated theme clues, and the week ones, to boot. I drawing LOTS from this one.
I enjoyed watching you quickly sink into madness while reviewing this puzzle. I’d rate it 5 wet socks full of wriggling slingogs.
Loved it. A puzzle with a real payoff, where you wonder and wonder what is going on, and when you finally get it there is a huge AHA!
. . . ORDO DEED
It TAKESTWOTO’TANGO’
or it’s GOODNIGHTIRENE,
so me and CARMENSANDIEGO
MANAGE our NITEs on SATEEN.
--- THANE OSLER
Got the aha early. Started to write in TAKESTWOTO...uh-oh, only three spaces left, need five. For a moment I was convinced I had to insert the NUMBER 2, but no--SNOWY was in. So I left it and tried to solve the dental thing: Bingo! GOLDTEETH, and it was "GO [think] outside the box!" From then on the solve, despite NTS and ERL, was a pop. No, a crackle. No--a snap.
This was fun. Who says the extras HAVE to be symmetrical? That would be icing on an already rich cake. Clues were definitely of the late-week variety, yet somehow I plowed through them. Hand up for sticking GO in front of SLINGS to complete the solve; an extra aha! as a lagniappe. I have heard GOOVERTHEEDGE before, so the phrase was fine with me. I do not recognize this name, so if a debut, this is very promising. IDARESAY a little cleaning of the short fill would be in order, but otherwise: birdie. In lieu of a name of a (non-toon) female, I'll award the DOD to Reese Witherspoon, star of the film CHICAGO.
tta love this great trick for a Thursday puzzle. Only checked on a couple of unknown (unremembered?) words/names. (See my trick?)
Hey puzzle - you GO!
Diana, Lady-in-Waiting for Crosswords
How large is the intersection of bloggers who complain that most NYT xwords are too easy and that the tough ones are unfair or ugly?
I loved the creativity and the challenge even though:
DNF when I couldn't give up my Lees in 1A and also had to confirm 'legato' via Google before I'd give up 'carat'. Also, I had stove or 'where the buffalo roam' for range, never the golf range. Dang, should have found 'froths' and 'global' to clean up SW. Great mis-directs got me!
What a Thursday should be!
Once I figured out how JAB could be "dig, in a way" (duh), and that there was no rebus afoot, this turned out to be "medium". I tried hard to see the rebus in 20 A, but it took GOOD NIGHT IRENE to see that the "GO"s went over the edge.
The revealer confirmed that for me, and the fact that there were a total of 8 themers made this a search and rescue operation. Without that mention of how many there were, I doubt I'd have got GOSLINGS or GOLD TEETH. CHICAGO seemed obvious, and GOLF GAME was excellent.
I never played the CARMEN SANDIEGO game, but it made me think of @Ron Diego. Wonder how he's doing?
Fun puzzle to suss out, and, @Spacey, aren't you thinking about Renee Zellwegger as the star in CHICAGO?
This Tricky Thursday was...uh...tricky and tough. Theme and revealer are good as GOLD [TEETH?].
GOOD NIGHT IRENE and TANGO first showed the edgy GO gimmick. GOLF GAME and GOSLING were last of the eight to appear. CARMEN SAN DIEGO was an unknown, though she (or it) rings a distant bell.
In the SW, cleverly clued misdirects of the GOLF GAME and AT BAT, and the barely recalled ERL-King, slowed things down considerably. The time was worth it.
Great stuff here. Enjoyed it .
It was kind of a stop and GO solve today.
I assumed SLINGS were some type of tiny aquatic creature, so I couldn't find the last GO. TWITS don't seem very a-holish to me, so I thought Gotwits was a new SLaNG word for an arse. I settled on GO MANAGE, which I thought was very green painterly.
GO ask Alice in SLINGS.
Like others I had to count ‘em up and GO back to the SLINGS for number 8. No hubbb nor IRE for ICE today.
I don’t know my cheeses from EDAM, but give me one crossing letter and it’s GOODNIGHTIRENE.
If you’re ATBAT for the other team (not mine) I’ll bet there’d be a yeah baby for Ryan GOSLING’S appearance.
LOTS of theme and pretty good stuff.
@rainy: you are right; my bad. Indeed, a special re-awarding of the sash to RZ. I have no idea why my post came out "anonymous," but I see my trademarks saved the ID day.
and: hooray for the apparent retirement of the captcha police!!
http://www.centrosubmurena.com/index.php?option=com_k2&view=itemlist&task=user&id=1636820
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