Letter after sigma / MON 8-5-2019 / Measure of light's brightness / Smidgen / Horace, as a poet / Slangy "sweetheart"

Monday, August 5, 2019

Constructor: Tracy Gray

Relative difficulty: Easy



THEME: Downward Dog— Theme answers were Down clues of two or more words where the second word is a dog breed.

Theme answers:

  • SHADOW BOXER (3D: Air-punching pugilist)
  • THE GOOD SHEPHERD (7D: 2006 Matt Damon spy film)
  • CHEMISTRY LAB (9D: Place with beakers and Bunsen burners)
  • LASER POINTER (21D: Lecturer's implement with a light at the end)
  • DOWNWARD DOG (28D: Popular yoga pose...or a literal hint to the ends of 3-, 7-, 9-, and 21-Down)

Word of the Day: LATH (5A: Plasterwork backing) —
lath or slat is a thin, narrow strip of straight-grained wood used under roof shingles or tiles, on lath and plaster walls and ceilings to hold plaster, and in lattice and trellis work.[1]
Lath has expanded to mean any type of backing material for plaster. This includes metal wire mesh or expanded metalthat is applied to a wood or metal framework as matrix over which stucco or plaster is applied, as well as wallboardproducts called gypsum or rock lath.[2] Historically, reed mat was also used as a lath material.
(Wikipedia)
• • •
Hi everyone, it's another Annabel Monday! My summer is going pretty great. I need to get outside more though, I spent this whole weekend vegging out, LOL. Oh well, Mondays are the day when I go to the farmer's market! *Sigh* I love being an adult. You get to go to farmer's markets.

I found this puzzle pretty middle-of-the-road. Nothing particularly stood out as amazing, and there were no discernable "mini-themes", but there was also a blessed lack of baseball and I didn't find any overused clue/word combos. Can't even fault it for how hard a time it gave me looking for a word to use as Word of the Day, since it's a Monday and it's okay to not use rarer words! I just hope I won't be ACHY or TEEMing with anything bad after staying up to write this. And that I won't SPRAIN my hand or feel the ONSET of POX. I guess words evoking pain are a little bit of a mini-theme after all then.

I lloved the theme--I really like dogs and I also really like Monday themes that incorporate downs, it's boring to see across-onlies all the time. However, Rex pointed out (very ASTUTEly?) that this theme was actually used just last week (July 31st) in an American Values Club crossword constructed by Steve Faiella:
if you're looking for the relevant DOWNWARD DOG it's 19-Down

Rex assures me this is just a weird coincidence. Which, yeah. It's just kind of unfortunate for both constructors. Or not--great minds think alike, after all!

Bullets:
    Image may contain: dog
  • CHEMISTRY LAB (9D: Place with beakers and Bunsen burners) — OK since we're drawing attention to the "Lab" part of the answer I need to post my awesome lab Rosie!!! We got her as a tiny baby puppy and now she's eleven and loves to yell at you until you pet her.





  • SHOE (59D: Pump or oxford) — I just wanted to relay one of my favorite comments I've heard at this job: "I just got back from a library conference. I've never seen so many pairs of sensible shoes in one place!" I love librarians and their shoes--yet another reason to become one; I hate heels!!
  • AMBER (71A: "For ___ waves of grain" [line in "America the Beautiful"]) — Did you know the author of "America the Beautiful" was a Wellesley grad?! Her name was Katharine Lee Bates and we sing it at, like, every Wellesley event. Except we replace "brotherhood" with "siblinghood"! Because we're cool like that.
  • SIESTA (34D: Nap south of the border)— Sounds very similar to another word, as Sesame Street, also ASTUTEly, pointed out in 1994: 
Signed, Annabel Thompson, tired twentysomething.

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

[Follow Annabel Thompson on Twitter]

67 comments:

jae 1:08 AM  

Easy. Liked the AVCX one and liked this one.

chefwen 2:05 AM  

How can you not love a puzzle filled with dogs? This was a super cute Monday that I thoroughly enjoyed. A great puzzle for beginners

My biggest hang up is trying to remember how to spell actor Stephan, is it Rei, Rey, Rai, or REA, gets me every time.

Would really like to banish BAE.

Loren Muse Smith 2:38 AM  

Annabel – funny librarian conference SHOE quip. And your Rosie looks like a Good Girl.

I totally agree with @chefwen - what’s not to love about anything Dog?! And as Annabel says, down themers are a nice change of pace. That this idea recently appeared doesn’t matter one whit. Just an unfortunate coincidence.

I did notice some sly periphery dog stuff:
- “Kind of toy that moves when you turn the key” (Hyper little yip dog that goes berserk when it hears you’re home.)
- “Ciao” – ahem.
- “Littlest ones in litters”
- “What ‘woof’ or ‘meow’ may mean”
- “Helper during taxing times” (Our dog, Ethel, saw my daughter through her middle school years.)

“Boo” before BAE. I always feel embarrassed when people use their pet names for each other in front of me. Even something as benign as BAE. It’s like a lexical French kiss.

Ben Affleck’s ARGO crossed Matt Damon’s THE GOOD SHEPHERD.

And PRIME crosses RIB. I know Tracy, know how she labors over filling grids. Studies, tweaks, perfects. This cross is no mistake.

So I also know that Tracy is a landscape expert person. I like it when the constructor’s avocation peeks through: ROSES, PATHS, LEAFS, PANSY, HEWN, GNOME, and the AMBER waves of grain.

I love the word ABIDE. A long time ago, we were at the beach with friends, and Arlene, a sophisticated, smart, funny friend said, I can’t abide orange marmalade in the morning. I immediately started not abiding marmalade in the morning, either. Ok. Well, I did add ABIDE to the rotation forthwith and have never looked back.

Tracy – terrific Monday, and one I’ll use the next time a student asks about crosswords. I loved this. Thanks.

DOUG 3:35 AM  

I THINK MATT DAMON AND BEN AFFLECK MAKE A FINE COUPLE THANK YOU GOD BLESS,,

Lewis 5:36 AM  

Would that there was a phrase that ended with MUTT, so my Chester could be included with this pack!

The puzzle has 61 theme squares -- a huge amount -- and look at how jank-free Tracy made it. That was not easy, and big props to the Gray lady for that!

Lewis 5:36 AM  

And may I add: @annabel and @loren, sparkling posts from beginning to end!

Steve Faiella 6:36 AM  

Hi Annabel!
I think that the GMTA principle is definitely in effect here. In fact, I was surprised that the theme had not been done before! Our thought processes (based on Tracy's constructor notes on the NYT) was quite different (Mine began as "Raining Cats and Dogs" with both types of pet going downward, but oddly most cat names seem to have the word Cat in them) so I went with only dogs and the revealer kind of wrote itself... :)
Perhaps Tracy and I should collaborate on a future grid! We seem to be on the same wavelength... :)

amyyanni 6:49 AM  

No problem from here with same themes. This is wonderful start to Monday; agreed putting the themers in the downs is a welcome change. Also Ben/ Matt intersection very neat. And Dogs!
Thanks Annabel, both for the write-up And the Siesta/Fiesta clip. Grins.

Hungry Mother 6:50 AM  

For a while, I had coined the word kNASH, but I recovered quickly Some nice long answers in an easy puzzle. Up top!

Greg Fingman 7:07 AM  

Are we still talking about female movie makers?

Maya Deren never directed "Death Wish VII" or any other film in the "Death Wish" franchise.

I wish you would stop spreading these lies.

kitshef 7:15 AM  

Re: librarian shoes. Candace Cameron Bure has a Hallmark mystery series in which she plays a librarian, and she always wears these insanely high heels that would jump off the screen in any context, but seem to do so ever-so-much-more-so in a library setting.

Theme didn’t work for me as one is a dog breed (BOXER) and others are partials (POINTER, SHEPHERD, LAB).

LATH was an interesting (and appreciated) choice for a Monday. Could have gone with wATER/wITH/iCE. So credit for adding a scintilla of difficulty to a beautifully wrought but very easy puzzle.

GILL I. 7:55 AM  

Well lucky me. I've owned all of these DOWNWARD DOGs. Our BOXER, Bebo, POINTER, Bidu, SHEPHERD, Reno and our sweet LAB, Murphy. No real favorites - all had their own special personalities. Well, maybe the POINTER was special. He could find an ACE up your sleeve if you asked him.
I like the word ABIDE. I don't think I'd use it for marmalade, though. I'd use it in the SHOE category. I can't ABIDE anything over an inch except my Lulu lace-up Espadrilles. They're awfully cute with jeans. Problem is that I tend to tower over everybody. The good...I can reach the pasta that I store in the top cupboard.
My (ahem) elderly friends do Yoga. Most do it for meditation and a chance to get away from their adult kids who want to live with them because housing is outrageous here in California and they don't want to think about anything except for when 5 o'clock rolls around and they can finally drink. They are not SOTs but the vino does wonders for relaxation. I'll ask them if they do the DOWNWARD DOG. Yo, @Lewis....and you?
Fun and pleasant write-up and Monday fare.

OffTheGrid 7:56 AM  

Nobody mentioned breeds. They are all dogs and that's all that's needed to make it work.

Z 7:59 AM  

I thought this seemed familiar. I’ll give this one a slight quality edge for not having non-themers of equal length and (I think, not going to take time to actually count) less ese.

Lab/Shepherd/Chow mix, so the big guy is two thirds represented, but the chihuahua mix got dissed. She’ll probably steal the big guy’s chew bone as a result.

Time came in on the harder side of medium, but no coffee because I’m on the 12 before they suck your blood fast, so probably just medium.

Sir Hillary 8:44 AM  

Solved this with acrosses only, just to see if I could. It was way easier than I thought it would be, testament to the Monday-worthiness of the clues and answers. I have to confess, though, that LATH was a guess -- that is the outlier by far.

Our JoJo would be clued as Rowdy concert area. *









* MOSHPIT

Nancy 8:47 AM  

In this one, the theme answers led me to the revealer, rather than vice versa. That's because I didn't know DOWNWARD DOG. But I imagine it's just one of many contorted, unnatural joint- and-spine-threatening positions that my totally unlimber and inflexible body can't perform. So I don't. I can't bring my "A GAME" to Yoga, because I don't have an A GAME in Yoga. I have an F GAME.

A word about A GAME (54D), which is badly clued. If only one's "best effort" always produced one's A GAME. But it doesn't. Sometimes your best effort produces a C GAME. Sometimes you're "in the zone" and you produce your A GAME with seemingly no effort at all. Sometimes (as in the case of Yoga with me) you don't have anything resembling an A GAME.

My tennis partner of many years ago once said to me: "When you wake up in the morning there should be a giant Ouija Board over your head that says: TODAY YOU WILL PLAY "A-MINUS TENNIS. And the next day: TODAY YOU WILL PLAY C-PLUS TENNIS. This way you'll know what level of game to put yourself in that day."

I thought this puzzle was cute, btw. Any puzzle featuring dogs is a Best Friend of mine.

Crimson Devil 9:10 AM  

BAE ???

pabloinnh 9:17 AM  

"ABIDE with me, fast falls the evening tide...". Funny how a word can mean "stick around" and "go away, I can't stand it".

I have taken down a few LATH and plaster walls, which you find in older homes. This is an extremely dusty and dirty job, but you do get lots of good kindling at the end.

I like dogs just fine, except for that stranger's dog who wants to jump on you or chew on your pants leg or whatever. This is when I wish I was wearing a t-shirt that says "I don't love your dog". "Oh he's just playing" doesn't always excuse canine rudeness (which is really owner rudeness).

Smooth as a Monday can be, but well into moo-cow territory (hi M&E). Thanks to TG.

RooMonster 9:26 AM  

Hey All !
Nice, easy MonPuz. No YAWn here. Simple but effective. No dreck, which is always nice.

Missed an opportunity to clue FEED ME with a "Little Shop of Horrors" reference. Add a bit of HUMOR in there.

Two writeovers, jaB-RIB, PoeSY-PANSY. Tracy even snuck an F in there. Good enough TO ME. :-)

Got a RUNTS for our Runty producer. Some great eazy-E clues to choose from, too. BAE may be ear-grating, but it's an awesome word as fill to a constructor!

Cool words, GNOME, POX, YAW.

LATER PANSY
RooMonster
DarrinV

The Dude 9:33 AM  

The Dude ABIDES.

Z 9:56 AM  

@Nancy - You ever see a dog doing her wake-up stretch? That’s a DOWNWARD DOG. Peoples’ hips having a different relationship to the rest of our body than a dog’s hips, the yoga pose looks more like an upside down V,

@Crimson Devil - I wish I could explain it, but just accept that BAE is modern speak for best friend. Allegedly it is textspeak for Before Anyone Else, but I have a sneaking suspicion that the explanation came after the phrase.

@pabloinnh - Both my dog’s have a jumping on strangers issue. The chihuahua is “cute” so the behavior gets reinforced constantly by strangers. The big guy gets to practice “sit” and “stay” a lot on walking paths (which we generally avoid for this very reason). I never say “just playing” because they’re not, they’re seeking attention. More common is the “Oh, it’s okay” when I chastise the big guy and make him sit until the stranger leaves. I had him mostly cured of this behavior, but after ten days at the kennel I’ve had to be much more controlling for the past few weeks.

Pete's dog Bubba 10:01 AM  

@kitsher - If you're going to point out a flaw in the puzzle, make sure you're correct. Pointer is a breed in and of itself. All those other breeds with pointer in their names are pale imitations.

jberg 10:34 AM  

Fun puzzle. I vaguely remembered the AVC one, but that didn't detract. Well, it helped a little, because the first time I spent too much time trying to remember the Sanskrit names for the asanas. I liked it fine, though.

@Lewis, all I can think of is "little and big cartoon characters," but that's really awkward, since it's always said as Mutt and Jeff.

Now, a lot of things have changed since I was young, so maybe this has too -- but in my day, if a WIND-UP toy moved when you turned the key, then it was broken. What you wanted to accomplish by turning the key was to tighten the internal coil spring, which would then make the toy move after you set it on the floor and flipped the switch.

@Nancy, I'm not proselytizing, really, I haven't done yoga myself for several years now. However, it's a misconception to think that you have to be limber to do it. For example, here's a picture of a woman doing shivasana, which consists of lying on your back on the floor with your arms a little out to the sides. If you can play tennis, you can do that one! More seriously, the idea is to simply do a given pose to the extent you can, which may be very little indeed -- it will still help you.

@pablo, I used to have a paper route when I was 12. There were a lot of dogs, and I quickly learned that if someone said, "Don't worry, he won't bite" it meant I had better be careful. Once someone said that to me after the dog had already bitten me. But as you say, it's the owners, not the dogs. I love dogs!

Malsdemare 11:05 AM  

This one made me smile and seeing LMS's additional canine references made it even better. My only wish would be that it were longer. Grandkids are coming tonight for two weeks and my todo list is a monster.

A lifetime of dogs but only one of our breeds is here, the shepherd who introduced me to Long runs late at night after the kids were in bed and life without fear. Bless you, Sergeant. The rest of the various beasts — dachshund, Lakeland terrier, malamute, Tervuren, doberman — don't lend themselves to this kind of wordplay. But I've done my share of yoga. Had to stop when I had neck surgery and haven't started up again. The spirit is willing but oh that flesh!

I love that the other constructor of a dog puzzle showed up to comment. That's one of the real joys of this blog.

@Nancy, I think I'll shall adopt that whole notion of deciding what game to bring to the day. Today it’s my C-game since the A game will be de rigueur for the next two weeks.

Thanks, Tracy!

Birchbark 11:26 AM  

Mired in plausible misdirects at the top:

acts --> CAST (1A Group in a play), happens to anagram.
trust --> HUMOR (16A "__ me" ("Go along with it"))
see ya --> LATER (5D "Ciao")

I don't have a puzzle-word-segue here so will just go with YAW. I'm about half-way through reading "Villette", by Charlotte Bronte. In that space of a couple hundred pages it has gone from a book I hadn't really heard of to among the favorites in the pantheon. The writing is fluid and gentle, but the structure is unrelenting, bleak complexity -- reminds me of Hawthorne in some ways. I recommended it to the book readers among us.

kitshef 11:44 AM  

@ Pete's dog Bubba - well, I didn't want to get into the whole FCI versus AKC classifications, but yes if you go by AKC it's two breeds and two partials.

Z 11:55 AM  

@kitshef - Why not? Everyone loves a good comments section dog fight.

@Malsdemare - There are yoga instructors who will lead sessions and teach poses specifically for us slightly more elderly and slightly less bendable than the seemingly ubiquitous lululemon clad harpies.*







*Decided I should add this short description from Wikipedia: They were generally depicted as birds with the heads of maidens, faces pale with hunger and long claws on their hands. ... Pottery art depicting the harpies featured beautiful women with wings. Ovid described them as human-vultures.

OffTheGrid 12:04 PM  

Take a look at this Peter Sellers clip.

old timer 12:28 PM  

Nice writeup, Annabel. And of the two puzzles, this is superior I think.

Fun fact: The past tense of ABIDE is abode, another word frequently found in our puzzles.

Unknown 12:32 PM  

Actually downward dog is pretty easy.

albatross shell 12:34 PM  

I do not hustle through puzzles regularly but when they start filling in easily I start rushing just to see how fast I can fill in a puzzle with my pathetic typing ability. Fastest is 15 to 17 minute area. This one was 15 and change. In my top 3. And my screen was being non-cooperative by not always reacting to my finger and I did a quick scan of answers before filling in the last letter. No happy music. All cross and down answers looked good. Took a closer look. The last across filled in with crosses and I never looked at the clue. Had AGEs crossing SASSEs. That cost me a minute or 2 by itself.

@Jberg 1034am
Both a paperboy and a one-time letter carrier. Many a dog snapped at me immediately after those magic words were spoken. They seem to be a command. One dog they were right about was a dog that was chained up where you had to enter his circle of trust to get to and from the mailbox. Most ferocious barker and chaln pullers I ever encountered. Seemed to only have one desire. Let me rip your throat out. Then as soon as you entered his circle everything changed. Friendliest dog ever. Would love you to death . Had to push him away to get by. And as soon you were one inch outside his circle, he would revert.
The theory is that dogs divide people in to two groups: those allowed in the house and those not allowed in the house. Delivery people and garbage men approach the house, make noise, and sneak away. Very suspicious activity to most canines.

Puzzle had a good theme, a lot of space used for that theme, and clean fill with a couple of amusing crosses. Topnotch Moday.

Masked and Anonymous 12:36 PM  

Dogs on the down-low. Hard not to luv them doggy pups. A nice lick-in-yer-face MonPuz.

Don't know much about yoga, so DOWNWARDDOG had a pretty new feel. Also, a bit hard to see the theme real early, since all the dogs were … well, on the down-low. But the fillins were smoother than snot, and the clues were tail-wagginly friendly, sooo … nanosecond-level solvequest, at our house.

This puz had no longballs, other than the themers. Unusual-ish.
fave runty fillins: WINDUP. HUDDLE. FEEDME. RUNTS.
fave moo-cow eazy-E MonPuz clue: {"E" on a gas gauge} = EMPTY. The epitome of an eazy-"E" clue.

staff weeject pick: M&A is torn, here, today. There was a pretty well-behaved litter of lil pups, in this puzgrid. ITO, BAE, and UAE were about as frisky as they got. Gonna go rogue, and pick DOG.
Primo clean weeject stacks, in the NE & SW, btw.

Thanx for the fun with furbark, Tracy Gray darlin. And superb blog-subbin, Ms. Tired-and True Thompson darlin. And yer a very very good doggy, Rosie.

Masked & Anonymo6Us


**gruntz**

Carola 12:43 PM  

A masterful Monday (no surprise with Tracy Gray): a perfectly done theme and a grid replete with other fun-to-write-in entries. Result: solver left in a very good HUMOR.

Re: other dog-related entries - the one that popped out at me was GNASH. I'm a PANSY when it comes to dogs, and nicely contained within a puzzle grid is exactly where I prefer to encounterthem. Decades ago I was cornered by a growling German SHEPHERD and have yet to recover (this house pet subsequently had to be given away to a security firm, after "treeing" the bottled water delivery guy on top of his van).

@Nancy, re: A-GAME. Your comment reminded me of teaching experiences - the day you've prepped your brains and heart out, the class turns out to be a when-will-it-end snoozer; the frazzled day you're hardly ready, the class is brilliant and no one wants to quit when the bell sounds.

Pete's dog Bubba 12:49 PM  

@kitshef - The only reason the FCI calls the Pointer breed the English Pointer is they still are afraid of the Germans who, megalomaniacs they are, think the German Shorthaired Pointer is the king of pointers, and should be named simply 'Pointers' without modifications to placate them. I believe it was Neville Chamberlain III who acceded to the name English Pointer for the FCI.

Anonymous 12:55 PM  

it is refreshing to learn that there remain folks who'll admit to attending Effete Eastern Intellectual schools. Oddly, to some, it's the graduates of such schools that have propelled Boston (well, the part of MA from 495 eastward) upwards. Socialism uber alles!!

John Hoffman 1:10 PM  

Fine Monday puzzle! Lots of words we don’t see all the time.

Anonymous 1:27 PM  

I've never known a yoga guru who calls it DOWNWARDDOG. It's downward facing dog.

Austenlover 1:32 PM  

Am I the only one who noticed the spelling error in the mini puzzle?

Lewis 1:33 PM  

@gill -- My adult kids do not live with me, but if they did, yoga would help me keep things in perspective.
@anon 1:27 -- I've been teaching yoga for more than 25 years, and I do call it downward facing dog, but I also call it down dog and downward dog.

Lewis 1:37 PM  

My five favorite clues from last week:

1. Temperature test, of a sort (3)
2. Character raised in "Rosemary's Baby" (10)
3. Important thing to know, if you will (6)(3)
4. Animal that doesn't have a sound coming out of its head (3)
5. They may go on long walks (5)


SIP
APOSTROPHE
ESTATE LAW
GNU
CANES

OffTheGrid 2:41 PM  

Good catch. I did not see it but went back and found it. 7A clue. Although I do not care about my time on the main event, I try to do the Mini as fast as possible, best being about 40 seconds.

Joe Dipinto 3:34 PM  

There's no spelling error in the Mini.

xyz 4:44 PM  

Really clean, really fast, maybe my fastest ever although I don't time, it was sub 6 minutes according to the puzzle.

Seemingly no junk fill, amazing. WOW

Crimson Devil 4:48 PM  

Re: mini
I think 7a clue can be spelled either with or sans a “w”.

Anonymous 4:59 PM  

Moderator says

@Austenlover, please don't post spoilers.

68Charger 6:32 PM  
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
albatross shell 6:37 PM  

Non-moderator says

@anonymous, that's a spoiler approaching zero.

Anonymous 6:55 PM  

@Albatross shell

Moderator says

I wasn't referring to @Austenlover's 1:32 PM comment, but the one s/he tried to post later (which I quashed).

albatross shell 7:17 PM  

I apologize. Thanks for the explanation.

Joaquin 7:23 PM  

Thanks, OTG, for providing the Peter Sellers clip. It's old, but it never gets old!

Monty Boy 7:39 PM  

8 dogs including 2 Heinz and 6 Shelties in 52 years. So yeah, we like dogs and hence the puzzle. We fall into the SHEPARD column. When first married, we lived in "Married Student Housing" in Bozeman. No dogs allowed, so our first pet was a hamster. Not nearly as much fun.

@lewis - My dad used MUTT as a synonym for a child. Aren't you a clever little MUTT? That Smith kid is a fast little MUTT. So make up your own saying and your pal is included.

Anonymous 8:19 PM  

ummmmm... Mod - since 99.44% of comments today or any other day are about the answers, which are all shown in the main grid by OFL (or one of his elves), how can a comment be a spoiler? just so the rest of us know what not to type about. :)

Wanderlust 8:23 PM  

My slowest Monday perhaps ever, but for a good reason. My first time solving using only the across clues. Never looked at a down clue. I was just racing through the acrosses at the top so I decided to see if I could do it. Probably easier because of the long downs — when I got stuck on an across near the bottom, I looked at the long downs and could usually fill them in, which helped with the acrosses I didn’t know right away.

At the end I got really stuck on the BAE - TAU cross. I couldn’t quite remember BAE as the slang endearment, and I thought the missing letter in T-U was either H (THU for Thursday) or R (TRU for Capote). When those didn’t work, I remembered my Greek letters.

Anyway, a nice feeling of accomplishment. And nice to see an Annabel writeup on a day with a dog theme - my pooch is Annabelle!

Anonymous 8:29 PM  

Mods - 6:32pm post is a spoiler from Saturday's puzzle.

Moderator 8:36 PM  

@Anon 8:19

I know you were being facetious when asking your question, but @Austenlover was giving away an answer to the Mini puzzle, which isn't kosher.

Moderator 8:46 PM  


@Anon 8:29

Thanks, I missed that.

68Charger 10:03 PM  

Not , trying to be difficult, but isn't that what this blog appears to be about? Especially for a three day old puzzle. Also, the original post that I replied to had the same format, IMO. that's the reason I thought there would be no harm in posting...
Oh well, won't do that again, sorry.

68Charger 11:04 PM  

Moderator:
Just curious why the 8:32 posting was verboten? It just referenced the regular Saturday NYT puzzle? Just like to know so it doesn't happen again. The original post had pretty much the same format. Just wondering, thanks!

Moderator 11:24 PM  

@68Charger

Posts providing spoilers for other recent puzzles should be avoided.

A Different Moderator 11:28 PM  

People reading the comments are expected to have completed that day’s puzzle. Spoilers about any other puzzle, including that day’s mini puzzle, are generally frowned upon at best, deleted if especially spoilsome. There are multiple moderators, and each of us have a different sensitivity. Clearly labeled spoilers have been allowed to stand in the past.

68Charger 11:37 PM  

Thanks for replying!

Burma Shave 8:42 AM  

EMPTY UNIT

He could USE another AMP or LUMEN,
for THE ONSET to PATHS home,
THE ODIST PEGS HYMN as a human,
but THE RUNT'S a WINDUP GNOME.

--- ANNA AMBER ASHE

spacecraft 11:12 AM  

I am happy. Happy that the Eagles won, and happy that OFC wasn't around to find something to bark about today. It was one of the easiest puzzles ever--but then this IS Monday. Yet the theme remained hidden until I got to the revealer clue. That's how it ought to work.

And the fill: smoother than creamy peanut butter. And delicious: I'm looking at you, PRIME RIB! What a cross! And ANNA Kendrick for DOD? What's not to love? E! A! G! L! E!

rondo 2:06 PM  

What @spacey said, except substitute Vikings for Eagles

leftcoast 2:18 PM  

Didn't know about the DOWNWARD DOG, but it did its trick. Also didn't know Matt Damon's THE GOOD SHEPHERD, which did his/her duty. (Female shepherds? Why not?)

Diana, LIW 2:22 PM  

What's better than creamy peanut butter? That peanut butter/cookie dough creamy stuff from trader Joe's. Heavenly.

This wasn't heavenly, but 'twas easy and fun.

Diana, LIW

wcutler 3:27 PM  

@Hungry Mother 6:50 AM, who wrote "For a while, I had coined the word kNASH ..."
Perhaps you were thinking of knish (food)!

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