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Food brand since 1922 with a Chinese character in its logo / FRI 2-4-22 / Nickname of 6' 9" N.F.L. great Ed Jones / 1987 sci-fi comedy spoof / Lemony Snicket antagonist named after a Salinger orphan / Ben & Jerry's sundae with an estimated 14,000 calories / Nonprofit with the tagline no more victims
Friday, February 4, 2022
Constructor: Joseph Greenbaum
Relative difficulty: Easy to Easy-Medium (depending on your familiarity with the proper nouns)
Word of the Day: LA CHOY (39A: Food brand since 1922 with a Chinese character in its logo) —
La Choy (stylized La Choy 東) is a brand name of canned and prepackaged American Chinese food ingredients. The brand was purchased in 1990 from Beatrice Foods by ConAgra Foods during the LBO firm Kohlberg Kravis Roberts' dismantling of the company and is still currently a property of ConAgra. (wikipedia)
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There were a few sketchy moments. Well, there's yet another example of hesitation-sound creep—today: "UH, NO" (16A: "Yeah ... never gonna happen"). I've seen "UM, NO" and "UH, OK" and variations on this er um uh stuff and if I see it rarely I don't really care, but not thrilled about its proliferation, tbh. But the much bigger problem today is crossing TOO with ... TOO. No matter how many times constructors and editors perpetrate this on you, it remains an example of shoddy craftsmanship. Put the second TOO on the other side of the grid, and *maybe* we don't notice (there are two "NO"s today, and I didn't care that much, though I did NOtice). But don't cross them don't cross them don't cross them. I say this all the time about two-letter words, and I'm saying it even louder in this three-letter case. I mean, maybe the TOO/TOO cross is supposed to be part of some weird theme I don't understand involving also the LOO/LOO cross in the SE and the GOO/GOO cross in the center/west. But this seems unlikely. Further problems: the phrase is "turn bad" not TURN EVIL (45A: Stop working for good?). If you google "TURN EVIL" in quot. marks you get all D&D and WOW (World of Warcraft) hits. Not a great sign for the general-use status of your answer. Hmmm, looks like there are no further problem. AVLAB sounded weird to my ears (I say AV you say CLUB! AV! "CLUB!" AV! "CLUB!"). But I'm sure it's a thing. It sounds like a thing.
Only minor difficulties today. Hesitated at the YIPES / YIKES dilemma (a strong kealoa*, that one) (52A: "Jeepers!"). Wrote in LTD before LLC and NEE before AKA (1A: Letters between two names). I remembered OMB but weirdly spelled MAAD like that, with two "A"s instead of two "D"s. I had no idea that anyone anywhere thought the "Amber" in "Amber Alert" was an acronym, and I have even less of an idea why anyone would care to *invent* an acronym origin phrase, a phrase that is never used and that I've never heard of. And it's a super-clunky and non-intuitive one at that: "America's Missing"!?!?!?! "Abducted Minors" makes more sense, but ... too grim? Anyway, everyone knows what "Amber Alert" is so what the hell? Why does this dumb BACKRONYM exist!? ... well, the superintendent of my wife's school district just called (well, a recording of his voice called) and looks like she's got a four-day weekend now (ice, snow, instructional programs canceled), so I'm gonna go try to convince her to make me pancakes. Wish me luck!
Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld
Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld
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151 comments:
No major overwrites, only @Rex Ltd before LLC and ALGAeBLOOM. Easy for a Friday, which is good because internet service here has been in-and-out (but mostly out) for the last few days.
No one has ever accused me of being a delicate eater. But the VERMONSTER, with 20 scoops - yes, not a typo, twenty scoops! - of ice cream just for starters is even a bit much for me. But maybe if you gave my arm a really good twist …
This guy has the makings of someone who could become one of my favorite constructors.
And what is this - just his 3rd NYTXW? I'm impressed.
More importantly, I had a little brain-teasing fun. A perfectly "Light and Lively" (do they still make that??) Fridee.
Lovely longs and junk-free (or at least drastically marked down) fill.
What's not to like?
Hey! I just noticed you can make BALLOON in the SE corner! And in 2 different ways, too! That's gotta be worth something, no? A ham sammich, maybe?
TURNEVIL RHOMBI sounds like a great MCU villain. He tortures people like me by trekking the universe and forcing people to do geometry.
Who can stop him? Why, BADREP DON O'HARM, of course. Don't get his Irish up!
Taxi!🙋♀️
🧠🧠.5
🎉🎉🎉🎉
I don't get Backronym. I mean, I got it, but I don't know what it means.
Had Terminator instead of Vermonster, for a while. Sigh..
Enjoyed the puzzle.
This seems a solid Friday. Not easy but a difficulty level closer to my liking than some. I just rarely notice the TOOTOO and NONO repeats. I did notice lots of O's and one of my favorite dooks, GO ON. It would please me to never see VERMONSTER or BACKRONYM again. I knew SWiM had to be SWUM but I had to think on it a bit. It took me an EON to get NOE. A happy start to the day.
As is my wont I used a puzzle word to start my Wordle. Pickings are slim on Fri. and Sat. I got a 4 and made a new rule for myself. After 3 tries I needed one letter and knew where it went. There were 3 viable options. I happened to guess the correct one for the 4. I decided that from now on, when it comes down to a random guess, I will consider my guess correct even if I don't get the green square.
Something weirdly appealing about having TOO TALL and TO TAL in the same grid.
Alternative clue: Corleone: DON O' HARM
LIFE ON MARS has gotten a lot of play in ads for Licorice Pizza. Wonderful song. Not sure why Rex posted a link to Kooks.
Too easy for a Friday. I think the point of the BACKRONYM clue was to slow us down by making us read that clue over and over to make sense of it.
Not too much WoE stuff today, which is always nice on a Friday (maybe ESME, MIRO, NOE, BALOO). Nice job by the constructor.
Still waiting for the head-slip when I get the clue for 50D (ITSME), “Part of a classic breakup line” - no idea, romantic breakup? Breakup a sentence - IT’S ME, Something from “Love story” circa 1975. Anyone to the rescue ?
I dnfed again. This time it was AdLAB (no idea what that could possibly be) and dERMONSTER. My first thought was ApLAB. AP whatever is quite common in puzzles of late. A nickname for Bing Crosby was Der Bingle and it could be slapped onto most anything. This was the only reason the D seemed quite plausible. Maybe if I had gone through the alphabet the lightbulb would have gone off with V in place. Doing that feels like a defeat anyway but I sure felt more dumb when I saw the actual grid at xwordinfo.
The OMB, ORL and REASONS section gave me trouble too. I had a mental block on the basketball teams' home town. Worse than that I kept seeing 36A as a phrase like CHEWS ON. That was with _E_SONS in place. That final S was some how discounted as I struggled to come up with a three letter verb to make this bizarre mis reading work. It finally dawned on me that I was looking for a single word but it was never because of that final S. Weird.
The rest of the puzzle solved like a Wednesday. This in no way made up for the dnf or how long it took me to get that trio of answers.
yd -0
Ah, rationalizing in crosswords, when you convince yourself a wrong answer is right because you can’t think of any other answer. For me, today, it was AD LAB, which I convinced myself was a thing -- a high school class looking like an old-time newsroom, where students were taught how to design print ads – because DER MONSTER sounded so right. When I finally saw the right answer, AV LAB, my rationalization brought a big inner laugh.
As for my solving experience today, it was a lovely pastiche of smooth and rub, with pleasure at uncovering LOOSEY GOOSEY and NOT TOO SHABBY (both NYT answer debuts), and smiles at cracking [Issue with image quality, informally?] for BAD REP, and [Not stress so much?] for UNDERSELL (another wonderful debut).
Thus, much happiness overall, not to mention the Heckle and Jeckle wannabees KEIRA and MEARA, a double-O fest (6), and four palindromes, to sweeten the pot.
Certainly, you brought much joy to my world, Joseph, and thank you for making it happen!
Pretty spot on, Rex. Fun Friday. Hope you have real Vermont maple syrup for those pancakes.
Ben and Jerry's plant is not too far from here and the VERNONSTER was a gimme, but I did wonder how many other folks had ever heard of it. This was counterbalanced by not knowing the lyrics to LIFEONMARS, so fair enough.
Hadn't thought of LACHOY in a long time but I can still see that bottle of soy sauce, which is what my experience with exotic cuisine was when I was growing up
MGRS before MGNT was about the only slowdown for me. Thought the rest of the puzzle was just great, slight pushback and lots of fun answers. NOTTOOSHABBY is the go-to expression in these parts for something that is truly excellent.
Excellent Fkrday, JG. Just Great. Thanks for all the fun.
PS-Since we had our little discussion about Novax Djocovid the other day, I feel compelled to pass along something from this AM's NY Post. I paraphrase--Say what you like about Australian tennis, but they sure know how to return a Serb.
Wordle 230 3/6
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It wasn’t looking good today - basically chipped in from off the green. Two under after 2 (round two).
@Southside Johnny - Think: "It's not you ... it's me."
A little trivia laden for a Friday - but overall a fine time. Liked the two long downs and LIFE ON MARS. Couple of unfortunate 3’s and SWUM was rough.
Not so fond memories of my mom opening a can of LA CHOY chop suey or whatever it was called and covering it with those crunchy noodles. Maybe 47a will stir up a spirited debate whether a square a RHOMBI today.
A wonderful acoustic RIPPLE.
Enjoyable Friday solve.
Rex and I were born in the same year and that cultural synchronicity made me feel the same way about LA CHOY (it was kinda rattling back in my brain somewhere, but have also become increasingly brand blind). I also made the same mistake with MAAD/MADD, which screwed up the NE corner for a bit. Also had FED for OMB and FLA for ORL, which was the last part of the puzzle to sort out. Otherwise, generally enjoyable, especially for a Friday!
My big gripe is with YIPES. Not a word. Not a thing b
Ok, I’m extremely irritated by the DONOHARM clue. I am a doctor and that is a part of the Hippocratic Oath but is by no means the ESSENCE of it as the clue says. That means the constructor has heard that phrase but never investigated the rest of the Oath. We take that all pretty seriously, and if DO NO HARM was the whole thing, then who would be helping, curing, preventing and all that?
Ok, rant over.
Should we have a problem with OMB and MGMT in the same grid??
Still learning the ropes with respect to irksome and inappropriate dupes.
SouthsideJohnny @7:22 AM:
"It's not you, it's me"
Surely there can be no more familiar breakup line?
BACKRONYM was kind of a dud for me, too, until I got what it actually meant and in spite of all the complaints I think it's actually a pretty nifty term for something you see all the time. Seems like when I was a mere lad, acronyms were just generated by the words for whatever it was--Atomic Energy Commission, National Aeronautic [and] Space Administration, or whatever. But sometime toward the end of the last century they started getting more and more cutesy, acronyms for congressional bills being a prime culprit, where it's obvious that they came up with the acronym first and then found the more-or-less apt terms to fit it. Sometimes it's pretty apt--SADD, MADDA f'instance--but a lot of times it's so contrived as to be kind of insulting. A BACKRONYM in short. I'm so happy to finally have a term for something that annoys the heck out of me!
No problem with the AV part, no clue on the LAB part. Having been to VERMONT, VERMONSTER was easy enough to infer, although it sounds more like a hooha machine than a sundae to me. I had the thought as Rex on the LIFE ON MARS clue. Although, I think the artist in the cover I linked to brought the song to a younger generation. Annie Lennox does the most Bowiesque cover version. Anyway, super easy if you love Bowie, but Hunky Dory is 51 years old so not exactly the most current lyric reference.
ENRON above DO NO HARM… Hmmmm.
Was expecting a Bowie selection for Rex’s videos, but I was pleasantly surprised by the MMJ pick. 👍🏽👍🏽
**wordle alert**
@egsforbreakfast late - Congratulations and how’s Vegas?
@Tim Carey - Agree it’s not a normal distribution, but I suspect it will look pretty close to one, but maybe my own results are skewing my hypothesis (0,3,9,10,6,2). At the third guess and later, even in “hard mode” your guesses get more and more constrained. Occasionally we’ll have the sh-re type conundrum getting more people to six guesses or even dnf, but my experience is more like today’s, where my third guess wasn’t actually all that random and I was certain on my fourth (I just checked and it was the only option left).
Wordle 230 4/6*
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AV club/lab used to be for mostly geeky kids who delivered such old-school technologies as film, filmstrip (remember those) and overhead projectors to various classrooms and ran movie nights at the school. Nary an overlap with the yearbook crowd.
Does the clue make sense to anyone?
If AV club's still exist, what do they do in the age of laptops and smart boards?
@pabloinnh - “Return Serb” - 🤣😂🤣😂🤣
Backronym - an acronym formed from an already existing word. Backronyms may be invented with either serious or humorous intent, or they may be a type of false etymology or folk etymology. -Wikipedia
Merriam-Webster doesn’t have a definition, though it does have a nice explanation of the difference between an acronym and an initialism. I’m a little surprised BACKRONYM hasn’t made the dictionary, yet.
BTW - The clue looks like it could have been lifted right from the Wikipedia article.
@Total Novice - Well, did it irk you?
Thx Joseph; very crunchy, fun Fri. puz! :)
Easy/med/tough all wrapped up in one.
Another dnf; lucky guess at AV LAB / VERMONSTER, but not so at OMB / BACKRONYM.
An excellent mental workout that didn't quite work out!
@Lewis & @Nancy
Very much enjoyed your 'your' puzzle yd! :)
@puzzlehoarder 👍 for recent string of 0's
@egsforbreakfast 👍 for your ace yd ⛳️
@TTrimble 👍 for 0 yd
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yd pg: 8:05 / Wordle: 4
Peace ~ Compassion ~ Tolerance ~ Kindness to all 🕊
I didn't get understand BACKRONYM either then I looked up the definition. an acronym deliberately formed from a phrase whose initial letters spell out a particular word or words,to create a memorable name
I thought it was a Tuesday til I got lost in the SW ... ☹️
Had the same initial errors as Rex and others: NEE/AKA, LTD/LLC, YIKES/YIPES, ALGAL/ALGAE (resulting in an EEL-shaped studio apartment, which is even less likely than an ELL-shaped one, and perhaps a viable answer?)
Didn't know anyone invented a backronym for AMBER. I don't know why it's needed, but when you Google it, the first hit that comes up is a .gov website that uses the backronym. It was named for a young girl from Arlington, TX named Amber who was abducted and murdered.
I’m wondering how TADS suffices as an answer for “Traces.” Yes, both can refer to a very small amount of something, but are these really synonyms? Try substituting “tads” for “traces” in a sentence: “his body contained tads of amphetamines.” Like AV LAB and other answers in this puzzle, rationalization is required to make the answer stick. Especially in the absence of a theme, the answers need to have more conceptual validity, in my opinion. Fun to see LIFE ON MARS; not so fun to do a themeless with unconvincing answers.
Classic today, @Frantic! 😂
It’s not you, honey. It’s me
Twisty, tricksy Friday in spots, but very doable. I have thought from its inception that the acronym in Amber Alert is just a tedious attempt to impress us with its importance as if a missing child by itself isn’t important enough! Then we have to go make up a “NYM” so we will remember that Amber’s letters mean something (other than the critical information that a child is missing?!?!?!). Just ugh. But no fault of our constructor. Them’s the facts.
Some good word play down in the SW, and I got bit by the kealoa twice with YIkES and Ltd. Liked remembering LA CHOY from my youth. Terrible in a real Chinese food sense, but that brand and its rival, Chung King were, for many of us post WW II kids an “exotic” taste that (for me at least) raised my awareness and made me hungry for more knowledge of the world and its cultures, especially through food.
Liked seeing TOO TALL Jones who could have been a brass instrumentalist TOOT ALL., but undoubtedly did better financially in the NFL.
Excellent Friday. I look forward to more from Joseph Greenbaum.
Try as I might to keep jingles out of my brain:
"La Choy makes Chinese food; swingggggg ... American"
Challenging for me; fun to work on, with those very nice long Downs; DNF. I had a tough time getting a grip in the upper tier...KIERA, ENRON...crickets..., so it was a pleasingly long Friday solve.
I ended up with the same DNF as @puzzlehoader and @Lewis, with DER MONSTER, in my case the wages of having taught German for 30 years. Well, that and my chronic impatience in alphabet runs: by the time I get to T I've lost the will to press on.
Thanks to those who pointed out the BAD REP DON O'HARM. Nice that he's paired with TURN EVIL and that there's a GOON in between.
Parade of do-overs: nee before AKA, "I bet" before UH NO, BAD REs for the image, Easy "peasey" before "does it" before STREET, egads before YIkES before YIPES, MGrs. Help from previous puzzles: MEARA, SPACE BALLS. No idea: LIFE ON MARS.
Does anyone remember the ubiquitous TV commercial jingle: "LaChoy makes Chinese food . . . swing American"?
Abracadabra … you’re pancakes!
WHAT A DEAL abutting UNDERSELL. This puzzle should have appeared on Black Friday
Good gravy on 20 scoops of ice cream. Some of you found this easy? I'm pretty sure I'm not the RIPEST MELON of the bunch, but I found parts of this impossible.
Where to even begin? I still can't figure out whether I liked this one or not.....
1A was NEE. AKA didn't come into view for like 10 hours. I could not...for the life of Riley...come up with VERMONSTER. I can't even finish a banana split even though I split it with my sisters. Then I get to LIFE ON MARS. I've never really listened to any Bowie songs. I couldn't even guess...I needed all the downs to help this Wanda. I didn't know AVLAB not KEIRA and forgot about ESME. Without those downs, I didn't have a SWUM chance in hell. So I called Mr. snooty know-it all and he snickered and sneered at my request. I tried being polite and thanked him.
I started to get a few answers here and yon so happy feet took a little break just to compose myself. In some places it worked, but, I felt like a squished toad when I got to BACKRONYM. I had to call the GOON again. He, too did a bit of a hmmmm. Would you believe that I initially had BACK TO NYC? Of course not. AND, don't get me started on SHIN I've seen many a dreidel but I never memorized any of the Hebrew letters.
To break my heart even further, it took me forever to get MIRO and his HorsePipeRedFlower Arte. YIPES, I guess Dali didn't do the deed. And here I am...an art major, flunking. All I can say is that I never liked MIRO not DALI...so there's that.
My favorite entry was LOOSEY GOOSEY. I even got SPACE BALLS all by my itty bitty little self. (I've never watched it but I've heard of it).
Well...the moral of this story: Don't TIP TAT through an acre of tulips. The RHOMI just might end up biting you in your fondillo.
Hey All !
One can make KEALOA in today's SB, although it's not accepted. Also, anyone notice an error in the Mini? 1A - shouldn't clue be "Lead-in to sled", not sleigh?
Fell into the MAaD trap, which led to my DNF. TEE could've been TIE or TOE, both automobile related. But with incorrect MAaD in, 12D was UNa_RSELL, and no amount of reasoning with the ole brain was going to come up with anything that made sense. So that DID SOME HARM.
VERMONSTER, Har! Don't think this RooMonster could handle a VERMONSTER. (Maybe when I was younger.)
Was going to do the OO's report today, but Rex covered it nicely.
A BACKRONYM for OMB could be Oh My Bubalah.
SPACE BALLS! Classic. Same year that Princess Bride came out. Same year I graduated High School, same year I went into the Army. I wouldn't LIES TO y'all.
Nice FriPuz. AYE SIR.
yd -10, should'ves 8 (YIPES!)
One F
RooMonster
DarrinV
FH
Crossword puzzle was good.
Wordle comments here are silly. One person is going to consider his answer correct even if it's wrong. Why play? One person talks about an SH_RE conundrum. If you want to avoid a DNF you sometimes have to try a word which leaves out letters you've already fixed, while trying as many still-unused letters that still remain, to narrow the odds before you run out of tries - - in this case A, I & O and so try AUDIO even though it doesn't contain S, H, R or E. If you obsess about minimizing your # of attempts every single time, you will increase the percentage of times you never finish, or take 6. Best metric (IMHO) is average # of tries over 100+ days' games.
This was my first DNF in months. I enjoyed figuring out LOOSEYGOOSEY and NOTTOOSHABBY, and even VERMONSTER. LIFEONMARS AND SPACEBALLS are things I've heard of so they they were also possible with crosses. But it was not fun getting stuck with that ORL OMB BACKRONYM LACHOY mess. I didn’t know any of them. I guess I recognized LACHOY once I looked up the team abbreviation, but that still didn't help with the B in BACK… Finally started filling in the alphabet but no luck. Seems I also had ALGAE instead of ALGAL. What a mess! Think I'll Wordle awhile.
A few WOEs: AV LAB? SORER? TADS? BACKRONYM? LOOSEY-GOOSEY made me wonder - does that really mean casual? Why yes I think it does now that I think about it.
Having been employed by the federal government 40 years, I’m no stranger to acronyms but backronym was new and fascinating. I always said the latest program or committee to come down the pike was named according to its acronymization quality, a term I coined for the likelihood of making a word out of the beginning letters. If it wasn’t pronounceable, they’d go back to the drawing board.
PEONY is gonna be my Wordler today.
I'm a little surprised that our Noe Valley is well known enough to be in the puzzle. It's probably the youngest district in town, sometimes referred to as Stroller City. Lots of quaint little shops and restaurants. It's a two-syllable word: NO-ee.
BACKRONYM is a cute self-defining word but it seems to represent a silly effort. Taking a well-known term and making a descriptive phrase out of its letters. The examples I've seen, including for AMBER, are all clumsy.
Crossing TOOs don't bother me at all. But manufactured phrases like TURNEVIL do.
A square is a rhombus but it isn't a good example of one.
Pretty bland for a Friday.
Easy. VERMONSTER was my only WOE and MGrs to MGMT was my only erasure. Pretty smooth with plenty of sparkle, especially the long downs. Liked it.
@Lewis and Nancy - I really enjoyed your Thursday LAT puzzle. Tougher than the typical LAT Thursday with some great cluing. Nice job!
....and if you’re looking for a real challenge and you haven’t done this week’s Monday BEQ give it a go. For me it was the toughest BEQ in quite a while.
What on earth is a pERMONSTER in ice cream-speak? Well, for one thing, it's a DNF. But I have no idea what a VERMONSTER is either. For me, the great sundaes are the hot fudge ones -- and they all were made by Schrafft's back in the day.
Obviously I didn't know AV LAB. I had AP LAB. Neither one existed in any of the schools I attended back in the day.
I was also thrown off by one answer I did correct: MGrs instead of MGMT. What on earth was a BACKRONer? BACKRONor? Who was the singer? Aha! It's ENYA, the NYTXW fave! So MGMT leading to BACKRONYM. (That's one of the really good "NYMS", btw.) And now TAT came in for Popeye. I thought his "anchor" was his significant other: OYL. She didn't work so I didn't write her in. But I wasn't thinking of a tattoo.
I had a "Senior Moment" for NOT TOO S. Not too sleazy? Not too shady? Not too sloppy? It was on the tip of my tongue. Oh, wait, there's a "B"! SHABBY!!!! That's it!!!!
There's really a song in which someone sings "It's a Godawful small affair to the girl with the mousy hair"????? What on earth has happened to the world of love songs? Whatever has happened to, say, "Younger than Springtime are you"? I must go and look up Mr. Bowie and find out what mousy gal he's crooning about.
A bit heavy on PPP today. Kind of ruined the solving experience. If you look up too much PPP the puzzle becomes too simple for a Friday/Saturday, and that happened to me today. So my thumb would be down for this puzzle even though I pretty much enjoyed solving it.
I watched and actually bought the British Life on Mars TV show. And bought the pale imitation American series. For some reason, I don't think Ashes to Ashes has been released in the USA. I am fond of the concept and wish the American series had been more popular. The transition from a dead policeman to the Master shows how versatile John Simm is.
In the back of my head I recall reading about a place I think in Vermont of Maine that offers those hiking from Georgia to Maine with a free sundae (if the hikers can finish the sundae). The article said that most could not finish the sundae, not because of the amount of ice cream but because of the amount of topping (which sounded sickly sweet to me). I wonder if there is some connection or copying going on here. Whatever, I was sorry when Ben and Jerry's left Yonkers. I don't recall the reason, which might be political antagonism between the then Republican city administration and the ice cream company. I though it was a big loss for the community.
A RHOMBUS is NOT a square as any right angle will tell you. Lots of crap in this that has already been identified.
I really thought this puzzle was just dandy and pretty much had the same “hang ups” as @Rex. I always leave a blank when I get the yikes/yipes option so no problem there. I did NOT like TURNEDEVIL as I’ve never thought or heard that term for a machine that quits working but it got to the point where I just sighed and let it go.
As for Rex saying that unless you knew the Bowie lyrics you would have a difficult time getting the answer…well, yes, I needed a few crosses but if you knew Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust alter ego when he sang things like Space Oddity, then LIFEONMARS is pretty easy to infer.
pmdm .
Not sure losing Mr. Cohen and Mr. Greefield is any sort of loss for Yonkers.
Frankly, they're the worsy sort of corporate frauds---jumping on board the latest NPR cause celebre without any coherent philosophy to underpin the cation.
Take 30 seconds and find a brief interview on Youtube the pair did with Axios in which they concede that their policies aren't just ill-conceived but untenable. Besidesm turkey Hill ice cream is worlds better.
As for Yonkers, the most imortant buisness in town is The Pizza Barn. If you don't know it, google their slice. Prepare to be amazed.
Parts of this puzzle, such as the existence of the word BACKRONYM, made me feel like I was on MARS, but I enjoyed the journey overall. Fell into a few traps, such as BAD RES before BAD REP, along the way. Never heard of a VERMONSTER or LACHOY, but now at least I know what to have for dinner tonight.
Lots of excellent fill, such as LOOSEY GOOSEY, NOT TOO SHABBY and WHAT A DEAL. (This puzzle is in a great mood.) Loved the clue for TURN EVIL.
I’m sure that there must have been an actress in the silent film era named ALGAL BLOOM. Perhaps she grew up on RIPE ST. in NOE Valley and then moved to Easy STREET in Hollywood. Or perhaps not.
Get MADD and honk your horn at everybody: TOOT ALL.
I give up, can someone please explain SWUM? Apparently I’m the only one with whom it still doesn’t register.
"Every square is a rhombus but not every rhombus is a square": Euclid
@Rube:
well... all squares are RHOMBI, but not all RHOMBI are squares. you don't have to believe me:
"A rhombus with right angles is a square"
the wiki
Wordle 230 3/6
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"A parallelogram with opposite equal acute angles, opposite equal obtuse angles, and four equal sides.
• any parallelogram with equal sides, including a square." (Oxford Languages)
@RooMonster
Ditto KEALOA
@jae 10:35 AM
Two cell dnf on BEQ's Mon. I'd rate his and Stella's somewhat south of Croce's, tough-wise. All three are excellent challenges! 🤔
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td pg: 14:47 / Wordle 230 4/6
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Peace ~ Compassion ~ Tolerance ~ Kindness to all 🕊
For REASONS unknown my MELON TURNed EVIL today. Back in my early teaching years I was yearbook advisor—those days when the AV LAB contained chalk & Dukane projectors the size of VW bugs—, so I must join the parade of dnfers at the intersection of AdLAB & dERMONSTER. Other than that and entering rObes for the klan (oops clan) clue answer until Herself reset my clue sensor, it was a Friday romp. Lots to like here as @Lewis (welcome back👍🏼) & others note and Joseph must have grinned as he juxtaposed SPACE BALLS with the earlier LIFE ON MARS. Now I’m off to rescue yesterday’s LA grid from its evanescent moment of glory, so thanks for the reminders by those who obviously enjoyed it already.
Nice themeless FriPuz. Had lotsa cool raised-by-wolves answers.
staff weeject picks: ORO & ORL. Celebratin their 207th & 9th appearances, respectively, in the Shortzmister Era NYTPuzs.
Some extra-sparkly wolf pups: VERMONSTER. LIFEONMARS. BACKRONYM. SPACEBALLS. RHOMBI. SWUM/SUM region.
Took M&A forever to get REASONS. Had R???ONS and that clue, but the M&A brain would not respond. Weird. I mean, shoot -- that same brain got VERMONSTER, even tho it had never ever heard of said monster before.
Thanx for the many calories, Mr. Greenbaum dude. Good job.
Masked & Anonymo3Us
p.s. Good luck on gettin them pancakes, @RP. We are now in trainin for watchin them winterized Olympics, after all.
**gruntz**
@Rube - A square is special type of rhombus. A rhombus is merely a quadrilateral where all four sides are equal. A square fulfills this definition. Similarly, a rectangle is a quadrilateral with four equal angles (i.e., right angles). A square fulfills this definition. A square is a specific type of all of these: rhombus, rectangle, quadrilateral, parallelogram.
Make your own pancakes, or better yet, make some for your wife.
First time I came across "its not you its me" was the Seinfeld episode where it gets used on George. She can't say that to me, I invented that line.
Enjoyable Friday. The East half filled in easier than the West half. All but the V at 2 across. No AVLABbers in the yearbook club in my senior year, but then we had an AVclub and a yearbook committee back then we didn't have no stinkin LAB. A mike,
a tape recorder, an amplifier, an 8 milimeter projector, an overhead projector, wires and speakers. The slide projector.
A tad of some spice X in a soup might result in someone asking "do I detect a trace of X?"
Great clue for TAT. Had me stuck almost to the finish.
Wanted Mgrs for MGMT. Readers of the Illuminati Trilogy will remember the midget who put signs "NO [something nobody did where the sign was but conceivably could do] BY ORDER OF THE MGT." just to create a feeling anonymous oppression in order to foment rebellion and cause chaos. Maybe he was traumatized by a bullying father and obssessed with his small hands.
After getting trounced last Friday nice having one that took some time but had a flow to it.
I'll look up BALOO if no one tells me who he is.
SHOddY before SHABBY. I've seen and used both.
Speaking of backronyms, it is a useful term and, as mentioned above, you'll find it used in urban legend-y folk etymology factoids. Like our favorite eff word standing for "for unlawful carnal knowledge" or "fornication under consent of the king" with some goofy story to go along with it. Or SOS standing for "save our ships" or "save our souls." It stands for nothing. It was a convenient, easily recognizable and remembered Morse pattern. Or "tip(s)" standing for "to insure prompt service" or "to insure promptness." There's a ton of these. If someone tells you a fanciful story of a common word actually being an acronym of something, 49 times out of 50 it's horse puckey. (And one of those times in fifty would be for the CARE in "care package," which comes from Cooperative for American Remittances to Europe during WWII.)
No, @Rube -- A rhombus is not a square, just as you say. But a square IS a rhombus. And that's how the clue is written.
@Beezer: Think of "Stop working for good" (45A) as giving up your job as a cancer researcher and becoming a bank robber instead. Then TURN EVIL will make perfect sense.
I thought "return Serb" was the funniest line on the blog today, until I read @Carola who talks about her "chronic impatience in alphabet runs: by the time I get to T I've lost the will to press on."
Oh, press on, @Carola, press on!!! You're already so close!!!
"It's not you, it's me. Seriously. Well... actually it's you too. You're not totally blameless. Sometimes you're a real drag. How can I put it? It's you being around while I'm being me. So it's me and you both. Together. Us, in other words. Don't you see? Us is the problem.
But mostly, it's me. With a little you thrown in. I'd say: 87.5% me, 12.5% you..."
This constructor's name always reminds me of this song.
And today we also present a classic film clip.
I'm a little surprised that so many are unfamiliar with Mothers Against Drunk Driving, MADD-18A, including OFL.
I thought this one was pretty good. Smooth, challenging in constructive ways, very few if any stretchers, no gimmicks. More, please.
Ellen 8.28: The students who meet in the AVLAB are exactly the kind you describe in your message, and they are all members of a club that is listed in the yearbook. They are NOT the folks who put the yearbook together!
Fast, but DNF, naticked at VERMONtER EtME. Never heard of either, did think the double T was odd but, y'know, it's ice cream.
Off to go whale watching on a sail boat!!
@Rube. Squares are RHOMBI.
IfRex thinks there are too many OOs, he should look at the ONs. VERM ON STER, LIFE ON MARS, ORS ON, D ON OHARM, GO ON, PE ON Y, BACKR ON YM, MEL ON. This puzzle was definitely a turn ON.
For those of you who have always suspected that @Z is really Rex, today we may have seen a small, but telling slip up, which I will also be forwarding to the January 6 committee. To quote from the 8:17 post of @Z:
“I had the thought as Rex on the LIFE ON MARS clue.”
From this I infer that he has two or more personalities, and that he can recognize which one of them has which thought. QED.
Wonderful puzzle, BTW. Thank you, Joseph Greenbaum.
My favorite comments this morning.
CDilly52 (9:32)
Peter P (12:03)
@upstate George thanks for this - i like your explanation much better than how i originally read the clue (which was akin to ellen's take).
Thanks @Nancy! What a big D’OH for me!
@Kathy you swim the first part of the ironman, so the start of the ironman race is swum. it's awkward and i didn't love it, but it checks out.
@Nancy (11:37) We are Wordle twins today. Great minds.
@Joe D (12:11) I’ve always loved that song but never knew the background. Interesting.
Pete P,
Hpw about posh? Port out, starboard home. Apocyrphal or one of the fifty?
A suggestion: Before posting a "hate the clue" rant, read it again and be sure you understand it. Today there are inches and inches of BLOG space wasted on RHOMBI/squares complaints and explanations. Look at the clue. "Squares e.g." Squares for example. Or, Squares are examples of ______. Very straight forward and correct.
I know where Ben and Jerry's is; I've driven by the factory. But my brain failed to REASON based on that, so I, too, ended up with dERMONSTER and a DNF. I think the AV LAB is not the AV room, where they store things like projectors, but a room with light tables, computers with layout software, etc. where the member of the Yearbook Club would actually layout the pages of the yearbook. I thought maybe in some schools the room was also used to layout ads. Shoulda thought more.
Am I the only one who wrote in easy does iT? Made it really hard to see NOT TOO SHABBY. Also, I thought maybe Kevin HART was a comedian or a basketball player.
I did kind of hesitated to put in MELON, since it's used frequently to designate another body part-- especially since it's crossing A TEAT.
@Lewis and @Nancy, marvelous puzzle yesterday! I solved it while waiting to see a periodontist, who then screwed a little metal gizmo to the implant he implanted last August. I felt like I was an erector set as he did all these mechanical things in my mouth. Fortunately it wasn't too painful (until I got the bill). Anyway, I really enjoyed the puzzle. I would have enjoyed it even if I didn't need to be distracted from my feelings of dread.
i'm still peeved about yesterday's puzzle having a cluing error at 41D - "teacher's helpers" which by the puzzle's rules would have to be read as "teacher's HETPERS" which isn't a thing as far as i know. am i the only one? that seems unlikely. i feel like i must be missing something, since even rex - the most critical of everything - didn't mention it either.
speaking of, we get it, your eating habits are better and more ethical than ours. puh-leeeeeeze. also, perhaps instead of getting upset about AMBER alerts and BACKROYNMS you could have looked it up and learned something and then shared with the class, but, oh well. didn't have any issue with TURN EVIL, and, as google results are not the same from one person to the next, mine offer "why did [character] TURN EVIL" and "what makes a good person TURN EVIL?" etc.
anyhow, i really enjoyed this friday puzzle. because of ads for licorice pizza, LIFE ON MARS has been stuck in my head for some time now. so much so that i googled the song the other day. but did the song name stick in my brain? no, of course not. i knew it was something about space, but the brain would only offer ROCKET MAN which was not of any use today. still, i resisted looking it up a second time so as not to spoil the satisfaction of the eventual solve. VERMONSTER and SPACE BALLS, both classic and welcomed blasts from the past for me.
LA CHOY i knew right away, but i thought it might just be a MA/RI thing so i didn't put it in at first. [americanized] chinese food here is a very particular version i've learned, including lo mein/chow mein which seem to be defined differently in other parts of the country. in any case, that cannister of la choy crispy noodles was a pantry staple. (we never had the canned chow mein, but my mom always needed extra crispy noodles when we got takeout and the restaurant didn't always abide.)
had the most trouble on the mid/lower west, forgetting the magic were from orlando and, having a three letter sports location ending in "L" went with ATL. didn't know OMB. and ironically took a very, very long time to suss out REASONS. TOTEM was also hard to see, but once i finally did all the other attached clues fell in easily. (like others thought OYL had to be popeye's anchor and took me a minute for the lightbulb to go off after getting TAT.) almost a DNF though, as i had ALGAE before i realized it was ALGAL and the apartment was not in fact EEL shaped. at least today i was able to find my errant square :)
hope everyone has a nice weekend.
Slog. Worse than trivia night. Renew your USAToday subscription.
The SW section took longer to do than the entire rest of the puzzle. Stain is to tint what Band-Aids are to stitches. Of course, I guess you can say the wine stained my blouse or the wine tinted my blouse. Wait, still no.
Just showing off the knowledge I gleaned from years of watching HGTV. Is it still interesting or did it become a game show thing like the Food Network turned out to be?
Agree with @Frantic, this constructor is a keeper. Liked the puzzle a lot.
For three days now, I've been close to second guess success on Wordle and have consistently picked the wrong first letter.
Wordle 230 4/6
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back in the 60s whence I was in jr. and high school, we only had AV rooms. no labs. can't have all those dangerous chemicals around, I guess. what is funny, in retrospect, is that those were the days chemistry sets did actual reactions:
"Most of the chemicals and equipment in these chemistry kits were harmless, but some would make even the most lenient modern parent worry: Sodium cyanide can dissolve gold in water, but it is also a deadly poison. “Atomic” chemistry sets of the 1950s included radioactive uranium ore. Glassblowing kits, which taught a skill still important in today’s chemistry labs, came with a blowtorch."
here: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/the-rise-and-fall-and-rise-of-the-chemistry-set-70359831/
I had one, of course, but I don't recall the brand; might have been a Gilbert. did the water to wine and back again trick.
Overall a very easy Friday, but I had RECKON instead of REASON for the longest time, which held up that corner.
The BALOO/NOE cross was unfortunate, but inferable.
I loved all the long downs: NOTTOOSHABBY indeed! And LOOSEYGOOSEY was fun.
Onto more important matters:
Wordle 230 4/6 There were three possibilities for the first letter, and it took me all three tries.
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@Stephanie
That wasn't the clue.
Prof's aides. Ptof implies shortened form.
@jberg/1:07 -
You total Cad, you!!!
@jberg *hand up* for easy does it. thought that was going to be a foothold but it turned out to be the exact opposite.
NOE Valley was my home for several years, and I suppose the reason my wife and I did not buy a house there was that even in 1974 a house cost well into the six figures. It was a primo family neighborhood even then, and we wanted to start a family. So we moved to Santa Rosa and bought an old house there. We used to say that our kids were the first to have been babies on our street for 20 years or more -- but they were not the last. The prime attraction in NOE Valley, besides a nice collection of stores, was Bud's Ice Cream. All hand-made, all first-rate, and people waited on cold rainy evenings to buy hot fudge sundaes there.
Now the difference between Bud's and Ben and Jerry's was that Ben Cohen is maybe the best marketing genius in recent history. No one better at getting media attention. So when they expanded from their initial Burlington location to a fairly large plant in Vermont, it was certain that Ben would find a way to sell whatever they made, and that they did. When Bud's tried to expand, it was a flop, at least in comparison. Bud ended up selling to a relatively big corporation, as did B&J. But the latter somehow convinced his buyers to keep the brand socially relevant, and to some extent they have done so, knowing that if Ben didn't like it, he could get nationwide publicity if he spoke out.
I shudder to think what a nice family house in NOE Valley would cost today, but it is "stroller city", more so than when I lived there. They don't get fog so much as they do in the inner Sunset and Richmond neighborhoods, and have a streetcar line that takes you all the way downtown via the Market Street subway.
The puzzle? TOO hard for me to solve without help. But well crafted and sometimes pretty clever, as others here have written.
Tricky Puzzle, 20 minutes for this father/son team. Enjoyed it a lot, Mr. Greenbaum! Thanks for the challenge. Loved the geography in the NW--MARS and VERMONT... enjoyed the TOO/TOO and other 'OO' themers.... BLOOMs and LOOSE GOOSEs, along with GOONs. Loved seeing "TOOTALL" Jones in the puzzle! TURNEVIL was not really "in the language", and "BACKRONYM" was the toughest answer for me. Enjoyed the clues for UNDERSELL and NOTTOOSHABBY. thanks! Great puzzle :)--Rick
This was pretty good, but maybe a few too many names, and unknown (to me) ones crossing each other. For instance LA CHOY crossing BACKRONYM and SHIN. And OMB (unknown acronym!) ironically crossing BACKRONYM, which I only got by examining the clue very carefully.
I finished with an error: TERMONSTER (unknown name!) crossing AT LAB. AT LAB doesn't make sense, but AV LAB isn't much better. Anyway at least ORSON, ENRON, MIRO, SPACEBALLS were familiar.
[Spelling Bee: yd 0. td pg in 11:44, just getting started...]
Brrrr. Today we once again learn why TexMex Land (deep south coastal Texas) is called subtropical. Temps are definitely suboptimal. Oh well, it won't be long until they fling open the doors of Hades and we once again see why the Civil War Union general Philip Sheridan said that "If I owned Texas and Hell I would rent out Texas and live in Hell."
Another effect we also get from time to time hereabouts is an ALGAL BLOOM and they can be awful. They remind me of the time in boot camp when we were taught how to use a gas mask. After putting it on we were ushered into a room full of tear gas and to show us the DO NO HARM effect of the mask and then we had to take it off! Still suffering PTSD from that! The first time I experienced an ALGAL BLOOM I recognized the stinging, burning, choking effect from boot camp days. I learned that it's called Harmful ALGAL BLOOM or the forwardonym HAB.
I always think it should be OBM (Office of Budget Management) rather than 30A OMB (Office of Management and Budget).
Anybody remember 43D RIPPLE wine from long ago in the previous century? It was cheap and popular among poor college students and winos. It was discontinued in 1984 and an unopened bottle of the stuff these days sells for $100+. The first---and last---time I tried it I thought it tasted like an ALGAL BLOOM. I nearly ARFED.
Mostly enjoyed this one, except for the long PPP entries and some dense cluing. Ran the alphabet in my head trying to get an alternative to ApLAB but VER-MONSTER didn’t register as VERMONT-STER. Talk about dense. Is pERMONSTER a salon accident?
Also I blanked on OMB and was thinking basketball teams were id’d by states and not towns. Wanted the Florida MAGIC but had _RL. Finally decided they must the Carolina Magic and complained to Mr. A “who abbreviates Carolina cRL?”
Which led me to my nytxw learning moment of the day. I looked up cMB and found myself immersed in a fascinating discussion of Cosmic microwave background radiation. Turns out telescopes in the Alps and Andes have recently captured significant data from 13 billion light-years away. Thanks, internet, now I’ll be reading about dark energy for light years. Talk about a RIPPLE effect. But, hey, it sure beats Wordle.
Like Rex I loved seeing Anne MEARA. Unlike Rex, I also liked TURN EVIL, though TURN to EVIL seems better.
Grid was full of doubles besides the double Os: INN, TERROR, UNDERSELL, MADD, TEE, TOOTALL (is he a TEETOOTALLer?), STREET, LLC, ELL, SPACEBALLS, RIPPLE, SHABBY, SEEMLY.
So thanks, Mr. Greenbaum, for a doubly rewarding Friday!
Ann Southam, Canadian composer, was born Feb. 3, 1937 in Winnipeg. Her Fidget Creek displays a delightful RIPPLE effect.
@albatross shell it very much definitely said "Teachers' helpers" yesterday. they have since edited it so it was a mistake.
@Joe D -- That's one of the best scenes in all filmdom from one of the best movies in all filmdom. It's not on my Blogger profile movie list -- but darned if it shouldn't be. It's certainly one of my all-time faves and I can watch it over and over. John Houseman's performance is absolutely brilliant.
The song you link to is a nice, catchy, folk-y type song that I've never heard -- but I would like it so much more if it were acoustic and not electric. Just saying. I'm sure absolutely no one will agree with me.
@jberg -- I am thrilled with my role in helping to keep you [almost] free of anxiety during your tooth ordeal yesterday! I'm sure Lewis will be thrilled, too. Thanks for letting us know. Hope you heal quickly!
One's first try in Wordle is a guess, but a reasoned guess. From there one has to think about each try based on the evidence provided by the previous try. If you get to a point where one letter is needed and there are 2 or more possibilities, it becomes a game of pure chance. Being correct is out of one's hands. So, as Wordler said, one of the options is as good as another regardless of the option chosen by Wordle.
The earth shifted. @Nancy gave perhaps the best most lucid explanation of a math question. Agog, a awed, amazed. Now it was visual geometry. Perhaps an exception to the never try to explain math to @Nancy rule? I feel I have entered Wonderland. How sweet it is.
MENINBLACK was 10 years off.
MARSATTACKS was 9 years, one letter and one ! off.
I'm in the read 1D clue wrong club too.
Speaking of "too" we also not onlt TOTAL and TOOTALL but the latter is crossing NOTTOO too.
Also I spy a rare two-track diagonal ROO that is a Pisces or just can't tell what direction he's going. Plus a stretched out ROO doing his bent over backwards yoga exercise. Ouchie.
Who is this AL GAL BLOOM? Gore's daughter or Molly's sister?
BBYBY
YYBYY
BGGGG
GGGGG
Does that make JD and me wordle second cousins?
@stephanie: I downloaded the .puz file at pretty much 7pm PST on the dot, and mine also says "Prof's aides". Of course I don't know the technical details of the web page / app / Across Lite versions; they could be different!
[Spelling Bee: td 0; my last word is an oldie that's new to me.]
@STEPHANIE
I started last around 11 pm wednesday night. I thought it said Prof by the time I saw it. Well, at least I know I thought of universities right off. If the paper solvers had the right clue it seems weird the web versions were wrong. What platform were you using? Anybody else? Not that I distrust your memory. No reson ever to doubt you, now or ever.. Just odd no one said anything yesterday.
Joe D and Nancy,
That scene is surely one of the great openers in film. But i dont tnk anyone beleive it to be the best scene in the movie. I think most folks would go with the scene where Bottoms's caharcter declines to answer question, Houseman's character smugly gives him a dime and tells Bottom's cahartecter to call his ( Botomms's) mother and tell her thare is seripus doubt about his becomn a lawyer. Bottoms dutifully takes time turns on his heels and makes for the exit. But all the while he's roiling, and by the time he gets 3/4 up the stairs he turns, confronts his overbaering professor saying " kingsford... You are a son of bitch". Kingsford considers the claim and concedes the point saying " Mr. Hart that is the nmost intelligent thing youve said today. You make take your seat"
It's worth finding on youtube. Hall's faming, the pacing, the acting, the editing and the scriptall were in harmony. It's in fact perfect. But I'll garnt, watching bottoms sweat then yak in the men's room is a genuine grabber.
Guessing ou know all this. Maybe this well. Bridges ( writer and director of the film) wanted james Mason to play Kingsford not Houseman.
However if you want to see Mason in a superb turn as an attorney re-watch The verict. He's great. Newman even better.
@albatrossshell, Yes, but once removed. I had four letters lined up on the second try and am deeply bitter. Like a nitwit, I think I keep choosing the more obscure words first.
@Anoa Bob:
Anybody remember 43D RIPPLE wine from long ago in the previous century? It was cheap and popular among poor college students and winos.
Well, among the more well-to-do college students of the previous century, the preferred inexpensive libation was Almaden Liebfraumilch.
https://blog.liebherr.com/appliances/us/sweet-cheap-liebfraumilch/
@Anon2:25 not true. pick a word that contains many of the possible letters. i do this all the time and have never had a 6.
@Z your personal stats are not a normal distribution. with a minimum of 1 it cannot be. probably weibull or lognormal. there is an exponential tail beyond 6 that is truncated.
golf follows a similar distribution, and using that analogy 4 should not be par. unless we are in an everyone gets a trophy world. you can get a 9 in golf but not a -1 so the distribution is skewed as it is in wordle.
my average is 3.5 which would be like 15 under. im not prepared to make that claim.
Surely there must be a more appropriate forum for wordle.
@JD
My center letter on guess 2 eliminated one possibility. And my 3rd guess eliminated another. So my guess was on my third word when for me there were a lot more possibilities. Yesterday(?) I had all first and had it wrong twice more before successfully(?) getting a double bogey.
Cousins 😀
@Penna resident
That is why playing "the hard way" is harder. I play the hard way for the heck of it, but not officially. I can just ignore it if I see the problem far enough in advance. Just haven't yet. It has cost me guesses but not successes.
0,0,7,11,3,3, +2 over.
Avg: 4+(2÷24) guesses per game.
At me 340pm
Had all but the first letter
Wordle 230 2/6
Eagle, beeatches!
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@pmdm 10:42 – The general store in Pine Grove Furnace State Park in PA offers a half-gallon challenge. Well, it used to be a half-gallon. Nowadays it’s 1.5 quarts. You pay for the ice cream (Hershey’s, IIRC) and you get one of those little wooden paddle-shaped spoons stamped with “Member of Half Gallon Club” if you succeed. I don’t recall a sundae challenge in Vermont or Maine but I don’t doubt it exists. You can’t stop for everything on the trail or you’ll never get to Katahdin.
Why do folks report wordle results as 3/6, 4/6 etc? Isn't it just 3 or 4?
first, wordle is far more on topic here than politics etc, being a NYT word puzzle. even though it is much more about logical elimination than language.
@albatross
i said a couple days ago that hard mode is dumb in this game. im all for doing puzzles the hard way when possible, but this option reduces the logic focus of the puzzle. forced guessing is not "harder" logic (unless you know josh wardle is british and the tallest building in london is a word used more often there than here).
just like having obscure proper nouns in xwords makes them harder but less about skill and less fun, so whats the point.
@anonymous 4:57…they are just sharing or copying/pasting what Wordle says.
@egs - You caught me! Actually I’m Rex’s TURNed EVIL twin and have update my display name to reflect that fact.
@stephanie - I just pulled up the newspaper version pdf from yesterday and the clue there is also “prof’s aids.”
I thought the Ben & Jerry’s VERMONT connection was well known so I’m a little surprised VERMONSTER caught so many people.
@Anoa Bob - Did some time as a party store clerk and remember well the cheap wines. MD 20/20 mixed with kool aid (that is, taking the dry mix and adding it the wine) is the weird popular item with the, er, professional drinkers that still shocks me.
The RHOMBI/square relationship is of the sort that often leads to fooling solvers. I know I have even used the “all squares are RHOMBI but all RHOMBI are not squares” explanation before when a similar relationship has caused solvers confusion.
@albatross shell - BALOO
**wordle alert**
@anon10:24 - Regarding the SH-RE conundrum- You are correct, if you are missing just a vowel your next guess should be “adieu” if it’s not your last guess. This doesn’t work, though, if you play in “hard mode,” which requires you to use your correct letters.
@Penna Resident - I think I’ve said every time that it isn’t a normal curve (it’s not random after all) but that given enough plays it will look so much like a normal curve so as to not matter. I have no idea why you think having a minimum of 1 makes a difference. I am also pretty sure the Weibull distribution doesn’t apply, but you’re the second person to suggest it might so now I’m wondering why you think it does.
As for “Hard Mode” not being harder, “Making it more likely that you will fail due purely to luck” is a little wordy. Personally, I strongly suspect that, if played properly, that one should never fail in easy mode and where’s the fun in that? So I play “Hard Mode.” No DNF yet, but that’s luck.
@Z (5:45 PM)
That was the primary reason I guessed the 'V'; altho, AV LAB also seemed reasonable.
Still finding 'hard' mode no more difficult than 'easy'; maybe even a tad easier, altho it may be due to going with STARE in lieu of ADIEU as my initial word. Was 1 over when I made the switch, now at 3 under. Having said that … lol
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Peace ~ Compassion ~ Tolerance ~ Kindness to all 🕊
I had a few hold-ups today - “as if” in for UH NO in the NE took a TAD of untangling, my wanting Aye aye for 27A, and my hate-affair with basketball made the O of ORL crossing OMB my final, teeth-gritting entry. I was pleasantly shocked to find myself in near record Friday area; it seemed like it was going much more slowly.
This is first time this has occurred to me but the 44D clue for TOTAL is “wreck” yet being a total wreck has no redundancy. This pleases me for some reason.
Thanks, Joseph Greenbaum, this was a smooth, pleasant Friday puzzle.
@Z the more observations you have the more it will look like its true distribution. im sure with public data one could easily parameterize the right distribution. i mentioned weibull and lognormal because they have a fixed minimum value, like wordle and golf. there is also a fixed maximum, but it is much higher than the mean and the distribution is obviously positively skewed so cannot be "close to" normal, even when truncated at 6. the mean is meaningfully larger than the median, which becomes more apparent with more observations.
weibull is often used in reliability engineering (my MS) and a common application is estimating time to failure, which is a cute shout out to wordle. dont know if thats the right one, but it has to be one with a positive third moment.
puzzles of luck are not fun or challenging. if the goal was simply to not fail (which is easy) then people wouldnt be tracking scores - it would just be 100% successes.
*back to the nyt xword alert* saturday is my favorite puzzle of the week - a wednesday with lots of obscure names crossing at vowels is harder to finish, but if they were like that every week i would stop doing them.
BACKRONYMs are definitely a thing. There is an enormous amount of urban mythology claiming that this word or the other is actually an acronym for something, when the actual word has a it’s own history going centuries further back than the claimed acronym.
E.g.:
Port Out Starboard Home (because it was supposed to be the most expensive booking, so posh people used it)
Free *se of Carnal Knowledge (feels stupid to put the asterisk in the backronym, but NYT can get prudish)
All Day I Dream About Sport (the firm was actually named after the founder, using his nickname)
Further examples left as an exercise to the reader. Hint: Merriam-Webster’s website has gazillions.
Everything went good for a Friday... except E?ME/VERMON?TER, BALO?/N?E, and SWUM. I knew the first leg of a traithalon was the swimming leg, but the word SWUM never conjugated with me. Had to correct ALGAEBLOOM, MAAD, and YIKES with the crosses, too. Looked at the clue for BACKRONYM puzzled for a while, but deduced it from the crosses. I work in an acronym heavy job and a coworker loves to make what I now know a backronyms out of them, each as bad pun/corny as the clue for 32D. Ugh.
@Z
Thanks for BALOO. Do not remember ever seeing that before. Had not looked it up yet. I am not a Jungle book fan in any form. I have tried.
I can prove you are mistaken about always being able to solve in the easy mode .... if plurals are allowed to be answers. LAPSE LEAST PARES each have six 5-letter anagrams. Thus you do not have a guaranteed solve unless your first guess is one of the anagrams of each one of these, and your first guess can only be one of them.
There are enough 5-letter words with 3 or 4 non-plural anagrams I doubt you could eliminate them in time. If mitre is an allowable word I think you have 5 anagrams. So you would need to eliminate that in your first two guesses. That might not stop you but it makes things seem inceasingly unlikely. Maybe you could. Most have common letters.
@anon
If one considers a puzzle where you might, on occasion fail, no matter how good your strategy to be dumb than yes it is dumb. If your goal is to have the best score after a year then no it is not dumb. If you consider poker blackjack, backgammon, and all sports betting dumb than I agree with you. If you consider both forms of wordle dumb, then I agree with you.
@Z
Another way to look at it. Suppose wordle is a 2 player game. The first player plays as if a normal wordle game. The second player can change the word after every guess as long as his answer does not change any previous guesses answers. If wordle were always solvable in the easy mode player one would still always win. Would you want to be player one or two?
Keeping Each Alternative Left Open Alive. Is it the true origin of the phrase, or a dreaded BACKRONYM? You tell me.
@Anon 2:54 – But I wanted the opening clip because Kingsfield says "Mister HART" more times.
@jae and @jberg -- Thank you for you kind words about Nancy's and my LAT/WaPo puzzle yesterday. I'm so glad you enjoyed it!
@jae -- Lewis's latish post sent me back to look for your earlier comment about our puzzle yesterday in the LAT. It's a very, very nice comment and I apologize for missing it the first time around. Thank you so much!
@Lewis, @Nancy
Not begging for a thank you here but I did do your puzzle yesterday and did post about it but maybe it never showed up. I can't find it now.
I said something about liking the theme in your puzzle but liking the one in the NYT's better because of its high degree of originality. Then gave you folks the edge in the clue department. And concluded with:
Erotic jigsaw*
LOVEPUZZLE
Not puzzle suitable, but good enough so you would get the message.
I also talked about something else. No idea what.
If anyone saw it let me know. I can't find it.
Gee thanks! I'm so impressed
Wow!. Outstanding
Omg you must be a genius
Nice
Nice
I'm stunned!
Oh wordle? You must be so smart!
Nice
Nice
Two Naticks, missed both. Vermonster and Baloo meant nothing, and I had NOE idea. Not in my enjoyment zone, this puzzle..
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VERMONSTER crossing with AVLAB is a huge Natick. BACKRONYM was just as bad as it crossed OMB and other hard-to-get crosses. Flotsam gallore. In additon to OMB there was SOS, AKA, ORL, ELL, NOE, LLC, TLC etc. etc. Cheap glue. But was it worth it? UHNO!
Looks like the moderator is napping again. Online casino ads do not belong! And what's with this Satellite 73?
Anyhow, I finished up in--again--the NW, at square #14. What kind of LAB...and a flavor ending in _ERMONSTER?!? I ran the alphabet. Could be D, maybe, or P? Then I got to V, and wound up choosing that one. Bingo!
I'm surprised that OFF didn't use the phrase "your MILEAGE may vary." With only 29 black squares/RHOMBI, this grid is about as open as you can get. Free access to all AREAS; no choked-off cubbyholes. A sticky spot or two (UNDERSELL was hard to get to--and grated against WHATADEAL!), but mostly easy for a Friday.
Though the NW was last to fall, DOD KEIRA got me started. Hey Fearless One: chuck some blueberries into that pancake batter. Good & good for ya. Birdie.
TOTAL DEAL
UH,NO, ENYA’s MEASURING small.
WHAT are the REASONS ESME’s flabby?
That STREET GOON’s STANDIN’ TOOTALL,
but YIPES, KEIRA’s NOTTOOSHABBY.
--- ORSON HART
11D had several transformations for me. Had ITSONSALE before ILLTAKEIT until finally ITSADEAL. Also had pot before ORO for 51A. Who could forget the Cheech and Chong classic: No stems no seeds that you don’t need. Acapulco Gold is…Badass weed!
IT’S SORER
DONOHARM, get MADD, when EVIL TERROR calls:
LIFEONMARS is BAD, YIPES, you get SPACEBALLS!
--- MIRO LACHOY
@Rondo often measures success by how many/few erasures he has. Well...my lack of success merely BEGINS there.
Wrote. Changed. Changed back. Again. Again. Repeated as needed.
What day is it? I think I've become Billy Pilgrim - lost in time. Half the clocks are already on daylight saving(s, optional) time. And finally, I ATE IT instead of AT. What a SPACEBALL.
Diana, Lady-in-Waiting for Crosswords
PS - I had itsonsale before illTAkEit before finally WHATADEAL. I also had pot before ORO for 61A. Who could forget the classic from Cheech and Chong: No stems no seeds that you don’t need. Acapulco Gold is… bad@ss weed!
Would someone please explain 46D - lack of comments have me at a loss, since I have no clue what this is about...
test
From Syndication Land:
With all the rants we get from Rex Parker about the lack of women constructors, I can't help wondering why he doesn't make his own pancakes! Surely it's not just women who can make pancakes?
I had pot before ORO at 51A. Why? Because of an old Cheech and Chong classic. Who could forget “No stems no seeds that you don’t need. Acapulco Gold is… Badass weed!”.
@anon 3:10 PM, H-1B and B-1 are VISAS for business (temporary) and specialty occupations like fashion models.
https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/immigration/h1b
I was getting bored and not doing tOO weLL on this grid, so I decided to work on a "puZZle-dOOdle" :
Five double OO’s
Three double EE’s
Two double LL's
One double NN’s
One double DD’s
One double PP’s
One double BB’s
One double RR’s
One double TT’s
________________
= Sixteen double letters TOTAL
[My wasted eFFort for the day.]
The start of a triathlon is running to the water, not swimming. Swimming is the first leg.
But a square is a rhombus
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