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Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium
The ROOMS:
- BOILER
- GUEST
- DRESSING
- PANIC
- ROMPER
Gaza (/ˈɡɑːzə/; Arabic: غَزَّة Ġazzah, IPA: [ɣaz.zah]), also referred to as Gaza City, is a Palestinian city in the Gaza Strip, with a population of 590,481 (in 2017), making it the largest city in the State of Palestine. Inhabited since at least the 15th century BCE, Gaza has been dominated by several different peoples and empires throughout its history. (wikipedia)
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| Puzzle by "Puzzles of Color" |
The puzzle played very easy, except the SW corner, which was comparatively quite slow, largely because I completely forgot the vacuum brand ("ORSON? ORLON? ORKIN? DYSON? Is the "O" wrong?"). Then I looked at the Acrosses down there for help but yikes, 63A: Ten pins in two bowls (SPARE) was inscrutable to me. I didn't know the attempt to knock over pins was called a "bowl." "It took me two bowls to topple all the pins" sounds super weird and stilted to me. But I guess that was the point of the clue—to make it look like the "bowl" in question was a basin and not an act of ball-rolling. Then I had SASH for 56D: Window part (PANE). So it got messy down there. So it got messy down there. But that was the only trouble spot. Other mistakes ... looks like I tried GIZA before GAZA. I should've known that one, since the Milton play about Samson is called "Eyeless in GAZA," not GIZA (sorry, that’s actually a *phrase* from the Milton play—play itself is called “Samson Agonistes”; Huxley wrote a novel called “Eyeless in GAZA”). Ah well. My literature Ph.D. fails me again. Had AMIGO before AMIGA and did the typical kealoa* two-step at 60D: Win easily after getting the initial "R" ("ROUT or ROMP!?") Aside from the overcommonness of the fill my only complaint is that "ON" is used not once not twice but thrice (RUN ON, UP ON, LED ON). Seems like at least one too many "ON"s. "On" too many.
- 16A: Backing, or the name of Athena's shield (AEGIS) — this is my starting Wordle word this week (I'm working my way through the dictionary) (yes, really). It's not a bad one. This was yesterday:
Thank you for reading my "online musings" (44D). Good day.
*kealoa = short, common answer that you can't just fill in quickly because two or more answers are viable, Even With One or More Letters In Place. From the classic [Mauna ___] KEA/LOA conundrum. See also, e.g. [Heaps] ATON/ALOT, ["Git!"] "SHOO"/"SCAT," etc.
[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]
The play by Milton is called Samson Agonistes. Eyeless in Gaza is the name of the Aldous Huxley novel, who took the title from a line in Miltons play.
ReplyDeleteBefore I sussed out the conceit, I noticed “guest” in the clue for LETTERMAN, the entry right next to GUEST room and thought this would somehow be involved in how the theme worked. Anyhoo, this is a swell theme idea.
ReplyDeleteRex – count me in the .01% of people who watched ROMPER ROOM. I was utterly convinced that Miss Nancy could see me through her magic mirror.
My Aunt Katty had a DRESSING ROOM, and I thought that was just the height of luxury. Now I understand that her DRESSING ROOM was a precursor to the over-the-top closets rich women have that look like Fifth Avenue boutiques. Toya Bush-Harris on Married to Medicine had a two-story closet. Can you imagine? Here’s a 3000-square-foot closet in Texas that is three stories.
Seeing stuff like this is tough; my main thoughts when I watch the obscene display of consumption and wealth are about the students at my school, many of whom are there mainly for the paltry breakfast and lunch. Last year I thought maybe I could take in apples for them, bought three big bags of apples at Food Lion, but they were gone by midday Wednesday. I watched one guy eat three in a row. That. Is. Hungry. As much as I’d like to, I can’t afford the $350+ it would cost me for the year, and this would be *before* word got out and other kids started stopping by to ask for an apple. Like Mom’s walker from yesterday, Maslow’s Hierarchy mocks me daily. Any rich Charlotteans out there who wanna donate apples to my students, have your people contact my people, k? TIA.
Whenever I want to put the verb lead in the past tense, I always use lead and then scramble back to change it to LED if I’m lucky enough to remember. I don’t care which one I use when I’m talking.
“Powerful adhesive” – the stuff they use to apply that little sticker to a tube of lip gloss, the one you have to remove with a paring knife and a lot of cussing before you can open it.
“Element in some food advertising” - extreme trickery. But I wear make-up and color my hair, so I can’t complain.
“Embarrassing sound when bending over” – If you’re lucky, a RIP. If you’re my age, a grunt. If you had corned beef and boiled cabbage lunch, well, you do the math.
Liked SNOB sharing the grid with ARTY and TASTE TEST. Look, we all have our little yardstick for sizing up someone else’s TASTE. I’m quick to judge someone who hangs their too-small painting too high over their couch. Others are quick to judge people who use the singular they. Or make flatulence jokes.
STUNS feels way stronger than just amazes, but I guess we’ve overused amaze to the point that it’s completely watered down. I tried to STUN my kids last year by eating yogurt out of a mayonnaise jar. Deion was properly upset and appalled, but Neon and Argon didn’t react. Ba Dum Tsss. (I did pull this prank on my students, and the reaction was deliciously electric. A couple of them pulled aside a BMT (Behavior Management Technician) and said they were concerned about my cholesterol. Good times.)
Sweet puzzle. I realized the circled letters were rooms before I got to the revealer, so seeing ELBOWROOM was really cool. Not a lot of names and no drek. The only wince was reading the clue, "well informed ABOUT". The ABOUT is superfluous and awkward sounding. Well done, Sue. Now I'll see if Rex liked it as much as I did.
ReplyDeleteI got that they were all rooms, ELBOWROOM was cool though. my only hesitation was the cross of ARA/RUNON. I did not think RUNON fit the clue and felt I was reading it wrong. Went with it and finished no errors. Great Tuesday - kind of a Monday in terms of difficulty
ReplyDeleteAnybody else want the Seven Dwarves Train to be “mini” ?
ReplyDeleteOf course we think of the TV show when we see ROMPER ROOM. But the show's name came from, wait for it, romper room, meaning- A playroom for very young children. So it isn't really an outlier.
ReplyDelete@EdFromHackensack: The RUNON clue puzzled me too. Still does. I also thought I was reading it wrong and even bumped the screen size up to be sure. I don't get it.
ReplyDeleteAnd I didn't know ARA either, except as Parseghian and Notre Dame. On a Tuesday puzzle, using the time-honored clue there, rather than something so obscure, makes sense and argues against the otherwise good idea of coming up with fresher clues. If you Google ARA, you won't find any constellation in the entire first batch of listings. You'll find the Housing Finance and Development Centre of Finland (ARA), though. So if that clue pops up at some point in the future, you're welcome!
This was an enjoyable puzzle, which I needed after my m*nkeyp*x diagnosis yesterday. Turns out you do need to be careful about stray dogs, as NPR reported yesterday. Did not like the inclusion of PANIC ROOM since that’s what my weekly friends meet up has now come to be called. Sigh.
ReplyDeleteImpressive to do a never-done-before theme on a NYT puzzle debut. Impressive to come out with a junk-lite fill-in with five right-angle theme answers, which greatly constrict the fill-in possibilities.
ReplyDeleteI liked the bonus answer SPARE (as in spare room), the schwa-de-vivre endings in AORTA, AMIGA, CAFETERIA, GAZA, ULNA, HORA, and wannabes backward ROMA and ETNA. I love the word MUSCLY, and in the 80 years of NYT puzzles, this is only its fifth appearance. Also, right next to MUSCLY is RIP, and my brain keeps wanting to see RIPPED. In addition, [Ten pins in two bowls] is a wow clue, IMO.
All in all, a lovely joint-based Sue Fracker joint. Sue, I love how you fill in your grids by hand (as you describe in your notes on XwordInfo and Wordplay), the old-fashioned way, as one of the crossword greats Merl Reagle did. Congratulations on your debut, and thank you for a sweet Tuesday solve!
@LMS I could really relate to your story about the apples and what they meant to your students. I taught young people that were also in need of the breakfast and lunch at school. Nothing makes my blood boil more than some paunchy politico that wants to cut down food and other necessities for these kids! One of my students gave me his apple one day as a gift. He said it was all he had to give.
ReplyDeleteAs for the puzzle, thanks for the clarification Rex! Once again I completed the puzzle, enjoyed the spoiler, but somehow in my thick noggin I missed the connections between the circled words.
An easy Tuesday but a bigger "Aha" than usual for a Tuesday when the theme was revealed. Nice debut!
ReplyDeleteMakes an old guy feel even older when he realizes he has never once felt the need to use (or has actually used) either Venmo or Zelle.
FWIW similar to romper room there's the rumpus room: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/rumpus%20room
ReplyDeleteWent by too quickly - couldn’t get a deep dig on it. Agree with Rex on the crosswardese - AGUE and the plural SSTS top the list. Liked the MUSCLY - RIP adjacency.
ReplyDeleteROMPER Room had a short shelf life for me - it was Miss Louise and Miss Mary Ann on WOR in NY.
My dad had a Spike Jones record that had The Ballad of CASEY Jones on it - but I prefer Jerry
Typical Tuesday solve this morning.
I had a similar Wordle experience yesterday, getting to ?O?ER quickly, and then going through
ReplyDeleteGONER
LOWER
HOVER
and finally
POKER in row 6. Just under the wire!
No mention of GUEST in the clue for 9D… right next door to where it appears as a theme answer?? I thought that was an egregious editing mistake, not just because of a (generally accepted) rule about repeats, but because it’s a theme answer and is therefore confusing. I thought for a minute that the other theme answers would be linked similarly. There has to be another way to clue LETTERMAN on a Tuesday.
ReplyDeleteWelcome back, Rex!
ReplyDeleteRomper room is definitely a thing. It’s in the basement or attic. There are toys. You send the kids there in February when everyone’s going a little stir crazy.
This one is about as good as you can ask for - Tuesday appropriate difficulty-wise. While Rex has some nits about the fill being a little ordinary, at least it's clean, junk-free (save maybe ARA as clued) and absent the linguistic contortions that the NYT engages in later in the week.
ReplyDeleteRUN ON doesn't seem to jive well with "Promise to do after being elected" - it seems like the tenses are out of synch (probably not though, as I'm guessing Rex or LMS would have caught that one). LED ON and Duped are close enough cousins that the clue is fine - but it didn't really seem like a good match to me at first though.
Love a clean grid with interesting cluing that is low on esoterica and PPP. Hopefully we have another Robyn in the making here. Welcome Ms. Fracker - stop back in again soon.
Loved this! As OFL said, the revealer really revealed! I was looking at the themers before I got to the revealer, desperately trying to find the trick before it was given to me (by the revealer). I'm trying hard to take more of a Look at the puzzle when it's done to try and appreciate more aspects of it. Its construction. Thelength of words. Etc.. And best my brain could come up with was at 30D: Cross DRESSING? "But 'crossing' would be done in the middle of the word DRESS", CHIMEd in my brain. And then a window PANE often has that cross-pattern in it. But what the heck would be a cross RaMP? Like an onramp for a highway? So I really was nicely surprised with the actual answer.
ReplyDelete@EdfromHackensack and Anon7:15, the politician RaN ON 'No new taxes' and promptly got elected. To RUN ON a platform, as in run the campaign on certain promises, policies, or slogans.
Other than that, I agree that it was lively fill for a Tuesday with SUPERGLUE, TASTETEST, CAFETERIA, MUSCLY, ICEBOX (reminds me of my fridge in Europe, which was essentially an ice box in the top of the fridge - like some hotel room fridges), TONIC, even the as-clued ARA, and such. For having as much 4s and 5s as it did, the dreck-meter was low in my opinion. Loved SPARE. I'm a huge bowling fan. Regret that I can no longer bowl on my leagues (body is just too worn out in too many places). So the clue didn't fool me for a second. Liked the mini transportation theme of RAIL and BUS and TAXI. Even bygone SSTS made it! And for good measure I'll throw in the CREW in their shell on the water. Hope more people turn to public transportation as gas prices are still high and climate warming is sering (sp?) so much of Europe and other places right now. Lets not be SNOBs and insist on our own car to everywhere. But back to the puzz. I think AGUE and AEGIS in the NE could be a problem for some newer solvers, especially on a Tuesday, but I found the whole thing just delightful. Thanks, Sue!
ARA/RUNON cross just a guess at the end, but got the fininshing music on the first try.
ReplyDeleteI didn't have the slightest need to know why the tiny little circles were there. The puzzle filled me with absolutely no curiosity at all as to why the tiny little circles were there. So therefore I never stopped to look at what was inside the tiny little circles. I solved the puzzle as a very, very easy themeless and then came here to find out what all the fuss was about.
ReplyDeleteCute, I suppose. Cute but completely irrelevant.
Unless not knowing what's in the tiny little circles stymies my solve in some way, I can be counted on to ignore them pretty much 100% of the time. As you know, this is not my favorite kind of puzzle. But then I also know that I'm probably not the tiny-little-circle-creator's favorite kind of solver:)
I watched Romper Room. And I had a Romper Room bouncing ball. There's a tragic tale behind that, but I won't tell it here.
ReplyDeleteWriting as fast as I could (except for AMIGO/AMIGA) down the West Coast, hit the revealer, which I didn't want yet, back to the NE, and then snagged in the Mid-Atlantic, mostly by not knowing LETTERMAN was doing something on Netflix. I really am out of the loop.
ReplyDeleteAs for ARA, another example for me of seeing an old friend. Those of us who are, um, "experienced" solvers have seen this clued in years gone by as "sky altar". Haven't seen OBI in a while either. Hi there to you too.
No problem with SPARE as "pins" = bowling.
Really enjoyed this one as the theme hit me as I wrote in ROMPER last, due to its proper location. Hadn't seen the ROOM part coming at all. Way cool.
Congrats on a fine debut, SF. Sure Felt like you've done this before, and I hope to see many more from you. Thanks for all the fun.
I am impressed by the amount of effort it must have taken to fit in all the ELBOW ROOMS. Computer programs can do a lot to ease the difficulty of creating a puzzle, but this construction must require many hours of human effort to get it done. Sue Fracker has my thanks and applause for giving us this enjoyable puzzle. As for the complaints about the fill: there will always be fill, and it's easy to ignore it.
ReplyDelete-Tryna keep it shorter today. I don't wanna aggravate those souls enraged by excessive square footage on blog commentary. Just read the first letter of each paragraph instead.
ReplyDelete-Had a hearty guffaw at "collection of online musings" for BLOG. Is that what we're doing? Musing?
-AEGIS sounds like a way fancier name than a goatskin shield should warrant.
-TYLER filled in with crosses on its own, thankfully, since I didn't know him, but I didn't know Nate Silver on Sunday and now we're best friends. I expect, if history repeats, I may be laying down some shady beats tonight.
-STIR CRAZY was a thing before the whole world went feral. Crazy is a much higher calling now.
-Who do we call about MUSCLY? Just look at it. Look. Stare at it long enough and you'll go insane. (See above.)
-Halfway fun to find RAIL, BUS and TAXI.
-You gotta love a JADED DINERO stack. Isn't it all?
-You gotta know CASH ain't far behind. Love that it's clued "old fashioned." Bring up the concept of counting back change and you'll quickly discover who is old fashioned.
-Oh how many times have I tried and failed with SUPER GLUE. It should come with a warning saying it only works on fingers.
-ULNA is the ELSA of the skeleton clue hater's club.
-How many food fights really happen in CAFETERIAs? I thought it was just in movies.
-ARTY is often clued negatively as it was today, but I grew up in a decidedly UNARTY home and I will take the pretentiousness over the alternative every day.
-Very favorite post from yesterday. "Anonymous 6:47 PM GJ can't take a hint!" I think that should go on a T-shirt, and in past tense on my tombstone cuz I really can't.
-ELBOW ROOM is a dandy phrase in my estimation and helps explain the dots, but the theme is a "meh" OHO to me.
-AIDES was GOFER first and INERT was NOBLE first.
-Too ON-EY with RUN ON and LED ON.
-Had fun with WENDY'S and TASTE TEST even though I find hamburger a little too murder-y for my tastes these days.
-Ummm, I guess that's my musings.
-Maybe no she-shed to trash today but I got my GIST across.
-Byyyyye!
Uniclues:
1 Oversleeper's morning routine.
2 Cost-saving procedure in the Republican health care plan. Just kidding, they don't have a plan.
3 She shed.
4 "Canada Dry is made with corn syrup."
5 David in a chair floating around the room.
6 The chicken pox party was a success.
1 WAKE BYE
2 SUPER GLUE AORTA
3 SPARE ELBOW ROOM
4 TONIC SNOB AMMO
5 LETTERMAN HORA
6 AGUE AIDS ROMP
Tough for a Tuesday but would have been easy on a Wednesday. Tough call on which day to run it, and I think it was done correctly.
ReplyDeletePlural of Inca is Inca.
I think I know the editor of whom Rex speaks. It adds a layer of challenge to construction, but makes for better puzzles.
Hey All !
ReplyDeleteFilling a puz by hand can get you STIR CRAZY. I've done a few, but the helping hand of using the computer for fill (not All the fill) is welcoming. 9 out of 10 constructors agree. Har.
Nice puz. Agree with the RUNON huhs? some are expressing. I wanted the answer to be "keep lying, doing nothing that I said I would". Doesn't matter which Party, all politicians suck.
Read ICEBOX clue as "Bygone friend", thinking it'd end in -EX.
Not TOO much else to say.
@Gill, enjoyed your story yesterday. Had a few guffaws. Good stuff. 😁
One F
RooMonster
DarrinV
In my early days of solving, ARA was in the puzzle regularly.
ReplyDeleteI bombed on Wordle yesterday. If I had used POWER, as Rex did, I would have gotten it. But POWER was the word recently and they don't repeat.
Jeff Chen punned on AGUE today. That's a word I've never heard and seldom seen outside of crosswords. I had assumed that it rhymed with "leg," but no. AY-gyoo.
Cute theme but it forces terribly dull fill. Not worth it.
@GJ...Thanks for your concern...
ReplyDelete@Nancy, With ya. Never look at the gimmicks unless I have too, and didn't need them for this one.
@TJS 9:31 AM Percentage of welcome you are: 100% 🙃
ReplyDeleteI didn't know this until 4 minutes ago, but Romper Room was a franchise - every major city had their own show, with their own hosts. I only looked it up because I knew that ( one of the ) hosts got fired from her position for having an abortion in 1962. She had been taking Thalidomide during the early stages of her pregnancy, found out the implications, and thought it in everyone's best interest to terminate the pregnancy. Someone found out, and her procedure was cancelled at the last minute. She eventually had to go to Sweden or Switzerland to have it done. She got fired during the ruckus, then got fired from her next job being the host of children's show for getting pregnant.
ReplyDeleteThx, Sue; fine Tues. puz! :)
ReplyDeleteMed.
Nice theme; took a few moments to grok the 'bent' ELBOWS.
Had ORkin before ORECK.
Smooth journey, except for the central East Coast.
Enjoyed the solve! :)
@jae
Excellent Croce workout; one cell dnf at the 'sculpture' / 'certainly not' cross. Nevertheless, a very worthwhile 2 1/2 hr. adventure! See you next Mon. :)
___
Peace 🙏 🇺🇦 ~ Compassion ~ Tolerance ~ Kindness to all 🕊
We’re off to a great start this week with a marvelous Monday followed by a terrific Tuesday. I liked the crooks of the ELBOW, the fill, the lovely symmetry and the absence of too many ARTY proper names. Solid and clean all around. Thank you so much for this Sue, and I love your kitty cat TOO!
ReplyDeleteRIP gave me a delayed chuckle and BOIL reminded me of my disastrous first attempt at making fudge when I lived in Colorado. Who knew water reaches that point 10° sooner at high altitude? A fact I didn’t know but never forgot after chipping rock candy out of my best baking dish with a chisel and hammer.
For me, INGE and ARA needed all crosses. Never heard of either. IROC I knew only because my mother had one. And AEGIS was hard for a Tuesday.
ReplyDeleteBut the clue I repeatedly dislike is “pretentious” for ARTY. Why? It seems like a value judgment or stereotype, and one I am not familiar with, perhaps because I come from an ARTY family. Can we not? There are other ways to clue it. Using “pretentious” isn’t even clever or unexpected. I have only been solving a few months and have seen it at least twice.
Easy. No WOEs and no erasures. Reasonably smooth given the theme constraints and clever. Liked it.
ReplyDeleteI should've done one of my silly stories on this one because I'd have fun with AGUE and AEGIS walking into my bar. RIP would be the bartended and @Gary Jug would be on stage reciting some fun poetry.
ReplyDeleteToday's puzzle felt like ten pins in two bowls filled with circles in my SPARE ROOM.
ON, ON, ON and away I go.
I did like STIR CRAZY...like watching Bond decide which way he likes his martini. AMIGA and DiNERO collecting CASH was in the cool beans category. TASTE TEST waving at WENDYS. I've eaten at WENDYS just once. I was desperate for food. Why do you make your hamburgers square? Would you eat a round hot dog?
The reveal was Tuesday cute...Now I'm hoping for extra salsa on Wed.
@GILL I. 10:24 AM Every time you write one, I reserve a little GILL I. time to focus on your "silly story." They're always a marvel to see how you cram so many of the words from the puzzle, switch their definitions at will, and flip their parts of speech like a literary boss. I don't say thank you nearly enough. I know what it takes to pull those off and it's always a joy to read. While I spend the majority of my time here being amused by the curmudgeons, the cry babies, the mansplainers, and those of the holier-than-thou ranks, we have plenty of wise and comical contributors making my daily journey here an eagerly anticipated joy, and your work is always at the top of my must read list.
DeleteCongrats to Sue Fraker on the debut. Fun puzzle with a clever theme and apt revealer. Interesting to read on XWord Info that she constructs on paper with a pencil and eraser.
ReplyDeleteGot stumped for a while at 37D where I had CAFE and wondered what part of a cafe would most lend itself to a food fight.
TASTE TEST conjures up a journey through Costco sampling the wares throughout the store. I know people who literally make a meal of this while pushing around an empty shopping cart.
Like Rex, my favorite answer was STIR CRAZY which pretty much sums up how I have felt during the pandemic.
You can look it up (I can't be bothered), but my poor but unhappy family would, very occasionally, visit with the Upper Middle Class, a romper room was common. But that was the 50s, of course. Which was the chicken or the egg... yes, a real place "https://www.dictionary.com/browse/romper-room"
ReplyDeleteAre arty and artsy synonymous for most people? I think of artsy as being more pretentious but that might just be me.
ReplyDeleteAfter all of the howling about ARTOO being absurd vs. the actual name (R2D2), I expect to hear a lot of disdain today for ARTY subbing for RT.
ReplyDeleteI say if MUSCLY WENDYS gonna RIP, LETTERMAN. BTW, MUSCLY doesn’t look right to me, but neither does muscley.
Far better to be one of the NEATEN than one of the CentralPark Five.
Great NYTXW debut, Sue Fracker. Your name could be a great aptonym for a lawyer crusading to shut down oil industry abuses.
Who is doing this howling? “Artoo” *is* his actual name. “Artoo” and “Threepio” have been written out that way in print since the beginning—since the original novel and screenplay.
DeleteSo Rex- Where do I find your friend's "clean and familiar" puzzle online?
ReplyDeleteOkay this was clever!
ReplyDeleteBut may I pick a nit?
I know one arty definition is pretentious, but I just hate ARTY seems like always—clued that way. No one I know (ok full disclosure- I’m an artist) ever uses that word to mean 😜pretentious.
Whew! Off topic a bit, but thanks 🦖, for the opp to vent.
Now I won’t care any more. 😂
Anyway good 🧩!
🤗🦖🦖🦖🦖🦖🤗
I didn't have any trouble filling in the answers and quickly finishing the puzzle, but I did not get the Reveal at all.
ReplyDeleteI didn't spend more than a minute or so trying to figure it out , but Rex is the one who revealed the theme to me.
I think I was stuck because I have never lived in a house that had either a boiler room or a dressing room or a panic room or a romper room and the houses I lived in growing up didn't have guest rooms either.
Oh, well, it was still fun.
When I visited my parents, I used to drink beer and play table shuffleboard at The Elbow Room in O'Neill, Nebraska. Pretty fun dive. I understand that O'Neill had to stop throwing its big St. Patrick's Day celebrations because they turned into multi-day brawls.
ReplyDelete@Kitshef 9:06. So this puzzle would have been easier for you if you had waited until tomorrow to solve it?
ReplyDelete@anon1209
DeleteNo. Grade is on a curve.
@Nancy. I think it's sad that you immediately hate a puzzle with circles before you even begin. Why do it at all?
ReplyDeleteThe print edition puts the number "58" in the grid where the number "53" should go.
ReplyDeleteI spent a lot of time trying to figure out how a HORA could be a bone in the arm.
I guess the NYT can't afford copy editors any more.
Villager
My favorite kind of reveal - never saw it coming (my other favorite kind is when I'm able to suss it out pre-disclosure). I thought the motley collection of ROOMs was great and very successful at diverting attention from the theme. I associated BOILER with our basement, GUEST with a TV show, and DRESSING with a salad. Lack of commonality didn't put me into a PANIC, though - just eager anticipation to see what was up. @Whatsername 9:57 - Thank you for pointing out the symmetry, lovely indeed.
ReplyDeleteDo-over: shot before AMMO. Help from previous puzzles + surprised to see on a Tuesday: IROC, ARA, INGE.
@Wunderin`:
ReplyDeleteOddly, in my printed version, well, actually, they're ovals. With the major axis vertical.
When I was growing up, ROMPER Room was a TV show but "rumpus room" was a real room in the house. One of my sister's funniest stories is from when they were getting a tour of someone's house, which included the rumpus room. Her 10 year old daughter kept silent through the whole tour, but when they finally left she asked: "Mom, why did they name their kid Rumpus?"
ReplyDeleteMy wordle was reach, trend, spore, power, poker.
ReplyDeleteYou revealed your amateur status as serious jigsaw puzzlers don't use the picture. Good to have the real Rex back albeit mellow from vacation!
ReplyDelete@Gary Jug 1:01. Please join my friends AGUE and AEGINS . RIP will be serving anything your heart desires. Drinks are on me... :-)
ReplyDelete@GJ - 🤣😂🤣 - My mantra is FEITCTAJ. Your response would have taken far too much effort for my taste. Still, 👍🏽👍🏽👍🏽
ReplyDelete@Muse & @DJ - Yep. It was always gob-smackingly stupid that otherwise intelligent people were pushing tests and charter schools to “fix education.” How about we just make sure kids are well fed and safely housed first?
No such thing as a "State of Palestine." Gaza is a city in the Gaza Strip and, when emptied of terrorists, will return to being part of Israel.
ReplyDelete@Zed - Because that solution is kind, and does nothing to destroy unions.
ReplyDeleteAnon 8:12 All will be fine when Israel falls back to it's legal boundaries established in 1949, and never legally changed.
Gary Jugert, you need to tone it down a bit.
ReplyDeleteJust because folks have commented on your uber-lengthy posts doesn't necessarily make us curmudgeons or mansplainers. Just commenting on the obvious.
ARA and INGE were the toughies for me today in what was a pretty delightful puz.
Reax will have done better with today's wordle I suspect.
ReplyDeleteStupidly Natick-ed today by ALEc/cOMBAT. (head hangs in shame)
ReplyDeleteThis comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
ReplyDeleteEasier than yesterday - filled itself in. But I certainly had room for it.
ReplyDeleteDiana, Lady-in-Waiting, in the Waiting Room
Had pOwdER before BOILER, yAp before GAB and Inglis before ICEBOX for 48D. Does anyone remember Inglis fridges? They were really good and reliable. Fridges don’t last as long as they used to. Those firdges were bullet proof. Anyhow, good theme well executed and pretty much junk-free fill (IRR, ARA, SSTS, EDYS). Cluing was pretty straightforward and rather stale - alas, not a SUPERcLUE in sight. There’s a mini sub-theme going on with 32A and 44A (Commuting option) for BUS and RAIL which could have been extended to 70A TAXI (Cry from the curb). INGE was unknown to me but getable via the crosses. Overall the puzzle was pretty easy except for the NW corner which raised the difficulty level to at least Wednesday. Putting all these nits aside, this was still an excellent debt puzzle. So Bravo to Sue Fracker!
ReplyDeleteROMPER TOO
ReplyDeleteSUPER NEATEN the best,
WENDY STUNS in a DRESS,
she's a MUSCLY TASTETEST,
MAN, LETTER be my GUEST.
--- CASEY TYLER
I agree AEGIS is a great Wordle starter, with its three vowels. However AIDES appears in the same grid, identical but for the D vs. the G. I suspect D might be a tad more common...
ReplyDeleteThis one was suitable for the day, circles to be sure, but a point to it all. ICEBOX was all I needed to see ELBOWROOM, clever use of a common expression. The thing does its Tuesday job, and no fill groaners. Birdie.
@rondo: consider bragging rights hereby exercised, but really, I know what the Minnesota Vikings are capable of--and last night SURE wasn't it. Mayhap we shall meet again in the playoffs, and a truer test will occur.
Edit - an excellent debut puzzle. Not debt puzzle…
ReplyDelete