Former name of a Kansas arena that commemorated a 1976 U.S. anniversary / SUN 2-12-23 / Triumphant shout at a crossword tournament / Beast with recurved horns / Locally focused lecture franchise / Civil rights icon Helen Burroughs / Shield of ancient Greece Var. / drag hockey maneuver / Restaurant competitor of Pinkberry and Sweet Frog / Hebrew version of the English pronoun "I"
Constructor: Christina Iverson and Samuel A. Donaldson
Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium (with added difficulty for me, who refused to solve the puzzle with correct formatting ... more below)
THEME: "Cheap Thrills" — theme answers are phrases meaning [Economizing], with each answer also represented elsewhere in the grid as a visual pun:
Theme answers:
CUTTING CORNERS (24A: Economizing, as represented by the circled squares?) ("SAW" and "AXE" appear in circled squares in the "corners")
PINCHING PENNIES (40A: Economizing, as represented twice in 12-Down)
BICENTENNIAL CENTER (12D: Former name of a Kansas arena that commemorated a 1976 U.S. anniversary) (two "CENT"s are "pinched" (into single squares) inside of this answer)
STRETCHING A BUCK (94A: Economizing, as represented in 58-Down?)
SSIINNGGLLEE (58D: Not in a relationship) (a "single" (dollar bill, or "buck") is "stretched" such that it takes up two squares instead of one)
MAKING ENDS MEET (four words meaning "(rear) end" "meet" at the center of the grid: INCAN, ASSET, BUTTE and ALBUM)
Word of the Day: NANNIE Helen Burroughs (97D: Civil right icon ___ Helen Burroughs) —
Nannie Helen Burroughs (May 2, 1879 – May 20, 1961) was a black educator, orator, religious leader, civil rights activist, feminist, and businesswoman in the United States. Her speech "How the Sisters Are Hindered from Helping," at the 1900 National Baptist Convention in Virginia, instantly won her fame and recognition. In 1909, she founded the National Training School for Women and Girls in Washington, DC. Burroughs' objective was at the point of intersection between race and gender.
She fought both for equal rights in races as well as furthered opportunities for women beyond the simple duties of domestic housework. She continued to work there until her death in 1961. In 1964, it was renamed the Nannie Helen Burroughs School in her honor and began operating as a co-ed elementary school. Constructed in 1927–1928, its Trades Hall has a National Historic Landmark designation. (wikipedia)
• • •
OK so I download the puzzle every day in what's known as the .puz format and then I solve it using software called Black Ink (the better-known software for solving .puz files is AcrossLite, but I like Black Ink better). This the software I have always used, ever since I started solving puzzles again after a hiatus that ran roughly from the late '90s (when I had a dead-tree subscription to the NYT) to the early '00s, when I realized "oh, wow, you can just solve these digitally now, cool." The NYT stopped officially offering puzzles in the .puz format a few years ago, but you can still get them using this special Chrome browser extension called "Crossword Scraper" (a godsend ... I almost don't want to mention it for fear that I'll jinx the whole magic set-up and .puz files will be well and truly discontinued). I am set in my ways, I am stubborn, and I resent the NYT making me solve in its app so that it can have all my data etc. Just let me have my puzzle and leave me alone. No stats, no streaks, no nothing. Just solving. Anyway, the point is that today I saw that there were "Puzzle Notes" accompanying my .puz file, and so I read them, and they told me that the software couldn't handle some of the formatting and that I should probably solve the puzzle at the source (i.e. the puzzle website or the app). To which I silently replied "**** that!" and just plowed straight into the puzzle. I'll read the little "Puzzle Notes," grudgingly, but if I'm told to change formats, my reaction is defiance. I happily accept whatever added difficulty is coming my way. I figure, I've solved a jillion puzzles, I can make the damn thing work without the fancy formatting. Weirdly, this all ended up in a Best Case Scenario today, as I was able to solve the entire puzzle, but one of the four "Economizing" visual gags was just ... invisible. You can see, in the finished grid (above) that SAW and AXE are in circled squares (for CUTTING CORNERS) and "SINGLE" (a "buck") is *stretched* out (each letter in the word repeated), and you can see the two rebus squares where "CENT" (a "penny") has been "pinched" (twice). But that left one themer unaccounted for: where, oh where, were the alleged "shaded squares" that would make sense of MAKING ENDS MEET!?!?! That was the question. And figuring out the answer to that question, dear readers, was the greatest damn experience of the whole solve. Where do "ENDS MEET" in this grid? What are "ends"? A letter string ("END" meeting "END")? Maybe it's words *meaning* end ... but where to look? Well, the other themers have their visual puns in symmetrical places, so ... where would the theme stuff be if symmetry were to be (roughly) maintained? How about the mid- ... oh my god!
My "ends" hunt was actually a butt-hunt! Four butts! Meeting! Butt congress! Well that ... that was unexpected. One hell of an exclamation point, one bright red cherry on top of an already pretty good puzzle. Discovering the butts, rather than having them, uh, shoved in my face—that was delightful. This should've been a meta puzzle where readers had to *find* the damned "shaded squares," because I'm telling you ... I really feel like I earned those asses.
I like this theme quite a bit, in that it's got a very tight core concept—every phrase can be defined by [Economizing], and the theme phrases are all perfectly symmetrically arranged, and the visual puns are *also* symmetrically arranged. It's elegant and layered and nice. My way of solving also gave me another unintended layer—the butt layer. I haven't been this happy after finishing a Sunday puzzle in ... well, a long time.
I don't believe MINIPIGs are real and you can't convince me otherwise, what an absurd idea (79A: Little squealer). Don't like NON GRATA on its own, just sitting there, wondering where PERSONA went (99A: Unwelcome, so to speak). And YOGISM ... come on (11D: Tranquil discipline). Seriously, come on. You mean YOGA. That is one painful -ISMing. I love "DEMON RUM" as a colloquial expression, but then I read a lot of pulp fiction from the '20s. Seems like the clue could've indicated "colloquialism" a little more clearly, or at all (36A: Prohibition target). That's pretty much all the MOANing I have to do about this puzzle. It was pretty easy overall. Didn't know NANNIE, but she only slowed me down a little. Had RANK before RUNG (22A: Hierarchy level), but I think that's the only time I made an initial error. Oh, no, one other: I thought [Parts of a gig] were LEGS. I was thinking musical gigs (actually, musical tours), not gigabytes (MEGS). Oh, and I had no idea about ANI (86A: Hebrew version of the English pronoun "I"), so that was tough, but again, the crosses were all fair and came pretty readily. The thematic concept is strong, the execution is solid, and the Unintentional Ass Hunt at the end, [chef's kiss]! Cheap thrills, indeed.
That's all for today's puzzle. Just a note now to say that all thank-you postcards have now gone out to people who made financial contributions to the blog in January. We'll be completely up-to-date on the correspondence by tomorrow. A few recent (February) contributors have worried about being "too late" to get the special cat / crossword thank-you card. To be clear, there's no such thing as "too late." All year long, any snail-mail contributions get this year's custom postcard as a reply. We made sure to order plenty. I have received so many lovely letters this past month, and so many shared stories of pet love and pet loss. And pictures! Pictures of kitties and puppers!
And drawings! Commemorating the writers' deceased pets...
... or my own ...
And then there's this card, featuring drawings of my new cat IDA and her progress from Day 1 (bloodied, emaciated) to now (healed, somewhat fatter), which is really, really special (it's currently on our fireplace mantle, probably forever):
I'm very lucky to have such thoughtful (and creative) readers. Thank you all. And in case you're wondering how IDA is settling in to her new home, here's a picture from earlier today—the big tabby is her older "brother" ALFIE (whom, you may remember, we found in the bushes outside our house, almost three years ago, near the beginning of COVID Times, in a rainstorm, at four weeks old). ALFIE is a beautiful boy, but not ... always easy to get close to, so this ... this is something else, esp. considering they've only known each other three weeks :)
That's all. Enjoy your Sunday.
Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld
P.S. PSA = Public Service Announcement, and the "Smokey" in the clue is Smokey the Bear (127A: Smokey spot, for short)
This is what you get when you order your crossword "fully loaded". And the black hole dead center surrounded by those four words brought out the 10-year-old in me.
As a few of you may recollect, I was, for several weeks, the ASS King, pointing out all manner of butt-related clues and answers. I retired a few months ago from this role, because it had become too boring and predictable. A butt here, a fanny there, but just nothing to write home about. Well, slap my ass and call me Sally if I didn’t retire a bit too soon! I almost think that Shortz was holding this one back until he thought no one was paying attention to the anal fixation that runs rampant in his department. And then bam!!! He hits you with the quadruple whammy of CAN, ASS, BUM and BUTT, all surrounding a dark little hole situated squarely between two spindly, spread out legs. The whole setup makes you sure you’re getting a shit-ton (and maybe even a crap-ton) of something really unpleasant blown at you. But for the fact that I liked the puzzle, I’d say it STANK.
Thanks, Christina Iverson and Samuel A. Donaldson, for the Cheap Thrills.
CHEAP THRILLS again! I will reiterate, CHEAP THRILLS is an amazing album. The cover art is also pretty amazing.
Mostly medium. I got seriously hung up in the BICENTENNIAL CENTER area. It took me a while to realize a rebus was required plus the MARTEN ANI cross almost did me in. I finally dredged up MARTEN from some long ago memory and got the happy music. This was mostly fun and if the ANI clued had been Star Wars or Wheel of Fortune related I would not have typed “mostly”. Mostly liked it.
After seeing the note, I still solved in Across Lite, but kept the NYT page open in my other monitor cuz it showed some extra shaded squares. But it didn't matter; as Rex noted, no big whup. I finished with an error at BERIA crossing IBIX... never can remember how to spell that danged animal. And damned obscure liberal arts colleges???? argh.
Everyone, heads up re the Crossword Scraper plugin: 1. Is available for Firefox as well as Chrome; 2. Works on many many crossword pages, not just NYT!
Typeovers: for "It's cried on a slide" had SAFE! (y'know, baseball). And for "Hierarchy level" had TIER. (funfact: the opposite of hierarchy is... anarchy.)
[Spelling Bee: Sat 0, very proud to have my first 5 words be all the pangrams! (honest)]
I had sEtS before MEGS, it made sense to me. If you have a gig in a band you play a few sets. Yeah, the BICENTENNIAALCENTER was a doozy.... I hate when only part of the puzzle is a rebus. The NE took me longer than the rest of the puzzle combined. I very much enjoyed this puzzle I found it unique and thought the cross-referencing element was cool - I normally do not like cross-referencing at all. YOGISM is clunky - is it really a word? and SAYLESS... ugh. I thought the clues for PIRATESHIP and ALAMO were cool.
I find there is an inordinate amount of time discussing and bitching about the app and formats. (Rex and others). And I get that. BUT the essence of the puzzle IS the puzzle. I am so stuck in my ways doing the newspaper version in pen. I did use an app years ago and yeah, it was faster, but I really didnt get the same thrill for whatever reason. I do NOT care about time at all. I kind of even take my time if it is going too fast. So this “app talk” is lost on me and a waste of space. Hey, try printing it out and solving in pen if the apps bother you. Solve like God intended you too :) Thanks Sam and Christina - that was two cups of coffee well spent
During the Spanish colonization of the Americas, the Spanish Main was the collective term for the parts of the Spanish Empire that were on the mainland of the Americas and had coastlines on the Caribbean Sea or Gulf of Mexico
The clue for 11d should have been • "It gets late early out here", e.g.
Pretty nifty puzzle, imo. Good grid, good clues, good theme tricks. Too bad they couldn't work this into the middle intersection. But they did get a number of other tunes in. "The Planets", "Yes, I'M READY", "DIANA". And, spanning three almost-stacked answers...
"It's hot in here. What is this place, anyway?" "This is a DISCO INFER-NO, SIR. Burn, baby, burn!"
I’m so jealous that my impatience prevented me from going on that BUTT hunt. Since my grid had no shaded squares, I just ASSumed that 111A was referring to the AXE circled squares, separate from the SAW ones, and I was UTTERly flummoxed. Dumb. Noticing those four ends meeting would have been such a thrill.
This is a tour-de-force for a gimmick-lover like me. You got your circles, your shaded squares, your rebus squares, your whatever you call SSIINNGGLLEE thingy. . . Wowser. Terrific.
Because I was so confused and because Rex’s write-up wasn’t up yet, I had to go to XWord Info, something I wish I had time to do more often. So Christina and Sam met at the ACPT. I’m sure glad they did! (On an ACPT sidenote, I was surprised by the clue for DONE. Do we really shout that? If memory serves, I thought we just raised our finished puzzle up high to attract the attention of one of the monitors. Then we leave the ballroom, head to the lobby, and run our mouths about the solve.)
I found it pretty hard, but a couple of mistakes held me back for a while: “stool” for ROSIN and, like @Alice Pollard, “sets” for MEGS. Oh, and “sea monster” has the same number of letters as PIRATE SHIP.
@Joe Dipinto – terrific idea for the 11D clue.
The clue for TLC and ALBUM made me feel mildly regretful for the kind of mom I was. If one of my kids came in crying from some fall, I’d look at the injured area, tell them they were fine, and send’em back out. No frantic assembling of ice, no Neosporin, no TLC. And I did briefly try my hand at scrapbooking but lost interest and patience after about 2 pages. I remember visiting a high school friend who had shelves of gorgeous scrapbooks. Gorgeous. I bet she had oodles of ready-to-go ice packs and Neosporin, too. On the way home, I did a frantic mental inventory of anything right I was doing as a mom: 1. I’d take them out in the woods after a rain to turn over rocks and logs looking for interesting bugs. 2. I packed them epic April Fool’s Day lunches. 3. I would have them point to the area of whatever to ask exactly where they wanted me to squirt the whipped cream, and then I’d start at that spot and continue squirting right up the length of their arm.
That’s all I could come up with. AH ME.
Went down a rabbit hole investigating exactly what an EPODE is and emerged covered in poetry terms – IAMB, strophe, antistrophe, dactyl, pyrrhic. . . when I got to spondee, I thought screw this.
It’s interesting how we all have our ways of cutting back. Mom will eat pretty much any kind of leftover in the fridge, regardless of its age or state. (Once she burned the crap out of some Eggo waffles but insisted on eating them anyway in the waste-not-want-not spirit. She insisted they tasted fine.) For me, I buy these little ROC retinol capsules – you’re supposed to use one capsule every night all over your face, but they’re too expensive. So I cut a little opening to squeeze out a tiny amount for around my eyes. So one capsule lasts several days. (I had a friend in WV who was very frugal And very eco-conscious. The first time I went to her house, I saw these small pieces of cloth hanging in her backyard, and I was convinced that they were reusable toilet paper squares. Like, she had washed them, and they were hanging out to dry. No, really. I was weak with relief when I used her bathroom and didn’t find a neat stack of these things next to a receptacle where the used ones went. I was expecting some kind of cute explanatory sign. Turns out they were just Tibetan prayer flags.)
There’s a joke about “How do you know you’re flying over Holland” where the answer is “You can see the toilet paper hanging out to dry,” (I guess the Dutch are thought to be extra frugal?)
EGIS: not a thing. MINIPIG: apparently a thing if you Google it, but should have been clued "trendy swine pet" or something. NONGRATA: should have been clued with "persona." GENOMIC: not a thing nor an adjective; GENOMICs is a thing. YOGISM: not really a thing; maybe okay clued to Berra but even then, a stretch. ACH is clued (sort of?) to mean "alas" (I guess?) in German -- yuck. NOBIG: not a thing; it's NO BIGgie or NO BIG deal. INDIC: ouch, but sort of okay.
This was probably the worst Sunday in a year for making up words. What a slog. "Creative" doesn't mean "make up words."
Same here. Hated the words you pointed out and actually INDIC being my biggest complaint/groaner. Also hated ISL, MAA, EYCK (don’t know the artist and those letters could be anything and I’d have to believe it), UTE, BEREA, TORRE, and probably some others I can’t immediately find. Didn’t mind the theme so much as hated the fill. -Brando
Acrostic solvers: I thought I was headed for an epic fail when clues A-P yielded only one answer. Fortunately, the last column had a few I could get so while it was still tough overall, at least it was possible.
The previous 2 Sundays were quite good, even enjoyable. As soon as I saw the grid today I knew I would take a pass. Of all the dumbass puzzles we've had this looks like the dumbassest. I can use the free time and there's always the LAT if I start jonesing.
Hand up for E/NE struggle with the rebus CENTs and MARTEN, ANI, DEMON RUM, EGIS, etc. Had to give up and sleep on it, but the fog cleared at the break of day. Impressive construction and clever theme. I'm getting better at visual puns, but still have room for improvement.
Very enjoyable write-up, Rex.
@egsforbreakfast--thanks for providing big laughs at the start of my day!
I found this puzzle batshit crazy and totally endearing. I loved how they pulled out all the stops. First off, you have the zigzaggedly sawn-off NW and SE with their CUTTING CORNERS themer and their silly encircled CUTTING tools. Then you have [CENT]s being pinched/squished in the [Former name of a Kansas arena that commemorated a 1976 U.S. anniversary]!! (All I can say to that clue is “Whaaa ?”) Next, there’s SSIINNGGLLEE [Not in a relationship] being stretched like a rubber band to go with STRETCHING A BUCK. And if all that wasn’t sufficiently deranged, you’ve got the flowering of CAN, BUM, BUTT and ASS in the middle to illustrate MAKING ENDS MEET! Absolute UTTER madness…with GUSTO! What’s not to like?
And it was no pushover. I found several areas of this grid quite challenging, particularly in the west. Like others, I was sure that [Parts of a gig] were sEtS, which caused havoc with PANAM and NOBIG (which I think is more in the language as NO BIGgie). As for the answers crossing SSIINNGGLLEE, the MINIPIG was unknown to me, NONGRATA was hard to see without “persona,” GENOMIC was an unexpected sort of map, and the small SW corner was empty except for OWEN [Wilson] for far too long. I also stayed blind to SPHERES [Round figures] thanks to effective misdirection, and thought DEALIO was going to be DEALIe. For a while I wondered if this insane puzzle was going to defeat me, but when I finally grasped the repetition of letters in the stretched SINGLE, I was able to start filling in the elusive crossing answers, and finished clean, just over my average time. Whew!
Sundays absolutely defeat me in relation to uniclues, but I have one left over from yesterday (didn’t get a chance to post on Saturday).
UNICLUE:
** It begins “Blessed are they who eat their fiber and hydrate well, for the regularity that descends upon them is the gift of God (and their own admirable habits)…”
** LOWER G.I. PSALM ONE
[SB: Friday, 0; yd, -3. I bow to your superior SB skills, @okanaganer – all the pangrams right off the bat! – Wow and more wow. I missed two appalling should’ves (both of which were pangrams!) and this, which I don’t think ever would have occurred to me and which is hyphenated in a lot of sources.]
Similarly to @okanaganer, when the puzzle tells me it has “features” I can’t see in AcrossLite, I just go back to the NYT site and glance at the “Newspaper Version” option and it instantly tells me everything I need to know in order to do it on AL. (I know some like Puzzazz or Black Ink but I’m just too attached to AL. Hallelujah for Crossword Scraper!)
A rare day indeed — Rex liked the puzzle more than I did! Not that I disliked it, but still.
@LMS - I love reading your hilarious stories of your mom, and now we get to actually watch them? Keep ‘em coming! The expression on your mom’s face is priceless. “It’s perfectly fine, dear (struggles to swallow).” I am like her in that I almost never throw away leftovers, but I would have thrown out those Eggos. I think I inherited the trait from my grandmother. I visited her once and she didn’t even kiss me before asking “Do you like pomegranate juice?” “Uh … sure, why?” “Oh, thank heavens. Your uncle bought some when he was staying here and I don’t like it. You have to drink it all.” The Depression sticks with ya.
I loved the puzzle too. I thought BICENTENNIAL CENTER was a bit of a stretch - an arena in Kansas that doesn’t even exist anymore? But I’m sure there weren’t many options with two CENTs. That part took the longest (hi, @ Alice Pollard) but once I grokked the rebuses it was easy. But unlike you, I love it when a theme has all kinds of different ways of expressing itself.
Hard not to picture four people mooning each other in the middle.
I liked the nearby series of “As I see it ..” followed by “Say less,” as in “Nada.” Alamo is there too, trying to fit in with Nada by being Spanish. If you go to San Antonio, yes, you do have to visit the Alamo for its history, but then go and see the other four or five old Spanish missions outside of town. They are gorgeous and a nice escape from the crowds at the Alamo.
@jJoe Dipinto -- My favorite Berra quote, because it makes me smile as well as wow at its underlying wisdom is: "If the world were perfect, it wouldn't be."
Ah, a lollapuzoola. A melting pot of gimmicks that kept me on the hunt throughout. An everything-but-the-kitchen-sink theme … about paring down! Punny clues, funny clues. Sledding downhill solving areas, slashing-through-vines areas. Crosswords as vaudeville. Hey, it’s Super Sunday and this is the perfect puzzle for it!
What a show! Please bask in my applause, Christina and Samuel. This was a hoot, and thank you so much for it!
It’s hard to garner the motivation to be impressed by the intricacies of the construction when the rest of it suffers so badly. Who ever says “AH ME” ? When was the last time you heard or said “NO BIG” (it’s ok to admit if it was never). Is that ACH supposed to be some cutesy German joke - hysterical. There are so many ways to clue SAL and we get UNA MARGARITA.
Wait, we’re not done yet - why don’t we take our “CrossWord” puzzle and have EGIS cross INDIC so as not to disparage people who don’t really like words but do crossword puzzles anyway. Sure, you want a YOGISM - go ahead, have fun, the more the merrier. While we’re at it, can we throw in a UNES, MAA, ANI and a DEALIO as well.
And just to show that we are an equal opportunity offender, we will include not only the perfunctory ASS for the 43rd day in a row, but today we will also include three bonus synonyms !
I LOSE, I FEAR, ID-ED, I MET, I’M READY?? TEDX + BEREA was the icing.
I did like DEMON RUM and PROM DATES.
We’ve seen good puzzles from both of these constructors previously - don’t know what happened here. Almost as if they tried to do much and just couldn’t quite get there. Next time try to SAY LESS.
@kitshef re Acrostic – I got the "proper name" answers at N, P and E first. After that I was getting more of the late alphabet answers as well, but I had a nice back-and-forth going on so I finished fairly quickly.
I don't think the quote makes grammatic sense exactly? Part of it seems to be a sentence fragment. That confused me a little.
MINIPIGS is a thing, for sure. I thought I knew my animals (way more so than plants), but MARTEN was almost new to me, registering only the very, very faintest blip in my brain.
The East/Northeast region held us up for a long time. Even after we figured out the CENT thing, we had a hard time, until we recognized that if one leaves the square completely dark (leaving out the whole CENT) and that this omission also applied to the crosses, it works. (We were leaving in a C or a T...) Oy.
And, many other answers were shortened - abbreviations, "informal", in brief, or otherwise - adding even more challenge. Almost PPP-ish... Not sure I enjoyed those so much.
But this was a very original, challenging puzzle. Thanks to Christina and Sam!
Why would anyone want to put a butthole in the center of their puzzle? My two CENTS is it's a meta thing for all the the crossword excrement to be found throughout. Anytime I found myself wondering where the constructors found a particularly bad entry like YOGISM or DEALIO I'd just look at that central black square and it would all make sense.
The real low point for me came at the end when I was finishing off that NE section and trying to make BICENTENNIAL fit. Just to even begin that I had to put BOPS in at 12A. It was one of the many moments when I had to mentally hold my nose because the fill just STANKeth.
Congratulations to the constructors on getting this thing out. Now go find a plunger and see if you can get it to flush.
Amy: as a child of parents who were children in the Depression, this frugal solver rates the puzzle as a real bargain! Really swell. Love the Ida and Alfie update, Rex.
NOBIG joins “My B” (for “my bad”) as something I’ve heard the hip youths say but I don’t understand the necessity for. Probably because I am neither hip nor a youth.
No more rebuses! The cardinal rule of crosswords is one letter per square; I will die on this hill. I must also agree with OFL; there is no such thing as a "mini" pig. Another horrible slog (in spots) where I sailed through others. This puzzle made me MOAN.
As much as I have always known that "Smokey" is an intentional misspelling of the adjectival form of Smoke (i.e., smoky), and used only in the name Smokey Bear, I still spent a few "WTF' moments staring at my last entry, 127A. As we say in Massachusetts, light finally dawned on Marblehead.
Not happy about seeing my evil reflective twin here, though.
This was DNF all the way for me - the two CENTS worth of rebuses, the bizarro terms et al.
But I was to blame too. Had TCBY and T _R R _ and put in….BERRA! Yanks manager for all of one season in 1964 (fired after winning AL but losing World Series - on the winning Cardinals team - Joe TORRE!)
Technically, yes, the creator of YOGISMs was before Girardi, but this was an old age slip up. How I could not remember bicentennial after hating all those annoying BICENTENNIAL Minutes is beyond me. (I forgot to all-cap the first BICENTENNIAL but not worth fixing, though explaining and retyping it took longer).
I watched the series with TORRE at the helm, knew both as “former catchers who will never be People’s Sexiest Man Alive” but yikes, an unBERRAble mistake. (No, the pun in the last sentence was worse. Why am I even submitting this? At least go Anonymous, Andrew - if that IS my name…)
DEEPLY unpleasant puzzle. A million abbreviations/short forms of unfun clues/answers. "Leaps on" (seizes as an opportunity)...nope, it's "Jumps on." "Demon Liquor," yes. "Demon Rum," no. Even if "Poli" (instead of "Poly") is OK, shouldn't there be a dash in the clue? "No Big???" It's "No Biggie" or "No Big Deal" No Big....nothing? My brow is in a permanent state of furrow. Not nice for a Sunday morning.
Demon Rum is most definitely a thing in American history. It was more popular in the 19th Century but was still in use during Prohibition. Since then mostly used ironically. (Rum was the first widely sold liquor in the 18th Century - so it was used generically for all liquor) I actually do not remember ever seeing demon liquor. No big might be obnoxious but if it is in use as a post noted above and I think fair for a Sunday. Each generation has its own annoying slang after all. People are complaining about some of the "stretches" in the clues but I don't think these 2 are.
It felt as though this puzzle was doing two different things. The CUTTING CORNERS* thing -- which was easy to see. And so PINCHING PENNIES seemed like part of the same CUTTING CORNERS thing.
And then there was the gray squares in the center thing -- which seemed to be a different thing entirely.
In the meantime, I failed to see the BICENTENNIAL CENTER thing, which was part of the PINCHING PENNIES thing. And that means I couldn't finish the puzzle.
When I got to MAKING ENDS MEET, the gray squares thing with its BUM, CAN, ASS and BUTT (Is Will Shortz doing a bit of trolling here?) finally made sense. But the NE corner remained unsolved. And anyway, my "catchy tunes" were pOPS, not BOPS. I've never heard of BOPS.
An enormously complicated puzzle that proved to be above my pay grade. I admire how much was going on in it, but it was a bit rococo for my tastes.
I am probably in the minority, but feel that STRETCHABUCK is quite a stretch. Nowadays, we stretch the truth, more often than money. Also, I am in the (minority) camp that feels the four iterations of buttocks (meeting at a central black square!) does not pass the breakfast test. Still, will admit that Kurt Vonnegut would have appreciated this visual. Check out his Breakfast of Champions to see what I am referring to.
This put up a fight, which I like, and was gimmick-laden, which I also like . Go big or go home. This one went big.
I'm with @JAE on enjoying seeing "Cheap Thrills" again, and thinking about the cover art. I'd go find it but I sold all my LP's when we downsized, and anyway I don't own a turntable any more. I can find just about anything I want to listen to on line, so there's that, but still...
Some nits that others have mentioned already, viz. MINIPIG and NOBIG, and it took me forever to come up with MARTEN, but it made me smile when I did.
Best Sunday in a while for me, CI and SAD. Consistently Interesting and a Sunday As Desired. Thanks for all the fun.
Stumpsters--Yesterday's kept me up an hour past my bedtime, but I by God finished it and could then get some sleep without thinking about it all night, thank goodness.
The northeast was Very Hard for me because I put in BICENTCENTER, which seems like a totally reasonable "pinching" of two cents. This spot being the only rebus left me puzzling over how PROMteamS might form and why prohibition forbids DEMONisM.
Oh, yes. I was so put off by my DNF in the NE, that I forgot to mention all the horrors in this puzzle. Now, as I start to read the comments, I remember all the things that irked me so much:
It's NO BIGGIE, not NO BIG.
YOGISM????? I do think the discipline is YOGA.
DEALIO??????????? I'm still dealioing with it -- but not well.
These things aren't just bad, they seem sort of unforgiveable -- and you would never expect such awful fill from seasoned pros like these.
I will be honest, looks like I am a complete outlier on this one ... I found this puzzle to be laughably horrendous. It's so bad it's knee slappingly hilarious.
The fill is overwhelmed with three letter abbreviations and weejects. @M&A will be exhausted finding the winner. At some point it started feeling like a grocery store puzzle. Seriously, go back and look at the grid. It's a train wreck.
Then, the Times slush pile editor said, "You think @egsforbreakfast has seen ASS before? Well here you go, one GIANT BUTTHOLE dead center in the Sunday times!" You can't write this kind of comedy as humor is supposed to be believable. Maybe they were still reeling from the swastika grid a few weeks back and thought this would help.
I don't remember seeing a Var. in a long time, but why not misspell things while we're putting together this nonsense.
As I say most Sundays, I'm looking forward to Monday.
Uniclues:
1 My thoughts on the NYTXW personnel budget. 2 Why those with homes on the market keep a mop handy. 3 Agreeing we can tolerate the house wine. 4 Unwelcome Piggly-Wiggly competitors known for selling joy. 5 Composing "Asteroids" after a lackluster box office from "Planets." 6 Medicine balls. 7 The wiggly denials of a guilty seven year old. 8 The blood of them thar skallywags.
1 CUTTING CORNERS, I FEAR 2 OPEN HOUSE TOE ROSIN 3 STRETCHING A BUCK AS ONE (~) 4 NON GRATA YEA-MARTS 5 HOLST MAKING ENDS MEET 6 GET IN SHAPE SPHERES 7 "NOT I" DEALIO ANTICS 8 PIRATE SHIP FOOD DYE (~)
Hey All ! "Turn right where Johnson's barn used to be..." is reminiscing of 12D's clue "Former name of an arena".
Pretty nifty puz. Took a bit to realize the SINGLE was doubled. Had the SS at the beginning, said, Nah, that can't be right, then had the II and said, What in tarhooties is happening? Looked over to the Themer that went with it, and figured out it was STRETCHING A BUCK, and said, Ah, I See! A BUCK is a SINGLE, ala one dollar bill! Being STRETCHed! Nice
Got a big chuckle out of the Center ASSETS. 😁 Go big or go home! Rear-ended in spades. The CAN and BUTT had to also work with the long Across Themers, so kudos on pulling off a clean enough fill with those constraints.
Is a MINI PIG really a thing? Some of y'all say it is. Is it those small pink pigs people have as pets?
ALOHA shirt - fun. EYCK - what now? STANK was in as STuNK. Is there a rule to differentiate twixt the A or U version of those types of words? Like the I before E thing? SAY LESS - odd clue HEH - HEH
Nice puz that held me up quite a bit. Didn't run to Goog, but did end up a FWE (Finished With Errors). After the Almost There message, found my wrongness (quite a few, ala PaRAdESHIP because brain -friedness was setting in), but was able to correct them all, then get the Happy Music.
no love out there for Jan van EYCK, greatest painter ever, and though not the inventor of oil paint, as misidentified by Vasari, certainly the perfector of it? if you don't know his work, find the closertovaneyck (one word) website for some extraordinary macrophotographs.
Oh, yes, thanks for remembering, @kitshef (4:07 a.m.). The reason I had a * next to CUTTING CORNERS was that I was going to mention my unworkable theme idea myself -- only I forgot. This idea is from a while back.
I tried it on Will Nediger, but he couldn't make the grid work. Then @kitshef emailed me (after I alluded to it here) saying he liked the idea and wanted to take a crack at it. But he couldn't make it work either -- although he did come up with a lot of new theme rebus words that neither Will nor I had thought of.
The idea was putting a rebus square with a cutting tool into each of the four corner squares. The four I had, I think, were AXE and SAW (same as here) plus KNIFE and SWORD.
The problem is that when each themer must be in the corner -- with each corner requiring two rebus themers of a rigidly defined order and pattern -- you have really boxed yourself in, to coin a phrase. I'm giving away the idea now because I'm convinced that it can't be done by anyone. Not that it can't be done well, mind you, but that it can't be done at all.
Someone throw me a softball I can catch. This was so out of my league....I wanted TORRE to bench me. I normally don't do Sundays because they've bored me silly. Since I like Sam's puzzles (I'm not familiar with Christina's as much), I thought I'd give this a whirl. A whirl I got. Up/down/sideways/upside down. Where to begin? I'll start by saying that this intrigued the hell out of me. And I do mean hell. Although it started out semi-easy, there were fits to be sure. I circled all the heinie's ...Was I to find some sort of buttocks? Let's see: PINCHING PENNIES kinda hangs on top like toilet paper....Then!..get this! I didn't know the name of the civil rights icon. I was proud as a peacock when I wrote in FANNIE! That had to be it. Nope...STRETCHING A BUCK has an N...NANNIE it was (sigh). I cheated on SSIINNGGLLEE. Ay, Dios mio...I couldn't figure what was going on. Didn't give up...I'm so bound and determined to figure this puppy out. He was a mastiff nipping at my heels. I flew all over the place trying to make sense of this. To very little avail. Rebus?...Double helix? Fill in the blanks? Go back to bed? I swear I stared at this for hours trying to figure out what the joke was. I came to @Rex for help. When he spelled out what was going on, I actually clapped with delight. I saw the light...I was saved. God loves me. So I've had time to really look at my finished grid. It's impressive. All I had to do was think outside the box. Jack jumped at me out of nowhere, but once he stopped boinking, I had time to really smile. Good Sunday puzzle...congratulations to those that figured it out and solved without help. IPSO NON GRATA.
One of the toughest Saturdays in a long time. Expecially that SE corner. Had oHME for a long time until I reviewed the puzzle at the end. Then I realized the circled letters did not make sense as SoW and AXE. Then I SAW the light and had an Aha! moment. Great puzzle for the themer fans. The central naughty words were amusing to the Beavises and Buttheads out there. Good fun. Well done.
Gotta get you on the "Direct Download" bandwagon with Black Ink! It handles lots of features that the Across Lite version you scrape with the Chrome extension aren't covering. In the direct downloaded version the squares are shaded :) Please get in touch if I can help address whatever problem is preventing you downloading the puzzles this way.
Today's acrostic quote o'erflows the senses, wit and poetry. Like @kitshef (4:07) & @Joe DiPinto (8:08) it started slowly for me, then the back-and-forth kicked in and the emergent words stirred up the old endorphins. Even with that minor grammatic hiccup (I think it was the constraint of the grid) this is one of my all-time favorites. I think it's the last that will appear online.
And a fine exit. Compare it to the very first Cox/Rathvon NYT acrostic, September 12, 1999, a gem of a very different sort, and you these how these great minds evolved and bore fruit.
As for their "Language Lab," I continue to stare at that half-solved cryptic cliff -- perhaps for eternity, as the words are in there but I haven't figure out how to crack the nut.
I got SAW early on and immediately went to the SE corner (or lack thereof) and confidently wrote SEE in that space, since the stepped visual looked like a SEESAW. Nope!
Very good puzzle, except for 41Down (Words of defeat). Nobody says "I Lose." We say "I lost."
I did like MAKING ENDS MEET and the corresponding shaded squares, but most of this puzzle just made me want to say AH ME.
Thought at first that there might be a connection between NO BIG and DEALIO two columns over, but, no, it was just two bad answers. Also, you LEAP AT an opportunity not ON one. And does everything come in a MINi version now? MINICOW? MINICHICKEN? MINIPIG?
But it least what makes a red velvet cake red is not HAIR DYE. So at least there’s that.
Acrosticians-Didn't find this one too tough and was helped by a name that appeared in an Acrostic not long ago. I agree that the finished product didn't quite scan. If this really is the last one we can print out, that makes me sad.
My favorite part was the total diss of a certain ELON by contorting to clue it without referencing him.
The part that nearly did me in was that I thought there was a different way to pinch pennies twice: PINennialCER. That is, I thought that a PINCER at the beginning and ends of ENNIAL had pinched the "bicent" -- or two cent -- part of 'bicentennial' right out of existence. P at the beginning worked perfectly for POPS. REC for 'recent' without an "Abbr." part of its clue seemed odd but I plowed on. NRAL is what was wrong enough that it finally made the... penny drop.
Fun SunPuz. The Circles, The Gray Areas, The Rebus Squares, and bonus puzgrid corner chews. Like. M&A solved it on paper, so everything was as the constructioneers had intended it.
Lotsa staff weeject picks: BUM, ASS, CAN, SAW, AXE.
Verrry interestin stuff: YOGISM. MINIPIG. DEALIO. INDIC & GENOMIC. SSIINNGGLLEE. BOPS. SAYLESS is also a good way to economize, btw.
Thanx for gangin up on us, Christina & Samuel folks. Primo job. It was a BUTTE.
Masked & Anonymo9Us
p.s. @RP: Yes! The cats' trainin of U is progressin along quite efficiently. They have now established co-ownership of the beds … a crucial milestone for most pets (other than goldfish).
I was not a fan of the ONE rebus square, which maybe I should have gotten but I didn’t know Demon Rum, or the name of that Arena so I was sort of stabbing in the dark. Rest of it was really fun so I guess I could call it a draw! Lol. Thanks for the great pics, Love seeing the drawings etc. I wish I could get a card too, made my contribution by Pay Pal. Oh well.
Sailing, sailing, over the bounding main; For many a stormy wind shall blow, ere Jack comes home again! Sailing, sailing, over the bounding main; For many a stormy wind shall blow ere Jack comes home again.
re: Acrostic
I found it on the tough side solving online. I'm not sure how I'll make out doing it in the magazine.
Thx, Christina & Samuel; what a doozie of a challenge this was! :)
Thx, @Rex for the NANNIE Helen Burroughs Wikipedia snippet. :)
Very hard (over 2x Sun. avg).
Ironic, in that I had an excellent start in the upper left quad, but soon started getting PINCHed and STRETCHed as I moved down.
I had so many gaffs, it's almost laughable: I hEAR; ReSIN; NON GRATU / STuttERS; onyX (really bad); tOnS.
Took forever to twig on the idea of a rebus, so that CENTER took ages to grok.
Nevertheless, enjoyed the theme when it all finally came together.
The kind of early morning battle I relish. Loved it! :) ___ Matthew Sewell's Sat. Stumper was another beaut! Finished just n. of 2 hrs, with the upper right quad being the toughest part. Being from the NW, and knowing the Seattle school moniker was critical to solving that area of the puz. ___ @Acrosticans: Sounds somewhat intimidating; looking forward to it! 🤞
@Birchbark (11:23 AM)
I'm with you on the Language Lab; chipping away at it periodically. :) ___ Peace 🕊 🇺🇦 ~ Compassion ~ Tolerance ~ Kindness to all 🙏
I’m relatively new to the. Word world but had come to believe that one “gimmick type” per puzzle. This one had rebus(i?), circled letters, stretched letters, grayed squares…. Or fair 😂
Jae @ 1.07, Yes indeed Cheap Thrills is an amazing album, and the cover art is great. And that is true whether you are talking about Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention, or Janis Joplin and Big Brother and the Holding Company!
Well, yes, there are mini-pigs and mini-cows and mini-horses (called "ponies"). You don't need convincing, just exposure.
Interesting puzzle, not too bad, but OMG, what a puerile center meeting place, ugh and yech.
In the contemporary parlance, your "dead tree" comment really triggers me.
Having spent my adult life in publishing, and much of my life in New England, I understand we say "prepress" and not "preprint". And...
I also understand that paper in the US comes from huge tracts of trees sustainably farmed for their use as paper, lumber, mulch, and other things--even some byproducts are used for plastics--that no single tree is used for any single purpose. You may like to count on machines made with strip-mined rare earth metals and gobs of non-recyclable materials which leech poisons into the earth of places where it's dumped and have a high carbon footprint, which run on electricity generated in such ways as to create yet more carbon, over a huge carbon producing grid of servers called "the web" (some of that carbon, but not enough, is soaked up by those huge tracts of tree farms) but don't pretend it's some morally superior decision you're making there, or that you're somehow saving the earth. It's not, and you're not.
Really enjoyable. I lived in north central Kansas for a time and attended events at the BICENTENNIAL CENTER in Salina, so that was a fun surprise. Despite getting that themer quickly and easily, the rest of the puzzle was challenging for me, but a fun challenge. Not knowing for sure what the visual puns would be was part of the challenge, and one of the delights. I was so sure the buck-stretching answer was going to deer-related (going stag?) that I couldn’t see how SSIINNGGLLEE fit the bill for a while even after I filled it in.
Most diabolical puzzle for me in a loooong time. Saturday level PPP difficulty, Thursday level tricky, Sunday level big. The four mini-themes were great, elegantly tied together, yet each with their unique (Thursday) gimmick. BICENTENNIAL CENTER (and consequently the NE) was a mess for a long time because I believed the arena name might be some sort of "pinching" of the word bicentennial; finally figured out pinching the CENT (hey, it's not Thursday!). Didn't help to have 69A shutting down access in both directions: Ancient Greek PLUS an abbreviation PLUS a "variant" EQUALS random letters and EGIS did not disappoint. The SW was another mess for a long time: 58D SS--- beginning with ASISEEIT and MEGS had me dead in the water until I found the back door with EE (WHEE and DONE) and the lightbulb went on for STRETCHINGABUCK. The SW was the last to fall, with PIRATEcopy instead of PIRATESHIP, I thought an illegal copy of a work was antagonistic to the "main" legal copy. "Main" as the ocean was not in my wheelhouse, so PIRATESHIP made no sense. And speaking of wheelhouse killers: HOLST, BEREA, IDEM (instead of Ibid), MARTEN, ANI, EYCK, GENOMIC, YOGISM, NANNIE, MAA, and MINIPIG all of which were in key access points. Muscled my way through with twice my usual Sunday time, but ultimately needed to look up BEREA to close out that final corner. It was an impressive work and monster theme, but ultimately the obscure PPP (for me) tarnished the genuinely masterful challenge with a visit to Slogsville... which *is* an actual place where MINIPIGS frolic freely and townsfolk have enshrined their right to bear EGIS.
DNF. Any name for the BICENTENNIAL CENTER, former or current, is completely outside my experience, and it never occurred to me that a constructor would use a rebus in only one part of a puzzle as part of a smorgasbord of gimmicks. I was too frazzled to take the "1976" as a tipoff or figure out how it connected to PINCHING PENNIES. I don't think I'd have gotten that in a million years. Between that and some other early mistakes, I made a complete hash of the NE. Most of the rest of the grid came to me in time, but there was no fixing that.
Sort of torn on whether EGIS is fair game. It was tagged with "Var."—but is a variant really a variant if no one uses it?
Glancing over this again, it occurs to me that this clue for 40a –
Economizing, as represented twice in 12-down?
– is inelegant, and even sort of wrong. The 40a answer is PINCHING PENNIES, plural. A visual representation of that phrase can contain more than one penny; in fact, it would more accurately do so. Ergo the *phrase* is represented only once in 12-down, regardless of how many CENT rebuses it contains.
Also, I'm struck by how many posters said they pulled MARTEN from some long-ago memory, because I had that experience too! Are we all remembering it from the same place? Was there a marten in a children's story, or a cartoon marten that we grew up with?
I tried Google but found nothing, although it did bring up the FISHER, another, similar animal I remember from somewhere way way back. Where, dammit? (Interestingly, a fisher does not eat fish.)
This is the first Sunday NYT puzzle I decided was not worth completing; this was after I’d done 2/3 of it. SAY LESS? PREPRINT? TCBY is a restaurant? Not worth the effort.
Despise puzzles without a consistent theme. Mixing compresses words in cells with circled and highlighted cells takes all the joy out of solving. Did not enjoy or bother to finish.
Yeah, I got the shaded squares too. Never would've guessed the unbounded joy I was denied hunting them out. I'll take OFF's word for it. That was an easy section for me; others...weren't.
Extreme trouble in the NE, which I was hoping to alleviate by solving 58-down. (I had STRETCHING_____, but no idea how that ended.) But then I seemed to have SS at the start of 58d, which looked impossible. Lots of stuff in that SW was WAY off the wall, led by MINIPIG. Is that supposed to be two words? Because it SURE ISN'T ONE! You play that on me in Scrabble and you'll get challenged in a New York minute.
But the east was no better. BEREA? Wow. I bet the salutatorian finished last in the class. LEAPS...AT? TO? No, it's ON. Seizes eagerly: LEAPSON. Trying for a visual here...adults playing leapfrog? Oh, Agadore, why did you pick THOSE dishes?? It was the shoes, it was the shoes.*
SAYLESS. Sure, I always say that when I mean you've made your point. Such a clever, "slangy" rejoinder. In a MINIPIG's eye.
At the end, I was able to pick up on the huge aha! moment of rebusing the cents, and finish. Toughest Sunday that I completed that I can recall. This one did everything a puzzle can do: wordplay, rebus, circles, shades...the works. In this case the circles and shades each had a SSIINNGGLLEE purpose, taking up a minimum of space, and so are forgiven. Excellent theme and execution, but fill from hell. Birdie anyway.
Wordle birdie too.
*I hope you all saw "The Birdcage;" if not, please do. It is very possibly the best movie ever made.
@DIANA in the puz again. Lots more often than RONDO every year or two. I also put my two CENTs in near the end. Rebus after all the rest, aargh. Wordle bogey, ASI wasn't SEEing IT.
FWIW at this late date … @Geo 9:40 — my brother, former portrayer with his employer, would have you know that Smokey is with the Forest, not Park Service @Anon 12:30 — earlier in my life’s experience, there is also a college in NC @cD 1:39 — in academia, we say preprint when sharing results not yet in publication
NYT - please try to make Sundays fun again. This was a nightmare slog. What do cutting corners and making ends meet have to do with cheap thrills ? Just because you're cutting corners, or making ends meet, doesn't mean you're engaging in a cheap action. And that is only one of many issues with this puzzle, not to mention it is impossible to solve completely online.
Just when I was happy enough hating you Rex, I had to find out you're a cat person. Damn! In good conscience, I cannot continue hating a cat person; thanks for ruining things.
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This is what you get when you order your crossword "fully loaded". And the black hole dead center surrounded by those four words brought out the 10-year-old in me.
ReplyDelete
ReplyDeleteAs a few of you may recollect, I was, for several weeks, the ASS King, pointing out all manner of butt-related clues and answers. I retired a few months ago from this role, because it had become too boring and predictable. A butt here, a fanny there, but just nothing to write home about. Well, slap my ass and call me Sally if I didn’t retire a bit too soon! I almost think that Shortz was holding this one back until he thought no one was paying attention to the anal fixation that runs rampant in his department. And then bam!!! He hits you with the quadruple whammy of CAN, ASS, BUM and BUTT, all surrounding a dark little hole situated squarely between two spindly, spread out legs. The whole setup makes you sure you’re getting a shit-ton (and maybe even a crap-ton) of something really unpleasant blown at you. But for the fact that I liked the puzzle, I’d say it STANK.
Thanks, Christina Iverson and Samuel A. Donaldson, for the Cheap Thrills.
My scorecard says this comment is your personal best.
DeleteCHEAP THRILLS again! I will reiterate, CHEAP THRILLS is an amazing album. The cover art is also pretty amazing.
ReplyDeleteMostly medium. I got seriously hung up in the BICENTENNIAL CENTER area.
It took me a while to realize a rebus was required plus the MARTEN ANI cross almost did me in. I finally dredged up MARTEN from some long ago memory and got the happy music. This was mostly fun and if the ANI clued had been Star Wars or Wheel of Fortune related I would not have typed “mostly”. Mostly liked it.
After seeing the note, I still solved in Across Lite, but kept the NYT page open in my other monitor cuz it showed some extra shaded squares. But it didn't matter; as Rex noted, no big whup. I finished with an error at BERIA crossing IBIX... never can remember how to spell that danged animal. And damned obscure liberal arts colleges???? argh.
ReplyDeleteEveryone, heads up re the Crossword Scraper plugin:
1. Is available for Firefox as well as Chrome;
2. Works on many many crossword pages, not just NYT!
Typeovers: for "It's cried on a slide" had SAFE! (y'know, baseball). And for "Hierarchy level" had TIER. (funfact: the opposite of hierarchy is... anarchy.)
[Spelling Bee: Sat 0, very proud to have my first 5 words be all the pangrams! (honest)]
I had sEtS before MEGS, it made sense to me. If you have a gig in a band you play a few sets. Yeah, the BICENTENNIAALCENTER was a doozy.... I hate when only part of the puzzle is a rebus. The NE took me longer than the rest of the puzzle combined. I very much enjoyed this puzzle I found it unique and thought the cross-referencing element was cool - I normally do not like cross-referencing at all. YOGISM is clunky - is it really a word? and SAYLESS... ugh. I thought the clues for PIRATESHIP and ALAMO were cool.
ReplyDeleteI find there is an inordinate amount of time discussing and bitching about the app and formats. (Rex and others). And I get that. BUT the essence of the puzzle IS the puzzle. I am so stuck in my ways doing the newspaper version in pen. I did use an app years ago and yeah, it was faster, but I really didnt get the same thrill for whatever reason. I do NOT care about time at all. I kind of even take my time if it is going too fast. So this “app talk” is lost on me and a waste of space. Hey, try printing it out and solving in pen if the apps bother you. Solve like God intended you too :) Thanks Sam and Christina - that was two cups of coffee well spent
Main antagonist =pirate ship? Help!
DeleteMain = the sea
DeleteMore help, pls!
DeleteDuring the Spanish colonization of the Americas, the Spanish Main was the collective term for the parts of the Spanish Empire that were on the mainland of the Americas and had coastlines on the Caribbean Sea or Gulf of Mexico
DeleteThe clue for 11d should have been
ReplyDelete• "It gets late early out here", e.g.
Pretty nifty puzzle, imo. Good grid, good clues, good theme tricks. Too bad they couldn't work this into the middle intersection. But they did get a number of other tunes in. "The Planets", "Yes, I'M READY", "DIANA". And, spanning three almost-stacked answers...
"It's hot in here. What is this place, anyway?"
"This is a DISCO INFER-NO, SIR. Burn, baby, burn!"
I’m so jealous that my impatience prevented me from going on that BUTT hunt. Since my grid had no shaded squares, I just ASSumed that 111A was referring to the AXE circled squares, separate from the SAW ones, and I was UTTERly flummoxed. Dumb. Noticing those four ends meeting would have been such a thrill.
ReplyDeleteThis is a tour-de-force for a gimmick-lover like me. You got your circles, your shaded squares, your rebus squares, your whatever you call SSIINNGGLLEE thingy. . . Wowser. Terrific.
Because I was so confused and because Rex’s write-up wasn’t up yet, I had to go to XWord Info, something I wish I had time to do more often. So Christina and Sam met at the ACPT. I’m sure glad they did! (On an ACPT sidenote, I was surprised by the clue for DONE. Do we really shout that? If memory serves, I thought we just raised our finished puzzle up high to attract the attention of one of the monitors. Then we leave the ballroom, head to the lobby, and run our mouths about the solve.)
I found it pretty hard, but a couple of mistakes held me back for a while: “stool” for ROSIN and, like @Alice Pollard, “sets” for MEGS. Oh, and “sea monster” has the same number of letters as PIRATE SHIP.
@Joe Dipinto – terrific idea for the 11D clue.
The clue for TLC and ALBUM made me feel mildly regretful for the kind of mom I was. If one of my kids came in crying from some fall, I’d look at the injured area, tell them they were fine, and send’em back out. No frantic assembling of ice, no Neosporin, no TLC. And I did briefly try my hand at scrapbooking but lost interest and patience after about 2 pages. I remember visiting a high school friend who had shelves of gorgeous scrapbooks. Gorgeous. I bet she had oodles of ready-to-go ice packs and Neosporin, too. On the way home, I did a frantic mental inventory of anything right I was doing as a mom:
1. I’d take them out in the woods after a rain to turn over rocks and logs looking for interesting bugs.
2. I packed them epic April Fool’s Day lunches.
3. I would have them point to the area of whatever to ask exactly where they wanted me to squirt the whipped cream, and then I’d start at that spot and continue squirting right up the length of their arm.
That’s all I could come up with. AH ME.
Went down a rabbit hole investigating exactly what an EPODE is and emerged covered in poetry terms – IAMB, strophe, antistrophe, dactyl, pyrrhic. . . when I got to spondee, I thought screw this.
It’s interesting how we all have our ways of cutting back. Mom will eat pretty much any kind of leftover in the fridge, regardless of its age or state. (Once she burned the crap out of some Eggo waffles but insisted on eating them anyway in the waste-not-want-not spirit. She insisted they tasted fine.) For me, I buy these little ROC retinol capsules – you’re supposed to use one capsule every night all over your face, but they’re too expensive. So I cut a little opening to squeeze out a tiny amount for around my eyes. So one capsule lasts several days. (I had a friend in WV who was very frugal And very eco-conscious. The first time I went to her house, I saw these small pieces of cloth hanging in her backyard, and I was convinced that they were reusable toilet paper squares. Like, she had washed them, and they were hanging out to dry. No, really. I was weak with relief when I used her bathroom and didn’t find a neat stack of these things next to a receptacle where the used ones went. I was expecting some kind of cute explanatory sign. Turns out they were just Tibetan prayer flags.)
There’s a joke about “How do you know you’re flying over Holland” where the answer is “You can see the toilet paper hanging out to dry,”
Delete(I guess the Dutch are thought to be extra frugal?)
Anyone who calls this easy-medium is nuts.
ReplyDeleteEGIS: not a thing. MINIPIG: apparently a thing if you Google it, but should have been clued "trendy swine pet" or something. NONGRATA: should have been clued with "persona." GENOMIC: not a thing nor an adjective; GENOMICs is a thing. YOGISM: not really a thing; maybe okay clued to Berra but even then, a stretch. ACH is clued (sort of?) to mean "alas" (I guess?) in German -- yuck. NOBIG: not a thing; it's NO BIGgie or NO BIG deal. INDIC: ouch, but sort of okay.
ReplyDeleteThis was probably the worst Sunday in a year for making up words. What a slog. "Creative" doesn't mean "make up words."
I so agree!
DeleteI also agree, way too many made up words of which yogism was the worst.
DeleteSame here. Hated the words you pointed out and actually INDIC being my biggest complaint/groaner. Also hated ISL, MAA, EYCK (don’t know the artist and those letters could be anything and I’d have to believe it), UTE, BEREA, TORRE, and probably some others I can’t immediately find. Didn’t mind the theme so much as hated the fill.
Delete-Brando
OMG let the ass parade begin.
ReplyDeleteOf course, the “ends” don’t actually meet. They just approach.
Loved the theme. Vaguely reminiscent of one @Nancy came up with a while back, that alas never came to fruition.
Acrostic solvers: I thought I was headed for an epic fail when clues A-P yielded only one answer. Fortunately, the last column had a few I could get so while it was still tough overall, at least it was possible.
ReplyDeleteSomehow Rex enjoyed it, I guess because of tracking down the 4 BUTT-ASS answers.
ReplyDeleteMe, not so much. I used the NYT website so did not have to figure that gray-area stuff.
But still, yet another sad-ass (oh, hey, there's that word ASS!) Will Shortz Sunday #NYTXW puzzle.
Seriously, it's become more emotionally satisfying that I solve the daily #Wordle rather than #NYTXW.
The previous 2 Sundays were quite good, even enjoyable. As soon as I saw the grid today I knew I would take a pass. Of all the dumbass puzzles we've had this looks like the dumbassest. I can use the free time and there's always the LAT if I start jonesing.
ReplyDeleteHand up for E/NE struggle with the rebus CENTs and MARTEN, ANI, DEMON RUM, EGIS, etc. Had to give up and sleep on it, but the fog cleared at the break of day. Impressive construction and clever theme. I'm getting better at visual puns, but still have room for improvement.
ReplyDeleteVery enjoyable write-up, Rex.
@egsforbreakfast--thanks for providing big laughs at the start of my day!
I found this puzzle batshit crazy and totally endearing. I loved how they pulled out all the stops. First off, you have the zigzaggedly sawn-off NW and SE with their CUTTING CORNERS themer and their silly encircled CUTTING tools. Then you have [CENT]s being pinched/squished in the [Former name of a Kansas arena that commemorated a 1976 U.S. anniversary]!! (All I can say to that clue is “Whaaa ?”) Next, there’s SSIINNGGLLEE [Not in a relationship] being stretched like a rubber band to go with STRETCHING A BUCK. And if all that wasn’t sufficiently deranged, you’ve got the flowering of CAN, BUM, BUTT and ASS in the middle to illustrate MAKING ENDS MEET! Absolute UTTER madness…with GUSTO! What’s not to like?
ReplyDeleteAnd it was no pushover. I found several areas of this grid quite challenging, particularly in the west. Like others, I was sure that [Parts of a gig] were sEtS, which caused havoc with PANAM and NOBIG (which I think is more in the language as NO BIGgie). As for the answers crossing SSIINNGGLLEE, the MINIPIG was unknown to me, NONGRATA was hard to see without “persona,” GENOMIC was an unexpected sort of map, and the small SW corner was empty except for OWEN [Wilson] for far too long. I also stayed blind to SPHERES [Round figures] thanks to effective misdirection, and thought DEALIO was going to be DEALIe. For a while I wondered if this insane puzzle was going to defeat me, but when I finally grasped the repetition of letters in the stretched SINGLE, I was able to start filling in the elusive crossing answers, and finished clean, just over my average time. Whew!
Sundays absolutely defeat me in relation to uniclues, but I have one left over from yesterday (didn’t get a chance to post on Saturday).
UNICLUE:
** It begins “Blessed are they who eat their fiber and hydrate well, for the regularity that descends upon them is the gift of God (and their own admirable habits)…”
** LOWER G.I. PSALM ONE
[SB: Friday, 0; yd, -3. I bow to your superior SB skills, @okanaganer – all the pangrams right off the bat! – Wow and more wow. I missed two appalling should’ves (both of which were pangrams!) and this, which I don’t think ever would have occurred to me and which is hyphenated in a lot of sources.]
Similarly to @okanaganer, when the puzzle tells me it has “features” I can’t see in AcrossLite, I just go back to the NYT site and glance at the “Newspaper Version” option and it instantly tells me everything I need to know in order to do it on AL. (I know some like Puzzazz or Black Ink but I’m just too attached to AL. Hallelujah for Crossword Scraper!)
ReplyDeleteA rare day indeed — Rex liked the puzzle more than I did! Not that I disliked it, but still.
@LMS - I love reading your hilarious stories of your mom, and now we get to actually watch them? Keep ‘em coming! The expression on your mom’s face is priceless. “It’s perfectly fine, dear (struggles to swallow).” I am like her in that I almost never throw away leftovers, but I would have thrown out those Eggos. I think I inherited the trait from my grandmother. I visited her once and she didn’t even kiss me before asking “Do you like pomegranate juice?” “Uh … sure, why?” “Oh, thank heavens. Your uncle bought some when he was staying here and I don’t like it. You have to drink it all.” The Depression sticks with ya.
ReplyDeleteI loved the puzzle too. I thought BICENTENNIAL CENTER was a bit of a stretch - an arena in Kansas that doesn’t even exist anymore? But I’m sure there weren’t many options with two CENTs. That part took the longest (hi, @ Alice Pollard) but once I grokked the rebuses it was easy. But unlike you, I love it when a theme has all kinds of different ways of expressing itself.
Hard not to picture four people mooning each other in the middle.
I liked the nearby series of “As I see it ..” followed by “Say less,” as in “Nada.” Alamo is there too, trying to fit in with Nada by being Spanish. If you go to San Antonio, yes, you do have to visit the Alamo for its history, but then go and see the other four or five old Spanish missions outside of town. They are gorgeous and a nice escape from the crowds at the Alamo.
I also liked SSIINNGGLLEE next to STAMMERS.
@jJoe Dipinto -- My favorite Berra quote, because it makes me smile as well as wow at its underlying wisdom is: "If the world were perfect, it wouldn't be."
ReplyDeleteAh, a lollapuzoola. A melting pot of gimmicks that kept me on the hunt throughout. An everything-but-the-kitchen-sink theme … about paring down! Punny clues, funny clues. Sledding downhill solving areas, slashing-through-vines areas. Crosswords as vaudeville. Hey, it’s Super Sunday and this is the perfect puzzle for it!
ReplyDeleteWhat a show! Please bask in my applause, Christina and Samuel. This was a hoot, and thank you so much for it!
It’s hard to garner the motivation to be impressed by the intricacies of the construction when the rest of it suffers so badly. Who ever says “AH ME” ? When was the last time you heard or said “NO BIG” (it’s ok to admit if it was never). Is that ACH supposed to be some cutesy German joke - hysterical. There are so many ways to clue SAL and we get UNA MARGARITA.
ReplyDeleteWait, we’re not done yet - why don’t we take our “CrossWord” puzzle and have EGIS cross INDIC so as not to disparage people who don’t really like words but do crossword puzzles anyway. Sure, you want a YOGISM - go ahead, have fun, the more the merrier. While we’re at it, can we throw in a UNES, MAA, ANI and a DEALIO as well.
And just to show that we are an equal opportunity offender, we will include not only the perfunctory ASS for the 43rd day in a row, but today we will also include three bonus synonyms !
NO SIR - not for me. Just a mess of a GRID - obtuse and disjoint theme and overall rough fill.
ReplyDeleteThe CRUSADERs
I LOSE, I FEAR, ID-ED, I MET, I’M READY?? TEDX + BEREA was the icing.
I did like DEMON RUM and PROM DATES.
We’ve seen good puzzles from both of these constructors previously - don’t know what happened here. Almost as if they tried to do much and just couldn’t quite get there. Next time try to SAY LESS.
The Schramms
@kitshef re Acrostic – I got the "proper name" answers at N, P and E first. After that I was getting more of the late alphabet answers as well, but I had a nice back-and-forth going on so I finished fairly quickly.
ReplyDeleteI don't think the quote makes grammatic sense exactly? Part of it seems to be a sentence fragment. That confused me a little.
MINIPIGS is a thing, for sure. I thought I knew my animals (way more so than plants), but MARTEN was almost new to me, registering only the very, very faintest blip in my brain.
ReplyDeleteThe East/Northeast region held us up for a long time. Even after we figured out the CENT thing, we had a hard time, until we recognized that if one leaves the square completely dark (leaving out the whole CENT) and that this omission also applied to the crosses, it works. (We were leaving in a C or a T...) Oy.
And, many other answers were shortened - abbreviations, "informal", in brief, or otherwise - adding even more challenge. Almost PPP-ish... Not sure I enjoyed those so much.
But this was a very original, challenging puzzle. Thanks to Christina and Sam!
It took me to my last themer - SSIINNGGLLEE - to get it. Not so tthhrriilleedd as others.
ReplyDeleteWhy would anyone want to put a butthole in the center of their puzzle? My two CENTS is it's a meta thing for all the the crossword excrement to be found throughout. Anytime I found myself wondering where the constructors found a particularly bad entry like YOGISM or DEALIO I'd just look at that central black square and it would all make sense.
ReplyDeleteThe real low point for me came at the end when I was finishing off that NE section and trying to make BICENTENNIAL fit. Just to even begin that I had to put BOPS in at 12A. It was one of the many moments when I had to mentally hold my nose because the fill just STANKeth.
Congratulations to the constructors on getting this thing out. Now go find a plunger and see if you can get it to flush.
Amy: as a child of parents who were children in the Depression, this frugal solver rates the puzzle as a real bargain! Really swell.
ReplyDeleteLove the Ida and Alfie update, Rex.
NOBIG joins “My B” (for “my bad”) as something I’ve heard the hip youths say but I don’t understand the necessity for. Probably because I am neither hip nor a youth.
ReplyDeleteNo more rebuses! The cardinal rule of crosswords is one letter per square; I will die on this hill. I must also agree with OFL; there is no such thing as a "mini" pig. Another horrible slog (in spots) where I sailed through others. This puzzle made me MOAN.
ReplyDeletePsst…before an angry Park Service ranger jumps in, he’s just “Smokey Bear,” no definite article.
ReplyDeleteAs much as I have always known that "Smokey" is an intentional misspelling of the adjectival form of Smoke (i.e., smoky), and used only in the name Smokey Bear, I still spent a few "WTF' moments staring at my last entry, 127A. As we say in Massachusetts, light finally dawned on Marblehead.
ReplyDeleteNot happy about seeing my evil reflective twin here, though.
But still a first class Sunday puzzle.
This was DNF all the way for me - the two CENTS worth of rebuses, the bizarro terms et al.
ReplyDeleteBut I was to blame too. Had TCBY and T _R R _ and put in….BERRA! Yanks manager for all of one season in 1964 (fired after winning AL but losing World Series - on the winning Cardinals team - Joe TORRE!)
Technically, yes, the creator of YOGISMs was before Girardi, but this was an old age slip up. How I could not remember bicentennial after hating all those annoying BICENTENNIAL Minutes is beyond me. (I forgot to all-cap the first BICENTENNIAL but not worth fixing, though explaining and retyping it took longer).
I watched the series with TORRE at the helm, knew both as “former catchers who will never be People’s Sexiest Man Alive” but yikes, an unBERRAble mistake. (No, the pun in the last sentence was worse. Why am I even submitting this? At least go Anonymous, Andrew - if that IS my name…)
DEEPLY unpleasant puzzle. A million abbreviations/short forms of unfun clues/answers. "Leaps on" (seizes as an opportunity)...nope, it's "Jumps on." "Demon Liquor," yes. "Demon Rum," no. Even if "Poli" (instead of "Poly") is OK, shouldn't there be a dash in the clue? "No Big???" It's "No Biggie" or "No Big Deal" No Big....nothing? My brow is in a permanent state of furrow. Not nice for a Sunday morning.
ReplyDeleteDemon Rum is most definitely a thing in American history. It was more popular in the 19th Century but was still in use during Prohibition. Since then mostly used ironically. (Rum was the first widely sold liquor in the 18th Century - so it was used generically for all liquor) I actually do not remember ever seeing demon liquor.
DeleteNo big might be obnoxious but if it is in use as a post noted above and I think fair for a Sunday. Each generation has its own annoying slang after all.
People are complaining about some of the "stretches" in the clues but I don't think these 2 are.
It felt as though this puzzle was doing two different things. The CUTTING CORNERS* thing -- which was easy to see. And so PINCHING PENNIES seemed like part of the same CUTTING CORNERS thing.
ReplyDeleteAnd then there was the gray squares in the center thing -- which seemed to be a different thing entirely.
In the meantime, I failed to see the BICENTENNIAL CENTER thing, which was part of the PINCHING PENNIES thing. And that means I couldn't finish the puzzle.
When I got to MAKING ENDS MEET, the gray squares thing with its BUM, CAN, ASS and BUTT (Is Will Shortz doing a bit of trolling here?) finally made sense. But the NE corner remained unsolved. And anyway, my "catchy tunes" were pOPS, not BOPS. I've never heard of BOPS.
An enormously complicated puzzle that proved to be above my pay grade. I admire how much was going on in it, but it was a bit rococo for my tastes.
I am probably in the minority, but feel that STRETCHABUCK is quite a stretch. Nowadays, we stretch the truth, more often than money. Also,
ReplyDeleteI am in the (minority) camp that feels the four iterations of buttocks (meeting at a central black square!) does not pass the breakfast test. Still, will admit that Kurt Vonnegut would have appreciated this visual. Check out his Breakfast of Champions to see what I am referring to.
tc
This put up a fight, which I like, and was gimmick-laden, which I also like . Go big or go home. This one went big.
ReplyDeleteI'm with @JAE on enjoying seeing "Cheap Thrills" again, and thinking about the cover art. I'd go find it but I sold all my LP's when we downsized, and anyway I don't own a turntable any more. I can find just about anything I want to listen to on line, so there's that, but still...
Some nits that others have mentioned already, viz. MINIPIG and NOBIG, and it took me forever to come up with MARTEN, but it made me smile when I did.
Best Sunday in a while for me, CI and SAD. Consistently Interesting and a Sunday As Desired.
Thanks for all the fun.
Stumpsters--Yesterday's kept me up an hour past my bedtime, but I by God finished it and could then get some sleep without thinking about it all night, thank goodness.
The northeast was Very Hard for me because I put in BICENTCENTER, which seems like a totally reasonable "pinching" of two cents. This spot being the only rebus left me puzzling over how PROMteamS might form and why prohibition forbids DEMONisM.
ReplyDeleteOh, yes. I was so put off by my DNF in the NE, that I forgot to mention all the horrors in this puzzle. Now, as I start to read the comments, I remember all the things that irked me so much:
ReplyDeleteIt's NO BIGGIE, not NO BIG.
YOGISM????? I do think the discipline is YOGA.
DEALIO??????????? I'm still dealioing with it -- but not well.
These things aren't just bad, they seem sort of unforgiveable -- and you would never expect such awful fill from seasoned pros like these.
I will be honest, looks like I am a complete outlier on this one ... I found this puzzle to be laughably horrendous. It's so bad it's knee slappingly hilarious.
ReplyDeleteThe fill is overwhelmed with three letter abbreviations and weejects. @M&A will be exhausted finding the winner. At some point it started feeling like a grocery store puzzle. Seriously, go back and look at the grid. It's a train wreck.
Then, the Times slush pile editor said, "You think @egsforbreakfast has seen ASS before? Well here you go, one GIANT BUTTHOLE dead center in the Sunday times!" You can't write this kind of comedy as humor is supposed to be believable. Maybe they were still reeling from the swastika grid a few weeks back and thought this would help.
I don't remember seeing a Var. in a long time, but why not misspell things while we're putting together this nonsense.
As I say most Sundays, I'm looking forward to Monday.
Uniclues:
1 My thoughts on the NYTXW personnel budget.
2 Why those with homes on the market keep a mop handy.
3 Agreeing we can tolerate the house wine.
4 Unwelcome Piggly-Wiggly competitors known for selling joy.
5 Composing "Asteroids" after a lackluster box office from "Planets."
6 Medicine balls.
7 The wiggly denials of a guilty seven year old.
8 The blood of them thar skallywags.
1 CUTTING CORNERS, I FEAR
2 OPEN HOUSE TOE ROSIN
3 STRETCHING A BUCK AS ONE (~)
4 NON GRATA YEA-MARTS
5 HOLST MAKING ENDS MEET
6 GET IN SHAPE SPHERES
7 "NOT I" DEALIO ANTICS
8 PIRATE SHIP FOOD DYE (~)
Hey All !
ReplyDelete"Turn right where Johnson's barn used to be..." is reminiscing of 12D's clue "Former name of an arena".
Pretty nifty puz. Took a bit to realize the SINGLE was doubled. Had the SS at the beginning, said, Nah, that can't be right, then had the II and said, What in tarhooties is happening? Looked over to the Themer that went with it, and figured out it was STRETCHING A BUCK, and said, Ah, I See! A BUCK is a SINGLE, ala one dollar bill! Being STRETCHed! Nice
Got a big chuckle out of the Center ASSETS. 😁 Go big or go home! Rear-ended in spades. The CAN and BUTT had to also work with the long Across Themers, so kudos on pulling off a clean enough fill with those constraints.
Is a MINI PIG really a thing? Some of y'all say it is. Is it those small pink pigs people have as pets?
ALOHA shirt - fun.
EYCK - what now?
STANK was in as STuNK. Is there a rule to differentiate twixt the A or U version of those types of words? Like the I before E thing?
SAY LESS - odd clue
HEH - HEH
Nice puz that held me up quite a bit. Didn't run to Goog, but did end up a FWE (Finished With Errors). After the Almost There message, found my wrongness (quite a few, ala PaRAdESHIP because brain -friedness was setting in), but was able to correct them all, then get the Happy Music.
Gonna get my NON GRATA BUTT outta here.
Three F's
RooMonster
DarrinV
no love out there for Jan van EYCK, greatest painter ever, and though not the inventor of oil paint, as misidentified by Vasari, certainly the perfector of it? if you don't know his work, find the closertovaneyck (one word) website for some extraordinary macrophotographs.
ReplyDeleteJoe, Nobody goes there anymore. It's too crowded.
ReplyDeleteOh, yes, thanks for remembering, @kitshef (4:07 a.m.). The reason I had a * next to CUTTING CORNERS was that I was going to mention my unworkable theme idea myself -- only I forgot. This idea is from a while back.
ReplyDeleteI tried it on Will Nediger, but he couldn't make the grid work. Then @kitshef emailed me (after I alluded to it here) saying he liked the idea and wanted to take a crack at it. But he couldn't make it work either -- although he did come up with a lot of new theme rebus words that neither Will nor I had thought of.
The idea was putting a rebus square with a cutting tool into each of the four corner squares. The four I had, I think, were AXE and SAW (same as here) plus KNIFE and SWORD.
The problem is that when each themer must be in the corner -- with each corner requiring two rebus themers of a rigidly defined order and pattern -- you have really boxed yourself in, to coin a phrase. I'm giving away the idea now because I'm convinced that it can't be done by anyone. Not that it can't be done well, mind you, but that it can't be done at all.
Someone throw me a softball I can catch. This was so out of my league....I wanted TORRE to bench me.
ReplyDeleteI normally don't do Sundays because they've bored me silly. Since I like Sam's puzzles (I'm not familiar with Christina's as much), I thought I'd give this a whirl.
A whirl I got. Up/down/sideways/upside down. Where to begin?
I'll start by saying that this intrigued the hell out of me. And I do mean hell. Although it started out semi-easy, there were fits to be sure.
I circled all the heinie's ...Was I to find some sort of buttocks? Let's see: PINCHING PENNIES kinda hangs on top like toilet paper....Then!..get this! I didn't know the name of the civil rights icon. I was proud as a peacock when I wrote in FANNIE! That had to be it. Nope...STRETCHING A BUCK has an N...NANNIE it was (sigh).
I cheated on SSIINNGGLLEE. Ay, Dios mio...I couldn't figure what was going on. Didn't give up...I'm so bound and determined to figure this puppy out. He was a mastiff nipping at my heels.
I flew all over the place trying to make sense of this. To very little avail. Rebus?...Double helix? Fill in the blanks? Go back to bed?
I swear I stared at this for hours trying to figure out what the joke was. I came to @Rex for help. When he spelled out what was going on, I actually clapped with delight. I saw the light...I was saved. God loves me.
So I've had time to really look at my finished grid. It's impressive. All I had to do was think outside the box. Jack jumped at me out of nowhere, but once he stopped boinking, I had time to really smile.
Good Sunday puzzle...congratulations to those that figured it out and solved without help.
IPSO NON GRATA.
One of the toughest Saturdays in a long time. Expecially that SE corner. Had oHME for a long time until I reviewed the puzzle at the end. Then I realized the circled letters did not make sense as SoW and AXE. Then I SAW the light and had an Aha! moment. Great puzzle for the themer fans. The central naughty words were amusing to the Beavises and Buttheads out there. Good fun. Well done.
ReplyDeleteGotta get you on the "Direct Download" bandwagon with Black Ink! It handles lots of features that the Across Lite version you scrape with the Chrome extension aren't covering. In the direct downloaded version the squares are shaded :) Please get in touch if I can help address whatever problem is preventing you downloading the puzzles this way.
ReplyDeleteHere's my favorite Yogism:
ReplyDelete"Always go to other people's funerals, otherwise they won't come to yours."
Today's acrostic quote o'erflows the senses, wit and poetry. Like @kitshef (4:07) & @Joe DiPinto (8:08) it started slowly for me, then the back-and-forth kicked in and the emergent words stirred up the old endorphins. Even with that minor grammatic hiccup (I think it was the constraint of the grid) this is one of my all-time favorites. I think it's the last that will appear online.
ReplyDeleteAnd a fine exit. Compare it to the very first Cox/Rathvon NYT acrostic, September 12, 1999, a gem of a very different sort, and you these how these great minds evolved and bore fruit.
As for their "Language Lab," I continue to stare at that half-solved cryptic cliff -- perhaps for eternity, as the words are in there but I haven't figure out how to crack the nut.
A Yogism is like an orgasm except with laughing.
ReplyDeleteI've always liked, "I'd give my right arm to be ambidextrous."
A friend told me this was a Yogism, but I checked and it isn't:
"In theory, there's no difference between theory and practice, but in practice there is."
Wait, what?
Enjoy the game. I'm going to try not to make a minipig of myself from the snacking.
Hey, @Whatsername - Are you ready for some football?
ReplyDeleteI got SAW early on and immediately went to the SE corner (or lack thereof) and confidently wrote SEE in that space, since the stepped visual looked like a SEESAW. Nope!
ReplyDeleteVery good puzzle, except for 41Down (Words of defeat). Nobody says "I Lose." We say "I lost."
I did like MAKING ENDS MEET and the corresponding shaded squares, but most of this puzzle just made me want to say AH ME.
ReplyDeleteThought at first that there might be a connection between NO BIG and DEALIO two columns over, but, no, it was just two bad answers. Also, you LEAP AT an opportunity not ON one. And does everything come in a MINi version now? MINICOW? MINICHICKEN? MINIPIG?
But it least what makes a red velvet cake red is not HAIR DYE. So at least there’s that.
The only thing left out of this puzzle was
ReplyDeleteTHEKITCHENSINK
And had that had been included, I might have respected the 🧩. 😂
Harumph! (They left that out too.)
😂😜😂
Acrosticians-Didn't find this one too tough and was helped by a name that appeared in an Acrostic not long ago. I agree that the finished product didn't quite scan. If this really is the last one we can print out, that makes me sad.
ReplyDeleteMy favorite part was the total diss of a certain ELON by contorting to clue it without referencing him.
ReplyDeleteThe part that nearly did me in was that I thought there was a different way to pinch pennies twice: PINennialCER. That is, I thought that a PINCER at the beginning and ends of ENNIAL had pinched the "bicent" -- or two cent -- part of 'bicentennial' right out of existence. P at the beginning worked perfectly for POPS. REC for 'recent' without an "Abbr." part of its clue seemed odd but I plowed on. NRAL is what was wrong enough that it finally made the... penny drop.
Fun SunPuz. The Circles, The Gray Areas, The Rebus Squares, and bonus puzgrid corner chews. Like.
ReplyDeleteM&A solved it on paper, so everything was as the constructioneers had intended it.
Lotsa staff weeject picks: BUM, ASS, CAN, SAW, AXE.
Verrry interestin stuff: YOGISM. MINIPIG. DEALIO. INDIC & GENOMIC. SSIINNGGLLEE. BOPS.
SAYLESS is also a good way to economize, btw.
Thanx for gangin up on us, Christina & Samuel folks. Primo job. It was a BUTTE.
Masked & Anonymo9Us
p.s. @RP: Yes! The cats' trainin of U is progressin along quite efficiently. They have now established co-ownership of the beds … a crucial milestone for most pets (other than goldfish).
biter beast alert:
**gruntz**
I was not a fan of the ONE rebus square, which maybe I should have gotten but I didn’t know Demon Rum, or the name of that Arena so I was sort of stabbing in the dark. Rest of it was really fun so I guess I could call it a draw! Lol. Thanks for the great pics, Love seeing the drawings etc. I wish I could get a card too, made my contribution by Pay Pal. Oh well.
ReplyDelete@gunner
ReplyDeleteSailing, sailing, over the bounding main;
For many a stormy wind shall blow, ere Jack comes home again!
Sailing, sailing, over the bounding main;
For many a stormy wind shall blow ere Jack comes home again.
re: Acrostic
I found it on the tough side solving online. I'm not sure how I'll make out doing it in the magazine.
@Dr A
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure it matters, but there are two rebus (cent) squares.
Red velvet cake doesn't depend on food dye, according to most web sites.
ReplyDeleteThx, Christina & Samuel; what a doozie of a challenge this was! :)
ReplyDeleteThx, @Rex for the NANNIE Helen Burroughs Wikipedia snippet. :)
Very hard (over 2x Sun. avg).
Ironic, in that I had an excellent start in the upper left quad, but soon started getting PINCHed and STRETCHed as I moved down.
I had so many gaffs, it's almost laughable: I hEAR; ReSIN; NON GRATU / STuttERS; onyX (really bad); tOnS.
Took forever to twig on the idea of a rebus, so that CENTER took ages to grok.
Nevertheless, enjoyed the theme when it all finally came together.
The kind of early morning battle I relish. Loved it! :)
___
Matthew Sewell's Sat. Stumper was another beaut! Finished just n. of 2 hrs, with the upper right quad being the toughest part. Being from the NW, and knowing the Seattle school moniker was critical to solving that area of the puz.
___
@Acrosticans: Sounds somewhat intimidating; looking forward to it! 🤞
@Birchbark (11:23 AM)
I'm with you on the Language Lab; chipping away at it periodically. :)
___
Peace 🕊 🇺🇦 ~ Compassion ~ Tolerance ~ Kindness to all 🙏
My hometown, Salina, KS, home of the former Bicentennial Center (now Tony's Pizza Events Center) makes it into the NYT crossword! Woohoo!
ReplyDeleteFound it to be very challenging.
ReplyDeleteI’m relatively new to the. Word world but had come to believe that one “gimmick type” per puzzle. This one had rebus(i?), circled letters, stretched letters, grayed squares…. Or fair 😂
Jae @ 1.07, Yes indeed Cheap Thrills is an amazing album, and the cover art is great. And that is true whether you are talking about Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention, or Janis Joplin and Big Brother and the Holding Company!
ReplyDeleteWell, yes, there are mini-pigs and mini-cows and mini-horses (called "ponies"). You don't need convincing, just exposure.
ReplyDeleteInteresting puzzle, not too bad, but OMG, what a puerile center meeting place, ugh and yech.
In the contemporary parlance, your "dead tree" comment really triggers me.
Having spent my adult life in publishing, and much of my life in New England, I understand we say "prepress" and not "preprint". And...
I also understand that paper in the US comes from huge tracts of trees sustainably farmed for their use as paper, lumber, mulch, and other things--even some byproducts are used for plastics--that no single tree is used for any single purpose. You may like to count on machines made with strip-mined rare earth metals and gobs of non-recyclable materials which leech poisons into the earth of places where it's dumped and have a high carbon footprint, which run on electricity generated in such ways as to create yet more carbon, over a huge carbon producing grid of servers called "the web" (some of that carbon, but not enough, is soaked up by those huge tracts of tree farms) but don't pretend it's some morally superior decision you're making there, or that you're somehow saving the earth. It's not, and you're not.
Good point in your comments about paper vs. computer
DeleteEnjoyed today's theme. Loathed the fill.
ReplyDeleteYOGISM, INDIC, EGIS, MINIPIGS, GENOMIC, etc.
I'm glad Rex liked it. It was a slog for me.
Really enjoyable. I lived in north central Kansas for a time and attended events at the BICENTENNIAL CENTER in Salina, so that was a fun surprise. Despite getting that themer quickly and easily, the rest of the puzzle was challenging for me, but a fun challenge. Not knowing for sure what the visual puns would be was part of the challenge, and one of the delights. I was so sure the buck-stretching answer was going to deer-related (going stag?) that I couldn’t see how SSIINNGGLLEE fit the bill for a while even after I filled it in.
ReplyDeleteHad a feeling Rex would like this because I hated it.
ReplyDeleteThe rebus squares were totally non-obvious, making the NW a mess. Some of the clues were incomprehensible.
I did get the gray squares in the PDF version and liked the "ends meet" thing, but that was about it.
This was a DNF, probably my first Sunday DNF in a couple years.
Did I mention I hated this puzzle?
Really wanted YOGASM instead of YOGISM...
ReplyDeleteJoaquin: Am I ready for some football? Oh well yeah you might say that. Eagles are going to be tough but I am looking forward to it.
ReplyDeleteMost diabolical puzzle for me in a loooong time. Saturday level PPP difficulty, Thursday level tricky, Sunday level big. The four mini-themes were great, elegantly tied together, yet each with their unique (Thursday) gimmick. BICENTENNIAL CENTER (and consequently the NE) was a mess for a long time because I believed the arena name might be some sort of "pinching" of the word bicentennial; finally figured out pinching the CENT (hey, it's not Thursday!). Didn't help to have 69A shutting down access in both directions: Ancient Greek PLUS an abbreviation PLUS a "variant" EQUALS random letters and EGIS did not disappoint. The SW was another mess for a long time: 58D SS--- beginning with ASISEEIT and MEGS had me dead in the water until I found the back door with EE (WHEE and DONE) and the lightbulb went on for STRETCHINGABUCK. The SW was the last to fall, with PIRATEcopy instead of PIRATESHIP, I thought an illegal copy of a work was antagonistic to the "main" legal copy. "Main" as the ocean was not in my wheelhouse, so PIRATESHIP made no sense. And speaking of wheelhouse killers: HOLST, BEREA, IDEM (instead of Ibid), MARTEN, ANI, EYCK, GENOMIC, YOGISM, NANNIE, MAA, and MINIPIG all of which were in key access points. Muscled my way through with twice my usual Sunday time, but ultimately needed to look up BEREA to close out that final corner. It was an impressive work and monster theme, but ultimately the obscure PPP (for me) tarnished the genuinely masterful challenge with a visit to Slogsville... which *is* an actual place where MINIPIGS frolic freely and townsfolk have enshrined their right to bear EGIS.
ReplyDeleteDNF. Any name for the BICENTENNIAL CENTER, former or current, is completely outside my experience, and it never occurred to me that a constructor would use a rebus in only one part of a puzzle as part of a smorgasbord of gimmicks. I was too frazzled to take the "1976" as a tipoff or figure out how it connected to PINCHING PENNIES. I don't think I'd have gotten that in a million years. Between that and some other early mistakes, I made a complete hash of the NE. Most of the rest of the grid came to me in time, but there was no fixing that.
ReplyDeleteSort of torn on whether EGIS is fair game. It was tagged with "Var."—but is a variant really a variant if no one uses it?
Good point about no one using egos now. But I guess if HAS BEEN used Shortz will let it in.
ReplyDeleteGlancing over this again, it occurs to me that this clue for 40a –
ReplyDeleteEconomizing, as represented twice in 12-down?
– is inelegant, and even sort of wrong. The 40a answer is PINCHING PENNIES, plural. A visual representation of that phrase can contain more than one penny; in fact, it would more accurately do so. Ergo the *phrase* is represented only once in 12-down, regardless of how many CENT rebuses it contains.
Also, I'm struck by how many posters said they pulled MARTEN from some long-ago memory, because I had that experience too! Are we all remembering it from the same place? Was there a marten in a children's story, or a cartoon marten that we grew up with?
I tried Google but found nothing, although it did bring up the FISHER, another, similar animal I remember from somewhere way way back. Where, dammit? (Interestingly, a fisher does not eat fish.)
Anyway, go back and watch the game. :-)
This is the first Sunday NYT puzzle I decided was not worth completing; this was after I’d done 2/3 of it. SAY LESS? PREPRINT? TCBY is a restaurant? Not worth the effort.
ReplyDeleteI was told once that Will didn't think UREA passed the breakfast table test. I guess it's all hit the fan now.
ReplyDeleteDespise puzzles without a consistent theme. Mixing compresses words in cells with circled and highlighted cells takes all the joy out of solving. Did not enjoy or bother to finish.
ReplyDeleteThis reminds me of one of those undecided Thanksgiving entrees that mix your fave FOWLs together. It's a ThurSunday.
ReplyDeleteAnd it even has (sigh) a rebus - or two. Just to put in my two CENTs, I am not a fan of the rebi. You knew that, right?
I started from the middleish out, since my eye espyed those shady areas. BUTT, ASS you know, that was a BUM steer. CAN you dig?
I'll go now before my spellcheck runs out of red squiggly lines. AXE me no questions. You SAW that coming.
Lady Di
Yeah, I got the shaded squares too. Never would've guessed the unbounded joy I was denied hunting them out. I'll take OFF's word for it. That was an easy section for me; others...weren't.
ReplyDeleteExtreme trouble in the NE, which I was hoping to alleviate by solving 58-down. (I had STRETCHING_____, but no idea how that ended.) But then I seemed to have SS at the start of 58d, which looked impossible. Lots of stuff in that SW was WAY off the wall, led by MINIPIG. Is that supposed to be two words? Because it SURE ISN'T ONE! You play that on me in Scrabble and you'll get challenged in a New York minute.
But the east was no better. BEREA? Wow. I bet the salutatorian finished last in the class. LEAPS...AT? TO? No, it's ON. Seizes eagerly: LEAPSON. Trying for a visual here...adults playing leapfrog? Oh, Agadore, why did you pick THOSE dishes?? It was the shoes, it was the shoes.*
SAYLESS. Sure, I always say that when I mean you've made your point. Such a clever, "slangy" rejoinder. In a MINIPIG's eye.
At the end, I was able to pick up on the huge aha! moment of rebusing the cents, and finish. Toughest Sunday that I completed that I can recall. This one did everything a puzzle can do: wordplay, rebus, circles, shades...the works. In this case the circles and shades each had a SSIINNGGLLEE purpose, taking up a minimum of space, and so are forgiven. Excellent theme and execution, but fill from hell. Birdie anyway.
Wordle birdie too.
*I hope you all saw "The Birdcage;" if not, please do. It is very possibly the best movie ever made.
ASISEEIT SASS
ReplyDeleteMY PROMDATE'S such a MINIPIG,
'tho I DIG PINCHINGPENNIE'S ASS;
her BUM or CAN or BUTT's so BIG,
I'M always READY to TOUCH that MASS.
--- OWEN ASTIN
@DIANA in the puz again. Lots more often than RONDO every year or two.
ReplyDeleteI also put my two CENTs in near the end. Rebus after all the rest, aargh.
Wordle bogey, ASI wasn't SEEing IT.
FWIW at this late date …
ReplyDelete@Geo 9:40 — my brother, former portrayer with his employer, would have you know that Smokey is with the Forest, not Park Service
@Anon 12:30 — earlier in my life’s experience, there is also a college in NC
@cD 1:39 — in academia, we say preprint when sharing results not yet in publication
[Ugh, this was horrible!]
ReplyDeleteNYT - please try to make Sundays fun again.
ReplyDeleteThis was a nightmare slog. What do cutting corners and making ends meet have to do with cheap thrills ? Just because you're cutting corners, or making ends meet, doesn't mean you're engaging in a cheap action. And that is only one of many issues with this puzzle, not to mention it is impossible to solve completely online.
Just when I was happy enough hating you Rex, I had to find out you're a cat person. Damn! In good conscience, I cannot continue hating a cat person; thanks for ruining things.
ReplyDelete