Sofia's husband in "The Color Purple" / FRI 2-3-23 / Outbuilding that's sometimes converted into a dwelling / Mined compound in the "Avatar" universe / Flowering plant such as old man's beard / Name written with an accent in Irish English / In science fiction suspended animation of a body at a very low temperature
Constructor: Barbara Lin
Relative difficulty: Medium-Challenging
THEME: none
Word of the Day: OAST (23A: Outbuilding that's sometimes converted into a dwelling) —
An oast, oast house or hop kiln is a building designed for kilning (drying) hops as part of the brewing process. They can be found in most hop-growing (and former hop-growing) areas and are often good examples of vernacular architecture. Many redundant oasts have been converted into houses. The names oast and oast house are used interchangeably in Kent and Sussex. In Surrey, Hampshire, Herefordshire and Worcestershire they are called hop kilns. (wikipedia
• • •
This seems well-made enough, but it was extremely not for me, especially not on a Friday. It had a definite Saturday vibe—big chunks of white space, lots of deliberately vague and misleading cluing—and it also had what felt like a lot of trivia, particularly from areas I have know or care little or nothing about. I can't imagine seeing "Avatar" or its sequel. Like, spending my money or time to do ... that. I know billions of people have, but I can't think of a less consequential international blockbuster movie. No one talked about "Avatar" for a decade ... so they're making some more, and they're making gajillions of dollars ... for some reason ... it's a pop cultural phenomenon I don't understand, and, as I say, cannot conceive of paying to understand. This is all to say that UNOBTANIUM (27D: Mined compound in the "Avatar" universe) ... I needed most of those crosses for that, although I guess that a little bit of "Avatar" trivia (besides NAVI) must have made its way to my brain somehow, because *eventually* I recognized it as a familiar term (though at first, at "UNOBT-," I was certain I had an error). Unlike with "Avatar," I did at one point try to watch, but then deliberately walked away from, "Game of Thrones." Luckily, ARYA has now become crosswordese, so even though I'm never quite sure if it's ANYA or ARYA or AYLA, I got that one with less trouble. No idea about HARPO, though (42D: Sofia's husband in "The Color Purple"), so getting into that SW corner was probably the hardest for me, what with MARS ROVER "cleverly" hidden in what looked like a regular-word clue (49A: Perseverance, e.g.) and GRAPE SODAS being clued as "cans" (?) (44A: Crush cans, maybe). The "cans" part is bollocks. [Crushes, e.g.] would've been wicked, but "Crush" is the soda and "can" is the container and while "can" can *stand* for the soda, it can't stand for the soda *when the soda is already in the term*. "Be sure to pick up some Crush cans at the supermarket!" No. As for CRYOSLEEP (51A: In science fiction, suspended animation of a body at a very low temperature) ... well, I could infer it from its constituent parts, eventually, but I'll just have to trust you that it's a thing. Ugh, I just read that CRYOSLEEP was featured in the film "Avatar"—what is this puzzle, sponsored content? No idea that BIKE RIDES were measured in "centuries" (18A: Long ones can be measured in centuries). Just had an "if you say so" reaction there. "IF I WERE YOU..." and "WISH ME LUCK..." gave me a couple of jolts of excitement, but mostly I just slogged through this.
I hate the term HUMP DAY, so that didn't help (42A: Midweek milestone). BELL CURVE is obviously a real term but it gave its name to and thus reminds me of a racist study of human intelligence from a few decades ago, which isn't the term's fault, but that's the association my mind made, and sadly I can't control my mind (yet). I'm stunned—resentful, really— that the puzzle waited this many years, i.e. my entire solving life, to tell me that an OAST was a *building* (!?!?!?!). Every, literally every clue for OAST in the years that I've been solving (so we're talking a lot of clues) had me convinced that it was just an oven or kiln. "Oven," "kiln," "fixture," "device," "dryer," etc. etc. etc. No "building." Here's the OAST clues going back nearly 20 years—see if you can find a single one (besides today's) that suggests A Whole Damn Building:
from xwordinfo.com
So "Outbuilding" had me like "what the ...?" Especially the part about living inside one. You can't live in an OAST! Isn't it ... hot in there? "There was an old lady who lived in an OAST. She's dead, of course." But then I go to wikipedia and there are pictures of, well, buildings, and the first paragraph of the wikipedia entry says you can convert them to dwellings, so ... I feel like I've been lied to my entire solving life. Everything I know about OASTs I know from crosswords ... and it's all been a lie. Great.
I had a relatively hard time right from the start with 1A: Finishing-line cry? (BINGO!). Now that I get it, it's a great clue, but it's brutal, esp. at 1A. Very Saturday. (note: the "line" part of the clue refers to fact that you shout "BINGO!" when you complete a "line" of numbers on your card). BINGO crossed BACON, which was also toughly clued (looking like a plural, i.e. something ending in "S" ... and then being something else) (1D: Some striped strips). Though [Some striped strips] were LEGOS for a bit. Some parts of the puzzle were very easy (DESK AVEC URDU QUILTS in about 10 seconds), and other parts were slow, and there wasn't a lot of happy-medium whoosh-whoosh time. I might've liked this puzzle better tomorrow, but I think sometimes you just have to accept that a puzzle, however competently crafted, isn't for you. This was one of those times. The first two puzzles of this week were so good ... I miss them.
The A in OAST was the last letter I entered, and I was somewhat surprised that I got the happy music. For the "Where's the Beef?" clue at 30D, I racked my brain trying to think of Clara Peller's name. I never was able to recall it but I looked it up post-solve, when the answer turned out to be more generic.
A in OAST was my last letter to fall as well. I actually found the puzzle much easier than Rex. Recently saw Avatar, CRYOSLEEP is a trope from practically every sci-fi film/novel and was a gimme, I even knew HARPO because of a recent rabbit hole into Oprah’s production company. Also an avid cyclist, and loved the misdirect for centuries. Great puzzle. -Brando
Brutal cluing. I managed to get QUILTS, even though SPELLS is more obvious. I managed to get MARSROVER by guessing that "Perseverance" was its name. But the SW killed me. I had no idea about CRYOSLEEP or ARYA. I also question whether EARPHONE is a valid answer.
At the end of the day (morning), I just wasn't smart enough to finish it.
I enjoyed this until I didn't (as they say). As I start solving I develop a vibe of some kind. This one was a bit difficult, a bit tricky, but doable. I filled the NW quickly (for me) and went on about business. Then I hit the Avatar abomination. Crosses took care of it but it took the shine off. So then I was in the SW. There were some self-made snags but the Perseverance clue was nasty, in a bad way. It was so out of sync with the rest of the puzzle. If you're going to throw a wrench in the works like that it has to be a better known name. Yes, even on Friday.
I dunno, Rex. I thought this was a peach of a puzzle. If I tried to list all the NOTEWORTHY entries, I’d use up most of my already-too-long real estate here. UNOBTANIUM was new to me, too, but I couldn’t help but think about the unobtania in my life: small plastic-coated paper clips, Topo Chico, the perfect black cardigan, contentment. . .
That you could live in an OAST surprised me, too. Here you go, Rex:
Mrs. Bread moved into her OAST. Its warmth’s what appealed to her most. Though cozy at first, The heat just got worse She has since changed her name to Ms. Toast.
Speaking of NOTEWORTHY, it crosses NEW HIRE. In my school, any new staff is NOTEWORTHY. And since a new teacher or even sub’s presence means I won’t have extra kids in my classes or lose my planning to coverage, I see them as doteworthy, too, and accost them with welcome wagon charm.Want some coffee? I even have biscotti to go with it! In one of those fancy cups with the lid. . . what’s that? You like herbal tea? Got it. I even have organic honey. Come on into my room and I’ll make you some. . .
I think I’d happily stay home and stab my kneecap with a plastic fork than go with Mom to the Tuesday BINGO event. You should see how she frets about her outfit and who’s slated to do the calling for the night. She and her friend get there 30 minutes early so they can sit at their customary table. No, really. For her, it’s the highlight of the week. For me, I get to come home to an empty house and collapse onto the couch in a fugue state. No questions, no chit-chat. No dredging the bottom of my empty tank trying to conjure conversation from the fumes.
I liked GRAPE SODA crossing SIPS ON. And it crosses RARE. I got a hankering for diet grape soda a few years ago, and lemme tell you – it’s almost impossible to find. Nasty stuff, I know, but still. (I loved the clue, by the way.)
I also liked the clue for URDU. The convention of what we call “languages” is a lot of times purely political or geographical. Danish and Norwegian are mutually intelligible, so you could argue that they’re actually just dialects of each other – not separate languages. And we have a “language” with dialects that are not mutually intelligible, so like you could argue that the cockney English spoken in London’s East End is a separate language from the English spoken in southern Appalachia and the Ozarks. And the English a very agitated Boogie was using last week to recount his upsetting run-in with the police because he was carrying in violation of his ankle monitor and tried to run and and and, well, I just couldn’t follow even though I was listening with all my might. . . you could argue that his English is a separate language from my English. The cool thing is, Boogie can understand mine, so in a sense he’s bilingual and I’m not.
I just used BUYS IN(to) yesterday when I was chatting with another teacher about the Classroom Maslow’s Hierarchy that is the first couple of weeks of a new semester with new kids. First you have to get control. This is not for the faint of heart, and mine is usually in my throat when I call out a particularly surly guy who’s twice my size. Once you get control, you have to get them to BUY IN, to accept that what we’re going to do is meaningful and valuable. (Pass out copies of The Mayor of Casterbridge and you’ll see what I mean. I just got some used copies on Ebay of Jason Reynolds’ The Long Way Down, and I’m starting to get their attention.)
If you can’t accomplish this control and this buy-in, things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; mere anarchy is loosed upon the world. No, really.
I completely agree what you said about dialect v. language. I would add that Chinese "dialects" like Cantonese are really separate languages and are mutually incomprehensible vis-a-vis Mandarin, Ditto Italian "dialects" like Napolitan and Sicilian compared with Italian.b
And everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned. JFK’s favorite poem. Little did we all know that 50+ years later the rough beast truly would slouch toward Washington to be born.
A bonanza of longs, 18 of them. That's the payoff when you don't clog the grid with Terrible Threes (only eight).
We saw Avatar 2 yesterday. An incredible spectacle. Great beauty, great excitement, all put together with great artistry.
Had fun filling in the squares briskly until I was left with a white lower left. I guessed CRYOSLEEP and then turned it over to The Closer. She got GRAPESODA and then we both saw MARSROVER to finish. Very good puzzle.
Felt like it was a missed opportunity at a really good one today. 75% of it pretty much sparkled, but it seems like they just couldn’t close the deal and fell back into familiar NYT territory with awful stuff like UNOBTANIUM, INTL, OAST, and a terrible cross of ARYA with CRYOSLEEP. Too bad, this one coulda been a contender, but some of those entries just reek.
Totally in my wheelhouse today, with a solving time half that of my typical Friday (mind you, I'm not the speediest solver and my average Friday tips over 30 minutes).
NW corner was my trickiest area in which to find purchase, for much of the reasons Rex cites. Had to move on and return to that quadrant last. The rest of the puzzle solved pretty smoothly.
HARPO filled for me because that's Oprah's production company, named derived from The Color Purple role. I filled enough of "ROVER" that "Perseverance" was put in perspective. I acknowledge Rex's difficulties with "OAST" and "GRAPESODA", but there were enough crosses that practically filled on their own I'm surprised that he obsessed over either of these.
I'd suggest this grid would be right at home on a Thursday.
UNOBTANIUM just sounds like something the writers put in as a placeholder, thinking they’d come up with a better name later on. Then they forgot to do so.
Couldn’t figure out why Clara Peller wouldn’t fit for 30D. Wonder what the age cutoff for people who remember her.
Overall, a professional puzzle but one that lacks zing in the long answers. MARS ROVER is the only one I particularly like, and BIKE RIDES and GOES HOME are especially snoozish.
FWIW the word “unobtanium” predates it’s use in Avatar by decades. I first heard it in engineering school in the 80’s as a joke reference for a material to use in your design that has the properties you need, but doesn’t exist.
I read through these comments hoping I wasn’t nuts… I’d definitely heard the word before Avatar came along. Like Rex, I’ve never bothered with the movies, but I guess bits of them sneaked into my brain.
Then there's a "metric century": 100 km. Centuries in the US usually mean 100 miles. I always thought metric century was just a cheap way for someone to say they biked a "century" Many serious riders bike that distance every Saturday and Sunday in the summer on routine rides.
Unobtanium is not a unique term to the "Avatar" franchise. It seems to date from the 1950s aerospace community, to express any item which is ideal, but unavailable, due to either cost, technology or physical impossibility. See also "then a miracle happens..." and "handwaving"
Give me some challenge and wit, throw in some smiles, wake up at least one lovely memory, teach me something, and you’ve done Friday right.
And here it was. No way I could sleepwalk through this. Oh, there were footholds, but the best kind; they yielded an answer or two at most. Then that answer or those answers maybe also yielded one or two answers. So, there was sweet, sweet effort engaged continually.
“Hah!”-inducing witty wordplay all over, such as [Give an edge to] for HONE, [Long ones can be measured in centuries] for BIKE RIDES, and [Finishing-line cry] for BINGO. That last one brought a throw-my-head-back “Hah!”.
Then being reminded of things I just haven’t thought about in a long time. UNOBTANIUM, which I loved when first exposed to it in “Avatar”, because it was so corny that it was cool. Also: “Oh yeah! There’s a soda called Crush!”
Learning CRYOSLEEP. Learning ELKHOUNDS and that they are some country’s national dog! Thinking “An OAST can be a building?” and finding out that indeed it can. (@Rex, your take on OAST, and @Loren your OASt limerick were priceless!)
Plus some sparkly bonuses. BUTTS OUT abutting MUN. QUAD above A FOOT. A Boggle-style HOO-BOY beginning with the H of OOH. And the sing-song roll-off-the-tongue CLEMATIS.
So yes, Barbara, this, your first themeless NYT puzzle, was, IMO, a Friday done right, fist-pumpingly right. Way to go, and thank you!
Today’s writeup is pure Rex for me. I was rolling my eyes at his crabby curmudgeonliness until I got to his OAST riff, which was hilarious - why I like reading him so much. And then @LMS’s poem about Ms. Toast living in an OAST. I just blipped right over OAST in the puzzle with no clue it was going to give me such pleasure post-solve.
A long BIKE RIDE is called a “century” when it’s exactly 100 miles. I did one in my serious biking days, part of an AIDS charity ride that totaled 200 miles over three days. The middle day was the brutal century, and I was so happy crossing the finish line that I yelled BINGO! No, I didn’t, but I LOVED that clue once I grokked it. Also the double whammy misdirection clues of GRAPE SODA and PERSEVERANCE.
I liked the puzzle - pretty much in my wheelhouse. I did see both Avatar movies, and Rex might find a lot to like if he did see them. The message they convey is not only pro-environment, but extremely anti-military. The US Marines are the bad guys in both movies. James Cameron (the director) gets to have it both ways - he obviously loves staging over the top battle scenes but he also gets to show that he really hates war and those who wage it.
I liked MEAT LOVER, BACON and DINER sharing the puzzle - perhaps to be followed by ORGAN DONOR. IF I WERE YOU, I wouldn’t eat another of those striped strips. Who am I kidding, yes I would.
@Conrad, I paused long enough to think of "Clara" (Peller), but when I saw that could not happen, I set aside the mental rolodex.
@lms, UNOBTANIUM/contentment--lol.
This was a fast Friday for me. NW fell quickly, and I proceeded clockwise through the NE, E and SE with only minor hang-ups. The W and SW did go a bit slower and in the end I had to resolve two issues in separate locations to get the Happy Music: 1) 46D, ARYA or ARiA (CRYOSLEEP or CRiOSLEEP) and 2) 29D, bLOB or GLOB--it seemed reasonable to me that some flat-earther might be afraid of bERMS.
There a CLEMATIS Street where I used to live--never knew it was apparently named for a flowering plant. Nice to learn something new.
I’m very far from a pop culture defender. I won’t watch Game of Thrones or any of the Marvel “Universe” “films” [sic] or Disney post-1965 (or so), etc. etc. But the new Avatar in 3D on a giant XD screen is a remarkably stunning visual experience. It’s a terrible movie, to be sure, paper thin and formulaic. But it’s gorgeous and thrilling to watch, to just let your eyeballs luxuriate in its splendor. I’m glad I saw it, and I recommend the experience (if not the movie).
The puzzle was pretty good! And I always enjoy Grumpy Rex.
Some of the best American animation has been post-1965 Disney; likewise, the first six seasons of GoT some of the best TV of their respective years. One gains so little by remaining “above” pop culture.
This one was tough, especially in the West. Had to resort to Google; once I got HARPO I was able to see MARSROVER and CRYOSLEEP and everything else in the SW fell. BINGO was the key in the NW, and took me forever to see.
The East was easier. I wrote in UNOBTANIUM without crosses - I remember that term being eye-rolled in reviews as just a little too on the nose, then learning later that it was used in engineering to refer to a material that was perfect for the needs of a project but either didn’t exist or was unavailable. Also in the West, ALEC, QUAD and BELLCURVE across the top provided a strong foothold (and I have the same unpleasant association with that last answer).
I disagree with Rex’s quibble on GRAPE SODA. “Grab me a can of soda” is very much in the language (although here it would be pop), and might even be necessary to distinguish from the cans of beer and larger bottles of soda in the same cooler.
Rarely do I have a completely different solving experience than Rex (as we are around the same age, and generally have similar cultural references in our wheelhouse), but today was one of those days! I breezed right through it until the SW corner... the Crush thing bugged me, because I only ever associate it with Orange soda. (And pickup brands aren't generally my thing, but this one *should* have been, as I am a devoted fan of This Old House and GMC is one of their sponsors.) Lots (for me) to love about this one!
It’s a century because it’s a bike ride of 100 miles. There are also double centuries (for crazy people) and metric centuries which are 100 kilometer rides. I have completed a couple of metric and imperial centuries.
@8:14 and for really crazy people you can inline skate a century. I finished 2 of those on inline skates (Rollerblades) but I skated many more metric centuries, 62 miles. I would follow along the cyclist who'd all yell: how far are you going? It is a lot harder (no gears! No brakes!) But I think more fun. I did cycle quote a few centuries as well. I stopped doing all of that in 2018, after 20 years, because my old body fell apart and now I do crossword puzzles, jigsaw puzzles and limp the dog.
Well, I liked it. Didn’t get BINGO in the first pass but got ALEC, QUAD, AFOOT and CITES among the initial acrosses, and did pretty well with the downs that begin along the north shore. This was a good solid foundation for the rest of the solve – much better than I often do in the early going on a Friday or a Saturday. As for the problematic SW, well, it just wasn’t a problem for me. Before I even looked at the long acrosses, I’d written in a bunch of the downs: ARYA, SIPS ON, DINERS and WENT SOLO. I also had MEATeatER, which had to be corrected, but when I finally saw [Crush cans, maybe], [Perseverance, e.g.] and the sci-fi clue, I had enough letters to splatz them all in, bang-bang-bang. I didn’t know UNOBTAINIUM either (what an odd name), but crosses got me through. At one point I could see that it was going to end with TANIUM (which made sense for something mined), and I also had the N and O from RNA and EGOT. No idea about those last two letters, but -- BUTTS OUT and SAABS to the rescue!
I liked many of the long answers: WISH ME LUCK, MARS ROVER, CRYOSLEEP, IF I WERE YOU, NOTEWORTHY, ELK HOUNDS and CLEMATIS. We used to have a CLEMATIS on the back fence. I doubt it was an “old man’s beard,” but it was an absolutely glorious color – I don’t know what to call it – magenta crossed with fuchsia, maybe? That probably sounds garish but it wasn’t, it was jewel-like. Anyway, it died for lack of sun...[moment of silence]...RIP, beautiful CLEMATIS. Yeah, that was a stunner for OAST, but I always had the notion of OAST-house in the back of my mind. I don’t know where I got that from, not from crossword clues judging from the list Rex printed. I’m with him on not liking the term HUMP DAY, I think because I don’t like the sound of the word HUMP, and feel its usage should be confined to camels. Call it “Median DAY,” and I’m right there with you.
Uniclues:
1. Carnivorous revolutionary. 2. Cervus canadensis harasses Marx Brother. 3. Makes headset out of cloth and batting. 4. Benefactor who gives Hammonds to churches in Rawalpindi. 5. Overweight mooners’ modus operandi. 6. NASA’s latest ploy to interest women in planetary exploration. 7. Possible answer to the question: “With your insomnia, were you able to stay under during stasis?” 8. Vehicles so ugly and unstreamlined, they look like lumps of fat.
1. ABBIE MEATLOVER 2. ELK HOUNDS HARPO 3. QUILTS EARPHONE 4. URDU ORGAN DONOR 5. ROOMY BUTTS OUT 6. MARS ROVER SONIA 7. “CRYOSLEEP? IN, OUT.” 8. BACON-GLOB GMCS.
Man, writing these uniclues is addictive. I wish @Gary Jugert had warned me. I thought I was going to post one or two on a very occasional basis, but look at me now. I’ve got to get a handle on this obsession!
[SB: yd, 0. My last word was this 5er. I can never quite remember whether they’re going to accept it or consider it too foreign.]
Rex needs to stop complaining so bitterly about the most ubiquitous pop culture like GoT and Avatar. It's... huge. These are very valid topics for clues.
Speaking of "Perseverance", congratulations to Barbara Lin on seeing this puzzle through, as she did so while dealing with a serious health issue. Here's WISH[ing you] LUCK on a full recovery.
Nice puzzle. A fun solve and I learned a couple of things in the process. Just the way I like 'em!
Leave it to the big guy to associate Gauss and Laplace with whatever social ill he’s banging against today. The normal distribution can be used to represent numerous natural situations. Do not disparage it - embrace it.
Wonderful puzzle - played normalish Friday. I’m not an Avatar guy either so had to back into that. No issue with the Crush cans clue. BUTTS OUT, WISH ME LUCK, IF I WERE YOU - the hits keep on coming.
Great puzzle. Very tough puzzle. Share the comments of Rex and others about the southwest part of the grid. But I managed, in just short of a half hour, to get it done. Kept going from across to down many times. Was surprised when OAST was correct. Big bunch of really clever clues made this a treat. Thank you, constructor and editor.
@Son Volt What Rex is banging on about is the book The Bell Curve, which has received a bad reception on methodological grounds (and much else besides): a poor legacy of Gauss and Laplace. No one should embrace misuses of probability and statistics.
On the other hand, what Rex was banging on about with cans and SODAS struck me as pretty incoherent.
CRYOSLEEP and, especially, UNOBTANIUM, were pretty nasty.
Interesting how there is a huge tonal difference between IF I WERE YOU and "if it were me". That one little word YOU is very powerful.
Okay, better stop here, otherwise I'll be in the WEEDS. I've got a full plate today. WISH ME LUCK.
Oasts are indeed real buildings, at least in the UK. Incredibly cute, they look like they belong in the Hobbit movie. However, I doubt if you will find any in the US. See if I did this link correctly
Actually found this one disappointingly easy for a Friday. Hey, I used to teach a college course on science fiction. But that leads to my one gripe. I'm familiar with UNOBTAINIUM as a longstanding and snarky term for one of the most dirt-common SF tropes. Its use in Avatar is actually kind of self-consciously ironic, like if you had an action movie where the thing driving the plot was actually called the McGuffin. I could wish the clue had reflected that self-aware irony somehow. Maybe one of the few actually witty things in the whole movie franchise.
By far the best puzzle of the week IMO and I wholeheartedly second Chen’s POW. I enjoyed the straightforward quality and smooth solve after the frustration of the last few days. A few stumbles, ABBEY before ABBIE, SPELLS before QUILTS, IF YOU ASK ME before IF I WERE YOU. Then got stuck in the SW with MEAT EATER instead of LOVER and a big blank at DEES (duh) and ANYA (§#@%!*? GOT clue) all of which was enough to keep me from seeing the brilliant GRAPE SODAS, et al. That took some time to untangle BUTT it was an enjoyable challenge and most satisfying battle to win.
**Book Recommendation** Just finished Spare, Prince Harry’s much vaunted memoir, and found it surprisingly good. It was ghost written by Pulitzer Prize winnerJ.R. Moehringer whose professional hand elevates the work from just another blue blood tattle tale to an engrossing account of history in the making. I expected to encounter a few eye-rolling parts but no, more eye-opening really. I doubt it’s on anyone’s list for a Pulitzer but it’s a NOTEWORTHY read for those with even a passing interest in the royals.
I really liked this puzzle. I found it to be just the right amount of difficult. With as fast a time as I got for a Friday, I was surprised to see it considered medium-challenging.
Yes, as Jim mentioned above. In ˋA Color Purple ´, Sophia was played by Oprah Winfrey. She was married to the character ˋHarpo ´ which is Oprah, spelled backwards, and the name of her production company.
@Kent 8:01 Thanks for the info about UNOBTANIUM! I thought it was idiotic and hilarious when they said it in the movie, but now I appreciate the original source and its evidence of ordinary workplace WRY humor.
I found this puzzle a bit daunting at first in the NW, but ended solving it in under half my usual time. The reason is probably because the names were familiar, even if they didn’t all spring immediately to mind. Looking it over now, I can’t figure out how it went so smoothly except that the crosses always provided a way in. Nicely constructed.
I would like it if folks would read the blog posts before doing their own. There is so much repetition. I understand there will be some anyway because posts are approved and published in batches. But give it a try. WISHMELUCK!
The late ABBIE Hoffman at 6 down -- love him or hate him, he was very very funny. He was the original "Sandwich Man" when he was a student at Brandeis, right before my time there. (You could say he was a dorm-to-dorm salesman.)
He said he was against women's rights -- "Why, if you gave women rights, the next thing you know men would want them too!"
When he was negotiating with the Miami police chief for protests of the GOP convention, he said, Listen Chief, if one curly hair on this head is hurt, my father will never come down here again. And the chief replied -- Abbie, I know your father -- he'll come.
Hey All ! A big Agree and a hearty chuckle with Rex's OAST screed. Dang, man, I was thinking how cramped it would be to live in a no-longer-used oven. Even if the OAST was a decent size, it would still be cramped. Who the heck knew it was a whole building? Dang, Englanders, a heads-up would've been nice. 😁
Weird how sometimes a correct answer is in, but you (I) can't get any crossers to work. One today was RARE at 45D. Had it in, actually thinking that Buffalo nickels aren't really Rare RARE, and I couldn't get any of the Acrosses. Took it out, to eventually figure out the Acrosses, and bam, RARE was correct. Same thing at GOESHOME. Had it in, took it out, figured out yes indeed, it was correct.
That NW corner toughest for me, only thing I was confident about was OTS. Had OWES in, but then thought 2D was IFyouaskme, so erased OWES, but then seeing that couldn't possibly be correct, erased all except IFI, rewrote in my OWES , and saw it was IFIWEREYOU. Finished at the C of BACON/CITES. Tricky BACON clue.
Wasn't UNOBTANIUM the element in that movie where the Earth's core stopped spinning? I think the name of the movie was The Core. Apparently is OBTANIUM enough...
FH Like a few other commentators, I thought this was pretty easy. 'Easy', for me, means 10-15 minutes. Quite a few gimmes: ALEC, BELLCURVE, OAST, MUNIS, RNA, LYTE, INTL, MARSROVER, ORSO, ABBIE, LEIS, URDU, AVEC, IMS, BUENO, TATS, DINERS, SUM, BUS, RARE. Once you just write those in you're of to the races. I frequently disagree with Rex but I share his lack of interest in Avatar. Probably for different reasons though.
I thought an OAST was a kind of oven, not an outbuilding. And it was another completely blind guess between CLEMITES and CLEMATES for the plant.
Interestingly, it was these two clues and not the pop culture that was my downfall today. ARYA, HARPO and UNOBTAINIUM eventually came in -- though there are two much less obscure ways to clue HARPO, surely. But while I may normally deplore the use of an "Avatar" clue in a given puzzle, the invented word UNOBTAINIUM is so droll, so WRY, so wonderfully tongue-in-cheek that it makes me wonder: Is the whole movie that funny? Should I actually watch it?
This had its moments. I learned the term for a germophobe; I had a nice "Aha" over MARS ROVER clued as "Perseverence"; I learned that BIKE RIDES are measured in centuries (really?); and I learned that any MEAT LOVER, not just a Wendy's customer, can ask "Where's the beef?"
And, yes, IF I WERE YOU is a really off-putting way of giving unsolicited advice.
My favorite clue, though, was for BACON at 1D. And the clue for BINGO at 1A was nice too. A strong way to start off a puzzle.
Interesting that I share many cultural opinions with Rex: I too found Game of Thrones shallow and thin, and Avatar pretentious.,warmed over, simplistic storytelling, I suspect that both of us cast a jaundiced eye on these modern attempt at myths and legend because we both read and teach the real myths and legends, the original texts in Old or Middle English or in Old Norse, which are more genuine and culturally relevant in their context. Reading the medieval sources — an Eddie Poem about Thor or a Middle English story of The Green Knight — puts you back in a world of real stuff, not the flimsy made-up dramas designed to titillate the audience and make piles of money for the producers. So it’s always a little surprising when I enjoy a puzzle like this much more than he does. I immediately got on the same wavelength as to the clueing: “if I were you”, “wish me luck”, “perseverance/Mars rover” all of these just popped right up. This was not one of those solving attempts where you slog your way through clue after clue and at the end of the day have a bunch of white space to show for your efforts.
Enjoyed this puzzle. Faster than Avg. Friday for me.
Same for me on Oast. Last answer filled with A.
Not as offended by Crush cans, not great cluing, but fine.
Earphone, bleh. Had “piece”1 first
Obviously Rex has bias against Avatar, ok, I get it. Implying Avatar: The Way of Water was a 10 yr after-thought, money-grab of a movie, however, is just wrong. It was planned all along, tech needed to advance, and get ready for it since there will be at least 3 more with releases in ‘24, ‘26 and ‘28.
I think constructors who use words in an unfamiliar way, like OAST, should check in with OFL before they submit their puzzles for publication. The poor man's day, and possibly week, are clearly now ruined. A little consideration please.
I'm in the "found it easy" crew today, started in the NE with QUAD and had to back into the NW, which felt isolated. Liked seeing AFOOT there, very Sherlock Holmes. I own a GMC and knew "century" as clued and what a "mysophobe" is and so on. Only slow down was the usual misreading of a clue number which had HARPO writing a YEATS poem, which seemed unlikely. Also hard to see new friend EGOT, as I had CARPHONE for EARPHONE and didn't know The Avatar reference. Oops.
Nice smooth Friday, BL. Big Love for this one, and thanks for all the fun. Hope you're OK.
@Stix I also had WENTYOKO before WENTSOLO. It was the first thing that popped into my head!
I liked today’s puzzle and all of its longer answers. Felt like such a rarity. I was clueless about UNOBTAINIUM and am still wondering about EARPHONE - I had EARpiece first and am not yet convinced that’s not a better answer.
You may have picked up UNOBTANIUM from its decades of use in both engineering and science fiction prior to Avatar, and of course CRYOSLEEP is a sci-fi staple, so you can imagine a universe in which the blue movies don't exist but this puzzle still does.
Enjoyably "medium" from BELL CURVE to CRYOSLEEP, then challenging to get into the NW, when all I had to work with was ROOMY. Last in: BINGO x BACON. The combination of the vague clues and the excellent longer answers won me over - I thought it was a great Friday.. I liked the parallel BUTTS OUT and BUYS INTO and feel an affection for AFOOT.
OAST: I was helped here by having seen one on a trip to California wine country that looked like a small castle.
CRY O' SLEEP was what popped out at me from the finished grid: my husband is on a new medication that causes weird dreams.
There's something about an OAST that just inspires poetry. I think Loren's contribution is the best, but they're all pretty good. However, you were all anticipated -- by several centuries -- by Milton, in "Lycidas:"
"That strain I heard was of a higher mood, But now my OAST returns..."
At least that's what I always think of when OAST crops up again in a puzzle.
Speaking of centuries, I've never ridden one, but I have gone on group bike rides, and have certainly heard the term. I got it from the K, but waited for crosses to see if they were BIKE RIDES or RacES.
@Pedaler, it's not just bike rides, cricketers call it a century when you score 100 runs. And I'm pretty sure that the original century was a 100-man unit of a Roman legion, commanded of course by a centurion.
Dpwn in the SW, I had OVE from the crosses, which was enough to let me know I was dealing with a ROVER--but what kind, MARS or Moon? More crosses needed!
Then I put in CRYOSLEEP, but remembered that some science fiction novels call it "Cold SLEEP." Another kealoa! And really, doesn't cryo- mean frozen? Like Ted Williams's head?
@Loren, when I was in college there were courses in the Serbo-Croation language; it was generally considered one language until Yugoslavie broke up, after which everyone insisted they were distinct. My son worked with a bunch of Croatians, and would occasionally ask what the difference was; the answer was always that they had different words for "belt." No one could come up with anything else.
But what about the Irish English in the clue for 53-A? Is that a thing? Or is that accent actually part of the Irish language?
@Whatsername -- Moehringer is a GREAT writer and I am tempted to read "Spare" just for him, as you recommend, even though I'm more than a bit Prince Harry-ed out.
And now, assuming you haven't already read it, you must read the Andre Agassi memoir "Open", whether you're a tennis fan or not. It's the most riveting and compulsively readable memoir I've ever read -- right after Moss Hart's "Act One" (which Moss wrote himself, but then he was a professional writer.) But having Moehringer as your ghostwriter -- I can't imagine anything more wonderful. You chose well, Harry.
Well I liked this puzzle also due to the many clever clues AND I learned what a “century” is in biking. Otherwise, still very much in my wheelhouse.
@Wanderlust and @mmorgan…very good points made about Avatar. Unfortunately, I saw the original in IMAX 3D (my first and ONLY) and found out for the first time in my life what “motion sickness” feels like and had a headache until the end of the next day. Nobody’s fault and I know it’s irrational, but I have no desire to see the sequel because of THAT.
@kitshef, I thought of Clara Peller but could NOT remember her name, which in the end I guess helped me.
So. I had one weird moment when my blanks for 26D had me scratching my head thinking how is ORlANDOfla a drivers’ license designation? 🙄
At age 86, my century bike ride days are long past, but I've done a few, as have my wife, my kids, and a couple of grandkids. But I could never have run a marathon.
In the collector-car world, authentic spare parts for uncommon cars are said to be made of two rare elements, unobtanium and cantaffordium.
Hate to say it, but this was the easiest Friday I recall working in months. Seriously, one of my fastest 5 ever Friday solves.
Sure, Avatar (1) was CGI meh and I won't bother to see the sequel, but I could have entered that answer without crosses except, what, how long is the answer supposed to be? Turns out that the I needed to omit the first I in UNOBTAINIUM and just enter UNOBTANIUM. That was a joke substance that Cameron came up with that I'm sure references back to some previous sci-fi or more likely Marvel comics story.
Had a moment of trouble in the SW because I wanted COLDSLEEP rather than CRYOSLEEP. Same difference.
Yes, long Saturday BIKERIDES by the sort of people I know via Strava might be measured in centuries. Like a long Saturday ride from Manhattan to Poughkeepsie via the rail trail network is damn close to 100 miles, i.e., a century. Then train it back to the city.
The HARPO answer, I was like, OPRAH's in that movie. So you're telling me... something? But, saw it in 1985 and never since.
HUMPDAY has also been around forever. I remember in the early 1980s that a bar near my college dorm advertised cheap(er) prices on Wednesday evenings using this phrase. Not that I ever went.
As a Brit that used to regularly go walking in Kent, I am taking being able to confidently write in OAST on the basis of _A_T as a small measure of karmic ease for all the time I've spent struggling with obscure American colleges, cutesy misdirection like "Cowboys home, for short" that turns out to be the ugly-looking NFCEAST, etc.
So so close to an OHO, but not quite. Devastating.
This was a snoozer. Not even one attempt at being funny. Not one. Like the editorial work process includes a bore-ification committee. I was pleased to see the slush pile editor continues to remain BUTT-forward. At least xi has a sense of humor.
The longer answers are all fine, but not glamorous. Very little in the way of junk. Learning to answer ARYA 80% of the time if the clue has GoT in it.
Uniclues:
1 When you're getting a C, but you're used to getting As thanks to your charming personality. 2 Reason given for wearing a shiny Spandex bodysuit with words written all over it. 3 The closet in the back with the computer where you watch the sexual harassment video. 4 Likes it well done.
1 BELL CURVE AFOOT 2 CITES BIKE RIDES 3 NEW HIRE OAST 4 BUYS INTO BURNT
@jberg, I thought the same thing with 53-A! That also leads me to ponder how there are four different names for the same name in an area that is not that large…John, Sean, Ian, and Ewen, because I’m pretty sure that ALL the Slavic countries use Jan. This THEN made me remember how my sister and I could not believe that our cousin named one son Sean and the other son Ian.
The joy for me was having century "bikerides" - do several a year - crossed with Norwegian "elkhounds" - have a big one of those and she greets meet at the 100-mile finishing line, bingo!
Well, sportsfans … if a FriPuz has to be themeless, it's always best when it goes slightly schlocky [CRYOSLEEP, UNOBTANIUM, MARSROVER, etc.]. IM&AHO.
Pretty easy-E solvequest, at our house. Very few, widely distributed, no-knows: * ARYA. Have yet to watch one episode of "Game of Thrones". Gotta get around to that, someday … yep. yep. * Livin in an OAST. [yo, @RP] Sounds kinda like what Hansel & Gretel got the wicked witch to do. * SONIA Gandhi. Pleased to meet her, tho. * How to spell UNOBTANIUM. Always assumed it was UNOBTAINIUM, with that there extra "I". * Century-long BIKERIDES. [Only familiar with century-long staff meetins, from back in my good ol' workin days.]
fave stuff included lotsa stuff: BINGO clue crossed with BACON clue. DEES clue. ELKHOUNDS. WISHMELUCK. IFIWEREYOU. NOTEWORTHY. BUTTSOUT and symmetric(al) BUYSINTO. UNOBTANIUM. MARSROVER. CRYOSLEEP. URDU.
staff weeject pick [Alas, only 8 to pick from]: OOH. Thankfully, OHH don't come up much, like that AAH vs AHH choice tends to, a lot.
Well under half an hour so easy here too. Flew through the eastern half fast enough to think it might not be Friday, then slogged through the west. fInES before CITES and meat eatER before LOVER didn't help. And it me a long time to see that crushing cans wasn't something related to recycling and that perseverance wasn't some character trait, but I persevered and got there.
Loved Saabs. Learned to drive in a 1963 Saab station wagon with a 3 cylinder engine that had a lifetime guarantee. I think my Dad got 4 engine replacements before it finally gave up the ghost.
Checking opening prices on the Comex this morning, I was surprised to find that UNOBTAINIUM was now trading at 1.625x the price of Vibranium. Must have gotten a bump from Avatar crowding out Black Panther as a NYTXW fave. And speaking of heavy metals, didn’t Wayne and Garth say “We are NOTEWORTHY” upon being asked to hang out with Alice Cooper? Almost.
Beware the Ides of March, and while you’re at it, be careful on BIKER IDES, particularly if you go for centuries.
@Nancy. Sorry to report that neither of your spellings of CLEMATIS is correct.
I love the single INOUT tray. It’s something that Mr. Burns would employ.
I got my mojo up and running...My OOH, AHA, YAY ME came back in a flash. A real enjoyment today. I didn't have to pull any hair out; the tangles were smoothed over. That's the YAY ME. First entry was BINGO BACON...that was my OOH and I spelled out UNOBTANIUM correctly...AHA!. Yes..I'll take these kinds of Fridays everyday. I had the same doovers as @Whatsername...Aren't we a pair? the MEATeater oops was the one that held me up the most. I Wasn't able to smooth some of the tangles until I took a breather and just stared. It worked...AHA!...GRAPE SODA/MARS ROVER/CRYOSLEEP....That was it. Proud of myself for dancing a fandango without tripping over slippery slopes. Now time to ponder. I love Sci-Fi because it pushes my fantasy button. I didn't know about the mined compound because I was probably too busy watching fantasy action in blue. If you knew the crosses, you'd get your answer. I did and I did. I haven't seen the second AVATAR but when it comes out via my TV, you can bet your sweet bippy I'll be watching. I'm even betting Moehringer will watch. Compares to my fiasco yesterday, I found this fairly easy. More importantly...it was enjoyable! @Loren...What fine form you're in today...Toast, indeed :-) Now to go and order up some Spare.
First I found out that Santa was not real. Now I am told that a last is not an oven, not a piece of brewery equipment, not some sort of brewery fixture. Somehow I think the writers of so many crossword clues obtained all their knowledge of lasts the same way I did, through crosswords.
I cruised through it, finishing in the NW with BINGO's B and proclaiming so. Then I came here and discovered my uhoh errors: ARIA/CRIO, CARPHONE/EARPHONE (I can never remember that silly EGOT). OAST simply appeared resulting from the crosses. With the temperature dipping below zero, I might consider moving in.
Well yeh, writing in “Wendy’s ad” for an early answer to 33 down (instead of 30 down) was a major issue, but after both eyes focused and the CRYOSLEEP hangover faded….things sorted themselves OR SO it seemed. IF I WERE YOU Barbara Lin, I’d just ignore the whining and keep tossing those grids at Uncle Will as you shift that BELL CURVE to the right 😉
Interesting that Rex thinks it was medium-challenging. I had what I think is my second fastest Friday ever, only 15 seconds slower than my record. Maybe that’s because I didn’t stop to be offended by things that offend Mr. Sensitive.
DNF at OAST / CLEMATIS / MUNIS. All outside my experience. This is my first time encountering OAST as a piece of crosswordese, and the other two are just outside my wheelhouse completely. Other than that, a great puzzle with a lot of bite. After the surprising lack of awareness of 50s/60s sci-fi kitsch from the themer earlier in the week, I suspected moving forward at least a few decades with UNOBTANIUM and CRYOSLEEP would give more than a few folks fits. Some people complain about "terrible threes" but many of the fours were way worse today. BINGO, BACON, and GRAPE SODAS were all clued excellently.
I was really surprised by our host's difficulty rating. Today's puzzle fell so easily I'm considering cutting back to just doing Saturday and Sunday. The only slow downs I encountered came from my own write overs. I had CAR/EAR, EATER/LOVER, AT/ON, LITE/LYTE and SONYA/SONIA. That last one came to me when I finally made sense out of 27D. Up until then it looked like it was going to be one of those strictly from the crosses kind of entries which it mostly was.
The OAST thing was a complete surprise to me too. After 33 years of solving I learn that I never really knew what an OAST was.
SB Sun-Thu we're all -0 with the exception of Wed. That was pg-1 due to a stoopit spelling variant.
@egs -- I had the CLIMATIS "IS" right in my grid, but mistyped it in my comment. That because I did know MUNIS. And now I must go to Google to look up its gorgeous colors, per @Barbara S.
Some more uniclues (yes, it can be addictive).
1) When everyone in the world feels very, very hot
2) Waugh's leg muscle gets a "Wow!" response
3) Comment on trouve "Avatar"
4) Not much humor in this crowd
1) INTL HUMPDAY 2) BINGO ALEC QUAD 3) AVEC UNOBTANIUM 4) WRY WENT SOLO
You’re right, Rex. It’s you. OAST was the first thing I entered. It helped that I’ve been to England and once stayed in a B&B that featured an oast house as part of its property. I thought this was a great Friday test. I flew through most of the right half, but struggled all down the left side. Great, tricky clues on BINGO and MARSROVER slowed me down, but still to be admired. bLOB instead of GLOB was just as punishing. Thanks B. Lin, great fun.
♪ My boyfriend's back, he's gonna save my reputation If I were you I'd take a permanent vacation ♪
Loving WENT YOKO. I wish I'd put it in as the answer. "The lead singer's girlfriend felt the band didn't sufficently appreciate him, so she had no choice but to go Yoko on the situation."
I enjoyed this puzzle. I would have liked a mite more difficulty, maybe. My only setback was putting in MEATEATER at 30d, which held up my getting into the SW corner for a bit. Rex's sour comments should be ignored (but that's always true).
In the mid Sixties, UNOBTANIUM was a common word among my Stanford dorm friends who were future oil company prospectors or techies. My favorite phrase: "Close enough for Government work."
In architecture school we had UNOBTANIUM except we called it Strongo! A thin slab of it was capable of spanning a hundred feet and carrying a heavy load.
Hands up for typeovers BLOB crossing BERMS and EARPIECE before EARPHONE.
@Loren re languages, I've always thought the rule should be (at least for phonetic/alphabetical ones) if almost all words are spelled the same but many are pronounced differently, they're dialects.
[Spelling Bee: yd -1, missed this 5er. I actually tried spelling it with an "o"; a mistake I've made before.]
For me, this was the most enjoyment I've gotten from a puzzle this week. Granted, Monday and Tuesday's puzzles were excellent, but the early week puzzles generally aren't as satisfying. It's like comparing a snack, however delicious, to a meal.
Other things:
Anyone who likes to bike knows what a century is, whether they've ridden one themselves or not.
Given how seriously Avatar takes itself, I can't see their use of UNOBTANIUM as tongue-in-cheek, as others have conjectured. It seems like the filmmakers just didn't want to take the time to explain how important it was to the military/industrial complex in the film.
While I agree with Rex that [Crushes, e.g.] would have been a better, if wicked, clue, the addition of "cans" made the clue a little easier in a difficult puzzle.
I agree with Rex about OAST. I feel let down not by this puzzle, but by every one that's featured OAST in the past.
I love the BELL CURVE! Not the book, which I've never read, but the Gaussian distribution. It involves some of the most interesting mathematics accessible at the undergraduate level.
Efforts to discredit Charles Murray's work in The Bell Curve have failed for nearly thirty years now. As much as folks like Rex don't want to hear it, The Bell Curve truthfully and plainly: black people of average score lower on IQ tests that white people in America. That's indisputable. The fact that some people use this fact to explicitly or even tacitly) prejudge people based on race is not the book's fault. And its worth noting the IQ thing isn't the book's primary focus.
As for centuries to measure 100, it's common in sport. Anyone who plays or follows cricket or has even read a Wodehouse story with Psmith as a character knows a century in cricket is a batsman scoring a hundred runs.
There are so many times when Rex puts into words exactly what I was thinking, and "OAST is a building?!?!" is one of those times. I had this vision that it was a few feet high. Thinking about it more, it wouldn't make economic sense for it to be less than the size of a small room, but an entire building?!?!? Learn something new every day.
Once again, my difficulty ratings differ from Rex. I'm a slow solver, usually find things challenging, esp. Friday and Saturday, and am always disheartened when Rex says they are easy. But this one was just the opposite, did it in one sitting while watching the tube. Fun puzzle.
Rex, good to see another ADULT comment on Game of Thrones. I tried a couple of episodes a few years back, thought to myself "this is for 14-year-olds" and never went back. Have never seen Avatar; movies are for actors, not CGI.
Anon 7:23 Spot on. But unobtanium is used even more broadly. It was ( and I'm guessing still is) a common descriptor for unavailable parts. Usually because the part is no longer made. That very frustrating phenomenon is sadly well known to people who fix old things. Especially vintage cars, cycles etc.
Not too tough, maybe slightly harder than average Friday for me, but I agree with you about "OASTS"; never have seen them clued as "outbuildings," or any kind of building for that matter.
OAST crossing CLEMATIS was impossible for me. I’ve never heard of either of these things, and that A is not inferable. I had to play the alphabet game there. Not a fun way to finish the puzzle.
Amy: got very involved in a NYT story about a 17 year old giving up her smart phone to be her authentic self. The comments are fascinating. So, late to the puzzle, but very glad I didn't skip it. Really good! My only beef is with GRAPESODAS, as Crush means Orange Crush. I got the reference; just took some time for me to accept that there are other flavors. Are there lots of others? Liked this a lot. Agree it was a fast solve. The Yeats quote put me in a sweet space. He's so lovely a poet. Too bad Rex doesn't like Hump Day. I rather fancied those silly TV ads for I forget what that featured a camel delightedly exclaiming about Hump Day.
Communities all over the country have "Century Bike Rides," often for charitable purposes. They are long enough to be an accomplishment for many people, but short enough to finish in a few hours. Extreme conditioning is not required, but my partner's first one gave her painful feet so she rode in her gym trainer's pickup for about 10 miles. No problem in subsequent years with better shoes and pedals.
Your comments are always amusing, especially on a very cold Friday when i am dreaming of warmer days and bike rides…you should come out to the Midwest sometime and ride in the Apple Cider Century! 🍎🍏🚴🏼🚴🏽♀️. And now I know I am not a mysophobe! And i do love my cookies extra crispy, just this side of burnt! Have a good weekend everyone! ❄️🥶
I’m pretty sure that OASTs are frequently worded as ‘OAST [i]house[/i]’ which helps fix the concept not as a cute little drying machine in the corner of a room, but rather something that’s substantial and actually a free standing structure. It’s quite odd to me that there is such a history of cluing for OAST without ever at least touching on that tangentially.
As for UNOBTAINIUM, I first heard of it from the first Avatar and eye rolled through it at the time. Then found out that it’s like the material form of the word widget, a place holder word for when the object or material isn’t really the point of the matter at hand. Which makes it even more of an eye roll choice for me in the Avatar universe, by ymmv
Just a note: UNOBTAINIUM is also used around the Pentagon to indicate that a technological goal is far-fetched. E.g. [Proposer]The new plane will be so stealthy as to be literally invisible. [Audience member to colleague]They're going to make it out of unobtainium, I guess.
Ugh for the unimaginative Avatar word in this puzzle. Hated the movie, too. Horrible screenwriting. Even talented actor Edie Falco went flat mouthing that dialog. Endless violence and noise. Ok, about 30 minutes of beautiful underwater scenes—out of 3+ hours. One could make a drinking game with the repetition of “I got this” line. Maybe I should have snuck in some booze to help. No more Avatar in crosswords, pleeeze.
Can't possibly pass on an opportunity to submit OAST poetry.
I'm a queen in my luxury OAST. I'd describe, but I don't want to boast. When they turned up the heat, All that warmth was a treat, And I love my new life as a ghost.
@Nancy (10:21) Understand about the Prince Harry overload but I was glad I read it because I have a much better understanding of his viewpoint now. I know it’s only his side of the story, but I believe it would have been a far different one had his mother been there all these years to defend him - which you know she would have done with all her heart. Thank you for the recommendation on the Agassi bio. I saw that book listed on Amazon and was curious about it so now I will put it on my list as well.
@GILL: Regarding do-overs … I’m pleased to be in such good company. I can’t think of anyone I’d rather be wrong with. 😄
Sincerely hope OAST being clued as a dwelling is a reference to the Alan Partridge: From the Oasthouse podcast on Audible (wherein the long-running British character moves into an oast-style house)
I’m with @LMS all the way. This was a sweet Friday offering with lots to enjoy and plenty of pitfalls and resistance. Never heard of UNOBTANIUM. Not a big sci-fi fan, but it did make me laugh as there have been many examples in my life of unobtania (hi again, @LMS) the main being diet Vernor’s Ginger Ale. No other brand actually tastes lime ginger. Narrow rules legal pads with the left margin set farther to the right. Those are the two biggies.
I’m so late to the party again today. T’all have noticed everything I would have said so see you tomorrkw.
Our OAST is a delightful B&B You're guaranteed to have a pleasant stay To host you we'd be privileged, you see— We'd love to watch your flesh turn ashy grey.
Chiming in on the CRUSH CANS ... I'm in Rex's camp.
If I say, give me a Crush, I'm asking for grape or orange soda, without specifying the container
If I say, give me a Crush can, there's no question that a soda is being requested, but the can container is what's specifically being asked for (with the assumption it has the desired soda).
CRUSH CAN can only be interpreted as a reference to the container, not the substance inside.
The distinction is sharp enough I'd argue against anyone suggesting this is splitting hairs.
(If anyone reads the blog this far down!) Got Oast from crosses. Last word for me. Didn’t know it. It’s a bit disconcerting that Rex references years and years of NYT puzzles to complain about the meaning of the word. I suggest thinking outside the box and trying Real Life instead of bouncing around the echo chamber of NYTXW. Easiest Friday solve for me (33 mins!), half my usual.
Rex, I’d say if you liked Dances with Wolves, you’ll like Avatar. If you didn’t, you won’t. Very similar Joseph Campbell adventure-of-the-hero stories.
Great limericks, bloggers, but @loren's leadoff was top of the line. Hilarious!
This puzzle was typical for me: the NW fell hardest and last. Very last entry: BINGO--even though we play it regularly! But also atypical: I found it easy-medium vis-a-vis OFF's med-chal. That is RARE.
My good man: you may pooh-pooh Avatar all you want, but the cinematography is beautiful, and so are the Navi, one with nature trying to survive against the brutality of big business. Plus a double DOD with Sigourney Weaver and Zoe Saldana. So there. But anyway, do you want to throw 2001: A Space Odyssey in the trash as well? CRYOSLEEP was certainly a prominent feature of that film.
Outstanding WOE: BIKERIDES as clued. In-crowd terminology unknown to outsiders. There's your INOUT.
OK, I'll try one.
The thing that would please me the most Is to rent an event in an OAST. So we would drink hearty While having a party: The quintessential Rex roast!
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ReplyDeleteThe A in OAST was the last letter I entered, and I was somewhat surprised that I got the happy music. For the "Where's the Beef?" clue at 30D, I racked my brain trying to think of Clara Peller's name. I never was able to recall it but I looked it up post-solve, when the answer turned out to be more generic.
A in OAST was my last letter to fall as well. I actually found the puzzle much easier than Rex. Recently saw Avatar, CRYOSLEEP is a trope from practically every sci-fi film/novel and was a gimme, I even knew HARPO because of a recent rabbit hole into Oprah’s production company. Also an avid cyclist, and loved the misdirect for centuries. Great puzzle.
Delete-Brando
Brutal cluing. I managed to get QUILTS, even though SPELLS is more obvious. I managed to get MARSROVER by guessing that "Perseverance" was its name. But the SW killed me. I had no idea about CRYOSLEEP or ARYA. I also question whether EARPHONE is a valid answer.
ReplyDeleteAt the end of the day (morning), I just wasn't smart enough to finish it.
I had the exact same reaction to OAST, although I enjoyed the new learning!
ReplyDeleteAnd yes, this felt more like a Saturday: lots of guessing and maybes. I was ultimately able to finish with a Friday-ish time though.
I enjoyed this until I didn't (as they say). As I start solving I develop a vibe of some kind. This one was a bit difficult, a bit tricky, but doable. I filled the NW quickly (for me) and went on about business. Then I hit the Avatar abomination. Crosses took care of it but it took the shine off. So then I was in the SW. There were some self-made snags but the Perseverance clue was nasty, in a bad way. It was so out of sync with the rest of the puzzle. If you're going to throw a wrench in the works like that it has to be a better known name. Yes, even on Friday.
ReplyDeleteI dunno, Rex. I thought this was a peach of a puzzle. If I tried to list all the NOTEWORTHY entries, I’d use up most of my already-too-long real estate here. UNOBTANIUM was new to me, too, but I couldn’t help but think about the unobtania in my life: small plastic-coated paper clips, Topo Chico, the perfect black cardigan, contentment. . .
ReplyDeleteThat you could live in an OAST surprised me, too. Here you go, Rex:
Mrs. Bread moved into her OAST.
Its warmth’s what appealed to her most.
Though cozy at first,
The heat just got worse
She has since changed her name to Ms. Toast.
Speaking of NOTEWORTHY, it crosses NEW HIRE. In my school, any new staff is NOTEWORTHY. And since a new teacher or even sub’s presence means I won’t have extra kids in my classes or lose my planning to coverage, I see them as doteworthy, too, and accost them with welcome wagon charm.Want some coffee? I even have biscotti to go with it! In one of those fancy cups with the lid. . . what’s that? You like herbal tea? Got it. I even have organic honey. Come on into my room and I’ll make you some. . .
I think I’d happily stay home and stab my kneecap with a plastic fork than go with Mom to the Tuesday BINGO event. You should see how she frets about her outfit and who’s slated to do the calling for the night. She and her friend get there 30 minutes early so they can sit at their customary table. No, really. For her, it’s the highlight of the week. For me, I get to come home to an empty house and collapse onto the couch in a fugue state. No questions, no chit-chat. No dredging the bottom of my empty tank trying to conjure conversation from the fumes.
I liked GRAPE SODA crossing SIPS ON. And it crosses RARE. I got a hankering for diet grape soda a few years ago, and lemme tell you – it’s almost impossible to find. Nasty stuff, I know, but still. (I loved the clue, by the way.)
I also liked the clue for URDU. The convention of what we call “languages” is a lot of times purely political or geographical. Danish and Norwegian are mutually intelligible, so you could argue that they’re actually just dialects of each other – not separate languages. And we have a “language” with dialects that are not mutually intelligible, so like you could argue that the cockney English spoken in London’s East End is a separate language from the English spoken in southern Appalachia and the Ozarks. And the English a very agitated Boogie was using last week to recount his upsetting run-in with the police because he was carrying in violation of his ankle monitor and tried to run and and and, well, I just couldn’t follow even though I was listening with all my might. . . you could argue that his English is a separate language from my English. The cool thing is, Boogie can understand mine, so in a sense he’s bilingual and I’m not.
I just used BUYS IN(to) yesterday when I was chatting with another teacher about the Classroom Maslow’s Hierarchy that is the first couple of weeks of a new semester with new kids. First you have to get control. This is not for the faint of heart, and mine is usually in my throat when I call out a particularly surly guy who’s twice my size. Once you get control, you have to get them to BUY IN, to accept that what we’re going to do is meaningful and valuable. (Pass out copies of The Mayor of Casterbridge and you’ll see what I mean. I just got some used copies on Ebay of Jason Reynolds’ The Long Way Down, and I’m starting to get their attention.)
If you can’t accomplish this control and this buy-in, things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; mere anarchy is loosed upon the world. No, really.
I completely agree what you said about dialect v. language. I would add that Chinese "dialects" like Cantonese are really separate languages and are mutually incomprehensible vis-a-vis Mandarin, Ditto Italian "dialects" like Napolitan and Sicilian compared with Italian.b
DeleteAnd everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned. JFK’s favorite poem. Little did we all know that 50+ years later the rough beast truly would slouch toward Washington to be born.
DeleteCentury is to cycling as marathon is to running.
ReplyDeleteSort of. A century is literally a one hundred mile ride. You can do a century without a formal race.
DeleteYou also can do a “metric century”—100 km.
DeleteA bonanza of longs, 18 of them. That's the payoff when you don't clog the grid with Terrible Threes (only eight).
ReplyDeleteWe saw Avatar 2 yesterday. An incredible spectacle. Great beauty, great excitement, all put together with great artistry.
Had fun filling in the squares briskly until I was left with a white lower left. I guessed CRYOSLEEP and then turned it over to The Closer. She got GRAPESODA and then we both saw MARSROVER to finish. Very good puzzle.
I cycled a lot in the '90's. I did 2 or 3 "centuries". I never liked using a time measurement term to describe a distance measurement.
ReplyDelete@Anon 6:42. No, it isn't.
ReplyDeleteFelt like it was a missed opportunity at a really good one today. 75% of it pretty much sparkled, but it seems like they just couldn’t close the deal and fell back into familiar NYT territory with awful stuff like UNOBTANIUM, INTL, OAST, and a terrible cross of ARYA with CRYOSLEEP. Too bad, this one coulda been a contender, but some of those entries just reek.
ReplyDeleteI agree that crossing cryosleep and another p.p.p. may be a bit much. Although I knew Arya having seen the whole show
DeleteTotally in my wheelhouse today, with a solving time half that of my typical Friday (mind you, I'm not the speediest solver and my average Friday tips over 30 minutes).
ReplyDeleteNW corner was my trickiest area in which to find purchase, for much of the reasons Rex cites. Had to move on and return to that quadrant last. The rest of the puzzle solved pretty smoothly.
HARPO filled for me because that's Oprah's production company, named derived from The Color Purple role. I filled enough of "ROVER" that "Perseverance" was put in perspective. I acknowledge Rex's difficulties with "OAST" and "GRAPESODA", but there were enough crosses that practically filled on their own I'm surprised that he obsessed over either of these.
I'd suggest this grid would be right at home on a Thursday.
Or is it simply Oprah spelled backwards?
DeleteActually both
DeleteI'd say a Wednesday. Thursdays are the hardest for me as I have never met a rebus I liked.
DeleteUNOBTANIUM just sounds like something the writers put in as a placeholder, thinking they’d come up with a better name later on. Then they forgot to do so.
ReplyDeleteCouldn’t figure out why Clara Peller wouldn’t fit for 30D. Wonder what the age cutoff for people who remember her.
Overall, a professional puzzle but one that lacks zing in the long answers. MARS ROVER is the only one I particularly like, and BIKE RIDES and GOES HOME are especially snoozish.
FWIW the word “unobtanium” predates it’s use in Avatar by decades. I first heard it in engineering school in the 80’s as a joke reference for a material to use in your design that has the properties you need, but doesn’t exist.
DeleteI read through these comments hoping I wasn’t nuts… I’d definitely heard the word before Avatar came along. Like Rex, I’ve never bothered with the movies, but I guess bits of them sneaked into my brain.
DeleteThen there's a "metric century": 100 km. Centuries in the US usually mean 100 miles. I always thought metric century was just a cheap way for someone to say they biked a "century" Many serious riders bike that distance every Saturday and Sunday in the summer on routine rides.
ReplyDeleteUnobtanium is not a unique term to the "Avatar" franchise. It seems to date from the 1950s aerospace community, to express any item which is ideal, but unavailable, due to either cost, technology or physical impossibility. See also "then a miracle happens..." and "handwaving"
Give me some challenge and wit, throw in some smiles, wake up at least one lovely memory, teach me something, and you’ve done Friday right.
ReplyDeleteAnd here it was. No way I could sleepwalk through this. Oh, there were footholds, but the best kind; they yielded an answer or two at most. Then that answer or those answers maybe also yielded one or two answers. So, there was sweet, sweet effort engaged continually.
“Hah!”-inducing witty wordplay all over, such as [Give an edge to] for HONE, [Long ones can be measured in centuries] for BIKE RIDES, and [Finishing-line cry] for BINGO. That last one brought a throw-my-head-back “Hah!”.
Then being reminded of things I just haven’t thought about in a long time. UNOBTANIUM, which I loved when first exposed to it in “Avatar”, because it was so corny that it was cool. Also: “Oh yeah! There’s a soda called Crush!”
Learning CRYOSLEEP. Learning ELKHOUNDS and that they are some country’s national dog! Thinking “An OAST can be a building?” and finding out that indeed it can. (@Rex, your take on OAST, and @Loren your OASt limerick were priceless!)
Plus some sparkly bonuses. BUTTS OUT abutting MUN. QUAD above A FOOT. A Boggle-style HOO-BOY beginning with the H of OOH. And the sing-song roll-off-the-tongue CLEMATIS.
So yes, Barbara, this, your first themeless NYT puzzle, was, IMO, a Friday done right, fist-pumpingly right. Way to go, and thank you!
Today’s writeup is pure Rex for me. I was rolling my eyes at his crabby curmudgeonliness until I got to his OAST riff, which was hilarious - why I like reading him so
ReplyDeletemuch. And then @LMS’s poem about Ms. Toast living in an OAST. I just blipped right over OAST in the puzzle with no clue it was going to give me such pleasure post-solve.
A long BIKE RIDE is called a “century” when it’s exactly 100 miles. I did one in my serious biking days, part of an AIDS charity ride that totaled 200 miles over three days. The middle day was the brutal century, and I was so happy crossing the finish line that I yelled BINGO! No, I didn’t, but I LOVED that clue once I grokked it. Also the double whammy misdirection clues of GRAPE SODA and PERSEVERANCE.
I liked the puzzle - pretty much in my wheelhouse. I did see both Avatar movies, and Rex might find a lot to like if he did see them. The message they convey is not only pro-environment, but extremely anti-military. The US Marines are the bad guys in both movies. James Cameron (the director) gets to have it both ways - he obviously loves staging over the top battle scenes but he also gets to show that he really hates war and those who wage it.
I liked MEAT LOVER, BACON and DINER sharing the puzzle - perhaps to be followed by ORGAN DONOR. IF I WERE YOU, I wouldn’t eat another of those striped strips. Who am I kidding, yes I would.
@Conrad, I paused long enough to think of "Clara" (Peller), but when I saw that could not happen, I set aside the mental rolodex.
ReplyDelete@lms, UNOBTANIUM/contentment--lol.
This was a fast Friday for me. NW fell quickly, and I proceeded clockwise through the NE, E and SE with only minor hang-ups. The W and SW did go a bit slower and in the end I had to resolve two issues in separate locations to get the Happy Music: 1) 46D, ARYA or ARiA (CRYOSLEEP or CRiOSLEEP) and 2) 29D, bLOB or GLOB--it seemed reasonable to me that some flat-earther might be afraid of bERMS.
There a CLEMATIS Street where I used to live--never knew it was apparently named for a flowering plant. Nice to learn something new.
I had WENTYOKO before WENTSOLO for broke up a band. LOL
ReplyDeleteAn amazing phrase if we could get it started. Truly genius.
DeleteThere was an old lady she lived in an oast
ReplyDeleteShe's toast
My first entry was IFIWEREYOU and mostly raced through the rest. UNOBTANIUM made some sense to me, as did CRYOSLEEP.
ReplyDelete@LMS - terrific poem! :-)
A century refers to one hundred - usually miles or kilometers. Very common for cycling fundraising events.
I’m very far from a pop culture defender. I won’t watch Game of Thrones or any of the Marvel “Universe” “films” [sic] or Disney post-1965 (or so), etc. etc. But the new Avatar in 3D on a giant XD screen is a remarkably stunning visual experience. It’s a terrible movie, to be sure, paper thin and formulaic. But it’s gorgeous and thrilling to watch, to just let your eyeballs luxuriate in its splendor. I’m glad I saw it, and I recommend the experience (if not the movie).
ReplyDeleteThe puzzle was pretty good! And I always enjoy Grumpy Rex.
Some of the best American animation has been post-1965 Disney; likewise, the first six seasons of GoT some of the best TV of their respective years. One gains so little by remaining “above” pop culture.
Delete“If I were you, I’d read some racist pseudoscience.” No thanks, Agnes.
DeleteSurely a student of myth would understand the value of “simplicity” (and recognize that’s it’s hard to be simple AND pretentious).
DeleteThe Bell Curve is drivel that was debunked contemporaneously, never mind waiting 30 years.
DeleteThis one was tough, especially in the West. Had to resort to Google; once I got HARPO I was able to see MARSROVER and CRYOSLEEP and everything else in the SW fell. BINGO was the key in the NW, and took me forever to see.
ReplyDeleteThe East was easier. I wrote in UNOBTANIUM without crosses - I remember that term being eye-rolled in reviews as just a little too on the nose, then learning later that it was used in engineering to refer to a material that was perfect for the needs of a project but either didn’t exist or was unavailable. Also in the West, ALEC, QUAD and BELLCURVE across the top provided a strong foothold (and I have the same unpleasant association with that last answer).
I disagree with Rex’s quibble on GRAPE SODA. “Grab me a can of soda” is very much in the language (although here it would be pop), and might even be necessary to distinguish from the cans of beer and larger bottles of soda in the same cooler.
Rarely do I have a completely different solving experience than Rex (as we are around the same age, and generally have similar cultural references in our wheelhouse), but today was one of those days! I breezed right through it until the SW corner... the Crush thing bugged me, because I only ever associate it with Orange soda. (And pickup brands aren't generally my thing, but this one *should* have been, as I am a devoted fan of This Old House and GMC is one of their sponsors.) Lots (for me) to love about this one!
ReplyDeleteIt’s a century because it’s a bike ride of 100 miles. There are also double centuries (for crazy people) and metric centuries which are 100 kilometer rides. I have completed a couple of metric and imperial centuries.
ReplyDelete@8:14 and for really crazy people you can inline skate a century. I finished 2 of those on inline skates (Rollerblades) but I skated many more metric centuries, 62 miles. I would follow along the cyclist who'd all yell: how far are you going? It is a lot harder (no gears! No brakes!) But I think more fun. I did cycle quote a few centuries as well. I stopped doing all of that in 2018, after 20 years, because my old body fell apart and now I do crossword puzzles, jigsaw puzzles and limp the dog.
DeleteWell, I liked it. Didn’t get BINGO in the first pass but got ALEC, QUAD, AFOOT and CITES among the initial acrosses, and did pretty well with the downs that begin along the north shore. This was a good solid foundation for the rest of the solve – much better than I often do in the early going on a Friday or a Saturday. As for the problematic SW, well, it just wasn’t a problem for me. Before I even looked at the long acrosses, I’d written in a bunch of the downs: ARYA, SIPS ON, DINERS and WENT SOLO. I also had MEATeatER, which had to be corrected, but when I finally saw [Crush cans, maybe], [Perseverance, e.g.] and the sci-fi clue, I had enough letters to splatz them all in, bang-bang-bang. I didn’t know UNOBTAINIUM either (what an odd name), but crosses got me through. At one point I could see that it was going to end with TANIUM (which made sense for something mined), and I also had the N and O from RNA and EGOT. No idea about those last two letters, but -- BUTTS OUT and SAABS to the rescue!
ReplyDeleteI liked many of the long answers: WISH ME LUCK, MARS ROVER, CRYOSLEEP, IF I WERE YOU, NOTEWORTHY, ELK HOUNDS and CLEMATIS. We used to have a CLEMATIS on the back fence. I doubt it was an “old man’s beard,” but it was an absolutely glorious color – I don’t know what to call it – magenta crossed with fuchsia, maybe? That probably sounds garish but it wasn’t, it was jewel-like. Anyway, it died for lack of sun...[moment of silence]...RIP, beautiful CLEMATIS. Yeah, that was a stunner for OAST, but I always had the notion of OAST-house in the back of my mind. I don’t know where I got that from, not from crossword clues judging from the list Rex printed. I’m with him on not liking the term HUMP DAY, I think because I don’t like the sound of the word HUMP, and feel its usage should be confined to camels. Call it “Median DAY,” and I’m right there with you.
Uniclues:
1. Carnivorous revolutionary.
2. Cervus canadensis harasses Marx Brother.
3. Makes headset out of cloth and batting.
4. Benefactor who gives Hammonds to churches in Rawalpindi.
5. Overweight mooners’ modus operandi.
6. NASA’s latest ploy to interest women in planetary exploration.
7. Possible answer to the question: “With your insomnia, were you able to stay under during stasis?”
8. Vehicles so ugly and unstreamlined, they look like lumps of fat.
1. ABBIE MEATLOVER
2. ELK HOUNDS HARPO
3. QUILTS EARPHONE
4. URDU ORGAN DONOR
5. ROOMY BUTTS OUT
6. MARS ROVER SONIA
7. “CRYOSLEEP? IN, OUT.”
8. BACON-GLOB GMCS.
Man, writing these uniclues is addictive. I wish @Gary Jugert had warned me. I thought I was going to post one or two on a very occasional basis, but look at me now. I’ve got to get a handle on this obsession!
[SB: yd, 0. My last word was this 5er. I can never quite remember whether they’re going to accept it or consider it too foreign.]
Barbara S. 8:16 AM
DeleteYou're wonderful. These are spectacular. #5! 🤣 LOVE how you wrangle so many I pass on. I'm gonna need to focus to keep up.
A very fine puzzle. OAST also surprised me.
ReplyDeleteRex needs to stop complaining so bitterly about the most ubiquitous pop culture like GoT and Avatar. It's... huge. These are very valid topics for clues.
Speaking of "Perseverance", congratulations to Barbara Lin on seeing this puzzle through, as she did so while dealing with a serious health issue. Here's WISH[ing you] LUCK on a full recovery.
ReplyDeleteNice puzzle. A fun solve and I learned a couple of things in the process. Just the way I like 'em!
Leave it to the big guy to associate Gauss and Laplace with whatever social ill he’s banging against today. The normal distribution can be used to represent numerous natural situations. Do not disparage it - embrace it.
ReplyDeleteWonderful puzzle - played normalish Friday. I’m not an Avatar guy either so had to back into that. No issue with the Crush cans clue. BUTTS OUT, WISH ME LUCK, IF I WERE YOU - the hits keep on coming.
WEED, whites and wine
Not a lot of glue here - OOH, OR SO, EOGT etc are necessary evils to things like the great YEATS quote.
Enjoyable Friday solve.
The CRESTS - before Johnny Maestro WENT SOLO
Great puzzle. Very tough puzzle. Share the comments of Rex and others about the southwest part of the grid. But I managed, in just short of a half hour, to get it done. Kept going from across to down many times. Was surprised when OAST was correct.
ReplyDeleteBig bunch of really clever clues made this a treat. Thank you, constructor and editor.
The line in finishing line refers to the row on the card, the cry is “Bingo”. Great clue.
ReplyDelete@Son Volt
ReplyDeleteWhat Rex is banging on about is the book The Bell Curve, which has received a bad reception on methodological grounds (and much else besides): a poor legacy of Gauss and Laplace. No one should embrace misuses of probability and statistics.
On the other hand, what Rex was banging on about with cans and SODAS struck me as pretty incoherent.
CRYOSLEEP and, especially, UNOBTANIUM, were pretty nasty.
Interesting how there is a huge tonal difference between IF I WERE YOU and "if it were me". That one little word YOU is very powerful.
Okay, better stop here, otherwise I'll be in the WEEDS. I've got a full plate today. WISH ME LUCK.
Oasts are indeed real buildings, at least in the UK. Incredibly cute, they look like they belong in the Hobbit movie. However, I doubt if you will find any in the US.
ReplyDeleteSee if I did this link correctly
Actually found this one disappointingly easy for a Friday. Hey, I used to teach a college course on science fiction. But that leads to my one gripe. I'm familiar with UNOBTAINIUM as a longstanding and snarky term for one of the most dirt-common SF tropes. Its use in Avatar is actually kind of self-consciously ironic, like if you had an action movie where the thing driving the plot was actually called the McGuffin. I could wish the clue had reflected that self-aware irony somehow. Maybe one of the few actually witty things in the whole movie franchise.
ReplyDeleteBy far the best puzzle of the week IMO and I wholeheartedly second Chen’s POW. I enjoyed the straightforward quality and smooth solve after the frustration of the last few days. A few stumbles, ABBEY before ABBIE, SPELLS before QUILTS, IF YOU ASK ME before IF I WERE YOU. Then got stuck in the SW with MEAT EATER instead of LOVER and a big blank at DEES (duh) and ANYA (§#@%!*? GOT clue) all of which was enough to keep me from seeing the brilliant GRAPE SODAS, et al. That took some time to untangle BUTT it was an enjoyable challenge and most satisfying battle to win.
ReplyDelete**Book Recommendation**
Just finished Spare, Prince Harry’s much vaunted memoir, and found it surprisingly good. It was ghost written by Pulitzer Prize winnerJ.R. Moehringer whose professional hand elevates the work from just another blue blood tattle tale to an engrossing account of history in the making. I expected to encounter a few eye-rolling parts but no, more eye-opening really. I doubt it’s on anyone’s list for a Pulitzer but it’s a NOTEWORTHY read for those with even a passing interest in the royals.
I really liked this puzzle. I found it to be just the right amount of difficult. With as fast a time as I got for a Friday, I was surprised to see it considered medium-challenging.
ReplyDeleteDon’t believe everything you read in Wikipedia. IF I WERE YOU, I’d read the BELL CURVE.
ReplyDeleteYes, as Jim mentioned above. In ˋA Color Purple ´, Sophia was played by Oprah Winfrey. She was married to the character
ReplyDeleteˋHarpo ´ which is Oprah, spelled backwards, and the name of her production company.
Nit regarding "Kind of office tray"/INOUT. If you have one tray for In and OUT your work will not be very efficient.
ReplyDelete@Kent 8:01 Thanks for the info about UNOBTANIUM! I thought it was idiotic and hilarious when they said it in the movie, but now I appreciate the original source and its evidence of ordinary workplace WRY humor.
ReplyDeleteI found this puzzle a bit daunting at first in the NW, but ended solving it in under half my usual time. The reason is probably because the names were familiar, even if they didn’t all spring immediately to mind. Looking it over now, I can’t figure out how it went so smoothly except that the crosses always provided a way in. Nicely constructed.
GETS HOME for GOES HOME gave some trouble in NW.
ReplyDeleteI thought of EARPHONE as an EAR TRUMPET but it turns out to be a general term for over-the-ear headphones.
I would like it if folks would read the blog posts before doing their own. There is so much repetition. I understand there will be some anyway because posts are approved and published in batches. But give it a try. WISHMELUCK!
ReplyDelete@Rex missed a crossing dupe. (EARP)HONE/HONE
ReplyDeletePlayed so easy I don’t know what to do will all my extra morning time! Go figure.
ReplyDeleteFH
ReplyDeleteIf you live your life in Crossword World, you know the word 'OAST' but don't know what a 'HOP KILN' is.
The late ABBIE Hoffman at 6 down -- love him or hate him, he was very very funny. He was the original "Sandwich Man" when he was a student at Brandeis, right before my time there. (You could say he was a dorm-to-dorm salesman.)
ReplyDeleteHe said he was against women's rights -- "Why, if you gave women rights, the next thing you know men would want them too!"
When he was negotiating with the Miami police chief for protests of the GOP convention, he said, Listen Chief, if one curly hair on this head is hurt, my father will never come down here again. And the chief replied -- Abbie, I know your father -- he'll come.
Hey All !
ReplyDeleteA big Agree and a hearty chuckle with Rex's OAST screed. Dang, man, I was thinking how cramped it would be to live in a no-longer-used oven. Even if the OAST was a decent size, it would still be cramped. Who the heck knew it was a whole building? Dang, Englanders, a heads-up would've been nice. 😁
Weird how sometimes a correct answer is in, but you (I) can't get any crossers to work. One today was RARE at 45D. Had it in, actually thinking that Buffalo nickels aren't really Rare RARE, and I couldn't get any of the Acrosses. Took it out, to eventually figure out the Acrosses, and bam, RARE was correct. Same thing at GOESHOME. Had it in, took it out, figured out yes indeed, it was correct.
That NW corner toughest for me, only thing I was confident about was OTS. Had OWES in, but then thought 2D was IFyouaskme, so erased OWES, but then seeing that couldn't possibly be correct, erased all except IFI, rewrote in my OWES , and saw it was IFIWEREYOU. Finished at the C of BACON/CITES. Tricky BACON clue.
Wasn't UNOBTANIUM the element in that movie where the Earth's core stopped spinning? I think the name of the movie was The Core. Apparently is OBTANIUM enough...
When I moon someone? ROO MY BUTTS OUT
🤔😜
One F
RooMonster
DarrinV
FH
ReplyDeleteLike a few other commentators, I thought this was pretty easy. 'Easy', for me, means 10-15 minutes. Quite a few gimmes: ALEC, BELLCURVE, OAST, MUNIS, RNA, LYTE, INTL, MARSROVER, ORSO, ABBIE, LEIS, URDU, AVEC, IMS, BUENO, TATS, DINERS, SUM, BUS, RARE. Once you just write those in you're of to the races. I frequently disagree with Rex but I share his lack of interest in Avatar. Probably for different reasons though.
Certainly not OUST. OAST? OIST? Eeny, meeny, miny, mo. OIST! Wrong! DNF.
ReplyDeleteI thought an OAST was a kind of oven, not an outbuilding. And it was another completely blind guess between CLEMITES and CLEMATES for the plant.
Interestingly, it was these two clues and not the pop culture that was my downfall today. ARYA, HARPO and UNOBTAINIUM eventually came in -- though there are two much less obscure ways to clue HARPO, surely. But while I may normally deplore the use of an "Avatar" clue in a given puzzle, the invented word UNOBTAINIUM is so droll, so WRY, so wonderfully tongue-in-cheek that it makes me wonder: Is the whole movie that funny? Should I actually watch it?
This had its moments. I learned the term for a germophobe; I had a nice "Aha" over MARS ROVER clued as "Perseverence"; I learned that BIKE RIDES are measured in centuries (really?); and I learned that any MEAT LOVER, not just a Wendy's customer, can ask "Where's the beef?"
And, yes, IF I WERE YOU is a really off-putting way of giving unsolicited advice.
My favorite clue, though, was for BACON at 1D. And the clue for BINGO at 1A was nice too. A strong way to start off a puzzle.
Interesting that I share many cultural opinions with Rex: I too found Game of Thrones shallow and thin, and Avatar pretentious.,warmed over, simplistic storytelling, I suspect that both of us cast a jaundiced eye on these modern attempt at myths and legend because we both read and teach the real myths and legends, the original texts in Old or Middle English or in Old Norse, which are more genuine and culturally relevant in their context. Reading the medieval sources — an Eddie Poem about Thor or a Middle English story of The Green Knight — puts you back in a world of real stuff, not the flimsy made-up dramas designed to titillate the audience and make piles of money for the producers.
ReplyDeleteSo it’s always a little surprising when I enjoy a puzzle like this much more than he does. I immediately got on the same wavelength as to the clueing: “if I were you”, “wish me luck”, “perseverance/Mars rover” all of these just popped right up.
This was not one of those solving attempts where you slog your way through clue after clue and at the end of the day have a bunch of white space to show for your efforts.
Enjoyed this puzzle. Faster than Avg. Friday for me.
ReplyDeleteSame for me on Oast. Last answer filled with A.
Not as offended by Crush cans, not great cluing, but fine.
Earphone, bleh. Had “piece”1 first
Obviously Rex has bias against Avatar, ok, I get it. Implying Avatar: The Way of Water was a 10 yr after-thought, money-grab of a movie, however, is just wrong. It was planned all along, tech needed to advance, and get ready for it since there will be at least 3 more with releases in ‘24, ‘26 and ‘28.
I think constructors who use words in an unfamiliar way, like OAST, should check in with OFL before they submit their puzzles for publication. The poor man's day, and possibly week, are clearly now ruined. A little consideration please.
ReplyDeleteI'm in the "found it easy" crew today, started in the NE with QUAD and had to back into the NW, which felt isolated. Liked seeing AFOOT there, very Sherlock Holmes. I own a GMC and knew "century" as clued and what a "mysophobe" is and so on. Only slow down was the usual misreading of a clue number which had HARPO writing a YEATS poem, which seemed unlikely. Also hard to see new friend EGOT, as I had CARPHONE for EARPHONE and didn't know The Avatar reference. Oops.
Nice smooth Friday, BL. Big Love for this one, and thanks for all the fun. Hope you're OK.
@Stix I also had WENTYOKO before WENTSOLO. It was the first thing that popped into my head!
ReplyDeleteI liked today’s puzzle and all of its longer answers. Felt like such a rarity. I was clueless about UNOBTAINIUM and am still wondering about EARPHONE - I had EARpiece first and am not yet convinced that’s not a better answer.
You may have picked up UNOBTANIUM from its decades of use in both engineering and science fiction prior to Avatar, and of course CRYOSLEEP is a sci-fi staple, so you can imagine a universe in which the blue movies don't exist but this puzzle still does.
ReplyDeleteEnjoyably "medium" from BELL CURVE to CRYOSLEEP, then challenging to get into the NW, when all I had to work with was ROOMY. Last in: BINGO x BACON. The combination of the vague clues and the excellent longer answers won me over - I thought it was a great Friday.. I liked the parallel BUTTS OUT and BUYS INTO and feel an affection for AFOOT.
ReplyDeleteOAST: I was helped here by having seen one on a trip to California wine country that looked like a small castle.
CRY O' SLEEP was what popped out at me from the finished grid: my husband is on a new medication that causes weird dreams.
There's something about an OAST that just inspires poetry. I think Loren's contribution is the best, but they're all pretty good. However, you were all anticipated -- by several centuries -- by Milton, in "Lycidas:"
ReplyDelete"That strain I heard was of a higher mood,
But now my OAST returns..."
At least that's what I always think of when OAST crops up again in a puzzle.
Speaking of centuries, I've never ridden one, but I have gone on group bike rides, and have certainly heard the term. I got it from the K, but waited for crosses to see if they were BIKE RIDES or RacES.
@Pedaler, it's not just bike rides, cricketers call it a century when you score 100 runs. And I'm pretty sure that the original century was a 100-man unit of a Roman legion, commanded of course by a centurion.
Dpwn in the SW, I had OVE from the crosses, which was enough to let me know I was dealing with a ROVER--but what kind, MARS or Moon? More crosses needed!
Then I put in CRYOSLEEP, but remembered that some science fiction novels call it "Cold SLEEP." Another kealoa! And really, doesn't cryo- mean frozen? Like Ted Williams's head?
@Loren, when I was in college there were courses in the Serbo-Croation language; it was generally considered one language until Yugoslavie broke up, after which everyone insisted they were distinct. My son worked with a bunch of Croatians, and would occasionally ask what the difference was; the answer was always that they had different words for "belt." No one could come up with anything else.
But what about the Irish English in the clue for 53-A? Is that a thing? Or is that accent actually part of the Irish language?
@Whatsername -- Moehringer is a GREAT writer and I am tempted to read "Spare" just for him, as you recommend, even though I'm more than a bit Prince Harry-ed out.
ReplyDeleteAnd now, assuming you haven't already read it, you must read the Andre Agassi memoir "Open", whether you're a tennis fan or not. It's the most riveting and compulsively readable memoir I've ever read -- right after Moss Hart's "Act One" (which Moss wrote himself, but then he was a professional writer.) But having Moehringer as your ghostwriter -- I can't imagine anything more wonderful. You chose well, Harry.
Well I liked this puzzle also due to the many clever clues AND I learned what a “century” is in biking. Otherwise, still very much in my wheelhouse.
ReplyDelete@Wanderlust and @mmorgan…very good points made about Avatar. Unfortunately, I saw the original in IMAX 3D (my first and ONLY) and found out for the first time in my life what “motion sickness” feels like and had a headache until the end of the next day. Nobody’s fault and I know it’s irrational, but I have no desire to see the sequel because of THAT.
@kitshef, I thought of Clara Peller but could NOT remember her name, which in the end I guess helped me.
So. I had one weird moment when my blanks for 26D had me scratching my head thinking how is ORlANDOfla a drivers’ license designation? 🙄
At age 86, my century bike ride days are long past, but I've done a few, as have my wife, my kids, and a couple of grandkids. But I could never have run a marathon.
ReplyDeleteIn the collector-car world, authentic spare parts for uncommon cars are said to be made of two rare elements, unobtanium and cantaffordium.
I hope @Unknown (9:39) is right about new Avatar movies in '24, '26, '28. I can't wait to not go see them.
ReplyDeleteHate to say it, but this was the easiest Friday I recall working in months. Seriously, one of my fastest 5 ever Friday solves.
ReplyDeleteSure, Avatar (1) was CGI meh and I won't bother to see the sequel, but I could have entered that answer without crosses except, what, how long is the answer supposed to be? Turns out that the I needed to omit the first I in UNOBTAINIUM and just enter UNOBTANIUM. That was a joke substance that Cameron came up with that I'm sure references back to some previous sci-fi or more likely Marvel comics story.
Had a moment of trouble in the SW because I wanted COLDSLEEP rather than CRYOSLEEP. Same difference.
Yes, long Saturday BIKERIDES by the sort of people I know via Strava might be measured in centuries. Like a long Saturday ride from Manhattan to Poughkeepsie via the rail trail network is damn close to 100 miles, i.e., a century. Then train it back to the city.
The HARPO answer, I was like, OPRAH's in that movie. So you're telling me... something? But, saw it in 1985 and never since.
HUMPDAY has also been around forever. I remember in the early 1980s that a bar near my college dorm advertised cheap(er) prices on Wednesday evenings using this phrase. Not that I ever went.
As a Brit that used to regularly go walking in Kent, I am taking being able to confidently write in OAST on the basis of _A_T as a small measure of karmic ease for all the time I've spent struggling with obscure American colleges, cutesy misdirection like "Cowboys home, for short" that turns out to be the ugly-looking NFCEAST, etc.
ReplyDeleteSo so close to an OHO, but not quite. Devastating.
ReplyDeleteThis was a snoozer. Not even one attempt at being funny. Not one. Like the editorial work process includes a bore-ification committee. I was pleased to see the slush pile editor continues to remain BUTT-forward. At least xi has a sense of humor.
The longer answers are all fine, but not glamorous. Very little in the way of junk. Learning to answer ARYA 80% of the time if the clue has GoT in it.
Uniclues:
1 When you're getting a C, but you're used to getting As thanks to your charming personality.
2 Reason given for wearing a shiny Spandex bodysuit with words written all over it.
3 The closet in the back with the computer where you watch the sexual harassment video.
4 Likes it well done.
1 BELL CURVE AFOOT
2 CITES BIKE RIDES
3 NEW HIRE OAST
4 BUYS INTO BURNT
@jberg, I thought the same thing with 53-A! That also leads me to ponder how there are four different names for the same name in an area that is not that large…John, Sean, Ian, and Ewen, because I’m pretty sure that ALL the Slavic countries use Jan. This THEN made me remember how my sister and I could not believe that our cousin named one son Sean and the other son Ian.
ReplyDeleteOOH! I’m too cool to watch Avatar!
ReplyDeleteThe joy for me was having century "bikerides" - do several a year - crossed with Norwegian "elkhounds" - have a big one of those and she greets meet at the 100-mile finishing line, bingo!
ReplyDeleteWell, sportsfans … if a FriPuz has to be themeless, it's always best when it goes slightly schlocky [CRYOSLEEP, UNOBTANIUM, MARSROVER, etc.]. IM&AHO.
ReplyDeletePretty easy-E solvequest, at our house. Very few, widely distributed, no-knows:
* ARYA. Have yet to watch one episode of "Game of Thrones". Gotta get around to that, someday … yep. yep.
* Livin in an OAST. [yo, @RP] Sounds kinda like what Hansel & Gretel got the wicked witch to do.
* SONIA Gandhi. Pleased to meet her, tho.
* How to spell UNOBTANIUM. Always assumed it was UNOBTAINIUM, with that there extra "I".
* Century-long BIKERIDES. [Only familiar with century-long staff meetins, from back in my good ol' workin days.]
fave stuff included lotsa stuff: BINGO clue crossed with BACON clue. DEES clue. ELKHOUNDS. WISHMELUCK. IFIWEREYOU. NOTEWORTHY. BUTTSOUT and symmetric(al) BUYSINTO. UNOBTANIUM. MARSROVER. CRYOSLEEP. URDU.
staff weeject pick [Alas, only 8 to pick from]: OOH. Thankfully, OHH don't come up much, like that AAH vs AHH choice tends to, a lot.
Thanx for the fun, Ms. Lin darlin. BUENO.
Masked & Anonymo10Us
**gruntz**
Well under half an hour so easy here too. Flew through the eastern half fast enough to think it might not be Friday, then slogged through the west. fInES before CITES and meat eatER before LOVER didn't help. And it me a long time to see that crushing cans wasn't something related to recycling and that perseverance wasn't some character trait, but I persevered and got there.
ReplyDeleteLoved Saabs. Learned to drive in a 1963 Saab station wagon with a 3 cylinder engine that had a lifetime guarantee. I think my Dad got 4 engine replacements before it finally gave up the ghost.
Checking opening prices on the Comex this morning, I was surprised to find that UNOBTAINIUM was now trading at 1.625x the price of Vibranium. Must have gotten a bump from Avatar crowding out Black Panther as a NYTXW fave. And speaking of heavy metals, didn’t Wayne and Garth say “We are NOTEWORTHY” upon being asked to hang out with Alice Cooper? Almost.
ReplyDeleteBeware the Ides of March, and while you’re at it, be careful on BIKER IDES, particularly if you go for centuries.
@Nancy. Sorry to report that neither of your spellings of CLEMATIS is correct.
I love the single INOUT tray. It’s something that Mr. Burns would employ.
Nice themeless debut and POW, Barbara Lin.
Loved it and mostly breezed through. Very enjoyable Friday!
ReplyDeleteI plunked down WENTYOKO for 33D (Broke up a band,say), haha!
ReplyDeleteI thought the cluing was fantastic, and definitely Friday worthy/appropriate.
ReplyDeleteOf course, if helps that I finished with a slightly above average Friday time with no assists and no errors.
Friday puzzles are my favorite puzzles - and this one wholly satisfied.
I got my mojo up and running...My OOH, AHA, YAY ME came back in a flash.
ReplyDeleteA real enjoyment today. I didn't have to pull any hair out; the tangles were smoothed over. That's the YAY ME. First entry was BINGO BACON...that was my OOH and I spelled out UNOBTANIUM correctly...AHA!.
Yes..I'll take these kinds of Fridays everyday.
I had the same doovers as @Whatsername...Aren't we a pair? the MEATeater oops was the one that held me up the most. I Wasn't able to smooth some of the tangles until I took a breather and just stared. It worked...AHA!...GRAPE SODA/MARS ROVER/CRYOSLEEP....That was it. Proud of myself for dancing a fandango without tripping over slippery slopes.
Now time to ponder. I love Sci-Fi because it pushes my fantasy button. I didn't know about the mined compound because I was probably too busy watching fantasy action in blue. If you knew the crosses, you'd get your answer. I did and I did. I haven't seen the second AVATAR but when it comes out via my TV, you can bet your sweet bippy I'll be watching. I'm even betting Moehringer will watch.
Compares to my fiasco yesterday, I found this fairly easy. More importantly...it was enjoyable!
@Loren...What fine form you're in today...Toast, indeed :-)
Now to go and order up some Spare.
First I found out that Santa was not real. Now I am told that a last is not an oven, not a piece of brewery equipment, not some sort of brewery fixture. Somehow I think the writers of so many crossword clues obtained all their knowledge of lasts the same way I did, through crosswords.
ReplyDeleteThx, Barbara, for an excellent, chewy Fri. puz! :)
ReplyDeleteMed.
Very slow start; only OTS in the NW.
Agree with @Rex in that it felt more like a Sat., but actually finished a tad under my Fri. avg. Go figure.
Many unknowns/hazies but, as usual, fair crosses saved the day! :)
On granddaughter's rec, finally watched 'Avatar' a couple of weeks ago, but somehow managed to forget UNOBTANIUM in the interim.
Lots of crunch today; liked this one a lot! :)
___
Peace 🕊 🇺🇦 ~ Compassion ~ Tolerance ~ Kindness to all 🙏
I cruised through it, finishing in the NW with BINGO's B and proclaiming so. Then I came here and discovered my uhoh errors: ARIA/CRIO, CARPHONE/EARPHONE (I can never remember that silly EGOT).
ReplyDeleteOAST simply appeared resulting from the crosses. With the temperature dipping below zero, I might consider moving in.
Easy except for the NW which was a tad tougher than the rest (e.g. BACON and BINGO did not leap to mind from their respective clues).
ReplyDeleterEEDS before WEEDS.
CLEMATIS and SONIA and HARPO (as clued) were WOEs.
...and speaking of MARS ROVERS, “Good Night Oppy” now streaming on Prime is excellent!
Smooth and solid with some fine long downs, liked it a bunch and Jeff gave it POW.
Well yeh, writing in “Wendy’s ad” for an early answer to 33 down (instead of 30 down) was a major issue, but after both eyes focused and the CRYOSLEEP hangover faded….things sorted themselves OR SO it seemed. IF I WERE YOU Barbara Lin, I’d just ignore the whining and keep tossing those grids at Uncle Will as you shift that BELL CURVE to the right 😉
ReplyDeleteInteresting that Rex thinks it was medium-challenging. I had what I think is my second fastest Friday ever, only 15 seconds slower than my record. Maybe that’s because I didn’t stop to be offended by things that offend Mr. Sensitive.
ReplyDeleteSo wait, what *is* the word for someone who's afraid of BERMS?
ReplyDeleteHAAA! i did the same!
DeleteDNF at OAST / CLEMATIS / MUNIS. All outside my experience. This is my first time encountering OAST as a piece of crosswordese, and the other two are just outside my wheelhouse completely. Other than that, a great puzzle with a lot of bite. After the surprising lack of awareness of 50s/60s sci-fi kitsch from the themer earlier in the week, I suspected moving forward at least a few decades with UNOBTANIUM and CRYOSLEEP would give more than a few folks fits. Some people complain about "terrible threes" but many of the fours were way worse today. BINGO, BACON, and GRAPE SODAS were all clued excellently.
ReplyDeleteI was really surprised by our host's difficulty rating. Today's puzzle fell so easily I'm considering cutting back to just doing Saturday and Sunday. The only slow downs I encountered came from my own write overs. I had CAR/EAR, EATER/LOVER, AT/ON, LITE/LYTE and SONYA/SONIA. That last one came to me when I finally made sense out of 27D. Up until then it looked like it was going to be one of those strictly from the crosses kind of entries which it mostly was.
ReplyDeleteThe OAST thing was a complete surprise to me too. After 33 years of solving I learn that I never really knew what an OAST was.
SB Sun-Thu we're all -0 with the exception of Wed. That was pg-1 due to a stoopit spelling variant.
@egs -- I had the CLIMATIS "IS" right in my grid, but mistyped it in my comment. That because I did know MUNIS. And now I must go to Google to look up its gorgeous colors, per @Barbara S.
ReplyDeleteSome more uniclues (yes, it can be addictive).
1) When everyone in the world feels very, very hot
2) Waugh's leg muscle gets a "Wow!" response
3) Comment on trouve "Avatar"
4) Not much humor in this crowd
1) INTL HUMPDAY
2) BINGO ALEC QUAD
3) AVEC UNOBTANIUM
4) WRY WENT SOLO
You’re right, Rex. It’s you. OAST was the first thing I entered. It helped that I’ve been to England and once stayed in a B&B that featured an oast house as part of its property. I thought this was a great Friday test. I flew through most of the right half, but struggled all down the left side. Great, tricky clues on BINGO and MARSROVER slowed me down, but still to be admired. bLOB instead of GLOB was just as punishing. Thanks B. Lin, great fun.
ReplyDelete♪ My boyfriend's back, he's gonna save my reputation
ReplyDeleteIf I were you I'd take a permanent vacation ♪
Loving WENT YOKO. I wish I'd put it in as the answer.
"The lead singer's girlfriend felt the band didn't sufficently appreciate him, so she had no choice but to go Yoko on the situation."
I enjoyed this puzzle. I would have liked a mite more difficulty, maybe. My only setback was putting in MEATEATER at 30d, which held up my getting into the SW corner for a bit. Rex's sour comments should be ignored (but that's always true).
I wan' it, I wan' it, I waaan' it
47 down. “Edges of a Diamond”. “Dees” What am I missing?
ReplyDelete@Anon 1:07
DeleteD–iamon–D. Dees are at the edges of the word.
Thanks.
DeleteEasy for me, too Easy for a Friday, I thought.
ReplyDeleteIn the mid Sixties, UNOBTANIUM was a common word among my Stanford dorm friends who were future oil company prospectors or techies. My favorite phrase: "Close enough for Government work."
In architecture school we had UNOBTANIUM except we called it Strongo! A thin slab of it was capable of spanning a hundred feet and carrying a heavy load.
ReplyDeleteHands up for typeovers BLOB crossing BERMS and EARPIECE before EARPHONE.
@Loren re languages, I've always thought the rule should be (at least for phonetic/alphabetical ones) if almost all words are spelled the same but many are pronounced differently, they're dialects.
[Spelling Bee: yd -1, missed this 5er. I actually tried spelling it with an "o"; a mistake I've made before.]
For me, this was the most enjoyment I've gotten from a puzzle this week. Granted, Monday and Tuesday's puzzles were excellent, but the early week puzzles generally aren't as satisfying. It's like comparing a snack, however delicious, to a meal.
ReplyDeleteOther things:
Anyone who likes to bike knows what a century is, whether they've ridden one themselves or not.
Given how seriously Avatar takes itself, I can't see their use of UNOBTANIUM as tongue-in-cheek, as others have conjectured. It seems like the filmmakers just didn't want to take the time to explain how important it was to the military/industrial complex in the film.
While I agree with Rex that [Crushes, e.g.] would have been a better, if wicked, clue, the addition of "cans" made the clue a little easier in a difficult puzzle.
I agree with Rex about OAST. I feel let down not by this puzzle, but by every one that's featured OAST in the past.
I love the BELL CURVE! Not the book, which I've never read, but the Gaussian distribution. It involves some of the most interesting mathematics accessible at the undergraduate level.
Efforts to discredit Charles Murray's work in The Bell Curve have failed for nearly thirty years now. As much as folks like Rex don't want to hear it, The Bell Curve truthfully and plainly: black people of average score lower on IQ tests that white people in America. That's indisputable. The fact that some people use this fact to explicitly or even tacitly) prejudge people based on race is not the book's fault. And its worth noting the IQ thing isn't the book's primary focus.
ReplyDeleteAs for centuries to measure 100, it's common in sport. Anyone who plays or follows cricket or has even read a Wodehouse story with Psmith as a character knows a century in cricket is a batsman scoring a hundred runs.
There are so many times when Rex puts into words exactly what I was thinking, and "OAST is a building?!?!" is one of those times. I had this vision that it was a few feet high. Thinking about it more, it wouldn't make economic sense for it to be less than the size of a small room, but an entire building?!?!? Learn something new every day.
ReplyDeleteOnce again, my difficulty ratings differ from Rex. I'm a slow solver, usually find things challenging, esp. Friday and Saturday, and am always disheartened when Rex says they are easy. But this one was just the opposite, did it in one sitting while watching the tube. Fun puzzle.
ReplyDeleteRex, good to see another ADULT comment on Game of Thrones. I tried a couple of episodes a few years back, thought to myself "this is for 14-year-olds" and never went back. Have never seen Avatar; movies are for actors, not CGI.
Anon 7:23
ReplyDeleteSpot on. But unobtanium is used even more broadly. It was ( and I'm guessing still is) a common descriptor for unavailable parts. Usually because the part is no longer made. That very frustrating phenomenon is sadly well known to people who fix old things. Especially vintage cars, cycles etc.
Not too tough, maybe slightly harder than average Friday for me, but I agree with you about "OASTS"; never have seen them clued as "outbuildings," or any kind of building for that matter.
ReplyDeleteOAST crossing CLEMATIS was impossible for me. I’ve never heard of either of these things, and that A is not inferable. I had to play the alphabet game there. Not a fun way to finish the puzzle.
ReplyDeleteAmy: got very involved in a NYT story about a 17 year old giving up her smart phone to be her authentic self. The comments are fascinating. So, late to the puzzle, but very glad I didn't skip it. Really good! My only beef is with GRAPESODAS, as Crush means Orange Crush. I got the reference; just took some time for me to accept that there are other flavors. Are there lots of others?
ReplyDeleteLiked this a lot. Agree it was a fast solve. The Yeats quote put me in a sweet space. He's so lovely a poet. Too bad Rex doesn't like Hump Day. I rather fancied those silly TV ads for I forget what that featured a camel delightedly exclaiming about Hump Day.
Disagree with your Crush cans argument. "There are PBR cans all over the floor" is a fine sentence.
ReplyDeleteCentury = 100 miles on bike. Ive done them and they are hard.
Peace and Love
Communities all over the country have "Century Bike Rides," often for charitable purposes. They are long enough to be an accomplishment for many people, but short enough to finish in a few hours. Extreme conditioning is not required, but my partner's first one gave her painful feet so she rode in her gym trainer's pickup for about 10 miles. No problem in subsequent years with better shoes and pedals.
ReplyDeleteYour comments are always amusing, especially on a very cold Friday when i am dreaming of warmer days and bike rides…you should come out to the Midwest sometime and ride in the Apple Cider Century! 🍎🍏🚴🏼🚴🏽♀️. And now I know I am not a mysophobe! And i do love my cookies extra crispy, just this side of burnt! Have a good weekend everyone! ❄️🥶
ReplyDeleteClever and tricky cluing.
ReplyDeleteFor a long time I wondered why anyone would have a fear of BERMS, then realized it was GLOB not BLOB.
I’m pretty sure that OASTs are frequently worded as ‘OAST [i]house[/i]’ which helps fix the concept not as a cute little drying machine in the corner of a room, but rather something that’s substantial and actually a free standing structure. It’s quite odd to me that there is such a history of cluing for OAST without ever at least touching on that tangentially.
ReplyDeleteAs for UNOBTAINIUM, I first heard of it from the first Avatar and eye rolled through it at the time. Then found out that it’s like the material form of the word widget, a place holder word for when the object or material isn’t really the point of the matter at hand. Which makes it even more of an eye roll choice for me in the Avatar universe, by ymmv
Easy, interesting, and enjoyable. Fine puzzle.
ReplyDeleteJust a note: UNOBTAINIUM is also used around the Pentagon to indicate that a technological goal is far-fetched. E.g. [Proposer]The new plane will be so stealthy as to be literally invisible.
ReplyDelete[Audience member to colleague]They're going to make it out of unobtainium, I guess.
Ugh for the unimaginative Avatar word in this puzzle. Hated the movie, too. Horrible screenwriting. Even talented actor Edie Falco went flat mouthing that dialog. Endless violence and noise. Ok, about 30 minutes of beautiful underwater scenes—out of 3+ hours. One could make a drinking game with the repetition of “I got this” line. Maybe I should have snuck in some booze to help. No more Avatar in crosswords, pleeeze.
ReplyDeleteAlmost set my personal record for a Friday, and Rex calls it medium challenging. I guess it’s Opposite Day.
ReplyDeleteCan't possibly pass on an opportunity to submit OAST poetry.
ReplyDeleteI'm a queen in my luxury OAST.
I'd describe, but I don't want to boast.
When they turned up the heat,
All that warmth was a treat,
And I love my new life as a ghost.
@Nancy (10:21) Understand about the Prince Harry overload but I was glad I read it because I have a much better understanding of his viewpoint now. I know it’s only his side of the story, but I believe it would have been a far different one had his mother been there all these years to defend him - which you know she would have done with all her heart. Thank you for the recommendation on the Agassi bio. I saw that book listed on Amazon and was curious about it so now I will put it on my list as well.
ReplyDelete@GILL: Regarding do-overs … I’m pleased to be in such good company. I can’t think of anyone I’d rather be wrong with. 😄
Sincerely hope OAST being clued as a dwelling is a reference to the Alan Partridge: From the Oasthouse podcast on Audible (wherein the long-running British character moves into an oast-style house)
ReplyDeleteI’m with @LMS all the way. This was a sweet Friday offering with lots to enjoy and plenty of pitfalls and resistance. Never heard of UNOBTANIUM. Not a big sci-fi fan, but it did make me laugh as there have been many examples in my life of unobtania (hi again, @LMS) the main being diet Vernor’s Ginger Ale. No other brand actually tastes lime ginger. Narrow rules legal pads with the left margin set farther to the right. Those are the two biggies.
ReplyDeleteI’m so late to the party again today. T’all have noticed everything I would have said so see you tomorrkw.
Jumping on the Oast Poetry bandwagon.
ReplyDeleteOur OAST is a delightful B&B
You're guaranteed to have a pleasant stay
To host you we'd be privileged, you see—
We'd love to watch your flesh turn ashy grey.
Very cute limerick, @Barbara S!!
ReplyDeleteAnd now that the OAST gauntlet has been thrown down...
ReplyDeleteA trendy celebrity roast
Was held in a Hollywood OAST.
Guests had paid for the night
But the quarters were tight,
So they went and ejected the host.
Chiming in on the CRUSH CANS ... I'm in Rex's camp.
ReplyDeleteIf I say, give me a Crush, I'm asking for grape or orange soda, without specifying the container
If I say, give me a Crush can, there's no question that a soda is being requested, but the can container is what's specifically being asked for (with the assumption it has the desired soda).
CRUSH CAN can only be interpreted as a reference to the container, not the substance inside.
The distinction is sharp enough I'd argue against anyone suggesting this is splitting hairs.
(If anyone reads the blog this far down!)
ReplyDeleteGot Oast from crosses. Last word for me. Didn’t know it.
It’s a bit disconcerting that Rex references years and years of NYT puzzles to complain about the meaning of the word. I suggest thinking outside the box and trying Real Life instead of bouncing around the echo chamber of NYTXW.
Easiest Friday solve for me (33 mins!), half my usual.
Rex, I’d say if you liked Dances with Wolves, you’ll like Avatar. If you didn’t, you won’t. Very similar Joseph Campbell adventure-of-the-hero stories.
ReplyDeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteGreat limericks, bloggers, but @loren's leadoff was top of the line. Hilarious!
ReplyDeleteThis puzzle was typical for me: the NW fell hardest and last. Very last entry: BINGO--even though we play it regularly! But also atypical: I found it easy-medium vis-a-vis OFF's med-chal. That is RARE.
My good man: you may pooh-pooh Avatar all you want, but the cinematography is beautiful, and so are the Navi, one with nature trying to survive against the brutality of big business. Plus a double DOD with Sigourney Weaver and Zoe Saldana. So there. But anyway, do you want to throw 2001: A Space Odyssey in the trash as well? CRYOSLEEP was certainly a prominent feature of that film.
Outstanding WOE: BIKERIDES as clued. In-crowd terminology unknown to outsiders. There's your INOUT.
OK, I'll try one.
The thing that would please me the most
Is to rent an event in an OAST.
So we would drink hearty
While having a party:
The quintessential Rex roast!
Birdie.
Wordle bogey.
ARYA LYTE?
ReplyDeleteSEAN BUYSINTO BIKERIDES,
WENTSOLO, though SUM doubt
he GOESHOME and re CITES,
“Shorts ain’t ROOMY, my BUTTSOUT.”
--- ABBIE YEATS
O.K., what is an "intl"?
ReplyDeleteAbbr. for "International" as in Business Machines.
ReplyDelete