Relative difficulty: Medium (possibly slower than usual, but only from having to tilt my head to enter the damn themers, sideways and backwards)
THEME: CLOCKWISE (63A: How this puzzle's grid must be rotated in order to read the answers to the starred clues, when written in 17-Across) — answers to starred clues must be written in UPPERCASE (17A: Shifty type?) but also backwards but also sideways, such that they are legible only when the grid is tipped on its side. For instance, WEOUZHWZO, is running Down, but if you rotate the grid CLOCKWISE, now it runs *Across* and reads ONE INCOME (i.e. the last letter becomes the first letter and all the letters are tipped over):
Theme answers:
WEOUZH WZO => ONE INCOME (11D: *Like a household with a stay-at-home parent, maybe)
Word of the Day: SADIRONS (39D: Antique tools for pressing clothes) —
: a flat iron pointed at both ends and having a removable handle (merriam-webster.com)
• • •
Well, I can see how a constructor might think this is cool, but the whole UPPERCASE thing doesn't really work as well as you might think in an era where the majority of solvers are entering the letters on screens. And the grid rotation thing ... I had to sort of tilt my head, squint, and imagine. I did have a small "aha" when I saw what was happening. But I only saw what was happening because I went down and read the revealer clue. I didn't bother to solve it—I just saw that grid rotation was involved and then went back and tried to see how to make "ZOOM ZOOM!" work given the letters I already had in the grid. What kind of rotation would I need. At first I was just mentally rotating each letter, and not the whole damn grid, as is required. Once I saw that the letters aren't tipped, the whole damn word is tipped, then I could see the answers. "Huh, OK." That was what this one got out of me. There's nothing left to do after you get the theme except awkwardly enter a bunch of straightforward answers. All the themers are easy to get once you know the gimmick, so all that's left is to endure the fill, which is quite awful in parts. DEEMIT (?), SADIRONS (!?!?), REOIL, SCUDS, NUNCIO ... these were all winces, for varying reasons. DEEM IT is a truly horrendously poor standalone phrase (8D: Consider something to be). SADIRONS is something only a massive and uncurated wordlist could cough up. NUNCIO is one of those icky words that I know solely from having solved crosswords as far back as the early '90s, when constructors didn't have software to help them make things smooooooth (47D: Papal emissary). See also SCUDS (1D: Moves quickly, as a cloud). LOL at the idea of anyone actually saying SCUDS. "Look at that cloud, it's scudding!" exclaimed the NUNCIO! Only in crosswords. It's not that the fill was bad overall, but that the handful of bad answers were really jarring. Overall, this ended up being one of those "feats of construction" that is undeniably clever in conception, but from the solving end, it was a bit of a chore. The revealer (CLOCKWISE) lands with a bit of an anticlimactic thud. But at least it was weird, I'll give it that. Better weird than totally boring. I like a bit of weird on Thursdays, for sure.
Huge hold-up at the final letter of THE BIG- (4D: Video game franchise starring major-league baseballers) ... it would've been so nice if the clue had simply said [Major League Baseball, slangily] or something like that. Throwing some ****ing video game franchise in there confused everything for me. All I could think of was "what damn letter would you use to represent all of baseball? The Big ... B? The Big ... L? Is this a rebus?" And the "S" cross was not at all easy. Had to get all the first three letters before I saw NEWS (30A: ___ crawl), at which point I realized "oh ... it's just THE BIGS ... sigh, ****ing video games." Had DEEM AS for a bit instead of the equally horrible DEEM IT, so that also slowed things down. I did not know FIGs grew on ... ficuses? We had FIG trees in our backyard growing up (in Fresno). Truly did not know they were technically ficuses until just now. Weird. Why are you taking pictures of NUDISTs, you creep? (53A: Subject of a fully exposed image?). I'm just a bit ... thrown by the use of "image" here. I get that the NUDIST is exposed, but what is this "subject" / "image" stuff? It's oddly leering. I mean, if you wanted to evoke art or photography, you'd have "nudes" as your frame of reference, not NUDISTs. What you've done is evoke the image of a peeper. Why would you do that? Just for your little photography wordplay? Strange.
OK, that's enough from me. ADIOS. See you tomorrow.
I liked it a whole lot more than @Rex did. Nifty "aha" moment when I put in CLOCKWISE and understood the gobbledygook in the down clues. Struggled a bit in the SW, where I didn't know the Muppet RIZZO (61A), COZEN (65A) isn't part of my vocabulary and I rejected ASHES for 67A because my brain, forgetting about the theme, wanted "I" instead of "H" in the middle position. Fun Thursday (and I usually hate Thursdays).
I wonder if a lot of people just solved this as a themeless, using the acrosses to fill in the bizarre letter strings on the themers. I couldn’t do that because so much of the fill was obscure and unknown to me (not PPP, just odd words). I really turned my phone to figure out “innocence” for example. (“Now what are they using for E? Oh,yeah, W”.) That’s because I couldn’t get COZEN, a word I’ve heard but did not know the definition of, and NEWS crawl wasn’t coming to me at all. (Once I got the W, I had to run the alphabet to get the S - no idea that baseball is called THE BIG S. Rex never says what the S stands for.)
Anyway, the result was a mix of frustration with the obscure fill - that SAD IRON makes me sad just to look at it, imagining the drudgery. Wrinkled sheets are just fine, thanks. But on the other hand, I liked that I used the theme to figure out two of the downs (er … acrosses?) - “innocence” and “Comic Con.” I didn’t get the UPPER CASE part at all until I read Rex and realized that some paper solvers might use lower-case letters and not get the trick without that part of the instructions. Even when I solve on paper, I use upper case.
I know Linda Ronstadt very well so her song should have been SO EASY for me but it took forever. I picked wrong on ISIAH THOMAS, going with ISaiH. I know it’s missing an A but never sure which way the other A and the I go. BUNKO is another word like COZEN that I know but don’t know the meaning of (and thought was BUNcO anyway). No idea on SISSY and TREYS was tough. So that EASY was way too hard.
In the end, I think I agree with Rex - I expect weird on Thursdays, and this delivered.
Rex doesn’t like what he doesn’t like. What else is new? I enjoyed it. Lower-case letters are way too round in many fonts to give an accurate sideways-view, so I’m not sure how else to do accomplish the sideways feat. The puzzle was a nice change of pace and fun for me.
I did enjoy the weird today. But as someone who enjoys baseball video games, even I thought that was a terrible clue. The prominent MLB video game is "The Show." "The Bigs" had two games over two years in the early 2000s, which is hardly a "franchise." If you want to go old school, at least pick Slugfest or the iconic Hardball featured in The Princess Bride.
Came hoping for a nice challenging crossword, and unfortunately was served up one of those Thursday “specials” that the NYT offers all too frequently - it’s not so much a crossword but some sort of made up logic/visual test stuffed into a crossword-like grid.
Great if you appreciate/enjoy these types of things. I’m off to WaPo and maybe the WSJ to search for an elusive crossword puzzle today.
I figured out the theme at ZoomZoom, but made a massive error by jumping down to 63A and typing in OnItsSide. So I thought I was going to crush a Thursday, but turned out to be average time once I figured out it had to be Clockwise, and cleaned up my mess.
A super tricky theme that I was unable to decipher and a puzzle thus impossible with so many WOE answers. Make them WTF answers today: COZEN, BUNKO, SCUDS, SADIRONS, NEMEA, RHYS, THEBIGS, CASHTRADE are all outside my knowledge base. I wouldn’t mind as much if four long Z heavy themes didn’t take up so much real estate.
I got CLOCKWISE very early on but that didn’t help at all. Even seeing the answer and having it explained still took me a while to understand. It reminds me too much of those puzzle games like “Mary loves grapes, but she hates apples” that people either get quickly and are amused by or they take too long to get and feel foolish. Word of advice is don’t do those games in large groups because the last person to understand the puzzle feels like they are put in the spotlight and not in a good way.
(Mary also likes bananas but she hates cherries. Solution: Mary hates foods with double letters.)
I'm a person of above-average intelligence, and I couldn't solve the puzzle even after the trick was explained to me. Am I the only one who admits to this?
Know what I love about Friday puzzles? That feeling of being far, far away from Thursday, the worst day of the week. Today’s puzzle was the most Thursday-ish I’ve seen in a long while. Hand up with the haters.
This is what Simeon does in his puzzles – more word gymnastics than simply word play, making his puzzles more romp than simply a start-to-finish. I love his devious mind.
Huge “Hah!” at the moment of theme realization, and as I’m guessing the theme will be the main thrust of the comments today, and the non-theme answers may get lost in the shuffle. So, here’s looking at you, non-theme answers:
• COZEN and BUNKO – There’s a couple of words that I’ve never used in real life, but look cool. • SAD IRON – a lovely piece of learning for me. • THE BIGS – I’m amazed that this answer has never appeared in a NYT puzzle in its 80 years, nor has it appeared in any of the major crossword venues! • ZEE – this puzzle’s mini-theme, with eight.
Simeon, your puzzles crackle, and today’s was memorable and fantastic. I love the hoops you make me jump through. Thank you!
Amy: round of applause from this corner. On Thursdays, if it's NOT a rebus, it gets extra points. Found this fun and entertaining. Challenging because even after figuring out what was happening, couldn't turn my tablet as the puzzle would turn with it. Wonderfully creative. While she died before I was born, my grandmother used sad irons. My mom and her 4 sisters recalled heating them on the cookstove and continuing to rotate them (with hot pads, of course) so she could keep ironing. Life was tougher then.
Rex used the right word for this: chore. When I saw that the letters had to be turned on their sides as well as the words, I had a little “aha” moment, after that it was - a chore.
A tribute to @Z. The rotated letters did slow the flow - but I liked the trickery - the themers were pretty straightforward so I’m assuming the offbeat fill was forced to put this into late week category.
Had trouble at first figuring out the rotated “I”. UPPER CASE plays into the scheme. No issue with COZEN or NUNCIO and SCUDS is quaint. SAD IRONS is SAD.
Same goes for RIZZO, BUNKO, CAAN, NEMEA (always forget if it’s an e or an i and today I was wrong). Bad fill just for the sake of pulling off this theme was just not worth the payoff.
Two things made this puzzle quite difficult. One related to solving online. Would have been much easier, once I got to the revealer, to fill in the theme answers on paper.
The second was the sheer volume of things I did not know in the SW. SADIRONS, NUNCIO, RUNIN (as clued – is this just an error? *), Mighty Patch, COZEN.
* I have not heard RUN IN used this way, and none of my various dictionaries recognize it.
There is a feature called “portrait orientation lock” on iOS. Typically you drag your finger from top right corner of the screen to the center and a menu of options appears. I use this all the time when reading this blog from my bed…
I really enjoyed this one, but understand while some may not have. For those iPad and iPhone users who had trouble with their screens rotating, you can lock it so it won’t rotate (which is what I did). Pull down from the upper right corner of your screen, and you will see an icon that looks like a lock with a clockwise arrow going around it. Hit that and it won’t rotate. Hit it again to turn it back on.
I figured out the theme fairly early but could not figure out for the longest time how to make the letter I. I *finally* realized through crosses that it was the letter H because the I had the lines on the top and bottom that are often removed. Felt a bit dumb once that finally dawned on me.
I thought the gimmick was clever but, like most others, the puzzle itself was... not great, just too many rough patches of fill to overlook and make it enjoyable. Shouldn't editors be thinking about entries like BUNKO, COZEN, SADIRONS and asking for the grid to be revised to make it cleaner?
Freakishly parallel experience to OFL today, from catching on at ZOOMZOOM to skipping to the revealer to having trouble coming up with the S on THEBIGS.
I always solve in UPPERCASE on paper so no rotating my phone or tablet, but I did have to erase some of the little tails on my U's to make them into C's.
I only remember that ISIAH spells his first name strangely and have never heard of SADIRONS. Was also unfamiliar with the RHYS and SISSY people as clued, but SCUD is what clouds, and as far as I know, only clouds do. Boats maybe?
I like a Thursday with a good gimmick and I thought this was a good gimmick providing a proper aha!, so OK with me. Sorta Stunning, SS, and thanks for all the fun.
GARBAGE, the fill as fetid as the theme. Didn’t even try to finish after I got the revealer. This is the kind of crap that turns people away from so-called crosswords. NYT, get your act together.
I… really don’t know how I feel about this one. What I know for sure: the fill had some awful clunkers and the constructor clearly centered showcasing their construction chops over the experience of the solvers. But while usually either of those two things on its own would be enough to put me off a puzzle, today I just… don’t know.
I think it’s the weird factor that’s saving it for me. I think… maybe I liked it in spite of myself? It was a different solving experience than a typical Thursday, it was way harder than a typical Thursday for me because it was basically impossible to solve as a themeless, and it’s led to a nice morning text exchange with my type designer friend who is a fellow solver. I appreciated the chutzpah of this puzzle, AND, I really hope that tomorrow we get a nice, solid, rule-abiding crossword with fresh, clean fill to make up for some of this week’s mishegas.
This must be one of the most polarizing puzzles in recent memory, which makes it especially weird for me to find my uber-opinionated self in the “both sides” camp, but here we are. I’m gonna do an old one from the archives just to get myself a bit less jumbled up. What a weird one.
NW corner was brutal for me. What are CASH TRADES? 4 of the first 6 across clues being ?s or “perhaps” (just ? by another name) turned out to be a bad omen for the fill. Gimmick was easy enough given the revealer.
Now that was a proper Thursday theme. Made it a real puzzle, unlike other day puzzles. My vocab didn't all come from xwords, so I thought nuncio was a great word, though I had to verify scud meant what I recalled, and I spelled bunco wrong. Glad that NYT is beinging back vocab expanding words. I'd never heard of sad irons.
Why can't we just get straight puzzles that get progressively harder through the week without all these stupid themes? I look forward to Fri and Sat puzzles
Cozen is a very old word. You really only run into it if you're a fan of literature from the 19th century and earlier, because its use peaked around 1805. (I am, but it never occurred to me to think of it. I got all the down clues and then went, "REALLY?!")
Hey All ! Tough tough here. Not just the figuring out how in tarhooties to put the Themers in, but just tough all over. Obscure cluing, with the ole brain refusing me help. Had to Check Puzzle a few time, plus Reveal Word twice! Ouch.
I got what the theme was shooting for, but it looks weird with the W's turned into sideways E's. And the E's into sideways M's.
NUNCIO was a new one here. Is that one word, or a NUN CIO?
One word to describe this puz - WEOUZHWZO. Gesundheit.
Had a nice aha moment at CLOCKWISE and then everything rapidly fell into place. However, like others, had never heard COZEN, SCUDS, BUNKO, or the SAD part of SADIRONS.
Hi, I`m wondering if anyone else is getting wrong times on the app for their solving stats. Today, for example, it put in a time two minutes longer than I had. A couple of Mondays ago it registered a time two minutes shorter than it should have been, which set a Monday record I`ll never be able to legitimately beat. About a year ago it didn`t register a Saturday I completed; so my solving streak should be about twice as long as it is. Maybe I just shouldn`t pay attention to it.
While "scuds" won't be known to most, it was my nickname for decades so I'm familiar with it. And thankfully it wasn't clued as "missles used by Iraq on Israel." Between that and "ComicCon" I felt this one was speaking to me. But "cozen?!?!?" Yeah, no...
@Nancy: I could hear this one hitting your wall before I even got halfway through it. I managed to finish but my hand was itching to wad up and wind up for a good strong pitch the whole time. And by the way, thank you for posting the list of poems. I look forward to exploring them fully.
Theme is ok I guess. Theme answers themselves were easy (once theme trick unlocked), but uninspired, imo. But that’s better than most of the remaining fill.
I don’t see anyone bragging about solving this one “Downs Only”. It occurs to me that we could call those who incorporate their “Downs Only” solving triumphs into their comments Downers.
Those who think this was a “feat of construction” type puzzle are, IMO, wrong. I believe that the constructor, once he thought of this very clever theme, had only 7 letters available for themers (M,I,Z,O,C,E,N). From these, he had to find two pairs of acceptable words to maintain symmetry. I imagine he went for the longest words possible within normal usage. Once those were in place, he had to fill around and through them, using their rotated alter egos (E,H,N,O,U,W,Z). It’s conceivable that some constructors could come up with better fill, but probably not by much. In the end, it’s a “feat of filling” around some difficult constraints.
I loved this because it was different. I always marvel at anyone coming up with a new or strange gimmick that can be developed well enough to make it into the NYTXW. Thanks for a wonderful puzzle, Simeon Siegel.
I really did rotate my phone to solve the theme answers. Very fun. I might have laughed out loud. Great idea and surprisingly good answers on their own. Reminds me of turning a calculator upside down and making words with the numbers.
The northwest tripped me up with SCUDS, and RIZZO, COZEN, and NUNCIO were blockers in the south. I don't think I've seen Midnight Cowboy in its entirety. I think I may have only seen the ending.
Uniclues:
1 Where old people who think kids shouldn't whip credit cards out for everything meet to agree the world is falling apart. 2 A gold one. 3 Hopefully all of them, you know, since certain things might sunburn easily, or get caught in a ficus. 4 Scheme developed by criminals who aren't very good at their jobs and assume they'll be caught.
A big THANK YOU to Anonymous 9:32 and @Allison for explaining portrait lock! I haven't been able to rotate images on my phone for months, but didn't know why. Now it's been restored to its normal state, and I'm really happy.
I'm even happy with the puzzle. I could see that something was going on with the incomprehensible answers to the starred clues; but I had no idea what. Clearly I needed the revealer, but I wouldn't allow myself to look at it until I got there naturally. Aha! Rotate the paper! I was still puzzled, because I write my Zs with the diagonal line crossed in the middle (I know it's an affectation, but I can't help myself), the Us as if they were cursive lower case us, and the serifs the Is were way too big. I finally got it, though, and the rest was easy
You can RUN INto somebody; but if you have had a RUNN-IN, it was either a verbal or a physical fight. "Encounter by surprise" would work as a clue.
Having NEMEA sitting atop the LION that Hercules had to kill there was a nice touch.
The flatiron picture Rex posted does not fit the definition he posted, which says a SADIRON is pointed at both ends. However, another definition is "a flatiron," so he's not actually wrong.
What I enjoy about trick puzzles is figuring out the trick. This one I couldn't figure out without the revealer, so the joy was lessened, but I did admire it.
Welp. Wasn’t this a clever and innovative way to approach a Thursday crossword? Some people may even call it brilliant. I call it one of the most frustrating and offputting puzzles I have ever done, and I hope I never see it done again. NO SIR!
And if you’re going to do this, don’t use pop culture clues for two out of the four themers. The car ad is at least something more or less universal but here’s a NEWS flash: most people who are not superhero fans have no idea what it’s called when they gather. It wouldn’t have mattered to me whether COMIC CON was CLOCKWISE, backwards, upside down, or right side up. But now I’m supposed to figure it out by not only knowing which way to turn the grid without a revealer (see below), but then also deciphering the letters to mean what I’m supposed to figure out they mean to read the answer, which might as well still be gibberish for all the sense it makes to me, a non fan.
AND don’t put four proper names and two religious clues in the corner with your revealer, especially when one of the names isn’t the standard spelling. If given a fair chance, I’ll try to figure out the most convoluted theme but that’s the kind of thing that made me want to follow @Nancy’s example and throw it [splat!] against the wall.
After reading the wide range of reactions I must weigh in. I liked it. I knew Rex would hate it and I knew Nancy would throw it against the wall. You guys crack me up.
A puzzle that makes my body parts hurt. It started with my brain and ended up with a crick in my neck after reading @Rex and discovering that I was supposed to turn my paper around in some sort of angle and figure out what my scribbled letters meant after giving this a whirl.... This was so un-fun. Like popping a ZIT on my WUZWUOZZH. It hurt. I suppose kudos should be tossed into the fray for coming up with this crazy. So I'll give you a HUZZAH which also spells HUZZAH if you want another crick in your neck.
@Nancy...Wow. Thank you for the recommendations. I do remember Frost and his "The Road Not Taken." Simple choices we make - big or small. It may have been the reason that I bought my children Dr. Seuss's "Oh The Places You'll Go." xoxo.
egs-actly! Despite all the puzzles over all the years, SS came up with something new, yet grokkable. With 4 themers containing only MIZOCEN, the fill was surprisingly good. I'm happy to learn something new, hi SADIRON. Willing to forgive the rest for the aha of originality.
SCUD missiles were named after the cloud usage.
I was with Rex, thinking bringing a camera to any NUDIST function is very bad form.
Last in a series dupe clue one of the better ones in that both answers are equally valid, one numerical/one alphabetical.
Pseudoephedrine from SUDAFED an ingredient used to make Meth. I had to look it up since the brand name rang a bell.
SCUt before SCUD hid DUE BY for too long. Goodbye rabbit, hello 'cloud'.
"The term SCUD is actually an acronym standing for 'Scattered Cumulus Under Deck'." KNWA
Got the 'turn' idea fairly early on, but couldn't come up with CLOCKWISE until near the end of the solve.
Enjoyed this adventure very much! :) ___ @pablo: came close on the New Yorker Mon., but no cigar. : ( ___ Peace 🕊 🇺🇦 ~ Compassion ~ Tolerance ~ Kindness to all 🙏
Medium; enjoyed figuring it out. After the first few rows, I was having so much trouble getting traction that I read down to the reveal clue much earlier in the game than I usually do, and that saved me: at 11D I had the initial WEO and further down the Z of ZOO - enough to get me ONE INCOME. Without then being able to get the remaining theme answers fairly quickly, I'm not sure I could have finished: there were so many clues that left me with a blank stare and ??? over my head.
Interesting to read the comments about the non-theme answers: I happily greeted SCUDS, NUNCIO, and COZEN as old friends I don't see around much anymore, and I knew SAD IRONS, though I couldn't say how. @jberg, thank you for pointing out the NEMEAn LION! @Gary Jugert, I wondered what you might do with the CAUTIOUS NUDIST :)
Oh,come on Rex! This puzzle was ingenious and a lot of fun. No wonder people say you hate everything! BTW a lot of people know that fig and ficus are basically synonyms.
Well I inadvertently learned some music trivia from this punnlw. For "1977 Linda Ronstadt hit" I immediately plugged in BLUE BAYOU, which was a #3 hit in December of '77. But as I proceeded it started to seem wrong, how could that be? Then, I remembered that the flip side IT'S SO EASY also got a lot of airplay. The exact same number of letters! How curious! So I changed it; crisis averted.
But what I learned, via some post punnlw googling, was that they were not flip sides of the same single, as I had assumed all these years. They were on entirely separate singles. Both were A sides, each with its own B side. IT'S SO EASY entered the chart a few weeks after BLUE BAYOU, thus they were on the radio simultaneously. Why Asylum Records chose to release two singles by the same artist right on top of each other, I have no idea. But, there ya go. I'm just glad I found out the truth before I died.
I loved the punnlw. Loved the rotational gimmick. Even the weird fill. What's wrong with NUNCIO? A nuncio's starting salary is $4,000 a month.
I liked it, for the most part. It was fun to deduce what letter might stand in for another. I recognized SADIRON and wrote in COZEN from the OZ. SCUDS is a lovely word often used to describe clouds that are moving at a good clip. Are we not language lovers here? Sure, in ordinary conversation we don’t use every delicious word we know - it might come across as pretentious. And conversation today is nearly a lost art, besides. Merely and minimally functional. I enjoy being reminded of useful, evocative words I know from reading.
The part of the puzzle I disliked was the southeast, where, in spite of good guesses for TREYS and WIDOWER, I was stumped by PPP. 54D, 55D, 69A and 66A.
Nice tie in to yesterday's POET SCORNER puzzle at 1 Down: "I wandered lonely as a cloud, That SCUDS on high o'er...".
Clued as "Consider something to be", 8D DEEM IT looks like a partial without the final "SO". Maybe a better clue would be along the lines of "Scottish Highlander's imprecation".
SUDAFED (39A) used to be an over the counter decongestant that many Scuba divers used to open up the eustachian tube to make it easier to equalize inner and outer ear pressure while diving. Then people started using the active ingredient, pseudoephedrine, to make methamphetamine and in 2005 (just looked) the FDA banned OTC sales and a prescription was required.
The theme gimmick didn't stick the landing for me. As OFL's rotated grid shows, several of the rotated letters didn't really look like what they were supposed to be. A W, for example, doesn't look to me like an E when rotated. (It looks more like the uppercase Greek letter Sigma.) The same non-correspondence issues with other letters made the rotated versions look like they came from some ancient Sumerian texts.
Well, I knew nuncio not from crosswords (which I’ve been doing since the mid 60’s), but from reading the Times (which I’ve been doing since the early 60’s). Why you protest certain words or ideas because they are of a generation other than yours is simply beyond me. The puzzle is meant for all generations. Sometimes I have trouble with a word that you grew up on, and vice versa. I never understand why you think it’s unfair fior me to get an easy one which you find difficult but you’re not bothered when the opposite happens.
The comments say it: You either liked this a lot (Clever!) or hated it (Time I’ll never get back!). The fill didn’t thrill me, but I did enjoy the weirdness of the rotated letters. Beautifully balanced grid, too. Thumbs up, here.
Real different. Like different. fave themer was definitely ZOUUHEOU.
Torn, on staff weeject pick: The panel really liked the anagrammatic feel of EAU and UAE. OTOH, ZOO turned sideways is NOO, which could be a neat summarizin themer for folks who threw their puz at the wall.
Like @RP, M&A immediately peaked ahead at the revealer, to calm things down. Really helped a lot. Also probably helped, that I solvequested this puppy on paper. Avoided massive nanosecond losses.
fave answer: HUZZAH. fave clue: ARE clue. fave har: DEEMIT. Better clue: {Reel back in what was just scudded out, before it hits the wall}.
Thanx for the feisty turn-on of a ThursPuz, Mr. Seigel dude. Cleverer than snot.
Masked & Anonymo11Us (and some sideways Cs, I reckon)
I cant understand the hatred for this puzzle. Once I got the revealer I just turned my laptop clockwise and I was off the the races. Inventive and unique. Maybe it was too tough for some of if they never figured out what was going on. Loved it
Two things worked in my favor. I start by going through all the clues looking for gimmes (which at 63A told me that the grid needed to be rotated for the asterisk words) and I solve on paper (allowing me to rotate my clipboard). That led me to look for letters that became other letters when rotated. H becoming I wasn't as clear as U becoming C. My aha came at COMICCON.
Aren't we used to looking for something ultra tricky on Thursday? Not only was this tricky, but also original. Loved it.
I liked figuring out the gimmick (from CLOCKWISE and then ONE INCOME, though it took me a while to see what letter was supposed to become I when rotated). What really tripped me up was UPPERCASE. You see, I was interpreting it as "you're supposed to write the themers in a way that's not the usual crossword convention [of filling everything in UPPERCASE]". Didn't help that I had EAT UP crossing ITALIC-something (shifty type, you see how the letters are slightly shifted to the right? Then I figured out the Shift (key) wordplay).
Having 2 Across revealer answers and 4 Down themers but only 32 black squares was a bold move. No wonder we get partial/preposition town in the north (LAP UP, DUE BY, TRY TO, AS PER, DEEM IT where having AS made it impossible to see TOOTH) and interlocking names ISIAH SISSY RHYS in the SE. SADIRONS and SUDAFED were also unknown to me.
Favorite fill - PARANOID, HUZZAH!
21D is what you shout at a novice solver who doesn't know what's a 3-letter word for a long stretch of time. EOOOOOON! EOOOOOOON!!!
Put me in the Thumbs Up column. I am always up for something new and clever that actually really is a "puzzle". I love to puzzle things out.
And what a cleverly sneaky way to get a lot of Z's into the grid!
True, there were a few obscurities (COZEN, SADIRONS, SCUDS, and I wasn't in love with CASHTRADE as a phrase), but if you sit back and look at the grid, it is a very satisfying set of words/answers.
Well done. For the complainers, well, I LAPUP your tears :-)
100 percent agree. If you're going to with a bygone MLB series, give me Triple Play or RBI or even High Heat. The Bigs had me baffled and the weird cluing didn't help either.
The app is also screwing up my times and now this is on top of the other issue that’s gone on for years — my success rate is under100% even though I’ve never ever not finished a puzzle. So there are a handful of puzzles that register as downloaded and not complete - like I can go through 20 yrs of archives to find them? (I admit I wanted this so badly I’ve actually tried it - okay, more than once)
Adding insult to injury, WE PAY GOOD MONEY FOR THESE FRUSTRATIONS!
A true Thursday challenge for me today. I'm glad some people are capable of thinking sideways (e.g. Rex) but I can't do it easily. My handwritten capitals, where I put a tail on the U like a small case U and I reflexively throw a slash through my Z, a holdover from my college engineering days means it was harder, perhaps, to make sense of the sideways letters than for many.
And then, after I'd figured out the theme, I was looking at 45D, mistakenly thinking it was another theme answer and trying my best to figure out what capital letter was represented by - (the I in WIDOWER). I eventually noticed that 45D made sense in the usual direction, oops.
And in place of HUZZAH, I had eUreka. Not that I knew what SADIRONS were but Sk_IRONS wasn't helping!
Simeon Seigel, this was certainly different, thanks!
Like @Andrew until I was able to recall that the upper right corner on the iPad has a rotation lock function, and then things righted themselves; W as an E replacement looks weird but gets the idea across.
Loved the solve after the UPPER CASE tipped off the CLOCKWISE GOOFiness. Squarely in @Lewis’s camp today as this puzzle was just good clean fun if appreciated for its intent. HUZZAH indeed for Simeon’s quirky mind; today’s grid was right up there with his MERGE LEFT that had many flummoxed last year. Seeing a Seigel byline, I WONT be saying ITS SO EASY since SS must delight in COZENing the commentariat. With his sixth publication today Seigel it would seem has made THE BIGS of Crossworld.
Can’t pass up the chance to encourage HZZOUWZUW readers to add Margaret Atwood’s new collection of short stories titled Old Babes in the Wood. 32 down clue was close enough for a trigger.
I’m not sure where I learned “nuncio” but it probably was from watching the HBO series “The Young Pope”. Maybe it was centered around a young man that was the pride of the small Italian village from which my in-laws hailed; until, that is, his prized job at the Vatican ended up as part of a corruption trial. I did like the puzzle. It was a combination of a crossword and the other games that used to appear on Sundays for those of us that are digital subscribers to The NY Times. It did take me longer to do and I learned a few new words as many bloggers attested to here.
@Carola 11:12 AM The moment I saw CAUTIOUS NUDIST I thought, "Today is the greatest day ever," but then I went to work and... blah. I turned a homer into a base hit. It's impossible to imagine such a scenario. DARING NUDIST, when will you appear in a puzzle? FLAMBOYANT HOT TUBBER, BRAZEN BARER, STALWART STREAKER. Zowee, a theme for Naked and NOT Afraid.
I’ve never posted a comment here before, but felt led by my sheer dislike of this puzzle. I do the NYT puzzle every day, and I usually can find some enjoyment in any of them. Not this one. Sheer drag.
Mixed feelings. The themers were fun in a way but also a lot of work. Surprised at the complaints about cozens and scuds. Definitely good words, Maybe more familiar from reading than conversation. Cannot remember ever reading or hearing sadiron for a flat iron so learned a word. Thought 53A was a clever clue/answer combo, tho at first I had nudism, as a more general subject , rather than nudist as a particular subject. Treys changed that. As with so many cultural names that show up in these crosswords had never heard of The Bigs and never hope to again.
I thought the gimmick was novel enough that I could overlook the problems. I spent a while trying to make COMICCON work in the normal way; the fact that the Os were correct prolonged the confusion.
But the very best part of the gimmick was going to xwordinfo.com where Jim Horne has programmed the grid so it flips back and forth when you click it. Awesome!
[Spelling Bee: yd 0 for the first time since Sat. Last word this 6er.]
As Rex points out, online filling makes these sort of puzzles obsolete. And this one was just dreadful; another puzzle that must have been SO FUN for the constructor.
A fine argument for Mr. Shortz' retirement. Let it be soon.
Totally agree. Probably the least enjoyable Thursday ever. If it was a movie I would have walked out. Sad I even started it. I am shocked by the number of people sticking up for the puzzle.
So tome consuming to try to do this on my phone!! This has been done before, but not recently enough (maybe?) for many newer solvers to have encountered it. I remember vividly in grade school/junior high that we used to pass notes written in caps and sideways. It was funny how hard some teachers found it to decipher this “code.” @Rex is right when he comments that the theme isn’t one that works well with technology. I got it quickly when I entered the obviously correct ZOOM ZOOM and it didn’t work at all. Flashback to Danny N and Cheri S and I tossed our coded notes with very little stealth in Mr. Rhodes’s class to get caught and watch him do his slow burn as he tried to figure it out. We thought it hilarious.
Overall, the puzzle wasn’t too tough, and was more of a trial. In order to get the theme entries correct, I had to wrote the answer on paper and then translate to the “code.” ZOOM ZOOM becomes NOOENOOE. Bingo, the rest of the answers fit.
Remembering my misspent youth (I have admitted before that I could be a handful) was fun. A short trip down memory lane wondering what happened to some of the members of my posse with whom I list touch over the decades.
Yesterday with its clever wordplay was more fun, but I applaud the constructor for the effort and for resurrecting some good memories.
OMG (no rotation necessary, WYSIWYG), riffing on Jeff Chen’s POW, to me this is, I hope, the DOW.*
@Rex, LOL...no, ROTFL: Look at that cloud, it’s scudding! exclaimed the NUNCIO.
Turns out, SCUD is one of the words that went in immediately for me. It’s a mystery, but clouds just scud. Even though, as you say, no one ever says it. People write it, though. And it is fun to say. Besides an action a cloud might take, scud is a noun, meteorologically “a formation of low fractostratus clouds driven by a strong wind beneath rain-bearing clouds” (Collins English Dictionary). And in Scottish (reference yesterday), it’s a slap.
The weirdness was appreciated, but to wrap with a British colloquialism, the puzz was just not my cuppa.
* D as in MILK _ _ _ S. Now crossing fingers for the next two crosswords.
From late yesterday, @Gill 8:04 pm, @Nancy 9:15 pm – Glad you both liked the clip. That beautiful poem makes me cry too.
Nancy, thank you for the recommendations. Look forward to the unknowns; will start with Tennyson’s “In Memoriam.” Yeats is a favorite poet; I especially like “When You Are Old” and “The Lake Isle of Innisfree.” When I saw “The Second Coming” on your list I remembered Joan Didion’s collection Slouching Towards Bethlehem and the documentary The Center Will Not Hold.” The latter looks like it’s still on Netflix.
Shortz claims he gets around 200 submissions a day/week whatever. So there are some hundred or so other crosswords that are worse than this one? Depressing. There are many who should something else for a hobby.
That was the most torturous, unfulfilling NYT puzzle I've ever solved. Just awful. The gimmick is so hard to work out in digital form..even when I KNEW the theme, it was so hard parsing out the complete rubbish into a word. And then on top of that, the fill was attrocious. Ugh
Wow! I’ve come in really late in the day, which I normally try not to do. But in this case it offers me the chance to witness the largest collection of Love-it/Hate-it messages that the world has ever seen! More glaring than the last presidential election, maybe. Very little middle ground here, eh? Well, I’m afraid I come down on the love-love-love it side. I was so thrilled and proud of myself when I caught on that I texted my cruciverbing brother and woke him up in the middle of the night. Clever clever clever! And the fill was totally a secondary matter, and easy enough so as not to interfere with the wild and crazy theme.
Had a busy day, so, although I did the puzz this am I just got to read all of this now.
The first thing that strikes me is that a great many anonymoti have posted "hated it" or variants, while most regular posters (ex @Nancy!) seemed to like it or at least be warm to it. My feeling about that is basically something my mom, and perhaps yours, used to say, "If you don't have anything polite to say, don't say it". It seems rude to anonymously post that you hated it. Why bother? It could be the same person umpteen times, so who cares?
Second thing is that the super easiest way to rotate your phone without the image rotating, people, is to put it on a flat surface. And rotate it. Works like a charm.
Third, I'm firmly in the "liked it!" camp. I knew 24D was COMICCON. For 21D I was remembering the old jingle "Piston engine goes boing boing boing but the Mazda goes hmmm", clearly too long. And 32D was obvious. But nothing worked... so, yes, I checked the revealer. Set my phone on the coffee table. Rotated it. And pow, or aha if you prefer.
Clever finding so many answers that work that way! Super enjoyable.
Last thing: I think all puzzles are done in CAPITAL LETTERS. It bothers me that SB answers are listed as capitalized lower case, huh? They're in CAPS on the puzz itself.
I guess bunko is a fairly old word now too. It was used often in the expression "bunko squad" on old TV cop shows. Another sign that I am old. I like most Thursday tricks but this was a bit annoying to me, maybe because I did it in the paper?
Thumbs up. Went from confusion at what I was sure should be Zoom Zoom straight to SW and figured out CLOCKWISE. That gave me all the theme clues with only a little confusion on how to make a cap I (originally tried to rebus an underscore but figured out the H later on with fill). I found this clever and fun with some unknown/clumsy fill everybody else already mentioned. Kudos from me for something fresh.
I understand your point but the Times has let SILTS in often. So I suppose the editors would argue there are different types of silt. So a plural can be used. But it does grate on my ears!
I would have gone nuts doing this on a screen, but on paper it was fun. Once I figured out zoom zoom the other 3 came easily. I would have bailed out on a computer.
My app keeps freezing so I had to delete all my stats to open this puzzle. 352 day streak lost for this nonsense. My puzzle is all CAPS. Turned clockwise it made no sense.After I saw the answers it was still a big stretch. And I knew some of the answers!
Loved it. Fun theme, lots of weird fill to get those Z/Ns. Actually figured it out and fully solved, though it took about 20 minutes of mostly staring just to get going, so I guess I was slow on the uptake. But then it was mostly smooth from there. Thanks, Simeon!
Loved the theme and had that AHA moment. Was way big into vocabulary as a teenager, so COZEN was a delightful blast from the past. The NUDIST clue didn't creep me out the way rex was offended, but i think rex is way more bothered by the human body than i am. I agree with Photomatte 8:02; once the animal is in the zoo it is scarcely "wild."
Overall I loved the cleverness. It was just marred by a few clunky answers (REOIL; THEBIGS; and that papal thing)
Wow! Tough crowd. I thought it was an incredibly creative Thursday. I figured it out with comic con then it was fun to solve. Without a tricky theme the rest would have been too easy. It made it fun.
First time in a long time I simply laughed my ass off as I read through Rex's take. This wasn't a pleasure to slog through and for the first time in a long time I pretty much kept at it simply to avoid a DNF.
Back in the 70's, when calculators first came out (and we were completely blown away by them), there was a neat joke where you would tell someone a story about the energy crisis, all the while multiplying numbers on your not-yet-pocket-sized device. Then, when you were done, you'd ask your listener: "And what does that all add up to?" At which point you'd turn the calculator upside down and show them "shell oil." This puzzle makes that little feat look positively stupid.
Hand up for connecting SCUDS to yesterday's POETSCORNER. Oops. POET SCORNER. Hey I bet someone noticed that yesterday. Haven't read that yet. Taxes were a pain this year. Still running behind.
Speaking of behind the the NYTCW is now going full frontal with the CAUTIOUS NUDIST. I was amused because the paper had a health article on hemmeroids yesterday that a what looked to me like a picture of an ass. The Shortz infection is spreading. Unless that was the WP.
I solve on the NYTCW app and I believe the default setting is frozen portrait. Not so here. But I found out what happened to some of you soon as I rotated.
What a lot of grouches. It was a fun idea well-executed. It thurzzed like a thuzzeday should. From CASHTRADE (off the tax books?) to the CAUTIOUS NUDIST to my new mantra: ASHES OSHA RHYS.
Speaking of obsolete devices, I’ve been binging on Colombo after watching its homage, Poker Face. In a 1975 episode, the murderer, Oskar Werner, a tech executive, is sporting a digital watch, the kind where you had to press a button to see the time. His sure recall of the time becomes a plot element in nabbing him.
I had a friend in med school who told me of one of her instructors showing off a similar watch where you used one hand to see the time. Then one smart aleck mentioned if you need two hands to check the time, you can’t use it to check a pulse
People complain when it uses the same words, complain when it uses words they don't know. Video games have been around for 40 years. They're gonna be clues. Sorry you had trouble physically doing it, and the inconvenience robbed you of enjoying it. If you didn't like this puzzle, just. Stop. Doing. Puzzles.
Couldn't agree more. This was clever and memorable. Actually a classic. As an English solver , this was reminiscent in a good way of tricks played by the fiendishly challenging Listener crossword. These are savoured , not resented by solvers. What else is Thursday for?
Well...OK, it works, sorta. The U's and Z's ARE perfect for C's and N's, The H's convert to I's if you elongate the crossbars, fine. The W's make Greek E's; changing E into M requires the same Greekness. We ARE now stretching things to near the breaking point. But it does work.
It's different, I'll give it that. Learned a new Muppet. Once saw a SADIRON go at auction for $750. What people will pay for! Special shout-out to DOD Linda Ronstadt, one of my old favorites.
IT'S not SO EASY to do this one, but the mcguffin eventually showed itself. At that point I thought: very clever. Some interesting fill. Birdie.
Awful fill? For many of the above complainers it seems to mean "words I've never come across". Try reading more widely. A waste of time? Hated it? Just another way of saying I couldn't complete the puzzle so it's the constructor's fault.
To the extent the ppl whinging about the puzzle are just unhappy they don't know how to set their device's rotate settings, learn; to the extent they're unhappy their times were much worse or their average increased, stop bothering or do timed trials on a universal standard puzzle like the USA Today or LA Times; to the extent they just dislike crosswords on devices, print it out.
For the rest like RP who just felt the trick was flat and the fill awkward... well, yeah, that's actually fair. ---- crawl being NEWS with the cross being THEBIGS clued to a blink-&-you'd-miss-it sports video game from decades ago was just awful. The way some of you react to COZEN and NUNCIO is the way I feel about SCUD: Never encountered it in my life aside from the missile and it's somewhat offensive that anyone would think mental capacity should be wasted continuing to schlep it into a new century of nonuse. To which the response is we should be here because we like language and nuance. Nuncios certainly have had historical roles from sending the English into Ireland to acting as mafia bagmen.
The true reason to hate the puzzle, fun as it was, is that the song was only ever ZOOM ZOOM ZOOM and it's unpleasantly awkward to stutter to a halt after two.
Loved it. One of the best puzzles of the year. It took a while to figure our what letters were in play even after figuring out the gimmick, especially the H’s. Very enjoyable solve. Bravo to Simeon Segel on a job well done!
Horrible puzzle for paper pencil users. I you put a hash mark through the letter z, as I do or if you don’t use capital h, I don’t , the supposed cleverness of this just becomes frustration. Not everyone solves the puzzles on their phone or tablet.
I'm a bit late doing this puzzle. I'm 'carrying water" for sad irons because of Robert Caro's great writing. Read this one chapter and you'll see what I mean. “The Sad Irons” chapter in Caro's THE PATH TO POWER details the life of housewives in the Texas Hill Country where Lyndon Johnson grew up. Caro writes about the back-breaking labor these women carried out daily. Lyndon Johnson used his influence to get electricity run to the Hill Country for the first time.
A long time ago, I was solving this puzzle and got stuck at an unguessable (to me) crossing: N. C. WYETH crossing NATICK at the "N"—I knew WYETH but forgot his initials, and NATICK ... is a suburb of Boston that I had no hope of knowing. It was clued as someplace the Boston Marathon runs through (???). Anyway, NATICK— the more obscure name in that crossing—became shorthand for an unguessable cross, esp. where the cross involves two proper nouns, neither of which is exceedingly well known. NATICK took hold as crossword slang, and the term can now be both noun ("I had a NATICK in the SW corner...") or verb ("I got NATICKED by 50A / 34D!")
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164 comments:
I liked it a whole lot more than @Rex did. Nifty "aha" moment when I put in CLOCKWISE and understood the gobbledygook in the down clues. Struggled a bit in the SW, where I didn't know the Muppet RIZZO (61A), COZEN (65A) isn't part of my vocabulary and I rejected ASHES for 67A because my brain, forgetting about the theme, wanted "I" instead of "H" in the middle position. Fun Thursday (and I usually hate Thursdays).
I liked the gimmick but Rex is right about the awful fill. Never heard of cozen either.
I wonder if a lot of people just solved this as a themeless, using the acrosses to fill in the bizarre letter strings on the themers. I couldn’t do that because so much of the fill was obscure and unknown to me (not PPP, just odd words). I really turned my phone to figure out “innocence” for example. (“Now what are they using for E? Oh,yeah, W”.) That’s because I couldn’t get COZEN, a word I’ve heard but did not know the definition of, and NEWS crawl wasn’t coming to me at all. (Once I got the W, I had to run the alphabet to get the S - no idea that baseball is called THE BIG S. Rex never says what the S stands for.)
Anyway, the result was a mix of frustration with the obscure fill - that SAD IRON makes me sad just to look at it, imagining the drudgery. Wrinkled sheets are just fine, thanks. But on the other hand, I liked that I used the theme to figure out two of the downs (er … acrosses?) - “innocence” and “Comic Con.” I didn’t get the UPPER CASE part at all until I read Rex and realized that some paper solvers might use lower-case letters and not get the trick without that part of the instructions. Even when I solve on paper, I use upper case.
I know Linda Ronstadt very well so her song should have been SO EASY for me but it took forever. I picked wrong on ISIAH THOMAS, going with ISaiH. I know it’s missing an A but never sure which way the other A and the I go. BUNKO is another word like COZEN that I know but don’t know the meaning of (and thought was BUNcO anyway). No idea on SISSY and TREYS was tough. So that EASY was way too hard.
In the end, I think I agree with Rex - I expect weird on Thursdays, and this delivered.
Rex doesn’t like what he doesn’t like. What else is new? I enjoyed it. Lower-case letters are way too round in many fonts to give an accurate sideways-view, so I’m not sure how else to do accomplish the sideways feat. The puzzle was a nice change of pace and fun for me.
One of the least enjoyable ever. Stupid theme. Life would have been better without it.
Godawful.
I did enjoy the weird today. But as someone who enjoys baseball video games, even I thought that was a terrible clue. The prominent MLB video game is "The Show." "The Bigs" had two games over two years in the early 2000s, which is hardly a "franchise." If you want to go old school, at least pick Slugfest or the iconic Hardball featured in The Princess Bride.
Came hoping for a nice challenging crossword, and unfortunately was served up one of those Thursday “specials” that the NYT offers all too frequently - it’s not so much a crossword but some sort of made up logic/visual test stuffed into a crossword-like grid.
Great if you appreciate/enjoy these types of things. I’m off to WaPo and maybe the WSJ to search for an elusive crossword puzzle today.
It’s “The Bigs”, not “The Big S”. So the s doesn’t stand for anything
Hard to catch any Zs with all that noise.
I figured out the theme at ZoomZoom, but made a massive error by jumping down to 63A and typing in OnItsSide. So I thought I was going to crush a Thursday, but turned out to be average time once I figured out it had to be Clockwise, and cleaned up my mess.
Sorry, Rex. This (in-print) solver thought this was a very imaginative and challenging puzzle. I enjoyed my 'Aha!' moment. Well done, Simeon!
I hated this puzzle more than I’ve hated any other puzzle in a very, very long time. That is all.
Too cute. Tries too hard. DNF. Lost interest in wrestling with this theme. Grumble, grumble.
Loved it.
Yes the fill was terrible, but the aha was worth it and the skill to create it impressive.
I also had THE SHOW at first, then doubted whether I was remembering properly or not! Glad I’m not going crazy.
Had the themer Z for the fourth letter of the Muppet and had a journey with GONZO, then FOZZY, before finally landing on RIZZO.
A super tricky theme that I was unable to decipher and a puzzle thus impossible with so many WOE answers. Make them WTF answers today: COZEN, BUNKO, SCUDS, SADIRONS, NEMEA, RHYS, THEBIGS, CASHTRADE are all outside my knowledge base. I wouldn’t mind as much if four long Z heavy themes didn’t take up so much real estate.
I got CLOCKWISE very early on but that didn’t help at all. Even seeing the answer and having it explained still took me a while to understand. It reminds me too much of those puzzle games like “Mary loves grapes, but she hates apples” that people either get quickly and are amused by or they take too long to get and feel foolish. Word of advice is don’t do those games in large groups because the last person to understand the puzzle feels like they are put in the spotlight and not in a good way.
(Mary also likes bananas but she hates cherries. Solution: Mary hates foods with double letters.)
I'm a person of above-average intelligence, and I couldn't solve the puzzle even after the trick was explained to me. Am I the only one who admits to this?
Clever! Though trying to solve on my iPad was tough - the orientation kept changing as I tried to rotate so I now have a crick in my neck.
Not a puzzle I could EOONEOON through but, to me at least, a gettable, unforgettable challenge!
ICNNCI! (HUZZUH! in CLOCKWISEse- couldn’t work out the A so went with the palindrome)…
Know what I love about Friday puzzles? That feeling of being far, far away from Thursday, the worst day of the week. Today’s puzzle was the most Thursday-ish I’ve seen in a long while. Hand up with the haters.
This is what Simeon does in his puzzles – more word gymnastics than simply word play, making his puzzles more romp than simply a start-to-finish. I love his devious mind.
Huge “Hah!” at the moment of theme realization, and as I’m guessing the theme will be the main thrust of the comments today, and the non-theme answers may get lost in the shuffle. So, here’s looking at you, non-theme answers:
• COZEN and BUNKO – There’s a couple of words that I’ve never used in real life, but look cool.
• SAD IRON – a lovely piece of learning for me.
• THE BIGS – I’m amazed that this answer has never appeared in a NYT puzzle in its 80 years, nor has it appeared in any of the major crossword venues!
• ZEE – this puzzle’s mini-theme, with eight.
Simeon, your puzzles crackle, and today’s was memorable and fantastic. I love the hoops you make me jump through. Thank you!
Solved puzzle with no idea what the theme was about.
Amy: round of applause from this corner. On Thursdays, if it's NOT a rebus, it gets extra points. Found this fun and entertaining. Challenging because even after figuring out what was happening, couldn't turn my tablet as the puzzle would turn with it. Wonderfully creative.
While she died before I was born, my grandmother used sad irons. My mom and her 4 sisters recalled heating them on the cookstove and continuing to rotate them (with hot pads, of course) so she could keep ironing. Life was tougher then.
Your comment is PERFECT. I'll never get that time back
Absolutely!
I'm with you. So disappointing
Rex used the right word for this: chore. When I saw that the letters had to be turned on their sides as well as the words, I had a little “aha” moment, after that it was - a chore.
I hate rebus puzzles but I hated this even more. Hope never to see its like in the NYT again.
Yeah… no. I was really just thinking the whole time Rex will lambaste this one! Haste manana.
the gimmick? Awful and irksome.
The fill? UGH. It had to be awful to support this godawful theme.
Yeah, The Show really screwed me up for while.
I really disliked this. I'd rather have a rebus any day.
A tribute to @Z. The rotated letters did slow the flow - but I liked the trickery - the themers were pretty straightforward so I’m assuming the offbeat fill was forced to put this into late week category.
Had trouble at first figuring out the rotated “I”. UPPER CASE plays into the scheme. No issue with COZEN or NUNCIO and SCUDS is quaint. SAD IRONS is SAD.
Enjoyable Thursday solve.
INNOCENCE Mission
Ahhhh… misread it, thanks!
Hated it with the white hot intensity of 1000 suns to steal a line from Diane Chambers from Cheers. In a word, why?
Let me know when another one of these comes along so I can skip it.
Same goes for RIZZO, BUNKO, CAAN, NEMEA (always forget if it’s an e or an i and today I was wrong). Bad fill just for the sake of pulling off this theme was just not worth the payoff.
Super theme.
Two things made this puzzle quite difficult. One related to solving online. Would have been much easier, once I got to the revealer, to fill in the theme answers on paper.
The second was the sheer volume of things I did not know in the SW. SADIRONS, NUNCIO, RUNIN (as clued – is this just an error? *), Mighty Patch, COZEN.
* I have not heard RUN IN used this way, and none of my various dictionaries recognize it.
There is a feature called “portrait orientation lock” on iOS. Typically you drag your finger from top right corner of the screen to the center and a menu of options appears. I use this all the time when reading this blog from my bed…
"The Bigs" I believe is short for The Big Leagues.
I really enjoyed this one, but understand while some may not have. For those iPad and iPhone users who had trouble with their screens rotating, you can lock it so it won’t rotate (which is what I did). Pull down from the upper right corner of your screen, and you will see an icon that looks like a lock with a clockwise arrow going around it. Hit that and it won’t rotate. Hit it again to turn it back on.
I figured out the theme fairly early but could not figure out for the longest time how to make the letter I. I *finally* realized through crosses that it was the letter H because the I had the lines on the top and bottom that are often removed. Felt a bit dumb once that finally dawned on me.
Loved it. But I solve on paper (the way the good lord intended) so that made it a lot easier.
I thought the gimmick was clever but, like most others, the puzzle itself was... not great, just too many rough patches of fill to overlook and make it enjoyable. Shouldn't editors be thinking about entries like BUNKO, COZEN, SADIRONS and asking for the grid to be revised to make it cleaner?
Freakishly parallel experience to OFL today, from catching on at ZOOMZOOM to skipping to the revealer to having trouble coming up with the S on THEBIGS.
I always solve in UPPERCASE on paper so no rotating my phone or tablet, but I did have to erase some of the little tails on my U's to make them into C's.
I only remember that ISIAH spells his first name strangely and have never heard of SADIRONS. Was also unfamiliar with the RHYS and SISSY people as clued, but SCUD is what clouds, and as far as I know, only clouds do. Boats maybe?
I like a Thursday with a good gimmick and I thought this was a good gimmick providing a proper aha!, so OK with me. Sorta Stunning, SS, and thanks for all the fun.
GARBAGE, the fill as fetid as the theme. Didn’t even try to finish after I got the revealer. This is the kind of crap that turns people away from so-called crosswords. NYT, get your act together.
.
Since when does silt have a plural. Silt is a collective noun
Wonderful exercise for the right side of my brain 😊👏
I… really don’t know how I feel about this one. What I know for sure: the fill had some awful clunkers and the constructor clearly centered showcasing their construction chops over the experience of the solvers. But while usually either of those two things on its own would be enough to put me off a puzzle, today I just… don’t know.
I think it’s the weird factor that’s saving it for me. I think… maybe I liked it in spite of myself? It was a different solving experience than a typical Thursday, it was way harder than a typical Thursday for me because it was basically impossible to solve as a themeless, and it’s led to a nice morning text exchange with my type designer friend who is a fellow solver. I appreciated the chutzpah of this puzzle, AND, I really hope that tomorrow we get a nice, solid, rule-abiding crossword with fresh, clean fill to make up for some of this week’s mishegas.
This must be one of the most polarizing puzzles in recent memory, which makes it especially weird for me to find my uber-opinionated self in the “both sides” camp, but here we are. I’m gonna do an old one from the archives just to get myself a bit less jumbled up. What a weird one.
NW corner was brutal for me. What are CASH TRADES? 4 of the first 6 across clues being ?s or “perhaps” (just ? by another name) turned out to be a bad omen for the fill. Gimmick was easy enough given the revealer.
I work it on my phone. Rotating the phone just makes the grid flip upright. Got sick of turning “lock” on and off. Abandoned ship.
Now that was a proper Thursday theme. Made it a real puzzle, unlike other day puzzles. My vocab didn't all come from xwords, so I thought nuncio was a great word, though I had to verify scud meant what I recalled, and I spelled bunco wrong. Glad that NYT is beinging back vocab expanding words. I'd never heard of sad irons.
Great puzzle for me. Sorry so many disagree.
This was a clever idea but it flopped. As others have said, when you solve online, this just simply doesn't work.
I hated it until I got that great AHA! rush. Wow, I think it's incredibly clever and, to me, original. Glad I stuck with it.
I’m with you Lewis! Great trick puzzle and loved the fill as well.
Why can't we just get straight puzzles that get progressively harder through the week without all these stupid themes? I look forward to Fri and Sat puzzles
Cozen is a very old word. You really only run into it if you're a fan of literature from the 19th century and earlier, because its use peaked around 1805. (I am, but it never occurred to me to think of it. I got all the down clues and then went, "REALLY?!")
Will an explanation for the mess of gibberish in my grid emerge before I hurl this puzzle unceremoniously against my wall?
[SPLAT!!!!]
Nope. Guess not.
Hey All !
Tough tough here. Not just the figuring out how in tarhooties to put the Themers in, but just tough all over. Obscure cluing, with the ole brain refusing me help. Had to Check Puzzle a few time, plus Reveal Word twice! Ouch.
I got what the theme was shooting for, but it looks weird with the W's turned into sideways E's. And the E's into sideways M's.
NUNCIO was a new one here. Is that one word, or a NUN CIO?
One word to describe this puz - WEOUZHWZO.
Gesundheit.
Two F's
RooMonster
DarrinV
FINISHED THIS ONE IN 3 MINUTES. Once I got WEOUZHWZO and hit reveal word to find out I was right, I had seen enough. Bye.
Had a nice aha moment at CLOCKWISE and then everything rapidly fell into place. However, like others, had never heard COZEN, SCUDS, BUNKO, or the SAD part of SADIRONS.
Re yesterday's blog: I posted the list that some of you requested last night around 9:15.
What a Colossal. Useless. Waste. of. Time.
Hi, I`m wondering if anyone else is getting wrong times on the app for their solving stats. Today, for example, it put in a time two minutes longer than I had. A couple of Mondays ago it registered a time two minutes shorter than it should have been, which set a Monday record I`ll never be able to legitimately beat. About a year ago it didn`t register a Saturday I completed; so my solving streak should be about twice as long as it is. Maybe I just shouldn`t pay attention to it.
While "scuds" won't be known to most, it was my nickname for decades so I'm familiar with it. And thankfully it wasn't clued as "missles used by Iraq on Israel." Between that and "ComicCon" I felt this one was speaking to me. But "cozen?!?!?" Yeah, no...
I'm okay with "sad irons" but I'm an antiquer and seamstress, so I am familiar with them.
@Nancy: I could hear this one hitting your wall before I even got halfway through it. I managed to finish but my hand was itching to wad up and wind up for a good strong pitch the whole time. And by the way, thank you for posting the list of poems. I look forward to exploring them fully.
Theme is ok I guess. Theme answers themselves were easy (once theme trick unlocked), but uninspired, imo. But that’s better than most of the remaining fill.
I don’t see anyone bragging about solving this one “Downs Only”. It occurs to me that we could call those who incorporate their “Downs Only” solving triumphs into their comments Downers.
Those who think this was a “feat of construction” type puzzle are, IMO, wrong. I believe that the constructor, once he thought of this very clever theme, had only 7 letters available for themers (M,I,Z,O,C,E,N). From these, he had to find two pairs of acceptable words to maintain symmetry. I imagine he went for the longest words possible within normal usage. Once those were in place, he had to fill around and through them, using their rotated alter egos (E,H,N,O,U,W,Z). It’s conceivable that some constructors could come up with better fill, but probably not by much. In the end, it’s a “feat of filling” around some difficult constraints.
I loved this because it was different. I always marvel at anyone coming up with a new or strange gimmick that can be developed well enough to make it into the NYTXW. Thanks for a wonderful puzzle, Simeon Siegel.
I really did rotate my phone to solve the theme answers. Very fun. I might have laughed out loud. Great idea and surprisingly good answers on their own. Reminds me of turning a calculator upside down and making words with the numbers.
The northwest tripped me up with SCUDS, and RIZZO, COZEN, and NUNCIO were blockers in the south. I don't think I've seen Midnight Cowboy in its entirety. I think I may have only seen the ending.
Uniclues:
1 Where old people who think kids shouldn't whip credit cards out for everything meet to agree the world is falling apart.
2 A gold one.
3 Hopefully all of them, you know, since certain things might sunburn easily, or get caught in a ficus.
4 Scheme developed by criminals who aren't very good at their jobs and assume they'll be caught.
1 CASH TRADE ARENA
2 GOOF TOOTH
3 CAUTIOUS NUDIST
4 PARANOID BUNKO
A big THANK YOU to Anonymous 9:32 and @Allison for explaining portrait lock! I haven't been able to rotate images on my phone for months, but didn't know why. Now it's been restored to its normal state, and I'm really happy.
I'm even happy with the puzzle. I could see that something was going on with the incomprehensible answers to the starred clues; but I had no idea what. Clearly I needed the revealer, but I wouldn't allow myself to look at it until I got there naturally. Aha! Rotate the paper! I was still puzzled, because I write my Zs with the diagonal line crossed in the middle (I know it's an affectation, but I can't help myself), the Us as if they were cursive lower case us, and the serifs the Is were way too big. I finally got it, though, and the rest was easy
You can RUN INto somebody; but if you have had a RUNN-IN, it was either a verbal or a physical fight. "Encounter by surprise" would work as a clue.
Having NEMEA sitting atop the LION that Hercules had to kill there was a nice touch.
The flatiron picture Rex posted does not fit the definition he posted, which says a SADIRON is pointed at both ends. However, another definition is "a flatiron," so he's not actually wrong.
What I enjoy about trick puzzles is figuring out the trick. This one I couldn't figure out without the revealer, so the joy was lessened, but I did admire it.
Hated it
Welp. Wasn’t this a clever and innovative way to approach a Thursday crossword? Some people may even call it brilliant. I call it one of the most frustrating and offputting puzzles I have ever done, and I hope I never see it done again. NO SIR!
And if you’re going to do this, don’t use pop culture clues for two out of the four themers. The car ad is at least something more or less universal but here’s a NEWS flash: most people who are not superhero fans have no idea what it’s called when they gather. It wouldn’t have mattered to me whether COMIC CON was CLOCKWISE, backwards, upside down, or right side up. But now I’m supposed to figure it out by not only knowing which way to turn the grid without a revealer (see below), but then also deciphering the letters to mean what I’m supposed to figure out they mean to read the answer, which might as well still be gibberish for all the sense it makes to me, a non fan.
AND don’t put four proper names and two religious clues in the corner with your revealer, especially when one of the names isn’t the standard spelling. If given a fair chance, I’ll try to figure out the most convoluted theme but that’s the kind of thing that made me want to follow @Nancy’s example and throw it [splat!] against the wall.
After reading the wide range of reactions I must weigh in. I liked it. I knew Rex would hate it and I knew Nancy would throw it against the wall. You guys crack me up.
Bologna.
A puzzle that makes my body parts hurt. It started with my brain and ended up with a crick in my neck after reading @Rex and discovering that I was supposed to turn my paper around in some sort of angle and figure out what my scribbled letters meant after giving this a whirl....
This was so un-fun. Like popping a ZIT on my WUZWUOZZH. It hurt.
I suppose kudos should be tossed into the fray for coming up with this crazy. So I'll give you a HUZZAH which also spells HUZZAH if you want another crick in your neck.
@Nancy...Wow. Thank you for the recommendations. I do remember Frost and his "The Road Not Taken." Simple choices we make - big or small. It may have been the reason that I bought my children Dr. Seuss's "Oh The Places You'll Go." xoxo.
egs-actly! Despite all the puzzles over all the years, SS came up with something new, yet grokkable. With 4 themers containing only MIZOCEN, the fill was surprisingly good. I'm happy to learn something new, hi SADIRON. Willing to forgive the rest for the aha of originality.
SCUD missiles were named after the cloud usage.
I was with Rex, thinking bringing a camera to any NUDIST function is very bad form.
Last in a series dupe clue one of the better ones in that both answers are equally valid, one numerical/one alphabetical.
Pseudoephedrine from SUDAFED an ingredient used to make Meth. I had to look it up since the brand name rang a bell.
See Robert Caro, The Path to Power, Chapter 27 — “The Sad Irons”.
Thx, Simeon, what a hoot; very clever. HUZZAH! :)
Med++
Very slow, methodical solve.
SCUt before SCUD hid DUE BY for too long. Goodbye rabbit, hello 'cloud'.
"The term SCUD is actually an acronym standing for 'Scattered Cumulus Under Deck'." KNWA
Got the 'turn' idea fairly early on, but couldn't come up with CLOCKWISE until near the end of the solve.
Enjoyed this adventure very much! :)
___
@pablo: came close on the New Yorker Mon., but no cigar. : (
___
Peace 🕊 🇺🇦 ~ Compassion ~ Tolerance ~ Kindness to all 🙏
Tough mostly because of the theme. This was more irritating than fun, especially solving on an iPad. I agree with @Rex about the fill.
Medium; enjoyed figuring it out. After the first few rows, I was having so much trouble getting traction that I read down to the reveal clue much earlier in the game than I usually do, and that saved me: at 11D I had the initial WEO and further down the Z of ZOO - enough to get me ONE INCOME. Without then being able to get the remaining theme answers fairly quickly, I'm not sure I could have finished: there were so many clues that left me with a blank stare and ??? over my head.
Interesting to read the comments about the non-theme answers: I happily greeted SCUDS, NUNCIO, and COZEN as old friends I don't see around much anymore, and I knew SAD IRONS, though I couldn't say how. @jberg, thank you for pointing out the NEMEAn LION! @Gary Jugert, I wondered what you might do with the CAUTIOUS NUDIST :)
Oh,come on Rex! This puzzle was ingenious and a lot of fun. No wonder people say you hate everything!
BTW a lot of people know that fig and ficus are basically synonyms.
Well I inadvertently learned some music trivia from this punnlw. For "1977 Linda Ronstadt hit" I immediately plugged in BLUE BAYOU, which was a #3 hit in December of '77. But as I proceeded it started to seem wrong, how could that be? Then, I remembered that the flip side IT'S SO EASY also got a lot of airplay. The exact same number of letters! How curious! So I changed it; crisis averted.
But what I learned, via some post punnlw googling, was that they were not flip sides of the same single, as I had assumed all these years. They were on entirely separate singles. Both were A sides, each with its own B side. IT'S SO EASY entered the chart a few weeks after BLUE BAYOU, thus they were on the radio simultaneously. Why Asylum Records chose to release two singles by the same artist right on top of each other, I have no idea. But, there ya go. I'm just glad I found out the truth before I died.
I loved the punnlw. Loved the rotational gimmick. Even the weird fill. What's wrong with NUNCIO? A nuncio's starting salary is $4,000 a month.
Rio. De Janeiro.
I need a drink.
I liked it, for the most part. It was fun to deduce what letter might stand in for another. I recognized SADIRON and wrote in COZEN from the OZ. SCUDS is a lovely word often used to describe clouds that are moving at a good clip. Are we not language lovers here? Sure, in ordinary conversation we don’t use every delicious word we know - it might come across as pretentious. And conversation today is nearly a lost art, besides. Merely and minimally functional. I enjoy being reminded of useful, evocative words I know from reading.
The part of the puzzle I disliked was the southeast, where, in spite of good guesses for TREYS and WIDOWER, I was stumped by PPP. 54D, 55D, 69A and 66A.
Nice tie in to yesterday's POET SCORNER puzzle at 1 Down: "I wandered lonely as a cloud, That SCUDS on high o'er...".
Clued as "Consider something to be", 8D DEEM IT looks like a partial without the final "SO". Maybe a better clue would be along the lines of "Scottish Highlander's imprecation".
SUDAFED (39A) used to be an over the counter decongestant that many Scuba divers used to open up the eustachian tube to make it easier to equalize inner and outer ear pressure while diving. Then people started using the active ingredient, pseudoephedrine, to make methamphetamine and in 2005 (just looked) the FDA banned OTC sales and a prescription was required.
The theme gimmick didn't stick the landing for me. As OFL's rotated grid shows, several of the rotated letters didn't really look like what they were supposed to be. A W, for example, doesn't look to me like an E when rotated. (It looks more like the uppercase Greek letter Sigma.) The same non-correspondence issues with other letters made the rotated versions look like they came from some ancient Sumerian texts.
Well, I knew nuncio not from crosswords (which I’ve been doing since the mid 60’s), but from reading the Times (which I’ve been doing since the early 60’s). Why you protest certain words or ideas because they are of a generation other than yours is simply beyond me. The puzzle is meant for all generations. Sometimes I have trouble with a word that you grew up on, and vice versa. I never understand why you think it’s unfair fior me to get an easy one which you find difficult but you’re not bothered when the opposite happens.
The comments say it: You either liked this a lot (Clever!) or hated it (Time I’ll never get back!). The fill didn’t thrill me, but I did enjoy the weirdness of the rotated letters. Beautifully balanced grid, too. Thumbs up, here.
Real different. Like different. fave themer was definitely ZOUUHEOU.
Torn, on staff weeject pick: The panel really liked the anagrammatic feel of EAU and UAE. OTOH, ZOO turned sideways is NOO, which could be a neat summarizin themer for folks who threw their puz at the wall.
Like @RP, M&A immediately peaked ahead at the revealer, to calm things down. Really helped a lot. Also probably helped, that I solvequested this puppy on paper. Avoided massive nanosecond losses.
fave answer: HUZZAH. fave clue: ARE clue.
fave har: DEEMIT. Better clue: {Reel back in what was just scudded out, before it hits the wall}.
Thanx for the feisty turn-on of a ThursPuz, Mr. Seigel dude. Cleverer than snot.
Masked & Anonymo11Us (and some sideways Cs, I reckon)
**gruntz**
where did Z go ?!!? was there a battle royal that sent him away or some more sad tale ?
Dumped my pitching wedge into the lake on the sixth hole. Talk about a SAD IRON
I cant understand the hatred for this puzzle. Once I got the revealer I just turned my laptop clockwise and I was off the the races. Inventive and unique. Maybe it was too tough for some of if they never figured out what was going on. Loved it
SCUDding clouds and the Papal NUNCIO are pretty common, actually.
Two things worked in my favor. I start by going through all the clues looking for gimmes (which at 63A told me that the grid needed to be rotated for the asterisk words) and I solve on paper (allowing me to rotate my clipboard). That led me to look for letters that became other letters when rotated. H becoming I wasn't as clear as U becoming C. My aha came at COMICCON.
Aren't we used to looking for something ultra tricky on Thursday? Not only was this tricky, but also original. Loved it.
Isn't COZEN used often in Shakespeare? Othello?
I liked figuring out the gimmick (from CLOCKWISE and then ONE INCOME, though it took me a while to see what letter was supposed to become I when rotated). What really tripped me up was UPPERCASE. You see, I was interpreting it as "you're supposed to write the themers in a way that's not the usual crossword convention [of filling everything in UPPERCASE]". Didn't help that I had EAT UP crossing ITALIC-something (shifty type, you see how the letters are slightly shifted to the right? Then I figured out the Shift (key) wordplay).
Having 2 Across revealer answers and 4 Down themers but only 32 black squares was a bold move. No wonder we get partial/preposition town in the north (LAP UP, DUE BY, TRY TO, AS PER, DEEM IT where having AS made it impossible to see TOOTH) and interlocking names ISIAH SISSY RHYS in the SE. SADIRONS and SUDAFED were also unknown to me.
Favorite fill - PARANOID, HUZZAH!
21D is what you shout at a novice solver who doesn't know what's a 3-letter word for a long stretch of time. EOOOOOON! EOOOOOOON!!!
I'm with Rex. I thought this was the worst gimmick for an NYT crossword yet.
Put me in the Thumbs Up column. I am always up for something new and clever that actually really is a "puzzle". I love to puzzle things out.
And what a cleverly sneaky way to get a lot of Z's into the grid!
True, there were a few obscurities (COZEN, SADIRONS, SCUDS, and I wasn't in love with CASHTRADE as a phrase), but if you sit back and look at the grid, it is a very satisfying set of words/answers.
Well done. For the complainers, well, I LAPUP your tears :-)
100 percent agree. If you're going to with a bygone MLB series, give me Triple Play or RBI or even High Heat. The Bigs had me baffled and the weird cluing didn't help either.
YES
The app is also screwing up my times and now this is on top of the other issue that’s gone on for years — my success rate is under100% even though I’ve never ever not finished a puzzle. So there are a handful of puzzles that register as downloaded and not complete - like I can go through 20 yrs of archives to find them? (I admit I wanted this so badly I’ve actually tried it - okay, more than once)
Adding insult to injury, WE PAY GOOD MONEY FOR THESE FRUSTRATIONS!
Are you trying to get me to delete my account NYT?
A true Thursday challenge for me today. I'm glad some people are capable of thinking sideways (e.g. Rex) but I can't do it easily. My handwritten capitals, where I put a tail on the U like a small case U and I reflexively throw a slash through my Z, a holdover from my college engineering days means it was harder, perhaps, to make sense of the sideways letters than for many.
And then, after I'd figured out the theme, I was looking at 45D, mistakenly thinking it was another theme answer and trying my best to figure out what capital letter was represented by - (the I in WIDOWER). I eventually noticed that 45D made sense in the usual direction, oops.
And in place of HUZZAH, I had eUreka. Not that I knew what SADIRONS were but Sk_IRONS wasn't helping!
Simeon Seigel, this was certainly different, thanks!
Like @Andrew until I was able to recall that the upper right corner on the iPad has a rotation lock function, and then things righted themselves; W as an E replacement looks weird but gets the idea across.
Loved the solve after the UPPER CASE tipped off the CLOCKWISE GOOFiness. Squarely in @Lewis’s camp today as this puzzle was just good clean fun if appreciated for its intent. HUZZAH indeed for Simeon’s quirky mind; today’s grid was right up there with his MERGE LEFT that had many flummoxed last year. Seeing a Seigel byline, I WONT be saying ITS SO EASY since SS must delight in COZENing the commentariat. With his sixth publication today Seigel it would seem has made THE BIGS of Crossworld.
Can’t pass up the chance to encourage HZZOUWZUW readers to add Margaret Atwood’s new collection of short stories titled Old Babes in the Wood. 32 down clue was close enough for a trigger.
I also got stuck with the Show. Hardball was a blast from past. I played that on a Commodore 64 in the 80s
I too had THE SHOW. I played Hardball back in the 80s on my Commodore 64. Good times.
It’s a long trip, but my crumpled up puzzle made it from my rock in the ocean to Nancy’s wall and landed with a dull thump. A very satisfying sound!
I’m not sure where I learned “nuncio” but it probably was from watching the HBO series “The Young Pope”. Maybe it was centered around a young man that was the pride of the small Italian village from which my in-laws hailed; until, that is, his prized job at the Vatican ended up as part of a corruption trial.
I did like the puzzle. It was a combination of a crossword and the other games that used to appear on Sundays for those of us that are digital subscribers to The NY Times. It did take me longer to do and I learned a few new words as many bloggers attested to here.
I solved it, but...No. Just. No. NOT EVER.
I think you mean N's.
@Carola 11:12 AM
The moment I saw CAUTIOUS NUDIST I thought, "Today is the greatest day ever," but then I went to work and... blah. I turned a homer into a base hit. It's impossible to imagine such a scenario. DARING NUDIST, when will you appear in a puzzle? FLAMBOYANT HOT TUBBER, BRAZEN BARER, STALWART STREAKER. Zowee, a theme for Naked and NOT Afraid.
Yay! Theme??? Hated it!
Ditto.
I'm with Lewis, Georgia, Joe, Alice et.al. Loved it!
I’ve never posted a comment here before, but felt led by my sheer dislike of this puzzle. I do the NYT puzzle every day, and I usually can find some enjoyment in any of them. Not this one. Sheer drag.
Meh. I used the cross letters to get the weird “words”. I like to relax doing my NYT puzzles. Not today!
Mixed feelings. The themers were fun in a way but also a lot of work.
Surprised at the complaints about cozens and scuds. Definitely good words, Maybe more familiar from reading than conversation.
Cannot remember ever reading or hearing sadiron for a flat iron so learned a word.
Thought 53A was a clever clue/answer combo, tho at first I had nudism, as a more general subject , rather than nudist as a particular subject. Treys changed that.
As with so many cultural names that show up in these crosswords had never heard of The Bigs and never hope to again.
I thought the gimmick was novel enough that I could overlook the problems. I spent a while trying to make COMICCON work in the normal way; the fact that the Os were correct prolonged the confusion.
But the very best part of the gimmick was going to xwordinfo.com where Jim Horne has programmed the grid so it flips back and forth when you click it. Awesome!
[Spelling Bee: yd 0 for the first time since Sat. Last word this 6er.]
Completely face-planted on 2D with 'Eat Up". That plus the Video Game clue on 4D made the NW corner an uncompleted nightmare.
I think a better clue would be step up from AAA
As Rex points out, online filling makes these sort of puzzles obsolete. And this one was just dreadful; another puzzle that must have been SO FUN for the constructor.
A fine argument for Mr. Shortz' retirement. Let it be soon.
how could you have never heard of bunko? Well, maybe it hasn't been used much in the last twenty years, so if you are very young...
Totally agree. Probably the least enjoyable Thursday ever. If it was a movie I would have walked out. Sad I even started it. I am shocked by the number of people sticking up for the puzzle.
So tome consuming to try to do this on my phone!! This has been done before, but not recently enough (maybe?) for many newer solvers to have encountered it. I remember vividly in grade school/junior high that we used to pass notes written in caps and sideways. It was funny how hard some teachers found it to decipher this “code.” @Rex is right when he comments that the theme isn’t one that works well with technology. I got it quickly when I entered the obviously correct ZOOM ZOOM and it didn’t work at all. Flashback to Danny N and Cheri S and I tossed our coded notes with very little stealth in Mr. Rhodes’s class to get caught and watch him do his slow burn as he tried to figure it out. We thought it hilarious.
Overall, the puzzle wasn’t too tough, and was more of a trial. In order to get the theme entries correct, I had to wrote the answer on paper and then translate to the “code.” ZOOM ZOOM becomes NOOENOOE. Bingo, the rest of the answers fit.
Remembering my misspent youth (I have admitted before that I could be a handful) was fun. A short trip down memory lane wondering what happened to some of the members of my posse with whom I list touch over the decades.
Yesterday with its clever wordplay was more fun, but I applaud the constructor for the effort and for resurrecting some good memories.
OMG (no rotation necessary, WYSIWYG), riffing on Jeff Chen’s POW, to me this is, I hope, the DOW.*
@Rex, LOL...no, ROTFL: Look at that cloud, it’s scudding! exclaimed the NUNCIO.
Turns out, SCUD is one of the words that went in immediately for me. It’s a mystery, but clouds just scud. Even though, as you say, no one ever says it. People write it, though. And it is fun to say. Besides an action a cloud might take, scud is a noun, meteorologically “a formation of low fractostratus clouds driven by a strong wind beneath rain-bearing clouds” (Collins English Dictionary). And in Scottish (reference yesterday), it’s a slap.
The weirdness was appreciated, but to wrap with a British colloquialism, the puzz was just not my cuppa.
* D as in MILK _ _ _ S. Now crossing fingers for the next two crosswords.
From late yesterday, @Gill 8:04 pm, @Nancy 9:15 pm –
Glad you both liked the clip. That beautiful poem makes me cry too.
Nancy, thank you for the recommendations. Look forward to the unknowns; will start with Tennyson’s “In Memoriam.” Yeats is a favorite poet; I especially like “When You Are Old” and “The Lake Isle of Innisfree.” When I saw “The Second Coming” on your list I remembered Joan Didion’s collection Slouching Towards Bethlehem and the documentary The Center Will Not Hold.” The latter looks like it’s still on Netflix.
Shortz claims he gets around 200 submissions a day/week whatever. So there are some hundred or so other crosswords that are worse than this one? Depressing. There are many who should something else for a hobby.
That was the most torturous, unfulfilling NYT puzzle I've ever solved. Just awful. The gimmick is so hard to work out in digital form..even when I KNEW the theme, it was so hard parsing out the complete rubbish into a word. And then on top of that, the fill was attrocious. Ugh
No. Just no. This is beyond stupid
Wrong day for the vertigo to kick in.......
Wow! I’ve come in really late in the day, which I normally try not to do. But in this case it offers me the chance to witness the largest collection of Love-it/Hate-it messages that the world has ever seen! More glaring than the last presidential election, maybe. Very little middle ground here, eh?
Well, I’m afraid I come down on the love-love-love it side. I was so thrilled and proud of myself when I caught on that I texted my cruciverbing brother and woke him up in the middle of the night. Clever clever clever! And the fill was totally a secondary matter, and easy enough so as not to interfere with the wild and crazy theme.
Been doing NY Times crosswords for 40 years and this was hands down the worst.
Had a busy day, so, although I did the puzz this am I just got to read all of this now.
The first thing that strikes me is that a great many anonymoti have posted "hated it" or variants, while most regular posters (ex @Nancy!) seemed to like it or at least be warm to it. My feeling about that is basically something my mom, and perhaps yours, used to say, "If you don't have anything polite to say, don't say it". It seems rude to anonymously post that you hated it. Why bother? It could be the same person umpteen times, so who cares?
Second thing is that the super easiest way to rotate your phone without the image rotating, people, is to put it on a flat surface. And rotate it. Works like a charm.
Third, I'm firmly in the "liked it!" camp. I knew 24D was COMICCON. For 21D I was remembering the old jingle "Piston engine goes boing boing boing but the Mazda goes hmmm", clearly too long. And 32D was obvious. But nothing worked... so, yes, I checked the revealer. Set my phone on the coffee table. Rotated it. And pow, or aha if you prefer.
Clever finding so many answers that work that way! Super enjoyable.
Last thing: I think all puzzles are done in CAPITAL LETTERS. It bothers me that SB answers are listed as capitalized lower case, huh? They're in CAPS on the puzz itself.
See you tomorrow!
I guess bunko is a fairly old word now too. It was used often in the expression "bunko squad" on old TV cop shows. Another sign that I am old.
I like most Thursday tricks but this was a bit annoying to me, maybe because I did it in the paper?
Thumbs up. Went from confusion at what I was sure should be Zoom Zoom straight to SW and figured out CLOCKWISE. That gave me all the theme clues with only a little confusion on how to make a cap I (originally tried to rebus an underscore but figured out the H later on with fill). I found this clever and fun with some unknown/clumsy fill everybody else already mentioned. Kudos from me for something fresh.
I understand your point but the Times has let SILTS in often. So I suppose the editors would argue there are different types of silt. So a plural can be used. But it does grate on my ears!
I would have gone nuts doing this on a screen, but on paper it was fun. Once I figured out zoom zoom the other 3 came easily. I would have bailed out on a computer.
First, I think it's great to celebrate 4/20 with a mind- and eye-bending puzzle. This was not that. It was a hot mess ab initio.
My app keeps freezing so I had to delete all my stats to open this puzzle. 352 day streak lost for this nonsense. My puzzle is all CAPS. Turned clockwise it made no sense.After I saw the answers it was still a big stretch. And I knew some of the answers!
@Gary Jugert 1:43 - The ficus makes it at least a double.
Animals in a ZOO are, by definition, not wild.
Loved it. Fun theme, lots of weird fill to get those Z/Ns. Actually figured it out and fully solved, though it took about 20 minutes of mostly staring just to get going, so I guess I was slow on the uptake. But then it was mostly smooth from there. Thanks, Simeon!
Loved the theme and had that AHA moment.
Was way big into vocabulary as a teenager, so COZEN was a delightful blast from the past.
The NUDIST clue didn't creep me out the way rex was offended, but i think rex is way more bothered by the human body than i am.
I agree with Photomatte 8:02; once the animal is in the zoo it is scarcely "wild."
Overall I loved the cleverness. It was just marred by a few clunky answers (REOIL; THEBIGS; and that papal thing)
The animals in a ZOO are, by definition, not wild. And so no, that is not where wild animals are most likely to see you.
Wow! Tough crowd. I thought it was an incredibly creative Thursday. I figured it out with comic con then it was fun to solve. Without a tricky theme the rest would have been too easy. It made it fun.
First time in a long time I simply laughed my ass off as I read through Rex's take. This wasn't a pleasure to slog through and for the first time in a long time I pretty much kept at it simply to avoid a DNF.
Squirrels and birds are wild animals, and the place they are LEAST likely to see me is at the zoo.
Absolutely put in the show right away. Just awful.
Back in the 70's, when calculators first came out (and we were completely blown away by them), there was a neat joke where you would tell someone a story about the energy crisis, all the while multiplying numbers on your not-yet-pocket-sized device. Then, when you were done, you'd ask your listener: "And what does that all add up to?" At which point you'd turn the calculator upside down and show them "shell oil." This puzzle makes that little feat look positively stupid.
Rex is right. Worst puzzle ever in my 40 years of solving
Hand up for connecting SCUDS to yesterday's POETSCORNER. Oops. POET SCORNER. Hey I bet someone noticed that yesterday. Haven't read that yet. Taxes were a pain this year. Still running behind.
Speaking of behind the the NYTCW is now going full frontal with the CAUTIOUS NUDIST. I was amused because the paper had a health article on hemmeroids yesterday that a what looked to me like a picture of an ass. The Shortz infection is spreading. Unless that was the WP.
I solve on the NYTCW app and I believe the default setting is frozen portrait.
Not so here. But I found out what happened to some of you soon as I rotated.
What a lot of grouches. It was a fun idea well-executed. It thurzzed like a thuzzeday should. From CASHTRADE (off the tax books?) to the CAUTIOUS NUDIST to my new mantra: ASHES OSHA RHYS.
Speaking of obsolete devices, I’ve been binging on Colombo after watching its homage, Poker Face. In a 1975 episode, the murderer, Oskar Werner, a tech executive, is sporting a digital watch, the kind where you had to press a button to see the time. His sure recall of the time becomes a plot element in nabbing him.
I had a friend in med school who told me of one of her instructors showing off a similar watch where you used one hand to see the time. Then one smart aleck mentioned if you need two hands to check the time, you can’t use it to check a pulse
I really enjoyed this puzzle. I always print the crossword out and solve over breakfast though. I can see how it could have been less fun on a screen.
People complain when it uses the same words, complain when it uses words they don't know. Video games have been around for 40 years. They're gonna be clues. Sorry you had trouble physically doing it, and the inconvenience robbed you of enjoying it. If you didn't like this puzzle, just. Stop. Doing. Puzzles.
Total slog, stunningly annoying, unwieldy, and unworkable for those of us who write in a stylized way
Couldn't agree more. This was clever and memorable. Actually a classic. As an English solver , this was reminiscent in a good way of tricks played by the fiendishly challenging Listener crossword. These are savoured , not resented by solvers. What else is Thursday for?
Well...OK, it works, sorta. The U's and Z's ARE perfect for C's and N's, The H's convert to I's if you elongate the crossbars, fine. The W's make Greek E's; changing E into M requires the same Greekness. We ARE now stretching things to near the breaking point. But it does work.
It's different, I'll give it that. Learned a new Muppet. Once saw a SADIRON go at auction for $750. What people will pay for! Special shout-out to DOD Linda Ronstadt, one of my old favorites.
IT'S not SO EASY to do this one, but the mcguffin eventually showed itself. At that point I thought: very clever. Some interesting fill. Birdie.
Wordle par.
CASH INCOME?
PER NEWS from THE NUDIST colony:
NOSIR, you WON'T TRYTO PAWAT me.
IT'S not SOEASY, WON'T you see?
TO TRADE INNOCENCE WON'T be free.
--- SISSY RIZZO
Awful fill? For many of the above complainers it seems to mean "words I've never come across". Try reading more widely.
A waste of time? Hated it? Just another way of saying I couldn't complete the puzzle so it's the constructor's fault.
Took a moment to see the H becoming an I, too.
Then - all fine. No rebi. All good.
Diana, LIW
PS SADIRONS is finally an honest way to describe the ironing task. I may have one - somewhere...
To the extent the ppl whinging about the puzzle are just unhappy they don't know how to set their device's rotate settings, learn; to the extent they're unhappy their times were much worse or their average increased, stop bothering or do timed trials on a universal standard puzzle like the USA Today or LA Times; to the extent they just dislike crosswords on devices, print it out.
For the rest like RP who just felt the trick was flat and the fill awkward... well, yeah, that's actually fair. ---- crawl being NEWS with the cross being THEBIGS clued to a blink-&-you'd-miss-it sports video game from decades ago was just awful. The way some of you react to COZEN and NUNCIO is the way I feel about SCUD: Never encountered it in my life aside from the missile and it's somewhat offensive that anyone would think mental capacity should be wasted continuing to schlep it into a new century of nonuse. To which the response is we should be here because we like language and nuance. Nuncios certainly have had historical roles from sending the English into Ireland to acting as mafia bagmen.
The true reason to hate the puzzle, fun as it was, is that the song was only ever ZOOM ZOOM ZOOM and it's unpleasantly awkward to stutter to a halt after two.
Loved it. One of the best puzzles of the year. It took a while to figure our what letters were in play even after figuring out the gimmick, especially the H’s. Very enjoyable solve. Bravo to Simeon Segel on a job well done!
Tough crowd. This may be the brilliant crossword construction I've ever seen. BRAVO.
Horrible puzzle for paper pencil users. I you put a hash mark through the letter z, as I do or if you don’t use capital h, I don’t , the supposed cleverness of this just becomes frustration. Not everyone solves the puzzles on their phone or tablet.
I'm a bit late doing this puzzle.
I'm 'carrying water" for sad irons because of Robert Caro's great writing. Read this one chapter and you'll see what I mean.
“The Sad Irons” chapter in Caro's THE PATH TO POWER details the life of housewives in the Texas Hill Country where Lyndon Johnson grew up. Caro writes about the back-breaking labor these women carried out daily. Lyndon Johnson used his influence to get electricity run to the Hill Country for the first time.
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