.png)
Diner owner in Garfield / SAT 5-27-23 / Squee-inducing / Sarcastic response to a first-world-problem complaint / Approval often uttered impatiently / Very clear say colloquially / California-based soft drink company
Saturday, May 27, 2023
Constructor: Samuel Smalley
Relative difficulty: Medium (though I made it much harder than it should've been...)
Word of the Day: SONJA Sohn (4D: "The Wire" actress Sohn) —
Sonja Denise Plack (née Williams; born May 9, 1964), known professionally as Sonja Sohn, is an American actress, activist and filmmaker, best known for portraying Baltimore detective Kima Greggs in the HBO drama The Wire (2002–2008). She is also known for having starred in the independent film Slam, which she co-wrote, and appearing as Samantha Baker in the ABC series Body of Proof. Her role in The Wire led to her work as the leader of a Baltimore community initiative called ReWired for Change. (wikipedia)
• • •
But even getting TOTES ADORBS (my first long Across) (33A: Squee-inducing) didn't dislodge PEAK HOURS or BEANSTALK: wrong answers, yes, but they had the right letters for the TOTES ADORBS cross. And yet ... as is fitting and possibly even TOTES ADORBS, a dog came to my rescue: TOTO! TOTES to TOTO! I had the back ends of the other long Acrosses (PROOF, TRAINS) pretty well sorted, and so when T-US-- PROOF just looked like total garbage, I boldly pulled both HOURS and STALK and bam, in went TAMPER PROOF, and then in went MODEL TRAINS (32A: Bad things to lose track of?). Felt great to finally get the breakthrough I needed. What felt less great was having the replacements of PEAK HOURS and BEANSTALK be significantly duller answers. PEAK TIMES is somehow much less vivid, and BEAN ... PLANT? Woof. As Jack might've said before descending the BEANSTALK, that's a long way down. Ah well, at least TAWNY was (infinitely) better than HAIRY. That's something.
The fat middle of this puzzle is fine, but I actually think the corners are the most entertaining part, which is saying something, as usually in a puzzle like this, the middle has all the marquee stuff and the corners tend to be kind of perfunctory. But today they're fizzing with energy: GINS UP GOODIE "NEED ME?" OPEN TAB DADJOKES had me in a good mood right from the start (to be clear, dad jokes never put me in a good mood, but as an answer, DAD JOKES was pleasing, and the clue really worked well (19A: Pop corn?) (as in "corny jokes your pop might make")). MOB FRONT "TO RECAP..." HERNIA ... RACE BIB "ALL MINE!" BIG NO-NOS ... LAB WASTE "POOR YOU..." "SAVE US!" ... the corners are really working hard to ensure you're having a good time. I appreciate it. I even liked seeing WOAH, a lamentably tenacious bit of nonsense, because the clue was perfect—the clue *knows* the spelling is garbage (however popular) and it tells you so, with its addition of a disdainfully eye-rolling "in one spelling." This puzzle has me liking DAD JOKES and WOAH—a truly huge accomplishment.
More stuff:
- 1A: Creates by artificial means (GINS UP) — really wanted CLONES.
- 14A: New Year's Day, informally (ONE ONE) — really wanted DAY ONE, really having trouble imagining someone saying "ONE ONE" and my understanding them, especially on New Year's Day, when it's at least possible I'll be nursing a hangover.
- 18A: Some toy carriers (SLEIGHS) — ??? How many Santas are there?
- 34A: Traveling sorts (HOBOS) — I feel like this is far too vague a clue for HOBOS. Without trains or bindles or secret code or unshaven faces, I'm at a loss.
- 9D: Actress DuVall of "21 Grams" (CLEA) — I know her from "Veep." She was the first answer I put into the NE, and absolutely crucial to getting traction up there.
- 30D: Role played by a dog with a bigger salary than some human actors in the same film (TOTO) — Doesn't this describe most major dog roles? Surely ASTA and CUJO made more money than "some (!?!?!) human actors" in those films.
- 43D: Going without, in a way (NUDE) — that's not an expression for NUDE. There are lots of slangy expressions for NUDE, and "Going without" is not one of them. You just omitted a word from the clue ("clothes"). YES, YES, I get that you wanted to do a misdirect, and have people think "Going without" meant "being deprived" in some way, but you can't just make stuff up, unless you wanna bring in the "?" to help you out. [Going without?]. I might accept that.
Hope you found things to like. See you tomorrow, or whenever.
Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld
[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]
Save And Share :
112 comments:
Had fun with this one, and made some of the same mistakes as OFL with BEANstalk etc., but worked my way back to the corrections.
Super low word count - nice center. Same experience as Rex wanting “stalk” and “hours” but somehow got those three longs in the middle easy enough. Didn’t like the repetitive - ONE ONE, HA HA HA etc but overall a pleasant solve.
Mossberg’s Stumper was more of a test for me.
LEAH
Toto was her stage name. Terry was her real name.
k well littttterally made basically every single one of the same errors rex describes; i was legitimately delighted at BEANSTALK, particularly as a down answer, so that mistake was a bummer. i also had the go-round with HAIRY--- specifically, being mad at how it isn't particularly leonine whatsoever... and then only getting TAWNY from late-in-the-game crosses (it's a perfectly fine word, i guess i just haven't thought about it or seen it in print or heard it said in like idk, decades? truly?)
i somehow got TOTES ADORBS within like seconds of opening the app, but definitely struggled with PEAK TIMES not being the correct PEAK HOURS right up to the end, pretty much. i don't know... PEAK TIMES just feels, for reasons mostly ungraspable to me at this exact moment, sort of.... too unrelated to the specific context of restaurants, maybe? like, insert literally anything else into that clue instead of "restaurants," and PEAK TIMES works just as fine (like, say, national parks, public swimming pools, movie theaters, farmer's markets, every road and street in every city everywhere....e.g.). PEAK HOURS is superficially not that distinct from PEAK TIMES, but i think my brain prefers HOURS if only because that's the term restaurants tend to use themselves, like, on the hours signs posted in windows/on websites, etc. to be fair, something like "hours of operation" could obviously apply just as fittingly to a host of other contexts as it does to restaurants; even so, the TIMES of it all just ended up sort of ruining that whole NW corner for me.
for that matter, PEAK TIMES essentially just reduplicated the WTF-ery of BEANSTALK actually turning out to be BEAN PLANT. just soooooo unnecessarily anticlimactic!!
and by essentially the same token, i suppose, answers like HAHAHA and YESYES just didn't land for me today. thankfully, though, aside from THE USA and maybe one or two others, this type of fill didn't end up occupying very much grid real estate, and ultimately just didn't seem to warrant a lot of griping, frankly.
oops hahaa end of rant....
very much enjoyed puzzle highlights like POOR YOU, SAVE US, and PARTY BOSS, but i also find it impossible to believe that PARTY BOSS couldn't have been clued in a more dazzly way.
the only other particularly remarkable thing about today's solve was the way in which i required exactly no evidence or prior familiarity with the subject matter to be convinced that a SHADOW MAP was a thing spelunkers and cavers.... create? rely on? just use like any other tool when they're down in the, you know, shadowy depths etc?
turns out shadow maps are a thing, but not ^^that thing, not even close, which i now consider to be a massive shame tbh. like, what a fun cryptic, mysterious thing the spelunkers could've had for all their cave-tivities! (with pastimes involving caves famously being barren of any mystery, and all).
Segmented nature of the grid meant each corner was like a mini-puzzle. NE, SE and SW were all pretty easy. Center and NW were tougher.
Despite the overall chattiness of the puzzle – normally a BIG NONO, I rather liked it. Minimal PPP and most of that familiar (sorry, IRMA and SONJA). I also liked NO NOS right over YES YES.
My first (and likely last) uniclue:
Fractured one’s patella while visiting Yellowstone
IN PARK TORE CAP
Really? A 64-worder created at age16? Clean as a whistle, Saturday tough, and feeling veteran-made? Fresh in clue and answer, with 13 NYT answer debuts?
The SLEIGH has arrived with a huge new gift to Crosslandia, it appears to me. Knowing that Samuel is working on more puzzles rings my chimes.
The cluing is heavy in vagueness, which throws out huge resistance in the beginning, because vague clues have so many answer possibilities. But one or two crosses narrow down each clue’s possibilities greatly, and answers start popping, sometimes in DRIBS and other times in bambambams. I found this puzzle difficult, fair, and fulfilling, just what I hope for on Saturday.
I love that this puzzle is light on pop culture and loaded with everyday phrases and words given riddle-y clues. That is, this is a capital-p Puzzle. I also love the NONO YESYES column 13, and that TOTO touches corners with ARF. And the DOOK lover in me loves TORECAP.
Samuel, where can you go from here? I am so eager to find out. Thank you for an astonishing debut and a tough, satisfying outing. Bravo!
"Impenetrable" was the right description. I simply could not get a toehold anywhere. Once I did, there was no connection between the constructor's mind and mine. Not just no fun, but a dead waste for me.
Both PEAK TIMES and BEAN PLANT seemed rather GREEN PAINTish as I was solving, since PEAK TIMES would be when pretty much anything would be busy and BEAN PLANT just seems so generic. In retrospect, that may have been some of the intentional vagueness that @Lewis referred to (and a bit of a misdirection as well, since BEAN stalk and PEAK hours also fit, which actually sidetracked Rex for a while).
TOTES ADORBS looks like it actually belongs in the NYT - which shows how far the mighty have fallen, lol. Btw, doesn’t India have like two dozen different languages that it recognizes as “official” ? If so, wouldn’t that make it a country without an “official language“ ? Of course, if that is the case then we can quibble about what “Largest country “ means (population, area, other ?). Close enough for CrossWorld.
Can 17-year-old Samuel Smalley be tried as an adult for kicking the snot out of an 80-year-old? It wasn't even a fair fight!
I'm obviously too old. Totes adorbs? Even when I'd filled in everything in I looked at it and thought WTF. My guess is that I will never use that phrase. Not even when my wife gets a new puppy, or my grandchildren start having babies. Spelunkers challenge - couldn't get past water sump because when I caved in SW England in Wookie Hole and Rod's Pot I never made it through one. A narrow gap? You can either get through it or you can't, but some of the dog legs and turns, those were challenges. In retrospect, however the puzzle was a lot better than I felt while I was doing it. Largely fair, but definitely on the challenging side, even for a Saturday.
Woe is me, but this one had answers I simply did not know as a younger person. Bummer to lose my first gold star in months. Alas, that’s the name of the game.
The corners were fairly easy (for a Saturday) but the center was brutal for me. My error was different from those of Rex and early commenters. I had OPEN TAp for what is closed at closing time (plausible), which led me not to BEAN something but pEA something for the pod holder. Obviously also plausible. Near the end, I had pEA-PLANT and was utterly mystified about the missing letter. Pear trees don’t have pods, do they? Finally saw that it was TAB not TAp.
But before I got there, I struggled badly in the center. It took running the alphabet to get the G in GAP, then seeing NARROW, and it finally came together. A bit of a side-eye to the grammar on the clue “bad things to lose track of” for MODEL TRAINS. I love clever cluing but that’s a stretch. “Pop corn” for DAD JOKES is excellent, and the misdirection on “steal” for SWEET DEAL totally fooled me.
So Samuel is 16? He probably rolled his eyes at a corny Dad joke just last night from his own pop. I think this is our second teen constructor of the past week or so. SALUT to you both! Makes me want to at least try to construct one.
I agree that there were lots of scintillating answers all over the place. Near my office, there’s a lunch place that never has more than a couple of people in it. I tried it once, and the guy behind the counter looked at me like, “You actually want us to make you something to eat?” I have wondered if it’s a MOB FRONT.
A toughie for me, just what I hope for on a Saturday. Dropped in my last letter to complete 1A — that almost never happens. Congrats to Samuel on a great construction!
When I was a kid we somehow came into possession of not one but two MODEL TRAIN sets. My mom simplified things by getting rid of the cars from one set and the track from the other. Of course they were two different gauges, which meant I spent a sizable chunk of my childhood staring at those trains and that track, imagining what fun I could have been having. Years of therapy later, all is forgiven, Mom.
Total respect for the puzzle’s elegance and lack of bad fill.
I did have trouble swallowing SLEIGHS, NUDE, HOBO, MODELTRAINS, and NARROWGAPS (so specific for a general clue) - it all crossed fair, so that’s okay, but the clueing seemed off. One or two are fine but they accumulated.
Texturally speaking, LINE A and ONE ONE were in a different dimension from TOTESADORBS and DAD JOKES. I think that’s a good thing?
Very entertaining fight. Take the W.
Never heard of Irma, Clea or Sonja, or so I thought. Had to look up all three. I do recognize Sonja's picture. Same problem as Rex & others with PEAK hours, though I was fortunate that BEANstalk didn't occur to me. SaltY before STAGY. Is STAGY even a word? beer TAB before OPEN TAB.
I am more likely to be irritated by a puzzle on Saturday than any other day. Maybe because I get frustrated more, but I think it is because there tend to be so many clues trying too hard. Bad things to lose track of? The "train" aspect jumps out at you but the clue really just doesn't work. If you "lose track of" the train, that's supposed to mean the train, um, loses track of the track? Also, I never was into model trains but I had Hot Wheels cars as a kid, and sending them crashing off the track was half the fun. So I don't accept the "bad" part of the clue either.
Loved the DAD JOKES clue.
TOTES by itself, ADORBS by itself, and TOTES ADORBS, not to mention "squee," are also inherently irritating words/expressions due to their smarmy cutesiness. But that's my problem. The constructor can't help it if I'm a curmudgeon.
Happy National Sunscreen Day. (I’m not inventing these – look it up.)
What a fantastic puzzle! Challenging, just as a Saturday should be, yet ultimately doable, cleanly and crisply. My first across pass yielded a grand total of four answers, two of them only three letters long and one of them wrong, as it turned out:
21A EARN IT [Achieve one’s due honestly]
26A EKE [Stretch (out)]
36A YET [Still]
40A cornY [Like hams]
This was not the most promising of starts. I began by building on YET in the SE, and realized that the impatient approval was going to be YES-something, [Patronize a restaurant] was going to be EAT-something, and the country with no official language was going to be THE-something. Well, it was a start, and enough to give me LEAH and show me that [Scientists’ discards] was going to be something-WASTE. Also, the more I looked at YES, EAT and THE, the more I realized that their completions were likely to be YES, OUT and USA, which gave me a big boost in that corner. This is the way you build a crossword solution: one incremental step at a time.
After the SE, I moved north to work from EARN IT and did well in the NE corner. *And* I was lucky to get TAWNY off the Y of ALLEY, so I didn’t make some of the goofs that Rex and others have mentioned. The erroneous cornY gave me some trouble down south in that center section, however, because it messed up the ends of several long downs. It also led to my thinking that [French toast] was croUT even though I was pretty sure that was wrong (real word = croûte, which means “crust” more than “toast”). I finally got fatally suspicious of cornY when [Steal] seemed to be ending with DErL and [Spelunker’s challenge] with WnAP. Huh? I trashed cornY, filled in SWEET DEAL and NARROW GAP, and STAGY started to take shape. STAGY, hmm. I’m not sure I’ve ever used the word the way it’s presented here.
I learned the expression GINS UP from crosswords and I can’t seem to get a fix on what it means. I thought it was synonymous with “livens up” or “peps up.” But [Creates by artificial means]?? I wanted something like “synthesizes,” although it was much too long, and I was astonished when the answer turned out to be the definitionally slippery GINS UP.
[SB: Yd 0. My last two words have a couple of very different meanings depending on context. More slipperiness in the English language.]
I took the clue on sleighs as: sleighs can also be a synonym for a sleds, and sleds are toys that carry kids.
I found this one much tougher than usual, possibly because I had the same mistakes as Rex (BEANSTALK, PEAKHOURS) and got gummed up in the center. I was also bothered by SALUT — if there are any native Francophones, please correct me, but I have never heard or seen SALUT used as a toast, always SANTÉ. I’m sure that it’s technically accurate, but it felt like it could have been clued better (even if it was a nice, tricky clue).
Thx, Samuel; lots of crunch in this ONE! 😊
Med (felt tougher, but avg time).
Initially, bubkes in the NW; came back at the finish to mop UP.
Very much enjoyed the battle; liked this ONE a lot! :)
___
On to Steve Mossberg's Sat. Stumper. 🤞
___
Peace 🕊 🇺🇦 ~ Compassion ~ Tolerance ~ Kindness & Freudenfreude to all 🙏
EAT OUT and HAND OUT? I was hesitant to keep both until they were firmly validated. Perhaps HANDOUT (one word) could have been considered as avoiding the dupe, but not with "Distribute" as its clue.
Tough puzzle for me. PEAK hours, BEAN stalk here, too. I thought SmokY might have worked as a ham.
@Anon 8:43, French is my (distant) second language, but I have French cousins. SALUT is a perfectly good French toast. It's a non-specific toast, like "cheers!!" in English. Santé by itself doesn't seem right to me. "A votre santé" would be "to your health" i.e. a toast directed at a specific person.
Gee, Rex, glad you think HERNIAs are “fizzy”. Guessing you haven’t had one.
I'm feeling somewhat original in my "errors that made things way harder" this morning. After chipping away at everything, I returned to the NW, where not much was going on. Couldn't remember IRMA (finally did, yay) and didn't know SONJA. The worst thing was I had PLANT, had filled in PEA, thanks to the "pods" part, and never noticed that that made the answer PEANPLANTS. PEA gave me TAP, so I had BEERTAP and then OPENTAP, which both seemed reasonable. The P from OPEN clearly meant INPORT for "not going anywhere". Also wanted a Biblical THOU until I noticed "preposition". In short, a NW train wreck, which was immensely satisfying to finally untangle.
So kudos to you, SS. Such an accomplishment at your age is Simply Stunning, and thanks for all the fun.
Very challenging for me, very satisfying to finish - aptly with 1 Down: GOODIE, which this puzzle indeed was. So many of the clues were the crossword equivalent of TAMPERPROOF! I had to go down to the bottom left to pry myself into the grid with HA HA HA x HANDOUT; then the T of TO RECAP got me TOTES ADORBS stretching across, enough to let me work through the rest of the puzzle, s-l-o-w-l-y. Great Saturday!
Do-overs: item A, SaltY before STAGY. Help from previous puzzles: DAD JOKES, TOTES ADORBS. No idea: IRMA, SHASTA, SONJA, CLEA.
I made all the same mistakes as Rex in roughly the same order, and it took me a bit to unwind.
Anonymous 8:43 I felt the same way about SALUT vs. santé.
As a gardener, I take this opportunity to point out, however irrelevantly, that beans do not grow on stalks. They grow on vines. I don't know why nobody else ever noticed this, but I have, and it indemnified me from writing in "stalk" until I had eliminated more correct botanical possibilities.
Actually yes I forgot to comment on SALUT. I am native French and, while it is technically correct, SALUT is not used anywhere near as often as SANTÉ or CHING
I didn’t think of SALUT even with SAL— and, again, I’m French and live in France. Some regions further South may favor SALUT but I am bit aware of it.
Hey All !
Proud of myself for sticking with the puz without cheating. Really wanted to hit Check Puzzle, but took a breath, said, "NONO, ROO, you can get this!" and continued chipping away until ending up in the NW, figuring it out and getting the Happy Music! YES YES!
Some missteps, janONE for ONEONE, outdiD-BESTED, SaltY-STAGY, sans-NUDE, meteOUT-HANDOUT, bioWASTE-LABWASTE, LoDES-LADES, grEaTDEAL-SWEETDEAL.
Since I finished up in NW corner, didn't have the troubles some of y'all had with PEAKhours and BEANstalk, as already had the ends, TIMES and PLANT, in.
Since I got the puz cleanly and I EARNed IT, I really liked this one! 😁 No POOR Roo today. Ya gotta take the victories where you can get 'em.
Have two MODEL TRAINS set-ups in my abode, an HO scale and an O scale. Just track without scenery. The scenery aspect is on my to do list. (Yeah, right...) Or should I say on my procrastinating list. 😁 I have a T-shirt that says "I put the "pro" in procrastination". Apropos, that.
Two F's
RooMonster
DarrinV
The reason PEAK HOURS and BEANSTALK felt so right is because they are right; those are the expressions we use. And what the hell is a squee? I kept thinking of Brett Kavanaugh's repugnant nomination testimony, when he repeatedly mentioned PJ and Squee. A lot of these long answers were just so ... unimaginative. Hmmm
Probably the most unpleasant experience I've had with a week of bad puzzles. Obscure terms? Check. "Modern terms"? (totes adorbs). Check. A true Saturday slog, and I made exactly the same mistakes as OFL. Had bio waste for lab waste, etc. I'm really getting annoyed with how cryptic some of the clues are these days; I suppose it's just because I really don't get some of the references, or disagree with the construction of the clue. Let's hope I like next week's offerings more.
Hands up for BEANstalk.
Worked my way around the edges of the grid, getting my first foothold with RACE BIB in the NE, then working back to the NW and down to the SE with some whoosh whoosh, but that stopped pretty quickly in the center and SW. Enjoyed the challenge!
This an area where the internet sows more confusion than provides elucidation, but I am morally sure that the correct spelling is “djinns up”, since a djinn can make something out of nothing, which “djinn up” means. The explanation that it is derived from “ginning” cotton doesn’t make any sense. “Djinn” has, for the most part, disappeared from usage, but back at a time when people still read whole books, like The Arabian Nights, it was used commonly. I am old enough to remember.
Minute 4:
Am I having fun yet?
Am I making progress yet?
No.
Minute 18:
Am I having fun yet?
Am I making progress yet?
A teensy bit. (Progress. Not fun.)
I finally figured out the NW and NW sections on my own. Don't ask me how. The bottom was impossible. I went to the blog, averting my eyes from all answers save the very bottom left. AP TESTS. Never would have gotten that. Made it all the way up to HOBOS.
Back to the blog, averting my eyes from everything but the very bottom right. SHASTA. Never would have gotten that. Almost made it back up to NEWTS and YET, only...
My hams were SaltY, not STAGY. Meaning I couldn't get to SWEET DEAL. And I never figured out "squee-inducing". What's a squee?
One of the most frustrating puzzles I've ever done. It was pretty much pure, pointless suffering that ultimately I just wanted to be over. I came here looking for a large contingent of equally unhappy failed solvers and instead found a healthy representation of the truly pleased and the highly successful. I never fail to marvel at how smart so many people in Rexworld are.
These puzzles need spoiler alert--this puzzle contains under 25 slang.
Lots of wrong answers to fix made this a grind, but I got there eventually.
BEER TAB (Instead of OPEN TAB), JAN ONE (Instead of ONE ONE), HANDFUL (instead of A COUPLE), HAH HAH (Instead of HA HA HA), MOB FENCE (Instead of MOB FRONT), BEAN STALK (Instead of BEAN PLANT), SUPER DEAL (Instead of SWEET DEAL) DREGS (Instead of DRIBS), AAAS (Like the battery - Instead of IONS), ASTA (Instead of TOTO), SALUD (Instead of SALUT)
Constructor Smalley had The Sopranos on the brain with MOB FRONT and POOR YOU, the latter phrase uttered as a recurring lietmotif during the show's run.
I stand corrected re: "Santé!" In my defense, my French has been rusting from disuse since the mid-1970s. Glad to get confirmation though that SALUT is valid (maybe it was more common usage 50 years ago??). I have it on good authority that there is a banquet scene in "Astérix et Cléopâtre" in which the characters toast with SALUT.
Some false starts here...
PEAK HOURS crossing HAIRY(?) ... nope
TOO PRECIOUS ... nope
IN HI-DEF took forever even after getting INHIDE_ and running through the alphabet in my head! Was baffled.
Also LINE A crossing old-timey LADES was the last thing to go in.
HAHAHA, such a cringe fest I read numerous things out loud to my wife (who could not care less). Most hysterical puzzle of the year in so many wrong ways. More to say on this, but I have a crazy day ahead so might not get to a real comment until late. Just wanted to share my dark joy early.
A total loss for me. I had SATURDAYS for busy restaurant time, then PEAKHOURS. I had SALTY for "Like hams" and JOBFRONT fistead of MOBFRONT. I also had JANONE instead of ONEONE (does anyone ever say that?) and had to look up IRMA.
TOTESADORBS? What in the world are totesadorbs? Just too hard for me.
So I mentioned the other day that one of the biggest stalls I run into with open grids like this are the kind of two-word answers where getting one of the words doesn't really get you the other one because it's something kinda generic. Like BEAN/PLANT. Seriously? BEAN/STALK is a thing. Bean PLANT is just redundant. "I planted a bean plant." RACE/BIB likewise. If the context is "marathon" it's just a BIB. That kinda thing. Worst is when they stick an "A" or "THE" onto it, which fortunately there are no examples of here, but it's leaning a bit in that direction. And there are so MANY! OPEN/TAB BEAN/PLANT MOB/FRONT POOR/YOU MODEL/TRAINS BIG/NONOS RACE/BIB--just to cite a few--to the point where it almost feels like a theme.
Shouldn't there be a term for this kind of thing, like NATICK or KEALOA?
Counter example here: TOTES/ADORBS. Either TOTES or ADORBS gets you the other term in the pair. Feels much more like a Yay! than a Meh!.
Mostly enjoyed the puzzle, anyway, but the Meh proportion was a little higher than I like for a really perfect Saturday.
Glad someone else is questioning STAGY!
Being unfamiliar with both “squee” and TOTESADORBS, I had to stare at my completed grid for a while to get the correct parsing of 33A. I was almost convinced that it would induce squee if one were to TOTE SAD ORBS. Like maybe it means walk around with a sorrowful look in your eyes. “Something must be wrong with @egs today. He’s really toting sad orbs.” “Yeah, you can almost feel the squee coming off that dude.”
It used to be that I DINED at PEAKTIMES if I decided to EATOUT. OPENTABs were BIGNONOS.
I tried to think of days that actually are referred to by their numerical month/day combo. Four twenty is the only one that came to mind.
A debut this good ar age 16? WOAH! Congrats and thanks, Samuel Smalley.
TOTES-A-F***ING-ADORBS! That's TOTES BS as far as I'm concerned.
Sadly, still in hospital after feeling queasy from an uncentered DISC the other day. MRI and X-rays show nothing, but I insisted they keep me under observation until they know more.
Didn’t have time to pack Wednesday so threw a few things in my NPR and PBS totes. Spilled some apple juice this morning that the bags immediately dried up. The totally adorable nurse noted, “TOTES ABSORB!”
Today my lower region started acting fizzy (a term these so-called docs had never heard of!) so I insisted they check if I have a HERNIA. They suggested my liver is all GINNED UP. ARF!
MAY be released tomorrow, depending on whether the Sunday xword (or Rex’ reaction) is medically triggering. PRAYERS!
How do you lose a good star before 8am? Walk away from it, have breakfast, come back to it with fresh eyes and ideas.
Rex,
I don't think you made it harder. That can only be said in retrospect. Despite your efforts to be positive, this just isn't a very good puzzle. There's a lot of fill that left me going, 'Really?
Found myself working from the bottom up and had to finish in the NW corner. Tried so hard to make MEAL TIMES and CAN/MAY I GO work.
All in all a nice Saturday puzzle.
Found the northwest far from fizzy. ONEONE is just awful, SONJA crossing with IRMA is borderline naticky. Had RIGSUP instead of GINSUP for way too long, so the whole corner left me flat.
Nancy, too tough for me also. I can usually handle up to twenty mystery clue/entries. Then I have sufficient letters in the grid to correctly guess the mysteries. But this one had 21 mysteries and I whiffed. There were ten entries I didn't know and eleven I was aware of but where the clue didn't narrow down the possibles enough.
When solving, I am always aware that the constructor and the editors can easily make a puzzle I can't do. So failing today doesn't upset me. Instead, I am grateful that they give me one I can do almost every day.
Tough! Lots of erasures but not very many WOEs...SONJA and CLEA were about it. I had OPEN TAp before TAB and it took me a while to fix it. LINE l before A was also a serious hang up. The center was blank except for MODEL TRAINS for quite some time. The bottom third was easier than the rest. Very solid with plenty of resistance, liked it. A fine debut!
I had Saturdays for the restaurant busy times. Changed it to mealTIMES eventually. GINSUP stumped me. Unfamiliar usage. As did the Pop corn? Especially starting with the K of cookie. I guessed it was an unfamiliar brand name. The rest of the puzzle was enjoyable enough.
I liked MODELTRAINS, TAMPERPROOF, INHIDEF. That final F was a big Aha! for me.
Spelunking, was fun to speculate about. I had something ending in map originally, and thought having a map in the first place would be nice, maybe uncommon, but reading it might be a challenge, especially if it was narrow. 😊
Tough puzzle, glad to make it through. The expression TOTESADORBS is vomit inducing. It was hard to gain traction, especially with my SINGLET TOPPED miss in the upper right. Saturday level vague cluing made it a rough solve. Challenging here, and a great mental workout.
@andrew (10:57 AM)
🙏s for a speedy and full recovery!
___
Peace 🕊 🇺🇦 ~ Compassion ~ Tolerance ~ Kindness & Freudenfreude to all 🙏
I found lots of things to like...even love.
OK, just to make @Nancy even more miserable, here's a DAD JOKE just for you:
If you spell the words "absolutely nothing" backward, you get gnihton yletulosba," which ironically means...nothing.
TOTES ADORBS YES! I finally got you. And all of your neighboring GOODIEs. I had struggles, yes I did, but I got you in the end.
GINS UP. How did I know that? Checks....yes, correct. The G gave me that NW section. RACE BIB? Checks...yes correct. Finish up the far right.
Come to halt with the lion. @Rex had hairy and I had maned. PEAK something or other. Of curse, PEAK TIMES are the busiest hours for restaurant. So it starts with a T...TA what. Aha! TAWNY. You saved my bacon Plunk, plunk... SWEET DEAL NARROW GAP..in you go.
And so it went... like a well oiled green Jaguar E-type convertible engine. That was me...
I'm really happy that not only did I enjoy this whole thing, or that I got answer I didn't know correctly, but that I actually finished a Saturday all by myself.
Rex,
You never read The Twany, Scrwany Lion as a kid?
Sad.
@egs, 10:49am: yep. Also preferred to parse it as TOTE SAD ORBS. Was kinda visualizin its "better clue" as somethin to do with the balls on Trump's ever-changin fleet of lawyers, tho.
Nice Jaws of Themelessness & Almost Jaws of Themelessness, in the puzgrid layout.
staff weeject pick, from a sad tote of six: ETS & RAS. Plural abbreve variety meats.
some fave stuff: BIGNONOS. POORYOU. TAMPERPROOF. SWEETDEAL. INHIDEF. DADJOKES clue.
WOAH. har
Thanx for the fun, Mr. Smalley young dude. Good job.
Masked & Anonymo5Us
**gruntz**
Apropos of nothing, I thought I’d throw in this excerpt from Maureen Dowd’s column today in the NYT. A few additions for your word list:
“ My most precious possession from my time at Columbia University is a green Patrón box stuffed with slips of paper on which I scribbled the new words I learned.
Limerence. Peloothered. Clinchpoop. Chthonic. Sillage. Agnation. Akratic. Leptodactylous. Chiasmus. Caesious. Pythoness. Pettifogger. Paronomasia. Dithyramb. Propugnaculum. Adumbrate. Remembrancer. Meridional. Prehensile. Aeternitatis. Scrupulosity. Supererogatory. Anagnorisis. Spatiotemporal. Sialoquent. Alterity. Floccinaucinihilipilification.”
Wunderkind is the only way to describe this constructor….wow
IN HI DEF was anything but in our household. IN HIDing was more like it! I’m almost suffering from the grandDAD JOKE this whipper snapper sprung for his NYTXW debut with its baker’s dozen of debut words. Truly amazing & as @Lewis pointed out a real boon for denizens of Crossworld. First time in ages that I employed both the check and reveal buttons on the iPad when brutally sneering at the screen produced only further consternation. Thanks Samuel for the lesson in humility.
@Unknown 9:49 AM: Hear, hear! Only magic beans grow on stalks.
But, sadly, BEANPLANT was such a boring and green-painty answer that "beanstalk" would still have been preferable.
@Anon 10:21 - You have me quite confused. First, not etymological source I can find has any reference to the Djinn. They cite several possibilities, buy not a Djinn to be found. Further, NGRAMS has no citation before the mid 1820's, well past the Djinn's heydays. Certainly if it entered the language from the Djinn's exploits, there would be documentation of such preceding American Slang. Further, since you likely can't produce documentation to support your contention, you resort to being "morally sure". What exactly is "morally sure"? Are you asserting a pure and honest heart as you're making an unfounded speculation? That really can't be, as the honest thing to do is to label it as an unfounded speculation.
So, what's up?
I know it's Saturday. I know Saturday puzzles are supposed to be tough. And I usually enjoy them. But I think this was (sorry) an ego trip for the constructor.
This is my favorite kind of puzzle: devoid of specific pop culture names, but has answers for the young and the old, and just generally a really tough solve (38 mins) but one that is absolutely solveable if you just keep plugging away at it. Best feeling to get the congrats pop up, without a single error - but you had to work to get there. And then to read here that the constructor is a teenager: absolutely amazing. Well done!
You can say only one about this constructor, He's good enough, he's smart enough, and doggone it, people like him!
Has any human being in the real world ever actually said "TOTES ADORBS"?!
I'm back one more time for another bite of crow. I finally realized how I was supposed to interpret the "lose track of" clue. While it still seems a bit tortured, I can't argue that it isn't valid. Oh well, I can still keep up my curmudgeonly self-righteousness over the smarminess of TOTES ADORBS.
@MetroGnome: unfortunately, yes.
Extremely tough due to “ bean stalk” before “bean plant” and “maned” before “tawny” but a brilliant puzzle that I thoroughly enjoyed.
Am I seriously the only person who thought restaurants are obviously busiest at MEALTIMES?
I also had GREAT DEAL for the "Steal" (I really wanted more EA combos, I guess). Hams were CURED then they were SALTY. Lions were MANED then DOWNY (really?) before TAWNY.
This was a classic Saturday. Quite tough, but steady gradual progress until finally Poof! it was done. Satisfying!
[Spelling Bee: yd 0, my last 2 words were shorties!]
The constructor of this puzzle is only 16 and that is pretty impressive. I found this puzzle more entertaining than some of the other recent NYT puzzles that have been done by either veteran constructors or older individuals.
@Andrew
Good luck! I hope they figure out what's going on real fast.
My guess would be that 1A GINS UP comes from the practice of making "bathtub gin" during prohibition days. It conveys the notion of throwing together inferior ingredients to imitate something of much higher quality.
Is WOAH (or WHOA) one or two syllables? The command to a horse or mule to stop is one short emphatic syllable "Wo!", right? The four letter version never looks right to me.
Not as much of an S fest as yesterday but still there's more than A COUPLE (47A) of POCs (plurals of convenience) in the grid including the uber useful two for one variety, for example when 11D BIG NO NO and 32A MODEL TRAIN both get a much needed letter count, grid filling boost from a shared final S.
TOTES ADORBS is CRAY CRAY ADORBS if you ask me.
@OKANAGANER: no, I also had mealtimes. It’s a much better answer than PEAKTIMES because everything is busier at PEAKTIMES.
Shocked I finished this without a DNF! Struggled mightily. I also hated BEANPLANTS. I had beanstalk and tried to squeeze in beansprouts .Surprized Rex didn’t complain about the A in ACOUPLE. Before I got the last letter, I parsed out INHIDE? And thought it had to be unhide with some mysterious letter at the end. I got to the theater and read reviews all the time and never heard a ham described as STAGY. Why is THEUSA acceptable? Totally agree with whomever it was that complained about the grammar on the clue for MODELTRAINS. I’m sure I’ve seen TOTESADORBS in crosswords before but fortunately I’ve never encountered it in the wild and hope I never do. If a friend of my ever said that I’d have to seriously consider unfriending them. But loved TAMPERPROOF HERNIA SHASTA as clued, and PARTYBOSS. Loved NARROWGAP because I once spelunked and yes, the gap was narrow, I got extremely claustrophobic and immediately crawled out. All in all a mixed bag.
The hobo was always my favorite costume when i was a little kid so it was hard to like this puzzle. That said hobos arent really "traveling"; they "ride the rails" or "pass through town", and set up makeshift hobo camps on their way "somewhere" like the old Rock Candy Mountains. "Travelling" is too tame, conventional and limiting a term for these bygone kings of the road.
DNF big time. I just couldn't let go of CUJO--I men, it was a Saint Bernard (actually a team of them) so it must have drawn a big salary. That blocked virtually everything else in the center, except for PEAK hourS, crunchPROOF, NEWTS, and SaltY. It didn't help because I spent the morning with my daughter, then went out to lunch with my wife, and came to the puzzle at 2:30 PM and 2 glasses of wine in my stomach (or bloodstream, more likely). I finally gave up and came here.
I hear ADORBS a lot, and TOTES a lot; not sure about the combo, but it makes perfect sense, and IMHO is self-descriptive. I've only heard it from people under 50, but some of them will cross that line soon. I think it came out of texting, and is probably obsolescent by now. Still, I didn't get it due to the aforementioned canine thespian.
I made a mistake, too; because I couldn't decide if they were DRIBS or DRaBS, I left it at DR_ _ S. If I'd thought to put in the B I might have guesses ADORBS eventually, and worked it all out from there. POOR me.
I associate NARROW GAP problems with me trying to get out of my car in a crowded garage with angle parking.
Hoping for better luck Monday!
Apparently, a lot of folks here use this expression, given their comments. I never will, because it's SOHEYTHWICK IN THE SMICKS.
33A: Impenetrable clue and answer. Yuck.
When I see a grid with what amounts to five little puzzles, each connected by a. NARROW GAP, I know I’m in for a tussle, and this one gave me some real pushback-especially when during the solve, the incredibly talented Clemson Tigers were hell vent on upsetting my #1 Sooners to force a Softball Super Regional game 3! Well, it took extra innings and much pacing and cheering on my part, but OU broke the record for consecutive wins and is on to the WCWS. Hoping for the three-pete.
Back to the puzzle. I made every mistake already mentioned including not wanting to give up BEANSTALK. Then there was the NE corner that was just tough and I had answers I simply didn’t want to trust! RACE BIB, for example just felt too out there, so it took until I had ALL MONE, EARN IT, ODE and DINED to decide to use the RACE BIB.
The SE was my easy corner and I zoomed right through it . . . and then the middle loomed large and blank. And it’s always the pesky middle of these segmented grids that can cause ruination via the dreaded DNF.
I had the OOF and thought that DRIBS was reasonable and very familiar to me as the phrase “DRIBS and drabs” was a favorite of my Gran’s. I toiled a bit with the downs throughout and got both TAMPER PROOF and MODEL TRAINS (my husband’s passion) but it took almost every criss to finally get TOTES ADORBS because I don’t understand the clue or how it relates to the truncated words. Sire, now I guess it’s all part of modern penchant for shortening words to make them sound cute? Not for me but ok. Still nit certain what “scree” means.
Perseverance paid off once again and in good Saturday fashion, the happy music did nit come easily. I most certainly had to EARN IT! Well done Samuel Smalley.
Perhaps the funniest puzzle I've ever done ... not so much for what is meant to be funny, but the hurricane of not-great thinking surrounding it.
Samuel the constructor reports 58% of the clues were written by the NYTXW editors, and I think by now even they know they shouldn't be writing anything ever. Maybe allow constructors to do their thing and let's push the editors' percentage down to 5% until you can show you're trustworthy with the English language again.
RACE BIB is attire mostly in NUDE Five-Ks. Samuel's reported first idea was immensely better.
ONE ONE said who exactly, informally?
If ALL MINE is a rapacious cry, I apparently have a much grander and far more titillating idea of what constitutes rapaciousness.
I suppose a 17 year old might find OPEN TABS of keen interest at closing time, but somehow I suspect most of those closing a bar down have a more rapacious focus.
SLEIGHS ... as 🦖 notes... seems to indicate a magical man at the north pole needs a fleet of flying transports he presumably changes out midair to keep the same team of reindeer working or the song makes no sense.
LINE A could be worse maybe, but invoking the tax code is going to guarantee you a win at the crossword Oscars.
The three center horizontals are lovely, except nothing is TAMPER PROOF, the vast majority of MODEL TRAINS are in boxes or on shelves with no track in sight, and TOTES ADORBS was automatically going to bring the Rex Parker commentariat to its knees. It's going onto my greatest moments in crossword history file.
Traveling is 20th on the key features of a HOBO list, but who cares when STAGY is sitting nearby waiting for howls of execration. And HERNIA rushing in with it's key trait of making things hard to pick up. HAHAHA.
Anything to do with AP TESTS is always unwelcome in a puzzle, and I had no idea SHASTA was still in business. MOB FRONT isn't a real thing except in the movies and in a certain former president's milieu apparently. RAS are VIPs like worms are popular among the snake crowd.
NARROW GAP is wha??! DRIBS, ug. WOAH, double ug.
Turns out knowing dog salaries from 84 years ago is cluing that makes sense for our editorial team.
DAD JOKES and its clue are top notch. As is POOR YOU.
N-Ks: IRMA, CLEA, LEAH, and SONJA. I should meet more women.
Uniclues:
1 Groan.
2 Those little New Testaments they give you in the university commons.
3 What my reaction will be next time I see this constructor's byline.
4 A reminder where adult men shouldn't be without a dog.
5 5 pm.
6 Hobo.
7 The philosophical underpinning of all adult entertainment.
8 See #7.
9 Result of every other country it seems these days.
1 DAD JOKES EARN IT
2 "SAVE US" HAND OUT (~)
3 GOODIE HAHAHA
4 TO RECAP IN PARK
5 SALUT PEAK TIMES (~)
6 ALLEY PARTY BOSS
7 BIG NONOS YES YES
8 IN HIGH DEF EAT OUT
9 BESTED THE USA
Had exactly the same experience, from hairy beanstalk peak hours to the tamper proof alley salut to the totes adorbs Toto ending. Also enjoyed the dad jokes.
Also disliked the clue for GOING WITHOUT and agree that PEAK TIMES is pretty bad (also had HOURS) first. What wrong with the spelling of WOAH, though? That’s how I would spell it. Is there another way to spell that exclamation?
Oops Typo! Hard *not* to like this puzzle!
Didn’t care for the word list—too many prepositions and weak word combos (IN HI DEF, POOR YOU, IN PARK, SAVE US, NEED ME, YES YES) which are fine here and there, but the sheer number make it hard to get a foot in with so many approximate/subjective options. Meh. Also didn’t care for so many words that nobody says ever (ONE ONE, BEAN PLANT).
The clueing was also really clunky. Losing “track” of MODEL TRAINS? A bit of a grammar stretch, but also what would be bad about that? Just pick up the train again. Now a (freight)TRAIN? That would make more sense. Also, everyone/everything is busiest at PEAK TIMES—more of a synonym/definition than an answer here.
And it what way does TAMPER PROOF mean “impossible to get into?” TAMPER PROOF generally means either more difficult to get into (e.g. to prevent simple or accidental tampering), or designed to let you know if something *has* been tampered with, i.e. whether someone already got into it before you did. Like a foil seal, or a tape closure that leaves words behind if it gets removed and replaced. It doesn’t at all mean to be impenetrable! Imagine if TAMPER PROOF consumer packaging was meant to be impossible to get into…
Clunky puzzle.
Fun fact: HOBOs are called this because they set up camp at the corner of Houston and Bowery streets in Manhattan.
I would go ahead and call this challenging but doable. The vagueness gave many solvers problems, enough so that I’d have to call it a feature of the puzzle. So many answers had plausible other answers that getting a foothold was a real challenge.
Typo... hard NOt to like!
The HOustonBOwery transient won a chuckle from me. Good one.
@Anonymous 6:41
Yes, the correct way, WHOA.
You say Wō, Not Wō-Ah.
I know language changes, but that one sucks.
(Anticipated Sunday’s 29A I see!)
My saddest one I had to let go of was “outliers” for “Scientists’ discards.” All that theoretical astrophysics sent me barking up the wrong tree. We never had LABWASTE in my discipline, LMAO!
Did the BEANSTALK , PEAKHOURS , HAIRY triple and was lost almost forevermore. Add SANTE for the toast and wasted a beautiful
day that I could have spent in our garden. Medium? Really?
Agreed - santé is far more common in my experience. Salut, while technically correct, feels like a bad translation (or at least a very outdated or niche regional use).
No one is going to see this maybe but I like the puzzle. I thought it was very challenging though. Had no clue as to the celebs mentioned except Toto but couldn’t get beyond Cujo for a long time.
I looked up hobo and it has no known origin. Etymologists have guesses only. It was first noticed in California towards the end of the 19th Century. A NYC origin is therefore highly unlikely. People make up etymologies all the time and the one suggested is a good made up one.
Nancy, if it’s any consolation, I hated this puzzle too. Took me forever, and while I managed to fill in all the boxes eventually, I had no confidence at all in some of my answers. Turns out I was correct with WOAH, even though it’s not a word. If the editors are going to allow misspellings, there’s no telling where we’ll end up. But I wasn’t correct with TOTESADORpS crossing DRIpS. The former looked to be miles away from correct, not just one letter off, and the latter seemed close enough for me.
So no, not everyone liked this one. Not even a little.
The last time that the PARTY BOSS (using that expression) was on the front page there was an article about the plight of the HOBOs on page five. (I’m reading “The Great Bridge — The Epic Story of The Building of The Brooklyn Bridge”; Boss Tweed was ‘deposed’ during that time.)
For that matter, back then etiquette was *breached*. Only if one was talking to a baby would it have been a BIG NO NO at that time (and for quite awhile after).
For the 1st two - I like history so like seeing them in the puzzle. But I couldn’t believe that *breached* was wrong … until it just was.
The cable show "This Old House" stole its name from a big hit by Rosemary Clooney in the early 1950s. Great song. Never seen the show.
The French never make a toast saying “Salut”. “Salut” means “hi” and “good-bye.” They DO say “Santé” when toasting, short for “A ta/votre santé.”
Nine eleven is one I can think of.
I felt like I made it harder than it should have been too! I didn’t do exactly what you did, but was looking for answers that were NOT obvious even when they WERE obvious so I took forever. But finally finished it.haha. Anyway, good puzzle.
Glad someone else balked at this! Otherwise a lovely grid
What the hell is totesadorbs?
Apparently it’s slang for “totally adorable”. Personally it falls in the “What kind of stupid word (phrase) is this?!”
Shouldn't the clue have been 'a steal' for sweetdeal? Shouldn't the part of speech match? Just 'steal' implies a verb.
NEED ME THE MODEL
Saw SONJA NUDE ACOUPLE TIMES,
INHIDEF ONE TO absorb,
ALLMINE TO ODE and TO rhyme,
so TAWNY and TOTESADORBS.
--- LEAH SHASTA
Never heard gins up before
TOTES ADORBS is the basis for LOLCAT memetic theory.
Hand up for PEAKhourS, as well as hairY. I had all the corners and sweated over the center for a while. But what remained the longest, and was toughest to dislodge, was SaltY for the ham. STAGY is a stretch you wouldn't want to try on your standard rubber band. Comes whisker-close to unfair.
With the dog's -O ending, I was determined to put CUJO in there, being as I am a devout King fan. But 33a wouldn't take a J. Oh well.
I don't know where you all get the constructor bio, but if this is indeed a teen, he has a very bright future in the biz. Only the presence of EKE prevents this birdie from being an eagle.
Wordle par.
I liked that the clue for DAD JOKES was itself a dad joke. A challenging and fun puzzle, thanks Samuel.
Oh GOODIE. It's official. My worst performance to date on a NYTP.
I'm amazed that I did get about 70% of it. I'm most proud of DADJOKES.
Wow. Must watch out for this constructor.
Diana, Lady-in-Waiting for Crosswords
PS - Hey @Spacey - I had a salty ham too, altho I pretty much thought it was some kind of emoting or some kind of chewing of the scenery.
Lady Di
Hardest puzzle in a long time. Really hard. Hard A.F. But I did it.
No fun here at all. Big no nos, totes adorbs? Dreck...
Post a Comment