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Hawaiian wood used to build the earliest surfboards / WED 5-17-23 / Inits in Congress beginning in 2019 / Unisex fragrance launched in 1994 / Old English for better or worse / Perform spectacularly colloquially
Wednesday, May 17, 2023
Constructor: Parker Higgins
Relative difficulty: Medium
Theme answers:
- MAKES EVEN / TENOR (16A: Brings to a tie / 17A: High low voice)
- CUBAN / ANACONDAS (27A: Grilled ham-and-cheese sandwich / 28A: Amazon swimmers)
- ASPIRES TO / CK ONE (43A: Aims for / 47A: Unisex fragrance launched in 1994)
- SLICK / ETYMOLOGY (55A: Certain ocean pollution / 56A: Old English, for better or worse?)
Otsego Lake is a 4,046-acre (16.37 km2) lake located in Otsego County in the U.S. state of New York. It is the source of the Susquehanna River and largest lake in Otsego County. The Village of Cooperstown is located at the lake's southern end. Glimmerglass State Park is located on the lake's northeastern shore, and includes Hyde Hall, a large mansion constructed in 1817, that overlooks the lake. The Glimmerglass Opera, opened in June 1987, is located on the western shore.
Between 10,000 and 12,000 years ago, glaciers of the Wisconsin glaciation filled the valley. Otsego Lake was formed when an ice tongue from a glacier carved out the Susquehanna River Valley. As the glaciers melted slowly, they filled in the valley they carved out. The lake takes its name from the Iroquois Indians, who inhabited the area around the lake in and before the 17th century. The name Otsego is from a Mohawk or Oneida word meaning "place of the rock", referring to the large boulder near the lake's outlet, today known as Council Rock. (wikipedia)
• • •
The fill felt a little rough to me, but again, I don't trust myself today, so I'm not going to stand on any of the following assertions too strongly. There seemed a lot of short fill, which can kind of gunk up a grid (with stuff like ASTO and AAH and SAO and ONO GDP YAS etc.), and some of the longer fill seemed wasted, but which I mean not as flashy or original or nice as I usually like the long non-thematic stuff to be. IONIA is a very crosswordesey entry, so IONIAN SEA just seems like crosswordese wearing platform shoes. Not better, just ... taller. Not a fan of OPERANDI on its own. A Latin phrase ... part? Pass. MODUS OPERANDI would rule, but OPERANDI on its own just seems sad. I kept waiting for the longer answers to surprise and amuse me, but my favorite answer ended up being just six letters long (KILL IT!). There was just something a little ... anemic about the grid, on the whole. Other observations: a weird lot of plurals, not all of which are great as plurals. This is possibly an observation I could only make at super-slow speed, but UNRESTS got my attention (not a word you usually see in the plural) and then PUMAS and YENS and EDIFICES and AHAS came at me real fast, with AHAS again giving me that feeling of "in the plural, really?" I think I'm just mildly mad at UNRESTS and AHAS, and that's making me *notice* other plurals I wouldn't otherwise pay attention to. I also noticed a lot (Lot) of geography, which is fine, but man it seems very ... niche? LOMA LINDA?! (62A: San Bernardino suburb whose name means "beautiful hill")!? LO(ma)L(inda). I didn't even know San Bernardino *had* "suburbs" and I lived pretty close to there for four years of my life. The name LOMA LINDA is very familiar to me, but couldn't have placed it on a California map if you'd paid me. And OTSEGO! I mean, few answers are as "right up my alley, almost literally" as that one, but still, seems slightly Yikes for non-NYers (and maybe even for some NYCers who never get out of the city). Like IONIAN SEA (more geography), these place names seem like they are here for their vowel-heaviness and not for any intrinsic interest. And yet I can't say they bother me. Seeing "Susquehanna River" in the clue for OTSEGO felt like the puzzle giving me a friendly wink—the Susquehanna runs right through town. I'm less than a mile from said river as I type this. Were you winking at me, Parker Higgins!? Well, whether you were or not, I appreciate that clue, thanks.
Sticking points? CANARD definitely slowed me down (11D: Unfounded rumor). Not a vocab word I was capable of retrieving easily this morning. The RAYS clue is good (18D: Sunshine, so to speak), but again, my brain just couldn't process it quickly / easily / at all, and so that made the CANARD section a tiny bit harder. I had SEED before SUET (61A: Makeup of many birdfeed cakes). I've heard of KEA and LOA but (unless it's a campground) not KOA, so that was interesting (2D: Hawaiian wood used to build the earliest surfboards). I think that's all the things I am able to say at this juncture in the journey of this morning. My best to you and yours and particularly your pets if you have them. If you do have them, please ask them who is a good boy / girl and when they don't answer just smush them and tell them that I say "YOU ARE!" They'll understand. See you tomorrow.
Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld
Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld
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90 comments:
I’d like to stick around and post a comment; however, I have places to go and people to see. So … I gotta split.
Pleasant Wednesday. I liked it better than @Rex would have if he'd been up to his usual speed.
Two overwrites:
MOMMy before MOMMA at 15D
naiL IT before KILL IT at 48D. That delayed getting PAINED at 51A because I think of PAINED as much less severe than "In agony."
EBRO/SER crossing, LOMA LINDA / GDP vs LINNA / GNP, TKTS ... all had me very uncertain or just wrong.
I’ll keep this short
Otsego, Oswego, Owasco, Otisco
Dreadful puzzle on all levels. So much junk filler and forced clues.
SW corner was brutal and should’ve been either heavily edited or outright rejected. GUS/OTSEGO, TKTS/MSS, AHAS/SLICK - didn’t care for the plural of AHA crossing a surprisingly nondescriptly-clued SLICK as a “certain ocean pollution.” The other clues and fill down there weren’t strong enough to withstand the outright bad fill.
Otherwise fairly easy puzzle.
@rex -- Terrific writeup! "Crosswordese wearing platform shoes" -- Hah!
I don’t get really mad at a clue often, but a CUBAN sandwich is NOT a “grilled ham and cheese.” It must have roast pork AND ham, plus cheese, mustard and pickles, and it is so good. A grilled ham and cheese is a grilled ham and cheese, it doesn’t get a special name. Rant over.
The theme was fine for me. I solved it as a themeless, except using LICKETY to get ETYMOLOGY. (I don’t get the clue for that. Help?). Can’t think of many other splits except the California Split movie that Rex used to start his column. I think you’re right, Rex, about the fill (and not just bleary-headed). Lots of short stuff, and UNRESTS is ridiculous. There are lots of countries suffering UNRESTS these days, said no one ever.
I am a geography nerd but I agree there’s a lot of obscure places on the x-word map today. The three Rex mentions plus EBRO. I knew that because I have traveled a lot in Spain but I doubt many solvers have heard of it. I didn’t know OTSEGO and was really trying to make OswEGO work.
Richard Thompson is one of my favorites but I haven’t seen him in years. I assume he is as good as ever, Rex?
@anon 6:24, I'll add Owego, Oneonta, Oneida, Onondaga. It was swell of us to honor the natives by keeping their original names of their places before relegating them to reservations.
This is quite a nice puzzle, and has some really good non-theme material like IONIAN SEA and DIORAMA.
And it made me think of Fleegle, Bingo, Drooper and Snorky for the first time in donkey’s years.
Clue for ETYMOLOGY is both strained and wrong. Etymology is more than just mentioning one of the languages in a word’s history. [@Wanderlust 6:51 - 'better' and 'worse' both came to English via Old English.]
I hung in there with IONIAN SEA and LOMA LINDA, but too much reliance on the EBRO, OTSEBO, CKONE type stuff for my taste - those well versed in geography (and perfume) should have a field day (I dropped in SINE wave with no problem, so things have a way of evening themselves out I suppose).
I hesitated before filling in RSVP - I wish we would get some clarity on the abbreviations v.v. common usage situation. I don’t care one way or the other, but consistency would be a big plus. Perhaps the NYT could exercise some leadership on that one instead of contributing to further murkiness on the issue.
Hello! I didn’t get the Old English clue right away either. Etymology is the study of language and apparently the phrase “for better or worse” comes from Old English.
Any interest in this slog quickly Withered and Died, to quote a Richard Thompson song…
Quick reminder about the cleverness of Parker Higgins. His debut NYT puzzle (today’s is his second), which he made with Ross Trudeau, had theme answers like ADDDDDDDDDD (representing ATTENDEES) and NNNNICSCIENTIST (for FORENSIC SCIENTIST).
Today, you may notice that the comments are shy on theme answer alternatives, and Jeff Chen notes how tight this theme actually is, with very few other answers that can precede the word SPLIT, all of them weaker than today’s.
I adored [Old English, for better or worse?] for ETYMOLOGY. If the rest of the puzzle consisted of the letter E in every box, I still would have loved this puzzle because of that. Okay, I exaggerate, but man, I loved that clue. It’s as intricate as an entire theme, and it works so well!
Fun fact: LOMA LINDA is the only of the Blue Zones – the five areas in the world where people are claimed to live longer than average – in the U.S. What do these five areas have in common? Emphasis on family, no smoking, plant-heavy diet, constant moderate physical activity, social engagement, and eating legumes.
Fun to see in the grid: Anagrams TOPS and STOP.
Much spark and shine in this one, Parker, a sweet start to the day. Thank you, sir!
Never heard Yas Queen before. Madonna made it vogue in the 90s in the NYC ballroon scene. I was working and missed it all.
The etymology FOR those 2 words includes Old English
@Wanderlust—re: Richard Thompson: Peak concert-going experience. Just him and his guitar (and a woman who sang with him on half the songs). That guitar! Legendary. And his voice is still great. Seemingly unaffected by age. I felt lucky just to be there. ~RP
As @BaronPremiere said, SER/EBRO was yikes territory. That R is not inferable. Just... pull that little section and ponder a rewrite. I know EBRO is currently crossing the themer and the revealer, but... yikes.
Well my good old cat started the day with a dilemma. He met me on the top of the stairs and the bedroom door was open slightly, so now he had to choose--get into the bedroom and tuck in (usually not allowed), or go down the stairs with me to get the treats for the morning? He opted for the treats, and is now ensconced next to me in my recliner.
Taking off with a side-by-side SIM and KOA did not look promising, but CKONE turned out to be the only other WTF in this one. Thought we were going to get more numbers after SEVEN and TEN but the theme was revealed at BAN ANA. Some forced plurals and I'm not crazy about INCEPT. Grew up in NYS so OTSEGO was familiar.
Liked the Spanish--LOMALINDA leads to lots of crosses. And OK class, what's the longest river in Spain? The EBRO? Good. Now conjugate SER.
Nice enough Wednesday, PH. If a puzzle can't have an OTTER, I'm Perfectly Happy with a TENOR, and thanks for all the fun.
Bonus themer:
Bon AMI/CABLE TV
And if you allow the word has to follow 'split and not precede it (which as far as I can tell the theme would allow):
HatHA/IRS agent
PleaSE/CONDiment
Big aPE/ASsemble
LiONESS/IDES of March
Deer TICK/ETcetera
Saw Thompson here a couple of years ago. Sat just a few yards away. Best motorcycle song ever.
You had me at Richard Thompson!!! Love him so much. Seen him a few times when I lived out East, once Wilco opened for him and lots of people LEFT after Wilco. I was like “Oh my god, you are here already, just STAY” but people, you know?
Anyhoo, decent puzzle, not much to say, 11 is extremely late for me too.
I get up at 4.
Not a fan of today's Wednesday. Theme was okay but never going to get excited by a 'Stock Split' - especially when it uses CKONE which I had never heard of (on googling I understand it to be Calvin Klein One which feels even weaker).
A lot of geography which I normally enjoy but some of it was very niche for an international audience and required every cross (LOMALINDA and OTSEGO) with the latter being particularly challenged when crossed by weak fill like DIS and Naticks like Gus.
Thought the clue for TKTS was poor as there was no suggestion of abbreviation, as was the clue for URN which I wouldn't associate with umbrella-holding. In general a lot of poor fill (relying on CCS, MSS and AAH?)
Enjoyed ETYMOLOGY and, unlike Rex, thought UNRESTS was fine and OPERANDI was good. Discovered an alternative name for All Saints' Day and had never realised the Ionian Sea stretched all the way over to Sicily.
Speaking of “NYCers who never get out of the city”…in NYC (and other parts of the Northeast?), we say “do a split,” not “do the splits.”
Great to hear! I’ll look for him in DC.
Agreed on the point about a CUBAN. I got hung up thinking of a Croque Monsieur which would fit the description and trying to work out if the theme used letters from CRetin before I worked out the actual theme.
I thought the theme was well done, and would have helped if I’d remembered it in the bottom half. This felt tough for a Wednesday, especially below the revealer. I’ve been working through the archives and this reminded me of a late-week puzzle from the time that CK ONE was all the rage, with the difficulty coming mostly from obscurity rather than cleverness. SER/EBRO isn’t a Natick but it’s at least a suburb and that cross was the last letter in. A little-known name like OTSEGO was in a pretty critical spot for the southwest corner, which remained half-filled for quite a while. Finally EDIFICES revealed itself, and that opened things up.
The clue for ETYMOLOGY was my favorite thing about the puzzle.
Got everything except the SER/EBRO cross. Good theme, which only came to me after I gave up on the idea that all the theme clues pertained to gymnastic exercises. I also took a while to get OPERANDI, because I was thinking in English, not in Latin.
I've never seen YEN(s) used as a verb before. Is it really possible to YEN something (or someone)?
TKTS is the name of the business, not an abbreviation. (I had to look it up after the solve, as that was another relative obscurity).
Grilled ham and cheese is grilled ham and cheese, not a CUBAN.
Does The Splits doesn't sound like a "thing" to me. I didn't try out for cheerleader because I couldn't do a Split (also I'm too crabby to cheer). But I've had a Banana Split and wished for a Stock Split. I guess you could work The in there but not very often.
Also Backflips went in early because it fit.
Did like Etymology and its clue because I knew it. Didn't like the Otsego, Incept, or EID I didn't know them. Hoof clue was a great misdirect from the game. Dragged Edifices out of the dusty attic of my brain and enjoyed it.
Agree on the Cuban issue.
Thx, Parker; nice workout! 😊
Med+
Had a tough time finding my groove. So many unknowns.
OswEGO before OTSEGO.
Nevertheless, a fine puz, and worthy challenge! :)
Enjoyed the battle! :)
___
@pablo: very easy KAC Mon. New Yorker yd; on a par with a med NYT Sat. Redeemed my Croce gaff. lol
___
Peace 🕊 🇺🇦 ~ Compassion ~ Tolerance ~ Kindness & Freudenfreude to all 🙏
Yay! LICK ETY split 😀
Nice Wednesday puzzle ! Always interesting to see how easy it is to turn a noun into a verb in the English . YENS is a good example. My favorite is FedEx.
Just for the record --
All Saints Day is November 1.
All SOULS Day is November 2.
Nice theme, although the grid definitely creaks in spots from the strain. Everyone seems to have covered most of what I was going to say, so I'll mention just a few random things...
A quirk: The grid contains SAO and a "split" SA/O, STOP and S/TOP, OAR and O/AR, and ONO and two O/NOs. It also has ANACONDAS and A/SP.
I grew up about 50 miles from LOMALINDA right next to a street called...LOMALINDA.
As Areawoman and others have noted, upstate NY has a preponderance of towns and bodies of water with Native American names. My favorite is Owego. Two of my college buddies decided to be knuckleheads and steal windsurfers from the boathouse at Cayuga Lake and drive them to Long Island. They got as far as Owego, where they were pulled over and arrested. So that town is forever known to all my friends as "Owego to jail."
Hey All !
Pretty neat puz. Grid gymnastics.
Got quite a few cheater squares, 8 total. The three-L shape in NW/SE corner are all Cheaters. If you don't know or remember, Cheater Squares are Blockers that make filling the grid easier, but do not change the word count. In other words, if you took away the three-L corner Blockers, you'd end up with the same amount of words as there are now. Just an observation.
Liked the Theme. STOCK SPLIT to my ears seems the weakest, but then I don't play around with STOCKs, so I just don't hear it often enough to register as common. My bad.
Just got up about an hour and a half ago, and still want to go to BED and take a SIESTA!
One F
RooMonster
DarrinV
For me, this is a cute and clever idea that's completely wasted because it doesn't lift a finger to make the solver part of the process. You fill in the puzzle and only after you've filled it in do you find out what all the those gray squares were about.
But this could have been turned into a crunchy and curiosity-provoking puzzle that involved the solver every step of the way. Bracket 16A and 17A's clues together and put "(at the bowling alley") after them. Next pair: "(at the ice cream parlor)". Third pair: (on Wall Street)" and last pair "(as fast as you can)". Would that have made me curious? You bet it would have!
The best puzzles, I believe, are the ones that spark curiosity on the part of the solver. The ones that draw us in and invite us to participate. I wish all constructors would try to do that.
I had SUREtY and tOMALINDA, also had no clue on the SER/EBRO cross. Tried running the alphabet but the other typo killed that. Quite frustrating.
YENS, OAR, INCEPT ... what a great set of verbs - Not! And unnecessary in two of the three cases.
Hey, SER could have been clued as "To be on the shores of the 24-D." Actually, I thought more people were familiar with Spanish these days, but SER seems to be getting more complaints than 'etre' usually does.
CK ONE was pretty bad, but I can't think of anything else if you want to put in a STOCK split.
Thanks to @kitshef and others for explaining the clue for ETYMOLOGY. I saw the answer, but couldn't figure out.
TKTS is great; half-price tix for shows the same day, as long as you don't mind standing in line. There's one in London, too. I think they adopted the name because they could register it as a trademark, and lots of other places had put up signs for a "half-price tickets."
It may be spelled LOMA LINDA, but it's pronounced Loma Linder!
@bocamp-The Croce was a put it down and walk away and come back and finally finish it. Tough stuff but a satisfying completion.
DOESTHESPLITS???? who has ever said that? Agreed, that is NOT a Cuban sandwich . NYCer here - TKTS is the lifeblood of my theatrical passion. Even waiting on the long line, chatting with out-of-towners is fun. Had OswEGO for far too long. Never heard of OTSEGO. that was baffling. I know Yorba LINDA - the Nixon library is there - but LOMA LINDA? Not so much. EBRO/SER bit the big one. Real clunky Wednesday. I normally like Wednesdays, they start to get a little more challenging but not too tough as Thursday rebuses can be. CKONE? I guess that is a Calvin Klein fragrance, but it escaped me.
Top half was smooth, bottom half had some rough crossings. EBRO/SER. OTSEGO/GUS. INCEPT/EID. As I'm looking at those, I'm imagining a non-crossworder thinking this is a dumb activity. They're barely words.
Nothing sizzly here. The theme is a yawner. Yas queen is dreadful as is the clue for etymology.
Warning: It's Wednesday. You know what that means. It's almost Thursday. Gah.
Uniclues:
1 Brazilian immigrants shaped like the country's famed product.
2 Mall shopper aiming for odiferous goal.
3 From "smooth" in Old Norse.
4 La-Z-Boys.
1 CUBAN ANACONDAS
2 ASPIRES TO CK-ONE
3 SLICK ETYMOLOGY
4 SIESTA EDIFICES
Nice array of SPLITS! And a fun moment for me when they were finally revealed: SEVEN-TEN and BANANA said nothing to me, and across the center the incorrect letters from OswEGO and INCEnT kept me from seeing the crucial phrase for many a long moment. Once I had DOES THE SPLITS, though, I was able to use the theme to get the CK for the scent and, at the end, to have a delightful "Don't tell me it's going to be LICK-ETY!" moment. And it was - and a good thing, too, because I hadn't understood the clue for ETYMOLOGY.
@JD 8:30 - Reporting from "THE SPLITS" territory: I was astonished to learn from your comment that there's such a thing as "a split." It certainly makes more sense logically, given that there's one pair of legs involved, but I've never encountered it before.. Another example of "comment enlightenment" :)
@pabloinnh (9:56 AM)
Well done! Way to 'tough' it out. That's what I 'shoulda, coulda' for that tiny little bit in the SE. 🤔
___
Peace 🕊 🇺🇦 ~ Compassion ~ Tolerance ~ Kindness & Freudenfreude to all 🙏
A Cuban sandwich is not the same as a ham-and-cheese sandwich, of course. But it often has ham and cheese in it. These are crossword clues, not necessarily definitions. Cf. Joaquin's Dictum.
Egregious CUBAN clue. Awful editing if that’s allowed through, even worse if that’s what Eds suggested.
Those of you who have SKIS may remember two-time Olympic gold medalist, Ted Ligety. He was still near the top of his game when he was injured in 2021. Many expected him to come back, but instead, Ligety SPLIT.
I’m that I owe Louis CKONE hundred dollars. I question this and have demanded an AUDITOR else.
Does a Frenchman calling a hog yell “SUET”? Asking for une amie.
Pretty fun Wednesday. Liked the theme. Thanks, Parker Higgins.
I didn’t mind the theme (though it felt more like a Monday or Tuesday theme to me) but the fill was fairly painful for me. Awkward s endings? Check (Unrests? Incept?) (a plethora of short fill? Check. Unlikely parts of speech? Check. (Oar? And I’m still fussing over Surely. Obscure geographical terms? Check. (Though Loma Linda was at least gettable if you had some knowledge of Spanish. ). I had to look up Otsego to finish, though I’m also operating on little sleep.
A Cuban sandwich has pulled pork. The clue describes a Croque Monsieur.
The only good thing I have to say about this is Lake Otsego brought me back to a beautiful summer day when my wife and I were courting and went to a pub on the lake and sipped Zima (don't judge me, I was young and foolish). It also reminds me of when Binghamton banned plastic garbage bags, everyone went out and bought disposers, and the sewage treatment was dumping more effluent into the Susquehanna than had been planned. Good times.
There is also a city of Otsego in the Minneapolis exurbs, so even though I’d never heard of the lake, as a MN resident I had heard the word and felt OK about filling in the blanks once I had enough crosses. Nice when things work out that way
Beautiful Skaneateles! My family lives there. We visit often.
Wednesday cute as expected Parker! Those CUBAN ANACONDAS were a bit scary, but we were able to put them in their place.
Always nice to see Richard Thompson pop up. Had never heard of him before attending the NOLA Jazz Fest and Bayou Country Tour that his (then?) wife Nancy Covey organized. A great experience for celebrating a retirement in 2002. Rex is a lucky dog to get a live performance even if it necessitated sleep deprived kitty herding!
Nice clue jberg but the way it is worded I should think ESTAR would be better.
Agreed, DOES THE SPLITS is incredibly awkward wording. I have never heard anyone say it like this
Easy-medium. No real problems with this one except I always have spelling issues with ASTIN and OTESGO was a WOE. Nice iteration of a familiar theme, liked it.
I got what was happening at BAN ANA and thought I would enjoy the rest, but LICK ETY was the only other one that lived up to my expectations. Too many weird plurals and trivial pursuits. Crashed twice. Once at the EID / INCEPT cross and once at the LOMA LINDA / YAS cross, neither of which seemed fair.
Now I’m off to Lake Otsego to oar away the unrests I feel due to my unfulfilled yens and lack of ahas while solving.
fave splitter: LICKETY.
Had to kinda get desperate, to score a STOCK split themer.
fave stuff: CANARD. OPERANDI. DIORAMA. INCEPT [Like the "Inception" schlock flick]. TRON. SIESTA clue. HYMN & HURL matchin bath towels.
no-knows: OTSEGO. CKONE. EID. SER. KOA.
staff weeject pick: EID. Part of an AENEID split?
Nice NW & SE weeject stacks, btw.
Thanx, Mr. Higg Ins dude. Good, but EID kinda like it better without that there STO CK ONE. How about a TIME TO split? (har)
Masked & Anonymo6Us
**gruntz**
@Wanderlust 6:51. I read the clue....I felt blasphemied....CUBAN SANDWICH?????? Ay dios mio....Where's the pork???? where's everything else you glop on the most delicious thing coming from Miami Cubans. Pero Che...que tonteria.....
Rant over:...Puzzle continuation.
OTSEGO...Yikes. Damn, I lived in NYC; I travel throughout the state and I had to pull all my muscles to remember you. Then EID Al-Fitr? What language is that? How do you pronounce Fitr? INCEPT is sci-fi slang? CKONE is a fragrance? I wouldn't want to try it...And so it went.
I guess the best part is that I actually finished this. It had some enjoyables: CANARD ETYMOLOGY and LOMA LINDA. They could be one of @JD's law firms. But other than that, I failed to dance the fandango tango. You know what I did dance? That CUBAN CRETIN.
I wanted "nail it" for so long (too long) that I couldn't enjoy this one.
Great reference to Withered and Died - quintessential Richard Thompson “feel good song.” With this and Rex’s earlier praise for Squeeze, reassuring to know he’s got time to listen to music worth listening to. Who’s a good kitty?!
Don't forget Oneonta, Onondaga, Oneida...
Richard (Thompson) is king (despite what Charles would have us believe). ‘52 Black Vincent is one of his live shows’ all time classics.
Dr. A:
Maybe Richard Thompson is fated to be the choice of the select few. Just reassuring to know he’s on Rex’s “Best of” list. Thompson AND Squeeze, who just announced their US tour this fall!
Thank you, thank you, THANK YOU, Fearless Leader, for that Richard Thompson clip. My, the old guy has still Got It, hasn't he? One of the many things I love about that song is the reference to Box Hill, which is, IMO, the only thing worth seeing in South London. You Jane Austen fans will remember the picnic there, in Emma.
I think it is a delightful puzzle. At first I thought the shaded squares would all be about numbers, like 7 and 10. No, it's about SPLITS, and the seven-ten SPLIT is every bowler's nightmare. Virtually impossible to hit both those pins in one roll. I liked LICKETY SPLIT, though it caused many a giggle when I was a young teenage boy.
The only thing I had to look up (after the successful solve) was CKONE. Hadn't the foggiest idea what that was (the CK stands for the ubiquitous Calvin Klein, who (I just learned) is turned of 80.
Rex said to his cats "you know if I die on these stairs, you won't get fed, you know that, right?" I had a roommate once, a very smart guy, who always argued with his cats. The funny thing is, they never argued back but somehow they always won.
There were two nasty crossings: EBRO with CUBAN and CKONE with CAROL. At least CAROL wasn't clued as an unknown name!... but "wassailing" didn't help.
I always have to stop and think: CANARD vs PETARD... one of them is a bomb.
[Spelling Bee: yd 0, my last word (for the umpteenth time) this 7er. QB streak 8 days!]
Hands up for EBRO/SER crossing being a WOE. I've seen every present tense conjugation of SER, but never SER, so that was new. Why isn't the largest river in Spain as well-known as large rivers in other countries? Thames, Loire, Rhone, Rhine, Danube are all iconic, but so many haven't heard of EBRO.
@Nancy, I see your Uniclue Brain idea there. I will say that I got the K from STOCK from having caught onto the other themers, so I was at least involved on that one.
Something about "unfounded rumor" seemed off for CANARD, but I went to look it up, and the first definition that popped up was exactly "unfounded rumor or story". It seems like it is used to complain about something false that has been deliberately planted, rather than an idle rumor. The examples given seem to support that.
I never remember how to spell piranha, so extra Rs or Hs made that fit for ANACONDAS.
@okanager - Just remember you can't be "hoisted by your own CANARD (duck)", although that is a fun mental image. Petard did send me googling when it last appeared here.
Boy ... some people get REAL serious about their sandwiches!
In agony was a terrible clue for "paid (51a). ?What kind of "slick"? Is yen a verb????
A few annoyances as I did the puzzle.
But reading through the "splits" afterward left me with a big smile at "lickety" split.
Rex/Michael/Pseudonymous and I are apparently worlds apart politically but I will give they/them credit:
With their references to Squeeze/Elvis Costello/Steely Dan and many more, they have exquisite musical taste!
Interesting. Gus Grissom was a famous astronaut, whose first name frequently has appeared in crosswords. Is it another indication of my age that the name is unknown to younger people?
But I think it is still a valid answer for Wednesday. Also surely, surely is not hard plus the s for the plural gets _us.
So that answers the question. Gus is now obscure for younger people. As I said above, I thought it appeared frequently in the Times puzzle and he was a famous astronaut.
I still would argue this GUS is not a natick. Just crosswordese you need to know.
@Nancy 9:32
Actually, the theme helped me late in the puzzle as I knew an answer had to be BANANA b/c of the "split" . . . .
I liked the theme, but - the rare puzzle I didn't enjoy because . .. .
SER/EBRO crossing . . . .
PUMA is not a mountain lion per se, but the Texas/Central American name for PANTHER, COUGAR, MOUNTAIN LION, etc.
And I never hear of a CUBAN, rather, a CUBANO (which I think has pork in it).
Del McCrouy version infinitely better!
The CUBAN sandwich dustup, "Is it ham or is it pork?", reminds me of a classic Homer Simpson line about how amazing it is that all those different meats, ham, pork, bacon and sausage, come from just one animal.
I think the more in the language phrase, likely to actually be said by someone, would be DO THE SPLITS, perhaps in "Can you DO THE SPLITS? Going to the plural of convenience (POC) version DOES THE SPLITS does net a grid fill boost of two squares but it doesn't quite sound as natural to me. Maybe just me.
*POC is a crossword term, not a grammatical one. It's adding an S, an ES (as here) or changing a Y and adding IES to a word or phrase primarily to boost its letter-count or to make the grid easier to fill or both.
The Iberian peninsula gets its name from the Ebro river.
Well, it’s Wednesday and we have a theme, but I wasn’t very excited or did I have any AHAS, and no real funny moments. What I did find was a couple of sticky wickets. ETYMOLOGY was the first because my brain wasn’t interested in working diligently enough to parse the clue. The other spot was up at the CUBAN-EBRO cross. I so wanted the sandwich to be a CUBAN, but my CUBAN Spanish prof at Illinois State where I was taking classes during my senior year in high school (long before early entry started to be a thing, so no college credit for me) insisted that a true CUBAN must have roast pork and cured ham. He went so far as to have his amazing wife (also a professor but also a fabulous cook) make the class a picnic that included, among other things authentic CUBANs. So, no pork in the clue or no word to give me the impression that the clue word choice did not mean that there couldn’t be pork on the sandwich, I suppose I just overthought the clue for a while.
That’s it. Wednesday done and dusted. Looking forward to Thursday.
RE: Yesterday. For some reason my post didn’t. And long after I thought I had pushed the”publish” button, I realized that my comment talked about the puzzle being an excellent Wednesday offering. Sheesh. There’s a whole story there, but it’s not important. I did like yesterday a lot because my family played that game frequently. One of my dad’s favorite expressions when he was especially pleased with the din er offerings was “This pot roast (or whatever) is so tasty, it has me totally gruntled.” Fun and entertaining yesterday whether it was in fact Wednesday or not.
i had a cuban for lunch yesterday and it had ham not pulled pork. i also kayak in lake otsego, although goodyear lake, just south, is a much more peaceful lake
Is it my imagination, or does the clue refer to a singular(performs “a” gymnastics move), and the answer is a plural(splits)? Unless I’m missing something, this is a major goof.
BED UNREST
DIS ain’t what I ASPIRE TO,
OAR DOES CAROL STOP for fun?
Take STOCK of what I’ll SURELY do:
TOE TO TOE and ONE ON ONE.
--- SIR GUS ASTIN
I won't split hairs - this was a fine Tuesday.
And hey @Anon2:05, for some reason I could never figure out it has always been called "the splits." English rears its crazy head again.
Diana, Lady-in-Waiting for Crosswords
Alright except for the Naticks at EBRO-SER and OTSEGO-GUS. The puzzle should not have gone to print with those Naticks IMO.
DNF. MAKES EVEN?? What is that? NOBODY says "Makes even." Breaks, okay. Pulls, draws, fine. But not makes. Nor did I know 1 or 2 down. Nor does "Clod" mean CRETIN. Nor do I know what a CUBAN sandwich is. Or the river in Spain that stays mainly on the plain. When you say "European river," my eyes glaze over. That whole section was a HUH??
Wordle birdie.
TIL that there also is an Otsego, Michigan, and an Otsego, Minnesota.
Way to go
Otsego!!!
@Theologian 9:16am:
17 years of Catholic education that started in the Latin mass era has been very useful in crossword puzzles. It can even help with other romance language answers, when you remember the Latin roots.
I can't believe all the carping about does the splits. That's all I ever heard my entire life, and growing up, I lived next door to 3 girls, who all became cheerleaders. They all did THE splits, but I doubt that they could do THE splits now.
Maybe it's regional?
I gotta split. It's a quaint old fashioned way to say goodbye
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