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Suffix with schnozz / TUE 5-9-23 / 1904 Nobelist who wrote Conditioned Reflexes / Independent divisions in corporate jargon / Apt name for a curator / Yes we can sloganeer of 2008 / Disney film set in imperial China / Mai singer with the 2018 hit Boo'd Up / Label for a post-makeover photo
Tuesday, May 9, 2023
Constructor: Margaret Seikel
Relative difficulty: Medium
Theme answers:
- "TWO, PLEASE" (4D: ✌️, when ordering)
- PEACE SIGN (20A: ✌️, at an antiwar protest)
- BUNNY EARS (10D: ✌️, in a silly group photo)
- V FOR VICTORY (52A: ✌️, from Winston Churchill)
Because it changes O’Hare to o hate,o hate, o hate — over and over, no matterhow many times I retype it. O hate, likean American tune, an American fablewhere, yo, you can enter an o hatebathroom, take a selfie in the mirrorcuz your sister wants to see the pocketsof your Great American Rhinestone Jeans.Because, on a street called Viewpoint,I get home becomes I get guns, off a roadon a mission to kill every squirrel-ishpedestrian. Because he was packing,concealed, threatening to use it, usehis hands or feet. My feet, iambof a son of a birch, of a brick chattingwith the devil, with God, with a listenernot listening. Because he’d gone bonnets,his garden bounty a faded wine, his wife’slinguine a longing for a golden ear,so I took her to the botanical gardensin my getaway car, to a fruit on a vine,but the limes went lemur, the night to nonfat,the clear to catastrophic. Because driving awayfrom the frog man croaking hypocrite,heavenly went down like a melting hedge,a gal gone hog-tied, a fish crying, a tiger-tiger togetherness, flight or fucked,a heart, stroked, racing to its vicariouscarousel, a fungus lashed to a beam gonebeleaguered. Because he will kill her,that’s his plan: to kill us all. Can’t commitor commute, can’t debone his breath,can’t take his acute paranoia, chalk it upto cute. Because this here’s a Josiemadhouse, a bedroom bedrock-locked.Because Blvd morphed to Bled, spiritsummoned with a Ouija board. Becausesoap holder went love hen, though lovehad flown the Calycanthuslike the grilled portobellos messingwith his vowels. Please please, I pleadedto the pleading day. Because prayeris like a bread line, a penny for yourexploded mind. Because lots of logs
• • •
Challenging for me, at first, since my software doesn't handle emojis, so my clue for "TWO, PLEASE" was just [, when ordering] and I sat there thinking "what in the world could a comma stand for when ordering?" But I quickly realized "oh, they're doing the emoji thing again" and I could pretty much infer from the TWO in "TWO, PLEASE" what emoji we were dealing with, and then PEACE SIGN came shortly thereafter and confirmed my suspicions. At that point, I could pretty much go ahead and fill in all the theme answers without hesitation. Well, at that point (very early) there were only two more to get, and I actually had trouble parsing V FOR VICTORY. I knew Churchill's "V" had to do with victory but I was looking for a slogan, like, I dunno, VICTORY OVER JAPAN or something like that. No matter, crosses took care of my confusion pretty easily. Are the black squares in the center of the grid supposed to be a visual approximation of the emoji? There's a vague "V"-like thing going on there, but it's more "Y" than "V" ... kinda slingshot-like. I hope it's not part of the concept and that I'm just seeing things, because if that's supposed to be a "V," yeesh. I'm kinda tepid on this whole concept. I guess the emoji is supposed to make it "fresh" but it's just a fairly easy, straightforward set of what that emoji can represent. Kinda ho-hum, thematically. The grid has an unusual look, with its mirror symmetry, and the theme answers appear in interesting places, so even if I don't buy the black-square "V," I do like the overall design. And the fill is much livelier than usual for a Tuesday. This wasn't really my jam, but it seems a well-made Tuesday puzzle nonetheless.
Speaking of things I don't buy: I don't buy the PLEASE part of "TWO, PLEASE." There is zero nada nothing about the emoji in question that indicates PLEASE. TWO, sure, PLEASE, come on, please, you fudged that in order to get the layout to work. I mean, it's an intricate layout, with overlapping themers, so it's a harmless fudge, but fudge it is, nonetheless. I also don't buy that YOGA is "quiet," LOL, have you ever been to a YOGA class? A zen retreat is quiet, YOGA sometimes features Om-ing and sometimes grunting and sometimes you are instructed to use that ujjayi breath, which is (per one YOGA DVD I own) "like Darth Vader," i.e. quite audible, so to this YOGA clue I say, quiet shmiet. (Also, UJJAYI ... put that in your wordlist and TOKE it). I also balked at BIG SPOON (8D: Implement for eating soup but probably not for stirring coffee), like "... huh, what SPOON is this? ... SOUP doesn't fit so ... BIG SPOON? BIG SPOON? Unless you are two humans spooning, there is no BIG SPOON, boo." But otherwise the fill was acceptable and even bouncy at times. Have you heard of PAVLOV's POPTART? Pretty famous experiment. Toaster goes down, salivating begins (He tried it with NACHOS but too messy). The whole west section is just roiling with multi-word fill, with I TOLD YA and OK BY ME sandwiching IT'S A GO, TOO BAD and OK BY ME. Very colloquial and sassy. I like it. The other side of the grid seems TAME(ST) by comparison.
That's all, see you tomorrow.
Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld
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78 comments:
As I often do with early week puzzles, I solved without reading the clues for the long answers. That made it an easyish themeless with a cute twist at the end when I finally read the clues.
Re: 4D - TWO PLEASE, unless you are in a bar in ancient Rome. Then it's "Five Please".
Fastest Tuesday ever and almost as fast as my fastest Monday.
I hate the way they constantly attempt to shame poor SHREK with that OGRE moniker (and FIONA is a PRINCESS btw). That was a gratuitous and unwarranted cheap shot.
SOBA and TOKE are, appropriately, sharing the same section - as YAKI SOBA is always a good safety valve to turn to after a late night TOKE or twenty.
Two please isn’t that big a stretch, it’s never spoken but in a crowded noisy restaurant if the host makes eye contact I would hold two fingers, let’s assume I’m polite.
Fastest Tuesday ever, faster yesterday
Welp, this is very much not a reflection of my skill but my wheelhouse, but that was the easiest Tuesday I’ve ever done, reflected in my time, by a very wide margin. In fact, like @DavidP, I came close to beating my fastest ever Monday time. (I know some folks don’t time themselves, I like to because it gives me a metric, both approaches are fine!) I whooshed through from top to bottom right from the start.
I groaned when I first saw the emoji (despite quite happily using them every day); I just want oh, I don’t know, actual *words* in my crosswords. When I saw the theme was a play on all of the ostensible meanings of the hand gesture rather than the emoji itself, I cut it a bit more slack, but as Rex said, it’s still a pretty simple and straightforward theme. I look forward to reading what @Nancy has to say about it later.
Agree with Rex about BIG SPOON — that’s just a SOUP SPOON. I actually found 4D’s TWO PLEASE to be accurate, though. Both parts of the phrase are inferred, and in my experience sometimes said/mouthed simultaneously with the hand gesture.
The OBI/OBIE cross was cute, and in general there was a zippy quality to the fill. Some really nice shorter words that are less common - ABYSS, POSIES, CLOVES. Some good less conventional cluing for words like STOOD, ERROR, PASTE. And I found all the colloquialisms charming. Basically, a good puzzle, maybe too easy for a Tuesday, that I simply couldn’t love because of the emoji theme.
Fortunately, ‘taste’ and ‘caste’ seemed unlikely for computer commands. I never know what network anything is or was on. It’s just one of those skills that has eluded me. See also ‘recognizing car logos’ and ‘knowing dog breeds’.
That west central section with ITS A GO, TOO BAD, I TOLD YA, GAME ON and OK BY ME is terrible. Five colloquial equivalency clues in an entire puzzle is two too many; five in a tiny section (six if you throw in the TWO PLEASE THEMER) is an abomination. This puzzle has a lot of good stuff in it, but at the end I was left primarily with the foul aftertaste of that section. Not even an ALTOID could get rid of it.
In my day, the two-finger sign behind someone in a group photo were donkey's ears, meaning that he was a cuckold. I guess the mock-insult has been Disney-ed down.
Thanks for the Sharon Van Etten link. Love her!
I think you meant the west side of the puzzle, Rex. In the fourth to last sentence?
Finished it by trial-and-error at the MULAN/ALT cross. Almost forgot that a boilermaker is a drink, so BEER looked wrong at first.
Good puzzle, a bit harder than most Tuesdays for me, but I caught onto VFORVICTORY as Churchill's emoji (even though Churchill probably never heard the word "emoji" in his life).
Common-hand-signal theme – ever done before? I don’t think so. Much credit to Margaret for coming up with this. And tight? I think so. After I failed to come up with another meaning for this signal, I figured there would be a TROVE from commenters, but no. Clever tight theme = “Brava!”
Also very impressive is having two theme answers cross the beginning and end of a third, PEACE SIGN. Not to mention that approximation of the hand signal in the middle of the grid.
There’s an unusually high double-O count (six), so I’m not surprised that when I saw PAVLOV, “drool” popped into my head. I also liked the anagram row, with MAR and ARM.
But the theme, which had me visualizing images of Churchill, me-as-hippie in the past, photo session jokesters, and restaurant scenes, was my favorite part of the outing today. This was a lovely lovely creation, Margaret. Thank you!
I also had commas instead of the emoji so that was confusing at first. BTW, Rex, I have a silverware drawer with little spoons and BIG SPOONs and that’s what I call them.
Ok, We say big spoon all the time. LOL.
I'm so utterly charmed by BUNNY EARS that I'm willing to overlook whatever shortcomings the puzzle might have (I agree with @kitshef about the center-left trio of columns, and it's not easy to overlook the BIG SPOON). I thought the theme was delightful, with its using a sort of sign "language" in the clues and with the chosen sign having four such different meanings. And I totally accept the grid art in the center as a bonus version of the sign. I'd wondered if @Rex was going to balk at PLEASE - New Yorker! Just kidding, but this Midwesterner could never do without it.
@Margaret Seikel, thank you. This was a real Tuesday treat for me.
So let's assume we'll have some disgruntlement over the emojis. One rages and storms over these things, doesn't one. We fight the important battles.
Everybody Loves Raymond has an entire episode on a big spoon and fork decoration on his mother's kitchen wall. It's funny.
Calling OMEGA the opposite of ALPHA is like calling Chevy the opposite of Ford. It's unwise.
Shrek and Fiona are killin' this week. Maybe the print advertisement and the TOOB AD helped. They live on AVA ST. where it crosses TAME ST.
Uniclues:
1 Aphid rugby.
2 What lads hope to extract from lasses.
3 One drooling at the scent of pancakes.
4 People like me.
5 Flip off flop.
1 GAME ON POSIES
2 NO DRAMA AYES (~)
3 LOG CABIN PAVLOV
4 POP TART ILKS (~)
5 BUNNY EARS ERROR
It's not shaming him unless you think it's shameful to be an ogre!
👋👋 for BIG SPOONs, I think because technically they aren't soup spoons, which have a round bowl rather than an oval one (have those, too).
@Rex, thx so much for including the poem!
Pretty whooshy as puzzles go. The online (not app) version had✌️.
This got a non-exaggerated LOL.
A bad day for dinosaurs. I tried to print the puzzle from the New York Tomes puzzle site and the numbers were cutoff the left side. I copied them onto the printout but of course the little yellow emoji things printed blank. it didn't matter they were just two finger gestures. For me this get a one finger salute. As for auto-correct I think chatGPT could write a better puzzle
I have spoons of several sizes. The mid size is good for soup. The big ones for serving side dishes.
In my day, vsign in a picture meant you were the devil .
I've studied yoga for years...it's a lot quieter than any go, go, go class. And starts and ends in quiet contemplation. Rex needs a new class...
Calling Verdi’s AIDA a “musical” is like referring to Beethoven’s Ninth as “some tunes”
@Lewis - a few other symbol uses: The logo for the TV show "The Voice", the letter "V" in American Sign Language, and Valvoline motor oil ads. There's another one from the seventies rolling around in my brain but I can't come up with the product. Normally, this means I'll wake up at 2am with the answer. I think it involved someone giving the peace sign and saying 'groovy'.
@Lewis, the only other possible meaning I can think of is more of a slant on the peace sign meaning, used as a kind of “See ya!”, aka “Peace out!”
This was pleasant and quick, but I really wanted more meanings for the raised index and middle finger. [Chant: More themers, more themers!] Four is quite a few meanings for one gesture, but still. The use of the emoji in the clues didn’t bother me – for starters, I could see it, which gave me a huge advantage over Rex – and, being a visually-oriented person, I don’t mind the odd pictogram in my crossword. (Are emojis pictograms? They do stand in for words. @Anoa Bob?)
Uh-oh, a word to the wise: it looks like there’s a major pitfall waiting to trip you up with this particular gesture:
The two fingers held aloft in a V are fine provided your palm is facing out, but in some countries—namely, Australia, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom—it's an insult of the first order if you make the same gesture but with your palm facing inward. In other words, you don't order two beers in an English pub by holding up two fingers with your palm facing you unless you want to get in a bit of a brawl. (From the tripsavvy website)
As far as the grid art is concerned, I saw a jolly soul with an Amish beard – or maybe an Amish goatee. Perhaps a tie-in to Abe L. and his LOG CABIN.
I don’t have much to say about the fill. I tend to like the chatty, vernacular stuff like OK BY ME and GAME ON. I didn’t mind BIG SPOON, as I think it's what we called soup SPOONs when I was a kid. Or maybe it was wooden stirring SPOONs. In any case, I have a mental video of my mother calling something a BIG SPOON. AIDA’s a musical?? Right, and The Sound of Music is grand opera – OK, I’m a snob, but I don’t think those terms are interchangeable.
Puttering around the web last night, I found another Ode to Autocorrect, this one by Aliya Smyth.
Ode to Autocorrect:
A poem
I hope the guy who invented AutoCorrect burns in hello!
When words fail me, you spring to action
Defecting typos with sneeze and accuracy.
You know me better hank I know myself.
Why speak of books, when boobs are more enticing?
You protect me from doomed friendships with those
Who might be named other than Susan or Winston.
Society would crumble without your ass toot observations
And face-shaving changes right as I press ‘send.’
Never could I prose your superiority too greatly
For without you words foil me, fall me,
Duck me.
Without you, sweat autocorrect, I am noting.
UNICLUES:
1. What you say in exasperation to your husband as soon as you’re out of earshot of Great Aunt Matilda, whose dry, petrified muffins he’s just insulted.
2. Pit for discarded grammas.
3. Accepting the challenge not to sneeze when confronted by a huge bouquet of asters.
4. What you commit if you fail to eat the aural appendages of your chocolate Easter rabbit first.
5. Hindu spiritual and physical practice concentrating not just on respiration, but on minty-fresh breath.
1. “I TOLD YA: PLAY-ACT!”
2. ABYSS NAN TROVE
3. “GAME ON, POSIES!”
4. BUNNY EARS ERROR
5. ALT ALTOID YOGA
[Spelling Bee: The week: 0,-4,-1,0,-2,-2,-1. Yesterday I missed this, possibly because of its proper noun overtones, although it appears to lose its capital letter in this form. And just so you know, I noticed two casualties last week – words that have been dropped from SB acceptance: hieing and peccant.]
Nice that the ALTOID is right next to the garlic CLOVE. And I see that FOOT and BEER are in the SW corner. Is a foot of beer one-third of a yard of ale?
Re: yesterday's puzzle: There is a shop in Nazareth PA with the name Cheeses of Nazareth. (Boo Boo Bear's late comment last night reminded me of this.)
Why does a smudge mean a "V"?
In my newspaper that's what I see.
An indistinct smudge
And I mutter "Oh, fudge!"
Since it's all such a myst'ry to me.
The two fingers sign -- that I got.
The fact that it's blurred, I do not.
Is it clearer perhaps
To the folks using apps?
In the paper it's only a blot.
A blot or a smudge or a blur,
Whichever the word you prefer.
But I found it quite weird
When the blurring appeared --
I wonder how many concur?
I think of Rex as a smart person most of the time...but not when he falls to the ground and pounds his fists on the floor crying "Waaa, my software can't handle the puzzle I blog about every day, boo hoo."
Not smart.
Hey All !
I grew up in a little spoon, BIG SPOON household. What else would you call them? Regular Spoons, SOUP Spoons?
Grid looks like a smiling face with its tongue hanging out, making (good) fun of us. 😜
Another theme level?
Thought Rex was going to lose his SOUP in that West-Middle area with all those multi-word entries. But again, he surprises me with actually liking it! He's a complicated man...
All of those multi-word entries are quotes, ala spoken, in case that means anything.
Another possible clue for ✌️ - Live Long and Prosper sign for someone who can't get their fingers to properly do it?
I know, oof. 😁
Uniclue:
Uninterested lion?
NO DRAMA ROAR
ALOHA.
Two F's
RooMonster
DarrinV
Thought it was my lucky day when the ctrl + v thing was the first clue and it was a computer thing I actually knew. Then the emojis showed up, and on my printed version they were undecipherable, so I solved online, but I had to get an answer that described the emoji before I could see the two finger thing. That made it wicked easy.
I am a certified ALTOID addict and I order them by the 12-pack on Amazon. I say they improve my singing voice but I think it's just what I do. Nothing like an ALTOID after a cup of coffee. Also a good idea to have them next to "garlic segments" if you care about your breath's effect on others.
Very easy Tuesday. SOO was the only real unknown, and I had a BOOT print before a FOOT print, easy fix.
Fun and fast Tuesdecito, MS. A little More Spine would have been appreciated, and my screens are and always have been emoji-free, but thanks for a fair amount of fun.
Hmph, isn’t ILK already plural? And OBIE crossing OBI, clued off of OBI? C’mon. That’s too much OBI.
Faster than* yesterday
(That never happens to me)
@Barbara S. 9:04 AM
Five for five today. Loved 'em. And, loved the poem too. That's the one I'd read before and marveled at it's last line. The one 🦖 posted was new to me and more aggressive. For autocorrect haters, it can be turned off. My typos are mine.
@Nancy 9:06 AM
we all stared in horror
at the emoji uproarer
but Nancy
we fancied
would lead the abhorers
"'tis but a smudge," surmised she
weeeeeeee
@prob_rick (8:39) - For future reference, when the puzzle prints like today's with the numbers cut off, all you need to do is download the puzzle to your desktop and print it from there.
@Joaquin 6:10 AM
Quinque placere. ✌️ 🙏
Good heavens -- I feel that I am quite alone in a rudderless sea.* Am I the only person on this entire blog who got smudges and not emojis? The only one???
*An unintended malapropism of mine from many moons ago.
We had a Bunn coffee maker at work. Now that I’m retired, I look back on those times as the BUNNYEARS.
YOGA teacher’s guide to watching baseball: Do not silently experience a home run, NOR ERROR ROAR.
You know what they said about NODRAMA OBAMA. He was an ALTOID, but a soprano ego.
I’ve found, in Googling around, that BIG SPOON Is also used to denote the person whose front side is touching the other person’s back while spooning, so Rex had that one right. But if you’re the little spoon, don’t get too comfortable, as the BIG SPOON may try to fork you.
I enjoyed this puzzle, but now that I know that the NYTXW can, and will, print clues with emojis, I’ve got to get back to work on my previously abandoned Poop Emoji themed puzzle.
Nancy! Brilliant verse! We've got a nice piece of cake for you over here.
I print up the puzzle from the NYT website. The two-finger emoji was quite clear.
FYI Black Ink handles emoji fine. The peace sign symbols appear as expected when you download the puzzle with the built-in downloader functionality.
Thx, Margaret; you're a winner! ✌🏽
Med.
Pretty smooth solve, with the exception of the central West Coast, which was a bit tricky to parse.
Learned that a POSy is not a flower, per se. 💐
Very enjoyable journey! :)
___
Crocers: Easy-med, except for the NW, which took forever; so, overall: med.
___
On to Gorski's Mon. New Yorker. 🤞
___
Peace 🕊 🇺🇦 ~ Compassion ~ Tolerance ~ Kindness & Freudenfreude to all 🙏
Not exactly a smudge for me, @Nancy, but very faint and very small. I had to stare at it closely for some time; and then I didn't get that it was an emoji, just two fingers held aloft (let's assume with the palm facing out). That was all I needed, though. BTW, to address Rex's "yeesh" I think the central black squares are an approximate representation of the whole sign, with the two fingers attached to the rest of the hand below.
At 26-A, "Make believe," I wrote in PLAY and then thought "Wait! It could be PrAY for!" That would have been a good answer, but not for my ILKS.
In addition to OBI/OBIE, I liked the TROVE of CLOVES.
I'm trying to remember whether senators actually say AYE, of if maybe it's Yea. I know the whole process is sometimes called "the yeas and nays," but it's been nearly 60 years since I had a summer job there, and I'm drawing a blank.
Anyway, count me among those who enjoy seeing colloquial expressions in the grid, provided they get them just right -- as this puzzle did.
Is the NYT morphing into a crossemoji puzzle?
Cute theme. But where I grew up, two fingers behind someone’s head in a photo was always meant to be a pair of horns.
@Liveprof from yesterday, try to avoid Sanskrit and Mycenaean Greek bars to minimize the risk of fluency. I know it will be hard, but it’s only until Monday.
@Nancy, you may be the only one with a smudge, but you got a great poem out of it.
AIDA is also a very popular Broadway musical.
Easy and faster than yesterday’s for me too. ELLA (as clued) was a WOE and udon before SOBA was it for erasures.
Cute idea, smooth grid, fun solve, liked it. Jeff gave it POW.
@Nancy, I agree with you about the image in the paper. I solved the puzzle using the app, but we also get the daily paper, so after reading your comment, I went to check out the version there. Even knowing what the image was, I couldn't make sense of the pale gray blotch I was seeing - it was too small and too faint.
Well I got the little emojis and even in a pretty shade of yellow but it sure messed up my printing process and left me with the annoying “newspaper version” with the left margin cut off. So I had to write in the numbers of the clues with a pen and try to figure out what they said without the first couple of letters. Thankfully the puzzle was so easy that didn’t turn out to be much of a challenge.
I thought the grid art was supposed to be the two finger SIGN but Jeff Chen called it a smiley face. It sort of looks like that too but I didn’t understand what a 🙂 had to do with the theme.
Agree with @Southside Johnny that Princess Fiona is no OGRE and my cat who is her namesake would also sharply disagree.
Good theme idea but the NYT should probably put some effort into working out the glitches of the emoji publication before it’s tried again….
It's true, it's true! I seem to be the only person on two blogs who got a puzzle with emojis so completely blurred and indistinct that I didn't even know they were emojis, much less what they were emojis of.
But I've figured out why. You've all heard me gripe over many, many months -- perhaps even years -- about how much I hate emojis: how ugly they are; how mindless and inane they are; how I wish everyone would stop strewing them all over the screen like the tiny little cockroaches they are.
Well, the emojis heard me too. And today was their day of getting even.
"You don't like us? Well, we sure don't like you, either, Nancy! You're gonna really need us today and, boy, are we not gonna be there for you! Just try to do the puzzle without us." [Extremely mean emoji face; I'm sure there must be at least one].
Well, I have news for you, mean-faced emojis. I finished the puzzle completely without your help. So there! Nyah, Nyah!
Smudge for me
100% agree!!! Couldn't believe it was worded that way!
@Nancy: My first thought was “Nancy is going to eviscerate this.” Congratulations on not only showing such remarkable restraint but coming up with an absolute masterpiece of a poem to boot. I’d put a hand-clapping emoji here but well … you know.
@Barbara S: I like your ODE much better.
@Joaquin (9:35) Thanks for the puzz printing tip.
Autocorrect is my worst enema.
Pretty good puztheme. Only gripe was that the printed emoji hands were small and rendered in light yellowish colors, so kinda hard to make out.
Impressive that 3 of the themers cross each other, courtesy maybe partly becuz of the primo E/W puzgrid symmetry.
staff weeject pick: OBI. Crossin and cross-reffin with OBIE.
At our house, we got runt spoons, regular spoons, middle spoons, big spoons. M&A totally believes this, as he washes the dishes and puts em away. If U try to eat soup with *our* BIGSPOONs, yer gonna need to blot off yer shirt with paper towels, after U are finished.
some fave stuff: NODRAMA OBAMA. PLAYACT. LOGCABIN. OKBYME. FOOT clue.
Thanx for the fun, Ms. Seikel darlin. Good job. Was relieved that the near-unreadable hands were usin *two* fingers, tho. [i.e. Not just that there middle spoon.]
Masked & Anonymo1U
**gruntz**
So I print my puzzle out. I stare at it and I see what looks like Alfred E Neuman. Then I get to my first blurred out theme. It looks like a dollar sign has been covered up. I stare some more at Alfred. I get to BUNNY EARS and I'm thinking "What Me Worry.". Did OBAMA say that? Was it Winston Churchill? Why can't I figure this out? Where's the reveal? Yikes....talk about living in some dark ABYSS with my FOOT in my mouth.
Thank you @Rex for clearing up my muddled mind. EMOJI...so that's what the is. It's not a dollar sign. Boo.
So now I change my mind. Yay. A two finger emoji that can be used for all kinds of stuff. Aha!...so that's what you hold up behind someone's head in a photo booth. BUNN YEARS!
The fill was easy and went by swiftly. Too bad I had no idea what the theme was. I'm still convinced there's a picture there of someone who holds up a V Sign.
I wish they wouldn't use emojis in their cluing (as Prob-rick & Nancy said) for those of us who prefer to do the puzzle on paper & (OMG!!) still get it delivered (I guess that makes me another dinosaur).
In a pinch, a BIG SPOON can be use to ladle out some GREEN PAINT.
Don't know if it's a regional thing or not but down here in TexMex Land when two motorcycle riders pass each other going in opposite directions, we will often give a Vee sign salute. This will be done with the left arm and hand hanging down so the Vee is almost inverted. Not sure exactly what the translation would be but I don't think it's BUNNY EARS.
PAVLOV got his Nobel Prize in Physiology for his study of digestion. He was observing the salivation response of dogs by putting various foods and other objects in their mouths but after a few trials the dogs would start to salivate before anything was put into their mouths. PAVLOV was unable to prevent this so he decided to study how that could happen. Thus was born PAVLOVian Conditioning, sometimes called Classical conditioning.
This process is often represented by a ringing bell becoming conditioned to produce salivation. He did try a bell at first but said the sound would upset the dogs too much so he switched to the much milder sound of a ticking metronome.
Once again we see that a modest amount of theme material leaves enough room for lots of nice fill. A good balance between theme and fill is always OK BY ME.
JM -- I'll try, but I'm only human!
It is you who is wrong. This puzzle was a blast.
There were emojis? I solve on paper, the paper emojis were smudged, so as far as I knew, the theme was "things indicated by the V-sign." I was, and am, flummoxed by the BIG SPOON. We have two ladles, and one of them is just a BIG SPOON, which I use for portioning out everything, but no one would eat soup with it. Our ordinary flatware includes an oval SPOON, used when we have soup, but it is not exactly BIG. Our fancy silver does include a round soup SPOON, but it also is not BIG, except in comparison to the teaSPOONs. Certainly never used for stirring.
I grew up with LOG CABIN syrup, and have an unpleasant memory of the time when the ants got to it when it was left on the table. My first (and only) wife is a Vermonter by birth, and as a result we have real maple syrup always on hand, shipped by some local producer. Mainly used these days when grandchildren come to visit.
I have a very fond memory of attending an OBAMA rally in San Francisco, back when he first ran for President. There was plenty of DRAMA, that's for sure, and we drove home with our hearts full of that "Yes, we can!" slogan. Gotta say, I miss him.
@ those who complained about AIDA being called musical I would totally agree EXCEPT Elton John and TIm Rice produced a musical AIDA. I remember this just as I started to rebel when the answer became apparent.
(Actually I remembered there was fairly recently the musical - had to Google it to see who produced it)
p.s.
@GILL I. - I didn't quite get an Alfred E. Neuman vibe, but that's a kinda cool take on the puzgrid art.
M&A was more seein that Disney dog Pluto, right after he had started to explode. [Which of course about had to be DeSantis's fault.]
M&Also
Even though I don't generally care for emojis I liked this emoji thing. Mainly because it was something different, and they displayed correctly in Across Lite. Jeff Chen's Puzzle of the Week!
SOBA vs UDON is always a Kealoa for me, even though they don't share any letters.
[Spelling Bee: yd 0, last word this 6er.]
The black spaces look more like a Hawaiian Shaka or possibly a Texas “hook ‘em horns” sign.
I guess they are trying to get away from the Maleska era preponderance of opera clues. AIDA (also known as Elton John & Tim Rice's Aida) is a musical with music by Elton John, lyrics by Tim Rice, and book by Linda Woolverton, Robert Falls, and David Henry Hwang, and produced by Walt Disney Theatrical.
There’s a famous musical based on the opera
Thanks to @JC66, @Sharon and @burtonkd for info about AIDA, The Musical! I admitted above to being a snob -- and an ill-informed one, apparently.
@Gary Jugert (8:23 and 9:26)
Thanks -- I was worried that I was out of practice. Loved your aphid rugby. I never thought of interpreting the word sequence that way.
@Nancy (9:06)
Excellent versifying! It stimulated this:
The emojis appeared in the app
A small feather in Shortz's cap
But he still must repair
Entry into one square
Of multiple letters -- still crap.
I thought of it as rabbit ears…
@Masked...1:57. I thought (for a nano seconds) about Pluto but his ears flop. These ears stick out and perk out...Like OBAMA's?
@Nancy and Barbars S. Clap, clap, clap, clap etc etc. You two make quite a pair!...Great comments today!
Love the poems. Auto correct converted me from Savta to Santa— quite appropriately
I do the puzzle in the actual paper with a pen, but had the same experience as Rex with the emoji. The tiny symbol did not print particularly well, and until I got a couple of the clues, it just look like a grayish square with a vague diagonal line in it, I actually thought a grease spot from my food had dropped onto the paper (there actually were a few of those nearby) until I saw they were several of them.
Thank you, Nancy. When I read these comments, I feel like I’m the only one that does the puzzle in an actual newspaper.
Got Soo right away only because I just saw Camelot last week and she was in it. And I saw in the playbill that she had done Hamilton.
Me too!
I couldn’t hardly tell what the emojis were until I got out a magnifying glass. The theme is alright but a bit thin. No reveal. It just needs something more. I don’t get why Jeff Chen gave this one the POW award. It’s got too much stuff like thiis: SOO, ALT DST PBS etc. plus you have the crossing of OBI and OBIE which should never have gotten the OKBYME from Mr. Shortz.
VFORVICTORY (2008)
ITOLDYA NODRAMA,
GAMEON FOR OBAMA. (TWOPLEASE)
--- REP. ELLA BROWN
Total smudge job in my paper. I shied away from those clues and looked for ironclad gimmes, finding one way down south. Knowing AVAST, I saw a problem: 46d had to end with V. Checked the clue--and there it was: PAVLOV. With that foundation it wasn't much of a job to uncover VFORVICTORY, and the inference was clear as to what the smudge was.
The rest of it was Tuesday-easy, except for the middle west, 23 & 25d offering resistance, and I didn't know any of the crosses. I very nearly DNF'd over there, till I tried ITSAGO. 25d was nasty in that the O__Y part really wanted to be OKAY, but no. I finally saw it had to be OKBYME, and so done. Whew!
So how to describe? Challenging-->easy-->challenging again. Say, medium-challenging? Interesting design, some feisty fill...OKBYME. Birdie.
Wordle bogey. Two-way guess for a par: *trombones*
OK puz
Wordle par, two way guess for birdie was wrong
Seattle Times website just has a ? in place of the emoji. But I caught on quickly enough.
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