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1994 film about a portal through the cosmos / TUE 7-11-23 / One attempting to outsmart a bridge troll, in a classic fairy tale / Tiny Bubbles crooner / Central bank branches informally / Sitcom character from the planet Melmac
Tuesday, July 11, 2023
Constructor: Aaron M. Rosenberg
Relative difficulty: Challenging (**for a Tuesday**)
Theme answers:
- STRAPPED FOR TIME (17A: "Got any news magazines?" "Sorry, we're ...")
- OUT OF SHAPE (23A: "Got any fitness magazines?" "Sadly, we're ...")
- LACKING / VARIETY (36A: With 40-Across, "Got any showbiz magazines?" "Regrettably, we're ...")
- MISSING OUT (53A: "Got any L.G.B.T.Q. magazines?" "Unfortunately, we're ...")
- SHORT A FEW PEOPLE (60A: "Got any celebrity magazines?" "Alas, we're ...")
Yeun Sang-yeop (Korean: 연상엽; born December 21, 1983), known professionally as Steven Yeun(/jʌn/), is an American actor. Yeun initially rose to prominence for playing Glenn Rhee in the television series The Walking Dead (2010–2016). He earned critical acclaim for starring in the thriller Burning (2018) and drama Minari (2020). The latter earned him a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actor, becoming the first Asian American actor to do so. Time magazine named him one of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2021.Yeun has also appeared in the films Okja (2017), Sorry to Bother You (2018), The Humans (2021) and Nope (2022), and starred in the dark comedy series Beef (2023). He has also voiced main characters in television series such as Voltron: Legendary Defender (2016–2018), Tales of Arcadia (2016–2021), Stretch Armstrong and the Flex Fighters (2017–2018), Final Space (2018–2021), Tuca & Bertie (2019–2022), and Invincible (2021–present). (wikipedia)
• • •
LACKING / VARIETY is lacking snap. It's the limpest of the set. The best, by far, are OUT OF SHAPE and MISSING OUT, but this brings me to the theme's final and perhaps most distracting problem—the repetition of OUT. OUT Magazine is a core theme element, so (for elegance's sake) there should be no other OUTs in the grid, let alone in the themer set. So that was unfortunate. But not nearly as unfortunate as it gets later on, with the subsequent piling on of OUTs. As if repeating OUT once wasn't bad enough, you've also got OUTLAW and OUTWIT (the latter of which has its "OUT" crossing the "OUT" in MISSING OUT!?). A total OUT-storm. How many times can you dupe a word before the flaw becomes FATAL?
Something about the theme concept made it play slow for me, for a Tuesday. You've got wacky clues and imagined phrases and you have to find your way to magazine titles ... this is not a complaint, I like the concept, but if you wanna know why the relative difficulty rating is "Challenging" (for a Tuesday), now you know. There were other things too. The ERAS clue inexplicably baffled me (6A: Ballpark figures, for short). I wrote in ETAS and then had no idea how the Soviet symbol could be TED-something (7D: Soviet symbol). RED STAR forced the change to ERAS but I still did not get it. I was reading the word as ... a word. And "ballpark" as metaphorical. But even after imagining a baseball park, I had a moment of "what?" I was thinking of "figures" as people, like UMPS. But it's just the pitching stat, Earned Run Average, pluralized. That is the last way I'd clue ERAS (leaning into the abbr. instead of the ordinary word), which may be why I just didn't see something that, in retrospect, is fairly obvious. Further issues for me included misspelling YEUN as YUEN, writing in JUMP TO before LEAP TO (50D: Arrive at quickly, as conclusions), having no idea at all about "ALL OK" (?) (49A: Completely fine), and expecting the "outburst" at 38D: Outburst that may be entirely symbolic? to be something more than a single WORD (I had the "CUSS" part and then ... shrug). The grid overall is pretty solid and polished, with only ALL OK seeming strange as a standalone answer, and none of the short fill really bothering me at all. I guess the short fill was ... ALL OK. Maybe ALL OK is ALL OK too. The theme execution just didn't quite work for me today, and the OUTs, man, yeesh. It's like Hitchcock's The Birds* up in here, but with "Outs." Total mayhem. See you tomorrow.
Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld
Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld
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90 comments:
Cool beans. What a great idea. I loved that the themers are strong in-the-language phrases, except, well, SHORT A FEW PEOPLE feels less established. You can also be short a few dollars, pencils, chairs, brain cells . . My whole take on the themers was limited to simply their in-the-languageness. I didn’t take time to think about semantics the way Rex did. And I’ll go on and have a perfectly normal day.
Does anyone say WEED whacker anymore? In my world, it’s “WEED eater.” When I lived on the farm, I told our farm manager that since I was off for the summer, I might as well learn how to weed-eat. He looked at me for a moment and said quietly, You don’t want any part of that. Apparently it’s back-breaking work. And hot. And you get covered in a spray of weed particles.
Loved the clue for YELL. Once I texted a colleague who I knew was at a concert. I typed in all caps SO THAT HE COULD HEAR ME OVER THE MUSIC. I just thought this was just the funniest thing, but he never acknowledged my cleverness. Sigh. I get no respect.
Also, the clues for BLTS and WITCH were outstanding.
Thanksgiving is too hectic to bother opening the oven every few minutes to BASTE the damn turkey. I’m consumed with setting the table, mashing the potatoes, making the carrot soufflé (a Thanksgiving staple for us), rooting through cabinets for serving dishes. . . Turns out you don’t have to BASTE the turkey. You’re welcome.
I wasted a ton of time investigating the word “quadfecta.” Like, why not tetrafecta? Are there pentafectas out there? Quinfectas? Do we have a heptafecta of continents? An icosafecta of fingers and toes? It kept showing me betting stuff and then some medical jargon, so I lost interest.
46A – I’ll remind everyone that AT has become a full-on verb. See below from Merriam Webster:
at transitive verb, informal
: to respond to, challenge, or disparage the claim or opinion of (someone) —usually used in the phrase don't @ me.
It goes without saying that Lucille Ball's comedic timing is unmatched—don't @ me, you'll be wrong. —Matt Brennan
I'll cut right to the chase: Men should be able to wear makeup, don't at me. —Carine Green
What’s really cool is that we have a typographical symbol that has been promoted to verbship. If you’re thinking about @ing me your disgust, remember I DINT cause this - just reporting the facts people.
A branch of the US central bank is called a “Federal Reserve Bank” [e.g. of Dallas]. The term “Fed” is used loosely to apply to the entire system, never a branch.
Love these comments!
Welcome back! I missed you!
I say weed whacker. :) Common in upstate NY, I think... but I feel a bit out of place saying it in Philadelphia, where I live now.
I'm definitely on Team @LMS and not Team @Rex. I thought the wordplay was delightful and I wasn't bothered at all by the nits that OFL picked.
My only overwrite was EstS (estimates) before ERAS at 6A.
Boogity Boogity
Other than the difficulty level - I’m down with the big guy on this one. Disjoint theme and oddly filled.
I still whack my WEEDs @LMS - maybe regional?
I’m going to catch that horse if I can
The worst part about the ERAS clue is that Taylor Swift is currently on the biggest tour in America right now called the ERAS tour. And NYT goes for a baseball clue, if that doesn’t scream stuffy and out of touch what does?
@LMS: Never heard the term "weed-eater." In the Great Lakes, we whack. I've also never heard of using @ as a verb--probably because I don't spend much time or energy on social media, but I like it! Thanks for the info.
As to Rex's quibbles with this puzzle's theming--the (sad, sad) fact that there are no newsstands any more, "strapped for" doesn't mean "out of," etc.--OK, sure. But the sense of each of those words was clear, and I enjoyed the puzzle. Except for EYED UP; kinda awkward and is that a thing? The clue for WITCH is superb! Seriously Lewis List-worthy.
@Loren Muse Smith - I am @ing you, girl! But not to complain about the verbification of a symbol, but to add # to the mix. I love how these once dusty symbols, rarely used except in strings to indicate CUSS WORDs in the Sunday comics (loved that clue), are now superstars. % and & must be so jealous. My stepkids and their friends loved to throw # around when the conversation brought up a theme. So if I recounted an embarrassing moment, they would say “hashtag loser,” or if I was grumpy at 7 pm, they’d say “hashtag hangry.” I haven’t heard them do it in a while, so maybe that flamed out.
As for the theme, I’m somewhere between Rex and LMS. I just went with the old-timeyness of a request at a now non-existent newsstand. I do miss going into a newsstand and just perusing magazines I would never buy, like PEOPLE or MEN’S FITNESS. I would buy something to justify my perusing time, but it would be brainy, like The Atlantic or The New Republic. One place you can still peruse a magazine rack is at the airport, but now that you can get wifi on the plane, I’ll bet that will go the way of the newsstand soon.
The whole puzzle felt like it could have run decades ago, with DON HO, ALF, ROSS Perot, and the Soviet RED STAR. (Who else tried to make hammer or sickle fit?) Yes, Steven YEUN, LIL Nas X and Ilhan OMAR beamed in from the future. I didn’t mind the overall retro feel, but I agree that some of the themers fell flat. I definitely side-eyed STRAPPED FOR TIME as not meaning “out of,” and SHORT A FEW PEOPLE sounded awful. I liked LACKING VARIETY as the best by far. I don’t usually care about dupes in a puzzle, but I definitely noticed the OUTs.
Over and OUT.
I found it very easy, because the theme wasn't difficult to understand and helped the solve. Question...if one "genuflects," does that suggest one KNEELED? I've always thought KNEELED meant "went to one's knees," not "bent one's knees."
Agree the “official” name is Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, but “informally”, it’s the Dallas Fed. It’s used all the time in banking, Dallas Fed is plastered all over their website, etc.. Since clued with informally, perfectly acceptable, imo.
With LMS on not getting hung up on the semantics of the theme answers. Did they roll off the tongue? pretty much. nice Tuesday theme.
Did notice all the OUT(s). Finished in SE and by OUTLAW was fairly put out.
But overall a somewhat breezy medium for me.
“…it's hard to imagine anyone wandering in and making any of these requests.”
Also, horses don’t really walk into bars… :)
I thought it was a fun concept - a little dated, but so am I.
@LMS I mow, my wife weed-eats, and I definitely got the better end of that deal.
I used the term "weed whacker" just recently, as in "Merlin(*) identified the neighbor's electric weed whacker as a white-winged dove."
Puzzle played about medium; just a hair faster than average for me. I liked the theme, didn't notice the semantic inconsistency. A slightly different approach to cluing might have been able to accommodate that. My main gripe is "fugitive" for OUTLAW. Certainly there is overlap between the categories but they don't equate for me, even taking into account What's-it's Rule about clues not being definitions.
(*) Bird identification app that, among other things, identifies bird songs and calls that you record on the phone. It's pretty dang good but clearly not 100%.
Theme answers that brought smiles. A theme where I could try to guess the theme answers with as few crosses as possible. And thus, a fun and involving puzzle.
There were a couple of magazine serendipities for me, as I looked over the completed grid. Seeing WEED made me think it would be a great name for an alternative magazine to “High Times”, and seeing YELL made me think of “Mad Magazine”.
It was lovely to see THE BYRDS, that is, the full name of the band, in a crossword grid. It’s the first time the full name has appeared in the Times puzzle, where it has shown up nine times as simply BYRDS with clues that included the words “with ‘The’”. How I loved this group, and when I hear one of their songs now, it shoots me right back into my adolescent mind, exactly how it felt to be me back then – what a gift!
Back to today, there was my classic how-many-things-can-go-wrong brain glitch at [“Tiny Bubbles” crooner], where the face I pictured was Tiny Tim, and, on top of that, I couldn’t think of his name. Hah!
All in all, an engaging outing that didn’t LACK VARIETY. I loved this. Thank you, Aaron!
I’m thinking the quad set of OUTs may be a feature, not a bug. The two inhabiting themers are nicely symmetric, and one of these is crossed by the third at the central U. OUTLAW then winks at the flagrant violation.
webwinger
Rex, you need to step down from your professorial dais and discard your old fogie attitude. The puzzle is an exercise in whimsy; it’s not subject to the pedestrian objections in the real world. Jokes and puns and wordplay in general should not be met with the pedantic rigor of a dissertation defense. They’re just funny , clever, uses of language. Lighten up!
@Conrad: Hand up for EstS before ERAS. And yes, @Wanderlust, that errant “S” led me to sickle before RED STAR. As OFL sez, challenging *for a Tuesday.*
Just think how dated the puzzle would be with a current Taylor Swift tour name. Who remembers in five years?
Edge trimmer, string trimmer and even strimmer in MD
Didn't think this was especially challenging, it felt just about right for a Tuesday. The only real outlier was YEUN, who was unheard of, as was "Mean", whatever that might be.
WEED whacker here in NH. Change the attachment and you've got a brush cutter, with which I have lots more experience than I wish I had
Hello RIA. Some good old=fashioned crosswordese always makes me smile.
Did think some of the themers felt a little off See @OFL for det4ails.
OK Tuesday, AMR Additional Minor Reworking may have helped some answers, but thanks for a fair amount of fun.
All the “outs” have to be on purpose yes? As the whole theme revolves around running out of magazines. Still the full made me groan. Thought Rez would hammer it harder so came to the blog thinking I’d find blood.
I thought this was adorable. Short a few people, yes falls a bit flat but I don’t hate it was much as @Rex. I doubt anyone would say Peoples. And they still have shops like this in airports, at least the last time I traveled. The Out storm was a bit overwhelming so I agree on that 100%. Otherwise, I think this was a pretty darn good puzzle.
@Nancy, @whatsername, and @Lewis -- thanks for your notes yesterday!
Had hoped Don Ho would be word of the day. Just a reminder that we can’t get everything in life I suppose.
@LMS -- thanks for info on @ as a verb. I'll grudgingly accept Merriam-Webster as authority, but will only be fully convinced when it appears in a New Yorker cartoon.
Speaking of magazines ...
Back in the Cold War era, my uncle lived in Washington, D.C. and he had a large collection of old "National Geographic" magazines. Rather than toss them, he ran a newspaper ad offering to give them away. He received an immediate telephone inquiry from the Russian Embassy. This was followed up by a visit from the FBI wanting to know why he was talking with the Russians.
Love love love that ‘Dan clip! I want to live like those backup singers live—to the nth power! 💪🏼
EDITABLE
Is regret-it-able.
It's A-OK --
That's what we say.
Not "ALL OK".
See ATS, a "plural" in the grid:
A "POC" -- that's what they did!
It makes one cringe; it should be hid.
Summing up: I found the theme mildly diverting and more fun to solve than many Tuesdays. But, alas, there's some really bad fill here too.
Man, being old sucks. Beyond the physical decay, actually painful, limiting, and embarrassing, you've got the mental decay. You forget things, and you learn new things at only a small fraction of the rate you once did. Then you get a day like today, where something, perhaps the one and only one thing, you learned in the past year turns out to be useless. I'm looking at you grawlix. It has to be the answer to 38D:
Outburst that may be entirely symbolic?, right? I read my comics, see an outburst represented as A#@$#! and it's grawlix, right? But no, it's CUSSWORD. What's the point of learning something if it's not the right thing to know when it's exactly the right thing to know?
My one accomplishment of the past year, wiped out by a @#$#@$ing crossword puzzle.
DON HO was a blind spot for me and I thought END IN looked perfectly valid, so I figured DINHO was the name of some Portuguese or Brazilian singer.
Wish there were a publication called HIS MIND because Rex clearly is OUTOFHISMIND.
TYS to all who agree!
Rex, thanks for the Steely Dan vid. One of their finest live performances...
@Pete -- Philip Roth said "Old age is not a battle -- it's a massacre."
Hey All !
I thought I liked it, until I read Rex. Now I'm supposed to nit pick it. Harumph.
Har. I still like it! "Sorry, we're STRAPPED FOR TIME, I only have one copy, and I have to save it for my regular customer who throws a full-on tantrum if he doesn't get his TIME."
"Alas, we're SHORT A FEW PEOPLE. However, the ones remaining are first come, first serve."
Plausible. Beside, Rex's rant on PEOPLE doesn't hold water here. It's not pluralizing the title. If you think PEOPLE as the singular noun as related to the magazine, then you can buy A Couple or A FEW of them. A FEW PEOPLE magazines. Or A FEW PEOPLEs. You can say SHORT A FEW TIME. It sounds wrong, but is technically right. 😁
Anyway, if you want to OUT WIT an OUTLAW, don't be OUT OF SHAPE because you'll be MISSING OUT. Think OUTSIDE the lines, don't be OUT OF ORDER, and GEt OUT while you can.
Over and OUT.
Four F's
RooMonster
DarrinV
I finished around normal time, so it was not especially challenging. BUT had the same exact problem with ERAS as Rex- and I was watching the baseball Home Run Derby at the time. I was convinced it should have been EtAS. and then when REDSTAR became obvious I changed it to ERAS but was sure the clue was wrong. Just never “saw” the baseball acronym
Thx, Aaron, an excellent VARIETY; nothing LACKING! 😊
Easy-med.
Very smooth solve; no holdups.
Pure fun; enjoyed every minute of it! :)
Not @ing anyone in particular, but just sayin', in Vancouver we 'whack' our weeds, except for those of us who have BILLYGOATS. Some of us even kill two BYRDS (sorry, BYRDS, no harm intended 🕊) at the same time by 'whacking' WEEDs while waiting on the 'cookout' to do its 'BBQing'. Then we 'eat' the WEEDs – possibly a salad of Purslane, Chickweed, Nettles & lamb's quarters – along with the BBQ. Just sayin', not really @ing. 😉
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@ing jae & all Croce doers: #824 was easy-med except for the wrong guess on my final entry at the 'Hyundai' / 'dumpling' cross (when will I ever remember how to spell that word?!) 😔
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On to Natan Last's Mon. New Yorker.
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Peace 🕊 🇺🇦 ~ Compassion ~ Tolerance ~ Kindness ~ Freudenfreude ~ Serendipity ~ & a DAP to all 👊 🙏
Agree with Rex that this was challenging..Enjoyed comments about the symbol @ by @Loren Muse Smith. They illustrate how easily an English noun can be changed to a verb—fedex, sandwich , etc. Best answer by far was MISSING since it had a double meaning. . Strapped for time-is a great expression but doesn’t fit the thene, or does it?
Enjoyable solve!
Happy Cow Appreciation Day.
I really enjoyed this and happily avoided the hang-ups over inaccuracy that plagued Rex. Since STRAPPED means “badly in need of,” I don’t see why, in context, it couldn’t mean “completely out of.” If you’re out of something crucial, you’re badly in need of it. Similarly, SHORT. If you’re SHORT A FEW PEOPLE, the implication is that your supplier sent 90 copies of People Magazine this week instead of the usual 100, with the result that now, at the point when your customer is making the request, there are none left. And I think it’s credible that someone might say “SHORT A FEW PEOPLE” instead of “SHORT A FEW PEOPLE Magazines.” We leave out words all the time in informal speech and, in this case, someone might just do so for comic effect. Rex found LACKING VARIETY weak, but I thought it was the most chuckleworthy.
I never noticed all the OUTs. Four is a lot and I can see that for maximum elegance, fewer might have been better. But repetition never particularly bothers me while solving and, like today’s, I often miss it.
Hah! My [“Whacker” target] was “mole,” thinking that the whacker in question was a person. Welcome back, one-time crossword puzzle favorite, DON HO, with your mellow take on tiny bubbles and pearly shells. I had a malapop – I came to 32A having skipped 18D, and put in PRO for [Maven] before discovering later that it was the answer to [For]. Always liked THE BYRDS and can never think of them without picturing Roger McGuinn’s tiny rectangular granny glasses with blue(?) lenses. For 16 years I had a Brit colleague, who every afternoon would pop into the Media Library from her office down the hall and cheerfully announce “TEA time!” as she went to put on the kettle. I always had coffee and sometimes she did, too, but her vocabulary never changed. As an editor, I find EDITABLE a bit questionable. It doesn’t seem wrong, just odd. (Hi, witty @Nancy!) And hey, we’re becoming burdened by ONUS – two in 3 days!
[SB: Sun -1, Mon 0. There was a great lot of excellent long words on Sunday’s list and I missed a good one. I was mad yesterday that they wouldn’t take PORPHYRY – perfectly good word that IMO isn’t particularly obscure.]
That confused me too.
I was also happy to see “The Byrds” in the puzzle as I am a big fan of folk rock. I guess that “outs” me as an older solver. As a senior I found the puzzle was in my wheelhouse. I’m wondering if younger solvers found this to be more difficult. What do you think?
The quadfecta doesn’t bother me in the least. After all don’t puzzle constructors break lots of rules to make challenging ones these days?
I think it’s delightful that people should be out and safe to be so; although the way things are going in the US courts lately it seems tenuous at best.
@LMS 6:18. “ When I lived on the farm, I told our farm manager that since I was off for the summer, I might as well learn how to weed-eat. He looked at me for a moment and said quietly, You don’t want any part of that.” I (egsforbreakfast) took him to be thinking that you were talking about spending the summer experimenting with edibles and that he didn’t approve.
No one has mentioned that the constructor himself has criticized his excessive duping of OUT in the puzzle (see xwordinfo).
I always preferred Don’s lesser known, but more talented, brother Gung Ho.
Until today it seemed futile to work FETAL and FATAL into the same puzzle. I believe that the 6th M-W entry for FETAL is “Of, or pertaining to, Greek cheese.”
I thought this puzzle was delightful. Since when is it important that a theme maps accurately onto everyday life? Thanks for a swell Tuesday, Aaron M. Rosenberg.
I enjoyed this one. Smooth, challenging, and as long as you know the word OUT you have a huge head start. Only one actor and reasonable fill with so many theme entries. Southwest took me as long as the rest of the puzzle.
So many people come to Estes Park these days they've instituted a reservation policy at Rocky Mountain National Park. When I was a kid you just went. They're trying like heck to keep forests forests, but our species' invasion makes us unlikely to succeed. Bears can't keep up with gobbling down tourists fast enough. Feels like the planet said to itself, "Well, they can't seem to behave in the forest, so I might as well burn 'em all down."
WITCH as a "hex nut" is inspired.
Peevishly admitting I've never heard a billy goat and troll story. Did I miss an important parable and that's why I haven't gotten far in life?
FETAL/FATAL. F-words, amirite?
Tee-Hees: STREAK and CUSSWORD ... put 'em together and you've written a scene from Two and a Half Men.
Uniclues:
1 Score dimensional portal.
2 Swear jar filler.
3 One who kicks the ball from under the tree onto the green without remorse.
1 WIN STAR GATE
2 CUSSWORD STREAK
3 ELM PUTT OUTLAW
My Fascinating Crossword Uniclue Keepsake from Last Year: Had a gardener over for breakfast. ATE GREEN THUMB
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
@Rex
FYI.
There are still hundreds of newsstands in Manhattan.
Cute little puzzle.
Rex has been extraordinarily annoying lately. I'm going to go back to skipping him.
@LMS (6:18). Brilliant! We're saving a nice piece of cake for you down here.
Thanks to the posters who explained the CUSSWORD clue.
Medium. Amusing, smooth and fun, liked it a bunch. Jeff gave it POW.
Did not know YEUN but it seems like I’ve seen him before?
This was really clever and fun to solve. Loved the word play with the magazine titles. Did not love the quadruple duplication of OUT and did not agree that bank branches are called FEDS. It seemed like a puzzle that took actual human brain inventiveness to come up with the theme, as opposed to some crossword programming app. I’ll never never be ANTI original thought.
I am in the do not BASTE camp when it comes to roasting THE BYRDS. Mine go in one of those big blue enamel roasting pans, and the oven door stays shut until the timer goes off. Really helps if you’re STRAPPED FOR TIME and cuts down on unnecessary maneuvering in the kitchen … where there is never a SHORTAGE OF PEOPLE milling around in your way. One Thanksgiving I put that yellow “caution do not enter” tape on the door kitchen door. It didn’t help. Like @Loren, I get no respect.
I didn't find this challenging. In fact, I found it was easy, fun, well-constructed, over too soon & I enjoyed it a lot.
Go figure.
Thank you Aaron!
@bocamp @ 9:23 - I'm still working on Natan Last's New Yorker from yesterday. That doesn't happen often. Good luck!
I just have to @Loren for the unparalleled amusement. I ADORED your cleverness of the typing in caps to be heard over the music! Always so happy to see when you post.
Hands up for EstS before ERAS.
@jb129 (11:28 AM)
Thx! 😊 Can always use some good luck, esp with Natan's creations. Just getting started on it shortly. 🤞
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Peace 🕊 🇺🇦 ~ Compassion ~ Tolerance ~ Kindness ~ Freudenfreude ~ Serendipity ~ & a DAP to all 👊 🙏
@Barbara S. 9:37 - Double thanks from me. First, as a Dairy Stater, I'm delighted to learn about Cow Appreciation Day. If my husband weren't out of town with our car, i'd head over to the Sassy Cow Creamery for a vanilla shake. Instead I'll celebrate with yogurt topped with homemade rhubarb sauce. Second, I'd been leaning @Rex's way on some of the theme answers seeming forced, so I appreciate your going into detail on how well they actually work.
@Wanderlust 7:44 - Indeed, all I could think of was "hammer" and "sickle." I hadn't trusted ERAs so left that space blank: with the R, ma-a-a-ybe I'd have come up with RED STAR.
@webwinger 7:58 - I had a similar thought about the two theme OUTs nicely mirroring each other, but I'd missed the wink of OUTLAW - nice!
@RooMonster 9:21 - Thank you for your defense of PEOPLE. I hope @Rex will read it :)
Sure it's corny, but isn't that the point? It was fun figuring out what the magazine would be (though I got SHAPE purely on plausibility, taking its existence on faith), and then fun trying to figure out what the opening phrase would be. That said, I'm perfectly happy to read Rex's suggestions about how a puzzle could be made more elegant. Whether he enjoyed it or not is his own affair.
@Gary J, yes, you are missing out. As kids we had a gray book of folk stories, and that was probably the one we most liked to have read to us. Great dialogue, like "Well, come along, I've got two spears and I'll poke your eyeballs out at your ears!" The clue has it wrong, though -- the smaller billy goats are not attempting to OUTWIT the troll, they ARE outwitting it.
Personally, I thought the misdirect at ERAS was brilliant. I had the R already, but it so plainly had to be EstS that I went back and questioned RED STAR.
According to the interwebs, WEED Eater was the name of the company founded by the inventor of the device; I've always heard it called Whacker until recently, when string trimmer seems to have taken it over. Mine has been jammed for a year now, I really ought to do something about that.
Somehow, I have ALWAYS known that DON HO sang "Tiny Bubbles," but somehow had never heard it -- so I'm listening right now. I probably won't do it again soon.
Actually, the original word for quadfecta, in its original sense: picking the first four horses to finish a race in exact order -- is SUPERFECTA. I attribute the loss of the word, and the change in the meaning of trifecta, to the decline of betting on the ponies.
Can someone explain how the answer to the clue force is DINT?
@ Barbara S, glad to see I wasn't the only one whose initial impulse was to whack a mole!
This was a crazy T fest this morning. Twenty T's! At least one T in all 15 rows. The NW corner features a diagonal run of 4 consecutive T's. I don't ever count letters in a grid, but the T's jumped OUT @ Tom T today.
Hands up for choosing whimsy enjoyment over grammatical parsing. This was a fun puzzle. I think here in mid-state NY weed WACKER dominates, but eater not entirely unknown. Big problem here is that with either grammatical choice unless you are careful the operation sprays you with #%^&@ed ticks.
Another smile-inducing puzzle, three in a row, shaping up to be a special week!
(But, predictably, Parker unearths nits that most solvers could care less about. I’m definitely in the LMS camp on this one.)
Is the NYT turning a corner or is this just a streak of good luck?
Dean Martin, hands down; he owned 47 across. Brings back fund memories of the Student Union easy listening music room where I always hit the button on the free jute box for “Tiny Bubbles,” among other great tunes back in the day.
WITCH clue was a definite super-superb highlite.
Theme was pretty good, except for all them OUTs. Fillins were generally excellent.
staff weeject pick: SCI. M&A now wonders in poli-sci-fi could be a thing. Sorta a MAGA relative, I reckon?
honrable mention to: OUT.
some of them fave fillins: STARGATE. THEBYRDS. CUSSWORD [@ @ @ relative?]. BILLYGOAT.
Thanx, Mr. Rosenberg dude. Yu en the Shortzmeister really emptied the magazine on us, today. So TuesPuz-tough we almost didn't have a play, boy.
Masked & Anonymo6Us
**gruntz**
I was bothered by the second OUT in a themer and I knew Rex would be too. I actually got the theme right away from the first clue, so I had several of the mag names: TIME, VARIETY, and PEOPLE, but for the first part of the phrase all I could think of was OUT OF ---.
Typeovers: A-OKAY before ALL OK and hands up for ESTS before ERAS.
[Spelling Bee: Mon 0, and Sun -1 missing for some strange reason this 6er. Barbara S, I never thought of PORPHYRY but I wanted PORTAPOTTY (evidently it's 2 words).]
@M&A
That's yesterday's **grunts**
Oh oh!... "ballpark" meaning "estimate" reminds me of a classic Friends bit. Monica and her boyfriend (I think it was Tom Selleck) are talking.
Monica: "So, how many lovers have you had?"
Tom thinks for a minute...: "Um, four."
Monica, gobsmacked: "Four? Have you SEEN yourself?"
Tom: "Well, how many for you?"
Monica: "Um...", then silence.
Tom: "Just,... ballpark."
Monica, immediately: "Oh, WAY less than a ballpark."
@JC66: Thanx for noticin. Wrong again, M&A breath.
Déjà vu, runt-style! (No refunds, tho.)
M&A Needs Help Desk
**gruntz**
@Loren Muse Smith 6:18 AM
Given the option to "eat" or "whack," I know what I'd choose.
@Pete 9:01 AM
Love this post.
The latter earned him a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actor, becoming the first Asian American actor to do so.
Someone should go over to Wikipedia and fix that sentence.
Jeff Chen gave this puzzle a POW? Seriously? Yesterday's was much better. I'm closer to giving this THIS.
If you get NYT Letters, I recommend "Is A.I. a Real Threat?" in today's West Coast edition.
@SiminSays (1:14 pm) - I've been thinking that too - that the NYT is turning a corner :) but I doubt it.
I guess we'll see.
How come STREAK and BREAK don't rhyme?
There has been a scarcity of POCs (plurals of convenience) here of late, so nice to see a resurgence today. There's a generous sprinkling of single, relatively short POCs like ERAS, BLTS, ATS, WAKES, PALES, and REFS, one longer non-theme POC at TEA BREAKS and, to round things OUT, a couple of the uber helpful two for one POCs, where a Down and an Across both get a letter count, grid filling boost by sharing a final S, as happens when SIRE/FED and KNEEL/STOW need some convenient help filling their slots. That last one is where a two fer is most likely to occur, in the lower, rightmost square.
One of my chores growing up in Tennessee farm country a long, long time ago was cutting WEEDs around our property. No electric or gas powered WEED eaters or whackers back then. I used a sling blade. I still have one these days in my tool collection but it's mostly just for nostalgia.
@s Anoa Bob. They do in 'Stralian.
@Joe Dipinto - Your link to the gong took me to one of my all-time favorite musical numbers. Perhaps it's my Bay Area roots or maybe it's just the happiness that exudes from that song and dance (or more likely it's watching Nancy Kwan), but "Grant Avenue" always lifts my spirits. Thx!
A WEED whacker is an electrical deceive used by men of a certain age to trim their ears and eyebrows.
@Gary Jugert 10:18
I fastidiously frown on your frank festooning of your statement "F-words, admite?"
I'm fond of words starting, finishing, or festering F's. For shame for further fuss over seeing them
Fear not, for the F is flying high! Feel free to frolic in the fascination of F-words! It's a fine fettle of funness.
In finality, I expect a fifty page facsimile of fleeting rebuttal.
Or not. See if I give a f$@!
🤣
RooMonster Fiesty Guy
(And that was without a dictionary!)
"Do you have any photojournalism magazines?"
"Sorry, not a single one – we need to..."
GET A LIFE
“Do you carry Cosmopolitan?”
“No. You can go to Elle.”
I thought this was a well constructed puzzle.
Im sorta new at signing on here and I keep seeing compliments to @LMS .Is that the name of Loren? I like her/their comments. They don’t brag on her/them and have a distinctive flavour.
The comments are worth the visit here— people here are obviously very smart but vey much encased in , or proud of NYC, probably Manhattan Island.
If you want newsstands,@jc something or other, come to my favorite place. London. You can’t go 100 meters without a newsstand, as you call them.
That STRAPPED thing was not very good. But all else mighty good.
.
The branch banks, like Dallas or St. Louis , are called “district banks.” These have “branch banks.” St. Louis has branch banks in Little Rock, Memphis, and Louisville, for example.
My 1999 dead tree edition Merriam-Webster says “to touch a knee to the ground in religious worship “.
Close enough for crosswords.
Love you Rex, loved you for years. That said, you are turning into a curmudgeon. You can't rain on EVERY parade....
@RooMonster 4:51 PM
Phooey!
I’ve had my bestest friend ever as a houseguest recently. I’ve worked the puz every day but haven’t had time to comment! As per usual, I agree with @LMS. Perfectly serviceable (or more!) Tuesday for me…I enjoyed.
In my part of the country both WEEDwhacker and WEEDeater are acceptable.
Just watched Nope by Jordan Peele a few weeks ago. Not one of his best, but his last scary movie was TOO scary for me. YUEN was great in his role as “Jupe” in the movie. Yes. I confess to liking scary, but not TOO scary movies.
I know. Not the best commentary on puz as a whole.
And out west, it's a "weed whip".
Were two of the graphics in this write-up supposed to be embedded YouTube videos? Because I am instead seeing captchas complaining about the network I am on, which is weird because it's just university wifi.
"Look. We're OUT of SHAPE, we're OUT of TIME, we're OUT of OUT, and we're OUT of TIME OUT. And since TIME is of the ESSENCE, we don't have ESSENCE either. But you're in luck. Our vendor has promised to SHAPE up and ship OUT. So tomorrow you can come in and get OUT."
@Joaquin 4:23 – I'm almost totally unfamiliar with "Flower Drum Song" so I watched the "Grant Avenue" number on YouTube – glad to have gonged you into remembering it!
This was a perfectly dine and, for me easy Tuesday. And I enjoyed it as much as @Rex did not. This is the perfect example of the type of puzzle about which @Rex and I will inevitably disagree. He focuses too much (as today) specific word choice or form and misses the fun of the theme.
I am mire picky and critical than most of writing. However, I can differentiate between formal writing for business and putting together a crossword theme puzzle. Yes, absolutely; today’s theme couls have been tighter-especially because this type of “word form” puzzle is a standard NYT “type.” That said, this was a very good idea that could have used some polishing. But I enjoyed it. Much less boring than the average Tuesday. But I enjoyed it.
Hand up for weed 'whacker'. Never heard of YEUN nor his show. OUTOUTOUTOUT - normally dups don't bother me, but when it goes over the top, it does.
Here I am solving Mon, Tues, Wed, Thurs all at once, after returning from a few days in the Adirondacks. I zipped through this Tuesday one without stopping for breath.
OUT OF THE FOG
I was STRAPPEDFORTIME TO vape,
and LACKING THE VARIETY I need,
SHORTAFEW and OUTOFSHAPE,
BUT DINT mind MISSINGOUT ON WEED.
--- LI'L BILLY ROSS
In baseball, when the defense commits an error, they are said to have given the offense four outs. Ergo, there must have been an error today! Not only that, but we also have BESTOW/STOWS. Tsk.
I didn't find this challenging, except when I started bumping into repeats, thinking, wait a sec, that's taken. But no, it was ALLOK, even that last across duping the first down. I sense that this "rule" has relaxed in recent times--to the point of non-existence.
Agreed that the theme is far from tight; "strapped for" does not mean "out of," and neither does "short a few." I mean, don't these vendors want to sell out of everything? Are they saving the last few copies for their relatives?? What is going on?
Oh, and everything is "EDITABLE." Including your puzzle, Aaron--but evidently it wasn't. Bogey.
Wordle bogey.
I approve 63D.
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