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Creature that grows longer in a classic video game / TUE 10-3-23 / Brightest light in Cygnus / Ancient inhabitant of Scotland / MTV prize whose trophy features an astronaut / Motormouth ___ "Hairspray" role for Queen Latifah / Roman goddess who is the equivalent of the Greek Nike / Native language in Oslo
Tuesday, October 3, 2023
Constructor: Troy Laedtke
Relative difficulty: Easy, mostly
The snakes, in order (each one "longer" (i.e. containing more letters) than the next):
- ASP
- MAMBA
- GARTER
- ANACONDA
- BOA CONSTRICTOR
Snake is a sub-genre of action video games where the player maneuvers the end of a growing line, often themed as a snake. The player must keep the snake from colliding with both other obstacles and itself, which gets harder as the snake lengthens. It originated in the 1976 two-player arcade video game Blockade from Gremlin Industries where the goal is to survive longer than the other player. The concept evolved into a single-player variant where a snake gets longer with each piece of food eaten—often apples or eggs. The simplicity and low technical requirements of snake games have resulted in hundreds of versions—some of which have the word snake or worm in the title—for many platforms.1982's Tron arcade game, based on the film, includes snake gameplay for the single-player Light Cycle segment, and some later snake games borrow the theme. After a version simply called Snake was preloaded on Nokia mobile phones in 1998, there was a resurgence of interest in snake games as it found a larger audience. (wikipedia)
• • •
The solving experience was painfully easy and painfully choppy through the middle. The easiness and choppiness were definitely related, as the NW corner took at least a little thought, and then it was just a sprint (a choppy, unpleasant sprint, but a sprint), through the snaky regions. The longer answers had some appeal, but the snake stuff really didn't, largely because the snake stuff is entirely unclued and since it's Tuesday, you absolutely Do Not have to even see the snake stuff to make sense of the grid. Clues through there are all very straightforward. Bizarre attempt to make VESTIGIAL a theme answer here (13A: Like the "legs" on a 48-Down). Not sure what that's about, VESTIGIAL is a nice answer on its own, as is COOKIE JAR. The NW was rickety enough (DENEB, SRTA, REI) that it gave me bad vibes and some trepidation about what was to come. The vibes were bad enough that I stopped and took a screenshot to remember them by:
But then I got into the center and things got so fast and so easy that the bad vibes kind of went away. Overall the grid wasn't terrible. I just don't really have any connection to this theme, and since the theme had no effect on my solving experience, the overall effect was that of solving a very easy themeless riddled with very short answers, i.e. not a very good time, but not an excruciating one either. I assume that if this game type means something to you, the experience was more exhilarating. Hoping to find more exhilaration for myself tomorrow. See you then.
Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld
Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld
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73 comments:
Rex, you must remember Centipede. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centipede_(video_game).
In cases like this one just solves it like a themeless and moves on to something more rewarding, right?
If you read the link you posted you’ll see it’s not an example of the game type in question
I think of snake games as one of the first home computer games and one of the first phone games back when flip phones were all the rage. I also remember playing it on my calculator senior year of high school. The theme worked to conjure some nostalgia for me which was fun.
It was a classic game on the ubiquitous Nokia candy bar phones of the late 90s/early 00s
https://www.itsnicethat.com/features/taneli-armanto-the-history-of-snake-design-legacies-230221
Snake was really popular on Nokia phones when they first came out in the early 2000s. I never thought of it as an arcade or video game
I "love" Rex's certainty that nobody he knows has ever played or heard of the snake game. Nobody, really?
Rex, I noticed some early games missing from your list: Pong, Breakout, Tank, among others. If you don’t remember these (which all gradually made their appearance in the local pub when I was in college), you’re not going to remember Snake. I guess you’re not as old as you think (a good thing!).
I really liked this puzzle. I could see that the shaded squares depicted a serpentine shape, and when VESTIGIAL dropped in from the crosses, making 48D a gimme, everything else fell in place. It wasn’t until I finished that I noticed the shaded squares were also types of SNAKEs (two of which I’ve had as pets, one mean as heck, the other adorable; can you guess which?)
Mostly almost Monday-easy, I thought, with a few exceptions. I had no idea about DENEB, never heard of it, didn’t know VICTORIA was a goddess, didn’t know MAYBELLE. I probably should have known at least the first two, and now I do! I thought the theme was pretty clever, but only in retrospect, as I basically solved it as a themeless and only figured out what the black squares were afterwards. Of course, I was completely unaware of the video game - my experience of arcade games being that of bored mom hanging around while kids play a few games at the mall on a rainy day.
A convoluted niche theme and a trivia-laden grid. There must be a constituency for it cuz the NYT publishes them all the time. Great if you enjoy this sort of thing, although it does seem like the editors are setting for triple-A ball when they could be aspiring for so much more.
If there is a saving grace, I guess it’s the fact that they ran it on a Tuesday. When we get one of these puppies on a Thursday it becomes an insufferable slog.
Snake was preloaded on Nokia phones in the mid 90s. Sort of like minesweeper on Madison computers.
Snake came on the old Nokia phones, and was one of the original widespread phone games pre-smartphone.
I totally did not get the “eating and getting longer” part until I came here. I thought it was just a nest of SNAKEs. I thought ASP was a pretty pathetic theme answer since it was so short and didn’t do any snakey twisting.
Trying to guess the eating black squares part, I wanted there to be black squares in the middle of the snakes, like undigested rats. I thought maybe the black squares at the end of the snakes were prey waiting to be eaten, but BOA CONSTRICTOR didn’t end in a black square. Nice aha moment when I read Rex and got it.
They didn’t only make VESTIGIAL a random theme answer, they also did it with ALIEN as something 48 downs are to Ireland. Seems like you could do that with almost any answer:
GODS: “ Some 48 downs were sacred to Egyptian ones.”
AL FRESCO: “How 48 downs usually dine.”
ONE SOCK: “All a 48 down would need if it used these at all.”
I had Odd SOCK before ONE SOCK. I think my answer makes more sense. You find one sock all the time while folding laundry without getting frustrated. Usually you then find its mate. It’s only when you find an odd, unmatched sock that you get frustrated. Hand up if you save those odd socks thinking you’ll surely come across its mate and they have been sitting in your sock drawer for years now.
I'm with @Johnny Mic. I remember Snake as a personal computer game, not an arcade game.
I like snakes IRL, so that aspect of the puzzle was fun.
Very few snakes have vestigial legs. BOA CONSTRICTORs do, and ANACONDAs, but none of the other puzzle snakes.
In situations like this it makes sense to ignore the dumb theme attempts and just treat it like a themeless
Now there’s an out-of-the box theme for our in-the-box pastime. One-of-a-kind themes like this make a puzzle so interesting, make a puzzle shine.
Oh, I never played Snake, the game Troy based the puzzle on (according to his notes), but that didn’t taint my enjoyment. The uncovering for me was twofold. First, filling in the grid, which had lovely answers such as VESTIGIAL, AL FRESCO, and CANTO. Second, figuring out the theme in full, which didn’t reveal itself to me with a pop; it involved the kind of riddle cracking my brain adores.
Making this grid had to involve much trial and error. Working the configuration just right, where the lengthening snakes are a single black square apart, not to mention coming up with snake names that allow a grid with recognizable words. Getting to smooth as silk in puzzle construction often involves much turbulence, and if it did for you, Troy, thank you for the sweat!
I like that the series of snakes emerges from the revealer SNAKE. I like the crossing PuzzPair© of ONLINE and NET. I like the sing-song joining of CANTO and STENO, and seeing STOOD up.
Once again, a veteranesque product in a NYT debut. A jewel that brought shine to my day. Thank you so much for this, Troy!
I enjoyed the theme, having played Snake back in the 90s, along with other non-shooter games. That was before I discovered crossword puzzles.
Hand up here, @Wanderlust. That other sock (the even sock?) eventually shows up.
Like Rex - played all those arcade games in the day but never heard of SNAKE. Solved as a themeless. Liked VESTIGIAL and ARAMAIC.
It was over quickly.
PERE Ubu
6 across says it all…
I say this all the time, which I guess is boring in its own right, but I’m bored by/indifferent to weird tortured little Easter eggs hidden in fill I have already solved.
Looks like you and I are both too old to have known about this “classic” video game. Which annoyed me as well. I never heard of it and I knew most of the phone games even because I was a pediatrician working with kids who have phones and play games!
Played the heck out of Snake on my first cell phone, a Nokia TracFone. (I also remember some kind of parachuting game, I think?). Only quibble with the theme is Rex’s note that the snakes don’t grow at a consistent rate - they did in the game.
I vaguely remember the 2 person, head to head arcade game. Very vaguely, and certainly couldn’t have told you the name. But, SNAKE on Nokia cell phones was ubiquitous with the early “phones with screens” era. 20 something me waiting in Drs office - SNAKE. Getting oil changed - SNAKE. Bored in a meeting - SNAKE.
However, none of that really moves the needle much past “it’s an ok themeless, oh and look, some haphazard sequences of letters make snake names.”
GARTER as a snake is really misplaced among the others. There is another ASP on the tail of the chain. technically would need another black square after the “R”, but still. Maybe would have liked more if some cobras, vipers or pythons were involved.
63D is duped in the WaPo today - same answer, identical clue. It seems to happen now and then, usually with pretty standard crosswordese / fill. It happens with trivia occasionally, though sometimes the clues are very similar but not identical.
Thx, Troy; definitely not a MEH production. Well done! 😊
Med.
Mostly a smooth solve except for VMA.
Enjoyed the trip. :)
___
On to Natan Last's Mon. New Yorker. 🤞
___
Peace 🕊 🇺🇦 ~ Compassion ~ Tolerance ~ Kindness, Freudenfreude & a DAP to all 👊 🙏
Ah the classics, traditional, enduring, memorable standards of excellence ... a a Nokia phone game from 30 years ago.
Some beautiful words that roll off the tongue, Vestigial, Al Fresco, Maybelle, Canto. But it's a little hard to say Norsk Rasp without really concentrating.
One great law firm, Boars, Borefruit, & Smears, LLC, representing farmers claiming libel.
HEY REX I DONT KNOW IF YOU HEARD - ITS A NOKIA GAME
I'm afraid my experience with video games began and ended with Pong, so SNAKE was news to me. I solved this as a themeless involving a bunch of SNAKES and that was that.
Found out about VMM and met MAYBELLE. Otherwise a nice enough solve.
Probably missing something theme-wise, TL, Though Looking back I'm not sure what. Thanks for aa fair amount of fun.
Hah! That was the game I was trying to recall as I read the column. Thanks for the reminder, and for (almost) completing my walk down memory lane by rounding out Rex's list of games.
I played Snake (or a version called Snaker) on some early computer or game device (an Atari, maybe?) and I remember being thrilled to discover there was a version I could play on my first IBM PC. If I’d known it was on a Nokia phone I might have bought one just for that reason. That said, this puzzle didn’t bring the Snake/Snaker experience back to me in any way. I agree with @CWT that this was best solved as a themeless.
No real overwrites, but once I saw BOA CONSTRICTOR I counted squares and filled in ANACONDA, but frontwards, which means backwards. I got DENEB (5D) from the D, filled in the rest and when it was confirmed via crosses said, “Where the hell did that come from?” Didn’t remember MAYBELLE (62A) but got it easily from crosses.
While I never saw the arcade version of SNAKE, I sure as hell spent my fair share of quarters trying to get past that Light Cycle level on Tron - and I was already very familiar with multiple variations of SNAKE on home game systems (Atari 2600, Atari computers, etc) that the gameplay was instantly recognizable, albeit with snazzier sound effects and graphics.
Rex you're too old for snake. It was THE classic game to play on Nokia phones circa 2002. And it's so fun. Especially when snake 2 came out.
I think this puzzle is cute. The shaded squares really do look like the snake in Snake!
Rex, I'm roughly the same age you are, and I had no clue what game they were talking about either. Looking online, it looks like the Snake game started to appear on Nokia phones around 1997. I guess that's long enough ago you could all it "classic." Boy, that makes me feel old!
Hey All !
Well, this had to have been ridiculously tough to fill. Holy moly, the entire SNAKE section was basically locked into place, along with the Blockers separating them. You may have been able to move the entire SNAKE chain around at first, but once it's set in it's final place, then you need to fill around and through the letters and Blockers that can't move.
And if that wasn't a tough enough thing, Troy decided to throw in VESTIGIAL! That may have been a happy coincidence, but still, any iffy fill gets immediate immunity from me. I lost hair just thinking about trying to fill this!
Pretty neat theme. Nice longer answers (COOKIE JAR!). Amazed by the common words "snaking" through the SNAKEs. A nit (of course, what would a review be without a nit?), what in tarhooties is going on with the ALIEN clue? Apparently there's no SNAKEs in Ireland? Or is it a reference to a movie or something? Just clue it as an ALIEN, outer space stuff. Weird.
Anyway, cool TuesPuz. The SNAKEs are even in an S shape. Wouldn't want to meet any of them in person, mind you. Even GARTER SNAKEs can give you the heebie-jeebies.
Two F's
RooMonster
DarrinV
Pong, Breakout, Asteroids, Pacman. Quarters up for your turn. Hard to be a teenage girl when you had to go to the diner and there was one of each game and the boys would hog them. To this day I get a thrill out of playing games, unlimited, on my phone. Never heard of Snake, but it reminded me of Snipes, which ran on our Novell network (just looked and that was 1983) and had a "boss key".
The puzzle was MEH. Started downs only and filled in some things like MAYBELLE and COOKIE JAR without their clues but needed a few acrosses to wrap it up. Actually the clue for MAY BELLE would not have helped as I now see. I was thinking the clue would be Carter...
Some of the answers were sooo ancient, like MAUDE, which is a gimme for me but probably not for the youngs.
And weirdly non-specific - looking at you, EMPERORS!
But worst of all I didn't get the theme, didn't even see it. Just solved as themeless. Then read OFL.
So this is an example of a puzzle that must have been hard to construct but wasn't at all hard to solve
Oh well, going to stare at the changing leaves for awhile...
No idea of the game, so just went ahead and solved it straightforwardly and themelessly. And in spite of Al fresco and vestigial, found it not worth the eight minutes it took to solve in pen and ink.
Splat!!!!!
I, too, never played Snake, but I certainly enjoyed the solve. Great debut!
Welp. @Rex, if you think solving this puzzle as a middle-aged man who lived through the classic video game game era was tough, try it as a semi-creaky old Boomer whose only experience with pre-smartphone games was Pac-Man. My reaction fell somewhere between MEH and DRAT. My take, a slightly challenging Tuesday with no obvious theme and for some reason, random shaded squares that had something to do with SNAKES. I gathered that 48D was supposed to be some sort of revealer but had no clue how VESTIGIAL related to it, and didn’t pretend to care. The only nostalgia it evoked was for a nice uncomplicated game of of pinball.
Troy, congratulations on your NYT debut. I’m sure you worked hard on this puzzle and a certain segment of solvers really loved it. Clearly you have the chops to get the job done and we’ll be seeing your name again. Hopefully I’ll be a little more on the same wave length of your next one.
Saw the S, planned on a Superman theme, got snakes. This is the way life works.
I had a hand-held game device at some point with a snake game on it. If I remember correctly, it's main goal was to avoid eating yourself.
Wow there's a lot of abbreviations today.
Tee-Hees: Get your ONE SOCK out, because we've got...
BOA CONSTRICTOR
ANACONDA
GARTER
MAMBA
ASP
And, of course, KNOB
Uniclues:
1 Heeben høben hurben.
2 One arriving here in a sweet ride.
3 Add tracking devices to penguins.
4 Birthday suit, according to those soon to be dead.
5 Secret woman's website.
1 RIPS NORSK GODS
2 COOKIE JAR ALIEN
3 OUTFIT EMPERORS
4 EMPEROR'S OUTFIT (~)
5 VICTORIA ONLINE
My Fascinating Crossword Uniclue Keepsake from Last Year: Unrepentant ax murderer. NO SWEAT SLAYER.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Yep, Rex you aren't as old as you think you are.
Snake was also on the first IBM PCs in the very early 80s. It was written in "Basic" (computer language) and one could even modify the code if one wanted. There was even a two player mode.
Great memories.
Black garter, mamba boa etc are apparently all actual snakes per Google.
I guess you never owned a Nokia phone.
The crosswordese on this one was terrible
When I had “SNA” for the video game, I thought back to “Snafu” which WAS a snake game on Intellivision, which we had, instead of Atari like all my friends, in the early 1980s.
Famously, St Patrick supposedly drove all the snakes from Ireland
Easy-medium but it felt tougher because I had no idea what was going on (see what @Rex said). I was also guessing on MAYBELLE and VICTORIA. Plus I’ve never heard of the “classic” video game. That said, a pretty good Tuesday, liked it.
No erasures fortunately.
48 yo here: knew the snake game well, and my younger ones play fancy-shmancy versions of the same game online, so the theme was definitely an enjoyable one. Finished within my standard time, but I've only recently been trying to work on my speed, so I guess it played a bit harder than average for me. Hand up for "VICTORIA was a GODess? Well, well - we live and learn." Little bit of bit, little bit of smile, nothing in the fill that made me groan, interesting to see two SCOTUS justices cross each other, and I'm pleased to have done this one. Thanks, Mr. Laedtke!
Tough crowd. I’m with @Roo. Fascinating and complex whether you played video games or not. Great appreciation for the intelligence and determination that saw this puzzle to fruition. Its glass is way more than half full.
As it says in the Wiki excerpt Rex posted, the game started in 1976, and was revived by Nokia in the 1990s. It was a generation before the games Rex mentions; you played it on an Apple or a PC, using the arrow buttons to move it around. Before realistic graphics, before mice, way before Game Boy. Rex isn't too old, he's too young.
The snakes may have been hard to construct, but they made the puzzle really easy to solve; you could basically fill them all in from one or two letters, giving you a big head start on the rest of the grid. I did have an Odd sock, thought one of the two crossing justices was NEaL, and was taken Aside before ABACK, but that was it for problems. GARTER is a bit of an outlier, since it's actually called "GARTER snake." All the other snakes named just stand on their own, or in the case of BOAs, have the whole name in the grid
In addition to the crossing Justices, it was nice to see both BOARS and their fruit in the puzzle.
What? You never played Tron? Your childhood was a sham!
Did you at least play Zaxxon?
Snakes? Snakes, Snakes. I don't know no Snakes.
I think that Harry and Marv would have been right there with @Rex and Ireland in cluelessness about snakes. At least this puzzle was only in two dimensions, hence Snakes on a Plane.
Do BOARS eat BOREFRUIT?
I read that Cassidy Hutchinson said HANS off my CANTO Rudy G.
Congrats on a fun debut, Troy Laedtke.
I felt very cool having Snake loaded onto my graphing calculator in High School
ESS at 7-down is apparently also theme-related: the fully grown sssnake is in an S shape.
I had no idea on the video game, but it really didn't matter. Liked some of the fill – VESTIGIAL was nice. AL FRESCO is where I should be today. I do think ODD SOCK would have been a better answer for the laundry clue.
@bocamp, @Carola – re the Sunday cryptic (yesterday's comments): Did you spot the error in the 9-Across clue? The letter count was indicated as (9) when it should have been (4,5). That held me up for some time. It was wrong in both the print and online versions.
Miss Dana Owens
@Wanderlust (7:05) Yes, I had ODD sock first and yes, I have one of those drawers.
@Lewis (7:28) Love your reference to “our in-the-box pastime.” Never really thought about it that way but it’s so true - boxes inside of a box. Each grid is a like a blank book to me - an enigma I have to [get to] solve to reveal the answers to the mystery. As a highly organized, compartmentalized typical Virgo, no wonder I love it so much.
@Nancy (9:23) I hear ya. My sympathies to your wall.
How about some love for the constructor (Troy Laedtke) for working in the names of five snakes through the shaded squares. Amazed not one word from Rex or fellow solvers for this accomplishment. Sad!
How about some love for the constructor (Troy Laedtke) for the skill in working the names of five snakes into the shaded squares. Great NYT debut.
Solved as a themeless. I have never played a video game in my life (I don't think backgammon counts)& I'm not fond of snakes. That's all I have to say.
I enjoyed building the S-shaped TRAIN of snakes, even though my snakes shrank, as I began with the BOA CONSTRICTOR and worked my way down to the shorter specimens. Then I had fun going back up from the ASP, seeing them feed on the black squares and get longer, some metabolic differences apparently accounting for the varied rates of growth. I liked the inclusion of VESTIGIAL, as a not-one-of-your-everyday words, and ALIEN, as a surprise - it took me a moment to remember that snakes were driven out of Ireland. Somehow, I found that reference to no snakes in a grid full of snakes appealing. Overall, an impressive constructing job and fun to solve.
Do-over: Me, too, for the Odd sock. No idea: the video game referenced.
@Wanderlust 7:09 - Nice job on the bonus SNAKE clues! Agree on Odd, and yes, a couple are languishing, still hopeful, in the drawer.
@bocamp from yesterday, thank you for the link to the cryptic answer. I have to admire the clue - for me it was perfectly worded to mislead. The vital indicator of what to do was new to me.
@Joe DiPinto 11:28, @bocamp - Yes, I did notice that error. At first I wondered if they'd adopted a new practice of not indicating multi-word answers, but soon saw I was wrong about that.
My first two cell phones were Nokias, but I never noticed any snakes. I did hear a hiss from time to time.
Snakes have vestigial legs because they have little bones that serve no purpose but are a remaining vestige of the quadruped land animals they evolved from. Another fun puzzle. I come here every day to see what y'all are going to gripe about but it's getting old.
Seemed OK for a TuesPuz, but that there Snake video game was a no-know, at our arcade. Did know all the participatin puzsnakes, tho. Sooo … it weren't a biter.
Nice windin S-shape for the snake caravan. Might be other aspects, like the increasin snake lengths as they eat black squares, that I'd appreciate more if I knew anything more than snot about the video game.
staff weeject pick: OOO. We're talkin ultimate hOmOgeneOus filler meat, here. honrable mention to no-know VMA [not much of a MTV watcher, here -- M&A sticks to the important stuff, like schlock movie flicks].
some fave stuff: VESTIGIAL snake legs. COOKIEJAR. BOREFRUIT. ALFRESCO. MENORAH. AROMAIC. SNEAKBY [M&A solvequest false alarm note: wrote it in, then erased it, when I thought 49-A was gonna be NORSe]. SMART [another M&A false alarm: had SMALL, at first. Cuz our appliances ain't real smart]. ELTON John.
Thanx for the fun, Mr. Laedtke dude. And nice, slithery debut -- congratz!
@Nancy: har!
Masked & Anonymo3Us
p.s. Luv seein all these great constructioneer debuts. OTOH, also miss some of our old puzmasters, like Hatrick Beery [see that? -- been so long, I kinda forgot how to spell his name]. And many more, of course. Just sayin. At least the newbies ain't AI invaders [I guess].
**gruntz**
I had no idea what the old video game was, and I most certainly lived through the era. Just that I never played any. Ever. For real. I do crosswords on my phone and that is the sum total of my gaming experience. Accordingly, that piece of the puzzle went way over my head. Good news is that ot didn’t matter.
What I found to be extremely clever was the “by eating a black square” trick Mr. Laedtke used to keep the snake “growing” from the three letter ASP that wound its way around in the center of the puzzle and “grew” to be a BOA CONSTRICTOR. This was an astonishing feat of construction. I am impressed as well as entertained. Wow. I cannot imagine how this construction worked out unless he literally took a blank grid and write the snakes in and then built a puzzle. And I don’t care how he did it because the result was fun, and I love fun!
I didn’t need the connection to a video game I’d never encountered. The puzzle itself was easy and understanding the relationship to the video game was irrelevant, so I ignored all that, assumed that the “creature” was a SNAKE and all was well.
Of course Snake is a classic game. Played it many many times as a kid on the old chocolate bar Nokia phones. Loved the theme. Hated some of the crosswordese.
Fine for a Tuesday; had a little trouble getting the snakes in the right directions. ADNOCANA?... they spelled it wrong! RETRAG?
Typeovers at ODD SOCK (no problem), and ELIAS instead of ELENA Kagan. I was probably thinking of Elia Kazan.
[Spelling Bee: Mon 0; no really goofy words. However BOGIE and GIBBET should have been accepted.]
Re: SNAKEs
The gray cells are so dim (to my eyes, anyway) that I proceeded without thinking about a theme, then forgot to check it out post-solve. What a fine feat of CONSTRUCTORing! 🐍
@Joe Dipinto (11:28 AM), (Carola 12:33 PM)
Overlooked that one. I see your point. Otoh, tho no dicts have it as a var, there seems to be plenty of usage on social media: here.
@(Carola 12:33 PM) yw 😊
___
Natan Last's Mon. New Yorker was relatively easy (1 NYT Sat.). Another excellent CONSTRUCTion, tho! :)
___
Peace 🕊 🇺🇦 ~ Compassion ~ Tolerance ~ Kindness, Freudenfreude & a DAP to all 👊 🙏
SNAKES! ...Is it in the grass? No? Slithering in some foreign video arcade game that I've never heard of? No?
You know what I had fun with today.....drawing a little picture in the shaded squares and wondering if they were VESTIGIAL enough...It remind me of some far away quotation: If the glove don't fit, you must acquit. Don't ask.
OK, so we have Tuesday SNAKES that eat a black square. Yummmm. I don't mind snakes. I think it was @Pete who had one stuck in his kitchen widow. I wondered if little messes might be crawling around.
The GARTER seems to be the nicest of the group. I'm not sure what I'd do if I should dance with a MAMBA. Isn't that little darling one of the deadliest of all? OOO look...it's slithering around the BAMBA.
Para bailar la BAMBA se necesita una poca de MAMBA....Ay frijoles.
Adios amigos, companeros de mi vida.
I might just go over to @JD's law firm and have a little chat with Boars, Borefruit and Smears. I'm betting they have a ton of stories to tell.
Snakes made an early appearance and then reappeared on Nokia phones. So it wasn’t a question of a parallel universe just that Rex was both too old and too young as people have said.
Also a lot of people never had a Nokia phone and they ( including me) could easily have miss its reappearance
So what. I enjoyed the puzzle anyway.
Liked finding the snake nams
@bocamp 1:44 - but those are just hashtags and other web headings that stereotypically run words together.
I thought only of centipede too. I liked that game.
If you are confused about "Sol", Google "solfege."
My combination of tablet and (software) keyboard made doing the rebus impossible, but the NYT app didn't care.
I know nothing of this or other video games but I found the theme amusing and fun to solve.
What about those plumbers' snakes? They never get any respect.
I wormed my way thru this puz - not sure I "get" all of the snaky answers. That's ok tho.
Diana, LIW
FRUIT JAR CANTO
ASIF the PERE INSTRUCTS
to RETRAIN and BORE ya:
in GOD'S OUTFIT no luck,
to make VICAR VICTORIA.
--- MAYBELLE MENORAH
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