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Relative difficulty: Easy
Theme answers:
- IN-APP PURCHASE (22A: Extra lives or additional gems, for a freemium game)
- "I'M TOO OLD FOR THIS NOW" (31A: "The kids these days have gotten way better than me")
- HAWAII ISLANDERS (48A: Former minor-league team that played at Aloha Stadium)
- CNN NEWS HEADLINE (84A: Something delivered by Jake Tapper or Anderson Cooper)
- KRISTIN SCOTT THOMAS (98A: "The English Patient" actress)
- BUSINESS SENSE (115A: Executive's acumen)
Eve Jihan Cooper (née Jeffers; born November 10, 1978) is an American rapper, singer, and actress. Her debut studio album, Let There Be Eve...Ruff Ryders' First Lady (1999) reached number one on the Billboard 200—making her the third female rapper to accomplish this feat—and received double platinum certification by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). The album spawned the hit singles "What Ya Want" (featuring Nokio), "Love Is Blind," and "Gotta Man." That same year, she guest featured on The Roots' Grammy Award-winning single "You Got Me" as well as Missy Elliott's single "Hot Boyz," which peaked within the top ten of the Billboard Hot 100.Eve's second studio album, Scorpion (2001) was released to similar success. Its lead single, "Let Me Blow Ya Mind" (featuring Gwen Stefani) won her and Stefani the inaugural Grammy Award for Best Rap/Sung Collaboration and an MTV Video Music Award, while peaking at number two on the Billboard Hot 100. Her third album, Eve-Olution (2002) found continued success and yielded the single "Gangsta Lovin'" (featuring Alicia Keys), which likewise peaked at number two on the chart. The album also spawned the Dr. Dre-produced single "Satisfaction," which, along with her 2007 single "Tambourine" and guest performance on City High's 2001 single "Caramel," peaked within the top 40 of the Billboard Hot 100. She also guest featured on Gwen Stefani's Grammy Award-nominated 2004 single "Rich Girl," which received double platinum certification by the RIAA. After parting ways with Interscope Records, Eve released her fourth studio album, Lip Lock (2013) as her first independent project.
As an actress, she starred as Terri Jones in the comedy drama films Barbershop, Barbershop 2: Back in Business, and Barbershop: The Next Cut, and played the lead role of Shelley Williams on the UPNtelevision sitcom Eve. Eve also had supporting roles in the drama film The Woodsman (2004), the comedy film The Cookout (2004) and the horror film Animal (2014). From 2017 to 2020, she co-hosted the CBS Daytime talk show The Talk, where she was nominated for two Daytime Emmy Award. (wikipedia)
• • •
I started the puzzle in Black Ink (my solving software of choice) but the notes said something about "blue squares" and I could see no blue squares in my grid, so I dutifully switched over to the NYTXW website in order to solve the puzzle. I didn't really need those blue squares—that is, the puzzle seems like it would've been easily solvable without them, but with them, it was a cinch, especially once you picked up on the gimmick. My main issue with the theme execution is how made-up some of the themers seem. HAWAII ISLANDERS? Does anyone know what that is? Who the hell knows former minor league teams that well. It was easy enough to piece together, but generally I think that if the answer wouldn't fly in a non-thematic context (and HAWAII ISLANDERS definitely wouldn't), it doesn't have much business in the puzzle as a themer either. I gave serious sideeye to "I'M TOO OLD FOR THIS NOW" as well. The "NOW" part is ... struggling. Very forced. "I'M TOO OLD FOR THIS" works great on its own. Add the "NOW" and you've got an obvious case of "I had to make this answer match the length of corresponding theme answer, for symmetry's sake." What I really wanted to write in was "I'M TOO OLD FOR THIS S***!" (mostly because that was how I was feeling as I solved yet another Scrabble-themed puzzle—live long enough, and they just keep coming at you). CNN NEWS HEADLINE also feels entirely made-up. Like, yes, that is a thing, but it's not nearly enough of a thing to be a standalone answer. I mean, by definition, the thing they say is a CNN NEWS HEADLINE because they are CNN NEWS anchors (???). Bizarre.
Had BUSINESSSAVVY before BUSINESSSENSE and was much happier that way. SENSE was yet another anticlimactic moment. Why couldn't you make SAVVY work there. It's a much snappier word than mere SENSE. Sigh. There were some answers I did enjoy. I think KRISTIN SCOTT THOMAS is the best of the themers. I enjoy her in anything I see her in, the latest thing being the Apple TV series "Slow Horses." I also like SWEET CORN and BRUSCHETTA and MAPLE GLAZE, yum. And overall, I thought the quality of the fill was pretty strong, or at least solid. I don't recall wincing very much, if at all. Oh, that clue on TSE, yipes (97A: Cyrillic letter pronounced like the "zz" of "pizza"). I might've winced at that. The most obscure clue, and you put it on the absolute worst bit of fill you've got? Why? Why would you do that? Don't put a flashing neon sign on the bad stuff. Just let people get it with the most ordinary of clues and Move Along. Cyrillic letter!? LOL, no. You've already got another foreign (Greek) letter in the grid (ETA), you don't need more.
Not many trouble spots today. Struggled with both DNA (35A: Two-million-year-old discovery in 2022 in the frozen soil of Greenland) and MOP (41A: Shaggy hairstyle), but thankfully DMITIRI Mendeleev came to the rescue. Had LEASH at 1A: New dog owner's purchase (CRATE), but discarded it as soon as I realized I couldn't get any of the crosses to work. After that, no wrong guesses that I can recall. Oh, nope, spoke too soon. I definitely had "NOT SO!" before "BUT NO!" at 11D: "Au contraire!" but BTS came to the rescue (weird how I can know virtually nothing about a band and it will still come to my rescue—solve crosswords long enough and you get very friendly with answers you actually know nothing about!) (11A: Pop group with an "army"). This puzzle added to my store of EMU lore, which is nice. They're tall, they run fast, they're from Australia, they lay big green eggs ... and they have "deep booming calls." I'm curious, now, about what that means. Let's see if we can find out ... ah, cool, here we go. And this video contains even more lore—two sets of eyelids, what!?
Speaking of birds ... check out this Sri Lankan money someone sent me earlier this year, during my annual $$$-raising week!
I can't really spend it, but I can admire it. I wish we had birds on our money. Besides the eagle, I mean. Wait, is the eagle even on our money, or is that just the quarter? Oh yeah, there it is, right across from the loopy one-eyed pyramid on the $1 bill.
Still, though, we can do better than an oddly splayed eagle. Realistic portraits of different birds are so much nicer than portraits of dour old white guys. And why do we still have monochrome money!? So boring. Now that no one uses cash anymore, I say it's time to mix it up. I want orange crows, blue owls, purple condors! We've had this off-green crap long enough.
Points? I went to all that trouble for POINTS???
ReplyDeleteLMTR! Much more, as a matter of fact. Though the theme was no great shakes and involved no humor, it was at least somewhat interesting. The puzzle was solvable. Though as usual I knew nothing about the pop culture personalities who were clued, the crossings were fair and there were no naticks that I could see, so, a clean finish. If the NYT could do at least this much every Sunday, I 'd be a happy camper. Very little crosswordese in this one (notwithstanding the ubiquitous "BAE"), so all in all, kudis to the collaborative constructors, and keep' em coming!
ReplyDeletePretty easy. No WOEs and only a few minor erasures (me too for leash). Reasonably smooth grid, clever theme (although I know nothing about how Scrabble works so I’m just assuming it’s clever), liked it except that I didn’t get the blue squares in my grid on the app on my iPad.
ReplyDeleteI was really clueless solving this puzzle. For starters based on the title I expected it to have something to do with pool as in billiards. Only when the revealer gave it away was I disabused of this. Of course other than that revealer it really has nothing to do with Scrabble either.
ReplyDeleteI have no idea what an APPPURCHASE is so that got the puzzle off to a slow start. More than the difficulty with the theme I was struggling with the fill. It was about 50/50 with the clues. Some sections were easy to fill but I had to leave a lot blank and come back later.
Today's nadir had to be when I spelled GESTURE with a J and then couldn't think of any Pan feature that started with a J. You'd think that would have clued me in but it stayed JESTURE until the crosses gave me GOATEE.
I got a clean grid in the end but it was a struggle.
yd -0, QB1
Supposedly I finished with an "error"; but I put quotes around that word because I argue I did not make an error, the clue writer did. For "Negative Boolean operator" I had NOT, as any computer programmer will tell you is correct. Check this Google if you doubt me. NOR is something quite different: "a truth-functional operator which produces a result that is the negation of logical or" (Wikipedia). Translation: basically what it means in everyday English.
ReplyDeleteAnyway, triple letter thing, fine. Shaky start when I omitted the I'M and had TOO OLD FOR THIS NOW, missing the actual method of deployment of the gimmick.
[Spelling Bee: Sat 0. My week, Sun to Sat: -1, -1, 0, -1, 0, -2, 0. No streaks for me!]
Thank you, @okanaganer 4:37 AM! My wonderful husband was a systems designer and is the one who taught me everything I needed to know about Boolean terms so that I could be the “baddest” Lexis/Nexis, Orbit, Dialog, ERIC etc searcher during the very early days before full text searching arrived and the research librarians were the grad students’ best friends. Before I left librarianship to practice law. I was ready to pounce on that construction mistake.
DeleteIn case I'm the first to say this: Rex, look at a picture of a Scrabble board. Some of the squares are labeled TRIPLE LETTER SCORE. Using them well is a great way to rack up POINTS. It's a pun (because you triple the score, not the letter), but a pretty direct one.
ReplyDeleteI think the idea is that the blue squares are triple letters; they spell POINTS, which give you a SCORE, completing the triple letter "score". If they didn't spell "points" then they'd just be triple letters.
ReplyDeleteThat said, I agree that many of the triple letter clues were not satisfying.
ReplyDeleteThank you, @Rex, for POINTS. I didn't bother to check post-solve to see if the blue squares spelled anything. I agree with Easy; I got the triple letter theme at IN-A[PP P]URCHASE and after that the only mystery was whether every themer would have a triple-P or if they'd spread out the wealth.
1A: Unlike all you leAsh before CRATErs, I had id tag first.
24A: THE teRROR before THE HORROR
32D: MAPLE syrup before GLAZE
61D: chi before ETA (both fit the clue)
81A: EvaDE before ELUDE
HAWAI'I ISLANDERS was inferable from the clue and the crosses, so I think it's fair if obscure. But completely agree with OFL about I'M TOO OLD FOR THIS NOW--the NOW takes a sparkly answer and makes it go *thud*. Sh!t would have been a much better add-on word. But yeah, it was easy, and Mark L. at 5:18 (really 4:18--ugh) and Anonymous at 5:31 (really 4:31--ugh) explained the TRIPLE LETTER SCORE. A lovely 19-minute diversion.
ReplyDeleteUnlike probably many of the logophiles here I have no interest in the game and thus none in this puzzle. A downright slog.
ReplyDeleteOne solving nit for me was the seemingly over abundance of double letter pairs throughout the grid in conflict with the themers - SWEET CORN, ODD MAN, THE HORROR etc.
Nelson Riddle at his finest - and on @Nancy’s list earlier this week
A decent puzzle overall, but the 'bonus' was not worth it (they rarely are). Why on earth would you clue LOREN that way? Neither IM TOO OLD FOR THIS NOW nor CNN NEWS HEADLINE are exactly standalone phrases. In general, the themers other than IN APP PURCHASE felt needlessly forced.
ReplyDeleteSurprised to see no comment from Rex about the dupe of “purchase”, especially nearly right on top of each other (1A clue, 22A theme answer). Never recall seeing NABOB before but I’m sure it’s been used before - looked it up after and it’s a word, while I was thinking I just wasn’t parsing it right (maybe NA Bob, like Coors Cutter).
ReplyDelete@Son Volt - how are the double letters in conflict with the triple letters in the theme answers? If it was DOUBLELETTERSCORES, I’d agree with you… but I don’t see double letters being outlawed by this theme.
ReplyDeleteThere squares on the scrabble board called “triple letter score” and “triple word score” and on those squares you get three times the points. It’s not complex math or anything involved.
ReplyDeleteIt seems a little mean to buy a CRATE for your dog - why is that necessary ? Is it the canine equivalent of a car seat for an infant or toddler ? I can see a cage for a bird or a hamster - but crating up dogs seems like something that would draw the ire of the ASPCA.
ReplyDeleteI forgot about the whole BCE convention even thought it’s probably been around for at least a decade now (I still reflexively go with BC/AD) and of course I never heard of ESTAR. We finally got a foreign language answer that I knew (ICH - mostly from JFK) which happens to appear right below that gibberishy looking GAELIC quote - is GAELIC a real language (that people still speak), or is it more like Latin ?
The theme once again felt forced, especially with the ISLANDERS and the NOW instead of SHIT. And of course I don’t know the actress, but from Rex’s comment she is apparently pretty well known.
Gaelic is a real language.
DeleteThe crate is used for “potty training” because the dog will not go to the bathroom in her crate. You use a crate big enough so she turn around but not so big that she’ll go on the other side and not have to worry about lying in her urine.
DeleteSurprised this puzzle missed the most apt three-letter combination: ZZZ
ReplyDeletePretty much a large Monday puzzle with a wee gimmick.
ReplyDeleteLike okanaganer, I had NOt for the Boolean operator. No clue on the Spanish cross, so could not spot the error and eventually had to give up and check Rex for the answer. Foreign language clues are usually ones I check against Google if I have an error, but I was so sure of NOT…
ReplyDeleteAs usual, I’m amused by the number of things we can complain about when the puzzle isn’t perfectly congruent with our standards of perfection.
ReplyDeleteThis puzzle was absolutely fine, especially for a Sunday audience. Triple letter squares score triple POINTS in scrabble. There. Perfectly fine. Why complain about it?
Overall, I found the fill-in to be smooth but with enough resistance to happify my brain. The triple-letter theme seemed, to me, to highlight the actual double-letters in the grid, of which there are just about 20.
ReplyDeleteI loved the comforting vibe of the HOT TUB, SWEET CORN, and BRUSCHETTA. I also liked the fauna mini-theme: ASPCA, ANIMAL, HERON, STEER, GOATee, BEE, EMUS, LION, RHINOS, and SNAIL. I adored using the triple-letter gimmick to help crack theme answers – that was très cool.
And I liked the pop of the seven theme-related answers – only one of them (IN-APP PURRCHASE) has ever appeared in the NYT puzzle before.
A sweet jaunt in the box, therefore, for which I’m eminently grateful. Thank you, Enrique and Matthew!
I enjoyed this pleasant Sunday puzzle. Agree some of the themers were a little forced, although I was good with BUSINESSSENSE and CNNNEWSHEADLINE. Considered CELEB for a "bigwig" but knew that wouldn't work with the Jake Tapper / Anderson Cooper cross. We were also hung up in the north for while, when my wife insisted that HBO aired "Better Call Saul."
ReplyDelete@SouthsideJohnny, 7:44 AM: Crating is a real thing, and it's fine. It keeps a young puppy from wandering around late at night, peeing all over everything. (Or getting into other things.) It's not some wooden crate that's all enclosed. Of course, you get a large-enough one that it's not cramped. You put some nice, comfortable bedding in it, and they're good with it.
https://www.aspcapetinsurance.com/resources/how-to-crate-train-a-puppy/
https://www.humanesociety.org/resources/crate-training-101
We know "nabob" from Spiro Agnew: Nattering kabobs of negativism, was how he referred to the press coverage of his misdeeds, a phrase attributed to his speechwriter, the one and only William Safire. His spontaneous reaction was, famously, "the b's changed the rules"
ReplyDeleteCrates are ubiquitously used for housebreaking puppies. Not cruel at all... They are den animals and happily go into the crates. Once the puppies are housebroken, the crates are left open and the dogs often use them as a sanctuary. That is, providing the cat hasn't beat them to it...
ReplyDeleteYeah it was fine.
ReplyDeleteThe Irish village of Clove speaks an unusual variant of Gaelic. It's referred to as a Gaelic of Clove. If a resident of Clove were to mince words, it would be minced Gaelic.
ReplyDeleteThe negation operator in Boolean logic is "not,", not "nor." Boo.
ReplyDeleteNOR is, in fact, a Boolean operator, but nobody ever uses it. It appears in one place in most logic textbooks, and usually not by that name. It has the nice property of being functionally complete, which is to say you can express any statement of elementary logic with just NORs.
ReplyDeleteA better clue would have mentioned its use as a logic gate in EE/CE. It's about as well-known as the mathematical usage, and a NOT gate is usually just called an inverter.
I'm not writing this post because I'm embarrassed that I can't conjugate Spanish 101 verbs. Nope, not at all.
For @Burghman -
ReplyDeleteSee “nattering NABOBs of negativity” per then VP Spiro Agnew
okanaganer – NOT may work but does ESTAT for the crossing clue?
ReplyDeleteI suggest adding WOE to the glossary in the FAQ.
ReplyDelete@Burghman. Who can forget Spiro Agnew and the "battering kabobs of negativism?"
ReplyDeleteVery annoyed with myself for having ESTAS/NOS instead of ESTAR/NOR, which caused me to DNF. I took Spanish in high school, and apparently it didn't stick. Otherwise, this one didn't put up too much resistance. I am slightly irked that one of the themers is an actress I've ever heard of from a 30 year old movie I'll never watch, but it did remind me of a funny Seinfeld episode, so I'll give it a pass.
ReplyDelete@okanaganer (and others): I had the exact same finish. @Sasha, I’m slightly embarrassed by my inability to conjugate Spanish verbs.
ReplyDeleteWhen I hit the cross of a TikTok celebrity and a rap album title, I thought, “I’M TOO OLD FOR THIS . . . Natick.”
In Scrabble, you try to use the triple letter score in two words simultaneously, e.g. foX crossing with Xi. You get that big X score tripled twice that way. The triple squares did not work with the crosses in the puzzle. They were just single letters. As a Scrabble fan, I was annoyed by that the entire (very easy) solve. Boo!
ReplyDeleteHey All !
ReplyDeleteHad the Revealer first off the back end, ergo, saw it was LETTER SCORE from pattern recognition from the Downs I had filled in. Dutifully threw in DOUBLE, because I said, "There's no way it'll be TRIPLE." Har. Ate some crow on that.
Can't seem to get a Streak on any type going. Got the Almost There, so on a SunPuz, I find it daunting to try to find mistakes, so I hit Check Puzzle today. Had three (!) wrong squares. Yeesh. PROtO/EtE (which is a silly one), KRISTeN/LeON (which is a forgiveable one [True Natick there, two Proper Nouns crossing at a vowel]), ESTAs/NOs (I'll give that one a pass also. 😁)
Did like the puz.
A lot of Threes today, 24(!) in the Acrosses, 11 in the Downs. 35 total. Fill pretty good. THE HORROR. DONE THAT. ODD MAN OUT. HOT TUB. Liked the little ABC/ABBA/ANNAN section.Got yer non-forced in Z.
IM DUE to get my taxes e-filed today.
Happy Daylight Savings Time Sunday!
One F
RooMonster
DarrinV
@ncmathdasist (8:57)
ReplyDeleteIn Boolean logic, NOR is used to indicate that two things must be false in order for something to be true. Cluing this as a 'negative Boolean operator" seems fine to me.
On the other hand, while "lukewarm" and "tepid" may be used interchangeable analogously in regard to persons, any baker knows that Lukewarm water and tepid water are not at all the same. Try to proof your yeast in tepid water and you'll wait until hell freezes over before anything happens (and starve for lack of bread in the process)
Was zooming around quite nicely, thank you, and hit a major roadblock, so I changed my DOUBLE to TRIPLE and that fixed that. Come on, man.
ReplyDeleteAgree with some that the Scrabble gimmick worked fine and was a nice little Aha! when it showed up. That took the IMTOOOLD themer for me to catch on, as the INAPPURCHASE was no help. Ditto for MS. SCOTTHOMAS. I'm sure she's a fine actress but her work is unfamiliar to me.
I thought most of this was fine but if I never see another clue referencing a tv channel, a text abbreviation, or a rap album, I'll be a happy man.
OFL's money observations made me wonder if he's received my check. I'm still waiting for my thank you note with a cat on it. Anyone else?
Liked your Sunday just fine, EHA and MR. Essentially Had A Monday Ring to it, and I had a good time. Thanks for all the fun.
@Pablo 10:04
DeleteNow that you mention it, yeah, still waiting for my @Rex kitty card! I venmoed him & he did acknowledge that but you're right, no card so far, huh.
Rex, you are a little too harsh about the Scrabble theme. I got it, but I dont understand INAPPPURCHASE. shouldn't the first letter be an A? can someone please explain what I am missing.
ReplyDeleteIt’s a phrase you might see in the Apple App Store, say, which indicates that you can buy things “IN” the app, even when the app itself is free.
DeleteWhen you go to purchase or download any app in the App Store, the description/info will tell you if there are any in-app purchases required. In other words, you’ll need to pay more later to keep using/playing the app or game. It’s a phrase or line item found in literally every app description in the App Store (sometimes the answer is “none”).
DeleteI thought @Rex gave a great critique today, especially since he topped it off with saying that the “fill” was pretty good. This kind of puzzle kind of matches my mood on Sunday mornings, that is, I like a puzzle that IKNOW I’ll be able to solve, but it takes a few more relaxing minutes to do so. I will say I’m a bit surprised that more bloggers HERE haven’t gone through a Scrabble phase at some point in their life, given the Spelling Bee squad. Add a little competition and strategy…it’s basically SB!
ReplyDelete@Southside, I see @Matthew B and @Colin have explained the crate scene…they are right! Hah! You should check on Google…some of these things could be described as mini-havens. Our dog used to retreat to his when we had gatherings and she had no where to “chill out.” I’ve never had a cat and a dog at the same time but I can only imagine there could/would be some “crate wars”! My guess is most times the dog finally does an eyeroll and goes…harumpf…ok, FINE!
For the longest time I was confusing SWEET CORN with CREAMED CORN in my head, so I kept refusing to add the CORN part because I was like “who on earth would eat creamed corn with their hands??”
ReplyDeleteI wouldn't call this B-B-Bad to the bone, but it was awfully easy. I assume the storm you all have raised about the Boolean operator would be a NOReaster.
ReplyDeleteI knew that 40D couldn't be popCORN, because that's always eaten with utensils. Of course if you combine it with 63A (What a cracker might crack), you get the NUTcracker SWEETCORN.
I finished and stared at the blue squares thinking "What's the POINTS?"
Still, I liked it fine. Thanks, Enrique Henestroza Anguiano and Matthew Stock.
ALICE: The reference is to purchases made within an app, ergo INAPP
ReplyDeletePERSONAL BEST Sunday time.
(This comment may only make sense to someone who solved on paper.)
ReplyDeleteIn my entire history of doing the NYTXW, I can't remember ever having a more profound reversal from highly negative feelings to highly positive feelings mid-solve.
Oh, was I ever hating this puzzle! Look -- you already know that I can't stand the squooshed squares one gets in a 16x15 puzzle -- squares that leave me no room to write in my own letter. You also know that I'm put off by annoying tiny little circles that look confusingly like "O"s when I want to write in my own letter. So I'm saying to myself today: "Don't those stupid NYT puzzle editors know that these bleepin' blue squares are MUCH TOO DARK to allow me to see the letter I'm writing in? I mean really!
And then I hit the "TRIP" of TRIPLE LETTER SCORE and the scales fall from my eyes. So THAT's why that shade of blue looked so familiar! Aha!!! Scrabble!!! And, yes, it would have been a weaker puzzle if the blue had not been that precise shade.
I went from hating this puzzle to absolutely loving it. Great "Aha!" moment. Cleverly chosen themers. Nice and crunchy before getting the trick and enjoyably whooshy thereafter.
You're forgiven NYT. Your choice of blue was necessary and correct. No, I still couldn't see the letters I wrote in, but...I coped. It was all in a good cause.
For all you folks bemoaning your inability to conjugate a Spanish verb, relax. The clue wants an infinitive, which is the unconjugated form of the verb-"to be" = ESTAR.
ReplyDeleteYou're welcome.
Of course knowing nothing about Boolean logic meant no confusion there either.
In the print edition the cyan boxes have little POINTS sticking out of each side, just like on a real honest-to-goodness Scrabble board! That was the most exciting thing about this puzzle.
ReplyDeletePOINTS for getting a music cue exactly right: this end-of-year 1970 hit is heard being played in a bowling alley in "The Holdovers", which takes place in late December of...1970!
This started out super galumphy until I wrote in TRIPLE LETTER SCORE off the T. Afterward, I grew to appreciate an amusing cluing voice and those triple letters were fun to battle. Unusual to enjoy a Sunday without reservations even with all the junkiness.
ReplyDeleteNow, this ate at me all last night. I have a math question: I believe 100% of the time a math clue appears in the puzzle, a math expert will pipe in and assure us it is wrong. Yesterday was no exception. Mathematics is nothing if not precise, and crosswords are in the business of celebrating the slightly askew, so fine, I get it, the clue is wrong. BUT, typically, as yesterday, the commenter is utterly grief stricken. We were dealing with COSET, and I wouldn't know a COSET if it was in line in front of me at the grocery store, but the puzzle left one mathematician "irritated" and another "appalled." The last math class I took was in 1984, so maybe things have changed, but my main recollection was an auditorium full of undergrads looking confused and getting it wrong. I am under the impression mathematicians live in a world surrounded by incorrect answers, wrongheadedness, dead ends, partial solutions, continuous questions, and students and colleagues getting it wrong like a pack of dolts. So how in the world can mathematicians muster the strength on every math clue to become aghast? Is it just mathematicians who do crosswords, or are they all scandalized all the time? Is there a Big Bang-style whiteboard with a formula describing the level of abhorrentness one can stand from the unwashed barbarians before you say enough is enough? I looked at the Wikipedia page on COSET and it says "heebledy geebledy, garbledy goober" (I'm paraphrasing) and that seems close enough for crosswords. It is assuredly wrong, but maybe not have-a-cow wrong.
Uniclues:
1 When you click on anything connected to Zuckerberg.
2 A great place to get drunk and lei-d.
3 Disney subsidiary shows Irishmen practicing what we once boorishly called Eskimo kisses.
4 Knowing when to fire the dude with the wrong power tie.
5 Zoo-yard bullies pick on cat.
1 THE HORROR IN-APP PURCHASE (~)
2 HAWAIIAN ISLANDER'S BREW PUB
3 ABC RAN GAELIC NOSES
4 ODD MAN OUT BUSINESS SENSE
5 RHINOS PROD LION
My Fascinating Crossword Uniclue Keepsake from Last Year: "It tastes good," and "you should try it." MELLO-YELLO LIES.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Isn’t “cannon fodder” the target, not the ammo. Surprised Rex didn’t pick that out.
ReplyDeleteHaven’t seen it myself, but think that tshirts are shot out of cannons as entertainment at certain events.
DeleteNo blue squares for me. I solve using the app on my iPad. I knew INAPPPURCHASE must be right, and thought there must be a rebus. But then TEPID became tepppid, which is obviously wrong. I had to come here and check the puzzle to see where the blue squares were supposed to be. Then it was very easy.
ReplyDeleteCrating dogs is very common, yes. That doesn't make it less cruel. We crate people, too, when we put them in prisons. After awhile, these prisoners become acclimated to their fate and voluntarily enter their cells. Long term prisoners often continue this practice upon being paroled; they've become habituated to it. Let's not pretend dogs would voluntarily go into a box barely larger than themselves if they weren't trained to do it, via carrot and stick, when they were young.
I thought this puzzle was a lotta fun — clever cluing and enough aha moments and trivia to keep me entertained. The triple letters helped with the solve and anyone who’s ever seen an open scrabble board will recognize those blue squares (tho I actually guessed “double” not believing there’d be enough triple letter phrases to populate a Sunday grid). Hooray, a fun Sunday! Almost makes up for losing an hour of sleep.
ReplyDeleteThe complete Agnew quite is this:
ReplyDelete"In the United States today, we have more than our share of the nattering nabobs of negativism. They have formed their own 4-H Club - the 'hopeless, hysterical hypochondriacs of history"
Though today nearly every citation erroneously reports that this remark was directed at the media and about the media, this is not the case. Agnew did not mention the media at all. Instead he was quite clearly referring more generally to a liberal intellectual class. It was only in the following year, when Agnew started explicitly attacking media and the press, that the myth begin to grow (apparently pushed by the media itself) that Agnew had pointed to them in this speech in Des Moines. Citations today uncritically accept this inaccuracy, not bothering the check the full speech and context. Another example of history being not what REALLY happened, but what people SAY happened.
For me, ditto with Okanoganer. I do not speak Spanish, but I do know library research. There are three Boolean operators: AND, OR, NOT-"nor" is not one of these. A pox on the house of the constructor. Other than that, this was a bit too easy for a Sunday.
ReplyDeleteYikes, MT IDA, PLANO, GAELIC, BTS, PROVO, HAWAII, EMU, ALPS, NAM—really had to chase around the globe for this one. Unlike @REX did not find it easy, but thought the Scrabble theme well done.
ReplyDelete@ JMS (11:27am)
ReplyDeleteExcellent catch. You are absolutely right. Fodder (a root word for food that will be consumed) are the expendable soldiers who are consumed by the ammunition shot from the cannon. TSHIRTS Are the ammo, not the fodder.
Not only might Rex have picked this up, but the crossword editors ought to have seen and corrected the error.
"Easy"?! We're supposed to know what the hell a "freemium game" is, and then fill in PPP answers for the other theme clues? Along with "CarPlay"? "Flashback console"? A "TikTok star"? A "1990s teen comedy"?
ReplyDeleteHow I miss crosswords designed for people who actually read books.
To correct the record LOREN was a WOE.
ReplyDeleteA scrabble board says TRIPLE LETTER SCORE in certain squares
ReplyDelete@Gary Jugert (11:23). Nice comment. We used to have a guy around here named Joaquin. He established Joaquin's Dictum which says that crossword clues are clues not definitions. The mathematicians who got all huffy are taking subgroup to be a definition instead of a conversational description.
ReplyDelete@JMS & @H. Gunn – I was wondering about that "cannon fodder" clue too. M-W gives this as a second definition of "fodder":
ReplyDelete2: inferior or readily available material used to supply a heavy demand
• fodder for tabloids
• This sort of breezy plot line has become cheap fodder for novelists and screenwriters …Sally Bedell
But I'm not convinced that definition would describe something loaded into a cannon in order to be shot out of it, even metaphorically. I find no indication that "cannon fodder" is ever used in that sense.
Almost forgot to say that I liked this Sunday's Acrostic. Fairly easy, I thought.
I held BRUNCH ITEM way too long before conceding to BRUSCHETTA. Doh.
ReplyDelete@Ken Freeland
ReplyDeleteI've seen LMTR before, because I know I've tried to Google it before, but I can't figure out what it means.
@Joe from Lethbridge
There are other Boolean operators in use besides the ones you found from a cursory search. People have used NAND, NOR, XOR, and there are others. (I personally think it's better to call NOR a *negated* operator, but I'm not too fussed about it.)
It's short for Liked More Than Rex, vs. HMTR... you can probably figure that one out yourself, lol
DeleteThe “contents” of the six shaded squares consist of 18 letters. “Points” does not have 18 letters.
ReplyDeleteFodder is feed. You feed a t-shirt cannon with t-shirts.
ReplyDeleteAlso, it looks like nobody picked up on that there is a rack in Scrabble where you 'Rack up' your letters.
soooo … The dark blue squares indeed do each "SCORE" [i.e. gain] a TRIPLELETTER, I reckon. POINTS, for that pun, at least.
ReplyDelete35 weejects, so very hard to just pick one fave. Well, split my infinitives, no … it's gotta be:
staff weeject pick: BTS. No matter how often this band shows up, I can never remember their weird abbreve-name. No ifs, ands, or bts.
fave stuff: SPACESUIT. [Just watched the Adam Sandler "SPACEMAN" flick last night. Schlocky … like]. BRUSCHETTA [PuzEatinSpouse makes it usin fresh herbs outta her plant pots. Deee-lightful. I want to go to there]. CRATE clue [This would not be M&A's number one purchase, for his new dog … and why purchase a crate, anyhoo? Don't they come free with some large food orders?]
Thanx for the fun, and for gangin up on us, Angulano & Stock dudes. Surely that Scrabble board square wasn't that dark a blue, tho -- I wouldn'ta been able to read it. [M&A prefers Bananagrams, btw -- doesn't require a century to play a game of it.]
Masked & Anonymo10Us
**gruntz**
p.s. M&A's solution/proof for that math problem from yesterday:
http://puzzlecrowd.com/kf/ABLineProof.jpeg
Those who insiste that there are only three Boolean operators leave out a critical word: "basic"
ReplyDeleteThat is, while it is true that there are three basic operators (AND, Or, NOT),there are additionally other complex operators that are built upon combinations of the three basic operators, to wit:
NAND: combining the NOT and AND gates
NOR: combining the NOT and OR gates
XOR: exclusively OR
XNOR; exclusively NOR
The clue was agnostic on the question of whether it referred to a basic or complex Boolean operator. Since NOR is a complex operator, there is nothing incorrect about the clue or about the answer.
Yes, it was an easy, breezy Sunday. But since I know very little Spanish and know nothing about negative Boolean operators, I got Naticked at the ESTAR/NOR cross, where I figured the final letter of each word had to be an S.
ReplyDelete@JMS 11:27 and H Gunn12:22
ReplyDeleteRIGHT
I was skimming through the comments wondering if anyone would comment on the cannon fodder goof. I looked it up after the puzzle to see if there was something I was missing about how t-shirts could be cannon fodder. Found nothing.
@MetroGnome. I found it difficult for similar reasons. Very obscure PPP. I googled TIK TOK and did not learn how there could be TikTok celebrity
Does anyone actually say "bae"??
I HOPE NOT
The recaptcha had been believing me without the test for a while. Apparently it was saving up. Today it made me do four or five. THankfullly the last two were large enough to be seen.
@Tom S. (1:45 pm) The clue was about "Cannon Fodder" - not "Fodder." "Cannon Fodder" has a specific commonly agreed-upon meaning, which does not in any way include whatever it is you feed into the cannon for ammunition.
ReplyDeleteCELEB before NABOB, IPC before BAR, KRISTEN before KRISTIN, but I seem to have won a Scrabble game with no opponents. Fine, as I haven't been able to find anyone willing to play Scrabble with me for years now.
ReplyDelete@GaryJugert - you had me hee-heeing out loud. Easyish puz but I can't be bothered looking for my mistakes when it tells me I'm off. Hate doing it online anyway - but "due to unforeseen circumstances" my papers didn't come today!
ReplyDeleteI've had two QBs this week, which I'm enjoying, seeing I'm not in the Premium League.
N.W. 2:35 PM Fodder is something you feed to something. I think feeding t-shirts to a t-shirt cannon is fair. You don't think the constructors were perhaps trying to fool us by being clever? OK, maybe they should have put a '?' after the clue...
ReplyDeleteI would have guessed that there would be near 100% overlap between the Venn Diagram circle for Scrabble players and the one for crossword puzzle solvers. I've long been a fan of both.
ReplyDeleteOne of the metrics that is used in grading puzzles is the "Scrabble score". There is a category by that name at xwordinfo.com where puzzles with highest and lowest scores are listed.
For those unfamiliar with Scrabble:
Scrabble letters are grouped by their relative frequency of occurrence in standard English texts with the less frequent ones getting higher values/scores and vice versa.
"When Alfred Butts invented the game, he initially experimented with different distributions of letters. A popular story claims that Butts created an elaborate chart by studying the front page of The New York Times to create his final choice of letter distributions." (Wiki)
One goal is to arrange your words on the board so that high value tiles like Q or Z land on double and TRIPLE LETTER SCORE squares, maximizing the POINTS for each word.
The "Rack 'Em Up" title refers to the tray or "Rack" where your tiles are kept as you search for places on the board where they will form new words. As tiles are used, new ones are drawn from the remaining pool and "Racked Up" on your tray.
The game ends when no one can form any more words, usually after most of the 100 tiles have been placed on the board. The one with the most points wins.
Now back to your regularly scheduled programming.
@M&A - yes, our answers are equivalent. Most easy seen by squaring them both. The squares are equal, and they are both positive numbers, so they are equal.
ReplyDeleteI'm too old for this s*** too. Going to stop wasting my limited time on this crap.
ReplyDeleteWhat I find most annoying is that the triple letters don't work when solving the down clues. Do the other two just bow out? This is lazy constructing.
@M&A: agreed, Banagrams is a fun game and much quicker than Scrabble. But Mrs. Freude and I play Scrabble with two house rules that purists will hate but which make the game quicker and more fun:
ReplyDelete1. Draw nine tiles instead of seven. Nine fit on the rack just fine, and the result is that more interesting and creative words end up on the board.
2. With nine tiles, there’s a higher chance of getting three of the same letter on your rack. When that happens, you have the option of returning one or two to the bag and redrawing. Keeps things moving along.
If this strikes you as cheating, remember that if both players do it, it’s fair. (Btw, with three or more players we revert to standard 7-tile rules.)
With these two modifications, we find that a quick game of Scrabble fills the cocktail hour nicely without pushing dinner too far back.
p.p.s.s.
ReplyDeleteI finally dug out my old Scrabble game … it was hidin behind some other games. By golly -- that triple letter score blue square **is** pretty darn dark, after all. Sooo… M&A is now convinced; go ahead and put yer dog in a high-priced crate.
@kishef: yep. We agree. M&A was monkeyin around futile-like with sines and cosines and a "picture looks close to this" approach, for his second guess, which led to answers that were close but not quite right.
Finally realized that any tangential line to a circle will be perpendicular to its intersectin radius. Then I was on a QED-path to victory and glory, on my third (more educated) guess. And then our math major cousin was obliged to go ahead and try to solve that next runtpuz.
@Andy Freude: Interestin Scrabble approach. The sticky part tho is how long each player takes to think of the best word-play. Need a timer clock to punch, like with chess. Sorta like how long actors get for their Oscar acceptance speech. Good to keep things movin.
fave "Spaceman" flick quotes:
1. You have many boundaries, skinny human.
2. The universe is as it should be.
3. Everything is permanent. Yet nothing ever is. That is the truth of the universe.
[But, keep in mind it was an overweight spider comin up with this stuff.]
M&Also
@Andy Freude I like it, will have to give that a try!
ReplyDeleteI find it strange that anyone who likes crosswords would not be at least passingly familiar with the basic rules of Scrabble.
As usual when I post late, y’all have said everything I would say. My nit with the solve was that I had no blue squares to figure out that they spelled POINTS. And I solve on the NYT app. What’s that about? Why didn’t my NYT app give me the blue squares?
ReplyDeleteDespite the technical glitch, I really liked the puzzle. It was easy, sure, but fun. I like a big fat Sunday puzzle that has cleverness and fun. This one delivered. Except for the blue squares.
In fact, I came here immediately to see which squares were supposed to be blue and weren’t, and I was delighted. It cleared up my irritation with the reveal that referred only to the triple letters and not the point of same in Scrabble, which of course is points.
Being a Scrabble fan, I hoped we would see some tricky grid situations with words. After completion though, I’m happy with the way this one played, even though it was easy. As @Rex mentioned, the nearly wince-free-ness of the solve made for very smooth sailing through almost the entire grid. Nice job.
Okay puzzle. Not great but it didn’t suck either.
ReplyDeleteLate in day for those who use NYT app BUT maybe an update needed? There (I think) have been TWO in last few months. The FIRST…I had to “force” and the second “just went through.” Just a possibility. The vagaries of updates elude me…that is, I often get TOO much info…and other times NO info (or notifications) as to updates. And yes…I generally have “update automatically”….does it work for everything?…No. I have mixed feelings on that.
ReplyDeleteI guess I'm one of those nuts who knows about defunct minor league baseball teams. HAWAIIISLANDERS was an instant get for me. Go figure.
ReplyDelete@SRD 4:15 – as a Scrabble player, I'm pretty unenthusiastic about this theme overall – but having the blue squares contain three letters in only one direction does sort of reflect how the triple letter score works. Only the first person to play a word using that square receives the triple point value of the letter there. If someone subsequently plays a perpendicular word through that square they get only the letter's face value.
ReplyDeleteBo Belinsky spent time there and played for the Hawaiʻi Islanders.
ReplyDeleteSunday puzzle.
ReplyDeleteI'm going to harp on this forever, or at least for another 50 years, which is apparently how long it'll take for Xword wordlists, constructors, and editor get the message:
GIs NEVER ate "MRE"s, they ate K-rations. MREs were introduced about 6 years after general inductees were deemed unnecessary in the US. If you want to insist on using the wrong nomenclature 50 years on, the editor can correct your clues to say, "once" or "in the past" or something. (Yes, Will, I'm looking at you.)
I mean, don't we already have enough ideas and words in our language which no longer mean what they meant 50 years ago? Conservative, Liberal, Freedom, Apartheid, Genocide; none of them mean what they did when I was 18 years old. Okay, GI is probably less worrisome than this list, but you catch my drift.
PS, you actually *can* call them "Joes," even though that's somewhat misogynistic. It seems to have caught on somewhere along the line.
Joe, you can make two words at one time and get the triple letter score twice. The triple letter square has to be open. Then you build a word crossing. Example:
ReplyDeleteT A N __. is on the board. I then play this and get the TLS for each word, across and down:
P
I
T. A. N.
E
Didn't see anyone else comment on SOHOT and SOLISTEN. I don't do a lot of crosswords (as evidence see: 4 days to finish this one) but I thought SO wouldn't appear in two answers. Or am I parsing the answers incorrectly?
ReplyDeletePretty COol!
ReplyDeleteCorn is actually a grain, not a vegetable.
ReplyDeleteWhen I saw that this was a rebus, on a Sunday, I said many words only Mr. W usually uses. I hate blanking rebiiiiii!!!!!
ReplyDeleteAnd then...the "black" squares that were indicated were not legible in my paper. Just sort of blurryish. Come on !
Just make a **** crossword!!
This puz deserves no other comments.
Diana, Lady-in-Waiting for CROSSWORDS
ASKED OUT
ReplyDeleteI'M IN THE TUB with KRISTINSCOTT,
SHE'S A CUTIE, SO SWEET and HOT,
I'M NOT TOOOLD,
BUT"NO", SO I'M told,
"I've DONETHAT, SOLISTE, let's NOT."
--- DAVE THOMAS
No shaded squares on my print copy; I was lost. Dnf.
ReplyDeleteWordle par.
Shaded squares were no help. This was NOT fun.
ReplyDeleteWordle par.
Puzzle at first very puzzling because my local paper reprint of the puzzle did a dark gray for the “blue” squares. After that I hit a logic block. To my mind there were 4 letters in the shaded squares, 3 for the across words, one for the down words. Otherwise tepid was being spelled TEPPPID, etc.
ReplyDeleteTwo thoughts on previous comments. I too thought POOL when I read RACK ‘EM UP. The first square had 4 Ps. The #4 ball is Purple. Obviously I was on a roll! Not until 65 across did I realize.
ReplyDeleteG. I. means general inductee? When I was one we all thought government issue.
I was surprised to see NEEDY as a way to describe being high-maintenance. Maybe I've watched When Harry Met Sally too many times, but it would be awesome if we could stop describing people as high-maintenance or needy. God forbid anyone, especially women, have needs AND are capable of saying them out loud. That would require others to acknowledge their existence and make space for them...
ReplyDeleteToo bad the tripled letters were all only worth 1 point x 3 in Scrabble, except for the P which I think is worth 3 in Scrabble.
ReplyDeleteThe letters you want to put on triple squares are J, K, Q, W, X, Y, Z. Good puzzle though IMHO.
@ CoAz 11:26 AM - It's not that all women are high maintenance, just a small minority. The ones that are are very needy, otherwise they would be standard maintenance and not so needy. High maintenance - most rock star/celebrity girl friends/wives. Low or standard maintenance - most all other women.
ReplyDeleteNot always the case but generally valid.
I liked it a lot. I was able to slowly pick away at it without googling anything, with lots of little ahas. I managed to fill in HAWAISLANDERS without noticing that it was missing two Is. I had enough crosses to guess that the ending of a team at Aloha Stadium would be Islanders, and then I got the H up front and went, yeah, that's HAWA... not even noticing that I didn't have enough Is. I'd already guessed DOUBLELETTERSCORE because I do know Scrabble, and then when that started to not fit, it clicked what had happened on the I.
ReplyDeleteI knew the Russian letter clue, but that left me going, "Um, Ц is one letter. How do I make it three?" I'd never seen it named in English. It could have just been, "sound made by the two zeds in pizza." I thought the letter that rhymed with the ones around it was hilarious, as they almost all do in English, but none has a T in the middle.
Last square was realizing that it's AMC/ASPCA and not RMC/RSPCA. I should have realized earlier the nation that fought off their association with Britain would not have a Royal affiliation for their dogcatchers.
Gotta agree with Rex on NOW, though. I was going through all of the things one is too old for, most of which are four choice letters and not allowed in the NYTXW.
Really late to this. My interpretation, in order to write (a synonym for) score in triple letters, one would write ppp-ooo-iii-nnn-ttt-sss
ReplyDelete