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Suddenly go silent, in modern dating lingo / THU 4-11-24 / Verb akin to "Zoom" / Slicing and dicing, say / Whales and alligators might be seen on them / French translation of the Spanish "calle"
Thursday, April 11, 2024
Constructor: Dan Caprera
Relative difficulty: Medium
Theme answers:
- FOOD PREPARATION (1A: Slicing and dicing, say)
- COURTSIDE SEATS (20A: Pricey basketball tickets)
- MAN-EATING SHARK (57A: "Jaws" menace)
- PRIME REAL ESTATE (70A: Valuable property)
Tara Ann VanDerveer (born June 26, 1953) is a former American basketball coach who was the head women's basketball coach at Stanford University from 1985 until her retirement in 2024. Designated the Setsuko Ishiyama Director of Women's Basketball, VanDerveer led the Stanford Cardinal to three NCAA Women's Division I Basketball Championships: in 1990, 1992 and 2021. She stepped away from the Stanford program for a year to serve as the U.S. national team head coach at the 1996 Olympic Games. VanDerveer is the 1990 Naismith National Coach of the Year and a ten-time Pac-12 Coach of the Year. She is also one of only nine NCAA Women's Basketball coaches to win over 900 games, and one of ten NCAA Division I coaches – women's or men’s – to win 1,000 games. VanDerveer was inducted into the Women's Basketball Hall of Fame in 2002. On December 15, 2020, she passed Pat Summitt for most wins in women's college basketball history. On January 21, 2024, she won her 1,203rd game as a head coach, becoming the head coach with the most wins in college basketball history, women’s or men’s. (wikipedia)
• • •
All that theme drama came early. Once SECRET PASSAGES went in, I didn't really notice or even need the theme much any more. The only answers you're gonna get stuck on in this puzzle, if you don't know the theme, are those four initial Acrosses on the first, fourth, twelfth, and fifteenth rows. I didn't even see the clue on MANE, so easily did the SW corner fill itself in, though the theme did end up helping me with that last row. A good deal of excitement / interest goes out of the puzzle once you get the theme. This is not uncommon, or terribly surprising, but the grid didn't have much to offer, non-thematically, in the way of fill—just OLIVE TREES and POLO SHIRTS, really. Overall fill is about average. We get a lot more 6+-letter fill than we did yesterday, but it's all pretty plain. Hard to get excited about ENLISTED or PARENTAL or FORSAKEN. I think my favorite part of the grid, spice-wise, is the SE, with its GHOST SHARK ORGY—you do not wanna get mixed up in one of those, I tell you what.
I did not know Van Gogh painted OLIVE TREES. I know he painted CYPRESS TREES because I went to that exhibit at the Met last summer with my daughter, when my wife and I were in NYC for the Lollapuzzoola crossword tournament that we never made it to because we got called home on a bat emergency and then proceeded to have Bat Week at our house—if you think a GHOST SHARK ORGY is scary, try waking up to a bat in your house multiple nights in a row, even after you've let it fly out of the house each night; finding it flying around your bedroom even though you shut the door, etc. etc. etc. ad infinitum ad astra ad nauseam. We got a bat guy who came to put these little one-way bat tunnels somewhere in our house that let the bats get out but not get back in. It was probably just the one bat. We never saw more than one. One was enough. Plenty. No more bats after the bat guy did his thing. Still, didn't sleep right for weeks. Serious short-term PTSD. Anyway, that's my Van Gogh story.
Explainers:
- 63A: Whales and alligators might be seen on them (POLO SHIRTS) — this was easy (I had most of SHIRTS in place before I looked at the clue), but we didn't have whales when I was growing up. There was the polo guy for Ralph Lauren and then the alligator for Izod and maybe a tiger for Le Tigré (did I dream that brand up?), but whales, not a thing in '80s California. Some brand called Vineyard Vines? I notice that dudes of all ages wear polos when they want to semi-dress up (i.e. ditch the hoodie), but I haven't touched one since I was a wannabe preppy teenager. They're weirdly expensive for being so boring. Ah, look, Le Tigré! It's real!
- 6D: Draft status (ENLISTED) — I see that this is a military thing but I thought your "draft status" was like "1-A" or "4-F" or something like that. Once you are drafted, then you're ... ENLISTED? There has not been a draft in my adult lifetime. Conscription for Vietnam ended when I was three.
- 47D: Author Joe Hill, vis-à-vis Stephen King (SON) — the pen name of Joseph Hillström King, who is a successful author of horror and fantasy in his own right.
- 53D: Suddenly go silent, in modern dating lingo (GHOST) — this seems slightly weird as an intransitive verb. You GHOST ... someone. That's how I've heard it used, for the most part. Although now that I think of it, "he ghosted" could just mean "he suddenly went silent," so ... OK. Here's merriam-webster.com on this relatively recent coinage.
- 56D: Verb akin to "Zoom" (SKYPE) — the capital "Z" was the tipoff here. Do people still SKYPE? Seems so ... 2006, or something.
- 61D: Name found in "affirmation" (IRMA) — just an awful cluing trend. Give us an actual human with this name or get out. I don't *so* much mind the [Apt name for a ___] type of cluing ([Apt name for a cook?] STU! etc.), but here, there's zero connection between the name and the word it's found in. [Name found in "time"] => TIM! Is that what you want!? (Actually, that's so bad I kinda like it). Anyway, IRMA Thomas is real, so use her.
P.S. forgot to mention that the west was a little thorny because I wrote in VALID / SLAY instead of ALOUD / ROCK 🙃 (40A: Not in one’s head, say / 36D: Be awesome, informally). Also, my first [Terse denial] was the truly terse NOPE rather than the comparatively verbose (not to mention quaint) “NOT I!”
[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]
[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]
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83 comments:
I found it easy for a Thursday (but I usually find Thursdays super-challenging). I had trouble getting a foothold in the NW, mainly because I couldn't reconcile FOOD at 1A with its clue. I shrugged, said "It's Thursday" and moved on. It helped that I figured "COURT" (20A) could be a type of seat.
Overwrites:
I wanted the red or white but not blue thing at 2D to be wine-related
Shot before STAB for the thing in the dark at 30A
SpARsE before SCARCE at 38A
mean before NORM at 59D
rAE Martin before MAE at 68A (a WOE)
I assume that "blinds" in the 9D clue is a poker term?
Semi-rare example of a theme helping me when I was stuck. Like Rex, I got COURTSIDE SEATS pretty quickly (but I figured the missing letters were all going to be S, or at least the same letter in each line). I got SECRET PASSAGES as soon as I saw the clue. The theme helped me see RATION (had the R and O) to complete that line.
But unlike Rex, I was really stymied in the SW. i had SHARK and E(S)TATE, but I hadn’t yet figured out that the secret squares would spell PASSAGES. When I saw that, I got the rest. It didn’t help that I had originally had sOho for MOOR (stupid - hounds don’t howl much in Soho) and mean for NORM. (That came out when I got POLO SHIRTS.) I couldn’t remember JESSE, though I loved Breaking Bad, and that PCP abbreviation still isn’t sticking with me despite being in the puzzle recently. Can we go back to the drug, please?
Some nice misdirect clues: “Not in one’s head, say” for ALOUD, “Place to take shots” for VEIN and “Appeals to” for BEGS.
Rex hates duplicated clues, but “head-scratcher” was nice for LICE and ENIGMA.
“100%, so to speak” works for both SURE and pURE. I guessed wrong.
I feel for that vintner. We are all AGING, but he must be particularly suffering from arthritis, gray hair and waking up three times a night to pee.
Liked it.
A clever gimmick and an easy solve.
Especially if you are a @GaryJuggert fan.
Bonus uniclue:
Apple knife injury?
(See 28 and 30A. Brrr!)
What the hell is a DAP?
I figured some type of rebus when FOOD looked so out of place, so I got hung up trying to make that work and made a mess out of everything. I also turned the whole NNE into a comical mess - seriously, something straight out of a cartoon. I got nowhere with the casino (RIO), RUE, the basketball lady (TARA), missed the misdirect on ANTES and no clue how we get from “Pfft” to IBET (can anyone explain that one? - must be something simple that I’m overlooking). Needless to say, OLIVE TREES was just never going to happen up there. On a positive note, I did manage to drop in OLES and NES, but they are pretty much one foot putts in CrossWorld.
Hopefully it was because I was hung up on the rebus thing, but this one made me feel like I did a decade or so ago when I struggled to finish a slightly difficult Tuesday. Obviously, gimmick puzzles are not my forte, and it really showed today.
Figured out the theme after a while but had something wrong somewhere ... turned out to be OREO instead of OLEO.
I woke up this morning hearing Irma Thomas in my head. If she had turned up in this puzzle, that would have been so cool!
Help wanted
FOOD, REP, RATION, COURT, IDE, EATS are all “plausible” albeit awkward answers for their respective clues. As are TIN and SHARK. Before I pocked up the gimmick I filled all of these in on the clue itself. Wound up finishing on the downs in the South West and wasn’t until then that I picked up how the theme was interpreted - i.e. secret passages.
But Jaws Menace = MANE??? Am I missing something or does MANE reference something with which I am just not familiar ?
The animal on the Lacoste/Izod polo shirt was a crocodile, not an alligator--see Rene Lacoste's nickname as a tennis player.
HIDDEN MESSAGE was a great way for me to hide SECRET PASSAGE which really sent me in the wrong direction!
Liked it well enough. Not too funky of a Thursday theme, but still a little SHARK bite, mainly with bottom 2 themers.
gOLf SHIRTS before POLO. Read doctor clue too quickly and threw in GPS off of golf. Fixed fairly quickly after revisiting and realizing singular doctor and changed to POLO/PCP.
The other, near fatal, was SLiP over SLOP, and convinced I was right. Just would not let me see ARGOT/ORGY for way too long.
Seems like Clue game-based themes have been used before. Not sure about @Rex’s take on men and these type themes. Just chalk it up to law of averages given NYTs male/female disparity.
Did you really expect me to count the row numbers?!!?
Otherwise pretty standard Thursday fare.
A very clever theme that I wish I had paid attention to earlier, rather than struggling through 95% percent of the puzzle, bogging down, then considering the theme.
In Cluedo, the secret passages connect diagonally opposite corners, so I assumed that would be the gimmick here, so I figured I needed lots filled in in the corners before it would make sense. Once I abandoned that idea, it got so much easier.
And Tara just retired yesterday, which surely must be a coincidence. I was delighted to see that clue/answer pair, even though I pretty much always rooted against Stanford. Women’s basketball deserves its time in the spotlight.
A fist bump
Dan likes midweek. Two of his five NYT puzzles are Wednesdays and three are Thursdays. He also likes gimmicks. For instance, one of his puzzles ( https://www.xwordinfo.com/Crossword?date=2/1/2023 ) had three extraterrestrial vehicles, one beaming up a cow, one a man, and one a car. So, the machinations of today’s puzzle don’t surprise me.
Much skill went into producing this. The theme answer in the top row, for example, has three words, their letter counts being 4-3-6, which means the theme answer in the bottom row must have a count of 6-3-4 to meet the requirements of symmetry. But not only that, only certain letters could go into the black squares of those rows.
Tough, tough, tough to find answers that would work, and work smoothly!
Most importantly, how was the solve? Sweet! For me, there was a terrific “Hah!” when the theme became clear, and the SW fought me hard there for a while – much to my brain’s delight. Other territory filled out in a swoop – much to my brain’s delight.
Your puzzles are fun, Dan. Thank you so much for this one, and MOOR please!
@southsidejohnny “pfft” and “I bet” are incredulous responses to balderdash
Love the fact that TARA got some love after the huge success of the women’s NCAA tournament and the week she announced her retirement. I suspect that was a relatively last minute editorial change - but kudos on that
Finished without noticing the black squares spelled anything. But I'm with (Anonymous) above... what does 'DAP' mean?
I got a little kick out of seeing COURTSIDESEATS hidden on line four. Then I looked at lines 1, 12, and 15. It was also fun to figure out the phrases there. I didn't notice that the black squares spelled out SECRETPASSAGES. I didn't play Clue much.
I just looked up Van Gogh and olive trees. I hadn't known that Van Gogh was blown away by their beauty.
For those of us doing the puzzle on a device, is there a way to enter letters into black squares? I’m at a loss. Thanks
Blitzed through this under 10 minutes, thinking it was a Tuesday level challenge.
With Joel as the new editor, just assumed some poor/odd cluing was involved. FOOD and COURT seemed fine to me, PRIMER could be valuable property to a house painter, and MANE - well, maybe there was a Jaws about a lion who used his hair to trap you before eating you.
Didn’t even read the revealer clue - SECRETPASSAGES fit nicely from the downs I had.
Wouldn’t have grokked the theme even after completing without the PASSAGES letters coming out of the black squares. Cute, but not fun as a solving experience.
This is one time when my newfound strategy of playing with Autocheck on hurt me. Since I had no doubt about my correct answers, didn’t look for a bigger picture (probably also would have enhanced the experience had I read the revealer clue).
Clever construction though.
I didn’t catch the fact that the missing letters made a word until I got here. A nice detail!
All I can say is “MAE” MARTIN!!!! God that was fun. I love them and their co-hosts on the Handsome Podcast. If you have not checked it out, it’s awesome. So glad to see their name in the NYT puzzle today.
All the gaming references mean nothing to me, so it takes the fun out of solving because how could I possibly know -- or even make a guess at -- the answer?
I needed to cheat in the SE, because I never heard of GHOST in that context and MARLA wasn't familiar to me. I also had "solo" in the SW instead of NORM, and couldn't remember that "Hound of the Baskervilles" took place on a MOOR.
I did appreciate the fact that the theme helped me solve it in the end, by providing the letters for MANEATINGSHARK and PRIMEREALESTATE.
All over the place looking for traction, finally got the SE completed which led to PASSAGES which led to HIDDEN PASSAGES which led nowhere. Lots of head-scratchers in this one for me so appropriate that LICE was about the last thing I filled in.
Names again. Vaguely knew TARA, but not JESSE or Ms. FALCO or MAE.
Didn't bother to go back and see that that the missing letters spelled PASSAGES. Pretty cute.
Pretty nifty idea, DC. Devious Construction for sure, and thanks for some hard-earned fun.
As a late birthday present to myself, I got to QB yesterday. This happens about as often as an eclipse, but I'll take it.
When was the last time you got a shot in a VEIN?
Blech. Didn't enjoy working on this one, but I am in a grumpy mood lately, so maybe it's me. Another double-digit proper-noun-a-palooza.
French translation of a Spanish word on plain ole crosswordese RUE. Way to make bad worse. Add INA, IDE, IDS, DAP, DAS, JLO, PCP, TIL. All this dreck for eight hidden letters.
Tee-Hee: TOKE. ORGY.
Uniclues:
1 Poke one's eye.
2 Polluted pantsless preppy party.
3 Where babies come from.
1 STAB RETINA (~)
2 POLO SHIRTS ORGY
3 PARENTAL VEIN
My Fascinating Crossword Uniclue Keepsake from Last Year: RuPaul. THE DIVA POPE.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I confidently inserted ‘QRCode’ where RETINA should have been that cause me no end of grief.
So a DAP is a fist bump? Huh.
I got the revealer early on, but it somehow didn’t help me with the shark until after I had the words all in with crosses.
And was so sure that FOOD could not be right because of the clueing ‘mismatch it took me a while to get that corner.
But it was fun. And i only needed to check a few words, which is a good thing for me on a Thursday.
@king_yeti 7:55 AM
Well, kinda, but don't you think they're more incredulous responses to poppycock?
Not easy for me but I was at a disadvantage, having never played Clue, never watched Breaking Bad, and just not familiar at all with some of the trivia and names. But the theme was fun and made the puzzle way more interesting once I figured it out. RP mentions the "masculinity" of using a board game as a basis for the grid but I give the constructor props for the Women's NCAA coach and HER Honor - plus JLO, Edie FALCO, MARLA Gibbs, MAE Martin, N.K. Jemison - some very notable feminine mentions.
@Nancy: It's been a chaotic week for me and little time for puzzling or commenting, but I completely agreed with your take yesterday.
A fist bump
Not typical Thursday trickery but I had fun for a short time with it. Never really played Clue so the entire idea was lost on me but easy enough to understand. COURT SIDE got it for me - MANEATING SHARK was cool.
Jim and JESSE
Liked FORSAKEN - SCARCE. OLIVE TREES was news to me also. Overall fill was pretty flat - but fine.
Enjoyable Thursday morning solve.
I have my books
Karl Grouch 6:47 AM
Aw. (But, ummm, he has fans?!)
Fun, easy-medium. Got the missing letter scheme pretty quickly, found it a pleasant, clean solving experience. C’mon, Rex, Clue is not a gamer’s game or a boys/men’s game. It’s a family game and this puzzle did not strike me as remotely exclusive.
I struggled a bit by having golf SHIRTS instead of POLO and refused to give that up for a long time.
And I had a terrible time trying to figure out what a PRIMEREAL ESTATE was. It sounded like a real thing I wasn’t familiar with. Correct parsing is important!
Very clever. This goes into the (small) running list I'm keeping for POY because, as you know, I won't remember it otherwise. But it's going in with an asterisk: more pop culture names than I tend to like.
Even though I know nothing about the game "Clue", I picked up FOOD (P)REP(A)RATION immediately. So, too, with COURTSIDE SEATS. This is because even though I have severe puzzle weaknesses in the pop culture arena, I'm very strong on word pattern recognition.
OTOH, MAN EATING SHARK was extremely well disguised, I wasn't expecting it that as an answer, and I wasn't helped at all by not knowing "The Hound of the Baskervilles" location nor Walt's meth-dealing partner. (I hadn't gotten to the SHARK answer at 62A yet.)
Was the crossing of the assorted names fair? Since I didn't have to cheat to finish, I'd have to say yes.
A solving aid that worked for me: I put a small dot in the margin before the 1st, 4th, 12th and 15th rows right after reading the revealer. This helped me immediately know what I was looking for.
Into my list for POY it goes. But with that asterisk.
Hey All !
A puz close to my heart. I once submitted a SunPuz with the "hidden letters in Blockers" theme, but wasn't accepted. My hidden letters worked in both Acrosses and Downs.
But enough about me. 😁
Didn't realize the hidden letters spelled PASSAGES, so that ramps the puz up a notch. Got stuck in SW corner. Just couldn't see PRIME or figure out MANEATING FROM _AN_TIN_. The ole brain denying me once again. Also, MOOR was unknown for this unsophisticated guy.
Add a * to my current Streak, since had to run like a baby to Google to get MOOR. Har.
Liked it. Creme de CASSIS is a new one here. Had menthe first, like I'm betting 98% of solvers did
Happy Thursday!
Two F's
RooMonster
DarrinV
Enlisted means you volunteered for one of the military services. Drafted means the government has compelled you to serve in the army. Enlisted is not a draft status
Very bizarre and unwarranted gender commentary re: games and architecturally impressive puzzles. Classic Rex!
Gazillions, all over the crossworld
I don’t like clues like 61D either, but there seems to be an audience for them. I especially didn’t like one such clue (but slightly more cryptic) last week sometime. I posted a comment to the Wordplay column and got angry feedback from two other solvers who loved the clue but assumed I didn’t like it because I couldn’t do or didn’t do Cryptics. I actually love the Cox and Rathvon puzzles but don’t want letter play in normal crossword clues. So I’m sure the Times is going to stick with giving them.
By the way, I also think the wordplay blog comments is full of those who love the puzzles and just don’t want to or are offended to hear a negative word of any kind. It’s why I come here instead of there usually.
I had “paternal” instead of “parental” and “golf shirts” before “polo shirts” for way too long! That messed me up for a time. Once I corrected those two I was able to solve the puzzle. I thought the puzzle was clever but I kept trying to find the missing letters from adjacent clues.
Rex, a family member went through a similar bat experience but we discovered that bats are protected in our area and it turned into a summer before the situation was remediated. I know your pain!
Adventurer: The nearest I came to dying was when I was starving to death and came face to face with a MANEATINGSHARK.
Companion: Egad! What did you do?
Adventurer: I asked the man if I could have a bite of his shark.
Attention constructors! If you're going to use a gimmick like having secret letters tie together whole rows, it behooves you not to have obvious phrases in need of secret connecting letters in the columns as well. Take, as one example, the column at 10D. With a simple clue like "Smear hot goo on the buttocks of someone who has invited a violent youth group to their house", the column obviously goes from TARA SAGA GHOST to the familiar phrase TARASSAGANGHOST. I'm not sure Will Shortz would have let that one slip through.
Judging by the use of PAREN in last Sunday's puzzle, today's PARENTAL could have been clued "Pertaining to an emoticon's mouth".
I remember when MARLA made marmalade. Now that was some real FOODPREPARATION.
Nice puzzle, Dan Caprera. It's got me thinking about constructing one where all of the answer letters appear only in the black squares!
The letters magically appear when you finish the puzzle.
Enough of this sexist dung. I had a real struggle with the last themer because it wouldn't even form in my mind. I've read the book and seen the movie a dozen times. The very first victim confirms that the Jaws is not a "man-eater." It doesn't smell the victims' genitals before eating the hosts. Pure garbage.
I was totally unaware of the theme until I came here. Realized it was kind of amazing that I managed to complete the puzzle only 7 minutes over my average time. I can't figure out why I missed something so obvious.
You can watch King Rat on Tubi for free if you are so inclined. It has 100% on Rotten Tomatoes.
re: Rex’ bat story:
When I was about 12, my family opened up our Northern Minnesota cabin in May. At least 15 bats swooping around. After weaving and bobbing for a couple minutes, took the only sensible action available. Squeezed into the dog cage and latched its door behind until the adults got the situation under control.
Don’t know which was worse - the abject fear of this Halloween worst-case scenario or the constant family ridicule I got for decades for being such a profile in courage.
Actually, it was an easy decision. Given the situation, would take the coward’s route each and every time.
Bat PTSD is real - and lasts a lifetime!
Once again I come here to see a layer of the theme that I'd missed. I got that there were SECRET letters in black squares creating PASSAGES (although I struggled for a while with whether those might be HIDDEN PASSAGES or SECRET PASSAGES).
I did not notice that the HIDDEN layers also *spelled out* the word PASSAGES. I like these types of tricky puzzles. I far prefer them to change-a-letter or sort-of-homophone answers clued wackily.
I don't mind the Clue reference, I think that's a relatively universal game. It's been around for 70 years and has been fairly popular for at least the first fifty of those. I don't think its as gendered as Rex makes out.
I wish I could turn back the clock....I didn't check to see whether the "SECRET" letters would spell anything because, "No, that would have been too hard to do." Geez. Add another to a long list of thank-you's to @Rex for pointing out a theme element I missed. I did get the rest fairly easily, though, backing into the grid from the NE. I had IDE and EATS in place, so COURT went in quickly and the pattern clued me into the top row. Hardest for me was the SHARK, with MAN-EATING so nicely hidden. Super construction feat and a fun one to solve.
Do-overs: Me, too, for hiddEn and PAtErnAL. Help from previous puzzles: the always handy NES and ONESIES. No idea: JESSE, TARA, MAE, MARLA, RIO.
@FUN_CFO and NY COMPOSER…Rex’s reference to “male-oriented games” was not to CLUE, but to crossword puzzles in general: “Guys make these puzzles, primarily, if not exclusively—especially lately; women have made precisely 1.5 Thursday puzzles this year. But guys tend to be more fond of the "look at what I did with my grid" architectural-wonder-type puzzles in general.”
Anon @8:29 raises an interesting point. Aren’t IV’s generally the purview of VEINS (it stands for intravenous for heavens sake). Generally you just get a stab in the upper arm (or the butt), no ? I wonder if there are any medical professionals who could offer an informed perspective.
How about….NEVER
I put in COURT and thought we were dealing with grid geography, since it's there on the SIDE. But eventually I got enough crosses to see OLIVE TREES, and RIO seemed like a possible casino name (I mean, c'mon, how am I supposed to know that? @Roo, this puzzle was meant for you LV residents.) And that made me see REP, and the first line became clear. After that my only problem was that little cluster of short answers near the bottom-- because I, too, went with PAtErnAL. That's quite a hole to get into, because most of the crosses work. I actually convinced myself that people might mine for aIr. I finally managed to parse MANE TIN SHARK, and all was fine.
ENLISTED is a draft status in the sense that if you have enlisted, you can't be drafted--so draft boards have to keep track of that.
I agree that it's meant to be a crocodile--but everybody I knew called them "alligator shirts," and as Loren would say, we knew what they meant.
Did the bat ever say, “Nevermore?”
I thought it was the perfect theme. Seeing it on top helped me overcome a little confusion in the lower part of the puzzle. I was stuck for a moment, then remembered to look at the whole line, rather than at the single words. Et voila. Quite a construction feat to create a fun puzzle with solid answers, perfect symmetry and a great trick as well. Bravo!
This puzzle was fine, the trick helped with the solve where I didn’t know some of the people, even though I didn’t remember there were secret passages in the Clue mansion.
@ Lewis - Thanks for the reminder of Dan's tractor beam puzzle! I loved that one. It was hilarious.
Clever and fun. Fill was fairly clean. POY candidate IMO. No problem with the IRMA clue since it crossed MAE Martin, who I know from one of the Taskmaster seasons. Love that show, highly recommend. NZ version is also great, esp. Season/Series 2.
Errata from my comments yesterday: JFK was inaugurated in 1961, and Idlewood Airport was renamed in his honor following his death in 1963. I never said I was S-M-R-T (even with Google).
I don't know how anyone entered FOOD from the clue, "Slicing and dicing, say." I immediately dropped in prep for 1A, a far better answer that was ultimately part of FOOD(P)REP(A)RATION.
Enjoyable puzzle!
So this is about the Clue game? No clue; I've never played it. BUT.....today I played and I did pretty good except I played this like a themeless.
So I get to Van Gogh. Now mind you, I had FOOD and that RATION in place in my first hint. Can "Potato Eaters" be hiding in the folds? Maybe "Fishing Boats?" "Sunflowers" fit and you eat the seeds. Talk about spending waaaay too much time trying to figure out what Van Gogh had in mind. Oh wait! OLIVE TREES. You can certainly eat some Olives....I'm looking at FOOD COURT EATS. It's ll about FOOD...Until it wasn't.
I'm staring at Jaws Menace and wonder why or what MANE is. I thought his boat name was Orca? What does that have to do with food? Maybe MANE is wrong. That was one big scary SHARK. Oh wait.....there it is! MANE TIN SHARK.
I got it...finally! SECRET PASSAGES... and all this time it was PASSAGES that I was looking for...not food!
So, when I figured out the little trick, I smiled. Que Bueno....
@Rex...I read your Van Gogh bat story about three times. All out loud. It was so funny and it made me want to use the bathroom.....
Thank you. I wondered the same thing. My age is showing!
The 2nd and 3rd clues in each theme row are clued normally. The 1st clue is not meant to make sense unless the whole row is taken into account with the PASSAGES letters in the black squares.
Another voice saying Nice puzzle. I liked it. No idea what was going on, and definitely wondering about 1A, until I got to 44 and 45 A ,then looked back at at the first line and saw" food preparation" withe the "p" and "a" hidden in secret passages.
It wasn't quite that fast. Having never played Clue, I first I had to google it to be sure there were, indeed, secret passages.
Then enjoyed sussing out the rest and thought it very clever when I saw that all the hidden letters spelled out "passages"
RULE instead of ROCK hung me up in the West for a while, as did SOSO for NORM in the SW.
I also saw the Van Gogh Cypress Trees show at the Met, but knew he also painted OLIVE TREES. Fortunately, no bats in the picture.
I'm with Wanderlust: I get that PCP means primary care physician, but that seems more like an insurance designation than any kind of intrinsic medical one. I was looking for an ENT or GP of some kind. I'm not looking to go to a PCP, but check that box on the form or look for one in the database when I need to visit.
You don't really have to know anything about the game Clue to solve this puzzle. I played it as a kid, but didn't remember the Secret Passages part.
Why these letters? hah!
This was a decent enough Thursday. Having missing letters spell out PASSAGES was not the most exciting thing; actual secret passages would have been neat but don't ask me how on earth that would work. It would be a difficult construction!
I kept wanting the row starting at 40 to be a themer just because regularity! Also the revealer is off center. Picky, picky.
Only typeover I can remember was SLANG before ARGOT.
[Spelling Bee: yd 0; streak 3. Congrats @pabloinnh!]
After getting the theme, I saw that the first S in COURT SIDE SEATS formed SEEK going down and I was hoping for other hide-and-seek, secret passage easter eggs, but that was it. EEK!
I agree with @Nancy about the names - RIO held up the top center for a while (couldn't think of any _I__E trees). At least I did know JESSE.
Thanks, Dan Caprera, nice Thursday.
routes include subcutaneous (SC or SQ, under skin), intramuscular (IM), intravenous (IV) and others. IV tends to be viewed somewhat differently because it usually involves gradual infusion over time, but not necessarily, eg drug abusers “shooting up”. So the clue is technically accurate in the opinion of this physician.
I interpreted the black squares in the themer rows as short secret passages where missing letters were hidden. Didn’t notice what they spelled until the app revealed them.
webwinger
I seem to be getting back into the habit of doing Thursday puzzles. Normally I don't bother with commenting but I'm babysitting my unconscious mother in law in hospice and there's not much else to do.
Saturday level of solving since I'm not a theme person. Got the theme with MANEATINGSHARK.
I did witness the total eclipse on Monday. It was a 5 hour drive downstate and 7 hours back. Exact same route.
yd -0. QB maybe 36 I'll count them when I get back home
You don't get shots in veins.
Easy, no WOEs and no erasures. I knew something was going on at 1a but the solve was so easy I didn’t need to figure out what it was to finish the puzzle. I was looking forward to going back over the completed grid to suss it out, but the app filled in the black squares before I had a chance. It would have been more fun to figure it out on my own.
Breezy Thursday, liked it except for the spoiler.
In here late, due to way too many A.M. errands.
A standard hide-stuff-in-the black-squares theme, but I really enjoyed the revealer and that the hidden stuff spelled somethin out. Nice adaptation.
staff weeject picks: themer hunks REP, IDE, TIN, and ALE. Kinda the way M&A caught onto the puztheme mcguffin … in little hunks at a time.
fave auxiliary stuff: POLOSHIRTS & OLIVETREES. ENIGMAS. IDS clue.
Thanx for secretin all that puz fun on us, Mr. Caprera dude. Enjoyed yer efforts.
Masked & Anonymo3Us
**gruntz**
@puzzlehoarder (3:17) -- Twelve hours of driving in order to experience a 4-minute eclipse. Holy cow! I'm not saying that the way I live is a good way to live and in fact it might be an absolutely terrible way to live, but I'm much too much of a Benthamite to consider those numbers an acceptable ratio of pleasure to pain.
Of course, I suppose if you don't mind driving. And especially driving in traffic.
The clues irritated me so much that I just plowed through this one, finished easily and forgot to look at the grid after the happy music! The SECRET PASSAGES thing failed to make sense measured against my frustration with so many of the clues and not just the theme clues. LICE, for example do not “scratch” one’s head: they bite, and cause their hosts to become “head scratchers.” I do not equate “spill” with SLOP, but ok. I loathe the word DOER (or DOERS). Surely we can do better.
Is the actual “draft status” ENLISTED or ENLISTEe? Just something I wonder and have yet to look up. All I remember of draft status is staying up all night during the first Viet Nam draft hoping that my gay, pacifist brother’s birthday would not be picked early. Thankfully, it wasn’t. Not a chance he’d have ENLISTED.
All that whinging aside, I liked the idea, not so much a fan of the execution. Loved seeing the great TARA VanDerveer recognized. Stanford’s women’s hoops program stands out as one of the best in the US. The Cardinal will miss her. POLO SHIRTS clue was excellent. Overall, nice idea, but the execution didn’t seem to capture the concept of SECRET PASSAGES.
I’m a fan of the goofy Thursday and look forward to it weekly. This one just needed some polish. 🎶 Where have all the editors gone . . . 🎶
Astonished by those who breezed through this. I found it a total slog with tons of trivia and deceptive cluing. A tough Friday. Getting the clever gimmick at the end redeemed it somewhat. Sometimes I just don’t click with the cluing style of the constructor and this was definitely one of those.
I can’t believe Rex wasn’t annoyed by the fact that the 12th row doesn’t use all the black squares in the secret passage part and all the other rows do. Not consistent and threw me off
Uh, dap used that way is slang. Non slang would be a way of luring fish, or a hair care brand [a law school classmate's family started the company
Got Secret Passage ways in the first pass so the entire thing opened right up for me. Finished in half the time I usually expect for Thursdays and was only 20s off a Thursday PR! I always feel extra proud when I thrive on a puzzle Rex labels as Medium or Difficult 🤣
Peggy hill was able to find “acquaintanceship” and “ZacharyQuinnJunior” in standard boggle play. Now tell me women don’t like puzzles and games. HO-YEAH!
PCP stands for primary care provider.
Can someone please explain the "blinds" "antes" clue/answer? Thank you.
I dunno, as much as I don't like the hidden names things, I think I like not knowing the names of (in 2024) relatively unknown people used in crossword answers far less.
At least a name found in a word is something I can puzzle out. The worst spots of crosswords are always the ones with intersecting names where literally my only option is to get every answer around it. Sorry, no, I have no reason to know MARLA from The Jeffersons.
Being an author named Joe King and then NOT writing humor books seems like a waste!
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