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Epithet for a G.O.P. moderate, maybe / SUN 11-24-24 / Small card for a short message / Filipino meat dish / Citrusy breakfast treat / Wirelessly driven toy, for short / One writing wrongs? / ___ Dingbats (icon-filled font) / Chemistry Nobelist Rutherford / Powell of the Federal Reserve / Midair collision of sorts / Component of an old PC tower / Queequeg's figurine in "Moby-Dick," e.g. / What Kwanzaa's first principle, Umoja, means / Sumatran swinger
Sunday, November 24, 2024
Constructor: Alex Eaton-Salners
Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium
Shape up:
- LEMON SCONE (25A: Citrusy breakfast treat)
- BASKETBALL STAR (26A: Sue Bird or Larry Bird)
- SEAL OF APPROVAL (105A: Imprimatur)
- COMES ACROSS (110A: Finds)
Ship out:
Word of the Day: ZAPF Dingbats (46A: ___ Dingbats (icon-filled font)) —- B
ARKEEPER (50A: Paging device) - DUB
LINER(64A: Nickname) BARGES IN (67A: Sloth, for one)SUBTRACTS (84A: Swaths of land)
ITC Zapf Dingbats is one of the more common dingbat typefaces. It was designed by the typographer Hermann Zapf in 1978 and licensed by International Typeface Corporation. [...] In the computer industry, a dingbat font or pi font is a computer font that has symbols and shapes located at the code points normally designated for alphabetical or numeric characters. This practice was necessitated by the limited number of code points available in 20th century operating systems. Modern computer fonts containing dingbats are based on Unicode encoding, which has unique code points for dingbat glyphs. [...] David Carson, radical editor of experimental music magazine Ray Gun, lent the font a degree of notoriety in 1994 when he printed an interview with Bryan Ferry in the magazine entirely in the symbols-only font – the double-page spread was therefore incomprehensible and would have to be interpreted like a cryptogram for those unfamiliar with the font. He said he did it because the interview was "incredibly boring" and that upon searching his typeface collection for a suitable font and ending at Zapf Dingbats, decided to use it with hopes of making the article interesting again. (wikipedia)
• • •
Also boring: the names in the puzzle. ERNEST Rutherford (88D: Chemistry Nobelist Rutherford), JEROME Powell (97D: Powell of the Federal Reserve), the JOBS ACT (19D: Bipartisan 2012 stimulus bill), zzzz. These left me FEELING NUMB. SCHEMATIC and OLD AS TIME weren't exactly raising my pulse either. I don't know what SCISSOR CUTS are, exactly. Is that ... as opposed to a buzz cut or razor cuts. Aren't most haircuts done with scissors? IDIOLECTS is a fancy term, and probably my favorite thing in the grid, but I'm a weirdo—I can't see IDIOLECTS being a winner with most solvers. I also liked CHEST BUMP, especially as clued (116A: Midair collision of sorts), but other than that, not a lot of longer fill to get excited about today.
And then there's the short fill, which gets rather rough in patches. The SESH / UTES / HEH patch, for one, the OPER / EVEL / AGLET patch, for two, and particularly the OHHI / AHAS / ESSO / RINO patch. Ugh to RINO (125A: Epithet for a G.O.P. moderate, maybe) (stands for "Republican In Name Only"). Extreme ugh. The clue is wrong, as the "epithet" has been used for people as "moderate" as Liz Cheney. RINO is a tired insult used by the worst people to describe any Republican who, however briefly, decides not to hold some stupid and monstrous opinion. What's next, are you gonna put "libtard" in the puzzle? "Cuck"? What other lovely pejoratives await us? Don't normalize these idiots' language. You can make that corner nice all around if you ditch the stupid "epithet." I've made three or four RINO-less versions just sitting here. Not hard. You can do some that not only ditch RINO, but ditch AHAS and OHHI and ESSO as well. Would love to ditch RCCAR too (RC = remote control), but you'd have to do a slightly bigger tear-down to accomplish that. Anyway, I made my way through this one without too much effort, but after the initial "aha," there weren't many more AHAS. I've done worse (and certainly cornier) Sundays, but the gimmick today felt like dazzle camouflage—a superficially showy concept covering up an essential lack of pure puzzling pleasure.
[43A: Like the main character in "Memento" (AMNESIC)]
- 33A: The Tabard, in "The Canterbury Tales" (INN) — used to be that the opening lines of the General Prologue were commonly memorized by English literature students (highschoolers, even). These are the lines that begin, "Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote / The droghte of March hath perced to the roote" and end with "The hooly blissful martir for to seke / That hem hath holpen whan that they were seeke." They're as famous a set of 18 lines as there is in the entire Middle English corpus. Well, the Tabard isn't mentioned in those lines. It's in the very next set of lines:
Bifil that in that seson on a day,In Southwerk at the Tabard as I lay,Redy to wenden on my pilgrymageTo Caunterbury with ful devout corage,At nyght were come into that hostelryeWel nyne and twenty in a compaignyeOf sondry folk, by áventure* y-falle* *chance *fallen togetherIn felaweshipe, and pilgrimes were they alle,That toward Caunterbury wolden ryde.The chambres and the stables weren wyde,And wel we weren esed atte beste.And shortly, whan the sonne was to reste,So hadde I spoken with hem everychon,That I was of hir felaweshipe anon,And made forward* erly for to ryse, *agreementTo take oure wey, ther as I yow devyse. (text from poetryfoundation.org)
- 39A: Component of an old PC tower (CD DRIVE) — I miss these. In fact, I still have a standalone CD DRIVE (actually, a CD/DVD drive) right here next to my laptop set up, for when I want to play CDs through my computer speakers. "Towers" don't really tower, but they are kind of vertical, and their components are stacked, so the term makes a kind of sense. Here's what's currently in my non-entowered CD DRIVE:
[from the album On Giacometti by Hania Rani—a fabulous musician with a name built for crosswords]
- 92A: One writing wrongs? (LIBELER) — I like the clue a lot better than I like the answer. SLANDERER seems like a much more ordinary word than LIBELER, probably because anyone can slander, but you gotta publish in order to libel someone.
- 5D: Pet name derived from the Latin for "faithful" (FIDO) — this seems obvious, and yet never occurred to me before today.
- 28A: Part of a certain chain (DAISY) — I know the phrase "DAISY chain" but ... do you just make a chain out of actual daisies? Like a lei? Yes: "a string of daisies threaded together by their stems." Also a metaphor for any interlinked series, particularly computer peripherals. There's a sexual meaning too. I'm just gonna let you imagine that one.
- 71D: Small card for a short message (NOTELET) — LOL, what? Hey, I have a short message for you: no. Also, boooooo! This is ridiculous. A non-thing if there ever was one. The epitome of "nobody asked for this" NYTXW debuts (that's right: shockingly, no one has put NOTELET in a puzzle before today ... but now they're gonna, because precedent, ugh. Use good judgment, people! Just say 'no' to NOTELET!).
[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]
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91 comments:
Medium for me, mostly because I was distracted by a number of really good college football games. Had some trouble in the SW because I wanted asiAN for the 30 million Americans at 114A. OH HI at 111D corrected tskS for the clicking sounds at 121A. Needed every cross for NOTELET at 71D, then thought, "Is that a thing?" I'm with @Rex on that: it isn't.
Liked it better than OFL did; a nice accompaniment to the games.
No Telet… got it! Thanks!
At 50 across my brain ignored the circled letters and I had "BAR BEEPER" in there (thinking it was the thing they give you while you're waiting for a table in some places) and that held up the solving music until I figured it out. Other than that, it wasn't bad for a Sunday! A little more fun than usual.
COMESAC was worth the price of admission
Pretty easy except for a spot right in the middle, where I had no clue on FT MEADE and could not parse what I was seeing with OLD AS TIME and BE SEEN. I had OLDen TIME for a long time.
My favorite solving moment was, after wondering for a long time what layered topping an avocado toast might take on, getting EGG from a cross, then wondering for a split second more what the heck kind of layers an egg has, then, with a huge “Hah!” getting HEN. Not just a bam, but a bam-BAM! Oh, I’ve seen the hen/layer trick before, but I fell for it again, and I simply adore getting got good like that.
There was plenty more for me to like as well. Plenty of cluing pushback, with areas that required several returns, giving my brain the rub it savors. Lovely NYT puzzle debuts OLD AS TIME and SEAL OF APPROVAL.
Plus the theme itself, how that lively title phrase was literally played out in the box – a terrific idea, IMO. After I caught on to it, it helped my solve. And nerdy me liked seeing five palindromes and the contrasting PuzzPair© of ABED and a backward PUMA.
I love the backstory, with Alex working on this puzzle for more than five years, rejecting versions for being too dull. This is an artist as well as a craftsman, one who keeps the solver and excellence to the fore.
Altogether, Alex, this was one terrific Sunday, a most splendid outing. Thank you, sir!
I noticed the answers bending upward and thought I had the theme SUSSed, but never got the shipping component, so BARGES IN just blew me away (adding NECCO and cluing DIET as a Japanese something didn’t help much either). I felt like I got cheated by missing out on half of the theme, which is too bad especially since SLOTH is my favorite deadly sin and I wasn’t able to enjoy it.
I never heard of the ZAPF Dingbats before - doesn’t it sound like it should be a Saturday morning cartoon show?
Well. I solved this reasonably easily (with some holdups here and there, nothing catastrophic) but it wasn’t until I got here that I understood that the words going up were actual shapes, and the words being taken out were actual kinds of boats. Ha. I just thought the letters going up were “shaped” up and the letters being removed were being “shipped” out. So the puzzle is far more impressive architecturally than I realized. But that had nothing to do with my solving experience.
IDIOLECT was a high point for me.
TIL that RC CARS are a thing.
Like Rex, I’ve no use for NOTELET, but unlike Rex, I don’t have much acquaintance with the Canterbury Tales. As a sometimes memorizer of poetry, when in disgrace with fortunes and men’s eyes, I’m humbled by the thought of memorizing a single line of Middle English, much less 18 lines. If I started now, I might achieve that goal just in time for April’s shouers soote.
Also, there was a time in my life when I watched Memento obsessively on DVD, coming to a different conclusion each time. Beyond a doubt, that is Chris Nolan’s best movie.
I still don't quite get the theme. Yes, the shapes go up and the ships go out, but the clues for the ship-themers don't jive with the answers. @Anonymous, 6:01 AM: I also had BARBEEPER for a little while - thinking it was one of those pagers you carried while you waited to be seated, yes!
My wife got the EGG/HEN pairing. Brilliant.
Haircuts are not necessarily SCISSORCUTS, no. Many buzz cuts out there. SCISSORCUTS take a little more time and effort. I liked IDIOLECTS, something new to my lexicon. NOTELET was also new, but less of a "real" word than IDIOLECTS, IMO.
This was medium-straightforward overall, but I am still scratching my head over how the ships' answers jive with their clues. Oh wait, oh wait! Just looked at it one more time. Aha, well OK.
Gave me a headache. NOTELET?
I knew I was in for a hard time when DIET was clued as Japan' s legislature. Oh boy.
I found it way more challenging than Rex, but not in a very fun way (though I admit it felt satisfying to finally get the EGG/HEN answer). I am not familiar with IDIOLECTS or CID, and I thought STEADED was very poorly clued, so it took me a lot of alphabet running to figure out that mess. It didn't help that I had HEE instead of HEH for awhile, so trying to SUSS out "_ESE" as an informal meeting was a struggle. The most exciting part of today's puzzle was Rex laying into the constructor for using RINO. Nice rant, Rex. Enjoy your Sunday, all.
LOL
So does the print version include the title “Shape Up or Ship Out”? Sundays used to always have titles, but I haven’t seen the titles in one on line version for years.
Finished with an error at IDOEpECTS/IDOp. I probably should have caught my error, but I was spending too much time a) worrying about STEADED b) wondering what the theme was. I did not get the theme post-solve when I looked at the title - which I always avoid doing.
STEADED? No no no.
On 92A: LIBELER is correct for “writing” wrongs. Legally, slander is a spoken lie and libel is a written lie.
Hated it. The theme was easy but what a slog. No thanks
Hey All !
"How does a BARKEEPER equal a Paging device?" I said to myself. Slowly, it dawned on me, "Oohhh, you need to take the Ship Out!" SUBTRACT it, as it were. There's nothing wrong with talking to oneself...
84 Blockers today, normal SunPuz max is 78, but it didn't seem Blocker-laden. I think because all the extra ones are cheaters. There's actually 10 Cheater Squares in here. If you don't know, a cheater square is a black square that helps fill the grid. In other words, it takes out a space that could have a letter in it, and the word count wouldn't change. Example is before 9A, if you took out that Blocker, and it was a regular fill-in square, you'd still only have one Across answer and one Down answer.
Oh, the puz? Thought it was good. Thin theme, but it is doing two things, and I'm sure adding more would've further tarnished the fill.
Fun to image BASKETBALLS as a noun to describe those two Birds.
Had crane first for EGRET. Can a Birdoligist (😁) tell me the difference?
NOTALOT holding me up today. Gool old timer says 30 minutes 1 second, so a quick SunPuz here. Liked puz FINE.
Time to ESIGN out.
Happy Sunday!
Six F's (BRAVo on that AES!)
RooMonster
DarrinV
Hard agree on the boring aspect. I almost gave up on this one, just due to a “why am I bothering?’vibe. But I finished, sigh.
NOTELET was the low point in this one. And the theme was pretty pointless, just annoying.
Grokked both maneuvers on contact, a quarter to a third of the way in - in fact, it was the bendy one, in the other direction, that I'd errantly chased in last Wednes's game, for much too long. Devices were fine, but, for the real estate, felt two to four short in number.
Looked to quickly wrap just before an evening kick-off and in doing so made several errors, most witless. One, I threw down DEo, 87d, which produced NEoN, 98a. But clearly, that's ja/NEIN (yes/no, the German). Second, dOBSACT, 19d (oscillate finger between lips, don the D cap) - set to shake a fist at the 19a x 11d ELHI (LINK, 11d, huh?). But obv. JOBS ACT and I s'pose (Angelina) JOLIE, 19a? Yawn. (C'mon, clue this as the French word that everyone and his grandmother should know. It's Sunday.) But it didn't end there: is it NECCO, 75a/is it NECCa, I can never remember. The eeny-meeny strategy landed me in left field on the latter and NamELET for the nonsense 71d, over which The Rex has already shredded. I was trying to think of the Japanese for 83a (hint - it's not diet) - fairly clued and cognizable.
Upside - post the gong, notwithstanding a triple clog, disparate areas, Rip was able to turbo Roto-Rooter the jams, jiffy-like. Whistle clean. So, my skewed book, a solve.
Astute, cogent, meticulous, thorough, deeply penetrating, and must we even say, punctual, analysis from The Rex.
After the ignominy and exit from the CFP that was last night (yes, people, Riprock does cry), come morning, there's The Rex, hot off the press, and sunshine over the horizon.
Filipino here and my only gripe is that we don't really make Beef Adobo. Usually it's just chicken or pork...
Maybe I'm in the minority here. I enjoyed the puzzle, and finally got the "ship out" aspect in time. I wanted "stamp of approval" for imprimatur, but it didn't fit. Then I hit on "seal" and finished it without cheating, unusually for me on a Sunday.
The print version does have a title. I am in the practice of blindly folding the corner of the page back so I don’t see it beforehand; I like to discover the revealer/theme within the puzzle. Today, therefore, was a bit disappointing.
Press the info button ('i') above the grid in the app and it will give info on the puzzle including the title. Titles only on Sundays.
Very clever theme idea. Great work Alex!
Medium difficulty and it's been a while since I've been more bored during a solve. This was a drag except for the anger that I experienced upon getting NOTELET.
I liked the construction , imaginative. Had RaCeR before RCCAR and Rum before RUM. I was sure ZAPF was wrong. Enem changed it to the British sAPF (ORGANIsE) and looked no better STEADED looked wonky to me . Also had tiNY before EENY until the TEXAN corrected that. AMNESIC? I would think it should be AMNESIaC. My dad was a lifelong NYC BARKEEPER, always nice to see that old-timey word. Nice puzzle, Alex. Thank you!
This was worth the puzzle and reading Rex's work today: 71D: Small card for a short message (NOTELET) — LOL, what? Hey, I have a short message for you: no. Also, boooooo! This is ridiculous. A non-thing if there ever was one. The epitome of "nobody asked for this" NYTXW debuts (that's right: shockingly, no one has put NOTELET in a puzzle before today ... but now they're gonna, because precedent, ugh. Use good judgment, people! Just say 'no' to NOTELET!).
Way to go, Rex! Thanks for salvaging an otherwise blah puzzle.
Easy. Started in the NW and finished in the SE without any jumping around. Full five mins below average Sunday time.
What a rush of adrenaline constructing this puzzle must have provided! What an accomplishment! All those circles going up produce shapes and all those circles going across produce ships! Wow!
I missed more than half of the whole shebang while solving.
Oh, I did see the circles going up that were needed to complete the clue: LEMON SCONE and BASKETBALL STAR and such. I needed them to solve, you see. It took me until I was almost finished solving to realize that the circles going sideways needed to be removed. "Offed", if you will. My very first fill-in, realizing that, was SIN for "sloth", ignoring BARGE. Two different parts of the puzzle doing two different things and I was slow to catch on.
But in neither case did I notice either the SHAPES or the SHIPS. I patted myself on the back for filling in SEAL OF APPROVAL -- missing the OVAL entirely. Which was the story of my entire solve.
So a construction coup mostly not shared by me, the solver. Which is always, always the problem with this kind of puzzle. But I do understand that those of you who are more visually perceptive than I am -- a very, very low bar, I might add -- may have had an entirely different and more exciting experience. At any rate, I applaud the effort that went into creating this.
There are NOTALOT of NOTELET fans out there, it seems. Bunch of AGLET-clutchers if you ask me.
Betsy: I want to sew a flag for our new nation. Can I use this fabric, Washington?
George: No, um, erm.... that's a COMESACROSS.
I once got JOBSACT for calling my boss an ICEHOLE. At the time I was working on a flat-bottomed freight boat, so I guess I committed a BARGESIN.
Nice construction off of an everyday phrase, IMO. Thanks, Alex Eaton-Salners.
Another crummy puzzle by my least favorite constructor.
i always have my avocado toast with a runny egg. So yummy
AES is one of the finest three-name crossword constructors.
Mostly pretty easy until the end when I had to pay close attention to the theme to figure out what was going on with the across circles in order to make sense of some of the answers. Which is the long way of saying my time wasn’t in the easy range.
Most costly erasure: agS before DAS.
Clever, cute and fun with a bit of whooshiness, liked it quite a bit more than @Rex did except he’s right about NOTELET.
Count me with those protesting STEADED. I had STEeDED which makes equal nonsense, but gave me OLDeSTTIME going the other way, which works just fine. "Was of service to???". Give me a break!
I was stuck on RCCAR & COMESAC I’ve never heard of the prior and am baffled by the later because I’ve heard that expression but I don’t see how it mean “Finds
I was stuck on RCCAR & COMESAC I’ve never heard of the prior and am baffled by the later because I’ve heard that expression but it did not mean “Finds“ - what am I not getting?
Few additional observations on this idle Sunday. In the way you might get into the glass-blowing at the local boho lab, to no end, Rip took a few typography courses, groovy, but no mention of Hermann Zapf or his dingbats.
One writing wrongs? (LIBELER) — "I like the clue a lot better than I like the answer. SLANDERER seems like a much more ordinary word than LIBELER, probably because anyone can slander, but you gotta publish in order to libel someone."
The writing qualifier in the interrogative is clearly the tie to libel. My read: you had an obligation and to wrap the review slapped this down without thinking it through. In fact, what you wrote doesn't make any sense.
RINO (125A: Epithet for a G.O.P. moderate, maybe) (stands for "Republican In Name Only"). Extreme ugh. The clue is wrong...
My reaction to the label is otherwise - I've come to see it a bit of a badge of honor and as a filter which readies me to listen to those so marked. Cheney voted with The Demagogue the last swing-the-cat-by-the-tail round at nearly every turn, well exceeding that of even chief lackey Stefanik, but in the end, she stood up and spoke out, persistently. And right now, that's what counts, not pissant qualms. Muttering under your breath does exactly zero. So for that, she's drawn my respect.
In fact, had Biden remained in the race, I'd decided to write-in Adam Kinzinger for his stalwart and vociferous stance regarding the same - though, had ours been a swing contest, the cast would have been straightforward.
Your "Morning" link, evocative of George Winston, riding the sustain pedal. I'd a mind to assume the lotus, shutter my lids.
And re the game, slick trick, if thinly visited, as mentioned, but overall.. weak sauce.
Let's.. c'mon, humor. Git some in there. Giddy-up.
To all of you NOTELET protesters:
I'd never heard of it either, but Google is very, very happy with it. It pops right up when you type in NOTEL and evidently I've been using them for decades without knowing what they are called. No, people, you're missing the real word sacrilege that's right in front of your face.
Right before STEADED came in, I said to myself: "Oh, please, please don't be STEADED!" But it was. I went to Google for that, too, typing in "STEAD (verb)" and was roundly ignored. 9/10 dictionaries listed it only as a noun. The one that did list it as a verb, wrote "obsolete" next to it.
So focus your objections, everyone, on the word that's really, really wrong! Which seems not to be NOTELET.
Seeing Alex Eaton-Salner's name at the top of a puzzle always makes me perk up and look forward to something interesting. Today, I thought the theme was a witty and elegant play on the title phrase, and I always like it when understanding the theme helps me with the solve (as in, "What kind of 'SIN'?" BARGE!) Starting out, I'd missed the CONE, instead grouchily thinking, "A sCONE isn't a shape!" After I saw how DUBLINER worked, I took another look. My first of a few AHAS (I loved that clue; LIBELER also got a smile). An enjoyable Sunday pleasure cruise.
Nice. I just learned the back-up for 110a was BALLS ACROSS. Would that have worked equally well for you?
I can still recite the first five or six lines from the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales (at one time I had memorized the first 26 lines.) And BOO to Notelet.
Comes across!
Rex, just wanted to let you know that the Lilac Time's Astronauts (their best album, imho) is receiving a deluxe reissue from Needle Mythology. You should check it out.
@Ray, 8:46am; if you are using the NYT app, the title (if there is one) is seen by clicking on the Puzzle Info icon (lower case “i”) above the puzzle.
Unlike @Carola when I see AES name, I don't perk up, I perk down especially on a Sunday :(
Agree with that - I shudder when I see AES
(sorry ...)
You know how to get even with your foe while ice fishing? You wait for him to bend over then you kick him in the ICEHOLE.
The slog of completing this puzzle was mitigated by three things:
The writeup above (especially NOTELET! dear lord)
Comment from @egsforbreakfast (may now begin using ICEHOLE in real life)
Post-puzzle reading all about Hermann Zapf and his wife and their very long and celebrated careers as designers / typographers. Zapf’s Optima font is used in both the Vietnam War and 9/11 memorials, wow.
I MAY need to see if there is a Google translate that is “English > Riprock.” I have no idea what CFP means unless it starts with “cluster” and ends in “puzzle.”
Even a good Sunday is bit of a slog just because of its length; I spent the whole time wondering "what the heck is the theme?" When I finally got to the end and the Happy Pencil, I spent a whole fruitless minute guessing, until I looked at the title and actually chuckled. (I always read the title when I open the puzzle and then forget it.) Cute!
RC CAR is most definitely a thing. I used to work with a young handicapped guy who, whenever he had nothing to do, would drag out his RC car and start fiddling with it.
Today I learned RINO so aside from Rex's valid objection, there is that.
Typeovers: for 64 across "Nickname", with the ER ending in place, I confidently put in MONICKER. Also OLD AS DIRT before OLD AS TIME.
Ponte en forma o márchate.
It sure would have helped me to look at the title of this puzzle before undertaking it. One of the weaknesses of the app is you can't see the Sunday title and sometimes it has a clue to help you solve it. This played like two separate puzzles. I breezed through the top third with no problems at all and struggled quite a bit with the bottom two thirds, and in the end I'm not sure I enjoyed it that much. Oh well, kept me busy.
❤️ I like the BARKEEPER and CHEST BUMP clues.
These entries use a lotta gunk to clue other gunk. Weird choice. And another huge overall percentage.
Tax deferred savings is in no way a [Pension alternative] and at my age I wish I'd've been able to handle 25 years of any job.
Who's putting guitars on knees?
😫 STEADED. IDIOLECTS. NOTELET.
Propers: 19
Places: 3
Products: 10
Partials: 17
Foreignisms: 9
--
Gary's Grid Gunk Gauge: 58 of 142 (41%) {yech}
Funnyisms: 3 😕
Tee-Hee: ICE HOLE.
Uniclues:
1 Frenchman receives an English waxing.
2 If Elizabeth could bonk a Bush.
3 The Rex Parker commentariat.
1 SEAL OF APPROVAL COMES ACROSS
2 TEXAN-TUDOR CHEST BUMP
3 OLD AS TIME MORASS (~)
My Fascinating Crossword Uniclue Keepsake from Last Year: When one said "gamers." MEANT NERDFESTS.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Regarding "scissor cuts" - I once went to a barbershop staffed mainly by Latin Americans who retained strong Spanish accents. When I got in the chair, the barber asked me if I wanted a "Caesar cut." I tried to imagine how Caesar's hair looked, but then he gestured with the scissors and I realized he'd been offering me a "scissor cut." It turned out pretty well.
I arrived at 62A, Divest, and my first thought was, "I am tempted to divest/RID myself of this puzzle. But I soldiered on through STEADED and NOTELET, etc, etc, etc.
Bottom half of the grid more resistant than top, but still finished in under normal Sunday time. Just experienced this one as a slog.
I've waited a bit to see if someone pipes in, but it looks like I'll have to say it myself. Ernest Rutherford is anything but boring. He is the father of atomic and nuclear science and the quantum physics. He taught Niels Bohr. He was arguably the best experimentalist of all times. So his name is only boring if Einstein's or Darwin's names are. And of course if you think so I would not argue. However, suum cuique.
Easy-medium? Rex is putting us on. This one was pretty tough for a Saturday IMO
EDIT: Make that a Sunday, not Saturday…
Reading through the comments I see a number of posters seem to still have the problem with the "ships out" themes that I did while solving Makes me feel not quite as Slooow as I thot.
I caught on right away about the answers continuing up so wanted to make something turning outward rom the others. Nothing made sense, including the answers as written. Finally, after finishing the puzzle and rereading the title, I realized "Oh all the horizontal words in circles are boats/ships of a kind and if I take them out!!!
Now I see that I had not caught on to the vertical words being shapes. Sorry I missed that. Would have enjoyed the puzzle more as I went along.
I"m with Lewis on some lovely answers. Enjoyed old as time and seal of approval and some others I'm forgetting because I did this many hours ago. At about 12am my time, which would be 4 am East coast I tried to post. But the blog was still on Saturday.
Pretty good SunPuz theme, with a humorously apt title, at least. Awful easy to figure the theme mcguffin out, thanx to them circles.
The Ships goin missin were maybe slightly harder to figure out than the Shapes' runt-rolls. Mainly cuz I hadn't suspected two totally different manueverances, for them circles to make.
staff weeject picks [of a shapely shipful of 28 of the lil devils]: EGG for Shapes, ARK & SUB for Ships.
some fave stuff: ORGANIZE. TEMPLATE. CHESTBUMP. LEGENDARY. RETELLS clue.
some fave Ow de Speration moments: NOTELET. OMGYES. STEADED. RCCAR.
some no-knows: ZAPF. BEEFADOBO. IDIOLECTS. KERR. ERNEST.
Thanx, Mr, Eaton-Salners dude. Nice shifty SunPuz.
Masked & Anonymo9Us
not a speck of spam in this certified meaty runtpuz:
**gruntz**
I second this motion, Nancy.
I had exactly the same reaction when it began to appear that STEADED was going to be the answer, and I absolutely agree that STEADED is even worse than NOTELET.
While neither answer is as OLD AS TIME, both harken back to an earlier era of NYT crosswords when obscure and archaic usages were par for the course, an era whose passing I do not mourn.
And yet, I found this puzzle to be far more engaging than the usual Sunday offering or the typical constructor's architectural feat. It was an interesting problem to locate the shapes going up and ships going out. Not a particularly challenging puzzle, as Sundays go, but one that kept me pleasantly occupied for the time it took to solve.
@Beezer, I'm going out on a limb and say it probably means "College Football Playoff". (Not a fan myself)
me too
comes across. the hint goes up with the cross as the shape up. sigh. i battled that one too.
It must be a generational thing, or some funny quirk of education; but the names Rex complains about I usually know, whereas the ones he loves I've usually never heard of. ERNEST Rutherford and JEROME Powell I knew, and I got the JOBS Act fine, though I thought it had something to do with creating jobs, not being a name of some computer whiz guy.
thank you. What was that (STEADED)?
This was a cute theme and a puzzle with a little crunch to it. I had to hop around for a while before my random solve landed on something that I could fill in. It was late in the solve before I saw the upward trajectory of SEAL OF APPROVAL; the dual theme parts made me smile when I looked at the Title and realized how it worked.
Thanks, AES!
And I wanted to give a recommendation of @Shirley Freitas' book which she mentioned in Thursday's blog comments. I enjoyed “The Fire Bell Strikes At Midnight” and it fulfilled my wish for a book I could immerse myself in.
I agree.
I agree Gary J about pension and IRA! I was a state employee for MANY years. Horrible pay BUT now I have a pension, and I feel guilty about it. I also had a relatively small “lump sum” biz that I transferred to an IRA. Nope. There is NO comparison.
I meant horrible pay compared to private sector equivalent.
Thanks Okanager…I REALLY tried to suss it!
And wait…I’m not a U.S. college football aficionado but isn’t it still the “regular season”? Um…I do watch (halfway) college football due to my husband.
I applaud the effort, too, Nancy. I didn’t have time to post…I was just pleased I did everything necessary to get my “Beezer” avatar back on Blogger this morning after getting a new iPad!
Bogged down there too. Overall unenjoyable. Make a NOTELET.
Yeah, I solved it but it wasn't worth the effort. I agree with Rex Parker. It was a boring puzzle with a lousy theme. BARGESIN to SIN? Give me a break. SUBTRACTS to TRACTS? Just silly. This almost felt AI generated.
Hey Alexa, give me a bunch of words that have other words in them and then clue the 'other words'. Sorry, just a poor Sunday which makes me really grumpy.
I had old as dirt. Once that was proven wrong I was absolutely stuck because the only thing I could come up with was ‘old as F***’. Pretty sure it wasn’t that.
Same here - wasnt familiar with STEADED so struggled with OLDenTIME until SUSS finally steaded(?) me.
Made very little sense to me either.
I liked the puzzle despite the fact that I missed the meaning of ship out (never saw barge as a ship?) and never realized there were shapes going up.
That did make it more of a slog for me.
What I particularly enjoyed was the clue about the Tabard and Rex’s inclusion of the beginning of the Tales.
I did study a section of it at some point translated into modern English but I bought a book which the original language, Middle English on one side, and the translation on the other. I tried to learn on my own how to read Middle English but never could. But I did learn how the opening was pronounced. It is so beautiful to listen to. Thanks to Rex for bringing that to mind again
dgd
Thanks for this, I really didn't know this was a thing until I read your comment!
1 out of 10. No notelets.
FWIW, I’ve called my 100 lb + dogs “doglets”
Yes, but only the top twelve teams make it to the playoffs. It doesn’t take many losses, especially to weaker teams, to knock you out of contention.
In suspect he’s a Bama fan. They lost rather ignominiously to an unranked team this weekend.
I’ve been solving in the app for a year and only JUST yesterday thought “It seems stupid no one online knows the theme. That would help. Maybe it’s under info …”
It still didn’t help me figure out what was going on with the letters you had to subtract but now I k ow it’s there! This one was very strange.
I did like “Dubliner” for “Nick name.”
I usually don’t comment because I’m grateful there are clever people who make my days with puzzles, but this was terrible.
The clues were awful, the theme was unsatisfying.
I didn’t even finish it. Moved on to something else…
Doesn't help when the theme title shows only as "X" (syndicated)
DIEHARD BARKEEPER
OLDASTIME and FEELINGNUMB
OTTO RETELLS the CASE, "ALAS,
LEGENDARY and NOT DUMB,
OH YES, I got ALOT MORASS."
--- EVE GABOR
From Saturday:
TRUE TOATEE
FEARLESSLEADERS TO A MAN
ARE CLASSIC TO their CORES,
TESTS of SEOUL and SPEEDS of plans
TO FALTER nEVERMORE.
--- ASA "POP" DORSET
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