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War room briefings, in military shorthand / SUN 1-26-25 / Pioneers of freeze-drying food / Ridge in metalworking / Annual observance for breast cancer awareness / ___ Urquhart, co-host of the podcast "Morbid" / Aid for using Bluetooth / Riveting persona of W.W. II / White House dog of the 1980s / Storage devices made obsolete by MP3 players / Water feature created by rising sea levels / Place for a white picket fence and a mom-and-pop shop / What "fitz-" or "-ovic mean, in names
Sunday, January 26, 2025
Constructor: Rich Proulx
Relative difficulty: Medium except NW corner, where I was stalled for (seemingly) ever...
Theme answers:
 |
| ["R" + CANE = ARCANE => CLEAR AS MUD (22A)] |
 |
| ["E" + ROAD = ERODE => EAT AWAY (29A)] |
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| ["B" + TRAY = BETRAY => BACKSTAB (42A)] |
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| ["U" + KNIT = UNIT => WORK GROUP (64A)] |
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| ["S" + CAPE = ESCAPE => SIDESTEP (87A)] |
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| ["E" + MITT = EMIT => GIVE OFF (98A)] |
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| ["S" + PIE = ESPY => HAVE EYES ON (111A)] |
Word of the Day: SITREPS (80A: War room briefings, in military shorthand) —
: a periodic report of the current military situation (merriam-webster.com) (emph. mine)
• • •
WORK GROUP is a UNIT?? Isn't ... anything ... a UNIT? One of anything? I don't even know what WORK GROUP is. Is that a group that works ... together? And ARCANE and CLEAR AS MUD are totally different things. The former denotes something esoteric, known solely or primarily by an initiated group, whereas the latter denotes something hopelessly confusing. Parsing CLEAR AS MUD was so hard ... but ultimately it was the *only* reason I was able to complete the NW corner *at all*. Everything (I mean Everything) east of ARCANE and north of AIL in that section was a big old blank for me. Just empty space. I had STD written in at 9D: P.S.T. part: Abbr., but I didn't trust it (PAC?). And then at 18A: Lifted one's spirits? ... MADEA...?!?!!??! I was thinking of all the "spirits," including liquor, and still couldn't parse that (MADE A TOAST). The INCAS pioneered freeze-drying!? (5A: Pioneers of freeze-drying food). LOL I definitely wanted a brand name there (FOLGERS? MAXWELL HOUSE?). No idea that ASU (Arizona State) had the biggest enrollment. No idea what a [Temporary residence] could be at 7D. Thought 6D: Without regard to privacy (NOSILY) was OPENLY. And EAR CLIP, oof. Is that what that stupid thing is called? (25A: Aid for using Bluetooth). EARPIECE was what I wanted? EAR BUD? Kinda wanted CLIP, but EAR CLIP sounded like jewelry. And then there was the clue on ITALIC (5D: Just like that!). Brutal. Even with the "-IC." Wanted MAGIC. Or PRESTO or VOILA! I've never had so much white space for so long in any section of a Sunday. I rarely get that stuck even on Saturdays. But finally CLEAR AS MUD (fitting!) got me traction and I crawled out of there. Everything seemed (relatively) easy after that.
Tapping the "Not All Debuts Are Good" sign again, strenuously, at SITREPS, which sounds like something you do at the gym. Needed every single cross to get that one, never heard it in my life. And then there’s NO-BRA DAY (74A: Annual observance for breast cancer awareness), which I've also never heard of, but which at least seems like a real thing that people *might* know about, or say, or participate in, unlike SITREPS, which seems like nonsense, like an unholy fusion of at least six words. Laughed out loud at KNURL, which is possibly the stupidest-sounding word in the English language (66D: Ridge in metalworking). Just say it out loud—you feel silly, right? Sounds like you made it up. Or, like, it's part of some imaginary creature, a cryptozoological body part, perhaps at the base of the antennae. "VENUSians are able to read human thoughts due to an organ located at the base of their well-developed KNURLs." As for SOFT A, I think of "soft" as related to consonants (SOFT G was in the puzzle very recently—that's the "G" in "gem" vs. the "G" in "guts," which is a HARD G). I think of vowels as either "short" or "long." So "SOFT A" is odd to me, though I'm sure I've seen it before. Bizarrely, when I look up [define "soft a"], the top hits are all about differentiating a certain racial slur ("hard R") from a more familiar / less derogatory term in African-American Vernacular English. In fact, this is the primary (sole) example used in the wiktionary definition of "SOFT A." It's hard to remember a part of this solve that seemed genuinely enjoyable—probably seeing Isabella ROSSELLINI, clued for her brief and nearly-silent but still stunning role in Conclave (109A: "Conclave" actress Isabella). I hope she wins that Oscar.
[Her little bow at the end of her speech to the Cardinals—dagger! I laughed out loud]
- 90A: Gordon ___ engineer with a "law" predicting a doubling of transistors on microchips every two years (MOORE) — and human beings lived happily ever after, The End
- 20A: Riveting persona of W.W. II (ROSIE) — Rosie the Riveter, icon of women in the (wartime) workforce.
- 34D: White House dog of the 1980s (REX) — I have no memory of this. I remember Millie, the Bushes' dog. That is the only presidential pet of the '80s that I remember. Why not just name the president??? I assume it's Reagan. Yeah, here we go. A Cavalier King Charles Spaniel that Reagan gave to Nancy in 1984. I was too busy going through puberty to notice, apparently.
- 45D: ___ Urquhart, co-host of the podcast "Morbid" (ALAINA) — wow, this clue couldn't have been more gibberish to me if it tried. Names I've never heard of, podcasts I've never heard of. Truly a perfect storm of my particular pop culture ignorance. Ah, no wonder I don't know it. Ask me how I feel about the "true crime" genre in general. I find most of it exploitative and creepy. But I admit I'm an outlier here. You all seem to love it. It's a very popular podcast.
- 14D: Storage devices made obsolete by MP3 players (MINIDISCS) — were these ever ... "solete?" I mean, for something to become "obsolete," doesn't it first have to be popular?
- 1D: Network owned by Showtime (TMC) — The Movie Channel. This was another reason I struggled in the NW. In retrospect, TMC is sorta obvious, but I definitely had other "T" networks in there at times (TNT, TBS, TCM ... TNN, is that something?)
- 93D: Theseus' need in the Labyrinth (THREAD) — because "HELP FROM ARIADNE, WHOM HE WOULD LATER ABANDON" wouldn't fit.
Enjoy the rest of your day. See you next time.
[Follow Rex Parker on BlueSky and Facebook]
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113 comments:
Walked away from the puzzle and decided why bother. I liked my streak. The constant references to other clues and then the Pictionary like quality drawings sent me straight out the door for bagels. Terrible puzzle in all ways.
Sitrep is a very common word in military parlance. I've also been watching Battlestar Galactica recently where it gets used regularly.
Brutal, without the payoff. Like going to the gym to do reps and then getting TRAPPED in a room and forced to do SITREPS.
No connection to the military but I got SITREP without any crosses.
Was sitting on NOSIL- and just couldn’t parse it. Completely stuck on assumption it was two words and trying to think of some slang equivalent of NO FILTER.
As a medical person who's been involved in a few epidemics/pandemics, SITREPs is also used there for the daily briefing from health authorities. Loved this puzzle a lot more than @REX did--Thanks Rich! Clever and imaginative while keeping it easy enough for me to be done in less than 30 minutes : ) . I really hate it when the Sunday puzzle takes me an hour. So this was GREAT. Agree with OFL that the NW was the hardest--had ARCANE and CLEAR... and just couldn't imagine how anything ARCANE was CLEAR... and finally it hit me--ASMUD!!!!! Great moment, but slowed me down at the end (I had long since moved on to the rest of the puzzle). Thanks, too, Rich, for name dropping REX in the grid--he probably hates it, but the rest of us fans think it's great! : )
Very little of this one made any sense at all to me. Very frustrating and not worth my time or scratching-my-head-bald-over today. I look forward to a pleasant Sunday morning puzzle with my coffee, it’s usually my favourite one, but this one disappointed.
SON OF a bitch - I wish someone had done me A SOLID and told me not to bother with this one. The Highlights-level sketches in the picture based themes are always brutal.
CAaMP
Just FYI - No Bra Day was started by a plastic surgeon to encourage breast reconstruction after mastectomy (it's morphed into something either wildly sexist or freeing depending on your point of view). For those of us who have either chosen not to have reconstruction, or have had it reversed, it's not possible to go braless in public as we use prosthetics.
A capital-P Puzzle for me, Stymie City, where I had to shift my brain into a gear that included patience, faith, and a lot of sweat.
I like that gear. I like this kind of work, where I have to up my game – if it’s fair. And, for me, it turned out to be. Despite the hitches that befell me – a host of no-knows, ultra-thorny clues, and a tough-to-unravel theme that took up a lot of squares – realizations kept popping out, with an “Oho!” here, an “Oh yeah!” there, and, from time to time, a “Bingo!”.
In the end, very satisfying.
This is Rich’s ninth Times puzzle, with eight of them being themed. I bring this up because I have loved every one of his themes, pulsing with originality. Today’s is his most complicated, where clues and answers intersect in the grid, where pictures are involved, and where the circled letters spell something. And where the horizontal elements of the theme pairs are symmetrical!
Wow!
Very happy to see you again, Rich, after you’ve been away for three years. I eagerly await your next, and thank you for a very worthwhile outing!
Finished with an error with OIL caN. I probably should have realized that isn't really a 'tool', but not knowing knurl or ragu, or for that matter Ana, that section was a bear.
Must have been a very difficult puzzle to construct. Alas, the wall wasn’t worth the bricks.
Also, I could not name any podcaster of any podcast if my life was on the line, so I hope ALAINA Urquhart and Morbid are never heard from again.
I swear I wrote this before reading Rex.
Had the S from OSH Kosh B’Gosh and confidently wrote in Schwa for the vowel sound, even though I should have known better. That slowed me down quite a bit in that section. And I had the same troubles as Rex in the NW. Otherwise pretty smooth ride, although it took me a while to grasp the theme.
I mentioned recently that the NYT has been flirting with self-parody. Today I think they finally crossed the line. Sorry, but submitting a grid with clues scribbled in crayon just doesn’t cut it. I don’t know what their aversion is to putting normal, real, (hopefully) English WORDS in their CrossWORD puzzles is, but it is very unflattering.
So we have an editorial team that so far hasn’t met a gimmick (or some esoteric trivia) that they don’t like - and this is the result. What an embarrassment. I feel bad for OFL - he deserves better than having to wake up at 3 am everyday to deal with this nonsense.
I guess I really love my precious streak, because I stuck with this through to the end and kinda wish I hadn’t.
I totally missed that the circle letters spell REBUSES until I came here. I thought that Rex was going to complain about the inconsistency that some of the circled letter down clues used a single letter (e. g. UNIT @67 D) while others spell out the letter sound with two letters (ARCANE @19D). That didn't bother me at all. I too struggled in the NW, but loved getting ITALIC when it finally dropped. Biggest struggle was in the middle where for the longest time I had sNIT instead of UNIT, and the cross made absolutely no sense. Overall, enjoyed the challenge.
This clunker swung wildly from Monday easy to Saturday hard to just plain awful.
Agree with Rex about the NE corner. Poor clueing, nonsensical construction.
Oh, and that weird appliance hanging off the 65 year old Uber driver’s ear is a Bluetooth device and would require an ANEARCLIP. Talk about skewing old!
Coffee and bagels are a welcome reprieve from this joyless grid.
Good idea, horrible implementation.
Yeah, DNF cause of CLEAR AS MUD. When I hear “arcane” I think old, maybe magical, ancient knowledge. Combine that with the insane cluing on INCAS (?!?), the completely uninferable clue for ASU (had the -SU but the first letter was a total guess so completely unhelpful), and the very hard clue for ITALIC and I just couldn’t get any traction in the NW. Rest of the puzzle was fine, but that NW corner felt like a very challenging Saturday. Made a fine solve end on a very frustrating note.
I've always thought of a FUTON as a mattress of Japanese origin. Definitely not something with SLATS. Apparently we Americans like FUTON SOFAS, FUTON COUCHES but also think of a FUTON as one of those pieces of furniture.
I liked it too! Except for clear as mud.
Medium. My problem was at 6Dx33A (NOSILY x ARDENCY), with an able assist from 25A, EAR CLIP. For 33A I had ARDENCE, which isn't a word but looked good to me as a form of "ardor". I couldn't make any sense of NO SILE and I couldn't -- and still can't -- see how an EAR CLIP helps with Bluetooth except in a very tangential way. Other than that small section, Easy-Medium. My only other WOEs were the @Rex ALAINA Urquhart person at 45D and SITREP at 80D.
Some of the rebuses used the actual spelling of the word (“cane,” “cape”), whereas some didn’t (“nit,” “py”). It would have been nice to have consistency one way or the other.
Nit for knit and rode for road. I mean come on.
Apologies in advance if this is deemed un-PC, but I couldn't help noticing that NO BRA DAY shared the grid with LARGE SCALE, DROOP, HAVE EYES ON, and STARED AT. Also VENUS, for whom every day was NO BRA DAY.
Sure it is. (Possible, that is.)
I must be missing something obvious, since Rex doesn’t even mention it. But I’m thoroughly stumped by (e)tray…(e)cape…(e)spy. What’s with those extra E’s on household words?
I liked the theme but also struggled in the nw corner. I think “italic” was the very last one I filled in and it didn’t click until I had only one or two letters left. That was rough.
did not enjoy.
Utter garbage. DNF. Agree with Anonymous 8:32, a FUTON is a mattress a futon frame has slats.
Same same with SCHWA
Hey All !
I think the ole brain cells maybe deteriorating quickly than originally thought. Had a nice Streak going recently (albeit with a look-up now and again for obscure PPP), but now needed to hit Check Puzzle like three days in a row to find my wrongness. Oof.
Today's errors were: ARDENCe/NOSILe (sure, both non-words, but you tell that to my brain!), OILpaN/RApU/KNaRL (thinking RAPU was some sort of Italian or French sauce I hadn't heard of), giVEEYESON/gSN/iTE (Game Show Network, at least a good error there!)
There's a stacked ON in SE, GAVE EYES ON, STEALS UP ON. On ONs, one might say.
Pretty neat puz. Cool how the picture +'s are the Clues to the corresponding circled crosser.
I'm sure this was difficult to construct, so bravo on that, Rich. Some funky Blocker patterns ensued. 82 Blockers, just a few from the usually max of 78. The extra four come from Cheater Squares. Considering the Theme, I'll allow it. 😁
(There's more than 4 Cheaters, but that's neither here nor there.)
Enough of my blabbering, have a Great Sunday! Rah Rah Football!
Four F's
RooMonster
DarrinV
I kept looking for Nancy's wall. What a waste of time and effort!
Yes. It’s pretty common in movies & books.
Just because you CAN do something, doesn't mean that you should.
This is a perfect example of the NYTimes Puzzle tech enhancements" driving the puzzle creation, instead of, as it ought the be, the other way around. The only people who could possibly be happy with this puzzle are the coders and graphic people employed. by the NYTimes.
Ever the contrary experience. You all breeze through things I don’t get. When I do succeed, most of you struggle. Weird Venn diagram of our solving.
Never heard of the podcaster (really??), or Gordon MOORE and had SchwA before SOFTA and openLY before NOSILY. But I finished with no errors. One of those puzzles that the theme was initially difficult to decipher, but once I got it this thing fell like a house of cards. I really enjoyed this puzzle, especially how the down answer becomes the clue for the crosser, and am surprised some folks hated it. Very clever - thanks
A lot of commenters ask some variant of the question "if Rex calls this easy-medium, what would a hard puzzle look like?" Well we don't yet know for sure, but we now know that one which he very nearly couldn't finish rates a medium, which is helpful in calibrating our scale. I'm thinking that a "hard" would signal that @Rex couldn't fill in any squares at all. And BTW, the Thesaurus has "arcane" as a strong match for CLEARASMUD in adjectival form.
Not much time today to look for cute-but-strained plays on words, but I would like to give a two thumbs up to this puzzle. Having 7 mini-puzzles, each of which requires three reasoning steps (identify the crude drawing, identify an unrelated first letter that can combine with the drawing, identify a roughly synonymous term to cross the circled letter), in addition to the circled letters spelling something that is a descriptor of the bases for the whole puzzle. Man, oh man, was this fun. And the mind that could both invent it and execute it! I sure hope @Nancy puts it in her POY file. Thanks a ton, Rich Proulx.
Love my streak too much so kept at it until I finally cracked the same NW section that slowed down OFL. Enjoyed the reward and the puzzle’s fighting spirit. Nice Sunday solve!
Solid review, Rex. Good job.
Bigtime dnf. Had CLEARlyold as my pairing with ARCANE. liMEYS instead of MATEYS. No chance at KNURL. I could go on ... but I'll not. Back to back days of defeat.
What are we doing?
This was one the least fun crosswords I’ve ever done without any reward at the end.
I'm with Rex on the NW being a real hold-up. Even after I got rid of EAR plug and saw ARCANE crossing CLEAR AS MUD, I was staring, and checking again and again at crosses, trying to make sense of NO SILY to mean "Without regard to privacy". Changing 33A to ARDENCe (is that a word?) in desperation helped not one whit. I finally left in ARDENCY and went somewhere else, only to finally parse NOSILY. Sheesh.
I just couldn't get into a rhythm with this theme. I think it's clever but it made for a halting solve for me.
Rex's "solete" got a chuckle from me.
Thanks, Rich Proulx!
Same here, kept streak going but had to revisit NW several times before things clicked
This puzzle was CLEAR AS MUD to me. How do you draw MUD, btw? I hope better than you drew Clues 29D, 107D, and especially 82D.
All that irritating cross-referencing! All those amateurish drawings! Why did I spend all that time with this? Probably because it was about 15 degrees in NYC yesterday. But right now it's 39 degrees and getting warmer -- the first time it's been above freezing in, what, a week? So after I picked it up again this morning, I dropped it. I may even go out today.
I have to say that as a female who has managed to dodge breast cancer in spite of a strong family history, I had NEVER heard of NOBRADAY and think it’s ridiculous. A woman's freedom of choice as to whether to wear a bra has ZERO to do with breast cancer awareness.
I thought the same as you about futons. I know that many do have slats, but yikes.
Love it or hate it, this puzzle provides some frustrating challenges. The architecture is complex and it uses rebuses, homonyms, and synonyms with abandon. I live surrounded by ASU but didn’t recognize it, and even though I filled in TGIF immediately found myself baffled by the NW until the end. Unlike @Rex I found MADEATOAST and CLEARASMUD (which certainly defines some of the puzzle) to be humorous good answers. Answers like ARDENCY and INCAS and MINIDISCS could also be described as ARCANE for different reasons. You have to be happy with some stretch-the-imagination word play to enjoy this one.
Well I checked out of the puzzle because I was confused. Once done, I didn’t notice or bother to look that the circled letters spelled anything.
This is an odd post for me because I really enjoyed solving the puzzle, yet technically did not solve (hung up in middle east so cheated on ALAINA), and also was aware of the inconsistencies. I guess the clincher for me is, for example, the TRAY in BETRAY. The clues say: “Letter in circle + [rebus]”, and there is nothing called an ETRAY. And yes, I know that the BE sounds like B. Also, I do hope we never see NOBRADAY again unless it is to protest laws to require women to wear bras, because as I said above, it has nothing to do with breast cancer awareness…
Like many, the NW corner stymied me. I was hung up with a seeming answer NOSILO (as in, one is no longer in a silo... one has no privacy) and knew the cross was either ARDENCE or ARDENCY, so... NOSILE was the Natick. (I didn't think of the word NOSILY as a single word, but rather as NO SILY... What's a SILY?) Also had GUST instead of GALE for a while. MADEATOAST is really quite poor; should be GAVEATOAST, IMO.
Wonder if Clarence Birdseye knew about the Incas? Wikipedia has it that he derived inspiration from the Inuit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarence_Birdseye.
I found the theme concept to be interesting, so didn't quite hate it as much as others.
I agree with Anonymous@6:04 a.m. This one is definitely in the running for WOAT. *Full* of factual and linguistic mistakes, grotesque obscurities, and dominated by a gimmick that is horrible even by recent NYTXW standards. I despair. The WaPo is much better these days; hell, so is the Boston Globe....
The theme was way too convoluted. ESCAPE wasn’t too bad since the S could represent Superman. But the others did not land.
Half-baked is what I meant to say.
Apparently this is a love-it-or-hate-it puzzle, and I loved it. It was a bit of a challenge and full of "aha" moments. I love that I had to strain my lateral thought processes in order to make sense of the pictured clues. As with everyone else, the NW corner was the most daunting, but once I sussed out italic, the rest fell neatly into place. And Rex: the "k" in knurl is silent (think knee). I have some background in metalworking, so that was a freebie for me.
I also struggled in the northwest corner. Everything else was fine. But no real pleasure in doing this one.
Liked the drawings. They remind me of drawings in children’s graphic novels which I read with my grandkids.
Just to add to Blue Stater’s comment above - The New Yorker Magazine crossword which runs Monday to Wednesday inclusive with mini xwords on Thursday and Friday is much better than the NYTXW in my opinion.
Absolute garbage. Worst puzzle in months.
Ok, figured this out after reading a few responses. It’s all phonetic. Say the letter. Say the picture word. Put the sounds together…and spell out the English word that matches that phonetic combo. Something like that….
I tried Inuit first..
Anonymous 9:35 AM
About slats and futons
I think it is a perfectly fine clue/ answer combo.
They are called clues for a reason.
They are hints not definitions.
Futons have been thoroughly Americanized and many people associate them with slats in any even. You can sleep on the futon. Doesn’t mean you take the futon and put it on the floor
So sometimes the drawings should be interpreted as homophones and sometimes not? I got hung up on that inconsistency. It was a bit of a tedious slog
Once I realized a few of the clues were less straightforward than on some Sundays the puzzle opened up. Hello MAKE A TOAST. I appreciated the additional challenge of figuring out what was going on with the themers.
The inconsistency of the letter sound vs the letter being added to the drawing, and/or homonym of the drawing, made it even more challenging. And I agree with those who think the crude drawings are an embarrassment to the NYT, but I suppose they are a necessity to ENSURE legibility in print versions.
I was reminded of another use of ARCANE, and KNURL was somewhere in my mental filing cabinet to eventually surface, so -
I fall on the thumbs up side for this one.
Also if you watch NCIS
Medium. I breezed through most of this while ignoring the theme. I finally paused long enough to figure out what was going on at the ESPY/HAVE EYES ON cross. I finished the Central NW where my experience was almost identical to @Rex’s. It took me quite a bit of staring to get CAMP/INCAS/ITALIC/ASU/NOSILY…. NOSILY is awkward at best a doesn’t seem to fit the clue all that well. Plus, INCAS, EAR CLIP, (I tried pods and buds) and ASU were WOEs.
Clever idea and a mostly fun solve except for IDEM. Liked it more than @Rex did.
Claro como el barro.
Brutal. This was like sweeping the unfinished basement in your dead grandmother's house before it's sold to a fix-and-flip company and being served a slice of cold cheese pizza and a warm coke as a thank you.
Propers: 13
Places: 3
Products: 6
Partials: 17
Foreignisms: 2
--
Gary's Grid Gunk Gauge: 41 of 140 (29%)
Funnyisms: 3 😕
Tee-Hee: This puzzle even took the fun out of NO BRA DAY.
Uniclues:
1 Let your wife pick the music.
2 Hot topic on an old cat forum.
3 Goofs ran the oars.
1 ENSURE STEREO SET FEAR (~)
2 KITTY AGE SPOTS THREAD
3 MATEYS WERE WHACKS
My Fascinating Crossword Uniclue Keepsake from Last Year: Foe's home town after you unleash your dragon. ASHEN ENEMY TURF.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I wanted to like it, rebus fan that I am, and I thought the CLEAR AS MUD -ARCANE pair got things off to a fine start. But along the way, as sad-sack theme answers like WORKGROUP x UNIT accumulated, I lost steam. I persevered to the end, but overall: wearisome.
Clumsy. Awkward. More gimmick than theme, and not a very good one. I expect better from a Sunday NYT xword.
It’s part of that “save the ta-tas” sexualization of breast cancer that I find repulsive. And I’m a woman who frequently goes braless. But NO BRA DAY has never done anything for breast cancer, other than give creepy men an excuse to talk about women’s bodies (as if they needed one)
In all my 42 years of teaching in the NYC public schools, I never had a dad chaperone anything. It was always moms, aunties, grandmas, older sisters. Unless I misread the clue, are you also minimizing women in society?
DOES A SOLID was the only smile I got from this one.
This is why I usually skip Sundays. So tedious.
I liked Anytown USA. That was about it.
Yeesh what a painful slog. It took ages to figure out what the trick was and when I did, like Rex I said "oh.", not "aah!". It actually would have been way better... although terribly easy... if the pictures had just included the letter instead of having circles in the grid.
So many stupid typeovers, I won't even go there.
What a drag of a puzzle - I'm sorry I spent so much time on it - like Rex would say SHEESH!
Go out @Nancy -it's really a nice day out if still a bit COLD. Walked my usual 5 miles this am - first time in a week - had to clear my muddled head :(
I don't remember a rebus puzzle that I hopscotched around on so much trying to figure out what the hell was going on. I don't remember when the trick became clear, but it was more of an "oh" than an "aha!". Initially left the NW but when I came back MADEATOAST was obvious, and I finally noticed the ! after the "just like that clue", and saw that it was one of those self-referential clues like "beat it! " for "drum".
Worst part was the EATAWAY ERODE crossing. Kept wondering exactly what the arrow was pointing to, missed the homonym part, eventually thought it might be pointing to erosion. Come on man.
Today's coup--when I took shop in HS (remember those days?) part of it involved what may have been "metal shop". Anyway, we learned how to melt I think aluminum and pour it into molds (I made house numbers). But the point is, we also used lathes to turn something, and I made a screwdriver with a KNURLed handle. Once you learn a word like KNURL, you don't forget it.
I don't keep track of streaks but I was going to keep at this one until I finished it, and for me it was a pretty grim task. Too many names not even in the area code of my wheelhouse and the usual struggle with tiny numbers. I appreciate your ingenuity , RP, but I was Really Praying this one would be over. Thanks for some fun at least.
how does the rebus in 29 down show erode? Puzzle was a pain in the bizzootie.
Hated it! It tries to be too cute!
Liked the use of pics in a SunPuz. Puztheme was very mysterious, until I got my ahar moment, at ESCAPE/SIDESREP. Basically was solvequestin down the left side of the puz, to get to there. Biggest challenge at that ahar-point was figurin out what-on-earth that CAPE rebus pic was tryin to depict.
Puztheme got pretty easy to decode, after that.
staff weeject pick [of a mere 30 choices]: ASU. Had no earthly idea. But at least it chipped in a "U".
a few fave things: MADEATOAST clue. ANYTOWNUSA. DOESASOLID. ROSSELLINI gimme.
Thanx, Mr. Proulx dude. Had neat stuff to please and displease everybody.
Masked & Anonymo9Us
... and a dessert ...
"As the Runtsaid" - 7x7 themed:
**gruntz**
M&A
Not sure what criteria they used, but according to Wikipedia, ASU ranks No. 5 on the list of largest university campuses by enrollment. Texas A&M University, my Alma Mater, takes the top spot.
I seem to be in the minority today. I enjoyed the pictures, aside from the road one, it was too vague. But my question is: isn’t the plural of asylum asyli? I guess I’ve forgotten my HS Latin. It didn’t matter, since the vowel was easy to get from the cross, but still, I was surprised. (Also, I’m not anonymous by choice - Google refuses to let me choose my account, even though I’m logged in. Probably user error in some way, but I really tried.)
Yuck. That's all the comment this puzzle deserves.
Never got it but finished
Never seen such a hard Sunday puzzle; couldn't come near how it worked. Only kept going because I hate to abandon a puzzle when so much of it is still blank - but it was a total waste of time.
Did anyone else want MidTOWN instead of ANYTOWN?
A futon is just a mattress or pad that can rolled up, it does not have slats. I used to have a futon holder that was a convertible couch or bed and it had some wood slats but it was not a futon it was a futon holder.
HATED IT! What happened to the NYT Crossword Puzzle? It's gone, and replaced by a children's restaurant menu placemat. I should have used crayons to fill in this crap.
Go Eagles! Go Bills! Any game but this WS-era POS.
First of all, EARCLIP is not a thing. Second, if it’s meant to refer to “your 65 year old Uber drivers” wireless earpiece, the clue remains nonsensical. The clue is “*Aid for using* Bluetooth”. Does the earpiece “aid” the driver in using Bluetooth? No. Rather, the earpiece *requires the use of* Bluetooth. If you’ve experienced these EARCLIPS in the wild, it’s probably when the driver **was wishing for aid** to connect it to Bluetooth.
No one will read the 78th comment but I’m going for it anyway -
just to vent.
No audiophile said STEREO SET ever.
There are grease guns, but they are not called OIL GUNS by mechanics.
That corner was the worst part of a dismal puzzle. And then "ardency", a word used by nobody, jutting into the corner made it even worse. But at least my streak still lives.
horrible analogy . dead grandmother?
egsforbreakfast
Couldn’t agree more with your take on the puzzle as bd couldn’t B say it better.
It doesnt. take the E away and you have RODE (homonym of Road, which is pictured. Have to think outside the box
Aha! I've long wondered how "rebus" could have been first used to describe a crossword puzzle. It must have been one similar to today's.
Here rebus is used in keeping with its Classic Latin definition, "with or by way of things". It's in line with how it's used in other rebus puzzles like the classic TV game show Concentration. It is also how language scholars use The Rebus Principle to explain how primitive writing with pictographs and hieroglyphics evolved into modern abstract alphabets.
Rather than using the literal meaning of the drawing, it uses the sound of the thing being drawn combined with other sounds to create a totally different word or phrase.
(Seems like litteris, Latin for "with or by way of letters", would be a better term for puzzles with multiple letters crammed into one square.)
Sounds like an epidemic of "sour grapes" among the commenters today. I wondered if Joel Fagliano would have been excoriated if this had run during his stint as editor.
Schwa as well. Fond flashback to elementary school. But then destroyed with the never-heard of SOFT A.
Actually, the Romans had bras. The bikini girls mosaic from Piazza Armerina is one bit of proof. Catullus 64 also makes a reference to the garment.
How is a line down a hill with a road snaking off into the distance an illustration of erode or erosion? The NW was also tough for me, but fell rather quickly in the end. That the Incas freeze dried food came to me after trying Inuit and Aleut. But EARCLIP? WTF. That has nothing to do with Bluetooth per se. BACKSTAB/BETRAY fell last. I did not now the name ALAINA and that was brutal. TALKED SHOP for 'got down to business' was lame, among a lot of other tedious clues and answers. But FFS futons DO NOT HAVE SLATS. The couches on which you can put a futon might, but futons are mattresses made of cotton batting. The editing hit a new low with that, much like EARCLIP. Not a fun puzzle.
Wow
A clear majority hated this puzzle. I liked it I usually do the Times puzzle much later than most. In the dead tree edition.
But yesterday evening I opened the Times and app believe or not didn’t realize I was doing the Sunday puzzle. Thought it was a themed Saturday! (I ended up doing Saturday after Sunday)
I thought the puzzle was easy except around the theme. I ignored the theme and got some of the theme answers from crosses. Eventually, I figured out the theme and finished.
Arcane can mean obscure so close enough for crosswords and clear as mud. (Agree with egsforbreakfast on that) For whatever reason wasn’t a slog for me at all. Rode v Road but tray with tray didn’t bother me either. Before I read Rex I thought he would say it was easy.
I can see why people didn’t like the crude drawings though.
BTW Rex called it medium because outside the NW didn’t find it that hard. But the NW clearly annoyed him!
The Romans had bras. We have the evidence in Catullus 64 and in a mosaic from Piazza Armerina.
What can I say? An actual rebus puzzle built on actual rebuses where I I didn't have to tap the bogus "rebus" (cram a bunch of letters into a single square) key once. I'm happy with it.
Thought this was great and many inapt complaints today. All the theme answers are phonetic and that is generally how rebuses work. No inconsistency there. Not all puzzle types follow the same rules... And, crude drawings? Again, have you ever met a rebus and, second, the goal is making a simple line drawing that effectively communicates an idea, not whatever Botticelli was up to. Of all the complaints about these puzzles, the "I'm upset that I encountered something new" always gets me.
OK, so those of you familiar with my posts know that I love a funny, clever big, fat Sunday puzzle with some silliness, puns, goofy stuff etc. Drawings? No. Never ok. There aren’t many hard and fast absolute taboos in cruciverbalism, but no drawings is an absolute.
My sweet Gran who taught me everything I know about crosswords and being a good person complained (for her) vociferously (I think I remember this accurately) “Oh my, I would prefer not to have anything but letters to deal with,” about drawings in puzzles. And in this particular memory, all we had to do is draw a ❤️ in the square rather than write HEART. And since the word could have been a rebus, the offense was, to her, more serious. I try not to let her loving tutorials keep me from having an open mind (another of her absolute life goals) but without any prejudice whatsoever - she was right! This solve was nothing but a chore. Period. And I accept as valid for anyone who likes this horrible convention your absolute right to love it, so disagree by all means. Love and peace to everyone. Mañana.
I can’t be the only old York Barbell Club member here. Bob Hoffman told us of the “knurled handgrips” on his machined bars.
Here we go again: the editor left in two naticks for our bemusement. I got lucky on KIR/ALAINA but not so on the dreadful triple natick in the center of the puzzle: MEGAN/MIRREN/ANA to which I believe can be added SLIER unless I am wrong that SLyER is a variant spelling. I repeat my contention (for which the evidence is mounting) that naticks are not a fluke but a FEATURE of NYT Sunday puzzleS.
Usually, I’m with @Jim who feels Sunday is a slog so I often just head elsewhere for my puzzle addiction fix. Today alas I did stop by because of the drawings which arrested my 👁️. Love my Thursday rebus most weeks but today’s Rex observation that “ I've never had so much white space for so long in any section of a Sunday” rang especially loud. Took a second look after the groceries were safe in the Fridge to grind it out. As my friend @CDilly52 says “a chore.”
Agree. I cheat and do NYT online where I check every word and look up all the hip terms in the Urban Dictionary. I'm old but new to crossword puzzles. I'm hoping my grandkids will think I'm dope.
Retired reading teacher here. There are hard and soft consonant sounds but no “soft vowels.” There is, though, a schwa vowel sound in father.
Agree with every complaint of Rex, and on top of that no one's yet mentioned the MIRREN / MEGAN Natick crossing WORKGROUP - as mentioned, not really a UNIT, so I doubted it, and with MEGAN crossing ANA and MIRREN crossing ARLO, and all of this right next to KNURL which I'm still doubting is a word.
This aspect was horrible. nit for knit, rode for road, py for pie, and mit for mitt, and etray for tray -- one of these would be too many, this was ridiculous.
Agreed. I do it religiously.
Mini Discs were only “solete” to radio broadcasters like myself, back in the 2000s; all of us had them. Great tool for recording broadcasts & interviews, & it was easy to mark for highlights. I had no idea they were originally designed for music until I was several years into using them. Which helps explain why they never caught on for their intended purpose.
In BETRAY, the circled letter is B..."B"tray, or BETRAY. In ESCAPE, the circled letter is S..."S"cape, or ESCAPE. Same with ARCANE ("R"cane"), ESPY ("S"spy), and so on. See?
I stared at that picture for like a minute before i realized it was a cape!
Ok I’m the only one who enjoyed this puzzle, was annoyed by RODE when the arrow was pointing at a ROAD, and thought it was SETREPS with the workgroup being U-NET. I thought the awkward person to butt dial was an EMT, but then I didn’t get REX either til I came here. Can’t find the B in REBUSS and I thought REBUSS meant there were several letters in one square.
The only thing I looked up was ARCANE.
Yes, it’s esoteric, but it’s only understood by very few people. Which would make it “clear as mud” to most people, unless you were one of the very few.
Well, it was tricky and I’m still going to look online to see if it was SETREPS, and UNET, which made more sense to me.
Best of all, I finished at bedtime on Sunday night!
Wow. Not everyone’s cup of tea today but I loved it. Fun drawings. I was traveling so had to do it on my phone today which I find more challenging but I enjoyed plugging away off and on until the happy music played.
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