Yogurt-braised Indian entree / SAT 11-22-25 / Telekinetic intimidation tactic used in the "Star Wars" universe / Ruthless Records co-founder / Chris formerly of S.N.L. / Eponym of a renamed N.Y.C. bridge / Actress Kelly of Netflix's "3 Body Problem" / Transit option since 2000 / Counterpart of "pls" / Outdoor setting for Plato's academy / Charles ___, founder of Cablevision and HBO / Lead role in 1978's "La Cage aux Folles"
Constructor: Blake Slonecker
Relative difficulty: Easy, maybe Easy-Medium because of all the names
THEME: none
Word of the Day: KORMA (52D: Yogurt-braised Indian entree) —
Sorry-not-sorry to be a broken record about this, but: too easy. And then the only thing giving the puzzle any bite at all is actually another downside of the puzzle: too namey. The only time I slowed down at all while solving this was when I had to traverse some pretty marginal names. It's so disappointing when a grid is mostly well built, when there are longer answers aplenty to admire, but a. the experience goes by so fast you hardly have time to appreciate them, and b. (worse) the only answers that really demand your attention are short names you've never heard of. The only memory I will have of this puzzle is that DOLAN / RENATO crossing (33D: Charles ___, founder of Cablevision and HBO / 45A: Lead role in 1978's "La Cage aux Folles"). Who and who? Crossing at a vowel? The very idea that I should know the "founder of Cablevision (?) and HBO" ... and then that you would cross said name with a foreign fictional character name so unusual that said fictional character is probably the only viable clue for it ... bah. In the end (and it was the end—the very end), this didn't hold me up so much as annoy me. I was able to work my way around the names and finally guess that last square (my finger hovering tentatively above the "A" for a second or two like "well, here goes..."). But yuck. Hard yuck. At least the other names are spread out a bit, though MARLO / DOERR offers a somewhat similar problem in the east. I know DOERR from the spine of some book or other that's in our house somewhere, so that cross was less tough for me, but still—MARLO somebody from a show I didn't know existed on a streaming service I stopped paying for because it's mostly a sea of garbage? I know the *book* The Three-Body Problem; I even know its author (LIU), but MARLO ... honestly I don't even know if it's MARLO Kelly or Kelly MARLO. I do know that MARLO Thomas's birthday was yesterday. 88! Happy birthday to an icon of my childhood.
[the whole show! gonna watch all of this today. children's entertainment was never better]
As for easiness (to say nothing of EAZY-Eness, which increased the easiness if you knew that answer, as I did) (54A: Ruthless Records co-founder), I don't think I've ever had a Saturday puzzle open up quite this easily:
Just a ridiculous gimme, one that gave me footholds in two different parts of the grid. And the grid came together from there, first the southeast:
And then the NW, until I finally tied the two together in the middle:
At this point, I was eyeballing those NE and SW corners like "you're gonna give me trouble, aren't you?" But no, not really, aside from really abusing me with names (MARLO DOERR ELIA ZINN DOLAN RENATO etc.), they didn't do much to slow my momentum. As for today's marquee answers, some of them were delightful—really loved the QUID PRO QUO / JUMP FOR JOY pair (not really a pair, but they felt like a pair, both at the top of their respective Across stacks, both a tripartite "___ FOR (or, in Latin, PRO) ___" pattern, both with wacky "?" clues (14A: Foreign exchange? / 61A: Exhibit hoppiness?)). Good energy on those. OLIVE GROVE is solid (11D: Outdoor setting for Plato's Academy) and KLEENEX BOX is hyper-Scrabbly, which is kinda fun. The rest of the longer answers don't make much of an impression, or, in the case of FORCE CHOKE (!??) they make a bad impression (27D: Telekinetic intimidation tactic used in the "Star Wars" universe). More Star Wars universe junk? I've seen so many movies in that particular universe and yet I don't know what this FORCE CHOKE is. Or I do, but didn't know it had a name. Is this a FORCE CHOKE?
If so, OK, I've seen it, but didn't know it had a name. ERASERMATE is product placement. UPPER BOUND seems fine, but I wanted UPPER LIMIT, which I like better as a phrase (17A: End of a set, in mathematics). In general, this was perfectly well made, but it could've used stronger marquees and fewer names (and name crosses).
Bullets:
16A: Essayist who wrote "If you wrest my words beyond their fair construction, it is you, and not I, that are the April Fool" (ELIA) — the pen name of Charles Lamb and an absolute staple of Old Crossword Grids. ELIA's frequency tapers off once the Shortz Era begins, and ELIA clues also move decidedly in the direction (!) of ELIA Kazan. The ELIA balance of power has shifted. But you still see the "essayist" clues from time to time. Sidenote: old crossword clues are wild; or, rather, they are the opposite of wild. In the '80s they'd just clue ELIA as [Lamb] or [Kazan]. No frills! Bare bones, baby!
29A: Number of Academy Award nominations for Best Actor received by Laurence Olivier (NINE) — one of them was for Wuthering Heights. I wonder what Olivier would think of this? (me, I can't wait):
26D: Certain miniature vehicle, informally (RC CAR) — radio-controlled car. Not my favorite fill. Only ever seen this abbr. in crosswords.
21D: Sea foam (SPUME) — went with SPRAY at first. A much, much nicer word, SPRAY.
35D: Beverage that Ray Charles once touted as "The right one, baby!" (DIET PEPSI) — apparently product placement bothers me a lot less when the music of Ray Charles is attached. Loved this clue.
That's all. See you next time.
Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld
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Overwrites: SOakEd before SODDEN at 9D I started to type Dr. pepPer for the Ray Charles-endorsed beverage at 25D, but it didn't fit. DIET PEPSI did. ORA gEL before JEL for the 46D toothache med
WOEs: Howard ZINN at 18A I needed every cross for 31D Anthony DOERR, even though I read the book Charles DOLAN at 33D MARLO Kelly at 36A. Combined with a stupid typo made WINE SELLER (12D) hard to see
18:23 for me today, so I think that’s easy-medium on a Saturday. Great puzzle. Lots of answers where I had no idea, but after a few crosses…. The aha moment comes. Knew ACRE and CENTRALPARK right away, so that was a nice start. Had drESS at 5A instead of BLESS for a long time, so that made me think 6 down was rOOMiNESS instead of LOOSENESS until the very end. Finally erased a bunch of stuff in that upper central section, saw boos was going to be “SWEETIEPIES” and not something about throwing tomatoes, and so SOakED had to be SODDEN, and then everything went into place. The other section that took me a long time was the SE—had kAnYE before EASYE, but AZURE fixed that. Liked seeing ERASERMATE in the grid. LENIN and AXIS were both gimmes and so those helped me get a foothold down there. Enjoyed the double Q QUIDPROQUO up top and the double-X KLEENEXBOX down below. This one actually fell faster than yesterday’s for me. Terrific, doable, fun puzzle, Blake!!! Thank you! : )
Anonymous 2:55 AM Boo ( singular) from beau and bae from babe have appeared in the Times fairly often. The 2 have bee popular terms for quite a while. They are not short lived, which is why they appear here. You can choose to ignore them, but they will appear again and remembering may make your solving easier.
Despite all the names, I found the puzzle a lot easier than yesterday's. A couple of corners in the Friday puzzle had me floundering around like it was already Saturday, but today it was whoosh all the way through. I enjoyed the Friday a lot more, though.
UPPER LIMIT is not a thing in math. There's something called a "limit superior" which is a much more technical concept than an UPPER BOUND.
It's a DOUBLE pangram. JUMP FOR JOY and QUID PRO QUO are solid but KLEENEX BOX feels green-painty (TISSUE BOX is a thing, obviously, but KLEENEX BOX as a crossword answer?). Given much of the short fill and all the names, I'll say that the double pangram stunt was (unsurprisingly) not worth it.
I guessed the O in ORAJEL from ORAL. A crossing that Rex didn't mention is VEZ x ZINN. VEZ shows up in clues for OTRA from time to time, not so much in the grid. Change SANG to SAGE and you get a bit of ZING in exchange for a crosswordesey goose formation, while keeping the double pangram intact.
@Anon 6:24. Enjoyed your comments today. Not being a math guy, I tried UPPER limit before having my hopes dashed by crosses. Your mention of the “Limit Superior” had me envisioning a proud figure decked out in full military ceremonial attire - stiff upright collar with glistening silver bars, epaulets holding golden braids in place, a chest full of medals - attended by her faithful UPPER BOUND. (I told you I wasn’t a math guy.)
As for ORA JEL, never heard of it. My mother would just give me a whole clove to suck on. Seemed to work.
Loved your suggestion about changing ZINN to Zing and SANG to SAge.That would have made my life so much easier. Not that I don’t consider Mr. ZINN to be crossworthy. Just not there. I looked him up post-solve and he seems an interesting guy.
KLEENEX BOX, however, is no more green paint than tissue BOX. I grew up using Kleenex tissues.I have grass and pollen allergies and am constantly reaching for the KLEENEX BOX. Even though Kleenex is no longer sold in Canada, every tissue I reach for is still a Kleenex and still, whatever the name printed on it, comes in a KLEENEX BOX.
Agree that upper bound is wrong. Upper bound is any number greater than or equal to all set elements. It need not be in the set. Upper limit is closer to correct. The upper limit is the largest element of a sequence.
Ick. UPPER BOUND. Just no. Sets don't generally have ends. Suppose your set contains the strings {end, aint, correct}. Which one is the end? Is it the upper bound?
Agree UPPER BOUND is not right for the clue. Close enough for crosswords, I suppose. I tried for too long to make right Brace (which fits) work with the crosses other than BRB.
I'm a little drunk and still did this faster than yesterday's so I gotta assume it's pretty darn easy. Or EAZYE. In particular, five WoEs yesterday and I think three today (ZINN, REDD, MARLO).
In other news, I just had my first puzzle acceptance by the NYTXW (hence the "little drunk"). No idea when it will run, but it will be on a Thursday.
I have not read Cloud Cuckoo Land but a week ago I read DOERR's All the Light We Cannot See, and while I had some issues with the pacing, minor character development, and editing, I found so much to enjoy in it that I still gave it five stars.
@Rick Sacra - I assume it will appear as Kit Sheffield, but I'm new to this so not certain. I should also mention that I solved today's puzzle and wrote up my comments last night, and am not drunk at 7am.
Anonymous 7:25 & 10:17 AM For long time solvers, ELIA is almost a gimme. Read Rex to see why. Hasn’t been around in a while but an old friend, as Pabloinnh calls crosswordese. 4 letter essayist probably Elia! that is why they maybe let this area in.
Well, you can do difficult “well” or you can load your grid up with gunk and trivia like ZINN and EAZYE and call it a Saturday. Today we get bludgeoned by the latter, and end up with proper names crossing proper names (DOLAN x RENATO) and foreign stuff crossing more foreign stuff (OTRA x CARA). What a dud of a puzzle.
On the positive side, this one played pretty easy for me and I didn’t get bogged down in a slogfest because I just let Uncle Google fill in about half of it. They should publish a warning when they just phone it in and publish a trivia test.
That is, I kept running into walls. Vague cluing and no-knows (11) would freeze me, and I’d go somewhere else and freeze and flee again. After ACRE / CENTRAL PARK right at the start, I thought I’d be gamboling through the box – hah!
Much lateral thinking and making educated guesses – things my brain lives for – were called on. I just kept pinballing around, and answers would come, sometimes in dribs, other times followed by mini-splats, and always with gratitude.
Hard work, but the kind I like.
Lovely wordplay clues: [Foreign exchange] for QUID PRO QUO, [Boos] for SWEETIEPIES, and [Sprinkle with oil, say] for BLESS. I also liked ERR crossing ERR in the middle east, because that's what my solve felt like often. And, as with Thursday’s puzzle, I was strurck by the profusion of schwa-enders (8).
I hope for a steep climb on Saturdays, and your obstacle course was just that, Blake. Thank you!
Dolan passes Shortz's anyone in the paper test. His son, James, is the highly visible and oft vilified owner of the Knicks and Rangers (due to the money his father made through Cablevision).
Evan I get the Times dead tree edition , so I unfortunately, am aware of the antics of the Dolan family. So that helped me. Many puzzle subscribers don’t. So I can understand the no clue reactions. The editors do seem to have a “if a name is known in NYC use it” exception.
Definitively not “too easy” for me, with the proper names and cluing misdirects. But a fair puzzle, and gratifying when it all came together in the end.
Solved it with two cheats (to get RCCAR and KORDA), but the music never sounded. This has happened several times before, once recently. I'll be damned if I know why. Good puzzle with puzzling outcome.
Hey All ! Medium -touch here. A lot of names that were unknown. Stuck in NE for that reason. That NE corner, what an ICE HOLE. 😁
Boos for SWEETIEPIES was different. Couldn't get Boos as booing something out of the ole brain for quite a while.
Confess to Googing for SPUME. Just couldn't think of what that Sea foam name was, though once I saw it, got a "Dang, of course!" D'oh. That one look-up, and the puzzle fell ERRor free from there.
Double Pangram today! Nice! And mostly didn't seem forced. Liked how the Q, J, and X were Doubled in the same answers. Heck, it's close to a Triple.
Nice SatPuz that didn't drain the ever receding brain. If you read my posts and think it's gibberish, now you know the ole brain is responsible. Har.
DOLAN/RENATO was an extra challenge for me because I had the miniature vehicle as some kind of CAB, so BENITO seemed likely, though DOLIN was less so. When the I didn’t give me the happy music I tried the A and still no go, so had to break that section down a little bit more and find my other mistakes.
When there's no long fill that makes one stop for a moment to admire its fiendishness, it's too easy for a Saturday. Agree re too many inconsequential names, though perhaps because of my age EAZY-E (was it supposed to fool one into trying to make KANYE work? THAT'D be clever!) was a fun layup and RAY CHARLES made me thirsty. 11:44 because i wasted 90ish seconds trying to turn KORMA into the distinctly not-yogurt-braised KOFTA, which was a definite meatball move on my part. Onward!
Hey — a double pangram. That was a fun one. Maybe I’m NYC-centric, but I thought that, in addition to Cablevision, the Dolans were pretty famous as the (somewhat reviled) owners of the Knicks, Rangers and Madison Square Garden.
So EAZY(E), even a dead gansta rapper from 1990s could finish this one, unless he never heard of the esoteric law firm ELIA; ZINN; MARLO; RENATO; DOERR; and DOLAN. At least proper nouns balanced out with REDD and KOBE, actual known quantities.
DOLAN was actually one of my favorite clues. As Evan and Keith said, it was a gimme for anyone in the NY metro area, and I like when puzzles in an (ostensibly) local paper reflect that paper's locale. This was a NYC-heavy puzzle, as far as those go, and I don't hold that against it, even if it wasn't my favorite
The New York Times is not really just a local paper. I know people in California, Oregon, Washington, and across western Canada with subscriptions. Thinking I might stop "borrowing" from my sister-in-law's subscription and pay up myself.
Les S More. You are right. The Times has long since been an international, never mind national news outlet. My Dad started getting a Times subscription as early as the’60’s. I continued that tradition and still get the dead tree edition in R.I. I think the international news, sports ( if a bit esoteric on occasion) science and cultural, as well as special reports, are top notch. I do have to admit that since the dawn of the Trump era the national news has been destabilized. Traditional “objective “ reporting often helps fascist liars like Trump. But the Times is still better than most. Also now he is a little weaker politically, their style works better. So maybe give the electronic edition a shot?
I figured out the names just fine. SODDEN sucks. I know it's a word, and a valid word, but so are sOakEd and SOppEd. Come to think of it I don't know if sopped is even a word but if not I would probably use it incorrectly before I would say SODDEN. Ruined that whole section for me, especially given that I had never heard of UPPER BOUND.
Now, it was also tricky to put in EAZY-E when kAnYE was a great misdirect, and I even tried to squeeze some weird version of JAY Z in there for a while. But the crosses were gettable, unlike an obscure math term. I know, I know I should have known LOOSENESS for laxity but the wrong answers in other places made that hard to see. Whatever. Not my day.
Same problems with the names with the same names as everyone else, so I'll skip mentioning them. Didn't stop to think about a Remote Control Car and left JFK, so a technical DNF. I did find out something interesting about our friend the PRAWN and ran into noted crossword essayist ELIA, who has been MIA for some time. Welcome back.
SPUME was easy as the Spanish is "espuma". See also OTRA VEZ
Hooray for Ray Charles. In a perfect world, our national anthem would be "America the Beautiful" and it would always be sung by Ray Charles.
Nice Saturday, BS. Would have been Better Still without all the you-know-whats but still OK. Thanks for all the fun.
I would put this in the Medium pile. Took longer than any puzzle in the last few weeks. Despite spending untold hours in CENTRALPARK (Hi, @Nancy), I didn’t make that connection immediately like Rex.
Names are interesting in that it is fascinating to see who knows what here. I would think that Howard ZINN would be a gimme for most here. His “People’s History” changed the way history is taught by focusing on the lives of ordinary and/or marginalized people, steering away from the “great men” approach.
I know EAZYE, but not from his record label.
As others have mentioned, any fan of the Knicks has heard the “Sell the team” chants for a couple of decades - due to nepo-baby James Dolan’s meddling in team decisions, and forcing things again and again that would keep them uncompetitive for years. Their recent run has calmed that down.
Even in comedians, I would rather see REDD Foxx.
Last no-happy-music-letter was the O in MARLO. DOERR’s presence was a WOE to me and makes me ashamed not to know more authors…Netflix has a sea of garbage, but also some surprisingly good stuff as well. Adolescence was a difficult but powerful watch, and a window into the lives of youth today. Rightfully acknowledged at the Emmys.
ICEHOLE reminded me of the shacks on the St Lawrence River, and Anthony Bourdain’s fantastic Quebec episode, doing fine dining in a shack on the river.
Was he visiting with Martin Picard, the totally nutbar chef/owner of Au Pied de Cochon ? I've taken my family to his restaurant where I ordered one of his signature dishes, "Duck in a Can". (Did I mention this guy is nuts?) He puts some celery seasoned toast in the bottom of a tin can and crams in some lovely duck, seals the can, and sou vides the thing for about a half hour. When the waiter arrives at your table he has a can opener in hand and he ceremoniously cranks the tin can open and slides out the duck - sort of like you might slide out a can of Alpo for your dog. Plop! He then slices it up and it is so, so good. Unreal.
It's a noisy place and everything on the menu is full of duck and goose and pork and beef and fat. It's all delicious, but you'll have to fast for the next 3 days. You should all go.
Anonymous 4:55pm Yes I knew of him and that his last name began with a Z and ended with an N. Eventually, I got it right. I read of him and the book in the Times Knew he was of the “old” ( pre boomer) left He died 15 years ago. His history was a popular history, not academic. So scholars looked down on it, as did some reviewers. I don’t think he was ever a household name. It doesn’t surprise me in the least that many didn’t know of him. (The old left was an interesting part of 20th Century American history, but I would argue not central to it except in the union movement. . They like the contemporary progressives were never very good at selling their philosophy to average Americans I think they themselves thought they were more important than they were.).
Fun puzzle! I strongly suspect the original clue for DIET PEPSI was a reference to Addison Rae’s chart-breaching alt-pop hit. But maybe that’s wishful thinking.
Never heard of an RCCAR, nor of the renamed bridge, and I thought JFK more likely than RFK, so I invented a jCCAR. Otherwise, I would have been under nine minutes, which is a fast Saturday for me.
AZURE sure to remember, food vendors at the early Mets games offered popcorn with SHEA Butter. Many of those games featured Mets infielders failing to step on the bag for the first out in a double play -- something known as a FORCECHOKE. They'd seldom go NINE without what became known as an EAZYE.
Given the QUIDPROQUO m.o. of the current administration, one could imagine a memo on how to extract maximum personal wealth from our European allies to be headed RENATO.
My aunt from Mississippi had a knack for mixing southern gentility with crudeness. Like when she'd reprimand me by saying "Egs, y'all don't be an ICEHOLE."
I was relieved to see that Olive Garden didn't quite fit for the site of Plato's Academy. But I could certainly envision a Platonic dialog on whether a drink can actually be bottomless or whether there is an UPPERBOUND.
I agree that the name selection slogified the puzzle a bit, but still enjoyed it. Thanks, Blake Slonecker.
Like Rex, I started out on a high note—tho I first filled in FingerLakes before entering CENTRALPARK. After that I bombed on all the names, except for KOBE, a slam dunk. Apologies for that one but couldn’t resist. Never heard of RCCAR or Boos, so my education has been sadly neglected. Liked QUIDPROQOU and JUMPFORJOY, and overall thought this a decent puzzle just miles out of my wheelhouse.
Don't want to seem like an ICEHOLE, but I thought this puzzle was terrible. Probably on the easy side if you knew the names but otherwise a mash nonsense with multiple Naticks. One star.
Case in point. 1A: is there anyone who does crossword puzzles even occasionally who doesn't know, without hardly giving it a thought, that when you have a four letter word clued as "One of [some somewhat large number] in [some location]" that the answer is ACRE? Then referencing 50C: what else with 14 letters makes sense for a location in NYC where you have 843 of these 1A's if not CENTRALPARK. So on a Saturday, in fewer than 5 seconds, you've filled in 1A and 50A, not only without having to break a sweat, but not even needing to have your first sip of coffee and begin actual thinking for the day.
And if crossing names of people who may not be terribly familiar to or easily recalled by many solvers was meant to add a little toughness to the way-too-easiness of the rest of the puzzle, it seems a rather odd, and not terribly enjoyable, way to do so.
But, I don't blame the constructor. This seems to be more meddling by editors (no doubt at the direction of NYTimes Corporate) to decrease the level of toughness and challenge across the board so that the Puzzle can do its part get those subscriptions up to 15 million by the end of 2027.
Still love the NYT - but when the gimmicks (Monday through Thursday) get too annoying I go to the NYer - you can find Robyn Weinstein & Erik Agard there frequently too.
I thought it was going to be some famous hotel or other tower and filled in 1A with “room.” Then 1D went in as “rose.” They didn't last long but CENTRAL PARK wasn’t a gimme, and I'm not new to XW.
Not easy at all for me; in fact, the toughest Saturday in a long time. If you draw a line from the NE corner to the SW corner, everything to the right of that line I was able to fill in without cheating (felt proud of myself for remembering ORAJEL). In the other half, I just couldn't make progress, Never would have gotten SWEETIEPIES or UPPERBOUND without getting their crosses, and they just didn't come to me. Darn.
Wow, times have changed. Two or three decades back, Howard ZINN's "A People's History of the United States" was almost universally known, though not universally loved -- it was a leftist take, enlightening but vilified by the right. He died in 2010, and I guess the political atmosphere has changed as well. But I was surprised that so many commenters hadn't heard the name.
Anyway, the puzzle. I saw and instantly solved that clue for ACRE in some other puzzle within the last month--but today I was totally befuddled, and went for treE (a ridiculous answer, if you bet the OVERs on that one you'd clean me out). But it did bring back memories of the churchyard at Painswick in England, where there are, always have been, and probably always will be exactly 99 yews. If they plant one, another one will die. Or so goes the legend. It's on the 5th day if you walk the Cotswold Way.
So that gummed things up good, as did my declining vision which makes it hard to read the numbers -- so I was trying to find a 5-letter basketball player where I needed a 5-letter rapper.
Islam before SUNNI, even though the clue needed either an adjective or a plural noun. (Rule #3: never assume that the puzzle has an error.) But the toughest part for me was that bridge crossing that toy car. I didn't know they'd renamed the Triboro at all, but was it RFK or jFK? I finally went with the former since he ended up a New Yorker, but it was just a guess.
@Nancy, who no longer comments here, has a letter about phones in today's NYT. Here's a link.
Here's the letter copy, for the many of us who hit the NYT paywall:
Re “Your Phone Doesn’t Have to Be Your Enemy,” by Steven Barrie-Anthony (Opinion guest essay, Nov. 13):
It’s my phone that’s experiencing grief, not I. My phone is sad and envious — envious of its smartphone brothers and sisters. They get to travel to exotic places! Give lifesaving advice — sometimes even to very famous people!
Whereas, because it had the great misfortune of being bought by a Luddite and technophobe, my smartphone sits forlornly in a dark drawer, never taken anywhere. Worse, it’s turned off for months at a time, with all of its many apps (none requested by the owner but somehow there anyway) completely ignored.
Is it any wonder that my phone experiences envy and existential sadness?
I was surprised, too, at how many commenters are unfamiliar with ZINN, which was a gimme for me. ELIA, ditto. But I had no idea about REDD, MARLO, or EAZYE.
A very easy puzzle, except for the unknown names. The intersection of RENATO and DOLAN I would've called a Natick except for the fact that only the "A" looked reasonable.
In spite of the unknown names, my time was several minutes faster than yesterday's puzzle.
Thanks @jberg for linking @Nancy’s letter. Saw it this morning and it just reminded me how sad I am that @Nancy is no longer commenting. Also, thanks @Pondie for sharing the letter.
Jberg I am not sure Zinn was quite that famous among Americans in general even at his height. My guess he was well known among the center to the left and much less known among the disengaged and the right. if they knew of him he might have encouraged them to to start their long campaign to whitewash history! Anyway while I knew of him and read reviews of his book when it came out, I had no interest in reading it and when doing the puzzle, remembered Z—N. And then the crosses helped (FWIW I have mostly been a Democrat positioned between progressives and moderates. I read a lot about the old pre boomer left and I didn’t like what I read , although I am aware ofthe brutal repression they went through in the McCarthy era.)
Been awhile, but I invited my good friend Go-ogle over for the solve and he's really good at knowing the essentially anonymous people stuffed into a weekend puzzle to make it un-doable and thereby making the "puzzles used to be so much harder" crowd cry less.
That is to say, another "not for me" outing. Nancy's wall worthy. Even before we talk about the gunk rating this was not a good idea.
I think SWEETIE PIES for [Boos] is my favorite pair. Glad we learned SPUME a few weeks ago.
People: 13 {Ya happy? Well, are ya?} Places: 3 Products: 6 Partials: 8 Foreignisms: 4 -- Gary's Grid Gunk Gauge: 34 of 72 (47%) {🔔This is one of the gunkiest puzzles ever... ever! And 13 weekend D-list names. I had to break out the calculator to add the gunk up. And as a reminder, there's no theme putting stress on the grid. A self inflicted tragedy we're roped into saying, "Well, at least it was tougher than lots of puzzles lately." I will say it: [Boos] = Not my sweetie pies.}
Funny Factor: 2 😕
Tee-Hee: SEXT ICE HOLE.
Uniclues:
1 Where you keep your crawfish. 2 Starbucks offering for fishophiles. 3 Relaxed fit jeans. 4 How you keep your garden clean.
I was ice fishing and catching nothing, a fisherman nearby was hauling out one after another. I asked his secret and he mumbled "kmmph wmmz wmm". When I asked him to repeat what he'd said, he spat in his hand and said "keep the worms warm." What an ice hole!
Is this a record for the number of names in a weekday puzzle?
I stopped watching SNL about the time Chris REDD turned 10, so he was one of the many unknowns to me.
MARLA/MARLO/MARLY? DOERR/DAERR/DYERR? - the great vowel conundrum of 2025.
I ran across the trivium regarding IDAHO's international border on Sporcle last week. Never would have thought that IDAHO's border is shorter than New Hampshire's before then.
I also misread Pls as Pee-Eye-Ess, so was trying to think of another shortened plural version of TEC for the longest time.
Some good cluing (for QUIDPROQUO, WINESELLER) and interesting answers (ERASERMATE, JUMPFORJOY, ICEHOLE, ORAJEL) but then so many obscure names that just made it one big disappontment.
I just read the recently published memoir by Anthony Hopkins; enjoyed it. It prompted me to watch Silence of the Lambs again. So nice to hear Hopkins coo, "QUIDPROQUO, Clarice."
Relatively easy for me, it had to look up two of the proper name crossings. Since the clued actress name was obviously feminine, went with MARLA - as the cross was unknown, it looked fine. And I had OTRA VES, so ZENN was SENN. Again, that looked fine, but I should have known better with VEZ.
Yes, it is the RFK bridge (recall that was serving as senator from NY when he was assassinated, so not unusual to have a bridge honoring him)
A pity, though, that it wasn't JFK. Today is the 62nd anniversary of his assassination. But there is nary a word of remembrance about it or him in today's NYTimes - anywhere. I never expected to be old enough to live during a time when November 22 would pass as just another day.
For me, easy up top, edging toward medium below, and engaging throughout. I liked the happy SWEETIE PIES and JUMP FOR JOY and Plato's OLIVE GROVE sharing space with CENTRAL PARK (with its crossing ARBOR). And now I know what Darth Vader's at-a-distance death grip is called.
Do-over: Odds before OVER. Names that helped: ELIA, ZINN, RFK, DOERR, LENIN, balanced by the unknown REDD, DOLAN, MARLO, EAZYE, RENATO.
Easy-medium. I too got off to a quick start by putting in ACRE/CENTRAL PARK with no crosses and it was pretty whooshy after that until I hit the SW. FORCE CHOKE, RENATO, and DOLAN were WOEs and I needed some staring to come up with RC CAR.
Other WOEs - ZINN, MARLO, REDD, EASYE (as clued…NWA would have worked), AJAX, and KORMA.
Costly erasure - UPPER limit before BOUND(Hi @Rex).
Mostly solid with just a smattering of junk (THX, TKTS, EST) off set by slightly more than a modicum of sparkle, liked it.
The old names stick. The Tobin Bridge in Boston will always be known as the Mystic River Bridge, and no one who lives in the DC area will ever call the airport on the Potomac River anything but National
Kitshef In NYC it even applies to streets. 6th Avenue’s was officially changed to Avenue of the Americas over 60 years ago but despite the “new” name being on the street signs most New Yorkers say 6th Avenue
Solved quickly without cheats but I am, like others, very annoyed with the obscure names crossing obscure names. How aren't the editors weeding this crap out? Such a saturday dud.
Except for a double write-over at 7D, this puzzle presented little to no difficulty. EQUAL TO, EQUALED, EQUATED, fixed by the obvious crosses of SWEETIE PIES and NINE.
I couldn't remember how to spell Anthony D_ERR's name so I went elsewhere to solve and later found I had left that square blank. I'm still wondering why "All the Light We Cannot See" won a Pulitzer and I've had several people agree with me.
I have ridden the bus from LaGuardia to 125th St. many times over the RFK bridge, my main method of getting to Manhattan from Minnesota. I know many people still call it the Triborough Bridge but I've only known it as RFK.
Blake Slonecker, I wish your Saturday puzzle had been harder, but it was fun, thanks!
Well I wouldn't call it EASY but it was doable. WOES were UPPPER BOARD, RC CAR, KORMA, ZINN & haven't a clue about SWEETIE PIES (anyone?) but I'll take this over some of the gimmick puzzles any day. I did really like 65A SEXT. If I never see a reference to the current RFK (no disrespect to his Dad who must be turning over in his grave) it'll be too soon. So after my mini-rant, thank you, Blake :)
This played quickly for me in the end but I struggled having a Spanish phrase (OTRA VEZ) crossing an Italian word (CARA) and two names (ELIA and ZINN). With RENATO/DOLAN and MARLO/DOERR also being in doubt, my confidence was low.
Upper right was horrible if you don't speak Spanish--two Natick squares stacked. V??, ?LIA, ?INN. So many possibilities to guess. Along with the MARLO/DOERR cross and the RENATO/DOLAN cross made this puzzle butt ugly as far as I'm concerned.
Seems to me that Howard ZINN is well known enough to qualify as a non-Natick name; "Boo" has been a Southern term of affection or endearment for a long time.
Tickets sold for Broadway shows by TDF (Theater Development Fund). You can stand in line and get significant discounts for shows the day of; There is a prominent booth at the north end of Times Square, surrounded by every single tourist to NYC that day.
PSA - The 11th edition of NYT Puzzle Mania drops this weekend. I realize it’s somewhat beyond the scope of the Rex Parker universe. Just saying happy analog solving to all here as we whoosh whoosh into the holidays.
Easier than yesterday's puzzle but still well within the Saturday range. That's pretty good for a pangram puzzle. Stunt puzzles tend to sacrifice difficulty to achieve a particular outcome. The obscure names were not a problem as they helped maintain the late week resistance. In spite of the NE having the greatest concentration of these names it was the first section I solidly filled as it started with the obvious VOWS supported by VEZ of the Spanish 101 phrase OTRA VEZ. Pangrams have to include the high value consonants and they tend to be dead giveaways. Obscure names keep the solve from being a pushover.
A couple of fortuitous gimmies came from KORMA being in last Tuesday's SB and my having just driven across the RFK bridge last Sunday.
The SE portion was downright self correcting. AZURE changed KANYE to EAZYE, CENTRALPARK turned CARO into CARA and when I tried to use the word ERASABLE to start 64A FEN changed it to ERASER.
I'm not familiar with this particular DOLAN person but DOLAN is a very common name. RENATO may not be as familiar as ELIA but it's a piece of crosswordese along the same lines so that A was never in doubt.
Pretty sure KOBE was the only name in this very namey puzzle that I knew, so I agree about the unpleasantness of the solve. Also agree that I appreciated some of the spunky long answers. Rex didn’t mention SWEETIEPIES, though some above have, but that was also a great word (even if plural), and, newbie that I am, I didn’t catch the misdirect of the clue until the very end when I was finding my error in the cross (EQUALED for EQUATED). It was a delightful moment of revelation on a clue that had me beat during the solve. All that to say, a lot to like here, but the heaviness of obscure names made it impossible for this newbie to solve without looking most (all but KOBE) of them up. The fact that I could possibly muddle my way through the rest made me know that Rex would call it too easy for a Saturday. :)
One of my least favorite puzzles I’ve ever done. Obscure name after obscure name, several of them crossing each other… just awful. I guess it’s “easy” if you know a bunch of obscure trivia names. Otherwise was just a grueling uphill battle without any fun
Mostly very easy but I have no familiarity with ELIA, ZINN, MARLO, or DOERR, so that NE cost me a bunch of time. Just couldn’t see OLIVE GROVE for some reason, but once I got it I could infer the missing letters in those names.
It started out okay, but in the end I was so disgusted with the Unknown Names (crossing each other like crazy!) that I gave up even trying to find my mistakes. I somehow got RENATO crossing DOLAN, but I had MARLY crossing DYERR (even though I read the book... a while ago).
And then in the upper right it's even worse: ILIA and SINN crossing VIS. I tried multiple alternatives (FINN, YINN, DINN) before giving up.
Just not my cuppa today...This was my first Saturday ever when I was able to get two answers in right off the bat with no letters entered at all - As @Rex said, it was 1A and 50A. That didn't annoy me, it excited me, but alas, from then on nothing really sparked. I think I counted 10-11 propers - many of whom I had no clue - that does not usually bother me either, but today I just didn't come away all that happy with all the new knowledge - I'll never think of any of these folks again! That's likely more a Hugh problem than the puzzle's but that's how I walked away... So after my initial whoosh, I had to muscle through most of this, I did like all the Marquee answers that @Rex mentioned but the work to get there was not as much fun as I would have liked. Thanks @Rex for the That Girl vid - my memories of that show revolve around being home sick in elementary school and re-runs were aired during the day. That along with I Love Lucy, Family Affair and Beverly Hillbillies. Not bad for a six year old! Nice memories even though I was mostly under the weather while watching. Blake - there was some great stuff here - I think I was just not on the same wavelength today. Looking forward to your next one. Also - Congrats @Kitshef for getting your first puzzle in! I'll be keeping my eyes peeled every Thursday!
As multi-mentioned here-in already, it's a Double-Pangrammer! It's almost a puztheme in itself, with showpiece themers: oliVegroVe. QuidproQuo. kleeneXboX. JumpforJoy.
Also, this rodeo was a Mega-Name-Grabber! Was unable to finish, without resortin to research. staff weeject pick was VEZ, which was in a Triple-Research NE puzcorner along with ELIA & ZINN. Apt clue for that there corner:{boos!}. And VEZ was a debut word, too boot.
some fave stuff: DOERR/ERR [even tho DOERR was a no-know]. EAZYE. All four of the pangrampuzthemers honored above. WINESELLER [Var. -- M&A prefers the WINECELLAR spellin]. CENTRALPARK, which made that openin 1-A chute into the rodeo extra-mysterious.
Thanxjqvez, Mr. Slonecker dude. Was the double-pangrammer an intentional constructioneerin quest, here? [VEZ/ZINN maybe kinda suggests to m&e that it was.]
Masked & Anonymo6Us
... and now, inspired [slightly] by the most-excellent Ken Burns American Revolution documentary ...
p.s. @kitshef! Wow! Congratz! U are now a PRO xword CONstructioneer! Really lookin forward to solvequestin it! [M&A once submitted a puz to the NYTPuzfolks ... they said it was way too complex a puztheme. sooo ... I then submitted it to the FireballPuzdude ... and he said it was too easy for a Fireball. Decided that makin runtpuzs made more sense, for the likes of m&e.]
MARLa/DaERR got me, and I don’t care. Re ease of puzzles, I’ve been working through the archive, and lately the puzzles from the earliest days of Rex' blog. Oct 14th (a Saturday) took Rex an HOUR and EIGHTEEN MINUTES. Fascinating to see him in his ( relatively) novice days; he also had an adorable toddler underfoot. I’ve been doing the puzzle for about ten years and have graduated to Friday and Saturday only. That puzzle would have been utterly impossible back then, of course. Yesterday it took me 25 mins ( with an error) Today’s puzzle took me 10. This blog has been a huge part of my puzzling ( mostly as a reader - I dislike the term lurker) and its kinda cool to see the early comments sections where its often Rex' wife, his response, her re-response, and maybe then a close friend. What he has done with this blog for almost 20 years is remarkable. My hat is even further, higher, off.
Loved your comment today @Anonymous 1:40 PM. I’ve also enjoyed @Rex from his earliest days and join you in your kudos. Recently, I expressed my appreciation to @Rex for the community his blog has created. I join you with my own hat held high!
Not sure how a 28D KLEENEX BOX would be a helpful "Offering to a teary person", as clued. In fact, I can't think of any kind of BOX that would fit the bill. (Okay, I'm trying to be snarky. The answer to that clue would be BOX of KLEENEX or, better, just KLEENEX, right?)
Anyone else notice all those names? (Okay, that's pretty much the UPPER BOUND of my attempt at snark.)
Anoa Bob 3:39 PM As someone who's spent way too many years teaching and managing teenagers and 20-somethings, I've handed over the Kleenex box a zillion times to weepy ones. It's a key part of leadership in the 21st century. There's a box in my desk drawer right now. 🤧
I have occasional allergies so there is a BOX of KLEENEX sitting on my desk right now as I type. When I use up all the tissues, I will throw away the now empty KLEENEX BOX.
Whew! The names in this one other than Howard ZINN, and KOBE were way outside my wheelhouse. Consequently, this played as @Lewis said, wall-to-wall, with me. I found myself unable to blast through the walls, instead, having to find little spaces to crawl through after guessing bunches of letters. Perseverance pays off though.
I prefer if we leave brand names out of our crosswords. We had KLEENEX BOX, DIET PEOSI, ERASER MATE and ORAJEL. On one hand, wince and on the other, some easy fill to get me through the swamp of unknown names.
As for the double pangram, good job - if that’s your jam. It’s one of those “constructor things.” If it’s there without any pizzazz, it’s just there. Or twice just there, as it was today.
It was not an easy puzzle for me. Maybe near challenging The names I didn’t know I generally knew of and after a few letters they came to me, Like ZINN and EAZYE. But as a long, long time solver, ELIA was a possibility as soon as I saw the word essayist. So I ended up liking the puzzle. I do think that Gary’s calculation shows they went more than a tad overboard. (BTW I like “foreignisms” so recalculate the % without them. Still over 40%.! )
Overall pretty easy, except the NE which was much harder than the rest of the puzzle for me! ELIA ZINN MARLO DOERR SPUME all unknown to me. Feels like the fill in the NE is a little forced in order to cram OTRA VEZ into the grid. Took me awhile to see OLIVEGROVE and VEG (not sure if VEG and loll are really synonyms in my world), but no complaints. Spume is a fun word to learn. My grandpa sometimes says HOLY MAN, instead of holy cow or something like that. Maybe that used to be common, I dunno.
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ReplyDeleteEasy Saturday.
Overwrites:
SOakEd before SODDEN at 9D
I started to type Dr. pepPer for the Ray Charles-endorsed beverage at 25D, but it didn't fit. DIET PEPSI did.
ORA gEL before JEL for the 46D toothache med
WOEs:
Howard ZINN at 18A
I needed every cross for 31D Anthony DOERR, even though I read the book
Charles DOLAN at 33D
MARLO Kelly at 36A. Combined with a stupid typo made WINE SELLER (12D) hard to see
18:23 for me today, so I think that’s easy-medium on a Saturday. Great puzzle. Lots of answers where I had no idea, but after a few crosses…. The aha moment comes. Knew ACRE and CENTRALPARK right away, so that was a nice start. Had drESS at 5A instead of BLESS for a long time, so that made me think 6 down was rOOMiNESS instead of LOOSENESS until the very end. Finally erased a bunch of stuff in that upper central section, saw boos was going to be “SWEETIEPIES” and not something about throwing tomatoes, and so SOakED had to be SODDEN, and then everything went into place. The other section that took me a long time was the SE—had kAnYE before EASYE, but AZURE fixed that. Liked seeing ERASERMATE in the grid. LENIN and AXIS were both gimmes and so those helped me get a foothold down there. Enjoyed the double Q QUIDPROQUO up top and the double-X KLEENEXBOX down below. This one actually fell faster than yesterday’s for me. Terrific, doable, fun puzzle, Blake!!! Thank you! : )
ReplyDeleteWhat is the connection between boos and sweetie pies?
DeleteCompletely foreign to me..
Boo is a modern term of endearment. See the song "My Boo" by Usher and Alicia Keys.
DeleteModern counterpart/misspelling of old-fashioned Beau (boyfriend)
Delete“Boo is a modern term of endearment”. Yuck! The term will last until maybe -
Deletetomorrow?
Geez
DeleteIt’s been a term of endearment for…a couple decades now? Not new in the least.
DeleteAnonymous 2:55 AM
DeleteBoo ( singular) from beau and bae from babe have appeared in the Times fairly often. The 2 have bee popular terms for quite a while. They are not short lived, which is why they appear here. You can choose to ignore them, but they will appear again and remembering may make your solving easier.
This use of “boo” dates from 1988
DeleteDespite all the names, I found the puzzle a lot easier than yesterday's. A couple of corners in the Friday puzzle had me floundering around like it was already Saturday, but today it was whoosh all the way through. I enjoyed the Friday a lot more, though.
ReplyDeleteUPPER LIMIT is not a thing in math. There's something called a "limit superior" which is a much more technical concept than an UPPER BOUND.
It's a DOUBLE pangram. JUMP FOR JOY and QUID PRO QUO are solid but KLEENEX BOX feels green-painty (TISSUE BOX is a thing, obviously, but KLEENEX BOX as a crossword answer?). Given much of the short fill and all the names, I'll say that the double pangram stunt was (unsurprisingly) not worth it.
I guessed the O in ORAJEL from ORAL. A crossing that Rex didn't mention is VEZ x ZINN. VEZ shows up in clues for OTRA from time to time, not so much in the grid. Change SANG to SAGE and you get a bit of ZING in exchange for a crosswordesey goose formation, while keeping the double pangram intact.
UPPER BOUND is a thing in math, but it doesn’t match the clue. 5 is an upper bound for [0,1] but in no sense an “end” of the interval.
Deletea double pangram improves a puzzle exactly as much as a single pangram: by none.
DeleteSame. Today’s names I actually knew.
Delete@Anon 6:24. Enjoyed your comments today. Not being a math guy, I tried UPPER limit before having my hopes dashed by crosses. Your mention of the “Limit Superior” had me envisioning a proud figure decked out in full military ceremonial attire - stiff upright collar with glistening silver bars, epaulets holding golden braids in place, a chest full of medals - attended by her faithful UPPER BOUND. (I told you I wasn’t a math guy.)
DeleteAs for ORA JEL, never heard of it. My mother would just give me a whole clove to suck on. Seemed to work.
Loved your suggestion about changing ZINN to Zing and SANG to SAge.That would have made my life so much easier. Not that I don’t consider Mr. ZINN to be crossworthy. Just not there. I looked him up post-solve and he seems an interesting guy.
KLEENEX BOX, however, is no more green paint than tissue BOX. I grew up using Kleenex tissues.I have grass and pollen allergies and am constantly reaching for the KLEENEX BOX. Even though Kleenex is no longer sold in Canada, every tissue I reach for is still a Kleenex and still, whatever the name printed on it, comes in a KLEENEX BOX.
Agree that upper bound is wrong. Upper bound is any number greater than or equal to all set elements. It need not be in the set. Upper limit is closer to correct. The upper limit is the largest element of a sequence.
DeleteIck. UPPER BOUND. Just no. Sets don't generally have ends. Suppose your set contains the strings {end, aint, correct}. Which one is the end? Is it the upper bound?
DeleteAgree UPPER BOUND is not right for the clue. Close enough for crosswords, I suppose. I tried for too long to make right Brace (which fits) work with the crosses other than BRB.
Deleteway way way too many marginal names. Way. Naticked in two places.
ReplyDeleteAmen. Way too much ppp. Not fun.
Deleteand in the body of the puzzle, as well. Not just in the margins.
Deleteway way way too much ppp. maybe happy not to be up on such stuff 😉
DeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteVery hard, esp. NE and SW. QUIDQUOPRO was the answer to a very difficult clue. ORAgEL before ORAJEL made the SW brutal.
ReplyDelete“The very idea that I should know the [co]founder of” Ruthless Records (?) …
ReplyDeleteI'm a little drunk and still did this faster than yesterday's so I gotta assume it's pretty darn easy. Or EAZYE. In particular, five WoEs yesterday and I think three today (ZINN, REDD, MARLO).
ReplyDeleteIn other news, I just had my first puzzle acceptance by the NYTXW (hence the "little drunk"). No idea when it will run, but it will be on a Thursday.
I have not read Cloud Cuckoo Land but a week ago I read DOERR's All the Light We Cannot See, and while I had some issues with the pacing, minor character development, and editing, I found so much to enjoy in it that I still gave it five stars.
Wow, congrats on your puzzle acceptance!!!! What's your author name as it will show in the NYT?
DeleteCongrats @kitshef! That's awesome! I'll live vicariously through you for the excitement. Har!
DeleteRooMonster Seriously, Congrats! Guy
Congrats!!!
DeleteMany congrats, hope the hangover goes well!
DeleteAgree on All the Light We Cannot See. IMO should be required reading in all high school English courses
Well done you! Will be looking for it.
Delete@Rick Sacra - I assume it will appear as Kit Sheffield, but I'm new to this so not certain. I should also mention that I solved today's puzzle and wrote up my comments last night, and am not drunk at 7am.
DeleteCongrats!
DeleteCongratulations!
DeleteCongratulations, Kitshef.
DeleteCongratulations!
DeleteCongrats! And thanks for the tip 'Kitt Sheffield' & that it will run on a Thursday. I'll certainly be on the look-out for it :)
DeleteCongratulations, kitshef! That is fantastic news and please give a heads up when you’re good work is published. May OFL treat you well.
DeleteCongrats!! We'll be looking for it!
Delete@Kit, congrats on the puzzle!
DeleteJust adding my congrats to a long list. You're a very respected commenter here. Looking forward to solving your puzzle.
DeleteCongrats!! Can't wait to try it!!
DeleteOne more Congrats!
DeleteCongrats @Kit! 🎉
Delete@kitshef 7:23 AM
DeleteWoo hoo! Congrats.
Kitshef
DeleteAlways find your comments interesting. Congrats on accomplishing something I will never do!
OMG, WTG, Kit, awesome! I can't wait to do it! Congratulations!
DeleteVEZ ELIA ZINN absolutely killed me. Otherwise easy breezy!
ReplyDeleteYeah, I don't know Spanish and having it cross two difficult names was absolutely a look-up for me!
DeleteAnonymous 7:25 & 10:17 AM
DeleteFor long time solvers, ELIA is almost a gimme. Read Rex to see why. Hasn’t been around in a while but an old friend, as Pabloinnh calls crosswordese. 4 letter essayist probably Elia! that is why they maybe let this area in.
Well, you can do difficult “well” or you can load your grid up with gunk and trivia like ZINN and EAZYE and call it a Saturday. Today we get bludgeoned by the latter, and end up with proper names crossing proper names (DOLAN x RENATO) and foreign stuff crossing more foreign stuff (OTRA x CARA). What a dud of a puzzle.
ReplyDeleteOn the positive side, this one played pretty easy for me and I didn’t get bogged down in a slogfest because I just let Uncle Google fill in about half of it. They should publish a warning when they just phone it in and publish a trivia test.
This was, for me, a wall-to-wall puzzle.
ReplyDeleteThat is, I kept running into walls. Vague cluing and no-knows (11) would freeze me, and I’d go somewhere else and freeze and flee again. After ACRE / CENTRAL PARK right at the start, I thought I’d be gamboling through the box – hah!
Much lateral thinking and making educated guesses – things my brain lives for – were called on. I just kept pinballing around, and answers would come, sometimes in dribs, other times followed by mini-splats, and always with gratitude.
Hard work, but the kind I like.
Lovely wordplay clues: [Foreign exchange] for QUID PRO QUO, [Boos] for SWEETIEPIES, and [Sprinkle with oil, say] for BLESS. I also liked ERR crossing ERR in the middle east, because that's what my solve felt like often. And, as with Thursday’s puzzle, I was strurck by the profusion of schwa-enders (8).
I hope for a steep climb on Saturdays, and your obstacle course was just that, Blake. Thank you!
Dolan passes Shortz's anyone in the paper test. His son, James, is the highly visible and oft vilified owner of the Knicks and Rangers (due to the money his father made through Cablevision).
ReplyDeleteEvan
DeleteI get the Times dead tree edition , so I unfortunately, am aware of the antics of the Dolan family. So that helped me. Many puzzle subscribers don’t. So I can understand the no clue reactions.
The editors do seem to have a “if a name is known in NYC use it” exception.
Definitively not “too easy” for me, with the proper names and cluing misdirects. But a fair puzzle, and gratifying when it all came together in the end.
ReplyDeleteSolved it with two cheats (to get RCCAR and KORDA), but the music never sounded. This has happened several times before, once recently. I'll be damned if I know why. Good puzzle with puzzling outcome.
ReplyDeleteThe music didn’t sound because it’s korma, not korda
DeleteIf you really had "korda," that's why you got no music -- it's KORMA.
DeleteMaybe the music didn’t sound because it’s korMa, not korda?
DeleteDid you really think it was ERASERDATE?
DeleteHey All !
ReplyDeleteMedium -touch here. A lot of names that were unknown. Stuck in NE for that reason. That NE corner, what an ICE HOLE. 😁
Boos for SWEETIEPIES was different. Couldn't get Boos as booing something out of the ole brain for quite a while.
Confess to Googing for SPUME. Just couldn't think of what that Sea foam name was, though once I saw it, got a "Dang, of course!" D'oh. That one look-up, and the puzzle fell ERRor free from there.
Double Pangram today! Nice! And mostly didn't seem forced. Liked how the Q, J, and X were Doubled in the same answers. Heck, it's close to a Triple.
Nice SatPuz that didn't drain the ever receding brain. If you read my posts and think it's gibberish, now you know the ole brain is responsible. Har.
Have a great Saturday!
Two F's
RooMonster
DarrinV
DOLAN/RENATO was an extra challenge for me because I had the miniature vehicle as some kind of CAB, so BENITO seemed likely, though DOLIN was less so. When the I didn’t give me the happy music I tried the A and still no go, so had to break that section down a little bit more and find my other mistakes.
ReplyDeleteWhen there's no long fill that makes one stop for a moment to admire its fiendishness, it's too easy for a Saturday. Agree re too many inconsequential names, though perhaps because of my age EAZY-E (was it supposed to fool one into trying to make KANYE work? THAT'D be clever!) was a fun layup and RAY CHARLES made me thirsty. 11:44 because i wasted 90ish seconds trying to turn KORMA into the distinctly not-yogurt-braised KOFTA, which was a definite meatball move on my part. Onward!
ReplyDelete@John. The EAZY-E/Kanye deception certainly fooled this old, non-rap fan for maybe "90ish seconds". Crosses to the rescue. All part of the fun.
DeleteHey — a double pangram. That was a fun one. Maybe I’m NYC-centric, but I thought that, in addition to Cablevision, the Dolans were pretty famous as the (somewhat reviled) owners of the Knicks, Rangers and Madison Square Garden.
ReplyDeleteYup, also pretty familiar with the Dolans because they also would pay for? sponsor? the 4th of July fireworks in Oyster Bay
DeleteNames, names, and more names. I saved the RENATO/DOLAN Natick for near the ends, then finished up with mlK. No, jFK. That is, RFK.
ReplyDeleteNot much fun overall, but the puzpair QUID PRO QUO and JUMP FOR JOY brought a smile to my face.
1. This was an ugly slog.
ReplyDelete2. ICEHOLE?? Really?
I'd say ICEHOLE was the least of the badness!
DeleteAn ice hole is a hole in the ice. The ice that covers a frozen lake.
DeleteI dislike paired answers and they seem unworthy of what Saturday is supposed to be. Too gimmicky.
ReplyDeleteSo EAZY(E), even a dead gansta rapper from 1990s could finish this one, unless he never heard of the esoteric law firm ELIA; ZINN; MARLO; RENATO; DOERR; and DOLAN. At least proper nouns balanced out with REDD and KOBE, actual known quantities.
ReplyDeleteYou’ve never heard of Howard Zinn?
DeleteNames. Boo!
ReplyDeleteunpleasant barrage of names. annoying paired answeres. Ugh.
ReplyDeleteToo. Many. Names.
ReplyDeleteagreed. and very obscure ones, too. not worth going forward
DeleteCan someone explain how a DATE can be a VESSEL?
ReplyDeleteYou mean eraserMate?
DeleteDOLAN was actually one of my favorite clues. As Evan and Keith said, it was a gimme for anyone in the NY metro area, and I like when puzzles in an (ostensibly) local paper reflect that paper's locale. This was a NYC-heavy puzzle, as far as those go, and I don't hold that against it, even if it wasn't my favorite
ReplyDeleteThe New York Times is not really just a local paper. I know people in California, Oregon, Washington, and across western Canada with subscriptions. Thinking I might stop "borrowing" from my sister-in-law's subscription and pay up myself.
DeleteLes S More. You are right. The Times has long since been an international, never mind national news outlet. My Dad started getting a Times subscription as early as the’60’s. I continued that tradition and still get the dead tree edition in R.I. I think the international news, sports ( if a bit esoteric on occasion) science and cultural, as well as special reports, are top notch. I do have to admit that since the dawn of the Trump era the national news has been destabilized. Traditional “objective “ reporting often helps fascist liars like Trump. But the Times is still better than most. Also now he is a little weaker politically, their style works better. So maybe give the electronic edition a shot?
DeleteI figured out the names just fine. SODDEN sucks. I know it's a word, and a valid word, but so are sOakEd and SOppEd. Come to think of it I don't know if sopped is even a word but if not I would probably use it incorrectly before I would say SODDEN. Ruined that whole section for me, especially given that I had never heard of UPPER BOUND.
ReplyDeleteNow, it was also tricky to put in EAZY-E when kAnYE was a great misdirect, and I even tried to squeeze some weird version of JAY Z in there for a while. But the crosses were gettable, unlike an obscure math term. I know, I know I should have known LOOSENESS for laxity but the wrong answers in other places made that hard to see. Whatever. Not my day.
You obviously don't live in the Pacific Northwest (or southwestern BC) where, from the middle of October to the end of March, everything gets SODDEN.
DeleteSame problems with the names with the same names as everyone else, so I'll skip mentioning them. Didn't stop to think about a Remote Control Car and left JFK, so a technical DNF. I did find out something interesting about our friend the PRAWN and ran into noted crossword essayist ELIA, who has been MIA for some time. Welcome back.
ReplyDeleteSPUME was easy as the Spanish is "espuma". See also OTRA VEZ
Hooray for Ray Charles. In a perfect world, our national anthem would be "America the Beautiful" and it would always be sung by Ray Charles.
Nice Saturday, BS. Would have been Better Still without all the you-know-whats but still OK. Thanks for all the fun.
I have friends with a 5-year-old boy who loves rc cars. That’s what he calls them. I asked him what ‘rc’ meant - he didn’t know.
ReplyDeleteI would put this in the Medium pile. Took longer than any puzzle in the last few weeks. Despite spending untold hours in CENTRALPARK (Hi, @Nancy), I didn’t make that connection immediately like Rex.
ReplyDeleteNames are interesting in that it is fascinating to see who knows what here. I would think that Howard ZINN would be a gimme for most here. His “People’s History” changed the way history is taught by focusing on the lives of ordinary and/or marginalized people, steering away from the “great men” approach.
I know EAZYE, but not from his record label.
As others have mentioned, any fan of the Knicks has heard the “Sell the team” chants for a couple of decades - due to nepo-baby James Dolan’s meddling in team decisions, and forcing things again and again that would keep them uncompetitive for years. Their recent run has calmed that down.
Even in comedians, I would rather see REDD Foxx.
Last no-happy-music-letter was the O in MARLO. DOERR’s presence was a WOE to me and makes me ashamed not to know more authors…Netflix has a sea of garbage, but also some surprisingly good stuff as well. Adolescence was a difficult but powerful watch, and a window into the lives of youth today. Rightfully acknowledged at the Emmys.
ICEHOLE reminded me of the shacks on the St Lawrence River, and Anthony Bourdain’s fantastic Quebec episode, doing fine dining in a shack on the river.
I’m amazed by the number of commenters who didn’t know Howard Zinn. Did nobody go to a liberal arts college?
DeleteWas he visiting with Martin Picard, the totally nutbar chef/owner of Au Pied de Cochon ? I've taken my family to his restaurant where I ordered one of his signature dishes, "Duck in a Can". (Did I mention this guy is nuts?) He puts some celery seasoned toast in the bottom of a tin can and crams in some lovely duck, seals the can, and sou vides the thing for about a half hour. When the waiter arrives at your table he has a can opener in hand and he ceremoniously cranks the tin can open and slides out the duck - sort of like you might slide out a can of Alpo for your dog. Plop! He then slices it up and it is so, so good. Unreal.
DeleteIt's a noisy place and everything on the menu is full of duck and goose and pork and beef and fat. It's all delicious, but you'll have to fast for the next 3 days. You should all go.
Anonymous 4:55pm
DeleteYes I knew of him and that his last name began with a Z and ended with an N. Eventually, I got it right. I read of him and the book in the Times Knew he was of the “old”
( pre boomer) left He died 15 years ago. His history was a popular history, not academic. So scholars looked down on it, as did some reviewers. I don’t think he was ever a household name. It doesn’t surprise me in the least that many didn’t know of him.
(The old left was an interesting part of 20th Century American history, but I would argue not central to it except in the union movement. . They like the contemporary progressives were never very good at selling their philosophy to average Americans
I think they themselves thought they were more important than they were.).
Fun puzzle! I strongly suspect the original clue for DIET PEPSI was a reference to Addison Rae’s chart-breaching alt-pop hit. But maybe that’s wishful thinking.
ReplyDeleteA clumsy construction . Very NYC-centric and multiple obscure name natics.
ReplyDeleteAmen
DeleteI suppose NY centric is excusable but the names? No.
DeleteNever heard of an RCCAR, nor of the renamed bridge, and I thought JFK more likely than RFK, so I invented a jCCAR. Otherwise, I would have been under nine minutes, which is a fast Saturday for me.
ReplyDeleteBOO -- and I don't mean SWEETPIE.
RCCAR has been used three times in the past year.
DeleteAZURE sure to remember, food vendors at the early Mets games offered popcorn with SHEA Butter. Many of those games featured Mets infielders failing to step on the bag for the first out in a double play -- something known as a FORCECHOKE. They'd seldom go NINE without what became known as an EAZYE.
ReplyDeleteGiven the QUIDPROQUO m.o. of the current administration, one could imagine a memo on how to extract maximum personal wealth from our European allies to be headed RENATO.
My aunt from Mississippi had a knack for mixing southern gentility with crudeness. Like when she'd reprimand me by saying "Egs, y'all don't be an ICEHOLE."
I was relieved to see that Olive Garden didn't quite fit for the site of Plato's Academy. But I could certainly envision a Platonic dialog on whether a drink can actually be bottomless or whether there is an UPPERBOUND.
I agree that the name selection slogified the puzzle a bit, but still enjoyed it. Thanks, Blake Slonecker.
P.S. Big congrats to @kitshef!
Might have to make a sign like that - Don’t be an ICEHOLE or
DeleteICEHOLEs go home!
Like Rex, I started out on a high note—tho I first filled in FingerLakes before entering CENTRALPARK. After that I bombed on all the names, except for KOBE, a slam dunk. Apologies for that one but couldn’t resist. Never heard of RCCAR or Boos, so my education has been sadly neglected. Liked QUIDPROQOU and JUMPFORJOY, and overall thought this a decent puzzle just miles out of my wheelhouse.
ReplyDeleteJFK vs RFK? I picked wrong.
ReplyDeleteJFK is the airport
DeleteDon't want to seem like an ICEHOLE, but I thought this puzzle was terrible. Probably on the easy side if you knew the names but otherwise a mash nonsense with multiple Naticks. One star.
ReplyDeleteYes
DeleteNot just too easy. Way too easy.
ReplyDeleteCase in point. 1A: is there anyone who does crossword puzzles even occasionally who doesn't know, without hardly giving it a thought, that when you have a four letter word clued as "One of [some somewhat large number] in [some location]" that the answer is ACRE? Then referencing 50C: what else with 14 letters makes sense for a location in NYC where you have 843 of these 1A's if not CENTRALPARK. So on a Saturday, in fewer than 5 seconds, you've filled in 1A and 50A, not only without having to break a sweat, but not even needing to have your first sip of coffee and begin actual thinking for the day.
And if crossing names of people who may not be terribly familiar to or easily recalled by many solvers was meant to add a little toughness to the way-too-easiness of the rest of the puzzle, it seems a rather odd, and not terribly enjoyable, way to do so.
But, I don't blame the constructor. This seems to be more meddling by editors (no doubt at the direction of NYTimes Corporate) to decrease the level of toughness and challenge across the board so that the Puzzle can do its part get those subscriptions up to 15 million by the end of 2027.
Still love the NYT - but when the gimmicks (Monday through Thursday) get too annoying I go to the NYer - you can find Robyn Weinstein & Erik Agard there frequently too.
DeleteI thought it was going to be some famous hotel or other tower and filled in 1A with “room.” Then 1D went in as “rose.” They didn't last long but CENTRAL PARK wasn’t a gimme, and I'm not new to XW.
DeleteNot easy at all for me; in fact, the toughest Saturday in a long time. If you draw a line from the NE corner to the SW corner, everything to the right of that line I was able to fill in without cheating (felt proud of myself for remembering ORAJEL). In the other half, I just couldn't make progress, Never would have gotten SWEETIEPIES or UPPERBOUND without getting their crosses, and they just didn't come to me. Darn.
ReplyDeleteWow, times have changed. Two or three decades back, Howard ZINN's "A People's History of the United States" was almost universally known, though not universally loved -- it was a leftist take, enlightening but vilified by the right. He died in 2010, and I guess the political atmosphere has changed as well. But I was surprised that so many commenters hadn't heard the name.
ReplyDeleteAnyway, the puzzle. I saw and instantly solved that clue for ACRE in some other puzzle within the last month--but today I was totally befuddled, and went for treE (a ridiculous answer, if you bet the OVERs on that one you'd clean me out). But it did bring back memories of the churchyard at Painswick in England, where there are, always have been, and probably always will be exactly 99 yews. If they plant one, another one will die. Or so goes the legend. It's on the 5th day if you walk the Cotswold Way.
So that gummed things up good, as did my declining vision which makes it hard to read the numbers -- so I was trying to find a 5-letter basketball player where I needed a 5-letter rapper.
Islam before SUNNI, even though the clue needed either an adjective or a plural noun. (Rule #3: never assume that the puzzle has an error.) But the toughest part for me was that bridge crossing that toy car. I didn't know they'd renamed the Triboro at all, but was it RFK or jFK? I finally went with the former since he ended up a New Yorker, but it was just a guess.
@Nancy, who no longer comments here, has a letter about phones in today's NYT. Here's a link.
Here's the letter copy, for the many of us who hit the NYT paywall:
DeleteRe “Your Phone Doesn’t Have to Be Your Enemy,” by Steven Barrie-Anthony (Opinion guest essay, Nov. 13):
It’s my phone that’s experiencing grief, not I. My phone is sad and envious — envious of its smartphone brothers and sisters. They get to travel to exotic places! Give lifesaving advice — sometimes even to very famous people!
Whereas, because it had the great misfortune of being bought by a Luddite and technophobe, my smartphone sits forlornly in a dark drawer, never taken anywhere. Worse, it’s turned off for months at a time, with all of its many apps (none requested by the owner but somehow there anyway) completely ignored.
Is it any wonder that my phone experiences envy and existential sadness?
I, on the other hand, am happy as a clam.
Nancy Stark
New York
I was surprised, too, at how many commenters are unfamiliar with ZINN, which was a gimme for me. ELIA, ditto. But I had no idea about REDD, MARLO, or EAZYE.
DeleteA very easy puzzle, except for the unknown names. The intersection of RENATO and DOLAN I would've called a Natick except for the fact that only the "A" looked reasonable.
In spite of the unknown names, my time was several minutes faster than yesterday's puzzle.
Thanks @jberg for linking @Nancy’s letter. Saw it this morning and it just reminded me how sad I am that @Nancy is no longer commenting. Also, thanks @Pondie for sharing the letter.
DeleteJberg
DeleteI am not sure Zinn was quite that famous among Americans in general even at his height. My guess he was well known among the center to the left and much less known among the disengaged and the right. if they knew of him he might have encouraged them to to start their long campaign to whitewash history!
Anyway while I knew of him and read reviews of his book when it came out, I had no interest in reading it and when doing the puzzle, remembered Z—N.
And then the crosses helped (FWIW I have mostly been a Democrat positioned between progressives and moderates. I read a lot about the old pre boomer left and I didn’t like what I read , although I am aware ofthe brutal repression they went through in the McCarthy era.)
Próximo.
ReplyDeleteBeen awhile, but I invited my good friend Go-ogle over for the solve and he's really good at knowing the essentially anonymous people stuffed into a weekend puzzle to make it un-doable and thereby making the "puzzles used to be so much harder" crowd cry less.
That is to say, another "not for me" outing. Nancy's wall worthy. Even before we talk about the gunk rating this was not a good idea.
I think SWEETIE PIES for [Boos] is my favorite pair. Glad we learned SPUME a few weeks ago.
People: 13 {Ya happy? Well, are ya?}
Places: 3
Products: 6
Partials: 8
Foreignisms: 4
--
Gary's Grid Gunk Gauge: 34 of 72 (47%) {🔔This is one of the gunkiest puzzles ever... ever! And 13 weekend D-list names. I had to break out the calculator to add the gunk up. And as a reminder, there's no theme putting stress on the grid. A self inflicted tragedy we're roped into saying, "Well, at least it was tougher than lots of puzzles lately." I will say it: [Boos] = Not my sweetie pies.}
Funny Factor: 2 😕
Tee-Hee: SEXT ICE HOLE.
Uniclues:
1 Where you keep your crawfish.
2 Starbucks offering for fishophiles.
3 Relaxed fit jeans.
4 How you keep your garden clean.
1 CREOLE'S ICE HOLE
2 PRAWN LATTE
3 AZURE LOOSENESS (~)
4 OLIVE GROVE AJAX
My Fascinating Crossword Uniclue Keepsake from Last Year: The elf in the mall. SANTA GAL PAL.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Marlo Thomas and I come within a week of sharing the same birth day. She's been my not so secret crush for at least 60 years.
ReplyDeleteDid Donald Hollinger know about this?
DeleteELIA, ZINN, REDD, MARLO, RENATO, EAZYE, DOLAN...awful, just awful. No pleasure in working through a puzzle with so many junky names.
ReplyDeleteAmen
DeleteElia is not a junky name
DeleteI was ice fishing and catching nothing, a fisherman nearby was hauling out one after another. I asked his secret and he mumbled "kmmph wmmz wmm". When I asked him to repeat what he'd said, he spat in his hand and said "keep the worms warm." What an ice hole!
ReplyDeleteIs this a record for the number of names in a weekday puzzle?
ReplyDeleteI stopped watching SNL about the time Chris REDD turned 10, so he was one of the many unknowns to me.
MARLA/MARLO/MARLY? DOERR/DAERR/DYERR? - the great vowel conundrum of 2025.
I ran across the trivium regarding IDAHO's international border on Sporcle last week. Never would have thought that IDAHO's border is shorter than New Hampshire's before then.
I also misread Pls as Pee-Eye-Ess, so was trying to think of another shortened plural version of TEC for the longest time.
Some good cluing (for QUIDPROQUO, WINESELLER) and interesting answers (ERASERMATE, JUMPFORJOY, ICEHOLE, ORAJEL) but then so many obscure names that just made it one big disappontment.
ReplyDeleteNo indication that the answer for "Gimme a sec" would be an acronym
ReplyDelete"Gimme" instead of "give me" and "sec" instead of "second" tipped me off to the abbreviated vibe.
DeleteI just read the recently published memoir by Anthony Hopkins; enjoyed it. It prompted me to watch Silence of the Lambs again. So nice to hear Hopkins coo, "QUIDPROQUO, Clarice."
ReplyDeleteBernie
ReplyDeleteRelatively easy for me, it had to look up two of the proper name crossings. Since the clued actress name was obviously feminine, went with MARLA - as the cross was unknown, it looked fine. And I had OTRA VES, so ZENN was SENN. Again, that looked fine, but I should have known better with VEZ.
ReplyDeleteSome enjoyable stuff in this puzzle, but my fun was ruined by all the trivia and a couple of brutal naticks
ReplyDeleteApropos of nothing....
ReplyDeleteYes, it is the RFK bridge (recall that was serving as senator from NY when he was assassinated, so not unusual to have a bridge honoring him)
A pity, though, that it wasn't JFK. Today is the 62nd anniversary of his assassination. But there is nary a word of remembrance about it or him in today's NYTimes - anywhere. I never expected to be old enough to live during a time when November 22 would pass as just another day.
I thought that too :(
DeleteFor me, easy up top, edging toward medium below, and engaging throughout. I liked the happy SWEETIE PIES and JUMP FOR JOY and Plato's OLIVE GROVE sharing space with CENTRAL PARK (with its crossing ARBOR). And now I know what Darth Vader's at-a-distance death grip is called.
ReplyDeleteDo-over: Odds before OVER. Names that helped: ELIA, ZINN, RFK, DOERR, LENIN, balanced by the unknown REDD, DOLAN, MARLO, EAZYE, RENATO.
Normally I’m a hater of names but I found this puzzle to be quite easy for a Saturday. No solver required!
ReplyDelete
DeletePlato‘s outdoor lecture space was called the groove of Academus or of acacdeme. Bad cluing.
Not a bad clue. It calls for a "setting" not for a name.
DeleteEasy-medium. I too got off to a quick start by putting in ACRE/CENTRAL PARK with no crosses and it was pretty whooshy after that until I hit the SW. FORCE CHOKE, RENATO, and DOLAN were WOEs and I needed some staring to come up with RC CAR.
ReplyDeleteOther WOEs - ZINN, MARLO, REDD, EASYE (as clued…NWA would have worked), AJAX, and KORMA.
Costly erasure - UPPER limit before BOUND(Hi @Rex).
Mostly solid with just a smattering of junk (THX, TKTS, EST) off set by slightly more than a modicum of sparkle, liked it.
Wish they would keep the old bridge names. I still call it the Triborough and, especially, the Tappan Zee.
ReplyDeleteThe old names stick. The Tobin Bridge in Boston will always be known as the Mystic River Bridge, and no one who lives in the DC area will ever call the airport on the Potomac River anything but National
Delete... and the Cabin John Bridge spans the Potomac NW of DC - not the newfangled name of "American Legion Memorial Bridge".
DeleteKitshef
DeleteIn NYC it even applies to streets. 6th Avenue’s was officially changed to Avenue of the Americas over 60 years ago but despite the “new” name being on the street signs most New Yorkers say 6th Avenue
Solved quickly without cheats but I am, like others, very annoyed with the obscure names crossing obscure names. How aren't the editors weeding this crap out? Such a saturday dud.
ReplyDeleteEasy until I hit not-so-famous names crossing each other and Spanish crossing Italian. I still finished but working out those crosses was a slog.
ReplyDeleteExcept for a double write-over at 7D, this puzzle presented little to no difficulty. EQUAL TO, EQUALED, EQUATED, fixed by the obvious crosses of SWEETIE PIES and NINE.
ReplyDeleteI couldn't remember how to spell Anthony D_ERR's name so I went elsewhere to solve and later found I had left that square blank. I'm still wondering why "All the Light We Cannot See" won a Pulitzer and I've had several people agree with me.
I have ridden the bus from LaGuardia to 125th St. many times over the RFK bridge, my main method of getting to Manhattan from Minnesota. I know many people still call it the Triborough Bridge but I've only known it as RFK.
Blake Slonecker, I wish your Saturday puzzle had been harder, but it was fun, thanks!
Well I wouldn't call it EASY but it was doable. WOES were UPPPER BOARD, RC CAR, KORMA, ZINN & haven't a clue about SWEETIE PIES (anyone?) but I'll take this over some of the gimmick puzzles any day. I did really like 65A SEXT. If I never see a reference to the current RFK (no disrespect to his Dad who must be turning over in his grave) it'll be too soon.
ReplyDeleteSo after my mini-rant, thank you, Blake :)
Not easy at all. Broke my streak. Too many names I didn't know, couldn't grok.
ReplyDeleteThis played quickly for me in the end but I struggled having a Spanish phrase (OTRA VEZ) crossing an Italian word (CARA) and two names (ELIA and ZINN). With RENATO/DOLAN and MARLO/DOERR also being in doubt, my confidence was low.
ReplyDeleteUpper right was horrible if you don't speak Spanish--two Natick squares stacked. V??, ?LIA, ?INN. So many possibilities to guess. Along with the MARLO/DOERR cross and the RENATO/DOLAN cross made this puzzle butt ugly as far as I'm concerned.
ReplyDeleteSeems to me that Howard ZINN is well known enough to qualify as a non-Natick name; "Boo" has been a Southern term of affection or endearment for a long time.
ReplyDeleteWhat the bloody hell are TKTS??!!
ReplyDeleteTKTS is a booth in NYC (& elsewhere but I'm only familiar with the one in NY) where you can get discounted tickets to shows.
DeleteTickets sold for Broadway shows by TDF (Theater Development Fund). You can stand in line and get significant discounts for shows the day of; There is a prominent booth at the north end of Times Square, surrounded by every single tourist to NYC that day.
DeletePSA - The 11th edition of NYT Puzzle Mania drops this weekend. I realize it’s somewhat beyond the scope of the Rex Parker universe. Just saying happy analog solving to all here as we whoosh whoosh into the holidays.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the tip - I don’t subscribe to the paper edition and finding one has proven to be increasingly challenging!
DeleteYeah, that Tonya Harding was a real ICEHOLE, wasn't she?
ReplyDeleteEasier than yesterday's puzzle but still well within the Saturday range. That's pretty good for a pangram puzzle. Stunt puzzles tend to sacrifice difficulty to achieve a particular outcome. The obscure names were not a problem as they helped maintain the late week resistance. In spite of the NE having the greatest concentration of these names it was the first section I solidly filled as it started with the obvious VOWS supported by VEZ of the Spanish 101 phrase OTRA VEZ. Pangrams have to include the high value consonants and they tend to be dead giveaways. Obscure names keep the solve from being a pushover.
ReplyDeleteA couple of fortuitous gimmies came from KORMA being in last Tuesday's SB and my having just driven across the RFK bridge last Sunday.
The SE portion was downright self correcting. AZURE changed KANYE to EAZYE, CENTRALPARK turned CARO into CARA and when I tried to use the word ERASABLE to start 64A FEN changed it to ERASER.
I'm not familiar with this particular DOLAN person but DOLAN is a very common name. RENATO may not be as familiar as ELIA but it's a piece of crosswordese along the same lines so that A was never in doubt.
Pretty sure KOBE was the only name in this very namey puzzle that I knew, so I agree about the unpleasantness of the solve. Also agree that I appreciated some of the spunky long answers. Rex didn’t mention SWEETIEPIES, though some above have, but that was also a great word (even if plural), and, newbie that I am, I didn’t catch the misdirect of the clue until the very end when I was finding my error in the cross (EQUALED for EQUATED). It was a delightful moment of revelation on a clue that had me beat during the solve. All that to say, a lot to like here, but the heaviness of obscure names made it impossible for this newbie to solve without looking most (all but KOBE) of them up. The fact that I could possibly muddle my way through the rest made me know that Rex would call it too easy for a Saturday. :)
ReplyDeleteOne of my least favorite puzzles I’ve ever done. Obscure name after obscure name, several of them crossing each other… just awful. I guess it’s “easy” if you know a bunch of obscure trivia names. Otherwise was just a grueling uphill battle without any fun
ReplyDeleteMostly very easy but I have no familiarity with ELIA, ZINN, MARLO, or DOERR, so that NE cost me a bunch of time. Just couldn’t see OLIVE GROVE for some reason, but once I got it I could infer the missing letters in those names.
ReplyDeleteIt started out okay, but in the end I was so disgusted with the Unknown Names (crossing each other like crazy!) that I gave up even trying to find my mistakes. I somehow got RENATO crossing DOLAN, but I had MARLY crossing DYERR (even though I read the book... a while ago).
ReplyDeleteAnd then in the upper right it's even worse: ILIA and SINN crossing VIS. I tried multiple alternatives (FINN, YINN, DINN) before giving up.
DNF. Apparently MARLY Kelly and Anthony DYERS weren’t the right pair of obscure crosses that I needed for success this fine morning.
ReplyDeleteJust not my cuppa today...This was my first Saturday ever when I was able to get two answers in right off the bat with no letters entered at all - As @Rex said, it was 1A and 50A. That didn't annoy me, it excited me, but alas, from then on nothing really sparked. I think I counted 10-11 propers - many of whom I had no clue - that does not usually bother me either, but today I just didn't come away all that happy with all the new knowledge - I'll never think of any of these folks again! That's likely more a Hugh problem than the puzzle's but that's how I walked away...
ReplyDeleteSo after my initial whoosh, I had to muscle through most of this, I did like all the Marquee answers that @Rex mentioned but the work to get there was not as much fun as I would have liked.
Thanks @Rex for the That Girl vid - my memories of that show revolve around being home sick in elementary school and re-runs were aired during the day. That along with I Love Lucy, Family Affair and Beverly Hillbillies. Not bad for a six year old! Nice memories even though I was mostly under the weather while watching.
Blake - there was some great stuff here - I think I was just not on the same wavelength today. Looking forward to your next one.
Also - Congrats @Kitshef for getting your first puzzle in! I'll be keeping my eyes peeled every Thursday!
@Hugh 1:16 PM - we share some excellent tv memories from our respective youths.
DeleteAs multi-mentioned here-in already, it's a Double-Pangrammer! It's almost a puztheme in itself, with showpiece themers:
ReplyDeleteoliVegroVe. QuidproQuo. kleeneXboX. JumpforJoy.
Also, this rodeo was a Mega-Name-Grabber! Was unable to finish, without resortin to research.
staff weeject pick was VEZ, which was in a Triple-Research NE puzcorner along with ELIA & ZINN. Apt clue for that there corner:{boos!}. And VEZ was a debut word, too boot.
some fave stuff: DOERR/ERR [even tho DOERR was a no-know]. EAZYE. All four of the pangrampuzthemers honored above.
WINESELLER [Var. -- M&A prefers the WINECELLAR spellin]. CENTRALPARK, which made that openin 1-A chute into the rodeo extra-mysterious.
Thanxjqvez, Mr. Slonecker dude. Was the double-pangrammer an intentional constructioneerin quest, here? [VEZ/ZINN maybe kinda suggests to m&e that it was.]
Masked & Anonymo6Us
... and now, inspired [slightly] by the most-excellent Ken Burns American Revolution documentary ...
"Pro-Colonist Runt" - 8x7 themed runt puzzle:
**gruntz**
M&A
p.s. @kitshef! Wow! Congratz! U are now a PRO xword CONstructioneer! Really lookin forward to solvequestin it!
[M&A once submitted a puz to the NYTPuzfolks ... they said it was way too complex a puztheme. sooo ... I then submitted it to the FireballPuzdude ... and he said it was too easy for a Fireball.
Decided that makin runtpuzs made more sense, for the likes of m&e.]
@M&A, I think we had a double theme with the pangrams and the brand names.
DeleteMARLa/DaERR got me, and I don’t care.
ReplyDeleteRe ease of puzzles, I’ve been working through the archive, and lately the puzzles from the earliest days of Rex' blog. Oct 14th (a Saturday) took Rex an HOUR and EIGHTEEN MINUTES. Fascinating to see him in his ( relatively) novice days; he also had an adorable toddler underfoot.
I’ve been doing the puzzle for about ten years and have graduated to Friday and Saturday only. That puzzle would have been utterly impossible back then, of course. Yesterday it took me 25 mins ( with an error)
Today’s puzzle took me 10.
This blog has been a huge part of my puzzling ( mostly as a reader - I dislike the term lurker) and its kinda cool to see the early comments sections where its often Rex' wife, his response, her re-response, and maybe then a close friend. What he has done with this blog for almost 20 years is remarkable.
My hat is even further, higher, off.
Loved your comment today @Anonymous 1:40 PM. I’ve also enjoyed @Rex from his earliest days and join you in your kudos. Recently, I expressed my appreciation to @Rex for the community his blog has created. I join you with my own hat held high!
DeleteOops… that puzzle was Oct 14 2006
DeleteThis one played difficult for me too many names I didn’t know and never heard of a force choke. But in general appreciated all the long answers
ReplyDeleteNot sure how a 28D KLEENEX BOX would be a helpful "Offering to a teary person", as clued. In fact, I can't think of any kind of BOX that would fit the bill. (Okay, I'm trying to be snarky. The answer to that clue would be BOX of KLEENEX or, better, just KLEENEX, right?)
ReplyDeleteAnyone else notice all those names? (Okay, that's pretty much the UPPER BOUND of my attempt at snark.)
Anoa Bob 3:39 PM
DeleteAs someone who's spent way too many years teaching and managing teenagers and 20-somethings, I've handed over the Kleenex box a zillion times to weepy ones. It's a key part of leadership in the 21st century. There's a box in my desk drawer right now. 🤧
I have occasional allergies so there is a BOX of KLEENEX sitting on my desk right now as I type. When I use up all the tissues, I will throw away the now empty KLEENEX BOX.
DeleteWhew! The names in this one other than Howard ZINN, and KOBE were way outside my wheelhouse. Consequently, this played as @Lewis said, wall-to-wall, with me. I found myself unable to blast through the walls, instead, having to find little spaces to crawl through after guessing bunches of letters. Perseverance pays off though.
ReplyDeleteI prefer if we leave brand names out of our crosswords. We had KLEENEX BOX, DIET PEOSI, ERASER MATE and ORAJEL. On one hand, wince and on the other, some easy fill to get me through the swamp of unknown names.
As for the double pangram, good job - if that’s your jam. It’s one of those “constructor things.” If it’s there without any pizzazz, it’s just there. Or twice just there, as it was today.
Made it through though. On to Sunday.
ReplyDeleteNot easy at all! So many names and obscure items like ERASER MATE! Much clever clueing - but I prefer fewer names
Oddly, the version of the puzzle in Saturday’s New York Times delivered in San Francisco had a different puzzle.
ReplyDeleteNot easy for me AT ALL.
ReplyDeleteIt was not an easy puzzle for me. Maybe near challenging The names I didn’t know I generally knew of and after a few letters they came to me, Like ZINN and EAZYE. But as a long, long time solver, ELIA was a possibility as soon as I saw the word essayist. So I ended up liking the puzzle. I do think that Gary’s calculation shows they went more than a tad overboard. (BTW I like “foreignisms” so recalculate the % without them. Still over 40%.! )
ReplyDeleteOverall pretty easy, except the NE which was much harder than the rest of the puzzle for me! ELIA ZINN MARLO DOERR SPUME all unknown to me. Feels like the fill in the NE is a little forced in order to cram OTRA VEZ into the grid. Took me awhile to see OLIVEGROVE and VEG (not sure if VEG and loll are really synonyms in my world), but no complaints. Spume is a fun word to learn. My grandpa sometimes says HOLY MAN, instead of holy cow or something like that. Maybe that used to be common, I dunno.
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