.png)
Relative difficulty: Medium-Challenging
 |
| [5D: Disney+ series whose name sounds like a compound conjunction = ANDOR] |
THEME: RIFFLE SHUFFLES (43A: Casino maneuvers carried out three times in this puzzle?) — first four letters of theme answers in the top half of the puzzle are "(riffle??) shuffled" into the last four letters of their respective answers to make the theme answers in the bottom half:
Theme answers: 
This was probably closer to a two-and-a-half-star puzzle for me, but I bumped it up for the final "joke" (i.e. the revelation that a shuffled GOOF-OFFS is also GOOF-OFFS). I should probably take that half star back for the duping of "OFF" in OFF-PUT (itself a pretty awkward verb ... or is it an adjectival phrase? Who can tell, when the only terms anyone actually uses for this phenomenon are PUT OFF (v) or OFF-PUTTING (adj.)) (32D: Repelled). But I like the goofy joke well enough to keep the rating where it is. If you're going to break crossword convention (in this case, repeat an answer), there better be a good reason, and today I think there is. Still, the very concept here is kind of a snore. And the revealer is a silly phrase that means nothing to me. I have heard of shuffling, of course, but not riffle-shuffling, which is ... just shuffling? Where the half-deck in one hand merges with the half-deck in the other hand in alternating-card fashion? Casino terminology, as you know, not my thing. A bigger issue, for me: the theme reeks of "a computer program helped me find these words." It's like someone wrote some code that could take a wordlist and determine which of the (8-letter) words in that list could turn into other 8-letter words if you did this. The non-GOOF-OFFS themers are a big shrug to me. I don't want to mentally shuffle longer words to that extent. I also don't really have to, as the theme clues are easy enough that you don't really have to pay attention to the theme. This puzzle feels like it's in some kind of thematic no-man's-land between Wed. and Thu. It's structurally complex ... but not that complex; not such that you really have to think about it. It took me a little longer than usual. I can write some of that off to the oversized grid, but those giant NW and SE corners had something to do with it as well—much harder to get traction in all that white space than it is to get traction in a typical M-Th corner.
Bullets:
Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld
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- STONEPIT --> SET POINT (41A: BEFORE (Deck 3): Quarry / 46A: AFTER (Deck 3): Crucial moment in a tennis match)
- CONSOLES --> COOLNESS (20A: BEFORE (Deck 2): PlayStation and Switch / 55A: AFTER (Deck 2): Noted quality of the Fonz)
- GOOFOFFS --> GOOFOFFS (16A: BEFORE (Deck 1): Slackers / 73A: AFTER (Deck 1): Slackers)
Against the Day is an epic historical novel by Thomas Pynchon, published on November 21, 2006. The narrative takes place between the 1893 Chicago World's Fair and the time immediately following World War I and features more than a hundred characters spread across the United States, Europe, Mexico, Central Asia, Africa and "one or two places not strictly speaking on the map at all," according to the book jacket blurb written by Pynchon. Like its predecessors, Against the Day is an example of historiographic metafiction or metahistorical romance. At 1,085 pages, it is the longest of Pynchon's novels to date. (wikipedia)
• • •
One other potentially OFF-PUTting thing about this puzzle is that it is positively drowning in pop culture clues. I can handle a pretty decent amount of movies / music / TV shows in my puzzles, but this puzzle was testing even my patience in this arena. It starts with Tom Cruise. MISCAST? Do people say that? That clue was lost on me, as those Reacher movies held zero appeal for me (1A: Like Tom Cruise as Jack Reacher, some say). They held appeal for someone, though, as the two of them made close to half a billion dollars at the box office, so I guess the MISCASTing wasn't such a problem. After Cruise, we get (deep breath): ANDOR, Paul MESCAL, The CARS, TOTAL Recall, "Werewolves of London" (SOHO), Nick at NITE, SLADE, Booker T & the MGS, The Fonz, ENCANTO, Spielberg's EGOT, Jay LENO, NIA Vardalos, ANI DiFranco, AL CAPONE (clued via Geraldo) and PERU (clued via The Emperor's New Groove). That is Yeeeesh levels of pop culture. I didn't even count the sports clues in there, or the (not exactly 1st-tier) Pynchon. What's odd is that so many of those answers were needlessly pop culturefied. TOTAL, PERU, CARS, NITE, SOHO. Just shift the cluing on those and you have something closer to a reasonable balance. As is, I kept rolling my eyes going "again?" Except with Paul MESCAL, whom I love and who can do no wrong. Put him in every puzzle, I won't mind.
The difficulty for me today lay in those big corners, where I just had to work harder than usual for traction. Otherwise, the difficulty level felt about normal for a Wednesday. I didn't have any real mistakes, though there was a bunch of stuff I didn't know. I've read a couple late-ish Pynchons (the most recent one, Shadow Ticket, which features a character known as the AL CAPONE of Cheese, and Inherent Vice), and I know the titles of his more famous works (V, Gravity's Rainbow), as well as the novel that One Battle After Another was based on (Vineland), but AGAINST the Day? That one got past me. I also didn't know if the common football score was going to be ONE-ONE or ONE-NIL (52D: Final score of at least 10% of professional soccer matches) (yesterday's World Cup matches were 3-1 (France-Senegal), 4-1 (Norway-Iraq), and 3-0 (Argentina-Algeria)), and I've never used or heard anyone use the phrase DOG IT in my life (59D: Give minimum effort), so that SE corner took some time. Similar problems in the NW, with MISCAST being hard to pin down, and then INTONE being oddly/vaguely clued (and just being an odd word to begin with) (2D: Vocalize), and SCAN IN being needlessly prepositionally awkward ("Digitize" = SCAN, no IN needed) (3D: Digitize, as a document).. No real trouble elsewhere in the grid.
Bullets:
- 19A: Fast-paced scam, such as the shell game (SHORT CON) — this is a fun term. I think I learned it (and LONG CON) from The Grifters. With "CONS" highlighted in CONSOLES, the CON in SHORT CON kind of feels like a dupe, even though it isn't.
- 57A: ___ With Friends (WORDS) — does anyone still play this? This feels very ... aughts. Huh, looks like it's an exceedingly popular mobile game. Or at least it was as of 2017 ("the most popular mobile game in the U.S." as of May 2017) (wikipedia). No one I know plays (or talks about playing it, if they do). I do So Many word games and puzzles every day. This just isn't one of them.
- 25D: Gathering, informally (SESH) — I will never like this awful shortening, though I will say that SESH is much, much more tolerable than UNFORCH, which is a shortening I encountered in a puzzle this past weekend, UNFORCH.
- 62A: Telepathy, e.g. (PSI) — I ... don't really know this term. Are supernatural abilities called "PSI"s? Apparently yes, though it's not a countable noun, i.e. PSI is just the collective term for "parapsychological psychic phenomena or powers"_which are fictional, of course, as the clue for nearby ESP kind of gets at with its scare quotes (71D: "Ability" that's hard to believe, for short).
That's all for today. See you next time.
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- Pop Sensation (vintage paperbacks)
Rex was 3 stars too generous. Brutal.
ReplyDeleteMama Weer All Crazee Now
That's exactly what I was thinking. Disney movies, Apple TV shows, yuck.
DeleteApple TV's Widow's Bay is the best show on TV if you ask me, or was as it just concluded its first season. Season 2 coming later
Delete
ReplyDeleteEasy-Medium but not much fun. I didn't fully get the theme until I got here.
* * _ _ _
Overwrites:
aver before avow before CUSS for the 11A swear. avow was "confirmed" by oak (Oakland) as the 13D airport (SFO)
My take on "Gray, say" at 67D was old before it was AGE.
WOEs:
I've seen so little of Paul MESCAL that I didn't recognize him at 1D.
Didn't remember '70s glam rock band SLADE at 60D.
Thanks, @Rex, for the explanation of PSI as an answer for Telepathy (62A). I would have put esp if I hadn't already encountered it in the grid. At that point I hadn't hit the second GOOF-OFFS. If I had, I might have used esp anyway due to the puzzle's embrace of duplicate answers.
Three OFFS in one puzzle is cheating.
Finished it with one look-up, to get Paul MESCAL, and an alphabet run for the three-letter cross at the top. Never used (or understood) the theme...unless I'm missing something, it's a collection of words and semi-words that add up to nothing. I'm hoping to be set straight.
ReplyDeleteDon’t know Paul Mescal or the Disney movie, so I had that as mIscal/Incanto. When I didn’t get the happy music, I assumed I was missing something with the Goofoffs dupe. Oh well.
ReplyDeletePart of the pleasure of crosswords is encountering things I didn’t know. But the mountains of pop culture in this puzzle screamed, “Not on your wavelength, Freude.” It seemed to be trying for a Thursday but wasn’t hard (or clever) enough, yet it was too hard for People magazine or TV Guide, where it otherwise belonged.
ReplyDeleteI don’t understand why we got Mingus today, Rex, but I’m awfully glad we did.
Mingus piece is the "Boogie Stop SHUFFLE"
DeleteExtremely hip of Mr. Parker
DeleteGiven revealer said " maneuver carried out THREE times, I got hung up on tripLE SHUFFLE, then tried doubLE, then singLE, really offputting!
DeleteThanks, jberg. Guess I was still woozy from the onslaught of pop culture.
DeleteA much better musical choice than “Shuffle Off to Buffalo.”
Yeah, this took me a long time..... 28 minutes last night! Not that any one area or answer was that hard, it just took a long time to parse what was going on. Once I grokked the them, I could fill in the shaded squares in the bottom and that helped me a lot. Yeah, the dupe GOOFOFFS was kinda cute. 16 wide grids are always nice : ). At least Roo will be happy today!!!!! Enjoyed COOLNESS, STEELER, DIDTIME. And, of course, ALCAPONE. Agree that there's a lot of PPP/Pop Culture. Didn't know PSI as clued. Thanks, Jonathan, for a unique Wednesday grid! : )
ReplyDeleteTom Cruise is widely considered to be miscast as Jack Reacher, because in the novels, Reacher is supposed to be a 6'5" giant, and Cruise...is not.
ReplyDeleteHe absolutely was miscast. But the movie is still very entertaining.
Deletehow many 6’5” lead actors are there?
DeleteHaven’t seen the Cruise movie(s?) but Alan Ritchie is perfectly cast in the Reacher TV series. Highly recommend.
DeleteJason Momoa would have nailed it. (Yeah, he’d have to cover up most of his tattoos, but so what?)
DeleteFYI -- The constructor's notes, as posted on XwordInfo:
ReplyDelete"It's nice to be back with another crossword in the Times!
"The three sets of (nonreversible, with one special exception noted below) "shuffle partners" appearing in today's puzzle are quite rare. So rare, in fact, that I was unable to find any other examples of greater than six letters across many thousands of candidates in my personal word list. This included searches for partners with an odd number of letters and for partners in which the first letter in the "shuffled deck" came from the "bottom half".
"This overall rarity, in my opinion, makes it even neater that one of the only three starting word hits (GOOFOFFS) shuffles back into itself!"
“Miscast” is a real thing in the theater. Usually but not always, it’s men singing songs written for women or vice versa. The performances are usually outstanding.
ReplyDeleteCan someone explain COO for Bill's partner, please?
ReplyDeleteThink lovebirds. "Bill and COO" can refer to courtship rituals between actual birds, touching and clicking their beaks together, but in the human realm, think of two lovers kissing and talking quietly with one another.
DeleteThis is the only part of the puzzle I rubbed against. Neither my wife nore I had heard of Bill and Coo. We did laugh about Jack Reacher, though, because that's all my brother would talk about for months. Initially we tried "TOOSHORT" but that was too long.
DeleteLast to fall. I hung onto "Ted" too long down there.
DeleteWhy is Bill’s Partner “Coo?” I don’t get it.
ReplyDeleteBill and coo is an old expression for being lovey dovey
DeleteI’ve only seen clips of Cruise as Reacher, and it is obvious from the get go that he’s MISCAST, although as Rex mentioned, his fans have a high capacity to willingly suspend disbelief.
ReplyDeleteThe four corner sections resulted in this playing like a group of mini-puzzles to me, which made for a choppy, uneven solve. The theme was kind of “meh”, more like the idea came first but the execution was more difficult than originally imagined.
It’s a shame that Shortz and his team don’t read Rex on a regular basis. When even he starts noticing the preponderance of popular culture, you’re probably close to losing a whole cohort of traditional solvers. Maybe the next generation of solvers grew up with their noses glued to a screen and have a wider base of knowledge regarding b-list celebs and the other usual cast of characters than us geezers and this is just a manifestation of their marketing genius (if you can call turning the Old Gray Lady into People Magazine genius).
I dunno. There are enough actors, actresses, baseball players and other proper names that are 100+ years old in crosswords all the time. Pop culture isn’t new to crosswords, it’s just pop culture is old timers haven’t memorized.
DeleteThey read
DeleteWhat I liked most about this puzzle was conquering a grid with so many no-knows. Even after solving puzzles for numerous years, being able to fill in so many didn’t-have-a-clue answers feels kinda like a miracle. So, victory was sweet.
ReplyDeleteOne of my no-knows, BTW, was “popcorn tofu”, and I eat a lot of tofu!
I also liked the theme, based on a language quirk, as I love language quirks. That brought the good kind of “Huh!” Plus, it was clever to relate the quirk to shuffling cards.
I did have a big and panicky “This has to be right, but why? But why?” moment with the two GOOF-OFFs. That was memorable. (I finally got my answer after reading the constructor’s notes, which I posted earlier.)
BTW, it’s funny how an answer can have great meaning to one solver while being hum-drum to practically everyone else. FUSE struck a potent note with me, who recently underwent spine surgery.
All in all, a lovely basket of riddle-cracking and quirk for me. Thank you for this, Jonathan!
In the end I was totally surprised I finished this one, well, almost….Wound up missing the “C” in SHORTCOM, but getting that far with all pop culture scattered throughout this puzzle was a win for guessing right where I knew nothing. Did not know MESCAL and never saw Reacher so started in the middle and worked south and west, finally making sense of ALCAPONE. Then back to the NW where I remembered the TV series Reacher and got MISCAST. ENCANTa sounded like a Spanish town, and after guessing MESCAL was close enough to figure out TOMES and INTONE, the latter a not-so-great clue/answer in my opinion. Anyway, a tricky feat of construction and tight theme, with some unusual clues, so not an easy one to complete.
ReplyDeleteFor some reason this puzzle was right on my wavelength, starting with 1A (even though I've never seen a Jack Reacher film), and I had a 10% faster-than-average solve.
ReplyDeleteI figured out early on that the shaded squares were spread out in their second deck appearance, so I could just fill them in, but I didn't get the full theme until I finished. I was thus confused about the GOOF OFF repeat -- until I wasn't and found it pretty cool. But that's the kind of discovery I enjoy.
The BEFORE and AFTER and deck #s plus the video game lingo in the clue for 20 across made it inaccessible to me. I really do NOT like this puzzle. The repeat of goof-off only made it worse IMO
ReplyDeleteHey All !
ReplyDeleteThe F Gods heard my laments in YesterComments apparently. Got a whole bunch of 'em today.
Got ma another "You're puzzle is too bland and plain for us" rejection email this morning. Man, all I want is one puz to get into the NYT. Just one. I've submitted so many, I'm running out of Theme ideas. I did get a life goal, however, in getting a book written and published (as long time readers here know), Changing Times by Darrin Vail (me). Get it wherever you get your books online.
Puz was interesting. Although I enjoyed the F's, the Double GOOFOFFS was kind of odd. Got them first, then wondered if the other two would also be the same words, but discovered no, they weren't, just same shaded letters.
16 wider today, in case you missed it. The Central Revealer is 14 letters, so your grid either has to be 14 wide or 16 wide. If Revealer wasn't a POC (Hi @Anoa), grid could've been the regular 15 wide. 42 Blockers, but acceptable for the extra column.
I have a Themeless almost complete, gonna finish it and submit it. May be the last time I try. We'll see. Maybe I need to get a job in the NYT puzzle team. 😁
Hope y'all have a great Wednesday!
12 F's (Record? I think @Lewis has that info)
RooMonster
DarrinV
Bummer on the rejection notice. Fingers crossed that your themeless will be the one that finally takes OFF.
Delete@Roo, having been part of this community for a couple of years now, I can't imagine you would submit a puzzle that would be considered bland. Peer pressure of the resulting commentary here, if nothing else.
DeleteAnd we all see what passes for "acceptable", especially lately (*cough* Sunday).
Hope that persistence helps you realize your goal. Fare well (1 F).
Well, you're still way ahead on being IN the puzzle so there's that.
DeleteWas thinking about you today @Roo - that's a ton of F's!!!
Delete
ReplyDeleteWhat is STON? Is that a word?
I noticed that, too. It's an extra clunker in a clunker of a puzzle.
DeleteIt's just the first half of the answer, RP highlighted it to show what is moving (being shuffled)
DeleteCame here for an answer to that, too - Goof and Cons are real words, so expected STON to be one too - I was looking for a casino cheating theme….
DeleteThat bothered me, too.
DeleteI hated this puzzle while I was solving it, until I was almost finished and it suddenly made sense. Partly it was the theme -- my first theme entry was CONSOLES, which in the old days were sometimes called DECKS, so there I went racing down the wrong fork in the road. I eventually figured out that there were four consecutive shaded letters in the top, and the same four letters with other letters between them in the bottom--and THEN realized that the "before" above had turned to "after" below, and started to grok the SHUFFLE part; but it was only when I got to GOOF-OFFS that I noticed that the unshaded letters did the same thing as the shaded ones. That had a lot of COOLNESS to it.
ReplyDeleteIt took me too long to see the RIFFLE SHUFFLES, because I thought a "maneuver" would be some way to try to win, like card-counting in Blackjack. I needed most of the crosses.
Like @Lewis, I did eventually enjoy being able to get all the unknown-to-me entries. I'm not really sure how I managed to do that. And if I hadn't remembered NOOR, I'd have been lost. Sometimes it was just a matter of parsing the clue correctly, with 7-D, "'The Complete Works of ...' books, say" as a prime example.
Well, that's enough out of me.
Trying to be kind, but I was in agreement with RP in at least one area today. Difficult for a Wednesday but could’ve been far more appealing without all the trivia. As he said, this puzzle felt as though it was absolutely drowning in it. I didn’t keep an official record like Gary J. but have 30 checkmarks: sports, movies, games, books, music, Disney, royalty. Ditto on the eye rolls … again?
ReplyDeleteOn the upside, I liked the theme idea. It was clever and edgy with the perfect revealer. The imagery of cards in a RIFFLE vis-a-vis letters shuffling, that works great. Plus once I got the first one, the others were easy to parse, and that helped me with the finishing the solve overall.So I think that extra half star was more than justified.
I don’t who Jack Reacher is supposed to be. Maybe it’s because Tom Cruise is short and can’t reach.
ReplyDeleteAmazingly, this is exactly correct. The reason people say Cruise is MISCAST is that in the books, Jack Reacher is very tall (6'5).
DeleteThe author, Lee Child, is 6'4. According to my favorite podcast, No Such Thing as a Fish, when Child was unemployed, his wife would joke that he should get a job as "a reacher" because people at supermarkets would ask him to get things down from high shelves. This is the origin of the character's name.
So while I think you were joking, you in fact hit the nail precisely on the head.
Once on Letterman, famously tall Michelle Obama told a funny story about being asked to reach something in Target. She’d snuck away from Secret Service and was trying to have a little me time in her favorite store, going incognito in a baseball cap and sunglasses. A very old, very tiny lady tapped her arm and asked her to get something off a high shelf. She did and handed it to the lady who thanked her and walked away without ever realizing she had just spoken to the First Lady of the United States.
DeleteRex gave a ton of weight, IMO, to the GOOFiness factor, which was surprising. We ended up over our average time analyzing which of the two GOOF OFFS had to be wrong, assuming there couldn't be a dupe.
ReplyDeleteAlso surprised to see the return of the Star Wars counter ("MISS ME?") Never heard of ANDOR.
But I'd move that the 1/2 star upgrade should have been reversed (or worse) for seeing the loathsome, racist profanity exemplified by the UFC(12D) "event" referenced in this puzzle.
Didn't know RIFFLE SHUFFLE was a thing; but it is, presumably an alternative to putting the cards in a pile and swirling them around the table. We did that when our hands were too small to riffle them. I don't know how else one would shuffle a deck of cards, but ok.
Wikipedia lists 12 types of shuffles, although one is called 52 pickup so I'm skeptical.
DeleteThis puzzle highlights the seedy and the gritty - con games, Al Capone, "did time", casino card shuffles, Grade B actors, the Steelers (for grit, not seediness), cussing, slackers, goofoffs, five finger discount, etc. In that context the reference to the UFC is appropriate. Likewise, the UFC steel cage match (or whatever it was) on the White House lawn was - sadly - appropriate in the context of the current presidency.
DeleteGreat mid-week puzzle. New solvers can solve it as a themeless (I.e no rebuses or architectural tricks), but getting the theme helps and provides an “a-ha moment” that’s an extra layer of fun. Or at least a chuckle.
ReplyDeleteFor me the revealer hit twice. Early on I realized the gray squares would be SHUFFLED, which I just thought meant the gray letters would be in a different order and spread through the second word. Only at the end did I realize the whole words were RIFFLE SHUFFLED, both gray and white squares.
I know the term RIFFLE SHUFFLE largely from YouTube tutorials on card tricks and close-up magic. Because I’m a cool guy. It’s a specific type of shuffle where you cut the deck in half, merge the two half’s at a corner and do the “pppppppt” thing with your thumbs while pushing the two halves together.
When I asked my Dad if he ever went to jail he said, "No, Egs, but I DIDTIME your mother's contractions when you were trying to come out. "
ReplyDeleteA shell game run by an incarcerated midget is a whole lot of SHORTCON.
A STEELER (Franco Harris) STOLE the game from the Raiders with the Immaculate Reception. You're officially old if you know what I'm talking about here (or probably anywhere else).
That blond's hair wasn't DYED. It was UNALIVED.
With NOOR, ANDOR is just and. And ASIS is just ASS until you add ANI.
Cool concept. GOOFOFFS was a gobsmack! Tone down the junk a tad and you've got a great Wednesday. Thanks, Jonathan Raksin.
I had no trouble completing the puzzle but came to Rex here hoping to learn what the theme means. I don’t gamble and I don’t get it.
ReplyDeleteA little north of Medium. Has this happened before in a grid, the exact same entry repeating? I thought there was an inviolate rule AGAINST that. Now please, I don't need to have the gimmick explained to me; I completely get it. How COOL I am with a thematic gimmick prioritized over a basic crossword convention it is yet to be determined. Rules are made to be broken, did you say? I don't know. Maybe sometimes. But something about this feels a little constructor-centric (it was so hard executing this them -- aren't you impressed, and especially impressed by how GOOF-OFFS shuffles into itself?). Whereas on the solver end it can be more "Seriously? You would do that? Because this makes me so uneasy, I can't be sure I really understood correctly, and by golly I sure hate DNF-ing".
ReplyDeleteI had thought (and this is in reaction to what Rex wrote) that a RIFFLE SHUFFLE was a perfect interleaving of two halves of a deck split exactly equally, 26 to each half, a skill that not many people have besides magicians, and something I think would require a great deal of practice. Whereas just "shuffle" can be more haphazard. But I'm not able to confirm that through a quick Google search.
If someone asked me before what "DOG IT" meant, I'd have queried back, does it mean "hoof it"? Right next to it is SLADE. I couldn't tell you a single SLADE song; I've barely heard of them at best. So yeah, the puzzle might be a little pop-culture heavy. It didn't bother me much in the heat of the solve, but I can see how it might others.
Agree with Rex about SESH. But not about INTONE. Nor about SCAN IN really -- I've certainly heard it.
Too soon for UFC, a few days after the s**t-show on the White House lawn?
Putting aside the entry repetition, I was pretty much okay with the grid. Nothing truly ugly leapt out at me. And that'll do it for now.
@tht 8:30 am, there is a rule about not repeating answers, but it is sometimes broken if there's a good excuse. The GROUNDHOG DAY puzzle from Feb. 2 this year is a great example.
DeleteReading the shuffling entry on Wikipedia i learned more than I wanted about shuffling and you are referring to the Faro shuffle (interweaving cards from each pile)
DeleteI can’t believe I solved this puzzle. Good guess work, I guess. In the print edition, there was a typo at 22 across that held me back a moment.With all the modern names and slang that I don’t like, I’m surprised to give it a 🎈🎈🎊🎊
ReplyDeleteJack Reacher is a huge guy in the novels and his size is an important plot device. Tom Cruise isn't, so... miscast. The story was changed to accommodate his smaller size.
ReplyDeleteI was not.a fan of this puzzle at all. It isn't hard, but the 'trick' was completely disinteresting, at least to me.
ReplyDeleteWhat Rex says about the pop culture clue/answers; I had a hard time breaking into the NW. At least I knew ANI and LENO. And SCAN IN. And the SE was also hard with SLADE, the Pynchon title and the meaning of "Was up the river" unknowns to me. AL CAPONE - I'm old enough to have watched the program where Geraldo reveals...nothing. Perhaps the constructor today has a fascination with opening "buried" things what with the AL CAPONE clue and TOMBS. On the other hand, it could just be editing that made those choices.
ReplyDeleteEven with the gray squares pointing out the theme, I needed Rex's help to get it. It's interesting.
Thanks, Jonathan Raksin.
@Rex was way too generous. You can't give 0 stars but this is no better than 1. The theme is a nothing burger. There's nothing to tie the theme answers together and the double GOOFOFFS are just wrong. Definite Peggy Lee song puzzle.
ReplyDeleteI just saw somewhere that Jack Reacher was supposed to be a big strong guy so MISCAST went right in and that was it in the NW for quite a while. Nothing like starting a section that eventually has MESCAL, ENCANTO, ANDOR, and CARS to make me look elsewhere, which I did, but I was not hopeful.
ReplyDeleteKept chipping away and the gimmick showed up and was helpful , although a RIFFLESHUFFLE is news to me, as was a SHORTCON, WORDS as clued, PERU as clued, SLADE, and PSI which I only know as a measure of tire pressure. It was nice to see PERU, as my first job was teaching Spanish in PERU, although it was PERU NY. Had some fun with that one.
Pretty clever stuff, JR, Just Really "not my jam", to quote my granddaughter. Thanks for some thorny fun at least.
RIFFLESHUFFLE is just one type of shuffle. Probably not the most common because not everyone can do it - the overhand, where you just shuffle in chunks back and front, is probably the most common. I like the pile shuffle where you just smoosh all the cards around the table in a big pile.
ReplyDeleteJames. When I was a kid, family games were occasionally board games but mostly cards. I was taught to RIFFLE SHUFFLE, but we never called it that; it was just shuffling. I never saw an "overhand" until I was at university and I thought, "Oh, this is much easier", and I adopted it for a while before returning to "real" shuffling. I don't think I've ever done the "smoosh" thing. I'll have to give it a try.
DeleteThe Times has added a words with friends clone to their games lineup, Crossplay.
ReplyDeleteOye, estoy tratando de hacer lo mejor que puedo.
ReplyDeleteHere we go. Another fine example of the adage, "Just because it's hard doesn't mean it's good." This theme is a forced idea that made solving fiddly and for no great payoff. Yep, the letters are shuffled. Super gunky, or as 🦖 says, drowning in pop culture, and so many 3s it's hard to be excited about this one. Triple OFF putting.
This just in from my Chihuahua possé, NOOR is a mammal and not a fish. But it is a fish shop in India. So important we cleared this up. Arf.
😫 Veal. PSI. Bill and COO. OPPO.
People: 7
Places: 3
Products: 13 {unfortunate}
Partials: 9
Foreignisms: 0
--
Gary's Grid Gunk Gauge: 32 of 83 (39%)
Funny Factor: 0 😫
Uniclues:
1 Gangster casts a ballot.
2 La-Z-Boy engaged.
3 The Ph.D. of weed.
4 Snuggle with a Panther! advertisement.
1 AL CAPONE AGAINST
2 GOOF OFFS DID TIME
3 MGS SESH DOC
4 COT OCELITE NITE
My Fascinating Crossword Uniclue Keepsake from Last Year: Performance space in a teapot. TEMPEST THEATER.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I think the quality of the puzzles has gone steadily downhill [dare I say since the brith of AI?] I have been doing the NYT for decades and now it seems like a slog instead of a joy with all these seemingly very forced gimmicks!
ReplyDeleteAs an older chap I find myself lost w Rap singers but credit Shortz. He's trying to expand our minds. You can't have Etui in every puzzle.
ReplyDeleteWhy? You can just solve w/o the shuffle
ReplyDeletePPP gunkfest. Ugh, Ugh., and double Ugh.
ReplyDelete+1
DeleteFrom yesterday, sayonara.
ReplyDeleteOlder Yankee fans may recall Graig Nettles' famous line when the Yankees let go of Sparky Lyle in 1978. He had won the Cy Young award in 1977. Nettles said "In one year he went from Cy Young to sayonara."
Sparky was the first AL reliever to win the award, beating out Jim Palmer and Nolan Ryan for it.
He has the most career wins of any pitcher to have never started a single game.
I recall seeing him come in once with the bases loaded and no outs and strike out the next three batters. Can't recall how many pitches it took.
Excellent trivia regarding careers wins sans a singke start!
DeleteThank you.
I, too, noticed the blatant typo at 22A (hard copy only). Don't they have proofreaders? Spellcheck? If you don't know what a RIFFLE SHUFFLE is check out Jason Ladayne on YouTube - this dude is absolutely amazing handling a deck of cards.
ReplyDeleteChallenging for us non-pop culture Boomer types, but I enjoyed working through it and got some education. Imaginative clues and soso theme
ReplyDeleteI learned the riffle shuffle in the late '70s from a woman from my Arizona church who had been one of the first female dealers on the Strip in Vegas. Apparently not all the casinos used shoes, and the dealers at these places were encouraged to show off their shuffling skills. The difference between that and the dealing in the movie "21" reflects the changes in society between early '60s and early '90s
For a moment, I thought you were telling us she shuffled with her feet. But I know what you mean.
DeleteTotal agree about the pop culture. It seems the NYT crosswords have become less about words and wordplay and more about trivia. If you are not watching pop culture 24/7 you are screwed.
ReplyDeleteWhat's next? Puzzles filled with AI crap? I can see it now..."He's the world's first trillionaire..." (eight letters)
DeleteMy dead-tree copy (Arizona edition) has 22-across clue as : LATERITE, FOR EXAMPLW. Anyone else?
ReplyDeleteYou ain't alone. My printed newspaper version of the puz had the same "examplw". At the time I just shrugged, riffle-shuffled it to "example", and moved on.
DeleteUnusual NYTPuz typo, tho.
M&A
yes, same. I always print out a hard copy of the newspaper version. I looked ar the digital version, and it had it spelled correctly.
DeleteI got DOGIT easily enough but I've usually heard the concept as "DOGgingIT."
ReplyDeleteI suppose one should put off being with someone who OFFPUTs them.
Toughie puz. The solvequest precious nanoseconds were suitably bruised. Probably due to stuff like this, at our house:
ReplyDelete1. NW start-up area had the no-knows matrix of MESCAL/ENCANTO/ANDOR. And the then-mysterious BEFORE (Deck 2): PlayStation and Switch.
2. RIFFLESHUFFLES was news to m&e. M&A doesn't do casinos.
3. STONEPIT. M&A also don't do quarries.
4. Had WELD before FUSE. Not a real biggie, thanx to the EENY gimme.
5. Puztheme was kinda weird. Caught on eventually, but took a while. RIFFLEd my theme sniffer. Almost decked m&e.
6. Bigger than average puzgrid.
staff weeject pick: UFC. This evidently has somethin to do with celebratin 250 years of our democracy.
primo quad weeject stacks, NE & SW, btw.
some fave stuff: Double GOOFOFFS. Bonus OFFPUT. MISSME & MISCAST.
Thanx, Mr. Raksin dude. A tough CUSS of a WedPuz SESH.
Masked & Anonymo5Us
p.s.
Runt puzzle:
**gruntz**
M&A
Medium-tough for me too.
ReplyDeleteI didn’t not know Paul MESCAL and ENCANTO which, coupled with the costly erasure CuRe before CARS, made the NW very tough even though unlike @Rex I put in MISCAST with no crosses.
I needed quite a bit of staring post-solve to grasp what was going on.
Clever, liked it a tad more than @Rex did.
I haven't seen a dealer in blackjack shuffle a deck for ages. They use a machine.
ReplyDeleteMy wife and some of her "friends" still play Words With Friends regularly. They chat between plays.
I'm just a little over 6' and LOLs sometimes ask me to reach a box in a top shelf at the grocery. I love doing it.
I’m 5’2” and once was asked by a shorter person to reach something on a high(ish) shelf at the grocery store. Made my day!
DeleteUFC, con artists, thieves, tax cheaters. No. The MGs. Yes
ReplyDeleteThis post made me curious about other kinds of shuffles (because indeed, one would only specify a RIFFLE SHUFFLE to distinguish it from others). According to Wikipedia, in addition to a RIFFLE SHUFFLE, there is an overhand shuffle, Hindu shuffle, pile shuffle, Mongean shuffle, and faro shuffle, and my poking around for examples of these also revealed a cascade shuffle. Who knew?
ReplyDeleteI solved the puzzle last night a few hours after I watched a Jeopardy episode in which the actor Paul MESCAL was featured in a question/answer. I’d never heard of him before.
ReplyDeletePlate of shrimp….
Had the same reaction to UNFORCH. Would be more forgivable if it wasn't already a cryptic puzzle. Boo! (AVCX Cryptic from 6/11/26)
ReplyDeleteI liked this theme, I had the a-ha moment of shuffling the two halves of the theme words together pretty late. I enjoyed doing the letter shuffling in my head.
ReplyDeleteThe NE and SW corners game me more trouble than the bigger corners personally. It’s full of crunchy 3 letter downs that were hard for me to parse through.
I was completely lost on COO for “Bill’s partner”, I’m glad people in the comments explained that one. I’ve also never heard of “up the river” as an expression for prison time, or DOG IT before, I hope those make it in the memory bank.
Not my kind of puzzle. When you have clues like “BEFORE (Deck 2): PlayStation and Switch”, you’ve lost me. Sounds like instructions for setting up a gaming system. No thanks. But it is Tuesday night and I do have a bit of time so …
ReplyDeleteAs Rex and many commenters have noted - just too much pop culture. That NW corner was just a People mag fest. Truly a slog even though I knew ANI and LENO and CARS and there were a couple of real words in there, I still hated it.
I guess Pynchon is PPP, but he’s certainly not Disneyware, so I’m willing to accept him. I’m not a big fan of 7D TOMES. I make exceptions but, normally, I pass on novels over 400 pages. I loved Pynchon’s “The Crying of Lot 49” (under 200 pages) and soldiered through “Gravity’s Rainbow” (over 750) - there was enough good stuff to keep me engaged - but “Against the Day” is over 1,000 pages and after the first hundred, I gave it up. I’d cop to having a short attention span, except that I’m seriously contemplating reading “Ulysses” (~750 pages) for the fourth time. (Confession here. My third “reading” was actually when I accidentally discovered an audio version and enjoyed having someone else read it to me for about two weeks while I was driving around doing errands.)
Rex, thanks once again for complaining about all the names so I don't have to. That upper left corner was brutal. This was a big disappointment after yesterday's refreshing lack of them.
ReplyDeleteI had a really quick solve at just under 12 minutes. Got off to a fast start with reading the clue for 1 across and instantly saying MISCAST! And even the awful onslaught of names didn't slow me too much because a lot of them were Knowns.
Never heard of that meaning for PSI. I only know it for air pressure. Speaking of abbrevs, lots of them today: MSN UFC SFO SSN STP SPF UFO NFC EGOT. (Isn't SSN in almost every puzzle lately?) I had NFL before NFC, and ONE ALL before ONE ONE before ONE NIL.
Most casino games that regular players play in these days use a mechanically shuffled multi-deck shoe. To my knowledge, at tables where they use a single deck, the dealer will generally do a tabled wash (ie. "spread the cards out on the table and swirl it around a bunch") as that is said to randomize the cards better and is harder for a skilled sleight-of-hand artist to rig. So referring to a riffle shuffle (the "split the deck in two and zwwwwwwwip the halves together" shuffle most people know) as a "casino maneuver" does strike me as a little odd, for whatever it's worth.
ReplyDeleteI saw a werewolf drinking a Pina Colada at Trader Vic's. And his hair was perfect.
ReplyDeleteThere were an annoying number of names and sports references in this puzzle, although I did manage to guess most of them. Did not know MESCAL or MGS or SLADE or the CARS. DOGIT is new to me, but I got it. And thanks Tht for the explanation of COO.
ReplyDeleteThe puzzle in retrospect was more fun than when I was struggling with it!
Unlike many here, I generally don't mind the pop culture items, even the ones I have no idea about... within reason. But halfway in I was thinking, is this entire puzzle pop culture? Which I wouldn't mind infrequently, but if you're going to do that I say go the whole way, every clue is pop culture.
ReplyDeleteI loved loved LOVED the theme. I agree that the fill wasn't great, but I thought the themers and revealer were brilliant.
ReplyDeleteNot my cuppa today. Funny, MISCAST came to me right away thought I don't know anything about the Jace Reacher series. Interesting to come here to learn about the height disparity. With 1A falling so fast, I figured this one would be a whoosh. Not even close.
ReplyDeleteSo much I did not know, which I generally like. But today there was so much that I was Naticked in several places and was just guessing letters. And the stuff I didn't know didn't ring any happy bells with the new knowledge. But, as I say below, this is a Hugh thing...
The theme, while somewhat interesting, has layers that are still escaping me even after coming here. And I'm not all that interested in finding out more. This is all a matter of taste and is a Hugh thing, so no real nits on the puzzle. Sometimes even quality puzzles don't hold my interest, this one may just be one of those.
Jonathan - much respect on the construction and making it all work! Just not in my wheelhouse today. I'm sure you'll get me next time!
What is the meaning of STON in the shaded squares? GOOF is a word, but:STON??
ReplyDeleteI’m not too proud to admit that I still do not understand this one. And that’s after reading the constructor’s notes and Rex and everyone’s comments. I love going to Vegas and I understand the concept of having three decks in the shoe etc., and I see the “before and after” shuffling. I just don’t feel a cohesive theme. Or maybe it’s that I do see the theme, but there wasn’t anything to figure out. At all.
ReplyDeleteI just solved the clues and put in answers. Sure, the shaded letters become a longer word when the original shaded letters get separated by other letters to make a longer word except for GOOFOFFS, which doesn’t change. And this represents a RIFFLE
SHUFFLE because just saying shuffle isn’t clear enough? Don’t misunderstand, I play a lot of cards and am aware that there are a few ways to mix up a deck or decks of cards to deal a new game or hand. I see what’s going on in the puzzle, I just don’t get a ready for prime time puzzle.
Or, more likely, my brain is still not all better yet. According to the doc, my sodium, potassium and magnesium are still having trouble playing nicely with one another. Sheesh.
DOG IT was very familiar to me in a sports context, although in my Southern upbringing, "doggin' it" is more natural to my ear.
ReplyDeleteAlso, I started playing WORDS with Friends about 10 years ago as one of the ways to stay connected with a dear friend who was moving away. We always have a game in progress always.
100% “doggin’ it” for me too, Tom T
DeleteI played Words with Friends with 2 people I met through the game for 12 years, then around the same time they both dropped off. I got off WWF when they started accepting foreign words and ridiculous “words” (like JE, in their dictionary the “definition” is “Je ne sais quoi”). Also when a good friend I was playing with started playing impossible words that he had to be looking up. BAH, I don’t need this. Just wasn’t fun anymore.
ReplyDelete