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Voltaire's penultimate play / SAT 7-11-26 / Bandleader who mentored Louis Armstrong / Statue in East Asian temples / Nookie nook? / G-rated verbal double-take / Julia Child catchphrase / Angsty feeling associated with exclusion / "Splendid" things in a Khaled Hosseini title / Target of a therapeutic tea bag / Boxing ring encouragement
Saturday, July 11, 2026
Constructor: Jim Quinlan
Relative difficulty: Medium
Word of the Day: KING OLIVER (3D: Bandleader who mentored Louis Armstrong) —
Joseph Nathan "King" Oliver (December 19, 1881 – c. April 10, 1938:) was an American jazz cornet player and bandleader. He was particularly recognized for his playing style and his pioneering use of mutes in jazz. Also a notable composer, he wrote many tunes still played today, including "Dippermouth Blues", "Sweet Like This", "Canal Street Blues", and "Doctor Jazz". He was the mentor and teacher of Louis Armstrong. His influence was such that Armstrong claimed, "if it had not been for Joe Oliver, jazz would not be what it is today." (wikipedia)
• • •
I called Thursday's puzzle "Easy," which it very much was for me, but Apparently Not For Others, as I got yelled at a lot. Well, today, let me make it up to you by highlighting the very funny (to me) initial faceplant I did at the very beginning of this puzzle. First, a run-of-the-mill mistake:
The marquee fill was very good today. OAHU, HAWAII is one of those geographical redundancies that always make me roll my eyes (see TEHRAN, IRAN, whenever that was ... recently), but everything else—all 11 of the other 10-letter answers—really pop. I enjoyed the crossing of FOMO and "I'M ALL ALONE"—gave the puzzle a really angsty, modern vibe. I object to the clue on "WHAT THE HEY?" (53A: G-rated verbal double-take). "WHAT THE HEY?" is more like "sure, why not? let's do it." There's a spirit of willingness, of gameness. The G-rated "double-take" (the thing you say when you can't believe what you just saw) is "WHAT THE HECK?" Also, I'm not sure LOVERS' LANE can plausibly be described as a "nook" (56: Nookie nook?). It's a lane. Is it not a literal lane? I think it's just a figurative term for any place you can park and make out. If you don't know what "nookie" is, ask your parents. Grandparents, actually. I think I learned it from '70s movies / TV. Maude? All in the Family? The Marin County satire Serial (1980), which my family owned on laser disc in the '80s and watched a lot? Wherever I learned it, I know I didn't learn it from this alleged children's TV show from 1981:
Bullets:
Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld
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- 16A: .08 for 49 of the 50 states (LEGAL LIMIT) — this clue is basically begging you to ask the question, "Which state has a different LEGAL LIMIT than all the others!?" I don't know, but I'm going to find out for you now. I thought maybe Wisconsin's would be higher ("Some of the drunkest counties in America are in Wisconsin and the state has 7 of the 10 U.S. cities with the highest alcohol consumption per capita."), but no. The one state that's different actually has a lower limit. It's Utah, at .05.
- 19A: Some docking helpers (TUGS) — I wanted USBS. Later, USBS actually turned up (28D: Some ports, for short). We call that a "malapop." I think Andrea Carla Michaels came up with that name. It's a phenomenon that happens more than you'd think. Or ... no, you probably know, since, if you're solving a Saturday, you probably solve a lot.
- 42A: Get out of Dodge (BOLT) — really thought this clue was doing some kind of wordplay and the answer was going to have something to do with disembarking from a car.
- 44D: Boxing ring encouragement ("GET 'EM!") — since the opponent you are telling the boxer to "get" is just one person, 'EM feels slightly wrong. But then "GET 'IM!" also feels wrong. Do people even say this at boxing matches? Kinda savage.
- 36D: Arkansas : Nebraska :: Argon : ___ (NEON) — one of my favorite clues in a while. Bizarrely incongruous, and yet simple, elegant, perfect (AR : NE :: AR : NE)
That's all for today. See you next time.
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117 comments:
Still dealing with jet lag, I got up at 4:30, solved the puzzle, came here and found that Rex hadn't posted. I struggled with this one, particularly trying to convince myself that JOHN XXIII could have been the 21st pontiff of his name. It's true, though--turns out no one is really sure how many popes there have been, and that's even without worrying about the anti-popes. And then I couldn't remember the APU TRILOGY, which I saw back in the 1960s. But it all came together, and as usual all the errors I spotted in the puzzle were actually mine. Fun, challenging puzzle.
Interesting - this appeared to play easier to me than it did for the big guy. The grid is daunting at first look with the highly segmented corners - but I liked the center crossing spanners and there was a lot of footholds offered. Made the same initial açaí misstep - but that was remedied quickly with the crosses.
Super Duper Love
The long tri-stacks were fantastic. BOSSY PANTS - IM ALL ALONE - BON APPETITE is pretty neat as a group. Agree with Rex on OAHU - the full proper name of a person or place is never needed - especially with the adjacent KING OLIVER. Limited glue - I liked the shorts for the most part. Needed all the crosses for IRENE.
The LILAC Time
Highly enjoyable Saturday morning solve. Matt Sewell’s Stumper today is more of a ball buster with a tough - clunky center section.
GIN and Juice
Easy-medium for me today, maybe because I knew the SAVANNAH BANANAS and put it in with only the SA at the beginning. OAHU, HAWAII was a gimme, which gave me LAIR and OH NO, which got me PLOT TWISTS, and I was off. Utah is the 50th state; its LEGAL LIMIT is .05. I enjoyed the puzzle and I agree with @Rex--elegant fill, fair crosses, a nice Saturday offering.
There were 23 popes named John, not 21. Pope John XXIII convened the ecumenical council in thevearly 60s.
For JOSS you could also have Hall of Fame pitcher Addie Joss, but maybe he is a little too obscure.
Much much easier than yesterday's puzzle. Only overwrites were rIB/BIB, EbaY/ETSY, and aReS/EROS.
I have no idea why anyone would want to poke a bowl.
Hand up for starting with AÇAÍ. But a quick check of the crosses immediately brought the great KING OLIVER to light, and POKE quickly followed. Rex, listen to “Dippermouth Blues.” Oliver takes a beautiful three-chorus solo that sets the stage for Armstrong, who then sets the stage for everything in jazz that came after him.
The other long entry that popped into place was the APU TRILOGY. I saw the first film, Pather Panchali, decades ago, loved it (mostly for the soundtrack by Ravi Shankar), but have never seen the other two films. Gotta track them down.
All the other long entries dropped in pretty easily with a couple of crosses,so this puzzle ended up having some of the swooshiness of a Friday for me. Nice work, Jim Quinlan!
Good to do your research before you pop off https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pope_John_numbering
Easy-Medium. Typical Saturday.
* * * _ _
Overwrites:
My 1A bowl was acai before it was POKE.
Before reading the 35A clue, SAVANNAH Georgia before BANANAS.
At 44D, I had GET up before GET 'EM as my boxing encouragement.
My nookie nook was LOVERS' Leap before LANE (56A).
WOEs:
I suppose I've heard of KING OLIVER, but 3D required just about every cross.
Temple statue JOSS at 23A.
IRENE as clued at 46D.
Or Joss Stone
I live in Savannah. This was probably my fastest Saturday time ever.
I tried to put down the INDIANAPOLIS CLOWNS, because they were the Harlem Globetrotters of baseball. Jesse Cole, founder of the SAVANNAH BANANAS has actually revived that team and it is now one of the Banana Ball teams. I learned all about the history of the Clowns through Banana Ball. The founder of Savannah Bananas doesn't care for the comparison to the Globetrotters- apparently the constructor knows this. Tne constructor probably had a different clue.
I think there should have been a better clue. 😌
I love this grid design – never in the Times before – that allows for a dozen 10-letter answers, and man, does Jim take advantage of them, bringing pop and interest into the box.
Just look them over for a moment. Look at them! Do they not bring color and zing into the solve? This to me was more than putting letters in boxes – these were answers that triggered memories, images, and pinged so many areas in my brain.
For instance, I heard Julia Child’s voice, saw Tina Fey’s face. I flashed on being lifted high in the air while sitting on a chair during "Hava Nagila". SKIPS CLASS and “nookie” brought me back into my high school head.
Also, there were enough hitches in this puzzle from misdirects and no-knows to make the solve interesting, and thus, I was fully engaged on multiple fronts.
Just a high-quality experience from your high-quality creation, Jim. It’s been eight years since your last Times puzzle and I hope your next one comes sooner. I want more of this – thank you!
I don’t ever “breeze” through a Saturday, but today I was fortunate enough to breeze through several portions of the puzzle. I dropped in both SAVANNAH BANANAS and BON APPETIT without any crosses, which was really nice for a change of pace on a Saturday. I suspected FOMO but hesitated slightly since there is no abbreviation in the clue, but then I figured, what the heck, YOLO and I went with it.
I wouldn’t recognize KING OLIVER or APU TRILOGY if they slapped me in the face with a dead BRANZINO, so I did solicit some assistance from my Saturday solving partner (Uncle Google) for those two, which helped keep things moving.
KEPIS sounds like something I’ve encountered in the wild but never bothered to look up. And in another rare occurrence, I actually passed a Saturday Spanish quiz as CARNE was a tap in putt for me.
I was going to put in Ares and Mars as Rex did, but then thought, wait, what about Hera and Juno? So I didn’t fill it in and neither pair was right. After I got EROS, I was really confused because I thought Cupid was the Roman counterpart and it obviously didn’t fit. Looks like Amor is another name for Cupid.
This was definitely hard for me, notably the NE. All I could get to start there was toss iN (wrong), SLR (right) and tApas (wrong). After I reluctantly pulled tapas, I put in CARta (menu). Well, that was closer. Another problem: for the Thanksgiving competition, I was obviously thinking football. I knew ANYA was right, so all I could think was that Thanksgiving games are always AFC. But the Lions always play on Thanksgiving, and I was pretty sure they are NFC. (They are.) So a real mess up there. I remembered that Satyajit Ray’s films were about APU, but I thought it would be something like “the trials of APU.” I finally got somewhere getting the front of I GUESS THAT’S THAT, which led me to put in LEGAL LIMIT, which I had thought of earlier but it felt like it should say LEGAL LIMIT of what? I had happy groans when I got the answers to “eschews English, say” (SKIPS CLASS) and “falls for some bait, maybe” (CLICKS.) Good clues, and the second one is kinda meta for a crossword misdirect clue. (You’re kind of falling for some bait when you assume the word in the clue is the obvious meaning.)
Tough but gettable. Liked this a lot in the end!
Hey All !
Replace 58A SEA with ROO ... 😁
NE corner toughest spot for me today. APUTRILOGY?? Holy BANANAS, Batman! Had AFC forever, thinking American Football Thanksgiving Day games. KEPIS not the most common hats. Had tossiN for SLAPON, left the I in when eventually figured out SLAP, ergo SLAP IN/JISS, which was my one-letter DNF.
Got a chuckle out of OAHU, HAWAII, knowing Rex would pooh-pooh it. Have seen some SAVANNAH BANANAS highlights, looks like a fun time.
Beside the NE, puz flowed pretty good. Finished today at 26 minutes, of which the last 8 was that NE. And still had that error. Dang
tApas-CARNE, rIB-BiB, AfC-AKC, (Rex) acai-POKE.
Hope y'all have a great Saturday!
One F
RooMonster
DarrinV
Thanks for this. The idea that one John was basically a rando who called himself pope for two years, and another John was “legitimate” but seems to have died at the hands of another rando who called himself pope—and later was inexplicably double-counted by a subsequent John—made my day.
:)
Started with ACAI too. But then, two of my favorite things in the world, KING OLIVER and THE APU TRILOGY, brought the joy.
Most of my clues survived the editing process. That one did not. My initial clue was different (something to do with TikTok) The edited version is still worded appropriately though!
Thanks @Adam for supplying the 50th state. Did not start out on the right foot with this one—in fact, more like several left feet. Started out with aReS and marS, and had no familiarity with the Indian and Asian literary references, not to mention JOSS, IRENE, and Louie’s mentor. But once I got enough of the short answers filled in, discovering the long answers was fun. Was never much of a cook, but Julia Child’s BONAPPETITE still rings in my head. And BANANA ball is an hysterical take on baseball…
Now for Nookie, goodness 😂
Fairly easy for me (~75% of average Saturday time); I spent part of a recent vacation solving ~50 Friday NYT puzzles from 2016 and 2015 (working my way backwards), which are definitely harder than current Fridays. I know today is Saturday, but all the tough Friday practice definitely helped here!
Semi-funny story regarding "City, State": I lived in Las Vegas in the early 1990s. When I moved and people asked where I had moved from, I had to say "Las Vegas, Nevada" because I was in New Mexico, which has Las Vegas of its own. Had I moved pretty much anywhere else in the world, I would have simply been able to say "Las Vegas" but in NM, I had to say "Las Vegas, Nevada" to avoid confusion!
Finished in just over half our "average time"; I keep wanting to try to corroborate that result as it seems our stated average is on the high side. Wondering whether we once left the app open and got a score of 24 hours that will take forever to "average out".
Actually started by entering POKE off the bat; better to be lucky than good. Knew Rex would disparage OAHU HAWAII (face palm that I first, rather confidently, typed in OAHU Harbor...until my wife pointed out "Harbor" was in the clue. Doh!
Not wild about GETEM for 44D. "Get...them?" Is this team boxing? Had "GET up" until SEA MONSTER made that not work.
I've never seen the SAVANNAH BANANAS, but know about them; wildly successful and entertaining. Did not know about the Indianapolis Clowns (per @Lisa 7:27); apparently neither did the constructor.
Twelve 10-letter answers and two crossing spanners. Maybe the cluing was a bit easy on us for a Saturday, but some colorful fill.
"This is Julia Child...BON APPETIT!" Can hear her voice like she's saying it now. She was once a neighbor of my wife; I only saw her on tv; loved her.
Apu Trilogy ❤️❤️❤️
Or JOSS Whedon, creator of TV show Firefly.
“the back-breaking Saturday puzzles of yore, back when the NYTXW absolutely did not care about your feelings”
🤌
Naticked at the USBS/SUNS cross. Also, needed a cheat for APUTRILOGY and didn't know JOSS. Good Saturday workout...just too tough for me.
I wonder if anyone can explain the popularity of "Sweeney Todd," a show about a wackamole who cuts living creatures up and then has them converted into meat pies. Who could ever gain enjoyment from watching that?
I found the northwest too difficult especially when the rest of the puzzle was so easy.DNF No 🎈for me.
I was lucky to catch a Bananas game in Savannah before they started barnstorming though the major league parks and gotta say: seeing them do their thing in a 5,000 seat stadium is a great time.
Also started with ACAI, confidently crossed it with the goddess IRIS, and was off and running (in the wrong direction)
The G-rated verbal double take isn’t “What the hey?” It’s “What the?…HEY!”
Etymology footnote of the day:
Re "Get 'em!": the "'em" in that contraction actually goes all the way back to Anglo Saxon "heom," sometimes written just "em." The orthographic convention of treating it as a contraction of "them" with an apostrophe is actually a false etymology and relatively recent. "Them," derived from Old Norse þeim was a later development, but "em" was such established usage in certain phrases that it never went away. Meanwhile in Chaucer's time the relative newcomer "þem" also started filling in as the indefinite-singular pronoun, which English lacked. So the "woke" pronoun actually goes that far back in the history of the language. The whole apostrophe thing is pretty recent, since orthographic conventions around that kind of thing didn't really get rationalized and fixed until around the beginning of the 1800s. Using it to represent the possessive ('s) is actually a false etymology too. Genetive "'s" goes back to Anglo Saxon and isn't a contraction of anything. Hence "its" (no apostrophe) possessive vs "it's" for "it is." One of the very few places we got it right! Except everyone gets it wrong. Or get's it wrong, because now we salt apostrophes into everything everywhere with no logic whatsoever. I say just get rid of the darned things.
Top middle section did me in. I couldn't get KEPIS / APU /JOSS. The rest was fairly whooshy.
I once looked up to see if there was a name for the kind of hat worn by Captain Renault (Claude Rains) in Casablanca, my favorite movie. So I've never forgotten that it's a KEPI.
What a surprise - now that's more like it! All I can say is thank you, Jim, for renewing my faith in the NYT puzzle. Very enjoyable :)
Estoy completamente solo.
Unfortunate Mega Gunkfest. Found this tedious, uninspiring, and ridiculous. Alas. It happens. There's always tomorrow.
SUNS (of all things) clued like they left an editorial committee tasked with being beyond silly alone with a pencil and popular novels.
❤️ SAVANNAH BANANAS
😩 APU TRILOGY. JOSS. OBEYER.
People: 12 {maybe why this is terrible?}
Places: 3
Products: 11 {probably why this is terrible}
Partials: 7 {not helping at this point}
Foreignisms: 2
--
Gary's Grid Gunk Gauge: 35 of 72 (49%)
{It's a blistering hot Sunday and the residents of Gunkopolis are setting up tents in the town square to celebrate the rare feat of 49% gunk. No, it's not a record, but it's really high and they wanted to give the constructor and the editorial team the keys to the city. Mayor Gunk will speak at noon and the Gunkettes will perform. Free GunkPops for the kids.}
Funny Factor: 3 😐
Tee-Hee: TUGS. Therapeutic tea bag.
Uniclues:
1 Ironically, what "Nookie Nook" isn't.
2 Sigmund of the Great Salt Lake.
3 Studies habits.
4 Paramour with a purple face.
5 Any crowd where people are sipping cocktails and trying to be pleasant.
1 AIN'T LOVER'S LANE (~)
2 UTE'S SEA MONSTER (~)
3 CLICKS NUNS
4 FARE LILAC BEAU
5 I'M ALL ALONE SIGN (~)
My Fascinating Crossword Uniclue Keepsake from Last Year: Headwear visible from a block away announcing you'll soon join women discussing poetry and smoking clove cigarettes at rickety little round tables in front of dilapidated coffee houses -- at least if it's 1982. SENTINEL BERET.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Couldn’t solve this one - got caught at KEPIS/APU/JOSS.
Finally recovering enough to feel like adding my two cents. This has been not a lot of fun.
Anyway, sped though the NW, after fixing ACAI (hi everyone), knew SAVANNAHBANANAS instantly as they have performed in such faraway places as Manchester NH, and easy time with the SE. (If you get a chance, Bananaball is a riot. Many fun rules--my favorite is that if a fan catches a foul ball, the batter is out.) Some problems in the SW, I wanted a LOVE something before a LOVERS something and it took forever to see a clog, as a SHOE. NE the stickiest as I had EYES for STYE which blocked everything for a while. Some faith solving led to the IGUESS beginning and LILAC and after I had entirely filled in APUTRILOGY I sort of remembered it. Still some brain fog here.
Seeing GETEM reminded me of my coaching youth soccer days when parents would stand on the sidelines and yell "kick it!" to their offspring. Sound advice.
And today's old-but-never-forgotten friend has to be KEPIS. almost never seen outside it's crossword habitat. Nice to see you again. How ya been?
Had a great old time with this one, JQ. Probably filled my July Quotient of outstanding puzzles all at one go, and thanks for all the fun.
Thanks for dropping in, JQ. Good puzzle!
Brutal solve today. I've never heard of the.SAVANNAHBANANAS or KINGOLIVER. APUTRILOGY seemed only vaguely familiar once the crosses gave it to me.
The NW corner was the easiest section. I went with POKE immediately and it gave me EROS and AMOR. I left the V of OLIVER blank for a long time as I wanted to be sure of the entire middle grid spanner before I put it in and that was a complete woe.
The most difficult section by far was the NW. I had to over come a TOSSIN/SLAPON write over as well as its JINN/JOSS partner. STYE was another killer as all I could think of was SORE.Never was a write over as I couldn't make the ORE work. For a very long time all I had in that very NE corner was AMOR supported by CARNE.
As much as I had to work for the NW I found that little four square block created by SUNS(woe), ANYA(woe), ETSY and USB to be particularly frustrating. I had a CABS/USB write over to fix and crosswordese of more recent vintage is always harder for me. I can't complain about the difficulty gradient this weekend as today's solve was a big step up from yesterday's.
Very easy for me. Great puzzle and on my wavelength. Rex, you should watch the Apu Trilogy. The movies are wonderful. I think some of my absolute favorites. I will slightly object to your objection because I use and have heard people say “what the hey” to substitute for what the hell!
Yes!
@Gary, you got me to go back and read the clue for SUNS, as we had it all filled in via crosses. Wow, a doozy, unless you knew it (hand not raised).
Your GGG is subjective by definition, but presumably it's objectively applied from puzzle to puzzle. So 49% is a real outlier, not in a good way, something we did not notice while solving.
If you attend the event, even though there will be tents, wear sunscreen!
@DrBB 9:17 AM
❤️
In the 1955 Three Stooges short "Gypped in the Penthouse", Larry comes up to Moe and says "Hey, what the hey!" It's a perfect example of Larry's effervescent wit, and makes for a fine line with which to practice one's Larry impression.
Funny, I was one of the many who found Thursday to be a slog. Today? Very very easy - 12 minutes under my average Saturday. It helps I guess that I immediately went with POKE and everything fell into place from there.
Good point. I’ve spent more time in Las Vegas, NM than the other one!
Got stuck in the NE corner (never heard of the APUTRILOGY, JOSS, or KEPIS, but slogged through as soon as I got SKIPSCLASS). Also was initially thinking football instead of dog show (AFC instead of AKC). Very satisfying to finally complete!
Hey Gary!
I totally don’t mind the critique and criticism- Quite the opposite- much appreciated :) However, I am curious as to what your definition of “partial” is. I don’t think our definitions are the same.
By my count, there are 0 partials (I’m not a fan of them).
I could be wrong, but I think many of us think of partials as entries that cannot stand alone because they are part of a longer phrase, such as A TON (as in “I hated Jim’s puzzle A TON!”)
In my experience, most editors will allow for one or two partials in a 15x themed puzzle, a couple more than that in a 21x, and very much frown on them in a themeless.
Have I been wrong about that? What is your definition?
Definitely started with HERA and JUNO. Who knew there were so many four-letter Roman/Greek counterparts?!
I spent the longest time refusing to fill in JOHN, even when the H was in place, because surely there were 23 popes by that name. Then when Rex didn’t point that out, I bolted onto the comment page to complain, and I’m grateful that I saw your comment right on the top so that I didn’t look like a fool. Looks like there’s a whole Wikipedia page for “Pope John numbering,” where I learned that the 10th century antipope John XVI is still in the numbering (though the later 15th century antipope John XXIII is not) and John the XX is skipped because John XIV had been counted twice. So good on the clue for forcing me to learn stuff.
Turns out that SKIPS CLASS (the correct answer for [Eschews English]) has the same amount of letters as GOES NATIVE. I thought my answer was clever, but it of course is laden with the troubling history of colonialism, so all for the best. Granted, the correct answer is laden with the troubling skipping of English class, so I don’t feel badly about not thinking of it first.
Before I had anything entered in the NE, I wondered if "Some congratulations" could be "odeS," which I mention only because if I had any poetry in me, I'd write an ode to this puzzle. There were so many pleasures in the clues and answers and for me the workload was just right for a Saturday.
@Jim Quinlan, congratulations on your first themeless. I look forward to more. Also - nice placement of Sweeney Todd's PIES next to CARNE :)
The common equivalent to EROS is Cupid. AMOR is aka for Cupid.
AMOR is also the Latin word for love, as is EROS in Greek.
I noticed!!! Welcome to Gunkopolis!
Easy and much easier than yesterday’s for me.
No erasures and JOSS, IRENE, and KING OLIVER were it for WOEs.
I did know SAVANNAH BANANAS
Kinda cringy - OBEYER
Monday level gimme - OAHU HAWAII
Mostly smooth with sprinkling of sparkle, liked it.
Only realized upon reading the writeup that Arkansas is, in fact, not directly south of Nebraska on the US map the way that argon is directly below neon on the periodic table. Which had been my thinking for that clue. Didn't fully seem correct in the moment, but it worked!
Tried DUST, SOUP, then ROSE which is 50% pOkE, confirmed by 2 and 4D, had me circling the "bowl" "flushed" with em-BARE-ASS-ment
This was a beauty. The grid was interesting and also quite intimidating at first glance. So much white space but all filled with some top notch treasures I lost count of how many 10 or 10+ letter answers there were today but *so* many that were *so* great. That kind of quantity/quality is a real feat of construction and makes for joy filled solve.
I also found this to be a proper Saturday challenge. Very little came easy but it was all very much worth the effort. Some great cluing on SKIPSCLASS and LOVERSLANE. I had thrown down LOVERSLair (??) until I realized 15A was LAIR and had to stop and think for a minute. I didn't know IRENE down there as clued and OBEYER was not something that was front of brain for me. But once I got my head around that one, it all fell into place.
The couple of spanners were also a ton of fun - up and down with the great in-the-language IGUESSTHATSTHAT, and SAVANNAHBANANAS. I'm familiar with the latter as they take up a lot of my social media feeds these days - I must have looked them up at some point...
Jim - this had everything I want in a Saturday puzzle. Please come back soon for more.
A little easier than I’d like for a Saturday but I enjoyed the puzzle, with one exception: plural USBS really grates on my ears. I can’t imagine a real-life human ever uttering that.
Count me in the acai opener bunch. But once I saw lair, it was evident that the 4/12:pairing was eros/amor. Apu Trilogy opened the NE for me. Once I saw Savannah Bananas, the center was straightforward. I had just watched a documentary on the Bananas (Netflix, I think), so it was on my mind. Overall, pretty easy.
@Megafrim, excellent Stooges/Larry Fine reference. My brothers and I watched them growing up (which might explain...something).
Your citation doesn't do justice to the inflection with which Larry (underrated and under appreciated, IMO) delivers the line.
Thanks for providing the chuckle.
You may call it congestion but it's not!
. . . Or "Aromatic stick"?
This was very easy for me until I reached the NE corner to finish up and just got mired down (up?) there, ending with a slightly better than average time.
I considered POKE for 1A, and when 1D was a gimme, I was out of the gate running.
I'm amused that RP's family watched any movie repeatedly on LaserDisc. My recollection is that you had to get up every 20 minutes to change discs. Kind of like listening to my grandparents' symphonies distributed across a stack of 78 RPM shellac records. Really takes you out of the flow ... like the NE corner.
Not only were the Indianapolis Clowns the Harlem Globetrotters of baseball, one of the greatest Globetrotters of all time -- Reese "Goose" Tatum" got his start playing first base for them.
Okay, I guess I'm the only one . . . What the hell's a FOMO??!!
I grew up (in the Northeast) regularly hearing the phrase "what the hey?" as a G-rated version of "what the hell?" rather than Rex's "why not?". However, since I've only ever heard the phrase spoken, I'd always envisioned it as"what the HAY" rather than "what the HEY"- the logic being that HELL (a noun that *proper people* just don't say) was being replaced by another more innocuous noun, HAY. By that context, even though it's been over 40 years for me since I've actually said it out loud, seeing "WHATTHEHEY" just seems utterly, impossibly, disturbingly wrong. WTF??
As my son’s their play by play broadcaster, I was delighted to see that clue. It did make me chuckle though. There’s now a Banana Ball league, but still the Globetrotters thing persists…
Johnny Carson included a snarky "What the --- HEYY?!" in his armamentarium of verbal routines, also.
16A LEGALLIMIT is technically .08% or .0008. Decimal placement matters. You'd be dead, not driving, if 8% of your blood was replaced with alcohol.
That's the signpost up ahead ... Your next stop: The "Midnight Zone". (Watch out for EELS/krakens.)
Kinda hard solvequest, probably due to [as @RP pointed out] all the no-knows. Plus, M&A stuck with RIB instead of BIB, for waaay too long.
There were three ?-marker clues in this puz. And they were all at three [56-, 57-, 58-Across] entries in a row! Real different.
staff weeject pick [of only 8 candidates]: THO - One of the few Shakespearean tweet lingo words still in use today.
some fave stuff: SAVANNAHBANANAS, even THO it was a no-know. WHATHEHEY. Kraken SEAMONSTER clue. GETEM. SKIPSCLASS clue.
Mysteries of the midnight zone deep: Who said "Release the Kraken!" Roman Neptune god dude or Greek Poseidon god dude? But Kraken was Scandinavian! Did maybe Odin say it?
And whoever said "OBEYER", btw? har
Thanx for a challenge to the legal limits, Mr. Quinlan dude. Nice 10-stacks.
Masked & Anonymo5Us
p.s.
Runt puzzle:
**gruntz**
M&A
60 Minutes (Leslie Stahl) did a piece on the Savannah Bananas last year or the year before. It was just repeated last Sunday.
This was me - I'll figure out soon enough (maybe)why I'm showing up as Anon unless I remember to change it. Also - I had a funny experience today - after completion, the timer stopped but no happy music came. When I got out of the puzzle and came back in, my grid was blank and nothing was saved (??) Not terribly interesting but anyone else experience this??
My averages are all screwed up from playing from my phone browser a lot back in 2013-2014 and frequently having the clock continue running overnight if I forgot to manually pause it. So many 8+ hour finish times I’ll never get ahead of. I can’t remember the last time I failed to beat my “average” because of this! I wish the app would let you set an average starting with a particular date or something.
Fear Of Missing Out
Not me! Saw the original on Broadway. Hated it.
Another stand in for "what the "h" I've heard is "what the hoo-rah". I may be unique in this experience, I realize.
Fear Of Missing Out.
I didn't have any downs yet, but when I read the clue about a nookie nook I immediately and confidently wrote in "sex dungeon." It was sadly wrong. So is LOVERS LANE, as a lane is absolutely not a nook.
After filling in a couple letters of "love," I tried "love shack," which would have been acceptable, but it was one letter too short.
I had a few overwrites today that made me chuckle. My fav, the fully confident GASSYPANTS.
A note on legal limits: the Federal government ties highway funds to setting the legal limit no higher than .08. You are obviously allowed to set it lower.
Same mistakes with ACAI, IRIS, and ARES, but also "I didn't know RINGO STARR was the band leader!"
Honolulu HI was my first choice for 2D
After attending UNM, I was amazed how many people are apparently unaware that New Mexico is a state.
A lot of good ones but wow, Natickfest 2026
Gotta love it - just for the Savannah Bananas! :)
Fear Of Missing Out
I had eyes for STYE also, so confidently entered APU TRILOGY on the wrong line, matching the Y. That made a mess - I GUESS THATS THAT became guess that is that etc. Needed a lie down to come back and sort it out.
Love your thinking here!
I'm with you all the way today, Gary. Today's offering struck me as more trivia test than word puzzle. So much PPP (as we used to say around here). Remember when that used to be considered a bad thing?
And "Nookie nook" is so juvenile it's painful. But the days when that would have been beneath NYT editorial standards have passed us by (apparently).
Typical Saturday elapsed time for me, but I can't say I enjoyed it much.
Then there's Portland... Oregon or Maine? If you're on the west coast you don't bother with the state unless it's the eastern one. But!... when I lived in Vancouver and travelled to Portland itself, and someone asked "where are you from", I learned to say "Vancouver BC", because Vancouver Washington is just across the river.
Yes, as the clue has it, and the blog.
A couple of funny items:
1. We use malapop to refer to malapropisms from my dad. E.g., using "Bernie" to refer to one of the cohabiting muppets on Sesame Street.
2. I totally, hilariously missed the state abbreviation/chemical symbol analogy. I was thinking, "Okay, so Nebraska is northwest of Arkansas, so what's northwest of argon? Fluorine? But wait, it's only four letters, so it's gotta be neon. But neon and argon are both inert gases, so it's only north of argon. Well, I guess, but that's a little sloppy..."
Those long answers are pretty great. I sailed through it pretty well, even though there are a lot of names, and many Unknowns: KINGOLIVER, APU, JOSS, ANYA, SAVANNAH, PAP, IRENE. I actually finished with an error: SLAP IN crossing JISS. It would have been fairer to clue JOSS as the stick.
At 10 down, when I saw "bait" in the clue I immediately thought: CLICKS! But I hesitated to put it in until much later when crosses agreed with it.
2 down took a few tries to get; it seems clunky. I had OAHU ISLAND, then OAHU HARBOR even though "harbor" is in the clue!
@Jim Quinlan 10:49 AM
Wow! Hey Jim. Very brave of you to read us the day the puzzle comes out. I am impressed. Your puzzle is being well received (even though it's hard to tell with our nitpicking!). I am usually put out when the gunk percentage goes above 35% because it becomes a "ya know it or you don't" trivia challenge and crosses begin to fail at that tipping point as they're also trivia. Sounds like our early solvers knew enough to survive, but 49% is unusually high.
I count partials as chopped off words, abbreviations, and initialism. Today I have:
THO
AKC
FOMO
SIBS
SLR
USBS
HSN
After counting daily for a few years now, I will say that 7 partials (by my system of count) isn't extraordinary, but combined with the names and products it felt like too many.
Lots of no knows but was able to piece them together with crosses and lots of the crosses were first rate, so a good solve overall. It helped that I got a good start by correctly guessing EROS and AMOR. That encouraged me to soldier on until the grid was filled and I could dust off my hands and proudly say I GUESS THAT'S THAT.
Baseball was my favorite sport play and I enjoy going to a ball park to watch a game, little league, college, minor league, whatever. But watching MLB games on TV is boring, boring, boring. We get the same repetition on every single pitch for the entire game, no exception. There's a close up of the pitcher's face, a close up of the batter's face and then an outfield view of the pitch chosen to best display the electronically projected advertisements behind home plate. Now some of those ads are NEON colors that are even brighter than the surrounding ambient lighting of the game. I might watch a game or two when the MLB World Series starts. Or not. (Rant over; feel better.)
So I was surprised and much amused to see a SAVANNAH BANANAS game on TV recently. It was refreshingly irreverent and light hearted. Good fun.
My favorite game to play is pool/billiards. The only JOSS I'm familiar with is JOSS pool cues. They are top of the line cues with a $ figure to match.
Always appreciate when the constructor stops by to share some insights to the puzzle.
Either I’m learning or crosswords are getting easier, probably both. But Rex said medium, so yay! Loved this puzzle. Had the same hang ups as Rex, and also wanted Cupid for AMOR.
I just went to banana ball with grandkids- I have to say we all preferred the Harlem Globetrotters, but the venue for SAVANNAH BANANAS was a football stadium badly adapted to baseball and overpowering in noise level (despite ear protection!). Really great Saturday puzzle. thanks so much!
Easy and hard by turns. Cheated once because I couldn’t find AMOR. Great collection of 10-letter entries. Thanks @Jim Q. I’ll echo @Louis and ask for more soon!
@Andy Freude, thanks for the KING OLIVER recommendation. Is this the recording of Dipper Mouth Blues you were talking about? This particular YouTube video isn’t the best quality sound but the photos are awesome.
Glad you’re on the mend, @pablo. I looked up anaplasmosis and it sounds dangerous.
Anyone know what’s up with @egs? Hasn’t posted since Wednesday and mentioned being under the weather. Unless it was just in service of a pun, which is quite possible.
Mimi L
PS. Thank goodness I didn’t think of açaí.
POKE confirmed with EROS and AMOR was my entry today. I'm just glad acai didn't occur to me (OAHU would have tipped me off to that error).
I was another who questioned the 21 JOHN popes, recalling the 1958-1963 Pope, John XXIII, who modernized, somewhat, the Catholic mass. On the other hand, with _OH_ in place, what else could it be. Good to know the reason for the miscount.
Like @GreggVL, I was thinking the 36A clue was pointing to a geographical tie-in to the periodic table. On the US map, Nebraska is one state west and two north from Arkansas. If you move similarly on the periodic table from ARgon, you end up off the table. When I pulled up a table on the internet, the postal code/element symbols were staring me in the face, aha.
A hard Saturday of today's vintage takes me 26 minutes. Today's took half that so I'm calling this easy. The crosses made the unknown PPP (APU TRILOGY, IRENE, KING OLIVER) easy enough to get and once I had SAVANNAH BAN in place, I threw in the bananas on a rhyming guess.
Jim Quinlan, nice themeless, thanks!
I also started with ACAI x IRIS (x LAIR) but then quickly found OAHU, POKE and thus EROS.
Did anyone else try BRAM at 52A off of just the B? It's surprisingly close to the actual answer.
Didn’t you call his puzzle near a record for gunk?
@Gary J, good to know your definition of "partial". I have always thought more along Jim's lines.
What is the AKC organization that has a competition at Thanksgiving? The American Kennel Club national dog show is in December or January. Thought this one was fairly easy - only place where I had any trouble was the NE which I started into from AKC, but thought that had to be wrong.
I thought this was a terrific puzzle: Apu Trilogy, King Oliver, Savannah Bananas, Bossy Pants. That’s a fun slice of literate popular culture.
Or Joss & Main, the furniture retailer.
Nice to have you back, Pablo, brain fog and all. Glad you're feeling somewhat better. I live on the far side of the continent from you and have only encountered ticks a few times. On my dogs, not on me. But apparently tick infections are way up out here due to climate change. My small farm has a few areas of unused pasture where the grass and weeds grow thigh high and have to be cut down every once in a while. The ground in those pastures is very uneven and I can't use a tractor there. I go through with a hand-held line trimmer. And then I come in and shower, and shower again, and then ask my long-suffering wife to inspect all the parts of my body that I cannot see. I'm totally paranoid about those scurrilous little bugs. I feel for you. I'm glad you're getting through this.
Oh, KEPIS. When we lived in Greece, my lovely (the aforementioned long-suffering) wife and I attended a few national celebrations in Syntagma Square in Athens where the ceremonially clad soldiers wore KEPIS. Can't remember what the little pleated skirts were called.
Those are fair thoughts, Gary! Thanks for the explanation- cheers from one fellow musician/educator to another :)
My new favorite epithet! Can't wait to use it, thank you.
Maybe too late as usual. I finish the puzzle later than almost everyone. Anyway, agree with Sun Volt. Found it at most easy medium. Liked it. Unusual, I didn’t have the problems Rex did. But of course Rex could do lots of puzzles in the time I do one. I think he was going a bit TOO fast and he tripped himself up.
Get ‘em. The problem is that in speech we don’t differentiate between the plural and singular. They are both pronounced as a schwa. Bottom line, ‘em is frequently used in writing for the singular as well as the plural. “im is relatively rare in writing.
BTW autocorrect accepts ‘em but not ‘im.
The northeast did me in today. I had to look up the famous Indian films. First time in years and years I have had to give up and cheat. Sigh. That section was still pretty tough for me, but I did hack my way through it. Another sigh.
The Savannah Bananas played before over 100,000 people in Houston in May. Crazy and inventive are they. Playful, athletic, joyful and Globetrotteresque are the feelings they impart.
Gary— you insulted the man. You said the amount of gunk in his puzzle approached a record.
Bob Mills
The plot is a little more complicated than that. Sweeney Todd , who is a barber, starts out as a hero. But Sondeim didn’t do conventional plots. Everything goes wrong for Sweeney. His girlfriend is raped and dies. The rapist is a judge who sees to it that Sweeney ends up in jail to eliminate him as a threat ( we are talking Victorian goals here!). He is eventually released but his mind breaks and he goes crazy. He convinces a ( meat) pie maker to go along with his revenge plot which you described The first victim is of course the judge who doesn’t recognize him. His insanity leads him to keep on going. And the meat pie maker likes the money. The only real difference between Sweeney Todd and the Phantom of the Opera is that there is a hero and a heroine in Phantom. (And I think the music & lyrics are much better in Sweeney!).
Wife and I are baffled that it’s not spelled hay.
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