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Monodrama that debuted in 1989 / FRI 8-14-26 / Average Joe, in modern slang / Couple's last coupling, perhaps / Shimmer colorfully / Purple drink ingredient at a boba tea shop / Mounted warrior skilled in martial arts / Costco competitor, informally / Issue in a modern remote work setting / Enthusiastic cry when one's favorite song comes on the radio
Friday, August 14, 2026
Constructor: Zhou Zhang
Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium
Word of the Day: King Khufu (1A: ___ Plateau, home to the tomb of King Khufu) —
Khufu, or Cheops, was the second pharaoh of the Fourth Dynasty of Egypt, reigning during the 26th century BC in the early Old Kingdom period. Khufu succeeded his father, Sneferu, as king. He is generally accepted as having commissioned the Great Pyramid of Giza, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, but many other aspects of his reign are poorly documented. Khufu is also the main character noted in the Westcar Papyrus from the 13th dynasty.The only completely preserved portrait of the king is a small ivory figurine found in a temple ruin of a later period at Abydos in 1903. All other reliefs and statues were found in fragments, and many buildings of Khufu are lost. Khufu has a conflicting legacy: while the king enjoyed a long-lasting cultural heritage preservation during the period of the Old Kingdom and the New Kingdom, the ancient historians Manetho, Diodorus and Herodotus hand down a very negative depiction of Khufu's character. As a result, an obscure and critical picture of Khufu's personality persists. (wikipedia)
• • •
[Michigan's own Bob SEGER]
I'm always embarrassed when my first foothold in a puzzle is some piece of crosswordese that comes to me instinctively solely because I've been solving crosswords for a million years. As I've said before, feels like cheating. Today, it happened again, this time with CASCA (30D: "Julius Caesar" role). I've read Julius Caesar a few times, but if it weren't for crosswords, I don't think the name CASCA would've stuck, and now it's a reflex. TRU is another good example of ye olde fill that is often a reflex, but today it was hidden (to me) behind a word I don't really know: "Monodrama" (52D: Monodrama that debuted in 1989). Does this mean it has just one actor? A one-word title? One act? That it's one extended mono-logue? A monotonous drama? A drama about mononucleosis? [Consults dictionary] Ah, I see. My first guess was correct: "a drama acted or designed to be acted by a single person" (merriam-webster.com). TRU used to appear all the time in drama form. Now it's also a TV channel, or part of one (TRUTV). It's also a nickname for Truman Capote (whom the play TRU is about), and (apparently) a hotel chain. If the clue had mentioned Capote, I'd've gotten it instantly. As it was, I needed an assist from crosses.
Always nice when you throw down a great long answer off of very little evidence and it ends up being right! Today, that answer was ...
Bullets:
- 37A: Mom-and-pop group (FAM) — so ... not PTA then? Got it.
- 60D: Of an indefinitely large number (UMPTEENTH) — like CONFABULATE, this seemingly improvised fantasy word adds an enjoyable fizz to the grid.
- 6D: 365th out of 365, in brief (NYE) — every fourth year would like a word! (that word is "leap")
- 12D: Purple drink ingredient at a boba tea shop (UBE) — I first encountered UBE in some fancy chocolates. Thought, "that would make a good crossword word." And here we are: UBE's sixth appearance (as a yam) since 2023. Actually, it's the seventh appearance overall. UBE appeared as a [Philippine yam] in 1954, but then for 36 years (after one attempt to pass it off as a "var." of the Latin UBI (!?)), it was solely a Japanese seaport. Then, for 32 years, it disappeared from the grid entirely. But with the popularization of Asian food ingredients in America, it's back! Purple as ever!
 |
| [in ice cream form!] |
- 43D: Average Joe, in modern slang (NORMIE) — I love this word, though I hear it most often used adjectivally, usually of someone's opinions. Sometimes, of my own opinions. It's got a slight pejorative tinge to it, but I just think of it as a cozy, slangy way of referring to general ordinariness.
- 32D: Plot device? (HOSE) — the one answer that didn't really make sense to me. You HOSE down ... a "plot" of land? Only when I thought of the phrase "garden plot" did the clue suddenly make (a kind of) sense.
- 35A: Huddling, as teammates (IN CLOSE) — can't say as I've ever heard this in a sports context, but physically, it makes sense. Still, it makes much more sense as a name for a talk show hosted by Glenn Close. Forget Charlie Rose—it's time for In Close with Glenn Close! Think about it, Glenn!
That's all for today. See you next time.
[Follow Rex Parker on BlueSky and Facebook and Letterboxd]
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83 comments:
Medium. Enjoyable themeless with decent Friday crunch.
* * * * _
Overwrites:
I confused GINza with GINSU at 1D.
At 13D, plus one before plus TAX.
For some reason, SalaaM before SHALOM for the 36D greeting abroad.
My deep-diving research took place on SEA bedS before SEA LABS (44A).
WOEs:
Pro wrestler RIC Flair at 20A.
I didn't know that ETON is a town in the Berkshires (59A).
61A muralist Jose Maria SERT.
I light up when I see ZZ’s name on a puzzle, and this one didn’t disappoint. Lively and fun. I’d rate it a bit tougher than Rex did, but maybe that’s just me. A delightful Friday.
Rex complains about Lewis Carroll coining a word. Shakespeare coined dozens.
Seinfeld told George about make-up sex.
Excellent crossword. Crunchy, I needed to look up GIZA to finish.
The use of "normie" has spiked in politics this month, and in contradictory ways. As in, "Normie Revolt" leading El-Sayed to victory. Or "normies don't respond to polls, unliked engaged non-normies, to explain why polls skewed toward the progressive candidates in MI and WI.
Conrad: Eton is in Berkshire County England famous for being the home of Eton College. I had plus one at first too.
I agree with Rex's 4-star rating, but found it harder than he did (that makes me a NORMIE). Finished a Friday with zero cheats (abnormie?). SAMURAI and IRIDESCE were highlight words for me, but the GAZA/ZOOMFATIGUE cross was a stumper (I had "room fatigue") until I thought of all the brutality at the Gaza Strip and the music sounded.
I'm eager for comments about BREAKUPSEX. Is that a real thing? If it is, who entered it into our vocabulary? And why?
NW played really easy, I thought I was going to blow through this in no time. But then couldn't come up with RAPACIOUS and I was doubting UMPTEENTH..... finally thought of TRU and I was making progress again. The other tough spot for me was around the middle and then NE. I had confidently put in POI figuring that might be used in tea.... never heard of UBE. So had to convince myself to change that. BREAKUPSEX and SNIFFSOUT got rid of poi for me. Thank you, ZZ, this was a terrific friday! 16 minutes for me. : )
This was a delight. Somehow “Thats My Jam” came to me almost immediately, but I was sure it was wrong. Break Up Sex was really fun to discover. And “Ay Caramba!” was an outstanding answer with a great clue.
Clue for UNFAIR was about as bad as yesterday’s clue for SOFA. siblings don’t “cry” UNFAIR — they may well cry NO FAIR, but I picture anyone crying “UNFAIR” and the person is definitely clutching pearls or something like that.
CONFABULATE my ass - this one tried too hard to be a splashy Friday. All five are bad Rex - the two “GO’s” and the three “ON’s”. The two vertical 11 stacks had so much promise at first glance and we get ZOOM FATIGUE.
COME ON Part 1
I liked the SNIFFS OUT - AY CARAMBA stack. BREAK UP SEX is fine. UBE is the new ONO. The full OCCAMS RAZOR is a waste - just a long gimme. IRIDESCE is neat.
HUSH HUSH
This one did not hit for me.
Why She’s A Girl From The Chainstore
Just yesterday i had Ube Coconut frozen yogurt. So delicious.
Also, interestingly to me, having _ _ _ ACIOUS, i was stuck between VORACIOUS, SALACIOUS and RAPACIOUS for Excessively greedy. My brain could make any of them work.
Simply a colorful bouquet of beauty.
OMG look at these answers!
SNIFFS OUT, BREAK UP SEX, GO SPLAT, RAPACIOUS, UMPTEENTH, I MEAN COME ON, ZOOM FATIGUE, IRIDESCE, NORMIE, RECLUSE, BARREN, CONFABULATE, THAT’S MY JAM, OCCAM’S RAZOR.
All in one box, IN CLOSE. A windfall.
And the skill to throw it all together seamlessly!
Took me some delicious brainwork to uncover it all, what with no-knows and slippery cluing. Thus, the fun of cracking riddles rewarded by beauty again and again. Crosswords as splendor.
This felt to me like a puzzle not made by a showoff, but by one wanting to share joy. And share joy you did, Zhou. This was a gem, a highlight, a day lifter. I loved it all. Thank you!
I thought this was fairly difficult. A great collection of fun words and phrases and hardly any crosswordese. None of it came easily to me—a fill here and a fill there and gradually images came into focus like sights in a dissipating fog. I thought the NE and SE stacks were great. The GO’s and ON’s didn’t bother me but I can understand the objections. Of the GO’s, probably LOCO was the least intuitive.
Hey All !
I was able to SNIFFS OUT everything today in near record time. Started out slowly, but without trying for speed, still finished quick.
Nice grid design. Longs in all corners. Good fill.
Not very verbose today. Just one of those things.
Hope y'all have a great Friday!
Four F's
RooMonster
DarrinV
Liked this a lot. A satisfying Friday. I had a little slowdown with TRU crossing RAPACIOUS. I didn’t know the word monodrama, happy to learn it, and forgot all about TRU, so as far as I was concerned, any three letters would have done and I initially put in vorACIOUS.
I don’t think a HOSE is considered a “device”, although I guess why not?
Very straightforward Friday. Remembered how to spell 'caramba' finally.
LEMURS are absolutely adorable. I strongly recommend a trip to the Duke Lemur Center in North Carolina, or better yet head on over to Madagascar.
Never saw UBE thanks to crosses, but if I had I would have thought I'd never seen that word in my life. That it has appeared five other times, including just five days ago, and including twice on Monday, comes as a shock.
I thought of BREAK-UP SEX from the B, but didn't believe the Times would go there; so I checked 13-D, figured it would be plus ONE, and left it blank. Finally had enough crosses to be sure, and plus TAX filled itself in unnoticed.
Can't blame the constructor, but didn't we have ITCH with exactly the same clue within the past week? Or am I imagining things.
I am definitely not imagining having EGYPT clued as the location of the Great Pyramid, and looking up GIZA just to make sure it didn't have 5 letters. If I had not done that, I would certainly not have known that the Great Pyramid of GIZA is also called the pyramid (and tomb) of Khufu. That was enough to give me ZOOM, although FATIGUE was harder to see. I wanted "lag" or some longer version of it.
RIC Flair?? Seriously? (or really, SRSLY?)
I always thought one of the 'rules' of crossword construction was: if you're looking for an abbreviation in the answer, use an abbreviation in the clue. 37A? Please explain.
Classic strong Friday - running the clues, across then down, almost zero traction, then a couple, and a couple more, then an increasing flood of answers and …almost…done. Wait what’s wrong?! Ahh of course it’s ZOOMFATIGUE not ROOMFATIGUE and thus GIZA (of course) not GIRA. Really not a bad spot spot throughout. Great puzzle.
Friday fun for me! I always enjoy ZZ puzzles but today I struggled most with the names and short crosses - Tru, ube, Ric, etc, so I cant call this easy. More of a medium for me.
If you're sitting in the front seat it's "THIS IS MY JAM" but if you're in the back seat then it's "THAT'S MY JAM".
A fantastic puzzle! 17 across, NYT, tsk, tsk .🎈🎈🎊🎊
Hi All, "CONFAB" is a marvelous word, with the more formal CONFABULATE dating back to 1701 according to my Webster's dictionary. in the context of chatting among friends, I of course use CONFAB. But yikes!, if you look up this word on the Google machine today, all you get is the clinical sense of "making shit up." Amen to OFL's meditation yesterday about why using AI to problem solve and GPT (Generative Predictive Text) to write is abhorrent. "Cognitive surrender" now has by now been documented among the current generation of college kids. Lots more to say on the topic of cognitive decline and confabulation in the clinical sense slamming us in the face daily amid the singular civic malaise we are living through at the moment, but I should stop here. Rex, thanks for all you do.
I second this! Sooo many wonderful answers! BREAKUPSEX and THATSMYJAM were fantastic gimmies for me (“THAT” being way more common than “this” in my world vs Rex’s!).
I see your point. I guess there's an argument, though, that 'FAM' is both an abbreviation and a slang word for FAMILY. "How's the fam?" I got it all from crosses so I didn't really stop to think about it.
58A: egregious anyone?
Correction: "Gaza" gave me ZOOMFATIGUE, then a vowel run gave me GIZA.
I’ve heard AY CARAMBA (mostly in cartoons I believe, but who knows, perhaps occasionally IRL as well),. Apparently it actually really means something - the same thing as “Dios mio!”, whatever that means. It’s all too confusing to me. . .
Things like THATS MY JAM and NORMIE always sound a little “off” to me, but that’s just another sign that while the NYT is keeping up with the times, I am not. I get most all of my news from the NYT, the WaPo, and crosswords! I can’t remember the last time I attempted to log into Facebook for example. I have no clue what Instagram is, and I once stumbled onto the sight formerly known as tweeter, which felt to me like I had landed on a different planet and was trying to communicate with aliens. Btw, I miss our old friend Nancy, with whom I could commiserate regarding our mutual lack of tech savvy.
Mom an d pop are abbreviations of sorts for mother and father. I didn't see a problem
Thanks - I've only heard CONFABULATE used in respect to the conversation of chatty folks with dementia. An agreeable sociability but not reality based. Now I know - CONFABULATE is the act, not the content.
I thought, at least based on how the puzzle has been trending easier for years, that this was put together really well. Nice to see.
Very, very good Friday. I found it appropriately late-week challenging and had a blast working it all out.
So much good, in-the-language fill. AYCARAMBA (which held the NE up for me as I spelled it wrong twice!), and I'm with @Rex on the sheer beauty of having IMEANCOMEON and ZOOMFATIGUE side by side, if there ever was a more perfect juxtaposition of answers, I haven't seen it yet.
THATSMYJAM also shined but took me the longest. The four short downs that would have given me THAT just wouldn't come to me. Also because I plopped down INN instead of the correct HAM for 53D (Country__) maybe because I'm kosher and HAM wasn't front of brain. But the aha moment was *very* satisfying when it all fell into place. My friends also tell me that HAM is very satisfying...
BREAKUPSEX was also a delight (I'm talking about the puzzle here)
UMPTEENTH made me work for a bit. I had always thought it was UMTEENTH, no P. That was good to learn but added to my trouble in the SW.
CONFABULATE and OCCUAMSRAZOR are another very nice paring in the grid today. If I could only remember that OCCAM is spelled with an A and not a U!!
@Rex, INCLOSE is a fairly common phrase. Coaching little league when I wanted to impart what little wisdom I had on 10 year-olds between innings, INCLOSE is what I used to bark just to try to get and keep the attention when things like butterflies and the snack bag were major distractions.
So much to like today, Thank you Zhou, you never disappoint!
I believe I read that in Texas you are now allowed/encouraged to use guns to BREAKUPSEX between same-sex couples.
I guess even seals want to look good by toning up their SEALABS.
Maybe HOSE as a plot device is being used in this sense (per M-W): "To deprive of something due or expected : TRICK, CHEAT." So you can imagine Shakespeare saying to himself, "Maybe I'll have Iago plot to really HOSE Othello."
I agree on the criticism of UNFAIR as a sibling's cry of protest. In my FAM we tended to use "inequitable."
Now THATSMYJAM. Thanks, Zhou Zhang.
This one was really well done. Agree with Rex but the SW area got me. I did not know TRU. And an APP isn't really a place. And the clue for HAM was not very helpful. I eventually got it once I guessed 58A, but that was the hardest part for me. I also liked JUT.
This was well over Saturday time for me. Part of the problem was my habit of only doing late week themeless puzzles. It made UBE and today's version of ALI unknowns. RIC was too but that was probably true for most solvers.
Inthe NW I was pretty sure of IMON and NEON but it wasn't enough to start there. However they did help me change CEREALS to ANNUALS when I backfilled the NW to finish.
In the NE NYE and OMS were the only things I felt sure of and they clashed with ONE for 13D. TAX never crossed my mind until the B of BARREN gave me BREAKUPSEX.
In the middle west SEGER and ESC were gimmies. The rest I had to work for.
In the SE I was pleased to have finally learned how to spell OCCAM. The last time we had it I still thought it had a K in it.
I did this on my phone last night. When the paper came today I was able to fill the grid in from memory without looking at any clues. It's a very different form of solving which I can only do when I've worked on an interesting difficult puzzle.
For me this was one of those puzzles where you just keep chipping away, and eventually get it, but it doesn't come easily. Sea beds? Nope. Stake? Nope. Ninja? Nope. I wasn't at all sure I'd get the happy music, because I doubted the TRU/RAPACIOUS cross. But I lucked out.
Enjoy your Friday, everyone!
heyo! psychiatrist here - thought this clue/answer was funny & appreciate you shedding some light! for anyone interested, i think of confabulation often in something called Korsakoff syndrome (a disorder caused by vitamin B1/thiamine deficiency often due to heavy alcohol use or malnutrition) where folks will “make up” things to fill subconscious memory gaps. i often ask patients if they remember meeting me before (when I haven’t) to see how they respond
Guessing Rex didn’t play a lot of sports.
Every coach in every sport I ever played used the phrase bring it in close….
So many good answers today! BREAK UP SEX! ZOOM FATIGUE! GO LOCO! THATS MY JAM! UMPEENTH, CONFABULATE!
UMPTEENTH makes me think of James Acaster's bit about how it sounds like a big number, but it's in the teens.
CONFABULATE took me forever to get but I enjoyed it once I did. Not sure why. I think I was afraid it was going to be "conversate" which is a non-word I hear often that annoys me a bit.
ZOOM FATIGUE should probably be TEAMS FATIGUE these days... does anyone still use ZOOM? But somehow ZOOM FATIGUE sounds better.
Also great to see OP posting The Jam. I think I'm gonna go listen to Down in the Tube Station and Midnight now.
Am i the only one who thought immediately of Gomez Addams for AY CARAMBA? Fortunately i’ve seen the pyramids in real life so GIZA was a sinch. And i learned something new with OCCAMS RAZOR, so much for Jack Donaghy and GE/Motorola’s Six Sigma Black Belts
I was worried, as I rounded the SE and back up into the NE, that 22A was going to be a NBA player of whom I had never heard ("Guard for some time?", get it?) So it was a relief that I later looked down and saw RENT-A-C was filled in.
No real hold-ups today, CASCo to CASCA, avON to ETON and that's it. Oh, and my mis-reading 17D's clue, multiple times, as "Untruthful" rather than "Unfruitful". How do the eyes manage that?
Zhou Zhang, thanks for another of your great puzzles!
OCCAMSRAZOR?
Because I convinced myself that 58A was vorACIOUS and therefore clearly 52D was svU (off by a whole decade, oops!), there was a decent stretch of time where I was pretty sure 52A was shiTS MY JAM, and I was both confused and delighted.
I will also always and forever believe that CONFABULATE means conflate.
A delight to solve, satisfying to finish. A solid Medium for me, with a very slow start up top; only thanks to SARI, NYE, OMS, and UBE did I see ...OUT, then TAX, and then had to believe that the Times really did put BREAK-UP SEX in the paper (hi, @jberg). The crosses with BARREN and FRUCTOSE sent me on a smoother passage to the bottom. I especially loved CONFABULATE and RAPACIOUS.
Help from previous puzzles: UBE, the spelling of CARAMBA, SEGER.
Help from high-school English class: performing CASCA in a bed-sheet-clad production of Julius Caesar: "Speak, hands, for me!"
It’s a convention not always adhered to on Friday and Saturday.
I'm with the "liked it a lot" crowd. The top clues were getting me nowhere so I looked around for a certainty and started with SERT. Worked upward from there and finished in the NW, and like @puzzlehoarder had CEREALS first off the ALS. I retired from teaching before Covid so never experienced ZOOMFATIGUE, gracias a Dios. Can't imagine trying to teach a foreign language without fact-to-face interaction. Today's only through-crosses answers were UBE, which is apparently old-school crosswordese, but unknown to me, and ALI, because pop culture, although I did know RIC and of course Bob SEGER. I would not say THATSMYJAM, although my granddaughter advised me on the proper use of JAM in this sense. I'm more from the "they're playing our song" generation.
Great stuff today, ZZ, and if you think I'm not going to say I Zig Zagged through this one you've go the wrong guy. This was, as we say in these parts, a "pissah". In fact, it was a "wicked pissah". Thanks for all the fun.
Easy-medium with the east side easier than the west for me.
I did not know GIZA and TRU as clued and noFAIR before UNFAIR made GINZU hard to see.
Not much junk, plenty of sparkle, liked it a bunch!
Chaperone's primary responsibility on Prom Night: BREAKUPSEX
Overheard at selfish man's breakfast: THATSMYJAM
Strategy to avoid triggering RP's Star Wars reference detector: BARREN
OCCAMSRAZOR: How William of Ockham, the 14th-century English philosopher and theologian, stayed clean-shaven before Harry's Shave Set went on sale at Costco.
************
Crossworld and real world collide: Story in today's NYT on Mt. Etna's activity causing serious problems in Sicily. High levels of oreo particulates, no doubt.
52 Acrosss: THAT'S MY JAM -- Especially, I presume, if the song is "Lady Marmalade" or anything by The Strawberries.
For better or for worse, I first heard both CARAMBA! and CARA MIA from Gomez. Great childhood role model for me.
FAM isn't an abbreviation here. If there were a period after "m," it would be.
Not really that uncommon -- attributed to the philosopher (and friar) William of Occam, it's the tenet that when you have multiple possible explanations for something, the one that makes the fewest assumptions (i.e., the "simplest" and most straightforward) is likely to be the correct one.
Started like this
N
I
N
Jumanji
A
Absolutely never heard of BREAKUP SEX (and the concept still makes no sense to me -- don't we STOP having sex with someone if we don't like/love them anymore?), so that "Plus . . ." clue was harder for me to get than it probably should have been. Wonder what OCCAM would have had to say about that.
I resisted putting in confabulate because I’ve also always thought it meant making things up to fill memory gaps. Learned something new today.
Love thinking about seal abs.
I agree. If you are singing the song you might precede it with THIS IS MY JAM but if you’re listening, you’d point to the speaker and say THAT’S MY JAM.
When you think about it, ALL words were made up by SOMEBODY.
Ube has a long way to go before it gets ono status…
Rex remembers Casca from crosswords; I definitely remember him for his lean and hungry look.
Maybe a better clue would be [What Your Favorite President calls any court decision that doesn’t go his way]?
@Adrienne 10:41; your first sentence = my experience exactly!
This was a pretty smooth solve right up to the end, where I had VORACIOUS for 58 across and was so totally convinced it was correct, I just couldn't replace it. I actually considered VIVACIOUS for a few seconds but just no.
Once again several short names: GINSU GIZA RIO RIC ALICASCA SAMS ETON SERT. And somehow I have not heard of TRU nor seen the word monodrama before! But as Rex said, some good lively answers made it worth it.
This and that are both super common just look online for one second. There’s a whole “This is my jam” meme.
Perhaps a Shakespearean coincidence that he had the same look as Cassius.
Right, he was taking Zepbound. But it was Cassius.
A friend once remarked that in his assisted-living facility the things that happened but were forgotten were in balance with things that never happened but were thought to have happened.
Bob, this is truly not to chide you, but if you want to know the answer to all of your questions about BREAKUPSEX you will find it by plugging THAT into your search engine of choice. Sometimes the answer is just too long to type out…
Haha to both ElStud (may I call you that) and Andy. And yes…kids that cry that out tend yo say “no fair!” unless unfailingly proper grammar is hammered in earlier than it was during my childhood…but, good enuf for crosswords.
I’ll just add in that THATSMYJAM seems to play into the morphing into a response to a general question, “do you like baseball”…”that’s not my jam.”
I recently did a puzzle with a clue that was something like "Way to insulate your drink", which my brain absolutely insisted read "Way to insult your drink", to which I had difficulty coming up with an answer.
Good grief, maybe Rex played Little League or other things when coaches said things like “be quiet and listen to me kids.” Or maybe “huddle up and listen.” With that said, I learned a new term today that wasn’t hard to infer…
A very entertaining Friday puzzle with lots of fun entries, such as SNIFFS OUT, BREAK UP SEX, THAT’S MY JAM, UMPTEENTH, and IRIDESCE. I MEAN C’MON, that’s a pretty good list.
But the entry that got me going down a rabbit hole was 1D GINSU and its connection to 18A SAMURAI. Really? I admit that I have never owned one, but I have used one while helping out in a friend’s kitchen. It was made of lightweight stamped stainless steel and had a combination serrated-scalopped edge. Not, as far as I can see, very SAMURAI-ish. Samurai used forged steel blades to slice you in half. And they were sharpened by hand on stones lubricated with water. Good kitchen cutlery is forged. Heated in - you guessed it - a forge and hammered, either manually or mechanically, into a blade shape and finished with various grinding processes, including a final sharpening on water stones.
The thing is, a good kitchen knife will last a hundred years or more if you treat it well. I’m planning to will mine to my kids. One of them has already put dibs on a couple (a pre WW II French Sabatier salmon slicer and an early 70s German 10 inch chef’s knife) but I haven’t promised them to him yet. Maybe when I die there’ll be a knife fight.
But back to the point. If you can’t resharpen them, they are throw-aways, and in the same category as that Vegematic and the Popeil Pocket Fisherman you also bought because you watched the crazy ads.
“But wait, there’s more …”
No there isn’t.
Um…I hate you/I love you, so one for the road? Kind of mutually?
Voracious was a VERY good first thought, unlike mine which was “salacious” which is just…totally wrong. Luckily the downs corrected that stupidity…
After several recent puzzles that made me think it might be time for me to look for another hobby, this one was a TRU delight and restored my faith in crosswords. Getting the cross-referenced GINSU and SAMURAI right out of the gate and remembering that CALORIE is a measure of thermal energy got things started of on a high note.
I had to work at it to get it all done but after finishing, I spent several minutes just admiring all those lovely long entries. And on top of those beauties, we get IRIDESCE! Splendid!
If the NYT wants to up its game with Spanish clues then add the upside down exclamation mark to the likes of 15A ¡Dios mio!
OCCAMS RAZOR could be clued as "Law of Parsimony".
What's a COUNTRYHAM? Never heard this term. Maybe it's someone at the Grand ol' Opry taking over the stage with a barrage of corny jokes.
@Hugh and @Anon 9:35. I've played a lot of sports and I can't recall any coaches saying IN CLOSE. Mostly they would wave us in and yell at us. Might be a regional thing, as they say in Rexland. Might be that I played on a lot of substandard teams.
Thanks, Beezer. I looked it up on Safari. They said 27% of young adults have sex with a former partner soon after breaking up. I can't conceive of that (no pun intended). What do you say afterward? "Let's break up more often." (?????)
Re CONFABULATE in reply to @Anon 12:03PM. Me too. Found a new use for a word that’s appropriate all too often in politics these days.
I could have written your post, except that I know that “Dios mio” is “My God.”
A lot of places that specialize in "downhome" or "country" breakfasts include a side of ham, cooked and seasoned in a particular way (don 't know the culinary fine points here), called "country ham." It's usually a pretty good-sized slice ("slab"?), as well.
Fact.
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