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Organ-related item in a wallet / THU 9-17-26 / Annual e-sport fighting competition, in brief / Twill-woven worsted wool garment / Addendum to the five W's / Side mirrors on a car, anthropomorphically / Chocolatier with the tagline "Life is a ball" / Pre-K building blocks / Expert employed by a sportsbook / Digital security credential / Plant that thrives in a terra-cotta pot
Thursday, September 17, 2026
Constructor: Enrique Henestroza Anguiano
Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium
Theme answers:
- ODDSMAKER (56D: Expert employed by a sportsbook / 1D: —)
- LOOK ALIVE (57D: "Show me some real effort!" / 2D: —)
- SEMICOLON (58D: It's not a full stop / 3D: —)
- CLOSED SET (46D: Film production environment for an intimate scene / 4D: —)
- HOT MESSES (63D: Absolute train wrecks / 5D: —)
- PHONE APPS (51D: Telegram and Simple Dialer, for two / 6D: —)
- OPEN SEATS (60D: Room in the audience up for grabs / 7D: —)
- ACCESS KEY (48D: Digital security credential / 8D: —)
- POP ARTIST (64D: Andy Warhol, e.g. / 9D: —)
- WHITE BEAN (53D: Cannellini, e.g. / 10D: —)
- DONOR CARD (54D: Organ-related item in a wallet / 11D: —)
- SWEET / SPOT (55D: Perfect place / 12D: —)
“Hope” is the thing with feathers -That perches in the soul -And sings the tune without the words -And never stops - at all -And sweetest - in the Gale - is heard -And sore must be the storm -That could abash the little BirdThat kept so many warm -I’ve heard it in the chillest land -And on the strangest Sea -Yet - never - in Extremity,It asked a crumb - of me. (poetryfoundation.org)
• • •
Also, for the second day in a row, you’re left with a theme that is *entirely* architectural. There's no theme content at all. I'm just supposed to be satisfied with an architectural trick alone. I can see how this would be enough for some solvers, but not for this one. Lastly, the very concept of INFINITE SCROLL seems both sinister (about as appealing as "doomscrolling") and kind of misapplied here. The "scroll" here is very finite. So while I slightly enjoyed the "aha," I can't say I enjoyed the revealer phrase itself ... which is really the only original phrase in the whole puzzle. (Finding a "Word of the Day" today was virtually impossible, so flat-out dull was most of the fill ... I've already used EVO before, reasonably recently, so ... you get a full Emily Dickinson poem today ... which ... hmm ... seems maybe to have a secret connection to the theme???!: "And sings the tune without the words - [the first 12 Down clues?] / And never stops - at all -" [the last 12 Down clues?] ... All right, in honor of Emily Dickinson and her eerily apt puzzle commentary, I'm gonna raise this puzzle's rating a half star (from 2.5 to 3). The power of poetry!
Bullets:
- 53D: Cannellini, e.g. (WHITE BEAN) — I had WHOLE BEAN ... which, in my defense, is true.
- 54D: Organ-related item in a wallet (DONOR / CARD) — "Organ-related item" ... yeah, that threw me. I was like "what kind of serial killer owns this wallet? Is there a credit card-shaped slice of someone's liver in there?"
- 21A: Chocolatier with the tagline "Life is a ball" (LINDT) — they make these little ball-shaped candies ("Lindor")
- 32A: Ferry or wherry (BOAT) — oh, dang, I probably should've made "wherry" my Word of the Day, as I have no idea what that is. But if I'd done that, I'd never have discovered the mystical Emily Dickinson, so ... I'll just look up "wherry" now:
1. a light rowboat for one person; skiff.
2. any of various barges, fishing vessels, etc., used locally in England. (dictionary.com)
- 61A: Addendum to the five W's (HOW) — who where what when why ... journalistic pentad
- 25D: Side mirrors on a car, anthropomorphically (EARS) — wow, I have never once in my life thought of them that way. Wings, maybe, but EARS ... yes, I see how if you were looking at your car from the front, and saw the headlights as EYES, then sure. Still, when I search [side mirrors ears], The first *six* hits are crossword-answer bot sites dealing with this exact clue. Then an Amazon ad for side mirrors. Then an Amazon ad for cat ears that you put on your side mirrors. Ah web searches. So useful.
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84 comments:
Thanks for the Emily Dickinson poem, @Rex. Now I'll have The Yellow Rose of Texas as an earworm for the rest of the day.
Challenging until I got to the revealer, then Easy. Overall, Medium. But not a lot of fun, for all the reasons OFL points out.
* * _ _ _
Overwrites:
For buds at 1A, I had pAlS before MACS.
I had rIcOh as the 39D Canon competitor before NIKON.
My 42A stuff was Awe-inspired before it was just AIR.
One WOE, the E-sport competition EVO at 19A. I didn't remember any prior occurrences (apparently, it's short for EVOlution Championship Series).
I think the constructor doesn’t really understand what INFINITE SCROLLING is - I know it’s a crossword and the revealer works in some kind of way - but this is a stretch. Rex summarizes the strained fill nicely - needed for the construct I guess but rough.
The MAKER
HOT MESSES is cute - I liked LILAC.
Paul Kelly
A for effort - I like the idea but it fails miserably.
Ultravox
16:54 for me. Small grid today (14 x 15), so that's medium challenging for me. Once I got the gist of the theme, it got easier, but the whole left side was inscrutable for quite a long time. I couldn't think of Kaitlin's last name (Oh, she's the one in High Potential, right?), the mosques I'm thinking of have minarets or spires--mainly it's the big ones that get DOMEs. For some dumb reason wasn't thinking of DOES, and I thought it was a CLOSEt for a while. So anyway--that was at least 1/3 of my time. Wanted DATA MINER for the sports book person, after removing PALS and figuring it was MACS.... Nice puzzle, fun theme, thanks Enrique!!!!! : )
Yeah, this is just not what infinite scroll is, which involves bringing in new content, not wrapping around.
Detested this puzzle.
I couldn't get the app to play the "San Jose Strut" telling me I had successfully completed the puzzle - even though I had clearly done so. Instead, it just kept sending me back to the top to work through the puzzle again and again and again, each time subtly adding new information to the clues and tweaking the answers.
Will this never end? Is there no escape? I am terrified the puzzle is giving me brain rot from which I may never recover.
Thanks for sharing Lana's 'Hope.' The first song of her's I loved. Lord, she is great.
I had expected a lower rating from Rex (I knew a puzzle full of so many short answers can hardly impress him), so it was fun to read the post and learn that I was right, and learn the delightful reason for the score bump. The Emily DIckinson connection was a fun addition to my morning. I remember occasionally thinking the clues managed to spice up the drab fill—or maybe I just thought that with the clue for SAID [“____ no one ever”].
I’m teaching Hamlet at the moment, and we’ll be doing the “closet scene” in [checks time] just under an hour, so before I had figured out the theme, so when I saw the clue about a film production environment for an intimate scene and had several letters in place, I kept on thinking, “…CLOSET? Surely not…they wouldn’t know that Renaissance meaning. But then again, they’re actors, so maybe they borrowed the term from Hamlet. No, it can’t be…” And indeed, it wasn’t.
Oh, brilliant concept!:
Let the first 12 down answers be unclued, which leaves the first ten across answers uncrossed, which starts the solver out in the hole. To give the solver “the thing with feathers”, the middle section is clued relatively easy, uncovering the revealer. Then, at the bottom, finally, the solver thrillingly sees the gimmick, and the puzzle quickly falls in a swoop.
Brilliant. Plaudits to the brain that came up with this, not to mention, that duplicated in the box the feeling you get online during an infinite scroll, where suddenly the bottom of a page becomes the top of a new one. Wow!
And plaudits to the technician that executed it, that had to not only connect those bottom down answers to those on top, but have all the answers -- across and down -- be real words!
For me, an amazing journey from “Wha?” to “Hah!” I shake my head slowly in wonder at what can be done in the crossword box.
Thank you, Enrique, for a sublime journey today. Bravo, sir!
Regardless, infinite scroll is the I.V. The drug is the dopamine boosting “content”.
If it’s free, you’re the product.
Ditch social media.
That’s literally why I started doing crosswords instead. Today completed number 640 consecutive NYTXWs. And my resistance to the infinite scroll has never been higher.
At first I thought there were going to be no down clues at all, and every across answer was entered both across and down for some reason, so it was a relief to hit some down clues.
A pretty neat puzzle with an absolutely terrible revealer, using a niche term that few will know, including apparently the constructor because this is not an illustration of infinite scroll.
Hey All !
Disheartening to see 12 Dashes in a row for the first 12 Down clues. How the heck am I supposed to get those?, I thought . But, did end up figuring it out with seeing both CLOSED SET and PHONE APPS, thinking there'd be Rebusses in the last box of CLOSED and PHONE, ala CLOSE(DSET) and PHON(E APPS), but then looking at the Top Downs, seeing I had the S__, also seeing the A___, after looking at PHON_, and the ole lightbulb clicked on. Helped already having the Revealer, well, revealed.
As Rex said, it got INFINITEly easier from there. (See what I did there?)
Interesting idea. Neat to be able to get 12 phrases to all play nicely together to form cromulent Acrosses in the top 12 and bottom 12 Down slots . I'm sure that wasn't easy.
Different, liked.
Hope y'all have a great Thursday!
One F
RooMonster
DarrinV
Skipped the top part and was about to skip the whole thing when I realized not ALL downs were clueless. Had success in the middle and when I realized the words that went off screen belonged on top.
And for those complaining that INFINITESCROLL was technically inaccurate, it’s CEFXW - Close Enough For XWords! (If a figure skater did the same jump repeatedly, would that qualify as Apple’s ONEINFINITELOOP?)
The juice WAS worth the squeeze on this one - well done!
Yeah, it was hard until it wasn't, to an extreme degree. I was getting more and more impatient, ready to throw in the towel, but I kept plodding on and suddenly saw that DONOR CARD worked, and followed the instructions that were more or less in the revealer. After that it was fun, even if a bit boring to have to scroll up and down so much. Ideally the solving software should let you just keep going down, but good enough.
Never heard of EVO, so I was worried that the E might be a dupe from "e-sport" in the clue; glad to learn I was wrong. And I thought all SETs would be CLOSED, but I guess some are more closed than others.
As @Lewis put it, I started in a hole—and never dug my way out. In retrospect, the revealer is decent, but the implication was lost on me this morning. Ah well, tomorrow is another day, and there is always HOPE.
Can someone explain how AIR is inspired stuff?
“Hiya, MACS,” SAID no one ever.
Impressive feat of construction, OK solving experience. I doubt the Emily Dickinson connection was intentional, but Rex’s discovery of it was the high point this morning.
This particular Dickinson poem doesn’t do the Yellow Rose scan.
Boring, annoying. Even Dickinson cannot redeem this. She, whose poems are often tightly-constructed runes rich in double meanings & requiring a large vocabulary of words & cultural references, but always to carry deep meaning, would have disliked it too.
I rarely have a positive first reaction when I open a puzzle and see a bunch of dashes in the clues - I *love* clues, I want them all! And I'm never confident enough to think I'll ever grasp what's going on. But I ended up liking this outing very much. Maybe because the clue for the revealer offered up a very clear, concise, and complete explanation of what was happening, and I think I needed that.
It still took me a while but the first one to hit me was SEMICOLON (well clued) and then it was a hoot figuring out the rest. I think my "aha" moment was a bit more intense than @Rex's and I had a lot more fun than he did.
Agree that the fill didn't sparkle and pop all that much today but the feat of construction and good time I had figuring it all out and dropping in all the goodies from bottom to top made up for any lackluster fill. I never would have connected the Emily Dickinson dots without @Rex, but if that was indeed part of this whole caper, that elevates this even higher. Thanks for that nugget, @Rex!
And thank you, Enrique! This one challenged my brain and made me smile!
The power of poetry indeed. Yesterday I watched a talk Jewel Rodgers, Nebraska State Poet, gave last spring titled The History of Spoken Word Poetry. Here's a link if you're interested: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ADb-lSWrH0A
“Inspired” means “inhaled”
dashes - so annoying 😭😭😭
did not enjoy at all.
I almost always hate the Thursday puzzles, and this one exemplifies why. The difficulty on Thursday almost always stems from something like the clues not quite fitting or an architectural theme like this one where the juice simply isn’t worth the squeeze. HATED the “MACS” answer. Great example of a bad Thursday clue and fitting that it’s the first one in the puzzle. If the trickiness stems from the answer barely making sense and/or there being a far, far more expected wrong answer that fits (here, PALS), then you’re probably doing a Thursday. I also agree with OFL that INFINITE SCROLL doesn’t really fit what’s going on with the downs either. I could imagine a hypothetical puzzle with a series of downs that somehow all looped together to create different phrases that could repeat “infinitely,” à la “this is the song that never ends,” (for ex, if “MAKER BIAS” and “BIAS ODDS” were also coherent phrases), but this puzzle certainly didn’t attempt that. So what in the world was “infinite” about this? Maybe I’m just extra cranky this week, but I haven’t disliked a puzzle this much in awhile.
Different meaning of inspire. It can be a synonym for “inhale.” Took me a second too!
I was so confident it was infinity scroll that I spent minutes trying to find a mistake somewhere else, even though I knew byds was probably not a word
I hated this Thursday theme more than any one in memory. I figured it out quickly but was annoyed because that literally isn't what infinite scrolling is in the slightest. The whole toxic point of infinite scrolling is to keep presenting you new content and not loop.
As I was reading Rex’s write up this morning, I was wondering if he has any cans of partial or broken BEANS in his pantry - it hasn’t hit me where he was going with that one. I skipped the top section since the crosses weren’t available and completed the entire middle before I groked the theme. To me, it’s too much of a stretch to use infinite inappropriately like that - especially as part of your reveal / marquee answer.
So it turned out to be a so-so puzzle and a so-so solving experience. I’ll count that as a success though (still trying to get my arms around the busted bean situation). Has anyone ever encountered ground or split Cannellini’s in the wild ?
Hey! Who took all the chocolates??!! LINDT remover
How the successful Scottish comedian did: KILT
Organ-related item in a wallet: condom
What the magician who lost her lingerie needed to start her incantation.....ABRA.
Didn't Warhol's son used to call him POP ARTIST.?
Whenever I try to remember the word for [Female antelopes], DOES DOES not come easily to me.
Modesty in math is important (unless you're Open AI). For example, in using decimal notation it is helpful to know ONES place.
I'm always a fan of something different, and I'm totally with @Lewis today. Yeah, the SCROLL turned out to be finite. But I think the constructor is on Buzz Lightyear's wavelength here - - "To infinity...and beyond." Thanks, Enrique Henestroza Anguiano.
obligatory comment that Lego are for older kids, and pre-K tots should be using Duplo
I liked this one because I figured it out, which is always satisfying, but agree it was sloggy
"It's not the despair. I can handle the despair. It's the HOPE!" -John Cleese, Clockwise
Did not know that, thanks!
I didn’t enjoy this. It was a mish mash of short answers that were too easy, and a theme that was simple to fill in across but meant nothing to me. I’m sure if INFINITESCROLLing was in my world, I’d feel differently.
When I first saw the blanks in the clues for numbers 1 through 12 down, I got a sinking feeling I was going to hate this. I just had a terrible dread those crosses were going to end up as gibberish. What a delightful surprise to figure out they were not only not gibberish, but each one was half of a correct answer. No gibberish anywhere. I had the same wrong answers for MACS and ABCS as Rex did, but no gibberish.
Yes the fill was a tad humdrum, but in this case I am willing to make that sacrifice for the sake of a clever theme. I may be wrong but don’t recall ever seeing one quite like it. This was a fun and entertaining Thursday, and I had a great time solving it. Thank you, Enrique.
The juice was worth the squeeze. Perfect description. Wish I’d thought of it.
Too hard to solve on the phone - I think I might have been able to on paper. So for me this was disappointing. I can appreciate the cleverness of the construction. Just wish I had a printer!
... dijo nadie nunca.
Another fast puzzle. I must've gotten much smarter all of a sudden this week. Maybe it's the rain.
I saw all those dashes up top, so I dropped down and worked through the middle and on my first bottom entry I guessed it rolled back to the top and I was right and poof the puzzle was done. Very fun. Very clean.
I use INFINITE SCROLL on some of my websites and it doesn't quite work like this theme depicts. It basically keeps adding more posts to the bottom of your screen without pushing a button. Probably no way to make a puzzle like that. This feels more like a finite LOOP-di-LOOP.
I adore Emily Dickinson.
❤️ Cheeky.
Gunkometer--
People: 4
Places: 0
Products: 3
Partials: 5
Foreignisms: 3
--
Gary's Grid Gunk Gauge: 15 of 67 (22%)
Funny Factor: 5 😄
🔥 Ooh-la-la! 🔥 Intimate scene.
Uniclues:
1 Old folks walking the mall.
2 Existentialism brought to you by the NYTXW.
3 Things that make your cell go ooh-la-la.
4 To encourage harvesters.
5 Sold a van down by the river.
1 LOOP CROWDS
2 DOES HOPE PINE?
3 TATA PHONE APPS (~)
4 DONOR CARD ROLE (~)
5 SOLD SWEET SPOT (~)
My Fascinating Crossword Uniclue Keepsake from Last Year: Sea monster electing to take the day off monstering. KRAKEN'S SICK-OUT.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Thanks for the comment on the blocks. When I was 6 I asked for building blocks for Christmas and was given an erector set -- with which my dad promptly built some giant monstrosity of a project complete with little motor. I was quite unable to build anything with it but got blisters on my little hands trying.
a potentially interesting idea with an inaccurate revealer and not well executed. seems about par for many puzzles lately. some variation of "wraparound" would have worked better.
mostly a downs-only solve for me where i went directly through the top and then got enough of the middle to see INFINITESCROLL so by the time i reached the depths, ODDSMAKER provided the a-ha moment. fortunately i missed out on MACS, EVO, and much of the other gunk.
I'm still frowning at the clue for MACS, but I did like the one for AIR, and overall I liked the puzzle; it had a nice sense of progression and discovery. HOT MESSES was the first one to click for me, because after getting the H from HOPE, the answer was obvious and all I had to do was look up. It was mostly whoosh, whoosh, whoosh after that, with LOOK ALIVE taking the most time since I didn't know EVO.
I look forward to Thursdays and this was fun. It hit the SWEET SPOT. Thanks, Enrique Henestroza Anguiano!
I enjoyed the puzzle’s aha moment when I realized the gimmick. Before then I’d been stuck on thinking cannellini was a type of pasta (PASTA having 5 letters). I think it should be pasta with a name like that.
The only important question is
DOES HOPE PINE?
As the Brits ( and Irish) would say, I took one look at all those dashes and I just couldn’t be arsed.
I just started it and already I hate it :(
Listening to Dolly Parton's Treasures album while doing this made this tolerable.
So basically what this is, is a cylindrical puzzle. You can print the grid out, glue the bottom edge to the top edge, and get a tube-shaped crossword where all the Downs are valid. Calling it "INFINITE" would be like saying that flat Earth is finite and real Earth is infinite. Just because you can keep moving in a loop without reaching an edge, it doesn't mean that you're on an "infinite" surface.
Also, fun fact: if by some miracle it was possible to make a puzzle where both the Downs AND Acrosses wrap around, then you could lay that one over a donut shape to get a grid with all valid answers and no edges.
Printed this one out and was immediately reminded of two New Yorker puzzles I printed recently that left out the Downs clues entirely. Had to solve those on line. Fortunately I am familiar with the -----being used to indicate a continuation of an answer from somewhere else, but this didn't kick in until I wound up in the SE corner looked up, made the connection and then it was woosh city, as others have noted.
Got the revealer all filled in and it was no help at all. I'm not quite technologically illiterate but I still learn lots of things from crosswords. Besides INFINITESCROLL, today I found out what Telegram and Simple Dialer are and that I might need an ACCESS KEY for something. Guess I haven't so far. Hello to Ms. OLSON and you too "Hacks", whatever you are. Also found out what a wherry is. Wherry has that word been all my life?
When we lived in far Upstate NY in the middle of apple country, spring was when you could see blossoms forever and about now the trees were full of MACS, so there's another possibility.
Impressive feat of construction, EHA. Every Hidden Answer was revealer, which was cool. Thanks for all the fun.
Per Ted Lasso Hope is what kills you.
Glad this wasn’t a true infinite scroll puzzle, would never complete, streak gone. More of a “Back to Top” experience. Fine. Ipso abra.
Well, I set a new fastest-time record for my Thursday solves, but I can't get past the fact that, as another commenter said, "infinite scroll" is misapplied. The whole theme doesn't work, because "infinite scroll" means you keep serving up new content (rather than having someone click "next page" or "next article"). It does not mean you loop back to the beginning.
I would have preferred a ‘Y’ too And t easily could have been, if the down had been clued something like “Cars from China’s largest EV maker “.
Good post! Thx.
Also: Mmmmm . . . donuts . . .
Easy. Saw all the blanks and went looking for the reveal which I’d never heard of. It wasn’t hard to figure out what to do from there and after that it was pretty whooshy.
I also did not know EVO and the Emily poem.
Costly erasure - earn before REAP
Clever idea, fun solve, liked it more than @Rex did.
Exactly!
Cool puztheme, but weird-ass revealer. INFINITE ... in what way, here? Maybe they were thinkin that each themer gets built IN a FINITE SCROLL way?
12 puzthemers, of which HOTMESSES & SWEETSPOT were my faves.
Caught onto the puztheme mcguffin sorta early, but wasn't sure I was right, for a spell. The top part was hard to make Acrosses-only progress on, at our house. So M&A immediately headed south to the border, amigos. There was eventually some progress there, no thanx to no-know OLSON . CLOSED + SET was my first SCROLLer to fall/rise.
staff weeject picks [of a mere 6 choices]: AMA & EVO. Resultin in a 33% no-know weeject rate.
fave clue: { --- }.
fave entry: Ain't any long ones, other than sorta the themers. Sooo ... gotta go with MOO. Hope that ain't m&e bein too COWardly.
Thanx for the real different fun solvequest, Mr. Anguiano dude. But hardly an infinite U-count, tho. Left poor M&A's solvequest U HOPE plumb featherless.
Masked & Anonymo0Us [not to be confused with a "moo" reference]
.p.s.
Runt puzzle:
**gruntz**
M&A
Never saw the clues for AIR IPAD EKED as that row filled itself in entirely from crosses. On a Thursday? Really? Rex's half-star bonus was generous. Too generous, IMO.
Dr Random, I'm happy to know that there's a Shakespearean reference to support my sticking with CLOSEt (actually, I'd forgotten to go back and check if it fit with the SCROLL.).
Like others, we had no clue why there were... no clues for the first 12 Downs. The breakthrough was at 63D; the clue was plural, the answer only three letters, and for some reason HOT MESS(es) clicked for my wife. After that, 1 through 12 Down went in easily.
Agree with Rex, and many here, that the fill was meh at best. Twelve split answers, on a Thursday, could have used a significant injection of wacky. Might have made the whole undertaking a lot harder, but likely would have been worth it for the solving community and worth more RP stars.
This solve went in three phases for me. The first was when I assumed there would be no down clues throughout. I went through all of the cross clues wondering how I would finish as there are so many fitting alternate answers for short fill. Accidentally realizing there were down clues (I solved on my phone) lead to the second phase in which I filled in the revealer without understanding it's significance. The third was when I recognized the scrolling trick after which it was a quick mop up.
EVO is a piece of crosswordese that's on a par with PWN and YEET.
Interesting. The only 2 puzzles I do religiously every week are Sunday...for obvious reasons...and Thursday precisely because of the various puzzle/meta components. To each his own cup of negus.
I enjoyed it: total bafflement at the start, then the nice moment of seeing how the SCROLL for DONOR CARD works, and having enough empty spaces left to keep the rest of the theme answers interesting. I was happy to know the term INFINITE SCROLL from the recent Meta settlement.
This puzzle took half my usual time. I immediately knew the dashed clues were continued answers. And since they went down, the clues had to be at the bottom - no? This was a puzzle posing as a Thursday. (Heaving a big sigh)
Well, the scroll may not be infinite, but the complaining about it is sure beginning to sound infinite.
Thanks, Iris, for explaining Conrad’s “Yellow Rose” reference. True, this is not one of the Dickinson poems that use Common Meter—alternating lines of iambic tetrameter and trimeter. Poems in Common Meter fit lots of melodies—not just “Yellow Rose of Texas” but also “Amazing Grace” (and lots of other hymns), “America the Beautiful,” “Auld Lang Syne,” etc., etc. That’s why they call it Common Meter, I suppose.
My grandson, who just turned 6 this summer, has been working with Lego for about 3 years. His parents bought him some Duplo and he worked with that for a couple of months before my son hauled out the giant storage bin from the closet and revealed that he had been a total Lego freak as a kid. They started building together and very soon it was "Goodbye gateway drug (Duplo) and hello to the real thing, the hard stuff, the Lego", and he was hooked. On a recent visit he presented me with a Hot Wheels version of my truck and then pulled out a second package which he unwrapped himself (he's a kid; they love unwrapping things) to reveal a quite accurate Lego version of said truck that he had designed and built himself, based on the Hot Wheels toy. He recently did a class presentation about the day I let him steer my tractor so now I'm waiting for a Lego Kubota.
😱 doh
HOW cool is it that @Rex mentioned Andy Warhol yesterday in a comment about POPTARTs and today the POP ARTIST himself appears.
I don’t know enough about INFINITE SCROLL is (or INFINITy SCROLL, which I had first) to be IRKed by the apparent inaccuracy, so I was impressed by the somersaulting. And I learned a few things - those PHONE APPS, a new OLSON girl, and a BOAT with a fun name. EVO was new too, but I won’t remember it.
I thought the cluing was a mix - some were interesting but too many were just straightforward. And what a tortured and yet vague clue for KILT [Twill-woven worsted wool garment]. On the plus side the SEMICOLON clue was great, and the best was invoking Emily Dickinson for HOPE. Loved OFL’s take on the secret connection.
Nice enough Thursday puzzle with a fun review by @Rex.
Oof! Just a big NO from me. Interesting concept but it just fell short. As others have noted, there is really nothing infinite about it.
I should have quit after my first entry - MACS. To quote @Andy Freude’ “Hiya, MACS,” SAID no one ever.”
And EARS for side view mirrors. Are you kidding me?
It also managed to be pretty boring.
Same here.
Ah, I get the trick! Thursday scrolls back and becomes Monday.
This was annoying from the start, because of all the missing clues at the top. And then, to rub salt in the wound, as many others have mentioned the clue for 38 across -- and thus the theme itself -- is wrong. INFINITE SCROLL would be something like this: the first time you click on the bottom row, a new row loads below it. (Now that would be annoying!) Really too bad, because it's a decent Thursday tricky theme, if the revealer were not so totally misleading.
Rhiannon Giddens has a new album coming out tomorrow called "HOPE Is the Thing with Feathers," so this whole discussion about the poem seems particularly timely! I assume it is simply a coincidence that it appeared in the puzzle the day before the album is set to come out. It would be fun though if one of the editors were a fan of her work and chose the puzzle to come out on this day!
Liked this one a lot. Agree with Rex that the fill was meh, but the satisfaction of my "aha" moment well outweighed the fill. Generally I prefer my difficulty to arise from the cluing but this one succeeded just on the construction. Good writeup as always, Rex
Since I always solve on paper with pencil, and I always start at the bottom of the grid, I got the theme right off the bat. Then it was just a Monday puzzle with a twist ... and a boring Monday puzzle at that. Please NYT, get on the ball and start to put some pep in your crosswords!
"Just go with the computer clue." - Did I read that right? Did Rex actually wish for an Apple Inc. clue? 👀
If the answers don't cross it's not a crossword puzzle. Absolutely hated this one.
I have not had to resort to answers in years. I was completely stumped for 40 minutes and caved. I had to read Rex’s writeup to understand the puzzle. Infinite Scroll gave me no clue at all…. Nope.
I think perhaps ‘screenwrapping’ is the word the constructor was looking for, from video games like Pac-Man.
And I thought BiDS was reasonable for 36D and INFINITiSCROLL looked reasonable too. Spent ages looking for a mistake elsewhere till a light bulb 💡 went off 😃
Les
That kid is gonna go places. (That’s what I said myself when I read your post. ). Kids who are super into some kind of skill and are good at it always fascinate me.
Anonymous 9:39 AM
I actually have the printed edition but wanted to lie down. What a mistake. I agree. Couldn’t figure it out on w app. Oh well.
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