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Server's warning at a restaurant / FRI 9-18-29 / Figuratively speaking / Not everyone agrees on this / Some features of backyard landscaping / Ball girls / Act like yourself, perhaps? / Clicked with a partner?
Friday, September 18, 2026
Constructor: Ryan Mathiason
Relative difficulty: Hard
THEME: None
Word of the Day: PISCES (25D: Leap day baby, e.g.) —
Pisces (♓︎; /ˈpaɪsiːz/;[2][3] Ancient Greek: Ἰχθύες Ikhthyes, Latin for "fishes") is the twelfth and final astrological sign in the zodiac. It is a mutable sign. It spans 330° to 360° of celestial longitude. Under the tropical zodiac, the sun transits this area between about February 19 and March 20.[4][a] In classical interpretations, the symbol of the fish is derived from the ichthyocentaurs, who aided Aphrodite when she was born from the sea.[5]
• • •
It's a Rafa Rexplacement day! Very exciting times. I hope you all are well and enjoying the almost-fall. Is there a better way to welcome the almost-fall than solving and blogging a crossword puzzle? Probably, yes, there is. But this is what I'm choosing to do so please join me on my journey. |
| A nice GAZEBO |
My first thought here is that this felt pretty hard. On a Friday, I'm used to getting a toehold very early. Usually within the first three clues. But here I was bouncing around for ages before I felt confident in any answer. I knew ARLO, and TAU, and DYSON came easy. But it was quite a while before anything meaningful coalesced up top. Eventually I got UNITED NATIONS [Country club?] from just the initial U (wow, look at me, I'm so smart), and things started to fall. The bottom half felt a little bit easier, but probably because I already had some letters to help me figure things out.
 |
| This is a JACK AND COKE. I know it looks like just coke, but you'll have to trust me |
The thing this puzzle seems to be doing is highlighting fun, multi-word 6-letter answers. And I think it does that quite well! IT'S HOT, QR CODE, SEE RED, DARN IT, I GOT IN, MAD LIB, ONE SEC, etc. all feel really solid. We already saw QR CODE this week, but I still enjoyed it. Something about it just makes it feel like very juicy crossword fill. DARE ME felt like a partial to me (though I can see it reasonably work as a standalone exclamation), and CAN TOO is veering too closely to [Playground retort] to my liking, but overall this is a really impressive showing.
The more I look back at this grid, the more I'm admiring it. The long stuff is great, too. That UNITED NATIONS clue is a banger, and [Element of a dating profile?] for TREE RING is lovely too. SNIFF TEST is probably my favorite entry in the whole puzzle. GOAL LINE STAND doesn't do much for me but I'm Not A Sports Person, and I'm very happy for the Sports People to feel represented. KFCS / FAA felt maybe a little initialism-heavy in a small area, but that really is as much as I can complain about the fill.
 |
| KFC bucket |
The grid overall was kinda heavy on black squares, but I don't think anyone really cares about that. I don't even know whether I care. But it is something I noticed, so here I am pointing it out. And ... yeah, I think those are my thoughts so I'll stop here and let you guys go carry on with your days. Until next time!
Bullets:
- 16A JUNE BUGS: Insects names for when they emerge — I have absolutely heard of JUNE BUGS before but I have no idea what they look like
- 44A DATA: Cookie contents — Clever clue! (It's a cookie as in the one in your browser.)
- 39D CRAZE: Fidget spinners or Angry Birds, once — It really was simpler times when Angry Birds was all the rage and we didn't have to worry about the AI bot apocalypse.
- 5D ODES: ___ of Solomon, literary collection written in the first or second century — At first I (incorrectly) put in SONS here, but then I also (correctly) put in SONS for 7-Down so I was sad because I wanted both to be right but knew it couldn't be.
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90 comments:
Medium-Challenging. Lots of proper names that I didn't know. Trouble spots in the NW and all across the South.
* * * _ _
Overwrites:
For begin to boil at 15A, I had SEEthe before SEE RED.
My 18A water containers were jugS before they were jArs before they were DAMS.
iN a SEC before ONE SEC at 50A.
WOEs:
6D sci-fi writer TED Chiang.
I've heard of the Song of Solomon, but not the ODES (5D).
Pixar's dinosaur ARLO at 19A.
NBA star TRAE Young at 20A.
The Office character KAREN at 41D.
UFC person DANA White (44D).
Drew a complete blank for Aladdin's sidekick ABU (46D).
Top notch - the grid is daunting upon first glance - highly segmented corners with limited access to that central tri-stack but the whole thing comes together nicely. The longs shine - JACK AND COKE x UNITED NATIONS - GOAL LINE STAND and SPLIT DECISION is an all-time cross.
JUNEBUG
Rafa summarizes the overall fill nicely. The mids are all solid and there’s limited shorts to glom things up. SNIFF TEST, TAP DANCED, TREE RING are great. A few oddball names in there but the crosses were fair. I’ve read TED CHIANG so that fell quickly. GO BANANAS was the theme in Monday’s puzzle.
Dead, Drunk and Naked
Highly enjoyable Friday morning solve - outstanding follow up to last Friday’s star.
Now I Wanna SNIFF Some Glue
15:26 for me this morning, so I think that's medium. The main thing I know about Junebugs is that they are pretty big beetles.... so they were exciting to me as a kid. Didn't get much in the NW corner, but dropped GOALLINESTAND in with no crosses, so that helped me get a foothold in the middle. Totally loved BELLES crossing DEB with their parallel clues; climbed MADLIB and DARNIT to JACKANDCOKE and on up into the NE, came down the far side and so PISCES and IGOTIN helped me see UNITEDNATIONS and SPLITDECISION. then I had the final IOS and that helped me see SCENARIOS. Like @Conrad had no idea about TED, ARLO, or KAREN, though I did know TRAE and guessed DANA off the D. This was a ****.5 as far as I'm concerned, definitely Puzzle of the Week, very clean nice fill. Wish I could spend the morning sitting in that GAZEBO, Rafa, but I gotta go to work today. Maybe tomorrow..... : ) Thank you, Ryan, this was a truly inspired puzzle, really really nice!
Too much niche trivia.
Challenging, but other than a too many obscure names (to me) I thought this was a very good puzzle!
This is Ryan’s third Times puzzle, and his first two were Mondays, so there was no indication until today that he could clue like this, where the box became Wordplay Heaven.
Not inferior wordplay either, but clever genuine pleasure wordplay.
OMG, one right after another. I marked 18 clues with either wordplay humor or wordplay misdirects, when generally four is a bounty.
Wordplay such as [Act like yourself, perhaps?] for DO A CAMEO, [Element of a dating profile?], for TREE RING, [Clicked with a partner?] for TAP DANCED -- three sublime original clues.
Wordplay makes the brain work in a feel-good way, and often makes it belly-laugh. You’re not just cracking riddles, but you’re having a good time as well. To me, that’s crosswords at its best.
Throw in freshness like NYT debuts, SNIFF TEST, I GOT IN, and DO A CAMEO, and that's crosswords at its very best.
Now that you’ve shown what you can do, Ryan, please sir, come back soon – I loved this!
Challenging for me. The first answer I put in was GOAL LINE STAND; I had trouble getting a hold but eventually had everything except the SW, where I had "trend" for CRAZE. Once I realized trend was wrong I was able to see A LA CARTE and I finally got that corner. Nice, challenging puzzle and a great one for Friday--more of this, please.
Yes, what Lewis said. Bravo, Ryan!
MACS two days in a row, properly clued today!
I had MAYFLIES before the crossers led me to JUNEBUGS
mayflies before JUNE BUGS, anyone?
Overall, a good Friday with some tricky cluing. I wish the central stack had had some of that same trickiness to the clues, but can't have everything.
Never heard of a Plant Mom.
Oh, and I knew TRAE Young right away - he's a Wizard now - but managed to get two of the four letters wrong spelling it TRey.
I got to meet Rex last night at the first WFMU Crossword Meet-up!
wow. Wordplay heaven? I'd say wordplay hell. one of the least pleasant solves in recent memory, and not because it was hard. It's as if the creator came up with a misdirect clue, and then built a second misdirect on top of that. Some of the choices are flat out incomprehensible - the clue to SEGUED? or HORDE? c'mon. that's not word play, just a way of being insufferable. Deeply unfun.
Enjoyable puzzle. The trick was to solve the misdirection, then pick the right answer from that subset. For example, for element of a dating profile I wanted CARBON something. A little faster than an average Friday.
All the names threw me off, but stayed with it because the longer answers were fun. UNITEDNATIONS and SNIFFTEST came pretty easily. Liked the misdirection in the clues—dating profile had me thinking about online dating sites about which I’m totally ignorant, and cookie contents had me thinking about recipes, about which I’m also quite ignorant.
Hey All !
Toughie today, had to Goog for two answers to ferret along the solve, as I was completely stopped in both areas. In NW, ODES was my cheat. In SE, it was for KAREN. Shocker, I know, I don't know every character and who played them from The Office. Why am I even solving crosswords without that knowledge? The nerve.
SE also deciding twixt ONE SEC and iNaSEC further flabbergasted me there. In NW, had SEEthe for SEERED and wanted sNap for ENDS providing nice roadblocks. Hate being stuck without a foreseeable way out, so Goog happens.
Nice tough FriPuz. , SO I SAY. 😁
Hope y'all have a great Friday!
Four F's
RooMonster
DarrinV
Not only did we have QR CODE this week, but we also had SPLIT DECISION and GO BANANAS as theme answers on Monday, and here they are crossing! Did the editors decide this puzzle needed to be a Week In Review?
(I phrase that as a complaint, but I actually wouldn’t hate it if it were to be a Thing. I have noticed how often the Midi and the main puzzle have an unusual answer in common.)
Same!
I also wanted something having to do with CARBON dating for most of the puzzle.
Here's a cool video demonstrating how QR codes work, using a Go board to construct one from scratch.
Hmm, wonder if you can make a crossword that's also a QR code ... yep, at least one person did.
Agree.
1:07. No cheats. Thursday evening = 4 solves. Fun puzzle. Made me think: “I still got it.”
I was there as well!!! Maybe we met??? I was the one who won the first raffle! 😊
I had to guess the F of FOES and FITS to finish. Never really heard anyone say give fits but i can kind of get with it. Still no idea why FOES is two in a row. Help please! I was just about to ask for help with SEERED and realised that it is in fact SEE RED. Grrrr!
Found this one extremely difficult taking me double my average time.
Unconvinced by SEGUED and HORDE clues but on the whole there are a lot of really clever clues that meant I had to seriously stretch myself to get in the right ballpark!
JACKANDCOKE: Jill left him because of his drug problem.
DARNIT! There's a hole in my sock!
Fish stick: PIKE
FOES: They come after fees and fies, and before fums.
******
Enjoyed the workout. Nice to see BANANAS crossing SPLIT DECISION, and GAZE above EYED UP
Hard and satisfying!
First, and I hope this is allowed here, I spent a great evening in Jersey City last night at Words Are For Crossing and was able to hang out with @Rex! Whoever said "never meet your idols" had no idea what they were talking about! Wonderful night doing some puzzles and talking all things crossword. I won a WFMU T-shirt, snapped some photos with @Rex and he signed my completed puzzle that he constructed for the event! I know my crossword geek is really showing here, but I couldn't think of a better way to spend my time!! Thank you @Rex!! Meeting you was on my bucket list!!
Now the puzzle. Similar to @Rafa, I found it fairly difficult but found much joy in the solve. I think all I had was PGA on my first pass. After darting around the grid to try to get any foot hold at all, I came back to PGA and suddenly PISCES clicked and that seemed to get my brain working a bit. It was by no means a whoosh-fest, but things opened up from there.
Like @Lewis mentioned, the word play today is just off the charts, wonderful stuff. There were so many "wow, nice!" moments today (many that I BARKed out loud) that led to a very satisfying solve.
The first in the long stack to fall was SPLITDECISION followed by GOALLINESTAND, probably my favorite. The cluing/wordplay for UNITEDNATIONS was also a high light.
Loved the in-the-language feel of SOTOSAY, SNIFFTEST, IGOTIN, and ITSHOT. On top of that, MADLIBS brought back some great memories of long car rides or bus rides that kept my brothers and I from killing each other.
I'm also having fun post-solve looking at the NE. When I see QRCODE, my brain is now reading ITS HOT as IT SHOT, whatever that might mean. Little moments like that, when a puzzle messes with me, is part of the beauty of the whole experience.
Thank you Ryan for a proper Friday that was a happy workout!
Juuuust below my average Friday time, so I guess that's the epitome of "medium". I truly enjoyed this one- lots of fun cluing and lots of flashy answers without getting bogged down in crossword-ese. The only thing I didn't like was DAREME and CANTOO- which are essentially synonyms- in the same corner. Still, great puzzle- 4 stars.
ODES of Solomon? How about SONG of Solomon?
I enjoyed it. I liked the tricky clues and I agree the United Nations clue was very clever. I clocked it off of IONS.
Although, there was a small dupe.
Country CLUB and org…held at CLUBS. That threw me because I was stuck on USO or NCO or something governmental.
And unless the answer is PELE or (mia) HAMM, count me out of sports trivia.
TRAE is a name that I don’t know and won’t remember. Sorry Trae. I’m sure you’re good at what you do.
A lot of agreement with Adam. Just couldn't break through in the SW. And was stuck on TREND for the longest time. If I had seen CRAZE I probably would have gotten GAZEBO. But a very good Friday.
You definitely don’t “do” a cameo. You “make” a cameo. That’s a big miss here, IMO.
Wanted ITSHOT immediately but that led nowhere, probably because I had SIMMER for "begins to boil. Over to the NE where EAGLE and DYSON showed up and eventually JUNEBUGS. If you've ever had a JUNEBUG crash into your screen door you might think it was a small bird. GOALLINESTAND was a life saver as was the by-now familiar SPLITDECISION.
Finally finished with ITSHOT, right all along, Didn't help that I had to change TRAY to TREY to TRAE. But jeez, the names. I've had a rum and COKE but never a JANCKAND COKE. ABU? Worst was crossing KAREN with DANA. Please don't do something like that.
Nice Friday workout RM and a very satisfying solve. The misdirection in the clues was fiendish and Really Made me work, which is the way it should be. Thanks for all the fun.
Ditto that!
Hugh, thanks for the report - I almost went, but a meeting ran long. Will definitely make it happen next time after reading this!
I knew when I saw the "hard" rating - usually just a theoretical possibility - that we had a guest blogger:)
Funny coincidence. Just last night we had a mass of marauders over for HORDE-oerves. They arrived en masse but each left whenever they reached a SPLITDECISION.
Given that eStand is an electric lift system for raising up hunters (wish I were kidding), perhaps their pitch to take the big step and finally buy one could be GOALLINESTAND..
Liked this puzzle a bunch. ITSHOT me in the foot a few times, but I recovered just fine. Thanks, Ryan Mathiason.
Lots of misdirection; some very tricky clues. Had SIMMER then SEETHE before SEE RED. Thought I knew TREY Young well but didn't (TRAE).
The grid spanners in the middle and the long downs that Rafa mentioned were all very good today (and the cluing was fun as well).
The SE section probably holds this one back a bit from consideration as an all around stellar effort. Personally, there is not much on the planet that I care less about than the U.F.C, and of course I have never seen an episode of The Office. You also have the two abbreviations, a rapper, a company name and the playground-ish CAN TOO down there to contend with. So that section scores high on the yuk scale and drops down the overall assessment of this one a bit.
Still, a fun puzzle and a fine overall effort from our constructor today.
DO A CAMEO kinda ruined this puzzle for me. It's not just an EAT A SANDWICH level of stretch, it's not even the more common phrase, which is "make a cameo." Could not believe my eyes when I realized that was the actual answer to that clue.
Liked this a bit less than the (so far) majority.
Expected Rex to pan DO A CAMEO for its "Eat a sandwich" resemblance. Did not care at all for three "(equivalent)" clues/answers on top of each other in the SE corner, bisected by two names, and one of those the (who the bleep cares) CEO of the UFC. Why him?
We got a DNF for going with I GOT It crossing CHEt; stupidly not seeing it was obviously a last name. Oh..."I got in"! Just dawned on me as I typed those words that it's talking about a HS grad's college acceptance letter. Ok; fair.
The puzzle has a lot of nice entries and typically misdirective Friday clues, for sure. Especially loved the clues for SUMS, PISCES, IN PEN and ORCAS. And BELLES crossing DEB, similarly clued, was excellent.
Slowed down by Adult before OF AGE; Dang before DARN IT; and In a before ONE SEC.
Agreed. Great puzzle!
"Profile" in that clue is doing a lot of work. Not sure I like it.
This is my first Did Not Finish in years, because of that northwest corner. :-(
I’ll join the lovers of this puzzle. It took quite a while to get a toe-hold; with the grid design, even getting momentum in the corners would come to a screeching halt quickly. (I also join those who found the names difficult, but on a hard Friday like this I’ll eventually allow myself to look them up, so they go from obstacles to boosts.) No whoosh until the end, when the whole puzzle completed itself with almost too much lightning speed (too much because I wanted to appreciate the wordplay of clues now that I had the answers). The E crossing BELLES and DEB with the double [Ball girl] clue was my last square, and I realize as I write that that the clue was not all that tricky. Also join those appreciating having MACS on the puzzle properly clued after yesterday’s fiasco…and even then there was a touch of wordplay with “Line” to keep it interesting. Great Friday.
My experience was the opposite of Rafa’s. I flew through the top 2/3 (including all three long acrosses on just a letter or two) and got bogged down at the end.
How can you put in a longish answer like that without proving it with at least one cross (other than the s)?
Same. That was the first one for me, too. Thank goodness!
ARLO, TRAE, TED, DANA, KAREN. Had to look them up. But that didn't spoil it for me. Liked it.
Today I learned the word “ ichthyocentaur.” Thanks, Rafa!
Super fun. The many unfamiliar proper names became fairly evident as I progressed through the grid (but were very disappointing in number on my first few passes).
I thought it was hard! It was so nice to struggle through after the recent spate of very very easy puzzles! Thanks for a great one Ryan!
I'm "puzzled." Expecting to open the blog to a rant from Rex about the spiraling standards of difficulty in the NYT cross-world, I was greeted with Rafa's "HARD" assessment, followed by so many others who described this Friday offering in similar fashion. I am slow at the solving game, even after years of daily practice. My "normal" Friday solve (on days that I solve it without a dnf) falls somewhere in the 30-35 minute range and can get way beyond that. I breezed through this one in 21 minutes! Here's to Ryan M. and I apparently sharing a "totally on my wave length" Friday. I guess crosswords are like a box of chocolates ...
Nancy said it well today: “A very good puzzle that would have been even better, certainly for me, without the names.” The rest of it? Fantastic. Extremely well crafted misdirects and artful cluing made this a real challenge worth tackling. Conversely, having to look up names detracted from my overall enjoyment … but was the only hope I had of finishing.
That’s a smell test to me. But otherwise, good puzzle. Tough but fun.
I'm glad I'm not the only one who found this challenging! I was on the brink of using Google to get the NW corner when I finally ripped out SIMMER at 15A, as well as ITS HOT and IQS, which I put in early but never trusted since it was such a mess otherwise. Somehow that allowed me to see SCENARIOS off of just the IOS, and I was off to the races.
One real clanker I was hoping someone would join me in complaining about: DO A CAMEO. No. Great clue. Terrible phrase. You can have a cameo role or make a cameo appearance. No one does a cameo.
The very rare day when I find a puzzle easier than many here. I started with IQS x QRCODES,, and with HORDE, ODES, and TED had enough to proceed down the left side. That gave me the UN- and G- for a quick UNITED NATIONS and GOAL-LINE STAND -- and it turned into one of those days when I had just enough crosses to get me the next entry. I enjoyed the creative cluing.
KFCs. Really truly awful. The plural of KFC. I can't even.
Great review by Rafa and I was relieved he deemed it “hard” because I had to cheat twice (TED and TRAE) plus got fubarred with DOOKing SEERED (I put in SEEthe) and confidently put in “song” instead of ODES, and not so confidently had “rarity” instead of PISCES (and I’m a PISCES). I also thought of the basketball red zone, so it took a lot of crosses to get GOALLINESTAND.
A very enjoyable Friday with top-notch wordplay….thanks Ryan!
PS…I only know enough about sports lingo to be dangerous (unless it’s tennis) so I’ll look up whether I was crazy to think basketball…so no need to fill me in.
haKE before PIKE
PPP gunk-fest.
This felt like a proper Friday workout, and I really enjoyed it. The puzzle has some great clues, including "Start to boil" for SEE RED (I first had Seethe and then Simmer), "Country club" for UNITED NATIONS, "Not together, in a way" for ALACARTE, and more. DO A CAMEO felt a little clunky, but that's a small quibble.
Unfortunately, I didn't get the happy music and couldn't find my mistake; I had I GOT IT instead of I GOT IN, which made Julie's last name Chet instead of CHEN. Ah well, I enjoyed it alnyway. Thanks, Ryan Mathiason!
Easy-medium except for the NW. I had Simmer and SEEthe before SEERED, plus TED, TRAE, and QRCODE (as clued) were WOEs…tough corner for me.
MY only other hiccups were deA before FAA and spelling PISCES.
Solid grid with more than a smattering of sparkle and a bit of crunch, liked it.
I don't see how those have double misdirects at all. They're both excellent clues, if hard. But that's Friday for you.
As in two people having a fight (a "row").
Ha ha, so true!
A “row” is a disagreement or fight
Agree wholeheartedly! I poked around a lot, then plugged in JACKANDCOKE and thought I was off to the races… alas, no. I added and deleted and tried things here and there and chugged my way to the music that way. A great ride!
I had fun too, @Hugh, and talking to you was one of the best parts of the night. I won’t forget your enthusiasm and kind words. Thank you.
This took a few minutes longer than usual thanks to good entertaining clues. I was slowed down by the two long sports terms and unfamiliar names. I could not recall JACK, fixating on Jim Beam. HORDE, DO A CAMEO, and TREE RING were ahas! I would like to request a moratorium on playground speak. The SE with CAN TOO and DARE ME is a bit sorry. DARN IT qualifies too.
FriPuz with an apt 4 Jaws of biter-feisty themelessness. Altho ...
* The no-knows all seem to have had fair crossers for decodin purposes.
* A coupla the longball middle answers came to m&e after very short startin letters: i.e., UN+ITEDNATIONS, G+OALLINESTAND. [SPLITDECISION took a few extra letters to get].
* Nanosecond consumption was mostly the fault of them sneaky clues.
staff weeject pick: DEB crossin BELLES, with near-look-alike clues.
some fave stuff: SPLITDECISION. JUNEBUGS. SNIFFTEST. GOBANANAS. TREERING & its clue. QRCODE. FITS clue of total mystery.
Thanx for the challenge, Mr. Mathiason dude. Good job, in 68 words.
Masked & Anonymo5Us
p.s.
AI-based Runt puzzle?:
**gruntz**
M&A
Did not like. Too hard.
Also, when I read the clue, "Element of a dating profile?", I immediately thought, "carbon"! Of course, carbon didn't fit, which was very disappointing, but I was convinced the answer would be some other element involved in dating things. I tried tungsten, even though I have no idea if that's used in dating, and it was wrong. The real answer isn't nearly as clever as the answer being an actual element. Why did the clue even use the word "element"? When I read a pun clue and immediately think of a much better answer than the actual answer, I get really mad at the puzzle.
We play an outdoor, sitting down, after-dinner game called June Bug on Cape Cod.
Scoring is simple: catch a June Bug, one point; throw and hit another player with said bug is also a point; throwing bug so it goes down opponent's shirt, five points.
It's a lot of fun, but the guys like it more than the girls and, I'm sad to report, the guys don't like it aal that much.
Hello Crossworld! I, too, was at the WFMU/Monty Hall event last night in Jersey City, where I met @Hugh (but did not meet @Al).
(Quick note that WFMU is indeed the greatest radio station on earth, and if anyone reading this doesn't already listen, they should go straight to the WFMU website and rectify that immediately.)
My wife and I thoroughly enjoyed all three puzzles from the event, though we opted to leave without saying "Hi" to Rex, as we were consumed with a sudden shyness. Perhaps next time?
We drove back to our home in Kensington (in Brooklyn), where I solved today's puzzle in bed and then promptly fell asleep. Now I remember nothing about the puzzle — even looking at it, I'm having trouble recalling the solving experience. Nothing stands out as memorably difficult, but nothing stands out as irritating or poorly constructed, so I am going to guess that I probably enjoyed it a great deal.
Good to meet you last night, @Hugh — fantastic to see you on stage, @Rex; I hope you'll do it again sometime!
Too many Unknown Names is a pet peeve of mine. 2 or 3 is fine, but today I had 7: TED ARLO TRAE NAS ABU DANA KAREN. Plus LAB as clued... never heard of Ecolab. However, otherwise it was a fine Friday and I eventually got all those names without Googling. And as Lewis said, lots of fun tricky clues, eg TREE RING, TAP DANCE, DO A CAMEO, and even ORCAS and SUMS.
Overall about average difficulty but quite a few typeovers. SIMMER before SEETHE before SEERED (and I thought: that's not how you spell SEARED!). GO BERSERK before BANANAS.
I think this took about my normal Friday time. I don’t use an actual timer. I just have a sense that if I start at 9:30 pm and don’t get called away I should finish before 10:15. My cigar is usually only two thirds to three quarters finished by then and so I spend another 15 minutes or so reviewing the grid and making notes. This felt about right.
There were three names that I didn’t know; Julie CHEN from Big Brother, sci-fi writer TED Chiang, and the basketball player TRAE Young. But, even though I have only ever watched one wretched episode of Big Brother, don’t read science fiction, and know almost zip about professional basketball, I managed via crosses.
I have also never played MAD LIBs, but had a vague idea about what it is.
Had SEnt on before the much better SEGUED and had no clue what a “plant mom” could be. Is it because her name is FERN?
The central stack of longs was pretty good, though I have to admit that, even though I follow hockey and baseball, I don’t watch basketball, soccer, or American football, so I was unsure about what a “red zone” might be. Running JACK AND COKE through that group was a big help. I hesitated there because, to me, J&C is a highball, not a cocktail. I looked it up post-solve and most sources say that a highball (1 part of a single spirit to 2 parts or more of a bubbly mixer) is a subset of cocktail. So I’ll take it. No, not a J&C. It’s awful. I wonder now what to call my often ordered whisky with soda on the side?
TAP DANCERS was great and BELLES crossing DEB was kind of funny, if dated.
Sorry to run on so long, but this is what happens when you actually make notes.
Oh … after readin all the comment gallery stuff, I come to realize that the FITS clue wasn’t so mysterious, afterall. My prob was that I confused the Across/Down clues, and thought the puz had served up a {Two in a row?} clue for FITS. Nope. sooo…
never mind.
M&A duh dept.
Got it, but a bunch of temporary missteps: not GO BATSHIT (for GO BANANAS), not SIMMER (for SEE RED), not MAYFLIES (for JUNEBUGS), not SONG (of SOLOMON).
Me too for MayflieS. I knew it could be JUNE BUGS, but mayflies are so much more beautiful (especially to a trou!). And locusts are too short.
Not sure I'm entirely happy with SEGUED ("Moved along [to[]." Yes, to SEGUE in music or video/film does mean to "move" from one section/segment/scene to another, but it's more in the sense of "dissolve" or "blend into" (instead of "cut") -- the term "crossfade" is usualy the synonym if we're talking about a visual segue. Not sure what that "to" is doing in the clue -- seems to imply dancing or moving "to" a rhythm or a beat, which really isn't the meaning at all.
So, what is Two in a row?/Foes. ?? Please, someone explain!
L E Case. I didn't really like the plural KFCS, either, but I think I might have used it once or twice in the past. I'm imagining one of my fishing trips with my buddy, Bags. We're headed to the Canadian Rockies from Vancouver and we don't have a lot of food in the truck, so we're starved. It's about 8 pm and the nearest town is about 20 minutes down the highway. "We're not gonna get any dinner, are we?" moans my fishing partner. "Of course we are," I reply, "Cranbrook's a decent-sized town. There'll be a Tim Horton's (ugh), definitely a Mickey D's, and probably at least two KFCs."
Works for me. You can get back to a sensible diet when you get home.
I got to the puzzle late because I had an urgent optometrical appointment this morning. The good news is that my sudden decline in vision is due to a complication from the cataract surgery I had 5 years ago, and can be fixed by a simple two-minute non-invasive laser surgery. The bad news is that I can't get an appointment with the surgeon for another two months--so I'll have to keep struggling to see the clues as I do the puzzle until then.
I had the mayflies error, along with a couple of others, and it took the UNITED NATIONS to sort things out for me. I'm also allowing myself to look up names when I don't know them. I did know NAS, but didn't know he once called himself Nasty Nas. That was a long time ago, wasn't it? And I had no idea about the basketball player; I had T_A_ so I tried looking up Thad, learned that there was a Thaddeus, and went with that. Quite a mess as a result.
Well, on to tomorrow -- or maybe not, we have to set up for our neighborhood yard sale by 9 AM. Come by if you want an old canoe or whitewater kayak for a low price.
Today, there's a special puzzle on page A22 of the NYT by Sam Ezersky and Anna Kaufman celebrating 175 years of The New York Times.
A lot more fun than this thing!
A row (rhymes with "cow") is a fight or a dispute.
The tip-off that it was SONG of Solomon was that it was written in the first or second century; SONG of Solomon was ancient Hebrew, roughly the tenth century BCE. I myself was unfamiliar with the ODES of Solomon, which are apparently a collection of early Christian hymns and mystical poems. Glad to learn something new from the crossword!
Meanwhile, bats have adopted the term "GO TRUMPSHIT" as an appropriate update to the expression.
Spot on correction. I puzzled over the verb for a while during the solve, and I’m glad to have you identify why it felt weird to me.
I don't understand this complaint at all. There are no misdirects here--these are the literal meanings of SEGUE and HORDE.
Maybe it's a nit, but we usually segues FROM one section to another, or segue INTO the next section -- I've never heard of segueing TO anything.
I don’t think that would’ve been a better answer; it would’ve been literal, and Fridays are for misdirects. You didn’t pick up on that misdirect, and others didn’t pick up on the “dating profile“ misdirect. That’s how Fridays are!
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