Rex Parker Does the NYT Crossword Puzzle: Old-timey "Whoa!" / WED 11-11-26 / Toy that can "walk" down stairs / NBA coach Spoelstra / 1988 Conway Twitty country hit with the lyric "And if it's too late for love to change your mind ..." / Apt name for a caroler (other than Carol) / Quickly indicate one's approval, say

Constructor: Damon Gulczynski

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium

THEME: BLURRY PHOTO (61A: Image that's difficulty to make out ... as suggested four times in this puzzle?) — well-known subjects of BLURRY PHOTOs are found hidden (in blurry squares) inside four answers:
Theme answers:

PLAYING HOST (17A: Welcoming people to a party, say)
"GOODBYE TIME" (10D: 1988 Conway Twitty country hit with the lyric "And if it's too late for love to change your mind ...")
"YOU FOOL!" (38A: "That was a boneheaded thing to do!")
TRAVEL VISAS (25D: Requirements for many vacationers abroad)

Word of the Day: The Turing test (57D: Turing who proposed the Turing test) —

The Turing test was designed by Alan Turing to assess a machine's ability to exhibit intelligent behaviour equivalent to that of a human by imitating interactive dialogue. In the modern version, a human evaluator judges a text transcript of a natural-language conversation between a human and a machine. The evaluator tries to identify the machine, and the machine passes if the evaluator cannot reliably tell them apart. The results would not depend on the machine's ability to answer questions correctly, only on how closely its answers resembled those of a human. Since the Turing test is a test of indistinguishability in performance capacity, the original (verbal) version generalises naturally to all of human performance capacity, including nonverbal (robotic).
The test was introduced as the imitation game by Turing in his 1950 paper "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" while working at the University of Manchester.It opens with the words: "I propose to consider the question, 'Can machines think?'." Because "thinking" is difficult to define, Turing chooses to "replace the question by another, which is closely related to it and is expressed in relatively unambiguous words". Turing describes the new form of the problem in terms of a three-person party game called the "imitation game", in which an interrogator asks questions of a man and a woman in another room in order to determine the correct sex of the two players. Turing's new question is: "Are there imaginable digital computers which would do well in the imitation game?" This question, Turing believed, was one that could actually be answered. In the remainder of the paper, he argued against the major objections to the proposition that "machines can think".
Since Turing introduced his test, it has been highly influential in the philosophy of artificial intelligence, resulting in substantial discussion and controversy, as well as criticism from philosophers like John Searle, who argue against the test's ability to detect consciousness.

• • •

On the one hand, this is just a "hidden word" theme that gets all of its punch from visual manipulation of the grid. Kind of a gaudy tactic, making those squares a ghostly gray. From a solving standpoint, they're identical to the circled squares you might see in any number of themed puzzles, including those with hidden-word themes. Without a coat of paint to make those squares look the way they look, this theme falls flat. It can't work. Even as it is, ghostly gray doesn't quite nail the concept of "blurriness." And yet ... the letters in those squares do seem less distinct, and there's nothing wrong with a little superficial whimsy, and the revealer did get an "aha" out of me (or the rough equivalent), and I sort of enjoyed thinking I had the idea (with GHOST and YETI—fictional creatures), losing the idea (with UFOS and ELVIS—neither of which is fictional), and then getting it for real with BLURRY PHOTO. Plus, the theme answers themselves, as answers, are really lively and entertaining—I've never heard of "GOODBYE TIME," but I've also never tried to hide a YETI before. I imagine one gets desperate. So I can tolerate "GOODBYE TIME" because it's inventive (as YETI storage goes) and it sounds like a song I want to hear. "YOU FOOL!" is probably my favorite of the set. What a colorful way to hide "UFO." And that's the other thing—the subjects of the blurry photos are well and truly hidden in their answers. That is, they break across two words and you'd never notice them there unless someone highlighted them for you. Every word in every theme answer touches a BLURRY PHOTO subject with at least one letter. It's elegantly done. I don't know if the fill is great (ORA ORS OLES UTES ATTY LLDS BABA BAAED AAH ELSA EYRE etc.), but it's OK, and I enjoyed seeing CRO-MAGNON JUDY BLUME (!) as well as RIMSHOT, and parsing MA AND PA was fun as well. I had a good time, so ... mission accomplished.

[I was wrong; I do not care for this song; oh well]
[No. 7 on the Country charts, so "Country hit" is technically correct]

The things that held me up today were oddly tiny. Like, I couldn't figure out ROBED (28A: Like a boxer before a fight, typically). The clue isn't wrong, but I was thinking about the boxer's mental or emotional status, or else the physical status of his body (OILED? TONED? ANTSY?). Crosses took care of it, but when the puzzle is pretty easy and you don't blank that often, the blanks stand out. I also blanked at the last square in ADV (37A: Shortly, e.g., for short). The "for short" part threw me. I thought it was supposed to indicate "Shortly"'s relationship to the word "short," and maybe it does (since shortly is the adverbial form of "short"), but primarily the "for short" part indicates that the answer itself ("adverb") is an abbreviation. [Shortly, e.g.] = "adverb," while "for short" takes that "adverb" and makes it ADV. Too thinky for my amped-up solving brain. I got muddled up. The idea that "Bros" and SIBS stumped me too (52D: Bros, for example). This is mostly because I've never heard or seen the word "SIB(S)" outside of crosswords. People tend to say "brother" or "sister" or "brothers & sisters" or the whole "siblings." So I've written SIB(S) into any number of crosswords over the years, but it always feels like some abbr. from some other world or bygone time. Other problems: I don't know stadium names (though LEVI'S makes sense for S.F.); I had -T-S and didn't know instantly if it was UTES or OTOS/OTOE (58A: Some Four Corners natives) (I actually know that can't be OTOS/OTOE (they're midwest) but at speed I get confused); wrote in AHH before AAH and AVER before AVOW (the latter is among the worst and most common of the kealoas*) (41D: Declare boldly). I also kept trying to guess the last blurred squares (ELVIS) and failing. "ELVES?"

["Elvis is in your jeans!"]

Bullets:

10A: It's over $30 trillion for the U.S., in brief (GDP) — never sure if I'm dealing with GDP or GNP. Looks like GNP is now a dated term. replaced by GNI, which I hope to never see in crosswords. GNI really wants to be the new GNU and we can't let it:

Gross national income (GNI), formerly known as gross national product (GNP), is the total amount of factor incomes earned by the residents of a country. It is equal to gross domestic product (GDP), plus factor incomes received from non-residents by residents, minus factor income paid by residents to non-residents. (wikipedia)

19A: Sporting blade that's an anagram of 16-Across (OAR) — I like this a lot better without all that anagram business. I can see it's an anagram. It's not interesting that it's an anagram. It's a three-letter word. ERA is an anagram of EAR and ARE. You see how that's not interesting. I like [Sporting blade] all on its own. Gets you thinking about EPEEs or something like that, but no! Wrong blade. Wrong sport type entirely!
22D: Apt name for a caroler (other than Carol) (NOEL) — excellent clue, particularly the parenthetical part. Made me laugh.

24D: Old-timey "Whoa!" ("EGAD"!) — I fear "Whoa" itself is becoming "old-timey," as everyone younger than me insists on spelling it "woah" now. I used to almost be able to accept this if the exclamation was one of surprise, but I saw that spelling yesterday from someone who clearly meant, "hang on, hold up, slow down," and dammit that is a horse command and it is always "Whoa." These things I believe!

47D: Toy that can "walk" down stairs (SLINKY) — "... alone or in pairs!" Does this "toy" still exist? Does anyone Gen Z or younger know about it? If you're over 50 and you watched TV as a child, then you saw ads for this thing a lot, which means you probably remember the jingle, which the clue practically quotes, which made this clue transparent.

That's all for today. See you next time.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on BlueSky and Facebook and Letterboxd]
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