Relative difficulty: EASY (at least that's how it felt after Thanksgiving dinner and a few glasses of wine)
THEME: THEMELESS FRIDAY!
Word of the Day: SRO (Kind of housing aimed at low-income residents, in brief) —
Single room occupancy (more commonly abbreviated to SRO) is a form of housing that is typically aimed at residents with low or minimal incomes, or single adults who like a minimalist lifestyle, who rent small, furnished single rooms with a bed, chair, and sometimes a small desk.[1] SRO units are rented out as permanent residence and/or primary residence [2] to individuals, within a multi-tenant building where tenants share a kitchen, toilets or bathrooms. SRO units range from 7 to 13 square metres (80 to 140 sq ft).[3][1] In some instances, contemporary units may have a small refrigerator, microwave, or sink.[1]
• • •
Hello, it's Eli once again! Did everyone who celebrates have a nice Thanksgiving? See some family and friends, eat and drink too much, and solve and blog about the NY Times Crossword? Just me?
So, yesterday Rafa left you by saying he hoped that today's puzzle kept up the good streak. Well, surprise! HE CONSTRUCTED TODAY'S PUZZLE! I promise I won't let today's write-up be influenced by the fact that we are both members of the Rex Parker fill-in squad (The Rexplacements?).
I like a good themeless puzzle, and this one really fit the bill. Not a ton of proper nouns or excess obscure trivia, a nice clean grid; smooth sailing from start to finish. Granted, if you put NERD FESTS (17A - Hackathons and "Star Trek"conventions, say) and DRAMA CLUBS (53A - Kids acting out?) into a puzzle, you're aiming straight for Eli. My only real hangup was putting in HUM instead of HUP for 46A (Drill sound) and questioning what a HELMLINE was and why a counselor would be involved. My head went to sailing for some reason until I got to the end and didn't get the happy message. I finally saw what 46A was going for and that HELP LINE (36D - A counselor may be at the end of one) made a lot more sense.
I also thought there might be a bit of a mini theme between LAST PAGE (6D - Where a whodunit may reveal "who done it" - fun clue, btw) and CLOUSEAU (35D - Fictional detective first seen in a 1964 film). Then I realized my brain was thinking of Poirot, not Clouseau, which also explained my confusion about why an Agatha Christie character could first appear in a 1964 film.
These are the same picture, right?
All in all, a good end to the week. I feel like the central entry CHANGE OF PLANS (35A - "Actually, this is what we're doing now...") was a nice and lively Clue/Answer pairing to anchor the whole thing. Maybe I'm just in a good mood from a nice dinner with friends (not to mention the wine), but I was smiling the whole time I solved. Maybe not the flashiest puzzle I've seen, but it was well-made and well-appreciated.
FAKE MEAT (37D - Option for a vegetarian) — I hope that any vegetarians celebrating Thanksgiving were able to get a meal that worked for them, whether they wanted Tofurkey (or another fake meat) or they would rather not pretend to have meat in the first place.
SEIKO (55A - Omega alternative) — I watched a bit of the dog show after the parade (I missed the COLLIES (40A - Some "bearded" dogs), and it felt like every other commercial was for a luxury watch. I guess the dog show/luxury watch Venn Diagram is more of a single circle than I had imagined.
VIGGO (32A - Actor Mortensen) — I wish Vigo the Carpathian from Ghostbusters 2 spelled his name the same way so he could split crossword clues with Mortensen.
Vigo!
Ok, I've started pulling out Ghostbusters 2 references. I think it's time to start getting ready for bed. Thanks for having me! Enjoy your Friday, and don't give go buying things just because commercials say you're supposed to!
Signed, Eli Selzer, False Dauphin of CrossWorld
[Follow Eli on Twitter (probably not for much longer) and BlueSky (eliselzer.bsky.social)]
THEME: Body part + gerund — Theme answers are a body part followed by a gerund verb, clued indirectly by sequences of letters as examples of the relevant actions.
Word of the Day: PLUTO (Second-most massive of the solar system's known dwarf planets) —
Pluto (minor-planet designation: 134340 Pluto) is a dwarf planet in the Kuiper belt, a ring of bodies beyond the orbit of Neptune. It is the ninth-largest and tenth-most-massive known object to directly orbit the Sun. It is the largest known trans-Neptunian object by volume, by a small margin, but is slightly less massive than Eris. Like other Kuiper belt objects, Pluto is made primarily of ice and rock and is much smaller than the inner planets. Pluto has only one sixth the mass of Earth's moon, and one third its volume. Pluto was recognized as a planet until 2006.
• • •
Theme answers:
EYE-OPENING (OPTO-)
ARM-TWISTING (MAR)
HEART-STOPPING (VALENTIN-)
JAW-DROPPING (_IGS__)
GUT-BUSTING (BEL LY)
Hi friends, and happy Thanksgiving! It's Rafa here subbing for Rex today. I hope you and anyone you celebrate with are happy and healthy!!
Onto the puzzle! This was a cute Thursday, I thought. Played a little bit easier-than-usual for me (which I am not mad about, at all) ... didn't really have any major snags. I only realized after solving that the theme answers all had body parts as their first words. That was a cool extra layer, and I went from being somewhat meh on the whole thing to being quite into it! Even though them being body parts wasn't relevant to the clues, it's details like this that can really elevate a theme.
Do MANDMs look like buttons? I guess they do...
There's nothing really to nitpick about the theme (unfortunately I feel the need to nitpick the theme of every puzzle I solve ... I wish I were not this way!) ... GUT-BUSTING was new to me (I had only seen it as the "bust a gut" idiom, but never in that form), but it feels legit enough and was probably just a blind spot for me. I also wish there had been a better way to convey the "stopping" than with a dash, which to me more directly indicates a prefix (e.g. OPTO-), but this worked well enough!
This LADLE is a cute dinosaur!
I wonder whether the editors were desperately poring over this puzzle trying to find a place to sneak a Thanksgiving reference (PLYMOUTH: [Site of what many regard as the first Thanksgiving]), or if the constructor submitted that clue and this puzzle was slated for today because of it? Or maybe it was all just a happy coincidence? Who knows!
Some ASPENS for you
The fill was quite clean for a puzzle with 5 theme answers and 72 words (that's themeless puzzle territory; theme puzzles can generally go up to 78. Fewer words generally mean more open space, and a greater challenge in finding smooth fill). The trade-off there is that it becomes challenging to include fresh bonus fill (NOTATION / GLOM ONTO is totally fine, but not really the sparkliest of stacks), but overall I really enjoyed the smoothness here and the chonkiness of some of the whitespace areas.
Bullets:
PLUTO (47D: Second-most massive of the solar system's known dwarf planets) — First they demote PLUTO to not even being a planet. Now they're telling us it's not even the biggest dwarf planet?!? Justice for PLUTO!
SPEARS (4D: Hunting tips?) — Very clever clue, but also a missed opportunity to include Britney in the crossword!
ALPO (18A: Spot food, perhaps) — I know the Spot = dog name thing is a crossword mainstay, but I have never met a dog IRL named Spot ... is Big Crossword perpetuating lies? Maybe so!
PLYMOUTH (1A: Site of what many regard as the first Thanksgiving) — I saw a TikTok the other day saying that Plymouth Rock is the most overrated tourist attraction ever and that it's just some random rock that wasn't actually referred to by the Pilgrims at all! I'm not positioning myself as pro or anti Plymouth Rock at this time, so don't come for me in the comments. Just sharing.
That's all from me today! Been enjoying this week's puzzles so far, and I hope tomorrow's (my favorite puzzle day of the week!) keep up the good streak. Eli will be back to blog about it!
A long time ago, I was solving this puzzle and got stuck at an unguessable (to me) crossing: N. C. WYETH crossing NATICK at the "N"—I knew WYETH but forgot his initials, and NATICK ... is a suburb of Boston that I had no hope of knowing. It was clued as someplace the Boston Marathon runs through (???). Anyway, NATICK— the more obscure name in that crossing—became shorthand for an unguessable cross, esp. where the cross involves two proper nouns, neither of which is exceedingly well known. NATICK took hold as crossword slang, and the term can now be both noun ("I had a NATICK in the SW corner...") or verb ("I got NATICKED by 50A / 34D!")
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