"Duality Quality," 5/7/17

Hi, loyal readers; guest introduction-writer Jamie here. I won't aspire to duplicate Allie's quipping, delightful written voice, or exhaustive lists. Let me get straight to listing a few facts about this week's puzzle that feel particularly salient to me:

• We finished this week's puzzle quickly. (24:33)
• We both enjoyed the theme and the execution of the theme.
• It's nice, I guess, to know that there are enough "Funny Amy"s with precisely seven letters in their last names (POEHLER, SEDARIS, SCHUMER) that one really has to struggle with the clue.
• This puzzle included the word "SWOLE." So.

First Fritz out!
------------------------------

Allie in. Should I take a hint about how "exhaustive" my lists are? Should this be the end of the post?

Haha! Of course not! ONWARD!

Clues I especially liked! Yay!

• I think it's a little unfair to use Game of Thrones clues multiple weeks in a row, but I benefit from it! Not only was IMPS easy enough, JAPES is one of GRRM's favorite Tyrion words. Which drives me crazy. I hate that guy and his stupid addicting books.
• I liked the cluing of Uncle Sam/GOATEED.
• TACOS/GUACAMOLE cross. Happy belated Cinco de Mayo!
• BASELINE VASELINE was certainly my favorite themer.
• Shout out to EMERSON, where my talented sister-in-law Marissa went.
• Took us forever to get ACTUALSIZE for Not blown up. Cute.

I'm too young for this $h*t

• Abie's Irish Rose, which was an audience success and a critical failure, apparently. The Fate of the Furious (aka Fast and Furious 8) of its day.

Really?

• Can we spell go-kart with a c? (That's c for cart, not co-kart.)
• Can we spell schnozz with one z? 

Things I learned today:

• LBO is a Wall St Thing. (Leveraged buyout. Uncle Dicky, if you are ready this, I'm sorry.)
• MIR means peace in Russian. I thought it just meant space station.
• Kachina dolls are from the Hopi people.
• Xian is the home of the Terra Cotta Army. I looked this up and it's pretty amazing. Seems like a good travel goal.

Things I have learned from previous crossword puzzles:

• DORAG. A rapper topper. I mean, I knew what a do-rag was before I started this blog, but I now store it in the part of my brain reserved for crosswordese. I keep it next to EOS. And across from AGLET.

Times I got to use my French major this week 

• No French here? We did get Spanish and Italian though, which are all basically the same.
• Wait there was one! MADAME. Come on though, everyone knows that. I'm not special.
• Also, "The Adventures of Alix" is a French comic book. But I didn't know this. Check out this picture from Wikipedia though: sign me up!
  

Second Fritz out!

"New England Chatter," 4/30/17

YOU GUYS. This puzzle was an unmitigated disaster for me. I'd like to think it's also a disaster for the NYT, the crossword community, and the world at large.

Time to finish/time I gave up: 1:23:39. I did finish the puzzle, but only because Jamie looked at the answer and helped me with the end. And even then we had 4 letters wrong. It was ugly.

Commentary:
The sad thing is, I actually liked this theme when I started out and got SPOCKPLUGS. I thought it was kind of funny. The bottom half of the puzzle basically went fine. And then it went south in the north. (Ha.)

Instead of my usual post sections, I thought I would just list for you all the things that I didn't know or generally went awry with this one.

• Let's start with the the clue that makes me think the apocalypse is nigh: ACALLTOOMS (24A Yoga teacher's invitation?) No one in their right mind pronounces "om" as "ahm." Rex blasts this failure, of course. Even the official NYT commentator gently says that this clue "falters a bit in [her] opinion because OMS is typically pronounced with a long O." You think???

We did eventually sort out that section of the puzzle (2nd last part we got.) The part I was so lost on that I needed help to finish was the center.

• PASSINGMOCK (69A Ridicule shouted out of a moving car?) "Passing mark" is barely a phrase. Using the word "mark" for "grade" seems old-fashioned to me. We had the MOCK part filled in, understood it meant "mark," and still couldn't come up with anything.
• So, struggling mightily, I got no help from any of these crosses. Maybe I should have known some of them, but I didn't.
• EUTERPE Sister of Erato
• SACCO 1920's anarchist in a prominent trial. Ok, in hindsight I think I learned about this in 11th grade.
• EFS Buffet centerpiece. I actually considered the little "trick" going on here and still didn't understand that it was supposed to be EFS. I thought about EFF, but that didn't work. I also considered EYE (center of a buffeting wind?) and EGG (a giant chafing dish of scrambled eggs?)
• TALIA Shire of Rocky
• END Squash.This one is a "maybe" on the scale of whether I would have eventually figured it out.
• AGITA Aggravation. I looked up this word. It's not even related to agitate, which is a word I know. Efs you, agita.
• To recap, not knowing any of this horsepoop left me with _A_______MOCK. Hard to believe I couldn't get it from that.

Moving on. Here are some of the other bad things. I honestly can't list all the things I had wrong at one point or another without breaking Blogger with an infinitely long post.

• Roster shortener ETALII. Et al, I know. This was two letters beyond my ken, and both of them were I. Not easy to guess. Especially when the cross is...
• First daughter of the 1960's LUCI. Granted, I didn't even know the answer, but why didn't she spell it Lucy like everyone else by that name?
• Inclined ASLOPE. Blech.
• Flower arrangement RACEME. According to Wikipedia, a raceme is an unbranched, indeterminate type of inflorescence bearing pedicellate flower. Must have missed that day in...herbology.
• Where Einstein was born ULM. "Germany" was too long, so that was the end of that for me.
• Strict Sabbath observer of old ESSENE. Now I know.
• Chrissie HYNDE is from The Pretenders. She looks like a badass. 
• ___-turn NOU. For a long time I thought this was going to be YOU, as some sort of terrible non-pun. While I'm glad it's not that, I still hate this one. I think the ___- construction is confusing. So, that was stopping me from getting ASNAP (also lame), and it didn't help that I didn't know...
• ANGELA Cartwright was the real name of one of the von Trapp children. Who knows this? It looks like she has done some other projects, so maybe that's why people know her, but it would take a real die-hard fan to know all the kids' names.
• In case you didn't look it up--she was Brigitta, who was the books one. Not to be confused with Louisa, who was a nasty trickster.
• Mother of Helios THEA. I have really got to study mythology one of these days if I ever hope to be a giant in the crossworld.
• Nitwits SIMPS. Neither of these words is useful.
• Shere HITE wrote Women and Love, which I have not read, but perhaps that's my own fault.
• I will admit that I had no idea how to spell MOHEL. Would have guessed MOYLE. In fact, did guess that, and spent a long time being wrong in that part of the puzzle.

And there you go. Taking all of that into account, I'm actually glad I finished in under an hour and a half. Oh wait, I didn't finish, I had to cheat. Well, at least tomorrow is Monday. Oh wait, Mondays are the worst. There is nothing good left in the world.

Fritz out!

"A Century of Song," 4/23/17

Hello, readers! Did you miss me last week? I did not enjoy this puzzle, so if you read this blog primarily to get your own complaints validated, you'll be glad you came back. If you like Ella Fitzgerald so much that this puzzle was still ok for you, you might want to just quit now. Go read Rex, he thought it was average.

Time to finish/time I gave up: 34:04

Commentary:
This is my first of what Rex calls "once you've finished, draw on it!" puzzles. I was concerned, since we always do the puzzle on the computer, like normal people of our age bracket (and most others at this point perhaps?) (how else do you even know if you got it right??? what would you do, check an answer key? ew, too much work.) (let's be real, you would just assume you were right and move along with your day.) Luckily, the NYT website traces the shape for you. Less luckily, it starts with the wrong box.

Instead of "QUEEN OF JAZZ," I am led to believe the answer is "ZQUEEN OF JAZ." Maybe they are just trying to show me the crown shape, not the correct answer. Now, I won't be too picky about the shapes you can make by connecting the dots of a crossword puzzle, but I do have to point out that this crown looks very evil. More fitting for a Lannister (JAIME of 51A?) than Lady Ella.

Clues I especially liked! Yay!

• I kind of liked 87A Frank HOTDOG. We had the _OTD__ part first and were feeling really concerned about it, thinking of the adjective frank, of course. But it turned out we both hadn't made an error *and* got to think about hot dogs! Yummy!
• 34D Unlikely book club recommendation SMUT. Maybe it's unlikely in your book club...

I'm too young for this $h*t

• Dallas actress Sheree J. Wilson. Unless the clue is "Who shot ___?" I am going to be out of luck on Dallas-related clues. And I don't know the answer to that question, or who J.R. is.
• Record label KTEL. Lol records.
• Ok, we do have a record player, like good hipsters, but still.
• 3 things in one clue: Ovaltine, Little Orphan Annie, and radio shows.

Really?

• Agreed with Rex that ENNUIS is unacceptable, as well as ZTILES (as much as I like Bananagrams.)
• Also, did not know about ZLOTY. Did not like that section.
• 53A Stone Age relics NEOLITHS. As far as I can tell, a "Neolith" is something that is "Neolithic." This is a lame word.
• 60A Talk endlessly to JAWAT. We put in GABAT at first, because why not, when you are coming up with things no one ever says.
• TNUT. Just look at that. When that is in your puzzle, you know you've gone wrong.
• ARIOSI. Bleh. I guess this is the plural of "arioso," which is a word I am barely cognizant of to start with. I keep thinking of "wingardium leviosa" instead. (It's ari-OH-sa, not ario-SA.) 
• And, right next to ARIOSI, MISSEND, which is apparently what the rest of us call "reply all fail."
• 8D Close again, as a purse. RESNAP. Setting aside the annoyance of "RE-random verb" clues, is a purse really the snappiest thing you can think of?
• ACETAL. Not even acetyl, which I would have accepted.
• Skating champ Brian ORSER. Do people know this? Does this belong as something I learned, not to scoff at?
• Bubs = MACS. Whatever. But also, Lil Bub the cat:
  

Things I learned today:

• Et seq. I think it's kind of unfair that "et cet." also fits here. Come on, Latin. Although I do acknowledge that "et cet." is not a thing.
• Have we talked about Dad's on this blog before? Dad's is a root beer maker. I don't like root beer, and I don't know about Dad's. I do like my own dad though.
• "Sic parvis magna" means "greatness from small beginnings." I'm still not sure what "sic" means though--apparently not "always" or "tyrants," since there's not a lot of overlap between those two phrases.
• Reminding me of one of my favorite West Wing lines, regarding the meaning of "post hoc ergo propter hoc": "after hoc, therefore something else hoc."
• AGHA is a Turkish title. Although to be clear, it's from the Ottoman Empire and Turkish language, not modern Turkey. Now I know.

Things I have learned from previous crossword puzzles:

• ELHI
• EOS
• Rapa NUI

Times I got to use my French major this week 

• Nice is in the sud of France. I have been there and can attest that it is, in fact, nice.
• Edith Piaf songs, which I listened to as part of a teacher's lesson plan multiple times.

Fritz out!

"Having Nothing On," 4/9/17

I must say, I highly recommend puzzling at your local brewery. A tasty puzzle for a tasting flight! Milo came along in the stroller and we had a grand old time.

Time to finish/time I gave up: 48:27. We had to check the puzzle again this week after getting the dreaded "you're wrong" message around 36 minutes and spending 10 minutes failing to correct the problem. We had 2 mistakes--1, we had BEAT for 72D Overcome instead of BEST, leading to the "duh" moment that Elizabeth with some memoir was EDWARDS, not EDWARDA...whoops.
I feel less guilty about mistake #2, where we had ACTS for 50A Parliamentary procedures and VACUS for 31D Empty spaces...granted that "vacus" is not really a thing, but "vacua" is not a word that I use often either. We were already guessing on LARUSSA and AEREO so that whole section was a mess. (We also tried LAROSSA, LARUSSO, and various other combinations. Aereo seemed the most likely--I assume this is airmail-related?--but you never know with these dang foreign languages. Speak American, crossword.*)
*This is a joke.

Commentary:
It took reading Wordplay  column for me to really understand that "nothing on" means OON. We got the pattern within solving a few of the themers but the "nothing" = O part escaped me...I kept trying for "having no thin goon" as the key to the puzzle. That said, I thought the themers were pretty funny, for the most part. My favorite is probably SAUSAGEFESTOON.

Another funny mistake I made: for a little while I had TBJ for the Toronto Blue Jays instead of TOR (don't ask me why...probably those beers...) which led to the 2D Sign of spring being BLOB_. Ah, let us herald the return of the spring blobs.

Clues I especially liked! Yay!

• 22A Home for Bilbo Baggins HOBBITHOLE. What, not Bag End? #nerdalert
• Shout-out to Frances Bavier, Aunt Bee of The Andy Griffith Show. I spent many a half-hour watching reruns with my dad, who also taught me crosswording, so this was a happy confluence.
• OTOH, if this were any other tv show of its era, I would probably not know the answer and file this under the following category.

I'm too young for this $h*t

• Rene Clement is a French director whose famous movies are from the 50s-70s. I'm not sure if I'm too young for this or if it's just the puzzle reminding me of my lack of highbrow cinema knowledge.

Really?

• 10A Blood enemy? CRIP. I mean damn, NYT.
• SPLEENY! What is this delightful word?
• What is the cross-section of people who do the crossword and people who listen to shock jocks? Especially OPIE? If it's not Howard Stern, I'm out of ideas. Besides, if you have another Andy Griffith clue in the same section, why not go for the one-two punch?

Things I learned today:

• I did not know that My Gal Sal is a musical. Via my father and my husband, I think of myself as knowing more than the average bear about musicals, but not this time. This oversight made me think the themer might be punning at the sentence "My gal's a loon," which would have made me mad (don't call a woman crazy, hypothetical speaker!) so I'm glad for the existence of My Gal Sal.
• Romain de Tirtoff was a Russian-born French artist and designer known by the pseudonym Erté, from the French pronunciation of his initials.
• That is a great fun fact! Go French!
• Confession: sometimes I mix up Belgrade and Belfast. Thanks for stopping me before I destroyed a corner of the puzzle with "eire" or something instead of SERB, Jamie.
• Jean Adair is an actress from Arsenic and Old Lace. I haven't seen the movie, but I saw our high school's version of the play and even that was hilarious.
• Selma is the "butterfly capital of Alabama." Glad they have another claim to fame down there.
• Polo has "chukkers" instead of quarters/periods/halves/etc. 
• Apparently there are usually six of them and they last 7.5 minutes each.
• Polo, you're ridiculous.

Times I got to use my French major this week 

• Not a ton of French in this week's puzzle, besides La Loire, but we did have acht and ocho, so that was cute.

Fritz out!

"Initial Description," 4/2/17

Apologies if you have been feverishly awaiting this post. (Ha.) I got back from a little weekend trip with my girlfriends in the late morning and have been reuniting with my baby all day. Ah, parenthood.

Time to finish/time I gave up: 53:08. I guessed on some stuff at the end, checked the puzzle to see how bad it was, had 5 letters wrong (all in the SW corner), but managed to get them all without revealing. (Also without typing in every letter in the alphabet but not technically clicking "reveal," a strategy by which I have been tempted in the past but is definitely cheating.)

Commentary:
I did not enjoy this puzzle. I liked the concept of the theme, but I didn't like any of the actual answers. They weren't cute. Rex was less perturbed by this than I thought he would be, and I thought his examples were pretty funny actually. But when it came down to it...a swan is a "swimmer?" Three "rolled into" one? It all felt too stilted for not enough payoff.

Here's all the stuff I messed up in the SW:

• Michael Stich. I believe our first try was Smith. Which I thought was as good as anything else, as far as guesses about names.
• Egon Spengler.
• Dys. (Not dis.)
• Bad start? is a terrible clue.
• Therefore, we also had STEER and ACRONYM wrong, but I was guessing on Rene for Preval, and O. Henry, so I needed the Check Puzzle to guide me towards getting these right.

Also, I don't enjoy being reminded of Sean Spicer during my fun crossword time. Or Ayn Rand, for that matter.

Clues I especially liked! Yay!

• The line starting with 84A was a big win for me:
• Jose Cuervo
• Dora the Explorer
• I don't really care about Dora (yet?) but I was very confident I was right about this one.
• UNC (GO TAR HEELS!!! AHHHHHH!!!)
• Saga
• In context, not interesting, but I do really enjoy the graphic novel series by the same name.

I'm too young for this $h*t

• The song "Once in Love With Amy." Now that I have listened to it, it sounds vaguely familiar. However, if you are looking it up, you should know that there is a Muppet Show version, and while there does not seem to be any actual footage on Youtube (copyright issues?), someone has delightfully recreated the number with puppets, and the original audio in the background. Well done, sir/madam.
• Alan King, who spoke at Kennedy's inauguration, died in 2004. Wikipedia says he inspired Joan Rivers, Jerry Seinfeld, Larry David, and Billy Crystal, among others, so I guess he's worth looking up.
• "Ta-ra-ra Boom-de-ay." This is from vaudeville, so everyone would be too old for it, except I guess Howdy Doody kept it alive?
• Loni Anderson. WKRP in Cincinnati is before my time.

Really?

• 20A Togalike Roman cloak ABOLLA. Two issues here: 1. Togalike is not even a word, so we are off to a rough start. (Why not "toga-like"?) 2. No one knows ABOLLA. I think this is the only time I have ever seen Google so short on related searches, meaning not only does no one know this word, no one even cares to find out about it:
  
• That's it. 4 suggestions. You've reached the end of the internet.
• The cross of the largest city of Yemen (SANAA) and the capital of Uganda (KAMPALA). Help a sister who's bad at geography out! 
• I did guess at this, but I felt pretty good about it. I'm 99% sure Sanaa has already been in a Sunday puzzle I've done. Crosswords > high school.
• Things I am almost certain I have complained about before, but like a bad penny...
• Gists = NUBS. If you say so.
• Cole Porter's "Well, Did You Evah?"

Things I learned today:

• I don't think I knew the word dotard? I'm not sure I like it. Looks like the r-word for old people.
• Rapa Nui is a Polynesian name for Easter Island and its people. I'm glad to know this!
• VSOP (Very Superior Old Pale) is a brandy grade. I think we could have been a little more creative here, brandy-grading committee. Very superior?

Times I got to use my French major this week 

• La terre. That's all I got this time.

Fritz out!

"Mixed Results," 3/26/17

My sister- and mother-in-law are here! I won't have time to write a full post today since we are busy hanging out with the baby. But I did do the puzzle while they were at the grocery store buying food for our poor empty fridge, so here are the results:

Time I finished: 46:33

It took me FOR.EVER. to figure out the theme of this puzzle. The themers were almost the last part I finished. Finally broke it open with the blue+red=purple one (blue hearts, red people eater) when we had _LU_HEARTS. I thought this was a clever puzzle and the fill was fun for once. Rex disagrees with me, but there's no pleasing him.

What did you think, loyal readers? What were you too old or too young for? What made you say "really?" Did you use your college major this week?

What did you learn? I learned that ERSE is a European language (apparently it's Irish/Gaelic). Given that I work at a language services company and know the names of probably at least 300 languages, I was pretty concerned that I couldn't fill this in early on, but I feel a little better now that I know it's an alternative and/or old-fashioned name.

"111-Across!" 3/19/17

It's a joyous weekend for my family; my dad was inaugurated as the 31st president of Centenary College on Friday. Congrats, Dad! We have all converged on Shreveport, Louisiana and have had a ball. Including the very best of activities...family crossword. We had 4 deft solvers on this one, leading to a nice time of...

Time to finish/time I gave up: 39:33. Not too shabby, especially considering that includes the time it takes to read the clues out loud.

Commentary:
Hey all! Guest poster Fran here. It's always great to get a chance to puzzle with the family when we're together. It's also not always so great because it reminds me how much less crystallized intelligence I have than most other members of my family (but I do know what crystallized intelligence is, so school psychology for the win). I don't know what Allie is going to say about today's puzzle yet but I enjoyed the theme, especially the Harry Potter theme clue. 10 points to Hufflepuff for any puzzle with HP references. That said, 10 points from Slytherin for Snape killing Dumbledore (spoiler alert). Frannie out.

Allie in (?). I, too, thought that the theme was fun, and was glad that there were no spoilers that I didn't already know. I don't know what crystallized intelligence is, and Frannie is very smart, even though she's a Hufflepuff.

As I am writing this post and my list of complaints grows longer and longer, I realize that I quite liked this puzzle but maybe only because it's easy when 4 people are thinking about it at once. Some of this might well have frustrated me if I had been on my own.

Clues I especially liked! Yay!

• 35A Product of Boston or Chicago SONG. Cute. We spent a lot of time trying to make this Sox-related. (SOCK? SOKS? SOXS?)
• 44A "Phooey!" DANG. As we all know, I normally dislike these clues, but my lovely sister (see above) says "dang" so it gets a pass.
• "A day without a friend is like a pot without a single drop of honey left inside" Small tear.

I'm too young for this $h*t

• I'll just leave this here:
  

Really?

• 7A Pale-faced ASHY. "Ashen" would be fine. "Ashy," when applied to skin tone, means (at least in modern parlance) white coloring on dark skin. Just Google it if you don't believe me. Therefore, I don't think this clue means what Thackray and Shortz think it means. Watch your privilege, NYT.
• I don't usually know the geography clues, which is often my own failing, but I do think it's a stretch to have Indonesian islands featured twice in the same puzzle. (BALI and ARU)
• 53A Bad luck, old-style UNHAP. What? Pretty sure this is like, medieval old-style, not weird 50's slang, saving it from the previous category. Urban Dictionary points out that "unhaps" is currently used as an abbrev for "unhappy," as in, "this clue makes me unhaps."
• 61A Peeping aid SPYHOLE. Gross.
• 90A Relating to the sun HELIACAL. The root helio is fair game, but this word was not familiar to our solver group, which would also be acceptable except that it crossed with 84D Interest for a limnologist, which turns out to be LAKES. It's a good thing that LOKES is not a word, or we would have been out of luck. Tough cross.
• 2D Tomboy HOYDEN. It's unhap that this word is no longer in use at all. When the dictionary lists it as "dated," maybe don't put it in your crossword.
• 12D Muddles MARESNESTS. I guess this means "muddle" as a noun, which I already dislike, but no one in my family knows this phrase, which means it doesn't exist. Also, "mare's nest crossword" is one of the Google auto-fill suggestions, so that's strike 3 for this one.

Things I learned today:

• Sir Basil Urwin Spence, OM, OBE, RA was a Scottish architect, most notably associated with Coventry Cathedral in England and the Beehive in New Zealand, but also responsible for numerous other buildings in the Modernist/Brutalist style.
• I also did not know there is a Brutalist style. I gotta say, I don't love it. The name isn't doing it any favors.
• Marshal Lon Nol was a Cambodian politician and general who served as Prime Minister of Cambodia twice, as well as serving repeatedly as Defense Minister.
• My dad knew this one (of course). From my end, all I know is that his name is a palindrome.
• A ferrule is a ring or cap, typically a metal one, that strengthens the end of a handle, stick, or tube and prevents it from splitting or wearing.
• File this in the crossword section of the brain next to aiglet. 
• Sometimes Shiva is spelled Siva.
• John Andre was a British Army officer hanged as a spy by the Continental Army during the American Revolutionary War for assisting Benedict Arnold's attempted surrender of the fort at West Point, New York to the British.
• Again, good thing my dad was here for this one.

Times I got to use my French major this week 

• Eau flows in a riviere. (Sorry for the lack of accents, Blogger is pretty terrible.)
• La fin. How appropriate.

Fritz out!