Tuesday, 11/29/16

I realize that it's Wednesday, but Tuesdays make me feel good about myself, and we didn't start this one until after 8, which is late when one has an infant.

Time to finish/time I gave up: 15:46
Did I finish it without help? Heck yes
Did I check puzzle? If yes, how many letters were wrong? N/A

Commentary:

I have a thing about always wanting to start the puzzle in the NW corner, where the 1 is. That section mostly eluded me at first though. While I was considering answer options, Jamie helpfully (not) jumped in with "Oh, that one is Nas [32A "Cherry Wine" rapper]." See, Jamie likes to look through the clues for things he knows and stick them in at random. Like, WHILE we are working on one of the other boxes. Ugh.

I will admit that this strategy worked out well enough, as we started with NAS/NTH (To the __ degree), and pretty much never looked back.

I'm too young for this $h*t

• 4D Neil who sang "Laughter in the Rain" SEDAKA. I don't think I know this song, but with the help of having Neil in the clue and the K already plugged in from TURKISH DELIGHT, I actually did know the name, although I wasn't sure of the spelling. Nothing too egregiously old school in this puzzle.
• Side note--shout-out to The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe for introducing me to Turkish delight, of which I think very fondly but don't think I have ever actually eaten. I am sure I'm not alone in this.

Really?

• 6D Commit arson on. "On?" Can we not just say "commit arson?" I am confused about this.
• 47D Shade provider. TREE. Wow. That is some People-magazine-crossword-level action right there.

Things I learned today:

• There are other parts of a croquet set besides the whacker thingys and the balls and the wickets. (It's the PEGS, 1A Croquet needs.) Obviously, I'm great at cricket. I mean, croquet. Whatever.
• HAMAN is the [35A] Purim villain. I am ashamed to admit that I did not know anything about Purim until I Googled this. Unless you count that Home for Purim is the fictional film-within-a-film in the Christopher Guest movie For Your Consideration. 
• Elihu Root is not someone that I knew, but I really like his name and will now never forget him.
• Alcoa is a company that makes cans, and their name comes from Aluminum Company of America. I kind of like that, although it also seems like what you would name your company if you got bored at the brainstorming meeting.

Fritz out.

Sunday, November 27, 2016

Time to finish/time I gave up: 1:54:13
Did I finish it without help? NOPE
Did I check puzzle? If yes, how many letters were wrong? 4. I got all the way down to 4 letters and then I was totally stuck. So, not only did I check puzzle, I revealed puzzle. Sigh.

Commentary:
We got the top half done in a decent amount of time and without using the pencil, and then the bottom half was a dumpster fire where we penciled in things and made a lot of mistakes and ultimately forced our way into all but 4 of the right letters. I call it a win!

Unfortunate error: I thought that Mariners' aids was SACBUNTS (like the baseball team? Right?) and felt pretty proud of myself. But then couldn't figure out the rest of that box. Then it became obvious that For two was ADEUX and Time for una siesta was TARDE, leaving us with the unfortunately nonexistent term SEXBUNTS. Jamie cleverly then made the jump to SEXTANTS.

The ones we never could get were:

• Big name in root beer (arguably not that big...but also I hate root beer)/Carter/Brezhnev agreement (I knew this in the back of my brain but couldn't pull it up.) DADS/SALTII. Was it Yalt II? Aalt II? Just couldn't get there.
• Old World lizard/Hulk Hogan trademark/Makes it? AGAMA/DORAG/TAGS. I still don't understand any of this, except that I do know that "tags" is a word.
• "My Cup Runneth Over" crooner/Bygone boomers, for short EDAMES/SSTS. I had to Google "Edames" before I understood that this was a person named Ed Ames. It's very hard to Google an acronym with multiple meanings, and I'm still not sure what SST stands for. I'm guessing that it's "supersonic transport," since things that are supersonic make a boom. But here are some other things that SST stands for, according to Wikipedia:
• Salt spray test, a method of measuring corrosion resistance of materials and surface coatings
• School of Science and Technology, Oregon or Singapore options
• Sea surface temperature
• Spitzer Space Telescope, NASA infrared space observatory
• Samoa Standard Time (Hey! This links to APIA, which is apparently where Robert Louis Stevenson died, although I knew Apia because in my job I talk to a lot of Samoan people. Every question's easy when you know the answer.)

I'm too young for this $h*t

• 11D Cat that epitomizes finickiness MORRIS. This ad campaign is from 1968. Don Draper probably came up with this.
• 115A "My Cup Runneth Over" crooner EDAMES. Wikipedia says, and I quote, "He is known for his pop hits of the 1960's." I'm glad to see he's still alive, though. Hang in there, Ed.

Really???
Things we got but thought were stupid.

• 64A Moved at a crawl = SNAILED? Really???
• 103A See = DATE? I get that this is half of the bigger theme clue, but, ugh.
• 78A Sushi go-with What is a "go-with"? I don't like it!!!

Things I learned today:

• The Paris Metro has 303 stations. Really, really thought they were talking about a television network, which made this clue surprisingly hard.
• The Otoe are a Native American tribe. Luckily, I learned this word in one of last week's puzzles, but today I bothered to look it up.
• There is a fast food chain called Del Taco. Of the taco?
• What is a bias tire? What's a radial tire, for that matter? Jamie does all the car stuff. I didn't actually learn anything about this because the article looked boring.
• Efrem Zimbalist plays (played?) the violin.
• Agnate: a person descended from the same male ancestor as another specified or implied person, especially through the male line. Aight, if you say so, dictionary. Brute-forced our way into solving this one.
• There is a mountain called Mt. Adams. It's in the Pacific NW.
• Ratt is a heavy metal band. I encourage you to look up images of them and fondly recall the 80's.

Fritz out.

About this blog!

My husband Jamie and I got a year-long NYT crossword subscription as our thank you gift for donating to our local NPR station's pledge drive. (Shout-out to WOSU!) We've been doing the crosswords here and there for the past few weeks, and enjoy reading Rex Parker's blog when we're done to see what he thought of the puzzles, and think about how dumb we are. (Shout-out to my dad, who likes crosswords and Rex Parker's blog!) Every time I read Rex, I think, wouldn't it be funny if I wrote a blog like this, because I don't finish half of the puzzles? So, here it is!

It is relevant to know that I am 30 years old, and therefore I find many clues to be outside of my potential knowledge bracket. I shall highlight these to make other readers of this blog feel old. If any of you brilliant crossword creators or Will Shortz are reading this: update your clues, geezers.