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.