Floor Support

Can somebody explain what I'm missing? Why is BBS as a plural an appropriate fill for cheap shot?

Coming in late, just to affirm that I'm with Kipling on this puzzle: East is East nd West is West...

I found the western half of the grid difficulto filll, but doable, whereas the eastern half left me nonplussed: RAIN DATE, TALL ONE, EXPEDIA, HEDER, ARENA ROCK, TIME SLOT,were all out of my ken. It seems that Thursday, maybe Wednesday, is my limit.

I take issue with the fill for the clues "Leader of the pack." In the world of wolves, that leader is the ALPHAfemale, not ALPHAMALE. In human society it can go either way.

#Subtlesexismpersists

I found today's puzzle really difficult. In hindsight, I'm going to blame my difficulties on being tired, having already been to a doctor and my tax preparer before I got to the puzzle.

Debated HER, him, and you, and didn't get much further along in NW, although that turned out to be my favorite part of the puzzle. (Yankee POT ROAST. Yum!)

Thought of TERABYTE but didn't have the nerve to put it in because I didn't like the Y. SOUND ASLEEP took forever. ROOD before SCAN soured my SOAVE.

COLD ONE before TALL ONE, so my climber was using some kind of an OX.

SNEAK IN before STEAL IN messed up my muesli and my spouse.

Forget about [Foreigner's genre]/ARENA ROCK. I'd never get it. NIE. Especially crossing the problematic TEN AM, RAS, and ECKO.

But after all that, when I filled in the last blank square and MHP failed to appear, it wasn't any of those problems. It was just a silly typo in NW. Grrrr.

All in all, a challenging and satisfying solve. Thanks to all.

Very enjoyable solve today. Lots of unusual-for-crosswords entries like TOUGH LOVE, BALALAIKA, SNOW CRAB, POT ROAST, SOUND ASLEEP. So nice to see STRAITLACED kamut correctly. Many tough clues, including "If so" for THEN, "It can be beaten" for PATH, etc. Unfortunately I can't finish this right now, but I look forward to more like it in the future!

I'm with the crowd who found this somewhat challenging. I filled in most of the eastern half and SW Thursday night, but my brain totally stopped functioning in the NW quadrant. I had RUG and OTHER HALF, but nothing else was working. Couldn't decide among HER, HIS, or YOU for 18A & didn't even think of the campaign slogan. So I put it away overnight and just came back and looked at it. And TOUGH LOVE immediately showed up, and that was all I needed to fill in the rest of the corner lickety-split.

The SE was my first solid fill, with BALALAIKA and ARENA ROCK.

ARIOSE is one of those words I've only ever seen in crossword puzzles.

Got our last bit of taxes done this morning. We discovered Tuesday night that Mr B's Merrill Lynch peeps had liquidated all his holdings in a fund in March without warning him. So there's a delightfully large and unexpected capital gains tax payment due. (I'm being sarcastic here). Grrrrrrrrrrr.

"Let me hear your BALALAIKAs ringing out/come and keep your comrade warm..." Do you suppose PUTIN is a Beatles fan?

Nice challenging Friday puzzle. Lots of sneaky misdirection in the clues. Had TAS before RAS. I just don't get the movie "Napoleon Dynamite," and misremembered the star's name as HAMER. I've watched "Deadliest Catch" a few times, but thought they were after KINGCRABS. So, a few write-overs today, but it all pulled together eventually.

My first thought for the Foreigner clue was another genre with a less genteel name. A word that rhymes with "rock" and has to do with anatomy. Happily, it didn't fit. I shall say no more.

David Bowie wrote and recorded the tribute song "Andy WARHOL" for his 1972 album "Hunky Dory." Personally though, I think the Stone Temple Pilots stole the song from him with their knock-out cover version from their appearance on MTV's "Unplugged" show:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UzhZx591rIQ

I decided not to write in ARENAFOLK because (A) I never heard of it, and (B) I hated FAS even more than I hated ELKO. I wish I'd thought of the correct answer, because RAS seems familiar. Not so the other correct answers. But even a double Natick doesn't mar the joy of (nearly) completing this easyish (for Friday) puzzle. Nor does it spoil the fun to admit that I should have got everything correctly. Humility is good to have.

So much to learn. Turned out that as I labored over deciphering what 'out' could possibly mean I must have been SOUNDASLEEP. That was sure a head hitter. As for 'Foreigner genre' my age belies me here. I've never gotten over the amazing variety and sometimes seemingly totally unsuitability of musical groups' names. I was busy looking for what foreigners might have in common.

Seems I am getting better at some of the sneaky clues; MOSES was my instant reaction to 'ancient mountain climber' but I discarded it at first as being unlikely.

Would I get a BADRAP if I played my BALALAIKA in a BOOTH?

As a good citizen of Red Sox Nation I really wanted "Yankee Fare" to be a Bart Simpsonian MY SHORTS, but none of the downs would cooperate except 5.

The clue for TENAM was infelicitous. Without the colons it was just...wrong, and yes I did serve in the military. And "familiarly" falsely implies slanginess. Better clue: ------- Puente, archeological site.

Very satisfying solve with many clues that themselves seemed like riddles (SCAT, EATER, APED, ARENAROCK, BOOTH, MOSES, PATH), and those are the best kind, IMO. In my house of wheels there were enough answers that appealed to give this puzzle spark (ABOUTTHAT, TOUGHLOVE, TALLONE, PARLANCE, BALALAIKA).

My brain is having a hard time processing the confluence of MOSES and WARHOL. Also, I looked up the origin of "mortal coil", and "coil" used to mean "fuss" or "chaos", thus the phrase refers to the chaos and confusion of our everyday lives. But whenever I see "mortal coil", I always think of DNA.

In any case, this was a right-on-the-mark Friday puzzle. Encore please, Andrew!

Count me in with the "this puzzle was challenging" crowd. Not many writeovers, but slow, slow, and slower, due to some very clever cluing. For 9A I tried "Send" before SCAT, and for 15D "meAN" before SPAN. All in all, a rousing Friday workout!
PS I am not inclined to believe anything PUTIN says about himself.

Whoever does the clues is fiendishly clever. What is odd is that after a while you start to think like him and thus learn to barely keep up. All the strange factoids you acquire over the course of a lifetime finally come in handy, if you can only think of them. Then it's up to the puzzle-maker to dazzle you with brilliance, which they do quite a bit. All in all, this was a very solid effort.

Is this puzzle an example of TOUGHLOVE? It sure did teach me a lesson which hopefully will make me a better solver in the future. So that SE section was for my own crossword solving good, right? TENAM/BALALAIKA/COIL did me in.

I always thought my husband was my better HALF, not my OTHERHALF.

I went from sitS to acTS to ASKS. Here I learned that "Poses" has many meanings.

And what's a LEE RAT? (I'm kidding!)

In vulgar PARLANCE, this one was a stinker--a SHOCK to my system, and that's PUTIN it mildly. Back and forth, back and forth. TAS or RAS? MEGA or TERA? Fashion designers? RAPpers? TV shows, hip movie actors, all that bad stuff.

If you want to see a real stinker of a movie, I recommend the Nelson Eddy film entitled BALALAIKA. (Jeanette MacDonald was not his co-star in that one, at least.).

On with the day!...

I needed to adjust: 1.My spelling for 21D; 2. Consider SWAT over belt; and, 3. COIL instead of soil.

60A and 54D both came a I waited for Happy Pencil by guessing the letter K.

Today is slow roast the Easter Ham day here in dk land. Other news, bears are up and visited the bird feeders last night: Wanton destruction.

Thank you Andrew... as you used SKAT for puzzle 7 will crazy eights be next.

Foreigner was a rock band in the 70s.

Worked on this for about 55 minutes Thursday night, only got about halfway done. Looked like a lost cause. Woke up at 5:15, unintentionally, and it hit me that WARHOL was behind "Chelsea Girls, and the rest of the puzzle, after another short spell of sleep, fell into place in about 10 more minutes after a few wild guesses (ARENA ROCK? Didn't know that was a thing, but OK. Ditto SNOW CRAB). Last word to fall: TEN AM for 1000. Oof! Was thrown off by inserting SAP initially for "Bud source." Another tough Friday puzzle, but so satisfying to solve.

Sorry to be slow, but how is ARENAROCK a foreigner's genre?

Thanks.

A bit dismayed but not surprised that people found this a bit easy. For me it was more like a Saturday. I did a lot of alphabet running, and still none of the letters clicked; the only example I can think of now is EATER for following fire and light. Head smack when I finally got it.

I did get TAVERN straight away, but wonder why a brewski is a TALLONE or even TALL ONE.

Is it time for a glass of SOAVE?

This went pretty smoothly. POT ROAST was my initial thought for 1A; how ABOUT THAT (to quote Mel Allen in keeping with the Yankee part of the clue). Bill HADER the other day and Jon HEDER today. Plus SKAT and SCAT.

Am I the only one who just learned that "STRAITLACED" is not "STRAIGHTLACED"?

An aptly challenging Friday puzzle. I wondered about the 51A clue: Was the wearer growing shorter? It took me longer than it should have to understand TEN AM. I was pleased as punch to fill in "Very conservative" (21D) with REACTIONARY, then dismayed to see every single letter proven wrong. My excuse for the mistake is that in these parlous times we tend to take "conservative" as a political rather than a behavioral term. Funny to see SOUND ASLEEP and CATNAP side by side and then SCAT and SKAT helping form the right-side corners of the grid.

MIT doesn't have RAS- they have GRTS (Graduate Resident Tutors)

Ain't no diner in New England that wouldn't have Yankee Pot Roast on the Entrees page. With mashed potatoes, gravy, and green beans.

Skat is a pretty good choice of card game if you have three players. Seven is the low card in all the French-suited card games, so that clue was a little unhelpful.

Likewise - oboe is the only common _four-letter_ instrument with speaker holes / octave keys, but the clue could have just read "crossword puzzle instrument" and we'd have dunked our Oreos and filled it in with O-B-O-E.

On the other hand, nice to see the Balalaika there, one of the more angular instruments in the lute family. Here is a master of the electric balalaika:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8gm_RKqeUNA

Was this a wildly easy Friday, or was it just my wheelhouse that let me SWAT it? Would somebody in the NBC BOOTH call it? I'm in SHOCK; did the ARENA ROCK? Didn't need a RAIN DATE. I'm AWL in now. Need a TALL ONE at the TAVERN.

(PUTIN a good word)

"...the answer is apparently POT ROAST."

Dubious, Deb? Here's a recipe:
http://www.myrecipes.com/recipe/traditional-yankee-pot-roast