I got the joke...I filled in the puzzle...but just for the record, there are some of us out here whose shoulders sag when faced with yet another sports theme. Ugh. Sorry.
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Very annoying puzzle. The clues may be considered “antique,” but they were also just bad. For example, tubas are not wind instruments. They are brass. No one has ever used oiled for drunk, ever. Just a waste of tome for little entertainment.
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STEREOtypical was world class subterfuge. Great puzzle.
2
Once again, I completed everything except for minor errors - without ever discovering the theme!
I really dislike the clue "caste" for ant. I believe it should only rightly be used to refer to a particular class or group of insects, such as worker, etc., and not to the type of insect such as ant, wasp, bee, etc The dictionary definitions I find bear that out. I felt that it was ridiculously misleading and inaccurate
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But, but... if each ANT is of some caste, then any given ANT is a “caste member”.
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Then... the clue, to be accurate, should be "caste member", not just "caste".
...and that is, in fact, the clue.
1
The Giants won the World Series in 2010, 2012 and 2014 and should have been in the 2018 NYT puzzle
Too short.
Caught the theme pretty early and filled in 63A (the "revealer") straightaway. The puzzle proceeded apace, but I admit to a little cheating by looking up the spellings of WEIMERANER and AMALIE. Got the dreaded "Try again?" window upon finishing, though. I was sure the problem was with the intersection of 11A and 12D where I tried all the vowels but none gave me the "Congratulations" window. Perused the rest of the puzzle and corrected three misspellings (two of which involved the letter "i" per chance!): SOLiCE, iSWAN, and STANTeN. Still no happy music! As described in my reply to Michael Brothers earlier, I wrestled with the TEAMO/ENATE area again until finally entering the correct E. Success at last! All in all, a fun puzzle!
I loved it!!! I was reminded of Michael Jordan, who told his coach, (Phil Jackson, I believe) that there's an "I" in win.
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We’re a baseball family and I particularly enjoyed the theme. Coulda used Chicago White Sox. Or the Cubbies (as those of us who love them call them).
Liked NOLO and NOCONTEST connection. Had a great deal of trouble in the northwest and southeast. Like others, I had tENDER before RENDER. Couldn’t get COW for a very long time.
Nicely difficult.
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Okay I haven't been around for three days because three days running I've completed every puzzle in respectable time but missed one letter each time . And I had no idea that the western town was Eta. But that's beside the point. One letter isn't bad I know but I've grown used to getting everything. I'm about to hang up my cleats. I've lost my xwrd chops.
It wasn't a Western town called Etta; it was a person in a Western movie, a female-type person whose name was Etta Place.
I didn't know that either.
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Hang in there, Mickeyd! I had a one-square-off period as well -- frustrating! Just check all your entries with the mind-set "Is there another similar word that would better fit the clue?" If you have the intersection of two unknowns, just try all reasonable letters until you hit the correct one (assuming you're solving on line -- yes, the software will let you do this!)
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Don't forget that many regulars posted that this past week was especially challenging compared to most.
Another big league team that didn’t make the cut: the PHILADELPHIA PHILLIES.
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Themers have only one I in each of the geographical name and the team name.
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I started out bopping around the grid looking for gimmes when I got the reveal right off the bat, so to speak. Quickly uncovered the crossing themers, beginning with MINNESOTA TWINS. Still, some of the shorter fill needed more time. TENDER before RENDER for me too, and I did a quick alphabet run @1A/1D, because WUTSIT didn't CUT IT.
George Harrison covering "BALTIMORE ORIOLE," written by Hoagy Carmichael, from 1981:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tEmW4PdB0so
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wOW was my first fill and last fix. I didn’t think of CUTS IT (though I was pretty sure that was where my mistake was) until I turned off the light after which I almost immediately saw the light - as it were.
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"I"-ronic that a puzzle centered around the letter "I"would come undone because of a misplaced "I". I ha TI AMO and INATE. As a fan of the band Phoenix I was certain it was right. Oh well.
I thought this was a fun puzzle, ingeniously constructed.
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I too had trouble with ENATE and TEAMO, First, I couldn't remember the former even though it recently appeared in a NYT puzzle. Then, somehow the E in TEAMO escaped me and I wasted much time questioning ATE and even TUBA! Finally, insisted on the these, and ran the vowels to get the E. Whew!
That was exactly my error! Ti amo works in Italian but not Spanish.
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hi, this is Evy's husband, Doug.
Not to be too windy myself, but for 11 down, TUBAS are brass (not wind) instruments, aren't they?
Fun puzzle!
We normally think woodwinds when we talk about wind instruments. But instruments like TUBAS are brasswinds. Since they both involve wind (blown air).
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Thanks, Wen and Sheila, for correcting me - Doug
Aaaaaaahhhhh.... Not anywhere I've ever been!
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I was confused by 11D. I am no musical expert - though a long-time marching band parent - and tubas are brass instruments, not woodwinds.
Tubas aren't woodwinds, but any instrument played by blowing into it is a wind instrument.
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Theme was very helpful in this one... had the idea in place very early and it was supportive throughout the puzzle. I like when that happens! Thus, this crossword made me happy.
As a lifelong baseball fan, I came out swinging on this one. Still have no idea what a PUPU platter is or who that muppet monkey is, but everything was gettable by crosses. It went by so fast, I almost missed the ultimate trick, but appreciate the tip (foul or no) from the circled letters.
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PUPU platter was a popular dish in Chinese restaurants in NYC when I lived there in the 80's. I never ran into it anywhere else, and of course it was the "butt" of many off-colour jokes at the time.
Solving patchwork-like around the grid, I got the "NO I IN TEAM" pretty soon, and looking around thought it kind of TRASHY that teams were sometimes designated by name (NATIONALS, CARDINALS) and sometimes by location (MINNESOTA, DETROIT)... and then I saw the TIGERS crossing at DETROIT's I,,,and then saw that was the pattern... and that's when (like Gwen) I fell WOWed but not COWed in admiration.
C'est la VIE, right?
To be honest, I stuck with POW till the bitten end, since PUTS IT made some slight sense. Still hard to swallow that overawed COW. WUTS IT all about, Alfie?
The well-OILED grid had a fine array of fill, and won me over completely with "SPINAL Tap". Overawe-ll, I thought some of the cluing quite FANTAbulous, and particularly admired the clue 'Admit' as gateway to either LET_IN or LET_ON.
Ever on the alert for the final fillip yielding a fulsome frisson, I found a favourable finish to the TEAM-I concept with a furtive wink at TEAM-O. Fortuitous, Mr Kahn? I think not.
Nice RENDERing, Mr. Kahn, and thanks FER all the fish.
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May be no “I” in team, but as an SNL sketch poking fun at a particularly narcissistic professional player notes: there is a “me”
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I'd wanted to enter LLAMA for 34A as soon as I saw the clue but decided to first look up whether llamas are actually ruminants. I ended up finding multiple web results saying that they are not ruminants.
So, I stubbornly refused to enter LLAMA until it appeared through the downs. I'm more peeved about this than any rational person should be. :<
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Perhaps llamas are just given to meditation.
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I see what you mean (Wikipedia), although other references refer to them as "pseudo-ruminants."
This bugged me, too. Llamas are not ruminates since they do not have a rumen. Their forestach is called compartment 1 and differs from a true rumen.
Very fun puzzle! I tend to skip around to look at clues and when I saw the one about where General Mills is, I thought, "Minnesota?" I got the theme, but am embarrassed to admit I didn't realize the down theme clues went with the across ones until I got to the final pair - Minnesota Twins! I looked back and realized I'd completely missed that the others were in pairs (despite having already solved them!). Keep the Minnesota and baseball-themed clues coming - always love to find them in a puzzle!
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I finally noticed the team name/location pairs, but completely missed that they all crossed at the “I” until reading the blog.
Several layers of theme here - great puzzle!
Still grinding my teeth over Saturday's puzzle which, for the lack of one letter, z, I would have patted myself on the back. But, it wasn't just the letter since 58D alternative to a cab I thought cabernet was spelled with a capital C, so I dismissed it.
I probably wouldn't have guessed zin anyway since I'm not a wine-drinker. But, I did enter pin (Pinot noir?) and who can not love tzatpiki sauce? Grr!
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Me too. One letter. This has never happened to me two, now three, days in a row.
Particularly easy Sunday for me - fastest time for a Sunday as well . I am a baseball fan and this was really in my bailiwick ( two i's ) .
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umm... three i’s, no?
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Regarding David's notes, if you regard the team's first name as the city, and second name as the team name, then the San Francisco Giants and the Chicago White Sox could join the Pittsburgh Pirates as candidates for this puzzle that there just wasn't room for.
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I did my best to give multiple awards to OSSIE DAVIS, but the resulting mess in the NE finally led me to VIOLA. (Denzel should have won an Oscar for his performance in 'Fences,' too.)
AD REM, eh? We should all try the bar exam one of these days; we've certainly had enough exposure to the Latin phrases (or parts thereof), not to mention the various pleas.
I thought this puzzle was just amazing and generally delightful. Only thing wrong with it was that CINCINNATI did not fit the theme--although I did think David J. Kahn could have used BIG RED MACHINE and made it work!!
Onward!
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For a baseball illiterate like me, this puzzle flowed surprisingly easily - although I'm still searching for whatever is keeping the happy music silent.
I had TENDER before RENDER; I'd never noticed their relationship before.
In spite of my baseball ignorance, I had no trouble getting all the team names and they all were familiar to me. I noticed the circles at the beginning but then forgot about them and didn't notice their significance. Good work, David.
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I had TENDER before RENDER as well. I only noticed the circles after getting the revealer, thinking that they'd be on the "I" of the team name, only later to realize it was on the "I" of the crossing city name too.
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I too had TENDER before RENDER, and had no clue what TINEAR was until long after the puzzle was finished, and I suddenly realized that it was two words...
Yes, the TINE_AR is where you find the Fork in the R-Road.
There is an I in amazing that can cross with the I in David Kahn to describe how brilliant this construction is today. So smoothly done I really needed the circles to see what David hath wrought.
The punchline at 63A was the icing on the cake.
Bravo!
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Ugh! Either the answers came very easily or I only got them on the crosses and still don’t understand them (typical intro=STEREO?). Had all the team crosses without seeing the circles because I foolishly insist on doing the puzzle on my iPhone, even though I suffer from an eye condition that makes it hard for me to see what I’m looking at. Still, I thought it was way cool once I went back and looked. Loved it!
Alanna, that's a STEREOtypical misleading clue.
Is that the Marietta that I think it is? We've been looking at houses up there.
1
Aarrgghh! Now I get it! Thanks! Marietta, PA is a quaint little town founded in 1812. We’ve just finished a river trail that’s bringing in people from all over the world. It’s central to 3 counties and close to Baltimore and Philadelphia.
Ahh, ok. Wasn't aware of that one.
Down here the city is (STEREO) typically pronounced - 'may-retta.' The pronunciation is an easy way to find out if someone is a native (I'm not).
1
There's no 'u' in team either; so who's going to be on this team?
Anyway, before I started this morning I decided I would attempt what I never have before: Go for speed on a Sunday. That didn't last long. I had next to nothing after running through the across clues and dropped that idea. Chipped away in the south half (starting in the WINONA / STANTON area), but was still slow going. Then with the double 'I' that INN and ICAN gave me in 63a, the reveal finally dawned on me. I went ahead and filled in the I's. First one I got was CARDINALS but it still wasn't dawning on me that it was going to be cities and teams crossing. I think I actually had TWINS at that point but wasn't seeing it as a theme answer because it was a down.
Was still stuck in a lot of places and just started running through team names and... somewhere in the midst of that the big bright lightbulb went on, and I filled in the rest of the theme answers in short order. And then was able to fill in the rest of the puzzle. I can't think of another time when catching on to the theme so completely turned the tables on my solve.
Had more than a couple of failed checks early on and much mental cursing of my memory along the way, but still a lot of fun in the end.
3
"There's no 'u' in team either;"
I can counter that with our hometown Durham Bulls, though they're a team in the Minors, not the Majors.
1
Talk about refuted axioms, how about "There is no I in Trump"?
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But there are two in IDIOT.
23
There is a place for tiresomely predictable political comments, and this forum isn’t it, IMO.
10
It might be the case this is not a good place for political comments in general, but if it's on-topic (i.e. related to the puzzle in some way, however tenuous), it will be made.
I guess the main thing is not to dwell and drag it out so that it becomes off-topic.
I'm one of the offenders, so I'll shut up now.
1
I think that THERE'S NO I IN TEAM is the longest entry I've gotten without any letters that I was 99% sure of. ( except perhaps a proper name I know for sure). At that point I only had BALTIMORE and ORIOLES. I also risked putting the I's in the circles.
Like most everyone I had wOW before COW, but at least that 2nd W helped me get WINE TASTER, a fun clue/fill combo. I'm off on Thursday to Alsace in France with my wine tasting group, but hopefully won't get pie-eyed or I think that THERE'S NO I IN TEAM is the longest entry I've gotten without any letters that I was 99% sure of. ( except perhaps a proper name I know for sure). At that point I only had BALTIMORE and ORIOLES. I also risked putting the I's in the circles.
Like most everyone I had wOW before COW, but at least that 2nd W helped me get WINE TASTER, a fun clue/fill combo. I'm off on Thursday to Alsace in France with my wine tasting group, but hopefully won't get pie-eyed or OILED.
Not especially tricky, but a lot of fun today, thanks, David. OILED.
Not especially tricky, but a lot of fun today, thanks, David.
1
I have no idea what happened with the last two lines.
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Of course not, suejean.
:)
Regarding 16D - didn’t Whoopi Goldberg win all these awards first?
1
After some investigating, I found that Whoopi Goldberg's Emmy is a "Daytime Emmy" and doesn't count in the "triple crown" the way a Primetime Emmy would.
2
Also, Whoopi's Emmys were not for acting but for hosting.
Regarding 16D, having already gotten the DAVIS part, I wondered which one fit the clue. Was it OSSIE? SAMMY? BETTE? GEENA? Ah, yes, VIOLA. Don’t those DAVISes ever give their children anything but 5-letter first names?
While on the subject of Hollywood, I believe it was KATHARINE Ross, not Katherine, who played ETTA PLACE.
And lastly, Stony Brook’s teams are also the Seawolves. The sea wolf is apparently a fish, and a pretty ugly one at that. At SBU games, they chant responsively, “What’s a Seawolf?” “I’m a Seawolf.”
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Thanks for that Steve, Katharine is now Katharine.
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Go Seawolves !! The Stony Brook teams were the Patriots when I was there in the late 1970s.
I am pretty sure that Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid died later than 1969. Someone should fact-check that date.
Glad I'm not the only one who had wOW for ages. So word blind this morning that I had T_BA_ (with a presumed S at the end) and still had to fill in UNDERSIDE before the (cute) clue clicked.
Enjoyable puzzle that lead to the lesson of the day: Never start a NYT crossword before your first cup of coffee.
4
very clever! Especially liked the joint intersection of "I" in cities and teams -- thus proving there is an I in teams after all!
2
I was seeing cities with "I" letters hosting baseball teams, but didn't get that the team names were crossing at the "I" until I had already filled out 4 out of 5. Once I was WOWed by that (or was I COWed?) I finally able to solve the fifth one - the Washington Nationals.
I had "WITH IT" and "WOW", which I thought were better answers for both 1D and 1A, but, I presume the rest of the NW corner didn't like those letters.
I thought the puncturing of the trope about having no "I" in "TEAM" was well done - if maybe a bit overdone, in general. I do think that it is likely that this particular saying is parodied more than it is parroted.
2
"WITH IT" for 1D would have had to be clued as "Up to the task". That little word "is" made it a different part of speech.
1
I had to think WOW... WUTS IT mean, to be overawed by a COW?
1
‘...parodied more than parroted’
Very nice!
I passed Caitlin’s prolonging the discovery of the theme test, even though I knew the relatives of bobolinks. I even had IINTEAM, but the bulb didn’t shine until I crossed the TWINS with MINNESOTA. But I enjoyed the journey even though my team, the San Francisco Giants, didn’t make the puzzle’s cut. Also part of the wOW field.
1
P.S. enjoyed the bat dog video.
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My aha moment was actually a WOW moment. Part way through I saw NATIONALS and CARDINALS along with MAJORS and realized the emerging baseball theme. When I realized the cities crossed. And then that they all crossed at the letter I. And then the NO I IN TEAM entry, I was just blown away.
3
To add to the wonder for me, I’m in Cooperstown for the weekend as we’re doing this puzzle.
2
I had the two aha moments - once I solved the revealer, then I saw the I's in the team names. Once I got BALTIMORE after getting ORIOLES, I thought, huh, that's a coincidence....or is it? After that the theme entries were mostly easily dispatched. Except MINNESOTA and TWINS. I for some reason wanted CINCINATI (obviously wrongly spelled). Took a while to fix that.
Interesting, Wen. I had exactly the same experience attempting to make Cincinnati fit. It seemed to me a likely headquarters for General Mills, and I had not yet grokked the theme. My aha moment was extra powerful because I had already crossed DETROIT and TIGERS, as well as WASHINGTON and NATIONALS and had not made any kind of connection to baseball yet.
Unfortunately there is no I in Montreal Expos. Oh yeah, there is no Montreal Expos, period. Sigh.
Clever offering.
1
Regarding yesterday's cocktail (Singapore Sling) I thought it was Peter Heering but Cherry Herring - fishy indeed! Must have been too busy for the past 35 years to examine the label.
1
It’s officially Herring Cherry Liqueur, but it’s referred to as Cherry Heering or Peter Heering (after the manufacturer). Sometimes it’s mistakenly called Cheery Herring.
It was the bottle I was told to pose with and to look drunk with, for the last picture in my bar mitzvah album, 1969.
2
I feel better-ish now.
That should have been HEERING Cherry Liqueur. Dammed ought toe corps wrecked.
WOW before COW, which still strikes me as better (but WUTSIT doesn't actually work).
Baseball is full of quirky names. I'm currently near Savannah, Georgia, which has a college-level summer baseball team called the Bananas. They play in a league that includes teams like the Macon Bacon, the Holly Springs Salamanders, the Wilson Tobs (short for Tobacconists), and the Lexington County Blowfish. Newspaper headline earlier this week: Bananas Beat Bacon.
11
Best I’ve heard: Las Vegas [Area] 51s.
1
I worked my way from WINSIT to WUTSIT, with TAN being obvious and a guess at University of RI, but then sat and stared at it for a long time. Finally, I skipped "A" as that clearly didn't work, and tried BUTSIT and then CUTSIT. I still don't like the answer, and I HATE the cluing of COW, but I'm glad it was near the beginning of the Alphabet....
Binghamton Rumble Ponies.
1
Stuck at the very beginning until the very ending - CUTSIT was the last thing I filled in, and I had a hard time getting to it. I had WINSIT, with WOW, and IRI, and NAN, and the last one was obviously wrong.
And OVERAWE cluing COW? I'd never thought of it that way before...
That NE corner kind of spoiled an otherwise enjoyable puzzle for me.
Can someone explain "Natick" t o me, please? I have NO IDEA what you all are talking about!
1
Patrick: from http://rexwordpuzzle.blogspot.com/p/frequently-asked-questions-i-get-lot...
NATICK PRINCIPLE — "If you include a proper noun in your grid that you cannot reasonably expect more than 1/4 of the solving public to have heard of, you must cross that noun with reasonably common words and phrases or very common names." Go here for the answers that occasioned my coining this phrase.
"Go here" leads to: Question for the day: does NC WYETH (1D: "Treasure Island" illustrator, 1911) pass the "very common names" test? Answer, NO. I mean, if the cross had been inside the name WYETH, fine, I'd have guessed it, as there is Another Famous Artist Named WYETH (Andrew, same family). But once we're into initials, forget about it. This guy is not W.C. Fields or E.E. Cummings. N.C.? The only N.C. I know is NC-17. Criminy. Look, I don't mind stuff I don't know (I see it every day), and I don't really mind stuff I don't know crossing other stuff I don't know, but only if there's some way for me to make a reasonable guess. If you don't know the lesser Wyeth or (choke) NATICK (1A: Town at the eighth mile of the Boston Marathon), that far NW letter could be anything, any consonant and at least two vowels. And I'm not even getting into the adjacent CARROL (19A: Charlie Chan player J. _____ Nash). Come on. That NW corner is just d***ish. Not clever (à la Walden), or evil (à la Klahn). Just d***ish.
6
I was wondering about Natick too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natick,_Massachusetts#In_popular_culture
1
Always knew what NATICK meant; never knew its origin. Thanks.
1
Too easy! Now what am I going to do for the rest of the weekend?
1
As a sports commentator in Australia put it: “There is no I in Team, but there is five in Individual Brilliance” after a particularly stirling by a player during an Australian Football match
4
Took longer to track down the comment link than to solve the puzzle. Did not get the theme until after the happy music played. Easy clueing.
The Ark didn’t land “on” Ararat; it landed *in* Ararat, which is the name of a kingdom (Jeremiah 51:27: “…the kingdoms of Ararat, Minni, and Ashchenaz…”; NYT crossword puzzle of 8/9/03: “Genesis country” = ARARAT). Here’s what Genesis 8:4 has to say about it: “And the ark rested in the seventh month, on the seventeenth day of the month, upon the mountains of Ararat.” Some time after Noah’s day, Ararat was invaded by an Indo-European speaking people and became known as Armenia. Of the four instances of “Ararat” in the Hebrew Old Testament, two are rendered as “Armenia” in King James; the same is true of the Latin Bible, in which the Ark comes to rest “super montes Armeniae” (upon the mountains of Armenia).
3
Perhaps... but the place where the ark landed (or widely accepted, as per wikipedia) is now known as Mount Ararat. It would be like saying that Leif Eriksson was the first explorer to discover North America, a name first applied to that region almost 500 years after his death.
The land Eriksson found wasn't then called North America, but is today; the mountain the ark landed on wasn't then called Ararat, but is today.
5
[aside] Are you the same Tyler as made a debut comment some years ago while a Divinity student in Brussels? IIRC, there was something in the day's discussion about 'Tippecanoe and Tyler too'.
For newcomers, FB has some triggers and ARARAT is one. He will not respond to logical rebuttal, possibly because he doesn't read comments other than his own. An example of a previous thread:
https://wordplay.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/05/03/big-house-party/#permid=18...
It's even noteworthy when he misses an ARARAT:
https://wordplay.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/05/24/person-whos-ready-and-able...
Ares (Mars to the Romans) had sons Phobos and Deimos (Fear and Terror) to precede him into battle; they gave their names to the two moons of the planet Mars - as featured in a Jeopardy game just last week.
Solar System Visualizer! Explore a fun site:
http://janus.astro.umd.edu/SolarSystems/
8
Oh - and Erie PA, which has previously elicited lots of negativity - I wonder if anyone else had GENEVA in there?
Good old Geneva on the Lake, OH.
Only if it’s Gene, Virginia, to match the clue.
Your link comes up on my iPad as a completely black page.
1