Caitlin: The author's name is actually Gary Belsky, not Ken. I should know, as I am Gary Belsky, and I co-authored "On The Origins Of Sports" with Neil Fine. But I'm sure Ken Belsky, whoever he is, must be a nice fellow, given his family name!
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@Gary Belsky
Thanks for the correction, Mr. Belinski... er, Battanski... er, Belsky. By the way, we didn't mean to snub the coauthor of this lovely book. We have a limit of 26 letters with which to spell the author and name of a work, so with regrets we represented only the first name here. Our salutes, nevertheless, to your partner Nellie Fine... er, Niles Brine... we mean the estimable Neil Fine!
This one was one of the tougher ones, especially for a non-sports person like me. And I made a few the initial mistakes cited before: RETRIEVE for FETCHING; UNION for OWNER - plus one other really bad one that threw me off track: ENDORPHIN for SERATONIN. As that was one of my few initial gimmes, I had a hard time getting started! I did know IOWA had to be right, which meant ENDORPHIN was unlikely to be right, but then sometimes a puzzle has some unusual combinations of letters in the quotation - and with a quotation about baseball, it could easily have a word or phrase unknown to me! Eventually, though, I did figure it all out. But it was a struggle!
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To Caitlin and everybody else:
Good news!
It looks like my Comments from Saturday were trapped somewhere in the system after all. Almost 24 hours later, they suddenly appeared.
Started with some guesses that didn't make me happy and will go down into oblivion, but also with EWER, SEROTONIN, TROWEL, IOWA, OVERHAND, SWEATY and SAWDUST.
I am most definitely not a baseball fan but I saw SPORTS in the acrostic part and made some lucky guesses from there. Dull subject made for a somewhat dull puzzle for me this week.
Got started with a few; EWER, YARDS, ELEVENTH, ROUGH-HEWN and IOWA. With a couple of those and possibly Home Run and Foul, in the quote, I got the idea of baseball, appropriate to the season. Sadly, the SF Giants didn’t have a good year, but it’s always good to get to the ballpark, relax and enjoy a kraut dog. It was fun to have all the baseball references in the word list, and I’ll look forward to seeing a GO AHEAD run next time I’m at the park.
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Ha! A puzzle about sports, and I actually solved it without looking up a single clue! I still know little to nothing about team sports, but I'm getting a lot better at solving puzzles about them.
Lots of guessing, of course. BABE RUTH, for example. Plus HOME RUN emerged from the grid pretty easily, so that gave me a few much-needed letters.
And I did have quite a few gimmes to start out with, including SEROTONIN, ELEVENTH, OWNER, IOWA, THEFT, FETCHING, OAFISH, and SUTURES.
One of these days I'm going to construct an entire volume of puzzles about sports, which will force me to learn all the terms and teams.
But for now, I'm working on a volume that's right up my alley -- it's all about words, etymology, linguistics, lexicography, etc. I've been gathering quotations for a month now because I can't just skim the books for a quote -- I simply have to read them from cover to cover!
Check out Kory Stamper's "Word by Word," John McWhorter's "Words on the Move," Patricia O'Conner's "Origins of the Specious," and Paul West's "The Secret Lives of Words," to name just a few. Ah, word heaven!
All the quotations are selected, and now I get to start deconstructing quotations into word lists -- my favorite part of the process...
Oops, sorry to digress. :)
Thanks for a great puzzle, EC & HR, even if it was about sports. I absolutely loved the quotation, and it came as a real surprise. I had no idea a HOME RUN was originally a FOUL!
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As I communicated to Caitlin, some of the Comments that I posted today did not go up. Are any other people here having the same problem?
@Jerrold
I can't find your comments anywhere! They have vanished into the ether. Usually they're just stuck in pending. Can you try to post again?
So sorry about that, it's a new one to me.
@Caitlin Re-posting would be impossible. I no longer remember most of what I wrote Thursday night on those two long posts.
Those documents are no longer in my computer.
Caitlin, I know that it is not YOUR fault.
Maybe we should even have a blog for the Mini puzzles.
[SPOILER ALERT]
Last night I did Saturday’s, which is like the “maxi-mini”.
What a trick with BUTTER, in this case a noun, even though the clue seemed to indicate a verb!
I first had PEEL instead of PARE. I saw that it was wrong when I put in CELLO, which in the end was also wrong.
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