I am doing this puzzle about 2 1/2 years late, as I came to it through a Will Shortz collection book
I looked through all the comments and did not see anyone commenting on the spare letter from the shaded answer “Castro Street”
The “R“ is not the shaded letter that should be dropped from the answer to reveal the name of the baseball team, yet it is the letter that’s required to spell out “sacrifice”
Just really surprised that no one else mentioned that, but now it’s so far removed I’m not sure anybody will ever know ;)
1
The R in SACRIFICE comes from (S)C[R]UBS(UIT), not from [C]ASTROS(TREET).
@Mark Conaway
Just finished today, and didn’t even. Price. Good call!
This puzzle seemed overworked. I agree with all of the complaints below, but will add to the mix:
I've never had COMPOTE for dessert. And the clue had no mention of fruit.
This was the least annoying of the annoying clues (ONLAY, APPOSITE, TOILETBAG, SCRUBSUIT, and on and on) of which there were many.
I personally hated this puzzle.
2
@Jessica Claire Roat
I thought it was tough. Plenty of new words, and things to look up. not an easy one for sure.
Would some kind soul please explain "utahns"? Are there more jazz fans in Utah than in other states? Thanks.
@Kisa
Jazz is the name of a professional basketball team in Salt Lake City, Utah.
@DGC Thank you. I guess I should have realized it was sports related.
There’s gotta be a deity somewhere in charge of “weird circumstances”!!
In less than three months, the words UTNE and AILIENEE - the first of which I had never heard before and the second of which I remember only as a vague memory from when I was reading case studies to assist my wife in her Law School studies - have appeared in NYT puzzles.
Today - - BOTH of them appear in the same puzzle and - not only that - they actually INTERSECT!!!
See what I mean??
88D came to me only because my very first post-college job was with RCA in Indianapolis (1965-67). RCA was a major - and I mean MAJOR - presence in Indy at that time. They made AM/FM Radios, Televisions, and “Console Stereos” (KIDS: That was an actual piece of furniture with a “record player” and a radio - and actual speakers - not ear buds - inside.), They also made. LPs and pre-recorded 1/4” tape. And MY Division produced that tape - probably enough to reach from earth to the moon several times with plenty left over to wrap around the moon a bunch of times. And we made the FIRST color video tape in the world - 2” wide on reels heavy enough to require a truss when lifting!
They must have built the RCA Dome after I left - - and before RCA (or at least most of RCA) left town or just disappeared into the “Valley of Obsolescence”. But the letters helped me get that answer.
Onlay? Really? I usually consider the Times xword lexicon reasonable, but alienee and onlay, not so much. Oh well.
6
An elegant piece of cruciverbal art like this, viewed in completion, might give one an eyeGASM. It could set all your senses ATHROB even while soothing your FRAYED nerves. Baseball never did any of that for me, but this puzzle came close. Nice work, Andrew Ries!
1
Wow, I am really dense! I finished the puzzle but had to come here to find out what the theme was about--a first for me on a Sunday. And I even sort of like baseball.
this was a slow one for me, and since I am not a sports fan, I almost dropped it unfinished. but then I wanted to keep my steak...
@Susan
True. Many r simple steak lovers on these boards.
1
Started out fast. Thought "this is easy"!
But after a very long time trying to find my error, finally conceded and used the check puzzle feature. ONE letter wrong. Tiny consolation that I still figured it out rather than looking at the answers.
Aha! (Or should that be "oho"!) Had "wily" instead of OILY.
2
@Donna White Neglected to state that I thought the theme was very clever and fun even with my limited baseball knowledge! A lot of flow to the clues.
1
Somehow this one took me twice as long as usual. Dithered around with LONER, thinking PORTWINE was NORTH... something. Didn't get my streak until I fixed KASHA. APPOSITE was a new one for me, I kept wanting to put APROPOS but that didn't fit.
1
Harder than usual methinks -- got stuck with STAYSUP for 44D, so finally had to do a rare "let's see the answer" download, too many blanks in that particular section.
So: somehow I think 45D as clued isn't quite right; most such desserts I've experienced in good restaurants are not syrupy. SCRUBS, yes, but "suits"? C'mon. And I still think 75A needs an extra "A".
Moomph.
4
I actually had to pause in solving today's puzzle to protest my beloved Chicago Cubs being depicted as the "Crubs." The nerve!
5
I had BIG hug before BRO hug. It brought back memories of the Teletubbies that I have spent the last twenty years trying to forget!
2
Fun!
Took me 17:28, a couple minute better than average for me
A very challenging puzzle! Maybe it’s because I’m not a baseball fan. Though I still managed to work my way through ... with a little help from Wordplay :)
GReYSCALE at 105A nearly cost me my gold star. You’d think the lack of “u” in “colorless” would have had me on alert for American spelling, but it wasn’t until my second review that I caught it.
4
Not my favorite puzzle. While the theme was enjoyable enough I was annoyed with having solved most of the puzzle and being stuck for quite a while with some of the fill.
4
Streak over. Can someone please explain ARB?
1
Gene,
ARB...
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/a/arbitrageur.asp
@Gene
ARB is short for arbitrageur, one who makes money by exploiting price differences between markets in the same asset.
"In economics and finance, arbitrage is the practice of taking advantage of a price difference between two or more markets: striking a combination of matching deals that capitalize upon the imbalance, the profit being the difference between the market prices."
2
A very similar experience to Saturday, like losing to a scrabble player who restricts themselves to three and four letter words out of pretension. I was stumped on ARB, NOB, ORO, IVES, even WRGS before ORGS.
Everything else went well ... these nit-pickings tripped me up even though they seem obvious now, except ARB.
I liked LEANT, TAPE, GRETEL, ADLAI and FREDSAVAGE. UTAHNS seems awkward enough to be wrong; similar to ONLAY and SRO it is part of the CROSSWORDESE vernacular I missed on my first few passes.
Kudos.
6
Solved this puzzle in the car on the way to see the [World Champion] Red Sox play the Mariners. I didn't read the note until after I finished because I got SACRIFICE easily from the crosses. The gray squares were easily identified as baseball teams with an extra letter, but I didn't analyze the extra letters before reading the note.
Also appreciated the ACUTE/OBTUSE pair as a supplementary bonus.
1
@Morgan
Hope you weren’t driving!
3
@Andrew
The Mariners were driving the ball over the fences, but of course I was not driving. That would have hurt my solving time. ;)
I found this puzzle both easy and tedious. I don't get "toat". How does that relate to "precisely"
5
“To a T”
6
@Treegarden Thank you so much. I can't believe I couldn't figure that out!
1
@Mark D
It's a dook.
4
I think I'm just cranky today.
I didn't read the note, so had no idea what was going on with the shaded squares.
Was a little irked by SCRUBSUIT (scrubs, anyone?) WHEELNUT (lug nut), and FOGLAMP (fog light). KRONA, as clued, MEATSAUCE and PORTWINES also felt a little forced, and I agree with the others who commented that a SACRIFICE is not taking one for the team.
But my main complaint for Sundays is self-inflicted--I usually solve on my phone, and a big puzzle on a little screen means I end up missing the inevitable typos I create with my fat fingers and the on-screen keyboard.
9
@Puzzledog I must be cranky too because I feel the same. Especially scrubsuit and wheelnut. Spy story also turned me off.
10
@Puzzledog
Where do old crossword fiends go to retire?
To their WHEELNUTHOUSE.
9
I too did not read the Note before doing the puzzle, and wondered about the meaning of the gray squares until I read Caitlin’s preface.
Even so, I finished in 80% of my average Sunday time.
Most of the clues were fairly straightforward, and there were enough crossers to handle the words I didn’t know (ROSEN, DEPP, NIN). EARGASM brought a smile.
The hangups were AHA for OHO, WILY for OILY, LOTSA for LOTTA, INLAY for ONLAY. Also had to flyspeck the grid to find one final wrong letter.
Enjoyed the puzzle, even if I didn’t understand the theme.
1
I liked the geometric pair OBTUSE and ACUTE (too bad there isn't a "right" in there somewhere), and the palindromic ALAS/SALA.
6
Frustrating, for two reasons. One, I had a few Naticks in the NW. I thought MESMER was a magician (whoops), could not remember MAUDE (wanted RHODA for the longest time), did not know that ELKS meet in lodges (raccoons and beavers, sure), and USUALS and SLUNK were elusive for me. So I spent almost as much time on these squares as on all the other entries combined.
Two, I thought the clueing was off in many cases. I appreciate that to make things difficult, the constructor needs to push up against the limits of sense. But several clues did not make sense to me. Maybe my fellow puzzlers see things more clearly than I.
CHITS - “payment voucher” reads to me like “acknowledgment of a payment”, but isn’t a CHIT an acknowledgment of a debt?
OAR - don’t dugout canoeists use paddles, not OARS?
BRO - not sure why it’s a BROHUG; many men hug each other with exaggerated claps on the back
KRONA - Swedish stock units are shares, aren’t they? And the shares are priced in KRONA
CAKES AND ALE - to me, this signifies the good life, not “simple” material pleasures
SACRIFICE - as others have noted, SACRIFICE in baseball means to give up an out. Getting hit by a pitch is hardly a sacrifice; many hitters actively try to do it.
STUD - doesn’t support the building except in the most general sense; it supports the wallboard and plywood that is nailed to it.
Agree with thoughts below about SPY STORY and TOILET BAG. These verge on GREEN PAINT, for me.
9
"STUD - doesn’t support the building except in the most general sense; it supports the wallboard and plywood that is nailed to it."
Magpie.
I wondered if the editors did not know a STUD does not support a building or if they deemed supporting something in a building fair misdirection.
@Magpie Although the studs in a non-load-bearing wall support only the wallboard and plywood nailed to them, studs in load-bearing walls most certainly support the portions of a building over them, as do the studs in exterior walls. And overall, if you have a stud-framed building, for the most part the studs DO support the bulk of the mass of the building above them. In multi-story buildings this could be most of the mass of the building.
1
"OAR - don’t dugout canoeists use paddles, not OARS?"
Magpie,
In my experience, canoeists use paddles, but not all dugout boats are canoes, and dugouts go way back. (I was surprised to see in M-W that the boat sense of dugout was first noted only in 1811.) You may find this somewhat rambling essay on oars of interest.
https://rowersoars.com/a-somewhat-inclusive-history-of-oars-dating-back-a-very-long-time/
1
I'm so happy it's baseball season! I hope this will be a good year for the Yankees instead of ending with them in the TOILET (BAG). That phrase was the only clunker in this otherwise fun puzzle.
1
Approaching any puzzle with a sports theme makes me sigh with sadness, but at least this one was easy enough for a non-fan.
An entry that IMO should have been nixed by the ed.: toilet bag. Just no. It is a toiletry kit. And that is gross. Mr. Shortz?
9
"An entry that IMO should have been nixed by the ed.: toilet bag. Just no. It is a toiletry kit."
GMA,
There are quite a few terms in use for this item.* I've always called it a Dopp kit, probably because my dad learned that term in the service in WWII. Today, I use a Dopp kit ... and a clear, quart-size, zip lock bag.
*see below
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toiletry_bag
3
Kept looking to see if there would be Giants, but not this time. Even so, a home run in the fun department.
4
leCarre writes 'stories'?
8
@michael - is that a novel idea?
11
Egads, MESMER! During my brief stint as a clinician I was trained as a Mesmerist. I was not very good but I did get my certification and used my new found skill in a criminal case. Not admissible as evidence but the heavy hand of justice fell correctly.
Thanks Andrew, although every time i see your name I think of a certain set of buildings in Manhattan.
1
dk,
Ries? Maybe Riis?
Except for the dread ELHI and the absolute groaner at 10D (the DHubby did an emphatic "UGH!"--being a lover of all things musical) this puzzle flowed smoothly. Of course I had not noticed the tiny yellow notepad on ALite, so I had to return to the computer and take another look; then back to my trusty paper and pen.
One would say TOILETRY BAG, no?
Dental ONLAY? Srsly?
No REDS? No INDIANS? No BRAVES? You call this a baseball puzzle? Just kiddin', Andrew. We could see you were usin' the ole DOME. (NOB or KNOB? That's that lump between your shoulders...)
Did my last yr of undergrad at GA State in ATLANTA, with at least one professor who also taught at ATLANTA University (right there with Spelman and Morehouse.) B.S. in Special Ed was a new major back then... many long years ago.
Ah, well.
3
@Mean Old Lady - there was F(RED S)AVAGE.
I tried to make TOILETRY(IES) fit in all sorts of ways, just couldn't be done.
3
@Mean Old Lady ONLAY is real. I have four of them replacing fillings that dated back to the Johnson administration.
@Chris Atkins
I have crowns, but I've never heard them called anything else. We are frequent flyers at the dentist's office (pre-fluoride) ...but if your dentist says ONLAY, that's good enough for me.
This has to be one of the best I’ve seen. So impressed with how this was constructed! Bravo!
5
Anyone having trouble getting the gold star on this one? I double checked every clue against the key after my solve and it still says I missed something. Seems like a bug. I’m on a 71 day streak and the lack of solve on this is really frustrating
2
@Jim Barrecchia
Same here...although typos have a way of hiding.
1
Jim,
Trust you've already checked 0's for Os, etc. You don't want a goose egg to end your streak.
2
@Jim Barrecchia
Just found it using “check puzzle”. Hated to do it, but I am not a patient person. I had Sacks, instead of SACHS, which messed up WHEELNUT. Good luck!
1
I love baseball and it was no SACRIFICE to finish this.
The puzzle wasn't particularly hard, though looking for my LOTTA vs. LOTSA mistake ate a couple of minutes.
Go PHILLIES! (Since they too didn't make the puzzle cut.)
2
Horrors!! I think a clue has escaped from its cage and hidden in the mini-puzzle.
“Youth has no AGE.” Is the relevant quote by Picasso.
Oooops!! Should have KNOWN better!!
My eyes must have crossed without my noticing it - - - again.
All is well in the Mini-Puzzle world.
The construction of this puzzle is utterly remarkable -- a thing of beauty.
But my aha moment was SACRIFICEd by my writing in SACRIFICE before I went back to find the letters in the circled words.
Even so, a great Sunday puzzle.
1
I always read the note and am certainly impressed with those who figured out the theme without reading it. It was obviously helpful in getting all the theme answers. I don't follow baseball any more, but still recognize most team names and know what a SACRIFICE is.
I found that I was unsure of more answers than usual today, not really sure why. I had exactly the same wrong first answers as Caitlin, and was also completely unaware of the poker, cowboy KINGS connection.
This must have been really difficult to construct, so quite impressive.
6
The first word I found in the Spelling Bee today had a very important baseball association, especially for New Yorkers.
1
SPELLING BEE:
70/311, 1 Pangram, Bingo.
Ax5, Ex7, Lx8, Nx4, Px5, Tx11, Mx30
4x25, 5x14, 6x17, 7x7, 8x5, 9x2
Σ 4 5 6 7 8 9
A 5 1 1 2 1 - -
E 7 - 1 1 4 - 1
L 8 3 2 1 1 1 -
N 4 1 - 1 - 1 1
P 5 1 1 3 - - -
T 11 5 1 2 - 3 -
M 30 14 8 7 1 - -
Σ 70 25 14 17 7 5 2
7 compound words.
22
@Wen
Thanks for the table!
As a Canadian, I am already deeply disappointed in the exclusion of PEAMEAL. And I just got started on the Bee.
4
@Wen Happily stopped midway above Genius, keeping resolve to stop the slog. At least this letter set seemed somewhat fresher with the P and M.
2
@Cheryl
One reason I now frequently stop short of of QB is irritation at omitted words, like emplane. p---ate, malm, maleate -- early in my solve, especially in these longer Bees.
On shorter Bees, I find it harder to stop shy of the finish line.
3
If I knew more about baseball, maybe I’d find a fitting analogy for this solve giving me my first 365-day streak!
19
@Elly Trickett
I’ll sacrifice: You’ve played both regular and winter league ball.
There are better out there but I bunted for the good of the team.
Elly,
"Hitting streak" should do just fine.
(Congratulations!)
7
@Barry Ancona
Good one. I think I popped up my bunt, but you got the runner to third and took second in a daring move. Home run hitter on deck.
(We just don’t see enough sports analogies applied to life)
1
Any baseball theme just leaves me lamenting the departure of the Montreal Expos. Today was extra sad because I would have liked to see the following clue:
Kama Sutra topic:
S*EXPOS*ITIONS
22
A Sunday trifecta!
Best time
Got the trick with reading any hints
Used the trick to solve other clues
Happy Sunday and a great puzzle!
2
Ugh, I mean “withOUT” reading any hints.
My proofing skills erode when excited.
4
I'm sure this can be put down to my lack of solving skills, but I didn't enjoy this one as much as most other commenters.
Started out with a bit of a downer at the crossing of OKSURE and KASHAS. OH or OK - both seemed to work, and I had no idea on the buckwheat dish, so I tried HASHAS and then checked it. So, I just started and I've already failed. Not like I'm on a streak or anything, but still nice to maintain hope through most of the solve.
And then I just struggled mightily in a number of other places; I won't go into detail. Yes, most of them don't look as hard as I made them, but it mostly involved things I just wasn't seeing in both directions, which just didn't leave me with enough crosses to disambiguate.
And lastly - I usually avoid reading the note when there is one, but with my struggles I finally decided to go ahead and look. As best I recall, the note is most often some kind of a hint, but this one just gave away the whole theme. Yes, I needed it and it was helpful, but it took away any chance of an 'aha' moment as the theme became evident.
Again, if I was better at these, I could have avoided all that. Seems like a quite clever piece of construction and I will defer to the majority opinion.
5
@Rich in Atlanta
If it helps, the OK in OK SURE directly parallels "All right" in the clue. That doesn't completely rule out OH, but it makes it a much less likely answer.
As for KASHA, either you know it or you don't.
2
@Rich in Atlanta - I usually just hold off on commenting about the puzzle as a whole, in favor of my usual comments sparked by words in the puzzle. But I'm on your boat today!
Both regarding the puzzle experience and regarding the note, we're on the same page.
I'm sure there are others who share the feeling that this one, between the construction and the note, was not "ours" but "theirs."
2
David and Rich,
As per my "easy but a bit tedious ... or just plain tedious" comment last night, please count me in the group that would rather solve a puzzle than go on a letter hunt.
3
The title was perfect for the theme.
It was fun figuring out the teams in the grid with just one or two team letters filled in, but because you never knew where the wayward letters were placed, you couldn't just slap the team name down. I liked that, as it added grit to the solve.
4
Interesting factoid: in researching why Kings are called Cowboys in poker I learned that Richard Nixon financed his first successful congressional campaign with poker winnings. From James MacManus’ “Cowboys Full: The Story of Poker”.
Also, that Robert E. Lee was a great bluffer at the poker table and that he and other Confederate generals applied poker skills to almost win the Civil War: “They were better at misrepresenting the strength of their position and their troop strength. And by those means, they almost defeated the North.”
Article about “Cowboys Full”: https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=120142452
7
As usual for me, the shading or circles or patterns do absolutely nothing for me. I couldn’t even figure out their purpose even after I had solved the entire puzzle today. Only when I read this article did I see what they meant. Others apparently did find them helpful though.
@Kevin Davis
You have to read the Notes to understand the significance of the shading. Unfortunately, unless you’re looking for the Notes, they tend to hide in the shade in the on-line app. If you use the NYT Xword app, they appear if you click on the “i” icon (“Puzzle Info”).
1
@Puzzlemucker Thanks I never thought to look there. I learned something new.
@Kevin Davis
Sure. I learned that from some other Wordplayer at some point. When I did the puzzle in the paper, I never tended to see the small-printed Notes when they appeared until after I had finished (or given up). Turns out they can be quite helpful!
1
LETTER BOX
I'm sure today's going to have lots of answers. I like my first solution for the imagery in spite of its length: B-T(11), T-S(5).
I also found a perfect solution, but I'm not going to post it because I used an anagram solver to see what possibilities were out there, and that made it too easy. But there's at least one to be found, probably more than one.
HINT to my own solution
How to get the best vacation souvenirs.
1
@Phil
So far I have T-S(8),S-R(7) which I like because it’s two unconventional words.
Off to seek perfection now!
@Phil P
Same as you and very quickly. I was surprised that my first word was accepted as one word.
Yesterday I had EQUALIZER REFIGHT, one letter less than the NYT solution.
@Phil P
I got a B-T(8) T-S (5). (Without Anagram solver)
The team names gave me a LOTTA help today, but my final frustrating obstacle was the SW corner, where the only thing I was *certain* of was that an "Outcast" is a LONER. I don't care for wine, so NORTWINES looked reasonable to me, but what the heck was an OLHI? Took me a long, long time to cast out that LONER. Yikes!
2
Cool! Love opening day.
1
Personal best yesterday, personal worst today. Put me in Barry's "just plain tedious" lineup even though baseball is one of my strengths. Those extra letters and the embedded constructions didn't allow the team names to jump out for me. At least I got STAN the Man.
Not only ALAS and ELHI, but EEL, ELLS, TIA, OREL, and UTNE crosswordese.
Some valid but strange contortions: UTAHNS, ONLAY, NIN.
(I guess they decided to give the old diarist a rest.)
Spent a LOTTA , not LOTSA, time MESMERized in the NW until 23a SLUNK into view and resolved the rest. ELLS not TEES or some variation on U's. Bah humbug.
4
A New York Times crossword puzzle about baseball and no mention of the Yankees? Oh - the ignominy of it all!
7
@Arthur - the Mets are in it. What about the ignominy of you overlooking that? :)
9
@Wen
Yankees = 27 World Series rings
Mets = 2
We deserve top billing! :)
7
@Arthur
Much to my chagrin, the old adage “pride goeth before a fall “ has never seemed to apply to the Yankees, unless “a fall” refers to when the World Series is played.
As for their absence from the puzzle, I’m assuming the Mr. Ries did not think that the following clue / entry would fly:
“What tweezers should never do”
YANK BEESTINGERS
10
Without seeing the clue, my instinct was to complete A_ARD with a 'G'. Funny world.
9
While we're at it, I've never heard "take one for the team" used to mean drop a sac bunt or hit a sac fly; I have heard it used to mean lean in on a pitch and get hit.
(Your coaching signals may vary)
9
N.B.: That was Comment a la Fact Boy, not a complaint; I enjoyed the wordplay.
This was more a case of “take one FROM the team,” no?
David,
No. FOR the team, you must take one (from the shaded/circled letters).
spent a week in SF last June at the opera. Thrilled to see all the historic places from the 60s -- Haight-Asbury, City Lights Bookstore and of course CASTRO STREET!
2
Why is someone messing around with AcrossLite? Shame!
I can only assume that someone, somewhere, for some reason, decided that the whole Sunday grid should fit on the screen all at once, removing the necessity to scroll up/down to get to all of the entries. This, of course, made the grid much smaller than it normally is. And that, in turn, made the little numbers incredibly littler. Unreadable in fact. And Ctrl-scroll doesn't embiggen the AL grid.
The clue for the entry where your cursor is located is highlighted -- in red, yet -- and also appears all by itself right above the grid, so it is possible to see where you are even though the numbers in the grid are too small to read. But when there is a cross-reference (see NANCY PELOSI) it is not possible just to look for the number you're seeking. You have to put your cursor in the general vicinity of where you think it is, then count to find the actual cross-referenced entry. (I really feel sorry for those who do the puzzle on their phones.)
Since we already knew the theme from the Notepad, that part was easy. Even as unbaseballed as I am, I saw the team names in the first couple of themers and then forgot to look. Saw SACR... and figured SACRIFICE, which I've heard of (although I couldn't have defined it).
I think of KRONA as a coin, not a stock unit, but I'll take your word. BRO hug is new to me, as is EARGASM (which I love!).
Thanks all, but whoever you are, stop messing up AcrossLite!
1
@Deadline - I don't think anyone's messing with AcrossLite - since it's a program that you download and install on your computer, unless you'd downloaded a new version, it is unlikely anyone messed with it.
As a test you can open a previous Sunday puzzle to see if it is opened the same way.
I opened the March 31st puzzle and saw that it did indeed display the full grid. Maybe the program does that based on something about the .puz file for March 31st.
In any case, that's the zoom setting that controls the display issue you'd identified. ctrl+f toggles zoom to display full grid or not. ctrl+- and ctrl++ zooms out or zooms in. It's all under the View menu in AL as well?
2
@Wen
Thanks, Wen.
I took your advice and opened another Sunday, and for some reason it also displayed the entire grid and the teeny-weeny-eensy-weensy numbers. I've certainly not touched AcrossLite since I first started using it several years ago.
I didn't know about CTRL-F to zoom in and out. I've always just used CTRL-scroll so that I can increase/decrease type size on other uses of my computer, and that doesn't work with AL.
So anyway, apologies to the person(s) I was blaming. Now if I could just figure out how this happened in the first place, when I hadn't touched anything!
2
@Wen Thanks for your Across Lite remarks. I print from AL and usually skip Sunday because the print is so small. Your comments led me to find the 2 page print option which solves the problem.
2
Fairly easy except the revealer, which I did not need to get the theme clues. I forgot where the note could be seen, so I solved the puzzle without ever knowing the clue for 76D. Afterwards I remembered it’s under the i button.
2
It was obvious that a lot of thought went into the construction of this puzzle. I found it especially easy that the team names were not scrambled anagrams, but merely had an extra letter in them to be removed. With the currently woolly-ness of my brain, I'm not sure I could have handled scrambled anagrams!
My first thought for "Drake" was Sir Francis, so I was trying to make him a CORSAIR or something like that. GLIB before OILY. Can someone who plays poker explain cowboys and kings?
I thank you.
4
Liz B,
I've always known Cowboys as a poker term for Kings. Why, I have no idea.
http://dictionary.pokerzone.com/Cowboy
1
bullet, deuce, trey, boat, nickel, boot, hockey stick, ocho, nina, dime, hook, lady, cowboy
A from single pip
2, 3, 8, 9 from number names
5 & 10 from values / coins
4, 6, 7, J from shape of the index
Q, K from status
11
@Liz B
I was thinking of a duck. Also, hand up for GLIB.
I don't get the cowboy thing either, but I'm not much of a poker player.
2
How clever. A football puzzle just as the baseball season is about to begin. I am not much for contrivances and this one was certainly one for the books. Great construction effort, though.
1
@HALinNY
Football?
2
@Hildy Johnson
Stop paying attention to what I write. It is a very long trip from my brain to my fingertips and the signals frequently get garbled. Remember, please, that I had just spent 19 hours solving the puzzle. 19 hours with no food, no drink, just solve, solve, solve. For you it may be simple being an iconic journalist. For me it is a Herculean task of Sisiphusean effort.
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@HALinNY
Lol! I honestly thought 'football puzzle' might be some reference to the grid layout or other crossword arcana I'm unfamiliar with.
Now go have a snack!
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PLAP goes the T NUT.
No, that’s for tomorrow puzzle. There could be a separate “Mrs. Maisel” thread for this puzzle (she works “blue”; some of her material would make Redd Foxx blush):
ATHROB, EARGASM (I pictured Hal writing that in on the train, raising some eyebrows), STUD, CASTRO STREET (used to live right nearby in SF), CANED (the consensual kind). . .
Oh baseball, that’s right, that was the actual theme. A wonderful puzzle! I predict a MEATS TWINES World Series.
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St. Ives (properly St Ives) is a place (seaside town in Cornwall) that takes its name from an Irish saint whose name was Ia. She isn't named in the riddle, the _town_ is named. And yes, she's a she. She crossed the Irish Sea on a magical leaf, so there's that. It's still March, after all...though her Name Day would be Feb. 3.
The YouTube comments on Geoff Marshall's "All the Stations" videos show that I'm not the only person who is strangely absorbed by his travels with his companion Vicki Pipe and others, visiting all the railroad stations in the British system. It happens that the very first leg of that epic series was a trip from Penzance to St Ives:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SoA1OTQJoxQ
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@David Connell
An ocean crossing magical leaf?
Shut up and take my money!!
@David Connell
Your post led me to the video and the comments, (which I usually try to avoid on You Tube). From there I learned that there is another St. Ives in Cambridgeshire upon which the nursery rhyme is likely based.
I still enjoyed the video which reminded me of my childhood passion to ride every bus in Montreal in order to collect the "transfers" of which I still have a collection. As for the quiet narration at the beginning of the video, I very much wanted to call it "the ASPIRATES of Penzance", but maybe Alan J can pick up on that one.
@Steve Faiella - magically delicious!
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Waiting for the play-by-play. I'm expecting this one to be called "easy but a bit tedious" by those who know baseball teams, and "just plain tedious" by the others.
(ALAS, we see ESO again, and ELHI, both crossing a LEPER.)
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@Barry Ancona
I'm waiting for the comments on how Hansen's disease is not appropriate crossword fodder. Got my popcorn at the ready.
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@Barry Ancona
I see Dr Mesmer was recalled for another visit....
@Hildy Johnson
I think this is parallel to the Gypsy/Roma discussion of a few weeks ago, inasmuch as the group in question goes by its preferred name, and the (now lower-cased) alternate name is used in a figurative way: for gypsy, a free spirit; for leper, one who is shunned (for non-medical reasons).
In any event, I will not be the one to complain. The use of this figurative usage doesn't bother me.
3
Here’s a peek in Genesis (8:4): “And the ark rested in the seventh month, on the seventeenth day of the month, upon the mountains of Ararat.” The same passage, in the Latin bible: “Requievitque arca...super montes Armenia” (and the ark came to rest...on the mountains of Armenia). The place name Ararat appears four times in Hebrew scripture; St. Jerome’s Latin translation renders two of them as “Armenia,” ditto for King James (but not the same ones). The only other “Ararat” in KJV is in Jeremiah 51:27, where it is an item in a list of “…the kingdoms of Ararat, Minni, and Ashchenaz.” What is known in modern times as Armenia was once called Biainili by its inhabitants; its Assyrian neighbors called it Urartu. Scriptural Hebrew made no provision for written vowels, so Urartu was rendered as RRT. Centuries later, when everybody had forgotten how RRT was originally pronounced, the Masoretic scholars added vowels points to scripture; since RRT was Assyrian, not Hebrew, they had to guess and arbitrarily inserted an A in front of each consonant. (The same process turns FLORIDA into AFALARAD.) In any case, the ark didn’t land on a mountain but in a mountainous region (Martin Luther: “das Gebirge Ararat” — the mountain range Ararat), and the name Ararat (originally Urartu) applies to the region, not a mountain.
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This was fast and fun. This brought to mind George Carlin's routine about baseball v. football:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aIkqNiBASfI
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@Paul
Love Carlin, football and baseball but taking intentional pass on this one.
@Paul
Thanks for the clip. Always a good thing to start the day with George!
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Caitlin,
In a sacrifice, the batter *is* out, but the out is not *counted against* the batter (as in a batting average).
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More accurately a plate appearance. Baseball analytics pays very close attention to outs, because as Earl Weaver observed “you only get 27 of them, don’t waste them”.
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@Brian
Earl Weaver. He exemplified class in professional sports coaching.
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Loved the title of his second book - “It’s What You Learn After You Know It All That Counts”.
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