The New York Times Crossword Puzzle thread

For some reason I do the Sunday on Saturday and the Saturday on Sunday. I'll get to the Saturday tomorrow and report back.

The Sunday was weird. Couldn't figure out the gimmick but got just about every box.

oops.

I'll withhold the gimmick until everyone has taken a stab it. 

Oh, MY.

Now I'm on Sunday's. I see the weirdness, but haven't figured it out yet.

The Sunday Acrostic puzzle is a trip this week. Really fun. If you haven't tried that puzzle before, this week's is a good one to start on. Don't be put off by the seeming nonsensicalness of it. The theme becomes clear fairly soon. I really enjoyed it.  

now looking at Saturday's puzz.  Yipes! Can't seem to get hold of it anywhere. I'm heading into the city later so I'll work on it on the train .,,

A 1 plus 1 equal 5 song title perhaps?

DaveSchmidt said:

Oh, MY.

bub said:

A 1 plus 1 equal 5 song title perhaps?

DaveSchmidt said:

Oh, MY.

Love the acrostic, too. That and the Spelling Bee are my Saturday morning indulgences!

that Saturday puzzle was wicked and wicked fun. The conceit - answers alternating backwards and forwards and up and down - was awesome. A great April Fools puzzle. The Acrostic had a similar gimmick. Everything was backwards. Lots of fun. 

Rex Parker appears to have confused me with P_RR_ MA_ON:

P.P.S. Someone tried to convince me that in that QUILL clue, "telling" referred to the thing that Ebeneezer Scrooge did, because he ran a "counting house" and so "telling" is supposed to refer to the verrrrry last definition of "tell" (2.4), here:




LOL OK, sure. Brilliant. The problem is that definition 1.1 is "communicate information, facts, or news to someone in spoken or written words." So whatever your little intended archaic wordplay joke was here, the ordinary definition of "tell" is kindastanding in your way. In fact, I'm not at all convinced that this "count" definition was the intended one. Feels like something the clue's lawyer dug up to try to excuse its behavior. "Your honor, if I may beg the indulgence of the court..." [GAVEL SOUNDS] [dramatic pause] "You may not."

You, too, can tweet the cruciverbalist:

Who else cringed at the pale ale answer today?

zucca said:

Who else cringed at the pale ale answer today?

Me! Me!

I guess I should take a look at today's puzzle. I've been skipping Mon Tue and Wed lately.

Saturday - 3 down and 11 down??

jimmurphy said:
Saturday - 3 down and 11 down??

11 down was familiar to me. (Maybe from older movies or novels?) Needed the crosses for 3 down. Spoiler below.

The .co made sense to me only after it was all filled in: It’s for “country.” Only then did I recall seeing .co.in and .co.nz, etc., in web searches.

22 Across took me longer than it should have. I was thinking it was a player, and couldn’t figure out how to stretch the team name to fit. 

Not to mention that the team I was trying to fit into seven spaces was R-O-Y-A-L. (Had KCROYAL in there at one point.)

I had a "u" for the second letter of 11 down.  22 across took me too long as well, although being crushed in '15 I knew it wasn't KC. I was "at sea" on the middle of 3 down...

shoot. I forgot it was Saturday.

Fun one today. Took me a long while to truly “get” the theme.

jimmurphy said:
Fun one today. Took me a long while to truly “get” the theme.

 Thursday; always interesting.

for the life of me, I can't get the intersection of 47 across and 44 down in today's puzzle.

eta: got it

drummerboy said:
for the life of me, I can't get the intersection of 47 across and 44 down in today's puzzle.

eta: got it

 I guess it’s the state of having had a saw taken to something. 

Not the only weird clue today. Dank memes? Apheresis? Mess boy? He goats? 

The_Soulful_Mr_T said:

drummerboy said:
for the life of me, I can't get the intersection of 47 across and 44 down in today's puzzle.

eta: got it

 I guess it’s the state of having had a saw taken to something. 
Not the only weird clue today. Dank memes? Apheresis? Mess boy? He goats? 

 agreed. idiolect too.

It might have taken me longer to get the last letter of Saturday's than to do the whole of Sunday's. Very easy.

drummerboy said:

The_Soulful_Mr_T said:

drummerboy said:
for the life of me, I can't get the intersection of 47 across and 44 down in today's puzzle.

eta: got it

 I guess it’s the state of having had a saw taken to something. 
Not the only weird clue today. Dank memes? Apheresis? Mess boy? He goats? 

 agreed. idiolect too.

 Yeah, idiolect? Gimme a break.

I kind of liked learning the word idiolect, even though, well, yeah. 

Had to use a lifeline to my 18-year-old to get the "a" for dank memes. She could tell me the answer, but not the derivation. I looked it up after the fact. Dictionary.com taught me this:

"The dank in dank meme is an ironic use of the slang term dank. According to lexicographer Jonathon Green, black, campus, and drug slang began repurposing dank—which originally meant 'unpleasantly moist or humid'—as 'excellent' or 'first-rate,' especially with reference to high-quality marijuana, in the 1980s. Dank meme stash, as we saw, additionally alludes to the marijuana sense of dank.

"The surprising inversion of the word dank, though, has many precedents. Slang has transformed other negative words, like bad, sick, or wicked, into positive ones. But dank meme flips dank once again, now characterizing online content as wholly un-dank: 'passé or clichéd,' 'out of touch,' or 'having missed the cultural Zeitgeist.' "

to be honest, I found ideolect interesting too. With a twenty something in the house, I knew the word dank, though the clue was still a tough one.