Brian: Thursday, April 17
Got home from the Yankees/Red Sox slugfest at about 12:45 am. Exhausted. Wife went to sleep, I went to try and tackle the Thursday in under 20 minutes. And I barely made it, with two cheats and a nearly frozen Firefox window.
New York Times – 19:35
Los Angeles Times – 13:10
New York Times
constructed by Byron Walden; edited by Will Shortz
As with Wednesday’s puzzle, I got going very quickly, solving the entire top eight or nine rows almost immediately. In fact, the only hole I had up there was the second half of the theme throughline — I had CHARLTON, but for some reason assumed that the six-letter neighbor (18A, the other half of the theme) was someone else, not his last name. Duh.
The bottom right was my problem area. I never saw his 1971 movie OMEGA MAN (the first M was one of my cheats), and I had another sports brain malfunction as I suddenly possessed zero ability to understand what “throw the flag on” meant. I realize now that it was the “on” that hurt me — all they do is throw the flag on the field, not onto something in particular. The clue is very misleading in that regard — to PENALIZE is to “throw the flag,” not to “throw the flag on.” What kind of football foul is designed to end in a preposition? Come on…
Still in that area, even finally getting OMEGA MAN and PENALIZE and a bunch of the downs, I was guessing on everything else and couldn’t figure out the last across clue, 66A. Textbook offerings. With absolutely no idea what they were looking for, I just started completing down answers with words that exist, even if they didn’t fit the clues: AMEN instead of AMEX (I play the “Amen” card when I need to get out of church in a hurry?), GAL instead of GAM (on the right track here, I think, in that cheesecake is slang for a female pin-up [even if it specifically means the legs, I know]), ALI instead of ALP (”jungfrau” could be German for anything, as far as I can see, and definitely seems more likely to mean “little girl” than “mountain,” and finally, I had Laila Ali on the brain for whatever reason, and there you have it, be more smarter next time), and ONER instead of ONES (I’m out of excuses). Don’t ask me what ENALILES are, though — I think they appear in textbooks. (And yes, fixing this last answer was my other cheat — I was useless at this point.)
Los Angeles Times
constructed by Dan Naddor; edited by Rich Norris
In today’s Los Angeles offering, a different COMPASS PT. (36A) is hidden in each of eight starred clues: DO[WNW]IND, CAN OP[ENE]R, NE[WS W]IRES, RY[E SE]EDS, A[NN W]ILSON, VO[NNE]GUT, CU[SS W]ORDS, and OPPRE[SSE]D. Sadly, the central down answer, DAN RATHER, was not part of the theme. Go figure.
The other day on the subway, my mother and I were working on an old New York Times Sunday puzzle that had a theme similar to this one — except it took it one step trickier. The compass points in question each only took up one square in that grid. My mother had made a relatively poor choice to not bother to write out the full three letters in the theme squares, but rather just indicate the gimmick with a dot. Of course, when returning to the puzzle much later, a dot in a completed across answer left a confusion in the crossing downward. From this, I learned to always try to write in something appropriate in rebus-style puzzles, not just a personal symbol that says “this is a gimmick.”
