![]() I don't know the Bartolomé guy at all ( 44A: Bartolomé de las _, social reformer during Spain's colonial era = CASAS).I love Patsy CLINE but that clue? No hope ( 44D: Singer with the 1962 album "Sentimentally Yours").I have honestly never heard of a PEACE DOLLAR (45A: Coin featuring Lady Liberty and a bald eagle).I thought might be INGS or GEES (since both appear twice in "Singing").I wanted CLEAR DAY before CLEAR SKY (48A: Part of a forecast without clouds).I never heard of SEA RATS and was not actually sure of the "T" ( 53A: Pirates, in old slang).I forgot what "leporine" meant (so mad at myself).I can't believe something as vague as SITE was clued via Fodor.I scraped my way to BREAD but then, even with -ONKEY in place, I had no idea and wrote in DONKEY BREAD ( 14D: Pastry that gets pulled apart).I guessed the correct Jordan, but I put him on a SHOE (8D: Jordan is found on one, notably = LOGO) From little things like not knowing "farrow," to medium things like having no idea who Sklyar ASTIN is, to big things like never having heard of MONKEY BREAD, I haven't felt so unwelcome in a puzzle in a long, long while. And many of the answers and clue terminology were absolutely new and baffling to me. Every single clue seemed amped way way up, difficulty-wise. I may be in error, I may be forgetting some 2021 struggle, but I honestly don't remember feeling like I couldn't get traction *anywhere*. I am not kidding when I say I struggled more with this first puzzle of 2022 than I struggled with *any* puzzle in 2021. Eventually, I got *so* nowhere that I had to stop the movie and sit up straight and really give the puzzle my attention, and while things got better, they didn't get much better. Solving context matters with this puzzle, or at least it really felt like it mattered, because I thought, "Oh, it's New Year's Eve, I've got the Nick & Nora Charles "Thin Man" movie marathon on, I don't want to interrupt the vibe, so I'll just bring my laptop downstairs and poke at the puzzle while I sit on the couch." And so I did that and got almost nowhere. At any rate, I'm up, so I'm solving and writing now instead of in the morning. Solvers on the NYT app should enter NOTHING or just N into the blank squares.It's New Year's Eve so I'm gonna try to wrap this up quickly so that I can be done by midnight, at which point. If there had been fewer shaky parts of the grid, it would have been a POW! for sure. Neat way to stack MUCHADO/ABOUT/NOTHING, too. Such a magnificent concept the perfect way to execute on this idea. That's a structure put together by a crane (bird), not a crane (machine). Helped to make up for some of the short glue I had to wade through.įantastic clue for NEST. I loved getting THE ROBOT, some yummy SCHMEAR, and even ANAGRAMS, with an homage to crosswords of the past. of organic chemistry, says that he never used the term when teaching - it was always "O-chem" - but his former students now use ORGO exclusively in their text messages. ADDED NOTE: Reader Larry Byrd, a retired prof. I took a lot of organic chemistry, but I couldn't remember anyone ever calling it ORGO. It's so difficult to fill around fixed shapes. Will Shortz recently mentioned that he's shying away from puzzles that have themers making patterns in grids like this, because of the glue they force. ![]() SSRS at the top of your grid isn't a great way to headline, and there was enough ABBR ISR OFA STS YRS - all things called out on editors' spec sheets - to bog me down. That did necessitate some trade-offs, though. I don't think it was necessary to place all the bubbled words symmetrically, but it added a touch of elegance. Note how consistent he was in his orientations, the synonyms always starting in the west and traveling clockwise: FRACAS, FUSS, HUBBUB, UPROAR, STIR, RUMPUS. I also appreciate the new initiative of sending the puzzle PDF to constructors a couple weeks before publication so that we can let the editors know if there are any changes we would like to be made. Thanks, as always, to the editorial team for their work I especially like the clue, which they added. The interlocking geometry of the theme entries is simply incompatible with many words (including some of my favorites: BALLYHOO, BROUHAHA, HULLABALOO, and HURLY-BURLY - it seems that certain letters really evoke a commotion!). ![]() Without that flexibility, I might not have been able to fill the grid, because this type of theme is very constraining. It's a common answer, so this gave me many options. To brainstorm potential words for the loops, I went on XWord Info to look up all the ways that ADO has been clued in past crosswords. This puzzle finally gave me the chance to do it! Ever since solving David Steinberg's excellent FROOT LOOPS puzzle, I've thought about using some sort of loop-based trick.
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