Theme: The Woods Are Calling
John Muir's quote was actually, "The mountains are calling, and I must go." What Muir really meant. Such a consistent theme here, with the first two, and last three letters of each spelling out a type of wood (or tree), and the 'filler' in between - thus WOOD FILLER. Awesome.
17. *Specialized baking surface: PIZZA STONE.
23. *Unwelcome sci-fi visitor: ALIEN INVADER.
34. *Pair with a license, often: MARRIED COUPLE.
47. *Location method requiring a sorted list: BINARY SEARCH.
55. Carpenter's compound, or what's found between each of four pairs of circled letters: WOOD FILLER.
Across:
1. Signs of healing: SCABS.
6. Like many summer drinks: ICED.
10. Pipe smoker's gadget: TAMP. Verb, not noun here.
14. Vinyl hit, usually: OLDIE. Vinyl has made a comeback and is pretty popular again.
15. Complimentary: FREE.
16. "I have an __": IDEA.
19. Reason for a cake, briefly: BDAY.
20. Flower bed tool: HOE.
21. Yet, poetically: THO.
22. What a person eats: DIET. Or more typically, what a person doesn't eat.
28. Spelunking spot: CAVERN.
30. Rescue copter: MEDEVAC.
31. Classical theaters: ODEA. From dictionary.com: a hall, theater, or other structure for musical or dramatic performances.
32. Paddle cousin: OAR.
33. One-time connector: ATA.
39. Diamond throw: PEG.
40. Kind of tale or fate: SAD.
41. Sweet companion?: SOUR.
42. Cheese on a cracker: CHEDDAR.
45. Lets go: LOOSES.
49. Frozen dessert chain: TCBY. The Country's Best Yogurt, a chain of frozen yogurt stores.
50. Common email attachment: PDF. Portable Document Format.
51. Wall St. specialist: ARB. Definitely not my area - anyone else know this? "The practice of simultaneously purchasing and selling securities in two separate financial markets in order to profit from price differences between them. For example, an arbitrageur would buy a security at one price on the London Stock Exchange and sell the same security at a higher price on the New York Stock Exchange. "Arbs" also get busy in mergers and acquisitions (M&A), mostly by shorting the stock of companies making an acquisition and simultaneously buying shares in the takeover target."
54. "Now hear __!": THIS.
59. Words with movie or show: SEE A. We're all doing this at home now. My local art theater is hosting viewing online in their virtual cinema, calling it "Distance and Chill."
60. Quattro maker: AUDI.
61. "Au contraire": NOT SO. French.
62. Formerly, quaintly: ERST.
63. Genealogy chart: TREE. Nice bonus word.
64. Laundry challenges: SPOTS.
Down:
1. Junior-to-be: SOPH.
2. Award coveted on "Mad Men": CLIO.
3. Shaping tool: ADZE.
4. Industry, informally: BIZ.
5. Poseidon's realm: SEA.
6. Programming decision construct: IF THEN.
7. Sing like Bing: CROON.
8. Yet, poetically: EEN.
9. "Don't Go Breaking My Heart" duettist Kiki: DEE.
10. Shinbones: TIBIAE. Tricky plural spelling.
11. What extra cost hopefully brings: ADDED VALUE. Not always so.
12. Ones enjoying a rare meal?: MEAT EATERS. Rare meal ... nice.
13. Fork over: PAY. Coming right after the clue above, I was thinking meat.
18. Hoosegow: STIR. Hoosegow is slang for jail - or also for being drunk and disorderly.
22. Movie format: DVD.
23. Say confidently: AVER.
24. Kind of jet: LEAR.
25. It's Intel-based since 2006: IMAC.
26. Lyre-playing emperor: NERO.
27. Early TV brand: RCA.
28. Inviting, as a look: COME HITHER. Lauren Bacall ...
29. Commercial writers: AD AGENCIES.
32. Unmatched: ODD.
35. Words to an old chap: I SAY.
36. All __: listening closely: EARS.
37. Biennial games org.: USOC. United States Olympic Committee.
38. Luxurious: POSH.
39. Banned chem. contaminant: PCB.
43. Pats gently: DABS AT.
44. Martini order: DRY.
45. Scottish boy: LADDIE.
46. "Carmina Burana" composer: ORFF. The Lasting Appeal of Orff's Carmina Burana.
48. Lyrical work: EPODE. A form of lyric poem written in couplets, in which a long line is followed by a shorter one.
52. Take five: REST.
53. Good buds: BROS.
54. Half a fly: TSE.
55. Angkor __: Cambodian temple: WAT.
56. Plural possessive: OUR.
57. Connections: INS.
58. Cut (off): LOP. Ow.
51 comments:
Good Mornina Solvers!
All this staying at home is making me STIR crazy! STIR may have come as a reference to the famous Start prison in London, and if you're itchy to get out or escape, you're STIR crazy. How about that! I did not know that at all, and it held me up solving the NW corner of today's puzzle.
TCBY also made me SAD, and I didn't get DABS AT at all. Wasn't a DAB once called a "terrorist fist bump?" Not very gentle, a terrorist fist bump!
I had to go all the way back to 9th-grade algebra for IF THEN. This was 100 years ago, and we had a time-share computer terminal in the back of our classroom and our super-hip math teacher, Mr. Henderson, encouraged us to do some very, very basic coding. It was in a soundproof chamber since the typewriter on the thing was so very loud. Isn't IF THEN - NOT SO some kind of grammatical construction? Nah, maybe not.
Cool how none of the solves for "formerly, quaintly," "Yet, poetically,"(1) or "yet, poetically"(2) were ERE, which those clues usually are. ERST I SAW ELBA doesn't have the smae ring to it.
So I'm 61. Does OLDIE qualify as a CSO?
Vermontah out!
Good morning!
Had A-SIDE above PIZZA STONE, and nothing was working. Wite-Out, please. So out came PIZZA STONE. Bzzzzt. More Wite-Out. Had the circles, and I did notice all the woods, but still tried WOOD FINISH before FILLER elbowed in. Took two minutes longer than Monday. Just right. Thanx, Roland and Melissa Bee.
IMAC: Nope. Nuff sedd.
ARB: Watched a movie recently about a team spending a literal fortune to build a fiber-optic tunnel that would shave a millisecond off the data transmission time. They figured that "edge" would make them $millions in faster trades. By the time construction was finished, another team had put in a microwave system that was even faster. Oops.
Anybody else notice ALTO Sax beside Take Five? That couldn't be coincidence. Roland?
Vermontah, in this crowd you'll get no props for being a mere 61.
FIR with one write-over: CLIO 4 CLeO. I saw the theme but got no use from it. BINARYSEARCH reminded me of my Computer Science professing days.
Hi Y'all! Great puzzle, Roland! Thanks, melissa bee, I wondered what was an EPODE that perped in.
Got all the WOODS and sat a while mulling over the FILLERS, trying to make more out of them than was intended. No anagrams found.
Vermontah: you young whippersnapper, I'm old enough to be your mother & I'm not the oldest here. Defer to your elders, sonny! LOL! You'll get old quick enough.
WOOD FILLER- I used some a few weeks ago to fill in a rusted out spot on a wrought-iron post. It was hard as the iron.
ARBs also buy company stock of proposed acquired companies and short the acquirer (or vice versa).
But I really had a DNF at the cross of TIBIAE & MEDEVAC. I was thinking heli-vac for the copter and TIBIAS but "TIBIAI and MEDSVAC" both looked dumb. I left the 'I'. It was either I for medIcal or E for Evacuation.
Vermontah- at 61 you're so young that if you are female, all the men commenting would have considered you as "jail bait" if they went after you in the 9th grade.
Good Morning.
I came so late to the game Monday and yesterday that I didn't post, but I read the explications and the comments. Thanks to our constructors and our tour guides and Corner wits.
Thanks for this one Roland. I, too, was jammed up with STIR in the NW. Jail, cell? Nothing seemed to be working. STIR fell last on crosses. I liked the theme, which I did see when I finished. Tah Dah for me.
Thanks, Melissa, but I'm still not sure about STIR. Maybe along the lines of stirring things up as in trouble. . . .
UM, no, Vermontah. OLDIE? Not you! ;-)
Have a sunny day. I'm studying Italian with a class mate. We're too cheap to involve ourselves in ZOOM, etc so we go over our lesson on the phone. (She doesn't have an iPad for Face time.) Ciao, tutti. Buona giornata!
From yesterday....I'll toss in my unsolicited tuppence...
"Dr." as a title is a replacement for Doctor. Dr. Frankenstein not Doctor Frankenstein. Mr. Smith not Mister Smith. If a clue included "Mr." would the answer have to be an abbreviation? When I was a newbie I commented that the answer "Fax" (abbrev.for facsimile) was incorrect because the clue contained no abreviations. My Cornerite Betters informed me that "Fax" is so common it doesn't require an abbreviation as part of the clue. IMHO the same goes for Mr. and Dr. "Mr. Ed is a _____ " HORSE. "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" is a gothic ___ TALE.
Owen...I LOLed when I finally put together your query.."Sherlock has an accent??" with your hearing impairment.. when DW says there's something wrong with my hearing. I inform her I'm not wearing an earring. Testing shows I suffer from auditory impairment at precisely her decibel level.
There's an Ad on my Blog page touting a "German hearing aid." I guess it's perfectly fine to hear German through your hearing aid as long as you understand the language..
Now let's see about today's puzzle
Good morning everyone.
Got it all without help or erasures. Cranky in spots, but when WOOD FILLER was sussed, the solve went better. Many compound fills like AD AGENCIES and IF THEN forced taking careful tip-toeing. I did like the 4 ten-letter long downs like COME HITHER. They were all compound, too. I thought STIR was OK, but the sense of 'hoosegow' invited a word more like 'pokey'; although we needed 4 letters. Overall, Roland ginned up a nice tight puzzle. IMHO.
Yesterday our bird feeder hosted the annual one or two day visit of a male Rose-Breasted Grosbeak. Beautiful coloring.
Musing
-WOOD FILLER and molding covered many of my carpentry errors
-In Close Encounters Of The Third Kind, the ALIENS were not really INVADERS
-There’s a big difference between FREE and at no ADDED cost
-Spelunking would be nightmare to me
-Our hospital’s helicopter route is directly over our house
-He hath LOOSED the fateful lightning of his terrible swift sword
-An IF/THEN Excel formula for overdue books. (THEN is inferred)
-Anybody a fan of the insurance commercials AD AGENCIES are producing these days?
-We are trying everything to entice our orioles to return more frequently
Good Morning:
After filling in the first two themers, I thought Trees was going to be part of the reveal, so Wood Filler was a big Aha. Of course, Roland sneaked in Tree, anyway, a cute Easter Egg. I went astray with Scars/Scabs, Ades/Iced, BFFs/Bros, and One/Odd. I needed perps for Dee and Orff, which I know but can never remember. I liked the Pay/Free, Odea/Idea, Hoe/Tho, and Free/Tree combos. There was also a mini tech theme with PDF, If Then, iMac, and Binary Search. And another RCA appearance, a CSO to Misty.
Thanks, Roland, for a mid-week treat and thanks, Misty, for guiding us along so smoothly.
Madame Defarge, I hope you’re back to your old self again after your surgery. Don’t be a stranger.
Jayce, thanks again for that tip on shaking the iPad to Redo the Undo function. It came in handy this morning with a lengthy entry.
FLN
My problem understanding Jonny Miller (Sherlock) was not so much his accent but the rapid-fire machine gun outburst of words. I’ve also noticed this fast speech pattern among the Z and Millenial age groups.
I wish someone would inform Mother Nature that we’re in the middle of May, not March!
Stay safe, all.
Good morning. Thank you, Roland, and thank you, Melissa.
Happy Birthday, Vermontah ! Take advantage of your youth while you can.
Each of the woods was easy to spot with the circles. I have a PINE and a MAPLE in the yard. The River Birch is long gone. No ALDERs around here that I know of. Maybe at the arboretum.
I've loved that Kiki Dee and Elton John duet since it came out.
WOOD FILLER: J-B Weld makes various really great two part expoy products. Among them is their Wood Restore Wood Filler. It cures harder than the wood itself.
Husker, I looked at your Excel example. How is it possible that due dates in early September would be "OK," but dates later in September would be Past Due? Also, shouldn't the formula use (Today()-A4>30 rather than (A4-Today()>30? I'm not much of an Excel user, so I could be wrong, but the logic in that example seems bass-ackwards.
This was a pretty quick run since I had the circles - once I had the first WOOD - I filled in the circles before filling in the rest of the theme answer. I hadn't really heard of BINARY SEARCH but since I already had BI RCH from the tree theme - I could guess at the rest and confirm with the perps!
Like IM I had SCABS before SCARS. I have heard of STIR for jail but usually in period literature set in jolly old England or somewhere similar. Some of my COVID reading has been the Brother Cadfael mysteries by Ellis Porter - and since it is set in England and WAles around the 1100s, I have been kept on my toes by the words used - but similar to reading Shakespeare - the more I do it the more fluid it becomes!
Thanks Melissa B and Roland!
Desper-ott, that's what I read as well. As well, what about columns past A4 ? But Excel was never my strong suit either. I'd take both flat file and spreadsheet data and then import the data into DB2 tables I'd create, and then run SQL queries and generate reports from there.
TTP, I assumed that the "A4" was relational and would become "A5" in row five.
No one had a COMEHITHER look like Lauren Bacall. Thanks for the pic!
Anyway FIR but more effort than usual for a Humpday challenge Even though I saw the forest through the tree which helped a lot.
Like DO Aside/OLDIE.... ades/ICED, bat/WAT (what is bOODFILLER?...oh...nm)
Never heard of EPODE, BINARY SEARCH. Thought "commercial writers" were people not things so that took a while. Learned TAMP is a noun as well as a verb. Makes sense. ARB? SEEA? BIZ just perp fill? SOPH again? Guess earlier puzzle debate didn't discourage that reappearance . STIR?
(What if PEG is off buying a hot dog when the ball comes in? )
Although a clue used in the not so distant past no way was I going to remember that composer's odd name: ORFF (are the F's pronounced separately like the infamous Burglar of Ban f f f
href="https://youtu.be/5qUagJGeZhc"
Kept striking out so the crowd yelled "_____ !!" ...USOC
Subtracts opposite..... ADZE
Sheep's in the meadow _______ is in the corn?... HOOSEGOW
For a change of scenery lodged myself at camp in the SW Adirondacks just an hour north of Utica. Snowed so heavily yesterday couldn't see the lake.
IF THEN ELSE ------ COBOL LIVES!!!!!
FLN: 1. Your baseball digression made me feel better about mine and mine had Aaron too . 2. RsBI is utterly ridiculous. RBIs it will always be.
Fast solve today THO depended on perps. Ere wasn't working eev less so finally PIZZA STONE and "yet" was EEN(Talk about "quaint".
Michael Lewis talks about ARBitrageurs in "Liars Poker"(or was it the "Big Short"?)
Better subject than baseball for which he was the village idiot. D-O that's exactly what I was referring to - the millisecond thing. Baseball calls that kind of thing "cheating".
Easiest of the week for me. WAR vs Bat held me up for a sec.
Vermontah, around here you're just a kid*
WC
*D-O also pointed out. I have a week's worth of Latimes xwords, maybe I'll get in real early tomorrow
Good Morning, all. Kind of challenging xword for Wednesday. Thanks Roland and thanks Mel B. I don't talk age in this group, Vermoontah cause while not a jr like you I am not near the top either. lol If/Then proposition was the basis of a whole quarter of logic in college. A lot of folks didn't like the philosophy classes. Programmer's would necessarily need these classes. FIW today. I had naticks at both the W and the F of wood filler. I thought "miller" as a wood worker??? and couldn't remember Orff or Wat. As clued the reveal got right by me. I kept looking between the circles for answers not realizing that they were just "filler" Other than that DDT turned to PCB and Pals to Bros and etudes to epodes. Very satisfied with today's effort.
Summers coming to a northern state near you. :o)
Kerry yay for Cobol
Yes, I guess so. I understand what you are saying.
I have spreadsheets for different stuff. One is for all my bills and expenses, so I can go back and for instance, see you what I paid for electric in June of 95 or for the year, or total since the account was opened. Utilities , vehicle insurance, charge cards property taxes, you name it. Everything all the way back to 91. It just became a habit, and took a lot of guesswork out of the expense side of financial planning.
I have some simple formulas in that spreadsheet, and have charted some of the expenses.
I understand if that rule was copied to rows 5 to 13, the rule would be changed to reflect cells A5, A6, A7... A13.
But in the (incorrect rule, as far as I can see) example, line 2 in red only applies to row 4. I don't get why the illustrator has arrows pointing to the additional rows... No big deal. Just seems odd that it would be illustrated that way.
Wilbur Charles- I'd read Lewis' "Liars Poker" and saw 'The Big Short' but the movie totally left out the most important person who somehow managed to short the mortgage market. Houses were overpriced (as they are now) and unqualified buyers (who put no money down) were borrowing 125% of the value to purchase them. The blame belongs to the bankers who wrote the mortgages, Freddie Mac & Fannie Mae who allowed the banks to unload the bad loans, but mainly Congress. They wrote crazy laws forcing bankers to loan money to those people that the bankers knew couldn't pay it back.
John Paulson is the person who figured out how to short the housing market and managed to make $15,000,000,000 (that's 15 BILLION). Read about it in "The Greatest Trade Ever". He wasn't even mentioned in the movie.
With PINE in the circles I guessed the circles would all refer to trees. Just WO-------- gave me WOOD FILLER. Neat theme.
It is interesting that we had the answer ARB in the LAT exactly one year ago today. May 13, 2019.
"Wall St. specialist: ARB. Wall Street had a roller coaster ride last week. I hope you all survived!"
SEE A - kinda Meh!
Pipe smoker's gadget would have to be a noun.
Dictionary: TAMP a tool for tamping (e.g., for tamping tobacco into a pipe bowl or a charge into a drill hole etc.)
I love an extra sharp aged CHEDDAR. Strange that a TV channel is called Cheddar. Isn't that a cheesy name?
Stir Crazy was a 1980 movie about jail. Stir in this sense feels quite familiar to me. I think it appears in other prison movies, too.
We have had below normal temps lately, but it is supposed to be 80 here by Friday. Some years on Mother's Day we had a backyard picnic on the patio.
COBOL largely disappeared circa Dec 31, 1999. That which remained most likely didn't have date-sensitive logic. By now, I'd bet that there is very little left in productive use.
Hola!
Thank you, Roland Huget and Melissa Bee! I love that photo of Lauren Bacall. She was outstandingly beautiful and a great actress as well. In later life she played Barbara Streisand's mother in The Mirror Has Two Faces, a movie I love.
It's nice to see Bing, too. In my teens he was all the rage.
This was a fun, woodsy puzzle!
I like seeing ORFF and recalling the bombastic sound of Carmina Burana.
The only time I've seen TCBY is when visiting my sister in Charlotte. There aren't any out here.
A DIET can not only be the food one eats but the regimen. E.G., she's always on a DIET.
The daughter of one of my friends was killed when a MEDEVAC helicopter crashed. She was a nurse going to offer aid with her other medical companions. There were no survivors.
I have a good IDEA about ODEA from reading British novels.
Yes, Vermontah, you are a youngster here among us elders.
Thanks again, Melissa! Wishing you all a pleasant REST of the day!
Good morning, folks. Thank you, Roland Huget, for a fine puzzle. Thank you, Melissa Bee, for a fine review.
Yellowrocks: Thank you for the response. I see where you are from. That is a good ways from my old turf. Lots of country up there and I am sure it is beautiful in the fall.
Puzzle went great. Theme did not. I was trying to unscramble the letters between the circles. Never looked at the circles. I guess I should have known better. Anyhow, that's my story and I'm sticking to it.
TIBIAE was a good one. I had to look at it several times, but the perps were solid.
I like CHEDDAR on crackers. Or, most other cheeses too.
ORFF not known. Perps.
I would not fit in with 12D's. I like meat (steaks), but not rare. Medium Well works great for me.
Looks like a nice day. I sent my seedlings out for some sun. I want to plant them, but we keep having frosts. I have about 200 seedlings. Tomatoes, Peppers, Egg Plant. Some HyBrid and some Heirloom.
See you tomorrow.
Abejo
( )
Spitz@ 8:47...we had a visit from a male grosbreak at the feeder yesterday. First siting this year. He may be making the rounds
TTP, you would lose.
COBOL did not disappear at Y2K. Lots of effort went into updating sensitive code. I was still working with customers using massive amounts of COBOL code when I retired in 2004. I suspect there is still a lot in productive use.
Ray @ 8:29 concerning abbreviations. What do you think of 1D SOPH? I don"t see anything in the clue to indicate the answer is an abbreviation. Is SOPH an abbreviation of sophomore? Just wondering.
Woohoo! Woohoo! I rarely get an entire Wednesday puzzle with no problems in record time--so this one was a total treat! Many thanks, Roland, for this gift. Everything fell into place from the very beginning, although, I too had SCARS before SCABS for a minute. Got the TREE (loved seeing it on the bottom) theme before I was even half-way down with PINE and ALDER, and a few minutes later MAPLE confirmed it. And, of course, I'm always happy to see my Dad's RCA company in a puzzle--thank you, Irish Miss.
My favorite item was the lovely MARRIED COUPLE in the middle. Wonderful puzzle, thank you again, Roland. And Melissa, your commentary is always a helpful delight.
Have a great day, everybody.
Loved the puzzle and FIR without complaint. ARB was new to me.
Madame Defarge, how cool that you are learning Italian with a friend! If you want to sign up for a Zoom account, it's free, giving you unlimited access to 40-minute video chat sessions. (Longer sessions require a paid account, but you can always start a new session when the free 40 minutes are over.) You need to have a device with a camera and microphone. An iPad or PC will work. My Mom's older PC had neither camera nor microphone, so I sent her a webcam (about $150) which has both, and plugs into the PC's USB port. Now Mom (sheltered in place all by herself) enjoys virtual get-togethers via Zoom and Facebook Messenger. Buona fortuna!
GJ @ 11:38. IMHO SOPH is being used as a short version of "Sophomore" not an abbreviation. Kinda like "Frosh" for Freshmen. Except I've never seen it before this and another recent puzzle.
Lucina, "The only time I've seen TCBY is when visiting my sister in Charlotte. There aren't any out here." That didn't sound right to me. I checked, there are 6 stores in Phoenix, two in Mesa, plus Tempe, Chandler, Gilbert, Glendale, even one in Scottsdale.
Madama di Farge..Don't forget to accentuate double consonants. A mistake than can lead to embarrassing
misunderstandings. Non dimenticare e Buona fortuna.
I liked the main theme, and the puzzle overall. Had SCARS for SCABS.
I did not love the mini-theme of antiquated words. I appreciated the effort to make it into a mini-theme of "poetic" and "quaint" words, but none of those words should be in a crossword, anyway.
I share Ray-o-sunshine and Yellowrock's feeling that SEEA is not a great answer, nor did I enjoy the way it was clued.
Couldn't see the trees for the forest (of circles)
I dunno,
something in the theme clue had me looking between the circles
for trees? PIzzastoNE? what kind of tree has two Z's?
(CED sees thing differently from normal people...)
Oh well,
I was looking for silly Wood Filler images,
& nothing was coming up to my high standards...
So then I switched to silly carpentry,
& pretty much gave up when I got to this one...
I enjoyed this puzzle somewhat and liked the theme.
desper:
That is interesting because I have not seen any of those TCBY but remember, this is a large, sprawling metropolis. A store can exist here for years without my having seen it or known about it and I wouldn't even search for TCBY because it's not on my DIET. I see that one is at the airport and another in far north Scottsdale.
Glendale is way out of my way though I go for book club meetings at a friend's house.
Musings 2
I agree D-O, I would change the sense of the greater than sign or the order of the text messages. I didn't peruse it very carefully when I first looked at it. When I used Excel as a grade sheet, I had nested IF/THEN statements and loved it.
-Very cool, breezy and misting on the Great Plains today! 85F next week. We're getting cheated out of a spring.
Hi Kerry, I didn't say it disappeared. I said it largely disappeared. Still, it was a rash statement on my part, and I would lose.
Granted, a number of legacy mostly mainframe applications are still being maintained. And no doubt, some are probably still being developed. But nothing comparable to the heyday. So my "in productive use today" is definitely incorrect.
In the years leading up to Y2K, - in some cases - it would have been cheaper and more expedient to test the lines of code, and fix or mitigate date computations, rather than try to totally rewrite applications with millions of lines of code. I get it.
I just don't think COBOL would be a first choice for developing new applications now, and hasn't been since Y2K. It has to be way down on the lists now. Besides, where would all the COBOL programmers come from ?
Thanks, Roland and Melissa for a good Wednesday workout. I didn’t see the trees or the circles. It all filled itself in but not without a struggle.
I loved the c/a for 12D, those rare steaks, and Unmatched for ODD. I’ve heard or read the use of STIR for Jail so that was no problem.Ray-o–Sunshine, my family claims I have selective hearing. I hear what I want. Not true. But I can identify with this testing to prove a problem at frequencies you want to ignore!
I also had SCARS before SCABS.
Lots of fresh clues.
A bit tricky today, but marvelously clued!
Ta ~ DA!
Well done, Misty! Congrats on a happy solve! This was not an easy pzl for a Wednesday.
~ OMK
____________
DR: A 3-way on the far side.
The main diagonal offers an anagram of an old rogue who’s decked himself out in colorful but tasteless decoration to lure underage victims,...
“A BEADED PERV”!
Wonderful Wednesday. Thanks for the fun, Roland and melissa bee.
Some crunch and a few inkblots but I finished. Then I came here to discover that I FIWed; My summer drinks were ICEy and Kiki Yee was as good as DEE to me. ACH! I should have entered either icy or Icee (a common CW entry), instead of my hybrid. I actually started out with Ades (Adey was just too wrong!).
I saw the trees in the circles, and then found the 63A TREE Easter Egg. When WOOD FILLER filled (pun intended) the spot, I smiled broadly as the light dawned.
I also waited for perps to decide between SCABS and Scars (but scabs are more recent signs).
(I should have just written WIMS for "What Irish Miss Says", as I just seem to be repeating her post!!)
Cleo gave me Pezz . . . and held me up for a while, until I corrected to CLIO (hello Hungry Mother) and saw the PIZZA STONE.
SOPH again. (Hello Ray)
I noted ERST, EEN and THO for poetic words. Maybe add LADDIE.
We had COUPLE and BINARY (I almost had Duet when I started to fill Fibulae instead of the parallel TIBIAE, but corrected to DIET.)
Hoosegow=STIR is a bit of a stretch for me; not a common usage here. Thanks Vermontah for reminding me of STIR crazy. LOL, Ray "Sheep's in the meadow _______ is in the corn?... HOOSEGOW"
ARB (thanks YR - I thought I had seen it here before) and ORFF filled with perps thankfully.
Let's say, Vermontah, that AnonT might be a Frosh, you and I might be SOPHs, but others here are Jrs and even Srs. Should we do a BINARY SEARCH and categorize all the Cornerites?
Wishing you all a great day.
Wow, this was a Wednesday?
I’m calling a Natick at 10D and 30A....I had MEDIVAC. Kind of a tricky cross. Anyway, a wrong cell, so no complete for me.
Write-overs....SIDEA/OLDIE, IFTRUE/IFTHEN, and the above Natick.
TTP (and Kerry)......COBOL...I’m guessing you missed the big article in Business last week...companies are looking for COBOL programmers, to both maintain and modify Legacy systems in addition to coding needed new programs. There’s a ton of COBOL still out there.
Almost made me look into it....almost. You couldn’t pay me to go back to work, even if from home, haha.
And on to Thursday...stay safe.
Anyone else met Grace Murray Hopper?
I am not one to normally point out my Stupidity,
(silliness, yes, Stupidity no...)
& I can't say it is Ignorance
(as I do want to learn...)
But for the past days/weeks/months (possibly years...)
I have been bitching about the Safari/Apple platform (IOS)
that is behind the LATimes Crossword online puzzle site.
On an Iphone, it is bad,
on an Ipad, it is better but flawed
why it is different on each was a puzzle,
a puzzle that I only solved just today...
I am speaking about the clues not having across & down side by side,
and much of the puzzle obscured...
Now, In my defense,
I was given an Ipad cover that turns into a pedestal
when twisted every which way. Which is great,
but it makes it hard to hold in a vertical format.
So I always use it in Landscape mode (horizontal)
Yesterday, by accident, I turned the whole Thingie vertical,
& the puzzle became whole,
the clues were side by side,
& everything made sense!
Which brings me to my rant...
(no the above was not the rant, THIS IS THE RANT!)
I have been complaining about this for (years?)
& no one (NO ONE) has said boo about turning the
whole thing sideways...
Why is there no manual for this crap!
Have you all been snickering at my helpless posts,
or are you all as helpless as I am?
A bit of a slog due to some of the cluing.
Carpenter's compound, or what's found BETWEEN each of four pairs of circled letters: WOOD FILLER. I was looking between the circles like crosseyedDave was. The revealer didn't reveal anything of use. Almost naticked at medevac and tibiae. Was it an e or an I in medevac? I've seen it spelled either way. Never came across tibiae before.
CrossEyedDave ~
I hear your rant and am not snickering.
I don't do the Xwd on my phone, but I have had occasion to access it on my iMac and print it out.
(When my print paper failed to be delivered.)
Until recently, the directions for the print-out process were absent, and I had to wade through several attempts to finally succeed.
Only now can I find an explanation on line.
I think there should be standard protocols for such directions to ALWAYS accompany anything appearing on line. This should be a self-imposed requirement for anyone publishing an app.
I am with you.
~ OMK
Hungry Mother - I heard Admiral Grace Hopper speak once. "Better to ask forgiveness than ask permission." "A ship is safe while sitting in a harbor, but that's not why ships are built." "You cannot manage men into battle." (they must be LED). Also heard she was a chain smoker all the way from the airport to the conference.
I was still maintaining COBOL code when I retired in 2009, but while it's good for batch processing, customers today don't want to wait overnight for changes to register.
Hi All!
I always enjoy the fill in a Jeff Chen puzzle. I had to lookup Seth to see that he and Jeff had a puzzle in May 2017. Keep 'em coming guys.
Wonderful expo as always Hahtoolah. I got the BERLAP tote joke but wouldn't know an oboe from a clarinet.
WOs: AORTA in ELOPE's spot, FLYINg (had to be ING, right?), REpeat b/f REHASH
ESPs: STR, BOHO
Fav:
{A, A+}
========
And that's as far as FLN's draft got.... I did enjoy reading everyone - esp. Maynard G. (WORK?!?) Krebs comments.
Notes show that I did want to mention - liked ALFA (thanks all for the SO), miss ARGYLE, Stillwater OK for TTP, and ask OMaxiN if he too went to OU.
Thanks for the puzzle Roland - quite the delight. Thanks for the expo mb - ditto + good music!
WOs: ades b/f ICED (Hi IM!), MEDiVAC, forgot to wait on AVOW|AVER perps.
ESPs: ORFF, WAT
Fav: CAVERN - I used to Spelunk in the caves of Southern, IL when I was a Boy Scout. Now I Splunk. [sadness, looks like they've already called for .conf20 to be virtual] logs for badness.
OMK - let that jail-bait attraction STIR a while in the joint :-)
HungryMother - I almost had CLEO too. If PIZZA was Natick-y, that would have been a FIW for sure.
CS Prof? See if I can pass: BINARY SEARCH is O(log n) but requires a sort of, at best, O(n log n). For one-offs, an O(n) search is computationally more efficient.
//for non-nerds: n=number of items in a list and O(...) is Big-O Notation which used to compare algorithms' speed relative to how much n is. There's fun to be had considering how you can break up a task like sorting things
TTP - I assume multiple arrows in the illustration is trying to show how the IF statement works in Excel but his logic is so wrong the company went bankrupt.
COBOL was still in use at least 10 years ago - my neighbor then, 60+ years old, had a T1 and worked for IBM from his spare room. Maintained COLBOL for them he did.
//wait, was that you PVX / billo?
Vermontah - C, Eh! is right (I'll be L July IX). You can make fun of my relative youth if it makes you feel better :-)
Cheers, -T
Vermontah:
In some circles 61 might qualify as an oldie, but not here. Speaking for myself, it's never too late to learn and I learn a lot from all you youngsters.
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