Themeless Saturday by Matthew Stock and Pravan Chakravarthy
Matthew Stock has another collaboration, this time with Pravan Chakravarthy. Matthew is an 8th grade math teacher in Gainesville, FL. and he put me in contact with Pravan who was kind enough to tell us this:
I grew up in New Jersey and am currently a sophomore in college at the University of Chicago, where I’m studying linguistics and physics. Outside of classes I’m on the crossword team of the Chicago Maroon, and like long-distance running and writing/playing music. I’ve been solving crosswords since middle school, but didn’t seriously get into constructing until early 2020. It was around this time I met Matthew, who’s given me an incredible amount of advice on the art and science of puzzlemaking, and without whom this puzzle would not exist!
1. Works on the margins, perhaps: SAVES PAPER - I thought of page formatters and retail sellers before this:
11. Water color: CYAN.
15. "Were you followed here?": ARE WE ALONE.
16. Hold sway: RULE.
17. Ambitious workers: CAREERISTS - I've never seen it but it makes sense
16. Hold sway: RULE.
17. Ambitious workers: CAREERISTS - I've never seen it but it makes sense
18. Wasatch Mountains resort: ALTA.
19. Oscar-nominated biopic about a Supreme Court justice: RBG.
20. "Your Movie Sucks" author: EBERT.
21. Dial on old TVs: VERT.
22. Disney princess from Avalor: ELENA.
25. Choler: IRE - I've only seen in cwd's
26. Pt. of VAT: VALUE - VALUE Added Tax
27. Ditches: DESERTS.
29. Cocktails flavored with orgeat syrup: MAI TAIS - Orgeat syrup
31. Actor Millen of "Orphan Black": ARI - Of all the ARI's in the world, Matt, Pravan and/or Patti chose this one
32. Change in holiday entertainment?: GELT - Chocolate candy in the shape of coins, usually wrapped in metallic foil, usually eaten on Hanukkah and often used for games of dreidel.
32. Change in holiday entertainment?: GELT - Chocolate candy in the shape of coins, usually wrapped in metallic foil, usually eaten on Hanukkah and often used for games of dreidel.
33. "Spring forward" letters: DST.
34. Small wing nut: LEPIDOPTERIST - Getting butterfly "nut" was the key to my completing the puzzle
38. "A __ upon thee!": POX - A first class literary put down
39. Checks: VETS.
40. Sticker in a cushion: PIN.
41. Black Friday exhortation: ACT FAST.
43. Made a course standard: SHOT PAR - Normal for some, a goal for me
47. Burnett who appeared on the final season of "Better Call Saul": CAROL - I can't wait to see how this came about
48. Actress Longoria: EVA.
50. Pink bear in "Toy Story 3": LOTSO - For LOTSO huggin'
51. Of all time: EVER - Candidates for best EVER in their sport
52. Puffed up: PROUD - Love suffers long and is kind; love does not envy; love does not parade itself, is not puffed up. 1 Corinthians 13:4
54. __-free: container label: BPA - All you'd ever want to know
55. Capital on the Gulf of Guinea: LOME - It's about a 4-hr drive from Accra, the capital of Ghana, to LOME, the capital of Togo
59. Son of Hera: ARES.
60. Wildly incompatible: POLES APART - MILES APART is not wildly incompatible, it's just wrong here
61. __ control: PEST.
62. "Studying, simplified" website: SPARKNOTES - This looks like a good site.
Down:
1. "Is nothing __?": SACRED.
2. Ready for field work: ARABLE - Oh, the ground itself is declared ready for field work
3. Teeters (on): VERGES.
4. Meryl Sheep of "Sesame Street," for one: EWE.
5. Date: SEE.
6. Cut (down): PARE.
7. Outs: ALIBIS
8. Someone who's all style and no substance: POSER
10. Musical pause: REST - Do you know what song is being referenced here (*answer at bottom): Phillips said that he wrote the song quickly, in about 20 minutes. The song includes a pregnant pause before the coda, which modulates up a semitone.
11. Necktie: CRAVAT.
12. Icelandic gift-givers of lore: YULE LADS - All you want to know about these creatures of 17th century Iceland.
13. Selfless sort: ALTRUIST.
14. Marie Kondo superlative: NEATEST.
23. With 28-Down, twice-daily occurrences: NEAP and 28. See 23-Down: TIDES.
24. End of a Google Maps route calculation: ARRIVAL my 32. Way finder: GPS arrival time is sometimes too late because speed limits are just a suggestion for me sometimes
26. Bile: VITRIOL - See choler above
30. First Hebrew letter: ALEPH.
34. Neighborhood diner?: LOCAVORE - Portmanteau #2
35. Absolute ends: EXTREMES - Nebraska sumer and winter temperatures
36. Treat with DJ Tropicool and Louie-Bloo Raspberry flavors: OTTER POP - Not around here
37. Wild about: INTO.
38. Warmup stretch: PACE LAP - The red car is leading these NASCAR vehicles in the pace lap and it is not allowed to go over 45 mph
42. Sylvan area: FOREST.
43. Flying __: SAUCER.
44. WWII craft: PT BOAT - You can buy this Revell kit for $23 and build a model of the famous PT 109 that was commanded by JFK
46. Cooks slowly: ROASTS.
49. "You can clap now!": VOILA - A clear blue sky and some nice home editing allows this guy to say VOILA.
52. Fires (up): PEPS.
53. Gloaming: DUSK.
57. Akira Kurosawa's retelling of "King Lear": RAN - Ran (ä¹±, transl. "chaos" or "turmoil")
58. Shares time, for short?: IPO - When a company goes public and offers shares for sale.
*That song with the pregnant pause is Monday, Monday written by John Phillips for The Mamas and Papas
36 comments:
The only “Burnette” I knew of was Carol; fortunately, that turned out to be right. And I kept wanting to put “Lima” but the perps demanded “Lome.” I took so many WAGS with this puzzle I felt like a large, friendly dog (joke, except for the number of them, which is true.) But somehow, I FIR, so I’m happy.
Neap tides are not low tides. They are tides during the period when the variation between high and low tides is the smallest, as opposed to spring tides, which are the tides occurring when the variation between high and low tides is the greatest. Neither spring nor neap tides occur "daily." Spring tides occur when the sun and moon are aligned with the earth, neap tides occur when the sun and moon form a right angle with the earth.
Good morning!
Couldn't visualize the NO in SPARK__TES, and the perps didn't help. Bzzzzt. YULE LADS just looked weird. Really? Those stacked tens in the NW and SE were very nice. Impressive. Does a tide enthusiast say "Neapo?" Spent almost half an hour on my way to defeat this morning. Rats. Thanx, Matthew, Pravan, and Husker.
DNF, typical Saturday. Filled 22, 20 correctly. on to Sunday!
After a FIR on Thursday, I Did Not Finish Friday and today without looking at the helpful blogs. It seems I am out of practice doing the puzzles but I still enjoy the challenge. Last Sunday I Finished It Right. We'll see what tomorrow brings.
Thanks, Gary, Matthew, and Pravan. Hope everyone has a good weekend!
"Sparknotes"? I mean, do the people that write these things get kickbacks for plugging something that nobody's ever heard of? That's all I can figure.
Yule lads cross with DST did us in. What is DST? We used PST for Yule Laps. It made sense at the time. Having never heard of a lepidopterist or an entremet we got it with a total guess. Otherwise tough puzzle but we finished with that one error.
Team Joy and Bill @ 8:16 a.m. - "DST" is Daylight Savings Time (I'm not sure if it's "savings" or "saving" but you get the point.)
A DNF today. Cross of RAN, DUSK, & SPARK NOTES and ENTREMET & GELT- didn't know and no guesses made sense. Left them blank. No other problems. ARI, CAROL, ELENA were unknowns filled by perps.
Dr. Ed Sessa is a regular constructor here and has presented us with quality puzzles many times. I know he has retired to Sanibel Island just off SW Florida and I wrote and asked him if the hurricane had affected him. This was his reply:
Hi Gary,
Thank you so much for your kind note of concern. We evacuated with our elderly neighbors to a condo owned by friends in north ft myers. Although we lost power and water it was a safe place. We live on Hurricane Lane but aerial views show our neighborhood in reasonably good shape but time will tell. Hard to imagine a total bridge collapse.
My best regards to you
Ed
DNF. Never heard of entremet, lepidopterist, or locavore. Even the perps couldn't help me.
Saturday Stumper. Thanks for the fun, Matthew and Pravin, and HuskerG.
Officially a DNF as this CW was above my pay grade.
I’ll blame the tricky clueing plus some Canadian disadvantage . . . and it is Saturday.
ALTA could have been clued as our Canadian western province. ELENA I have learned as a Supreme Court judge, but we had RBG today.
I do not have OTTERPOPS here.
Ascot was too short; CRAVAT fit.
Great but tricky clues for LOCAVORE and LEPIDOPTERIST.
ENTREMET was unknown to me. Same for EPICURIOUS.
Had anyone heard of LOME?
EBERT and CAROL filled as educated WAGS. (I’m with subgenious re that dog!)
Wishing you all a great day.
Thank you Matthew and Pravan. It was only through sheer bullheadness that I finished this puzzle, confident that it was an FIR, but came here only to find that it was an FIW (see below). I got the bottom 2 fills in the 10 letter stack in the NW fairly quickly, along with 1D and 4D and to the East, but couldn't get anything to work with 1A, 2D and 3D (see below!).
Thank you Husker for the fine exigesis and for pointing out the error of my ways.
Some favs:
11A CYAN. AQUA didn't work, but then the fill is a "water color".
19A RBG. I had RGB (DUH!, geek speak for "Red Green Blue") until a double-retake finally saw the typo. The NW then fell into place.
34A LEPIDOPTERIST. Absolute favoritest clue. It took me a while and a few perps to realize that this had nothing to do with hardware or politics. My last fill.
59A LOME. We had the Gulf of Guinea 2 days ago as a clue for NIGERIA.
69A POLES APART. My undoing. As Husker pointed out, MILES APART fit too, but was wrong. Had I asked myself what "PEMS" had to do with "Fires (up) I might have succeeded. ATTERCOP would have kinda sorta fit in 36D, but that didn't perp either.
9D ENTREMET. A learning moment.
12D YULE LADS. Also new to me. Started with YULE LOGS, but they weren't very rewarding.
Cheers,
Bill
Anonymous @ 5:04 AM Thanks for the explanation of NEAP TIDES. I too thought that they are monthly, not daily occurrences, but filled them only because they perped.
CanadianEh! @11:05 AM I used to have a friend from TOGO and knew LOME, but it took some dredging. And don't you get a CSO for ARI MILLEN?
Husker @9:30 AM Has anybody heard from Lemonade? I suspect that the "computer problems" C.C. mentioned yesterday were really networking problems. All the pictures I see coming out of Florida show downed utility lines everywhere.
Saturday toughie, but with lots of great clues and words popping up--mean thanks, Matthew and Pravan. And I always enjoy your pictures, Gary, thanks for those too.
Well, it looks like the ALTRUIST in this puzzle was an animal lover who found a EWE that needed help and took her to a VET to get some care. She turned out to be the NEATEST pet he EVER had, not a bit of a PEST, and he's now a PROUD owner. He now wants to marry a LEPIDOPTERIST so that he can have his EWE play with her butterflies.
Have a great weekend, everybody.
Hand up a serious Saturday challenge with all those proper names. Learning moments about YULE LADS, ORGEAT SYRUP, GLOAMING and LOME. Even though we were in France most of this week, never heard of ENTREMET.
Husker Gary Thanks for the BPA-FREE information. I use Nalgene water bottles which have been around for decades, designed to be as chemically neutral as possible for lab purposes. Unfortunately, French airport security threw mine in the trash and lied about it.
Favorite clue/answer was for LEPIDOPTERIST.
Here is my article on LEPIDOPTERIST heaven just a twenty minute walk from our home.
Has anyone else witnessed these butterfly cluster festivals?
GELT was certainly easier for those of us of Jewish heritage, but it does appear in these puzzles fairly often. Amazed to FIR today.
From Yesterday:
Thank you all for the warm greeting back home!
AnonT Thanks especially for the amusing note that my photo of us along the SEINE in Paris this week was NOT NICE!
Musings
-I'm hoping Lemon is okay as the big damage seemed to be on the gulf side of Florida. I hope he checks in with us.
-Here’s the bridge Dr. Sessa mentioned. The causeway was the only roadway connection between the mainland and the island and he has told us he is in Ft. Myers with friends.
waseeley- thanks for pointing out that ARI
Millen is a fellow-Canadian. I was not knowledgeable about him.
NASCAR pace car speeds actually vary - usually by the size of the track. At Talladega this weekend the pace car speed will be 70 mph. A short track like Bristol or Martinsville the pace is 30 mph.
51 Across: Of All time: you forgot to mention: Serena Williams, Steffi Graff, Abby Wambach, Megan Rapinoe, Diana Taurasi, Sue Bird, Nancy Lopez, Sheryl Swoopes…among many other female athletes who are considered best of all time.
Composed last night
"Made a course standard " SHOT PAR. Merveilleux!! But…
Is that capital LOME? LOCAVORE as in carnivore may score. I couldn't think of Ginsburg's full name but 30 minutes later it dropped.
The names were familiar CAROL is the only Burnett I could think of. We had EVAn Longoria for the Rays who can't pay for excellence
I had Uboats/PTBOAT but thought recipes would be about meals. I was familiar with "The Homer in the Gloaming" by Gabby Hartnett in 1938 which led to the last of the Cubs pennants prior to 2016(discounting WWII). But I had dark/DUSK.
I also had get cash/ACT FAST and a complete mess in SE which I finally unraveled
Combination of LHF with clever clueing and complete UNKs like RAN. IPO was another V8
FIR I see, I peeked.
Let's see Gary's take
WC
-Mea Culpa, Synergy Girl! Here are the 36 most iconic female athletes of the past century! Thanks for the gentle reminder.
Ugh.
Another Saturday with bad clues and worse answers.
Judging by the increasing lack of entries here I’d say the new editor's attempts to make the LAT Crossword passé is working well.
I heard the gov talking about the causeway washout. It wasn't a bridge, but the road over sand which washed away. Wonder if they'll fill it back in, or leave it as an inlet and span it.
Did Lemony get back from Asia? Last I saw CC had to add fill because he wasn't in a place where he could post.
Lepidopterist?
Hi All!
Way over my pay-grade -- 17a had nothing to do with anTS and aqua was right-out. A learning Saturday, for sure.
Thanks Matthew & Pravan for the morning diversion. Thanks HG for the fine expo telling me what those two knuckleheads were thinking.
Fav: CAROL Burnett. 15 min of cast crack-ups.
GELT xing ALEPH was cute too.
Serendipity - I looked up a recipe last night and found one on EPICURIOUS. I thought that was a great name for their site. Too bad amps (should be PEPS) blocked that thought.
Jinx - you beat me... I had ~18 filled and only 15 right. Also, re: Lem, that's what I last recall. He posted from his cell after he got settled in Asia.
Anyone heard from Tin? Unclefred posted yesterday, so he's OK.
JGS - I've heard of SparkNotes (I think Youngest uses it in classes) but didn't know that's it's tag-line.
Back to playing with the dishwasher. It won't fully drain. I took (part of) it apart this morning, thought I fixed it, but there's still water in the bottom.
Cheers, -T
Too, too tough today.
The minds of the Stock/Chakravarthy team operate on a (shall-we-say?) different level than many constructors, difficult to follow, even when deconstructed by our own Husker G.
I reckon I knocked off abut 65% of yon PZL before the cheating dragon fired up my behind. While I was stealing a peek at one fill, I "accidentally" saw that my AQUA should be CYAN. And that was discouraging, as I had based my NE corner on a wrong starter.
Sorta takes the wind outta your sails, know what I mean?
Anyway, it kept me occupied for a while on the first day of the month.
Rabbit rabbit.
~ OMK
_____________
DR: True to its tough form, today's XWD gives us short shrift when it comes to diagonals. We find ourselves with only one, and we should be grateful.
That one (NE to SW) is shy of vowels, granting only two in its 15 letter span. This, of course, offers little in the way of useful anagrams. I have chosen a two word phrase (a mere 9 of 15 letters) because it reminds me of a tasteful if unhealthy luncheon treat my mom would offer to me and my little bro.
To Set The Stage:
I grew up in wartime, at a time when rationing prevailed, and America's ingenious spirit devised foodstuffs that helped stretch our limited menus. The main item in the anagram below, while created by Hormel on the eve of WW2, saw its rapid expansion and adoption by the military and its acceptance on the Homefront thanks to the need for easy preservation & safe storage--and for its ability to make use of ALL of every animal's parts.
I sorta remember my mom explaining to me that this item was capable of absorbing every inch of a pig--and indeed of any extra animal parts that happened to be lying around.
And weren't we all good little PATRIOTS for never complaining about it!
That's why I would gleefully wolf down a...
"SPAM MELT (sandwich)"!
Hip hip HooRay!
Whoops. Sorry.
Not even 9 of the 15 letters!
Merely 8.
~ OMK
DNF. It's been a while since I've had so many unknowns in a CW. Just POLES APART, I guess. HG's IS NOTHING SACRED? comic made the beating worth it. Thanks for that!
Speaking of nothing ... zero in mathematics has an interesting background. For those interested, I recommend "Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea" by Charles Seife. Here's a quote from the back cover: The Babylonians invented it, the Greeks banned it, the Hindus worshiped it, and the Church used it to fend off heretics.
Anon-T,
Sorry or hear your dishwasher is making you grumpy.
Assuming you cleared the dishwasher drain, there are other causes according to the grumpy plumber...
(It would never have occurred to me that backflow from the sink or garbage disposal would refill the dishwasher.)
DEC had a facility out west and a search engine named ALTA Vista
That's Ruth BADER on RBG
ELANA not Ariel
I'd guess I needed 4 perps for LEPIDOPTERIST then how to spell for a few more
Where's the xword BE Bobby ORR. Yes, great female performers list. Is Wilma Rudolph on it?
I like aloof Monday, Monday
SPARK NOTES have been around for 50 years. Print version
From the J-Hobbit
"Sneaking up behind he gave a wallop to a spider pelvis
A blow to the ego is something no spider can relish
And hearing names like puddle wetter and bamboo brain*
Put them in a rage. But chasing this truant would be in vain."
*In the original it was Attercop and Tomnoddy
Picard welcome back, enjoyed the pix
Spam melt sounds delicious
WC
No way. Impossible for me.
Could not finish in spite of some righteous cheating.
If ENTREMET is used as an English word it might be correct as is, if as a French word then there should be an S at the end even though it is a singular noun.
Looking forward to a Sunday puzzle.
Such a paucity of black squares… 😎
CED - the link you provided may be onto something. Two days ago, I did notice the sink belch the dishwasher egress. I flipped the disposal button. But the not-fully-draining continued (and it's just a trickle now). Maybe something back-flowed into the dishwasher's drain line.
Time to get the air-compressor out.
Thanks for the link.
Cheers, -T
I've been solving LAT Saturday and Sunday puzzles for nearly a half century and I can sincerely say today's entry was the most poorly clued entry I've ever experienced! A note to the editors: read the comments here and in the future DO YOUR JOB!
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