Saturday Themeless by Erik Agard
Erik's byline and enigmatic smile always means to get ready for an adventure and this puzzle did not disappoint. His grid-spanning center stacked block was very helpful.
I had a very unusual experience in that the SW corner had a lot of blanks at the end because of so many possibilities and my wrong take on Pacific in the down clue. Once I changed HAN Dynasty to QIN, that gave me QUARRELSOME and the SW cleared up as fast as I could type!
Across:
1. Point guard?: PEN CAP 😀 No basketball here.
7. Rihanna song with the lyrics "That was quite a show / Very entertaining / But it's over now": TAKE A BOW. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Unknown but the lyrics made sense quickly
15. Harlem theater: APOLLO - This theater and NASA's moon project use two "L's'" and skater Apolo Ono only uses one. It reminds me of Ogden Nash's silly poem
16. Upper management?: HAIR CARE 😀
17. Going from A to B, say: LINEAR - In plane geometry the shortest distance between two points is a straight line but not in curved geometry.
18. Far from fresh: OVERUSED - Even Erik could not avoid an OREO reference at 13 Down
19. Wave home: OCEAN 😀 Yeah, we baseball peeps thought of a third base coach signaling a runner to head for home
20. Uber around the Eiffel Tower?: TRES 😀 This finally occurred to me. Uber is German for "very" which is TRES in French.
21. Uncles, in Spanish: TIOS.
22. Save, in a way: DVR - DVR became a verb
23. China's first imperial dynasty: QIN - The Qin Dynasty (221-206 BCE) was the first imperial dynasty of China, establishing a centralized government and uniting the country after the Warring States period. I held on to HAN for a long time but it took over after only 20 years of the QIN Dynasty so...
19. Wave home: OCEAN 😀 Yeah, we baseball peeps thought of a third base coach signaling a runner to head for home
20. Uber around the Eiffel Tower?: TRES 😀 This finally occurred to me. Uber is German for "very" which is TRES in French.
21. Uncles, in Spanish: TIOS.
22. Save, in a way: DVR - DVR became a verb
23. China's first imperial dynasty: QIN - The Qin Dynasty (221-206 BCE) was the first imperial dynasty of China, establishing a centralized government and uniting the country after the Warring States period. I held on to HAN for a long time but it took over after only 20 years of the QIN Dynasty so...
24. 2, 4, and 24, e.g.: EVENS - I looked for a pattern but these were just random even numbers
26. Negative post?: PRE 😀 Erik! The opposite (negative) of "post" is PRE
27. Many a TV episode title: PUN - Here are some: 1. So Help Me Todd · 2. Better Off Ted · 3. Fawlty Towers · 4. Get Smart · 5. Schitt's Creek · 6. I Dream of Jeannie · 7. Grey's Anatomy · 8. Pawn Stars.
28. The Grand __ Opry: OLE.
29. Foreign exchange issue: LANGUAGE BARRIER - A fellow golf league member works in a packing plant where there are mostly Hispanic workers. He uses a device like this in verbal exchanges.
36. Imposition lead-in: I'M TERRIBLY SORRY.
37. Setting for Haiti: EASTERN TIME ZONE - Haiti has chosen to be on the Eastern Time Zone but its island mate, the Dominican Republic, has chosen to be in the Atlantic Time Zone.
38. Journey part: LEG.
39. Brahma, for one: GOD.
40. Gaming release of 1985: NES.
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| 40 Years Ago |
44. "__ Explain Things to Me": Rebecca Solnit essay collection: MEN - She is given credit for coining the phrase "Mansplaining".
45. Paul with an axe: LES - Never mind Paul Bunyan, this axe is slang for a guitar and LES Paul invented the solid body electric guitar.
47. Relaxation locations: SPAS.
49. Precipitated: LED TO.
53. Frymaster filler: HOT OIL.
54. Fiction title?: MISNOMER
55. Not busy: AROUND - "Can you help me on Sunday?" "I'll be AROUND."
56. React slightly: BAT AN EYE.
57. Tutor's charge: MENTEE - Every student I taught was said to be a CHARGE of mine or my responsibility
Down:
1. Word for "stick" found in a Bay Area city name: PALO - Of course, PALO Alto means tall stick
2. "Shogun," for one: EPIC DRAMA.
3. Duds: NON EVENTS.
4. "Let's be __": CLEAR.
5. "Reacher" star Ritchson: ALAN.
5. "Reacher" star Ritchson: ALAN.
6. Iberian country, on Olympic scoreboards: POR - Portugal
7. Rose barb: THORN.
8. Dialectical source of "no cap" and "down bad," for short: AAVE ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ African American Vernacular English
9. "Long Division" novelist who wrote "Heavy: An American Memoir": KIESE LAYMON ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
10. Get it wrong: ERR.
11. Angle type: ACUTE.
12. Wide bowl: BASIN - Old hotels always had a BASIN and a chamber pot in the room. Uh, I'm only showing one of those.
13. Fried __: fair fare: OREOS - "Nutritional" info on a fried OREO
14. Commits to, in a way: WEDS.
20. Giving a bit of color: TINGING.
23. Pacific counterpart: QUARRELSOME
25. Knowledgeable: VERSED.
26. Ballet bend: PLIE.
27. Hand sanitizer brand: PURELL - Like DVR, it became a verb as in, "PURELL me."
28. Does as asked: OBLIGES.
30. Trick: GET.
31. Grocery payment meth.: EBT - Electronic Benefit Transfer
32. Marsha Warfield's "Night Court" role: ROZ.
33. Put right: IRONED OUT - "I took the job once we got everything IRONED OUT"
34. Human rights activist Eckstein who is profiled in Season 4 of the "Making Gay History" podcast: ERNESTINE. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
35. Some deli loaves: RYES.
41. Supreme Court name: SONIA and 43. Supreme Court name: ELENA - Vowel-rich jurists
42. Lowest-tier: WORST.
44. Sierra __: MADRE - Three separate ranges in Mexico
45. Show a tell: LET ON.
46. Search thoroughly: COMB.
48. 2022 "Predator" prequel: PREY.
50. Ye __ Shoppe: OLDE.
52. Trick: CON.
53. Cubano ingredient: HAM.
31 comments:
Well, I’m not quite sure
how, but I got through this puzzle, though it took me one hour plus. And I didn’t have any idea how to parse the name of that “Heavy” writer, until I came on this site. Nevertheless, I got that, too. Anyway, FIR, so I’m happy.
I stamped this one "Insufficient fun" and routed it to the recycle bin. Far too much A&E to hold my interest. But I did get PALO and LES without benefit of perp, so I got that goin' for me. Which is nice.
Thanks to H.Gary for the insights. BTW, if you tighten a piece of thread between your origin and destination on a globe, the thread will show you the great circle route. Nautical GPS devices will calculate and display the points to steer along the great circle route.
This wasn't too tough except the NW. Eventually getting PALO unlocked it easily, but even then I went with ESP before POR. Cut-off corners in a themeless grid can be a struggle to solve.
KIESE LAYMON is a classic Agard-ism. A long name that many solvers won't even know how to parse, but crossed fairly.
We have a rare case of 3 (!) duplicate clues, none of which is forced just for the sake of reusing a clue. GET/CON, SONIA/ELENA, SWELL/COOL. I still tried NO ICE for "Neat", expecting misdirection, but that wouldn't be good fill.
[Save, in a way] for DVR as a verb is a crazy Stumper-tier clue. Not fit for a LAT puzzle even on a Saturday, IMO.
Welp, my first few trots around the grid resulted in a sea of white. I tried using red letters. Didn’t help much. I Tried alphabet runs. Didn’t help much. I Tried WAGs. Didn’t help much. I Tried Google. Didn’t help much. Then it occurred to me. You’re only on this planet for a very finite amount of time. Do you really want to spend precious moments on something like this? Answer: no. Anyway, that’s my long winded way of saying that I’m going to get my butt out of bed and engage in more enjoyable pursuits like scrubbing the bathroom and then tackling some yard work. Oh, and I forgot to mention, the Atlanta Braves lost last night. Again. Could life get any worse? I submit that it could not. Anyway, have a great L-O-N-G weekend, every one of you.
The things I do not know, let me count the ways. Erik has been a challenge since his first puzzle when his picture was of a young man with a huge reddish afro. This puzzle made me feel a bit like a failure in my race relations as the true unknowns, AAVE ; KIESE LAYMON : and ERNESTINE are all cultural references. Like Gary, the three grid spanners in the middle kept me going, even if I failed in the end. I did recall the QIN Dynasty from discussions we had in the early days of the blog when we were getting to know C.C. Also, the Greek god Apollo was my first double L thought. I also appreciated the visual CSO with the Lemonade pic. Thank you, Erik and HG
Nope.
Well, for the first forty minutes or so I was pretty much grasping at straws, but with a personal record in the amount of intuition and WAGs needed, I was able to FIR w/out help in 1:03:31. A few corrections along the way, sweet became SWELL, tinting became TINGING. COOL gave me SONIA and ELENA in the right locations. (Personally glad it wasn’t Brett or Alito 😂). KIESELAYMON was all perps with no clue to parsing it. AAVE is about as esoteric as it gets, and the clue deserves a nomination for “worst of the month”. To me, this was a mind-wracking workout but I’m glad I didn’t give up on it. Thanks Erik for this Saturdayesque challenge, and to HG for the elucidation!
FIW. I had no idea who the Heavy author was, and completely missed tres, which is odd considering French was my first language. I kept thinking uber in German was over!
I was quite pleased when I was able to throw down the three long answers in the center of the puzzle and went on to finish the bottom.
The NW was a bear, but eventually that fell too.
Overall an enjoyable puzzle for a Saturday.
I knew this would be a challenge with Erik as the puzzle creator, and it did not disappoint! My last challenge to fill was the PRE crossing NON EVENTS. Wasn't sure how to parse the latter and kept going back and forth between the Duds clue being clothes vs something that didn't work
3 letter gaming answer is usually NES or Wii
27A TV episode title - HG was more TV series title - but I bet a lot of the episodes' titles are also puns, but most of us probably don't know what those are
Thanks to HG for the informative and fun blog
Took 33:39 to get it wrong at D_R and PR_ crossing None__nts.
I don't care for "negative post" meaning "pre". Once again, a Saturday "?" from the LAT means "anything goes". To this solver, it was a disappointing Saturday puzzle, despite a few really good clues (quarrelsome).
I didn't know today's writer (Kieselaymon), aave, or this Ernestine. But then again, I felt like it was included because I probably wouldn't know them.
A A V E
O V I M
Oy Vey Iz Mir !
Erik had his foot on the gas for the whole trip on this one - barely a gimmie to be found. KIESE LAYMON obliterated whatever shard of momentum I had going up until that point. That clue /answer combination for QUARRELSOME was excruciatingly tedious to parse out (but a classic Agard, nonetheless) - not knowing the QIN dynasties didn’t help any either.
This was a true twelve-rounder for me. Had to keep my gloves up and my feet moving or I would have wound up on the canvas seeing stars. Fortunately, I was able to go the distance - and emerged only slightly banged up, bruised . . . and exhausted.
TITT on this one. I have too much to do to continue since it was obvious I wouldn’t get the names.
I was put off by the clue Uber around the Eiffel Tower. No good.
Thank you HG for the really nice review. So necessary.
Saw Erik's name and knew this would be a trick or treat. Turns out, some of both. He even threw in some OREOS! FIR but took over an hour. I don't mind a challenge as long as it's ultimately doable.
Many thanks to Gary for for his deep-dive review. I filled in the squares, but he filled in the blanks (looking at you "Negative post?").
When I saw Erik's name, my first instinct was to skip it altogether, considering how absurd his last offering was. But I took the challenge and finished in 17:48 with the help of red letters.
Oddly, I found the grid-spanners to be easy solves, which helped immensely. There was, as expected, some ridiculous clues and obscurities, but they were kept to a minimum (on the Agard Scale). The Northeast presented the most of these and was the last to fall.
Good Morning:
I finished this in well over an hour but received no satisfaction or enjoyment in the solve. IMO, this is a perfect example of a puzzle designed to please the constructor not the solver. The esoteric fill and the exaggerated cluing both were too cutesy by half for my taste.
Thanks, HG, for being such a steady, even-handed Saturday Sherpa, not to mention keeping us informed, enlightened, and amused! 😉
Have a great day.
Thank you Anonymous 6:45 for the great laugh! So nice to know that I wasn’t alone in my struggles and took an hour to finish. NE corner did me in until I looked up Kieselaymon. However, I thorough enjoyed the battle and am proud of my scars! Thank you Erik!!
Erik is one of those modern constructors who think looking things up can be OK. Surely he condones the level of red-letter help I needed to nearly finish his puzzle today. Ultimately, I could not come up with the “Long Division” novelist’s first name and the last letter of the uber/Eiffel entry (despite my most overt cheating: I tried to find synonyms for “uber” in other languages but couldn’t find anything in French).
I enjoyed the puzzle despite countless unknowns, unhelpful clues, and preposterous entries. Well, actually I branded 24 such entries, which is high, but far from the record 31.
The biggest annoyances, aside from the aforementioned Natick, were duds/NON-EVENTS; negative post/PRE; episode title/PUN; fiction title/MISNOMER, wave home/OCEAN; AAVE; TINGING; EBT; DVR as a verb; cluing an unknown show’s prequel/PREY; being expected to know anything about Rihanna’s songs in such detail; and ERNESTINE, although that last one was the key to filling the SE, which fell first.
The most helpful entries were ROZ, the COOL/COMB combo; EASTERN TIME ZONE (people forget the southeastern U.S. is not nearly as far east as the Northeast, so even Haiti isn’t in an exotic time zone), and QUARRELSOME, which I didn’t figure out until I had the RELSOME part filled in. Hand up for Han before QIN.
Thumb screws are more fun than this.
A snowball would have made it through hell and back before I could have done this puzzle. Two laps around and I gave up. I finished the NE, SW, and SE and correctly guessed LANGUAGE BARRIER. I did complete the perimeter, filling RYES and PLIE. The Rremaining center was all white.
Haiti was on HISPANOLA ISLAND.
KIESE LAYMON, ERNESTINEL, AAVE, ROZ, QIN, PREY, PUN- not a clue about those fills. I never knew ebonics had another name.
German equivalent of TRES is 'sehr'. My Uber was a taxi. I know a lot of German. I'm not familiar with it being used as 'very' for an adjective.
I didn't clean the toilets; just went to the gym. I will usually give a puzzle 30 minutes but I knew that would be waste of the last 15 minutes.
In English, "uber-" is used as a prefix to indicate something is of the highest, greatest, or most extreme example of its kind. It's often used in fashion and popular culture contexts.
Examples of "uber-" as an adjective:
Uber-hip: Extremely stylish and trendy.
Uber-cool: Extremely cool and stylish.
Uber-rich: Extremely wealthy.
Uber-trendy: Extremely trendy.
Uber-babe: Extremely attractive person.
Uber-model: Extremely good model.
Uber-intellectual: Extremely intelligent person.
Uber-nerd: Extremely geeky or nerdy person.
Uber-chic: Extremely stylish and fashionable
Saturday toughie, but Saturday puzzles are supposed to be toughies, so many thanks all the same for this treat, Erik. And thanks, as always, for your commentary, Gary.
Well, this puzzle sure had a lot of negativity in it, with items like QUARRELSOME and OVER-USED, and NON-EVENTS, and WORST, and CON, and ERR, and MISNOMER and others. But it did also have an apology, telling us I'M TERRIBLY SORRY. Makes you want to go to a SPA and get some HOT OIL to COOL off, and a COMB for some HAIR CARE, and then enjoy some OREOS for a snack. Yep, that feels better.
Have a lovely weekend, everybody.
I struggled with this puzzle, as I expected I would have to, given that it is an Agard puzzle. At first I thought I'd just skip it, but curiosity got the better of me and I decided to give it a try. I had to look a lot of stuff up and use red letters many times but finally finished it. I was hoping I would feel more satisfaction than I actually felt, which was more like relief at getting it over with.
Gary, yes, we have recently been misusing the word uber a lot in English.
TITT after one run through. Thank goodness! After reading HG's review, I was glad I did. What an obscure, arcane, and unclear tribute to the constructors ego. Sheesh. Tutor=Tutee. Mentor=Mentee. DVR is an acronym, not a verb. And so on, and so forth. Tough is one thing...this was another.
Yup. Saturday ridiculosity. Knew it was going to be an exercise in misdirection when I saw this was an Erik Agard job, so I was fairly ready to be slapped around a bit.
But even having so girded my loins, there were waaay too many “WtF?!?”s in this. C’mon, dude — I’d guess that exactly 17 people in the world have listened to all of Season 4 of that podcast…
Okay, some good stuff: being a guitar player, LES was a gimme, but fun clue anyway. Somehow I managed to get that stack of wall-to-walls in the center of the grid (thank you, perps) and I got a kick out of some of the clues, like for MENTEE and PENCAP. By some stretch, I remembered from high school history that the Pacific Ocean was misnamed as being “serene”, so I sussed that. But AAVE drew a blank, even after perps filled it. And Erik, you couldn’t think of a weirder clue for AROUND? Shame on you 🤣.
@KS, you’re absolutely correct; the German word for “very” is “sehr” (as in “sehr gut!”), so how it got twisted around to what we got is a tight stretch to me, too. I will give props to DVR as a verb, though — we used to “tape” shows to save ‘em, but now we DVR ‘em.
Admirable job in the review, HG, considering what you had to deal with in terms of parsing all that misdirection; you’re a braver soul than I — a tip o’ th’ ol’ fedora to ya, mate!
====> Darren / L.A.
Thanks to Erik for the Saturday struggle! I had a DNF but I am getting closer so I hope to complete an Agard Sat. puzzle one of these days....
The triple stacks of 15s were impressive and only 15 blocks made an impressive grid! I noticed 1A PEN CAP and 8D "no cap".
Thanks to H-Gary for all of his help! I like how you share your solving experience. Hand up for Han before Qin then QUARRELSOME helping with the SW.
Hola! So, there's another Chinese dynasty besides HAN? Who knew? I certainly did not and I read a lot. I though HAN was the precursor but I guess not.
i managed to complete about 85% then just looked up the rest. Earlier I went shopping so it got late by the time I returned to the puzzle. Weekends are for other things to do besides mulling over a puzzle.
I hope you all enjoy your time, everyone!
Gary, es ubersetz nicht. Translating English to French of a German word being used as an adjective of an English word? Get real. Nicht sehr gut.
I might be AROUND this weekend, but I'll be BUSY sorting my sock drawer. :-(
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