Saturday Themeless by Ricky Sirois
1. Like Oscar winner Troy Kotsur: DEAF - I was thinking about a nationality for a while but it soon showed it was a characteristic.
5. "Lasers" rapper __ Fiasco: LUPE ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
9. Security concerns?: SAFES 😀 Hacks first came to my mind
14. Symbol of British divine right: EXCALIBUR - This is the mythical sword King Arthur either pulled from the stone or received from the Lady Of The Lake to show his divine right to rule Britain.
16. Whitlock Jr. of "The Wire": ISIAH ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
17. Governed by fate: MEANT TO BE.
18. Drag one's feet: TARRY.
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| Reminds me of "The Little Red Hen" |
20. Sweetheart __: DEAL.
21. Turning point in a DIY project?: SCREW 😀 "Screw up" better describes what I might do
22. French holiday: NOEL.
24. Cause trouble: STIR THE POT - Don't we all know people who like doing this?
29. Disney villain: SCAR.
30. Morass: MIRE.
31. Hamper: STYMIE.
33. Wrestling promoter Maivia whose grandson is Dwayne Johnson: LIA.
34. Online "I can relate": IT ME - Social media meme.
35. Like some steakhouses: BRAZILIAN - This one is in Omaha
41. McElhenney who co-owns Wrexham A.F.C.: ROB ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ On the left below
42. "Forget it": NO DICE.
46. "Paint the Town Red" singer __ Cat: DOJA ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
47. On the fence: TORN.
49. Food brand with a Westie mascot: CESAR.
53. Novelist Jaffe: RONA ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
54. Cast iron, e.g.: ALLOY.
55. Aft: REAR - Titanic's AFT sank last
57. Quaint "True": TIS.
58. Only U.S. vice president born in Maryland: AGNEW.
59. Hit that's hardly felt: MICRODOSE - Research continues to see if a MICRODOSE hit of hallucinogenics like LSD can be helpful without big side effects
61. May of Queen: BRIAN - On the right with Freddie Mercury
62. Royal guard?: BEEKEEPER - Royal BEEKEEPER John Chappell on the right below was given the task of telling the bees that their Queen had died.
64. Petrol name: ESSO.
65. Signs of victory: VEES - Cue Beethoven's 5th
Down:
1. Exacts: DEMANDS.
3. West Point, e.g.: ACADEMY.
4. Whiff: FAN - I know which one below that C.C. would have chosen
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| Whiff™ Ceiling FAN |
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| In baseball, a batter who has struck out is said to have whiffed or fanned |
6. WWII fleet: U-BOATS.
7. Institutions "full of sunk treasure," per Virginia Woolf: PUBLIC LIBRARIES.
8. Poetic conjunction: ERE.
9. Circumstance, slangily: SITCH -When Kim Possible absolutely does not have enough time to say situation.
10. "In case you forgot ... ": AS A REMINDER - iCalendar allows me to set an alert for an event. I usually set it for an hour before a tee time.
11. Campsite warmer: FIRE PIT.
12. Tune that really catches on: EARWORM - Here are 50 of them. My Barbara Ann did not make the list.
13. Shrinking: SHY.
15. Close of business, briefly?: LTD - Limited: It means a company has separated its personal assets from the business assets.
21. Filter: STRAIN.
23. Touchdown celebration in Green Bay: LAMBEAU LEAP.
25. Stability aid: RAIL.
26. Shirt tail?: TEE - The last (tail) letter in shirt is a TEE
28. Dame analogue: SIR - Dame Helen Mirren and SIR Ian McKellen
32. Like some reds: EARTHY.
36. Circuses: ZOOS.
37. NYC rep from the Bronx: AOC - The oft-photographed U.S Representative
38. Beverage suffix: ADE.
39. Food processing giant that began as a grain enterprise in Nebraska: CONAGRA - This giant company with many products acquired Swanson's who are famous for inventing the TV Dinner in Omaha.
40. Thor's hammer: MJOLNIR ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I can't spell or pronounce it. I suspect Ricky built around this word in his puzzle and did not just discover it to fill an area.
43. Variant in a lab: ISOTOPE - This huge plant in Oakridge, TN was built to process fissionable ISOTOPE U235 from U238 for the Manhattan Project. America recently attempted to prevent Iran from doing that.
44. Curious request: CAN I SEE.
45. Takeoff gear?: ERASERS 😀
48. Some siblings, to their parents' siblings: NIECES.
51. Red carpet garb: GOWNS - As I am typing this I am wearing Under Armor
52. Gyllenhaal title role: DARKO ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Jake was the protagonist in this movie that featured a very odd looking rabbit.
56. Toast Skagen garnish: ROE - ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Toast Skagen är en populär Svensk förrätt (Toast Skagen is a popular Swedish appetizer)
58. Disney channel?: ABC.
59. U.K. honor: MBE - Member of the Order of the British Empire
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| Ed Sheeran with his medal |
60. "Monkey Man" actor/director Patel: DEV ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
31 comments:
It came down to
Did I remember how to spell Thor’s hammer? An alphabet run was of absolutely no help. Ultimately, the “Mj” combination defeated me. Bzzzt, as D-o would say. I’m not happy about that, but I am happy to be on this site and see how the rest of you friends did. Subgenius out!
Well I gave this one 20 minutes and took a break, when I returned I had 48% filled (not necessarily correctly). I figured my current string of FIRs was in jeopardy as I DNK the Oscar winner, the rapper, Whitlock, the wrestling promoter (could there be a worse clue?), McElhenney, the food brand, and many more. STYMIEd to say the least. Somehow it was MEANT TO BE that I could get it right w/out help in 43:56. Had to change bonfire to FIRE PIT, and cane to RAIL. Last fill took an a-run to get the J in DOJA/MJOLNIR (which can’t possibly be a real word?). Anyway, it was quite the mental workout from Ricky today, and I have to say I enjoyed Gary’s write-up more than the puzzle. My overall take - ridiculously hard, ENOUGH SAID!
When I saw you hadn’t posted by 6:00 EDT I figured you were struggling with it like I was.
I needed the help of an alphabet run to get Doja and Thor’s Hammer, but other than that I was able to complete the grid without help. Better than usual for a Saturday puzzle.
My wife and I are visiting long, long time friends in Peterborough, Ontario. We are having a great time, because you cannot not have a good time when you’re in Canada no matter where in Canada you are.
FIW. I had no idea who the rapper Lupe was so I guessed ore at 8D. Wrong! I'm no fan of rap and am hopeless when that genre appears in a puzzle.
The SW had me believing this would be the area I would fail. Mjolnir just looked wrong on every level, so at that point I threw in the towel. Who knew it'd be right?
Once again a plethora of proper names, most obscure, made this Saturday presentation very difficult.
Overall not an enjoyable puzzle.
I was STYMIEd by the plethora of named, so i abandoned this puzzle.
I did enjoy your review, HG.
That should be nameS.
Good Morning:
When I saw Ricky’s name, I was pleased because I remembered enjoying his previous offerings. This one took much P and P but I finally finished w/o help in 43:04. I’d say this was more difficult because of entries like Mjolnir, Lambeau Leap, Microdose, etc., but the fair and abundant perps saved the day. I like Ricky’s cluing which I think is very clever and misleading, but doesn’t stray into the overly cutesy, smarty-pants realm. My minor nits are Sitch and It Me, and those are purely generational differences. I thought the fill was fresh and lively, especially the grid-spanning Public Libraries, Excalibur, Beekeeper, and As A Reminder, Stir The Pot, Enough Said, etc.
Well done, Ricky, and thanks, HG, for the overview and the usual stunning visuals.
Have a great day.
I got most of the puzzle ok but the SE corner was my downfall. I still can't figure out how royal guard equates to beekeeper and I would hardly call an eraser "gear"but the rest of the puzzle was fun.
Strange Women lying in ponds, dispensing out swords, is hardly the basis for a form of Government...
Took 32:41 to finish, somehow, without help.
I spent about the last 10 minutes in the top-left.
So, so many unknowns, including the wresting promoter, the rapper, the food brand, the food processor, the birthplace of a VP, "online" phrases, slangily clues, and others. I'm thankful we didn't have the usual Saturday obscure food clue/answer, but the "?s" still need more work. "Takeoff gear?" is not a worthy clue for "erasers".
I believe it is Brian May from Queen that is also a noted astrophysicist.
Does the "royal" aspect of the beekeeper relate to the "queen" (royalty) bee?
Once again, the Saturday "?s" are at work.
FIW, missing DOoA x MoOLNIR and oICRODOSE x oBE. But I got LAMBEAU LEAP and EARWORM without benefit of perp, so I got that goin' for me. Which is nice.
The 50 EARWORMs don't include his one?t I think it could be used by the CIA to get bad guys to spill the beans.
Neal Boortz used to call Atlanta's Cynthia McKinney "the cutest little communist in Congress." If he was still on the air, I'll bet that title would go to AOC now. Admire her or not, she's a gifted politician who has succeeded in transforming her Yorktown Heights (a wealthy suburb in Westchester County) childhood into a self-described "girl from the Bronx."
Eating BRAZILIAN is delightful. Getting a BRAZILIAN is not (I'm told.)
Thanks to Ricky for the workout, although my gripe about too much A&E junk applies today. And thanks to H.Gary for the interesting review. But shouldn't your phone be telling you that you should be on the range an hour before your tee time?
Lovely time out from today's puzzling, CrossEyedDave at 9:35 AM!
FIR in 13:43 despite my intense dislike for the many obscurities and too-cute cluing. I spend a considerable amount of time on social media and have never come across IT ME.
Raise your hand if you knew the name of The Rock’s grandmother and/or the rapper.
However….there was plenty of easy fill perp-wise to make the puzzle easier than most Saturday offerings.
I'm a fan of Ricky's, but not of this puzzle! Seven names that were solid DNKs. That LAMBEAU celebration was quite a LEAP for me, and I was convinced of BEEfEatER instead of BEEKEEPER. Don't think I've met Thor's hammer by name before, either. Meh! Hats off to those who FIR, and always to Husker Gary.
Nope. Bailed out of this one. Another "ooh, look how clever I am" collection of drek.
Yikes! I was down to the equator before I entered a word I was sure about. Ultimately FIR thanks to fair(ish) perps. Thanks to Ricky for the challenge!
Virginia Woolf is from England, so DUBLIN LIBRARIES seemed plausible and shares most of its letters with PUBLIC. The final N gave me SNEE instead of SCAR, and the initial D didn't hurt the unknown rapper's name. Part of why the northern hemisphere was a wasteland for a while.
ROB McElhenney found fame as a creator and actor in "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia," the longest-running live-action TV comedy in American history. 16 seasons of raunch mixed with hilarity. Danny DeVito costars.
Gary, I don't envy you having to tackle this one, but you did a great job nonetheless.
Except for the SW, where I was thwarted by the MJOLNIR-DOJA Natick, I enjoyed Ricky's challenge today. Despite his misdirected clues and surprising fills, he rarely seems to lose sight of a key goal of a constructor: the best interests of the solver (us). Is he tough? Yep, especially on a Saturday.
I love today's vertical grid-spanner. Public libraries are a compelling and vital asset to any society, and Ricky gives them center stage, standing there smack-dab dead center like an exclamation point. Well done.
As a sports nut, I appreciated the baseball and football fills (FAN and LAMBEAULEAP), interestingly right on top of each other. If you're not a sports aficionado, I trust you found enough neighboring helpful perps to rescue you.
It seems that every day the LAT puzzle includes some words that I find underused yet lovely, like yesterday's DULCET, and before that such gems as STOLID and NONCE. My favorite today is STYMIE.
At the other end of the spectrum today is ITME. If a goal of the LAT crossword editors is to include fill that is "in the language," I vote to take this aberration OUT of the language.
Thanks, Ricky, for your usual clever and entertaining challenge. And HGary, first, I'm abashed to admit my ignorance of Conagra. I'm sorry. Second, your recap today was colorful and useful, hitting all the salient points.
Guarding the queen bee, I guessed. I thought it was a stretch.
FIW, because of the Cat/Thor Natick, but I still felt I did well, including getting the FAN entry that may have perplexed many of you. More on that below.
The proper names got me close to success, including LAMBEAU LEAP, but also DUMAS, LUPE Fiasco, RONA Jaffe, BRIAN May, Spiro AGNEW, AOC, and DEV Patel. PUBLIC LIBRARIES made sense, and I liked STYMIE and TARRY, too. The bur ending led me to EXCALIBUR.
As is too often the case, the clues in quote marks were mostly lame. The AS A portion of the REMINDER entry was particularly not-something-I-would-say. There were also too many obscure names, many of which could have had less obscure examples, such as ROB, ISIAH, LIA, and, especially, CESAR.
You don’t hear FAN used for striking out much anymore, but when I was a child, I repeatedly read the 1956 Baseball Digest’s play-by-play rundown of the 1955 World Series, which was terse but more artful than the “how the runs were scored” summaries we ran with box scores in the 1980s/1990s era when sports sections had lots of space for such things. They went something like this: “Rizzuto walked. Noren reached on a fielder’s choice, Robinson to Reese, forcing Rizzuto at second. Mantle walked, moving Noren to second. Berra flied out to Furillo in right. Skowron fanned.” As some of you might assume, my standards for editing “how the runs were scored” were rather exacting.
Interesting, if slightly tough Saturday puzzle, many thanks, Ricky. And your commentaries are always a big help, so many thanks for that too, Husker Gary.
Well, the puzzle started out suggesting that maybe a DEAF person might be used as a LURE to open some SAFES. This might certainly STIR THE POT and provide extra guards for the PUBLIC LIBRARIES in order to protect all those BRAZILIAN books that had just been made available there. It worked, and the libraries stayed safe, and all the guards sat around the FIRE PIT and enjoyed some CESAR salad and some honey on biscuits provided by the BEEKEEPER. This was so delicious he saved some for his NIECES, and afterwards took them to the ZOO where they felt like they were at an ACADEMY with lots of new skills to learn. Well, I'm getting an EAR WORM from all this discussion and plan to hang out with BRIAN for the afternoon. He's promised to take me out on one of the U BOATS. That'll be a treat, won't it?
Have a lovely weekend, everybody.
So many names I flat out didn't know and had to look up sucked a lot of the enjoyment out of this puzzle. There was also plenty for me to like, to wit: EXCALIBUR, MJOLNIR (which I knew, due to my interest in Norse mythology because my roommate in college was Norwegian), STYMIE, ACADEMY, and ISOTOPE.
🤙🏽🤣 Classic Monty Python! Thanks, CED!
Well, it’s a Saturday, so I guess I should’ve expected this. Sixteen (!!) pop-culture names, grossly questionable clues (“Quaint ‘true’” for TIS? um…No. EXEDOUT um…No. X’ed out). After seeing all the pop junk, I was about to bin this one — but, being the ol’ stubborn cuss that I am, decided to give it a go anyway, following my customary tactic of looking up all the names (the Rock’s granny? Who knows? Who knows cares?? besides Dwayne). For me, the only good part was Gary’s effort to make sense of this MIRE. Sorry, Ricky — no cee-gar for this one.
Being a Packers FAN, the Leap was a gimme, and for some odd reason I knew CONAGRA Foods. The only names I had were AOC, BRIAN May and DEV Patel; at least they are all well-known. It also took perps to alter oBE to MBE, but that sort of stuff is fun. The rest of this mess? A real STRAIN to endure…and I finally went “SCREW it!” ENOUGH SAID.
====> Darren / L.A.
BEEfEatER was one of my sticking points too.
WEES about the metric ton of names. Plus I was STYMIEd by some wrong guesses that looked very right: OBE for MBE (awful fill either way, and I only remembered OBE from doing cryptics), SAME for IT ME, SCREEN for STRAIN (crossing SCREW, SCAR, and NO DICE which are all correct!) .
[Royal guard?] is... not how "?" clues are supposed to work. The word you're punning on (queen) should be in the clue. In a cryptic, having the solver do an extra step to find the right synonym for a word in the clue is fair game (sometimes). So you can have a clue like [Royal with no name has right to become LGBTQ member? (5)] for QUEER ("royal" is QUEEN, "no name" means removing the N, "has right" means adding R which can be an abbreviation for "right", and I'm using "member" a bit loosely here to indicate that the answer is part of the acronym, hence the ? at the end).
Hola! Saturday stumper that led me to ALEXA for LUPE of whom I've never heard. EXCALIBUR slipped right into place as did a few others. I well remember the scandal with AGNEW and ultimately his resignation.
CONAGRA rings bell but I have no idea about MJOLNIR. GOWNS was my first fill. Most of this puzzle was way over my ken of knowledge so I relied on ALEXA quite a bit more than usual. Thank you, Gary, for providing perspective that I otherwise did not have. Steakhouses is not the first fill that comes to mind with BRAZILIAN. Not in the books I've read, anyway.
Have a super Saturday, everyone!
Because I am an avid reader DUMAS occurred to me quickly.
Quite true. Welcome to Canada!
Saturday Stumper. Thanks for the workout, Ricky and HuskerG.
I was STYMIED and TITT.
Above my pay grade today.
Really late to comment on this Saturday puzzle. Didn't even start the puzzle until after lunch.
FIR, and the game clock shows 1:10:29. That isn't correct. I didn't stop the clock three different times when I got up to do other things. Mainly the laundry. Anyway, my computer is set to go to sleep after 10 minutes of no activity, so at least 30 minutes too much.
It was the northeast corner that nearly did me in. I had attempts with
Cause trouble - STIR up dirt
Security concerns - leakS
Drag one's feet - delaY
Filter - purify
Turning point in a DIY project? - lathe
but couldn't make any of those words interlock with the others. The cells for MIRE and IT ME remained blank.
Erasing all of the letters in the NE was the key. With a clean slate, I tried REMINDER and built around it. STIR THE POT fell, then FIRE PIT, and the rest fell into place. SITCH came from perps.
Elsewhere:
I recognized DOJA Cat because the first time I heard that name it reminded me of DOJA Doc who used to comment here.
Similar with LUPE. I've known of DUA LUPE for some time, so when I saw the name of another artist with LUPE, especially with the contrived last name, I remembered it.
RONA (Jaffe) has appeared in many puzzles.
Got DUMAS with the AS and the word author. Had the word been painter, I would have entered DEGAS.
NOEL is the only name of a French holiday that readily comes to mind.
Thank you, Ricky, a really good challenge today. I didn't care for EXED OUT
Thanks, HG. I didn't know (by name) 14 of those EARWORMs. The first one is the song from the movie Benny and Joon.
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