"EDGE"SSENTIAL WORKERS
Tracy Gray had two puzzles last year, one landing 51 weeks ago, also on a Friday, that had the themers 'turn' on the word DIME. Today's construction is another "visual" theme from her, offering us a series of ten fills that are "jobs", found on the perimeter, or "side" of the grid - very clever. We have seen this type of theme before, and I liked the puzzle, but it felt like the author had to "RAM IN" some of the fill - I'm looking at you, 18A~! Perhaps having the solution to begin will be the best way to explain the reveal;
38. Secondary gig, or a literal description of 10 answers in this puzzle: SIDE JOB - the edge, or "side" fills are careers, or "jobs", but clued synonymously;
Top Across:
1. Undergarment brand: JOCKEY
7. Single-story home: RANCHER - just called a "ranch" where I grew up
Down Right:
13. Enc. or dict.: REFerence, encyclopedia & dictionary; one of two abbrs - REFEREE
29. Representation built to scale: MODEL - not the meteorologist🠅, this🠇
52. Perry of classic TV: MASON - Stonemasonry - name #1
Left Up:
57. Confirm the credentials of, say: VET - the straight verb, and the other abbr, VETERINARIAN
33. Test episode: PILOT - "Pilot~? What's a pilot~?"
1. 2017 AL Rookie of the Year: JUDGE - NY Yankees baseball slugger, Aaron, name #3
B u t W
M a
o i
r t
e ,
T h e r e' s
ACROSS:14. Starts a revolt: UPRISES - my incorrect Down fills seriously hindered my progress in the NW
16. Good-natured: AMIABLE - the Corner discussed AMICABLE not too long ago
17. Fresca, for one: DIET POP - a Coca~Cola product - an interesting history
19. Extra product: GUM - clever misdirection; this product
20. Some surfers: WAHINES - Downs gave me - - HINES, and I recalled this 'Hawaii Five-O' term
22. Collaborate on Microsoft Teams, say: eMEET
25. "The Man Who Fell to Earth" director Nicolas: ROEG - name #4, and I am shocked that I had never heard of this 1976 Sci-Fi movie staring David Bowie - more here
30. Big to-do: RUCKUS - in another Sci-Fi movie, Agent J asks why all the "ruckus"
32. 1990s fitness fad: TAE BO
33. High-performance German cars: PORSCHES - I'll have the plug-in hybrid 918 - name(ish)
36. Frank: CANDID
37. Brewpub fave: IPA
40. Beth Ann Fennelly's "__ to Butter": ODE - name(ish) - Quite raunchy - I love it~!
41. "Grumpy Old Men" actor: LEMMON - I remembered these movie outtakes; name #5
43. Spot for horsing around?: CAROUSEL - Great clue/answer~!
45. Film production company named for a constellation: ORION - they put out a lot of winners
47. Shades at the beach: TANS
48. Daycation locations: SPAS
49. Earthquake: SEISM - the "def" from Greek seismos
53. Tops of most org charts: C-SUITES - CEO, CFO, COO, etc.
56. __ salt: SEA
57. No longer occupied: VACATED
63. Paragon: EPITOME - uh PIT oh mee - like hyperbole 😜
64. Starting line?: "HERE I GO - again", Whitesnake~!
DOWN:
2. Yves Saint Laurent perfume: OPIUM - name(ish)
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3. __ anglaise: CRÈME - I thought HABLA, but no - it's this Frawnche sauce
4. Word with mess or press: KIT - ah... Not HOT 😏
5. Unusual ability: ESP - Friday, so no indication that this is an abbr~?
8. Interspersed with: AMONG
9. African flower?: NILE - crossword misdirection - flow-er, like mower
10. Former name of a med. imaging tool: CAT SCAN - originally EMI, now CT - here's why
11. "Task" network: HBO - filled via perps
15. Ignited: SPARKED
21. Comfy cover-up: HOUSE COAT
23. Hesitant sounds: Ers - I had Ums to start
24. City near Saguaro National Park: TUCSON - filled via perps; geo name #7
27. Overhauls: REDOs - the noun, not the verb REDOES
28. Remain faithful to, with "by": ABIDE - meh. I filled in STAND
31. Viola holder: CHIN - Dah~! Not CASE
34. Palais Garnier performance: OPERA - total WAG
35. Force to fit: RAM IN - my time at UPS was spent putting 10lbs of boxes in a 5lb van
36. Heart: CORE
39. Impromptu gig, casually: JAM SESH - has actually appeared once before in another crossword
42. Sweet Italian wine: MOSCATO - WAGed the "C" - my 53A. was messed up due to my 48 Down🠇
44. Draw upon: USE
46. Biter of Miles Morales: SPIDER - mostly perps, not a comics fan, didn't "get it"; his Wiki; name #8
48. Sarcastic challenge: "SUE ME." - I filled in "SEE ME", as in "watch this~!" - Bzzzzt
50. "To refresh your memory ... ": "I SAID . . ."
51. Marsh plant used for papyrus: SEDGE - I was tempted to try REEDS
54. Discontinue: STOP
55. Misrepresent, as data: SKEW
58. Diamond birthstone mo.: APRil - I knew this; here's a comprehensive with alternatives chart
59. AFL partner: CIO - frequent crossword appearances
61. Golden yrs. fund: IRA - Individual Retirement Account; I can finally start funding mine again - let's just say I'm about to be the next "Hubby" - more to to be revealed in the coming weeks~!
62. Parts __ million: PER
25 comments:
As I’ve done before,
I reserve the right to put in my comments later. See you then.
I do look forward to Fridays, my old blogging stomping grounds both for the challenge of the puzzles but also for the visit with Splynter. This was a joy on both counts.
We begin with a wet maiden with legs that don’t end, to linking underwear ads where most would have included boys boring ones, to a wonderful perfume ad and the one time famous Suzanne Somers , no relation to the actress who played Joyce Summers in the Buffy movie and co-starred in the David Bowie movie. Fun every place I looked.
I also grimaced at RANCHER and BOLT OFF
but overall Tracy made this fun and perfect for a Splynter write-up.
Thanks and avoid ladders and black cats
Good morning!
YEOW! -- not Ouch. DIET POP, not SODA POP. UPRISES, not RISES UP. JOCKEY didn't occur to me -- I wear Flute of the Room. That entire NW corner was too messed up to salvage. Bzzzzt. Further down, Nicolas with four letters -- gotta be CAGE, right? Hand up for Viola CASE. What a fiasco. I remember Suzanne SOMERS as the blond in the red TBird in American Graffiti. The puzzle was very clever, but d-o just wasn't up to it. Thanx, Tracy and Splynter.
There are many ways
a person can be “helped” with crossword puzzles, if they are doing it online.
I wasn’t getting anywhere with this puzzle, so I took one of them, putting a diagonal line through each incorrect letter.
So I solved it, but not without a LOT of help!
Never got the theme but managed a FIR. That Northwest corner though!
Took 12:05 today to get the jobs done.
Had I caught the theme, "Warden" & "Judge" would've come a lot quicker. I knew the Actress of the Day but never realized it was spelled "Somers". Have never heard of the director (Roeg) or his movie, although I am familiar with the David Bowie song, "The Man Who Sold the World" (though I'm partial to the Nirvana acoustic version). I also didn't know the French sauce (creme), the perfume (Odium), or that a ranch was a "rancher."
Saguaro National Park is an interesting park to visit. Those cacti are huge and everywhere. I believe that when I got to the park at around 9 a.m., it was 100F. I'm guessing our Senora Lucina has been there before.
I'd love to say I FIR but it was a DNF today. I couldn't complete the NW because I couldn't think of JOCKEY, even with KIT and YEOW filled. But JUDGE, OPIUM, CREME, and E MEET were unknowns. I think the last FRESCA I drank was in the 60s. DIET POP would have been all perps because nobody in the South call it 'pop'. All the rest was filled correctly, except ROEG ad C SUITES. MOSCATO is unknown and I filled Executive-SUITES.
Definitely a Friday worthy puzzle today.
RANCHER- never heard of that term. Ranch or ranchette style.
FIR, but it was a struggle as often Friday puzzles are. There was a lot of tricky cluing and to honest I thought some of it was a bit forced to suit the theme.
And I completely missed the theme even with the reveal. I had to come here to have it explained to me.
So overall a so-so puzzle.
Anon, I remember visiting there, but it was still a national monument at the time, quite a few years from achieving national park status.
The E-dog ate my comments. Here's what I remember:
FIW, missing with BOLT Out->ELu and REt. I obviously didn't get the theme, or I would have gotten REF and maybe that would have fixed ELu. Also, soda pop->DIET POP, vacancy->VACATED, athlete->TROOPER, snares->TABORS, and in a ->PER.
As a soon-to-be home seller and home buyer, I've been doing a lot of searching online. I've seen RANCHER used a lot.
RAM IN - we used to say "pound to fit, paint to match."
Thanks to Tracy for the challenge. And thanks to Splynter for the interesting tour. I'll stay tuned to find out if you are getting married or becoming a handyman.
DNF. I got the theme quite early, that’s why I got RANCHER, (here realtors call them ranch houses) but the JUDGE eluded me. I hung on to hustle so totally missed the SPARKED and not knowing ROEG didn’t help.
The rest actually was pretty easy for some reason. I thought the theme was clever. I liked it.
Splynter, thank you for the review. I knew immediately it was you when I saw the weather girl. 🤣🤣
The term "rancher" is commonly used in real estate listings here in the SF Bay Area. I've always found its usage odd in the context of rows of tract homes in suburbia.
A fine Friday offering, with a sticky NW corner that eventually revealed itself via perps.
Musings
-I am at my SIDE JOB this morning but this teacher only has 35 students/day and no kids until 10:35!
-What a fun gimmick today.
-I didn’t have a real, certain fill until RABIES and then suddenly that gave me the key to finish the entire right side and work back up to the entry port.
-Me too, I have never heard a ranch-style house referred to as a RANCHER. So many other alternatives are available.
-A tour guide in San Francisco once told us that any Painted Lady house with more than 6” between it and its neighbor was called Ranch Style
-Revelle MODEL KITS like this ate up a lot of my newspaper delivery money
-Speaking of which, one of the reasons I watch Perry MASON reruns is to see the old “works of art” cars of that era.
-Spencer Silver at 3-M invented adhesive that was too weak but it SPARKED the idea of Post-It notes.
-Peter Parker is the only SPIDERman I know
-Splynter, if your HUBBY range ever extends to eastern Nebraska, I have a long list!
Fab Friday. Thanks for the fun, Tracy and Splynter.
I came here to discover that I FIWed in several places. But I did get the SIDE JOBS theme, although I forgot to look at the jobs on the top and bottom edges. D’uh!
I had problems as I started with the Across clues, and I switched to the Downs. I had many of my first thoughts/fills like Splynter’s - Stand before ABIDE, RANCH not RANCHER (that’s a person), Case before CHIN, wanting 2 Ms in SOMERS.
And I liked that clue for CAROUSEL.
I wanted a U in MOSCATO to match the Muscat grape, but ORION was firm. I pencilled in Soda before DIET POP perped.
I did an alphabet run to get the T in KIT, but I stopped too soon at SEe ME (thinking of a card game bet) instead of SUE ME. (I missed correcting to SUITES)
Another E word today with EMEET (I’m still trying to remember UTNE not eTNE from yesterday).
We had CRAM and RAM IN (same meaning but you CRAM into your brain).
Are SKI PADS optional?
Wishing you all a great day.
My wite-out was putting in overtime on todays crunchy offering.
African flower / Nile was a witty clue.
Force to fit / Ram In was a nose wrinkler.
Missed the finish by having q-suites and. Mosqato wine. Sigh
Thanks Splynter for a fun and informative recap.
I'm impressed that Tracy took on the challenge of filling the entire perimeter of her grid with the theme answers. They all are indeed side jobs, and there they are, on all sides.
The cost for this clever configuration may have been that some of the fill seemed a bit forced, like BOLTOFF, RANCHER, and RAMIN. But I give Tracy a pass: these are small costs to achieve her overall goal.
The idiom "she's a real trouper" has through the years increasingly misspelled the last word to "trooper." A troupe is a group of actors or other performers working closely together. That is the source of the word "trouper." But I'm not going to mark 65-Across wrong for misspelling. In a few years, probably "trouper" will be totally forgotten.
Thanks, Tracy, for an enjoyable Friday morning diversion. And thanks, Splynter, for another colorful and helpful recap.
I FIR, which given how little I liked today’s puzzle, gives my gripes more credibility. If I was a TROOPER, it meant I was indefatigable, more than a good sport. And TROUPER is considered the proper spelling, as I learned when I looked it up.
The intersection of SKI PADS and JAM SESH bothered me most – the former because googling “ski pads” doesn’t readily yield the puzzle definition of this needlessly complicated entry, and the latter not because of “sesh” but because a jam session is nearly always a post-gig thing, a chance to improvise with the few people talented enough to hang with you. “Gig” was also a problem with the SIDE JOB entry, because a secondary job is a side gig, not usually the other way around. And that was the unifier! For me, the theme fell by the waySIDE.
Clunkiness was rampant. Topping that list: RAM IN, BOLT OFF (I’d just bolt), making nouns of “overhauls” and RE-DO, and abbreviating APRil, one of five months that shouldn’t be abbreviated, according to most style guides. And the Realtor jargon of RANCH(ER) was literally a stretch.
It was so bad that the “horsing around” clue for CAROUSEL, which was also a stretch, seemed clever, the best thing in the whole puzzle.
I initially parsed SKIP ADS as SKI PADS as well, and thought that "streaming" might be slang for skiing. Doh!
I liked the misdirect cluing on this one more than the puzzle itself. FIR so I guess Tracy did a good job.
TABORS are not fife-and-drum drums. Yes, they are portable drums that may be played alongside other instruments including a pipe (like a wooden recorder), but neither of these is used in fife and drum corps. Corps use a snare drum and the fife is akin to a piccolo. I have been to many militia musters in Colonial Williamsburg, and have seen my friends' instruments up close. The sound carries for a mile, which was the point for battlefield communication.
RANCHER didn't come up in a brief Google search, but it may be a real estate term as others have suggested. They have their own lingo, like a FROG - a Finished Room Over Garage.
Thanks, Splynter, for the exposé. Made my Friday.
Thanks for Splainin Splynter, not an easy one by any means.
I WAG'd, Alpha Ran, Wack-A-vowel'd my way through this. The theme was a great though, I liked it! even if there were a few stretches... (my only ranchers were jolly...)
Impressive puzzle and theme (even though I missed it), thanks Splynter as always. I managed to FIR but it was a challenge. "Csuites" had me puzzled until I realized it was "sue me" not "see me". Well done Tracy.
I did too.
I had TROuPER at first also. Only reluctantly did I change it.
Just a couple of thoughts, (memories really...) regurgitated by this puzzle.
I must have been 6 or 7 years old, when I heard this tv theme, I knew it was my bedtime...
However, when I heard this one, I would hide under the covers...
anyone remember this scary theme?
Pilot reminds me to watch again one of a series of "plays of the week," that I absolutely love. Watch them all to be endeared by the same actors messing up roles every week... this one is called The Pilot, ( not the pilot...)
Tracy's puzzle raised some interesting issues about particular words. Regarding TABORS, I'll defer to Rusty Brain's clarification that they're not really fife-and-drum drums. I found it interesting that RB says they can be heard a mile away. That fits perfectly with my knowledge of tabors: they are often the drum of choice for Scottish pipe and drum marches. The pipe is of course bagpipes, and a piper with hearty lungs can actually be heard several miles away. That's why they were used in battle: the noise confused and scared the !×#!* out of the enemy.
But back to tabors--they have often been the particular percussion sound a classical composer is looking for. So Richard Strauss, Bizet, Copland (Appalachian Spring), Darius Milhaud, and many others have featured the tabor in their works. And this goes back hundreds of years, to the Medieval Age.
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