Saturday Themeless by John Guzzetta
I flew through in 15 minutes but finished with one bad cell as you can see in the grid. The Italian words for numbers and Sam Raimi are not in my vocabulary. I'll write it off as a learning (forgetting) moment. π
1. Diplomatic terms?: CODE WORDS - As I'm sure you do in your business, we educators have CODE WORDS we can use and others know what is really meant.
10. Lugosi of "Dracula": BELA - A crossword regular that rewards some of us with "some mileage on our tires" (CODE WORDS for senior citizens).
10. Lugosi of "Dracula": BELA - A crossword regular that rewards some of us with "some mileage on our tires" (CODE WORDS for senior citizens).
14. Health insurance marketplace legislation, familiarly: OBAMA CARE.
15. Title that has a 31-Across: SΔNOR and 31. Squiggly diacritic: TILDE.
16. Tea with a shot of espresso: DIRTY CHAI.
17. Place for some belt-tightening: WAIST π
18. Still: YET.
19. Displaces: BUMPS.
20. Advantages: EDGES - This All-American pitcher gives the nationally ranked Husker softball team a real EDGE
18. Still: YET.
19. Displaces: BUMPS.
20. Advantages: EDGES - This All-American pitcher gives the nationally ranked Husker softball team a real EDGE
21. Navigational hazard: SHOAL - We call these sandbars on the Platte River seen here just south of m town of Fremont, NE.
23. Prepares for a funeral: EMBALMS.
25. "Show Boat" pair: ACTS.
25. "Show Boat" pair: ACTS.
27. Takes in more than: OUT EATS. π
29. Stopper: CORK.
33. Get even with?: TIE.
34. Spectrum maker: PRISM.
35. "Give Peace a Chance" collaborator: ONO.
36. Sam who created the "Evil Dead" franchise: RAIMI ¯\_(γ)_/¯
36. Sam who created the "Evil Dead" franchise: RAIMI ¯\_(γ)_/¯
38. Actress Gadot: GAL - Two versions of Wonderwoman
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| Linda Carter Gal Gadot |
39. Beside: ALONG.
41. Boggle pieces: DICE.
41. Boggle pieces: DICE.
42. Indigestion relief: ANTACID.
44. Craft store purchase: YARN.
46. Setting for Ernie's "Rubber Duckie" song: BATHTUB - Millions are still sold today
48. Tuned to: SET AT - Growing up, we all had our radios SET AT the same five AM stations 590, 890, 1110, 1290 and 1620.
51. Metric prefix: CENTI.
52. Device in olive oil extraction: PRESS - Here's a low-tech one.
54. Big D pro: MAVericks
56. "Little Miss Sunshine" Oscar winner: ARKIN - I'm pretty sure you can pick Alan out of this poster
57. Something a customer service professional might need to wear: FAKE SMILE.
59. Brother from France: FRERE - Didn't we all sing this in grade school?
60. A bit too excited: OVER EAGER.
61. Thornfield governess: EYRE - This 1847 first edition of Jane Eyre will run you $9,500.
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62. Has a clear conscience: RESTS EASY.
Down:
1. Yellowstone National Park gateway city: CODY.
2. Stage awards: OBIES - Off Broadway
3. Sith title: DARTH.
4. Expert who wears a Star of Life emblem: Abbr.: EMT.
4. Expert who wears a Star of Life emblem: Abbr.: EMT.
5. Internet Archive initiative: WAYBACK MACHINE - More info ¯\_(γ)_/¯
Some of us remember a very different version
6. Section in some alternative bookstores: OCCULT.
7. Spanish golfer Jon: RAHM - and family. Jon has left the 34. Tour gp.: PGA to play on the LIV tour.
7. Spanish golfer Jon: RAHM - and family. Jon has left the 34. Tour gp.: PGA to play on the LIV tour.
8. Fall gracefully: DRAPE.
9. Field concerned with movers and shakers: SEISMOLOGY - Here's the earthquakes of the last 24 hours
10. Minor parish official: BEADLE - ¯\_(γ)_/¯ More
11. Puzzling: ENIGMATIC.
12. Falls behind: LOSES TIME.
13. Song and dance: ARTS.
15. Stylish and cozy garb: SWEATER DRESSES.
22. Boat pair: OARS.
24. Pal: BUD.
26. Defended: STOOD UP FOR.
28. Half of dodici: SEI ¯\_(γ)_/¯ At a 50% off sale, a dodici euro book would cost SEI euros
29. Common juice blend fruit: CRANBERRY.
30. Shell ship by the seashore: OIL TANKER - What a cute turn on the tongue twister "Sally sells sea shells down by the seashore".
32. Stop for the night: INN.
37. "__ No Sunshine": Bill Withers hit: AINT.
40. On: LIT.
43. Threads: ATTIRE.
45. State with confidence: ASSERT.
47. Intrepid: BRAVE.
49. Latina bestie: AMIGA.
50. Armistead Maupin's "__ of the City": TALES ¯\_(γ)_/¯
51. Garçon's employer: CAFE.
53. Just scrapes (by): EKES.
55. Rather: VERY.
58. Whitman who voices Tinker Bell: MAE - The Tinker Bell of my misspent youth did not speak.
Notes from C.C.:
RustyBrain (Brian) and I made today's USA Today puzzle. It's edited by Amanda Rafkin. Give it a whirl. It's Brain's first USA Today puzzle.
41 comments:
I got it! On the first try,
which means it only took me about half an hour when it usually takes me an hour or more.
Everything fell into place, and there were a lot fewer obscurities than is usual in a Saturday puzzle!
I’ll have to look for the constructor , John Guzzetta’s name on other puzzles, because I had a great experience with this!
A very impressive construction having ten nine letter fills, and two tens and two fourteens in the verticals. Also some fresh fill including ENIGMATIC and SEISMOLOGY among others. I always approach a Saturday puzzle with a little trepidation of a FIW or a worse TITT, but today those fears were unfounded as I was able to FIR w/out help in 18:08, fast for me on a Saturday. Not familiar with WAYBACK MACHINE or BEADLE, but perps took care of those along with several other long fills. Thank you John G for your very fine work on this one, and to HG for the enlightenment.
On a side note - Zhouqin shares the byline in USA Today, and I think the coauthor may be our own Rusty Brain.
Good morning!
I often blow off the Saturday puzzles. Glad I gave this one a shot. Those stacked 9s -- three deep in the NW and SE, and paired in the vertical SW and NE -- were very nice, and very helpful. D-o LOST STEAM before LOSES TIME showed up. Nicely done, John and Husker. (In my ute the 50,000 watters on my car radio were 890 WLS, 1000 WCFL, 1090 KAAY, and 1520 KOMA.)
Enjoyable Saturday puzzle as I was either more tuned in to the creator (like getting the mega Chicago station WLS(?) On a clear night) or it was easier. Learned recently those brown spots on the Eyre book are called foxing. Store it away for another Saturday. Interesting to compare the costumes and physiques of the two WWs - from a purely academic perspective, you understand - indicating changes in views of the ideal woman , or not.
I used to listen to Dick Biondi on Chicago's WLS. The signal only reached Eastern Kentucky after dark. (Established by Sears, WLS stood for "World's Largest Store.")
Took 10:11 today for me to rest easy.
I knew the Actress of the Day (Gal) and Actor of the Day (Arkin).
I didn't know "beadle", "dirty chai," "dodici" or "sei", the Spanish golfer (Rahm), what "Show Boat" is, and that there are, evidently, alternative bookstores.
"Code Names" is a very fun party game (about $25 online or in some stores) that we play with our friends and family. I think most of the Cornerites here would enjoy too. Easy to learn. Two teams. You place 25 cards, each with a word or name, in a 5x5 grid on the table. One person from each team is the "clue giver", and they see which 7 or 8 words are their teams. They then have to give a 1-word clue and a number to their team. The word is the clue, and the number tells them how many of the words you're trying to relate/clue/connect with the clue. It spawns some lively guesses and conversations.
Jinx, after getting kicked off WLS for his haircut joke, Biondi migrated to WCFL, voice of the Chicago Federation of Labor.
FIR! Me! Saturday! However, among->ALONG, meg->MAE, and bishop to the unknown BEADLE. I thought that BEADLE was Sarge's subordinate at Camp Swampy.
I didn't read the last word in the clue "common juice blend fruit" and tried to wedge in "cranapple," but perps made me reread it.
Thanks to John for a Saturday Special that even my dumb mass could solve. My favorite was "Shell ship by the seashore." (In my ute we said "she sells seashells by the seashore." And thanks to H.Gary for another informative tour. I love that your radio picture has the CONELRAD triangles at 640 and 1240 on the AM dial. Nostalgic nuclear war dread.
Up in the U.P. on a clear night, we used to get WOWO out of Ft. Wayne, and WLS and WCFL out of Chicago, and CKLW out of Windsor ON, all hundreds of miles away.
Thank you, John and Husker Gary
I liked it. A lot. Impressive, as YooperPhil wrote.
Like HG, I finished right at 15, but no congrats. I found my typo at 19:16. It was hiding as a real word.
WAYBACK MACHINE - It's a great tool to find source articles or docs cited in Wikipedia references. And just like Wikipedia itself, you can find previous iterations of information. Dash T uses it too.
Here's a good example. Years ago I linked Wake Forest Baptist Health's drive thru diet calculator in a blog post or comment. It was an excellent tool to understand caloric intake of menu offerings at numerous fast food sites.
The link was: Drive Thru Diet Try it now. You'll get a Page Not Found 404 error.
A few years after my original link to it, I was saddened to see that it was no longer available. I commented about that.
Dash T used the Wayback Machine to find an archived copy of the webpage, and posted the link to it. I just did the same. Here's a link to it from Aug 31, 2011:
Drive Thru Diet .
Sadly, in this example, the actual calculator no longer works, but at least you can see the webpage and get an idea of what it was about.
There are many useful functions of the Wayback Machine. I most often use it when needed to vet the citations in an article, or to read the original source of an aricle.
For me, it was the nation's original clear channel AM radios station. KDKA out of Pittsburgh. At night I could sometimes pick up the Chicago stations.
Gotta run. Appointment at 9
I stumbled around the upper third of the puzzle, finally abandoning my "acrosses first" policy to locate helpful perps.
The bottom half of the puzzle filled in smoothly and swiftly, leading to a finish time of 13:22.
A really nice Saturday puzzle by a constructor who "gets it."
Good Morning:
This is the most enjoyable Saturday solving experience that I’ve had in a very long time. Although I struggled in several places, especially the NW, it was a rewarding and successful venture. I was very impressed with the challenging fill and its freshness. The cluing was outstanding, tough and misleading but thought-provoking and, ultimately, discernible. The fair and generous perps allowed me to FIR, although not as quickly as some of my fellow Cornerites. The highest praise I can give, and I give it without hesitation, is that I felt as though I was solving a Silkie!
Thanks, John, for a true Saturday Stumper and thanks, HG, for the great photos and related facts and comments. Your 15 minute finish amazes this slow poke!
The Seismology entry was Jayce’s CSO, for sure!
Have a great day.
Wow! I not only finished a Saturday puzzle, but loved it. The NW gave me a little trouble. RAHM is not a Spanish sounding name and DIRTY CHAI had to be a wild guess. But the rest just wrote itself practically.
HG’s intro said it all. I’ll now move on to the USA Today puzzle.
FIR. This took no time at all, easiest Saturday I can ever remember. There's not a lot to say about this puzzle. We definitely got a break from the typical Saturday fare.
Overall a very enjoyable puzzle.
Super Saturday. Thanks for the fun, John and HuskerG.
Any time I can finish a Saturday CW on the road to visiting the grandchildren is a good day!
Wish you all a great day too
Virtually all radio and TV stations' call letters begin with K if they are west of the Mississippi River, and begin with W east of the Mississippi. KDKA is so old--one of the first radio stations in the U.S., as indicated by TTP--that it predates the FCC's Mississippi R. criterion.
Before our family moved to California, we lived in Pittsburgh, and the KDKA morning show was hosted by a wild and crazy guy named Regis Kordic. The recent movie "High Society" starring Grace Kelly, Frank Sinatra, and Bing Crosby featured the song "True Love," sung by Grace and Bing. Subsequent to filming "High Society," Grace had become Princess Grace of Monaco. Rege Kordic played "True Love" all the time, and at the end of it, he would always say, "Thank you, Queenie."
I breezed through John’s puzzle, but it was interesting and challenging, with lots of guesses panning out. I think this is the puzzle that exemplifies what many of us want on Saturdays.
I might not have breezed had I not asked DW about the Internet Archive initiative early on. She didn’t even pause before answering. Nearly all the first seven verticals were interesting trivia questions like CODY and RAHM or revelations like DARTH is a title, not a first name.
I thought the “Show Boat” clue might contain a trivia question but was quite disappointed, and BEADLE was an unknown for me. I did enjoy being right about RAIMI and ARKIN.
“Rubber Duckie” confession: Our octet used to sing an arrangement of the song. In addition to my tenor duties, I was the duckie. Ee-er, Ee-er.
TehachapiKen : A few other rule-breaking call letters: KFIZ Fond du Lac, WOAI San Antonio, WFAA Dallas, WMT Cedar Rapids, WHO Des Moines.
WEES about this being an easy puzzle - I don't think I've ever cleared under 10 minutes on a Saturday!
Like Anon at 7:08, our family likes to play CODE WORDS
WHB in Kansas City was the big top 40 radio station when I was a teen, now it is an all sports station. It started in 1922 and back then the division line between the W stations and the K stations was the western border of Kansas and was moved later to the Mississippi River. So there were a few W stations in KC that grandfathered in
I think of Sam RAIMI more for directing Spiderman movies but I'm not a fan of horror movies though I know a smattering of them for crossword & Sporcle solving. I liked Bruce Campbell in the "Burn Notice" television series though
Thanks HG for the fun blog and John for the puzzle!
Flew thru this in 7:52. Was able to plunk down some of the long answers right away like wayback machine. Nice puzzle.
Agree with your thoughts on the WAYBACK MACHINE. Invaluable resource and just plain fun to look around at early websites.
Yay!! FIR! Only my second time for a Saturday. This puzzle was pretty doable…the northwest was the last to fall. A very satisfying solve!
FIR, on a Saturday, no less! And had an enjoyable time, to boot! Nice way to end the week.
I zoomed through and thought I was a genius! Until I came here and found everyone else did to. LOL
Fun fact about BELA Lugosi - it's a myth that he learn his lines phonetically for Dracula. By 1931, he had lived in the States for a decade and his English was pretty good as attested by a filmed 1932 interview where he speaks with an accent but without trouble. However, for his first American film in 1922, The Red Poppy, he did go the phonetic route.
Thanks, HG, for all of your fun facts!
I enjoyed the puzzle, (even though I had red letters on, and cheated a bit.)
No silly theme link today, but I did learn a lot. Like where HG gets those wonderfully impossible emojis. ¯\_(γ)_/¯
Of course, this means you will be seeing a lot more KittyKat emojis from me. ΰΈ ≽^•⩊•^≼ΰΈ
There are still a few (of hundreds) that I am not sure I understand what they mean though... ╭∩╮( •̀_•́ )╭∩╮
Hola! I have to agree that solving a Saturday puzzle is truly pleasurable. Quite often I don't finish it. I scan the grid for a possible starting point and CRANBERRY gave me that edge. From there it was a fun fest and I filled that SW corner very quickly.
I well recall ARKIN in "Little Miss Sunshine." He was so naughty!
If I can't work out unfamiliar names, I ask ALEXA and she gave me RAHM. It's not a typical Spanish name, but Spain has a diverse population of Jews, and it may be from that group; I'll have to research it.
My fourth graders used to love "playing" with the PRISM and seeing the colors emerge.
I wish you all a wonderful day and hope you can REST EASY.
RB, not everyone zoomed or flew through this offering, as attested to by my post. But, even after reading all of the speedy solver’s ease of completion, I wouldn’t change a word of my personal experience. Although, I may admit to a small amount of early St. Patrick’s Green! ☘️
A bit more about Jon RAHM; his grandfather, George RAHM was from Switzerland and Joh's full name is Jon Rahm Rodriguez.
I surprised myself by solving this Saturday puzzle without having to look anything up or use red letters. I enjoy seeing nifty words such as SHOAL, EMBALMS, ANTACID, BATHTUB, OCCULT, ENIGMATIC, CRANBERRY, and of course SEISMOLOGY. BEADLE is also an excellent crossword word.
I knew Armistead Maupin because his 'Tales of the City' series is set in San Francisco.
I was once told that servers (waiters) in French restaurants do not like to be called "Garçon" (which literally means "boy".)
Good reading all your comments.
Speaking of learning moments, here is some trivia that (one or two of) you might like.
Those old AM push button radios were an amazing piece of mechanization. I've always wanted to know how they work. But believe it or not, this is the best visualization I have found on YouTube showing the guts of one of these doohickies... (1:08) More interesting (to me) was that before you can get those push buttons to stop at the right place, you have to "tune" the variable capacitors to evenly move the mechanical dial through the frequencies.
That is what those slits in the capacitor plates (10:37) are for...
Lastly, I always wondered how Mississippi paddle boat captains knew how to avoid those Shoals. In searching, I have learned that the best way to avoid them is to never buy or rent a boat...
(If anyone can find a video on it, post it for me. )
π π π π π
I did the USA puzzle, very enjoyable.
I don't see a theme though, is it themeless?
Also, I the hardest part (for me) was trying to figure out how to do the puzzle on an IPad, when the whole puzzle with keyboard does not fit. When you get half way through, it's a puzzle to get the clues and the puzzle part needed for typing in the same frame. I tried landscape, portrait, and ended up using whack-a-mole...
Oh, and both darn and damn before dang...
I know I didn't get smarter last night, but this was an easy puzzle for a Saturday. Unlike Gary, I new Sam Raimi (but not the movies) and it allowed SEI to fill for the unknown number but guessable 12 equivalent dodici. I knew a dodecahedron has 12 sides.
DIRTY CHAI wan an unknown but the perps were very kind. So was BEADLE.
Boggle was an unknown and DICE filled the blank spaces.
SET AT- at least Gary had a car radio; I think the first one our family had was after I was out of HS. The only option our cars had was a heater. No AC, auto transmission, power brakes, power steering, no white walls.
Diplomats talk with a FAKE SMILE when using their diplomatic CODE WORDS.
WAYBACK MACHINE- the Internet Archive initiative is unknown but I certainly remember Mr. Peabody and Sherman.
Delightful Saturday puzzle, many thanks, John. And thank you too for your always helpful commentary, Gary--appreciated that too.
Well, it was interesting to see that first CODE WORD in the puzzle have a part of itself be CODY, a city and not a fellow--so not that SENOR we met on the second line. Maybe we already got earlier help from that BEADLE, who took time from his parish job to help out here. Thankfully he was probably real and not some guys with a FAKE SMILE, and not somewhat OVER EAGER to get things done, that make him then OVER-EAT. He should probably just REST EASY and enjoy a CRANBERRY or two along with a bit of CAFE or some tea. Not a bad morning, all around, I'd say.
Have a lovely rest of the day, everybody.
Looks like a double barrel "you're number one!" to me.
He's also a gifted but hotheaded golfer, who sometimes can't seem to get out of his own way. He's currently ranked the 54th best in the world, but was #1 in his younger years.
Your car also probably didn't have seat belts, windshield washers, turn signals, right-side rear view mirror, or the unheard-of airbags. Likely a 2-bbl carb with a slant 6 engine. I'm thinking of my grandma's last car.
Like IM, I take my CWs nice and slow, like my driving.
This was the easist puzzle of the week. Finished in 9:45.
BEADLE was mentioned in Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” by the maid when Scrooge woke up from his “dreams”….”should I call the BEADLE?” or similar.
Jon Rahm left the PGA and joined an assn owned by the UAE for the money. Not a popular move.
Thanks AnonPVX. I knew I remembered BEADLE from some British book.
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