Kiran Pandey has been constructing puzzles for a few years now, but this is his LAT debut. Congrats!
This grid features a less common mirror image symmetry, and that's a reflection of its creator.
55A. Some lead roles, or features of 3-, 7-, and 11-Down?: TITLE CHARACTERS. Each film TITLE has special CHARACTERS (like in a good password) that have been used to create a phrase found in movie reviews. Note that none of these movies actually fit the answer in the traditional sense, it's just the punctuation we're looking at.
3D. "M*A*S*H," in a way?: STAR VEHICLE. A STAR VEHICLE is a film specifically designed to showcase the talents of a well-known performer. The "stars" in this one are actually asterisks, but I still rate it 3★'s.
7D. "E.T.," in a way?: PERIOD PIECE. A PERIOD PIECE is a movie set in a specific, earlier historical era, often characterized by lavish production design, costumes, and settings that evoke that time. Period.
11D. "Face/Off," in a way?: SLASHER FILM. A SLASHER FILM is a sub-genre of horror films involving a killer stalking and murdering a group of people, often by use of blades or sharp tools. Lovely. I like horror films but not slashers with their gratuitous violence.
Fun theme. Kiran is new so he doesn't know that themers are supposed to go horizontally...kidding! I liked the mix of downward themers and discovering the revealer across near the end. He also includes several other nice long vertical fills, which add sparkle, but also leaves us will a lot of 3LW & 4LW. Overall, a good Thursday effort.
M0▽!N9 ()n:
Across:
1. Rae of "Barbie": ISSA. ISSA Rae is a popular American actress, writer, and producer. She is a living doll!
5. Baseball card giant owned by Fanatics: TOPPS.
10. Covert summons: PSST.
14. Court dividers: NETS. Court dividers: BARS.
15. Fast train in the Northeast: ACELA.
16. Hoppy drafts: ALES. The perfect brew for Easter week!
17. Insta post: SNAP. Instagram is a social media network featuring SNAPshots and short videos.
18. Untamed: FERAL.
19. Namesake of a speed ratio: MACH. Ernst MACH defined velocities compared to the speed of sound, commonly used as unit of air speed where MACH 1 is 761mph (the speed of sound at sea level).
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| When I'm in a hurry, I shave at 2,283 mph. |
20. Cause of inflation: AIR.
21. Spotty?: STAINED.
23. __ Lanka: SRI.
24. Celestial explosions: NOVAE. Had to wait for perps for the final letter to determine if we were using the Latin or English plural.
26. "__ a chance": NOT.
27. Bygone anesthetic: ETHER.
29. Standing straight: ERECT.
30. Church headquartered in SLC: LDS. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is located in Salt Lake City, Utah.
31. "Shrinking" actor/co-creator Goldstein: BRETT. BRETT Goldstein is an English actor, comedian, podcaster, producer, and writer who is perhaps best known for his role as Roy Kent in the Apple TV+ sports comedy series Ted Lasso. I saw him in a stand-up special on HBO and he was surprisingly good.
32. The Phanatic's team, on scoreboards: PHI. The Phillie Phanatic is the mascot of the Philadelphia Phillies baseball team. He is one of the highest paid mascots in MLB, earning $200K per year! I'm green with envy.
33. Basket made on a rebound: TIP-IN. Part of the madness that is March. My alma mater, UVa, runs hot or cold. They once lost in the 1st round, then won it all the following year. This time they didn't make it past the 2nd round. Oh well, there's always next year...
35. Form 1099 agcy.: IRS. The Internal Revenue Service is the agency that is responsible for collecting U.S. federal taxes.
36. Dry as a desert: ARID. I guess we are going through my whole medicine cabinet today.
37. Soul singer Baker: ANITA. ANITA Baker is an American jazz and soul singer known for her sophisticated, romantic ballads.
38. Creative degs.: MFAS. Masters of Fine Arts are graduate degrees in visual arts, creative writing, film, or performing arts.
40. Campaign-funding gps.: PACS. Political Action Committees are groups that pool campaign contributions from donors to support or oppose political candidates, legislation, or ballot initiatives.
41. "The Hunger Games" ally of Katniss: PEETA. Katniss Everdeen and PEETA Mellark, the "star-crossed lovers" from District 12, evolve from reluctant allies in the 74th Hunger Games into a deeply bonded couple.
42. Trig ratio: SINE. Trigonometric should not be abbreviated because SINE is the full name of the function. Its abbreviation is SIN.
43. Weekly skit show, familiarly: SNL. Ye olde Saturday Night Live.
44. Symbol produced by pressing shift+5: PERCENT. % - hey, it works!
46. Cell service letters: LTE. Long-Term Evolution is a 4G wireless broadband technology that provides high-speed data for mobile devices.
47. Just make do: EKE BY. I'm not sure this is proper English. “To eke” can be used by itself meaning to stretch a limited resource. “She eked the meager budget to cover expenses.” Or, more commonly, it is used with “out” as in, “He managed to eke out a living.” Seems like he was going for "squeak by."
49. Spanish infinitive: SER. SER means "to be." An infinitive is the base form of a verb, often preceded by "to" (e.g., to walk), that functions as a noun, adjective, or adverb within a sentence.
50. "Darn it!": AW MAN.
52. Add up to: ARE.
54. Connecticut Ivy Leaguer: ELI. A student from Yale in Saybrook, Connecticut.
55. [theme]
64. Hat part: BRIM.
65. Indulge: HUMOR.
66. Group of three: TRIO. Now you're checking out my vitamins?
67. Turn down: DENY.
68. "But of course!": OH YES.
69. Goes on and on: YAPS. FuzzyBrain YAPS when we get a delivery. Better than a doorbell!
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| Buster guarding the house. |
Down:
1. Absurd, as a scheme: INSANE. That's crazy!
2. Shenanigans of the upper class?: SENIOR PRANK. This is a trick! "Shenanigans" is almost always plural, but seems odd with a singular answer.
3. [theme]
4. Nile viper: ASP.
5. 27th U.S. president: TAFT. As you can see, William Howard TAFT had a sweet tooth. They even named Salt Water Tafty after him.
6. Passenger ships: OCEAN LINERS.
7. [theme]
8. Temporary water provider: PLANT SITTER. A PLANT SITTER comes to your house while you are away. They typically charge $20/hr for just watering, but it can be more if they keep them company.
9. Red tag event: SALE.
10. Cooking spray brand: PAM.
11. [theme]
12. December tradition in some offices: SECRET SANTA.This is a tradition in which staff members are randomly assigned a coworker to whom they give a gift, often with a price limit.
13. Gym top: T-SHIRT. While gym is short for gymnasium, T-SHIRT isn't short for anything. It's just shaped like a T. The only way to shorten a T-SHIRT is to make it a crop top.
21. Ready: SET. In America, we say, "On your mark, get SET, go!" In Britain, it's often, "Ready, steady, go!"
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| Thank goodness we don't use starting pistols anymore. |
22. Former Interior Secretary Haaland: DEB. DEB Haaland was the first Native American to serve as a Cabinet secretary. She is currently running for governor of New Mexico.
25. Litmus reddeners: ACIDS. This is a test.
28. Takes a little off the top, say: TRIMS.
33. Cassette: TAPE. A 90-minute cassette has about 440' of tape inside - that's 1-1/2 football fields long all over the seats of my car! Don't ask me how I know.
34. Bread baked in a tandoor: NAAN.
36. Church recess: APSE.
39. Observed: SEEN.
44. Combustible pile: PYRE.
45. Soft mineral: TALC. Can't stay out of my medicine cabinet, can you?
48. Pleasant, as a summer night: BALMY.
51. Good at banter, say: WITTY. Better than corny!
53. Parrot: ECHO.
54. "I'm all __!": EARS. ...said the field in Iowa. OK, that was corny.
55. Up in the air, briefly: TBD. To Be Determined.
56. Great vexation: IRE. I'm Really Enraged. Wait, that wasn't an abbreviation.
57. Soft metal: TIN. Like my old Band-Aid box, but stop snooping around my bathroom!
58. "You don't see that every day!": HUH.
59. Poehler who co-founded the Upright Citizens Brigade: AMY. From SNL to Parks & Rec, AMY has always been a dependable comedienne.
60. Fish-to-be: ROE.
61. Bullpen stat: ERA. Another baseball clue, this is the Earned Run Average - the average number of earned runs a pitcher allows every nine innings, with lower numbers indicating better performance.
62. Fabric tear: RIP.
63. Request for a tropical getaway, perhaps?: SOS. Fun clue. SOS is not an abbreviation of anything, it's just the letters corresponding to a Morse code distress signal that are easy to remember and type.
Godspeed, Artemis!
Be good. RB
23 comments:
Although it looked
daunting at first, with those long side-by-side vertical fills and so many “?” clues, everything actually turned out very smoothly and satisfactorily.
FIR, so I’m happy.
Good morning!
POLK, too early. BUSH, too late. TAFT, just right. I always thought LTE was a "lite" indicator -- fewer features than the full-blown thing. This one timed out just like yesterday...and there was a crash of the symbols. Thanx, Kiran and Rusty.
IRS: Due to the senior discount this year, d-o overpaid via the quarterly estimates. And due to the inclusion of form 8283, Turbotax refused to E-file the return. End result: Return was mailed in January and I'm still waiting for the refund in April. Grrrrrr...another gift from the present administration.
Don't blame the current administration for you being too cheap to fork out the $25 to use Jackson Hewett and file on line(•̀ᴗ•́ ) Balme them for forcing the extra filthy lucre onto you.
I thought SOS was an abbreviation for Save Our Ship?
FIR, surprisingly with no erasures. DNK PEETA, SER, DEB, and BRETT.
I love the Phanatic, but I think the greatest ever was Ted Giannoulas as the San Diego (Padres) Chicken.
Blah, blah, blah Poehler is going to be AMY. Just for Splynter, here's a different AMY (Adams') leg shot.
Finally, happy 79th birthday to Emmylou Harris. She's beautiful and talented, but best of all actively supports dog rescue through her Bonaparte's Retreat, named for one of her previous canines.
Thanks to Kiran for the easy-ish late-week grid. It would have been a WITP except for the abundance of A&E fill. And thanks to Rusty Brain for another fun review. You are right about LTE - it enabled telcos to claim 4G without actually meeting all of the standards.
Save Our Ship or Save Our Souls are known as backronyms - phases created after the fact. Another is "port out, starboard home" being the posh shady side of OCEAN LINERS traveling between Britain and India.
FIR. I'm not a fan of vertical puzzles but this one had perps where needed and solved easily. I just prefer a diagonal grid.
Once again I missed the theme and didn't get it till I came here.
For some reason the crossing of "aw man" and witty kept me baffled for a while, but a sudden aha moment sealed the deal.
Overall a so-so puzzle.
Yes. SOS was chosen as a distress call due to its simplcity in Morse Code: ...---... Three dots/three dashes/three dots.
Good Morning:
I had no idea of the theme until RB explained it. Either I’m not as crossword savvy as I used to be, or the newer constructors are a lot more creative-minded about themes. Anyway, it was an enjoyable solve with lots of fun fill and just two unknowns, Brett and Peeta.
Thanks, Kieran, and congrats and thanks, RB, for the excellent and appreciated explanation and illustration of the clever theme. Thanks, also, for the cute photo of cute-as-a-button Buster. I think he should be featured every Thursday as your faithful mascot and muse!
Have a great day.
DO, imagine my surprise (and delight) when I e-filed on a Wednesday and my refund was deposited on Saturday. I couldn’t believe it was processed so quickly, but it was a simple return which makes a difference, I suppose. Hope yours is forthcoming soon!
Musings
-After filling in “had to be” cells, the gimmick occurred to me at E.T.
-My extensive collection of TOPPS cards from the 50’s would be worth a lot now but DW would have grown tired of moving them.
-Yesterday, it took Artemis II about a minute to break the sound barrier which silenced the roar of the rockets as they were going faster than the sound they were making.
-ETHER parties were the rage in the 1800’s
-That BRETT will never replace the most famous KC Royal for me
-The school where I sub does not let us get FaceBook on their Wi-Fi and so I have to go to LTE
-“Quiero SER feliz.” (I want to be happy.)
-OH YES! An inch of rain has made farmers very happy as they will not be planting in dust now!
-As a SENIOR PRANK some boys took apart a VW bug and rebuilt it in the school library. They were missed at graduation.
-We used our granddaughter as a kitty SITTER when we travelled. She got $100/day.
-North Bend, NE has a beauty shop called A.L.O.T.T. (A Little Off The Top)
-In Britain BALMY is used as slang for crazy or foolish
I just knew I wouldn’t be able to finish this puzzle. Those vertical answers were slow to fill, then I got to the reveal and eureka I understood the gimmick. What fun. The other vertical clues were also quite clever.
I didn’t know ISSA, TOPPS, BRETT, PEETA, but perps and WAGS got me through. I liked this CW.
Thank you RB for that great review. I’m sure you sleep comfortably knowing Buster is on the job.
Jinx, I blame the current administration for just about everything. They've earned it.
When flying in a helicopter, the pilot will count the SOB's -- souls on board.
As usual, I circled the numbers of the clues with names, came up with 16, but only 5 DNFs among them. I usually hate CWs that start right off with names, as this one did (ISSA, TOPPS) but I knew both.
This looked at first like a tough CW, but I breezed through it with a 15 minute FIR, which for me is a good Thursday time.
50A and 58D coulda been a lot of things. Took perps to see what KP had in mind.
8D = best clue.
Thanx KP, I enjoyed the CW very much.
Thanx too to RB for the great write-up. Your picture of corn reminds me of visiting a friend in Illinois who is a farmer, and grows corn, among other crops. We walked into the corn field to inspect his crop, and I remarked about there being only one ear per stalk. He told me that's all corn produces: one ear/stalk. I later learned that it was the TYPE of corn he was growing and the density of his plantings, although in general, it is usually only one ear/stalk. If the stalk has two ears, the second ear is usually a runt.
BTW, it is NOT an urban legend that you can hear corn growing. It makes a snapping sound.
Learning moment: S.O.S. does NOT stand for Save Our Ship, as I have though all my life. And I'm 81!! Oy.
D-O, 👍
I just want to add to RB's thoughtful and entertaining recap--because there still seems to be some confusion about the three seed entries at 3D, 7D, and 11D.
All three clues contain a film title, and all three of these are punctuated. M*A*S*H is starred, E.T. has periods, and Face/Off is punctuated with a slash. These punctuation marks lead to, respectively, STARvehicle, PERIODpiece, and SLASHerfilm. Pretty elegant on Kiran's part, I think.
I didn’t want to come across as complaining yesterday. I was responding to Chairman Moe who said “It is a bait-and-switch tactic designed to annoy or humorously surprise”. I meant my comment to be funny. It when over my head, but I do recognize the puzzle and review to be masterful. I just got “fooled”!
Harris is also a great songwriter. Just listened yesterday to her sing her song, "I Didn't Know It Was You. " Beautiful song in every way.
Why not? I blame everything on Murphy's law.
Guess you have to blame Artemis II on him, just to be fair. I remember when Alan Shepherd was launched as the first American in space. All the kids in my ELHI were rounded up in the auditorium, then they rolled in a giant (26") B&W TV. They repeated that for a couple more missions, then I guess it was old hat and we had to remain in the classes until the World Series, which we also watched. (They were day games in those days.)
Or as we kids say, "you just got pwned."
I found Kiran's puzzle fun to do, and the theme entries were really original. Very clever! Nifty grid design, too. Thanks, Kiran and Rusty!
My experience?
Fun puzzle, in that most of it filled in without revealing the theme, which remained until last. Not fun was some unkind three letter perps which left a blank right in the middle, and in the middle of the themers, which were puzzling indeed. Wasn't familiar with the slasher film, so slash didn't help. E.T. As a period piece was also confusing, but M*A*S*H* as a star vehicle was very clever, except for those 3 letter unkind perps that were personal Naticks that took forever to alphabet run away...
Which leads to the silly theme link. You have to make this one silly yourself...
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