Theme answers:
- 16A: *Tennis legend nicknamed "Rocket" (ROD LAVER).
- 23A: *Mighty Mouse's archenemy (OILCAN HARRY).
- 33A: *1983 film that won the Oscar for Best Music, Original Song (FLASHDANCE).
- 38A: *Stray hunter (DOG CATCHER).
- 51A: *Deli side (POTATO SALAD).
- 61A: 1979 song for which Donna Summer won a Grammy, and a hint to the puzzle theme found in the answers to starred clues (HOT STUFF).
Running super, super late today so this will be really, really quick. I really had no idea where this theme was going until I hit the reveal clue at 61A. Theme answers all seem pretty cool to me. Except POTATO SALAD. Not that there's anything wrong with POTATO SALAD, it's just kind of … there, right? It's awesome to see REDRUM (59A: "The Shining" mantra) in the grid, although I admit my first thought was "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy." Obviously, that wouldn't fit. I also like the clue for HAL (25D: Difficult computer of film). On the other hand, AAHED AT? DABO?? (66A: Showed awe over / 19A: Olivia of "The Wonder Years"). Not pretty. Okay, I've gotta jet outta here. See you back here tomorrow.Crosswordese 101 Round-Up:
- 22A: Hebrides tongue (ERSE).
- 67A: Safari sightings (ELANDS).
- 23D: Giant of a Giant (OTT).
- 62D: Defense gp. founded in Bogot· (OAS).
Everything Else — 1A: Minute Maid product (LIMEADE); 8A: John or Paul (BEATLE); 14A: Hotel option (TWIN BED); 15A: Corsage flower (ORCHID); 18A: Early hr. to retire (NINE P.M.); 20A: Resident's suffix (-ITE); 22A: Hebrides tongue (ERSE); 27A: Watch (EYE); 28A: Squirrel's home (TREE); 29A: Put away (ATE); 30A: Claude who played Sheriff Lobo in "B.J. and the Bear" (AKINS); 32A: Profs' aides (TA'S); 35A: Swing __ (ERA); 37A: Granola grain (OAT); 44A: Call from a crow's nest (CAW); 47A: Mozart is on some Austrian ones (EUROS); 48A: Hefty ref. (OED); 49A: Pesky yard critter (MOLE); 50A: Spot to stop: Abbr. (STA.); 55A: Stevie Wonder's "__ She Lovely" (ISN'T); 57A: Court cry (LET); 58A: Partner of void (NULL); 65A: Rio Grande city (EL PASO); 67A: Safari sightings (ELANDS); 68A: Arachnophobe's fear (SPIDERS); 1D: USPS delivery (LTR.); 2D: WWII battle site, briefly (IWO); 3D: Means (MIDDLES); 4D: Intertwine (ENLACE); 5D: Addis __ (ABABA); 6D: Cornwall neighbor (DEVON); 7D: Stamp finish? (-EDE); 8D: Faux pas (BONER); 9D: Airport north of Pittsburgh, in itineraries (ERI); 10D: Reason to see a dermatologist (ACNE); 11D: Legalese adverb (THEREIN); 12D: Mouth the words (LIP SYNC); 13D: '80s attorney general (ED MEESE); 17D: Gaucho gear (RIATA); 21D: Half of seis (TRES); 23D: Giant of a Giant (OTT); 24D: Lyricist Gershwin (IRA); 26D: "Blah ..." (YADA); 31D: "Krazy __" (KAT); 33D: Sprat's taboo (FAT); 34D: Old TV knob (HOR.); 35D: "Foucault's Pendulum" author (ECO); 36D: Farrier's tool (RASP); 38D: Obama's first social secretary __ Rogers (DESIREE); 39D: Move more goods than (OUTSELL); 40D: Pop's pop (GRANDPA); 41D: Pigeon shelter (COTE); 42D: "Macbeth" setting (HEATH); 43D: N.J. summer setting (EDT); 44D: Plan a heist (with) (COLLUDE); 45D: Cookbook words (A LA); 46D: Marry (WED); 49D: Shake alternative (MALTED); 52D: "Stand and Deliver" star (OLMOS); 53D: Ready to be drawn (ON TAP); 54D: Sashimi cousin (SUSHI); 56D: Air__: budget carrier (TRAN); 60D: Amer. currency (USD); 62D: Defense gp. founded in Bogot· (OAS); 63D: Way off (FAR); 64D: NBA stats (FT'S).
26 comments:
I found this one to be surprisingly challenging for a LAT Thursday. Didn't remember DESIREE. MIDDLES clued as "Means" is a bit abstruse. DABO and HAL were new to me.
I didn't recall that FLASHDANCE won an Oscar for anything. I saw the movie and didn't care for it at all.
MIDDLES clued as "Means" transcends abstruse. The mean annual salary between myself, my two brothers and Bill Gates is approximately $250 million per year. The middle is approximately $100k. MIDDLES = Median.
ALLWORKNOPLAYMAKESJACKADULLBOY.
ALLWORKNOPLAYMAKESJACKADULLBOY.
ALLWORKNOPLAYMAKESJACKADULLBOY.
ALLWORKNOPLAYMAKESJACKADULLBOY.
I liked the HOT STUFF theme, but there sure was a lot of crappy fill. Solved the puzzle in a FLASH.
Liked YADA and OIL CAN HARRY
Hey, where's that KRAZY KAT Lady?
A bit of a slog today, esp. in the SW corner.
Now I don't mind if I'm suppose to remember things like "80's Attorney General" ED MEESE.
But now I'm suppose to remember "Obama's social secretary?" DESIREE Rogers?
Along with AAHED AT, they both get a "Boo/Hissssss!" yuck!
Liked the theme since I searched out the reveal clue right off the bat. Faves were ROD LAVER & DOG CATCHER.
Hey, I like HOT Rods & HOT Dogs (esp. over July 4th weekend).
Addis ABABA, what a great name for a city.
SUSHI & Sashimi are cousins?
Is that on the mothers side?
@Zeke
ALLWORKNOPLAYMAKESJACKADULLBOY.
ALLWORKNOPLAYMAKESJACKADULLBOY.
That was the Mantra I remembered.
When I saw the movie the first time all I could think of was the poor assistant who had to type that over and over and over and over.
I'm surprised no one has bottled REDRUM yet.
IRA is used a lot in puzzles. Of course I love seeing IRA Gershwin as the clue. The Gershwin brothers were perhaps in the top ten greatest composers/lyricists of the 20th century. How could I pass up a vid clip of SUMMERTIME sung by Kiri Te Kanawa?...another frequent CW visitor.
I also forgot DESIREE Rogers, but then I remembered that she was fired for a huge Obama staff BONER... the flap over the White House intruders.
Remember the couple (Tareq and Michaele Salahi) that crashed the White House state dinner?
I don't understand when people say that they don't remember people and this causes a slog. That's what the crosses are for people! I didn't remember DESIREE but with the easy crosses the name became apparent. MY only huh moment was in the AAHED AT section where I first put in ERR for FAR.
Guess we'll all have to put DESIREE and REDRUM in the data banks. I tend to suppress sad stories.
It's becoming a pattern with me. M-W - EZ, no Googling.
Thurs. - off the precipice. I had 3 Googles besides the aforementioned social secretary and mantra. They were all in NW: RODLAVER (sports), DABO, and OILCANHARRY. Of the three, I'm glad to know the cartoon entity.
Did not know AKINS, air TRAN.
Wanted beLACE for ENLACE. Just kidding. Didn't want either.
Some yucky abbrevs, a pet peeve of mine. LTR, USD. Really?
AAHEDAT was awful.
Good3-letters: ECO, KAT.
Means = MIDDLE. Reminded me of a Deutscher comic oompapa song:
"Meine Mittel erbauben mir das." (My means allow me to do it.)
When I mention these songs I learned as a child, I suspect even they are old-fashioned to the couple of young Germans who read this.
However - a math mantra that won't grow old: The product of the means equals the product of the extremes. The means are the middle two variables.
AB=CD, ergo,
A times D equals B times C.
Try it with, say, 1/4 = 2/8
Unless your EYEs have glazed over.
That's what he's talkin about.
Got the theme soon enough to use it.
I used to buy 4 1-gallon size Minute Maid Cherry-Flavored LIMEADEs from WAL*MART at a time. They have now disappeared. I did my part.
BONER means something entirely different to me. As Robert Herrick said:
"Gather ye rosebuds while ye may
Old time is still a flyin."
He wasn't talking to the rosebuds.
That's why I can't seriously lecture kids to save themselves for marriage.
Captcha - brati - this fellow has insulted me too many times. I'm your elder, show some respect!
Not too tough a Thursday puzzle. "Swing ___" as a clue for ERA is pretty meh.
I did enjoying learning that Mozart is on some Austrian euros.
Was unpleasantly reminded of what a tool Ed Meese was. Was against Mirandizing suspects, spearheaded the War on Drugs, was involved in the Iran/Contra scandal, now a fellow at the Heritage Foundation.
@*David* said...
"I don't understand when people say that they don't remember people and this causes a slog."
Just curious, who said that?
I don't understand how AB=CD leads to A times D equals B times C.
@ anonymous: "the product of the means equals the product of the extremes" is a mathematical formula to solve a proportion written in the for AB = CD.
The "product of the means.. " applies as in:
When you cross multiply to show 2 fractions are equivalent. Ex a/c =b/d so cross multiplying would show a x d = c x b
c , b are the means (middle) in a/c=b/d
a , d are the extremes in a/c=b/d
Uh, A/B=C/D is much, much different than AB=CD.
There will be no math in the following comment:
Today's puzzle put up a fight but I wrestled it into submission. Missteps included DERBY before DEVON and COOP before COTE.
Have not been to Europe since the advent of the euro so did not know different countries had their own euro designs (Mozart is on some Austrian ones.)
Olivia D'ABO is written as such.
Hal, the computer in "2001," is the most famous computer, fictional or otherwise, that ever was. Suck it, ENIAC.
D'ABO is familiar enough. AAHEDAT is an abomination. Never heard of the OILCAN figure. YADA doesn't quite work. Thumbs down today.
rp
@Shrub5 Thank you...
Found the puzzle today to be on the challenging side. But when all was said and done, I had fun. Took me all the way to the revealer to get the theme. One of these days, I'll try solving @Tinbeni style from the bottom up.
Ah HOT FLASH - a term I'm very familiar with. There was a bit of an 80's vibe going on what with Donna Summer's HOT STUFF, "Stand and Deliver," ED MEESE and FLASHDANCE. I remember that Oscar winning song well, "Flashdance - What a Feeling." That movie along with the Jane Fonda workout video started the whole leg warmer, ripped tee shirt trend. Didn't remember REDRUM from "The Shining" also from 1980. Had Moors Instead of HEATH for MacBeth setting. Did not like AAHAED AT at all. Did like Krazy KAT thank you JNH! Knew DESIREE Rogers since she was all over the news a couple of months ago beacause of the state dinner party crashers that @JNH mentioned.
@Van - You didn't see "2001 a Space Odyssey?"
49A MOLE should have been clued: "One of ten arrested this week" :-)
Hard one for me today, especially NW, with 16A, 19A, and 23A all being sports/pop-culture references I had no idea of. 1A similarly; I didn't know they made a LIMEAID product; plus, I was expecting a trademarked brand name, not a generic description. Then I misguessed 14A, about which see below. Once I'd Googled OILCANHARRY, a stab-in-the-dark guess of ENLACE got me going.
Bad guesses screwed me up. Some amusing ones:
- "kingBED" crossed with "pkg" for 14A and 1D (instead of TWINBED and LTR resp.). I hate when two errors seem to confirm each other!
- "eleven" for 18A. Well, for me, 11PM *is* an early bedtime :-)
- "aint" for 85A. Only somewhat later, as the song surfaced in my head while I worked on other parts of the puzzle, did I realize that the tune wants two syllables there and corrected it to ISNT
- 47A: I also didn't know EURO(S) currency had national variants, so guessed "coins". Well, I was on the right track...
@Zeke: I'm with you; 4D "Means" for MIDDLES is just worng [sic]! My immediate guess was "methods" (as in patents, which always talk about both "methods" and "means" for doing the patented thing), but I knew right off that that was too obscure. Still, of all the MEANings that came to mind -- "meanings", "financial means" (to accomplish something), "means to an end" -- "average" wasn't one of them.
@Sfingi: How amusing, then, that German appears to link "middle" to "means" in the financial sense. Does it really? What's the etymology of "mittel"?
@Sfingi: Why is USD yucky? It's the standard abbreviation. USD for U.S. dollar, CAD for Canadian dollar, GBP for UK pounds, EUR for EUROS; there's a standardized (ISO 4217) list of TLAs for all the world's currencies (see, for e.g., oanda.com).
I also booEDAT AAHEDAT, but for the record, I quite liked YADA.
Total guess at the R in Air TRAN. Don't like horror; never saw The Shining; no clue what REDRUM might refer to.
A question I answered (correctly) on a grade-12 chemistry test: "If a mole of moles can dig a mole of holes in one day, how many holes can one mole dig in a mole of days?" Feels like a mole of days ago, grade 12 does... But I digress.
@Wolfenden - second your Mozart and Meese points.
@CCat - For me, something can be on the news for weeks - red dress and all. When it's gone, the memory goes into hiding.
@Anon1033 - Sorry, to y'all -
@Benny is correct - I forgot the slashes to signify fractions.
@Vans - I guess it is abstruse!
@Eric - where is "USD" standard? In the world of stocks? I just don't know. What is an ISO? (I better find or it will be in the next CW.) I don't mess with stocks knowingly. Was brought up anti-gambling. 11th commandment. For some reason, this one sunk in as I'm a sinner in other ways! (No discussion on boners?)
Mittel signifies funds, source of money. Meinen signifies "to mean."
English uses "means" for many things: signifies (v.), funds (n.),
intends (v.), cruel, stingy, subsistence (adj.).
It seems it's not how the German developed, but the English, which is usually more complicated, seeing as it's a conglomerate of at least 2 languages, and another step away from the grandmother tongue (Indo-European).
At my previous entry, the system chastised me for length, but still took the comment. I better watch out.
@Erik I too thought King bed at first. I don't think any reputable hotel these days offers a TWIN BED. king, queen, full or sometimes a foldout sofa or a roll away. Maybe in Europe. In Italy a king is two twins pushed together. Someone always ends up in the crevasse.
@Sfingi a BONER is to ERR. Let's leave it at that : >)
@eric - REDRUM, murder spelled backwards.
@chefwen I'm going to have to go back and watch "The Shining" again. I think both times I watched it I had a pillow over my eyes most of the time. It made me very afraid of big old resort hotels.
Oh no! My captcha is Killyz!!! In Red!!
@sfingi
ISO is International Standards Orginization.
They keep our lives much simpler, and most people do not even know it.
AAHEDAT was the single worst answer in recent memory.
JD
@Sfingi: Not just stocks, but the whole financial community, uses those three-letter codes. If you look up exchange rates online, you'll more than likely see the currencies' codes instead of, or in addition to, their full names.
Typically, the first two letters are the two-letter code for the country (as specified in a different ISO standard), and the third is the first letter of the currency's name (e.g. US + D). But there are a few exceptions -- by the rule, Euro would presumably have been EUE, but they sensibly opted for the people-friendly EUR instead of strict adherence. So now you should be able to guess what DEM was, and perhaps what CHF is...
Sorry for not explaining ISO -- that's my geeky nature assuming everybody knows such arcana. As JD said, ISO is the International Standards Organization. They standardize everything from country and currency codes (duh!) to CD-ROM formats (which is why all CD-ROMs are readable the world over), to procedures for crash-testing cars.
One standard of theirs that you're likely familiar with is film speed. When you buy "ISO 400" film, or set your digital camera to that speed ... well, now you know what the "ISO" stands for :-)
I want a puzzle that has "drey" as a squirrel's home.
McBeal
Most Valuable site on the Internet. I use a little bit of it almost every day. Some Saturdays I tend to over use it since I don't have sufficient time to work it out. Always glad that I found this site, and it is bookmarked on my browser.
Keep up the good work!!!!
Ron Geiken Phoenix, Arizona
Post a Comment