ACROSS LITE PUZZLE: [ THEMELESS MONDAY]
PROGRAM: [Across Lite]
PROGRAM: [Java]
PRINTOUT PUZZLE: [ THEMELESS MONDAY]
PROGRAM: [Adobe Acrobat]
Just asking: are we sure those were the two best teams in the World Cup last night? That was one fugly game.
Immediately after the match, Liz and I weren’t talking about the game, but rather the mind-scrambling Paul the Octopus story. BEQ, ever the cynic, wasn’t buying it because of all the anthropomorphization needed to make Paul’s story even remotely plausible. That is to say, we have to believe an octopus understands the concepts of countries, understands the concept of flags, can differentiate between two flags, understands the rules of soccer, understands what the World Cup is, understands that eating from one box is to be interpreted as making a choice for whatever team represented by the flag on the box, etc. Liz, ever the scientist, wasn’t having any of it as well, because she felt the charade of his “decision” wasn’t consistently performed in a controlled environment. Basically, we both called bullshit. Having said all that, if we were to suspend disbelief just for a minute, isn’t this the closest example, yet, that we’ve had to support the Infinite Monkey Theorem?
Anyway, I wanted to go for the cleanest fill in a 64-word grid (!) that I could have gone for with today’s grid. I hope you agree. I think the clues are a little more on the medium side of hard with this one. But definitely more in the medium wheelhouse than a straight-up hard. Let me hear it, if you feel otherwise, in the comments.
Share the puzzle. New one on Thursday.
Yeah, it’s astonishingly clean. Really liked ONE CAN HOPE and ME SO HORNY. They kind of go together.
Good work,
rp
North was medium for me: south was a BIG old DNF – too many proper names, misdirection and plain old ignorance of words like adsorbent (knew it, but too vaguely I guess) and adjacent fill like 35 & 36D and 42 and 43D all conspired to make me resort to the “REVEAL” button.
I tried really hard to be a soccer fan over the last few weeks, but it just ain’t gonna happen. For a World Cup final that game was about as exciting as watching my mother’s quilting bee. It’s pretty bad when I get more pleasure out of watching the player’s facial contortions when they were dive than from the actual game play.
As for the puzzle, yeah, it’s maybe a bit on the hard side of medium. As usual for me, it’s the music-related ones that catch me up. RE: 42D – I never knew that about Bowie on the album cover. Cool bit of trivia.
Before Paul the Octopus there was Hans the Wonder Horse (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clever_Hans)
I agree with your assessment of the puzzle.
My solving time suggests non-easy Friday NYT or easy Saturday NYT. Is that where you calibrate a BEQ “medium”?
I didn’t love all the fill (crossing chemicals!), but it felt like a 68- to 72-worder and not a 64, so yeah, I’d have to call that smooth.
The verb in the 35D clue is amiss; should be “holds.”
Today’s lesson is ME SO HORNY can be mistaken for MY SHARONA.
Okay, changing it to HARD.
I found this easier than most of the Friday/Saturday NYTimes of late. A doable “Hard” for me, which translates to a solid “Medium” here, I suppose.
Great fill. No clunkers at all. APARICIO doomed me in the SW esp. since I did not associate PANDORA with the Music Genome Project. Got OBAMACARE, but did not like it. Should be clued as a pejorative.
You want a beautiful World Cup game? The third-place Germany-Uruguay match was amazing, right down to the last kick of the game. One of the best matches I’ve ever seen.
not a coincidence… the 3rd-place game always ends up being more open and free-flowing than the final, because the teams aren’t super-nervous and play for fun instead of playing not to lose. but yeah, that was an ugly, ugly game. i wonder how different it would have been if howard webb had sent of de jong for his bruce lee flying kick on xabi alonso.
thought this grid was pretty amazing. for a 64 to actually include some great fill like ME SO HORNY, APES_IT, SNOB APPEAL, OBAMACARE, ONE CAN HOPE, is really something. that, and a complete dearth of awkward -ER words. very clean. one partial, one prefix, a few awkward plurals… that’s really good.
Thanks Joon, for helping me to understand what exactly is meant by “clean”.
But the real question is: Is the infinite theorum monkey good enough to join the Boston Typewriter Orchestra?
My definition of hard is if I have to Google, but I understand to some the definition of easy is if they don’t. Still there are times in a BEQ hard puzzle when I Google all I can and still have gaps to “reveal.” In this case I only Googled Steve Martin and the 18A author to break open that last section–I had ROXANNE crossing NIXON initially. So I guess mard would be a correct evaluation. I also had AERATOR and SALOME (for AIRPUMP and SAMSON) for a while but worked out of that jam. Thanks, BEQ
BEQ, it wasn’t HARD. I’d stick w/ your initial calibration. Thursdayish for me. Seems like your MEDIUM. These ratings are inexact; it’s probably always best to stick to your original assessment, barring massive outcry.
rp
Very nice grid, and the clue for ROBOT made me laugh too.
Joon — on the replays, when De Jong gets up from his karate kick to the chest, you can see in his eyes that he thinks he’s about the get a red card.
I found it HARD and wasn’t a big fan of it. It seemed to be more all over the place then usual even for a BEQ puzzle with plenty of mundane fill. AIR PUMP and CAN OPENER left me almost as cold as CAPITAL P and A NEGATIVE.
Huh, Thursday NYT difficulty? Maybe even hard Wednesday? Multiple gimmes in all quadrants! But yes, very very clean but still managed to have interesting stuff like OBAMACARE and APESHIT! Astonishing!!
Lets see Paul the Octopus selects Germany 11/13 times he can. The one time he doesn’t is against Spain… Sounds to me like someone realized Germany’s got a very good chance of winning usually and trained the octopus accordingly… Missed 2 in the Euros by picking Germany. Bah!
Top half medium, bottom half hard for me. Mostly, because I stuck with AERATOR for way too long. Pretty slick puzzle!
A quibble: AB Negative is THE rarest blood type; my husband has this, and they’d love it if he would donate, but if anyone tries to take his blood, he faints, so too bad…. (I’m B+, which isn’t all that common.)
Had to Google for APARICIO, but had the pleasure of seeing that his number is unretired now and being worn by Omar Vizquel. We loved him during his years as a Cleveland Indian! Impressed that he’s still playing.
Hand up for ROXANNE.
@Rick Snyder–watch it with those quilter put-downs.