ACROSS LITE PUZZLE: [ ANIMAL COLLECTIVE]
PROGRAM: [Across Lite]
PROGRAM: [Java]
PRINTOUT PUZZLE: [ ANIMAL COLLECTIVE]
PROGRAM: [Adobe Acrobat]
Animal Collective “My Girls” from Chad von Nau on Vimeo.
Don’t panic. This puzzle has absolutely nothing to do with the band Animal Collective. Just shares a title with the band. That is all.
Darn. I was kind of hoping it would have something to do with them. Good puzzle nonetheless.
I was really hoping it had something to do with them. Hey, at least you put the “My Girls” video up.
puzzle >> band. 🙂
damn, if that was only a medium, my puzzle skills are rusty….
Good puzzle, although it is a “dopping” of ducks, not a “dropping”. Thanks for giving me a new way to waste time at work on MWF!
For me harder than Monday’s Hard puzzle. Relatively a lot of arcana just beyond me: TEK, DENEB, GZA, AMIDOL, SERIN, ENA (clued by voice actress) …. In fairness, I’ve been fooled before by GZA and TEK, and so I should get smarter about them (but will I remember all 9 members of Wu-Tang Clan? Raekwon? not likely). Also, most of these terms of venery (ok, venereal terms) are pretty obscure, and so it was hard to make much of a connection between, e.g., moles and LABOR. Googling “dropping of ducks” does indeed seem to bring up only references to the Anaheim Ducks getting beaten in hockey.
This one, didn’t work for me, got the theme fairly quickly but getting the theme didn’t help me one iota because I basically hadn’t heard of any of those collective nouns. I suspect they’re not at all in use. I do realize trying to combine words to get real compounds is trickier than it seems – I’ve had a couple of goes at it before…
The theme words being basically inaccessible, almost like a quote theme, I relied on the crossers – the clues felt more vague than misleading… SERIN/CIGNA was impossible for me, but I’m guessing CIGNA is universally known within the States, so that’s just me…
Probably an isolated case today… Guess I’m never gonna like every crossword. Feel awkward saying so though…
Again, your MEDIUM is another man’s IMPOSSIBLE, but that’s just part of the learning curve. I still don’t really get the theme, but that’s mainly because, as others have mentioned, those collective terms are so rarely used.
Yeah, I didn’t get the theme, either. I gather from previous comments that those are collective nouns for the animals in question. Despite seeing lists of such, these seem completely unfamiliar to me. Oh, well.
GZA, GMA, CIGNA, and MARGO had me SwERIN. Par for the course for me on BEQ’s (requisite unknown musician reference was PALMER, but it was very gettable from crosses). I just don’t have the same knowledge base. But I still appreciate the puzzle and the fresh fill thereof. Thanks, as always.
brendan: i just saw richard maltby’s acrostic in the july harper’s. was this puzzle inspired by it?
Just finished the puzzle, great to see the Dresden Dolls, quite popular in LA. Had one Google and three mistakes so wasn’t too bad. Almost all was doable with the crosses. The theme like, the others had stated, was simply out of my familiarity zone so didn’t connect. I did like it being all on the downs as a change of pace.
CIGNA is most definitely *not* universally known within the States.