Thursday, 12/18/08

NYT 4:19 ... SUN 2:55 ... LAT 2:17 ... CS 1:42

Had a bunch of problems with Michael "Francis" Vuolo's Times puzzle...

  • Didn't want AGENT following UNDERCOVER because I didn't like the Down possibilities in the NE. It turned out to be right, and the NE took way too long (especially since JAGUARS had a Tuesday clue), but I'm not ashamed of trying RARE instead of FINE as a coin "classification"...
  • Could not see SABBATH across the middle until I erased some wrong guesses: NOSE for BODY, OHWOW/OHJOY for OHBOY. At one point I was looking at SANJ---, and thinking of the famous Biblical prophet, Sanjaya.
  • Never heard of the verb ABLATE, but that got straightened out with the rest of the center section.

Enjoyed the LAT theme today, but HASTY PUTTING has a significant pronunciation change and the others don't. Maybe that's why it's in the LAT and not the NYT? (Actually, probably not -- Jack McInturff is a LAT regular, with only 2 NYT puzzles to his name.)

Really digging this West Coast schedule, with the NYT available at 7pm, and the CS/LAT at 9pm. I think I'll keep up this daily blogging for the rest of my vacation, and reassess from there...

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Hi, Dan. I didn't know you had a blog!

I wondered what happened to you on Thursday's NYT. Your time was fast, but not Feyeresque. I didn't run into any major stumbling blocks in this one, though SABBATH was one of the last entries I filled in.

I was stoked to see THE EVIL DEAD in Sunday's puzzle. I watched some of the clips from the musical on youtube.com, and they're a riot.