NYT (p) 8:13 ... SUN (p) 5:33 ... LAT (p) 4:06 ... CS (p) 2:23 ... CHE (p) 3:13 ... WSJ (p) 7:43 ... BEQ 2:49 ... MGWC 3:28
Wow, I haven't been so stymied by a NYT crossword in a while. Four of the initial short Downs were gimmes, but there were only a couple other entries I knew for sure in the whole puzzle. I even managed to screw up the "Twelfth Night" clue with AS A BOY instead of AS A MAN. APGAR SCORE rang no bells, SHORE COVER made no sense, SUA and PICO (clued as the partial city) I've never seen. Not even going to mention L-SEVEN. At least I spelled REBEKAH right. I should have seen and solved the clue for TEY much earlier, which would have given me WRIT and opened up the NW.
The only movie character I knew in the Sun puzzle was TUGG SPEEDMAN. Six empty boxes taunted me in the SE, until I guessed DRAKE could be a surname, which meant AKITA was a place and [Cathouse cheese] was a person.
Shocking "Natick"-style crossing in the Chron: AT_A (Kofi Annan's middle name) and _TEST (statistics mumbo-jumbo). I vaguely remembered ATTA, but that's rough. At least the bizarre CEEB had easy crossings.
Also had trouble throughout the northern part of the WSJ, but I needn't get into it except to remind myself that HAIFA can be spelled JAFFA, and to smack myself for not getting TYNE DALY. (I am a close personal acquaintance of Tim Daly's.)
Set some more personal records on this week's tour of the NYT archives... if only someone had been filming me, I could have been a YouTube star.
Mon 10/15/01 paper - 2:03
Sun 10/14/01 paper - 5:54 (pretty sure I solved this one in an old collection, pre-obsession)
Mon 11/19/01 Across Lite - 1:17
Fri 11/23/01 Across Lite - 2:20 (by Byron, but semi-themed)
2 comments:
i knew both ATTA (because i recently had to clue this word for a puzzle, so i looked it up in the clue database) and T-TEST (because i know statistics). i didn't think twice about it at the time, but yeah, that's a rough crossing.
i wish i could say i enjoyed getting beat up for 20+ minutes by paula's puzzle, but it's not so.
Toughest NYT Friday I've seen in a while. I fell into the AS A BOY/AS A MAN trap and also had NSA instead of CIA in the upper right for way too long. I vaguely remembered APGAR SCORE from an old puzzle, but I needed nearly every crossing to jog my memory.
1:17? That's sick.
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