NYT 3:46 ... LAT 2:45 ... CS 1:28 ... ND 2:00 ... CHE 2:45 ... WSJ 5:38 ... BEQ 4:40 ... MGWC 2:34
Nice double-shot of Doug Peterson in Newsday (including NEWSDAY in the fill!) and CrosSynergy. Then a super-sized Trip Payne in the CHE. And hey, I sort know LAT constructor Gareth Bain from the blogs (but haven't met him, since he's South African). What's next, Joon Pahk in the NYT? [Jaw drops upon opening applet]
Not as showy a fill as Joon's other themelesses, but smooth and chewy with great clues. JUT was my first fill and I immediately figured out CARJACK, and got lucky many times along the way with the right letters in place to crack the tough clues. [Biochemical arrangement] freaked me out when I had one letter, but when it was DN-? Gimme. Irony of ironies, the knottiest clue for me was ["___ in Love" ("Kismet" song)]. Don't know "Kismet", but I was sure I'd know the song even if it wasn't one of the famous ones. So I spent some time flicking the Rolodex before coming up empty and filling it from crosses.
7 comments:
3:47? Duuude.
...Wait, are you still sick as a dog?
duuuuude. it took me 4:15! admittedly i wasn't racing, more looking at which clues (and maybe letters, though not this time--my streak is at an end) had been changed. but yeah, this was a hard puzzle. it was destined to be a saturday.
i think we should start saying "sick as a pig" instead. i've honestly never associated dogs with illness anyway.
Oh no, I'm fully recovered! :)
Joon, I suspect it wasn't a Saturday because there's no obscure fill (save maybe CECUM)...
really? i think CECUM, WELTER, EQUIPAGE, FEHR, UNRIG (yuck) and perhaps KLEPTOCRACY are not well-known words.
Late comment:
Yeah, that was pretty harsh. 3:47? Only if I first exceeded the speed of light to relatively slow down time somehow. I managed to get all but the top-left done in (I think) about 5 minutes on the timer, and then stopped dead with nowhere left to go. I turned to Orange's ever-helpful blog the next morning to realize where I fell flat.
I rememberd Donald FEHR, and CECUM was not a problem, since anatomical/medical terms come up at work occasionally, but WELTER gave me pause, and KLEPTOCRACY was an educated guess based on the root (and was also the last word I filled in). In retrospect, I should have been able to finish this, but it was a bear.
True, Joon... though WELTER is highly recognizable as a word (not that I can define it) and KLEPTOCRACY is inferrable (even by non-Howards). And UNRIG has appeared a bunch of times, so it's nowhere near a Sat. word. :)
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