Solving this twisty Alex Eaton-Salners puzzle is truly an ordeal.
SUNDAY PUZZLE — Happy Halloween, for those who celebrate! Today’s big, scary grid is by a frighteningly good constructor, Alex Eaton-Salners, who works as a lawyer for a tech company in San Jose, Calif. Mr. Eaton-Salners is also a prolific contributor of all sorts of puzzles to The New York Times, and he has written a book on diagramless puzzles that’s coming out next year from Puzzlewright Press. (Can’t wait that long? Try the puzzle from Oct. 18, 2020; it’s perfect for the occasion.)
This year, we’re getting rebuses with our candy, but don’t freak out — they’re doable. I think people who don’t love rebuses will love these, because they come with spoilers, once you know where to look.
Tricky Clues
By the end of your solve, you’ll realize that quite a lot of this grid is tied up in the theme. But the fill is also choice.
51A. Horses run in a derby, don’t they? Furlongs, lengths, necks and noses — nothing fit here. I’m supposing that METRES refers to metric measurements used in the English city of Derby.
73A. The “see” in this clue is the Holy See, which is governed by the POPE. Add this pun to the infinite list of POPE jokes.
76A. The first phrase that came to mind here worked well enough to trick me for some time. “Sign me up” sounds so cheerful and competent, and it crossed perfectly with “tremolo,” which sounds right for an “Alveolar trill.” Instead, try SURE LETS, which intersects with a ROLLED R (hard for me to find, and hard to perform, if you didn’t learn this technique when you were young).
1D. Considering that this entry runs down from PAT — which I thought could also be “wag” at one point, another pup-related choice — PET FOOD is a good choice for “hands-free” fare.
7D. Are these legendary action figures or is this a niche bit of trivia? There are some 21st-century iterations of “Battlestar Galactica,” but they’re not on my list of things to watch, and I don’t recognize CYLONS. Hey, one could be knocking on your door at any moment — they’re the ones that look as if they’re covered in chrome.
89D. This one gave me pause. It’s an old-timey reference and a rather corny pun for “head,” an OUTHOUSE, but I don’t get the “for the hills” part; the Appalachians, maybe, or the Berkshires? Another early American entry is nearby: the Northern SPY, an excellent apple that supposedly got its name from a popular 19th-century James Fenimore Cooper novel.
Today’s Theme
I made several missteps wandering the path of this theme, so if you consider it challenging, I won’t argue. In the end, however, it’s quite clearly laid out with what is essentially its own answer key, something I initially thought might be a red herring.
There are five squares in the grid that take a rebus. The first and biggest mistake I made was entirely missing that and coming up with a satisfactory, rebus-free solution at the first theme entry I filled out, at 118-Across: “Hectic trip abroad.” I came up with “whirled tour,” which I still think is pretty cute. (Have you ever seen those “whirled peas” holiday cards? Cute.) This made me think that we’d be doing homonyms, which didn’t help me at all in the rest of the puzzle. I also completely glossed over 114-Down, “Places hangers hang,” which had to be “cets” if “whirled tour” was correct.
Then I thought we were replacing the letters “or” with something else, since the title of the puzzle is “Choice Words”; that notion went nowhere as well, but at least it’s a bit more relevant. At this point, I had found a couple of expressions of choice — IN OR OUT and MORE OR LESS — but hadn’t come close to connecting the dots.
It took figuring out a third expression — WIN OR LOSE — for the trick to come into focus. WIN OR LOSE is on the same line as that first entry, “whirled tour.” Let’s say you wanted that entry to actually be WHIRLWIND TOUR. And let’s say you wanted that “cets,” which is supposed to be where “hangers hang,” to make sense. How about CLOSETS?
So there is our equation: Each rebus square uses a different term in its Across and Down entries. Those terms appear in plain sight in the puzzle, next to the Across entry, so as you solve you use one to deduce the other. That’s what I did, anyway.
I didn’t get the joke at 68-Across — “Noted U.S. rock group?” — until I realized that it would have to incorporate either MORE or LESS, somewhere. (“Consecrates” then takes the other term and becomes BLESSED.) I also stared at 21-Across, “Noted Apple release of 1968, to fans,” drawing a blank on the record label. But seeing HIT OR MISS was all my brain needed.
If you’re stuck on any of the rebus rules, using HIT OR MISS as an example, the following variations should be acceptable: HIT/MISS, MISS/HIT, HIT, MISS, H/M, M/H, H or M.
I did miss “trick or treat,” with this weekend being Halloween, but it seemed impossible to get that long a phrase in the same row as a rebus (“metric kilo” maybe, but that’s too lame for this puzzle). You will notice that the first term in the “this or that” entry goes with the Across entry each time, which is another little grace note that probably increases the complexity of the construction by another few degrees.
Constructor Notes
As sometimes happens, the starting point for this puzzle didn’t end up in the final grid. While brainstorming another puzzle idea involving the phrase UP OR OUT, I came up with the gimmick you see here. UP OR OUT describes career advancement in hierarchical partnerships and tenure organizations, where workers either need to climb the ladder or leave. During the editorial process, UP OR OUT was replaced with IN OR OUT, erasing the link to the original inspiration. So, I guess that means the result was “OUT” rather than “UP” for UP OR OUT!
In some ways, this puzzle marks the end of an era for me. It was my last snail-mail submission accepted by the editors (though not the last to be published as I still have a couple of earlier acceptances in the queue). Although the online portal is easier to use, I miss the ritual of printing, collating and sending in puzzles by hand. And, unfortunately for me, I purchased a large supply of envelopes, stamps, labels and paper clips just before the switch to digital.
Dazed and Confused?
Subscribers can take a peek at the answer key.
Trying to get back to the puzzle page? Right here.
What did you think?
"choice" - Google News
October 31, 2021 at 05:00AM
https://ift.tt/3EmTWt4
NYT Crossword Answers: Alveolar trill, as it's commonly known - The New York Times
"choice" - Google News
https://ift.tt/2WiOHpU
https://ift.tt/3c9nRHD
Bagikan Berita Ini
0 Response to "NYT Crossword Answers: Alveolar trill, as it's commonly known - The New York Times"
Post a Comment