Happy to bring you another Saturday! This puzzle calls for a shoutout to my older sister Lindsey, who helped me brainstorm clues while ... read more
Happy to bring you another Saturday! This puzzle calls for a shoutout to my older sister Lindsey, who helped me brainstorm clues while we were both home for the holidays last winter. As a longtime Vans employee, she was singlehandedly responsible for the ERA clue you see today (not sponsored, but I wouldn't complain if Vans hit me up).
This summer I'm in Pittsburgh interning at Duolingo, where we have a crossword club that meets during lunch every day to solve New York Times puzzles together (hi, Alina, Ming, and Art!). I can't wait to sit there smugly as my coworkers solve this in front of me!
Jim Horne notes:
Jim here, sitting in for Jeff Chen who is performing in both the Winter and Summer Olympics, in different sports. This one is easy, ... read more
Jim here, sitting in for Jeff Chen who is performing in both the Winter and Summer Olympics, in different sports.
This one is easy, right?
Whoa, Jim, you know better than that! Your life experiences, including the percentage of your life you devote to crosswords, are uniquely your own. You know things that I don't, and vice versa. But still. 1-Across has to be IMHO, and 5-Across is clearly SPACE FORCE, so before we've completely settled into our Eames puzzle chair, we've got two Across answers and the first letter of fourteen Downs. Fortunately, my ego boost was temporary, as the rest of the puzzle provided more resistance.
TELENOVELA ("soap in Mexico") ought to be a constructor's dream word, with its alternating vowels and useful consonants, Jeff tells me it's more common in other venues, but this is only its second appearance in the NYT. Juliet CAPULET is a prototypical "star-crossed lover." (I hope I didn't spoil the ending.) REAL MATURE is an evocative phrase. "Chains of churches" describes literal ROSARIES.
Pro tip: "Home" as in "Standing at home" often refers to baseball. "Course" as in "Course pro" often refers to either golf or meals. Other seemingly odd words like "shell" often refer to food, although not pasta this time. You "put away shells" at a TAQUERIA. Poke is often food too but, PSST, it's a literal finger poke today.
Are you Team Stridex or Team OXY? I have no opinion.
Take this kiss upon the brow!
And, in parting from you now,
Thus much let me avow —
You are not wrong, who deem
That my days have been a dream;
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.
AI results are often bogus, but can sometimes be insightful or entertaining, and occasionally even helpful.
Analyzing...
Statistical Analysis
Day of week comparisons
Rebus puzzles are ignored when calculating averages. Flow averages also exclude disconnected grids.
Distribution of answer words by length
Letter distribution
Scrabble Score: 1
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Thumbnails
Various thumbnail views are shown:
Standard view shows the grid pattern most clearly
Open Squares (those which don't touch any block, even diagonally) are blue
Vowel distribution
Scrabble score uses the same color key as above
Freshness view shows unique answers in red (see colorized grid below)
With answers
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Unusual or long words that appear elsewhere:
Identical grids
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Topologically similar grids
Colorized grid for Sat Jun 25, 2022
The next two sections attempt to show how fresh the grid entries are.
In this view, unusual answers are colored depending on how often they have appeared in other puzzles.
Unique answers are in red, red overwrites orange which overwrites yellow, etc.
Unique
1 other
2 others
3 others
4 others
Freshness Factor
Freshness Factor is a calculation that compares the number of times words in this puzzle have appeared
in other Modern Era puzzles. Click here for an explanation.
The chart below shows how many times each word has been used across all NYT puzzles, old and modern including Variety.