My time: 11:39, just a minute slower than the record!
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David J. Kahn created this puzzle with a baseball theme. Sports isn't my thing, so I had a very hard time cottoning on to the joke, but once I did, I was pretty impressed with the wordplay. Anyway, baseball phrases are clued with non-sports-related puns rather than definitions: BOTTOM OF THE NINTH is also the "bass part in Beethoven's 'Choral' symphony;" BASES LOADED is "result of a lot of drinking in the army;" TWO MEN OUT is "a couple of prisoners after an escape from Leavenworth;" FULL COUNT is "Dracula, after stuffing himself;" and my favorite, DOWN BY THREE is "plan for a midafternoon nap."
And, apparently, a GRAND SLAM HOME RUN "will cause a walk-off win in the situation" described by all these clues.
I haven't heard the Lorette Lynn song "I LIE." It hit #9 on the Billboard Country chart and was released on the 1982 album of the same name.
LOU Brock was a baseball player, mostly from the St. Louis Cardinals. He was inducted into the Hall of Fame (in Cooperstown) in 1985.
Here's a new word: COTTER, a curved metal pin used in fastening pieces together.
Never heard of Spanish muralist José María SERT, known for his grisaille style. He was hired to do the mural at Rockefeller Center after Diego Rivera painted Lenin and was fired.
I've heard of Nolan RYAN, of course, but couldn't have told you that he holds the all-time record for strikeouts. He has 5,714, nearly one thousand more than his closest rival, Randy Johnson.
In other sports news, Yogi Berra won TEN World Series when he was a player, from 1947 to 1962. He won thirteen World Series total, including as coach and manager.
The Saint Louis Cardinals have eleven World Series wins (starting in 1926), but I don't know that anyone refers to them as ST. L, do they?
Arizona's Glen Canyon DAM is on the Colorado River. It is 710 feet high and forms Lake Powell, one of the largest man-made reservoirs in the US.
The Jaguar model XK-E last appeared on October 1, 2017.
Clever clues: "It's California's fault" is SAN ANDREAS. "Strike with a pickaxe" is ORE. "Yarn that stretches" is SAGA. "Met demands" is ARIAS --- now that's a good one. "Bypass arteries" is TOLL ROADS.
This was a nice, fun puzzle that I didn't find hard, but was just the right amount of challenging. My quick time is a stroke to my EGO.
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My time: 12:47 , a new record! I beat my old best time, set just a week ago, by a full minute! Theme: "Cin... -
My time: 6:37 , a new Thursday record, beating the old one by eleven seconds! Theme: BEETHOVEN'S FIFTH is celebrated in this puzzle. Th...
There's a lot of baseball in the NYT puzzle -- it's kind of the official pastime of the East Coast intelligentsia, I gather.
ReplyDeleteI don't think anybody calls the team ST. L, but I think a convention had emerged of three letter abbreviations for teams in the box scores at the bottom of television feeds, and that we're seeing them a lot in crossword clues.
There is a lot of baseball in the puzzle! Maybe even... too much baseball?
ReplyDeleteST L as a sort of established code for teams, like airport codes, makes sense. I thought maybe that was the reasoning.