Tuesday, May 15, 2018

Tuesday's New York Times puzzle solved: May 15, 2018

My time: 7:10.

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Ross Trudeau and genius cartoonist Garry Trudeau collaborated on this puzzle, which features STAND-UP COMICS.  Not the Dave Chapelle and Jim Gaffigan kind, though.  These are the comics like Trudeau's "Doonesbury," featured "standing up" because they are all Down answers: TIGER, POGO, BABY BLUES, MUTTS, OPUS, GARFIELD, DICK TRACY, and L'IL ABNER.  Being the long-time student of the genre that I am, I've heard of all of these, so the theme didn't puzzle me.

I do, however, have the complaint that while most of the themed answers are clued as other than comics (TIGER is "feline in a zoo," POGO is "bounce on a stick"), both DICK TRACY and LI'L ABNER are clued as the properties they are (one describing the detective character, one describing the 1959 film of the comic).  I wish the constructors had made the theme cohesive by substituting two different comic strip names that could also be clued synonymously rather than by definition.

Still, though, I enjoyed this one.  On to the fill.

I'm not old enough have played Tank or Tank II, when they came out on ATARI, but I did play its successor Combat.

Super Bowl III-winning coach for the NY Jets WEEB Eubank's name is just silly enough that I mostly remember it.

"Kitchenware brand with a hyphenated name" is T-FAL.  A French company founded in 1956, its name outside the USA is Tefal, which is a portmanteau of the words Teflon and aluminum.  DuPont would not let them use that name in the US so they shortened it to T-FAL.

Well, we've seen the classic Pontiac models GTO and the Grand Prix in crosswords, and now it's time for the GRAND AMS.  They were Pontiac's best-selling car and were later replaced by the G6.

I haven't seen the seminal 2004 comedy Mean Girls, so I didn't know that Rachel McAdams and Amanda Seyfried played a MEAN GIRL each, Regina and Karen respectively.

Clueless actress STACEY Dash appeared on November 1, 2017.

ASANA, the term for yoga poses, appeared in the plural on December 26, 2017.

Clever clues: "Something to stand on" is LEG.  "Played at work?" is DJ'ED.

I did pretty BUONO on this one.  SOY contente.

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