Friday, October 16, 2020

Friday's New York Times crossword puzzle solved: October 16, 2020

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

My time: 9:28, only one minute slower than the record.

I loved the fill in this puzzle!  So many popular and slangy phrases, like JUST AS I THOUGHT, ACCIDENTS HAPPEN, EMPTY SUITS, and THEM"S THE BREAKS, plus unusual words like ZEPPELIN, OZYMANDIAS, HEAD TRIP, AMAZON, and ACID TEST.  What a great grid!

Well, I'M ALL SET.  Onto the stuff that I needed to figure out!

I really got in my head that "showboaty home run celebrations" would be something laps, but it was BAT FLIPS.  This is one of those sports terms of art.  Not this

More sports: I've come across the term "Big EAST" before, even in this blog, but it's not one in my wheelhouse.  Its nucleus is composed of the "Catholic Seven" members of the original Big East Conference: DePaul University, Georgetown University, Marquette University, Providence College, Seton Hall University, St. John's University, and Villanova University.  And then there was something about the various basketball- and football-centric colleges having a schism, and then my eyes gazed over and I stopped reading about it.

Malcolm X was born in OMAHA in 1925.  You know, OMAHA has come up a few times in the puzzle, and every time, I question whether the clue is a fact worth knowing.

I assumed that when Ralph NADER wrote Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us!, he was being facetious.  It turns out to be a novel about a utopia in which the super-rich use altruism to help the world.

"Most valuable player awards?" is OBIES.  Meh, that's not quite clever enough.  Maybe if it had been Oscars?

"Door or window frame" is CASING.  I've heard this term, but it took me a while to fill it in.

JENA Malone is an actress who started in bit roles when she was about 12 and is best known for her role as Johanna Mason in the Hunger Games movies.  It's the role she was born to play!  They have the same initials.

Dutch painter Jan STEEN last appeared on December 11, 2018.

Clever clues: "Graduation props?" isn't something you hold but your props, like respect, as in HONORS. "Key chain?" is ISLES.  "Inits. at the top of some brackets" is a clever way to get to NCAA.  "Half of a jazz duo" is ZEE.

Well, that about wraps it up for this Friday.  Happy end of the work week.  I hope we still have an America in a couple of weeks.

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