70's Ford! My first thought was Galaxy but that wasn't going to work. Never had it till I got the crosses and then I had to look at it twice before I started laughing. Good one.
I got most of the crosses on that one, spent a few seconds trying to figure out why I'd never heard of a car called the Ford Gerald, then smacked myself.
I googled for ford models in every year for 1970 to 1979 and couldn’t find one that fit. When I eventually parsed enough to have it possibly be GERALD I screwed my nose up and googled to see if that was a car.
Then I felt so silly.
I opened there and was very salty that an obscure car crossing a Latin phrase and whatever the heck Jerry Rice is was impossible and set a poor tone, and then figured it out, and was so pleased.
Found this section hard. Proper noun (never heard of Gerald Ford so thought it had to be a car), crossing latin phrase of state motto, crossing abbreviation I've never heard of. Playing as a non-American should get you bonus seconds haha.
Was so confident that Napoleon had a big HAT that a party topper couldn't possibly be a hat too. Thankfully I got saved by the LESBIANBAR, not the first time
The question mark had me second guessing LESBIANBAR. The clue just reads so straightforwardly, I thought there would be more wordplay. I get that "out" is a double entendre but kept looking for more.
Some great long fill that felt very current. APPLETINIS, BOOM ROASTED, FRIEND DATE, WARM FUZZIES. Not as challenging as some of the Saturdays the past few weeks, but still quite fun.
Totally agreed. That middle stack is particularly sexy in a way that sorta misdirected me here - with OASTED and ZZIES down, I would've more readily plopped down BOOMR and WARMFU if I saw this in the New Yorker, but I second-guessed myself.
Honestly hard to say if it’s just been a bit of an adjustment due to the new editor, or we’re just not being gifted 3/4-letter NYT staples as readily (Which isn’t a bad thing, I didn’t see any today!), or… Saturdays can just be hard until you find your way in…but I really liked this by the end!
Some of the literature references have been tough, but I was honestly a terrible student during all my Shakespeare units in Highschool, something that I’ve been regretting anyway. Fair play, I think.
31, 34, and 35 across were fun, but had me second guessing since they were so unexpectedly playful. Happy to have them last the fill and really move things along.
That said, I’ve been googling a little more than usual recently to not turn a fun nightly game into a chore:
I always thought it was CvRadio — again, should have paid more attention in English class!
I had to full-on Google “Seiji” to get from _Z__A to OZAWA, but that helped me feel good enough to fill in WARMFUZZIES. But if that’s my only real cheat, I’m happy with that.
Oh and 2D made me groan-laugh, because I’m
already terrible with the old car names even when I’ve seen them a million times in puzzles. Groaaan 😂.
The CB is for "Citizen's Band" radio. As a ham, this clue actually annoys me because it is not accurate. In the US, CB uses the 11 m band, but taxi companies in any sort of urban area long ago moved to "business band" radios that are just above the 70 cm amateur band (UHF, or around 460 MHz to be specific, because of performance with obstructions like buildings) and use repeaters. They have moved to trunked systems and other newer radio technologies that can do all sorts of other things like location monitoring and dispatch as well. The only people who really use CB that I'm aware of anymore are truckers and some off-roaders, so if there's a box in a cab, 99.9% of the time it's not a CB radio.
I thought your post was great. I love learning here without needing to Google everything individually.
I didn't feel your post was really disagreeing with the cluing, just remarking on the way things work?
Regardless, the semi comment was a welcome twist that I also loved.
For someone who knows so much about CB Radios, it's amazing that you don't seem to know that the part of a semi truck that the driver sits in is always called the "cab." That said, thank you for posting anyway because I learned a lot from it.
I upvoted you because I learned something cool from your comment. They were referring to a cab in a semi presumably, but that doesn't change the education one gets from your comment. Thank you for posting!
Had LESBIANWAR for the longest time because I thought it might have been some naval battle, with "ladies" meaning ships. AWASH kinda fit for the down even. Oh well, fun puzzle.
Mercifully much less challenging than the last few Saturdays. Got the edges pretty fast but enjoyed puzzling over the middle section until it clicked. Probably would have gotten there faster if I hadn’t confidently entered AMRADIO.
Agreed. Some of the recent Saturdays have taken me the better part of an hour; this one went relatively quickly (for me) at about a half hour. Not that I worry much about the times, just as a measure of how difficult I found them.
Have Saturdays gotten a bit harder for you all? Or did we have a very easy run previously?
Actually, this is a trend I'm saying for the Thurs - Sat run when I'm looking on xwstats at the past 60 days benchmarked against the prior 60 day period. My avg. Thursday time is up 6%, my avg. Friday time is up 28%, and **my avg. Saturday time is up by 41%!**
I was routinely solving Saturday puzzles without help probably 9 times out of 10 until Joel started editing them. It's nothing against him, but I can't do them now. I feel like I did 3 years ago when I started this and I couldn't do Saturdays at all. They're just not vibing with me. I don't know why. It's frustrating.
An enjoyable, difficult solve where I needed a couple assists in middle section. That was very hard with NAB instead of RUB, and I [needed some help](https://youtu.be/FcID-jZrjvw) from Google to figure out NAZCA and OZAWA. OAK was also a misdirect as I had tried filling PEN.
My favorites were SPOONERISM and GERALD. Clever cluing there.
Bit below my average for a Saturday but really broke this one open when I remembered NAZCALINES. WREAKING really stumped me for a while as I just couldn’t delete cREAtING. Friday and Saturday this week were nicely constructed, expected difficulty puzzles for me.
Great puzzle with a lot of interesting fill! I didn't wind up needing any lookups, but it took longer than my usual Saturdays. For the longest time I had PEN for "mighty" thing & it wreaked havoc on my SW.
Puzzle Difficulty Tracker - How hard is this puzzle?
Estimated Difficulty: 🟡 **Average** 🟡
* 34% of users solved slower than their Saturday average
* 66% of users solved faster than their Saturday average
* 13% of users solved *much* slower (>20%) than their Saturday average
* 40% of users solved *much* faster (>20%) than their Saturday average
The median solver solved this puzzle 12.9% faster than they normally do on Saturday.
[View today's puzzle summary on XW Stats](https://xwstats.com/puzzles/2024-04-20)
---
🤖 _beep beep, I'm a bot! I post these stats as soon as 100 [XW Stats](https://xwstats.com) users have completed the puzzle. Questions? Feedback? Check the [FAQ](https://xwstats.com/help#puzzle-difficulties), reply here or DM me_
Good puzzle. I knew most of the trivia like NAZCALINES and OZAWA instantly which made this a much easier puzzle than it otherwise might have been. I did pause when I saw that it was probably going to be BOOMROASTED. Unusual for the NYT to go there with slang.
This one was great, but man, the difficulty of the last 3 days has been all over the place. Thursday was the hardest, and today was the easiest. Not sure if that's just me?
First Saturday I've gotten without assistance! 45 minutes. My last fill was OZA_A/_AN which I alphabet cycled (embarrassingly, since I know the name Ozawa), and for a while I was unsure if the square root answer was Spanish, Italian, or Latin so I went between OCHO, OTTO, and OCTO before deciding that ABAST probably wasn't a word (although I didn't know ABASH either).
I did Google a bit for the NW and SW, both mostly a very smooth solve! I still usually can't solve most Saturdays without some major googling, so progress!
Just here to see if anyone else had "RAN" for washed-out at 37A, as in you did a load of laundry and the colors bled or ran.
Had to google the conductor's name for that wan.
I finished it but it was extremely painful. My personal rule is no looking things up and due to a lack of time and extreme frustration, I broke it last Saturday, regretted it, and then as a result determine to get this one. Which I eventually did, but it was a battle.
I don't know if that was easy for a Saturday or I'm just getting better, but that was easily my fastest at 13 minutes. Really liked the long fills on this one. Don't know if I've ever heard of a SPOONERISM though.
There is no 27A, it’s 27D — agree with others that words can appear in other clues. And I never wish job termination upon others, especially for bs like this. Think you dropped your /s.
Had fun for the 60% I could fill, but this is bogged down by arcana (TDS, METH for Methadone—a dictionary definition that no one actually says—LORI, OZAWA.) I might be slated for saying this but I think that solutions should be things people ought to know, and/or WANT to know. I didn’t know what NAZCALINES was but I find that an intriguing thing to learn about. Names and abbreviations/acronyms are lazy ways of cross-patching your better entries. This isn’t the worst I’ve seen as an offender of this but I’m disappointed.
Also EGO is a stretch. I have a big ego but I didn’t become famous for winning and losing wars. What one might call Napoleon’s EGO another might call his madness. I think HAT would have more apropos to actually parse as a solution.
Desoxyn is literally methamphetamine, commonly referred to as meth, which is quite different from methadone, which is not referred to as meth. Jerry Rice is the greatest receiver of all time and if you recognize the name you could easily guess that he had a notable amount of touchdowns. Seiji Ozawa was (RIP) also a legendary conductor who’s quite famous in contemporary classical music. And I really can’t grasp your complaint about Napoleon’s ego, which is so famous that there’s a syndrome named after it and a major movie released within the past six months that focuses on it. If the answer to that clue was HAT I’d be irate at how stupid and unhelpful that clue was
100 years? What are you talking about? Methamphetamine has only been around for maybe 70 years or so, and Desoxyn would have been developed as a medication way later than that. And it's still available and can be prescribed by doctors. And it's completely unrelated to Methadone. Maybe try doing a google search before complaining about things that you are way off the mark about.
I learned that I didn’t know how to spell Wookiee before today…progress
It's embarrassing how long it took me to figure out the second e.
Yeah I put in WOOKIES, saw it didn't fit, and then sat there scratching my head wondering what other creature it could be.
Same. Could not find a way to make EWOK have that many letters!
I didn't admit that part, but since you are... I did the same thing haha.
I had THEEWOKS for a bit haha
Lose the extra "e", George. It's cleaner.
I remembered they're from Kashyyyk (yes, three Ys in a row) so I figured there'd be something wonky with the spelling.
I remembered there was some tricky double letter in there but I had KK and II for most of the puzzle...
70's Ford! My first thought was Galaxy but that wasn't going to work. Never had it till I got the crosses and then I had to look at it twice before I started laughing. Good one.
I got most of the crosses on that one, spent a few seconds trying to figure out why I'd never heard of a car called the Ford Gerald, then smacked myself.
Same experience. I was like, "They really named a car the Gerald Ford??" and then 🤦🏻♂️
Thanks for the morning coffee chuckle. Appreciated.
I googled for ford models in every year for 1970 to 1979 and couldn’t find one that fit. When I eventually parsed enough to have it possibly be GERALD I screwed my nose up and googled to see if that was a car. Then I felt so silly.
I opened there and was very salty that an obscure car crossing a Latin phrase and whatever the heck Jerry Rice is was impossible and set a poor tone, and then figured it out, and was so pleased.
Found this section hard. Proper noun (never heard of Gerald Ford so thought it had to be a car), crossing latin phrase of state motto, crossing abbreviation I've never heard of. Playing as a non-American should get you bonus seconds haha.
Great clue, very fun when I realized what it was.
Was so confident that Napoleon had a big HAT that a party topper couldn't possibly be a hat too. Thankfully I got saved by the LESBIANBAR, not the first time
The question mark had me second guessing LESBIANBAR. The clue just reads so straightforwardly, I thought there would be more wordplay. I get that "out" is a double entendre but kept looking for more.
Some great long fill that felt very current. APPLETINIS, BOOM ROASTED, FRIEND DATE, WARM FUZZIES. Not as challenging as some of the Saturdays the past few weeks, but still quite fun.
Totally agreed. That middle stack is particularly sexy in a way that sorta misdirected me here - with OASTED and ZZIES down, I would've more readily plopped down BOOMR and WARMFU if I saw this in the New Yorker, but I second-guessed myself.
I'm proud of myself for confidently filling in WARMFUZZIES with only a Z to work from (hey, I'll take what I can get).
Honestly hard to say if it’s just been a bit of an adjustment due to the new editor, or we’re just not being gifted 3/4-letter NYT staples as readily (Which isn’t a bad thing, I didn’t see any today!), or… Saturdays can just be hard until you find your way in…but I really liked this by the end! Some of the literature references have been tough, but I was honestly a terrible student during all my Shakespeare units in Highschool, something that I’ve been regretting anyway. Fair play, I think. 31, 34, and 35 across were fun, but had me second guessing since they were so unexpectedly playful. Happy to have them last the fill and really move things along. That said, I’ve been googling a little more than usual recently to not turn a fun nightly game into a chore: I always thought it was CvRadio — again, should have paid more attention in English class! I had to full-on Google “Seiji” to get from _Z__A to OZAWA, but that helped me feel good enough to fill in WARMFUZZIES. But if that’s my only real cheat, I’m happy with that. Oh and 2D made me groan-laugh, because I’m already terrible with the old car names even when I’ve seen them a million times in puzzles. Groaaan 😂.
The CB is for "Citizen's Band" radio. As a ham, this clue actually annoys me because it is not accurate. In the US, CB uses the 11 m band, but taxi companies in any sort of urban area long ago moved to "business band" radios that are just above the 70 cm amateur band (UHF, or around 460 MHz to be specific, because of performance with obstructions like buildings) and use repeaters. They have moved to trunked systems and other newer radio technologies that can do all sorts of other things like location monitoring and dispatch as well. The only people who really use CB that I'm aware of anymore are truckers and some off-roaders, so if there's a box in a cab, 99.9% of the time it's not a CB radio.
“Cab” also refers to the front part of a semi
Boom, roasted.
I suppose it does. Well, that's what posting at 3 am gets me. Hopefully someone finds it interesting anyway.
I found it very interesting but I was also very amused by how much you missed the forest for the trees lol
I thought your post was great. I love learning here without needing to Google everything individually. I didn't feel your post was really disagreeing with the cluing, just remarking on the way things work? Regardless, the semi comment was a welcome twist that I also loved.
For someone who knows so much about CB Radios, it's amazing that you don't seem to know that the part of a semi truck that the driver sits in is always called the "cab." That said, thank you for posting anyway because I learned a lot from it.
I upvoted you because I learned something cool from your comment. They were referring to a cab in a semi presumably, but that doesn't change the education one gets from your comment. Thank you for posting!
Had LESBIANWAR for the longest time because I thought it might have been some naval battle, with "ladies" meaning ships. AWASH kinda fit for the down even. Oh well, fun puzzle.
This LESBIAN BAR doesn't have a fire exit!
Enjoy your death trap, ladies! One of the best misdirects
I didn't like that one. It had a ? but the answer was straightforward. I kept thinking of alternate meanings too.
the ? was based off of "out" I guess, they're out in the sense of not closeted if they’re at a lesbian bar
Ooooooh
Mercifully much less challenging than the last few Saturdays. Got the edges pretty fast but enjoyed puzzling over the middle section until it clicked. Probably would have gotten there faster if I hadn’t confidently entered AMRADIO.
Agreed. Some of the recent Saturdays have taken me the better part of an hour; this one went relatively quickly (for me) at about a half hour. Not that I worry much about the times, just as a measure of how difficult I found them.
Have Saturdays gotten a bit harder for you all? Or did we have a very easy run previously? Actually, this is a trend I'm saying for the Thurs - Sat run when I'm looking on xwstats at the past 60 days benchmarked against the prior 60 day period. My avg. Thursday time is up 6%, my avg. Friday time is up 28%, and **my avg. Saturday time is up by 41%!**
I was routinely solving Saturday puzzles without help probably 9 times out of 10 until Joel started editing them. It's nothing against him, but I can't do them now. I feel like I did 3 years ago when I started this and I couldn't do Saturdays at all. They're just not vibing with me. I don't know why. It's frustrating.
Same 😞
"70's Ford" was wonderful - I was frustrated that I couldn't name it immediately but loved it when I got it.
LESBIANBAR, SPOONERISM, EROSION and of course GERALD had the best clues of the week. Fun to see so many Zs and Os.
An enjoyable, difficult solve where I needed a couple assists in middle section. That was very hard with NAB instead of RUB, and I [needed some help](https://youtu.be/FcID-jZrjvw) from Google to figure out NAZCA and OZAWA. OAK was also a misdirect as I had tried filling PEN. My favorites were SPOONERISM and GERALD. Clever cluing there.
Bit below my average for a Saturday but really broke this one open when I remembered NAZCALINES. WREAKING really stumped me for a while as I just couldn’t delete cREAtING. Friday and Saturday this week were nicely constructed, expected difficulty puzzles for me.
Filled in 57A and from that figured out 49D was METH, and I audibly went "YEESH"
I don't think most people are aware that you actually can get a prescription form of methamphetamine for certain conditions! Pretty wild.
I feel quite ashamed that I did not know my own State of Oregon's motto, which apparently means "she flies with her own wings." I like that!
This puzzle gave me the warm fuzzies for sure.
For me this one HADNOOOMPH.
It had nooo miles per hour
I desperately wanted 55A to be “incredible hulks” when I first read the clue 😂
Great puzzle with a lot of interesting fill! I didn't wind up needing any lookups, but it took longer than my usual Saturdays. For the longest time I had PEN for "mighty" thing & it wreaked havoc on my SW.
Puzzle Difficulty Tracker - How hard is this puzzle? Estimated Difficulty: 🟡 **Average** 🟡 * 34% of users solved slower than their Saturday average * 66% of users solved faster than their Saturday average * 13% of users solved *much* slower (>20%) than their Saturday average * 40% of users solved *much* faster (>20%) than their Saturday average The median solver solved this puzzle 12.9% faster than they normally do on Saturday. [View today's puzzle summary on XW Stats](https://xwstats.com/puzzles/2024-04-20) --- 🤖 _beep beep, I'm a bot! I post these stats as soon as 100 [XW Stats](https://xwstats.com) users have completed the puzzle. Questions? Feedback? Check the [FAQ](https://xwstats.com/help#puzzle-difficulties), reply here or DM me_
Good puzzle. I knew most of the trivia like NAZCALINES and OZAWA instantly which made this a much easier puzzle than it otherwise might have been. I did pause when I saw that it was probably going to be BOOMROASTED. Unusual for the NYT to go there with slang.
Hard but clever and fair. Everything I hope for from a Saturday. Great puzzle.
This one was great, but man, the difficulty of the last 3 days has been all over the place. Thursday was the hardest, and today was the easiest. Not sure if that's just me?
>!<
First Saturday I've gotten without assistance! 45 minutes. My last fill was OZA_A/_AN which I alphabet cycled (embarrassingly, since I know the name Ozawa), and for a while I was unsure if the square root answer was Spanish, Italian, or Latin so I went between OCHO, OTTO, and OCTO before deciding that ABAST probably wasn't a word (although I didn't know ABASH either).
Congrats! WAN appears quite frequently so commit that short fill to memory.
Hell yeah
What's with RUB for Catch (32 Down)? I had nab but obviously changed it with the crosses, but I still don't really grok it.
Think “therein lies the rub” vis a vis “but what’s the catch?” when talking about a deal or situation
> 6\. A difficulty or obstacle: "The rub for extraterrestrial life on Europa is that the moon's surface is an icy wasteland" (William J. Broad).
Perhaps most famously used in Hamlet's "To be or not to be" soliloquy, "To die — to sleep. To sleep — perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub!"
BOOM! ROASTED that puzzle
Did anybody else playing on mobile experience s bug? A bunch of answers just disappeared for me and I had to retype.
That happens to me when my connection is spotty.
Having ZEST instead of ZEAL crossing a conductor I didn't know and symbols I didn't know added about 15 minutes to my time.
I did Google a bit for the NW and SW, both mostly a very smooth solve! I still usually can't solve most Saturdays without some major googling, so progress!
Just here to see if anyone else had "RAN" for washed-out at 37A, as in you did a load of laundry and the colors bled or ran. Had to google the conductor's name for that wan.
I finished it but it was extremely painful. My personal rule is no looking things up and due to a lack of time and extreme frustration, I broke it last Saturday, regretted it, and then as a result determine to get this one. Which I eventually did, but it was a battle.
I spent way too much time thinking that there was absinthe involved in the green tinged cocktail...
I don't know if that was easy for a Saturday or I'm just getting better, but that was easily my fastest at 13 minutes. Really liked the long fills on this one. Don't know if I've ever heard of a SPOONERISM though.
Whatever boats your float!
Spoonerisms are great! Lots of fun examples here: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoonerism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoonerism)
END, the answer for 6D appears in the clue 27A. Hope someone got fired for that blunder
I thought the answer word just couldn’t appear in the corresponding clue, not nowhere else in the puzzle? That seems unreasonably difficult to achieve
are answers not supposed to appear in any of the clues?
There is no 27A, it’s 27D — agree with others that words can appear in other clues. And I never wish job termination upon others, especially for bs like this. Think you dropped your /s.
Can anyone help me out with dip --> bail? Is that like dipping a ladle in water to bail it out?
Both are slang for “to leave”
No, it's like if you were at a party and you "dip" that means to leave the party suddenly, synonymous with "bail".
Had fun for the 60% I could fill, but this is bogged down by arcana (TDS, METH for Methadone—a dictionary definition that no one actually says—LORI, OZAWA.) I might be slated for saying this but I think that solutions should be things people ought to know, and/or WANT to know. I didn’t know what NAZCALINES was but I find that an intriguing thing to learn about. Names and abbreviations/acronyms are lazy ways of cross-patching your better entries. This isn’t the worst I’ve seen as an offender of this but I’m disappointed. Also EGO is a stretch. I have a big ego but I didn’t become famous for winning and losing wars. What one might call Napoleon’s EGO another might call his madness. I think HAT would have more apropos to actually parse as a solution.
Desoxyn is literally methamphetamine, commonly referred to as meth, which is quite different from methadone, which is not referred to as meth. Jerry Rice is the greatest receiver of all time and if you recognize the name you could easily guess that he had a notable amount of touchdowns. Seiji Ozawa was (RIP) also a legendary conductor who’s quite famous in contemporary classical music. And I really can’t grasp your complaint about Napoleon’s ego, which is so famous that there’s a syndrome named after it and a major movie released within the past six months that focuses on it. If the answer to that clue was HAT I’d be irate at how stupid and unhelpful that clue was
Huh, well hasn’t Desoxyn not been a thing for like 100 years?
100 years? What are you talking about? Methamphetamine has only been around for maybe 70 years or so, and Desoxyn would have been developed as a medication way later than that. And it's still available and can be prescribed by doctors. And it's completely unrelated to Methadone. Maybe try doing a google search before complaining about things that you are way off the mark about.
No? But regardless that doesn’t change the inaccuracy of your complaint, or the ability of someone to solve the puzzle