Tag Archives: Erik Agard

NYT Crossword Puzzle 10-16-21 Complete (contains spoilers)

I pulled out 8A Bright night lights: NOVAS because my friends Cat and Nick have a dog named Nova. Nova is very big and very friendly. If Nova ever sees this blog post, hiiiiiiiiiiiiii!

Honorable mention clue: 15A “Sorry if you were offended,” e.g.: NONAPOLOGY because Calah and I were talking today about nonapology apologies and how annoying they are.

No theme for this Saturday puzzle, but the time was something exciting for me. I bested my personal record of 20:12 on July 24, 2021 with a new record of 20:11. I had to scramble to find when the prior record was, but I got there. So it bears mentioning again:

Finished this one in 20:11.

DayThis WkBestAverage4-Wk AvgStreak
Monday4:413:499:235:1578
Tuesday9:115:2213:139:532
Wednesday15:347:3817:0315:5719
Thursday12:2112:1228:2026:545
Friday17:3310:2930:5817:3019
Saturday20:1120:1132:4831:5919
Sunday15:1153:2843:225

NYT Crossword 12-25-20 Complete

This wasn’t bad for a Friday at all! I was surprised at how I made it through. That’s not to say that I didn’t screw up in places, but I’m happy with how this went.

I pulled out 23A _ Bay (place mentioned in “(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay”): FRISCO because people I know who are from San Francisco and those who live there do not accept that word as an abbreviation for their city. It’s like how USC hates being called Southern Cal–a lot. I remember reading in the media fliers before broadcasting UCSB-USC in baseball games that we were not to refer to the school that way. But back to FRISCO! SFGate wrote about the FRISCO origins and how out-of-towners call it that.

I have my own experience with the FRISCO name and why Bay Area friends of mine have said, “Frisco is a city in Texas.”

I’ve mentioned the game Rail Baron before. I’ll dig up where I wrote about it so you can click through if you’d like to. OK here it is. It’s a Spelling Bee post.

In Rail Baron, there’s a railroad abbreviated SLSF on the board. It’s the St. Louis-San Francisco Railway. It was known as the Frisco Line, and the town of Emerson, TX renamed itself Frisco, TX after the railroad, since Emerson was built around the railway station there. Now more than 100 years old, Frisco is now a city of about 200,000.

The St. Louis-San Francisco Railway never extended west of Texas and was absorbed into the Burlington Northern Railroad in 1980. The Burlington Northern Railroad merged with the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway in 1995 to make the Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway. That’s the BNSF we see on railcars.

As for the theme of this puzzle, I didn’t see any, so I’ll end this here.

Finished this puzzle in 25:54.

Have a great weekend!

NYT Crossword 7-31-20 DNF

Yeah, I got demolished by this one and then finally called it. I’ve been watching the health officials testify before the House Select Subcommittee in background, and this whole thing is a mess. Jim Jordan once again is trying to steamroll, bully, and pontificate rather than find anything out.

Maybe I was close to getting the answer to a key clue that would let me resolve the rest, but almost 40 minutes in, and I’m calling it. I don’t think I did enough to have any other opinion about this puzzle than it was tough.

Reminder that I won’t be doing the Saturday NYT crossword puzzle because I do that with friends, so I’ll do some other puzzles for tomorrow’s posts instead.