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NYT Crossword 11-19-20 Complete

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An easy Thursday? Could it be? This just shows the unpredictability of Tuesdays and Thursdays. And credit to Geoffrey Bishop for giving me confidence to approach this one with optimism rather than with regular Thursday dread.

I chose 45D as the highlighted clue/answer today because I don’t like it.
45D Little waves, in Spain: TILDES.

Tildes aren’t water waves and aren’t hand waves. That’s not the Spanish word for wave. Rather, the answer is the little wavy line above n in ñ. Dumb.

It was clear to me from very, very early on that this puzzle’s theme answers contained no vowels and was for a specific gameshow.

18A *Creator of 55-Across: MRVGRFFN->MERV GRIFFIN, creator of all kind of gameshows who lent his name to a street in Beverly Hills that goes into the Beverly Hilton Hotel.
20A *Co-host of 55-Across: VNNWHT->VANNA WHITE who never seems to age.
30A *Group of six given for free on 55-Across: RSTLN->RSTLNE, but there are no vowels, so no E.
41A *Co-host of 55-Across: PTSJK->PAT SAJAK who seems to age slowly.
52A *Bad place to land on 55-Across: BNKRPT->BANKRUPT. Always painful to see someone who has the trip and the $5000 and other prizes and who has just one consonant missing decide to spin instead of solve the puzzle, land on bankrupt, and the contestant who has $300 solves the puzzle for the win.
55A *It debuted on 1/6/1975: WHLFFRTN: WHEEL! OF! FORTUNE!
13D What you might cry when trying to answer the six starred clues? CANIBUYAVOWEL.

I’m disappointed that there was no clue Encouraging words repeated by contestants: BGMNY.

Time: 17:47. Not close to my Thursday PR of 13:09 back in October of 2018 but better than my Thursday average of 29:55.


NYT Crossword 10-22-20 DNF

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I’m calling it. I should have a long time ago, but now that’s it.

I couldn’t resolve everything, and my guesses didn’t get me anywhere. There are probably a lot of things wrong on this, but this is as far as I’ve gotten. I’ll revisit it another day, but that’s it for today.

I really wish I could have gotten the answer to 61A, and usually I figure the one out that brings them all together after figuring out the thread and the other answers, but none of that happened today. Better luck tomorrow, right?

NYT Crossword 7-30-20 Complete

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Well that was way easier than I thought it was going to be. The clues were linked, so once I got the hang of it, it kinda filled itself out.

But that also means I was kind of disappointed! I looked forward to struggling with the Thursday puzzle. The Spelling Bee today also was underwhelming. It took very few words to get to the genius level.

The clue I have a story about is 5D Rental availability sign: TOLET.

I took a trip in the summer of 2014 (you know, when travel was a thing) that included some days in London. I saw a bunch of TO LET signs, and that was new to me because signs I’d seen around LA were SPACE AVAILABLE or FOR RENT. But no TO LET.

So I had a good time seeing the signs with lampposts in the space between the two words.

A London street with a lamppost that makes the TO LET sign look like TOILET
It looks like TOILET!

This has been a clue more than once so far in the last couple weeks, I think, but I figured it was worth sharing the story about it today.