Today’s is messing me up, so I’m hoping for a breakthrough. Right now I have 30 words for 132 points, and I don’t have the pangram. There may be more than one pangram today. I don’t know. Nothing I’ve tried so far has worked. I haven’t yet talked to my sister (twitter.com/raablauren) about the puzzle.
Today’s genius level is 179. I don’t know how I’m going to make up 47 points.
Done in a rush job, but I got there. The pangram today was BOYCOTTED, and I was going to say that I have a story about this, but I’ve written it already in a post for a crossword puzzle. In short, Boycott was a dude in Ireland who was a bad landlord. Tenants stopped paying rent altogether, all together.
I got the pangram partway through but then tried to figure out how to get the necessary words to get to the genius level.
No dice with maror or marror, and that made me bitter.
Nothing doing with Aral, Ural. You know, the crossword staples.
Ultimately got there!
Aaaaand I’m back! Got to genius level early in the day, so I don’t expect there to be a follow-up final later. This was way easier than the puzzles for the past two days. I think this is a great one to end the week on.
I’m proud of my 29 words for a 143 points.
Once again, notaspellingbeeword (twitter.com/notaspellingbe1) and I ran into the same issue independently. The other day it was mazal/mazel. Today it was gonif. I feel like I’m in Fight Club, but I know I’m not, so I can talk about it. I’m happy notaspellingbeeword exists.
With no Sunday WSJ puzzle, here’s one from last week’s LA Times. It’s where my sister works, so shoutout to her (twitter.com/raablauren).
This is a Tuesday puzzle and felt like it. The logic for it certainly is different from the ones from the other coast. Clues like 53A Be mad about. Yes, mad like crazy. So it was ADORE. I guess I could see that in a NYT puzzle and its Jeremy Giambi-like brother The Journal, but it feels more in line with clues and answers here like 18A TV coverage of local events, say (LOCALNEWS) and 55A Library contents: Abbr. (BKS).
Why do we need the “say” in the local news clue? It’s a straightforward clue. Also to abbreviate books is kinda lame. How about Alternative to Mickey D’s?
Overall, I’m happy to do the LAT crossword, even if I have to sit through an ad. That will probably be my Sunday go-to as a replacement for nothing from WSJ.
Wow. This one. Wow.
I was chugging along no problem, but the pangram eluded me. As I have been doing daily, I checked in with my sister (twitter.com/raablauren) to see how she’d been handling today’s puzzle.
She assured me that I could resolve my pangram issues, and she revealed that there are TWO of them.
Crap.
So I kept going and found the first one before finally passing out. I’d get the second in the morning.
Maybe I wouldn’t, but for sure there’d still be a way to get to genius level, right?
I couldn’t find that way and couldn’t find the other pangram. So I was stuck on awesome.
I looked and looked.
ICICLE, CLINIC. No help.
I thought I was stuck with how I had felt these past many days: INVINCIBLE.
After what seemed like unreasonable struggle, I realized that if there an invincible, shouldn’t there be a vincible?
There is.
Second pangram.
Genius level.
Got some more before going to sleep. I was fumbling with the spelling of the word cuckoo, but I got there.
Wow this pangram was tough to get. Luckily, my sister (www.twitter.com/raablauren) came to my aid to reassure me that it is a word I know.
So after some time of frustration and some pretty gross and incorrect guesses, I finally got there.
Along the way, I got words like uncock, which is fine if you think of it in sense of a gun and not think of in the context of a not-so-surehanded mohel.
Wow! It’s August! But since it’s a Saturday, I’m doing puzzles from the archive. This one is from the end of March. Remember March? Remember how Coronavirus was just becoming a thing people were taking seriously? California shut down on March 17, stopping what otherwise would be fun drinking for St. Paddy’s Day.
So this March puzzle Abstract Attacks. Lots of A’s all around. Starts with 1A Pre-GPS travel aid: AAAMAP. It’s important to note that AAA still makes and prints maps, and the AAA maps are still cool to look at. I argue that they’re nice to have for planning because you get to see where things are relative to each other and not just exactly where you’re going.
But the clue that I like the most is 38A Amazonian biter PIRANHA. Like the majority of Americans, I always believed that the pronunciation is pih-RAWN-uh, and that was that. But piranhas are in Brazil. Where they speak Portuguese. Where hn is like the French gn which is like the Spanish ñ. So rather than pih-RAWN-uh, it’s pronounced pee-RAH-nya. Here it’s still the normal way, but there it’s the way that’s new to me.
There’s no WSJ Friday puzzle, so here’s a special puzzle from NYT from March of this year.
Overall easy, which seems always to be the case for the special puzzles. I don’t mind that. I finished this one in 6:49. And, like the other special puzzles, it taught me something.
14A Music genre from the Caribbean: SOCA
So what even is soca? I’d never heard of it. It’s Soul of Calypso from Trinidad. Its creator, Ras Shorty I, formerly Lord Shorty, born Garfield Blackman, died 20 years and a little more than two weeks ago. He had 14 kids. That’s a lot of kids!
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2000/jul/15/guardianobituaries2
Have a great weekend, everybody! It’s supposed to be a hot one here in the other Southern California.