Saturday January 5th 2018, NY Times Crossword

Time: 22:43

Saturday Average: 38:05

Best Saturday: 10:34

The 16-hour drive from Massachusetts to Indiana begs for a meaty crossword to pass some of the time, so a Saturday is perfectly ideal. I get nervous when the first clue involves ballet shoes and sure enough POINTE was one of the last clues to fall. I managed the P on my own. I nearly wrote in “I AM a rock” instead of I AM WOMAN but since I know the lyrics to the former song, I eventually heard alternate Homer Simpson singing the correct song in my head. 

I had to repeat I CAN SEE THAT to myself with various inflections before deciding that it works well enough for “Obviously!” I haven’t heard of a TRAIN MASTER but that one was easy enough to infer. 

My dad’s Boston Terrrier has spent the last ten days with my giant labrador and has been engaged in walks a bit longer than usual, which led to a limp that fortunately turned out not to be an ACL TEAR, which I hadn’t heard of in dogs until yesterday. Now that we’re driving back to Indiana, he can look forward to being more RESTED. 

Is there something tasteless or just odd in referring to multiple RAMADANS for “Fast times?” It seems a bit trivializing. 

In terms of what I learned, SIROCCO is a hot wind (often dusty) blowing from North Africa to Southern Europe across the Mediterranean. I also wasn’t sure about XERISCAPING (“Design of park land requiring minimal water”) and didn’t even know the root word to help me guess. But “xeric,” which autocorrects to Eric, as a synonym for “arid” is another helpful word.

The tricky cross, of course, was LYME (“Historic town in SE Connecticut”) with PISTIL (“It has a stigma”). The latter clue and answer required some Googling for me, but “pistil” refers to the female organs of a flower, which contains a “stigma,” which is the part where pollen germinates. So, if you’re not up on your botany, that’s a gut punch of answer/clue combination. And now back to the drive.