QuillxWords

Time: 47:35 Sunday Average: 47:42 Best Sunday: 21:55 Title: Take One For The Team Andrew Ries is probably my favorite crossword constructor for his Aries Themeless Puzzles  that he publishes online, so I'm always excited to see his name come up on the NY Times Crossword app. However, I don't love his themed puzzles as much because he doesn't seem to enjoy the same cluing flexibility here. He sneaks in some of his patented excessive cleverness here and there, but mostly we just end up with still a very strong Sunday crossword, just not quite that Aries special, I suppose. As you can see from the title, we have a number of baseball teams SLUNK into the gray squares each with an one extra letter that you should take to get the team name. Thus (I'm italicizing the gray areas and underlining the team names), you get A S PIRATES ,   ME A T S AUCE , C ASTRO S TREET , S C R UB S UITS , TELEV ANGEL I S M , F RED S AVAGE , PA I D RES PECTS , G RAY S C ALE , and PO...

Time: 25:41 Saturday Average: 36:12 Best Saturday: 10:34 I suppose I really should have understood why Gregor MENDEL was clued as "Pea brain?" But he's known as the "father of modern genetics" because of his experiments with peas in the early 19th century. Get it? Many cities are known as The City of Trees and BOISE is not even the only US capital, since I remember Sacramento being called the same thing back when I lived there. Are there more cities of trees or cities of lights? Even though I was staring at my dog and his pile of chewable DOG TOYS , the "They're chewable but not meant to be eaten" clue was still the penultimate that I got. OK THEN , that's a bit embarrassing. I believe I went through all of the across clues in today's puzzles without writing in a single answer, with the only one I wondered about being the alternate spelling of PANGEA . Somehow I managed to cobble this one together and even finished cleanly w...

Time: 26:56 Saturday Average: 27:33 Best Saturday: 10:21 The Friday themeless is usually a treat, but this one gave me fits as so many proper nouns fell somewhere outside my wheelhouse. For starters, we had 19th century founder of the Ethical Culture Movement FELIX Adler and Anne MEARA , mother of Ben Stiller. I always forget the names of the BeeGees, but there's BARRY GIBB taking up space here too. Ka LAE is apparently Hawaii's southernmost point. Anyhow, that collection left me feeling MALADROIT (perfectly welcome great word)   in an otherwise largely enjoyable puzzle. I don't really understand cluing JUBILEE as "Golden time" when obviously the more comprehensible way would be "Pyrotechnical mutant who's now a vampire, I think." OK, I don't love GLISSANDI for "Dramatic musical effects" either. "In dat place" yields DERE ? Come on. That one ATE AT me. "Preoccupied with arcane details" in terms of actual ...

Time: 11:17 Thursday Average: 24:51 Best Thursday: 10:18 Apparently Apple isn't completely discontinuing IPODS just yet, but I'm having trouble remembering the last time I saw one outside of the tech graveyard in my basement. But it was that device along with a playlist that included two versions of "Waitin' Around to Die" that got me through my first marathon, so I'll be sure include them in future TOASTS . SKOAL ! It's a fairly light theme for a Thursday, so much so that you could probably blink and miss it. But the constructor tells us to GIVE ME SOME SPACE in order to get four of the answers. I'm guessing that originally, the constructor imagined that the "space" would come before the letters "me," as is the case for "Tome" cluing FROM WHERE I STAND . As you can see, you are meant to give some space by separating the clue into two words to create "To me." I'd be more impressed if they had follow...

Time: 7:12 Wednesday Average: 16:54 Best Wednesday 6:52 I actually drew a complete blank on the first 7 clues and was vaguely worried about this Wednesday until I finally got PATTY MELT . From there, we had a couple gimmes with HBO and AMY  Poehler, followed by a quartet of extremely famous figures with ISAAC Newton, MONA Lisa (seriously?), Catherine PARR , and EWAN McGregor (the man everyone thinks of when they hear Obi Wan Kenobi). Based on that, I was able to cruise to a near PR for Wednesday with the only costly moment being when I wrote SnUbs for "Gives the cold shoulder" and needed some time before being able to expel that incorrect answer in favor of SHUNS . It takes more than a NUDGE to get rid of a perfectly reasonable guess and come up something new. I think that might have been the most difficult hurdle for me in terms of getting half decent at crosswords. Regarding the theme, we have several FINANCIAL MYTHS , in the sense of mythical creatures that go alo...

Time: 5:01 Tuesday Average: 12:57 Best Tuesday: 5:01 While apparently Thurday's MLB OPENING DAY games will be the earliest ever, today's puzzle still manages to come in too early. I suppose this would be far too easy for a Thursday, as evidenced by my new Tuesday PR, so I still appreciate the reminder. My baseball obsession has quieted to a gentle hum in the background, a far cry from the daily plebiscite that it once occupied in my imagination. Still, I imagine I'll be watching the Red Sox take on the Mariners at 7pm on Thursday, a game which will hopefully end with them UP ONE with at least one RBI credited to Mookie Betts.  As far as the theme goes, we have seven answers that start with the standard abbreviations for days of the week in order with SUN G , MON TE CARLO , TU E S BELLE , WE D ID IT (makes me think of Elliott Kalan), THU RMAN (how often does her last name show up in crosswords?), FRI AR TUCK , and SAT E . It works well, as themes go, but th...

Time: 4:55 Monday Average: 8:17 Best Monday: 4:10 When I read the clue "Old records.. or a hint for this puzzle's seven longest answers" for LPS , all I could hear was Anne Murray's "Everything old is new again." In terms of those theme answers, we have LATIN PERCUSSION , LEOPARD PRINT , LOW POST , LAUNCHING PAD , LEGAL PROCEEDING , LOTTO PRIZE , and LATEX POINT . Is there anything else to say about this theme? I wouldn't mind getting back to SERBIA for this onset of Spring. I've been laughing lately about my Serbian driver who, as he drove us to Slovenia, couldn't stop talking about how boring I would find my destination. In Belgrade, he told me, you can do anything at 3am. You can go to the club or you can get your car washed. Good luck, he said, finding anything to do after 8pm in Slovenia. It's a beautiful country though. Did everyone know ERIK Satie, noted 19th century French composer and pianist, whose work some considered ...

Time: 29:38 Sunday Average: 47:42 Best Sunday: 21:55 Title: Code Switching Since I spend more than most on the phone with airline representatives reading out series of letters, I’ve recently been making a point of learning the NATO PHONETIC ALPHABET , so I was tickled to recognize the theme of today’s puzzle. There are a couple letters that I forget, mostly because they’re less fun than whiskey or sierra, such as mike and kilo. Mike is really the best we could do for M? As far as the theme goes, we have common phrases that feature a word that sounds like a letter and replace that letter with the NATO equivalent. “Ballroom dancing event for Beantown residents?:” BOSTON TANGO PARTY . So, instead of Boston Tea Party, we replace the Tea with Tango and wackiness ensues.  “Annoying member of a New York baseball team?:” YANKEE BOTHER . Why bother with the redundancy of having “annoying” in there? Boom! “Wager in which the winner gets the loser’s pants and jersey?:” UNIFORM...

Time: 23:43 Saturday Average: 36:20 Best Saturday: 10:34 Is TELEPORTING a “Futuristic travel method?” Nightcrawler has been doing it since the 70s, accompanied by a bamf and the smell of brimstone. I mostly struggled to fill in those isolated corners, especially since I’d never heard of a show called CASH CAB and had also mistakenly plugged in iDA instead of ADA Lovelace. I’m not sure where I dredged up a memory of something called BLUSH WINES , but that broke me into the NE corner and   VANUATU just needed those last couple letters to come to mind. I don’t understand “T T T” for TRUES , so I’d appreciate it if someone explained it to me. Is it just that T is short for “True” on an answer sheet and there are three of them? If so, I’m calling foul. I loved the clue “Ten-year-old business, say” to get LEMONADE STAND . The trendiness of DISTRESSED DENIM distresses me. I always loved ripped up jeans, but in my day we earned those tears by climbing trees. Seems like ch...

Time: 34:13 Friday Average: 27:34 Best Friday: 10:21 I guess you could call this a bad start among  BAD STARTS for me. Fortunately, I'm all over the MULTIVERSE theory since, you know, I read comics and all. Of course, when I saw the clue "Rogue and Armada," all I could think was, "Is there an X-Man called Armada?" Typically enough, it's cars again, so NISSANS . Boring. I was thinking Magnum P.I. or some such for "Detective in an aloha shirt," but giggled to myself when it turned out to be ACE VENTURA . I never actually watched any of those films, even though they're firmly of my generation, because I was too busy being contrarian in the face of my Jim Carrey loving friends. So, that's the same reason I did basically anything in middle school. WIIITIS for "Joint pain from playing too many video games?" You can't be serious. Urban Dictionary confirms that at least someone thinks it's a thing, but I'm highly s...

Time: 10:57 Thursday Average: 25:00 Best Thursday: 10:18 Maybe my favorite new crossword test is whether or not you can spell SAOIRSE Ronan's name. Of course, pronunciation is a separate test that doesn't come up in crosswords, but I assume in your everyday life. As for me, I'm proud to say that I got it in one and it helped me blaze through this crossword. The SLASHER FILM theme is straightforward as we have three film names that have a "/" in them. Get it? I'd never heard of VICTOR / VICTORIA , but IMDB describes the plot succinctly as follows: "A struggling female soprano finds work playing a male female impersonator, but it complicates her personal life." Got it. Meanwhile, I can say that I have recently re-watched Nicolas Cage classic FACE / OFF , which still has enough classic lines and moments to make up for its tedious action film pacing. If nothing else, be sure to watch Nicolas Cage's iconic "I'm Castor Troy!" sce...

Time: 9:12 Wednesday Average: 16:59 Best Wednesday: 6:52 What have I learned from crosswords? Mostly that if there's a clue about a song I've never heard of, the answer is probably DON HO . I also imagine that, to a younger generation, a clue involving "jewel cases" (for CDS ) is complete nonsense. It took me a minute to understand the DISAPPEARING INK theme, because the letters INK are very much present in the first theme answer, I CAN'T SLEEP A WINK (to which I pretty always can relate). However, it turns out that the letters are gradually disappearing from common phrases, so you end up with KITCHEN SIN (k), HOT P.I. (nk), and MAKES YOUTH (ink). Not bad! Is "kitchen sin" an actual phrase, by the way? I definitely want to talk about the "Sexy detective" clue for HOT P.I., since I definitely had no idea what was going on there for a while. Of course, my mind immediately went to ASOIAF's (or GoT) Hot Pie character and I thought...

Time: 7:52 Tuesday Average: 13:01 Best Tuesday: 5:05 I think I've said this before, but nobody types ROFL anymore, do they? That seemed dated in 1996 (and I was young then, so I'd totally know). I'm not going to run through all the theme answers, because it's another barely noticeable theme, but essentially the alphabet is run through in sequence, spread out through the puzzle. Notice that we have EASY AS ABC to start and XYZ AFFAIR to end and, if you're so inclined, you can track down the rest of the alphabet. Considering that some of these answers have only two letters to contribute, it's not the most impressive feat. However, FI LM NO IR has four letters and remains my favorite genre of film and Calvin & Hobbes comics. I'd read Tracer Bullet all day. "Post office service" for US MAIL is a bad clue. They know that other countries have post offices, right? By the way, I mailed postcards from India in February and then a week l...

Time: 5:09 Monday Average: 8:19 Best Monday: 4:10 I just finished reading Fun Home by Alison Bechdel (I know I know, what have I been doing all this time?) after having to leave it at home during my travels, but she spends a fair amount of time on Joyce's Ulysses, particularly the YES passage, which is apparently the theme of today's puzzle. As you probably didn't notice, because I certainly wouldn't have if I hadn't tasked myself to notice these things now, the theme answers each have a last word that phonetically means "yes" in a non-English language: PLAIN TO SEE (Spanish and other languages too), LAH DI DAH (Russian), AIMS HIGH (Japanese), and THE ROYAL WE (French). I don't have that many other DEETS to share, but it works as well as a Monday ought to. As I'm writing this, I can think only that my MOOD must be hungry since I keep fixating on HASH , TAMALE , and THAI food. It's an ACUTE hunger and I need all those things. Sounds...

Time: 40:00 Sunday Average: 47:53 Best Sunday: 21:55 Title: That’s Another Story If you have a YEN for various characters, both historical and fictional, showing up in other works in your imagination, you probably enjoyed this puzzle as much as I did. As usual, there was a fair amount of mucking around in the puzzle until the theme became clear. I even laughed at loud after at reckoning at least one of these theme answers. “Biography of Ebenezer Scrooge?:” MARLEY AND ME . Unsurprisingly, this was the first one I got. Since I watch Muppet Christmas Carol so often, I sometimes forget that there’s only one Marley in the novel.  “Biography of Amelia Earhart?:” GONE GIRL . Too real?  “Biography of Archimedes?:” LIFE OF PI . This one doesn’t really work for me, but maybe that’s because I never really liked this book title anyway.  “Biography of the Venus de Milo?:” A FAREWELL TO ARMS . I laughed. After all, what else is there to know? “With 112-across, bio...

Time: 34:22 Saturday Average: 36:30 Best Saturday: 10:34 Andres Ries is probably my favorite crossword constructor and I feel like an enormous nerd just from having given thought to such a subject. In his bi-weekly Aries themeless puzzles, he consistently challenges me with clever wordplay and minimal reliance on trivia. There’s a fair amount of that good stuff today, but also some references so far out of my wheelhouse that, I’ll confess, the puzzle started to seem a bit TEDIOUS . “1947 Hope/Crosby film” yields ROAD TO RIO , which I suddenly want to see after reading its IMDB plot synopsis: “Two inept vaudevillians stow away on a Brazilian-bound ocean liner and foil a plot by a sinister hypnotist to marry off her niece to a greedy fortune hunter.” Actually, is there an X-Men version? This does seem like Mesmero scheme and, obviously, the vaudevillians would be Nightcrawler and Wolverine with Kitty Pryde being the niece about to be married off to... how about Black Tom Cassid...

Time: 32:01 Friday Average: 27:29 Best Friday: 10:21 Today's puzzle seems heavy on the trivia and random phrases, which slowed me down significantly. I was sitting with PINa MARTINI (which might be a drink) for a long time before reckoning PINK MARTINI , which apparently is a drink that I'm not interested in. "Mnemonic device" is a standard phrase, but I've never come across AIDE MEMOIRE , but sure, more French please. And NAPOLEON III is the "Youngest French president before Macron." Noted. From crosswords, I've learned that an ELI is a YALIE . So, I love the "EBay ashtray, e.g." clue for PIG LATIN . But if we translate it, the message is "Be trash." Right? Or is my Pig Latin rusty? CALORIE BOMB really is the only possible answer for "Double cheeseburger with extra bacon, e.g." That was my standard order at Burger King in my youth and became something of a tradition when on roadtrips with my parents. Even a...

Time: 14:59 Thursday Average: 25:09 Best Thursday: 10:18 I never consciously registered the term BLACK HAT until I watched HBO's Westworld series, but, as so often happens, now that I'm aware of it I come across it everywhere. Today, it reveals that the center black square should read as "Hat" in order to complete the answers that border it, which yields  YOU DID W (hat), CHEW ON T (hat), (Hat) E MONGER , and (Hat) CHET JOB . There's a more difficult version of this in which the black square is replaced by different types of hats, but in the end you can probably hack your way through with the across answers. That assumes, of course, that you're familiar with "Onetime division of the Chrysler Corporation" DESOTO , which I am not. SHRUG . I love fun stuff like "Worst in a competition" cluing BEST . The joys of the English language. I've heard "worst" used in that way a handful of times, but probably never by a real pers...

Time:17:48 Wednesday Average: 17:03 Best Wednesday: 6:52 As expected, I've been awake since around 4am, drifting in and out of sleep, reading, emailing, and completely forgetting about UNO Pizzeria as well as the USO Tour. Throw in VERSO (publisher speak for even-numbered pages) and I'm struggling my share on a Wednesday. VALES are just valleys, right? I suppose those can be "Places where streams flow." I very much enjoyed the OBLIQUE REFERENCE theme, in which the circled letters spell out various reference works diagonally. "Thesaurus," "Dictionary," "Almanac," and "Atlas" are all represented and actually helped me out in that highly segmented north. That layout slowed me down fairly significantly as well. How is it that I've never listened to any of SHAQ 's four rap albums? If you're curious what I'm listening to now, it's Patty Griffin's new album. In my head, it's probably around 10pm...

Time: 14:50 Tuesday Average: 13:03 Best Tuesday: 5:05 After several more delays, I finally made it back to Bloomington. I guess United wanted to try to make up for all their failures, so I was fortunate enough to get upgraded to 1st class for the SFO to IND leg. However, I had to explain what an Irish Coffee was to the servers on the plane, so I was immediately skeptical. It will be some time before I’ve successfully SEGUED to this time zone, but it’s good to be getting a start. I suspect that this 6 week trip TOOK A TOLL ON me overall and I’ve been just staving off a cold these past few weeks and I’m betting that it’ll be out to get me now that the adrenalin is wearing off. Today’s theme was BUTTON - DOWN , which may be appropriate as I return to my normal life. As you can see, there are 4 theme answers running down that start with kinds of buttons in SNOOZE FEST (I probably won’t need that for a while because I’ll be up at 4am if I’m lucky), LIKE YOU KNOW (I just want t...

Time: 6:37 Monday Average: 8:20 Best Monday: 4:10 There was no need for any type of revealer this TIME as we got a straightforward oxymoron themed puzzle. LIVING DEAD , RECORDED LIVE , FOUND MISSING , and OPEN SECRET all fit the bill, even if they’re not particularly exciting. I might have finished this puzzle in close to record time if I hadn’t had my usual typo, which took me a while to find as I didn’t have confidence in the  SNEAD / OLIN crossing and ran the alphabet while an error existed elsewhere.  My flight has been further delayed to 11am this morning so I’m killing time in the lounge getting lightly TOASTED with Irish coffees. It’s the nighttime back home, so I’m just getting back on schedule. I thought United would owe me an upgrade for all this nonsense, but, unsurprisingly, NO DICE .  I’m looking forward to not living out of my suitcase, constantly wondering if I need to IRON my clothes or if I can get away with being lightly dishevele...

Time: 48:59 Sunday Average: 47:58 Best Sunday: 21:55 Title: Math Hysteria I don’t know how hysterical these math clues are, but they do involve some math wordplay to varying degrees. “L x A:” LOS ANGELES TIMES: This was the first one I got and it works fairly well. “X - y = x - y:” SAME DIFFERENCE: Yup, basically perfect clueing. “(A- or B+)/7:” SEVENTH GRADE: So, the seven just becomes Seventh? Seems like a crossword faux pas to me. “√666:” ROOT OF ALL EVIL: Yes, this one works for me. “$$$/X:” CASH DIVIDEND: Really stretching for that X becoming ND, I think.  “3.BB:” THREE POINT SHOT: Literal step by step, yeah. Again, the 3 is just three, which doesn’t seem great. “X(Esq):” POWER OF ATTORNEY: Took me a while to see this one but yes, esq becomes attorney. I also couldn’t get this to appear correctly on my phone, but it’s supposed to be x to the power of esq. I struggled to wrap up this puzzle, particularly with the VARIG / GENESEE crossing, since I’d ne...

Time: 30:20 Saturday Average: 36:22 Best Saturday: 10:34 Good morning from Singapore where I’m enjoying a long-awaited free day and looking forward to the journey home tomorrow night. I DECLARE that there’s a lot of food here that I can’t wait to taste (I did just recently watch Crazy Rich Asians, after all), but I went with delivery pizza last night and felt great about that decision. I had a rough initial run through this puzzle getting just BURKINI , which felt like a gimme, and ELLEN Page. TESS Trueheart and X-MEN were of course automatic for me, so I just built from there. I’d never heard of DRAWMEN , but apparently they’re workers who draw precut plastic materials to desired shapes in a hand or power press. That crossing with the vaguely inferable MG MIDGET was brutal but, damn, now that I’ve googled the midget, I absolutely need that car. It’s 80 degrees but feels like 102, according to my weather app, which boggles my mind and means that I likely won’t ven...

Time: 17:53 Friday Average: 27:27 Best Friday: 10:21 I surprised myself with a clean finish to this Friday puzzle during a 5am taxi ride to the Hanoi airport, still somewhat drunk from last night and deeply confused by the breakfast box that my hotel provided. I was craving a WINE FLASK but ended up instead with a mild SUGAR RUSH from some overly sweetened yoghurt and two pieces of fruit. NIIHAU  (“Island WSW of Kauai”) is quite the boon to crossword constructors, but I doubted myself all the way. SILENT C for “Miscellaneous part?” caused me some physical pain. Those clues get me every time and then I groan when I remember them. Initially I had ‘rap battle’ for “Song that a hip-hop rivalry might inspire,’ which made me think of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, but that’s easy to do. DISS TRACK makes the same degree of sense. I just finished the Punch Up the Jam episode about AFRICA and feel that I LUCKED OUT by listening to it on a flight. Is it possible to overrelate to a...

Time:15:07 Thursday Average: 25:16 Best Thursday: 10:18 This theme has me singing the “Bring ‘em out” theme from the Punch Up the Jam podcast. It would have fit the theme, but I suppose there’s no shortage of phrases with “‘em” out there. The revealer, STICK EM UP, shows that the letters “em” are oriented vertically in the theme answers. Fortunately, I knew HANG EM HIGH off the top of my head and ROCK EM SOCK EM ROBOTS are a staple of Los Heros tournaments. HOOK EM HORNS for “Cheer at a Texas football game,” on the other hand, is entirely unfamiliar to me but was surprisingly easy to infer. KNOCK EM DEAD rounds out the somewhat aggressive theme. CHIN MUSIC means “Chitchat?” I think I’ve always heard it in the context of a high and tight pitch in baseball. Greetings from the streets of Hanoi!

Time: 15:42 Wednesday Average: 17:02 Best Wednesday: 6:52 I MEAN , I don’t understand the theme of today’s crossword. I hope that someone will explain it to me in the comments or maybe, as has occurred before, I’ll grok it as I try to write up this blog entry. In terms of long answers, we have MARCH OF PROGRESS (OK, so it’s March), WINTER WONDERLAND (which my family in Massachusetts certainly seems to be in) and SPRING HAS (allegedly) SPRUNG . Then, we have a supposedly “apt word ladder” with LION , LIMN (which means to depict or describe or painting or words), LIMB , and LAMB . So, it’s Ash Wednesday and I suppose that this is awkwardly representing the lion laying down with the lamb? I find it not particularly apt and if we needed to go through “limn” to get there, well, that’s a longer walk than I would have liked to take. Am I missing something? Should I LET IT SLIDE ? However, I am happy to have learned a new word in LABILE , which means liable to change or easil...

Time: 8:03 Tuesday Average: 13:02 Best Tuesday: 5:05 I actually can’t believe that I’m still in Saigon. I never spend this long in a single AREA on a work trip, so I have to confess that I’m AT A LOSS , but in a good way. I’m not entirely DEAD from moving from country to country on a daily basis and that approaches the surreal. Today’s theme is the repeated clue “It has spots,” which indeed can lead to a number of answers. I actually predicted one of them as I was running through the clues as I said to myself, “you know, if you capitalize ‘Spots’ in one of these, it would be a good clue for ‘kennel.’” Instead, the constructor did me one better with DOGGY DAYCARE , to go along with PARKING LOT , LEOPARD PRINT , COMMERICAL BREAK and TEA SERVICE . I really struggled with that last one as I kept seeing “Teaser Vice,” which as far as I know is meaningless. During my street food tour of Saigon, we had some barbecued OKRA along with goat, beef, and pork. Check out XO Tours if y...

Time: 8:52 Monday Average: 8:21 Best Monday: 4:10 I entered almost nothing on my first pass through the acrosses, which gave me a bit of a scare for a Monday. Fortunately, you can always count on finding an ASEA ("Between ports") in any given crossword, so I had something to build off. I didn't WHOMP this puzzle by any stretch, but I managed. I suppose it's a "Starts with B" themed crossword, which doesn't really require a revealer. So, we get B MINOR MASS (needed most crosses for this one), BEA ARTHUR (her name is not automatic for me, but it'll come eventually), BEE STINGS (sure), and BE YOURSELF , clued as "Bit of advice to the insecure." As a member of the Insecure, I can assure you that this advice, while well meaning, accomplishes absolutely nothing. How, exactly, do I be myself? I hadn't heard of PONE , which is apparently unleavened cornbread in the form of flat oval cakes. Although it's clued as southern food,...

Time: 43:45 Sunday Average: 47:58 Best Sunday: 21:55 I suspect that James Welsch was all over this “D.J.’s Spinnin’” puzzle, in which common phrases have a D replaced with a J to fit the wacky clues. I enjoyed the silliness of the theme but also got bogged down in a few places, especially since I’ve only ever heard of SNOODS in the context of that addictive game from the 90s, not as a scarf. I also didn’t know writer NGAIO Marsh, one of the “Queens of Crime.” As for the theme, there’s a lot of fun happening. “Vacuum cleaner blockage?:” HOOVER JAM . “Sign at a restricted area of the Playboy Mansion?:” JUST BUNNIES . Smart bunnies, Hef.  “Driving through some off-road terrain, say?:” ROLLING IN THE JEEP . Was this a phrase before Adele?  “San Francisco Giant, for example?:” JOCK OF THE BAY . Nailed it.  “Overly serious Irish dancers?:” GRAVE JIGGERS . Makes me think of the classic Gravediggaz album, “Six Feet Deep.” “Write an order to replenish inventory of...

Time: 18:43 Saturday Average: 36:37 Best Saturday: 10:34 I’m just barely holding onto my blogging GOALS this week as I try to get this one in just barely under the wire. Finally, I completed a crossword in which I didn’t get painfully stuck and rather calmly hacked my way through, wondering if we would have Bette or GEENA Davis, honestly hoping for the former since I just recently watched All About Eve (thanks to the Unspooled podcast). Good morning from Vietnam, specifically Ho Chi Minh City, home of some truly fine breweries like Pasteur Street, where I found myself last night. I’m staying here for four whole nights, which diminishes my sense of TRANSIENCE during these endless TREKS . And it makes me feel like less of an ERSATZ (a favorite word that reminds me of Magic the Gathering) traveler. I don’t even have any TRAVEL IRONS . I could think of more than one “Beast slain by Hercules,” but I was happy that NEMEAN LION fit, since it was always one of my favorites as a...

Time: 47:17 Friday Average: 27:33 Best Friday: 10:21 Maybe my Bangkok brain just isn't cutting it for crosswords these days, as that's two serious scares in a row. This Friday themeless had me thoroughly stumped in the north for what seemed like hours. I fairly cruised through the middle and south with gimmes like ARTEMIS ("Twin sister of Apollo") and SITS IDLE ("Does nothing") and didn't even struggle too much with weirdness like DISCS ("Most cookies, essentially") and SLOVENS ("Pigs), which is just a fantastic word. Of course, CARA MIA was tricky for me because darn it I don't speak Spanish, but now I know that Jay & The Americans have a song by that title and I'm listening to that now. But FOX CUB for "Kit" leading to XI JINPING for "The world's most powerful person, per a 2018 Forbes list" just took me forever. ODOR EATER from "Sole mate?" makes a certain degree of sense, but ...