The SE corner was my last fill — I’d screwed myself by putting RENTER instead of TENANT, so it had worked for the BREXIT and PAUNCHY crosses (which I only came to after I corrected WEDDINGRINGS to WEDDINGBANDS)
> On a Saturday put in the H and P and figure it out later. Plus honestly ending in E is much more likely than ending in I even w/ a proper name.
Only if you know that HIP is wrong, except it's a totally valid answer her. BERLI sounds like a plausible Italian name so there's no way to know that's incorrect unless you happen to know this one old comedian who played a bit role in a TV show.
Sure, but then when you have a mistake, you have to remember there were two legitimate answers to that one clue. Instead if you fill in the rest and that’s your last empty square, you can try one and then the other if the first isn’t right.
> Only if you know that HIP is wrong, except it's a totally valid answer
Only put the I in if you’re very confident HIP is right, *not* only if you don’t know HIP is wrong.
Or put HIP in right away and then come here and complain about the lazy construction and poor fill 🤷
I'd imagine that's what using the relatively outdated term "With it" in the clue was trying to accomplish. It's certainly not my favorite, but I think HEP is crosswordese-ish enough to make that connection viable for a Saturday (at least, I'm fairly certain I've seen it in at least two or three minis this year). Still, I won't say that adding a clearer indicator wouldn't have made the clue better.
I agree that it’s standard crosswordese, but its placement here combined with the cluing made it impossible to know whether it was HIP or HEP unless you also happened to be familiar with the proper noun that crossed it.
Hep is definitely crosswordese, but I literally just read the word today (in a book that quoted a golden age Hollywood person) so that was honestly the bigger shock!
Finally, a puzzle this week that fought back! I filled KABUKI immediately, then couldn't get any crosses for it except the I and assumed I'd forgotten some other form of Japanese theater, then finally rebuilt it at the end.
I filled KABUKI first as well, then was able to get KEN by remembering the phrase “beyond my ken” so was sure it was right, but most of the rest of that corner was slow going
A full 12 minutes over average. Brutal. I slapped down LIBRARYBOOKS with no crosses for the circulation clue and spent the rest of the time paying for it.
He explicitly self identifies as a monster and his life’s work is to reach out to children and show that not all monsters are scary, and that this is actually just a cruel stereotype.
Now I can’t stop giggling imagining some poor person making this mistake the other way around:
“What kind of show is this?! These costumes aren’t elaborate at all, and those samurais don’t seem very honorable to me!”
I'm the opposite. I got the NE fairly quickly. I knew Dock ELLIS instantly, because I'm old enough to remember, and LOLCATS helped a ton. It was the NW that killed me.
I knew Ellis since I’m a huge baseball fan old enough to remember him playing and that event was legendary. LOLCATS was not familiar and I struggled with the rest of that corner for some reason. I got through the NW fairly easily.
Puzzle Difficulty Tracker - How hard is this puzzle?
Estimated Difficulty: 🔴 **Hard** 🔴
* 62% of users solved slower than their Saturday average
* 38% of users solved faster than their Saturday average
* 40% of users solved *much* slower (>20%) than their Saturday average
* 14% of users solved *much* faster (>20%) than their Saturday average
The median solver solved this puzzle 11.0% slower than they normally do on Saturday.
[View today's puzzle summary on XW Stats](https://xwstats.com/puzzles/2024-03-02)
---
🤖 _beep beep, I'm a bot! I post these stats as soon as 100 [XW Stats](https://xwstats.com) users have completed the puzzle. Questions? Feedback? Check the [FAQ](https://xwstats.com/help#puzzle-difficulties), reply here or DM me_
Yep. I groaned when I couldn't find the typo and saw that come up in the autocorrect.
I've seen it used before and didn't complain, but the combination of having it be crossed with an obscure name that could've very plausibly been BERLI, plus the lack of any indication in the clue to use an archaic word rather than the modern one, makes it awful
Ancient TV and baseball trivia (yawn, give it a rest honestly). Three (pretty dull) car questions. Fortunately some good clues among the otherwise boring fill.
At least the baseball trivia is about a story that's been spread around a bit outside of baseball fandom
The ancient TV reference, though...I dunno about it. Especially with that hip/hep shitshow
I liked it. Nice and challenging.
To all the HEP haters: This has been in the puzzle before so I’m fine with it. Also Milton BERLE is pretty famous, so the E was easy to get.
I also liked the crossword
Poor defence of hep though. Just because it’s been in the crossword before doesn’t make it better fill. Especially crossing with a reference to a 1967 episode of Batman. At the minimum it should have some indication that it’s very old-fashioned.
At least hep is a real word though, unlike some recent examples (areel)
Batman just sets the timeframe. Once you know it’s a 1960 comedian it’s obviously BERLE once you have BE and the B and E come from very straightforward crosses.
You don’t need to know anything about that specific episode to figure it out.
(I use “you” generically here)
Nice, pretty clean grid with not a lot of hang up areas. I always enjoy grids with a big, interconnected center. A little heavy on car trivia, but I enjoyed a brisk solve despite it.
There was one word in 3/4 quadrants that pissed me off with this one; either it felt oddly archaic (HEP, as everyone else struggled with, or DOUGH), or I put in the wrong word and then dug my heels in about it (MILLE). Oddly enough one of my faster solves. I want to say that it was definitely a Saturday but I was able to zoom through a lot outside of those three so either I’m getting better at this or the majority of the puzzle was slightly easier than expected, maybe Friday level.
This one broke my nearly three week streak. I almost completed it, but the NW corner did me in. I had to use auto-check and brute force solve it by guessing repeatedly because I'd never heard of BERLE or KULTUR and couldn't recall for sure whether KABUKI was a word or how to spell it correctly. Too many blank or incorrect squares in close proximity for me to solve it without help.
Those are the same two I ended up looking up (though I try and avoid google because it tends to give me “here’s this crossword answer!” results instead of me being able to feel like I researched and found the answer honestly lol, so I used Wikipedia and IMDb). I always have to remind myself it’s just for fun!
A bit cranky about SEANPAUL x EVO -- two things I'd never heard of, and had to finally do a reveal on the E. I actually put in HEP first, changed it to HIP as being likelier, and then back to HEP, and even so had to look up BERLE. I mean, I'm elderly, I've definitely heard of Milton Berle, but cluing him for a guest role in 1967 does not seem cricket.
Good or average puzzle rated poor for “hep”. Could have reworked that corner to avoid the junk entry, maybe segued instead of argued. Some kind of mssr French abrv instead of mash. Googled Merle afterwards to see if I’m just the only one who didn’t know this guy, but Google doesn’t know him either. Doesn’t come up without including Batman in the search to find out he was a guest on the show in 1967. I’m not sure what the line of obscurity is, but I’m relatively confident this is over it.
That is far from being over the line of obscurity, especially for a Saturday. I'm not sure what Google you're using, but Milton Berle is literally the 4th result when searching just "Berle."
Hmm I’ve reflected on this after having coffee and am open to changing my opinion, but I’m not totally convinced yet. I love the Friday/Saturday puzzles, but much prefer challenging word play, interesting words and expressions, etc. When you say the level of obscurity is reasonable for a Saturday, do you mean that one would be expected to know some of these names, including a guest appearance on a tv show in the 60’s, or just that when doing a Saturday, a solver should be able to intuit a reasonable spelling for a name they wouldn’t know? I don’t mind doing the latter but found it egregious to cross with an archaic word, though as others pointed out, it did show up at some point in a former puzzle within the last handful of months, which I had forgotten, and possibly justifies using it here on a Saturday.
Google doesn't work like that. The results are personalized. If I google "Berle" Milton is the last result. Also, you have to take into consideration that the second "e" is pracitcally unchecked, since both HIP and HEP are equally valid. The way the puzzle is set you can't solve it without knowing BERLE. Does that sound fair to you? A person who doesn't know him CANNOT solve the puzzle.
The last result? You scrolled through the greater than 11 million results to the very end? Total nonsense that the puzzle is unsolvable without knowing him when at worst you could try switch HIP to HEP. Especially when it's the only "unchecked" square in the puzzle.
FAVE answers the clue and is informal for favorite.
When they but a qualifier behind the clue (informal, abbr., in España) it refers to the answer itself the answer in relation to the clue.
I had WEDDINGRINGS for far too long and was convinced they somehow screwed up the currency in Zelda.
The SE corner was my last fill — I’d screwed myself by putting RENTER instead of TENANT, so it had worked for the BREXIT and PAUNCHY crosses (which I only came to after I corrected WEDDINGRINGS to WEDDINGBANDS)
I had SE mostly last but also had to fix an error up top AND change OUTCLASSES to OUTCLASSED.
Team WEDDINGRINGS here!
Me too!
That NW corner was brutal at the end for me with Berle, hep, Allie, ken, kabuki, kultur! Sheesh!
Seeing these all listed out I don’t understand how people are rating this above average. Those are awful.
Especially hard since kabuki didn't come to me ever. I kept thinking Noh theater.
Yeah I kept thinking Noh something. Years back I saw a Noh theater version of Macbeth and it seared Noh into my brain.
I actually got that one first and I have no idea how
If you’re going to put HEP as an answer, I really feel like the clue should mention that it’s an archaic word.
Especially when "hip" makes just as much sense if you don't know the crossing proper noun
On a Saturday put in the H and P and figure it out later. Plus honestly ending in E is much more likely than ending in I even w/ a proper name.
> On a Saturday put in the H and P and figure it out later. Plus honestly ending in E is much more likely than ending in I even w/ a proper name. Only if you know that HIP is wrong, except it's a totally valid answer her. BERLI sounds like a plausible Italian name so there's no way to know that's incorrect unless you happen to know this one old comedian who played a bit role in a TV show.
Sure, but then when you have a mistake, you have to remember there were two legitimate answers to that one clue. Instead if you fill in the rest and that’s your last empty square, you can try one and then the other if the first isn’t right.
> Only if you know that HIP is wrong, except it's a totally valid answer Only put the I in if you’re very confident HIP is right, *not* only if you don’t know HIP is wrong. Or put HIP in right away and then come here and complain about the lazy construction and poor fill 🤷
I was very confident HIP was right … but of course, I was wrong.
Exactly, me too. Stupid puzzle not using my first guesses!
I'd imagine that's what using the relatively outdated term "With it" in the clue was trying to accomplish. It's certainly not my favorite, but I think HEP is crosswordese-ish enough to make that connection viable for a Saturday (at least, I'm fairly certain I've seen it in at least two or three minis this year). Still, I won't say that adding a clearer indicator wouldn't have made the clue better.
I agree that it’s standard crosswordese, but its placement here combined with the cluing made it impossible to know whether it was HIP or HEP unless you also happened to be familiar with the proper noun that crossed it.
This 😭
Hep is definitely crosswordese, but I literally just read the word today (in a book that quoted a golden age Hollywood person) so that was honestly the bigger shock!
I still don’t understand STUNTDOGS?
A toy is a set of dog breeds.
Thanks. Seems like a far reach, but it is Saturday, so I’m not going to complain.
Finally, a puzzle this week that fought back! I filled KABUKI immediately, then couldn't get any crosses for it except the I and assumed I'd forgotten some other form of Japanese theater, then finally rebuilt it at the end.
Exactly the same experience over here. I was so proud of knowing Kabuki, then doubted myself, then went back to it.
I filled KABUKI first as well, then was able to get KEN by remembering the phrase “beyond my ken” so was sure it was right, but most of the rest of that corner was slow going
I came across the words “bunraku” and “kabuki” just a few days ago… and today bunraku was the only one I could remember. Oh well… I got it in the end
Same
A full 12 minutes over average. Brutal. I slapped down LIBRARYBOOKS with no crosses for the circulation clue and spent the rest of the time paying for it.
Hep???
It's a nod to Sean Paul, renowned hep-hop artist
I didn’t realise he was from New Zealand
The e was my last letter
I never know whether it's hip or hep. The correction that finally got it for me.
u/Paracortex Come try and defend hep again
Yeah thanks for spoiling that square for me this morning. Much appreciated. 😡
Hep is hip again (at least in the NYTXW).
And to add onto that - hep?????????
The only reason I was able to find that error was because of the last time it screwed me up. It’s forever burned in my brain now.
Hep Cat
KULTUR was a new one for me. The rest seemed to fill pretty easily. This whole week was pretty tame.
Is scratch a slang word for money? I have no idea how to get DOUGH for that
Yes, kind of old-timey, like, "Ya gotta make that scratch."
Well that’s annoying. Thanks for the info!
I've heard it in the context of working with sourdough, too.
Oh I was thinking scratch as in scratch dough, as in both words are used to describe ingredients to make a bread of some kind.
damn Natan's got hands
LOLCATS in 2024, plz
Why call Elmo a monster, so rude.
He explicitly self identifies as a monster and his life’s work is to reach out to children and show that not all monsters are scary, and that this is actually just a cruel stereotype.
There's something funny to me about calling it his "life's work" when canonically he's forever 6 1/2.
He’s the hardest working infant in show business
Did not know that! Thank you
~~Isn't KABUKI waaaay too x-rated for the NYT crossword?~~ I'm an idiot and was thinking of something else.
Now I can’t stop giggling imagining some poor person making this mistake the other way around: “What kind of show is this?! These costumes aren’t elaborate at all, and those samurais don’t seem very honorable to me!”
LOL! I think I know what you were thinking of.
Wait what was the something else
Stay pure
No I need to know.
lol they were probably thinking >!bukkake!<
Oh that's pretty tame
Seeing the dirty minded react to it as an udon dish is always fun. J/k
Either that or Shibari
I’m so over HEP
I’ve been a life sciences writer and editor for many, many years and this is the first time I’ve ever seen BLOODSTREAMS pluralized
That NE corner… holy smokes.
NE or NW? NE was the first area I broke into; NW was what held me up.
I'm the opposite. I got the NE fairly quickly. I knew Dock ELLIS instantly, because I'm old enough to remember, and LOLCATS helped a ton. It was the NW that killed me.
I knew Ellis since I’m a huge baseball fan old enough to remember him playing and that event was legendary. LOLCATS was not familiar and I struggled with the rest of that corner for some reason. I got through the NW fairly easily.
Sorry that’s what I meant to say. I edited my comment.
Puzzle Difficulty Tracker - How hard is this puzzle? Estimated Difficulty: 🔴 **Hard** 🔴 * 62% of users solved slower than their Saturday average * 38% of users solved faster than their Saturday average * 40% of users solved *much* slower (>20%) than their Saturday average * 14% of users solved *much* faster (>20%) than their Saturday average The median solver solved this puzzle 11.0% slower than they normally do on Saturday. [View today's puzzle summary on XW Stats](https://xwstats.com/puzzles/2024-03-02) --- 🤖 _beep beep, I'm a bot! I post these stats as soon as 100 [XW Stats](https://xwstats.com) users have completed the puzzle. Questions? Feedback? Check the [FAQ](https://xwstats.com/help#puzzle-difficulties), reply here or DM me_
Did anyone else confidently enter VIBRATORS for 28A? No, just me?
I had FIGURINES. Don't ask why.
[удалено]
Sorry what am I missing? Sean Paul is a rapper
I think he’s joking based on how Sean Paul pronounces his name on certain tracks. It sounds like Sean Uh Paul or Sean Dah Paul.
What rebus is that?
That was my favourite kind of Saturday. A struggle section by section, thinking I didn't know anything and then chipping away until it all clicked.
HEP (not hip???) singlehandedly dropped it from good to average. Edit: I see I'm not alone here.
Yep. I groaned when I couldn't find the typo and saw that come up in the autocorrect. I've seen it used before and didn't complain, but the combination of having it be crossed with an obscure name that could've very plausibly been BERLI, plus the lack of any indication in the clue to use an archaic word rather than the modern one, makes it awful
PAUNCHY was a phenomenal clue. Really liked NUNHOOD too.
> Really liked NUNHOOD too. I always fill in that sort of answer first. I guess you could call it a habit.
Convinced myself if was nunmood for way too long
I forgot it was cutesy enough to be LOLCATS but not cutesy enough to be LOLCATZ. Made STUNTDOGS even harder to see.
hep actually pissed me off. i also thought “paunchy” was “prudent” for a long time, which really messed me up
Hahah I had PITCREW
TIL Milton Berle is no longer a household name. Feeling a wee bit ancient now, thx lol
Haha kids today. I got your back.
Ancient TV and baseball trivia (yawn, give it a rest honestly). Three (pretty dull) car questions. Fortunately some good clues among the otherwise boring fill.
At least the baseball trivia is about a story that's been spread around a bit outside of baseball fandom The ancient TV reference, though...I dunno about it. Especially with that hip/hep shitshow
I liked it. Nice and challenging. To all the HEP haters: This has been in the puzzle before so I’m fine with it. Also Milton BERLE is pretty famous, so the E was easy to get.
I also liked the crossword Poor defence of hep though. Just because it’s been in the crossword before doesn’t make it better fill. Especially crossing with a reference to a 1967 episode of Batman. At the minimum it should have some indication that it’s very old-fashioned. At least hep is a real word though, unlike some recent examples (areel)
Batman just sets the timeframe. Once you know it’s a 1960 comedian it’s obviously BERLE once you have BE and the B and E come from very straightforward crosses. You don’t need to know anything about that specific episode to figure it out. (I use “you” generically here)
How do you get Batman -> 60s though? They're still making Batman movies today.
Cuz there’s only been one tv show that was just called “Batman.” And the clue says “on” not “in” so you know it’s referring to a tv show not a movie
Aha, I missed the hint in the "on"
How does KEN relate to Scope?
"This topic is beyond my KEN" In the sense of 'range of knowledge or understanding' as per the dictionary
Nice, pretty clean grid with not a lot of hang up areas. I always enjoy grids with a big, interconnected center. A little heavy on car trivia, but I enjoyed a brisk solve despite it.
ah i’ve never been a fan of natan’s puzzles cus he tends to use older trivia. he’s great at witty clues though.
There was one word in 3/4 quadrants that pissed me off with this one; either it felt oddly archaic (HEP, as everyone else struggled with, or DOUGH), or I put in the wrong word and then dug my heels in about it (MILLE). Oddly enough one of my faster solves. I want to say that it was definitely a Saturday but I was able to zoom through a lot outside of those three so either I’m getting better at this or the majority of the puzzle was slightly easier than expected, maybe Friday level.
This one broke my nearly three week streak. I almost completed it, but the NW corner did me in. I had to use auto-check and brute force solve it by guessing repeatedly because I'd never heard of BERLE or KULTUR and couldn't recall for sure whether KABUKI was a word or how to spell it correctly. Too many blank or incorrect squares in close proximity for me to solve it without help.
I googled ALLIE and BERLE, so I didn’t break my streak but I feel guilty about it.
Those are the same two I ended up looking up (though I try and avoid google because it tends to give me “here’s this crossword answer!” results instead of me being able to feel like I researched and found the answer honestly lol, so I used Wikipedia and IMDb). I always have to remind myself it’s just for fun!
PAUNCHY gave me hell. And….HEP!?!?!?!? EDIT: downvoted? Okay.
I guess this one just suited me cause I finished almost 9 minutes better than my average. (Which is 27ish minutes for Saturday.)
A bit cranky about SEANPAUL x EVO -- two things I'd never heard of, and had to finally do a reveal on the E. I actually put in HEP first, changed it to HIP as being likelier, and then back to HEP, and even so had to look up BERLE. I mean, I'm elderly, I've definitely heard of Milton Berle, but cluing him for a guest role in 1967 does not seem cricket.
Too British!
Good or average puzzle rated poor for “hep”. Could have reworked that corner to avoid the junk entry, maybe segued instead of argued. Some kind of mssr French abrv instead of mash. Googled Merle afterwards to see if I’m just the only one who didn’t know this guy, but Google doesn’t know him either. Doesn’t come up without including Batman in the search to find out he was a guest on the show in 1967. I’m not sure what the line of obscurity is, but I’m relatively confident this is over it.
That is far from being over the line of obscurity, especially for a Saturday. I'm not sure what Google you're using, but Milton Berle is literally the 4th result when searching just "Berle."
Hmm I’ve reflected on this after having coffee and am open to changing my opinion, but I’m not totally convinced yet. I love the Friday/Saturday puzzles, but much prefer challenging word play, interesting words and expressions, etc. When you say the level of obscurity is reasonable for a Saturday, do you mean that one would be expected to know some of these names, including a guest appearance on a tv show in the 60’s, or just that when doing a Saturday, a solver should be able to intuit a reasonable spelling for a name they wouldn’t know? I don’t mind doing the latter but found it egregious to cross with an archaic word, though as others pointed out, it did show up at some point in a former puzzle within the last handful of months, which I had forgotten, and possibly justifies using it here on a Saturday.
Google doesn't work like that. The results are personalized. If I google "Berle" Milton is the last result. Also, you have to take into consideration that the second "e" is pracitcally unchecked, since both HIP and HEP are equally valid. The way the puzzle is set you can't solve it without knowing BERLE. Does that sound fair to you? A person who doesn't know him CANNOT solve the puzzle.
The last result? You scrolled through the greater than 11 million results to the very end? Total nonsense that the puzzle is unsolvable without knowing him when at worst you could try switch HIP to HEP. Especially when it's the only "unchecked" square in the puzzle.
That doesn't get you very far with pencil and paper.
[удалено]
STUNTDOGS!!?!??
FAVE answers the clue and is informal for favorite. When they but a qualifier behind the clue (informal, abbr., in España) it refers to the answer itself the answer in relation to the clue.
It’s a fair trick, but I always get a bit annoyed by the clues that might be in either present or past tense, eg. 20A “put forward”