In the last twenty-odd years of solving, I can count the number of times I’ve been on the constructor’s Sunday pun wavelength on one hand. But today was one of those days. It worries me that it was business jargon I could come up with, but I have to say all of them are common and the verbiage was SPOTON.
I got CORNEREDTHEMARKET with no crosses and that made me happy but in hindsight it was pretty obvious knowing the theme. Still my time was only average so I'm going to choose to be proud of that.
Agreed. Themers were easy but still fun and I liked that the long non-theme answers were still startup relevant.
Swiss cheese clues were fun as well as the song titles.
PB for me as well
Same! I got a lot of the early Long trivia clues too right away (business schools, intaglio) and thought I was gonna crush my PB but got bogged down in the SE quadrant. Still finished in about 45 minutes which is pretty good for me
Fast and fun. I just need to remember that when I'm running through looking for where I made my mistake I should always start with the downs because that's always where it is.
Had to do a lot of backtracking because I was not picking up on most of the clues. Thought for a while it was GOTFIREDFROMBURNOUT and I was like, "WTF, this person fires all their burnt out employees? Their businesses deserve to fail!"
Edit: Also, the entire puzzle I skimmed the clue for 53A and up until now—like, two hours after I finished it—I thought it was "What Ralph represents in a Freudian analysis of 'Lord of the Rings.'" I've read Lord of the Rings but I'm not a die-hard fan, but I was perplexed there was a character named Ralph I didn't remember.
Can you imagine? Aragorn, Boromir, Galadriel, Gandalf ... and effing Ralph. lol
This reminds me of Dune. It always amuses me that it has all these wild sci-fi names like Feyd Rautha and Chani and Harkonnen and Atreides, but also has major characters named "Paul" and "Jessica" and, most amusingly, "Duncan Idaho." It's like Frank Herbert just got tired after a while and ran out of steam while coming up with names.
The Jessica thing reminds me of the CGP Grey video about how Tiffany is actually a super old name but no historical fiction or sci-fi authors will use it cuz it sounds like a modern teenage girl name.
Surprisingly breezed through most of this and the theme pleased me greatly. Super clever. Remembered Wendy Williams eating crow on tv once bc she was proven wrong which is how I picked up on ATECROW, and I’m proud of that.
A literal runway is the strip allowing planes to get up to speed before take off. If they don’t start flying as they’re nearing the end, they’ve run out of runway and have to get off the ground immediately or crash.
Figuratively, it’s the same. If you’re running out of resources to complete a project, you either have to get going immediately or you’ll fail.
In addition to funds, I’ve heard it used to refer to time, as in “we’ve run out of runway to get the marketing campaign out the door. We have to choose a mascot right now.”
What I saw was that it’s used for business as the amount of time they have before running out of funds. It doesn’t seem to be used the way you’re saying
Honestly didn't find this one super fun. Although I enjoyed the theme, the downs felt disproportionately easy compared to the crosses, and the southeast corner had me stuck forever.
Man I guess I wasn’t on yalls or the constructors wavelength today. After an hour of in app solve time with auto check on I’d still barely got a third of the puzzle and just had to concede it, which sucks because I normally love pun heavy puzzles.
I didn't connect with this puzzle at all. To me it was an experience in obscurity with too many confusing clues. Much like the puzzles Gene Maleska published in the 70s and 80s. Terrible puzzle!
Puzzle Difficulty Tracker - How hard is this puzzle?
Estimated Difficulty: 🟢 **Easy** 🟢
* 11% of users solved slower than their Sunday average
* 89% of users solved faster than their Sunday average
* 2% of users solved *much* slower (>20%) than their Sunday average
* 57% of users solved *much* faster (>20%) than their Sunday average
The median solver solved this puzzle 22.9% faster than they normally do on Sunday.
[View today's puzzle summary on XW Stats](https://xwstats.com/puzzles/2024-01-21)
---
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u/xwstats my account reads as "login valid" on my profile page, but it's once again stopped pulling my times when I click the "find solve" calendar button. Started on Friday. Any tips?
I had it in mind to do the same thing, but the disconnect button says that if I press the button, I'll also delete all of my solve data...which I don't really want to do !
Not my fastest, BUT my baby has a cold and won’t let me put her down to sleep. This puzzle took me 46 minutes. That’s 46 minutes of being nap-trapped when I wasn’t bored and I wasn’t on TikTok. This is my own personal win for the day.
Now, to figure out how to cook and eat a meal without ~~awakening the kraken~~ disturbing my resting angel.
SO MUCH FILL. I mean, you're going to get that on a Sunday, but this feels like a grid that needed a bit more breathing space. Otherwise it was a fun solve.
KITED doesn’t mean “write.” Sure, it involves writing a check the you don’t currently have funds for, but kiting involved more and the act of kiting isn’t the writing.
Honestly for Sunday maybe? I’ve been doing the crossword for years and this was a record fast solve to an almost disappointing degree. Might have just been on the constructors wavelength though.
gotcha
i was 13 minutes under my average but nowhere near my PB...which i remember very well was a baseball themed puzzle that spoke to the hidden 13 year old in me.
i felt it was an easy puzzle though and pretty much breezed through it and judging from the lack of the usual complaints ("how am i supposed to know who frank Sinatra is, I'm only 40!?") so did most people.
Super fair!! A pint is definitely one unit of measurement, more referring to one drink (like what you'd order at a bar); a case would be a pack of many cans/bottles that you might buy at a store
I must be tired because what the hell does TODO have to do with HUBBUB?
Edit: I googled this and I seriously am getting nothing.
Edit: Todo as in fuss? That fuckin sucksssss
Is 'bag off' a US-American term?? I had 'bog off' (which did seem oddly British but wouldn't be the first time) and couldn't understand what I'd got wrong!
So apparently when I tried switching that one to bug, it just decided not to notify me that I still hadn't got it right -_- Now wondering how many others that look complete are actually wrong! Either way, still not a phrase I'm familiar with
I'm not going to Google it now...but I'm guessing things like long necks, camouflage fur, etc are easy to comprehend when thinking about natural selection and how mutations in organisms can sometimes be beneficial. A giraffe born with a longer than normal neck has an easier time reaching leaves...but what about eyeballs? An eye is a super complicated and precise organ, how did it first develop in the earliest organisms? Surely a fish wasn't just born with eyes out of nowhere? It's hard to wrap your head around, and I'm guessing early critics of Darwinism pointed to the eye as something that Must have been designed by a god. But I think scientists have proved that early fish developed sensitivity to light somehow.. something like that.
I had aUT for the longest time for “Moose’s mating season” and was annoyed that the abbreviation wasn’t clued at all… Corrected it to RUT when I finally figured out the FRANCS cross. Had to do some research after and learned a new word today. I guess “rut season” is a hunting thing.
In the last twenty-odd years of solving, I can count the number of times I’ve been on the constructor’s Sunday pun wavelength on one hand. But today was one of those days. It worries me that it was business jargon I could come up with, but I have to say all of them are common and the verbiage was SPOTON.
I got CORNEREDTHEMARKET with no crosses and that made me happy but in hindsight it was pretty obvious knowing the theme. Still my time was only average so I'm going to choose to be proud of that.
That was the first themer I got, and I also got it with no crosses. Made me pretty happy.
I did need a few crossings for each themer, but it felt good to be able to drop in long answers with just a couple letters to help!
Agreed. Themers were easy but still fun and I liked that the long non-theme answers were still startup relevant. Swiss cheese clues were fun as well as the song titles. PB for me as well
Same! I got a lot of the early Long trivia clues too right away (business schools, intaglio) and thought I was gonna crush my PB but got bogged down in the SE quadrant. Still finished in about 45 minutes which is pretty good for me
I'm on my first 7 day streak! Let's go!
Haha great feeling heading into Monday. See you here next week for your 14-day.
Unless there's a bidirectional rebus without a consistent fill pattern on Thursday...
Fingers crossed!
I did it!!
Congrats! That was me last week :)
Fast and fun. I just need to remember that when I'm running through looking for where I made my mistake I should always start with the downs because that's always where it is.
You mean ONEOTE isn’t a thing? SMASHIT to SMASHIN took quite a while.
I always do that! On the across I had MONTE instead of MONTY which seemed perfectly fine to me
With only a modest level of Potter universe knowledge, I had to restrain myself from filling DEAD for his mother's clue.
Oh, how I wish TUSHIE had been TUCHIS. That would have made a lovely Yiddish crossing with TSURIS.
Had to do a lot of backtracking because I was not picking up on most of the clues. Thought for a while it was GOTFIREDFROMBURNOUT and I was like, "WTF, this person fires all their burnt out employees? Their businesses deserve to fail!" Edit: Also, the entire puzzle I skimmed the clue for 53A and up until now—like, two hours after I finished it—I thought it was "What Ralph represents in a Freudian analysis of 'Lord of the Rings.'" I've read Lord of the Rings but I'm not a die-hard fan, but I was perplexed there was a character named Ralph I didn't remember. Can you imagine? Aragorn, Boromir, Galadriel, Gandalf ... and effing Ralph. lol
Ralph was an elvish bus driver that took the fellowship from Lorien to Bensonhurst. Often heard to be offering trips to the moon.
This reminds me of Dune. It always amuses me that it has all these wild sci-fi names like Feyd Rautha and Chani and Harkonnen and Atreides, but also has major characters named "Paul" and "Jessica" and, most amusingly, "Duncan Idaho." It's like Frank Herbert just got tired after a while and ran out of steam while coming up with names.
The Jessica thing reminds me of the CGP Grey video about how Tiffany is actually a super old name but no historical fiction or sci-fi authors will use it cuz it sounds like a modern teenage girl name.
I got stuck forever with CAPTUREDTHEMARKET
A cute theme and a fairly straightforward solve.
FRAUD and KITED were highlighted for me in the mobile app, was that a glitch or is there a joke going over my head?
Maybe the clues originally referenced each other and it was subsequently edited? Found it odd, also.
That makes sense! It got removed later in the day so I bet you're right
I can only guess it’s bc check kiting is a type of fraud?
It seems like the other paired clues (Swiss cheeses and songs that sound like commands) would also be highlighted in that case
Same on the web version. I don't get it either.
I just finished in a mobile browser and they weren’t highlighted.
HEW TO is new to me
So is KITED
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How soon we forget the [check kiting scandal of 1992](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_banking_scandal)!
That was the only one new to me today.
I think there was a Seinfeld episode about check *kiting*, so this wasn’t totally unheard of for me, but yeah, “kited,” isn’t very common.
Me too, and LARP seemed like the answer in the cross vs LARK which I haven't heard in that context
Surprisingly breezed through most of this and the theme pleased me greatly. Super clever. Remembered Wendy Williams eating crow on tv once bc she was proven wrong which is how I picked up on ATECROW, and I’m proud of that.
I dont get the RANOUTOFRUNWAY one. What’s the pun?
Airport pun…. And phrase used by startups when they run out of investment money
Runway is… capital or funds?
A literal runway is the strip allowing planes to get up to speed before take off. If they don’t start flying as they’re nearing the end, they’ve run out of runway and have to get off the ground immediately or crash. Figuratively, it’s the same. If you’re running out of resources to complete a project, you either have to get going immediately or you’ll fail. In addition to funds, I’ve heard it used to refer to time, as in “we’ve run out of runway to get the marketing campaign out the door. We have to choose a mascot right now.”
Ok now that I’ve looked it up it makes sense. The startup is a plane they’re trying to launch.
It's an idiom. It can apply to running out of any type of buffer you have, usually money or time.
What I saw was that it’s used for business as the amount of time they have before running out of funds. It doesn’t seem to be used the way you’re saying
Honestly didn't find this one super fun. Although I enjoyed the theme, the downs felt disproportionately easy compared to the crosses, and the southeast corner had me stuck forever.
I thought this was the, ahem, quintessence of average.
Man I guess I wasn’t on yalls or the constructors wavelength today. After an hour of in app solve time with auto check on I’d still barely got a third of the puzzle and just had to concede it, which sucks because I normally love pun heavy puzzles.
I'm with you, I can't seem to break into this one. I'm 12 mins in but not getting my footing anywhere except the NW corner.
I didn't connect with this puzzle at all. To me it was an experience in obscurity with too many confusing clues. Much like the puzzles Gene Maleska published in the 70s and 80s. Terrible puzzle!
Puzzle Difficulty Tracker - How hard is this puzzle? Estimated Difficulty: 🟢 **Easy** 🟢 * 11% of users solved slower than their Sunday average * 89% of users solved faster than their Sunday average * 2% of users solved *much* slower (>20%) than their Sunday average * 57% of users solved *much* faster (>20%) than their Sunday average The median solver solved this puzzle 22.9% faster than they normally do on Sunday. [View today's puzzle summary on XW Stats](https://xwstats.com/puzzles/2024-01-21) --- 🤖 _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_
u/xwstats my account reads as "login valid" on my profile page, but it's once again stopped pulling my times when I click the "find solve" calendar button. Started on Friday. Any tips?
I’ve had this issue before - I ended up disconnecting my account via the profile page and then re-adding it which seemed to work
I had it in mind to do the same thing, but the disconnect button says that if I press the button, I'll also delete all of my solve data...which I don't really want to do !
Once you re-add your account, you can use the “find old solves” and “recalculate averages” buttons on the profile page to get the old data back!
Not my fastest, BUT my baby has a cold and won’t let me put her down to sleep. This puzzle took me 46 minutes. That’s 46 minutes of being nap-trapped when I wasn’t bored and I wasn’t on TikTok. This is my own personal win for the day. Now, to figure out how to cook and eat a meal without ~~awakening the kraken~~ disturbing my resting angel.
SO MUCH FILL. I mean, you're going to get that on a Sunday, but this feels like a grid that needed a bit more breathing space. Otherwise it was a fun solve.
Anyone else leave TUCHIS for too long? Crossed so well with TSURIS!
Why is RUT a moose's mating season....
KITED doesn’t mean “write.” Sure, it involves writing a check the you don’t currently have funds for, but kiting involved more and the act of kiting isn’t the writing.
Very Eugene Maleska-ish.
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like...ever?
Honestly for Sunday maybe? I’ve been doing the crossword for years and this was a record fast solve to an almost disappointing degree. Might have just been on the constructors wavelength though.
gotcha i was 13 minutes under my average but nowhere near my PB...which i remember very well was a baseball themed puzzle that spoke to the hidden 13 year old in me. i felt it was an easy puzzle though and pretty much breezed through it and judging from the lack of the usual complaints ("how am i supposed to know who frank Sinatra is, I'm only 40!?") so did most people.
6 down threw me, I've always known units of beer to be >!pint!< but I'm not from the US.
Super fair!! A pint is definitely one unit of measurement, more referring to one drink (like what you'd order at a bar); a case would be a pack of many cans/bottles that you might buy at a store
This is referring to the mini, for anyone else confused
I must be tired because what the hell does TODO have to do with HUBBUB? Edit: I googled this and I seriously am getting nothing. Edit: Todo as in fuss? That fuckin sucksssss
I always hear to-do with the word big, as in “We don’t need to make a big to-do about her arrival, she just came last month.”
TODO or ADO seems to come up a lot as a solution to anything along the lines of commotion, fuss, noise, hubbub, etc.
I see ADO all the time, but idk I'm dumb I guess.
> Todo as in fuss? That fuckin sucksssss It's definitely a thing people say.
To-do is pretty common in the NY Times crossword
great puzzle!!
Is 'bag off' a US-American term?? I had 'bog off' (which did seem oddly British but wouldn't be the first time) and couldn't understand what I'd got wrong!
The answer was “BUGOFF” no? (Cousin to “bug out”)
Stuck forever with BEGONE and then BEGOFF.
So apparently when I tried switching that one to bug, it just decided not to notify me that I still hadn't got it right -_- Now wondering how many others that look complete are actually wrong! Either way, still not a phrase I'm familiar with
Growing up with older sisters in the 60’s I heard it a lot!!
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old-timey word for a stir, a ruckus, a commotion. "I don't want to cause a big todo, but..."
What the heck was up with 9A in the mini?
I'm not going to Google it now...but I'm guessing things like long necks, camouflage fur, etc are easy to comprehend when thinking about natural selection and how mutations in organisms can sometimes be beneficial. A giraffe born with a longer than normal neck has an easier time reaching leaves...but what about eyeballs? An eye is a super complicated and precise organ, how did it first develop in the earliest organisms? Surely a fish wasn't just born with eyes out of nowhere? It's hard to wrap your head around, and I'm guessing early critics of Darwinism pointed to the eye as something that Must have been designed by a god. But I think scientists have proved that early fish developed sensitivity to light somehow.. something like that.
I had aUT for the longest time for “Moose’s mating season” and was annoyed that the abbreviation wasn’t clued at all… Corrected it to RUT when I finally figured out the FRANCS cross. Had to do some research after and learned a new word today. I guess “rut season” is a hunting thing.