That was a proper Saturday I thought… Right on my average time, lots of long answers, plenty of pop on most of the fill. Clues were tricky but not obscure. Trivia was mostly at that place where I knew it with a variable number of crosses, somewhere in the back of my mind but needed a bit of a nudge. The kind where my first pass through was pretty barren but the corners fell one by one. Also appreciated the grid design where the corners and middle were sort of their own entities but had multiple ways in. I really dislike the super-isolated four corner layouts where, if you can’t get a foothold, success in the rest of the puzzle isn’t helpful.
The long fill, I thought, was great:
ZOROASTER, ONELINERS, SWORDSMITH, IDLEGOSSIP, DEROGATIVE, ITSAFREECOUNTRY (!), SKYBOXSEAT, HYPNOTIST, RIESLINGS, TRES CHIC, ALPHANERDS, RETRODINER and COSTARICA. That’s a lot of ground to cover in a single puzzle!
Learned some stuff too: TAIKONAUT (that may have been in my brain somewhere), HAGIOLATRY (loved it).
And very few weak parts of the fill. LILA (Zorba the Greek seems to get outsized NYT crossword play), EMITTING isn’t super fresh but not too bad, ADHERENTS was a fine answer but the clue was a little lame, and I would love to never see another ambiguous Barnyard Sound clue (BAA MAA MOO). But overall great.
spoiler
Man, I was so confident that the first clue was BLACKSMITH, but then could not get the rest of the northwest corner going.
no, wait, okay… KNIFESMITH? No, the Jewish mourning period is SHIVA… Ok… uh… STEELSMITH??? Yeah that fits…
Finally got it figured to SWORDSMITH and the rest fell into place.
HAGIOLATRY was a new one for me. Although the definition says its the worship of saints…
All in all, good Saturday puzzle that was a good challenge and a proper sense of statisfaction once completed.
Mini crossword link (free to play, account not mandatory): https://www.nytimes.com/crosswords/game/mini
Share your time!
1:16
3:25. It seems like it went faster than that. But thank you for the link.
3:56
Sheeh. 2D “Made fun of” and 4D “Toboggan, e.g.” tripped me up.
Managed to solve SW corner through a lot of trial and error, but for the life of me cannot figure out the rest.
