Sighturday

To quote the immortal Homer, "D'oh!" I liked Patrick Berry's Saturday NYT, except for one word and its pesky "American English only" spelling in place of the more oft-seen diaeresis. I could've done without the brain freeze that made me eschew the E instead of the A, which rendered the crossing "short, of a sort" incomprehensible, and made me doubt the R in WARE, further muddling things. I pieced it together, but it took me an extra 3 minutes.

Aside from that little trauma, what did this puzzle offer? A shout-out to the movie Lost in America, which is forever in my heart for Albert Brooks' (real name: Albert Einstein) tirade about nest eggs, nests, and eggs. I'm rather surprised to see "two-fisted" as a clue for VIRILE; somebody explain this to me, please—because women can be two-fisted drinkers too. And did you know VIRILE and VIRAGO have the same root? Never heard of the bespectacled owl character or the '30s actress GLENDA (yup, looks like a Saturday all right). As for CIGARILLO, were you aware that these are now available in flavors like peach and grape? Must be a subtle attempt to reach the younguns. I liked DEEPSIXED (tried to fit JETTISONED in first), LES ASPIN, EDITED OUT, and PUMPS IRON. Odd to have two trade names stacked together at 1A and 15A, isn't it?

Updated:

Henry Hook's LA Weekly puzzle made me a little dizzy with its vertiginous theme. Happy birthday (whenever it was), Henry.

I liked the theme in Con Pederson's WaPo puzzle, especially ASCENT OF A WOMAN and AGATES OF HEAVEN. Overall, it seemed easier than the Hook puzzle, except for the SE corner that bogged me down.

I had just been wondering whether Stella Daily and Bruce Venzke had attempted a themeless puzzle, and then their LA Times puzzle popped up today with three triple-stacked 15s. Not a very tough Saturday themeless, but then we look to the NYT for that.

This week's Saturday "Stumper" stumped me for a whopping 25 seconds longer than the always-easy CrosSynergy puzzle. I've been wending my way through Stan's Cranium Crackers, which contains 100 puzzles that I presume are old Stumpers. The quality and challenge level varies widely. Some puzzles took a mere 4 minutes. Some are perfect (particularly the ones by Brendan Emmett Quigley). Some took me 20+ minutes and a peek at the answers to penetrate the Maleskan gloom of words like TEMS ("textile chemicals"), UHNAK ("cop novelist"), and PAON ("peacock blue")—and I do not care for Maleskan gloom. Give me Shortzian elan any day. Anyway, there are some gems in there, and the book's only $6.95, so if intermittent plunges into the Maleskan deeps don't daunt you, check it out.

If I won the lottery, here's what I'd do with the money: I'd become a decadent patron of the puzzling arts. Puzzles by my favorite constructors generally show up only a couple times a month, at most. With my spare millions, I could afford to woo the constructors to make extra-challenging puzzles for an extremely limited audience (me). While they are surely motivated partly by the fame of national newspaper syndication, who would turn down, say, $500 or $750 to make a single 15x15? Alas, I never buy lottery tickets, so this plan is unlikely to come to fruition.

NYT 10:26 (ah, I still remember the 7:11 I saw when I was almost done)
LAT 5:21
Stumper 3:51
CS 3:26

LA Weekly 9:28
WaPo 9:27