SATURDAY PUZZLE — Who was clamoring for a hard Saturday solve recently? Happy for you, hope you don’t fly through this one too fast. That doesn’t often happen with Byron Walden’s puzzles, of course; he can be counted on for a beautifully crafted grid full of surprising material, always tough, but fair. I was played for an absolute fool multiple times today, but enjoyed every minute.
This is Mr. Walden’s 73rd Saturday puzzle for The New York Times, a lofty figure, and his ninth in a row. You could spend several great days in the archives with his body of work.
Tricky Clues
26A/42A. These entries are loosely related, and neither came easily to me. 26A is wordplay; the [Light refreshments?] here are beige beverages, or PALE ALES. 42A is trivia; the[Eponymous Ontario brewer John] is John LABATT (whose company makes PALE ALE, among other types of beer).
38A. You might actually know the character in this clue because of its entry, but I was left hanging here. [Alex Honnold’s “How I climbed a 3,000-foot vertical cliff — without ropes” and others] are TED TALKS.
43A. I can’t look at this clue, [Kind of catfish or screw], without thinking of those people who put their hands under the water and tickle the fish into somehow getting captured. They would know the answer here right away. I leaned toward “Phillips” for a while, which is not a fish or a screw, but eventually had enough letters from crossing entries to get FLATHEAD.
7D. This is a funny little clue if you take a minute to get it: [Bad tipper?] solves to FINK, a disparaging term akin to “rat” or “canary” — someone who can’t be trusted not to tip off the big boys.
9D. This pun clue has an idiomatic answer. In [Bunch of dubious characters?], the pun is “characters,” which should be interpreted as letters and numbers. The idiom is CHICKEN SCRATCH, which means impossible-to-read writing.
15D. The [Country house?] here is urban and packed with countries — it’s the U.N. HEADQUARTERS on the far east side of Manhattan. Its footprint is much bigger than I thought, 18 acres — plenty for a little farm.
20D. “Green” is good, but in this case [“Go ____” (environmentalist’s catchphrase)] solves to SOLAR. This isn’t so obscure, I know, but when I jotted down “Green,” it was one of the first guesses I had made, and it was hard to let “Green” go.
24D. Hm, what federal monument could this be? Psych! The [Noted DC locale since 1939] is WAYNE MANOR, which was originally a modest little stucco house, maybe to avoid alienating late Depression era audiences. By the 1960s it was an opulent mansion, and it evolved into a real castle that met its fiery demise in “Batman Begins.”
37D/39A. Mr. Walden’s constructor notes notwithstanding, it took me a ton of letters from crossing entries to come up with the answer for 37D, the [Ethnic group in China’s Xinjiang region], and I still spelled it “Uighurs” at first. That meant that 39A, [Kind of concrete that does not require pre-mixing], was “driset,” which looked like a perfectly cromulent brand name to me. The entries here are UYGHURS and DRYSET, neither of which has appeared in a Times puzzle before.
Constructor Notes
Life would have been much easier making this puzzle if I had allowed myself the option of UIGHURS instead of UYGHURS. It’s hard to know if UIGHURS would have incurred the dreaded “(var.)” tag, but better not to risk it. And UYGHURS just looks cooler in the grid, I think.
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