Rex Parker is really annoyed at today's NYT crossword. I won't say any more — because maybe you haven't done the puzzle yet and actually care about preserving your state of innocence — except:
12D: Gilbert who wrote "Love and Death on Long Island" (ADAIR) — I ... ??? If the ADAIR's not Red, I don't know it.I have a special feeling for that name, Adair. I know it well. But not well enough.
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It's Jerry Adair, Orioles second baseman back in the 60's.
The puzzles have lost much of their interest. Too many pop cliches. Too many irritating formatting tricks. By the time you finish a Sunday puzzle, you can pretty well guess its author's age and sex. It's possible our fractured culture doesn't have enough common referents (history, literature, geography, and music, say, as opposed to minor characters on many more television channels' shows) to sustain the concept.
The Times used to sell years-old collections of previous puzzles, and once you figured out who Perle Mesta was, you could solve them. Those days are gone.
I remember giving new people at a new school my middle name. I wasn’t thrilled with my first name. But then I became a citizen, my father was doing the paperwork and told me I could change my name, new country, new name. I decided right there and then not to change it. And now I think it was the right thing and the first and last favorite thing ;-)
I have to confess, I don't understand what is meant by "GISINQFEU." Anyone want to help me out here?
Somebody, asking in the wrong place, wanted to know what "GISINQFEU" meant.
It's funny if you understand it, but the explanation will be plodding and unlikely to strike you as funny.
Rex Parker has been critical for years on his blog about the use of stupid strings of letters to fill in the squares in crossword puzzles. He'd like to see as little as possible of things like "gis," "inq," and "feu" — all of which were answers in today's puzzle. It doesn't much matter which clues the puzzle editor came up with to justify those stupid answers. The point is, puzzle constructors should work harder to make a grid out of real and interesting words.
It's Jerry Adair, Orioles second baseman back in the 60's.
Nobody could have complained if he had used "Boog" as a name, except my auto-correct, of course. It almost sounds like he assumes you are going to use a search engine to solve the puzzle, the same we the creator probably used a search engine to construct it.
Love and Death on Long Island is one of my favorite movies. John Hurt’s scene with the VCR is hilarious understated comedy. I didn’t know it was based on a novel, will have to consider a trip through the portal.
Rex Parker always sounds like a mashup of Rex Stout and Raymond B. Parker to me. So my image of Rex Parker is a man in a fedora smoking through a pack of cigarettes, cursing at the crossword, in a city that keeps its secrets.
Red Adair is cool, but actually when I hear the surname Adair, I immediately think of Ronald Adair, the murder victim in “The Adventure of the Empty House.”
Yes, I always imagined Rex Parker as a hard-boiled fictional detective, with a skinny mustache and an idiosyncratic cigarette holder.
It bothered me that the one Adair everyone knew was Red Adair, because I was Adair and I had red hair and (naturally) got called "Red" sometimes. I had this annoying feeling of that should be me while knowing, of course, it wasn't me, but it should be me.
a mashup of Rex Stout and Raymond B. Parker
A mashup of Raymond Chandler and Robert B. Parker, I presume?
I go to the Rex Morgan M.D. cell in my fading memory. It was (is?) a comic strip, one of those story line type they used to have back in the day. Haven't seen it in forever.
@campy -- Right. Duh. I probably wrote Raymond B. Parker because Raymond Chandler is also mixed up in my head with the other two. And I've actually read Raymond Chandler. The others two I just know by reputation.
In the immortal catchphrase of Vinny Barbarino...
On June 2, 1967, Adair was traded by the White Sox to the Boston Red Sox for Don McMahon and minor leaguer Bob Snow. Adair played well down the stretch with the Red Sox, hitting .291 with 3 homers and 26 RBI in 89 games, rounding out his season stats to .271 with 3 HR and 35 RBI in 117 games. With his pennant push performance at the plate, coupled with stellar defensive play, Adair finished 15th in the AL MVP balloting. Teammate Carl Yastrzemski won the award that year after claiming the elusive triple crown.
Wasn't Anna Dare one those Merry Pranksters?
like Fetchin' Gretchen the Slime Queen?
Not spoiling the puzzle is much appreciated. Our local paper prints it, but a week later. (And, not that it matters, it seemed like last week's was easier than normal.)
Adair is a good name. A very good name, even.
I used to be the secretary to the Manager of Production and the Manager of Drilling at a You-stin ohl bidness, and one of my bosses was a great personal friend of Red Adair.
When he first showed up at my desk and gave me his card, I buzzed my boss and said "Red uh-Dair" is here to see you. I am from Idaho. I had no idea who he was. They got such a laugh out of that. He told me his name, and pronounced it Ray-ud AY-dayer.
Then they told me stories of fighting ohl well fahrs. What a great day.
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