I don't know how old Adams is, but it's the usual stance over there, guest-blogger or no, to disparage the puzzle for skewing to the knowledge base of the old. Anyway, here's a (long!) sentence that focuses on the long answers in the middle of the puzzle:
Like, there's two old white dudes (LON CHANEY and DAVE CLARK, the latter of whom I've *never* heard of, and doubt most solvers my age or younger will know) anchoring those downs, along with PUNISHERS, which...eh, it's not the worst as far as roll-your-own -ER(S) forms go, and by definition *something* has to be the worst entry here, and it's perfectly serviceable in terms of holding the rest together (especially the across entries, which were much more fun comparatively speaking), but nobody's writing home about PUNISHERS.
The clue for "punishers" was "Disciplinarians, at times." The problem with that is that it's not much of a word, just one of those concocted words you can make with the power of the suffix "-er." And when you do that, you're a concocter! See how easy — and dumb — it is?
Now, let's get to the old white dude that Christopher Adams has never heard of. The clue was: "British pop star with more 'Ed Sullivan Show' appearances than the Beatles." Now, the clue tips you off that this performer is going to be at least mildly surprising. The Beatles are supremely famous, and their going on "The Ed Sullivan Show" is the most famous thing about "The Ed Sullivan Show." But Ed had his favorites, his repeat performers, and they were a lot more available than The Beatles.
If you were to ask me to name a performer who was on Ed's show more than The Beatles, I'd be the exclaimer of the name of a mouse: Topo Gigio. I looked it up and see that Topo Giogio comes in second only to a comedy duo I barely remember, Wayne & Schuster. W&S were on the show 58 times. The cute little mouse puppet was on 50 times. The musical performer who was on the most was an opera singer, Roberta Peters (41 times).
But the crossword clue narrows it down to British pop stars. It wouldn't really take that much to beat the Beatles, who were very conspicuous but only did the show 9 times. The answer was tricky for me because, even though I loved the British invasion and watched Ed Sullivan every week in those days, the clue suggests a solo performer, and the act was called The Dave Clark Five. Consequently, even when I had "CLARK" filled in and 4 blanks in front, I was racking my brain trying to think of a British pop star with the last name "Clark." (Petula Clark has too many letters, and Gene Clark was not British.)
So the clue was misleading. When it comes to groups, of course, I know The Dave Clark Five. There was a time when people discussed the question whether The Dave Clark Five were better than The Beatles — kind of a warm-up to the decades-long question whether The Rolling Stones were better than The Beatles. Anyway, The Dave Clark Five were on "The Ed Sullivan Show" 18 times, and NPR informs us that this was "more than any other rock, pop or R&B artist."
I question that assertion. Was Connie Francis not a pop star? She was on 26 times. Here she is doing "You Make Me Feel So Young" (in a way that might make you feel so old).
And here are The Dave Clark Five in one of their "Ed Sullivan Show" appearances. That's Dave on the drums, the only one of The Five who didn't have to do that ridiculous wide-stance bounce for the entire song:
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31 comments:
Curious if this triggered your Men in Shorts phobia?
I was just discussing this phenomenon (older crossword references) last week. The challenge crossword creators will face in the coming years is the atomization of culture in America. If you go back 20 years, most adults were exposed to the same TV shows, movies, and to a lesser extent, music. More recently, consumers can customize their culture consumption far more readily. Finding cultural references that are horizontally shared (across regions and classes) necessarily requires sacrificing vertical sharing (commonality across generations).
I compete in the NYT puzzle contest, and I’m continually stunned that under-30’s can possibly place well, given their generational disadvantage.
"Curious if this triggered your Men in Shorts phobia?"
LOL
Had to look back on it, but the optical illusion is hilarious once you see it
I guess I'm officially old(er) because I remember all of these people, including Wayne & Schuster. But I have always loved comedy acts, even as a kid, so I knew them all. It was a big deal when Ed Sullivan booked Wayne & Shuster, bringing them down from Canada to appear on his show. They were huge in Canada. Funny how many great Canadian comedians we've enjoyed over the years. People think a lot of things about Canadians- they're so nice, peaceful, welcoming, great hockey players, etc.- but you never hear, "I love Canadians because they're so damned funny!" Yet they've given us so many greats.
Back in the day, The Dave Clark Five was one of my favorite bands. Topo Gigio...would have been my guess for most appearances. You think Topo Gigio could make a go of it in today's kid market? Heh.
My favorite performer on the Sullivan Show was Jose Jiménez. “Oh, I hope not.”
Good thing Ed loved Wayne and Schuster.
Because nobody else did. With apologies to Temujin.
I've got a couple of books of NYT Sunday puzzles that I bought almost 50 years ago. Been doing them in airport lounges and waiting rooms since then.
Let's see how Christopher Adams does with those.
I thought Dave Clark was the keyboard player.
Who got one and done on Ed Sullivan? Elvis? (Not people whose Sullivan appearance was the highest point, but people who continued to be famous.)
I don't recall W & S or the opera singer at all (which is odd--ears not sophisticated enough I guess); Topo Gigio was replaced by Mickey Rat in the cultural pantheon.
Speaking of Canadian artists--any Robertson Davies fans hanging out here?
"The answer was tricky for me because, even though I loved the British invasion and watched Ed Sullivan every week in those days"
The Dave Clark era on Ed Sullivan was 1964 to 1970. Too long ago to remember a detail like "how many."
D. Clark occurred to me and I thought—-Heh, I didn't know that the New Year's Eve guy was British. So I put down DAVECLARK, and it worked out. Now I realize that my mind only created one memory box for the two guys Dave and Dick. It's a phenomenon that I notice often. My mind has, for example, only one box for Dustin Hoffman and Al Pacino for some reason. If I remember one I have trouble remembering the other. Same with Robert de Niro and —— See, I can't remember the other guy's name. Oh yea, it's Robert Duvall.
Huh. No one remembers the Shakespeare baseball sketch?
Don't forget creepy Senor Wences and the weird guy attached to his head!
The Byrds.
Narr said...
Who got one and done on Ed Sullivan? Elvis?
==============================================
Elvis appeared 3 times on Ed Sullivan. The Byrds and The Doors each only appeared once. David Crosby got into an argument with the show’s director about something and they never were invited back. For the Doors, they were asked to change some lyrics Sullivan deemed inappropriate for his younger audience members. Morrison refused to do so and as a result were never invited back.
While The Beatles appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show 9 times, they only appeared on the show live 3 times - Feb. 9, 1964, Feb. 16, 1964, and Sept. 12, 1965. Their Feb. 23, 1964, appearance was actually taped on Feb. 9, 1964, before their live appearance that night. All of their other appearances were via what they called “promotional films” that were filmed of individual songs beforehand in England, what today we call music videos. Interestingly, the Sept. 12, 1965, Ed Sullivan show was the last Sullivan show that was broadcast in black and white. At the end of that show, Sullivan announced that the following week his show would then be broadcast in color going forward.
Going back to David Crosby arguing with the Sullivan Show director on the Byrd’s only appearance - is there anyone on this planet who Crosby hasn’t pissed off that he has met?
I’ll always remember Topo Gigio for one appearance, in which he and Sullivan chatted. Topo says he expects to make a large amount of money in show business. Sullivan questions him. Can Topo sing? No. Can he dance? No. Can he act? No. So Sullivan asks him “Well, if you can’t sing, or dance, or act, how do you expect to make any money in show business?”
And the mouse innocently asks him, “How much to they pay you, Eddie?”
"(Petulia Clark has too many letters...)"
And when you spell her name incorrectly, it has even more letters. It's spelled P E T U L A.
The Dave Clark performance looks like a very early influence on Devo - turn the sound off and picture them doing Devo's version of "Satisfaction."
I am no expert, but I have designed puzzles and participated in discussions with other puzzle (and trivia) designers. The designers themselves tend to be older, and also realise that their audience trends older as well. See also the Bridge Hand features in papers. There are young bridge players, but...
Yet even beyond that there is the conscious decision not to have questions that are known only by a single decade's solvers. I have picked things from the 50s and 40's and even a very few from the 30's (I was born in '53), yet always those items that would transcend narrow categories from those eras and become general knowledge. While boxing was popular on TV in the 50s and even people who didn't follow it would have heard of twenty names, only a very few were remembered even twenty years later. Those are fair game.
So also with new information. It is not unfair to include hip-hop artists who have had some continuous fame over the last thirty years, because only people like me who consciously avoid popular culture would not have heard of them. (And with five sons, even I have heard of a few of those.) But if someone were big only from 2004-2006, even if they were gigantic then, they might not be a reasonable question.
Trivia games at the pub at the local college are different from the games at a pub a mile up the street, and should be.
Thanks for the detailed answer to my question, Scotty. The Ed Sullivan show was a fixture, like Welk, but three or four boys and/or cousins didn't sit still long for adult shows.
I was going through some WWII letters home at work once, and came across a GI writing from London about the entertainment--comedians and performers expected for the era, and the child Petula Clark. That brought me up (b. 1953)
When I was teaching history I came to realize how much 'common knowledge' is generational in nature.
“ And when you spell her name incorrectly, it has even more letters. It's spelled P E T U L A.”
LOL
Will fix
“ It is not unfair to include hip-hop artists who have had some continuous fame over the last thirty years…”
I know I get irritated by any requirement to know any movie or music folk from the last 25 years, but I would expect current stuff to be most common. And I do feel coddled by the endless use of names from the 60s and surrounding decades.
@Narr "any Robertson Davies fans hanging out here?"
I first read the Deptford Trilogy in the late 70s. I've re-read that and the Cornish Trilogy more than once (Salteron just didn't do anything for me.) I discovered Davies and Iris Murdoch around the same time, and both are still high on my (short) list of favorite authors.
I'm a Robertson Davies fan. I remember trying NY Times crosswords back in the 60's and not knowing being able to figure out any of the clues. My mother did the Sunday puzzle in ink but she had a copier in her office which attached to the house. Wordle is more my speed.
>>I know I get irritated by any requirement to know any movie or music folk from the last 25 years
That's our problem at pub trivia. Almost all the pop culture questions are from the last 25 years or so. You've got to have a youngun. We have a fairly decent one at the moment, even though he's 33 and is an Indian (Tamil family) who grew up in Singapore. We're still pretty weak on the music and sports, though I can sometimes get some of the older baseball questions or questions involving Chicago or Boston teams.
Apart from the youngun, we (mid to late 50s) are generally by far the oldest ones playing. On the plus side, the kids by and large know *nothing* about history (US or otherwise), geography (US or otherwise), literature (though we get burned on the all-too-frequent kiddie lit questions), mythology, etc. They're a little better on at least some of the science questions because the bar is close to the Longwood medical area and many have a medical background.
A week and a half ago I was chatting with some charming twenty-somethings sitting around the corner at the bar. One of the bonus categories was "this day in history." One of the questions was to name the man (don't remember whether he was further identified as an actor and comedian) who was married to Gracie Allen and had died on that date in the late 90s. I said to them: "You have no idea who Gracie Allen is/was, do you?" Not surprisingly, they didn't. I was a little more surprised that they had never heard of George Burns. When I was in my mid-20s, I knew tons about movies that had been made long before I was born, who had starred in them, etc. (including, you know, some with Gracie Allen).
On Althouse's spoilers, I forgot I hadn't quite finished the puzzle. I already had Lon Chaney. I struggled a bit with Dave Clark because I thought, for some reason, the clue related to a comedian. I didn't have "punishers" yet and don't know how easily I would have gotten it. Overall, I did a lot worse on this puzzle time-wise than I normally do.
Off to the Sunday puzzle . . .
--gpm
Oops, that should have been mid to late 60s, not 50s.
I should also confess that I missed a couple of letters on the Saturday crossword, which very rarely happens.
--gpm
Why don’t Americans do *cryptic* crosswords?
"So the clue was misleading."
Not only was Dave Clark not a solo act, he wasn't even the lead singer in his own band. Kinda like Manfred Mann or Alan Parsons, he was stuck in back while someone else got to pull the birds dancing in front of the stage.
According to the Wiki, Clark owned all the masters to the band's hits. Perversely, he allowed his catalog to go out of print, and refused to re-issue the records for almost 30 years, by which time most of his original audience had moved on. Why?? Talk about leaving money on the table!
"Wayne & Shuster ... were huge in Canada."
Growing up in Canada in the 1970s, there was a time when I thought the only showbiz acts on Canadian TV were Wayne & Shuster, The Pig and Whistle and The Irish Rovers. I thanked God and my parents for putting us 5 minutes from the US border so that I could watch American TV, which brought us such great U.S. acts as Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, Anne Murray and SCTV.
"any Robertson Davies fans hanging out here?"
The Deptford Trilogy was pretty much mandatory reading in Canadian high schools, or at least Fifth Business. As a result, I've read pretty much every novel the guy wrote.
After Davies died in 1995, he pretty much vanished from the curriculum and the culture. Too old, white and Anglo. I doubt one high school student out of a thousand would know of him today.
As for the original subject, I was a fan of the Times' Sunday puzzle and The Globe and Mail's Cryptic Crossword for a long time, but I haven't taken either of those papers for many years. After being reliable "sensible centrist" papers for decades, they lost their minds after 9/11, and abandoned me.
I was aware that Davies had died, which makes me a rare American, I think. IIRC most of my friends and their wives and/or girlfriends enjoyed them--not always the case with my recomendations.
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