Today's NYT puzzle

[rhu]

Didn't much care for today's puzzle.

{Mean crossword clue writer's challenge to solvers?} for TRYGOOGLINGTHIS?!? If qaqaq had used that for the Wacky Weekend Warrior, I'd have smiled. Or if it were Thursday and it was part of a theme, I could accept it. But in a themeless? Feh. The only thing I can hope is that a bunch of bloggers will complain about it and it'll be perfectly Googlable by the time the puzzle appears in syndication. Ha!

{Unimpeachable} for BEYONDSUSPICION threw me for a long time. I had BEYONDCRITICISM, but I'm more used to "above" suspicion than "beyond."

My favorite clue, though, was {Fortune 500 company whose toll-free number ends with 23522}. Since I love creating phone number mnemonics, I was able to get that first.

And it was nice to see Molly PICON show up; Zamir has done many songs that she made famous, including her signature song Abi Gezint ("If you have your health"). It also brings back fond memories of listening to Art Raymond on WEVD radio after school; he played an amazing assortment of Jewish music --- Yiddish, Israeli pop, liturgical, parodies, you name it, he played it --- and he often mentioned the Molly Picon room at the Second Avenue Deli.

Comments

[mabfan.livejournal.com]

Molly PICON was one of the ones I got without a problem.

[rikchik.livejournal.com]

The Fortune 500 clue is cute - I got it (just now, I don't do the crossword) by typing it into my phone, which did not give the answer but got close enough (I got the first 5 letters of a word meaning "next to").

[saxikath]

I agree with your reaction to this puzzle. TRYGOOGLINGTHIS was blech. BEYONDSUSPICION is odd to me too. And I was very surprised to see ETHNICCLEANSING; borderline on the breakfast-table test for me. There were also a lot of just blah fill, some with weird cluing.

[qaqaq.livejournal.com]

Borderline? To me, that was worse than when SWASTIKA appeared a few years ago.

True story: as I was solving, I said aloud "This is the worst entry ever" as I filled in 17A ... and then I said, "No, THIS is the worst entry ever!" when I hit 11D.

Plus there was all the lousy fill -- something like 10 abbreviations, plus OGOD, ISE, NARD, ILEA, THIOL, and so on. Just yuck.

[elainetyger.livejournal.com]

It was an unremarkable puzzle. Last night, I noticed that 3 people on my friends list had something to say about it, so I solved it right before bedtime and didn't find it anything special, then came back to read the blogs in the morning.

When I saw 17A, I thought there might be a clever theme, like trivia that you could solve with Google, but only 57A fit that very well, so to me it was just a little disappointing rather than outright terrible.