Today's Sunday puzzle TRIANGULATION by Natan Last (answers) both delighted and annoyed me. According to Orange, this author is a Brooklyn high-school student who, at 17, is the youngest ever Sunday constructor. Congratulations!
Answers that include extraneous articles are starting to bug me. "Place for surfing" turned out to be THE NET. It wasn't even clued as "A place for surfing". Oh well, nobody else seems put off by this. My comprehensive knowledge of Tahitian served me well since I knew, ok guessed, that "good" must be MAI TAI. This is the first time the scary word SUDOKU has shown up in the Times and it was cleverly clued as "Numbers game" but a couple of lines below he added to the ERA count (now 253). "Bottom of the ___" had me thinking some kind of barrel for a long time. NINTH is only an ok answer, no better than any other low ordinal. I loved "Single, for one: Abbr." The answer is SYN. I had to think about that for a few moments.
I did like that it was both a circle and a rebus puzzle but I'm not crazy about the rebus letters. SIN, COS, and TAN aren't words, they're just calculator abbreviations. And if you think that's picky, wait for my next whine. I must be in a grumpy mood.
Here it is. "When the sun is directly overhead" is AT MIDDAY? Only if you're somewhere between the Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn on one of the two days of the year when it works out that way. Up here in Seattle the sun is never remotely directly overhead. A Freudian psychoanalyst would probably point out that the only reason I'm so critical today is that I got stuck and had to look some answers up. (And I'd better start watching TV, or at least The Simpsons, if I'm ever going to improve.)
