Done with Ease

It took two constructors to stretch out the long E's in the May 11 Sunday puzzle by Tony Orbach and Patrick Blindauer (answers.) This is their third collaboration at the Times. Their previous joint effort was the clever Forward Thinking which didn't get a lot of blog coverage because it came out during the Crossword Tournament but was an excellent puzzle. Today's was more typical, sticking to a vowel substitution scheme of a sort not uncommon on Sundays, but it was still enjoyable.

AMEX was clued as "green card", a clue Mr. Blindauer has used before, but I love it. ARTURO got a non-Toscanini clue, referring this time to Arturo Sandoval. The smiling face belongs to Lauren TEWES. Can you look at that photo without hearing her TV theme song? Yeah, sorry about that. You can only get it out of your head by humming It's a Small World After All but then you can never stop that song from banging around in your head. "The less you see of this person, the better" is a splendid clue for DIETER. Otherwise it felt like standard Sunday crossword fare for me. Nothing wrong with that.

Comments

[PhillySolver]

Thanks guys for the Sunday fun. It took awhile and now I want to know if axions would have been ok where ANIONS went. I have heard of axions and since I had educe instead of EDUCT, I created the new strong chemical bond called resoxane. At least I corrected newthing for NESTLING. I was thinking immigration for green card and hops and stuff for brewing, but those worked out. I am glad some of the obscure names worked out through crosses and despite the error, the last area to fall was the AFLAT ARP (tried an E) just to show the music lesson didn't stick very well. Sorry Jim.

[Linda G]

I don't get the TEAM DUNCAN answer. Is Tim Duncan someone I should know about? Thought maybe I had something wrong there...but all of my answers check out.

ABANDONED SHEEP was my favorite.

[JimH]

I didn't know who Tim Duncan was either; I just assumed he must be someone.

Turns out he's a basketball player.

[PhillySolver]

Duncan Yo Yo company popularized the sport in the post WWII era. My father was a local Duncan Yo Yo champion. When I played with them in the early 1950's a Duncan was considered the Cadillac of the equipment.

[KarmaSartre]

I don't know the TV theme songs you mention, but I get the concept. In '04 I heard (ex-) poet laureate Billy Collins speak at Benaroya Hall in Seattle (sold out - a poet filled up the concert hall!). He said there were three miserable songs he could not get out of his head for the rest of the day: Tainted Love, Build Me Up Buttercup, and More Than a Woman to Me. The only solution that worked for him was to await a new day.

Odd seeing JANOS without his Starker. Interesting that 3.9 is identifiable as a GPA, but other numbers, say 1.8, not so much. Perhaps they're rarely mentioned? Pi would make an interesting GPA.

@Phlly -- Incredible! I have been meaning to ask if you are related to JoeSolver, the famous YoYo champ.

[joon]

sundries:

tim duncan--yes, you should know this basketball player. he's probably one of the ten greatest players of all time, and has won four championships in his ten NBA seasons, all with the san antonio spurs. he's more famous than duncan yo-yos, i'll say. (google backs me up on this one, as "tim duncan" out-hits "duncan yo-yo"+"duncan yo-yos" by about 2 million to 15 thousand.)

AXIONS might have been a reasonable answer, except that nobody is quite sure if axions exist. they are hypothetical particles that some physicists think would resolve the strong CP problem in quantum chromodynamics. a friend of mine got his PhD working on an axion detection experiment (and has since moved on to making a killing on wall street). anyway, axions are not, i would say, part of your everyday electrolysis in chem lab. ANIONS, on the other hand, are simply negatively charged ions.

pi can't be a GPA, as GPAs are calculated by averaging rational numbers (like 4.0 and 3.5, or 3.3 in some places for e.g. a B+. pi is a transcendental number, which means you can't ever get it by doing sums/products/roots of rational numbers. (of course, 3.14 is a perfectly reasonable GPA. but that's not pi.)