Both ELEANOR RIGBY and MR. WIZARD make their NYT puzzle debuts in today's Saturday, July 26 puzzle (answers) by Barry C. Silk. Mr. Silk seems to be a crossword machine. This is his ninth puzzle this year. The last one was less than a week ago — last Sunday's chess problem.
The Beatles clue worked perfectly for me: "title woman of song who lives in a dream." I read the clue, saw the word song, and by they time I got to "lives in a dream," four musical notes floated through my head. After a few moments of da-da-da-DA-ing the title hit me. It's so satisfying when a puzzle pulls a dormant factoid out of your memory like that.
This crossword is appropriately Saturday tough. So, for example, how familiar are you with your sub-Saharan antelopes? Sure, you got your oribis and your dik-diks, but what's that one in the picture again? Oh, right, a RHEBOK. There's a shoe company that got its name from a variation of that spelling.
MOUE is an odd word. It means a pouting or, I suppose, an "unhappy face." Pronounce it moo. I've already whined that B MOVIES aren't necessarily bad, but I accept that I’m on the losing side of this battle against current usage.
The 1966 Pulitzer-winning poet is Richard EBERHART. His experience with the horrors of Word War II made him wonder, "Was man made stupid to see his own stupidity?" At the other end of the cultural scale, VANNA apparently holds the record for TV clapping. What an honor.
Since this is Saturday, "ready to be put to bed" didn't even have a question mark and we had to figure out it was TYPESET. So when I got to "players with saving accounts?" and saw that question mark, I knew it had to be an interesting clue. If you've ever sat next to a GOALIE in the bar after a big game, you know they like to relive every blocked shot as they suck back Molson Canadians. It's a great clue. It's an excellent puzzle.