One of the Culkin brothers was actually a doorman in my building for some time. Weird dude, that one.
John | 08.30.07 - 10:38 pm | #

Amy,

Hess is a large independent oil company and has 1,250 service stations (yeah, I looked it up... what do you mean I should get a life?) on the East coast.

-Dave
David Gates | 08.30.07 - 10:55 pm | #

Whew. Very much one-word-at-a-time, and very few giveaways-- but ultimately doable. I had SNEAKERS for GYMSHOES, FAB/FAT for FAN, REDOAK for REDELM, ... the list goes on... and on...
Matt | 08.31.07 - 6:55 am | #

I've had that happen in the applet on occasion.. I think the difficulty of this puzzle left it sputtering. (My app didn't do that this time, whatever my time was, is exactly what it was. This one squished me a bit - I'm not as competetive ;) ).

Why am I getting a Byron-esque vibe again for tomorrow's puzzle? Can you imagine what that's going to be? A puzzle with all one-word clues? One where most of the clues reference others? ("With 5-Across, a 14-Down" etc.) Maybe all clues written backwards and in Icelandic? Have a feeling we're in for a crunchy one.
Howard B | 08.31.07 - 7:27 am | #

It was a good tough puzzle. Definitely seemed Saturdayish to me.
Gary (garymac9) | 08.31.07 - 4:00 pm | #

re: BEEPER STING ... fwiw, the clinicians I work with here in the Medical School still wear pagers, especially when they're on call. I don't know anybody else who still carries one, though!
Jeff A | 08.31.07 - 5:20 pm | #

Spotted this letter in today's Sydney Morning Herald and thought the Fiend Team may get a giggle:

Andrew Woodhouse's blond comments (Heckler, August 31) remind me of my daughter's experience in Manhattan. While waiting to be changed from brunette to blonde she was doing The New York Times crossword. On completion of the transition her hairdresser, pointing to the puzzle, said: "Well you won't be able to do that any more."

Louise Luscombe St Ives

Cheers -
DA | Homepage | 08.31.07 - 6:11 pm | #

Besides still selling gas, Hess stations have an annual toy truck that comes out in November. They are quite sought after (for example, by my nephews), and have been in the clues for HESS in a few puzzles recently, one of the clues even included their metal composition.
Jan (danjan) | 08.31.07 - 6:42 pm | #

I have felt extremely dense since about 10:00 EDT, yesterday. I got killed by NYT, mortally wounded by NYS, beaten badly by LAT, and told by CHE that my mother was a hamster and my father smelled of elderberries.

HESS has been showing up a lot lately, seems to me. I had it show up in a fill I was working on about 4 months ago, so I checked the CRUCI database and saw that it had shown up a fair number of times (the db currently shows 85 hits going back to the beginning), but I'm thinking I must have seen it a good half-dozen times or more in just the last three or four weeks.

My comment about the NYS puzzle is that it was quite well constructed, in general, but that it seems to me that the theme was implemented in a way that all of the CRU experts tell us newcomers not to: Of the seven theme clues, the first four and the seventh had the double letter in the first position, while the the fifth one had it in the middle and the sixth one in the last position. Between that and the lack of any symmetric placement of the double letters or even theme entries, I felt moved at the end to cry "not fair," less because of my inability to cope as a solver than because I've read Stan's book and Nancy's entries in the Sage Advice section on the Cruciverb site, and found myself thinking, "Hey! They wouldn't let me do that!" I realize I'd be whining a lot less if I'd taken 10 fewer minutes to solve the puzzle, and that some of the consistency and symmetry rules, like many of the rules of writing, can be let slide on purpose by an expert who knows what they're doing, in a way that a newcomer to the field can't.

Oh, no. It's almost 10 again....

Russell
Russell Brown | Homepage | 08.31.07 - 8:10 pm | #

If a theme is limiting enough, other limiters like "all the modifications must be to the first letter of the phrase" or "they should all be proper names" or whatever become less important. "Two-word phrases that differ by one letter, and that when you take those two letters in order of appearance also appear in another phrase as individual letters (as, say, initials or an abbreviation)" turns out to be pretty constraining all on its own. Then you try to fit all those nonsymmetric pairs into a symmetric grid and whoo boy.
Francis | Homepage | 09.03.07 - 1:08 pm | #

Thank you, thank you! I have just started in the New York Times world of crosswords. Learning curve... Appreciate the insight on this very puzzle.

M
Michelle | 10.30.07 - 10:19 pm | #