I finished the NYT faster today than earlier in the week, but I slipped three times in the SE. Scale for Sole pattern(I thought that was clever), Sports bar for BRA and end run for SKI run. The rearrangement of letters leads to words in most of the fill, but not LAGE. Good stuff(ing) for Turkey Day. Happy Thanksgiving to all.
PhillySolver | 11.26.08 - 10:16 pm | #

PS...isn't the word count very high today? I used your formula from yesterday's post, but it seemed too high, then I see an extra row!
PhillySolver | 11.26.08 - 10:21 pm | #

Loved the Sun puzzle!!! It took me a while to tumble to the rebus, though I should have known at BEVIES. It was the BALKS/KSWISS corner which did it for me too. What a laugh that the longest answers were unrelated -- unless Collins was opining that FELLINI and HIROHITO were for the birds...
ArtLvr | 11.27.08 - 7:54 am | #

p.s. I also enjoyed the last two very much, especially the Klahn with jokey answers formed by the addition of FE! My favorite -- THE FELINE IS BUSY, but they were all good ones. Happy Thanksgiving, everyone...
ArtLvr | 11.27.08 - 9:09 am | #

Amy, I have been tutoring a student in chemistry for the past few months.

Here are some tricky elements:

Hg
W
Sn
Fe
Sb

Great Thursday puzzle with a very tough SW

Steve
Steve Manion | 11.27.08 - 9:45 am | #

i uncovered the sun rebus at ... 1a, frank THOMAS--a gimme for baseball fans. it took only a little while to figure out where the extra letter went. still, ironing out the rest of it was tough. i tried LAYS instead of L[AN]DS at at 6a, but when i got to the NE corner and found another baseball gimme, BAL[KS], i suspected there needed to be an [AN] square.

the LAT puzzle has a lot of rather arcane football/soccer terminology. well, the football terms are arcane, and the soccer terms are commonplace, but most americans seem to know nothing about soccer. in football, a QUICK kick is when you punt before 4th down in an attempt to catch the other team by surprise. the last time i remember that happening in the NFL is when buddy ryan called for randall cunningham to do it when coaching the eagles some time in the early 90s. a DROP kick is a little-used rule nowadays but it's still allowed: instead of using a holder for place kicks, you can have the kicker drop the ball and then kick it off the bounce. doug flutie converted a DROP kick for an extra point for the patriots a couple of years ago. a FREE kick is what happens after a foul is committed in soccer, assuming the foul occurred outside the penalty area. the team that was fouled gets to kick the ball, but the defenders can stand ten yards away from the spot of the ball. they normally line up in a defensive "wall" between the ball and the goal if the foul occurred close enough for the attacking team to try to score directly from the free kick.

i took the periodic table quiz last week and got i think 77/118. i missed copper and zinc, embarrassingly, but got almost all of the actinides (!?). the transition elements and lanthanides got me.

my brother read some ITALO svevo stuff a few years ago. he said it was pretty good. i think he's probably the second-best novelist named ITALO.

happy thanksgiving, everyone!
joon | 11.27.08 - 11:32 am | #

ps--philly, the typical word count for a 15x16 is something like 82. today's was a little lower than usual, due to the stacks of ASIAMINOR/GINGERNUT and STARTEDUP/AUSTRALIA in the corners. unlike a 15x15, though, a 15x16 can have an odd word count and still maintain usual crossword symmetry, and this one did (79).
joon | 11.27.08 - 11:34 am | #

SVEVO means Swiss in Italian. I believe this is a pseudonym but I am not sure and have not had a chance to look it up. It makes his name mean SWISS ITALIAN. CALVINO's ITALO may be a given name but I am surmising.

I took a while with the NYT because I was looking for a different kind of theme and didn't trust the clues at first at all.
Zulema | 11.27.08 - 1:18 pm | #

It's my week to go slow and muddled my way through the LAT but did recognize all the soccer and football references. A Drop Kick is fun to watch since it is rarely done and difficult to do. Pinkish-Orange for Coral was a nice clue.
David | 11.27.08 - 3:05 pm | #