Tough to Grasp
SATURDAY PUZZLE — This is a beautiful and imposing grid from John Hawksley, who has constructed three previous puzzles for The Times, and they all have interesting geometry. This one’s wide-open center, composed of stacks of five 11-word entries in both the acrosses and the downs, is quite a centerpiece, and nine of those 10 entries are debuts.
It would be understandable if a solver picked around the edges of a grid like this for a while, wouldn’t it? That was my approach, anyway; I needed to fill in all of the chunky corners, which are a little gentler than the center, to get a few crossing letters on which to base another stage of attack.
Tricky Clues
31A. Would it help if I told you that the “Roman statesman for whom a Midwest city was named” got his own name from the Latin for “chili on spaghetti?” Just kidding, and the real meaning would have been no use to me, at least: CINCINNATUS means “having curly hair.” Cincinnati was known as Losantiville until 1790, and was renamed after a society founded to preserve the ideals of the American Revolution.
32A. This is magnificent wordplay, especially if you get to it after solving 24A, because the two clues are nearly twins. 24A, “Find time for,” is straightforward: GET TO. That deadpan entry suggested to me that 32A, “Finds a time for, in a way,” might be similarly workaday. Instead, the answer is a high-minded pun for a technique that determines the age of organic matter, CARBON DATES. (Do you wonder if scientists still use carbon-14 dating? It was developed in the 1940s but still prevails, with improvements.)
Source: The New York Times
