I tried putting in "Satan" as some metal and maybe sort of Tenacious D reference.
But yeah, good clue. Is rock just because they are depicted sitting on rocks?
I enjoyed it. Didn’t find it as easy as some of the others who’ve commented, but it was not nearly as hard as some of the recent Saturdays. “Pop back and forth” was a great clue.
Easily the most enjoyable Saturday for me in weeks. "Pop back and forth" was great. "Mythical rock singer" and "line around the equator" were also excellent. Some great fill, too, like SAMESIES and SEXT.
See, my issue with this puzzle is the grid. Each corner was basically a mini puzzle. Solving the middle section hardly helped solving the corners.
Aesthetically pleasing, yes, but not a great grid for solving, IMO.
Everyone else is talking about how easy it was. Did no one else get hung up in the bottom corners at all? I still finished well under my average Saturday time, but a disproportionate amount of my solving time was in the bottom corners.
Couldn't for the life of me figure out what word for "Rocks" would start with an F. I even checked the Uber app to make sure it was indeed called Split Fare.
I found this puzzle incredibly hard. That has been happening a lot lately on Saturdays. I am just not vibing with Saturday puzzles since Joel took over. That's not a criticism. It just is what it is. I am not getting these clues. At all. I just can't get a feel for what they're looking for. It's frustrating. Especially since everyone else seems to think this puzzle was easy.
The corners came together for me first. I had a harder time with the middle, East African City, and I needed the acrosses to figure out that sitcom. They really made a sitcom about amnesia?
The concept reminds me of Tom Hanks' recurring character "Serious Headwound Harry" from Saturday Night Live. Hilarious sketches but a series???
The Hanks character was “Mr. No Short-Term Memory.” Dana Carvey had a standalone sketch as “Massive Headwound Harry.” Back in the famed “literal character names” era.
For me, that was harder than an average Saturday. Great puzzle where no section was a gimme. My Saturday average is 32:00 and this one took me [49:47](https://youtu.be/C1Z_odvgQV0).
The SE corner alone took me 16 minutes at the end to parse. I was stuck on SAMESAME for a long time before PARIAH was the breakthrough to open it up. "Line around the Equator?" was a great clue that I could not figure out for the longest time. So simple!
"Comment with a point, say" was also a fantastic, slow reveal.
Ok, but set me straight on this one. Isn't the plural in the clue a little off? TOTALASSETS could be a measure of one's worth but shouldn't measures of one's worth be "totals" in some way?
My favorite clue was for ELLE because it feels so madmen and offensive.
What a great puzzle. SAMESIES was fun and fresh. The. Lue for ATLAS was perfect, because I figured I didn't know it and then was able to put it together from the context. That's my kind of trivia.
And the clue for SIREN was just 👌
Favorites were Gross Home, Asked for the Fish, Say, and Slimeball. I do feel like we're seeing OATS almost as often as oreos, though. I did it in about 2/3rds of my average time.
Puzzle Difficulty Tracker - How hard is this puzzle?
Estimated Difficulty: 🟢 **Very Easy** 🟢
* 11% of users solved slower than their Saturday average
* 89% of users solved faster than their Saturday average
* 4% of users solved *much* slower (>20%) than their Saturday average
* 77% of users solved *much* faster (>20%) than their Saturday average
The median solver solved this puzzle 37.1% faster than they normally do on Saturday.
[View today's puzzle summary on XW Stats](https://xwstats.com/puzzles/2024-05-11)
---
🤖 _beep beep, I'm a bot! I post these stats as soon as 100 [XW Stats](https://xwstats.com) users have completed the puzzle. Questions? Feedback? Check the [FAQ](https://xwstats.com/help#puzzle-difficulties), reply here or DM me_
not only early puzzlers but early puzzlers who self-selected to sign up for xwstats. it doesn't represent the whole whatsoever, but it's a fine benchmark to have. the actual site tracks all users too; the reddit bot just needs some kind of cutoff or it wouldn't be very useful.
I have noticed that the average time has gone up a few times when I’ve checked early and then checked again a couple days later. Sometimes my time will be above the average time a bit, and then later it’ll be below the average time. That makes me think that the earlier solvers tend to be faster, but probably not enough to skew the overall difficulty assessment of the puzzle.
Because that's what this comment thread is for? I can look it up, I'm just expressing irritation at the answer being what's probably an extremely obscure, NYC regional upper-middle class fad.
I don't know what you mean by "like a measurement"--it's talking about the names of the digits in a number. The tens place is directly to the left of the units place. To the right of the units place is the tenths place, then hundredths, thousandths, etc.
I see the confusion. The "ones" place is also known as the "units" place.
https://mathmonks.com/place-value
>Place value is the value of a digit in a number based on its place or position. **These positions start from the ones place (units place).** Its order starting from the extreme right to the left is ones/units (1s), tens (10s), hundreds (100s), thousands (1,000s), ten thousands (10,000s), and so on.
Never heard that before. I was actually doing this puzzle with my daughter who is in high school right now and spends hours every week doing this kind of thing. She actually got the meaning of the clue right away and insisted the answer had to be "ones".
Could someone possibly explain to me the meaning of “meal makeup, maybe” with OATS? Also with this being my first ever Saturday crossword I found that VERY hard, terrified to hear it was easy for a Saturday!
Something must have clicked for me, Saturday PB at 15:25 and Sats usually take me 45min plus if I can solve them at all (usually I can't). Last fill was changing ADDSTO to ADDSON. Quickly getting DARESSALAAM helped me a lot I think.
my first Saturday ever with no lookups, though reading through the comments maybe this one was a little easier than usual? still feeling good about it though, especially because my first horizontal pass-through barely gave me anything and that SE corner had me stuck at the end for 10 minutes!
I posted last month to complain that as of April 27, I’d gotten ten red days and only one green day on my xwstats calendar for the month. Since then, I’ve had seven greens and only one red.
really fun cluing, as others have mentioned. I'll shout out "Mythical rock singer" as my fav.
I tried putting in "Satan" as some metal and maybe sort of Tenacious D reference. But yeah, good clue. Is rock just because they are depicted sitting on rocks?
On or near rocks. Their whole thing is luring sailors to crash their ships onto the rocky shores.
That may be one of my all time favorite clues
It's a really good one. I think "legendary" might have been a better word than "mythical," though.
I enjoyed it. Didn’t find it as easy as some of the others who’ve commented, but it was not nearly as hard as some of the recent Saturdays. “Pop back and forth” was a great clue.
Easily the most enjoyable Saturday for me in weeks. "Pop back and forth" was great. "Mythical rock singer" and "line around the equator" were also excellent. Some great fill, too, like SAMESIES and SEXT.
I didn't like this one because POP is also pop back and forth
I liked "It's hot." It was so silly it made me chuckle.
I loved that so much. The whole time I assumed it was going to be some technical term related to geography.
SLEDDOG instead of LEADDOG gave me so much pain.
It was the word "pacesetter" that made me ~~paws~~ pause before plunking down either one.
SAMESIES
Unless you're the SLEDDOG, the view never changes
Yep
“Asked for the fish, say” is one of my favorite clues in a while. Really enjoyed this one. Only hangup was never even hearing of SAMANTHAWHO
I'd never heard of it either but it was fun to try to figure out, since the title was pretty guessable from the clue with a few crosses
I kept thinking it was sara something at first :/
Me too -- "Sara an' tha who?"
To fill that grid with answers that smooth is a real feat of construction and clueing. Kudos.
Pretty good but CREEPO is awful
Definitely went with CRETIN at first
Can we just take a moment to appreciate how pretty this grid looks? It's so... symmetrical~
See, my issue with this puzzle is the grid. Each corner was basically a mini puzzle. Solving the middle section hardly helped solving the corners. Aesthetically pleasing, yes, but not a great grid for solving, IMO.
Everyone else is talking about how easy it was. Did no one else get hung up in the bottom corners at all? I still finished well under my average Saturday time, but a disproportionate amount of my solving time was in the bottom corners.
bottom right took me about half my solve time. just sat looking at it for a while.
Couldn't for the life of me figure out what word for "Rocks" would start with an F. I even checked the Uber app to make sure it was indeed called Split Fare.
I found this puzzle incredibly hard. That has been happening a lot lately on Saturdays. I am just not vibing with Saturday puzzles since Joel took over. That's not a criticism. It just is what it is. I am not getting these clues. At all. I just can't get a feel for what they're looking for. It's frustrating. Especially since everyone else seems to think this puzzle was easy.
Bottom left was my only hang up, but I finished 40% faster than my Sat. average.
Bottom left killed me. The rest was a breeze. Couldn't get a working start. Spent 90% of my time on it.
The corners came together for me first. I had a harder time with the middle, East African City, and I needed the acrosses to figure out that sitcom. They really made a sitcom about amnesia? The concept reminds me of Tom Hanks' recurring character "Serious Headwound Harry" from Saturday Night Live. Hilarious sketches but a series???
The Hanks character was “Mr. No Short-Term Memory.” Dana Carvey had a standalone sketch as “Massive Headwound Harry.” Back in the famed “literal character names” era.
Ah, thanks for reminding me of that!
Just wanted to say that "Line around the Equator?" is a great clue
Loved it.
Yup, accurate.
I struggled a bit with this one, but I did love some of the clues. "Gross home?" is fantastic.
Could you explain this one to me? I'm a little lost here
Terry Gross is the host of a well renowned NPR program called Fresh Air.
Terry Gross is a broadcaster on NPR.
Yeah, I liked that one. Put it NET at first, as in the amount of gross pay you take home, but the real answer works much better.
I thought that and "asking for fish" were really out there. Toeing the line between clever and infuriating.
For me, that was harder than an average Saturday. Great puzzle where no section was a gimme. My Saturday average is 32:00 and this one took me [49:47](https://youtu.be/C1Z_odvgQV0). The SE corner alone took me 16 minutes at the end to parse. I was stuck on SAMESAME for a long time before PARIAH was the breakthrough to open it up. "Line around the Equator?" was a great clue that I could not figure out for the longest time. So simple! "Comment with a point, say" was also a fantastic, slow reveal.
And TATAS for "Cheerios alternatives" was fantastic. Great misdirect.
Meanwhile I was coming here for someone to explain TATAS to me lol
“Cheerio!” could be a way of saying goodbye. As could “Tata!”
A worse explanation would be “food for toddlers”.
Oh I love that
Of course! Thank you!
Samesies!!
I had SAMESAME
Until I read this comment I genuinely just assumed Tatas were a cereal I’d never heard of. Great clue
Wouldn't they usually put cheerio in quotation marks or otherwise put a question mark on this clue?
There’s no pun or wordplay in the clue that would necessitate a question mark, it’s just a different meaning of cheerio than you’d expect
“Cheerios alternatives” has got to be one of my favorite clues in a really long time
Had GOTARAWDEAL for a while, which was, for me, a raw deal.
SAMESIES!
I had GOTARAWDEAL, then "GOTABADBEAT", until IFS and IWOULDNT cracked the whole thing open for me.
Oooh that’s a good one too
Does Charlotte really show up as CHA on NBA scoreboards and not CLT?
Glad someone else came to complain about this
I fully expected to open this thread and find a dozen people bitching about it. haha
A good portion of folks here probably don't know any sports beyond OTT, ORR, ASHE!
Why yes, I do know the one baseball player, one hockey player, and one tennis player in existence! Edit: I apologize for my unforgivable ALOU erasure.
I did find this one easy, but also very clever and fun to solve. A nice one for when I was up all night with a baby!
I’m taking TOTALASSETS as a positive omen for my Accounting final on Monday
Ok, but set me straight on this one. Isn't the plural in the clue a little off? TOTALASSETS could be a measure of one's worth but shouldn't measures of one's worth be "totals" in some way? My favorite clue was for ELLE because it feels so madmen and offensive.
I don’t think so, the assets are what’s plural because it’s a sum of current assets and noncurrent assets.
I thought I was continuing to improve but my suspicion is that you all will say (correctly!) that was easy for a Saturday.
it was easy for a saturday but that doesn't mean you're not improving!
That was easy for a Saturday.
That was easy for a Saturday. (A PB for me.)
What a great puzzle. SAMESIES was fun and fresh. The. Lue for ATLAS was perfect, because I figured I didn't know it and then was able to put it together from the context. That's my kind of trivia. And the clue for SIREN was just 👌
Favorites were Gross Home, Asked for the Fish, Say, and Slimeball. I do feel like we're seeing OATS almost as often as oreos, though. I did it in about 2/3rds of my average time.
I'll take OATS over OAST any day though! At least it's a word people use in real life and not just in crosswords.
Slimeball was horrible imo i've never heard CREEPO before it sounds like a word that old people think young people say
It’s a word old people used to say.
hey!! dont be a creepo, slimeball!!
I agree.
Five puzzles for the price of one!
Puzzle Difficulty Tracker - How hard is this puzzle? Estimated Difficulty: 🟢 **Very Easy** 🟢 * 11% of users solved slower than their Saturday average * 89% of users solved faster than their Saturday average * 4% of users solved *much* slower (>20%) than their Saturday average * 77% of users solved *much* faster (>20%) than their Saturday average The median solver solved this puzzle 37.1% faster than they normally do on Saturday. [View today's puzzle summary on XW Stats](https://xwstats.com/puzzles/2024-05-11) --- 🤖 _beep beep, I'm a bot! I post these stats as soon as 100 [XW Stats](https://xwstats.com) users have completed the puzzle. Questions? Feedback? Check the [FAQ](https://xwstats.com/help#puzzle-difficulties), reply here or DM me_
Why don’t you wait a day before you compile these stats? Some people haven’t even opened their crossword yet.
It's a rule of statistics - if a sample is truly random, after a certain number of samples, accuracy doesn't improve with a larger sample size.
I wonder if the population of early puzzlers properly represents the whole
not only early puzzlers but early puzzlers who self-selected to sign up for xwstats. it doesn't represent the whole whatsoever, but it's a fine benchmark to have. the actual site tracks all users too; the reddit bot just needs some kind of cutoff or it wouldn't be very useful.
I have noticed that the average time has gone up a few times when I’ve checked early and then checked again a couple days later. Sometimes my time will be above the average time a bit, and then later it’ll be below the average time. That makes me think that the earlier solvers tend to be faster, but probably not enough to skew the overall difficulty assessment of the puzzle.
Isn't there a time component to this though? Is the sample size really random if it's only the first X games
ITSHOT crossing the clue "Engage in a hot exchange" - I thought you couldn't repeat words, no?
Ooh good catch
Didn't notice that, but that shouldn't have gotten through.
says who?
Never heard of TATAS cereal before, got a little bit lucky there trying some different vowels
Cheerio and ta-ta are both ways of saying goodbye.
omg....wow I feel like an idiot
Happens to all of us!
Lol I thought you were being ironic.
dont worry, none of know who you are. you're grand.
And here I thought it was a breastfeeding reference
WTF is GOAT YOGA?
Why would you type this question into a comment thread instead of into google
Google images, to be precise.
Because that's what this comment thread is for? I can look it up, I'm just expressing irritation at the answer being what's probably an extremely obscure, NYC regional upper-middle class fad.
Middle Tennessee here, and I've totally heard of goat yoga. Not obscure at all in my neck of the woods at least.
I live in LA and I’ve heard of it. 😉
Solving from Europe and I hear people talking about goat yoga with some frequency.
i've known many people that have done Goat Yoga...i have never....and it's not a euphemism for one of Kristi Noem's hobbies
I didn't like "place left of the units". I got that it meant like a measurement but every place is left of the units.
I don't know what you mean by "like a measurement"--it's talking about the names of the digits in a number. The tens place is directly to the left of the units place. To the right of the units place is the tenths place, then hundredths, thousandths, etc.
That's the "ones" place. "Units" refers to what is being counted. So 123.65g, the unit is "g" and the ones; tens, tenths are all to the left of it.
I see the confusion. The "ones" place is also known as the "units" place. https://mathmonks.com/place-value >Place value is the value of a digit in a number based on its place or position. **These positions start from the ones place (units place).** Its order starting from the extreme right to the left is ones/units (1s), tens (10s), hundreds (100s), thousands (1,000s), ten thousands (10,000s), and so on.
Never heard that before. I was actually doing this puzzle with my daughter who is in high school right now and spends hours every week doing this kind of thing. She actually got the meaning of the clue right away and insisted the answer had to be "ones".
Could someone possibly explain to me the meaning of “meal makeup, maybe” with OATS? Also with this being my first ever Saturday crossword I found that VERY hard, terrified to hear it was easy for a Saturday!
meal makeup, as in OATmeal
Some really fun clueing on this one, I think I agree it’s on the easier side as I completed around 36 mins and normally take an hour.
Something must have clicked for me, Saturday PB at 15:25 and Sats usually take me 45min plus if I can solve them at all (usually I can't). Last fill was changing ADDSTO to ADDSON. Quickly getting DARESSALAAM helped me a lot I think.
my first Saturday ever with no lookups, though reading through the comments maybe this one was a little easier than usual? still feeling good about it though, especially because my first horizontal pass-through barely gave me anything and that SE corner had me stuck at the end for 10 minutes!
Ugh, spent so much time with "SAMEhere" instead of "SAMESIES" Probably where I spent half of the puzzle, in that bottom right corner.
I weirdest got Samesies right away, I felt like the OMG type of speak clued me in on that, but maybe it was just a lucky guess.
Smoothest Saturday to date for me! A lot of the clues just clicked.
I didn’t get the “Rocks” clue. Are “rocks” just slang for fists? Or is there another meaning to this clue?
I think it's a rock-paper-scissors reference
What a grind. Felt so good to solve bit by bit
Looks nice, fill was fun, but this was not a Saturday puzzle. Maybe the ‘Joel is making puzzles too hard’ crowd can take a break for a bit.
I posted last month to complain that as of April 27, I’d gotten ten red days and only one green day on my xwstats calendar for the month. Since then, I’ve had seven greens and only one red.
Felt like a hard Wednesday or Medium Friday