I started today's Saturday NYT crossword by filling in KOOLAIDMAN for Ad pitcher who's really a pitcher, but I had my doubts. MRKOOLAID sounded better to me, but that didn't have enough letters, and the one crossing answer I had in mind for 1 Down, Dawdling sorts (POKES) seemed sort of lame, too. I was pretty sure I was headed for reinking something up in the upper left hand corner, but it wasn't clear what it was.
So off I went to the lower right corner, where I suffered my first reinking after writing in SPECIATION for Evolutionary process. The answer was ADAPTATION, instead. I've noticed that I tend to get into trouble with clues from areas that I know the most about (Math, Computer Science, & science in general), maybe because I can think of lots of words that work, and can't tell what the "most known" ones are. Another clue in this general category that I had trouble with in a recent puzzle was Verify, as a password (7), for which I could think of various technical words such as DECRYPT and the wrong-length answer HASHCODE, none of which I could manage to force from the front of my mind, stupidly (anyone ever actually use "hashcode" as verb? I don't think so...it's always just "hash" instead, but still, kind of a nice usage); the answer was simply REENTER.
Later, in the lower left corner, and wanting to be done so that I could watch the Stanford UCLA basketball game, I guessed the pair of crossing answers
DEPARTURE for Terminal offering and
EYES for They're near temples.
Instead, the answers are RENTALCAR and EARS.
So, more reinking there, but the upper left corner ended up being OK, after all. Done:
So off I went to the lower right corner, where I suffered my first reinking after writing in SPECIATION for Evolutionary process. The answer was ADAPTATION, instead. I've noticed that I tend to get into trouble with clues from areas that I know the most about (Math, Computer Science, & science in general), maybe because I can think of lots of words that work, and can't tell what the "most known" ones are. Another clue in this general category that I had trouble with in a recent puzzle was Verify, as a password (7), for which I could think of various technical words such as DECRYPT and the wrong-length answer HASHCODE, none of which I could manage to force from the front of my mind, stupidly (anyone ever actually use "hashcode" as verb? I don't think so...it's always just "hash" instead, but still, kind of a nice usage); the answer was simply REENTER.
Later, in the lower left corner, and wanting to be done so that I could watch the Stanford UCLA basketball game, I guessed the pair of crossing answers
DEPARTURE for Terminal offering and
EYES for They're near temples.
Instead, the answers are RENTALCAR and EARS.
So, more reinking there, but the upper left corner ended up being OK, after all. Done:
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