Paul Oberjuerge header image 2

Eight Letters: ‘Anachronistic’

September 16th, 2013 · 1 Comment · Newspapers

This perhaps should not surprise me.

Hoary clues in New York Times crosswords.

If you buy NYT crosswords by the book, as I do, 200 of them at a pop … well, some are certain to be less than modern.

(And I also doubt that all of these Sunday crosswords actually appeared in print, in NYT; do the math — 200 Sundays is almost four years, and at least 12 volumes are extant, so that’s 2,400 “Sundays”, which is 48 years … and God help me if they start asking me for LBJ’s transportation secretary.)

Turns out most of the puzzles, in Volume 7, are showing their age.

The word is … “outdated”.

To wit:

1. Transportation secretary Federico

2. 1995 college football champions

3. 1973 Charlton Heston sci-fi film

4. Army Vietnam group

5. 1971 Pan-American Games host city

6. “Blondie” character

7. 1969 Kingsley Amis novel

8. Rafsanjani’s land

9. Senor Ferrari player in “Casablanca”

10. 1990 Best Actress

11. One of the three rivers of Three Rivers Stadium

Those are actual clues to puzzle No. 87 of Volume 7 … and with some forensic sleuthing here, I am going to guess it was created at least a decade ago … and maybe closer to two decades.

Here are the answers.

1. Pena

2. Nebraska

3. Soylent Green

4. Green Berets

5. Cali (Colombia)

6. Elmo

7. Green Man

8. Iran

9. Sydney Greenstreet

10. Bates (Kathy)

11. Ohio.

Observations. Many of you probably have noticed that “cabinet” members seem prominent while they hold their jobs, and then they slip out of your mind almost immediately after leaving office. Federico Pena was in Bill Clinton’s cabinet, and Clinton hasn’t been president since January of 2001.

The 1995 college football champions? I love college football, but I couldn’t come up with “Nebraska” without some letters. Hardly anyone under the age of 50 has seen the movie Soylent Green or heard of the Green Berets. (The clue for the puzzle was “Color Me Irish”, by the way.)

Rafsanjani has not been Iran’s president since 1997, and Sydney Greenstreet died a very long time ago.

And I don’t know about you, but I rarely, if ever, associate movies with the years in which they appeared, and I would not have guessed Kathy Bates  (in Misery) if you’d given me 100 tries.

And the Ohio River? To know the answer to that clue, you have to know about a stadium (Three Rivers Stadium) that was blown up in 2001. So, the stadium, which has not existed for 12 years, did sit at the confluence of the Ohio and the Monongahela and Allegheny rivers. Of course. And Ebbets Field sat in Brooklyn.

So, yeah, NYT Sunday crosswords are hard enough … and then to throw in “everyday” clues from a day long gone … Well, it doesn’t make things easier.

Tags:

1 response so far ↓

  • 1 Doug // Sep 18, 2013 at 3:58 PM

    Yeah, I do crosswords and it is obvious they are skewed towards an older demographic. I would be surprised if many people under 50 bother with them.

Leave a Comment