The Tuesday Sun

SPOILER WARNING: Don't read any further until you've done today's New York Sun Crossword Puzzle. New York Sun puzzles are every bit as fun and challenging as the more well-known New York Times and they're indisputably better in one way -- they're free. If you'd like to read about an unbiased head-to-head competition between the Sun and the Times puzzles check this out. Or if you're ready to decide for yourself you can download this puzzle and join in on the fun here.

"Filming Retakes" is by Barry C. Silk, and it's a fun one if, like me, you like movies and wordplay and themed entries that go down and not across.

7D: What a Thanksgiving chef seeks? (THE RIGHT STUFFING) Good luck on that, since everybody has different ideas on what goes into the right stuffing. Bread crumbs, eggs, vegetables, sausage, tofu. Lately people have begun stuffing birds with other birds. A turducken is a turkey stuffed with a duck stuffed with a chicken. Not my kind of dressing -- for one thing it sounds too much like turd-duckin', which is not at all appetizing.

10D: Activity of oysters (PEARL HARBORING) Speaking of not very appetizing. Oysters, yuck. When I was a vegetarian I was trying to explain my dietary choices to an acquaintance who wanted to know if I ate fish.

"Basically, I don't eat anything with eyes," I said.

"So that mean you can't eat potatoes, but you can eat oysters." Since French fries were a big part of my diet -- I was a vegetarian but not a health nut -- I had to come up with new guidelines.

"Okay, I don't eat anything that had a mother."

"Well, you can still eat oysters. They don't have mothers."

I finally added the no mucus-looking-shellfish clause to my dietary guidelines, but it did set me to wondering about oyster reproduction. I mean they're all alone in that shell, how do they -- you know -- do it?

From Wikipedia:

Oysters usually mature by one year of age. They are protandric, which means that during their first year they spawn as males (releasing sperm into the water). As they grow larger over the next two or three years and develop greater energy reserves, they release eggs, as females. Bay oysters are usually prepared to spawn by the end of June. An increase in water temperature prompts a few initial oysters to spawn. This triggers a spawning 'chain reaction', which clouds the water with millions of eggs and sperm. (Not a good day to go swimming.) A single female oyster can produce up to 100 million eggs annually

18D: What you might have seen if you had been at director Stone's prom? (OLIVER TWISTING) Unlikely, since he attended the Hill School in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, which at the time he attended was all-male, though it has since gone co-ed. Still, it's a nice visual. He seems so serious -- if you saw him agonizing over every single answer when he was on Celebrity Jeopardy a few years ago you'll know what I mean -- and nobody can look serious when they're doing the twist.

14A: Half of CDXXIV quintupled (MLX) Yeah, I know I could stop being verbal and solve this math problem, but I really wish instead of doing this -- and even worse, that "year in the reign of some king nobody ever heard of" thing -- they'd just say "Some random Roman numeral."

8A: University of Texas city (EL PASO) Someday we'll have personalized crossword puzzles. When we do, my clue for EL PASO will be "Your favorite country song of all time."

36A: Jungla animal (TIGRE) Reading fast is a blessing and a curse. Here a glance is all I need to see "Jungle animal" -- which is not exactly right.

56A: Cookbook writer Rombauer (IRMA) She penned the classic "Joy of Cooking".


65A: New York county (ORANGE) Which reminds me, if you haven't already picked up Amy Reynaldo's book "How to Conquer the New York Times Crossword Puzzle" you need to do so. It'll help you get better at all crosswords BTW not just the Times.



That's all for today. See ya Wednesday.