NYT giving us a case of the Mondays!!! Connections was just backwards with purple being the most straightforward. I had to use hints on strands The mini was interesting. I too never heard of e-tail as a term before. But Banff is in Canada by Calgary. You must go given the chance. It's possibly more beautiful than CO
It is interesting to me how the difficulty changes based on our experience. I aced the connections today in less than a minute, but failed the "easy" one yesterday.
By the time I got to the bottom of Strands, I was so worn out that I selected a word letter-by-letter, and then tried to lock it in by pressing the button that says "hint". I may have thought I was back in Connections.
I got yellow in Connections by imagining someone say, in a New York accent, "Look at that yahoo / look at that dodo / look at that yo-yo / look at that ding-dong."
In the UK we can say some one or something is a hoot meaning they are funny. There is also the phrase to hoot with laughter. Yuk is more like yuck which in the UK is an expression of disgust , although I now remember seeing YUK in the big crossword a few weeks ago. Whoop seems to me to be more an expression of excitement and har-har seems to belong in comic strips. I don't think we call idiots dodos in the UK. This one was a minger.
It's funny, I had a perfect solve and I got yellow first. I thought the category was more along the lines of a goofy person because it would be odd for Yahoo to name their website after someone who is a knucklehead. Rest of the terms made sense. But it did get me to think "gee whiz, if that's the yellow, I"m afraid to ask how much harder this is going to get". Next I got light blue, and all of those to me were common enough: You've heard of the expression 'big whoop' and 'it was a hoot'. Also, when a comedy draws a lot of yuks, it is deemed a success. I was able to separate green from purple at the end, but I didn't use that odd 'O' word to describe the car sound effects. I was shocked that only 10% got yellow first. My solve was like 1 in 295. The solve rate did go up a bit to 49% with 17% getting a perfect solve.
The crossword wasn't too hard today for me. Took me 1 minute and 3 seconds. I managed to get connections, but only because I connected purr with an engine noise right off the bat.
