Yes! Gary Cee nails it. Five v. catchy road songs...great for baby boomers...Bruce's "Thunder Road" at the top was a real kick...nice craft w/ only 74 words, decent fill, and an attractive grid...38 blacks is a bit on the high side but the big Ls in the E and W are better-looking than lumber piles usually are.
Decided this morning to see how my typing speed is...one of my defensive "I'm not really that bad" reactions to my less than stellar solving times is my lousy typing...not a Fri.-Sat. issue, but maybe an issue for Mon.-Tues. So I went around the block again on this puzzle this morning after doing it first last night...clocked in at almost exactly three minutes on the re-solve. Typing is yet another one of those things that some of us are simply a lot better at than others of us are. Also, knowing most of the answers doesn't mean you know them all. On my re-solve I typed in the across answers and messed up by putting in NED for the Bobbsey Twin answer...I'd done the VAS and ENTER downs in my original solve and gotten NAN right that way without realizing it.
We human beings are morally excitable, easily stimulated critters...MetaRex at least is in that category...my comments about my typing speed or lack thereof can be understood perhaps correctly as a veiled or not so veiled allusion to the times of Rex and other v. speedy solvers and to all-too-human suspicions that some supertimes are posted by some solvers who engage in all-too-human fudging or fakery. Have I had such suspicions? Sure. I posted a fake "typed-in" time myself once a year or two ago on a Friday...where I myself have sinned or played around or whatever, why not others?
If I have a moralistic suspicion about Rex that I express, is it corrosive to my being a friendly participant in the community of which he is the creator and ringmaster? Yes, absolutely. Do I have such a moralistic suspicion? No, I don't think so. I don't think Rex's times are re-solves like my unposted time this morning or my time on that Friday when I cheated.
But can the airing and denial of suspicion itself be corrosive to community? Well, yes. Perhaps the issue can be worked through...let's try...
Do I think Rex operates according to an absolutist "thou shalt not in any way fudge or stretch" ethics that most of us violate most of the time and that all of us or very nearly all of us violate some of the time? Might he use Google a time or two? That's another question entirely. I don't have an opinion on it other than to guess he is probably like the rest of us, whatever that means. And being like the rest of us is very much fine by me. I'm inspired by but not in the end personally partial to Kant's dissatisfaction with the crooked moral timber of human nature. (Dan Ariely is worth reading for those of us drawn to a more relaxed, counter-Kantian approach to the ethics of fudging.) I'm more partial to a "most of us situationally fudge or stretch even as we honor and mostly adhere to the idea that it's wrong to cheat--and that combination of qualities in us is basically a-okay" ethics.
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