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Like the Rear Extremity of Many Animals Crossword Clue

wordplay, the crossword column

Either End of a School Charabanc

Oliver Roeder either gets rid of something or draws attention to it, depending on your viewpoint.

Credit... Mario Tama/Getty Images

March thirty, 2022

Thursday PUZZLE — Were you a doodler in school? I was. To the teacher, I was a daydreamer. But it felt equally if I heard the teacher better as long as trivial cubes, pyramids and other assorted geometric shapes were flowing from my pen. Counterintuitively, doodling around the edges of my work helped me focus. It wasn't until I was an adult that I learned that this type of activeness was actually helpful to those with attention deficit disorders. Live and learn.

As always, this is a hint simply non a spoiler. Hopefully, you lot will savor the theme of Oliver Roeder'southward puzzle every bit much every bit I did, but if you have any difficulty it might be a good idea to accept notes.

Tricky Clues

5A. I was today years sometime when I learned that the 16th-century astronomer Tycho BRAHE not only made enormous strides in edifice sophisticated instruments used to measure out and prepare the positions of the stars, but likewise lost role of his nose in a duel with his cousin later drunkenly quarreling over who was the improve mathematician. He wore a metal prosthetic for the rest of his life, which made going through airports a real deport. In that location was a rumor that he died of [checks notes] "nose toxicity" because of the brass prosthetic, but, more than recently, scientists have concluded that he just as well polite to ask to go to the bath.

65A. At first, I idea that the "Kid-lit character with a green suit and gold crown" might be the Piffling Prince, simply that didn't fit. Somewhere in the dusty files of the storeroom in the dorsum of my brain, BABAR the elephant rex emerged.

3D. "Some span positions" refers to the card game, not a water-spanning bridge, and the respond is EASTS.

4D. I'd like to offering a shout out to DR. TEETH, my rock idol, who makes his New York Times Crossword debut in this puzzle.

9D. This is one of those "Look at the phrase, not the object" clues. Either end of "school bus" would exist an ESS.

21D. This is an extra bit of theme cloth, in a manner. A twin-ish clue to the revealer at 22D, "Reader's jotting, e.g." is an ANNOTATION, which has not appeared in the Crossword since 1953.

Today'due south Theme

Was your first assumption that this was a rebus puzzle? I thought then, too. My general philosophy virtually rebuses is that, if I have been working on a puzzle for a while and have still not filled in very much, and if I detect myself getting set to expletive at the grid, it is most probable a rebus.

However — and this is a big withal — there have been puzzle themes that I phone call "anti-rebuses," where, instead of packing multiple letters in a single square, the constructor simply leaves them out of the grid. Sometimes you have to keep rail of them mentally, equally is the example with Mr. Roeder'southward puzzle. If y'all are solving in print, of course, you have an advantage: Y'all can jot down these extra messages in the margins in order to complete the reply. Print solvers, therefore, may figure out the theme earlier online solvers do. Hang in in that location either mode, because there is a really absurd surprise in store.

Mr. Roeder has constructed a puzzle that contains 12 entries that are impossible to consummate within the grid. For example, at 1A, the respond to the clue "Beat in chess" is MATED, but we can write in only ATED.

Huh. Permit's mentally place an G just outside the grid to complete the answer. Proceed an heart on information technology.

If you lot expect at the leftmost and rightmost entries of every third row in this 16x15 grid, the same thing happens. Either the first letter on the left or the last letter on the right falls out of the filigree.

We get a hint as to why this is happening at 22D. The reply to the clue "Reader'southward jottings … or a hint to this puzzle's theme" is MARGINALIA.

Recollect that M at 1A? Permit's expect at the other letters that fell out. When read from pinnacle to bottom, they spell MARGIN.

Now look at the extra messages that fell out on the correct-manus side of the grid. MARGIN once again!

In that location'southward no mode to putter or jot anything downwards in the app, only I am drawing 3-D geometric shapes in that location in my head.

Nicely washed, Mr. Roeder.

Constructor Notes

My fascination with marginalia began with my babyhood love of the book "Fermat's Enigma" past Simon Singh. I learned that the French mathematician Pierre de Fermat, in the margin of his copy of "Arithmetica" past Diophantus, wrote this concerning a vexing conjecture in number theory: "I have a truly marvelous demonstration of this proposition, which this margin is too narrow to incorporate."

Withal, it was some 350 years — and countless mathematical innovations — later on that the theorem was demonstrably proved. I promise today's crossword puzzle takes somewhat less time.

Similar Fermat, I am a big believer in writing in one's books. I read with a pencil tucked behind my ear, eager to engage with, augment, question and emphasize the text in the margins. I imagine many crossword solvers feel the same way, considering there you are, after all, writing in your newspaper (or, I suppose, on your device)! What communal joy, too, to find the scribbled annotations of previous readers in a used volume.

The ANNOTATIONs and MARGINALIA required to complete this puzzle are rather literal — spelling, well, MARGIN on either side — and they certainly don't expound on any deep results in number theory. But even they, I hope, appoint with and broaden the puzzle inside the filigree, completing and emphasizing its answers. Hither'due south to scribbling.

Oh, and HI MOM!

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