Answers to This Week's 'Metropolitan Diary' Puzzle
Did you finish this week's New York Times Metropolitan Diary puzzle yet? It's a tricky and conceptual set of quizzes this week. Here is the answer key for the five puzzles it contains. Don't cheat if you haven't solved it yet!
1. Lonely woman drops thing in disgusting, dangerous spot, cannot get to thing, waits sadly for thing, no one will retrieve thing. Where is my thing, lonely woman has to wonder. It is right there, before me, and I cannot have it. Four days later, lonely woman returns to the site of the dropped thing, and it has been retrieved for her, and she smears it all over the keratinized stratified squamous epithelium of her face.
2. KIDS SAYS DARNDEST THING.
3. I OVERHEARD SOMETHING.
4. [Nonsensical; no answer.]
5. It's sad being poor and/or old.
4. Should be "people are smart-asses." Birder tired of being asked if he's a "real" birder replies that he's made of wet newspaper and glue instead.
Birder showed enormous restraint. Birder could have strangled questioner with binocular strap.
Judges will also accept "Submitter encounters rude stranger; decides to pretend rudeness was actually playful banter."
Metropolitan Diary = LIfe is Hard and Things Happen and Sometimes You Have to Do Things
Woman (1), overjoyed by Kismetetrics, gives lipstick to boy (2) who applies it and thus is inspired to enter the Theatre (3), where, as often happens, he meets and enchants an odd bird (4) whom he marries, and with whom he composes the Tony- and Pulitzer-Winning Drama about bittersweet rites of passage, Hallmarks.
This is beautiful.
I can't believe that I clicked through and read that. Now I'm mad at you Choire.
I cannot stop thinking about how some one could use a lipstick after it has spent some not inconsiderable time in the ratopolis of the subway tracks. This is really upsetting (not quite as upsetting as that she thought a police officer?! in our budget-strapped teacher-firing subway-line cutting city would come get her "favorite" lip gloss). Prices for Chanel lip gloss on Amazon range from $12.00 to $30.00.
Do you think it is this Jennifer Freed? http://www.trevannapost.com/. Or the one who is a pediatrician in Washington Heights? I'm betting on the former.
I'm glad this is ironic. I was starting to think the Times had sent over a basket of minimuffins and some catnip.
The big news in number 4 is the apparent replacement of "without missing a beat" with "without hesitation"
I always get a kick out of the 30 year-old recollection of some random amusing cab ride or something that someone's just been dying to get off their chest.
It makes me so happy to see the "Metropolitan Diary" tag getting some use. More please!
anything that falls on the platform is dead to me, let alone the tracks.
how many rats do you think nibbled on it before she got it back?
Hopefully enough ..
When I'm stumped, the correct answer is usually 1958.
"The Council of Trent!"
"Excuse me?"
"I missed the question."
The last one kind of made me shed a tear?
I really liked it, too!
(You know if Balk had written this post, there would have been a helluva weepy exegesis on lifemates and anniveraries…)
Thank you! So I wasn't alone. Picturing me and the wife, when we are olds…verklemptness achieved.
"The next Tuesday night, purely on a whim, I went to the booth to check…"
Lady, who do you think you are kidding with this "whim" stuff. You wrote a freaking essay about the deep significance of your separation from your lip gloss. There was nothing whimlike about your returning to ask for it the next day. "Obsession" is the word you want. Know how I know? Because you didn't just SHRUG AND LEAVE IT ON THE TRACKS as soon as you dropped it. Also, because you think this is a delightful story!
The booths must have retrieval tools! Someone get on that toot sweet!
You know those claws on sticks they use in supermarkets to get toilet paper and potato chips up from high? I think they work downwards as well.