Sonntag, 3 September

NYT 11:37
WaPo 9:34
BG 8:23
LAT 8:08
CS 7:51

Lee Glickstein and Ben Tausig teamed up for the Sunday NYT, in which each theme entry is a puzzle unto itself. I suspect that accounts for the challenge most solvers are running into—although the non-theme clues are on the tricky side, too.

Cute theme in the Washington Post crossword by Paula Gamache, "A Losing Proposition"—if you don't ordinarily solve this puzzle each weekend, think about doing this one. I liked it.

In the "Triple Play" theme, each entry's a three-word phrase made of homophones of the words in a common base phrase. One of the entries is recycled from an Ink Well puzzle Ben published last year—CZECH BI MALE, clued here as "Eastern European guy who loves both sexes." An entry that perfect deserves to be reused! My favorite clues were "Salon workers, for short" for EDS, "Results of piercing pain?" for NOSE RINGS, "Prudent time to get to the airport" for EARLYISH, and "Subject of some gossip" for MISTRESS. And of course, it's always fun to see one's own name in a crossword, especially when it's placed in close proximity to a word like POUTIER.

Emily Cox and Henry Rathvon's Boston Globe puzzle (again, the one online is weeks behind what's in the dead-tree edition), "Cracked Cases," makes puns with the names of fictional sleuths. One person's obscurity or knowledge lacuna is another person's "Well, duh, everyone knows that." Here are the lacunae I uncovered in this puzzle: DOPANT ("Electronic impurity"), CORTONA ("Town of Tuscany"), OATCAKE ("Kin to a bannock").

Updated:

Bob Klahn's CrosSynergy Sunday Challenge was a tough one.

Stella Daily and Bruce Venzke's LA Times Syndicate puzzle, "Get a Move On," dispenses plenty of action verbs, and mystified me with ORV (abbreviation for off-road vehicle)—ATV, of course, is a much more commonly seen abbreviation.