NYT 7:44
Sun 4:38
LAT 5:20
WSJ 6:49
CHE 5:10
Fri. BEQ #21 6:06
Wed. BEQ #20 4:07
Onion 5:22
Tausig 4:16
I've been up since 3:30 this morning, so I might well be asleep before the NYT puzzle comes out at 9:00 p.m. Central. If so, feel free to discuss that amongst yourselves here until I return. Will I make it through all those puzzles on Friday? Highly doubtful. My son is off school tomorrow and sick, and my husband will be home sick too. You envy my life of glamour, I know.
Peter Gordon's crafted his annual "And the Nominees Are..." Sun crossword featuring the just-announced Best Picture Oscar nominees. I was hoping he'd take a rebus approach, given the unwieldy length of a couple titles, but no, he just split 'em up into multiple entries. But look! It's still a symmetrical 15x15 grid with symmetrically slotted theme answers. The only quasi-cheat was docking "The" off CURIOUS / CASE / OF BENJAMIN / BUTTON and READER. MILLIONAIRE is in the middle with its SLUMDOG opposite CURIOUS. FROST/NIXON balances OF BENJAMIN; MILK, CASE; The READER, BUTTON. It's fitting that the Brad Pitt movie takes up so much space in the grid since it hogged up a lot of nominations too. You'd think the circumscribed fill would make for clunky fill, but no—there's CZARINA, MCRIB, TROJAN, and KRANTZ. Okay, so the puzzle also has RENA and IBERT—but at least the crossings were reasonable.
Updated at 10 p.m.:
Barry Silk's New York Times crossword has plenty of interesting fill that was hiding behind good clues. I slowed myself down owing to sheer exhaustion of the eyes and brain—I didn't see the "H." in [George H. W. Bush, once], so CIA DIRECTOR was the furthest thing from my mind. The only answer that was at all jarring was SNEAK THIEF, or [Lifter], not a familiar phrase to me.
And so to bed.
Updated Friday morning:
Dang, my kid woke me up before 8 this morning. On the plus side, he and his dad are the picture of health today, and the freelance project is done. (It may appear that I have been doing fewer crosswords than usual this week, but really, that extra batch of 25 puzzles counts.)
In Dan Naddor's LA Times crossword, puns are de order of de day: [Support for a formal downgrading proposal?], for example, is I SECOND DEMOTION, playing on "I second the motion." There are six of these "the –> DE" puns in all. I forgot that NENE was both singular and plural for those [Hawaiian flyers]. Speaking of geese, [Goya's goose egg?] is CERO, Spanish for "zero."
Patrick Berry kicks it literary with his Chronicle of Higher Education crossword, "Unhappy Endings." Edgar Allan Poe was a huge fan of the unhappy ending, so it wasn't so hard for Patrick to find five Poe characters who met dramatic ends in wildly different ways. My personal favorite is FORTUNATO, the [Poe character who gets walled up alive in a crypt] in "The Cask of Amontillado." Now, I thought I knew plenty of Poe, but I didn't know three of the characters here, and if you don't already know METZENGERSTEIN, it's not as if it's easy to guess it from the clue. Super-smooth crossings made the puzzle eminently doable, though.
Liz Gorski's Wall Street Journal crossword, "Whack Job," has a CHOP, CHOP theme: Each of the other seven theme answers joins two words together with a hidden CHOP, as in SANCHO PANZA. The theme entries are a little on the short side, so there's plenty of breathing room for smooth fill and wide-open grid spaces along the top and bottom. Among the livelier entries are "I'M FOR IT," "GO HOME," MAN-TRAP, "OH, GOODY," TOOK A HIT, HARP ON, the ONE RING to rule them all, and O. HENRY.
Ben Tausig constructed this week's Onion A.V. Club crossword. 69-Across, FRENCH, ties everything together: [People inaccurately adjectivized before a word in 18-, 29-, 46-, and 57-Across]:
So this puzzle goes beyond the "phrases with words that can follow ___" theme by including only such phrases in which the French part is a misnomer. Well done, Ben. From elsewhere in the puzzle: LOQUAT is a [Fruit used in Chinese traditional medicine]. BOHEA is a [Fujianese tea]. SORREL is a [Fragrant Jamaican beverage]. Less exotic beverages include NECTAR, or [Godly stuff], and ADE, or [Fruity quaff]. [TV role for Savalas and Rhames] is LT. KOJAK (the Ving Rhames version was on the USA Network in 2005, while the Telly Savalas series was a classic '70s cop show. "Who loves ya, baby?").
Ben Tausig's Ink Well/Chicago Reader crossword, "You Send Me," goes postal. Each theme entry begins with a word that's a mail class. Madonna's EXPRESS YOURSELF is a ["Like a Prayer" single]. MEDIA ELITES are [Bogeymen for Stephen Colbert]. STANDARD OIL is the [Company in "There Will Be Blood"]. And BULK FOOD SECTION is an [Area with nuts and grains, often]. Who doesn't love bulk mail?
Today's Brendan Emmett Quigley puzzle is called "Alternative Medicine" and the theme includes three famous alternative medicine gurus. Actually, I'm not sure that Mehmet Oz qualifies as "alternative." He's on Oprah a lot, he has books, he says some reasonable things—is there lots of alternative medicine in his shtick? My friend Kristin thinks he's hot. Anyway, the theme entries:
Lots to like in this puzzle. [Bouncing all over the place, perhaps] clues BRALESS. Remember that lawsuit brought by a strip-club customer who complained that a dancer's capacious bosom had been used to BLUDGEON ([Beat but good]) him? Another B-word, BREEDER, is [Straight person, in gay slang]. Has VOIP ([Transmission technology used in Skype]) been in an NYT crossword yet? I don't know that it has. [Generating heat] sounds like it wants a word from physics or chemistry, but the answer's EROTIC. [Safari sight] is a POPUP AD, Safari being an internet browser. [Bar order] is A BEER, and while usually crossword answers don't include an indefinite article like this, I like it here.
The Wednesday BEQ has an iPod theme, with the theme entries starting with the iPod varieties TOUCH, NANO, SHUFFLE, and CLASSIC. You don't need an answer grid or discussion here today, do you? You've moved on already?
January 22, 2009
Friday, 1/23
January 23, 2008
Wednesday, 1/23
NYT 3:24
LAT 3:20
CS 3:17
NYS 3:10
Just got home from pub trivia, where we won first place, unfortunately. Second prize was the usual first-place prize, a $25 gift card for use at the same bar. First prize was a pair of tickets to Wednesday's Wyclef Jean show at the House of Blues, but my team does not wish to see a concert (with standing-room tickets) tomorrow. Here's hoping we can sell 'em!
The Wednesday New York Sun puzzle wasn't posted in advance because Peter Gordon needed to make it first. (If you don't know why, I'll give you a small hint: It's an annual tradition.) Look for it to be posted sometime Wednesday morning(ish)—if you see it before me, leave a comment to let folks know it's out, would ya? Thanks.
Henry Hook's New York Times crossword plays a rhyming game that's missing my favorite mouse of kiddie lit, Maisy, but contains all (I think) the other plausible rhymes. There's PATRICK SWAYZE, a name made for crosswords with the Z, K, and W—he's clued obliquely as ["She's Like the Wind" singer, 1988] rather than as an actor. There's another name for the [Aster], the MICHAELMAS DAISY. And then the trifecta, "Those LAZY HAZY CRAZY Days of Summer." Gotta love a shout-out to ROSE MARIE, clued here as a ["Hollywood Squares" regular] rather than a member of the Dick Van Dyke Show ensemble. And ANATHEMA! Love that word ([Something detested]). One favorite clue is [C's in shop class?] for CLAMPS (as in C-clamps). [Its motto is "Manly deeds, womanly words"] clues MARYLAND. What the eff does that mean? (Janie, an explanation? And speaking of JANIE, that's clued as [Title girl with a gun in a 1989 Aerosmith hit].) I have no idea why there's a question mark in the clue, [To say in Spanish?] for DECIR. Perhaps a Spanish speaker can explain? Have you heard AT HAZARD used to mean [On the line]? I have not.
Updated:
Quick takes, because I've got to go to the gym—
The New York Sun crossword is an annual Peter Gordon (or "Roger DePont") tradition—a puzzle that appears the day after the Oscar nominations are announced and includes all five BEST / PICTURE nominees. Now, if you know this theme in advance and pay attention to the titles of the nominated movies, the grid practically fills itself in. Kudos to Peter for once again finding a way to include all the movies in a symmetrical grid. Thanks to the Academy for not nominating The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, which would really crowd the grid (as it is, there are 72 theme squares), and to the filmmakers who called the Clooney movie MICHAEL / CLAYTON, which splits so nicely across the center square. ODE TO JOY and a HOT PLATE are nice inclusions in the fill, but I think the theme's requirements forced some fill Peter wouldn't ordinarily be pleased with; e.g. ANIL, and, well, I guess that's the only obvious crosswordese sort of answer.
I got a kick out of Bruce Venzke and Stella Daily's LA Times crossword. Gotta love a theme that includes the words SCREWBALL, HALF-BAKED, DIMWITTED, and COCKAMAMIE, eh? And then the fill includes "OH, FUDGE" for good measure.
Patrick Jordan's CrosSynergy puzzle, "Lingo," tacks a LING onto each theme entry's base phrase. (I will take one CITY DUMPLING, please.) One request: A moratorium on cluing IMACS as [Colorful computers]. These haven't been colorful in years. They were glossy white for a couple years, and now they're brushed silver.
