BEQ 5:24
LAT 3:12
NYT 2:51
CS 4:57 (J—paper)
Sorry to be late (and brief) with the writeup—am visiting with an old friend. Her brother, by the way, had the best reaction of anyone to seeing my July 5 NYT crossword (co-written with Tony Orbach)—there was exuberance and there were swear words. It was richly rewarding. People should swear aptly more often.
Andrea Carla Michaels and Ashish Vengsarkar's New York Times crossword
Andrea and Ashish's joint byline is so long, what I see on the applet is that the puzzle's editor is "Will Sho." Still, Ashish's previous byline with his friend Narayan Venkatasubramanyan still wins for longest. A&A's theme includes GO FISH, TAKE THE BAIT, OPEN A CAN OF WORMS, GET REELED IN, and [Hook, line and ___] SINKER. I can't quite decide if the long Down answers are definitely thematic or just quasi-thematic: UNDER THE SEA sounds good, but MARINE GREEN as the [Algae color] seems less fishing-centric. (Marine green is a color?) If they are part of the theme, it's a ginormous amount of theme material for a Monday puzzle.
Super-smooth fill and light clues abounded. Favorite bits: [Instill with the three R's] for EDUCATE (my son returns to school on Tuesday); adjacent Simpsons characters APU and NED; and BLAH directly opposite an ETUI (editorializing?). The closest thing to a rough spot is COR as an abbreviation for corner ([Where streets meet: Abbr.]).
That's all for now. Thanks for an entertaining Monday puzzle, A&A.
Updated Monday morning:
Sarah Keller's CrosSynergy/Washington Post puzzle, "Chips Ahoy!"—Janie's review
Can't remember how long it's been since I breezed through a puzzle the way I breezed through this one. Certainly my time was a personal best, but even if it hadn't been, I'd still have had the pleasure of the smooth solve this puzzle provided. Not unlike a Wheel of Fortune "Before and After" puzzle where two phrases may be blended into one, here the word chips follows the last word of each theme phrase, yielding two phrases for the price of one and a fine choice of chips in the process. And so, in the example:
If we DELVE further into the puzzle, we come across some more excellent fill in the descriptive if somewhat disparaging DWEEBISH for [Nerdy]. The SUPERHERO [Captain Marvel or Batman] definitely has the UPPERHAND [Controlling position] here—but what I like best is the way these longer words words INTERACT [Work together].
I semi-question the clue [Brilliantly colored fish] for OPAH. Take a look at that baby. While there're those red-orange fins, that is one shiny, metallic-looking body. It's not a "terrible" clue, but some of the fish on this page (the angelfish or the tigerfish, e.g.) better conform to my idea of being "brilliantly colored."
And in the almost-totally-useless-information department, take a look at the two names in the SW: there's ANNE ["Green Gables" girl] atop TODD [Broadway's "Sweeney ___"]. A search of the internet and IMDb turned up not only Ann Todd, an actress and third wife of director David Lean, but also 1940s child star Ann E. Todd.
Finally, if you're ever at a loss to know just where you are, I can tell you with certainty, ["You are ___] HERE."
Los Angeles Times crossword by "Teri Smalley"
"Teri Smalley" anagrams to "it's really me," a.k.a. editor Rich Norris.
The theme is about things done in the NFL (61D: [Org where you can see the first words of 20-, 38- and 55-Across]). You PASS the ball, RUN with it, and KICK it, and those words begin PASS JUDGMENT ([Give one's verdict]), RUN INTERFERENCE ([Create a distraction]), and KICK UPSTAIRS ([Get rid of by promoting, as an employee]). What's sticking in my craw here is that the word INTERFERENCE is used in football, but it's not part of the theme because JUDGMENT and UPSTAIRS aren't thematic. It would've been good to have a RUN ___ phrase that didn't mix in another football term.
Brendan Quigley's blog crossword, "Themeless Monday"
Hey, you've got until midnight Tuesday to enter Brendan's crossword contest.
Lots of Scrabbly stuff (ALEX COMFORT, QUARTZ CLOCK, FUZZIER, BON JOVI, CHEEK BY JOWL, JOB BOARD), but more small pieces of awkward fill than you might expect in a 72-worder (ENLS, SDA, U NU, CERT, plural ORZOS). The last square I filled in was the I in AIGLET (33A: [Decorative bow]) and LOUIS II (2D: [Holy Roman Emperor known "The Younger"]). I know the spelling teasel, but not TEAZLE (21D: [Plant with lavender flowers]); the dictionary tells me teazel is also legit.
September 06, 2009
Monday, 9/7/09
January 20, 2008
Monday, 1/21
CS 3:48
LAT 3:06
NYS 3:00
NYT 2:43
It's a two-fer from Andrea Carla Michaels, who constructed both the New York Times and the New York Sun crosswords for Monday.
In Andrea's New York Times crossword, the theme is "Win, Lose or Draw": WIN BY A NOSE, LOSE ONE'S BALANCE, and DRAW A BLANK. All three theme answers are sort of competition-based, referring to a victory, a gymnast on the balance beam, and Scrabble. Did you try to link NOSE, BALANCE, and BLANK as I did? My favorite fill included UNDER OATH, SMIRKS, and the JUMBLE (now with strippers!). Not crazy about the variant YACK, but it's in the dictionary. This puzzle kept trying to lead me astray. [More unusual]? Must be ODDER, right? No, RARER. [Unoccupied, as a theater seat] was FREE, not OPEN. EBB*** wanted to be EBBETS Field, verb clue be damned. Hey, how about the headline across the top row: LEWD DWARF JEST.
In the New York Sun puzzle, "You Say Goodbye and I Say Hello" refers to the three words that begin the theme entries—words that double as both "hello" and "goodbye" in their original languages. ALOHA STADIUM invokes Hawaiian, CIAO BELLA GELATO invokes Italian, and model SHALOM HARLOW's name evokes Hebrew. I thought I'd never heard of that gelato brand, but when I checked out the company's website, I recognized the packaging from the freezer case at Whole Foods. Is this stuff good? Should I buy some? My favorite clues included [___=washed jeans] for ACID (ooh, bad '80s fashion!); [Dessert, to a Brit] for AFTERS (I could go for some gelato now, but it seems silly to venture out when it's 5° to buy ice cream); and [Tina's "30 Rock" role] for LIZ Lemon. Best entries: SHUSHED, THE ARTS, AL PACINO, the LAST WORD, and those Scrabbly words with Q, X, and Z in the corners.
Updated:
Rich Norris's CrosSynergy puzzle struck me as dull (though Scrabbly—missing F and W and so not a pangram, but including all the less common letters), but I think it was because a reader left specific comments with theme details first, so I was in a PIQUE (61-Across) when I solved the puzzle. I receive copies of all comments via e-mail, and I hadn't done this puzzle yet when I saw those comments. I'm not about to embargo my e-mail just because twice a year, somebody posts spoilers before I've done a puzzle. Instead, I'll just ask PLEASE DON'T COMMENT WITH SPECIFICS ABOUT PUZZLES I HAVEN'T BLOGGED ABOUT YET. Thanks. As the commenter already mentioned, in the CRONY theme, each theme entry begins with a "crony" as part of the first word (e.g., PALACE, CHUMP). I think it's more elegant to hide the word within another than to gather phrases that start with a set of words, don't you?
The LA Times crossword by Teri Smalley (which anagrams to "it's really me," so I presume the constructor is editor Rich Norris) has a sprawling theme—four long "king" names in a 15x16 grid, along with four other short (4 and 5 letters) "king" names, with most being people called "the king of ___" (LEAR isn't called a king, he is a king; ALAN King is named King). The fill has some boring stuff but also plenty of showy answers—OJIBWA, YO HO HO, SQUAWKS AT and GOBBLE (poultry!), THE WHO. Now, there are 18 circled squares in the grid. I've been eyeballing these from various angles and in various orders, and regrettably, I will have to peek at the Across Lite Notepad to understand what the circled squares are about. Okay, it says to anagram them to discover the subject of the puzzle. Ah, a puzzle within the puzzle! MHUAREGLRTINIJRNTK wasn't looking like much, so I used a trick I learned from Will Shortz (on a Chicago radio program, I think)—write the letters in sort of a pyramid-form bunch so your eyes can hook the letters up more easily. MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR. jumped right out of that heap of letters. Hey, this is cool! Not the usual sort of tribute puzzle—those typically include key words or titles from the person's life. This one riffs on King's name and gift-wraps itself with an anagram challenge.
