Sun 6:01
LAT 4:09
NYT 3:41
CS 3:00
(updated at 12:30 Thursday afternoon)
Happy New Year! Stay tuned for talk about another 1,700 or so crosswords over the course of the coming year. I have a good feeling about this 2009 business.
It could be the New Year's Eve margaritas talking, but I found Alan Arbesfeld's New York Times crossword to be just lovely. Sure, there are only three theme entries, but the trade-off is that we get eight 8- or 9-letter answers in the fill and a 72-word grid that satisfies the word count limit for themeless puzzles. The theme answers tack on a Z (the best of all letters) to completely change the subject of a phrase:
The longer answers in the fill include phrases like ON ONE'S OWN ([Independent]), ALL AT ONCE ([Suddenly]), and the surprising HOLD WATER ([Add up]), and the under-ballyhooed BALTIC SEA—that's [Part of Poland's border], not to mention the Baltic lands of Lithuania (I'm an eighth Lithuanian, you know), Latvia, and Estonia. BOYZ II MEN (pronounced "Boys to Men"), the R&B vocal group, are clued with [Band whose 1994 song "I'll Make Love to You" was #1 for 14 weeks]. That title seems a little racy for the Gray Lady, doesn't it? The Gray Lady is gettin' some action tonight.
Remember when yesterday's puzzle had YAKUT in it? Today, we get [Yakutsk's river], the LENA; you owe it to yourself to read up on Yakutsk—ice road truckers, four months of well-below-zero temps, a Museum of Mammoth, and a highway you can't always access from town. ILLER is clued [More wonderful, to a hip-hopper]; the daintiness of "more wonderful" amuses me here. [Certain scale start] is CDEF; these are music notes, I presume, and the C*EF lured me into entering CLEF at first. I didn't see this clue while doing the puzzle—[Rear end, anatomically] is NATES, with two syllables, a plural noun meaning the buttocks derived from the Latin natis meaning "buttock, rump." Despite my years of crosswords and medical editing, that one's new to me. Pound and stone are units of weight, while [Pound and Stone] are two EZRAS. Ezra Stone? He's as unfamiliar to me as nates—he got famous as a radio actor back in the '30s.
Updated:
I'm glad I saved Karen Tracey's Sun crossword, a "Themeless Thursday," for this morning. I was much too tired to do it justice last night. I mostly waltzed smoothly through the clues—until I reached the 4x5 section in the upper right corner. For the longest time, all I had was the -OR at the end of the constellation. Eventually it occurred to me that [Woodstock artist] meant the creator of Snoopy's bird friend and not a 1969 musician: CHARLES M. SCHULZ. It might've helped if I hadn't been convinced that [Where Samsung is headquartered] was somewhere in Japan rather than SEOUL, South Korea. It all looks so plausible now, but I needed just one of those answers to be a gimme. I should've known [Service designation] would be the ol' ONE-A.
Favorite clues and answers:
Andy Sawyer celebrates New Year's Day with a bowl game theme in his LA Times crossword:
It almost looked as it DUMB DOWN ([Uncomplicate to a fault]) and BONA FIDE ([True]) could be theme entries too, based on their length and positioning. Oh, if only there were a Dumb Bowl in NCAA football!
Overall, an excellent and timely theme with some interesting fill and Thursday-tough clues. [Spanish sherry city, formerly] could be spelled Jerez, but here it's XERES, crossing GEN X, or [Thirtysomethings et al.]. [Makes a bust] isn't about narcs, it's about Rodin and his peers—the answer is SCULPTS. Its L crosses GADFLY, or [Annoying sort]; I hereby make a New Year's resolution to find more uses for the word gadfly. [Yearns for pines?: Abbr.] duped me again—it's SYN, short for synonym, and the last time I saw a clue like this, I was lost. A few days ago, PORNO was in the Sun crossword, and now it's in the LA Times one, clued as [Blue books?]. Miscellaneous other clues: MINYAN is a [Synagogue quorum]. CASCA was [One of Caesar's assassins]. [Insolvent banking giant, familiarly] is WAMU, recently reported to have been approving anyone for a mortgage.
Tom Schier's CrosSynergy crossword also has a seasonal theme—"Resolutions for the New Year." His four resolutions are notably lacking any mention of "get better at crosswords," but exhort the following: BE NICER TO OTHERS, SAVE MORE MONEY, EXERCISE DAILY, and LOSE EXTRA POUNDS. I like to misread multi-word crossword answers, don't you? "Be nice toothers," those are words to live by. One of the long Down answers, [Part of a sportscaster's game recap], is FINAL SCORE—there'll be plenty of that going on today. My personal favorite is the hockey Winter Classic at Wrigley Field, a matchup between the Chicago Blackhawks and Detroit Redwings. I wouldn't want to be sitting outside in Wrigley when it's 30° out—it's tough enough to make it through a spring ball game when it's 50°. (But then, I wouldn't have wanted to be standing in Times Square last night with the frigid temps, either.) It's cool to have an NHL game happening in the neighborhood, though, and luckily the skies are cloudy so the skaters won't have to contend with blinding glare.
December 31, 2008
Thursday, 1/1
December 29, 2007
Sunday, 12/30
NYT 11:25
LAT 9:15
BG 7:20
PI 7:04
WaPo 6:42
CS 3:59
I read some hopeful wishes that the Sunday New York Times puzzle would be a trademark Liz Gorski crossword with visual oomph, and it is. In this plus-sized 23x23 grid with left/right symmetry, Frosty the Snowman takes up residence. His hat is made out of black squares, FROSTY THE SNOWMAN is spelled out in circled letters that, in connect-the-dots fashion, outline two big balls of snow (white squares!) to form Frosty's body. The song lyrics unwind in the theme entries: Frosty the Snowman was a JOLLY HAPPY SOUL (2-Down) with a CORNCOB PIPE (134-Across) AND A BUTTON NOSE (16-Down) AND TWO EYES MADE OUT OF COAL (114-Across). That last part is clued [Lyric, part 5], and I don't see an [End of lyric] anywhere so I think that's it. The HABERDASHER who might've made Frosty's hat also ties to the theme, but tangentially. Despite the constraints of the circled squares that build the snowman shape, the fill is smooth. IRS AGENTS and PAD THAI noodles, a timorous I DARE NOT, BAKER'S DOZEN, BEDSPREAD, STRONG-ARM, ONE O'CLOCK, a HAIRBRUSH, HOOSIERS, and a SHOE STORE were all good long answers. Favorite clue: [Artificial heat?] for TOY GUN. I lost a little time with a typo when I filled in this puzzle—no, it's not ROPRS crossing HABRRDASHER, not at all. Never heard of ["The Oath" author Frank] PERETTI. Oh, here's why: He's a contemporary Christian author specializing in the topic of "spiritual warfare." Not my genre. Tiffany designer Elsa Peretti is more my speed—this heart-shaped box sits on my dresser.
Updated:
You know who's a really fast solver in Across Lite? Ellen Ripstein. Crikey! Those solving times for Sunday-sized puzzles are short. (Sigh.) I'll always have Saturday...
Henry Hook's Boston Globe puzzle, "Four-Part Harmony," has five theme entries in a sort of a rebus puzzle. 22-Across is MOTHER OF A FILLY, or a mare. Next up is OUTCRY ON SEEING A MOUSE, or eek. The JOINT LINKING HAND TO ARM is wrist. UNMARRIED WOMAN'S TITLE is Miss. Put all four words together to get a HOLIDAY MESSAGE: mare-eek-wrist-miss, or Merry Christmas. It's cute, and not a sort of theme/wordplay I recall seeing in a crossword before.
Easy Washington Post puzzle from Randolph Ross, one called "Let's Face It." The theme entries share this in common: THEY WEAR MASKS. The theme clues were mostly straightforward, so I got all the theme entries without having any idea what the theme was. Favorite clue: [Calculus taker?] for the masked DENTAL HYGIENIST. Trickiest crossing: 13-Across and 13-Down. With *IDDLES for [Hoedown needs] and *INCHES for [Buntings et al.], it eventually dawned on me that buntings, like the brilliantly hued painted bunting, are birds along the line of FINCHES and not just decorative draping.
Updated:
Andy Sawyer's syndicated LA Times crossword, "New Year's Re-solutions," has a hyphen in the title because the theme entries all have a RE- added to the beginning of a phrase to generate something new. My favorite theme entries were RESENT PACKING (who doesn't?), REMORSE CODE (dot, dash, head slap, dash, self-flagellation, dot, dot), and the REBUS DEPOT where one stores picture puzzles. Good theme, in my opinion. In the fill, it felt like there was more than the usual amount of words that have fallen out of favor as crossword fill in recent (re-cent...) years—[Chinese weight] TAEL crossing RARA avis, muralist SERT and puppeteer SARG, actor CLU Gulager. I do like the one-two punch of ["Woe ___"] for IS ME and [1996 grammar bestseller "Woe ___"] for IS I.
The title of Merl Reagle's Philadelphia Inquirer puzzle, "Repeat Business," suggests that the theme will be like Sawyer's LAT theme, but in Merl's, each phrase begins with a repeated string of letters. I like TWENTY-TWENTY VISION and OLLY OLLY OXEN FREE best.
Paula Gamache's themeless CrosSynergy puzzle is anchored by three horizontal 15s crossing THE GRATEFUL DEAD. I had a brief Dead phase in college... Other highlights: FRIGHT WIG across from PLATO'S CAVE (those two phrases have not appeared together on a web page until right now); SHTETL crossing SHALOM; [Mercury Seven astronaut Deke] SLAYTON's last name appearing in the grid instead of the more crossword-friendly first name; and Martin MILNER of the Adam-12 cop show (rewarding my childhood spent watching TV).
