Onion 4:51
BEQ 3:56
NYT 3:15
LAT 2:57
CS 6:43 (J—paper)
Nancy Kavanaugh's New York Times crossword
Nancy Kavanaugh presents an instant puzzle: JUST ADD WATER (58A) and the theme will appear.
The Middle East accounts for three answers. An IRANI is a [Certain Oriental rug maker]. An OMANI is a [Muscat native]. And YEMEN is a [Red Sea land]. Europe rings in with NEIN (German for "no"), or [Frau's "forget it"]; NAE, a Scottish [Kiltie's turndown]; the French phrase Les ETATS-Unis; EUR., [Where It.'s at]; [Zuider ___] ZEE; and DADA, [Jean Arp's movement] in the European art tradition. Hawaii is on the board with two: UKES are [Luau strings] and a LEI [may have plumerias or orchids].
Most likely trouble spot: Where TRURO, the [Cape Cod town], meets several intersecting answers. DR. LAO was a [1964 Tony Randall title role]. [Having a rough knotted surface] clues NUBBY, as in a nubby, bumpy knit. An ARIL is a crosswordese word meaning [Seed covering]. And then there's the two-word answer ONE CUBIT—[18 inches, give or take].
Byron Walden's Onion A.V. Club puzzle
By the way, I hear this Saturday's NYT puzzle will be a collaboration between Tyler Hinman and Byron. Should be a fun one—with a touch of evil.
The Onion theme is TEABAGGING, the [Actual protest activity for tax-and-spend opponents that sets the tone for this puzzle's theme]. Teabagging is not just a tax protest, it's also a sex term relating to the balls. So the rest of the theme entries also have sexual connotations (don't ask me what they all are), but are clued as non-lewd protests with embarrassing double-entendre names:
There are two full names from the music business appearing opposite each other in the grid. CLEO LAINE and Motley Crue's VINCE NEIL. Nice contrast. [Today's 20-somethings, as a group] are GEN Y; my husband has an Aunt Geny, but she's 70-something. Never heard of METALLO, the [Kryptonite-powered cyborg supervillain]—I mean, I probably saw a movie with this villain but sure don't recognize the name. I never knew ZONIAN was the word for a [U.S. citizen living near the Panama Canal, once]. An unusual partial, ALAS I, completes ["___ Cannot Swim" (2008 Laura Marling album]. Laura Marling is 19 and thus part of GEN Y. Did you need all the crossings to get LEHUA, the [Hawaiian hardwood tree]? I did.
Updated Wednesday morning:
Sarah Keller's CrosSynergy puzzle, "If the Shoe Fits"—Janie's review
The theme of this enjoyable puzzle—shoe styles—is spelled out in the second half of each of the two-word theme fill. You won't find the Sirius Stiletto among the options, but you will find:
So that's it for the theme. But that's not it for fill that's making its first appearance. BELLMAN, a variation of "bellhop" is taking a bow, as are TIP JAR and LIE AWAKE (well, for these two, a CS bow anyway). All of these feel very fresh to me and not merely because they're first-timers. They have a real specificity to them in the kinds of images they conjure up. This is a good thing.
I seemed to like this puzzle from the get-go. While its connotation is not that of a happy place, TORA Bora is still a place that grabs our attention; CALEB Carr's The Alienist was one of the grizzliest books I've ever read. I was glad to be reminded, too, of author ALISON Lurie, whose literate The War Between the Tates I read years ago. And it was refreshing to see Arthur ASHE clued not as a world-class tennis player, but in conjunction with his three-volume series [A] Hard Road to Glory: A History of the African-American Athlete. "Arthur! Arthur!"
Back to the map of the world, we get good ol' domestic TERRE Haute, IN, but we also get the more exotic KASBAH [Old section of Algiers]. This one led me to investigate the differences between KASBAH and Casbah. (Haloscan can be a bit frustrating, sending you back to the home page as it does after visiting a link, but sometimes it's worth the trip. Give it a go.) And then, from this site of "greatest film misquotes", there's this on the subject:"Come with me to the Casbah," followed by "we'll make beautiful music together" - was not said by Charles Boyer to co-star Hedy Lamarr in Algiers (1938); it was said by cartoon characters Yosemite Sam and Pepe LePew in subsequent Looney Tunes cartoons, among others; in fact, animator Chuck Jones based the Warner Brothers cartoon character Pepe LePew on Charles Boyer's Pepe Le Moko.
While we're in movie-land, there's not only producer Marcus LOEW, but also SOME Like It Hot, Citizen KANE (and not Citizen Ruth...), Keystone KOP, HAN Solo, ILSA Lund.
ALEC Baldwin is clued wonderfully: [A Baldwin, but not a piano]. Sweet! And there are lots of other lively clues: [Grace period?] for AMEN; [Ducktail applications for GELS; and loads of alliteration with [Seaside souvenir], [Genesis gent], [Stable sound], [Black, to Blake],[High-spirited horse], [Valley of the Vineyards]. (Nice, too, how NEIGH, that [Stable sound] is in grid-proximity to STEED, the [High-spirited horse].)
Does this puzzle have perhaps too many names and pop culture references? Perhaps. I haven't even mentioned all of them. But each name seemed to trigger some other connected thought. That kept things interesting for me. Oh—and I almost forgot—the crossword-friendly ORIOLE [Baltimore player] found its way here, too. So, really, what's not to like (said the girl from Baw'mer...)?!
Brendan Quigley's blog crossword, "P.B.R. Me A.S.A.P."
Between IHOP and the Jewel, I'm out of free time this morning. Medical editing! Puzzle editing! Work awaits. So, quickly:
The theme is phrases that, like Brendan's beloved Pabst Blue Ribbon, have P.B.R. initials. POINT BLANK RANGE, a PUSH BUTTON RADIO, and Colin Powell's famous POTTERY BARN RULE, the ["You break it, you buy it" foreign policy]. It's not the timeliest appearance of that phrase, but is it not still a fantastic 15? Highlights in the fill: BREAK A SWEAT, YO LA TENGO, FIRST DIBS. Trouble spot for me: The crossing of [Dwight Howard's team, on scoreboards] and [Naughty by Nature hit of 1991]. ORL, or Orlando, and OPP? SESTETS and TSETSES populate the bottom row in the constructor's fallback copout fill, but at least they're clued as anagrams of one another. The ERNE clue is very inside-baseball: [Bird indigenous to crosswords]. So those answers are excused, but we still have ENOTE, APIA, and SOLING reminding us that the puzzle can't all be SASHAYS and SKI PLANES.
Laura Sternberg's L.A. Times crossword
In my L.A. Crossword Confidential post, I already lauded this theme. Five colorful phrases that begin with words that can precede PEPPER (69A), in turn creating other colorful phrases? Win-win. Here are the theme answers:
Throw in a LAMAZE class for a ZOMBIE mom, the twin [Rogue]s KNAVE and SCAMP, DEEP-DISH pizza, and the handful of blah bits (ICC, AEC, OAS, RESODS) can be forgiven. Plus: 69 squares of particularly rich and flavorful theme content buys a lot of good will.
May 12, 2009
Wednesday, 5/13
March 18, 2009
Thursday, 3/19
NYT 4:19
Tausig (not timed)
CS 3:27
LAT 3:13
Ooh, I really liked Laura Sternberg's New York Times crossword. The theme replaces a word in each long answer with a sound-alike 2-letter state postal abbreviation, and the state is evoked by the city mentioned in the clue:
Where I went awry in doing this puzzle was filling in *EE for [___-necked] at 27-Down and leaving that middle E in place when it meant that answer would be EEE. Whoops—it's EWE-necked, and no, I never would have had a clue what that meant if not for that semi-recent crossword that introduced EWENECK to us non-horsy types. The errant E had me mired in [Tax-free transaction, usually], or SWAP. That A came from PAL, with the tough clue [Shadow, so to speak]. [Preceder of a case name] clues the phrase IN RE. NAGGER, as in "one who nags," is clued as an [Unpleasant reminder?], but in general one who nags is called a nag and not a nagger, no?
Favorite clues/answers:
Ben Tausig's Ink Well/Chicago Reader crossword for this week is called "Springing Ahead." When I test-solved this one, it was a day before daylight saving time kicked in, and the theme seemed all backwards to me. Then after moving my clocks ahead an hour, everything made sense. The theme touches on TIME ZONES, which are [Things standardized by Congress on March 19, 1918]—happy 91st birthday, time zones! Where the TIME ZONEs hit the arbitrary division between days of the week is called the DATE LINE, which for the terms of this puzzle is the [International boundary which, when crossed from east to west, causes a traveler to 49-Across (and a hint to this puzzle)]. 49-Across is LOSE A DAY. The other three theme answers involve our hypothetical traveler LOSing A DAY thusly:
Lots of clues from music in this puzzle:
Other clues, in the They Come in Pairs category:
Updated:
It took some thinking and some looking to find the theme in Ernie Lampert's LA Times crossword. HIT THE HAY appears in the middle at 35-Across, clued as [Turn in, perhaps using items hidden in 17-, 24-, 48- and 57-Across]. Those items for hitting the hay are shown in bold within the following phrases:
Ideally, a hidden-word theme will be consistent in where the words are hidden—within a single word (e.g., SCOTCH), across two words (BEBE DANIELS), or across three words (WORKS OF ART). It can be mildly jarring to have an assortment of multiple routes.
Here's an olio of clues and answers, which bundle themselves into various categories:
Favorite clue: SOCCER is a [Goal-oriented activity?].
Randy Ross's CrosSynergy puzzle is called "Hamburger Helpers," and the phrases all contain hamburger toppings in other contexts:
I had a turkey burger the other day, and my burger wants to know where the lettuce, tomato, and ketchup phrases are.
Assorted clues:
October 28, 2008
Wednesday, 10/29
Tausig 4:25
CS 3:45
NYT 3:36
Onion 3:35
LAT 3:12
Sun untimed
(updated at 10:30 a.m. Wednesday)
The crux of Steven Zisser's New York Times crossword theme lies in the clues. The trick those clues play isn't usually so prominent in a Wednesday puzzle, which strives to be more challenging than Monday but not so vexing that it scares people off. If you've seen the flower = "something that flows, a flow-er" trick before, you know what's happening in the theme clues:
Clues and answers I liked:
If you're fairly new to solving Wednesday puzzles, here are some words you should know:
Laura Sternberg's Sun crossword plays around with anagrams. CRAZY HORSE, the Sioux chief, anchors the puzzle, and crazy anagrams of HORSE appear hidden within the other theme answers. For example, CULTURE SHOCK contains RESHO in the circled squares, and those letters unscramble to make HORSE, and the other theme entries' circled letters are also anagrams of HORSE.
My favorite clues and answers:
I didn't notice that the Across Lite timer was stopped when I opened the puzzle, so I didn't start the timer. Whoops.
Updated:
Steven Ginzburg's LA Times crossword includes a selection of window treatments in the theme entries. The theme's not super-tight as the window treatments land in the middle, end, beginning, and end of the theme answers. Ginzburg's batch of phrases is:
Now, all four theme entries could have started with a window treatment: BLIND AS A BAT and CURTAIN CALL are both 11's and SHUTTERBUG and SHADE TREES are 10's. We'd lose the 15's and end up with fewer theme squares, though.
Of course, a theme this flexible has also been done before. I searched for CURTAINCALL in the Cruciverb.com database and found two similar themes—Fred Piscop's 12/8/01 CrosSynergy, with BLIND ALLEY and SHADE OF BLUE joining CURTAIN CALL and SHUTTERBUG; and Lee Weaver's 6/15/99 Newsday, with two 11's and two 9's. Mind you, this is no slam on Ginzburg's puzzle today. Crossword constructors do tend to play with language in many of the same ways, so several are likely come up with the same theme idea independently. You wouldn't want to see the same theme reworked in the same venue just months apart, but for versions of a theme to be published in different venues or separated by years? Not a problem.
Hey! What do you know? Randolph Ross's CrosSynergy puzzle, "Compression Chamber," has a variation on a Lynn Lempel theme I remember well. For my book, How to Conquer the New York Times Crossword Puzzle, I delineated my step-by-step solving of Lynn's 4/24/06 NYT crossword, which had two of the same theme entries as Randy's puzzle today. Here's what Randy has:
Lynn's stand-ins for SQUEEZE and MASH were two 10-letter phrases, LEMON TWIST and the delightful CAP'N CRUNCH. Favorite clues and answers today: [It has its pluses and minuses] for MATH; HOT TUNA was a [Rock group spun off from Jefferson Airplane] (thank you, crossword answer, for not being the abysmal Starship); [King of pop music] for CAROLE King (I've seen this clue before, but I still love the Michael Jackson mislead); and [Work on a sentence?] for DO TIME (not EDIT). The toughest clue for me was [Apt. ad abbr.] for EIK (eat-in-kitchen). Cluing HAREMS as [Women's groups] sat wrong with me—the clue had me thinking of feminism and then HAREMS came along and depressed me.
Hah! After the Cubs were eliminated from postseason play yet again, I texted Tyler Hinman and pretty much laid the blame squarely at his feet. After all, he had lived in Wrigleyville at the beginning of the baseball season, but then moved to California and jinxed the Cubs. Tyler's reaction to the Cubs' loss was not to accept responsibility, but rather to construct an Onion A.V. Club crossword focusing on baseball's sad sacks. The [Hard-luck subject of this puzzle] is 20-Across, the CHICAGO CUBS. The rest of the theme clues cross-reference 20-Across. There's the BILLY GOAT and its CURSE; hapless STEVE / BARTMAN; the DODGERS, who shattered the Cubs' hopes this fall; and NINETEEN OH EIGHT, [The last time 20-Across won it all]. Every single one of these answers was a gimme for me. Tossed in without regard for symmetry are the bonus entries TRIB, the [Newspaper that owns 20-Across, familiarly], and the Cubs' AGE-LONG wait for another championship. Speaking of symmetry, did you notice that this puzzle has left/right symmetry rather than the typical rotational symmetry most crosswords have?
Most surprising answer: HYMEN, clued as innocuously as possible with [Maidenhead]. Toughest clues, for me: [Moirae (Greek) or Parcae (Roman)] for the FATES; [Satanist LaVey] for ANTON; [Beetle's bane] for SARGE (from the "Beetle Bailey" comic strip); [Chief Lone Wolf and his people] for KIOWAS. Favorite clues: [Unit of force?] for COP; [Smashing Pumpkins guitarist James] IHA, because I bought his sweet, RETRO solo CD in the '90s; and [On the clock?] for TIMED, the way Tyler, I, and many of you solve most crosswords.
Ben Tausig's Ink Well/Chicago Reader puzzle, "October Surprise," has a 15x15 variation on the theme that was in the 21x21 syndicated LA Times crossword this past Sunday: BOO is added to assorted phrases to alter their meaning.
In the "not in your daily newspaper" category, we have an ENEMA, or [Colon cleanser, perhaps]; CYBERSEX, or [Second Life hookup]; STD clued as [Result of a rubber shortage?: Abbr.]; and ESG, a [Much-sampled South Bronx band]. You know, editors clean up punctuation. Are we colon cleansers too? REBAG ([Organize differently, as groceries]) looks like one of those terrible made-up verbs, and yet who among us has never rebagged our groceries at least a little, especially at the self checkout? KRUMPS is another answer that isn't likely to pop up in the daily paper's crossword. It's clued as [Dances in a clown suit, perhaps], and I'm not sure what it says about me that with the P and S in place, my first answer there was STRIPS. That's got to be worse than mixing up Lou Dobbs and Lou Rawls.
March 10, 2008
Tuesday, 3/11
Tausig 4:36
Onion 3:55
CS 3:27
LAT 3:20
NYS 3:01
NYT 2:54
Blog reader Robin Stears, a budding crossword constructor, did me the great honor of constructing a puzzle just for me. But I'm not greedy and I'm willing to share: If you'd like to try the Sunday-sized "Four Amy" puzzle, go here. Thanks, Robin! (And for the record, crosswordy people really dig it when someone makes a crossword for them just for fun. One mostly-themeless constructor recently ventured into themes featuring me and Emily Cureton, and Emily and I both ate that up. I would rather get a crossword than have a poem written about me, quite honestly.)
That's two days in a row that the NYT and Sun puzzles are on a par, difficulty-wise. This is not a trend I expect to continue, as Peter Gordon likes to tout the Sun crossword as the nation's hardest—Wednesday through Sunday had better be gnarly bastards! (Other papers' crosswords are also welcome to be gnarly bastards more often.)
Eugene Sard's previous New York Times crossword was published in 2002, also on a Tuesday. This time around, the theme is pessimism, optimism, and apathy—EXPECT THE WORST, HOPE FOR THE BEST, COULDN'T CARE LESS. The theme doesn't do much besides sit there looking fetching, but it is quite fetching if you ask me. Favorite fill: MYRRH, RACCOONS, X-ACTO knife, WACKO, "SO TRUE" (when I Googled that phrase, I found myself at a blog agreeing with this XKCD cartoon), and CAT TOY. [Get all steamy] seemed so promising, so racy, but was merely FOG UP. Brand-new phrase in my lexicon: SPY-HOP, clued as [Springing bounce in tall grasses, as by an animal, to view the surroundings]. I thought a Google search would show me sproinging springboks, but all I could find was assorted whales spy-hopping above the water's surface.
The New York Sun crossword by Kevin George is called "Trains Rolling In" because the EL rolls into each theme entry. For instance, bag handlers become BAGEL HANDLERS. Favorite answers and clues: [Montana, once] for NINER Joe Montana; S AND H, or shipping and handling; [E, often?] for theme entry VOWEL OF SILENCE; HALAL ([Slaughtered according to Islamic law]), because there's a KFC restaurant in Chicago's Pakistani neighborhood that serves halal chicken, and because I saw my first genuine authentic New York halal cart during the ACPT weekend; and FILLIP. Somebody somewhere the other day pointed out that oblique fonts are a [Slanted printing style], whereas ITALIC letters are designed separately by type designers and are not merely slanted letters. Typographical nerds, you will be heard! (Typographical nerds will also appreciate keming, but have probably already seen that webpage.)
Updated:
Laura Sternberg's LA Times puzzle is going straight into my folder of favorite easy puzzles. So many Monday and Tuesday puzzles don't captivate me, but this one did, for several reasons. (1) Fun pop-culture theme. (2) A fair number of Scrabbly answers in the fill. Two Q/Z words intersecting! (3) Lively fill, such as D-BACKS, QUARTZ, LOLLIPOP, GO DEEP, MINOTAUR, JIGS, and KEYLESS entry. (4) Big swaths of white space in two corners, each with an 8 and three 7s crossing a 7, a 6, and two theme entries. Favorite clue/answer: [Nullify, redundantly] for VOID OUT (as in "Hang on; I have to void out the sale and then ring it up again").
Brendan Quigley's Onion A.V. Club crossword abuses all sorts of substances. COKE, WEED, ACID, E, and HORSE—all slang terms for drugs—begin each otherwise-unrelated theme entry. I love this puzzle for including ACID-WASHED JEANS, an abomination clued as [Certain '80s clothing fashion]. Then there's {"Yes ___" (Obama's campaign slogan)], Yes WE CAN. The zippiest 8-letter entry is NY GIANTS, who put an end to the overmuch-vaunted Patriots season this winter. And how about this combo: [It happens, it's said] for SHIT in the same puzzle as the [1847 South Seas adventure] OMOO. It's new-wave meets old-school.
Ben Tausig's Ink Well/Chicago Reader crossword for this week, "Ease Out," eases out the EE(S/Z)E at the end of each theme entry and converts it into a plural. Processed cheese becomes PROCESSED CHIS, [Life forces with coloring agents and preservatives]; summer breeze is SUMMER BRIES; and asthmatic wheeze turns into ASTHMATIC WIIS, [Nintendo consoles for people with breathing problems?]. I'd never heard of the [Kazaa alternative] SOULSEEK, a file-sharing network. Favorite bits: [[An offer to "en1arge your m@nhood," probably] for SPAM; [The ___ of all...] for MOTHER; AMWAY above its rhyme, AT BAY; and the not-San-Francisco answer of TOKYO for [Where baseball's Giants play].
Randall Hartman's CrosSynergy puzzle, "3M Company," advertises no Post-its or Scotch tape. Rather, each theme entry is a contrived two-word phrase in which each word has three Ms: the [Pleistocene matriarch?] is a MAMMOTH MOMMIE, for example. With assorted other Ms outside the theme, there are 24 Ms in the grid—compare that to the NYT record of 15 Ms in a daily puzzle. Favorite clue: [Sport of Kings] for HOCKEY, citing the NHL's Los Angeles Kings while evoking horse racing.
February 03, 2008
Monday, 2/4
CS 3:32
NYS 3:17
LAT 3:03
NYT 2:32
The crosswordese haiku/senryu/short doggerel contest is here; I'll choose the winner on Saturday. (The prize is Russell Brown's wooden crossword earrings.)
The New York Times crossword interface was having some technical glitches tonight—the Java applet still doesn't have the Monday puzzle, three hours after it was supposed to be there. No worries—the puzzle's available in Across Lite, too, which is where I solved it.
The byline reads Dave and Tracy Mackey—Dave has had his work published in the NYT before, but I believe this is Tracy's debut. (Congrats!) The theme of their New York Times puzzle is "See you again!"—three folksy phrases that mean that include "DON'T BE A STRANGER," "DROP IN ANY TIME," and "Y'ALL COME BACK NOW." Au revoir means the same thing, but it's hardly folksy so it would be out of place here. My favorite clues took me back to my '70s youth: [Where "you can do whatever you feel," in a hit 1978 song] for YMCA, and ["Happy Days" cool cat, with "the"] for FONZ. I think the with "the" is extraneous—didn't his friends call him Fonz, sans article, when addressing him face to face? Or do I remember this wrong?
Updated:
Mike Torch's LA Times crossword has six theme entries that begin with an xAxA word (and one, BABA WAWA, that also ends with such a word). There's also PAPA BEAR, LA-LA LAND, GAGA OVER, DADA ARTIST, and MAMA TOLD ME. Now, caca fails the breakfast test and "ha ha" doesn't really begin a stand-alone phrase. But the crossword-friendly rara avis! Where is it? Kicked to the curb because the vowel sound's different? And Nana Mouskouri! Yes, I know, you'd need a bigger grid to comfortably fit everyone in. And I liked this crossword—six theme entries that are fun to say, along with good fill (e.g., DRIBBLE, ORLANDO, PREQUEL, QUARRY).
Laura Sternberg's New York Sun crossword, "J Crew," features three J.J.J. people. I'd never heard of JAMES J. JEFFRIES, a boxer of note a century ago. (Wikipedia says he was a "Great White Hope" touted as the white man who could beat Jack Johnson, a black boxer. He couldn't.) J. JONAH JAMESON, Peter Parker's editor/boss in Spider-Man, was recently in another crossword with J. Alfred Prufrock. And then there's JESSE JACKSON, JR.—my mother's representative in Congress. (He's endorsed Obama in tomorrow's primary.) Love the extra J names—JOAN JETT and JANE EYRE, JUDE Law, Jason sounds-like-a-J GIAMBI, and Elvis silent-J STOJKO.
Rich Norris's CrosSynergy crossword, "A Bunch of Baloney," has five theme entries beginning with "baloney"—WIND, HOT AIR, BUNK, FUDGE, and GAS. I don't think I've heard FUDGE used that way—perhaps the people who say that are the same ones who eat PEA SALAD. Plenty of longish fill here (ERIC IDLE!), and three Zs and an X.
