In Randall Hartman's Sun puzzle, "O Yeah," I was delighted to see a color clue that wasn't another mystifying Peter Gordon oddball color clue—I can't say I've ever heard of "sea pink," but it sounds like a fair description of CORAL. "Boy toy" is a cute clue for GI JOE, as is "What you never want to hear a mohel say" for OOPS.
David Kahn sure crammed a lot of Andrew Lloyd Webber entries into his NYT puzzle, didn't he? Four 4-letter words, the 6/5/6 name, and the four 10's. "You might get a ticket for doing this" is a fun clue for EIGHTY, but all the stuff about the musicals? Eh, not my thing.
NYS 3:45
LAT 3:44
NYT 3:42
CS 3:05
January 09, 2006
Mardi
January 08, 2006
Lundi
Great TV SHOWS theme in Allan Parrish's Monday NYT, featuring phrases ending in words that were long-running TV series with one-word titles. The extra oomph comes from the titles and entries using different meanings of the same words: "Wings" of an airplane vs. waiting IN THE WINGS, a football "Coach" vs. STAGECOACH, the California Highway Patrol of "CHiPs" vs. POTATO CHIPS, and the "M*A*S*H" mobile army surgical hospital vs. MONSTER MASH. I can only think of a few other TV series that could fit this theme: LIQUID SOAP, HAPPY MEDIUM, and ANIMAL CRACKER—though "Medium" is a new show and "Cracker" didn't last long. A show like "Friends" would work only with something like SOCIETY OF FRIENDS, which is too long...
Updated:
Curtis Yee's got two puzzles out today. I liked the gimmick in his LA Times puzzle—"half-priced" book titles. (Know what? It's easier to do the math in your head when you're working with one- and two-digit numbers than with a four-digit number.) In Curtis's Sun puzzle, "Obvious Choices," he's peppered the grid with X's and Z's, and this appears to be JAY-Z's debut as a crossword entry. (Hey, the last time I saw LL COOL J in a grid, I had *LCO*** and started putting in ALCOHOL before I read the clue. Um, yeah...you do have to read the clues.)
CS 3:42
LAT 3:40
NYS 3:34
NYT 3:15
January 07, 2006
Sonntag
The Sunday NYT by Michael Ashley is called "Amateur Poker Party," and all the theme entries are poker terms. I'm sure the theme delighted the hordes of people who enjoy playing poker (or watching it on cable), but I've never played a hand in my life. But I liked the puzzle anyway—entries like ESTRAGON*, My SHARONA, HOLY TOLEDO, BLOTTO, and ENTRE NOUS; clues like "Store outside a city?" for ENSILE and "Food for thought?" for DATA
* If you liked Waiting for Godot and cooking shows, you'll love Francis Heaney's parody, "Bake Me Cutlets" (scroll waaay down toward the end). "Bake Me Cutlets" is, of course, an anagram of Samuel Beckett. Or skip the hassle of scrolling and buy yourself a copy of Francis's book, Holy Tango of Literature.
Updated:
Bob Klahn's CrosSynergy Sunday Challenge is easier than most Friday and Saturday NYT puzzles, but it's about as stern a challenge as a CrosSynergy puzzle ever offers. I counted eight shiny new entries, including FAINEANT, which I never knew was from the French (it looked Irish to me), HOW ARE YA, PUTSCH, and BUSFARE (clued as "Greyhound charge"). Other good clues were "Parchment?" for THIRST and "End of Denver?" for BRONCO.
Nice LA Times puzzle from Matt Skoczen, "See You Around." Usually I enjoy the Washington Post and LA Weekly puzzles more than the LAT, but this week it's flipped.
NYT 9:25
LAT 9:10
CS 5:05
WaPo 8:43
Hex 7:53
January 06, 2006
Samstag
I found the Saturday NYT puzzle by Jim Hyres harder than Friday's. What the hell is CLOOTIE? I just noticed that in looking back at the puzzle. Oh, Scottish Satan. Okay. Got that one through the crossings, obviously. I was also unfamiliar with SARRE and H HOUR, although I think *HOUR was my first entry. Clues I liked include "Pluto and others" for TOONS, "Change places?" for MINTS, "Bullyragged" (a new word for me) for MISUSED, and "Driving aid, of sorts" for LARIAT, and the last thing I filled in after working backwards, "Some pizza slices, e.g." for OCTANTS.
I just might go to Sundance for the Wordplay premiere. How else can I recoup the $5 I spent to preregister to be assigned a 30-minute time slot in which to attempt to buy tickets?
NYT 5:21
LAT 4:49
Saturday Stumper 3:42
CS 3:13
January 05, 2006
Freitag
The marquee puzzle of the day is Byron Walden's Weekend Warrior in the Sun. I wouldn't say this is Byron's toughest puzzle ever (some may dispute that), but it could be his best. I counted 14 entries that aren't listed in the Cruciverb database—and that's a lot of shiny newness to stuff into one puzzle. There are some trademark colloquialisms (most notably HMM I WONDER and HUMOR ME) and a trademark tech term (DRILL DOWN), two intersecting authors with Z's in their names, and an R&B song from 1994 (HEY MR DJ) that I'd never heard of. The Jack Nicholson movie was hard to come by, even with the first letter—his last three Oscar nominations were all for movies starting with an A! (Different letter counts, though.)
But as fantastic as the fill is, it's the clues that make me a loyal Walden customer. The best "aha" clues are "Mystery offer?" for RAT POISON and "Dick Cheney supporter?" for STENT. When a math professor writes, "Fixed circle above a moving center?" it's natural to think of geometry, but it's basketball: RIM. "Odio's opposite" probably befuddled everyone who doesn't speak Italian, but when AMORE fills in, the etymology reveals itself. "Nose expert" hints at otolaryngology, not wine (OENOPHILE). DOGWALKER is, naturally enough, "One who follows many leads?" Both of these clues tempt the solver to assume the wrong meaning of a word like "nose" or "lead"—par for the course in Waldenesque cluing. P.S. What was your solving time?
David Levinson Wilk's NYT features a pair of triple-stacked 15's that are about as zippy as triple stacks get: GONZO JOURNALISM looks great across the top of the grid, doesn't it? There are a few new entries, but, um, not as many as in the aforementioned puzzle; JERRY RICE, PAW PRINTS, and FOSTER DAD make their debuts, along with one of the 15's (HOT ENOUGH FOR YOU). As with Byron's puzzle, there are also a number of entries (I like WHO IS IT and WASH ME) that have been used only once or twice before. Best clue: "Sticking point?" for CARET.
Updated:
Check out the order of the theme entries in Rich Norris's CrosSynergy puzzle. My golf experience is limited, but I'm guessing that TEE, ROUGH, BUNKER, GREEN, HOLE would be a reasonable sequence of locations for a somewhat troubled golf ball.
Today would have been my late grandmother's 93rd birthday. When I was a kid, she's the one I watched tackle the NYT and other crosswords. The only time there was no folded newspaper page with a crossword atop her kitchen table is when the space was needed at mealtimes; dishes cleared, the crossword was returned to its rightful place. Grandma found the puzzles increasingly difficult as more pop culture and wordplay were incorporated, which raises the question: What will crosswords be like 40 years from now? Will we still like them, or will we grumble that they were better back in our heyday?
NYS 8:38
NYT 6:50
LAT 4:23
CS 3:22
Reagle 9:35
WSJ 8:47
January 04, 2006
Donnerstag
Brilliant Thursday Sun puzzle ("One Step at a Time") by Pete Muller, featuring a vertical WORD LADDER along with four rebus squares containing the steps in a word ladder (in which one letter at a time is changed, yielding a new word). Even the symmetrical locations of the rebus squares didn't speed things up much for me, and the NE corner slaughtered me. I should have jettisoned PYREX (which I had in place of SILEX) much sooner, since 8A appeared to be AMOEBAS and not something ending with a P. It didn't help that I'd never heard of Green Day's drummer, TRE COOL. But I'm most disappointed in myself for failing to get the LAVE rung despite having watched "[LAVE]RNE and Shirley" for years. Speaking of Green Day, have you ever encountered the color "mermaid," which purportedly is similar to SAGE GREEN? (Peter Gordon claims it's supported by his dictionary, which has provided him with oddball color clues in the past.) This puzzle has a number of not-in-Cruciverb entries: A CAPPELLA and DOULA, in addition to TRE COOL and SAGE GREEN. Well done, if vexing.
The timed applet wouldn't load Vic Fleming's NYT for me, so I defected to Across Lite. (Grr.) Anyway...the puzzle features a classic Oscar Wilde quote that breaks down nicely into 15/12/15-letter chunks, supplemented by the author's first and last names at the beginning and end of the puzzle. Favorite clue: "Banks on a runway" for TYRA. Edited after reading Lee's comment: D'oh! Okay, so it didn't break down into 15/12/15, it was 16/12/16. Eh, who counts?)
Updated:
Unless I miscounted, David Kahn packed 82 theme squares into the LA Times puzzle. I've seen a similar theme at least once before, but I daresay previous versions of this theme weren't as elegantly executed or as thorough. I won't add any spoilers because I know some of you don't normally do the LAT puzzle—you should do this one.
Raymond Hamel's CrosSynergy puzzle has two corners of nice 8-letter entries.
NYS 8:33 (nope, no typo there)
NYT 4:45
LAT 3:38
CS 3:07
Would you like to play a game?
No, it's not a WarGames reference. It's an invitation to play a theme game.
Tuesday's NYT puzzle by Lynn Lempel featured BUCK'S KIN (clued as "Family for Pearl?"), WHITE'S ALE, COLE'S LAW, HEAD'S TART, and SAND'S TONE. In each of these, the first part is a famous person's surname, and together the two parts can also be read as a well-known one- or two-word term. Lee Glickstein says there are likely 100 or more other candidates for this type of theme, and he's already got a list of 20 good ones. So let's play in the HaloScan comments party room. Write clues (with enumeration), guess answers, or both. We'll stop when we reach 100.
To start us off, here are two from Lee's list:
1. Dad for Doris? (6)
2. Jack-of-all-trades for Rich? (13)
January 03, 2006
Mittwoch
If you haven't done Ben Tausig's "Subscription Descriptions" yet, consider going to the Voice website and solving online or downloading the Word version—the Across Lite version posted this afternoon appears not to be the final one. Never mind—I hear the AL file's been replaced.
Brendan Emmett Quigley's Sun puzzle, "Put a Finger on It," pays homage to the QWERTY keyboard and demonstrates the most straightforward manner of accomplishing a pangrammatic crossword. (Though it must've been tricky to arrange the fill around something like ZXCVBNM.) The clues I liked best were "Dead waters?" for STYX, "Shuffle, e.g." for IPOD, and "Moving direction?" for SHOO. This puzzle also marks the second day in a row of Sun puzzles containing TIP JAR. Yesterday, new and exciting; today, old hat.
John "Popeye" Minarcik and Nancy Salomon's TALE OF TWO CITIES theme occupies an impressive 60 squares of the Wednesday NYT. It's one of those themes that makes the solver rely heavily on the crossings, so it ups the challenge a bit. I'm a little disappointed, though—I'd have hoped that pathologist Popeye would have tied OOZE and ITCH together in a clinically relevant fashion, and maybe found a way to work a PUSTULE or LESION into the grid somewhere.
Returning to the Tausig puzzle—in addition to some seldom-seen entries like KVETCHES and METS FAN, Ben's got the great clue, "Went platinum, perhaps, but probably not gold" (for DYED).
Looking ahead to the rest of this week's Sun puzzles, I will say that the Thursday puzzle killed me (particularly the NE corner), but Byron Walden's excellent Weekend Warrior did not, even though it's rumored to be leaving solvers feeling battered.
NYS 4:45
NYT 4:19 (Would you believe I typed a bracket and a 3 in this grid? I just could not type tonight! I blame the Sun puzzle for jinxing my keyboard.)
Tausig 3:57
LAT 3:53
CS 2:50
January 02, 2006
Dienstag
Cute NYT puzzle from Lynn Lempel. All these years I've been eating cole slaw, I've never been tempted to pronounce it as if it were COLE'S LAW—until now. This is one of those themes that make me wish I'd had the idea first, because it looks like it would have been fun to concoct a list of candidates for the theme entries.
I've been in New York Sun withdrawal since early last week. Here's hoping this week's puzzles are posted first thing in the morning so I can binge again...
Updated:
The Tuesday Sun by Anthony Salvia has been posted, but I haven't seen the next three days' puzzles—anyone else get 'em yet? I liked the puzzle, "Capital Liquidity," because of my fondness for geography themes (blue is my favorite Trivial Pursuit color) and anagrams. The bonus is some top-notch fill, such as TOKLAS, ERSATZ, and TIP JAR (which doesn't show up in the Cruciverb database, despite showing up on so many café counters. Now I'm supposed to tip someone for selling me a dish of ice cream? Feh.)
NYT 3:35
Tausig tba?
LAT 3:21
NYS 3:03
CS 2:23
Montag
Cute theme in Linda Schechet Tucker's NYT puzzle, and well-timed—I did the puzzle shortly after my family left, and the group included my kid's UNCLE TOM and my MAMA (alas, I have no COUSIN VINNY). I managed to cost myself 20 seconds on the applet with the typo SHPERE (which should be a word in its own right)—why is it that when I have a typo near the top of the grid, I start searching for it from the bottom? Looking at DESSERTS, my eye traveled up and saw STRESSED, so I checked the opposing spot of the grid to see what it offered. STUNTCAR backwards is even better!
CS 3:54
NYT 3:11
LAT 3:04
NYS (Is today a Sun holiday?)
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