Diary of a Crossword Fiend

Tuesday, 11/24/09

2009-11-23T22:26:00.001-06:00

Jonesin' 4:42
NYT 3:20
LAT tba
CS tba

Vic Fleming and Bonnie Gentry's New York Times crossword

The three multi-part theme entries in this 16x15 crossword made an especially cohesive set for this solver, as I'd recently read this Language Log post refuting the idea that phrases like "at the end of the day" were management-speak. (Turns out everyone else is using these phrases, too.) The theme entries were split up into two or three chunks apiece, with cross-referenced clues flailing all over the place. This provided a rather choppy solving experience rather than a nice Tuesdayesque flow.

The theme pieced together three phrases that mean [everything considered]. 19A and 64A spell out AT THE END / OF THE DAY. 34A, 43A, and 48A say WHEN ALL / IS SAID / AND DONE. And 4A's clue is [After "in", and with 44-Down, everything considered], which is a crazily stilted clue. THE FINAL / ANALYSIS really wants its introductory IN to appear with it in the grid.

The fill's got some sparkle to it, particularly in the longer answers:

• 1A. [Eucalyptus] is the GUM TREE, as in "Kookaburra sits in the old gum tree..." Not to be confused with the sweetgum tree.
• 30A. ALAN BALL is the [Oscar-winning "American Beauty" writer] who went on to create the show Six Feet Under.
• 67A. Hey, look, it's ONASSIS, [The "O" of Jackie O.], rather than crosswordese ARI.
• 23D. A small [Traveling bag] is a VALISE. This word has always amused me. "Set down your valise, dear, and have a seat on the divan." Does anyone call it a VALISE these days?
• 47D. V.P.'S are [#2's, for short]. Can we start calling #2 pencils "V.P.'s"? Who's with me?

If you didn't know that 68D: [Soul: Fr.] is AME, make a note of it. This is Franco-crosswordese and while it doesn't come up often, you'll probably see it again. I needed all the crossings for 55A: LAIRD, [Melvin of the Nixon cabinet]. And I was briefly thrown by the 4-letter Roman numeral, 3D: [The year 1450], or MCDL. We don't often see 4-letter Roman numerals without an I, do we?

Matt Jones's Jonesin' crossword, "Initial Reaction: letters, not words"

The five theme entries change the first word of (semi-)familiar phrases into the single letters whose names sound the same:

• 17A. [Valentine sentiment to the 80-89% crowd?] is "B, MY LOVE" instead of "be my love." Does B MY LOVE make sense to you? It's eluding me. Is it "B, be my love" or "B, (you are) my love"? Is B the letter grade or a person who earns that grade?
• 26A. [Thankful thought toward a universal blood type?] is "O, WHAT YOU DO TO ME" (swapping O for oh). Wouldn't you be thanking O for what she/he/it does for you rather than to you?
• 32A. [Cloud shaped like a small Roman numeral?] is I IN THE SKY (swapping an I for an eye—wait, has that theme been done, or maybe "an eye for an I"?).
• 41A. [Tagline of a rap-oriented cologne slogan?] is "G, YOU SMELL GREAT." Urban Dictionary helps explain "G" if you don't grasp that part. I was hoping for an evocation of Gee, Your Hair Smells Terrific shampoo from the '70s-'80s.
• 53A. [Hassle at the local community gym?] is a Y BOTHER ("Why bother?"). My favorite among the quintet of theme entries.

The biggest "WTF" clue was right up top at 1A: [Numerical classification of some World War II U-boats]. As luck would have it, 1A intersected the second biggest "WTF" clue, 5D: [Surname of four generations of French painters in the Louvre]. Did not know of the TYPE VII boats, nor the VERNET artistic dynasty. I could see 39D: VALJEAN/["Les Miserables" surname] meeting 52A: ABUJA/[Current capital of Nigeria] mucking things up for some folks. Did anyone else want 43D: [North Africans disputed in a "Seinfeld" Trivial Pursuit question] to be the MOOPS rather than the MOORS?

Monday, 11/23/09

2009-11-22T20:32:00.004-06:00

NYT 3:41
BEQ 3:34
LAT 2:50
Payne's Squeezeboxes #1, harder version untimed (easier option with enumerations also available)
CS untimed

If you use the NYT's applet, as I do, you rarely have difficulty loading the puzzle at the promised time. Somewhat more frequently, however, the NYT's link to the Across Lite version gets shanghaied at puzzle time. When the puzzle's not where you expect it to be, visit Jim Horne's Across Lite Links to Recent NYT Puzzles page. At the bottom of the page, there's a perpetual link to the latest second Sunday puzzle in PDF (not Across Lite) form—as those links go haywire sometimes too.

Ben Pall's New York Times crossword

Today's constructor is 14 years old, I hear. What sort of crosswords could you make when you were 14? If your name isn't, say, Will Shortz, Henry Hook, or Merl Reagle, probably the answer's "Well, nothing like this one." The BEATLES are celebrated via the four lads' first names being circled in non-Beatles-related phrases and assorted Beatles-related short fill scattered throughout the grid.

The four lads are here:

• In 18A, PAUL McCartney is in the circled letters in POLE VAULTER, or [Athlete trying to pass the bar?].
• GEORGE Harrison dwells in 59A, AGENT ORANGE, the [Toxic herbicide]. Yay, Orange! Boo, toxic herbicide! Sorry you're in there, George.
• To JOIN THE NAVY is to [Head out to sea, say], and 3D is where JOHN Lennon is hiding.
• RINGO Starr is found in 26D, READING ROOM, or [Library area].

It would be cool if the phrases the Beatles were embedded within had something to do with the band, but alas, they do not. The stray Beatles bits include the following:

• At 9A/46A, ABBEY / ROAD is infelicitously clued thus: [With 46-Down, 1969 album by the 38-Across].
• 14A: [Yoko ___] ONO.
• 16A. ["We're more popular than Jesus now," famously] is a QUOTE.
• 30A. MAN completes ["Nowhere ___" (1966 hit)].
• 47A. RAVI, [Sitarist Shankar], father of Norah Jones, is the Indian musician who turned George Harrison on to the sitar.
• 48A. TRY fills in the blank in ["Gonna ___ with a little help from my friends"].
• 13D. YER ["___ Blues" (song on the White Album)].

From the non-Beatles fill, five clues:

• 55A. An EARPLUG is a [Silencer?]. Generally, earplugs will knock off about 30 decibels, which is not quite silencing.
• 10D. [Like eyes seemingly about to pop out] clues BULGING. I will not link to the video of that woman who can pop her eyeballs out of the sockets at will. (You're welcome.)
• 24D. [Commoner, for short] is PLEB, short for plebeian. Is this Monday-grade fill?
• 68A. A SNORT is a [Sound akin to "Harrumph!"].
• 67A. Looks like LORES in the grid, but it's LO-RES, short for low-resolution. [Like a fuzzy computer image, informally].

Nice debut, Ben. Can you do me a favor, Ben, and try to get some girls your age interested in constructing crosswords? We keep having bright young men entering the field of crossword construction, and it would be great to get some young women involved, too. Mentors are standing by!

Trip Payne's Squeezeboxes #1

If you haven't poked around Triple Play Puzzles yet, go have a look. If you have Thanksgiving travel or down-time ahead and you'd like some puzzles to occupy you, you'll find a trove of goodies at Trip's site. All the puzzles are Trip's own work, and they include regular crosswords (including jumbo themelesses, my favorite), cryptics, variety crosswords, variety cryptics, and more.

If you've seen Frank Longo's "One, Two, Three" puzzles in the Games publications, you get the basic concept of a Squeezeboxes puzzle—except instead of putting 1, 2, or 3 letters in each box, Trip has squeezed in 2 to 6 letters. Most of this crossword tumbled for me, except the zone around 25D (an [Actress on Silver Spoons]? Help! Uncle!), 15D, 24A, and 29A. I finally caved and Googled 25D, and the others fell into place soon after. 29A vexed me because the first part was not either of the two words that came to my mind, and I was blanking on what else could go there. The 24A clue, [Green coin?], completely stymied me for so long.

Trip, what was the construction process like for this puzzle? Just a lot of trial and error, noodling around in the grid? Where does one start to build a puzzle like this?

Updated later Sunday night:

Joan Buell's Los Angeles Times crossword

Easy puzzle, as expected on a Monday. Now, you probably think the NYT crossword was just as easy as this one, and you're probably right. I have no idea where all that extra time went when I was doing the NYT. Even though I had an errant body part in the LAT puzzle, I still got out in less than 3 minutes, so...

The theme is wearable items whose names begin with various lower-extremity terms. ANKLE BOOTS are clued as [Beatles footwear]—that went in the grid early and made me wonder if today is some significant date in Beatles history, for two puzzles to be devoted to them in a single day. But no, the other theme entries included HIP-HUGGERS, or [Pants with a low waistline] (mind you, in recent years, low-rise pants are everywhere but no longer called hip-huggers as far as I know); LEGWARMERS, or [Stockinglike workout wear], which seems off as a description of legwarmers but I'm not sure how else I'd clue 'em; and SHIN GUARDS, or a [Goalie's protective pair]. My misfire was putting KNEE GUARDS there. Hmm? Yes, I know. It's crazy. SHIN GUARDS are utterly Monday-obvious here, and yet I was expecting something KNEE and went with it.

Favorite entries:

• HANGMAN is a [Word game involving a stick figure]. You know who would be a tough Hangman opponent? A lexicographer, that's who.
• The [Spanish wine punch] is SANGRIA. Who doesn't welcome teeny diced-up fruit bits in their booze?
• DIII is [503, in old Rome]. My kid has been grooving on Scholastic 2010 Almanac For Kids this week (the Scholastic book fair was on Wednesday), and he was quizzing me on the Roman numerals over dinner. Also quizzing his parents on state capitals. Mind you, we were at a restaurant. He read from the book during the walk there, too.

Updated Monday morning:

Martin Ashwood-Smith's CrosSynergy/Washington Post puzzle, "Art House"—Janie's review

20A. PABLO PICASSO ["Three Musicians" artist]. From Wikipedia: "Picasso was exceptionally prolific throughout his long lifetime. The total number of artworks he produced has been estimated at 50,000, comprising 1,885 paintings; 1,228 sculptures; 2,880 ceramics, roughly 12,000 drawings, many thousands of prints, and numerous tapestries and rugs."

So it's no exaggeration when the two-part quip Martin builds his puzzle on has the master himself boasting:

• 36A. GIVE ME A MUSEUM
• 53A. AND I'LL FILL IT.

(A slacker he wasn't.)

Corollary: Give a constructor a grid and s/he'll fill it! Martin's done so in a lively way, too, with colloquial phrases like ACES IT for [Gets 100% on an exam] and "NOT ON A BET!" for ["Forget it!"]. There's also the Jack Benny-conjuring ["Now cut that out!"] for "STOP IT!" (If you use the link to this clip of Jack with Johnny Carson from 1955, you can hear him say it.)

He also gives us a couple of mini-themes. First there's the nautical one, as the puzzle begins at 1A. with [Captain of the Pequod] AHAB, followed shortly by "AHOY!" [Sailor's cry]—and "sailorman" [Popeye's favorite food] SPINACH. (GARP may have been the [Robin Williams title role of 1982] but Popeye was his title role of 1980.) [Dinghy or dory] clues BOAT, and finally there's RINGO STARR in response to ["Yellow Submarine" singer].

Then, there's the apparent tale of an AMOUR [Love affair] that's gone south, complete with a JILTER ["Dear John" letter writer], the ADIEUS [Parting words] and THE EX [Former spouse, informally] because there's more than one marriage that's also been a serious "love affair." Where affairs of the heart are concerned, do read up on Picasso.

Brendan Quigley's blog crossword, "All Caps"

The [Buffoon in modern-day slang], ASSHAT, is hidden in five places covering 10 Across answers—the ASS part is in the five longest Across answers and the HAT appears right below ASS. Now, if you're wearing your ass as a hat because your head's so far up it, shouldn't it be a HEAD that the ASS is on rather than HAT? Just a thought.

The OBI is clued as a [Martial arts sash]. Good gravy, if obis are worn in martial arts (e.g., the black belt), why is this the first time (or close to it) that I've seen martial arts mentioned in an OBI clue? I vote that OBI should get a martial arts clue more often.

GRAPHS are clued as [Calculus homework]. Is that why I got a C in calculus? Because I don't remember there being any graphs? Maybe graphs would have gotten me an A.

OAT is a [Bagel ingredient]? Not usually, I don't think.

Excellent clue for PHAT: ["Cool," to those who think they're cool using rap slang].

No idea what ISOS might be short for. Anyone up on their [Instant replay cameras, for short]?

Sunday, 11/22/09

2009-11-21T19:02:00.005-06:00

Reagle 7:47
BG 7:38
NYT 7:17
LAT 6:55
CS 4:27

If you haven't done Caleb Madison's Bard Bulletin crossword in Across Lite (posted at the Crossword Fiend forum), now you can also solve it online at the Bard High School Early College's student paper site.

Patrick Merrell's New York Times crossword, "Career Day Speaker Schedule"

Did you know that Patrick Merrell has two blogs? At Pat Tricks, where he writes on an occasional basis, his latest post features a cartoon in honor of Will Shortz's 16th anniversary as the New York Times crossword editor. (Congrats, Will! And no, we're not giving you a convertible for your sweet sixteen.) Pat writes more regularly at the NYT's Wordplay blog, where he alternates weeks with Jim Horne now. Hey, look! Patrick blogs his own puzzle today. He mentions that many of his past puzzles have been one-of-a-kind innovations, but that this one is more ordinary. Indeed it is. The theme didn't especially grab me, but there were some shining stars in the fill and clues.

First, the theme. The clues are playful redefinitions of various job titles. For example, a DRIVING INSTRUCTOR might be thought to be a good label for 38A: Career Day Speaker [#3: Golf pro?]. At 70A, the FILE CLERK is billed as a [#5: Manicurist?] on the Career Day schedule. 111A: [#8 Disc jockey?] is billed as a RECORD KEEPER. Who was responsible for all these misconstrued job titles? You might say that the 119A: [Career of the parent who typed up the Career Day schedule?] is a NOVEL WRITER, in that...he or she writes things in a novel manner? That doesn't feel quite as apt as I'd like a theme's capstone to be.

Here are the highlights in the clues and non-theme answers:

• 19A. [Literary work in which Paris is featured] is the ILIAD. Paris, the Trojan, not Paris, the city in France.
• 57A. [Suffix with pant or aunt] clues -IES. So help me, I laughed at this one. A good friend of mine and her sisters just became aunties for the first time this week when their little sister had a baby. (Rowan, a baby girl. As in Rowan Atkinson?)
• 68A. IRAN is the [First landfall north of Oman]. If you have a good sense of what the first landfalls are in various directions from various countries, try this Sporcle quiz.
• 90A. An author's PEN NAME is one sort of [Literary creation].
• 118A. BROWBEATS means [Bullies]. Is the bully beating you with her brow or beating your brow?
• 126A. A [Bay, for one] is a type of INLET. My son's been toiling all day, drawing pictures of geographical terms including bay and inlet (and dune, isthmus, glacier, coastal plain, marsh...38 terms in all). His picture dictionary is due Monday and it will damn near kill the entire household to get it finished by Sunday night. But it's a cool project, and one he's had three weeks to work on. Hmm, fondness for procrastination? I'm sure I couldn't tell you where he gets that from.
• 17D. GRUELS are [Meager bowlfuls]. Even a giant bowlful is meager, no?
• 30D. Fresh clue for EDSEL: [It debuted on "E Day"].
• 55D. ERST is boring crossword fill in English (archaic word, portion of "erstwhile), but if you know German, it's a common word: [First, in Frankfurt].
• 99D. ACTI, ACTII, ACTIII, ACTIV, and ACTV are entries that don't thrill me. ACT FIVE, however, seems cooler. Why is that? It's [When Juliet says "O happy dagger!"].
• 123D. The EAR is a [Human body part with vestigial muscles]. Holy anatomy, Batman! Can this be true? Wikipedia clarifies: They're the muscles that some people can use to wiggle their ears. I am a non-wiggler, but my son can do it.
• 124D. [Hosp. V.I.P.'s] clues R.N.'S. Yay! If hospitals didn't have nurses on staff, the patients would not do too well at all. This clue is a lovely nod to the nursing profession's importance.

Entries that aren't highlights, but that may be found at a fabric store: CIRE is a 29D: [Glazed fabric] and NACRES are 67A: [Button materials]. The latter is solid old crosswordese, but CIRE is markedly less familiar to me.

While the theme didn't wow me, I'm delighted by Patrick's return to the NYT puzzle page. His creativity and humor have led to many memorable puzzles over the years, and I look forward to seeing more of his twists on the conventions of crossword puzzles.

Merl Reagle's syndicated crossword, "Mr. H and Mr. L"

On November 22, 1963, President John F. Kennedy was killed. The same day, two famous writers also died: Aldous Huxley and C.S. Lewis. They are the Mr. H and Mr. L mentioned in the theme clues. I figured out who they were via two of the answers, but for the remaining theme entries I leaned heavily on the crossings. I'm surprised the puzzle didn't take me longer because of that—I suspect Merl made a point of keeping the clues for the themers' crossings as gettable as he could. Hang on a second—does every single Down answer cross at least one theme answer? I think so, and I think Merrell's NYT puzzle is the same. I swear I never noticed that many Sunday puzzles with all-Across themes are like that, too. Moving on, here's the Huxley/Lewis trivia theme:

• 20A. THE SCREWTAPE LETTERS is a ["Devilish" work by Mr. L]. Don't know it.
• 39A. BRAVE NEW WORLD, which I read in high-school English, is the [Classic work by Mr. H]. This was the only Mr. H clue that told me H = Huxley.
• 43A. [Space novel by Mr. L] is PERELANDRA. This is only very faintly familiar.
• 48A. [Mr. H co-wrote a few, including "Jane Eyre"] clues FILM SCRIPTS. Who knew?
• 65A. This one was my only L = Lewis clue. THE CHRONICLES OF NARNIA is a [Seven-book series by Mr. L].
• 80A. SHADOWLANDS is a [Film starring Anthony Hopkins as Mr. L]. Really? Didn't know that. Haven't seen the movie.
• 89A. SGT. PEPPER'S is the [Classic album featuring Mr. H on its cover (and lots of other folks, too)].
• 92A. HEAVEN AND HELL is a [Philosophical work by Mr. H]. Don't know this one, either.
• 107A. The rationale for the theme is explained here. [Interesting factoid about Mr. H and Mr. L] is that BOTH DIED ON NOV. 22, 1963.

That last answer is insane, isn't it? With six numerals? They're numerals in the intersecting Down answers, too:

• 106D. [Rockets deployed in Germany's second wave of missile attacks in WWII] are V-2'S. I would not have guessed the 2 if not for the November 22 date that appears with the puzzle's title.
• 78D. GREASE 2 is the [1982 sequel to a high school musical]. Whatever happened to Maxwell Caulfield?
• 86D. APRIL 1ST is the [Fool's day].
• 111D. The [Three-digit number denoting a charge call (as for puzzle answers] is 900. Except that the zeroes are letter Os in 117A and 121A, so in Across Lite, 9OO works.
• 112D. [Time that's exactly halfway between midnight and noon] is 6 A.M.
• 113D. [Elementary school basics] are the 3 R'S.

Favorite clue: [They tell you how to fix things] for RECIPES. I'm planning to make pecan pie for Thanksgiving. Want the recipe? Follow the one on a bottle of Karo dark corn syrup, only use at least double the amount of pecans so you have pecans throughout the pie rather than floating atop goo. I haven't decided if I want to make a butter crust from scratch or buy frozen crust.

Weirdest answer: 29D is LARIATED, clued as [Lassoed]. Is lariat a verb, or just a noun? The Dictionary of American Regional English, or DARE, says it's also a verb.

I do prefer it when Merl's themes have a lot of humor built in, which this one does not. Next week's probably will, but I'm not sure when I'll get to it—the pies and I will be out of town, and an all-star team of guest bloggers will hold down the fort here.

Updated later Saturday night:

Ken Bessette's syndicated Los Angeles Times crossword, "Literal Translations"

Ooh, I loved this theme! It was heaps o' fun for my inner anagrammer. Each theme clue is an anagram of a word in its corresponding answer, and the answer explains how the anagramming was accomplished. At the same time, each theme answer is a familiar phrase. To wit:

• 23A. [TOG?] is GOT TURNED AROUND.
• 38A. [GLIBNESS?] is MIXED BLESSING. This entry reminds me of a 4/8/07 NYT puzzle by Byron Walden in which the entry BLESSING IN DISGUISE was linked to both GLIBNESS and B SINGLES.
• 51A. [FELT?] clues LEFT IN DISARRAY. LEFT could also be used to clue FELT CONFUSED.
• 66A. [GOES?] is ALTER EGOS. This one's a bit weaker because the word EGOS is alterED. With a different letter count, ALTERED STATE could be paired with TASTE.
• 69A. [RAGE?] is a GEAR SHIFT of a sort.
• 89A. An OUT-OF-ORDER SIGN is [SING?].
• 97A. [EARTH?] clues CHANGE OF HEART.
• 118A. [STOP?] evokes the POST-REFORMATION era.

Fun, isn't it? My favorite fill:

• 28A. An ARGONAUT is [One of Jason's men].
• 55A. "TAXMAN" is a [Song on the Beatles' "Revolver" album].
• 104A. The INNER EAR is a [Canal locale].
• 110A. "IS THAT SO?" sounds like a challenge, as does ["Says who?"].
• 2D. Hey! Not the usual ORONO clue. [Maine town named for a Penobscot chief].
• 16D. I misinterpreted [Curling gadget] as referring to the sport of curling and figured IRON was just a term I didn't know. Whoops. Curling IRON, used to curl hair.
• 91D. Leonardo DI CAPRIO is the ["Catch Me If You Can" star]. I meant to see that movie.

46D's clue is [Riding for ___: acting overconfidently], for A FALL. I feel as though "heading for a fall" is the more familiar phrase, but "ride for a fall"/"be riding for a fall" has more solid dictionary support.

Less desirable are 68D: REASCENT, or [Second time to the top], and 14D: REDRILL, or [Put through one's paces again]. (RESELL is A-OK, though.) Is it just me, or does New York have more than its share of 5-letter towns with 3 vowels? 73D: TIOGA is a [New York town on the Susquehanna], and then there's UTICA and...maybe there are just the two.

Who is this 114D: [Disney duck princess] named OONA? This cavewoman duck princess (yes, that's right: a cavewoman duck) is possibly not known to more than a teeny fraction of Americans: Wikipedia says "The adventures of Princess Oona have appeared in Disney publications in many countries including Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Finland, Germany, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Hungary, Brazil, and Russia." Had you ever heard of Princess Oona?

Updated Sunday morning:

Tony Orbach's CrosSynergy/Washington Post "Sunday Challenge"

This is a terrific themeless crossword. Zesty fill, fun clues, minimal junk. Let's take a stroll through the grid.

Multi-word phrases:

• 1A is IN A FLASH, or [Pronto].
• 18A. There's also the BAD END [A villain might come to...].
• I like to say AS IT WERE (61A: [So to speak])
• 14D is AND SO ON, or [Et cetera].
• 34D, the [Words said with an exasperated flourish], clues "UP TO HERE." This one feels like an 8-letter partial, though, doesn't it? Does anyone say it in isolation, along the lines of a Honeymooners "Straight to the moon!"?

The freshest fill includes:

• The LETTER C—22A: [Embroidery on a Cubs cap, e.g.]. Go, Cubs! (Poor, woebegone Cubs.)
• 33A is [Quarterback Daunte] CULPEPPER of the Detroit Lions. (Poor, woebegone Lions.)
• 7D: SHAG CARPETS are [Lush, plush furnishings], which is not to say furniture.
• I like the zippy TABLE-HOPS at 9D, or [Makes the rounds at a restaurant].
• 10D is OVALTINE, the [Malt drink pitched by Joe Namath], and yes, I was thinking malt liquor. 'Tis the season to watch A Christmas Story and see the kid disgusted by the naked mercenariness of the Ovaltine people.
• 24D: JASPER JOHNS, the ["Numbers" abstract expressionist artist], works two Js in to the grid.
• 31D. I'm fond of PLEONASMS, which means [Redundancies], because it's a spoonerism of neoplasm. "Tuna fish" and "safe haven" are neoplasms—is there a tuna that's not a fish, or an unsafe haven?

Hottest clues:

• 59A. A [Termite's terminus?] might be the ANTEATER that scarfs it up.
• 5D. Good clue for LEERED: [Didn't make proper eye contact] but was instead most improper.
• 9A. TOYOTA is the [Tundra producer].
• 31A. [The time there might be five to ten] clues prison. Not "five minutes to 10," but "five to 10 years."
• 28D. [An addled brain might be likened to one] clues SIEVE.

Answer for which I needed all the crossings: 23D: [Producer of early multi-track recorders] is TEAC. I've seen the brand name before, but the clue wasn't summoning up that answer in my SIEVE of a mind.

Cute shout-out: 51A is MARTHA ["___ My Dear" (Beatles song)]. Three guesses what Tony's wife is named.

Emily Cox and Henry Rathvon's Boston Globe crossword, "Animal Quackery"

The theme is rough puns on health-care specialties with animal names affixed at the beginning. For example, RODENTISTRY is clued as a [Branch of medicine for gnawers?] (rodent + dentistry). BOAFEEDBACK is [Self-help for snakes?] (boa + biofeedback). SOCKEYEATRY is a [Fishy shrink's practice?] (sockeye salmon + psychiatry]. The puns are a mixed bag of added consonants, changed consonants, vowel changes, added syllables, etc. I wasn't crazy about this theme—pun themes straddle the fine line between "ha ha" and "uh-uh."

Favorite word in the grid: 89D: BOLLIX, or [Completely bungled]. OONA is here, but clued as [Mrs. Chaplin] rather than the cavewoman duck very few of us know.

I suspect the grid got changed along the way but an old clue remained in error. At 58A, the answer is STOOP, but the clue is [Dive like a hawk]. Now, that sounds exactly like a clue for SWOOP. But with those theme entries above and below, the W would've been O*W*P, which doesn't look feasible at all. Hmm. Is there a swooping-like-a-hawk usage of STOOP that I'm not aware of?

Saturday, 11/21/09

2009-11-20T21:55:00.003-06:00

NYT 9:07
Newsday 7:45
LAT 4:22
CS untimed

Gary Whitehead's New York Times crossword

I didn't get quite enough sleep the last couple nights, and then there was some beer, and then my eyelids kept closing while I was doing this puzzle. My solving time says "ZOMG! Harder than Klahn!" but that's not a reliable measure tonight.

By the numbers: This is a 64-worder, and fortunately low on the roll-your-own-words scale. (UNITER would feel less roll-your-own if clued with reference to "I'm a uniter, not a divider," but that'd be too easy for Saturday.) It's got 32 black squares, well within the limits. The stair-step stacks at the top and bottom bleed into wide-open spaces, which is something you're less likely to see when the stack contains all 15s rather than the 11/13/15 stacks here.

Worst misstep: Crosswords have taught me that sheep say BAA and goats say MAA, So why on earth is BAAS the answer to 25A: [Kids' greetings]? Sure, MEER makes no sense for 25D: [It has a head], but by the time I had letters 2, 3, and 4, I was no longer looking at the clue. BEER! I blame beer. That was the one square I needed to change after clicking "done" the first time.

Least familiar answer: 11D: [Horticultural practice] is SEEDAGE.

A selection of clues/answers:

• 12D. Lovely "SAVE THE PLANET" is a [Green line].
• 14A. The pretty JAPANESE LANTERN is a [Party lighting option].
• 22A. [Company dinner] clues MESS. "Company" as in "the troops of C Company."
• 24A. Sports trivia clue that went on and on and was no help to me: [World Match Play Championship champ a record seven times] is golfer Ernie ELS. I thought TAL of chess or ALI of boxing first, but let the crossings lead the way.
• 29A. [Lineup at some entrances] consists of {turn)STILES. Aw, my fellow Carleton grad T.J. STILES won the National Book Award for his biography of Cornelius Vanderbilt this week. I don't know if T.J. does crosswords, but it'd be cool to see the noun turned into a surname in the puzzle sometime.
• 41A. Who knew SELMA was an [Alabama University] and not just an Alabama town? Not I.
• 45A. Favorite entry: MAKE A MENTAL NOTE, or [Store something for later thought].
• 48A. [One of many American houses] isn't architectural, it's a STATE SENATE.
• 3D. Very Olaf-ish clue. "Olaf" is Crosscan's coinage for clues that provide lots of specific information that really don't help you get the answer if the first couple words don't get you there. Case in point: [Egyptian king credited with founding the First Dynasty]. MENES! Who? 24A was rather Olaf-ish, too.
• 8D. Shakespeare fill-in-the-blank: ["...in thy possession lies ___ unparall'd": Shak.] clues A LASS.
• 10D. Ooh, long French word. [Hear, to Henri] is ENTENDRE. Not sure why I had ATTENDRE at first.
• 13D. [Alabama and others] is a wonderfully misleading clue for TRIBES. It's also a state, a country-rock band, and a university.
• 14D. JUICE is a [Press release?] if the press is a juice-press.
• 29D. Love the word SMARM, which is clued as [Oiliness].
• 33D. WALPOLE is fun to say. [Britain's first prime minister] is markedly less well-known to Americans than the P.M.'s of the 20th and 21st centuries.
• 43D. ["Abyssinia"] sounds like "I'll be seein' ya," or TA TA. Whoa.
• 44D. Yay, old familiar crosswordese! TARN is a [Mountain lake], and it's one of the crosswordese words I'm fond of.

Good night, folks!

Updated Saturday morning:

Lynn Lempel's CrosSynergy/Washington Post puzzle, "A Ride at Last"—Janie's review

In yesterday's "Opposite Beginnings" we were asked to look at the start of the theme fill to understand the gimmick; today we're asked to look at the end the theme fill (the "last" part) to appreciate it. That's where we meet up with various sets of wheels that'll provide "a ride." What's really fresh about the way Lynn has executed the theme, is that none of the rides appears as a discrete word—even when the fill is a compound; each is a part of the larger word or phrase, almost cryptic-style (though not as tricky to discern...). Take a look. You can travel by:

• 17A. MADAGASCAR [Island known for its unique species]. This one delivers a double helping and that's fine by me.
• 11D. EYESTRAIN [Result of poring over print, perhaps].
• 34D. AWESTRUCK [Stunned]. (This combo has a non-thematic mate, btw, with AMAZE and [Stun]).
• 59A. ED SULLIVAN [Big Beatles booster in America]. Because of the variety and basically high quality of the acts he presented every Sunday night (including excerpts from Broadway shows), Sullivan was one of the great (if almost personality-free) [TV HOSTS] of his day. The jury is still out where [Sajak, Smiley and Springer] are concerned. Here's a clip from 1960 of the original Broadway cast of Bye Bye Birdie performing "Hymn for a Sunday Evening" (an absurd and delicious tribute to Sullivan) while on The Ed Sullivan Show.

There's a lot of nice fill in here today of the non-theme variety as well: TOP HAT [Crowning touch for Uncle Sam], FAT CAT [Campaign contributer with deep pockets], BUY-OUT [Corporate takeover], BEDOUIN [Member of a nomadic desert culture], ANARCHY [Absence of government], and (with reference to the tennis-playing Williams gals) SERENA, by way of the well-clued [She has many court dates with her sister] for starters. (And yes, I am partial to compounds. I feel like they give puzzles a certain ZEST [Gusto]).

I was also amused by the "bad manners" pair of GORGES [Eats like a pig], and what may happen if you do—BURP [No-no at the table], although I always heard that "it's better to belch and bear the shame than squelch the belch and bear the pain"... The other natural pairing is the J.M. Barrie shout-out with ["Peter Pan pooch] NANA and ["]I'VE [Gotta Crow" ("Peter Pan" song)].

Good morning, y'all! I went straight to bed after blogging last night and slept for 10 hours. Now that's more like it.

Barry Silk and Doug Peterson's Los Angeles Times crossword

Fun Saturday LAT, for a change—polished fill, fun clues, and the difficulty level of a Friday NYT rather than a Tuesday. Excerpts from my L.A. Crossword Confidential write-up follow.

When I want to earn some money, I either work on crossword assignments or do some medical editing. So I was pleased with the biomedical slant of a bunch of the fill in this puzzle:

• 1A: We all know what MUSCLE is from an anatomical standpoint. It's also a slangy term for [Hired goons].
• 17A: Use your ears to [Heed], or LISTEN TO someone or something.
• 21A: ["Fantastic Voyage" setting in sci-fi] is the BLOODSTREAM. Great pop-culture clue for a word that could be kinda boring.
• 35A: [Its contents are under pressure] clues AEROSOL. Doesn't look biomedical, except that a sneeze aerosolizes horrid germs.
• 48A: [Geneticist's pursuit] clues DNA RESEARCH. Just read today that there's pressure on the University of Nebraska to limit stem-cell research. Now, "stem-cell research" is a rock-solid phrase. DNA RESEARCH feels kinda iffy to me. Genetics research, sure. What does Google say? Google says "DNA research" is good for 411K hits and that there's a scientific journal by that name. (Objection hereby withdrawn.)
• 63A: [Biological catalyst] is an ENZYME.
• 25D: [Solution for a fertility problem, perhaps] could be a SPERM DONOR, or in vitro fertilization, or a handful of other options. My best friend's son is the genetic offspring of lucky Donor #9. (If you feel this answer pushes the bounds of what's tasteful, be glad that it wasn't clued as, say, "male grad student's side job.")

Other highlights:

• 7A: To [Snub] someone is to HIGH-HAT them. HIGH-HAT is also a noun and adjective. With the G and T in place, NEGLECT seemed like an obvious answer, but all the other letters were wrong.
• 28A: To [Refuse to make changes] is to SIT PAT. No, wait. I don't like this one. I would like STAND PAT, but SIT PAT is a bit weaker.
• 9D: [Rakes it in] clues GETS RICH. How awesome an entry would GET-RICH-QUICK be?
• 11D: The [SUV that replaced the Passport] is the HONDA PILOT. We see relatively few make/model combos in crosswords, and I, for one, would welcome more. VW BUG sometimes shows up, but answers like TOYOTA CAMRY, CHEVY CAVALIER, and FORD MUSTANG would be cool too.
• 15D: The GLIDER is a [Quiet aircraft]. My dad took lessons in the '70s.
• 22D: Hands down, my favorite clue. [Three less than once] looks surreal—wait, is that negative twice?—but once in Spanish is "eleven" in English, so 11 – 3 = OCHO. OCHO is the funniest of the Spanish numbers, isn't it? That Ocho Cinco guy in the NFL has brought the number a great deal of pizzazz.
• 36D: I like familiar brand names as crossword fill. The ["Sorry, Charlie" brand] is STARKIST canned tuna.
• 46D: [2002 Campaign Reform Act co-sponsor] is John MCCAIN. For those who suspect that President "60% Vowels" Obama gets his name in so many crosswords because of a liberal plot, here's your McCain for balance.
• 54D: [Normal in Illinois, say] is a small CITY. Home of Illinois State University, neighbor of Bloomington. I hope some people thought "normal" was an adjective here.
• 56D: One [Instrument played with a plectrum] is a LYRE. You know what a plectrum is? Nothing more than a guitar pick.

Doug Peterson's Newsday "Saturday Stumper"

(PDF solution here.)

Am I the only one whose PDF printout lops off the bottom two clues on the page? 10D and 49D were cut off. Not that it really mattered—10D came via the crossings and 49D, [Harry Senate on "Boston Public"] is a clue that meant nothing to me. KATT? Was William Katt on that show? He is always and forever The Greatest American Hero, and that's that.

8A: PINATA is clued as a [Stuffed party treat]. Check out Patrick Merrell's cartoon in honor of Will Shortz's 16th anniversary as the editor of the New York Times crossword puzzle. Pat, we want more cartoons! Ashen and Noir want to come out and play.

17A is HALF-SLIP—[It hangs from the waist]. Hardly anyone wears these anymore. If you or someone you love is Filipino-American, you might enjoy the Happy Slip videos (name derived from the way the video blogger's Filipino mom pronounced "half-slip").

Favorite clues/answers:

• 19A. OLAF is not just a Norwegian king—it's also [One of Snoopy's brothers].
• 20A. LOADED DICE is a great entry. [Pair of cheaters?], not cheater squares.
• 31A. VANITY PLATE is a great answer, too. [Barbara Bush's "I READ," e.g.] is the clue.
• 34A. [Jefferson successor] was looking wrong with two As at the beginning, until AARON BURR bubbled up.
• 41A. [Many months in Mato Grosso] are AÑOS, or "years." The answer and clue are unexceptional, but on Crossword Fiend forum, Zulema mentioned receiving a poorly translated bilingual brochure from New York's State Majority Leader Pedro Espada, boasting that he'd been honored as "el Senador del Ano." That's Spanish for "the senator of the anus" without the tilde.
• 48A. HAD KITTENS is an idiom I never use. It means [Came unglued].
• 13D. ["20/20" creator], 7 letters, starts with A...I went straight for ABC NEWS, but it's Roone ARLEDGE.
• 15D. SPACE INVADERS is an old [Shooting game] in video arcades.
• 28D. [Revolutionary?] clues IN ORBIT. Got this one right away.
• 32D. Egg foo YUNG includes the [Chinese menu word]. You wanted TSO'S, didn't you?
• 34D. [Remote energy sources] are AAS, the double-A batteries used in TV remote controls.
• 39D. Movie trivia: Rod STEIGER was the [Only American star of "Doctor Zhivago"].
• 40D. Boxing [Ring areas] are CORNERS. Were you thinking of AREOLAS? There's no shame in that.

Never heard of 35D: MATHIAS, [Decathlon champ at Helsinki].

Daily Beast, 11/20/09

2009-11-20T06:36:00.017-06:00

"New Moon" - 11:45
I was smart this week. I guessed what Matt's theme would be before the puzzle was even published.

Of course, not being a 92D: [Like some mortgages] TEN YEAR old girl, I knew none of the Twilight Saga:New Moon answers specific to the movie. Which is too bad, because I believe the main demographic reading my posts are ten year old girls.

I did better with Matt's take on a new moon, which, as defined at 65A: [Where the moon is located in its new moon phase - - and a pattern that appears twice in this puzzle] BETWEEN THE EARTH AND SUN. So we get a SUN theme answer, then a MOON, then an EARTH. Each theme answer is a movie with SUN/MOON/EARTH in the title. Whew! Why do I never get to blog puzzles with themes like "each theme entry can follow the word CAT"? These are much cooler, though. By the way, if the moon is directly in line between the earth and sun at a new moon, a solar eclipse occurs. Don't look!!

Other theme answers:

23A: [2003 Diane Lane] - UNDER THE TUSCAN SUN
32A: [1982 Albert Finney/Diane Keaton drama] - SHOOT THE MOON
45A: [1991 Jim Jarmusch movie about cab drivers] - NIGHT ON EARTH

87A: [1946 Gregory Peck Western] - DUEL IN THE SUN
103A: [1999 Jim Carrey biopic] - MAN ON THE MOON (Jim Carrey is Canadian)
113A: [1988 Geena Davis comedy] - EARTH GIRLS ARE EASY. The Earth has moved to the front of the title here. The only one of these movies that I've seen.

Movie theme answers:

19A: ["New Moon" protagonist] - BELLA
75A: [ Lautner of "New Moon"] - TAYLOR
54A: ["Twilight" town] - FORKS
125A: ["Twilight" author Stephenie] - MEYER
52D: [Last name of 19-across] - SWAN

Other stuff:

57A: [Be a bootlicker] - KOWTOW - don't you want this to start with a "C"?
84A: [Part of DOS] - SYS - For the ten year olds: Disc Operating System.
118A: [Zener cards test it] - ESP. Successful proven tests remain at zero. But you knew I was going to say that.
6D: [Average guy] - SCHMOE. When did this start getting an "E"?
10D: ["You Can't Take It With You" co-author] - MOSS HART. Checking...George S. Kaufman is your other co-author.
12D: [One of Cosby's TV kids] - Lisa BONET, who played Denise.
16D: [Key used often by Mozart] - G MINOR. The key I use often is house.
32D: ["Oh my!"] - GOSH. Your grandmother's OMG.
36D: [Glocks and such] - GUNS. I'm Canadian, so I don't know guns.
46D: [Britney Spears' "Piece OF ME"] - Do ten year girls still like her?
63D: ["Two and a Half Men" actor] - Charlie SHEEN. Started watching this in reruns. I should hate it but it is too funny.
100D: [1970 AL MVP BOOG Powell] - If the entire puzzle was about 1970 baseball players I would finish faster than Dan Feyer.
111D: [Led Zeppelin classic "DYER Mak'er"] - Hit it!

Crossing of two random names:
124A: [Cervenka of punk rock] - EXENE. huh? How did this turn into a Brendan Emmett Quigley puzzle?
108D: [Dakota Fanning's sister] - ELLE.
EXENA/ELLA looked good to me. Buzz!! Wrong!! Lose bonus points!!

Next weekend is Thanksgiving for you guys down south. I had better start studying. Bye!

Friday, 11/20/09

2009-11-19T22:18:00.007-06:00

BEQ 4:54
LAT 4:36
NYT 4:35
CHE 4:05
CS untimed
WSJ 7:02

You're probably here because you like the harder crosswords that are published later in the week. If so, Peter Gordon's Fireball Crosswords will be right up your alley. For just $10, you can get one puzzle a week, mostly hard themeless crosswords by Peter himself, for pretty much all of 2010. For more money, Peter will work the answer of your choice into a puzzle. See the Fireball subscription page for details. Tell your friends! (The smart ones.)

Alan Olschwang's New York Times crossword

This is a weird puzzle for me. Part of it feels super-fresh and part of it feels like a retread or homage with old answers. What do I mean by the latter? It goes beyond ZOLAESQUE, which was the dramatic linchpin answer in the 2005 ACPT and the documentary Wordplay. There, in Byron Walden's tournament finals puzzle, it was clued as [Stark and richly detailed, as writing]. Here, it's [A la the founder of literary naturalism]. Then there was Bob Klahn's Saturday NYT monster, 12/27/07, in which [Mob rule] clued OCHLOCRACY. Here, [Ochlocracy] clues MOB RULE. Yesterday's Hinmorwitz puzzle had three answers including UP, and so does this one: To REUP is to [Extend one's service life] in the military, [Indicates that one is in] clues ANTES UP, and to [Squirrel] away your nuts is to STORE UP. Last, there's JAZZERCISE at 1A, clued as a [Tae Bo alternative], and the clue weirdly echoes 61D, TAE, or [Inits. of a noted "Wizard"] of Menlo Park, Thomas A. Edison.

What I liked:

• The high-octane Scrabbliness of the fill. Three Zs, three Qs, a pair of Ks, and an X? Me like. Speaking of Scrabble, in a Lexulous game (that's the loose facsimile of Scrabble on Facebook) tonight, I bingoed by playing DOODIES, and twigged the S off CRAP so that CRAPS and DOODIES cross. Isn't that lovely? I thought so, too. Speaking of potty words, PEE is clued as 44D: [Top finisher?] because P is the last letter of "top." Heh.
• 15A. ONE OVER PAR is clued with [It's not bad for a duffer].
• 22A. Trivia! Lech WALESA is the [Only private non-American to address a joint session of Congress (1989)].
• 26A. [Season opener, say] is an EPISODE of a TV show. Were you thinking of sports? Bzzz!
• 28A. [Lions might score one]—are you thinking of sports, the Detroit Lions? Bzzz! The Lions are terrible at scoring. But out on the savanna, a lion might bring down a GNU. Nice to see a fresh (if gruesome) GNU clue.
• 29A. [Foul territory?] is a STY. Were you thinking of baseball? Bzzz! Gotta love having three consecutive clues that aren't about sports but might fool sports nuts.
• 45A. An OTO may be a [Chiwere speaker]. As with the GNU clue, I like the new twist on an old 3-letter answer.
• 58A. [Ones who might get service calls?] are military RESERVISTS. It would be lovely if the RESERVISTS had no war to attend.
• 64A. EAT ONE'S HAT is a great phrase, balancing out ONE OVER PAR in the grid. [Be forced to backpedal] is the clue.
• 66A. Three Ss in a row! DRESS SHOES are a [Pair for a suit]. Not playing cards, but haberdashery.
• 3D. I needed crossings for ZEB, ["The Waltons" grandpa]. ZEB! I never knew Grandpa Walton had a name.
• 6D. [Proofs] clues REREADS. Hey, that's my line of work there.
• 10D. [1990s White House chief of staff Bowles] has an even cooler first name than Grandpa Walton: ERSKINE. There's also author Erskine Caldwell.
• 11D. Ornithology! The [Umbrella bird's "umbrella"] is a CREST atop its head.
• 24D. Never heard of [Irish statesman Cosgrove], but LIAM is a guessable Irish name (and the lovely name of my cousin's baby boy).
• 32D. Like 58A, this sounds like it's about appliance repair, but it's not: ORS, or operating rooms, are [Where some parts are repaired, briefly].
• 33D. PETRI DISH is clue by way of [Germs grow in it]. See also 29A.
• 42D. In some places, NO TURNS is a [Rush hour restriction]. In my neighborhood, that restriction is reserved for the arteries within a half mile of Wrigley Field around game time.
• 45D. Didn't we have a clue like this not so long ago? The OZARKS are your [Buffalo National River locale], but Buffalo smacks of the Great Plains and the state of New York.

Overall, there's much to appreciate in the puzzle, even with that handful of blast-from-the-past answers. Lots of good clues today.

Updated Friday morning

Randall J. Hartman's CrosSynergy/Washington Post puzzle, "Opposite Beginnings"—Janie's review

Well, here's a nice thematic change of pace. The first two words of each of today's theme phrases (their "beginnings") are also pairs of opposites. The first example uses words that are adjectives; the other two, prepositions. These two not only make for lively fill, but they stretch the conceit as they aren't opposites contextually. They certainly add a measure of fun, however. We've got:

20A. LITTLE BIG MAN [1970 Dustin Hoffman film]. You don't need me to point out the opposites...
36A. OFF ON A TANGENT [Straying from the subject].
56A. OUT IN THE OPEN [Transparent].

If this idea isn't a serious ENIGMA [Something hard to grasp], it is fresh—and fresh is greatly to be desired. The last thing anyone wants from their solving experience is a SNOOZER [Real bore], one that would cause the puzzler to SNORE [Saw logs]. Oh—and nice cluing there, too, with [Saw logs], where saw is the present tense verb related to the activity (of sawing...) and not the past tense of "see."

Other clues that made me pay attention: the punny [Slop talk] for OINK, the folksy [Give what for] for SCOLD, the 19th century-sounding [Dastard] for FIEND (which we love, of course!), and [Labor party] for MOM. All I have to say about that last one is "ZOUNDS!" [Gadzooks!"]. I also liked the nod given to the humble writing irons: [Pencil end] for ERASER and [Pen end] for NIB.

And in a mini-thematic way, Randy goes in for a bit of globe-trotting today. From Turkey there's the [Ottoman muck-a-muck] or SULTAN (and another colorful clue, no?); [Turkmenistan neighbor] IRAN; a SIBERIAN [Novosibirsk native] (Russia's third-largest city after Moscow and St. Petersburg. I'd no idea.); the NORTH SEA, that [Body of water between England and Norway]; ASTI, an [Italian wine region]; and BALI [Island near Java]. There's even (bear with me...) AMERIKA [Kafka novel], IOWAN [Waterloo resident] and a tip o' the Stetson to the American West, with ALL IN [Texas Hold 'Em bet], SSW [Dallas-to-Austin dir.] and RODEO [Cheyenne Frontier Days, notably], an annual event since 1897.

Michael Blake's Los Angeles Times crossword

Wow, is it just me, or is this the first Friday LAT in ages that's been ever bit as hard as the Friday NYT? The first theme entry I figured out was the fourth one, which led me astray because LEGO CRAZY, or [Nuts about Danish toys?], looked like the Prince song, "Let's Go Crazy," minus the TS. Then I moved back to the top of the grid and got LENO LIMIT, or [Maximum tolerance for a stand-up comic's jokes?]. Wait, where's the missing TS? Oh, I see: It's +LE, not –TS. (Edited to add: Oh, yes. There's also the explanatory entry ADDLE, to be parsed as ADD "LE.")

The other theme entries are LEON TELEVISION, or ["All Trotsky, all the time" channel?]—that's so goofy, I love it—and LEASH WEDNESDAY, or [When dogs can't run loose?].

Favorite clues/answers:

• SNARF is a slangy word meaning [Wolf (down)].
• LOLA is a [1970 hit by the Kinks]. I like this LOLA much better than a Damn Yankees or Falana reference. I don't suppose we'll ever get [Filipino grandma]?
• [You can count on a lot of bucks from] one...hmm, 6 letters? THE ATM? No, a buckin' BRONCO.
• BERN, Switzerland, is the [Capital northwest of Rome]. Why couldn't I remember this city? I had Berlin on the mind.
• ["___ behold!"] clues the partial LO AND. I don't usually enjoy a partial, but my mom's always been a big "lo and behold" sayer.

Jayne and Alex Boisvert's Chronicle of Higher Education crossword, "Mark My Words"

Cute theme. The central entry, ACCENTS, explains what's going on: [They're missing from the clues for 17, 23, 50, and 58 Across]. Those four answers have one-word clues, which need acute accents in order to correspond to their answers. Without the ACCENTS, the clue words are entirely different words:

• Pliés are BALLET MOVEMENTS, but [Plies] is a verb or the plural of ply.
• The clue is the verb [Resume], but it's a résumé that is a JOB-HUNTER'S NEED.
• Gold lamé is a METALLIC FABRIC, while [Lame] is an adjective and verb.
• [Attaches] is a verb, but attachés are people who are DIPLOMATIC AIDES.

Favorite clues:

• [Cylindrical opening?] is the word's first letter, a SOFT C.
• J. CREW is often clued as an L.L. Bean competitor, just because of the initials thing. But it's more accurate to call it a [Gap competitor].
• I learned a new word in the clue [Like many dactylology experts]. Dactyl- means "finger," so it's DEAF people who use sign language.

Randolph Ross's Wall Street Journal crossword, "Faculty Meeting"

Randy Ross's puzzle is a nice counterpart to the Chronicle of Higher Education crossword, thanks to the light faux-faculty theme. Most of the theme entries are non-academic jobs clued as if they're very specific types of faculty. For example, a military DRILL INSTRUCTOR might also be what you call a [Faculty member at a dental school?]. A couple are academic positions, but clued with a different sort of angle—ENGLISH TEACHER is a generic [Faculty member at Eton?] in England rather than a teacher of the English language, and RHODES SCHOLAR becomes a [Faculty member with expertise on a Greek island?]. I like that last one best. Second favorite is STAGECOACH clued as [Member of the drama faculty?]. Least familiar: PAST MASTER is clued as [Faculty member in the history department?].

I like the way the 11 theme answers are distributed throughout the grid, with Across trios and Down pairs running in alternate rows. Favorite fill: [Giant star] sounds like it's astronomy, but it's crosswordese baseball legend MEL OTT making a rare full-name appearance. Also "THAT'S WHY," or ["Here's the reason"]. I think I probably say those words to my son a lot.

Brendan Quigley's blog crossword, "To Your Corners"

Remember playing FOUR SQUARE on the playground with a classic red rubber ball? In each corner of the grid, Brendan adds a FOUR-square layout spelling out FOUR clockwise from the corner. That gives a third level of checked letters to the answers in the corner, which came in handy with KRONUR, the [Icelandic coins] plural. The gimmick is implemented well here.

Favorite clue: [Meadow in New Jersey] is Meadow SOPRANO, Tony's daughter, and has nothing to do with the Meadowlands. Great mislead.

Last square filled in: The X in SIX/[Volleyball side] and XED/[Ticked off]. I was running through the alphabet and made it to P before the X possibility occurred to me.

Most potty-mouthed answer: PEE is [Whiz]. I was thinking of ACE or PRO and wasn't sure what the last letter of RATLIN* ([Ship's ladder step]) was until PEE finally trickled out.

Worst and best neighbors: Strained APISHLY beside juicy, tart KUMQUAT.

Thursday, 11/19/09

2009-11-18T22:22:00.003-06:00

NYT 3:40
LAT 3:17
CS untimed
Tausig untimed

Tyler Hinman and Jeremy Horwitz's New York Times crossword

Here's how I envision this puzzle's development:

Tyler: "Let's make a themeless together."
Jeremy: "No, I want to do a themed puzzle. Something with trivia."
Great cacophony ensues as the chocolate hits the peanut butter, cruciverbally speaking.
Tyler: "Hey, you got a theme in my themeless!"
Jeremy: "What are you talking about? You got your themeless all over my themed puzzle!"
Light bulbs appear over both men's heads.
Together: "Omigod! We made a 70-word themeless puzzle packed with juicy fill and managed to fit three theme entries into it."

I know today's constructors are on the same pub trivia team, so I wonder if A SEED for this puzzle came about from a trivia quiz or if they hit on the trivia trio themselves. It's light as themes go—just 31 squares. But it's thematically solid, bringing together three directors of movies with one-letter titles:

• 17A. ["Z" director, 1969] is known as COSTA-GAVRAS.
• 32A. ["M" director, 1931] is FRITZ LANG.
• 51A. ["W" director, 2008] is OLIVER STONE.

I greatly enjoyed solving this puzzle, though usually I would grumble about a 70-worder that's clued easy enough to hit a Wednesday/Thursday level of difficulty. But I kept getting surprised by answers that were cool, and that was fun.

On the down side, the three UPs distracted me because (a) I hesitated to enter the second and third ones and (b) one of them felt iffy. That one is 8D: [Encircle with a belt] for GIRD UP. I see it in the dictionary entry for gird in the example "gird (up) one's loins," but I don't think that sort of "girding up" involves a belt. If you're belting your loins, I don't wanna hear about it. I wanted UPSIZE to be RESIZE (42D: [Enlarge]) because of 8D, and then UP TO PAR (35D: [Adequate for the job]) showed up and made me wish the other UPs had left this one alone.

Favorite clues and answers:

• 6A. [Symbol in a Riemann sum] is SIGMA. All I know is that SIGMA is used in math for sums of some sort. The clue looked a lot scarier than it turned out to be.
• 16A. MOO [___ juice (milk)]!
• 20A. Scrabbly KLEENEX, a [Kimberly-Clark brand]. KOTEX was too short. (HUGGIES and PULL-UPS would fit, though.)
• 26A. Slangy WHUP means to [Tan] someone's hide, figuratively.
• 31A. "WANT TO?" means ["Are you game?"].
• 34A. Scrabbly JUAREZ is an [El Paso neighbor]. (Hi, Monica!)
• 41A. [Cause of an awakening] sounds metaphysical, but it's the APNEA that might disrupt your sleep.
• 44A. STAR MAPS are [Some Beverly Hills tourist purchases]. There was a recent NYT story about a teenager who's gone into business selling Hamptons star maps.
• 50A. Didn't see this clue while solving: [Google had one in 2004: Abbr.] clues IPO. Tyler, your employer really doesn't need the extra publicity.
• 1D. I hope someone somewhere complains that clueing LUCKIER as [More Irish?] is derogatory to the Irish. And then I hope they're mocked.
• 3D. What is it about the word NOSEGAY that I find so charming? It's a small bouquet or [Posy].
• Anyone think that 6D and 7D would be my entrée into the grid? STAX and rap impresario IRV Gotti, you don't scare me.
• 10D. Oddest clue in the puzzle: [Hearers of Jonah's prophecy] are ASSYRIANS. This may be Biblical, but ASSYRIANS is not short enough to find its way into the puzzle often so it's not Biblical crosswordese.
• 13D. I read a little IONESCO in college—["Le Rhinoceros" playwright Eugene]. I read it in an English translation.
• 18D, 24D. More Scrabbleocity: GEE WHIZ and QUIZNO'S.
• 30D. CREAM SODA is an [A&W beverage] and my favorite Dum-Dum flavor.
• 36D. I like the pairing of [Cousins] and ANALOGS. As in "this is analogous to that/these things are cousins."
• 38D. A WASHOUT is a [Complete failure].

I hereby give my blessing to the cruciverbal union of these two constructors. Jeremy and Tyler, do you have more joint productions in the pipeline?

Updated Thursday morning:

Gail Grabowski's CrosSynergy/Washington Post puzzle, "Case Study"—Janie's review

We know this theme very well: the last word of the theme fill is one that combines with a word in the title. Today that word is "case." The good news is that the theme fill is fresh and the re-configured phrases are pretty lively, too. Today's offerings are:

• 17A. [Wimbledon feature] GRASS COURT → court case.
• 11D. [Delete, for one] COMPUTER KEY → key case.
• 25D. [Healthy all-occasion gift] FRUIT BASKET → basket case (someone who's mentally not-so-healthy. This pair is my fave).
• 63A. [It's said there's no cure for it] COMMON COLD → cold case (followed closely by this pair).

And there's some lively cluing and fill throughout that give this puzzle its [Pizazz] ELAN. I'm fond of the SW corner—the children's corner?—with "BE NICE" ["Don't fight, please"] right next to "ARE NOT!" [Childish denial]. Other exclamations are ["]MAMMA [mia!"] and "TADA!" [Cry of accomplishment]; and one that summons up a variation of "the actor's nightmare": "I'M ON!" for ["That's my cue!"].

Then there's:

• [Smart set] for MENSA;
• [It can cover a lot] for TAR (anyone else start with SOD—and thinking of that "lot" as something more exclusively along the lines of ONE ACRE [4,840 square yards]?);
• [Lasting impression] for SCAR;
• [Pay what's due] for PONY UP (love this expression, even with its apparently unknown etymology);
• [Sketcher's eraser] for ART GUM (because when was the last time I owned one or even thought about art gum?!);
• and in the "good, clean fun" department, [Washer batch] LOAD and COIN-OP [Like some laudromats].

Jack McInturff's Los Angeles Times crossword

Jack McInturff mentioned me in his Crossword Corner interview today:

"Orange" the puzzle commentator, once said of a puzzle I did "The fill seems old school." It's probably because I'm 79 years old and that's what I remember. It did give me a wake-up call, however, and I'm trying to be more current.

See? That's why crossword bloggers write about crosswords: We want crosswords to be as good and as entertaining as possible, so it's gratifying when we see evidence that a puzzle-maker or editor uses our critiques in a constructive manner to give solvers a better experience.

Today's L.A. Times theme involves phrases that end with sort of synonymous words, JERK, GOOSE, YO-YO, and DOPE. A thesaurus tells me JERK is a synonym for "fool," but I don't use it that way. I guess some people say "I felt like a complete jerk" to mean "doofus" rather than "heel," though. The theme:

• 20A. CLEAN AND JERK is a [Weightlifting event].
• 30A. The CANADA GOOSE (not "Canadian goose") is a [Golf course pest]. Last spring, I saw a goose perched atop a three-story building. Is that not bizarre? The very same week, my mother saw a rooftop goose for the first time in her life. Heads up, people: The geese have plans. Watch your back.
• 39A. A [Spinning toy manipulated with sticks] is a CHINESE YO-YO.
• 49A. The STRAIGHT DOPE is [Honest info]. You know Cecil Adams' "Straight Dope" column in alt-weekly papers? A couple times I have seen a lexicographer citing Cecil's answers. I think that means his research standards are considered good.

The #1 clue people will be Googling today is 32D: [British actor Robert, the original Colonel Pickering in "My Fair Lady"]. Robert COOTE? That doesn't ring a bell for me.

#2 is 5D: [Original primer used to paint the Golden Gate Bridge], or RED LEAD. No idea what RED LEAD is. Dictionary tells me it's a red form of lead oxide used in paint.

Favorite clues:

• The twin old Ford clues. [Early Ford success] is the MODEL A, while EDSEL was an [Ill-fated Ford].
• [Actors, often] are EMOTERS. Note that the clue does not say "overactors."
• [Some heroes] are called HOAGIES. Yes, I was thinking heroically rather than sandwichly.
• [Very big wind], 4 letters. The obvious choice is between GUST and GALE...but it's a TUBA. That's what my nephew plays. My sister has to listen to three horn players practicing at home, and no, she hasn't developed a case of hysterical deafness. (Speaking of HYSTERIA, that's a [Common crowd reaction in monster films].)

Ben Tausig's Ink Well/Chicago Reader crossword, "A Few Words With You"

The puzzle's title should be interpreted as "A Few Words with 'U' Added to The End": [Yogi's house?] might be HINDU QUARTERS. [Cuddly pasta sauce freebie?] is RAGU DOLL. [Ambrosia and nectar selections?] are a MENU OF GOD. "SHAMU, WOW!" is a [Literal cry at Sea World?]. That one's my favorite because it builds on the silly infomercial product name, ShamWow, which in turn plays on chamois. And the last one is FONDU MEMORIES, or ["The melted cheddar...the kitschy pots...ah, youth"?]. Hooray for cheddar! I don't do Swiss.

Given how few English words there are that end with a U, and how few of those would lend themselves to this theme (familiar word/phrase begins with U-less part of -U word), I'm impressed with this theme. The answers had some decent "aha" action. Now, the fill includes BADU, SABU, TUTU, and APU. A.P.-meets-APU has some potential. King Tut doesn't really have familiar phrases that begin with "Tut," though.

Top answers in the fill: KOJAK meets JETSKIS; WASILLA's near another W*S*L word, WEASELS; CECILIA is opposite OPHELIA. I like BAGATELLE, but feel it would best be clued as [A mere ___]. Top three clues:

• KEN is clued as [Sugar's Daddy ___ (controversial new Mattel product)]. Have you seen this guy doll? Sugar is a teeny dog, and KEN is her "daddy." He's dressed ridiculously and his name evokes the non-Mattel term "Sugar Daddy."
• THA is clued as an [Article in Source magazine?]. Not a magazine article, a definite article.
• IRAQ is an [Emancipated Middle Eastern country with no more problems]. Honest!

Wednesday, 11/18/09

2009-11-17T22:28:00.006-06:00

BEQ 6:58
NYT 4:35
Onion 4:29
CS untimed (J)/3:44 (A)
LAT 3:14

Paula Gamache's New York Times crossword

This keeps happening—my kid has a hard time falling asleep, and in the effort to set a good example for him, I get so dang sleepy that when I rouse myself to do the NYT crossword, I'm not at full speed. The wheels did not spin at their usual clip, and stray typos find their way into the grid more easily than they find their way out. I had "CAN O?" ([Childish plea], CAN I) crossing OCHABOD ([Washington Irving's Crane], ICHABOD), and didn't see it until the grid was filled. Then when I fixed that, my grid was still wrong—BOY TOT/RET instead of BOY TOY ([Young stud])/REY ([Palacio resident]). Adjacent-key typos, my nemesis today.

The theme hinges on a poker phrase, which is something I often find alienating. The [Five-card draw variation] and hint to the theme answers is JACKS TO OPEN, but man, I was stuck on the last letter. (See? Tired.) "JACK STOOPER?" I asked myself. The other four theme entries begin with words that can follow an opening JACK:

• 17A. HAMMER THROW is an [Olympic track-and-field event]. Jackhammer.
• 30A. FROST/NIXON is a [Play and film about a noted 1977 series of interviews]. Jack Frost, nose-nipper. FROST/NIXON is a great-looking answer, isn't it?
• 36A. [Loosely woven cotton fabric] is CHEESECLOTH. Monterey Jack cheese is often called Jack cheese.
• 44A. [Indoor dipole antenna, colloquially] clues RABBIT EARS. Jackrabbit. If you're like me, you always see "rabbi tears" (and "superb owl" for that NFL game).

Ten quick clues:

• 27A. ROTI means [Roasted, in Rouen].
• 35A. DEICE a plane to [Make ready for winter flight].
• 57A. NOOSES are [Causes of some untimely ends]. That's dark.
• 2D. HIALEAH, Florida, is a [Historic racetrack site]. Is it no longer so?
• 3D. ARMAGNAC is an [Eau de vie from Gascony].
• 11D. MAALOX completes ["___ moment" (ad catchphrase)]. Oprah does not lay claim to the Maalox moment.
• 22D. An ARIETTA is a [Short opera piece].
• 25A. Ford MODEL A'S were [1903-04 cars sold only in red].
• 39D. HOUSE PET is a [Collar wearer, often]. Kinda wanted this to be PRIEST.
•42D, 63D. [Roll call response] is PRESENT in, perhaps, a classroom, and NAY in a legislature.

Updated Wednesday morning:

Bob Klahn's CrosSynergy/Washington Post puzzle, "Go Ahead, Shoot!"—Janie's review

I'm happy to say today's title has nothing to do with firearms, in case that's what you were thinking. That imperative is also something you might say when you want you listener to tell you something. Or ask you something. Today it's the latter, and the colorful theme phrases all start with a word that also describes a particular kind of query. The phrases are unified, too, by the clue and fill at 63A., [Objection elicitor, and what the first words of 17-, 26-, and 47-Across could be doing]—and that would be LEADING QUESTION, and LEADING "QUESTION." The additional questions in question are:

• 17A. Trick question, by way of TRICK OF THE TRADE [Professional's shortcut].
• 26A. Burning question, from BURNING RUBBER [Peeling out].
• 47A. Loaded question, which comes to us from the great phrase LOADED FOR BEAR [Livid]. Never heard the expression before and love making its acquaintance. It sure has a lotta character.

So, too, does the cluing, which keeps the play in "wordplay." F'rinstance, the sequential linked-pair [Absent animation] for the lovely LANGUID and [Animation still] for the oft-seen noun CEL. Not only do we get the repeated word in the clues, but something that's "still" is also "absent animation." So we get some double-play action here.

Then we get both [Coiled choker] right next to [Coiled coif], or a BOA beside a BUN. With vocabulary that shows up as often in puzzles as these words, it really is refreshing to have cluing that shortchanges the solving process. Like [Undying dying words] for ET TU, or [Promise at the table] for OLEO (where "Promise" is the brand-name noun and not a verb), or [Net sales?] for E-TAIL (where "net" is short for "internet" and not the opposite of "gross"), or the lengthy but lyrical [Where to house cows once they browse] for BARN.

Other combos that appealed (by no means exhaustive): [Short pants?] for TROU (think about it...), [The same partner] for ONE (ditto), and [Concluding letters for proof reader] for Q.E.D. That's the reader of a mathematical proof and the letters stand for quod erat demonstrandum meaning "which was to be demonstrated."

Fave crossing today: SCHWA [Stress-free sound symbol] (ə) and "SH-H!" [The sound of "Silence!"]. If I omitted your faves, by all means: speak up! ([Ladies in wooly cotes] EWES, anyone?)

Dan Naddor's Los Angeles Times crossword

As usual on Wednesdays and Saturdays, this writeup is drawn from my L.A. Crossword Confidential post.

The theme could be called "Barflies"—Six famous people's last names form new phrases or compound words with BAR. Here are the theme answers:

• 18A: [*"Seven Year Ache" country singer] (ROSANNE CASH). My high-school reunion had a cash bar.
• 20A: [*"All I Wanna Do" singer] (SHERYL CROW). Crowbar. I just reviewed (for work) another puzzle with a theme of female vocalists that included both CASH and CROW, so I couldn't help expecting the other theme entries to follow suit. Nope! In that other puzzle, I changed the clue to include this song instead of some other song I'd never heard of. Good call, right?
• 32A: [*Longtime "American Bandstand" host] (DICK CLARK). The Clark Bar is, well...is it as good as a Butterfinger? I do like me a Butterfinger bar, and I ate all the minis my kid got for Halloween.
• 45A: [*Notable member of The Second City improv group] (JOHN CANDY). The Clark Bar is a candy bar. Rex Parker feels it's redundant to have both generic CANDY BAR and specific CLARK BAR in this theme. My feeling is that you can never have too much chocolate, and that Rex's suggestion (in the comments at L.A.C.C.) that Barbara Hershey and the fictional Veronica Mars could have joined Dick Clark is a good one (if only the word lengths matched up—and if only there were a famous person with the surname Snickers).
• 59A: [*French writer who befriended Chopin] (GEORGE SAND). Don't ground your boat on a sandbar. This is the only theme person who's more high culture than pop culture.
• 63A: [*"The Mark of Zorro" star (1940)] (TYRONE POWER). A Power Bar is one of those horrible things I never eat. I hear people like them.
• 65A: [Happy hour site, and word that can follow each last name in the answers to starred clues] (BAR).

With 63 theme squares, you expect to tolerate a few "blah" entries in the fill. I dunno. This one felt a little heavier on "blah" than usual for a Dan Naddor puzzle: L-DOPA, UTA, L.I.U., ENID, ADE, ADJ., K.P.H., the weird ANC. (Short for "ancient"? Not the much more famous African National Congress?), MAU, SEP., and TRAC are the sort of answers a constructor isn't striving to use, just ends up using to make the fill work.

Highlights:

• 42A: [Bette's "Divine" nickname] (MISS M).
• 50A: [Time-share units] (CONDOS). Hey! Plenty of us city-dwellers live in condos year-round. Are the suburbanites unaware of this? Is it the New Yorkers who ruin everything, by "buying apartments" rather than "renting apartments"/"buying condos"?
• 10D: [Bach work] (TOCCATA). I don't know classical music much, but this answer always makes me think of veal. (Piccata.) Which I don't eat.
• 21D: Gibraltar landmark (ROCK). This gave me a chance to include a photo of Dwayne (The Rock) Johnson in my L.A.C.C. post. He sure was cute in that Disney movie, Game Plan.
• 30D: [King Arthur's meeting spot] (ROUND TABLE). This is where King Arthur hung out with Dorothy Parker and Robert Benchley, at the Algonquin.
• 43D: [Chat idly: Var.] (SHMOOZE). I prefer the schmooze spelling.
• 46D: [Official emergency status] (CODE RED). My kitchen was at code red last week. It's down to the standard code orange now.

Tyler Hinman's Onion A.V. Club crossword

Tyler's theme is "potentially disastrous neighbor"s, #1 through #5: Your MOTHER-IN-LAW (I'd be fine with mine living nearby, honest), a smelly RENDERING PLANT (I would move), a SEX-CRAZED COUPLE (I highly recommend hearing loss so you won't hear them), a CRYSTAL METH LAB (eek), and PUNK ROCKERS (hey, it's fine so long as they're not rehearsing at home).

Favorite clues/answers:

• 6A. KITES are [Some quadrilaterals].
• 14A. I like the German in the clue [Unterwasser vessel], but it makes me want the answer to be U-BOOT instead of U-BOAT.
• 56A. COLD gets clued in a sporting sense: [Not shooting well]. Basketball, not guns, right?
• 2D. The ABO blood grouping system is a [System that helps you determine if someone's your type].
• 13D. [Animal that hisses], 5 letters, ends with E...SNAKE? Try a GOOSE.
• 27D. [Back], adverbially, clues IN REPLY. "In reply," of course, is the adverbial form of the adjective "in rep."
• 42A. Hey! Fresh ELBA clue: [Porto Azzurro's place].
• 60D. The NFL is [Ochocinco's org.]. His number, of course, is 85. What would your Spanish number name be?

I thought [Iranian city, or its river] would be QOM rather than QUM, but there's no unterwasser O-BOAT. Did you know the city—a holy city and a center of learning for Shiites—can also be spelled KUM?

Updated Wednesday evening:

Brendan Quigley's blog crossword, "Letter Rip"

The theme involves ripping a letter into two, but it's hard to visualize this in Across Lite or if you print your answers in capital letters. The breakage involves lowercase letter strokes:

• 18A. [Huge scissors?] are the BIG clIPPER. See how a lowercase cl, when squished together, looks like a lowercase d? The Big Dipper is the original, pre-ripping phrase.
• 20A. Double Dutch is a jump-rope game. DOUBLE clUTCH is clued as [Extremely reliable under pressure?]. Not too familiar with clutch as an adjective. Is that a sports usage?
• 38A. [Cornfield bunched together?] is CROP clUSTER (crop duster).
• 55A. [Starting up a digital stopwatch?] is LOADING clOCK (loading dock).
• 59A. [Muhammad Ali?] is BOXING clAY. Excellent combination of the Boxing Day holiday that people in other countries may celebrate after Christmas and boxer Muhammad Ali's birth name, Cassius Clay. I didn't love the rest of the theme, but I'm glad it built up to this one. If this one had come first, the rest would've felt like a letdown.

Brendan labeled this one medium difficulty, but it smacked me like a hard puzzle. Toughest spots for me:

• [Snatch beneficiary] is a DELT, or deltoid muscle.
• TEN CC is the British rock band at 39D. Boo! It's 10cc, just as U2 is not spelled U-TWO. I don't recall "I'm Not in Love" at all, but "The Things We Do for Love"? Oh, yeah.
• My Star Wars-fu is down. The scoundrel in 21A is LANDO Calrissian. I barely remember the movie he was most prominent in, so I tried JANGO Fett first.
• That 1D-2D-3D group of two-word phrases that we don't see much of in crossword grids.
• At 56A, wanted [Athlete's handlers: Abbr.] to be MGRS or MGMT instead of AGTS. Abbreviations that only save one or two letters are dumb. (See also Jun., Jul.)
• The answer for [Knocker holder] is incorrect. It should be DDCUP, not DCUP.

MGWCC #76

2009-11-17T11:00:00.004-06:00

crossword 6:45
puzzle 0:45

quick writeup this time, as i'm super-busy this week. hopefully you all can make up for it in the comments. the 76th episode of matt gaffney's weekly crossword contest, "On the Strait Where You Live," featured a curious geographical theme:

[Part of Montana's capital, to Spanish-speaking immigrants? (4)] is ESTE HELENA, as in east helena.
[Awful place to take a vacation? (1)] is HELLISH ISLAND. i think i went there once. it sucked.
[Founding father visiting Portugal's second city? (2)] is O PORTO JEFFERSON. or maybe OPORTO JEFFERSON. i know this city as porto (mostly because i know the soccer team, formerly coached by jose "the special one" mourinho), but wikipedia tells me that oporto is also sometimes used as the name of the city. well then.
[Honorific for Sooners' favorite lady? (3) is MADAM OKLAHOMA.
and [Games between the Cleveland Indians and the Toledo Mud Hens? (5 -- and the theme of this puzzle)] is a LAKE SERIES. the mud hens, by the way, are a real minor league team, the AAA affiliate of the detroit tigers, in the international league. as such, they'd never play the major league indians. they do often play the buffalo bisons, long-time affiliate of the indians (but now affiliated with the mets), and i suppose that would be a LAKE SERIES too.

so what's going on with this theme? well, it probably has to do with lakes (as the last clue implies). can you think of a LAKE SERIES with five members? i sure can: the great lakes, including lake ERIE of crossword fame. and lookie here, LAKE ERIE is hiding in that last theme answer, except that the ERIE part has been bracketed with a pair of Ss. a similar thing has been done to a geographical place name in the other four theme answers: ST. HELENA plus Es, ELLIS ISLAND plus Hs, PORT JEFFERSON (where is that? wikipedia tells me it's a new york town of 7000 or an ohio town of 300. well then.) plus Os, and ADA, OKLAHOMA plus Ms. putting the extra letters in the indicated order gives ... HOMES, the mnemonic for the great lakes that everybody learned in elementary school. although i have to say, huron, ontario, michigan, and superior are much less useful than ERIE for crossword puzzles.

quick hits from the fill:

PASTIS is apparently a [French aperitif]. never heard of it.
somebody named TILLIS is ["Stutterin' Mel"]. never heard of him, either.
not one but two gratuitous chess clues: pawn SAC and OSLO, home of world #2 magnus carlsen.
["Antigone" playwright] is SOPHOCLES. i so wanted this to be jean ANOUILH, the french playwright who had his own take on the story. i mean... his name ends with -LH. how cool is that?
least favorite answer: IOO, clued as [Five score, written out]. ouch.
favorite answer: HELD IT, clued as [Didn't go to the bathroom]. now there's a good use of IT in the answer, unlike ACE IT, which i see semi-regularly but don't much care for. i'm not wild about the IT in PLAY IT OFF [Act nonchalant], while we're on the subject. HOOF [___ it (walk)] is good. i think IS IT ALIVE [Sci-fi movie question] is a little iffy, but probably okay. except that it's kind of getting to be too many its, no?
oh yeah, YAWNER [No barn-burner] is great, too. if this were the saturday stumper, this would have some boring clue about somebody who's yawning.

okay, that's all. see you next week!

Tuesday, 11/17/09

2009-11-16T21:45:00.002-06:00

Jonesin' 3:59
NYT 3:40
LAT 2:35
CS untimed

Caleb Madison's newest Bard Bulletin crossword is available now in Across Lite, at the Crossword Fiend forum's "Island of Lost Puzzles." It'll be online in Java applet form later this week. Enjoy!

John Farmer's New York Times crossword

Structurally, this is an unusual puzzle. The theme entries are 10 (or 14)-letter doubled entities criss-crossing in two 5 (or 7)-letter halves that intersect in the middle, and these are found in the four corners and in the middle of the grid. The letters in those central intersections spell out RINGO. Here's how it plays out:

• 16A. [WIth 2-Down, group with the only James Bond theme to hit #1] is DURAN DURAN.
• 18A. [WIth 10-Down, flashy jewelry] is BLING-BLING.
• 39A. "TWINKLE, TWINKLE" is [With 25-Down, start of a nighttime nursery rhyme]. It's not just the start of the rhyme/song as a partial entry—we often call it "Twinkle, Twinkle" without adding the "Little Star" part, don't we?
• 61A. [With 60-Down, #1 hit of 1969] is "SUGAR, SUGAR." The Archies?
• 64A. [With 54-Down, intro to a joke] is "KNOCK, KNOCK."
• 52D. RINGO Starr is the [Rock star whose name is spelled out by the middle letters of 16-, 18-, 39-, 61- and 64-Across].

Okay, John: Please fill us in. What drew you to playing with crossword conventions in this way? Was there a compelling thematic reason to have the middle letters spell out RINGO, or could you have just as easily gone with another 5-letter word? How many iterations did you go through while working on this puzzle?

Okay, fellow solvers: Is it just me, or was this puzzle of Wednesday difficulty for you, too? Here are the tougher spots:

• WIGAN?!? 40D: [City near Manchester]—Wiggin' out about that one? Me, too. If you didn't know that RIGEL is the name of that 46A: [Bright double star in Orion], you were sunk here.
• 53A. The SKUA is an [Arctic seabird]. Remember this one with the AUK, ERN(E), and TERN.
• 12A. OCULI are [Eyelike windows]. I prefer auriculi, the ear-shaped windows.
• 21A. [International alliance] didn't shout ENTENTE to me, so I worked the crossings instead.
• 34A. I kinda wanted the [A.P. transmission] to be a WIRE STORY, but it's a WIRE PHOTO. On Twitter, you can follow the APStyleBook or, for a more irreverent take on writing and editing, there's Fake AP Stylebook. Sample: "Avoid using 'gadzooks,' lest your monocle pop out and land in your jar of mustache wax."
• 47A. [Japanese prime minister Taro] ASO puts me in mind of taro chips.
• 59A. The weird "I MEAN NO" is clued as an [Emphatic refusal].

Matt Jones's Jonesin' crossword, "You Want Fries With That?"

This week's Jonesin' theme is unusual French fry toppings or dips, beyond ketchup and malt vinegar and my son's preference, barbecue sauce. Me, I want a dash of sea salt flakes and a little ketchup. Other options:

• 17A. [Garnish that some upscale fries at Chicago restaurant mk are served with] is TRUFFLE CREAM.
• 26A. [Ingredient served with fries and brown gravy in the Canadian dish poutine] clues CHEESE CURDS. The gravy ruins poutine for me. Not a gravy fan. As for CHEESE CURDS, I like 'em breaded and deep-fried, à la the Upper Midwest. Mmm, hot cheddar goodness.
• 40A. MAYONNAISE is the [Condiment most often used by the Dutch with their fries]. Mac, is this true?
• 56A. I don't quite understand how this one works. CHICKEN SOUP is a [Seasoning option for fries at the Japanese fast food restaurant First Kitchen]. Wet or powdered soup?
• 67A. WENDY'S FROSTY is the [Fast food dessert that some kids insist on dipping their fries in].

Freshest answers in the fill:

• The FAR LEFT is an [Ultraliberal's place on the political spectrum].
• The GEEK SQUAD is the [Tech support subsidiary of Best Buy].
• Good gravy (a nonsequitur for me)! Crosswordese ARLO gives way to his last name for a change. GUTHRIE is clued as ["Alice's Restaurant" singer Arlo].
• The F-TEST is an [Analysis named after statistician Sir Ronald Fisher]. I've heard of Fisher's exact test, too. Someone else named the F-test after Fisher.
• GLAM ROCK is the [Genre for Gary Glitter].
• SIA is clued as ["The Girl You Lost to Cocaine" singer]. Who? Sia Furler is an Australian pop singer.
• [MSNBC anchor Monica] NOVOTNY is not anyone I'd heard of. I'm not a big consumer of cable news. What I see from across the health club once a week is pretty much it.

Updated Tuesday morning:

Patrick Jordan's CrosSynergy/Washington Post puzzle, "Cart Game"—Janie's review

This "cart" game deals out three fresh phrases and one familiar name whose first word can be followed not by cart but by its synonym WAGON, as is made clear at 69A. [Word that can follow the starts of...]:

• 20A. STATION BREAK [Spot for a commercial] → station wagon. Here's a Hudson classic from the '40s. Are station wagons even made today or is it all-SUV-all-the-time? (Remember, this question comes from someone who lives in Manhattan and doesn't own a car. And the last time I did, it was a VW Beetle... that got great mileage!)
• 35A. CHUCK NORRIS ["The Delta Force" star] → chuckwagon. Here's an interesting backgrounder on this mobile food wagon that first came into being in the American West, in the mid-1860s. And here's a picture of one from the 1920s.
• 42A. COVERED DISH [Potluck dinner contribution] → covered wagon, the 19th century version of a station wagon? If you were crossing the Great Plains, your belongings were likely to be packed inside.
• 59A. WELCOME SIGHT [Glimpse of something pleasing] → Welcome Wagon. You and your covered wagon would not have been greeted by one on your arrival in, say, Oregon, but Wiki tells us that "the company was founded in 1928, by Thomas Briggs in Memphis, Tennessee. At that time, Welcome Wagon 'hostesses' would visit new homeowners with a gift basket containing samples, coupons, and advertising from contributing businesses. These home visits continued for over 50 years until 1998, when changing demographics meant few homeowners would be at home when representatives called." I never realized there was an actual company with this name—that that's where the phrase (apparently) came from. And it's still around—on the internet, these days.

There's a lot of good fill and cluing throughout to make this a solid kind of puzzle. For instance, there's a mid-Eastern mini-theme by way of [Palestinian leader Yasir] ARAFAT, ARABS [Jordanian majority], OMANI [Muscat resident] and KURD [Certain Turk or Syrian].

There are also a pair of hirsute creatures—one diminutive, the other... probably not. The former is the EWOK [Forest-dwelling Jedi ally]; the latter, the YETI [Hairy Himalayan humanoid]. Oh—and I nearly forgot a reference to a third creature (a certifiably real one this time) with [Cat's coat] and FUR.

About to be late? You might not be if you [Hotfooted it] RAN. If someone were doing a play-by-play, she might even say, "There he is, and he RACES IN [Enters hurriedly]!"

Other TREATS (they're not only [Halloween handouts]) include SPLOTCH [Irregular stain], because it's a great word to get your mouth around; TABASCO [McIlhenny Company sauce], because it's hot stuff; VAN clued as [Part of Mayflower's fleet], because that's a fleet of moving vans and not ocean-going ships bearing Pilgrims...; BOTOX [Wrinkle-reducing treatment], because I just like that "X"; THREE for its thought-inducing clue [Line count of a haiku]; and the homophonic crossing of SITE MAP [Table of contents on the Internet] with WELCOME SIGHT.

Finally, whether by design or chance, there's that whole assonant SE corner. Look at it: STEEP [Like a canyon's sides], DEEP [Low-bottomed] (like that canyon, no doubt) and THREE. Plus the eye-rhyme that EPEE [Olympics rapier] lends, and the true rhyme of the bottom-central PEEP [Hatchery sound]. Nice touch!

Bruce Venzke's Los Angeles Times crossword

The four theme entries end with words that can substitute for BUNCH: a VACANT LOT, SEATTLE SLEW, IMPERIAL TON, and RIVER RAFT. Two of the theme answers have 9 letters, so it was a little distracting to have an 8-letter non-theme answer, NO BIGGIE, also end with a word connoting largeness.

The theme square count is 45, which is not small but also not too dense. So I was surprised by the amount of answers that can fit the category of crosswordese (words seen more often in crosswords than in the wild). Consider BRAE, IRANI, SMOTE crossing EMOTE, the OAS, AGER and APED, ANON, E'EN, MOUE, APSE, and G-MAN. Plus a prefix (ACRO), abbreviations (APR, ABA, NET WT, TMI), partials (ALL OR, A CHIP, a single NANU, PRIORI), and a bizarre plural (MA'AMS). These outweighed the theme and the zip of MR. FIX-IT for me.

Monday, 11/16/09

2009-11-15T18:10:00.003-06:00

BEQ 4:50
LAT 3:12
NYT 2:43
CS untimed

James Mulhern and Ashton Anderson's New York Times crossword

This pair of cruciverbal newcomers have crafted a puzzle with an "_OCK AND ___" theme:

• 17A. COCK AND BULL is [Like a story that can't be believed].
• 27A. [Military strategy during the 2003 invasion of Iraq] is SHOCK AND AWE.
• 45A. [Subject of a 1950s "revolution"] is ROCK AND ROLL. I don't think rock was the "subject" of the revolution—I think it was the engine that drove the revolution.
• 61A. LOCK AND LOAD is clued with [Prepare to use a rifle].

A novice puzzler in my living room found the common ANDs to be helpful. This is why it's a Monday theme and not a Wednesday theme. The novice thought she wouldn't get too far in the puzzle, but she actually polished it off in a matter of minutes. Thank you, Monday puzzles! You help lure people into the crossword habit, give them their cruciverbal sea legs.

Updated Monday morning:

Raymond Hamel's CrosSynergy/Washington Post puzzle, "K-K-K-KT"—Janie's review

One of the most enduring songs to have emerged from the World War I era was "K-K-K-Katy," also known as "The Stammering Song." With a wink to that title, Ray has found four well-known phrases whose first word ends with the letter "K" and, with great success, has "re-purposed" them to end with the letter "T." So, doing the K/T swap out:

• 17A. Pack of lies becomes PACT OF LIES, a [Worthless agreement?] containing a pack of lies, too, no doubt.
• 11D. Track record turns into TRACT RECORD, a [Log of land sales?]. This example and the ones that follow are more successful for me as they go farther afield from the context of the base phrase.
• 25D. Duck hunting metamorphoses into DUCT HUNTING, or [Looking for new gutters?]. This one is sounds plain silly and I love it for that.
• 50A. Pickpocket changes to PICT POCKET, [Where an ancient Brit kept his wallet?]. Not only silly but conjures up a strong image. Although... did you know that the Picts (among other peoples) are reputed to have been unclad warriors? Some say that they are known as Picts for the body-paint that covered them... I think my favorite line from the first linked article is the observation that the down side of naked combat is that "the combatant misses the practicality of hiding/carrying objects in pockets attached to clothes." Knew that "tract" could get this discussion back on "track"!

There's some very nice longer, non-theme fill that deserves mention. First the playful sounding, symmetrically-placed pair: DOO-DADS [Gizmos] and BON-BONS [Chocolate goodies]; and then the symmetrically-placed cinematic pair: tv WESTERNS ["Bonanza" and "Gunsmoke"] and WARNER [Surname of Hollywood brothers] fave PORKY PIG [Stuttering cartoon character] (who would have been right at home singing "K-K-K-Katy"...).

While its roots are in the word for "entreaty" and its first meaning has to do with prayer, I loved seeing the word LITANY, which is also accurately defined as a [Long list] (as in a "litany of complaints"...). Other fill/clues that caught my fancy would include:

• PANCAKE [Flapjack]
• OLD SALT [Ancient mariner]
• IVY [Wrigley Field wall covering] crossing IVES [Currier's lithography partner]
• NOT clued as [Undoing word], as in, "Tampa Bay's Bucs look to be having a great season so far. NOT!" Apparently they're having trouble meeting requirements related to their [Passing goals (abbr.)] TDS.
• JAUNT [Pleasure trip]
• SPLAT [Pie in the face sound] (We saw this not too long ago clued in connection with the sound an ice cream cone makes when it hits the floor; both work fer me.)
• And while I'm not wild for SHOER [Village smithy, e.g.], [Writer of sweet words?] for ICER really delights me.

Nancy Salomon's Los Angeles Times crossword

The title for this puzzle could be "Doing It in Grand Style," as each theme entry adheres to the "___ing [synonym for big]" format:

• 17A. WALKING TALL is [Striding self-confidently].
• 60A. LIVING LARGE is [Enjoying an extravagant existence].
• 11D. AIMING HIGH is [Shooting for the stars].
• 29D. TALKING BIG is [Carrying on conceitedly].

The theme's straightforward, so I'm not quit sure why this puzzle took me as long as a Wednesday crossword. I derailed partially with SUGAR BEET in lieu of SUGAR CANE ([Crop yielding a common sweetener]), and [Whammies] didn't shout HEXES at me like a [Bad spells] clue might've. I also didn't quite know that the [Game in which "bullets" can be whatever card you decide] is called ACES WILD. Deuces wild is more familiar, and it's got a definition link on Google, whereas "aces wild" doesn't. Not that this is the most reliable indicator of a phrase's solidity, but I've heard of deuces wild while aces high is more familiar to me than aces wild.

A few two-word answers:

• 53A. WAS ON is clued as [Aired, as a TV show].
• 46A. "TAKE THAT!" is [Words while delivering a blow]. 4D: MAKE TIME has the somewhat ungainly clue [Provide a schedule slot (for)]. I think the 8-letter TAKE and MAKE phrases swirled around in the theme part of my brain with WALKING and TALKING and made it a little harder for the theme to stand out clearly.
• 42A. ICE AX is a [Climbing tool for frozen surfaces].

Brendan Quigley's blog crossword, "Themeless Monday"

No time to blog now! In short:

• Terrific topical long answers, GOING ROGUE, BALLOON BOY, and SWINE FLU VACCINE. PENIS ENVY isn't topical, but also sparkles.
• Yay for a return to "Themeless Monday"!
• Boo to fill like U-TWO (the band always uses a numeral) and ONER, and to a couple clues. OVA aren't exactly [Places where it all began]—they're wee little cells. The Fallopian tubes and the uterus feel more like the "places" to me. OXIDE is clued as [Iron compound]. While iron oxide is a compound, this just feels wrong to me—oxides are oxygen compounds, no? Chemists, please explain.

Sunday, 11/15/09

2009-11-14T15:15:00.009-06:00

LAT 8:28
BG 7:40
Reagle 7:25
NYT 7:15
CS 3:42
NYT diagramless untimed

I'll be out at the movies and dinner at puzzle time tonight. Go ahead and chat amongst yourselves in the interim, and I'll see you late Saturday night. xoxoxo

—Back home by 10 p.m.!

Liz Gorski's New York Times crossword, "Man of Many Words"

All right, there's nothing at all wrong with this puzzle, but the theme couldn't be more perfectly designed to leave me unmoved. JOHNNY MERCER songs? Ten of them? Luckily, they were clued with other contexts, because most of the songs are not ones I've heard of. Those circled letters from A to N make a connect-the-dots picture of a, whaddayacallit, Wikipedia tells me it's a G-clef. It's a pretty symbol, but I have no idea if it's inextricably linked to these Mercer songs or what.

BEFOOL (39D: Hoodwink] looks kinda crazy. Haven't seen the word before—dictionary labels it "archaic."

Company calls—will return to the blog Sunday morning.

Updated Sunday morning, after sleeping in and having quality family time:

Henry Hook's Boston Globe crossword, "Decimation"

Well, I guess I don't really need to blog this puzzle since its constructor explained the theme in the comments before I'd done the puzzle. Spoiler! Spoiler! So, filling in the puzzle was just a rote process, no brain work to decipher the theme. The clues are words in all caps, and if you insert TEN, you get another word, and that word clues the theme answer in sort of a clue/answer reverse: [BAR(TEN)D?] = SERVE DRINKS, [CHAS(TEN)ER?] = ONE WHO PUNISHES, [HEAR(TEN)S?] = ENCOURAGES, [LA(TEN)CY?] = DORMANT STATE, [S(TEN)O?] = SHORTHAND WRITER, [SHOR(TEN)ING?] = LARD OR BUTTER, [AN(TEN)NA?] = RABBIT EARS, and [PAN(TEN)E] = BRAND OF SHAMPOO. You DIVIDE each clue word by TEN by inserting TEN into it.

I think I would've liked the theme a lot if I'd had to puzzle through it myself.

Merl Reagle's syndicated crossword, "Homophone Sylables"

I enjoyed this theme a ton. A sound-alike word replaces some syllables in a longer word, and the resulting portmanteau is clued accordingly:

• 21A. MISSILEANEOUS (miscellaneous) might be a [Category the Pentagon uses instead of "other"?].
• 32A. [Process of growing grass for cows?] could be called PASTUREIZATION (pasteurization).
• 41A. PROMISECUITY (promiscuity) is clued as [Habit of giving your word to everybody but never keeping it?]. Brilliant. We should adopt this as a useful term. The English language could use a single word to describe this concept.
• 50A. FUTILEISM (feudalism) is the [Social system under which nothing ever gets better?].
• 63A. CHORUSPONDENCE (correspondence) is [The fan mail that backup singers get?].
• 72A. [Organically grown herbal medicines?] are FARMACEUTICALS (pharmaceuticals).
• 83A. [Of an age when pork and mutton were pretty much all you ate?] is MEATYEVAL (medieval).
• 91A. [Having a sweet taste that kind of sneaks up on you?] is SYRUPTITIOUS (surreptitious). This one doesn't work as well for me as the others because I pronounce it "seer-ip," not "sir-ip." (Both pronunciations are listed in my dictionary.)
• 104A. MASSAGEYNISTIC (misogynistic) is clued [Contemptuous of rubdowns done by women?].
• 118A. FILL-IN-THROPIC (philanthropic) is [Pertaining to puzzle events that benefit charities?].

And now, a handful of non-theme clues:

• 27A. [Self-serving aims, often] are AGENDAS.
• 58A. [Knife for Nanook] is an ULU.
• 111A. PASSADO is a [Thrusting move, in fencing]. I don't recognize the word, even though we did some fencing in high school gym class.
• 112A. [Ludacris song, "___ Fool"] clues the two-word partial phrase ACT A. Nobody loves partials, but this is fresher than clueing the word ACTA.
• 1D. [Auctioneer's query] is "DO I HEAR [some random dollar amount]?"
• 10D. ["Well, you go ___ and I'll go mine" (Groucho)] clues URUGUAY, Groucho's pun on "your way."
• 20D. [Rubber hub] is rubber manufacturing city AKRON, Ohio.
• 28D. [P.M. whose jacket caught on] is NEHRU. The NEHRU jacket is, well, not a fashion I've ever worn, but it's had its day.
• 50D. Holy cats, really? FUSEL is today's out-there, uncommon answer. [Fermentation product, ___ oil] is not a clue that helped me get the answer. No clue would.

Mike Torch's syndicated Los Angeles Times crossword, "Ling-uistics"

For me, this is today's most challenging 21x21 crossword. The theme involves adding -LING to the end of a word to alter its meaning, and the results are pretty good. I like it when theme entries aren't completely obvious and you have a bunch of "aha" moments when you piece them together. The Gorski NYT's theme didn't offer me any of these "ahas," with the "aha" reserved for the connect-the-dots visual aspect. Hook's Globe puzzle would've given me a big "aha" with some oomph to it if I hadn't known the theme up front. And Reagle's puzzle, like Torch's, had a solid "aha"/amusement payoff for each theme answer.

Here's the "Ling-uistics" theme:

• 24A. STARLING TREK could be a [Migration of gregarious birds?].
• 50A. The Ox-Bow Incident is a novel and movie. OX BOWLING INCIDENT is a [Bovine argument at the lanes?]. This one made me laugh. There were no oxen present when I went bowling last week, luckily.
• 71A. [Game for lazy kids?] is IDLING TAG.
• 95A. Can I pick your brain? PICKLING YOUR BRAIN is [Drinking too much?].
• 122A. LEGAL FEELING is a [Courtroom intuition?].
• 3D. [Result of way too much praise?] is EGO TRIPLING.
• 31D. RED INKLING plays on red ink, and is clued as a Joseph [McCarthy suspicion?]. I like this one a lot too.
• 58D. This clue could've gone down the vomiting lane, but it didn't. BEN HURLING is [Affleck on the mound?"], hurling a baseball. It would've been really impressive if Torch had built the entire theme around movie titles + LING—24A and 50A join with this one in the movie category.
• 74D. The Fab Four become FABLING FOUR, a [Quartet of storytellers?].

Least familiar answer in the grid: 110D: TROON is a [Town on the Firth of Clyde]. Overall, the fill is pretty smooth. I'll dock it one point for having both UNO and UNI, but at least they're small and on opposite sides of the grid.

Doug Peterson's Washington Post/CrosSynergy "Sunday Challenge"

Do HAIRY CHEST ([Symbol of manliness]) and its opposite grid partner OPERA HOUSE ([Sydney Harbor landmark]) constitute a mini-theme? I like to think they do. (Of course, they do not.)

Highlights in this definitely-on-the-easy-side themeless:

• 15A. A BROMANCE is an [Intimate friendship between two guys, slangily]. Near the end of Superbad, which I watched again last night, there's a sweet moment between Michael Cera and Jonah Hill's characters, in the fine tradition of the bromance.
• 8D. "HERE GOES NOTHING" is clued with ["This probably won't work..."].
• 12D. ALGORITHMS is just a cool word, so different from the rest of the English language. They're [Step-by-step procedures].
• 27D. At the Crate & Barrel Outlet on Friday, I passed up the chance to buy a FLY SWATTER, or [Inexpensive extermination device].
• 46A. HATCHET MEN are [Enforcers for the mob], among other things.

Toughest clues:

• 16A. UVULAR means [Sounded from the back of the throat].
• 41A. TOMSK is a [Siberian city]. We see OMSK much more often in the puzzle than TOMSK.
• 2D. URDU is related to the Hindi language, so it's a [Hindi relative] but not a Hindi word for a family member.
• 21D. GALOPS are [Lively dances]. The word's related to "gallop."

Fred Piscop's second Sunday NYT puzzle, a diagramless crossword

It took a little longer than usual to figure out how the first rows were laid out. 1A SCHISM, 11A CRULLER, and 14A DEADLY SINS were stacked together, but was the 7A CLAM, 13A HAHA, 17A AVON stack to the right of the bigger stack (with 1A and 7A on the top line), or was it to the right (with a bunch of black squares to the left of 1A and above 7A)? Turns out to be the latter. I didn't piece it together until the end of 21A DAYS IN A WEEK, in the fifth row, hooked up with some Down answers and showed me the way.

The theme answers are all clued the same: [There are seven ...]. Four of the five were quite familiar, but that unfamiliar one was a killer. The famous septets are as follows:

• 14A. DEADLY SINS
• 21A. DAYS IN A WEEK
• 37A. WONDERS OF THE WORLD
• 58A. HILLS OF ROME
• 68A. LITTLE FOYS

It was LITTLE FOYS that killed me. The Seven Little Foys is a 1955 Bob Hope movie that was nominated for a screenplay Oscar, but I've not only never seen the movie, I've scarcely even heard of it. The O crossed a partial that I had trouble piecing together: 59A ["___ of You" (Hank Williams Jr. album)] clues I'M ONE of you. I pondered "I Mane of You," "Imene of You," "I, Mine, of You," and "Imune of You" for the vowels, and IMLNE and IMRNE for FRYS and FLYS. Gah.

I was slightly thrown by the dated word SLOVEN, 20A [Neatnik's opposite]. It's a dated word, much less familiar than "slovenly." I'm not telling my husband that this word, meaning "a person who is habitually messy or careless," exists.

Saturday, 11/14/09

2009-11-13T22:28:00.006-06:00

Newsday 6:17
NYT 6:15
LAT 3:22
CS untimed (J)/3:01 (A)

Joe Krozel's New York Times crossword

Have we seen quadruple-stacked 15s before? I feel like I've seen it in a Frank Longo puzzle, maybe in a book rather than the NYT. Yes? No? Jim Horne suggests that this is a first, but I have some vague Longo deja vu.

Having a central quad-stack requires an even number of rows (this puzzle is 15x16). The 15s are:

• 32A. INCOME STATEMENT is an [Overhead shower] that shows what your overhead expenses are.
• 37A. I actually saw MOON OVER PARADOR, the [1988 comedy starring Richard Dreyfuss and Raul Julia]. The fake country name appears to be a portmanteau of Paraguay and Ecuador. Who's making this up—George Lucas?
• 38A. "ARRIVEDERCI, ROMA" is the [Song with the lyric "City of a million warm embraces"]. We had this answer in a themed L.A. Times puzzle by Lee Glickstein a month ago, grouped with other A__A phrases that ended with place names.
• 39A. MANDARIN ORANGES are, like other citrus fruits, [Pomelo relatives]. My nephew once asked my mom for some "oranges 'n' mander."

Favorite clues/answers:

• 8D. [Charging giant, informally] is AMEX, short for American Express. Surely I'm not the only one who built off the X by putting T. REX here?
• Burrowing animal alert! PRAIRIE DOG is a [Natural tunnel creator] (11D) while MOLE is an [Uninvited rooter] (42A).
• 25D. [Not to be persuaded] means UNMOVABLE.
• 26D. To GET ACROSS is to [Convey] your point.
• 30D. [Item sometimes planted in a garden], sort of, but not planted beneath the soil, not unless you're lucky that your neighbors don't want to be tacky, is a GNOME. (See also ELVES, [Noted workshop workers].)
• 34D. I don't eat CORNED BEEF, but it is indeed [Something to make a hash of].
• 49D. SKID is clued by way of [A screech may accompany it].

What I didn't much care for:

• 10A. SPAN is [6-Across, for one], and 6A is YEAR. SPAN partners up better with GET ACROSS, if you ask me. Or should just stand alone. None of this year business.
• 43A. DELS., short for delegates, are [Pol. convention attendees]. Don't recall seeing that abbreviation before.
• 45A. MESS ROOM is [Where things are bolted down on base]. Anyone not want this to be MESS HALL?
• 60A. [Etym. followers, often] clues DEFS., short for definitions. Most of my dictionaries (two out of three!) put the definitions first, followed by the etymology. Only my Merriam-Webster's Collegiate puts etyma first.
• 61A. [Tenor Cura] clues JOSE. Really? That's your go-to José? I Googled him: opera singer, born 1962. Is it bad that Ezio Pinza is so much more familiar to me than this guy?
• 2D. NEALE is clued as [Former Canucks coach Harry]. I cannot name a single hockey coach, not even for the Blackhawks.
• 6D. "YOU PASSED IT!" ["That was the turnoff!"]. I'd say "You missed the exit."
• 21D. ALOE VERAS in the plural, as [Alternative medicine treatments]? Aloe vera is a scientific name. Can those take a plural?
• 35D. [One way around Spain] is by TREN, which is not among the Spanish words most likely to be known by non-Spanish-speakers.
• 47D. The clue for crosswordese ORIEL, [Large bay], looks calculated to mislead. Does anyone like it when the payoff for a tricky clue is crosswordese? (It's a large bay window.)

Overall, the fill was smoother than we've seen in a number of other Krozel kreations, so I'll give it a modest thumbs-up. The crossings for the quad-stack are a good bit better (save TREN) than you might expect, given the sort of muck that often intersects triple-stacks, and they're mostly on the long side. So we can say that one advantage of a quad-stack is that it cannot have any crappy 3-letter abbreviations crossing it. Another plus is the Scrabbly fill—a Q, two Zs, an X, K, and J. Notably, none of those Scrabbly letters is to be found amid the 15s and their crossings.

Updated Saturday morning:

Patrick Blindauer's CrosSynergy/Washington Post puzzle, "AV Club"—Janie's review

No—not a shout-out to the kids with the plastic pocket-liners who set up the sound and projection equipment for school events. Patrick instead takes the letters that begin A(udio)-V(isual) and interpolates them into four well-known phrases—with some very fine results, namely:

• 20A. BEAVER BELLIES [Abdomens of some dam builders?], which began life as beer bellies. This one really sparkles. It's easy to imagine those industrious beavers knocking back a few after a long day of gnawing, and eventually having to deal with their expanding waistlines. Time to build more damn dams!
• 36A. BRAVER FOX [More courageous vixen] takes its lead from Joel Chandler Harris's Br'er Fox, one of Br'er Rabbit's classic foils in his Uncle Remus stories. This is the only one of the four in which the meaning of the new phrase is not all that different from the meaning of the base phrase—and I'm afraid it suffers some as a result.
• 42A. WAVING TIP [Hint on how to greet from afar]. Ooh, this is good, as it creates its own picture and is so far away from its equally lively base phrase, wing tip.
• 56A. CAVITY COUNCIL [The American Dental Association, e.g.], which also comes up strong. It starts with city council, but that additional "AV" takes it in a whole new direction—one that takes us back to 20A, in fact. Anyone remember Bucky Beaver, Ipana toothpaste spokes-mascot?

There are several other clue/fill combos that kept me on my toes and that keep this puzzle lively:

• [It may be purple]/PROSE. Purple prose, as in Edward Bulwer-Lytton ("It was a dark and stormy night," etc...).
• [Staffs]/MANS. Staffs is a verb...
• [Number that's its own square]/ONE. This is a "do the math" clue and not a reference to a square in the grid.
• [Long-time Moore costar]/ASNER. Should be easy enough, right? But not when your thought process says, "Demi Moore? No, no long-time costar there. Oh, Dudley Moore. So the answer must be Peter COOKE... No, wait. Mary Tyler Moore! Right—Dick VAN DY... never mind..."
• [Eyes guys, e.g.]/OGLES and in the "turn-about is fair play" department, [Eyes thighs, e.g.]/LEERS. Gotta love the specificity. Gotta love the rhymes.
• [Hot shot?]/LOVE SCENE. So that's a camera shot.
• [Long lunches]/HEROS. Submarines, hoagies, grinders. Whatever they're call in your neck o' the woods, we're still talkin' about the sandwiches here.
• [It's worn on the bridal path]/VEIL. And guess what? It's worn along the bridle path, too. Check out these Victorian riding hats!
• ["Houston, we've had a problem..."]/"UH-OH"—and what a fine example of understatement that is!

Two sorta flag-raisers in the mix as well. I was unfamiliar with the term SPOOLED for [Prepared to send, as data to a printer], but it certainly makes sense to me; and then there was UKE defined as [Tiny Tim's strummer]. Is the instrument a strummer (something that gets strummed) or is Tiny Tim the strummer (the one who does the strumming)? And if the latter, does that mean this should have been clued [Tiny Tim's strum-ee]? I know. I'm in the land of overthink, but I'm afraid it goes with the territory...

Oh—and the one link you must check out is the one that goes a long way towards explaining ["An] ENOLA [Gay Christmas" (Off-Broadway show)]. Seems our multi-talented constructor was otherwise engaged in 2003. I'm only sorry I missed it. Any chance of a revival, Patrick?

Adam Cohen's Newsday "Saturday Stumper"

(PDF solution here.)

The fill in this 72-worder is a bit drier than I had expected. The letters are mostly the common ones, and there's no showy marquee answer. The 15-letter entry across the middle, THE THREE SISTERS ([Literary characters surnamed Prozorov]), is filled with letters like E, R, S, and T. The only question-marked clue is [Dodging the draft?] for ALEE, "on the side of a ship that is sheltered from the wind." I like there to be more payoff for question-marking than a drab 4-letter word like ALEE.

A dozen clues:

• 12D. [County on the Firth of Clyde] is AYRSHIRE.
• 17A. ["Oliver!" director] is CAROL REED. I like full names in the puzzle, but it helps if the names are really famous or packed with crazy letters. Sir Reed died nearly 40 years ago and doesn't have anywhere near the name recognition of Frank Capra, Orson Welles, or John Ford.
• 26D. [With 34 Across, source of the samara fruit] is the ASH / TREE. It's the flying seed thing, not an edible fruit. Samara is also the name for maple trees' "helicopters."
• 26A. Paul ANKA is [Canada's Walk of Fame inductee]. Why, I've heard of more than half of the inductees!
• 53A. AS SEEN ON TV is a good entry, but the clue, [Common come-on], is less zippy.
• 63A. [Carnival ride] clues SEA CRUISE. Does anyone call it a "sea cruise," or just a cruise? (Carnival is a major cruise line company.)
• 6D. TERI Polo is not quite famous enough to be clued as [Polo, e.g.]. Again, as with ALEE, I want more of a payoff for a clue striving to mislead.
• 14D. I had hoped [Upright ones] would be some sort of pianos. Nope: STANDEES.
• 35D. THESAURI are [Places where land may be close to home].
• 36D. [Paramedic device] clues HEMOSTAT. It compresses a blood vessel to stanch the bleeding.
• 43D. EMEERS are [Some dynasts]. The primary spelling in English is EMIR. Secondarily, there's AMIR. EMEER is an unwelcome variant that has fallen out of fashion in most crosswords. It should be used only to facilitate better fill in its crossings, but EMEERS here crosses RAVER and UTILE, which are pretty flat.
• 57D. ["Pagliacci" part] wants you to think it's a role, but VOCE is Italian for "voice."

Frederick Healy's Los Angeles Times crossword

Excerpts from my L.A. Crossword Confidential post:

This one's back down to the easier level we've seen in recent months. I like to be expected to work hard on a Saturday puzzle—harder than I have to work on Wednesdays. Ah, well.

I was disappointed to find the first person singular pronoun lurking in five answers:

• 15A: ["Land sakes alive!"] clues "I DO DECLARE!"
• 22A: ["__ no idea!"] is completed by I HAD.
• 23A: [Cooperative after-dinner offer] is I'LL DRY.
• 29A: [Player's lament] clues I LOST.
• 41D: ["Out of the question"] clues "I CAN'T."

I can overlook a second use, but not a third, fourth, and fifth. Too much!

Highlights:

• 30A: [Voice of Mr. Magoo] (JIM BACKUS). Also the millionaire Thurston Howell III on Gilligan's Island. Now that's the kind of full-name answer I like in a crossword—someone whose name is familiar, plus it's got a J and K in it.
• 36A: [French capital?] (DES MOINES). Friend visiting from out of town works in Des Moines a lot. Like the answer, but frowned at the clue.
• 50A: ["High Voltage" rock band] (AC/DC). I only know "Dirty Deeds in a Dundle Jeep," as my best friend in 7th grade called it. Cute to clue the band's name with an electrical song title.
• 54A: [Shaq, 15 times] (NBA ALLSTAR). That's one more time than Michael Jordan, who interrupted his hoops career with his baseball interlude. Is 15 the record, or have others been at the top of the game for longer?
• 22D: [Revival meeting shout] (IT'S A MIRACLE). Dang it, the offical Culture Club video of the song by that name cannot be embedded. It's also the title of a Barry Manilow song.

Daily Beast, 11/13/09

2009-11-13T19:36:00.007-06:00

Time – 11:42 (paper)
“Team Palin” by Matt Gaffney

The publication of a 1A/132A [...new book by Sarah Palin] titled “GOING ROGUE” leads Matt to using the unusual Palin family names for theme answers. Whatever your opinion of the ex-governor of 109A: [Wasila home] – ALASKA, you must admit that not every family could get this puzzle treatment. Osmonds? No. Jacksons? Tito and Jermaine, maybe.
Other theme answers:
23A: [Math lessons for one of Sarah Palin’s kids?] – TRIG CLASSES. Will Trig’s kids be named Calc, Alg and Arith?
39A: [One of Sarah Palin’s kids, when she’s upset?] – WEEPING WILLOW.
56A: [What one of Sarah Palin’s kids puts in her coffee?] – BRISTOL CREAM.
84A: [One of Sarah Palin’s kids, when a slapstick prank is pulled on her?] – THE PIED PIPER.
101A: [Lamp in one of Sarah Palin’s kids’ rooms?] – TRACK LIGHTING. Isn’t high school hard enough with a regular name?
119A: [Dialect spoken by Sarah Palin’s husband?] – TODD ENGLISH. This was new to me. Todd English is a celebrity chef.
Pseudo-theme answer:
82A: [Singer Bareilles] – SARA. Didn’t know the name but I know the song.
Canadian content for the blogger:
93A: [“The Love GURU” (Mike Myers movie)]/ Compare with 32D [Mystic] - SWAMI
2D – [Bobby of NHL fame ] – ORR
115D – [Neighbor of Sask.] – NDAK. Shouldn’t that be neighbour?
Other stuff:
25A: [“Thus Spoke Zarathustra” author] – NIETZSCHE. Made me think of 2001, a Space Odyssey music.
49A: [Throw a fit] – GO APE/76D [Freak out] – PANIC/51D: [Audience disapproval] – BOO HISS
(Is there a hidden political commentary in this puzzle?)
50A: [Fast spreading idea] – MEME. A slow spreading idea is called a YOUYOU.
51A: [Jaw covering] – BEARD. Clever and yet ordinary.
62A: [Fields Medal winner Terence] TAO. That is a big mathematics prize. I’ll bet Mike Nothnagel knew this. I’ll bet Amy didn’t.
69A: [X] – CHI. You wrote TEN, didn’t you? Yes you did. Don’t lie to me.
73A: [Grossmutter, casually] – OMA. Name two terms for grandmother that I didn’t know. I prefer Bubbie.
100A: [Maine college] – BATES. Would you go to a college named after the motel in Psycho?
42D: [Magazine whose next cover features Sonia Sotomayor] - LATINA
54D: [“About SCHMIDT”]. 2002 Jack Nicholson movie. Or another term for grandmother that I didn’t know. Either answer is equally possible.
59D: [Crab-eater’s tool] – MALLET. Why would you eat something that needs a mallet?
91D: [Fencers and hurdlers, e.g.] – ATHLETES. Not in the Winter Olympic, coming to Vancouver in 2010.
95D: [U.S. senator with a palindromic name] – Daniel AKAKA of Hawaii. Not Alaska, despite the A’s and K’s.
98D: [Watch whose days are numbered] – DIGITAL. Clue of the week!
See you next week!

Friday, 11/13/09

2009-11-12T22:18:00.006-06:00

NYT 5:57
BEQ 5:37
LAT 4:14
CHE 3:50
CS untimed
WSJ 8:07

Dana Motley's New York Times crossword

It's been a couple years since the last Dana Motley puzzle. You know what her themelesses are notable for? Rather than going with grids with longish stacked answers, triple-stacked 15s, or corner blocks filled with 7s, she spreads her long fill all around. Rumor has it such a grid is easier to fill than the stack-heavy ones are. One good thing about them from a solving standpoint is that the longer answers serve as bridges between the puzzle's various zones, so you can extend some footholds if you get a few long entries early on.

That said, there are some insanely tough clues here. For example, 1D: [Port near Ogre]. Ogre, it turns out, is a Latvian town of 26,000 that is ridiculously new for a European city, dating back only to 1928. And "Ogre" doesn't shout "must be Latvian" to most of us. The answer is RIGA, but that's a roundabout way to approach it. Speaking of place names that start with O, OSHKOSH is the 39A: [Seat of Winnebago County], Wisconsin—but there are counties by that name in Illinois and Iowa, too. OHIO is clued by way of being 59A: [Title locale in a Leonard Bernstein song where "life was so cozy"]. I relied on the crossings for all three of these. The other geo answer, ANGOLA (48D: [Cabinda is an exclave of it]), is the only place name the clue helped me to get.

Highlights in the fill:

• 17A. [Big wheels, often] clues GAS GUZZLER. Crossword clues more often use "big wheel" to mean a boss, so I like the change.
• 26A. Okay, this clue didn't help me much at all. [Funshine, Grumpy or Love-a-lot] is a CARE BEAR. Good answer, goofball clue that I am the wrong age to know.
• 60A. ACROPHOBIA is the [Source of high anxiety?]. Fear of heights, of course.
• 3D. [She's identified with a cause] clues POSTER GIRL.
• 18D. ZYDECO is a [Grammy category starting in 2007]. I saw Queen Ida and the Bon Temps Zydeco Band in college.
• 22D. WELCHERS, another spelling of welshers, are [Debt disregarders, slangily]. My dictionary says the word's origin is unknown, so don't get your knickers in a twist defending the morality of the Welsh people.
• 24D. ABSINTHE is the [Potent stuff called "the green fairy"]. I knew ABSINTHE was green, but not that it had this nickname.
• 30D. BOOSTER BOX is an [Item-concealing shoplifting aid]. Never heard of this one.

Other favorite clues:

• 10A. [Top or bottom, in baseball] clues a HALF of an inning. Here's why the clue makes me laugh.
• 38D. [1/768 gallon] is a TEASPOON. Remind me to tell this one to my kid.
• 50D. [One may give facts about acts] clues EMCEE. I was thinking of acts that are passed by Congress rather than entertainment acts introduced by an EMCEE.

Quibbles:

• 16A. [Stick out in a restaurant?] clues OLEO. Out where? On the table? I have never seen a stick of margarine on a restaurant table. Out in the restaurant kitchen? Boo to the clue.
• 21A. [American goldfinch] clues YELLOWBIRD or YELLOW BIRD. It is a small yellow bird. Wikipedia redirects yellowbird to the yellow warbler. Is this answer meant to be a specific bird name or just the description of a bird of a certain color? Because as a generic phrase, it's not good fill. It needs to be a specific term for something.
• 44A. [Opposite of me, in Munich] is SIE, which means "she," "they," or (when capitalized) the formal "you." I'd argue that "me" does not have an opposite, per se, and surely not an opposite with three distinct meanings. Ulrich or Zulema, back me up here.
• 53D. [Worrier's words] are "OH, ME"? Who says that? Anyone you know? "Oh, me, oh, my," sure. "Oh, my," of course. But not OH ME or AH ME, which keep showing up in crosswords. I have just consulted my husband about the utility of OH ME and AH ME and he said "no [bleep]ing way." It's fill like this that turns off newbies, isn't it? More so than OLEO? Maybe it's a tie.

Clues that may stymie:

• 6A. [Watch things, briefly] are LCDS. Meh.
• 29A. A spherical GLOBE of the earth is a [Meridian shower] in that it shows the location of the meridian and the equator.
• 47A. [Was an accountant?] clues NARRATED, as in "gave an accounting of a tale." Not wild about this clue.
• 56A. [NFL'er Olsen or Toler] clues GREG. Who? Husband tells me G. Olsen plays for the Bears.
• 67A. [They're applied to some backs] clues WAXES. As in the wax that's used to strip out body hair?
• 5D. [Sch. whose sports teams are the Violets] is NYU. Really? Did not know that. I like it. Violets are closely related to pansies. Pretty flowers.
• 7D. [Kale kin] is COLLARD, as in collard greens. Looks weird without "greens" appended to it.
• 27D. ["Dawson's Creek" role] is PACEY. Except that here, we need ANDIE. Who? Not one of the core four characters, ANDIE was played by Meredith Monroe, who played a 16-year-old when she was 30. Now, that's just silly. Andie MacDowell wants her clue back.
• 28D. [Chloe in "Uncle Tom's Cabin," e.g.] is an AUNT.
• 43D. [Dog for logs] is an ANDIRON. Not familiar with this use of "dog."
• 57D. EINE is a basic German word, one of the ways of saying "a." ["Nosferatu, ___ Symphonie des Grauens"] is missing its EINE.

Overall, I think this was harder than the usual Friday puzzle. And you?

Dan Naddor's Los Angeles Times crossword

The theme is "add an R to words that end with GE":

• RADAR RANGER is a [Park official who tickets speeding bears?]. Radar range is not familiar to me, but the Amana Radarange is.
• [Smallest allowable bet?] might be the MINIMUM WAGER. Minimum wage is certainly familiar.
• [Steals a plumbing supply?] clues TAKES THE PLUNGER. I'd clue that as [Steals a plumber's helper?] or [Steals a bathroom tool?] or something—I think of "plumbing supply" as being pipes and valves.
• [San Fernando creator of fake van Goghs?] could be a VALLEY FORGER. Speaking Valleyspeak, no doubt. "Grody to the max!"
• [Burrowing creature cited for excellence?] is MERIT BADGER. Brendan Quigley just had MERIT BADGE in a recent cigarette-themed puzzle.

Weirdest long fill: [Stereotypical pratfall cause] clues BANANA SKIN. SKIN?!? Not BANANA PEEL? Who calls it a BANANA SKIN? Not me.

James Sajdak's Chronicle of Higher Education crossword, "Produce Literature"

This week's CHE theme is works of literature with fruit in their titles. To accommodate two 15s and and two 16s, the grid's stretched a little taller. The books are THE CHERRY ORCHARD, A RAISIN IN THE SUN, THE GOLDEN APPLES, and THE GRAPES OF WRATH.

Favorite clues/answers:

• LARRUP means [Thrash].
• RICE CHEX is an [Ingredient in a certain party mix]. Would someone remind me to buy Rice Chex?
• ALLAH is a [Word spoken when reciting the shahada]. What's that? It's this, the ritual declaration of belief in Islam. (See also SALAAMS, [Respectful greetings].
• [Audacity] and MOXIE are more or less synonymous.
• [One with a heart of stone?] is a DRUPE. Apt for a puzzle with this theme—DRUPEs are stone fruit, like peaches, plums, and cherries. (See also: PEAR, [Popular compote fruit].
• DOORMAT is an [Overly unassertive person]. Not to be confused with a doorman (which differs by one letter).
• [Trooper on the highway, e.g.] is an ISUZU, as in the Isuzu Trooper SUV.
• Indy [500 letters?] are STP.

Who is this? [Field of White?] clues STYLE, but I can't think of a relevant person in fashion/style named White.

Updated Friday morning:

Martin Ashwood-Smith's CrosSynergy/Washington Post puzzle,"Inland Seas"—Janie's review

In the world of cryptic puzzles, they're known as "hidden answers." These are the words that can be found by looking at the last letters of one word and joining them with the first letters of the next one. Today Martin's theme fill gives us two such examples and one in which the word in question (see title...) falls within another in its entirety. The beauty of this particular construction is that in each case, the "inland sea" occupies the seventh, eighth and ninth squares of the row it appears in. And there's a little bonus fill as well. The three places you'll find those hidden bodies of water are within:

• 17A. IS THIS SEAT TAKEN? [Moviegoer's question].
• 35A. PROPOSE A TOAST [Raise one's glass].
• 54A. JAPANESE ANEMONE [Showy garden plant of the buttercup family]. Attractive to members of the APHID [Garden pest] family, too, I fear. Today's IRISES are not clued botanically, but anatomically as [Pigmented eye parts]. Durn!

And bonus fill:

• 33D. SEA [Word in the center of all three long entries]. This one's intentional. Just in case the key element ELUDED [Gave the slip to] you... This one (I suspect), sitting right next to it, is not:
• 31D. SEAMS [Clothes lines?] Hmmm. Sure wish there'd been a way to avoid using this word...

Elsewhere, there's a healthy amount of longer fill, clued in a very straightforward way, so it's not too difficult to complete the grid—even with the likes of ROAST PIG [Luau food], MOUTHWASH [Listerine, for one] and ANACONDAS [Jungle crushers]. If they're on the loose, you might want to set out some SNARES [Game keepers?]. Ouch.

There's a little computer mini-theme going on in the Texas portion of the grid with EXE [Computer file suffix] adjacent to USER [Computer operator], which shares its "U" with
URL [Web browser entry].

But my fave combo today? No, not NESTLÉ [Crunch maker] or ORIOLE [Baltimore player], but TWO for [Tango requirement]. Sing out, Dean. Nowhere in this clip, however will you see a tango... Here you definitely will!

Elizabeth Gorski's Wall Street Journal crossword, "For Your Inner Child"

Wow, really? New York City has a PULASKI DAY PARADE? I had no idea. It's a government and school holiday here in Chicago, but I didn't know NYC celebrated Casimir Pulaski at all.

That and the other theme entries contain an "inner child," or KID. I'm not crazy about the theme answers, which don't feel all that natural to me. KHAKI DRESS? KABUKI DANCE, not drama? CHICKEN TERIYAKI DINNER, not steak and not lunch? What I like better is the long non-theme fill:

• 46A. SEX ORGANS are [Features of anatomically correct dolls]. People have 'em, too.
• 80A. WHACK JOBS are [Nutters].
• 92A. SAY PLEASE is a [Reminder from Mom]. I'm more circumspect than that. I say "Psst, did you tell her..." and then my KID says "please" or "thank you."
• 126A. [They may be dusted] clues CRIMES SCENES. Not, you'll note, my bookshelves and furniture.
• 4D. I like the SCULPTURE clue: [It might be a bust]. Indeed.
• 82D. Full name! JOHN DEREK [was married to Ursula Andress and Linda Evans]. Also, notably, to Bo Derek, but that would kinda give the answer away.

Most unusual fill: 30D: TUK, [Barbados musical style]. That one's new to me. I have seen FELLAH (54A: [Egyptian peasant]) before, but quite seldom.

Brendan Quigley's blog crossword, "The Final Four"

The theme is the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, right? SUDDEN DEATH, FEAST OR FAMINE, ENOS SLAUGHTER, and THE ART OF WAR? Apparently not: They're Conquest, War, Famine, and Death, no Slaughter. So it's just four things that can be "final" in terms of your life?

I didn't care for I'M BAD, the [Little devil's observation], right at 1-Across. Had no idea an IN-RUN was a [Ski-jump feature]. Thought the commonest phrase was PUB CRAWLS, not BAR CRAWLS—haven't seen the latter. Grumbled at the clue [Last year that was a palindrome, in Roman numerals] for MMII, Roman for the Arabic number 2002. Does the word palindrome really apply to numbers? And oh, crap, now we're expected to know the names of Mad Men characters even though a vast majority of Americans do not watch the show?

I had some crazy typing today, so GRITH (GIRTH!) put an R in a Roman numeral, and MICS (MISC!) put the S in OFF-SCREEN (OFF-CAMERA!). D'oh. It's one of those mornings.

Highlights:

• AL LEWIS, Grandpa Munster, is the gubernatorial candidate at 25D.
• [Shock preventer: Abbr.] clues EMT. Took a while to make sense out of this: paramedics try to prevent you from going into shock.
• [Epic ___] FAIL.
• [Puzzler Trip] PAYNE! Howdy, Trip of Triple Play Puzzles fame.

Thursday, 11/12/09

2009-11-11T21:50:00.005-06:00

NYT 6:07
Tausig untimed
CS untimed (J)/3:27 (A)
LAT 2:59

Go here for Eric Berlin's specially commissioned crossword, made for Rex Parker, Patron of the Cruciverbal Arts via Eric's kickstarter.com project. It's Rex's 40th birthday this month.

Brendan Quigley's New York Times crossword

Maybe it's just my browser that does this; I don't know. If you use the applet, do you often have the rightmost characters of a clue cut off by the red scroll-bar ends? 3D: [Excited answer to "Who want / ...?"] is what I saw, with a line break after "want." Well, that's not right at all. I suppose it's just "wants," but I spent some time trying to approach it from different points in the clue list to see if I could move the clue out from behind the red bar...and then I remembered the clock was ticking away. Oh! Moving on.

After I finished the puzzle, I replaced the {DIAMOND} rebus squares (which I'd entered as a D) with asterisks that look ever so slightly like diamonds. Easier to make sense out of, no? So yes, the gimmick theme is a rebus, with five {DIAMOND}s, one in the central answer and four others in symmetrical spots in the top and bottom rows. The sparkling theme answers:

• 1A. [Tycoon who was reputedly the first person in New York City to own an automobile] is {DIAMOND} JIM BRADY. That is, of course, the man the Brady Law is named after. (Just kidding. Different Jim Brady.)
• 1D. [Union symbol?] is {DIAMOND} RING. Were you thinking of political unions? I was.
• 10A. {DIAMOND}HEAD is a [Hawaiian landmark].
• 10D. [Chase Field team] are the Arizona {DIAMOND}BACKS. Sometimes they're called the D-Backs, aren't they? So that one looked fine in my grid without the full rebus word.
• 36A. [Classic marketing tagline] is "A {DIAMOND} IS FOREVER." Did you see that Blood Diamond movie? Hard-hitting.
• 37D. {DIAMOND} LIL is a classic [Mae West role].
• 67D. The silliest song of the '80s, for my money, is NEIL {DIAMOND}'s "Heartlight." A song about E.T.'s glowing heart? "Let it make a happy glow for all the world to see"? Major cheese! ["Heartlight" singer, 1982] is the full clue.
• 44D. BLACK {DIAMOND} is the [Symbol for a difficult ski run]. I couldn't master the gently sloping hill by the ski resort parking lot, so I'm pretty sure the black diamond runs are beyond me.
• 68D. [Home setting] is a BASEBALL {DIAMOND}.
• 54D. The HOPE {DIAMOND} is the [Subject of a renowned curse]. THE CUBS wouldn't fit here.

I like the variety of diamond meanings here—two nicknames, a surname, three gems, two baseball references, a place name, and the shape as symbol.

Five other bullet points:

• 20A. [Like some fancy soap bubbles] clues TORIC. That's soap bubbles being blown all fancy, not bubbles from a fancy bar of soap.
• 40A. CURL is clued [Show signs of age, maybe]. Like the corner of a poster or a book page?
• Good gravy, so many other people's names clued by their works, and I had to rely on the crossings to get them. ["The Red Tent" author Diamant]—hey, Diamant is German for "diamond," isn't it?—is named ANITA, but I blanked on that. R. KELLY's the [Singer with the 2002 hit "Ignition"]. Thomas ARNE is clued with [His first opera was "Rosamund"]. And Andre GIDE is your ["Corydon" author].
• 32A. RECTO is clued as the right-sided page, a RECTO—[Chapter's starting point, usually]. This answer never, ever gets clued as a prefix for "vaginal."
• 17A. ISOLATIVE means [Tending to cut off] and is not a common word.

Updated Thursday morning:

Tyler Hinman's CrosSynergy/Washington Post puzzle, "Leeway"—Janie's review

Well, lookee here—a new constructor joins the CrosSynergy roster of all-stars. Welcome, Tyler—and congrats on a great start out of the gate. All of the fill today seems skewed to a slightly younger solving audience—or let me say it's more inclusive of several generations of solvers—and I take this as a good thing. Tyler would be a member of Gen Y, but he's included lots today for the [Gen-___ ] X-ER as well as Boomers and their parents.

All of the theme-fill focuses on celebs of the stage, screen and rock 'n' roll who go by their full names and whose middle name is Lee. Hence the title... And those folks'd be:

• 20A. JAMIE LEE CURTIS ["Halloween" actress].
• 33A. TOMMY LEE JONES [He went to Harvard with Al Gore] (where they were roommates for a time).
• 40A. JERRY LEE LEWIS ["Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On" singer]. The AIRWAVEs [Transmission medium] could barely contain him!
• 51A. JONNY LEE MILLER [Title actor of "Eli Stone"]. Have never seen it, but Mr. Miller happens to be in New York City right now in the Broadway production of After Miss Julie, where his co-star is Sienna Miller (no relation). Have never seen "Entourage" either, but courtesy of the puzzles, do know that ARI is the name of the [...agent].

(The musical theatre has a shout out to Lee as a last name, in Sherman Edwards's jaunty "The Lees of Virginia" from 1776. Thank you for giving me the leeway to follow that tangent...)

The grid today is fresh indeed, with the three-stacks of sevens at center-top and -bottom, the five-square at center, the two six-columns in the NW and SE and the fabulous vertical 15s that flank them. And it's filled just beautifully, to boot. Those 15s are especially lively: HIS MASTER'S VOICE [Trademark associated with a dog and a gramophone] and WAXING NOSTALGIC [Remembering the good times] (which is something folks who grew up with gramophones probably enjoy doing).

It's a bit too soon to be waxing nostalgic about SIM CITY [Long-running computer game series], isn't it? Still, it does make for more fill of the contemporary sort. Ditto DRE [Eminem's mentor, popularly]. Now ["Africa" band] TOTO—well, that may be another story... Nice to see Toto clued in connection with the band and not The Wizard of Oz. (Also nice to see Toto in the same grid with TUTU [Arabesque attire].) There's another group from the same (basic, if slightly earlier) period: [1970s band] MOTT [the Hoople]. Plenty in today's puzzle for DJ'S [They spin in clubs] to choose from.

Other fill and/or clues I like: TOOL BOX [Handyman's carryall] (probably for that "X"); DAY JOB [One might be advised not to quit it]; the colorful [Confuzzled] for AT SEA (confused + puzzled...); ["Who wants ice cream?" response] for "I DO!"; [Optimist's word] for CAN; the presence of both (Abba) EBAN and JEW... the former clued as [2001 Israel Prize recipient], the latter as [Seder participant, usually]; and finally, did you know that MAY is [National Salad Month]? News to me, but it's that kind of nugget of info in a clue that keeps things interesting! IMHO ["As I see it..." in a chat room] (or on line...).

I was surprised to see that the title of Tyler's puzzle, "Leeway," included the LEE part in it. I thought that was verboten in titled puzzles. I was pleasantly surprised to see that the puzzle had an impressive ladder structure—each of the two vertical 15s intersect all four of the theme entries.

Kelsey Blakley's Los Angeles Times crossword

The DNA SEQUENCE theme includes five answers in which there's a hidden DNA:

• 17A. [All-big-gun battleship] is a DREADNAUGHT. It's also spelled dreadnought, which is what I first went with.
• 24A. A [Deeply ingrained habit] has become SECOND NATURE.
• 39A. [Shanghais] means KIDNAPS.
• 42A. OLD NAVY is a [Gap subsidiary].
• 53A. [Cuba or Puerto Rico, e.g.] clues ISLAND NATION, but Puerto Rico doesn't have autonomous nation status. There are a zillion other island nations, from Madagascar to Kiribati to Iceland to Grenada to Taiwan, so I'm not sure why this clue includes a non-nation.

Most mysterious answer: 61D: [Nestle cereal beverage], or ECCO. Ecco is also a brand of practical shoes that, it turns out, don't fit my feet well. The Google page for an Ecco search is filled with shoes. Nestlé Australia mentions ECCO, the drink. Ecco doesn't exist on the Nestlé USA website. Boo! Terrible clue! This should be a shoe clue. The crossing could plausibly be either I GET or I GOT, and since ECCO is clearly a shoe, I was tempted to try OCCO for the drink. Took a gamble that it was an unfamiliar ECCO and won.

I haven't got anything else of interest to say about this puzzle, so I'll move along to the next puzzle now.

Ben Tausig's Ink Well/Chicago Reader crossword, "Union Agreement"

Ben's wedding is this weekend. To mark the occasion, he snuck an I DO into four familiar phrases, with the resulting made-up phrases clued without reference to the I DO:

• 18A. [Sources of odd teenage behavior?] are MAD LIBIDOS. Mad-Libs are those fill-in-the-blank books that can have zany results. My son enjoys Mad-Libs.
• 29A. The common (but not technically accurate) term "Bush Senior" feeds BUSHIDO SENIOR, or a [Gray-haired samurai?].
• 49A. "SEE YA, IDOLATER" could be [Words of farewell to an object-worshipper?]. "See ya later" is the base phrase.
• 62A. [Quick look at various melon liqueurs?] is MIDORI SCAN (MRI scan). I have never tried Midori and in fact seldom even see it in stores or bars. But I used to look at ads for it in Vanity Fair years ago, and the ads made it look like all the cool people drink it regularly.

I liked this theme a lot. When the base phrases are themselves entertaining fill, a theme has extra oomph. Highlights in the fill:

• Eddie VEDDER is the [Writer of the song "Elderly Woman Behind the Counter in a Small Town"]. My son has better hair than Eddie Vedder—true story.
• FREEGANS, rhymes with vegans, are [Certain anti-capitalist dumpster-divers].
• AUTO-TUNE is [The "A" in Jay-Z's "D.O.A."]. That's "death of Auto-Tune," yes?
• I just booked my February flights for the ACPT. I virtually possess an E-TICKET, or [Modern travel provision].
• I learned something from the clue for CRO: [___-Magnon man (outdated archaeological concept]. Outdated? Really? Tell me more.
• The RED SCARE was a [20th century witch hunt].

Wednesday, 11/11/09

2009-11-10T21:53:00.009-06:00

Onion 5:18
BEQ 5:05
NYT 3:21
LAT 3:07
CS untimed

My son will be home with me tomorrow—Veterans Day. Thanks to war veterans old and new for their service. I wish you all peace.

Kelsey Blakley compiles a set of phrases that contain four different letters, which are used ONE, TWO, THREE, FOUR times apiece:

• 17A. [User of barley malt] is a BEER BREWER. One W, two Bs, three Rs, four Es.
• 30A. [Emphatic boast of responsibility] clues I DID INDEED. I dunno, feels more like a boast of accomplishment than responsibility.
• 46A. [One way to be armed] is TO THE TEETH.
• 64A. This jingle/slogan meant nothing to me, but the crossings told me ROTO-ROOTER is the ["And away go troubles..." company].

My solving experience was par for the Wednesday course, judging by my solving time, but it felt a little rougher. Here are...let's call it ten. Ten clues:

• 15A. [McGwire's friendly home-run rival] is Sammy SOSA. Have you seen the latest pictures in which his "rejuvenated" skin looks freakishly pale?
• 19A. [Stick in the mud] is the verb MIRE.
• 37A. A street GANG is a [Turf group].
• 38A. [Slo-___ fuse] clues BLO. I can think only of Rainblo gumballs.
• 51A. Never heard of this ORB, the [Marvel Comics villain with an eyeball-like helmet].
• 68A. NORMS? [They're par for the course].
• 9D. [Unbending] clues HARD-LINE. Are you HARD-LINE when it comes to crossword puzzle quality?
• 'Tis the season. 26A: ["Punkin" cover] is FROST and 47D: [Like a jack-o'-lantern] is HOLLOW.
• 32D. [Key shade] is vowel-consonant-O-consonant-Y. EBONY this time; could be IVORY.

Allan Parrish's Los Angeles Times crossword

This theme falls squarely out of my wheelhouse. I listened to top-40 radio in high school (early '80s with an emphasis on new wave) and then went to college, land of R.E.M. and Violent Femmes and college bands. By graduation in '88, I was completely out of touch with the poppiest pop music. So a theme with the titles of one rap cut from 2002 and two pop songs from 1989? Crossings! Easy crossings. The theme:

• 20A. [2002 #1 hit for rapper Ja Rule] is ALWAYS ON TIME.
• 36A. [1989 #1 hit for Paula Abdul] is FOREVER YOUR GIRL.
• 56A. [1989 #1 hit for the Bangles] is ETERNAL FLAME.

I'd never heard of any of these songs, so I took a gander at them on YouTube. I discovered 20A is laced with profanity and not a very feminist cut at all. 36A was poppy with a too-long instrumental portion near the beginning (dance! keep dancing!) and not my style. The only Bangles song I know is...wait, am I thinking of Katrina & the Waves? "Walk Like an Egyptian" is Bangles, "Walking on Sunshine" is Katrina. Yes? The live performance of 56A I watched on YouTube suggests I like the Bangles OK, but I really do not know their oeuvre.

I'm sorry, nobody asked about my musical history. Anyway—I liked a lot of the fill in this puzzle. Check out L.A. Crossword Confidential Wednesday morning for more details.

Ben Tausig's Onion A.V. Club crossword

Either this puzzle's a notch or two harder than usual or I'm a notch sleepier. The nuptial theme celebrates Ben's upcoming (this very weekend!) wedding. 17A/58A BREAKING / THE GLASS is clued as [a Jewish wedding tradition...and the theme of this puzzle]. The three longest answers have a broken GLASS interspersed among their letters.

The toughest spots for me were 7D: [Spanish province]/SEGIA (never heard of it) and 29A: [Sport spun off from James Naismith's game]/NETBALL (never heard of it). The dictionary entry tells me netball is a mostly British game with seven-player teams and a requirement to stand still when in possession of the ball. That must be weird for a basketball fan to watch. Also, down at 43D: ["Orlando Furioso" poet] is ARIOSTO. Why did I need all seven crossings?

Favorite five:

• ESTELLE Getty [was actually a year younger than Bea, despite playing her mother on TV]'s Golden Girls.
• [Oft-knocked-off thing] is a HANDBAG. That's "knocked off" in terms of being counterfeited.
• [Emulates the chicken] clues CROSSES, as in "Why did the chicken cross the road?"
• BABYGAP is a [Clothing store with models who weigh A LOT less than Ralph Lauren's]. Ha!
• LOCA is the [Word rhymed with "mocha," in a 1999 Ricky Martin hit]. I may have stopped listening to most pop music a decade before "La Vida Loca," but some songs are simply inescapable.

Updated Wednesday morning:

Sarah Keller's CrosSynergy/Washington Post puzzle, "Proudly They Served"—Janie's review

Perhaps not at first glance, but this is a really lovely puzzle. Not only does it pay Veteran's Day tribute to four U.S. presidents who (as younger men) served in the armed forces during wartime, but the grid is clued in a lively manner that boosts its "oomph." See if you don't agree. The theme fill is pretty straightforward—although you do have to use some "process of elimination" thinking (and/or the crosses...) to zero in on the correct fill. All of the clues name a "war" veteran and end with the phrase [...who served as a U.S president]. In case you didn't know:

• 20A. [World War II veteran...] LYNDON JOHNSON. Also Ike, JFK, Nixon, Ford, GWH Bush. Carter was still at Annapolis; Reagan served in the military but his eyesight kept him from active duty (and full "veteran" status)... Here's the skinny.
• 28A. [World War I veteran...] HARRY TRUMAN (the only U.S. president with that distinction, btw).
• 46A. [Revolutionary War veteran...] JAMES MONROE (ditto Andrew Jackson and some guy named George Washington...). There's a bonus with this war and its heroes by way of [American Revolutionary soldier Nathan] HALE, he of "I regret that I have but one life to lose for my country" fame. Do they make 'em like that any more?
• 57A. [Civil War veteran...] CHESTER ARTHUR (likewise Andrew Johnson, Ulysses Grant, Rutherford Hayes, James Garfield, Benjamin Harrison and William McKinley).

In addition to this little history lesson, we get a lotta lively clues and clue/fill combos to keep things peppy. There's:

• [To-do] for FLAP;
• [Do to do] for OCTAVE—so here, do is pronounced "doe," as in "...a deer, a female deer...";
• ["Zip-] A-DEE [-Doo-Dah"]. An example of do to do in "Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah": that first "Zip-" is do and the final "Doo-" is the do that's an octave higher;
• [Usher's creator] for POE. As in the short story from 1839, "The Fall of the House of Usher" and not Usher the entertainer... Never read the story? Want to re-read it? Here'a a link. (Public domain and the internet. A heady combination, no?);
• [Zaire's Mobutu] SESE [Seko], a bad leader with a great crossword puzzle name whose regime had the dubious distinction of being synonymous with the concept of kleptocracy;
• ["Dagnabbit!] for "NERTS!";
• [It's good to make them meet] for ENDS;
• [Not a cutting edge blade?] for EPEE; and my fave
• [It's more in an adage] for LESS, as in architect Mies van der Rohe's minimalist observation: "Less is more."

I only wish the long but clinical INANIMATE and GERMICIDE, clued as [Lifeless] and [Disinfectant] respectively could have been given the same clever treatment as these shorter entries; ditto KNEECAP [Triangular leg bone]. Better is ARMOIRE with the visual [Where shirts and ties may be kept] or the active [Dangled a carrot in front of] for TEMPTED.

As for not only our leaders, but all of our men and women who have served in the armed forces and seen active duty—our most profound respect and appreciation is yours. And not only on Veterans Day.

Brendan Quigley's blog crossword, "Themeless Wednesday"

All right, I gotta feed my kid breakfast and oversee some homework, so let me head straight to the list of favorites.

Favorite word: TRENCHANT, or [Sharp-edged]. I need to use this word more often.

Favorite clue: [People mover?] for a NEWSSTAND that moves a lot of issues of People.

Favorite fill: MAO JACKET atop AQUA VELVA, goofy YACHT ROCK, KLIBAN the ["Cat" cartoonist].

Other clues I liked: [Thelonious Monk supporter] is his PIANO STOOL. Gloria STEINEM is the [Feminist who wrote "Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions]. [Mythical realm on one end of the rainbow bridge Bifrost] is ASGARD; I don't know a ton of Norse mythology but it's so appealing.

MGWCC #75

2009-11-10T11:00:00.003-06:00

crossword 4:57
puzzle -2:00 minutes (approximately)

hola. hell month is over at matt gaffney's weekly crossword contest, and this week's easy-breezy puzzle, "Ain't No Way," is proof. the straightforward theme involves people whose first name is almost a state (or two):

[She was personal couturier to Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis] is somebody named CAROLINA HERRERA. except that crosswords have led me to believe it was OLEG cassini, no?
["Mrs. Dalloway" author] is VIRINIA WOOLF. you shouldn't be afraid of her. her books are excellent.
["The Secret Life of Bees" actress, 2008] is DAKOTA FANNING. for somebody with a long and not unusually vowel-heavy name, she shows up a lot in crosswords. there's no other explanation for why i know who this is, since i certainly haven't seen any of her movies.
pulling everything together (and spelling it out in impossible-to-miss detail) is the last theme clue: [Be without "stated" aim in life -- like the three people in this puzzle's theme entries] is HAVE NO DIRECTION.

so north/south CAROLINA, west VIRGINIA, and south/north DAKOTA ... see? (yes, of course you see. why am i belaboring the point?) speaking of points, the instructions this week tell us that There are three points you need for this week's MGWCC. This week's contest answer is the fourth point, the one you don't need. that would be east, although east carolina is ... okay, no, it's not a state.

the fill contained some good, some bad, some ugly, and some unfamiliar:

under the "good" heading would fall KOREAN, the [Cuisine with the beef dish called "bulgogi"]. mmm. mmm! my son's birthday was yesterday, and we had some bulgogi at the party. there was a bit left over, so we had bulgogi again tonight for dinner. did i mention mmm? because yeah, mmm.
also under "good": DILI, [East Timor's capital]. last week, for no really good reason, i decided to learn all the countries and capitals of the world by doing those infernal sporcle geography quizzes. i did eventually learn all 195, so this was a nice gimme for me at 1a, even though sporcle prefers to call this country timor l'este. anyway, i had to learn all the countries and capitals back in 10th grade, but east timor wasn't a country then, so this one was new to me as of a few weeks ago.
file this under "bad": IS IT A ["boy or girl?"] is a fairly awkward partial, made more awkward by the presence of IT'S ME and I LIKE IT elsewhere in the grid.
definitely "ugly": [Get an ___ (fail)] F ON is the worst partial i've seen since "LA, A note to follow so(l)." i guess we can be glad that the answer wasn't AN F ON.
either "bad" or "ugly": crosswordese OPA, the [German grandpa]. OMA is the grandma equivalent.
the "unfamiliar" category includes california gubernatorial candidate MEG whitman, "the GONG show" (?) and four people named COHN i've never heard of (al, roy, mindy, or marc).
gratuitous chess clue of the week (which is really its own category, i guess): the [Annual chess tournament won in 1957 by 14-year-old Bobby Fischer] is the US OPEN. and yes, that's as absurd as it sounds. more absurd than tyler hinman winning the ACPT at age 20.

that's all from me this week. peace out.

Tuesday, 11/10/09

2009-11-09T20:58:00.008-06:00

Jonesin' 3:57
NYT 2:50
LAT 2:30
CS untimed

Uh, yeah, hi. I haven't done the puzzle yet because it's about to come out but I am about to leave to take a friend to a late-night MRI appointment (they have those!), and I just got home from the vaccination clinic (2.5-hour wait). Gah!

Go ahead and discuss amongst yourselves for the time being. It's Tuesday. How mystifying can a Tuesday theme be, anyway?

Updated Tuesday morning:

Bruce Venzke & Stella Daily's CrosSynergy/Washington Post puzzle, "Assorted Searches"—Janie's review

Last Tuesday, Doug Peterson gave us a puzzle entitled "Search Party." Bruce and Stella look to have developed the idea Doug set in motion. Now where the connection between today's title and today's theme fill is concerned, what ya sees is what ya gets: four theme phrases, each describing the object of a different search. The variety and range of quests, however, makes for some very fresh fill, and there's a nice SENSE of PLAY in the non-theme fill as well. Cue up The Coasters' "Searchin'" as you, too, go looking for the:

• 17A. [Object of a Ponce de León search] FOUNTAIN OF YOUTH.
• 26A. [Object of an eHarmony.com search] PERFECT MATCH. Finian's Rainbow is enjoying a well-reviewed revival on Broadway right now, and in that Burton Lane/Yip Harburg score, our heroine Sharon explains in song that in matters of the heart, she'd been well-advised to "look to the rainbow" and then "follow the fella who follows a dream." Ah, for the days before the internet!
• 48A. [Object of a Sir Lancelot search] THE HOLY GRAIL. Wait—ya mean?...I thought that was the object of a Monty Python search!
• 63A. [Object of many a hopeful machine inventor's search] PERPETUAL MOTION. Hopeful—and deluded...

Bruce and Stella do name a lot of names right at the top of their puzzle: EDIE McClurg, GENA Rowlands, Mos DEF, Dr. PHIL, OONA (O'Neill) Chaplin, and Burt LAHR [...of "The Wizard of Oz"] (the score of which was written by our pal Yip Harburg with Harold Arlen). But they also give us several fill combinations that can be nicely tied together in a sub-theme kinda way. For instance, there's a [Quaint exclamation] for EGAD, and also a [Quaintly polite response], YES'M. Also quaint to my ear (and totally charming), is [Have a crush on, to a Brit], for FANCY. In baseball, if you [Overthrow, for one], you commit an ERROR. An error of a different sort is a TYPO, as demonstrated in [Thsi clue has one]. If it's more than that—a word that's wrong or a sentence that can be cut, say—the offending text may be marked DELE [Editor's "take it out"].

[Do-___ ] RE-MI is the way many a singer will warm up, tune up the voice. TUNE-UPS, though are also [Car maintenance requirements]. Benzoyl peroxide treats ACNE; ACME is [Wile E. Coyote's favorite catalogue company. IGNITES is a word for [Sets ablaze]; when something's [Going out, as a fire], it's DYING.

I liked the misdirection of [Stuff in blue books?] for SMUT. And you thought this was a reference to your college EXAM booklet. Then again, maybe the stuff in your exam books was smut... (You know—for your History of Porn class...) STIR is but one of the many great words for another great word, [Hoosegow]. Clink, pokey, cooler, coop, jug, can. Colorful language for a place where "grey" is the new everything, and the only kind of companionship might be a CHIA PET...

Alan Arbesfeld's' New York Times crossword

Okay! I'm only 12 hours behind schedule. Why, I'll be caught up in no time. Maybe.

Eh, I don't love this puzzle. The theme entries are five phrases that begin with the words TAKE THE MONEY AND RUN, which apparently is a a line associated with WOODY /ALLEN. First, I do not like Woody Allen. Second, never would've thought he was connected to that line. Two non-theme answers are stacked with the first and last theme answers and are the same length, which is not optimal. And then there are a zillion two-word answers littering the grid, along with a three-word, 9-letter phrase clued as a partial. Two short answers (TONY, EDIE Falco) are tied to THE SOPRANOS, but why? The THE is part of the Woody Allen theme. It's distracting to shift the focus to The Sopranos.

The glut of two-word answers includes SIC 'EM crossing SIT ON and IN AWE, SAW IN, partial Q AS, I'LL DRY, and I LIED. None is particularly juicy.

As for the theme entries themselves, I like THE SOPRANOS, MONEY LAUNDERING, and AND I LOVE HER, but TAKE PLACE is flat and RUN SCARED, well, I don't like it as much as those others.

I'm short on time this morning too, so...moving on!

Donna Levin's Los Angeles Times crossword

Lovely early-week puzzle from Donna. DRIVE at 68A ties everything together: The four longest Across answers begin with "___ drive" words. FLASH IN THE PAN, SEX EDUCATION, LINE ITEM VETO, and TEST BAN TREATY point towards the lively "drive" phrases flash drive (the itty bitty USB gadget that's so handy for transporting files, and that holds a gazillion more bytes than diskettes ever did), sex drive (hey-o!), line drive (baseball term), and test drive (we fell in love with our 9.5-year-old VW on the test drive when it took a sharp curve fast).

Highlights in the fill include ROUND TRIP ([There and back]), MOON RIVER ([Song with the lyric "I'm crossing you in style"]), VISHNU ([Four-armed Hindu deity]), and HIPSTER ([cool cat]). Overall, smooth stuff.

Matt Jones's Jonesin' crossword, "Home Slice"

Matt's theme is bread puns:

• 17A. [Bready agreement?] is YOU GOT THAT WHITE ("you got that right"). Except there's no inherent "agreement" in YOU GOT THAT WHITE. That's merely identifying that the white bread has been gotten. How about clueing this as a [Wonder lover's question?]?
• 32A. [Bready folk singing group?] is PITA, PAUL AND MARY (Peter, Paul and Mary). Cute.
• 42A. [Bready magic act?] clues SIEGFRIED AND RYE (Siegfriend and Roy). Cute.
• 60A. [Bready phrase after a double take?] is HEY, WHEAT A MINUTE ('hey, wait a minute"). This one has no surface sense at all. Boo!

Highlights:

• TAX DOLLARS are clued via [They're "at work" when talking about public projects]. I am most appreciative of the economic stimulus road resurfacing. My car is grateful for smooth roads replacing horribly pot-holed streets.
• ERIC BLAIR is the [Author who went by the pseudonym George Orwell].
• THE PLAYER is that [1992 Robert Altman satire of Hollywood execs].
• GRUB and [Vittles] have the same variety of slangy vibe to them.

Mystery TV answer #1 (because my son's too old for preschooler TV shows): LAN is clued ["Ni Hao, Kai-___" (Nickelodeon cartoon)]. I know the "local area network" sort of LAN, but needed every crossing for this one.

Mystery TV answer #2 (but inferrable): "I PIE" is the ["Good Eats" episode title where Alton Brown discusses lemon meringue]. I like Alton Brown's goofy-yet-practical sensibility.

Monday, 11/9/09

2009-11-08T20:01:00.006-06:00

BEQ 4:44
LAT 2:53
NYT 2:41
CS untimed

Lynn Lempel's New York Times crossword

Gotta put my kid to bed now, having been out bowling and tippling a few hours ago when the puzzle came out. So, extra-quick:

Another classic Lempel Monday NYT, perfectly light and smooth, with lively fill and a theme that I didn't even identify right away—phrases or words that end with synonyms. COUGH DROP, NIGHTFALL, KITCHEN SINK, SKINNY DIP, and THINK TANK. If your performance drops, falls, sinks, dips, or straight-up tanks, you need to work on your skills.

Highlights: KING-SIZE and GIRL TALK, WEASELS and icky MENTHOL that's tied to the COUGH DROP. Oh, and SPARES clued as [Bowling scores inferior to strikes]. I had a couple spares and a strike tonight in 1.5 games. In the first game, I stank—all the verbs in this theme? Completely relevant. I bowled a 61. The second game, it was men vs. women and we women wiped the floor with the fellas, sharing a 141 game vs. the husbands' joint 89.

Updated Monday morning:

Randall J. Hartman's CrosSynergy/Washington Post puzzle, "Beam Me Up, Scotty!"—Janie's review

It seems that like Rick in Casablanca, who never said, "Play it again, Sam," Captain Kirk never really said, "Beam me up, Scotty!" He said things like that, so that's what we remember. And repeat. It may not be completely accurate, but really, who cares?! It takes away from our enjoyment of the reference not one bit. And how does this title play into today's theme? Focus on that first word. Now attach it to the first word of the theme-fill et voila! Full disclosure: I didn't figure this out until a minute or so after I'd finished solving... Here's how it plays out:

• 17A. [Star of "Yes Man"] JIM CARREY → Jim Beam. You know, this stuff. Bottoms up!
• 28A. [Desktop publishing aid] LASER PRINTER → laser beam. Those focused beams are used in measuring the distance to the moon. Never knew that. Did know that laser is an acronym, but never remember that its letters stand for light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation (and fear I'm not likely to either...).
• 49A. [Statement of financial position] BALANCE SHEET → balance beam. Love how this rather dry fill triggers thoughts of this vividly rigorous gymnastic challenge. Here's Nastia Liukin at the World Championships. Don't try this at home!
• 66A. [Idaho skiing mecca] SUN VALLEY → sun beam. Lovely. And if skiing isn't your thing but the sun is, how about the SEA SHORE [Summer vacation destination]? The thing to remember about the sun's RAYS is that [They're soaked up at the beach], too, and a great way to get yer vitamin D. Wherever you choose to go, remember to use the spf 15...

And there's more strong cluing and fill all around the grid by way of:

• [Something stuffed in November?] isn't TOM TURKEY or YOUR BELLY, but BALLOT BOX. Did you vote last Tuesday?
• [Poem that begins "Once upon a midnight dreary..."] for Poe's "THE RAVEN";
• "negatives" from two very different worlds—[Old fashioned denial] 'TISN'T and ["Fuhgeddaboutit!"] "NAH!"; whose contemporary tone is a nice complement to the phrases
• "ARE [ ___ you out of your mind?"] and ["Take a chill pill!"] for "LOOSEN UP!";
• [Cover story] for ALIBI; which is a fitting complement to
• [Pen pal's place?] for CELL (as in prison cell);
• and, probably my fave, [Monkey that resembles a squirrel], which is MARMOSET. Why do I love this one so much? Because it gives me the chance to trot out the link to "The Marmoset Song." If you click on no other link here, please make it be this one... Silly, but satisfaction guaranteed.

In addition to Sun Valley, sports fans will take note of BART STARR [MVP of the first two Super Bowls], the terrific clue [Arrive home safely?] for SCORE, and [Throwing this in basketball might earn you a foul] for your [ELBOW]. And in addition to Jim Carrey, cinéastes are rewarded with a witty reminder of Madeline KAHN [...who made Boyle boil in "Young Frankenstein], and OTTO Preminger ["Laura" director...], who won an OSCAR [Academy Award] nomination for that picture. The film had five Oscar noms, in fact, but won only one—for Joseph LaShelle in the category of Best Cinematography (Black-and-White).

Barry Silk's Los Angeles Times crossword

The theme entries begin with a trio of related words—MAGIC, TRICK, and ILLUSION—in phrases of varying familiarity:

• 20A. The MAGIC EIGHT BALL is the [Toy that might answer "It is decidedly so"]. 100% familiar! And fun.
• 35A. [Sly inquiry] seems a little off as a clue for TRICK QUESTION. I like the CKQ mash-up in the middle, and the overall Scrabbliness of this puzzle's fill. It's one V short of a pangram, but Barry did use Zs with CRAZY WOOZY ZING (and ZEN ABLAZE TOPAZ).
• 51A. [Cesar Milian dog-training apparatus] is an ILLUSION COLLAR. I have no idea what that is. Am I the only one who's in the dark about this? All I know about Milian is that he's called the Dog Whisperer and that many deplore his training techniques.

Brendan Quigley's blog crossword, "Light It Up"

Brendan stretches the grid to 16x15 to accommodate the two longer theme entries. Each theme entry starts with a cigarette brand, which became obvious when KOOL and SALEM joined WINSTON in the grid. MERIT and MORE came later. At long last, a theme that combines the natural team of WINSTON CHURCHILL and KOOL AND THE GANG!

The fill had some Quigleyesque crazy woozy zing to it, like SHIT-TALK, NFL TEAMS, and the colloquial LET'S (["Aw, what the hell"]) and IS IT ME (["Nobody else feels this way?"]).

Least favorite crossing: [Actress Peggy ___] REA meets the [Ship with a single mast], the CATRIG. CATRIG? The hell? I wanted something more like CUTTER or CUTRIG, but a non-LIU actress's last name ending with U wasn't looking probable.

Sunday, 11/8/09

2009-11-07T19:16:00.009-06:00

Reagle 8:50
BG 8:32
NYT 10:50 (joon—paper)/7:19 (A—applet)
LAT 6:44
CS 3:45

Robert W. Harris's Sunday New York Times crossword, "Colonization"

hi folks. joon here, subbing in for amy, who's at her *cough*25th*cough* high school reunion. she'll be in later tonight and will be blogging the rest of the puzzles tomorrow, but here i am with the sunday NYT puzzle. it's a good one. it's a letter insertion theme involving ANT:

["O say can you see" or "Thru the perilous fight"?] is an ANTHEM LINE, playing on hem lines in clothing.
[Resident of a military installation?] is a BASE TENANT.
[Tropical fruit seller?] is a PLANTAIN DEALER, playing on "plain dealer." does anybody ever use this base phrase any more, or is it just the name of a cleveland newspaper? either way, i think this was my favorite of the theme answers.
[Place to get drunk in the kitchen?] is a PANTRY BAR. i don't think i'm familiar with "pry bar." is that another word for a crowbar?
[What overuse of a credit card might result in?] is a GIANT BILL. nothing to do with the oversized golden statue of president clinton recently unveiled in pristina, kosovo.
[Gentleman's intransigent reply?] is "MADAM, I'M ADAMANT." okay, maybe this one was my favorite.
[Where nitpickers walk on a street?] is a PEDANT XING.
and an [Online beauty contest?] is a WEB PAGEANT. sort of like am i hot or not, i guess.
finally, there's an answer in the lower right corner that i can't quite tell if it's part of the theme: ANTSY, clued straight-up as [Fidgety]. as we used to say in software, "is that a bug or a feature?" in this puzzle, of course, it may well be both. *rim shot* (no, i won't be here all week, luckily. like i said, amy will be back late saturday night.)

what else did i like about this puzzle? well, the fill was reasonably smooth. not much really jumped out at me as being particularly eye-catching, though i did enjoy the ZEBU [Indian bovine] sighting at 10d. we like to visit the ZEBU at the local zoo; it's got a crazy-looking hump/shield/shoulder thingy going for it. the notable exception to the smoothness of the fill was in the "midatlantic" region, which featured the following less-than-ideal fill:

[Pauses during speech: Var.] for CESURAS. first of all, it's caesura. second of all, the plural is caesurae. this one made me wince.
[Like surveyor's charts] is PLATTED. PLAT as a noun is already a fairly odious piece of crosswordese to me; this is a step below that.
[Most withered] for SEREST. same objection as PLATTED, x2.
in comparison with those, ARETE, LIBELEE, RELISTED, NEET, and LPS don't seem so bad, but ... they're not good, either. just an unfortunate corner all around, especially considering it was all in service of by far the weakest theme answer, PANTRY BAR.

a sunday NYT is usually good for at least two or three really great clues, but this one was fairly dry. the only tricky clue was [Cause of star wars?] for EGOS. oh, i guess [Part of a book ... or something to book] for PASSAGE had a nice "aha" moment. some others that i enjoyed, even if they weren't exactly uproarious:

[&&&&] is a strange clue, for sure. the answer is simply ANDS, which is actually not a great answer, but i think the clue makes it good.
[Rice ___], five letters... this usually clues the (hideous) partial A RONI. not today; it's yummy PILAF instead.
[College world] is ACADEMIA. i somehow have never managed to leave it, except for a one-year stint in a dot com. pet peeve: people who rhyme this word with "macadamia." you see the E there? it's pronounced like an E.

two clues i could have done without: [Brand with a pyramid on the package] for CAMEL and [Back-room cigar smokers, say] for CRONIES. smoking = yuck. more humped beasts of burden, please.

that's all for me, at least until the MGWCC blog post on tuesday. i'll see you in the comment box.

Updated Sunday late morning, because whoo, did I ever sleep late today:

Merl Reagle's syndicated crossword, "Like, Totally Jazzed"

Merl riffs on various familiar phrases by punningly changing a word to one with jazz connotations:

• 23A. [Jazz guitarist's admission?] is IT'S ALL IN THE RIFFS ("it's all in the wrist").
• 40A. [What lifelong jazz musicians are?] is BORN TO BLUES ("born to lose").
• 56A. [Name for a jazz club?] is THE BASSMENT ("the basement").
• 69A. [Play clarinet?] is BLOW YOUR NOTES ("blow your nose").
• 84A. [Jazz crooner?] is NAT KING COOL ("Nat King Cole").
• 98A. [Where to buy jazz instruments?] is SAX FIFTH AVE. ("Saks Fifth Avenue").
• 118A. [Our jazziest president?] is not saxophone-playing Bill Clinton, it's GROOVER CLEVELAND ("Grover Cleveland").
• 16D. [Name for a jazz revue?] is SNAP, CRACKLE, BOP ("Snap, crackle, pop").
• 51D. [Like jazz movies?] is MELLOW-DRAMATIC ("melodramatic").

Favorite clue:

• 48D. [Fish made of vitamins?] is the not-so-well-known DACE. I used the crossings to pin down DACE after asking myself if there was a vitamin H for HAKE. Vitamins A, B, C, D, E, and K were the letter bank for the fish name.

Toughest clues:

• 65A. [Big name in skis and snowboards] is ELAN. I originally had EBAN crossing SNAPCRACKBEBOP.
• 80D. [WWI Treasury secretary William] MCADOO.
• 87A. [Large evergreen, ironically] clues RED FIR. Is it "ironic" if an evergreen has red in its name? I don't think that's irony.

James Sajdak's syndicated Los Angeles Times crossword, "What's Yours?"

I liked this one a little more than the first two Sunday puzzles. Fun theme, smooth fill. The theme is cocktails that sound occupationally appropriate:

• 25A. [The barber ordered a __] VODKA TONIC. Barbers slap some tonic on a man's face sometimes, right?
• 27A. [The heating contractor ordered a] BOILERMAKER. That's a whiskey shot with a beer chaser.
• 40A. [The farmer ordered a] PLANTER'S PUNCH. What's in that? Rum, lime juice, carbonated water, and sugar. Sounds good.
• 60A. [The popcorn producer ordered a] HOT BUTTERED RUM. If you buy microwave popcorn, go for brands that don't use diacetyl flavorings—those cause lung disease in the people working at the popcorn factory.
• 84A. [The orthopedist ordered a] SINGAPORE SLING. Gin and cherry brandy? That sounds gross.
• 102A. [The high roller ordered a] SEVEN AND SEVEN. Some sort of whiskey plus 7-Up, I think.
• 119A. [THe handyman ordered a] SCREWDRIVER. Vodka and OJ, for your vitamin C and potassium needs.
• 123A. [The citrus grower ordered a] FUZZY NAVEL. OJ (the "navel") with peach schapps (the "fuzzy").

Favorite clues/answrs:

• 66D. RIFFLES is [Mixes, as cards]. Less mixing than a full-bore shuffle, right?
• 112D. [Where to get down] is from an EIDER.
• 13D. ASK FOR IT means to [Invite trouble].
• 30A. A REF is a [Whistling zebra?].
• 75A. HANG-UPS are [Emotional problems].

Randolph Ross's CrosSynergy/Washington Post "Sunday Challenge"

I'm not sure why the CS team calls it a "Sunday Challenge" when its difficulty is often on a par with the weekday themed offerings. If it's clearly labeled as a challenge, why not toughen the clues up a notch?

Ten clues:

• 1A. [Informing secondarily, for short] is CCING.
• 16A. [Baked goods at an English Christmas] are MINCE PIES.
• 28A. [Top draft selection in the NBA, e.g.] is a LOTTERY PICK.
• 31A. [Small breakfast] clues ONE EGG. No, this answer does not rise to the level of an "in the language" unit of meaning.
• 52A. [Words before Olay or vitriol] are OIL OF. "Oil of vitriol"??
• 54A. [Truman, Clinton, Reagan, or Obama, e.g.] clues a LEFTY, or left-handed person.
• 1D. [Where to hear church music] is the CHOIR LOFT. But don't people hear the music from everywhere else in the church?
• 35D. [Second largest island in the world] is NEW GUINEA.
• 37D. [Put on a pedestal] clues IDEALIZE. I wanted IDOLIZE(D), but COTE D'AZUR's Z said no.
• 47D. [Cosmonaut Gherman or Vladimir] TITOV? Never heard of either one.

Emily Cox and Henry Rathvon's Boston Globe crossword, "Interior Hues"

I liked this kind of theme better when it's a little tighter, as when they had contrived phrases with hidden gemstones. Here, the first hidden-color entry is EPHEMERAL DOME, with a hidden EMERALD, and that one's good. But there's practically no limit on made-up phrases in which you could find a hidden RED, so VAMPIRE DEN did nothing for me. The embedded colors in the theme entries also include apricot, silver, orange, pink, indigo, green, peach, amber (another gem), and teal. It all feels kind of loose—the colors don't form a logical set (as the seven colors on the ROYGBIV spectrum would), and there's no particular logical order in which they're presented.

Favorite clue: [Bacon with links?] for "Six Degrees of KEVIN Bacon."

Saturday, 11/7/09

2009-11-06T22:31:00.004-06:00

Newsday 8:26
NYT 7:02
LAT 4:05
CS untimed (J)/ 3:57 (A)

Bob Klahn's New York Times crossword

I had just finished drafting my L.A. Crossword Confidential post for Saturday when I checked Twitter and saw this from Rex Parker: "Sat. puzzle = KLAHN! Holy crap. I'd forgotten what it feels like to be brutalized by a puzzle." Bob Klahn does tend to brutalize his NYT solvers. The skewed clues you see in his CrosSynergy puzzles get sharpened to a razor's edge in the Times, and the fill's packed with not-your-usual-stuff, so you get material like this:

• 5D. SPANG means [Squarely], as in "I looked 'im spang in the eye."
• 10A. [Landlocked Muslim land], 4 letters...Iran, Iraq? No, MALI, over in Africa.
• 15A. Only-in-crosswords-now old-time movie cowboy Lash LARUE is clued as [Cheyenne Kid portrayer]. Anyone get this off the clue by knowing it rather than thinking "that sounds like an old Western thing, maybe it's that LARUE guy"?
• 23A. FROTHY like whipped cream? No, [Insubstantial]. You gotta eat a lot of whipped cream for the frothiness to reach the level of substantial.
• 24A. [Appeal from a diplomat] is DÉMARCHE. I have to look this one up in the dictionary..."a political step or initiative." Didn't know that. Also Frenchy: 28A: REGLE, [En ___ (by the rules: Fr.)].
• 26A. The YAZOO is a [Mississippi river named by La Salle]. I tried YAHOO first.
• 27A. [Local operation?] clues UNION SHOP, as in the union local.
• 34A. [Base of a column] isn't architectural, it's the SUM at the bottom of a column of numbers being added. I totally grasped what the clue wanted.
• 37A. [As different as night and day, e.g.] is a CLICHÉ. Hope you didn't spend much time trying to think of a 6-letter word for "opposite."
• 41A. I'd rather have ODALISQUE clued via the Ingres painting than as [Harem slave].
• 43A. [A slew] sounds singular but clues the plural RAFTS.
• 53A. SOFIA, Bulgaria, is the [World capital at the foot of Mount Vitosha]. Never heard of Mount Vitosha before.
• 52A/55A. Good gravy, two entries given over to [lead female role in TV's "Peter Gunn"], which was before my time/aside from my inclination: EDIE HART.
• 2D. [Dancer in a suite] is crosswordese ANITRA. I'll assume this relates to Grieg's Peer Gynt. In a similar category, we have 7D: ARIADNE, [Strauss heroine from classical myth].
• 3D. Israeli writer AMOS OZ wrote Black Box and My Michael years ago. More recently, he's ["A Tale of Love and Darkness" author, 2003].
• 4D. Of all the ways to clue SENATOR, they go with ["Damn Yankees" chorister]?
• 5D. SLATY is an adjective derived from slate. [Dull blue-gray]. Wouldn't you rather call it slate blue than SLATY? Of course you would.
• 6D. PALE is clued as [Cadaverous]. Hey! That's my complexion you're talking about here.
• 8D. [Cores] are NUCLEI. When I had the CLE in place, I was at a loss for what **CLES word meant cores.
• 11D. [Not likely to go with the flow], quite literally: AT ANCHOR.
• 13D. [Doughty] means INTREPID. Got this off the I near the end.
• 21D. [Low finish?] is SHOESHINE. Got this off the first two or three letters. Did anyone watch Parks & Recreation last night, with the shoeshine love triangle?
• 22D. NANCY DREW! She looks terrific in the grid. ["The Bungalow Mystery" solver] is your clue.
• 32D. I briefly wondered if this was about amazon.com: [The first complete navigation of the Amazon was in search of this]. EL DORADO.
• 33D. Trivia! TIA MARIA is a [Liqueur reputedly named for a noblewoman's chambermaid].
• 39D. Why did it take me that long to tease out LUCIFER for ["Doctor Faustus" character]?
• 42A. Wanted TAI CHI and I CHING before the crossings coaxed out QI GONG, the [Chinese meditative practice].
• 44D. [Casting option] in flyfishing is FLY ROD.
• 45D. I totally guessed on the [Four-note chord]. I know there's a triad, so I gambled on TETRAD for four.
• 51D. Holy schnikes, [Flagitious]? It means VILE, criminal, villainous. The word dates back to Late Middle English.

Klahn's puzzles do tend to make solvers gnash their teeth, pull their hair, rend their garments, and curse his name. How was it for you? Was it spang flagitious? I liked it and my teeth, hair, and garments are intact.

Updated Saturday morning (and no, you're not seeing double—yet...):

Bob Klahn's CrosSynergy/Washington Post puzzle, "Y Not"—Janie's review

This is a great puzzle to end the solving week with. The familiar drop-a-letter theme (you won't find the letter "Y" where you're used to seeing it) yields fill and cluing of the first order, and the remainder of the grid delights in equal measure. As regular solvers of the CS puzzle know (and regular puzzle-solvers as a group know), our constructor is NO SLOUCH, a far more than [Fairly capable one]. As a result, the SHINE [Twinkle] factor today couldn't be higher. Starting with the theme fill, there's:

• 17A. "ISN'T IT A PIT?" [Guess when asked what one calls where the orchestra plays?]. Whether your taste runs to Gershwin, a non-SITAR-playing Harrison or Clapton (covering Harrison), there's an "Isn't It a Pity?" for you.
• 21A. STAG PART [Antler?]. Did you catch The Hangover? If you think that was an outrageous depiction of the stag party rite, do check out some of the traditions in other parts of the world.
• 33A and 35A. THREE TO / GET READ [...the fine print, the riot act, ad your palm?]. Elvis—whose [...early...albums] appeared in MONO)—explains it all in "Blue Suede Shoes"... Love this one, because of the specificity of the clue and for the way the fill-pair crosses the grid at center.
• 51A. DUCK DECO [Design scheme on display at Donald's domicile?]. That's one very funny concept, but with those "V"-like flight formations, maybe it's not such a stretch. The FAQs of this duck decoy site should clarify your "'why-a-duck-' decoy?" questions.
• 55A. PEACE TREAT [Reward for ending the war?]. While this one doesn't go as amusingly far afield as its theme-mates, a peace treaty really is a peace treat.

A word (or three) about construction elements in the grid before looking at the rest of the puzzle. Note: the way 17A overlaps 21A with three letters (ditto 51A and 55A); the triple columns of eight in the NW and SE corners, and the triples of six in the NE and SW; and the complete absence of the letter "Y" in the grid as a whole. "Y Not" indeed, and in this way, a kissin' cousin to Patrick Blindauer's 10/26 "What's Eating U?"

Bob has also unified the puzzle in his inimitable cluing style. There are some 15 alliterative clues which raise the "wit" level of both lively and everyday fill. Some faves include:

• [Cauldron concoction contributor] for NEWT ( think of "the Scottish play"...);
• [Role for Reeve or Reeves] for KENT (a/k/a "Superman," so that'd be George Reeve or Christopher Reeves);
• [Show shamelessly] for FLAUNT;
• [Priggish pronouncements] for TUTS (which might be heard in response to something RIBALD [Bawdy]); and
• [Banshee's bailiwick] for EIRE, whose first "E" was the last letter to go as I solved. That crossing with EOCENE [Epoch in which modern mammals emerged] was tough for me.

Then, Bob has included seven "sequential" clue pairs—where there's a word in the first that's repeated (usually to different effect) in the second. Again, this tends to up the ante on even familiar three- and four-letter fill. Among the best are:

• [Friendly start?] for the oft-seen ECO- and [Big start?] for BANG. No, not exactly as in the "Big Bang theory," but as in the idiomatic expression "start with a bang." When you want to grab the attention of your audience, it's a good idea to give 'em something they'll remember, so start with a bang. That's the kind of "big start" this clue is talking about. This one's twisty, and I like it!

• [Diamond clubs] for BATS (so that's the baseball "diamond") and [Its birthstone is the diamond (abbr.)] for APR (where "diamond" is literally the gem).

• ["One Piece] AT A [Time" (1976 Johnny Cash hit)] and [50 Cent piece] for RAP SONG. The Cash song makes me laugh; the 50 Cent material doesn't...

Finally, some random fill and clues that are more than pleasing:

• the cross of TRIP [Junket] and TREK [Space odyssey];
• [Drawing room session?]/ART CLASS;
• [Cold Italian coneful]/GELATO;
• [Capital place to talk Turkey]/ANKARA;
• [Blow the suds off (your suds)]/BEHEAD (one superb combo!); and, because it's that time of the year, the colorful
• [Pyramid-shaped ornamentals that turn bright red in autumn]/PIN OAKS (at left...).

See how much more playful Klahn's clues are in a CrosSynergy puzzle?

Weird but true: Last night I had a wee spoonful taste of some sweet corn/honey GELATO with NUBS ([Kernels]) of corn in it. Vegetables in ice cream is...not where I'm at.

Bob Peoples' Los Angeles Times crossword

Full write-up over at L.A. Crossword Confidential. Excerpts:

This puzzle mostly left me cold, though I enjoyed the retro '90s oomph of 42D: EUROPOP clued as [Ace of Base genre]. A few of the answers crossing it are just insane, though:

• 41A: [Tiny white ovum] (ANT EGG). Uh, ick.
• 48A: [Iberian river] (DOURO). Okay, I have been paying attention to our Crosswordese Rivers of Europe my whole life, and this one? Is not ringing a bell.
• 52A: [Noilly __: vermouth brand] (PRAT). Pratfall, yes. Noilly Prat? Not ringing a bell.

Other unusual inclusions:

• 15A: [Bridge bid, briefly] (THREE NO). Three? No. What? I've seen ONENO as desperation fill in other crosswords, but now THREENO is taking up even more space. Is this totally legit bridge-speak or desperation fill?
• 17A: [Old Meccan governors] (SHARIFS). If you're in my generation, you know SHARIF from The Clash's "Rock the Casbah" perhaps even more than via Omar Sharif. Omar would know THREE NO, wouldn't he?
• 32A: [Shrub with clusters of blue flowers] (HYSSOP). A much prettier word than anything that sounds like "hiccup" has a right to be.
• 4D: [Three times, in Rx's] (TER). Meh. Doctors never write this on a prescription. They'll write tid, short for ter in die, Latin for "three times a day." But they're just not going to spell out TER.

Doug Peterson's Newsday "Saturday Stumper"

(PDF solution here.)

Anyone else find this one tougher than the Klahn NYT? My main trouble spots:

• 36D. [Road debut of 1908] is the Ford MODEL T.
• 1A. [Minor mistakes] aren't SLIPUPS or BOOBOOS but BOBBLES.
• 16A. [Screenwriter?] clues E-MAILER. Don't care for E-MAILER as fill. E-MAILED, yes. (See also 14D: TRYSTER, [Romeo or Juliet].)
• 17A. [Rectangular cell] is a NINE-VOLT BATTERY.
• 31A. [Hang over] is MENACE. Not EXTEND, nope. Not even close.
• 32A. [Expedient course] clues POLICY. Not every POLICY is expedient. Some are convoluted or ill-advised or require a tremendous waste of effort.
• 36A. [Makes fast] clues MOORS, as in mooring a boat. Took forever to piece together, even with most of the crossings,
• 41A. ["Canale" crosser] is an Italian bridge, or PONTE.
• 44A. [Western star] is the sheriff's BADGE.
• 8D. [Cats' beats] are BEBOPS. That can be pluralized? I thought of ALLEYS first, and then STOOPS with a few crossings.
• 10D. [Palm product] is a DATE, the fruit from a palm tree. Not the Palm TREO.
• 13D. [Ben Affleck's birthplace] is BERKELEY, California, and not Boston? Who knew?

Daily Beast, 11/6/09

2009-11-06T11:05:00.024-06:00

Time - 8:46
Hello possums!
You’re late!

You should have been here an hour ago. Didn’t you remember to fall back on November 1? Matt Gaffney remembered, and that’s the 50D: [Crossword puzzle feature] – THEME of this week’s Daily Beast puzzle, "Daylight Savings”.
All the theme answers had to be pushed back one hour. Isn’t that 53D: [Underhanded] – SNEAKY? Not so much to me as I got this on the title and 1 Across, so a very fast solve. Nevertheless, some fun clues and answers as we have come to expect from Marvellous Matt.
1A & 5A: [Gary Cooper Western, as of 11/01/09?] – High Noon gets pushed back to HIGH ELEVEN.
23A: [Facial growth, as of 11/01/09?] – (Five) FOUR O’CLOCK SHADOW.
54A: [Dolly Parton movie, as of 11/01/09?] – Double switch from Nine to Five to EIGHT TO FOUR
71A: [1933 John Barrymore movie, as of 11/01/09?] – DINNER AT SEVEN (Eight).
89A: [Pot smoker’s favourite time, as of 11/01/09?] – (Four) THREE TWENTY. This one needs some explaining. Mr Wiki?
420, 4:20 or 4/20 (pronounced four-twenty) refers to consumption of cannabis and, by extension, a way to identify oneself with cannabis drug subculture. The term originated from a group of teenagers at San Rafael High School in California in 1971. The teens would meet after school at 4:20 p.m. to smoke marijuana. April 20 (4/20) has evolved into a counterculture where people gather to celebrate and consume cannabis.
It is held in Victoria in a park right by my bus stop home from work. Since I usually leave around four, I arrived last April 20 at the stop to a gathering crowd that clearly didn’t include many crossword solving accountants. I walked to the next bus stop.
122A: [Count Basie classic, as of 11/01/09?] – (One) TWELVE O’CLOCK JUMP.
16D: [1961 #1 hit for Gary “U.S.” Bonds, as of 11/01/09?] – QUARTER TO TWO (Three).
65D: [Best Picture of 1969, as of 11/01/09?] – (Midnight) ELEVEN COWBOY.
Other cool stuff:
21A: [Dame] EDNA. Here “she” is performing in Montreal.
44A: [Whiz] – ACE. Wrong. PEE. There goes Matt again.
60A: [One-third of a WWII movie] – TORA. The other thirds are tora and tora, respectively.
75A: [Moo goo gai pan pan] – WOK. Three-letter word madness!
88A: [Olympic great Ray] – EWRY. Who? Raymond "Ray" Clarence Ewry was an American track and field athlete who won 8 gold medals at the Olympic Games This puts him among the most successful Olympians of all time. This guy could Jump!
95A: STEELY [Dan]
110A: [Constellation component] – B STAR . Also known as random letter star.
128A: [Belgian beer, for short] – STELLA Artois. Marlon Brando was ordering a beer in “A Streetcar Named Desire"?
129A: [Maker of the Ektorp chair] – IKEA. Four letters, furniture, IKEA.
2D: [“Young Frankenstein” role] – IGOR. What hump?
10D: [Cup Noodles company] – NISSIN. I don’t think we have this in Canada.
41D: [“Into the GROOVE” (Madonna hit].
66D: [Toronto landmark] – CN TOWER. Popular in puzzles lately.
84D: [This clue has four] – SYLLABLES. Were you thinking, “words” won’t fit?
106D: [Fiona’s guy] – SHREK. As in green ogre.
107D: [“A Confederacy of Dunces” author John Kennedy TOOLE].
115D: [“Africa” band] – TOTO.
120D: [Expectorated] – SPAT.
124A: [“Bravissimo!”] – OLE, Matt!

See you next week, possums.

Friday, 11/6/09

2009-11-05T22:25:00.006-06:00

NYT 6:01
BEQ 4:32
CHE 3:42
LAT 3:24
CS untimed
WSJ 8:05

Doug Peterson's New York Times crossword

Aargh! Don't you hate it when you click "done" with 4:46 on the clock but you have a typo in a Down answer and begin scanning all the Across answers so it takes a good long while to see JULEETTE BINOCHE sitting in reproach? Hell, for all I knew, 19A: ["The Ballad of ___," 1967 comedy western] was spelled JOSEE rather than JOSIE because hey, there's The Outlaw Josey Wales. Wales was a '76 movie, whereas The Ballad of Josie "attempted to humorously tackle 1960s themes of feminism in a traditional western setting." The plot: "A young woman living in fictional Arapahoe County, Wyoming accidentally kills her very abusive husband. She is put on trial but acquitted. She then incurs the annoyance of her male neighbors by farming sheep instead of cattle and setting up a woman's suffrage movement." Anyone ever hear of this Doris Day flick?

Okay, the puzzle: 68 words. Two 15s, four 10s, eight 9s, some intermediate-length answers, and only six 3s, which is nice. The highlights:

• Why not cross ALPHA MALE with UN-P.C.? It's a natural pairing. 16A: [Leader of the pack], 3D: [Sexist, say]. Right beside that is OGLE, or [Regard impolitely].
• 1A. I filled in MOUNT FUJI via the crossings, as I was thinking I needed an East Asian equivalent of Mecca for the [Far Eastern pilgrimage destination]. Another mountain: 28A: PIZ [___ Bernina (highest peak in the Eastern Alps]. I like to say PIZ.
• 14A. Love the word IGNORAMUS. [Dull type] doesn't begin to capture it.
• 36A. The title doesn't ring a bell, but [Subject of the 2005 biography "iCon"] is STEVE JOBS. Is that "ooh, he's an icon" or "he'll con you with his iWhatnots"? I'm reading the title as a hatchet-job "I Con."
• 37A. If you [Spotted] me $40, you LENT it to me. Thanks. I'll totally pay you back.
• 46A. [Hamburger's acknowledgment] is DANKE, a Hamburger being someone from Hamburg, Germany.
• 52A. I, CLAUDIUS is a great entry. [John Hurt played Caligula in it].
• 57A. The SERENGETI is [Where some buffalo roam]. Water buffalo?
• 1D. M.I.A.'S are clued with [They're officially honored on the third Friday in Sept. Veterans Day is next Wednesday, Nov. 11—my kid's off school then...and tomorrow too.
• 8D. JULIETTE BINOCHE, ["The English Patient" Oscar winner]. See? Sometimes I can type the right letters.
• 12D. [It often has controls] refers to an EXPERIMENT. I was in a medical study once—I think I was in the control group and man, did that stink. (Though it turns out the active-treatment group didn't fare much better.)
• 25D. [Its bulb is small]—my little Book Owl LED light? That too. But GREEN ONION is what Doug was going for here.
• 29D, 40A. ZESTY, meet CRUSTY. Is this about saltine crackers? Wait, those are crispy Zestas. [Vivacious], [Gruff].
• 31D. [Baseball nickname that's a portmanteau] is A-ROD, short for Alex Rodriguez. No baseball talk here, please. Not 'til opening day, 2010.
• 32D. [Fibula neighbor] down below is the TALUS, the big ankle bone. Did you want it to be TIBIA, 5 letters, starts with T?

OK, I like question-marked clues usually, but [Cabinet member?] for 48D: FILE doesn't do it for me. Your files are in no way "members" of your file cabinet.

Arcane factoids I am likely to forget by morning: PAUL V was the [Pope who met with Galileo], and ACETIC ACID is a [Wood distillation product].

Patrick Berry's Chronicle of Higher Education crossword, "Koined Terms"

From my Mac's widget dictionary: koine means "the common language of the Greeks from the close of the classical period to the Byzantine era; a common language shared by various peoples; a lingua franca." Our "Koined Terms" here begin with adjectives based on Greek names and are phrases of varying familiarity:

• HIPPOCRATIC OATH, check. [What doctors are expected to follow].
• SOCRATIC METHOD, check. [Teaching technique that involves asking questions].
• PYRRHIC VICTORY, check. [Win that wasn't worth it].
• HOMERIC LAUGHTER—huh? [What hilarious jokes induce] but also very bad news, medically: "Uncontrolled spasmodic laughter induced by mirthless stimuli, a symptom of organic brain disease that indicates a poor prognosis; HL may be seen in multiple sclerosis, pseudobulbar palsy, epilepsy, intracranial hemorrhage, frontal lobotomy, and kuru, which causes 'laughing death.'" My goodness.

I like the inclusion of Greek mythology's Athena (in a clue for MINERVA) and THESEUS, the MOHS/OHM'S echo, the SCUM clue ([Dirty film]—no, not that kind of film), and learning a new word in the CELTIC clue ([Like the festival of Beltane]). Beltane ushers in the summery half of the year on May 1 and Samhain closes it out on November 1. Have I seen the name HAUER before, or is [Austrian composer Josef Matthias ___] new to me? I think he's new to me. A 20th-century composer.

Sharon Petersen's Los Angeles Times crossword

The theme centers on words that sound like plurals of letter names:

• 17A. [Nursery rhyme dish?] with a question mark is PP PORRIDGE, with PP pronounced as two "Ps" standing in for "pease."
• 25A. CC THE DAY represents "seize the day," the ["Time is fleeting" philosophy?].
• 38A. "Whys and wherefores" becomes YY AND WHEREFORES, or [Reasons?].
• 49A. ["Good grief!"?] has got too much punctuation. GG LOUISE represents "jeez Louise."
• 61A. Remember that [1999 Kidman/Cruise film?] before she married Keith Urban and he married Katie Holmes? Eyes Wide Shut gives us II WIDE SHUT.

Favorite clues and answers:

• [Brest milk]! Ha! LAIT is milk in French, and Brest is a French city.
• ROSEY [Grier of the Fearsome Foursome] once sang a song, "It's All Right to Cry." He's right, you know.
• DAPPER DAN is a [Well-groomed guy].
• A [Website that users can edit] is a WIKI. If you've never fixed a typo in Wikipedia, you should try it sometime.
• [Verminophobe's fear] is GERMS. Yeesh! Maybe I'll be all better come Monday and can get the H1N1 vaccine with my kid.

Updated Friday morning:

Patrick Jordan's CrosSynergy/Washington Post puzzle, "Natural Defenses"—Janie's review

Yesterday, Ray Hamel's puzzle gave us five man-made items that are worn "for your protection," or man-made defenses. Today, Patrick gives us four of nature's own defenses, each of which appears as the first word of a well-known phrase having nothing to do with defenses—man-made or natural. You may want to don some protection, however, if you find yourself anywhere near these sometimes lethal weapons:

•17A. STINGER COCKTAIL [Brandy concoction]. I suppose drinking too many of these could be mighty dangerous, too, but the defense in question here is the stinger of the apian sort. On the subject of bee stings, all I can say is "Ow, ow, ow, ow, ow!!"
•26A. SCALE MODEL [Proportionate reproduction]. Fish, reptiles, even butterflies have scales. They're not likely to harm you (in the way a stinger might), but they do help keep the species safe from their predators.
•48A. CLAW HAMMER [Carpentry staple] and, depending who's wielding it in a non-functional way..., quite capable of doing a lot of damage/providing a lot of protection. But let's focus instead on the claw component of the avian and ursine variety. Again: OUCH!!! (I feel certain you know this but the claws of the former may also be called "talons.")
•61A. POISON-PEN LETTER [Malicious message]. And you'll find poison everywhere: in spiders, snakes, fruit, plants, mushrooms. What can I tell you? Mother Nature looks out for her own, so be very careful!

If this puzzle isn't a knock-out, a solver could still WARM TO [Grow fond of] it. There's some fun in the cluing: [Result of baby's first spaghetti dinner] for MESS is particularly vivid; ditto [Cluelessness gesture] for SHRUG. Yesterday, we saw verdant and schnoz as fill. Today, [Became verdant] clues GREENED and [Jimmy known as "The Schnoz"] clues DURANTE, whose proboscis was famously immortalized in Cole Porter's "You're the Top":

You're a rose,
You're Inferno's Dante*,
You're the nose
On the great Durante.
I'm just in the way,
As the French would say, "de trop."
But if, baby, I'm the bottom,
You're the top!

*Also in yesterday's puzzle. Patrick, were you and Ray in communication when you were constructing these puzzles?

[Beetle Bailey's outfit] is not his UNIFORM but THE ARMY (his meta-outfit, so to speak). Did you know: "Beetle Bailey" was introduced by Mort Walker in 1950, and Walker is still producing the comic strip? Or that Lois, of Walker's "Hi and Lois," is Beetle's sister? I'm just wondering if Otto, Sarge's anthropomorphic dog, has ever said "ARF!" [Comic strip bark].

Myles Callum's Wall Street Journal crossword, "I'm a PC"

For my money, "I'm a PC" is among the more annoying, jejune commerical catchphrases out there. You may use a Windows machine, but it doesn't mean you are one. That's just insipid. The theme phrases have P.C. initials, but they're livened up via the clueing. Each clue defines the P.C. phrase in two ways, one straight and one jokey. For example, PRINCE CHARMING is [Fairy tale guys? Hexing a pop musician? Whatever! I'm a PC], and the really-not-so-familiar phrase PRIVY COUNCILS is clued as [Royal advisers? Outhouse committees? Whatever! I'm a PC]. If you have to do a "phrases with the same initials" theme, you're best off having some fun with the clues to add some pep to the puzzle.

A couple relative obscurities in the fill—CRESSETS are [Metal baskets for burning oil]. I know PONIARD, or [Slim dagger], but it's an old word. I was also stumped, weirdly, by 4D: ["Major Dundee" star] is HESTON, but I started out with the [Hormel product] being SPAM rather than HASH and thinking I needed the name of the Crocodile Dundee star, which I'm still blanking on.

Brendan Quigley's blog crossword, "Circular Reasoning"

Am I missing something here? The circled letters spell out IT IS ALL COMING BACK TO ME NOW. (Wouldn't "it's" sound more natural?) One of the long answers is WEDDING BAND, which is a circle, but the other is the WAITING GAME of vultures, which touches on the circle of life tangentially. There's an ORBITER in the middle of the grid. The three-way checking of squares nudges the constructor towards some compromises in fill—TLAs, partials, foreign words (Latin IN REM, French ANNEE), REMOP, not much in the way of juicy answers. Is there a theme beyond "look, the circled letters spell out something"?

Hmm. I'll probably like Monday's BEQ better.

Gotta run—busy day!

Thursday, 11/5/09

2009-11-04T21:47:00.003-06:00

NYT 3:41
LAT 2:58
Tausig untimed
CS untimed

Patrick Blindauer's New York Times crossword

I didn't read the Notepad entry for this puzzle, and it's just as well or I would have been sidetracked from the task of answering the clues. I finished the puzzle, then read this: "When this puzzle is completed, one letter of the alphabet will appear 22 times. Shade in its square everywhere it appears. The result will be an image suggested by 36-Across." 36A is INVISIBLE MAN, so there's a hidden drawing somewhere...and look, his torso is at 25D: SSSSSSS, the [1973 horror flick about a doctor who turns his assistant into a cobra]. I should've known SSSSSSS was there for a grander purpose! This now-visible man seems to have a freakishly long torse relative to his limbs. Poor guy. Must be impossible to find jackets that fit.

I'm tired and distracted, so let me resort to a scarcely annotated list:

• 16A. [Canine care grp.?] is ADA, canines being teeth and the ADA being the American Dental Association. I used to freelance for them, you know.
• 18A. ROSES ARE RED is the [Start of a lover's quatrain]. ...Irises are purple. If you're ill-bred, you call it a nurple. Is that how it goes? Looks like a theme entry because it's long, but no. All that's thematic are those symmetrical-in-the-grid Ss.
• 33A. Why isn't this clue [___ wazoo]? UP THE [___ ante] is boring.
• 34A. OSTIA, [Port of ancient Rome], crosswordese, an S where Patrick needed one for the drawing.
• 55A. MONKEES was the [#1 album for 13 weeks in 1966-67, with "The"]. I had BEATLES. Seriously.
• 60A. [Eliminates undesirable parts]...hmm...CIRCUMCISES fits. So does CLEANS HOUSE. "Parts" is a dangerous word.
• 64A. Are you kidding me? [Panties, old-style] were called STEP-INS? Never heard that term before. The Ss are the man's feet.
• 65A. LAE is the [Pacific port where Amelia Earhart was last seen]. I hear Amelia is a boring movie. LAE I know from Kevin Der's record-breaking grid, where it was perhaps the ugliest answer.
• 2D. Robert Randolph and the Family Band miss out here. RANDOLPH is clued as [Air Force base near San Antonio].
• 6D. [19th-century James] is vague. First name? No, last. JESSE James. He should've known better than to rob the Northfield, Minnesota, bank.
• 8D. [Filly] clues LASS. Gag me. "Filly"?
• 21D. RISHI is a [Hindu sage], and the S is the man's hand.
• 38D. ENATE means [Maternally related]. Hoary crosswordese.
• 45D. Showtime at the APOLLO! [New York theater on the National Register of Historic Places, with "the"].
• 51D. MENSA, [Indicator of brightness]. Is there a reason it's not clued [Indicator of social skills]? I don't get Mensa. I liked the newsletter when my mom was a member for a few years in the '70s, but since then? Nah.

Okay, so I lied. That was more than scarce annotation.

Good night!

Updated Thursday morning:

Raymond Hamel's CrosSynergy/Washington Post puzzle, "For Your Protection"—Janie's review

For a puzzle that yields theme-fill of a highly industrial nature, this puppy sure has a lot to recommend it. Each of the five theme-phrases is clued identically: [It's worn for your protection]. The five theme-answers are:

•4D. WELDER'S MASK
•18A. HAZMAT SUIT
•25D. KNEE PAD
•27D. CRASH HELMET
•60A. FLAK JACKET

But look how nice and scrabbly the fill is. And there's a lovely assonance thing going when you say the words aloud: mask, hazmat, pad, crash, flak jacket. You can also hear it as well in such non-theme fill as CACKLE [Witch's outburst], AT LAW [Words on a shingle] and the cleverly clued CLARA [Bow on the screen] (so that's a long "o" in "Bow").

I think this may be the first time we've seen E-BOOK clued as a [Kindle download] in a CS puzzle. And it looks like this is the first time ROZ has been clued as [Cartoonist Chast] here. Love Roz Chast's observations on the details of everyday life.

Also love such lively fill as SCHNOZ (with it's lively [Honker] clue), which shares that "Z" with TABRIZ [City in Iran]. Tabriz is Iran's fourth largest city, and Iran sits right across the Persian Gulf from SAUDI Arabia (though today Saudi comes to us by way of the clue [Arabian leader]). Lotta desert land in that part of the world, so thank goodness for the OASES [Places for camels to drink].

Then there's VERDANT [Green] (to keep things fresh) and POOL TOY [Inflatable raft, say] (though I'm not sure a floating raft qualifies as a toy...). When you (or your raft) are [Drifting on the briny], you're ASEA, where "AVAST!" is a [Gob's stopper]. In addition to those two clues, I enjoyed [Not dis] for DAT, [Do a do] for PERM and [All you need, according to the Beatles] for LOVE. (And remember, they're the ones who declared "money can't buy me love!" For guys who sang that they "don't care too much for money," they sure managed to amass quite a bit of it. Ah, well, it was a dirty job and somebody had to do it...)

Xan Vongsathorn's Los Angeles Times crossword

Xan Vongsathorn's debut puzzle was in the New York Times, while his second puzzle (that I know of) comes to us from the West Coast. The theme hovers around four [Non-speaking line?]s, tied together by SILENCE IS GOLDEN, the [Apt adage for this puzzle]. The other four phrases are MY LIPS ARE SEALED, I'M ALL EARS, WORDS ESCAPE ME, and NO COMMENT. Now, they don't all mean exactly the same thing—I won't blab, I'm listening, I can't describe it, I refuse to answer—but they loosely fall under the SILENCE IS GOLDEN rubric. You'll note that although there's a MY, I'M, and ME, there are no repeated words in the theme answers.

TATTLE, or 21A: [Spill the beans], is practically the opposite of MY LIPS ARE SEALED. Any other talking answers in the fill? MEOW is a [Cat call], not a human word. "DUH" and "I'M GONE" are spoken language for people. And OBAMA is clued as [President with a Grammy], for his Spoken Word Book.

Ice cream! [Country where Haagen-Dazs H.Q. is] is, of course, the USA.

I guess we're still in the holding pattern waiting for Thursday L.A. Times puzzles to inch up in difficulty. Or maybe Thursdays will remain Tuesdays and only Friday and Saturday will be tougher? I'm not sure. I'm not finding much to talk about in this puzzle. Well, you know what they say—silence is golden.

Ben Tausig's Ink Well/Chicago Reader crossword, "Silent Treatment"

Ben puts a different spin on silence, adding a silent letter to each of five phrases to change the meaning but not the pronunciation:

• 17A. [Totally sweet depth-checking gadget?] is a SUGAR PLUMB. Have any of you ever had a sugar plum? I have not.
• 26A. [Architectural piece in "Where the Wild Things Are"?] clues MONSTER JAMB. What is Monster Jam, you may wonder. Monster truck derbies. I always call such events "Truckasaurus" after The Simpsons.
• 39A. Freestyle rap yields FREESTYLE WRAP, or [Improvise with some ribbons and bows?].
• 52A. [Olfactory reward for leading a good life?] is HEAVEN SCENT.
• 62A. A latex dental dam becomes DENTAL DAMN, or [The curse of the orthodontist?].

Miscellaneous fill and clues:

• AREPAS are [Some Spanish small-plate items]. I've never had arepas, but Chowhound knows a few places I might try in Chicago. More South American than Spanish, apparently.
• You gotta know your political figures to nail all of Ben Tausig's puzzles. Don NICKLES of Oklahoma was the [Senate Majority Whip before Reid] and after Lott. How would he fare in a battle with Don Rickles?
• [Soul backing band named for their singer] is the JBS, after James Brown. I did not know this one.
• [Bygone TV award] is the CABLE ACE Award. Didn't people joke about those during the Emmys this fall?
• [Macedonian city where Mother Teresa was born] is SKOPJE, Macedonia's capital. It wasn't called Macedonia when she was born. Ben's original clue, [Mother Teresa's birthplace, today] was impossible for me, so if you got this one, you can thank me. I was guessing KOSOVO based on the old clue. Wikipedia tells me that when she was born, it was called Üsküb, Ottoman Empire. Her family was Albanian, and modern-day Albania and Macedonia share a border.
• [Discount travel agency for students] is called STA. I don't think this existed when I was a student.
• [Tries to look bigger than one is, in a way] clues BSS, short for "bullshits."
• [Due times cinquanta] is CENTI. I gather cinquanta is Italian for 50?