Thursday, 4/14/11

Pete Muller’s New York Times crossword

4/14/11 NYT crossword solution 0414

Pete enhances the usual “all four theme entries have the same clue” by hiding the clue in a picture in the grid. When you finish the puzzle, trace the letters in the circled squares to spell out UMBRELLA and you’ve got a drawing of a bumbershoot. And those “[ ]” clues need to be filled with your magic word so that you have the following four UMBRELLAs:

• 21a. TRAVELERS LOGO refers to the insurance company’s trademark red umbrella. (Link is a good Slate article about Travelers reclaiming the umbrella logo after splitting from Citi.)
• 28a. An umbrella is a SHADE PROVIDER.
• 44a. And also a GENE KELLY PROP from Singin’ in the Rain.
• 52a. Plus, “Umbrella” was a huge HIT FOR RIHANNA a couple years back. I confess I have not actually listened to the song all the way through. That doesn’t mean that I didn’t find this answer to be what really sold the theme and made it “pop.”

The extra oomph of the visual aspect gave a good, solid rationale for the flip-flop theme. Can we use that label for this type of theme, where not-in-the-language phrases that would normally pass muster as clues, not answers, show up as theme answers for one-word clues? I’m going with flip-flop theme. Usually I feel a flip-flop falls flat, but this one worked for me.

By the way, the 15th column that was missing from Monday’s puzzle? It’s been added to the side of this puzzle, which is 16×15.

Overall, the fill felt rather ordinary, what with the constraints posed by needing to have specific letters appear in specific places to map out the umbrella connect-the-dots.

Favorite clue:

• 40d. A TAP DANCE is a Shirley [Temple performance]. Most religious temples do not, I don’t think, offer tap dances with any regularity. And isn’t that a cryin’ shame?

Daniel Finan’s Los Angeles Times crossword – Neville’s review

4/14/11 LA Times crossword solution

Every little part of this puzzle messed with me, and I like it! Did you figure out what’s going on? Each clue is a part of the answer, and… well, let me just show you. This is hard to explain.

• 20a. [Pan?] – COMPANION PIECE. Okay, so PAN is a PIECE of COMPANION. Got it? Good!
• 33a./44a. [Ten?] – SENTENCE FRAGMENT
• 54a. [Kin?] – SMOKING SECTION

Rejected theme entries include [Ick?] for CHICKEN NUGGET and [Age?] for BAGEL BITE. Hey, we could’ve had a junk food theme integrated into this as well! I can think of a few more that don’t quite pass the breakfast test – I’ll leave them as an exercise to the reader.

All of the theme clues end with the letter N – that was one of the things that threw me off in this puzzle. Some other tricky clues that made this feel like an NYT Thursday:

• 1d. [Really smart] is CHIC, like “Hey, that’s a really smart scarf you’ve got on!” I wanted WHIZ, which doesn’t really pass the substitution test.
• 9a. One [Hyphenated dessert name] is JELL-O. Another is FRO-YO, or frozen yogurt, which is incorrect.
• 19a. [High humor] is JINKS, as in “high jinks” or “hijinks” – I use the latter, so this one eluded me until the end. Also, that new film Your Highness kept jumping out at me. I hear it’s terrible.
• 23a. [Relative of -like] isn’t -ISH but -OID. Yes, this was a New York Times Thursdayoid puzzle for me.
• 45d. [Hall of fame] is ARSENIO. I could’ve used a question mark here, and definitely a “(sp. var.)” – the generally accepted spelling is ARSENIOOOOOOOOOOOOOO.
• 50a. [Radius, e.g.] is always an ARM BONE in crosswords (usually as an entry), but the mathematician in me wanted it to be a line SEGMENT. This was before I had FRAGMENT filled in above it.

What’s great about this puzzle – in addition to its difficulty – is the fill! WAX POETIC, JUJITSU, A LA KING and TOMBSTONE are all symmetrically placed great fill entries. This really was a great puzzle – thanks, Daniel!

Lee Glickstein and Patrick Blindauer’s Fireball crossword, “Phonetic Call”

I am a big fan of both Lee and Patrick’s work, but this puzzle was mostly unpleasantly vexatious. If you do not know the 1958 song “WITCH / DOCTOR,” then you are left working the crossings. If you have a faint familiarity with, say, “WALLA WALLA BING BANG” (I thought it was “walla walla bing bong,” but close enough), you can get partway there. I Googled the phonetic syllables that appear at 40-Across because I did not have a stinkin’ clue what the hell was supposed to go there. Hey! Here’s an idea: When your rebus is kinda obscure nonsense syllables, maybe you try to keep the crossing clues more accessible! Who the hell knew 36d was L{AH}R based on the clue? Or that the Pilgrims ate, among other things, {EE}LS? That middle section was just ugly. And {OO}{EE}{OO}{AH}{AH} is a ridiculously impenetrable bunch of nonsense to stick in the middle of a puzzle.

When there are puzzles with a lot of names, some people grumble because those answers have a “you know it or you don’t” dichotomy. Well, Peter Gordon adds an extra layer of that by emphasizing newness of clues. I didn’t remember the name of the Superman II villainess and tried ILSA instead of URSA. What the heck is that monstrosity at 7a, Lee and Patrick? BIG BAMBU does not help anyone iron out the crossings. And what the hell are the “flea-flickers” that LATERALS are part of? Damn football terminology I’ve never heard of. Don’t get me started on [Crwth cousin], either.

So with the nutty nonsense syllables surrounded by overly tough clues, weirdo fill like BIG BAMBU, arcane clues about flea-flickers and the 1964 Broadway musical Foxy, I am almost tempted to give this puzzle 2 stars. At best, it’s a grudging 3 for me.

Not wild about the “Hey, WITCH / DOCTOR won’t fit in symmetrically, so we’ll make 1a be SWITCH and clue 2a as its last 5 letters” approach.

Updated Thursday morning:

Nancy Salomon’s CrosSynergy/Washington Post puzzle, “Alien Invasion”—Sam Donaldson’s review

Okay, let’s get something out on the table right now: I’m a big Nancy Salomon fan. I’m not aware of anyone in this activity who has devoted more time to mentoring novice constructors than Ms. Salomon. I have read dozens of testimonials from constructors over the past three years, all crediting her for helping them get their start in crossword construction. Although I never solicited her help by email, and although she wouldn’t know me from Adam (though I bet she’d correctly surmise he was the one clad only in a fig leaf), she had a big influence on me too. I devoured all of her tips that she helpfully memorialized in writing and made available to everyone through Kevin McCann’s Cruciverb website. And one of my proudest moments came when she commented favorably on my second NYT puzzle over at the Wordplay blog. So I won’t pretend to offer the most objective or detached review of this crossword.

Instead, allow me to use this puzzle to illustrate Ms. Salomon’s own words of advice. In her article, “Constructing Tips,” Ms. Salomon offers extremely important and helpful advice to new constructors. She first lists the most theme problems made by rookies:

• “Strained theming. Your theme entries have to be familiar.…” In today’s puzzle, Ms. Salomon adds “-ET” to the end of four common phrases, so “bike rack” becomes BIKE RACKET, clued [Hog hullabaloo?]. Likewise, a “lottery pick” from the NBA draft becomes a LOTTERY PICKET, clued [Protest of a numbers game?], and “pass the buck” becomes PASS THE BUCKET, clued as a [Bailer’s request?]. (I would have been tempted to clue it along the lines of [Cookie tosser’s request?]. but she has more class.) Finally, “punk rock” becomes a PUNK ROCKET, clued [Dud of a firework?]. The four base phrases are all very familiar, I think, with the possible exception of “lottery pick” (that one worked easily for me, but I’m a sports fan in general and a basketball fan in particular).
• “Theming inconsistency. If you have three singular entries and one plural, you’ve probably got a problem. If three of your entries begin with verbs ending in ING and the fourth doesn’t, again there’s a problem.” This puzzle seems perfectly consistent to me. Nit-pickers might observe that only one of the theme entries has three words and the others all have two, or that the three-word entry is based on an expression while the two-word entries are based on nouns. But since PASS THE BUCKET is the liveliest of the bunch anyway, I’m pretty forgiving here.
• “Theme looseness. You need a unifying factor to tie all your theme entries together–the tighter the better.” The unifying factor here, the addition of –ET to the end of phrases, is sufficiently tight. Looseness would have been an issue, for instance, if the –ET was added after the first word in some phrases and after the last word in others. Here, it is consistently added at the end. It makes for an elegant touch.
• “Repeated word themes. These are frowned upon by many editors.” And solvers! No repeated words here, so all is good.
• “Overdone themes. If you’re not a frequent solver, it’s a good idea to check with someone to see if your theme idea has been done to death.” I know I’ve seen the “-ET addition” gimmick before (and as I recall, it even made reference to an “alien invasion” like this puzzle’s title) but can’t recall exactly where (anyone else know?). And sure, the “add-a-letter-or-two-or-three” gimmick is one of the most commonly used in crosswords. So today’s theme may not be revolutionary in its novelty. But the theme entries themselves seem fresh and interesting, so again I’m forgiving.

Next, on the topic of “overambitiousness,” Ms. Salomon observes: “New constructors often try to cram an unrealistic number of theme entries into a puzzle or to create grids with very low word counts. I’ve learned something the hard way. Solvers don’t give a darn how many theme squares you have. Editors, for that reason, aren’t overly impressed either. A good solid theme with a lively, colorful fill will get you sales. A marginal fill in a puzzle loaded with theme squares or with a low word count will get you rejections.” Sure enough, today’s puzzle has a solid theme, and some of the fill is terrific. There’s MEAN STREAK, the [Trait of a nasty no-goodnik] (the clue itself is terrific!), PHISH (clued [Scam, modern-style]), OK OK (clued as [“Enough already!”]) and the wonderful [“Mind your own business!”] imperative, “BUTT OUT!” Note too the near absence of abbreviations and suffixes (only ETTE, the [Kitchen add-on?], stood out to me, perhaps because it’s dangerously close to the puzzle’s theme).

On the subject of fill, Ms. Salomon writes: “For the shorter entries in your puzzle, some crosswordese is usually unavoidable, but if your grid is filled with STOAS and ANOAS, and ORONO, etc., you’ll probably have a hard time selling it. Even worse are very obscure entries with which most solvers will be unfamiliar. Also, foreign words should be reasonably common. You can’t expect solvers to know the Portugese word for ‘tablecloth.’” Sure enough, there’s little crosswordese in the short fill of this puzzle. AL-ER, ANISES, OTOE, STEN, and ATRAS, perhaps, but that’s about it. On the foreign word front, there’s just TRES, clued [___ bien], and TOALHA DE MESA, the [Portuguese tablecloth]. (Okay, I made up that last one.)

There’s many other helpful tips in Ms. Salomon’s article, and I highly recommend both this article and the other nuggets of “sage advice” on the Cruciverb site. Even if crossword construction seems like a pipe dream or something you’d never want to try yourself, you’ll learn to appreciate the crossword form more when you see how much goes into the construction.

Brendan Quigley’s blog crossword, “What’s the Hub, Bub?”—Matt Gaffney’s review

BEQ 323 answers

Brendan’s theme entries today each have a familiar three-letter airport code ensconced in them.  Hilarity ensues.  Witness:

• 17a. [Strong feelings towards the Milky Way] = GALAXY PRIDE (gay pride + LAX)
• 27a. [Morally reprehensible Roman Emperor] = SORDID CAESAR (Sid Caesar + ORD)
• 44a. [Research money given to a Canadian city?] = CALGARY GRANT (Cary Grant + LGA)
• 59a. [“We’re really lost without a book of maps”?] = ATLAS NEEDED (as needed + ATL)

LAX and ATL you probably know, and I’m guessing LGA is LaGuardia and I believe ORD is O’Hare.  Just looked them up, and that’s correct — so intuitive, even if you didn’t know all four.  And the results in each case are funny, so thumbs-up on themage.

78 entries in the grid and 36 black squares (no cheaters), which are on the high end but 100% OK. Quigley takes full advantage, as the fill is both clean and JAZZY (22-A).  The only two slight blots are GM CORP at 5-A (easy to figure out, but I’ve never heard it called that and it doesn’t Google very well) and the crosswordy SERE at 39-D.  I bring those up right away not to quibble but to illustrate how clean the fill is; if those are your two worst entries, you’re doing quite well.

As usual, Quigley goes 4-for-4 on three-point shots (7-, 8-, and 9-letter entries), hitting with Oscar-winning Susan Sarandon role Helen PREJEAN, director Gus VAN SANT, BEELZEBUB and PIZZA SHOP.  Much else to like, too:  NO IDEA, XEROX, CCNY, MVPS and GEYSER.

Top three clues:

• 23d. [Time of your life?] for AGE.
• 46d. [Big Bowls?] for ARENAS.
• 41a. [A quarter of four] for ONE.  Clue number: 41. Word in clue: four. Answer: ONE.  The universe is speaking to us.

Also, let’s not forget that Brendan just ran a contest puzzle: each member of the Brady Bunch family (CAROL, MIKE, CINDY, JAN, MARCIA, BOBBY, PETER, GREG, ALICE) hid in the grid, and in their exact spot from the show’s introduction.  Brendan even got the dog TIGER in the grid!  See Brendan’s post for results.

Thanks for the puzzle, BEQ, and have a pleasant Thursday, everyone!