Morton J. Mendelson’s Wall Street Journal crossword, “Airdrops”—Jim’s review
Theme answers are familiar two-word phrases or compound words arranged vertically with the first word being a weather-related phenomenon and the second word located below the first word and separated by a block (and having its own unrelated clue). The revealer is UNDER THE WEATHER (7d, [Slightly sick, and where to look for part of four answers in this puzzle]).
Wall St Journal crossword solution · “Airdrops” · Morton J. Mendelson · Thu., 7.18.24
- 3d. [Winter wheel] / 29d. [Burn out] SNOW / TIRE.
- 13d. [Extra protection at the entrance] / 38d. [Opportunity, in metaphor] STORM / DOOR.
- 27d. [Do-over ticket] / 49d. [Chess warning] RAIN / CHECK.
- 36d. [Flexible cone showing the direction of breezes] / 59d. [Punch] WIND / SOCK.
Apt puzzle for me today, as I’m engaging in my third dance with Covid as we speak. Seems to get milder each time, though, at least in my case.
I knew something was odd when I uncovered SNOW and then I knew the word that was missing when I got to STORM. When I found DOOR, I figured out the revealer and had my aha moment. The rest was relatively easy after that. I liked how the second halves had unrelated clues allowing them to stealthily blend in with the other grid answers. Nicely done.
Nothing especially sparkly in the fill, but at least we have some longer entries than yesterday: NEWS SITE, “I ASSUME…”, and TITLISTS (not the golf balls which are spelled “Titleists”). We get another playground retort (“I CAN SO“) which makes for two in as many days. Didn’t know TOESHOE, but it was inferable.
Clues of note:
- 14a. [“I’m at a loss”]. DUNNO. Hmm. I’d prefer a clue that hinted at the elision in the answer.
- 8d. [Juillet is part of it]. ETE. I needed every crossing before the penny dropped that this was referring to the month of July.
- 9d. [Sentence segment]. YEAR. Sneaky clue right next to ETE.
- 50d. [Unslanted, typewise]. ROMAN. You know, I’m not totally sure that I was aware of this.
3.75 stars.
Kareem Ayas’s New York Times crossword — Zachary David Levy’s write-up
Difficulty: Easy (9m13s)
Kareem Ayas’s New York Times crossword, 7/18/24, 0718
Today’s theme: WORMHOLE (Portal represented by each pair of circled letters in this puzzle)
- STAR … TYOURENGINES
- COMET … OJESUSMOMENT
- NOVA … CANCY
Uncredited bonus content courtesy of Carl SAGAN, personal hero of mine, whose novel (and subsequent [unfairly] maligned movie adapation] Contact centered around the use of a WORMHOLE for interstellar travel — i.e., from one STAR to another, preferably not while going NOVA.
Cracking: SPY RING, John le Carre staple, the most internationally intriguing of shapes.
Slacking: the clue on PARAMUS (New Jersey borough known for its shopping malls), jokes on you, that’s what most of them are known for.
(…although Willowbrook Mall was my adolescent haunt of choice, so touche)
Sidetracking: LOCKJAW
May Huang’s USA Today Crossword, “Tri-Tip” — Emily’s write-up
Get ready for a trek!
USA Today, July 17, 2024, “Tri-Tip” by May Huang
Theme: each themer starts with a synonym for “tip”
Themers:
- 17a. [One’s A game], PEAKPERFORMANCE
- 37a. [“Mean Girls” song with the lyric “every food chain has its acme”], APEXPREDATOR
- 59a. [You can’t go back from this], POINTOFNORETURN
A fun themer set of PEAKPERFORMANCE, APEXPREDATOR, and POINTOFNORETURN.
Favorite fill: TOUCHE, KFC, DOSA, and STEEPS
Stumpers: SEEFIT (needed crossings), KRIS (new to me), and ENDSUP (also needed crossings)
Great grid design that allowed for a nice mix of overall fill, including some lengthy bonus fill. Smooth slove, though I again found the cluing to be a bit more challenging than usual. Are you all finding these puzzles on the trickier side lately? It seems the difficulty has increased, which is perfectly okay with me especially since crossings are still fair.
4.0 stars
~Emily
Susan Gelfand’s LA Times crossword – Gareth’s summary
Susan Gelfand assembles a collection of two-part phrases whose second part means, roughly, “lecture”, than uses a different meaning of the first part to create wackiness(tm):
- [Presentation on an organic flytrap?], WEBADDRESS
- [Presentation on how to generate chemistry when matchmaking?], SPARKPLUG
- [Presentation on hot dogs?], FRANKDISCUSSION
- [Presentation on recycling?], TRASHTALK
- [Presentation on the Indiana WNBA team?], FEVERPITCH
Gareth
NYT: I liked the innovative theme and the superb execution thereof, which kept me in the dark for at least as long as I like to be kept in the dark … and then finally figure out what’s going on.
I enjoyed it, too, even though it took a few minutes to figure out what was going on.
But It’s not an entirely new theme. One of my favorite puzzles from the last few years was an LAT puzzle that used this trick. In that one, the travelers through the wormholes were well-known sci-fi space travelers and their spacecraft.
Very cool, well executed and fun to solve.
Liked TOO TOO
And a SYNAPSE right smack in the middle of everything. Appreciate the puzzle getting my synapses to fire after a long day.
I must’ve been what seemed pretty far along before the theme light dawned half? more? not sure). I think it was when I (finally) intuited CANCY in the lower middle down word, that nicely finished NOVA for the motel sign.
I liked it, though filling it out was a little hesitant; I still ended close to a record time. NO VACANCY went in first, then I put in START YOUR ENGINES, but on the wrong side, which got fixed with LOCKJAW, and then COME TO JESUS MOMENT went in. Overall, I liked it.
I hadn’t thought about Squidbillies in a very long time…
Slightly O.T.: The Spelling Bees, which I’ve been doing daily since its inception, has become less fun in recent weeks or months. The pangrams are often boring Latinate words that few people know, or else letters that have very words to find (like the Thursday, July 18 one).
If the problem is that they’re running out of good letters that have never been used before (as has been predicted they would), why not just repeat one from five or six years ago?
The Bee has always been a mixed bag but I still enjoy it.
As for today’s, are they really saying that PIZZABITE is not a valid pangram? Should be :)
I admit that I tried BZZT. Twice.
The last few pangrams:
BAPTIZE
UNINVITED
WIZARDRY
NORMALLY
EJECTION
INJECTION
BILINGUAL
CONDOMINIUM
TWITCHED
FRONTMAN
BRONZING
These don’t strike me as obscure, and I’m not sure what Latinate means in this context.
NYT: What’s the rationale here? Stars, comets, novas, they have no direct physical connection to hypothetical wormholes. From a wordplay angle, we don’t see the names—partial or otherwise—of types of worms (earth, flat, tape, ring, et al.) proximate to the portals. Okay, ASTRONAUT and SAGAN are present, but they’re merely ancillary.
re STAR, COMET, NOVA: to paraphrase SAGAN himself, the underlying thread is simply “star stuff”
That doesn’t cut it, for me.
Agreed. The theme feels like vague hand waving while someone says SPAAAAAAACE.
I agree. I figured out the trick in the puzzle pretty quickly but was left baffled by it. The location of the ‘wormholes’ seems random, and what is the reason for the single letters that are stranded at the top of long downs?
I think the circles/circled letters is to represent the ends of the wormholes. Not clear how we’re supposed to know which pairs go together – I guess there is a randomness to wormholes?
In addition to the “why” problem, my experience was that this puzzle became a speed solve as soon as I saw the trick (and I saw the trick pretty quickly). It ended up being way too easy for a Thursday IMO.
“What’s the rationale here?” Indeed.
An easy-breezy puzzle with a fairly simple “trick.” Enjoyable enough, but a bit disappointing on a Thursday, a day where I hope for puzzles that are more challenging and more thematically coherent.
NYT: It took me forever and a day to understand the answer to “small change in party parity” ANI? Huh? But then I realized it was AN I. As Gilda Radnor used to say on SNL, “Never mind” 😎
I feel like with Joel, there’s usually one “cryptic” style clue in most of the puzzles now.
Anyone do today’s BEQ? Since it’s not blogged anymore, there’s no explanation of the theme. I fully solved it, but can’t understand what I think is a missing “ST.” Thanks, CRU!
Not missing ST. Missing EXI.
Thanks. I wasn’t making much sense of the theme, either, though I should have figured it out. (EXI)LE ON MAIN STREET is one of my favorite Stones albums.
Thank you Martin! Tried inserting the wrong letters of course.
And Eric, agree about Exile…great album.
NYT fun and clever. It also took me longer than others here, although I got the revealer right away. In part I was overthinking. “Pair” in its clue had me thinking the circled entrance and exit letters would match, and I tried too hard to make that happen. I also wondered if the long themes would have more in common than their starts and passing through the wormholes.
The Jesus idiom is out of my cultural circle and then some. OTOH the relevance of the three stellar words was good enough for me. It might indeed be a wasted effort to ask for more. After all, wormholes owe more to sci-fi plots than cosmological necessity.
I did not like this puzzle at all. I felt like there were multiple things going on all over. It made a little more sense after I read the comments but it was not much fun.
First NYT puzzles I’ve really liked over the past 10 days or so. Good idea, solid execution.
LAT: Can anyone explain 51D? Clue: “Was extremely sweet?” Answer: “Ruled”. Thx.
(Good puzzle otherwise, but weak editing always deserves a demerit at the expense of the constructor.)
Both slang terms for “very positive.” “That car is sweet. That car rules.”
TY Martin for the reply and explanation, and now I guess it kind of makes sense to this 69-year-old who doesn’t know much “Gen-Speak”, even though I have three married children and none of them use the contemporary language of their own generation, lol!
I’m 65 and I remember my peers using “sweet” in that sense 40 or 50 years ago. “Rules” is probably of more recent vintage — 1990s, maybe? But neither usage is particularly new slang, and I wouldn’t call the clue “weak editing.”
Yeah, I guess you and Martin are correct that nowadays “sweet” can mean terms such as “rules”, “rocks”, “slaps”, “spanks”, and “totally rad”. (As one of the frequent commenters on this site wrote, “maybe I’m aging-out from the crossword world”…)
Nah, don’t think of it as “aging out.” Just have to look at crosswords as a chance to keep up with the youngsters at least a little bit.
I have nieces and nephews, but they’re all in their 40s now, and their kids are junior high or younger. I don’t see or talk to them much in any case, but they’re about the only young people I know.
At least when I was still working, I would know a few people in their 20s or 30s.