Barbara Lin & Matthew Stock’s New York Times crossword—Amy’s recap
NY Times crossword solution, 7/27/24 – no. 0727
I do like a lot that’s in this challenging puzzle, but have a bone to pick with a few entries. First up, right there at 1-Across, SPCA. There’s the ASPCA (for which Vanjie Mateo was raising money in the latest RuPaul’s Drag Race All-Stars), but SPCA is more a category of organizations than an umbrella organization unto itself. Some places have an SPCA, but there’s not really the SPCA on a national level, is there?
“I DIG” (one of three “I ___” phrase answers in this puzzle), NO TAR, and ORANG are also on my “please, no” list.
Now, my “fave fill” list is replete! The ABC ISLANDS, BARBIECORE, retired Olympian Allyson FELIX and Olympic torch bearer Snoop DOGG, BLUE MARLIN (it’s wrong that Nemo’s clownfish dad in Finding Nemo was named Marlin), FISH EYES, OUTPACE, FACE TATS, STEM FIELD, FEMININE SIDE, “GO FOR IT!”, LEANING TOWER, TAKE A DIVE (not in the Olympic way), “I CAN’T EVEN,” and GETS SMART. Good stuff!
Three more things:
- 55a. [Big name in small loans], KIVA. Microloans, to be specific. If you don’t know the organization (which lets you lend small amounts of money to small enterpreneurs in various parts of the world), read up. I could see the K’s crossing being incredibly vexing for solvers who don’t know/remember the name Kiva, since the crossing clue, [___ stand], lacks any sort of beer/frat party parenthetical to give it needed context. If you pondered beg stand, deg. stand, leg stand, meg stand, peg stand, reg stand, veg stand … I would not blame you. The KEG clue feels like a Newsday “Saturday Stumper” clue.
- 28a. [Golf apparel brand], ETONIC. Uh, this not a great clue. If you go to etonic.com, you get running shoes. Not a single golf product. At etonicgolf.com, you get golf stuff. Maybe it’s just me who doesn’t follow golf apparel?
- 22a. [Small craters in auto-body paint], FISHEYES. Apparently these are little spots where the (re)paint was applied over a dot of debris or something? Never, ever encountered this usage before. I’d’ve maybe gone with a fisheye lens angle here.
3.25 stars from me.
Mike Shenk’s Wall Street Journal crossword, “Keep Your Twits About You” — pannonica’s write-up
WSJ • 7/27/24 • Sat • “Keep Your Twits About You” • Shenk • solution • 20240727
Phrases beginning with W, pop on a T at the start, adjust spelling as necessary:
- 21a. [Place to type a post on X?] TWEET FIELD (wheat field). Friends don’t let friends post on X, aka ‘Vichy Twitter’.
- 23a. [Time for last-minute adjustments before a product’s launch day] TWEAK NIGHT (weeknight).
- 37a. [Specialist focusing on muscle spasms?] TWITCH DOCTOR (witch doctor).
- 57a. [Fitness club offering to tone the glutes?] TWERKING CLASS (working class).
- 63a. [Big Ben output at 2:00?] TWINNED CHIMES (windchimes). My favorite of the themers?
- 82a. [Society of dervishes?] TWIRLED ORDER (world order).
- 101a. [Air of authority given by wearing a herringbone suit?] TWILL POWER (will power). Went for TWEED … first, but then—
- 103a. [Moth in a prof’s closet] TWEED EATER (weedeater).
Good enough to pass the time.
- 1d [Resort southeast of Salt Lake City] ALTA. 77d [City south-southeast of Salt Lake City] OREM.
- 4d [Disdain] SNEER AT. Was not expecting the clue to be a verb.
- 10d [He married his student Maria Skodowska] PIERRE CURIE. Enough clues are there to make this rather easy.
- 20d [Grounds keeper?] FILTER. Coffee, presumably. 110a [Egg container] NEST.
- 27d [Food available with a soft or hard shell] TACO, not CRAB.
- 34d [Pair in a plane] DIMENSIONS. Nifty.
- 61d [Fliers with ear tufts] SCREECH OWLS, genus Megascops, which derives from Greek mega (great) and skops (owl), even though they aren’t particularly large.
- 91d [Paris divider] SEINE, site of last night’s Olympic opening parade.
- 97d [In this place] HERE. Once again recommending Richard McGuire’s amazing graphic book Here. Check it out before the upcoming film adaptation ruins it.
- 46a [Bringer of bad luck] HOODOO, symmetrically paired with 76a [Thingamabob] DOODAD. I’m therefore compelled:
- 74a [N.W.A. rapper MC __ ] REN. Haven’t seen it clued this way before.
- 86a [With full battery] CHARGED. Don’t know why this one gave me trouble.
- 106a [Brother of Prometheus] ATLAS, another Titan. I could only think of Epimetheus, whose ‘gift’ was hindsight (he was WED (48a) to Pandora, by the way—oopsie!).
- 108a [Treat maliciously] SPITE. I used to play a card game called SPITE and malice with my grandparents.
Lance Enfinger & Bob Weisz’s Los Angeles Times crossword — Stella’s write-up
Los Angeles Times 7/27/24 by Lance Enfinger & Bob Weisz
This puzzle started out a little slowly, got easy, and then gummed up at around the 60% mark. I enjoyed the entries HOT GLUE GUN, GREENWAY, AND STAY OUT, BREWSKI, MUD MASKS; less so PRISON CELL, ILLEGAL ACT, and my least favorite entry LHOTSE. Feels like you have to be a pretty serious geography buff to know that one, and that letter pattern really means you have to work for those crossings if you don’t know the YEKIOYD.
Lester Ruff’s Newsday crossword, Saturday Stumper — pannonica’s write-up
Newsday • 7/27/24 • Saturday Stumper • Ruff, Newman • solution • 20240727
As advertised, less rough. Was able to fill about 80 percent of the grid very smoothly, with the lower right section a holdout.
This has to do with a combination of a bottleneck entry into that area and the how the long entry serving as a bridge—37d NBA DRAFT [2023 Barclays event starring a French center]—is a two-word phrase where the second word isn’t immediately knowable or even guessable, at least for me.
What allowed me to break open that corner was a good guess for 55a [’97 musical with “A Rumor in St. Petersburg”] ANASTASIA. With it I was able to confirm some potential bits of fill ([51d Opportunist] USER, 56d [Erstwhile RFK stadium pro] NAT, 55d [Beast in a “silly” synonym etymology] ASS (i.e., asinine)). Unhelpful was my first try for 50d [Rosencrantz or Guildenstern] PAGE rather than DANE. Nevertheless, I’d reached a tipping point and sealed up that final area.
15a [Canada’s Nimmo Bay Wilderness, e.g.] ECO-RESORT. Looks incredible. Also, very expensive. The location seems to be in what was once Kwakiutl or perhaps Bella Coola land.- 18a [Stamping grounds?] MINTS. I will always say ‘stamping grounds’ and also ‘champing at the bit’.
- 19a [22 letters in DC] STREETS, not AVENUES, as I first tried.
- 31a [5 1/3 shots] CUP. Can we please use the metric system?
- 32a [Name on the cover of Favorite Haunts cartoons] CHAS. Addams. Don’t know the reference; perhaps it’s simply for the Addams Family? 16a [Phantom’s hangout] OPERA; that’s one phantom in particular.
- 35a [Only Bond villain on AFI’s Villains list] AURIC GOLDFINGER. A huge help in breaking open the grid. Was able to confirm it using only the I of ARTEMIS I, 4d [NASA’s return to lunar exploration (2022)].
- 40a [Baseball-hitting-Snoopy’s-head sound] BONK. That’s a very specific reference for a rather generic word.
- 58a [First-founded US capital] SANTA FE, NM. Those wily ol’ Spaniards.
- 8d [Costumier’s evocation] ERA. An elegant clue.
- 12d [Loonie’s shape] HENDECAGON, with eleven sides.
- 22d [He’s got an impeccable image] MR CLEAN. I tell you, that –RCL— opening didn’t look promising. Not convinced the clue is good here.
- 47d [Mountain sport path] PISTE. I enjoy describing things as off-PISTE, and not only when mad I’m.
Impressive stacked entries in the four corner regions, with the grid-spanning 35-across buttressing the center.
Maybe I’m just being an emotional male here, but I found many answers offensive.
In terms of the “zoo creature” clue, I encourage everyone to read why this was so completely wrong…. https://www.orangutanssp.org/orang-vs-orang-utan.html
As always, get well soon Will Shortz
I second “completely wrong,” for the reasons explained in the article cited above, and also because the insinuation that they are colored orange is factually incorrect, even given the subjective nature of color perception. Pumpkins and school buses are orange. Orangutan hair is reddish-brown.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orangutan
School buses are yellow!
BTW, the word “orange” does appear in the wikipedia article you cite.
I didn’t know if the NYT was difficult or bad, but when I hit 20D I decided on bad.
Yes, that was kind of cringey.
Agree. I audibly ughed. Maybe I’m extra sensitive (with feelings!) due to the “can a woman ever be president” discussion and typical misogynistic comments directed towards our newest presidential candidate.
Yes, it was really cringey for me.
I kept running into obstacles on this one, especially in the extended SE, with a ton of them, although I hadn’t heard of ETONIC either, and yes that LO/NO TAR fill with NORA was beyond me. I like the challenge, but we’ve seen a lot better.
ORANG doesn’t bother me one bit. It’s not how you spell orangutan, although when I was little and ORANG wasn’t really in usage I did pronounce it with a G at the end. But spelling aside, ORANG has simply entered English as a short substitute, as well as all dictionaries, so if you want to reform the language, surely there are better places to begin. (Oh, and are they orange? I’d never have said so, but plenty of serious and knowledgeable people discuss it.)
20D: “It might be expressed with emotion.” FEMININE_SIDE
I was surprised to see it on Amy’s list of favorites. Apparently, she’s had little experience with an Italian family. (Think of Tony Soprano.) It has a tinge of sexism, to me.
I watch “RuPaul’s Drag Race,” where most (but not all) of the competitors are cis-men. One reason I enjoy the show is that the men are not afraid of openly expressing their emotions. They also embrace their FEMININE SIDE through drag.
Much of our culture does try to shame men for expressing any emotions other than anger and pride. I didn’t like the clue for FEMININE SIDE, because all humans should feel free to express the full range of emotions.
I’m confused. If you didn’t like the clue, why is it included in your list of “fave fills”?
NYT: put me in the ‘Veg stand’ crowd. No idea on KIVA.
No issue with 20D — got a better clue?!?!
Enjoyed this Saturday challenge. Had my daughter explain what —CORE meant
I put LOTAR instead of NOTAR and had no idea on awkwafina’s first name. Lora seemed as plausible to me as Nora. A google search for a no tar cigarette redirects to low tar cigarettes. not a fan
I went with LO TAR, too. Thought of NO TAR first, but I wasn’t sure such a thing exists (I’m not a smoker). That was my one error when I finished – finally gave up and had AL point it out to me.
Your suspicion is correct: there is no such thing as a NO TAR cigarette. In fact, the once-common terms “light,” “low” and “mild” have been banned in tobacco advertising since 2010 because of the false perception they create.
There’s a series that I know of mostly from crosswords called “Awkwafina Is Nora from Queens.” It took a while, but her first name is now stuck in my head.
Nora Lum. You never know when LUM will show up with an Awkwafina clue! Side note: The movie “Quiz Lady” (on Hulu) stars Awkwafina and it glorifies being good at trivia. I enjoyed it.
Pure guess, but I wonder if KIVA was originally DIVA and changed to make it trickier for a Saturday. If so, not a good choice. I don’t mind harder, but that was an unpleasant way to increase the difficulty.
It would have been a simple task to make the KEG clue easier so that KIVA was an entirely fair entry. It’s a neat thing to learn about, but if you’re pissed at the crossing, you won’t enjoy the learning.
Stumper: slow steady progress until middle left. Three crossing unknowable names made it impossible for me to finish without looking some up: EHUD OLMERT, AURIC, CHAS. And SCARCE doesn’t make sense to me — I wanted SWIRLY, and luG instead of COG.
NE corner and SW corner were the last to go in for me.
When I saw OPERA, that took care of the NE. Then I “accidentally cheated” to get EHUD OLMERT. I started to look up Ehud Barak to see how his last name is spelled (I was thinking it either had two r’s or ended in “ck,” either of which would make it fit, though still incorrect) and the third search Google offered me was Olmert. Oops!
In a catalog of autographs for sale, I assume SCARCE would be sort of like rare – making the autograph more valuable.
I don’t see the problem with 20D. Everyone know that only girls have emotions, amirite guys?
KEG/KIVA was pretty bad, but worse was the repetition of EVEN. Especially because I can’t make any sense of EVENER. Noun? Adjective? Either way, how does it mean ‘level’?
I didn’t care for EVENER either. I assume the clue is referring to “Level” as a carpenter’s tool.
I had a friend who got into making microloans through KIVA some years ago, and I did some reading about it, so it was at least vaguely familiar. Drinking games/stunts are a very distant memory for me at this point – and after googling KEG stand, I don’t think it’s anything I would have found amusing even in my college days.
Hmm, that could be it. But if that’s the idea an EVENER would be a plane more than a level. Bad word, worse clue.
A level concrete surface is “even.” It’s actually the first sense in M-W.
“Even” in M-W.
Of course ‘even’ can mean level, but the only tool called ‘evener’ that Google seems to know about is a gadget for checking the length of horses’ toes, or something.
It’s not a specific tool called an evener, it’s something used to even.
Don’t care. It’s a bad word.
I think “evener” is meant to be a verb. Nonetheless, I agree that it’s an
awkward clue/fill. To be precise, I’ve never seen a level used to level something. It merely measures its levelness.
https://www.homedepot.com/p/Milwaukee-24-in-Concrete-Screed-Level-MLCON24/304927593
Last time we saw KIVA Amy also told us some details but there were zero gripes in the comments. And it was a Sunday, not a Saturday. I say we’re getting soft.
2015, huh? That might be one reason I didn’t recognize KIVA as a microlender. (I’ve been solving the NYT archive puzzles from 1993 forward and just recently started on 2007. I didn’t start solving the puzzles as published until 2020, so I have a sizeable gap in my solving history.)
To me, KIVA is a ceremonial room of the Pueblo peoples.
Fairer crossing that time.
+1, but fun to see that 2015 comparison! (thnx!)
Down (vs Across) helped, too…
Why not DIVA/DOG, vs KIVA/KEG, with funner clueing, unless you’re going to mention 80%+ of KIVA’s funds go to women (etc.)? Um. Well. Except, I’m doing that here. Hmm… (Kinda meta.)
Anyhoo, I only associate KIVA with one thing:
those omnidirectional shelf-moving robots at Amazon…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vdmtya8emMw
I may have heard of the other KIVA? (Like, on a TED talk?) But I surely didn’t recall the name, even so!
Stumper: Relatively smooth going, helped a great deal by AURIC GOLDFINGER. (I’m glad my first guess, Rosa Luxemburg, didn’t fit, and neither does the actual Bond villain I was thinking of, Rosa Klebb.)
My false steps on the 2023 Barclays Center event were NBA final and NBA semis. I pay less attention to the drag than I do to the games, and I don’t pay all that much attention to the games.
One little cheat when I got bogged down in the NE — I googled “eleven-sided polygon.” I don’t remember HENDECAGON, though I have probably heard it before.
For once, the “rule” against duplicates in the grid spared me some grief. I had originally placed MEDIA at 26A [Instagram filter] (because I know next to nothing about Instagram), but it made sense at 54A [____ player].