Paolo Pasco’s New York Times crossword, “The Big Five-O” — Nate’s write-up
Today, we are treated to a *banger* of an Olympics tribute puzzle. I just finished solving it and WOW! Not only an achievement in construction, but a true joy to solve. Let’s be like Tom Daley and dive right in!
07.28.2024 Sunday New York Times Crossword Puzzle
First, take a look at that incredible grid art of the Olympic rings. Wow! But the colors of those rings aren’t just for show – they also represent a color word that needs to precede each grid entry to fully answer each respective clue!
Blue ring, clockwise from the top:
36A: (blue) PRINT [Detailed plan of action]
45D: (blue) STATE [Democratic stronghold]
79A: (blue) BAYOU [Signature hit for Linda Ronstadt]
43D: (blue) BIRDS [They fly somewhere over the rainbow]
Black ring, clockwise from the top:
38A: (black) MAGIC [Malevolent sorcery]
47D: (black) MAILS [Extorts from, in a way]
81A: (black) OLIVE [Supreme pizza topping]
46D: (black) SHEEP [Ostracized family member]
Red ring, clockwise from the top:
40A: (red) ROBIN [Restaurant chain with an avian mascot]
50D: (red) SCARE [Phenomenon allegorized in “The Crucible”]
82A: (red) ALERT [“Danger! Danger!”]
48D: (red) PANDA [Raccoonlike mammal of China]
Yellow ring, clockwise from the top:
59A: (yellow) PAGES [Obsolescent book]
65D: (yellow) BELLY [Milquetoast]
98A: (yellow) CARDS [Results of some fouls in soccer]
63D: (yellow) STONE [National park since 1872]
Green ring, clockwise from the top:
60A: (green) GIANT [Brand in the frozen food section]
69D: (green) SALSA [Dip made from tomatillos]
100A: (green) HOUSE [What has a lot of room to grow?]
67D: (green) RIVER [Creedence Clearwater Revival song named after a place “where cool water flows”]
How amazing to not only find solid, five-letter, color-related entries to fill those rings, but to do so in a way that allows for clean fill AND sees those rings overlapping?! And entries like PAGES, OLIVE, and GIANT are smoothly part of three(!) intersecting rings! Incredible.
We also have some bonus theme fill at the top and bottom of the grid to solidly round out the puzzle, if the Olympic Rings tour de force wasn’t enough for you:
17A: RING BEARER [Wedding role … or a description of 114-Across?]
20A: COLOR WHEEL [Artist’s diagram … or one of the five for 114-Across?]
114A: OLYMPIC FLAG [This puzzle’s subject]
Sensational! What a fun and joyful way to celebrate both The Olympic Games and crosswords. This is easily one of my favorite puzzles of the year – the rare tribute puzzle that absolutely delivers on so many levels. Kudos to Paolo!
What did you think of the puzzle? Let us know in the comments – and have a great weekend!
Evan Birnholz’s Washington Post crossword, “Making the Switch” — Matt’s write-up
Evan Birnholz’s Washington Post crossword, “Making the Switch” solution, 7/28/2024
A more straightforward theme than last week’s meta: two-word phrases have their word order flipped, and are clued to match:
- 22a [Appearances of a certain basketball player?] FORWARD LOOKS
- 35a [Free ticket to enjoying TV static?] INTERFERENCE PASS
- 59a [Actress Sally exited?] FIELD LEFT
- 61a [Actress Bernadette when she’s tagged on the basepath?] OUT PETERS
- 68a [Person often thinking about real estate?] PROPERTY INTELLECTUAL
- 92a [Acknowledges a dinnertime prayer?] NOTES GRACE
A revealer not only confirms the theme mechanism, but points to a typically Evan element:
- 110a [Switching positions, and a phrase spelled by the first letters of 12 words that have switched positions] FLIP FLOPPING
No complaints on the theme, and I found the fill varied, interesting, and generally a bit on the tougher end. It was a nice workout, particularly in the areas crossing PROPERTY INTELLECTUAL. The mirror symmetry allows for a different grid flow than we’re used to, but even so, some chunky downs that weren’t exactly gimmes. Welcome, to be clear. Hoping you enjoyed, as well.
Notes:
- 1a [Bird depicted on many a Bryn Mawr College lantern] OWL. On one hand, a little trivia-y (though Evan goes to the Bryn Mawr well decently often), on the other, as three-letter birds go, it’s probably not EMU or TIT. Not to mention the OWL’s close association with wisdom and learning.
- 53a [Veil of ___ (goddess-inspired metaphor for the mysteries of nature)] ISIS. This is new to me, but there are only so many four-letter goddesses, particularly with a crossing or two.
Amie Walker and Rebecca Goldstein’s Universal Sunday crossword, “Olympic Games”—Jim’s review
Theme answers are familiar phrases repurposed as if they were literal words of advice from Olympic coaches.
Universal Sunday crossword solution · “Olympic Games” · Amie Walker and Rebecca Goldstein · 7.28.24
- 23a. [*Encouragement from an Olympic volleyball coach?] “DIG A LITTLE DEEPER.”
- 43a. [*… from an Olympic tennis coach?] “SWING BOTH WAYS.”
- 50a. [*… from an Olympic taekwondo coach?] “KICK IT UP A NOTCH.”
- 73a. [*… from an Olympic pole vault coach?] “GET OVER IT!”
- 90a. [*… from an Olympic water polo coach?] “TREAD CAREFULLY.”
- 98a. [*… from an Olympic basketball coach?] “DODGE THE PRESS.”
- 121a. [*… from an Olympic marathon coach?] “GO TO GREAT LENGTHS.”
Fun theme, and all the entries are on target…except one. Maybe it’s just me, but I’ve never heard the phrase DODGE THE PRESS. “Meet the Press”, yes, but DODGE THE PRESS, no. Googling the phrase in quotation marks does give me some hits, but the Google Ngram Viewer shows “avoid the press” has far more traction. What say you?
The fill is delightfully smooth with highlights CHILD ACTOR, MOSCOW MULES, MIXED GREENS, SWEET TREATS, and TIN FOIL.
Clues of note:
- 86a. [“Boil ’em, mash ’em, stick ’em in a ___” (Sam Gamgee line)]. STEW. Referring to taters—er, poh-tay-toes—of course.
- 69d. [Card game with unspoken rules]. MAO. Brand new to me. I guess I should be thankful for that.
Good puzzle. 3.75 stars.
NYT Sunday. Gspot? Hmmmm. I’m no prude, but that’s assuming a lot about its supposed existence. It’s existence is an unproven theory, yet was “discovered” by a man? Aye-yi-yi. Otherwise it was a fun puzzle, but this clue and answer is pretty egregious.
G-SPOT has been in the NYT puzzle 15 times now, beginning in 1996.
But, still, I have to agree with Susan’s point.
+1
A lot of women have been in touch with their G-spots and do not doubt their existence. That’s no guarantee of universality, but it’s not exactly a sham.
The clue is [Part of a woman’s anatomy named for Dr. Ernst Gräfenberg]. The name is simply a fact. You can argue that ithe G-SPOT doesn’t exist, or that if it does, it’s inappropriate that it’s named after a man, but neither argument invalidates the clue.
Personally, I’m waiting for P-SPOT to make the leap from indie crosswords to mainstream ones.
Agree 100% about Paolo’s tour de force! A great puzzle.
NYT: A clever idea that I’m sure was difficult to construct, for the reasons Nate described so well.
So it’s too bad that the colors made it very difficult to solve in the app. I turned off overlays almost immediately, and that helped a lot. Unfortunately, I hadn’t yet grasped the significance of the colors, but the answers were clued so easily that even with all the rings in gray, I could figure out what was going on.
The 19 X 23 grid had squares that were smaller than usual, adding to my difficulty in reading the letters in the grid. You can enlarge the grid, but it behaves oddly when you do that.
I expect this would have worked much better in print. Online, it was better than OK but far from my favorite.
Great constructor note, though.
Agree, -very- frustrating to do on my iPad. Often couldn’t tell which blocks were selected. Relieved to finish it without needing to go back over any errors.
Actually, in the print magazine smaller squares and the overlay of color, especially black, made reading the clue numbers in the grid kinda hard for my eyesight. Had I printed the puzzle as on weekdays, I would have seen only heavy shading, which could be worse. And PP will always have more trivia than I’d like, although he’s much more adjustable to solvers than some.
That said, it was worth well soldiering on, and I much admired the puzzle, because it exceeded my expectations. This was an Olympics issue of the Sunday Times Magazine, which mostly meant close-up photos of flying bodies with little to read, so on that grounds alone I figured an Olympics puzzle would be just a routine necessity. It’d have some related clues (including nonthemers that Nate doesn’t mention), centering on dreaded cross-references and a cute but otherwise nonfunctional grid.
Little did I know that it’d have the thematically dense addition of silent colors. Terrific! Oh, I hate to return to a dumb topic from earlier this week, but here on Sunday why are olives a “supreme” topping?
The Supreme pizza is another abomination that is covered with salty pork products and usually an assortment of spurious vegetal matter including onions, peppers and olives.
The version of today’s puzzle I solved had no color, and was extra fun.
Mmmm! You’re making me hungry! I have to go get my Domino’s order in now!
I decided to solve in AL, in spite of the warning that there were “features not supported” in .puz format. It rendered all of the colored squares as circles, so the “tropical” part of the grid just looked like a mish-mash. Discovered the missing colors part of the theme fairly quickly with [black] MAGIC and [red] ROBIN. It took a bit longer to see that sets of four answers arranged in a square were all missing the same color. I suspect I would have caught on sooner if I were seeing colored squares, but it wasn’t a big deal.
It held my interest enough that I finished the puzzle, and it didn’t really seem like a slog. Overall, a decent Sunday.
After the fact, I looked at the puzzle on-line in my browser and also looked at the “newspaper version.” Certainly easier to see what’s going on, but (a) they look like boxes to me, not rings and (b) for obvious reasons, the black ring is actually gray. Still not a fan of grid art.
Finished with an error I just could not find without help from AL. Someday, I will learn how to spell NEGEV. And unfortunately, Allie seemed as reasonable as Ellie for the movie character I did not know.
Gary, if I may ask, regarding grid art: As a self-professed nonfan, what is your opinion of this puzzle?:
https://www.xwordinfo.com/Crossword?date=9/1/2021
I’m curious, because the caliber of cuteness of this puzzle was, for me, at a level of Hard to Forget, and I was wondering how you yourself perceived it, especially as the “art” is letter-based and not object-based.
I agree that was cute and, more importantly, the grid art accurately depicts what it is intended to. That’s not often the case, at least to my eye (see today’s square rings).
Apparently it was not Hard to Forget (for me). After following your link, I didn’t recall the puzzle, but I dug into Amy’s archives and found that I actually commented on the puzzle that day (something unrelated to grid art). ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Until reading this, I didn’t realize the app had an option to disable overlays. Would’ve made the solve more joyful for me as I woke up with a slight headache that’s a little worse now…
Amazing feat of puzzle construction, though.
I’m color blind. The only color I could be sure of was blue. I solve in Black Ink. I went to the NYT site and the colors there looked very similar to what I saw in BI. I’m sure if I could see the colors I would have liked it a lot
Hey PJ,
I’m color blind, too. Ditto your post. Thank you!
Same here. It was tough until I could get one answer in each ring. I should have asked my wife to identify the colors for me.
A masterful piece of construction rendered into a horrible slog of a solve by the Times’ overdone graphics and highlights. Impossible to tell where you are if you solve in the NYT app.
I printed out the NYT, as is my Sunday habit, so was not bothered by any excessive graphics. Appropriately themed puzzle, although very straightforward to solve once you got the trick.
Speaking as a (former) physicist, I will say that I have never in my life heard of WATTS law (122A), and what I find by Googling seems iffy. It’s true that P = IV is (one) formula for calculating power, which is measured in watts, but James Watt is certainly not responsible for the formula, because electricity hadn’t been invented in his lifetime.
And before Martin jumps in with a list of internet citations, yes, they exist, but on sites for HVAC contractors and the like. This reputable site agrees with me.
The NYT was fabulous to print and solve on paper; the ring squares were grey, which worked well for me. This is a dazzling feat of construction, future ORCA award material 😍.
And speaking as a (former) engineer and physics teacher, I had never heard P=IV called Watt’s Law, but it was gettable.
I love grid art (and clue art), not that everyone else has to. YMMV. It is understandable to think that design constraints might adversely affect a puzzle’s fill, but it works (for me) for this puzzle.
In many years of working in electronics, I have only ever seen P=IV referred to as the “power formula” or “power equation.”
I agree with you that “Watt’s Law” is goofy, since James Watt did not work in electricity. OTOH, as you say, electricians use the term extensively so I don’t see what the clue’s problem is. In the language doesn’t mean logical.
I question whether it’s “in the language” if it’s a name used only in the electrical trade.
But Watt is (I hope) a well-known name so I guess it’s OK, he said grudgingly.
NYT is a frontrunner for Puzzle of the Year. Tackles what must have been an absolute challenging construction, keeps the fill smooth AND throws in bonus fill on top. Wow.
Being color blind, this was an egregious solving experience. A constructor’s puzzle that will have the cognoscenti salivating but some of us left out.
4.5 stars from me. Fun puzzle, terrific theme idea. The execution of the colored rings was quite good on the Times website. It was tricky to see which space was selected as the current entry, but that was only a minor annoyance.
JOSE Rizal! Good to see that name in the puzzle. Filipinos and the Filipino-adjacent know it.
I appreciated that the grid was 23×19, more of a flag shape than the standard Sunday 21×21 would be.
Agreed; I thought it looked good on the app. I didn’t have too much trouble with the color highlighting; in fact, once the theme hit me, I did all of the ring entries right away to get them filled out. Maybe that simplified the rest for me. But it didn’t dawn on me until BLACK SHEEP, though the clue for RED PANDA almost got me when I thought “well, PANDA fits, but I’m thinking of a RED PANDA, so … maybe it’s something else”. D’oh!
WaPo: fun puzzle! Really like PROPERTY INTELLECTUAL.
Regarding OWL, I read recently that owls are considered in some cultures to be the iconic dumb animal…
On a completely minor note, I see that the WaPo crossword app now uses pink instead of blue… I dig it.
NYT: I didn’t feel “Milquetoast” is a good clue for (yellow) BELLY, since “yellow bellied” applies to someone lacking courage, while “milquetoast” means someone who is entirely unaggressive, but not necessarily scared of anything.
LAT: Another nice Olympic themed puzzle; fun theme entries and good clues.
NYT — makes sense, sorta, with much effort.