The Fireball is on summer vacation.
Damon Gulczynski’s New York Times crossword — Zachary David Levy’s write-up
Difficulty: Average, for an oversized 16×15 (11m38s)
Damon Gulczynski’s New York Times crossword, 8/14/24, 0814
Today’s theme: SPEECH TO TEXT (Technology used in writing the starred clues?)
- EIFFEL TOWER (Rod-shaped Paris site)
- PARTY SUB (Super sandwich)
- BUTT DIAL (Embarrassment from a cell phone, perhaps)
- CLOUDY SKIES (Grey day quality)
Speaking of “rod-shaped”, the microbial term is bacillus. Prime example: Bacillus cereus, or B. cereus by convention. How can I possibly tie that factoid back to this puzzle? Please, I can’t. Be serious.
Also worth noting — you can spot SCENIC TAI CHI ON FOOT in Central Park if you know where to look. (Hint: look inwards … in words.)
Cracking: the LOVE SEAT is a little divan where, we can sit together (LOVE SEAT baby), okay, is that all? NOPE. I’ve got me a pull-out, it’s as big as a whale, just make sure to put down the rail
Slacking: No, it’s not DDT, it’s PCB, although the historic DDT-to-PCB ratio is >7:1, so you’d be forgiven for thinking otherwise.
Sidetracking: ITS ME
David Karp’s Wall Street Journal crossword, “Chew on This”—Jim’s re-cap
The theme consists of circled letters in a circular formation spelling out kinds of teeth. The revealer is TEETHING RINGS (56a, [Comforting set for an infant, as depicted by this puzzle]).
Wall St Journal crossword solution · “Chew on This” · David Karp · Thu., 8.15.24
- CANINE in the upper left.
- MOLARS in the top center.
- WISDOM in the upper right.
- INCISCORS in the center.
I didn’t solve this, so I can’t make a judgment as to how the puzzle progresses, but I will say that while the theme is solid, it’s not necessarily my cup of tea since I prefer themes with some kind of wordplay. I also noticed the inconsistency in pluralization of the teeth, but that’s probably me being nit-picky.
Fill highlights include a reference to the Coen Bros. TRUE GRIT remake, CHESTNUTS, TURTLES, and CLAPTRAP. Brand new to me is CAPOEIRA which has a few appearances in the Cruciverb database.
Jay Silverman’s USA Today Crossword, “Back Channels” — Emily’s write-up
Tune in for this puzzle today.
USA Today, August 15, 2024, “Back Channels” by Jay Silverman
Theme: each themer ends (aka “back”) with the name of a TV network (or “channel”)
Themers:
- 20a. [“Not difficult at all!”], ASEASYASABC
- 38a. [Miley Cyrus hit with the lyric “I hopped off the plane at LAX”], PARTYINTHEUSA
- 55a. [Drama series set in Avonlea], ANNEWITHANE
A mix of themers in today’s set wit: ASEASYASABC, PARTYINTHEUSA, and ANNEWITHANE. I needed some crossings to get the first and third but the second themer filled in immediately for me, as it’s a household favorite of ours. With the theme, we get the channels: ABC, USA, and E.
Favorite fill: TEABAG, PAWED, CLAMOR, and ALICIA
Stumpers: BAR (misread clue as before the word), RAHRAH (needed crossings), and TAXI (only thought of “Uber” and “Lyft”)
Overall a smooth solve with great fill and cluing. Lots of lengthy fill too. I really enjoyed DAUB crossing DAB. Nicely done!
4.25 stars
~Emily
I had no clue whatsoever about the NYT puzzle, even after finishing it and pondering for some time. Pronunciation tricks always seem to elude me. Paris site = parasite? Soup or = super? Close, but not really, according to my ear. Self-own = cellphone: better, but the stress pattern is wrong. Grade A = gray day is the only one that sounds right to me, but coming to it last I was too befuddled to understand what was going on.
Ditto. This one stumped me. I came here to find the answer, so thank you!
Same here. Some of the NYT theme answers sorta make sense, in a way. But not consistently.
They all sound pretty reasonable to me, especially if I’m speaking quickly. I’m a midwesterner, so “or” often comes out as “er.”
I had the first couple of letters in the revealer and put in “spell checker,” so that slowed me down some (and had me looking for the wrong type of anomalies in the clues/answers).
My quibble is that I don’t see how the Eiffel Tower is “rod-shaped.” (And since “rod-shaped” doesn’t really have anything to do with the theme, isn’t there a better descriptor?)
Overall, a fun Thursday.
Completely defeated me, along the way and even after I could stare at the answers. After coming here, it still took real effort to sound out the puns.
To make it harder still, besides facing all the theme fill without a clue, I didn’t know PEEP, CHIA (apart from the pet), or SANTORIA and strongly considered CIS for HET and DDT for PCB. The tributary came none too soon as well. I still don’t get VET / ROOK, so I must really be dense today. Oh, well.
It just now dawned on me that vet=rook opposites probably means veteran vs. rookie.
I’ve never seen “rook” as shorthand for rookie, so that one was a bit of a headscratcher for me.
I’m familiar with rook in that sense but I encountered it many years ago
I hadn’t either, head scratching for sure, but I could only think of 2 kinds of rooks, the bird and the chest piece, and neither of those made any sense.
I use “rook” regularly to refer to new rookies on my favorite team (most often baseball, for some reason) when they haven’t been around enough for me to refer to them by their first names yet and I don’t have a favorite nickname for them yet. “C’mon rook!” “Atta boy, rook!”. Fandom can be weird.
M-W includes it as a definition of ROOK.
Ah, thanks. I’m new to rook for rookie, too. I’m not complaining about the puzzle. It was foreign to me, but I know some things are.
It just now dawned on me that the vet opposite rook must mean veteran vs. rookie. Maybe.
sorry for the dupe… connection problems this a.m.
Yeah man, they sound close enough for speech-to-text to mix them up. That’s all. I never understand the gripes about pronunciation. They’re just puns, it’s not that deep
NYT: I for one really enjoyed it, once I got the idea.
My experience with speech-to-text isn’t that it uses exact sound alikes, but close matches that it can find. Does paninis really sound like penis? No. But a friend got embarrassed by that. The only one that didn’t sit solidly with me was the Eiffel tower one since it isn’t rod shaped, but it is a Paris site… otherwise I thought they were pretty cute.
I figured the Eiffel Tower is as rod-shaped as an engine connecting rod, so whatever. And yes, the surface meaning was a nod to bacilli, although we don’t normally call bacteria parasites.
“Rod-shaped” wasn’t part of the theme, so that’s a bit of unnecessary distraction that I don’t believe should have made the final cut. Calling the Eiffel Tower “rod-shaped” is a Saturday Stumper type of clue that didn’t need to be in this puzzle. I realize the point was to tie “rod-shaped” to “parasite,” but a huge number of the comments about the puzzle on Wordplay are understandably about how the Eiffel Tower isn’t rod-shaped rather than about the theme or other aspects of the puzzle that the constructor and the editors would probably rather be the focus of the conversation.
Is “-plasm” really a suffix? I think of “-plasm” as being the root word here, with potential prefixes like “proto-,” “cyto-,” “ecto-,” etc. I don’t really think of “root word” as being synonymous with “suffix,” but I don’t know what the actual, technical definitions are.
The same thought occurred to me (as opposed to Me), but the dictionaries I’ve checked list -plasm as a “combining form.” The combination of that qualifier and the hyphen, same as occur in prefixes, sold me on the clue’s legitimacy.
That never would have occurred to me, but sure enough I looked up suffix in Wikipedia, and the article begins with “In linguistics, a suffix is an affix which is placed after the stem of a word.”
The “stem” of a word — a term I didn’t know — means a piece of a word that carries at least some of the word’s “lexical meaning”, sez Wikipedia. Which seems to perfectly fit -plasm.
So, I guess it’s not technically a suffix.
I came here to see how the Eiffel Tower could be thought of as rod-shaped, and after looking at the connecting rod image, I think you’re being very generous, Martin. I did like the clue for CLOUDY SKIES, however; to me, it was the most apt.
This puzzle lived up to my expectation of a tricksy Thursday, though. I really had to think about the relationship of the entries to the clues before I got it; that’s what I like about Thursdays.
NYT: A cute theme which, despite my solving the revealer and all, did not dawn on me during this fun solve. But it all made sense afterwards.
Maybe if the clues had been a tad harder, I would have been forced to grok the theme in order to complete the solve. That’s always my preference for a theme.
PS I would definitely not call the Eiffel tower “rod-shaped”, because of the way it flares out toward the bottom.
Same here: I solved the puzzle without understanding the way the starred clues worked, then I went back and figured them out. That’s OK, but I would rather have a theme that I have to understand to fill in the grid.
BEQ: Fun puzzle!