Nancy Stark & Will Nediger’s Wall Street Journal crossword, “Clippings”—Jim’s review
Theme answers are familiar phrases whose final letters spell out a synonym of “hair”. These final letters are turned downward as hinted at by the revealer LET YOUR HAIR DOWN (59a, [Act in an uninhibited way, and what to do three times in this grid]).
Wall St Journal crossword solution · “Clippings” · Nancy Stark & Will Nediger · Thu., 9.19.24
- 16a. [Sacred pilgrimage site for Christians] GARDEN OF GETHSE(MANE).
- 21a. [They’re often tried out in stores] MAT(TRESSES).
- 28a. [First places in races?] STARTING B(LOCKS).
I predicted the revealer after getting two of the entries, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t enjoy it. What surprised me most was the placement of the last two theme answers at 21a and 28a which means they’re both stacked and crossing each other. Normally you’d expect to see a pile-up of iffy fill in that section, but not today. Kudos to our constructors for an impressive construction.
Fill highlights: I like that “GO TEAM” / MASCOT stack in that same area of the grid as well as Brian DE PALMA, KIBOSH, TALKS SENSE, CALIBER, and ED NORTON (of The Honeymooners).
Clues of note:
- 1a. [Ripped]. BUFF. Started off the grid with a misstep when I went with the straightforward synonym TORN.
- 25a. [Obie-winning playwright Will]. ENO. Wha? There’s another ENO out there?!
- 14d. [Like a heart in a hand]. RED. This isn’t about blood and gore as I first thought, but playing cards.
Solid theme executed beautifully with smooth fill all around. 3.75 stars.
Josh Goodman’ New York Times crossword — Zachary David Levy’s write-up
Difficulty: Stuck (16m05s)
Josh Goodman’s New York Times crossword, 9/19/24, 0919
Today’s theme: professional verbs
- don’t rearrange the letters in TEXAS
- don’t put (ALL)(YOUR)(EGGS) in one BAS / KET
- don’t mix BUSINESS and PLEASURE
- don’t CRY over 90 degree M / ILK
- don’t put the CART before the HORSE
Better late than never. 16×15 grid which was mostly gettable (for me) until I hit a wall in the NE corner. Could not see TEXAS for the longest time, and had no inclination as to whether or not I should be messin’ with the letters. Also couldn’t come up with TETON as I was looking for a specific peak (there is no Mount TETON; there’s Grand and South TETON, along with a few other peaks in the massif.)
Cracking: MY TREAT, where I confidently dropped ITS ON ME at first, but don’t worry, you can get the next one.
Slacking: WIRERS
Sidetracking: Robert California talking about GEISHAS
Harry Doernberg’s Fireball Crossword, “Commercial Break” – Jenni’s write-up
At first I thought this was a rebus and I guess in a way it was, although not the usual way.
I realized fairly quickly that a number of entries were missing AD, which makes sense given the title. I tried to squeeze them into the white squares but that’s not where they belong. Here’s Peter’s grid.
Fireball, September 18, 2024, “Commercial Break,” Harry Doernberg, solution grid
- 8d is [Meet for coffee] and looks like GOON. That’s not right. 24a [Nitwit] is DUNDERHEAD with the AD in the black square, and if you keep reading down from 8d to 32d that makes GO ON A DATE.
- 11d [Large file transfers] starts out as DAT, which for all I know is some kind of techie initialism. Wrong. 22a [Invasive amphibian in Australia] is CANE TOAD and the AD between 11d and 27d gives us DATA DUMPS.
- 38d [Swim with the fishes] joins 60d to make SCUBA DIVE and 54a [1949 film starring Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn] is ADAMS RIB.
- 40d [Dream team members are picked during it] is the WNBA DRAFT and now the AD gives us the revealer at 52a [Plug pullers…and a hint to four squares in this puzzle] is AD BLOCKERS.
How do I love this? Let me count the ways. All the entries are rock solid and in the language. The second part of each Down theme answer is a word in itself, clued appropriately. The AD sits at the end of the Across answers in the top half of the grid and starts the ones on the bottom. A thing of beauty and a joy to solve.
What I didn’t know before I did this puzzle: never heard of Nathalie and Manal ISSA or the film “The Swimmers.”
Amanda Rafkin & Jared Goudsmit’s USA Today Crossword, “It Started With the Wine” — Emily’s write-up
Cheers!
USA Today, September 19, 2024, “It Started With the Wine” by Amanda Rafkin & Jared Goudsmit
Theme: the first word of each themer can prepend with “wine” to form a new phrase
Themers:
- 16a. [Entree that might be served with mint jelly], RACKOFLAMB
- 38a. [Outstanding achievement], TOURDEFORCE
- 63a. [Coming-of-age ritual often held at a synaguge], BARMITZVAH
Fun themer set today with RACKOFLAMB, TOURDEFORCE, and BARMITZVAH. When combined with the theme, we get: WINE RACK, WINE TOUR, and WINE BAR.
Favorite fill: UPSHOT, TEAHOUSE, and LASERPOINTER
Stumpers: AGEGAP (tricky cluing for me), SMU (needed crossings), and KAT (new to me)
Enjoyed today’s puzzle, especially the theme and title clue. Lots of lovely entries and great bonus fill too! A quicker solve for me, which is always fun!
4.0 stars
~Emily
Nancy Stark & Will Nediger’s LA Times crossword – Gareth’s theme summary
LAT
240919
Nancy Stark & Will Nediger’s puzzle revolves around four fabric-related idioms. These are shoehorned into a very short story with Merl Reagle-esque clues:
- [The shady lawyer tried to __ a client’s eyes, …], PULLTHEWOOLOVER
- [… and was confident nobody would __ the scheme …], COTTONONTO
- [… and sure the client would __, ], GETFLEECED
- [… but I saw everything, so I’m the __!], MATERIALWITNESS
Short and sweet.
Gareth
NYT: The NW stymied me for far too long. I knew 17A/18D were playing with “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket”/“Eggs on.” I knew TOTEM and IT’S FUTILE were right. But it took me a while to make sense of the clues for ALIBI and AT BAT, and even then, I couldn’t figure out how to make 17A work until “BE-[ALL]” clicked. Rebuses in a puzzle that otherwise didn’t have any!
It might have been completely different if I remembered the Jason Mraz song (the name is familiar, but I don’t know that I have ever heard it).
I spent twice as long with that corner as with the rest of the puzzle, and put it aside a few times. Sad to say, but it took a lot of the fun out of it.
I felt the NW was near impossible if you had not done some other part of the puzzle and figured out the gist of the theme.
But even though I came back to it at the end, I couldn’t finish without cheating re the Mraz song. The idea of the basket surrounding the eggs is very cool, but I wanted each circle to be an egg, or to have the 3 circles spell EGG. I do see that it has its own logic, it was just not easy for me to tumble to.
Two days in a row where I admired the construction but felt it came at some cost.
I knew the Jason Mraz song so I was able to put the “YOUR” in the circle, but otherwise that corner would have been a huge struggle.
I don’t know if I’ve ever seen a puzzle before where some of the circles had rebuses and some did not.
I liked the puzzle, although I think a relatively newbie to NYT Thursdays would have been overwhelmed by so many different tricks. I liked that it kept me on my toes though, but my time was not great. This whole week, my times have been above my average.
I started out with the three circles spelling EGG, but the single egg doesn’t fit the idiom. I’m familiar with the Mraz song, but couldn’t come up with the title. So that area took a long time. But my ultimate downfall was the crossing of SANRIO and LEO. Don’t know the company or the writer, so it was a guessing game.
I must’ve picked up SANRIO from some earlier crossword puzzle. It wasn’t quite a gimme, but once I had a few letters, I remembered the name. I don’t think I had ever heard of LEO Rosten, and that could just as easily have been Len, Les, Lev or Lew.
Ditto re cheating on the Mraz song. I had all the other theme answers, but just couldn’t see the “ALL YOUR EGGS” rebus until I looked up that song. I’m laughing at myself for wanting to complain about that, after so many weeks of grousing about Thursdays not being tricky enough. Now I’m wishing I’d given it a little more time before going to Google.
TBH, I thought this was a great Thursday puzzle, and other than that one glitch, I loved it! My hat is off to Mr. Goodman!
DNF for me because of that corner. I had EGGS in the right square, but put KEY at 4D, so wanted OUR for the other rebus square. I couldn’t come up with ALIBI for ‘out’ and had no idea about the song name. After a while I got tired of trying to figure it out so just hit ‘reveal.’
Sounds to me like a situation where you just look up the song. Which is what I did.
I was tempted to do that, but I really prefer to avoid lookups when I can.
Same here.
Really interesting puzzle. It took me a long time to get the theme. On top of that, tricky clues tempted me to enter a few wrong answers.
It also defeated me. I’d have said that I was done once I finally realized that NE circles “messed with” Texas. (State mottoes didn’t easily spring to mind apart from “Don’t treat on me.”) I just had this unexplained GON. But I wasn’t done after all.
I got what looked like it had to be the song, without its troubling me, since I had no idea what to expect. I got BEE, too, thinking that it didn’t quite make sense, but you never know. And while I did have the thought that a single EGG within BASKET didn’t do justice to the idiom, all the themers required at least a slight stretch in interpretation. Oh, well. I still blame myself rather than the puzzle for not trusting my gut.
NYT: Where was the kitchen sink? Too much. Too much.
NYT – What I particularly enjoyed about the puzzle was after I figured out one mechanism I couldn’t immediately fill in the others. Definitely kept me engaged longer than most Thursdays
It was my slowest Thursday in a long while. I’m not sure that I was engaged as much as I was stubbornly persistent. I got the first couple of theme answers from the crosses, and after getting AESTX understood how it fit the clue.
But even after getting the “Don’t mix business and pleasure” answer, it’s such a meaningless assortment of letters that it took me a few minutes to see what it was. (I have difficulty reading the circled letters. Probably time for new glasses.)
I’ve enjoyed other puzzles that had a mix of tricks in them. And I like the way Josh Goodman worked in “Don’t cry over spilt [spilled?] milk.”
I might’ve had a completely different experience if “I’M [YOUR]S” had come more easily.
I got lucky in that as I was getting the downs for PLEASURE / BUSINESS, I was just getting the uncircled entries, and it made it much easier to see what was going on. Even with knowing the theme, it took a bit to finish the two north entries; I tried EGG first, before starting to correct it; then I had KEY instead of BE/ALL, so my rebus was Y / OUR / EGGS… and I didn’t know the Mraz song either. Whew. Finally figured out it was ALIBI and had to stare for a bit to get how it was clued by “Out” … not the most satisfying, I would say. And I’m not used to calling X-RAYS “diagnostics”; I was thinking it had to be some synonym for “sizing”. Made for a slower than average solve…
NYT: Cute theme!
At first I half-wondered if the NE theme entry was “Don’t screw up your taxes”, although this was a state motto I had never heard before. Forgot about it.
As I was drifting off to sleep last night, some little micro-researcher in my subconscious suddenly informs me that it’s “Don’t mess with Texas!”
Funny how these things happen.
That’s so funny, Dan.
Today’s NYT was my favorite puzzle of the year! Such a fun mix of tricks that all made perfect sense (once you got the right answer—and yeah, the NW stymied me for a while).
Ditto that sentiment. Can’t help but shake my head at all the negative comments and ratings. Rex Parker and I don’t always see eye to eye, but his rave review was spot-on, I thought. Check it out, naysayers, for a finer appreciation of what you might have missed in Mr. Goodman’s ORCA-worthy opus.
I’ve been to a few banquets in Kyoto that hired geishas to mingle. Some spoke English well, and they were as fine conversationalists as we’ve been told. But in Kyoto, they are called geiko. “Geisha” is considered a bit rude, not exactly derogatory — and forgivable from foreigners — but “geiko” is the properly respectful term. In Tokyo, they are geishas, with no disrespect implied.
Because Kyoto is the home of the soul of this aspect of Japanese culture, I cringe a tiny bit at “geisha” (my ikebana sensei cringes a lot), but Tokyo people don’t so I wouldn’t object to it in a crossword.
Although I realize it may have been obscure for some, I loved seeing LEO clued in relation to Leo Rosten in the New York Times. The Joys of Yiddish was always at hand in our house when I was growing up, and I still have the same copy. Some great jokes in there too.
I think the saying re NYT 9A is “Don’t …” [mess with] TEXAS: “rearrange” is too timid, methinks, but I am not a Texan.
Zachary slipped in a reference to the correct motto in his review, after he listed the theme answers in an indirect way. I would have preferred a straightforward list. The puzzle was puzzling enough.
LAT: Cute example of a sort of old-fashioned trick, what I would call a “story puzzle” where the theme clues are intended to be read together. Merl Reagle was an expert.
NYT: I liked it, although the Wordplay comments seemed split over whether having five different ways to get theme clues was fair or not. I got the “Texas” clue quickly, but hesitated as how exactly to mess (up) the word.
Yes, the LAT had that Reagle flavor.
+1
NYT. Commenting late. I never cracked the NE for many of the reasons listed.
Was I the only one who thought the three circles may have been OVA? I knew EGG was wrong, but never cracked it.
No omelette for you!
Lol to both comments!
USAT: When Jared Goudsmit creates or edits a puzzle, I can always expect an overabundance of clues/answers that are geared to the under-40 crowd. Someday he might recognize that the over-50 crowd is the majority of solvers, and gear his thinking that way.