David Karp’s New York Times crossword—Amy’s recap
NY Times crossword solution, 9/21/24 – no. 0921
All right, let’s get this out of the way first. That southeast corner, with the vaguely clued league crossing the could-be-any-of-seven-letters music entry and the name of a golfer clued via trivia. Are you serious with this? 45a. [What Los Angeles and New York are represented in twice: Abbr.], I guessed it was a sports league but youMOZQM know what? The cities each have two NBA, MLS, and MLB teams too, don’t they? This puzzle wanted NFL. That music crossing, 46d. [Key of Beethoven’s Sixth: Abbr.], I filled in *M** and waited for crossings but still had *MAJ. (Do not even think of @ing me about this—as a lifelong hard-of-hearing person, I view the vast majority of *MIN, *MAJ, and *FLAT entries as hostile and truly I hate to see them in crosswords.) The golfer is 47d. [Golfer Thompson who qualified for the U.S. Women’s Open at age 12], LEXI. Don’t know that I’ve seen the name before but L seemed like the only workable letter there. Irksome corner!
Fave fill: MOZAMBIQUE, “ARE YOU NUTS?”, “I CAN RELATE,” HAM IT UP (100 times better than yet another EMOTE), delicious chocolate POT DE CREME (but France, come on! “Pot of cream” is an awful name for something so good), ANTICLIMAX, PEACH EMOJI ([Butt text?] because people use that emoji to represent an ass), HAS A HEART, Lionel Messi’s squad INTER MIAMI, CUBICLE AFICIONADO (yes, those are separate entries, but they go great together).
Today I learned: 32d. [Country name that’s also the Portuguese word for “turkey”], PERU. Nothing to do with the country name’s etymology, though. While we’re on the continent, 6d. [Half a South American capital name] bugs me because BUENOS is 6/11ths of a capital name.
Another Stanley Newman-style random name clue in the NYT: 21a. [Nickname for Alexander, in Slavic cultures], SACHA. Wikipedia tells me the French spelling is Sacha. Slavic languages either use the Cyrillic alphabet, Saša, or Sasza. Is it really worth ignoring Sacha Baron Cohen to go this route instead?
Three stars from me. Some weird cluing/editorial choices dropped some unpleasant vibes on this puzzle.
Mike Shenk’s Wall Street Journal, “Happy Feet” — pannonica’s write-up
WSJ • 9/21/24 • Sat • “Happy Feet” • Shenk • solution • 20240921
- 63aR [Experience elation, and, in a way, each set of circled letters] WALK ON AIR. Those sets are synonyms for walk and in each case they appear above the sequence A-I-R.
- 22a. [Danish relatives] BREAKFAST ROLLS.
26a. [Scottish estate owner] LAIRD. - 36a. [Cook book?] CAPTAIN’S LOG.
45a. [Site of Ramses Square] CAIRO. - 52a. [1964 Nina Simone song] I AM BLESSED.
57a. [Do damage to] IMPAIR. - 80a. [Marvel antihero played by Nicolas Cage in a 2007 movie] GHOST RIDER.
86a. [Capital that’s home to Uhuru Park] NAIROBI. - 93a. [Fit to be activated] COMBAT READY.
97a. [Link between stories] STAIRS. - 110a. [Stage framer] PROSCENIUM ARCH.
116a. [Risky hand to go all in on] ONE PAIR.
This is both a clever theme and a well-constructed puzzle. Not easy to fit so much content even in a 21×21 grid! There are some unusual words in the ballast fill, but nothing beyond the pale, not even close.
- 6d [More widespread] RIFER. There’s one example right near the beginning.
- 21d [Fix a failing pen, perhaps] REFENCE. And another. Maybe I’ll just collect them all up front: 72a [Dug, perhaps] SPADED. 89a [Sighting] ESPIAL.
- 56d [Alpha Aquilae, more familiarly] ALTAIR. Not part of the theme.
- 63d [Enter at random] WANDER IN. Not great fill, but the clue elevates it.
- 94d [Flip decision?] TAILS. Nice clue. As was 43d [A lot of bucks, say] DEER, now that I think about it.
- 100d [Prepared to duel] ARMED. The clue is a little tricky because it more readily reads as a verb phrase.
- 103d [Seaweed product] AGAR, not NORI.
- 92d [Cambodia’s Lon __ ] NOL. It’s been remarked previously by many others, but it’s odd how some historical monsters are absolutely taboo in crosswords while others get a pass.
So. “Walking on Air” reminds me of the film poster for Being There (1979). There wasn’t much music in the film, but it did employ variations on Satie’s Gnossiennes, and I’m in turn reminded of the cover art for Anne Queffélec’s recordings of Erik Satie’s compositions, similarly inspired by Belgian surrealist René Magritte. So it all comes back around.
Lester Ruff’s Newsday crossword, Saturday Stumper — pannonica’s write-up
Newsday • 9/21/24 • Saturday Stumper • Ruff, Newman • solution • 20240921
This week’s Stumper played tougher than I’m accustomed to from the ‘less rough’ byline, and I really had to work (read: run through the alphabet quite critically) to finish up in one area.
The manufactured difficulty for several clues really stretched credulity:
- 19a [Amazon user] EEL.
- 29a [Extension of rays] FIN.
- 38a [a.m. or p.m.] TOD, time-of-day, presumably.
- 52a [Arrive in] HIT. I don’t even understand this one.
Let’s look at the rest now.
- 9a [Tigon kin] LIGERS. Was primed for a singular answer rather than a plural, so early on dismissed LIGER for not fitting.
- 20a [Reduced-by-two “up to”] TIL. If the clue had just read [Up to] it would’ve been easier, so this is mostly blowing smoke.
- 21a [Part of a Daredevil costume] RED BELT. The Marvel comics character. Quite green-painty. 47a [Ancient 44-Across in Marvel films] TILDA. (44a [Person] ONE.) TILDA Swinton portrayed the character known as the Ancient One in the Doctor Strange orbit. The clue really doesn’t indicate that we’re looking for an actor’s name.
- 25a [Frl., to Francisco] SRTA. Fraulein and señorita.
- 26a [Made good on] MET. This is the spot where I had to carefully run through the alphabet. 30a was tricky, and 23d was obscure to me: in 30a [Thirty-second leader letters] it’s easy to construe the first part as referring to half a minute, but it turns out to be a reference to Roosevelt as the 32nd US president. 23d [Lt. col. equivalent] C––R didn’t look like much to me, so it was powering through the two acrosses that sewed it up. FDR, CMDR
- 27a [Endymion adverb] ANON. Not sure, but I believe this a reference to the 1750 book Endymion: or The Universal Satirist, published anonymously?
- 32a [Maya Hawke’s mom] UMA. The crossword would have taken much longer to complete had I not known this—it helped to crack the northeast section.
- 39a [Largest arboreal animal] APE. Was considering ORANG (see discussion in the comments for this past Wednesday), and then wracked my brain for some non-mammalian animal that could be larger. This was an almost unfair clue because the answer is a lot more generic than one would expect.
- 41a [Park it] SIT. 49a [Park it] STAY PUT.
- 51a [Intimate] PAL. 3d [Intimate] IMPLY.
- 53a [Not-so-good golfer] HACKER, not DUFFER.
- 56a [Expands on, say] ALTERS. Hmm.
- 1d [Dalai Lama’s “best meditation”] SLEEP. Fine by me.
- 4d [Source of stings] FBI. Didn’t fool me, so I just needed one crossing to confirm that I had the right organization in mind.
- 5d [Part of a Miss Piggy costume] FEATHER BOA, but I thought it might be some sort of TIARA, despite DIAMOND TIARA not fitting.
- 8d [Script writers] MDS. My very first entry filled in.
- 13d [Available virtually immediately] REAL-TIME. First I had ON DEMAND, then IN NO TIME. Took a while to disencumber myself from those and as a result this section was the second-to-last to be completed.
- 24d [Yonder, to some New Yawkers] DAT DERE.
- 30d [Don’t fool yourself] FACE FACTS. 59a [Fait accompli] DONE DEAL.
- 33d [NASDAQ two-timer] is not a company at all, but a reference to the letters comprising the acronym—the letter A appears twice. CAPITAL A.
- 41d [Private counterpart] SEAMAN, not YEOMAN.
- 51d [What southpaws can’t suit up for] POLO. They can, but they must play right-handed.
NYT: I zoomed along through most of the grid, but got a little stuck in the NW. My first guess for 1A had been Abel Tasman (yes, I know where Tasmania is, but that doesn’t preclude the Tasman Sea from being 6,000 miles away — some of those 17th century explorers really got around!). When none of the crosses worked, I ditched it and left most of the NW empty, though I managed to get I CAN RELATE and a few of the Down answers.
Then I stepped away for a few minutes. When I came back, the YO from AYN and MORALES (both gimmes) suggested the YOU of ARE YOU NUTS and I was more or less finished.
Both the NW and the SE caused me to step away for a bit.
In the NW, it took me a little while to see both ARE YOU NUTS and CAN YOU RELATE (which now sort of seem to fit together).
In the SE, I cook, but I’m not a dessert guy, so POT DE CREME was unfamiliar, and I didn’t really care for HI TECH.
I had a somewhat similar experience. Interestingly, I tried ZOOM instead of SAIL first (thinking maybe some variation on ZITHER for the instrument that ended up being SITARS). Not sure why AFICIONADOS took me so long to see, but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I kinda like the SE corner puzzle aspect of it; the key on the down crossing meant the league had to be either NBA or NFL, though I don’t think a lot of earlier music was in B major or minor; perhaps B flat, but that wouldn’t fit. So it’s most likely NFL; once you get POT DE CRÈME, that seals NFL, because the name is very likely not starting AE. It was tricky, but was doable for me without knowing the name.
Challenging, and ended a little faster than my average.
NYT was tough but doable.Tried to start in NW, got nowhere, envisioned ending up with a blank grid, then worked slowly clockwise around, back to NW. Met the various ambiguities Amy mentions, then a final correction with SASHA/SACHA. Good puzzle.
NYT: I agree re the SE corner, and the NW was the last to fall for me. But I loved so much of this puzzle. I would enter things tentatively and they would mostly turn out to be correct, which is its own weirdly reinforcing thing–Living on the edge and remaining alive.
And some of the cluing was simply outstanding (e.g. MELEE).
I like your description of tentatively entering answers, huda. The more crosswords I solve, the more I realize how much I depend on the fact that the words cross. An answer that I just can’t see may suddenly become apparent with a few key letters. Sometimes it often pays off to take a chance on a word or even a letter that may turn out to be incorrect.
But then there are the times I get held up from seeing an easy answer because I have either an incorrect answer or a typo in the crosses. That’s why if I have any doubts about what I have entered, I try as quickly as possible to check it with a cross or two.
I had a similar experience with this puzzle. A lot of initial guesses turned out to be correct, and several of the longer answers were fun. I agree that the clue for MELEE was excellent! Also, the clue for MATE, which stumped me briefly but gave me a nice “aha” moment when I finally saw it.
I had a different experience with the SE corner, though. I didn’t know LEXI, but NEMO was a gimme, and the musical key had to start with a letter from A through F, so the league couldn’t be anything but NFL. So that seemed like pretty standard late-week fare to me.
The trivia answers I didn’t know filled in pretty readily from crosses. If I have a complaint, it would be that there seemed to be a lot of trivia, and yet the puzzle played pretty easy for a Saturday; I finished well under my average time.
I should’ve said 45A had to be either NBA or NFL, so a typical “kealoa.” As it happened, this was another first guess that turned out to be correct.
LOL, I just now got that Melee clue!! sheesh, that was a good one. So was the Appealing outcome, perhaps…. took me a few clicks to get it. :)
Lots to like about this puzzle, despite nits picked!
NYT: Only one team represents New York in the NBA because the Nets represent Brooklyn. Don’t get involved.
Yes, both NFL teams actually play in New Jersey. As does one MLS team. Just trust me on this. Don’t get involved.
NYT: I wouldn’t refer to Los Alamos as a city, but I’m biased.
Funnily enough, yesterday’s NYT had a story in the real estate section about the country’s most expensive towns, which it referred to as ‘micropolitan’ areas. Los Alamos was #9 on the list.
Yeah…. I spent two years there as a grad student. It’s about 10,000 people, I believe? Really pretty area, but I wouldn’t call it more than a town.
Part of why it’s so expensive is that it’s essentially land-locked, being surrounded by the lab and national forest.
The mix of names in the NYT was a bit too much. As an occasional follower of golf, I knew LEXI immediately (she announced her retirement recently), but I had no idea about MORALES and NEMO (a completely inscrutable clue for me). RAMI and HUGOS were gimmes, PETCO was easy to guess, and MOZAMBIQUE and SARASOTA became clear after a few crosses.
Some good cluing, and a pretty good puzzle overall, but it illustrates the problem of relying too much on names that you either know or don’t.
NYT: Amy, hard to blame you for the NFL/NBA mixup, with only LEXI to really break the tie (as BMAJ and FMAJ are both equally plausible keys for a symphony). In fact, I would say NBA actually responds better to the clue as written since there are exactly two NBA teams in New York: the Knicks and the Nets.
Meanwhile, there are *3* NFL teams associated with New York, as the clue didn’t differentiate between City and State: the Giants, Jets, and Bills. Of those, only the Bills actually play in New York (Buffalo), as the Giants and Jets share a stadium in New Jersey.
NFL still works as a correct answer if you take the clue very literally — two NFL teams have the words “New York” in their team name. But it’s less intuitive IMO. Meanwhile, MLS could technically work as well, except that L is not a musical note so it can be ruled out from the Beethoven clue.
Also, while I am also often annoyed by “key of musical work” entries, it does pay off in trivia/crosswords to be familiar with the names of Beethoven’s symphonies, even without listening to them. For example, today I was fairly sure that the 6th was either Eroica (nope, that’s the 3rd) or Pastoral (yep), both of which sound more likely to be in a major key.
If you don’t know the letter notes, is there any way to distinguish between AMAJ, BMAJ, CMAJ, DMAJ, EMAJ, FMAJ, and GMAJ, short of rote memorization of things that aren’t of interest to me? I gather that musicians can hear a note and recognize which one it is, but this is not possible for me.
My hearing is fine, and I enjoy music, but I can’t recognize the key a piece of music is in, and it’s not something I typically remember except for a few famous cases (Bach’s Mass in B Minor, for example), where the key is traditionally a part of the title of the work.
So, like you, I need the cross to be familiar, otherwise I’m up a tree.
I’ve been a lifelong classical music fan and these bits of trivia are somehow even more irksome for me, precisely because the ‘key’ tells you almost no positive information about the work itself. I get the limited cluing for “consonantMconsonantJ” but I’m really eager for a fresher angle on these.
Don’t worry, even with perfect hearing and pitch, you’d still be saying to yourself…”really?” Even among AFICIONADOS, very few works are referred to by their key.
That said, I did quite like the overall approach today. About a minute or two behind my average time, but it was worth it for MOZAMBIQUE, POT DE CREME, and PEACH EMOJI et al. I did have Saratoga for a minute, but the awkward “…HAGAY..” induced by the middle g quickly sorted that out.
Amy wrote “…is there any way to distinguish…short of rote memorization of things that aren’t of interest to me?”
This is exactly how I feel about pop music performers and sitcom stars.
Lots of musicians don’t have perfect pitch.
But the few works of music I do know the key of come from listening to them enough times, and every time a piece is googled, its key will come up among the hits. (E.g., Beethoven’s 1st is in C major, his 5th in C minor, his 7th in A major, and his 9th in D major.)
NYT: 6d agree with Amy being bugged about Buenos Aires… my first stab at it was the Aires and it was too short so I kept racking my brain for a two-part SA Capitol that would fit… NE was my last area to fall.
I also agree with the vagueness of the Los Angeles/New York representation. Los Angeles is a city. NY may be a state and a city, (and it isn’t New Jersey) so the clue was doubly obfuscating for such a short answer, esp. to non-sports Aficionados.
I was hoping that the Madagascar channel would be a name of a person that would be recognizable but no… just the country which is named for a very very obscure person.
Enjoyed the puzzle and the fresh answers, which are described in the write up.
Alternatively, the name consists of two complete words, and one of them is BUENOS.
Alternatively, the name consists of four syllables (unless my Spanish is worse than I think it is). BUENOS represents two.
That said, I struggle to get that answer and only figured it out after getting a couple of crosses (which is fine by me).
Yep, got that after a while, but it kept me out of that corner til the end.
I took the clue to be looking for one part of a two-part city name, and already had the “n”, so Buenos seemed obvious. But I can see how a person could parse that clue differently.
There seems to be a link issue for the Stumper. When I click on the Newsday link on the site’s main page, I get: https://crosswordfiend.com/2024/09/20/saturday-september-21-2024/#nd
When I shift to this page, clicking on the Newsday link only takes me to the first puzzle posted, not the Newsday one.
It wasn’t just the Stumper. It was all of today’s puzzle links. Issue is now fixed.
I didn’t try any others. Thanks!
Oops! I miskeyed my e-mail address in my first post, so my usual avatar isn’t showing! And for some reason, that one’s not appearing immediately — says something about “awaiting moderation”?)
Stumper: Regarding pannonica’s review, he/she is correct, as usual! Regarding NASDAQ, what threw me was that NASDAQ wasn’t capitalized in the print version of the puzzle — it was “Nasdaq”! Regarding “52a [Arrive in] HIT. I don’t even understand this one.” — I was puzzled, too, but my husband indicates that it’s like “I hit Las Vegas in the morning” — that is, I’m traveling and I arrived at Las Vegas. :)
NYT: Early on, I saw the A at the end of 44D and decided with some delight that 54A (Butt text?) was FLATULENCE. Alas, I really liked that answer and stayed with it for far too long, even though I could find no other crossing. (I should add that though I’ve certainly used emojis, I’d never heard of a PEACHEMOJI.)
Stumper: I think Endymion in 27A likely refers to Keats’s 1818 poem “Endymion,” which begins with the familiar line “A thing of beauty is a joy forever.”
How does that connect or point to an adverb? [Didn’t read through the whole poem. Is it in there?]
from https://www.gutenberg.org/files/24280/24280-h/24280-h.htm :
Thus ending, on the shrine he heap’d a spire
Of teeming sweets, enkindling sacred fire;
Anon he stain’d the thick and spongy sod
With wine, in honour of the shepherd-god.
Now while the earth was drinking it, and while
Bay leaves were crackling in the fragrant pile,
And gummy frankincense was sparkling bright
‘Neath smothering parsley, and a hazy light230
Spread greyly eastward, thus a chorus sang:
Per the text, anon occurs 13 times in the poem.
You are correct, sir! (in my best Ed McMahon imitation)
NYT: It took a while to get any traction. A good challenge for me. I greatly appreciated its lack of pop culture trivia.
For some reason I felt positive that Beethoven’s 6th Symphony was in A major. It just always sounded that way to me, so it was a big surprise to learn that it’s actually in the key of F major.
I thought the Stumper was pretty ruff, for the reasons pannonica gave. The singular/plural ‘tigon’/LIGERS business is weird, and I too was mystified by HIT. In the copy I printed out, ‘Frl.’ looked like ‘Fri’, so I was perplexed to end up with SRTA.
DATDERE doesn’t seem to me the same as ‘Yonder,’ more like ‘that item yonder.’
I always look forward to the Stumper, but this one fell into the ever-present trap of Overdoing Things, I thought.
As I indicated above in my earlier post:
Regarding “52a [Arrive in] HIT. I don’t even understand this one.” — I was puzzled, too, but my husband indicates that it’s like “I hit Las Vegas in the morning” — that is, I’m traveling and I arrived at Las Vegas. :)
Stumper entry was SRTA crossing SANTANA but I still had to restart in the other 3 quadrants. Thank goodness ALAN ALDA is such a common crossword answer because all I could remember of that Mel Gibson movie was Helen Hunt.
That little CMDR, FDR, MET area was pretty crazy, with the clue for PSYCHS doing some undermining of its own.
Overall, I think it met its Lester Ruff standard. Thanks, Stan.
I’d been thinking of the NYT as my ideal Saturday. No obvious foothold, and lots of clever stuff to figure out along the way. Sure, the golfer crossing the team sport abbreviation isn’t ideal, but other stuff is.
But then I hit the NW, with just so many terminal obstacles that I had nowhere to go. I don’t know what to say of the puzzle as a whole.
stumper – under 20′ so definitely les ruff than it usually is for me… though i absolutely hated DATDERE and CAPITALA… but i was happy to get the long plonks of FEATHERBOA and CARBONDIOXIDE to help speed things along
Maybe it was just a typo, but in case I’m missing something… What does “youMOZQM know what?” mean (in Amy’s writeup)? Is this a new acronym I’m unfamiliar with?
NYT: I agree with JohnH about the Saturday puzzle. It was close to my ideal. Yes, I agree with some of Amy’s criticisms. I didn’t relate to most of the sports and sports geography clues, some of which I was able to fill in though I had a couple of blank squares remaining. FMAJ will never be the best type of fill. It’s something like OP.CIT. or other crosswordese for most people. For some who know music well, the answer might be warm and resonant. But for lesser solvers, a key still can be very nice, half a gimme sometimes. The first letter has to be something in the range of A to G, so you check what the crosses are. The second letter is M, and you check whether MAJ or MIN will work. I don’t think there’s much of a difference in how Amy or I would fill in such a clue (though cyco above has a nice insight, and Amy will still always be 10-20 times faster than I will be). I understand that some topics are more off-putting. I love Beethoven’s Sixth. That will have nothing to do with whether I can answer the clue, but I’m not put off. My biggest reaction to the puzzle was that it was a pleasure, and I thought that other people would find it too easy for a Saturday.
LAT: Can anyone explain 12D?
“Lay Dormant” is “Slept”. Shouldn’t the clue be past tense, as in “Laid Dormant”?
“Lay” is sometimes used as a past tense of lie.