Robert Charlton’s Wall Street Journal crossword, “Misstated”—Jim’s review
I’ve been blogging the WSJ puzzle since just after they started a dailies back in 2015. I think this is the first time I didn’t finish a puzzle without having to look something up. I gave up 20 minutes into trying to sort out that middle-right section. But I get ahead of myself.
The theme is familiar phrases that feature words that are also two-letter state abbreviations, clued as though they were mottos of said states.
Wall St Journal crossword solution · “Misstated” · Robert Charlton · Wed., 10.23.24
- 17a. [Hoosier State’s unofficial motto?] “I’M ALL IN“
- 18a. [Pelican State’s unofficial motto?] “OOH LA LA“
- 22a. [Buckeye State’s unofficial motto?] “OH, COME NOW“
- 40a. [Pine Tree State’s unofficial motto?] “IT’S ALL ABOUT ME“
- 54a. [Bay State’s unofficial motto?] “LOVE YOU, MA“
- 60a. [Keystone State’s unofficial motto?] “PROUD PA“
- 64a. [Sooner State’s unofficial motto?] “THAT’S OK“
For the most part, I enjoyed this theme. The phrases are mostly in the language, and they work as re-interpreted. The one that gets my side-eye is PROUD PA. No one says “proud pa,” everyone says “proud papa.”
As to the fill, I got BEER GUT, DELTOIDS and THROTTLE and gave them a thumbs-up. BOOK A ROOM is fine as well. Loved seeing timely “I VOTED” (get out there and vote, people!), but would prefer not having ENSLAVE in a grid. When I encountered PULI and WEEB, I winced, but I got past them.
But that right section…hoo boy! We have TRUMEAU [Pillar dividing a church entryway] stacked next to TONE ARM [Turntable part] (never heard of either), both crossing uncommon SET TO [Brief tussle], DROP clued opaquely as [Exclude] (I wanted DENY), and a word in the title of a French film UNE (I wanted LES). Oh, and let’s not forget OPE over there at 29d [“Behold, the heavens do ___”: “Coriolanus”]. What the heck? This was a rough mash-up. Oof. At least go easier on the cluing when you have such thorny entries crossing each other.
Clue of note (aside from the ones in the preceding paragraph): 45a. [Take from the top?]. BEHEAD. Making light of a grim entry, but I’ll choose to interpret it as applying to flowers (even though that’s usually called “deadheading”).
I enjoyed the theme and some of the long fill, but one section of the grid was unexpectedly thorny. Three stars.
Rebecca Goldstein’s AV Club Classic crossword, “Down the Drain”—Amy’s recap
AV Club Classic crossword solution, 10/23/24 – “Down the Drain”
Ha! The puzzle was easy enough that I filled everything in without really paying attention to the first four theme clues. Thank goodness for the revealer! 65a. [American Dialect Society’s 2023 word of the year, which describes the decay of online platforms, or what has befallen 18-, 24-, 40-, and 57-Across], ENSHITTIFICATION. Take a familiar word or phrase, add a synonym for “shit,” and clue the resulting wackadoodle phrase:
- 18a. [DIY upcycled cutting board event at the local makers’ studio?], SCRAP LUMBER PARTY. Slumber party + crap. I … would not attend a scrap lumber gathering.
- 24a. [Trashiest spot on the internet?], WEB DUMPSTER. Webster + dump.
- 40a. [Cleansing super-coily strands?], KINK SHAMPOOING. Kink shaming + poo. (My son’s curls get Shea Moisture shampoo.)
- 57a. [Dairy animals that pair their grazings with sweet Italian dessert wines?], MOSCATO COWS. Moo-cows + scat. Briefly thought this started with a weird plural Moscows, but no. Also: Moscato? Yum!
Pretty solid fill overall. And I enjoyed the theme, which you wouldn’t see in a newspaper puzzle but it works for an indie venue like AVCX. Four stars from me.
Matthew Stock & Brooke Husic’s New York Times crossword—Amy’s recap
NY Times crossword solution, 10/23/24 – no. 1023
The theme is A MATTER OF DEGREE, 54a. [Not distinguished by large differences … or an apt title for this puzzle?]. A thing that might be relevant to someone with a particular degree in a field of study, and also has initials that match the degree, make up the themers. B.A. in Communications, BRAILLE ALPHABET. M.S. in Biology, MICROSCOPE SLIDE. And Ph.D. in Computing (feel like that wants to be Computer Science but maybe that’s dated?), POCKET HARD DRIVE. Is that the same as a thumb drive? Term wasn’t familiar to me.
Fave fill: DOULA (my puzzler friend Katje has been a doula!), James Baldwin and GAY LIT, MATH TEAM (ours were called Mathletes), somewhat retro MAPQUEST.
Didn’t know that 15d. [Pi’s last name in “Life of Pi”] was PATEL, having not read the Yann Martel novel nor seen the Ang Lee movie. But tigers and India go hand in hand, and Patel isn’t uncommon. I hear that a tenth of U.S. folks of Indian descent are named Patel.
3.5 stars from me.
Laura Dershewitz’s LA Times crossword – Gareth’s summary
LA Times
241023
Laura Dershewitz’s theme is a simple, elegant affair. The middle entry is the meteorological caution DRESSINLAYERS. I’ve lived most of my life in temperate coastal areas where that rarely applies. In any case, four dresses are spelt out in circles stack into two layers: FROCK, CAFTAN, SHEATH & SHIFT.
Those double layers actually make filling the grid a lot more problematic. In most cases, this is hard to recognize, with grace notes such as BACKATYA and NEWSTOME in the middle. The bottom-right was a bit messy, however: RECLOTHE?, SYS?? and plural AIOLIS with weird interjection UHNO…
Gareth
Amanda Rafkin’s USA Today Crossword, “The Right Thing” — Emily’s write-up
Let’s get to it!
USA Today, October 23, 2024, “The Right Thing” by Amanda Rafkin
Theme: the last part (or right side) of each theme is a “thing”
Themers:
- 19a. [Product that flies off the shelves], HOTTICKETITEM
- 36a. [“I’ll buy you whatever you want!”], MONEYISNOOBJECT
- 49a. [Piece of writing that deep-dives into a topic], FEATUREARTICLE
This fun set is giving me throwback vibes for when holiday toys would drop and for a while there people were frantic about getting furies and Tickle-me-Elmos, to the point of getting into fights and dangers mobs rushing into a store when the doors opened. Many a FEATUREARTICLE has been written (even more recently) in which some people believed that MONEYISNOOBJECT for a HOTTICKETITEM.
Favorite fill: NOTTODAY, INEEDAMOMENT, and ARESO
Stumpers: MAR (cluing just didn’t click for me), REACT (kept thinking of related phrases instead of the concept for the example), and TRAGICHEROES (took me some crossings)
A lovely puzzle overall. Took me a bit longer than usual and though nothing was too tricky for entires, the cluing was more challenging. Love the grid design! Lots of nice lengthy bonus fill.
3.5 stars
~Emily
NYT: Matthew Stock and Brooke Husic are great constructors, but I didn’t love this one. While BRAILLE ALPHABET, MICROSCOPE SLIDE, and POCKET HARD DRIVE are all things that exist, none of those theme answers are particularly common phrases. BRAILLE ALPHABET could be BURMESE ALPHABET, BENGALI ALPHABET, or {any language that uses alphabets} ALPHABET. I think GLASS SLIDE would be a more common designation for that object than MICROSCOPE SLIDE. And, like Amy, I’ve never heard of POCKET HARD DRIVE before today, either.
And I kind of think the PhD answer should have been PH— D—.
I really liked “Birth day party” for DOULA, though. There were a lot of fun clues in this puzzle.
The theme idea was nice, but I wasn’t in love with the theme answers, especially POCKET HARD DRIVE which I kept checking when the SW wasn’t coming so easily. I also think of AXE throwing more as recreation than really a sport… but I’m happy to be wrong about that. I agree that the clue for DOULA was great.
I agree that the theme answers didn’t live up to the overall idea.
The DOULA clue *is* nice, but so is this one from a 2021 NYT puzzle by Robyn Weintraub: [Birth day presence?]. I don’t mind the recycling of clever clues as long as it’s not too frequent.
I didn’t care much for this one. To me, although clearly not to you guys, it was disappointing to discover (and slow to come) that these were just initials, not genuine abbreviations, and the phrases so far from idiomatic and not at all connected to the revealer’s pun on matters of degree as “sort of.” And no, I’d never heard of POCKET HARD DRIVE.
NYT: Okay, Amy – a couple of weeks ago you gave a puzzle a 2.5 rating because you’ve never eaten BOAR. Then today you give a puzzle with three not-very-idiomatic themers a 3.5??
Today’s theme was an interesting idea that needed a lot more work, “IMHO.”
NYT: Thematically weak and uninspired clues. It looks like a puzzle that comes out of Stan Newman’s assembly line.
I thought it was a clever idea and also impressive that theme answers were all grid spanning.
WSJ was indeed harder than expected, although I finished it without even worrying about which states appear, and TRUMEAU and PULI, as Jim notes, are particular reaches. But I don’t understand why a SMUDGE is a problem for lefties, and I don’t think of tenure as a PERK.
With a perk, you’re more or less as secure as ever in a job, but you get something free almost like a tip but from the company, like use of a car. Tenure is what ensures you have a job next year. The practice has been criticized as stifling opportunity for others and handing older faculty a salary without much in the way of job responsibilities or openness to students. But then reliance on adjuncts can be a cost-cutter at the expense of students, who get a teacher with no experience, less knowledge, and more care for job hunting for next year’s post than for students. I can tell you that at first hand, since I had one as thesis advisor, and it was a disster. End of my academic career.
I think the SMUDGE problem for lefties is because they tend to drag their hand across the paper they’ve just written on. I think there was a clue/answer along these lines recently in the NYT.
I agree that PERK is a little bit off for tenure, but probably not a fatal flaw. I had tenure before I retired, and thought of it as “earned job security,” as opposed to a bonus or extra like a car or free parking (which I didn’t have).
By the time I retired, my institution was making extensive use of adjunct faculty (we called them “fixed-term faculty”). It was a mixed bag for our students – some of the adjuncts were exceptional teachers, others, not-so-much. My institution had a form of job security for adjuncts – after 3 or 4 years of good performance, they were put on 3-year rolling contracts – not TENURE, but a lot better job security than you get in the private sector.
John – I’m surprised that you had an adjunct as a thesis advisor. That would not happen where I taught (although there were probably adjuncts who would do as-good or better job as an advisor than a tenured faculty member.)
It was only an undergraduate thesis, not for a PhD, but yeah it wasn’t supposed to be that way, and it was pretty devastating. I won’t trouble folks here on anything so complicated and way off-topic.
WSJ: Interesting how different folks have troubles in different areas. Unlike the reviewer, I thought PULI and WEEB were two gimmes in a surprisingly tough puzzle. I initially had reservations with TONEARM being part of a turntable, because (as an audiophile) my tonearm was purchased separately from my turntable and I have never considered them to be one entity. But I concede that most folks purchase a turntable with inbuilt tonearm, so the clue and answer work.
Never, ever, heard of a TRUMEAU.
NYT: I’ve worked in IT for 20+ years and have never heard of a pocket hard drive.
I googled ‘pocket hard drive’ and got an Amazon link — featuring portable hard drives. I’m not techie but this was odd to me too.
I, too, was somewhat addled by that one. Could POCKET be a verb referring to a thief who steals a disk from the store???
Pocket hard drive was a thing about 20 years ago. (About when IBM last made PCs.)
Memory sticks maxed out at around 1 GB and if you wanted more you needed magnetic storage. Enter the micro-miniature hard drive, aka the pocket hard drive. Today we have multi-terabyte memory sticks, so a 5 GB tiny hard drive seems laughable.
WSJ: I didn’t time myself, but with the exception of the vocabulary-expanding TRUMEAU, I didn’t run into anything problematic.
I didn’t much care for THROTTLE clued as [Choke] crossing BEHEAD and ENSLAVE. It made that whole SE corner a bit depressing.
BEHEAD was the one that got me. Gross. I grunted at ENSLAVE, too. Neither term should be breakfast fare.
I just saw this interview with Will Shortz at Rex. https://www.brainandlife.org/articles/crossword-editor-will-shortz-says
Sorry if it’s a dupe
WSJ–I had most of the same problems noted above, but also it was inconsistent to have OH at the beginning of the answers when all of the other state abbreviations were at the end.
That was kind of strange. At first I guessed that others on the left side would have the state start things out, too, as opposed to those on the right, but no.
NYT: Echoes of this puzzle by Trip Payne: https://www.xwordinfo.com/Crossword?date=5/31/2006&g=59&d=A