Tuesday, November 12, 2024

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Matt Jones’s Jonesin’ Crossword, “The Follow-Up” —- there’s a replacement. – Erin’s write-up

Hello lovelies! This week Matt has expressed his thoughts on the recent election by substituting the letters FU for five letters in the theme entries.

• 17a. [British elevator that flat-out doesn’t work?] FUBAR LIFT (T-BAR LIFT)
• 23a. [Movie star known for silly and bumbling characters?] SCREEN DOOFUS (SCREEN DOORS)
• 36a. [“This event totally reminds me of a traveling carnival”?] THAT IS SO FUNFAIR (THAT IS SO UNFAIR)
• 48a. [Two focuses of a Grateful Dead-themed vegan restaurant?] TOFU AND JERRY (TOM AND JERRY)
• 59a. [Group that reports on a single Greek island?] NEWS CORFU (NEWS CORP)

Basically, the letters FU replace the letters T, R, U, M, and P in the theme entries.

Other things:

• 35d. [Cookie that partnered with Coca-Cola] OREO. Somehow they made Coke taste like an Oreo. My spouse buys a bottle if he sees it somewhere. We tried the cookies and couldn’t get past the tiny Pop Rocks pieces in the creme.

Until next week!

Seth Bisen-Hersh’s Wall Street Journal crossword, “Part-Timers”—Jim’s review

Theme answers around the perimeter of the grid are common words or well-known names that are also occupations. The revealer is SIDE JOB (36a, [Secondary gig, and a literal description of this puzzle]).

• 1a. [“Night and Day” songwriter Cole] PORTER.
• 7a. [R&B star who performed the 2024 Super Bowl halftime show] USHER.
• 14d. [Female goat] NANNY.
• 40d. [Manage] STEWARD.
• 67a. [Sewing machine brand] SINGER.
• 66a. [Small car or plane, perhaps] MODEL.
• 44d. [Drink very slowly] NURSE.
• 12d. [Sports shoe, to Brits] TRAINER.

Solid theme. Not so sure about the inclusion of STEWARD here because “managing” seems to be the essence of the job. All the other entries are different enough in meaning though.

I’ve read that themes that are around the perimeter of a grid are difficult to construct because of the constraints throughout the puzzle. That must have been the case here because there are a lot of thorny entries and crosswordese that really sapped the strength of the puzzle. I’m looking at REDOSE and REPAPER, RPS (when I was expecting the more common RPM), UTERI, French UNES, LES, and ETE along with Spanish LAS, and lastly GELEE [Styling goop]. This was my final word in the grid and left me on a sour note.

There are definite highlights though: TADPOLE, PAYPHONE, TEAM USA, DOE A DEER, GALOOT, and the theme adjacent WORK ETHIC. But mostly I felt worn down by the other gluier entries.

Clues of note:

• 24a. [“Minari” Oscar nominee Steven]. YEUN. I don’t remember hearing about this 2020 film about a Korean family moving to Arkansas in the 1980s, but it picked up numerous awards and nominations. You may know Steven YEUN better as Glenn from The Walking Dead.
• 49a. [Styling goop]. GELEE. Is this different than gel, and if it’s not, who would use this word? Most online dictionaries define this as a food substance.
• 61a. [Give the walls a new look]. REPAPER. With REPA_ in place, I went with the obvious REPAINT.

A fine theme is weighed down heavily by difficult fill. 2.75 stars.

Avery Gee Katz and Aaron Gee’s New York Times crossword — Eric’s review

If you missed it, the striking NYT Tech Guild members are returning to work on Tuesday and have called off the boycott of the NYT Games.

And congratulations to Aaron Gee, who is making his New York Times puzzle debut here.

Today’s theme is a bit long in the tooth. The revealer 51A [From which to hear the real story, as suggested by the starts of 20-, 26- and 51-Across] HORSE’S MOUTH tells us that each of the other theme answers incorporates a homonym of a word for a sound that a horse might make:

• 20A [Father ___, personification of New York City in old cartoons] KNICKERBOCKER
• 26A [Vocal skeptics] NAYSAYERS
• 51A [Bear who sings “I’m so rumbly in my tumbly”] WINNIE-THE-POOH (I take exception to this clue; I’ve read the Winnie-the-Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner books many times and don’t remember that being one of Pooh’s songs. There are lots of faux Pooh quotes on the internet, and I strongly suspect that this is one of them.)

Despite the questionable pedigree of the last theme entry, this is a solid Tuesday theme.

The grid is oversized (16 rows instead of the usual 15) and has vertical symmetry to accommodate the theme answers. Two of those are 13 letters long and can’t be any closer to the top and bottom than the fourth and 14th rows; the second 13-letter answer is pushed up to the 11th row.

Pushing the theme answers closer together often results in compromised fill, but the longer down answers here are for the most part pretty good:

• 10D [Bozos] JACKASSES (In my taxonomy, a jackass is someone more malevolent than an often clueless bozo, but the clue works.)
• 31D [Internet deep dive, metaphorically] RABBIT HOLE
• 33A [“Not a big deal”] IT’S NOTHING

Elizabeth C. Gorski’s Cr♥ssw♥rd Nation puzzle (Week 702), “It’s Just Common Sense!”—Ade’s take

Hello there, everyone! I hope all is well with you, or, at the very least, I hope you’re all doing as well as can be now that we’re one week removed from the Election Day results.  As always, for those who need to find comfort, here is hoping crosswords (and commentary about them) can provide just a little bit of that.

We have a pretty cute theme today, as puns are created by combining two different words and/or phrases that share the same word. The common word also happens to be one of the five senses also. Sorry, hearing, you’ll have to wait for the next sensory-related puzzle like this to be included!

• • • • SORRY SIGHTSEERS (16A: [Regretful group of tourists?])
      • MIDAS TOUCHDOWN (24A: [Gold-standard scoring play in football?])
      • FUNNY TASTEBUDS (44A: [Hilarious flavor detectors?])
      • NEW CAR SMELL TEST (59A: [Close scrutiny of a mint-condition automobile?])

Normally wouldn’t have a clue with anything plant-related, but I totally remembered HOSTAS because a former neighbor of mine (who filled his concrete backyard with Home Depot buckets where he raised a whole bunch of plants inside) showed me his plants and and was enamored with the hostas he had, which were like a whitish yellow color (42A: [Border plants]).  But, outside of that, my knowledge of plants is not worth a SOU (35D: [Old French coin]).  Have some old-school lingo in the grid that might be new to some solvers, with “cagers” referring to basketball players, particularly those in the NBA (31D: [Cagers’ gp.]), and the word ANAs as a name for what’s described in its clue (51D: [Literary collections])

“Sports will make you smarter” moment of the day: STYX (64A: [River of the underworld]) – I forgot if I mentioned this or not recently, but one of the highlights of Pittsburgh Steelers home games is during the beginning part of the fourth quarter, where the already-frenzied fans inside the stadium wave their Terrible Towels more vigorously when Styx’s “Renegade” blares over the public address system. It’s one of the newer fan traditions in the National Football League, and one of the most intimidating.

“The jig is up! The news is out! They finally found me! … “

Thank you so much for the time, everybody! Have a wonderful and safe rest of your day and, as always, keep solving!

Take care!

Ade/AOK

Darby Ratliff & Amie Walker’s Los Angeles Times crossword — Jenni’s write-up

Cute! We have circles, here represented by orange letters.

• 17a [Embarrass one’s friends in public, say] is MAKE A SCENE.
• 26a [Resort to desperate measures] is CLUTCH AT STRAWS.
• 42a [Cartoon character often depicted as a spinning tornado] is the TASMANIAN DEVIL.

So we’ve got MANE, CLAWS, and TAIL. Clearly there’s an animal lurking in our puzzle. But which one? 56a [Answer to the joke “What is the lazy pride member known for?” and an apt title for this puzzle?] is LION AROUND. See? Cute!

What I didn’t know before I did this puzzle: that SYFY has? had? a program called “Resident Alien.” Without looking it up, I suspect it involves little green men, not green cards.

Alexander Liebeskind + Jeff Chen’s Universal Crossword, “Time and Time Again” (ed. David Steinberg) — Matt F’s Review

We have a cheeky revealer today based on a famous quote from Winston Churchill:

• 60A – [British prime minister who might say that this puzzle is doomed to repeat itself?] = CHURCHILL

The quote, from 1948: “Those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”

In the theme, there are 3 “pieces” of history repeated in each answer:

• 17A – [Like some matching towel sets] = HIS AND HIS
• 27A – [Fought it out] = WENT TOE TO TOE
• 44A – [Town crier’s shout] = HEAR YE HEAR YE

HIS-TO-RY, HIS-TO-RY, aha! The theme set is not without its flaws, having “his” unhidden in the first, and a third “to” in the 2nd. Only the third theme answer hits all the notes of a “perfect themer” by disguising the substring across a word break. But hey, these conventions are not so black and white, and are often broken by necessity in order to make the theme work. Such is the case today.

The grid is filled nicely around the theme, with fun bonus words throughout: TRAMPOLINE, WATER BREAK, SAY UNCLE, and SAND EELS. I thought [Hop on it!] was a fun clue for the first. I also found joy in the small things. like CEDE crossing CCED. Overall, this is a well-designed puzzle!

Aimee Lucido’s New Yorker crossword — pannonica’s write-up

In a themeless like this it’s often the longest entries that impart the character of the puzzle and establish whether the solving experience is memorable. There are some pretty good ones here.

• 24a [Nursery-rhyme boy with a rhyming name] GEORGIE PORGIE. (31d [Intro to children’s literature?] ONCE.)
• 39a [Entrée that Panda Express calls its “signature dish”] ORANGE CHICKEN.
• 9d [Shot with a salty chaser] PICKLE BACK. Not sure I want to know exactly what this is, but I assume instead of a water chaser it’d be a pickle juice chaser. Incidentally, apparently today is National Happy Hour Day.
• 23d [Baby] MOLLYCODDLE.

Now let’s tour the rest.

• 12a [Religious or cultural renegade] ICONOCLAST. Always liked this word.
• 16a [Bakers’ inner circles?] DONUT HOLES. Nice.
• 29a [“Warrior” actor Nick] NOLTE. 22d [Arnold Schwarzenegger’s character in the movie “Predator,” e.g.] PREY. Are these clues setting a weird mood? Also, I feel that predator and prey are too close etymologically.
• 38a [Croquet alternative] BOCCE. I suspected that this might be a trick clue, but it turns out that croquet is not an acceptable alternate spelling of croquette.
• 51a [One prone to wandering?] DAYDREAMER, bunking with 55a [Person who might not need an alarm] EARLY RISER. (26d [Strange bedfellows] ODD COUPLE.)
• 58a [Machines in the Sahara?] SLOTS. It’s a famous casino.
• 4d [Bearded beast] GNU. Such a tired clue.
• 11d [Boorish] CRASS. Needed a crossing to confirm that it wasn’t CRUDE.
• 48d [Chuck, slangily] YEET. Have we all got this in our vocabularies yet, or is there still outcry?
• 37d [Bamako’s country] MALI.