Alina Abidi’s New York Times Crossword — Sophia’s review
Hi folks! Happy to be back covering after the end of the NYT tech guild strike.
New York Times, 11 15 2024, By Alina Abidi
I loved the vibes of Alina’s puzzle! So many of the long answers felt fun and conversational. A couple that stood out to me are RARING TO GO, YOU’RE NOT WRONG, DON’T TELL ME, EVER HEARD OF IT, I CAN SEE YOU. Actually, almost none of the long answers are proper nouns, which I think will make the puzzle more interesting and accessible to different groups of people. I normally don’t care much about duplicated words in puzzles, but RARING TO GO and I’VE GOTTA GO felt a little egregious to me, because it uses the same word in the same context/similar length answers.
Things that were tricky for me included TETE A TETES and SOUPÇONS (me, looking at the first 5/8ths of this answer: “…. soup cans??”). I didn’t know Henry LUCE or ERMA Franklin. I studied math in college but I wasn’t familiar with the word IDEMPOTENT. My tech background was helpful for knowing LINUX, EVICTS as clued, and Kara SWISHER.
Other thoughts – very elegant to have CARL crossing SAGAN. My two favorite clues in the puzzle were [Macy’s or Wendy’s, for instance?] for HERS, and [Library section that may have comic books and beanbags] for TEENS, just because of its specificity – I can confirm that I spent a *lot* of time on the teen section beanbags of my local library back in the day.
Happy Friday all!
Mark McClain’s Los Angeles Times crossword — pannonica’s write-up
LAT • 11/15/24 • Fri • McClain • solution • 20241115
Everything is out of whack, courtesy of negating prefixes.
- 17a. [People less likely to appear in a police lineup?] UNUSUAL SUSPECTS.
- 26a. [Institute of weird learning?] ABNORMAL SCHOOL.
- 42a. [Salad dressing ingredient that has to be special ordered?] NONSTANDARD OIL.
- 55a. [Group of TV episodes shown out of order?] IRREGULAR SEASON.
Yeah, I’m feeling it.
- 1d [Scant Wikipedia article] STUB. That’s the terminology.
- 19d [London coppers] PENCE. Coins, not police.
- 24d [Obsolete display type] PLASMA. LCD won the day. LED too?
- 28d [Feels sorrowful] MOURNS. 47a [Reject] SPURN.
- 49d [Bear in the night] URSA. You have to be conversant in crossword tropes to get the constellation reference right away.
- 14a [Prohibited by social custom] TABOO. 11d [Sense of appropriateness] TACT.
- 15a [Showroom selection] AUTO, not DEMO.
- 16a [Not fancy at all] HATE. 33a [Not fancy at all] PLAIN.
- 22a [Really bug] EATS AT. 5d [“Dinner’s ready!”] SOUP’S ON.
- 36a [Stand the test of time] LAST. 50a [Stand up to] DEFY.
And there we are.
Mike Graczyk’s Universal crossword, “Poetry in Motion”—Jim’s review
Theme answers are familiar phrases with types of poems found scrambled within.
Universal crossword solution · “Poetry in Motion” · Mike Graczyk · Fri., 11.15.24
- 17a. [Easy life, metaphorically (In this answer, unscramble letters 2-4)] BED OF ROSES. Ode.
- 25a. [San Jose’s country (… letters 1-8)] COSTA RICA. Acrostic.
- 40a. [“Funny you should mention that …” (… letters 6-10)] “STRANGELY ENOUGH…” Elegy.
- 50a. [Elsa’s creation in “Frozen” (… letters 1-4)] ICE PALACE. Epic.
- 64a. [Unchangeable (… letters 5-10)] SET IN STONE. Sonnet.
I only blog the Universal on Fridays, and it seems like every Friday puzzle has circles in them these days. It’s not the circles I mind, it’s the outlandish square-counting tips in the clues that drive me nutty. I can’t imagine anyone bothering to count squares whether they have circles in their grid or not.
But that’s not an issue with the puzzle, just the venue. As for the puzzle, I personally am not going to try to resolve an 8-letter scramble when I’m solving for time, so I solved this as a themeless, and had an enjoyable time doing it. Good choice of theme answers and some fun long fill.
It was only afterward that I looked at the circled squares. That COSTA RICA / ACROSTIC find is pretty impressive.
Top fill entries are the opposing (and rhyming, I might add) colloquial phrases, “ARE WE DONE?” and “THIS IS FUN!” Honorable mentions go to “I HAD TO” and the name MIGUEL which we don’t see in crosswords very much.
Fave clue: 53d. [Do the dishes?] for CATER.
Overall, a nice puzzle. 3.5 stars.
I liked the casual phrases in the NYT, although the combo of RARINGTOGO and IVEGOTTAGO bothered me too. A lot of names, but the only one I didn’t know was IMAN. I vaguely remembered IDEMPOTENT from long ago, but EVICTS, as clued, was new to me.
The NW corner was last to fall. I was thinking SOCK rather than LACE, and despite seeing BLINI regularly in crosswords and the Spelling Bee, I don’t believe I’ve ever seen one in the wild and couldn’t tell you exactly what they are.
Oh, and EXT in a film script? Means what — extra, maybe?
I think EXT is “external”. At the start of a script it might say
Cafe, ext
(aka a cafe outside)
Int would mean the scene takes place inside.
I could be wrong!
BLINI are thin pancakes of Eastern European origin. In Russian, BLINI is plural and the singular is properly “blin”; in English, BLINI is both singular and plural.
EXT in a film script is an abbreviation of “exterior,” for the very common shot that establishes where a scene takes place.
Sam would disagree. He takes BLIN in the Bee as the (English) singular.
Ah — but is Sam accepting BLINI as singular or plural?
He takes BLIN and BLINI, so I assume it’s singular and plural, as per M-W.
Despite my joking comment yesterday regarding HEME, I’m unconvinced of Sam’s authority with respect to English vocab.
(He wouldn’t accept PALMATE today, for crying out loud!)
IDEMPOTENT comes up in linear algebra; I was a bit surprised to see it in a puzzle, though giving the Latin roots probably helped.
Pretty good Friday puzzle; felt like there was a lot of proper names, but it worked out reasonably well with the crossings. And the French OISEAU was new to me…
“Linear algebra” takes the cake, in my opinion, for most deceptively named math class. I remember taking it in college. “Oh, I love lines.” Hahaha, I had a lot to learn.
Nyt: Loved the macys / Wendy’s clue.
Hated the Canard / Emue clue. Personally I feel writing an entire clue in french and having the answer be a word in french that the average person wouldn’t know, is pretty egregious.
I’m not understanding the answer to this clue, could you please explain?
NYT: enjoyable Friday but personally Naticked with EVICTS/OISEAU/LUCE. I need to get up to speed on my sysadmin, French and magazine magnates.
As as math major, never heard of IDEMPOTENT either, but gettable from the crosses. Thought EXPONENT would be part of it.
All in all, nice puzzle!
NYT: I don’t quite know why, but I loved this puzzle. I had some of the same issues others did, especially names, but somehow it worked. It helped to know French to unlock entire areas.
Maybe because the puzzle had this combination of tough clue/answers and familiar phrases that opened up an entire segment that together made it fun?
Same here. I ended up liking it a lot.
When starting out trying to get some footholds, I was thinking “How terrible!! I hate this!” because of so many names I didn’t know(5 not counting Carl Sagan, who was a dreaded/hated cross-reference). But they all came together, esp. with help from the conversational and gettable long acrosses. I didn’t have to look anything up after all and was happy at the end.
Had to look up after the fact what A24 meant in 19a. I’m not much into horror movies.
had a bit of a shiver at seeing Cornell, after just coming off reading the news of the suspension of a frat at Cornell, and allegations that the goings-on were nothing new :( .
I didn’t recognize A24 — the list of company names at the beginning of a contemporary movie is often ridiculously long — but they’re hardly limited to horror movies. Their name is attached to“Everything Everywhere All At Once,” “Moonlight,” “Uncut Gems,” “Lady Bird,” which is an impressive and diverse portfolio.
I knew Rory Kinnear from seeing the “Penny Dreadful” series on Netflix, but I don’t remember hearing about the movie MEN.
I saw “Men” in the theater. Not a spoiler but the final scene is, um, quite a scene. Something you couldn’t possibly forget even if you tried (which in my opinion is also true of another A24 movie, “Lamb”).
Thanks.
We used to see a lot of movies in theaters, but COVID killed that.
Agreed! A challenge here and there but some fun conversational fill and CARL crossing SAGAN was great.
I’d mixed feelings. Most of the informal long entries worked, and some of the obscure fill was intriguing. Say, I could swear I don’t remember seeing IDEMPOTENT in math, and my first thought was that it’s just a fancy way of describing an identity element, which isn’t a word we really and truly need. Well, some actions basically get done only once. Say, you take the real part, and it’s real, so no point in taking it again. You collapse the wave function, and it evolves from there. But I’m not sure we need a word for that either. Maybe in computer science? Anyway, at least it got me curious, and the Latin did help. EXT left me puzzled, I admit.
On the other hand, there were names. I got IMAM from crossings, but MARA / ERMA was just an unpleasant guess.
I was a math major, and I’ll never forget IDEMPOTENT from a professor’s metaphor: he walks into class and says, “well, the action of the washing machine on my headphones was idempotent: I ran them through the wash once and they stopped working. I ran them through again by accident, and they still don’t work”
NYT: Enjoyed the puzzle, but finished with an error – TAD instead of TIP. Didn’t know the actor’s name, so that was just a guess. And I think of PING as more of an action than a notification sound. I like to cook, so it seemed reasonable that I might add a TAD of some ingredient to a pot – but TIP is clearly a better answer.
I am a software developer and have never heard that usage for evict, although there was nothing else it could be with the crossings. And I agree with you about ping – you hear a ding if somebody pings you. So that led to tad, not knowing the actor’s name either.
I also had TAD there.
If you Google MACY, it says it’s a gender neutral name.
BTW, the WSJ meta is relatively accessible again this week.
Thanks! I’ve been busy today (for me) and would have forgotten about it.
LAT: 1D “Scant Wikipedia article” is a stub. (Pannonica typoed “stab” as the answer instead.)
oops! Fixed.