LAT 2:38 (Stella)
Newsday 20:16 (pannonica)
NYT 6:55 (Kyle)
Universal tk (Matthew)
USA Today tk (Matthew)
WSJ untimed (pannonica)
Mike Shenk’s Wall Street Journal crossword, “Wait and Seek” — pannonica’s write-up
WSJ • 11/16/24 • Sat • “Wait and Seek” • Shenk • solution • 20241116
I don’t know whether anyone else was considering it, but the title isn’t a play on “hide and seek”. Instead it’s “wait and see”, so we parse it as wait and see K, for the letter K sound is attached to the ends of the theme phrases, adjusting spelling as necessary. Unfortunately, calling the puzzle “Wait and Heark” would not work at all. (30a [Found out, in a way] HEARD.)
- 21a. [Stretch when the paper contains only opinion pieces?] EDITORIAL WEEK (editorial we).
- 31a. [Ostentatious oddball?] FANCY FREAK (fancy free).
- 50a. [Stroke of luck in Seville?] SPANISH FLUKE (… flu).
- 69a. [Peer in the Pyrenees, perhaps?] MOUNTAIN DUKE (… Dew).
- 87a. [Material for a really lightweight boat?] MARINE CORK (… Corps).
- 103a. [Misfit on a merry-go-round?] REVOLVING DORK (… door).
- 3d. [Disguise for a reviewer?] CRITICAL MASK (… mass). Or an N95, for example.
- 57d. [Commander in the baby-delivering forces?] GENERAL STORK (… store).
These were pretty fun.
Not part of the theme DESPITE (74a) being a longish entry ending in K: 13d [Noted resident of Prinsengracht 263] ANNE FRANK.
- 2d [“The Burghers of Calais” artist] RODIN. There are six figures in all and, judging by images I’ve seen of various castings and displays, it appears that there is no prescribed relative arrangement for them.
- 10d [Dunvegan denial] NAE. 16d [Dunkerque denial] NON.
- 41d [Black __ (bygone police vans] MARIAS. The etymology is uncertain, but Wikipedia collects some of the lore.
- 42d [Wise] SAPIENT. As in, for instance, pearwood.
- 50d [Sacred spot] SHRINE, crossing 54a [Worship of divine beings called “kami”] SHINTO. My cat’s name derives in part from the name of Shinto shrine maidens.
- 76d [Boom, e.g.] SPAR. Nautical. Followed by 78d [Toward the wake] ASTERN.
- 94d [Symbols of oppression] YOKES. 5d [Ready for pulling the plow, perhaps] SHOD. 93d [58-Down, e.g.] HORSE. (58d [Track has-been] OLD NAG.) Kind of a bleak collection.
- 89a [Teegarden of TV’s “Friday Night Lights”] AIMEE. I didn’t know the answer, but with the first couple of letters I decided to try AIMEE, consciously influenced by the double-E in her surname.
(I discovered that contemporarily there were both an English and Australian footballers named Jack Armstrong—so I have a tenuous connection here.) - 96d [Nation whose capital is the highest in Europe] ANDORRA. That’s a really interesting bit of trivia that I don’t recall ever learning before. It’s Andorra la Vella, elevation 1,023 m (3,356 ft), and of course is located in the Pyrenees (see 69-across).
Fun crossword. On to the Stumper!
Peter Gordon’s New York Times crossword – Kyle’s write-up
The New York Times solution grid – Peter Gordon – Saturday 11/16/2024
Peter Gordon’s byline hasn’t appeared on a NY Times themeless puzzle since 2016, though I believe he produces themelesses regularly for his Fireball series. I was curious to see what would be in store in this 66-word puzzle.
- [Phrase on ID tags] FAMOUS POTATOES. Outstanding clue! That’s ‘ID’ as in Idaho, and ‘tags’ as in license plates.
- The other 14-letter entry, JAZZ ORCHESTRAS, has those jazzy Z’s but the clue is more straightforward [Big bands]. Vague at first, but I was able to fill it in with a couple of letters.
- SAFARI HAT also gets a tricky clue: [Something to wear while watching the game]. Had to get a lot of crosses for this one, which gave me a nice aha moment.
- Enjoyed learning this piece of trivia: [Subject of New York City’s first public statue of a woman (1915)] JOAN OF ARC. Sculpted by Anna Hyatt Huntington, located at 93rd Street and Riverside Drive.
- Also learned [Ballerina who popularized “The Nutcracker”]–that’s Maria TALLCHIEF, first prima ballerina of the New York City Ballet who danced the role of the Sugar Plum Fairy in George Balanchine’s 1954 production. She was a member of the Osage Nation.
- I liked seeing TAOISEACH in the grid. That’s the official title for the [Prime minister of Ireland], which is the Irish word for “leader”. (not the name of the Irish prime minister, currently Simon Harris). Approximately pronounced tee-shuck, with the final sound being closer to the sound of ch in “loch”.
- It feels like the clue for HUSKIES [College basketball powerhouse] is a step removed from the answer–no doubt the powerhouse in question is University of Connecticut, but from there you have to get to the name of the team. This applies to both the men’s and women’s teams.
I’ll leave it at that. Thanks Peter for an interesting puzzle. Fiend readers, what did you think of it?
Zhouqin Burnikel’s Los Angeles Times crossword — Stella’s write-up
Los Angeles Times 11/16/24 by Zhouqin Burnikel
Afraid I have little time to comment today, so I will say two things:
- Too easy
- Wouldn’t be a Zhouqin Burnikel puzzle without multiple references to good things to eat and drink, like MANGO LASSI, SEA SCALLOP, ROE clued as [Eggs on top of toast Skagen], HOT SAUCES, and MAPO tofu.
If you’re ever in Scandinavia, try toast Skagen. It’s awesome, and despite its simple-looking appearance, I have not been able to find a suitable recreation at a NYC restaurant or make it properly at home.
Lester Ruff’s Newsday crossword, Saturday Stumper — pannonica’s write-up
Newsday • 11/16/24 • Saturday Stumper • Ruff, Newman • solution • 20241116
My experience was not that of a ‘less rough’ puzzle, but as always your mileage may vary.
The black squares in the grid describe a sort of hybrid pinwheel/crosshairs design. It flows mostly all right, but there are bottlenecks leading from the central eye to the corner sections.
The route for my solve was: upper right, some of center, lower right, more of center, lower left, upper left.
- 1a [Bowling center facility] SNACK BAR. Needed many crossings here. The first was 8d [Jane Eyre addressee] READER, then 3d [Loblike] ARCED. But it wasn’t until I took a half-guess on 5d [Earliest (1901) of Modern Library’s 100 best 2oth century novels] KIM that it cracked; suddenly 4d [Schedule fillers] CPAS—based on the CK combo—revealed itself and I finally hit on SNACK BAR.
- 9a [Second male Open Era career Grand Slam achiever (1999)] AGASSI. Took an educated guess here and confirmed it with the crossing G in 10d [Fooled] GOT.
- 16a [Whom Sotomayor succeeded] SOUTER. I feel as if I should have known this outright, but needed crossings.
- 19a [Tiny platforms] TEES. Surprisingly tough clue for me.
- 20a [More or less] ODD, not ISH.
- 24a [Goddess on the Medal of Honor] MINERVA. Was temporarily stymied when the obvious notion of Athena didn’t fit. 18a [Helmet accessories] STRAPS.
- 29a [Deliberation location] JURY ROOM. Suspected the ROOM part early on, but needed crossings to confirm and also to get the first section.
- 30a [Took a course] ATE. Closest thing to a gimme that this puzzle yielded.
- 31a [“What makes human progress possible,” per FDR] FREEDOM. We’re about to have less of both FREEDOM and progress.
- 34a [Baby hamster] PUP. I was thinking it’d be either this or KIT and I was leaning toward the former.
- 35a [Every president from Washington to Biden] SON. Not MEN or MAN. So we can see that this crossword was locked in before the election.
- 39a [Wave-catching skill] ESP. I might dispute the clue, but ‘ESP’ is essentially being skilled at cold-reading and interpreting other subtle cues, so I feel it’s okay. 11d [Subjective surroundings] AURA.
- 54a [Sour expression] MOUE. Another early toehold, confirmed with 54d [What Meet the Beatles could be bought in] MONO, which didn’t fool me for a moment.
- 55a [Male name with two male name anagrams] RONALD. I don’t like this kind of clue. It might be interesting per se, but it’s decidedly unhelpful until it’s practically filled in via crossings. Didn’t help that misinterpreted the clue as meaning that was composed of two male name anagrams: LON + ?, ROD + ?, et al. So now let’s see … ROLAND and ARNOLD.
- 58a [Poker variety named for its sinuous card shifting] ANACONDA. Didn’t know this but the ‘sinuous’ in the clue was very helpful, along with a couple of crossings.
- 63a [Fancy bookends] GEODES. Accurate, but an odd clue. I have the same reaction to the crossing 31d [Part of many a baby picture] FLEECE RUG. They both feel idiosyncratic.
- 1d [Scrap] SET-TO. Was not considering a noun.
- 7d [DMV, somewhat controversially] ACRONYM. Not understanding the clue. Is it that some states call the entity something else, like Motor Vehicle Commission, but people still use the ACRONYM for Department of Motor Vehicles?
- 13d [Brady-era image] SEPIATONES. Once it clicked that the clue was about 19th century photographer Matthew Brady, famous for Civil War images, this was almost a gimme.
- 26d [Proof of purchase] VOUCHER, not RECEIPT.
- 29d [Very dark] JET. There was a Learned League question about this a few days ago, and I got it wrong.
- 33d [In which krucvorto is “crossword”] ESPERANTO. I kind of guessed on this one, based on how weird but also familiar the word looked.
- 42d [It’s in the etymology of “penny”] PFENNIG. Helps to know a little German!
- 48d [Depp role on horseback] TONTO. I was kind of thinking it would be Ichabod CRANE, but that wasn’t working with any potential crossings.
- 49d [The first “all-aluminum” autos (1994)] AUDIS. Unsure why the quotes. Without investigating at all, I’m also thinking that whichever models are being referenced were the first production autos so constructed. It seems there would have been prototypes decades earlier?
- 52d [Related] SAID. 42a [Articulates] PHRASES.
- 57d [Filler/driller designation] DDS. Oh right, this was another easy answer.
- 60d [Beverage or bus alternative] CAB. I get the taxicab vs omnibus part, but not the beverage one. I can only think of cabernet [sauvignon], but that is a beverage, not an alternative to one.
How did this Stumper treat you?
In the Stumper, I loved 7-D, seven letters, “DMV, somewhat controversially.” Funny and persnickety, though I wouldn’t say there’s any controversy, really. But maybe I’m being persnickety.
Ha, came here to gripe a bit about this clue. Is it controversial because technically an acronym gets pronounced as a word, like NASA? If so, I think the clue is silly. It only works if calling DMV an acronym is iconic in some way. Like “DMV is an acronym” is some sort of meme in society. But it’s not, as far as I know. Calling DMV an acronym is just wrong.
Unless this is an example of the Stumper giving a very specific clue for a general thing. Like, there’s nothing specific about DMV, it could’ve been any initialism, and the Stumper just picked one at random.
And maybe your liking the clue and my griping is exactly proof of the controversy. So I may have talked myself into liking the clue, at least for a Stumper!
As I wrote, I don’t think there is a genuine controversy, because DMV is an initialism, not an acronym. It’d be like saying there’s a controversy about whether the earth is round or flat. No, there’s no controversy. But people might get it wrong and refer to DMV as an acronym. I just like seeing a clue that calls attention to the difference between an acronym and an initialism. (I’m a Garner’s Modern English Usage kind of guy.) I also like the rhyme of “DMV” and “controversially.”
According to M-W, an initialism may also be called an acronym. I think we found the controversy. :)
M-W has zero authority about anything but how English is used.
They make little or no attempt to point out mistakes.
This is the new utopia of descriptive lexicography.
I wonder if linguists have a term for a word that the academics and grammarians tried their best to keep out the dictionaries, but found it’s way in, nonetheless, by sheer force of popular usage. “Acronym”, as a synonym for “initialism”, seems to be one such word. I noticed Wiktionary listed a definition for “supposably” as a “nonstandard” version of “supposedly”; have more prestigious sources given in on that one, too? Up till a few years ago, I personally would gladly have died upon the hill of Don’t Use Literally To Mean “Metaphorically”!–I waved that flag every chance I got. But, as a commenter on this blog schooled me, popular usage has entrenched “literally” in the collective psyche as a colloquial intensifier that only appears to be a synonym for “metaphorically”. To me, it’s useful to have “acronym” mean one thing and “initialism” another; but that’s just not how the people want it.
For two weeks I suffered some pretty severe Comma Trauma, when I just couldn’t write one more sentence with a comma inappropriately *inside* the quotation marks. I had to ask myself some Big Life Questions like, Does the fact that this is self-evidently wrong, to me, legitimize my defiance of a universally (within the US) accepted standard? I mean, it seemed to me like shoving a comma inside the quotation marks every chance you got was just young America demarcating its identity separate from Britain, like with the metric system. I don’t do that anymore, I put my commas where they should be; but getting to that point was a long, hard road. And I wonder how many people would have to be doing that to actually constitute a PREscriptive usage of which the dictionaries and grammar guides were DEscriptive, rather than vice versa.
Same comma/quote dynamic for me.
You might want to dive into a few style manuals. The “Chicago Manual of Style,” “U.S. Govt Printing Office Style Manual,” “U. of Oxford Style Guide,” and my favorite for the last 65 years, “Elements of Style “ by Strunk & White, all place the comma and end periods within the quote marks.
Yeah, my point is that it’s wrong. Those books saying to do that, they’re wrong. It shouldn’t be that way. A period or comma that is the bodily property of a sentence cannot ethically be hijacked by quotation-marked material unless the sentence and the material utilely share said punctuation mark. It’s ugly, prescriptivist dogma.
I’m well aware of the various style manuals’ recommendations. For this bit of orthography they’re dogmatic and illogical, in thrall to misplaced aesthetics.
Nothing crossword-related: I’m not much of a “streaks” or “statistics” guy when it comes to puzzles – and I don’t entirely understand why the NYT wants to impose them on me.
I usually, but not always, do the end-of-week “news quiz” on the Times site, and it insists on telling me whether my score is “above,” “below,” or “near” my recent average. For as long as I can remember, the quiz consists of 11 multiple-choice questions (sometimes there’s a question that has more than one correct response, and you can get partial credit for selecting at least one correct response). Last week, for some reason, the quiz had 15 questions. I believe I scored 14-of-15, and the NYT congratulated me – I had “scored above your recent average.”
Today, we’re back to the traditional 11-question quiz. I managed to score a perfect 11-of-11. The message from the NYT was “You scored 11 out of 11. Congratulations! That’s below your recent average.”
Gotta love the NYT!
I assume that the streak tracking is to encourage people to come back and theoretically be exposed to more ads (though I don’t see any ads in the Games app or the “paper” itself, since I have an ad blocker on my browser).
That’s funny about your News Quiz “average.”
Here’s what it told me:
You scored 11 out of 11. Congratulations! That’s above your recent average.
Pretty easy this week.
I wish there were an option to turn off the statistics, since I don’t even want to know them.
I’ve never done one. Not my thing. But prompted by this thread of friends, I gave it a shot, not hoping for much from how a quiz might happen to run. I got 10 of 11, though, and it may not surprise anyone who has listened to my rants that the one I missed was the Grammys.
It of course wouldn’t be a massive challenge to program the bot so that it remembers your percentage rather than your total. Perhaps the shift to more questions was an accident, however well motivated, that they don’t plan often to repeat, so it didn’t seem worth the effort to change the formula. Amusing for sure all the same.
“I don’t entirely understand why the NYT wants to impose them on me.”
I share your confusion. I put up with it to do the crossword (I know I could solve it in other, unmeasured ways, but I find it much easier to just use the website)–even though all the statistics really stunt my enjoyment of the pastime. I do not need to compete with myself; or worry that all lack of progress against my statistics is evidence of cognitive decline. Recently I was surprised to discover just how completely I reject these metrics when they were added to Connections and I stopped playing it immediately. I didn’t intend to, I was merely disgruntled. But I never went back, either.
Stumper: That clue on CPAS is bruuuttttal. In a good Stumper way. Raise your hand if you had TBAS at some point. That section was by far the hardest for me, partly due to this. I had to see SMACK BAR with the wrong T in place for me to finally finish it.
(Raises hand) Yep! I had TBA!
*raises hand cause i had tbas the whole way through and could. not. let. it. go*
FLEECE RUG? That one feels like a phrase that fit the grid and desperately needed a clue.
I couldn’t come up with any well-known 3-letter novels, and KIM still hasn’t rung any bells for me.
MUssELS before MUD EELS.
Like @pannonica, I thought of Crane before TONTO filled in.
Easy for a Stumper but it had its moments.
I couldn’t come up with Kim, either. Perhaps because I read it long ago and don’t think of it as “great” — it was good, though. By Kipling, by the way. I must admit to looking it up and that’s the only way I finished that upper left section. I wasn’t fond of “fleece rug,” either — I thought of bear rugs first. The one that puzzles me, though is 28A “bag” — I guess it’s in the sense of “bag it”?
my fairly confident plonk on the 3-letter novel was she… which unfortunately for me is about 13 years too early
I believe the 60D clue is to be read as if there were a command after the first word.
In my no doubt biased memory, it was Peter Gorden who, as editor of a departed New York newspaper, enforced the new idea of a puzzle that you just have to know a lot of stuff to complete. I hated it then and still do now in the NYT today (and much of TNY puzzles). The NW was particularly egregious.
Re NYT: I agree that 9D felt too removed from the clue..I was brainstorming colleges for a long time there and felt frustrated because I know college basketball pretty well. And ASHES/USHES (is this really a word) surprised me – NYT editors have denied my puzzle before for basically the same similarity between crosses.
stumper – defeated once again by the downs only challenge… i caved at the 90′ mark and opened the across clues… which made me only more confused until i did a full check and saw just how wrong i was… on the plus side, i got most of the right side on my own… i just wish i knew how people were so good at this, maybe it just takes practice but i dont know how or when :(
you tried the newsday saturday stumper downs only???? i don’t know if i know anyone who’s successfully done that
Yes, that’s a wild thing to do.
people on twitch do it on the regular and are very good at it… they declared downs only too easy so now they also use a program that in addition to downs only replaces a third of the words at random with the word “turtle”… they’re not so bad at that too
NYT Can someone please explain how the answer to 34A is ADDS?
Someone who adds makes sums.
Aha. Weak. Thank you