Monday, November 25, 2024

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dena R. Witkes’s New York Times crossword— Sophia’s write-up

Happy Monday folks! I’m on Thanksgiving vacation so just a quick write up today. Congrats to Dena on her NYT debut!

Theme: each theme answer begins with a word that can also be an action taken on social media.

• 17a [*Corporate investor] – SHAREHOLDER
• 27a [*Difficult to wrangle, per an idiom] – LIKE HERDING CATS
• 44a [*Advice to someone seeking happiness] – FOLLOW YOUR BLISS
• 59a [Modern networking aid, as suggested by the starts of the answers to the starred clues] – SOCIAL MEDIA

SHARE, LIKE, and FOLLOW are all classic social media related words, so much so that they almost feel quaint in the social-media saturated landscape we’re in now. I like that Dena chose phrases in SHAREHOLDER and LIKE HEARDING CATS that totally change the meaning of the social media verb. I use the HERDING CATS idiom all the time as well so that was a personal favorite answer. This puzzle played very easy for me – I solved it on my phone rather than my laptop (because vacation) and I still ended up with a faster than average time. Curious how it felt, difficulty-wise, for other people.

Clue highlights: The [Pesky insect]/[Pesky kid] clue repetition for GNAT/IMP, [Miss Piggy’s pronoun] for MOI, [Las Vegas A’s] for ACES (poor Oakland though :( )

Fill highlights: I LOVE IT, FIREMEN. And a personal highlight – I went to Crater Lake in OREGON for the first time last month, it was absolutely beautiful.

New to me: that 72 is PAR on many golf courses

Alan DerKazarian’s Wall Street Journal crossword, “Lunch Time”—Jim’s review

Theme answers are familiar phrases whose outer letters spell a slang word for money. The revealer is LETTUCE WRAP (61a, [Low-carb lunch, and a hint to the answers with circles]).

• 17a. [Walter White’s show] BREAKING BAD.
• 25a. [Seller of Razr phones] MOTOROLA.
• 39a. [“As if!”] “DON’T MAKE ME LAUGH.”
• 51a. [Michigan governor Whitmer] GRETCHEN.

A fine theme, but I think I would have liked it better if the slang words were more modern. “Green” might be the only one that people still use nowadays. The rest are pretty dated.

Not much to highlight in the fill, but I do like HOAGIE, ROB ROY, BIG EASY, and BY GUM. I struggled with AMAIN [With all one’s might, formerly] which seems pretty archaic for a Monday.

Clue of note: 1d. [Sailor, informally]. GOB. I went with TAR. To me,, GOB is Brit-speak for “mouth.”

A mostly smooth grid, but not a lot that makes it stand out. 3.25 stars.

Sean Ziebarth’s Los Angeles Times crossword — Stella’s write-up

Relatively simple theme today: The revealer at 68A [Some surprise hit songs, and what 1-, 21-, 37-, and 53-Across all have?], is B-SIDES, meaning that each theme entry both starts and ends with the letter B:

• 1A [The Dynamic Duo’s underwater craft] is BAT-SUB.
• 21A [Navigational aid for Hansel and Gretel] is BREADCRUMB.
• 37A [Many a union position] is BLUE-COLLAR JOB.
• 53A [Firefox or Safari subwindow] is BROWSER TAB.

I think the themers get better as you go down the list. BAT-SUB is real but feels like a deep cut (although of course you can buy a Lego kit to make one), and it’s also too short to recognize as a theme entry until you get to the revealer, I think. As you go down the list the entries feel more like they’re part of everyday life, especially BROWSER TAB. (BTW, if you’re one of those people who has hundreds of them open at a time, please help me understand how your mind works.)

Olivia Mitra Framke and Sally Hoelscher’s Universal crossword, “Driftwood” — pannonica’s write-up

A notably beginner-friendly crossword. Very little, if any, fancy stuff in the fill or clues.

The theme is types of wood (or trees, but the title says otherwise) hidden in names and phrases. We also see the placement of those hidden bits ‘drifting’ right as we proceed through the grid.

• 16a. [It whistles when it’s ready for English breakfast] TEA KETTLE (teak).
• 26a. [“The People’s Princess”] DIANA SPENCER (aspen).
• 46a. [Bond theme song by Duran Duran] A VIEW TO A KILL (oak).
• 61a. [Unlikely to pose] CAMERA SHY (ash).

All really nice entries.

• 10d [Place where researchers might do a deep dive] OCEAN. Literally.
• 59d [Features of hurricanes and potatoes] EYES. Pretty obvious here, though this type of clue often involves more oblique or lateral thinking.
• 5a [Frolic] ROMP. I have just learned that the lyric in the following song involves ‘rump’ not ‘romp’ but I’m sharing it anyway.
  
• 22a [Vegas opener?] LAS. See? Not tricky.
• 25a [ __ Kim (fashion model and journalist)] IRENE. Didn’t know this because I am Out of Touch™ but crossings solved it just fine.
  
• 45a [Honors for Lil Nas X and Dolly Parton: Abbr.] CMAS, Country Music Awards.
• 52a [Union-made relation?] SON-IN-LAW. Not much of a misdirection. What I’ve been saying.

Anna Schectman’s New Yorker crossword — Eric’s review

The folks at The New Yorker set me up this morning. I get an email from them every morning with a link to the day’s crossword puzzle (as if I’m going to forget to do it). The email includes one clue from the puzzle.

Today’s clue was 19A [1990 Whit Stillman film about New York City’s “urban haute bourgeoisie”]. The email told me the answer was 12 letters, and my only question was whether METROPOLITAN was really that long. It’s a pretty good movie, at least in my memory. (On the other hand, I just watched a clip from Metropolitan and decided to go with Daniela Mercury instead. Make of that what you will.)

I went for the easy stuff first, and even though I had to jump all over the grid, I got off to a quick start. I briefly misstepped with 44D [The only key in which Irving Berlin could play the piano], certain that it would end in MAJOR. Fortunately, I have a few songs by 47A [Electro-pop duo Sylvan ___] ESSO in my collection, which quickly told me the Berlin key was something SHARP.

Another entry I had to change was 28D [Data center that might be darkened] SERVER FARM. I tried SERVER ROOM first (I’ve been in one of those, and it was cold as well as dark). I had no idea about 52A [Swedish artist whose 2018 retrospective broke a Guggenheim attendance record] HILMA AF KLINT and couldn’t parse it once I had it. Now that I see the name, it’s somewhat familiar — but I’m probably conflating Ms Klint with the Austrian Gustav Klimt.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

While I didn’t get stuck, it took a bit of teasing to get through the grid. But that’s always fine with me; I like figuring out stuff from the crosses.

Some nice stuff:

• 18A [Shows up near the front?] USO TOURS C’mon, you thought “shows” was a verb, right?
• 26A [Impetuosity] RASHNESS
• 45A [Wobble at the brink of] TEETER ON
• 56A [Platonic legacy] IDEALISM
• 3D [Result of “different systems of moral understanding,” per James Davison Hunter] CULTURE WARS That’s a concise description of why our society is so polarized.

New or newish to me, in addition to Ms Klint’s full name:

• 15A [Museum that offers a route for visiting the works featured in Beyoncé and Jay-Z’s “Apeshit” video] LOUVRE Maybe if I’d ever seen that video, I’d have gotten the answer quickly.
• 36A [New York city, county, or river] OSWEGO I was born about 100 mile south of there. I wonder how many possible answers there were for this one.
• 4D [Madewell competitor] EVERLANE Let’s just say I am not their targeted customer. But then, the only companies that target me probably advertise in AARP The Magazine. The L of EVERLANE was the last letter I filled in because I confused my Spanish and Portuguese compass points and couldn’t remember whether 21A [South of Portugal?] was SUD or SUR. I felt pretty dense when I belatedly remembered it’s SUL.
• 24D [Chaplin title for which Sartre and de Beauvoir named the publication they founded in 1945] MODERN TIMES I saw the movie 50-ish years ago, but I didn’t know of the journal Les Temps Modernes.

This is a nice, solid puzzle, even if there’s nothing that lifts it to Top 10 list status.

Brendan Emmett Quigley’s Crossword #1734 (Themeless) — Eric’s review

When I finished this one, I was surprised to see it described as “Hard.” Maybe I just lucked out with the proper nouns, but it seemed like the easiest of Brendan’s puzzles from the last few months.

The NW corner was empty until I hit 17A [“Freeze-Frame” group] J. GEILS BAND. While “Centerfold” is the song that I most remember by them, I’m sure I saw the “Freeze-Frame” video dozens of times. I didn’t recognize 19A [Musician with the 2011 album “Mission Bell”] as clued, but I know the name AMOS LEE. (And now I’m chagrined because the one song I have from him is off that record. There’s just too much music out there.) But with a few strategic crosses, I got both those answers and the theretofore opaque 15A [Socket for an amplifier] AUDIO INPUT.

I’m not sure how I feel about 35A [Help for quitters] NICODERM PATCHES. On the one hand, I’m 99% certain I’ve never seen that in a grid before, which is a plus. On the other, it’s just another brand name in a world where we’re constantly bombarded by ads. Maybe I’m just cranky because NICOTINE PATCHES fit and such things weren’t sold when I quit smoking.

There was some good stuff, especially in the SE:

• 54A [Summon out of thin air] CONJURE I feel like I do that a lot with harder puzzles.
• 57A [Special effects outfits] MO-CAP SUITS Motion capture will always remind me of Andy Serkis’ wonderful performance in The Lord of the Rings trilogy. I read the books many times before the first movie came out and never had much sympathy for Gollum until I saw that performance.
• 60A [Class that might assign Calvino and Pirandello] ITALIAN LIT Easy enough to get even if, like me, you don’t really know anything about either author.
• 62A [French connections?] TÊTE À TÊTE Nice clue.
• 49D [___ Fufkin (Paul Shaffer’s “This Is Spinal Tap” role)] ARTIE I vaguely remember Shaffer as some sort of journalist, or maybe a manager? Obviously, I need to watch Spinal Tap again.

New to me:

• 12D [Take some air, poetically] INBREATHE Much easier than it would have been without the “poetically.”
• 24D [Moral anecdotes] EXEMPLA 
• 31D [Go yard] HIT A HOMER I’ve not heard “go yard” before, but I don’t follow sports much.