Matt Jones’s Jonesin’ Crossword, “The Best of 2024” — let’s look back, one more time. – Erin’s write-up
Jonesin’ solution 1/7/25
Hello lovelies! It’s time for Matt’s annual review of some of the best-reviewed pop culture of last year.
- 16a. [Miranda July novel that made The New Yorker’s “The Essential Reads 2024” list] ALL FOURS
- 18a. [Netflix “true story” miniseries that was #2 on The Guardian’s “50 Best Shows of 2024”] BABY REINDEER
- 35a. [Poker-based roguelike deck-builder nominated for The Game Awards’ 2024 Game of the Year] BALATRO
- 49a. [Country crossover album that made many “Best of 2024” lists] Beyoncé’s COWBOY CARTER
- 54a. [Character paired with Wolverine in a 2024 title, the highest-grossing R-rated film ever] DEADPOOL
Do you agree with these picks? Did anything else stand out for you in 2024?
Until next week!
Elizabeth C. Gorski’s Cr♥ssw♥rd Nation puzzle (Week 710), “So Much in Common! “—Ade’s take
Crossword Fiend puzzle solution, Week 710: “So Much in Commin!”
Hello there, everybody! Many parts of the country have had some snow fall over the past few hours, so here’s hoping that you’re warm and that you have your driveways and sidewalks shoveled!
It may have felt like the weight of the world was on your shoulders when solving this puzzle, and that’s because of the theme. The letters TON appear consecutively in each of the theme answers as those letters spanned multiple words..
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- SOUP TO NUTS (17A: [All-inclusive])
- WHAT ON EARTH (24A: [“Am I seeing things!!??”])
- PORTO NOVO (34A: [Benin’s capital])
- JUST ONE LOOK (48A: [Linda Ronstadt hit with the lyric “That’s all it took”])
- SWEET ONION (57A: [Ring on a burger])
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Lots of longish fill in the corners made this a pretty enjoyable solve, along with the African touch with the center answer across as well as BISSAU (26A: [Guinea-___ (West African nation)]). This was also a geography-heavy grid, with CROATIA (2D: [Slovenia’s neighbor]) and ALBERTA (11D: [Edmonton’s province]), so much so that even COUNTRY appeared (38D: [Nation]). What in the Where In the World is Carmen SanDiego is going on?
“Sports will make you smarter” moment of the day: OATS (20A: [Horse’s meal]) – From math teacher to a head coach in the Final Four? Well, that’s what current University of Alabama men’s basketball coach Nate Oats did. Just over a decade ago, Oats was teaching five math classes a day – algebra, geometry and statistics – at Romulus High School in Michigan while coaching the basketball team. By 2019, he was leading the University at Buffalo to a 32-win season and a No. 15 national ranking. He then left for Tuscaloosa, where he’s led the Crimson Tide to two SEC regular-season and tournament titles. Last March, Oats led Alabama to the first Final Four in school history. How do I know that ‘Bama made to the Final Four last year? Because I was there!
Here’s yours truly with Alabama’s pachyderm mascot, Big Al, on the Arizona court where the 2024 Final Four was staged. Roll Tide!
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
Dana Edwards’s New York Times crossword–Amy’s recap
NY Times crossword solution, 1/7/25 – no. 0107
Fun typographical theme:
- 17A. [Communists want to dISMantle it], CAPITALISM. With a capital “ISM” in clue.
- 27A. [It’s conditioned on regular payments], SUBSCRIPTION. The ION is subscripted.
- 42A. [It’s hard to believe], BOLD-FACED LIE. LIE in bold. Problem is, the generally accepted (by publishers, et al.) phrase is bald-faced lie. Merriam-Webster weighs in. The editors didn’t reject this, but it’s a definite ding on the puzzle.
- 56A. [Protest seeking a different arrangement with landlords], RENT STRIKE. Strikethrough on RENT.
Fave fill: “OOH, BABY!”, NEOLOGISM. Speaking of neologisms, YEETS is pretty new.
Does anyone use the EHOW site?
Fave clue: 53D. [Kind of place that’s beside the point?], ONES. The decimal point, that is.
3.5 stars from me.
Rebecca Goldstein’s Universal Crossword, “Practice Makes Perfect” (ed. Taylor Johnson) — Matt F’s Review
Universal Solution 01.07.2025
Revealer:
- 15D – [Way to have something you’ve mastered, and a hint to the ends of the starred clues’ answers] = DOWN TO A SCIENCE
Theme answers end with a prefix for a scientific field: chemistry, biology, and astrophysics:
- 4D – Yiddish author whose work inspired “Fiddler on the Roof” = SHOLEM ALEICHEM
- 8D – Info on a certain dating profile = TINDER BIO
- 31D – [San Francisco gayborhood] = THE CASTRO
Rebecca is great at showing her voice in puzzles, and this one is no exception. She has a knack for reflecting her lived experience in crossword puzzles. I suppose that’s what a good artist always does!
Gary Larson & Amy Ensz’s Wall Street Journal crossword, “Recipe for Disaster”—Jim’s review
Theme answers are familiar phrases that are re-imagined as punny natural disasters.
Wall St Journal crossword solution · “Recipe for Disaster” · Gar Larson and Amy Ensz · Tue., 1.7.25
- 18a. [Tsunami approaching the Shire?] SHORT WAVE.
- 39a. [Hurricane hitting a coffee plantation?] JOE BLOW.
- 58a. [Earthquake affecting a carnival?] FAIR SHAKE.
- 9d. [Forest fire engulfing a hiking path?] TRAIL BLAZE.
- 28d. [Lightning bolt blasting a Broadway musical?] RENT STRIKE.
Some of these were okay, especially the first one which made me chuckle and the third one. But the second has no surface sense; “Joe” is a cup of coffee, not coffee plants. The last one is odd as well unless they’re performing the musical outside. And TRAIL BLAZE feels a bit on the nose and not humorous at all. Points for a consistent theme, but the cluing was hit-or-miss.
A pinwheel-patterned theme leaves little room for long fill, so there’s nothing to highlight here. That ELBE/NABOB crossing in the NW is unpretty and looks like it should be avoidable since there’s no theme material up there.
Three stars.
Paolo Pasco’s New Yorker crossword — pannonica’s write-up
New Yorker • 1/7/24 • Tue • Pasco • solution • 20250107
This one was a breeze to solve, even though there were enough fresh entries to make it feel just a little unfamiliar and different.
- 17a [Part of a reindeer costume] ANTLER. Seems a little weird in the singular here.
- The longest entries: 28a [Person who might give you a lift?] PLASTIC SURGEON. 42a [Jocular conspiracy theory alleging government surveillance in avian disguise] BIRDS AREN’T REAL. Not the first time the latter has been referenced in a crossword. See also the Washington Post for Sunday, 16 July 2023.
- 38a [Period awaited by an étudiant] ÉTÉ. Pretty sure the French words for student and summer are etymologically unrelated, despite those ét- starts.
- 40a [Creatives who work in bars?] RAPPERS. Musical measures.
- 55a [Event with undercover transactions?] TENT SALE. <moue> okay.
- 59a [Old-school messaging option, for short] IRC. Internet Relay Chat.
- 2d [“Absolutely,” casually] HUNDO P. “A hundred percent.”
- 6d [Pulitzer-winning Barbara Kingsolver novel inspired by a Charles Dickens work] DEMON COPPERHEAD. The touchstone being David Copperfield.
- 25d [Lard __ (boyish doughnut-shop mascot on “The Simpsons”] LAD. Based rather obviously on the Bob’s Big Boy mascot.
- 35d [Poet Hayes who won a National Book Award for the collection “Lighthead”] TERRANCE. New to me.
That’s all I’ve got today.
NYT: My heart sank when I realized it was BOLDFACED LIE (rather than baldfaced).
The idiom is “baldfaced lie”, not “boldfaced lie”.
The fact that dictionaries now collect every mistake (and thereby help propagate them) means that if “boldfaced lie” happens to appear in some dictionary, that does not give it any more credibility.
I sure wish the NYT crossword editors cared about traditionally proper usage and spelling, instead of rushing to include the newest mistake as soon as possible.
or, you know, look it up and you’ll see that the idiom has changed over the centuries: bare-faced > bald-faced > bold-faced. Merriam-Webster traced its usage back roughly 40 years: https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/is-that-lie-bald-faced-or-bold-faced-or-barefaced
(they speculate that it arose with the ability of modern word processors and WYSIWYG pprinting for ordinary folks to create bold text at home)
personally? I think bold-faced is actually much better imagery! i think of the 200 pt headlines: MAN LANDS ON MOON or whatever when i read it. I.e., a lie so brazen, it’s the equivalent of that giant bold headline.
English is always evolving! it’s what gives the language its great strength. and it cracks me up you’re criticizing the Gray Lady of all venues for not being traditional enough: the only paper still using courtesy titles for crying out loud!
But read to the end of that M-W article and you’ll find this: “bald-faced is decidedly the preferred term in published, edited text.” So even the proponents of English-as-heard-on-the-street at M-W are hedging their bets on this one.
Me too – thanks for confirming my original answer as correct!
I know BALD-FACED is the presumably superior spelling for that expression. But Bold-Faced makes me think of someone who is more brazen, unashamed of lying. In contrast to other people are meek liars :).
Do you use the word “awful” to mean “inspiring awe” or “horrible”? If you said the latter, then you’re also contributing to the “mistakes” of the English language.
BOLD faced lie is not a mistake, it’s an evolution of a former phrase. People say it and people know what it means. Language changes over time, and it is ridiculous to treat these changes as mistakes.
The usage standards are generally higher for published language vs spoken. I expected that the Times would adhere to more rigorous standards. Searching nytimes.com shows more balds than bolds, and the bolds are within quotes.
Given the recent HANNUKAH/HANUKKAH error in the Strands puzzle, one wonders if the Games department is excused from adhering to NYT style.
Clues are considered editorial content and must conform to the style guide, but entries are not.
I didn’t think of BOLD-FACED LIE as a mistake, but rather as an inconsistency. I’d never seen it before, although defenders are absolutely right that BOLD-FACED itself as impudent is in MW. (It’s not in RHUD.) So I assumed it was a play on words.
In fact, not a bad pun. I was then just thrown when I discovered two more themers with wordplay that didn’t require punning, just applying the capital letters and subscripts to yield a common phrase. I’m torn now whether to find the puzzle flawed by inconsistency. Not just Dan but Amy, too, seems to have been unaware of the usage.
To make things more confusing, the strikeout didn’t show at all well in pdf. It skirts the top of the letters, which are all closed at the top, so I didn’t notice a change one bit. If I had, I might have hoped to take the strikeout letters out of the answer. Oh, well, I’m sure it was clearer to online solvers.
The strikeout letters were faint in the online version as well as in the pdf version.
NYT: What was with that cluing? The theme was incredibly easy (once I got 17A I was able to fill in the other themers without crosses) and I *still* had my worst Tuesday time in forever. I must have checked the date on the puzzle a dozen times as clue after clue seemed like it was meant for Thursday-Saturday.
I mean, 41A clued via a lyric that’s from the *bridge* of the song? 8D as a Star Wars quote? There were pretty vague clues for 1D, 15A, 38A, and some very difficult clues for 25A and 61A if you’re not super online. Nothing unfair, just not Tuesday, especially when I had the entire theme figured out so early.
I totally agree – my time was closer to a Thursday or Friday puzzle.
Felt like yesterday— interesting theme, pitched for later in the week…
Some slight recalibration may be needed.
Agreed all around. Dismal times so far this week. Did enjoy the puzzle though.
loved the times. definitely seen a welcome tick up in difficulty since Will got back on the horse!
Missed seeing this comment when I wrote mine. But yeah.
I absolutely agree that a little more challenge in Tuesday puzzles would be a welcome change.
ACROSSLITE: Something wrong with AcrossLite? Late Monday night, WSJ, Universal and LA Times puzzles won’t open with direct clicks. Instead, one must right click and save PUZ file to the desktop after which AcrossLite can open it. Thanks for any help. David
Things like this are sometimes caused by changes to your antivirus software. I doubt anything with Across Lite has changed.
I agree this was tough for a Tuesday. I also prefer BOLDFACEDLIE. It just sounds more audacious. I mean most faces are bald; doesn’t mean you’re dishonest.
When was the last time we had the same theme answer in the NYT and WSJ on the same day?
And I came here because the strikethrough in print NYT’s 56A is almost invisible, didn’t get the joke.
Oops, I wrote my comment before reading this, but me, too. I was so baffled in trying to make it fit a theme.
May I ask for help with “Tsunami approaching the Shire?” for SHORT WAVE in the WSJ? Of course, a tsunami is a wave, but how about the Shire part? (BTW, spooky to have RENT STRIKE as a themer both here and in the NYT.)
The Shire is where Hobbits are from, and they’re famous for their short stature.
Thanks! OK, why not?
I learned a lot from TNY, although I’ll forget it all tomorrow.
Early candidate for “worst clue of the year” at 46-Across in today’s WSJ – sort of amazed that was allowed to go to print! I don’t even think you can chalk it up to “rarefied circles.”