Ryan McCarty’s New York Times crossword—Amy’s recap
NY Times crossword solution, 1/11/25 – no. 0111
Did this one off the clock, freshly hooked on a Netflix show. For the longest time, the top right quarter was nearly empty, with some dead-end entries blocking any progress. The fruit-filled 24a DATE BREAD played at being a PANETTONE for too long, with 25d TEAMS making sense for the BLOCS clue. There were musical bits that would’ve helped me make way if music were my thing, but KATE SMITH and BIZET weren’t sure things in my head. 40a DOT, [Note extender, in sheet music], also a mystery to me.
Fave fill: COME CLEAN, explorer JAMES ROSS (but primarily because there was a James Ross in my 5th grade class with a phenomenal fro), FEMINISTS, WORD DOC, NUMETAL, CARAMEL LATTES, PANTSED.
Not entirely sold on NERDSPEAK and AA CELL as things people say. “D-cell batteries” sounds familiar to me, but not with the multi-A battery size.
That wide-open diamond in the center of this 62-word grid is impressive to behold. 3.75 stars from me.
Kareem Ayas’s Los Angeles Times crossword — Stella’s write-up
Los Angeles Times 1/11/25 by Kareem Ayas
I liked this puzzle! Some highlights:
- 18A [One concerned with baby weight?] is a very cute clue for STORK.
- 58A [Sharp infusion in some fish marinades] is WASABIOLI. Hadn’t heard of this portmanteau, but it’s inferable. And wasabi plus aioli sounds like something I would like to be eating.
- 13D [Where the walls have ears?] is CORN MAZE. Fave clue in the puzzle!
- 25D [Wretched] It’s very easy to put in PITIFUL instead of the correct PITEOUS here, which added a little extra difficulty.
- 27D [Air out?] is DEFLATE, clever.
- 32D [Gemma of “Crazy Rich Asians”] is CHAN. I’m sad that it doesn’t look like there will be a sequel to Crazy Rich Asians; that movie was totally set up to have Gemma CHAN‘s character ditch her cheating husband for Harry Shum’s character in a sequel. Which I would totally have been here for.
- 38D [Upright part] is PIANO KEY, but there’s a slight bit of extra difficulty in that PIANO LEG is very plausible.
- 59A [Tree hugger?] is BOA. I both think it’s a clever clue and am into it because, as we approach the Year of the Snake, it feeds into my anticipation for Lunar New Year.
One thing I didn’t love: having two trying-to-be-clever-spelling-related clues in the form of [What sitcoms always begin and end with?] for ESSES and [Start to celebrate?] for SOFT C. I think once per puzzle for this sort of thing is plenty.
Alex Eaton-Salners’ Wall Street Journal crossword, “Time to Get Up” — pannonica’s write-up
WSJ • 1/11/25 • Sat • “Time to Get Up” • Eaton-Salners • solution • 20250111
- 111aR [Low-to-high transitions in digital signals, and an apt description of the circled letters] RISING EDGES, which I’d never heard of and had to work out by actually examining the theme entries (gasp!). The circled letters at either end of each spell out things that can be said to rise.
- 23a. [AMC show whose title is stylized with two chemical symbols] BREAKING BAD (bread).
- 25a. [Where autograph seekers wait] STAGE DOOR (star).
- 42a. [1970 Temptations hit subtitled “That’s What the World Is Today”] BALL OF CONFUSION (balloon).
- 65a. [Relatively quiet form of tap-dancing] SOFT SHOE SHUFFLE (soufflé).
- 89a. [Handles a situation without getting flustered] TAKES IT IN STRIDE (tide).
- 109a. [Influence adversely] PREJUDICE (price).
These are good finds.
I don’t have much in my tank today, and am already running late, so no tour of the rest of the fill. Suffice to say that there were a few tricky spots that added to my solve time and it was overall a good challenge.
Matthew Sewell’s Newsday crossword, Saturday Stumper — pannonica’s write-up
Newsday • 1/11/25 • Saturday Stumper • Sewell • solution • 20250111
This crossword felt really tough and resistant, but my progress was essentially steady and I was surprised by the accrued time when it was done.
No notable mis-fills, with the exception of 22a [Philly Jesuit school] ST JOES, where I reflexively entered LOYALA upon seeing Jesuit.
- 34a [Memorable date] EPOCH. Does ‘date’ seem not quite right? I think of it as a span of time, but it turns out that the definitions at m-w include support for the clue’s framing.
- 36a [Hottest seasonal streamer] SONG OF THE SUMMER. This grid-spanning entry was pieced together in my solve, with SUMMER falling first.
- 41a [Sure things?] AYES. Hmm.
- 43a [Paleo diet no-no] BRAN. Oh right, I tried CARB here.
- 44a [JAL Mileage Bank accrual] PTS. Oh and YEN for this. So it seems there a few mis-fills.
- 54a [Absolutely minimally] ONE IOTA. Oh oh and and I’d stuck in -EST provisionally. Safe to thoroughly disregard my earlier statement.
- 58a [Opposite number] EQUAL. 62a [Opposite number] PEER.
- 60a [Relaxed-sounding deity] LOKI, low-key. Dammit, I had IDOL for a while. Is there any part of this grid where I didn’t have a significant mis-fill?!
- 1d [What you shouldn’t fall for] SCAMS. Unexpected plural!
- 21d [Plumassier’s creation] BOA. I correctly surmised that the word in the clue has the same root as plumage.
- 27d [Cat __ ] DOOR. Bit random.
- 33d [Went over] ENDED LATE. I think this is my favorite clue in the puzzle, for some reason.
- 46d [Certain ultimate limit] NADIR. Ooh, in that direction. Didn’t see that coming.
- 50d [Absentee done deals] E-TAIL. Eh.
- 53d [Aliment to avoid] SLOP. Not until just now do I see the clue reads aliment and not ailment. No doubt this was intentional obfuscation.
On the NYT, I was led into the wilderness for a while, because I had “confess to” at 27A, which worked nicely with 24D “domed roof”— but was, of course, wrong.
Good Saturday puzzle, pitched, I think, at the right level of difficulty.
It was a good puzzle; I thought it was slow going, but ended a little under my average. I was worried about the number of proper names, but it worked out quite well. I got thrown off by having “butterfly” instead of AUTOCRATS for “monarchs, e.g.” as my son’s school’s mascot is the monarch butterfly. And for the longer time I had “tie” instead of DOT for note extender (when you add a dot to a note, it increases the duration by 50%, so a dotted quarter note is a quarter note + eighth note, whereas a tie connects two or more notes at the same pitch over their entire duration). For the Antarctic explorer, I could only think of Shackleton… but it worked out from the crossings. And SURE CURE was a weird one for me; I had it as “SURE, SURE” until I filled in YORICK.
I found it very hard indeed but impressive.
Amy,
I never call a 1.5V cell a battery. If you open a 9V battery, you’ll find six little cells, making it a battery. So, yes, I say AA cell.
BTW, I know that people call single cells “batteries,” and the dictionary documents the usage, but I don’t have to like it.
My vote for the batteries… I would say double a or triple a. As in, “the remote is out of battery could you grab a couple double as.”
That last clause (“the dictionary documents the usage, but I don’t have to like it”) is my line!
Confessing to having never heard pants as a verb…tough but fair workout this morning!
I had … and wasn’t 100% sure it was what the NYT was looking for until I had a few crossings.
My fastest Stumper ever. I haven’t suddenly become twice the solver I was last week, so waiting for the “pretty easy for a Stumper” verdict.
Don’t lessen your Stumper victories! Take any pride you can get out of that thing.
Wow! A strange week where the Stumper was easier than the NYT for me. Had to google a couple to finish the NYT and got the Stumper without any cheats at all. Not that it was easy by any stretch, and I thought that top left might do me in, but ultimately it came together. Having failed at some recent allegedly Les Ruff puzzles, I will definitely celebrate the win.
Same here, and I never needed to resort to Dr. Google. I just kept getting one area after another as I started penciling the answers in, and the crossings all worked with my guesses.
I think I was on Mr. Sewell’s wavelength today.
Very good NYT. Maybe a small demerit for having both a Star Wars and a LOTR reference. I breezed through the NW but then slowed to a normal Saturday pace for the rest. I remembered the much-ballyhooed and frankly annoying Ingebrigtsen from the Paris games last year, where he didn’t win gold in the 1500 m, har har. Couldn’t remember his first name, of course.
I had DUSTCAP before DESKPAD. What is a ‘desk pad’ anyway? Another name for a mouse pad?
Oh, and I apologize for being excessively cranky yesterday on that whole LORANGE biz. But it was a stupid clue and answer…
I don’t know if they still exist, but it used to be that a DESK PAD was this thing you would put on a wooden desktop (back when there were wooden desktops) to protect the desktop from scuffs and scrapes. Maybe 18″x24″ and made of leather (or some facsimile thereof) and often designed to hold a large calendar or pad of paper you could use to jot notes on (pre-Post-its).
Kudos to Kareem Ayas, who has today’s puzzle in all three of Universal, LAT, and USA Today. Three themelesses too! Has that ever happened before??
NYT: This is the epitome of what a Saturday NYT crossword should be. Tough, fair, interesting, with clever clues.
And if I hadn’t entered ECONOnIC it would have been done about three minutes sooner, too.
And I still remember from the early 1950s that when my grandfather came back from his pharmacy around 4 pm he would turn on the Kate Smith TV show, which always began with her rendition of “When the Moon Comes Over the Mountain”.
Amy, won’t you tell us what Netflix show you are freshly hooked on?!
I thought today was a fun challenge – and it seems like two themeless days in a row where there was shorter average fill length, but lively clueing angles. Could have done without KATE SMITH crossing JAMES ROSS and JAKOB but I’m not that upset about it.
“Missing You,” based on a Harlan Coben novel. Five episodes for the story, quick one!
NYT: I’m gonna have to take issue with the clue for UMPS at 6D. In baseball, it’s the catchers that squat. Home plate umps crouch.
I know that in general use there’s some overlap between the two terms, but in sports I think there is a clear distinction between the two postures.
The catcher squats as described by Merriam-Webster: “the knees are bent so that the buttocks rest on or near the heels.” The ump never does this.
Nice catch!
Nice pun!
As a former umpire, I agree. This clue bugged me too.
Stumper: pannonica is on target, like usual. I also wasn’t fond of the cluing for epoch, aye, and e-tail. I’ll add that I wasn’t fond of 5A “irritate, in a way” for “chap” — “in a way” definitely applied. Also, I didn’t like 63A “plot size, for instance” for “spec” — seems like plot size is a restrictive given, not a spec. I’d also never heard of a DNA virus, which didn’t help.
Stumper: AYES for “Sure things?” seems perfectly fine to me. If you want to answer “yes” to something, you could say AYE or “Sure.”
NYT: Not really sold on SURE CURE as being a real phrase. I Googled it and the first few pages are all various brand names. Should have just been SINECURE, IMO.
Way to slay, Ayas
We finally got to Saturday’s WSJ after being snowed out of our home for several days. I found it interesting and reasonably challenging. My wife, who’s usually a lot faster than I am, seems to be struggling more than I did. The answers to most clues were NOT the first thing I thought of. I wound up with two letters wrong after less than an hour of work. She’s still at it.