Scott McMahon’s New York Times crossword—Amy’s recap
NY Times crossword solution, 1/18/25 – no. 0118
Been a while since I’ve done a triple-triple stack. This one’s well-done—the Down crossings are not bad overall (always a risk with such stacked 15s) and the 15s are all solid.
Toughest entry for me was the heard-of-it-but-didn’t-remember-it 2d [Capital and second-largest city of Minorca], MAHON. I’m going to guess that constructor Scott McMAHON got a kick out of including it.
Fave fill: “A MAN, A PLAN, A CANAL, …” (topical these days with talk of upending Panama’s sovereignty), “CARE TO ELABORATE?,” CHRISTMAS SPIRIT, Katherine Hepburn’s OSCAR NOMINATIONs, SPANISH OMELETTE, SATELLITE DISHES, HOTEL CALIFORNIA, and Kate WINSLET.
Clue/answer pair I might remember now: 43D. [Arabic for “prayer”], SALAH. A lot of Liverpool games air in this house, and their star player is Mo Salah. To keep winning, they just need Mo’ Prayer?
Nice to have a Jimmy Carter shout-out: 47D. [Jimmy Carter was the first president regularly seen in these], JEANS.
Jess Rucks’s Los Angeles Times crossword — Stella’s write-up
Los Angeles Times 1/18/25 by Jess Rucks
I liked this puzzle, although I found the difficulty level inconsistent through different areas of the grid. (This is not the same as, say, some moderate, some hard, and some very hard clues being distributed fairly evenly through the puzzle, which is a feature, not a bug.) Specifically: Left side of puzzle, very easy; bottom right, moderate; top right, hard.
Notables:
- 15A [“Should I be worried about us?”] is ARE WE COOL, but could easily be ARE WE OKAY as clued, contributing to the difficulty in this corner.
- 17A [Monopoly property based on a historical monopoly] is READING RAILROAD, an entry that could be kind of meh on its own but is elevated by the clue.
- 37A [“Great, now I’m scared of this” hashtag] is NEW FEAR UNLOCKED. It feels like this entry won’t have the longest shelf life, but it’s very fun. Now is the right time to pop it into the middle of a puzzle!
- 61A/62A I didn’t notice this while solving, but I don’t love the duplication of DO in adjacent entries here (I’VE DONE IT and OUTDO).
- 2D [Drew Barrymore film promoted as “A Cinderella Story”] Okay, so I said the left side of this puzzle was very easy; I guess part of that is because, as I should be embarrassed to admit, I’ve seen EVER AFTER a lot of times. (“Dougray Scott” rhymes with “hot,” amirite?)
- 3D [Strength exercise done on all fours] is BEAR CRAWL, another easy get but also triggering. (I hate doing it!)
- 11D and 12D, [Crow bar?] for ROOST and [Covers] for COATS contributed to the difficulty of this corner.
- 39D I liked the clue [Signs to act?] for CUES.
- 47D [“The __ I get, the better I used to be”: John McEnroe] is OLDER. Sigh. Accurate. Is it a coincidence that the number of the clue is the age I will be on my next birthday?
Paul Coulter’s Wall Street Journal crossword, “Turn Up the Heat” — pannonica’s write-up
WSJ • 1/18/25 • Sat • “Turn Up the Heat” • Coulter • solution • 20250118
Discerned the theme mechanism, appropriately enough, by degrees—and I swear that when I came up with that description the pun was not intended.
At first I was perplexed because I could see there was something going on with the first themer at 23-across, and I naturally assumed it was a rebus-square affair. Then I noticed that the ‘removed’ letters were RE and that wasn’t particularly helpful. Finally, referring to the title, I perceived that in each case it was actually the trigram IRE (which can be a synonym for hotness/anger), and it extended upward from the across answer, I’ve circled those squares in the solution grid for ease of reference.
- 23a. [“View From the Summit” memoirist] SIR EDMUND HILLARY.
2d. [Ireland, poetically] ERIN. - 44a. [One goal of the Civil Rights Act of 1964] FAIR EMPLOYMENT.
31d. [Border lake] ERIE. - 50a. [Places to go for runs] SKI RESORTS. Struggled a bit here because I hadn’t realized it was the location of a theme answer.
35d. [Composer Satie] ERIK. - 70a. [“Told you so!”] I REST MY CASE.
43d. [Ready for surgery, perhaps] STERILE. - 90a. [Fast shipping option] AIR EXPRESS.
60d. [“Ta-ta!”] CHEERIO. - 93a. [Place to order tom yum soup] THAI RESTAURANT.
62d. [“Great czar] PETER I. - 120a. [1868 event that consolidated imperial rule in Japan] MEIJI RESTORATION.
Some really good finds there for the required letter sequences. Perhaps surprisingly, none of the down crosses were TERI Garr/Hatcher or Cheri OTERI.
- 27a [President for whom an African capital is named] MONROE.
- 30a [Beat it] LIT OUT. Perhaps this is idiosyncratic, but I think of lighting out as heading away to a destination, and beating it as retreating from a location.
- 52a [Athletic supporter?] TEE. Was considering shirts, but this is about golf props.
- 53a [Not so nice] MEANER.
- 55a [Katniss’s “Hunger Games” ally] PEETA, 51d [Rotary transformer] SELSYN. Before my solve, I saw that commenter PJ highlighted a tough crossing in the WSJ—at which point I stopped reading farther so as not to taint my experience. I’m presuming this was the troublesome location. SELSYN is short for self-synchronous.
- In the same area, 62d [They do deep work] PEARLERS is a little tricky too, which might add to the general difficulty there. 42d [It’s plucked in Parma] ARPA (harp) is also nearby.
- 76a [Road atlas page] STATE MAP, not ROUTE MAP.
- 125a [Happy companion] DOPEY. Of the Seven Dwarfs in “Snow White”.
- 9d [Lecher’s look] OGLE. Not usually seen as a noun.
- 24d [Abbr. for a person with only two names] NMI, no middle initial.
- 46d [Protect oneself from viruses, in a way] MASK UP. Anecdotally, in the past week, I’m seeing more people wearing masks in public.
- 86d [Repeated melodic phrase] OSTINATO. As you might guess, it’s from Latin and a direct cognate to obstinate.
- 94d [Many a Yemeni] ARAB. ‘many’ “-meni”
- 21d [Many] A LOT OF. 113d [Gobs] A TON. 4d [Arbitrary amount] SOME.
Lester Ruff’s Newsday crossword, Saturday Stumper — pannonica’s write-up
Newsday • 1/18/25 • Saturday Stumper • Ruff, Newman • solution • 20250118
I found this ‘less rough’ offering to be anything but. Struggled quite a lot.
On first pass, desultory fill-ins but no legitimate footholds. Then—and now surveying the area I can’t see how it progressed—I made significant headway in the lower right corner, essentially completing that section.
From there, I slowly expanded my territory to the rest of the grid, with many a mis-fill and corrective.
- 1a [(Without) even] SO MUCH AS. This answer was my instinctive guess, but I ended up waiting for many crossings before feeling comfortable enough with it. Same experience with the crossing 4d [It’s above Betty Ford on 2024 stamps] USA.
- 14a [Pinterest recycling suggestions] TRASH ART. Ended up being the very last entry in the solve.
- 17a [Fixer-upper] REPAIRER. Was fooled into thinking it was the object rather than the doer.
- 18a [Kid-lit pessimist] EEYORE. Closest thing to a gimme in the puzzle.
- 23a [Part of every Julian month] IDES. My first entry filled.
- 25a [California map word near Bruno] MATEO. Making a correct guess here was wildly successful in catapulting to the end of the solve.
- 30a [Certain Miniature/Miniature mix] SCHNOODLE. Gotta be schnauzer and poodle. Once I’d dropped ANYHOW in favor of ANYHOO at 11d, I was able to confirm -OODLE.
- 32a [Attempting to follow] À LA. I might have considered this as the answer, but I’d already been to 35a [Himalayan center] and decided -ALA- was the answer there; right idea, wrong decision—it was just the ELL in the middle.
- 36a [Live wire?] SINGING TELEGRAM. Pieced together the second word first, eventually figuring out the first part. This central grid-spanner is bisected by a vertical counterpart: 8d [Blow things up] STRETCH THE TRUTH.
- 44a [First musical act with a permanent retail store (Carnaby Street, since 2020)] THE STONES. No qualifier such as ‘familiarly’ in the clue made it tough. Also, I had —TONES for quite a while and was considering that to be a word unit.
- 55a [Website with a Find Your Brush Match page] ORAL-B. I was definitely thinking of paint and not teeth, but was able to get this thanks to an incorrect guess elsewhere. I’d gotten 61d [Mouth mirror buyer] DDS, confirming the S with 66a [Ladybug adornment] SPOTS; this allowed a (good) guess of BEET for 56d [Source for yed or yellow food coloring]. I mistakenly thought 45d [Unload on] was TALK TO (with 60a [Threw off or took in] as ROOKED and then maybe BILKED), and THEN I had a weird –LB sequence for 55-across and I finally saw ORAL-B. But 458-down was eventually revealed to be SELL TO, and 60a MISLED. Whew!
- 1d [Japan/Korea separator] is just the generic STRAIT rather than some SEA. Tshushima Island, belonging to Japan, lies in the middle. On one side is the Tsushima STRAIT and on the other is the Korea STRAIT.
- 13d [Literally, “little cake”] TORTILLA. The TORT- part was easy, not knowing which language the answer would be in made it tough-ish.
- 31d [Resort not far from Mount Snow] OKEMO. Not knowing the locale (Vermont), I at first tried ORONO (Maine).
- 38d [Can’t wait for] NEEDS ASAP. My early thought was —S UP, and it was difficult to abandon that idea.
- 39d [“Class dismissed”] GO NOW.
- 49d [Corresponds] AGREES. Aha, this was probably my entry into the southeast section, which as I mentioned in the introduction, was where my solve really began to take hold.
- 58d [It may be headed by a figurehead] SHIP. The original! Kind of a double-fake clue.
… and done.
nice puzzle but not for a saturday
played more like an easy friday
without being in a hurry, one of my quickest saturday solves
Agreed; very zippy Saturday. In all three of the triple stacks I was able to drop at least one entry in immediately. Not my fastest Saturday but pretty close; would’ve been a perfectly serviceable Friday. Felt like there was a decent amount of proper nouns but with the ease of the puzzle, didn’t need to worry too much about those.
“Hit 1976 album whose title track won Grammy for Record of the Year” sounded so tortured to me I had to go check Wikipedia after; so TIL that “Record of the Year” is for a song, not for the album…
Also…it won a Grammy for 1977…not 1976.
It’s a 1976 album, though, having been released in December of that year.
We crossword editors perennially struggle with years for songs and movies. If a song was released in 2010 but didn’t chart until 2011, is “2010 hit” right or wrong? “Argo” came out in 2012, won the Best Picture Oscar in 2013–so the year to use depends on how the clue is phrased.
Even more convoluted:
“Record of the Year” is for the _recording_ of a particular song/track, and is awarded to the performer, producer, engineer, etc. – anybody involved in making the recording.
“Song of the Year” is for _composition_ of a song, and is awarded to the writers of the lyrics and/or music.
I guess the confusion Amy mentions over when work is released and when it wins an award probably led to the tortured wording of the clue.
The clue doesn’t seem at all “tortured” to me. It doesn’t mention the year in which the Grammy was awarded.
I didn’t know the answer offhand, but with a few crosses it was easy to see. I was in higher school when that record came out.
NYT; Very deft triple triple-stack. All common phrases or terms and, as Amy says, no torturing the down entries to make it all work congenially.
I agree with Steve that it played much easier than a typical Saturday. One of my faster times.
NYT: agree with steve and Greg: very smooth, fairly easy Saturday solve. I never time my puzzles (I solve using pencil ✏️ and paper), but I finished this in less than 15 minutes. I threw in the bottom three grid spanners right off the bat, and then I was off to the races. Thanks Scott for a fantastic Saturday puzzle
NYT: I enjoyed this puzzle. HOTEL CALIFORNIA has been running through my head lately, along with Me and Bobby McGee… Some sort of nostalgia for the angst of a different era…
re SALAH: I entered SALAT first, although I can see how SALAH is the western version of this Arabic word صلاة. The last letter is a special one in the Arabic alphabet that can sound like a soft H if it’s at the end of a sentence. But if it is followed by a connecting word, it is pronounced as a T– for example “Salat-wa-Salam” means blessings and peace.
Amy, the H at the end of Mo SALAH’s name is a very different sound in Arabic. It’s a guttural H, pretty strong sounding (no equivalent in English). In that case the word SALAH صلاح means goodness, wholeness and/or reconciliation.
So صلاة vs صلاح : The leftmost (i.e. last letter) is quite different. I know, the Arabic alphabet is wild and some of the sounds are not easy to transliterate or say for an English speaker (my own last name has a couple of them).
Very interesting! Thanks, Huda. I most likely will not be putting Arabic on my list of languages to learn in my retirement.
Haha, it’s not the easiest.
WSJ – The intersections of 55a and 62a with 42d and 51d did me in. I didn’t have a clue. I get to learn a few things today
NYT: agree with everyone’s assessment of difficulty. I didn’t finish last Saturday’s until Thursday past. This was done by 9am!
Immediately entered 1A, as I will contend it is the greatest palindrome ever!
Not a challenging NYT, but I didn’t find it as easy as others did. Partly because ABLEWASIEREISAW also fits 1A. Also, a Star Wars clue and a Spiderman clue — neither of which came to me without crosses. I despair of Will Shortz’s obsession with space opera and superheroes. MAHON and ALAIN were unknowns.
I do enjoy the challenge of triple stacks, but not so much when they are filled with even more names, pop culture and trivia than yesterday’ puzzle, so that diminished my enjoyment of this one quite a bit. I wasted precious seconds guessing at a couple of those unknown crosses, but still finished faster than either Thursday or Friday. XWSTATS tells me it’s my 6th fasted Friday of all time. So, yeah, pretty easy. A decent debut puzzle that was published on the wrong day of the week, IMO.
It wasn’t easy at first for me, because of starting right off with that wrong palindrome. Indeed, I think I fell for every conceivable trap (“a bit” for WHIT, “let me” for LEMME, “crime” for ANIME). I could only credit the puzzle for having laid so many plots on top of the nicely done, idiomatic three stacks. In the end, I worked my way up. Good one.
I also didn’t know SALAH and at first thought of “Selah” in the Psalms, although of course that word’s not “prayer” or strictly Islamic. And for that matter no one really knows what it means (perhaps a cue to music or a musical interlude, much as a guitar solo was mandatory in rock songs of a certain age).
wish there was a stumper review
as quick as nyt fell, stumper was the opposite
nothing impossible, clean fill, but twice as long, as usual
a word here a word there, ooops, okay, yes, oops
did not want to give in so just kept pecking at it and finally got to the promised land
for me, difficult but satisfying
It’s up now.
hahahahaha
except for starting with anyhoo, i might have written that review
almost the same order of fill and most of the same problems
like deja vu all over again
thanks for making me feel like maybe i am not losing it completely
Yep — pannonica’s usually on target, like today. I/we (my husband and I usually do it together — he starting with a few entries, then me) went through basically what pannonica did, just I got Eeyore early, which gave me the upper right first. Then he had Ore-ida, so I saw ides, which took care of the upper left. I then had issues with the bottom, partly because I’d never heard of Gru and had “tones” like pannonica for a while. However, I managed to get Uta Hagen which helped. My husband then managed to get the lower left with the help of singing telegram. So, a true team effort was needed today.
I didn’t find it easy, and in fact couldn’t finish because of the ONCLE/OKEMO/HECK/EMO area. I was thinking of school reunion for 26D – I have a feeling family reunions are more of an American thing, so I don’t know if actual French people would understand the clue.
OKEMO was an unknown, and I’ve never come across EMO being used as a noun (not a word I would use in any context). I might have got HECK eventually but I don’t know whether that would have got me to the finish line.
I also wiped out at Okemo and had “yell at” initially for 45D and then the less confident “yell to” which caused the creation of a band called the Trey Tones which broke up immediately over creative differences in what the heck 37D could be.
I have heard of a jazz group called The Three Sounds, which might be what you were thinking of. :)
Yes, oncle/okemo/heck/emo was a difficult area — I, too, had never heard of Okemo, so I tried to fit Orono in there because I had the starting and ending letters. However, I had heard of oncle and didn’t worry (or know) about French customs. I knew emo as a music genre and it fit, so I just went with it.
Slightly off topic, but if you’re a palindrome fan, it’s fun to mull over the following preposterously long palindrome sentence. (Not clear who gets the “credit“ for this. I always thought it was concocted by Roger Angell, but others say W.H. Auden or Alastair Reid):
“T. Eliot, top bard, notes putrid tang emanating, is sad. I’d assign it a name: gnat dirt upset on drab pot-toilet.”
A bit odd. I prefer this on I recently encountered: “Go hang a salami — I’m a lasagna hog!” It’s kinda cheating, but it’s also kinda funny.
NYT: A fun puzzle and something of a challenge, but with nine (NINE!!!) across 15s, getting a few down answers often led to seeing one of the across 15s and suddenly lots of letters were filled in, leading to one of my fastest Saturdays.
Not all that hard of a Stumper but DNF because of my EgO/OKEgO crossing, OKEMO not known to me. Nice puzzle, thanks, Stan!