Kate Chin Park & Rafael Musa’s New York Times crossword—Amy’s recap
NY Times crossword solution, 2/1/25 – no. 0201
Not too tough on the Saturday scale of things. I’m digging the grid design, with not many 3s, a plethora of 8+ letter answers, and flow through the six chunks of the diagram.
Fave fill: APPLE TART, “AIN’T I A WOMAN,” MINIMOON (awkward to have “moon” in the WAXING clue when the entries are stacked together), ODDS AND ENDS, journalistic HIT PIECES, “AND VOILA!”, GO DUTCH, STAGE MOM.
Working the Crossings Zone: 12D. [Main script of written Japanese], HIRAGANA. The first half came from the Acrosses, and then I blanked on the second half. Some A’s or maybe an I? And which consonants?
41Aa. [Deg. held by Shaquille O’Neal and Melinda Gates], hmm. Ed.D wasn’t going to work out with crossings. I don’t think I knew Shaq had gotten an MBA earlier.
Really smooth fill throughout, though I look a bit askance at BIG NO-NOS. 4.25 stars from me.
Adrian Johnson & Will Nediger’s Los Angeles Times crossword — Stella’s write-up
Los Angeles Times 2/1/25 by Adrian Johnson & Will Nediger
This puzzle was too easy, and I liked the Downs a lot better than most of the Acrosses — starting off with the gluey phrase TIE ON was not my favorite, and I thought most of the multi-word phrases (DON’T BE SO HASTY, LET’S COMPROMISE, IT’S TIME FOR BED) were fine if not particularly having a themeless level of zing. I did like PRESSURE COOKER, a thing that I use in real life quite often (although it was clued in its metaphorical sense, not its Instant Pot sense, here).
Downs I liked:
- 1D [Big name in pizza rolls] is TOTINO’S, which is nice and evocative and now I want a pizza roll or six.
- 6D I thought [Recycling-plant worker] was a cool angle on SORTER.
- 12D [People who partially identify as female] is DEMI-GIRLS, a neologism that was new to me but totally inferable as clued.
- 21D [Rotten to the Corps, perhaps] is a fresh angle on the ubiquitous AWOL.
- 27D [Handled better?] is REBRANDED — an entry that feels very modern and yet not like it’s going to age out of the language in the next five minutes, and a clever clue to boot.
- 56D [Interrupting animal in a classic knock-knock joke] is COW. My six-year-old niece was obsessed with this joke the last time I saw her.
I am curious about how people feel about lots of S’s in row and column 15. Entries like ASSESS and STRESSTEST make the filler’s job a lot easier and will undoubtedly lead to nicer entries everywhere else, but they also little the grid with plurals. Today’s NYT is a nice example, with seven S’s out of the 25 right/bottom squares. Do you care? As someone who occasionally makes puzzles, I’d be interested to know what people think (or not) about the question.
Peace and good health to all.
NYT: Super fast today; 6 seconds behind my PR. Almost felt like I was solving with Thursday cluing for the Saturday puzzle (if they still do that… not sure?), although there were some tricky entries in there like HIRAGANA that I got from the crossings.
And today is Eat Ice Cream for Breakfast day, if you’re into that sort of thing.