Sunday, February 2, 2025

Oscar season is upon us and so are our version of the awards for crossword puzzles, the ORCAS. Check out the nominated puzzles and vote for your favorites here on this page. Voting closes on Monday, February 17th with winners announced in a livestream a week later.

Derrick Niederman’s New York Times crossword, “Two-For-One Special”–Dave’s recap

Dave here again, subbing for Nate this week. Nate will be off blogging duty for weeks or months after losing his home to the California wildfires. There’s a GoFundMe raising money to help Nate and Ben rebuild their lives in the aftermath.

NYT Crossword Solution – 2/2/25

So we have a rebus puzzle today, two word phrases are clued in italics where the first word in the phrase clues a word that is just one letter different from the word clued by the second word. (Hope that makes sense!) Perhaps it’s better to list them out:

• 18D: [Skinny/dip] clues SLIM and SWIM, the LW appearing in the crossing 22A: RACHE[L W]EISZ
• 24A: [Fast/car] clues QUICK and BUICK, the QB appearing in the crossing 8D: PD[Q B]ACH
• 25A: [Wild/bunch] clues ZANY and MANY – and – 48A: [Holland/tunnel] clues DUTCH and DITCH, the ZM and UI appearing in the crossing 13D: HA[ZM]AT S[UI]TS
• 31D: [Horse/power] clues COLT and VOLT (I would claim WATT instead of VOLT is a unit of power), the CV appearing in MMMD[CV] (rather hard to find entries that end in CV without resorting to Roman numerals, eh?)
• 61A: [Stadium/timekeeper] (granted I imagine there is such a person, but as a standalone phrase it doesn’t ring true to me) clues METRODOME and METRONOME, the DN appearing in ROA[D N]OISE
• 74A: [Average/income] clues PAR and PAY, the RY appearing in FLATTE[RY]
• 77A: [Denver/Colorado] clues STAGE NAME (John Denver?) and STATE NAME, the GT appearing in YOUN[G T]URK
• 102D: [Slumber/party] clues SIESTA and FIESTA (my favorite of the set), the SF appearing in U[S F]LAG
• 105D: [Trail/head] clues PATH and PATE, the HE appearing in [HE]RNIA
• 111D: [Promise/keeper] (I’ll just leave you a link to their Wikipedia entry and have you make your own judgement) clues WORD and WARD, the OA appearing T[OA]STMASTER
• 116A: [Dino/expedition] (this is a phrase?, perhaps in Jurassic Park but not elsewhere) clues T-REX and TREK the XK appearing in JAGUAR [XK]ES (another hard letter sequence to find a crossing entry for!), and finally…
• 117A: [Card/game] clues JOKER and POKER, the JP appearing in [JP]EG

I’m afraid this theme just wasn’t for me–I’m not confident that all of the italicized phrases really work on their own, and it’s just hard to look at entries where the rebus works as 2 letters in one direction and as a choice between 2 letters in the other. And further, these choice letters tend to both be consonants limiting what the crossing entries can be. I wonder too if the theme is too dense, was there really a need for 12 of them in the grid, leading to entries like YESM, LETTER A, AGIO crossing DOGEs and the vaguely sexist BE A DOLL?

Hope you enjoyed this one more than I did, and have a great rest of your weekend!