Note: No WSJ puzzle due to the Presidents Day holiday.
Jay Silverman’s Universal crossword, “Building Blocks” — pannonica’s write-up
Universal • 2/17/25 • Mon • :Building Blocks” • Silverman • solution • 20250217
- 55aR [Toy construction pieces, or what can be found at the starts of the starred clues’ answers?] LEGO BRICKS.
- 17a. [*”The Wonderful Wizard of Oz” author] L FRANK BAUM.
- 34a. [*French-Belgian cookware maker] LE CREUSET.
- 39a. [*Iconic garment of 1980s aerobics videos] LEG WARMER.
Okay, but L-LE-LEG doesn’t account for LEGO, especially as the revealer is not a starred clue. Feels weird.
Overall, this was a very easy early-week crossword: no fancy clues, no unusual answers. Row 15 even seems to be a meta-commentary: 61a [Look to be] SEEM, 62a [Not challenging] EASY, 63a [“Sayonara!”] SEE YA.
- 9d [Sci-fi travel aid] TIME WARP. 10d [“Give me some __”] SPACE. Space and time!
- 28d [Jumping-off point, maybe?] LEDGE. Little gruesome, maybe?
- 40d [“Right on!”] AMEN.
- 47d [Does what Viola Davis does] ACTS. Strange little idiosyncratic clue. But nothing wrong with that.
- 53d [Food safety agency.] USDA. Do we still have that?
- 22a [Completely surround] ENCASE. 24a [Encyclopedia’s range] A TO Z.
- 30a [2010 health law: Abbr.] ACA. Definitely in their sights.
- 36a [Many a gala hairstyle] UPDO. 37a [Make pricier at auction] BID UP.
- 44a [Eye’s outer layer] CORNEA. I wasn’t thinking clearly and wrote in SCLERA at first.
Janice Luttrell’s Los Angeles Times crossword — Stella’s write-up
Los Angeles Times 2/17/25 by Janice Luttrell
The revealer at 56A [High-level government post, and what the ends of 17-, 25-, and 42-Across may have?] is CABINET POSITION, because the second word in each theme answer is something you might find in your kitchen CABINET.
- 17A [Chocolate treat from Reese’s] is a PEANUT BUTTER CUP. (I do not consider a PEANUT BUTTER CUP a “treat,” which I realize makes me weird and un-American.)
- 25A [Replacement on the mound] is a RELIEF PITCHER. That is, the “mound” on a baseball field.
- 42A [Venue for summer concerts in Los Angeles] is HOLLYWOOD BOWL.
HOLLYWOOD BOWL was my favorite theme entry: It takes me back to an earlier time when newspapers were more focused on local coverage, and I’ve been doing enough reprints of ’90s and ’00s puzzles lately to see that that translated sometimes into region-specific trivia in puzzles. This is the Los Angeles Times, and so a reference to the HOLLYWOOD BOWL seems very appropriate.
There were some hiccups in the short fill: I didn’t love the partial -A-BOO, the crosswordy APSE, the contrived-feeling EL ORO, and my personal pet peeve, UM NO. Yes, that last is very in-the-language; however, there’s no good way to distinguish between UM NO and UH NO, which I think trips up beginning and intermediate solvers and just annoys advanced solvers who don’t fill in that second letter until they have the crossings.
Kate Hawkins and Erica Hsiung Wojcik’s New York Times crossword — pannonica’s write-up
NYT • 2/17/25 • Mon • Hawkins, Wojcik • solution • 20250217
- 60aR [“Uh-huh, I bet” … or a literal description of what 17-, 24-, 36- and 50-Across all have] YEAH, RIGHT. Those theme clues end in synonyms of approval. Nowhere is it specified or even mentioned that it’s the ends (although the relevant squares are pre-circled). I’m reminded of the humorous apocryphal story of a linguistics professor discussing double positives. Also, I find it bordering on duplication to have 63a [“Not. Good.”] UH-OH so close to a (theme!) clue containing “uh-huh”.
- 17a. [Memento-filled craft project] SCRAPBOOK.
- 24a. [Fast-food chain that serves Louisiana chicken] POPEYES.
- 36a. [1981 hit by Queen and David Bowie] UNDER PRESSURE.
- 50a. [Child’s urging to a horse] GIDDYUP.
Fine theme. 8d [Opposite of refuse] ACCEPT.
- 4d [Messing around on set] DEBRA. Fooled me. 38d [Item on a stage] PROP.
- 14d [Glimpsed] SAW. 47d [Looked for] SOUGHT. Etymologies (from m-w.com): see – Middle English seen, from Old English sēon; akin to Old High German sehan to see and perhaps to Latin sequi to follow — more at SUE ; seek – Middle English seken, from Old English sēcan; akin to Old High German suohhen to seek, Latin sagus prophetic, Greek hēgeisthai to lead. So, it may be that these words with somewhat similar meanings derive from words meaning the opposite of each other!
- 40d [Ingredient in tempera or tempura] EGG. Nice little observation.
- 51d [Swing at a ball?] DANCE. Perhaps, perhaps.
- 29a [Lead-in to phone or ass] SMART. Butt-dialing, however, is not so clever.
Brooke Husic’s New Yorker crossword–Amy’s recap
New Yorker crossword solution, 2/17/25 – Husic
Hey! This was nowhere near as challenging as I’d expected. Still Saturday-NYT level, mind you.
Fave fill: SPRAWL, SISTER-IN-LAW, BLAVITY, PHALLIC (the [Cocky?] clue kept me guessing for far too long), SAFE WORD, WALUIGI. Not keen on stand-alone “I’M GONNA” or SAW UP.
Pieced together with help from Netflix’s Dinner Time Live With David Chang, thanks to their end-of-the-year holiday foods focus: [Korean rice-cake soup eaten on New Year’s Day], TTEOKGUK. Chang tells us that it’s also eaten for the Lunar New Year.
Did not know: [Only woman to be officially drafted into the N.B.A.], LUSIA HARRIS. I need to look this up! Wiki tells us “Harris did not express an interest to play in the NBA and declined to try out for the Jazz. It was later revealed that she was pregnant at the time, which made her unable to attend the Jazz’s training camp. She was selected ahead of 33 male players.” She never played in the NBA but did play in a women’s pro league.
3.75 stars from me.
Brendan Emmett Quigley’s Crossword #1758 — Eric’s review
Brendan Emmett Quigley’s Crossword #1758 — 2/17/25
We get a nice, dense grid today, with just the right amount of bite for me. Some notable clues and answers:
- 1A [Summer event that offers an out-of-this-world experience] SPACE CAMP Cute clue. The space camp in Huntsville, Alabama is the only one left in the United States.
- 10A [Rugby play] SCRUM It’s always nice to have a gimme near the top of a puzzle.
- 15A [Covers with tessellation] TILES OVER I knew that a small bit of stone, glass, or similar material used in making a mosaic is a tessera, so this was pretty easy.
- 16A [Tennis player Rybakina] ELENA That’s not a name I knew; she’s the first Kazakhstani to win a major championship (Wimbledon, 2022).
- 17A [“The silence is really eerie”] A LITTLE TOO QUIET
- 26A [Test for babies, briefly] AMNIO My first guess here was APGAR, which isn’t really a test. But then, a fetus isn’t really a baby.
- 29A [American Airlines Center pro] MAV The last arena concert I saw was the Who in Dallas in 2002, at the American Airlines Center, so this was a little gimme. Stadiums and arenas change names so often that I don’t try to keep up with them.
- 34A [Graceful runners] ARABS I assume this means the horses, though I’m sure there are ARAB people who run gracefully.
- 37A [With 4-Down, “Saturday in the Park” singer]/4D PETER/CETERA The band Chicago had a lot of hits when I was in high school, and though I wasn’t a huge fan of their music, their lead singer’s name stuck in my head.
- 45A [Fast and then some?] STARVE That’s not something I would make a jokey clue about.
- 49A [The King’s Birthday ___ (annual UK awards)] HONOURS Nice way to point us to the British spelling. I recently learned that Noah Webster was influential in jettisoning all those unnecessary U’s in words like HONOR.
- 58A [Waste in some test tubes] CHEMICAL RESIDUE That seemed a little green-painty when I filled it in, but the phrase Googles well enough.
- 61A [Creamy, amaretto-based dessert from Italy] BONET I’d never heard of this. Wikipedia says it’s from the Piedmont region and has cocoa powder (yum) as well as amaretto (not so yummy for me). Kudos for a clue other than Lisa BONET, a fine actor whom I haven’t really seen in years.
- 43D [Order of blocks] LEGO SET I saw through this clue quickly, but it could just as easily have been LEGO KIT.
- 50D [Hair-raising spot?] SCALP I had SALON at first, until I remembered that 54A [Model/actress Bellucci] was MONICA.
NYT: I read the YEAH, RIGHT revealer as meaning the synonyms for YEAH are all on the RIGHT side of the theme answers.
Yeah, right (you are)
Oh, that works very well then. I like it much more than before.
Me, too. I had a “meh” reaction. That’s a lot of letters just to pull out something like OK.
New Yorker today: I found it tough, but satisfying.
I thought it was horrible. TTEOKGUK? Give me a break. BLAVITY crossing SEITAN? Neither of those is a word. And the constructor wants me to know the relationship between an actor I could care less about and an actress I could care less about? I thought this was an absurd puzzle.
I agree. So many obstacles to a fair finish. The basketball player running all the way across the center needed every crossing letter, one by one, except that there, too, was an odd name. But the NW was the worst for me.
I take it, Mr. Grumpy, that you meant to say you could not care less. Otherwise you care some, apparently…?
I’ve yet to experience tteokguk, but it sounds interesting. Seitan is a versatile form of protein and can be found in some very tasty dishes. Give it a try sometime, you might like it.
Tteokguk is served on New Year’s Day, and seems very similar to the ozoni the Japanese prepare for New Year’s. Ozoni is always a soup with mochi, rice cakes, although each region adds different ingredients. Tteok are rice cakes, although they usually have a different texture than mochi. And the guk (broth) can have many variations, just like ozoni.
By the way, doubled consonants in Korean just signify stress, and can ignored to a first approximation by non-Korean speakers.
Starting the new year with rice cakes is considered good luck, in both of these very different cultures.
I found it tough and eventually impossible to complete. There were just too many you-know-it-or-you-don’t answers that I couldn’t even guess at from the letter patterns I had. I’ve only managed to complete three of BH’s ten TNY Monday puzzles (and those at a very slow pace for me).
DNF for me too, because of the NW. I had RAVERS instead of RAGERS, which prevented me from seeing (I mean guessing) some of the other words.
Not my kind of puzzle — unfamiliar names everywhere. But that’s the style for many of the New Yorker constructors.
“Keeps in step” is a poor clue for TOESTHELINE, IMO. “Toe the line” means to obey, stick to the rules, etc. I’m not sure what “keeps in step” is supposed to mean, but it sounds like keeping up, staying in tempo or something of the sort.
I also found it tough. And finished with an error at the crossing of SEITAN and BLAVITY. I’ve heard of SEITAN before, but wasn’t sure of the spelling, so I went with an “E.”
I thought the long Downs in the middle were nice. Entertaining clues for SPRAWL, CHILIES, PHALLIC and SAFE WORD.
NW was last to fall. Stuck with the obvious “finals” for too long at 15-A, then after some crosses, went with RAvERS (though I’ve only heard of “raves”). But got that corner straightened out in the end.
A nice chewy Monday.
TNY and BEQ are now off my list of Monday puzzles because of too many arcane words and names. Both of today’s crosswords are easy ways to lose your fan-base.