Non-blogged puzzle I want to recommend: Today’s AVCX+ themeless puzzle by Rebecca Goldstein. If you have an AVCX account, you can log in and solve it here. So much fun fill!
Colin Adams’s New York Times crossword—Amy’s recap
NY Times crossword solution, 2/21/25 – no. 0221
Okay, I don’t think I’d ever heard of a WET MARTINI until a WET clue this week. Is this just the default martini recipe, vs. the variant called a dry martini? Not a martini person here, but WET MARTINI looks all kinds of wrong to me. See also: OREO COOKIE. It’s just an OREO!
Fave fill: TIME TO KILL, FACE TAT, MACARONI, SCAVENGE, OUTER SPACE, MANSCAPEDD, PINA COLADA, “DON’T DO IT!”, GEL PACKS (got a whole wardrobe of them in the freezer, great for migraines or hot flashes or sweaty weather), ZERO TO HERO.
Meh: AZOV, NENE, AVER, singular ALTOID, plural VEXATIONS.
New to me: [Going backward, in skateboarding slang], FAKIE.
3.5 stars from me.
Jeff Stillman’s Los Angeles Times crossword — pannonica’s write-up
LAT • 2/21/25 • Fri • Stillman • solution • 20250221
For this theme, the letter A is inserted to wackify phrases, but it’s more restrictive than that: for each phrase, the first word has a single E as the only vowel, and the A goes in after it. Further, the sound change is consistent: from a short-e to a long-e. More technically, those are an open mid-front unrounded vowel and a close front unrounded vowel.
- 20a. [Say, “Everyone put your key in the ignition and turn,” e.g.?] TEACH START-UPS (tech startups).
- 28a. [Brief reminder before a Disney musical featuring Belle?] BEAST IN SHOW (best in show).
- 44a. [Sidewalk stand earnings arranged in tidy stacks of cash?] NEAT PROFITS (net profits). No idea why ‘sidewalk stand’ is there.
- 55a. [One overseeing a reform program for kleptomaniacs?] DEAN OF THIEVES (den of thieves).
That’s all there is to it!
- 29d [“Big Mouth” writer/voice actress Edebiri] AYO. Unfamiliar to me. I miss a lot of television references, you may have noticed.
- 33d [Times of youthful innocence] SALAD DAYS. Comes from Shakespeare, in Antony and Cleopatra, as per m-w.com.
- 34d [Perfect copy] EDIT. I certainly was fooled by the clue, thinking it was an adjective phrase rather than verb one.
- 46d [“Smallville” actress Annette] O’TOOLE. Someone other than Peter, that’s a bit of welcome variety.
- 47a [Cinque et uno] SEI. Italian numbers. Also a type of rorqual, whose etymology comes from Norwegian: seihval, from sei coalfish + hval whale (m-w.com again). Similarly, rorqual derives from Norwegian, with the first part possibly meaning red (per Wikipedia) and the second part from the same hval/whale root.
- 5a [Half an island in French Polynesia] BORA Bora. I tried PAGO-Pago first.
- 24a [Early late-night host] Jack PAAR, who preceded Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show. Old crosswordese that I haven’t seen in many a moon.
- 39a [Bar sing-along] KARAOKE, which I’m sure many of you already know translates literally as (1d) EMPTY orchestra.
- Not part of the theme: I HEAR, A PLEA, TEAL, LEAP (3d, 32d, 57d, 63a)
Jake Halperin’s Universal crossword, “Toned Down”—Jim’s review
Theme answers are familiar phrases whose final words can follow the word “muted” in other phrases. The revealer is “YOU’RE MUTED” (64a, [Heads-up at a web conference … or a possible comment about the ends of the starred clues’ answers?]).
Universal crossword solution · “Toned Down” · Jake Halperin · Fri., 2.21.25
- 17a. [*Genuine character] TRUE COLORS. Muted colors.
- 28a. [*Leverage one’s network] PULL SOME STRINGS. Muted strings.
- 47a. [*Prompt-followed-by-answer format] CALL AND RESPONSE. Muted response.
Hmm. First off, in the revealer clue, why “web conference”? That just sounds weird. I’d think most people would say “Zoom call” or “Zoom meeting” or “online meeting”. Second, I’ve only ever heard “You’re on mute”, however “YOU’RE MUTED” does google almost as well, so maybe it’s just me. Lastly, I’ve never heard the phrase “muted strings”, but apparently it refers to the act of physically holding down certain strings when playing the guitar. Are there non-guitarists who know this as a phrase? So perhaps my response to this theme is somewhat, oh what’s the word…let’s go with “less than enthusiastic”.
In the fill, SHOWBOATING is great, and having done some web design, STYLE SHEETS went in easily. STUMBLES and LONE STAR are assets to the grid as well. Not so keen on pluralized PBJS and IPS. That last one is easy to fix: Change 39a from SLIT to SLUG. Also, CAR MAT? I think most people say “floor mat”.
Clue of note: 65d. [Authority on slides and swings?]. UMP. Nice clue. Might work just as well for a TOT on the playground.
Three stars.
At first, the Times struck me as a very tough Friday. But I must have been attuned to its wavelength, because all of my guesses on long fill turned out to be correct, and I actually finished in slightly better than my average time. Fun!
FAKIE/NIKKI Natick
(I wound up with NICKI/FACIE)
I NEED A HINT / I ATE A SANDWICH
Sort who might go for all the bells and whistles — Bad clue
Awful clue for RAIN
Otherwise excellent, challenging puzzle.
I thought the RAIN clue was very interesting!
I agree. It wasn’t a useful clue for most of us, which is probably what Lee is saying, but if a clue is going to force you to solve by crossings at least it should educate. Botswana is mostly Kalahari Desert, and the fact that rain is a metaphor for money (or vice versa) is wonderfully evocative.
Ollie, goofy, fakie: three basic sk8ing terms everyone should file away in their memory bank for doing crosswords.
You may not be up on popular culture…
but Nikki Glaser is definitely NOT a natick.
She’s a very popular stand-up comedienne, who’s had podcasts and a Reality TV series, and who hosted both the Tom Brady Roast, and the most recent Golden Globes Awards (both which got rave reviews).
This is the second “pot grower” ante/poker reference in a week or so?
All the other ? clues are tired and cliched.
When will NYT Games pass the torch to Erik Agard already?
Please don’t. There’s my vote.
I, too, found this one a bit too youthful for me even without Agard. I worked hard at this one and felt lucky to get past NIKKI, FAKIE, SWAK, and a couple of other names although I felt sure with other crossings that it had to be NIKKI to be a name. But the number of positive ratings makes it clear that this time the problem is my fault.
“SWAK” is not youthful at all, quite the opposite.
Good to know.
SWAK is not a name.
I liked the puzzles when Joel Fagliano was editing. Will’s return is a breath of stale air, I’m sorry to say.
Ouch! To which I reply that my vote would have to go with Shortz. I never synched with Joel.
NYT: The difference dry and wet martinis is the amount of vermouth used. It has nothing to do with the presence or lack of olives, so either DRYMARTINI or WETMARTINI would fit the clue.
Very slow NYT. One of those frustrating puzzles where -almost- all of my initial guesses were correct, then followed by many wrong guesses. Finished with one look-up.
NYT: Both “Time to Kill” and “Don’t Do It” happen to be songs by The Band, the latter their cover of Marvin Gaye’s “Baby, Don’t You Do It”.
NYT: NE last to fall for me. I deciphered the NIKKI/FAKIE just fine. PWNED is new this guy, as OWNED seemed like the answer — thank goodness PINA COLADA was there to confirm this bizarre entry. A word borne from mistyping becomes a word? Puh-lease!
All in all, a good puzzle.
Yup … I kinda hate that I now think PWNED almost as naturally as I do OWNED when solving crosswords the past few years. PWN (and its derivatives) first appeared in the NYT puzzle in 2017. Now that it seems locked into the crossword solving portion of my brain, it will surely soon disappear from the vernacular.
The concept, as I understand it, is that ‘P’ coming after ‘O’ alphabetically, makes being PWNED worse than being OWNED. Go figure.
Amy asks about the default martini. According to the ANSI standard K100.1-1966 for the dry martini, the gin to vermouth ratio is 20-1 to 16-1, depending on gin proof. But that begs the question of default martini dryness.
For most contemporary martini drinkers, the dry martini is, in fact, the default. A very-dry martini may be pure gin. (I do not recognize “vodka martini” as anything but a self-canceling phrase, by the way, and will not discuss it further.)
But it was not always so. At the dawn of the martini era, in the late 19th century, the default martini had much more vermouth than today; 1-1 ratios were not unheard of, which would qualify as a wet martini today. But the evolution of the martini has been one of increasing dryness. As recently as the ’50s and ’60s, the default ratio was 8-1, which is how I make mine. Some might call that a wet martini, but I certainly don’t. I would call any martini with at least 1 part of vermouth to 4 parts of gin “wet.” Another orthogonal variable is sweetness. Most martinis today, whether dry or wet, are made with dry (“Italian”) vermouth, but historically they used mixtures of dry and sweet vermouth. Some modern recipes for martinis, especially wet ones, continue this, which is why the opposite of a dry martini may or may not be a sweet martini.
And don’t start me on the damage done by Fleming’s erroneous “shaken not stirred” recipe. Shaken gin is bruised gin.
Further, when a drink is ‘perfect’ that means it has equal parts dry and sweet vermouth.
Colorfully, there is the Montgomery, which sports a gin-to-vermouth ratio of 15:1, based on the premise that the namesake military man would only engage the enemy if his forces outnumbered them by such a factor.
Did you mean French there? I think of French vermouth being the historically dry style, but of course both kinds are available from those two countries (and elsewhere).
The terms “French” and “Italian” are ambiguous, for sure. “Sweet” and “dry” or even “red” and “white” are better.
I prefer my manhattans perfect, but martinis made with dry vermouth.