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Matt Jones’s Jonesin’ Crossword, “Live and Let Dye” — touching up the answers. – Erin’s write-up
Jonesin’ solution 4/1/25
Hello lovelies! We have a simple theme this week in which we find the word DYE spanning our two-word theme entries.
- 15a. [Adjective for college sophomores] SECOND-YEAR
- 54a. [Just me, really?] NOBODY ELSE
- 9d. [Portrayer of Jed Clampett] BUDDY EBSEN
- 24d. [Museum-Go-Round proprietor on “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood”] LADY ELAINE
Other things:
- 37a. [Put one name after another, maybe?] HYPHENATE. Hi to all my fellow hyphenates out there!
- 47d. [Terribly, acronymically] FUBAR. Either F***ed Up Beyond All Recognition (or Repair)
- 19a. [___ 3000 (“New Blue Sun” artist)] ANDRE. The 2023 jazz album was his first solo album and his first new material in 17 years. (Outkast released their last album, “Idlewild,” in 2006.
Until next week!
Lynn Lempel’s Wall Street Journal crossword, “Final Score”—Jim’s review
Looks like we’re the victims of some April 1st shenanigans. This puzzle has the same title and byline as yesterday’s. At first I chalked it up to an error since the WSJ labeled it “Monday, April 1”. But after doing the puzzle, I realized the title works for both grids, so I’ll assume the author of this puzzle is also Lynn Lempel. Kudos to Ms. Lempel for the trickeration that had me scratching my head.
In this puzzle, the theme answers are familiar phrases whose final words are related to sheet music.
Wall St Journal crossword solution · “Final Score” · Lynn Lempel · Tue., 4.1.25
- 18a. [Whatever’s still left] ALL THE REST.
- 24a. [Low-risk government security] TREASURY NOTE.
- 39a. [Shower safety feature] GRAB BAR.
- 51a. [Key White House aide] CHIEF OF STAFF.
- 61a. [Quick-witted] RAZOR SHARP.
A simple and straightforward theme, but it has the same format as yesterday’s, so I’m thinking of the two in parallel. I loved the concept and execution of this little trick, so good on Lynn and Mike for bringing it to us.
But wait, there’s more! An eagle-eyed commenter on the WSJ site noted that both grids are exactly the same in structure, down to every single black square. Really quite an impressive feat!
Moving to the fill, we get ROSE PARADE, CRIME SCENE, VERMEER, and MACH ONE, all strong assets to the grid with little to nothing in the way of clunky fill.
Clues of note:
- 6d. [Nocturnal fish]. EEL. I wouldn’t know, but this strikes me as odd. Are all types of eels are nocturnal?
- 53d. [Body build]. FRAME. I think we’re talking cars here.
Nice puzzle in its own right, and a fun and impressive double play. 4.25 stars.
Elizabeth C. Gorski’s Cr♥ssw♥rd Nation puzzle (Week 722), “Why, of Course!”—Ade’s take
Crossword Nation puzzle solution, Week 721: “Why, of Course!”
Hello there, everyone! Hope all is well with you! Before anything else, I do want to let you all know that this will be my last Crossword Nation post (and post in general) on Fiend. It’s been such an incredible ride, and I can’t thank each and every reader of this blog, and those of you who have taken the time out to read my musings on a weekly basis. It’s more than possible that I might not be your cup of tea amongst those who reviews crosswords, but I definitely don’t take for granted that there are those readers who revolve their time around reading our opinions and being a part of this wonderful community!
On a related note … APRIL FOOLS!!!
Nope, I’m not going anywhere anytime soon … to the consternation of some, I’m sure! But definitely had to get into the April Fools’ Day festivities! As for today’s grid, we have some puns as themes, created when a phrase/noun is altered when a word from that originating phrase is replaced so that the J syllable turns into a Y syllable.
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- YAK OF ALL TRADES (16A: [Handy, multitasking wild ox?]) – Jack of all trades
- JELLY’S LAST YAM (33A: [Broadway musical about jazzman Morton’s ultimate tuber?]) – Jelly’s Last Jam
- YALE HOUSE ROCK (40A: [Eli-approved version of an Elvis Presley classic?]) – Jailhouse Rock
- PRACTICAL YOLKS (59A: [Useful omelet ingredients for an April Fools’ Day breakfast?]) – Practical jokes
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Loving the multiple entries of IMAGE (49D: [Publicist’s concern]) and EXPOSURE using the same clue (50A: [Publicist’s concern]). Then you have the nice touch of EXPOSURE crossing UNLIT, if you think of the former in the photography/exposing to light sense (52D: [Lacking illumination]). I probably should have saved POE for the next graph, given that the Baltimore Ravens football team is named after the famous poem written by Baltimore’s own Edgar Allan Poe, and that the football team’s mascot is named Poe (11D: [“The Bells” writer]). In 2022, the person in the Poe costume was injured while playing with kids on the field and was carted off. The team then replaced Poe with two mascots for the remainder of that season. Their names? Edgar and Allan. I kid you not.
“Sports will make you smarter” moment of the day: FINAL (17D: [Tournament ender]) – Well, the final of the NCAA Men’s and Women’s Basketball Tournament is nigh, and six of the eight teams that have made the Final Four are all No. 1 seeds. In the men’s version, all four No. 1 seeds — Auburn, Duke, Houston, Florida — advanced to the Final Four, just the second time since seeding was introduced into the NCAA Tournament that all four top seeds made it to the national semifinals (2008 was the other year). As of Monday night, both teams who have advanced to the Final Four in the women’s tournament are No. 1 seeds, South Carolina and UCLA.
Thank you so much for the time, everybody! Have a wonderful and safe rest of your day and, as always, keep solving!
Take care!
Ade/AOK
Sande Milton’s New York Times crossword—Evan M’s review
Oh, what an interesting and fun idea for the Tuesday NYT, honestly. I loved this puzzle as it brought me back to memories of reviewing my mom’s word on the crossword together, and laughing at some of the (somewhat to very) wrong answers. My grandma loved erasable pens, though the palimpsest of our mistakes was always just a little bit visible.
The online version, as I expect the print will, has a few answers “prefilled” for you, in childish pencil scrawl. Some of the prefilled creepy scrawlies are 100% right (MAC [57A: __ and cheese]), others are 50/50 (AVER in pencil; AVOW in correct-crossword-land [17A: Declare openly]), and one of them is only 20% correctamundo (HORSE instead of SOLAR sharing that luckiest of second letters O [44D: __ power], though BLACK could’ve been a fun 0% correct answer).
The concept was cute, most of the theme revealers were fine (INFLIGHT MAGAZINE, SEATBACK POCKET, OK we get it, these are found in an airplane and an airplane would be an obvious place where this could happen, sure). However, the puzzle ends on a kind of meh note with the two clunky and rather J’accusatory final revealers. 49A PRIOR PASSENGER clued as “Person who may have ruined your puzzle experience” and 61A RETURN TRAY TABLES clued as “Announcement that could put an end to the misery caused by 49-Across”… I get it, it’s supposed to be cute, but why accuse someone of “ruining” your puzzle experience, even if it is half-jokingly and like mock-cutesily? (Making mock-cutesily a thing is a hill I could die on.) Isn’t it kind of fun to write over the wrong, instead of something “miserable”? I know setting up the scene as doing a puzzle with your family or friends could have been harder to make “work,” but that’s the scene I prefer to think of here. And also, if we’re being technical, RETURN TRAY TABLES would only be part of the announcement… although I am glad the puzzle didn’t try to make “TO THE UPRIGHT POSITION” happen.
Alright, so I promised an intro last week and here it is! My name is Evan Mulvihill and I mostly create themeless puzzles. You can find some of them over here at my very poorly designed blog, FlossWords! My day job (the one I didn’t quit to create puzzles, wisely) is as a clinical pharmacist at San Francisco General Hospital, which I do enjoy very much (in a not-mock-cutesily way). I reached out to Amy to see if she needed any help with blogging crossword puzzles and she said yes, so here I am.
Zhouqin Burnikel’s Los Angeles Times crossword — Jenni’s write-up
I was relieved to see that this wasn’t an April Fool’s theme….or was it? I figured out the connection among the theme answers quickly and was curious to see what the revealer would be.
Los Angeles Times, April 1, 2025, Zhouqin Burnikel, solution grid
- 17a [*Simple lunch meal] is a BALONEY SANDWICH.
- 27a [*Dude ranch quarters] is the BUNK HOUSE.
- 32d [*Slow cookers] are CROCKPOTS.
- 35d [*Suffer forever] is ROT IN HELL.
The revealer is 62a [With 68-Across, sprinter’s infraction, or what the answer to each starred clue has] and that’s a FALSE START. So maybe it *is* an April Fool’s theme! BALONEY, BUNK, CROCK, ROT. Nice. I also liked the distribution of theme answers – not completely symmetrical and split between Across and Down. Plus the smooth fill we’ve all come to expect from a Zhouqin Burnikel puzzle.
What I didn’t know before I did this puzzle: that CATAN has hexagonal tiles.
Adam Aaronson’s New Yorker crossword, “Language Barriers” — pannonica’s write-up
New Yorker • 4/1/25 • Tue • “Languagie Barriers” • Aaronson • solution • 20250401
Instead of a moderately challenging (‘mocha’) Tuesday offering, it’s an easy themed tie-in to the technology-and-something-I forget-what magazine issue.
- 34aR [Arriving at an “Aha!” moment … or what this puzzle is doing vis-à-vis its circled letters] CRACKING THE CODE. The names of programming languages are separated by black squares.
- 16a. [Whiz] GURU.
17a. [Dismissive farewell that comes from the 1995 film “Friday”] BYE FELICIA.
(ruby) - 22a. [Retail __ (shopping intended to make oneself feel better)] THERAPY.
24a. [Word that might refer to pairs of underwear or pairs of shoes] THONGS.
(python) - 44a. [Cheese crumble atop elote] COTIJA.
47a. [Modern hit piece?] VAPE PEN.
(java) - 54a. [Collaboration] TEAM EFFORT.
56a. [Post that might be described as a “wall of text”] RANT. I won’t read even non-ranty posts that don’t have paragraph breaks. Shift-enter usually does the trick, in case you didn’t know.
(fortran)
Pretty supple grid for one that has so much theme content.
Pretty sure I shared this song recently, but am practically compelled to do so again now:
- 1d [Potato-chip parcels] BAGS. ‘Parcels’ ha-ha. Interesting word choice.
- 2d [Nunavut Native] INUIT. It’s been discussed in these pages often—both in the comments and the write-ups—that INUK is singular and INUIT plural.
- 5d [Campaign aimed at influencing the public’s beliefs, informally] PSYOP, for psychological operation. I feel that collectively we’re more susceptible than ever before to such campaigns, awash as we are in digital technologies and the lack of a shared reality.
- 42d [Performance at an E.D.M. festival] DJ SET. I wasn’t tempted to enter DANCE because that would duplicate part of the clue.
- 53d [Acronym for numbers-oriented fields] STEM. In fact, this crossword has a lot of cluing that evokes to various degrees aspects of technology—too many for me to list without things getting out of hand. But feel free to hunt for them yourself, if you’re so inclined.
- 5a [Front-__ news] PAGE. (I’m telling you, there are so many songs that I could have used in this write-up, such as this Little Feat tune for this entry, but I don’t want to get carried away or water things down. Look! 19-across (not to mention both 26a and 27a) evokes The Band and 20-across Charlie Rich—and that’s just in this immediate area.)
- 59a [Word in a second-in-command’s title] VICE. It’s actually a preposition! etymology: Latin, ablative of vicis change, alternation, stead; etymology for the prefix form: Middle English vis-, vice-, from Anglo-French, from Late Latin vice-, from Latin vice, ablative of vicis (m-w.com)
Kathy Bloomer’s and Jeff Chen’s Universal Crossword, “Mixed Materials” (ed. David Steinberg) — Matt F’s Review
Universal Solution 04.01.2025
Today we have a classic anagram puzzle featuring commonly recycled materials. The materials are scrambled near the center of each theme answer, hence our revealer:
- 61A – [Facility processing reusable material … and a hint to this puzzle’s indicated letters] = RECYCLING CENTER
“Recycled” is the anagram indicator here, and also the literal description of what we are anagramming: recyclable materials. Here’s the full theme set:
- 17A – [Something delivered at a campaign rally] = POLITICAL SPEECH (plastic)
- 28A – [Where political journalists sit] = PRESS GALLERY (glass)
- 38A – [Decadent, airy dessert] = CHOCOLATE MOUSSE (metal)
- 46A – [Fruits that originated in New York] = EMPIRE APPLES (paper)
We have 2 answers that are nearly recycling centers, which makes them feel a tad off from what the revealer is trying to convey. I’m sure the theme research was exhaustive, and this is not a bad set – I’m just saying it would have been extra impressive if the anagrams were precisely dead-center. I do appreciate that each substring is inset by at least 3 letters from each end of the longer word, and the substring always spans a word break. I was less impressed by the overt dupe in the second theme clue, using “political” from the first theme answer. Clue dupes don’t always bug me, but when the word is essential to the theme and could easily be avoided, then why not try to avoid it?
Really nice fill here, even if we don’t have any long bonus words. We still have fun shorter stuff like HELIX, SAX SOLO, and RASCAL to keep us entertained. Dense themes like this often necessitate a tighter grid to keep everything clean. Constructor’s rule of thumb is to avoid slots that cross through more than 2 theme answers. This grid here manages to pull that off without feeling too restrictive, and that’s an impressive feat. Each section has multiple paths in and out which helps to facilitate grid flow.
NYT: By far my least favorite crossword in or out of the NY Times in the 60+ years I’ve been doing crosswords.
Sounds like it might be a successful April Fools puzzle then!
NYT: By far my most favorite crossword in or out of the NY Times in the 30+ years I’ve been doing crosswords.
Sorry Dan.
What would make you think I would mind if someone else likes a puzzle that I didn’t? (I don’t.)
I liked NYT! Though I feel as though “ham and cheese” was a missed opportunity.
I thought that was going to be the actual answer first!
thought the NYT was cute. it’d gonna be a love it or hate it puzzle i think.
i had no issue with the PRIOR PASSENGER entry as i have been burned by that experience of opening the magazine to find the puzzle half done (and quite wrong—domes in pen, too!) — although not in some time as now i just solve on my phone in flight. but RETURN TRAY TABLES (note the odd 16×15 size to fit in this and INFLIGHT MAGAZINE) is just an awful not in the language phrase. basically a 16 letter partial that’s only valid when followed by “…to their upright and locked position”.
I enjoyed the puzzle and thought it was a fun April Fool’s Day puzzle. But I agree that RETURN TRAY TABLES by itself without the “to their upright and locked position” isn’t an announcement. It’s part of an announcement, and it doesn’t make any sense as a standalone phrase.
I chuckled at the NYT puzzle but in flight magazines are mostly a thing of the past.
I fly only Delta, and I think they quit printing their inflight magazine at the start of the pandemic. They used to run a NYT crossword, a couple of Sudoku puzzles, a couple of KenKens and some “brain teasers.” Sometimes a useful diversion, but the PRIOR PASSENGER had often messed things up for me!
I liked in-flight magazines that printed NYT puzzles. Some of the other ones had much easier puzzles. I’m not the world’s fastest solver by any means, but I used to make a game of seeing if I could fill in the in-flight magazine puzzle before the plane took off.
Same here! Puzzle done before wheels up = victory.
I was thinking of this exactly… I flew last week to a conference and thought to myself (as I was doing a crossword on my iPad) they don’t have the inflight magazines anymore. This was on American Airlines.
Interestingly, it was those inflight magazines that first got me doing crosswords *years* ago… I used to only enjoy math puzzles, and I was on a flight about 20 years ago, and decided to try the crossword. I was very bad at it, and thought that if I want to get better at these, I will probably need to practice. Back then (early 2000s), Yahoo had a daily crossword that I did for a while. And that helped the next few times I was on a plane :-) Then … I fell out of practice for a long time, and then picked it up again a few years ago around the start of the pandemic. I remember listening to John Hodgman talk about on his podcast about trying to have a full year streak, and I thought “that seems like an achievable goal”.
In summary: bring back inflight magazines!
Those magazines were also great markets for us freelance writers.
Years ago I was on a plane in my own personal Room 101. In the row behind me was a drug rep trying very hard to pick up the woman sitting next to him by bragging about how important he was, how stupid doctors were, and how he managed to get around FDA rules. In the row in front of me, a woman was doing the crossword in the inflight magazine with her parents, so they were reading each clue out loud (very loudly) and their answers were frequently wrong. I still shudder to think about it.
(loved the puzzle, agree that the tray table answer was not great, liked “prior passenger”)
I think that woman was on a flight with me once. She and her husband were sitting next to me, discussing every clue in the puzzle they were doing. They were going on and on about an “ancient ask-etic,” and I finally cracked and blurted, “it’s ESSENE.”
She turned to me and, sort of haughtily, told me, “It can’t be. It needs to be six letters.”
And it was a six-hour flight.
It’s got nothing to do with crosswords, but here’s my story of the worst flight ever:
https://www.nytimes.com/shared/comment/46guft?rsrc=cshare&smid=url-share
I used to go to a swimming pool where a small group of people worked the Sunday NYT together and out loud. They couldn’t get anything. I felt very smug because they all had much higher level professions than I had (one was the former governor of my state) and I quit doing the Sunday puzzle because it was too easy.
Martin’s sense of humor showed with his anecdote about “ESSENE”. Too funny!
I loved this concept, likely because it immediately reminded me of my in-flight magazine experiences. Well done!
NYT: I’m in the ‘loved it’ camp. cute and fun for April fools.
Other puzzles today:
Bee: lols on that and an appropriate pangram
Connections: yellow only. Can’t say I loved it.
Flamed out after yellow and green Connections. Liked the first half of the puzzle, not a fan of the second half.
Yellow was easy-peasy, no clue on the rest. Even after seeing the answers it took me a while to understand them, and I’m still not convinced about the greens.
Same here. This one was a stinker!
I’m next in line… yellow easy … the rest I am not really happy with. Oh I guess lavender works for me but the others I would never have gotten and still not sure I see.
Another time of rolly-eyes and smh. The lavender the other day being “Proper nouns in Broadway titles that are spoken phrases”… LOL, good thing I didn’t have to spell out the whole connection on that one (the spoken phrases part). I do appreciate the effort to keep us gaming, it can’t be easy.
BTW, enjoyed my court jester hat today when Genius was attained at SB. :) .
Same here on Connections. After yellow, I went looking for hints, and still managed to make four mistakes. Not a fan of that one.
On Spelling Bee, I get the joke but don’t much care for it. The ING bees are annoying enough to begin with, and the way I play (generally keeping a game open until I reach Queen Bee or it’s about to drop out of the recent games list), I’m constantly missing words that I found in a puzzle from a few days earlier.
I know there’s only so much you can do with 25 letters, but there’s a built-in repetitiveness to Spelling Bee that doesn’t need to be reinforced.
Lovely NYT. It’s a very enjoyable journey from “wtf?” to “oh April Fool’s gimmick?” to “aha, not just a gimmick, nice!”
This was exactly my thought first – I was like, “What’s going on?” and then when I realized what the punchline was, I actually got a bit nostalgic of my very first days solving crosswords and looking for the few easy entries first in the grid. It’s how my mom and I still connect!
NYT: Just confirming that the print puzzle looks exactly like the screen grab here, same filled-in graphics.
I really enjoyed the NYT, especially for only a Tuesday. It has a great final twist, too, that some of the entries were in fact correct.
My first association wasn’t with a solver prone to dumb answers (not that I’d call the tidy handwriting all that childish either). It was rather my own solving habit of holding off entering something when there are two perfectly good choices, and AVER / AVOW or RNA / DNA would be a frequent case in point
Jonesin link not working–anyone else?
My fault. I had the date wrong. It’s fixed now.
Hi Martin — Thank you so much from all of us Fiends who greatly appreciate everything you can to make this website such a wonderful place!
I’m having a problem with the Jonesin’ website at:
https://www.crosswordnexus.com/jonesin/
It’s showing last week’s puzzle. Any ideas about how to contact Matt Jones?
(But I can download the PUZ file from your link above.)
I’ll let him know.
Thanks
I had no idea. File was sent Sunday evening AFAIK and I don’t directly run Crossword Nexus. Sounds like the issue has been resolved.
But thank you all for solving Jonesin’!
Anyone else having trouble getting the Jonesin’ puzzle? Can’t get it here under Today’s Puzzles nor on its website. It has last week’s puzzle.
Whoever fixed it, thank you!
New Yorker: “I won’t read even non-ranty posts that don’t have paragraph breaks.”
Amen to that!
I had a colleague who wrote lengthy emails with detailed answers to questions posed to him. Not only did he use about a five-point font, he apparently didn’t know how to break a paragraph up. It was really annoying.
And thanks for the parenthetical explanation of “mocha.” That threw me the other day.
Ya, I don’t think it’ll catch on, but I keep trying.
You never know. Do you think Rex Parker knew how far “Natick” would go?
Ade: I was really believing you in the first paragraph and getting sad before I remembered it’s April Fool’s Day. Haha. I really love your “sports will make you smarter” sections.
NYT: You know, I feel kind of like they had a great idea here and it just came out under-baked. I had a good time solving it, for what that’s worth, but it seems like a proper April Fools Day puzzle would have had way more pre-filled nonsense, with more amusing mistakes. I mean, back when I was first trying to crack this puzzle nut, I would get so frustrated that, by the end of the puzzle, I was just filling in foul language.
A note on the somewhat insufferable snobbery of the theme cluing, though: The plucky newbie who attempted this puzzle prior to me on my April one flight today is not to blame for my experience. Its the airline employee who forgot to replace this used magazine with a new one at my seat. Whenever I ran into this problem on an actual flight, I asked for, and received, replacement along with an apology. This is where the blame must lie. If not, then I am doubly damned for having enjoyed completing this puzzle, thus ruining the experience way more completely for the next passenger in this chair.