Rafael Musa’s New York Times crossword—Amy’s recap
NY Times crossword solution, 4/5/25 – no. 0405
So many great 9- and 10-letter answers throughout this puzzle! It played more like a Friday puzzle for me. Definite “Friday and Saturday were switched” vibes.
First up, the phrase that was entirely new to me: 9D. [Mathematical process used to model unpredictable phenomena], RANDOM WALK. Walk? Huh. Sounds … mathletic.
Fave fill: TROJAN WAR, alien CRASH SITES, YOGA CLASS, NO PRESSURE, PHONE IT IN, PIPE DREAM, HELLHOLES, AFTERPARTY (very much enjoyed season 2 of the Apple TV+ series, The Afterparty), JANSPORT backpacks, NBA FINALS.
Could do without the STOAT, one of our crosswordese mammals. Not entirely sold on “OH, I FORGOT” and “OK, WISE GUY“; thoughts?
I like the nonspecificity of 8A. [Like some who take testosterone]. There are cis women who take T. There are cis men who take T. And of course, there are TRANS men on T.
Weird clue: 1A. [Between 75 and 140, for an adult cheetah: Abbr.], LBS. This doesn’t work. The cheetah’s weight is between 75 ad 140 lb. “How much is the cheetah’s pounds?” “The cheetah’s pounds are between 75 and 140.” Also, lb is both singular and plural, per Merriam-Webster.
Enrique Henestroza Anguiano & Erik Agard’s Los Angeles Times crossword — Stella’s write-up
Los Angeles Times 4/5/25 by Enrique Henestroza Anguiano & Erik Agard
Some really fricking great cluing happening here:
- 14A [Pitcher’s start] is HERE’S AN IDEA. Get it? “Pitcher” as in “someone pitching an idea.”
- 36A [Ken’s job, in “Barbie”] is BEACH. There may be a time some twenty to thirty years in the future in which this reference is no longer hilarious to me, but it’s not now.
- 51A [Fierce competition] is a DRAG PAGEANT. Ugh, I’m deeply envious that a) they got to this entry before I did and b) it’s such a damn good clue!
- 11A [Sweet, chili-infused condiment] Nice to see HOT HONEY in a puzzle. (Try it on pizza!)
- 12A [What highly motivated people may have zero goals for?] is INBOXES. As someone who tries to keep her inbox clear of any items that don’t require an action from me, this clue makes me feel seen.
- 33A [Under-the-table purchase] is AREA RUG. So good.
Mike Shenk’s Wall Street Journal crossword, “Beastly!” — pannonica’s write-up
WSJ • 4/5/25 • Sat • “Beastly!” • Shenk • solution • 20250405
It’s pretty self-evident what’s going on here: phrases beginning with types of animals are altered by having that word turned into an adjective ending in Y.
- 23a. [Cantankerous interstellar cloud?] CRABBY NEBULA (Crab Nebula).
- 37a. [Questionable hockey equipment?] FISHY STICKS (fish sticks).
- 57a. [Scheming company?] FOXY BUSINESS (Fox Business).
- 71a. [Unkempt baseball player?] RATTY CATCHER (rat catcher).
- 91a. [Seats for sycophants?] TOADY STOOLS (toadstools).
- 109a. [Spiteful intruder?] CATTY BURGLAR (cat burglar).
I tend to think of significant grid overlaps among theme answers as a Mike Shenk trademark, but the entries here are a bit too short—and few—for that.
The crossword was unsurprisingly fluid and even the ‘tricky’ clues were on the whole rather easy to parse.
- 5d [High returns] LOBS. Not what we might expect in the Wall Street Journal.
- 6d [Prevented from progressing] STYMIED. First had STOPPED, then STUMPED.
- 12d [Hammer and Spade, e.g.] SLEUTHS. 96a [Earth mover] SHOVEL. 112d [Big heart] ACE. 69d [Parts of hearts] ATRIA.
- 36d [Windows strip] TASK BAR. 39a [Make a cameo, say] CARVE. 58d [Cut-and-dry location] SALON. See, these I consider to be merely gently tricky clues.
- 52d [Paste used in artificial seafood] SURIMI. I suspect this will be the most unfamiliar entry for most solvers, although I’m equally certain most people will have encountered it, perhaps without knowing the name.
- 65d [Arrogant gait] STRUT.
- 68d [Breezy course, often] INTRO, 55d [Breezy courses] EASY AS, 11d [Getting by with minimal effort] COASTING, 48d [Kicks back] CHILLS.
- 99d [“The Dream of Gerontius” composer] ELGAR. Based on the 1865 poem by John Henry Newman.
- 100d [Cousins of pollocks] CODS. 116a [Flounder’s kin] PLAICE.
- 1a [Crosses to bear, perhaps] MEDALS. Bit tricky, especially for the opening entry.
- 26a [Moves through a membrane] OSMOSES. Handy word in a crossword; surprising we don’t see it more often.
- 51a [Attacks from the side] FLANKS. I didn’t know it could be used as a verb in this way.
- 53a [Like a C in physics?] HARD. Or phonetics.
- 62a [Jargon suffix] -ESE. I love jargonese! (I will make this joke every time.)
- 63a [Daughter of cheesecake baker Charlie Lubin] SARA LEE. The only clue where I needed to take a few beats and do some deduction.
- 80a [Star in Cetus] MIRA. Needed the crossings for this.
- 107a [Bridget Riley, for one] OP ARTIST.
Original 1965 album art:
- 119a [In piles, maybe] SORTED. 72d [Stockpile] AMASS.
So that’s SORTED.
S.N.’s Newsday crossword, Saturday Stumper — pannonica’s write-up
Newsday • 4/5/25 • Saturday Stumper • S.N., Newman • solution • 20250405
I’ve had longer solve times on Stumpers, but I can’t think of another that drained me quite as much as this one did. Pulling teeth, fits and (very modest) starts, just an ordeal every step of the way.
Solving order was roughly: fewer random entries across the grid than a normal opening salvo; upper right, middle right, top left, bottom right, middle left, lower left.
- 1a [Gestural exasperation] FACEPALM. Managed to get ––––PALM and tried OPEN PALM then FLAT PALM.
- 13a [Any record] CATALOGUE. Even with the —OGUE in place, it took some time for me to fill in the front.
- 15a [2024 Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show walker] CARLA BRUNI. Apparently it was notable because it was her début there, at age 56. But it is it notable enough?
- 16a [Grounded birds] SSTS. Not EMUS, as I’m sure a lot of you, like me, tried.
- 17a [Opry sponsor in the Fortune 500] HUMANA. Not what I would have suspected. Is there a special connection I’m unaware of?
- 22a [Where to buy SONY] NASDAQ. I think this was my first entry; the all-caps SONY helped. From there, I got 12d [Legal list intro] ET SEQ, whereupon I realized the trick at 20a [Roman numeral] and it remained to be seen whether it was TRE or due.
- 27a [Fabric favored by Marie Antoinette] ALENÇON. Oof. And crossed by 8d [Element #109] MEITNERIUM?! Hooboy, tough stuff. Also, the singular they in 30a [They’re cutting down] LUMBERJACK? Oof!
- 29a [A going concern] ETD, estimated time of departure. Tricky but good clue.
- 32a [Leaves] FOLIATION. When I finally had enough crossing letters to get this—about three-quarters or four-fifths of the way through the solve—I really felt like I had gotten somewhere. Timely center entry, too.
- 33a [Eliciting amazement] PORTENTOUS, not MIRACULOUS. 42a [Half a pair of thrills] OOHS. 47d [Half a pair of pants] GASP. 7d [Inspiration destination] LUNG.
- 45a [Notable] VIP. Aha, a noun. Not an adjective like BIG.
- 39a [Battery-recharging period] ME TIME, not SIESTA. You can see just how many of these dilemmatic clues there are!
- 47a [Awl cousin] GIMLET. The cocktail gets all the attention, right? Instead of a simple punch tool, a gimlet has a grooved shank and a screw tip. And I guess you can order a gimlet with a twist!
- 49a [’30s radio staple] DIAL. Unclear if this is the physical knob or the soap as an advertising sponsor. Either way, I don’t understand why the clue specifies the 1930s.
- 54a [What Georgia aspires to be] NATO STATE. Same for Ukraine.
- 55a [Performer in Camden Yards] ENYA. Here’s the cryptic-style clue for today, and it fooled me good.
- 5d/6d [Pasado __ (… soft-boiled)] POR | AGUA. I’ve never heard of that, although I know what the Spanish words mean literally.
- 9d [Short walks on the field] BBS. Bases on balls?
- 11d [Can order] OUTRANK. Clue looks as if it would better signal OUTRANKS, but it also works here. Remember, Stumper.
- 19d [World’s most popular city name (1700+)] SAN JOSE. Tried SAN JUAN before that.
- 23d [Contronymic look] SCAN, which can indicate either an intense examination or a perfunctory skim. Contronyms, or autoantonyms, can be dangerous—context isn’t always enough to ensure the intended meaning is conveyed. And sometimes the ambiguity is intentional.
- 33d [Richard Pryor, birthwise] PEORIAN. I didn’t know this, but with just a few crossings I filled it in anyway.
- 40d [Desert storm fighter plane] TOMCAT. This was an answer in a crossword within the past few days, which helped me to get it here.
- 46d [Oil company, to Wall Streeters] PETE. New to me. Guessing it’s based on petroleum.
Time to make coffee!
agree, good puzzle for a friday
no real sticking points
NYT: Still under my average Saturday time, though the NW gave me a tough time. I think LBS as a 1A entry with a weird clueing made it hard. I first had BPM, thinking it referred to heart rate. That made me take out STOAT, and I couldn’t make heads or tails of it till I took it out, and then got LATCH (I only had the C from CRASH SITES), then the rest finally came together.
My sticking points were due N and the NE. I wanted so much the pile of submisssions to be the “slush” pile, couldn’t know for sure whether the email folder would be SENT or “junk,” should have seen coming TMI as a NYT favorite, wanted “before” in Latin to start “pre,” didn’t know INES, and took some crossings to think of the old AY CARAMBA. To the N central, I didn’t know JOSH and came badly to its crossings in the backpack maker and the tricky grammar (which I don’t care for) leading to SEAT.
But then come to think of it I held off at the first clue, which could have led to “hinge” as well as LATCH and didn’t know about CODA and PHIL or think of SHREK either.
Apologies, and I don’t know how I entered this in the comment. I do know better. I meant that I wanted “ante” for before, not “pre” (although, given that a prefix comes before, it might have been a punning clue).
NYT: What a difference a good night’s sleep makes! Up yesterday morning at 4:00 am to get my wife to a medical procedure. Late last night, with the grid about 1/3 filled, I was stymied (yes, there was also a little bourbon involved). This morning it all fell into place in about 5 minutes.
Liked most of the long entries. RANDOM WALK is familiar – often used to describe the movement of the stock market. Until some idiot decides to start a trade war – then it’s a RAN-DUMB WALK.
Agree with Amy on 1-A – should have just gone with a football clue (linebackers).
36-A – is a TUNIC necessarily a “billowy” garment?
NYT was good, though very slow starting. First pass filled just a few spaces with ‘S’s but then longer entries provided clues as everything filled in. Solving proceeded left-to-right with much less difficulty than I’d anticipated. Not sure whether this emo journey made it a fun puzzle, but it was a good puzzle. And RANDOMWALK was a nice entry— though my first guess was MONTECARLO.
I too put in MONTE CARLO first, though it’s a method used for much more than “unpredictable phenomena” I just figured that was the usual inaccuracy of crossword clueing. I think RANDOM WALK is a much nicer entry.
For those that are wondering, a simple example of a RANDOM WALK (sometimes called a “drunkard’s walk” in older literature) would be if you started at a corner in a city, and then chose a random direction to walk, and continued until you came to an intersection, then chose another random direction, and so on. There are lots of variations on this, as well as lots of applications. It’s been used to model stock market fluctuations; Einstein used it to understand Brownian motion (where grains of pollen in water were seen to be moving around under a microscope), which led to our general understanding of diffusion; it can explain how polymers behave; how genes change over generations; I’m sure there are many others out there. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Random_walk
RANDOM WALK is a wonderful entry, although I think of it less as modeling than as a reason you shouldn’t try. That is, you shouldn’t try to outsmart the market by picking stocks or by market timing, with reference to the book titled “A Random Walk down Wall Street” by Burton Malkiel (who lectured in Econ 101 when I took it) that made the point of view popular.
I didn’t care for the NYT today. Too many names, too much trivia. I agree with Amy’s dislike of LBS, and APS was ugly too.
The clue for PRIORI is iffy. Latin for ‘before’ is usually ‘ante.’ A priori, in logical reasoning, means ‘from the preceding,’ more or less. The clue for TROJANWAR is cute, I guess, but doesn’t make any sense that I can see.
And the puzzle was quite a bit harder for me than yesterday’s.
Yes, APS was a little weird to me, too. I think of AP courses and AP tests, but not APs for the first. I’ll hold out for inhuman geography.
Stumper = Road Runner
Me = Wile E. Coyote
But I just completed the latest Club 72 puzzle in record time. I knew one long entry right away from the title
I find the Club 72 puzzles vary widely in difficulty. Some (like 1001) I zip through. On others, I need to set the puzzle aside for a while and even then sometimes struggle to get all the answers.
NYT: I found this initially very slow to break into, especially with many medium long words for which a letter or two did not suffice to see the whole thing. But it slowly melted and ultimately left me with a very satisfied feeling upon completion.
I did not know that AP courses can now just be called APS, something I hadn’t heard. Also, I’m not sure what kind of CRASH SITES some consider to be evidence of extraterrestrial life, but I hope to find out soon. I did not know the pop culture references, but these were thankfully rather few. Oh, yeah: It seemed a bit odd to say a latch is on a “door”, since most commonly I think of a latch as something instead on a *gate*, but I’m sure this is arguably correct.
One of the most CRASH SITES:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roswell_incident
I used to drive through Roswell a few times a year. They’re still trying to make money off this thing.
“most famous CRASH SITES . . .”
My biggest regret of my CBGB days was never having managed to catch Television; I so loved his guitar work. I did see Richard Hell, mostly concluding that now I knew why he got kicked out of the band.
Stumper: pannonica nailed it like usual, but I would not be as polite as she was. I felt that some stuff like the plural on 30A’s clue were downright unfair. The same applied to 21A — “khan” singular, but the answer is plural?? I’m not sure of the reasoning for 11D, although pannonica seems to get it. Hated this one.
My brothers are my kin; so agas are the khan’s kin.
If I can order you to do something, I outrank you.
We-ell, agas are khans kin. Thanks for the explanation for 11D, and if that’s the answer, I still don’t like the clue/answer. I’ll admit I kept thinking of “can” in the sense of firing someone.
My least favorite Stumper in a long time. (Sorry, Stan.) So much trivia and obscurity.
Another problem: 10-D,“Prof’s pursuit, perhaps.” A POSTDOC would be something one pursues after grad school while trying to land a position as a professor, not something a professor would pursue.
A professor might be interested in bringing a postdoc into a program.
So a person, rather than a position. Hoo boy!
Re Stumper: 22A – Does “SONY” in “Where to buy SONY” refer to the Japanese electronics company’s stock? Because NIKKEI doesn’t fit the down answers, NYSE is too short, and you can’t buy Sony stock on NASDAQ.
https://www.sony.com/en/SonyInfo/IR/invest/
Sony’s ADR (American depository receipt) is traded in the US under the symbol SONY. I haven’t checked, but given it’s a four letter symbol I’d wager it’s traded on the NASDAQ
Nope. NYSE. This clue is this week’s “15th century.”
Hopefully the only bet I lose today
I tried Nikkei, too, and also “WallSt,” but nope. SONY is the stock symbol, but it doesn’t surprise me that it’s not traded on NASDAQ.
Worst Stumper showing in a long time. Without help, I only got AGTS crossing LUNG and SSTS. Then I had to look up a few things like what DJIA stood for, and element 109.
Back and forth on SHIITE vs SHIISM.
Nobody else briefly thought of Frank BRUNI? Yeah, I know…
And it’s technically Shia, not Shiite or Shiism, but I realize that the U.S. usage is not Shia.
I’m a day late on a Stumper comment cause it took me until today to finish it. Just absolutely brutal from start to finish. The one thing I’ll say is, I’m all for the singular “they” in, you know, life, but boy that opens up a whole new can of worms for super hard crossword clues. I didn’t even realize that was the usage in the clue until I read the writeup. I thought maybe LUMBERJACK could somehow be plural too.
I’ll use the word “they” informally when referring to a particular person when I don’t know someone’s sex (like public forums such as this), but not otherwise. I’ll use he/she more commonly when writing formally. I hadn’t thought of “they” as a “singular pronoun,” though. Interesting thought, but I hate it with crosswords.
WSJ 111d “Off the hook” = “LIT”???