Peter Gordon’s Fireball Crossword, “Themeless 177” – Jenni’s write-up
I got myself into a little trouble in the NE which was more my fault than Peter’s. I didn’t find the pair of answers that often make up a mini-theme in Peter’s themelesses – did I miss something?
Highlights:
Fireball, April 16, 2025, Peter Gordon, “Themeless 177,” solution grid
- 8a [What needs to be removed when doing shots] had me thinking about liquor. Nope. It’s LENS CAPS.
- 8d [Comics mother of Chip, Dot, Ditto, and Trixie] is LOIS of Hi & Lois. Her brother is Beetle Bailey. Why do I know these things?
- 31d [Unlikely reply to “Who dat?”] is IT IS I.
- 40a [Square container for a round product] is a PIZZA BOX. Not all pizza is round.
- 42a [Property owner, at times] is ASSESSEE, not ABSENTEE, as I first thought.
The NE was an issue because I dropped IPOD NANO into 28a instead of IPOD MINI and it took me a while to figure out what I had done wrong.
What I didn’t know before I did this puzzle: that Britney Spears’s OOH LA LA is on the “Smurfs” soundtrack.
Jim Quinlan’s Wall Street Journal crossword, “Inside Out”—Jim’s review
Really nice chewy grid by former Fiend blogger Jim Q. But ugh, my solve time! Couldn’t see the theme for the longest time and that SW corner nearly did me in. Let’s get to it.
Theme answers are familiar two-word phrases that have had the two inside letters (the one ending the first word and the one beginning the second word) moved to the beginning and end of their respective words.
Wall St Journal crossword solution · “Inside Out” · Jim Quinlan · Thu., 4.17.25
- 17a. [Mimic some owls?] APE HOOTERS. Pea shooter.
- 26a. [Dr. of rap gives a darn?] DRE CARES. Red scare.
- 36a. [Campus areas for typical jazz combos?] TRIO QUADS. Riot squad.
- 51a. [Illegal jeans distribution outfit?] LEVI RING. Evil grin. (But does anyone say a singular “Levi” when referring to jeans?)
- 61a. [Fitbit count for a postal worker?] ROUTE PACES. Outer space.
These new wacky phrases seemed oh-so-familiar but the alteration mechanism was just out of reach for most of my solve. It was the last entry where I finally had my long-awaited aha moment. From there I could make sense of the other answers, and though I still struggled with LEVI, when it did fall, it made sense as well.
I’m very curious how Jim Q came up with these entries, whether by a brute force search or something more automated (like a regedit search). Hopefully he can stop by and clue us in.
But that SW corner was all kinds of trouble for me. CACAO and OSAKAN crossing card game TAKI, COLOGNE clued very ambiguously, ASEXUAL with a ? clue, and CAVORTS wanting to be STROLLS and NATS wanting to be NETS. Throw in half an inscrutable theme answer, and I was flailing. In hindsight, it’s all (mostly) fair, and I was glad I was able to work my way through it.
Elsewhere, TIP JARS, TO-GO CUP, Swiftian YAHOOS, and OPEN ERA are highlights. Not so sure about STEP-KID when I’m pretty sure Mike Brady would call Marcia his “step-daughter”, and HR ISSUE is meh. Also, I don’t recall the TV show TOP COPS but oh well.
Clues of note:
- 35a. [Big name in the truffles business]. LINDT. Chocolate, not mushrooms.
- 36d. [Game akin to Uno]. TAKI. I thought this would be clued with respect to the snack, but the brand is “Takis”. Never heard of the card game.
Despite my own difficulties, lovely theme and grid. Four stars.
Ilan Kolkowitz and Shimon Kolkowitz’s New York Times crossword — Zachary David Levy’s write-up
Difficulty: Tricky (11m17s)
Ilan Kolkowitz and Shimon Kolkowitz’s New York Times crossword, 4/17/25, 0417
Today’s theme: being unable to see the FOREST for the TREES
- (f)LOTUS
- ELM(o)
- (r)ASH
- FIR(e)
- (s)PEAR
- APPLE(t)
Very unusual grid layout — completely asymmetric, a rarity in the NYTXW universe (averaging one asymmetric puzzle every two years, though trending up in the last 15 years or so, per definitely-not-defunct website xwordinfo.com). This appears to be in the service of rendering an evergreen tree with the black squares without the hassle of an unchecked square at 24D (among others), although there are other unbalanced black squares that have nothing to do with the arboreal design aesthetic.
Cracking: USE THE FORCE and get positive feedback from Harrison Ford afterwards
Slacking: MARNER crossing MCPHEE. I also suppose if you didn’t spend several months of your life memorizing the ACTIN-myosin bridge complex, that would also strike you as obscure
Sidetracking: FARRIERS
Brendan Emmett Quigley’s Crossword #1775 “Missing Period” — Eric’s Review
Brendan Emmett Quigley’s Crossword #1775 — 4/17/25
The title led me to expect that what was missing were punctuation marks, but as indicated by 66D [Historical period removed from the theme answers in this puzzle], the theme answers are all common expressions with AGE taken out to leave wacky new phrases:
- 16A [Dam builders in a part of the hospital?] ER BEAVERS Eager Beavers
- 20A [What glitter guns in a pie fight can make?] INSTANT MESS Instant message
- 30A [With 41-Across, “Let me explain how you hear a call from a canary once you push play on the stereo”?]/41A I KNOW WHY THE/CD BIRD SINGS I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, the poet Maya Angelou’s 1969 autobiography.
- 53A [Jeans for the Beast’s beloved?] BEAUTY PANTS Beauty Pageants
- 63A [“Let’s roll!”, or an alternate title for this puzzle] IT’S GO TIME It’s not clear to me whether this is a theme answer or a second revealer; if AGE is supposed to fit in that phrase, I don’t see where it goes.
Brendan describes this one as medium difficulty. I would have called it easy, as I filled it in without much pause.
I did have a few errors to track down at the end. At 28A/28D, I originally had ABC and AFC. I’ve never seen Jimmy Fallon’s show; NFC, which is short for near-field communication, is an initialism I’ve only seen once before, in another BEQ puzzle. (Card readers of any sort frequently seem to not work for me.)
I had a less defensible error at 39A/31D ABA/NAS. It doesn’t bother me that I didn’t know which basketball league introduced the three-point shot, but I should have realized sooner that the [“Ether” rapper] was unlikely to be NNS.
This is an okay theme. I kinda liked ER BEAVERS as an answer, and the Maya Angelou spin was fairly obvious once I had the I KNOW WHY part. I wasn’t particularly amused by INSTANT MESS or BEAUTY PANTS.
As for the non-theme material:
-
- 6A [Coffee variety] ARABICA The company we buy our coffee from warned us a few days ago to expect steep price increases soon.
- 13A [The princess in “The Princess and the Frog”] TIANA I only vaguely remember hearing about that 2009 Disney film, but I’m hardly the target audience.
- 66A [Big tool] A-HOLE I’m just now noticing that “tool” here is not a device for carrying out a particular function; I expected that answer to be something like AUGER.
- 68A [Radner of “SNL”] GILDA She was brilliant. Period.
- 3D [Waves in front of an airport terminal, say] HAILS A CAB Pretty straightforward clue for a not-particularly-interesting phrase.
- 34D [(Had) set in] TAKEN HOLD Ditto.
Jay Silverman’s USA Today Crossword, “On What Planet?” — Emily’s write-up
Clearly, I was on the wrong frequency today–how did you all do?
USA Today, April 17, 2025, “On What Planet?” by Jay Silverman
Theme: each themer begins with the name of a planet
Themers:
- 19a. [Costal community near Jacksonville, FL], NEPTUNEBEACH
- 34a. [First Black woman ranked No. 1 singles player in the Open Era], VENUSWILLIAMS
- 50a. [Annual prizes given to top sci-fi and horror films], SATURNAWARDS
A stellar themer set today with: NEPTUNEBEACH, VENUSWILLIAMS, and SATURNAWARDS.
Favorite fill: LIMEADE, JIGSAW, and INDIE
Stumpers: INCH (misdirect and thought only of the body part), ADHERE (misdirect and thought of a twig), and JELLY (needed crossings)
Overall, I found today’s cluing more difficult so it took me longer to solve though everything was crossed fairly so once I began to piece areas together, it started to fill in. Lots of fun fill and I enjoyed today’s theme.
3.5 stars
~Emily
Nice theme for the NYT. I wish the app did something like replace the trees with the letters of FOREST.
Also, while it is true that both Alaska and FLA are #1 and #2 in coastline, Maryland actually has over 3000 miles of shoreline thanks to the Chesapeake Bay and its tributaries.
it did do just that replacement for me when i solved.
very nice puzzle!
Interesting. It didn’t do it on my wife’s iPad, but it did do it when I viewed the puzzle on my Android device. Go figure
I’m not googling much difference between coastline and shoreline. Add Maine to the list of states that kicks FLA’s a** in coastline at 3478 miles.
An NOAA report that lists the shoreline of Maine as 3,478 miles lists Alaska’s as 33,904 miles, Florida’s as 8,436 miles, and Louisiana’s as 7,721 miles – so Maine comes in at #4. There are several states that fall in the 3,000 – 3,400 mile range (including, as Tony mentions, Maryland).
https://coast.noaa.gov/data/docs/states/shorelines.pdf
Apparently there is no one “standard” way to measure shoreline. The approach used in this report includes tidal inlet areas and also Great Lakes coastlines.
Fireball: I believe the mini-theme is that you can shift the first letter of EMANATE to the end and get MANATEE.
WSJ – Jim, actually it’s the first letter of the first word (then put last in that word) and the last letter of the second word (then put first in that word) (i.e. the “outer” letters of the theme answer) that provides a sane explanation of the theme answers. And I’m still confused!
WSJ – Duh, I just realized we’re saying the same thing. Sorry.
You say tomato, I say tomato.
This puzzle defeated me where Jim points things out, in the SW. Besides the sources of difficulty he mentions, the ambiguity of Polo was lost on me since I didn’t know it was a cologne. Since I hadn’t heard of the card game either, I kept wanting it to come out “taxi,” since that was a word I knew. I don’t know the baseball players’ city of origin. Tough one! Which is not to say flawed. Still very clever.
What did Jim mean by a regedit search? I know the term “regedit” only for the hidden settings in Windows.
I think Jim meant regex.
That’s the one!
NYT: “TUN” of fun!
I thought the NYT theme was unusual, for sure, but I can’t say I liked it much. I get that the answers without the hidden letters are all trees, but the hidden letter only applies to one of the answers that it abuts. That confused me. The puzzle struck me as yet another example of ingenious construction that’s a bit of a slog for the solver.
agree re: the letter in the black square only applying to one interesting word. And the fact that they included tree names in the puzzle was interesting and supports the theme but not helpful. Only saw that after the puzzle was solved.
As a classic rocker, I was hoping for a reference to Rush’s “The Trees” somewhere in here.
I disagree; I caught on to the theme pretty early, and it was helpful with the *’ed clues. I suspected something was up with ELM(O), and when I got to (F)LOTUS it was confirmed. Nice puzzle!
did not say that we didn’t catch on to the theme. Saying it was confusing the fact that the hidden letter only applied to one of the intersecting words.
I am old-fashioned in this regard, but I didn’t like that the puzzle wasn’t symmetric.
Thanks for the thoughtful review of the WSJ, Jim. I made this one about five years ago before I went on hiatus after my computer crashed and I lost all my files, enabling a years-long “rage quit” akin to a pre-teen who lost a game of Mario Kart because his kid sister unplugged the gaming console.
Anyway, to answer your question: brute force. I essentially went through every 3-5 letter word in the database to see which ones I could manipulate the last/first letter. I remember this being super time consuming but oddly fun. I think I’m lucky to have found a somewhat coherent set. TALKS SMACK / STALK MACKS is about the only other one I could find 😬 If anyone can think of others I’d love to hear em!
NYT: I never fully caught on to the theme while solving, since it did not occur to me that the trees stood for just single letters.
Upon reaching the reference to clue 64 at clue 38, I immediately entered FOREST, but still expected the trees to stand for tree names. I wish there had been more of an indication of that.
I was also slowed down by a) not knowing that MNEMosynE was some kind of muse, and b) not knowing that MNEME was another name for her. But I’m always (OK *often*) happy to learn new things that are not pop culture trivia.
Looking again at the filled diagram with the added letters, I see only FIR, ELM, and APPLE as tree names.
Ultimately, I do not like this puzzle, because the theme is far too obscure for my taste.
Plus ASH. With ELM, FIR, and APPLE on the left of the tree icons, but ASH on the right, and with the letters F and S of FOREST (apparently) not connected with tree names.
Too much of an inconsistent mess.
I caught onto the theme as soon as I got one of those answers. Not a problematic point for me. I did wonder why Mneumosyne didn’t fit.
All of them are tree names: (f)LOTUS, ELM(o), (r)ASH, FIR(e), (s)PEAR, APPLE(t). And three are on the left, and three are on the right. I guess I wouldn’t have thought “not seeing the forest for the trees” would be obscure? Or the trees? But I guess everybody’s different.
Let’s ask a question that they ask on Sesame Street: “Which of these things is not like the others?”
That would be LOTUS, which IRL is a water-lily. It’s only a tree in the Odyssey, which also features Poseidon, Athena, Proteus, Calypso, the Cyclopes, Circe, Scylla and Charybdis. The LOTUS tree is only as real as Greek gods, nymphs, and sea monsters.
Please explain the Universal crossword “Braces Oneself”. It’s not listed here.
I’d be happy to, except that after staring at the puzzle for a long time, I still have no idea how the theme works.
The revealer TENSES UP makes me think that the answers to the starred clues have tenses (perhaps grammatical one) that read from bottom to top. Or that the tops of those answers have something to do with tenses.
But neither of those possibilities pans out.
Sorry. Maybe one of my colleagues has a better idea.
Thanks for replying Eric. This is the first time I posted here.
You’re welcome, John. I appreciate knowing that people are reading this blog, and I assume my colleagues do, too.
I hope you’ll be back.
The revealer needs to be re-parsed as TEN SE’S UP. Collectively, the five starred answers have SE going upward ten times. For example, there are three in (ES)TAT(E S)AL(ES).
That didn’t come easy and I can’t say it was a satisfying aha moment, but there it is.
Thanks, Jim.
I suspected that “parsed differently” in the clue for TENSES UP might mean TEN something, but TEN SE’S seems a bit obscure (especially for a Universal puzzle).
You’re not wrong. But recently I’ve *finally* been getting a handle on cryptic crossword cluing, so maybe that helped in this case.
we have a history of publishing themes like this! recently we ran one with the revealer TENETS, meaning all the theme answers collectively have TEN ET’S. fun wordplay, imo!
Thank you so much Jim. Now I understand.
Thank you, Jim, for this solution! I came here looking for it. Thank you to John and Eric, too. I knew there had to be something besides being vertical!