Monday, April 28, 2025

Sue Fracker’s New York Times crossword—Sophia’s write-up

Theme: MULTIHYPHENATES – each theme answer contains more than one hyphen.

New York Times, 04 28 2025, By Sue Fracker

• 17a [Versatile yet unspecialized sort] – JACK-OF-ALL-TRADES
• 24a [Typical kindergartner] – FIVE-YEAR-OLD
• 35a [Smarty-pants] – KNOW-IT-ALL
• 51a [The Bible’s Naomi vis-à-vis Ruth] – MOTHER-IN-LAW
• 58a [Ones with many talents … and a hint to 17-, 24-, 35- and 51-Across] – MULTIHYPHENATES

This theme is a fun repurposing of the term MULTIHYPHENATES, which I mainly hear used about celebrities that do a bunch of different things. Take Rihanna as an example: she’s a singer-actress-beauty mogul. So it was neat today to see the term used to literally mean “terms that use multiple hyphens”. JACK-OF-ALL-TRADES was my favorite, because it’s a grid-spanning 15 letters and is such a specific term. For the same reason, FIVE-YEAR-OLD and MOTHER-IN-LAW didn’t hit as hard for me, because the first word could have been many different things in those phrases (obviously not as clued, but any number in front of “yea-old” is a valid phrase, so it felt less special to me). I also liked how the NYT web app added hyphens into the grid once I was done solving!

Second Monday in a row full of corners with 7 letter answers! Today, I especially liked MOJITOS, NEMESIS, I’M THERE, and TOTAL UP. I also liked the duplicate clue of [Bread box?] and [Bread box, for short?] for TOASTER and ATM, respectively. In terms of pop culture clues, I knew SETH Rogen and Cheri OTERI, but Marcus LOEW and DEBI Thomas were both new to me.

Happy Monday all!

Yuuya Cook’s Wall Street Journal crossword, “Figures of Speech”—Jim’s review

Theme answers are familiar phrases about speech or the written word interpreted literally.

Wall St Journal crossword solution · “Figures of Speech” · Yuuya Cook · Mon., 4.28.25

• 17a. [“I do,” e.g.?] SWEAR WORDS.
• 52a. [“I got hypoallergenic, soft and firm,” e.g.?] PILLOW TALK.
• 11d. [“Let’s throw the ball around,” e.g.?] CATCH PHRASE.
• 25d. [“This appendage has five digits, including a thumb,” e.g.?] HAND WRITING.

This is almost the reverse version of my own puzzle which ran in the NYT about five years ago. I didn’t use any of these terms in the finished puzzle, but I did have THINK FAST as my entry for the clue [Catch phrase?] in my notes.

Anyway, this isn’t about my puzzle, but about this nice debut grid. I like the play on words (obviously, since I made a similar puzzle), and the choices of theme entries are nice. I do think it’s odd that three of the entries seem to be about verbal speech and one is about the written word. And I feel like the clues could be livelier by employing colloquial phrases (as the first one does) or additional plays on words if possible (perhaps “Let’s get down tonight” for the pillow one).

Elsewhere, DEAD ENDS, PREDATOR, and WIDE OPEN are assets to the grid, though I’m less keen on odd entries like STOA, ETAT, RARES, and PROT, especially in a Monday puzzle.

A good debut puzzle though I would hope for a little more consistency in the theme entries and some spunkier clues. 3.25 stars.

Emet Ozar’s Los Angeles Times crossword — Stella’s write-up

Los Angeles Times 4/28/25 by Emet Ozar

I’m a fan of Emet Ozar’s puzzles — I used to edit her at Planet Crossword and I’ve always found her grids fresh and fun. She’s here with a cute Monday theme, in which the revealer at 63A [Morning person, or a feature of the answer to each starred clue?] is EARLY BIRD, meaning that each theme answer starts with the name of a bird:

• 17A [*Defiantly petty retaliation] is TIT FOR TAT. I’ve entered TIT into a puzzle who knows how many times, but I never bothered to look them up until now. They’re really cute birds!
• 26A [*Figure used for counting] is CARDINAL NUMBER. (Ordinals are “first, second, third,” etc.; cardinals are “one, two, three,” etc.)
• 47A [*Wrecking ball swingers on a construction site] is CRANE OPERATORS. “Wrecking ball swingers” is a bit of an awkward phrasing, but the entry works.
• 52A [*Ride the waves using wind power] is KITE-SURF. Today I also learned what a KITE looks like in the bird sense.

I liked the amount of thematic material and that, in all cases, there’s a big difference in meaning in the “bird” word in the theme phrase from its bird sense. Nice breezy Monday!

Anna Shechtman’s New Yorker crossword—Amy’s recap

New Yorker crossword solution, 4/28/25 – Shechtman

Quite a handful of “never heard of it” answers in this one:

• 21a. [“The Green Hat” novelist Michael], ARLEN. A 1924 British novel in ARLEN‘s clue.
• 24a. [“Un Señor Muy Viejo con ___ Alas Enormes” (Gabriel García Márquez story)], UNAS. Not impossible to guess the missing word is an article, but untranslated short story titles are not common crossword fodder. There’s another “Spanish word in a title” clue, a Bad Bunny song for OTRA.
• 39a. [Filmmaker and critic who has been called the godfather of American avant-garde cinema], JONAS MEKAS. His first letter crosses JARGON, [“The ___ of Authenticity” (Theodor Adorno book that critiques the language of existentialist philosophy)], which in turn crosses another name that many solvers, I wager, don’t know: [Writer Xingjian who was the 2000 Nobelist in literature], GAO. Not loving the constructor/editor’s decision to use a more arcane clue for JARGON where the word crosses two names. If you didn’t struggle with these crossings, please speak up!
• 23d. [Condition also known as word blindness], ALEXIA. Also a brand of frozen vegetables!

Fave fill: David CRONENBERG, HAIROGRAPHY (here’s a brief explanatory video), HOUSEDRESS, THEATER KIDS, ARCHETYPES, POCONOS. Could’ve done without PST OAS CLE PRES EGAD NRC GYNT TSETSE FRAS TOLEASE (the typical sign says FOR LEASE, not TO) ACH. If you count up the proper nouns, you get enough to frustrate solvers who don’t excel at learning/remembering/encountering names. I usually know the names in puzzles, but this crossword threw a lot of unfamiliar things at me.

Three stars.

Matthew Luter’s Universal crossword, “Ta-Da!” — pannonica’s write-up

Universal • 4/28/25 • Mon • “Ta-Da!” • Luter • solution • ,font size=1>20250428

• 65a^R [While … or, read differently, a letter pattern shared by the starred clues’ answers] EVEN AS, or even As. That is, the second, fourth, sixth, and so on spaces are the letter A. To keep it consistent (and rhythmic), those are the only vowels in those entries.
• 20a. [*”You know the rest,” as popularized by “Seinfeld”] YADA YADA YADA.
• 31a. [*Rum cocktail with a rhyming name] BAHAMA MAMA.
• 44a. [*”I Heard a Rumour” girl group] BANANARAMA. The ‘girl’ qualifier isn’t really necessary, but it helps the solver.
• 52a. [*Greek dip of pureed roe, olive oil and lemon juice] TARAMASALATA.

It’s a neat idea to re-parse that little phrase, and the theme answers are all solid.

• 4d ]Mythical forest nymphs] DRYADS. 5d [University of Michigan city] ANN ARBOR.
• 11d [Word before “date” or “process”] DUE. The latter of which the current administration seems to believe is optional at best.
• 12d [UFO passengers (allegedly)] ETS. Most such clues don’t include that qualifier (see also Santa Claus, cryptids, et al.), but I appreciate it.
• 30d [Water brand owned by Coca-Cola] DASANI. Did a cursory check online and can find no consensus on what the name means. The official website didn’t seem to have any information about that either.
• 61a [Most visible stars] A-LISTERS. A wink to the theme? Anyway, 36a [Famous person, informally] CELEB, 42d [Letters to an idol] FAN MAIL.

Brendan Emmett Quigley’s Crossword #1778 — Eric’s Review

Brendan Emmett Quigley’s Crossword #1178

Mostly, I didn’t find this overly challenging, but neither was it a breeze. In other words, it was generally the kind of puzzle I most enjoy, one in which I can use the crosses to fill in the gaps in my knowledge.

And there were plenty of gaps, starting right at the top:

• 1A [Jörmungandr of Norse mythology, e.g.] SEA MONSTER I was into Greek and Roman mythology for a bit as a tween, after we studied it in fifth grade or whenever. But I’ve never formally studied mythologies from other cultures, and I don’t really know how I know what little I know about those subjects.

Jörmungandr as drawn by the Norwegian illustrator Louis Moe (1898)

• 15A [Scarlett’s mother] ELLEN O’HARA I knew this was a Gone With the Wind reference, but it’s been decades since I’ve seen the movie and while I’m not surprised that Scarlett’s mother is a character in the story, I don’t remember her. I was a little surprised that her last name was part of the answer.
• 17A [Protest by subverting mainstream media] CULTURE JAM That’s a new term to me.
• 23A [Attorney Honig on CNN] ELIE He’s apparently their chief legal analyst.
• 37A [Rimshot/cymbal sound, in some cartoons] BADUMTSS This was moderately annoying, as that sound could probably be spelled 100 different ways. I finished filling in the grid there and didn’t get the AcrossLite happy pencil, so I tried multiple letters for that T because I didn’t know 38D [Max series set in an ER] THE PITT.
• 4D [Canadian indigenous tribe whose name means “mixed”] MÉTIS I know the Latin American term mestizo for someone of mixed European and indigenous American heritage, but I don’t remember hearing the Canadian equivalent.

The triple stack of 10-letter words in the SE corner is much less trivia-oriented than the NW corner:

• 53A [Putting on the list] CATALOGING
• 56A [Head shop purchase] E-CIGARETTE I had the G from MARRIAGE and expected this to be BONG-something.
• 58A [Good judge of character?] TYPESETTER A punny clue that I kind of liked.

Other notable stuff:

• 27A [Actress Barbeau] ADRIENNE A gimme, as I remember her as the daughter on the 1970’s series Maude. In looking at her Wikipedia entry to see what she’s done since that people younger than 50 might remember, I see she was married to horror director John Carpenter for about five years. I might have known that at the time, but I’d forgotten it.
• 35D [“___ is not just spiritual communion, it is also remembering to take out the trash” (Dr. Joyce Brothers)] MARRIAGE I don’t think it’s particularly difficult to fill in that blank even if you have any idea who Joyce Brothers was. My mom subscribed to a couple of “ladies’ magazines” and I would read just about anything when I was a kid.
• 39D [Flute feature?] SILENT E I almost never get this kind of answer without a few crosses, despite having seen similar clues many times.

Crossword blogs have warped my mind; I was moderately peeved by some duplication:

• 22A [Louse eggs] NITS
• 35A [It’s a head-scratcher] LICE

Finally, we get a bit boozy in the SW corner:

• 48A [Imbibes] HAS A NIP
• 36D [Knock one back] DO A SHOT

I just finished breakfast, so I’ll pass, thanks.