LAT untimed (pannonica) 
[2.50 avg; 1 rating] rate it
NYT 5:07 (Amy) rate it
Universal 3:08 (Jim) rate it
USA Today tk (Emily) rate it
Robyn Weintraub’s New York Times crossword—Amy’s write-up
NY Times crossword solution, 5/2/15 – no. 0502
Fun puzzle, classic Robyn Friday grooves. Heck, I’d be content if Robyn made half of the Friday puzzles.
Fave fill: TRAGIC HERO, ONION RINGS (though you can have my share), “HOW CAN I RESIST?”, “YOU GET THE IDEA,” PIGEONHOLE, THINK IT OVER, CEMENT MIXER (who didn’t love those as a kid?), and a REPORT CARD.
Fun Disney/Shakespeare duo:
- 29A. [Titular female Disney character whose name also appears in a Shakespeare play], ARIEL. Prospero’s sprite in The Tempest, or The Little Mermaid.
- 30A. [Titular male Shakespeare character whose name also appears in a Disney film], TIMON. Timon of Athens (have even a tenth of us ever read that one?), Pumbaa’s meerkat buddy in The Lion King.
Lucky guess that worked out: 45A. [Malaysian state or island], PENANG.
Four stars from me.
Kathy Lowden’s Los Angeles Times crossword — pannonica’s write-up
LAT • 5/2/25 • Fri • Lowden • solution • 20250502
Breezed through this one especially the first third starting in the upper left. Wasn’t understanding the theme answers but I just went with the flow, finally arriving at the revealer more or less at the end of the solve.
As of right now, I haven’t applied its instructions so am not sure how the relevant clues will look. Let’s go!
- 73aR [Stop by unannounced, and how to make the starred clues match their answers] DROP IN.
- 21a. [*Hot point] SHABU-SHABU. During the solve at this point I just assumed the theme answers would all be reduplicative. Anyway, dropping in from [Hot point] yields [Hot pot].
- 27a. [*Main event] MOTHER’S DAY (Ma event).
- 50a. [*Chain-chain-chain] CUBAN DANCE (Cha-cha-cha).
- 56a. [*Rhino] PI FOLLOWER (Rho).
Well and good.
- 2d [Not fooled by] ONTO. Unlike me—sort of—regarding the theme during the solve.
- 4d [Elephant-headed god] GANESHA. Not precisely the polar opposite of 58d [Norse god of war] ODIN—they both claim the attribute of wisdom, for example—but near enough, I’d posit.
- 13d [Animals found only in Madagascar] LEMURS. In the wild, yes; they’re endemic to the island.
- 23d [Rabbit’s larger cousin] HARE. Among common names, some hares are called rabbits (e.g., jackrabbits) and some rabbits are called hares (e.g., red rock hares). And don’t get me started on mice and rats.
- 48d [Zambezi Valley antelope] IMPALA. Oddly specific clue, but sure why not.
- 57d [Island banquet] LUAU. 7a [Tenerife, por ejemplo] ISLA.
- 1a [Number with 101 digits] GOOGOL. Have you done Spelling Bee today?
- 17a [Cardiology implants] STENTS. Today I learned (via m-w.com) that the word is an eponym for Charles Thomas Stent, a 19th century English dentist. But, per Wikipedia, the origin is in dispute.
- 37a [Cross piece?] PEN. Cross is the name of a company that makes writing instruments.
- 53a [Mushroom with a honeycomb-like top] MOREL. Etymology: French morille, probably from Vulgar Latin *mauricula, from maurus brown, from Latin Maurus inhabitant of Mauretania (m-w.com)
- 64a [“It’s __-brainer!”] A NO. Avoids the tilde controversy of the Spanish word for year. Besides, this crossword already contains two other clues en español.
- 69a [Hard-to-break plates] MAIL. Toughest/trickiest clue of the puzzle, by far.
Jake Halperin’s Universal crossword, “Can You Break a Hundred?”—Jim’s review
Each theme answer is a familiar phrase that has had its single C (Roman numeral 100) exchanged for two Ls (Roman numeral 50). The two-part revealer—which cleverly breaks the non-duplication rule—is FIFTY / FIFTY (37a, [With 39-Across, like an even split … and a hint to a pair of Roman numerals in the starred clues’ answers]).
Universal crossword solution · “Can You Break a Hundred?” · Jake Halperin · Fri., 5.2.25
- 17a. [*Device for setting money on fire?] BILL LIGHTER. Bic lighter. I really would’ve preferred an entry without an additional L. Technically it fits the theme, but it looks inelegant.
- 21a. [*Many shoppers?] MALL USERS. Mac users.
- 54a. [*Infant’s medicine?] BABY PILLS. Baby pics. Except we don’t give pills to babies. Something something choking hazard.
- 59a. [*Ken’s greeting to Barbie?] “WHAT’S UP, DOLL?” “What’s up, doc?“
Nice theme. Even though I picked some nits above, the premise is clever, and the chosen theme answers are fine-to-good. Plus, it’s always fun when a theme cheekily breaks one of the established crossword rules.
TALK RADIO, ETSY STORE, and “OOH LA LA” top the fill. Everything else was quite smooth. I don’t think I’ve ever been fast enough to solve a puzzle in less than three minutes, but I came close on this one.
Clues of note:
- 47a. [“Are we there ___?”]. YET. I like that this clue immediately follows [Ambulance destinations, briefly] for ERS. Coincidence? I suspect not.
- 53a. [(Come closer)]. “PSST.” Hmm. Parentheses don’t seem to be the right punctuation here. Or there should at least be quotation marks around them.
Good puzzle.
Amy, Would it be possible to have some kind of vetted voter / commenter functionality at the site? For example, people could request a login, and provide some background that demonstrates enough history with crosswords to have developed an objective personal sense of what good and bad qualities of puzzles are meaningful to them. Star rating statistics could be kept on each voter to identify anyone that is habitually sandbagging the system at the scale extremes. In other words, anonymous bogus ratings from trolls could be largely eliminated. Thank you.
NYT: I had problems at the PENANG/PITA square also.
Favorite non-clue at 9D: “Is that actress waiting for a cue?” NO SHES ON
NYT: 47a Poke bowl delicacy = AHI
Having trouble grokking the “delicacy” angle here – it’s just tuna!
NYT: 4 stars!
Removing ratings: 0 stars!
I’m curious why the rating decision was made in secrecy and then launched without any announcement. Did you survey your users on how they leverage your sight? If not, this feels misguided.
Yes – Amy, I think this is going to ruin your site. How could you have done this unilaterally? I mean, yes, it’s your site – but still… Those of us who liked the ratings are going to cancel our subscriptions and take our business elsewhere!
Oh, wait – I don’t have a subscription. I just come here and enjoy write-ups by a bunch of dedicated volunteers and comments from folks who share an interest in crosswords – all for free!
But the secrecy – very unseemly!
Thank you, Gary!
What a glib response. People can have preferences for how they use this site and voice them. It’s ok if not everyone has the same thoughts, that’s kind of the point of a community.
Thanks, Gary R.
Just so Amy doesn’t take all the blame for the ratings change: All the Fiend reviewers had an opportunity to weigh in on the subject. The group’s consensus was that, for the reasons mentioned yesterday, the ratings were not as useful as we would like them to be.
I don’t know if tom’s suggestions above are at all workable. I’ve only been here a few months and I don’t know what the technical limitations of the software we use are.
I must have missed the memo, but I’ve never been a fan of the ratings system in practice anyway. I suspect there’ll be an adjustment period and things will continue here without too much turbulence.
The vast majority of readers hadn’t been supplying any star ratings, so it seems unlikely that the absence of star ratings would have an impact on many people.
Next April 1, revive the rating system for a day, but use raspberries instead of stars. That way, 5 raspberries would be awful, and the trolls will be giving raves when they rate puzzles with 0 raspberries.
As Amy notes, the vast majority of readers haven’t been rating. Don’t need a survey to see that. How many of the aggrieved users are donating time or money to the site? How much are star ratings worth it to you? How much are they worth it to Amy and team? Donate button is in the top right.
It does sorta suck that the trolls won.
LAT – Little Richard with an alternative music choice. At least phonetically https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r6XJ4uhEy0U#ddg-play
The WSJ meta is pretty neat and very approachable
I was going to go with Kenny Rogers and the First Edition’s “yeah-yeah—oh-yeah” version, but in the process learned that it was a cover of a Teddy Hill & The Southern Soul song. Ended up with the punchier latter-day Sharon Jones/Dap-Kings rendition.
I play the games at the squares.io site and for quite a long time there has been a bug on the WSJ Friday puzzle in which there is no option to Check the grid to see if answers are correct and it does not let you “win” at the end because it never acknowledges that the puzzle is complete. Any idea what is happening there?
I don’t know the site you’re talking about, but I solve the Friday WSJ puzzle with AcrossLite using the .puz file from Daily Crossword Links.
When I finish filling in the grid, I get the AcrossLite message that there’s a mistake. Clicking “check all squares” will, if I remember correctly, mark all the squares as wrong.
I assume that since these are contest puzzles, there’s no online solution anywhere.
Yes, my converter adds “X” for any square missing an answer key. AcrossLite requires something in each cell.
Thanks. I thought it was something like that.
It only took me two or three weeks to figure out that I needed to ignore the message about an error in the grid.
No idea about that site, but the Friday contest puzzle has been published without an answer key for quite a while now. They don’t want to provide any hints.
I tended to rate only if I was blown away by how good a puzzle was, or (more often) if I really disliked it. Then I thought that seemed kind of pointless, so I stopped. I will miss the ratings only for the sense of outrage I would get when I thought a puzzle was great, but it only had 2 stars or something.
Spelling Bee: Apparently, Sam is too young to have experienced doing something GROOVILY.
That was my guess for the pangram too — and I still haven’t come up with the correct one. Strange collection of letters.
The pangram jumped out at me as soon as the hive loaded. That happens now and then. If it doesn’t, it can take me a lot of agony to find.
I got it eventually. Not exactly an everyday word, but not unfamiliar either.
LOL, Gary.. I tried that one!. The pangram today was my first word, which doesn’t happen often.
As to the Stars controversy, I never let a low score deter me from a puzzle I usually did but a high score would sometimes get me to do one that I wasn’t normally doing. I was sometimes interested to see the lowest scores distribution on puzzles that I thought were particularly great.
Actually, I’ve read Timon of Athens a couple of times now years apart (apart from having to reread a Shakespeare play right after a time spend reading it, so that I’m sure I follow it). It’s from a period often said to run to “problem plays” and has a downright nasty edge I can relate to. And I can safely promise never to see the Disney offering.
I don’t think I follow the clue in the NYT for FOB. Help?
Many car keys nowadays are an electronic fob that can unlock or even start the car remotely.
Cool how the word for a wireless device for operating a car securely comes from old German dialect for “pocket.” First a pocket, then a pocket specifically for a watch, then the chain to keep the watch attached to the pocket, then something attached to the chain, then a key attached to the chain, then a keyring attached to the chain, then a virtual key that often has other keys attached to it. English loves reuse.
It reminds me of futurists’ “two-way wrist communication device” or Star Trek’s communicator. When they actually arrived, we called them “phones.”
I rarely comment but am glad to see the conversation about the demise of the ratings continue. Ratings are one of the more interesting aspects of the site and I am very dissappointed to see them go and do hope they are reinstated. It was always fun to guess what they were going to be and why a score went one way or another. The trick is to remember:
The highest rating is from the constructor’s mother.
One star or 1.5 star ratings are nearly always from trolls.
We are blessed with excellent crossword editors so true garbage rarely gets through (though sometimes it does].
A four-star puzzle with an arcane or quirky theme without broad appeal will garner low scores.
I ‘d vote for bringin back the star ratings. One of the things that draw me to the site, along with the comments and ratings from the puzzle solution write-ups.
NYT: I love Robin Weintraub Friday puzzles, but am beginning to think I’d like them to be tougher.
You could try covering up the Across clues and solving Downs only to ramp up the challenge level.
WSJ: As PJ commented earlier, this week’s meta is fairly easy to solve.
If you’ve been interested in trying meta puzzles, this would be a good place to start. I’m bad at metas, but I had the mechanism before I finished filling in the grid.
NYT puzzle seemed really easy for a Friday puzzle.
Puzzle: LAT; Rating: 2.5 stars
LAT: I call foul on 69A. “Hard to break plates” and the answer is “Mail”. By Wiki’s definition, Chain Mail is made from rings and Scale Armor is made from small plates, so basically different. (One-half point deduction for vague clue.)
The clue is describing plate armor.
Jim –
Thanks for your explanation of the Universal theme. I got the LL meaning 100, but didn’t catch on to the idea of replacing it with a C, which makes it a lot more fun.
I also found the triple L a bit odd, so to speak.
As for solving any 15×15 puzzle in just over 3 minutes… wow! I was just over 15, and that’s one of my better times…