Wednesday, June 18, 2025

AV Club untimed (Eric) [3.38 avg; 4 ratings] rate it
LAT 4:33 (Gareth) [3.00 avg; 1 rating] rate it
NYT 4:14 (Amy) [2.65 avg; 13 ratings] rate it
The New Yorker 2:28 (Kyle) [4.25 avg; 4 ratings] rate it
Universal untimed (pannonica) rate it
USA Today 7:51 (Emily) [2.83 avg; 3 ratings] rate it
WSJ 5:42 (Jim) [2.33 avg; 3 ratings] rate it

Mike Shenk’s Wall Street Journal crossword, “It’s Catching”—Jim’s review

Theme answers are familiar phrases with the trigram NET hidden inside. The revealer is INTERNET (61a, [Site of sites, and a hint to a three-letter bit of five of this puzzle’s Across answers]).

Wall St Journal crossword solution · “It’s Catching” · Mike Shenk · Wed., 6.18.25

• 17a. [Feature of the state flags of Maine and Vermont] PINE TREE.
• 21a. [Tweak] FINE TUNE.
• 25a. [Port authority?] WINE TASTER.
• 47a. [Federal holiday since 2021] JUNETEENTH.
• 52a. [Series of repeated missed connections] PHONE TAG.

To be honest, I felt a bit let down when I got to the revealer and realized the theme was about phrases with NET in them—three of the most common letters in the alphabet. But to be fair, it’s a perfectly solid theme and all the theme answers are good. Maybe it could’ve been slotted earlier in the week, but that’s not a problem with the puzzle.

DARK DAYS and NUTHATCH are my fave entries in the fill along with Sir Elton’s real first name REGINALD. I’ve heard of the LEVANT [Region that includes Syria and Jordan], but couldn’t have told you what or where it was. Now I know.

We get plenty of the red-breasted NUTHATCH here in Washington state.

Clues of note:

• 1a. [Flat bread?]. RENT. Not a new clue (per the Cruciverb database), but a good one.
• 16a. [Crispy Crinkles brand]. ORE-IDA. Sounds like donuts, but it’s about french fries.
• 18d. [Wearers of caps and crowns]. TEETH. A little tricksy here with graduation season upon us.

Three stars.

Eli Cotham’s New York Times crossword–Amy’s recap

NY Times crossword solution, 6/18/25 – no. 0618

Meaty theme today, with four themers and a long revealer taking up 49 squares, but it’s still just 72 words. Lots of 7-letter fill throughout.

The revealer is the game THE FLOOR IS LAVA, which we called “don’t touch the ground” when I was a kid. Not sure if it’s a regional or generational thing, this “floor is lava” version. Either way, it involves clambering around on the furniture without touching the floor. (Dangerous! You’ll put your eye out.) COUNTERBALANCE, TABLE-HOP, COUCH-SURF, and BAR-CRAWL can all be reimagined as the physical moves of someone playing this game. Really a fun theme, and it feels super fresh to me.

Fave fill: ATM CARD, NO CAN DO, “WORTH IT!”, BACCHUS, EYESORE. Less keen on singular TAPA, OP ART, ERST, SST, A TO B, TSAR, plural UMS. It would be hard to tease out meaning if you squeezed them together: tapaoparterstsstatobtsarums. Part, stat, and rums look like words in that, but the rest?

Three more things:

• 44D. [The first one was delivered in 1984], TED TALK. Dang! Really? So the talks existed for quite a while before YouTube was invented.
• 35D. [Course that may follow trig], CALC. I mostly did not enjoy calculus. I wasn’t wild about trigonometry, but at my high school, the junior-year honors match class was called College Algebra and Trigonometry. I loved the algebra portion!
• 23A. [M.L.B.’er in a blue-and-orange uniform], N.Y. MET. Awkward, because the singular player would just be a Met, no? No other city has Mets so the “N.Y.” adds nothing useful. Also, “M.L.B.’er” is an ugly construction. “MLB player” looks better to me, no period-apostrophe combo.

3.5 stars from me.

Dennis Mc Cartney’s Universal crossword, “Summer 2025 Themeless Week, Puzzle 3” — pannonica’s write-up

Universal • 6/18/25 • Wed • “Summer 2025 Themeless Week, Puzzle 3” • Mc Cartney • solution • 20250618

A couple of quasi-related 13-letter entries highlight this offering: 25a [Recollections that aren’t real] FALSE MEMORIES, 41a [Soft-focus scene in a soap opera, sometimes] DREAM SEQUENCE.

Elsewhere, two notable misfills occurred on similarly somewhat linked entries: 8d [Deny entry] BAR, not BAN, and 40a [Search for contraband] FRISK, not BRISK (which I must have answered without reading the clue).

• 20a [Line after a movie’s ending] IT’S A WRAP. Ending of production, not presentation.
• 31a [Corner piece?] ROOK. I feel the question mark is superfluous here.
• 35a [Plant whose wood is used to make shillelaghs] SLOE. That’s a different, non-gin approach.
• 45a [Star whose Greek name is “helios”] SUN. Though this was going to be SOL. 36d [Franchise featuring the USS Enterprise] STAR TREK.
• 53a [Cellular modification of genetic sequences] RNA EDITING.
• 57a [Ray with the largest brain-to-body ratio of any fish] MANTA. That’s an interesting factette.
• 5d [Stir-fry vegetable whose French name means “eat all”] SNOW PEA, mange-tout.
• 6d [Social activities where leaving early is encouraged?] ESCAPE ROOMS. Ha-ha.
• 12d [Spectrum] GAMUT. etymology: Middle English gamut, gamma-ut “lowest note in the medieval hexachord system, the system itself,” borrowed from Medieval Latin, from gamma gamma entry 1 (used as a symbol for the lowest note in the scale) + ut ut; UT : a syllable used for the first note in the diatonic scale in an early solmization system and later replaced by do (m-w.com)
• 22d [Ennemi’s opposite] AMI. 26d [Supporter of a cause] ALLY.
• 27d [360 on a roller coaster] LOOP-DE-LOOP. Ngrams confirms that loop-the-loop is more common.
• 28d [Ecstasy] SHEER BLISS. 40d [Real blast] FUN TIME. Both entries feel greenpainty to me.

Caitlin Reid’s New Yorker crossword – Kyle’s write-up

The New Yorker solution grid – Caitlin Reid – Wednesday 06/18/2025

Fun puzzle from Caitlin Reid today, with two nice corner stacks of AND SCENE/DEEP ROOTS/DOMAIN NAME and PIE A LA MODE/CAFETERIA/LEGOLAND, as well as the central grid spanner “I COULD EAT A HORSE!”. By coincidence I had a Universal themeless puzzle earlier this year that contained both I COULD EAT A HORSE and PIE A LA MODE as entries.

When I reached 20A [What a good song does, in modern parlance] I had SLA__ and had to take a moment to recall whether it was SLAPS or SLAYS. Fortunately for my solving time I chose SLAPS. If the clue had referred to a good joke or a good drag performance, then SLAYS would have been more apt.

Thanks Caitlin!

Jim Quinlan’s AVCX Classic Crossword “Not Quite Full” — Eric’s review

Jim Quinlan’s AVCX Classic “Not Quite Full” — 6/18/25

A nice skip-some-letters theme from a former Diary of a Crossword Fiend contributor. Each theme answer contains a food item that must be ignored in reading the crossing Down answers:

• 19A [“Bring it on, dude”] COME AT ME BRO
• 29A [Mall security guards, e.g.] RENT-A-COPS
• 41A [Some shipped boxes of goodies] CARE PACKAGES
• 54A [2024 hit play that was sued for allegedly plagiarizing a memoir by the producer of Fleetwood Mac’s “Rumours”] STEREOPHONIC I hadn’t heard of this; reading the Wikipedia synopsis, it does sound like the band at the center of the play is based on Fleetwood Mac.
• 69A [Article that may lead to ego inflation] PUFF PIECE
• 81A [Pizza or Chinese, perhaps, or what to do throughout this puzzle in order to solve all the Down answers] TAKE-OUT FOOD

This is a nice theme, and all the theme answers are lively. The foods are sort of a mishmash, with the generic MEAT and PIE offset by the fresher-sounding AREPA and PHŌ.

I’m of two minds with the circled letters that AVCX uses in these skip-the-letter themes. On the one hand, when a fairly obvious answer like 28D [Go downhill fast, say] SKI doesn’t fit, you know you need to effectively leave one square empty, and the circle makes it clear which one that is. On the other hand, it might be almost impossible to solve this without the circles, and the food items might get lost.

Bonus points for all the Down answers being legitimate crossword answers, with or without the circled letters.

Wendy Brandes’s USA Today Crossword, “Fallback Positions” — Emily’s write-up

Hut, hut, hike!

USA Today, June 18, 2025, “Fallback Positions” by Wendy Brandes

Theme: the last word (aka “fallback”) of each themer is a position

Themers:

• 17a. [Municipal building with public recreation spaces, often], CIVICCENTER
• 41a. [Passing kindness along], PAYINGITFORWARD
• 65a. [Protective barrier at a salad bar], SNEEZEGUARD

A mix of themers in today’s set with CIVICCENTER, PAYINGITFORWARD, and SNEEZEGUARD. The first took me a while but the second themer filled in easily and the third was an insta-fill though it made me cringe despite it’s importance in buffet lines.

Favorite fill: ANAIS, BURST, and EMINENT

Stumpers: SEESTO (needed crossings), ENID (new to me), and OFUSE (also needed crossings)

A quicker solve for me today, which is always a delight. Loved the grid design, overall cluing, and great fill that culminated in a smooth flow. Lovely!

4.0 stars

~Emily

Emet Ozar’s LA TImes crossword – Gareth’s theme summary

Emet Ozar’s Wednesday puzzle features a typical theme concept. The full-width revealer THESECRETGARDEN is an early 20th century children’s novel, and doubles as an explanation that the three other long across answers feature words satisfying “___ GARDEN” spanning their two parts.

1. [“The”, Grammatically] is a DEFINITEARTICLE
2. [Baseball over time] is an EXTRAINNINGS. I’m not sure I’ve ever encountered a rain garden…
3. [Heavy-duty material for cutting boards] is a BUTCHERBLOCK

Gareth