Tuesday, December 9, 2025

Jonesin’ 5:05 (Erin) rate it
LAT untimed (Jenni) [3.00 avg; 3 ratings] rate it
NYT 6:24 (Eric) [3.45 avg; 11 ratings] rate it
The New Yorker untimed (pannonica) [3.83 avg; 9 ratings] rate it
Universal 5:04 (Eric) [3.25 avg; 6 ratings] rate it
USA Today tk (Sophia) [2.50 avg; 1 rating] rate it
Xword Nation tk (Ade) rate it
WSJ untimed (Jim Q) [2.50 avg; 4 ratings] rate it

Matt Jones’s Jonesin’ Crossword, “Piece Out” — get on board. – Erin’s write-up

Jonesin’ solution 12/9/25

Hello lovelies! In this week’s Jonesin’ the theme entries are flanked by chess pieces, like so:

• 17a. [Adam Scott/Ken Marino comedy series about caterers] PARTY DOWN (pawn)
• 21a. [Hotel professional] ROOM CLERK (rook)
• 31a. [Recognize from a picture, perhaps] KNOW BY SIGHT (knight)
• 41a. [Place to repair a two-wheeler] BICYCLE SHOP (bishop)
• 52a. [Very perceptive] QUITE KEEN (queen)
• 58a. [Persevere] KEEP GOING (king)

Other things:

• 1a. [Ludacris genre] RAP. My nine-year-old informed me recently that there is a Ludacrisp apple, a hybrid of Fuji and Honeycrisp. The naming story mentions the similarity to “ludicrous,” but the spelling has to be a nod to the “Southern Hospitality” artist.
• 66a. [Abbr. stamped on a bounced check] NSF, aka non-sufficient funds.
• 12d. [Fish dams] WEIRS. They’re used to trap fish for catching or research, or to funnel them to locations such as fish ladders.

Until next week!

Adam Levav’s Universal Crossword “Dear Boy” — Eric’s Review

Adam Levav’s Universal Crossword “Dear Boy” — 12/9/25

The theme is fairly standard — seemingly unrelated compound nouns that have something in common that’s not immediately apparent. In this case, each theme answer begins with a term of endearment and ends with a word beginning with B:

• 17A [*One born in the 1950s] BABY BOOMER
• 25A [*General Mills cereal with a blue ghost mascot] BOOBERRY
• 36A [*Falltime loaf] PUMPKIN BREAD
• 51A [*Romantic song] LOVE BALLAD
• 57A [Certain hive worker … or a hint to both parts of the starred clues’ answers] HONEYBEE

The theme answers are all fine, though BOOBERRY cereal never appealed to me even when I ate those sugary breakfast bowls. PUMPKIN BREAD might not be a whole lot healthier as a breakfast, but I expect it tastes better.

Other stuff:

• 15A [Artemis’ Roman counterpart] DIANA The goddess of the hunt. It took me a second to remember that one.
• 28A [“Full House” actor John] STAMOS I needed a lot of crosses to drag that name out.
• 47A [Former Washington Mystics player Delle Donne] ELENA Sometimes the sports trivia sticks; this name is now a gimme though I’ve never seen a WNBA game.
• 60A [“On Photography” author Susan] SONTAG A gimme.
• 64A [Tennis great Stefan] EDBERG I needed more crosses than I should have to remember him; he won the Australian Open in 1985 and 1987, Wimbledon in 1988 and 1990, and the US Open in 1991 and 1992.
• 33D [“Jessie” actress Jackson] SKAI Both the TV series (which ran from 2011–2015) and the actress are new to me.

Kate Hawkins’s New York Times Crossword — Eric’s Review

Kate Hawkins’s New York Times Crossword — 12/9/25

Four grid-spanning answers and a centrally-located revealer make up today’s slightly squishy theme:

• 17A [“Judging from the information available to me …”] AS FAR AS I CAN TELL Is this really an equivocation? To me, it’s just an honest admission that the speaker knows there might be other information that would alter what they’re about to assert.
• 23A [“These are merely my spur-of-the-moment suggestions …”] JUST SPIT-BALLING
• 35A [Verdant privacy features … or a punny description of the four longest answers in this puzzle] HEDGE ROWS My thesaurus offers these synonyms for the qualifying sense of  “hedge”: “equivocation, evasion, fudge, quibble, qualification, qualifying expression; temporizing, uncertainty, prevarication, vagueness.”
• 50A [“Here’s my two cents, which might not amount to much …”] FOR WHAT IT’S WORTH
• 57A [“Feel free to dismiss this idea — however …”] ONLY A THOUGHT BUT

This is a fine theme for an early-week puzzle: All four phrases are colorful and well-known enough that one doesn’t need too many crossings to get them. None of the theme answers except AS FAR AS I CAN TELL has ever before appeared in a NYT puzzle, which gives the grid a fresh feel.

Other stuff:

• 5A [San Diego baseballer] PADRE A gimme even though I’m not sports fan: The San Diego Padres are one of the few MLB teams I’ve seen in person.
• 14A [Termites, for an aardwolf] DIET Not FOOD, which I abandoned quickly on seeing that 4D STARTS did not likely start with SD.
• 31A [Accurse] BEDAMN I usually cast a side-eye at BE____ constructions like “bedazzle” or “becalm” because (oops) they sound fusty. But as old-fashioned as “bedamn” is, I kinda like it.
• 33A [33-Down, across the Atlantic] ZEE/33D [33-Across, across the Atlantic] ZED Cute, though I guess Canada counts for zip here.
• 34A [“Oh, ___!” (hit Broadway farce about Mrs. Lincoln)] MARY I just now read that clue and am a bit surprised this is a recent play (it was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2024). I used to be more aware of New York theater than I am these days.
• 54A [“Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a ___” (old maxim)] FIRE I don’t think I’d heard that before, but I like it.
• 8D [Asahi Super Dry or Kirin Lager] RICE BEER I’ve heard of both breweries but not these specific beers.
• 24D [Music app named for a figure in Greek myth] PANDORA Does that mean there’s some hope at the bottom of the streaming box?
• 25D [Pigmented rings] AREOLAS Think irises, not nipples. (Not that I have anything against nipples.)
• 47D [“Edie & ___: A Very Long Engagement” (2009 documentary)] THEA I got that from the crosses, but it just now occurred to me that this movie was about Edie Windsor and her wife Thea Spyer. Windsor received a large estate tax bill when Spyer died and sued for a refund, since she’d have had no tax liability if she’d been married to a man. She prevailed at the Supreme Court in 2013 when the court held the federal Defense of Marriage Act unconstitutional. United States v. Windsor paved the way for Obergefell v. Hodges, which struck down state laws against same-sex marriage two years later.

Doug Peterson’s Los Angeles Times crossword — Jenni’s write-up

I wasn’t sure where we were going until the revealer at 38a informed that we were on a BEER RUN, clued as [Trip to buy brewskis, or a sequence found in the starts of the answers to the starred clues].

Los Angeles Times, Doug Peterson, December 9, 2025, solution grid

• 17a [*Metaphorical container similar to Pandora’s box] is a CAN OF WORMS.
• 24a [*Result of serious core training] are SIX–PACK ABS.
• 50a [*Advocate from a social agency] is a CASEWORKER.
• 60a [*Pilot’s aerobatic maneuver] is a BARREL ROLL.

I was expecting a KEG instead of a BARREL at the bottom. That’s a bit of a letdown not just because I was surprised but also because beer isn’t usually dispensed or sold in a BARREL. Or is it?

What I didn’t know before I did this puzzle: that ELMO has a sister named Daisy.

nb: I know I’ve been doing a lot of baking when I twice tried to type the constructor’s first name as “Dough.”

Erik Agard’s New Yorker crossword — pannonica’s solution grid

New Yorker • 12/9/25 • Agard • solution • 20251209

[open discussion]

Stephanie Lesser’s Wall Street Journal crossword, “That’s a Wrap!” — Jim Q’s write-up

THEME: Words/Phrases that feature the letters C-A-S-E on either end

WSJ • 12/9/25 • Tues • “That’s a Wrap” • Stephanie Lesser • solution • 20251209

THEME ANSWERS:

• CLIENT BASE
• CASH ADVANCE
• CABOOSE
• CANADA GOOSE
• [“To be on the safe side,” like each starred answer] JUST IN CASE

Me and Tuesday ain’t on the same wavelength lately. Similar to last week, I’m a bit confused with the theme. I didn’t figure out what was going on until after the solve, and it took me quite a while since I kept looking for a more complex way to interpret the revealer, JUST IN CASE and the title “That’s a Wrap!”

A little AHA moment as I noticed they all began with C and then the C-A-S-E pattern became apparent shortly thereafter, but I don’t understand how each themer fits with [“To be on the safe side,” like each starred answer]. Is it that C-A-S-E is on the “sides” of the theme answers? I guess so.  If I have that right then something like CASE OUT might make more sense to me as a revealer. But I still don’t really get JUST IN CASE. Namely the JUST IN part. Is something “IN” (between) the C-A / S-E pattern? Hey there’s NADA GOO! in CANADA GOOSE. NADA GOO! is indeed  JUST “IN” C-A-S-E.

And I guess “That’s a Wrap!” as a title refers to the word CASE “wrapping” itself around the theme answers? I’m honestly not entirely sure.

This is where you roll your eyes and say “It’s a crossword puzzle, Jim. Just shut up, don’t overthink it, and enjoy.” At least that’s what I just said to myself.

Noted.

I’ll move on.

OTHER STUFF / ERRATA / MISSTEPS

• My biggest misstep was entering CLIENTELLE for CLIENT BASE. My cringey spelling of “clientele” was not sitting right with me, so eventually I deleted the last three letters, but left the E. So my response for [Like Haydn’s Symphony No. 46] was IN E and not IN B. If you’re anything like me, you don’t know most of the key signatures of every symphony ever written, so IN E looked fine. It was a very long time before I managed to get myself out of that little mess.
• [Chow line?] LEASH. Cute. A dog being the “Chow.”
• [Lt. Yar of “Star Trek: The Next Generation”] TASHA. New to me- so that made it even harder for me to suss out that section.
• [Time toggle] AM/PM. Made the classic mistake last night of setting my alarm for PM. Let’s just say I had to skip a couple steps this morning before heading to work because I ERRed and missed the alarm. If “Hygiene” were a class, I’m not exactly an A+ student today. TMI?
• Felt a tad name heavy with STEIG, OSSIE, TASHA, NAOMI, AVRIL, SAM, CARDI, ENO, ANI. Maybe felt like more because I didn’t know a few.
• Felt sorta heavy on Crosswordese too with two partials (which seems to be par for Mon/Tue WSJ lately) ONE AT (at time) and A AS (in apple). HARI, A TON, ENC., DID TO, MED., TOME, DEET, DYER, TUNG, NOM, and TOI.  Aforementioned musicians ANI and ENO ain’t exactly strangers to crosswords either. I just know this is the stuff that my unofficial student-led crossword club of high school seniors struggle with. It’s sometimes hard to sell crosswords to them when they don’t have the foundation to wade through Crosswordese, and that much at one time can be overwhelming. NADA GOO! should be the goal whenever possible.
• The longer answers were quite nice with DREAM DATE, HOTLANTA, WHAT AM I?

I don’t mean to be overly negative, and at the end of the day, solving a crossword that isn’t my favorite is still better than whatever responsibility I’m shirking in order to solve said crossword puzzle. So in that sense, I still enjoyed this. Just found it confusing.

2 stars.

P.S. Originally solved in web applet on my phone… not ideal, of course, but why in the world am I not permitted to peruse the clues post-solve?