BEQ 9:37 (Eric) 
[3.58 avg; 6 ratings] rate it
Fireball untimed (Jenni) [3.50 avg; 4 ratings] rate it
LAT 4:38 (Gareth) 
[1.83 avg; 3 ratings] rate it
NYT 6:49 (ZDL) 
[3.05 avg; 19 ratings] rate it
Universal 5:10 (Eric) [3.00 avg; 4 ratings] rate it
USA Today tk (Emily) [3.00 avg; 2 ratings] rate it
WSJ untimed (Jim Q) [3.00 avg; 2 ratings] rate it
Peter Gordon’s Fireball Crossword “Themeless 184” – Jenni’s write-up
Over the years I have learned that Peter’s themelesses often pair up the first (1a) and the last (64a, in this case) entries in some amusing fashion. This time he kept me on my toes by pairing the second and second-to-last instead.
Fireball, January 28, 2026, Peter Gordon, “Themeless 184,” solution grid
- 15a [Face lift?] is PILE DRIVER and 62a [1998 collection of stories by Steve Martin] is PURE DRIVEL. Why PILE DRIVER, you ask? Peter explains: “In the kayfabe world of professional wrestling, a face is a hero and a heel is a villain. A PILEDRIVER is a lift in which one wrestler picks up the other and rams that wrestler headfirst into the mat.” We’ll return to this later.
- Michelle OBAMA makes two appearances. 1a [“Becoming” won one] references her memoir which won an NAACP IMAGE AWARD, and 48d cites her as [Author of “The Light We Carry”]. Barack who?
- 9d [Place where runners who lean to the right usually do better] is RED STATE. I was expecting something a bit more abstruse.
- 36a [K’s lower them] are ERAS. I guess so, although if you give up too many extra-base hits and walks along with the K’s your ERA won’t be so hot. 12 days until pitchers and catchers!!
- I’m amused the the FDIC has a hashtag (#GetBanked).
What I didn’t know before I did this puzzle: never heard the word “kayfabe” before. Wikipedia says it’s “the portrayal of staged elements within professional wrestling (such as characters, rivalries, and storylines) as legitimate or real. Although it remains primarily a wrestling term, it has evolved into a code word for maintaining the pretense of “reality” in front of an audience.” Okay then.
And of course this:
Hey, a video from Minnesota that makes me laugh.
Kit Sheffield’s New York Times crossword — Zachary David Levy’s write-up
Time: 6m49s
Difficulty: Breezy (<8m) | Easy-ish (8-9m30s) | Working on it (9m30s-11m) | Rough going (11+m)
Kit Sheffield’s New York Times crossword, 1/29/26, 0129
Today’s theme: I never promised you a ROWs garden
- Expand — GGGGGGGGGG, no ROWs
- Sadness — SORSORSORSORSOR, no ROWs
- Day after today — TOMORTOMORTOMOR, no ROWS
Three rows, where’s the ROW?
Gently down the stream?
Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily
I don’t get the theme
Cracking: MACGYVERED
Slacking: I bid you a sweet ADEUX
Sidetracking: Clubber LANG, a.k.a. MR T
[Postscript: Okay – there’s a G row, a SOR row, and a TOMOR row. Actually pretty clever!]
Adam Shapiro’s Universal Crossword “It’s Five O’Clock Somewhere” — Eric’s Review
Adam Shapiro’s Universal Crossword “It’s Five O’Clock Somewhere” — 1/29/26 (Click to Embiggen)
An alternate title for this one could be “Around the World in Four Drinks,” which doesn’t have as much of a ring to it as I thought it did after a few beers (my adult beverage of choice). There’s no wordplay in this theme, just straight-forward clues for mixed drinks named after a place.
- 17A [With 38-Across, geographically named drink made with a splash of cola]/38A [See 17-Across] LONG ISLAND/ICED TEA
- [Geographically named drink made with Southern Comfort] ALABAMA SLAMMER
- [Geographically named drink made with cherry liqueur] SINGAPORE SLING
- [Geographically named drink made with ginger beer] MOSCOW MULE
Missing from the drink menu: Cuba Libre. And undoubtedly some others. As I said, I’m more of a beer drinker. The only one of these four drinks I’ve had is a Moscow Mule (served in that special copper mug, of course). But I’ve heard of the other three, and I would think that even people who don’t drink will recognize most of these.
Other stuff:
- 1A [Modern baseball bat wood] MAPLE/37A [Traditional baseball bat wood] ASH I didn’t know until a couple of years ago that bat makers had stopped using ash because the emerald ash borer has killed millions of ash trees in the Eastern United States. But even as I typed maple, I wondered if I was misremembering and the new material is alder.
- 2D [2025 Best Picture winner] ANORA Technically, it won the Oscar for 2024, the year it was released. This may be the first time I’ve entered the name without really having to think about it. (I still haven’t seen it, but I want to.)
- 39D [Where to poach an egg?] COOP Cute clue.
Brendan Emmett Quigley’s Crossword #1857 “Quart Toppers” — Eric’s Review
Brendan Emmett Quigley’s Crossword #1857 “Quart Toppers” — 1/29/26 (Click to Embiggen)
I might have been a little quicker had the title’s play on “Chart Toppers” clicked a little sooner. As it was, though, the substitution of QU for CH was obvious from the first theme entry:
- 17A [Stop a personal quixotic pursuit?] GET OFF ONE’S QUEST
- 26A [Pick up the pace during a 5K?] QUICKEN RUN
- 49A [Bon mots in just a few words?] MICROQUIPS
- 62A [Two things you might need to write “Bridgerton” fanfic?] NETFLIX AND QUILL I might have been the next-to-the last person on the planet to understand the real meaning of “Netflix and chill.”
The theme answers are all OK, though none truly amused me. Maybe you found them funnier than I did.
Other stuff:
- 20A [Deg. for those studying calculus?] DDS It was only from crosswords that I learned “calculus” can be another term for tartar.
- 36A [Site for cineastes] IMDB A gimme; I visit that site almost daily.
67A [Bondi Beach swimmer] AUSSIE Surely there’s a better way to clue this than reminding people of the horrific terrorist attack of December 14. Not that I think that event should be forgotten, but people turn to things like crosswords for a brief escape from reality.- 68A [Fanny pack that holds a six pack] BEER BELT Yeah, I need such a thing. Almost as much as I needed to see fanny packs designed to look like a white guy’s beer belly. (The perils of googling.)
- 69A [Improv actor’s mantra] YES, AND? I should have remembered that on my own, as I’ve seen it in plenty of crosswords now. But even with _ESA_D, I was stuck until I looked up 60D OLIN Kreutz. (The College Football Hall of Fame is even more uninteresting to me than the Pro Football Hall of Fame. At least the gridiron football season will be over soon.)
- 7D [New York Dolls or Dresden Dolls, e.g.] BAND I tried TRIO first, though I should have known better. Dresden Dolls were a duo of Amanda Palmer and Brian Viglione; by the time I started listening to Amanda Palmer, she and Viglione had split.
- 30D [___ Heller (neighbor on “Only Murders in the Building”)] UMA I didn’t know that Ms Thurman had competition in the crossword-worthiness department.
- 32D [Strait of Hormuz resident] OMANI Not IRANI. I thought my Middle East geography was better than that.
Mike Shenk’s Wall Street Journal crossword, “Forced Out” — Jim Q’s write-up
Sorry for the lateness! Only have time for a theme explanation.
THEME: Clues only make sense when the letter D is removed from theme answers.
WSJ • 1/29/26 • Thus • “Forced Out” • Mike Shenk • solution • 20260129
THEME ANSWERS:
- [Trying to corner the market on] BUDDYING UP (BUYING UP)
- [Home of the Ontario Hockey League’s Otters] DERIDED (ERIE)
- [Beat at a pie event] OUTDATED (OUTEAT)
- [Flock protector, perhaps] COLLIDED (COLLIE)
- [Lacking color] PADDLED (PALE)
- [Travel measure] MIDDLE-AGED (MILAGE)
- REVEALER: [Group of players, or, if spaced, a hint to making sense of six Across answers] BAND read as “BAN (the letter) D”
Tough one! We’ve seen this type of theme before- can be a frustrating solve when you can’t figure out the gimmick and the clues don’t offer any help. But I managed!
Ooh… just realized the title can be read similarly to the revealer: FORCE “D” OUT!
3.5 stars.
MaryEllen Uthlaut’s LA Times Crossword – Gareth’s theme summary
The entire 13th row explains MaryEllen Uthlaut’s LA Times puzzle: SEPARATE/CHECKS [sic]. GER[BIL/L]EMON, LOVESE[T/AB]SCOND, SAT[IN/VOICE]D and TARM[AC/COUNT]ESS spell out other pieces of paper similar to cheques. As always, a downside of this kind of puzzle is a lack of splashy longer answers.
Gareth
Puzzle: NYT; Rating: 1.5 stars
I hope I’m not setting the tone with the first comment… but I didn’t enjoy this one at all. The theme was totally irrelevant once you figured out it was just a pattern of letters across the grid – they could have meant anything in the end. The cluing was weird. (The Vietnamese language is… TONAL?) And the fill for the most part was choppy and dull. In a word, OOF.
Puzzle: NYT; Rating: 4 stars
except that it’s not just “any” letters going across the grid.
you interpret the answer to the clue as [thing] + ROW and rebus style create an entire row of [thing]s.
i quite liked it. clever and a pleasing aha when i got the trick.
also yes Vietnamese like Chinese and some other asian languages is in fact TONAL. that is, the same syllable pronounced with different tones has different meanings. In Chinese at least (I don’t speak more than a dozen words keep in mind) you have a flat tone (pitch unchanged through the syllable), rising in pitch, falling in pitch, and falling then rising. Say “ma” with a steady tone and you have “mother”; say it with a tone that drops and then rises and you have “horse”, etc.
I got the theme eventually when I read the recap here… but when I was solving it, they were just letters going across the grid. I figured out they were repeating and filled them all in without thinking about what they meant. That’s what I was saying. It wasn’t necessary to understand the theme if you figured out the pattern so they could have stood for anything as far as I was concerned.
I will also admit to being highly biased against grids that are heavy on short fill and this one had a ton.
Ok. So you can make the case for [thing] + row, which never occurred to me.
But that only works for SOR-ROW and TOMOR-ROW.
G-ROW would sound like GEE-ROW, so that’s a bit off to me.
AMORE/ADORE with an unfamiliar French cross was a blemish.
I think it’s more a spelling thing than a “sounds like” thing (although the ROW has the same sound throughout – C-ROW would work, but B-ROW, not so much). You have a row of G’s – GROW, a row of SOR’s – SORROW, and a row of TOMOR’s – TOMORROW.
Then add the extra obscure and uninteresting GLAXO to that section to get a bit of a mess.
I liked it. The first part of the theme – the repeating letter pattern – was helpful in filling the grid. The second part of the theme – the ROW – was a nice aha! Took me about a minute after completing the puzzle to see it. It dawned on me while looking at the TOMOR-ROW.
Not sure if this is what you meant, but there’s a standard linguistic designation of TONAL languages, in which changing the pitch of the syllables (from rising to falling, say) changes the meaning. So the clue and answer are completely legit.
I know a smattering of Chinese, and it’s fascinating to me that if you say the wrong tone, the listener has absolutely no idea what you are saying. It’s not like the listener can automatically convert the syllable from one tone to another tone, any more than a listener in English is automatically going to convert a long vowel into a short vowel. If you said to a native English speaker, “I met a lace,” they wouldn’t automatically think you’re trying to say, “I met a lass.” They would probably be completely stymied as to what you’re trying to say.
Thanks for the review, Eric. My original submission had wordplay clues for the theme answers, but David and Taylor reasonably concluded that it was hard to find punny references to Long Island and Singapore that worked at Universal difficulty levels.
However much sense this made, I was a little sad to lose [Kremlin jackass?] for MOSCOW MULE.
Puzzle: NYT; Rating: 1 star
Ugh. Complete waste of time. Not at all entertainng.
+1
Puzzle: Fireball; Rating: 4 stars
A little easier for me than most Fireballs – a fifteen minute clean solve. My favorite clue was “Something that questions the rule of law” for BAR EXAM.
Puzzle: NYT; Rating: 3 stars
I didn’t understand the theme until I finished and looked at the grid, then it clicked. A grid, crossword or otherwise is made up of rows and columns. The three theme rows are:
A G row
A SOR row
A TOMOR row
It was a very fast Thursday for me, close to a PR. I admit that I saw the pattern, then after it was done realized they were all missing ROW but … I didn’t put it together that they were G row’s, SOR rows, and TOMOR rows until coming here. For some reason, I started looking for boat-themes, thinking ROW ROW ROW your boat with all the repeating (but missing) ROWs. Cute enough! Not sure if it would’ve been improved with a revealer or not.
Nice job Kit! Too many grumpalumpasses in chat. Really looking forward to your next one!
Puzzle: BEQ; Rating: 5 stars
Ding ding ding.
We have a winner.
I loved BEQ today. It was a workout and I worried I would not finish but I did and boy am I satisfied.
Puzzle: BEQ; Rating: 4 stars
I didn’t care for the ADA/UMA crossing, nor having both IRE and IRATE as entries. But I did enjoy the theme — very silly (and fun).
Puzzle: NYT; Rating: 3.5 stars
The NYT was a fast solve and I had no idea what was going on until I came here. To be fair, I didn’t spend a whole lot of (or any) time trying to figure it out once I finished solving. I don’t always rate puzzles; when I do I base it on my enjoyment and the skill of the constructor. Sure, I enjoy it more when I get the “aha!” moment and that’s not entirely up to the constructor.
TNY: I didn’t grok the theme immediately, and wondered how I was supposed to assume that QU was switched for CH… I finally got it. A fairly tough puzzle for me, which I like.
Eric: “I might have been the next-to-the last person on the planet to understand the real meaning of “Netflix and chill.”…. making ME the last, the one behind you. I learned that today after you mentioned it in your writeup. I was taking it at face value.
Cool! I’m now next-t0-next-to-last!
(I have a friend a few years younger than me who didn’t know what it meant, either. But she once had her brother tell her that no, he and she were not going to hook up.)
Oho so she found out before me, so I am officially last in our little parade of late-learners ;-)
Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow
Creeps through this petty place
And all our piety and wit
Can’t make any sense of it
Nor all our tears make it worth the time