Jem Burch’s Wall Street Journal crossword, “Circle of Life”—Jim P’s review
Theme: FOOD CHAIN (58a, [Ecological hierarchy, and a structure found in this puzzle]). The other theme answers are all familiar(ish) two-word food (or drink) items. Not only are they standalone items, but the second word of each phrase can be paired with the first word of the next phrase in the series, with the final word of the final phrase wrapping around to go with the first word of the first phrase…thus creating a FOOD CHAIN. Pretty nifty, eh?
Wall St Journal crossword solution · “Circle of Life” · Jem Burch · Wed., 2.1.23
- 16a. […juice and sometimes egg white/harvest festival…] SOUR CANDY.
- 22a. […treat sometimes covered in nuts/rich, moist…] APPLE BUTTER.
- 35a. […bakery offering/cinema…] CAKE POP.
- 49a. […snack/cocktail made with lemon…] CORN WHISKEY.
The chained-together items are a whiskey sour, candy apple, butter cake, and popcorn. The key is the forward slash in each clue and realizing that everything before it should be read with the previous clue and everything after it should be read with the next clue.
I thought this was wonderful! Those clues were beguiling at first, so it took me a while to eventually apply the title and then to have my aha moment. Once I did, I really appreciated the construction here. Not only do you have to have four two-word phrases, but you have to chain them together (second-word-to-the-next-first-word), and of course everything has to fit symmetrically. Really impressively done and a fun solve from start to finish!
But wait there’s more! Despite a dense, fun theme, we still get standout fill entries like ON THE ROCKS, “AM I LATE?,” “SAY WHAT?,” and PEGASUS. Also good: BOX STEP, PSY-OPS, FLUB, and BLIP. Lots to like here!
Clues of note:
- 6a. [Microchip factory, for short]. FAB. I was stuck on LAB here for a looong time. I don’t think I’m familiar with this use of FAB (being short for what…a fabrication plant?).
- 18a. [Over the top, in slang]. EXTRA. I’ve heard my kids using this, so that helped.
- 43a. [Not true]. ASKEW. The K made me put in FAKED. It took another length of time to sort that out.
- 47a. [He sprang from the blood of Medusa]. PEGASUS. I tried stretching Perseus to fit in here, even though I knew that made no sense.
- 65a. [47-Across, for Bellerophon]. STEED. Never heard of him. Some of these clues today are really more on a Thursday level.
- 23d. [Place for un pique-nique]. PARC. Ha! I had assumed pique-nique was the result of the French absorbing our word “picnic” into their language. But apparently, the reverse is true.
Really this was more of a Thursday puzzle, but I’m not complaining. 4.5 stars.
Dan Caprera’s New York Times crossword—Amy’s recap
NY Times crossword solution, 2 1 23, no. 0201
Fun theme! This plus-sized puzzle (16×15 to accommodate the 12-letter themers) depicts TRACTOR BEAMS (58a. [Science fiction energy rays that might suck up earthly bodies, as depicted three times in this puzzle]) by having three UFOs sucking up a COW, MAN, and CAR in their tractor beams. [Science fiction vessel] clues FLYING SAUCER, MOTHERSHIP (which evokes George Clinton and Parliament Funkadelic for me), and SPACECRAFT. Dangling below each is a circled 3-letter word that’s the end of the longer entries SCOW, “MAGIC MAN,” and BAR CAR.
Fave fill: JELL-O, KLEPTOCRATIC, NABISCO, BALLET DANCER, LOSE IT, CAPSICUM (check out Hot Ones on YouTube, a celebrity interview show during which host and guest eat hot wings topped with 10 increasingly spicy hot sauces—the questions are so different from the typical celeb interview, and the pain and sweating add difficulty to the whole process—and if you hate celebrities and pop culture, just think how much you’ll learn that could help you with crosswords!), and CHEAT SHEETS. Less keen on SMILERS, ETO, AAR, but the stacked 12s, those 11-letter Downs, and the three beamed-up words do constrict things. (It’s an 80-worder, though, above the usual limit of 78 but there’s an extra column adding three entries.)
Four stars from me.
Tracy Gray’s Universal crossword, “Musical Adaptations” — pannonica’s write-up
Universal • 2/1/23 • Wed • Gray • “Musical Adaptations” • solution • 20230201
Pretty straightforward outing here. Titles of musical plays, their final word anagrammed.
- 16a. [Musical about photographer Leibovitz chasing her wildebeest?] ANNIE GET YOUR GNU (… Gun).
- 26a. [ … about a quirky golf shirt?] A STRANGE POLO (… Loop).
- 43a. [ … about where to become a sommelier?] SCHOOL OF CORK (… Rock).
- 57a. [ … about the private life of singer Ariana?] THE SECRET GRANDE (… Garden).
Nothing too exciting, but it passes the time.
- 25d [Chinese soup variety] EGG DROP. The least of the standard TRIO (4d), in my estimation. By a significant margin.
- 38d [Mouse-spotter’s shriek] EEK. 45d [Squeaky mouse, perhaps] CAT TOY.
- 56d [It’s often cut and dried] HAIR. Also the name of a musical.
- 1a [Whiskey serving] SHOT. Clustered nearby are POUR and OUNCE, and somewhat farther is BOG, which evokes whisky. (13a, 3d, 39a)
- 13a [Rain buckets] POUR. Minor misdirection, as the clue looks at first as if it calls for a noun.
- 19a [Inside job?] DECOR. Nice.
- 36a [Acted all lovey-dovey?] COOED. Lovers and doves coo.
- 42d [Boo-boo or blooper] ERROR. 44d [“My bad!”] OOPSY. How common is that spelling, versus oopsie? Ngrams to the fore!
Zhouqin Burnikel’s USA Today Crossword, “Lane Change” — Emily’s write-up
A fun theme and themer set today, along with great fill overall!
USA Today, February 01 2022, “Lane Change” by Zhouqin Burnikel
Theme: each themer contains the word “lane” with various arrangement (or change) of those letters
Themers:
- 16a. [Tofu or chicken breast, for example], LEANPROTEIN
- 32a. [“Cryptonomicon” author], NEALSTEPHENSON
- 62a. [Singer who starred in “Stormy Weather”], LENAHORNE
I had the second part of LEANPROTEIN before I realized what today’s theme meant. NEALSTEPHENSON is an author with a plethora of works, though I’ve read only one or two so needed some crossings to get me started on this one. LENAHORNE is a name I recognize but the cluing wasn’t one I knew today—hopefully some of you did though. For the theme today, we get three “lane changes”: LEAN, NEAL, and LENA.
Favorite fill: PEKOE, NAILBITER, and KTOWN
Stumpers: SLYDOG (“sly fox” and “sly one” came to mind), BUDGE (kept thinking “slide” or “shift”), and WACO (needed crossings)
Great flow and cluing today. I enjoyed the theme once I saw it—a fun take and great title play on words too!
4.5 stars
~Emily
Wendy Brandes’s Los Angeles Times crossword–Amy’s recap
LA Times crossword solution, 2 1 23
It’s Amy subbing for Gareth, and the three paragraphs I just wrote vanished when I inadvertently navigated off the blogging page. Oops.
Theme revealer in this 16×15 grid is TWISTED HUMOR, and the letters in the words WIT, QUIP, and PUN are “twisted,” or scrambled, in the circled letters within ONE-HIT WONDER, KEEP QUIET, and COINPURSE.
3.75 stars from me; sorry I lost those other paragraphs.
BEQ from Monday — 7 Down’s answer is probably wrong. According to Wikipedia, Cher is the only artist to date to have a #1 single on a Billboard chart in six consecutive decades, from the 1960s to the 2010s, which is a few decades more than Mariah Carey’s four decades. But Carey is the first artist to top the specific Billboard “Hot 100” four decades in a row.
Does anyone have a link to Matt Jones “Jonesin'” archives that goes back to 2016? I didn’t bookmark the link and can’t it on the web. Thx.
https://www.fleetingimage.com/wij/xyzzy/nyt-links.html
TY Martin, you’re a great help to all of us!
NYT: fun theme, good Wednesday fare
One nit: isn’t a comet’s path actually an OVAL and not an ARC?? I thought they orbited the sun or other terrestrial bodies. No one really says the moon arcs across the sky, or do they???
Some comets have an ellipsoid orbit around the sun, where they would return to the solar system, but there are many that have parabolic or hyperbolic orbits, meaning they only pass through the solar system once:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_hyperbolic_comets
I think ARC for a meteor’s path makes a bit better sense than comet.
The definition of ARC at MW is pretty general, including more or less any smoothly curved path. In geometry, I would say an arc is strictly a section of the circumference of a circle, but that would exclude, eg, the path of a hit baseball, which is a parabola. I don’t have any objection to saying that a comet arcs across the sky, although (for reasons I can’t put my finger on) I wouldn’t say that about the moon.
WSJ–I don’t usually give up on a Wed. puzzle, but did today.
I eventually managed to get through it, but I hear ya. This makes two WSJ Wednesdays in a row that I’ve really had a tough time finishing. I thought the theme was pretty clever.
The NE was particularly difficult for me. I didn’t know what BUTTER CAKE was until today and wasn’t aware of the slang definition for EXTRA (“Over the top, in slang”). Without those answers, I struggled to come up with the crossing SEATS (“Finds a spot for”) and BOX STEP (“Simple dance pattern”). Also, I’m not sure that I knew a SCAD is a fish. ShAD? Sure. SCroD? Yup. But SCAD? Not so much. To me, SCADs is a synonym for “a lot” or “many” (or somewhat ironically, “big number”, which instead turned out to be the clue for FINALE elsewhere in the grid).
I also tripped over FAB (“Microchip factory, for short”) and submitted my solution with ‘lAB’/’lINALE’. I guess I figured that ‘lINALE’ was some weird math word I don’t know, but that was supposed to be the aforementioned FINALE (“Big number, perhaps”).
USA Today 3D OKAYS and 51A ITS OK. Again I wince at a blatant dupe that for me tends to overshadow the rest of the puzzle.
My couple of paragraphs…
TWISTEDHUMOR is the revealing answer of Wendy L. Brandes’s puzzle today. There are three circled answers that spell out: QUIP, PUN and… WIT? One of those is not like the other two. So, in that regard the execution here felt off.
New / tricky spots for me:
[___ Top ice cream], HALO was not an angle I had encountered. It appears to be a brand.
[Jazz pianist McCoy], TYNER. Hands up if you thought his name was going to be Tyner McCoy; it’s McCoy Tyner apparently!
[Another name not familiar to me was [“All the Birds in the Sky” Nebula winner ___ Jane Anders] for CHARLIE.
Gareth
Send me cross word posts! I love them!