Thursday, April 20, 2023

Note: Fireball is a contest this week. We’ll have our usual review after the submission period closes.

Robert Won’s Wall Street Journal crossword, “I’ll Hazard a Guess”—Jim’s review

Theme: (SHOT) IN THE DARK (53a, [Wild guess, and a hint to four of this puzzle’s squares]). The word SHOT doesn’t appear in the grid. Instead, it takes the place of four specific black squares in order to satisfy the adjacent clues.

The four SHOT squares are as follows:

Wall St Journal crossword solution · “I’ll Hazard a Guess” · Robert Won · Thu., 4.20.23

• 1a [Debunked] DOWN and 13d [It holds about 1.5 ounces] GLASS. (SHOT) DOWN and (SHOT) GLASS.
• 24a [Close enough to be picked up] WITHIN EAR(SHOT).  12d [Take the front passenger seat] RIDE with 31d [Cause to race] GUN give us RIDE (SHOT)GUN. I didn’t expect 12d to span all the way down to include 31d, but that’s clearly what is intended. The clue for 31d is satisfied simply with GUN and not SHOTGUN.
• 36d [Elite group of wildfire fighters] HOT with 57d [River sport] CREW give us HOT(SHOT) CREW. I’ve never heard this phrase and it doesn’t exactly sound legit…until you find that the term has its own Wikipedia page. We also have the revealer at 53a here.
• 70a [Hardly a favorite] LONG and 52d [Y-shaped weapon] SLING. LONG (SHOT) and SLING (SHOT).

Nice theme. It was fun being befuddled right from the start at 1a, then sussing the theme out and having an aha moment. I wasn’t sure if I liked the little twist at 12- and 36d, but it’s grown on me, and it’s especially nice how the two phrases (RIDE SHOTGUN and HOTSHOT CREW) fit symmetrically in the grid.

Fun fill in LASER BEAMS, “DARN TOOTIN‘” (I wanted “durn tootin'”), WEAK TEA, ALTER EGO, YAKITORI, DRONED ON, and CASSAVAS. Plenty to like there on top of the nifty theme.

I didn’t know the proper name at 29a, nor the J. Lo album at 21d, so that made their crossing a bit ambiguous. But A seemed the likely choice to make both TEENA and UNA, and thankfully, it was the right one.

Clues of note:

• 32a. [Years, in Poitiers]. ANS. I had to double- and triple-check the crossings on this before I was satisfied with it. This isn’t a very common cluing angle for this entry. Cruciverb shows it was last clued this way in 2018.
• 66a. [Prepare to drop, maybe]. DRAG. Took me a long time to pull up the phrase “DRAG and drop”.
• 17d. [Debut, in Variety-speak]. BOW. No idea on this one. Is Variety magazine the only place that uses this word in this way?
• 44d. [Basic diet, for diabetics]. ANAGRAM. Nice one.
• 54d. [Cup, in Cannes]. TASSE. Knowing the word demitasse helped with this one.

Good puzzle all around. Four stars.

Simeon Seigel’s New York Times crossword — Zachary David Levy’s write-up

Difficulty: Difficult (17m49s)

Simeon Seigel’s New York Times crossword, 4/19/23, 0419

Today’s theme: UPPERCASE and CLOCKWISE (How this puzzle’s grid must be rotated in order to read the answers to the starred clues, when written in 17-Across)

• WUZWUOZZH (innocence)
• ZOUUHEOU (Comic Con)
• EOONEOON (“Zoom-zoom”)
• WEOUZHWZO (one income)

Really enjoyed this.  A proper Thursday challenge with a twist that required me to stop and think through the revealer.  Some people don’t like entries that are nominally gibberish, but I’m not one of them.  I had to turn my head and squint to make the H into an I and the W into an E, but it all works in the end.

Plus — and it’s partly my own alphabetic bias talking — look at all those Zs! Count ’em: 8! It just zips and zings and leaves you with zero regrets.  HUZZAH!

Cracking: SPRITZ — I know what an Aperol spritz is, and I’ve heard the term “wine spritzer” before. but I didn’t realize that the spritzes were a broad group of Prosecco-based cocktails.  The more you know.

Slacking: SAD IRONS — and not dour presses.

Sidetracking: RIZZO –> The Muppets Take Manhattan –> “Peoples is peoples”

Elizabeth C. Gorski’s New Yorker crossword – Kyle’s write-up

Good morning! Elizabeth C. Gorski has the Thursday New Yorker slot this week. Let’s see what’s in this puzzle:

The New Yorker solution grid – Thu 04/20/23 – Elizabeth C. Gorski

• 34A PIANO TEACHERS [Coaches for benched players?] – a wonderful central entry. The clue is pitched just right for an easy themeless.
• Among the longer entries, I liked HAVE NO FEAR, BASKETBALL, PARASAIL, IRISH SEA. There are also a handful of 6-7 letter entries that I haven’t seen much in puzzles, like EAR EXAM, MAMBOED, and CURSOR, which added to the fresh feeling of the grid.
• The bottom central region with MBAS/BAMA/AMAL/SARS felt like a potential trouble spot, particularly as BAMA is clued with reference to 20th-century college football trivia.
• PERTEST (12D) feels iffy as the superlative form of pert. “Most pert” sounds more natural to my ear. According to Onelook pertest has some support in online dictionaries, although it doesn’t appear in Merriam-Webster.
• 56D MOW [Trim the lawn] – on my to-do list now that spring has arrived in Chicago!

Thank you, Elizabeth!

Dan Schwartz & Shannon Rapp’s LA Times crossword – Gareth’s summary

LA Times
230420

Dan Schwartz & Shannon Rapp’s sixteen-wide puzzle features re-duplicative spoken-word phrases, four of them. All of them use a cute, but somewhat imprecise [Double…] clue, which does add a second layer. So:

• [Double bond?], PROMISESPROMISES.
• [Double check?], TESTINGTESTING.
• [Double fault?], EXCUSESEXCUSES.
• [Double jump?], SURPRISESURPRISE.

Other notables:

• [Shady, in gamer lingo], SUS. Not to be confused with “sussed”, which is figured out.
• [Early Canon autofocus camera], SURESHOT. The camera to my right while solving this puzzle is a PowerShot, which I assume is a descendant?
• [__ James of “The White Lotus”], THEO was a new name on me.
• Similarly, [“Antiracist Baby” author Ibram X. __], KENDI. Seems he smooshed it together from a bunch of unrelated languages…
• [Where to hang on the line?], BUSDEPOT. This clue feels like a try hard…
• [Spanish “this”], ESTO. I thought it was usually est(e/a) so I looked this up . In sum, as a pronoun, it’s esto, but as a determiner it’s est(e/a).

Gareth

Hanh Huynh’s Universal crossword, “Ho-Hum” — Sophia’s write-up

Theme: The first syllable of each theme answer sounds like a word that a bored person would say.

Universal Crossword, 04 20 2023, “Ho-Hum”

• 20a [Robotic monster of Japanese kaiju movies (Note the first 2 letters in this answer)] – MECHA GODZILLA (meh)
• 25a [Masks, fins, etc. (First 4 letters)] – SNORKELING GEAR (snore)
• 47a [City north of the Bronx (First 3 letters)] – YONKERS NEW YORK (yawn)
• 53a [Someone to bounce ideas off of … or a phonetic hint to this puzzle’s theme] – SOUNDING BOARD

I like this theme, but I have no idea why the theme clues are focused on letter counts rather than syllables! Especially when it’s part of the theme that none of the sounds are spelled like their “bored” word… I’m assuming there must be some behind-the-scenes reason for the choice, but as someone who refuses to count letters in Universal puzzles, I thought this made an elegant theme needlessly more complex. Side note that MECHA GODZILLA was totally new to me, but I love it as an answer.

This puzzle played easy for me, time-wise – I’m curious if other folks felt the same. I didn’t realize that KEYNOTES were always opening speeches – for some reason I just assumed that they were the biggest most important ones? – so that held me up a little.

Fill highlights: OK CUPID, I RECKON, ROSARIO Dawson

Fill lowlights: TEMPI, SHERO (This is just personal preference; I feel the same way about “herstory”).

Clue highlights: [“Sharknado” channel] for SYFY, [Addams family member with a child named What] – ITT. With all the Cousin Itt clues in crosswords over the years, how did I not know this?