Jacob McDermott’s New York Times crossword—Amy’s recap
NY Times crossword solution, 7/19/24 – no. 0719
So I wasn’t specifically solving at my top speed (was watching TV while solving), and the “8 minutes and change” on the timer doesn’t reflect “oof, tough Saturday here,” just inattention.
Lots fun fill here! Among my faves: RARIN’ TO GO, “I CAN’T EVEN,” PROFILE PICS,SWING STATE (eek), GOT A BAD RAP, WENT BANANAS, SMOG ALERT (might’ve been ozone I was smelling the other day?), “I’M ON A ROLL,” LOVE POTION.
A few things to talk about:
- 9d. [Screw cap alternative], POP TOP LID. Wait, what? Like a can’s pop top (which is just a pop top, no “lid” about it)? Or is this some sort of lid contraption for a bottle?
- 48a. [Physiologist whose namesake exercise is part of an Army fitness test], BURPEE. I’ve heard of these Burpees being a CrossFit exercise, no idea about the Army. There’s also the Burpee seed catalog.
- 39d. [Non-silence of the lambs?], BAAING. Booooo! This is terrible! (I like it.)
Four stars from me.
Zachary David Levy’s Los Angeles Times crossword — pannonica’s write-up
LAT • 7/19/24 • Fri • Levy • solution • 20240719
The theme answers are strings of, well let’s call them meta words and phrases.
- 17a. [Ermine, polecat, mink, etc.] WEASEL WORDS.
- 24a. [Bouncing off the walls, frenzied, feverish, etc.] HYPER TEXT.
- 34a. [Sodium chloride, potassium cyanide, calcium phosphate, etc.] SALTY LANGUAGE.
- 46a. [On the house, gratis, comped, etc.] FREE VERSE.
- 56a. [Violaceous, heliotrope, mauve, etc.] PURPLE PROSE.
It’s an elegantly simple theme and I liked it a lot.
- 24d [Alternative to high water] HELL. In an idiomatic phrase.
- 42d [Three-horse ride] TROIKA.
- 50d [Fumble] ERR. Paired symmetrically with 18d [Not my mistake] SIC.
- 20a [Red shade] CERISE. From the French word for cherry (singular).
- 29a [Muse of poetry] ERATO, the favorite of crosswords. Note that Calliope was the muse of epic poetry.
- 30a [Dolts] TOMFOOLS. We much more commonly see an inflected form.
- 58a [Cover letters?] AKA. Just enough of a stretch to still be legitimate.
- 61a [Sharp bark] YAP. Which I initially read as [Sharp bank] and dutifully filled in YAW, which kind of works for that. Then I did YIP and finally YAP.
- 63a [The Oilers, on ESPN tickers] EDM. Those Albertans are big into electronic dance music, as we all know.
Zachary David Levy’s Universal crossword, “On-Off Switch”—Jim’s review
Theme answers are familiar phrases that have had ONs swapped for OFFs and vice versa, with wacky cluing of course.
Universal crossword solution · “On-Off Switch” · Zachary David Levy · Fri., 7.19.24
- 20a. [Really into news media?] HOT ON THE PRESS.
- 27a. [Cheap lumber?] KNOCK-OFF WOOD.
- 47a. [“This postseason game begins now,” for example?] PLAYOFF WORDS.
- 56a. [Endless period of voting?] RUN-ON ELECTION.
Solid. Seems like there might be a near-endless supply of potential theme answers though (I just found “fly on the handle” [Pest trying to open a door?] and “let on Steam” [Give someone your online gaming password?] within a minute). I wonder if there’s some way to add a constraint to tighten the theme. Still, I like the wordplay in the title, and it makes a good basis for a theme.
FISH BOWLS, STAR ANISE, and a POWER UP are your grid highlights today. Also good: ST PETER, PULSARS, and FICKLE. Challenges: KEA clued [Large New Zealand parrot] and LEN clued [“Steal My Sunshine” group].
Clues of note:
- 66a. [Explosion sound in comics]. BLAM. I went with BOOM. Anyone else?
- 11d. [Watchmaker whose ambassadors include Roger Federer and Michael Buble]. ROLEX. I pretty much stopped reading the clue after the first word since I had the R in place.
- 48d. [“Steal My Sunshine” group]. LEN. Whoa. It took a few moments for the song’s hook to trigger in my brain, but it was in there. The band’s name, however, was not.
3.5 stars.
LAT: Fun theme with some interesting fill like CERISE, CHARISMA, TROIKA and TOMFOOLS (I don’t think I have ever seen anything but TOMFOOLery).
I got off to a less than stellar start with oPulent in place of UPSCALE, but AD REP disabused me of that.
I agree…fun and interesting! I don’t often do the LAT but I liked this one.
POP TOP LID I’ve seen in pharmacies as the alternate option to safety caps on pill bottles for patients.
NYT: Yes, really good Saturday puzzle with many fun entries. I CANT EVEN always cracks me up.
For some reason, I entered REP instead of RAP and it took me for ever to find my error. But the rest went relatively smoothly. Plunking AVILA right off the bat was very helpful.
I too had no idea what a POP TOP LID was. What I do know is that screw caps are now so much more commonly used for wine- I find it disorienting.
Huda and Amy: here in my part of the country it’s Friday.
Nice NYT but was on the easy side for me.
I feel obliged to point out that ODOR is clued without any reference to bad smells! (Although the word itself sure is getting a lot of mileage recently).
NYT for me really hard, for multiple reasons. Knowledge as of Psy Burpee(where I considered burlpey gamy), flipping birds in cooking, Nile boats, and more. Fill that wasn’t quite to my ear as in basing or eyedrop in the singular. Clues also not to my ear as in the one for profile pics. Ambiguities as with would it be went or gone crazy. Interesting though.
Sorry. For the tough crossing I meant that BURPEE and GAME might for all I knew have both ended with a Y. Also meant Baaing as a part of speech that doesn’t come naturally to me from Baa. Typing on a city bus that in the irregularity of NY streets has long since lost its shock absorbers.
Pop Top Lid… we had some Bundaberg Ginger beer that had what seems to be a pop top lid or cap … they call it rip top, I think … it looks like a screw off top of a beer bottle, but has a tab you pull up, and can actually use to recover and the soda doesn’t go flat for at least a day in my experience :)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fKXR1m7iSGw
NYT: Minority report: I’m sorry to say that I found this puzzle to be relatively trivia-heavy (a characteristic I abhor) and easy (because I knew a lot of the trivia), and therefore just not very interesting.
I liked the clue for SWING STATE and enjoyed seeing PENNY ANTE; but thought the clue for PROFILE PICS was weak.
I was particularly disappointed with the clue for OVEN TIMER because try as I might I cannot think of a bird that gets flipped when in the oven. The birds that we oven-roast are chickens, a biennial turkey, and an occasional duck. None of them need, or are even amenable to, flipping. They are basted in place and otherwise left alone until extracted, filling the kitchen with a glorious aroma (not ODOR!). So that clue was a big swing and a miss for me.
Maybe I’m missing something obvious here, in which case I’m sure someone will enlighten me. Until then, this puzzle gets a thumbs-down from me.
I have a vague recollection of cooking a turkey years ago using a method that involved basting it and wrapping it tightly in foil, then roasting it in a very hot (450) oven for a much shorter than usual time. I believe it started breast-side down, than after a couple of hours you had to take it out, turn the oven down, put the turkey in right-side up, and remove the foil so it browned.
What the supposed advantage was I can’t remember (except for the shorter cooking time), nor can I remember that it tasted much different from any other roast turkey, i.e. kinda boring.
I’ve never heard of that method, but I’d guess it’s meant to self-baste the breasts so they don’t dry out. But anything that’s wrapped in foil ends up steamed rather than roasted. Spatchcocking is a much better method for roasting a bird faster and more evenly, and – like standard roasting – involves no turning.
The recipe I like for spatchcocked chicken involves a heavy weight (e.g., a couple of bricks) atop the chicken in a cast iron skillet – and it does call for turning the chicken, about 2/3 of the way through the roasting process.
Until we started roasting turkey on a charcoal grill, we used a high temperature oven roasting method. I don’t remember if you had to flip the bird, but I remember the ends of the drumsticks getting so thoroughly charred that they snapped off.
I highly recommend the charcoal grill method. The skin comes out wonderfully brown and crispy. And it frees the oven up for all the side dishes.
Has anyone else noticed that Mike Shenk has been making a lot of the puzzles himself in the WSJ lately?
I’ve had a few puzzles published in the WSJ over the years, but I stopped submitting there a while ago. The response times are ridiculous and Shenk’s perfectionism has prompted unreasonable editing suggestions that further slow the process and any re-submitted material will end up being scrapped in favor of Shenk’s preferences anyway. All dialogue is filtered through his assistant, too, as he’s too self-important to directly respond himself. Worst editor to deal with by far in my experience. Perhaps other constructors feel the same, and Shenk feels the need to write more of the puzzles himself due to fewer submissions that clear his self-elevated standard.
The only day I regularly solve the WSJ puzzle is Friday, where it seems it’s Matt Gaffney’s one week and Mike Shenk the next.
(I usually have better luck solving Gaffney’s metas, but this week’s is by Shenk, and I am pretty sure that I have finally solved the meta after a months-long drought.)
Mike constructed tomorrow’s too:
https://herbach.dnsalias.com/wsj/wsj240720.puz
It’s also taking 8 or 9 months for them to reply to a submission.
Far be it from me to defend Mike Shenk. While I don’t have the privileged insights of a constructor, I posted a comment here at least a year go worried by his both writing often and editing. I worked in print publishing, as an editor working with authors on the style and content, and it’s an old saying in the business that you can’t be your own editor. (To my discredit, I ignore that in my own writing.)
I got no positive feedback, which made me think I was just being my annoying self. Still, the NYT puzzles consistently get higher ratings, and I still wondered.
But fair is fair, and I have to say, while Shenk wrote today’s contest puzzle and tomorrow’s oversized puzzle, he wrote only once in the previous two weeks. (I haven’t looked farther back.) So are you folks sure he’s writing more often?
I haven’t ventured an opinion on whether he’s using more of his own puzzles. I think he does a great job with a much smaller staff than the Times uses, fwiw.
I used to draft legislative documents, and everything I wrote was reviewed by another attorney and usually edited by a trained legal editor. Any kind of manuscript almost always benefits from having multiple people looking over it. It’s just too easy for the writer’s brain to fill in the gaps.
” It’s just too easy for the writer’s brain to fill in the gaps.”
Absolutely.
FWIW … Here’s the number of Mike Shenk puzzles in the WSJ per year:
2018: 48
2019: 41
2020: 48
2021: 51
2023: 67
2024 (to date): 39
At this pace he’ll have roughly the same number of puzzles in 2024 as he did in 2023 (maybe a couple more). So yes, the number of puzzles with his name in the byline has increased a good bit the last two years.
It’s more difficult to know how many WSJ puzzles before 2018 were his because he used various aliases instead of his name in the byline. Keep in mind that he typically has 24 or 25 Friday puzzles “baked in” per year because he and Matt Gaffney generally alternate the Friday meta-puzzles (each of them takes one or two Fridays off each year with either Patrick Berry or Peter Gordon usually subbing in for them).
When did the WSJ Friday meta puzzles begin? Perhaps that accounts for the bulk of the increase. Also, I believe the WSJ used to run their 21x on Fridays, with four 15x puzzles a week. They added 52 puzzle-days a year.
I’ve got daily puzzles back to 9/14/2015 in my solving database when they started publishing a daily crossword. Friday metas began on 11/6/2015. Shenk and Gaffney have basically alternated Friday puzzles since September 2015. Before 2018, Shenk usually used Marie Kelly as his alias (“really Mike” anagrammed), but occasionally used one of his others.
Also, I screwed up my first post. The number of puzzles published under Mike’s each year is correct, but 2018 – 2021 should have been identified as 2019 – 2022. The WSJ changed its policy about allowing constructors to used pseudonyms in 2019, not 2018.
I should know better than to post something for public consumption on a message board before I’ve had my full quota of coffee.
No need for apologies from you because I’m impressed by — and truly appreciate — your input to this great website!
Universal: Congratulations to Fiend’s ZDL for his double play!
I didn’t enjoy this quite as much as the LAT puzzle, in part because the fill and clueing seemed a bit more familiar. And as Jim’s review notes, there are probably a lot of ON or OFF phrases that would work. Of the four that ZDL used, I especially enjoyed KNOCK-OFF WOOD and RUN-ON ELECTION.
ZDL – both UNI and LAT: I truly like his crosswords because he injects some badly-needed humor into the “Crossword World”. And his reviews are always full of funny perspective too!
(And I’m bumping up my rating on both of his puzzles today because ZDL pulled off a double-down, and his work always brings a smile to my face.)