Mike Shenk’s Wall Street Journal crossword, “Olympic Games”—Jim’s review
Theme answers are familiar phrases that have a Greek god added somewhere within, causing all kinds of mischief.
Wall St Journal crossword solution · “Olympic Games” · Mike Shenk · Thu., 7.25.24
- 20a. [Headline about a streaking cucumber? (war)] PICKLE BARES ALL. Pickleball + Ares. Not a lot of surface sense in this entry though I can certainly imagine an anthropomorphic pickle.
- 25a. [Concert souvenirs from the early 2000s? (marriage)] BUSH ERA TICKETS. Bus tickets + Hera.
- 42a. [Big cat who’s chaotic and self-destructive? (messages)] HOT PANTHER MESS. Hot pants + Hermes. This one was confusing since it seemed like the base phrase was going to be “hot mess.”
- 47a. [Not following any religion, even on the Sabbath? (wisdom)] HEATHEN ALL WEEK. Hell week + Athena. I like this one quite a bit.
Good wordplay which I appreciated more since it took some time to figure out what was going on. In this case, I liked the challenge provided by the lack of circles. The entries with the longer god names are impressive.
Four fun long Downs anchor the center of the grid: KEN KESEY, SIDEKICK, “SEND HELP!,” and “OPEN WIDE.” I didn’t know or I’ve forgotten the word BUNCO [Con man’s con]. Proper names HERO [Ill-fated priestess of Greek myth] and TOM [Olympic diver Daley] crossing at the O had me finishing with an error. My knee-jerk reaction on seeing “Greek myth” was to go with HERA, and TAM seemed plausible. Only later did I realize HERA was in the second theme entry.
Clues of note:
- 61a. [Focus of a pitching scout?]. TENT. I see what you did there. Good clue.
- 52d. [Polish writing]. EDIT. Can you think of any other words that might change pronunciation when capitalized?
Four stars.
Alan Arbesfeld’s Fireball Crossword, “Wet Compresses” – Jenni’s write-up
The title doesn’t suggest summer as much as the theme does. We have rebi! The revealer tells us what to look for, and I needed it to help me circle back and fill in the theme answers. 62a [Summer resort accessible by ferry from Montauk (and the theme of this puzzle)] is BLOCK ISLAND. We are looking for names of isles. Peter’s grid is easier to read than mine.
Fireball Crossword, July 24, 2024, Alan Arbesfeld, “Wet Compresses,” solution grid
- 17a [Prolific letter writer] is a CRUCIVER{BALI}ST
- 24a [Site of a 1971 uprising] is ATTI{CA PRI}SON
- 37a [Suffer remorse] is FE{EL BA}D.
- 40a [Develop gradually] is IN{CUBA}TE
A chain of islands! Very fun.
What I didn’t know before I did this puzzle: that the ST. CROIX river forms part of the border between Maine and Canada.
Damon Gulczynski’s New York Times crossword — Zachary David Levy’s write-up
Difficulty: Easy (8m28s), particularly given the 16x grid
Damon Gulczynski’s New York Times crossword, 7/25/24, 0725
Today’s theme: GOES OUT WITH A BANG (Finishes in grand style, like the answers to the starred clues?)
- CHIPS AHOY! / SHEBANG
- YAHOO! / SLAM BANG
- O PIONEERS! / BANGLES
- JEB! / HEADBANGS
Today I (re)learned that programmers (and mathematicians?) sometimes refer to exclamation points as bangs. JEB! Bang. Please clap. What’s the opposite of a cult of personality? And how much does it overlap with the types of people also likely to refer to exclamation points as bangs?
Cracking: PETE LORRE, forever Ugarte in my mind.
Slacking: IVOR. Can I interest you in a -y?
Sidetracking: O PIONEERS!
Owen Bergstein’s USA Today Crossword, “Let Me Spell It Out” — Emily’s write-up
Listen up!
USA Today, July 25, 2024, “Let Me Spell It Out” by Owen Bergstein
Theme: each themer contains I—T— (or “it” spelled out)
Themers:
- 17a. [“Building” that represents academia], IVORYTOWER
- 38a. [Sibling like Hallie or Annie in “The Parent Trap”], IDENTICALTWIN
- 62a. [Inflatables on waterslides], INNERTUBES
Creative themer set today with IVORYTOWER, IDENTICALTWIN, and INNERTUBES. The title is a great hint and helped me get the second and third, once I had a few crossings to fill the first themer since it’s not a term I hear a lot anymore so it just didn’t ring a bell initially for me. Nice cluing that wasn’t too tricky for the themers in particular.
Favorite fill: GUISES, IDBET, BASSIST, and CLOSEKNIT
Stumpers: AWCOMEON (needed a few crossings), ANKLET (new to me), and BEATUP (only “worn out” and “run down” came to mind)
A quicker solve today with a lovely grid and great overall fill with some lengthy bonus fill too.
4.0 stars
~Emily
NYT: I think I vaguely recall hearing an exclamation mark referred to as a “bang.” [shrug]
I’m familiar with the term “headbanger” (I knew a few in my youth) but has anyone ever uttered the word “headbang”? [meh]
Would have been more impressive if all the crossing entries intersecting the themers had also “gone out with” a BANG, like 9-D and 14-D.
The term “bang” is quite familiar in the computer industry.
Perhaps interesting: the sometimes-seen typographical glyph with a question mark overlaying an exclamation point (or vice versa) is often called an “interrobang”
https://www.xwordinfo.com/Crossword?date=1/16/2015&g=1&d=A
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exclamation_mark#Slang_and_other_names_for_the_exclamation_mark
NYT: IVOR Novello “slacking”? Not really. He was a big enough deal that a well-respected songwriting award is given in his name.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivor_Novello_Award_for_Best_Song_Musically_and_Lyrically
Two Hitchcock films, like Peter Lorre. But they were silent films (the more well known now is The Lodger).
No need to throw shade at programmers. And what’s duller: referring to an exclamation point as a bang, or as an … exclamation point ?!
(Which reminds me of my favorite programmer punctuation lingo, the Elvis operator “?:” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elvis_operator)
learning this made me smile. thnx! ?:^]
WSJ: Three of the four theme answers (minus the Olympic God name) make sense (sort of) as valid alternate answers to their respective clue. 20A stumps me. How does PICKLEBALL work in this way?
You’re trying too hard to make this work. I don’t think any of the phrases are meant to be valid answers until you add the Olympian. Whether the final answers are sufficiently meaningful and idiomatic I leave to you.
NYT: re 6A. Why the hating on MOIST??
I thought it might be SWELL or LOUSY. Weird!
I wondered about that, too. Overall, the puzzle was harder than some weeks, mostly because I’d forgotten that all these things end in a !. (I wonder if others, too, also started with TONNE for the British unit.) The added difficulty made it more interesting.
https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/64984/science-behind-why-people-hate-word-moist
NYT: Enjoyable, but a bit on the easy side for a Thursday.
It’s hard to comprehend how the editors, if any, could have gotten STONE clued as a unit of mass when it is a unit of weight. (Do they still bother with fact-checking?)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stone_(unit)
Now, now, Dan. As a former physics major, I no doubt should revel in the chance to be hypercorrect, but this is silly. The kilogram is the SI unit of mass, but that doesn’t stop people in a country on the metric system (almost anyone but our own foolish one) for speaking of how much they weigh. It doesn’t get them to answer the question in Newtons, and it doesn’t stop RHUD (but not MW) from calling the kilograph a unit of “mass or weight.” Maybe these things would have more urgency if everyone were obliged to articulate the laws of nature, after of course a weightless day in orbit and a stop on another planet to see how much they weigh there.
Dan isn’t being hypercorrect; he’s got it backwards. A 15-stone astronaut in the weightlessness of space is still a 15-stone astronaut.
I agree that Dan is being too picky about the interchangeability of mass and weight in common usage, but I wouldn’t say he has it backwards. The stone is a traditional unit of weight and has never been adopted into any scientific system of measurement as a unit of mass. So the question of how to refer to a 15-stone astronaut in weightless conditions is one that NASA, to the best of my knowledge, has not weighed* in on.
*har har
https://www.efunda.com/units/show_units.cfm?search_string=stone
Stone is not an SI unit, but fastidious authorities agree it’s a unit of mass.
eh, I don’t think that website settles the matter. In any case, it’s basically a silly question :)
Don’t forget the Wikipedia article I posted first. We live for silly questions.
Is it a silly question? Maybe, but it’s kinda interesting, anyway…
Seems like it should be one or the other, mass or weight, and those are different things. It’s frustrating that different “references” say different things, e.g.,
https://www.britannica.com/science/stone-unit-of-weight
btw, KILO has never had an nyt clue referring to “mass”, but 15 of 108 clues use the word “weight”. That’s just the way it goes, I suppose…
Found the NYT lacking. I don’t think an exclamation point meaning ‘bang’ is common knowledge, and I never really got why the acrosses weren’t getting anything from the rebus.
Also, O PIONEERS crossing OTIS Day, PETERLORRE, ALOUETTE, and SASE was tough. Hard for us 90’s babies.
I’d say: hard for anyone who didn’t know a bunch of proper nouns, stylized product names, and one particular bit of coding lingo (raises hand); and really easy, apparently, for those who did.
JEB!, by the way, was a campaign logo, not a “slogan”. “Yes We Can” was a slogan. A candidate’s name, with or without punctuation, is still a name, not a slogan. And certainly nobody ever said “Jeb-Bang” (although that would’ve been pretty funny).
This gimmick would’ve been cute in a Tuesday puzzle. “We don’t normally use punctuation in crossword puzzles, but Surprise! today we did!”
But it was thin gruel for a Thursday.
“…I never really got why the acrosses weren’t getting anything from the rebus.”
This has bothered me since the get-to. I just accept it as the norm, now.
I’ll give you ‘90s babies OTIS Day, but PETER LORRE (a wonderful actor in the right role), ALOUETTE and O PIONEERS! are just as old-timey to this Generation Jones solver as they are to you.
What you know isn’t necessarily determined by when you were born.
Plenty of people saying it was easy, so I just assumed that was scaling with age a bit…I’d still posit it does, but welcome, fellow-person-who-found-it-difficult-but-is-older-than-me!
BTW, “bang” for ! has a very practical origin. When reading code out loud, as in a code review or just assisted desk-checking, the common operator “!” would take a lot of tongue tripping if we didn’t have a punchy name for it. When we moved from a Fortran and COBOL world, where the character wasn’t used, to a Unix and C world, where it was, it became apparent very quickly.
NYT: Fun puzzle, the clue about Jeb was the one that tipped me off to it and things fell neatly from there. Had the hardest time figuring out what SASE was for RSVP convenience – that one took me out of it a bit
I’m not having a good morning, made worse by the BEQ puzzle. I can’t remember the last time I had so much frustration and headshaking while doing a puzzle. (Since the puzzle has yet to be reviewed, I’ll not spoil it with answers.) The theme is nonsense. The letter O is not a ball, no matter how you look at it. At best it can be a circle.
I hope your day has gotten better.
The BEQ theme didn’t annoy me, though I agree that a ball is a sphere or spheroid and an O could be a circle. My time was not impressive, but I never got too stuck anywhere.
One of these days, I’m going to remember that it’s SIMU Liu. I used to think it was SIMa (the name of my sister-in-law’s niece). Today, I knew the last letter was either A or U and left it blank. A small step forward.
I thought it was classic BEQ — which is a very good thing. The surface meanings were silly enough to elicit chuckles, and they were based on solid phrases. As with Edward Lear, nonsense can be art.
No, O is not a ball — except when it’s the ball for MINIGOLF:
https://www.xwordinfo.com/Crossword?date=5/13/2024&g=18&d=A
Point taken, but I liked the puzzle (and can’t think of a better title for it). Just the right sort of silly for me, I guess…
(Hope your day got better, too!)
Thanks to all who commiserated with my lousy morning. The sun is now breaking through the grey clouds and has brightened the day and my disposition.
Kudos to Stella Zawistowki for the clue in Tough As Nails #118, 10D [Neither here nor there?) Very amusing once I finally got it.
Fun puzzle overall. I zipped through the NW, slowed a bit in the rest of the grid, and ran into serious trouble in the NE, not knowing Beeple, Shape Tape, “A Worn Path” or the Björk song.
WSJ–Anyone else annoyed at references to Greek gods? Does anyone care anymore? And while I am at it, I feel the same way about the Greek alphabet.