Kate Chin Park’s New York Times crossword—Amy’s recap
NY Times crossword solution, 8/2/24 – no. 0802
Fun and fresh puzzle, felt rather challenging for a Friday.
Fave fill: NOT ONE BIT, STORY LINE, WENT ROGUE, “IS PEPSI OK?” (if you’ve ever ordered Coke or Diet Coke in a Pepsi restaurant, you’ve heard this question and probably changed your order to iced tea or just water), football FIRST AND TEN, “I’M NOT A ROBOT” because I checked a box to affirm that, “POINT TAKEN,” “STILL I RISE,” GAP YEAR.
I slowed myself down by getting stuck at 1a and 1d. The “carrier” in the 1a clue is an aircraft carrier, U.S.S., and not a mail or parcels carrier. And the cap being removed in 1d isn’t a hat, it’s a lid you UNSCREW. D’oh!
A few things:
- New to me: 61a. [Nathan ___, physicist who collaborated with Einstein on a theory of wormholes], ROSEN. Not sure I can think of other famous ROSENs. Chicago has an S. Rosen’s bread purveyor since way back when.
- 7d. [Like some fridges and doughnuts], MINI. I was thinking ICED.
- 8d. [Decides to leave], STETS. This one’s editorial, decides to leave as is after all.
- 15d. [Color for un campeón], ORO. Didn’t know that Spanish word, for “champion.” Is the gold medal just the color gold? Seems more like a metal for a champion. My husband disagrees with me and says it’s both.
Four stars from me.
Josh M Kaufmann’s Los Angeles Times crossword — pannonica’s write-up
LAT • 8/2/24 • Fri • Kaufmann • solution • 20240802
Location, location, location!
- 17a. [LI?] LINE LEADERS. The first two letters of line.
- 24a. [TE?] MID-SENTENCE. The middle letters of sentence. You get the idea.
- 38a. [R?] EARTH’S INNER CORE.
- 50a. [AL?] HEART OF PALM.
- 61a. [LY?] EARLY FINISH.
And we shall all note that the clue letters spell LITERALLY, which describes things quite aptly.
So it’s a dual-layer theme and the entry phrases come across as natural, although I’m not sure what line leaders are, it sounds plausible. Middle managers on assembly lines? Kids in school?
- 1d [Brand of mandarin oranges owned by The Wonderful Company] HALOS. The company—or at least its owners—are not so wonderful.
- 2d [Cut from the same cloth] ALIKE.
- 7d [King with a touching story?] MIDAS. A little silly, but nice all the same.
- 9d [Classic Ford named for an Italian city] TORINO. Anglicized as Turin, of course.
- 11d [Triple sec and vodka cocktail] LEMON DROP.
- 22d [Song that’s only familiar to superfans] DEEP CUT. I wonder if the term itself is esoteric?
- 26d [ __ bra: narrow-cupped garment] DEMI. I would say shallow rather than narrow?
- 28d [Mail] LETTERS. Taken another way, the key component of the theme.
- 32d [“Odyssey” prelude] TROJAN WAR. 53d [“Odyssey” prelude] ILIAD. That’s spiffy.
- 49d [Brain scan, for short] FMRI. From memory, I’m saying functional magnetic resonance imaging.
- 50d [Disgruntled grunt] HUMPH.
- 1a [Cybersecurity event] HACK, not LEAK.
- 20a [African animal with features similar to zebras and giraffes] OKAPI. Their morphology is much more similar to giraffes (they’re in the same family), while the striping on their legs is a rather superficial characteristic.
- 22a [Verbal nudge] DO IT, not PSST.
- 43a [Tabby] CAT. Etymology (from m-w.com): French tabis, from Middle French atabis, from Medieval Latin attabi, from Arabic ʽattābī, from Al-ʽAttābīya, quarter in Baghdad.
- 60a [Level the playing field?] MOW. In a way, sure.
- 65a [Coin that fittingly weighs five grams] NICKEL. Because it’s worth five cents. I wonder if that’s intentional or just an amazing coincidence.
- 69a [Smell] ODOR. Obligatory mention of a (relatively) neutral clue for ODOR.
Enjoyable crossword.
Hanh Huynh’s Universal crossword, “Parting Word”—Jim’s review
Theme answers are familiar phrases that hide synonyms of “hair” separated by a letter. The revealer is SPLIT HAIRS (57a, [Quibble, or a hint to what the four skipped letters spell]).
Universal crossword solution · “Parting Word” · Hanh Huynh · Fri., 8.2.24
- 17a. [Iced tea garnishes (In this answer, note letters 3-6, minus letter 5)] LEMON PEELS.
- 25a. [Fight card highlight (… letters 1-5, minus letter 3)] MAIN EVENT.
- 35a. [Exams taken on a treadmill (… letters 2-9, minus letter 7)] STRESS TESTS.
- 47a. [Winter footwear (… letters 4-9, minus letter 5)] WOOL SOCKS.
Nice theme that gets the job done, but man oh man, I didn’t think counting squares could be more annoying. Here I’m proven wrong by the fact that the circle-less solvers must then subtract a square from their count. Do people actually bother to solve a puzzle that way? I know this has nothing to do with the theme, and I don’t count it against the puzzle especially since the parenthetical hints are easily ignored, but I feel I have to mention it.
Oh yeah, the skipped letters spell something, don’t they? Yup, they spell NITS which is a fantastic addition to the theme! Not only are figurative NITS what someone is “picking” when they’re splitting hairs, but literal NITS are what someone is looking for when combing through their kid’s lice-infested head (been there, done that). An elegant touch and a lovely aha moment!
Fill highlights: SONOGRAM, GROUCHO, SAMBAS, and LANTERNS. Not so keen on AS AM I and IT’S A NO both of which sound very awkward, but everything else is quite smooth.
Clues of note:
- 54a. [Adidas shoes named for Brazilian dances]. SAMBAS. No idea on this one. But apparently the recent uptick in sales for the shoe is drawing to a close ever since former British PM Rishi Sunak revealed he’s a wearer of the shoe.
- 12d. [Cardinal’s counterpart]. ORDINAL. Not religion or baseball or birds or colors, but math. A lot of possibilities here!
- 29d. [Former Vietnamese capital, or a tint]. HUÉ or HUE. HUÉ in central Vietnam served as the capital from 1802 to 1945 at which point the capital was moved back to the northern city of Hanoi.
- 51d. [It might bounce back from a server]. EMAIL. I really thought this was about tennis, and that was probably the intent of the misdirection.
Good puzzle (assuming you ignore the square-counting). Four stars.
NYT: It’s a dated reference (definitely seen in older crosswords), but Al ROSEN was a great third baseman for Cleveland back in the 40’s, well before my time.
Jacky Rosen is Nevada’s junior senator
Al Rosen rented the house next to our home in a Cleveland suburb, Lyndhurst. He gave my older brother a baseball cap. I got squat. Bob Feller also rented it one summer.
For the record (and somewhat OT, but I can’t help myself) … Al didn’t play in the big leagues much at all before 1950. He was a late-bloomer and had a relatively short but brilliant career. His path to the Majors was blocked by another Cleveland legend, Ken Keltner.
To mix a metaphor: Koufax, Greenberg and Rosen — the Trinity of Great Jewish Ballplayers.
Nice.
NYT: Maybe I was just tired last night, but I got between a third and a half of the grid filled, mostly on the bottom, before I had to go to sleep. (I can usually finish the puzzle before that happens.)
This morning, I did much better. Ditched SeedY and tried RATTY. Realized the “cap” in 1D was not a hat. Decided that [Half a train] was indeed CHOO. Mostly finished in a few minutes.
But even then, I had trouble with the NW. [Carrier letters] had to be UPS, right? But what the heck does POT HERE mean? I haven’t dooked an answer that badly in months.
I wish I could remember where I recently saw IS PEPSI OK as a crossword answer. I think the phrase is pretty solidly in the language, though I don’t drink soda often. (If anyone remembers that, I would be grateful to know where it was. I’m interested in comparing the clues.)
Sorry I can’t help as to when that phrase might have been in an xword, but in the “how soon we forget” column, seeing constructors remarks on rejections of it at Wordplay and at also remarks about it at RexParker, like nobody’s ever heard of it…, according to google AI, “Is Pepsi OK?” was a campaign Pepsi ran during Super Bowl LIII in 2019 to show that their soft drink is “more than OK” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xF366MYHT1I Is that ad when everybody in the crossworld took a potty break? :D :D
Thanks.
I’ve watched the Super Bowl once in the last 40 years. But I knew the phrase not only from its recent appearance in that now-otherwise -forgotten puzzle, but because my husband’s drink of choice is a Myers’s rum and Coke. It’s always a crapshoot as to whether a restaurant doesn’t serve Myers’s or doesn’t serve Coke.
DNF for me, because I had UPS at 1A and couldn’t figure out the right letter, even after running the alphabet. Duh.
I found it pretty hard for a Friday. ROSEN is a deep cut, even among physicists. No idea about 15D so I just waited until a color I knew appeared. I don’t understand how “really” means SUPER. I had LAO before TAI (unfamiliar to me). The clue for ITERATE is a stretch (I know the idea in math of solving a problem by iteration, but that doesn’t really count as experimentation). And since I don’t drink sodas at all it took me a long time to get ISPEPSIOK (cute answer, though).
“The puzzle was super hard.” “The puzzle was really hard.” That works for me.
My limited Spanish vocabulary does not include “campeón.” In hindsight, the relationship to “champion” is obvious, but last night it wasn’t.
TAI is new to me, too.
We seem to be on the same wavelength today. Same experience with UpS/USS. ROSEN required nearly all the crosses and an educated guess. Lao before the unfamiliar TAI. Also thought ITERATE was a stretch.
I was okay with SUPER for “really,” per Eric’s explanation.
I’m not a soda drinker either, but a restaurant my wife and I frequent serves Pepsi products, so I’ve overheard the question often.
Like everyone else, it seems, I had UPS at 1A until the very end. I am aware of TAI (languages and ethnicities) but didn’t put it in until I saw that Lao had to be wrong, because 3-letter SE Asian languages in crosswords are always Lao, amirite?
I knew none of the names today: not ROSEN, not NIGEL, not the ANGEL Jibril of Islamic tradition. Fortunately, there were very few of these, and they were all short.
IS PEPSI OK, however, was brilliant! It was a real Aha! moment when that dawned on me. WENT ROGUE was pretty good, too. Those two were worth the price of admission right there.
I didn’t know Jibril, either, but it’s another one that I should have been able to figure out. Apparently, that’s just the Arabic name for Gabriel.
As noted, a tough NYT. Made the same errors as everyone else, also noted repeatedly that SSNs and ZIP codes are both nine digits.
Agreed with everyone that it’s a splendid NYT with lots of lively fill that’s interesting to figure out. And yes hard for a Friday,
but then the concensus here has been saying that about a lot of Fridays under the new editor.
Hard in a good way. I don’t think we’re supposed to know, say, ROSEN, and agreed that a physics background isn’t much help. And with due respect for suggested alternatives, I wouldn’t know them either, and I’d much rather be asked to remember a forgotten physicist than a forgotten ball player. (Wormholes are catchy anyway.)
I held off on UPS but did get snagged by Lao and asserts for ALLEGES.
LAT: Thanks, pannonica, for calling attention to the LITERALLY in the theme clues. I missed that. It’s a nice touch.
LINE LEADERS and EARLY FINISH seemed a bit green painty to me, but it looks like the first is a job on an assembly line. I don’t remember ever hearing it before. And my 30 seconds of googling suggests EARLY FINISH is another workplace term, for letting employees go home early on Friday (when their productivity is at its lowest). I’m glad I’m retired.
if you’ve seen Contact, Donnie Darko, Deja Vu, any of the Thor movies, or probably a bunch of other sci-fi movies i’m missing, you’ve heard of Rosen and his collaboration with Einstein
LAT: Regarding 33A, and for the edification of the editor, an AMP is not a SPEAKER. Amplifiers can connect to all sorts of other devices besides speakers. Half-point deduction from an otherwise nicely created puzzle.