Katie Hoody’s New York Times crossword—Amy’s recap
NY Times crossword solution, 10/12/24 – no. 1012
It’s been a helluva week and I’m tired out. In brief—
Fave fill: “THAT’S IMPOSSIBLE,” HONEYMOON PERIOD, IT TAKES A VILLAGE, “GEE WHIZ,” HITTING A DEAD END, “WHAT DID I TELL YOU?”, ANTARCTIC, SUCKS WIND.
Mysteries: That ENDO is a mountain biking move, that [Insectoid moon dwellers in H.G. Wells’s “The First Men in the Moon”] are SELENITES (sorry, don’t recognize the book title), that there us a David and Bathsheba and it has a URIAH in it.
Bettina Elias Siegel & Dan Elias’s Los Angeles Times crossword — Stella’s write-up
Los Angeles Times 10/12/24 by Bettina Elias Siegel & Dan Elias
This puzzle was a smidge easier than I like on Saturday, but had some goodies nonetheless. Notables:
- 15A [Path finder] is a clever clue for CAREER COACH.
- 19A [Enhancer of soups or venue for hoops] is MSG. Not a hard clue, but the rhyme makes it fun.
- 25A [Much-feared natural disaster] is BIG ONE, an entry that felt GREEN PAINT-y to me, at least without adding THE in front.
- 42A [Old book collection?] is DUST — the last entry I filled in, and a nice clue.
- 53A [Pay-to-play need] is ARCADE TOKEN. Which is fine, but I wish the clue had included some reference to the past, because I can’t remember the last time I used a TOKEN to play at an ARCADE. (Much like subway tokens, I think they’ve largely been replaced by card swipes.)
- 3D [Pharmacopeia entry] is DRUG. I wish the standard spelling of “pharmacopoeia” had been used in the clue.
- 7D [Williams work] isn’t much to go on (in a good way) for SCORE; presumably the clue refers to John Williams, but don’t let that stop you from giving Ralph Vaughan Williams a listen!
- 10D, 11D I was not wild about the entries ECHOLESS and SHE-GOAT, which to me lacked the elusive “sparkle.”
- 26D I liked the clue [South American domain name] for INCA EMPIRE. Cute!
- 37D I also liked learning that Mary CASSATT was born in PA.
Stan Newman’s Newsday crossword, “Saturday Stumper” (bylined “Anna Stiga”)—Amy’s grid
Newsday crossword solution, “Saturday Stumper” – 10/12/24
Just popping up a solution grid for the Stumper, with one remark: I don’t think the GOLF CLAP is sarcastic, just muted. The slow clap, that’s the one that mocks.
The NYT was, in my view, the best kind of Saturday puzzle. At first glance, it looked hopeless, with vast expenses of white and only a few tentative stabs for my answers.
But there was tons of cross-talk between the four quadrants, and each of the six long answers was a very common phrase. So the puzzle ultimately fell, and in slightly less than my average Saturday time! Brava, Ms. Hoody!
Earlier this evening, I had struggled with the most recent Tim Croce puzzle and a 2007 Rich Norris Saturday in the NYT archives. My first thought on starting today’s NYT was that it was going to be a beast like those others. Instead, I got through without getting seriously stuck anywhere.
Amy, Wikipedia says an ENDO is “a cycling trick also known as a ‘stoppie,’ after the possible outcome of flipping ‘end-over-end’ if performed incorrectly.” It’s not something I plan on trying.
I liked it a lot, too, and thought the long ones ingenious and ultimately familiar. Really nice Saturday, for me maybe a wee bit easier than some.
I could have lived without the names clustered at top: Star Wars, H. G. Wells, Rus, and The Upshaws. But solvable. I still don’t understand lead /DET.
DETectives follow leads.
At least, that’s how Wordplay explains it. That one eluded me, too.
I liked the long answers quite a bit, although some of the fill in this puzzle (AGS, BYO, RUS, SYN, etc.) was very iffy. Overall, 4 out of 5 stars for me.
Jim Horne at xwordinfo..con had this to say about the effect of those long answers:
“This grid has eleven words Jeff Chen has scored at 25, a rating he calls ‘hard to defend as fine’: AGS, BYO, CEES, DESE, DET, ENDO, IMED, IRL, RUS, SYN, and UGHS. Most puzzles have one or two. Whether a high number of iffy words balances out the fun of the stacks is a matter of considerable debate amongst the crossword cognoscenti.”
They mostly didn’t bother me, though BYO looks weird without a final B; I didn’t understand DET until reading Wordplay; and whether it’s DMS or IMS in any particular instance is always up in the air and of no real interest to me
That’s good stuff – thanks.
NYT: MAGNANI was a natick for me. The clue about drilling lubricants could have started with any number of consonants, as could the actor’s name. Also, is MY IDOL idiomatic? I’ve heard MY HERO, but not MY IDOL.
MY IDOL feels off to me, too. I wanted HERO there, but by the time I reached that spot, HERO wasn’t going to work.
Yeah, “idol” is definitely not a word people tend to use in direct address.
Instead, it occurs more in discussions *about* that kind of situation.
I did the downs first today, and “my hero” went in with no hesitation. That is THE stereotypical melodramatic phrase. I really, really could not believe it when that turned out to be wrong. MY IDOL just soooo doesn’t fit that clue nearly as well IMO.
I am really ambivalent about this puzzle. I loved the long stacks! All in-the-language, all fairly clued.
But hoo boy there was a steep price to pay for those stacks today. So much deep trivia, so much crosswordese, and a few really “iffy” clues on the short fill as garnish. In the end, not really a fan of this one.
I’m with you; one of my longest Saturday times in a while. Love the stacks. But such a steep price to pay in the rest of the puzzle…
Well put, all.
I think of MY IDOL as more jokey than effusive, but still in my vocabulary.
I agree that that was an avoidable Natick.
Universal: I do this puzzle waiting for my wife to wake up so we can tackle the NYT as a team. They’re usually kind of blah, but today I was really impressed with all of the long fill, full of phrases I hear in real life and haven’t seen in puzzles before (I’m so there, I’m on a roll, face facts), and even the more obscure but real idioms (desire paths and mean mug). And equally important, not too much crosswordese at all. The cluing isn’t inspired, but respect to the constructor for getting so much sparkle and so little dross.
Universal: Yes, a very nice (smooth) themeless.
Somehow not in love with (say) [Had a seat] clueing for SAT, e.g., but overall? Very fun! (btw – I too had to look up “DESIRE PATH” and “MEAN MUG”, but I agree they are totally legit – and it was fun to learn.)
Seat/SAT bugged me, too, and I rarely even notice that kind of stuff. Perhaps this was different because I hesitated to put SAT until it was obvious that was what it had to be.
I came across DESIRE PATH recently — maybe a BEQ puzzle? I hadn’t heard it before; I’ve always heard such unofficial paths referred to as “social trails.”
I’d never heard of MEAN MUG before, either.
It was a nice puzzle, if a bit on the easy side.
I came here to see if there had been any comment on “mean mug” – it’s new to me. Thanks, y’all!
Hardest NYT for me in a long time, and a DNF in the end. It took me forever to find a few footholds, but then I worked my way through it, only to finish with an error that I couldn’t track down. I had TEAMER (a noun rather than a verb) at 4D, which I didn’t like but which seemed plausible given some of the other stuff in the grid. That gave me RES instead of RUS, but that was a totally uninformative clue, and CCCR at 25A. I should have known that was wrong, but after hunting around the grid fruitlessly for a while I gave up and hit ‘reveal.’
Still, a pretty good puzzle, but leaning toward Stumper territory in some of the fill and cluing, I thought.
What does the abbreviation syn stand for in zest for life clue?
Synonym.
Thanks to Alison L. for asking and to MattF for answering that question, since I didn’t understand that clue/answer combo at all.
Even after reading “synonym” I had to think of how that could be. I guess one could say “That group shows a lot of zest” or “That group shows a lot of life” and mean pretty much the same thing.
Still, I find that calling these words synonyms is rather a stretch.
Did NYT in average time. Started with footholds in the south, got the long bottom entries, then pushed up northwards. Pretty good puzzle overall, in spite of some UGH fill.
I often think that it’s a shame the NYT not only dropped online access to second Sunday puzzles, but later also dropped it from Wordplay, so there’s no discussion, commentary, or other room for hints. For tomorrow, I’m definitely missing that, as it’s a curious theme puzzle in which stretches of five or six letters go unchecked, including the entirety of the first answer (More than enough (5), with many possible answers). (Other words have partial checks, in stretches of shared, but jumbled letters, which does help, although I also don’t have Owl’s prey (6), although I have the first four letters, scrambled.) Whether that’s fair enough I leave to others.
Sorry, I’m not understanding which puzzle is the “curious theme puzzle …” that you are talking about here.
Judging from the clue “More than enough,” I’d guess JohnH is referring to Eric Berlin’s puzzle:
https://www.xwordinfo.com/data/NytVarPDFs/2024/Oct1324.2.pdf
That’s right. I tried to identify it as the second Sunday NYT puzzle, or maybe I should just have said variety puzzle. I’ve solved it, but a comments/review board at NYT would still be nice. I do many of the puzzles that aren’t acrostics or diagramless.
Was there an answer you couldn’t get?
It took me a bit, but I think I solved it correctly.
As Katie said, all of the answers are checked, though in an unusual way.
I agree (i.e., on having an NYT comments option, for the Variety puzzles.
I think Jim Horne has attempted to start up EXACTLY the type of blog you crave here?
https://xwordblog.com/2024/05/25/jim-saves-variety-puzzles/
Maybe if interest perks up there, NYT would take note?
Thanks. Acrostic fans in the past seemed especially fond of sharing their reaction.
As I said, I did finish. My, never occurred to me to look at the white blocks that way. How neat.
Oct 13 variety puzzle: They ARE NOT UNCHECKED! :-D
I made the same assumption initially — that only “shaded” squares were “checked” — but nope! It is EVERY groupette of 6 (white or shaded). So, every square is indeed checked.
i.e., BOTH the “white” and “shaded” squares count as “corresponding regions”. (Thus, Left Twin 1 [More than enough] cannot be, say EXTRA. It needs to match the first 6 squares in Right Twin 1 [College student’s need in order to eat on campus (2 wds)]…)
Also, thanks for bringing this up (JohnH) and sending the link (Eric H), as I would not otherwise have found-nor-done the puzzle!! It was pretty fun, fwiw. (4.5/5, for me)
If JohnH hadn’t mentioned it, I probably wouldn’t have done it.
It’s definitely a different sort of puzzle. I think it’s a good mental exercise to do something that’s not the same as a typical crossword.
Well put. Maybe I’ll go check out some past “Variety” puzzles now (on xwordinfo)…
Last, perhaps this is obvious (and perhaps it’s wrong) – but I’m pretty sure sure the Left Twin and Right Twin are supposed to represent DNA, graphically — with the same basic parts, just “scrambled a bit”. (Sorry for so many comments today, everyone…)
I missed the DNA strands, but that idea fits with the “Fraternal Twins” title.
No apology needed, as far as I’m concerned. It’s nice to feel like I’m actually having a conversation with someone.
Stumper: Bottom left felt much harder than the rest for me, because of all the proper nouns/trivia: PREACHER, CHOPRA, KENTON, PTA, TROD, TOREROS. Plus, the ends of SLUG/SISAL weren’t coming, so I had a hard time getting into the bottom left. But I kind of guessed SLUG, then some tiny recess of my mind though SISAL sounded the tiniest bit familiar, and then finally I saw LUTES (I was thinking the “them” in that clue was a group of people), then everything started to fall.
But CHOPRA/KENTON/PTA/TROD was basically a total guess. Guessed the T for TOREROS, which helped me guess TROD, which helped me see CHOPRA. Glad to get it done clean!
Yes, I would agree that the lower left was the hardest. The second hardest was the upper right because I couldn’t think of Bonzo, never heard of L.A. Story, etc.
More work than fun for me today.
It’s helpful to the rest of us if you identify which puzzle you’re commenting on.
Thanks!
NYT: A very enjoyable challenge, not as hard as it seemed at first because the two remarkable stacks of common phrases provided many letters all at once.
On the other hand, I’ve never run into the phrase SUCKS WIND before.
(I wonder if it is related pejoratively to the noun “mouth breather”.)
One of my skiing friends says she is “SUCKing WIND” when the exercise and altitude have left her slightly out of breath.
NYT: So happy to see the stack is back! I thought crossword bloggers bullied those out of existence (not pointing the finger here, of course).
I’m only seeing the NY Times review — I’m assuming a technical issue of some kind. I’ll have to return later to see what pannonica thought of the Stumper.
I don’t see ir either, disappointed.
Gotta figure life intervened. It happens
I can’t see the WSJ solution. Is it just me? Thanks
No it’s Mon. afternoon and there’s still no write-up.
Pannonica says in her review of today’s (10/14) Universal puzzle that she has been pretty ill the last few days
John H and Eric H (no relation?) have a couple of comments about it below
NYT: Much closer to loving it than being mad at it. The obscure and odd short answers were resolved fairly quickly (by my standards) by the gettable long answers. I’m not a Saturday solver, but it was easy-ish to do a perfect job with all the tricks and puns by having those long phrases. I agree that it was a fun change to have the blocks of long answers, with the obvious tradeoff being the difficulty of the short answers. While a certain degree of trickery was a pleasure, the quantity of three-letter answers that were a struggle to figure out marred the experience slightly. Therefore, four stars for this underrated puzzle.
I don’t know what others think of the WSJ, but it was a let-down to me. It boils down to two distinct themes, songs clued by the singer (which I mostly didn’t know even when I recognized the song) and countries, circled letters within the themers, clued by their capital cities, which were hardly always common knowledge.
I could live with that and with my usual struggle with circled-letter puzzles, since my ink often obscures the circles. It wasn’t a hard puzzle. But if only there were something else linking the two themes. I just had trouble motivating this one. It felt so forced and arbitrary.
You’re right about the arbitrary nature of the theme answers. It seems like one could find an infinite number of song titles that have country names embedded in them, especially since the letters making up those names are not all contiguous.