Daniel Bodily’s Wall Street Journal crossword, “A Matter of Record”—Jim’s review
Answers to the theme clues are common words and phrases but with an added letter making them… other common words and phrases. The revealer is TAKE A LETTER (62a, [Dictator’s order, and how to make sense of the answers to the starred clues, in two ways]). In other words, TAKE A LETTER from the answer in the grid to form the answer to the clue.
Wall St Journal crossword solution · “A Matter of Record” · Daniel Bodily · Thu., 10.24.24
- 17a. [*Coin-operated phone, datedly] P(L)AY STATION.
- 25a. [*Risk everything] GO ALL IN(E).
- 27a. [*Military ruler in old Japan] SHO(T)GUN.
- 39a. [*Warhol genre] POP (T)ART.
- 48a. [*When Hamlet sees his father’s ghost] AC(E)T ONE.
- 51a. [*Warhead measure] MEGAT(R)ON.
As I hoped, the extraneous letters spell something, in this case LETTER.
Now this is more like it. It’s been somewhat of a rough week in WSJ Puzzle Land, but this one scratches the itch. We’ve got a tricky but gettable theme, some good wordplay, an aha moment, and a meta-esque payoff at the end. Two thumbs up from this guy.
POLO SHIRT, INCOME TAX, and PHENOMENA are grid standouts. ELASTOMER is today’s TRUMEAU, but it was far easier to suss out via the crossings. Other than that, smooth fill all around.
Clues of note:
- 19a. [Parking order?]. “SIT.” As in, “Park your rear end.”
- 30a. [Sight read?]. AIM. This was pretty much impossible to uncover without the crossings, but it made sense in the end.
- 45a. [Sheet from a drawer?]. CEL. “Drawer” as in “one who draws.”
- 6d. [City south of Arches National Park]. MOAB. In my defense MESA is in fact south(ish) of Arches…just much farther south.
A fun theme, strong fill, and some fresh cluing make this the best WSJ puzzle of the week. Four stars.
Ella Dershowitz’s New York Times crossword — Zachary David Levy’s write-up
Difficulty: Challenging (18m06s)
Ella Dershowitz’s New York Times crossword, 10/24/24, 1024
Today’s theme: ANY TAKERS (“Who’s interested?” … or, phonetically, what four answers in this puzzle are vis-à-vis the answers next to them)
- IMPA(
NE)LING -> THEO(NE) - SEA (
NE)TTLE -> FAR GO(NE) - HEADSTO(
NE) -> COCK(NE)Y - (
NE)W AGERS -> ALL I (NE)ED
Classic Thursday shenanigans.. was hung up quite a while on WAGERS and IMPALING, but the hallmark of a good puzzle ends with a concession once I wrap things up, and not incredulity. This puzzle ended with the former, and not a Bobby Knight-style chair toss.
Cracking: CAN WE NOT, incidentally also something I might say in a state of dubiety
Slacking: PPS, also known as the first step in potty training
Sidetracking: Mike Myers’s original Scottish accent
Howard Neuthaler’s Fireball Crossword, “Job Hopping” – Jenni’s write-up
Fireball, October 23, 2024, “Job Hopping,” Howard Neuthaler, solution grid
I solved this yesterday and could not figure out the theme so I kept staring at it. It is totally brilliant and I don’t have time to explain the whole thing because I have to get to physical therapy….here’s Peter’s grid.
Each pair of theme answers has a job title removed from one and placed in another. So when you move RABBI from 17a and insert it in 38d, suddenly the answers make sense.
Talk among yourselves while I go try not to scream at the physical therapist who is bending my left knee.
Brendan Emmett Quigley’s Crossword #1725: “Finding God” — Eric’s Review
Brendan Emmett Quigley’s Crossword #1725, “Finding God”
We get a trio of Olympians (the classical kind) and a lesser Greek god hiding in plain sight:
- 19A [Salt of the earth types] SQUARE SHOOTER
- 26A [“What’s going to happen then?”] SUPPOSE I DON’T
- 41A [“Everybody come closer”] GATHER AROUND
- 48A [What you might stop to do] SMELL THE ROSES
This was an easy, zippy puzzle. The circles in the theme answers helped in several places. I wasn’t sure where SUPPOSE I DON’T was going, but a few letters and the number of circles made it obvious that the god to be found was POSEIDON. Similarly, I filled in EROS just from the E.
SUPPOSE I DON’T is my favorite answer. It’s a fun phrase to see in a grid and it’s just impressive that BEQ could find a common phrase incorporating POSEIDON.
New to me were the Gil Scott-Heron title and the Allan H. SELIG award. I missed the MLB reference in the clue for SELIG and just now connected Allan to Bud.
Noelle Griskey’s USA Today Crossword, “Tracks Down” — Emily’s write-up
Keep an eye out.
USA Today, October 24, 2024, “Tracks Down” by Noelle Griskey
Theme: the last part of each down themer (bottom portion) can be prepended to “track” to form a new word
Themers:
- 3d. [Inlet that Seattle and Olympia are on], PUGETSOUND
- 17d. [Offensive football position], RUNNINGBACK
- 31d. [Gary Larson comic strip], THEFARSIDE
Today’s themer set includes PUGETSOUND, RUNNINGBACK, and THEFARSIDE. With the theme, we get SOUND TRACK, BACK TRACK, and SIDE TRACK. Fun!
Favorite fill: UNPAIR, SPOTME, PROPS, and WEDGE
Stumpers: MIATA (needed crossings), UGH (also needed crossings), and HAH (also needed crossings)
Overall a fun puzzle with great fill. Enjoyed the theme and the themer set. Some cluing was trickier but still a very fast and smooth solve all in all.
4.0 stars
~Emily
Renee Thomason’s LA Times crossword – Gareth’s summary
Renee Thomason’s puzzle today features a fairly standard LA Times midweek theme type. When I got to DANCEMOVES, I hadn’t gotten much of a bead on what was happening, and the answer itself sounded like it could go a number of interesting ways. However, it is simply the letters of DANCE that are scrambled and spanned across the central part of four phrases:
- [*Smack-dab in the middle], DE[ADCEN]TER
- [*Appetizer with lots of toppings], LOAD[EDNAC]HOS
- [*Solving the Sunday crossword, for one], WEEK[ENDAC]TIVITY
- [*Some design transfers], IRONO[NDECA]L
Not too much more to add, I guess with a five entry theme and a fairly closed grid design everything was a skosh conservative, but with less unreasonable answers than yesterday.
Gareth
NYT: Cute theme that was very easy to suss out from a few theme answers. Overall an enjoyable solve.
But I had a heckuva time getting every last letter right! Never heard of SZA, and did not know which vowel made _SS into an intensifying suffix. And never heard of the BAI oxidizer-infused water (and would VASTLY prefer clues that don’t make me wonder “How much did that free ad cost?”).
To make matters worse, I have usually seen the word spelled EMPAneLING rather than the IMPAneLING (that dictionaries apparently prefer). Oh, well.
I only know SZA because I have a teenager at home.
SZA’s song “Kill Bill” is something I know of only from crossword puzzles. (To me, “Kill Bill” = Tarantino.) I was proud of myself for typing that it without any crosses. It’s the little things, right?
The IMPAneLING thing gets better and better. According to the American Heritage Dictionary, not only can you spell it with an E or an I, you have your choice of one or two L’s.
…and, of course, Tarantino’s KILL BILL was scored by an artist from the Wu-Tang Clan named Rza. So at least I walked into the lower NW corner knowing “Man-o-war” wasn’t right, but missing the most important important key to “Sea(NE)ttle.” Sigh.
I also had EMPANELING/BAE until the very end.
I liked the puzzle but found it very hard to suss everything out, especially in my head. I had never heard of SEA NETTLE or IMPANELING with an I before, which didn’t help. It was also tricky for me because the -NE could be plopped anywhere in the right-hand answer.
I really liked how adding the -NE changed the pronunciation significantly for THEO/THEONE and ALLIED/ALLINEED.
SZA was in some other puzzle I did in the past week or so (maybe at slate.com?), or I’m not sure I would have gotten that answer.
That also threw me, as when I first came across the clue, I thought it was going to be a rebus, and I wasn’t sure how many L’s were needed… still ended up being a faster than average solve. I had to fix SPACED -> SPACES (I know to match the verb tense, but it’s still something that I still mess up when solving).
Likewise with SZA. I still can’t seem to come up with an example of how “ASS” is an intensifying suffix – is it like a BADASS is badder than just bad? I’m sure it’s something simple that I just can’t see this morning …
https://bigassfans.com/
My sister has a couple of these fans in her house. They’re not cheap.
Sir Mix-A-Lot *kicking* himself for not jumping on this domain name.
Ha!
Merriam-Webster, ASS definition 3: “used as a postpositive intensive especially with words of derogatory implication,” as in “fancy-ass.”
Cheech and Chong introduced me to that usage
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iwcSNp-NET4
I didn’t find the theme easy to suss out. I got the revealer – ANYTAKERS – pretty quickly, and understood what it meant, but I still struggled to come up with the correct combinations of words in the appropriate places.
I agree with the objections to BAI crossing IMPALING. My first instinct was to go with ’empaneling’ but I thought that if 1D was BAE it would have been clued with the (now outdated) sweetie-pie meaning. I’ve never heard of BAI as clued.
ASS is indeed a general intensifier — that’s a big-ass truck, e.g. Not something I’m likely to say but it’s pretty common.
I lucked out and went with the spelling I knew best, IMPANEL, but had never heard of BAI. There was some other new vocabulary to me, like SPACES without “out” and WAX (where I first tried LPS), and lots of marine life. Not knowing BETTA and unsure between ACE and “ice,” I wavered on BOAST / boost / hoist as well. I also thought of STL instead of ATL for a while. Oh, well. Good theme and some good entries, and it worked out.
I agree completely. The ANY (N-E) TAKERS theme was cute, if not terribly tricky. I finished a bit under my Thursday average, and would have been well under if not for the time it took to sort out that NW corner with its BAI/IMPALING and SZA/ZETA/ASS, for all the reasons already mentioned. The I and Z of those crosses were the last two entries for me. It’s kinda disappointing when names, alternate spellings, and slang cause more difficulty than the Thursday theme itself.
“In my defense MESA is in fact south(ish) of Arches.” Jim, the master of coincidences sympathizes. The NYT’s occasional travel feature “24 Hours in” has posted one online this morning about Moab.
I’m old enough to have used a pay phone, but I never heard it called PAY STATION. Is it regional or even older than me? – I found the answer on ngram. It’s older than me.
I agree. I think PAY STATION would have been better clued in relation to pay-to-park parking lots. That’s where I’ve heard the phrase. I also had never heard the revealer TAKE A LETTER. I did enjoy the theme though.
Meet William Gray, the inventor of the payphone and founder of the Gray Telephone Pay Station Company in 1891. Sometimes “dated” means like “phat,” but sometimes it means really dated.
And I’m old enough to remember when my grandparents still used the hand-crank phone in their farmhouse, but I’ll swear that I’ve never heard a pay phone called a “pay station.” That term may have been used in the name of Mr. Gray’s company, but I’m highly skeptical that it was ever widely used in normal conversation.
The term is still used by collectors for the oldest model payphones that have coin slots and no dials. It seems like the term was common, but even before your grandparents.
The google books corpus finds 35,000 occurrences before 1931.
NYT was doable but tough for me. Took some thought to unravel the revealer. I was helped at the end by the donor and donee words both being altered into actual words or phrases in the language.
FB – I enjoyed the Job Hopping theme. Being a huge Sam Cooke fan pays off. Four jobs – COOK, RABBI, HOST, and ACTOR “hop” from one entry to another. When the jobs are returned to their “original” positions, the clues make sense
Moving COOK from SMARTCOOKIE to SAME gives us SMARTIE and SAMCOOKE
Similarly,
RABBI from RABBITEARS to GEST yields TEARS and GRABBIEST
HOST from WHOSTHERE to GED yields WHERE and GHOSTED
ACTOR from REACTORFUEL to REFRY yields REFUEL and REFRACTORY\\And we still get
BEQ – a small nit that I’ve brought up before. The upper arm muscle that we flex is a “BICEPS”, not a “BICEP”. It comes from the Latin meaning “Two Heads”; it’s a single muscle that has two branches at its origin. Similarly, “TRICEPS” and “QUADRICEPS”.
Sadly, that ship has sailed. M-W now accepts “bicep” without as much as an “informal” tag. You might as well (correctly) point out that “pease” is the proper singular, not “pea.”
I agree that BICEP is now part of the language. But I would note that the American Heritage Dictionary (which is more prescriptive than Merriam-Webster) says “ The word bicep is a back-formation created out of the mistaken impression that biceps is a regular English plural formed by adding -s to a singular noun. It is widely considered an error.”
I have seen this in so many puzzles that I barely notice it anymore.
Yep, error in an anatomy book. No longer one in a crossword. Hey, I railed for years.
(Pea is a back-formation created out the the mistaken impression that pease is a regular English plural. There was plenty of righteous railing.)
BEQ 15a Bridge coup – I immediately entered SLAM without much of a thought. Well that didn’t work out for me. Growing up my family played Bridge and Pinochle. I remember MELD in Pinochle, but not Bridge. It’s been decades since I played. Am I not remembering something?
The Meld app is clogging up my attempts to search for bridge+meld.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/10/19/health/crossword-will-shortz-stroke-recovery-wellness/index.html
LAT: I don’t know why the LAT continues to receive low ratings. In my opinion, the editors have done a better job selecting and editing the puzzles over the last few months…