Rajeswari Rajamani’s New York Times crossword— Sophia’s write-up
Theme: Each theme answer is a phrase of the form _ _CK AND _ _LL
New York Times, 11 18 2024, By Rajeswari Rajamani
- 17a [Personal bidding, in an idiom] – BECK AND CALL
- 28a [Who went “up the hill” in a nursery rhyme] – JACK AND JILL
- 44a [Two-player offensive sequence in basketball] – PICK AND ROLL
- 59a [Like a hard-to-believe story] – COCK AND BULL
Interesting find that so many common phrases have this same structure! All of these phrases came to me pretty quickly and felt Monday appropriate – I’m a basketball fan so I especially liked PICK AND ROLL, but I am not sure if that’s a phrase known by other folks. This is the second NYT Monday puzzle this fall to have the answer JACK AND JILL, which is wild since prior to this it had only been used once at all in the Shortz/Fagliano era. I was hoping for some kind of revealer/hidden to tie all the answers together, but instead it’s just the shared format of the answers as the connection between them, which is fine too.
There’s some fun stuff in the rest of this puzzle! EL CAPITAN, SNO CONE, ANECDOTES, and SKATERS were standouts to me. Everything was pretty Monday smooth, although I didn’t love the partial A NAP. It’s been a hot second since we’ve seen Mel OTT in a puzzle, hasn’t it? He used to show up all the time! My favorite clue in the puzzle was the one for ROCKET – [What goes up after a countdown?]. I also liked the back to back of [On which croquet and cornhole are played] for LAWN and [On which Ping-Pong and air hockey are played] for TABLE.
Happy Monday all!
Shout-0ut to commenters CrotchetyDoug & TZ: I was just looking at my first review here (it’s been a month already!) and saw the nice comments you left. I truly appreciate them. Thanks!
NYT: Super easy, but I didn’t know PICK AND ROLL, or BRIANA Scurry, which added some time. I keep wondering when beanbag toss became known as cornhole – it must have been a regional thing when I was growing up. (Here’s a hint – don’t look up cornhole in Urban Dictionary!)
NYT: A typically easy Monday, but in my view seriously flawed by the inclusion of a not-very-common phrase, PICK AND ROLL. The other three theme entries are totally familiar, so this created an unaesthetic asymmetry.
It is beyond rare for a Monday puzzle to have any answer that I’ve never encountered before, but this was one of those.