Harry Zheng’s New York Times crossword, “Multi-Hyphenates” — Nate’s write-up
12.29.2024 Sunday New York Times Crossword
22A: —- WORKER [Electrician who might put in overtime after a bad storm]
28A: —- CHARTS [Graphics that show trends]
59A: —- DRIVES [Hard hits off the bat]
72A: —- DANCES [The Macarena and Cha Cha Slide, for two]
105A: —- BACKER [Defensive position]
112A: DASHED LINE [Indication of where to cut … or something written five times in this puzzle?]
On its surface, this seems like a pretty straightforward, relatively scant theme for a Sunday puzzle, with each set of —- representing the word “line” in the theme entries. But! The elegance and sheer wow factor of this puzzle is in the collection of 20(!) theme-crossing, hyphenated down entries that the constructor was able to fit into the puzzle, still resulting in smooth overall fill and gorgeous execution of the theme. Wow!
1D: UH-UH [“Don’t even think about it”]
2D: NO-NO [Proscribed action]
3D: TO-DO [Kind of list]
4D: OP-ED [Opinion piece]
10D: LIP-READ [Watch one’s language?]
11D: AGE-OLD [From time immemorial]
12D: GET-GO [Very start]
20D: RE-UP [Sign on again]
47D: TA-DA [Magic word?]
40D: KAL-EL [Superman’s birth name]
41D: EMO-POP [Genre for Fall Out Boy]
42D: TIN-POT [Descriptor for a dictator]
61D: TV-MA [Rating that signifies lewdness or violence]
55D: PRE-OP [Awaiting surgery, informally]
51D: CHIN-UPS [Bar exercises]
52D: MUST-READ [Highly recommended story]
89D: DO-RAG [Closefitting headwear, in variant spelling]
83D: MID-AIR [Place to hover]
84D: ORE-IDA [Big name in frozen food]
85D: YES-MEN [Obsequious types]
I can’t even imagine the undertaking it would have been to pull this off, so kudos to the constructor for his work and admiration from me, a fellow constructor. I’m curious to hear whether the wow factor of this puzzle’s construction translated into folks’ solves, especially for those of you who solve but don’t construct crosswords. Was the juice worth the squeeze for you? Let us know in the comments.
Have a great weekend and the happiest of new year’s celebrations. Here’s to a wonderful 2025!
Evan Birnholz’ Washington Post puzzle, “Closing Performance: A Marching Bands Metapuzzle” — Matt’s write-up
Evan Birnholz’ Washington Post puzzle, “Closing Performance: A Marching Bands Metapuzzle” solution 2, 12/29/2024
Evan Birnholz’ Washington Post puzzle, “Closing Performance: A Marching Bands Metapuzzle” solution 1, 12/29/2024
Evan Birnholz’ Washington Post puzzle, “Closing Performance: A Marching Bands Metapuzzle” Solution 3, 12/29/24
It’s a variety meta to close out 2024 from Evan – we’ve got three Marching Bands and are asked to find “a well-known song.” A long travel day from rural Missouri home to Oahu doesn’t help, but I haven’t figured it out, even with a nudge from Evan. Let’s see what we’ve got.
If you’ve never seen a Marching Bands before, all squares are clued in two directions, like a standard crossword, but clue directions go across Rows, and around rings (“Bands”). There are no black squares or bars.
Two elements of the suite jump out as likely meta relevant. First, the four outer bands in each grid end in a four letter musical band, clued in the same format. Some of these groups I recognized — TOOL, KISS, RUSH (of course) — while others were newer to me.
Secondly, there’s a pretty big flag for us in the last Row clue of the suite [“‘Cause you know sometimes ___ have two meanings” (“Stairway to Heaven” lyric, and a hint for solving the meta)”] for WORDS.
From there I got nothing, other than a hunch that our answer could be AULD LANG SYNE, which is seasonally appropriate, fits the title, and is 12 letters long for the 12 bands in the three puzzles. But no luck backsolving. As I type this, ANTS MARCHING by Dave Matthews Band also comes to mind, but I’d be less confident in trying to chase that down.
A follow up hint from Evan: “Based on the Zeppelin lyric, which words might have two meanings and where might you find them?” To which I can point to “Bands” being both a structural element and a recurring entry, but I’m not sure where else to look. I can’t even report many rabbit holes, other than rearranging the 12 bands in different combinations and rereading the clues and grids several times hoping something will jump out.
So with apologies, I have to tap out. I’m sure between email, comments here, and Evan’s own writeups over at the Post, I’ll wake up to a helpful explanation, which I’ll edit in here tomorrow. Happy New Year to you all!
Edit: I’m back, with a night’s sleep and Evan’s recap over at WaPo live. AULD LANG SYNE is indeed the meta answer, extracting by finding clues in each puzzle that are a bit tougher and vaguer than the rest of the suite, and can apply broadly to their answer in the grid but also one of the band names (e.g. TOTO is an [Emerald City visitor] in addition to the LION, who provide the -L- of “AULD”. Very satisfying, and I’m bummer I couldn’t put it together. Thanks Evan!
Paul Coulter’s Universal Sunday crossword, “End of the Line”—Jim’s review
Theme answers are familiar(ish) names and phrases whose final letters spell out a type of fish (backwards). All these fishy entries are in the Down direction causing the solver to imagine each fish has just taken the bait and is “on the line.” The punny revealer is STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS (112a, [Ocean current where “school” teachers train fish to be on the alert for fishing lines?]). Seems to me that these teachers all failed pretty badly if each of their pupils is in the process of being caught.
Universal Sunday crossword solution · “End of the Line” · Paul Coulter · 12.29.24
- 1d. [Jacob and Esau’s mother] REBEKAH. Hake.
- 3d. [Angler’s equipment also known as a “split cane”] BAMBOO FLYROD. Dory.
- 6d. [Bugs Bunny cartoon that parodies Wagner’s Ring Cycle] “WHAT’S OPERA DOC?” Cod.
- 9d. [Strip with a lot of people around?] MAIN DRAG. Gar.
- 12d. [50th-anniversary celebration] GOLDEN JUBILEE. Eel.
- 15d. [Crunchy Hawaiian treat with a buttery flavor] MACADAMIA NUT. Tuna.
- 17d. [Big citrus fruits] POMELOS. Sole.
The essential part of the theme remained hidden to me for quite a while since I couldn’t immediately resolve the first two, and then the next three all spelled words in the Down direction (doc, rag, lee). Solving the last two and finally seeing the fish helped me finish the first two since I was spelling REBEKAH wrong and couldn’t get the FLY in FLY ROD until I knew I needed dory. So I enjoyed that part of the theme and sussing it out.
The punny revealer is good, too, but in a way it feels forced onto this theme. As a phrase, it doesn’t really have anything to do with fish being caught on a line, except by way of the clue. Further, we don’t usually say a stream is an ocean current, so that also contributed to the awkwardness.
But I may be overthinking it and being nit-picky. Overall, I enjoyed figuring out the theme as well as the wordplay. So I’m cool with it.
There’s plenty to like in the long fill: DEMO MODEL, SODA BOTTLES, SELF-DRIVE, ODD OR EVEN, “I’M NO FOOL!,” ON A ROLL, MENORAH, EAST ASIA, EVIL GRIN, and ROBOCOP. But there were also some fiddly bits that could easily stymie some solvers. I’ve never heard the phrases TAX TITLE nor TRUE RIB. ROTTERS (clued [Cads]) is weird at best. And numerous proper names could be challenging, especially where they crossed: nickname PUDGE and RUDI as well as HAVEL and RAVI at the V. If you don’t know those last two names, almost any consonant could go in there. And another one: AMARE crossing LAA [AL West team, on scoreboards].
Clue of note: 7a. [Some soup beans]. LIMAS. Eww, really? Do people put lima beans in soups? They’re bad enough on their own, now you’re going to ruin the whole soup?
Nice puzzle with some lively long fill but some finicky short fill. 3.5 stars.
My biggest concern was worrying if I had the DASHED lines entered correctly in the grid (D / dash or L / line or – or _ or who knows what)….fortunately the dashes worked.
Fun but almost too easy….just would prefer more like 20 minutes than 11….but for the record not 30 either!! 8-)
Thought either thin air / mid air would be wrong but it/they wasn’t/weren’t!
HNY
I too was dazzled by Zheng’s ingenuity in constructing this puzzle. To even come up with that many hyphenated words, let alone fit them so seamlessly into the grid – It boggles the imagination.
Once I latched onto the theme, it was one of my fastest Sunday solves. Fast, but enjoyable all the way.
+1
I entered all the clues and the dashes correctly on two different devices, but the puzzle does not show as complete. Frustrating, since a long streak is on the line.
No wow factor for this solver, Nate. The 5 LINE excluding answers were uninteresting, and the only answer in the whole BIG grid that had any pep at all for me was UPARROWS, which I still don’t understand from the clue.
I hadn’t noticed that all 20 of the theme-crossers were hyphenated words until I started reading Nate. I thought, “Oh, Okay”, since it had zero relevance to the solving experience. When I thought about it, I got what a magnificent feat of construction it was, but it had nothing to do with the solving experience. And if I caught onto it in mid-solve it would have been of no help.
I’m wondering how many others noticed.
I presume UPARROW is a reference to PC games, where pressing the arrow makes the character you are playing as jump.
Oh, I disagree entirely… the hyphenated words were key to greatly speeding up my solve. I got clued in when I had CHARTS, but not LINE or – – – -, and LIPREAD wouldn’t fit in. It clicked pretty quickly, and having the dashes for the crosses meant that all of the downs where two word hyphenated phrases.
What I can’t quite put my finger on is that the grid felt small for a Sunday; it’s 21 x 21 but somehow didn’t feel that way. I think it’s the lack of any particularly long entries. Still, a very fast, fun solve; almost a PR.
+1
WaPo:
Nerd – Dork
Hole – Aperture
Toto – Lion (Emerald City Visitor)
Free – Untie
Wasp – Gnat
Dare – Adventure
Cake – Loaf
etc.
It’s getting late, I can’t even see what RUSH matches to…
I got that far — the band names are alternative answers to other clues — although I paired DARE with ‘provoke’ and RUSH with ‘thrilling experience.’ But I couldn’t figure out what to do next. I tried taking the initial letters of the alternative clues but that didn’t give me anything I could make sense of. I await enlightenment.
(AULD LANG SYNE seems like a good guess but I can’t see how to derive it).
Yes, it’s Auld Lang Syne:
Aperture
Untie
Lion
Dork
Loaf
Adventure
Needle
Gnat
Slung
Yell
Nail
Embrace
Aha, thanks! I went a step too far, trying to do something with the clues for the alternative answers rather than the answers themselves.
Although I see now that I paired FREE with ‘less expensive,’ which wasn’t right.
Yes, and these alternate words are in grid order from top to bottom. I loved it!
thank you all! I threw in a link to Evan’s writeup but appreciate it here in the comments, too
Fun to do the Marching Bands; I figured out the bands and the alternate answers… all that I missed was how to get them in the right order. Very cool and fun puzzle and meta!
NYT straightforward but reasonably nice. At first I was looking for something more complicated. Say, the down clues wold require a hyphen, but maybe the five across clues would lead to LINE, DASH, and maybe even more variety, to be discovered. But I adjusted expectations.
I should say that I was briefly encouraged in my hopes by LINE CHART, where I might have expected as idiomatic bar chart or line graph.
Strike Up the Band
NYT didn’t do much for me as a solver, alas. It took me a while to suss out what was going on, because (LINE)WORKER didn’t come to mind and (LINE)CHART is not a description I’ve come across before.
And I didn’t notice at all that the down answers are (potentially) hyphenated. Several of them would not be, in my usage: OPED, LIPREAD, MIDAIR, TVMA, TADA, PREOP, YESMEN, GETGO. You could put hyphens in all of these, I guess, but it would strike me as odd to do so.
I agree. Quite a few of the (supposedly) hyphenated answers strike me as generally NOT being hyphenated, including all of the first four encountered in the NW.
Also, I would say that the “indication of where to cut” is much more typically described as a “dotted line” (even if they are actually composed of dashes). “Dashed line” just sounds awkward to my ear.
And (thirdly), a hyphen and dash are not the same thing. Per Wikipedia: “The hyphen is sometimes confused with dashes (en dash –, em dash — and others), which are wider…” I could have let that go, since they are functionally interchangeable in everyday use, except that (as noted in point #1 above) too many of these theme entries do not require a hyphen at all.
So this didn’t really work for me at all, I’m sorry to say.
You’ve a point about some most often not hyphenated. But, first, not all. The common dictionaries do hyphenate “get-go” and “yes-man,” say, and are divided on “preop” (where RHUD gives the hyphen as an alternative spelling. While TV-MA is too new for dictionaries, Web sites clearly prefer it (and Googling just TVMA without it will get you something else entirely. And second, bear in mind that usage will vary, including in puzzles. It’s a constant frustration to know what Spelling Bee editors will count as one word?
So why not play around with it? Ditto with “dash,” which many people will say in common speech, wrong as it is.
And since solving and commenting, I’ve been won over to the cleverness of this and, yes, did use the hyphen as a help with solving.
Relatedly, I had initially misinterpreted the meaning of “DASHED LINE”. Early on, after noticing you could skip over the letters in LINE (for some entrees), I somehow thought of DASHED as meaning the letters in LINE should be “obliterated” or “utterly removed”, e.g., as in “dashed her hopes of a clean solve”… just skipping over the letters in LINE.
(Yes, I don’t tend to read the puzzle titles…)
I was quite happy to (finally) figure out the real intent! What a constructing feat – and by a second-year college student (reading Joel’s blurb on xwordinfo). Bravo!
Also, my instant emotional response, upon seeing the unfilled grid, was of seeing a set of 12 “mini” crosswords, which of course makes sense, given the dictionary constraint!
For me, the NYT was OK but not great. The only real question was how to translate ‘——‘ into a word. Otherwise rather easy.
NYT: A clever idea. But the solve itself grokked the theme from the very beginning, since the title along with the one-letter-too-short answers in the upper left gave it away almost immediately.
Then there was not much to be surprised by, and I was a bit disappointed that all the hyphen sequences – – – – were interpreted identically as LINE.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/29/crosswords/editors-note-guess-whos-back-back-again.html?unlocked_article_code=1.lE4.iuuS.lYQriSMrvFoV&smid=url-share
Welcome back to Will, and thanks to Joel!
And sure enough, tomorrow’s puzzle credits edited by WS. I hope he didn’t suffer financially from the extended medical leave, but it sure sounds from the editors note like he’s been busy.
Great that Will’s recovery has gone so well. Joel did a great job over the almost year.
NYT: 30a [Like cobras and jackets] HOODED. Better, more accurate phrasing of the clue would be [Like some cobras and jackets]
My version has “Like cobras and some jackets.” My understanding is that all true cobras can display at least a small hood, which is why I was ok with the clue. Do you have an exception?
Yes I accidentally omitted ‘some’ from the reported clue. I’m not a trained herpetologist and a skim of Wikipedia supports your assessment when ‘true’ cobras are restricted to the genus Naja (and even when expanded to include the related genera Ophiophagus and Hemachatus).
Nevertheless I’d be more comfortable with the clue I suggest, as there are rather many species colloquially called cobras.
First definition in MW of “cobra” is a creature “distinguished’ by the ability to flatten the head into a hood, while the sole entry in RHUD is of a creature that can enlarge its head into a hood. So maybe the clue would have been wrong (and a tad less witty) if it changed so that “some” included cobras. But what do I know of cobras?
Really amazing construction by Evan for the WaPo meta, even if some of those four-letter bands aren’t exactly well-known!
The only thing I could think of in response to today’s WaPo monstrosity was the following article from “Flyover North Carolina”: Thirteen-year-old Alexander Rossi of Fuquay-Varina qualified for the Rubik’s WCA World Championship after achieving a solve rate of under 10 seconds. But neither puzzle really invited my attention.
Happy new year to you too, guy on the internet.