Steve L
Haverstraw, NY
TIR (Today I realized) that SAUTÉ PAN and "saucepan" share seven of eight letters. Ask me how I know.
No, no, no! A PIT STOP is a brief stop, not an overnight stay in a hotel. This PIT STOP is an actual PIT STOP, at an auto race, where the driver stops to re-tire his race car. Re-tire-ment, get it?
Take note, everyone, that in order to avoid the issue of "and sometimes Y," Marshall left Y out of the puzzle altogether.
Since yesterday's installment was so popular, here's a new list of the anticipated nits from today's puzzle: Theme: --How do I write the rebus? --It's not a rebus? --Circles are bad enough; triangles, too? --I'm supposed to go up and down and up and down? --The triangles spell what? --The circles spell what? --I don't get it. Clues and Answers: Foreign languages: EAU--I'm supposed to know French? ALEPH--I'm supposed to know other alphabets? MAIS OUI--More French? Computers and phones: MSN--What is this, 1990? AGE--Ugh, online dating. OTOH--Ugh, textspeak. TBH--Ugh, more textspeak. DMED--Ugh, social media. LCD--A kealoa. Could be LED. Or even CRT. WIFI--Nothing wrong with the clue. But how many tech words are there going to be? Abbreviations and initialisms: PLO, IED, LCD, TBH, OTOH, DMED, DJS, IPASGSU, STP, GSU, CSIS--How many flippin' letter salads are there going to be? APT--Wait...that's not an abbreviation?!?!?! Sportsball: GSU--I'm supposed to know random abbreviations about college sports teams? TIPINS--Come on, it's not even clear what sport that is. Basketball? Golf? Both of them? END--Football is too violent. I never watch it. Also: ATOMIC DOG--I'm supposed to know some song that barely made the charts over 40 years ago? UVEA--Too obscure. MEDEA--Wasn't she in those Tyler Perry movies? MEDIA--Wasn't she in those Tyler Perry movies? ESSIE--I'm supposed to know nail polish brands? OCCAM--I'm supposed to know a 14th century dude? Happy solving, folks!
If you're going to go all foreign plural with THALAMI (unfortunately, Caitlin beat me to the joke I was going to make about it sounding like a deli meat), you might as well get "Fathers, in Hebrew" right. ABBA is father, but fathers is AVOT. ABBAS is a Palestinian politician. I'm aware that English regularizes plurals; in fact, I tell this to people all the time (i.e. paninis). But the clue was "Fathers, in Hebrew", not in English, and ABBA has not become a typical word in the English lexicon yet. Its only use is in religious contexts, as a title, most often for God. I held my nose when I entered it. Might as well been "Swedish quartet and namesakes".
This puzzle kinda needed to have a revealer (or was EDITORS supposed to be one?)...without one, it just seemed pointless. I got through the puzzle in a normal amount of time, and saw there had to be a rebus right from the start...it had to somehow be VIVIEN LEIGH, which didn't fit. Soon after, I discovered that the IE's and EI's were the rebus, but the across answers and the down answers each had the other digraph. But why? Just because they could? That didn't seem like a satisfying reason. I was waiting to see what clever gem tied all of this together. And there was none. Quite disappointed. (I bet Rex Parker tears this one apart tomorrow morning.)
@John Deal I had the same reaction. I'm not sure where that out-of-left-field diatribe came from, but to say "I found a puzzle from 13 years ago that I think is better than this one" seemed pretty random and pointless. First of all, that puzzle was about a maze and not an escape room. Those are different things. Secondly, that one was a Sunday, which means there was more room to carry out an elaborate theme. And most importantly, even the most clever of concepts cannot be duplicated at will. For example, everyone marveled at Sunday's four-way Schrödinger puzzle, but despite Schrödinger puzzles appearing for the first time in 1988, there have only been 14 of them. If you're waiting for every puzzle to be that elaborate, you're not going to have a puzzle to solve every day. I thought today's puzzle was a perfectly cromulent Thursday puzzle.
I got through this one, finally, and my last chore was to change from one pair of subbed letters to the other pair of subbed letters for each theme answer. Before taking out the UT of GUTTER and putting in the RA for GRATER, I was so sure that the theme answers worked that way that I actually checked my entire grid for unrelated typos. I didn't find anything, although those gobbledygook downs at the theme letters were making it hard to figure them out. Finally, I did substitute in the RA for the UT and the others, and got the little jingle. But to me, it didn't make sense. RAT OUT was, for example, the instruction to answer 22A. So the clue for 22A is [Proverbial bad thing to have your mind in], so the answer is GUTTER. To get it to GRATER, you go from UT to RA, not the other way around. But the "hint" in the previous answer said RA to UT. The others followed the same way. It seemed to me that it was all bass-ackwards. The clue should have been for GRATER, and the printed answer should have been GUTTER (with different down answers that made sense with the U and the T). And so forth for the others. Or the whole puzzle should have been constructed with the UT to RA order.
Someone at the NYT Games Department was reviewing this puzzle and looked at a certain entry and decided: WORDLE! If you know, you know...
Possible nits to pick today: Celebrities: BEYONCE-I don't pay attention to music after 1980/1990/2000... MELANIE-I don't pay attention to music before 2000/1990/1980... SUSANNA-I'm supposed to know a song from the 40s? The 1840s? OHIO-I'm supposed to know where random people were born? MODEL-I'm supposed to pay attention to supermodels now? Literature: CHOLERA-Too foreign. Foreign words: PROST-Wasn't he that French writer? SALATA-Now I'm supposed to speak Italian? NOEL-Now I'm supposed to speak French? DER-Now I'm supposed to speak German? Miscellany: ITS A TIE--Ugh, sportsball. NBA JAM--Ugh, sportsball and video games. BBC-Random niche cable TV network. LA LAW-Some random TV show that was cancelled 30 years ago. APSE-How am I supposed to know about someone else's religion? ARTEMIS-Ugh, who cares about dead religions? ITALY-Who knows trivia like that? ELPHABA-Did you know CYNTHIA has the same number of letters? THREE-What's that, some kind of leftist agenda? Finally... SNARK-Is that even a real word? Have a good Wednesday, all.
First things first. Thanks to all on this board who served our country, Barry, Rich and many more I'm not aware of. Especially during unpopular and poorly thought-out wars that were unpopular.
The fact that this was a Monday puzzle, and a very straightforward one at that (which is to say a perfect one for a newcomer to try his or her luck on), it's a bit anticlimactic to announce the following, but here goes: This puzzle marks the 3000th consecutive solve in my NYT solving streak. Every solve has been a clean solve; in other words, there have been no lookups of any sort. The solve might have been even longer if I hadn't been doing my puzzles on other media when the NYT web interface came out (Puzzazz was an app that worked for the NYT puzzles way back then, and never was unable to handle an oddball theme; Across Lite was my go-to before that), but 3000 puzzles ago was when I started in the NYT interface, and so it's a 3000-day streak today. (What I'm saying is that I was already doing them without lookups before the streak started, but I don't have documentation for how long.) I have been solving for over 40 years. If you can't imagine doing 3000 puzzles in a row without help, keep in mind that these days, with all the resources that exist that didn't when I was starting out, you can become good much faster than when I was new to this. My solves are rather fast these days because that's my natural pace now. Solving fast allows me to fit them in every day without fail, even on busy days. I savor them afterward, among good company here at Wordplay. Happy puzzling to all!
I have perused the existing comments, but I might have missed someone already having said this. Anyway, in case no one has, let me say this: There’s an added layer of elegance in the puzzle. There are so many O’s in straight lines as the ball caroms around to get from tee to cup, but there isn’t a single other O anywhere but in that long path. Very cool!
Wow! A hundred comments by midnight! I wouldn’t be surprised if we break 1000 today! Most of them are from haters, and things like “this isn’t a crossword” that tell me there are a lot of newbies out there. Imagine stepping into, and then out of the batter’s box after three quick strikes, and complaining, “No fair, curve balls. I didn’t know that could happen.” Without curve balls, hitting would be too easy and the games would be five hours long and the final scores would be 48-27. Curve balls make baseball a better game. As a batter, you have to be able to figure out when to expect them, and how to hit them. Or give up and sell cars for a living. This puzzle was a masterpiece, and you do it a disservice by blaming the puzzle for the fact you weren’t ready for it. (Yeah, I know, you’re the exception: you’ve been solving for 15 years and you still hate it, blah blah, blah.) This one could be a contender for Puzzle of the Year. A perfect game is a work of art, but the opposing batters on the losing team still don’t like it.
Usually, it’s the quarterback who takes a KNEE, but today we found out that it was the tight end that did it, and Swiftly ushered in a new ERA. How prescient to have planned both words for tonight’s puzzle!
Anyone else, with JOSIE already in place at 13A, decide that "Item in a trunk" (13D) had to be JUNK? Everybody has some, or so they say. !!!! !!!!
A theme based entirely on Pig Latin is drudgery for me. By the time I got to the lower third, I was just plodding along just to get finished. I'm sure a lot of solvers loved it, but as they say in the decluttering business, it didn't spark joy for me.
@Lorne Eckersley Sorry you didn't like this puzzle. I did, and I don't share your assessment that it wasn't funny, amusing or interesting. But when you purport to know a constructor's motive, and impugn them based on no evidence whatsoever (a hunch, perhaps?), you are just being nasty without reason. The fact that one person in Creston, BC, didn't like this puzzle doesn't mean that a constructor created a puzzle for the sole purpose of feeding his ego. Only one person looks bad when you make assertions like this, and it sure isn't Mr. Lively.
@George It might be time for you to find a new hobby.
84A [Headwear that's stereotypically red]: Hands up if you thought MAGA HAT???
Everyone all set for the "This is not a crossword" crowd? For a touch of elegance, the only regular T in the puzzle is in the revealer. !!!!! !!!!!
The pièce de résistance actually is the fact that all the words minus their covered-up initial or final letter, are themselves the names of trees or plants: ASH, FIR, PEAR, APPLE, ELM and LOTUS. LOTUS flowers are a real thing; there is a mythical thing called the LOTUS tree mentioned in the Odyssey.
Tonight I reached a streak of 3653 gold stars. No arbitrary number at all, just an annual milestone...I'm sure by now, you've figured it out that Dec. 17, 2015--the Obama era--was the last time I had a blue star. And looking at my solve in the Archive, I don't even know why. I apparently "Revealed square" where ANDY, clued as the tennis player Roddick, and OYS, clued as exclamations of exasperation, crossed. I'm sure ANDY was a gimme, and OYS seems obvious...who knows what made me do that? All I know is that if I hadn't done that, I would have reached this milestone months earlier. But only months, not years, because sometime not long before that, I had just switched to solving in the NYT interface. I had previously been solving on a platform called Puzzazz, and on Across Lite before that. For a time, I switched from one platform to another often. So my streak couldn't have even been a year longer. But at the time, the idea of a streak was something new, and I guess it didn't matter that much to me back then. After all, why would I have revealed a square that was easily gettable? I hope that ten years hence, I'll still have a streak. Heck, I hope I'll still be doing crosswords...or anything! Who knows what can happen in ten years, but I hope to report on 12/17/35 that my streak is 7305!
@Vae Odin didn’t fit today. It was Tyrsday.
This is basically a reply, but I don't want to attach it to any specific comment, because it could apply to any of several comments made so far (and quite a few more that will be made, I suspect). This was in my opinion a very solid Friday puzzle. It actually played more like a Saturday for me, as I had very little the first time through, and I figured I was in for a serious battle. Having found a few things near the bottom to get a foothold, I was able to make headway, and eventually completed the puzzle at the top, which was quite sparse halfway through my solve. Experienced solvers look forward to puzzles like this one because we can breeze through a lot of supposedly challenging late-week puzzles, even though these puzzles give trouble to less experienced solvers. I can appreciate that this one might have been a backbreaker for newer or less proficient solvers, but that doesn't make it a bad puzzle. Vague cluing? A feature, not a flaw. Obscure trivia? Ditto. Please don't denigrate the puzzle because you couldn't solve it. You don't come to the crossword fully formed as a solver. It takes years, decades even, to get to the point where you can always solve any puzzle. Be positive, and you may get there. (And I emphasize "may". I don't think everyone does.) But the fact that a puzzle is too hard for you doesn't make it a bad puzzle. It just means you weren't ready for it. Factually, it was a very good puzzle.
@Theresa Explained previously, recopied just for you: The "like you were a five-year-old" explanation: In the first three theme clues, TEN stands in for a dime, ONE for a penny, and FIVE for a nickel. The companion clues tell you how the gimmick works for each of those coins. In 101A, you are told to turn on the dime for 19A. In 19A, you reach the TEN rebus and turn downward and complete the answer, HAIR EXTENSIONS. In 32A, you follow the advice in 62A. You TAKE A PENNY and LEAVE A PENNY. So the first "one" (i.e. penny) in BUY (one) GET ONE FREE is taken (so it's not there) and the second "one" is left there. You have to take one and leave one. In 54A, you have the FIVE rebus in there, working fine with the cross (FAB FIVE), but backwards for TREVI FOUNTAIN. The companion answer, 78A, is NICKELBACK, telling you that the FIVE has to be read backwards. 98A, which solves to NO QUARTER, is the companion clue for 117A (PERCENT). QUARTER, like the other coins, represents its value in cents, which is 25. So the clue for 117A, [1/4], solves to 25 PERCENT, but since you are advised to enter it with "no quarter", you omit the "25", and are left with PERCENT as your fill. It's totally logical if you follow the steps. If you don't follow the logic, read this over again until it sinks it. If it doesn't make sense to you, keep at it; it just hasn't clicked for you yet.
Just wanted to point out that TIP ROAST and "top round" share an insane number of letters. Ask me how I know.
@Jake I've never heard OPEN ENDER for questions requiring more than a yes/no answer. The term I knew is "open ended". That being said, it's just as likely that the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) might be commencement attendees, no?
Reposted: In which ICE disappears. If only...
I would like to personally thank Will Shortz for giving us both a Friday and a Saturday puzzle this week that were worthy of their placement at the end of the week.
For the "Skewered meat dish" (9A), I wavered between possible spellings, and settled on entering only K-B-B, intending to wait on the crosses for the vowels required. It turned out to be SATAY. I guess I should B more #.
So yesterday, everyone was going on about REUNE, ETERNE and NEONATE...all good words, unknown to some, disliked by others, and claimed to not be a word by a few. (And yes, if it's in the dictionary, it's a word. And if it's a word, it's good to be in the puzzle. That's how it goes.) Anyway, today's obvious clunker to anyone who follows the sport is MINOR TEAM. Certainly, these two words together as a pairing exists, at least sporadically, since if you do a search, you'll find examples on the internet, although none of the ones I saw were by professionals. And this is because it's not what teams like the Syracuse Mets are called. They're called "minor-league teams." This distinction is important; one is the normal term, and one is the term a few people who don't know the normal terminology have occasionally used. (I base my opinion on the fact that I watch or listen to at least 150 games a year, and no one well-versed in the proper lingo says it...I've literally never heard it on a baseball broadcast.) Does it work in a crossword? Sure, most people (Americans, that is) will be able to figure it out. But it is still very clunky.
Sam, it's not just that AL are the first two letters of the theme answers. AL is the state postal code for ALABAMA. AL is the chemical symbol for ALUMINUM. AL is a common nickname for ALBERT. Which makes it one step more clever than before.
@EastCoaster Certainly, if you were of a mind to take offense at these words, which I agree I wouldn't want my wife or daughter to have shouted at them on the street, you quite well might wind up with the opinion you have, but take into account: The puzzle was created by two women, who obviously felt that the words used were perfectly fine. MISSUS is just (oddly enough) the written-out spelling of "Mrs." BABE is a nickname used endearingly toward both women and men by both women and men. As for DAME, I'm sure Judi Dench, Helen Mirren, Julie Andrews and a bunch of others might disagree with you. Note that the puzzle doesn't condone shouting things at random women on the street. Just some things to consider.
@Cormac My first thought upon seeing this is that there's going to be someone complaining about incorrect pluralization. I knew it was going to happen; just didn't know that someone would beat me to it by a minute at 10:07 p.m. ET. You've fallen into the tamale trap, North of the Border version. Yes, among the various polar region peoples of North America, the term INUIT is the only plural, and the singular is indeed INUK. But that's in their language, not in English. English has a tendency to regularize foreign plurals, so you go to a sandwich counter and order two PANINIS, which is like ordering two sandwicheses, if you were speaking Italian. But it's perfectly fine English to say INUITS. And it also fine to use INUIT as a plural, just not the only plural. <a href="https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/Inuit" target="_blank">https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/Inuit</a> <a href="https://www.dictionary.com/browse/inuit" target="_blank">https://www.dictionary.com/browse/inuit</a> <a href="https://www.britannica.com/dictionary/Inuit" target="_blank">https://www.britannica.com/dictionary/Inuit</a> <a href="https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/learner-english/inuit" target="_blank">https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/learner-english/inuit</a> <a href="https://tinyurl.com/bdd62nst" target="_blank">https://tinyurl.com/bdd62nst</a> (Collins Dictionary) I'm sure someone will still insist that all five dictionaries are wrong, but there are people who believe Tim Walz will turn the Midwest into Mogadishu.
The [Soup or sandwich] clue (27A) reminded me of an old joke: An eighty-year-old wife says to her eighty-year-old husband, "Tonight, would you like to have super sex?" The husband replies, "I'll have the soup." Ba-da-bum!
@George How could you and I have done the same puzzle? After doing the one I did, I don't know how anyone could say it was a weak theme. In fact, I believe that if someone thought it was a weak theme, they probably didn't fully understand it. (Of course, Deb does a good job explaining it in the column, but I realize a lot of people don't bother with the column.) If you thought that the theme was just "the same answer used twice in a row", then of course it's a weak theme. But also of course, there's actually more to it than that. So when your "review" is a grand total of 12 words and two numbers, it's hard to tell what you saw or didn't see, and thus what your opinion is worth. I'd say "Clever theme, and typical Thursday-level fill." PS If you think some of the clues were nice, why not tell us which ones, and why? (Why bother. This is a drive-by comment, anyway.)
For those of you who are unaware (and I am guessing that includes many of you), today's puzzle is by the editor of the LA Times crossword.
@Dan How to say this gently... As a beer league softball player, would you find it disheartening that Shohei Ohtani can hit a 100-mph fastball into the upper deck of Dodger Stadium? As a weekend duffer, would it bother you that Tiger Woods can shoot a 72 on any given day? (Or at least could at one time?) Why would you stomp on the joy of someone who just set a personal best and wants to tell the world? I know, they could say they got a personal best without giving the time, but why? Because you're not there yet? I personally don't post my exact times anymore, not that I'm obsessed with them anyway. I've gotten fast without necessarily aiming for it after more than 40 years of solving. Back then, there was newsprint and pen(cil), and no help column, and certainly no comment section. The learning curve was extremely slow. Now, you can get that help to improve your game and move up the ranks infinitely faster. The column and comments are resources that I think some newer solvers take for granted. But with these resources, come people who express their experiences in a multitude of ways. Why silence their form of expression because you think it's gauche? For every person who disapproves of time posting, there's probably another who's fine with it, and a third one who doesn't care one way or the other. Don't like time postings? Ignore them.
@Paul No puzzle is—nor should it be—constructed without ample research, even the simplest of Mondays. And certainly, even if the constructor doesn’t do due diligence and research the correctness of every clue and answer, the editors have the duty to do so; in fact, that’s the very reason for their job. The problem here is that you make assumptions about how the puzzle was constructed, and unless you have a room in Quezon City and a pair of binoculars, you have no way to know how the puzzle was crafted. What Barry said, or how he said it, is beside the point.
I do not think of BANC as a "Chaise alternative". This is because Chaise is my BANC. (Ducks and runs for cover.) !!!! !!!! !!!!
FARE IS FOUL AND FOWL IS FAIR has got to be the groaner of the year. Maybe the decade.
@Bob Tourney clued the shortened ELIM. Months are not capitalized in Spanish. MENSA is Latin for table, not an abbreviation or acronym. And yet your entire comment was stated with such utter confidence.
Sam writes: It’s not the past that’s loved but the love that’s past. That might be the best sentence I’ve read in Wordplay in a…um…long time.
Pro tip #1: If a clue is "(Month) birthday celebrant", the answer is usually one of the two zodiac signs that fall within that month. So when 37A asked for "July birthday celebrant", I looked at the answer's length, three letters, and confidently plopped in LEO. Those letters didn't play well with the crosses, but then just a few clues later, at 41D, another three-letter answer was clued "Shortest of a group of 12". This time, it actually was LEO, so my maned friend had to be pulled from 37A. Pro tip #2: When you put an answer into the grid which proves to be wrong, but actually belongs elsewhere in the grid, this is, as per Andrea Carla Michaels, a malapop. Pro tip #3: Do not fear the malapop.
Caitlin writes: 99D. I’m a sucker for a good homophone like this: “School name that sounds like a Canadian territory.” The correct solution is UCONN, which sounds like Yukon, in wordplay that is really fun even though it’s not as showy as Manitoba or Saskatchewan. ____________ Manitoba and Saskatchewan are provinces, not territories, so I'm having Nunavut. !!!!
ETSY is back for a second straight day, making 11 appearances in 2025. Let the conspiracy theorists have at it.
@Chris You may have seen abbreviations like 14K and 24K for the level of purity in gold—those are KARATS. The weight of gemstones—those are CARATS. What Bugs Bunny eats—those are carrots. What Bad Bunny eats—¿Quién sabe? Happy Super Bowl Sunday, and may your team win!
@Daniel Rebuses are fun. Please stop bashing them.
This pair, together and individually, are among the premier puzzlers of this generation.