Meat-filled puff / SUN 6-30-24 / Two halves of a platonic whole / Preferring platonic relationships, in a way / River in a classic dad joke / Paul ___, Hungarian mathematician with over 1,500 published papers / Hindu god of death / Spanish wine region / Landlocked African country / Coke-ette? / "Mm-hmm, get a little nearer"?

Sunday, June 30, 2024

Constructor: Ginny Too 

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium


THEME: "Misstated" — US state puns ... that is it:

Theme answers:
  • "FLOOR IT, DUH!" (Florida) (22A: Getaway driver's plan obviously?)
  • "MISS IS ZIPPY" (Mississippi) (28A: "She sure runs fast!"?)
  • TEN ASEA (Tennessee) (34A: Captain and nine crew members?)
  • "ORE AGAIN!?" (Oregon) (45A: Jaded miner's remark?)
  • MINI SODA (Minnesota) (51A: Coke-ette?)
  • INDIE ANNA (Indiana) (60A: Actress Kendrick, when appearing in smaller films?)
  • DELL-AWARE (Delaware) (70A: PC-sensitive, in a way?)
  • "WHY OMING?" (Wyoming) (80A: "You realize this is a silent meditation, right?") 
  • EYED A HOE (Idaho) (86A: Considered buying that garden tool?)
  • "HUH, WHY 'E'?" (Hawaii) (96A: "Wait ... can we not play this in F sharp instead?")
  • "VERGE IN, YEAH" (Virginia) (102A: "Mm-hmm, get a little nearer"?)
  • "WHISK ON, SON!" (Wisconsin) (113A: Parent's encouragement to a budding chef?)
Word of the Day: RISSOLE (14D: Meat-filled puff) —


rissole (from Latin russeolus, meaning reddish, via French in which "rissoler" means "to redden") is a small  patty enclosed in pastry or rolled in breadcrumbs, usually baked or deep fried. The filling has savory ingredients, most often minced meatfish or cheese, and is served as an entréemain course, or side dish.

In Australia and New Zealand, a rissole is patty of minced meat and other ingredients, without a pastry covering but often covered in a breadcrumb coating, similar to Hamburg steak and Salisbury steak. (wikipedia)

• • •

["Dude..."]
Once again, if you enjoy groaner puns, have I got a puzzle for you. Not so much for me. But for you, maybe. If so, lucky you. For me: painful from start to finish. Never not painful. I admire some of the more, uh, ambitious puns, I guess, because at least they had the courage to flop hard, but mostly, yeesh, these were rough. And off. So often just way off. Huge variations in aptness. Stuff like DELL-AWARE and INDIE ANNA are dead-on, soundwise, whereas "FLOOR IT, DUH"!?!? ... I have no idea what that answer thinks it's doing, or how it thinks it's anywhere close to punny. There's a damn "T" in there, what the hell? The worst (by far) was VERGE IN, YEAH ... I mean, I can't even begin to imagine any context, even the most fanciful context, where anyone would utter those words. I don't even know what "VERGE IN" means. Who says that? "Get a little nearer" = VERGE IN????? What are editors for if not to say "uh, no"? The clue and the answer there are both nth-degree tortured. As if dad joke-level puns weren't hard enough to endure over the course of a Very Large 21x21 canvas. "MINI SODA?" No One Pronounces The State Name That Way. It seems as if the idea today was volume. Dazzle them with ... density? Twelve themers!? When the theme is unsavory, more is not better. Why not all the states? Since quality of pun seems not to matter at all, why not keep going? "CALIPH OR NIA?" [Choice between a Muslim ruler and actress Peeples?] Or WASH IN TUN [Use wine cask for bathing?] MISHA GUN [Firearm belonging to Baryshnikov?]. Go to town. I think I almost liked EYED A HOE and "ORE AGAIN!?" and "WHISK ON, SON!" But twelve of these, in a grid that doesn't really have anything else to offer as far as marquee fill ... I was enduring fare more than I was enjoying. (You Sundays-only solvers should know that the puzzle was on a Very good run this week, from Wednesday through yesterday—there really is a Sunday-specific quality problem) (Also, there are two WHYs in the state puns... why? That kind of duplication seems ... bad.)


The puzzle was mostly easy. The theme, despite having some bonkers entries, was very easy to work out, in general, so all the difficulty really came from the fill, which was fine but forgettable, with some occasionally ugly answers and forced cluing. It's weird how often I'm asked to know this ERDOS guy's name (7D: Paul ___, Hungarian mathematician with over 1,500 published papers). OK, only eight times in twenty years, but that seems like a lot. ERDOS makes me miss MS/DOS. Seems like you'd do everything you could to keep that name out of your puzzle. ERDOS makes EULER seem like a household name. A moratorium on five-letter "E" mathematicians, I beg you. Never heard of RISSOLE, so that was easily the scariest / diciest / iffiest part of the solve for me. TATAR / RISSOLE ... that cross wasn't exactly in doubt, since at least TATAR meant *something* to me, but in general, RISSOLE was a yikes for me. I did like the juxtaposition of RISSOLE and ZOLA. If there's not a ZOLA RISSOLE, there should be. The clue on GEESE is 49D: V-six or V-twelve?). I mean, yes, they fly in "V" shapes, vaguely, but 6? 12? Arbitrary numbers. I mean, why not V-eight? Bizarre. Also, GEESE crosses OASES, which (as clued) could easily (or so it seemed to me) have been OASIS (56A: Sandy springs)—that's what I wrote in at first, and that made GEESE very hard to see. I also had what felt like a close call at ABS / "BOOYA!" The spelling on the latter one felt odd, and ABS had a tricky / vague clue (67A: Core components) (I think I wanted CPU there at first). Do people really use the term "COHEIR?" (77A: One of several named in a will). You just refer to the heirs as "heirs", right? Normally? Like normal people do, when they say things? I don't know that I've ever heard of YAMA (105D: Hindu god of death). I had RAMA. Not a great feeling to discover YAMA via uncovering the absolute worst themer of the bunch ("VERGE IN, YEAH!"). I still can't fathom this answer. The tone, the context, nothing. "VERGE, ENYA!," while still nonsensical, would have been so much more pleasing.


There were some bizarre clues today. Like the one on WOOD. Such a nice, versatile, ordinary word, you could clue it any number of ways, but today you clue it as a synonym of ... "woods" (33A: Where fairy tale creatures often live)? I haven't heard the woods called a "WOOD" outside of the Winnie-the-Pooh stories (set in the Hundred Acre WOOD). Fairy tale characters live in the woods. With the "S" on the end. The fairy tale-based Sondheim musical (starring INDIE ANNA Kendrick!) is called Into the Woods, for god's sake, not Into the WOOD. Appropriate that that answer crosses LAID EGGS. Boo to that answer. You have to really do some heavy imaginative lifting to make "AND?" work at 119A: Sassy retort. Specifically, you have to mentally add the "?" And the sass. You end up with a kind of substitute for "Your point being?" ("YOUR POINT BEING?" would be a top-tier crossword answer, by the way, if you're looking to pad your wordlist). Do people really "frown upon" BURPs (15A: Frowned-upon sound)? I guess in some contexts it's considered rude, still, but fewer and fewer things are, and seems to me people are as apt to laugh at or ignore as "frown upon" a BURP.  As I learned the last time BURP appeared in the grid (yesterday? two days ago?), there's a whole kid-lit industry dedicated to how funny BURPs are. 



Additional notes:
  • 98A: River in a classic dad joke (NILE) — wait, you've made a puzzle that's inundated with dad jokes, but you're gonna be coy about this one? Weird. Does the "joke" involve calling someone "Cleopatra Queen of Denial?" If so, the first person I heard say that was Roseanne, I think. Famously not a dad. There's also this Pam Tillis song:
  • 1D: Two halves of a platonic whole (BFFS) — weird to refer to BFFS as "platonic" (how do you know they're not making out in private?) and also a "whole." I get that you want to make some kind of philosophy joke here, but like many of the "dad jokes" in this puzzle, it doesn't quite land.
  • 61D: Poet who wrote "Behold the duck / It does not cluck" (NASH) — as in Ogden NASH. Without crosswords, I wouldn't know he existed. His rhymes seem to have been very popular in the last century. "A one-L lama, he's a priest," etc.
The one-l lama, He's a priest. The two-l llama, He's a beast. And I will bet A silk pajama There isn't any Three-l lllama.
  • 87D: Certain camarade (AMIE) — French spelling of "comrade." Some of your "comrades" are friends. Friends who are female. Hence AMIE
  • 101D: What's left of the Colosseum (RUINS) — ever get misdirected by a clue that's actually being straightforward? I was thinking "left" was a direction ... and then I thought maybe the answer was going to be the word for "left" in Latin (but that's "sinister," so no fit). But "What's left" here is just "what remains."
I forgot to do Puzzles of the Month for May, so here's May *and* June 

Themed (two from May, two from June)
  • Joe DiPietro, "in old Rome" (letter strings "ONE" "TWO" "FOUR" and "EIGHT" rendered in grid as Roman numerals) (Thursday, 5/9)
  • Jack Scherban, "YOU AND WHAT ARMY?" (non-military figures with military titles) (Monday, 5/20)
  • Rebecca Goldstein, "I'M WALKIN' HERE" (famous walkers) (Wednesday, 6/26)
  • Paolo Pasco and Sarah Sinclair, STUFFED CRUST pizza (edges of the pizza-shaped grid are "stuffed" — two letters in each square) (Thursday, 6/27)
Themeless (one from May, one from June)
  • Billy Bratton, Saturday, 5/11 (SAMANTHA WHO?, GOAT YOGA, SAMESIES)
  • Alice Liang and Christina Iverson, Friday, 6/7 (TRIPLE SEC, SATANISM, IN A GOOD WAY)
See you next time.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

129 comments:

Anonymous 6:08 AM  

I didn’t hate the theme as much as Rex… except VERGE IN YEAH, which is just terrible. But hard agree that the theme density lead to some really rough fill and cluing throughout. I’m just not a Sunday guy, honestly.

Anonymous 6:15 AM  

I feel like the theme was done better decades ago by Perry Como, but maybe that’s just because my mom had a crush on him when she was three 😂

Adam 6:29 AM  

I thought WHY OMING was so goofy as to be great. And agree about DELL AWARE and INDIE ANNA. VERGE IN YEAH and FLOOR IT, DUH aren't great. I didn't dislike it as much as @Rex and knowing the theme helped me with MISS IS ZIPPY with only the last four letters filled in. Average time, average puzzle, thee poker clues (DEAL, RAISE, ANTE) and a couple "Zip"s (NADA, PEP) helped a little but ultimately were a little annoying as well. Mostly meh.

Adam T 6:32 AM  

There's a thing among scientists and mathematicians called your "Erdös Number", which is like six degrees of Kevin Bacon but for co-authorships. I think mine is 5, but I might have missed a connection somewhere.

Glen Laker 6:47 AM  

I thought Rex was going to unload on 3 “Poker action” clues. Maybe he wore himself out hating on the theme.

Anonymous 6:55 AM  

Clever theme, terrible fill. Truly terrible. Along with many of Rex's examples, there's 65A: "Like yesterday's bread compared to today's" STALER. No. No, it's not "staler" because today's bread isn't stale at all. Clever themes aside, a crossword is a word puzzle, first and last. You get the words wrong, you have a bad puzzle. This is a bad puzzle.

Hard to believe Rex isn't at least a bit familiar with Ogden NASH and dismisses him with such ease. Anyone who enjoys wordplay should be at least somewhat familiar with his work. My favorite is "The Eel."
I don't mind eels
Except as meals.
And the way they feels.

Son Volt 6:56 AM  

This was rough - maybe pared down to three themers in an early week puzzle? Overall fill was clunky also - COHEIR, STALER lead the way.

Blue Rodeo

Years ago when my brother was at Bell Labs I had the privilege to meet Fan Chung and listened to her speak to people far smarter than me about ERDŐS. My path was more towards practice and less theoretical so he remains mostly unknown to me. I’m sure @TTrimble could speak eloquently of him.

Time to play the new word search game.

Flip Your WIG

Conrad 6:57 AM  


Easy-Medium here too. Liked MISS IS ZIPPY and WHISK ON, SON. The others not so much.

Overwrites:
Ascetic before ANTI-WAR at 13D
nil before PEP at 31D
eIn before DIE at 37D

WOEs:
Had to work to extract RISSOLE (14D) from my reptilian menu brain
Matthew RHYS (23D)
BALLERS as clued (38A)
Bhagavad GITA (50A)
AKEELAH and the Bee (72D)
YAMA (105D)
Belle de JOUR (109D), although inferrable

Iris 7:15 AM  

So atrociously dumb. I feel embarrassed for the NYT.

kitshef 7:17 AM  

Wild guess on the 107A/109D cross (RIOJA/JOUR). Well, not completely wild. I figured N, L, J, or T. Went with T, which as you know was incorrect.

Did not enjoy the puzzle nearly as much as Rex did.

Anonymous 7:20 AM  

I had VERGE IN NEAR, whatever that means, before I noticed that “near” was in the clue. MISS IS ZIPPY and TEN ASEA were easy enough to get, and the best themers by far were INDIE ANNA and especially DELL-AWARE. I thought “PC” = “politically correct” at first.

Rick Sacra 7:23 AM  

Wow, had a rough time today. DNF due to the RIOJA/JOUR crossing--got naticked there. Also struggled to see DIE/DUD though in retrospect DUD Was pretty obvious. Agree that the puns are strained. Anyway.... : ) Thanks!

SouthsideJohnny 7:31 AM  

I’m neutral on the theme - it pretty much is what it is, so if you’re going to do the puzzle you have to live with it. The rest of the grid paid a pretty high price to accommodate that theme though. It’s not very pretty to gaze upon the grid post solve and be staring at GLOTTAL, SYNTH, AEON, RHYS, ERDOS, RISSOLE, GITA, ITALO, YAMA, ARO, SABADO and the like in addition to the contrived theme entries. So your grid ends up looking like one giant square bowl of alphabet soup.

Mack 7:46 AM  

Sorry Rex, but you lost some rant credibility by going just a little too far with your indignation.
Yes, VERGE IN, YEAH is awful. No argument there. But as a Minnesotan, let me assure you that the MINI SODA pun is classic and time-tested. One of my kids just made that pun last week. Hard to call a pun tortured when it's been around since the beginning of time.

Puns are awesome and always will be. I'll take tortured groaners over names of obscure nobodies any day.

Puzzle was okay. Some good fill, some bad.

Anon 7:51 AM  

INKEY and ONKEY both seem fine. Crossing a foreign word I don’t happen to know.

Anonymous 7:57 AM  

As a known bad pun enjoyer, I loved this puzzle. Every single theme answer got a good guffaw out of me and the wife. One of my favorites in a long time. Not one "wtf" answer, every single one we struggled with ended with an "oh of course, should've known". Didn't know the mathematician. Put saudi instead of
omani and that caused confusion for a while. Very enjoyable overall.

Anonymous 8:02 AM  

“No one says “Minisoda “”…unless you’re from Minnesota. Our “T’s” tend to flatten to “D’s”. So that pun was dead on here in flyover country . Virginia not so much.

Hal9000 8:07 AM  

I like dad jokes. I like puns. And I hated this puzzle. Mostly because, as Rex said, the puns just didn't land. Blissfully easy, though. Just...ugh.

andrew 8:17 AM  

I think I told the MINI SODA joke when I was six. Or else I read it along witn “what did Delaware? I don’t know - Alaska!” in My Weekly Reader and passed it off as my own.

Whatever, and cornball though it was, I thought it passed Rex’ wackiness litmus test. Would have preferred “vice squad surveillance accomplished” with EYED A HO pun, but that’s just me.

FLOOR IT, DUH was actually my favorite and works phonetically despite naysayer/nitpickers’ comments. After the first one fell, was actually looking forward to each coming groaner so in that it succeeded nicely.

Anonymous 8:18 AM  

Even better, there's an Erdos-Bacon number. Natalie Portman has a 7, Clive Owen has a 6, and Stephen Hawking and Carl Sagan both have a 6 as well. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erd%C5%91s%E2%80%93Bacon_number#:~:text=A%20person's%20Erd%C5%91s%E2%80%93Bacon%20number,the%20person%20is%20separated%20from

Anonymous 8:20 AM  

I love puns, and even I thought the VIRGINIA answer was awful. The rest were okay. I prefer ERDOS because I think that it is hysterical that an Erdos-Bacon number is a thing. Not as good as the end of the week puzzles, but not awful.

mmorgan 8:21 AM  

OMG. Absolutely terrible, painful groaners. And they were perfect -- I loved it!! It felt like the Sunday puzzles of the 70s and 80s, in the best possible way. Sure, maybe some themers landed better than others, but the overall effect was sheer bliss, making me feel 50 years younger. I struggled some in the middle (around PLAITED and LETMEGO in particular), and it took me a while to figure out why DELL was in there. The fill was mostly fine to good but mainly there to get me to the next themer. They did get easier after the first few but all were tremendous fun. Thank you Ginny Too for one of the most wonderful Sunday puzzles I've seen in a long, long time. And a debut! More soon, please!!!

I'm not surprised that Rex was negative, but I think he's being a little too harsh. I grant that VERGE IN, YEAH made me wince, but I can easily tolerate that in such a fun puzzle. It just hit the right classic, nostalgic vibe for me!

By the way, as others may point out, the phrase "into the wood" (singular) is used quite a few times in the show. The witch sings "Go to the wood and bring me back..."; Rapunzel's prince asks "What brings you into the wood today?"; etc.

Colin 8:27 AM  

I liked this. Agree VERGEINYEAH was a bit of a stretch, but ya gotta stretch at least a little for all such goofy answers. RISSOLE was new to me too, and I wasn't 100% confident about BALLERS or even TATAR (although 90% confident). Since I misspelled LUAU as LAUA at first, I had _AR_ at 15D and toyed with FART as the "frowned-upon sound" but couldn't believe this would appear in the puzzle...

My wife and I chose an Ogden Nash poem at read at our wedding! From Tin Wedding Whistle:

Though you know it anyhow
Listen to me, darling, now,
Proving what I need not prove
How I know I love you, love.
Near and far, near and far,
I am happy where you are;
Likewise I have never larn't
How to be it where you aren't....

Mack 8:28 AM  

I was going to make the same point but then realized Rex was probably referring to the "MINI" part, and that people say "Minn-uh-soda", not "Minn-ee-soda".
The pun still works, though.

pabloinnh 8:39 AM  

I think everyone who thought VERGEINYEAH was dreadful can just start posting "me too", which would save a lot of time. Let me be the first to say, me too.

I know YAMA. YAMA is a nice little Asian restaurant ant the bottom of the hill here. Now I'm wondering why they chose such an unsavory name. That and AKEELAH led to a technical DNF. So what, and me too.

Ogden Nash may be "last century" but that's when I started reading him and still love his stuff. And remember, if called by a panther, don't anther.

At least there was an OTTER, but some work was needed to make a raft of OTTERS into a singular OTTER. Fewer OTTERS is never a good thing.

Like many others, I felt that some puns (which I love) landed and some fell short, some clues tried too hard, and that I finished this because that's what I do on Sunday.

OK Sunday, GT Good Theme, uneven results. Thanks for a medium amount of fun.

Anonymous 8:42 AM  

Wow. Really terrible. I would add more but that says it all. Terrible.

Steve 8:48 AM  

Being from Baltimore, I wanted 5a demOS before THEOS

Anonymous 9:02 AM  

How are BOOYA and BOOSAT both allowed in the same puzzle? Thought that would be a top gripe for Rex.

nalpac 9:13 AM  

Argh! There's Dad jokes, there's a step down to Grandad jokes, and then there's...... well put it this way..... I don't have a great grandfather, and if this is what I'd have to put up with on a Sunday morning, thank goodness. Whoever it was that said the pun is the lowest form of wit could not have envisioned anything this bad. This puzzle made my jaw jar. I'd nevah dare to stoop so low. Can sass be far behind? My wife might know. I'll ask her. Yuk!

Anonymous 9:18 AM  

Also had VERGEINnEAr because I had no clue what the crosses might be.



Villager


Benbini 9:23 AM  

I found this medium/challenging due to how far the puns were taken beyond the breaking point (and the consequent difficulty of leaning on, well, pretty much anything to deduce crosses); really wish would-be punsters here and elsewhere would adhere to the principle of *all* double meanings/readings needing to be firmly in-language, which monstrosities like "Why Om'ing?" are not. SABADO / TAEBO / ONKEY was murderous (I had INKEY as well, perfectly reasonably IMO) and required Google checks.

Anonymous 9:23 AM  

FH
Paul Erdos is a legend in the world of computational mathematics.

jc 9:31 AM  

I was raised vegetarian [Seventh-dayAdventist in the South in the 50sand 60s]. For Thanksgiving dinner and Christmas Eve dinner, we always enjoyed Mother's Pine Nut Rissoles.

Ken Freeland 9:32 AM  

Just couldn't get any traction with all the PPP fill until I finally got the gimmick, and then things fell into place. For me only one natick, BALLER/RISSOLE, which I downgraded to a quasi-natick because nothing but "L" really makes much phonetic sense there. However, I fully sympathize with non-francophones who tripped over RIOJA/JOUR. On the whole this seems like editorial improvement, and I noticed the new editor is now named, so perhaps some accountability there?

For those unfamiliar with the classic riddle it goes like this: Q: If Mrs. Sippy lent Ms. Surrey her new jersey, what would Della wear? A: Idaho, Alaska! Six states in fifteen words, an all time record...

RooMonster 9:39 AM  

Hey All !
Fav two were WHISK ON SON and EYED A HOE. LOL! TEN ASEA is quite clever, also.

Rex, Rex, Rex. You're always saying "if you're going to pun, make them as groany as possible", or something to that effect. Then you get your groany puns, and you don't like them! What are we going to do with you? 😁🤣

Broken English speaker asking about the lead in a #2? - PENCIL VEIN, YA? (Now There's a groaner!)

I liked this quirky puz. You know me, the more Theme the better. Fill didn't seem to suffer all that much, either.

Had a DNF/FWE with coTTON/cATS/DoD, even though cats and dod made no sense. Also had to run the alphabet for the J of RIOJA/JOUR, although now with hindsight... seems obvious.

I had fun, so says my EGO. Har.

Railroad engine graveyard? MASS A CHOO SITS

OK, enough outta me. Happy Sunday!

Two F's
RooMonster
DarrinV

Sam 9:46 AM  

Same sticky spots at TATAR/RISSOLE (straight up guessed the R and got it right somehow), and the Y in YAMA. VERGE IN, YEAH is just so awful.

Ken Freeland 9:48 AM  

"At least there was an OTTER, but some work was needed to make a raft of OTTERS into a singular OTTER. Fewer OTTERS is never a good thing."

There OTTER be a law!

Stuart 10:01 AM  

Not the best, but ok for a Sunday. We need to remember that we are aficionados, and Sunday caters to a lot of commoners who do xwords just occasionally. We shouldn’t expect Friday/Saturday-level challenges on Sunday.

Given my Sunday standards, this was fine.

Gary Jugert 10:01 AM  

Super fun. A really wonderful puzzle. Laughed and laughed at those theme answers. Hope nobody BOOS AT 'em

Propers: 6
Places: 9
Products: 7
Partials: 9
Foreignisms: 6
--
Gary's Grid Gunk Gauge: 37 (26%)
Funnyisms: 14 😂

Tee-Hee: BURP

Uniclues:

1 Get the sense a Middle Eastern theme party is about to break out into show tunes.
2 Prepares pine LIV, LUV, LAFF sign for hanging.
3 Head chef direction to sous chef making tapioca.
4 Russian rulers sharing their unhappiness.

1 FEEL OMANI LUAU MORPH (~)
2 MATS WOOD TYPOS (~)
3 I SEE BEADS... WHISK ON SON
4 GUSTY AND SORE TSARS (~)

My Fascinating Crossword Uniclue Keepsake from Last Year: New Mexico priest. TORTILLA RECTOR (They really do use tortillas there.)

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Stuart 10:03 AM  

Given my Sunday standards, this was fine. We should remember that we are aficionados, but Sunday caters to a lot of commoners who only do the crossword occasionally. For a Sunday, this was OK.

Evyenia 10:18 AM  

Minnesotan here. Mini-soda is dead on, especially if you're joking around. Chill, dude.

Beezer 10:36 AM  

As per @Paboinnh I start with “Me too.” But, I did like the puzzle more than @Rex. I was thankful that I knew RIOJA due to my daughter’s semester abroad, and also thankful I know more of the nonsensical lyrics of Bohemian Rhapsody than I should. And yep. When I THOUGHT I had completed the puzzle and the NYT apps informed me I was “close but no cigar”, I had to press “check puzzle” in order to sort out my BAtLEr/ RISSOtto/ ORoAGAIN (hah…I’m so used to Spanish gold, I thought nothing of “oro” instead of ORE).
I HOPE Ginny Too is not discouraged by the comments today!

Anonymous 10:47 AM  

Why-oming had my wife laughing out loud… that’s a good thing.

Anonymous 10:48 AM  

I say this with a complete absence of mallets here in CT where we're swingin' in the rain while watching hockey with the goal minder's daughter. My wife is heavily pregnant we're likely be going from here to maternity. WaPo/LA Times puns are so much better this week

Anonymous 11:02 AM  

HUHWHYE: F sharp is an arbitrary choice of another key; why not D flat, or B?
F flat would've been funnier since Fb is E.

Anonymous 11:07 AM  

Agreed. It was the first NYT Sunday puzzle in more than 30 years of doing Sundays that I hated so much I just bailed on it. There’s been some stinkers lately that I just grit my teeth and continue to finish. This one today was just too awful to bother with.

Anonymous 11:10 AM  

About a WOOD as a home for folktale personalities, l thought about Robin Hood in Sherwood, but remembered that it's actually Sherwood Forest. However, it's really the WOOD as according to Wiki, "Forest" got tacked on later like those other redundancies, e.g., "PIN number" which stands for "personal identification number number."

Gary Jugert 11:11 AM  

Gary's Grid Gunk Guide Wrap-Up for June

Total answers I bought: 2512
Current Price Per Puzzle 15¢
Money I spent on gunk each day: 4.6¢ (up)

People and Proper Nouns: 236
Places: 92
Products: 148
Partial Words and Initialisms: 198
Foreignisms: 98

Most Gunky Puzzle: 41% on 6/23 (a Sunday!)
Least Gunky Puzzle: 16% on 6/10 (a two-month low)
Average Monthly Gunkiness: 31% (up from May)

Averages by Day:
M: 23%
T: 31%
W: 35%
R: 31%
F: 31%
S: 31%
U: 32%

Things I learned this month:

May was one day longer than June, so most raw numbers are down, but foreign phrases went way up. Are you feeling well versed in your Urdu? The percentage of gunk went up mostly across the board from May. As with last month, we complain about gunk, but it has little to do with our overall appreciation of a puzzle. If you know the gunk, you're fine with it. Mondays continue to be the cleanest in spite of a theme. C'mon Friday and Saturday themeless, time to step it up. Wednesdays beat all other days noticeably at being gunky.

I grow weary of how many Asian food ingredients pass through my mornings as if it's legitimate knowledge my life requires. Honestly, all the recipe clues feel cloying to me lately. Just as birds used to gunk up puzzles, I'm considering adding cooking to the list of gunk. Haven't made a decision yet, but beware, we might be counting our bok choys and rotis next.

jb129 11:11 AM  

GROAN

Anonymous 11:15 AM  

As soon as I got "Floor it, Duh", I stopped solving in order and just figured out the themers based on clues. Much more fun, and only struck out trying to decide why "PC-sensitive, in a way" was "Tech's Sass". (Even got "Verge in, yeah," despite not liking it at all)

Tale Told By An Idiot 11:16 AM  

No to “Ore again”. That is not even one of the mispronunciations I heard when I lived in the east for 12 or 13 years after leaving my hometown- Portland, “Or-y-gun”. Not “Or-uh-gone” nor “Are-uh-gon” nor “Or-gun”.

Anonymous 11:28 AM  

As a last century person, and someone who enjoy lighthearted wordplay, my go-to Nash is The Panther...

jae 11:32 AM  

Easy-medium for me too with the SW the toughest section. Serous erasures: Terps before THEOS, eIn>sIE before DIE, and i rule before BOOYA. I did not know YAMA so it took a while to get VERGE IN YEAH which was my last fill and the worst theme answer (hi @everyone).

Some of the puns were truly amusing, liked it a bit more than @Rex did.

@jberg from late yesterday: Joon Pahk and Brendan Emmet Quigley take turns doing the Boston Globe Sunday puzzle. They took over from the late Henry Hook and Emily Cox & Henry Rathvon who I believe retired. Joon also reviews Matt Gaffney’s weekly meta on the Crossword Fiend site. WATSON was an IBM creation that did well on Jeopardy.

Nancy 11:35 AM  

When does a collection of puns that are unremittingly and excruciatingly dreadful suddenly MORPH into "Hey, not so bad at all" and become fun to figure out?

Answer: When they have a raison d'etre theme that ties them all together and makes even the worst of them guessable.

FLOOR IT DUH was perfectly awful in every way imaginable -- and I hate, hate, hated it when I filled it in. "You call this a pun?" I said to myself. "I mean, really."

But then what looked like it was going to be a Mississippi pun started to come in. There was a fast-running "she" who was obviously (and from my crosses) a MISS. Aha, she IS something! What IS she? Hmmmm. Aha -- ZIPPY! Yippee, this is sort of fun, after all. It's going to be puns of STATES. I notice the terrifically apt title for the first time.

And I'm off and running to find as many state puns as I can without crosses. Gotcha, MINI-SODA! Gotcha, WHY OMING! Gotcha, HUH WHY E! Gotcha, WHISK ON SON!

I needed many, many crosses for the others -- and I had to cheat on RHYS to get TEN ASEA. But I ended up having a very good and, in its own way, challenging time with this. Perhaps the most successful puzzle I've yet seen in making a bunch of silk purses out of a bunch of sow's ears.


Fun_CFO 11:55 AM  

Like several others, can at least live with theme (though some really tortured), but the remaining fill and cluing was below average, even for a Sunday. On the editors, imo.

Anonymous 11:56 AM  

Me too!

Carola 12:11 PM  

My kind of Sunday - I thought it had wit and plenty of it, and required just enough brain work to catch on to the puns. As a resident of the Badger state, after getting Mississippi and Oregon, I thought, "Too bad there's no way to make Wisconsin work" - but then...what a delightful surprise! WHISK ON, SON! Loved it. I also thought EYED A HOE and HUH, WHY E? were right up there, and WHY OM-ING? got a laugh, too. YEAH, the Virginia one was really terrible, but I'm with @mmorgan 8:21 on this point. Fun all the way for me.

Help from previous puzzles: ERDOS. No idea: RISSOLE.
@Steve 8:48, I almost wrote in orEOS, as a play on "Orioles."

Anonymous 12:17 PM  

thank you. soooo bad! that section was tough because NO to *again*

Anonymous 12:23 PM  

Just another frustratingly unsatisfying 2024 puzzle. These past 4 months should prove, if anyone ever had reason to doubt, why Mr. Shortz was and is so incredibly important to the Times’ crossword.

Aphid Larue 12:31 PM  

Some fun puns, and I love Ogden Nash. Re: three L lama, I’ve always appreciated the name of champion basketball player Jewell Loyd. the L missing from her last name seems to have been added to her first name, to make her a definite 3 L.

JonnyZ 12:34 PM  

After the rant about VERGEINYEAH, crossed with YAMA, how can you call this easy-medium? If that isn’t a Natick I have never seen one. I was remembering “carry me back to old VIRGINNY so I had “VERGEINNEAH” crossed with “NAMA.” Seemed plausible, but nope. DNF.

kitshef 12:37 PM  

@Anonymous 8:02 Fun Fact: more flights pass over Virginia without landing than over any other state.

Teedmn 12:38 PM  

DNF due to my ignorance of YAMA and my imagining a southern accent making sense of VERGE IN nEAH. Not that I knew of nAMA any more than YAMA…

Whenever my husband and I go out of state and someone finds out where we're from, they say, “Oh you're from MinneSOda”. Unless that's how folks up on the Iron Range pronounce the state, I don't think anyone from here emphasizes that SO. But if MINI SODA is what it takes to get in the crossword… :-).

I was solving very desultorily, using the random method, and I never really hit upon the theme until well into my solve, when WHY OMING filled in. I think that one and WHISK ON SON were the most fun, clue-wise, and HUH, WHY E and the Virginia mess were the least successful.

But, as Sundays go, this was a pleasant diversion, so thanks Ginny Too.

Anonymous 12:41 PM  

What are the Baltimore Theos?

PHV 12:43 PM  

I thought the puzzle to be heavy on words that a well-rounded person might well not know. Ballers? Rhys? That plus the 12 novel creations in the theme answers put too heavy a lift on the crosses. Not fun.

Kate Esq 12:50 PM  

Going to put on my pedantic lawyer hat here. Technically an “heir” is someone who inherits from an estate when there is no will. If someone is named in a will, they are a legatee or beneficiary.

I recognize that heir is more in the language, but CO HEIR is not, so phooey.
(Also hated Verge In Yeah, but didn’t loathe the theme overall. It was just…. Too much. Keep the good themers, ditch the bad, and shine up the rest of the fill)

JC66 12:56 PM  

@Anon 12:41

The Baltimore Orioles are sometimes referred to as THE O's.

Bob Mills 12:58 PM  

I do the Sunday crossword in the magazine itself, so I rarely comment here. But this was one of the most enjoyable Sundays I've ever had with a puzzle.

EYEDAHOE, WHISKONSON, etc. All wonderful puns. I hope the constructor will be back soon.

Anonymous 1:19 PM  

Can someone explain “Dell” as the PC portion of this answer?

Noreen 1:23 PM  

Ogden Nash is worth knowing. My favorite:

Shake, and shake
The catsup bottle;
First none'll come
And then a lot'll.

Sailor 1:31 PM  

"MinneSOda” is pretty much exactly how my Scandinavian immigrant great-grandparents, who settled in Otter Tail County (not the Iron Range), pronounced the name of their adopted state. Maybe even "MinneSOOOda" TBH.

As a Northwesterner myself, however, I can attest that ORE AGAIN is one of the biggest misses. But the theme is "Mis-Stated," no? And ORE AGAIN surely is.

Les S. More 1:41 PM  

This is why I haven't done Sundays in years. Annoying. Awful puns and lots of them, held together by choppy little gluey sections. Yawn. I just quit. I couldn't bother finishing. I got about half way through and contemplated all that unfilled space and just bailed. I have things to do today and if the puzzle was engaging and fun I would put those things off for a bit. But I think I'm about ready to go out and sort some compost issues.

The reason I decided to try this, after years of abstinence, is that I did last Sunday's puzzle. I had a bunch of time on my hands and thought I'd give it a try. It was the one about famous paintings and it was very entertaining. So I guess what happens - for me, at least - is that when I'm happy a 21x21 grid is a good place and when I'm yawning and shaking my head that's all that space is just a desert.

Anonymous 2:12 PM  

And one of the poker actions being “deal” was a stretch…

okanaganer 2:13 PM  

I thought some of the puns were pretty great, and some were pretty poor. At the end I wondered: how would this theme work for Canada? Hmmmm... (I'll skip the clues)...

NONE OF IT
YOU CON!
SASS, CATCH YOU ONE (good luck cluing that)
ON TERRY, OH!
'KAY, BECK
NEW FUNLAND
That's about it.

For the Baltimore squad, I had OREOS and I thought: perfect! And note to constructors for future puzzles: YAMA is Japanese for mountain and the Kanji characer is 山 which is of course, a stylized mountain.

jazzmanchgo 2:18 PM  

80-Across is simply wrong. The chant "OM" does not rhyme with "OHM;" it's pronounced "O-ooom". WHY-OM-ING does not work as a pun on WYOMING. (Meanwhile, HUH-WHY-E? is pretty labored, as well.)

Karlman 2:22 PM  

Wait! Three(!) POKER ACTION clues and no comment from Rex? Repeated clues of a hated subject? Must have been just too painful for him.

Karlman 2:28 PM  

Ogden Nash faves
:
Two nudists of Dover
Being purple all over
Were munched by a cow
When mistaken for clover.

And

On a Good Dog
O, my little pup ten years ago
was arrogant and spry,
Her backbone was a bended bow
for arrows in her eye.
Her step was proud, her bark was loud,
her nose was in the sky,
But she was ten years younger then,
And so, by God, was I.

Small birds on stilts along the beach
rose up with piping cry.
And as they rose beyond her reach
I thought to see her fly.
If natural law refused her wings,
that law she would defy,
for she could do unheard-of things,
and so, at times, could I.

Ten years ago she split the air
to seize what she could spy;
Tonight she bumps against a chair,
betrayed by milky eye!
She seems to pant, Time up, time up!
My little dog must die,
And lie in dust with Hector's pup;
So, presently, must I.

MetroGnome 2:30 PM  

No clue about "YAMA," so I assumed a Southern accent would result in VERGE IN HEAH and went with "HAMA" instead. No way of knowing otherwise.

okanaganer 2:35 PM  

Oh, oh! Forgot one:
PRINT SAID WE'RE DIALIN'

Gary Jugert 2:54 PM  

@mmorgan 8:21 AM
+1 Agree with you. You'd think we'd have fewer folded arm harumphers when something is clearly meant to be silly. The oft repeated sentiment today is, "That's not how you pronounce Virginia." Well, it could be if we'd even half try to have a sense of humor. Or we could, as 🦖 teaches us, to humbug it. We could each do all 50 states and vote for the groaniest. Hm. What would be more fun? Being curious or being right? [What a volcano thinks.] VIRGIN EEE YAH!

pabloinnh 2:57 PM  

@Noreen-I introduced the ketchup poem to my boys when they were young and we have used it often ever since.

Fun fact-ketchup behaves this way because it is thixotropic. This is a real show-off word but you usually only get to use it when you're around ketchup.

Anonymous 3:02 PM  

Stupid theme approach. Total waste of time. Some of the clues were beyond belief.

Gary Jugert 3:29 PM  

@Karlman 2:28 PM
😢

Anonymous 3:30 PM  

Awful. Not fun

Masked and Anonymous 3:42 PM  

Fun puztheme, with 12 stately puns. Perfectomundo for a SunPuz, as it has 50 theme possibilities. Shoot, this theme'll work for about any state, if U R desperate enough. Examples:

* ILL ASK HER.
* LOO IS SIENNA.
* MISERY.
* NORSE CAR OFFLINER.
* KNEE BRA SKA.

I'd clue em all up, but gotta get back to the Caitlin Clark game.

staff weeject pick: DIE. Whaaa…?!? A German article clue, for this perfectly good English word? Kinda admire its backdoor desperation, tho. Fun fact: the word "SPEED" in Swedish is "FART".

Thanx for all Yer Knighted States, Ms. Too darlin. Great SunPuz debut; congratz.

Masked & Anonymo10Us


**gruntz**

pbc 3:51 PM  

Another Nash fan here. In the book of his poems I was given as a kid, there was an asterisk after "three-l lama' in the one Rex cited. Nash then added that "some people say a three-l lama is a large conflagration in Boston. Pooh."

Elizabeth Sandifer 4:23 PM  

I had a surprising amount of time for the puns, which successfully pushed through all sanity and plausibility into charming.

Much less time for a combo Natick/Kealoa when both IN KEY and ON KEY were plausible and I didn’t know my Spanish days of the week having taken French in high school. I went with the more technically correct IN, since a key is a range, not a single point. Ugh.

Chris 4:23 PM  

Coincidentaly, in another musical: "Like a strean that meets a boulder halfway though the WOOD...Like a seed dropped by skybird, in a distant WOOD."
But don't get me started on "skybird."

Unknown 4:26 PM  

Interestingly, there are several places in Into the Woods where Sondheim uses the singular "wood" in the sense used in this puzzle:

"Prologue":
Witch: Go to the wood and bring me back: / One: the cow as white as milk,... And you shall have / I guarantee / A child as perfect / As child can be. / Go to the wood!

"No One is Alone"
Cinderella: Sometimes people leave you / Halfway through the wood.
...
Baker's Wife: Sometimes people leave you / Halfway through the wood.

I think the usage is a little archaic, so fairy tale context makes sense to me, though Mirriam Webster doesn't mark it as archaic.

Les S. More 4:47 PM  

@Okanaganer
I noticed you couldn't come up with anything for British Columbia. Try BC, it's gotta be easier.

Anonymous 5:14 PM  

Lighten up folks! Why so crabby? I ‘m from “sick sound” (Illnoise) and I went to
college in “Kathy Bates role” (Misery)…I thought the theme answers were very creative. Once I got the first one (113 A “whiskonson”, I had a lot of fun figuring out the rest…

Anonymous 5:26 PM  

They are puns. They are supposed to be awful. Thats like the whole point.

Stuart 5:49 PM  

Apologies for posting twice. My bad!

Anonymous 5:58 PM  

If Mississippi wore Georgia's New Jersey, what would Delaware?

Idaho, Alaska.

Georgia 6:01 PM  

WOW, I found this fun!

Anonymous 6:11 PM  

This old timer knows that booya has nothing to do with booing. It’s closer to a cheer, in the military

Anonymous 6:29 PM  

Benbini
To each his own
I thought Why oming was very clever. Om is not obscure at all in American popular culture. There are many jokes based on it. I don’t see the necessity that the joke be based on a standard phrase. Note that not many complaints here about it.
TAEBO has been in the Times puzzle often so it is perhaps crosswordese. It also is not obscure.



Ken Freeland 6:34 PM  

Don't forget the rissoles....

Ken Freeland 6:38 PM  

Dell is a brand of Personal Computer

puzzlehoarder 6:49 PM  

I got a clean grid on this but I can't say I enjoyed it. Nails on a chalkboard puns aren't my thing. Basically it was torture from beginning to end. Instead of rage quitting I rage solved. The most iffy crossing was ERDOS and COS. I wasn't sure of either but O just looked right.

Just last year I learned that people in Oregon pronounce the ending like gun. I've always said gone and will continue to do so. Webster's supports either.


yd -0

Anonymous 6:59 PM  

I didn’t enjoy doing this puzzle too much awkward slang , like done trying to be cool by not being cool. Awkward and a little clumsy.

Anonymous 6:59 PM  

Not enough good puns to justify the big grid. Most of the puns were just bad. The NYT gets hundreds of submissions every week. This is the best they had? I don’t think so…

dgd 7:11 PM  

I liked the puzzle though it was a dnf for me.
I didn’t know YAMA or AKEELAH The y and the h did cross my mind but not at the same time! I hated it originally but now that I look at it I don’t think the pun was that bad, ( it was the hardest to figure out for most I see.) I like the fact that there is a parallel structure with FLOORITDUH and VERGEINYEAH
MINISODA got lambasted by Rex but apparently it’s an old joke in that state. Rex just expresses his feelings but I wish he had acknowledged that fact in a note. Most Americans, if they actually listen to themselves on tape would realize they pronounce the T closer to a d. That’s standard American pronunciation.
The second syllable is off but close enough for a pun I think. .

I see that no one has tried to take a crack at my state: Rhode Island. (It is pronounced as one word by us locals
Roe-DYE-land BTW) I don’t do puns.

Matthew G. 7:17 PM  

I love groaner puns, and this was fabulous.

(I agree that VERGE IN, YEAH was the weakest.)

Anonymous 8:19 PM  

Rioja is not an obscure wine, ergo cannot be a Natick!

Martin Prince 8:19 PM  

Strongest agreement with Rex: VIRGIN,YEAH for VIRGINIA was indeed horrible!
Strongest disagreement with Rex: MINI-SODA for MINNESOTA was darn tootin’ brilliant!

Scott in Chicago 8:26 PM  

@anon 12:43 The Orioles

Anonymous 8:31 PM  

There was a recent show on HBO (ever heard of it?) starring The Rock (ever heard of him?) called BALLERS. This is a well known phrase for anyone in tune with contemporary culture (hip-hop, tv, hoops, teh internetz), C’MON PEOPLE

Anonymous 8:55 PM  

RIOtA for a Spanish wine region and Belle de Tour for the movie title seemed a little too believable for me to find today.

EasyEd 9:13 PM  

Late to comment, but I’m with @Nancy: Game on!

Mark 12:45 AM  

You can complain about Erdos but he's not just another E mathematician. He is widely known across all sciences, many in which he had no direct impact, because of the Erdos number. At this point it's achieved meme status and is totally fair to include in a puzzle.

Anonymous 1:30 PM  

Yeah, as a musician, this one just killed me. It makes absolutely no sense

Anonymous 3:45 PM  

I had a copy of “Ogden Nash: Good Intensions” as a child growing up in the 1960s. I can still quote his corny / funny limericks.

Anonymous 3:48 PM  

There once was a lady named Jeannie
Who wore an outrageous bikini
Two wisps light as air
One here and one there
With nothing but Jeannie betweenie
-Ogden Nash

Anonymous 4:00 PM  

Agree with Anon 5:26; puns are supposed to be bad. Other than, specifically, the YEAH-YAMA cross, the worst thing here is how 12 medium-to-long theme answers made for underwhelming fill. The fun part for me was figuring out the bastardized state names with minimal crossing letters, and was pretty successful until the dissonant VERGE IN YEAH.

Anonymous 7:19 PM  

You need your PIN Number at the ATM Machine

Anonymous 10:32 AM  

i liked the puzzle but agree with about half of rex's comments. Erdos is fine. minisoda is fine. Co-heirs-no that's not a thing. agree it's just Heirs.

Cyrus 3:00 PM  

Rex, you're so grumpy. My wife and I loved the puns. Groaners, sure, but smart and they sounded out just fine, including "Flooritduh" and Vergeinyeah." We struggled with "coheir" and a few other clues, but really lots of fun.

Anonymous 4:53 PM  

I had “Ore a gone” for a while and thought, “maybe the writer of this puzzle is from the East Coast and don’t know better.”

Anonymous 9:39 AM  

All of the theme answers kind of cracked me up but I really loved Why oming and Miss is zippy. Was a little thrown off by the “misstated” clue because I got Mississippi first and tried for awhile to fit “Mis” into the theme answers. Overall super enjoyable Sunday!

Anonymous 9:42 AM  

Or if you have a teenage boy in the house talking about how everything is “ballin”…

Anonymous 2:23 AM  

Poor one-syllable Maine

Anonymous 10:40 AM  

Wow. Even Lewis didn't comment. Must really be bad if he can't come up with a fluffy paragraph or two.

spacecraft 1:37 PM  

Shades of Mitch Miller:

"Oh, what did Della wear, boys, what did DELLAWARE? She wore a brand new jersey..." and

"Oh, what did Missy sip, boys, what did Missisip? She sipped a MINISODA..."

Where, indeed, has Oregon? I WISH this puzzle had followed her. A bunch of outlandish puns, filled by more obscure PPPs than I've ever seen in a single grid. I came to the last of about nine naticks, square 109, and disgustedly wrote in J out of spite. Good grief, it was right!

The very definition of a Sunday slog. Score: other.

Wordle birdie. Oh yeah, I'm gonna like this putter.

Anonymous 2:59 PM  

Much better! “What did Della wear, boys?”

Burma Shave 3:47 PM  

BALLER'S WANTS

YEAH, I'm AWARE THAT MADE you MAD,
WHY don't you LETMEGO?
AND I didn't get LAID, IT'SSAD,
DUH, I just EYEDAHOE.

--- LEO ZOLA ERDOS

rondo 4:12 PM  

"Have a pop, gents" - MEN, A SODA.
57a - ITSSAD. YEAH, it is.
The corners get you BABE, YEAH, like ANNA.
Wordle par.

Anonymous 6:01 PM  

I am so tired of this gimmicky dreck. Dies every fucking puzzle need some stupid theme???? ABSOLUTELY NOT!!!!!!

Anonymous 7:21 PM  

As I've said before, if it doesn't make you groan, then it's not punny. And I believe some of these belong in the Ogden Nash Punitentiary Hall of Fame.

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