THEME: STATE FLAG STARS — States are given reviews, with the number of stars corresponding to the number of stars that appear on their flag
Theme answers:
★ A big ditch in a big desert. Big deal. for ARIZONA
RATING: ★ Sin, sun and sand … so? Not worth the gamble. for NEVADA
RATING: ★★★ Graceland and the Great Smoky Mountains. I volunteer to visit again! for TENNESSEE
RATING: ★★★★★★★★ Fresh salmon and spectacular scenery. Go north, young man! for ALASKA
★★★★★★★★★★★★★ Peaches, peanuts and pecan pie. You'll always be on my mind! for GEORGIA
Word of the Day: NYRO (Laura in the Songwriters Hall of Fame) —
Laura Nyro; born Laura Nigro; (October 18, 1947 – April 8, 1997) was an American songwriter and singer. She achieved critical acclaim with her own recordings, particularly the albums Eli and the Thirteenth Confession (1968) and New York Tendaberry (1969), and had commercial success with artists such as Barbra Streisand and the 5th Dimension recording her songs. Wider recognition for her artistry was posthumous, while her contemporaries such as Elton John idolized her. She was praised for her emotive three-octave mezzo-soprano voice.
• • •
Good morning folks! Happy off-schedule Malaika MWednesday to all who celebrate! Tonight I solved this puzzle listening to the soundtrack from Stereophonic, but particularly the song Bright. I listened to it a couple of times, since this puzzle took me longer than usual to get through. I'm excited to read every single comment as I always do and see what y'all thought!
This puzzle was hard, mainly due to the vocabulary, which is not how I like for puzzles to be hard. (Though if I'm honest, I don't like hard puzzles at all.) I figured out the theme and got every theme entry (there were eight of them!) and then had to spend seven-ish minutes guessing letters. Glancing at the puzzle now, OLIO (as clued), ALL IS, DIO, SIDER (as clued), NYRO, ASTA, NADIRS, CIRRO, POME, CEL, IN A SUIT, NAE, DONNA (as clued), ALI G, ALTAIR, CDL, and IPSO were all entries that tripped me up. Okay yikes, I didn't realize it was that many until I wrote them all out :(
My favorite TV hosts, IN A SUIT
Usually, a puzzle ends up with tough vocab like that because the theme constrains the grid in some way. In this puzzle, it was probably the fact that there were eight theme entries throughout, one of which was vertical. And there were some tough letters to work with, like the Z, V, an K. When I'm struggling through a constrained grid, I need the theme to really click with me so that I feel like the pain was worth it. Alas, this theme didn't.
I like the idea of cutesy fake reviews, but the execution on these felt off. The three star review seemed exactly as effusive as the eight and thirteen star reviews. Giving something Eight Stars Out Of Five isn't a known concept (vs "11/10" or "110%" which are both idiomatic to me), so I needed the clue to sell the above-and-beyond-ness. But they just ended up reading like regular good reviews... especially in this age of Instagram Influencers taking one bite out of a bowl of pasta and shrieking that it's the most life-changing show-stopping thing they've EVER had in their WHOLE LIVES!!!!!!! (The review for Georgia low-key felt like a 3.5 star review...)
I like to imagine that the Utz Girl is sisters with Betty Boop
The constructor clearly took care to arrange the states symmetrically in the grid and order them from fewest stars to least. Unfortunately, this type of symmetry is kind of lost on me when you end up having an asymmetric revealer. At that point, I say toss the symmetry away! That would have allowed the puzzle to include perhaps the most famous State With A Star On Its Flag-- Texas!! The theme really felt incomplete without Texas, in my opinion. The star on its flag is its whole thing!!
What did you guys think? Did the theme click with you or no? Was the vocab easy for you or hard? What would your one-star review for Texas look like? (Or maybe a four-star review for Chicago?) (I KNOW that Chicago is not a state btw!!!)
Bullets:
[Catchphrase for Captain Underpants] for TRA LA LA — I adored these books when I was younger. My copies were in tatters. I still remember my prescribed weird name-- Pinky Wafflehead!
[Old T-shirt, maybe] for DUST RAG — I filled this in with no problem, but when I was glancing over the grid to write this post, I kept on reading it as "Du Strag" and thinking it was someone's last name
[Working on a board, perhaps] for IRONING — I had "planing" here at first. Cute clue!
THEME: The HORSE'S MOUTH (56A: From which to hear the real story, as suggested by the starts of 20-, 26- and 51-Across) — theme answers begin with homophones for horse sounds:
Theme answers:
KNICKERBOCKER ("nicker") (20A: Father ___, personification of New York City in old cartoons)
NAYSAYERS ("neigh") (26A: Vocal skeptics)
WINNIE-THE-POOH ("whinny") (51A: Bear who sings "I'm so rumbly in my tumbly")
Word of the Day: LEGIONARY (4D: Roman soldier) —
The Romanlegionary (in Latinlegionarius; pl.: legionarii) was a citizen soldier of the Roman army. These soldiers would conquer and defend the territories of ancient Rome during the late Republic and Principate eras, alongside auxiliary and cavalry detachments. At its height, Roman legionaries were viewed as the foremost fighting force in the Roman world, with commentators such as Vegetius praising their fighting effectiveness centuries after the classical Roman legionary disappeared.
Roman legionaries were recruited from Roman citizens under age 45. They were first predominantly made up of recruits from Roman Italy, but more were recruited from the provinces as time went on. As legionaries moved into newly conquered provinces, they helped Romanize the native population and helped integrate the disparate regions of the Roman Empire into one polity. They enlisted in a legion for 25 years of service, a change from the early practice of enlisting only for a campaign. Legionaries were expected to fight, but they also built much of the infrastructure of the Roman Empire and served as a policing force in the provinces. They built large public works projects, such as walls, bridges, and roads. The legionary's last five years of service were on lighter duties. Once retired, a Roman legionary received a parcel of land or its equivalent in money and often became a politically prominent member of society. (wikipedia)
Secondary Word of the Day:
legionnaire (n.):
a member of a legion, in particular an ancient Roman legion or the French Foreign Legion. (Oxford Languages / google)
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What does the horse say? Well, "neigh," obviously. If you're speaking English and not Horse, then a horse might "whinny." I did not know that a horse could "nicker." If I've seen this word (and I'm sure I have, somewhere, sometime...) it's probably in books about pre-industrial life. A book from Horse Times. But I could've sat here and listed every horse-sound term I know and never gotten to "nicker" (in fact, never gotten past "whinny"). This made no real difference in terms of solving difficulty, since I didn't know horses were involved at all until near the very end, and you didn't have to know horses sounds or have any specific horseology expertise to solve the themers. But it wasn't just the lesser-known horse sound that made KNICKERBOCKER strange to me; I'd also never heard of Father KNICKERBOCKER, and since I hadn't heard of him, I couldn't possibly know that he was the "personification of New York City in old cartoons." I know KNICKERBOCKER as a general (and old-fashioned) term for someone from New York, as well as (obviously) the formal name of anyone playing on the New York basketball team, the New York Knicks. "Knicks" is short for KNICKERBOCKER that I knew. Not a hard answer to infer with a few crosses, but still, kind of tough trivia for a Tuesday. Another thing I didn't know: LEGIONARY. I know "Legionnaire," which is a ... conventioneer of some kind, as well as a famous disease. But when "Legionnaire" wouldn't fit today, I had to wait for crosses to help me get the ending. This is only the second time LEGIONARY has appeared in the NYTXW (the other time was in 2015). The 1-2 punch of KNICKERBOCKER-LEGIONARY alone put this puzzle into somewhat harder territory than the average Tuesday for me. Not uncomfortably so. But so.
The theme idea is simple and cute. I'm weirdly missing the "the" in the phrase "the HORSE'S MOUTH," though. Feels like the revealer clue should at least have "With 'The'" as a qualifier. You'd never hear HORSE'S MOUTH used in this idiomatic, non-veterinary sense without the "The." Otherwise, the theme is solid. Just fine. It's an oversized puzzle (16 rows tall), so if it played a little slower for you today, that's one possible reason why. It definitely played slower for me, but size had nothing to do with it. In addition to the now-legendary LEGIONARY-KNICKERBOCKER debacle, there were other obstacles lying in wait for me today. Not one but two minor TV actors made me stop short and look to the crosses for help. I've at least heard of CHAD Michael Murray—sort of, vaguely (21D: Actor ___ Michael Murray of "One Tree Hill") (side note: why is "Actor" in this clue??). One Tree Hill makes me laugh because that's not just bygone TV, that's bygone network. It started on The WB, which later merged with UPN to form THE CW, which has somehow appeared in the NYTXW only twice despite being a novel and potentially hard-to-parse 5-letter answer THECW (pronounced 'THECK-wuh') (jk). One Tree Hill ran nine seasons!? (2003-12). Wow, the early '00s really are a cultural black hole for me. I actually watched Glee for a time (the first few seasons), but did not know the actors' names beyond crossword-famous LEA Michele (my apologies to NAYA Rivera) (35D: "Glee" actress Rivera). So, I didn't know the actor from the show I did watch, and I did know (kinda sorta) the actor from the show I didn't. Strange. Anyway, the point is that relatively obscure pop culture trivia added another element of slowness today.
There were other small trouble spots. I had no idea what "Completion document" even meant. Just a completely inscrutable phrase to me. And I didn't just need to know what it was, I needed to know its abbrev.? Didn't happen without lots of help from crosses (CERT. = "certificate," I imagine, i.e. a document you might receive upon completing ... something). And then EASE really wanted to be EASY (25A: Smooth sailing, so to speak), which left me with a bygone African country name that I seemed never to have heard of. Me: "... DAIRY? FAIRY? ... ZAIRY!? Oh, right, ZAIRE" (12D: Former name of the Democratic Republic of the Congo). The rest of the puzzle was reasonably smooth sailing (see!), though the clue [Assisted pregnancy procedure, for short] had me thinking of a procedure performed literally at birth, perhaps by a doula or midwife or something, and I was like "ok, what abbr. am I going to not have heard of today!?" But the "procedure" was from way earlier in the pregnancy—it's just IVF, i.e. in vitro fertilization.
NEOPET in the singular seems less than ideal (see yesterday's DORITO / TIDE POD discussion), and again, as with the TV clues, it feels bygone. Having EELY and EGGY in the same grid feels somehow unappetizing, though unatama don (grilled eel with eggs on rice) does sound kind of good. EELY just has a slime factor, as a word. DCAREA also has a slime factor, in that it's arbitrary and bad. It's about as valid as [any city + AREA]. The only metropolitan "___ AREA" that really lands is BAY AREA. You can't have DCAREA and not, say, LAAREA, and you see how dumb that looks (I'm staring at it DUMBLY right now). LAAREA has never appeared in the NYTXW, and yet I somehow like it even better than DCAREA (perhaps because I once lived in the greater LAAREA. DCAREA's one virtue is that it's better than INDC, a four-letter abomination that you see from time to time (LA wins here once again: at least with INLA, you can make it into a plausible partial).
Loved RABBIT HOLE (31D: Internet deep dive, metaphorically) and (to a lesser extent) JACKASSES (10D: Bozos). I also loved how I stupidly parsed "IT'S NOTHING" as "IT's NO [space] THING" and thought "What? Who says that?" I could imagine "AIN'T NO THING" (which is a Toby Keith song as well as an Outkast song (?!)), but "IT'S NO THING" seemed weird. Because it was. Because it wasn't the answer. The answer was "IT'S NOTHING" (33D: "Not a big deal!"). At least I didn't read it as "It's not hing," I guess. That would've been worse. "'HING!?' What's a HING!?" It's nothing.
THEME: TOM, DICK AND HARRY (62A: Trio of average guys, as seen at the ends of 16-, 25- and 48-Across) — last words of three theme answers are the last names of three famous guys named, Tom, Dick, and Harry, respectively:
Theme answers:
CARIBBEAN CRUISE (Tom Cruise) (16A: Island-hopping vacation that might start and end in Miami)
BIG BAD WOLF (Dick Wolf) (25A: Huffer and puffer in a classic fairy tale)
FREESTYLES (Harry Styles) (48A: Raps off the cuff)
Word of the Day: Dick Wolf (see 25A) —
Richard Anthony Wolf (born December 20, 1946) is an American film and television producer, best known for his Law & Order franchise. Since 1990, the franchise has included six police/courtroom dramas and four international spinoffs. He is also creator and executive producer of the Chicago franchise, which since 2012, has included four Chicago-based dramas, and the creator and executive producer of the FBI franchise, which since 2018, has also become a franchise after spinning off two additional series.
Wolf has also written four books. The first, the non-fiction volume Law & Order: Crime Scenes, is a companion to the Law & Order television series. The Intercept,The Execution, and The Ultimatum are works of fiction in a thriller series featuring an NYPD detective named Jeremy Fisk.
About the easiest Downs-only solve I've ever experienced. It's not just that the Down clues were easy, it's that so many of them were short. There's a reason that, with any puzzle, I start in on the short stuff first. In general, the shorter the answer, the easier it is to get. That doesn't mean that short answers can't be hard, just that your odds of scoring a hit are better, especially right out of the box, with a short answer rather than a long one. Get enough short stuff in there, and now you've got traction, and the longer stuff becomes much easier to see. In a Downs-only situation, the short stuff is particularly important, since you have no recourse to the Acrosses. Short Downs are your friends, they're gonna get you access, and today, holy moses are there a lot of short Downs. Of the fifteen Down answers crossing the first (Across) theme answer, twelve (12!) of them are 3s or 4s. Not even 5s, which I also consider "short." 3s and 4s ... for 80% of the crosses. I got every one of those 3s and 4s no problem, but you don't even have to be that successful at first pass. Even if you got only half to 2/3 of those short Downs up top, there's a good chance that long theme answer is going to come into view—that is, it'll be inferrable from the six to eight short Downs that you did get. Once you infer an Across, you can then use its letters to help you get the Downs you couldn't see at first pass. And so on. Anyway, with soooooo much short stuff in the Downs, there was no resistance today. Ran right through this thing.
As for the theme, I like it, or I like the idea of it, anyway. I basically came down the west side of the grid to start, and it was fun to watch the front end of the revealer come into view, and then to have that "aha" when I got enough initial letters (five?) to throw the whole thing across the grid. Not many things start "TOMDI-," it turns out. Do young(er-than-me) people know the phrase "any Tom, Dick, or Harry?" Feels like something I learned from old songs or Warner Bros. cartoons as a kid. I don't know how widely used the term is these days as a way of talking about "any rando guy(s)." Looks like it's a song in the Broadway musical Kiss Me, Kate? Huh. I did not know that. Looks like the phrase has its origin in the 17th century, though different names were used then. Also, apparently "TOM, DICK AND HARRY" is also a mnemonic for med students:
English-speaking medical students use the phrase in memorizing the order of an artery, and a nerve, and the three tendons of the flexor retinaculum in the lower leg: the T, D, A, N and H of Tom, Dick, and Harry correspond to tibialis posterior, flexor digitorum longus, posterior tibial artery, tibial nerve, and flexor hallucis longus. This mnemonic is used to remember the order of the tendons from anterior to posterior at the level of the medial malleolus just posterior to the malleolus. (wikipedia)
Seems way fussier than Every Good Boy Does Fine or Roy G. Biv, but what do I know. I'm not, nor ever have claimed to be, a [squints] flexor retinaculum expert.
I only have two minor notes on the theme execution. Not complaints, just ... notes. Neutral comments. One is that CRUISE and WOLF are free-standing words in their respective answers, whereas STYLES is a word part (the latter half of a single word). The other is that I could not remember who Dick Wolf was. He's one of the most successful TV producers in history (the Law & Order, Chicago, and FBI franchises, among other things), and though I've heard his name before, today... that was not who I thought "Dick Wolf" was. Instead I was imagining some other Dick. Who was that guy who worked for Clinton and then wrote a thinl- ... PRIMARY COLORS! Oh my god I've been sitting here for fifteen minutes trying to remember the name of that damned book and it finally came to me, mid-sentence. OK, so who wrote Primary Colors? [googles]. Joe Klein!?!? That's not a Dick. Who am I th- DICK MORRIS! Is that somebody? [googles] Oh, right, the political consultant. Joe Klein wrote the roman à clef about about Clinton's first presidential campaign (1992), while Dick Morris was the campaign manager for Clinton's second presidential campaign (1996). My brain has fused these guys into one unholy '90s political operative: Joedick Morklein. My brain has also, mercifully, made me forget the specificities of most of '90s politics. Thank you, brain.
I don't have much to say about the fill in this one. The longer Downs tend to be the hard things to get in a Downs-only solve, but SPRINGTIME was a flat-out gimme (no crosses needed), and NUT ALLERGY was pretty easy to build from the ground up—I was able to infer the Acrosses at its back end, so -RGY led easily to NUT ALLERGY, and from there it was just a matter of figuring out TRACE (weirdly, one of the toughest Downs for me to get today), and I was done. Besides TRACE, I think ALBUM ART and DETACHES were the only Downs that forced me to stop and think a little. Not sure what I wanted for ALBUM ART. Wanted something like DITCHES (?) for DETACHES. I guess I was thinking of [Breaks off] in terms of ending a relationship (abruptly). All the other Downs seemed obvious to me. Surprised ADA got such an old-fashioned clue (64D: Nabokov novel) (superfamiliar if you've been doing xwords forever, but probably less so if you're younger). "Momager" is perhaps the worst portmanteau of all time (10D: "Momager" of the Kardashians = KRIS). Is it "mom-ager," like "teenager," or "momager," like mom + manager? Or mom + dowager?? I assume it's mom-ager, but in that case it really (really) needs the hyphen. It's an unrecognizable word blob without it. I do not like TIDE POD very much in the singular (this is how I feel about DORITO every time I see it), but it's hard to deny it's a thing. The product itself is plural, but what else are you going to call one unit of said product?
The Guild is asking that readers honor their picket line by boycotting the Times’ selection of games, including Wordle and the daily digital crossword, and to avoid other digital extensions such as the Cooking app.
Annie Shields, a campaign lead for the News Guild of New York, encouraged people to sacrifice their streaks in the wildly popular Wordle and Connections games in order to support the strike.
There were some anti-union talking points being credulously repeated in the comments recently, so just to be clear (per Vanity Fair): "The union said Tech Guild workers' main concerns that remain unresolved are: remote/hybrid work protections; “just cause” job protections, which “the newsroom union has had for decades”; limits on subcontracting; and pay equity/fair pay."
Since the picket line is "digital," it would appear to apply only to Games solved in the NYT digital environment—basically anything you solve on your phone or on the NYT website per se. If you get the puzzle in an actual dead-tree newspaper, or if you solve it outside the NYT's proprietary environment (via a third-party app, as I do), then technically you're not crossing the picket line by solving. You can honor the digital picket line by not using the Games app (or the Cooking app) at all until the strike is resolved. No Spelling Bee, no Connections ... none of it. My morning Wordle ritual is was very important to me, but ... I'll survive, I assume.
THEME: "From Start to Finish" — words with prefixes are made into two-word phrases by detaching the prefix and making it a second word. This results in wacky phrases, clued wackily: Theme answers:
STANDARD SUB (23A: Six-inch or footlong?)
PENSIVE EX (25A: Who might tearfully wonder "Were we just not meant to be ..."?)
MANAGED MICRO (27A: Made it through Econ 101?)
PENULTIMATE ANTE (42A: Buy-in the round before going all in?)
AFRICAN PAN (68A: Vessel for cooking jollof rice or injera bread?)
SOLVING DIS (70A: "Next time try reading the clue!" or "Stick to sudoku!"?)
APOCALYPTIC POST (87A: Something in a doomscroller's feed?)
COMPLETE AUTO (109A: The engine, the steering wheel, the catalytic converter, all of it?)
VISION PRO (112A: Eye doctor?)
HEATED SUPER (114A: Someone shouting that maybe YOU should try fixing your apartment?)
Word of the Day: EDGAR LEE Masters (19D: Masters of the written word?) —
Edgar Lee Masters (August 23, 1868 – March 5, 1950) was an American attorney, poet, biographer, and dramatist. He is the author of Spoon River Anthology, The New Star Chamber and Other Essays, Songs and Satires, The Great Valley, The Serpent in the Wilderness, An Obscure Tale, The Spleen, Mark Twain: A Portrait, Lincoln: The Man, and Illinois Poems. In all, Masters published twelve plays, twenty-one books of poetry, six novels and six biographies, including those of Abraham Lincoln, Mark Twain, Vachel Lindsay, and Walt Whitman.
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From start to finish, this just wasn't for me. I don't mind a simple theme concept—they can be very effective and yield genuinely amusing results. But the results here just felt flat. The theme was easy to understand but the answers were still somewhat difficult to grasp on a case by case basis. Solving them ended up being frequently tough without being at all rewarding. The clues ended up mattering very little, once I got the basic idea. You put the prefix at the end, OK. But mostly that just required me to infer the prefix from the root word or the root word for the prefix. The clues were there ... but they were usually either way too plain ([Eye doctor?]) or way too cryptic ([Someone shouting that maybe YOU should try fixing your apartment?]) to be much help. You can tell when a Sunday theme is particularly weak because we get "treated" to an excess, a surfeit, a glut of theme answers. "Unsatisfying, yes, but also plentiful!" Ten times blah is still blah. You can stack themers and do whatever kind of architectural mumbo jumbo you want, but none of it matters if the core concept doesn't pay off, and today, it really doesn't. I don't even know what "superheated" means, beyond just ... heated ... a lot? "In thermodynamics, superheating (sometimes referred to as boiling retardation, or boiling delay) is the phenomenon in which a liquid is heated to a temperature higher than its boiling point without boiling" (wikipedia). Huh. Exciting.
As for the (non-theme) fill and clues, they weren't helping make the experience any more entertaining. "YES, BABE"? (101A: "Sure thing, dear"). That doesn't seem like a very coherent, standalone expression, any more than "SURE, BABE" or "OK, BABE" or "LET'S GO TO ARBY'S, BABE" does. You just wrote a clue with a synonym for "YES" and a synonym for "BABE" and then tried to pass it off as a standalone thing. "YES, DEAR" and "YES, MAAM" and "YES, SIR" and "YES I DO" and "YES WE CAN" and "YES, PLEASE," these are all coherent. "YES, BABE" is something one might say, but it does not have standalone status. Boo.
And GET A TIP!?!?!? (2D: What servers and sleuths each hope to do). I want to say this is a real "EAT A SANDWICH"-type answer, but it's actually worse than EAT A SANDWICH, which itself was supposed to be hyperbolically bad in the first place. ONE MONTH is a horrible standalone answer, especially with ONE TON already in the grid. The I LOSE / I WIN thing is bad enough when just one of them appears in the grid (it's never clear whether it'll be "I LOST!" / "I WON!" or "I LOSE!" / "I WIN!"). Cross-referencing just doubled the annoyance. "WAS I?" and "CAN'T I?" feels like going to the interrogative "I?" well one too many times. And who says "CAN'T I?" The equivalent of "Pretty please?" is "CAN I?" not "CAN'T I?" The kids I've known are not this linguistically fancy or formal. On and on these little annoyances kept coming, with very little in the way of fun fill to lighten things up. I really enjoyed "I'M DYING!" and (as clued) UPSTAIRS (82D: Above the strike zone, to a baseball announcer) and GLARE (76A: Daytime annoyance while watching TV). I don't think there was a single other thing in the grid that made me smile. Oh, ALT TEXT is pretty good. Not smile good, but original for sure (Just looked and it is, in fact, a debut).
Do people know how EDGAR LEE Masters is? I'm really torn on that answer, as I love Masters's Spoon River Anthology, a moving and haunting group of elegies, but I hate EDGAR LEE as an answer, in that it's a very long name fragment. It's like having ARTHUR CONAN as an answer. Bah. But again, can't recommend Spoon River Anthology enough. As for the other names in this grid ... LUANN (57A: ___ de Lesseps of the "Real Housewives" franchise) and COLMAN (69D: ___ Domingo, Best Actor nominee for 2023's "Rustin") were complete unknowns, but nothing else gave me much trouble, that I can remember. It's so weird to me that not only do I not know COLMAN Domingo, I also have absolutely no recollection of the (very recent!) movie he got an Academy Award nomination for. Rustin? How did that get by me? Embarrassing (for me). I really thought I was paying close attention to movies these past few years, but I guess the film universe is just too big for my brain to take in everything. Oh, wait, it was a Netflix movie. There's the problem. If it lives exclusively in streaming land, I tend to miss it. Oh, and now I remember that I didn't know who BAYARD RUSTIN was when his complete name appeared in the puzzle earlier this year (just last month), and some people shouted at me "how is that possible, did you not see the movie?" and I was like "what?" and now here we are. Let's see if any of this sticks the next time BAYARD or RUSTIN (or COLMAN or DOMINGO) appears in the grid. I did know TINA Turner (4D: Turner backed by the Ikettes) and Kenneth BRANAGH (3D: Kenneth of "Oppenheimer") and Punxsutawney PHIL (40A: Groundhog of renown) and EL GRECO (59D: Young disciple of an old Titian) and Jacques CHIRAC (78D: Former French president Jacques) and Stanley "Stella!" KOWALSKI (83D: Brando's role in "A Streetcar Named Desire"), which was probably the name I most enjoyed seeing today, if only for the fact that it started Brando playing on a loop in my head:
Here are some more clues and answers of note, arranged in "bullet" list form:
38A: Stirrup's place (EAR) — lots of ear puns in crossword clues. The stirrup is a tiny bone in your EAR that helps transmit sound vibrations. You've got a hammer and anvil in there too. And a drum, of course. And a canal. You can do ear-based clue humor all day long, and the NYTXW definitely has. I saw right through this clue, immediately.
52A: Rum, in Spanish (RON) — I thought "rum" here was going to have its slangy adjectival meaning ("strange, odd, unusual"—chiefly British), but no, it's just the drink. Very straightforward English-to-Spanish translation.
74A: Yellow-green soft drink per the stylization on its packaging (MTN DEW) — so ugly. Definitely a Fagliano-era word (debuted in August, and here it is again). Are we better off with MTN DEW in the grid? Especially given that the clue is going to always have to add the qualification that the answer involves "stylized" spelling? We are not. Pour the MTN DEW into the harbor.
84A: N.Y.C.-based sports channel (MSG) — stands for Madison Square Garden. Knicks, Rangers, Islanders, Sabres, Devils. Lotta hockey, basically. The puzzle really leaned into regionality today with this one and WAWA (50D: East Coast convenience store chain), which is a Philly phenomenon that has made its way along the eastern seaboard but hasn't gone west of Pennsylvania at all, as far as I can tell. "The WAWA business began in 1803 as an iron foundry." There's your useless fact for the day. Thanks, wikipedia!
100A: Asia's so-called "___ countries" (STAN) — the phrasing on this clue absolutely killed me. I know the countries in question, but they're just "the STANs" (you know, AfghaniSTAN, PakiSTAN, TurkmeniSTAN, etc.). I've never heard this so-called quote unquote "STAN countries" so I was sure there was some Asian country group I simply hadn't heard of. The "STAR countries," maybe (countries with stars on their flags??).
33D: Not supporting, maybe (MAIN) — another tough one. "Not supporting" looks like it means "not in favor of," "not backing," "against," something like that. But here it refers to roles in a theatrical or TV or movie production. There are supporting roles and there are MAIN roles. I think LEAD is a better counterpart for "supporting" than MAIN is, but MAIN still works.
67D: Thunder shower? (ESPN) — oof. Hyper-specific clue for a very general answer. How much of ESPN's programming involves showing The OKC Thunder basketball team, specifically? <1%? You are more than forgiven if you found this clue inscrutable.
101D: Broadway gossip (YENTE) — thought maybe there was a word for gossip about Broadway, but no, it's just a "gossip" made famous by a Broadway musical, namely Fiddler on the Roof. YENTE is the "matchmaker."
Since the holiday season is coming up, and since I've been getting a lot of "what other high-quality puzzles are out there besides the NYTX?" questions lately, I want to take this opportunity to plug The American Values Club Crossword (AVCX), which expanded in recent years from its brilliantly inventive and modern "classic" crossword and now includes two regular-sized crosswords (15x15), two smaller crosswords, a cryptic crossword (yesssss!), and a trivia quiz. A whole team of great constructors and editors put these things together, including Francis Heaney, Wyna Liu, Paolo Pasco, Quiara Vasquez, Ada Nicolle, Rafael Musa, Stella Zawistowski ("Stella!"), Nate Cardin, Aimee Lucido, and many more, all under the leadership of one of my favorite crossword editors, Ben Tausig. That's six puzzles a week from the best puzzlemakers in the business. Standard subscription rate right now is $44/year, but there are various rates based on your ability to pay. They're doing things right over there. AVCX is one of only a handful of non-NYTXW puzzles that I solve regularly. Expand your puzzle horizons! Get yourself a subscription, or get one for someone you love. Very much worth it! (Hey, look, there's even a free trial subscription if you want)
I'm going to start plugging crossword-related gift ideas in the coming weeks, so if you've got puzzle-related things to sell, or you have any crossword books or subscriptions or throw pillows or whatever that you'd recommend, shoot me an email and let me know about them.
Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld
P.S. all discussion of EMEET was omitted from this write-up for your protection.
***
Important Note:
As of Monday, 11/4/24, the NYT Tech Guild is on strike.
The Guild is asking that readers honor their picket line by boycotting the Times’ selection of games, including Wordle and the daily digital crossword, and to avoid other digital extensions such as the Cooking app.
Annie Shields, a campaign lead for the News Guild of New York, encouraged people to sacrifice their streaks in the wildly popular Wordle and Connections games in order to support the strike.
There were some anti-union talking points being credulously repeated in the comments recently, so just to be clear (per Vanity Fair): "The union said Tech Guild workers' main concerns that remain unresolved are: remote/hybrid work protections; “just cause” job protections, which “the newsroom union has had for decades”; limits on subcontracting; and pay equity/fair pay."
Since the picket line is "digital," it would appear to apply only to Games solved in the NYT digital environment—basically anything you solve on your phone or on the NYT website per se. If you get the puzzle in an actual dead-tree newspaper, or if you solve it outside the NYT's proprietary environment (via a third-party app, as I do), then technically you're not crossing the picket line by solving. You can honor the digital picket line by not using the Games app (or the Cooking app) at all until the strike is resolved. No Spelling Bee, no Connections ... none of it. My morning Wordle ritual is was very important to me, but ... I'll survive, I assume.
Two constructor names I have come to look forward to individually ... together on one byline. Nice. This is a very well-made puzzle, which I mostly enjoyed. The parts I didn't enjoy had very little to do with grid or clue quality and everything to do with the fact that I have a deep and admittedly only semi-rational aversion to Millennialspeak. Not to Millennials, per se, whom I tend to think of as ... well, just people. Dividing people by generation doesn't do most of us any good, so I try not to think that way. And yet. Yet. When it comes to certain expressions, slang, etc., there's no question that generational divides exist, and I guarantee you no one my age ever called their kid a THREENAGER (16A: Portmanteau for a moody and strong-willed toddler). What a ridiculous, unnecessary word. You already have "toddler," why did you need this other thing? Are you so portmanteau-deprived? I am admittedly not searching too hard, but the earliest references I see are circa 2016. Help me, OED! (Sorry, OED has only SCREENAGER (which was my first thought, actually) and TWEENAGER (which obviously couldn't be true, given the age restrictions)). The term THREENAGER also seems to be playing on negative stereotypes of actual teenagers, i.e. defiant, strong-willed, etc. so boo to that. The whole thing seems like a marketing gimmick. "We invented a new kind of toddler, buy this thing, take this advice, worry more than you already are!" The kid is three. Soon he'll be four. Come on.
After THREENAGER came STRUGGLE BUS, another term I never heard until I was well into middle age (10D: Something the floundering are said to be on). I never liked it because initially I thought it was playing on the term "short bus," the term for the bus used to transport kids with mental or physical disabilities to school. So STRUGGLE BUS seemed inherently offensive. The term appears to be of uncertain, early 21st-century origin (online OED's got nothing), and I doubt it's actually offensive, but even if I wanted to use it now (and I don't), I just can't. It's ruined for me. And then, after those answers, after THREENAGER, andSTRUGGLE BUS, after I already thought to myself "this is a heavily Millennialspeak puzzle...," came the Millennialspeak term I hate most of all: ADULTING (19A: Making a car payment, dusting the living room, scheduling a doctor's appointment, etc.). There's something so whinily self-infantilizing about it. Nothing makes me want to shout "Grow up!" more than someone talking about ADULTING. It's not cosplay! You get old. Then you die. Childhood is meant to be left behind and fondly remembered. Aging isn't bad—desperately clinging to youth is. Look, I'm just being honest about the gut reactions of the cranky old man who lives inside me. I believe only good and kind and warm things about Millennials as human beings, and I love everything about them, except for their invented vocabulary, which is frequently embarrassing. Avocado toast, however—delicious.
But less about getting off my lawn and more about how generally beautiful this puzzle is. It's full of freshness and surprises, and I suspect that even the slang that made me wince will give others great joy. I CAN TAKE IT! In fact, I'll take any puzzle that puts PANDA CAM alongside ALOO GOBI. Imagine eating delicious Indian food while watching adorable pandas (I am imagining it right now, and it's great). The NE corner is only so-so, but every other corner is bursting with life (or bursting with blood, in the case of the NOSEBLEEDS)). NOSEBLEEDSwould be better at the top of the grid, but I like that CRAWL SPACE is down low where it belongs (I also love the clue: 54A: Very short story?). There's a clunky answer or two, here and there. KNEELAT, for instance, is a bit ungainly, and NOVATE ... well, I don't know what that is, but "legalese" is not exactly rich ground for fun fill (44D: Replace with a new contract in legalese). But this puzzle made me remember ICHIRO (good) and Ed "TOO TALL" Jones (good) and—once again, for the second time this week—Agnès Varda! (18A: Domaine d'Agnès Varda). So glad to see the NYTXW finally coming around on her. It's the Age of Varda! I hope my gushing about her at every opportunity helped you piece together CINÉ (the French word for "cinema") today.
It's note time:
11A: Plant also known as Pisum sativum (PEA) — I want at least one of you to have written in POT ("sativa" is a strain of cannabis).
17A: Actress Shawkat who played Maeby on "Arrested Development" (ALIA) — first thing I wrote in the grid. She's this century's EERO, or ELIA, or ENYA (technically ENYA is this century's ENYA, but you get my point). Straight-up crosswordese. And you no longer have to go to the Latin phrase "inter ALIA" to clue ALIA, hurray. I last saw ALIA Shawkat in Blink Twice (2024), where she plays Jess, a woman whose bright yellow lighter (with her name on it) becomes an important recurring object in the film.
1D: Ride arranged on one's own (KIT CAR) — this is a car you assemble yourself. So "arranged" as in "physically put together," not "ordered (like an Uber)."
47A: Accomplish with precision (DOTOAT) — allow me to parse this for you: it's "DO TO A 'T'." Four words. I know, it's awful, let's not think about it. (Or, you can have fun pronouncing it "doe tote," as I'm doing in my head currently)
34A: Get hot and bothered (SWELTER) — first thought: "STEAM UP." The clue wanted me to think about sex so I thought about sex, what can I say?
48A: Purchase on an island? (GAS) — those little areas where you pump your GAS are sometimes called "islands." Hope you didn't write in LEI here.
53A: Falsify, in a way (COOK) — as in "COOK the books" (i.e. falsify financial records). I had -OOK and wrote in ROOK. So I was in the Fraud ballpark, but just ... off.
2D: Mononymous baseball star who played 28 seasons (ICHIRO) — I don't think of anyone whose last name is well known and frequently used as "mononymous." But yes, he's commonly referred to by ICHIRO ... so I guess it's OK. Is SHOHEI mononymous too now? PELE, now he's mononymous, as I cannot tell you any other part of his name. See also, once again, ENYA. (the "e" key just went out on my wireless keyboard, R.I.P. little keyboard, hello new tech expenditure)
51D: Musical counterpart of pizzicato (ARCO) — ARCO = played with the bow (pizzicato = plucked with the fingers)
41A: Like i, say (NONREAL) — very proud of getting this one fairly quickly, of the -EAL. I know "i" as the square root of "-1"—thus, a NONREAL number. Here's a more technical definition. Mathematicians will no doubt chime in in the comments. They tend to be big chimers when their field is at issue ("As a mathematician, ...”).
56D: Shot one waits to knock back (LOB) — alcoholic misdirection, my favorite kind of misdirection. Obviously the real context is tennis.
Gonna go knock back several shots of coffee now. Not gonna wait. Take care, see you next time.
Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld
***
Important Note:
As of Monday, 11/4/24, the NYT Tech Guild is on strike.
The Guild is asking that readers honor their picket line by boycotting the Times’ selection of games, including Wordle and the daily digital crossword, and to avoid other digital extensions such as the Cooking app.
Annie Shields, a campaign lead for the News Guild of New York, encouraged people to sacrifice their streaks in the wildly popular Wordle and Connections games in order to support the strike.
There were some anti-union talking points being credulously repeated in the comments recently, so just to be clear (per Vanity Fair): "The union said Tech Guild workers' main concerns that remain unresolved are: remote/hybrid work protections; “just cause” job protections, which “the newsroom union has had for decades”; limits on subcontracting; and pay equity/fair pay."
Since the picket line is "digital," it would appear to apply only to Games solved in the NYT digital environment—basically anything you solve on your phone or on the NYT website per se. If you get the puzzle in an actual dead-tree newspaper, or if you solve it outside the NYT's proprietary environment (via a third-party app, as I do), then technically you're not crossing the picket line by solving. You can honor the digital picket line by not using the Games app (or the Cooking app) at all until the strike is resolved. No Spelling Bee, no Connections ... none of it. My morning Wordle ritual is was very important to me, but ... I'll survive, I assume.
A long time ago, I was solving this puzzle and got stuck at an unguessable (to me) crossing: N. C. WYETH crossing NATICK at the "N"—I knew WYETH but forgot his initials, and NATICK ... is a suburb of Boston that I had no hope of knowing. It was clued as someplace the Boston Marathon runs through (???). Anyway, NATICK— the more obscure name in that crossing—became shorthand for an unguessable cross, esp. where the cross involves two proper nouns, neither of which is exceedingly well known. NATICK took hold as crossword slang, and the term can now be both noun ("I had a NATICK in the SW corner...") or verb ("I got NATICKED by 50A / 34D!")
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