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We are family! / MON 7-14-25 / What streets and avenues often make, collectively / Lois Lane and co-workers at the Daily Planet
Monday, July 14, 2025
Constructor: Christina Iverson
Relative difficulty: Easy (6:28, solving on the train and my phone screen is broken)
THEME: HARRY STYLES — English pop singer whose name sounds like a goofy hint to the ends of 17- and 38-Across and 11- and 29-Down (i.e., "hair-y styles")
Theme answers:
Word of the Day: RAZZIE (Film award that has had the categories "Worst Excuse for an Actual Movie" and "Most Flatulent Teen-Targeted Movie") —
- [Textile pattern that resembles braided wicker] for BASKET WEAVE
- [Sledding event that debuted in the 2022 Winter Olympics] for MONOBOB
- [Gourmet bread for a hamburger] for PRETZEL BUN
- Is a pretzel bun gourmet?? I was trying to make "brioche bun" work here at first.
- [Steinbeck novella set on a horse ranch] for THE RED PONY
Word of the Day: RAZZIE (Film award that has had the categories "Worst Excuse for an Actual Movie" and "Most Flatulent Teen-Targeted Movie") —
Three people have won both a Razzie and an Oscar the same weekend: composer Alan Menken in 1993, screenwriter Brian Helgeland in 1997, and actress Sandra Bullock in 2010, though all three won for different films (e.g., Helgeland won a Razzie for The Postman and an Oscar for L.A. Confidential).
• • •
The theme was cute! I like when a name is sort of re-parsed to describe the theme answers-- my favorite example I can think of was the revealer "Shonda Rhimes" where the theme answers all rhymed with "Shonda." If you have a favorite, describe it in the comments!! I haven't been solving as long as y'all so I might not have heard it. Name puzzles are generally only fun if you know who the person is, so knowing Harry Styles probably also contributed to me thinking this is cute. I actually just read a romance novel (Big Fan, by Alexandra Romanoff) where the main character was a stand-in for Harry Styles... This happens a lot, btw, and I always wonder if he reads them.
(Btw, if you've never heard Harry Styles, I highly recommend his cover of Sledgehammer which you can listen to below. The song starts at 48 seconds.)
There are a lot of options for the theme answers here. I already mentioned "brioche bun" as a possibility, and there are tons of other buns, like cinnamon buns and potato buns. And "bob" could have been something like "Sideshow Bob" or "Thingumy and Bob." Any other theme answers you can think of?
Bullets:
- ["Eventually..."] for ONE DAY — I would have loved to see this clued in reference to the book / miniseries, but I always want more pop culture references than other people do
- [Like a kid in a "Sister" T-shirt vis-à-vis one in a "Sister" onesie] for OLDER — I like when a clue tells a story like this!
- [Alternative to Gramma or Granny] for NAN — What did you guys call your grandmother? I called my mom's mom Grandma and my dad's mom Dadima. I just read a book ("Thank You for Listening," by Julia Whelan) where the protagonist calls her grandmother "Blah Blah" which honestly sounds mildly insulting to me...
P.S. My uncle once commented that "all" of my NYT puzzles have a pop star in one of the long slots which I thought was a hilarious demonstration of our memory perception. (Exactly one of my seven NYT puzzles has had a pop star in one of the long slots.) I wonder if he thought that I wrote this one.
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6 comments:
Medium for me. MONOBOB was a WOE and HUt before HUP cost some nanoseconds.
Reasonably smooth grid, cute/quirky theme and reveal, liked it.
Croce Solvers - Croce’s Freestyle #1027 was on the easy side for me. No major hang ups. Good luck!
Hi Malaika! Happy Malaika Monday.
I tried solving this down clues only. Before you unleash the hate, let me remind you that I didn't bother doing Mondays for quite a while because they were too easy, and just whuff! they were done. When I started solving down clues only, Monday became maybe my favorite day... challenging and different. Today I came close to succeeding, but the clusterf**ck around square 23 did me in. I have never heard of EZRA, RAZZIE, or PREZELBUN so I gave up and looked at some across clues.
I have also never heard of MONOBOB. That's a joke, right? Google Ngrams returns "ngrams not found" for that, with or without a space. I wonder if the NYT bigwigs realized Mondays were too easy and difficulted (is that a word) them up to an absurd extent.
Anyway, inferred the theme from the last words of the themers, although it was tough because they were mixed between acrosses and downs. And finally read the clue for 61 across! Um... okay, I guess.
Maybe I’ll be an outlier but easy? No way. This was an insanely difficult Monday. Monobob!? WTF. Pretzel bun? Never eaten nor seen one. Lars and the real girl? Nope. More than double my usual time. I’m posting because I’ll bet there were many solvers like me who found this challenging. We will see.
Okay, I’d like to say something really nice about this puzzle. After all, it features my grandson’s name at 47A. Hi, EUGENE. But it also had EVAL at 2D. Is there anything millennials won’t shorten? GOSHNO, there isn’t. Who actually says Gosh? Your 100 year old aunt? I don’t know if I’ve ever actually heard it in the wild. GOSH, gee whiz, darn, drat, all seem really ancient to me and yet they keep appearing in my puzzle. It may be time to print some of the expletives that people really use.
And 23 D, oh joy, another bible book. How many of these are there? A hundred? A thousand? Please keep in mind we weren’t all raised by nuns or Jesuits. Some of us aren’t even christian. And why would you blush while contemplating a 43D NUDE by, say, Titian or Ingres, unless you were schooled by nuns or Jesuits. There is nothing titillating about this stuff. Do you go back to your pensione in Florence and flagellate yourself after seeing Michelangelo’s David? I hope not.
The revealer kind of sucks. Weave, bob and bun all sort of work as hairy styles, but pony? How about ponytail? Almost works.
Trying to find something positive to say here. Perhaps I should say that I’ve never heard of a PRETZELBUN - and I’m a pretty decent grill cook - but it sounds good. I’m always looking for a way to avoid using those crappy supermarket hamburger buns and I hate baking my own brioche. And though I felt it failed as a themer, I fondly remember reading THEREDPONY in junior high.
And, finally, while I was carrying out my errands today in my truck, Spotify, as it often does, decided to apply one of its weird algorithms and insert Sister Sledge’s “We are Family” into my Sly Stone playlist, right behind “It’s a Family Affair”. I’ve been happily humming it all day. So, no, it’s not that I’m cranky - I mean Sister Sledge, right - it just wasn’t a stellar puzzle.
My five favorite original clues from last week
(in order of appearance):
1. Tales are related about them (9)
2. Cylindrical grain holders (4)
3. Rush to find a mate? (5)(5)
4. Member of a sub-Saharan matriarchal clan (5)
5. Adjunct faculty? (5)(5)
CAMPFIRES
COBS
SPEED CHESS
HYENA
SIXTH SENSE
My favorite used-before clues from last week:
[Alternative to French] (5)
[Went from 0 to 60?] (4)
RANCH
AGED
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