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Combatants in the Titanomachy / TUES 8-26-25 / They spike during the holidays / What you'd expect when you're expecting? / Mother's daughter's daughter, perhaps
Tuesday, August 26, 2025
Hi, everyone, it’s Clare back for our regularly programmed last Tuesday of August! Hope everyone is staying cool and enjoying these last days of summer. I’ve certainly enjoyed watching my Liverpool win their first two games of the season (we won’t go into detail on how they won and how nail-biting and not fun they were at times — a win is a win!). I discovered some good trails that aren’t too far away from my apartment, so my puppy and I have been on a few hikes lately, and she seems to love the trails. And now I’ve got the U.S. Open tennis to watch (Go, Carlitos and Coco!), with the NFL not far behind (Go, Steelers! But not Aaron Rodgers).
Anywho, on to the puzzle…
Relative difficulty: Medium (maybe on the harder side of medium)
THEME: ASYMMETRY (66A: Unusual feature of this puzzle … or, when parsed as two words (1,8), another unusual feature of this puzzle — The only A's present in the puzzle form a large letter “A” in a grid that isn’t symmetrical
Theme answers:
- N/A
V-Day is a global activist movement to end violence against women and girls started by author, playwright and activist Eve Ensler. V-Day began on February 14, 1998, when the very first V-Day benefit performance of Ensler's play The Vagina Monologues took place in NYC, raising over $250k for local anti-violence groups. V-Day was formed and became a 501(c)(3) organization with a mission to raise funds and awareness to end violence against all women and girls (cisgender, transgender, and those who hold fluid identities that are subject to gender-based violence). Through V-Day, activists stage royalty-free benefit performances of The Vagina Monologues "to fund local programs, support safe houses, rape crisis centers, and domestic violence shelters, change laws to protect women and girls, and educate local communities to raise awareness and change social attitudes toward violence against women" during the month of February. The 'V' in V-Day stands for Victory, Valentine and Vagina. (WIki)
• • •
Gimme an A! Gimme another A! And another — well, a bunch more. The reveal of the “A” across the puzzle was clever, and the construction is really quite impressive, even if I ultimately didn’t love the puzzle. The constructor gets points (maybe even an “A”) for there not being any A's other than the ones used to form the A across the puzzle. But this really was a themeless puzzle that the software drew a big A on at the end. (What happened for those who solved on paper, I wonder?) I found this to be a slightly harder Tuesday than usual. Maybe it’s that there wasn’t a theme to maybe help you out if you were stuck in a place or two. I may have just had a hard time getting going because I didn’t know LIANE (6D: Former NPR host Hansen) or TATI (14D: Comic actor Jacques) at the top. And then the several long acrosses added a layer of difficulty. Thankfully, I took a COG SCI (24A: Study of the mind, for short) class in college, but that one might’ve tripped some people up.
Of the long acrosses, the most interesting was SALMONBERRY (60A: Fruit traditionally eaten with the fish it's named for). It’s apparently common in the Pacific Northwest and looks like a quite tasty berry. I will say most recipes that I found for this show the berries used in some sort of dessert, but I’m not from the Pacific Northwest, so who knows. The rest of the long acrosses were just kind of there. ECONOMIST (12A: British weekly on business, politics and culture, with "The") was fine. PROUD PAPAS (16A: Ones taking baby pictures in the delivery room, maybe) was cute. I hated NET EFFECT (20A: Overall impact) with a passion for some reason — it's just so ugly. And PREORDERED (64A: Like goods bought before they hit the shelves) feels somewhat blah. But those sorts of words seem to be the price you pay if you want to work out there being a giant A for your theme of ASYMMETRY in the puzzle.
There was some crosswordese and a couple answers that I didn’t care for — such as LIE (51A: That's unbelievable!) and WHOA (53A: "That's unbelievable!") clued essentially identically and I’D BET (52D: "My gut says …"). AS PER (7D: In line with) just looks bad. And RELEASE ME (34D: Cry to a captor) feels like a rather tame thing for someone to say who's been tied up. But the fill was fine, if a bit boring.
I will say I loved the clue for NORM (56D: What you'd expect when you're expecting?). SELF (8D: Beginning of consciousness?) was also funny. I had fun seeing TUFTS (19A: University just north of Harvard) in the puzzle because my cousin went there, and it seems like a great school. BLEAT (39A: What the shepherd heard, perhaps) was cute.
Misc.:
Signed, Clare Carroll, screaming AAAAAAA!!! as Liverpool’s 16-year-old scores a goal in the 11th minute of stoppage time to win the game
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Misc.:
- Where the sidewalk ends is with Shel Silverstein (not the CURB (24D))
- Seeing ONE L (25: First-year legal student, informally) in the puzzle takes me back. And it’s to not-very-fond memories of law school! Man alive, I’m glad that’s over with.
- I like the slight connection that this puzzle constructor’s last name is Curry, and we’ve got TREY (Shot that made its N.B.A. debut in 1979, slangily) in the puzzle, which is the shot that Steph Curry is known for!
- I would’ve said BLONDEs (44D: Marilyn Monroe or Britney Spears) have more fun. But I dyed my hair red a few years ago and haven’t looked back since.
- In the Majors (a level up from AAA (40A)) at the Dodgers game last night, V (no, not A) from BTS threw out the first pitch and did quite a good job! You can see the video here. My dad (who actually knows probably very little about this) guesses the pitch was probably around 75 mph.
- It was nice to have both MOM (61D: Certain parent) and PROUD PAPAS (16A) represented in the puzzle.
And that's all from me! See you in September.
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23 comments:
How is a Mother's daughter's daughter a niece?
On the tough side for me. I was moving along at a medium pace until I hit the SW. SALMON BERRY and VDAY were WOEs, the revealer clue was no help, and the clues for NORM and ID BET were a little tricky.
An impressive feat of construction but, like @Clare, I was not that fond of this one. The giant A didn’t to much for me and as @Clare pointed out the fill was “a bit boring”.
Hmmm...the scarlet letter, unsure if I was successful .... Terra?
'Costly erasures.' That's what you people like to call it, right. 'Cost me two nanoseconds..' I dunno, sounds a bit dramatic. I focked up, that's what happened. Ahgain. And it cost me more than a couple nanoseconds. KEep v. KEPT tense/scha-flipping-mense déjà focking vu - GoT AN A/GET AN A Sun. redux. Must be fiddy unis round Boston, and I'm thinking, I know most ov'em.. pU_TS (19a) ?!
Righted plus wrapped behind a passel of nanoseconds and.. ehh, it was fine. Asymmetry apparent at outset - the A-play, in my blindered beeline, not 'til curtains. Aye, author amusement over gamer service, but.. nifty, the game-end overlay.
Cannae git what I want, bit of humor, so.. lower the bar, chillax.
(O' course, The Egs, doing it every day. Just hire that guy. Prob solved.)
Thanks for the writeup, Clare! I loved the big, red A that appeared at the end. But could anyone explain the clue for NORM?
So I’m still trying to be nice. And hanging on by a thread. Since when did a nut get defined by its smallness? I’ve cranked on nuts that required a 14 inch pair of channel pliers. Not so small. About the size of a closed fist. Fortunately I had the channel pliers in my TOOLSET. My youngest son is a carpenter/contractor and the number of tools he owns is hard to describe. The bed of his pickup is full of tools. Does this constitute a TOOLSET? No. Tool set conjures up an image of hammers and hand saws and screwdrivers in a closed container like a sewing kit, or something. Not real.
COGSCI is about the ugliest word I’ve ever seen in a puzzle. I asked my wife of 50 years, a recently retired psychologist, if she had ever heard the term. She replied that she knew what was meant but she couldn’t remember hearing it spoken. Case closed.
The SALMONBERRY thing is a bit confusing because I’ve always assumed they were named for the colour of their flesh, plain and simple. So I looked up the pairing tradition of the berries with the fish and found only references to pairing the fruit with salmon roe in indigenous cultures. The problem here is that SALMON BERRies (which grow on my property, though not profusely) ripen in late spring or early summer while salmon roe is not harvested until late summer or fall. So maybe I’m missing something here or something’s just wrong about this.
Oh, and EELs, one of hundreds of species that can “burrow into the seabed”. Big deal.
And all this for a giant letter A whose crosspiece has an extra few letters in it …
I wanted to be nice, I really did.
That pitch was under 50 mph.
I found this very clever.... 1st, I was sitting there looking at the grid, as I struggled with the entire upper third of it--kept checking the calendar to make sure it really was a Tuesday!--and saying to myself--this is weird--since when does the NYT let someone post a puzzle that has NO symmetry to it? And then, when I got the revealer, going through the puzzle and finding the As and saying to myself... now that is a cool form of symmetry--"A" symmetry!!! Awesome. I actually used the theme to help me figure out "VDAY" which I had not heard of. I agree the cluing was a little fussy--like what @LES said, NUTS aren't always little. And I am not really familiar with the SALMONBERRY. But I thought the theme was very inventive and worth all the effort!!! Thanks, Kevin!!! : )
Sorry to add another sentence, but I think the point is that there IS symmetry in the grid. It's the left/right symmetry of the placement of the As. So it therefore keeps the rule that there must be some type of symmetry, even though the unfilled grid itself has none. very cool.
Mostly easy, except I had "leotard" before UNITARD and needed a lucky guess for the TOAD/TEATREE cross (never heard of a tea tree). Solved it mostly as a themeless, because I didn't see the A-letter pattern until I was finished.
Easy-Medium for a Tuesday. Liked it better than @Clare and @Les did, although I agree with Mrs. More about COG SCI.
Overwrites:
SEmi-consciousness before SELF at 8D
My 14D Jacques was brel before he was TATI
lOGic I (as in a college course title) before COG SCI for the mind study at 24A
When I'm expecting something, I expect News (56D), not the NORM (sloppy reading of the clue)
WOEs:
NPR host LIANE Hansen (6D)
V-DAY (48A)
SALMONBERRY (60A)
your mother's daughter is either you or your sister. Your sister's daughter is your niece.
Right! Are we missing something?
I never noticed the 'a' symmetry, which I'm sure is normal. I never noticed the 'a's formed a bit A, which might be normal. But I also never noticed the grid asymmetry, which I'm guessing is not normal.
It's a weird idea for a theme, but I enjoyed it. Today, by the way, is the 28th anniversary of the worst theme ever, 8/26/97.
My mother's daughter is my sister. My sister's daughter is my niece.
Do people really still use AOL or MSN enough to justify being in the NYT crossword?
I’m getting to the point where I really detest gimmick puzzles - especially those that impersonate crosswords - so the NYT is in danger of falling out of the top five in my daily rotation.
It seems like every day we get battered with subpar or really arcane fill to accommodate whatever the stunt du jour is (you need look no further than COGSCI today for exhibit A). It’s only Tuesday folks - this does not bode well for the remainder of the week.
A mother can have more than daughter .If you're one of those daughters than your mother's other daughter's daughter is your niece
This mystified me too, but if it’s my mother’s daughter, who is my sister, not me, her daughter is my niece.
You devil, you, Kevin Curry. The Times crossword submission guidelines specifically say “Crosswords must have black square symmetry”. It is what the guidelines call one of the few “hard rules”, rules that are broken “with extreme rarity”.
Yet you found a way, came up with a theme so novel that they couldn’t say no. After all, here is a theme that has no theme answers – Hah! – not to mention that it features symmetry within asymmetry in a way that has never been done before.
Oh, I saw the asymmetry early on, when the design didn’t fit even some of the rarest symmetries is Crosslandia, but never saw the A factor, and let me tell you, Kevin, when that big A lit up the digital grid upon completion, well, that was a jaw dropper in the best way. (Yes, I am a cross-nerd.)
Thank you, Kevin. You created a classic puzzle that I will remember, possibly for aeons. One of the most brilliant of the year. A bow and a wow, sir!
Clever construction I guess, but not much fun to solve. Without the appearance of the big A at the end, I would have had no idea what the theme was. No Aha Moment today! As Clare notes, how would paper and pen solvers have any idea?
COGSCI? Yikes. Never heard the term. And I guess the DL in ONTHEDL is for ‘down low’, but the phrase I know is ONTHE qt, maybe for ‘quiet’?
Hey All !
I'm sure someone has already said this, however, the Giant A actually is Symmetrical. The Revealer clue tells you that the Blockers are ASYMMETRY, but that it has A SYMMETRY, as in the A's are indeed symmetrical.
Funky grid to have as a Theme. So, is the Theme just the A's with the Revealer, or is it actually the Entire Puzzle? A little COGSCI for ya.
Fill came out surprisingly good, considering the A's to work around, and unable to use any other ones. Higher Blocker count once more, 41 of 'em.
Interesting, different type puz. Tougher than your average Tuesday. I'd give it an A. (Groan!)
Have a great Tuesday!
Three F's
RooMonster
DarrinV
AS PER usual, I solved this as a themeless, then got a mild chuckle out of the giant A made out of A’s I hadn’t noticed (though, like Les, I was bothered by the stray letters in the crosspiece). As for the asymmetry, I did notice that right off the bat, and especially when I got down to that ugly stack of threes in the SE.
The best part of this one for me is that it brought back the memory of Kitty Wells singing her big hit song “RELEASE ME.” A country classic.
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