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A schooner has at least two of them / WED 10-1-25 / Splinter in "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles," e.g. / Power to remove a nomination for eviction on "Big Brother”
Wednesday, October 1, 2025
Constructor: Neville Fogarty
THEME: Country-themed letter banks with cute clues — A letter bank is similar to an anagram, but less constrained, because you can repeat letters.
Theme answers:
Word of the Day: "Big Brother" (Power to remove a nomination for eviction on "Big Brother" for VETO) —
- [Elite soldier from GERMANY] for ARMY RANGER
- While an army ranger is not in fact from Germany, every letter in the answer (A, R, M, Y, N, G, and E) is found in (thus comes "from") the word GERMANY
- [Vessel for cooking rice from NEPAL] for PAELLA PAN
- [Sci-fi attack from SLOVENIA] for ALIEN INVASION
- [Fighting style from OMAN] for MANO A MANO
- [Seasonal precipitation from SURINAME] for SUMMER RAIN
Word of the Day: "Big Brother" (Power to remove a nomination for eviction on "Big Brother" for VETO) —
The show broadly follows the premise of other versions, in which a group of contestants, known as "houseguests", live together in a specially constructed house that is isolated from the outside world and compete for a cash prize of $750,000. The houseguests are continuously monitored during their stay by live television cameras as well as personal audio microphones. Throughout the course of the competition, houseguests are evicted by being voted out of the competition.
• • •
 |
| The clue [Shower affection (on)] made me think of this |
Forcing the banks to be countries wasn't just a random constraint. It also means you get a cute double meaning when you read the clues. I think the styling they used gave too much away, but I suppose the bank would have to be capitalized.... I acknowledge that [Elite soldier from Germany] feels wrong. I preferred the clues that were completely factually wrong (like for PAELLA PAN, which is absolutely not from Nepal) because they made you do a little double take. More..... puzzling, if you will.
I like when I know things about the constructor, and then see threads of that in the puzzle. For example, I'm pretty sure Neville is a big Competition Reality TV Guy (Neville, chime in if I'm wrong here), so I guess the reference to "Big Brother" came from there. Of course, it doesn't always work like that! I had a puzzle where many solvers thanked me for a clue that used some particularly girly twenty-something slang and I had to reveal that the editors had contributed that particular clue.
Bullets:
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- [Chinese monastery known for its style of kung fu] for SHAOLIN — I did not know this at all, and only know the name "Shaolin Fantastic" from a character on the short-lived but awesome TV show "The Get Down"
- [Candy brand with a Big Cup variety] for REESES — I love candy and I love the specific niche candies. Big Cup isn't that niche but it's more niche than a regular Reese's. My favorite weird candy is probably the giant chewy SweeTarts. I also adore Nerds Gummy Clusters which I think have gained a bit of a cult following in recent years.
- [Online subscription service since 2016] for ONLYFANS — lol I cannot believe he got this into an NYT puzzle. And referring to it as an "online subscription service" is simply diabolical. Legend.
[Follow Rex Parker on BlueSky and Facebook and Letterboxd]
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72 comments:
Fun, easy, but I don’t know that I’ve encountered this concept of a letter bank before. Makes a lot of sense retrospectively
Two days in a row now where I spaced out in the SW. Sort of saw MANOAMANO coming into focus, but was hoping they wouldn’t go there (it sounds contrived to me). I recognized SHAOLIN but needed the crosses for the spelling. I also had a brief mental lapse re crossword mainstay ASAHI, and the colloquialism I’M HOOKED probably could have been a dozen things.
It was kind of an easy puzzle for midweek with a pretty obvious theme construct, so I didn’t mind fighting my way through that one rough spot.
Very easy except for the note above Fa; the spelling of all those stupid fake words always gets a typo from me. Of course it had to intersect the least helpful name ever, made entirely of an odd assortment of L A & I…
Rex, you should absolutely go watch “Shaolin Soccer” today. Very fun movie, and a classic in my humble opinion ;)
Pretty easy except for tracking down a typo. I realized that the theme sort of involved anagrams fairly early but I didn’t need to stop to figure them out until after I’d finished….and now that @Malaika mentions it, I vaguely remember having encountered letter banks some time in the distance past.
No WOEs and no costly erasures.
Solid with some nice/colorful long downs. These types of puzzles are not my favorites but this was fine, liked it.
From yesterday - I too highly recommend The Americans as well as Keri Russell’s current effort The Diplomat on Netflix.
I also highly recommend (@Malaika) Baz Luhrmann’s The Get Down if you are at all interested in the birth of hip-hop.
Very easy, provided you don't take the theme literally, e.g., an ARMYRANGER isn't really from Germany.
Easy, solved without reading the theme clues. Nice "aha" moment when I read them post-solve.
Overwrites:
My 4D sneaky one was a SLY fOx before he was a SLY DOG
Thought TMNT's Splinter might have been a cAT before he was a RAT (of course, living in a sewer. D'oh!)
Not familiar with skiing terminology; wanted 31D to be AiR(something) before it was AERIAL
WOEs:
Gillian FLYNN at 49A
The SHAOLIN monastery at 50A
I’ve always seen it as “sol” or “so”. Not familiar with any other spellings.
The Get Down is indeed epic. Best thing that was unseen by virtually all human beings.
Wu Tang vs. Shaolin is TWTC’s first album.
Happy to learn about letter banks. Thought it was very easy overall, except for the SE, where two crossing unknown names, FLYNN and GLORIA, and ONLYFANS had me stymied for a bit, but I managed to work them out.
Does ONLYFANS pass the breakfast table test? I’m not so sure.
Okay, not technically an anagram puzzle, but similar in that it is not easy to construct, and not fun to solve.
I count 54 countries with no letters repeating, including some nice long ones like Uzbekistan and Switzerland.
“So: a needle pulling thread” is the lyric from Sound of Music.
Rex didn't write today's blog.
Ah to be so young again never to have seen Kung Fu with David Carradine. The theme was a big help in solving for ARMYRANGER and some PPP to the south. Enjoyed this puzzle.
Personal best for a Wednesday. But the inclusion of onlyfans makes me sick. I felt my stomach drop when I saw that coming into focus. You can say what you want about the democratization of the sex trade and women’s empowerment, but it’s still exploitation and the world is a much worse place because of it.
Lovely theme idea, and it was fun to guess at the theme answers with as few crosses as possible. That was my favorite part of this puzzle.
Excellent twist on the letter-bank genre, having the bank be a country name.
Crossnerd me was also impressed with what seems like a very tight theme, given its constrictions:
• The country’s name can’t have any repeating letters.
• All of its letters must be used.
• The answers must be in-the-language phrases.
So, wow on that! I was going to end this post with “Got to go!”, drawn from TOGO, but that wouldn’t have worked for this puzzle, as “Togo” has that repeating O. Alas.
I liked the theme echoes in the grid – LAILA ALI coming from the letters of “Ail”, and SAHARA coming from the letters of “rash”. I also liked the PuzzPair© of BREA and a backward TAR.
Sweet to see you back in the Times after nearly a five-year absence, Neville. Thank you for a fun and impressive outing!
Can I just say something about use of "pedi" (25D)? While a pedicure can be had at a Spa, it's more commonly done at a salon or nail shop. A "peel" is more specifically a Spa treatment, and that's the answer I always write in first ... sigh.
Just about perfect Wednesday offering: well-executed theme and plenty of fun fill. I don’t recall seeing Neville’s name before, but I hope to see it again now that I’M HOOKED.
Then I guess you don't know the NYT game Spelling Bee.
Pretty easy puzzle except for SHAOLIN. I don't ever remember seeing that before. Anyone know if it's a first?
Hey All !
Neat puz. Remember something similar in a different puz years ago. (What an EAT A SANDWICH sentence that was!)
Fill good. Pushing @Lewis High-Doubles, with 17. No ASS, but ONLY FANS, which an ASS is inferred. Har!
REESES is A#1 candy here, I like peanut butter, plus chocolate, and it's just yummy!
Apparently not too much to add. I can think of a few non-letter repeater Countries, though. Spain, France, Egypt, Iceland, Uzbekistan, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines 😁
(That is the Country with the most letters)
Anyway, have a great Wednesday!
Four F's
RooMonster
DarrinV
Call it "stupid" and "fake" if you will, but the word (really a syllable) SOL has been in use for maybe a thousand years. Maybe worth committing to memory, as it frequently occurs in crosswords.
Shaolin Soccer is a fun and funny Kung Fu movie from 2001… which is how I know Shaolin. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shaolin_Soccer
I guess it wasn't hard, but I got bogged down in the SE, with the confluence of WOOF, FLYNN, and ONLY FANS. I don't know that author. I don't think of Bowser as a stereotypical dog's name, but rather the name of a Mario character. And ONLY FANS I just found hard to see (the YF particularly). I expect there will be a large contingent of solvers who are unaware of the main claim to fame of ONLY FANS, but I think it's also used for other purposes besides pornography. (You SLY DOG, Neville Fogarty.)
I caught on pretty quickly to the theme. "Oh, like Spelling Bee." Thanks to Malaika for reintroducing me to the phrase "letter bank".
The La BREA Tar Pits is a famous example of redundancy. Never been there.
No puedo esperar al próximo episodio.
Morning @Malaika!
Well, hm, not sure why I should care that the letters are all limited to the word in the clue, but here we are.
You're wearing a hoodie with a historic spaghetti stain in your less-than-warm basement at your messy crossword constructing desk with the computer permanently open to Wikipedia and it's clue writing time and you're staring at TAN. You think, "Golden brown bodies glistening in the sun on a beach in Rio... or defunct candy color?" The results of these choices will never cease to flabbergast me.
❤️ ALIEN INVASION. SLY DOG.
People: 6
Places: 2
Products: 9
Partials: 4
Foreignisms: 2
--
Gary's Grid Gunk Gauge: 23 of 76 (30%)
Funny Factor: 2 😕
Tee-Hee: ONLYFANS is an online subscription service like Pornhub is a service for cinephiles.
Uniclues:
1 What a teacher does while staring at the scroll at the bottom of the local newscast on a snowy morning.
2 Where one canoes on a sea of cheese.
3 What happened in Mrs. Frisby's gymnastics class at NIMH.
4 Where to find the cool kids. Ha.
1 BEGS STORM LIST
2 EDAM SEA LANE
3 RAT AERIAL
4 TWEENS DEN ... NOT.
My Fascinating Crossword Uniclue Keepsake from Last Year: One helping to ensure "Frankenstein" refers to the doctor, not the monster. COPY EDITOR IGOR.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Yes, second day in a row she made me feel very old. First Lalanne, not Shaolin.
This puzzle reminds me of all the times I've worn yarn from Norway, or got rabies in Serbia.
ASAHI, I prefer GLUE to AMSTEL. The only problems are that it's not SAFE and IMHOOKED.
Mortgage defaults are out of hand and bankers are preparing ALIENINVASION.
Is a GAMEBALL similar to a Rocky Mountain oyster?
What's not to like here? A bunch of fun teeny puzzles in a grid that contains a few real interesting answers (I'm looking at you, ONLYFANS). Thanks, Neville Fogarty.
Cheers, Malaika! I'm indeed "a big Competition Reality TV Guy." 😊
EASY?!! Names, brand names (incl. one in Japanese!), word-salad pop culture references ("Power to remove a nomination for eviction in 'Big Brother'") . . . once again, a trivia-clogged path to Natick.
Never heard of a PAELLA PAN, either.
I saw from ARMYRANGER that this was a sort of an anagram thing but you got to use letters over again and TIL that the name for this is a "letter bank", so now I know how to refer to that thing in SB. so today is a good day.
Played easy here, didn't know MED or FLYNN as clued and I lead such a sheltered life that ONLYFANS means nothing at all to me, and I'm thinking that's a good thing.
The la BREA Tar Pits always makes me think of the redundancy in tv listings for MLB baseball.
INCAPS-I was reading a description of the execrable behavior of American fans at the Ryder Cup and the author said we have become a society that is living in ALLCAPS. Too true, that.
I liked your Wednesday very much, NF. I Never Find trying to make words from a letter bank tiresome (see SB) and thanks for all the fun.
Ironically your last sentence redundantly says THE THE TAR TAR PITS
Thanks for dropping by and very fun puzzle!
But I'm not sure what else you'd call the thing that it's usually cooked in. I just learned that the word PAELLA means "frying pan" (in Valencian/Catalan), and so PAELLA PAN wins first place for redundancy of the day. (Honorable mention goes to BREA, as that's probably best known to English speakers as part of La Brea Tar Pits.)
Goodness, not being familiar with something doesn't make it stupid or fake. Solfège is common training for vocalists and other musicians, and being three letters, SOL shows up quite often as easy fill in the xw. Hopefully it's a gimme next time you see it.
This was a very fun puzzle to solve and I kind of breezed through it in spite of the hole in my brain that knew nothing about SHAOLIN monks, their kung fu, or its application to playing soccer. I may check out the movie tonight.
Seems like I’ve at least heard of ONLYFANS, but did not know about the dark side. I will confess I had a brief moment wondering if the Spaniards got inspiration for their PAELLAPAN from Nepal before I decided that the answers were just whimsical results of the country’s letter bank.
I’m willing to bet there will be a lot of personal best times recorded with this one. Read clue, fill in answer. Rinse, repeat. I don’t keep track of my Wednesday best times but it sure felt easy and I’ve got a lot of time to kill before bed. Should have been a Monday or Tuesday.
I look forward to Wednesday because I get to cast off the shackles of downs-only solving and tackle something a bit tougher. Not tonight. Weak theme and dull fill
Looking forward to hearing what Rex has to say about 36D.*
Only thing that slowed me down was 50A SHAOLIN and that was only because I had an easily fixed typo at 43D SAHARA. Have I mentioned before that I am a terrible typist?
Oh well, maybe I’ll have time to fit in an early week NYer before bedtime.
*Oh, it’s Malaika. This is what happens when you solve in the evening.
Ha, you're right, Anonymous 10:16 AM! Nice catch. I seem to have ample precedent though.
I was apprehensive at first but wound up really liking it - thanks for the fun, Neville :)
It's sol. I was surprised years ago when I saw it spelled.
Shaolin should have been word of the day!
I think he must be published elsewhere regularly, bc the name is too familiar to not have seen it in 5 years. Thanks, Neville for stopping by if you're still around!
It is the first use of SHAOLIN in a NYT crossword puzzle.
Pretty easy once I figured out what was going on. It's a fairly common type of cryptic clue, actually invented by Will Shortz, or so I've been told, so how could he resist?
The hardest part for me was the type I spent trying to figure out which of Edith Wharton's novels had a common three letter abbreviation. House Of Mirth as HOM, maybe? But then it dawned on me.
I liked the paired "desert" clues, once as verb and again as noun. On a Wednesday I think they might both have been clued simply as "desert," without the "Arabic name" giveaway. It's supposed to be a puzzle, after all!
I don't know how I knew SHAO LIN--I had the S and maybe one more cross, and wondered "is that Shao-lin?" But I didn't have the confidence to put it in without a whole lot of crosses.
Here's a nice picture of the Asahi Building in Tokyo designed to resemble a glass of beer.
The Breakfast Table is one of my Onlyfans subscriptions !
I do the puzzle to learn stuff. Today I learned about ONLYFANS. It seems to be a place where people display porn and get paid when it is viewed. Sounds like a great idea. The porn that I've seen is also amateurishly done. Porn is a huge industry and yet I only know of one person who watches it. I was at his house using his computer. I must know many others.
Possible you can provide average and standard deviation of the gunk gauge?
Hm, “letter bank” - now I have a phrase to describe that feeling in Spelling Bee when I see antic and immediately know I have cantina, incant, intact, tactician, tannic, and titanic.
@Anonymous 7:24 The Sound of Music "needle pulling thread" lyric is a pun/mnemonic for the word SEW, but spelled SO just to keep its roots aligned with the original SOL musical term.
Only thing I would have changed is the verb tense in the clue for 15A. I don’t know that the late Stan Lee still /has/ CAMEOs in current Marvel films, but I could be mistaken.
The theme was good; as many have noted it's much like Spelling Bee. I finished at exactly ten minutes! However the names, names, names got me down. And the company names: AMSTEL, ANACIN, ONLYFANS, REESES, ICEE sucked a lot of the fun out of this.
I'm pretty sure we never had a school day cancelled by a STORM. Or by snow. However, while I was in architecture school in Winnipeg, a blizzard shut the entire city down for two days.
And tactic.
Random internet website says - Using all modalities of pornography, 91.5% of men and 60.2% of women herein reported having consumed pornography in the past month.
Enjoyable puzzle Neville, thanks
I, like Malaika, was pretty amazed (okay, I was shocked!), "Only Fans" got in! It struck me well; it's fresh for the NYT, and it's something a lot of folks know about.
And don't forget TACIT and TACTIC and ATTIC and CANTATA.
(Not tactic if the central letter is N.) Anyway, studying classes of words grouped according to drawing from the same bank of letters (like a, c, i, n, t) would be excellent training for SB. At one time I had begun compiling a list of those, but it's a very long list, obviously.
@ChrisS 2:19 PM
Pretty sure 8.4% of men are liars.
Such a lot of trivia, but I got through it all with just a bit of cussing.
@Anonymous 1:37 PM
I used to post a monthly summary and had a lot of fun writing it, but I think I was the only one who was interested. It's often challenging around here to know if anybody reads your post or not. But to go to your most likely question, on average over the course of a month about a third of every puzzle is gunk. I don't say much unless it's under 20% -- a very rare achievement, or over 40% -- a frustratingly regular happenstance.
really fun yes! also everyone check out WSJ thurs puzzle for tomm just did it absolutely classic as well 'Moveable Feast' dont miss!!!!
@Mr. Benson: and if HEAD works, you also get HEADED, DEADHEAD, and DEADHEADED for the same price.
To me , the question of trivia is not always so simple when people dump on a puzzle for.too much of it. Take VETO. Never watched Big Brother. But it is a puzzle after all. So I read the clue. Very wordy. Deliberately so I bet to help those like me who know nothing of the show.
Four letters, maybe VETO? Confirmed by the O. What else would it be? In short, technically trivia but easy to puzzle out just as a word.
Also some trivia becomes crosswordese and appears often. Like ASAHI because of favorable letters That can be very annoying for newer solvers but “old friends” as pabloinnh calls them.
I also learned the term letter bank today. I like the concept and execution of it here with the generally unrelated country names as the “bank”.
Don’t think I’ve seen it mentioned here yet but Big Brother also just wrapped up their 27th U.S. season last week!
If you recite the scale it sounds like So because the next letter is La. SoLaTiDo. But if you see it written you see it’s Sol La Ti Do. That’s why there’s confusion.
Nope, tacit, tactic and attic don’t have n’s. (But if you do have those, you also have cacti.) Cantata doesn’t have an i.
@okanager yes, and as an actual DEADHEAD I usually find that one early! (Username comes from one of their songs)
You forgot “IMO”
What is “peel” short for?
Sorry, thought this puzzle had way too much esoterica.
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