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Top three sights in Fiji? / WED 8-19-26 / Immature high score initials on an arcade game / Old West outlaw who left behind poetic messages after some robberies / Three unnamed things, in shorthand / 2008 film about a solitary trash-compacting robot / The word "salary" derives from the Latin for this / ___ royale (champagne cocktail) / Female friends from Fuenlabrada
Wednesday, August 19, 2026
Constructor: Kareem Ayas
Relative difficulty: Easy
THEME: BURIES THE LEDE (57A: Hides one's central point, in a way ... with a doubly homophonic hint to 20-, 30, 38- and 48-Across) — the "lead" word in each theme answer is a type of "berry":
Theme answers:
- GOOSE FEATHERS (20A: Natural pillow filling) (gooseberries)
- ELDERCARE (30A: Services for senior citizens) (elderberries)
- STRAW POLL (38A: Unofficial vote) (strawberries)
- BLACK BART (48A: Old West outlaw who left behind poetic messages after some robberies) (blackberries)
Charles E. Boles (c. 1829 – ? Last seen February 28, 1888), also known as Black Bart, was an English-born American outlaw noted for the poetic messages he left behind after two of his robberies. Often called Charley by his friends, he was also known as Charles (or C. E.) Bolton. Considered a gentleman bandit with a reputation for style and sophistication, he was one of the most notorious stagecoach robbers to operate in and around Northern California and Southern Oregon during the 1870s and 1880s. [...] In 1867, Boles went prospecting for gold in Idaho and Montana. In a surviving letter to his wife from August 1871, he told her of an unpleasant encounter with some Wells, Fargo & Company agents and vowed to exact revenge. // Boles adopted the nickname "Black Bart" and proceeded to rob Wells Fargo stagecoaches at least 28 times across northern California between 1875 and 1883, including a number of times along the historic Siskiyou Trail between California and Oregon. Although Boles became widely known for the poetic messages left behind after his robberies, he wrote only two poems–left at the fourth and fifth robbery sites–but this was enough to ensure his fame. Black Bart was quite successful as a highwayman, often taking in thousands of dollars a year. // Boles was afraid of horses and he fled from all of his robberies on foot. He was invariably polite, never using foul language except in his poems. He dressed in a long linen duster coat and a bowler hat, using a flour sack with holes cut for his eyes as a mask. He brandished a shotgun but reportedly never once fired it during his years as an outlaw. All these became his trademarks and he quickly gained notoriety. (wikipedia)
• • •
Weird. I always thought BLACK BART was fictional. I wonder why ...
Gonna have to be short a write-up today (I swear), as today is my first day back at school for the Fall semester, and I ... still have a little work to do. Not a lot. A little. But because it's not done and I have to stand in front of a class in [checks clock] seven hours, it feels like a lot. So I gotta get a move on. The puzzle was funny today because it felt like it was accusing me, personally, of not getting my second syllabus finished in a timely fashion. It's throwing things at me like STUDENT (47D: Lecture attendee) and UNIT (16A: Section in a textbook) and CURRICULUM (10D: Set of courses offered) and ASS (as in, "why aren't you totally prepared, you ASS?") (54A: Immature high score initials on an arcade game). I laughed it off. What else could I do? One thing I couldn't do: understand the the damned theme once I'd finished the puzzle. The puzzle was easy to finish, and the themers all easy to come up with, but I had no idea how BURIES THE LEDE was supposed to be singly homophonic, let alone doubly so. I kept trying to read the clue cryptically, so I was looking for something "buried" in the answer ... maybe a word that meant "lead"? But the middle of each themer (i.e. the letter "buried" at the heart of each themer), taken in order, spells ERWK, so ... no luck there! No matter how hard I looked, there was nothing "buried" in those damned theaters. Finally I had a look at the "lead" words in the theme phrases and noticed that they were all types of "berries" (!!!!!!). Not a pun I was looking for (clearly)! Is LEDE a pun? Since LEDE basically means the introductory (or "lead") portion of a news story, it indicates primary status (i.e. firstness) just as well as "lead" does. Doesn't seem nearly as "punny" as the bury/berry thing. Anyway, first words "berries," very clever, liked it. I do wonder if the Pronunciation Police are going to come out today. "Bury" and "berry" sound the same in my ear, but I have this suspicion that that may not be the same for everyone. Still, it's close, and it's crosswords, and as with horseshoes and hand grenades, close counts.
The fill was wobbly to start. "I'M NOT OK" feels ... unsolid. "I'M OK," all day long, no problem, solid as heck. "THAT'S NOT OK!," same. "I'M NOT OK" gets me some songs (?), and ... I guess it has some currency in mental health contexts. I can imagine someone saying it, but I can imagine someone saying lots of things. Lots of other fill just felt ordinary and tired: ARID SKORT PSATS (plural) UNSEE ERR ERS URSA etc. But the themers were all interesting, and sometimes the short fill picked up (PUFFY next to SNEEZE—successive answers! (Why weren't these tied together the way URSA and ASIA ([___ Minor]), or LOWER and DIP ([Drop]) were? You've got PUFFY tied to allergies—that's a set-up for a SNEEZE tie-in if there ever was one). FAN BASE and LOST CAUSES also liven up the grid. The only real difficulty I had today came with trying to understand the theme. Oh, and remembering which spelling of AVA/EVA to use for AVA Max (39D: ___ Max, singer of the 2018 hit "Sweet but Psycho").
Bullets:
- 10A: Private sleeping accommodations? (COTS) — So ... "Private" in the Army.
- 24A: Three unnamed things, in shorthand (XYZ) — nearly wrote in XXX, but that's a porn movie, or else the letters on a jug of hooch.
- 67A: 2008 film about a solitary trash-compacting robot (WALL-E) — WALL-E stars in commercials for Lavazza. Or his double does. Hulu can't/won't stop showing me ads for this new coffee system they have called TABLI (5!). And if the robot from Short Circuit and WALL-E had a baby ... well ...
- 4D: Top three sights in Fiji? (DOTS) — now this is cryptic. The word "Fiji" has three DOTS at the top (the top of the "i" the "j" and the "i")
That's it. Gotta run (to make coffee). See you next time.
[Follow Rex Parker on BlueSky and Facebook and Letterboxd]
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52 comments:
Easy. A decent outing, with a Tuesday difficulty level. I got the "buries/berries" part of the theme immediately but had to come here to get the "lede/lead" part.
* * * _ _
Overwrites:
I thought the wrestling president at 41A might have been polk, making the 41D American Dad network pBS (TBS).
One WOE, singer AVA Max at 39D.
Cute - multilayered theme and well filled for the most part. GOOSE FEATHERS was the highlight - I liked the revealer. ELDER CARE could have used some further development.
MINK Deville
Rex discusses the school lean nicely - that fill works fine. IM NOT OK, TATTLE, ONE STARR all wonderful. Some short stuff due to the grid constraints that was 50-50 but it’s not over the top. Learned some presidential trivia which is always neat.
LOOSE Lucy
Enjoyable Wednesday morning solve.
That was the river - this is the SEA
Same experience as Rex...found the puzzle easy but enjoyable, without ever understanding the theme or the revealer(s). Needed a lucky guess for the BED/DYES cross (didn't know a trampoline had a bed, or that colors of the rainbow had numbers).
While it was easy enough to answer, I was disconcerted by 63D - given the title of the song, I was pretty sure that the correct answer should be RE, not RAY. But according to the RIchard Rodgers site, "RAY' is correct, for that part of the song only. who knew?
My “Aha” moment came as I was parsing the theme answer. Maybe because I only recently learned the correct spelling of “lede.”
Yup, me too — I finished the puzzle very quickly and just could not figure out what the themers had to do with the revealer.
Gook luck on the first day of classes, Rex! With the late date of Labor Day this year, my university doesn’t begin until August 31… a calendrical gift I’ll take.
Well, I love the kind of mind that comes across the phrase “bury the lede”, and sees a double-wordplay crossword theme. That’s the kind of mind I want making my puzzles.
Then came a terrific TIL post-solve, when, while looking up types of berries, I learned that botanically, blackberries, mulberries, raspberries, and strawberries (Hi, @Steve L!) are not berries, while bananas, pumpkins, eggplants, oranges, grapes, and avocados are. Huh!
I also had a huge aha when I saw the berry connection in the theme answers before coming to the revealer or its clue. I’m usually not good at that ability, so I gave myself a little bow. No, I didn’t guess the entire revealer, but small steps…
Loved the faunal vibe pervading the answer set, with GOOSE, MINK, BATS, LAMB, URSA, RAY, STY, and ASS.
I love when simple letters in a box can raise the mood of a day, as your puzzle did, Kareem. Thank you!
I think one day I’ll create a museum for a certain berry, and call it the Lingon Memorial.
Agree with OFL today. Great write up. Easy enough but I didn’t get the theme until coming here. I don’t pronounce “bury” like “berry” so not sure I’d ever have figured it out on my own.
Unlike OFL, I was happy to see IM NOT OK as it reminded me of the My Chemical Romance song (maybe showing my age here as a straddler of the Gen X/millennial cutoff).
https://youtu.be/dhZTNgAs4Fc?si=IIMj4l1YFLDB1ab9
I thought this was an unusually easy Wednesday and still a lot of fun to solve and even more fun to work out the theme. I almost gave up to come here for the answer when in rereading the themers quickly my mind added “berries” all on its own. Lingon Memorial indeed!
I spent more time puzzling over the theme post-solve than I spent solving the puzzle. Clever, even though the pun is a groaner almost as bad as every line of that “Do Re Mi” song.
Good luck today! First day of class after summer inertia is always such a jolt into reality. Life is hectic again. It is also good! But suddenly much more of your time is no longer yours alone.
I think I might homophonically parse the revealer as "Berry's the lead", meaning that a different type of berry is the start/lead of each of the long answers.
Got tangled up for a while on the fact that “Elder” has the letters for “lede” buried in it before finally grokking the theme
My first reaction was this is a bit on the easy side for a mid-week solve as I whooshed through it so quickly (for me) that I kinda forgot about a theme. I almost said out loud, "what's the big deal here to make this a Wednesday?" I then remembered that 57A was staring me in the face with a revealer (that happens to be *great* fill) and the fun started with trying to figure out what the heck was going on.
It was a very nice aha moment when the BURIES/BERRIES hit me. I then needed to noodle what the *doubly* was all about. That took a bit but a very nice, bright lightbulb went off when the LEDE/Lead thing finally clicked in my vacation mode brain. That was good stuff. It was indeed *double* the fun!
I'm with @Lewis, very impressed that this phrase came to Kareem and he thought to create a puzzle with this clever theme.
Like @Rex, I noticed the back to school vibe here but man, I got my degree where @Rex works and I don't remember classes starting quite this early! All the best for your first day back!
So...while the solving was easy, grocking the theme took some very pleasant work that was well worth the effort. The themers are all very, very good fill on their own and there was some nice longer non-theme stuff going on. I liked the in-the-language of IMNOTOK and CURRICULUM and LOSTCAUSES fill the grid in nicely.
Kareem, this was a fun trip! Thank you!
Hey All !
Kind of an interesting Theme. Agree with Rex that the pronunciation pundits are gonna come out. Some may say BURY is pronounced Burr-E. I say it as Bear-E., ergo BURY=BERRY for me.
Came here to figure out Theme, cause I'm just too lazy to do it myself! Didn't recognize the standalone first words as Berries. Silly brain.
Got the requisite ASS, no Star Wars, however.
Easy WedsPuz. Sort of strange Theme. Neet to see XYZ.
Hope y'all have a great Wednesday!
Three F's
RooMonster
DarrinV
Never did get the theme (no surprise there). Fortunately it’s Wednesday so the theme answers were pretty much common usage, although I thought BLACK BART was a cartoon character. That, and other trouble makers like WALLE made the South more difficult than the North today.
It was interesting (and slightly amusing, in a good way) to see that we have a theme on a Wednesday that Rex had to struggle with, post-solve, before the light bulb went off. Like I said, at least it’s Wednesday, so the crosses were mid-week appropriate and in the end it was solvable.
¿Recibiste el memorándum?
Fast. And why we keep 🦖 around for the days when the theme is too obscure to figure out. Now I see the berries in the lead. Love it. Delightful.
By the way, I've been axed the last few days which is always frustrating as I am pretty sure it's Go-ogle and not the boss. I re-read my posts to see if I can figure out what makes the robot blush, and I have a complicated theory involving hourly fees in fancy locations. Or maybe it's more simple and the matrix is tired of my nonsense.
I believe Arnold Steven Smith would not call his high score on Centipedes "immature."
❤️ Fiji.
Gunkometer--
People: 5
Places: 4
Products: 6
Partials: 3
Foreignisms: 2
--
Gary's Grid Gunk Gauge: 20 of 76 (26%)
Funny Factor: 3 😐
🔥 Ooh-la-la! 🔥 PUFFY. ASS. See-through. BRAS.
Uniclues:
1 Kidnapped a nursing assistant.
2 Discuss cleavage.
3 Those loving Schadenfreude.
4 Theme song of an opera about the semicolon.
5 One being led to the academic slaughter.
1 STOLE ELDER CARE
2 ORATE BRAS AREA
3 I'M NOT OK FAN BASE
4 DOTS LOST CAUSE
5 CURRICULUM LAMB
My Fascinating Crossword Uniclue Keepsake from Last Year: Nut nut. PECAN FANATIC.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
There are *two* homophones: BURIES sounds (almost) like "Berries", and LEDE sounds like "Lead". So "Berries: the lead" -- I thought that's what was meant by "doubly homophonic."
It felt like a Monday puzzle. I have no business finishing a Wednesday in 6:35. Zero resistance from top to bottom.
A game of tag neatly divides the world into those who are "it" and those who are UNIT.
Mrs. Egs and I are dressing as TikTok for Halloween. I said I'd do it only if I could be Tik, 'cuz IMNOTOK.
In the NYTXW, if there's ever an ASS, there'll always be an ASTER.
I really had to mull over this theme for a while before I got it. You might say I had to mulberry hard. In the end, I liked the 1.5 - 2 puns in the revealer. Thanks, Kareem Ayas.
Kind of a dumb after the fact theme.
Count me in as one finding the puzzle easy without knowing the theme.🎈🎈🎊🎊
Here to rep the upstate NY accent: Bury, berry and Barry all come out of my mouth the same (as do merry, marry and Mary) with the first syllable rhyming with hair. But I can definitely understand how some people pronounce bury with more of a burr at the beginning and Barry starting with the sound a sheep makes.
I pronounce it "BEAR-e."
Kinda blah. Just something I did.
Had no clue (ha) of the revealer. Obtuse rather than clever. Probably how this Monday puzzle got placed on a Wednesday.
It was a nice Wednesday but I didn't get the homophone until Rex explained it.
I enjoyed this but I was surprised. Except for WALL-E, this was pretty easy & could've run on a Monday or Tuesday. Thank you, Kareem :)
But made me wonder what's going on at the NYT? Not too much 'consistency' there of late.
This. Which I was about to write, but you beat me to it.
Can someone explain how Immature high score initials on an arcade game = ASS?
Does anyone think RAY (at 63D) might be a subtle nod to Raymond "Berry," the Hall of Fame receiver for the Colts who was the favorite receiver of Johnny Unitas? If ever he deserved a spot in the puzzle, it's today. Berry died at the age of 93 just last May. At the time of his retirement in 1967, he was the leading receiver in pro football history. He squeezed Silly Putty to gain hand strength. He didn't start on his HS team until he was a senior even though his dad was the coach. He had an unremarkable college career and was the 232nd pick in the draft. His Hall of Fame biography includes this statement: “Why the Baltimore Colts selected him, even as a ‘future choice’ on the 20th round of the 1954 draft, is a mystery.”
Here's a joke on 54A (ASS)
A man needs to get to Minsk but has no money for a ticket. He gets on the train and when the conductor asks for his ticket he explains that he has no money and no ticket. So at the next stop, he's thrown out on his ass. He waits a few hours for the next train and gets on that one. Again, when the conductor asks for his ticket he explains that he has no money and no ticket. And, again, at the following stop he's thrown out on his ass.
He waits there several more hours until the next train arrives. The scene is repeated, and he's thrown out on his ass yet again.
As he's sitting and waiting at the fourth station, a man sitting next to him strikes up a conversation. "Where are you headed?" he's asked. "Minsk," he replies. "If my ass holds up."
Having 30A start with ELDE, an anagram of LEDE, helped me not one bit in discerning the actual theme. Thanks, Rex, for the BURIEd BERRIES (well, not buried but hidden anyway.)
I was going all Latin-like on 11D with CURRICULae and wondering like heck how NOah was going cats and dogs. Pairs of them, I would guess.
Kareem Ayas, you buried me with this theme, nice one!
Printer still AWOL so my wife printed this one for me from her desk top and kindly did the large print version, which if you have never tried it comes out as a great big puzzle with clues on a separate page, which I dislike intensely, so I solved on line again, and sped through this one. Paused briefly at AVA and ASS as clued and never remember if WALLE has two L's or two E's, but that was about it for speed bumps.
The revealer took some thought but then I saw all the berries and eventually figured out the double pun thing (see @Len Fuego). Bury and berry are all the same to me (see @Adrienne). I'm from Upstate NY too.
School is starting up again but since I retired quite a while ago I no longer have to think about CURRICULUM, thank goodness. I think every teacher has the occasional nightmare about standing in front of a class with no idea of what to do. I know I still do.
ingenious revealer with apt themers, KA. I pretty much Knew All the stuff in this one so it was over too soon, but thanks for a bunch of fun.
I'M NOT OKAY is a pretty common Gen Z phrase - used in a situation where something amazing has happened - like a Jonas Brother kisses you on the cheek at a concert (or whoever the current version of a Jonas brother is.). So I would argue that the phrase works but the clue is off.
Took a minute to get the theme after I finished, but the AHA was a big one! The rest was soso and pre-revelation I wasn't impressed , but the theme twist made it a good one!
Rex, I also thought Black Bart was part of the lore of the west and not a real person. If you get stuck preparing your class, maybe you could work him into an assignment!
I had the same thought, but didn't look it up. Are all the notes treated the same way, as "doe, a deer...?" In any event a nice entry for a puzzle focused on homophones.
I'm a bit sick (though I wouldn't say IMNOTOK) this morning, so I slept a couple extra hours, solved the puzzle later than usual, and didn't have the patience to figure out the theme. It was a good one, I just got misdirected, thinking that 'doubly homophonic' must meant that both words in the theme answers were homophones. I even thought of 'berries' and 'lead,' but I couldn't put it together. I really should have seen the berry varieties.
Maybe 50 years ago I worked as a stringer for a weekly left-wing newspaper, and was sent a guide to how to write news articles. There was a section on 'writing a good lead,' spelled like that. I've always wondered how the spelling changed, so today I looked it up. Sometime in the 20th Century some paper decided that people were mixing up the lead in an article with the lead used in typecasting. At least, that's what search assist tells me. Not completely convinced, but it's plausible.
So anyway, LEDE is technically an alternative spelling, not a homophone -- like labor and labour. But close enough, and I only thought of it after solving.
As a long-time Bostonian who doesn't go to many movies, when I started to see WALL-E mentioned in the press, I just assumed it was the Red Sox mascot. I think I did learn that it was a movie character, but until today I still thought the mascot name was spelled that way. Nope.
Rex, my sympathies. I am teaching one course this fall, but my class starts September 10.
michael, enjoy that post-first-day-back cocktail tonight
13-year old John Doe has the highest score and enters his initials as ASS.
I'm OK with IM NOT OK, but to me it means "I need help" more so than "My mood is pretty low."
Easy, but I too needed a bit of staring at the grid to grok the theme.
No erasures and AVA, ASS, and TAFT as clued were it for WOEs.
Smooth grid, cute/punny/amusing theme, liked it.
Wicked easy for a Wednesday (maybe even for a Monday). The theme wasn't at all necessary for the solve; fortunately so, as we needed Rex to (figure it out and) explain it.
Someone else thought, as I did, that Black Bart was from a cartoon (Quick Draw McGraw came to mind; there's an oldie). But nope, a real dude.
Clue for ASS...really?
Favorite clue in the puzzle was 10A for COTS. It's telling that I say that about a four-letter answer which is actually a three-letter word with a POC.
I think Rex was a 1/2 star generous, but after a nice vacation, that's fine. Hopefully his soon-to-be students share such beneficence.
James McMurtry's new (ish, 2025?) song Sailing Away (which I love) has the line, "Feelin' faded and I'M NOT OK" so that answer works for me!
Seems clear from the comments that this theme was less transparent than usual. I wonder how many didn't get it because it relies on a failure to distinguish u and e, apparently common in certain parts of the USA?
@LenFuego 7:36 am: or, "Berries: the lead!"
This was fun, as I went through it pretty quick while in the back of my mind wondering "what the heck is the theme?" At the end I saw LEDE scrambled into ELDE at the beginning of 30 across so that was baffling for a while. Then after quite a bit of thought: oh! BURIES = BERRIES, LEDE = LEAD. Nice! Just clever enough for a good Wednesday.
Only one truly Unknown today: AVA Max. But a lot of Known 4 letter names: ASIA, SETH, ELON, URSA, TAFT, BART (as a partial), IOWA. Of course at 7 down I put in URSA and had to take it out, only to run into it at 37 across.
4 down thinks it's so clever that "Top three sights in Fiji" = DOTS. In Canada, the top classified ad site is Kijiji. It looks so neat: five DOTS, three pipes, and two tails.
Both 'lede' and 'lead' are acceptable. If anything, lede is non-standard
I've been doing some puzzles from the archives (and then reading Rex's column), and I just completed one that Rex disliked so much he stopped solving it halfway through! If this surprises or intrigues you, you may want to check it out: Sunday, September 4, 2011. I found it challenging but liked it in the end, as did many others.
Although Anonymous 11:24 am gave it a try, I don't think they really explained so you can understand. I will endeavor to do so:
1. On arcade games, anyone getting a top-ten score can enter their initials, which are then periodically displayed on a high-score screen.
2. "Ass" is a slang term that means 'bottom,' or 'derriere' but is considered more crude than those terms.
3. Due to fact #2, some immature high-score-getters find it funny to enter "ASS" for their initials, even if their initials are actually not ASS.
4. For reasons similar to #2 and #3 above (but with different specifics for part #2, if you need help with those, just post!), other valid responses for this clue include "FUK", "POO", "NUT", "COX", "CUM", and "SEX"
I enjoyed this even though I’m not a huge fan of puzzles that rely on homophones. I mean, it was pretty well executed but there are so many regional differences in pronunciation that there are bound to be problems. Even without the regional thing, people pronounce things differently. My wife and I share a similar cultural background - raised in western Canada by parents whose parents emigrated from England. We grew up in the same area and even attended some of the same schools. But I say berry (rhymes with bear + ly) and she says burry (rhymes with furry).
I had no big problem with this because my pronunciation is more common here. I even used to design layouts for the Features section of the paper about making fruit pies and such and headline them “Berried Treasure”, or some such punny thing. She would always ask, “What’s a burr-ied treasure got to do with dessert?”
So, homophonic confusion is a thing, and probably not the greatest thing upon which to base a puzzle.
And, having never been an arcade gamer, ASS was a mystifying entry. Gettable from crosses, but …
In the newspaper business lede is the word.
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