Saturday, April 27, 2024 | (2024)

Posted on April 26, 2024 by Amy Reynaldo

LAT2:31 (Stella)

NYT5:56 (Amy)

WSJuntimed (pannonica)

Rich Norris’s New York Times crossword—Amy’s recap

Whaddaya know, a Saturday puzzle I finished faster than yesterday’s puzzle. How’s the fa*gliano Difficulty Meter working for you today?

Fave fill: LOCAL PAPER (an endangered species), James Bond’s WALTHER PPK (not that I’m a fan of guns), SQUEE, NOT CRICKET, CHORUS LINE, DOPE SHEETS, AT A PREMIUM, TALK SENSE. Not so keen on –STER, and it’s so weird to see NEGRO in a grid. I’m not a coffee drinker; does [One way to order café] resonate?

Never seen SQUIRCLE before, I don’t think. Wondering if many people are still using the BOOK ON CD option.

3.25 stars from me.

Evans Clinchy’s Los Angeles Times crossword — Stella’s write-up

I had to double check that this grid actually meets the specs for a themeless — of course it does, it wouldn’t have been accepted otherwise. But with the preponderance of 4- and 5-letter words and the placement of the longest entries, this felt like it could be a grid for a themed puzzle. The very easy cluing didn’t help with making this puzzle feel like Saturday.

• 14A/15A I can appreciate after the fact the juxtaposition of [Settle down] and [Come down] for RELAX and POUR, respectively. But since the puzzle was easy enough that one encounters no obstacles working counterclockwise in a circle, or with mostly Downs, I never noticed it while solving.
• 20A [Fair activities for kids] isPONY RIDES. I feel like this one could have gotten a way less straightforward clue.
• 25A [Nightie nights?] is a cute clue forPAJAMA PARTIES.
• 41A [World Chess Champion from 2013 to 2023] isMAGNUS CARLSEN. I was able to nail the spelling of his last name on the first try thanks to last week’s NYT acrostic.
• 25D [Game that may be played on horses, bicycles, or elephants] is a nice evocative clue forPOLO.
• 49D [Willa Cather’s “The Song of the __”] isLARK, and I highly recommend the novel!

Mike Shenk’s Wall Street Journal crossword, “In Conclusion” — pannonica’s write-up

… or perhaps a more appropriate way to say it would be “conclusion in”—each of the theme answers’ original phrases have the trigram END inserted to wackify them.

• 22a. [Roughly 0.4% of the total in an adult human body?] SIXTEEN TENDONS (“Sixteen Tons”). Some deep math and a weird clue.
• 32a. [Story explaining the Golden Fleece’s origin?] LEGEND OF LAMB (leg of lamb).
• 46a. [Cowardly member of one’s social media network?] FRIENDED CHICKEN (fried chicken).
• 63a. [Bejeweled lockets, for example?] FANCY PENDANTS (fancy pants).
• 77a. [Focus of a co*cktail class?] BARTENDER SYSTEM (barter system).
• 92a. [Say “Your leathery wings are really creepy,” say?] OFFEND A BAT (off the bat).
• 106a. [Couldn’t make sense of “Nostalgic numbers,” maybe?] SKIPPED TEN DOWN (skipped town). The implied original is an appropriate conclusion to the theme group. The “ten down” is of course a reference to the actual 10d clue in this crossword.

I dunno, uneven? Just my hasty characterization.

• 3d [William who introduced the printing press to England] CAXTON. Got ahead of myself and put in CASLON.
• 6d [Like artiodactyls (pigs, sheep, deer, etc.] EVEN-TOED. Clue should read “et al.”. In contrast to perissodactyls which are you guessed it. And both of these orders are ungulates, which is to say that they walk on their toenails, or hoofs.
• 38d [Scoring out] SAC FLY. 77d [Hit close to home] BUNTS. Both recall the 92-across themer. Great clue at 77-across, incidentally.
• 41d [3, for 6 and 9: Abbr.] GCD, greatest common denominator.
• 47d [Multiply (though that feels contrary) like an amoeba] REDIVIDE. Two sides of the same coin.
• 73d [Danish astronomer Tycho] BRAHE. 44d [What Lee Marvin won an Oscar for in “Cat Ballou”] DUAL ROLE.
• 87d [Upchuck] RALPHS. Well.
• 88d [Perfect place] UTOPIA, which of course etymologically means “no such place”.
• 37a [People to keep up with] JONESES. Or you could just not. 71a [Conforms] FITS IN.
• 82a [Mulligan, e.g.] REDO. When I was younger, it took a while for me to sort out Mulligan and MacGuffin, which merely sound similar.
• 99a [Fatigued group?] GIS. Often in both senses.
• 114a [Tedious talkers] PROSERS. Surely I wasn’t the only one to put in DRONERS here?

Stella Zawistowski’s Newsday crossword, Saturday Stumper — pannonica’s write-up

More of the typical sputtery Stumper solving experience for me this time, but it all came together relatively quickly for me here. Kind of unusual for an SZ offering!

• 15a [Not a broad way] ONE-LANE ROAD. 16a [B’way, by definition] AVE. 4d [Angels fear it] FLOP.
• 20a [HI does without it] DST. Kind of a hunch fill for me.
• 27a [Sanskrit word for “seat”] ASANA. Makes sense, and I’d have gotten it sooner were it not necessary to correct 28d [Steel crossbeams] from I BARS to AXLES.
• 30a [Impatient utterance] WHAT’S NEXT. Not 100% sold on this framing.
• 35a [Englander as presenter] HOST. I don’t think this is about anyone surnamed Englander, so it must simply be referring to the way Britons use the wordpresenter whereas in the US someone fulfilling that function is typically called a HOST.
• 39a [Arrival announcement] IT’S IN, not IT’S ME.
• 43a [Cambridge and Oxford] SHIRES. Surprisingly tough.
• 49a [180 intro] DO A. Weak.
• 55a [Steel production] NOVELS. Danielle, and nothing to do with 28-down.
• 57a [K ration, for instance] RDA, not MRE.
• 60a [It can mean “imitation”] -EEN, the suffix. No better or worse than the poet’s contracted E’EN.
• 61a [Simon says it’s about Beatty] YOU’RE SO VAIN. I guess this has now been confirmed.
• 1d [More than a single kind] SORTS. I guess? Can’t immediately come up with a good way the ‘substitution rule’ works for it.
• 3d [Massenet opera with Castilian soldiers] LE CID. Correcting this from EL CID really helped open up this section.
• 6d [Whenever] ON DEMAND. Laconically deceptive clue.
• 7d [Bobolink bill] NEB. Whoa. “the beak of a bird or tortoise”; Middle English, from Old English; akin to Old Norse nef beak (m-w)
• 12d [Daisy relative whose name means “little clock”] CALENDULA. As you may surmise, calendar derives from the same Latin root. Not sure in what context it’s applied to the plant. § Okay, this essay offers a theory.
• 24d [Court’s “Big Aristotle”] O’NEAL. I have now learned that this is Shaquille O’NEAL. Apparently it is self-styled and tongue-in-cheek.
• 27d [Duds] ATTIRES. Are these … verbs?
• 37d [Curlers may have to deal with it] CURLERS. Neither hair styling nor the ice sport, so presumably a particular type of weight room denizen?
• 44d [Bar from ’50s TV] SALOON. Any one in particular, I wonder.
• 59d [Relatively recent story starter] HER, as inherstory.

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