Today, at Barnes & Noble, I picked up Frank Longo’s 25-Foot-Long Crossword Puzzle. I’m trying to figure out how best to proceed, and when I do, I’ll probably ramble about it here. Most likely, if you’re reading this, you’ve already done it yourself, but I’m a late (crossword) bloomer. I also got Amy Reynaldo’s book on conquering the New York Times puzzle. She’s a freakin’ genius — I will be lucky if I can ever consistently come in under five minutes on a Monday. Hell, I’ll be lucky if I can ever make it through an actual Monday day.
New York Times 9:37
Los Angeles Times 6:24
The Onion 12:02
New York Times
by Daniel Kantor and Jay Kaskel; edited by Will Shortz
After spending most of yesterday on the go, I only got to Tuesday’s puzzle this morning. As Ryan blogged about it (see below), I won’t bother. Instead, I’m getting up to speed on Wednesday, and took care of this little New York Times grid in just under ten minutes. As I check my nerdy spreadsheet, I see that my average Wednesday time has dropped from 11:30 to 11:23 with this recent accomplishment. Yay me! (And P.S. — Boo me for having a nerdy spreadsheet… Perhaps I will link to it from here, and you can all see that I’m actually more of a dork than blogs and podcasts show!)
While the dailies don’t have titles per se, this puzzle did give us one as something of a wrap-up to the theme clues. The first three of the theme:
- 20A. “I asked for tomato bisque, not gazpacho!” (complaint #1) : MY SOUP IS COLD — Incidentally, I only just noticed now that this is not just a reference to generic soup complaints (of which there may be several), but also that gazpacho is a cold soup. Duh. Come on, Brian — be more smarter!
- 28A. “Has our waiter even made eye contact?” (complaint #2) : ARE WE INVISIBLE?
- 47A. “What, are they growing the food?” (complaint #3) : WHERE’S OUR ORDER?
and all summarized with 54A. Title of this puzzle : WHINE AND DINE.
The rest seemed to flow smoothly. I was pleased to see myself with about 75% of the grid filled at just under five minutes. That it took another five to get the rest was frustrating, especially since I had errors that I didn’t know I had. Apparently, I thought it was ALAN Robert, not Robert ALDA who won a Tony for “Guys and Dolls” (56A), and that somehow Mitt ROMNEY was the German commander at the invasion of Normandy (29A), and not Erwin ROMMEL. Whoops.
Because it was easy to find, I’ve included a picture of 32A. “South Park” boy (IKE).
Los Angeles Times
by Donna S. Levin; edited by Rich Norris
I’m quickly skimming through the clue list, and can’t seem to find anything to explain the nature of this puzzle’s theme. The four long answers all rhyme with “Alice,” but aside from that — there’s little else to say. I seem to run the L.A. Times quicklier than the New York puzzles, so maybe I’m on the wrong coast.
So you’re looking for MARIA CALLAS, BLENHEIM PALACE, WYNTON MARSALIS and HOLY CHALICE. That’s what you’re here for, right? There you go.
The Onion
This is the second Onion puzzle I’ve tried to do, and I just don’t seem to wrap my head around them very well. The whole bottom left was full of things that I either didn’t consider or didn’t know:
- 51D. False flattery : SMARM – I had S—M, and was sure it was STEAM. I realize now that the phrase I was thinking of was “blowing smoke,” but no phrase I ever thought of was “blowing smarm.” I always just described generally icky people as being smarmy, never thinking that it meant something more specific. Oops. Thanks Onion, for helping my vocabulary!
- 55A. Vaccine mixture, for short : MMS – what is that even short for?
- 61A. Speedily : APACE – I don’t even know if I knew “apace” was a word, let alone what it meant.
- 66A. Scout’s mission : RECON – Part of my issue here was that I had STEAM back at 51D, so I was looking for something beginning with an A. The other part was that I was thinking about boy scouts and girl scouts and Thin Mint cookies, and nothing about actual military scouts ever entered my mind.
- 62D. Country’s David Allen : COE – I am now assuming that’s his last name.
This blog has taken me fourteen hours to actually publish, so I’ll stop here without doing the New York Sun. Besides, I ain’t smarter enough yet for that one…
