After that, I tried to to Wednesday’s puzzles.

New York Times – 12:54 (worst Wednesday for me in what feels like centuries — except I’ve only been doing crosswords since early February)
Los Angeles Times – 8:59
New York Sun – 9:55
The Onion – 8:56

New York Times
constructed by Edward Sessa; edited by Will Shortz

I got off to a hot start here, filling about 80% of the grid in the first three minutes. I got three of the long answers:

• 17A. INK – This is the one I didn’t have at first.
• 25A. IN : SOCIAL ADVANTAGE
• 43A. I : PERSONAL PRONOUN
• 57A. : DISAPPEARING INK

Very clever, lots of fun. (And by the way, I’ve switched to maroon highlights for the answers to go better with Ryan’s re-design for the site!)

I was also flying along brilliantly with lots of words I never thought I’d find: DADA, DECO, KWAI, KAYO, SCAMP, GINSU, MASSE, ITALY (if you asked me to name two countries affiliated with G8, I don’t even think Italy would be one of them, and yet — here it is!), BRAVO, GOP, etc… All great. I had a little trouble in the top of the grid, as I’ve never heard of MARL (pictured at left), and spent too long trying to decide whether I approved of “clayey” as a legitimate word. I got hung up also with the crossing at 39A/39D, as I tried GATE for a tollbooth’s access and GUNK for what gets caught in a trap (correct choices: LANE and LINT, respectively). Further complications arose when I couldn’t understand what kind of hound deserved its own quarry, and what that would even mean (48A). Oddly enough, Merriam-Webster, suggests the “one that is sought or pursued” definition (in the case of 48A, a HARE) before the one about an excavation site. Go figure.

And finally, the top center was my downfall. I doubted everything I thought I knew (5D. FILIAL, 7D. TAPE and 8D. ANOS) in favor of things that seemed less likely (21A. NULLS instead of NIXES) and apparently a bunch of random letters instead of either 5A. FATAL or 15A. INANE. To my own fault, I didn’t know the word ANOXIA, and Merriam-Webster isn’t much help here: “Hypoxia, especially of such severity as to result in permanent damage.” Okay, I’ll look up HYPOXIA: “A deficiency of oxygen reaching the tissues of the body.” Hm. Whatever.

And what ended up putting me into a crossword coma was my complete inability to locate the term CEPHALOPOD despite haveing CEPHAL—DSB-AY staring me in the face. (Yes, I later learned that 10D. was ALPERT not ALBERT, but even that combined with the knowledge of creatures who spew ink in defense was not enough.)

Los Angeles Times
constructed by Alan Olschwang; edited by Rich Norris

Like the New York Times puzzle, I was off to the races at first, and then spent a good four minutes on seven squares, most of which I had to cheat to get. The long answers were easy enough:

• 17A. Space shuttle supply : ROCKET FUEL
• 26A. 80s title sitcom role for Soleil Moon Frye : PUNKY BREWSTER
• 43A. Quick action in an emergency : RAPID RESPONSE
• 57A. Roll toppers : POPPY SEEDS

But then the “theme” clue: 22A. With 48-Across, what 17-, 26-, 43- and 57-Across each begins with. My head is still spinning from trying to understand what they want here… 48A has the oh-so-useful clue of See 22-Across. I have GEN-E, so I’m thinking it’s either GENIE or GENRE. And 22A so far has M—C, which immediately suggests MUSIC, although I’m sure there are other ideas out there. My brain is still swimming in the filth that was Night At The Museum (at least it was in Blu-Ray), and I can’t figure out what the hell they’re looking for. ROCKET, PUNKY, RAPID and POPPY — what are these things? R-P-R-P… I decide that 22A is MUSIC, but fail to understand that while each long answer is a two-word thing, it’s not the first word they’re looking for, its the first syllable: ROCK, PUNK, RAP and POP. Four MUSIC GENREs.

Sigh. Now onto the New York Sun, and I’ll see if I actually can give myself ANOXIA.

New York Sun
constructed by Lee Glickstein; edited by Peter Gordon

I’m getting more exhausted as the night progresses, and my Chinese food is talking back to me. The Sun puzzle was cute, taking normal phrases or titles, and using a homonym-like swap, changed one of the words in said title or phrase to a person’s name:

• 17A. Educator Horace alongside a comic book hero? : MANN AND SUPERMAN
• 35A. Leave the infant of “In Treatment” star Gabriel in the sun too long? : BURN, BABY BYRNE — This clue had too many “in”s in it for me… Infant, In Treatment, in the sun… In in in.
• 53A. Discussion between a former Colorado senator and a ’70s to ’90s rock band? : HART TO HEART TALK

Fun and nice, even if I got stuck for a while with answers I ought to have known (BMOC was in two puzzles today!) but didn’t. I need to go to sleep…

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…

New York Times
by Gary Whitehead, edited by Will Shortz

I looked at the clock with about four empty squares on my grid. SIX MINUTES AND FOURTEEN SECONDS. Yes, I had all but four squares filled in just over six minutes. That is amazing.

Almost.

What would have been amazing was if I could have taken less than four more minutes to do four more squares.

And without cheating.

The southwest killed me. It’s like San Diego, Phoenix, Albuquerque and something in northern Mexico all teamed up and beat me to a pulp. For the life of me, I had absolutely no idea on 56A. Deceptive talker or 64A. Chocolatier’s gear, and specifically the squares crossing with 58D. M.p.h., e.g. and the explanation-of-the-theme clue, 56D. What 20-, 37- and 53-Across may do.

(more of this and the other puzzles below… click the link for more!)

Of course 58D killed me. I’ve explained enough how I hate the use of e.g. in a clue. And I’ve been told again and again that it doesn’t imply abbreviations. Of course — I can’t get my mind away from non-abbreviated words in spite of the rest of the clue, which most certainly is an abbreviation. The answer — which I had to stare at for another minute or so before understanding — is VEL (short, I assume, for velocity). Ugly clue, and ugly answer.

56A made me stare at my computer keyboard, working out -I-ER words until my frontal lobe simply overheated and shut down (like my HP laptop does four times a day — but that’s another rant). TILER, MILER, FILER, BIKER, HIKER, DICER, RICER, LIFER… Never did any word beginning with a J come to mind. Never did any word using a V come along. And never did a word that isn’t really much of a word to begin with — JIVER — come along.

64A also gave me no release, since -O-DS didn’t look like it had any options. I kept putting TODDS into it, wondering if a todd was actually anything. The answer, MOLDS, only became clear when I looked at http://www.xwordinfo.com for help, and copied his work.

The theme answers:

• 20A. Desktop publisher’s need (LASER PRINTER)
• 37A. Commuter’s woe (RUSH HOUR TRAFFIC)
• 53A. Def Leppard, for one (HARD ROCK BAND — since BIG HAIR BAND didn’t fit)

all led to my final question mark of the night, clue 56A. I couldn’t see what LASER, RUSH and HARD had to do with one another. Then I thought — maybe they’re all tourist places. The Hard Rock Cafe, for one. Maybe there was a Rush Hour Restaurant and a Laser Lounge or something like that… And even after cheating and putting JIVER and MOLDS in their proper places, and reading the answer (JAM), I wasn’t happy.

Four minutes for four squares. Wednesday, you have beaten me again.

The Onion

Maybe I need to read The Onion to understand why they chose safe sex as the central, uh, concept for this week’s puzzle. The theme answers were:

• 17A & 21A. Family planning success? (TRIUMPH OF THE PILL)
• 29A. Catchphrase of a contraceptive device’s mascot? (MY NAME IS IUD)
• 45A. Personal choice the morning after? (PRIVATE PLAN B)
• 52A & 61A. Vacation filled with safe sex? (SIX DAYS OF THE CONDOM)

I got a bit stumped once again by New Mexico and Arizona (i.e., the Southwest corner). I didn’t see the theme answer yet, and I was guessing on everything I put in. 47D. Reebok competitor was five letters, and try as I might, I can’t make NIKE or ADIDAS fit. Somehow, my brain found ASICS, and so I guessed it. Furthermore, I would not accept that a BIDET is a Fixture near a toilet (48D), since I’ve peed in lots of places and never seen one. And although I like the Rolling Stones, I was unaware they had a 1972 double-album called EXILE On Main St. (49D).

Los Angeles Times
by Robert E. Lee Morris, edited by Rich Norris

Today is my day to die in the South Pacific. Again (and I stress this because it is the third of three puzzles today), I failed to secure anything in the bottom left corner of the grid. The clues I could not wrap my head around were:

• 51D. Rhyme guy with three fiddlers (COLE) — I still have no clue what this means.
• 45D. Mary Hartman portrayer Louise (LASSER) — My lack of knowledge on this subject has left me completely unable to discern if Mary Hartman is the actor or the character.
• 50A. Folk singer Phil (OCHS) and the corresponding 50D. City near Moscow (OREL) — There are approximately 179 million four-letter places or rivers or mountains all over parts of the world that I have never seen that escape my brain on a regular basis. I need to get a list of these and their definitions and read it every night.

And then on the left edge, 27D. Anklebone just stumped me. I tried TARSI and TALON both, and I don’t know what a TALUS is. According to Wikipedia, it’s Latin for ankle bone. LATIN. That means NOT ENGLISH, you stupid clue writers.

There was a theme, I think, although even with a “what is the theme” clue in the puzzle, I still don’t understand it. Herewith:

• 17A. Head honcho (TOP BANANA)
• 61A. Elegant table setting (BONE CHINA)
• 11D. Fair transaction (SQUARE DEAL)
• 29D. Winnebago, for one (MOBILE HOME)

And the piece de resistance:

• 38A. Be the perfect size, and what the first words of 17A, 61A, 11D and 29D can do.

Can you figure it out? The answer is, of course, FIT TO A T. I understand the first part of the 38A clue, but how do TOP, BONE, SQUARE and MOBILE fit anything to a T? I will have to read someone else’s blogs to make sense of it.

EDIT: I have since read someone else’s explanation (thank you, Orange) which is this: Each of the four words can be preceded by a T to form something else we’ve heard of — T-TOP, T-BONE, T-SQUARE and T-MOBILE. [And to that, I say, "What the hell is a T-Top?"]

CrosSynergy
by Mel Rosen

I felt pretty good about this rather non-descript grid from CrosSynergy. Got it in under ten minutes, didn’t need to cheat or guess.

I had a little trouble in the southeast (although I did know that 9A. City northwest of Orlando was OCALA — hello to my friend Amy who is from there [she'll never read this page, never]), as I tried both PIER and PORT for 71A. Berth place (DOCK), leading me to a number of wrong ideas in the whole corner. 68A. Lake where Perry prevailed in 1813 was chock full of things I didn’t know. Ask me about 1813? Not a clue. Ask me who Perry is? Not a clue. Ask me for yet another four-letter geographical thing that’s not in my own backyard? Not a clue. Okay, a bit of a clue. But the list of things I know about Lake ERIE does not include anything about this battle that O.H. Perry fought.

49A. Doctors on the cutting edge? confused me… I had most of the letters in place, and SURGEONS (the right answer) seemed to fit the grid, but why the question mark? What’s clever about this clue? Doctors = surgeons. How are they on the cutting edge? Is it because surgeons physically cut things? That’s not clever, that’s lame.

And now I’m off my soapbox of abbreviations and on my soapbox of foreignerity. Like in the L.A. Times puzzle (Hello, California? TALUS is still Latin!), I didn’t like that 41D. Gathering after hitting the slopes led me to a French answer. This, aside from the fact that I didn’t like the use of two -ing words in the same clue. But really — English clue, French answer? Maybe if the French answer was a colloquialism here in America… Oh, who am I kidding? Maybe it is. I don’t ski. I don’t speak French. The one time I tried skiing, I sprained my talus, and I was enjoying the apres-ski with a bit of cocoa…

New York Sun
by Ogden Porter, edited by Peter Gordon

First of all — is Ogden Porter a pseudonym for Peter Gordon? Or is it merely a magical coincidence that they are anagrammatic of one another?

I’m going to start with the three-letter answer for 37A. It can help you find your balance. For reasons I don’t understand, the first thing I put in was EAR. I thought scientifically, that’s a clever answer. But after I got 30D. 2007 title role for Dustin Hoffman (MR. MAGORIUM), I had an M in the last space. Aha! I thought of SUM — very clever! Add it up, you find your monetary balance! Cute. Then I noticed that the clue didn’t have a question mark. Oops. Can’t be that clever without the question mark — unless we’re talking about surgeons. So I went back to normal concepts of balance, and chose ARM for the answer. And then, of course, 29D. Game-ending announcement seemed to have no options… I went through the whole alphabet with -ARE in place, wondering if anyone ever shouted “YARE!” for the end of a game. Maybe back when Dinka Yare played for the Nets. He was a scrub player who never got off the bench much. At the end of the games, the crowds might be screaming to put him in. “Yare! Yare!” Okay, that was clearly not going to be it. Since I had never heard of a 28A. Device for measuring current (AMMETER — or A.M. METER? or AM-METER?), I was lost as to the initial letter for 29D, which would keep me from ever understanding 37A. I was dismayed to find out (eventually, thanks to Across Lite’s help) that the answers at that crossing were MATE and ATM.

Abbreviations. In the answer. Not in the clue.

Clever answer. No question mark in the clue.

The clue may as well have read: 37A. Three random letters I plucked from a bag of Scrabble tiles.

Meanwhile, 39D. Sea of ___ (setting of the Gulf of Taganrog) could have been in Swahili for all the information I gleaned from it (AZOV – another &!*@# four-letter place). And apparently John Philip SOUSA was not 53D. “You’re A Grand Old Flag” songwriter, George M. COHAN was. Incidentally, I once co-wrote a play (about a baseball team) in which Mr. Cohan walked on stage in the middle of the first act and said, “I’m George M. Cohan, the great song and dance man!” He had maybe two more lines, and then was never seen again.

This puzzle took too long to solve. I was so pleased with my (relatively) quick CrosSynergy time, only to be embarrassed by this poor showing. Thankfully, the weekend puzzles are coming soon, and I have absolutely no hope whatsoever of even completing one of them.

Universal
by Emmet Coffie

This wasn’t so much fun… I even left it alone for a minute to read an email (without stopping the clock), that’s how into it I wasn’t.

I don’t like quotes in crosswords. It makes for a very long paragraph or sentence, and I don’t usually see it at all. Gimmicky turns of phrase are more fun for me. This was worse than a quote — it was a quip, which I believe translates as follows:

• QU, short for “quote”
• I, as in “idiot”
• P, which rhymes with T and that stands for Take this dumb clue and…

The three-part quip, beginning at 13A. Start of a buyer’s quip, and continuing with 37A and 64A is I SHOP LIKE A BULL; I CHARGE EVERYTHING. Not clever. Not funny. Not pertinent to anything. Not of interest to me. Really, it wasn’t much more than an obstacle to me solving the rest of the puzzle.