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.

New York Times 7:38 (or 6:06 with one square wrong)
New York Sun 6:02
LA Times 4:31
CrosSynergy 13:21
USA Today 18:19
Universal 13:17

(my stories come after the link… read on!)

New York Times
by C.W. Stewart, edited by Will Shortz

Generally easy, with the gimmick answers being exclamations somehow linked to historical figures:

• 17A. What President Washington said upon winning the lottery? (BY GEORGE)
• 23A. What flagmaker Ross said …? (HEAVENS TO BETSY)
• 33A. What Miss Molly said …? (GOOD GOLLY)
• 42A. What Galileo said …? (OH MY STARS)
• 47A. What the Big Bad Wolf said …? (WELL, BLOW ME DOWN)
• 62A. What Noah Webster said …? (OH MY WORD)

First — are we supposed to assume that this is what all of them said upon winning the lottery? Maybe, although I certainly didn’t see that connection between clues when solving. And second, and this is bigger — why do two of the answers start with “Oh my”? In fact, I was only solving in one direction to start, and I had (and was certain of) ON MY WORD for Noah Webster. It ended up being the one square I spent another 90 seconds finding… Seems weak to have two theme answers start with the same two words like that.

New York Sun
by Francis Heaney, edited by Peter Gordon

Fairly straightforward, I suppose. I didn’t get the trick to the long answers (excepting noticing that IRISH SETTER was… uh, Irish), and had to seek out another blog to inform me that the opening words of each of the four long answers complete the phrase KISS ME I’M IRISH. That is precisely what my wife told me this morning, and I plan to continue obeying her wishes throughout the day.

Los Angeles Times
by David W. Cromer, edited by Rich Norris

I was going to keep a spreadsheet of my times and such, and see how I did over the course of this next year, but now I haven’t started. I’m so weirdly OCD about some things that since I started blogging without tracking times, I can’t start tracking times now without revisiting puzzles, and that’s not fair because I already did some of the puzzles, and oh hell, what will I do?

CrosSynergy
by Rich Norris

A stupid math error was my biggest obstacle to this one. Math. Me! MMXX divided by X does not equal CCXX, for those wondering (it’s actually CCII, duh). Therefore, there is no such television show as Dr. Uxidare or Dr. Exodare or anything else like it (enjoy DR. KILDARE reruns, if you can find them). Nor is there a letter of the Arabic alphabet known as alxf (ALIF), as fun as that sounds. Also of note is that chefs do not salt things totally, they salt them TO TASTE.

The theme didn’t really help, as I think I know less about Ireland than I did yesterday. My friend Dan says that CrosSynergy puzzles are similar to New York Times Wednesdays. I will combine that with my time of 13:21, salt it to taste, and eat it for breakfast.

USA Today: Saints For A Day
by John Underwood

I don’t know if USA Today operates on the same difficulty scale as the New York Times, but eighteen minutes is too long for a Monday. If this is a trend, and it gets harder from here, I now question who the USA Today is marketing their paper to.

From the title, I was looking for the names of saints, either in the clues or the answers. There were two “Patrick” clues, but either nothing else, or nothing else I noticed.

Universal: Where?
by Steven L. Zisser

Boring, and generally unsatisfying. If more of the Universal series are like this, I’ll skip them.
I’m tired, and have to go to work. Goodbye.