Hey gang! It's that time of the month again - the time where I get cranky and insist on making very poor decisions - that's right, it's monthly roundup time! After doing another 250 puzzles, I've separated the wheat from the chaff, and I'm proud to announce that I have the objectively correct takes on all of crosswords.
My favorite puzzle of February 2022 was... "Throw Some D's" by Kelsey Dixon and Erik Agard! Everyone loves Erik Agard; everyone loves Kelsey Dixon [citation needed]; everyone loves Rich Boy's ringtone rap classic "Throw Some D's" [citation sorely needed]; what could go wrong with a grid like this!?!? (Nothing, that's what.) Give yourself a minute to solve the puzzle, then report back to me...
...ok, you did it? Awesome. What I like about this puzzle, on the most obvious level, is that it's a very interesting fusion of two distinct but synchronized varieties of "you don't see that every day" cluing and entries. Erik's doing his thang here, as evidenced by the one-two punch of the consecutive across entries [daequan smith org. for workers' rights] and [___/xer pronouns] (cluing UAW and XIE, of course), but you also have some extremely Kelsey clues like [painting, cinema, minions fanfic, etc.] for ART. The unabashed voiciness here means that clues that would be the highlight of any other puzzle - e.g. [south american city where you may have a come to jesus moment] for RIO - barely even register when deluged with such cool stuff.
But all this talk about cluing voice is surface level - one of the secretly most brilliant things about this puzzle is it how it handles its theme. "Add a letter" themes are, of course, a dime a dozen, but I don't think I've ever seen a puzzle which lays out the added letters in the same way this puzzle does. There are ten Ds sprinkled across five theme entries, but instead of putting 2 Ds in each themer, the Ds are put in in quantities of 1/2/4/2/1 - a very mathematically appealing way to do it, which allows for greater theme density in that you can get both HAND SOLO and the marquee DRANK AND FIDDLED to fit. It's a very satisfying themeset, done very elegantly. I give this... a D+!!! Get it, because... oh, never mind. Anyway, Erik edits a lot of puzzles, duh, so you'll see his name... um, literally everywhere, and Kelsey you will start seeing monthly as part of Lil AVC X, the midi branch of the AVCXpansion! Please sign up for that if you haven't already, because I get more money if we get enough subscriptions.
More highlights and lowlights under the cut...
Other Puzzles of Note
π Feb. 2: It's-a-Meal! (Steve Mossberg & Mike Lieberman, Square Pursuit)
Pun themes are pretty hit-or-miss, unless you possess either a Reaglesque wit or some sort of tightness to the wordplay. Thankfully for us, Steve (with an assist from the equally lovely Mike Lieberman) has both on display here with this lovely grid, which riffs on "X of Y" phrases using foods with final schwa sounds (e.g. TAPA THE NINTH). It's light and lovely and yet somehow manages to fit in a tripartite analogy Infinite Jest clue!
π¦Ά Feb. 4: Footloose (Alex Boisvert, Crossword Nexus)
The "Yacht Rock" series on Crossword Nexus is going to draw to a close in March (not that I would know anything about the contents of the final Yacht Rock puzzle... foreshadowing...) and this puzzle is probably the most charming one of the bunch - it's a slightly tinier grid than you'd expect given standard crossword conventions, but that hides the very funny constraint here that there are 24 squares worth of theme content lurking at the margins of the grid! Much to love here, as always with Alex.
⭐ Feb. 4: The Atlantic Mini (Paolo Pasco, The Atlantic)
I haven't talked about Paolo's Atlantic puzzles in a hot minute, so here's a pretty fun one, anchored by the very Pasconian clue [You might be dyeing to get a new one!] for HAIR COLOR atop [Influencer's post] for HYPE HOUSE. Also also: a gratuitous Phoebe Bridgers reference by way of her Tom Petty cover.
πΉ Feb. 4: Horrible Clues (Luis Kim, Luis's Puzzles and Playlists)
It seems like every month there's a cool new indie blog by some cool zoomer with a distinctive cluing voice; February's debut of note comes from Luis Kim, whose inaugural puzzle is "literally" horrible - packed with synonyms for "horrible" - but figuratively kickass, with cool clues all over. This grid doubles as a crash course in the past decade of pop music (Chainsmokers, BROCKHAMPTON, Lingua Ignota, A$AP Ferg, and most improbably, the Mountain Goats covering Ace of Base - were Paolo and Luis sharing a brain cell on 2/4?), but there's also tons of charming clues like ranging from the uber-terse ([Bye, bitch!] for CIAO) to the logorrheic ([Sounds made by *babies* when they watch "The Conjuring", but not by me (I'm a big boy who isn't a scaredy-cat)] for EEKS). Oh, and it references the greatest video of all time:
π’ Feb. 6: Graduation Exercises (Adesina O. Koiki, Boswords Winter Wondersolve)
This is a prime example of one of those "aha moments" puzzlemakers always strive for. There are ten circled squares in this puzzle, some of which seem to be one-way rebuses (e.g. (B)HUMOR for [Device essential to kiddie lit's Captain Underpants?]) but some of which seem to be circled for the hell of it... until you realize that when you connect these circled squares, you discover that the elided words in the theme entries are actually going along the diagonal. Tricky construction all around, but a beautiful one too, the finishing touch being that MAJOR slopes southeast and MINOR slopes southwest, perfectly mirroring one another in the grid. Adesina Koiko's first love is sports trivia, which you can tell with the angles on clues like ERA and TROJAN and puns like [Needing to be saved?] for ON GOAL - plus, the sorta-ugly entry L.A. RAM is saved with a hyper-timely Super Bowl clue. Take a bow, Ade.
⏩ Feb. 7: Trans Rights (Ada Nicolle, USA Today)
I don't really do USA Today puzzles on account of their - I will not mince words here - shit-tastrophic solving interface, but I'm glad I did made an exception for this one. Why? Because in her first ever USA Today grid, friend of the blog Ada Nicolle has smuggled in the name of her all-time favorite constructor:
[___ McStuffins (title role for Kiara Muhammad)]
[Victor or Rosa Vasquez, to Billy Batson]
She didn't spell my name right, but whatever. Thanks for the shoutout, Aida!
⭐ Feb. 8: Themeless 18 (Mollie Cowger, Crosswords from Outer Space)
Mollie Cowger got a big promotion last month which got in the way of her posting beautiful puzzles for free on the Internet for all to see. (Now she *edits* puzzles which are behind a scary paywall, one which you definitely can't bypass by hitting Ctrl-U, ha ha ha, because that would be wrong. Not that I would know anything about that.) Anyway, this puzzle is typically brilliant, and is notable for its aggressive Scrabblefucking (XERXES, VAXXED, QATARI, OXIDIZED) and the presence of exciting new entries that I'm fairly certain have never appeared in a mainstream outlet (.CSV, TAPSILOG, MEHNDI) and sometimes both simultaneously (XIE XIE!) ... and of course, the cluing angles are fresh and fun, like B-SIDE clued in reference to the video game Celeste, and TEETH clued in reference to... whatever this tweet is.
πͺ Feb. 8: Vox 2/8/22 (Juliana Tringali Golden, Vox)
Vox's daily mini is only 9x9, a size which does not lend itself to grid art. And yet, that's exactly what Juliana has done with this gorgeous grid - I really, really loved this one, which ties seemingly every square of the grid into its extraterrestrial theme, even the three-letter stuff. It's why Tuesday is my favorite day at Vox, even considering the sheer quality of its constructor roster (Nediger! Koiki! Ries! Blindauer!) - Juliana's "Twosday" grid was a super-solid rebus effort that would be the best midi offering at any outlet if not for this grid, which is an incredible hitrate.
π₯ Feb. 9: Wednesday 2/9/22 (Peter A. Collins, LA Times)
OK, now here's a puzzle that I've been thinking about for the past few weeks, not because the puzzle is brilliant (it's not) or because the puzzle is terrible (it's definitely not) - it's because the themeset is blatantly duperific but in a way that acts like there's nothing weird about it. Per Mr. Collins, HOT PANTS have HOT LEGS, a HOT SEAT, and HOT POCKETS - which is simultaneously a very cohesive and funny themeset, and one that I would absolutely never imagine passing muster at any outlet. It breaks with convention, but in a way that doesn't draw attention to itself - I wasn't particularly charmed by this grid, but it's so odd that I think it deserves a mention.
π Feb. 9: The (Wednesday) Crossword (Natan Last, New Yorker)
This grid, well, it's not bad. There's a nice circular-ish grid shape slightly marred by a pair of cheaters that ruin what would be some very cute diagonal symmetry. We get a Michelle Williams reference (the DESTINY'S CHILD one), which is great, and a Curtis Sliwa reference, which is either really funny or grid killing. As per usual, Natan's come up with some very clever bits of wordplay, e.g., [It's smelly and wicked] for SCENTED CANDLE.
But I'm not writing to say nice things about this grid. (If you want to read compliments on a Natan Last grid, scroll down towards the end of this section.) Rather, I'm writing to complain about its two spanners: A FAREWELL TO ARMS & TYLER THE CREATOR. I can hear you now: "Q, how could you complain about TYLER THE CREATOR? That's a great, super-hip 15!" Yes, TYLER THE CREATOR was a great 15... when Anna Shechtman used it in a New Yorker puzzle on June 25, 2021. (Similarly, I can't find it via googling but I'm fairly certain A FAREWELL TO ARMS has shown up in the New Yorker before - granted, it's a very common 15.) Meanwhile, one of Shechtman's puzzles from last month prominently featured the entry AIME CESAIRE, which I knew from my useless liberal arts degree, but also invoked deja vu from its appearance in a Natan Last grid from not even six months prior (August 21, 2021, if you're keeping track at home). Now, I love me some Odd Future, but like... The New Yorker doesn't get that many puzzle submissions per year, and they only work with a dozen or so constructors, so I don't know how these repeated marquee entries happen.
⭐ Feb. 9: Take a Hike (Drew Schmenner, WSJ)
Look, I'm a simple woman. I see a puzzle with five Qs in it (in this case, as half of theme entries with STARTING QBs, e.g. QUAD BIKE and the always-a-joy-to-see QUIZ BOWL) and I am duty-bound to give it my endorsement. But Mr. Schmenner has turned in a pretty tight grid, with the only sad bit of glue being COQ, which is only half-bad (it's French but it also sounds like you're talking about a schlong, so literally 50/50). Also of note is the presence of both EAZY-E and M'BAKU, which is two more "Things White People Don't Know" than I'd expect in the WSJ. (They are the only two "Things White People Don't Know" in the grid. The WSJ skews kinda white, is what I'm saying.)
⭐ Feb. 10: themeless 17: swoops (Malaika Handa & Mollie Cowger, Girlbosswords)
Not content to just drop the best themeless of the month and then abscond to Conde Nast HQ, Mollie Cowger joins forces with Mali Handa on this grid, which is (unsurprisingly) very very good. I'm never not going to laugh at clues like [Focus of a clean eating fad?] for... you know what [Focus of a clean eating fad?] is a clue for. But not only is the sheer number of long clues with mic drop wordplay in this grid enviable (see the clue roundup), but you also get references to like, oughties middle school lit and YouTube hip-hop playlists, and probably one of the all-time-great "get this junk entry over with" clues in BORATE, clued as a chemical compound whose Wikipedia article helpfully informs you that it is, quote, "Not to be confused with Borat."
π¦ Feb. 12: Does It Quack? (Rose Sloan, A Crossword Rose)
Did you guys see that new Pokemon? Quaxly? The one that's a duck with anime hair? He's very handsome. I feel like the weed kitty is currently bogarting (pun intended) the limelight this guy deserves. Even though he looks an awful lot like that previous duck Pokemon "Ducklett." Remember Ducklett? Look at Ducklett, he's so precious:
⭐ Feb. 12: Freestyle 685 (Tim Croce, Club 72)
Tim notes that he used to be terrified of a road sign with a pattern *very* similar to this grid; solvers have reason to be terrified of this grid pattern as well, because it's got a very scary shape - two veeeeery long fingers (12 blocks long!!) which poke out and divide the grid into three big long vertical strips, with a quintet(!) of spanners and a TON of 5 letter entries. I don't usually enjoy puzzles like these, which I jokingly call "worm grids," because the puzzle is just a twisty line. Luckily, Tim's wit shines through on this one, including one of my favorite 15s of the year: [Art that's over the moon?] for LOWER BACK TATTOO.
⭐ Feb. 15: The Charter Puzzle (Stella Zawistowski, Vulture)
Oh god. Okay. So. This is a Below Deck tribute puzzle. Do you know what Below Deck is? I didn't! It's a reality TV show, airing on Bravo, about the crew of a superyacht. God bless Vulture for letting this happen.
⁉ Feb. 15: These Go to Eleven (Matt Jones, Jonesin')
Oh man. Oh man. This puzzle has TWO DIFFERENT 5x11 STACKS. Holy shit, am I right?? Note that I didn't say "clean" 5x11 stacks, because the fill here crossing these entries is, generally speaking, not very good. Like, one of these stacks has ELAMI, DIMAS, AMENT, BIRNEYS, and STEERERS going down. In a row. But you know what? I don't care, this is a stunt grid of the sort that you only get once a month or so, and also, there's a ton of really fun long entries here. The only thing I didn't like is that there was an eleven-letter Mary J. Blige song in one of the stacks, and I was sure it was "The Real Love," but no, it was "Love No Limit." Damn you, Matt Jones! Oh, thanks to a scrabblefucked corner, this is a pangram too, because why not! I kind of hate this puzzle, but not as much as I love it.
π£ Feb. 18: Welcome to Utahs (Matthew Sewell, Newsday)
You know, I almost liked this grid, because this is - on its face, anyway - a pretty cute gimmick for a puzzle. A particular arrangement of black blocks in a grid (the P pentomino) is known as a "Utah," and this puzzle's grid is just a bunch of Utahs, with the longest entries all relating to the state of Utah in some way. Cool! Only problem is, by doing so, the grid ends up with four completely isolated corners, connected to the rest of the grid by only a single isolated square. (Was this a meta gag? Four Corners? Probably not.) I wasn't really feeling any of the theme content either, unless you're big into LAND SPEED RECORDs or the ROMNEY and OSMOND families. And most alarmingly, the grid shape means that there are only four entries in the entire grid of seven or more letters. Ruh-roh!
Now, could this sort of gimmick grid work? Um... maybe. There are arrangements of the Utah pattern that would open up those corners, which would be a start, but you'd still end up with a lot of short entries. My take on a grid like this - inspired heavily by a New York Sun puzzle from two decades ago which did this with Ts - would be to make this a rebus puzzle. See below. (Not that this autofilled grid is very good - ON KP + KP D(UT)Y would individually be terrible entries; together they're grid-killer - but I'm sure with some mild alterations you could get something much nicer.)
π Feb. 19: Universal Freestyle 8 (Enrique Henestroza Anguiano, Universal)
A neat, basically invisible aspect of Universal's recent spate of themelesses is that several of them have a 74-word limit rather than the 72-word limit that most mainstream outlets use. Is this grid from Enrique *better* because it's 74 words rather than 72? Probably not (there is literally no doubt in my mind that Enrique would be able to make an equally great grid with two fewer slots)... but on the other hand, maybe 74 slots is better because that gives you the capacity to have two more great clues.
But then again, this is a "freestyle," not a themeless, and there *is* a minitheme here: the first and last across entries are PRINCELY SUM and KING'S RANSOM, both clued as [Royalty payment?]. But you also have to love stuff like GODADDY, CHANTERELLE, HIS AND HIS, and NEW DELHI, as well as cute angles for stock propers like ARLO and YODA.
π Feb. 19: LA Times Saturday 2/19/22 (Evan Kalish, LA Times)
Plenty of good stuff in this offering from Evan, which dutifully checks off every box for A+ fill options. Crunchy consonant clusters like GMC YUKONS? Yep. Modern conversational phrases like CHEF'S KISS or even something like OK BYE? Yep. Etc, etc. (There are more than two good types of entries, to be clear, I'm just trying not to list every entry in the puzzle.) The grid shape is cute too - it's superficially similar to what I nickname a "worm" grid, where you snake around the grid in a single S-shaped path, but there are black squares in the big-ass corners which function like roundabouts and give the grid a lot more flow. Very cool.
You can often see a tension in daily papers' themelesses when the constructor is half the age of the editor, where a phrase will show up but it's clued in a weirdly specific way that doesn't quite capture the meaning of the phrase. This is how you get, e.g., BEAST MODE showing up in the Saturday Stumper clued as [Animalistic persona]. In this puzzle, that obvious editorial switcheroo was [Ellen Morgan's revelation in a 1997 episode of "Ellen," e.g.] for COMING OUT. Aren't there more relevant reference points for that than a 25-year-old sitcom episode? Was Evan even alive in 1997? Is this really a bad clue or am I just mad that I'M LESBIAN wasn't the right answer, causing me great confusion? Good questions! [Edit: apparently, this was Evan's original clue! Sorry, Evan. I still found this reference dated.]
♚♛ Feb. 20: The Atlantic 2/20/22 (Chandi Deitmer, The Atlantic)
This puzzle didn't sit right with me, honestly. The gimmick here is that sitcom titles are reparsed to be about famous people, like, THE WONDER YEARS is now a sitcom about Stevie Wonder. (OK.) And all the people referenced are black. (Great!) And the revealer is... BLACK COMEDY. Erm... hm. Happy Black History Month, guys?
I should note that only two months prior, on 12/12/21, The Atlantic ran a puzzle by Simon Vozick-Levinson where all the themers were questions posed by song titles, and every one of the songs referenced was by a black artist (Whitney, Marley, Q-Tip, Marvin Gaye). I sailed through that puzzle and then found myself thinking, "you know, it's kind of cool to see a puzzle like this, that doesn't need to pat itself on the back for putting four black people in a grid." Oops.
To be clear, I don't think this sort of stuff should be off-limits for white constructors/editors, but the execution here is severely lacking in a way that I associate with clumsy WAKANDA FOREVER tribute puzzles of the sort you see in more mainstream outlets rather than indie darlings like Chandi [Deitmer, who did an all-timer Boswords puzzle last year] and Caleb [Madison, Atlantic editor, aka the only person to ADD Janet Jackson references to one of my puzzles rather than remove them]. It did not help that this grid was markedly oversized at 17 by 17, despite having an 11-letter revealer, and that some of these clues felt very, very strained, e.g., [Series about Regina finding out she's descended from Elizabeth II, Catherine the Great, etc. (1998–2007, with The)?].
π Feb. 21: The (Monday) Crossword (Anna Shechtman, The New Yorker)
While I greatly disagree with George W. Bush on nearly all fronts, he and his media apparatchiks did do one really good thing during those eight years: they really, really stuck it to France. Say what you will about George W. Bush's disastrous nationbuilding exercises and Rove-approved gaybaiting - he would NEVER ask you to fill in the blank in [“De la Politique des ___” (1957 AndrΓ© Bazin essay about film criticism)].
Alas, while Anna Shechtman may not have bungled the disaster response to Katrita, prompting a visibly upset pre-GetOutified Kanye West to claim that she "doesn't care about black people," she has bungled this puzzle, which I can only describe as Cahiers du Crossword. In addition to the aforementioned AUTEURS clue, we are also expected to know the full names of WIM WENDERS and CLAIRE DENIS, and that [___ : Joseph L. Mankiewicz :: My Mother : Pedro AlmodΓ³var]. All valid clues by their lonesome - great clues, even! - but in tandem they're more than a bit much - we get it, you do film criticism!!
But really, this grid's problem is in its architecture. If you pay attention to the edges of your typical themeless grid, the "fingers" will poke out of the vertical edge on (e.g.) rows 5 and 11, resulting in a clump of four- and five-letter entries on the outermost columns of the puzzle. That gives you plenty of room for perfectly cromulent words with relatively few constraints. But instead, this grid opts to divide those downs into sets of 3, 4, and 6, which means we get the worst of both worlds. On the one hand you have two gnarls of deeply unfun three-letter entries in the corners, such as the final four downs in the puzzle - IN E, EIN, SOT, and TNS??? - crossing the definitely-a-word MOTLIEST. While in the corners, which are 6x6, you get blah fill like STASES crossing TESSIE and IRENES crossing TSETSE.
If I sound like I'm being very negative about The New Yorker's puzzles in this grid, that's because grids like these are to a certain extent anomalies. I mean, let's not mince words here - we are talking about the highestbrow of the mainstream outlets here, one infamous for managing to take even the cartoon, the plebeiest of all art forms, and turn it into a Rorschach test for Whit Stillman characters. And if you understood that reference, mille grazie, you are exactly the eminently guillotinable milieu of effete left-liberal arts grad upon whom Eustace Tilley's monocled visage smiles. But while the archetypal New Yorker crossword takes great pains to have "intellectual" content abut more fun stuff like (to cite a prior Shechtman jawn) CHUMBAWAMBA, this puzzle's particular cocktail of I-Am-Very-Cultured trivia plus NEHIS-tier (actual entry in this grid!) gunk is less Eustace Tilley and more Eugene Maleska, with only a SHAKE WEIGHT reference on the technicolor pop crap side. (The first E of which is crossing EVONNE Goolagong, so, um, fuck you if you think it's SHAKY WEIGHT.)
It's all the more frustrating compared to Anna Shechtman's puzzle from earlier in the month, which got this balance perfectly right with much better fill all around, or really, any Shechtman puzzle prior to this, the majority of which feel hip and fun rather than stodgy in the way puzzle does.
π Feb. 22: happy twosday! [Claire Rimkus, Just Gridding!]
This is a pretty great novelty grid which is worth experiencing blind (this is your cue to solve the puzzle if you haven't already before I spoil it - it's a very breezy puzzle of approximately mini size, so it shouldn't take you that long to go through it) but it also is worth analyzing as a challenge to one of the classic rules of American-style crosswords: namely, are two-letter entries really that bad? And the answer is... yes, arguably, unless your idea of fun is remembering the abbreviations for "osmium" and "nanogram." (I count 16 abbreviations here out 30 down entries.)
But at the same time, some of these clues/entries are arguably more natural than the very similar three-letter entries with the same premise you see in crosswords all the time. DRS, MTN, and NNW are bullshit fill, but can the same be said of DR., MT, and NW? Isn't there some novelty in seeing ED Markey get a shout-out in a puzzle, or having to plug in the middle part of Ana DE Armas rather than the first part? Anyway, I had a lot of fun with this grid - indisputably the best of the many, many, MANY "two" themed grids we got in anticipation of 2/22/22.
⭐ Feb. 25: Free Association 59 (Trent Evans, Grid Therapy)
I've yet to praise Trent on this blog, but I have a lot of love for his grids, and his cool dad vibes. This grid is the best of his last couple jawns, in my opinion, not for the solid stacks (although, yes, these stacks kick all kinds of ass) but for the opinionating inherent in clues like [Spirit Airlines' bajillion] for FREE, or even sort of goofy angles like [Something impossible for me to ever say literally] for I'M A DEAD MAN. Trent is an interesting constructor because content-wise, he's not so different from your mainstream puzzle outlets, but he has a very distinctly voicey voice, which makes him an awesome gateway drug into indie puzzles. (See also: Rosswords.)
⭐ Feb. 26: Universal Freestyle 9 (Adam Aaronson, Universal)
This one is notable mostly for just how wide open it is while remaining noob-friendly. You've also got some really fun trivia, and some Tuesday-level wordplay that's nevertheless extremely fun. Consider the following A+ entries:
- [Good time to change locks?] for BAD HAIR DAY
- [What may stop you from spilling the beans?] for TORTILLA
- [Top shooter at a basketball game?] for TSHIRT CANNON
πΎπ― Feb. 27: holes in the house (themeless xix) (Brooke Husic, xwords by a. ladee)
A Brooke Husic puzzle that's good? No surprise there. The WAP-adjacent title here is perhaps a good reference point for the content of the puzzle, which includes POSED NUDE, PILLOW TALK, and an astonishing stack in the northwest corner with PERIOD SEX, LEMON JUICE, and DOMINATRIX. I could live without a League of Legends reference in the clue for LIZARD GIRL, but whatever.
However, it's been a little while since I said something spicy in this post, so here's where I drop a hot take: the aforementioned stack is enabled by the entry XE/XEM, clued by [Pronoun pair]. Many people, from what I see in the crossworld blogosphere, regard entries consisting of concatenated pronouns as an asset to a puzzle. I am deeply confused by these people, and am not sure what exactly makes HE/HIM a colorful entry rather than a deeply mundane difficult-to-clue phrase in the vein of AND/OR. Sometimes I hear entries like HE/HIM described as a positive on the grounds that it is "trans representation," which I personally find ludicrous, as though the most interesting/crossworthy thing about LGBT people is their choice of pronoun rather than their names, achievements, etc. (To be clear, that XE/XEM is a neopronoun is really, really not the issue here - although it easily could have been, in the sense that a clue like [Pronoun pair] is equally valid for HE/HIM, ZE/ZIM, EM/EIR, etc etc, and also in the sense that the very similar XIE/XER showed up in my favorite grid of the month, so why shouldn't XE/XER be valid, y'know?)
⭐ Feb. 28: The (Monday) Crossword (Natan Last, The New Yorker)
After a lot of hating, I'm proud to say I absolutely loved this offering from Natan Last. I'm also proud to say this puzzle was atypically easy for a Monday New Yorker (I solved it in well under four minutes). These are maybe interlinked.
But I don't know, maybe I just loved this puzzle because it namedropped Gwendolyn Brooks' classic poem WE REAL COOL, one of the all time great works of American poetry (and also one of the shortest - again, maybe interlinked). The relatively proper-heavy southeast corner of this grid is perhaps going to be trickier for solvers who are not on Natan's wavelength like I was given crosses like, e.g., GYOZA x FRANZEN, but who can't love a puzzle with [Someone who might spend a lot just for kicks] cluing SNEAKERHEAD?
⭐ Feb. 28: Themeless Monday #661 (Brendan Emmett Quigley, BEQ)
Hey, it's a triple stack puzzle, and a pretty good one at that. Even better, it's a triple stack crossed by two vertical 15s that are not merely as good as but BETTER THAN the content of the stack itself. On top of that, there's tons of cute clues here, as well as very fun longer entries like CYBERSEX, FLOPHOUSE, and DANIEL-SAN. Also, GO ON A TOOT, which is a really funny phrase! Look at those OOs. Also, TOOT is a euphemism for "fart." I don't know if you knew that?
Clues of Note
Per Stella Z.: [Decisionmaking board with no members] OUIJA
Chris Adams, racking up points in the "short clue for long entry" category: [Florida man] JUAN PONCE DE LEON
Nice polysyndeton courtesy of Luis Kim: [Word that you can stick on the end of "rat" or "act" or "opt" or "posit" or "miss" or "pass" to make new words] ION
From Matthew Sewell: [Popular college course] RAMEN
A rare not-stilted angle for a common entry courtesy of Kate Chin Park: [Possible response to "You are being so annoying right now"] AM I?
Per Rebecca Goldstein & Claire Rimkus: [Who's there, in a joke] FIRST BASE
Nice wordplay find from Jesse Lansner: [Discord server] ERIS
Kate again, with a d'aww inducer: ["Elmo doesn't know who needs to hear this today, but remember Elmo ___ you!" -@elmo] LOVES
Per Robyn Weintraub: [Protest slogan concerning congress?] MAKE LOVE NOT WAR
A blast of millennial nostalgia from Richard Allen: [Computer from 2001 that didn't come with an AOL CD-ROM] HAL
A blast of Xer nostalgia from Tim Croce: [Kind of rock popular in the '70s] PET
Per Mollie & Mali: [Purchase made in anticipation of getting As?] TRAINING BRA
Per Mollie & Mali (again): [What came before Bing in the '90s] CHANDLER
Per Mollie Cowger, solo this time: [Shares on Reddit] STONKS
Per Mali Handa, solo this time: [Toy company that sells ugly pop-culture collectibles] FUNKO (ed. note: it's true and you should say it)
Evan Birnholz, being very clever with his "this is a first name" indicator: [T/I/N/A turner] VANNA
A totally unparseable one courtesy of Kate feat. Rafa Musa: [: : __ :: :: : "as"] IS TO
Per BEQ: [Some of its classes go into depth] ART SCHOOL
From Chris Adams again: [Word rhymed with "face" and also with "aahs" in the Herclues song "Zero to Hero"] VASE
Brian Thomas being weirdly specific in a fun way: [World's largest tire manfuacturer (by quantity, probably not by volume)] LEGO
From Tim Croce, just in time for the Winter Olympics: [Number of gold metals] ANTHEM
Per Robyn again: [Common sight in New York City (except when you need one)] CAB
Will Nediger spitting straight facts: [Animal in alphabet books that are too cowardly to end with "zyzzyva"] ZEBRA
Per Brooke Husic, with a typically clever take on a STD (standard) entry: [Helpful inits. when you want to focus on a subject] SLR
Things I Learned This February
For one month in 2006, the New York Mets' shortstop and the Chicago Cubs' catcher were both Dominicans born in 1983 named Jose REYES; the B in USB is short for BUS, which is short for omniBUS; Max Ernst's "collage novel" Une semaine de bontΓ© turns Victorian lithographs into weird Bosch-oid tableaus; Amy Schneider the Jeopardy! superchamp has a cat named MEEP; Anabasis, the Greek soldier Xenophon's account of the conquest of Persia by Cyrus the Younger (and the source of the quote "thalassa, thalassa" - "the sea, the sea") was extremely loosely adapted into the 1979 "remember when New York was *really* cool, and by cool I mean a shithole" cinema classic The Warriors; Johnny Depp had a tattoo that said WINONA FOREVER, which, after his divorce from Winona Ryder, he had slightly amended and now reads WINO FOREVER; there was a goth Flintstone named Schleprock. No, really...
... Legally Blonde star ALI Larter's first role was as Allegra Coleman, the completely fictitious "it girl" on in an obviously-completely-fabricated Esquire cover story circa 1996 (which inspired a bevy of Hollywood producers who saw a pretty white girl with an exposed midriff on a magazine cover to go "cast this bimbo, STAT!!!!!", thus launching Larter's career); Nintendo was founded in the 1890s as a playing card manufacturer, but flush with cash in the '50s after a licensing deal with Disney, they briefly branched out into Nintendo vacuum cleaners and Nintendo love hotels; "Phyrgian caps" were once associated with emancipated Roman slaves and, by extension, the entire concept of liberty, but are now mostly known as "those hats the Smurfs wear"; after World War II the practice of SHIATSU was banned for a decade in Japan, a ban which was overturned in part by Helen Keller; speaking of white lady saviors in Asia, the dominance of Vietnamese-Americans in the nail salon industry can largely be ascribed to Tippi Hedren. . .
... yes, Shitterton is a real town, and yes, its name does come from the word "shit"; Jean-Bertrand ARISTIDE was the liberation theologist turned two-time Haitian president who normalized the practice of Vodou in the region and who may or may not have been overthrown by the U.S. government (pretend I am winking at you like I'm Kathryn Hahn in WandaVision); "Type A" personality was basically invented by the tobacco industry; Persian King Xerxes I's defeat (as detailed in the highly accurate, totally-not-Riefenstahlian movie 300) happened at the hilariously-named Battle of Salamis; legendary sci-fi author/crank/groper/N-word enthusiast Harlan Ellison once mailed a publisher 213 bricks and made them pay the postage, and also mailed a different publisher a dead gopher; "harem pants" and the "hobble skirt" were invented by Paul Poiret, once the most famous couturier in the entire West but perhaps these days mostly known as an orientalist who would dress up as a whip-toting "sultan"; character actor Philip AHN (of Kung Fu fame) was the brother of Ralph Ahn, who played Tran on New Girl (and who died last month at age 95), and the son of Ahn Chang-ho (aka Dosan), Korean independence fighter who co-wrote South Korea's national anthem; Cleopatra was born in 69 BC (nice); former Bulgarian prime minister Simeon Saxe-Coburg-Gotha is the world's last living TSAR, having been six when he took power in 1943 and nine when he was forced into exile in 1946; the cereal HONEY SMACKS were originally called Sugar Smacks, having changed their name (but not their recipe, which is still 55+% sugar) in the '80s, and having changed their mascot approximately a zillion times, including to... Mr. Spock!; ASAHI's HQ in Sumida, Japan, is shaped like a beer can and topped with the "Flamme D'Or," which allegedly represents beer froth (see below)...
... NOBLE ROT is a fungus cultivated by vintners because it allows infected grapes to hold more sugar; Mike PIAZZA was drafted as a favor to his father, multimillionaire used-car tycoon Vince Piazza, who paid Ted Williams to personally coach a teenage Mike at the batting cage; the FDA approved medical use of maggots in 2003; Louise Post and Nina Gordon of '90s rock group Veruca Salt (whose single "Volcano Girls" I have blasted at 3 AM more times than I care to admit this year) were introduced by actress LILI Taylor; at Mexican weddings, sometimes the maid of honor will eat the worm at a bottom of a glass of mezcal; Franz KAFKA's The Castle entered the public domain this year, as did Winnie the Pooh - two works that have little in common other than that Xi Jinping probably isn't a fan of either; Noomi "Dragon Girl Tattoo Girl (I Haven't Seen This Movie)" Rapace and her husband Ola both took the invented surname "Rapace" upon marriage, from the Italian word for "bird of prey;" the UK's Prime Minister's cat is called the "Chief Mouser" ; PANAMA HATS are actually Ecuadorian in origin; Black Panther Raymond "MASAI" Hewitt taught karate as a self-defense method, but left the party due to disillusionment with Huey Newton; speaking of the Panthers, you know who was a Panther as a teenager? Nile Rodgers, of all people; oh, and more about the Panthers, apparently they really loved gay (white) French playwright Jean GENET and invited him to the US on a speaking tour; OSPREYs live on every continent except Antarctica; Franco NERO played Django in the 1966 spaghetti Western Django, but he also had roles in Die Hard 2, John Wick 2, and Cars 2; Palau's capital, Ngerulmud, is the world's least populous capital with only 271 inhabitants (yes, even counting Nauru's de facto capital, Yaren); there is no God, but there is a Johnny Cash Funko Pop...
...Alice B. TOKLAS was Gertrude Stein's lover for 40 years, but she's almost certainly best known for publishing a pot brownie recipe in her autobiography; Tamara de Lempicka is the artist DECO whose work fuses cubism with portraiture with total bisexual energy; pivoting from Fyre Fest, Ja Rule is an NFT guy now; probably the earliest recorded example of skeuomorphism, a term I exclusively associate with the floppy disk icon being the pictograph for "save file" decades after floppy disks fell out of favor, is the stone DORIC column (whose ornate design pointlessly mimics the necessary features of wooden architecture); the iconic Monopoly thimble and boot tokens are no more, as of 2017 (they were booted - pun intended - in favor of a T-rex and a penguin); the term TETE-A-TETE (fuck you, no diacritics) comes from a kind of sofa/bench which is tilted to enable conversation; the last man of the YAHI people was Ishi (not his real name - per Yahi tradition, he could not speak his name until another Yahi introduced him) died in 1916 after working as a janitor at Berkeley for five years, and after being the subject of great media/ethnographic scrutiny; Corsica's flag is literally the disembodied head of a black man - further proof that George W. Bush had the right idea re: France; a pre-fame Jon Secada taught humanities courses at Miami Dade College for five years; Xochitl Gonzalez's 2021 debut novel OLGA Dies Dreaming takes its name from the Pedro Pietri poem Puerto Rican Obituary, literally one of the best pieces of Latino writing ever; the ACL, MCL, and meniscus are collectively known as the "unhappy triangle"; the first version of "Respect" was recorded not by Aretha but by Otis Redding...
...BTS is short for Bangtan Sonyeondan, Korean for Bulletproof Boy Scouts; the Bee Gees got their start (and their name!) thanks to Bill Gates - no, the other one; plums may have originated in Damascus and been introduced to England during the Roman empire (hence the name "Damson plum"); Walt Kelly's Pogo the Opossum, whose name lives on through Crossfire suggesting I GO POGO for literally any seven-letter entry, was an early critic of McCarthyism through the character of Simple J. Malarkey (Biden would not approve!); Offset (the middle Migo, the one who has two kids with Cardi B) has a song called "Ric Flair Drip" featuring a distressingly old RIC Flair; Dock Ellis pitched a no-hitter for the Pittsburgh Pirates in 1970 while under the effects of "Purple Haze" - a super potent strain of LSD cooked up by Owsley Stanley (the inspiration for Steely Dan's "Kid Charlemagne" and, allegedly, Breaking Bad); TSAI Ming-Liang (no relation to TV chef Ming Tsai) directed 1998's The Hole, a film about a virus in Taiwan that makes people act like cats, and the connection between two people in neighboring apartments as they live through the plague, which is carried out in the form of musical numbers - still a better movie musical about cats than you-know-what (don't @ me, Paolo); the squat thrust called the "burpee" is named after its inventor, the improbably named Royal H. Burpee; disgraced ex-Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich now has a Cameo account; don't tell any constructors, but Diana Ross has a son with a mountaineer named Arne Naess, and that son is named Evan Olaf Ross-Naess, and he had a part in the 2006 film ATL... again, don't tell any constructors!!; the month of May may (pun intended) be named after Hermes' mother, Maia; Mt. ARARAT is known in Turkish as Agri Dagi, or Mountain of Pain...
... before SOS was the standard distress signal, an Italian named Quintino Bonomo proposed the distress signal SSS DDD back in 1903; celebrity lawyer/straw-feminist/publicity hound Gloria Allred (nee Gloria Rachel Bloom) isn't related to Crazy Ex-Girlfriend creator Rachel Bloom (who plays a lawyer/straw-feminist), nor is she related to Colin Allred, linebacker-turned-lawyer-turned-Texas congressman; she is however related to lawyer Lisa Bloom, yes, that one; sprinkles (of cupcake fame) are also called nonpareils, jimmies, and hundreds-and-thousands; "skrt," the onomatopoeia for the noise car tires make when they drive away, was mainstreamed by rapper Kodak Black on his 2014 single "SKRT", but the first recorded usage of "skrt" in a hip-hop context dates back to 1994, by Pete Rock and CL Smooth on the track "Tell Me"; Costa RICA has no standing army; among his many, many cinematic innovations, Akira Kurosawa invented the "buddy cop" genre with the 1949 film Stray Dog; the '50s/'60s TV show 77 Sunset Strip (featuring Efrem Zimbalist Jr., who'll you remember from last month's post was the voice of Doc Ock in the '90s Spidey cartoon as well as the son of violin prodigy Efrem Zimbalist Sr.) had several extremely avantgarde episodes, including an episode with no dialogue and one in which Zimbalist was the only character onscreen for the entire hour; ROSTRA (rostrums) are daises are pulpits, except the word "rostrum" is way cooler because its name derives from how they would be decorated with the prow of losers' warships; Tarek El Moussa, host of HGTV's Flip or Flop, was diagnosed with thyroid cancer in 2013 after an eagle-eyed viewer spotted a lump had spread to El Moussa's lymph nodes and wrote in to the show's producers; the term "quidnunc" for a busybody comes from the Latin phrase "quid nunc?" meaning "what now?"; LINEN and LINSEED are etymologically related, because they both come from flax; there are three different rock bands named after characters from The Neverending Story: indie rock act Vetusta Morla (named after a turtle), metalcore band Atreyu (named after the book's antagonist), and deeply deeply awful Spanish boy band AURYN (named after the wish-granting amulet)...
...the team now called the Brooklyn Nets were originally the New Jersey Americans; the world's first dams were built in what is now Jordan in 3500 BC; Tim Allen's full name is Timothy Alan Dick, ha ha ha; I delight/regret to inform you that banana peel bacon exists; Union general Abner Doubleday didn't invent baseball, but he was president of the American branch of the Theosophical Society, and his interest in the occult led him to translate several highly influential French mystical texts into English; LA Times film critic Richard EDER was grandson of James Martin "Santiago" Eder, the Lithuanian-Jewish-American-Colombian sugar mill impresario; TikTok influencer and living argument for infanticide Bella Thorne played a blue-haired nun in the 2021 film Habit, a sub-Tarantino shitfest mostly interesting for containing a "lesbian Jesus" played by Michael Jackson's daughter Paris; the only royal residence in the 50 states in in OAHU, it's called Iolani Palace; SLOVAK Zdeno "Big Z" Chara is 6'9" (nice), making him the tallest person to play in the NHL; he's also the oldest man in any major US sports league; Richard AVEDON's most iconic photographs are of John F. and Jackie Kennedy, but he also took the cover photo for Whitney Houston's debut album; Petri Hawkins-Byrd, Judge Judy's longtime bailiff and crossword enthusiast, will not be in Judge Judy's new IMDBtv show; the USPS operates a mule train in the Grand Canyon; the gin and tonic was originally invented as a sweetener for the anti-malaria medication quinine; penne pasta was invented in 1865 (which I find weird, like, can you imagine someone *inventing* pasta??); POODLES are probably of German origin, not French as you might assume; art deco artist ERTE was born Roman Tyrtov, the descendant of a Tatar khan; the omnipresent icon made up of three parallel horizontal lines shaped like the Greek letter xi (Ξ) is called the HAMBURGER BUTTON; the word "shampoo" comes from the Hindi for "to massage"; Commodore named the AMIGA so it would come before Apple in the phone book, which is funny because Apple is so named in part because a spiteful Steve Jobs wanted his company to show up before Atari (Steve Jobs' former employer) in the phone book!; Marie Antoinette's many nicknames during her lifetime included "Madame Deficit" (for her profligacy), "L'Austrichienne" (a portmanteau of Austrian and chienne, or, um, bitch), "Le Tribade" (the lesbian), and "prostituee babylonienne" (self-explanatory). What a note to end on!
Miscellany
π In the Crossings From Hell Department: Jamey Smith's 2/26 themeless for the LA Times has a nook in the grid where _ MINOR is crossing _TS. I polled constructors in Crosscord about this, and their reactions tracked with my gut instinct: that blank should be filled by a B (for BTS), or maybe an A (for ATS), or possibly an E (for ETS). This grid went with... G MINOR crossing GTS, as in, multiple GT cars. Not the worst choice, I guess - I'm sure someone has found a spurious clue for CTS, DTS, and/or FTS.
Now, I know what you're thinking: are we really limited to musical keys for _MINOR? And the answer is... Yes. But are we limited to single letters? Through the magic of rebus squares, we could have had prominent emancipated African-American medical expert JANE MINOR crossing the plural JANETS. Or, even better [citation needed], we could have [CNET co-founder] HALSEY MINOR crossing [Some indie music merch with the subtitle "From The Badlands Without Love," e.g.] HALSEY T'S. I would love to hear your take on BETTER rebus squares than that, if that's even possible.
π In the "I'm An Editor At A Major Outlet Now" Department: AVCX put out its first week of AVCXpansion content this February, and it's all very, very good. For my part, I'm proud to say I was involved in editing a breezy themeless puzzle ("Causing a Ruckus" - ironically, very easy by AVCX standards) by the inimitable Yacob Yonas, and, oh yeah, I did all the graphics for the shiny new AVCX website. (Still a work in progress!) I'm very happy with the quality of the work here, not merely from myself/Sid/Chris/Max but from every single person involved with the site, including the cryptics (which I have started doing now, and guess what, they're fucking awesome!) and the trivia game, which is extremely cute. In merely one month, we have eclipsed Fireball, Outside the Box, etc as the premier crossword subscription service - or at least, I sure think we have.
π΅ In the "Music to Solve Puzzles To" Department: An errant reference to KRS-One's "Sound of Da Police" got me Googling the song, and I'm kind of astonished just how famous this song is as a leitmotif for law enforcement in popular culture, because the verses in this song are so explicitly ACAB that they make Straight Outta Compton look like Blue Bloods.
As for happier tunes to listen to, a reference to a deep cut from The Meters in a BEQ puzzle has reminded me how awesome their particular brand of funk syncopation is; a reference to New Jersey-born oudist ARA Dinkjian in this month's a. ladee has turned me on to the music of New Age/jazz quartet Night Ark. All worth a listen!
π In the "Seriously? We're Still Referencing Gone with the Wind In Puzzles? In 2022? Not Merely For Stuff Like RHETT and O'HARA, Where Margaret Mitchell's Paean To The Good Ol' Days Of Chattel Slavery Are, Frustratingly (But Objectively), The Most Famous Instances Of Those Names In Popular Culture, But For TARA? TARA, For Chrissakes??? There Are Literally Hundreds Of Real Life Women Named Tara And You've Opted To Clue TARA As The Name Of A PLANTATION??? Jesus Christ, Seriously???" Department: Seriously? We're still referencing Gone with the Wind in puzzles? In 2022? Yes, apparently: in the WSJ alone I clocked three different references to this book/movie this year. Including [Scarlett's love], a five-letter clue that in 2022 should clearly be COLIN, after the most punchable of all the current and former SNL cast members (who did not seduce and groom a high schooler who ran an SNL fansite, nor actively enable the pedophilic actions of said cast member with absolutely no consequences to his own extremely lucrative and vacuous career), not RHETT.
Look, I begrudgingly acknowledge there are people who, in my opinion, go a little too far about this sort of thing - I do not abide by USAT's informal "no famous white guys" rule, I put SNL in puzzles all the time despite that parenthetical I just wrote and see no cognitive dissonance in doing so. I would never say you can't reference Harry Potter in puzzles, for instance, even as its creator seems dedicated to die on her transphobic dolt hill. But, um... come on. I was going to say "as a woman of color" or but that's stupid, even a white male boomer should not have a hard time understanding why Gone with the Wind is perhaps not kosher clue material!!
(For the curious, a quick peek at XWordInfo makes me think that The New York Times has phased out GWTW references in puzzles - last one I can spot was from April 2020. Mike Shenk, Rich Norris, et al - maybe take the Gray Lady's lead here!)
π© In the I'm Not Totally Sick Of Wordle Yet Department: Two cool bits of Wordle ephemera. First, friend of the blog Jacob "Conflux" Cohen wrote a very nice roundup of all the Wordle variants, and then proceeded to drop the mic by getting the world record time of Seven Wordles. Second, and this one you've probably seen, but the YouTube channel 3Blue1Brown made a beautiful video ostensibly about finding the best starting word in Wordle, but that's actually about Claude Shannon and information theory, concisely and intelligently explaining a very difficult subject in a super approachable fashion.
In The QVAnon Department: As we all now, the greatest conspiracy theory in all of crosswords is that the prolific "constructor" "Alex Eaton-Salners" is actually Will Shortz using a pseudonym. And by conspiracy theory, I mean obvious and self-evident fact. Well, Mr. "Eaton-Salners" (clearly a made-up name) had the February 28 puzzle in Universal, titled "We're Number One," and at this point he's just rubbing it in our faces:
I'm onto you, Will.
...
Well, that's it for me. I encourage you to comment on your favorite puzzles of February, or how I am not giving Margaret Mitchell enough credit or whatever. Alternatively, you saw there's a contact me page on this site now, right? Hit me up!
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