Tuesday, April 29, 2025, Gene Louise De Vera

This is a fun theme of GROWINGPAINS - exclamations of physical and emotional pain that get longer left to right along the bottom of the puzzle. It's a theme that would be very hard to notice without the shaded squares to emphasize "ow," "oof," "ouch," and "shoot" at the ends of longer answers. 

Funny that HIED (Went in haste) should be in the puzzle today, because I just noticed again yesterday that "Spelling Bee" does not accept it as a word. NOCLUE really, what Ezersky's rules are for entry...

In other news, it was good to be reminded of HOTORNOT (Early 2000s rating site with a rhyming name). Hah. Those were the days...

I've never thought of TANGENTLINES as "Figures that are straight approximations of curves, in geometry." And geometry was my best math course! Sigh. I guess I was too involved in the PHOTOSHOOT world, where f-stops and shutter speeds were all the numbers I needed.

Best clue: "Double-decker checker" (KING). Brilliant.

- Horace

 

Monday, April 28, 2025, Sue Fracker

An unusual theme today of MULTIHYPHENATES:

JACKOFALLTRADES - Versatile yet unspecialized sort
FIVEYEAROLD - Typical kindergartner
KNOWITALL - Smarty-pants
MOTHERINLAW - The Bible's Naomi vis-à-vis Ruth

It would have been something if the hyphens could actually have existed in the grid, but then they'd have to work (or be used somehow) in the Downs. It's also noticeable that two of the clues use hyphens, but only one uses a multihyphenate. And that MULTIHYPHENATES is not, itself, multi-hyphenated. Or is it interesting ... ? Sometimes when you review puzzles you get a little carried away with analysis.

So let's just leave the theme where it is. No wait - is "multi-hyphenate" really used to describe someone with many talents? I mean, I can see how it could be, but I don't think of it as a normal thing to say. Maybe it's just that I'm not hanging around with the multi-hyphenate set.

Anything AWESOME today? I liked the clue "Heart throb?" for PULSE. I thought "Hershey's Kiss wrap" was an odd, but apt, clue for FOIL. And was there a mini-theme with MOJITOS, REDNOSE, and TOTAL UP (Add together, as a bar tab)? Or is that just the kind of thing one notices when one is on the wagon?

- Horace

Sunday, April 27, 2025, Jacob Reed

NUMBERS GAME

All I can remember from my junior high calculator days are things like 58008 and 71077345. Anybody? So today's theme was more of a "why did they write this clue in calculator font?" than a "what's going on here?" 

Nice to see EMILYBRONTË show up again after all that talk about her name a few days ago. And speaking of diacritics, there's one in IGA Świątek's name that I can't even get my Mac to reproduce! I had to copy and paste it. The tail is called an ogonek, and it denotes a nasal sound, apparently. (Time for me to donate to Wikipedia again...)

I enjoyed TRUTHBOMB (Sudden dose of reality, in slang), SONOTTRUE (Emphatic words of denial), CATCONDOS (Some large structures for pet owners), MEDIAFASTS (Periods of abstinence from TV, news, social platforms, etc.), and CREEPO (Sleazeball). That last one is almost too cute a word for what it means. I was not familiar with Kid CUDI, LIANE Moriarty, or MUKBANGS (Food-centric broadcasts originating in South Korea), so it's good to learn those.

Gotta run this morning. See you tomorrow!

- Horace

Saturday, April 26, 2025, Sarah Sinclair and Rafael Musa

First off, AYO Edebiri made the puzzle for the third time this week. First name only today and Tuesday, full name yesterday. I think she might have a SECRETADMIRER at the NYTX.

Second, is DREAMYOGA (Tantric meditation practiced while in a sleeping state) really a thing? If so, I'm not sure I WANTTOTRY. 

Third, this puzzle went by so fast that I didn't even see several clues. That is unusual for a Saturday. One such was the nice Santayana quote "The young man who has not WEPT is a savage." 

Fourth, I was at a disadvantage when encountering the clue "Creature in the National Audubon Society logo," because I live in Massachusetts, where we have our own Audubon Society with what looks like a swallow-tailed kite in its logo. Except the beak isn't quite right for that... Anybody know for sure what bird it is? It's not easy to find out, and the Google AI bot claims it's an EGRET, like the national one uses, but does it look like an EGRET to you?

- Horace

Friday, April 25, 2025, Adrian Johnson

Nice ten-stacks in the NW and SE, and an interesting middle, with that grid-spanner and weird little channels of staggered threes. But it all flowed smootly enough. I was happy that I had just put a picture of AYOEDEBIRI in the review recently! I don't watch "The Bear," but because of that photo (and, of course, her inclusion in Tuesday's puzzle), was familiar with her name, which helped with "Producers of stains" (SINS). That I was my last square.

SPEEDTRAPS (Things feared in the 80s and 90s?) was fun. Ish. It also reminds me that I still have to pay Hertz for having incurred a speeding ticket while driving one of their vehicles... DEEPSIGH. And I questioned a COMMA as a "Common component of a date" until I entered the date at the top of the review, like I have done for over a decade. Hah. I was thinking of things like "4/25/25" not "Friday, April 25, 2025." DEEPSIGH.

I hadn't realized that nine presidents were UNWED while in office. I thought Buchanan was the only unwed president - and while it's true that he was the only one who never married, four others were widowed prior to becoming president (Jefferson, Jackson, Arthur & Van Buren), three had their wives die while they were president (Tyler, Harrison, Wilson), and Cleveland entered the White House a bachelor, but about halfway through his first presidency, he married a 21-year-old whose upbringing he had supervised. He was 49 at the time. No one was disturbed by this, apparently. Frances Folsom was still a college student when she married him and she remains the youngest First Lady ever. They had five kids, the first of whom, Ruth, died of diptheria at twelve. And it is that Ruth, not Babe Ruth, who is famously purported to be the namesake of the Baby Ruth candy bar.

- Horace

Thursday, April 24, 2025, Kathleen Duncan

GENRE/BENDING trick today, where mash-ups literally take a ninety-degree turn in the grid. As so often happens, the dash clues gave the game away early, but there really wasn't any way around it in this one. And still, I couldn't think of DARK/FANTASY ("Interview With the Vampire" and "Prince of Thorns") or COMING/OFAGE ("Lady Bird" and "Stand By Me") without a few crosses. The one that broke it for me was "'Borat' and 'This is Spinal Tap'" (MOCKUMEN/TARY), although at first I wanted it to be plural. And, for the record, for the purposes of carrying on this talk of diacritics as long as possible, I tried to put the rock umlaut over the "n" in Spinal Tap just now, but the umlauted N is not, apparently, allowed as a character. At least not in whatever editor Blogspot uses.

Very nice NE corner, with OBEISANT (Deferential) ("... not the least obeisance made he..."), and VENDETTA (More than a mere grudge). CEN (One of 10 in a millennium: Abbr.) was unusual, but totally worth it up there.

And in the opposite corner, NICKNAME got a great clue (Second calling?), and one always enjoys a reference to "The Simpsons" (NED - Subject of Homer's loathing), even if it does focus on ill will.

- Horace

p.s. I didn't realize that the Knights of REN were a whole thing in Star Wars. I thought it was just a surname. (Is it both?)

Wednesday, April 23, 2025, Brandon Koppy

So I've been thinking a lot about that Brontë clue from yesterday. It seems that the family name was changed by the Brontë sisters' father, who was born Patrick Brunty. One wonders, then, what he wanted that mark over the last letter to do - if he had wanted it pronounced the way it is by most people today, he could have used an accent aigu, as in Bronté. Maybe, as an Irishman, he had reasons that he did not want to appear to be French. There is one theory that he wanted to associate himself with Admiral Nelson, who was the "Duke of Bronte." Note the lack of diacritical mark there. If he really were trying to make that association, why change it? And one last thing - I saw one comment in a Reddit thread, I think, from a Russian speaker, who said that ë in Russian is pronounced "yo," so when talking about one of the Brontës, this person pronounced it "Brontyo." That might be what I do from now on. :)

So anyway, what day is it? Right, Wednesday. I've never heard of the term GALAXYBRAIN (Having ideas far too profound for anyone else to comprehend ...). Perhaps that goes without saying. :) Used as a revealer, it nods to the space objects and phenomena in the other four theme answers:

NEBULAAWARD - Honor for "Dune" and "American Gods"
STARSTRUCK - Like Swifties vis-à-vis Taylor Swift (Parsed for theme as "stars truck")
BLACKHOLESUN - Grammy-winning Soundgarden hit of 1994 (Is "Soundgarden hit" really a thing?)
NOVASCOTIA - Canadian province on the Gulf of Maine (I wonder if our erstwhile friends to the north are considering changing that to the Gulf of Nova Scotia?)

I liked three of the long Downs today: ASPARAGUS (Spears on a plate) (yum), PLANAHEAD (Not leave details to chance) (I tried PLANitout), and NOTAGAIN ("Why does this keep happening?!"). A "Bassinet alternative," however, can just be a crib. It doesn't have to be a BABYCRIB. Oh, I have to get a BABYCRIB for my baby. So that after DINDIN I can put my baby into a BABYCRIB. No.

But that makes it sound like I'm mad. I'm not. Sure, the revealer was new to me, and I didn't love a couple things, but I didn't hate it. What about you?

- Horace