Saturday, November 7 2026, Adrian Johnson

Rounding out my blogging week is a gem of a Saturday crossword.  Not that it was super difficult - the solve itself was only moderately challenging - but I tip my hat to the two quadruple stacks in the NW and SE corners, with long Down clue pairs in the other two corners.  Furthermore, I felt like I learned way more stuff than usual from this puzzle.

Stuff like TREEPOSE, where one leg is perpendicular to the other.  (I don't do yoga.)   Or that EPEE literally means "sword".  Or the Hawaiian word for "family" is OHANA.  Or a group of Mediterranean appetizers is called a MEZE.  Or that THEWHO's "Live at Leeds" album went double-platinum.

The cleverest clue today, I think, was "Someone who might need to get a life?" (GAMER) - which works on multiple levels - in a gaming context and also from a broader perspective.  Another fun QMC was "One looking over a shoulder?" (ROADWORKER). But not "First to seven?" (ESS).  Boo!!! 

My brother ran a GOATFARM of sorts for a while in the interior of British Columbia.

For those not familiar - in pro tennis, a SERENASLAM is what you call four Grand Slam titles in a row *ending with* the Australian open, which in the modern era takes place in January, so the "Slam" spans two calendar years, as opposed to a "Grand Slam", which must be contained in a single year, and was last accomplished by the incomparable Steffi Graf back in 1988.  Serena Williams completed her eponymous Slam twice - in 2002-2003 (defeating her sister Venus in all four finals!) and again in 2014-2015.  Testament to the longevity of her dominance!   And, per the clue, Novak Djokovic picked up where Serena left off and did it in 2015-2016.

I leave you with that little tennis nerd-out.  Horace takes the reins tomorrow! 

Friday, November 6 2026, Aidan Deshong

That time of the week has arrived - my favourite two NYT crosswords, back to back!  Today's grid looked very promising, with stacks of long clues both horizontal and vertical; and true to expectation, it was a fun solve, though perhaps a titch on the easy side for a Friday.  And being a Friday, there's no theme to describe - so here are a few of my favourites among the many top-notch clues in the puzzle.

I liked the meta-ness of PRE ("Lead-in to face or fix").  But my favourite clue of the week so far has to be the magnificent, impenetrable "Greenish black rock?", for which I needed most of the crossers to winkle out CLEANCOAL.  Brilliant!!  And how about the two down "'Give me one moment...'" clues side by side?!  BERIGHTBACK and HANGONASEC - excellent cluing!

Didn't love the awkwardly pluralized CAMOS ("Paintball outfits, informally").  But just before it is the delightfully misleading "Apple device":  IPHONE? IMAC?  Nope: CORER!

In today's instalment of Downfall o' the Day:  I'd never heard of BESTCOAST as Californians refer to their own state, nor was I familiar with "'Shockingly refreshing' soda" SIERRAMIST, and so I had them in the grid as BENTCOAST (hey, the coastline IS kinda bent, is it not?) and SIERRAMINT (well, plausible, right?).  Only upon review did I notice and correct that intersecting 'N' to an 'S'.  

A really well-put-together crossword.  Saturday's xword will be hard pressed to match this!

-philbo

Thursday, November 5 2026, David P. Williams

Well, what have we today?  A standard-looking grid with four long-ish Across entries, each containing a circled letter, plus a grid-spanner bisecting the puzzle.  It quickly became apparent that there was some sort of encoding, or translation, going on, as those long answers weren't making sense as their crossers filled them in.  For example - 17A "Hand-held communication devices" was coming out as WALKIHLKIES with the 'H' circled.  Gibberish!  The long middle revealer sheds the necessary light:  "Admission of confusion" = ITSALLGREEKTOME - of course!  replace the circled 'H' with its Greek counterpart ETA and you get WALKIETALKIES, which fits the clue nicely.  Similarly,

• "Songs played on an oldies station" = CLASSIXTS with X --> CHI
• "Juggernauts" = POWEPUSES with the second P --> RHO (but see below)
• "Popular fundraising event" = SILENTCTION with the first T --> TAU

I liked this construction, largely because of its opaqueness - it was not at all obvious what was going on at first.  My one nit here is the equating of RHO with the letter P.  Sure, it looks like a 'P' but it's really more like 'R' phonetically.   For that reason, I originally entered POWERUSES, but then that would make "Galileo, for one" a RISAN, which was definitely not right.  Note that this Greek-to-English translation only applies in the Across direction, which is helpfully pointed out in 59A.

My only real hiccup was mistaking "Comfort" at 6D as a verb and entering SOOTHE instead of SOLACE, so there was a bit of scribbling there.  I was misled by 50A "Digs" (ISINTO) as I was looking for some sort of residence.  ..  Is "Vernacular" really the same as PATOIS?  I guess so, though I suspect one is more about vocabulary and the other is more about delivery.   ASIAGO was cute and punny as a "cheese that comes from northern Italy (and not another continent!)"..  ANGSTROM tickled my geeky physics-y fancy as well.

Favourite clue of the day?  "Letter indicating ownership?" (ESS).  Took me ever so long to understand the reference - to the possessive 'S' at the end of a noun ...

A fun puzzle overall.  Back for more tomorrow!

-philbo

Wednesday, November 4 2026, Peggy Sue Marlin

Today's crossword is all about the revealer at 56A.  The three similar-looking theme clues point the way : "56A on a store/elevator/interstate".  Not much to go on!  So one approach here would be to go straight to 56A, work out the answer and then, armed with that, revisit the first clues.  Or...just blunder down the grid so that by the time the revealer is exposed, so is most everything else and it's just a matter of looking back and seeing how it makes sense.   And so it was for me.  "That spells trouble!" reveals ITSNOTAGOODSIGN, and I'd already worked out the other answers...

• SORRYWERECLOSED - bad sign on a store;
• OUTOFSERVICE - bad sign on an elevator; and
• EXPECTDELAYS - bad sign on an interstate

Very clever!  Honestly I'm so impressed with Ms. Marlin, and every setter really, for the inexhaustibility of the themes they come up with.

Some nice fresh takes elsewhere in the grid.  "Sensationally detailed" is an excellent clue for LURID.  Never thought of giraffes as having MANES, but of course they do! I also liked the PC key clues side by side (CTRL and ESC) but only because I was solving with pen+paper today.  Clues like that are too "gimme" when you're doing the puzzles online.

"Sourdough starter" (ESS, of course) made me smile.  It was a sliver of a silver lining during the pandemic, that my spouse became a dab hand at making sourdough bread..HAIM ("Rock band founded by three sisters) was new to me.  I must give them a listen!  Intersecting this clue was HERA ("Divine protector in 'Argonautica'"), which was also unknown to me.  And intersecting that was another Argonautica clue, a "Magical ally" this time - MEDEA, also outside my sphere of knowledge. This is the scenario most dreaded at the NYT Xword Tournament.  Evidently, I need to brush up on my classics!

As I write this, the US midterm results are rolling in.  Maybe there's hope for you people after all.  But leave us not prematurely count our chickens ....

-philbo

Tuesday, November 3 2026, Victor Schmitt

The five long clues in today's crossword are all similarly constructed, as pairs of names, some famous and some not-so-famous.  It was not immediately clear what they had in common - e.g. 18A "Michael Jordan and Anatole France?", the latter not primarily known for his basketball skills.  But with a slight perspective change, the similarity between the last names jumped right out, and sure enough, the answer is COUNTRYBOYS.   I find this quite cute, and there are four others:

• "Faith Hill and Sally Field?" = LANDLADIES
• "Jenny Slate and Emma Stone?" = MATERIALGIRLS
• "John Snow and Robert Frost?" = WEATHERMEN
• "Sabrina Carpenter and Anita Baker?" = CAREERWOMEN

The relative obscurity of a few of these people turns out to be immaterial.  I liked this concept for its pleasant "aha" factor.    (Would "Jon Snow" have been more recognizable, though?)

Pretty easy going elsewhere.  I liked the QMCs "Merger site?" (ALTAR) and "Candy wrappers?" (PINATAS).  JURYRIG ("Set up as MacGyver might") has its roots in the world of sailing, and reminded me of a recent puzzle whose theme answers all had nautical origins - looking back, it was Wednesday, Sept 6, in which setter Dario Salvucci packed in six (!) such clues.  

GENUS makes its second consecutive Tuesday appearance, this time as "Homo, for humans" .. I did appreciate the absurd improbability of having "M_SS_SS_PP_" on aWheel of Fortune board and still having to buy ANI.  I mean, geez..  And KODAK, the erstwhile maker of Instamatic cameras - classic example of a company whose sector dominance is swept away by the winds of progress.  There's a street not far from where I live here in Toronto called Photography Drive, on which, up until about 15 years ago, was a Kodak plant.  C'est la vie ...  

-philbo

Monday, November 2 2026, Max Schlenker

Well, it's almost Monday and having put a serious dent in our cache of leftover Hallowe'en candy today, I am fighting off a sugar crash.  Fortunately, today's crossword didn't put up much of a fight, even for a Monday.  

In keeping with my need of a brain jumpstart, the theme is electrical in nature, the four theme answers ending with items necessary to illuminate a room : EMOTIONALOUTLET, CHICKENWIRE, TULIPBULB and STAYCURRENT, all leading to the humourous revealer IVESEENTHELIGHT.  All very straightforwardly clued, though the electricians among us might have expected others; e.g. CONTEXTSWITCH, HAIRPLUG and oh, I dunno, BLUESBREAKER..  Yes yes yes, it's a 15x15 grid, I know, I know...

I have to say, reviewing the rest of the grid, nothing noteworthy is really jumping out at me.  KIRBY was unknown to me in a Nintendo context.  SLC as "Capital of Utah, in brief" gave me a few moments of pause.  And right off the bat, 1A "Gender-neutral pronoun" (THEY):  I have no issue with gender neutrality, or gender fluidity for that matter, but can we as a species not have done better than co-opting an existing word that already has a (plural) meaning?  It's a little nitpick of mine.

I do think it's cool that a Boy Scout can get a merit badge in Nuclear Science.  In my day, when a kid had a meltdown, it meant a whole other thing..

OK I'll stop now.  "See" ya tomorrow!

-philbo

Sunday, November 1 2026, Kevin Curry and Zhou Zhang

Greetings everybody!  It's been a looong time since I last had the pen on this Blog thing.  Thanks Horace+Frannie+Colum for crushing it in the meantime!  

Today's puzzle was so much fun. We're presented with an unusual-looking grid, with clusters of black squares in the interior and several entries partially highlighted in grey.  Also, sprinkled throughout are several circled letters.  So ignoring all this, and the self-referential clue at 1A ("This puzzle's subject"), I just worked my way around the (quite gentle) grid in a clockwise spiral, encountering no real roadblocks along the way until the very bottom right corner, where 122A "Its famous holes are formed by propionibacteria" and 108D "'Smile!'" intersect in their last square, which happens to be circled, and is filled with the six-letter ending to SWISSCHEESE and SAYCHEESE.  That was an interesting development, given the circled squares already encountered were all filled with single letters..  

Moving along (and moving the narrative along) .. the grid got filled in and I hadn't really consulted the "theme" clues (the ones with the partially greyed answers), so it was at that point that I was able to sit back, inspect everything and appreciate the cleverness of the construction:  I already had CHEESE in the lower right; and the answer to 1A turned out to be LABRAT.  Now finally looking at those theme clues - each only cluing the un-greyed part of its answer, with the greyed part being an additional word, completely unclued, which results in a perfectly legal phrase.  For example -

• 30A "Appetizers, entree or dessert" : OBSTACLECOURSE
  
• 67D "Many a shipwreck site" : BARRIERREEF

The greyed words have something in common - they're all impediments to progress - and sure enough, if you treat them as such and view the whole grid as a maze, there's only one way to navigate from top left to bottom right - to get the LABRAT to the CHEESE (which explains the odd placement of black squares).  Collecting the circled letters along the way, they spell out WHOMOVEDMYCHEESE, the title of a best-selling motivational book.  So many layers to this puzzle!

I've gone on long enough here.  My one blip was filling in BURMESE and not SIAMESE for "Feline with distinctive blue eyes".  I looked it up - Burmese cats' eyes are yellow. Oh also!  There I am, as the answer to 53D "Pride of Punxatawney"!!

Not getting the Terseness Award for this review, I fear.  But I hope you enjoyed this puzzle as much as I did!

Cheerio and Happy All Saints' Day!

-philbo