Brandon Koppy’s puzzle might make you hungry.
WEDNESDAY PUZZLE — The difficulty of Wednesday puzzles can be a little hard to nail down, because they’re generally easier than tricky Thursday puzzles, and a little more complicated than straightforward Mondays and Tuesdays. But sometimes they surprise you with an unexpected extra helping of challenge.
Brandon Koppy, who has now constructed five Wednesday puzzles (out of the seven he has published in the New York Times Crossword), adds a little extra spice to today’s puzzle. With a surprisingly high number of tricky clues for a Wednesday, and a fiendish little twist in the theme, this puzzle is sure to add some kick to your hump day.
So buckle up, folks, because we have a lot of tricky clues to cover today!
Tricky Clues
5A. Right out of the gate, in the center-north section of the grid, I slammed into the trickiest clue of the puzzle like Wile E. Coyote slamming into the side of a mountain with a railroad tunnel painted on it. “More than right … or seldom correct?” had me completely stumped, and it was the last word I entered in the puzzle. I needed a majority of the crosses to understand that the wordplay here was on the word right, not as in “correct,” but as in “right angle.” A angle that is wider than a right angle is OBTUSE, which can also mean dense or uncomprehending, as I was while solving this clue.
14A. I am not particularly well-versed in Broadway musicals, but I love the musical HAIR. The song “Easy to Be Hard” is a powerful and beautiful song that I think about a lot.
15A. In that same tricky center-north region of the grid, “Bad record to set” left me a little flummoxed. Eventually, the Down entries helped me figure out that the bad record to set was a NEW LOW.
27A. “Including an unlisted number?” is a fun but tricky clue. The question mark means wordplay, and, in this case, the meaning of the phrase “unlisted number” changes from the usual “phone number not in the phone book” to “number of people not listed at the end of this citation,” or ET AL.
29A/56A. I enjoyed the pairing of the clues “Comic cry of dismay” and “Cartoon cry of dismay” for ACK (the catchphrase of the perpetually dismayed cartoon Cathy) and D’OH (the catchphrase of the perpetually dismayed Homer Simpson).
32A. I truly did not understand how the clue “Concerns for golfers” worked for the word LIES until I looked it up. Apparently, “lie” in the context of golf means the position in which the ball lies (which is a bit of a tautology, if you ask me).
43A. Ditto the above on this clue; an internet search after the solve revealed that “SAL soda” is another name for sodium carbonate, or “washing soda.” This is the 14th appearance of this clue in the New York Times Crossword, so I’m not sure how I managed to avoid absorbing this science-y tidbit. But now I know!
57A. The clue “Nonsubmerging W.W. II menace” is sure to trip up some solvers (myself included) who know about the U-boat but not the E-BOAT, a German boat during World War II that, unlike its submersible cousin, operated on the surface of the water.
6D. More wordplay here! The clue “Omaha stake?” refers not to an Omaha steak that you can order by mail and keep in your freezer, but rather to the stake one might put up for the card game Omaha, which is a BET.
8D. I’m not convinced that ULNAR and radial are opposites, per se; that seems like a strange way to characterize two major nerves/bones/arteries in the forearm. But I suppose ULNAR and radial body parts are on opposite sides of the arm.
10D. Yet another sticky part of the central-north section of the grid is the clue “One in a cote with a coat.” I know that doves live in cotes, but I hadn’t realized that word was also used for sheep enclosures, so I could not push the image of a dove wearing a tiny jacket out of my head. It’s a cute image, but deeply unhelpful for coming up with the word EWE.
11D. There’s a nice misdirect here, as I read the word “Id” as “ID” in the clue “Id checkers.” In Freudian psychology, the part of the psyche that checks the id, which is driven by instinct, is the superego. Since it has to match the plural “checkers” in the clue, the answer here is SUPEREGOS.
26D. When a clue contains a word or phrase in a non-English language, you can expect that the entry will be in that same language. In this case, the clue “Boeuf alternative” uses the French word for beef, so the entry that goes with it is PORC, the French spelling of pork.
36D. This is just one of those clues you should memorize, because it appears fairly regularly in crossword puzzles. “Big inits. in handbags” (or “in fashion”) will almost always be YSL (Yves Saint Laurent) if the entry is three letters long; this has happened 85 times to date. As an added bonus, you can also guess that this same clue will work for DKNY if the entry is four letters long (although this has been used only 15 times).
Today’s Theme
This puzzle made me crave tortilla chips. The theme, which was illustrated by circles throughout the grid, is revealed at 59A: “Topping made with this puzzle’s chopped and squeezed ingredients,” or PICO DE GALLO. Those ingredients are hidden inside of the four theme entries in ways that illustrate how they are prepared for PICO DE GALLO.
In the first theme entry, at 17A (OMNIPOTENCE), we find the letters of the word ONION in circles. The clue “Absolute power [chopped]” indicates that the ONION has been chopped up into its component letters throughout OMNIPOTENCE, just as you would chop an onion to prepare PICO DE GALLO. In the third theme entry, TRASH COMPACTORS (“Waste minimizers [chopped]”) contains the letters of the word TOMATO, once again chopped up, as indicated by the bracketed part of the clue.
This would have been a sufficiently fun and clever theme in itself, but Mr. Koppy’s puzzle has one final citrusy twist that is really the icing on the cake. (Wow, I am really mixing my food metaphors here!) In the fourth theme entry, FISH FOR COMPLIMENTS (“Self-deprecate, then pause to get a reaction [squeezed]”), the word LIME is squeezed into one rebus box, just as one would squeeze a lime to make PICO DE GALLO.
This unexpected last-minute rebus totally surprised and delighted me, although I’m sure some solvers were stymied by the unexpected rebus. As always when we encounter rebus squares, I recommend checking out Deb Amlen’s helpful guide to rebuses for beginners who may not know that they are an option.
Constructor Notes
I normally don’t enjoy themes with circled words spread throughout longer answers. Too often, they’re just “hidden,” with no justification for why the letters have been broken up. So I wanted to try a theme that focused on the “chopping,” and a secret recipe seemed like the obvious choice. I first considered mirepoix, but I was concerned it might not be widely known. I much prefer this recipe, however, because it has a little twist for the final ingredient. (My apologies for the sloppy knife cuts and snubbing of delicious cilantro.)
This is a very dense theme with limited flexibility in layout, so it required a few gluey bits to stitch together. I hope they don’t sour anyone’s solve too much, and I promise to never put E-BOAT in another puzzle.
As always, thanks to the editing team for all of their great work.
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