Bruce Haight really loves television.
MONDAY PUZZLE — Congratulations to Bruce Haight on his 56th New York Times Crossword puzzle, which is his 17th Monday puzzle!
Monday puzzles are famously the easiest of the week, but for new solvers, completing a Monday puzzle can feel like an incredible victory. Mondays are often described as the gateway puzzles into the world of the crosswords. They’re the puzzles that turn casual-airplane-seat-back scribblers into solvers. That feeling of satisfaction (and the rush of dopamine!) that comes from filling in that final square — or hearing that happy jingle if you’re solving online — is truly unparalleled. Being able to put down your (literal or figurative) pencil and say, “There! I did it!” — that’s the feeling that keeps so many of us coming back every day to play this funny little word game.
Tricky Clues
44A. I love clues that incorporate fun facts, such as this one and 40D (below). The fun fact here is “The fact that the Bible is the most shoplifted book in America, e.g.,” which is the clue for IRONY, because it is ironic that a book that lays out a clear prohibition against stealing is the most stolen. I guess whoever is stealing it hasn’t read it yet!
54A. New puzzle solvers should expect to fairly regularly see time zone abbreviations, where the letter representing the time zone is either followed by ST for “standard time” (in “winter”) or DT for “daylight time” (in “summer”). In this case, “West Coast winter hrs.” is PST, or Pacific Standard Time.
3D. Here we have a colloquial clue, so we need to find a phrase that matches the meaning of the phrase in quotation marks. “You were close with that response” is a near match for GOOD GUESS, and both made me think fondly of Alex Trebek.
8D. “Ones with A.P.O. addresses” is the clue for GIS because A.P.O. is the abbreviation for Army Post Office, and GIs is an initialism with many possible interpretations (including, according to Merriam-Webster, “government issue” or “galvanized iron”) but here it means “member of the armed forces.” When you see that a word has been shortened in a clue, you can assume that the answer will also include an abbreviation or acronym.
40D. Our second fun fact of the day is that “The sum of the digits of any multiple of NINE is a multiple of NINE (arithmetic curiosity).” For instance, 81 is a multiple of 9, and 8+1 = 9. 315 is also a multiple of 9, and 3+1+5 = 9. Curious!
63D. A “Parisian denial” is NON because if you were to deny that you speak French while in Paris, you might say, “NON, je ne parle pas français.”
Today’s Theme
This puzzle features five TV catchphrases, clued with references to the shows in which those catchphrases appeared. Pretty straightforward! My personal favorite is “NO SOUP FOR YOU!” However, FINAL ANSWER is equally iconic. I was unfamiliar with 39A and 49A, but I think my millennial-ness is showing.
Construction Geek-Out
This puzzle is one square wider than the typical 15x15 grid we see from Monday to Saturday (Sundays are typically 21x21). Mr. Haight needs a 16x15 grid to accommodate the central theme entry JUST ONE MORE THING, and would have had a much harder time placing the 12-letter entries NO SOUP FOR YOU and HOW SWEET IT IS if the grid were only 15 blocks across.
Twelve-letter entries are notoriously difficult to place in a 15x15 grid with a lot of thematic content, because they are the only entries you can fit in a row (see sample grids below demonstrating the placement of two 12-letter entries). Unless the grid has 16 squares across, you can’t separate a 12-letter entry from a three-letter entry, as Mr. Haight does in the rows containing NO SOUP FOR YOU and HOW SWEET IT IS. Because 12-letter entries break up the grid so significantly, it becomes much harder to place additional long theme entries around them in a 15-wide grid.
Constructor Notes
My first try at this theme had HOW YOU DOIN’ (“Friends”), I AM THE DANGER (“Breaking Bad”), WINTER IS COMING (“Game of Thrones”), FRIENDS DON’T LIE (“Stranger Things”), NO SOUP FOR YOU (“Seinfeld”) and SURVEY SAYS (“Family Feud”). The editors felt most of these were not well known enough to be catchphrases, and the fill with six themers was strained, at least for the Monday puzzle they wanted this to be. The revision was more like a total remake, and the new theme set skews quite a bit less current than the initial group. However, I think people will recognize these phrases even if they didn’t see all of the shows. I really wanted FINAL ANSWER to be the last theme entry, and it worked out. I really like the seldom-seen BAGGY and PARRY as short answers, and I think entries like BOMBS and HANGS are perfectly fine with the right clues.
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The Tipping Point
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