Lisa Bunker constructs a love letter of a Sunday puzzle.
SUNDAY PUZZLE — Lisa Bunker, who makes her Sunday debut with this idiosyncratic construction, is a member of the New Hampshire House of Representative and an author with two published young adult novels, “Zenobia July” and “Felix Yz.” Those titles definitely indicate a word lover’s touch, and their plots are similarly inventive, involving a trans girl cyberdetective and a boy fused with a four-dimensional alien life form. Boom! Now you have a taste of what we’re working with here. I love the Scrabbly elements in this grid — they’re everywhere — and I found a lot of the fill very challenging and satisfying, especially the north by northeast third.
If you recognize this constructor’s name from past Times puzzles, you’ve got a great memory. Ms. Bunker constructed a handful of daily grids in the early ’00s, as she relates in her notes, back when online solving was still pretty new and puzzle submissions were done via snail mail. I love that the concept for this puzzle dates to then as well (I think it feels modern and fresh), and I love happy returns like this one — they give me hope for the ideas I’ve filed away myself, for “someday.”
Tricky Clues
This grid presents some excellent obstacles! The theme is tricky to get your head around, and the fill is very bright and offbeat. As much as I stumbled through a wide swath at the top — the corner area roughly outlined by PAN, STOP and BETS — I have to bow down to Ms. Bunker for crossing CASQUE, which last appeared in the crossword in 1953, with SISQO (who remembered how to spell SISQO? Also, he’s still working).
23A: Very savvy for our constructor to stuff in a little catnip for the word community. Here we have STEFAN Fatsis, whom I mostly know as an engaging sports-biz commentator on NPR but is also a Scrabble hound; at the bottom of this puzzle, a nod to another puzzle, the VERTEX, and another letter game that gives RSTLNE to its finalist, every show.
39A: For the last year, three of my four companions have been dogs, and the gesture described in the clue means “stay” to me, not STOP. This seems like such a small misstep, but I didn’t grok the “PX” in 29D, meaning “post exchange,” a military shop for NCOs and others on a base. So I had a blank spot there until later on, when the theme forced my hand at 7D. Oh, but I got GO FETCH immediately.
79A: A wicked misdirect, here: In an ANARCHY, all rules are out.
116A: “Soubise” pops up here and there in the crossword and involves a whole lot of ONIONS (nothing against the smelly bulbs — I'm sure they have a pet name, but can’t remember it).
35D: These names hark back to the days when “juice” was “good for you,” glass bottles with the trivia on the inside of the pop top, SNAPPLES. The portmanteau comes from an early flavor, “Snappy apple juice.”
51D: She’s usually clued as the title character of a play by Jean Giraudoux, famously played by Audrey Hepburn; Debussy’s ONDINE is new to me, at least, and lovely.
66D: Robes on sweaters might make this click for you — think of sweating in a SAUNA (sounds nice on the East Coast right about now, it’s been very cold).
Today’s Theme
I hope that almost everyone sees eight same-colored squares in the grid today — either the entire box or an outline. On Across Lite, those squares have bubbles in them to set them apart. If you’re on the app on the iPhone/iPad and are using iOS 14, you may not see the color at all; here’s the blank puzzle pdf for reference/download. Each of those squares has the same rebus, plus a letter that is specific to the two crossing entries. These letters, read in order, spell a poetic quality germane to this puzzle’s date.
(For solvers who are trying to get their rebuses to work, you should be able to get by with entering only that specific letter, or spelling out the four missing letters using the rebus key.)
It took me some time to “get” this whole sequence because I didn’t solve both parts of one theme entry for a while. My first certainty was the last clue in the puzzle, “Sea lion, for one”; I had enough crosses and pinniped knowledge to strongly suspect that EARED SEAL was correct. Too long, but the letters R-E-D falls right where that red square sits in this entry. Aha! E-A- (RED) -E-A-L it is, never mind that “S” (which I left out completely at this point), and no idea what “Ones with plenty of reservations” is, the crossing entry that ends on that red square.
Scanning for “RED”s in the rest of the theme entries yielded a handful of safe bets: An actor, an instrument, a foot race. I kept getting the R-E-D but glossing over the missing letter. Then a nervous wreck gave me a pair of entries and I realized that they shared more than the color, they also shared a “Y,” and that’s how I broke into the meta part of the puzzle, which helped immensely with the rest of the theme.
Now I realized that an “R” would go into the theme entry at 4D, as well as R-E-D — making REDRAFTS, or “subsequent versions.” (An additional soupçon of cognitive dissonance — I kept seeing “red rafts” and “snared rums.” Funny how the mind works sometimes.) Picking out that extra letter helped with the rest of the theme entries, most of which I solved backward.
If you’re still stumped by a pair:
23-Across and 7-Down
CREDULOUS x POWERED UP (extra letter is U)
46-Across and 31-Down
CHARTERED BUS and SACRED BOOK (extra letter is B)
76-Across and 58-Down
JARED LETO and ASSUREDLY (extra letter is L)
101-Across and 82-Down
EXTRA CREDIT and INGREDIENTS (extra letter is I)
109-Across and 85-Down
FRED PERRY and ORDERED PAIR (extra letter is P)
125-Across and 105-Down
EARED SEAL and MAITRE D'S (extra letter is S)
That last one, really! Bonne chance.
I was sure that the hidden message was in a romantic Shakespeare sonnet, but I’m misremembering (it’s mentioned in the death scene of “Julius Caesar,” of all places). I hope the corners of your RUBY LIPS turned up upon solving all of these theme entries
Constructor Notes
What a thrill to be back in The Times, especially with my first Sunday grid! I had five daily puzzles published between 2001 and 2006. In those days, that meant mailing Will a manila envelope and getting a letter back, and then running out on publication mornings to buy a paper to keep. I got away from constructing, but I recently rediscovered how much I love it, and I am delighted to find that a whole crossword community has grown up in my absence, with blogs and Facebook groups and more. I’m excited to be part of it!
Here’s my bio top line, since I’m effectively new: I had a 30-year career in noncommercial radio. Currently I’m self-employed as an author, with two recently published novels for young readers featuring lots of LGBTQ+ content without that being the preachy point. I also represent my town of Exeter, N.H., as one of the first out transgender state legislators in U.S. history.
I came up with the theme for today’s puzzle back in the ’00s. That early version had symmetrical placement of the red squares, at the cost of some real stretches among the theme words and fill. I enjoyed the editorial process with Joel Fagliano, who gave me permission to abandon the symmetry and helped guide me, with patience and good humor, to this better final version. Kudos also to the editorial team for finding some excellent cluing opportunities I missed.
I hope this grid brings solving joy!
Missing the buss?
Subscribers can take a peek at the answer key.
Trying to get back to the puzzle page? Right here.
What did you think?
"kiss" - Google News
February 14, 2021 at 06:00AM
https://ift.tt/3ahMB1G
Sealed With a Kiss - The New York Times
"kiss" - Google News
https://ift.tt/2ZQDhec
https://ift.tt/2SoDRgQ
Bagikan Berita Ini
0 Response to "Sealed With a Kiss - The New York Times"
Post a Comment