Wednesday, August 20, 2025 |

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August 20, 2025

On August 20, 2025

AV Club untimed (Jenni) [2.67 avg; 3 ratings] rate it
LAT tk (Gareth) rate it
NYT 7:12 (Eric) [2.13 avg; 12 ratings] rate it
The New Yorker 2:07 (Kyle) [3.50 avg; 3 ratings] rate it
Universal untimed (pannonica) [2.50 avg; 4 ratings] rate it
USA Today tk (Emily) rate it
WSJ 7:12 (Eric) rate it

Gary Larson & Amy Ensz’s Wall Street Journal Crossword “Any Given Sundae”— Eric’s Review

Gary Larson & Amy Ensz’s Wall Street Journal Crossword “Any Given Sundae” — 8/20/25

I skipped past the title, a play on the football novel and movie adaptation Any Given Sunday. We’ve got punnily-named frozen dairy desserts for different occupations:

17A [Ice cream treat for a warehouse worker?] STOCK SPLIT Also known as a “stock divide,” a stock split is when a company issues a fixed number of new shares in exchange for outstanding ones. In a 2 for 1 split, for example, each shareholder gets twice the number of shares they held before and each new share is worth half of an old share. (This ends the financial markets portion of today’s review, brought to you by The Wall Street Journal.)
25A [Ice cream treat for a grand marshal?] PARADE FLOAT
35A [Ice cream treat for a day laborer?] HAND SHAKE
49A [Ice cream treat for a bus driver] TRAFFIC CONE
59A [Ice cream treat for a bachelor?] SINGLE MALT

Like many people, I enjoy ice cream, and a theme that makes me think about it is almost always welcome.

I like the first and third theme answers better than the others; those two play on multiple meanings for “stock,” “split,” “hand” and “shake.”

And I like that for a change, the theme helped me fill in the grid. For example, I had CONE before TRAFFIC and pondered CONE for a few seconds before the logical TRAFFIC popped into my head.

Other stuff:

6A [“Seinfeld” rating] TV-PG I’ve never seen an entire episode of that show, but the only other rating in the United States that’s all letters is TV-MA — and it seemed a safe bet that Seinfeld wasn’t limiting itself to “mature” audiences.
23A [“Saving Private Ryan” craft, briefly] LST The 1998 movie Saving Private Ryan begins with a depiction of the D-Day landings in WWII that shows how horrific it must be have been. Many Landing Ship, Tank vessels were deployed in that operation. I feel like I used to see that answer in puzzles a lot more than I do now.
27A [Bowling alley employee, once] PIN BOY I had SETTER first, because a pin boy’s job was to re-set the bowling pins and return the bowling balls to the players. Mechanical pinsetters appear to have taken over by the 1950s, if not earlier.
Pin Boys in the Subway Bowling Alleys, Brooklyn, NY, 1910

53A [Nice season] ÉTÉ “Nice” as in the city on the French Riviera, not as in “pleasant” or “agreeable.”
54A [Grp. that ousted Cuba in 1962] OAS The Organization of American States. That’s another answer that seems dragged from an older crossword, though the OAS is still around.
2D [Disoriented] OUT OF IT We all have those days, don’t we?
3D [How legal aid lawyers work] PRO BONO
12D [Event for select customers] PRE-SALE I’ve been lucky enough to twice see Elvis Costello in seats very close to the stage that I bought during the pre-sale.
25D [Negri of silent films] POLA 100 years ago, she was the real deal, living in a house in Hollywood modeled after the White House. Seeing this gimme added to the retro feel of this grid.
38D [“My goose is cooked!”] I’M TOAST I don’t know why I like that expression (which I don’t think I’ve ever used), but I do.

Victor Schmitt’s New York Times Crossword — Eric’s Review

Victor Schmitt’s New York Times Crossword — 8/20/25

Not your usual theme this time. The grid has six areas of nine contiguous squares, shaded gray and arranged into larger squares. Two 11-letter answers run Down, and there are some seven- and eight-letter Across answers.

So what’s up? The center of the grid makes it all clear:

- 36A [Item seen rolling through this puzzle] DIE
- 33D [What every “O” in this grid represents] PIP And it is every O; that letter appears only in the shaded squares.

Thus, the gray squares are a faces of a standard six-sided die. Fun fact: The pips on the opposite faces of a standard die add up to seven. (OK, it’s not really that fun, but if anyone ever tries to get you to play with six-sided dice that don’t adhere to that standard, you might well wonder if the dice are loaded.)

I got the revealers before I figured out what the gray squares were about. I suppose I could have used the O patterns to fill in some answers, but the clueing is so gentle that I didn’t need to do that.

The cynic in me thinks the New York Times is running this puzzle now because they’ve just introduced a new game called “Pips.” But we’ll be charitable and assume this puzzle was scheduled months ago to run today.

If my math is right, 36 answers run through those shaded squares. You’d think that would put a lot of pressure on the grid, especially since each of those answers has to have an O in the right place. But there doesn’t seem to be any logic governing where in the grid each die face appears, so that would have offered some flexibility in construction.

There’s a nice Japanese mini-theme going on:

17A [Common sushi go-with] MISO SOUP
32A [Custom in Japanese food service] NO TIPS I didn’t know this, having never been to Japan.
36A [Brief verse from Japan / With seventeen syllables / Illustrated here] HAIKU I’m waging my own little war against overly-wordy clues, but I like this one even though the first four words would have been enough.

Other stuff:

31A [Org. that prohibits Magic 8 Balls and baseball bats] TSA Good to know, I guess, if I ever fly anywhere again.
47A [Slobbery smooch] DOG KISS Having administered some pretty slobbery kisses in my life, the DOG part of that didn’t immediately come to mind.
59A [Frenemy of Betty in comics] VERONICA When I was in grade school, we had a large box of comic books of all sorts in the family room: Superman, Batman, Spiderman, Archie, and more I’ve forgotten. I read them all, more than once.
43D [Actor Lamorne of Fox’s “New Girl”] MORRIS Not a name I was familiar with (it’s Lamorne Morris, by the way). He’s got a lot of credits, but I don’t think I’ve seen him in anything.

Michael Schlossberg’s AVCX Classic Crossword “Rosetta Stone” — Jenni’s review

I started out very annoyed at this puzzle and ended up grinning. So much fun!

As the title suggests, we are translating hieroglyphics. Three of the theme answers have rebus blocks where the glyph stands in for part of the answer. The other three provide the definitions. It’s easier to demonstrate.

AVCX, August 20, 2025, Michael Schlossberg, “Rosetta Stone,” solution grid

24a [“Be sure to read that fine print”] or THE DEVIL IS IN THE {EYE} {EYE} (crossing BR{EYE}RS and OB{EYE}D). 74a [Quality of observance (and the key to 24-Across)] is AN EYE FOR DETAIL.
31a [Clock-setting mnemonic] is {MAN} FORWARD, {MAN} BACK crossing SHOW{MAN}CE and AREA {MAN}. 112a [1966 Orson Welles film adapted from a play (and the key to 31-Across)] is A MAN FOR ALL SEASONS. I especially appreciated that since MAN stands in for both SPRING and FALL and I was really confused.
62a [1976 Clint Eastwood role] is THE OUT{ASS} JOSEY WALES crossing H{ASS}LE. 104a [Critique of wrongheaded policy (and the key to 62-Across)] is THE LAW IS AN ASS.

I love this theme. The fill is smooth and amusing and it was a lot of fun to solve.

What I didn’t know before I did this puzzle: aside from all the hieroglyphs, I didn’t know that pointing your feet at people is TABOO in much of Asia. Duly noted.

Caitlin Reid’s New Yorker crossword – Kyle’s write-up

The New Yorker solution grid – Caitlin Reid – Wednesday 08/20/2025

Thanks to Caitlin for today’s New Yorker outing. Despite a couple hiccups, I nearly finished with a sub-2 minute solve time. The fill and clues are almost uniformly straightforward. The main impediment to speed is the segmentation of the grid, which has fairly large isolated corners in the NE and SW quadrants.

Highlights:

14A [“Can’t fool me!”] “I’M ONTO YOU!” I needed the “I” to complete 6D [Groovy] HIP, which could have also been hep.

4D [Hit rock ___] – at a glance, I thought this might have something to do with music, but it’s actually the common phrase “hit rock BOTTOM”. Usually on Wednesdays, the New Yorker gives a parenthetical hint when cluing fill-in-the-blanks for idioms, so the lack of one here threw me off. In contrast, see 17A [“Camping is in ___” (outdoorsy pun)] for TENTS.