Evan Birnholzs guide to the Post magazines December crosswords ·

28 Aug 2024, 00:00

Hi! I’m Evan, and I’m the new crossword writer for the Washington Post. This blog will recap the Sunday Magazine crossword each week, with answer grids, explanations about the themes, and background about how I put the puzzles together. In addition, this will be an opportunity for solvers to provide feedback: what you liked, what you didn’t like, which clues tortured you the most.

Normally I’ll write about one puzzle at a time, but since my first three crosswords have already been published, I’m including reviews of all three in this post. So let’s get to it!

**SPOILER ALERT: This post contains the answers to the Sunday Post Magazine puzzles of Dec. 6, 13 and 20.**

**Special thanks to Dan Feyer and Erik Agard for test-solving each of these puzzles, and to my copy editor Jenny Abella for her thorough proofreading and fact-checking of clues. The Dec. 20 puzzle had many, many other testers, credited below.**

December 6, 2015: “Heroes Welcome”

This was my debut puzzle in the Magazine. The idea for the theme is pretty straightforward: I took familiar phrases and added either MAN or WOMAN to them to create superhero-based puns.

Theme answers:

22A: [Pulitzer Prize-winning play about Selina Kyle?] is CATWOMAN ON A HOT TIN ROOF.
39A: [Source of inspiration for Arthur Curry?] is AQUAMAN LUNG.
50A: [Bruce Wayne, when he’s out for blood?] is VAMPIRE BATMAN.
65A: [Diana Prince’s arctic retreat?] is WINTER WONDER WOMAN LAND.
84A: [One posing as Clark Kent?] is SUPERMAN MODEL.
91A: [Person receiving special orders from Tony Stark?] is IRON MAN CHEF.
113A: [Miniature Peter Parker?] is THE ITSY-BITSY SPIDERMAN.

I think there’s (appropriately enough) a DC-centric vibe to this theme. The first five superheroes are from DC Comics, and the last two are from Marvel. Gotta have something for everyone, though, unfortunately, ANT-MAN and the entire X-MEN team didn’t make the cut.

Anyhow, the initial “seed” entry was the CATWOMAN pun. I don’t remember exactly why I thought of it at the time — it certainly wasn’t while watching the 2004 Catwoman movie with Halle Berry (it’s a horrible movie). But when I noticed it was exactly 21 letters long, I knew I had the starting point of a good (if somewhat basic) Sunday-themed puzzle. Then it was a matter of finding other superheroes whose names could fit with decent puns of their own. As I recall, it felt like a minor miracle when I realized that THE ITSY-BITSY SPIDERMAN also had 21 letters and could be a symmetrical counterpart with CATWOMAN ON A HOT TIN ROOF.

I was glad to work in answers like AREA CODE, VIAGRA, PIPE DOWN, EXPOSES, GOBOT, TOM PETTY, IT’S TAKEN, UNCOLA, REX REED, and FLIP OVER. I wasn’t as enthused about small stuff like OBI, and SAYS NO TO isn’t the liveliest answer, but overall I was happy with how the grid turned out. Other answers and clues of note:

62A: [Tailless pet] is MANX. Small aside: The first newspaper puzzle of mine that ever got published appeared in the Wall Street Journal in May 2013. It had this same answer and one of my favorite clues ever: [Cat o’ no tails]. I didn’t even write that clue; my wife of thought of it. Anyhow, I was dying to reuse the clue, but I didn’t like repeating the word “cat” when CATWOMAN was a prominent theme answer. Maybe some other time.
72A: [Shrieking ___ (underwater terrors in “The Princess Bride")] is EELS. Yup, I’m a big fan of the film.
108A: [Common time?] is ERA. As in the phrase “common era.” It’s very, very difficult to come up with new clues for this answer, as it’s the single most common answer word in American-style crosswords.
84D: [All-Pro defensive tackle Ndamukong ___] is SUH. Perhaps a tough get for non-football fans, but he has been a good (though controversial) player for his first several years in NFL so far.
88D: [National Pizza Month] is OCTOBER. I did not know this until I wrote the clue. In other news, October is the Best Month Ever™.

One last thing: I actually wrote a draft of this puzzle a little more than two years ago; the original can be found here and it looks very different from the final product. I never submitted it anywhere because I didn’t like some of the filler answers and got pretty worried about some tough proper noun crossings that solvers might find unfair. Glad I kept the idea around, though!

December 13, 2015: “Sound Packing”

Inspiration for a crossword theme can come from just about anywhere. This one came from my cat. She has a very sing-song quality to her meow, and I’ve spent years making fun of her by imitating her voice. Some of the puns here are probably ones I’ve uttered to her several times. I’m not a crazy cat man. I swear. I just have a pet who deserves both love and ridicule.

The theme involves changing the “EH” vowel sound at the end of familiar words and phrases to “OW” vowel sounds to create wacky answers, like so:

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23A: [“Tell me I’m not the only one here who fights knights"?] is SURELY YOU JOUST. From “surely you jest.”
36A: [Top that’s simply divine?] is GOD BLOUSE. From God bless.
38A: [Talk smack about “The Waltz King"?] is DIS STRAUSS. From distress. This one is a minor outlier in that it adds a phoneme with the second S, where the others just change the vowel sound. I thought the answer was still pretty funny, so I gave it the nod.
56A: [Source of comedian Billy’s jokes?] is CRYSTAL MOUTH. From crystal meth.
69A: [Federal reservations?] is NATIONAL DOUBT. From national debt.
80A: [Classroom figure’s bratty expression?] is TEACHER’S POUT. From teacher’s pet.
101A: [Mickey’s comment after he met Minnie?] is WHAT A MOUSE. From “what a mess.”
103A: [Wallop Goethe’s legendary alchemist?] is SLUG FAUST. From slugfest.
114A: [Columnist Maureen, when she goes for a stroll?] is THE WALKING DOWD. From the AMC show The Walking Dead.

This theme started from SURELY YOU JOUST. I had that potential theme answer sitting around in my files for more than a year, in part because it’s 14 letters long. Some technical talk here: Other crossword writers who write 15×15-sized puzzles will tell you that 14-letter answers are often the black sheep of daily crossword grids. They force you to use extra black squares, they might require you to squeeze the whole set of theme answers close together, which makes crossing them a real pain …. basically, they’re just difficult to work with when the grid is 15×15 squares across and down. In a 21×21 grid, however, they work just fine.

Admittedly, this theme’s a bit looser than the previous puzzle; there’s no common thread between these answers beyond changing the one vowel sound. But I like the puns they produce, as well as fill like RATED PG, LEGAL TEAM, LETTERMAN, OH STOP, TWO-TIMING, HEADFIRST, SCHMALTZ, DRUM ROLL and CLIMAX.

Other answers and clues of note:

44D: [1977 hit named the 34th best hard rock song ever by VH1] is BARRACUDA by Heart. It’s not a song about a fish, but rather Ann Wilson’s anger about false rumors that she was in an incestuous relationship with her sister. Not a bad way to get some payback.
52D: [High-end room] / 53D: [High-end room?] are SUITE and ATTIC, respectively. Fortuitous how these two clues could work right next to one another.
62D: [“___, c’est moi!"] is L’ÉTAT. Maybe a difficult crossing for non-French speakers with the French word for “summer” ÉTÉ at 68A. If you’re wondering why I didn’t make 62D LET AT instead (clued maybe as [Sic on]), it’s because AT SEA was right next to it, and EATS AT was elsewhere at 51A. Little repeats like that don’t usually bother me, but having three “at” answers in a puzzle felt a little much.
100D: [Dangerous fly] is TSETSE. A staple among crossword writers because of the useful letter combination. It’s not my favorite answer, but I needed it here.
101D: [East Coast-based convenience store chain with a repeated syllable] is WAWA. So, about this answer: Wawa is a major chain in Philadelphia. I’ve lived in the Philly area for more than a decade, but I did not use this clue simply because it’s familiar to me, however. Normally in crosswords, the answer WAWA gets a reference to a guitar or trumpet effect, or a baby’s nonsense word for “water,” or the old SNL character Baba Wawa. The problem was that the musical effect is usually spelled WAH-WAH — so that option was out — and there was the crossing JAWA at 109A ([Cloaked desert dweller on Tatooine]). “Star Wars” is mega-famous, but if you don’t know the name of the minor cloak-wearing race in that movie (or potentially the old Gilda Radner character), the crossing at 101D could become very difficult very quickly. So I needed to clue WAWA in a way that was transparent and wasn’t uber-tortured. The convenient store angle was the best way to accomplish both tasks, in my view, and the “repeated syllable” bit was a hint to help people out of a jam there.

December 20, 2015: “Present Day”

Christmas shopping can be stressful, but I caught the holiday spirit anyway and made a puzzle about it. The crossword includes this written introductory Note: “Nine famous people got together for a holiday party and gave one another gifts. Some gifts were a little more expensive than others, but each gift is appropriate for each recipient in its own way. One other thing: Another famous person showed up to the party, but it’s a secret! Can you find out who it was? (Hint: You may have to think outside the box to find the answer.)”

Alright then. First, there were nine theme clues indicating that a celebrity received a gift. The gifts were appropriate because each celebrity’s last name matched the first word of the gift they received:

24A: [Containers given to comedian Jackie] is a set of MASON JARS.
52A: [Stone shiner given to comedian Chris] is a ROCK TUMBLER.
69A: [Jewelry given to singer Neil] is a pair of DIAMOND EARRINGS.
90A: [Italian pants given to actor Vin] is a pair of DIESEL JEANS.
119A: [Shakable souvenir given to NBC News journalist Kate] is a SNOW GLOBE.
4D: [Sporty top given to actress Teri] is a POLO SHIRT.
16D: [Tech device given to musician Fiona] is an APPLE WATCH.
75D: [Seed holder given to NBA star Larry] is a BIRD FEEDER.
88D: [Bottled drink given to actress Betty] is a bottle of WHITE WINE.

(These clues were italicized in the print version but starred in the electronic version.)

That theme is basic enough, but I threw in a separate twist elsewhere in the puzzle. The answers to five clues near the southern-central edge of the puzzle didn’t quite fit. One letter appeared to be chopped off from each one:

113D: [World of Warcraft beasts] is OGRES, and not OGRE as it seemingly appears in the grid. For the World of Warcraft fans out there.
120D: [Mount Doom product] is LAVA, not LAV. For the “Lord of the Rings” fans out there.
121D: [Clive of “Inside Man"] is OWEN, not OWE.
122D: [Crooked] is BENT, not BEN.
102D: [Sylvan Lake’s province] is ALBERTA, not ALBERT.

Going back to the puzzle’s Note, if you think a little bit outside the box — meaning, write the chopped-off letters beyond the grid border — you’ll find that they spell SANTA. He’s the secret famous person you’re looking for. And hey! A Secret Santa sounds like a party these nine celebrities could have attended. I probably BENT the traditional crossword rules just a bit, but what would Christmas be without a few surprises?

Rather than go through other pieces of fill, here’s a little backstory: My earlier drafts of this puzzle were much, much crazier than this. In addition to the SANTA hiding below the southern border, originally I had nine circled spaces in the grid, one for each of the nine celebrity gifts. I wanted solvers to connect those circled letters with a “chain” of gift-giving, using specific instructions in the clues and the puzzle’s introductory Note about the order in which the celebrities exchanged the gifts. The idea was that you could spell out SAINT NICK using one circled letter in each theme entry, and if you played connect-the-dots……well, I wanted it to resemble Santa’s toy sack, and it fails miserably on that front. See for yourself.

Basically, I was trying to do too much with the puzzle. I was so unsure about all those extra bells and whistles that I recruited many test solvers to give me their two cents on it. While they expressed some differences in opinion, the overriding sense I got was that the circled-letter game was more confusing than it was rewarding, and the idea of getting people to draw a mangled toy sack that they’d likely not even see once they drew it was dead on arrival. There’s a lesson in all this: Sometimes, simpler is better.

My thanks to Dan Feyer, Erik Agard, Neville Fogarty, Sam Ezersky, Erin Milligan-Milburn, Andrew Ries, Joon Pahk, Eric Maddy, and Tyler Hinman for looking over this one.

Okay, that’s quite enough puzzles to review. Happy holidays everyone, and I hope to see you again next week!

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Evan Birnholzs guide to the Post magazines December crosswords

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