Welcoming '10
by Alice Long
edited by Mike Shenk
January 1, 2010

Alice Long is sister to last week's Natalia Shore, i.e. an alias of the editor, an anagram of collegian. So I'm told.

Full answers available on WSJ's crossword puzzle page [note: this is a new link for 2010] or with the following week's puzzle on WSJ's online Leisure Weekend or Lifestyle Arts pages.


Theme: 10 added to phrases in celebration of the new decade.*
POR-TEN-T AUTHORITY {23A Oracle?}
PO-TEN-T BELLY {33A Sumo wrestler's asset?}
WOULDN(')T HURT TEN-A()FLY {47A Campaign slogan for a New Jersey mayoral candidate?}
HEAR-TEN-ING AID {66A Cheering section, say?}
AMBULANCE CHAS-TEN-ER {82A One taking emergency vehicles to task}
ARMY TEN-ANTS {99A Base residents?}
TEN-SING LIKE A BIRD {11A Imitating Tom Turkey before Thanksgiving?}
[* I hopped up and down about 2001 being the real start of the century, but loosen up after I read a convincing argument for it all being arbitrary.]


News To Me:
ESTOPPED {38A Prevented legally} – 'Oh no you don't. My lawyer won't let you.'

ELD {65A Former times, poetically} - According to my OED connection, ELD can be noun, adjective or verb, mostly to do with old age. Byron and Longfellow both used it in the sense it is used here.

CUGAT {44D Bandleader Xavier} – Known for Latin music.

AARONIC {88D Like lower-order Mormon priests} – Named after Moses's brother.

Speaking of Aaron, Webster's Third lists eight words starting with AA: aardvark, aardwolf, Aarhus (Denmark), Aaron~ic, ~ite,~'s-beard, &~'s-rod, and aasvogel (vulture).

News words are saved from blank-squarehood by their crosses. Even then, all I know about them is the information contained in the clue and answer. Just above these on the solving scale are recall words. {14D Arthur's foster brother} had the solving impenetrability of a news word but once I saw KAY, White's The Sword in the Stone came rolling back.


Admissions of Defeat: 1
So close. I guessed on 3 letters/5 words and missed one. Why does it always come down to an evil cross of proper nouns? This one had a 50/50 cross in the middle right and a nest of p.n.s at the bottom.

WOULDN(')T HURT TEN-A()FLY/ELAYNE {37D Comic Boosler}. Tenafli, NJ, seemed more likely but the expression calls for fly. Boosler's name could have gone either way. I took a flyer on Y and stuck the landing.

EAKINS {105A “The Gross Clinic” painter}
EGAN {105D Richard of “A Summer Place”}
SARA {107D Singer Bareilles}
Couldn't get the beginning or end of the painter here. Had a vague memory of the name Richard Egan without context. Bareilles was right out of the ballpark. Given EAKIN_, it could have been EAKINg but gARA made no sense. I settled on EAKINd with dARA. But no.

For Your Amusement, a totally unrelated Summer Place.


Commentary: With apologies, in the winter a compulsive puzzler's fancies lightly turns to thoughts of the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament, February 19-21, Brooklyn, NY. I've never attended but hope to, so I stick with the Monday & Tuesday NYT & LAT puzzles. Partly, I figure I may see words that will repeat later with harder cluing. Also, in Crossworld [Broadway, 2005], Marc Romano advises potential attendees to keep up with all levels of puzzles, “Since there's an art to doing the easier puzzles as much as there's an art to doing a Friday or a Saturday, and knowing it is important to scoring high in the first few rounds during a tournament.”[p66]

OTOH, Monday has become a bit of a fill-in exercise. I have a misty recollection of reading that left-handed writing stretches one's brain cells. [I believe it is in Dean Olsher's From Square One [S&S 2009] but couldn't locate the passage.] So I did. I filled in this Monday's NYT left-handed. While it is too soon to tell the effect on brain function, it did make the puzzle amusingly difficult. Did I have this much trouble learning to write the first time around? Another thing I did years ago in the interest of body balance was to switch my mouse to my left hand. Unclear what this has done to my chi, but now I can click & take notes without having to switch hands.

Katherine Walcott
Puzzle Fan