For all the ways I try to keep up with the puzzling scene, there’s one way in which I lag behind. Two weeks behind, to be precise. That’s the delay between a Sunday puzzle’s first run in The New York Times and its syndication in The Virginian-Pilot. The latter paper is my old hometown paper, and my dad and I got into the habit of doing its Sunday together, a tradition we now maintain over Zoom.
So it wasn’t until yesterday we discovered the NYT had done a double-homophone theme of its own, not quite like the one I just discussed, but surprisingly close!
Puzzle is by Rich Katz (rich cats?), and goes like this…
The first long entry’s clue was given as “But wait!” and after a number of crossings, it could only be JUNK IN THE TRUNK. “Butt weight,” Janice emphasized, giving Dad and me the click we needed to understand the rest:
To peace! — STRING BIKINI (two-piece)
Holy Week — TUCKERED OUT (wholly weak? This one feels a little mismatched, since “tired” is a more specific and temporary kind of weak. I would’ve gone with INEFFECTUAL)
Air rights — CORONATIONS (heir rites)
Bare feet — SUPER BOWL WIN (Bear feat. The Chicago Bears won eight NFL championships before the Super Bowl became a thing, but they have only one Bowl win on their record, Super Bowl XX in 1985. Neither Dad nor I could remember that one.)
We won! — KINDERGARTENER (wee one)
Flew by — ROBITUSSIN (flu buy)
See in — BEACH HOTEL (sea inn)
“We won”/wee one and “To peace!”/two-piece are especially interesting, since either way they’d be natural phrases. If I’d taken this approach with my “Jim Carrey” example, I could have done this:
Jim Carrey — BARBELL WALK (gym carry)
On the other hand, the tae bo/THAI BEAU idea doesn’t convert to this format. There’s no shorthand for “Thai boyfriend” in English, and ที่รัก, the Thai address for one’s boyfriend, doesn’t fit into a grid. Most of the answers in my puzzle are unconvertible like this: I needed a broader approach to generate enough ideas to fill that 125x125 canvas.
But it’s still nice to be echoed, even if only by coincidence. Everyone likes to feel heard.