Constructor: Kathy Bloomer
Relative difficulty: Easy (easiest Sunday in recent memory)
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THEME: "Le Puzzle" — wacky phrases created by adding "LE" to familiar phrases:
Theme answers:
So ... [Erstwhile candy bar whose name was an exclamation], then. Good thing they discontinued the candy bar "quietly," otherwise, my god, you can imagine the uproar ...
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Relative difficulty: Easy (easiest Sunday in recent memory)
Theme answers:
- TRICKLE QUESTION (22A: "When will the leaky faucet get fixed?," e.g.?)
- ALL OVER THE MAPLE (106A: Where you'd find the sap for syrup?)
- SKIPS A BEATLE (3D: Says "John, Paul ... and Ringo"?)
- CLASS TRIPLE (63D: The three R's?)
- WORDLE OF MOUTH (31D: M_U_H?)
- LOTTERY PICKLE (34D: Loss of the winning ticket?)
- STARTLE DATE (15D: Show up naked, perhaps?)
- PALACE COUPLE (60D: King and queen?)
Oh Henry! is a candy bar containing peanuts, caramel, and fudge coated in chocolate.There are multiple versions of the Oh Henry! bar origin story. The manufacturer Nestlé says that the bar was introduced by George Williamson and his Williamson Candy Company of Chicago in 1920 in United States. The most popular alternate story is that Thomas Henry, manager of the Peerless Candy Co. in Arkansas City, Kansas, invented a bar he called the "Tom Henry Bar" in the late 1910s, and sold the recipe to George Williamson in 1920. There is no credible documentation of this story.
There are other alternate accounts of the origin of the name of the bar. The story supported by Nestlé is that there was a boy named Henry who frequented George Williamson's second candy shop. He became a favorite of the young girls who worked there, who would say "Oh Henry" when speaking to or about him, and Williamson used this phrase to name his new confection. The other (undocumented) story is that the name was changed from the Tom Henry Bar to Oh Henry! when it was purchased by Williamson. Popular myths are that it was named after O. Henry or Henry Aaron.
The Williamson Company was sold to Warner-Lambert in 1965, which soon sold Oh Henry! to Terson, Inc. Nestlé acquired the United States rights to the brand from Terson in 1984. In 2018, Nestlé sold the rights to its U.S. confectionery products to Ferrara Candy Company, a subsidiary of Ferrero SpA. Ferrara quietly discontinued the US version of Oh Henry! in 2019. (wikipedia) (emph. mine)
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This is one of those themes that feels like it belongs in some other publication. The concept is pretty stale. You're just adding letters. Two letters: "LE." Why? I don't know. The title, "Le Puzzle" ... is that supposed to evoke Le Car? What is that? It's as if the title is admitting, "yeah, there's not much of a concept here, but there's wackiness, so, you know, enjoy." Seems like you could add "LE" to words all day long, and then the number of phrases you might use those words in, hoo boy, that list has gotta go on forever. So you find some and you arrange them symmetrically and here you are, but where are you, really, besides killing 10 min. to a half hour on a Sunday morning. The wacky really Really has to pay off for a theme this conceptually thin to work, and it's hard to argue that the payoff is very substantial here. I gotta give credit to WORDLE OF MOUTH for at least trying hard. That answer is grammatically tortured but it's got the right idea: as with all things wacky, go big or go home. The clue is innovative and cute and the answer is current, so props to that themer for sure, but the rest of this is pretty lackluster. Well, STARTLE DATE is pretty startling, and that's better than just being chuckleworthy, so we'll count that one as a plus as well. The rest, shrug. There they are.
The non-thematic fill is pretty unremarkable, and occasionally wobbly. RATEDAAA and AAH ... I feel like there's a potential theme here somewhere [Like bonds issued at a spa] (RATED AAH), something like that. But all the AAAAAA action here is weird. The TNOTE / NOTPC (ugh) / O'MEARA section is pretty thick with mustiness as well. SEE ME!? I LAY! The fill never gets above mediocre. The grid's main problem is that it's poorly filled so much as that it's just loaded with ordinary, unremarkable 3-to-5-letter answers. Not a lot of fun to be had there. Second day in a row for HORSEMAN, which is the bizarro fact of the day (okay yesterday was HORSEMEN plural but close enough). I didn't have a lick of trouble anywhere with this one. Maybe getting from [Boos] to HONEYS took me a few beats, or acceding to ASSHAT, that might've cost me some seconds, but mostly I was writing in answers as fast as I could read clues. I wish there was more to talk about today, but this grid just isn't giving me a lot to work with. I had PROD before CROP (101A: Whip) and couldn't remember the Nickelodeon brothers' names (PETE) (102D: Name of either brother in a classic Nickelodeon sitcom) (that show missed me completely, though honestly that's true of virtually every show on Nickelodeon; I was too old for that network, and my daughter just never cared).
The clue on ALL OVER THE MAPLE feels very weird (106A: Where you'd find sap for syrup?). Imagine if your maples were actually covered in sap ... because that's what I was imagining, because the image the clue evokes. You know what's actually ALL OVER THE MAPLEs (outside my house) right now? The damn screaming blue jays. What is it with the blue jays this late summer / early autumn? I've never heard more damn jay yelling. I mean, jays are notoriously pushy jerks, but they are really going at it, screaming-wise, this year. They are beautiful birds, but I am looking forward to shut-the-hell-up season, whenever that is.
I'll leave you with a couple of bonus features today. First, video of the crossword round-table discussion I participated in last week as part of the opening festivities of the Finger Lakes Crossword Competition (it's me and "Wordplay" blogger Deb Amlen and constructor Adam Perl, moderated by New Yorker constructor (and Cornell professor) Anna Shechtman):
And then, finally, an email I got from a reader this week. It had the subject heading: "A Will Weng story" so naturally I was intrigued (Weng was the NYTXW editor in the '70s, the successor to the original editor Margaret Farrar and the immediate predecessor of Eugene Maleska, who was Shortz's predecessor ... mind-boggling that in 80 years there have been only 4 NYTXW editors!). Anyway, here it is, your Crossword Anecdote (from reader Oliver)!
It is 1970. I was doing my two-year Vietnam military obligation in San Francisco, working for the Yellow Berets in the U. S. Public Health Service (q.v. — “Yellow Berets”).I was then married to Lisa Ferris Brown [ed.: not her real name], a cruciverbalist and cryptogram solver.Lisa, then 25, decided to compose an X-word puz for the NYT. It took some prodding on my part (not re: content, but re: persistence), but eventually Lisa completed the puzzle and sent it off to Will Weng. A few weeks later, a poorly typed letter on undersized and mis-aligned stationery (poorly typed because of a number of overstrikes with ribbon-clogged keys) arrived from Mr. Weng.Mr. Weng wrote: “Change ‘Ahab to arab' and we’ll publish it.” There was one other change Mr. Weng wanted — I cannot recall. After some more encouragement, Lisa made the suggested changes and mailed the revised puzzle back to New York. Lisa also sent a Xerox (a Big Deal in 1970) of the puzzle to my dad, who, as I noted in my test email to you, was a 30-year veteran NYT X-word pro — could even do the Friday puzzle between Lexington and Wall Street.OK. Silence for another few weeks, and then…. a letter to Lisa Ferris Brown (née as written, but may have sent her letter to Mr. Weng as Lisa Brown Kelman) from the New York Times arrived. Well, an envelope arrived, not exactly a letter. In the envelope was a check for $15.00 from the NYT’s bank. No hint what it was for.A few more weeks passed. Then my dad called me: “Lisa's puzzle is in today’s paper!” I have no recollection whether it was a Monday or any other weekday.End of story? No.In April, 1970 Lisa and I took the Italy Grand Tour. On the way back, we checked in at Fiumicino in Rome for our flight to SFO. A guy in the window seat had the International Herald Tribune (which carried a mishmash of Euro stringers and NYT stuff) opened to the crossword puzzle. Lisa was sitting next to him. At some point, the guy turns to Lisa and asks, “Hey what’s a 4-letter word for XXXX?”Lisa says, “May I please see that puzzle for a moment and may I borrow your pencil?”The guy surrenders the folded Herald Tribune and his pencil. Maybe it was a pen.It’s Lisa's puzzle, the rights to which she had surrendered when she sold it to the NYT for a small fortune.So Lisa proceeds to complete the puzzle in mere seconds without looking at the clues and hands it back to the guy in the window seat. The guy makes a few feeble efforts to check the clues against Lisa's fill-ins to make sure she had not entered just a bunch of letters, and then says:“How did you do this?”Lisa answers:“I wrote it.”The guy does not know which is more improbable — that she wrote it or that she was some kind of 200 IQ genius. But Lisa convinces him it was just a freak coincidence. They guy was a shrink from Berkeley.We shared some drinks.
Y'all are free to send me random crossword-related stories like this *any* time you like. They entertain me no end. Take care, and see you later.