Crossword Nation Week 378

Time: 8:31

In terms of crossword influences, I have to put Liz Gorski’s brilliant Crossword Nation near the top of the list. If you’re looking for a weekly low-difficulty crossword that is consistently better than The NY Times Tuesday Crossword, look no further. My blog could just as easily be a Liz Gorski fan site. She’s also a regular contributor to the New Yorker’s crosswords these days. In addition to constructing lively grids with peppy themes, Liz tends to share tidbits about how she went about constructing her crosswords and often mentions her starting point, which is beyond fascinating to me. The emails that deliver the Tuesday crosswords are probably my main influence in autobiographical crossword blogging. 

This week’s “High Stakes” stemmed from listening to T-BONE WALKER’s “Stormy Monday.” As I’m sure you’ll glean, the theme features four steak types that are high, as in the top part of four down answers, the other three being SALISBURY PLAIN, SKIRT LENGTH, and CHUCK BARTOWSKI, with whom I'm entirely unfamiliar despite his status as "one of TV's best nerds." I've never seen "Chuck." So we have a simple, smooth theme with a fair amount of fill that’s close to my heart. 

A personal favorite for me is right there at 1-across with BISTRO, which I’d always presumed as coming from the Russian word for “fast,” and I totally bought that it originated during the Napoleonic Wars when Russian soldiers occupied Paris and would sit at restaurants yelling “Bistro Bistro!” But Wikipedia claims that has been "discredited due to its manifest illogic" (I might need to do some real research and figure out what that means, exactly) and I'm a bit saddened. As long as we’re talking about Russians, I’ll always take a Solzhenitsyn clue for GULAGS. 

We also have THIN SKIN clued as the “trait of an insecure, intolerant person.” Now, I wonder which insecure, intolerant person first comes to mind for you. It’s sitting right next to FIASCO, if you need your memory jogged a bit more. 

If you listen to a lot of podcasts, you’re probably hearing STITCHER advertised quite frequently, so that’s coming to mind well before “needle-and-thread user” for me. I mean, they have the first scripted Marvel Comics podcast, Wolverine: The Long Night. I might have just talked myself into getting a subscription, so make sure to collect your cut, Liz. I’ll do my best to make Tuesday a two-blog day from now on. 

My Delhi hotel has just started putting out little cold brew coffee bottles and I may or may not have thrown three of these into my bag. Black coffee is hard to come by in Indian schools, so these got me through the day in style!