Themeless #1
Hello! Welcome to Poppy Puzzles, a new crossword blog for my fellow pop culture obsessives. I wanted a place where I could be excited, rather than worried, about the density of pop culture references in a puzzle, and so here we are! Starting a blog in the year 2025.
My favorite crosswords both to make and solve are medium difficulty/Friday-ish themeless puzzles, so that's probably mostly what you can expect to find here. Clues and some marquee entries will assume a pop culture-savvy solver, but I still want these puzzles to be relatively accessible, and am not intending to sacrifice wordplay for trivia, or shoehorn in a reference at every conceivable opportunity. I don't have any kind of set schedule, and am just hoping to post something here every few months.
I've got a 70 word themeless to kick things off. I didn't have anyone test solve this puzzle, so let me know of any errors, and constructive feedback is very welcome. If even one person is reading this, I'm immensely grateful! Thanks for being here!
Built by maddy ziegler with the online cross word generator from Amuse Labs
Hi Maddy, I really enjoyed this...and managed to get all of the pop culture references...even BROOCH! And loved the reference to Barbra Streisand and Katharine Hepburn's tie for Best Actress back in 1969. I'm always impressed by stacks in themeless grids. The one at the top of your puzzle is especially nice because all three answers are related to movies. There were a couple of answers I didn't understand: 10-Down and 55-Across: could you enlighten me? I also have a couple of comments that could be considered extremely nitpicky, so apologies if that's the case. I tend to think of the word NESTLE as suggesting placement IN something, so CUDDLE UP as the clue felt a bit off. (I might have clued to the food and beverage company). And, vis-a-vis 25-Down, it felt redundant to refer to Oscar the Grouch as a grump. Again, nitpicky. Congratulations and kudos on kicking off your blog! I'll be back for more.
ReplyDeletethanks so much for solving and taking the time to comment! appreciate the (fair!) nitpicks as well!
Deleteas for your questions - ON ONE is modern slang that means, like the clue says, someone is acting over the top, wild, angry, "on a tear," "on another level," etc.
SLIME TUTORIAL is a term i love and was one of the seeds for this puzzle - a few years back, people who had filmed theater bootlegs started titling those videos "slime tutorials" on youtube, since real videos about how to make homemade slime were popular, to obscure what the videos were and avoid getting caught uploading copyright infringing material. not sure how effective that ever was, but it caught on and became an established term!
this was super fun! I had not heard about 55A so that was a really cool thing for me to learn today. thanks for the puzzle, and I'll look forward to when the next one pops up. (and fwiw, the 11D clue worked fine for me!)
ReplyDeletethank you so much!!
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