"OH HELL NO" is right. OH crossing OH (at "OH WELL")?! And "OH WELL" absolutely does not mean 8D: "What a pity." I had "AH WELL" there at first, both because it's more apt (apt!) and because, well, surely they wouldn't cross "OHs." Ha. Speaking of Ha, HAHAS, plural, more awful (and improbably plural) noises. Also, speaking of HA, you've got HA, backward, at AH (OK). Then you've also got some OWS (another possibly even more improbable plural). At the level of two-letter noises alone, this thing is off-puttingly cacophonous and messy. With longer, non-noise answers, there are also problems. TO THE SIDE is wobbly and seems desperately to need an "off" in front of it (33D: Where a wallflower often stands). HAD A SOLO not only ate a sandwich, it ate *all* the sandwiches (57A: Played by oneself). The clue on APT TO is completely inapt because the clue is pointedly slangy, whereas the answer ... isn't (31A: Likely gonna). People take GROUP SELFIEs all the time, why doesn't that clue at least have a question mark on it? (27A: It's a lot for one person to take). Do you mean "a lot of people are in the shot"? Is that why it's "a lot to take"? Yeah, that needs a "?" ... like the clue on ABET (22A: Do a bad job of helping?). Only that clue doesn't quite work either. I mean, I see what you're doing, if you ABET, you help someone in committing a crime, and crimes are "bad," but ... if you get away with the crime, then you did a good job of helping. I guess the "?" covers you here, but barely. Moving on: this puzzle made me remember MR. MISTER, automatic demerit (38D: 1980s chart-topping band with a semi-duplicative name). Closing: there's just too much tired and / or gunky short fill: ESTOP ORALB ABET STE EES NOTTE PLEBS ULNA OWS TEE ETNA EPI KAL KEW INE AHOK HAHAS EOS SIA ISSA INCA. You might say I chose to focus only on the negative today. To which I'd say, OH WELL—we all make choices.
[I once nearly got beat up for making a crack about MR. MISTER which honestly would've been the funniest reason anyone ever got their ass kicked—I would've had to take ... my broken legs ... and learn to walk again, learn to walk so free; thankfully the kid in the MR. MISTER muscle TEE managed to calm down]
I will say that BOOGIE DOWN BRONX absolutely rules. One full star added to the rating for that answer alone.
["'Cause we roll with a posse / From Strong Long to Canarsie / QBC, BOOGIE DOWN BRONX, back to Marcy ..."]
Bullets:
1A: Artist whose first two initials stand for "Maurits Cornelis" (ESCHER) — too easy, come on. MC ... who else is it gonna be? (Note: If you wrote in HAMMER here, god bless you, that's amazing):
20A: Peak overlooking the Grindelwald Valley (EIGER) — an ALP. Forgot it existed. Crosses bailed me out.
44A: Round and round and round? (BOXING MATCH) — Pretty short match but OK.
50A: Determine the going price? (SET BAIL) — as today's "?" clues go, this was one of the better ones. I was a little worried this clue was gonna have something to do with pay toilets, but thankfully no.
59A: Animated character with a signature quiff hairstyle (TINTIN) — more of a comics / cartoon character than an "animated" character, although I guess he was, technically, "animated" at some point. The Adventures of TINTIN is a long-running series by pioneering artist Hergé, master of the ligne claire style. Comfort reading for me. The stories themselves don't matter much—I just want to live in the beautiful worlds he creates (also, they are just at my level of French literacy—so all those years of high school and college French weren't for nought).
9D: Sports figure who traditionally wears an orange armband, in brief (NHL REF) — I was not aware the NHL had "traditions." Do the refs perform various rituals, hand down lore, etc.? I assume there are rules and regulations. Looks like the orange armband has been standard NHL REF gear for a while now (since the '69-'70 season, best I can tell).
24D: Like a sketchy person (SUS) — short for "suspicious." First appeared in 2024 and has come on like gangbusters since, that's right I said "gangbusters!" (this is the 9th appearance). There were 21 pre-Shortz SUSes ("susses?"), but they were all [Swine genus]. Fun fact*: SUS is actually a contraction of "Swine genUS"
That's all for today. See you next time.
Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld
*this is not, in fact, a fact, fun or otherwise
[Follow Rex Parker on BlueSky and Facebook and Letterboxd] ============================= ❤️ Support this blog ❤️:
35D: Princess who says "Governor Tarkin! I should have expected to find you holding Vader's leash. I recognized your foul stench when I was brought on board"]
THEME: none
Word of the Day: WONG Kar-wai (36A: ___ Kar-wai, acclaimed Hong Kong filmmaker behind 1994's "Chungking Express") —
Wong Kar-waiBBS (born 17 July 1958) is a Hong Kong filmmaker. His films are characterised by nonlinear narratives, atmospheric music, and vivid cinematography with bold, saturated colours. An auteur of Hong Kong cinema, Wong frequently appears at international film festivals. [...] Exhausted by the time-consuming production of Ashes of Time, Wong directed Chungking Express (1994), a smaller film that he hoped would rekindle his love of cinema during a two-month sabbatical while waiting for post-production equipment to arrive for Ashes of Time. The film, with its more lighthearted atmosphere, catapulted Wong to international prominence, and won Best Film and Best Director at the 1995 Hong Kong Film Awards. Wong followed up with the crime thriller Fallen Angels (1995), which has since become a cult classic of the Golden Age of Hong Kong cinema and is considered especially representative of Wong's style. Wong consolidated his reputation with the 1997 drama Happy Together, for which he won Best Director at the Cannes Film Festival. // The 2000 drama In the Mood for Love, revered for its lush visuals and subtle storytelling, concretely established Wong's trademark filmmaking style. Among his other works are 2046 (2004), a romantic drama and science fiction film, and The Grandmaster (2013), a biopic of Ip Man, both of which received awards and nominations worldwide. [...] In 2000, Empire ranked [In the Mood for Love] number 42 in its list titled "The 100 Best Films of World Cinema". It was ranked 95th on 100 Best Films from 1983 to 2008 by Entertainment Weekly. In November 2009, Time Out New York ranked the film as the fifth-best of the decade, calling it the "consummate unconsummated love story of the new millennium". // In the 2022 decennial critics' poll conducted by Sight and Sound, In the Mood for Love appeared at number 5, making it the highest-ranked film from the 2000s and one of only two from the 2000s to be listed in the top 10 of all time, along with David Lynch's Mulholland Drive. Wong's film was also the highest-ranked film by a Chinese filmmaker. The film owed its placement to the votes of 42 critics (out of 846) who placed it in their own individual top 10 lists.
• • •
Seems like it's been a while since I tore through a Friday, but I sure tore through this one. A few snags along the way, but overall, this felt more like a Wednesday. Almost all the difficulty for me lay in two answers, both sports (I don't follow): PAK and EL CLASICO. The funny thing about PAK is I didn't really know what sport I was dealing with, despite "Cricket's" being right there in the clue (38D: Cricket's Men in Green, on scoreboards). I was like "who is Cricket?" I thought "Cricket's Men in Green" was some kind of long name for, like, an Irish soccer team or something. We don't have cricket here. I shouldn't say that. I have seen South Asian men playing cricket in the local parks a few times over the years, so ... it's here. Just not professionally. That I know of. It's big in New Zealand, where my wife is from, but so is Marmite, and we don't have that here either (unless you know where to look) (we're exclusively a Vegemite household, but that's another story ... a yeast-extract spread story). So, because I was not processing "Cricket" at all ("Jiminy Cricket?"), that "K" (as you can see from the completed-grid picture above) was the very last thing I filled in. As for EL CLASICO (56A: Much-anticipated rivalry game in soccer's La Liga) ... I inferred it, eventually. One "S" in "CLASICO," eh? Cool. As for the rest of the puzzle, I whippet it, whippet it good.
[37A: Hounds that can run up to 35 m.p.h.]
Today's puzzle felt a little tepid. Solid, mostly, but without a lot of sizzle. A FORTIORI, oof, I got it easily enough, but that's too much real estate to give over to legal Latin on a Friday (17A: By an even stronger argument, at law). TOP PAIR, shrug, I get it, but it's not an interesting answer (41A: Two aces, say). No active complaints about most of the rest of the long stuff, but it never gave me a thrill. Except SISYPHEAN, that one I loved (58A: Extremely difficult and ultimately futile). I've had Camus's phrase "One must imagine Sisyphus happy" on my brain a lot lately, I'm not sure why. Maybe it's something to do with seeing Coyote v. Acme. Or maybe it was a video from We Rate Dogs of a lab fetching a ball from the water, dropping it on the shore, watching it roll back into the water, fetching the ball from the water, dropping it on the shore, watching it roll back into the water, fetching the ball etc. (I can't find a proper copy of the video or I'd show you) (It's here, at Facebook Reels). I also liked SIREN SONG (4D: What Odysseus' crew waxed on about?—because they put wax on (that is, "in") their ears so as not to hear the tempting tunes). And I thought the 8s dancing through the middle of the grid (SCROOGES CORONARY WHIPPETS "FRESH AIR") formed a nice set. Also thrilled to see WONG Kar-wei (though I spelled it WANG at first); kinda stunned they used Chungking Express instead of the much more famous In the Mood For Love in the clue, but always happy to see international cinema in the grid. Still waiting on VARDA and OZU, but ... some day ...
Bullets:
10A: "Super Dry" brewer (ASAHI) — if you can manage to remember just one Japanese beer, make it ASAHI. If you can manage two, throw KIRIN in there as well. Five-letter beers. Very useful.
52A: Drawing on another's life (PARASITIC) — took me longer than it should have because the clue seemed so innocuous and vague. I actually wanted PARASOCIAL but it wouldn't fit. "Drawing on" is accurate but doesn't really get at all the (potential) blood-sucking and disease-causing etc. The depletion, I guess, is what I was looking for. Something even slightly negative. But as I say, the clue is fair.
28D: Near failure, colloquially (ON THE ROPES) — was reading this as a noun, i.e. a "near-failure," so the prepositional phrase surprised me a little.
42D: Student of Socrates (PLATO) — maybe I didn't notice at first because they were mostly easy, but man there are a lot of names here at the bottom of the grid. Six of the last ten Down answers are names, plus ORCS, which are fictional and therefore name-ish. PLATO SATIE ERICA DALI ALY. Meanwhile, there are only a small handful of names scattered around the rest of the grid. I'm realizing now that this is not a very interesting observation. APOLOGIES (12D: "My mistake").
33D: One who regularly takes a best friend out? (DOG OWNER) — I understood the canine implications here pretty quickly (dog = "Man's best friend"), but OWNER, yeesh, that was not clear. I figured walking the dog would be part of the answer. Like DOG WALKER or DOG SITTER or something. But no, just the OWNER. Anticlimactic.
51D: ___ team (AS A) — bad fill should not get confusing clues. This thing I believe. If the OWNER part of DOG OWNER was anticlimactic, I don't know what to call discovering the answer here was AS A—disappointing? Sad? Horrifying? Probably "disappointing" will do.
9D: Device geared to draw rotationally symmetrical shapes (SPIROGRAPH) — is "geared" a pun? Because I believe literal "gears" are involved—at least they were on whatever childhood toy version of this device that I had...
That's all for today. See you next time.
Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld
[Follow Rex Parker on BlueSky and Facebook and Letterboxd] ============================= ❤️ Support this blog ❤️:
A long time ago, I was solving this puzzle and got stuck at an unguessable (to me) crossing: N. C. WYETH crossing NATICK at the "N"—I knew WYETH but forgot his initials, and NATICK ... is a suburb of Boston that I had no hope of knowing. It was clued as someplace the Boston Marathon runs through (???). Anyway, NATICK— the more obscure name in that crossing—became shorthand for an unguessable cross, esp. where the cross involves two proper nouns, neither of which is exceedingly well known. NATICK took hold as crossword slang, and the term can now be both noun ("I had a NATICK in the SW corner...") or verb ("I got NATICKED by 50A / 34D!")
.png)
