The step cut's rectilinear form was popular in the Art Deco period. Antique jewelry of the period features step-cut stones prominently, and there is a market in producing new step-cut stones to repair antique jewelry or to reproduce it. The slender, rectangular baguette (from the French, resembling a loaf of bread) was and is the most common form of the step cut: today, it is most often used as an accent stone to flank a ring's larger central (and usually brilliant-cut) stone. [Wiki]
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Hey squad! It's Malaika, filling in for Rex who is on a trip. I solved this puzzle on the train home from seeing Maybe Happy Ending, so am generally feeling nostalgic and plagued with a sense of romantic doom. On to the puzzle!
It is my belief that the NYT has decided the Friday puzzle should be an easy themeless puzzle, and the Saturday should be a hard themeless. No more of this "a little hard" and then "very hard." I absolutely breeze through these Fridays like they are Wednesdays. This is not a complaint, but rather to fend off complaints! Don't complain that Fridays are easy, because I'm pretty sure they're supposed to be!
"It's as easy as falling off A LOG!" said the Earl, falling off a log with a loud thump
This is a pretty intense grid shape to fill! When I see three long answers vertically intersecting three long answers horizontally, it is usually in the form of six eleven-letter answers. (Like this one, from KAC.) Here, Ms. Cohen has used a fifteen, a thirteen, two elevens, and two nines. Something a little different!
The best entry by far in this grid was THE MUNCHIES and it's not even close. Fantastic addition to the puzzle. It does seem totally insane to clue this without referencing weed... I'm pretty sure that if you are just looking for a snack, you don't have the munchies. The term only applies when you're high, right? Chime in, fam.
A lot of the other long entries fell flat for me.... ERADICATES and SONOROUS and CAPABLE are all just regular words, and ARMADILLOS felt less exciting to me because of the plural. SPOILER ALERTS felt a little ruined by the plural, actually, it didn't feel grammatically valid to add an S there (same with APPLE TVS). LOCK AND LOAD sounded awkward, since I'm used to "locked and loaded" and BANK AUDIT is not what I would call fresh or interesting. I did like COLD TAKES, COUPLES ONLY, and MAKE BELIEVE, though all three got boring (or I suppose I should say, easy) clues.
Bullets:
["WandaVision" co-star Elizabeth ___] for OLSEN — I just watched her in "Eternity," which I loved. Exactly the type of cute-but-still-interesting romcom I've been looking for.
[Company whose name comes from a term in the board game Go] for ATARI — The term describes one of the board's potential states
[Big name in petrol] for ESSO — I've seen this a thousand times in puzzles and I will simply never remember the final letter. Here I tried every vowel since I wasn't familiar with RKO either.
[Dough in tamales] for MASA — I went to Mexico City over the weekend and took a class where we learned about nixtamalizing corn and made tamales. I've made tamales before, but this was the first time I used banana leaves as wrappers. (Usually I use corn husks.)
[Home of Swansea and Wrexham] for WALES — I knew this because of the soccer club that Ryan Reynolds co-owns.
xoxo Malaika
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THEME: OSCAR BAIT (59A: Film angling for awards ... or what's depicted three times in this puzzle?) — Best Picture Oscar winners, appearing in circled-square formations shaped like hooks, drop down and snag three different fish, which are lurking in the shaded squares inside longer answers:
Theme answers:
EXIT ROUTE (17A: Part of an evacuation plan) — the TROUT is hooked by PATTON
PSALM ONE (21A: It ends "But the way of the ungodly shall perish") — the SALMON is hooked by RAIN MAN
POP CHART (50A: Hit list) — the CHAR is hooked by BEN-HUR
Word of the Day: Mechanical Turk (31A: Chess-playing Mechanical Turk of 1770, for one = HOAX) —
The Mechanical Turk (German: Schachtürke, lit.'chess Turk'), also known as the Automaton Chess Player or simply the Turk (Hungarian: A Török), was a chess-playing machine first displayed in 1770, which appeared to be able to play a strong game of chess autonomously, but whose pieces were in reality moved via levers and magnets by a chess master hidden in its lower cavity. The machine was toured and exhibited for 84 years as an automaton, and continued giving occasional exhibitions until 1854, when it was destroyed in a fire. In 1857, an article published by the owner's son provided the first full explanation of the mechanism, which had been widely suspected to be a hoax but never accurately described while the machine still existed.
This puzzle won me over with its ridiculousness. The concept here works because the puzzle really commits to the bit, elaborately literalizing a common phrase to the point of extreme silliness. A deconstructed, reconstructed metaphor, with the movie titles "fishing" not for Oscars, but for literal fish. Does it make any sense for Patton to catch a TROUT? No! But who cares. It's the arbitrariness of the fish that makes it truly loopy. So much crossword "wackiness" is lukewarm at best—subdadjoke, barely chuckleworthy. But this one? This one follows the golden wackiness rule, which is Go Big or Go Home. Also, Go Fish! Are there some problems with the theme execution? Yeah, a few. First of all, there's some visual ambiguity—the movies are supposed to be OSCAR BAIT, but they look more like hooks. Maybe they've been threaded onto their hooks so perfectly that they just *look* like hooks. Or maybe those shapes aren't hooks but worms. They look like inverted candy canes to me. But I think you could argue that the circled squares are the hooks and then you "bait" those hooks with movie titles. That's how I'm choosing to see it. I don't love the CHAR answer for a couple of reasons: one, the CHAR is a much much less familiar fish than the other two, but two, and more importantly, the CHAR does not break across the two words in its theme answer. SALMON touches both words in its answer, TROUT touches both words in its answer, but CHAR belongs only to CHART, so POP's just hanging out there doing nothing. The ideal embedded-word scenario has that word involved with every element in its host answer. It's clear Shortz doesn't care about this, given how often this weakness occurs—but I learned from the great constructor/editor Patrick Berry, so I will cling to my belief that this is how embedded words should work! But it's an admittedly minor point, esp. when there's so much entertaining visual chaos going on. I don't love PSALM ONE, written out like that, but as with POP CHART's failure to properly embed CHAR, sometimes you have to do what you have to do to make a worthily wacky theme work out.
The short stuff is kind of a drag today—a real onslaught of repeaters. So many crossword names (OGDEN IHOP RUBE AYN OATES CHER etc.) and then ENTS OSHA ICAN SYNE AETNA LODE, the always ugly SNES. It's a good thing the theme is so shiny and loud, and that the longer non-theme answers are admirably strong. EMBALMER and RAINMAKER really hold down the fort in the NW, and STAY CLOSE and BEN HOGAN do the same in the SE, those "STAY CLOSE!" is not an "admonition" I've heard on tours before (34D: Tour guide's admonition). Anyway, it's more a request or instruction. "Admonition" would be more like "Don't touch that Monet!" Because the instruction was unexpected, if not entirely unfamiliar to me, that SE corner was by far the hardest part of the puzzle for me. I got quadruple stymied heading into that corner. The quadfecta! I blanked on BEN ___, POP ___, "STAY ___," and CRAB ___. My favorite ("favorite") part was that I kept wanting 58A: Seafood dish known as the King of Salads to be CRAB ... SALAD. Should've remembered BEN HOGAN but kept getting interference from his main rival, Crossworld's own Sammy SNEAD. Knowing the theme actually helped me get into that corner (another thing in this theme's favor), as I was able to infer BEN-HUR from BEN and then got the CHART part of POP CHART from there, which got me RIALS, which was wrong (it's RIELS), but it was right enough to get me traction. Outside of that patch, the puzzle seemed quite easy.
[BEN HOGAN not pictured]
Mistakes? Not many. The RIALS/RIELS thing, and then CRUDE for CRASS (1D: Vulgar). Had one of those "malapops" where you want a word that's wrong, but then that word actually appears elsewhere later in the solve. Today, I wanted TADA for VOILA (obviously impossible given the word length, but that's what popped into my head first) (55A: "There it is!"). And then later ... TADA! There's TADA (26A: Revealing statement?). I'd never heard of the Chess-playing Mechanical Turk of 1770 and assumed that that was its (his?) full name. Kind of disappointing to discover it's just called "the Mechanical Turk" and the other bits in the clue are just descriptors. I was like "The Chess-Playing Mechanical Turk of 1770, what a badass name. If that were my name, I'd insist on being called by my full name at all times. I might have to become a pro wrestler with that name. Anyway, HOAX took some crosses, is what I'm saying.
Bullets:
19D: ___ good turn (DO A) — it's funny to me that there are non-Oscar winning movie titles trying to catch the fish as well. D.O.A. is probably the best of them—a classic 1950 film noir in which Edmond O'Brien has to solve his own murder! (dum dum dum!). But there's also the '90s legal drama The RAINMAKER out there trying to catch a fish. And then there's the Jaws ripoff ORCA! Very sad when an ORCA can't catch a fish. Can't believe ORCA lost out to PATTON today. Real upset, fishing-wise.
18A: Former carrier over Mauna Kea (ISLAND AIR) — boo to "former carriers." Luckily, the answer is very inferable with a few crosses. The clue mentions something Hawaiian, so there's your "ISLAND" part, and then ... well yeah, "carrier," there's your AIR part. VOILA! TADA! VOILDA!
5D: Holder of a large bed (OCEAN) — "Holder" is weird, but I guess defensible. I wanted this to be PAPA, as in PAPA Bear, but I think his bed was defined by firmness, not bigness. Wait, do we ever learn which bed belongs to which bear? English professor can't remember plot of Goldilocks and the Three Bears! Shameful.
11A: What am I, chopped liver? (PATÉ) — still laughing at this one. Again, like the theme, so stupid it's genius. I read the clue as if it were in quotation marks so I tried to make the four-letter answer mean something equivalent to "What am I, chopped liver?" Not easy. "I'M ME!" "UH, ME?" "IT ME!" But no, it's literally chopped liver. Better, it's the existential musing of chopped liver. "I'm chopped liver, therefore I am ... PATÉ!" Unlike PATTON, PATÉ won no Oscars because it is a film that does not exist.
13D: Gen Z slang for awesome style (DRIP) — pretty sure it was part of hip-hop vernacular before it was "Gen Z slang" but whatever.
22A: Toys for tots, perhaps (TYPO) — you'd've gotten it quickly if they'd put "toys" and "tots" in quotation marks like they should be, but where's the fun in that?
41A: What "R" might stand for on an envelope (RHODE) — as in "RHODE Island," commonly abbreviated "RI." Too deep for me. I kept wanting ROUTE and then remembering that ROUTE was already in the grid.
38A: Mocking name for failed businesses of the early 2000s (DOT BOMB) — nice to follow up yesterday's tepid (DOT) COM puzzle with this colorful (if dated) zinger.
Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld
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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!")
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