THEME:MID-As TOUCH (64A: Moneymaking skill ... or, when read as three words, what happens in 17-, 21-, 35-, 45- and 54-Across) —five 10-letter themers, each made of two 5-letter words where first word ends in "A" and second word begins with "A" ... thus, the "A"s "touch" "mid-"answer:
Theme answers:
OPERA ARIAS (17A: Songs for divas)
FIONA APPLE (21A: 1997 Grammy-winning artist whose last name is a fruit)
LHASA APSOS (35A: Tibetan watchdogs)
PAULA ABDUL (45A: Former "American Idol" judge)
SANTA ANITA (54A: Noted California horse-racing venue)
Word of the Day:BOLLS(26A: Pods of cotton) —
(google)
• • •
This is pretty damned elegant, especially for a puzzle of the phenomenally easy variety. The revealer came as a real "wow," which is a rarity on Any day of the week. I could see that it was MIDAS TOUCH but didn't stop to read the clue that closely and could only think, as I was speeding off to finish the rest of the grid, "Uh ... where's the gold in these answers? How does 'AA' represent gold?" But it doesn't. Instead "A"s touch in the "mid"dle of the answers. The exact middle—a nice "touch." I'm not sure I like OPERA ARIAS that much as an answer, since it seems almost redundant—where the hell else am I going to hear ARIAS? And you have to cheat a little bit with the pluralizing to get LHASA APSOS to come off. But let's just call that "creativity," not "cheating." Why can't I learn how to spell LHASA. It always comes out LLASA on first try. Like ... I confuse LLAMA and LHASA. And yet I would never ever spell the animal LHAMA. Maybe writing about this will help settle this issue in my brain. And yet, somehow, I feel I have written these exact words before, to no avail.
I was down near my record time on this one. Where were the hiccups. Well, LHASA, obviously, though that was easily fixed. Honestly, the only other issues I had involved my clumsy fingers, which will apparently never obey me well enough to allow me to break the 2:20 mark. I was right at 2:30 today. I got lucky at a couple turns. I had LAKE and threw down GENEVA more as a hope than a certainty. That worked out. Also, I was able to make the turn into the center of the grid via the *back* end of PAULA ABDUL without any trouble (she's a gimme for me ... I had a ... let's call it a "phase" ... in college; an ABDUL phase ...). Fill here is pretty clean, with some pretty exciting longer answers (yes, I am someone who finds CLIPBOARDS exciting, for real) (11D: Ones providing backing for writers?). Nice Monday work, for sure.
This was one of the least enjoyable Sunday puzzles I've solved in a long time, which is saying A Lot. I've seen Sunday grids that are much worse filled, but I've rarely seen a theme this thin, pointless, and radically unentertaining. What is the pleasure here? Where is the fun? I suppose you can somehow admire the construction (if you are being awfully generous), but did anyone consider the solver here—how it would feel to solve this? Where is the *payoff* for waiting for those stupid "Four-Letter Words"? What was the point? That you could do it? It makes no sense. I got through the whole thing with no idea what was going on, only to find out that I *did* know what was going on and that thing was nothing. So LONG / SHOT can be a clue? So? So can LONG / AFTER? Who. Cares? And the themers? BEYOND THE TIME LIMIT? What is that? That's a clue, not an answer. EXPENSE TYPE? Has God ever invented a duller non-answer than EXPENSE TYPE? No. No She has not.
There were a few nice moments, where I got to see answers I've never (or rarely) seen before like "EVE'S BAYOU" (totally forgot about that movie) (3D: 1997 Samuel L. Jackson film) and AUTOBOT (50A: Decepticon's foe in "Transformers") and SKELETOR! (63D: Archenemy of Mattel's He-Man) But then there was stuff I hadn't seen and didn't really care to see like ... SEA DUCK? (85A: Goldeneye or harlequin) and AGEMATES (?) (8D: Fellow students, generally) and "K"-NARK? (74D: Informer, informally) WTH is that? And then name parts like KONG and FASO and a bunch of OCA-esque crosswordese and blah blah blah ETUI TAW multiple D'OHS. Massive disappointment overall. Nothing more to say. Good night.
Word of the Day:GARO Yepremian(55D: 1960s-'80s placekicker Yepremian, who helped the Dolphins win consecutive Super Bowls) —
Garabed Sarkis "Garo" Yepremian (June 2, 1944 – May 15, 2015) was an American footballplacekicker in the National Football League for the Detroit Lions, Miami Dolphins, New Orleans Saints, and Tampa Bay Buccaneers, during a career that spanned from 1966 to 1981. [...] Yepremian is best known for two feats — one famous, one infamous. In a divisional playoff game against the Kansas City Chiefs on Christmas 1971, he kicked a 37-yard field goal 7 minutes and 40 seconds into double overtime, ending the longest game in NFL history and sending the Dolphins to the AFC Championship game against the Baltimore Colts (which the Dolphins won to go on to Super Bowl VI . // Despite all of Yepremian's success, many people remember him for an incident in Super Bowl VII in 1973. With his team leading the Washington Redskins 14-0, Yepremian was sent on to the field to kick a field goal with slightly more than two minutes left, which would have put the game out of reach. The field goal attempt was blocked by Bill Brundige, and Yepremian managed to get to the ball before any other player did. Instead of just falling on the ball to preserve the Dolphins' 14-0 lead, he picked it up and frantically attempted to throw a pass. The ball slipped from his hands and went straight up in the air. Yepremian then attempted to bat the ball out of bounds but instead batted it back up in the air, and it went right into the arms of his former Lions teammate, Redskins cornerback Mike Bass, who returned it for a touchdown. The Dolphins managed to hold on to win, 14-7. Yepremian later joked to reporters after the game, "This is the first time the goat of the game is in the winner's locker room." In the 1973 Pro Bowl Yepremian kicked five field goals to lead the AFC to a win, and was voted Most Valuable Player in that game. He was elected to another Pro Bowl after he kicked twenty consecutive field goals without a miss in 1979.
• • •
I really enjoyed this one. It alternated between easy and hard, giving me a nice success/struggle textural contrast. Fill is sparkly and very, very clean. Is it SEXY? That's for you to decide. I won't judge. I had no idea who this GARO guy was, but I did enjoy learning about him, though (see video, above). I don't know how I know SAZERAC (8A: Official cocktail of New Orleans) because I couldn't define it for you, but it's possible I've been in enough bars and hung around enough former bartenders (hey, Lena!) in recent days that the whole big vocabulary of Liquor is just sinking in. I get SAZERAC confused with that New Orleans brand of rice products, SAZERIN? SAZERAN? I'm gonna look it up. . . Oh, criminy, I'm way off. it's ZATARAIN. I see their ads on TV sometimes, and what with the shared "Z" and trisyllabic name, and the whole N.O. connection, you can (maybe?) see where the confusion came from.
TOSSPOT (18A: Juicer) is part of that whole vocabulary of drunkenness that I know only from crosswords. My wife read me a cryptic clue recently, the answer to which was TOSSPOT. I got it fast. It was something like [Drunk defeats drunk in comeback]. Or else it was much better than that.
Biggest LOL of the day was starting with BRB at 4D: Palindromic bit of textspeak (LOL). Couldn't do much with the NW because of that error, so I settled into the upper middle with KERRY (25A: Clinton's successor) and ORB and RBI. This made my solve oddly symmetrical, as my final squares were in the same central area on the lower half of the grid. From that middle place, I was able to shoot out in both directions, first changing BRB to LOL and moving down the west side and into the very easy SW, then, after getting stuck, coming back up top and shooting up into the NE courtesy of SAZERAC. Eventually, I had the SE corner surrounded, but wasn't sure how I was going to take it down.
Just getting that "Q" in place for TRANQ took work (30D: Downer, for short). I wanted the [Powerful board member] to be CHAIR, so ... TRANC? Mmmm, probably not. TRANK, I've definitely seen. In the end, getting the "U" from RUINOUS (26D: Devastating) made the "Q" in QUEEN seem the likeliest bet. But then, staring at the above grid, I had issues. Could *not* get the NOTE of SEE NOTE (42D: Often-bracketed direction), even after I got to SEE NO-E. I thought I had an error. I started running the alphabet. Now it seems obvious. Weird. Also couldn't pick up the MORE of ANY MORE for a while (44D: These days). AERATOR is a [Faucet accessory]? I did not or else barely knew that. GARO, no hope. Had LOO for LAV at first (60D: John) (not sure why you don't go with [John, abroad] there, thus echoing the IAN clue...). Wanted ACCUSED instead of AVOIDED at 40D: Like pariahs. Thankfully, NBA LOGO was easy (59A: It features the silhouette of hoops legend Jerry West), and, even more thankfully, I do crosswords a lot and so know IBN very well (47D: Arabic name part). That was really the key to finally bringing the puzzle down. Allowed me to get both VIN (46A: Porto, par exemple) and COBOL (50A: Language created in 1959), and then, majestically triumphantly and finally, CHINWAG! Great word to end on (54A: Yak).
Word of the Day:PETARD(40D: Small bomb used for breaking down gates) —
• • •
Started out crushing it, as I often do with Wentz freestyles, but then got repeatedly stymied, sometimes by my own mistakes, sometimes by genuinely puzzling / tough stuff. Maybe it's the alcohol or the pie or the seconds I had of both alcohol and pie. Maybe the puzzle is actually very easy and my brain was just in a feast-induced fog. But I don't think so. Thanksgiving dinner already feels like it happened a million years ago. Or yesterday, at least. The whole early eating thing is lovely when it's happening, but disconcerting later. All night, I kept wondering how it could be as early as the clock was telling me it was. I've been falling asleep early lately, it's true, but ... 7pm? My body was like "Yes!" but my brain was like "Bad idea." And my brain won. Anyhow, eating and drinking are both far enough in the past that I don't think they played a role in any solving slowness. Plus, I've had a Ton of coffee, so alertness is not an issue. No, I think this one was a pretty normal Friday, difficulty-wise. Quality-wise, I think it was solidly above average.
I was a bit clunky out of the gate, as I wrote in ZINS for CABS (1A: Napa options, informally), and had trouble convincing myself that Sublime were really SKA. But once I got LURK (15A: Browse without comment) and changed ZINS to CABS, those Downs started to drop and after just a minute or so I was already here:
It probably helped that I'm a huge John O'HARA fan and that I'd seen that exact clue on M.I.A. very recently (19A: "Bad Girls" rapper) and that I eat BOK CHOY with reasonable frequency (22A: Chinese cabbage). From here, it looked like I was going to sail easily into the NE—SNAP ON, in, TODAY, in, and then ... 7D: "Goodness!" I had ---Y and went with "OH, MY!" And that, right there, was probably the difference between Easy-Medium and Medium for me. A dumb little four-letter answer, but it kept me from getting Any of those Acrosses up there. Total stymification. So I went down and got RESPECTS and followed it further down into the SW corner, which seemed pretty easy until I got to AVERAGE ... what? I wrote in JOE at first, but there are multiple reasons why *that* was obviously wrong (51A: Regular joes). I wrote in MEN but took it out because AVERAGE MEN is not a phrase. And yet ... there it is. That is easily the most disappointing thing in the grid. I wrote in "AVERAGE JOE" for a reason—because that's the phrase. I'd also accept AVERAGE GUY. But MEN? Blargh.
I managed to crawl up the central passage to the NW, where I finally got OH, MY changed to I SAY!, and then that just left the SE, which was weirdly full of pitfalls. Dropped ENGINE ROOM no problem (28D: Scotty's domain on "Star Trek"), but other stuff proved harder. Got vocabbed to death there with both "stola" and "halluces" being huge WTFs for me. Even with -OG- in place at 35A: Stola : woman :: ___ : man (TOGA), my only thought was "... DOGE?" And [Halluces] had me thinking (perhaps not surprisingly) "hallucinates." Wrong. Also, the (awesome) clue on TEXT was tough to see through (35D: Exchange between cell mates?). Finally ended it all by conceding that the MEN in AVERAGE MEN had to be right. Is BAKER part of some radio alphabet or something. "Able, BAKER ... Candlestickmaker?" Who knows? All I know is that I got the Happy Pencil. Game over. Had a great birthday/Thanksgiving. Looking forward to a long weekend of leftovers and lollygagging.
THEME:TEN (71A: Number of mispelled [sic] words in this puzzle's clues (oh, by the way, watch out for those tricky circled squares!) — circled squares are areas in common words that are often misspelled. Today, the common misspellings will actually give you a *correct* answer in the Downs/crosses. Hence the "watch out" admonition in the revealer clue:
Theme answers:
OCCURRENCE / DREW (not DRAW!)
SEPARATE / PATS (not PETS!)
PHARAOH / BALD and OHS (not BOLD and AHS!)
CALENDAR / GRAY (not GREY!)
DEFINITELY / CLICK (not CLACK!)
Word of the Day:PELHAM(45A: New York's ___ Bay Park) —
I actually liked how this one started out. There were lots of snappy little words like CHOKED and DOCILE and BAD COP, and the clue on UNZIP was especially nice (18D: Drop, like flies?). But after POP TAB (which I enjoyed), the bottom started falling out of this thing. The fill started to deteriorate badly, and when you first themer is the horribly dull OCCURRENCE, well, that doesn't promise good things. As I went along, I saw that the random circles were filled with random vowels, vowels that didn't appear to anagram to anything or form any kind of pattern ... and I'm wondering what kind of dumb post-solve puzzle I'm going to have to solve. And then after enduring TARARA and PSAT and RELO and ATAP and IFAT and SSRS and ILA and All Of It (please let constructing software help you ... please!) I got to the revealer clue. My first two thoughts were negative: "Who cares if words in the *clues* are misspelled?" and "Who cares that people often misspell those words? How many people a. solve the NYT crossword and b. somehow *don't* know how to spell PHARAOH or DEFINITELY? If you are a reasonably good speller, this puzzle will go right by you." OK, I'm not sure that second thought was so coherent at the time, but that's the gist of it. It was only after a few moments, after I considered the implications of misspelling the words in the grid, that I noticed that, technically, all the crosses would *work* with the misspellings. *This* made me admire the puzzle, conceptually, a heck of a lot more, even though the only one of these misspellings with any hope of tripping me is "SEPERATE," which even now looks correct to my eyes. So though it wasn't terribly fun to solve and is way, way too chock full o' junk, the theme had real cleverness to it.
Why does the puzzle think I will want to count things in the clues? It tried to get me to count 49 "R"s a while back, and now it wants me to count misspelled words? No. Pass. Also, all hail the arrival of the new Stupidest E-Word Ever: EBATE!! I went initially with ESALE, as that seemed equally stupid but no less plausible. With each new dumb E-word, I e-love ECIG more. Let's see, what else? I think PELHAM is probably the hardest thing in the grid (for non-New Yorkers), and I definitely would've clued that thing ["The Taking of ___ 1, 2, 3" (1974 thriller set on a New York City subway car)], but the crosses all seem fair—unless, somehow, you've never heard of a DACHA, which seems slightly possible (25D: Accomodations [sic] along the Black Sea) (oh, look, I unintentionally found one of the misspellings!). Since the puzzle was so easy, I didn't make many mistakes. TAB SETS (is that a thing?) instead of TAB KEYS at first (44D: Computer cursor advancers). CERUS for CETUS (36A: Whale constellation). I think CERUS has to do with wax." Oh, ha ha, I quickly wrote in EVITA before fully reading the clue at 23A: Musical character who sings "Wouldn't it be loverly?" (ELIZA). Else, no problems.
["Let's not split at Thanksgiving / That would be too rough"]
Happy Thanksgiving, which is also my birthday. Just FYI—the proper way to give thanks for me is with bourbon and pie, though regional traditions do vary.
THEME: Somewhat literal TV shows — I think the deal is that theme answers reimagine famous TV show titles as (mostly) straightforward descriptions of things:
22A: "House of Cards"? (HALLMARK STORE) (also pretty literal)
46A: "Game of Thrones"? (MUSICAL CHAIRS) (see, this is less literal ... a "throne" is a ridiculous way to refer to a simple "chair," so ... this clue probably needs two question marks)
57A: "The Walking Dead"? (PALLBEARERS) (I'm not sure I even understand this one—PALLBEARERS "walk" while also *carrying* the "dead," so ... I ... yeah, I don't see how this one works. Maybe, uh, "those walking the dead" ... like ... taking them for a walk? I want this to work, but syntax and grammar matter in crossword cluing, and you'd have to torture the English language pretty hard to get it to agree that this clue/answer pairing makes any sense.
Word of the Day:SMALL SLAM(31D: "All but one" win, in bridge) —
(google)
• • •
There's a germ of a good idea here. But the theme answers gets less precise and more figurative and by the end, the theme appears to have fallen apart entirely. I can't get PALLBEARERS to work without hiring a very talented theme lobbyist and paying her a lot of money. If I carry a dead body, I am a pallbearer. So ... I am walking, but not dead. I am walking THE dead. But the title is "The Walking Dead," so ... how is PALLBEARERS a literal answer (in a way that is parallel to "Mad Men" / PSYCHOPATHS)??? I thought maybe we had entered the realm of the super-figurative, and "The Walking Dead" were zombies, who of course "bear" a "pall," in the sense that their complexion is the opposite of ruddy, but ... then I realized I was thinking of "pallid," not "pall," and besides, that kind of a wordplay stretch just isn't in keeping with the more straightforward literalizing that is going on with the other themers. I want this theme to work, but I just don't think it does. "The Golden Girls"? (EMMY AWARDS) ... I think that works. Am I doing it right? I honestly don't know. It just seems like there must've been many, many more TV shows that you could do this with, with better results. I will say that these shows are all very recent and non-network, so they have a kind of consistency. Which is nice ... if you can stick the landing.
One of my friends just remarked on Twitter that "I've never seen 37-Across (i.e. AMUCK) spelled that way." I replied, "No one has." That's god-awful. How you get yourself stuck with AMUCK, I don't know, but you need to rethink your choices. In fact, the grid seems really oddly built. Huge gaps between theme answers in the middle, with these intervening longer Acrosses that have nothing to do with the theme but that somehow result in our getting stuck with AMUCK. And also stuck with singular SCAD, which, jeez louise, no. No no. Stop it. Back to the drawing board. SES and MEI are also yucky in a super-undemanding grid. Ditto ETUI. The puzzle felt easy, but sussing out the themers actually took some work. I forgot that HALLMARK had STOREs, so getting the STORE part took an odd lot of work. And PALLBEARERS ... well, you can see why that took work. I also struggle with GANGSTERS, largely because that seemed a very anti-climactic answer for 33D: Capone and Corleone. Those aren't just GANGSTERS. Those are crime bosses, crime lords, kingpins. So after GANG- I was looking for something signifying Big Cheeses ... but all I got was -STERS. Not inaccurate, but kind of a letdown.
THEME:SPIN CYCLE (60A: Washer action ... or a hint to four consecutive letters inside 18-, 23-, 38- and 49-Across) — SPIN "cycles" through four different formations within the theme answers:
Theme answers:
UP IN SMOKE (18A: 1978 Cheech & Chong comedy)
KEVIN SPACEY (23A: Academy Award winner for "American Beauty")
STEVEN SPIELBERG (38A: Besides Charlie Chaplin, only film director on Time's list of the 100 most influential people of the 20th century)
HMS PINAFORE (49A: Gilbert and Sullivan operetta set on a ship)
Word of the Day:OLETA Adams(14A: Soul singer Adams) —
Adams embarked on a world tour with Tears For Fears in 1990, performing by herself as the supporting artist at the start of each show, and remaining onstage throughout the Tears For Fears set where she would provide piano and vocals. // Following her work with Tears For Fears, Adams was offered a recording contract by their label Fontana Records and restarted her solo career in 1990, assisted by Orzabal who co-produced her new album, Circle of One. The album received much critical acclaim and (after a slow start) eventually peaked at no.1 in the UK in 1991 after she scored her biggest hit to date with her Grammy nominated cover of Brenda Russell's "Get Here". The song reached the UK and US Top 5 and became popular during the 1991 Gulf War conflict as families of deployed troops in the region embraced the tune as a theme song. 1991 also saw Adams sign to independent music publisher Fairwood Music (UK) Ltd. and contribute to the Elton John/Bernie Taupin tribute album, Two Rooms, on which appeared her version of John's 1974 hit "Don't Let the Sun Go Down On Me". Adams' version became another top 40 hit in the UK.// Her next album, Evolution (1993), was also a commercial success, making the UK top 10. It also featured her self-penned adult contemporary single "Window of Hope". Her 1995 release, Moving On, saw Adams move more in the direction of R&B, and she also reunited with Roland Orzabal for the duet "Me and my Big Ideas" on the Tears For Fears album Raoul and the Kings of Spain the same year. Two years later she released the Christian themed album Come Walk with Me. (wikipedia)
• • •
This theme feels like it must've been done a million times, but I could find just one. Sadly, it was very recent (2013) and had 3/4 of the same theme answers:
[IS IT SAFE?]
There's no way anyone could've expected today's constructor to know about this puzzle, as it's (somehow?) not in the (poorly updated) cruciverb database, and it was an LAT puzzle, not an NYT. You can see how a. SPIN CYCLE might lead you to just this idea, and b. this idea would lead you to these exact theme answers. Once SPIN CYCLE clicks in as a possible revealer, the number of roads and possibilities narrows considerable. Thus two constructors working completely independently arrive at virtually the same place with their themers. It happens. As for the puzzle's quality: fine. Mildly entertaining. The fill is decidedly OLD TIMES (59A: Days of yore), a bit stale. That NW corner for sure should've been redone, as the POTOK (1D: Chaim who wrote "The Chosen") / OLETA (14A: Soul singer Adams) crossing is something only a constructor's mother could love, and will Natick at least a small handful of people who have not been doing crossword puzzles every day for 20 years. ASSAI OMANI ESTEE ASSES ASPS NOES YSL ... none of it terrible, but when you pile up the over-familiar like that, it gets a bit suffocating.
MASH NOTE (5D: Love letter) and OVER HERE! (20A: Helpful cry during a rescue mission) are wonderful, as is SLURPS (6D: Eats noisily). Embarrassingly, I barely remember what a PET SCAN is (45A: 3-D image in medical diagnoses), and my father was a radiologist (sorry, dad). The scans that leap most readily to mind are CAT and MRI. But PET came back to me, eventually. It stands for "Positron Emission Tomography," only one word of which I can actually define. Sigh. I was only a mildly APT science pupil (36D: Perceptive, as a pupil) (meanwhile—non-humble brag—my daughter's report card just arrived and she got 115 in AP Physics. 115!? I am both proud and mildly embarrassed by the goofy fictional inflated "weighted" numbers they give students these days) (Oh, and let me undo the non-humble brag somewhat by telling you that her lowest grade, by far, was in ... English. [... crickets ...] If this is what passes for teen rebellion, I guess I'll take it.). Please give at least a smattering of polite applause for the TOKE / SMOKE crossing, which is adorable.
THEME:fractions — a fraction progression where the numerator remains "1" throughout but the denominator moves from "5" to "1"; so one FIFTH, one FOURTH, one THIRD, one HALF, and finally one WHOLE
Theme answers:
FIFTH ELEMENT (17A: 1997 Bruce Willis sci-fi film, with "The")
FOURTH ESTATE (23A: Journalistic profession)
THIRD TIMES A CHARM (38A: Saying about persistence paying off)
HALF MARATHON (48A: Race just over 13 miles long)
WHOLE SHEBANG (60A: Entirety, informally)
Word of the Day:OCULUS Rift(54A: ___ Rift (virtual reality product owned by Facebook)) —
The Rift is a virtual realityhead-mounted display developed by Oculus VR. It was initially proposed in a Kickstarter campaign, during which Oculus VR (at the time an independent company) raised US$2.5 million for the development of the product. (wikipedia)
• • •
This theme has definitely been done over and over again where FIFTH, FOURTH etc. are ordinals, but I guess the surprise fraction twist is new. It's also mildly awkward, in that you have to imagine "a" or "one" in front of the first words for the progression to really make sense, and WHOLE is not really the correct finale. Should probably be ONE something. And why is this 16 wide—totally unnecessary. All that having THIRD TIMES A CHARM in here does is open up the classic THIRD TIME'S A CHARM vs. THIRD TIME'S THE CHARM debate, and no one wants to open up that can of worms. That controversy tends to get real ugly, real fast. I'm definitely team THE, but I've learned to live with my A neighbors. Coexist, man. But seriously, THIRD BASE? THIRD DEGREE? You're going 16 wide ... why? I'm not a fan of breaking the rules for no good and possibly even bad reasons. But I guess I did get about 20 extra seconds of Monday puzzle today. Maybe that was worth it.
Puzzle gets pretty chock full o' crosswordese at times, especially over there in the east where "ERNO and the T-MAN"® climb Mt. ETNA in search of the fabled ODEON of Apolo (Ohno). It's a pretty epic adventure—they even wrote a SESTET about it. But I guess most of the fill is OK. I messed up my Biblical verb and wrote DOEST instead of DOETH. I also totally blanked on the MASAI, even though I did this whole report on them in 7th grade Geography (27A: Native Kenyans). Actually, the report was on Tanzania, but they were in there. Sorry, Mrs. Stevens. Got very confused by [Center of a place setting], especially when I got it down to PLA-E and was like "... uh ... PLACE?" I think that's all I have to say about this puzzle.
THEME:"Right On, Right On!" — theme answers turn right (i.e. drop Down) when they reach a word which can also mean (when preceded by the phrase "Right on...") [Exact]
Theme answers:
TIPPING / POINT (25A: Threshold of major change)
SHOW ME / THE MONEY (39A: Catchphrase from "Jerry Maguire")
PAID THROUGH / THE NOSE (65A: Was a victim of price gouging)
RACE AGAINST / TIME (75A: Rush to beat a deadline)
MOVING / TARGET (101A: Mark that's hard to hit)
SNOOKER / CUE (117A: British pool stick)
Word of the Day:KIVA(118D: Big name in microloans) —
noun
noun: kiva; plural noun: kivas
a chamber, built wholly or partly underground, used by male Pueblo Indians for religious rites. (google)
Nah, it's probably this one:
Kiva Microfunds (commonly known by its domain name, Kiva.org) is a 501(c)(3)non-profit organization that allows people to lend money via the Internet to low-income / underserved entrepreneurs and students in 82 countries. Kiva's mission is “to connect people through lending to alleviate poverty.” // Since 2005, Kiva has crowd-funded more than 1 million loans, totaling more than a half a billion dollars, at a repayment rate of 99 percent. As of November 2013, Kiva was raising about $1 million every three days. The Kiva platform has attracted a community of more than 1 million lenders from around the world. (wikipedia)
• • •
I've seen this answer-dropping-type theme a bunch. Did this one bring a new twist to it? Sort of. It's not a very tight theme. Seems scattered in a bunch of different directions. There's the turning right part (which is really a turning Down part) and then there's the part where you have to prepend "Right on" ... I guess the first "Right on" (of the title) refers to the direction change and the second to the phrase that has to follow the Down part for the [Exact] clue to make sense. Seems conceptually messy. Mainly, it just wasn't that fun to solve. There was some initial scrambling to get the concept under my feet, but then the theme answers ended up being both easy and kind of forgettable. Also, [Exact] doesn't feel like a very exact clue for all those "Right on ___" answers. Right on the money, sure, but right on cue? Tough to swap out "Exact" there. I am sure you could lawyer up an example, but it seems like a stretch.
The puzzle was memorable much more for a bunch of (to me) tough crosses, rather than for the theme. I'll start with KIVA, which I needed every cross to get because WTF? It's new fill ... is it good? This is how I felt the other day about HOLI, which is clearly a valid answer, but ... actually, now that I think about it, HOLI > KIVA for sure. One is an ancient festival, the other is a company. HOLI has the advantage of being (worldwide, anyway, I would think) far far better known. It does not surprise me that HOLI would be in the grid. It does surprise me that KIVA is. Its fame feels marginal. But I learned a new thing *and* the crosses were all fine, so no problem.
I had real trouble, though, in the NE with the crossing capitals. I never remember ASMARA (28A: Eritrea's capital), and HARARE (12D: Zimbabwe's capital) ... well, it came to me, eventually, but I had LAHORE there at first, which isn't even the right continent, let alone the right country. When you add in the inExact clue of [Rap] for HIP-HOP and then the unexpected price/earnings or P.E. RATIO (17D: Equity valuation stat), that corner was trouble. Also a lot of trouble: SWELLS (54A: Puffs) / WARHEADS (55D: Sour candy brand). I just don't know the latter. No hope there. And then [Puffs] for SWELLS ... that took me a while to see (though I see it now). Then there was MANCALA (35D: Board game popular throughout Africa), which I've seen before but never remember, crossing PALISH (?) (43A: A little light), which I didn't get even after having it down to P-LISH. That's more scary crosses than I'm used to facing, but they all fell into place, eventually. Fill overall seems fine, though it can get pretty rough in the short stuff, here and there (AST B'NAI ... HRH AGAL ... REECE SSS ... TAVI AMOI, etc.). AZTECAN and UTAHN and RUMBAED aren't prettifying the grid much either. Still, overall, it seemed no worse than average.
The only thing wrong with this puzzle is that it's over. I haven't had this much fun solving a Saturday in ... I want to say ages, but K. Cameron Collins' gem was just last week, so ... I haven't had this much fun in a week. Before *that*, who knows how long. I wish (as I wished last week) that the puzzle had been harder; I was 2+ minutes faster than yesterday, and that's including taking the time to stop and get screenshots mid-solve. As I was solving, I couldn't believe how much great stuff he was managing to cram in here. I stopped at THE NOTORIOUS B.I.G. to take a screenshot, little knowing that the rest of that stack (pillar?) of 15s was going to fill out so beautifully. I was still oohing at Biggie when bam, HATERS GONNA HATE! That is a sick one-two punch. And then AMERICAN APPAREL, which is also young-skewing, and also timely, in that they filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy just last month.
[HATERS GONNA HATE]
Often, with stacks (columns!?!) OF 15s, that's where All the action is, or most of it, anyway. Here, pfft, it's just the flashiest part of a great overall show. BOLLYWOOD! THAT'S NICE! CLUB OWNER! SHAKE ON IT! ROSIE'S BAR! And I DON'T BITE, which was the site of one of my few miscues, as I figured it was I WON'T BITE. I feel like the latter is more common. Is it? Nah, looks like DON'T googles twice as well (though both are perfectly in-the-language). Anyway... when you're not digging the ART SCENE, dig the solid answers that flesh out the grid: PACKERSand ETERNALLY and HAMPSHIRE (nice clue, 14A: First US college to divest from apartheid South Africa) and SIDEKICKS. This grid makes HOP ON POP and YO-YO MA look a little on the dull side (hard to do!). Even the stuff that made me initially squint and go "What?" ended up having me going "... yep, that works." Couldn't remember my Spanish 101, possibly because I never took it, but once the GUAPOS finally showed up, I recognized them and they seemed just fine. Welcome, GUAPOS. Then there was 55A: Like some hockey passes, and I had UP--- and thought "What made-up crap is this...?" Then ICE fell into place and then I imagined a hockey play-by-play commentator's voice and...yep, UPICE is totally a thing. The equivalent of "upfield" in (U.S.) football. I mean, damn, this thing even managed to make EWE look good with the a fancy mythological clue (25A: Animal that Poseidon turned Theophane into, in myth).
[Please watch, for intro as well as performance]
OK, ESNE is never good, but the puzzle totally knows that and is winking at you like "come on, you know you're gonna forgive this" (9D: A slave to crosswords?). And I did. And do.
Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld
P.S. MEN! (58A: "Luxuries," not "necessities," per Cher)
Word of the Day:EROS(13D: Destination of NASA's NEAR) —
433 Eros is an S-typenear-Earth asteroid approximately 34.4×11.2×11.2 kilometres (21.4×7.0×7.0 mi) in size, the second-largest near-Earth asteroid after 1036 Ganymed. It was discovered in 1898 and was the first near-Earth asteroid discovered. It was the first asteroid orbited by an Earth probe (in 2000). It belongs to the Amor group. // Eros is a Mars-crosser asteroid, the first known to come within the orbit of Mars. Objects in such an orbit can remain there for only a few hundred million years before the orbit is perturbed by gravitational interactions. Dynamical integrations suggest that Eros may evolve into an Earth-crosser within as short an interval as two million years, and has a roughly 50% chance of doing so over a time scale of 108–109 years.[5] It is a potential Earth impactor,[5] comparable in size to the impactor that created Chicxulub crater and led to the extinction of the dinosaurs. // The NEAR Shoemaker probe visited Eros twice, first with a 1998 flyby, and then by orbiting it in 2000 when it extensively photographed its surface. On February 12, 2001, at the end of its mission, it landed on the asteroid's surface using its maneuvering jets. (wikipedia)
• • •
There is some really nice stuff in here. The banks of Acrosses in the NW and SE are solid, and GABRIELLE / GIFFORDS is a great, current, important name that I don't think I've seen in the grid before—certainly not in full-name form. It's a *little* weird to have her name broken up so oddly (last name "first," i.e. farthest left, and then with the two name parts in totally different areas of the grid); normally you'd handle a marquee name like that a little more ... elegantly? I did enjoy seeing it, though. I also loved the nose-thumbing at [Fossils] (OLD FOGIES)—it would be simplistic to see that answer as ageist, since it describes a type of older person (with a certain stodgy "In my day..." mindset) rather than older people in general. The same way that BRAT or IMP is not anti-child. I would never have thought of NEWS as an ACROSTIC (11D: NEWS for the four directions, and others => ACROSTICS). I would've said "acronym." Are all acronyms ACROSTICS? If "An acrostic is a poem or other form of writing in which the first letter, syllable or word of each line, paragraph or other recurring feature in the text spells out a word or a message" (wikipedia), then ... it would seem so. I think of ACROSTICS as puzzles or poems, not just ... a group of letters like we have in NEWS. But it seems I'm wrong. OK.
There's some not-great stuff in here, notably the double-improbably RE-words (RELAP, REICE), and the truly abominable LAICS (6D: Flock members). Wow. "'Twere profanation of our joys / To tell the LAICS our love"??? No. It's LAITY. The word is LAITY. The word will never not be LAITY. LAIC is a decent adjective, but it's an abysmal noun. Beyond that, though, I don't have many fill complaints. I'm not in love with P-TRAP (the "P" seems to have migrated from DIDDY to TRAP...), but it's crossed fairly enough by PELOSI. And MUS is gross and we've had ILE two days in a row now, but these are tiny things compared the overall solidity of the puzzle.
IT'S A SHAME (27D: "So sad") that the puzzle ended on such a sour note for me, though. If you'd just cold asked me what a prefix for "Croatian" was, I'd've said "SERBO" (18A: Croatian head?). However ... because of the cluing on 13D: Destination of NASA's NEAR, I had no choice but to write in ERIS, since until just now I did not know that EROS (actually "433 EROS") was a celestial object of any sort. I knew very well, however, that, like CERES (20D: Destination of Dawn), ERIS is a dwarf planet. So I couldn't very well go with EROS, despite SERBO-'s sounding *so* much better than SERBI-. The NASA-related CERES clue made me virtually certain that the the other NASA clue had to have another dwarf planet as its answer. But no. It's some asteroid I didn't know existed. Irksome, as a. the only reason for this anomalous clue on EROS is that someone wanted to get cute with the parallel clues, and b. SERBO- is manifestly bad fill—always hurts to crash and burn on the grid's ugliest part. Well, second-ugliest. I mean LAICS, come on ...
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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