1980s Pakistani president / TUE 4-25-17 / Wind tile in mah-jongg / WW II era British gun

Constructor: Gary J. Whitehead

Relative difficulty: Probably normal ... don't know. I stopped to take a screenshot mid-solve, so my time tells me nothing ...

THEME: HOME (71A: There's no place like it ... or a word that can precede either half of the answer to each starred clue) — just what it says...

Theme answers:

• BODYGUARD (17A: *V.I.P.'s security agent)
• GAMEBOY (22A: *Nintendo hand-held)
• COMPUTER PORT (27A: *Place to plug in a USB cable)— ouch. I think the answer you're looking for here is "USB PORT"
• MOVIE THEATER (48A: *Multiplex, e.g.) 
• ICELAND (56A: *NATO's smallest member, populationwise) — I had IRELAND briefly :(
• FRONT PAGE (63A: *Where a newspaper's biggest stories go)

Word of the Day: ZIA (41D: 1980s Pakistani president) —

Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq (Urdu: محمد ضياء الحق‎; 12 August 1924 – 17 August 1988) was a four-star rank general who served as the 6th President of Pakistan from 1978 until his death in 1988, after declaring martial law in 1977. He was Pakistan's longest-serving head of state. (wikipedia)

• • •

This is the second time in recent memory where I would've stopped solving if I hadn't had to write about the puzzle. And in this case, I would've stopped almost immediately. Wrote in 1A: IRAQ, then went straight to "Q" for the cross ... QTY? First thought: "Dude, that "Q" was not worth it." Went on to next answer: 14A: Suffix with refresh or replace. And right there, I was out. Done. I'm three answers in and the fill is already a war crime.

This is a small corner. There is noooooo reason for -MENT to be in your small corner unless your small corner is Very compromised by the theme *or* you don't know what you're doing. You can look at that corner and see that it didn't get better. REORG URI and EGESTS? Disaster. By the time I made my way to the center, with its improbable (and ultimately self-referential) ZZZ string, I figured the theme was some weird thing with "Q"s and "Z"s because why else would they be in this grid when the fill is so terrible. There must be a reason .... there was no reason. The theme type was one of the oldest in the book, one that provides all the pleasure of re-reading the theme answers while inserting "HOME" before each part. Which is to say, no pleasure whatsoever. On the day that the NYT takes it mini puzzle into the land of Snapchat (something called Snapchat Discover), it continues to take its *real* puzzle into the grave and heap dirt upon it. We're in an astonishing run of non-inventive puzzles, non-current, running-on-fumes-of-the-1990s puzzles. But hey, you can get the mini crossword in Snapchat now, so everything's fine, I guess.


Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

P.S. I love this article about the NYT's move into Snapchat Discover because it contains this sentence: "It even includes a mini-crossword puzzle for its younger readers."

P.P.S. the Philadelphia Inquirer has changed its crossword to the "Universal Crossword," which would not be notable at all except that Universal = notorious crossword plagiarist, whom you may remember from this story at fivethirtyeight.com last year. He's still widely syndicated. Even merriam-webster runs his puzzle (on their website, I just found out). There's no law against his continuing to be published, just as there's no law against my occasionally reminding you that "unrepentant crossword plagiarist" is a concept that exists in the world. (Thanks to Evan Birnholz for calling this to my attention)

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