Word of the Day: NADIA Petrova (33D: Tennis's Petrova) —
Nadezhda Viktorovna Petrova (Russian: Надежда Викторовна Петрова; born 8 June 1982) is a Russian retired professional tennis player. // Overall, she has won 37 WTA Titles, 13 in singles and 24 in doubles. In singles, Petrova reached a career-high ranking of world no. 3 in May 2006, and reached the semifinals of the French Open in 2003 and 2005. In doubles, she won the year-ending Sony Ericsson Championships in 2004 with Meghann Shaughnessy, and in 2012 with Maria Kirilenko. With Kirilenko, she also won the bronze medal in the women's doubles at the 2012 Summer Olympics. (wikipedia)
• • •
Great long Downs on this one, but the rest is just OK. Heavy on the crosswordese for a Friday, for sure. Found it 75% easyish, but then I stalled out badly in the SE, for reasons both understandable and dumb. The dumb is what's bugging me. I seem to have this thing where I get "stuck" (at least my brain tells itself it's "stuck") before I've actually looked at every clue in a section. I get "stuck" feeling, and get frustrated, and keep banging my head against answers I think I *should* be able to get ... and then seconds or minutes later I look at a clue to a nearby four-letter answer, say (today, it was 29D: Feeling that everyone's having fun without you, in modern lingo (FOMO)), and it's a gimme and all of a sudden the section I've been "stuck" in opens right up. Sigh. This is a dumb and tenacious solving habit that I haven't quite figured out yet. I think it's pig-headedness. Like, if I feel like "I've got four of this answer's eight letters, how do I *not* have it yet!?" then I will dig in instead of leaving it and looking at everything else around it. I refuse to accept defeat ... and meanwhile just get more and more defeated by the puzzle. Anyway, FOMO made the SW suddenly far less hard than it had been, though SEA CALF was weird / unknown to me, and I still don't really know what [Noodge] means, and I never saw "Silent Movie," and SLIVER was clued hard (44D: Dieter's piece of cake?), etc. That *was* the toughest corner, but I shoulda brought it down faster. Still, all in all, I think the puzzle was pretty average in terms of difficulty.
SOPPY is blawful. Grawful. [Excessively sentimental] for sure 100% dead-on-the-money means SAPPY. SOPPY!? That's croppy. HAHA FUNNY isn't haha funny, but it's funny (20D: Humorous as opposed to strange). CHARM OFFENSIVE is the best thing in the grid by far (16D: Campaign of flattery). RAM HOME took me a long time—the RAM part I had to get all from crosses. Still to this day I have only ever see ANNA SUI in crosswords. Nowhere else. That clue on "I LOVE L.A." is for sure recycled (60A: 1983 song that begins "Hate New York City"). Total gimme. I thought the French coin was a SOU and that the phrase was ARS gratia, at first. There is a coin called the SOU (or an amount, anyway) and "ARS gratia artis" is the MGM motto, so I wasn't entirely wrong. Just wrong for this puzzle. Which, sadly, is all that counts. Flawed but OK puzzle, overall.
Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld
P.S. just add an "of" and you've got the quite the movie title there...
KENYA GIVE ME A HAND (18A: Request for aid in East Africa?)
BAHRAIN WASH (27A: Call for cleanup in the Persian Gulf?)
GHANA FLY NOW (49A: Slogan for a West African airline?)
TAKE MY WIFE BELIZE (62A: Entreaty for a spouse's emigration to Central America?)
Word of the Day: ADELA Rogers St. Johns (37D: Writer ___ Rogers St. Johns) —
Adela Nora Rogers St. Johns (May 20, 1894 – August 10, 1988) was an American journalist, novelist, and screenwriter. She wrote a number of screenplays for silent movies but is best remembered for her groundbreaking exploits as "The World's Greatest Girl Reporter" during the 1920s and 1930s and her celebrity interviews for Photoplay magazine. (wikipedia)
• • •
I can't even muster up the energy to RANT AT this one. Corny, sure, but really bad corny. Just bad. Like ... no consistency, no zing, no thought. Just really lousy country puns. Four of them. Why these four? No reason. None. And the fill? Half-century old, at a minimum. Stale as heck. The fill is playing EUCHRE with ADELA Rogers St. Johns. Wow. ANGE? SSA? There's no excuse for fill this bad in a puzzle with such a light theme. And it's 16 wide? No, no excuse. Poor. Fail. SPAIN, NEUTER YOUR PETS! BHUTAN YOUR LIP! BOLIVIA ME! HEARING LAOS! NAURU ESCAPE! NORWAY, JOSÉ! SPEED THE PALAU! STRANGE PERU! POLAND FOR COLUMBINE! WELCOME BACK, QATAR! SWEDEN THE POT! TAIWAN ON! Are you not amused? Here, here is a cool video from the "Hamilton Mixtape." Trust me, it is ~100 times more entertaining than this puzzle.
Relative difficulty: Medium-Challenging (just figuring out wording of quote, esp. very beginning, added difficulty)
THEME: 1A: Start of a quip about a whimsical celebrity couple —"HOW I WISH NATALIE / PORTMAN DATED / JACQUES COUSTEAU / SO I COULD CALL / THEM PORTMANTEAU"
Word of the Day: DUOMO (2D: Cathedral of Florence) —
Duomo (English: /ˈdwoʊmoʊ/, Italian: [ˈdwɔːmo]) is a term for an Italian cathedral church. The formal Italian word for a church that is now a cathedral is cattedrale; a duomo may be either a present or a former cathedral (the latter always in a town that no longer has a bishop and therefore no longer has a cathedral, as for example Trevi). Some, like the Duomo of Monza, have never been cathedrals, although old and important. (wikipedia)
• • •
I'm clearly missing something, because this joke is not original, and yet ... no credit is given. Not in the clues, and not on the NYT puzzle website (which often publishes constructor's "Notes"). I think this is the origin of the joke (but in the Age of the Internet, who the hell knows?):
It's a cute gag. But the rephrasing for crossword purposes (i.e. the remaking of the joke into a symmetrically divisible joke) made everything a little weird, especially at the beginning. HOW I (as the phrase opening) is oddly quaint—the joke, in a plausible voice, should just start "I WISH"—and that initial HOW I part runs right through the roughest / strangest part of the grid. That one corner created 80% of my trouble. DUOMO!? (2D: Cathedral of Florence) DEWAR flask!? (3D: ___ flask (thermos)) Yikes and yikes. I had EJECT before EVICT (4D: Kick out). So the overlap of odd phrasing (for symmetry purposes) with bizarro fill made things icky from the jump. Then there was the fact that I kept misreading "PORTMAND..." as "PORTMAND AND" (ugh!) and so kept looking for someone's name on the other side of AND. But on the other side of AND was ATED (?), and *that* area was the *second* roughest part of the grid. LYS!?!?! (27A: River of France and Belgium) My brain didn't trust that ALDO was right (25D: Gucci of fashion), and I could Not figure what kind of "range" was in play at 19D: Things having their home on the range? (TEES). Wanted the context to be the stovetop, not the driving range. Phew. Bottom half of grid way way way easier. No issues except singular SCAD (ugh) (40D: Whole bunch). Wanted SLEW (duh).
[R.I.P. GERI (4) Allen]
No more to say. Quote should've been attributed. Fill could've been better. Moving on.
Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld
P.S. The themer clue is painfully inaccurate. A "whimsical celebrity couple"? It's a fictional couple. If I have a "whimsical" sense of humor, that sense of humor Actually Exists ... whereas this couple ... does not. Bizarre.
THEME: GO DOWN SWINGING (48A: Fight to the better end ... or a hint to the starts of 20-, 32- and 40-Across) — themers being with three words related to swinging and missing a baseball ... but they're Not a great set ... ugh ... I love love baseball, so double ugh ...
Theme answers:
WHIFF OF SCANDAL (20A: Slight sense that something is seriously shady)
FAN FAVORITE (32A: One who really brings out the crowds)
STRIKE FORCE (40A: Military unit assembled for sudden attack)
Word of the Day: ROSE GOLD (38D: Copper alloy used in jewelry) —
Rose gold is a gold and copper alloy widely used for specialized jewelry. Rose gold, also known as pink gold and red gold, was popular in Russia at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and was also known as Russian gold although this term is now obsolete. Rose gold jewelry is becoming more popular in the 21st century and is commonly used for wedding rings, bracelets, and other jewelry. (wikipedia)
• • •
Whiff is right. At the theme level, at the fill level, this one just doesn't work. Typical Tuez. I knew before I even got out of the NW that the puzzle was gonna be rough. SHAH PACA HATH ET AL ACAI ... how do you get so much mediocrity in such a tiny space. Astonishing. And then ANAL SOL ARNO ... seriously, there is No Reason your short fill should be that dire. The theme is Not Demanding At All, so boring / ultra-common words should not dominate. I mean ANAL SOL. Really? Come on. The theme doesn't work either. Three strikes would've worked, except fan doesn't really work as a noun (the way the other two do) and strike doesn't really work as a verb (as the other two do), and "fan" usually means the full strikeOUT, so ... blah. As a baseball fan, I found the yuck factor kind of intolerable. Luckily, this was one of the easiest Tuesdays I've done in a long time. A long long time. Finished in under 3 (a full 35 seconds faster than yesterday). Speaking of yesterday, i.e. speaking of substandard puzzles, and being particularly annoyed by bad puzzles with themes relating to things you Love ... you should do this crossword by Finn Vigeland, which is a direct response to yesterday's anemic "tribute" puzzle. Finn loooooves yesterday's puzzle topic, and so, in less than 90 minutes, stem to stern, he made a decent tribute puzzle. Better than decent. And Way better than the one that appeared in the NYT. Here it is (PDF; .puz).
Gene AUTRY and ARTIE Shaw and ESAI Morales and on and on. This really is OLDE, in all the worst ways. And [Quaint dagger]? I doubt anyone ever thought of any "dagger" as "quaint." Pretty sure DIRKs kill people, so ... I think you mean "quaint word for 'dagger.'" Kind of a big difference. Also, DIRK is a name, so you could've avoided the dagger route altogether. I have never heard of ROSE GOLD. Neither has my wife. It's real, but ... it's not interesting. Make sure your themes work. Polish your grids. Try harder, everyone. Thanks.
Relative difficulty: Challenging (30+ seconds over my normal, which is Significant on Monday)
THEME: HARRY / POTTER and THE PHILOSOPHER'S / STONE — anniversary puzzle honoring the debut of the HP series by J.K. ROWLING, whose name is embedded in that center row, across three answers (oh, and DANIEL RADCLIFFE's in there too, for good measure)
Word of the Day: "GET OUT" (13A: Hit 2017 Jordan Peele thriller) —
This appears to be a debut from this constructor. And I do love HARRY / POTTER (both because I enjoyed the series myself and because of how genuinely important that series was and is to my daughter, who graduates high school next year). So I'm inclined to have affection for this puzzle. And yet ... I can't ignore some of the messier technical details. The fill is rough from the jump and never improves. This is largely because (once again) vaunting ambition got the constructor into jams he just couldn't get out of, and so the grid ends up getting pinned and pasted and paper-clipped together every which way, with material no one would ever use for building anything except in the most desperate of circumstances. I also don't quite get why HARRY and POTTER were hidden like that (not clued in relation to the theme). I imagine the original concept had the theme clue on HARRY, and then someone somewhere got the idea to put it on the "first" (closest to the top) themer. Weirdly, HARRY (67A: Persistently torment) and POTTER (68A: Crafty person at a wheel?) were two of the harder answers to get in this grid. But that's not a problem. The problem is ... it's just weird having him lurking down there, uncredited. And can we talk about the ludicrous letter string (GHIJK)? I mean, it's clear why you felt you needed to do it—consecutive JK is hard to come by—but oof. Your fill is already buckling pretty pad under the weight of the theme. That answer is a laugher, and you don't want a laugher front and center.
There's some great stuff scattered in here. The clue on ALASKAN—mwah! Fantastic. Not Monday by any stretch, but perfect nonetheless (12A: Person in a detached state?). And hurray for the very current clue on "GET OUT," which, unlike most of my friends, I have yet to see. It's streaming now, so it shouldn't be long now. But those were the only two real highlights (besides the considerable highlight of being reminded J.K. ROWLING exists). I was skidding off the road immediately with 1D: Given benediction, the old-fashioned way (BLEST) (!?). Everything about that is Red Flag. Too much gunk up top, with that and ETH and A HOT. Absolutely no reason *that* part of the puzzle should be *that* rough. Down below, roughness makes more sense (more theme-dense by a good margin). AS NEAT = barf. Ditto -IER. ID NO. was ridiculous in that That Number is an SSN and I Know That the Puzzle Bloody Well Knows It (60D: Nine-digit fig. on a Social Security card). How many times in the past quarter century have I written SSN into a puzzle? How many, Lord!? Oh, and EFFS? Eff that. Biggest self-inflicted wound: staring at ST---S for 26A: Units in stables and writing in ... (drum roll) ... STEEDS. The coup de grâce? Putting AVID in right underneath it (37A: Enthusiastic => KEEN). Sigh. Onward!
THEME: "Cropped" — various crops (!) are "shortened" (into two-letter-per-square chunks) inside the theme answers, with the revealer (VEGETABLE SHORTENING) explaining the gimmick (107A: Canful in a cupboard ... or a hint to parts of six answers in this puzzle):
Theme answers:
ASIAN LONG-HORNED (BEET)LE (27A: Tree-damaging pest accidentally introduced to the U.S. in 1996)
FOUR (CORN)ERS (44A: Southwest tourist destination)
(KALE)IDOSCOPIC (48A: Having a variegated, changing pattern)
NATIONAL AR(CHIVES) (68A: Constitution holder)
SYMP(TOMATO)LOGY (90A: MCAT subject)
COSM(O KRA)MER (93A: "Seinfeld" character)
Word of the Day: Tommy HAAS (56D: Tennis great Tommy) —
Thomas Mario "Tommy" Haas (born 3 April 1978) is a German professional tennis player. He has competed on the ATP Tour since 1996. After breaking into the world top 100 in 1997, and reaching a career-high singles ranking of World No. 2 in May 2002, Haas's career was interrupted by injuries: he has twice dropped out of the world rankings due to being unable to play for twelve months.[1] His first period of injury saw him miss the whole of the 2003 season, and he did not return to the world's top 10 until 2007. He also missed over a year's tennis between February 2010 and June 2011, but has since returned to play on the tour. He returned to World No. 11 in 2013 after reaching the quarterfinals at the French Open for the first time in his career. // Haas has reached the semifinals of the Australian Open three times, and Wimbledon once. He is among a few players to have reached the quarterfinal stage of each of the Grand Slams. He has won 15 career titles in singles, including one Masters tournament(Stuttgart) in 2001, and has a silver medal from the 2000 Summer Olympics. (wikipedia)
• • •
I vaguely remember when shortening came in a can (I'm remembering largish cans of Crisco in the pantry when I was a kid). When I've used it lately, it's come in sticks ... so getting that revealer was a bit tricky. But otherwise, no problems here. At least, not after the gimmick became clear, which didn't take too long. Often with puzzles like this, once you grok the theme, the hunting down of the remaining answers really isn't that much fun, but today I quite liked the vegetable hunt. I had no idea what vegetables were coming up, and at least half the time, they showed up in bonkers (i.e. really unusual) answers like ASIAN LONG-HORNED (BEET)LE (!) and SYMP(TOMATO)LOGY (!). I think a tomato is technically a fruit, but we'll leave that debate to ones pickier than I (you know who you are). Only two things really made me wince, and that was due entirely to their cluing. First, cutesy clues on OBESE now strike me as kind of awful (121A: Like those who really have guts?). Not *offensive* awful, just ... somewhat yucky. Would you tell an OBESE person, "Hey, you're a real *gutsy* person! ... huh? Huh? Get it!?" Probably not. And then there's the clue on NIGEL (22A: British politician Farage). F*** that guy. You wanna *kill* the entertainment, destroy the joy, put that guy in your puzzle. It's like finding mouse poop in your ... well, anywhere. It's mouse poop, basically. There is no other IDI, no other AMIN, but there are sure as f*** other NIGELs, so spare me that racist ********@#$%. Thanks for listening.
I have seen Tommy HAAS in the puzzle several times of late, and since clues keep calling him "great" I imagined he was from the distant past, but no. He's younger than I am by almost a decade. And has never won a major. So ... "great"? Remember, this is a world that contains Serena Williams, so ... "great"? He's clearly very good at tennis. But I feel slightly less bad about not recognizing his name now.
Bullets:
73A: Second-largest city in Vermont (ESSEX) — this is the first I've heard of it. Name recognition has a pretty precipitous drop-off there after Burlington. I was like "... STOWE?"
9D: Often-doubled cry at a play (AUTHOR) — had the "AU-" and wrote in "AUTEUR!" because if the Italians get "Bravo!" then the French should have something ... though I guess they already have "Encore!"
12D: Former Haitian president Préval (RENÉ) — I somehow mostly remembered this guy's name today. Trivia has a way of Not sticking to my brain, so it's always nice when something takes, or begins to.
29D: Where Sanyo and Panasonic are headquartered (OSA(KA)) — four squares, and I had the "S" ... so I tentatively wrote in ASIA even as I side-eyed the front end of 27-Across...
Word of the Day: ALAN Bean (19A: Bean in a pod?) —
Alan LaVern Bean (born March 15, 1932), (CAPT, USN, Ret.), is an American former naval officer and Naval Aviator, aeronautical engineer, test pilot, and NASAastronaut; he was the fourth person to walk on the Moon. He was selected to become an astronaut by NASA in 1963 as part of Astronaut Group 3. He made his first flight into space aboard Apollo 12, the second manned mission to land on the Moon, at the age of thirty-seven years in November 1969. He made his second and final flight into space on the Skylab 3 mission in 1973, the second manned mission to the Skylabspace station. After retiring from the United States Navy in 1975 and NASA in 1981, he pursued his interest in painting, depicting various space-related scenes and documenting his own experiences in space as well as that of his fellow Apollo program astronauts. (wikipedia) (I guess Bean is in a "pod" because ... space pod? I searched "pod" on the wikipedia page and turned up nothing)
• • •
Fairly clean for a lowish-word-count puzzle, but fairly dull as well. HOPE TO GOD and MALIA OBAMA are sharp, and DEMOLITION DERBY is OK (but not original—this clue is basically recycled from 2001). But the rest just sits there. It was a fine workout, but more routine and lackluster than I expect from a Saturday. The over-reliance on proper nouns is a bit of a drag here. The NE gets particularly bad, with LAALAA next to ERNEST crossing ALAN, right in the same section with the worst cross in the whole puzzle: ODILE / OVETT. That's dire. That's a one-way ticket to Natick for some people, especially considering the relative popularity of the AVETT Brothers. Yikes. Anyway, that section is yuckily name-dense. Rest of the grid doesn't have this same issue, though ESALEN will be rough for youngSTERs (just as ODELAY will be rough for oldSTERs). LAALAA and LALA in the same grid? With YAYAS? Nah, nah. Make better choices.
I had a rougher-than-usual time with this one, due almost entirely to the wheels coming off in the SE. Looking back, my stuckness doesn't make sense. It's stupid. I should've been much faster. I just Could Not see (or, later, spell) NOXZEMA (35D: Brand once advertised with "Take it off. Take it all off"). I had BELOW ZERO and PARALLELED and FOWL and (tentatively) BOLES, and (more tentatively) NOLA, but ... nope. Stuck. N--ZE-- was staring at me and all I could think of was NETZERO, which seemed unlikely to have had a slogan about "taking it all off." Kept plugging in *correct* answers (MEGA, FORTY, e.g.) but still not seeing things. Turns out I did that thing where I don't look at all the damned clues before behaving as if I'm stuck. Once I looked at 52A: "Love is not ___" ("Tears on My Pillow" lyric), I found I could sing the song (is it in "Grease" somewhere? Not sure how I know it), and so my brain started to sing it ("Love is not a gadget...") and bam, A TOY went in. Then DAY at the end of DAY-TO-DAY; then MEGA. Finally "got it," but "it" was ... NOCZEMA. Which left me with BOCSET for 41A: It might contain a discography). Oy. Another minute or so of befuddlement followed. Then completion.
Word of the Day: PERCALE (20D: Bedsheet material) —
noun
noun: percale
a closely woven fine cotton or polyester fabric used especially for sheets. (google)
• • •
Expected something a little showier here, but all in all it's decent and clean. The long Acrosses don't really sing, though I do like the juxtaposition in the north, i.e. the idea of someone (I assume drunkenly) twirling in SWEAT PANTS while asking "HOW DO I LOOK?" I finished in just over 6. I don't know if the puzzle was easier or harder or exactly as hard as I rated it because I was aided somewhat in the NW, and mightily in the SE, by that niche knowledge I have only because I solve a ton of crosswords, i.e. by crosswordese. I got a superfast start by guessing AMMO right out of the box (1A: They may make the rounds) and then confirming it with (drum roll) ARNESS! (crosswordese the first) (1D: "Gunsmoke" actor James). And then at the end, in the SE corner, I just had blank space below SPINAL TAP, and got a little panicky. Then I tried ATTILA (42D: Verdi opera set in the fifth century). Now I know squat about opera, and I know zero about ATTILA, but something about the clue jogged the answer loose. I didn't trust it At All, but after stumbling with PHOTON instead of PHASER at 43D: Particle beam weapon, I could see it was all going to work out. Shoulda been able to get GARTH from just the "G"; shoulda been able to get PEPITA from the "PE-" ... but shoulda woulda coulda didn't. ATTILA to the rescue.
Other trouble spots:
Wanted MU SHU at 2D: Kind of pork, but saw the number of squares and wrote in MOO ... SHO :(
Had the "B" at the end of 7D: Baby animal in a parable in II Samuel and wrote in BEAR CUB
Wanted THE KEYS instead of CAR KEYS for some reason (35A: Request to Dad, perhaps)
Could remember only ASNER and ZOOEY DESCHANEL as Ferrell co-stars in "Elf"
Could picture SLUGGO perfectly in my head (I own two fat volumes of "Nancy" comics) but for some reason his name eluded me and it came out BLUTTO (39D: Nancy's friend in the comics).
TEST SCORES is boring and annoying because when I had ___ SCORES, I expected something specific. I wrote in PSAT, knowing full well no one puts those on their actual applications (do they?)
34D: Arm that's tucked away (COVE) — just brutal. Way harder than anything else in the puzzle.
THEME: EYESEEEYE — phrases following pattern "___ [body part] to [body part]" are represented in the grid with the "___" part literally between the [body part]s:
Theme answers:
HANDPASSHAND (pass from hand to hand) (20A: Transfer, as in a bucket brigade)
EARSMILEEAR (smile from ear to ear) (33A: Grin broadly) (I think "grin from ear to ear" is the more common phrase, but this is acceptable)
TOESTANDTOE (stand toe to toe) (40A: Confront one another head-on)
FACEMEETFACE (meet face to face) (50A: Rendezvous)
Word of the Day: TIDAL bore (41D: Like some colossal bores) —
noun
noun: tidal bore; plural noun: tidal bores
a large wave caused by the funneling of a flood tide as it enters a long, narrow, shallow inlet. (google)
• • •
Jet. Lag. Jetlag. Why didn't I get someone to cover today? Dunno. But here I am after west-to-east travel that got me home around 1 a.m. this morning and now it's some other a.m. this morning and I'm solving and writing. It's fun. So I'd like to thank Ms. Margolin for lobbing a softball this morning—one that took me something like the usual amount of time, but that I knew was easier than usual. The basic concept is simple but effective, and was very easy to pick up. And then once you pick it up, it had the same advantage palindromic themes have, in that if I got one end, I could fill in the other immediately. Again, my tired brain and body thank you, Ms. Margolin. The puzzle was probably more interesting in the fill than in the theme, where OUTDOORSY and AZKABAN were both genuine pleasures, the clue on SIGH gave my weary brain a slap in the face (1D: Heaved "ho"?), and AAAMAP (25D: TripTike, e.g.) provided sufficient visual weirdness.
This puzzle would've been "Easy" even for sluggish me if I'd ever (ever) head of a TIDAL bore (41D: Like some colossal bores). Add to my never-heard-of-it the fact that it had a ruthlessly tricky clue, and then add in the fact that I got NICEAN instantly (and spelled it thusly) (29D: Christians' ___ Creed) and that little inch-wide section in the SW explains almost all my "difficulty" today. Proud to have remembered EILAT even if I had to leave the last vowel blank because of non-remembering. Had ILLS for AILS but there's no shame there (53D: Troubles). [Book of the Bible after Amos] is a pretty hilarious clue for me, in that it supposes that I have any idea where Amos is (OBADIAH). There are three "IN"s in this grid, but that doesn't really bug me. Today, I'm just happy to be here, at my good old desk with my good old writing set-up, even if I do have a good old travel headache. See you tomorrow.
Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld
P.S. CHEEKDANCECHEEK would've made a Very cool 15.
Relative difficulty: Medium-Challenging (easy theme, but the fill / cluing ... MUCKY)
THEME: BUTTERFLY (35A: Word that must be added to 1-, 8-, 65- and 66-Across to make sense [with a visual hint in the grid] — put "BUTTERFLY" before the corner Acrosses. I guess those four black double-L formations are visual representations of the insect in question:
Theme answers:
ORIGAMI (1A: Insect made of paper)
MADAME (8A: Puccini opera)
SOCIAL (65A: One going from party to party)
MONARCH (66A: Orange, black and white flutterer)
Word of the Day: IBOS (54A: Some native Nigerians) —
The Igbo people (English: /ˈɪɡboʊ/; erroneouslyIbo, formerly also Iboe, Ebo, Eboe, Eboans, Heebo; natively Ṇ́dị́ Ìgbò[ìɡ͡bò] (listen)[citation needed]) are an ethnic group native to the present-day south-central and southeastern Nigeria. Geographically, the Igbo homeland is divided into two unequal sections by the Niger River – an eastern (which is the larger of the two) and a western section. The Igbo people are one of the largest ethnic groups in Africa. (wikipedia) (emph. mine)
• • •
I knew as soon as I opened this that the black squares were gonna be some element in the theme, but lord knows what. I saw a bunch of "L"s. Then moths kissing. Shrug. Once I got that central element, then the puzzle got very easy (all of the themers, transparent), but there was enough rough / odd fill and iffy cluing to make the puzzle somewhat harder, overall, than an average Wednesday. The theme just doesn't come off very well. The visual is a little weak, and the four corner answers are ... I don't know, not much of a revelation. ORIGAMI feels like a stretch. Butterfly isn't a shape I readily associate with that art form (unlike, say, the crane). And it's just a paper version of the "insect" in the MONARCH clue, so there's not a lot of variety. I guess there aren't that many words that can precede "BUTTERFLY" comfortably. Maybe that's a sign. Sometimes you have to a let an intriguing idea go instead of forcing it.
Speaking of forcing it, ENDWAYS! AT ONE GO! These are awkward, uncurrent phrases. IBOS is old-school crosswordese (and now apparently very much the non-preferred term—IGBOS is gonna be harder to shoehorn into grids). If you're gonna use ITGUY, then your clue should indicate gender. [PC problem solver] has nothing "guy" about it. [Hip-hop pal] is jarring. The "pal" part really ... doesn't nail it. Something tonally off-sounding. Very MUCKY (btw, wtf?). The entire center area could be soooo much cleaner, without that much effort. ON DATES was awkward, UHS was awkward, RAINHAT is always awkward, RAYOVAC ... is a brand, but one I never see. ICE COLD is a great answer, but I wasn't a big fan of the clue (17A: Phase in beer ads). Clue on MACK was just fine (19A: Vehicle company with a bulldog logo), but I botched it bad: four letters, starting in "M" — I went with MINI. In my defense, well, this ad, for starters:
THEME: AIRPORT TERMINALS (55A: Arrival and departure locales hinted at by 17-, 21- and 50-Across) — final words in the three themers are all airlines:
Theme answers:
MANCHESTER UNITED (17A: One of the premier clubs in the Premier League)
MISSISSIPPI DELTA (21A: Southern region where blues developed)
SOUTH BY SOUTHWEST (50A: Annual Austin festival)
Word of the Day: CUESTA (47A: Hill that's steep on one side and gentle on the other) —
A cuesta is a hill or ridge with a gentle slope on one side, and a steep slope on the other. In geology the term is more specifically applied to a ridge where a harder sedimentary rock overlies a softer layer, the whole being tilted somewhat from the horizontal. This results in a long and gentle backslope called a dip slope that conforms with the dip of resistant strata, called caprock. Where erosion has exposed the frontslope of this, a steep slope or escarpment occurs. The resulting terrain may be called scarpland. (wikipedia)
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The one and only thing I like about this puzzle is that it looks interesting. 16-wide, with those ridiculous 11-letter non-theme Acrosses riding shotgun with the top and bottom themers? Bonkers. Oh, and KICKS BUTT is kinda fun. But besides that, this thing was deeply unpleasant. I'll start with the theme, which is just a bloated last-words theme. The revealer fails twice, first by being a really booooring entry, and second by being ... not really what ... those last words are. Those are airlines. They may have their own "terminals." Or they may not. Theme answers themselves are fine, but the revealer was kind of a letdown. And then there's Maude! I mean, the fill (and cluing). Hoo boy. Here we come to the Downside of the puzzle's "interesting" look. Those 11-letter Acrosses abutting the grid-spanning themers make for a ****ton of cruddy short fill in the crosses. INA SSN OPE (ugh) TRA EDA SYS TEMAS (double ugh). Things get rough in other places too: ACHOO TWPS (ugh ugh ugh) INTWO NCIS—that's a pretty section. My favorite*, though, was AKEY crossing CUESTA. That was my last square. I hate riddles. I hate bad fill. AKEY is an answer to a riddle, and it is also bad fill. CUESTA was just a thing I've never heard of that clearly doesn't belong in a Tuesday. I saw "hill" in the clue and thought "CREST ... A?" Oy.
I don't like the clue on LGBT (40D: Like the group you're in if you're out, for short), as it seems to imply that being "out" is a precondition of being L or G or B or T. Now it doesn't say "*only* if you are out," so I guess you can lawyer that clue into being technically accurate, but it feels off, and all for the sake of wordplay (in/out) that isn't even that good. The clue did get some pretty high-power defense when I complained about it last night, though:
Ben and Andy are certainly right, but I still think the use of the conditional in the clue is lazy and confusing. In frustration, I'm gonna go punch IDEATE in the face (12D: Conceptualize). I'm just tired of looking at it, is all.
Relative difficulty: Medium-Challenging (theme type, incl. its complete reliance on proper noun knowledge, made this slightly tougher than the average Monday)
THEME: DUETS (37A: Performances by two singers ... like 21- and 49- Across and 3- and 29-Down) — familiar phrases are clued as if they were two singers:
Theme answers:
PAGE TURNER (3D: Singers Patti and Tina?)
ROTTEN APPLE (21A: Singers Johnny and Fiona?)
URBAN LEGEND (49A: Singers Keith and John?)
KELLY GREEN (29D: Singers Tori and Al?)
Word of the Day: Tori Kelly (of KELLYGREEN (29D: Singers Tori and Al?)) —
Victoria Loren "Tori" Kelly (born December 14, 1992) is an American singer, songwriter, record producer and voice actress who slowly gained recognition after starting to post videos on YouTube at the age of 14. When she was 16, Kelly auditioned for the singing competition television series American Idol. After being eliminated from the show, Kelly began to work on her own music. In 2012, she independently released her first EP that she produced, wrote, and mixed herself, titled Handmade Songs By Tori Kelly. The following year, Scooter Braun became her manager after seeing her videos on YouTube and introduced her to Capitol Records, with whom she signed in September. Kelly's second EP Foreword came out in October 2013 as her first major label release. On June 23, 2015, Kelly's debut album, Unbreakable Smile, was released. The lead single, "Nobody Love", was released in the spring and became her first US Billboard Hot 100 appearance. Kelly was nominated for Best New Artist at the 58th Grammy Awards. She voiced a shy teenage elephant named Meena in the 2016 animated film Sing. (wikipedia)
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This is a nice theme concept, though I think it's more a Tuesday or (with tougher cluing throughout) Wednesday concept. The "?" clues are tricky, and I had to fill in at least some of every theme answer from crosses before I had any chance at getting it. [Singers Keith and John?]??? Give me that out of context, and I'm gonna be like "uh ... SWEAT ELTON?" And I've never ever Ever heard of Tori Green. I mean, never. I see where she got a Best New Artist Grammy nomination recently, but ... she ain't close to Monday-famous. No major awards, no major hits (her highest charting song hit only #51??) ... just no. I mean, all best wishes, but right now, nah. I recognize only one "Singer Tori," and her last name isn't Green.
Fill is not bad. I'd've tried to get rid of phrase parts like VOOM and THEM'S and LEONE, foreign crosswordese like ÉTÉ and plural TÊTES, and lastly AYLA, which, ugh, no, nails on chalkboard. That is pure, uncut crosswordese: a weird four-letter fictional name that isn't well known. This isn't like EYRE or AHAB or IAGO. AYLA should retire to the Island of Crossword Has-Beens and stay there except in case of real crossword emergencies. She can take care of ASTA.
THEME: "Silent Treatment" — familiar phrases clued as if their silent letters didn't exist. Silent letters (in circles) spell out KNIGHT (so ... per the title ... Silent "(K)Night" ... which has like three silent letters in it, actually ... but ... I don't know; I think that's the theme)
Theme answers:
DOUBLE (K)NOTS (23A: Reversals of reversals in sentences?)
GIVES A DAM(N) (41A: Donates shelter to some beavers?)
RENAISSANCE FA(I)RE (57A: Soup, black bread and, for the wealthy, meat?)
REI(G)NING MONARCHS (81A: Kings and queens bringing their steeds to a halt?)
AFTER (H)OURS (98A: "Excuse me, but my partner's and my kids go first!")
TARO(T) SPREAD (119A: Feast consisting entirely of Hawaiian foodstuffs?)
Word of the Day: TYGA (30D: Popular rapper with a feline-sounding name) —
The basic gimmick here is super duper basic and old. Words have silent letters ... yup, they sure do. So the only "joy" is the wackiness of the clues, which are not very funny, as written. So it's a bit of a dud. Then I thought, well, the circled letters must do something ... and they do. They do spell KNIGHT. Which (I guess?) relates to the title ("Silent Treatment"), in that the puzzle has a silent, if not a holy, KNIGHT in it. OK. It's just ... weird, because the waters are all muddied by the fact that the *word* "KNIGHT" itself has A Bunch of silent letters in it, not just the "K." Also, even though the "k" in "knight" is silent, technically ... in the context of the puzzle ... *every* letter in "knight" is silent. So it's just ... loose and unclear, concept-wise. A puzzle's gimmick / theme / revealer / whatever should *snap* into place. Boom. Pow. There it is. No questions. No loose ends. This theme wasn't that strong to begin with, in its bones, and then the added spelling-"knight" bit, rather than clarifying matters, only raised more questions about what, exactly, the puzzle was trying to do.
Also the puzzle got a little cute in the fill, perhaps because it was trying to make up for a pretty anemic theme, with only six themers in play. Scrabble-f***ing gets you the ludicrous AQUACAR (?) / LOQUAT crossing in the NW and the less explicable DR. OZ / ZETA crossing in the SW. DROP / PETA is better if only because the cluing options for DROP are so much more numerous. You can go thousands of ways with DROP, but only one kinda icky way with the celeb doc. It's patchy, this grid. There's the SNOOP LION / ANTI / TYGA patch in the north, which I kinda like, but which will be very rough for you if you don't follow contemporary R&B/hip-hop music. Then there's the is-this-a-parody-of-bad-crosswords patch in the east, where things break down something awful. TGEL (62A: Neutrogena dandruff shampoo) (what ... is that? whatever it is, it's not good fill), crossing GOT A C (so bad it's almost good but not quite) and the dreaded E-CASH (64D: Digital currency). The puzzle on the whole isn't terrible, but it just never quite found its footing, never quite came together, and was far too ... yeah, patchy, in the end, to be very enjoyable.
Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld
P.S. what is a TAROT SPREAD? I have never heard of that? Is that what it's called when the tarot card leader lays out your ... cards? To read? Familiarity-wise, that answer seems like a major outlier.
THEME:None Word of the Day:SEMIBREVE(26A: Whole note, to a Brit) —
In music, a whole note (American) or semibreve (British) is a note represented by a hollow oval note head and no note stem. Its length is equal to four beats in 4 4time, that is the whole 4 4 measure (or bar). Most other notes are fractions of the whole note (e.g., half notes and quarter notes are played for one half and one quarter the duration of the whole note, respectively). The symbol is first found in music notation from the late thirteenth century, and its British name derives from the semibrevis of mensural notation, which is the origin of the British name. The whole note and whole rest may also be used in music of free rhythm, such as Anglican chant, to denote a whole measure. (Wikipedia)
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Can I PIG IT? Everyone say "yes you can!" Lena here, covering for Rex on this debut puzzle by Ryan McCarty. I don't see a lot of Saturday debuts-- it's my favorite day of the puzzling week and I'm a tough customer when it comes to themeless fare. Also when I'm blogging a puzzle for Rex everything takes me like 50 times longer than it does him, and so when the puzz drops at 10pm I know I'm in for a long, and potentially cranky, night.
As themelesses go this one is not terribly sparkling in terms of the overall fill, but the marquee/seed entry, SCHUYLER SISTERS (33A: Sibling trio in "Hamilton") is certainly a modern-day crowd pleaser. Sometimes it's nice to drop in a grid-spanning answer like that with few/no crosses. Maybe you look around to see if anyone saw you just totally own the longest answer in the hardest puzzle of the week. My solve started at 1D (French anise-flavored liqueur) with the declaration "It's either PERNOD or PASTIS" and confirmation of the latter by incorrectly filling in TIFFS for 19A (Rows) and its correct-yet-incorrect T. Oops. TIFFS also allowed for ENTIRE (2D: Uncut), and so before I knew it I had a wrong answer locked in. I think it stayed in there for a while, too-- I seem to recall ending in the NW and realizing my mistake through TOURNIQUET (4D: Flow stopper, of a sort). Someone told me that I need to crawl out from under my rock and watch "Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt." I barely made it through one. Her voice is the vinegar that curdles the show. And that's just one of the problems I have with it. Anyway I dissed the show and now I've got the star's full name stabbing straight down the middle of the grid-- this is the kind of cosmic revenge I can get down with. ELLIE KEMPER (14D: Title actress on Netflix's "Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt") was ELSIE KEMP_R for a bit because I didn't know LIDA ROSE (20A: Barbershop staple from "The Music Man") and couldn't remember Ms. EDERLE (46A: Channel swimmer Gertrude).
Although the fill didn't particularly dazzle me I did find myself enjoying many of the clues. I wanted 25D (Goes for the bronze?) to be ORES so bad because crosswords (you get what I'm saying here, right Crossworld? Those "wait what, you can verb that word?" answers), but I do like the actual clue/answer (SUNS). I also have a masochistic love for those nasty little one-word clues like 3D (Flow), 30A (Friends), and of course the devilish 19A (Rows). They keep me on my toes. Oh yeah, and (Meal maker?) for PESTLE is an excellent clue-- exactly how I like my question markies. Imagining DANES waging war, fighting for territory, to become the (Builders of the original Legoland) cracked me up.
The tortured plural STASES (57A: Equilibria) and the tortuered partial ILIE (37A: "Would ___?) did not crack me up. I have burned down almost-complete grids for less ugly fill, and if I were trying to get a puzzle in the NYT I wouldn't have even considered it. And I wouldn't have been terribly attached to the content of that corner-- IONIAN,QUINTE and HISPANIA are not the kind of answers I would be sad to lose.
Overall a pretty smooth and ultimately pleasant debut themeless. Not too easy, not too hard. Just right for piggin' it.
P.S. Fun fact: if you accidentally highlight text in Blogger you cannot make it go away. I tried, but ultimately just picked the closest color to the background because, like I said, I'm piggin' it.
Signed, Lena Webb, Court Jester of CrossWorld [Follow Rex on Twitter and Facebook]
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