Open-sided shelters / SAT 6-3-17 / Horizontal pieces covering joints in architecture / Weaver of Greek mythology

Constructor: Roland Huget

Relative difficulty: Medium

THEME: none 

Word of the Day: ARECIBO (52A: Puerto Rican home to the Western Hemisphere's largest radio telescope) —

Arecibo (Spanish pronunciation: [aɾeˈsiβo]) is a municipality on the northern coast of Puerto Rico, on the shores of the Atlantic Ocean, located north of Utuado and Ciales; east of Hatillo; and west of Barceloneta and Florida. It is about 50 miles (80 km) west of San Juan, the capital city. Arecibo is the largest municipality in Puerto Rico by area, and is part of the San Juan, Caguas and Guaynabo Metropolitan Statistical Area. It is spread over 18 wards and Arecibo Pueblo (the downtown area and the administrative center of the city). Its population in 2010 was 96,440. // Arecibo is also known as La Villa del Capitán Correa (Captain Correa's Villa) after the Puerto Rican hero Captain Antonio de los Reyes Correa of the Spanish Army, who drove off a British Navy invasion by ambushing forces led by rear-admiral William Whetstone. Arecibo is also known as El Diamante Del Norte (The Diamond of the North) and La Ribera del Arecibo (The shore of Arecibo). // The Arecibo Observatory, until July 2016 the world's largest radio telescope, is located here. Arecibo is the seat of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Arecibo. (wikipedia)

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Big groan when I opened this. Design is cool to look at, but we've got here is a super-segmented quad-grid, which is essentially four mini-puzzles. Success in one area only really helps you in that area, as your ways into and out of every section are so narrow. So we get four puzzles, all roughly 7x7, which means the *best* we're going to get is a dull, clean puzzle (which is, mostly, what we get). It's hard to fill big chunks of white space like that cleanly, and even if you manage clean, you're never gonna manage interesting, at least in part because there are No answers longer than 7 letters in the entire puzzle. Tends to make things somewhat snoozy. In a puzzle like this, you gotta be looking for common-letter-laden answers. For instance, my first guess at 17A: Some farm machinery was REAPERS, despite the fact that I don't really know what those are, or what they look like. I just knew it was gonna be an -ERS answer (or was likely to be) and REAPERS has lots of common letters, so I didn't even wait to see if the crosses checked out. The "S" (which I had from SASS) was enough. You can see how the letter bank here tends to skew hard to RLSTNE, and far away from Scrabbly stuff. As my friend Doug Peterson said (just now—he's sitting right next to me), STREETS is a classic bottom-of-the-grid answer. We were talking earlier about stacks where the bottom answer is something like PEER ASSESSMENTS and STREET ADDRESSES. Do enough puzzles, and you start to know what to look for, what to expect.


So this thing isn't bad. But it was definitely ho-hum, and it feels weird to give it one difficulty rating, because it played like four different puzzles. Easiest by far (for me) was the NE, where several of those answers were gimmes. THISTLE was first in. PIRATES, a no-brainer. ARACHNE, same. I finished that quadrant at a Monday pace. The NW was the opposite. Despite SASS / REAPERS opening, I couldn't do much up there. Eventually I said the clue to 6D: Bleachers blaster out loud and Doug guess "AIR HORN" so I don't know how long I would've been stuck up there. I think I would've gotten CAPISCE and OWES TO and TYPE without too much trouble. The other quadrants ... are there. There they are. They exist. I did them. Doug again helped with a clue—41A: Like hippies, by nature—when he said something like "Pacifists?" and since I had the last "R" I said "yep, ANTIWAR." Only real sticking point down there was ARECIBO, which I've never heard of. So ... that's it. Not much to say. There it is. It is not terrible. Neither is it remarkable. This grid shape yields mediocre results at best, so maybe don't use it ever again, thanks!

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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