Escapee from Miss Gulch's bicycle basket / SUN 4-12-20 / Player of Ben Watt on Parks Recreation / Weak unconvincing argument / Moore whom Sports Illustrated called greatest winner in history of women's basketball / Asian city with monument to John McCain / So-called enclosed rhyme scheme

Constructor: Joel Fagliano

Relative difficulty: Medium (10:48)

THEME: "Barista Training Day" — familiar phrases are clued as if they completed imagined sentences about to people learning to make coffee:

Theme answers:

• SPILLED THE BEANS (24A: Things got off to a bad start when one trainee tripped and ...)
• SPLIT HALF AND HALF (40A: The carton leaked milk everywhere when the trainee accidentally ...)
• LACKED A FILTER (53A: The drip coffee tasted grainy because they ...)
• FAR FROM YOUR AVERAGE JOE (68A: In fact, every cup they served was ...)
• RAN OUT OF STEAM (85A: To make matters worse, the espresso machine ...)
• GROUNDS FOR FIRING (95A: They worried about their jobs -- these mistakes were ...)
• GOT INTO HOT WATER (115A: Sure enough, when the boss showed up, everyone ...)

Word of the Day: Berbers (90A: Home to man Berbers => MOROCCO) —

Berbers, or Amazighs, (Berber languages: ⵉⵎⴰⵣⵉⵖⵏ, ⵎⵣⵗⵏ, romanized: Imaziɣen; singular: Amaziɣ, ⴰⵎⴰⵣⵉⵖ ⵎⵣⵗ) are an ethnic group of several nations mostly indigenous to North Africaand some northern parts of West Africa.

Berbers mostly live in Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Mauritania, northern Mali, northern Niger, and a small part of western Egypt. (wikipedia)

• • •

As you've probably come to understand by now, my expectations for Sundays are quite low. When the theme misses, or is just too weak to sustain over the course of a 21x21 grid, then the solving experience is the sloggiest of slogs, even when the puzzle isn't terribly difficult. Slightly weak theme on a Wednesday, you can endure, maybe even enjoy, but stretch that same theme out to Sunday size, and woof. Not fun. It's strangely rare that a NYT Sunday has a theme that is truly inventive and delightful *and* well executed. So I have learned not to expect much. But even with those low expectations, I was genuinely stunned at how weak this effort was. Or, rather, I was surprised to see so weak an effort from someone so experienced but also so (relatively) young. This concept is corny and old-fashioned—take a concept, find phrases unrelated to that concept but that contain words that *can* be related to that concept, and then make that wacky reimagining of the phrases the basis of your overarching pun-driven narrative. Seen it. A lot. If you like that sort of thing, great. Especially great if the puns really land, but some people like even just-OK puns of this sort. Fine. A pun-based puzzle like this really has to hit much more often than it misses, and hit Big; this one just putters along. Humor-wise, it's pretty average for this theme type, but too often the phrases themselves seemed awkward or forced or strange. LACKED A FILTER is ... ick. It's just not tight. It's a phrase someone might say, but it isn't stand-alone strong (whether you found them funny or not, SPILLED THE BEANS, RAN OUT OF STEAM, GOT INTO HOT WATER ... those all hold up; solid expressions, and thus tolerable answers). SPLIT HALF AND HALF ... I kept wanting that first word to be "spilt"; also I don't think of "half and half" as "milk," so the clue is weird there. Also, the phrase itself ... teeters. This is ... not a great set of first search results (when I google the phrase in quot. marks):

Wanted FAR FROM YOUR AVERAGE to end in BEAR, but the Yogi Bear phrase is "smarter than the average bear." Still, the phrase as is isn't exactly strong or particularly current. The worst, to my ear, though, was GROUNDS FOR FIRING. The phrase is "grounds for dismissal." Here are the "grounds for" phrases that google expects:

Actually, this is a terrible list. What is "grounds for sculpture"?! The more important google info is that "grounds for dismissal" absolutely trounces "grounds for firing" by about 10 to 1. I figured out FIRING without much trouble, but all these minor misses really left me with a, let's say, bitter taste in my mouth.


But the more surprising issue was how rough the fill was in many places. AYS AAHS *and* AMS!? More than one FIDO!?!? GRP AGER BAHA and on and on. Why do COG (45A: ___ sci, college major related to psych) and ABBA (51D: So-called "enclosed" rhyme scheme) have the dumb clues they have? A COG is a thing; clue it as a thing, not as this alleged major that no one says this way (would sound too much like "cock sigh" ... "cock's eye?"). And I teach bleepin' sonnets and yet have never referred to ABBA as an "enclosed rhyme scheme." I'm sure someone somewhere calls it that, but 9 times out of 10 if ABBA comes up in my life, this is what it means to me:


I did enjoy some stuff today. PHONE TAG is fun (58D: Series of missed calls). RAIN DATE and PRESS BOX aren't bad. I enjoy the work of ADAM SCOTT (might watch all of "The Good Place" again real soon, as I already miss it). But the grid averages out to somewhat below average, and without a tight / funny theme to anchor everything, we end up with another mere time-filler; an exercise in filling in boxes, dutifully completed because that's what we do. But this really does feel like weak ... sauce (I can't even bring myself to use the puzzle's own "weak TEA" metaphor).

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

P.S. Peter Sagal reviews a new book about crosswords in today's New York Times Book Review; it's very much worth reading, even if he does refer to me as "the curmudgeonly scold whom every constructor resents [...]"  

P.P.S. (reprinted from yesterday's write-up) please read this blog post by the great Liz Gorski, a wonderful crossword constructor whose name you might recognize from NYT crosswords past. She stopped submitting to the NYTXW a while back. The blog post explains why. Her words (which, trust me, are diplomatic) provide a complementary perspective to that of the recent Open Letter to the Executive Director of Puzzles at the NYT, calling for, among other things, increased diversity among the test-solving and editorial staff. But Liz is writing from a place of longtime personal experience, and she's demonstrably (and understandably) less sanguine about the likelihood that small editorial policy changes are likely to seriously address the problems with gender parity and overall inclusivity at the NYTXW. Anyway, it's worth a read. She's a legendary constructor, and I'm happy she's added her voice to this discussion.

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