Assembly at a camporee perhaps / SAT 1-1-22 / Home for a farrow / Where scenes on Tatooine were filmed for Star Wars / Big outdoor June event / Length of a president's veto window / Baking aisle mascot / Red Guard's attire / Skylar of Perfect Pitch films / Leporine creatures / Pirates in old slang / Like some fruits and tennis players / Mopey teen's lament / Setting of Robert Graves memoir Goodbye to All That in brief

Constructor: Peter Wentz

Relative difficulty: Extremely Challenging

THEME: none 

Word of the Day: farrow (12D: Home for a farrow = STY) —

n.

A litter of pigs.

v. far·rowed, far·row·ing, far·rows

v.tr.

To give birth to (a litter of pigs).

v.intr.

To produce a litter of pigs. (thefreedictionary.com)

• • •

It's New Year's Eve so I'm gonna try to wrap this up quickly so that I can be done by midnight, at which point ... I guess it will be Saturday. Not sure why I'm staying up, really. At any rate, I'm up, so I'm solving and writing now instead of in the morning. Solving context matters with this puzzle, or at least it really felt like it mattered, because I thought, "Oh, it's New Year's Eve, I've got the Nick & Nora Charles "Thin Man" movie marathon on, I don't want to interrupt the vibe, so I'll just bring my laptop downstairs and poke at the puzzle while I sit on the couch." And so I did that and got almost nowhere. Eventually, I got *so* nowhere that I had to stop the movie and sit up straight and really give the puzzle my attention, and while things got better, they didn't get much better. I am not kidding when I say I struggled more with this first puzzle of 2022 than I struggled with *any* puzzle in 2021. I may be in error, I may be forgetting some 2021 struggle, but I honestly don't remember feeling like I couldn't get traction *anywhere*. Every single clue seemed amped way way up, difficulty-wise. And many of the answers and clue terminology were absolutely new and baffling to me. From little things like not knowing "farrow," to medium things like having no idea who Sklyar ASTIN is, to big things like never having heard of MONKEY BREAD, I haven't felt so unwelcome in a puzzle in a long, long while. 

• I have PAUSEd many a YouTube video but had no idea "K" performed that function
• I had ECO-diversity before BIOdiversity
• I thought the Red Guard was Communist, but Russian Communist, so MAO SUIT? No idea
• 
  I guessed the correct Jordan, but I put him on a SHOE (8D: Jordan is found on one, notably = LOGO)
• I scraped my way to BREAD but then, even with -ONKEY in place, I had no idea and wrote in DONKEY BREAD (14D: Pastry that gets pulled apart)
• I can't believe something as vague as SITE was clued via Fodor. Just baffling (26A: Fodor's listing)
• I forgot what "leporine" meant (so mad at myself)
• I never heard of SEA RATS and was not actually sure of the "T" (53A: Pirates, in old slang)
• I wanted CLEAR DAY before CLEAR SKY (48A: Part of a forecast without clouds)
• I thought [Singing duet?] might be INGS or GEES (since both appear twice in "Singing")
• I have honestly never heard of a PEACE DOLLAR (45A: Coin featuring Lady Liberty and a bald eagle)
• I love Patsy CLINE but that clue? No hope (44D: Singer with the 1962 album "Sentimentally Yours")
• I don't know the Bartolomé guy at all (44A: Bartolomé de las ___, social reformer during Spain's colonial era = CASAS)
• I wanted RANTS before LASTS (43D: Goes on)
• I had TEARS AT before CLAWS AT (19D: Feverishly tries to open)
• I don't know who Robert Graves is (do I?) (1D: Setting of the Robert Graves memoir "Goodbye to All That," in brief" = WWI)
• I have been in the baking aisle—there are lots of "mascots" and anyway I've never seen DOUGHBOY without "Pilsbury" in front of it
• I had "AS IF!" before "LIES!" (25A: "That's so not the case!")
• I would've been here all day and never gotten to Oil-RICH (?) were it not for crosses
• I have never started a Google search "WHO...?" WHO Googles in complete sentences?
• I didn't know "CATHY" was still being published in 1998 and don't know why "snoring" should make me think "CATHY" (29A: Comic strip with the 1998 collection "I Am Woman, Hear Me Snore")

The thing is that the grid is basically fine—not one of my favorite Wentz grids, but still generally lovely. The clues just made it grueling, in a really unpleasant way. I had the bottom parts of the two long Downs in the NW ("I HATE IT HERE," "NO MORE FOR ME") and still had no idea what they were. Was it "IT HERE" or "I THERE" I was looking at? Didn't matter, as I couldn't make phrases out of either. And with -EFORME, I really struggled to come up with the NO MORE part. PLANBS is a weird plural and hard to parse ("When the truth doesn't work, try PLAN B.S.!"). There are lots of first names on daytime TV. Etc. Etc. The highlight of the puzzle for me was actually the zaniest answer in the grid: ZXCVBNM (32A: Line just before a comma) (if you don't get it, look at your keyboard). The lowlight was having to change TOUCH SCREEN (a great term that human beings actually use on a regular basis) to TOUCH SENSOR (sad tromboooooone) (17A: Smart device feature). There were so few gimmes today: SAX, CSI ... I wrote RED in with no crosses, but I wasn't at all certain (52D: Like diamonds) (think: card suit, not gemstones). Same with NEW / BLEW—put them in, but it took forever for me to feel comfortable with them, esp. since SAM'S seemed certain, which meant I was going to have an answer ending -NM, which seemed impossible ... until it wasn't (ZXCVBNM!). There were absolutely no carefree parts of this grid for me. The SW was the easiest, but only part of it. After that, the west was what fell first, then the middle and NE, and finally the E/SE, which by that point wasn't so hard since I could come at it from the west and the north. Plus, having the *front* end of the long Downs in that section, as opposed the *back* ends that I had in the W/NW, made taking them down so much easier. 

In summation, this was a bloodbath. I don't mind a bloodbath if I'm expecting a bloodbath, but frankly I no longer expect them from the NYT. The Newsday Saturday Stumper, some Fireball puzzles, some indie blog puzzles (which tend to be much more niche, much more "for my friend group," less edited for a general solver population)—*those* are ones where I brace for brutality. This one caught me off guard. But then again, if I'd just solved at my desk upstairs, with the office door shut, and no distractions, like I normally do, it's possible this puzzle would've seemed far less ferocious. But I do think it's objectively much harder than your average NYT Saturday (which, as you know, is already pretty hard). I wish this had been more fun to solve, because as I say, the grid actually looks pretty good. Ah well, Happy ZXCVBNM to all who celebrate. And best wishes for an enjoyable 2022.

The correct plural is actually

PLANS B

— Rex Parker 🐈🐾☕️🐾🐈 (@rexparker) January 1, 2022

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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