Word of the Day: CAROLINA REAPERS (46A: Extremely hot peppers named for their scythelike tails) —
The Carolina Reaper is a cultivar of the Capsicum chinense plant. The crossbreed is between a "really nastily hot" La Soufriere pepper from Saint Vincent and a Naga pepper from India, and was named "Reaper" due to the shape of its tail. It has been described as having a fruity taste, with the initial bite being sweet and then immediately turning to "molten lava" Developed by American breeder Ed Currie, the pepper is red and gnarled, with a bumpy texture and small pointed tail. In 2017, Guinness World Records declared it the hottest chili pepper in the world. (wikipedia)
• • •
This is a beautiful grid so let's talk about the one feature that is inexcusably bad. Inexplicably bad. Mind-shakingly bad. "Why would you?!" bad. I'm talking, of course, about the KARL / KARTS kross. I mean cross. No, kross. Wait ... cross? Is it? Who Can Tell? It's true that in retrospect, you can see they were *trying* to nudge you toward the "K" choice—the mystery "mathematician" has a last name that sounds German (23A: Mathematician Weierstrass dubbed the "father of modern analysis"), and video games seem like an arena where you'd find wacky spelling (23D: Vehicles in a Nintendo racing game) [Note: The "K" spelling is by far the preferred spelling for the racing vehicle, although the "C" spelling is attested; as a NYTXW crossword answer, GOCARTS switched permanently to GOKARTS in 2003, no one knows why...]. OK, I see the reasoning I was *supposed* to use. It was the reasoning that I did, in fact, use. But sitting right here, right now, I can tell you that some non-zero number of solvers are going to come to that exact crossing and throw up their hands. That's certainly what happened to me, and I've been at this solving thing ... a while. Now, I made the right guess, and for the right reasons, but let's be very clear: It Was A *Guess*. And that is not the situation you want *any* solver to be in on a single square. Ever. And it's such a stupid, avoidable issue. Make the KARL Benz or Marx, someone who is much better known and thus much more obviously a "K"-KARL. Or, better yet (much much much better yet), make that damn letter a "C." Why in the world do you want/need that "K"? Its high wackiness factor? Higher Scrabble value? In *that* situation, it is Not better. [Shopping icons] crossing [Weathers who played Apollo Creed in the first four "Rocky" films] gets you a clean and clear "C" in that space. Make the clues harder or weirder, I don't care, but in the end, when the solver is down to one square, that square should ultimately be indisputable. This square was not. I've *heard* of Mario Kart a lot. A lot. Not unfamiliar to me. But the spelling? Shrug. I would say "well, that's on me," but that's what crosses are for: for when you blank out or aren't sure or are generally ignorant. But today, the cross did Nothing to help. This was me trying to get -ARL: "D'oh, not sure, better check the ... d'oh!" Just horrendous editing there. And for what? It's not like KARL and KARTS are good, or have clever clues. I would argue KARTS, on its own, is actually suboptimal, whatever the clue. You could've done something harder *and* more interesting with a "C"—*and* avoided any C/K confusions. But no. No. You did this.
OK, so, if you ignore that stupid "K," this puzzle is something close to ideal. Precisely what I predicted would happen yesterday, when we got yet another sloggy soggy disappointing Friday. This should've been the Friday. Breezy, zippy, colorful, dynamic ... in a word, fun. Only that one CLUNK (KLUNK?). Those stacks look daunting, but they were like most pitbulls I've known—scary to look at, snuggly babies when you get to know them. All you gotta do is just start working the short Down crosses. Me, I went STACEY to YAY (wrong) to YES (after I noticed 3D was a plural) to CANES PRONGS EGGS OHMAGE (kind of a guess?) and then boom!
Off the SOP-, woo hoo! Turns out, not a lot of words start "SOP-" so getting to SOPHOMORE SLUMPS wasn't that hard. "Let's try ... this!" And it worked, LOL. What a feeling. Those other 15s were cinches. I might've gotten both "A MODEST PROPOSAL" and the "THRILLA IN MANILA" with absolutely no letters in place (another reason why the puzzle feels like a Friday and not a Saturday). Once those upper 15s are locked in, you've got the front ends of alllllll the Downs up there, and so it's very easy to make short work of the entire upper half of the grid. I had a little trouble bringing down the Downs in the NE corner, but SALT and PLAY were clear, and they got me NYT (which, again, I would've gotten with absolutely no crosses) (20A: "The 1619 Project" publisher, for short), and then MISNAMES was doable, and I just hacked through there (w/ a brief pause for guesswork at the awful C/K crossing). Thought maybe SALT BATH at first, but you don't really swim in the tub, do you (do you?). Anyway, upper half, up in SMOKE, fast.
Lower half, very similar if you come at it from the west. LOAMS ORLEAN and SPATTED went in easy from their last letters, and then I had the front of all the Downs there in the SW, and none of them put up much of a fight. I will say that SPATTED and especially APCS (?!)* are ... not good. But they're so small, such minor flaws, and since they help to prop up a truly gleaming grid, I'm happy to tolerate them here. I love that the puzzle doesn't just dazzle in the long, showy answers; you get some very nice stuff in the connective areas, like "WE'RE OK!" over "THAT'S ME!" crossing "THE NERVE!" Just aces. Again, as above, so below with the easy 15s. Even CAROLINA REAPERS, which I've never heard of, was easy to get from the clue. I had a little trouble initially bringing CRUSADE into view (34D: Intense movement), but everything around it was so easy that I didn't struggle long. I wish this had run yesterday and I wish that C/K thing had been handled more professionally. Otherwise, perfect, no notes, really really like this one. Will definitely be a contender for Themeless Puzzle of the Month. See you tomorrow.
Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld
*I know it stands for "AP Computer Science" but still I say "?!" One of the uglier abbrevs. I've seen.
P.S. A "helicopter" might fly out of a MAPLE because that's what you call the little winged seeds that twirl to the ground as they fall from MAPLE trees. I've got two sugar maples out front, so this phenomenon is very familiar to me.
Word of the Day: BITMAPS (23D: Alternatives to GIFs) —
A bitmap (also called "raster") graphic is created from rows of different colored pixels that together form an image. In their simplest form, bitmaps have only two colors, with each pixel being either black or white. With increasing complexity, an image can include more colors; photograph-quality images may have millions. Examples of bitmap graphic formats include GIF, JPEG, PNG, TIFF, XBM, BMP, and PCX as well as bitmap (i.e., screen) fonts. The image displayed on a computer monitor is also a bitmap, as are the outputs of printers, scanners, and similar devices. They are created using paint programs like Adobe Photoshop. (Indiana University)
• • •
I don't really know how BITMAPS is being used here. I think it's just those dumb pictures people make out of keyboard characters on Twitter, but turns out I was thinking of ASCII art (like this):
So I have no idea why or when you'd use BITMAPS in place of GIFs. GIFs are everywhere on social media. JPGS are a very common image file format. And even after looking it up I still don't quite understand BITMAPS, or know what they look like. Is it really just pixel art? Shrug. Definitely struggled with that answer, a struggle compounded by the fact that I thought the slangy lunch fare was SAMMIES (a term I hear all the time) not SAMMICH (a term maybe Popeye says?). SAMMICH abuts BITMAPS, so ugh. And those answers occur right at a passageway from one section (NW) to another (SE), so they really gummed up the works. The whole grid was very quadranted, so the whoosh-whoosh flow never happened. Nice answers here and there, and a pretty clean grid overall.
The "?" clues eventually got irritating. Turns out there aren't *that* many of them (six), but *five* of them come on long answers, so it somehow felt like there were a lot, possibly because I had to spend more time with them. No idea what a PHARAOH ANT is (had PHARAOH CAT there for a bit, before I read the clue more closely) (15A: Pest so named because it was originally found in royal tombs). I thought HARDPAN was something related to the earth (it is); no idea it had make-up relevance (it apparently just means any kind of "hardened, impervious layer") (41D: Dense buildup in makeup powder containers). So lots of stuff today that was just outside my familiarity. But then even the stuff I know well I was a bit slow with today. Took me a minute to get English LIT, a subject I ostensibly teach. Only other thing I struggled with was TESTY (31A: Easily put out), which I had as TENSE, and later TECHY (not "tecky" but with the "ch" pronounced like in "touchy"). Looks like TECHY *is* an obsolete form of TETCHY, which would very much have fit the clue (it means "touchy; irritable; peevish"). Not knowing that answer made seeing the Downs in the NE tough. I had TEASETS before TEAWARE but fixed it quick by way of WAVE (38A: It can mean hello or goodbye). Oh, and I definitely had ROLL A JOINT at 29D: Prepare some leaves for burning? (ROLL A CIGAR). I mean that answer *really* wanted to be ROLL A JOINT. See, ROLL A JOINT, that's a good answer, whereas ROLL A CIGAR ... well, that's closer to "EAT A SAMMICH" category of answer. Weird how some "[verb] A [noun]" phrases feel stand-alone perfect and others ... don't.
I like this puzzle's commitment to sleep. As an EARLY RISER who needs his BEAUTY REST, I share that commitment, which is why I despise Daylight Saving Time, which is a lie on its face, as you cannot "save" daylight, as I explain here in this Twitter RANT:
you cannot “save” daylight there’s just daylight and there’s as much of it as there is, you just relabeled it, I mean we should reject DST based on that fraudulent advertising language alone, it’s some Freedom Fries bullshit
And despite my weariness at all the try-hard "?" clues, I did really like the clue on GO COMMANDO! (17A: Join a boxer rebellion?). Nice historical misdirect there. In case you didn't know, to GO COMMANDO is to not wear underwear. This is something that Joey Tribbiani taught huge swaths of America in the 1990s.
Anything else need explaining? JUMP SCARES are the reason I avoid most horror movies (being scared like that just makes me angry). These are the moments designed to make you jump. Loud non-diegetic noise or music (which always feels like a cheat) combined with things coming out of nowhere. Pass. A DRAG MOTHER is mentor to an aspiring drag queen. [Just for kicks and giggles] is a bowdlerized version of what people actually say (when you google "just for kicks and giggles" you get a lot of sites referring to this puzzle, which is how you know it's not the real thing). Replace "kicks" with something more scatological and you're there. [It's past due] is a Methuselah-old clue for TRE that plays on the fact that "due" is Italian for "two" (and TRE is "three," so one more than or "past" due). DAVE Grohl (formerly of Nirvana) has fronted Foo Fighters for decades now (16A: Rocker Grohl).
I hope I covered all the stuff that might need explaining. Take care, see you tomorrow.
A long time ago, I was solving this puzzle and got stuck at an unguessable (to me) crossing: N. C. WYETH crossing NATICK at the "N"—I knew WYETH but forgot his initials, and NATICK ... is a suburb of Boston that I had no hope of knowing. It was clued as someplace the Boston Marathon runs through (???). Anyway, NATICK— the more obscure name in that crossing—became shorthand for an unguessable cross, esp. where the cross involves two proper nouns, neither of which is exceedingly well known. NATICK took hold as crossword slang, and the term can now be both noun ("I had a NATICK in the SW corner...") or verb ("I got NATICKED by 50A / 34D!")
.png)
