Rex Parker Does the NYT Crossword Puzzle: Conor Sefkow

Constructor: Conor Sefkow

Relative difficulty: Easy

THEME: ALLITERNATION (37A: Portmanteau coinage describing this puzzle's theme) — two-word alliterative phrases where the first word is a nationality:

Theme answers:

RUSSIAN ROULETTE (17A: Game that has only a single round)
FRENCH FRY (23A: Single item seemingly always found at the bottom of a McDonald's bag)
DUTCH DOOR (49A: Entrance divided in half horizontally)
CHINESE CHECKERS (58A: Board game played on a big hexagram)

Word of the Day: YANNI (26D: One-named Greek New Age musician) —

Yiannis Chryssomallis (Greek: Γιάννης Χρυσομάλλης, born November 14, 1954), known professionally as Yanni (listen; /ˈjɑːni/), is a Greek-American composer, keyboardist, pianist, and music producer. [...] His breakthrough concert, Live at the Acropolis, yielded the second best-selling music concert video of all time. [...] At least sixteen of Yanni's albums have peaked at No. 1 in Billboard's "Top New Age Album" category, and two albums (Dare to Dream and In My Time) received Grammy Award nominations. Yanni has performed in more than 30 countries on five continents, and through late 2015 had performed live in concert before more than 5 million people and had accumulated more than 40 platinum and gold albums globally, with sales totaling over 25 million copies. A longtime fundraiser for public television, Yanni's compositions have been used on commercial television programs, especially for sporting events. He has written film scores and the music for an award-winning British Airways television commercial. (wikipedia)

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This is what happens when you fall in love with your pun revealer—you love it so much that you can't give it up, even when the concept that it yields is dry as dirt. The answers are so easy, so plain, so blah, esp. the sad, lone FRENCH FRY, that really all you have is your tada moment of ALLITERNATION, and the only thing that made me think was, "Oh, so *this* is why we're doing this. Huh. Sounds like a nation where people litter a lot, but OK." As a stand-alone answer, I like DUTCH DOOR fine—it's certainly the most original of the themers. But this mainly feels like a Monday themeless with a groany joke in the middle—a joke that is basically a made-up word, which maybe is what's supposed to elevate this (difficulty-wise) from a Monday to a Tuesday, but it was really really really easy anyway. It was also really grim. I mean, this is a fine way to open your Tuesday morning:

Do you really need more cutesiness here in the clue (playing on the word "round," obviously)? You've already provided me with the image of someone shooting themselves in the head, I don't think you're making it better by trying to distract me with wacky wordplay. The grimness continues later on with more violent death, in the form of a LEAD PIPE, though that clue had the virtue of making me remember the board game "Clue," which I actually enjoyed as a child, so I didn't mind the grimness so much. Plus, you can imagine a LEAD PIPE in non-head-injuring contexts—not so true of RUSSIAN ROULETTE. The theme amounted to a lot of ordinary phrases with a non-word joke at the center. I think the theme "works," but that the results are meager. I will say that the puzzle didn't miss any obvious ALLITERNATIONs. I didn't check a complete list of world countries, but I did a mental world tour and didn't hit any good alternatives. So... thoroughness. That's something.

There's also a weird irregularity to the difficulty, in that the vast majority of the puzzle is sub-Monday-level easy. Fill as fast as you can read clues. I didn't fail to get a single answer at first glance until ALLITERNATION (not surprising, as it's not a word), and then I had a couple of minor need-to-check-crosses slow-downs with SOURCE (46D: Listing in a footnote) and PEACE (64A: Informal goodbye), but those were bumps I barely registered. But *then* I hit the SW corner, and since I didn't look at the LEAD PIPE clue early (would've helped), I ended up balking at a ton of stuff in there. No idea about E-SPORT, wasn't sure if it was LUTE or LYRE (43D: U-shaped stringed instrument), thought COCOA might be served at the ski resort (47A: Hot drink at a ski resort = TODDY), had to infer TOPO as I've never seen that as a stand-alone answer ever (62A: Map with elevation lines, in brief), and wrote in FEES before DUES (40A: Club charges). All that after having, as I say, encountering almost zero resistance in the rest of the grid. Massive imbalance. That's an editing problem, though, not a constructing one. There wasn't much to see in the fill. Felt kind of crosswordesey from the jump, starting with AM(which vowel will it be?}N RA and then SIS ALI INS NIELS ECO IRENE IWO across the top ... but then through the middle things are OK, until we touch down with a jarring THUD at SNEE AGLET (which sounds like a sleepy coastal New England town where spooky things are about to happen...). This really is a one-joke, one-note, one-moment puzzle. The rest is perfunctory.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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