What is that, a phone? A grumpy face? A grumpy phone? It's an odd, blobby-looking grid, is what it is. It's unusual, I'll give it that. Daunting at first glance, but then you realize that actually there are plenty of short answers all over the place, which means lots of potential footholds, and not so much scary white space as there initially seems to be. I began by confidently attacking the short stuff in the NW corner and got precisely nowhere. I teach a class on 20c American Comics, including comics by important Black creators, and *I* couldn't come up with ORRIN, so if you knew that one, hoo boy, I am impressed (2D: ___ C. Evans, journalist who co-founded All-Negro Comics (1947)) (All-Negro Comics ran for exactly one issue). I wanted Jackie ORMES, and was very proud of knowing her name ... until I realized she was not the answer. Better ORRIN C. Evans than ORRIN Hatch, for sure, but YIPES, that's legitimately obscure. Thought Red and White might precede SEA, thought the bygone royal was a TSAR or a SHAH, wrote in FUSS for 3D: What's raised in a ruckus (CAIN) and tried to cross that with ACT AS at 16A: Be part of, as a show. I got INS in that section and that's all I got. Things then went from difficult to ugly as I crossed to the other side of the grid, where the going was easier but not exactly pretty. First answer: TASE (15D: Stun, in a way). Oof. Never happy to see this (brand-name) instrument of police brutality or the verb that derives from it. It was especially ... police-y today, appearing as it does right next to MIRANDA RIGHTS. I went TASE OOPS GEE SHMOO ... I told you, not pretty. And the unprettiest part came next: STENOG (11D: Court figure, informally) ... STENOG... STENOG. I thought the days of STENOG, with a "G," where behind us. I mean, the days of STENOG are, literally, behind us, but the "G," woof, been a long time (actually it appeared once in 2020, but before that it had been eleven years). Anyway, here was me:
And so I got started, but the NE continued to be impenetrable because getting the back ends of the long Acrosses didn't help me get the fronts. I forgot the name of the environmental MOVEMENT. I thought the [Silence notifications?] might be LIGHTS. And [Bourgeoisie and proletariat] sounded so specifically Marxist that I figured something much more particular than SOCIAL preceded CLASS at 1A. Then I tried to dip into the middle of the grid with an entirely made-up bread product called CROSETES! (7D: "Little toasts," in Italian). Very wrong, and yet ... somehow I managed to get into the middle of the grid anyway, and finally ended up with some fill I could enjoy: a SEX SCENE (30D: When you might see a star's moon?):
Things got way easier from here on out, as, unlike up top, I was able to get those middle answers from their back ends. I was especially able to see the horrid wrongness that was CROSETES and change it to a word I actually know reasonably well, it turns out: CROSTINI. After that, whooshed back west across the middle, then whooshed down around the SW corner into the south (where all the long answers went in very, very easily). But before that I must've taken a detour back into the pesky NW via ADELAIDE, a queen I've never heard of but a city I know of, and a song I know very well.
SAKS SOX SINTAX, all the things I failed to see at first fell into place. Then it was down to the Monday-easy bottom to finish things off. Ended with SINGLET, which I didn't understand at first (45A: Attire one might grapple with). I've never worn a SINGLET. Are they so hard to put on that you have to "grapple" with them, I wondered. But sometime during this write-up, it struck me that wrestlers wear SINGLETs, and that's probably what the "grapple" business is all about. In the end, this felt like three puzzles, difficulty-wise: the NW (hard), the middle and NE (easyish), and the bottom (extremely easy). Outside of the NW (and CROSETES!), I had no errors to speak of, except TAMPA before TEMPE (42D: Home of one of the country's largest state universities), and (much less explicably) RINGLET before SINGLET. A pretty average Saturday overall, but bonus points for the creepy, rotten pumpkin-like, ghost-like, sad-telephone-esque grid.
Word of the Day: LEGO HOUSE (9D: Danish tourist attraction with multiple play areas) —
Lego House is a 12,000-square metre building filled with 25 million Legobricks in Billund, Denmark, located near Legoland and the headquarters of The Lego Group. It is also known as Home of the Brick with reference to Billund, where Lego originates. Visitors can experience a variety of activities during their visit, including physically and digitally building with Lego bricks, programming robots and animating models. The centre's visitor experience includes four experience zones, two exhibitions and the Lego Museum, which showcases the history of the Lego brand and company.
Lego House has been recognised for its innovative design, which aimed to reflect the Lego brand. The building incorporates 21 staggered blocks that resemble Lego bricks, with nine roof terraces containing children's play areas. The house was designed by the Bjarke Ingels Group and was inaugurated on 28 September 2017. The building is owned and maintained by Lego System A/S. (wikipedia)
"Lego House" is a song by English singer-songwriter Ed Sheeran. It was released on 11 November 2011 as the third single lifted from his debut studio album + (pronounced "plus") of 2011. It was released as the second single in the US on 11 February 2013. It was written by Sheeran, Jake Gosling and Chris Leonard, and produced by Jake Gosling.
The song received its first radio play on Zane Lowe's BBC Radio 1 show on 8 September 2011 and was Sheeran's first song to make the BBC Radio 2 playlist. The remix featuring P Money premiered on MistaJam's BBC Radio 1Xtra show on 30 September 2011. The music video features actor Rupert Grint, as a play on their similar appearance. The song did well worldwide, reaching top 5 on Australia, Ireland, New Zealand, and the UK Singles Chart, and top 50 on other countries including United States. (wikipedia)
• • •
Aside from the Harry Potter clue, which as usual can **** off, and the "GOT" clue, which, ugh, can someone read a real book, please, or read anything but lowest-common-denominator fantasy, anything, anything at all??? Other genres exist! Or if you need fantasy, there's Ursula Le Guin, she can write! I'd accept some NK Jemisin ... Marlon James is doing cool things with the fantasy genre right now ... branch out! (and grow up) ... sigh. As I say, aside from the warmed-over Tolkien, I liked this a lot, but it was very, Very easy. The NW corner went up in a flash because I knew HORCRUX, and then just when I thought I might get thwarted trying to turn the corner into the heart of the grid (that BRAILLE clue was hard), I took one look at 32A: Cognitive contortions, looked at the ME- that I already had in the grid, and MENTAL GYMNASTICS went right in. The whole grid just bloomed out from there, with only a couple of small hitches on the way to completion. I wish the clue on MENTAL GYMNASTICS had been better, or more clever. It's just really just [Synonym for 'mental' Synonym for 'gymnastics'], isn't it? Not too much fun. But it's a great central answer, and the reason this grid is 16 instead of the typical 15 squares wide. Ironically, very few MENTAL GYMNASTICS were required today in order to solve the puzzle. There was one slightly harrowing passage, where I had to manage abutting proper nouns I didn't really know (HODOR, SOO), but luckily LEGO HOUSE was inferrable from LEGO --USE, so I slid through there, changed SLURPEE to SLUSHIE, and wrapped things up in the SE corner. Actually, I only thought I changed SLURPEE to SLUSHIE. EGO BOOST made SLURPEE impossible, but somehow I didn't write over the "R" and just left SLURPEE there. I fixed the ending to -IE because ICE CREAM was pretty easy to get (30D: Kind of sandwich), but I still didn't notice that the "P" from SLURPEE was still there, so HIRED GOON ended up being the hardest thing in the grid for me to get (29D: Gorilla with a job to do), but only because of my own error. Nothing to do with the actual difficulty of the puzzle. Must've lost 20 seconds or so wondering how any answer could start PIRED-... No trap so deadly as the trap you set for yourself, as they say (as Philip Marlowe says, to be exact). By the way, I don't think you need the "with a job to do" portion of that HIRED GOON clue at all. Accurate, and much more Saturdayish, without it. I finished things up with THE GOAT, and if this puzzle doesn't make you feel like THE Saturday solving GOAT, no Saturday will. An EGO BOOST, for sure.
I do love a POUR OVER, so I'm excited to get this write-up finished and go downstairs for the Chemex ritual that marks the dividing line between early-morning blogging and the Actual Day. Best time of the day, by far: the coffee-making time. Just me, the coffee, the cats, and the morning darkness. The coffee reveries are strong this morning, where was I? ... Oh, yes, this grid is very clean and lively. We've seen FREEGAN recently, but it remains a good, current answer (13A: Person who lives on discarded food). I love a good PLOT TWIST, and I loved "The French Dispatch," particularly the segment that starred Frances McDormand and TIMOTHÉE Chalomet (lots of people thought this was the weakest segment, apparently, but it just *looked* so cool I don't see how that's possible). I enjoyed remembering BOTTOM even though most Shakespeare comedies leave me slightly cold (Looking forward to watching Frances McDormand and Denzel Washington in "Macbeth" some time very soon...; the tragedies, those are my groove).
I thought 28D: Chips, e.g. (SNACK) was STACK at first, because of poker. I had RES before I had LEX at 5D: Justinian law, which is really the stupidest error. I mean, I saw right through the clue, knew it had to be the Latin word for "law," and wrote in ... the Latin word for "thing" instead. Faceplant, albeit a brief one. The clue on BRAILLE was probably the trickiest one of the day, as it uses " with feeling" in such a misleading way (I wanted something to do with oration or recitation, obviously) (35A: Words read with feeling). I liked seeing HOT COMB, which is the title of a wonderful collection of comics by Ebony Flowers (15D: Hair-straightening tool); it's a collection I've taught in my comics class a few times now. Speaking of my comics class, I really Really gotta get to work on that syllabus today (the semester starts on Tuesday). Hope you enjoyed this puzzle as much as I did. Never gonna be mad to see a snappy Friday puzzle on a Saturday. Give me easyish and bright over tough and plodding any day. See you tomorrow.
Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld
PS very clever, and tough, clue on SPF today (41D: Screen rating, in brief?). Wants you to think of TV/movie ratings, but the "Screen" here is actually sunscreen.
THEME: "Job Sharing" — jobs reimagined as other jobs (i.e. "side hustle"s):
Theme answers:
LOCKSMITH (23A: Side hustle for a hairstylist?) (because stylists shape locks)
LAB SPECIALIST (34A: Side hustle for a veterinarian?) (... vets deal with labs)
BAGGAGE HANDLER (50A: Side hustle for a therapist?) (... therapists handle your 'baggage')
OUTPATIENT COORDINATOR (67A: Side hustle for an anesthesiologist?) (... anesthesiologists put patients under i.e. "out")
NAIL TECHNICIAN (87A: Side hustle for a carpenter?) (... carpenters work with nails)
CIVIL ENGINEER (101A: Side hustle for a marriage counselor?) (... counselors ... deal with ... civil unions, maybe?? Not really getting this one)
BASE COACH (118A: Side hustle for a drill instructor?) (... drill instructors work on army bases)
Word of the Day: CPI (35D: Economic stat.) —
A consumer price index is a price index, the price of a weighted average market basket of consumer goods and services purchased by households. Changes in measured CPI track changes in prices over time.
A CPI is a statistical estimate constructed using the prices of a sample of representative items whose prices are collected periodically. Sub-indices and sub-sub-indices can be computed for different categories and sub-categories of goods and services, being combined to produce the overall index with weights reflecting their shares in the total of the consumer expenditures covered by the index. It is one of several price indices calculated by most national statistical agencies. The annual percentage change in a CPI is used as a measure of inflation. A CPI can be used to index (i.e. adjust for the effect of inflation) the real value of wages, salaries, and pensions; to regulate prices; and to deflate monetary magnitudes to show changes in real values. In most countries, the CPI, along with the population census, is one of the most closely watched national economic statistics. (wikipedia)
• • •
Really wanted to like this one because Doug is my friend and I almost always love his work, but this theme didn't work for me at all. I think the idea is a fine one, but the execution here is just one clunk after another. I think my main problem is I really really hate the term "side hustle" in a way I did not fully realize until solving this puzzle. It's such a horrible coinage, born of an economy where living-wage jobs are disappearing but you're supposed to somehow feel like the problem is *you*, you're not *doing* enough, you gotta hustle, baby. Your problem is you're just not industrious enough, not that unfettered free-market capitalism is completely soul-crushing. It's gross because it makes the desperate need for more cash sound like a cool fun thing you do if you're a real go-getter. Seriously, I hate the term so much. Really, what you've got here are second jobs. "Moonlighting" would somehow have been less irksome, despite implying the same thing (i.e. that you need a second job to, uh, live). But beyond my aversion to the term, there are real problems, namely that roughly half the "jobs" are so vague that they don't land with any kind of oomph or precision. What the hell is a LAB SPECIALIST? What kind of lab? Specializing in what? I had by far the hardest time solving this puzzle in the area just above the SPECIAL part of SPECIALIST. There's just nothing *vivid* or specific happening there. LOCKSMITH, cool, BAGGAGE HANDLER, yes good, but the rest, as jobs, all feel pretty -ish. Kinda nebulous. SPECIALIST. COORDINATOR. TECHNICIAN. They just don't tell me anything. I needed all kinds of crosses just to make those parts of the theme answers come into view. I guess BASE COACH is a job ... though usually I hear the term with "first" or "third" in front of it, so again, the answer didn't exactly snap, crackle, or pop. I don't really know what a CIVIL ENGINEER does, but I've definitely heard of it, so that one can have a pass. The others just felt limp. I thought the nail person was a CLINICIAN ... or maybe just a cosmetologist? I don't doubt that all these "jobs" are real jobs that someone has, I'm just saying they are murky and vague in their terminology. INSURANCE SALESMAN seems well-defined and snazzy by comparison, and that's just sad.
Further, everything just felt clued harder than usual. I sailed through some parts of this grid, but at other times I felt like I was just crawling because I just couldn't find the handle on some of these clues ... and then the answers would turn out to be something deathly dull like DATA or CPI. But seriously, that whole MASH-UP area was brutal for me. Genuinely thought I wasn't going to solve it. Finally looked at the MOUSER clue and that saved me because before that, with no idea about LAB SPECIALIST (again, ???) I could not get MAMA BIRD (that MAMA part, yikes), or SCULPT, or PARTIER, and definitely not MASH-UP or ARCANA (had an "S" at the end of that one for a bit). It's not a bad section, fill-wise, just ... really hard to access because LAB SPECIALIST was such a non-thing, which deprived me of crucial toeholds. Not a lot of longer non-theme stuff to spice up the grid today. Mostly 3-to-6-letter stuff, which is hard to make consistently interesting. LOSE-LOSE is good (ironically), and POGO STICKS is bouncy (literally), but everything else was just OK, and when cluing got tough ... well, it's just not terribly fun to struggle through the cluing for short stuff, since there's no payoff. There's just ... short stuff. The grid is clean enough, just not a lot of fun. In fact, with ALITO LEPER GHETTO REEKING LOSE-LOSE in it, the whole vibe of the puzzle is kinda downerish. Didn't know DARLA, but most of the rest of it I was familiar with; it just felt like a slog getting a lot of it to turn up.
Explanations and other stuff:
74A: Avid bird-watcher, say (TOM CAT) — any cat that's around birds will watch them. No idea why "tom" is apt here, except that it's an outdoor cat. But my cats are indoor cats and they too will watch the hell out of birds. And squirrels. And leaves that float in the wind.
7D: Frodo's film franchise (LOTR) — "Lord of the Rings"
106A: Small sweater? (PORE) — your pores are small (relative to, I don't know, fire pits or moon craters) and you sweat through them
40D: Thrift-store fashion, informally (BOHO) — I got this quickly, which really isn't like me. What do I know about fashion? I couldn't even get the TECHNICIAN part of NAIL TECHNICIAN right. Anyway, BOHO is just a shortened form of "Bohemian."
66D: Aggressively mainstream, in slang (BASIC) — can you be "aggressively mainstream"? How do you "aggress" into the fat middle of the culture? "Screw you, independent-minded people, I'm gonna watch a whole season of 'Friends' and then I'm gonna listen to the new Adele album on repeat! *That'll* show you! Grrrr ... Aggression!"
82D: Sole ingredient in some cookies? (DATA) — really thought this was gonna be a fish pun. After I finally got it ... really wished it had been a fish pun. "A cookie is a small amount of data generated by a website and saved by your web browser. Its purpose is to remember information about you, similar to a preference file created by a software application." (techterms.com)
Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld
P.S. You wanna see a trick puzzle? And an easy one, so you won't get all angry? Here you go: a 7x7 with a fun little twist.
P.P.S. a timely and important (and puzzle-related) message from my friend and fellow crossword blogger, Rachel Fabi:
"These Puzzles Fund Abortion" (TPFA), a puzzle pack of 14 crossword puzzles by all-star constructors, raised over $60,000 this year to support abortion funds around the country. In light of the legal challenges to abortion access currently under consideration by the Supreme Court, a donor told TPFA that they will match donations to abortion funds up to $1500 -- just donate to an abortion fund (see here for a list) and forward your receipt to the email address on the TPFA page above to double your impact. Keep an eye out for an all-new TPFA pack coming in spring 2022!
Relative difficulty: Medium-Challenging (*for a Tuesday*)
THEME: wacky law stuff — regular old legal phrases, clued wackily:
Theme answers:
PRO BONO ATTORNEY (17A: Advocate for U2's frontman?)
MOVE TO STRIKE (27A: Swing of a bowler's arm?)
MOTION DENIED (49A: A little tied up at the moment?)
CLASS-ACTION SUIT (65A: Attire for gym period?)
Word of the Day: GOJI (35D: Berry touted as a "superfood") —
Goji, goji berry, or wolfberry (Chinese: 枸杞; pinyin: gǒuqǐ), is the fruit of either Lycium barbarum or Lycium chinense, two closely related species of boxthorn in the nightshadefamily, Solanaceae. L. barbarum and L. chinense fruits are similar but can be distinguished by differences in taste and sugar content.
Both species are native to Asia, and have been long used in traditional Asian cuisine.
The fruit has also been an ingredient in traditional Chinese, Korean, and Japanese medicine, since at least the 3rd century AD. The plant parts are called by the Latin names lycii fructus (fruit), herba lycii (leaves), etc., in modern official pharmacopeias.
Since about 2000, goji berry and derived products became common in developed countries as health foods or alternative medicine remedies, extending from exaggerated and unproven claims about their health benefits. (wikipedia)
• • •
Surprised this made the cut. This is some straight-up 20th-century corn. The most basic recipe there is. All you have to do is assemble phrases from literally *any* field in symmetrical fashion in your grid. You know, four or so answers of 8 or more letters in length. Then, just write some wacky "?" clues where you imagine the phrase means something else, something ridiculous. That is all. Done and done. It's the lowest theme bar of all. The theme ends up riding entirely on the theme *clues* (the interestingness of the answers is usually irrelevant), and those are usually groaners at best, tortured monstrosities at worst. Today it's a bunch of legal phrases, so there's no real interest there. I guess they'd be fine answers in a themeless puzzle; they're solid long answers. But it's not like you're exactly happy to see any of them, or like any of them feels particularly original. And then there's the clues ... which are awkward and forced in the case MOVE TO STRIKE and MOTION DENIED, pretty good in the case of CLASS ACTIONSUIT, and, in the case of PRO BONO ATTORNEY ... well, that one had no shot, because the answer itself should've disqualified it entirely from this puzzle. One thing you'll notice about the other three themers is that when the clues wackify the answers, they take the alleged meaning of those answers Entirely Outside The Realm Of Law. That is what you're supposed to do with a theme like this—you hide the nature of your underlying theme by making the clues point elsewhere; today, that means no legal frame of reference, and 3/4 of the clues get that right, but the PRO BONO ATTORNEY clue *can't* get that right because it's got ATTORNEY in it and you can not not not redirect the meaning of attorney away from law. It is an impossibility. If PRO BONO had been the entire themer, bang, you're in business. [Wild about U2's frontman?]. Perfect. But here you have to frame the whole thing legally, putting the awkward "Advocate" in the clue. It just doesn't work. Understand the nature of the theme you're dealing with and craft your puzzle carefully rather than just saying "close enough, who's going to notice?"
The fill is also last-century and has nothing to make up for the stale theme concept. IONIA SAYST, AARP SIRI, ABO OBIT, and on and on. Overfamiliar threes and fours OVERRUN the grid. NEWSOM is timely because of that catastrophic and embarrassing attempt to recall the California governor last week or whenever it was (52D: Successor to Brown as California governor), but otherwise there's not much else here to make you sit up and take notice. Also, the worst clues, and hardest clues, for me, were the ones where someone thought it would be a good idea to shoehorn more legal stuff into the puzzle. That's how you know someone's anxious that the theme isn't substantial enough—you get clues like 55D: Onetime Supreme Court justice Charles EVANSHughes. Died in '48, never heard of him, isn't even the first "Charles Evans" that comes up when you google (that would be a medical facility on Long Island called the Charles Evans Center). Do you need EVANS to be legal this bad? On a Tuesday? And the clue on NEED, oof, so awkward (37D: Lawyer, for a defendant, typically). I had no idea what that clue wanted, or what all those commas were doing, or ... anything. When I got NEED ... eyeroll, sigh, etc. Other sticky spots for me: RETORT and REBUFF before REBUKE (4D: Sharp talking-to); total blankness when confronted with the clue for ALDO (42D: Global shoe retailer) (I know ALDO as the titular proprietor of the pizzeria I went to in my childhood; the shoes remain theoretical to me); AONE before ARCH (5A: Primary). I also "get around town" IN A BUS, so that's what I went with for the (awful prepositional phrase) IN A CAB (51D: How many people get around town). Speaking of the bus, mine will be here in a couple hours, so I gotta go.
Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld
P.S. Happy Earth, Wind & Fire Day (and thus happy birthday to my best friend, who doesn't do crosswords :)
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!")
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