THEME: "Of Course!" — golf puns (bad-at-golf puns, I guess, to be quite specific, since the main "character" in each theme clue is a "duffer")
Theme answers:
MICROCHIPS (23A: Duffer's approach shots that barely go anywhere?)
A STROKE OF BAD LUCK (33A: Duffer's putt that just misses?)
CAPTAIN HOOK (46A: Nickname for a duffer who can't hit straight?)
DISTRACTED DRIVING (66A: Result of spectators heckling a duffer?)
WEDGE ISSUES (88A: Duffer's problems with an angled club?)
IRON DEFICIENCIES (100A: Duffer's reasons to choose a wood?)
NOT UP TO PAR (115A: Like the duffer in this puzzle?)
Word of the Day: BOBSTAY (71A: Rope holding down a bowsprit) —
: a stay to hold a ship's bowsprit down
bowsprit: : a large spar projecting forward from the stem of a ship
spar:1
: a stout pole (merriam-webster.com)
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Take a field, area, topic of some kind. Write down a bunch of words from that area, topic, field that also have meanings outside of that area, topic, field. Find ordinary phrases containing those words. Congratulations, you are a Sunday NYTXW crossword constructor. Last week, coffee. Ooh, GROUNDS is a word from coffee but did you know also it has a different meaning!? Theme time! And today ... wow, DRIVING has a meaning in golf *and* in the automotive world! How far can I take this [six minutes later] wow, pretty far! In short, this theme was death. Well, no, I'd rather do this puzzle again than die, but only barely. This is the kind of puzzle you'd show someone who had never done a puzzle before to explain the concept of "theme" — that is, if you wanted to actively discourage that person from ever wanting to solve another puzzle ever again. "Oh ... yeah, yeah, I get it. I do. 'Cause 'chip' is a golf shot, so ... MICRO... CHIPS, yeah, it's cute. It is. OK, look, I gotta go, I'm late for this thing." End scene. Also, golf is the worst. But that's just opinion. Good opinion, but opinion. Whereas the tiresomeness of this theme type is not opinion. It is stone cold fact. This theme ARFED and you know it.
There's a smattering of likeable stuff in here. SCARJO! ELDERWAND! (I forgot this was a thing) SMURFETTE! SPEEDBAG! BAT SIGNAL! All of that is very nice. But I'm gonna need a lot (LOT) more of that to make up for IRON DEFICIENCIES and every other corny theme pun in this grid. Also, someone needs to come get BOBSTAY (??!) and LYSE (!?!?!?!) (76D: Disintegrate, in a way, as cells in the body) and whoever this LEILA is (62A: Orphan girl in Byron's "Don Juan"). Also, PLONKS?? (18D: Carelessly drops). Is that different from PLUNKS? Answer: it is not. Once again, I direct your attention to the concept of the *variant*!!!!
Word of the Day: GREENWASH (39A: Give a false impression of eco-friendliness) —
noun
noun: greenwash; noun: green-wash
disinformation disseminated by an organization so as to present an environmentally responsible public image.
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Hello, everybody! It's Aimee Lucido here taking over for Rex for the day to justify me shamelessly using his platform to plug my brand new book that just came out on Tuesday!
But first, the puzzle:
I always let out a sigh of relief when I'm on the hook for a blog post and I end up solving the puzzle relatively quickly. In this case, I solved the puzzle in 28:02 (which is about 10 minutes below my average Friday (please don't judge me for being slow)), but I spent about 8 of those minutes stuck in the NW.
I tore my way through the SW, loving ICEBREAKER andTAG TEAMED, wanting MAKES BANK for MAKES A MINT even though it didn't fit, and figuring out TRACKING before I got TORNADO for 7D. I figured out GREENWASH (great word!) from the straightforward clue, even though I'd never heard of it before, and the NE and center fell from there. But I struggled significantly in the NW because I had LOOS for IANS and refused to put NON-GMO as the first six letters in 3D because of how non-thing-y it seemed.
Overall, I found the grid mostly solid, if a little sleepy, with the only things that I didn't know being ZUNI and TOPOS, but I balked at some of the "green paint" answers in the grid. TENNIS SHOT? Does that mean we can use SOCCER SHOT or BASKETBALL SHOT or LACROSSE SHOT in our grids? NON-GMO CORN could have just as easily have been NON-GMO BEAN or, I dunno, NON-GMO PEAR. CHOCOLATE RABBIT seems to open up the door for CHOCOLATE SANTA or CHOCOLATE EGG or CHOCOLATE HEART. CHOCOLATE HAND? Why not!
These phrases in the grid are by no means bad, and I would even say some are good, but the excitement is lost a bit in the arbitrariness of the adjective/noun pair. By contrast, however, URBAN DECAY is a thing all its own, and replacing URBAN with, say, RURAL completely negates the meaning. This to me is why URBAN DECAY or GREENWASH make me happy, but NON-GMO CORN makes me sad.
I found the cluing on this a little too straightforward, as I usually hope to walk out of a Friday with at least one or two meaty "?" clues, but I did enjoy learning that MR T used to be a bouncer and that "Rockin' Around The Christmas Tree" was sung by BRENDA LEE.
Bullets:
31D: Like good cakes and bad cellars (MOIST) — I wonder how many solvers cringed when they put this word in. It's never bothered me, but I know a lot of people hate this word. Moist, moist, moist.
53D: ___ pad (LILY) — I reaaaaallly wanted MAXI here.
35A: Person put in a box(JUROR)— I enjoyed this clue! It made me think contortionists and I spent a lot of time trying to think of a five-letter synonym for that.
18A: Hand-held anxiety reliever (STRESS BALL) — This was a debut word in all the databases that I have access too, and I really liked seeing it!
100A: Middle-grade book written by Aimee Lucido about girls learning to program computers that got a starred review from Kirkus (EMMY IN THE KEY OF CODE) — Wait, this wasn't in the puzzle! Oh yeah, it's my brand-new book that I'm shamelessly plugging! Check it out here!
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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