THEME: FLOWER / GARDEN (5D: With 50-Down, place that this puzzle grid represents) — circled (or shaded) squares spell out kinds of flowers, and (I ... guess?) are flower-shaped:
FLOWERS:
VIOLET
DAHLIA
AZALEA
ORCHID
Word of the Day: LIA Fáil (ancient crowning stone) (28D) —
The Lia Fáil (Irish: [ˌl̠ʲiə ˈfˠaːlʲ], meaning Stone of Destiny (or also "Speaking Stone" to account for its oracular legend) is a stone at the Inauguration Mound (Irish: an Forrad) on the Hill of Tara in County Meath, Ireland, which served as the coronation stone for the High Kings of Ireland. It is also known as the Coronation Stone of Tara. According to legend, all of the kings of Ireland were crowned on the stone up to Muirchertach mac Ercae, c. AD 500. (wikipedia)
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So many things had to go wrong for this to be as unpleasant as it was. First, it's Monday, and Mondays are often very good—the best themes are simple, with a nice, tight, interesting themer grouping, and then squeaky clean fill as far as the eye can see. If you blow a Monday, I get extra mad because it's clearly a day that can routinely be executed to a high degree of precision, overcoming even the occasional editorial malfeasance. But this puzzle ... wow. First, it's way way way too theme-dense for a Monday. What this does is make the grid buckle. The fill is just bad, all over. No one should have to endure stuff like LIA AINTI AGRI YAYAS EKEBY ACIDY ASA ISTO ONTV etc on a Monday. A couple of those, OK, but it was like being assaulted, over and over. Worse, there are no themers with actual ... theme in them? So the revealer was a bear to get without a ton of crosses. And then the cluing, it just didn't compute, over and over. Usually on a Monday I can run the first three Acrosses easily. Maybe I can't get one of them right away, fine, but the clues tend to make sense, anyway. Today, right off the bat, I couldn't understand any of the clues. Whiffed on first two Acrosses and only tentatively guessed the third. BEST ... from that present participle to a simple adjective was yikes (1A: Winning a blue ribbon). And FRAN!?!? I was born there, LOL. Seriously, no idea until (very late, toward the end) I got the "F" from FLOWER. Is it AVOW or AVER!? (14A: State as fact) Who can say? RATED R or RATED X? Shrug. A LEGO is a "toy"? Don't most toys hurt when you step on them barefoot? Four-letter word for [Sweetie]? Lots of options. Just flailing around. Obviously there are easy answers in that NW section too, so it was all ultimately gettable, but only after flopping around, with no real reward for the flopping. Ugh, the longer answers not being themers is so annoying. SERVE TIME instead of DO TIME (3D: Be in jail) ... it's just irksomeness all over. A very hot case of Trying To Do Too Much and just face-planting as a result. If this had been a Tue or a Wed, I'll admit it would've been a little easier to take. But only a little.
Further, AZALEA is a flowering *bush*, and seems slightly out of place in your FLOWER / GARDEN. At any rate, I think of them as flower shrubs more than as flowers, per se. Beyond the theme (and all the yuck fill and vague cluing), I don't get why you give a good word like NICHE such an awful, bizarre "business" (???) clue (11D: Limited kind of market). A NICHE is a "market"? Isn't NICHE the adjective, as in "a NICHE market"? Seems like NICHE goes with "limited," but it's not clued that way. I mean ... your clue could just as easily have been [Limited], tbh. But even that is terrible. The authorial / editorial voice on this one just way far away from my idea of a good time. Take your show-offy "feat of construction" puzzles and ... well, put them somewhere I never see them, but above all keep them far away from Monday (or Friday, for that matter—some days are sacred).
THEME: digits — themers begin or end with words that can refer to one of the five fingers:
Theme answers:
THUMB WAR (41D: Hand-to-hand combat?)
BODY MASS INDEX (18D: Calculation using height and weight)
MIDDLE OF THE ROAD (7D: Neither left nor right)
BOXING RING (32D: Place to duke it out)
LITTLE EVA (36D: "The Loco-Motion" singer, 1962)
Word of the Day: ECCO (40D: Danish shoe brand) —
ECCO Sko A/S is a Danish shoe manufacturer and retailer founded in 1963 by Karl Toosbuy, in Bredebro, Denmark. The company began with only the production of footwear, but has since expanded into leather production, as well as accessories and small leather goods. ECCO opened its first retail store in Denmark in 1982. ECCO’s products are sold in 99 countries from over 2,250 ECCO shops and more than 14,000 sales points. ECCO is family-owned, founded in Denmark in 1963, and employs 21,300 people worldwide. (wikipedia)
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This is an old theme. It has been done, in one form or another, roughly a billion times. I guess running the themers Down gives it ... something. Some kind of angle. But not much of one. So the concept is not novel, but if you've never seen it before, then maybe it holds some charm. But truthfully I wasn't as put off by this puzzle as I might have been normally because I solved this one in a completely and entertaining way: namely, over Zoom, with my daughter, Ella. I made a video of the whole experience, which you can can watch, well, here, now, if you like:
[when I talk in the video about there being no apparent pattern to the "finger" placement, I meant "beyond the very obvious fingers-in-correct-order arrangement," in case that somehow wasn't clear]
The only interesting thing for me, puzzle-wise, was trying to figure out what the theme answers were going to be. Once we got MIDDLE filled in (from crosses) and then INDEX filled in (Ella got BODY MASS INDEX very quickly), I knew instantly that we were gonna be looking at a hand, and so I just went ahead and filled in the circled squares Without Even Looking At The Clues For Those Answers. This was a bad strategy, as you can see if you watch the video, because both of us just assumed that that final themer would start with PINKIE. If I'd looked at the *clue* before writing anything in, I might've realized right away that the answer was LITTLE EVA (a name I know, largely from crosswords), but because I cockily wrote in PINKIE, when the time came to actually look at that clue, I had no idea who the singer of "The Loco-Motion" could be. PINKIE LEE sounded like someone. But I'm sure I was thinking PEGGY LEE. Annnnnyway, if you watch the video of us solving, you can actually hear the moment we realize that it's LITTLE and not PINKIE—audible unrehearsed simultaneous groans. Yes, it's your LITTLE finger, but ugh, come on, it's the PINKIE. Ella surmised that it's more commonly spelled PINKY, which may be true, but still, LITTLE was not a winner with either of us. That was very easily the lowest point of the solve.
No other points were terribly low. Neither of us liked SHIRT as the answer for [Jersey], largely because "Jersey" just has so many other meanings that eclipse the SHIRT meaning. I can't think of a single instance where I would swap "jersey" for SHIRT. Maybe, mayyyybe when talking about a baseball player's jersey??? I dunno. Seemed off. Otherwise, fill seemed pretty typical. Not wonderful (ITGO?) but not any worse than your average NYTXW. I'd never solved a puzzle with my daughter, nor had I ever watched her solve a puzzle, and I was surprised, both at how fast she got some answers (she's clearly developing her solving muscle) and how certain gimmes for me remain totally mysteries to her (see Kim NOVAK, for instance). She also had never heard of the term D.O.A., and since that initialism crosses EGAL (which she also didn't really know), she might've been derailed by that crossing had we not been solving together. She also didn't get OWNS and LIT nearly as fast as I thought she should, given that she is still a card-carrying member of teendom (for another few months) and I figured that stuff was straight out of her lexicon. She knew both terms, of course—just wasn't as quick on the uptake as the old guy she was solving with.
Hope you found something here to like. I think I should co-solve all Tuesdays with people I like. Maybe Sundays too. Having an entertaining solving companion really helps lackluster puzzles go down easy.
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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