Rex Parker Does the NYT Crossword Puzzle: Kelvin Zhou

Constructor: Kelvin Zhou

Relative difficulty: Medium

THEME: none

Word of the Day: LASH-UP (55A: Makeshift arrangement) —

noun informal
1.
a hastily made or arranged device, organization, etc.
2.
any improvised arrangement (Collins Dictionary)

• • •

I didn't sleep very well, so when I say this felt like a slog, I mostly mean that I just couldn't click with the clues that easily at all today. Nearly every clue seemed to be trying Really hard to be misdirective or unclear, such that I never got a nice flow going. I never got really stuck, but I did do a lot of double and triple takes with the clues, and needed more crosses than usual today to get many of the longer answers. I think I'm most frustrated by LASH-UP, a term I've somehow made it well into middle age without ever having seen. Is it British? At one site I looked at, all the examples were from the Economist. The term has never, not once, appeared in the NYTXW before today. Strangely, every dictionary site seems to have a slightly different definition or set of definitions. Wiktionary has "a crude improvisation or bodged effort" (why would you use 'bodged' in your definition, what is that word? Is it like 'botched?'). Dictionary dot com has "a temporary connection of equipment for experimental or emergency use." Some of these have LASHUP as one word, some have it hyphenated. All I know is that I had -ASHUP and the only thing in my word closet that fits that space is MASHUP. When "M" (eventually) bombed, I considered HASHUP (I mean, you can make a "hash" or mess of things, and a "hash" is a kind of "makeshift" meal, so it seemed plausible). That "L" was absolutely crucial to my understanding of the very trickily clued SAFETY SCHOOL, since I was coming at it from below (9D: Plan B, for seniors). So while there are some fine things in this puzzle, my strongest reaction today was "LASHUP? Ugh, what? Come on..."

The puzzle was trying to get vague and tricky right from the jump, with PARER (a word I hate, mostly because it's a potentially brutal Wordle or Quordle word—you have to really force yourself to remember "R" can go in PA-ER, and add at to "P" and "G" and "L" and probably "V") (see also CORER, another kitchen implement, another pain-in-the-ass word). I wanted CIDER here. CIDER is nicer on every level than CORER. CIDER is also nicer than EDUCE, oof, that's a word only a crossword could love (14A: Draw forth). Lots of trouble getting READY SET GO because "READ" looked like a standalone word so somehow I thought the "starting line" was maybe the "starting line" of instructions, like "READ ... ME FIRST?" or something like that (5D: Starting line at a starting line). STICKER SHOCK is a nice answer, though that ambiguous "tag" really got me (20D: Dismayed reaction to a tag). It's baseball season after all—the World Series starts today—so I thought it was that kind of "tag." I loved "I DON'T KNOW, CAN YOU?"—easily the best thing in the grid—both because it's a great colloquialism and because it deliberately breaks the rule about not using clue words that are also in the answer (namely, "Can") (37A: Snarky reply to a question that starts "Can I...?"). Constructor: "Can I break that rule?" Snarky Editor: "I DON'T KNOW, CAN YOU?" The snark comes from the fact that technically, the questioner should be using "may," not "can." The latter is a question of ability, the former a question of permission. Love a big slab of pedantic snark smack in the middle of my grid.

The hardest part for me was probably the NE. I figured when I got SAFETY up in there, things would just open up, but no. I thought Frankenstein ran into his monster in the Arctic, so ALPS took some doing (6A: Where the monster and Frankenstein cross paths, in "Frankenstein"). Parsing PR TEAM, rough (8D: Spinning ring, informally?). PARACHUTE wasn't too hard, but somehow ART FORGER was. Oh, and THREE PIN, yeesh, just an arbitrary pin number? And no bowling context in the clue? Tough. But I got through, without ever getting completely bogged down, so that makes it probably a pretty normal Friday puzzle, difficulty-wise, in the end.

Bullets:

17A: Fictional sidekick on a donkey (PANZA) — I know at least some of you wanted SHREK, even though he's not a "sidekick." Something about "Fictional" and five letters and Donkey (who was the sidekick) screamed SHREK. But no, it's Don Quixote's sidekick, Sancho PANZA

41A: Thai money (BAHT) — a gimme except that I always want to spell it BHAT. Always.
42A: Returns home? (IRS) — tax returns!
43A: Spread followers (BETTORS) — oh, the betting spread. How many points a team is favored by in a given game. You can bet on a team that wins but you still end up losing the bet because the winning team was favored by 7 points and failed to cover the spread (e.g. only won by 3).
53A: Number discovered in the 1500s (ETHER) — now this trickery I saw right through. Cluing ETHER as "number" (i.e. something that numbs) is about as old as cluing a river as a "flower" (i.e. something that flows).
60A: Clarence ___, "The Wire" mayor (ROYCE) — even if you watched The Wire, you could be forgiven for forgetting this name. He only appeared in seasons 3 and 4. These tertiary characters in bygone TV shows ... you can see how annoying (and trivial-seeming) they'd be if you never watched the show. The Wire ended its run 17 years ago now.

[Rose ROYCE]

9D: Plan B, for seniors (SAFETY SCHOOL) — really thought this was something to do with Medicare, which is probably by design.
16D: Derivative of sin (COS) — "Sin" here is the abbr. of the trigonometric function "sine." COS = "cosine."
44D: Chest: Prefix (STETHO-) — huge "d'oh!" moment for me here, as I confidently wrote in STERNO- (you know, because your STERNUM protects your "Chest"). PATRIOTIC forced a change (56A: Flag-waving, say), but I only changed the one letter and so had STETNO. That "N" really really made TCHOTCHKE (a hard word to begin with) hard to see (61A: Bobblehead, e.g.).

That's all. See you next time.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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