Rex Parker Does the NYT Crossword Puzzle: Melinda Gates

Constructor: Melinda Gates and Joel Fagliano

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium (4:00)

THEME: doubling of first letters — familiar phrases that start with a single letter have that letter doubled ... and then the whole thing is wackily clued:

Theme answers:

XX FACTOR (17A: Part played by women and girls?)
CC SECTION (29A: Area below To:" in an email?)
JJ CREW (37A: Ones on set with 2009's "Star Trek" director?)
AA LINE (40A: Any one of the 12 steps?)
BB COMPLEX (46A: Group of buildings housing a King?)
EE READER (64A: Lover of Cummings's poetry?)

Word of the Day: BLUE ROAN (12D: Horse with evenly mixed black-and-white hairs) —

adjective

1.

denoting an animal's coat consisting of black-and-white hairs evenly mixed, giving it a blue-gray hue.

noun

1.

an animal with blue roan coat. (google)

• • •

Oh, we're still doing the whole "celebrity" co-constructor thing? Really thought that fad was finished, but I should've known better. This is the kind of theme that could've been good if there had been some Reason for the doubled letters. Seems like the potential basis for an interesting meta-puzzle, if you could get the letters to spell something or otherwise work in concert, and the puzzle had a snappy revealer or something. Here, it's just a bunch of double letters. Now, to be fair, most letters of the alphabet don't provide very good answer options when doubled up at the front. Not a lot of TTs out there, for instance. So maybe the list of viable letters for a theme like this is too restricted to do anything Extra. But there was still something slightly unsatisfying about the arbitrariness of the letter choices and answers. Why not AA TEAM or AA LIST—AA LINE is just bizarre. I mean, calling "any one of the 12 steps" a "line" is bizarre. Also, I really wish the NYTX would avoid chromosome clues altogether, largely because they are oversimplistic and essentialist and blargh.

Mainly I just thought the theme clues were far more boring than they ought to have been. [Area below "To:" in an email?]?? Snore. If you ditched the XX answer and replaced it with some initials (LL COOL J? HH MUNRO? WW NORTON?) and then changed the CC one to a clue about pitcher C.C. Sabathia and the AA one to something about Milne, then they would all be about people ... so there'd be some consistency. And maybe there's a phrase out there that would make a nice revealer, I don't know. But there has to be something Extra that could be done to make this pop.

Longer weird answers made this slightly tough in parts. The CYCLADES aren't exactly a household island group name, and I've never heard of either ECKERD College (?) or a BLUE ROAN. The latter created the toughest part of the puzzle by far. I needed almost every cross, especially considering that even black-and-whiteness does not suggest BLUE to me. Yeesh. But most of the rest of the fill was OK. Weakest in the whole ONME / OXO / ECOLI / ECKERD region, but much more solid elsewhere. I probably would've tried to avoid all double letters altogether in a puzzle like this, especially in the Acrosses, just so the theme can, you know, pop. But this puzzle did what it did, and except for that XX clue, the results were largely unobjectionable.

Five things:

7D: Irony? (FERRIC) — OK, FINE, that's cute.
42A: Grant with the 1991 #1 hit "Baby Baby" (AMY) — this is such a weird, weird place to go for your AMY. I mean, I knew this because I had a secret affection for this song when I was in my early 20s. But still, of all the AMY clues in the world, you're going with a Christian crossover singer who had a hit 27 years ago?
1D: Freight train part (BOX CAR) — Had this as MOXCAR at first, for obvious reasons
18A: Have hot cocoa on a winter day, say (WARM UP) — before or after you BONE UP? (51D: Study, informally)
24D: Obsolescent TV attachment (VCR) — "attachment" threw me. I was thinking something like "rabbit EARs"—but yeah, I guess you did have to "attach" the VCR to the TV, so, fine.