I could tell this was gonna be bumpy before I ever left the NW. When one crosswordesey Disney princess crossed another crosswordesey Disney princess, I had a sense that things were not going to go well, and then when LO-RES (?) showed up in that same section, along with AROAR, well, it was all rough enough that I stopped to take a picture, so I could remember just when I knew for certain that this one was gonna be rough all over.
It's Monday. There is no day where the short fill should be cleaner than on Monday. This is not a demanding theme. Yeah, it's got five themers, which is a little on the dense side, but there's just no reason for things to get this clunky, right out of the gate. It's a completely unremarkable little corner, and it should be easy to fill unremarkably (at a minimum). Of course the fill never got better, because why would it? The longer Downs are OK, but for the most part filling this one in felt like a chore, albeit a brief one. ORIT EEL EON THE RNA EER TATAR DRU LIL NEO ONO BLAH RERUN YETIS etc. ... this stuff is fine, but only in much smaller doses. AT NOON, oof, very rough. Also, it's a BREAD BOX—"is it bigger than a bread box?" Not "BREAD BIN" ... it was a whole thing. BREAD BIN? Bah. BIN shmin. In this household (literally, in *this* household) we have a bread *box*. Also, it's "I DON'T MEAN TO PRY, but..." That's when you hear that phrase. What is up with this strange past-tense version? Yes, people might say it, but it doesn't feel On The Nose. What it feels is "15 letters long," which is what it has to be to make the theme answers work out symmetrically today. With a theme that is this old-fashioned (one of the oldest theme types there is), I expect some serious polish in the fill. Actually, I expect some outright flair. Pray pree pry etc. isn't much. The theme answers are fine, but you aren't winning any friends with TENNIS PRO. When I was done, I thought the theme was "silent X" at first (ANNIE PROULX is the real winner of the bunch, though isn't her name *E.* ANNIE PROULX!? When did she drop the "E"?) (the "E." is for EDNA, I just learned, so ... there's a new EDNA clue for you, folks). Anyway, the theme was just so-so and the fill did not hold up its end of the bargain.
I found the puzzle pretty much normal Monday levels of Easy. I got thrown on the first theme clue by all the birds, which all looked like sports teams. So I used crosses to figure it out, and even though it looked very much like BIRDS OF PREY, I kept expecting there to be some pun or wordplay or something (BIRDS OF PLAY? Because they're sports teams???), so really did use every cross to get that. Once I realized that the clue was just straightforward (not "?"-tricky), then I got back into a Monday groove. Very much slowed down at the end by ONE BY ONE (41D: Individually) crossing Isle ROYALE, which ... how is the "least-visited National Park in the contiguous United States" a Monday answer? Battle ROYALE. ROYALE with Cheese. These are the ROYALEs of Monday. I'm sure Isle ROYALE is gorgeous, but save it for Thursday, Michigan. Could *not* believe the puzzle was trying to get me to choke down AREEL when it had already served me AROAR (*and* ARIEL). I as agog and annoyed. BITTER END and TVDINNER give the grid some much-needed non-thematic personality. I've certainly had worse Monday experiences, but it costs nothing for constructors and especially editors to insist on cleaner fill than this, particularly in early-week grids.
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!")
.png)
