Rex Parker Does the NYT Crossword Puzzle: Nicole Wiegmann

Constructor: Brad Wiegmann and Nicole Wiegmann

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium

THEME: duckrabbit — once you finish the puzzle, if you connect all the circled squares, in alphabetical order, you get an image that looks like a DUCK (38D: What some people thing this puzzle's image represents) or a RABBIT (66A: What some people thing this puzzle's image represents), depending on which way you think the image is facing. This image is described twice in the puzzle, once as an OPTICAL ILLUSION (17A: Image depicted in this puzzle by connecting the circled letters alphabetically), and again as an AMBIGUOUS FIGURE (59A: Image in this puzzle)

The "EYE" answers:

37A: It keeps you in the dark (EYE MASK)
30D: Late-night host Seth (MEYERS)

Word of the Day: Thomas KYD (46A: "The Spanish Tragedy" playwright) —

Thomas Kyd (baptised 6 November 1558; buried 15 August 1594) was an English playwright, the author of The Spanish Tragedy, and one of the most important figures in the development of Elizabethan drama.
Although well known in his own time, Kyd fell into obscurity until 1773 when Thomas Hawkins, an early editor of The Spanish Tragedy, discovered that Thomas Heywood, in his Apologie for Actors (1612), attributed the play to Kyd. A hundred years later, scholars in Germany and England began to shed light on his life and work, including the controversial finding that he may have been the author of a Hamlet play pre-dating Shakespeare's, which is now known as the Ur-Hamlet. [...]
Evidence suggests that in the 1580s Kyd became an important playwright, but little is known about his activity. Francis Meres placed him among "our best for tragedy" and Heywood elsewhere called him "Famous Kyd". Ben Jonson mentions him in the same breath as Christopher Marlowe (with whom, in London, Kyd at one time shared a room) and John Lyly in the Shakespeare First Folio. The Spanish Tragedy was probably written in the mid to late 1580s, with its first recorded performance on 23 February 1592 by Lord Strange's Men. The earliest surviving edition was printed in 1592, the full title being The Spanish Tragedie, Containing the lamentable end of Don Horatio, and Bel-imperia: with the pittifull death of olde Hieronimo. However, the play was usually known simply as "Hieronimo" after the protagonist. It was arguably the most popular play of the "Age of Shakespeare" and set new standards in effective plot construction and character development. There were "twenty-nine performances between 1592 and 1597" and "eleven editions between 1592 and 1633", which the historian J. R. Mulryne states is "a tally unequaled by any of the plays of Shakespeare". (wikipedia)

• • •

I can't say this isn't original. But I also can't say that I enjoyed it. The actual solve (you know, the thing you spend your time doing) was not entertaining. I'm being told there's an OPTICAL ILLUSION but I can't see it, so that's a meaningless claim to me and thus not a fun answer to get. AMBIGUOUS FIGURE is somehow worse, because it doesn't even feel like a real phrase. Big "Green Paint"* vibes. And scattershot circles? I couldn't see what they were supposed to be doing and I didn't care. I kept looking briefly at the letters to see if they spelled anything, but that's obviously not what I was supposed to be doing. Still, I doubt if I would've kept stopping mid-solve to check how the "alphabetical order" was shaping up even if I had registered that "alphabetical order" was the organizing principle. The one enjoyable thing about the puzzle was discovering a surprise rebus square! It was like the theme all of a sudden did something interesting. But that moment faded and I was still left with a mess of circles I didn't know what to do with. Even DUCK and RABBIT weren't any help, as those words didn't have proper clues (since I couldn't see the image, I had to get them completely from crosses). It was only upon completion of the puzzle that my software went "ta da!" and showed me the image I was supposed to be seeing (or supposed to draw if I was solving on paper (?)). And yeah, that was an "aha" alright, but not one that *I* discovered in the course of *actual solving*.

Getting from the beginning to end of this puzzle was a genuine slog. The fill is remarkably poor, at least in part because the theme puts a *lot* of pressure on the grid—four themers, a *lot* of fixed letters strewn about (in circled squares), and a rebus square. If you wanna see what extreme theme pressure does to fill, just look at that SW corner, oof. ACR MAA BRB BIEB and (aptly) UGLI. Because AMBIGUOUS FIGURE and RABBIT are set in stone down there, there's almost no wiggle room in the intervening answer (CARELL), and so ... you get what you get (a mess). CELLI into III over AAS into ACER was when the pain first registered. ADAY followed. I was listening just yesterday to the latest episode of "Crosstalk" (Daniel Grinberg's crossword podcast), and the guest was Aimee Lucido. When asked about the kind of fill that she hates and tries to keep out of her own grids, one of the things she mentioned was Roman numerals (check) (III), and another was four-letter "article + three-letter-word" partials (check) ("A DAY"). I don't think either of today's examples of these answer types is particularly egregious, but they're part of a weak-fill onslaught that includes EUR LORES ENEWS etc. This puzzle lacks any interesting non-thematic fill, and the thematic fill isn't inherently interesting to begin with. In short, this puzzle exists solely to get you to the picture. And the picture is neatly executed, no doubt. But man I did not like what it took to get there.

What else?:

1A: Protection from an infection (SCAB) — figured this was something you did or purchased (something in the "vaccination" or "Band-Aid" realm), not a thing your body does by itself. Needed crosses here for sure.
14A: Accusative, for one (CASE) — I think only pronouns have an "accusative" case in English. Me, him, them—those are all accusative (used when the word is an object of a verb or preposition). I, he, they—those are in the nominative case (used when the word is the subject of a verb).

49A: Grocery aisle enticement (SAMPLE) — baffling. Aroma? S... SALE AD? I've had many a SAMPLE at grocery stores, but aisles are too narrow to accommodate the SAMPLE distribution. I think of SAMPLEs as being handed out at the ends of aisles or in more open-flow parts of the store.
55A: Beer brand discontinued in 2010 (BUD ICE) — one way to know if you should delete a beer brand from your word list is if it was discontinued in 2010.
63A: Steve of "Battle of the Sexes" (CARELL) — of all the things I know him from, this is not one of them.
5D: Beverage sometimes served with cucumber sandwiches (TEA) — did Big Cucumber write this puzzle (11D: Unlucky "Wheel of Fortune" purchase for COOL AS A CUCUMBER = AN "I")
25D: Website with a "Conservadox" option (JDATE) — "a niche online dating site aimed at Jewish singles" (wikipedia). This is the seventh NYTXW appearance of JDATE, the second this year. It first appeared in 2016.
53D: Pixelated, informally (LO-RES) — my last square and I just stared at it: LO-ES. I thought I had an error somewhere. I could tell that "R" was gonna have to go there, but my brain was like "what are LORES and what do they have to do with pixels?" But no, it's just the awkward-looking and seldom-used hyphenated compound adj., LO-RES.
55D: Nickname of the "Love Yourself" singer, with "the" (BIEB) — hey, if you'd never heard of "Love Yourself" and you ended up writing "BOSS" in here at first, please know that I was right there with you. "The BIEB" refers of course (of course?) to Justin Bieber.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

*”Green paint” = an answer made up of weak adj./noun pairing. TALL WOMAN, for instance, is green paint—it's certainly a phrase one might say, but it doesn't have enough coherence, conceptually, to be a good crossword answer.

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