THEME: MOVE DOVER (62A: Change a map of southern England? ... or, when parsed differently, what you need to do to the answers to the starred clues) — familiar phrases are clued in wacky ways that make sense only if you ... MOVE "D" OVER (i.e. make it the first letter of the second word instead of the last letter of the first):
Theme answers:
SPICE DRUM (17A: *Large container for cinnamon or coriander?)
LOVE DONE (21A: *Gist of a Dear John letter?)
FORGE DALLIANCES (39A: *Play matchmaker?)
CHIME DIN (54A: *Tinkling racket on a windy day?)
Word of the Day: Wyclef JEAN (66A: Rapper Wyclef) —
Kind of a placeholder puzzle. It's got a real basic core concept that renders the kind of low-key, mostly sub-chuckle wackiness that I associate with last-century puzzles. But the revealer really saves it from outright ordinariness and blandness. MOVE DOVER has the kind of big, weird wackiness that wacky puzzles need if they're gonna work (nothing worse than tepid wackiness). There's something so strange and improbable and cartography-specific about moving Dover. Like, where did you have it in the first place? In a Bristol suburb? I also just like imagining that "MOVE DOVER!" is some kind of all-hands-on-deck cartographical emergency, like an alarm is going off and siren lights are flashing in some secret subterranean mapmaking lair. 'The Queen's atlas is wrong! All wrong! MOVE DOVER! I repeat, MOVE DOVER!" So the puzzle put that image in my mind, if nothing else. Also, I like that the revealer is itself a theme answer. Usually revealers just point at the themers, but this one exemplifies *and* explains the theme concept. Neat trick. I also like that the best of the rest of the themers is sitting midpuzzle, in a marquee position. FORGED ALLIANCES is the biggest of the lot, and also the one that has the most transformative power, i.e. the biggest sound change (ALLIANCES to DALLIANCES, with the stress moving from the "I" to the first "A"). So the theme idea is a bit dull, but at least one of the first four themers came to play, and the revealer had enough juice to make the whole endeavor seem worth it. Arguably. I don't know if I'm arguing that, but it's arguable.
The rest of the puzzle had fewer high points. Like the theme concept, it felt old. Creaky. Lots and lots of names, and lots and lots of things that felt last-century, including (especially?) EGG TIMERS. Do those still exist? Don't we just call them ... timers, now? I guess traditional EGG TIMERS came in the form of miniature hourglasses. So ... not so much last century as the century (and many centuries) before that. It's supposed to measure the time it takes to boil an egg. You're probably using your phone or your microwave timer at this point. I wonder if people under 40 have even heard of EGG TIMERS. Or TALIA Shire. Or "Remington STEELE" (9D: 1980s TV role for Brosnan). These answers were all right over the plate for me, but then again I'm old. Wyclef-JEAN old (seriously, we were born one month apart! It goes Wyclef JEAN, me, Jay-Z—your important late-'69 birthdays!).
AISLED is bleh (41D: Designed with passageways), but mostly the fill just feels stale. ENOLA ADESTE IDES OREO OPEC ANTE INBED DOSED (a verb I only see in xwords). And names. A ton of names. TALIA DRNO IDRIS EMMA EZRA ELSA JEAN STEELE. Even the longer answers feel last century. Is RAISIN BRAN still a big seller (3D: Kellogg's cereal with a purple box)? Do people still play CANDYLAND? (10D: Game with Lollipop Woods and Gumdrop Mountains) This puzzle feels like it's from my teenage years. Except for E*TRADE. But when your one (non-IDRIS) modern answer is E*TRADE, which is itself old by now, I don't think you've improved things much. It's good for puzzles to have some balance, but this one feels heavily tilted toward yesteryear. Clues on TESLA (33D: Automaker with a Cybertruck) and EMMA (5A: Stone on a set) and ENOLA (27D: "___ Holmes" (streaming film about Sherlock's sister) try their best to add some currency, but to little avail.
This was a typically easy Tuesday puzzle in most respects. Hardest part for me, by far, was the 1-Across / 1-Down crossing. I have no idea where EZRA is in the Bible, it turns out (1A: Book after II Chronicles). If it's a book of the Bible in four letters, I tend to want ACTS, but not today! And that clue on ELSA, yeesh (1D: Woman's name that's also the first four letters of a Central American country name). You really have to run through your Central American rolodex before you alight on EL SAlvador. I didn't even bother to try—just got the letter entirely from crosses. After that, my only stumbles were FORMED ALLIANCES (instead of FORGED) and a bizarre inability to get INCENTIVES, even after I had IN-ENTI-ES in place (31D: Deal sweeteners). Kept seeing INTESTINES. Sigh. See you tomorrow.
Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld
P.S. re: "ENOLA Holmes" (27D), why "streaming film" and not "Netflix film" or just ... "film"?
Took a while for my brain to register the gimmick. The first theme answer is the weakest of the lot (in that something might be called "overbearing" but no one actually uses "overbear," to say nothing of OVERBEARS, as a word… and the pun is weakest there, too; the “bears” are … “over” … you? … in the sky? Mmmkay), so I mostly didn't register anything there except for the most awkward kind of wordplay, and I kept moving on. By the time I got to NIGHT CRAWLERS (20 seconds later??) I somehow had completely forgotten the clue to OVERBEARS and so the clue, [Scorpio and Cancer?], had me thinking "oh, a zodiac theme!" But then I got down to the clue for SHOOTING STARS, and the presence of Orion in that clue made me realize, finally, that it's just constellations—constellations used as wacky clues. Actually, this theme is a bit of a wacky theme reversal, in that the answers are the kinds of things you'd usually see as wacky clues. [High horse?] is a completely plausible clue for PEGASUS, for instance. The others you'd have to imagine in the singular, and their wackiness would be more of a stretch, but still, it is a bit like we got answers as clues as clues as answers. Which is fine. I think the theme is cute, and I like that I got OVERBEARS out of the way early so the rest of the themers could lead me to a brighter (!) place. I will say that I sincerely didn't know PEGASUS was a constellation. I mean, it's been clued that way in the past, so it's not like the idea is new to me, or mind-blowing. I just know PEGASUS for so many other things that it never stuck as a constellation, whereas I know Orion and Ursas pretty much exclusively as constellations. But my ignorance here had zero effect on the solve, for once, thank god. So this one left me feeling pretty good. The theme works, it improves over the course of the solve, *and* I get to think of myself as a SHOOTING STAR! (born 11/26 19-something or other I forget)
But back to my ignorance: BRATISLAVA! Got it easily enough with a few crosses, so it's definitely a place name I'd heard of, but I learned all my geography (or most of it) in high school, before the fall of the Berlin Wall and the decomposition of the U.S.S.R. and the war in the Balkans and all the other things that seriously changed the European map, so some of the more recently-formed countries and their capitals still haven't fully registered with me. Wikipedia says that "Slovakia became an independent state on 1 January 1993 after the peaceful dissolution of Czechoslovakia, sometimes known as the Velvet Divorce." OMG "Velvet Divorce"! That's fantastic. Sounds hot. I don't want to get divorced, I love my wife more than I can say, but if we *had* to get a divorce, I hope it would be velvet. So soft. Also, constructors, you are encouraged to put VELVET DIVORCE in your grids now—totally valid, based solely on my having run into it during a random wikipedia search just now. Come on, you know it's better than half the stuff you were planning on putting in your themeless grid anyway, go for it! Also, I would eat a dessert and/or drink a cocktail called the "Velvet Divorce." The phrase just has so many suggestive possibilities ... Anyway, back to BRATISLAVA, it borders not one but two countries (Austria and Hungary)! That's pretty cool. Odd enough to have your capital border even one, but two!? I mean, I have no burning desire to go to Hungary right now, but still, seems cool that you can essentially walk to two foreign countries and still be home for tea. Like VELVET DIVORCE, BRATISLAVA sounds like a dessert I would eat—a kind of fancied-up baklava, maybe. I feel like I'm learning / making up so much today...
The fill on this one was OK. Of course, the hardest part of the solve was the part where they decided they were going to do that paired successive clue thing—32D: Defensive line? / 36D: Offensive line? Love to fight my way to ... SLUR? *That* kind of SLUR? Pfffft. Don't need to think about *those* kinds of SLURs any more than this stupid world already makes me think about them. I guess the ALIBI clue is OK. I just hate when the cluing gets ugly or warped just because the cluer (whether constructor or editor) thinks they can get off a "clever" clue pairing. I don't read the clues in succession or solve them successively, so whatever cuteness is supposed to be there is always lost on me and I'm left just wondering why, why lord? That ALIBI part was the only part that was even remotely tough today, mostly because I couldn't really understand the clue on WRAP (again, it's trying way, way too hard) (26D: It's filled, and may be filling), and I somehow still haven't read / watched Dune, so "???" on SPICE, which is far more generic a term than I thought I'd be dealing with (40A: Critical resource harvested in "Dune"). But as I say, this puzzle was easy so these hang-ups were nothing out of the ordinary for a Wednesday and barely count as hang-ups. Looking over the grid, maybe it's actually better than OK. In addition to BRATISLAVA / GANGSTA RAP (splashy answers both), you've got bouncy stuff like ELIXIRS and JIMMIES and GARISH (a great word), and there isn't much that's grating (beyond ESME and her condescending clue) (61D: She's found in "She loves me not"). Anything else I might complain about amounts to little more than NITS. Not exactly a BLOG RAVE today, but yeah, this is pretty good Wednesday fare. See you tomorrow.
THEME: LIES / UNDER / OATH (70A: With 71- and 72-Across, commits perjury ... or what can be found four times in this puzzle) — literally, the word "LIE" can be found directly underneath an "OATH" (i.e. a mild swear word) four times in this puzzle
The quote-unquote OATHS:
CAR GOSH IPS (18A: Vessels with large containers)
M EGAD EALS (37A: Front-page mergers and acquisitions, e.g.)
BON DRAT IO (44A: Investment guide calculation)
DANG ERSIGN (59A: Exclamation point inside a yellow triangle, for one)
Word of the Day: NOLITA (35A: Manhattan neighborhood next to SoHo) —
Nolita, sometimes written as NoLIta and deriving from "North of Little Italy", is a neighborhood in the borough of Manhattan in New York City. Nolita is situated in Lower Manhattan, bounded on the north by Houston Street, on the east by the Bowery, on the south roughly by Broome Street, and on the west by Lafayette Street. It lies east of SoHo, south of NoHo, west of the Lower East Side, and north of Little Italy and Chinatown. // The neighborhood was long regarded as part of Little Italy, but has lost its recognizable Italian character in recent decades because of rapidly rising rents. [...] In the second half of the 1990s, the neighborhood saw an influx of yuppies and an explosion of expensive retail boutiques and restaurants and bars. After unsuccessful tries to pitch it as part of SoHo, real estate promoters and others came up with several different names for consideration for this newly upscale neighborhood. The name that stuck, as documented in an article on May 5, 1996, in the New York Times city section debating various monikers for the newly trendy area, was Nolita, an abbreviation for North of Little Italy. This name follows the pattern started by SoHo (South of Houston Street) and TriBeCa (Triangle Below Canal Street). (wikipedia)
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***HELLO, READERS AND FELLOW SOLVERS*** How is the new year treating you? Well, I hope. Me, uh, not great so far (COVID, you know), but I'm 95% better, and was never terribly sick to begin with, so I have every reason to believe things will turn around for me shortly, thank God (and vaccines). Anyway, it's early January, which means it's time once again for my annual week-long pitch for financial contributions to the blog. Every year I ask readers to consider what the blog is worth to them on an annual basis and give accordingly. I'm not sure what to say about this past year. This will sound weird, or melodramatic—or maybe it won't—but every time I try to write about 2022, all I can think is "well, my cat died." She (Olive) died this past October, very young, of a stupid congenital heart problem that we just couldn't fix (thank you all for your kind words of condolence, by the way). I'm looking at the photo I used for last year's fundraising pitch, and it's a picture of me sitting at my desk (this desk, the one I'm typing at right now, the one I write at every day) with Olive sitting on my shoulder, staring at me, and making me laugh. It's a joyous picture. Here, I'm just gonna post it again:
I love the photo both because you can tell how goofy she is, and how goofy she made me. Her loss hurt for the obvious reasons, but also because she was so much a part of my daily routine, my daily rhythms and rituals. She was everyday. Quotidian. Just ... on me, near me, being a weirdo, especially in the (very) early mornings when I was writing this blog. She took me out of myself. She also made me aware of how much the quotidian matters, how daily rituals break up and organize the day, mark time, ground you. They're easy to trivialize, these rituals, precisely because they *aren't* special. Feed the cats again, make the coffee again, solve the crossword again, etc. But losing Olive made me reevaluate the daily, the quotidian, the apparently trivial. In a fundamental way, those small daily things *are* life. No one day is so important, or so different from the others, but cumulatively, they add up, and through the days upon days you develop a practice—a practice of love, care, and attention given to the things that matter. If you're reading this, then crossword puzzles are undoubtedly an important ritual for you, just as writing about crosswords for you all is an important ritual for me. It gives me so much. I hope that even at my most critical, my genuine love for crosswords—for the way my brain lights up on crosswords—comes through. I also hope that the blog brings you entertainment, insight, laughter ... even (especially) if you disagree with me much (most? all?) of the time.
[man, I really wear the hell out of this red fleece...]
The blog began years ago as an experiment in treating the ephemeral—the here-today, gone-tomorrow—like it really mattered. I wanted to stop and look at this 15x15 (or 21x21 thing) and take it seriously, listen to it, see what it was trying to do, think about what I liked or didn't like about it. In short, I gave the puzzle my time and attention. And I continue to do that, every day (Every! Day!). And it is work. A lot of work. Asking for money once a year (and only once a year) is an acknowledgment of that fact. There is nothing to subscribe to here ... no Substack or Kickstarter or Patreon ... and there are no ads, ever. I prefer to keep financial matters simple and direct. I have no "hustle" in me beyond putting my ass in this chair every morning and writing.
How much should you give? Whatever you think the blog is worth to you on a yearly basis. Whatever that amount is is fantastic. Some people refuse to pay for what they can get for free. Others just don't have money to spare. All are welcome to read the blog—the site will always be open and free. But if you are able to express your appreciation monetarily, here are three options. First, a Paypal button (which you can also find in the blog sidebar):
Second, a mailing address (checks should be made out to "Rex Parker"):
Rex Parker c/o Michael Sharp
54 Matthews St
Binghamton, NY 13905
The third, increasingly popular option is Venmo; if that's your preferred way of moving money around, my handle is @MichaelDavidSharp (the last four digits of my phone are 4878, in case Venmo asks you, which I guess it does sometimes, when it's not trying to push crypto on you, what the hell?!)
All Paypal contributions will be gratefully acknowledged by email. All snail mail contributions will be gratefully acknowledged with hand-written postcards. I. Love. Snail Mail. I love seeing your gorgeous handwriting and then sending you my awful handwriting. It's all so wonderful. My daughter (Ella Egan) has designed a cat-related thank-you postcard for 2023, just as she has for the past two years, but this year, there's a bonus. Because this year ... the postcard is also a crossword puzzle! Yes, I made a little 9x9 blog-themed crossword puzzle for you all. It's light and goofy and I hope you enjoy it. It looks like this (clues blurred for your protection):
I had fun making this puzzle (thanks to Rachel Fabi and Neville Fogarty for proofing it for me!). For non-snail-mailers who want to solve the puzzle, don't worry: I'll make the puzzle available for everyone some time next month. Please note: I don't keep a "mailing list" and don't share my contributor info with anyone. And if you give by snail mail and (for some reason) don't want a thank-you card, just indicate "NO CARD." Again, as ever, I'm so grateful for your readership and support. Now on to today's puzzle...
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I liked the placement of the revealer on this one, as it is really lying under ... well everything else in the grid. Just hanging out there at the bottom taking up the whole row. And that SW corner must hold some kind of record for Most Theme-Dense 3x4 section in NYTXW history, with the first "E" in ELIE being the only one of a dozen letters down there *not* involved in thematic material. So structurally, the puzzle is interesting, in at least a couple of ways. But overall, despite being (once again) very easy, this was something of a SLOG. Maybe the whole premise was just too quaint for me, or too repetitive. GOSH? I get that all these "oaths," in fact the very word "oath" in this since, is old-fashioned, and so we were never gonna see something like F*** or SH** over LIE, but ... GOSH? Wow. That is ... mild. I think the problem here is that GOSH EGAD DRAT and DANG aren't just "oaths"—they are specifically "minced oaths," i.e. "euphemistic expression(s) formed by deliberately misspelling, mispronouncing, or replacing a part of a profane, blasphemous, or taboo word or phrase to reduce the original term's objectionable characteristics" (wikipedia) (emph. mine). "Oaths" are out-and-out coarse or blasphemous words—"minced oaths" are the stupid things people do when they're pretending they're not actually swearing (like saying "frickin'" or "friggin'" or "a-hole"). So what you've really got here in this puzzle is LIES UNDER (MINCED) OATHS, and their ... mincedness ... was a little cloying. And, as I say, repetitive. LIE LIE LIE LIE sigh. And there are no proper "theme answers," since nothing thematic is going on in the answers themselves, or their clues. There's just something both cutesy and dreary about the whole endeavor.
Also, the fill was off-putting, over and over. BOND RATIO was like watching paint dry. MISS TEEN USA, ew, very high creep factor (29D: Beauty pageant founded in 1959 as a mail-in photo contest). Wasn't that the pageant where a certain former president walked in on a bunch of the contestants while they were changing and when they scrambled to cover up imperiously told them, "don't worry ladies, I've seen it all before"? ... [Fires up Google] ... Yup, that's the one alright. Ugh. Shoot that answer into outer space and explode it. On a somewhat less objectionable note, I think I would just take TONTO out of my wordlist. There isn't really a way to come at it that doesn't evoke the history of condescending / sentimentalized representation of Native Americans in US popular culture. As for ADULT as a verb, ugh, always repulsive, this self-infantilizing baby-talk about how being a gwown-up is hawd (15A: Fulfill mundane but necessary responsibilities in modern lingo). Yeah, it's hard, and if you're under 40, I get that everyone older than you helped destroy the economy and the planet and made the assumption of ADULT responsibilities even harder, but please talk normal, please. I beg. The theme is already dripping with euphemism, I don't need naive-sounding neologisms thrown in on top of it all. I think the thing that put me off the most in this puzzle (OK, second-most after that pageant, yikes) is the clue on ATHEIST (30D: One who doesn't have a prayer?). I see what you're doing there with the word play, i.e. ATHEISTs don't pray because they don't believe in God, so they don't "have a prayer," and maybe that seems clever, but the way it *reads* is that ATHEISTs are doomed because they don't believe in God. It seems to be oddly celebrating their presumed future demise. I'm not offended, I just think the puzzle has a tin ear when it comes to atheism, and this is another example. (They've been clued as ones without "belief" in the past, which is just ... inaccurate, frankly)
"Get Lost!" sounds absolutely ridiculous in anything but the imperative voice. GETTING LOST? I'm trying to imagine using that in a (realistic) sentence. "Why are you still here!? When will you be GETTING LOST!? I told you to get lost and yet here you still are, not GETTING LOST, it's maddening!" I can imagine "Scramming" much more easily than GETTING LOST because "scramming" doesn't have another literal meaning to make things confusing. "Get lost!" is what you tell someone you want to go away. GETTING LOST is what used to happen when you traveled through rural Wisconsin without a map (not that that ever happened to me and my friend Kathy on our cross-country trip in 1992, no sir, just a random example involving me, my friend, the non-existence of cellphones, and a few cows). No one says USH, why does the puzzle keep saying USH? It's nuts. But again, the puzzle was easy easy easy. I didn't know who Lil REL Howery was (28A: Actor/comedian Lil ___ Howery), and I briefly thought 9D: Lifted (STOLEN) was ARISEN (???), so that created a hold-up of, what, a few seconds there up near the top of the grid? And I guess BOND RA...zzzzzz.... sorry, where was I? Oh, BOND RATIO took me some crosses to figure out. And I didn't really know NOLITA because it is some made-up yuppie real estate term that didn't even exist before the rents started rising in the '90s (you really wanna live in a neighborhood that rhymes with LOLITA?). But none of these problems constituted real problems. Most of the puzzle was just read clue / write answer, without much of anything to make you pause and think, let alone struggle. Hoping for better luck tomorrow. Take care.
Relative difficulty: Easy to Easy-Medium, somewhere in there
THEME: "Pardon My French" — ordinary phrases where first word has been replaced by a French homophone, making them wacky phrases, clued wackily (i.e. as if the French word were literal):
DIEU ("God") PROCESS (34A: Means of becoming a god?)
BELLE ("beautiful") TOWER (51A: Where Rapunzel let down her hair?)
EAU ("water") FOR HEAVEN'S SAKE (65A: Holy water?)
C'EST ("it is") CHEESE (83A: Answer to "What is Roquefort or Brie?"?)
LAIT ("milk") TO WASTE (96A: Spilled milk?)
REINE ("queen") CATS AND DOGS (112A: The queen with her pets?)
Word of the Day: CARYATIDS (78D: Architectural columns in the form of sculpted female figures) —
A caryatid (/ˌkæriˈætɪd/KARR-ee-AT-id; Ancient Greek: Καρυάτις, pl. Καρυάτιδες) is a sculpted female figure serving as an architectural support taking the place of a column or a pillar supporting an entablature on her head. The Greek term karyatides literally means "maidens of Karyai", an ancient town on the Peloponnese. Karyai had a temple dedicated to the goddess Artemis in her aspect of Artemis Karyatis: "As Karyatis she rejoiced in the dances of the nut-tree village of Karyai, those Karyatides, who in their ecstatic round-dance carried on their heads baskets of live reeds, as if they were dancing plants".
An atlas or telamon is a male version of a caryatid, i.e. a sculpted male statue serving as an architectural support. (wikipedia)
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I'm not sure I will pardon it. Your French, that is. The wackiness mostly doesn't land today, largely because of the often extreme grammatical awkwardness occasioned by the French translations. LAIT TO WASTE just doesn't read as a good answer to 96A: Spilled milk? when you render it as "milk to waste"; if you spilled it, it's wasted, I guess, but the "TO" just doesn't work. "Queen cats and dogs" is likewise iffy. I don't really get what "Rapunzel" has to do with anything? All the other clues contain the English version of the French word, but not so the clue on BELLE TOWER (51A: Where Rapunzel let down her hair?). There, I guess you are supposed to take BELLE as a substantive adjective (beautiful woman) and you are supposed to think of Rapunzel's definitive quality as beauty (I don't; I think of it as long-hairedness). The biggest problems, though, are pronunciation problems. Some of these are right on the money (OUI SHALL OVERCOME, C'EST CHEESE, EAU FOR HEAVEN'S SAKE). But REINE doesn't really sound like "rain" (it's closer to "ren"), and DIEU really really Really sounds nothing like "due"—it's more like "dyuh." It's a diphthong with absolutely no long-U sound in it. Huge miss on that one. If all the answers were spot-on, this would be an adequate, somewhat ho-hum Sunday concept you might've seen many years ago. But they aren't all spot-on, so it's somewhat less enjoyable than that.
As if ATREE weren't annoying enough as a partial answer, this puzzle had to go and riddle it up, thereby calling attention to it, highlighting it in neon yellow, rather than cluing it as a much more humble fill-in-the-blank so we can just solve it and forget it ever existed (108A: What's clothed in summer and naked in winter, per an old riddle). Why people insist on drawing attention to their worst fill like this, I'll never understand. AT NINE is bad, but at least it's straightforward and easy, so its badness isn't likely to linger in your mind. The voiding of "nerdiness" of all meaning continues apace at 39D: Most likely to win at Trivia Night, maybe (NERDIEST). I know plenty of real nerds who don't concern themselves with trivia at all. Math, science, "Star Trek" and "Star Trek"-related shows, sure, but this thing where "nerd" just means "someone who knows trivial stuff," I dunno. It doesn't track that well. I had no idea GEICO was an acronym: "Give Everyone Insurance, Come On!"? Ah, no, I see it's "Government Employees Insurance Company." Huh. I feel like I've learned and forgotten this before. I had T-BOND before T-BILL because honestly I don't know financial things at all and when I'm solving I just put in plausible-sounding words and hope for the best (54A: It matures quickly, in brief) (T-bonds actually mature slowly—takes at least 20 years). There's not a lot else to say about this one. "ANNE WITH AN 'E'" is original, for sure, but that's the only non-theme answer that really stood out. The grid is mostly clean and clear. The theme just isn't up to snuff. Dommage.
Another Boswords virtual crossword tournament (or "league") is just around the corner. I think it's a "league" because competitors solve puzzles once a week over a period of months, as opposed to solving a bunch on one day. Anyway, this time it's the "Boswords 2022 Spring Themeless League"! Here's a few words about the tourney from tourney organizer John Lieb:
Registration for the Boswords 2022 Spring Themeless League is now open! This 10-week event starts with a Preseason puzzle on Monday, February 28 and features weekly themeless puzzles -- clued at three levels of difficulty -- from an all-star roster of constructors and edited by Brad Wilber. To register, to solve a practice puzzle, to view the constructor line-up, and to learn more, go to www.boswords.org.
The puzzles for these Boswords competitions are excellent, and as I've said before, if you're curious about what the world of crossword tournaments is like, if you wanna dip your toe in those thrilling waters, Boswords is a good way to find out. You can choose your own difficulty level. You can solve with a friend or family member as a pairs team. What've you got to lose!?
Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld
P.S. my daughter (who just graduated college in December) is currently on tour for her first professional theater gig—stage managing a regional tour of "Church Basement Ladies" across the upper midwest. They open on Thursday in Ottumwa, IA (yes, Radar O'Reilly's hometown, that Ottumwa). She also has a summer job lined up assistant stage-managing at a Shakespeare festival, but I'll tell you more about that later. Anyway, I'm proud, and my daughter is working, so hurray for a Theater degree, actually!
THEME: QUINCUNX / PLUS SIGN (1A: Pattern of five shapes arranged like this puzzle's central black squares / 62A: One of five depicted in this puzzle) — two answers refer to the five black-square formations seen in the grid (the rest of the grid is mercifully themeless)
Word of the Day: CLAFOUTI (36D: French dessert of fruit encased in sweet batter) —
Clafoutis (French pronunciation: [klafuti]; Occitan: clafotís[klafuˈtis] or [kʎafuˈtiː]), sometimes spelled clafouti in Anglophone countries, is a baked Frenchdessert of fruit, traditionally black cherries, arranged in a buttered dish and covered with a thick flan-like batter. The clafoutis is dusted with powdered sugar and served lukewarm, sometimes with cream.
A traditional Limousin clafoutis contains not only the flesh of the cherries used, but also the nut-like kernels in the stones. Cherry kernels contain benzaldehyde, the compound responsible for the dominant flavour in almond extract. They also contain a small amount of amygdalin, a cyanogenic glycoside - a compound potentially capable of releasing cyanide if consumed, but non-toxic in small quantities. (wikipedia)
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I saw Brad Wilber's name on the byline and thought it would be on the tougher side for me, since he will inevitably throw some fancy / exotic / foreign vocabulary I've never heard of before in there because he reads more than you and me put together and he's just smart that way. And sure enough, there it was, bam, QUINCUNX (!?!?), bam, CLAFOUTI ... and yet my time was totally normal for a Saturday, so I learned a couple new words without too much aggravation, which is just fine with me. I was much more aggravated by AES and HOBS and ENE and a little bit by FES (mostly because I thought it was spelled FEZ) (58D: Morocco's next-largest city after Casablanca). But I very much liked "I DON'T LIKE TO BRAG" and "RETURN OF THE JEDI," and NAHUATL (40D: Language from which peyote comes) and XANADU (8D: Site of Coleridge's "stately pleasure-dome") and SPIT TAKE (14D: Reaction to an unexpected joke) were pretty snazzy as well (for the record, this is the only way in which I will accept "SPIT" in my puzzle). I'm very much not a fan of themes on Saturday (or Friday), as they tend to be themed enough to restrict the quality of the fill but not themed enough to really be worth it. Today's theme was kind of a shrug for me. A push. A wash. I didn't care about it. It's fine.
QUINCUNX nearly broke me up front. First of all, I wanted PENT-... something. Then I really wanted the latter part of the word to be -CRUX (because the black-square formations looked like crosses). I wasn't quite sure if the "Pattern of five shapes" was the five PLUS SIGNs or the five black squares arranged to look like a PLUS SIGN in each instance. Anyhoo, -CRUX was wrong. But knowing my Coleridge really helped because XANADU gave me not only the "X" but the "A" I needed to see UNDERSEA, and I was able to slowly piece things together from there. Found BANS very hard to get (19A: Some last a lifetime); had -ANS and still no idea, but luckily QUÉBEC fell into place and gave me that last letter I needed. Whole NE was a piece of cake. Zero problems there. Watched all of "Veep" earlier this year and still had no idea re: ANNA Chlumsky, but now that I see her face of course I know who she is. I did not realize she was the (child) star of the 1991 movie "My Girl" (opposite Macaulay Culkin) until just now. That's quite a career.
Never saw "My Girl," but I did see "RETURN OF THE JEDI"—probably several times—and yet that didn't keep me from failing to understand the clue and initially writing in RETURN OF THE KING (12D: Whence a memorable emperor's fall). I think of Darth Vader as "Lord Vader," so "emperor" weirdly threw me off (I also, it seems, completely forgot that the Emperor was actually Palpatine, who I don't remember being in *any* of the first three "Star Wars" movies ... time for a rewatch, I guess). CLAFOUTI gave me trouble in the SW, but otherwise, smooth sailing. So overall, tough going around the two longer words I didn't know and couldn't hope to infer, and easy going everywhere else. Thus, Medium. Good day.
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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Kind of a placeholder puzzle. It's got a real basic core concept that renders the kind of low-key, mostly sub-chuckle wackiness that I associate with last-century puzzles. But the revealer really saves it from outright ordinariness and blandness. MOVE DOVER has the kind of big, weird wackiness that wacky puzzles need if they're gonna work (nothing worse than tepid wackiness). There's something so strange and improbable and cartography-specific about moving Dover. Like, where did you have it in the first place? In a Bristol suburb? I also just like imagining that "MOVE DOVER!" is some kind of all-hands-on-deck cartographical emergency, like an alarm is going off and siren lights are flashing in some secret subterranean mapmaking lair. 'The Queen's atlas is wrong! All wrong! MOVE DOVER! I repeat, MOVE DOVER!" So the puzzle put that image in my mind, if nothing else. Also, I like that the revealer is itself a theme answer. Usually revealers just point at the themers, but this one exemplifies *and* explains the theme concept. Neat trick. I also like that the best of the rest of the themers is sitting midpuzzle, in a marquee position. FORGED ALLIANCES is the biggest of the lot, and also the one that has the most transformative power, i.e. the biggest sound change (ALLIANCES to DALLIANCES, with the stress moving from the "I" to the first "A"). So the theme idea is a bit dull, but at least one of the first four themers came to play, and the revealer had enough juice to make the whole endeavor seem worth it. Arguably. I don't know if I'm arguing that, but it's arguable. 
