Antigone's sister / FRI 1-3-20 / Mark on foreheads of Hindu women / Economic lose-lose / Signs in 2002 sci-fi film Signs / Employer of Wonder Woman in old comics / Leader of olden clan / Occupant of Zarzuela Palace / Hero of film literature who rode horse Tornado / Removes as from currency control

Constructor: Will Treece

Relative difficulty: Challenging (7:29)

THEME: none

Word of the Day: BINDI (25A: Mark on the foreheads of Hindu women) —

A bindi (Hindi: बिंदी, from Sanskrit बिन्दु bindú, meaning "point, drop, dot or small particle") is a coloured dot worn on the centre of the forehead, originally by Hindusand Jains from the Indian subcontinent. The word bindu dates back to the hymn of creation known as Nasadiya Sukta in the Rigveda.^[1] Bindu is considered the point at which creation begins and may become unity. It is also described as "the sacred symbol of the cosmos in its unmanifested state" (wikipedia)

• • •

Wow, really thought this was a Saturday. Between having just woken up from a nap to discover that we are trying to start a hot war with Iran, and still being under the "what day is it even?" holiday haze, and the puzzle's Saturday-level difficulty, I was very confused. I even tweeted about the puzzle with the hashtag #Saturday... But it's Friday, Friday, Across and Down on Friday!


I think I went in with Big Saturday Energy, and the puzzle met me where I was at. That is, I was braced for hardness, and so I was somewhat more deliberate, somewhat more on the lookout for pitfalls, second-guessing myself, etc. But the real problem for me was the barrage of wrong answers, wrong answers that looked very right, wrong answers that, in fact, shared half or more of the letters of the *correct* answers. And all of these came in a bunch, up top. The worst of them all was OTHELLO for OPHELIA (4A: Shakespeare character who introduced the phrase "primrose path"). I had "O-HEL--" and Did Not Blink. I also don't think I read the clue past "Shakespeare character," because, well, it seemed obvious that the answer was OTHELLO, why go on? WHY INDEED! Ugh.


Then at 15D: Heaters (GATS) I had GUNS and at 7D: "___ Is Betta Than Evvah!" (1976 album) (ETTA) I had ELLA. Yes, in retrospect, ELLA does not rhyme with "Betta," but that meant nothing to me in the moment. I just thought "hmm, ELLA sings Cole Porter, right? And he wrote 'Did You Evah?', didn't he??" Pffffffffft. O those three mistakes just wrecked me. I also wrote in GRADDAD instead of GRANDKID at 11D: IV vis-à-vis II, e.g. because ... I dunno, dumbness? That whole section was a big claggy. I knew BINDI, but forgot Alice MUNRO won the Nobel and totally did not understand the UNCLE clue (22D: Cave man?) until well after I was finished with the puzzle (if you "Cave" (in) you might cry "UNCLE!"). I am now literally laughing at the UNCLE / CRACKER crossing:


I have definitely read "Antigone" and I definitely have no recollection of ISMENE, yipes! (47A: Antigone's sister). I only remember CREON! Just looked it up and CREON has somehow been in the grid only once (!) in the entire time I've been blogging (13+ years!!!). And this makes *two* appearances for ISMENE in that time period. The world is broken and upside-down. . . My last observation about this puzzle is that the perimeter, from the S around the SE corner (so SEERESSOSSMESSES) is not, uh, good. When you're pushing that many "S"s and "E"s into terminal positions, you are *struggling* to keep the grid from collapsing. Crutch city. But on the whole, I thought this one was solid enough. And I can see its having played as a very normal Friday if I hadn't fallen into a trap or two.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Read more...

Clothing brand with long vowel mark in its name / TUE 11-10-15 / Jazz combo's cue / Venom conduit / Sitcom equine of 60s / New Left org of 60s

Constructor: Will Treece

Relative difficulty: Medium (normal Tuesday)

THEME: names that belong to two different famous people —

Theme answers:

• ANNE HATHAWAY (19A: "Les Misérables" actress  [or] Wife of the Bard)
• GRAHAM GREENE (32A: "Dances With Wolves" actor [or] "The Third Man" author)
• MATTHEW PERRY (39A: "Friends" actor [or] Naval officer who sailed to Japan in 1853)
• STEVE MCQUEEN (53A: "The Great Escape" actor [or] "12 Years a Slave" director) 

Word of the Day: MATTHEW PERRY —

Matthew Calbraith Perry (April 10, 1794 – March 4, 1858) was a Commodore of the United States Navy and commanded a number of ships. He served in several wars, most notably in the Mexican–American War and the War of 1812. He played a leading role in the opening of Japan to the West with the Convention of Kanagawa in 1854. Perry was very concerned with the education of naval officers and helped develop an apprentice system that helped establish the curriculum at the United States Naval Academy. With the advent of the steam engine, he became a leading advocate of modernizing the US Navy and came to be considered The Father of the Steam Navy in the United States. (wikipedia)

• • •

Trivia theme. Not the most exciting. Theme clues are so straightforward that there's no real pleasure there for the solver, beyond the "oh, right ... those people have the same name" moment. Just not much interesting going on. No cleverness. Then there's the very odd grid construction, with these double stacks of 9s running parallel to the themers. On the one hand, they're the only interesting part of the grid. On the other, they create some disastrous fill situations (most notably that banks of 3s NE corner, yikes). And 74 words on a Tuesday? Would've enjoyed a higher word count and cleaner grid, I think (with less of stuff like GITS and ENDO and ASNO and RTE and OLEOLE and ATA etc.). Also, I prefer my long non-themers running Down rather than Across. There's nothing illegal about having them go Across; it just feels awkward. They're really long and running Across, so they feel like they could/should be themers, but they're not. But mainly I just wish the fill were cleaner. I don't think AIR INTAKE is good enough to justify the 9 stacks. Better to lose one of the 9s in each corner, release pressure on the grid, and fill it better.


Why is the cluing so incredibly straightforward and dull? I know it's Tuesday, so you want to be easy, but gah! Liven it up a bit. The clue on ECKŌ (54D: Clothing brand with a long vowel mark in its name) was the most interesting but also the most bizarre—accurate enough (the "long vowel mark" is also known as a "macron," btw), but ECKŌ is already the least well known thing in the grid, and that clue doesn't bring people any closer to it. It's not definitive / distinctive enough of a feature to really make a cluing difference. But again, I'll take weirdness over the painful ploddingness of the rest of the clues. My only hesitation today came at 1D: Muslim's headscarves (HIJABS), where I thought maybe NIQABS, and then tested the "Q" cross at 17A: Tilters' contest (JOUST) and briefly thought "... QUEST?" But I didn't end up stuck in that hole for long. Pretty easy Tuesday overall.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Read more...

Suffragist Carrie Chapman / WED 2-11-15 / Overzealous copy editor / Kool-aid alternative / Region next to Chad / Competitor for Jules Verne Trophy / Former barrier breaker

Constructor: Will Treece

Relative difficulty: Easy (with wide variations probable)

—OR—

If you solved in the actual newspaper, this:

[Note the much cruddier western section, which they realized was TOO cruddy TOO late to make changes in the paper version. TOO BAD]

THEME: Overzealous copyediting (?) — musical acts (with oddly spelled names) spelled like they sound:

Theme answers:

• DEAF LEOPARD (3D: *"Hysteria" group, to an overzealous copyeditor?)
• THE BEETLES (18A: *"Rubber Soul" group, to an overzealous copyeditor?)
• LUDICROUS (23A: *"Chicken-n-Beer" rapper, to an overzealous copyeditor?)
• LINCOLN PARK (26D: *"Meteora" band, to an overzealous copyeditor?)
• BOYS TO MEN (53A: *"Evolution" group, to an overzealous copy editor?)
• MOTLEY CREW (60A: *"Dr. Feelgood" band, to an overzealous copyeditor?)

Word of the Day: Linkin Park —

Linkin Park is an American rock band from Agoura Hills, California. Formed in 1996, the band rose to international fame with their debut album Hybrid Theory, which was certified Diamond by the RIAA in 2005 and multi-platinum in several other countries. Their following studio album Meteora continued the band's success, topping the Billboard 200album chart in 2003, and was followed by extensive touring and charity work around the world. In 2003, MTV2 named Linkin Park the sixth-greatest band of the music video era and the third-best of the new millennium. Billboard ranked Linkin Park No. 19 on the Best Artists of the Decade chart. The band was recently voted as the greatest artist of '00s in a Bracket Madness poll on VH1. In 2014, the band was declared as the Biggest Rock Band in the World Right Now by Kerrang. (wikipedia)

• • •

Love this theme, though I'm not sure I like the cluing—presumably even overzealous copy editors are familiar with proper nouns and the fact that they might be spelled all kinds of ways. Also, if the copy editor has never heard of The Beatles … I wouldn't trust her to feed my goldfish, let alone edit my writing (she'd probably have the album as "Rubber Sole," too, btw). But the cluing makes its point effectively enough, I suppose—all the band names (and the one rapper's name) look, in their proper forms, like misspellings, and an overzealous copyeditor would zealously "fix" all misspellings, so … OK. Cluing aside, this is a great concept. Not sure why ONE wasn't built into the center of the grid (where ICE currently sits). It's clued thematically (47A: Chart position reached by all the albums seen in the starred clues in this puzzle), so … yeah, that's weird. I think I'm realizing now why I don't like the theme cluing—seems like the cluing could've been a *lot* funnier (or, funny, period) if the musical acts were clued in relation to their (often ridiculous) copy-edited names. I want a good DEAF LEOPARD clue! Just having them all end "… to an overzealous copyeditor" is monotonous and humorless. Still, I am down with this concept of "properly spelled" band names. Fresh, fun, contemporary, playful, good. Helps that the fill is pretty good. Slightly above average for an easy puzzle, I'd say, EHS and AHH and OLA and EDUC and AND notwithstanding.


CHEESES made me laugh, solely because it's in almost the exact grid location that the much-loathed (by me) SWISSES was in a few days ago. DARFUR did not make me laugh (4D: Region next to Chad), but I like it as fill. I had ERROR instead of TO ERR and WINE instead of WINO for a bit (41D: Grape nut?), but no other missteps, resulting in a very fast solve. I think many will not find the puzzle so easy, but only because of musical ignorance, i.e. I think it highly likely that many solvers won't ever have heard of LINKIN PARK. They're nearly too recent for me (I actually couldn't tell you a single thing they've done, but I've seen their name a lot). Many won't know Christopher Brian Bridges, aka Luda, aka LUDACRIS either, even though he's been crazy prolific for well over a decade. Won't surprise any of you that rap is a blind spot for your average crossword solver. But then so is contemporary music generally. I know that feeling locked out of a puzzle's cultural playing field can be frustrating, so I'd understand if this puzzle were less than thrilling for some of the less pop-musically inclined. But I liked this a lot.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

PS Looks like dead-tree edition has different clues in the west. Well, that's … idiotic. Two words: regime change.

Read more...