This feels pretty half-hearted. OK, you've got the latticed 15s, fine, but they are an uneven collection at best—ULTRA-FASTIDIOUS?—and there's really nothing else of interest. Glut of short fill means glut of tired stuff (PSST ISON IBN IPO IHOP ERGO TTOP UHOH UFW SUI SRTA SETI SETTO and on and on and on). And then there's the smarmy self-regard of the answer THE NEW YORK TIMES (11D: It sold for a penny at its 1851 launch). Blargh. Also, NO DAY AT THE BEACH ... is a phrase (I googled it), but NO WALK IN THE PARK is so much better. Doesn't fit, but it's so so so much more the answer to that clue (3D: Hardly a piece of cake). I don't really get NO DAY AT THE BEACH. At least walking in the park is an act, so it makes sense as an easy thing. But a day at the beach isn't an act. It's just ... nice, I guess, if you like beaches (a day at the beach would be NO DAY AT THE BEACH for me, frankly). Dunno. Just don't like it. It's like NO PICNIC. More "unpleasant" than "not easy." More legitimately unlikable is that SE corner. Crossing NOBLESSE with ESSE is grosse. Bad form. ESSE is terrible enough fill on its own. Here, it's got that terrible going for it as well as the added terrible of being a dupe of the last four letters of an answer it crosses. You gotta do better than that. (See also TINGE / INGE)
Here's how I got in:
Tried a bunch of wrong things at 1D: Inclination, like TILT and LEAN. Also tried TETON for 4D: Name on a range, I'm not even joking. But by running all the short Downs up top (and toggling from TETON to AMANA), I was able to see ANOMALIES (14A: Blips). It wasn't too long after that that I got the answer that broke the whole grid open:
Now I've got it spelled wrong here (it's KERRY, not KERRI), but that hardly matters (8D: Lead actress on TV's "Scandal"). Getting a central grid-spanner very early is a huge solving boost. The grid's structure was such that the grid-spanner allowed me to make short work of all the short fill in the middle and bottom, and from there, expanding out into the rest of the grid was a walk on the day at the park beach picnic, for real.
Word of the Day:TYRESE(34A: Rapper/actor in several "Fast & Furious" movies) —
Tyrese Darnell Gibson (born December 30, 1978), also known mononymously as Tyrese, is an American Grammy-nominated singer, songwriter, actor, author, television producer, former fashion model and MTV VJ. He is best known for his roles as Joseph "Jody" Summers in Baby Boy and as Roman Pearce in the Fast and the Furious series. After releasing several albums, he transitioned into films, with lead roles in several major Hollywood releases. (wikipedia)
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This fall, I have somehow almost fully switched over to old people time. That is, I fall asleep ridiculously early and get up before 5. This is partly my schedule (start early *every* weekday), possibly the fact that I started going to the gym 4x/week (my appetite for both food and sleep, way up), and partly the general malaise of the country (can't deal ... must sleep). The puzzle implications of this new sleep schedule are that I am solving in the strange wee hours. 3:45. 4:15. And I am still a crap morning solver. So I think I might have to adjust my difficulty ratings accordingly. Felt like I really struggled with this one—second time in a row that's happened to me with a Wentz puzzle, which I normally crush. Clock said difficulty was just a tick more than average, so I might have been judging myself again my Wentzpectations as opposed to my Friday expectations. Anyway, this grid is bright and lively and current (and, it's worth noting, remarkably, anomalously, black—the fact that I would say that about a puzzle with four black people in it tells you something about the norm), but So Many Names. So many proper noun rocky shores to crash your ship on. NW is probably the rockiest, with COLMES KULIK crossing ABOUT A BOY BILLY ZANE, with "BABALU" and STYX thrown in for good measure. I personally slipped on ORTHO / ZENO (shakes fist at ORKIN!) and then fell right down at the very end, where I tripped on J COLE. Because of LOADS at 46A: A lot, I had him as JOOLE. "Who the hell is JOOLE? No, not Jewel. JOOLE! Damn it, I ask for more black representation in the grid and it bites me in the ass!" But it was J COLE, whom I have heard of. Much more familiar to me than SHAD, actually (46D: Source of valuable eggs).
I do think my 1-Across Theory of Speedsolving applies here, as 1A: Go over again, as one's writing? was a no-hoper for me (without crosses). Not only that, it seemed to beg for the RE- prefix, which I tried for a bit. If 1-Across is a gimme, I'm gonna crush the puzzle. If it takes a few crosses, I'll be OK. If it's really intractable, I'm in trouble. The most dispiriting moment for me came when I read the clue at 8D: One of Augusta National's first two female members and thought, "That's Condi Rice! Let's see CONDOLEEZA ... wait, it doesn't fit. Damn it!" Two Zs, Condi!? Come on! It's just not fair that there should exist in the world both a one-Z LEEZA Gibbons and a Two-Z CONDOLEEZZA Rice. No justice, no peace!
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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