Relative difficulty: Medium (probably easier, but it's 5:15am on a Saturday and my unwarm brain came in with a Medium time) (7:45)
THEME: none
Word of the Day: PTOLEMY (4D: Astronomer with a geocentric model of the universe) —
Alexandrian astronomer (of the 2nd century) who proposed a geocentric system of astronomy that was undisputed until the late Renaissance (vocabulary.com)
• • •
This one started pretty dull, but got better (and harder) toward the bottom. There's slightly too much neon junk here, like AREI and especially ILLE (ugh), and to a lesser extent APLAN ICAMEAREEL. ILLE always used to get the dumb clue ["Winnie ___ Pu"], which is some Latin version of Milne, I guess. Turns out no clue is really gonna save ILLE. The longer stuff in this grid could've been more interesting too. ANTOINETTE was a giveaway, and TETE-A-TETES and RAT-A-TAT just seem like filler. I see that NETFLIX AND CHILL *wants* to be the marquee answer here, but that phrase has already appeared in the NYT crossword and (worse) already feels soooooo dated. Like, in the future, decades from now, someone will throw an "Early '10s Party" and a couple will come as both NETFLIX and CHILL and people will go "Greeg! (or whatever the new "OMG" is), your costumes are so 2014! Hey, remember memes!? [Sigh] Things sure were better back then." This is another puzzle that really wants you to feel its colloquial nowness. The upside is that this striving gets us the two best answers in the grid: BUTT-DIALED and FLIPPHONES, which are *almost* a perfect crossing; you know, if you could butt-dial a flip phone. BUTT-DIALED is even kind of sitting on FLIPPHONES. Not bad. The rest of the grid was just OK. Workmanlike. Not bad, by any means. But kind of blah.
[Grieg! "Death of ASE"—beware this crosswordese, which may return at any time to bite you!]
Fact that both good answers were "?"d made them Much harder to get, and since both good answers are long answers, not getting them meant not being able to move easily between sections. In fact, the SE corner was by far the hardest part of the grid for me, as both those answers meet down there, and AHOY, MATEY seemed way more possible than the vaguer, breezier AHOY THERE (43A: Ship-to-ship communication). And then the clue on TYPES was impossible for me, even with the "Y" in place. And clues on LAC (31A: Switzerland's ___ de Neuchâtel) and WILL (35A: Something that's "free" (although that's debatable)) meant nothing to me, and I had no idea about the WARHOLS or Hannah Montana, and the FBI is a "Spy grp."? I think of CIA as spies and FBI as, you know, cops, feds, G-MEN. Had the "-BI" and honestly didn't want to put in the "F" because the clue seemed so weird. I had no interesting wrong answers today, though I did want my NEUROTIC to be a PSYCHOTIC at first (40A: Head case, so to speak) (I'm seeing "Psycho" tonight with live orchestra, so maybe that got in my head!). Oh, right, and AHOY, MATEY, botched that one. Oh, and also, the worst one was a wee one back at the very beginning. 14A: Advanced (LENT), for which I had WENT. This led to me imagining a high-schooler asking, in a bewildered voice, "Why are we weading da CWASSICS!? I wanna wead Ward of da Wings!" (1D: Makeup of a high school reading list)
This was definitely a puzzbro puzz. Trying very, very hard to let you know it's NEXT GEN, man. Look at all the lingo and argot and very-now (or at least very-this-century) turns of phrase. It's made for FRATBROs who go to the gym a lot and say things like "yo, bro, this one time when I was ON VACAY in SYDNEY, showin off my SIX PACK by the OCEAN, you know [high five] I met this girl ASHANTI and we stole this shitty COROLLA and just drove around listening to oldies like NE-YO and J-LO but then the POPO started chasing us and we were like 'SEE YA!' and led them on this long chase to the EDGE of the city until eventually we ditched the CAR down this DEAD END street and just ran for it, and all of this definitely totally actually happened ... bro. Hey you wanna go catch the latest APATOW movie? Cool." Whatever, I'll take aggressively "hello, fellow youths!" over tired and stale any day.
I really don't like when tech stuff stands in for "fresh fill." Generations used to be defined by music, style, etc. and now it's just operating systems or devices or whatever. You can shove your NEXT GENIO DEVICE (whatever that is), Ugh. I am an Old-in-training, this is my attitude toward the uncritical embrace of all things tech, and it will Never Change. BOO HISS! The SE corner here is one million times harder than the rest of the puzzle, which (for me) was quite easy. First off, did you all know how to spell SMEAGOL?! Dear lord, that name looks Nuts. I never made it through all the Tolkien books (and regretted making it through the interminable Tolkien movies) so his name looks bonkers to me. Also we call them FRAT BOYs, so that messed me up. All the Acrosses in the SE were not easy for me, especially EASY TEN (63A: Roll of 4 and 6, in craps). Maybe FRATBROs with a ratpack fetish (the fratpack!) know that term. Anyway, all of my struggles were in this general region, but they weren't that struggly, honestly. Ended up with below-average time, and that's with the early-morning solving disadvantage. So I'm old enough to be irked by the youthful pretension, not old enough to be fazed by it. Sweet spot!
Gotta run. To the gym. Not to get RIPPED, but to engage in a futile struggle against body fall-apart and eventual death. It's fun!
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)
