G.I. pal of Forrest Gump / FRI 7-23-21 / Crystal gazer's lead-in / Classic hit that begins My friends feel it's their appointed duty / Elusive thing for a popular show / Oversize letter at the beginning of a chapter

Constructor: Michael Hawkins

Relative difficulty: Medium-Challenging

THEME: none 

Word of the Day: HOBART (41A: Tasmania's capital) —

Hobart (/ˈhoʊbɑːrt/ [...] is the capital and most populous city of the Australian island state of Tasmania. Home to almost half of all Tasmanians, it is the least populated Australian state capital city, and second smallest if territories are taken into account, after Darwin, Northern Territory. Hobart is located in Tasmania's south-east on the estuary of the River Derwent, making it the most southern of Australia's capital cities. Its skyline is dominated by the 1,271-metre (4,170 ft) kunanyi/Mount Wellington, and its harbour forms the second-deepest natural port in the world, with much of the city's waterfront consisting of reclaimed land. The metropolitan area is often referred to as Greater Hobart, to differentiate it from the City of Hobart, one of the five local government areas that cover the city. It has a mild maritime climate. [...] Founded in 1804 as a British penal colony, Hobart is Australia's second oldest capital city after Sydney, New South Wales. Whaling quickly emerged as a major industry in the area, and for a time Hobart served as the Southern Ocean's main whaling port. Penal transportation ended in the 1850s, after which the city experienced periods of growth and decline. The early 20th century saw an economic boom on the back of mining, agriculture and other primary industries, and the loss of men who served in the world wars was counteracted by an influx of immigration. Despite the rise in migration from Asia and other non-English speaking regions, Hobart's population remains predominantly ethnically Anglo-Celtic, and has the highest percentage of Australian-born residents among Australia's capital cities. (wikipedia)

• • •

Maybe this would've flowed more nicely if I'd been able to mentally process 15A: Country without an official army, navy or air force (COSTA RICA). I thought the clue wanted a general term for such a country ... not an actual country. If the clue had had "Central American" in it or really anything in it to specify that a specific country was in play, I would've gotten it easily. I've been to COSTA RICA, I know it has no army. But I figured there must be a general term. And since the only other things I could conjure up in that NW corner were CCED and DAMUP and ERE (and I was not at all sure of those first two), this thing opened feeling sluggish, Saturdayish, meh. Jumped over to the NE where I read a bunch more clues I didn't know before seeing NOIRE and then getting ERASE TESS ISEE, and I was in business. Still, I never felt like I got a rhythm going in this one, never really felt like I hit a good patch. There was no thrill to this one. Bunch of solid stuff, but no real marquee answers. No wows. And it just didn't have bounce. This is a cluing voice problem that is, I'm sure, largely a matter of taste. Felt like it was trying to be hard in many places, but its idea of clever was rarely mine. That SNL clue, for instance, yeesh (10D: Letters that can fill in the blanks of "_A_D_ER" to make an appropriate surname). Poker slang? There's nothing I'd enjoy less, thanks (43A: TNT, in poker slang) (tbh, I didn't see this clue at all, so that's good). This puzzle wanted to Cliff Clavin me with trivia and tell me riddles and jokes out of a book and honestly I just want light and witty conversation, puzzle. 

[Maze runner] is a pretty good MINOTAUR clue. [Sixers in pro sports?] for TDS, also good. But a clue like the one for STAGE MOM feels like a swing and a miss (21D: One who knows the drama of raising children?)—I think of STAGE MOMs as ones who (***stereotypically***) create the (usually unnecessary) drama. Overbearing, overpresent, hovering, demanding. The term has a negative connotation that the clue doesn't catch. There is a difference between *knowing* the drama and *being* the drama. LAZY RIVER seems like a nice thing, but the water park (???) clue kills it. I got it easily enough, I guess, but LAZY RIVER just doesn't seem iconically water parky (admittedly, water parks are not places I would voluntarily go these days). Too often today (my beloved Friday!), I was either struggling to understand the clue or not really feeling the clue's whole vibe.

I liked RIDESHARE, though the "?" clue on it was deadening (12D: Pool service?). Big fan of DROPCAPs in general, and "NICE CATCH!" is probably the snazziest, most delightful thing in the grid. If it involved books, editing, poetry (METERED!) today, I was generally on board. I don't understand why the NE and SW corners are so weak in their short fill. Actually, what I don't understand is LTDAN and YENTE, the one a secondary character from a movie I've tried really hard to forget for the past quarter century, the other ... honestly, I just don't understand the spelling, I think. It's enough for me to keep YENTL and YENTA straight, but I've got YENTE too? (she's a character in "Fiddler on the Roof"). Looks like YENTA and YENTE are girl's names, YENTL is a girl *or* boy's name (as well as a Barbra Streisand movie), and YENTA is the only one of those that has become a regular English loan word (meaning, roughly, "busybody" or "gossip"). Anyway, if you needed YENTE in your grid, sure, you could use YENTE, but under SIDEA and SLIER, with that ambiguous last vowel, it just doesn't liven things up much. It just felt so anticlimactic to end down there, to have the last thing you fill in be ARE (60D: =) because you were not sure of the last vowel in YENTE, which is itself buried under a pile of overfamiliar stuff. When the highlights of a puzzle are very high, when it crackles and sizzles, swoops and spins, I tend not to notice little problems with the 4s and the 5s. But today, my brain didn't have those highs to enjoy, so it found something else to gnaw on. The Friday bar is So High now that there are close to half a dozen constructors I can name off the top of my head who routinely crush Fridays. Software plus the wordlist arms race means that putting together passable themeless grids isn't so hard any more. You need style, personality, verve. Computer power will get you to "serviceable." You need more. See you tomorrow.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld 

P.S. REMINDER: the Boswords Crossword Tournament is *this weekend* (July 25). Here's the announcement from tournament organizer John Lieb:

Registration is now open for the Boswords 2021 Summer Tournament, which will be held on Sunday, July 25. This event will be ONLINE only. Solvers can compete individually or in pairs. To register, to see the constructor roster, and for more details, go to www.boswords.org, where past tournament puzzles are also available for purchase.

A percentage of the proceeds goes to local Boston charities. There are cool constructors involved, like Malaika Handa and Wyna Liu. You should definitely check it out.

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Read more...

TV journalist Pressman with a Peabody and 11 Emmys / THU 7-22-21 / Ones sporting man buns and ironic t-shirts say / Closest living relatives of whales / Home to Planck Einstein and Heisenberg when they won their Nobel Prizes / the Autopilot inflatable balloon character in Airplane / Ziff Marge's ex-boyfriend on the Simpsons

Constructor: John Guzzetta

Relative difficulty: Medium-Challenging (this is going to vary widely ... also the grid is oversized (15x16))

THEME: JOINED AT THE HIP (57A: Inseparable ... or like three pairs of answers in this puzzle?) — HIP runs alongside HIP three times (how you're supposed to make sense of the crosses, I don't know):

Theme answers:

• HIPSTERS (17A: Ones sporting man buns and ironic T-shirts, say)
• HIPPOPOTAMUSES (20A: Closest living relatives of whales)
• PARTY WHIPS (35A: They enforce discipline among legislators)
• SHIPWRECKS (42A: Locations of some dives)
• JOINED AT THE HIP
• PITA CHIP (63A: Little dipper?)

Word of the Day: GABE Pressman (11D: TV journalist Pressman with a Peabody and 11 Emmys) —

Gabriel Stanley "Gabe" Pressman (February 14, 1924 – June 23, 2017) was an American journalist who was a reporter for WNBC-TV in New York City for more than 60 years. His career spanned more than seven decades; the events he covered included the sinking of the Andrea Doria in 1956, the assassinations of JFK and Martin Luther King Jr., the Beatles' first trip to the United States, and the attacks on the World Trade Center on 9/11. He was one of the pioneers of United States television news and has been credited as the first reporter to have left the studio for on-the-scene "street reporting" at major events. Dubbed the "Dean of New York Journalism", Pressman's numerous awards include a Peabody and 11 Emmys, and he was considered a New York icon. (wikipedia)

• • •

There must have been some kind of printing error. The Downs don't make any sense if HIP and HIP occupy entirely separate squares, so I figured the newspaper version of the puzzle must have used enlarged cells, like a double-decker cell for the "H" and the "I" and the "P" so that they could be part of both Acrosses but still represent just one letter in the Downs. But that is not what the newspaper version looks like. It has HIP alongside HIP as well. So I'm back to the first and most obvious problem, which is ... the crosses. The Downs. They make no sense. Full stop. The End. I genuinely don't understand how you can just neglect the Downs like that. The grid is now full of nonsense like AIIR and TEPPID. Baffling. The NYTXW has really lost its bearings this past week. The puzzles have either been exceedingly weak or  lazily executed. Not sure I've ever seen a summer puzzle dump quite like this. We're in a brutal run right now. I hope it's over. Tomorrow is Friday. Hope springs eternal on Fridays.


I got the theme concept early ... or so I thought. See, I'm one of those people who figures the Acrosses *and* the Downs will make sense, so my first instinct was that the Downs had to work and that the gimmick must have something to do with leaving certain squares empty. Here's what my puzzle looked like after just a half minute or so:

REHAB ARISE TEPID. I got RAT (1A: Bad singer?) and then got *all* of those Downs right away. When one didn't fit, I figured I was wrong, but when they all didn't fit, and they all didn't fit in exactly the same one-too-many-letters way, I "knew" there was a disappearing-letter theme afoot. When I saw that the long Across up top was HIPPOPOTAMUSES, I figured the "HIP" and just hopped (hip-hop!) up to the line above (i.e. to HIPSTERS), so the theme must have something to do with "moving your hips" (up, down ... side to side?). But apparently hips *do* lie because these hips are not moving; instead, they just sit there, alongside other hips, trying to convince me that monstrosities like ARIISE and DOPPED are actual words. I just can't forgive the puzzle for making me fill in those squares, thus murdering the HIP-crossing Downs. Beyond the theme, I found the NE corner very hard, but the rest of it was pretty normal, maybe even easy for a Thursday. In the NE, I got EGOS and ENRAGE and DRESS SIZE, but really struggled to get TEX (wanted maybe NEB?), WEIMAR, INCUBUS, ICEBOX, and especially GABE, who ... how would anyone outside of last-century NYC know who that is? He seems to be a local media legend, but yeesh. Come on. You're an international puzzle. There are lots of GABEs in the world. OK, there are some GABEs in the world. You can find one known outside the tri-state area, I promise you. Anyway, GABE, sure. 

Five things:

• 32A: Pelvic joints (COXAE) — there's a coxa? I know of the coccyx, sure, but wow, you are asking for some deep pelvic knowledge here ... and the plural. Not the prettiest X-word I've ever seen
• 35D: Rodentlike relative of a rabbit (PIKA) — huh, it's really test-my-taxonomic-trivia day, isn't it? Like COXAE, never heard of it. I had PACA here. PACA, like PIKA (now), is a four-letter creature I've only ever seen in crosswords. The way to tell them apart is a PACA is an actual rodent (not "rodentlike"), and the PIKA is slightly adorable (very much unlike the PACA):

ohhh look how cute...

Gah! Run!

• 17A: Ones sporting man buns and ironic T-shirts, say (HIPSTERS) — are we still doing this sneery stereotyping? It's lazy and dumb. People have hair. They wear shirts. None of this has anything to do with being hip, or hipsters. Next you're going to tell me beards are for hipsters, or IPAs, or some other thing you don't have or you don't like. HIPSTERS seems to be a largely imaginary class of person onto whom people anxiously project a self-loathing that comes from the horrifying realization of their own hyper-consumerism and hyper-conformity. "Look at those people ... doing things I don't do ... with their hair ... and shirts ... enjoying themselves! ... so pretentious!" Sure, the HIPSTERS are the pretentious ones. Whatever you say, pal.
• 60D: Texter's farewell (TTYL) — still never seen anyone actually text this, perhaps because BYE is actually shorter. TTYL still feels fanciful and imaginary (stands for Talk To You Later, in case you somehow didn't know)
• 42A: Locations of some dives (SHIPWRECKS) — I like this clue, probably because I like imagining run-down bars, diners, etc. Reminds me of my favorite crime fiction. It's rare that misdirection truly pleases me, but this misdirection did.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld 

P.S. oh hey I forgot to mention that the Boswords Crossword Tournament is *this weekend* (July 25). Here's the announcement from tournament organizer John Lieb:

Registration is now open for the Boswords 2021 Summer Tournament, which will be held on Sunday, July 25. This event will be ONLINE only. Solvers can compete individually or in pairs. To register, to see the constructor roster, and for more details, go to www.boswords.org, where past tournament puzzles are also available for purchase.

A percentage of the proceeds goes to local Boston charities. There are cool constructors involved, like Malaika Handa and Wyna Liu. You should definitely check it out.

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Read more...