Golfer Carol who won 1965 US Women's Open / FRI 12-27-19 / Establishment with 12 cabins in classic 1960 film / Smith player of doctor on doctor who / Co-creator of Watchmen comic books / Historic speaker at Israel's Knesset on 11/20/1977 / Mountebanks less formally

Constructor: Sam Trabucco

Relative difficulty: Medium-Challenging (for me) (6:24)

THEME: none

Word of the Day: BOTNETS (21A: Malicious creations of hackers) —

A botnet is a number of Internet-connected devices, each of which is running one or more bots. Botnets can be used to perform distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS attack), steal data, send spam, and allows the attacker to access the device and its connection. The owner can control the botnet using command and control (C&C) software. The word "botnet" is a combination of the words "robot" and "network". The term is usually used with a negative or malicious connotation. (wikipedia)

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I had no strong positive or negative feelings about this one. It's fine. I do think the Friday NYTXW has an obligation to be somewhat better than fine, but there's nothing particularly *wrong* with this grid. It just doesn't have much sparkle or personality. It's fine. It's full of ... things. Real things. Maybe it's the editing / cluing that's the problem—the voice. It just doesn't have one, or not an interesting one, anyway. It all just feels very pro forma and workmanlike. I just can't see being excited to put any of these answers in the grid, and with themelesses, exciting answers should be the seeds—the things you build your grid out from. Always excited to see ALANMOORE, but I've seen him before. Same with BATESMOTEL. FROZEN MARGARITA is probably the snazziest thing here, and it occupies its rightful place of centrality. I just didn't experience any "ooh, good one!" moments, which, on a Friday (the best day) is a bit disappointing. I also found the puzzle frustrating to solve not just because of the clue difficulty but because of names I didn't know. A MATT here, a MANN there. The answers ... don't seem like terribly important people. I dunno. At least if you're teaching me a new name, give me someone it seems like it might be worth knowing. There have been a million "Doctor Who" doctors, Who cares? And a golfer who won a tournament 55 years ago??? There are so many great MANNs you could've gone with: a barely consequential golfer of yore just didn't do anything fo r me. Of course the relative delightfulness of names varies from solver to solver, so you may feel differently. But take GOTYE. I got(yed) it easily, but I don't think it's *good*. A single hit 7 years ago, and a name that is utterly uninferrable at every letter ... is not great fill. You really gotta be careful with names.


I struggled to get any real flow going with this one (though the NW and especially the SE went much faster than the rest of it). Made a ton of mistakes. Here are some of them:

Mistakes:

• IVORY for EBONY (4D: Key material) — the fact that the "O" and the "Y" worked in the crosses made this one pretty tenacious. I was very lucky that SAT (25A: Rested) and HUH? (31A: "You said what?") were both correct guesses, and that I was (thus) able to see FELT AT HOME with only three letters in place.
• SAGS for SETS (13D: Goes down) — thank god ALAN MOORE set me straight, 'cause I felt pretty good about SAGS.
• SODA for COLA (49D: Mixer option) — I mean, of course I made this error; it's a classic error, and I'm always going to make it: SODA for COLA, COLA for SODA ... I'm just doomed that way.
• OBE for DSO (54D: Brit. military honor) — a. I think you mean "honour" and b. uggggggh of all the bygone clues of yore, the Brit. military honor is the one I would like to be the bygoneiest.
• GEEK for KOOK (39A: Weirdo) — I did think the clue was a *little* harsh for GEEK, but I had that terminal "K" and just ran with the first thing that came to mind.
• STEN (!?) for ICBM (48D: Cold War weapon, for short) — I knew pretty much as I was writing in STEN that it was wrong and that ICBM was another, probably stronger possibility. But still, for the record, I definitely wrote in STEN. 

Other struggles included: wanting FROST or FROSTED or FROSTY something at 34A: It's icy and coated with salt (FROZEN MARGARITA); wanting OH MY something for the (to me, Very difficulty) "OH, LORDY!" (45A: "Heavens!"); wanting absolutely nothing for ELON, which, crossing the absolutely unknown MANN, was brutal (50D: Southern university or the town it's in); having ZERO and then zero idea what could follow (35D: Favorable loan term); figuring the [Malicious creations of hackers] were some kind of BOTS (i.e. I wanted BOTS at the end of the word); and forgetting Stormy Daniels was a PORN STAR (for some reason, I just thought she was a stripper—look, I try really hard not to pay attention to the most of the more lurid *&$^ associated with the current administration, I really do, it's just too much soul-crushing sludge for a decent human mind to bear) (10D: Stormy Daniels, e.g.). Glad to see ALAN MOORE clued as *co-*creator of "Watchmen"—was half-hoping the answer to that clue was going to be DAVE GIBBONS. Comics artists are often creators of worlds, not just secondary illustrators, and nowhere is that more true than in "Watchmen." I hope the next ALAN MOORE clue recognizes his vast and influential post-DC output ("League of Extraordinary Gentlemen," "From Hell," "Tom Strong," "Promethea," etc.). But, you know, baby steps.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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Transitional zone between two biomes / THU 12-26-19 / Secret headquarters for Bruce Wayne / Comic strip title character who is Beetle Bailey's sister / Classic tune often played by ice cream trucks

Constructor: Trenton Charlson

Relative difficulty: Medium-Challenging?? (untimed)

THEME: BOWLING (62A: Sport that is the key to interpreting the answers to 21-, 40- and 56-Across) — you must read "/" and "X"s as bowling symbols in order to make sense of the long theme answers:

Theme answers:

• "/ ME THE DETAILS" ("/" is the symbol for "spare" in BOWLING) (21A: "I've heard everything I need to hear")
• X THE RIGHT BALANCE (40A: Find an ideal compromise)
• XXX IN THE STRAW (56A: Classic tune often played by ice cream trucks)

Word of the Day: SKEG (34D: Surfboard stabilizer) —

1: the stern of the keel of a ship near the sternpostespecially : the part connecting the keel with the bottom of the rudderpost in a single-screw ship

2: a fin situated on the rear bottom of a surfboard that is used for steering and stability (merriam-webster.com)

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Truly viscerally did not like this one, so not gonna spend a lot of time on it. Took one look at the grid and thought "ugh, why is it so choppy? why are there all these stupid short words everywhere? this is going to be ugly" and it was. Bad enough to have so many 3-letter words, but then when you try to clue those three-letter words (none of which are or can be good fill) at a Saturday level much of the time ... the result is fussy and annoying. And at 16-wide there was just ... more of it. More JAMERGSHYDOW and YOWFLOYESNEO and on and on. I can't even get to the theme because the rest of this thing is so painful. And then just the dumbness of RIVERSEINE, what, are you writing a poem? (5D: Subject of several Georges Seurat paintings) It's just the SEINE, we call it the SEINE. I hated that ansswer So Much, even more than when I see RIVERPO, which, yes, I have seen, and which is also bad bad bad. Is the theme cute? I don't think so, but maybe you like BOWLING? I don't like that "/" is a symbol that has to be weirdly added to the grid (i.e. you would normally just write ACDC) whereas the "X"s are just those letters (i.e. writing in EXEC here was no different than writing in EXEC any other time). I resented the revealer, because a. things would've gone faster if I'd just started there, and (related) b. by the time I got there, it was a redundant dud of an answer. Also, it's a revealer with no symmetrical theme answer (unless BATCAVE factors in somehow in a way I haven't yet figured out). But the theme isn't what's truly objectionable—the crosswordese-laden trash pile of short fill is. Oh, and ECOTONE (43A: Transitional zone between two biomes), ack, blecch, no ... and it crosses RIVERSEINE too, my god I need coffee to get the taste of this thing out of my mouth.


The only place anyone says "TGIF" is in crosswords, so much so that I now truly hate the expression (58D: "What a long week!"). Why do we pretend people say this? They do not. Do they even say it ironically. Does the restaurant chain TGIFriday's even exist anymore?? At least this grid didn't have TGI, which I have definitely seen (twice this year ... so apparently the restaurant chain *does* still exist, because that is virtually the only clue the NYTX has used for it, [___ Friday's]). What the hell is a XEROphyte? (57D: Prefix with -phyte) Maybe don't just do the dumb twin clue thing (see 72A: Prefix with -phyte) when the word you are imagining is so far out of common usage (unlike "neophyte"). Incorporate the meaning into the clue somehow, so at least the solver can learn something. A XEROphyte is a species of plant that has adapted to live in environments with very little water, which makes sense, as the only XERO- prefixed word I know is XEROscaping, where you replace your stupid thirsty lawn with plants that don't require supplemental irrigation. And LOL it's not XERO-scaping but XERIscaping, oh well. My bad. ELAL AGER NNE GTO OLE ERG (!) ENGR (!!) ERSE (!!!) ELLER (!?!) it truly is relentless, this grid. There are only three real themers here, why is this grid such a black square-ridden, short fill-infested disaster??

May this post-YULE period bring us the joyous grids we deserve! Cheers!

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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