.png)
Game option represented by a flat palm / SUN 1-2-22 / Sinuous dance that emulates a creature / Daughter in the comic strip "FoxTrot" / Culinary phrase after pollo or scaloppine / Goddess who turned Picus into a woodpecker / Final Fantasy character who shares a name with a U.S. city / Bottle flipping in the mid-2010s e.g. / God sometimes depicted with green skin / Rapper known offstage as Mathangi Arulpragasam / Car model made entirely of Roman numerals / Ones doing stellar work / High on marijuana in slang
Sunday, January 2, 2022
Constructor: Paolo Pasco
Relative difficulty: Medium
THEME: "Color Mixing" — theme answers are anagrams of two colors; the clues contain both the colors and a normal clue:
Theme answers:
- REINDEER CALVES (21A: CERISE + LAVENDER = certain baby animals)
- DOG COLLAR (32A: CORAL + GOLD = pet store purchase)
- GERMAN BEER (46A: AMBER + GREEN = imported brew)
- MARINE CORPS (52A: PEAR + CRIMSON = fighting group)
- MENTAL IMAGE (60A: LIME + MAGENTA = visualization)
- STAR CLUSTER (74A: RUST + SCARLET = celestial group)
- PEACE MARCH (83A: CREAM + PEACH = nonviolent protest)
- HOT CEREAL (94A: TEAL + OCHER = breakfast option)
- VEGETARIAN MENU (107A: MAUVE + TANGERINE = restaurant handout)
Mathangi "Maya" Arulpragasam MBE (born 18 July 1975), known by her stage name M.I.A. (an acronym of "Missing in Acton"), is a British rapper, singer, record producer and activist. Her songs contain evocative political and social commentary regarding immigration, warfare and identity in a globalised world. Her music combines elements of alternative, dance, electronic, hip hop and world music with eclectic instruments and samples. [...] M.I.A.'s first two albums, Arular (2005) and Kala (2007), received widespread critical acclaim for their experimentation with hip hop and electronic fusion. The single "Paper Planes" from Kala reached number four on the US Billboard Hot 100 and sold over four million copies. Her third album Maya (2010) was preceded by the controversial single-short film "Born Free". Maya was her best-charting effort, reaching the top 10 on several charts. Her fourth studio album, Matangi (2013), included the single "Bad Girls", which won accolades at the MTV Video Music Awards. M.I.A. released her fifth studio album, AIM, in 2016. She scored her first Billboard Hot 100 number-one single as a featured artist on Travis Scott's "Franchise" (2020). // M.I.A.'s accolades include two American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) awards and two MTV Video Music Awards. She is the first person of South Asian descent to be nominated for an Academy Award and Grammy Award in the same year. She was named one of the defining artists of the 2000s decade by Rolling Stone, and one of the 100 most influential people of 2009 by Time. Esquire ranked M.I.A. on its list of the 75 most influential people of the 21st century. According to Billboard, she was one of the "Top 50 Dance/Electronic Artists of the 2010s". M.I.A. was appointed Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) in the 2019 Birthday Honours for her services to music. (wikipedia)
• • •
Is the NYT trying to make people tired of the PRIDE PARADE? Back-to-back appearances are pretty conspicuous for an answer this ... colorful ("colorful" is an apt adjective based on the pride flag and is in no way a corny pun based on the theme of this puzzle). Not sure how I feel about AD ASTRA and ASTRONOMERS sharing the same grid. No, turns out I am sure, and I'm agin' it. STAR CLUSTER and AD ASTRA, fine, you can hop languages, but duping the ASTR- part is going too far. The puzzle was hard today primarily to the extent that I didn't know a bunch of proper nouns: EGO RENO ELSIE AIDAN PAIGE and MEL, to be specific. The MEL miss really hurt because I am a faithful watcher of "GBBO"—turns out I never knew MEL's last name. Also, clue really should say "former co-host" since she left the show in 2016, which is many eons ago in "GBBO" time. But if proper nouns hurt, they also helped: MARA SOLANGE FAVRE ELENA and M.I.A. went straight into the grid, no problem. So: win some, lose some, normal Sunday difficulty.
I didn't know NUDE was a lipstick choice. I'd heard of it as a stocking choice but it seems like a problematic concept, given that NUDE skin is obviously *all kinds* of colors. Looks like there are all kinds of NUDE, too, so hey, great. I have never spent significant time with a makeup wearer, hence my cosmetics knowledge deficiency. Hardest part of the grid for me by far was the very beginning; took me forever to figure out PAPER (1A: Game option represented by a flat palm), and even after I got it, it took a few beats before I understood what the hell "game" was even involved (A: Rock, PAPER, Scissors), and then I totally forgot there was going to be an Olympics in PARIS (1D: 2024 Olympics host) (I wanted CHINA there, but that's *this* year, not 2024). My favorite answer (that didn't involve swole ungulates) was FADED. I just watched someone rush to Twitter to show off their answer for 56D: High on marijuana, in slang, and while the tweet did get a lot of likes, there was a small problem: the grid-poster had written in BAKED, not FADED, and in doing so had also let the world know that they thought "Nappy" was the British term for NAPKIN (105A: Nappy : U.K. :: ___ : U.S. = DIAPER). So, a small bit of advice from someone who routinely writes in wrong first guesses: don't tweet out your grid at all (come on, spoilers!) and *especially* don't tweet out your grid Before You Have Finished.
Read more...
