Sorrento and Telluride / WED 1-4-23 / Amazon-owned home Wi-Fi brand / First of the Chinese dynasties

Constructor: Laura Breiman and Tom Bachant

Relative difficulty: It felt hard but my time was standard-- 6:40

THEME: CELESTIAL BODIES — Various space things are spelled out in circles:

• MOON
• COMET
• GALAXY
• STAR
• ASTEROID

Word of the Day: "The Song of the LARK" (Willa Cather novel) —

Cather achieved recognition as a novelist of the frontier and pioneer experience. She wrote of the spirit of those settlers moving into the western states, many of them European immigrants in the nineteenth century. Common themes in her work include nostalgia and exile. A sense of place is an important element in Cather's fiction: physical landscapes and domestic spaces are for Cather dynamic presences against which her characters struggle and find community.

• • •

Hey besties, welcome to another addition of Malaika MWednesday! I write to y'all from Mexico City where I will be vibing for the next several weeks. Tonight I was sipping on some mezcal from a brand called Mala Idea, which means "bad idea"-- I loooove that name. I have a zillion things to say about this puzzle, so let's dive in!

First of all.... I think I know one of the constructors?? Like not as in "we talk on Twitter" but as in she and my sister went to the same very small middle school together roughly fifteen years ago and we would sometimes give her a ride to school and watch episodes of Psych in the car but we have not interacted since then. Laura, if you are ISK Laura, hi! Crazy running into you here.

Next, let's talk about the theme. I think this type of theme sits very well on a Wednesday. It doesn't fit into one of the Standard Crossword Themes (TM), like "add a letter to make a wacky phrase" or "all the last words can follow the same word" but it isn't quite diabolical enough for a Thursday. And "reading the letters in the circles" is definitely a Known Crossword Concept, but I've never seen it executed with this subject matter.

Arranging letters into those patterns is very tough from a constructing standpoint, and I am impressed that we still got some fun answers like OREO THIN and WEIRDOS and MAGENTA. There were some harder things-- for example, I am very much a Tech Girl but had never heard of EERO. Had y'all? I also don't love to see random Roman numerals, like CDL, in a puzzle, but at least they gave it an easy clue! And, I am positive I have complained about NOES as the plural of "no" on this very website and I am also positive that the commenters have reassured me that it is correct actually. But it just looks so weird!!

What I loved most about this puzzle was the grid design (soo pretty) and the revealer, which reminded me of the "Heavenly Bodies" theme of the 2018 Met Gala. (Actually, I literally thought the theme was CELESTIAL BODIES until I just now Googled it to find out what year that happened.) Any entry that reminds me of these legends is a welcome sight.

My least favorite thing about the puzzle was the shapes of the theme answers. Whenever there's some attempt at turning the squares of a puzzle into a shape, people will argue about whether it was successful or not. For example, I loved this duck, but other people didn't see it at all. I liked the depiction of COMET here, but the rest didn't quite convince me.... MOON in particular was depicted as a square.... I don't know much but I know that moons are not squares. And isn't our GALAXY more of a spiral shape than a large circle? What did y'all think? Maybe I just don't know enough about space!

Bullets:

• ["Evita" setting: Abbr.] for ARG: One thing I hate is when an entry has an existing modern meaning, but the editors at The Times pick a clunkier or more dated reference. To me, ARG is a common term in Python programming, but instead they chose to use a kinda random abbreviation. :/ (See also, GIT and LOCS.)
• [Type of car whose name comes from the French word for "cut"] for COUPE: A coupe is also a type of glassware. I was recently at a party where a friend was drinking out of one and she said "I have a fun fact-- but don't fact check it!!" The fact was that the first coupe glasses were molded after Marie Antoinette's breasts and indeed that is very fun and I will never fact check it.
• [Circus barker?] for SEAL: Nothing to say here beyond I loved this clue!

xoxo Malaika

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TV political drama known for its walk and talks / TUE 1-3-23 / Bird in Tootsie Pop commercials since 1970 / Epitome of slipperiness / Multitasker's browserful

Constructor: Margaret Seikel 

Relative difficulty: Medium

THEME: "MOVE FAST AND / BREAK THINGS" (17A: With 55-Across, modern principle of start-ups) — "THING" is "broken" in two, with "TH" on one side and "ING" on the other side of three long theme answers ... I confess I have no idea how the "MOVE FAST" part factors in:
Theme answers:

• "THANKS FOR COMING" (23A: Host's farewell phrase)
• "THE WEST WING" (34A: TV political drama known for its "walk and talks")
• "THAT'S SURPRISING" (48A: "Never would have guessed it!")

Word of the Day: MEG CABOT (3D: "The Princess Diaries" author) —

 

Meggin Patricia Cabot (born February 1, 1967) is an American novelist. She has written and published over 50 novels of young adult and adult fiction and is best known for her young adult series Princess Diaries, which was later adapted by Walt Disney Pictures into two feature films. Cabot has been the recipient of numerous book awards, including the New York Public Library Books for the Teen Age, the American Library Association Quick Pick for Reluctant Readers, the Tennessee Volunteer State TASL Book Award, the Book Sense Pick, the Evergreen Young Adult Book Award, the IRA/CBC Young Adult Choice, and many others. She has also had number-one New York Times bestsellers, and more than 25 million copies of her books are in print across the world. (wikipedia)

• • •

So I am going to move now from blaming my possible blogging impairment on jet lag to blaming it on illness (and also still somehow jet lag). I was on the couch all day watching movies while my wife was in bed all day just sleeping with the cat (who was Extremely happy with this development, thank you very much—nowhere he'd rather be than curled up next to "The Lady," which is what he, that is I-doing-his-voice, calls Penelope). It is currently 11-something PM and I just *woke up* from my latest short / fitful sleeping episode. The worst is over, but oof, sleep, it is not on schedule. Anyway, my solving skills seem to be still intact, but I feel like I must have missed something with the theme, as I cannot find the "MOVE FAST" component and I'm sure there must be one. Or else, I feel there should be one and so I'm stubbornly still searching. The lack of such a component, combined with my inherent revulsion at the revealer phrase (tech bro'y sloganeering can go jump in the sea), meant that I didn't really groove on this one. Its pop culture universe is also (largely) not my pop culture universe, but that's just ... the breaks (boom, big pun, even in sickness, still got it!). Don't know anything about "The Princess Diaries" so 2x "Princess Diaries" = 2x = [shrug] (22A: ___ Thermopolis, Anne Hathaway's role in "The Princess Diaries" => MIA). MEG CABOT's name does ring a bell, though—I've probably had her name in my eyeline countless times at the bookstore). Never did take to "THE WEST WING," but the whole Aaron Sorkin "walk and talk" thing, I have definitely heard of (I was a big fan of Sorkin's "Sports Night," which probably shares some dialogue characteristics with "West Wing"). I have read Sally ROONEY, though (61A: "Normal People" author Sally), and anyway, it's not like you needed to be Very familiar with any of these pop culture answers to solve the puzzle fairly quickly. My issues with the puzzle are, as I say, primarily thematic, in that it seems incompletely executed, and that revealer phrase, blargh.

It's weird that puzzleworld wants to perpetrate "I WAS HAD" on the world when my ear always wants it to be "I'VE BEEN HAD!" Now, "I WAS HAD" returns the most Google hits, but you get a whole bunch of odd hits for grammar sites, instances where there's a comma between "was" and "had," instances where the relevant phrase is something like "who I was had nothing to do with it." I think the phrase I'm *really* hearing in my head is "WE WAS ROBBED!" but I watch a lot of gangster films, which might explain why I hear what I hear. On the symmetrical side of the grid, "WANNA GO" feels perfect. Fresh, current, terse, bouncy, good. "SEEMS OK" is in the same general category. As for difficulty, there wasn't much today, but it didn't seem unusually easy, either, for a Tuesday. I had JET before SST (the retired FRANCo-British supersonic crosswordese that time forgot!) (47D: Concorde, e.g., in brief), but no other mistakes / write-overs. I am currently amusing myself by reading a couple of rows in this grid as if the answers went together. I'm particularly intrigued by the existential question "IS LAM LAM?" and by the potential animated series "EEL TEEN" or "TEEN EWE." I'm imagining a juvenile delinquent young sheep just hanging out under a street light, smoking, glaring defiantly at me as EEL TEEN rides up on his motorcycle and does the same. I would watch a show about the escapades of these two, for sure. Sorkin, call me.

See you tomorrow, everyone.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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