Relative difficulty:Medium-Challenging (*for a Monday*: 20+ seconds over normal time)
THEME:OPED COLUMN (29D: Place for airing an opinion ... or what five of the his puzzle's Down answers contain?) — "OPED" can be found inside four down-running themers:
Theme answers:
PIANO PEDAL (3D: One of three at the base of a Steinway)
SLOPE DOWN (33D: Decline, as a ramp)
HOPE DIAMOND (17D: Large gem in the Smithsonian)
EUROPE DAY (9D: Annual celebration when a 12-star flag may be flown)
Word of the Day:EUROPE DAY—
In Europe, Europe Day is an annual celebration of peace and unity in Europe. There are two separate designations of Europe Day: 5 May for the Council of Europe, and 9 May for the European Union (EU). The latter is the EU's flag day and has a greater visibility.
The Council of Europe's day reflects its own establishment in 1949, while the European Union's day is also known as Schuman Day and celebrates the historical declaration by French foreign minister Robert Schuman in 1950. Europe Day is one of a number of European symbols designed to foster unity among Europeans. (wikipedia)
• • •
Pretty straightforward, with "OPED" inside of "columns" (i.e. Down answers). The "columns" in question were uniformly tough for me to figure out, first because I could think only of PIANO LEG ... then because SLOPE DOWN is such a Green Paintish-type answer that I had SLANT DOWN at first, and lastly because I've never heard of EUROPE DAY. Not at all. Thus, my Monday solving time spiked up. Which is fine. Cluing / fill seemed on the slightly tougher side overall for a Monday. STEW POT sounded right. STEW PAN still sounds weird, even now. The more I look at it, the more I disbelieve its thingness. STEWPOT definitely googles better, though not by as much as I expected. Between that and EUROPE DAY, the NE played slow. Then there was 19A: Bond girl Shirley (EATON). No clue. Zero, none. There have been roughly ten thousand Bond girls. Come on.
Then there was --MME- at 45A: Pound repeatedly (PUMMEL), which of course sent me to HAMMER. Then there was ROADWAY (62A: Surface to drive on). Had the ROAD, and then ... nothing. ROADWAY is a word I recognize but would never use, ROAD being normally sufficient. Finally, the clue on REVUE told me virtually zero (30D: "Side by Side by Sondheim," e.g.). Could've been OPERA for all I knew. Maybe since Sondheim is a notorious puzzle-lover, that was supposed to be a little wink / nod to him. Fine. Not a Monday clue, but fine. It's all fine. Just fine.
THEME: "Double Features" — imagined double features, which are really imagined single features in which two movie titles have been fused together [addendum—please read the P.P.S., below]:
Theme answers:
FROZEN WATERWORLD (22A: Double feature about the Arctic Ocean?)
ALIEN CONTACT (38A: ... about the search for extraterrestrial life?)
TITANIC SKYFALL (49A: ... about baseball-sized hail?)
BIG CONSPIRACY THEORY (67A: ... about Lee Harvey Oswald not being the lone gunman?)
SAW THE DEPARTED (87A: ... about attending a funeral?)
ROCKY SLEEPER (96A: ... about an insomniac?)
NOTORIOUS KINGPIN (116A: ... about Pablo Escobar?)
Word of the Day:BORIS Johnson(67D: ___ Johnson, former mayor of London) —
Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson (born 19 June 1964) is a British politician, popular historian, author, and journalist. He has been Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs since 13 July 2016 and has served as the Member of Parliament (MP) for Uxbridge and South Ruislip since 2015. He had previously served as MP for Henley from 2001 until 2008 and as Mayor of London from 2008 until 2016. A member of the Conservative Party, Johnson identifies as a One-Nation Conservative and has been associated with both economically liberal and socially liberal policies. [...] Johnson is a controversial figure in British politics and journalism. Supporters have praised him as an entertaining, humorous, and popular figure with appeal beyond traditional Conservative voters. Conversely, he has been criticised by figures on both the left and right, accused of elitism and cronyism, laziness and dishonesty, and using xenophobic, racist, and homophobic language. Johnson is the subject of several biographies and a number of fictionalised portrayals. (wikipedia)
• • •
Ugh. This shoulda been called "Wordplay Trainwreck." Two major, deal-breaking flaws with this theme. PART A (ugh, I say): it is infinitely replicable. Just plunk two movie names next to each other. You could probably do a Sunday-sized puzzle from post -2010 movies alone. Getting symmetrical theme answers is really your only challenge. "The Martian Room"! "Brooklyn Bridge of Spies"! I haven't even left 2015 yet. There is nothing here. Not only that, I guarantee you that this theme has been done, and been done better, and been done more cleverly. Even the title is just a [shrug]. A bored "how's this?" And then Part B, the execution. These answers ... it's like the creators weren't really sure what "funny" was. Like they looked up "humor" on the internet at the last minute. How else to explain the singularly weak BIG CONSPIRACY THEORY? You Can Plunk "Big" In Front Of Anything, why why why would you do that??? Nothing Clever Is Happening Here! And ALIEN CONTACT!?!?! You know that CONTACT was actually about ... alien ... contact ... so ... literally nothing clever is happening here. It is negative clever. Also, SAW THE DEPARTED would just never work ever on any level. I can imagine the other pairings as coherent phrases, but not that one. Titles so rarely begin with the perfect tense and no clear subject. Everything about this puzzle, including how it got approved for publication, is utterly baffling. Also, the fill isn't great.
[NOTORIOUS ... BIG]
MITRAL x/w CARRÉ = rough (7D: Kind of heart valve + 26A: French for "square"). Very rough. I'm actively relearning French as we speak and couldn't come up with CARRÉ, probably because there are no accents aigus in crosswords. PART A (not I!?) and GNMA (blargh) were also dire and made ALIEN hard to see (because, again, who would've expected so banal a pairing as ALIEN and CONTACT!). MEIS! ASYE! TER! I have to stop now. This appears to be a debut, and it's one a discriminating editor should've sent back, with notes on how to make it NYT-worthy. Only Merl Reagle could pull off something like this—could give it the ridiculous, clever, ingenious humor it *needs* to come off. He would've added some twist that made it all seem worthwhile. I miss him.
Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld
P.S. this tweet
P.P.S. IMPORTANT
Please read the following comment from reader Martin Abresch, who found out from reading another blog (one in the "NYT Family," ironically...) that:
the submitted version was much *MUCH* better. The theme answers were
not designed to be wacky movie combinations. The design was for a
two-movie answer to describe a one-movie clue.
FROZEN WATERWORLD = Ice Age?
ALIEN CONTACT = ET The Extraterrestrial?
TITANIC SKYFALL = Armageddon?
BIG CONSPIRACY THEORY = JFK?
SAW THE DEPARTED = The Sixth Sense?
ROCKY SLEEPER = Insomnia?
NOTORIOUS KINGPIN = The Godfather?
I
mean, this goes beyond issues of one clue being better or worse than
the other. The answers were designed to provide accurate descriptions of
movies. They were not written to be wacky. In the published
puzzle, SAW_THE_DEPARTED (Double feature about attending a funeral?) is
dull as a doorknob and barely makes sense. In the original version,
SAW_THE_DEPARTED ("The Sixth Sense?") is clever and precise.
Personally,
feel sorry for the constructor, Jerry Miccolis. The theme was solid,
and several of the theme clue-answer pairs made me smile. The editors
utterly ruined it. I do not understand why they changed the clues at
all. Epic fail.
This is jaw-dropping, honestly. One of the worst editing fails I've ever heard of. The original clues are the raison d'etre of the whole puzzle. They actually make sense of the title, for *&%^'s sake. Maybe it's time the NYT started seriously considering a changing of the guard. Yeesh. Sorry Will ruined your puzzle, Jerry. Better luck next time.
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!")
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