Constructor: John Guzzetta
Relative difficulty: Medium-Challenging
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THEME: word ladder ... in rebus form—from WARM to COLD in five boxes:
Theme answers:
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Very uneven. Unusual and ambitious, but also, at heart, just a boring old word ladder. From WARM to COLD. Why? And why in tiny boxes? Don't know. It definitely required some effort to piece together, that's for sure. Couldn't see the theme at all, or even fill in all the rebus squares properly, until the grid was completed, and I could work backward from COLD—CORD—WORD. Some of the rebus answer clues were almost no help. [Renaissance fair props] for SWORDS??? Ha, no. I could've guessed all day long and not solved S-S. Further, I had no idea what kind of BODY was called for at [Any old person], and I was convinced that ___UP was CUE UP (1D: Get ready to play). I've heard of BIRD'S EYE VIEW, but never ever WORM'S, and EAR ___ made me think only of EAR CANDY. Even after I figured out it was EAR WORM, I thought there was something going on with BIRD'S EYE VIEW and EAR WORM, i.e. a rebus where the crossing elements ... act out adages? The early BIRD catches the WORM? Honestly, I was giving this serious consideration for a while. So I had to work for it, which is great. It's just that figuring out that it was all for the sake of ... a word ladder? That was something of a let-down.
The fill was also uneven, with a bunch of stuff giving me great joy (INFERNO! OTTO DIX! BESTIARIES! SCREEN SHOT!) and some stuff leaving me wondering "what?"AZOTH? NITRILE? (41D: Latex-like glove material). Those two and TRASK (7D: "East of Eden" family name) I would've tried desperately to ditch if this had been my puzzle. Still, overall, I think the good outweighs the bad. It was important that the non-rebus fill be pretty gettable, because you need it to fill in the areas around and eventually *find* the rebus squares. It was pretty clear early on that a rebus was in play. Here's what my grid looked like a couple minutes in:
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At this point I've located the first two rebus squares, but still have no idea what goes in them, how many there are going to be, etc. Once you know they're out there, you end up looking for them everywhere, including places they're not (which, today, included the NE and SW corners). I just noticed that the rebus squares today are symmetrical. I generally don't think much of symmetrical rebuses—too easy to find. Better to make people really look, and let maximal grid smoothness dictate where the rebus square goes (rather than forcing the grid to accommodate a fixed rebus square). But today I clearly didn't even notice the symmetry, and the grid doesn't seem to have suffered too much. So symmetry seems neither plus nor minus.
Bullets:
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Relative difficulty: Medium-Challenging
THEME: word ladder ... in rebus form—from WARM to COLD in five boxes:
Theme answers:
- WARM (___ BODY / ___ UP)
- WORM (EAR ___ / ___'S EYE VIEW)
- WORD (PASS___ HINT / S___S)
- CORD (FOR THE RE___ / ___IAL)
- COLD (HEAD ___ / GO ___)
noun 1.mercury,regardedbyalchemistsastheassumedfirstprincipleofallmetals.2.theuniversalremedyofParacelsus. (dictionary.com)
• • •
The fill was also uneven, with a bunch of stuff giving me great joy (INFERNO! OTTO DIX! BESTIARIES! SCREEN SHOT!) and some stuff leaving me wondering "what?"AZOTH? NITRILE? (41D: Latex-like glove material). Those two and TRASK (7D: "East of Eden" family name) I would've tried desperately to ditch if this had been my puzzle. Still, overall, I think the good outweighs the bad. It was important that the non-rebus fill be pretty gettable, because you need it to fill in the areas around and eventually *find* the rebus squares. It was pretty clear early on that a rebus was in play. Here's what my grid looked like a couple minutes in:
Bullets:
- 5D: The P.L.O.'s Arafat (YASSER)— Spelled it YASSIR, one of a string of misspellings today that included PADMA for PADMÉ (56D: "Star Wars" queen) and WOPNER for WAPNER (55A: Judge of 1980s-'90s TV)
- 38D: "___ the light!" ("I SAW")— I went with "I SEE." I'm not sure what context is intended in either case.
- 14D: 2003 OutKast hit that was #1 for nine weeks ("HEY YA")— I'm happy to be reminded of this catchy song. Given its popularity and its five-letterness (i.e. shortness) and its vowel-endingness, I'm kind of surprised I don't see it in puzzles more often. I'm kind of horrified by how the old the song is now. Still feels current to me :(
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