Japanese salad herb / Hardwoord percussion stick / WED 7-6-16 / Corcoran of Bachelor Father / Nonpro sports org / Biophramaceutical company that makes Enbrel / Cudgel made from knotty stick

Constructor:David Woolf

Relative difficulty:Challenging


THEME:TWO-STATE SOLUTION (39A: Topic of international negotiations ... and a hint to every four-letter answer in this puzzle)—four-letter answer all made up of two two-letter US state postal codes

Word of the Day:CLAVE(64A: Hardwood percussion stick) —

n.

1. One of a pair of cylindricalhardwoodsticksbeatentogether as a percussioninstrument.

2. A syncopatedtwo-barmusicalpattern. (thefreedictionary.com)

Well, first, this should've been a Thursday. I was two minutes over my normal Wednesday time, which is to say it took me 40-50% longer than normal. The grid *is* extra (16) wide, so that accounts for a little of the time, but not nearly all of it. But appearing on the wrong day of the week isn't this puzzle's main problem. It's not even top three. What a joyless, horrible, painful slog this was. The worst, most obnoxious kind of puzzle, in that it exists *solely* to satisfy the constructor's sense that he pulled off some architectural feat ("look at me, ma!"), and is in no way—not one—geared toward the enjoyment or pleasure of the solver. Tell me, please, how interesting / entertaining / enthralling it is to know that the four-letter answers (ooh, four letters, exciting!) are made up of two state codes. How on god's green can that be interesting? What's worse—much worse—is that not only is it horribly uninteresting, it *causes the fill in the puzzle to be terrible*. Laughably terrible. You can't have walls of hyper-restricted four-letter answers like this and expect *anything* good, fill-wise, to come of it. For instance, we call it SAINTHOOD, not SAINTDOM. A HOST, OK, fine, I can let that particular partial slide, but then, hot on its heels, A FARM!? A bleeping FARM? Also, something called TRIAMORY, of which I'm hearing for the first time today ("polyamory," sure, but this? gah). Something called a CLAVE. Someone named MAE (?). Someone named NOREEN (??). Dreaded short stuff like UDO and AAU. And ... OAKED? For real?? EST GAIA LETTS TWI TNUTS etc. make it stop stop stop. And for what? For what? Four-letter words. I've got some four-letter words for this puzzle, that's for sure.


The best (read: not best I'm being sarcastic) part was having to guess on the final square. Just ... guess. Now, it was an educated guess, and I guessed correctly, but ... AMGEN!? (18A: Biopharmaceutical company that makes Enbrel). I laughed out loud at the clue, because ... Enbrel?? What futuristic planet is all this happening on? I've literally never seen either of these ... names ... in my life before today. AMGEN, dear lord. I guessed that "M." That clunky clue for ROM (2D: It can't be written to, in a PC), yikes. I knew a CD-ROM was a thing, so I guessed ROM. Ill-conceived theme, terrible fill ... just astonishing. I got the revealer very very early and instantly ceased to care. "Oooh, look, an OR *and* a CA," I failed to imagine myself thinking. What kind of bored masochist is going to go back and check to make sure that, indeed, those four-letter answers are all made up of two-letter postal codes? Oy, HOI, no.


Good night.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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