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Channel: Rex Parker Does the NYT Crossword Puzzle
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Elsa's younger sister in Frozen / TUE 4-11-17 / Motto for modern risk taker for short / Gradually slowing in music / Bill who popularizes science

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Constructor:Zachary Spitz and Diane Roseman

Relative difficulty:Medium (I was slow, but my mistakes were dumb and likely atypical)


THEME: UNITED NATIONS (49A: Organization founded in 1945 ... or a literal description of 20-, 24- and 44-Across)— two country names, fused into one, three times:

Theme answers:
  • PAKISTANZANIA (20A: Indian Ocean bloc?)
  • NICARAGUATEMALA (24A: Central American bloc?)
  • SWITZERLANDORRA (44A: Western European bloc?)
Word of the Day:LENTANDO(38D: Gradually slowing, in music) —
becoming slower —used as a direction in music (m-w)
• • •

Like yesterday's theme, today's is rudimentary. Seems decades old and not terribly clever. These are the combinations you can get into symmetrical positions, fine. But there are tons of -LAND countries and tons of -STAN countries, so getting ones to work out can't have been that hard. I only wish we could've gotten some of the more outlandish combinations in there, like NEPALAU, JAPANAMA, SWEDENMARK, NIGERMANY, VIETNAMIBIA, and, my favorite, UNITEDKINGDOMINICANREPUBLIC. I see that there is an attempt to give the theme an extra coherence by way of "blocs," but ... that seems pretty forced, especially when it comes to linking Pakistan and Tanzania. Anyway, I'm already being told the theme has been done before, multiple times, and at least once with very similar theme clues (with the revealer used as the puzzle's title). Fill isn't terrible, but longer answers never really get up to the level of genuinely interesting.


I was ridiculously slow today, for reasons I don't quite understand. Slowed first at SICK (3D: "Awesome!"). I use the term myself, but couldn't imagine the puzzle doing so, and thus at SI- I just ... stared for a few seconds, I think. Also HOLIDAY didn't compute At All, even with many crosses in place (4D: Office-closing time). I kept wanting a time of day. Answer was way more generic that I imagined. I then badly misread 15A: ___ vera and wrote in VICE (...). Still never seen "Frozen" so ANNA = ??? (so many great ANNAs in the world, and we get this one, blargh). I also wrote in SPAM instead of SENT at 64A: Email folder. None of this was hard; I just didn't slice through it the way I usually slice through Tuesdays. Now I'm amusing myself by doing country/state mash-ups, like GUATEMALABAMA and DENMARKANSAS ... so I should probably go now.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld\

P.S. here's a somewhat more spectacular version of this theme:



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