Cuneiform discovery site / WED 10-4-17 / Edward longtime bishop of New York / Bird found on all continents including antarctica / Band featured in documentary 1991 Year Punk Broke

Constructor: Evan Mahnken

Relative difficulty: Medium

THEME: Where blah blah is "in the dictionary"— common two-word phrases are clued as if those phrases were indicating where the second word can be found (very roughly) in the dictionary:

Theme answers:

• AFTER HOURS (17A: Where "house party" is in the dictionary?)
• NEAR MINT (23A: Where "new" is in the dictionary?)
• BY ITSELF (50A: Where "isolated" is in the dictionary?)
• AROUND NOON (56A: Where "midday" and "one" are in the dictionary?)
• UNDER FIRE (10D: Where "flanked" is in the dictionary?)
• BENEATH ME (31D: Where "menial" is in the dictionary?) 

Word of the Day: AMARNA (1D: Cuneiform discovery site) —

The Amarna letters (sometimes referred to as the Amarna correspondence or Amarna tablets, and cited with the abbreviation EA) are an archive, written on clay tablets, primarily consisting of diplomatic correspondence between the Egyptian administration and its representatives in Canaan and Amurru during the New Kingdom. The letters were found in Upper Egypt at Amarna, the modern name for the ancient Egyptian capital of Akhetaten (el-Amarna), founded by pharaoh Akhenaten (1350s – 1330s BC) during the Eighteenth dynasty of Egypt. The Amarna letters are unusual in Egyptological research, because they are mostly written in Akkadian cuneiform, the writing system of ancient Mesopotamia, rather than that of ancient Egypt. (wikipedia)

Appreciated this one more after I was done than while I was solving. While I was solving, the whole theme just seemed fussy. Who cares where these words are? Couldn't you make this puzzle infinitely, with any [preposition + noun] phrase as a theme answer? Also I would never use "beneath" or "under" or "around" to orient someone in a dictionary (in relation to another word). Add in the super-weird grid design (more on that later) and the pretty ugly fill that crops up an awful lot, and you have a somewhat less-than-enjoyable puzzle. After I finished, though, I noticed that the clues are very much relevant to their answers, i.e. it's not just some random "H" word that's AFTER HOURS, it's a "house party"—which would, of course, take place AFTER HOURS, just as someone who is "flanked" might be UNDER FIRE, just as "midday" and "one" are AROUND NOON (time-wise), etc. So I'm grateful that the cluing was so tight. And I am also grateful for SONIC YOUTH (30D: Band featured in the documentary "1991: The Year Punk Broke") and BROWNIE MIX (6D: Betty Crocker product), two great tastes that go great (I imagine) together. I GOT NEXT, also a fine phrase. I just wish the crosswordese didn't drag this one down so bad. "GAI MIL EDY DER NEE!" he said, in a sad language all his own.


So this grid is sooo weird. Those ridiculously giant NE and SW corners ... and yet it's a 78-worder (the max allowed)?? The center is so choppy, so full of tiny answers, that the NE and SW corners end up having to be these great wide-open things just to compensate, just to keep the word count below the standard max. Those corners, in addition to the "huh?" nature of the theme, made the puzzle feel harder than normal. My time, though, was pretty normal (low 4s). Oh, and the other thing that impeded swift progress through the grid was the isolation of the NW / SE corners. You can't move across the top or bottom. There's just no connective tissue. You gotta go six rows down (or up) to get around that wall + diagonal line of black squares. Structural strangeness. So it was very uneven, but there's a thoughtfulness in the theme execution that shows promise, for sure.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

P.S. MOO is in the grid and also in the GAI clue :( (46A: Moo goo ___ pan)

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