Mediterranean to ancient Romans / SAT 11-11-17 / Polymathic Isaac / 1964 role for Honor Blackman / Whose tears create morning dew in myth / Eponymous weapon designer

Constructor: George Barany and Michael Shteyman

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium


THEME:ELEVEN / ELEVEN (i.e. VETERANS DAY)— today is 11/11. There are 11 11-letter answers in this grid

Theme answers:

• VETERANS DAY (34A: Time for remembrance)
• ELEVEN (60A: How many letters are in the longest answers in this puzzle - or how many of these answers there are)

Word of the Day: RIN (35D: 1/1,000 of a yen) —

1.

amoneyofaccountofJapan,thethousandthpartofayenorthetenthpartofasen. (dictionary.com)

I need people to understand that this is not a theme. Having eleven 11-letter answers, none of which bear any relation to each other, is called being a "themeless" puzzle. I can't begin to say what a fraud this puzzle is. It is not a thing, not a feat, not hard, to fill a puzzle like this. It is 70 words. It's just a themeless grid, with two answers that are pretending real hard that they are a theme, but no. I see you, and no. So you gunk up yet another lovely themeless day with a fake-ass "theme," a., and then b. it's not even about VETERANS DAY. How does this celebrate, honor, or even vaguely refer to veterans. Please don't point to ARES, because that is bull. IKE? Come on. He's in like half of all puzzles in some form. GUADALCANAL? OK, that is a war thing, but still, there is nothing here cohesive enough to qualify as a theme, and what *is* here does nothing to actually honor veterans. You wanna do a VETERANS DAY theme, do a real VETERANS DAY theme. You wanna do an ELEVEN theme, well, unless it's based on "Stranger Things," I'm not interested.


While some of the longer fill is pretty sweet, the amount of garbage is kind of startling. SEPTAL? RIN? And the pièce de réstistance, AWS!? (41A: Comments like "Yer joshin'!") What the af? I'll give the 11s this: they are solid. NETIZEN will never not be crud, but QUEEN BEY and ROBERT STACK liven up any party. I didn't have any trouble with this at all. I guess I forgot the NOSTRUM part of MARE NOSTRUM, and that ate up some time. Oh, and I couldn't come up with the DRAFT part of DRAFT ANIMAL. Had MOVIE in there before FLICK. But these were all minor bumps. I should probably rate this one Easy, but I feel like I need to beat 6 minutes for a Saturday to qualify as truly Easy, and I was mid-6s, I think, so ... just easyish. AWS!? Sorry, I'm still smh over that one. Oh well, that's all for today.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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