Constructor: Damon Gulczynski
Relative difficulty: real, REAL easy (personal best Thursday for me)
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THEME: INITIALLY (54A: At the start ... or how the first two letters of each starred clue relate to the answer?) -- clues for themed answers only make sense when their first two letters are broken off as initials, at which point they become dead giveaways, basically.
Theme answers:
Anyway: hi, everyone! Pleased to meet you and Happy February! I'm Ken Walczak. I usually write about booze or yammer about David Lynch on the Internet, but tonight I'm filling in for Rex while he catches up on [/consults notes] screaming into the void. Oh wait, sorry. I mean, "screaming into OBLIVION." My mistake.
I breezed through this one, and even shaved a few seconds off my personal best Thursday time, thanks to a pedestrian theme (Rex notes that the initial gimmick has been used before, and less than two years ago, by the NYT) that revealed its secrets super quick.
Man, that theme, though. The first themed clue--"Roman of Hollywood?"--juts right out on to the thinnest of ice. I mean: it's February 1, 2018, during that brief hopeful window between Oscar nominations and the Oscar telecast, but also right smack in the middle of #MeToo and #TimesUp and a burgeoning awareness about the horrible deeds of horrible men in every industry but famously and perhaps especially in Hollywood ... and the most famous crossword puzzle in the country chooses a clue that will surely elicit, for many people, the immediate first guess: "Polanski."
As in: Roman Polanski, the director whose films have won eight Academy Awards, six of them after he fled the United States to escape sentencing after pleading guilty to unlawful sexual intercourse with a 13-year-old girl.
Gross.
And then RYAN O'NEAL, the answer that apparently could not have been clued any other way than with "Roman of Hollywood?", because Ryan is after all a "man of Hollywood" with the initials R.O., crosses ... OGLE. "Roman of Hollywood?" + OGLE. Very gross.
Less SORELY vexing, but still notable: 24 across. We all love Linda Evans (speaking of which, Wonder Woman: 28 fewer nominations than films by Roman Polanski) but "legal acting" is ... not a phrase. Not a thing. Is the alternative "illegal acting"? #LegalizeActing! No. Maladies, regents, Romans: all nouns one might use in a clue that would be intelligible on its own, i.e. without this "initialism" gimmick. "Legal acting" is not.
Qualms about the theme aside, the fill was solid overall. It would have been pointless to expect sparkling answers in the scrawny 3 x 4 corners (NW and SE), but nothing there was truly awful ... and ECHELONS, OBLIVION, PRETAX, and STEM CELLS all get a ROGER EBERT memorial thumbs-up from me.
Other Gripes, Even Though I Liked the Puzzle Overall and Had Fun:
Signed, Ken Walczak, BARFLY of CrossWorld
[I'm on Twitter and Instagram!]
[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]
Relative difficulty: real, REAL easy (personal best Thursday for me)
THEME: INITIALLY (54A: At the start ... or how the first two letters of each starred clue relate to the answer?) -- clues for themed answers only make sense when their first two letters are broken off as initials, at which point they become dead giveaways, basically.
Theme answers:
- RYAN O'NEAL (17A: Roman of Hollywood?)
- LINDA EVANS (24A: Legal acting in a 1980s prime-time soap opera?)
- MARIE ANTOINETTE (34A: Malady of French history?)
- ROGER EBERT (46A: Regent of film criticism?)
John Rolfe (1585–1622) was one of the early English settlers of North America. He is credited with the first successful cultivation of tobacco as an export crop in the Colony of Virginia. (wikipedia)
• • •
AND he married Pocahontas! How does that fact get lower billing than the tobacco thing, or Rolfe being "of colonial Jamestown"? I'm not a big fan of defining people by their choice of spouse, but I do think a fair rule is this: if you marry someone, and Disney makes a movie about that person 350 years later, you get to be "Mr. Pocahontas" thereafter. Yes, I realize this means that by 2340 or so, Jay-Z will be known exclusively as "Mr. Beyonce." I am fine with that.Anyway: hi, everyone! Pleased to meet you and Happy February! I'm Ken Walczak. I usually write about booze or yammer about David Lynch on the Internet, but tonight I'm filling in for Rex while he catches up on [/consults notes] screaming into the void. Oh wait, sorry. I mean, "screaming into OBLIVION." My mistake.
I breezed through this one, and even shaved a few seconds off my personal best Thursday time, thanks to a pedestrian theme (Rex notes that the initial gimmick has been used before, and less than two years ago, by the NYT) that revealed its secrets super quick.
Man, that theme, though. The first themed clue--"Roman of Hollywood?"--juts right out on to the thinnest of ice. I mean: it's February 1, 2018, during that brief hopeful window between Oscar nominations and the Oscar telecast, but also right smack in the middle of #MeToo and #TimesUp and a burgeoning awareness about the horrible deeds of horrible men in every industry but famously and perhaps especially in Hollywood ... and the most famous crossword puzzle in the country chooses a clue that will surely elicit, for many people, the immediate first guess: "Polanski."
As in: Roman Polanski, the director whose films have won eight Academy Awards, six of them after he fled the United States to escape sentencing after pleading guilty to unlawful sexual intercourse with a 13-year-old girl.
Gross.
And then RYAN O'NEAL, the answer that apparently could not have been clued any other way than with "Roman of Hollywood?", because Ryan is after all a "man of Hollywood" with the initials R.O., crosses ... OGLE. "Roman of Hollywood?" + OGLE. Very gross.
Less SORELY vexing, but still notable: 24 across. We all love Linda Evans (speaking of which, Wonder Woman: 28 fewer nominations than films by Roman Polanski) but "legal acting" is ... not a phrase. Not a thing. Is the alternative "illegal acting"? #LegalizeActing! No. Maladies, regents, Romans: all nouns one might use in a clue that would be intelligible on its own, i.e. without this "initialism" gimmick. "Legal acting" is not.
Qualms about the theme aside, the fill was solid overall. It would have been pointless to expect sparkling answers in the scrawny 3 x 4 corners (NW and SE), but nothing there was truly awful ... and ECHELONS, OBLIVION, PRETAX, and STEM CELLS all get a ROGER EBERT memorial thumbs-up from me.
Other Gripes, Even Though I Liked the Puzzle Overall and Had Fun:
- 19A: Pretend (LET ON) — Webster has "pretend" as a third definition for this phrase, and ... sure/maybe/I guess??!? ... but I cannot think of a single time anyone has ever used it that way in conversation. Here in real life, "let on" always means "admit" to me. As in: "he still won't LET ON, but that senator knows exactly what Trump said about Africa."
- 20A: Shoe company based in Southern California (LA GEAR) — Can we retire this one, please? I have not seen a pair of L.A. Gears on a living human being's feet in more than a decade. The last athlete L.A. Gear signed to an endorsement contract was, hand to Wikipedia, Ron Artest. Not even "Metta World Peace" yet! Famous Original Ron Artest! Yet LAGEAR, persists, endures, crops up roughly twice a month. Please stop.
- 22D: Average guy (SCHMO) — I think of calling someone a "schmo" as a bit more pejorative than just calling them "average", and it's a bit odd to see SCHMO clued without a "Joe" anywhere in sight. NBD, though, as the kids (and constructors needing to fill a 3 x 4 corner) say.
- 39A: Really binges, in brief (ODS)— Way overused, inevitably clued in some cutesy way like "binges" to evoke "ODing" on potato chips or Netflix. Invariably makes me think of hard drugs anyway. Would love to see it ICEd (oh yeah, "clinch" for "ice" also strikes me as odd!) but I do try to set realistic expectations.
Signed, Ken Walczak, BARFLY of CrossWorld
[I'm on Twitter and Instagram!]
[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]