Constructor: Greg Johnson
Relative difficulty: By the clock, Medium-Challenging, but I solved at 4:45am, so ... adjusting for brain fog, probably more Medium (3:37)
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THEME: gases— letters form molecule annotations for three gases at three different points in the grid:
Theme answers:
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Word of the Day: MALAR (34D: Of the cheek) —
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It is what it says it is. There's the gas, there's the molecule. Ping, pong, ping, pong, ping, pong. Not a lot going on. Maybe there aren't that many "HNH" or "HCH" answers in the world, and somehow getting the molecule thing to work out is supposed to elicit an ooh and/or aah, but this felt pretty dull and pointless to me. Further, the grid was choked with crosswordese (in a way that the NYT has, to its credit, increasingly avoided, of late). All IMACs and IPADS and DON HO's OBI and OHO UHUH! extra-H AHCHOO! ECONO-OWIE! EMT ETO ESTOP! You could say the grid was AWASH in such answers. Brutal. I got held up in a number of places for the dumbest of crossword reasons, to wit: is it SCAT or SHOO!? (1A: Shout to a pest). Is it HEWN or SAWN!? (5D: Cut, as logs). Is it AHA or OHO!? (58D: "Well, what have we here?!"). You see how fun this is! In the end, molecules are written out as adjacent letters and crosswords have adjacent letters and that is apparently good enough for a random three-gas theme with no wordplay or "play" of any kind. Tuesday!
Five things:
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Relative difficulty: By the clock, Medium-Challenging, but I solved at 4:45am, so ... adjusting for brain fog, probably more Medium (3:37)
Theme answers:
- METHANE (20A: Flammable gas represented in 18-Across and 9-Down)
- CARBON DIOXIDE (38A: Respiratory gas represented in 36-Across)
- AMMONIA (55A: Pungent-smelling gas represented in 57-Across and 49-Down)
adjectiveANATOMYMEDICINE
• • •
Five things:
- 19D: Means of hair removal (HOT WAX) — another point of slowage. Had the "H" but needed many crosses to get it. Not surprisingly, I think it was the "X" that gave it to me.
- 42A: Part of da-DUM, da-DUM, da-DUM (IAMB) — I'm literally going to be teaching the concept of IAMB later today and *I* had no idea what this clue was doing. But, yes, one "da-DUM" is, technically, an IAMB (a poetic foot that goes unstressed-STRESSED)
- 11D: Word after fire ... or a synonym of fire (AXE) — too much information for a Tuesday. Didn't appreciate what was going on here (i.e. that the post-ellipsis part of the clue had a different meaning of "fire") until, well, a few seconds ago.
- 34D: Of the cheek (MALAR)— well you don't see that one that often. Probably for reasons. (Seriously, it's been E L E V E N Y E A R S since this word last appeared in the NYTX)
- 50A: Devices that may serve as cash registers (IPADS) — the answer that took me the longest. Just couldn't process it, despite having people process my purchases with IPADS literally every week at the farmers market. I think ... yeah, I don't think of them as "cash registers" because, well, there is no "cash" in them. We'll be calling IPADS"cash registers" thousands of years, when "cash" is some archaic word that exists only in dictionaries and crosswords.
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