Noted Hungarian puzzle / WED 11-28-18 / Govt watchdog until 1996 / Contemporary of Pizarro / Historical event suggested by each of six groups of circled letters / Betting game popular with Wyatt Earp Doc Holliday / Contents of football shower /

Constructor: David J. Kahn

Relative difficulty: Challenging (6:10, which is LOL slow ... it's an oversized grid, but still)

THEME: FRENCH REVOLUTION (7D: Historical event suggested by each of the six groups of circled letters) — circled letters form rings, of sorts (so, "revolutions"), that spell out words that follow the word "French": HORN, PASTRY, CUFF, DOOR, POODLE, KISS

Word of the Day: BENNY Andersson of Abba (57D) —

Göran Bror Benny Andersson (Swedish pronunciation: [ˈbɛnːʏ ²anːdɛˌʂɔn]; born 16 December 1946) is a Swedish musician, composer, member of the Swedish music group ABBA, and co-composer of the musicals Chess, Kristina från Duvemåla, and Mamma Mia!. For the 2008 film version of Mamma Mia! and its 2018 sequel, Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again, he worked also as an executive producer. Since 2001, he has been active with his own band Benny Anderssons orkester. (wikipedia)

This was a mess. So terribly unpleasant to solve that I kept wanting to quit. It's a ridiculously fussy grid, with way way way more words (85!?) than a daily puzzle is supposed to have (even an oversized one). This means there were tons of short words and the grid was very choppy, which means slog city. Further, the entire grid, every inch of it, is compromised by the demands of the fill, and you can feel it. All over. Everywhere. Strain. All of it made infinitely worse by the cluing, which was dated and awkward and vague. What is KICK UP A ROW??? (I had DUST being kicked up) (36D: Start some trouble). [Roast a bit] is such a horrible clue for RIB, and it's doubly horrible when you realize it was someone's idea of a good cluing gambit, since the answer right under it is clued virtually identically (14A: Roast bit). In fact, I don't know what 1A wasn't just [Roast bit], since a rib roast is way easier to imagine than the idea that merely ribbing someone is akin to "roasting" them. I finished this puzzle having no idea what the circles were doing. They were just massive distractions. And when, in the rubble of my finished solve, I saw the French revolutions... I did not care.

Snoopy has a brother besides Spike? Wow. OK. I missed a whole chunk of "Peanuts" in there somewhere. And I love "Peanuts" and own many collections. I just don't know where OLAF is in there. The "Hunger Games" is no longer current or relevant, please cease all clues, thanks, ALMA. A friend of mine is on a mission to eliminate DR. T (67D: Richard Gere title role) from all crossword grids, and I support this mission. I also now laugh every time I see the good doctor. Also, predictably, I saw the clue and thought "is he a Mr. or a Dr." and before I did the visualizing thing, I wrote in MR. :(

Five things:

• 1D: Good-for-nothing (ROGUE) — a good example of how the cluing on this puzzle just lost me. This is not what I think of when I think of ROGUE. Something about "good-for-nothing" makes him seem like a layabout or a loser, which is not how I think of ROGUE as all. Also, I think of ROGUE more often as an adjective for something that's gone off-pack or off-script. Or I think of ROGUE as an X-Person. I know this clue is dictionary-defensible, but ugh. And on a Wednesday. ("On a Wednesday?" was a thing I was thinking a lot today)
• 43A: Strawberry, e.g. (FLAVOR)— by far the hardest thing for me to get today, largely because of TULLE, which I had only as TUILE or TOILE. Ugh, TULLE. Like, a million times ugh at that crosswordese fabric. Anyway, for [Strawberry, e.g.], at one point I had FIELDS.
• 30D: Attempt, informally (WHIRL) — another one I just couldn't see for the longest time. My brain: "Is it STAB?" Me: "No" My brain: [shrug]
• 18A: Echelons (STRATA) — got the ST- quickly (yay!); wrote in STAGES (boo!)
• 21D: Abbr. in help-wanted ads (EEO)— OK, look, is EOE a thing? Because I wrote in EOE which I thought stood for "equal opportunity employer" so ... what is this EEO thing?* Also, can you please never use either ever in your grids again ever ever because they're both bad? Great.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

*Equal Employment Opportunity

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