Constructor: Paul Coulter
Relative difficulty: Challenging (13:24, though at least a minute of that was me a. reading the NOTE (ugh, again with the notes in AcrossLite) and b. trying to shut off text notifications, which kept pinging as I was trying to solve—even shutting Messenger off didn't help; it just came back on w/ new texts, wtf? Anyway, eventually I hit mute ... but even if I give myself a minute 12:24 is still long for a Sunday)
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THEME: Represent!— answers are represented by ... god, who knows? Stuff. It's vaguely like cryptic crosswords, but also vaguely like a rebus puzzle on a children's restaurant place mat. Clues are visual representations of the answers rather than your typical clues:
Theme answers:
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Well, the good news is: this week is over. This week. Hard and joyless puzzles, almost everywhere I look (four of five since Wednesday). And this one. Where to begin. Well, really, the only thing that matters is that the theme is a complete wreck. It has no coherence, no consistency, no ... binding agent (sorry, watching "Great British Baking Show"...). What a mess. I don't mind [13579 AZ] for ODDS AND ENDS, but I certainly mind Large large skip skip for TOO BIG TO IGNORE. The former is quite literal. Bing bang. Great. The latter, holy crap, what? TWO BIGS AND TWO IGNORES, maybe, but this whole idea that you can go from "represent"ing (as you did in themer 1) to some kind of dumb homophoning (?) and then ... play fast and loose with plural v. singular (i.e. if you want "large large" to be "two" versions of "big" then it's two BIGS—who's saying this, a caveman?). Look, I know you know this beause *you did it with FRANKS (plural) IN ATRA*. "Hot dog hot dog," ergo two hot dogs, ergo FRANKS. Holy moses, this puzzle. Worst of all—and I mean, *inexplicably* bad—is the clue on LONG OVERDUE (117A: Yearn ÷ due). OK, so "Yearn" is ia word meaning "LONG," great, gotcha. And "due" is ... "due" is ... &#*! are you trying to do the homophone thing again!? Why isn't the clue [Yearn ÷ expected]? I mean, I still would've thought the theme a total mess, but at least this particular clue would've made *some* kind of sense. "Yearn" means LONG and "due" means ... DO!?!? It's insulting. It is adding insult to the injury that is this entire puzzle.
The puzzle / editing is also really sloppy in places. You've got FRETSAW (54D: Woodworking tool) but also SAWN (which is eeeeeasily changed) (92A: Cut, as a log). And, as a certain crossword editor pointed out to me, SHAM / HEIR makes way more sense than SWAM / WEIR. No offense to WEIR, but with short answers, you're gonna wanna go with something more common, with infinitely more cluing possibilities. How is EDIBLES [All you can eat] and not, say, a marijuana clue. Google EDIBLES and see what kind of hits you get. What is ENDURO? Seriously, I stared at END-RO crossing O-T and had no idea what letter went in there. I still don't really get how OUT is right for 28A: Home sick? So it's ... OUT as in "not IN the office" ... because you are home [space] sick .... which has a "?" clue because it's supposed to be a pun (?) on "homesick"? ... except ... people say "oh, she's home [space] sick" all the time. Like ... [Home sick, e.g.] = OUT. Literally. No "?" needed. Also, what is NANKEEN? Also, what is CRENEL? I'm a medievalist and have been to castles up and down the coast of Wales and still I wasn't sure CRENEL was a real word. I just reasoned backward from "crenellate" (sp?). JENS! EDWARDV! Oy. And then a mass of crosswordese, like DST and SSE and the world's worst crosswordese dilemma: ESSEN or EMDEN!? It's almost always the former ... but not today! (105D: German port in Lower Saxony) Oh, what fun. What whimsy. What ATONAL SWARD! I did have one pretty devastating wrong answer, though. Let's see if you can beat it: I had -N--D at 3D: Reversed (UNDID). I confidently wrote in: ON END. I also wrote in DRAWER for BREWER (86A: Creator of a draft), but I'm not sure that one's as good. Recalling your wrong answers is a fun way to distract yourself when you don't really want to think about the substance of the puzzle any more ... or there's this visual clue that my friend Jenna LaFleur made for the FRANK SINATRA clue:
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Or you can just amuse yourself by saying "hot dog hot dog!" over and over again. Whatever it takes, man. It's been a rough week.
Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld (Twitter: @rexparker / #NYTXW)
[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]
Relative difficulty: Challenging (13:24, though at least a minute of that was me a. reading the NOTE (ugh, again with the notes in AcrossLite) and b. trying to shut off text notifications, which kept pinging as I was trying to solve—even shutting Messenger off didn't help; it just came back on w/ new texts, wtf? Anyway, eventually I hit mute ... but even if I give myself a minute 12:24 is still long for a Sunday)
Theme answers:
- ODDS AND ENDS (23A: 13579 AZ) (odd numbers + ends of the alphabet)
- TOO BIG TO IGNORE (36A: Large large skip skip) (so... two words meaning "big" and two words meaning "ignore" and the "two"s are homophones (!?))
- FRANK SINATRA (56A: AT hot dog hot dog RA) (franks are literally inside the "word" ATRA)
- ADD INSULT TO INJURY (66A: Wound + dis) (word meaning "insult" added to word meaning "injury")
- PARALLEL BARS (80A:
- PP
- UU
- BB) (synonym for "bar," parallel to itself)
- BREAKING A SWEAT (94A: Per spire) (word meaning "sweat," broken in two)
- LONG OVERDUE (117A: Yearn ÷ do) (pfffffffffft, so, synonym for "long" is divided by, i.e. is, fractionally, "over" ... a word that ... is somehow not a synonym, but instead a homophone, for "due"—lord have mercy on us all)
Enduro is a form of motorcycle sport run on extended cross-country, off-road courses. Enduro consists of many different obstacles and challenges. The main type of enduro event, and the format to which the World Enduro Championship is run, is a time-card enduro, whereby a number of stages are raced in a time trial against the clock. (wikipedia)
• • •
The puzzle / editing is also really sloppy in places. You've got FRETSAW (54D: Woodworking tool) but also SAWN (which is eeeeeasily changed) (92A: Cut, as a log). And, as a certain crossword editor pointed out to me, SHAM / HEIR makes way more sense than SWAM / WEIR. No offense to WEIR, but with short answers, you're gonna wanna go with something more common, with infinitely more cluing possibilities. How is EDIBLES [All you can eat] and not, say, a marijuana clue. Google EDIBLES and see what kind of hits you get. What is ENDURO? Seriously, I stared at END-RO crossing O-T and had no idea what letter went in there. I still don't really get how OUT is right for 28A: Home sick? So it's ... OUT as in "not IN the office" ... because you are home [space] sick .... which has a "?" clue because it's supposed to be a pun (?) on "homesick"? ... except ... people say "oh, she's home [space] sick" all the time. Like ... [Home sick, e.g.] = OUT. Literally. No "?" needed. Also, what is NANKEEN? Also, what is CRENEL? I'm a medievalist and have been to castles up and down the coast of Wales and still I wasn't sure CRENEL was a real word. I just reasoned backward from "crenellate" (sp?). JENS! EDWARDV! Oy. And then a mass of crosswordese, like DST and SSE and the world's worst crosswordese dilemma: ESSEN or EMDEN!? It's almost always the former ... but not today! (105D: German port in Lower Saxony) Oh, what fun. What whimsy. What ATONAL SWARD! I did have one pretty devastating wrong answer, though. Let's see if you can beat it: I had -N--D at 3D: Reversed (UNDID). I confidently wrote in: ON END. I also wrote in DRAWER for BREWER (86A: Creator of a draft), but I'm not sure that one's as good. Recalling your wrong answers is a fun way to distract yourself when you don't really want to think about the substance of the puzzle any more ... or there's this visual clue that my friend Jenna LaFleur made for the FRANK SINATRA clue:
Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld (Twitter: @rexparker / #NYTXW)
[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]