Constructor: Kevin Adamick
Relative difficulty: Challenging (14:47, most of that in free fall, just staring at a bunch of nothing in the NW)
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THEME: none
Word of the Day: Anna KARINA (48A: Anna who played Scheherazade in 1963's "Scheherazade") —
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Hated this puzzle as soon as I opened it. It's a type. A type that men make. A type that you don't see so much anymore because it's boring and bad and leads to bad fill and is terrible. It's meant to cause pain. The grid structure is sadistic, not in a "ooh, fiendishly clever" kind of way, but in an "ugh, why are you making me do four separate puzzles" kind of way. That segmentation, with only tiny access lanes into each quadrant—it's hateful. There is no good fill in the grid. How can there be? It's all E's and R's and T's because it has to be because woo hoo, low word count! A feat only a constructor could love. I wish someone had UNLADEn (!!?!) this puzzle from the world before it ever saw print. Here's the entire story of this puzzle from my perspective: I wrote in BRANDO / TROUNCED. Then nothing happened. Then I left the NW and solved the other 3/4 of the puzzle at a pretty much regular Saturday pace. Then I returned to the NW and minutes went by before I got anything I was certain of. Looking over the NW now, I don't really remember how I got anything. I must've lucked into DERANGED as a decent guess (23A: Nuts), and then finally LIVING came to me, and that seemed indisputable, so I built things from there. In retrospect, SALIVA (4D: Slobber) and ROLLOVER (17A: What some investments and trained dogs do) feel like things I should've gotten. Whatever. Who cares? God bless all hard puzzles that are hard in clever ways. But anyone pulling this dusty, 20th-century, exclusively BOYS CLUB type of grid out as their way of achieving difficulty, your wares are unwelcome.
Let's see, maybe there are at least some funny wrong answers in here. Ooh, yeah, faced with -AGAN at 36A: Author of the 2011 political memoir "My Father at 100," I wrote in CARL SAGAN. My apple pie apples were SLICED. My Italian city or TORINO. My [Emphatic agreement] was something-SORRY (I read "emphatic" as "empathetic"). For [Split] I had IN HALF (courtesy of the "N" in TROUNCED, which was also wrong). El Alto was ANDORRAN for a little while before it became BOLIVIAN, so that's cute. Tried to make YESTERDAY fit at 39A: "When I was a kid..." ("YEARS AGO..."). SION (?) before BERN. IRIS before UVEA. OPINER (?!?!) before YELLER. TESTY and HASTY for TERSE (35A: Brusque). Oh, and I repressed one of the most tenacious wrong answers of all: BROTHERS at 1A: Fratty group (BOYS' CLUB). That NW ... getting the center of the grid does Nothing for you. Center gives me the MEG- in MEGASTORE, the YE- in "YEARS AGO...," the -GAN in REAGAN, but giving me the -ED in DERANGED is virtually no help. My gimmes today were awful and embarrassing. AD ASTRA. Like, I knew that. Just knew it. It's Not Good Fill. But I knew it. AERATED, same. TRICOLOR, gimme. ODEA, gimme. REALER, pretty much a gimme. A few other things were easy because I had letters in place. ARGENT off the A, GEEZER off the G. Gimmes didn't make me feel smart. Nor did taking this puzzle down, eventually. It all just felt like dental work. BOYS CLUB—that is the (marquee!) answer you should remember here.
Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld
[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]
Relative difficulty: Challenging (14:47, most of that in free fall, just staring at a bunch of nothing in the NW)
THEME: none
Word of the Day: Anna KARINA (48A: Anna who played Scheherazade in 1963's "Scheherazade") —
Anna Karina (born Hanne Karin Bayer 22 September 1940) is a Danish-French film actress, director, writer, and singer. She rose to prominence as French New Wave director Jean-Luc Godard's muse in the 1960s, performing in several of his films, including The Little Soldier (1960), A Woman Is a Woman (1961), Vivre sa vie (1962), Band of Outsiders (1964), and Pierrot le Fou and Alphaville (both 1965). For her performance in A Woman Is a Woman, Karina won the Silver Bear Award for Best Actress at the Berlin Film Festival. (wikipedia)
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Let's see, maybe there are at least some funny wrong answers in here. Ooh, yeah, faced with -AGAN at 36A: Author of the 2011 political memoir "My Father at 100," I wrote in CARL SAGAN. My apple pie apples were SLICED. My Italian city or TORINO. My [Emphatic agreement] was something-SORRY (I read "emphatic" as "empathetic"). For [Split] I had IN HALF (courtesy of the "N" in TROUNCED, which was also wrong). El Alto was ANDORRAN for a little while before it became BOLIVIAN, so that's cute. Tried to make YESTERDAY fit at 39A: "When I was a kid..." ("YEARS AGO..."). SION (?) before BERN. IRIS before UVEA. OPINER (?!?!) before YELLER. TESTY and HASTY for TERSE (35A: Brusque). Oh, and I repressed one of the most tenacious wrong answers of all: BROTHERS at 1A: Fratty group (BOYS' CLUB). That NW ... getting the center of the grid does Nothing for you. Center gives me the MEG- in MEGASTORE, the YE- in "YEARS AGO...," the -GAN in REAGAN, but giving me the -ED in DERANGED is virtually no help. My gimmes today were awful and embarrassing. AD ASTRA. Like, I knew that. Just knew it. It's Not Good Fill. But I knew it. AERATED, same. TRICOLOR, gimme. ODEA, gimme. REALER, pretty much a gimme. A few other things were easy because I had letters in place. ARGENT off the A, GEEZER off the G. Gimmes didn't make me feel smart. Nor did taking this puzzle down, eventually. It all just felt like dental work. BOYS CLUB—that is the (marquee!) answer you should remember here.
Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld
[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]