Puckered fabric / SUN 6-16-19 / Co-owner of Paddy's pub on It's always sunny in philadelphia / Onetime US soccer prodigy Freddy / Weapon with distinctive hum / Thomas Aquinas others philosophically / Classic play with Delphic oracle

Constructor: Joel Fagliano

Relative difficulty: Medium-Challenging (10:59)


THEME:"Not In So Many Words" (Unthemed)— well, not theme, but they want you to know that the word count is low for some reason ...

Word of the Day: PLISSÉ (44D: Puckered fabric) —

adjective

1. 1. 

   (of fabric) treated to give a permanent puckered or crinkled effect.

   "a plissé prom dress"

noun

1. 1. 

   material treated so as to be permanently puckered or crinkled. (google)

My god this puzzle is annoying. And coy. Oh, it's themeless ("Unthemed") but oh, tee hee, 1-Across is FATHER'S DAY, which is today! ... but no, yeah, it is Actually themeless and there is nothing else FATHER'S DAY about this. This is called punting. We got nothing good in the hopper, we can't pull off a Sunday theme to save our lives lately, so let's try to make the word count as low as possible (near as I can tell, this ties the record for low word count for a Sunday at 124 ... the puzzle it ties was published New Year's Eve 1961, and it's A Doozy) (in that it has "words" like FOSSA, GISHU, ARRHA, TEMENI, KEZIA and FISCS). Look, 21x21 is just too big for a themeless. Not enough constraint. 15x15 works well for themelesses—you can make it superhard and it's still small enough not to take forever, and the constraint (in terms of size and word count, which must be 72 or lower) forces a certain amount of creativity and ingenuity. A 21x21 canvas is just too big for a themeless. I can't really be impressed that you could pull off *anything* in a 21x21 grid. What's stopping you? Who even thinks in terms of word count on a Sunday. Mostly this is just word sprawl. Very little of it is bad. Some of it is fun. But it's mainly just blah blah blah. And then ADIT and TISCH crossing PLISSÉ, bleecccccch. THE SLOTS and THE BIT. Do Something Interesting. Just slapping FATHER'S DAY at 1-Across isn't it.


I did not have a bad time solving this. I merely had A Time. Not enough for the Marquee Puzzle, though. Not nearly enough. Sundays are the hardest day of the week to pull off. Themed puzzles are hard in general, and to get one to work, and not become tiresome, across such a great amount of space, is truly special. Which is why y'all should go back and admire Agard's "Stoner Movies" instead of whinging that it was about drugs. Eric is (almost) single-handedly keeping the NYTXW from being a full-on embarrassment of bygoneness and white-guy mediocrity. Sincerely, they're lucky he lets them publish his stuff.


I don't care about this grid enough to comment much.

Didn't know:

• PALOMA (39A: Cocktail of tequila and grapefruit soda)—rough clue. I think Picasso is the only PALOMA I know
• PLISSÉ (44D: Puckered fabric)—oof. OK. New words are cool, but crossing ADIT and TISCH, maybe less than cool
• DENNIS—(83D: Co-owner of Paddy's Pub on "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia")—may as well have been clued [Man's name] or [Name]. Uniconic.

OK bye.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

P.S. FACEVEIL? As opposed to what, ASSVEIL? Come on. (80D: Muslim niqab, e.g.)

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