Constructor: Erik Agard
Relative difficulty: Medium-Challenging for me, very easy for everyone else (I'm seeing lots of "personal record!"s, while I was in the 11s somewhere, i.e. slower than average)
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THEME:"Food Engineering"— Note: "When this puzzle is finished, change one letter in the last word in the answer to each asterisked clue to name a food. The replacement letters, in order, will spell an appropriate phrase." The phrase is BREAK BREAD. Here's how you get there:
Theme answers:
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Very unpleasant solve for me, only some of which is the puzzle's fault. My software was lagging, so I'd type or move the cursor, but nothing would happen for a second or so, and then all the backed-up keyboard strokes I'd made would happen at once. Fantastically annoying. Also, for some reason my software did NOT alert me to the "note" (in AcrossLite you get a little yellow note symbol, but in Black Ink ... I think the notebox is just supposed to pop up, but for whatever reason it didn't this time, so at the end, when I was all done, I kept looking at the themers wondering what the Hell was going on. I could see almost-foods, like DVANISH was almost "danish" and ... well, TASTE is embedded in "WHAT A STEAL!" and that's *kinda* related to food. Eventually, I went in to manually check to see if there were puzzle notes and bam, there they were. At that point, following directions made uncovering the hidden message easy, and dull. Paint by numbers. Totally anticlimactic. I'm used to doing really interesting meta-puzzles every week (between Matt Gaffney's Crossword Contest and the Friday WSJ contest), so this one ... just seemed anemic by comparison. I guess it's not really a meta, since you don't have to piece anything together—it's all spelled out for you. But I'd prefer a full-blown meta, a crossword contest of some sort, to this hand-holding "note" baloney. There's gotta be some middle ground between complete inscrutability and spoon-feeding. Anyway, the theme is what it is, and if you liked it, cool. It fell flat for me. *Admittedly* the tech lag and the "note" issues put me in a foul, frustrated mood. Still, I think this wasn't as interesting as it could've been. It's basically a Sunday-sized themeless, but at the end, you can go find a theme if you want. Shrug.
What's also frustrating is the way crosswords made by constructors I very much like have (here and in other venues) been playing really fast and loose with proper names, niche terms, slang, etc. I love learning new things from puzzles, particularly since our popular culture is increasingly segmented and fewer and fewer things can be counted on to be truly "popular" in the sense of "familiar to many different demographics"; pre-internet, even if I didn't watch a TV show, see a movie, listen to a particular band, there was a good chance I at least knew it existed. Today, even being a sports fan / old movie fan / watcher of TV / extremely online person, I don't even have purchase on sizeable areas of culture that are *very* popular (gaming is a good example; anything having to do with reality TV is another). I love that younger constructors are adding their personal predilections and fandoms to the vocabulary of crosswords, but, as with *any* proper name that is not truly universally well known, you *have* to mind your crosses, and the less mainstream your answer, the more you have to take care that surrounding / crossing fill is gettable. It's just polite. You want to invite people *in* to your world, not shut them out on an uninferrable cross. Anyway, this is all to say that LIZ CAMBAGE was, until the very end, a string of random letters to me, and several adjacent answers made putting her name together somewhat brutal. MALODOR? Definitely inferrable, but used by no one and archaic (poetic?) (67D: Bad smell). Then the whole Lisa BONET clue, what the heck (70A: Lisa who "ate no basil," in a palindrome). If you'd just given me a "Cosby Show" clue, or a "Different World" clue, or even an "Angel Heart" clue (the only Lisa BONET movie I've seen, I think), then maybe, but this palindrome clue??? which is basically just saying (I figured out, eventually) that her name is spelled backward in the quoted phrase!?!? So confusing. Also, that is not a famous palindrome. I guess the full palindrome is just "Lisa BONET ate no basil"? Is that it? Sigh. The worst, though, was SMAZE, a word I've never seen ever ever outside of maybe in a crossword once or twice (52D: Pollution portmanteau). I had SMA- and ... nothing. No hope. Eventually, I had SMA-E and ran the alphabet. Also, LIZ makes a woman's name, so I just prayed the "Z" was right and moved on. A singularly icky experience, that whole area.
Speaking of icky, and stying In That Same Area: BLEAH (70D: "Ugh!"). You will or will not be surprised to find out that BLEAH ... is a debut. It's never appeared in a NYTXW before. I submit that this is because it is not a real sound one makes with one's mouth. I would accept (and did try) BLECH before I accepted (or tried) BLEAH. BLAH and BLEH are real. BLECH is very Mad Magazine, which makes it real. BLEAH, I have no idea. It's like ... when you have your primary LEAH, the LEAH you really like, and then your backup: B LEAH. And then adjacent to *that* was ALLTOO, also very hard to pick up (74D: Alarmingly). So basically everything from ALLTOO NW to SMAZE and LIZ CAMBAGE was a disaster. Very rough going. I *did* end up getting it all. But it felt awful. And ALOG is in there too, further BLEAHing things up. Honestly, the rest of the puzzle is kind of a blur. There are good answers in there (e.g. GRAMMAR POLICE and Beethoven's PIANO SONATAS, a new album of which I was literally listening to just this morning). But between the half-baked (!) theme and that whole CAMBAGE-y area, the time I had was more bad than good.
On the Clipboard (observations from the Week in Crosswords):
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Relative difficulty: Medium-Challenging for me, very easy for everyone else (I'm seeing lots of "personal record!"s, while I was in the 11s somewhere, i.e. slower than average)
Theme answers:
- SKINNY JEANS (beans, B)
- TIME FLIES (fries, R)
- BAR GRAPHS (grapes, E)
- RIP CURRENTS (currants, A)
- WHAT A STEAL (steak, K)
- LIZ CAMBAGE (cabbage, B)
- CORNER BOOTH (broth, R)
- EYE POPPER (pepper, E)
- COPY PASTE (pasta, A)
- UP AND VANISH (danish, D)
Elizabeth "Liz" Cambage (born 18 August 1991) is an Australian professional basketballplayer who plays for the Las Vegas Aces of the Women's National Basketball Association(WNBA) and the Australian Opals. Cambage currently holds the WNBA single-game scoring record with her 53 point performance against the New York Liberty on 17 July 2018. (wikipedia)
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What's also frustrating is the way crosswords made by constructors I very much like have (here and in other venues) been playing really fast and loose with proper names, niche terms, slang, etc. I love learning new things from puzzles, particularly since our popular culture is increasingly segmented and fewer and fewer things can be counted on to be truly "popular" in the sense of "familiar to many different demographics"; pre-internet, even if I didn't watch a TV show, see a movie, listen to a particular band, there was a good chance I at least knew it existed. Today, even being a sports fan / old movie fan / watcher of TV / extremely online person, I don't even have purchase on sizeable areas of culture that are *very* popular (gaming is a good example; anything having to do with reality TV is another). I love that younger constructors are adding their personal predilections and fandoms to the vocabulary of crosswords, but, as with *any* proper name that is not truly universally well known, you *have* to mind your crosses, and the less mainstream your answer, the more you have to take care that surrounding / crossing fill is gettable. It's just polite. You want to invite people *in* to your world, not shut them out on an uninferrable cross. Anyway, this is all to say that LIZ CAMBAGE was, until the very end, a string of random letters to me, and several adjacent answers made putting her name together somewhat brutal. MALODOR? Definitely inferrable, but used by no one and archaic (poetic?) (67D: Bad smell). Then the whole Lisa BONET clue, what the heck (70A: Lisa who "ate no basil," in a palindrome). If you'd just given me a "Cosby Show" clue, or a "Different World" clue, or even an "Angel Heart" clue (the only Lisa BONET movie I've seen, I think), then maybe, but this palindrome clue??? which is basically just saying (I figured out, eventually) that her name is spelled backward in the quoted phrase!?!? So confusing. Also, that is not a famous palindrome. I guess the full palindrome is just "Lisa BONET ate no basil"? Is that it? Sigh. The worst, though, was SMAZE, a word I've never seen ever ever outside of maybe in a crossword once or twice (52D: Pollution portmanteau). I had SMA- and ... nothing. No hope. Eventually, I had SMA-E and ran the alphabet. Also, LIZ makes a woman's name, so I just prayed the "Z" was right and moved on. A singularly icky experience, that whole area.
Speaking of icky, and stying In That Same Area: BLEAH (70D: "Ugh!"). You will or will not be surprised to find out that BLEAH ... is a debut. It's never appeared in a NYTXW before. I submit that this is because it is not a real sound one makes with one's mouth. I would accept (and did try) BLECH before I accepted (or tried) BLEAH. BLAH and BLEH are real. BLECH is very Mad Magazine, which makes it real. BLEAH, I have no idea. It's like ... when you have your primary LEAH, the LEAH you really like, and then your backup: B LEAH. And then adjacent to *that* was ALLTOO, also very hard to pick up (74D: Alarmingly). So basically everything from ALLTOO NW to SMAZE and LIZ CAMBAGE was a disaster. Very rough going. I *did* end up getting it all. But it felt awful. And ALOG is in there too, further BLEAHing things up. Honestly, the rest of the puzzle is kind of a blur. There are good answers in there (e.g. GRAMMAR POLICE and Beethoven's PIANO SONATAS, a new album of which I was literally listening to just this morning). But between the half-baked (!) theme and that whole CAMBAGE-y area, the time I had was more bad than good.
On the Clipboard (observations from the Week in Crosswords):
- I actually liked a Bruce Haight puzzle for the first time in my life ... and it appeared in the LA Times (???!). How does this guy get a jillion puzzles into the NYT, none of them enjoyable (to me), and then somehow his LAT puzzle is good. I like to think it was rejected by the NYT. I know my best themed puzzle (back when I made puzzle) was rejected by the NYT and published by the LAT, so it wouldn't be the first time. Anyway, he had a nifty little RAISE MONEY puzzle on Thursday, where monetary units appeared inside long Down themers, running backward (i.e. upward, hence the whole "raise" concept). Even the revealer had some raised money in it (YEN!). The rest of the grid was also interesting and not BLEAH (!). This was definitely one of the nicer puzzle suprises of the week.
- That same puzzle also had one of my favorite clues of the week: [You basked for it] => TAN. Though the clue of the week was very definitely a NYTXW clue—that [Ernst & Young locale] clue for SENATE. Gold.
- I saw VSCOGIRL as the answer in some crossword (I want to say a New Yorker) and then (just a couple days ago, saw VSCO girl in a clue in the AVXC crossword by Aimee Lucido ("Word Wide Web"). I asked my daughter what the hell "VSCO girl" was and even when she described it to me, it didn't make much sense. Anyway, here's some info, in case "VSCO girl" somehow makes its way into a grid near you.
- Erik Agard (today's constructor!) continues to do a bang-up job as editor of the USA Today crossword (where women constructors are currently responsible for 76% of this year's puzzles so far) (NYT currently at 20%, which is actually up a tad from recent years). Erik does this great thing with his editing where he freshens up old fill with new clues, often in ways that highlight women or people of color instead of the predictable (often white male) stand-bys. On Thursday, for instance, he gave us an ASHTON that was not Kutcher but Sanders (an actor in the Academy Award-winning "Moonlight"), and instead of Mike ROWE (or whatever other ROWEs there are), we got [Sportscaster Holly] ROWE, who is a sideline college football reporter for ESPN. In both cases, the crosses for those answers are unimpeachably fair, so you aren't left hanging or weirdly struggling if you don't happen to know who these people are (I actually knew neither of them by name, though by sight I definitely know Holly ROWE). Anway, this is good, inclusive editing, and I'm thrilled by it.
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