Telecom of old / TUE 3-24-20 / Palindromic bird

Constructor: Olivia Mitra Framke

Relative difficulty: Easy (3:15)

THEME: imagined meetings— themers are familiar two-word phrases clued as if they referred to some kind of gathering:

Theme answers:

• TV RECEPTION (17A: The sitcom writers met at a ...)
• TRIG FUNCTION (28A: The mathematicians met at a ...)
• MEDICINE BALL (46A: The pharmacists met at a ...)
• SEARCH PARTY (58A: The Google employees met at a ...)

Word of the Day: MARC Jacobs (68A: Designer Jacobs) —

Marc Jacobs (born April 9, 1963) is an American fashion designer. He is the head designer for his own fashion label, Marc Jacobs, and formerly Marc by Marc Jacobs, a diffusion line, which was produced for approximately 15 years having been discontinued after the 2015 fall/winter collection. At one point there were over 200 retail stores in 80 countries. He was the creative director of the French design house Louis Vuitton from 1997 to 2014. Jacobs was on Time magazine's "2010 Time 100" list of the 100 most influential people in the world, and was #14 on Out magazine's 2012 list of "50 Most Powerful Gay Men and Women in America". He got married on 7 April 2019, to his long time boyfriend Charly Defrancesco. (wikipedia)

Another puzzle about which there is very little to say. Words that can mean "gathering" appear in phrases where they don't actually mean "gathering," but then those phrases are clued as if they *do* have something to do with a gathering. Or so I gather, gather ye rosebuds, etc. The ellipsis-style theme clues are slightly unusual, but basically you've got a wacky last-words-type puzzle, and today, the wackiness just wasn't big enough. Very bland, very straightforward. The whole thing felt ... workmanlike. Pro forma. Programmatic. This feels like a kind of sample puzzle, one that would've been just at home in the NYTXW in 1995 as in 2020. GENDER GAP is a highlight, obviously (34D: Male-female pay differential, e.g.) ... and maybe it's the obviousness that's the problem—literally nothing else stands out or seems the least bit noteworthy. Meanwhile, there's this low-level hum of sub-optimal crosswordese running through the grid, from EEG to ENT to ETH INE INGE TOI IMO GTE REL RRR and esp. ENTR. This phenomenon is probably not much more on display here than it is in your average easy crossword, but I'm not sure that should be a source of consolation. Even the clues don't offer much in the way of cleverness of funniness. It's all very serviceable. The one actual criticism I have is that the clues are phrased weirdly, in a way that doesn't really convey the party-ness of it all. That is, "met" just doesn't describe what happens at fetes or bashes. You "meet" for tea, or coffee, or maybe a ... let's say, meeting. But there's a huge gap between the ordinary word "met" and the fancy event that is a BALL. Something's just off or discordant about the clue phrasing.


I like the clue on WINE. I actually never saw the clue on WINE when I was solving, but I like that, in looking at the clue just now, without looking up at the grid, I guessed that the answer was WINE (37D: "A constant proof that God loves us, and loves to see us happy," per Benjamin Franklin).  For a puzzle with BRO in it, it's decidedly less BRO-y than your average NYTXW puzzle, with women (and women's concerns and women's clothing) in prominent places. And now, in conclusion, here are some thoughts on OTTERs (51D: River frolicker):

Enjoy your social distance as much as humanly possible, people! Mwah!

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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