Home for Hogarth or Constable / SAT 5-16-20 / Unit of magnetic flux / Means of devastation on Game of Thrones / Fictional land in highest-grossing film of 2018 / Claw-proof crate / Aristocrat in British slang / Chain with loaf of bread in its logo

Constructor: Tracy Gray and Jeff Chen

Relative difficulty: Easy (5:50)

THEME: none

Word of the Day: Donna SHALALA (41A: Congresswoman who once served in the U.S. cabinet) —

Donna Edna Shalala (Arabic: دونا إدنا شلالا‎; /ʃəˈleɪlə/ shə-LAY-lə; born February 14, 1941) is an American politician and academic serving as the U.S. Representative for Florida's 27th congressional district since 2019. A member of the Democratic Party, she previously served as the 18th United States Secretary of Health and Human Services under President Bill Clinton from 1993 to 2001. (wikipedia)

This is a completely acceptable Saturday puzzle. No real wows, but not much garbage either. Sturdy throughout. The highs were higher and the lows were lower yesterday, but I liked yesterday's puzzle somewhat more—it hit more than it missed. This one rarely misses, but only CRAZY BUSY and RUMOR HAS IT really made me sit up and take notice. The rest was just fine. Oh, I also liked WAKANDA. It's hard for me, specifically, when I finish a puzzle like this because I just don't have much to say, one way or the other. It's nice to have something *remarkable* to work with, even if what is remarkable is that the puzzle stinks. With a kind of beige / taupe / ecru puzzle like this, I was more aware of how I was solving than of the specific quality of the puzzle. For instance, starting Saturdays is almost always tough, and this was no exception. First pass at the NW yielded a few things, but nothing that allowed me to put it all together. I guessed ZIN correctly, but didn't trust it, and since I also didn't trust its neighbor, ARID, I just decided to abandon that corner and move on. I did, however, have enough sense to see the "VI" toward the end of 14A: Look down on something and write in the word VIEW. Seemed probable. Of course my next move was dropping WEASELS down from the "W" in VIEW at 15D: Spineless sorts, metaphorically (WET RAGS), so even though VIEW was the right move, it had a bad initial outcome. Sometimes even your good moves turn out bad.


What I really noticed was the power of the CRUCIAL answer (which, today, was not, in fact, CRUCIAL). Today's crucial answer was a totally banal one: ATTACH (10D: Online action symbolized by a paper clip). I don't think of ATTACHing as inherently "online," but ... I guess it is. I attach things to emails, emails are "online." I guess I think of "online" as referring to something that happens (primarily) in my web browser. Annnnnyway, I ATTACH things regularly to emails so the paper clip icon was familiar to me. Writing in ATTACH gave me the first letters of all the 4s in the NE, and that helped me knock them off 1-2-3. Which then meant that the long Downs could fall easily as well. Then it was easy to back GOATHERD into the middle of the grid, sweep down to the SW, then back up to the formerly pesky NW, which proved far less pesky this time. RAKE gave me the "K" to get down into the SE via WAKANDA, and a correct guess of BALLADS allowed me to come at the SE from the other side as well. Some trouble with NAPA, but otherwise made pretty short work of the SE and ended up with a pretty swift under-6-minute solve time. When I look back over the grid, or over my print-out of the grid, the part I like most is actually the two wrong answers I had, which I have written in the margins, one over the other: YOGA WEASELS. Now *that* is a gang I would join. (I had YOGA for 1D: ___ pants (CAMO)).


Five things:

• 4D: Cab alternative (ZIN)— yes, my brain went first to transportation, but if you've been doing these long enough, the wine meaning of "cab" will shout at you pretty quick
• 23A: Name that's an anagram of both 16- and 18-Across (ETTA) — not (at all) a big fan of this kind of clue, which is essentially content-free. It's annoying enough to be sent around the grid to figure out answers; to have no actual clue beyond "anagram" is very disappointing
• 33A: Binary code snippets (BYTES) — for some reason, I wasn't sure about the "Y"; thought it might be "I." Something about bits and bytes, I don't know. Luckily, getting the "Y" from TYPE A wasn't hard (30D: Like go-getters)
• 37A: Unit of magnetic flux (WEBER) — the fragmentary remains of my college Physics I class still clatter around my brain, so even though I couldn't tell you anything very definitive about physics, I still have a decent physics vocabulary storehouse, and with crosswords, that is often enough (fun fact: the only award I received in college was for my Physics I class, in which I got the highest grade—this is what happens when Physics is your respite from your three 200pp/week literature classes).
• 48A: Mount near Olympus (OSSA)— considered ETNA, but that's on Sicily, which ... honestly, I don't know where "Olympus" is, but I'm pretty sure it's in Greece. Four-letter mountains from ancient literature = ETNA or OSSA (if it's three letters, you're probably looking at IDA) (if five, MT. IDA) (IDA is on Crete, btw) (also, Mount OSSA is the highest point in Tasmania ... you know, in case that ever comes up)

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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