Chinese port city on Korea Bay / SUN 5-17-20 / Pan flute musician in iconic commercials of 1980s / End-of-level challenges in video games / Dyes that can be used as pH indicators / Rockyesque interjections / Group of 18th-century thinkers that included Voltaire Rousseau

Constructor: Byron Walden

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium (9:48)

THEME: none— puzzle has a title ("Wide-Open Spaces") but there's no actual theme; the title just describes the amount of white space in the grid, i.e. it's a low word-count puzzle, for a Sunday. That's ... the "theme"

Word of the Day: LUMIÈRES (68D: Group of 18th-century thinkers that included Voltaire and Rousseau) —

The Lumières (literally in English: Enlighteners) was a cultural, philosophical, literary and intellectual movement of the second half of the 18th century, originating in France and spreading throughout Europe. It included philosophers such as Baruch Spinoza, Denis Diderot, Pierre Bayle and Isaac Newton. Over time it came to mean the Siècle des Lumières, in English the Age of Enlightenment.

Members of the movement saw themselves as a progressive élite, and battled against religious and political persecution, fighting against what they saw as the irrationality, arbitrariness, obscurantism and superstition of the previous centuries. They redefined the study of knowledge to fit the ethics and aesthetics of their time. Their works had great influence at the end of the 18th century, in the American Declaration of Independence and the French Revolution.

This intellectual and cultural renewal by the Lumières movement was, in its strictest sense, limited to Europe, and was almost exclusively a development of the ideas of Renaissance humanism. These ideas were well understood in Europe, but beyond France the idea of "enlightenment" had generally meant a light from outside, whereas in France it meant a light coming from within oneself.

In the most general terms, in science and philosophy, the Enlightenment aimed for the triumph of reason over faith and belief; in politics and economics, the triumph of the bourgeois over nobility and clergy. (wikipedia)

I can never evaluate Sunday themelesses fairly because I just don't like them. It feels like cheating. Of course you can put a lot of snazzy fill in a themeless Sunday—you have a Huge Grid. There's so much wide-open space that there is, for me, a feeling of formlessness and incoherence. I'm very interested in what kind of cool things a constructor can do in the limited space of 15x15. Open it up to 21x21 and even fantastic fill just doesn't land. It doesn't feel meaningful or special when it's done like this. It's a big blur. Byron is a very good constructor, so my problem really is with the form, per se, more than with the execution here. I finished this puzzle and then went in the other room and five minutes later couldn't remember much of anything about it. Even looking it over now (an hour or so later), I barely remember solving it, or what I felt, or ... anything. There's lots of stuff I've never heard of, but who cares? I worked around it and finished in a faster-than-average time. That's the other thing that probably makes this puzzle a disappointment—I'm used to themelesses being tough. This was like a giant themeless Wednesday. Pass.


I do remember getting THE VAULT and thinking, "really, THE?" Let's see ... Had real trouble at BOSSES (30D: End-of-level challenges in video games) / CONGO REDS (34A: Dyes that can be used as pH indicators), largely because I had heard of neither. BOSSES in particular is brutal if you have no idea what that is. --SSES and ... nothing. Thank god those crosses were gettable / inferrable, though I had real trouble with the "B" from BARTERER because when "?"s are appended to clues that end in quotation marks, for some reason those clues don't register in my brain as "?" clues (i.e. as tricky / wordplay clues). So I was thinking of 30A: One who might say "Your money's no good here"? (BARTERER) as something like ... "treater" or "footer of the bill" or something like that. But no. Bartering is a way to get goods without using money. Got it. This whole cluster should've torpedoed me, and might have in a 15x15 grid, but here, I just worked around it and sussed it out in very little time. Even the punches that landed didn't do much.


Trouble: how to spell HAGAN (went with HAGEN at first) (86D: Former North Carolina senator Kay ___). Also trouble: DÉCOLLETÉ (64D: Having a low neckline, as a dress). I think I know the word "decolletage," which is, like the bit around the neckline on a woman's blouse? Dress? Whoops, nope, it's actually the part of her torso *exposed* by the "low neckline." Well. OK, good to know. ANSWERER feels weak and FIZZER feels even weaker, but mainly there were no problems with this grid. I guess I was not keen on the plug for KENT CIGARETTES (22A: R.J. Reynolds product that once sponsored "The Dick Van Dyke Show"), or the massive generality of EASTERN AUSTRALIA (15D: Victorian home?), which is certainly a geographical area, but then so is SOUTHERN IDAHO, and I doubt anyone thinks that's crossworthy. But still, this puzzle is mostly fine. It has many nice answers. I just don't think they're as nice as I would if I encountered them in a more meaningful (because stricter) 15x15 context. EXTRA LARGE PIZZA is 15 ... if it means that much to you, you can get it in a F/Sat grid.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

P.S. Daily Beast has a daily (!) puzzle now, written by veteran puzzle pro Matt Gaffney. It's 10x10, gets harder as the week goes on, and features lots of timely, news-based answers. Check it out!

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]