Constructor: Stella Zawistowski
Relative difficulty: Challenging (no idea how long it took me ... stopped several times out of boredom / annoyance ... felt harder than normal for a Tuesday)
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THEME: PLONK— jk ... looks like ordinary phrases where the first word is also the name of a Broadway show, clued as if they somehow referred to said show:
Theme answers:
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Theme seems extremely weak. Part of the reason I found the puzzle hard was I assumed the theme was actually doing something ... Got RENT FREEZE and thought it was RENT FREE with -ZE added for some wacky reason. Then I kept waiting for some big idea to gel, for Anything to happen beyond "first words are Broadway shows," but that moment never came. Concept seemed hackneyed and the clues seemed anemic. Where's COMPANY CAR? NINE WEST? GYPSY MOTH? CHICAGO BEARS? Huge shrug for all of today's themers and their clues. And then the fill was just ragged through the middle there. The phrase "all wet" is so olden that I don't even really know what it means, so WRONG was actually a mild surprise. PLONK could've been any sound effect, as far as I was concerned. I had CLONK and CLANK and god knows what else in there. Huge let-down to have actual answer be something as ugly and random as PLONK. I think of PLONK as ... either something akin to PLUNK (i.e. put something down heavily) or else cheap wine. Would not have associated it with "old pianos."CRACK could've been lots of stuff including BREAK (35A: Succumb to pressure). It was the awful vagueness coupled with the non-aha moment when I finally "got" it that made solving this one (esp. the middle section) particularly miserable.
Whole SE corner was a mystery. Had OCHER / OCHRE at 62A: Dark, yellowish green (OLIVE). Barely heard of NORN (yuck), and I surely won't be the only one. Surprised to see NORN on a Tuesday. Could not come up with TRIANGLE from that clue (39D: Word with love or right). GOOD part of WICKED GOOD was not clear. Wouldn't know a TELEX if it bit me (though I've heard of them). Everything felt confusing and ye olde. And the modern stuff was just awkwardly clued. I "find" Alexa ... in (?) ECHO (51A: Where to find Amazon's Alexa). I've used Alexa. I have never owned an ECHO. Everything from stem to stern in this thing just clonked (or plonked) for me. Theme weak and thin (and not nearly funny / wacky enough), fill stale, cluing often vague, clunky, or not right for the day of the week. WHOLE HOG and SHERLOCK are fine answers, but mostly this one was a total miss for me.
"Friends" and "Frasier" are specifically sitcoms, so needing all the crosses just to get ... SHOW (?)??? This is the kind of weird combo of hard and disappointing that this puzzle managed to be at many different points. The saying of "no thanks" to something and the SKIPPING of it are completely different acts (43A: Saying "No thanks" to, say). There's just a weird lot of common / borderline crosswordese stuff. Seems like with a theme this (relatively) light, the fill wouldn't be so IRR AROD RIIS ESTA TELEX ORES ORSO ACTI ANTE AXLE etc. The worst of the short fill, though, was the GPO / EEOC crossing. Truly awful, if only because their crossing *initialisms*, which means if you don't know what the letters ... stand for ... you have no hope. I knew EEOC (Equal Employment Opportunity Commission), so never really noticed GPO, which ... I don't think I've ever seen in a crossword. General Post Office? Oof, if I google [GPO] I get the US Government Publishing Office. Do they ... "collect letters"? No ... looks like this clue is definitely referring to General Post Office, which is ... British? Or maybe they have them everywhere? This is only the second appearance of this particular initialism in the past ten years. And that other time? Was on a Saturday. At annnny rate: GPO / EEOC is just an objectively bad crossing, on any day. Sigh. If this puzzle had a. had snazzier themers with funnier clues, b. run on a Wednesday, and c. had much cleaner fill, maybe. But as it is, no.
Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld
[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]
Relative difficulty: Challenging (no idea how long it took me ... stopped several times out of boredom / annoyance ... felt harder than normal for a Tuesday)
Theme answers:
- RENT FREEZE (17A: Super-cold spell on the set of a 1996 Broadway musical?)
- HAIR SHIRT (11D: Souvenir from a 1968 Broadway musical?)
- ANNIE HALL (34D: Performance venue for a 1977 Broadway musical?)
- WICKED GOOD (58A: Positive, albeit terse, review of a 2003 Broadway musical?)
The Norns (Old Norse: norn, plural: nornir) in Norse mythology are female beings who rule the destiny of gods and men. They roughly correspond to other controllers of humans' destiny, such as the Fates, elsewhere in European mythology. (wikipedia)
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Whole SE corner was a mystery. Had OCHER / OCHRE at 62A: Dark, yellowish green (OLIVE). Barely heard of NORN (yuck), and I surely won't be the only one. Surprised to see NORN on a Tuesday. Could not come up with TRIANGLE from that clue (39D: Word with love or right). GOOD part of WICKED GOOD was not clear. Wouldn't know a TELEX if it bit me (though I've heard of them). Everything felt confusing and ye olde. And the modern stuff was just awkwardly clued. I "find" Alexa ... in (?) ECHO (51A: Where to find Amazon's Alexa). I've used Alexa. I have never owned an ECHO. Everything from stem to stern in this thing just clonked (or plonked) for me. Theme weak and thin (and not nearly funny / wacky enough), fill stale, cluing often vague, clunky, or not right for the day of the week. WHOLE HOG and SHERLOCK are fine answers, but mostly this one was a total miss for me.
"Friends" and "Frasier" are specifically sitcoms, so needing all the crosses just to get ... SHOW (?)??? This is the kind of weird combo of hard and disappointing that this puzzle managed to be at many different points. The saying of "no thanks" to something and the SKIPPING of it are completely different acts (43A: Saying "No thanks" to, say). There's just a weird lot of common / borderline crosswordese stuff. Seems like with a theme this (relatively) light, the fill wouldn't be so IRR AROD RIIS ESTA TELEX ORES ORSO ACTI ANTE AXLE etc. The worst of the short fill, though, was the GPO / EEOC crossing. Truly awful, if only because their crossing *initialisms*, which means if you don't know what the letters ... stand for ... you have no hope. I knew EEOC (Equal Employment Opportunity Commission), so never really noticed GPO, which ... I don't think I've ever seen in a crossword. General Post Office? Oof, if I google [GPO] I get the US Government Publishing Office. Do they ... "collect letters"? No ... looks like this clue is definitely referring to General Post Office, which is ... British? Or maybe they have them everywhere? This is only the second appearance of this particular initialism in the past ten years. And that other time? Was on a Saturday. At annnny rate: GPO / EEOC is just an objectively bad crossing, on any day. Sigh. If this puzzle had a. had snazzier themers with funnier clues, b. run on a Wednesday, and c. had much cleaner fill, maybe. But as it is, no.
Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld
[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]