Constructor: Alex Eaton-Salners
Relative difficulty: Medium-Challenging (?) (3:14) (20 seconds over my average ... 20 seconds on a Monday is a lot)
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THEME: ???— RIGHT and LEFT, and then FRONT and BACK, I have no idea what is being documented / illustrated / celebrated here, and I honestly don't care
Theme answers:
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If you're gonna make things a *little* tougher than usual on a Monday there better be a Pay Off and man was there not one. There's nothing playful or fun or even coherent about this themer set. FRONT OF THE LINE isn't even a particularly solid phrase. Why are we being subjected to this half-assed stab at whimsy? Am I supposed to ooh and aah at the fact that they all have prepositional phrases in them. Thrill to the wonders of ON THE, swoon at the litheness of IN THE ... I have no idea why a puzzle like this makes the cut? Are you telling me that in the 6000 submissions you brag about getting every year there aren't Monday puzzles, maybe by women (?) that are At Least as good as this? Or better? There's a group of male constructors who just take up space and don't offer much else. Don't seem very thoughtful about the quality or inclusiveness of their fill, don't seem interested in doing much besides putting forth merely passable product. The question is: why does it keep getting accepted? I mean, where's the wow here, Best Puzzle On the Planet? Is it ARFS? LIL? HERA crossing HORA? EVIE? DHL? ANO? Stop me when I hit it. HEH? Must be HEH. Who Doesn't Love a Laugh Syllable!? LEHI? KPH? AMIE? H-BOMB? HAHAS? ALFA? IWO? ETTE? OPS? [continues listing fill until he nods off...]
Big open corners made it harder to navigate this one as quickly as I do most Mondays—which would be *fine* if the theme or fill was good. But the theme, as we've established, was a gigantic nothing. So then the question is: does the fill offset the thematic weakness? And the answer is just no. See the list I ended the last paragraph with. See also the fact that NARWHAL and ICECUBE and maybe FLUSHOT were the only answers I kinda sorta liked. I also just like the word DISHY, so that was fun. But not fun enough to offset the harder-than-usualness of the puzzle and the irksome non-theme and the overall low quality of the fill. HANDVAC? What? I can't get excited about that. Just can't. I hate poker, so your "ideal poker" blah blah blah was nothing to me (ACE HIGH). LEHI, again, what? I cannot keep all the four-letter Biblical places straight. NO CARBS remains absolutely not a thing. Not at all a thing. Forget "ketosis," you literally cannot avoid eating all carbs, stop perpetrating this dumb mythological dumbness on society. You can go extremely, stupidly low, but "NO"? No. That = death. Stop. Even meat contains some carbs. Ugh. There's nothing non-annoying about the puzzle today? I'm going to redo Wyna Liu's puzzle from yesterday, because it has the playful energy I *expect* to see on a Monday. I hope Tuesday out-Mondays Monday. Stop the Mediocre Crossword Boys Club!!!! If you insist on mediocrity, surely women can do that as well as men. S u r e l y!
Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld
[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]
Relative difficulty: Medium-Challenging (?) (3:14) (20 seconds over my average ... 20 seconds on a Monday is a lot)
Theme answers:
- RIGHT ON THE MONEY (17A: Exact)
- LEFT IN THE LURCH (31A: Abandoned and helpless)
- FRONT OF THE LINE (37A: Where someone who goes next is standing)
- "BACK TO THE FUTURE" (57A: Classic Michael J. Fox movie)
The narwhal or narwhale (Monodon monoceros) is a medium-sized toothed whale that possesses a large "tusk" from a protruding canine tooth. It lives year-round in the Arctic waters around Greenland, Canada, and Russia. It is one of two living species of whale in the familyMonodontidae, along with the beluga whale. The narwhal males are distinguished by a long, straight, helical tusk, which is an elongated upper left canine. The narwhal was one of many species described by Carl Linnaeus in his publication Systema Naturae in 1758. (wikipedia)
Big open corners made it harder to navigate this one as quickly as I do most Mondays—which would be *fine* if the theme or fill was good. But the theme, as we've established, was a gigantic nothing. So then the question is: does the fill offset the thematic weakness? And the answer is just no. See the list I ended the last paragraph with. See also the fact that NARWHAL and ICECUBE and maybe FLUSHOT were the only answers I kinda sorta liked. I also just like the word DISHY, so that was fun. But not fun enough to offset the harder-than-usualness of the puzzle and the irksome non-theme and the overall low quality of the fill. HANDVAC? What? I can't get excited about that. Just can't. I hate poker, so your "ideal poker" blah blah blah was nothing to me (ACE HIGH). LEHI, again, what? I cannot keep all the four-letter Biblical places straight. NO CARBS remains absolutely not a thing. Not at all a thing. Forget "ketosis," you literally cannot avoid eating all carbs, stop perpetrating this dumb mythological dumbness on society. You can go extremely, stupidly low, but "NO"? No. That = death. Stop. Even meat contains some carbs. Ugh. There's nothing non-annoying about the puzzle today? I'm going to redo Wyna Liu's puzzle from yesterday, because it has the playful energy I *expect* to see on a Monday. I hope Tuesday out-Mondays Monday. Stop the Mediocre Crossword Boys Club!!!! If you insist on mediocrity, surely women can do that as well as men. S u r e l y!
Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld
[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]