Constructor: Jakob Weisblat
Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium (low 4s)
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THEME: September 9— clues are all [99, in [some field]]; today's date is 9/9:
Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium (low 4s)
Theme answers:
Word of the Day: DFC (38A: U.S.A.F. honor) —
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Nine is my favorite number, so this puzzle should've been pleasing to me. And yet. And yet. And yet this answer set feels totally arbitrary and not terribly interesting. I love remembering '80s music as much as the next person, but something about this concept felt tinny and cheap. And the fill had some highs (a few of the longer Downs), but enough awful lows that those were the things I remembered. DEP? (22A: Terminal abbr.) Is that short for "departure"??? Yikes. I generally look at a screen marked "Arrivals" and "Departures," and can't recall seeing that exact abbr. at a "terminal." I genuinely thought it was short for "DEPot" (as in "train depot") before I started writing this paragraph. Note: DEP hasn't been clued as an abbr. for "Departures" since Before I Started Blogging (mid-2006). It's always short for "deposit" (as in "bank deposit"). There's one sheriff DEPuty in there too. You'd think you'd've gone with SEP today—I mean ... look at your theme. Then there was DFC, which was just a random series of letters. I thought, after nearly fourteen years of writing every day about the NYTXW, that I'd seen the entire alphabet-soup collection of three-letter military award abbrs. (truly the junk drawer of crosswordese), but DFC, wow, you gotta go back to 1999 to find an appearance of that little gem. LLCS is probably clued correctly (56D: Hybrid business entities: Abbr.) but financial abbrs. (again, junk drawer) are not my thing and also even financial experts will have to agree (I insist) that the plural here is yuck. The worst thing about the grid for me was PEEP (1D: Look-see). I wrote in PEEK. Because that's the best answer. It swaps out perfectly: "Let's have a look-see,""Let's have a PEEK." See. Perfect. "Let's have a PEEP"!?!?! That's something you say to a baby chick who refuses to come in on cue in your poultry chorus. I get that eyes are "peepers," but yuck and ugh. I had KENCAP at 19A: Something removed before signing (PEN CAP) and just stared. All the crosses were correct, as far as I was concerned. What the hell was a KENCAP? Well, it's nothing. A typo for "kneecap," maybe.
- EINSTEINIUM (17A: 99, in chemistry)
- NAMES OF ALLAH (28A: 99, in Islam)
- WAYNE GRETZKY (47A: 99, in hockey)
- LUFTBALLONS (60A: 99, in pop music)
The Distinguished Flying Cross is a military decoration awarded to any officer or enlisted member of the United States Armed Forces who distinguishes himself or herself in support of operations by "heroism or extraordinary achievement while participating in an aerial flight, subsequent to November 11, 1918." (wikipedia)
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Monday's puzzle had a gratuitous reference to so-called "right-to-work" laws, which are some anti-union right-wing bullshit, and today, right up front at 1-Across, we get a right-wing PAC: Citizens United. Look, if you thought the racism and sexism and other garbage that creeps into the NYTXW from time to time was just a matter of ignorance or well-intentioned misunderstanding about word meaning, maybe it's time you start to rethink this. There's no reason, with either of the clues I've mentioned, to showcase right-wing bullshit. You can clue PAC and WORK just fine without doing flak work for bad-faith political orgs. This kind of cluing is highly intentional. As shorthand for a landmark Supreme Court decision, Citizens United is fine. I was actually thinking "what's a three-letter abbr. for a Supreme Court decision? DEC???" But as a PAC, it's garbage. Corporations aren't people and "right-to-work" is some Orwellian nonsense.
What else. Oh, I misspelled GRETSKY, like so. That made me think 34D: Something that just might work (CRAZY IDEA) was a CRASH ... something. I might even have written in CRASH IDEA before I got wise to my screw-up. And that's it. That's all I've got on this one. Happy September 9th, I guess.
Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld
[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]
Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld
[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]