Constructor: Kameron Austin Collins and Paolo Pasco
Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium (low 6s)
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THEME: none
Word of the Day: HETTY Green, a.k.a. the Witch of Wall Street (32A) —
Very happy to see the names on the byline this morning. Feel like I don't see them nearly enough. I was not surprised by how much I enjoyed the puzzle, but I was a little surprised by how easy I found it. It had a very open, bouncy, Friday feel to it—not a dreary low-word-count puzzle, not a lot of showy white space, lots of opportunities for toeholds. The toehold thing is important, and probably the reason that the center of the puzzle weirdly felt harder than any other place. If you've always got 3- and 4-letter answers near by to grab on to, then you've always got hope of getting the stacks (or blocks) of longer answers. Shorter answers are, in the main, much easier to get without crosses than longer answers are. And there are 3- and 4-letter answers available in all sections of this grid, which you'd think might make the grid kind of tiresome, short stuff being typically unexciting. And yet the short stuff is solid enough that it's not a distraction, and the longer stuff that it's propping enough is so interesting that that is what you remember. I mean, when I think about the NE corner of this grid, I think "wow, I loved that," not "ugh, ELOI and DSL again!" Anyway, I never felt truly stuck or in trouble because shorter answers kept providing the lifelines I needed to keep going whenever things got thorny. Plus, the grid is full of things I like and know, and what I don't like or know wasn't terribly hard to get. So the puzzle felt playful and spirited but not SNOTTY (or "bumptious," a word I thought I knew but I guess not ... I would've had it as "loud and crude or otherwise acting like a bumpkin" (!?) but it means "self-assertive or proud to an irritating degree").
Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld
[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]
Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium (low 6s)
Word of the Day: HETTY Green, a.k.a. the Witch of Wall Street (32A) —
Hetty Green (November 21, 1834 – July 3, 1916), nicknamed the Witch of Wall Street, was an American businesswoman and financier known as "the richest woman in America" during the Gilded Age. She was known for her wealth and was named by the Guinness Book of World Records as the "greatest miser", which meant that even when being incredibly rich, she was a renowned cheapskate, as she refused to buy expensive clothes, pay for hot water, and wear a single dress, that was only washed when it was worn out. She amassed a fortune as a financier when other major financiers were men. After her death, The New York Times stated that "It was the fact that Mrs. Green was a woman that made her career the subject of endless curiosity, comment and astonishment." (wikipedia) (side note: like many wealthy people, she inherited *so* much of her initial wealth—hundreds of millions in contemporary US$)
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| Kameron Austin Collins wrote the essay that accompanies this recent Criterion Blu-Ray, which I just bought and am excited to open |
Always nice to run into a gimme at 1A: Flatten like a bug (SMOOSH). At least, I hoped SMOOSH was right, and when I ran the crosses, enough of them came back plausible that I kept SMOOSH in place, which proved to be the right move. Most of my problems today ended up being single-letter problems, the worst of which was writing in SNAP-ON instead of SNAP-IN (the former being infinitely more common than the latter, in my unscientific estimation) (23A: Secure with a click). That little vowel problem made PILED IT ON (21D: Really didn't hold back) really hard to see, esp. because my brain wanted POURED IT ON, for which the "O" (in SNAP-ON) worked ... but of course POURED IT ON was too long, so I kind of freaked out at the possibility that the phrase was actually spelled PORED IT ON and I had somehow never realized this in my half-century+ on this planet. That answer ran through HETTY, which I also didn't know, and it's very close to STN (28D: What a dot on a map might represent: Abbr.), which was hard to get, esp. after I decided that the "dot on a map" might be a mountain (MTN).
Elsewhere, struggled with a single letter yet again when I wrote in SAXOS before SAMOS (31A: Aegean Sea island) (probably because of analogy to NAXOS, which is also a Greek island, as well as a classical music label). Then there was the very last letter I put in the grid: the "R" in AGER / ART ROSS (46D: Smoking or drinking, e.g. / 58A: Eponym of the N.H.L.'s points leader award). I didn't struggle there so much as stumble blindly into success. I have only a very general awareness of the NHL and its rites and rituals. I've almost certainly heard of the ART ROSS Trophy (see, I knew it was a name associated specifically with a "trophy"), but there's no way I could've put that together without almost all of the crosses. So it's ridiculously lucky that the first time I actually laid eyes on the clue came when I had literally one square left to fill in. And luckily I'm familiar enough with this type of clue on AGER (as in, something that ages you), so I dropped the "R" and bam, done. ART ROSS—handled before he ever became a problem.
I haven't highlighted the great answers in this, possibly because they highlight themselves. CELEBRITY CRUSH! DROP THE MIC! NOT ANY MORE! And wow, GARANIMALS, I had no idea I needed to see that in the grid (11D: Mix-and-match children's clothing brand). I had no idea they still made those. Feels like a throwback to my childhood, though I might be confusing GARANIMALS with UNDEROOS ... has that been in a grid!? Anyway, it's underwear with a coordinated top and bottom, with different themes like superheroes and what not. Typically (originally, anyway) for children, but now I see there is an adult line and I'm mildly disturbed so I'm going to log off now. Have a nice day.
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