Constructor: Kristian House
Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium (untimed)
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THEME: "To" => "Two" — familiar phrases that contain "to ___," where the blank is a homophone of a letter of the English alphabet; in the grid, the "to ___" phrase is represented as two (2) letters:
Theme answers:
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Well there's one main problem with the theme and it's so obvious that maybe I'm the only one who actually found it a problem. Always possible. The problem is, There are two letters ... lettersssssss ... Two As, two Us, etc. So what I'm looking at is "Two 'A's Skylark," not "Two A Skylark." It's two As ... then SKYLARK. It's not a compound adjective (i.e. a two-A skylark), because that makes no sense unless the answer were SKYLAARK (now *that* is a two-A skylark!). Unless you are thinking mathematically (which, ugh, I guess is what half of you all do), then the whole AA = 2A feels off. It's two "A"s, not two A. "TWO Bs OR NOT TWO Bs!, that is what I'm looking at!" If you can overlook this massive conceptual ... let's say, issue ... then you've got a pretty straightforward, basic, kinda old-fashioned Thursday on your hands. The grid is definitely a little heavy on the overfamiliar short fill, which often happens when the grid is built with massive amounts of 3-, 4-, and 5-letter answers—not much room for sparkle, lots of room for AÇAI and ALAI and etc. PLUGS AWAY and HIT AND RUN are just fine, "SIR DUKE" is always welcome, and I have an odd fondness for I.T. BANDS (perhaps because they are a constant concern in my own life). So, the theme is conceptually flawed, from where I stand, and the fill is a bit on the tepid side, but I did not have a bad time.
Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium (untimed)
Theme answers:
- "To a Skylark" => AA SKYLARK (so, "'two-A" SKYLARK) (17A: Shelley ode that begins "Hail to thee, blithe spirit!")
- "Talk to you later" => TALK UU LATER (28A: "Bye for now")
- Floats out to sea => FLOATS OUT CC (45A: Gently leaves shore)
- "To be or not to be..." => BB OR NOT BB (61A: Famous question first asked around 1600)
Tasha Alexander (born 1969) is an American author who writes New York Times bestselling historical mystery fiction. [...] In 2002, while living in New Haven, Connecticut, she started work on her first novel, after being inspired by a passage in Dorothy L. Sayers's Gaudy Night. Carolyn Marino at William Morrow acquired the book, And Only to Deceive, which was published in 2005 as the first installment of the Lady Emily series. Following a move to Franklin, Tennessee, where Alexander wrote her second novel in a local Starbucks, she eventually relocated to Chicago, where she married British novelist Andrew Grant (brother of bestselling author Lee Child) in 2010.[...] The Lady Emily series, set in a time between the 1890s and 1900s and spanning across cities throughout Europe, follow the adventures of Lady Emily and her husband Colin Hargreaves. (wikipedia)
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There are an awful lot of names in this puzzle, which is the one aspect of the puzzle that I can see moving the difficulty level much further up for some people. The names also skew older. It's at least a little dangerous to cross TANDY (30D: Jessica who was the original Blanche DuBois on Broadway) and EYDIE (44A: Vocalist Gorme), as neither of those names is particularly common / obvious / inferrable, and there's a good chance that people under 40, and especially under 30, would never have heard of either of them. I don't know any other TANDYs or EYDIEs *besides* these two, so if I didn't know them ... I'd have no way to get to them by analogy. Most of the other names seem like they wouldn't present too much problem *except* that KAROL / TASHA crossing, yikes. TASHA was the real yikes, actually. I feel very lucky that kinda sorta knew KAROL (26D: Pope John Paul II's first name) (wrote it in when I got the "K" from SKA), because the only TASHA I know is TASHA Yar from "Star Trek: The Next Generation," and I didn't even actually watch that show (my wife did). Needed every cross for TASHA, and KAROL was by faaaar the diciest of those crosses. It's really really really best to avoid crossing not-universally known names, especially at letters that can't be easily inferred (this is what the term "Natick" was created to describe). And such crossings arguably happened twice today—though "A" is probably the only good guess at TASHA / KAROL, as KIROL seems pretty implausible... but if I'd never seen EYDIE, I'd think that was implausible too. Be careful with crossing names, please. Thank you. Good day.