Constructor: Portia Lundie
Relative difficulty: Challenging (3:45 ... normalish Tuesday / fastish Wednesday)
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THEME: LET YOUR HAIR DOWN (10D: "Loosen up!" ... or a hint to this puzzle's circled letters) — hairdo types are found embedded (in circled squares) inside long Down theme answers:
Theme answers:
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This is a good theme, and the revealer is very good. It really, really should've been a Tuesday or Wednesday, because it was on the tippy-top high end of my Monday times, just above my Tuesday average and well within my normal Wednesday range. Long answers next to long answers, unclear cluing, and a weirdly isolated center all conspired to make this very slow (for a Monday). I don't want to focus on this misplacement too much, because, again, the theme is well conceived and pretty well executed. But place your puzzles on the correct days! Bah. Anyway, the theme. "BOB" does not break across two words in its answer, which is the gold standard for embedded words, but DISCOMBOBULATED is such a weird / cool word that it more than makes up for BOB's anomalous embeddedness. DISCOMBOBULATED was also part of what made the puzzle hard. I had DISCO- and still no idea what it could be. BRAID and AFRO break nicely across the two parts of their respective answers, and as I say, the revealer is superb. I'm just going to pretend it's Tuesday so I can force myself to have only, or primarily, positive feelings about this one. Hard to pull off an early-week themed puzzle with any kind of panache, so give respect where respect is due.
Relative difficulty: Challenging (3:45 ... normalish Tuesday / fastish Wednesday)
Theme answers:
- DISCOMBOBULATED (3D: Completely confused)
- "TOMB RAIDER" (6D: Lara Croft, in film)
- PERMAFROST (31D: Layer of soil that never thaws)
Roc-A-Fella Records was an American hip hop record label founded by rapper/entrepreneur Shawn "Jay-Z" Carter, Damon "Dame" Dash, and Kareem "Biggs" Burke in 1995. It was operated as a division of Def Jam Recordings. [note: it's been defunct for eight years] (wikipedia)
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So mad at myself about being so slow on ROC-A-FELLA, and for botching J-LO as well (21D: Musical artist "from the block," familiarly). In both cases, I was in Monday clue-reading mode (i.e. very cursory, quick-glance mode), and with ROC-A-FELLA I didn't really register the Jay-Z part of the clue, and then with J-LO, I didn't pick up anything after [Musical artist...], and since I had "NICE ONE!" instead of "NICE JOB!" at 20A: "You did it!," my [Musical artist...] was three letters starting with not a "J" but an "O," so (OH SO!) so ... so, my musical artist came out ONO! "ONO from the block!" Yes, that very famous song lyric!: "Don't be fooled by the rocks that I got / I'm still, I'm still ONO from the block!" Wow. That is some kind of miss. In my very feeble defense, if you are gonna use "from the block" in your clue, the answer better damn well be JENNY. It's "JENNY from the Block," not "J-LO from the Block." Lyric specificity matters!! Speaking of JENNY (almost), I didn't know Liz and JENNA were "best friends," though I've only dabbled in "30 Rock" viewership, so maybe the clue is apt (1D: Liz's best friend on "30 Rock"). LYRA was hard (25A: Harp-shaped constellation). MCCOY should've been easy (5D: "Star Trek" doctor), but between wanting BONES, having one of the crosses wrong, *and* not knowing what ****ing letter the musical answer was supposed to be (*C* MINOR), I got slowed up badly there. PRIESTESS was weirdly hard, the "High" part of the clue only making sense in retrospect (11D: "High" figure in a tarot deck). LOL my knowing anything about a tarot deck. It's enough that I know TAROT is a thing that might appear in xwords. TOUTS was wicked-hard (32A: Ballyhoos). I had TO-TS and even then honestly wanted TOOTS. Yeesh. THERMO, yipes, again, only intelligible in retrospect (43A: Lead-in to -stat). Just nowhere near Monday-normal. But again, for a T or W, it's nice work.