Constructor: Yacob Yonas
Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium to Medium (again, the proper nouns—and there are a lot of them—are gonna cause experiences to vary wildly)
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THEME: none
Word of the Day: MASER (55A: Atomic clock timekeeper) —
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Really liked this one. If there were half as many names, I'd probably have liked it more. I have no problems with any of the names, on an individual basis, but, as I've said many times, nothing includes/excludes solvers more sharply than a proper noun. Also, nothing gives less of an "aha" than the completion of a name you don't know. If I have to struggle to get RESENT (and I did, a little), then at least at the end of the struggle, I know what RESENT is. I don't have this same satisfaction upon completing ELY, ARON, or AMELIA, for instance. Names are parts of puzzles, and if they're just a small part, they're great. I just feel for solvers (of all kinds) when the proper nouns pile up. For instance, for me today, I just stared blankly at four different answers when I was done, three of which were names (the fourth was MASER, which I thought was maybe a watch brand, idk). Importantly, the names I blanked on were generations apart, all three of these names. There was a Verdi opera name (AMELIA) (2D: Renato's wife in Verdi's "Un Ballo in Maschera"), a Beatles song name (MR. KITE) (38A: Title character in a "Sgt. Pepper" song), and a "YouTube star" name (LANA) (61A: Actress/YouTube star ___ Condor). I worked them all out reasonably easily, and none of them actually diminished my enjoyment of the rest of the puzzle. But ... I'm just thinking about people for whom the proper noun experience will be more arduous.
Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium to Medium (again, the proper nouns—and there are a lot of them—are gonna cause experiences to vary wildly)
Word of the Day: MASER (55A: Atomic clock timekeeper) —
A maser (/ˈmeɪzər/, an acronym for microwave amplification by stimulated emission of radiation) is a device that produces coherent electromagnetic waves through amplification by stimulated emission. The first maser was built by Charles H. Townes, James P. Gordon, and Herbert J. Zeiger at Columbia University in 1953. Townes, Nikolay Basov and Alexander Prokhorov were awarded the 1964 Nobel Prize in Physics for theoretical work leading to the maser. Masers are used as the timekeeping device in atomic clocks, and as extremely low-noise microwave amplifiers in radio telescopes and deep space spacecraft communication ground stations. (wikipedia)
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It's funny, names: I do like seeing them, when I know them. It's like the puzzle is saying, "Hey, there, this one's for you. You belong." Which is important, at a fundamental level. And yet it's not the most *satisfying* level, for me, as a solver. Like, when I get handed something like LOVETT, I feel like I came by it cheap. I did not earn LOVETT or work LOVETT out. LOVETT's just there, tipping his hat at me, letting me past some figurative rope or gate to get further into the puzzle. It's a different level of pleasure. A candy level. I *do* like it. But it's somehow not as satisfying as the answer I have to work for, even if that "work" is just correctly making sense of the cluing. On the flip side, when I work out something like "MR. KITE," I'm left with ... not much of a feeling at all. I don't mean to pick on that answer, which is fine, and which I definitely *should* have known (I know so much of the Beatles catalogue so well, and yet have never listened to Sgt. Pepper (!?)). I'm just trying to think through the ways that names are different from other kinds of answers, at the satisfaction/dissatisfaction level. One last thing that should be said about today's names (HAILE TRACI AMELIA LOVETT HAMM LANA MRKITE ISIDORA SANGER DANIEL ELY ARON): this is a really beautifully diverse slate. I am into the cultural breadth on display here. It's true that names can be exclusionary, but if you offer a genuine variety, then at least they aren't exclusionary along one (racial / generational / gender) line. Anyway, I hope you navigated them successfully, because the puzzle really was bright and delightful overall.
"BALL IS LIFE!" is quite the opener! (1A: Hoopster's mantra). Hopefully its vibrancy will be pleasing even to people who have never heard it before. I needed crosses to get it, but when I did, I perked right up. Very different energy than the answer I opened with (TEA SERVICE). Quite a bracing experience to believe you're at a rather prim tea party only to have a bunch of ballplayers crash the party and start dribbling, dunking, and raining threes down upon you. And the fresh phrases kept coming: FACEPALM, MEET-CUTE, ASCII ART. The one thing I will say about the glut of names today is that they are from alllllll over the cultural / generational spectrum. There's something for everyone to love / trip on! The only time the names got truly dense was in the SW, where ELY and ARON (old) and LANA (new) crossed MET GALA. The lucky thing about this name pile-up is the names *do* come from different worlds. Old pros are gonna pick up ELY and (maybe?) ARON with little sweat, but trip on LANA, but then vice versa for younger solvers, perhaps. MET GALA seems like a generally known thing, only, if you are like me, and only half paying attention, you went and wrote in MET BALL and got yourself in a little trouble. BALL and GALA have that "AL" core in common, so the wrongness of BALL ("confirmed" by ACAI) was not immediately apparent. A word about LANA Condor. She is indeed a YouTube star, but she's also the main star in a very popular Netflix film series ("To All the Boys I've Loved Before"). She's been in a Marvel movie, she did voicework on "Bojack Horseman" ... what I'm saying is, if you're introducing a person to grid life (GRID IS LIFE!) then it would be cool for the clue to include something specific about that person's accomplishments, so that even if a solver hasn't heard of the person, they have some reason to care. "YouTube star," with no specifics, is not a reason to care.
Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld
Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld
P.S. I sorta like the colloquial quality of the clue at 47D: Like, now (AT ONCE), but that clue could just as easily have been, like, [Now]. The "Like" part adds only confusion. I thought I was supposed to come up with a modern word for "Like." Like, we used to say "Like," but "now" we say ... what? What do we say?! ... quite the misdirection hole.
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[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]