Constructor: Sridhar Bhagavathula
Relative difficulty: Easy
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THEME: none
Word of the Day: FAKE BOOK (3D: Resource for music performers) —
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Loved this one. A Friday bullseye. Light on the groans, heavy on the delightfulness. I should say that this one was so "Easy" for me in part because I knew *all* the names, and I super-duper knew the biggest name in the grid: the marquee, dead-center guest of honor, AKIRA KUROSAWA. By "super-duper knew" I mean I don't just know his name, or his most famous movies ("Rashomon,""Ran,""Yojimbo,""Seven Samurai"), but I know (and own) a lot of his earlier work, including his first major films, made in the immediate post-war era in Japan: movies like "Drunken Angel" and today's clue movie, "Stray Dog," which is one of my favorite Japanese noirs, and consequently one of my favorite movies of all time. Today's write-up is basically a PSA for the films of AKIRA KUROSAWA. I was just wondering aloud the other day (Twittering aloud is more accurate) why the great film director Yasujiro OZU was not in crosswords much, much more often ... or at all. Anyone who has ever studied film even casually, or who has browsed the Criterion Collection, will have heard his name over and over. And his last name has So Much grid potential. And yet ... nothing. Tumbleweeds. This is a grievous oversight and one of you all needs to fix it immediately, thank you. But back to Kurosawa—see "Stray Dog." He films on location in Japan in the immediate aftermath of the war. It's really eye-opening and moving.
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Relative difficulty: Easy
Word of the Day: FAKE BOOK (3D: Resource for music performers) —
: a book that contains the melody lines of popular copyrighted songs without accompanying harmonies and that is published without the permission of the copyright owners (merriam-webster.com)
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The only slowish part for me was in and around SLOVENIA, which is slightly weird, because I threw SLOVENIA down very quickly (off the SLO-). But when I couldn't get either PSA or CANAAN (I may even have written ISRAEL in for that last one), I started second-guessing SLOVENIA, thinking ... maybe SLOVAKIA? Also, wanted ALB at 31D: Northern neighbor of [SLOVENIA], and even after getting AU-, I just couldn't process what the last letter could be (this is not the first time that I've had grid trouble caused by the rather simple abbr. for Austria). But then between VIPER, PAT, and PERSEPHONE (all pretty easy), the whole section came together, and nothing else bothered me much after that. Truthfully, the whole mess caused maybe 20 seconds of delay, but comparatively, it was a sticky patch. The only time I really went "ugh" during the whole solve was when the puzzle crossed a fill-in-the-blank quip (ugh) (32A: RID) with Another Fill-In-The-Blank-Quip (9D: ECONOMISTS) ... and one of those quips was the third (!) Shakespeare clue of the day! (see also the clues on VIPER and CHAPEL) We get it, you took a class once, mix it up! But that's it for distasteful moments. Oh, that and SCUM :( Otherwise, I bounced around this grid with something like a grin on my face, which is exactly what's supposed to happen on Friday. No one WIPES OUT! Everything is ROSY!
Five things:![]()
Five things:
- 36D: Directly opposite point (ANTIPODE)— Got this quickly (off the ANT-). You normally see this word in the plural, and I know it well, as it is a (northern hemisphere) word for where my wife is originally from. It refers to AUS ... hey, wait, didn't we establish in some earlier puzzle that the abbr. for "Austria" is AUT!?!?! I feel quite sure of this ... Aha! Yes! I knew it! From late January, when the puzzle clued AUS as the abbr. for Australia:
But today we're just supposed to accept that AUS is the abbr. for Austria. Just switching them around, willy-nilly, are we? I call foul. Pick a three-letter abbr. and stick with it. Anyway, where was I? Oh, right ANTIPODEs—a northern hemisphere word for AUStralia and New Zealand (where my wife was born)
- 46A: Choreographer Twyla (THARP) — she once attended Pomona College (my alma mater), so I've known her name for decades. Speaking of Pomona, yesterday I learned, very randomly (i.e. by letting YouTube autoplay me from one movie into another) that the opening of "The Kid with the 200 IQ," a 1983 TV movie starring Gary Coleman, was filmed on the Pomona campus. I looked up and thought, "well, that's Pearsons ... that's Harwood ... that's Marston Quad ... Big Bridges ... wow, they're just taking shots of every damn building." I stopped watching after the opening shots so this is all I have to say about "The Kid with the 200 IQ."
- 19A: End of a three-word U.S. president name (BUREN) — oh right, this answer. No idea what the clue was even trying to get at. Needed most of the crosses, possibly all of them. BUREN without the VAN is ... not great. Like NIRO without the DE.
- 15A: Era that began in the late 1950s (SPACE AGE) — great answer. Unfortunately for me, I came at it from the back end, getting AGE, which was not much help. There should be a word for that—when you get a substantial part of an answer, but it's a stand-alone word and seemingly infinite things could go with it. Luckily, in this case, it didn't take me too long to guess SPACE.
- 52D: Some beverage suffixes (-ADES) — the plural suffix is a low form of grid life, maybe even the lowest, and yet if it's easy, and everything else in the grid glows, you can make quick work of it and no one is really going to care. Ugly stuff should be a. rare b. as inconspicuous as possible. Check and check.
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