Constructor: Michael Hawkins
Relative difficulty: Medium
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THEME: none
Word of the Day: "Caligula" by CAMUS (35A: "Caligula" writer) —
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A slight step up from yesterday's puzzle. The grid is just a shade more interesting overall, and there are somewhat more top-notch answers (for me, BIG ASK, FAR FROM IT, "THAT'S ON YOU," and BACK FOR MORE ... though now that I look at those, they don't exactly sizzle, but I do think they're very good). It was very Saturdayish and I moved through it in very Saturdayish fashion, i.e. somewhat more ploddingly than Friday, but steadily and without significant slow-down. Very much not a fan of Marvel movies or weight-loss supplements, so at least a couple of the puzzle's marquee answers left me cold and somewhat squinch-faced, but overall, it worked fine. The one truly unusual answer (to me) was ISHTAR GATE (53A: Entry point in the walls of Babylon), which I've never heard of, and which really truly sounds like it wants to be ISHTAR'S something. ISHTAR wants to be possessive. ISHTAR GATE sounds like a scifi TV series, a probably very ill-advised space-opera mash-up of Elaine May's most notorious movie flop and the TV show "Stargate." Warren Beatty and Dustin Hoffman flying on spaceships and going through wormholes and, I dunno, solving space crimes or something. Luckily the short answers in the SE were well known to me, so I worked the ISHTAR answer out, but there were a harrowing few seconds there. Probably the worst "mistake" I made in the puzzle was beating myself for not knowing the Roman author CAMUS (pronounced, in my head, CAY'-mus) :( Did not dawn on me until I went to look his name up that CAMUS was the very famous 20th-century French writer Albert CAMUS (pronounced ka-MOO'). Caligula was Roman, CAMUS looks Roman, I had no idea the playwright wrote such a play ... and there you are: literary humiliation.
Relative difficulty: Medium
Word of the Day: "Caligula" by CAMUS (35A: "Caligula" writer) —
Caligula is a play written by Albert Camus, begun in 1938 (the date of the first manuscript 1939) and published for the first time in May 1944 by Éditions Gallimard. The play was later the subject of numerous revisions. It was part of what the author called the "Cycle of the Absurd", with the novel The Stranger (1942) and the essay The Myth of Sisyphus (1942). A number of critics have reported the piece to be existentialist; however, Camus always denied belonging to this philosophy.[3] Its plot revolves around the historical figure of Caligula, a Roman Emperor famed for his cruelty and seemingly insane behavior.
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Had SUPPOSE before SURMISE (24D: Reckon). Managed to scrounge up PICAROS despite not being at all sure that it was a word. I know that there is a literary genre called the "picaresque" which involves dudes going on a series of adventures, so I thought, "hey, maybe those dudes are [Rogues]?" And there it was, PICAROS. While ISHTAR GATE was the answer I was least familiar with, the answer I struggled *most* with was actually CAMERA SHY. I did not have the "A" from CAMUS (because I still thought that the Roman (!?) author might at that point be someone named COMUS), so I looked at the obviously tricky clue, 31D: Out of the picture, say, and I looked at the answer boxes, C-MER-SHY, and wow I have no idea how I didn't see CAMERA SHY at that point, but I didn't. I sincerely believe I was unconsciously slotting an "O" in that second position, and so kept seeing COME as the first word in the phrase. Also probably wanted to make one word out of that answer, but COMERISHY ... not a word. OK, that's all, good day.
Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld
[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]
Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld
[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]