Hello! It’s Clare for the last Tuesday in June. Hope everyone had a great month and is surviving this insane heat wave. The AC in my apartment was off for a period today, and I thought I might just melt. Although, watching the track and field Olympic trials that just wrapped up put things in perspective and made me feel a tad bad about my complaining. Imagine running 25 laps around a track when it’s 105 degrees. No, thank you! I’ll stick to mainly staying indoors to study for the bar and venturing out into the 100-degree, humid weather only when it’s absolutely, positively necessary.
Anywho, on to the puzzle!
Relative difficulty:Challenging
Theme answers:
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Misc:
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- THE JACK (in the) BOX (17A: Toy with a spring, literally)
- THE NIP (in the) BUD (24A: Put an early stop to, literally)
- THE BE (in the) WAY (31A: Interfere, literally)
- THE UP (in the) AIR (40A: Undecided, literally)
- THE PIE (in the) SKY (48A: Unrealistic, as wishes, literally)
- THE BACK (in the) DAY (55A: “Years ago …,” literally)
Tamil is a Dravidian language natively spoken by the Tamil people of South Asia. Tamil is the official language of the Indian state of Tamil Nadu and an official language of the two sovereign nations, Singapore and Sri Lanka. In India, it is also the official language of the Union Territory of Puducherry… One of 22 scheduled languages in the Constitution of India, Tamil was the first to be classified as a classical language of India and is one of the longest-surviving classical languages in the world. (Wiki)
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You know it’s a rough puzzle when you have to sit there for 10 minutes thinking about what the theme was and how to explain it. Besides, it makes for a fairly boring theme when, after you get the trick, you can write in the first word of all the theme answers. And all those words are “the” — I don’t particularly like seeing “the” in the puzzle at all, let alone six times. The only nice thing I can say about that theme is that at least as much as people overuse “literally,” it was refreshing to see “literally” be used in the correct way in the puzzle.
With 17A, “Jack” is in between “the” and “box” in the sense of the puzzle construction, just like with the toy, where the “Jack” is actually inside of the “box.” But, that’s the only theme answer where this is really the case. An argument could be made that for 46A, the “pie” is actually in “the sky,” but I’d say that’s flimsy. It just seems like there’s no rhyme or reason with the answers that were selected for this theme, and some uniformity could have helped tie everything together. My least favorite of the theme answers by far was 31A. I’m not entirely sure why, but I had a visceral reaction when I saw THEBEWAY in the puzzle — it looks and feels ugly.
On top of the theme, I found a lot of the fill to also be challenging. It felt like it skewed toward a puzzle later in the week or, at the very least, to an older generation. That’s fine, but it made for a particularly hard solve for me when I didn’t know the JACOB K. Javits Convention Center (18D), STACY Keach (23A), Timothy LEARY (30A), Willy LEY (34A), Norman MINETA (52A), or TOD Browning (63A). I stalled a fair amount in the southeast corner because of MINETA and TOD and the long downs — 43A: "Can we move forward?"as IS IT A GO, in particular.
With 2D: Release, as a trailer, I never got it out of my head that the clue was referencing a movie “trailer” and not a vehicle, so I got stuck there. I don’t think anyone in history has ever called something an ENOTE (8D: Online memos). They’re “notes” — adding an “e” to the front of something doesn’t make it a real online thing. I really disliked 24D: It goes up during takeoff for TRAY. The TRAY on a plane goes up before takeoff — not during takeoff. (I’m pretty sure everyone has heard those announcements a million and one times from flight attendants.). Also, I don’t think anyone in the last decade — at least — has used the slang REEFERS (38D).
I guess if I’m looking for something nice to say about the puzzle… I liked the words ELIXIR (32D) and TOXIN (9D) because they felt fresh. The clue/answer for 29A: Greek god whose name sounds like a zodiac sign as ARES (or, “Aries”) seems a bit fun. And, as someone with running-induced ASTHMA, I did get a bit of a chuckle out of 46D: It can take your breath away. (That is, admittedly, some dark humor on my part.)
Overall, though, this puzzle felt like a slog to me. To put it in perspective, I’d rather go study for the bar for four hours than do this puzzle again.
- This may be a small gripe, but I think that Kamala HARRIS (36A) could be clued for her own accomplishments, rather than her place next to a man.
- I’m not sure what it says about me that my first thought (and one I couldn’t get out of my head for a bit) for 32D: Sorcerer’s concoction was “poison” rather than the much more benign ELIXIR.
- Well, I really can’t think of anything more to say about this puzzle. So, to get back to the track Olympic trials, everyone should watch Sydney McLaughlin set a world record in the 400m hurdles. Her run was incredibly impressive.
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