Constructor: Katie Hale
Relative difficulty: Easy
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THEME: ABBA (69A: Pop group with the hits 17-, 39- and 61-Across) — ABBA songs that have repetitive titles, all of which are 15 letters long (!), all of them clued wackily (i.e. with "?" clues, as if they were not, in fact, ABBA titles):
Theme answers:
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I love ABBA, so this should've been delightful to me, but noticing a weird fact about three ABBA songs (repetitive titles + 15 letters long) is only the first part of putting together a solid puzzle, and unfortunately the other parts just weren't there. The main issue is the grid, which is built in such a way that we get a glut of short fill. Just an avalanche. Absolutely no reason for a 3x15 theme to have a grid this rough, this choppy, with this much short stuff. And the preponderance of short fill leads to the other issue, which is that the short fill is (perhaps not that surprisingly) very dull, very overfamiliar, very yesteryear. GAMER TAG (5D: User name on an Xbox) stands out like a goth teen at a white-tie gala, as it is the only answer that seems to have any experience of the culture of the last thirty years, the only answer that seems like it hasn't been dredged up from the bottom of Ye Olde Crosswordese Swamp. I'm exaggerating A DAB (or is it A BIT) :( about the fill, in that it obviously isn't wall-to-wall old and tired, but when you've got AROD *and* ALOU, which crosses OLIN, which crosses SNAPE (plus: it's from the last thirty years! minus: it's *$&%ing J.K. R0wling again), and then ABO TEM LETO LES NENA OMNI NANO and ANNA and her NYET and the STENO STYE and god knows what else (I'm out of breath), and then MR. COOL, which feels like it was never a thing but someone used it once and now it's in everyone's wordlist so everyone *thinks* it's a thing ... there's too much drudgery here, and so whatever joy ABBA might've brought to the table just gets drowned out. Doesn't help that you don't even know you're *dealing* with ABBA until the very end (if you solve top to bottom L to R, as I did). The whole solve, all I could think was "... why??" At least the puzzle eventually answered my question. But the actual work of getting from A to B, from NW to SE, was, well, work. The dutiful filling in of boxes. No lightness, no bounce, no joy. No ABBA vibes, frankly. Plus, this was a very, very easy puzzle that should've run yesterday (yesterday's puzzle having played, for me, like a very hard Tuesday or easy Wednesday).
On a technical level, there's one striking flaw with today's grid: you absolutely cannot cross ESPNU and SDSU, and you especially cannot cross them *at the 'U'*, as that is essentially crossing a word ("university") with itself. Baffling that this should even have been an issue, since it's not a particularly taxing grid to fill. Should've been comparatively easy to avoid that kind of abbr. pile-up, coupled with the egregious crossing. That whole SW corner ... ALINE? LES? REDOS? AROD? And the ESPNU/SDSU thing to boot? I know it's just a little corner of the puzzle, but you gotta polish things better than this. You can't just go with the first thing that "works." The SE corner is similarly anemic, but at least there, you have some excuse (i.e. ABBA is set in stone as the revealer, so that corner is actually quite theme-dense, and thus harder, in theory, to fill cleanly). No trouble with anything today except GAMER TAG (I know the terms separately, but I'm not sure I've seen them paired). Didn't know PANTOMIMES, and I have no clear idea what "British Christmastime theater" even is, but I had enough crosses in place there to make the answers very guessable. Wikipedia says,"Outside Britain, the word "pantomime" is often understood to mean miming, rather than the theatrical form described here," and that is certainly true for me.
Relative difficulty: Easy
Theme answers:
- "MONEY, MONEY, MONEY" (17A: All that a greedy businessperson thinks about?)
- "GIMME, GIMME, GIMME" (39A: Demand made with hands outstretched?)
- "I DO, I DO, I DO, I DO, I DO" (61A: Particularly enthusiastic cry at the altar?)
Mateo "Matty" Rojas Alou (December 22, 1938 – November 3, 2011) was a Dominicanformer professional baseball player and manager. He played as an outfielder in Major League Baseball from 1960 to 1974. He also played in Nippon Professional Baseball (NPB)with the Taiheiyo Club Lions from 1974 through 1976. Alou was a two-time All-Star player who is notable for being the 1966 National League batting champion
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No idea why you would clue SINBAD as an absolutely undistinguished "2003 animated film..." (a "box office bomb"), especially when you're just going to give away the answer with "Legend of the Seven Seas." It's a weird cluing choice that brings no actual color or pizzazz, since there are no lively animated-film details in the clue (and anyway, no one actually saw the movie). Overall, it's dismaying to have a core theme idea that seems so promising, only to have it smothered by lackluster fill and tepid cluing. Gonna go make coffee now, and maybe listen to some ABBA ... or maybe I'll just listen to morning birdsong with the cats, and wait until Penelope (my wife) actually wakes up before I start the Swedish disco party. See you tomorrow.