When the Lyrid meteor shower typically peaks / THURS 8-4-2021 / Son in "Tess of the D'Urbervilles" / Portrait seen on renminbi bank notes

THEME: MYTHICAL CREATURES — The "components" of two mythical creatures serve as words in idioms

Theme answers:

• MERMAID (7D: Hybrid creature of myth)
• [WOMAN] OF THE WORLD (17A: After the top half of 7-Down, sophisticated lady)
• DRINK LIKE A [FISH] (30A: Before the bottom half of a 7-Down, tipple and then some)
• CENTAUR (42D: Hybrid creature of myth)
• [MAN] HOLE COVERS (45A: After the top half of 42-Down, circles around the block?)
• BEATS A DEAD [HORSE] (58A: Before the bottom half of a 42-Down, keeps arguing after something has been decided)

Word of the Day:

APRIL (When the Lyrid meteor shower usually peaks) —

Good morning, folks! Malaika here, back for round 2 of blogging. (But after this, I'm done-- you'll have some other guests.)  I solved this puzzle while listening to "Silver Springs" on loop. I listened to it about four times, which means this puzzle took me about twenty minutes.

It took me a bit to understand what was happening because I mistakenly thought that the two central down entries were one fourteen-letter creature. (No reason for that except maybe the cocktail that I had with dinner.) (Grapefruit juice, lemon juice, arak, and mint, wildly tasty, thanks for asking.) Once I finally got it, my big question was Why. I actually jumped to the lower left to see if there was a revealer. But nope! No reasoning at all!

These are certainly not the only mythological creatures that are half/half, and not even the only ones that are half animal and half human! I fear that the rationale here is constructor-based. As in, "Oh hey! These are two mythical creatures! They both have seven letters! There's no other connection at all, but I can't get this detail out of my head, so I am going to build an entire puzzle around it!" (By the way, I think it's fine to go ahead and build that puzzle, and then it's up to The Times to say "Sorry babe, that's not tight enough for us.") Is a mermaid canonically half-fish? Or just half- ...sea creature? Also, you could argue that a centaur is front/back more than it is top/bottom, so even the phrasing of that triplet of clues didn't totally land for me. The gender thing was super weird as well. A mermaid has her merman counterparts (I'm not going to delve too deep into the gender binary right now!!), but are centaurs all men?? Surely not, and yet that's what the clues would have us believe. I'm not going to do any Googling on this by the way, for fear of what I may discover.

I actually don't solve Sundays, because I'm not a masochist, but I wonder if this would have made more sense in a Sunday puzzle, with a bunch more creatures (faun! Griffin!) sprinkled around the grid. I get that crossing the theme answers with the creatures is a Big Fancy Architectural Feat, but it didn't add much to my experience, personally.

LOTS of double clues in this one. We had Sushi bar choice for EEL and AHI. Then Graph component for GRID and AXIS. And Bucolic call / Bucolic beasts for BAA and EWES. I think that double clues are the least exciting way to make a clue clever. It's sort of like, "Hmm. I couldn't come up with a good question-mark clue. I couldn't come up with some evocative imagery. There is nothing historically interesting about this. What else can I do... oh! I guess I'll do a repeat clue. That'll add a little zest." And I guess it does add a little zest, but just a little.

Also, I guess I'll call out that this is the second day in a row with a "Game of Thrones" reference. Yesterday's didn't need it (IRON can be clued a zillion different ways), but KHALS is a word that only exists in the "Game of Thrones" universe, to my knowledge. I'll rarely complain about "Game of Thrones" in a puzzle, because they're always easy gets for me, but I acknowledge that fantasy stuff is super tough if you didn't happen to consume that piece of media, because the letter-order isn't necessarily inferable. (At least they didn't put him in there, I guess.) I learned the words "orc" and "ent"exclusively from solving crosswords.

Bullets:

• All this talk about horses reminded me of a fact I learned last week, which is that all horses have the same birthday. Can you believe it??? Add that to your calendar: August 1. Horse Day.
• Draft picks for ALES is a lovely clue
• Pole worker for ELF as well
• A host of answers? for TREBEK as well
• Perhaps it is shallow to comment that this is a really pretty grid layout, but here I am. Commenting that this is a really pretty grid layout. I love those chains of diagonal blocks.
  

Signed, Malaika "7x7 overlord" Handa

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