Constructor: Billy Bratton
Relative difficulty: Medium to Medium-Challenging
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THEME: CONVERT TO METRIC (54A: What you have to do to interpret the answers to 16-, 25- and 40-Across)— familiar names/phrases with MILES, DEGREE, and POUND in them (respectively) have those units converted to their metric counterparts in the actual answers:
Theme answers:
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No, what I have to do is convert things *out* of metric. That's the actual process that occurred. A strange phrase showed up in my grid, and in order to understand it, I had to "convert" the other way. I see why CONVERT TO METRIC is the revealer (theoretically, you have to do that in order to go from actual answer to grid answer) but that phrase fundamentally does Not describe what a solver actually does. Conversion runs the other direction. Thank you for coming to my Theodore Talk ("Theodore" being the metric equivalent of "Ted"—or the non-metric equivalent, I forget). This puzzle kept its themers well hidden, as "In a Silent Way" is unrecognizable to me as a Miles Davis song, and "pound foolish" is a phrase I know exclusively from the longer, now well out-of-use idiom "Pennywise, pound foolish," so seeing it stand on its own is weird. Then there's the fact that I had no clear idea what a RADIAN was ... I could see that RADIAN was going to be the unit, and I recognized it as a unit, but from where I didn't know, and what it's metric counterpart might be: no idea. Just blanked. Worse, I know the phrase as "diploma mills," so I couldn't even figure out what the unit was by inferring from the base phrase, because I was pretty sure "diploma" was not a unit of anything. So that section around RADIAN was by far the hardest for me, and consequently the last one to fall (you can see from the grid screenshot that my cursor ended up on ELLIS, a name I always forget, or want to be ELLER for some reason). This puzzle just had a lot of proper nouns, too, which made it potentially very thorny. From Clea DUVALL to ELLIS Bell to the ELI Young Band to Lula da SILVA to El Greco and his fellow CRETANS and the Gaga name part JOANNE and on and on, it got very very trivial. The worst name, of course, was MARSHA Blackburn, a right-wing ghoul who has done and said (and politically supported) too many disgusting things to list. I would you show you her racist, xenophobic tweet where she congratulated the former "president" on recovering from Covid by "joking" that he had "once again defeated China," but honestly, **** her and whoever thought I'd want to see her at 1-****ing-Across.
Relative difficulty: Medium to Medium-Challenging
Theme answers:
- KILOMETERS DAVIS (16A: "In a Silent Way" trumpeter [~3:5]) (converted from Miles Davis)
- RADIAN MILLS (25A: Some unaccredited universities, derisively [~57-1]) (converted from "degree mills")
- GRAM FOOLISH (40A: Hardly parsimonious, in a saying [~1:454]) (converted from "pound foolish")
• • •
Does anyone call them ALEKEGS? (13A: They may be iced for a hoppy birthday party). I've heard "beer kegs" and just "kegs," but ALEKEGS seems like something someone put in a puzzle once and now it's just out there, in hundreds of constructor wordlists, just waiting to resurface. I would use ALEKEGS about as readily as I would use ALIMENT (a word I've only ever seen with the suffix "-ary" attached, and even then only in biology class ("the alimentary canal") (2D: Food, quaintly). I feel like I rolled through this one mostly by happening to know enough of the trivia. MARSHA and TORI and REMY and AM(E)N-RA (never sure about that second vowel) and ELI etc., and the crosswordesey half-dance NAE was probably the thing that got me over the hump in that RADIAN section (forgot ELLIS, forgot El Greco was Cretan, didn't know RADIAN, forgot SILVA ... not my finest solving hour). The overall fill seemed mostly fine, I guess. A bit too trivial, but (for me) ultimately tractable. There's not a lot of room for real sparkle, but TOP TIER and "WE'LL SEE..." are pretty decent. In the end, though, despite the clever concept, the result was a little plodding, with a revealer that is mere instructions. I did have three little ahas when I finally got the theme, so that's something. But overall it felt very programmatic and workmanlike.
Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld
Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld