Constructor: Timothy Polin
Relative difficulty: Medium to Medium-Challenging (depending on your knowledge of trivia and Words I Know Solely From Crosswords)
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THEME: SKIPPING / STONES (58A: With 59-Across, lakeside activity ... or a hint to the words spelled across the fifth, eighth and 11th rows of the completed grid) — evenly spaced unchecked squares spell out types of stones, three times: the stones are thus spelled out by "skipping" squares with each letter. Also, I think (maybe?) the words are supposed to be a visual representation of an actual skipping stone, touching down and then going up and touching down and then up down etc. But actual stones thrown on a lake don't really skip with even spacing, do they? Nevermind.
The Stones:
This puzzle is sort of like yesterday's puzzle, in that I liked it better once I'd finished it than I did while I was solving it. There was something off-putting about the grid, with its giant boxy white corners (daunting) and it's completely bullet-ridden mid-section—no in between, all black squares just shoved to the middle. Plus, the puzzle kept wanting to get Real cute with its clues, which just felt annoying. Like, I've already got this super-weird grid to deal with, I don't need your forced cleverness on stuff like MARACA (17A: Harmless rattler) and REAR AXLE (18A: Ram rod?) and TYRANNY (10D: Rule that should be broken?)—those last two in the same section, and crossing! Plus the fill gets real, uh, odd and crosswordy. This was my opening:
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Five things:
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Relative difficulty: Medium to Medium-Challenging (depending on your knowledge of trivia and Words I Know Solely From Crosswords)
The Stones:
- R O L L I N G (row 5)
- R O S E T T A (row 8)
- B L A R N E Y (row 11)
Lieutenant-Colonel John McCrae (November 30, 1872 – January 28, 1918) was a Canadian poet, physician, author, artist and soldier during World War I, and a surgeon during the Second Battle of Ypres, in Belgium. He is best known for writing the famous war memorial poem "In Flanders Fields". McCrae died of pneumonia near the end of the war. [...] "In Flanders Fields" first appeared anonymously in Punch on December 8, 1915,[9] but in the index to that year, McCrae was named as the author (misspelt as McCree).[10] The verses swiftly became one of the most popular poems of the war, used in countless fund-raising campaigns and frequently translated (a Latin version begins In agro belgico...). "In Flanders Fields" was also extensively printed in the United States, whose government was contemplating joining the war, alongside a 'reply' by R. W. Lillard, ("...Fear not that you have died for naught, / The torch ye threw to us we caught...").
In Flanders Fields
In Flanders Fields, the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
We are the dead, short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.
Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.
• • •
Ugh, carriages. I always feel slightly guilty for my oddly extensive knowledge of carriage terminology, which comes to me *exclusively* from having solved crosswords for three decades. OK maybe some of it comes from 19th-century novels, but crosswords definitely drove it home over the years (over and over and over). So I got SHAY but didn't feel great about it. Same with EXARCH (an answer only a crossword could love). I think I learned MARE from crosswords too; I seem to remember wondering at some point what horses had to do with the moon (MARE is just Latin for "sea," of course) (there are no actual seas on the moon, obviously, just big dark patches that early astronomers mistook for seas). Silas DEANE was another answer where I felt like being an old-timer really helped me move through the grid quickly. But then it wasn't always creaky and old-fashioned. NEXT-GEN had some spice, and I actually really like WAR POET and REAR AXLE and IN 'N' OUT and "ASK ANYONE!"
As for the theme, I could see pretty early on that the unchecked letters were spelling out types of stones, and that definitely helped by the time I got to BLARNEY. The revealer didn't land for me at first, because I didn't see what the "skipping" referred to. Since the unchecked letters appear exclusively in Downs, I was oriented in that direction, and so the letters seemed to form bridges across a divide. But then I thought "oh, no, they just have spaces between the letters, so they "skip" squares ... that must be it." And that's not bad, conceptually. It was a weird puzzle to solve, but weird in a (mostly) good way. Wait, I forgot about TOPE! When I was going over "Words I Know Solely From Being a Longtime Solver," I left out TOPE! LOL, TOPE, hello darkness my old friend (52D: Imbibe). The Secret Language of Crossword Drunkenness ... I'd almost forgotten. Yeah, I guess if someone's making you eat BEAN PATÉ, you're gonna wanna TOPE, perhaps quite a bit (bean dip sounds great, BEAN PATÉ sounds like you're gonna try to use beans to approximate the taste of actual paté, and that will definitely be a hard pass from me) (49A: Vegetarian spread).
Five things:
- DRY EYES (41D: Unmoved reaction)— only in the phrase "not a dry eye in the house." Thus, only in the singular. DRY EYES is a medical condition.
- ELLS (20D: What jelly rolls are filled with?) — I get more mail about this type of clue than any other, by far. I think of them as "letteral" clues, in that you are supposed to take the clue "literally" as it refers specifically to "letters" in a particular word. In this case, words: both "jelly" and "rolls" are "filled with" (i.e. contain) multiple "L"s (or ELLS).
- BERG (49D: On the surface, it might not look like much) — this is some kind of "tip of the (ice)berg" clue, it seems. Only a small part can be seen above the "surface" of the water.
- BOOER (25D: One who's not a fan) — I had HATER at first. I also had DENTED before DINGED (27A: Left a bad impression on?) and LADLE (!) before LASSO (26D: One way to prevent stock losses?)
- CARD (7D: Memory ___)— these are used in portable electronic devices. I have somehow gone my whole life without ever having to deal with them. Or, if I have been dealing with them all along, I haven't noticed.
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