Constructor: Anne Grae MartinRelative difficulty: Challenging
THEME: YOGA POSES (58A: What the five formations of circled letters in this puzzle represent) — circled squares are shaped like, and spell out the names of, the poses:
Theme answer?:- AWARENESS (18A: Goal of some meditation)
Word of the Day: Honey Boo Boo (
6D: ___ Thompson a.k.a. Honey Boo Boo) —
Here Comes Honey Boo Boo was an American reality television series that aired on TLC featuring the family of child beauty pageant contestant Alana "Honey Boo Boo" Thompson. The show premiered on August 8, 2012, and ended on August 14, 2014. Thompson and her family originally rose to fame on TLC's reality series Toddlers & Tiaras. The show's name comes from a taunt that Alana hurled at another pageant contestant during her debut in Toddlers and Tiaras, but a sweeping misinterpretation from the general public resulted in Alana being referred to as "Honey Boo Boo Child" instead. The show revolves around Alana "Honey Boo Boo" Thompson and her family's adventures in the town of McIntyre, Georgia. The reality series received predominantly negative reviews from television critics during its run.
On October 24, 2014, TLC cancelled the series after four seasons when cast member June "Mama June" Shannon was seen with Mark Anthony McDaniel, a man who served 10 years in prison after being convicted of aggravated child molestation in 2004 and who is a registered sex offender. This prompted Shannon to admit to Entertainment Tonight that the father of her daughter Lauryn "Pumpkin" Shannon was not McDaniel as previously stated, but Michael Anthony Ford, another convicted sex offender who served time for sexual exploitation of minors after being caught on 'To Catch a Predator' in 2005. A number of episodes had already been taped for a fifth season, but none were released until TLC aired four of them as the two-hour special Here Comes Honey Boo Boo: The Lost Episodes on April 21, 2017. (wikipedia)
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Ha ha. OK, so in 2015 Mary Sue Hayward and I co-constructed a puzzle with this theme and it was accepted by Buzzfeed but then Buzzfeed's crossword folded before our puzzle got published and so we had our puzzle returned to us and promptly did nothing with it. I have lots of different versions of the fill, so I don't remember which one was the final version, but anyway, it looked something like this:
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LOL 9D "STTNG" = abbr. for "Star Trek: The Next Generation"—
pretty sure we redid that corner in subsequent drafts, though
you could get away with wacky stuff in the Buzzfeed crossword sometimes
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The circles are a little hard to see in this screenshot, but there's a progression in ours, as you descend the grid, from DOWNDOG* through BRIDGE to CORPSE. Other poses can't be represented that well, as you can see in today's puzzle: CAT is an absurdity (just three squares, and it's shaped no differently from DOWNWARD DOG), as is COBRA. Those squares don't evoke their poses at all. CHAIR and BOAT are closer, but still too tiny to be really effective. You need a bigger canvas. Today's DOWNWARD DOG is the one pose that's on point. So obviously I like the *idea* of this puzzle. It's just that there's this cramming of too many poses in, and these formations end up a. not evoking the poses well, and b. really really compromising the fill by fixing theme material in virtually every corner of the grid. I can tell you that it is actually really hard to fill puzzles that have theme material on the diagonal. A Down or an Across themer is just a fixed answer; you get a few and you build the rest of the grid around them. But when you deal in diagonals or otherwise dispersed letters, now the theme is everywhere, and nearly Every answer has a limitation (that is, one fixed theme square in it) right from the start. If you look at today's grid, you can see that with the exception of some short stuff, the vast majority of all answers run through the theme in some way. Some of them run through theme material multiple times. This makes filling the grid very hard, and it's how you end up with cringey fill like ABSIT (!?!?!) (61A: ___ omen (Latin akin to "Heaven forbid")), which hasn't been in the puzzle for twenty years ... for a reason.
The NW corner was the hardest Wednesday NW corner I think I've ever done, mostly because I refused to look at Allllll the cross-reference clues and wouldn't just move on and come back. No idea about the AUDEN poem (2D: "The Shield of Achilles" poet), wasn't certain about the vowels in ADUBA (17A: "Mrs. America" actress Uzo), and then the corner is super-isolated and the longer answers poking their heads in were not gettable so the only thing I knew for sure for a while was REN. Brutal. And it felt like this toughness in the cluing was Everywhere. And fussiness also. Is it KEA? Nope, LOA (15A: Mauna ___). Is it HOMEMADE? Nope, HANDMADE (21A: Like many items on Etsy). Is it YOWIE? Nope. ZOWIE? Still nope. It's WOWIE (16A: "Gadzooks!") ... huh ok. AWARENESS was absolutely brutal. So abstract, no idea. I guess it's supposed to be part of the theme??? So you've got two different theme elements running through there? Wow. That makes it thematically very dense through there. Solving this was a Grind. The UK version of Clue?? Really? (43D: Colorfully named victim in the U.K. version of Clue). And oof, the Honey Boo Boo stuff, why? Bygone child exploitation reality TV? ... and I'm supposed to know her *first* name? The vibe coming off that answer was ... well, what's the opposite of YOGA? Still, as I say, I do like the basic idea here. I just think the execution is a little inelegant. A bit of a mess. Trying to do too much.
Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld
*Today's DOWNWARD DOG is obviously more spectacular than the DOWN DOG that we went with in our grid, but it's no less an abbreviation. You'll hear DOWN DOG *and* DOWNWARD DOG used all the time in yoga classes, but the full name is actually
DOWNWARD-FACING DOG (you're gonna need a Sunday-sized grid for that one). The Sanskrit name, which you also hear, is
Adho Mukha Svanasana.
