Constructor: Simon Marotte and Victor FlemingRelative difficulty: Medium
THEME:"Lettered" answers— themers, when you say them out loud, sound like a bunch of
letters ... I am pretty sure that is all there is to it—if there's some meta puzzle where the 17 letters can be arranged to spell something, well, that's more effort than I'm willing to expend right now:
Theme answers:- EMMY EMCEE (17A: Lettered awards show host?) (M, E, M, C)
- CAGEY ENEMY (30A: Lettered adversary in a battle of wits?) (K, G, N, M, E)
- EMPTY TEPEE (49A: Lettered home on the range when no one's home?) (M, T, T, P)
- EASY ESSAY (65A: Lettered school paper that's a snap to write?) (E, Z, S, A)
Word of the Day: "Lohengrin" (
11D: Lohengrin's love = ELSA) —
Lohengrin, WWV 75, is a Romantic opera in three acts composed and written by Richard Wagner, first performed in 1850. The story of the eponymous character is taken from medieval German romance, notably the Parzival of Wolfram von Eschenbach, and its sequel Lohengrin, itself inspired by the epic of Garin le Loherain. It is part of the Knight of the Swan legend.
The opera has inspired other works of art. King Ludwig II of Bavaria named his castle Neuschwanstein Castle after the Swan Knight. It was King Ludwig's patronage that later gave Wagner the means and opportunity to complete, build a theatre for, and stage his epic cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen. He had discontinued composing it at the end of Act II of Siegfried, the third of the Ring tetralogy, to create his radical chromatic masterpiece of the late 1850s, Tristan und Isolde, and his lyrical comic opera of the mid-1860s, Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg.
The most popular and recognizable part of the opera is the Bridal Chorus, colloquially known as "Here Comes the Bride," usually played as a processional at weddings. The orchestral preludes to Acts I and III are also frequently performed separately as concert pieces. (wikipedia)
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Jarringly dated and not up to contemporary standards at all. Both theme and fill feel like they're from another era, another century, and not in some cute nostalgic way, but in a way that makes you appreciate how far even average puzzles have come in the past couple of decades. First, I don't even know what the joke is supposed to be with this theme. That is, how is "lettered" being ... used? Punned on? Am I supposed to imagine that all the "lettered" things earned a "letter" in sports? In high school? Or is the idea that they have all been formally educated? Even the TEPEE? What? The use of "lettered" here is a painfully awkward and confusing way to signal the theme. The clues aren't even wacky—they're just straight clues with "lettered" attached to the beginning. There's nothing wordplay-ish about any of it, so why, why is this happening at all? If you can't get a good revealer to make all these answers make sense, to tie them all up in a neat package, then you need to not be doing this theme at all. Even if the cluing (or hypothetical revealer) had been letter (!) perfect, the premise is still of dubious merit, and the theme answer set does not exactly sparkle. How is anyone gonna get excited about an answer like
EASYESSAY? What part of it, clue or answer, produces joy, or even a hint of a smile? These are imagined phrases that just lie there—this puzzle doesn't even have the decency to throw some genuine wackiness my way. It's a load of earnest Blah from start to finish. Also, that is an awkward spelling of TEPEE. Also, EMPTY has that "p" sound, which kind of undermines the theme's central premise. Also,
ELLIE conspicuously fulfills the theme concept without being part of the actual theme—ideally you'd get rid of all such non-theme answers. There's really nothing to like about this theme.
IT'S not
OK.
I'm trying to remember the last time I saw [
Lohengrin's love] as a clue. Turns out it's only been about four years or so, but you used to see it all the time before "Frozen" came out and absolutely took over
ELSA cluing duties. [Lohengrin's love] simply adds to the conspicuous bygone feel of this puzzle. This puzzle coulda run when
LOU Bega was dominating the charts or even when Miss
ELLIE was all over the TV airwaves.
AMY ADAMS and
SWOLE are about the only things connecting this thing to the 21st century. The fill is plain and bland and overfamiliar. I'm looking for highlights and not finding any. The only thing that stood out to me about this puzzle, besides its thematic inadequacy, is that western section, which for some reason was 10x more difficult than the rest of the puzzle (very easy). Most of the clues in there just didn't add up. I had
LAY AN EGG, but even those "G"s didn't help. The
SHOE clue was baffling (
27A: It's a little longer than a foot), and I was imagining the "bit" in
36A: Bit of bar food as something much smaller than a
WING.
ONE UP is confusing when you make golf the context, since being ahead actually means having a stroke count *under* the other person's. Any other sports context would've worked fine for that clue, but ugh, golf, sure. I took "Shout-out" as something
ORAL so "
HI MOM" didn't occur to me for
28D: Shout-out from the stands (since it usually comes in sign and hot "shouted" form). And of course the one answer I knew in that section (
LOU) led me straight into a sinkhole—having the "L" in place at
27D: Muscled, slangily (SWOLE), I wrote in BUILT. But my limited speed failings aren't the real problem here. The weak theme and tepid fill, that's the problem.
GLOOP—that just about sums it up. Hoping for better results tomorrow. See you then.
Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld
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