Constructor: Zhouqin BurnikelRelative difficulty: Medium? (super easy except for three longer answers I've never heard of before, all of which required every cross)
THEME: New Years of the world ... (I think that's all there is) —
Theme answers:- SPRING FESTIVAL (16A: Chinese New Year, celebrated on Feb. 1, 2022)
- ROSH HASHANAH (26A: Jewish New Year, celebrated on Sept. 25, 2022)
- SOLLAL (28D: Korean New Year, celebrated on Feb. 1, 2022)
- NOWRUZ (29D: Iranian New Year, celebrated on March 21, 2022)
- SONGKRAN (55A: Thai New Year, celebrated on April 13, 2022)
Word of the Day: NOWRUZ (
29D) —
Nowruz (Persian: نوروز, pronounced [nowˈɾuːz]; lit. 'new day') is the Iranian New Year, also known as the Persian New Year, which begins on the spring equinox, marking the first day of Farvardin, the first month of the Iranian solar calendar. It is celebrated worldwide by various ethnolinguistic groups and falls on or around March 21 of the Gregorian calendar. In 2021, Nowruz fell on March 20.
Nowruz has Iranian and Zoroastrian origins; however, it has been celebrated by diverse communities for over 3,000 years in Western Asia, Central Asia, the Caucasus, the Black Sea Basin, the Balkans, and South Asia. It is a secular holiday for most celebrants that is enjoyed by people of several different faiths, but it remains a holy day for Zoroastrians,[29] Baháʼís, and some Muslim communities.
As the spring equinox, Nowruz marks the beginning of spring in the Northern Hemisphere. The moment the Sun crosses the celestial equator and equalizes night and day is calculated exactly every year, and families gather together to observe the rituals.
While Nowruz has been celebrated since the reform of the Iranian calendar in the 11th century CE to mark the new year, the United Nations officially recognized the "International Day of Nowruz" with the adoption of UN resolution 64/253 in 2010.
• • •
Happy Chinese New Year to all who celebrate! I don't really understand how this puzzle "celebrates" anything, though. This felt like school—like I was being taught the names of three different New Year's celebrations (
SOLLAL, NOWRUZ, SONGKRAN, none of which I've encountered before), and while I don't mind learning, I don't know how any of this adds up to a *puzzle*. It's trivia, and it isn't a particularly cohesive chunk of trivia, either. The New Year's celebrations feel haphazard—chosen for no clear reason except that they can be arranged symmetrically. It felt really weird to me that CHINESE NEW YEAR (14! Same as
SPRING FESTIVAL) wasn't referred to as CHINESE NEW YEAR, but the Chinese term does in fact translate as
SPRING FESTIVAL, and you couldn't very well have "New Year" in the grid and also in all of the clues for the themers. The biggest question of the day, then, is why a puzzle appearing on CHINESE NEW YEAR /
SPRING FESTIVAL didn't try to make some kind of puzzle magic out of the fact that CHINESE NEW YEAR and
SPRING FESTIVAL are both 14 letters long. Symmetry comes built-in! Why just list random New Yearseseses? I don't really get it. The one interesting physical feature of today's grid, besides mirror symmetry (as opposed to the more common rotational symmetry) is that it is 14 squares wide (as opposed to the more common 15). This allows
SPRING FESTIVAL to become a grid-spanner, and also allows both
ROSH HASHANAH and
SONGKRAN, as answers with an even letter count, to sit dead center in the grid. I would not have minded at all seeing
SOLLAL or
NOWRUZ or
SONGKRAN in a late-week grid, or in a theme that had anything puzzle-y about it. Any wordplay at all. It's just that "uh, here are some other random New Years" does not seem like a strong theme concept to me. But I can't say I didn't learn anything.
The rest of the grid, the non-theme part, is so easy that there's nothing really to say about it. Four-letter answers as far as the eye can see.
ABOUT US is probably the most interesting thing in the grid outside the New Year's names (
30D: Explanatory page on a company's website). I like that
RAFAEL Nadal is sitting next to
CHAMPS, since just this past weekend he
won the Australian Open, passing longtime rival Roger Federer and anti-vaxx numbskull Novak Djokovic in number of Grand Slam singles titles (21!). Outside the theme, the only time I struggled with the puzzle today came as I tried to enter the middle of the grid from the top. Got the "S" from
NOSH and the "T" from
TATA, which gave me S----T for
21A: Lines at a theater? (SCRIPT) ... which was easily the hardest clue of the day. A baffling clue *right* at the gateway from one section of the grid into the other. If I'd just looked at the clue for
ROSHHASHANAH at that point, I would've moved along quickly, probably, but I tend not to look at longer answers until I've worked shorter crosses, so I jumped into that weirdly isolated center section and luckily found RAFAEL pretty quickly. After that, no more hesitations. Just the low-key grind of getting every cross on
SOLLAL, NOWRUZ, and
SONGKRAN. And I thought
BEAK was BILL at first (
57A: Big toucan feature). And I started writing in LIMA at
15A: Capital where natives say "Arrivederci!"ROMA) because I had -MA and "Capital" + "-MA" just activated some solving instinct. Oh, the teeny corner in the SE was odd because I couldn't get in via
SONGKRAN (no idea about that "N") and
NERD was clued as [
Peter Parker in "Spider-Man," for one], which I guess is accurate, but didn't register At All. The whole concept of
NERD has been so diluted that I don't think nerdery hits as hard, as a character trait for Peter Parker, as it did when Spider-Man was first created, in the mid-'60s. Nerds no longer seem anti-heroic in our culture. But sure,
NERD. OK. Have a nice day.
Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld
[Follow Rex Parker on
Twitter and
Facebook]
