Constructor: Aimee Lucido
Relative difficulty: Medium (Challenging-Easy)
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THEME: none
Word of the Day: Peace Bridge (14A: Fort ___ (Peace Bridge terminus) (ERIE)) —
This one started out absolutely brutal for me. And not because of any BRAIN FART, either (17A: Mental goof). I just couldn't make any of the short Downs in the NW happen, and I had absolutely no hope on the [Deep-fried Japanese pork cutlet] (not a thing I have heard of or would likely eat), so it was SEIKO, SWOON, and a whole lot of nothing up there for the first part of the solve, and since moving on wasn't going to help me at all, I just had to wait it out and run the alphabet *repeatedly* in order to finally understand the short Downs. This was what my grid looked like at that point:
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Bullets:![]()
Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld
[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]
Relative difficulty: Medium (Challenging-Easy)
Word of the Day: Peace Bridge (14A: Fort ___ (Peace Bridge terminus) (ERIE)) —
The Peace Bridge is an international bridge between Canada and the United States at the east end of Lake Erie at the source of the Niagara River, about 20 kilometres (12.4 mi) upriver of Niagara Falls. It connects Buffalo, New York, in the United States to Fort Erie, Ontario, in Canada. It is operated and maintained by the binational Buffalo and Fort Erie Public Bridge Authority. (wikipedia)
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I think what eventually happened was that I mentally stuck in DAPS at 1A: Offers a fist, in a way and finally saw PIANO, but before that, yeeeeesh. The clues were all written in a way that omitted some element I needed ... the "click" element. [Soft] ... oh "Soft in music!" I see ... now. Ugh. As for [Keyboard symbol], first, I wanted a piano (!!!!!?) keyboard for some reason, but even after I imagined a keyboard like the kind that my fingers are typing on right now, I couldn't make any sense of --R-W. Words like THROW and SCREW were interfering. And there are a million damn "symbols" on this keyboard! As for DEBTS, the answer there is so dumbly straightforward that I would never have guessed it in a million years. I also had no idea what was supposed to follow NANO- at 18D: Small-scale study, for short, but that's a separate, more manageable problem, really. At least I could come at NANO- from another direction, whereas I was (for a time) completely trapped up there in the NW. Once I got that corner sorted, though, things clicked right over the zoom-zoom Friday fun. OSH to STREETS to TEA to ANODE to the whole SE corner, which behaved very differently than its rotationally symmetrical cousin (done in seconds, no resistance at all). Once I started moving and the longer, cooler answers started opening up, the puzzle got a hell of a lot more enjoyable.
I have to say that BRAIN FART does nothing for me. I know it's supposed to be naughty or edgy or something ("Ooh, look at the Gray Lady ... so UnGrayLadylike ... te(e)-hee!"), but I could do without FART in my puzzles, as I could do without all things scatological and all bodily fluids besides blood, thank you very much. I don't even like SPIT in my puzzles—maybe if you clue it as the thing that turns meat, SPIT is OK, but ... please no shit or piss or vomit etc. I realize the BRAIN FART is a metaphorical fart but ... look, it doesn't bother me so much as it fails to produce the delight that a similarly original colloquialism might produce in that same space. This is very much a matter of *my* personal taste. But yeah, I'm not 8 years old, so I'm not hugely entertained by farts. Occasionally funny in real life, not so welcome in my puzzle. Bring on the sex stuff, the swear words, I am very liberal on those fronts (for the most part). But anything even vaguely (even metaphorically!) scatological kinda spoils the solving mood for me. But my feelings here are clearly not in line with the way current crossword winds ... are blowing ... and that's OK. The puzzle has probably been overly prim in the past, in every way, and if the cost of loosening up is that I have to contend with the occasional fart, then so be it.
The absolute winningest answer of the day was BODICE-RIPPERS (37A: Steamy period pieces). That's the point at which I got that great Friday Feeling—the excitement that comes from an exciting answer that just rips open the puzzle. I was also a big fan of BOXED WINE. I don't drink much BOXED WINE and I don't read BODICE-RIPPERS at all but I do like to drink and read "trashy" fiction so I am still very much in sync with the vibe of this puzzle. I also enjoy the music of Dana Elaine OWENS, a.k.a. Queen Latifah, and have since college:
- 11D: Field that involves blood, sweat and tears? (FORENSICS) — I think I don't quite get this. Or ... I do. Is the idea that blood, sweat and tears are crime scene evidence? The "tears" part really threw me because I imagined that the loved ones of a murder victim were crying, and so the whole thing felt really awful and cruel. But maybe tears are evidence? Or maybe it's not liquid tears but cuts, gashes, those kinds of tears. No less gruesome, but those kinds of "tears" seem more plausible as crime scene evidence than boo-hoo tears. I'm still not sure I like the idea of the puzzle doing cutesy wordplay over a dead body, though.
- 48A: Not *quite* a failure (D-PLUS) — I think this is a grade that exists only in "Peanuts" -- no, wait, Peppermint Patty always got a D-MINUS ... which actually fits this clue even better:
- 29D: Something drawn by an invisible horse outside Disney's Haunted Mansion (HEARSE) — had the "H," wrote in HANSOM ... which is something that *only* a longtime crossword solver would do ... #CarriageLife
- 14A: Fort ___ (Peace Bridge terminus) (ERIE) — another component of my disastrous NW corner. Neither the fort nor the parenthetical thing that was supposed to point me to the fort was known to me. I live within (very loud) shouting distance of the Peace Bridge and had no idea it was a thing. So though I've seen ERIE in my puzzle roughly one trillion times, I couldn't access it today.
- 37D: First K-pop group to perform at the Grammys (BTS) — this group is so massive that you should just memorize their name right now if you haven't already. I realize it's not easy to remember seemingly random letters, so I went through the trouble of finding out what the letters mean, and, well ... I learned something. Thank you, Seventeen Magazine:
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| backronym!!! |
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