Hey besties, thanks for joining me for a second Malaika MWednesday! (If we can change the clocks twice a year, why not change the days of the week.) If you'd like to enter The Malaika Headspace, today I was blasting this song which is from the Twilight soundtrack.
Relative difficulty: Pretty average, then spent 8mins in the NE (22:11)
THEME: TAKE OUT THE TRASH — In the theme answers, if you ignore letters that spell out synonyms for "trash" then you get words that actually match the clues
Theme answers:
I really appreciated how the mechanism interacted with these theme answers! The majority of the letter addition / deletion themes I see result in either wacky phrases (like here, where you have IRISH SCANNERS) or entries in the grid that do not make sense (like here, where you end up with nonsense like HIGLIDAYS). This theme very elegantly did neither! One thing that Puzzle Reviewers like to talk about is whether a square is "checked"-- i.e., whether a letter corresponds to both an across clue and a down clue. In some complicated Letter Switcheroo Puzzles (like this), you end up with a square that only gets clued one time. But that doesn't happen here. While it's true that something like WILD ROSES never got an across clue, every single letter in it did get an across clue. We knew that the circled letters would form a word meaning "trash" and we knew that the uncircled letters would form a word meaning "trick." And, you get a bonus of knowing that the whole entry does still read as a word!
- LITTLE ROCK: LITTER is removed to give LOCK clued as [Secure]
- WILD ROSES: DROSS is removed to give WILE clued as [Trick]
- IOWA STATE: WASTE is removed to give IOTA clued as [Speck]
- SHOOT CRAPS: SCRAPS is removed to give HOOT clued as [Riot]
Chester Trent Lott Sr. (born October 9, 1941) is an American lawyer, author, and politician. A former United States Senator from Mississippi, Lott served in numerous leadership positions in both the United States House of Representatives and the Senate. He also joined with three other Republican Senators in the Singing Senators barbershop-like quartet. In 2003, he stepped down from the position after controversy due to his praising of senator Strom Thurmond's 1948 segregationist Dixiecrat presidential bid. (Wikipedia.)
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Okay that was a lot of technical blah blah blah, but as a newer constructor, that sort of analysis is very helpful for me as I brainstorm and workshop themes. I hope it was helpful for some of you. Anyway, let's talk about what I liked and didn't like.
It made me beam to see AUNTIE clued as [Term of address for many a respected elder]. Since I'm third gen, I am very bad about remembering that, which gets me some exasperated sighs from my dadi ma. The little stacks of down answers were all lovely. (I like to call these "colonnades," which in real life is a term for pillars that are side-by-side.) We had OVERLOOKS, NAKED LIE, RAT TAILS, and SANTAS LAP. That last one was clued incredibly as [Popular site for holiday gift orders]. Soooo good.
This segues me nicely into a complaint that the clues were a little hard for a Thursday. That one could have used a question mark, in my opinion. (This is my same complaint from yesterday lmao. I feel like what I'm getting at is "Malaika wants to do easy breezy puzzles!!" and y'know what. That's true.) Opaque stuff like [Flip-flop] for THONG and [Astronomical news] for NOVA and [Incense, in a sense] for ODOR really slowed me down.
I've found that in puzzles with a Jeff Chen byline, I'll run into a lot of terms that I 100% learned from crossword puzzles and have never seen in the wild. That is not to say that these things don't exist in the wild, just that I don't come across them. In this puzzle, that's stuff like OLIN as a chemical manufacturer (I know it as a college of engineering) and LADE and ARG as an abbreviation for Argentina (I see it in software stuff, as an abbreviation for "argument") and ATT (an abbreviation for "attempts" apparently?) and SCOW. The worst for me was SPEX which I am so resistant to that I actually refilled that corner:
I am curious-- were there any entries like that where we have different experiences? For example-- probably lots of you watch more football than me and know of ATT outside of solving. And on the flip-side, I was familiar with OPI like a decade before I was doing crosswords, but I'm sure that's different for some of y'all.
Bullets:
- ICEES (Some frozen drinks) — Anyone else wanted "margs" to go here?
- Please let me know your best alternative answer for the clue [Didn't wax, say]
- I always love to see CORGI in a puzzle
- The clue for TILDE (What a jalapeño has that a habanero lacks)was clever, because a lot of people do actually think that the word "habanero" has a tilde!! There's a whole wikipedia page about this phenomenon which is called "hyperforeignism."
- Let's talk about crying UNCLE. I have never in my entire life heard this phrase except in crosswords, where I feel it appears once a week. I have not even read it, or heard it in movies. Please can you reassure me that this is a real thing that exists??
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