Constructor: Sam Ezersky
Relative difficulty: Medium
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THEME:"Magazine Racket"— from what I can tell, familiar phrases have "ET" added to their ends (or almost-ends), creating wacky phrases, which are clued wackily (i.e. "?"-style) ... I want to believe there is something else going on here, something that I'm missing, but I just don't see it. I think this is all there is:
Theme answers:
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This will be short, because I honestly don't get it. I mean, I get it, I think ... I get the whole "add -ET / make it wacky!" conceit, but why? Why -ET? What do "Magazines" have to do with any of it? Is there an "E.T., phone home!" or some other kind of extraterrestrial meaning that I'm supposed to be able to extract from this thing? Because this alone ... this apparently meaningless add-two-arbitrary-letters ploy ... I don't see how it makes the grade. I don't know how this puzzle gets accepted with a theme this simplistic. There's certainly no genuine humor in the themers. WATSON AND CRICKET kind of gets off the ground, a little, but the rest do absolutely nothing. Huge thuds. APPLE JACKET? UNDERGROUND ROCKET? The "wackiness" is so low-grade, so faint as to be almost imperceptible. And you add -ET at the very end except ... when you don't? BUCKETS and ROCKETS just get to be plural ... why? Lastly, and perhaps most egregiously, SITTIN' ON THE DOCK is a *nothing* phrase. Meaningless. Before you wackify a term (today, by adding -ET), it has to actually be a term, and this just isn't. Couldn't stand on its own if it tried. The song's title is "(Sittin' On) The Dock of the Bay," so there is no way you can extract "SITTIN' ON THE DOCK" and perpetrate like it's a standalone thing. It is not a thing. Not in the title, not in the lyrics—no. Nothing but an incomplete thing, a part of a thing. I'm truly stunned. I know it's easy to write these complaints off as "oh, that Rex, he's so grumpy, he never likes blah blah blah," but honestly, the constructors out there, whether they'll say it aloud or not, they know that this theme isn't up to par. This puzzle would be very at home in any number of publications I can think of, but as the marquee puzzle of the highest-profile outlet in the country? Nah. Not even close. But again, it is always possible I have missed something. If so, well, I guess I'll be back here with an addendum.
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Relative difficulty: Medium
Theme answers:
- APPLE JACKET (23A: Bit of company swag for a Genius Bar?)
- WHAT MAKES / YOU TICKET? (25A: With 114-Across, exasperated question to parking enforcement?)
- WATSON AND CRICKET (28A: Elements of a Sherlock Holmes sports mystery?)
- SITTIN' ON THE DOCKET (48A: Today's plans: watchin' someone's kids?)
- LIKE A MILLION BUCKETS (65A: How much Michael Jordan or Wilt Chamberlain could score, hyperbolically?)
- UNDERGROUND ROCKET (86A: Missile silo's holding?)
- FRONT OF THE PACKET (107A: Where Sweet'N Low displays its logo?)
- DARN SOCKETS (115A: Cry following an electrical malfunction?)
- noun An aphid, plant-louse, or some similar insect, kept and tended by ants for the sake of the sweet fluid which is secreted in its body and used as food by the ants. (wordnik)
• • •
And then there's the fill, which is also a real head-shaker. There's a kind of desperation for the new here, and you can smell it. Unfortunately, for every BERNIE BRO (very good) there are two things like WOODTAR or ANTCOW or NULLVALUE or PREWEB. There's the insipidness of the single KUDO (telling me it's "jocular" doesn't make it less insipid). I laughed out loud at how bad EATS PALEO is ... day by day, we are inching closer to the Platonic Ideal of Random Phrases: EAT A SANDWICH. Can't eat a sandwich if you're eating PALEO, but oh we're close! I've been in academia my whole adult life and still have never heard anyone refer to a POSTBAC in the wild. Not once, ever. I'm sure whatever that is exists, but usually after your Bachelor's, you get your Master's, what the hell? And the (presumably) hard "C" on BAC ... is that from BACCALAUREATE? POSTDOCs are absolutely positively 100% real things. POSTBACs, as I've said before, are your wordlist lying to you. Further, no matter how you clue CAR BOMB, it's never going to be a fun thing for people to see in their grid. Yes, ha ha, funny drink name, but it's named after terrorist violence, what in the world are you even doing here?
There was one very, very sticky moment for me, and unfortunately it involved the (to me) arcane WOOD TAR (?) and NO-OUT, which I couldn't parse to save my life despite having been a baseball fan for (checks watch) roughly 45 years. Oh, and BOOS. Couldn't see it. Had BO-S and still no idea how to make it be [Common results of penalties]. As for the baseball clue, after NO-HIT and NO-RUN my brain just gave up (69D: Like a situation at the start of an inning). So, to recap, BO-S, WOOD-A-, and NO-U-. Bots! Woodwax! No fun! I have to concede that the phrase "NO-OUT situation" is very much in-the-language when describing the progression of an inning, especially when runners are on base and strategies become more important. But my brain wanted only consonants to go in the empty spot in BO-S, so it took me a weirdly long time to see NO-OUT. Fun fact, I have been to multiple baseball games with today's constructor. Yankees Stadium. Camden Yards. Post-xword tournament outings of years past. Sam is an O's fan. I am a Tigers fan. Thus we share ... well, pain, mostly. Although today I had great joy, as I got to see Miguel Cabrera get his 3,000th hit (the first Venezuelan player ever to achieve that milestone):
Explainers:
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- 109D: "Bye 4 now!" (TTYL)— "talk to you later." Ever since I heard that someone once saw TTFN in their grid ("tata for now"), I've been paranoid that that variation is going to jump out and bite me. So I let crosses reassure me that TTYL was indeed correct.
- 88D: Fun plans after work, say (DRINKS)— assuming you go out with friends; otherwise, these plans might be less "fun." Had real trouble with this one. At one point, I wanted DOINGS!
- 4D: Text back and forth? (LOL) — the clue is merely referring to the fact that LOL (a common "text") is a palindrome.
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