Constructor: David Distenfeld
Relative difficulty: Easy
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THEME: none
Word of the Day: OPEN MATTE (66A: Film technique that accommodates wide- and full-screen display) —
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This week has been ridiculously easy. I wonder if there's some kind of long-term plan to lower the difficulty bar across the board, so as to make the puzzle more generally accessible. All I know is that I would like the puzzles to have a little more teeth than they've had of late. The good kind of teeth, though. Not obscurity teeth or awful forced "?"-clue teeth. Clever misdirection teeth. Sneaky ambiguity teeth. It would be nice to meet some pleasant resistance. I dropped today's 1-Across in immediately, with no crosses in place (1A: Lures into a relationship by using a fictional online persona). Extremely literal clue on well-established slang. Whatever feeling of currency that answer might have had (and it's not exactly new anymore) is undermined by the dull, straightforward, obvious clue. The puzzle does a better job with the ALL THE FEELS clue (12D: Mixed emotions, so to speak), though in that case the answer is an expression so personally off-putting that it didn't add to my solving enjoyment at all. ALL THE FEELS is like ADULTING, a cutesy phrase that flattens the diversity and complex reality of human experience into meme-able onlinespeak. You don't have "mixed emotions," you have very specific feelings that you could probably express if you wanted to, but no, ALL THE FEELS, which basically says Nothing but wants to be seen as adorable. Pfft. That expression is, as they also say online, cringe. It's important to say here, because people seem to get confused, that when I don't like a phrase, like ALL THE FEELS, I'm writing as an ordinary solver who has Feelings about words, phrases, etc. I like some, don't like others. This is (mostly) a personal solving diary, not a rule book. If I really think an answer Has No Place In All Of Crosswords, I'll tell you. ALL THE FEELS is extremely valid. And I hate it. So that's where we've landed with that.
Relative difficulty: Easy
Word of the Day: OPEN MATTE (66A: Film technique that accommodates wide- and full-screen display) —
Open matte is a filming technique that involves matting out the top and bottom of the film frame in the movie projector (known as a soft matte) for the widescreen theatrical release and then scanning the film without a matte (at Academy ratio) for a full screen home video release.
Open matte can be used with non-anamorphic films presented in 2.20:1 or 2.39:1, but it isn't used as often, mainly because it adds too much additional headroom, depending upon how well the framing was protected or if the director chooses to create a certain visual aesthetic. Instead, those films will employ either pan and scan or reframing using either the well-protected areas or the areas of interest. Films shot anamorphically use the entire 35 mm frame (except for the soundtrack area), so they must use pan and scan as a result. [...]
With high-definition television now in common usage (with its standardized 16:9 (1.78:1) aspect ratio), the need to reformat 1.85:1 movies for television viewing has virtually evaporated, although television broadcasts still reformat 2.39:1 movies by means of using open matte or pan and scan. For films with wider aspect ratios (2.39:1, for example) the matting bars will appear on the top and bottom of the screen of the broadcast image, thus preserving each director's framing intent. (wikipedia)
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I love the expression IN THE WEEDS, though I don't think the clue here adequately conveys the lost-ness implied by the phrase (42A: Dealing with technical difficulties, say). Dealing with technical difficulties is a neutral activity—people who deal with technical things do it all the time, and when they do it, they're not IN THE WEEDS, a phrase which implies being over your head or talking over someone else's (i.e. immersed in details of a technical nature to the point where you've lost your audience). Looks like the phrase has some prominence as restaurant slang for when a server is totally overwhelmed by orders ... now that is interesting to me. Here's a good overview of this multivalent phrase (none of the valences seem properly represented by today's clue). The cluing was suspect in several other places today. Some HOUSE WINES are good, and there's no reason an oenophile might not drink one (7D: Improbable orders for oenophiles). It's hard to believe they chose the clue [Like households with stay-at-home spouses, typically] for ONE-INCOME, especially in a post-pandemic age when sooooooooo many more people are working from home. I don't like the weird assumptions this clue is making ("typically").
The only slow-down I experienced today came in the eastern section, where both EDU and SEEPS had bizarro clues that made it (briefly) difficult to get both ADAPTER (28D: Item to pack for a trip abroad) and the more toughly-clued SUNSETS (29D: Down times?). That is one highly metaphorical clue on SEEPS (41A: Infiltrates). Seems to be attributing a lot of nefarious agency to whatever moisture is SEEPing through your basement windows or improperly sealed food container or whatever. I think that's it—"Infiltrates" feels active and "SEEPS" feels passive and I wouldn't put them in the same universe, though I'm sure the clue is defensible. As for state names appearing before EDU (33A: Follower of many state names) ... sigh, OK, in the few cases where the school is a flagship state school, maybe, but I got my Ph.D. from a flagship state school and the domain name was "umich.edu," not "michigan.edu," and Cal is "berkeley.edu," so ... I dunno, man. This clue seems pretty forced. Then there were two things I simply didn't know, right on top of each other, in the SE. I read the OPEN MATTE wikipedia entry several times and still don't quite get it. Modern TVs don't require conversion to "full-screen" (4:3) aspect ratio anymore, so I guess OPEN MATTE was more important in yesteryear. Anyway, this answer felt pretty IN THE WEEDS to me. RADIO DIAL is a familiar enough phrase but what "55" might have to do with it, I had no idea. Been a long (long) time since I stared at an AM dial (!). Apparently 540 Khz is the low end of the AM spectrum, and radio dials often represented this as a 54 or (why!?!) a 55:
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| 55 |
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| 54 |
I'm guessing that of all the clues that might befuddle people today, this RADIO DIAL clue will be the befuddlingest. I don't think there's much else that requires explanation. [Act crabby?] is SIDLE because crabs SIDLE. RONA Barrett was a gossip columnist in times of yore (52A: First name in gossip). The "flute" in 10A: Occasion for a high flute? (TOAST) is a glass and it's "high" presumably because you have raised it ... for a TOAST. I had "Is that ALL?" before "Is that A NO?" and I won't have been alone there, but I don't think I made any other errors or initial missteps, which is super-odd for a Friday (or any day). I either knew the answer, or I didn't and I waited for crosses to help, but no face-planting, no whoops I fell in a hole. It's a solid puzzle, but it didn't offer much in the way of adventure.