Constructor: Sid Sivakumar
Relative difficulty: Medium
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THEME: none
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Word of the Day: Noomi RAPACE (37D: Noomi ___, lead actress of 2009's "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo") —
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A properly tough Saturday, somewhat more interesting than yesterday's puzzle, but I still don't really see much in the way of marquee fill or exciting seed entries. Usually you start a themeless with some cooler longer entries that you want to use, and build around them, and so when I don't see a handful of real sizzlers on a Friday or Saturday, I wonder what the point was, aside from competently filling in a 72-entries-or-less grid. The only answer that really got my attention (in a good way) was "WHO CAN SAY?!," which has that colloquial tang I'm always a sucker for. WET MARTINI would've been lovely but the clue on it was so awful that the answer was ruined for me (46A: Drink with dry vermouth, paradoxically). Hey, you know what is also a [Drink with dry vermouth]? A DRY MARTINI. The wetness of a WET MARTINI is not a result of the ingredient per se, as the clue implies, but is instead just a matter of proportion (WET MARTINIs simply have more vermouth). You could have done something with the irony of a drink's getting wetter by adding more of something dry, but the clue makes zero reference to proportion (which, again, is the CORE issue in a WET MARTINI), and so the whole thing is a hard fail. Paradox, shmaradox; a fine answer spoiled. Maybe solvers got excited by POD RACERS? (23A: Vehicles in "The Phantom Menace"). Not this solver. Ditto MEAT CASES (9D: Some supermarket displays). SHAPEWEAR actually seems like a freshish entry (13A: Some spandex garments). It's not showy, but it's part of the sartorial spectrum that I don't think has been represented much in the grid. I'm having trouble imagining a HIGH STEP that doesn't involve show horses or maybe a ... what's that person who leads a marching band called? Ah, drum major, right. Maybe those in fact are the desired referents (33A: Walk or run in a showy way). That answer has a little flash. But while all these answers fit together nicely, and there are no weak or off-putting parts of the grid, as a whole it still felt a little flat. Lacking in high points. Which I guess is what "flat" means. So there you go.
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Relative difficulty: Medium
Noomi Rapace (Swedish: [ˈnǒːmɪ raˈpasː] née Norén; born 28 December 1979) is a Swedish actress. She achieved international fame with her portrayal of Lisbeth Salander in the Swedish film adaptations of the Millennium series: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played with Fire, and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest. In 2010, she was nominated for a BAFTA Award for Best Actress for her performance in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and for an International Emmy Award for Best Actress for the miniseries version of the trilogy. She has also starred as Anna in Daisy Diamond (2007), Leena in Beyond (2010), Anna in The Monitor (2011), Madame Simza Heron in Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (2011), Elizabeth Shaw in Prometheus (2012), Beatrice in Dead Man Down (2013), Nadia in The Drop (2014), Raisa Demidova in Child 44 (2015), and the seven lead roles in What Happened to Monday(2017). (wikipedia)
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The names seem like things that could've really tripped solvers up. I know LUPE Fiasco and ELTON Brand pretty well, so those didn't get me, but Noomi RAPACE definitely got me despite the fact that I literally looked her up earlier this week. My wife was solving one of Joon Pahk's excellent Rows Garden puzzles and they involve a lot of six-letter words arranged in a circular pattern—these are the "roses" in the garden (there are also literal straight "rows" that run through said "roses," which are clued separately, but I digress...). She finished the puzzle but couldn't match one of the completed "roses" with the clues on the list. It was an actress clue. So I tried to parse RAPACE from the circular arrangement of letters, and having wondered aloud "is RAPACE someone?" my wife then looked her up. And sure enough, she's a reasonably successful actress who has been in ... I want to say absolutely nothing that I've ever seen. She somehow has managed to get through my movie radar completely (I watch 350+ movies a year since the pandemic, though admittedly most of them have been from last century). So I learned her name from a puzzle and completely and utterly forgot it three days later when I needed it. Does not bode well for my senior-year solving. Oh well. I managed. With crosses. As one does.
- 19A: "Weird ..." ("IT'S ODD...")— had "HOW ODD..." at first. "Weird" means "odd," so I don't love the clue / phrase correspondence here (no accounting for "IT'S"), but the phrases do mean roughly the same thing, so whatever.
- 7D: Authority in the field, informally (REF)— anything might be a REFerence. Capital "A" Authority not actually required. Again, not sure what the clues are trying to do today. [I'm being told this clue is referring (!) to a REFeree. Ah, *that* "field." Got it. That makes much more sense.]
- 20A: Button on a Facebook post (REACTION) — really trying to stay off Facebook, which is, in general, both cesspool and timesuck. I thought this would be an actual button, but it's just a broad category of button. The "button" on my FB is just "Like," which you hover over in order to see REACTION options. Which are also "buttons"? OK.
- 25D: One side of a fast-food restaurant (COLESLAW) — "of" is doing a loooooooooot of work here. "In" or "at" are way, way more apt, but then you wouldn't get misdirected (as I def. was), so sure, "of."
- 17D: Study buds? (EAR PLUGS) — I work at a University and you know what students have in their ears when they are "study"ing (and seemingly all other times). Ear Buds. That was all I could think of. To me, EAR PLUGS are for concerts. But apparently there's also a whole ear plug industry aimed at students. I did not know this.
- 26A: Ollas, e.g. (STEW POTS) — embarrassingly confused my crosswordese here and imagined an OAST, not an Olla ... and therefore was looking for some kind of ... oven, I think. I knew Ollas were for food, but, yeah, just glitched on how they were for food.
- 43A: Willingness to listen (OPEN EARS)— well I didn't want EARS for (glaringly) obvious reasons. I wanted OPENNESS. Because "EAR," as we've seen, is Already In The Grid. A truly bizarre and unfortunate dupe.
- 38D: Wrapping weights (TARES) — i.e. the weight of the wrapping (or other container). When you're trying to measure the weight of something, you don't want to measure its "wrapping," so you correct for the weight of the wrapping—that's the tare weight. TARES are also injurious weeds in the Bible, but only if you're solving a puzzle circa 1978. Seriously, Shortz ditched that [Biblical weed] clue as soon as he took over (~1994) and it hasn't been heard from since (last appearance: Aug., 1993).
- 41D: Banned backyard game (JARTS)— oh to have grown up in a time of great backyard danger! Wait a second, I did grow up in that time! It was great! I mean, if you ignore the impaled body parts! Great, I say! JARTS are a brand of lawn darts. The game has largely been superseded by Cornhole (at least in these parts).
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