Constructor: Sophia Maymudes and Margaret Seikel
Relative difficulty: Challenging (possibly, I dunno; felt way harder than most Fridays, to me, but all puzzles have been so easy lately that maybe this was just Medium)
THEME: none
Word of the Day: ARTURO Schomberg (30A: Historian Schomberg of the Harlem Renaissance) —
I am in no condition to write clearly or fairly about this puzzle, as my morning has been a complete disaster. The cat has complicated new meds which just arrived yesterday, and there are glass bottles, and cheap syringes that I can't read or wield easily, and viscous liquids, and just a whole lot of fussiness involved. "Shoot the liquid into your cat's cheek," like LOL am I supposed to grow a third hand? Anyway, it was weirdly traumatic all around. So traumatic that I just abandoned all cat-feeding plans and went straight into my office to solve and write. There, I discovered ... non-operative internet! The indicator lights all looked good, but ... nothing. So I rebooted the modem and that worked ... for a while! Long enough for me to download and solve the puzzle. But then it faded out again. Then the modem rebooted itself (!?). And now I seem to be typing in some spirit world between connectivity and disconnectivity. I keep hitting "Update" so that I can be sure this post is getting through, if only incrementally. If you are somehow reading this early in the morning and it seems, uh, unfinished, it probably is! Anyway, I couldn't have been in a worse mood / headspace when I solved this puzzle, so I don't have a lot of good vibes to spread. I don't know if it was genuinely harder than usual because of names and concepts I didn't know, or if I was just so distracted by all the morning frustration that I couldn't think straight. Anyway, the grid looks fine, but the cluing was out of my wheelhouse, a lot, and there wasn't much that gave me genuine joy. Maybe LOVER'S QUARREL, which is nice and also looks kind of like LOVER SQUIRREL, which is an amusing visual. SORORITY SQUAT is original and will be very entertaining to someone, but my general feelings about campus Greek like are ... not ... too positive ... so that answer doesn't hold the charm for me that it might for others. But again, my particularly terrible morning is probably coloring a lot of my solving experience today.
Relative difficulty: Challenging (possibly, I dunno; felt way harder than most Fridays, to me, but all puzzles have been so easy lately that maybe this was just Medium)
Word of the Day: ARTURO Schomberg (30A: Historian Schomberg of the Harlem Renaissance) —
Arturo Alfonso Schomburg (January 24, 1874 – June 10, 1938), was a historian writer, collector, and activist. Schomburg was a Puerto Rican of African and German descent. He moved to the United States in 1891, where he researched and raised awareness of the contributions that Afro-Latin Americans and African Americans have made to society. He was an important intellectual figure in the Harlem Renaissance. Over the years, he collected literature, art, slave narratives, and other materials of African history, which were purchased to become the basis of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, named in his honor, at the New York Public Library (NYPL) branch in Harlem. (wikipedia)
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I don't care about royal weddings At All, so TIARA clue meant nothing to me (17A: Meghan Markle's "something borrowed"). I had KANGAROO but absolutely no idea what was supposed to follow—it was so weird that I started doubting KANGAROO. That clue is so weird. Other marsupials have marsupia (marsupiums?) but surely those are not called KANGAROO POUCHes. Surely koalas and opossums don't have KANGAROO POUCHes. You would call a *kangaroo*'s marsupium a KANGAROO POUCH, but that's not a term for the marsupium generally. Very confusing. Also confusing: getting -OOD- at 15A: Place to slurp ramen and writing in FOOD COURT (it fit!). Probably the worst hole I fell into.