Constructor: Adam Aaronson
Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium
![]()
THEME: none
Word of the Day: SAM SMITH (26D: Pop singer who came out as nonbinary in 2019) —
![]()
This puzzle really wants you to know how young it is. I can't decide if all the slang is what a 20-something sounds like, or what a 50-something imagines a 20-something sounds like, or what a 50-something who wants desperately to sound like a 20-something sounds like. Anyway, there's a lot of slang that is not mine but that is Very Familiar to me. Oh, wait: "QUITE SO," that's all mine. I will cop to that. That's the kind of thing I'd say "ironically" but then you'd also have to put the quotation marks in quotation marks because, PSST, [whispers] not so ironic. But "it's a BOP,""I'M SO OVER IT,""KILLED IT!""THAT!," all of these answers demonstrate a real awareness of how people are using the language "these days," whatever their age, and yeah, that's cool. I think you're kind of pushing your luck on the "look at all the youthfulness!" front when you insist on putting both the MUPPETS *and* the CARE BEARS in your puzzle (I might have shouted "REAL MATURE!" at this puzzle when I hit CARE BEARS ... "ironically" shouted!), but you wanna wallow in your childhood, go off. There are worse things a puzzle could do. I'll take nostalgia for one's lost childhood over stuff like SPACE FORCE, that's for sure (5A: Branch of the U.S. military launched in 2019). This puzzle has wide range and nice bounce, but not a ton of bite. Easier for me than yesterday's puzzle. The top half felt like it was hardly there at all—when you just *hand* me OXY right up front, well, I can do a lot with that (4D: Competitor of Stridex). The second half was somewhat harder, but only because I (not being 20-something) totally blanked on SAM SMITH's name. I was like "ooh, I know this one, that's ... gah, they're mega-famous, British ... delicate, kinda soulful voice ... you get them confused with ED SHEERAN for some reason (sorry to both) ... SAM ... SAM ... ADAMS? No, that's a beer, damn it!" I was so mad at my brain that I wouldn't do the normal human solver thing and just Move On. The SAM SMITH troubles pretty much cascaded into the whole SE (amazing the damage that losing momentum can do), but that just meant that that corner felt like a proper Saturday. The rest, I blew through like it wasn't there.
Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium
Word of the Day: SAM SMITH (26D: Pop singer who came out as nonbinary in 2019) —
Samuel Frederick Smith (born 19 May 1992) is an English singer and songwriter. After rising to prominence in October 2012 by featuring on Disclosure's breakthrough single "Latch", which peaked at number eleven on the UK Singles Chart, they were subsequently featured on Naughty Boy's "La La La", which became a number one single in May 2013. In December 2013, Smith was nominated for the 2014 Brit Critics' Choice Award and the BBC's Sound of 2014 poll, winning both. // Smith's debut studio album, In the Lonely Hour, was released in May 2014 on Capitol Records UK. [...] The album won four awards, at the 57th Annual Grammy Awards, including Best Pop Vocal Album, Best New Artist, Record of the Year, Song of the Year, and nominations for Album of the Year and Best Pop Solo Performance. [...] As of April 2022, Smith has sold over 33 million albums and 227 million singles worldwide. Smith's achievements include four Grammy Awards, three Brit Awards, three Billboard Music Awards, and an American Music Award, as well as a Golden Globe and an Academy Award. Smith is genderqueer and uses they/them pronouns. (wikipedia)
• • •
As I say, OXY had some real slingshot power. I wrote in OTOH for 1A: Texter's preamble, for some reason (IMHO), but OXY fixed that *and* got me COAX, and with the front ends of those long Downs in place, I was in business. For someone who is my age (think Stranger Things kids if we followed them allllll the way to 2022), and for someone who saw all those exceedingly boring Peter Jackson movies, and for someone who actually played D&D for a time as a kid, I remember surprisingly little about "LOTR," so ARAGORN came to me out of the cultural ether rather than any particular part of my knowledge storehouse. Or that's how it felt, anyway. Even if it had given me trouble, everything around it is so easy that it wouldn't have stalled me for long. Entire NE was done in Monday/Tuesday time (not getting PEDANTIC by *me*, that's for sure). But as I say, things stalled a little on the descent to the bottom half of the puzzle. That was mostly SAM SMITH's fault, but also partially Alek WEK's fault. I am doomed to forget her name every time she comes up, no matter how many times she comes up. Not having the "K," I couldn't see SKATER (the phrasing on that clue is preposterous, since it makes it sound like the same person is doing both sports ... also made it sound like the clue wanted a specific athlete, not a kind of athlete ... also, why is "in different sports" on there at all?—Winter and Summer Olympics don't share any sports, so that's a redundant qualification). But I rebooted in the far SW with STY (48A: Where snorting isn't rude), which gave me SCRIM THEME YEAST, bang bang bang, and then I whooshed back into the middle of the grid from there, finishing in the SW, where there was still trouble waiting even after I'd sorted SAM SMITH. I had JUMP / JAM before BAIL / BOP, so that gummed things up (61A: Abandon ship / 61D: Catchy song, in modern slang). And then, more dangerous because less completely wrong, I had SPAT instead of SPAR at 38A: Squabble. This made parsing ROSARIES impossible until the bitter end. "TOSA ... what? Aargh, great, some religious term I know nothing about ..." But no, just ROSARIES hiding behind a completely understandable error.
Bullets:
Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld
[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]
- 57A: Classic Vans sneaker model (ERA)— LOL I've been wearing Vans off and on for my whole life and I had no idea about this model or that Vans had model names at all.
- 37D: Place where shells are put away (TAQUERIA)— ah, right, the other reason I had trouble getting into the SW. The attempted misdirection here with "shells" didn't work on me at all, and yet ... I couldn't get past TACO ... TACO STAND, TACO BAR, TACO TRUCK ... nothing about the clue suggested I'd be getting the Spanish term, so I just stalled and ended up having to work the answer from the back end later on.
- 55A: What comes before a bet (ALEPH) — now this misdirection *did* work. This is a very well disguised Hebrew letter clue. Not sure I love the cheap trickery of adding the indefinite article "a" to the clue, but I respect the attempt to at least *try* to make this puzzle a little tougher.
- 60D: 2020 thriller in which Jessica Chastain plays the title role ("AVA") — I vaguely remember seeing this come across my Netflix menu a couple years back. I wonder if pandemic-era movies ... if anyone's going to remember they happened.
- 63A: Brand name on Cakesters snack cakes (OREO) — I had HOHO in here at some point. I'm kind of sad now that the "Is OREO in today's #NYTXW?" Twitter account is gonna have to reset its "Days since last #NYTXW OREO" count to zero. The streak was up to 33!
2022-06-24: No.
— Is OREO in today’s #NYTXW? (@NYTXW_Oreo) June 24, 2022
Days since last #NYTXW OREO: 33*
*New 2022 OREO-less streak
See you tomorrow!
[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]