Constructor: Karen SteinbergRelative difficulty: Slightly to the harder side of Tuesday (mostly because the first longer answer was basically unclued and the second one ... I know only vaguely)
THEME: SLEEP-WAKE CYCLES (57A: Body's internal clock patterns, regulated by the phenomenon seen in the circled letters) — circled squares form a wave across the grid that spells out CIRCADIAN RHYTHM. You also get the answer
TWENTY-FOUR HOURS at the top of the grid (
16A: Approximate length of 57-Across), as well as
DAY up top (
5A: Light time) and
NIGHT down below (
66A: Dark time)
Word of the Day: circadian rhythm (spelled out in the wavy circle-line across the grid) —
A circadian rhythm (), or circadian cycle, is a natural, internal process that regulates the sleep–wake cycle and repeats roughly every 24 hours. It can refer to any process that originates within an organism (i.e., endogenous) and responds to the environment (entrained by the environment). These 24-hour rhythms are driven by a circadian clock, and they have been widely observed in animals, plants, fungi and cyanobacteria.
The term circadian comes from the Latin circa, meaning "around" (or "approximately"), and diēm, meaning "day". Processes with 24-hour cycles are more generally called diurnal rhythms; diurnal rhythms should not be called circadian rhythms unless they can be confirmed as endogenous, and not environmental.
Although circadian rhythms are endogenous, they are adjusted to the local environment by external cues called zeitgebers (German for "time givers"), which include light, temperature and redox cycles. In clinical settings, an abnormal circadian rhythm in humans is known as a circadian rhythm sleep disorder.
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What does the wave represent? I am not quite understanding the visual representation. It looks like an EKG or other hospital monitor ... but are circadian rhythms measured this way? If you do a google image search on [circadian rhythm], all the visuals you get are basically dial-shaped, like a clock face (not surprisingly), showing day on one side and night on the other, or something like that. Something like this, actually:
or this:
or this:
You do have the
DAY / NIGHT thing going on, but those answers are so small they hardly register. As for the "circadian rhythm" wave: there's no doubt that a "wave" is a common enough representation of
a cycle, but the connection between the visual (the puzzle's whole reason for being) and the word it contains just seems weak. Also, I know the phrase primarily in the plural: circadian rhythm
s. That's how it appears in the title of this page at
UCLA Sleep Disorder clinic, for instance, and it must be the way the phenomenon is commonly talked about, otherwise I'm not sure why it would exist in the plural in my head. Its appearing in the singular here certainly isn't an error or inelegance, just a grid-fitting tweak that jarred my ear a bit. Notice that while "rhythm" is in the singular, the revealer is in the plural. More grid-fitting. Notice also that the wave isn't exactly regular, i.e. flattens out at the top of its cycle (for two squares) but then spikes at the bottom. Again, the grid is a harsh taskmaster, so you make your theme material work however you can. I don't think any of the grid accommodations here are egregious or disqualifying, but when you make a visual element into the marquee event, little glitches and incongruencies stand out (if you bother to look and don't just get on with your day like a normal person).
The fill was rough, especially through the wave, which is not surprising. As I've said before, trying to fill a grid neatly around a word that runs on diagonals is very hard. If you put TWENTY-FOUR HOURS in your grid, well, it just sits on one line and behaves itself and you just have to do the normal amount of architectural work to accommodate it, whereas when a phrase does what "circadian rhythm" does, hoo boo are you in for a rough ride. Seems like it should be the same amount of trouble—same number of letters as TWENTY-FOUR HOURS, after all; but when you leave the straight plane of the Across, now you're involving all the other Across planes in your shenanigans and the grid will really start to buck and thrash on you. This is why you get FAA and DOFOR and AONE and RAE all clumped in a wet bunch there in the middle, and then the OTTO OHM OHH wad in the east, oof, that was probably the roughest part of the grid for me. I'm never good at those [Good name for someone who works in some profession]-type answers, and having the "O" at 38A: Apt name for a car mechanic? (OTTO) all I could think of was "... OILY? Are people named OILY?" And then I wanted ERGO for THUS (40D: Start of a conclusion). And *then*, after I got THUS, I really Really wanted AHA for 44A: ""Now" I get it!" ("OHH!"). Oof, that one answer, "OHH!," gave me more trouble than anything else except the revealer, which I needed almost every cross for (that WAKE part was ???). I wanted OHM for 41D: Physicist Georg with electrifying discoveries? but AHA wasn't letting me go with it. And even when I went with it, I ended up with "AHH!" for 44A: ""Now" I get it!," which, come on, seems at least as right as "OHH!" Just a wreck, and a wreck happening on some of the junkiest fill in the grid. Not too much fun. I did run into a classic example of a kealoa* today, though, which wasn't fun either, but it does allow me to illustrate the phenomenon rather neatly with a grid shot:
The only way this could be a more perfect example of the type is if the word "Observatory" were not in the clue. Maybe it's supposed to help you decide between LOA and KEA, but not being an observatory aficionado, it didn't help me at all. And as you can see, I had the "A"—which also didn't help me at all. That is the hallmark of the kealoa*—there's no way to decide between two (or more) options until you get some crosses ... and then you get one (or more) ... and it *still* doesn't help you. This happens with a bunch of common crossword answers: ATON v ALOT, ELUDE v EVADE, etc. A kealoa is a little hassle, not a Natick**-level catastrophe. See you tomorrow.
Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld
[UPDATE: the thing about having smart readers is, well, you will hear about it if you go crashing ignorantly into their specialities. Thankfully, I have not only smart but (mostly) kind readers. So thank you to reader Bill L. for sending me the following email this morning:]
*kealoa = a short, common answer that you can't just fill in quickly because two or more answers are viable, Even With One or More Letters In Place. From the classic [Mauna ___] KEA/LOA conundrum. See also, e.g. [Heaps] ATON/ALOT, ["Git!"] "SHOO"/"SCAT," etc.
**Natick = an impossible crossing (see blog sidebar for full definition)
