Constructor: Andy Kravis
Relative difficulty: Easy
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THEME: [body part] THE [noun] — familiar phrases that follow this pattern, with the body part serving as a verb:
Theme answers:
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It's not uncommon for me to not care for a theme but find much to love in the fill. Today, world upside-down. I really like this theme a lot. Like yesterday's, there's an elegant simplicity—it took a while for the gimmick to fully sink in, but somewhere around SHOULDER it did, and then even though I had it, I was still left curious what body parts were left to make fitting phrases with. There's a bit of a cheat there at the end with the pluralization of TOES (yes, you do have multiple toes, but you also have multiple feet, and shoulders (probably) and those appear here in the singular). But that particular pluralization is one of those "brain notices, heart doesn't care" moments you experience when your good will toward a puzzle is too strong to allow nits to undermine it. But then there's the fill, which ... wasn't so much horrible as it was surprising (to me) in its old-fashionedness, its old-schoolness, its "play the OLDIES" vibe. So many things that I have only (and often) seen in crosswords, things I wouldn't even know if crosswords didn't exist, like where OPORTO is and who Stephen Vincent BENÉT is. These proper nouns will give long-time solvers a leg up today and, conversely, possibly make things a little slower going for people who've only been solving a few years. But that's just the tip of the repeater iceberg. IONE and ENLAI are hanging out together in a very small back booth there in the NW, both of them looking at her ACER laptop, for some reason. Cat videos, probably. Meanwhile, in a nearby booth, ALBEE and AHAB and BIL KEANE are soberly discussing the EEC (gonna give BIL a pass today since he appears in full-name form, though—that takes him out of the routine category) (uh oh, just noticed that BIL crosses BILL. Judges? ... no foul! Phew, that was close). There's a TSAR and Cousin ITT and two (?) different hesitation sounds (UMM, ERS), the hairy pair of ESAU and OSO studying for their LSATs, there's "The APIAN TABU," which is a fantasy fantasy novel I just made up, and well, finally the H- I mean N- I mean A-TESTS take us out with a crosswordesey bang. The gang is all here. Except ENO and ONO. Total no-shows. The point is, this one felt deliberately dialed back (in time). I solved puzzles back then (in time), so all this fill feels perfectly ordinary. Just 1993 ordinary, is all.
[Many OLDIES are great—'60s girl groups, for instance!]
Relative difficulty: Easy
Theme answers:
- FOOT THE BILL (18A: Pay for something expensive)
- FACE THE MUSIC (26A: Confront unpleasant consequences)
- SHOULDER THE BLAME (40A: Take responsibility for a misdeed)
- BACK THE FIELD (49A: Bet on every competitor but one)
- TOES THE LINE (62A: Conforms to expectations)
Stephen Vincent Benét /bɪˈneɪ/ (July 22, 1898 – March 13, 1943) was an American poet, short story writer, and novelist. He is best known for his book-length narrative poem of the American Civil War, John Brown's Body (1928), for which he received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, and for the short stories "The Devil and Daniel Webster" (1936) and "By the Waters of Babylon" (1937). In 2009, The Library of America selected his story "The King of the Cats" (1929) for inclusion in its two-century retrospective of American Fantastic Tales edited by Peter Straub.
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But enough about the short fill, what about the long fill. It's good. Varied, colorful. I got SAUERKRAUT off the SAUE- without even looking at the clue, so that was fun (29D: Ingredient in a Reuben). I have never seen a DOG HOTEL but I believe that they exist. I wanted DOGSPA at first (which is also a thing that somehow exists), but it wouldn't fit. No FLEAS in a DOG HOTEL, I bet. That would be a major ISSUE. I've seen RAGEQUITS before (37D: Angrily stops playing a game, in modern parlance)—it's possible that I learned it from crosswords years and years ago—and I like it, since, well, let's just say, "rage-quitting: it's just just for video games anymore!" [cue photo of Any Number of people abandoning Sunday's puzzle]. And then there's AIR BUBBLES, which are literally bubbly. This quartet definitely alleviated some of the short-fill malaise.
I reacted so negatively to the "dad joke" that my eyes ran away from it holding only the phrase "four seconds" and then used crosses to make something vaguely related to that phrase (CLOCK) (my fingers are now refusing to type out the full clue, sorry). Interesting choice to clue KUBLAI that way (23A: ___ Khan, Yuan Dynasty founder) instead of via Coleridge, though Coleridge is almost certainly the reason the vast majority of solvers know who KUBLAI Khan is.
According to Coleridge's preface to Kubla Khan, the poem was composed one night after he experienced an opium-influenced dream after reading a work describing Shangdu, the summer capital of the Mongol-led Yuan dynasty of China founded by Kublai Khan (Emperor Shizu of Yuan). (wikipedia)
Haven't read Coleridge for a while so I'm gonna have Ian McMillan read him to me now while I format this post. Take care, everyone.