Constructor: Garrett Chalfin
Relative difficulty: Medium (normal Monday)
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THEME: THE PRICE IS RIGHT (59A: Classic game show ... or a hint to 17-, 26- and 47-Across)— words meaning (roughly) "price" are all the way over on the "right" side of the grid (i.e. at the ends of long Across answers):
Theme answers:
This one lost me right away. It's a very bad sign when a Monday puzzle can't even keep the fill clean enough for me to get out of the NW corner without me becoming distracted by its weakness, so much so that I'm inclined to stop and take a screenshot.
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Some more things:![]()
Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld
Relative difficulty: Medium (normal Monday)
Theme answers:
- WHOLE BEAN COFFEE (17A: Input for a barista's grinder)
- "CARE TO ELABORATE?" (26A: "Can you say more about that?")
- GUERILLA WARFARE (47A: Tactic employed by the Vietcong)
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The title was revived in 2018, when Queen Elizabeth II bestowed it on her grandson Prince Harry on 19 May 2018 upon his marriage to Meghan Markle. (wikipedia)
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DYE LOT? DYE VAT? I dunno, I just know that the whole world of DYE-related things exist in my mind solely because of crosswords, why? DYE DYED DYES DYER DYERS, then DYE LOT, which I definitely learned from crosswords, and DYE VAT, which maybe I've also seen, but sigh. To be clear, I'm sighing not so much because of DYE VAT, but because it was the last straw, the answer that exhausted me before I was even 30 seconds into this thing. OAHU OTOE EEL ... it's a teeny corner and I felt like already I was just getting all the old repeaters flung at me before I'd even had time to get underway. And of course things didn't really improve. I mean, the longer answers are, of course, more interesting, but LIL ANI OSLO et al just never let up. Are we still doing LOLCAT (singular?) in the year of our lord 2022? OK. And as for the theme, well, the discovery of that was occasion for yet another deep sigh and another screenshot:
FEE ... RATE ... oh boy, grindingly mundane transactional bizness-y terms. This reminded me of all the crosswordese I have had to endure involving ads (including ADRATE and ADFEE as well as ADMAN ADSPACE etc.). The dullest things in life ... turned into a puzzle theme. OK. I mean, there's cute wordplay in the revealer (the "price" is indeed "right"), but it's really just ... at the end. If you'd actually *shifted* something right, that would seem like ... something. This is just a "like endings"-type puzzle masquerading as something slightly more elaborate. The answers themselves are mostly fine. I would enjoy seeing something like WHOLE BEAN COFFEE or "CARE TO ELABORATE" in a themeless puzzle, or under different thematic circumstances. I'm less sanguine about GUERILLA WARFARE, which is grisly on its face and is made somehow grislier by the clue's specificity about the Vietnam War. Surely there are other -FARE ending words out there that could fit the bill. The theme concept is stronger than the overall fill, but both are a bust for me today.
- 54A: Love, with "the" ("L" WORD) — this was one of the few answers that slowed me down. I could not conceive how anything "with 'the'" could possibly mean "love"—certainly not as a verb, and not as a noun either. I really think ... well, two things: 1, the clue needs some kind of qualifier, like "it's said," perhaps, because I have never called "love""the 'L' WORD"; and that leads me to 2, which is that the "L" WORD is "lesbian." Everybody knows this. They made a TV show about it and everything. Two TV shows!
- 49D: "The Shining" plot device that became significant when read backward (REDRUM)— "plot device?" I got this because of the "read backward" part but would never have got it without the "read backward" part because "plot device" just feels like a bizarre thing to call it. It's no more a plot device than the hotel or the labyrinth or Jack's typewriter or the axe or the elevator ... like, it's *in* the book, but ... "plot device" feels wrong. It's too specific. It's not a "technique." It's not a recognizable thing that other plots have used. It's just this freaky way that "Tony" indicates to Danny that some bad **** is going to go down. It looks cool and sounds scary when Danny says it (in "Tony"'s voice), but "device"? I dunno.
See you tomorrow.