Baby aardvark / WED 8-10-2022 / Welty with a Pulitzer / Grammy-winning Aimee

Theme answers:

• Drink from a spring-- MINERAL WATER (as in, "Actually, I'd like well water!")
• Steakhouse option-- MEDIUM RARE (as in, "Actually, I'd like it cooked well!")
• Queasy, perhaps-- FEELING ILL (as in, "Actually, I'm feeling well!")

Word of the Day: EUDORA (Welty with a Pulitzer) —

Eudora Alice Welty (April 13, 1909 – July 23, 2001) was an American short story writer, novelist and photographer, who wrote about the American South. Her novel The Optimist's Daughter won the Pulitzer Prize in 1973. Welty received numerous awards, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Order of the South.

Heyyyy friendos, it's your pal Malaika subbing in for the ephemeral Rex. Sometimes y'all call me "adorable" and sometimes y'all call me "thoughtless," so we'll see what you think today! (Honestly, I think those are kinda the same thing.) I just played an incredibly good game of volleyball and I'm high off endorphins and adrenaline and serotonin and etc. I want to sprint laps around my block like a small child who was allowed to have both cake and ice cream at their birthday party but instead I will write this blog post!!!! ONWARDS!

I breezed through this puzzle (I average about ~15mins on a Wednesday, and this one I solved on my phone on the train!), and had all three of the theme answers before I reached the revealer, and zero guesses as to what it could be. It took a second for it to click-- It's not that "nitpicker" is the wrong term (it's not!), it's just not the term I most associate with "Well, actually..." 

You know how people will usually discuss the plusses and minuses of something? Or the highs and lows? I've been toying with listing the "zings" and "dings." Let me know in the comments if you're in.

Zings: We get three different meanings of the word WELL. The revealer is fun and modern, and ties things together with a good "Oh!!" moment. That's only two things but the last zing is just... I really liked this theme!! Which counts for like ten more zings because really that's all that matters when you solve your little crossword on your little train ride home from your little volleyball game.

Dings: My main ding is the grid layout. I am picky pick picky about grid shapes, and I am not a fan of groups of three three-letter words in the corners-- this puzzle has that in all four corners, and two of them were closed off. And, while there was some nice mid-length stuff like WINGMAN and TWIRLED and GAYDAR (with that clue!!! [Sense of orientation?]), there were no (non-theme answers) that were longer than seven letters. 

I totally get that building a grid around a revealer that's twelve letters is tough, but I wonder if just removing that block after LSU could have worked. Or either of these shapes? (I'm not putting in any effort to fill this, so maybe they're impossible.)

Bullets:

• [Tall, slender hound] for SALUKI — This is a new term for me. The dog resembles a greyhound with fluffier ears.
• Production company that's its founder's name spelled backwards]for OPRAH — I like that this went a more modern angle than the Marx Brothers :)
• I have not heard of OXY (Big name in acne medication) or DMX (First musician to have his first five albums debut at #1) and I feel like in a corner this small and closed off they were just added to get the letter X in there?
  

xoxo Malaika

P.S. I'll close with an unrelated tip from when I started constructing crosswords: I thought the hardest part of making a puzzle was arranging the black squares, so I would take themes from old NYT puzzles, lay them out in a grid, and then compare my layout to the original! It was kind of like Puzzle Push-ups. A good exercise, if you will.

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