Old music halls / THU 10-13-22 / Extended feature of "Hey Jude" and "Layla" / Congress-created media giant / Churchill portrayer in 2017's Darkest Hour / Mankind biblically / Jamaican sprinter Thompson-Herah / Fruit liqueur from Italy / Evidence provider for some citations

Elaine Sandra-Lee Thompson-Herah OD (née Thompson; born June 28, 1992) is a Jamaican sprinter who competes in the 60 metres, 100 metresand 200 metres. Regarded as one of the greatest sprinters of all time, she is a five-time Olympic champion, the fastest woman alive over the 100 m, and the third-fastest ever over 200 m. 

Thompson-Herah is the first female sprinter in history, and the second sprinter after Usain Bolt, to win the "sprint double" at consecutive Olympics, capturing 100 m and 200 m gold at the 2016 Rio Olympics and again at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. A six-time Olympic medallist, she rose to prominence at the 2015 World Athletics Championships, winning a silver in the 200 m. At the Rio Olympics, she became the first woman since Florence Griffith-Joynerin 1988 to win 100 m and 200 m gold at the Olympics. (wikipedia)

Much as I hate saying this (and I do), this was not enjoyable to me at all. The theme didn't seem to be playing fair, and the "reveal" was completely deflating. The worst part of all, from a puzzle-enjoyment standpoint, was that the answers in the grid are not clued. There is literally nothing pointing to them at the level of meaning or sense. This is an *especially* galling problem when getting those answers is so hard. I've seen unclued puzzle elements before, but usually they aren't your endpoint. They aren't your goal. They're incidental, or you get them relatively easily but don't quite know why? But here ... a lot of work for an answer with no apparent relationship to anything. You have to put the themers together from a formula ... for no reason. You just do. There is no thematic coherence to the set. What does REBUTTED have to do with BLARED OUT (an awkward phrase to begin with)? Nothing. At the level of meaning: nothing. None of the answers have anything to do with each other (at the definitional level) and none of the answers are even clued (at the definitional level). So you have this incredibly arduous task of having to figure out what the formula is for making the clues make any sense, and then you have to make a plausible (again, unclued) answer from that formula. When I say that the puzzle wasn't playing fair, I mean not just that the answers are unclued, but that they are unrelated to one another. I was really, really expecting the non-town elements of the theme answers to have *something* to do with each other. I somehow got REBUTTED (slowly, completely from crosses—had REBUTTAL in there at one point), and then thought "oh, ok, colors are involved" (because "BUTTE" appeared inside "RED"), and then ... well, the next themer started "BL-" so obviously that was going to have something to do with "BLUE," right? Ugh, wrong. With CHEERIEST I realized that the container words, i.e. the literal clue answers (RED, BUT, CHEST, etc.), unlike the "towns," were *also* not going to have anything to do with each other. It's just arbitrariness after arbitrariness, and for an extremely anticlimactic payoff. Anticlimactic at the level of the individual answer ("the answer to the clue .. is just ... BUT?"), and anticlimactic at the revealer (SKIP doesn't even accurately describe what's happening in every case—see below).

Add to all this the fact all the clues in the puzzle feel like they were turned way up, difficulty-wise. It was such a slog. I actually came to a dead stop with the entire SW mostly empty, wondering how in the world I was going to get in. I had DONNE and RELO written in there and that's about it. Couldn't get: SUITE, NPR (clue made it seem like something I'd never heard of) (46A: Congress-created media giant), TRAVAIL, RECIPROCAL, RADAR, MALTED (ugh), RECANT, ELAINE (just didn't know her), POLLED. But ... and maybe you can see where this is going ... the real issue in this section: PROVOLONE. Why? Because "SKIP" implies "jump over," i.e. start on one side and then continue on the other. But this answer Does Not Do That. The "answer,"LONE (53A: Sole), "skips" precisely *nothing*. You don't even deal with PROVO. It just sits off to the side, and then LONE comes after. That is not "skipping." And the letter combinations in that word meant that even though I knew PROVO was the "town" involved, I tried to put PROVO in using the "O"s from DONNE and HERO (i.e. the 2nd and 3rd "O"s) instead of those in RECIPROCAL and DONNE. And then of course couldn't make any answer fit. And since, as we've established, the full answers are Completely Unclued ... ugh. The only joy I got from this puzzle was writing in YEA HIGH, which is a fun thing to say (39A: "... about up to here"). The rest: a deliberately obtuse chore. I just don't understand where the fun is on this one. 

Had a few wrong answers, like SOLO for CODA (1A: Extended feature of "Hey Jude" and "Layla"), and ODE for OED (15A: Meaningful work, for short?). But mainly I just couldn't get things. I knew people got their GEDS, but I didn't know they had "scores," and boy does that look weird in the plural (40D: Their scores are on some coll. applications). Speaking of abbreviations, it felt like an onslaught at times. NBA OED BEEB ADDL is just the densest example. There's other clusters too, like NCIS IFC. And NSFW WDS IDS. And it's not like there's a lot of lovely fill to make up for it. I had this theme that was slow and unpleasant to solve, and then this grid that was both full of less-than-sparkling fill *and* clued hard. It just wasn't my day. Ooh, sorry: LIMONCELLO. I do like that (both as fill and as beverage). Ultimately, it just felt like there was no consideration given to what it would feel like to solve this thing. If you're gonna put me through the wringer, at least give me a prize for my perseverance. 

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld 

P.S. worth noting / confessing that I once published a puzzle with unclued theme answers, and that PROVOLONE was actually one of those answers (!?). My themers were more in the "real things clued wackily" vein, so the sense of the answer was literally there in the clue. Anyway, it's highly possible that many solvers failed to enjoy my puzzle, the way I failed to enjoy this one. It happens.

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