Constructor: Bruce Haight
Relative difficulty: Medium-Challenging (***for a Tuesday***)
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THEME: LINKING VERB (59A: Grammatical connector like "is" or "seem" ... or a connector found literally in 16-, 24-, 35- and 49-Across) — the letter string "VERB" can be found inside the theme answers, "linking" the first word in the answer to the second word in the answer:
Theme answers:
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Hey, this is a pretty good theme. Now take literally every single answer that is not a theme answer out of this puzzle and start over. Please. I'm begging you. The fill on this one was so rough, so old-fashioned and stale, so head-shakingly unsmooth, that I don't know why .... I don't know how ... I don't ... know. The red lights and alarms went off very, very early when I realized (with a start) that I was seeing MERL on a Monday. Like the canary in the coal mine, the MERL is a harbinger of doom, specifically the kind of doom that befalls you when you wander innocently into a Monday puzzle and get buried under a mountain of crosswordese and old world fill. I may have literally said "uh oh" when I hit MERL. Then ADELE ... crossed the "barbershop quartet"ADELINE ... which seems like a lot of ADEL-action, especially for crossing answers, but OK, you make it out of the NW alive, fine. Maybe things improve. But they do not. ACTIVTRE OER ... and all the time, you're getting what feels like a heightened number of cutesy "?" thrown at you (17D: Frequent flier? 7D: Coffee in the milky way? 27A: Slept soundly?). You really should earn that cutesiness. In a smooth grid, fine. In a mirthless, olden grid, the "?" are less welcome. As for the fill ... it gets worse. O'ER / ORE pair is unwelcome but looks harmless and quaint next to the *crossing* EERIE / ERIE pair. How in ... why ... why does no one balk at that, at any stage of the puzzle-making? Baffling. "IT" is here, twice. The proper noun "I" is here, twice. Even the acceptable stuff in the grid is pretty standard and stale (TEL OGLED (ugh) IRE DRNO EEO SAN ODE, those last three all stacked together). I don't know why greater polish is not required of the early-week themed grids.
Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld
Relative difficulty: Medium-Challenging (***for a Tuesday***)
Theme answers:
- NEVER BETTER (16A: Upbeat response to "How are you?")
- RIVER BASIN (24A: Central Brazil, for the Amazon)
- COVER BAND (35A: Musical group that doesn't play original songs)
- OVER BUDGET (49A: Costlier than projected)
Ecolab Inc. is an American corporation that is headquartered in Saint Paul, Minnesota. It develops and offers services, technology and systems that specialize in treatment, purification, cleaning and hygiene of water in wide variety of applications. It helps organizations, both in private as well as public market treat their water, not only for drinking directly, but also for use in food, healthcare, hospitality related safety and industry. Founded as Economics Laboratory in 1923 by Merritt J. Osborn, it was eventually renamed "Ecolab" in 1986. (wikipedia)
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Then there are the answers from outer space. First, VUDU, lol, I think maybe I kinda heard of that? Maybe? (36D: On-demand digital video brand). I had HULU in there, as people use HULU, and HULU seems the more Tuesday answer. But fine, sure, VUDU, whatever that is. Moving on, ECOLAB (28D: Big name in water purification) "Big name"? My dumb ass has been solving crosswords for 30 years and generally paying attention to the world for a good chunk of that time, and yet here it is, a Tuesday, and I get VUDU (faint bell) next to ECOLAB (literally no bell at all), back to back, side by side. And it's not like ECOLAB looks great. It doesn't look like cool, imaginative fill. It looks like product placement for a brand with an unloveable name. It looks like Yet Another ECO word. So it's both unfamiliar (to me) and unexciting. Last and possibly least in the "what?" department was MOVIE AD (39D: Trailer in a theater), an answer that is stunning in its failure to recognize that it is a clue, not an answer. That is, [Movie ad] is perfect for TRAILER. The reverse, much much less so. They're called TRAILERS. I saw about six of them before "TÁR" on Sunday. I might have accepted TEASER or even TEASER AD. Maybe. But MOVIE AD feels so completely tin-eared that I ... am out of words to describe how out of tune with the editorial process I am today. You've got a good theme. Seriously, simple concept, right on the money. Themers are all solid. All you've gotta do is fill a 76-word grid cleanly (and you could've made it 78 if 76 was too hard—no one would've blinked). But instead we get this. I have adored early-week puzzles in recentweeks, so if you wanna believe that I'm just "being a grump" or whatever, have at it. Or you could go back and look at *those* grids and acknowledge the overall quality difference. There's weak stuff in every grid; I only spend time enumerating it at length when the puzzle's not really giving me much else to do. This (clever) theme deserved (much) better fill.
Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld
P.S. I did (very much) like seeing ["Rumor has it..."] in a puzzle that also contains ADELE. Don't know if that was an intentional little wink, or an accident, but either way: nice: