Constructor: Erica Hsiung Wojcik and Matthew Stock
Relative difficulty: Medium
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THEME: colored rings and then more colored rings — first themer is clued as ["Red and yellow circles"] and then each subsequent theme clue adds a colored circle until you end up with five colored circles:
Theme answers:
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I just had a big delicious pricy meal which included cocktails *and* port and while this has put me in a pretty good mood, I think it also has something to do with the fact that this puzzle just didn't do much for me. I could process the concept fine, but it just didn't ... land. I see what's happening. I see that there is a steady progression, new colors added at each phase, etc. It's an ... interesting discovery, I guess. There's definite thematic consistency. My reaction is "huh, curious." But that's about it. It wasn't amusing, and I didn't have much of a feeling of revelation. The TWISTER MAT is not iconic to me at all—I know it has colored circles, but I have no idea what those colors are. I must never have actually played Twister. You could've told me they are any number of colors and I would've believed you. What color are the OLYMPIC RINGS? I might've been able to guess, but I don't know. The rings are iconic, that there are five, that seems iconic, but I don't think of the *colors* as particularly iconic. So when I got the answers, I just thought "oh, is that so?" Not, "aha!" I'm not even sure I could tell what color the Mastercard circles are. I sincerely would've told you that one of them is orange. But red and yellow, you say? OK. I know that the traffic light is red yellow green. *That* is iconic. The others are true enough, so the puzzle is valid enough. But it just didn't have any zing to it. More like an odd kind of trivia test. I do love the grid shape—the unusual mirror symmetry, the unusual 16x14 dimensions. But the only answer that really made me sit up and say "ooh" was DEATH GRIP (33D: Super-tight grasp). The theme is very interesting, but it wasn't funny or exciting to solve. Curious. Interesting. Those are the only words I have for it.
Relative difficulty: Medium
Theme answers:
- MASTERCARD LOGO ("Red and yellow circles")
- TRAFFIC LIGHT ("Red, yellow and green circles")
- TWISTER MAT ("Red, yellow, green and blue circles")
- OLYMPIC RINGS ("Red, yellow, green, blue and black circles")
Pirelli & C. S.p.A. is a multinational tyre manufacturer based in Milan, Italy. The company, which has been listed on the Milan Stock Exchange since 1922, is the 6th-largest tyre manufacturer and is focused on the consumer production of tyres for cars, motorcycles and bicycles. It is present in Europe, the Asia-Pacific, Latin America, North America and the Post-Soviet states, operating commercially in over 160 countries. It has 19 manufacturing sites in 13 countries and a network of around 14,600 distributors and retailers. In 2015, China National Chemical Corp. Ltd. (ChemChina) took controlling interest of Pirelli - with the Chinese state-owned company agreeing to maintain the tire company's ownership structure until 2023. (wikipedia)
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I had -STER MAT and still no idea. "Is there a ... TOASTER MAT?" But I also had -IC RINGS and no idea, which is less explicable. I blame the port. But honestly the "black" ring was what got me. I just couldn't fathom how "black" fit in. So I was slowish. I was also slowish on a bunch of two-part answers where the first parts seemed like they could've been a lot of things. Like "AW, NUTS" and "WHY, YES" and DART OFF. I also had issues with WAR DRAMA, which ... hmm. I know "war movies," that seems like a genre. But most of those are dramas, right? There really aren't that many war comedies or war horror films. I think the "drama" is kind of implied by the "war," so WAR DRAMA feels slightly off, slightly redundant. "War movie" googles much better. But WAR DRAMA googles reasonably well too. I dunno. I do know that HAHAS remains absurd as a plural, but overall this grid is very clean. The only thing I flat-out didn't know was PIRELLI, which I actually do know, or have at least heard of, but I wrote in BORELLI, which I think is a kind of pasta. It's at least pasta-adjacent. AW, NUTS, it's "Barilla" pasta. Is there a famous *singer* BORELLI? Ah, man, that's Andrea BOCELLI! Which rhymes with "vermicelli," which brings us back to pasta.
My family is having a voluble conversation about religion and death and glass-blowing so I have to go see how all those things fit together. Sorry I didn't feel the Zing with this one. I hope you did.