Constructor: Adam Wagner
Relative difficulty: Medium
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THEME:"Going Off on a Tangent"— the five theme answers are BENT OUT / OF SHAPE (85D: With 86-Down, very upset ... like the answers to five of this puzzle's clues?). That is: the themers have two elements: the clued element literally goes off on a tangent (i.e. zags diagonally up and to the right at the end); the unclued element continues straight (like a conventional Across answer) *and* spells out a shape (CIRCLE, HEART, TRIANGLE, STAR, SQUARE). So the bent (clued) answer literally gets BENT OUT / OF SHAPE (i.e. appears to emerge from a word that is also a shape ("shape" words are in red below):
Theme answers:
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Maybe there's some kind of letdown that I'm having here at the tail end of Thanksgiving vacation / birthday week, because wow I found this one very, very tedious. There are individual answers here and there, like WHIZBANG and maybe BONG HIT, that offer some entertaining moments along the way, but for the most part this was a slog. The theme was so depressingly void of interest, so impossibly one-note. So ... these Across answers go (per the title) "off on a tangent"—that is, they kick up to the NE, on a diagonal, at their tail ends. But ... why? To what end? Those "tangents" are just ... nothing. They're random letters. The letters do not spell anything. They do not relate to one another. They are completely random and arbitrary letters, as far as I can see (-TY! -ING! -ACK!). If those tangent-going letters do anything ... anything at all, I apologize for being unable to see it. So there's this inherent pointlessness. Or seeming pointlessness. Then there's the unclued answers that just keep heading Across; that is, only the "off on a tangent" answer is clued—the regular only-horizontal answer is just ... a plausible answer. With no clue. None. Zero. This is fun how? I guess the revealer is supposed to tell us how—all of the "bent" answers (the clued answers) arise out of a word that is also a "shape"—that is, the clued answers are bent (got it) "out of (a) shape" (i.e. the bend gives you one answer, but the continuing (unclued!) Across answer turns into a shape (CIRCLE, HEART (!?!), TRIANGLE, STAR (!?!?!), SQUARE ). This concept was totally invisible to me until well after I'd started this write-up. I thought BENT OUT / OF SHAPE was just another (redundant) way of expressing that the clued themers went "off on a tangent." The presence of actual shapes in the (unclued) straight-Across answers ... just didn't register. Probably because, as I've said, many time, parenthetically and unparenthetically, those straight-Across themers are Un Clued! So how *can* they make an impact!?!? If you immediately grasped the "out of shape" bit, you are a more perspicacious solver than I am. Or you're just less full of cocktail / chocolate cake.
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Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld
Relative difficulty: Medium
Theme answers:
- INNER CITY (22A: Urban area typically with the tallest buildings) / INNER CIRCLE
- OPEN HEARING (38A: Public court proceeding) / OPEN HEART
- RIGHT TRACK (61A: What you're on when you're making progress) / RIGHT TRIANGLE
- SUPERSTORM (83A: Major concern for a meteorologist) / SUPERSTAR
- LEMON SQUEEZER (101A: Certain juicing need) / LEMON SQUARE
Keenan Alexander Allen (born April 27, 1992) is an American football wide receiver for the Los Angeles Chargers of the National Football League (NFL). He played college football at California before leaving after his junior year. He was drafted by the Chargers in the third round of the 2013 NFL Draft. Allen won multiple rookie honors after setting Chargers' records for receptions and receiving yards by a rookie. In 2017, he was named the NFL Comeback Player of the Year. [ed: He's also a 5x Pro Bowler] (wikiepdia)
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That corner with the revealer ... woof. Tough, precisely because of the revealer (a two-part cross-reference in a tightly enclosed space). If you don't know the revealer (and how could you without considerable help from crosses), it's difficult to get traction. PAVED ROAD was way too generically (and boringly) clued (104A: Residential construction project). Then I wanted EATS for SUPS (!?!) (109A: Has a meal) (nothing in that clue quite gets at the quaintness of SUPS). And if the Bruins aren't UCLA, shrug, no idea (I *have* heard of the BOSton Bruins, just ... less so). But the difficulty of the corner is truly beside the point—the point is, this theme (at least the "shape" angle) is a tree falling in a forest with no one to hear it. And then when you do hear it, it sounds mostly like a sad trombone.
DANK memes? Whaaaaat year is it? I haven't heard that expression in what feels like a decade, but is probably just five years or so. But five years may as well be *two* decades in Internet Time. Woof. AGAPE and AGHAST are not only both in the grid, but practically on top of each other. And ugh x 100 to the very concept of "don't yuck my yum," which is for sensitive babies who can't bear the fact that some people don't like what they like. Grow up. And stop talking baby talk. Also, more importantly, YUCKED, in the past tense, is about as ugly a thing as I've ever seen in a grid. Just nonsense. The worst thing about the fill, though, was the EWAN / VAN crossing. Why in the world would you cross names at a vowel like that, when neither of the names is household, and one of the names (VAN) could Easily have been clued in a non-name way!? That square pretty much had to be an "A" since is the only name you can plausibly make out of EW-N, and I can kinda picture VAN Jones, now that I think of it (I LOATHE 24-hr news and stopped watching it completely after the 2016 election). But it's an awful editorial decision to clue VAN as a name there, esp. if your EWAN is of the non-McGregor variety.
No idea what a "Pitch Perfect" film series is, so I needed every cross for KAY (43A: ___ Cannon, creator of the "Pitch Perfect" film series). Looks like these were exceedingly popular movies of a type I would never ever see. Sometimes I am in touch, but frequently I am out. Ah well. I know ELENA Ochoa (golfer) but this not-quite ELENA (i.e. ELLEN) Ochoa, that name threw me (14D: Discovery astronaut Ochoa) (ha, joke's on me: the golfer is actually LORENA Ochoa). As for UPZONE ... is "urban planning lingo" actually a lingo that we're supposed to know now? Seems astonishingly, uh, narrow. What is it "up" from? What does "up" mean here? You can't even infer it very easily. Is "more high-density housing and mixed-use development" good? It sounds pretty good? Is it ... up? There are surely answers to these questions, but this is a term that is both too specialized and not immediately clear enough in its meaning. Just because it appears in some wordlist / dictionary doesn't make it good. The first hit I get when I google it says "Upzoning is just what it sounds like: growing a little taller to have more homes and businesses in our communities." But the clue says nothing about height (of buildings). I would never have considered that the UP in UPZONE meant "growing a little taller," i.e. literal height. The clue is no help. If you're going to introduce professional argot of a highly specialized type, the least you could do is clue it in a way that makes the term make sense. This write-up was exhausting. Just explaining the theme, ugh. I need sleep. See you Monday.
Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld