Constructor: John-Clark Levin
Relative difficulty: Easyish
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THEME: "As Heard Around the Dinner Table" — theme answers contain circled letters that are MEAT SUBSTITUTES (102A: Vegetarian options ... or what the shaded letters in this puzzle are, phonetically); that is, they are letter strings that sound just like meats (in their respective answers) despite not being spelled as such:
Theme answers:
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Really wish I had better news here, but this was pretty brutal. Not brutal as in hard–it was mostly a breeze—but brutal as in painful to solve, for a number of reasons. The basic theme concept ... I don't think it really works. They aren't MEAT SUBSTITUTES in any meaningful sense of the term. The "shaded letters" aren't substituting for anything. If you'd spelled it PORKLEANSER, then sure, "meat" is serving as a "substitute" for the actual letters, but as is, what you've got are answers that are spelled absolutely correctly. The fact that the circled letters are kinda pronounced like various meats doesn't make those letters "substitutes" for anything. So on a literal level, the theme doesn't seem to work that well. Also, just circling the "LAM" in an answer doesn't seem like ... anything. How many billions of words could you have used there? So your themers are either arbitrary and totally non-special answers, like LAMP POST, or, on the other end of the spectrum, they are tortured answers, like GO TO A RESTAURANT. I mean ... wow. Wow. I ... I mean, I invented the goofy phrase EAT A SANDWICH to describe a certain variety of ridiculous "[verb] A [noun]" phrases you sometimes see in crosswords, but I never ever imagined I'd seen an answer that was actually *goofier* than EAT A SANDWICH. I'm gonna have to rename the concept now. No, I'm not going to, but GO TO A RESTAURANT is hall-of-fame ridiculous. And then to have the gall, the gumption, the nerve to also put GETSANA in the same grid?! Amazing. Amazingly gruesome, but amazing nonetheless. Add to all this the puzzle's bizarre, perverse commitment to gratuitously inserting some of the very worst human beings into the grid (BRET Stephens!?!? SAM Bankman-Fried!?!? Whyyyyyyyy? What are you doing? Who is that for?), and you've got ... well, I don't know what, but nothing I would care to re-experience, that's for sure.
Relative difficulty: Easyish
Theme answers:
- GO TO A RESTAURANT (22A: Dine out) (goat)
- DUCT TAPE (35A: Aid in some makeshift repairs) (duck)
- PORE CLEANSER (38A: Blackhead remover) (pork)
- BEFORE PICTURE (62A: Part of many a weight-loss ad) (beef)
- BAKE IN THE SUN (85A: Lie out on a scorching day) (bacon)
- LAMP POST (89A: Landmark at the entrance to Narnia) (lamb)
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GO TO A RESTAURANT omg sorry I'm still laughing / dying inside over this answer. LOL, HOW DAREYOU indeed. I think I blacked out after that, somehow completing the puzzle without retaining much memory of any of it. The long Downs on the sides are kind of interesting. That's a nice little feature. Or ... it's the nicest feature of the puzzle, that's for sure. PANCAKE (as clued) and SLAMMER have some good energy. But the grid as a whole is rather bland, and the structure of the grid, woof, it's so horribly segmented. So many black squares, and those NE and SW corners are *ridiculously* cut off from the areas just beneath them. If you are in the NE corner, you cannot move down the grid without going All The Way Over, past the puzzle median, to AIRDROP at 41D: Apple wireless file transfer. Obviously the same holds true in reverse for the SE corner (gotta go allllll the way over to DECADES to move up). It feels really clunkily put together. I'm sorry I don't have more to say, or at least more to say that's positive. I just think this one missed the mark on every level—at the level of concept, execution, and overall fill. As for difficulty, there wasn't much. I think the hardest part for me was the DOUR DYED LOAF EUROS part. Lots of clues there I didn't understand. Had IDLE for LOAF (43D: Do nothing) and SOUR for DOUR (51A: Ill-humored) and had no idea what to make of the clue on EUROS (44D: Paris bar tender?) ("tender" here is "money"—so, the money you'd use at a Paris bar = EUROS). So that was a tough patch, but that's the only one, I think. I truly hope you found more to admire than I did.
Anything need explaining? A COT is [Where you might go down in the ranks?] because "go down" = "sleep" and "ranks" = "other soldiers." That's all for me on this one. See you next time.