Constructor: Erica Hsiung Wojcik and Matthew Stock
Relative difficulty: Medium
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THEME: none
Word of the Day: "R.U.R." (29D: 1920 play from which the word "robot" comes) —![]()
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Fridays continue to come in flat for me, though this one is better than I've seen in a while, actually. It's solid throughout, nothing wrong with it, but nothing much exciting about it either. Themelesses don't ... well, they don't have themes, you'll be surprised to hear, and so you get a good amount of real estate to work with; the grid is yours to fill as you wish and since the word count is typically lower than that of a themed puzzle (72 answers or less), there's typically a high number of longer answers—"marquee answers," I tend to call them. These are places where a themeless puzzle has a chance to shine, and since this is supposed to be the Best Puzzle In The World or whatever, I expect these "marquee answers" to be not just sturdy, but glimmering. Not all of them, perhaps, but the bulk of them. Certainly, in a grid like this, it would be ideal to be able to say "nice!" in every corner at least once, and then again, across the middle, at least once. I got exactly two "nice"s today—both on answers that I initially struggled with, so "nice" has no necessary connection to ease of solving. I had WATCH ... actually I had -TOR WATCH at 37A: Obsolescent two-in-one device and wrote in TRANSISTOR WATCH (is that a thing? ... I think I was thinking of Dick Tracy's two-way radio watch ... I listened to a podcast about Madonna and Warren Beatty and the making of Dick Tracy yesterday, so my brain's in a weird place). But then AER Lingus came to the rescue (first time I've ever been grateful to that crosswordese fragment for anything), and -ATOR quickly became CALCULATOR, and yes, CALCULATOR WATCHes I remember those, maybe had one, cool, retro answer, liked it, thank you.
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Relative difficulty: Medium
Word of the Day: "R.U.R." (29D: 1920 play from which the word "robot" comes) —
R.U.R. is a 1920 science-fiction play by the Czech writer Karel Čapek. "R.U.R." stands for Rossumovi Univerzální Roboti (Rossum's Universal Robots, a phrase that has been used as a subtitle in English versions). The play had its world premiere on 2 January 1921 in Hradec Králové; it introduced the word "robot" to the English language and to science fiction as a whole. R.U.R. soon became influential after its publication. By 1923, it had been translated into thirty languages. R.U.R. was successful in its time in Europe and North America. Čapek later took a different approach to the same theme in his 1936 novel War with the Newts, in which non-humans become a servant-class in human society. (wikipedia)
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I had a similar struggle-to-revelation experience with 63A: "OK, there's something puzzling me ..."—I had the "ASK" part and tried to write in "I GOTTA ASK" and "I'VE GOT TO ASK," neither of which fit, so instead I went to ... "I HATE TO ASK." And then I "confirmed" HATE by writing in STN at 60D: One of 17 spaces on a Monopoly board: Abbr. (AVE.). Yes yes *of course* I know there are not *17* railroads in Monopoly, and that the railroads in that game aren't even technically stations, but I had "I HATE TO ASK" and TORN TO BITS at 65A: Shredded, which meant -TN for the Monopoly answer, so my brain just went "Monopoly, railroads, stations, yep, keep moving." Anyway, "I HAVE TO ASK" is good. It's got a nice colloquial pop. So, another "nice!" But it's just hard to get excited by much of the rest of it, solid though it (mostly) is—very very very hard to ever get excited about something like DATA CENTER. I did like turning the middle of the grid into a hypothetical rhyming cafe conversation ("ESPRESSO?""I GUESS SO"), but overall there just wasn't that Friday zing that I (now) miss so much.
Had trouble getting started with this one until I found ANNA Gunn, followed by ATE NEST and PSA, and then I think I was finally able to put CARNE ASADA in there (I might be more excited by this answers if I didn't see both CARNE and ASADA in grids fairly regularly, especially ASADA ... I actually thought 13D: Mexican marinade (ADOBO)was ASADA at first). Found TRANSLATOR very hard to pick up (18A: Jorge Luis Borges vis-à-vis William Faulkner or Franz Kafka), and not only wasn't 100% sure about ADOBO, but also had RATES :( before RATIO at 12D: Two to one, e.g., and no idea what the MOOS clue wanted (25A: Low notes?), so I really had to work for that first corner (note: cows "low," that's the verb, that's what they do when they moo). Things got much easier after that. Names weren't too much of a problem today. I actually knew CARLOS Boozer —if you don't follow the NBA, he must've seemed pretty obscure. None of the other names seem too tough, although I did have some trouble with AKBAR and really that whole NW corner, which is a bit YUCK, with its intersecting NYSE / NCAA abbrevs. Totally guess on the CUTS part of CUTS A DEAL, which I absolutely needed to make sense of things up there.
A few more things:
- 51A: Was out of one's league, so to speak (DATED UP) — this is original, but something about the phrase rubs me wrong, since it's inherently either classist or ... I don't know, making a comment about someone's relative ugliness or boorishness or I don't know what. It's mean-spirited.
- 45D: They've got bills for their newborns (STORKS)— I liked this one even less. The "their" in this clue is doing some weird work. Are we really propagating the "STORKS bring (human!?) babies" myth in 2023, without even a ... question mark or anything? Is this even an active myth any more? The "wordplay" doesn't even really work here, on any level. Is this supposed to look like a ... hospital bill reference? I know yes yes STORKS have "bills" ha ha got it, but what was the misdirection supposed to be? Huge miss, this clue.
- 26A: Power ender (-ADE) — an ad for PowerADE. Great.
- 7D: Period of one's life, in TikTok talk (ERA)— yes, TikTok invented this :/
- 61D: Half a cocktail (TAI)— well there's a kealoa* for you? Why not [Part of a cocktail (in two ways)?]? Because it's part of the cocktail name (Mai TAI) and it's actually found in the word "cocktail". Anyway, guessing between MAI and TAI, not anyone's idea of a good time.
- 53A: Landmark 1990 antidiscrimination legislation, for short (ADA)— the Americans with Disabilities Act
- 52D: "No more than passing from one room into another," per Helen Keller (DEATH) — Helen Keller has DEATH quotes? Weird. I had DREAM here, which I really, really liked. I still like it. Not mad at DEATH, just like DREAM better. It's a cool way to think about dreams. Plus, unlike DEATH, a DREAM is a room you can actually come out of.
*kealoa = a pair of words (normally short, common answers) that can be clued identically and that share at least one letter in common (in the same position). These are answers you can't just fill in quickly because two or more answers are viable, Even With One or More Letters In Place. From the classic [Mauna ___] KEA/LOA conundrum. See also, e.g. [Heaps] ATON/ALOT, ["Git!"] "SHOO"/"SCAT," etc.
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