Constructor: Parker Higgins
Relative difficulty: Medium
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THEME: DOES THE SPLITS (33A: Performs a gymnastics movie requiring flexibility ... or enters answers into this puzzle's four shaded parts)— words that can precede "SPLIT" in familiar phrases are found "split" across black squares four times:
Theme answers:
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My apologies for what will have to be a fairly short* and somewhat tentative write-up today. I went to see Richard Thompson (again) last night, in Homer, NY (about 70 miles west of OTSEGO Lake on State Route 80) and I didn't get home til late, and by "late" I mean 11pm, and yes, you are right to heckle me for calling 11pm "late," but when that means you won't actually get to *sleep* til midnight and the alarm goes off at 4:15am, trust me, it's late. So I'm sitting here on precisely that much sleep, and just doing everything ... methodically. The cats were like "come ON!" but I was like "look I'm not descending these stairs until you are well and truly clear of my feet, so ... go play or something ... oh, you're just going to mill around my feet even more? ... you know if I die on these stairs, you won't get fed, you know that, right?" Etc. I approached the puzzle with the same amount of caution, just one letter at a time, no racing, not even opinion-having, just ... getting it done. I said this was going to be short and I've already got a full-paragraph preamble going. Sorry about that. The point is that I have no confident feelings about this puzzle. I was able to grasp the theme and finish with no errors, and these were my only goals. But let's see if I can't say something about the whole endeavor. Well, the theme does what it says it does. My only issue (not even sure it rises to the status of "issue") is that SEVEN-TEN doesn't feel properly "split" ... which is a weird thing to say, I know, since technically it's precisely split, with the SEVEN (pin) over here [points here] and the TEN (pin) over there [points there], just like in the bowling scenario for which it's named, but since the split doesn't "split" any words in two, it feels like an outlier compared to the other themers. Now that I think about it, I don't think I have an "issue" after all. That themer is executed differently, yes, but necessarily so, I think. You could only split one of those words and then you'd be leaving just the one word unsplit. I think that themer gets the good old "Bowling Exemption" (a thing I just made up). The difference between six hours sleep and four hours sleep is Remarkable...
Relative difficulty: Medium
Theme answers:
- MAKES EVEN / TENOR (16A: Brings to a tie / 17A: High low voice)
- CUBAN / ANACONDAS (27A: Grilled ham-and-cheese sandwich / 28A: Amazon swimmers)
- ASPIRES TO / CK ONE (43A: Aims for / 47A: Unisex fragrance launched in 1994)
- SLICK / ETYMOLOGY (55A: Certain ocean pollution / 56A: Old English, for better or worse?)
Otsego Lake is a 4,046-acre (16.37 km2) lake located in Otsego County in the U.S. state of New York. It is the source of the Susquehanna River and largest lake in Otsego County. The Village of Cooperstown is located at the lake's southern end. Glimmerglass State Park is located on the lake's northeastern shore, and includes Hyde Hall, a large mansion constructed in 1817, that overlooks the lake. The Glimmerglass Opera, opened in June 1987, is located on the western shore.
Between 10,000 and 12,000 years ago, glaciers of the Wisconsin glaciation filled the valley. Otsego Lake was formed when an ice tongue from a glacier carved out the Susquehanna River Valley. As the glaciers melted slowly, they filled in the valley they carved out. The lake takes its name from the Iroquois Indians, who inhabited the area around the lake in and before the 17th century. The name Otsego is from a Mohawk or Oneida word meaning "place of the rock", referring to the large boulder near the lake's outlet, today known as Council Rock. (wikipedia)
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The fill felt a little rough to me, but again, I don't trust myself today, so I'm not going to stand on any of the following assertions too strongly. There seemed a lot of short fill, which can kind of gunk up a grid (with stuff like ASTO and AAH and SAO and ONO GDP YAS etc.), and some of the longer fill seemed wasted, but which I mean not as flashy or original or nice as I usually like the long non-thematic stuff to be. IONIA is a very crosswordesey entry, so IONIAN SEA just seems like crosswordese wearing platform shoes. Not better, just ... taller. Not a fan of OPERANDI on its own. A Latin phrase ... part? Pass. MODUS OPERANDI would rule, but OPERANDI on its own just seems sad. I kept waiting for the longer answers to surprise and amuse me, but my favorite answer ended up being just six letters long (KILL IT!). There was just something a little ... anemic about the grid, on the whole. Other observations: a weird lot of plurals, not all of which are great as plurals. This is possibly an observation I could only make at super-slow speed, but UNRESTS got my attention (not a word you usually see in the plural) and then PUMAS and YENS and EDIFICES and AHAS came at me real fast, with AHAS again giving me that feeling of "in the plural, really?" I think I'm just mildly mad at UNRESTS and AHAS, and that's making me *notice* other plurals I wouldn't otherwise pay attention to. I also noticed a lot (Lot) of geography, which is fine, but man it seems very ... niche? LOMA LINDA?! (62A: San Bernardino suburb whose name means "beautiful hill")!? LO(ma)L(inda). I didn't even know San Bernardino *had* "suburbs" and I lived pretty close to there for four years of my life. The name LOMA LINDA is very familiar to me, but couldn't have placed it on a California map if you'd paid me. And OTSEGO! I mean, few answers are as "right up my alley, almost literally" as that one, but still, seems slightly Yikes for non-NYers (and maybe even for some NYCers who never get out of the city). Like IONIAN SEA (more geography), these place names seem like they are here for their vowel-heaviness and not for any intrinsic interest. And yet I can't say they bother me. Seeing "Susquehanna River" in the clue for OTSEGO felt like the puzzle giving me a friendly wink—the Susquehanna runs right through town. I'm less than a mile from said river as I type this. Were you winking at me, Parker Higgins!? Well, whether you were or not, I appreciate that clue, thanks.
Sticking points? CANARD definitely slowed me down (11D: Unfounded rumor). Not a vocab word I was capable of retrieving easily this morning. The RAYS clue is good (18D: Sunshine, so to speak), but again, my brain just couldn't process it quickly / easily / at all, and so that made the CANARD section a tiny bit harder. I had SEED before SUET (61A: Makeup of many birdfeed cakes). I've heard of KEA and LOA but (unless it's a campground) not KOA, so that was interesting (2D: Hawaiian wood used to build the earliest surfboards). I think that's all the things I am able to say at this juncture in the journey of this morning. My best to you and yours and particularly your pets if you have them. If you do have them, please ask them who is a good boy / girl and when they don't answer just smush them and tell them that I say "YOU ARE!" They'll understand. See you tomorrow.
Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld
Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld