Constructor: Rafael Musa
Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium
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THEME:"Flying Colors" — six answers are shaded in the colors of the PRIDE / FLAG (i.e. rainbow colors (minus indigo)) (57A: With 58-Across, what's represented by this puzzle's colored "stripes"). Those colored answers have literal clues, but there are also adjacent answers that explain the color; for instance, ON AND OFF are clued normally but also clued by the adjacent RED STATES (because ON and OFF are "states" and the answer ON AND OFF appears in red-colored squares). And so:
Theme answers:
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I realized today, just now, why I never, ever solve the puzzle on the website or in the app unless (like today) I absolutely have to—it's because I print out the puzzle when I'm done (I need to mark up the finished puzzle with my notes, and I need it sitting here on the desk beside me as I type), and you absolutely cannot print out a finished, solved puzzle from that stupid site. You can print out a blank puzzle, of course. You can also (for some completely incomprehensible reason) print out The Solution Only (seriously, no clues, just ... the finished grid, which, today, was offered to me in glorious ... black & white) (Who Is Printing Out Just The Solution???). But you cannot print out the puzzle as a whole, clues and answers, completed, inside the dumb dumb applet. Why is everything so badly built over there, they're swimming in puzzle subscription money ffs. None of this is the puzzle's fault, I know, but I have a very specific job that I do, and while the NYTXW website has zero obligation to accommodate my admittedly niche needs, maybe now you will understand why solving inside their proprietary, data-mining environments is of no real interest to me on a daily basis. I download the puzzle. Then the puzzle is mine. And I use Black Ink software to solve. And that software is easy to use and it prints my puzzle, solved, complete, bam. But that software cannot handle technical gimmicks, which the NYTXW seems to be resorting to more and more. I have learned to check "Puzzle Notes" to make sure there's not some element I'm going to be missing by solving in Black Ink, but 9 times out of 10, when there *is* such a gimmick, hauling my ass over to the actual website to do the puzzle ends up Not being worth it. Today, though ... well, the color thing was cute, I'll admit, though either my eyes are bad or the color on my screen is bad because that ... that is not blue (see PEACOATS, in the posted grid, above). That's ... kind of purplish. You see DEPART over in the SE (where the cursor is in the posted grid, above)? Those squares are blue. That is blue. Compared to that, those PEACOATS squares—Not Blue. Also mysterious: VIOLET. I kept trying to make something PURPLE happen in that answer. VIOLET RAY is a real reach (what the hell is it? a bygone what now?) and easily the worst thing about this themer set. Other than that, though, I thought the theme was kinda fun, if terribly, terribly easy to solve once you suss out the gimmick (well, those last two themers excluded ... but I wrote all but one of the color answers in immediately):
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I started this one off feeling very powerful, as somehow every Down answer I plunked down up front turned out to be ... right? How!?
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P.S. The Kickstarter for Peter Gordon's "A-to-Z Crosswords 2023" (aka "Petite Pangram Puzzles") ends at 10pm tonight. The subscriber funding goal is in sight, so if you'd like to add a peppy little puzzle to your regular solving regimen, I really recommend these puzzles. Pangrams don't normally impress me, but getting all 26 letters into such a small package—the grids are just 9x11—makes things more interesting. Here's the blurb I wrote for the 2022 version of this project:
Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium
Theme answers:
- ON AND OFF (colored red) (17A: Intermittently) are RED STATES (18A: They're right on an election map ... or a description of 17-Across?)
- STEROIDS (colored orange) (37A: Olympics no-nos) are ORANGE JUICE ("juice" is slang for STEROIDS) (33A: Screwdriver component ... or a description of 37-Across)
- DARK ROOM (colored yellow) (48A: Negative space?) is a YELLOW LAB (51A: Marley in "Marley & Me," e.g. ... or a description of 48-Across?)
- CASSETTE (colored green) (76A: Device with a pair of spools) is a GREEN TAPE (73A: Bureaucracy surrounding environmental legislation ... or a description of 76-Across)
- PEACOATS (colored blue) (allegedly) (Double-breasted outerwear) are BLUEJACKETS (Columbus's NHL team) (95A: N.H.L. team from Ohio ... or a description of 93-Across)
- BRADBURY (colored violet) (111A: "The Martian Chronicles" author) is a VIOLET RAY (108A: Bygone medical device used in electrotherapy ... or a description of 111-Across?)
Thaddeus Michael Bullard Sr. (born April 29, 1977) is an American professional wrestler and former arena football player. He is the Global Ambassador of WWE and also performs for the promotion as a wrestler under the ring name Titus O'Neil. Described by the company as "one of the most philanthropic Superstars in WWE history," Bullard is the recipient of the WWE Hall of Fame 2020 Warrior Award.Bullard played college football for the University of Florida, and thereafter played in the Arena Football League (AFL). His career as a professional wrestler began in WWE's developmental territory Florida Championship Wrestling (FCW), before being moved to NXT where he was part of the second season and fifth season, NXT Redemption. In WWE, he is a former one-time WWE Tag Team Champion as part of The Prime Time Players with Darren Young and a one-time WWE 24/7 Champion, being the inaugural holder of the latter title. In 2021, Bullard was inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame as a recipient of the Warrior Award, honoring his charitable work – especially in his hometown of Tampa, Florida. In the summer of 2021 a public school in Tampa was also named after Bullard honoring his charitable work and contributions to and for the Hillsborough County public school system. (wikipedia)
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I realized today, just now, why I never, ever solve the puzzle on the website or in the app unless (like today) I absolutely have to—it's because I print out the puzzle when I'm done (I need to mark up the finished puzzle with my notes, and I need it sitting here on the desk beside me as I type), and you absolutely cannot print out a finished, solved puzzle from that stupid site. You can print out a blank puzzle, of course. You can also (for some completely incomprehensible reason) print out The Solution Only (seriously, no clues, just ... the finished grid, which, today, was offered to me in glorious ... black & white) (Who Is Printing Out Just The Solution???). But you cannot print out the puzzle as a whole, clues and answers, completed, inside the dumb dumb applet. Why is everything so badly built over there, they're swimming in puzzle subscription money ffs. None of this is the puzzle's fault, I know, but I have a very specific job that I do, and while the NYTXW website has zero obligation to accommodate my admittedly niche needs, maybe now you will understand why solving inside their proprietary, data-mining environments is of no real interest to me on a daily basis. I download the puzzle. Then the puzzle is mine. And I use Black Ink software to solve. And that software is easy to use and it prints my puzzle, solved, complete, bam. But that software cannot handle technical gimmicks, which the NYTXW seems to be resorting to more and more. I have learned to check "Puzzle Notes" to make sure there's not some element I'm going to be missing by solving in Black Ink, but 9 times out of 10, when there *is* such a gimmick, hauling my ass over to the actual website to do the puzzle ends up Not being worth it. Today, though ... well, the color thing was cute, I'll admit, though either my eyes are bad or the color on my screen is bad because that ... that is not blue (see PEACOATS, in the posted grid, above). That's ... kind of purplish. You see DEPART over in the SE (where the cursor is in the posted grid, above)? Those squares are blue. That is blue. Compared to that, those PEACOATS squares—Not Blue. Also mysterious: VIOLET. I kept trying to make something PURPLE happen in that answer. VIOLET RAY is a real reach (what the hell is it? a bygone what now?) and easily the worst thing about this themer set. Other than that, though, I thought the theme was kinda fun, if terribly, terribly easy to solve once you suss out the gimmick (well, those last two themers excluded ... but I wrote all but one of the color answers in immediately):
I got the revealer (the oddly offset PRIDE / FLAG) very late in the game, and literally said, out loud, "Really!?" Like, yes it's Pride Month, but nothing about the content of the grid suggested Pride *at all* until that moment, so it really came as a surprise. I mean, obviously the PRIDE / FLAG is a rainbow, so it was in front of me all along, but none of the answers were PRIDE-related, so ... yeah, a late surprise for me there. Cool.
I kept forgetting that the colors in the various theme answers referred only to the *literal* color of the cross-referenced answers in the grid, so I kept having moments like "Wait, are PEACOATS blue?" and "How the hell is a CASSETTE green??" But no, with BLUEJACKETS, the word meaning "Jackets" (PEACOATS) appears in "blue" squares; with GREEN TAPE, the word meaning "tape" (CASSETTE) appears in "green" squares, etc. I'm impressed by the construction here, not so much architecturally (the colors unfortunately don't really end up evoking the flag that well, given their positions) but conceptually. You're not just dealing with your typical wacky clue / theme answer pair. You've got to get two-part answers that begin with each of the colors, and then get the second part of those answers to clue a second, adjacent answer, and get alllll of them to line up symmetrically. For instance, I might like GREEN CARD better than GREEN TAPE, but then I'd need an eight-letter word meaning "card" to go where CASSETTE is now. Perhaps doable, perhaps not. So if you're the constructor, you're juggling several considerations with every themer pair. The colors themselves are merely decorative, but the way the answers are laid out and the way the cluing actually works, that's quite complex. This is definitely an above-average Sunday puzzle. Plus it's pretty. And it's proud. Win win win.
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Never heard of DUNBAR's number (1A: ___'s number, cognitive limit to how many relationships a person can maintain), but shocked myself by filling all in from crosses immediately, bam bam bam bam bam bam! Love when the initial guesses all break my way! The SW corner is the only part of the puzzle that really made me make faces. First, there's VIOLET RAY, which as I say, wtf. But then there's also a bunch of ragged fill (DESEXED LTE EPS LEDTV ATTN). Getting through there did not feel so great. But most of the rest of it seemed smooth and bright and pleasingly varied. Never can and never will spell GINKGO right on the first try (35D: Ornamental tree with fan-shaped leaves). Never gonna love the double-S spelling of YESSES (117A: R.S.V.P. tally). I kept wanting 30A: Reference for exploring America to be U.S.A.-something, but U.S.A. what? Needed almost every cross to see that the answer started not U.S.A. but U.S. ... U.S. ATLAS (the "America" in the clue should've tipped me off that "A" wouldn't be part of the answer, but it didn't). Haven't seen AJA in a while (used to see it all the time), and I've been on a big Steely Dan kick lately, so I was happy to welcome AJA back to the grid (hopefully it won't wear out its welcome, again). Speaking of musical acts, I was also happy to see glam rock legends SLADE and T REX.
"WHO? YOU?" was very inventive, if initially very confusing (20A: Taunting response to a challenger). I had the "YOU" part but couldn't work out the "taunting" part. "Uh ... 'BOO, YOU!'? 'POO, YOU!'?" But no, it's two one-word standalone questions. Creative. Hope you found things to like about this one. See you next week (or Monday, or however your schedule works).
My experience is that these are very tasty snacks. More meaty than a mini, but small enough and doable enough to knock off during a spare 5, 10, 15 minutes or so (depending on your skill level). The pangramitude means that the fill gets pretty lively in places, and you also always know, if you’re struggling, that until you’ve ticked off all 26 letters, well, those remaining letters are definitely out there ... somewhere. Knowing you gotta touch all 26 actually helps with the solving at times. These puzzles are unusual and fun and snackable. Worth it, for sure.Would make a nice little addition to your solving routine. Might be great for someone who’s just getting into crosswords (or someone you want to encourage to get into crosswords).
It's a 13-week subscription, with new puzzles every day of the week (including weekends). That's 91 puzzles! For just $14!? Come on. Go get them.