Constructor: John Hawksley
Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium
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THEME: none
Word of the Day: Triple ENTENTE (51A: Triple ___) —
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I always feel like I'm meant to ooh and / or aah at these Saturday puzzles with wide-open centers like this, where lots of long answers intersect. What I usually feel, and feel today, is that a few of the answers are nice and some are OK and others feel weak or obscure or jury-rigged in some way. The Acrosses in there seem fine–I really like "HE STARTED IT!," and I'm not sure I would've gotten good traction at all without CINCINNATUS—but the Downs are less appealing. Hard to like something like TELESCOPIUM, which sounds more like an element than a constellation, and anyway I have no idea what that is or what stars are in it or anything. Big shrug. And "STAND AT EASE" is really badly clued. Do they really say the whole thing like that. The only "order!" I've ever heard used is "AT EASE!"STAND AT EASE is something you do after the order, I guess, but it doesn't feel like an order (exclamation point!). ORNAMENTING is weird in the gerund form, and contributes to this puzzle's overall -ING problem: SETTING FREE near ORNAMENTINGcrossingE-SIGNING crossing TIRING (we'll let GINGER slide...). I definitely recognize that the center was probably tough to construct, and that making it come out as smooth as it is is a kind of feat, but there were too few highs for me today. Felt a bit bland, a bit off, especially in the cluing. What does a MOM CAVE have to do with "zen." Are they using "zen" ... super-metaphorically here? Like, it's where mom goes to find some ... zen-as-in-peace? Is she meditating? Is a MOM CAVE even a thing? Is that somebody's idea of gender equity? "Well, we've got mancaves, why not MOM CAVEs? Surely we can sell *that* concept to anxious upper middle-class people!" It's better than SHE-SHED, I'll give it that. Anyway, you're insulting Zen is all I'm saying (note: Zen, being Zen, doesn't care). The best/worst thing in the grid is CAWCAWED. I hate/love it, then hate it again, then love it some more. I wish it were crossing EAPOE so my hate/love could expand infinitely throughout the universe. The past tense, my god! As I worked my way through theoretical CAW verb permutations (CAWCAWING? CAWCAWCAW?), my mind boggled, then toggled, then it just melted away. I'm not even sure it's there any more. Very Zen.
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Other things:![]()
Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld
[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]
Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium
Word of the Day: Triple ENTENTE (51A: Triple ___) —
The Triple Entente (from French entente [ɑ̃tɑ̃t] meaning "friendship, understanding, agreement") describes the informal understanding between the Russian Empire, the French Third Republic, and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. It was built upon the Franco-Russian Alliance of 1894, the Entente Cordiale of 1904 between Paris and London, and the Anglo-Russian Entente of 1907. It formed a powerful counterweight to the Triple Alliance of Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy. The Triple Entente, unlike the Triple Alliance or the Franco-Russian Alliance itself, was not an alliance of mutual defence.The Franco-Japanese Treaty of 1907 was a key part of building a coalition as France took the lead in creating alliances with Japan, Russia, and (informally) with Britain. Japan wanted to raise a loan in Paris, so France made the loan contingent on a Russo-Japanese agreement and a Japanese guarantee for France's strategically vulnerable possessions in Indochina. Britain encouraged the Russo-Japanese rapprochement. Thus was built the Triple Entente coalition that fought World War I.
At the start of World War I in 1914, all three Triple Entente members entered it as Allied Powers against the Central Powers: Ottoman Turkey, Germany and Austria-Hungary. On September 4, 1914, the Triple Entente issued a declaration undertaking not to conclude a separate peace and only to demand terms of peace agreed between the three parties. Historians continue to debate the importance of the alliance system as one of the causes of World War I.
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Felt very POWERLIFTER-y right off the bat today, as SLEIGH was my first guess at 1A: Curved bedframe style and GEL and ISIAH immediately confirmed it. In almost no time I was here:
... and HALOGEN BULB dropped from there. Then things slowed down considerably. Weirdly, the biggest mistake I made in that center area was a small one: GET IN for GET TO (24A: Find time for). "I'm gonna try to GET IN a few rounds (of golf?) before it rains," something like that. This wee mistake gunked up two of the long Downs for a bit, but eventually "HE STARTED IT!" became undeniable and all the letter combos got bad and I had to pull IN and think for a bit and then, of course, TO, GET TO. Other errors: I had HIREE instead of HIRER (28D: Headhunter's correspondent). Surely a headhunter has to contact the head that she's hunting, right? But I guess at *that* point the "correspondent" is not yet the HIREE, fair enough. No other outright errors, though bizarrely I blanked, or partially blanked, or felt creepily unsure about, two three-letter answers that I absolutely know: AMC and GTI. I watched Mad Men loyally and wrote in AMC easily ... but then it was turning the zen place into MOM-something and that made no sense so I looked at AMC and thought "Is that even right? Isn't that ... American Movie Classics ... why would a TV show be on American Movie Classics? ... A Movie Channel? ... jeez louise, what do letters even mean anymore!?" Turns out AMC did (originally) stand for American Movie Classics. But now it ... doesn't. As for GTI, I wanted that, but it started seeming more like an infection than a car, so I considered GTO, but I knew that the Beach Boys or Jan & Dean or whoever were not singing about a Volkswagen, so out went the "O." Eventually, with both these short answers, I ended back where I began, with my first instinct, which was correct.
[Ronnie & the Daytonas!? How many surf rock bands were there!?]
Other things:
- 34D: Prudent poker player, perhaps (PASSER)— oof, this puzzle has a way of putting a bright hot spotlight on its worst fill. I know you "pass" in poker but would you ever call anyone a PASSER. The American football clue is always going to be the best one if you have to use PASSER (there's a "PASSER rating" and everything).
- 8D: Fly, at times (LURE) —think fishing ("fly" = "a fishhook dressed (as with feathers or tinsel) to suggest an insect" (merriam-webster.com))
- 26A: Not from Scotland (NAE)— i.e. the word "Not," as they would say it in Scotland.
- 34A: Athlete often found on the bench (POWERLIFTER)— "bench" = the "bench" from which you do the "bench press" (one of three powerlifting components, along with deadlift and squat: the Triple ENTENTE of weightlifting!
- 39A: Van trailer? (BUREN) — this clue is CAWCAWED levels of loopy, and yet I got it easily, and kind of liked it. BUREN"trails" Van in the name of our beloved, mutton-chopped president, Martin Van BUREN. Look on this facial hair, ye mighty, and despair!
Have a lovely, hopefully smoke-and-haze-free weekend. See you next time.
[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]