Constructor: Taylor Johnson and Christina Iverson
Relative difficulty: Medium (normal Monday)
![]()
THEME: "PICKY, PICKY, PICKY" (61A: "So particular!" ... or, in different senses, like 17-, 32- and 42-Across?)— theme answers are people who pick:
Relative difficulty: Medium (normal Monday)
Theme answers:
![]()
OK look I will admit that I still have some geographic confusion around Tonga, Trinidad & Tobago, and Togo. They are all very far from one another, and yet those "T"s and "G"s, man, my head keeps filing them all in the same box and then mixing them up. I think I know Tonga the best because it's part of Oceania, as is NZ, and since I've been to NZ a half a dozen times or so (my wife was born there, as I've probably told you many times), I've had plenty of occasion to pin Tonga down on the map in a pretty fixed way. But the other two countries, yikes, they won't stick. This is all to say that LOMÉ was oddly slow in coming. I remembered it, eventually, with some help from the "L," but even after getting it, I could not have located it on the map with anything like certainty. Very humbling thing to face up to on a Monday. Otherwise, this puzzle was pretty doable (I solved Downs-only, as usual). My main, perhaps only, objection to the theme is VEGETABLE FARMER. We just call them ... farmers? Our farmers (the ones we buy produce from every weekend at the farmers market) grow vegetables, yes, but at least one of them also grows hemp (they're leaning more heavily into CBD products, and may eventually be making a play to grow marijuana, I dunno). One of the other farmers also raises meat and poultry. Anyway, I've only ever thought of the people we buy produce from as "farmers." If you say "farmer," it's pretty much assumed that you're referring to someone who grows "vegetables." It's only if you're *not* growing vegetables that you'd offer a qualifying adjective. I would also say that most TEAM CAPTAINs do not "pick" their teams unless the specific context is P.E. class in middle or high school. So that was a little odd. But I really love the revealer—it's silly, in a way that makes the puzzle fun. Much better than PICKERS or PICKING or something like that. I also like that there are bonus picking answers in the grid. You can pick your SPOT, for sure, and you can definitely pick NITS, and if you do the whole "She loves me, she loves me not" thing, well then you can pick PETALs as well. Just don't pick your ACNE.
- VEGETABLE FARMER (17A: One growing asparagus, spinach, corn, etc.)
- TEAM CAPTAIN (32A: Squad leader, in sports)
- BANJO PLAYER (42A: Certain bluegrass musician)
Lomé (UK: /ˈloʊmeɪ/ LOH-may, US: /loʊˈmeɪ/ loh-MAY) is the capital and largest city of Togo. It has an urban population of 837,437 while there were 1,477,660 permanent residents in its metropolitan area as of the 2010 census. Located on the Gulf of Guinea at the southwest corner of the country, with its entire western border along the easternmost point of Ghana's Volta Region, Lomé is the country's administrative and industrial center, which includes an oil refinery. It is also the country's chief port, from where it exports coffee, cocoa, copra, and oil palm kernels.
Its city limits extends to the border with Ghana, located a few hundred meters west of the city center, to the Ghanaian city of Aflao and the South Ketu district where the city is situated, had 160,756 inhabitants in 2010. The cross-border agglomeration of which Lomé is the centre, has about 2 million inhabitants as of 2020.
• • •
The FARMER part of VEGETABLE FARMER gave me most of my non-LOMÉ trouble today. I also wrote in SYSOP (!?) before ADMIN (19D: Web page moderator, for short), and left the second vowel blank at TAC-T because I wasn't 100% sure of the musical term (51D: "Be silent," in music). Also went for Hi-RES TV before Hi-DEF (9D: Hi-___ TV). I misspelled Megan MARKEL, thusly, but luckily OVAE and TETL looked hellishly wrong, so I managed to fix it (47D: Meghan ___, Duchess of Sussex => MARKLE). Needed to infer a lot of crosses before I closed things out with MAKE NICE (40D: Act friendly despite feeling otherwise). That answer alongside the vaguely clued / kinda hard-to-parse LEGUP made the SE a bit tricky, but only just a bit (45D: Advantage). The fill wasn't terribly memorable, but "EYES ON ME!" gave the puzzle a bit of a bossy attitude, which I liked (4D: "Pay full attention while I'm talking!").
I dropped my wife off today at a two-week writers workshop near Saratoga Springs, so now I'm home alone with the cats. Normally, The Lady feeds them ("The Lady" being what they call my wife, I presume). But The Lady isn't here so they are beginning to circle me and eye me hungrily. Ida just threatened to walk across my keyboard, so I better go before things escalate. See you again soon.