Constructor: Simeon Seigel
Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium
![]()
THEME: TAKE FIVE (63A: Get some rest ... or what to do with the end of the previous answer to solve each starred clue) — to make sense of the answers to the starred clues, "take""five" letters from the ends of the previous answers (and stick them on the front of your starred answers):
Theme answers:
![]()
This puzzle never recovers from the bad first impression that NW corner makes. I don't know what era CUT NO ICE is from, but it's not mine (16A: Carry zero weight, idiomatically), and yet that's not what made me double over with "you gotta be kidding me" grief. That role was played by ASSIGNOR, a singularly painful bit of legalese for which I needed literally every cross (13A: Counterpart to a receiver, legally). I thought maybe ASSIGNEE? I have no idea. ALIENOR, ALIENEE, these are entirely unwelcome legalese answers, but at least by this point in my (long) solving career, I have seen them. They are enemies, but they are known enemies. ASSIGNOR ... oof. I literally said oof. I might've doubled over. The fact that it ultimately ended up being involved in the theme makes its (lamentable) presence here a Lot more understandable, but ASSIGNOR over (CUT NO) ICE—not so nice. That corner, yeesh. And I was lucky enough to know "EREWHON" cold, no need for the anagram bit in the clue (6D: 1872 utopian novel whose title is an anagram of NOWHERE). I imagine not knowing that title made that corner seem even wonkier. Y'KNOW? :( The theme just isn't good enough or sparkly enough or "wow!" enough to take away the pain of ASSIGNOR.
Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld
Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium
Theme answers:
- ASSIGNOR / AMUSES (15A: *Complete fools)
- STRAPS / HOOTERS (24A: *Ones with clay pigeons in their sights)
- FOREVER / BERATES (39A: *Echoes)
- SHINDIG / NATION (48A: *Outrage)
Cori Dionne "Coco" Gauff (born March 13, 2004) is an American professional tennis player. She has a career-high ranking of world No. 4 in singles, reached on October 24, 2022, and world No. 1 in doubles, achieved on August 15, 2022. Gauff won her first WTA Tour singles title at the 2019 Linz Open aged 15 years and 7 months, making her the youngest singles title-holder on the Tour since 2004. She has won three WTA Tour singles titles and eight doubles titles – three partnering with Caty McNally and five with Jessica Pegula. Gauff rose to prominence with a win over former World No. 1 and seven-time Grand Slam champion Venus Williams in the opening round of 2019 Wimbledon. [...] Gauff made her WTA Tour debut in March 2019 at the Miami Open and won her opening match. She received a wild card into the qualifying draw at the 2019 Wimbledon Championships, where she became the youngest player in the tournament's history to qualify for the main draw. There she reached the fourth round, and each of her matches was the most-watched of the day through the first week of television coverage in the United States. Later that summer, still aged 15, she reached the third round of the US Open. In 2021, she reached her first major final in women's doubles at the US Open, and reached her first major singles final at the 2022 French Open. (wikipedia)
• • •
Even without ASSIGNOR, the theme is only so-so. There's a cleverness there, but there's also a "so what?" feeling I was left with after theme discovery. You have false answers, and then you get the real answers by adding five letters from the previous answers. OK. Theoretically. But in practice, this is one of those puzzles where you just accept nonsense answers until you get down to the revealer, or you just skip down to the revealer because you can't be bothered waiting to find out how the wrong-seeming answers can be made right. Stupidly, today, I chose to wait. So AMUSES, HOOTERS, why? Who knows? Just random words. No joy there at all. There's always the possibility in a theme like this that the revealer will provide a really big "aha," that the wading through shrug after shrug will result, finally, in a satisfying revelation. But that revelation was severely undermined, in my experience, by the revealer itself, which really seemed like it wanted to be TAKE ... A NAP. That is certainly, undeniably a better answer for [Get some rest] than TAKE FIVE is. [Get some rest] strongly implies sleep, or at least a protracted time "off," not just five dang minutes. Yes, you are "resting" when you TAKE FIVE, but that clue is misleading in an awful, cheap way. [Rest for a bit...], that would've worked. Anyway, took me a couple hacks at crosses to figure out what was supposed to follow TAKE.
Then it took way too long for me to figure out how in the hell TAKE FIVE applied to the theme answers. The problem was with the meaning of "TAKE," which usually means "TAKE away," as in "make disappear." So I was vaporizing the last five letters of the previous Acrosses instead of bringing them over and affixing them to the front of the answers to the starred clues. This resulted in ... well, nothing, as you can imagine. The worst obstacle to my grasping the theme is fact that ASSES (first three letters of ASSIGNOR + last two letters of AMUSES) is a perfectly good answer to 15A: *Complete fools, and it's five letters long (!?), so I thought that maybe ASS/ES were the "five" letters I was supposed to "take" and ... do something with, god knows what? Sigh. Even after I saw IGNORAMUSES, I thought "wow, he's' got ASSES and IGNORAMUSES going simultaneously, what eldritch spellcraft is even at work here?" But ASSES was a red herring. Alas.
The rest of it? Easy, for the most part. No real thrills. The long Downs in the SW are strong, for sure. In the NE? They're just OK. In fact, everything else is just OK. I totally forgot what a "caravel" was, so PINTA gave me more trouble than it should have (3D: Historic caravel). Should've made that my Word of the Day (it's a small, fast Iberian sailing ship of the 15th-17th centuries). Latter part of TEAR SHEET was not clear to me. I wanted TEAR AWAY (or AWAYS, I guess) (11D: Page detached from a magazine). Thought the BLAHS might be the BLUES (29A: Melancholy, with "the"). Had DIZZY and DITZY before DITSY (47D: Spaced out). Loved seeing COCO Gauff in the puzzle (look for GAUFF, eventually). I didn't exactly love seeing "EREWHON," but I got a perverse pleasure from knowing it, down to its odd, near-but-not-quite reverse-spelling of NOWHERE. The fill in this one runs a little rough around the edges (lots of overfamiliar short stuff like SSNS ANI EMI ABE IKE etc.), but the grid never feels genuinely gunky (NOR does it feel GOOPY, which I wanted to be GLOPPY or GLOOPY). Hoping for more SEEMLY weekend fare. See you then.
Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld
P.S. it seems possible (probable?) that TAIL ENDS was originally part of the theme somehow (60A: Closing parts). It's right above the revealer and, well, you do TAKE FIVE letters from the TAIL ENDS of the previous answers to make sense of the starred clues, that's for sure. Bizarre to just leave TAIL ENDS there, thematically unmarked, but I guess there was no smooth way of incorporating it, ultimately. Or maybe it's just a happy (or sad) accident.
P.P.S. what the hell is a LAMP tree? (45D: Tree whose first four letters are an anagram of another tree => MAPLE)
P.P.P.S. yes I'm kidding, I know it's MALP tree, please, no mail