Constructor: Kameron Austin Collins
Relative difficulty: Hard :( Probably 40mins in total?
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THEME: none
Word of the Day: ADAMS (Yolanda with four Grammys in gospel) —
Hey besties, I'm here for on unscheduled Malaika MFriday! Today I solved on paper and it was a huge mess. I am not a fast solver to begin with, and Kameron is known for making hard puzzles. I picked this up and put it down several times, and it definitely took over 30 minutes to finish. In order to make progress, I had to look up [Jewell who played Jewel on "Deadwood"] (GERI) and [High-performance Saab model] (AERO). I like this picture of my solve because you can see exactly where I struggled (top-right-- had TMI instead of BYE and PUT ON instead of GRAVE and GAPE instead of GAWP).
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Bullets:
Relative difficulty: Hard :( Probably 40mins in total?
THEME: none
Word of the Day: ADAMS (Yolanda with four Grammys in gospel) —
Yolanda Yvette Adams (born August 27, 1961) is an American gospel singer, actress, and host of her own nationally syndicated morning gospel show. She is one of the best-selling gospel artists of all time, having sold over 10 million albums worldwide. In addition to achieving multi-platinum status, she has won four Grammy Awards, four Dove Awards, five BET Awards, six NAACP Image Awards, six Soul Train Music Awards, two BMI Awards and sixteen Stellar Awards. She was the first Gospel artist to be awarded an American Music Award.
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With a triple-stack like this, I often see two things happen: 1) Constructors will keep the answers that intersect the middle as short as possible, and 2) The number of long answers in the rest of the grid is limited. So it's worth shouting out that Kam did neither of these things! Four long answers (IN EXTREMIS, SOSO REVIEW, FREE AGENTS, and SAUERKRAUT) wove in and out of the stack, and we also got four long across answers (WINE BARREL, PROXY VOTE, VITAL ROLE, LINED PAPER) to go along with them.
A trade-off is that we ended up with two very closed-off corners. The top-right and bottom-left section are super disconnected from the rest of the puzzle-- which is what allows all those fun Scrabbly letters in JAZZY and QURAN. When I make a puzzle with closed-off corners, I try to make the clues in there a little easier, since you don't have a way to "break in." It seems like Kam&co did the same here, as those two corners were the first sections that I managed to fill in.
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| jazzy! |
Another trade-off is short fill-- there was definitely stuff here I didn't love, like FINI and ELGAR and ERLE but not a ton, and I think it was worth it: the central stack was awesome! All three answers are delightful, and Totally Real Things. (Sometimes, constructors will use phrasing that's slightly off to stretch or shrink an answer to fifteen letters.) LIVING ON THE EDGE is probably my favorite, but it was hard to pick.
Bullets:
- [Opposite of playing it safe] for LIVING ON THE EDGE — I just read a book called Now is not the Time to Panic (which I loved) and (without giving too much away?) it describes a societal panic caused by posters with the phrase "The edge is a shantytown filled with gold seekers. We are fugitives and the law is skinny with hunger for us." This entry reminded me of that book!
- ["Little Birds" eroticist] for NIN — I got this entry because a wine bar that sells erotica just opened in my neighborhood and they're called Anais. The concept was apparently "What if we made a coffee shop / bookstore but for adults only....?"
- [Heavy stock] for LINED PAPER — Can someone explain this to me? I've heard paper referred to as stock like "cardstock" but I don't understand the rest. In my experience, lined paper is very lightweight.