Constructor: Ricky Cruz
Relative difficulty: Medium
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THEME: key signatures— regular clues appear to the right of musical notation indicating initial key signature (i.e. the five lines of the staff with clef + various sharps and flats); thus, the clues are imagined as if they are in a certain key (IN C, IN A, etc.), and those key phrases are added to the ends of the clued answers to get new, unclued answers:
Theme answers:
Relative difficulty: Medium
Theme answers:
- "MONSTERS, INC."
- BALLERINA
- PALESTINE
- FALLING FLAT
... clued as follows:
Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld
[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]
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| MONSTERS IN C = "Monsters, Inc." (17A: Some energy drinks) |
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| BALLER IN A = ballerina (30A: Court athlete, slangily) |
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| PALEST IN E = Palestine (45A: Most wan) |
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| FALL IN G FLAT (61A: Leaf-raking time) |
Word of the Day: EIDETIC (34A: ___ memory (ability to recall images with high precision)) —
Less time today because I have to teach and also because much of my writing time was just taken up trying to image-capture and typeset the theme clues (above). Lots of tech fail on my part! Speaking of tech (if not exactly fail), I'm gonna start with MEGAMAN and SLOFIE, which is the kind of fill that makes me sad because it reminds me of how much of what passes for young-skewing or current or hip fill these days is extremely online or otherwise tech-oriented. Congrats to the tech overlords for convincing everyone that the pathway to freedom and self-expression and identity lies in screens. This isn't new (TV ruined boomers, TV and home video gaming ruined my generation (X), etc. etc.) but the phone has perfected it and now reality happens on screens and ... I don't know what's happening in this meat-sack world we used to call "reality." Bodies ... moving around ... angry ... not paying attention. Anyway, I am trying to make peace with the fact that minimizing the role of screens in my life is going to mean accelerating my detachment from popular culture (including cutesy self-documentation terminology). Sucks to get old, but it sucks more to be glued to the depression- and anger-making machine that is your phone / The Internet, so ... I dunno. Win some lose some (I've been reading Naomi Klein-not-Wolf's Doppelganger, please forgive my tech despair). MEGAMAN has been around since 1987, so there's no good reason that's unfamiliar to me (14A: Video game hero who battles the evil Dr. Wily). Gaming was never my thing. Shrug. As for SLOFIE ... look, the reason I hate SLOFIE more than I would normally hate an extremely embarrassing tech portmanteau like SLOFIE is that it was the *last* thing I entered, the last thing I pieced together, and I was truly enjoying the puzzle up to that point. So just when I'm ready for the puzzle to stick the landing, it serves me the heaping plate of garbage that is SLOFIE. Real mood-killer, that stupid "word." You absolutely do not have to cram the latest dumb word into your grid to prove that you aren't one of the OLDS, I promise. The high quality of your work is enough. I'm just glad I could piece together what the elements of the portmanteau were (slow + selfie), because I famously (and probably not exclusively) never can remember how to spell Jackson POLL-CK.
But anyway, the theme: it's great. I particularly love how it takes musical crosswordese you see all the time (key signatures like IN C, IN A, IN E, or notes like G FLAT) and then, by incorporating them into this bizarro magical musical theme, makes them parts of longer, familiar words and phrases ("MONSTERS, INC."BALLERINA etc.). Putting a regular old clue *in a key*. Like, actually giving it a musical setting, literally putting it on a staff ... it's ingenious. MONSTERS might have been hard for those who are not up on their energy drink terminology, and BALLER might have been hard for those who are not up on their basketball terminology, but the basic concept here seems very clear ... once you finally see it. Happy to see FALL IN G FLAT, the obvious best of the bunch, occupying its rightful place at the bottom of the grid—always good to finish big. Only wish I'd actually literally finished there, instead of with the "O" in SLOFIE. Just saying the word feels awful. Just looking at it. It's like the sound of a sloth vomiting.
Eidetic memory (/aɪˈdɛtɪk/ eye-DET-ik; also known as photographic memory and total recall) is the ability to recall an image from memory with high precision—at least for a brief period of time—after seeing it only once[1] and without using a mnemonic device.
Although the terms eidetic memory and photographic memory are popularly used interchangeably,[1] they are also distinguished, with eidetic memory referring to the ability to see an object for a few minutes after it is no longer present and photographic memory referring to the ability to recall pages of text or numbers, or similar, in great detail. When the concepts are distinguished, eidetic memory is reported to occur in a small number of children and is generally not found in adults, while true photographic memory has never been demonstrated to exist.
The word eidetic comes from the Greek word εἶδος (pronounced [êːdos], eidos) "visible form". (wikipedia)
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| "EROICA" (as seen in Psycho) |
Hey, did you know EIDETIC!? I did! Or, I "did"—by which I mean I got "EI-" and looked at the clue and my brain shrugged and went "... is this something?" while handing me EIDETIC. "I dunno, brain, let's find out!" And it was right. LOL, there are so many technical words like that that all just blur together in my head in a jargony soup. "Diegetic" is in there ... "epideictic" ... "enclitic" ... "ekphrasis" ... "E"s seem to be involved a lot. Anyway, threw up EIDETIC from half court and ... swish! Outside of that word (and the MEGAMAN SLOFIE, of course), everything in the grid felt familiar and solid and nicely varied. BONE IN! CAT TREATS! NEGRONIS! TAPAS BAR! It's a tasty night out for you and your cat! The "?" clues did their thing, i.e. slowed me down a bit. [Frequent flier?] (JET) could've been a lot of things (initial thought: BAT). I thought [Jerky?] was going to have to do with spasms, but I took the wrong misdirection path there. "Jerky" as in "Jerk-y" as in "like a jerk," i.e. IMPOLITE. Nice. Didn't like the boring "on the Hollywood Walk of Fame" clue they gave GLADYS Knight. It's the worst possible clue you can give a celeb. It's like you hate them and don't want to mention anything they've actually done. And in GLADYS's case, she's done a lot. Legend.
See you tomorrow.
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