Constructor: Robert Ryan
Relative difficulty: Easy
![]()
THEME:"You're Onto Something"— -URE is added on to ... something—namely, familiar phrases, thereby creating wacky phrases, which are clued wackily (i.e. "?"-style):
Theme answers:
![]()
This is the kind of thing that would've passed muster 30 years ago, but doesn't feel really up to snuff today. I can only imagine that the title (?) was the hook for this one—it does literally describe what's going on in the theme. But the title ... no one solves the title. It's just there. The answers, those are the things that matter, and these answers ... the gimmick is straightforward, obvious, even, and the wackiness never gets above lower-case "w." None of the wordplay feels particularly clever or inventive, let alone funny. Turns out you can add -URE to a lot of words to make different words. There are plenty that aren't even being used here (press / pressure, dent / denture, etc.). But changing one word to another word by adding a suffix is not inherently funny. The meaning change brought about by the spelling change has to be jarring, radical, genuinely surprising. NO MEAN FEATURE ... isn't any of those things. No one even says "doesn't give a fig," so the whole theme feels disappointing and dated, right from the beginning. WASHINGTON POSTURE changes the vowel sound of the original word (POST) in a weird, anomalous way, and when you're noticing these kinds of small details, you know the theme is not doing its job, wackiness-wise. Ideally, I would shrug off such inconsistencies because the puns are so good. But no such luck today. Seems slightly surprising that this puzzle made the cut, given how many submissions the folks at the NYTXW claim to get. The Sunday stack must really be hurting.
The fill on this one did nothing to improve the overall quality of the grid. Lots of gunky little conglomerations of short fill, from ECRU ERAT in the west, to WIIU ADDR in the NW, to the fraternal twins AER RAE in the center, to OF AN ERA—a sad stand-alone prepositional phrase if ever there was one. ORA INRE! TEL ABET! It's hard to find the fun today. I love Ronnie SPECTOR, so seeing her next to GROUCHO and (aptly) MADCAPS was kinda fun. The NE was maybe my favorite section. I don't know how much currency VIN ROUGE has, but I enjoyed the fact that my HS/college French came in handy (VIN ROUGE = "red wine") (16D: Pairing for an entrecôte or filet mignon, perhaps). I also love EPHEMERA (as a word, as a physical phenomenon), and have exclaimed some variation on "I'M A MORON!" too many times to count, frequently while solving ("DEAR ME!" less often). So that corner had a nice energy. But there was not nearly enough of that. Too much ELSA AGER and TEENIE NITERS, not enough CODE BLUE LOVELINE. Speaking of CODE BLUE LOVELINE, that corner had the one square in the puzzle that made me wince and cock my head to the side a little. I don't really keep up on all the [letter]-CLASSes of Mercedes, so I was very (Very lucky) that I knew what SBA LOANS were—specifically, what SBA stood for (Small Business Administration) (79D: Govt. funds for mom-and-pop shops). I'd written E-CLASS for the Mercedes clue at first and was trying to talk myself into EBA LOANS when I decided to pull the "E" and then remembered the"S"-CLASS (79A: Top-of-the-line Mercedes). Not a great cross. Not a KATNAK- (Th) or IDODENEO-level (Sat) bad cross, but not great either.
Other things: a list:
![]()
Relative difficulty: Easy
Theme answers:
- DOESN'T GIVE A FIGURE (23A: Acts coy in salary negotiations?)
- WASHINGTON POSTURE (36A: Public stance on a member of Congress?)
- PASTURE CARING (49A: Shepherd's job, essentially?)
- ALLURE TOO WELL (63A: Turn more heads than intended?)
- NO MEAN FEATURE (74A: Newspaper write-up that's light on criticism?)
- ADVENTURE CALENDAR (92A: Bungee jumping on Tuesday, skydiving on Wednesday, etc.?)
- ENDURE ON A HIGH NOTE (107A: Show off one's vocal range and stamina?)
a crease on the palm; palmists say it indicates your emotional nature (vocabulary.com)
• • •
The fill on this one did nothing to improve the overall quality of the grid. Lots of gunky little conglomerations of short fill, from ECRU ERAT in the west, to WIIU ADDR in the NW, to the fraternal twins AER RAE in the center, to OF AN ERA—a sad stand-alone prepositional phrase if ever there was one. ORA INRE! TEL ABET! It's hard to find the fun today. I love Ronnie SPECTOR, so seeing her next to GROUCHO and (aptly) MADCAPS was kinda fun. The NE was maybe my favorite section. I don't know how much currency VIN ROUGE has, but I enjoyed the fact that my HS/college French came in handy (VIN ROUGE = "red wine") (16D: Pairing for an entrecôte or filet mignon, perhaps). I also love EPHEMERA (as a word, as a physical phenomenon), and have exclaimed some variation on "I'M A MORON!" too many times to count, frequently while solving ("DEAR ME!" less often). So that corner had a nice energy. But there was not nearly enough of that. Too much ELSA AGER and TEENIE NITERS, not enough CODE BLUE LOVELINE. Speaking of CODE BLUE LOVELINE, that corner had the one square in the puzzle that made me wince and cock my head to the side a little. I don't really keep up on all the [letter]-CLASSes of Mercedes, so I was very (Very lucky) that I knew what SBA LOANS were—specifically, what SBA stood for (Small Business Administration) (79D: Govt. funds for mom-and-pop shops). I'd written E-CLASS for the Mercedes clue at first and was trying to talk myself into EBA LOANS when I decided to pull the "E" and then remembered the"S"-CLASS (79A: Top-of-the-line Mercedes). Not a great cross. Not a KATNAK- (Th) or IDODENEO-level (Sat) bad cross, but not great either.
Other things: a list:
- 10D: Porpoise, in old usage (SEA HOG) — like, how old? Seems like maybe pretty old, and possibly mythological. I thought SEA COW, remembered that was an *actual* alternate name for a manatee, and so pivoted to ... SEA HAG. I still want it to be SEA HAG.
- 20A: Greyhound's competition (DOG RACE) — sooo much trouble parsing this one, mainly because I thought the clue was asking for a bus line.
- 86A: It can be a strain on the pupils (COURSE LOAD) — one of the puzzle's tougher moments. Also, one of the highlights. Hard to see this puzzle as anything but ocular, given that there's no "?" on it, and that if you were actually referring to students, you'd say "It can be a strain on pupils," not "the pupils." I had -OURSEL- and thought the answer was something about YOURSELF (??). That first letter was eluding me because I forgot about Amal CLOONEY, as I am wont to do from time to time (especially between crosswords, which is the only place I ever hear about her) (I mean she's clearly legitimately famous, I just ... don't follow legal stuff / celebrity stuff closely, I guess) (86D: ___ Foundation for Justice (international human rights group)).
- 24D: Something a Brazilian is unlikely to wax (SKI) —Hey-o! Not where I thought this clue was going. I guess they don't really ski in Brazil ... 'cause it's warm? No reason a Brazilian couldn't hop over to Chile—lots of great skiing there. But plausibility isn't really the point of this clue, is it? If you're unfamiliar with the concept of the "Brazilian wax" (the basis for the misdirection / wordplay in this clue) here's everything you might want to know, possibly more.
P.S. Thanks so much to the readers who've recently sent me postcards for my Reader Postcard Collection. Got a promo postcard for a reader's book, a postcard from a gallery exhibition about baseball caps (!), and a couple of nautical postcards (wildly different in tone and style).
If you've got anything even vaguely cinema-related, that's my real postcard passion, but any card is a treat. Hell, non-junk mail of any kind is a treat. Reading anything that doesn't appear on a screen is a treat. Anyway, I'm grateful for these, thanks.