Constructor: Jacob McDermott
Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium
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THEME: none
Word of the Day: Thomas Campion (44D: "Follow THY Fair Sun" (Thomas Campion poem)) —
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This one got off to a very bad start with me, as I cannot adequately express how much I do not care about and am not curious about the lore and practice and general behavior of YALIES, who have, historically, been overrepresented in the crossword, compared to other institutions of higher learning, to an absolutely absurd degree. YALIE YALIES ELI ELIS ELIHU OLDELI BOOLA LUX (et Veritas) and on and on, seemingly. So ... Bladderball? I have no &^$%ing clue. I assume it's something embarrassing like Quidditch. The name itself is something someone should've changed a long time ago. I know and admire and even love many people who have attended Yale, but dear god please stop making me know things about Yale. So, right from 1-Across (1A: Bladderball players, historically), it's a NO(-NO) from me. OK OK? No, it is not OK (OK)? But then things got better. I do not know if that is how I would spell "LOOKIE HERE!" or if I could spell "LOOKIE HERE!" at all, but I like the bounce of the phrase, and I also like that it feels like a rejected revealer for *yesterday's* puzzle (LOOK! "IE" HERE!). Also recalling yesterday's puzzle:HIHOS, LOL! Ask for the bygone cracker spelling, get the bygone cracker spelling! The next day! Maybe OOXTEPLERNON (the God of Short Bad Fill) actually does answer prayers. Oh Great One, please, hear me out about the Yale stuff, for god's (your?) sake! Amen.
Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium
Word of the Day: Thomas Campion (44D: "Follow THY Fair Sun" (Thomas Campion poem)) —
Thomas Campion (sometimes spelled Campian; 12 February 1567 – 1 March 1620) was an English composer, poet, and physician. He was born in London, educated at Cambridge, studied law in Gray's inn. He wrote over a hundred lute songs, masques for dancing, and an authoritative technical treatise on music. [...] While Campion had attained a considerable reputation in his own day, in the years that followed his death his works sank into complete oblivion. No doubt this was due to the nature of the media in which he mainly worked, the masque and the song-book. The masque was an amusement at any time too costly to be popular, and during the Commonwealth period it was practically extinguished. The vogue of the song-books was even more ephemeral, and, as in the case of the masque, the Puritan ascendancy, with its distaste for all secular music, effectively put an end to the madrigal. Its loss involved that of many hundreds of dainty lyrics, including those of Campion, and it was due to the work of A. H. Bullen (see bibliography), who first published a collection of the poet's works in 1889, that his genius was recognised and his place among the foremost rank of Elizabethan lyric poets restored. (wikipedia)
[Perfect, thanks, Google]
• • •
Follow Thy Fair Sun
Follow thy fair sun, unhappy shadow,Though thou be black as nightAnd she made all of light,Yet follow thy fair sun unhappy shadow.Follow her whose light thy light depriveth,Though here thou liv’st disgraced,And she in heaven is placed,Yet follow her whose light the world reviveth.Follow those pure beams whose beauty burneth,That so have scorched thee,As thou still black must be,Till Her kind beams thy black to brightness turneth.Follow her while yet her glory shineth,There comes a luckless night,That will dim all her light,And this the black unhappy shade divineth.Follow still since so thy fates ordained,The Sun must have his shade,Till both at once do fade,The Sun still proved, the shadow still disdained. (1601) (poetryfoundation.org)
Once I got out of the NW (the ELIS to ERTES (ugh) stretch). Things were noticeably more pleasant. I like the juxtaposition of AHAMOMENT and "DUH!" although I do call foul on the clue for "DUH!" which very much screams "D'OH!" (25D: Cry that might accompany a forehead slap). If headslaps are involved, I assume "D'OH!" not "DUH.""D'OH" is much more self-accusatory. "DUH!" might be as well, but unlike "D'OH!" it's often turned outward, toward another dummy besides yourself. I had "D'OH!" there, locked in, and that created the one real sticking point in the puzzle (didn't help that it was located right at the passageway into the entire SE section—had to go all the way around from and come at that section from below. MULCH "DUH" LIBRA was the last set of answers to go in. My favorite section was probably the SW, because the longer answers both had something special going for them. KINDA SORTA is just fun, so that one's got fun going for it. And STAYCATION, while it doesn't move me as much as an answer, per se, does have a fantastic clue today (59A: Break in?). If you take a "break""in" your own home ... STAYCATION! Nice, clean, compact misdirection there. STAYCATION also makes a nice echo of its near-symmetrical counterpart, "HOME AT LAST!" If the couch is your favorite place, this is the puzzle for you!
Beyond the "DUH" / "D'OH" confusion, I didn't have any mistakes besides AGED for FIRM (57D: Like cheddar, but not brie, an error I made because I couldn't get the help I needed from the first-letter cross, 56A: What U.P.S. routes tend to avoid (LEFTS). I had no idea!. I was like "... LEAFS? LEDGE? LEAKS?" Do they "avoid" them or just "minimize" them? Can you really have an entire U.P.S. route with no LEFTS? Are the brown trucks really that cumbersome? I'm much more curious about U.P.S. lore and practice than I am about Yale, that's for sure.
Bullets:
Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld
[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]
- 17A: World capital since 1971 (DOHA)— I had no idea its capital status was so young. Admittedly, I don't think a lot about DOHA. In fact, it's possible I wouldn't think about it at all, or even know of its existence, were it not for crosswords. This is true of much of the world. Is OSLO even real?
- 23A: Grand ___, town in Nova Scotia that's a UNESCO World Heritage Site (PRÉ) — biggest "???" in the grid for me, by far. This is a prefix dressed up in geographical costume. The name translates to "Great Meadow," and wikipedia has it as hyphenated ("Grand-PRÉ").
During the French and Indian War (the North American theatre of the Seven Years' War), the Acadians were expelled from Grand-Pré during the Bay of Fundy Campaign (1755). There were various British soldiers who kept a journal of the deportation from Grand-Pré such as Lt. Col. John Winslow and Jeremiah Bancroft. The site of Grand-Pré during the expulsion was later immortalized by American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow with his epic poem Evangeline.
Acadians from Grand Pré were dispersed in many locations and some eventually returned to other parts of the Canadian Maritimes such as Nova Scotia, Newfoundland and New Brunswick. Many Acadians expelled from the Grand-Pré area eventually settled in the New England States and travelling overland to South Louisiana in the United States after being dropped on the Atlantic coast. In Louisiana, the term Cajun evolved from the name Acadian. (wikipedia) (my emph.)
- 41A: Subjects of the 2019 Pulitzer-winning novel "The Overstory" (TREES) — my wife really loved this book and keeps telling me to read it. I keep putting it off. I don't know why. Maybe it's the pre-existing mountain of books that is my To Be Read Pile.
- 16D: Antlered animals (ELKS) — never budging from my contention that the plural of ELK is ELK.
- 11D: Good speller? (MAGE) — because a mage casts spells...
- 29A: Galactic scale? (LIBRA)— because LIBRA is the "scales" sign of the zodiac, and also a constellation (hence part of the "galaxy"?)
- 64A: Brews (STEEPS)— I'm a coffee drinker, as I believe I've (frequently) mentioned, but I just subscribed to a newsletter about tea called "Leafhopper" by Max Falkowitz, and I love it. It is beautifully, nerdily, warmly obsessive about all aspects of the tea world, from cultivation to drinking. Highly recommended (by me as well as Helen Rosner, the New Yorker food writer from whom I found out about it). Now it's time for my coffee...
See you tomorrow.
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