Constructor: Julian Xiao
Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium
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THEME: none
Word of the Day: Arpad ELO (22A: Arpad ELO, creator of an eponymous chess rating system) —
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This one wasn't really showing me much. Kind of a placeholder. It skews a little quaint and old-fashioned ([Canoodle] / NECK, "THEM'S THE FACTS," that interminable "old quip" about OPERA, a host of overfamiliar short answers, etc.), and the cluing was frequently either flat or irksome. The worst part of the cluing was that the awful twin-clue convention was used not once not twice but thrice. The first time, it's used to predictably off and awkward effect, and right up front! Right out of the gate! Why? There's nothing "fun" about a double "conductor" clue that leads to CIRCUITS (?) and CUING (?). Yes, you have tapped into that astounding linguistic fact that "conductors" can mean multiple things! But [The works of many conductors] is such an awkward way of cluing CIRCUITS. What's the idea? Are you trying to misdirect people toward orchestra conductors (rather than electrical conductors)? Composers are the ones with "works," not conductors, although I guess recordings might be considered a conductor's "works." The fact that I'm having to think about this only reinforces my sense that the clue here is trying too hard. And then the puzzle goes and doubles down on the whole "conductor" business with CUING? (1D: Task for a conductor). I mean, yes, conductors do "cue" players in various ways, but CUING feels forced. Defensible, but not great because it's trying to do something no one actually cares about, i.e. echoing the 1-Across clue. You've also got two (2) "word found backward inside another similar word" clues (for ALOHA (HOLA) and TUNA (NUT))—fine when I saw it the first time, boring when I saw it again. But wait, there's more! You've also got two (2) "let's try to make bad fill interesting" clues (for SCI (Fi) and ROM (com)) (both clued as [First syllable of a rhyming film genre]).
Other things:
Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld
[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]
Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium
Word of the Day: Arpad ELO (22A: Arpad ELO, creator of an eponymous chess rating system) —
Arpad Emmerich Elo (né Élő Árpád Imre; August 25, 1903 – November 5, 1992) was an American-Hungarian physics professor who created the Elo rating system for two-player games such as chess.
Born in Egyházaskesző, Kingdom of Hungary, he moved to the United States with his parents in 1913. He was a professor of physics at Marquette University in Milwaukee and a chess master. By the 1930s he was the strongest chess player in Milwaukee, at the time one of the nation's leading chess cities. He won the Wisconsin State Championship eight times, and was the 11th person inducted into the World Chess Hall of Fame. (wikipedia)
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The reason I am focused upon this dumb c(l)uing minutiae today is there's not much to focus on in the marquee stuff, which just isn't marquee enough. The long Downs are all adequate, but not bringing much heat. I guess maybe golfers might chuckle knowingly at THREE-PUTT (12D: What might turn you red on a green). Who knows what golfers will do? I don't care about the game at all, and still that was the most interesting of the Downs for me. As for the long Acrosses, the 8s in the corners are very ho-hum, and then you've got the triple-stack across the middle. "THEM'S THE FACTS" has its charm, I guess, if you like faux-folksiness (fauxksiness!), and "ARE WE THERE YET?" is certainly an old (certainly clichéd) backseat refrain, but what the hell is TRY NOT TO LAUGH??? A "challenge"? Maybe, *maybe* if you'd clued this as an introduction to the revelation of an embarrassing fact, it would be OK. But as clued, it's awful. NOT LAUGHING is (maybe) the "challenge," but "TRY NOT TO LAUGH" is an impossible-to-imagine dare. It's a spoken phrase that needs a darer. Is someone saying this to me as they hand me their phone to show me a blooper reel, or cat videos? Bizarre. Not a phrase that stands alone well at all, and certainly not with this clue.
Aside from the initial CIRCUITS / CUING awkwardness, there was only one part of the grid that offered any pushback, and (tragically) it involves some of the grid's weakest fill—GOSEE x/w ADSPOT. ADSPOT is on-its-face bad, a commercial redundancy that only biznessspeak speakers could love (50A: Social media post labeled "Sponsored," e.g.). I thought the clue was gonna point to some neologism along the lines of SPONCON ("sponsored content"), but all I got was ADSPOT, blech. As for GOSEE ... "modeling lingo"? I had no idea there was such a thing (44D: Open call, in modeling lingo). I believe the clue—that it's a real thing. And the clue is at least trying to make GOSEE interesting. But in general I'm not a fan of deliberately adding difficulty to the parts of the grid that are least attractive. You want people to linger on the Good stuff, not the bad (in this case, more mediocre than truly bad, to be fair). I think most of what I'm annoyed about today falls under the category of bad editing, not bad constructing (I have to finish editing a puzzle for the forthcoming These Puzzles Fund Abortion 4 benefit collection today, so I maybe jinxing myself here ... or just pre-yelling at myself)
[Saw this same song—with this same clue—in another puzzle this past week, which is the only reason I knew it (59A: 2019 #1 hit by Shawn Mendes and Camila Cabello). I remembered it because in the other puzzle I had it as "SEDORITA" and wondered what that might mean ... turns out I had SHAVED where I should've had SHAVEN; the one upside of screwing up is the answers involved tend to stick your brain]
Other things:
- 38A: Shade akin to peridot (LIME)— I could've told you that peridot was a color, but apparently I could not have told you what that color was, or was akin to. I wrote ROSE here at first :(
- 3D: Nina of fashion (RICCI) — my first answer in the grid. Do you ever feel like your vast storehouse of crosswordese is a form of cheating? That's how it felt to get my first toehold in the puzzle with Nina RICCI, about whom I know nothing.
- 8D: One who has ways of making you talk ... (SPEECH THERAPIST)—again, what is going on with the cluing? What is that mysterious ellipsis doing there at the end (...) and why (dear god) would you evoke torture in your clue? Even cartoonish, TV-and-movie-bad-guy torture?
- 35D: Simple bucket (LAY-UP)— they got me here. Was really looking for a bucket-shaped bucket here, not slang for a made shot in basketball.
- 18D: Luxury brand ... or a non-luxury option (COACH) — my favorite wrong answer of the day. I had C--CH and decided to go with the non-luxury sleeping option: COUCH. "Hmm, I'm not familiar with the COUCH luxury brand. Do they make handbags? Scarves? Funny that their name is so close to ... hey!" There should be an anti-luxury brand called COUCH. A perfume that smells like NACHO chips, something along those lines.
End of February. There were four 4️⃣ solo woman constructors this month! Four more than last month! Hurray?! 2024 totals now
— Rex Parker 🐈🐾☕️🐾🐈 (@rexparker) February 29, 2024
Women 4
Men … 41
🎉😕
15 collabs so far this year;those skew M as well, but not nearly as bad, obvs
M/W: 8
M/M: 5
W/W: 2
It's the end of February, so it's time for my Puzzles of the Month feature: three of the best NYTXW I solved this month: two themed, one themeless
February 2024 Puzzles of the Month:
Themed:
- Sam Donaldson, "OPPOSITES ATTRACT" (Thursday, Feb. 8, 2024)
- Teddy Katz and Rich Katz, "DOUBLE OR NOTHING" (Thursday, Feb. 15, 2024)
Themeless:
- Carolyn Davies Lynch and Jeff Chen (ROCKET SCIENCE / BRAIN SURGERY) (Saturday, Feb. 3, 2024)
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