Constructor: Michal Schlossberg
Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium (very easy but for the NW corner, which is more medium)
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THEME:"OH. FUDGE." (62A: What you might cry upon recognizing this puzzle's ingredient list?) — first words of theme answers (shaded), taken together, are a basic fudge recipe, I guess:
Theme answers:
Well the revealer clue was almost right, except replace "cry" with "say flatly." Oh. Fudge. Now I see what was going on there. Huh. I endured all ... that (gestures at everything about "OH FUDGE") for ... a fudge recipe? Let's just grant you that turning the mild oath "OH FUDGE!" into the imagined solver reaction "OH! FUDGE!" is clever. There remain the minor (not minor) problems of how to execute the theme and how to fill the grid. On the first count, the answers aren't all that exciting, but that's not a big problem. Between recipe and symmetry restrictions, it's a tough needle to thread. And BUTTERFINGERS has some zing. But MILKSOP is borderline archaic ("milquetoast" seems the more likely term), and COCOA BEACH ... has a population of 11,539. That is the one and only fact about it in the entire opening paragraph of its wikipedia entry, beyond the fact that "[i]t is part of the Palm Bay–Melbourne–Titusville, Florida Metropolitan Statistical Area" (wikipedia), and that ... that doesn't help me at all. It's a minuscule town ("city?" come on...) inside a metro area I've never even heard of. Total desperation fill. Not hard to get / infer—crosses are easy, and since COCOA butter is a sun tan lotion ingredient, there's at least a vague association between COCOA and BEACH. But COCOA BEACH is not a crossworthy place. It sounds like a famous place. I'm sure lots of solvers were like "oh, yes, COCOA BEACH, I should've remembered that!" but no, it's nowhere. And COCOA BEACH takes us to the heart of this puzzle's problem, which is SOPOR (7D: Abnormally deep sleep)—a bizarrely obscure word (I know it only as a prefix for -IFIC) that is also the anchor holding the two weakest theme answers in place (MILKSOP / COCOA BEACH). You can see how it's grid design that gets you SOPOR in the first place. You've got MILKSOP and COCOA BEACH locked in as themers, but the resulting --PO- in the Down really narrows your choices. And so you end up not only with the completely unlikeable SOPOR, but also ARCTICS (1A: Waterproof overshoes), whatever those are (the term hasn't appeared in the NYTXW since 1951). The ugliest bit of fill, and the only real Unknowns for me in this puzzle, all glued together in one spot. That is the kind of wonkiness that should make a constructor lose sleep and tear up the grid the next day.
Notes:![]()
Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld
[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]
Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium (very easy but for the NW corner, which is more medium)
Theme answers:
- MILKSOP (17A: Coward)
- COCOA BEACH (20A: City on Florida's Space Coast)
- BUTTERFINGERS (32A: Nickname for a clumsy person)
- SUGAR SNAP PEAS (42A: Some stir-fry vegetables)
- VANILLA ICE (54A: Rapper with the hit 1990 album "To the Extreme")
Cocoa Beach is a city in Brevard County, Florida, United States. The population was 11,539 at the 2018 United States Census. (wikipedia)
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| [Caspar Milquetoast] |
There's also the rest of the grid, which is full of short, unappealing, frequently subPAR fill. From the grimness of ODS (19A: Some poison control center cases, in brief) and doomsday preppers stockpiling AMMO (yeesh), to all that ARCTICS SOPORCOCOA BEACH nonsense I just went over, to the avalanche of crosswordese: CELS TSK INS UPS ISTO INON TSARINA GTOS TEEPEE TEHEE SHO SOLI FUM UTE. You may as well consider OOF a kind of second revealer. It sits atop "OH FUDGE" like a commentary. While I did not "cry""OH FUDGE," I definitely did cry OOF. Several times.
Notes:
- 25A: Bassist Meyer (EDGAR)— the one thing outside of SOPOR Junction that I didn't know. I thought briefly "oh, I've heard of him," but I think I'm thinking of EDGAR Winter. Meyer is an incredibly accomplished classical, bluegrass, and jazz bassist, as well as a composer, and he's not that much older than I am, so I'm surprised his name doesn't ring a bell. Gonna check him out. Thanks, puzzle.
- 23D: Having a baby bump, slangily (PREGGO)— leaving aside how cringe this term is, the clue is bad. It's redundant. "Baby bump"is slang, so "slangily" is completely unnecessary. [With child, slangily], [Expecting, slangily], those make sense. But here, no, you can (should) ditch it. Or rewrite the clue entirely. Or tear up your grid and get rid of PREGGO altogether. For some reason PREGGO is worse even than PREGGERS, and I can't put my finger on why. Maybe because PREGGO feels like a slangy degradation of a perfectly good Italian word.
- 34D: Fiddlehead producer (FERN) — one of the symbols of New Zealand. Speaking of which, I gotta get my wife to the bus station by quarter to 7 this morning so she can get down to the city to visit her mother, who flew in from NZ two days ago. So that's all, folks.
See you tomorrow.
[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]