Constructor: Alana Platt
Relative difficulty: On the harder side, for a Monday (solved Downs-only)
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THEME: ON THE BOARD (56A: Helping to manage a nonprofit, say ... or where to find the answers to the starred clues?) — things that can be found on a board:
Theme answers:
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I thought this was a fantastic Monday theme. It's not the snappiest revealer, maybe—since I was solving Downs-only, I had no idea how it was clued and assumed it had to do with sports, where, when a team (finally) scores, the announcer might say they're ON THE BOARD (as in the scoreboard, duh). And now that I write that out, I realize that there are probably lots of boards not represented by this puzzle. Scoreboards and tote boards and emery boards and diving boards—the theme has Sunday potential in terms of its scope, though (like Many theme ideas) it might get wearisome stretched to a 21x21 grid. At any rate, what we get is a vibrant set of theme answers, representing four very different board types, with CHARCUTERIE holding its rightful pride of place—that was probably the answer that was most fun to parse from a Downs-only perspective. I had no idea what the theme was and (as with every Across answer) had to just rely on letter patterns supplied by the Downs in order to make sense of the answer. The puzzle hadn't really grabbed my attention to that point, but "TRIP OUT, CHARCUTERIE FOREMEN!" has a way of making you take notice. I appreciated that the puzzle gave me a couple of fine longer non-theme answers (HARD TIME, COLD BREW) and even threw in some surprisingly sassy short stuff in the bargain, like DUCK IN or GO OFF, which is a normal enough phrase but in the grid looks like a typo for "goof." And as for DUCK IN, phew, also hard to pick up Downs-only. I had STOP IN and then when that didn't work ... zippo. It's fun when answers, even short answers, feel *worth* discovering, and not just the same old. This puzzle had far more personality than most Monday puzzles—more than most puzzles generally, to be honest.
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Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld
Relative difficulty: On the harder side, for a Monday (solved Downs-only)
Theme answers:
- CHESS PIECE (17A: *King or queen, but not prince) (chess board)
- WOOD GRAIN (10D: *Texture in a cross section of timber) (wood board)
- CHARCUTERIE (35A: *Artfully arranged meats) (also wood, but for eating off of: a serving board)
- THUMBTACK (32D: *Cousin of a pushpin) (bulletin board)
Samira Denise Wiley (born April 15, 1987) is an American actress. She is best known for her starring role as Poussey Washington in the Netflix comedy-drama series Orange Is the New Black (2013–2019) and as Moira in the Hulu dystopian drama series The Handmaid's Tale (2017–present), for which she won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Guest Actress in a Drama Series.Wiley also had starring roles in such films as The Sitter (2011), Nerve (2016), Detroit (2017), and Social Animals (2018). She also narrated the Netflix documentary Night on Earth (2020). (wikipedia)
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The thing that made it harder than normal, at least from a Downs-only perspective was ... well, first, the fact that so many of the 7+-letter answers were Downs (when you can't work crosses, the longer an answer is, the harder it is to get if you don't know it right off the bat). But the bigger problem for me was the grid seemed kinda name-y. Pop culture name-y. These tend to have a heavy risk/reward component—if you know 'em, wheeee, if you don't, especially if the names aren't terribly common in the general population, yikes. My big yikes was SAMIRA Wiley. Now I kinda sorta knew the name, but the vowels, The Vowels! Sigh. I survived by the skin of my teeth, but *only* because ATE RAW was already in the grid, which allowed me to infer that (probably!) ATE was not the answer at 29A (-TE). My ear wanted something that sounded like SaMEERa as the name, but I was absolutely prepared to doubt my brain and go with SAMARA (which is not a thing, unless you are John O'Hara and you have an appointment there, in which case you'd have to add an "R").
Staring down SAM-RA / -TE, I was in guessing territory. After crossing "A" off the ... board ... I was left with "I" and "E" as plausible answers. Both ÉTÉ (French summer) and ITE ("meteor" suffix) are viable 3s, so I had to go with a hunch—which looked more namelike: SAMIRA or SAMERA. I chose the former. I had my reasons, but it was just dumb luck.
BATEMAN was right up my alley, but as I wrote it in I had this feeling that BATEMAN was gonna be somebody else's SAMIRA (i.e. a pop cultural blindspot, though with perhaps more familiar / inferable letter combinations) (25D: Patrick ___, villainous protagonist of "American Psycho"). Jason BATEMAN seems like the more Mondayish BATEMAN to me. But back to things I *didn't* know: ICE Spice! (9D: Rapper ___ Spice). I would like to confess my mistake and come clean about my membership in the LIL Spice fan club! I see we have other members here with us today (I see you). Welcome.
ATE RAW felt a little wobbly as a verb phrase (3D: Consumed uncooked). EAT RAW would be great, in the sense that it's a common fad diet slogan, but ATE RAW, while completely defensible, doesn't quite have the zip. UTERUS was hard as hell to parse because when POUCH wouldn't fit, I was out of ideas and not getting a ton of help from (inferred) crosses (44D: One of two for a female kangaroo, surprisingly). Once I got GOOFF (boom!) and committed to NEGATE and ROMEO in the crosses, I saw the second UTERUS, but that was a weird way to come at that answer. Cool, but not Monday-easy. I never ever want ANAL in my grid (despite having put it in a grid once—once!) so I had PRIM in there at first (50D: Fastidious to a fault). The SW corner bugged me—it's a throwaway little corner, just an innocuous stack of fours, so I shouldn't notice it at all, but AAH / ASEC had me like "aaaah, no." There's something ugly about having *two* strongly subpar answers in such a tight space. My printed-out grid has alternative after alternative scribbled in the margin (if you construct, you know that your brain can fall down an infinite rabbit hole trying to make a tiny section of grid come out "right"). Here are the versions I currently have written at the bottom of my print-out:
AGRA
SPEC
HAWK
MIRA
SPEC
GAWK
TARA
ALEC
GAWK
HERA
AVEC
HAWK
SARA
AVEC
GAWK
Clearly none of the above answers bothers me as much as AAH (-not-AHH) and the partial ASEC. Your irritation level may, and probably does, vary.
[I know the puzzle wants me to see HAWK as a bonus theme answer but I absolutely do not and would be willing to sacrifice him in a heartbeat to make this corner better (61A: Skater Tony who is also 56-Across?).]
See you later.
Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld