Constructor: Ryan Judge
Relative difficulty: Very Easy
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THEME: none
Word of the Day: Rafael DEVERS (25D: Rafael ___, All-Star third baseman for the Red Sox) —
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I guess the idea is that Saturday = Friday + proper nouns. Yesterday's puzzle was very easy for most people, and it was notably light on names, and devoid of any names that might be considered "niche" or "obscure." Today's puzzle was, for me, just as easy, if not EASIER, but I was aware as I was moving through it of how many more Name Bombs there were. If you know the names, then they aren't bombs—they're actually accelerators, and today, I knew most of them, so whooooosh. But it seems very likely that if solvers get hung up anywhere today, it's gonna be somewhere in the thicket of names. DEVERS O'DAY STYNE DON VITO VERA AIMEE, somewhere in there. Because the rest of it was cake. Wednesday-level cake. Cake that tastes like Wednesday (in my head, "Wednesday" is brown, so ... chocolate?). There are hardly any inky patches on my printed-out puzzle, which means trouble spots were nearly non-existent. I wish this puzzle had run yesterday and something much, Much thornier had run today. Today's puzzle definitely had the lightness, the breeziness, and the fun factor, but no bite. Well, there's the SNAKE BITE (51A: Injury that usually involves two puncture wounds), but that (ironically) was no threat at all. I guess I should just be grateful that I got back-to-back enjoyable Fridays, but it's hard not to notice how much they've eased up the late-week puzzles. Maybe their money-generating algorithms A.I. told them it would be best for sales and renewed subscriptions. Probably tons of computing power going into finding exactly how much you can dumb things down and still maintain brand value and integrity. But these days, if I want challenge, I gotta turn to cryptics, British cryptics in particular. Those things will punch me in the face and then drag me around the block a few times. Am I into that? I am not ... not into it.
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I love how symmetrical that screenshot is. Made me aware (in a way that I wasn't beforehand) that the grid has mirror symmetry along the NW-to-SE diagonal—an unusual way to bring the required / expected grid symmetry, for sure. To me, the white squares look like a bug of some kind, flying NW, and those answers that come bursting out of the NW are on its wings. It also looks a bit like a smiling tater tot wearing a fancy hat, or a swole gingerbread man—the NW its head, the NE and SW its Popeye-like arms. I like the Popeye connection, since pumping those answers into those corners was definitely a Popeye-eating-his-spinach moment. Forearm muscles bursting, puzzle about to be pounded into submission. This metaphor doesn't quite work, as the puzzle would have to pound ... itself ... but now I've got the "Popeye the Sailor Man" tune in my head now so the metaphor stands. Ooh, just noticed that CHILDHOOD MEMORY mirrors "AM I MAKING THAT UP?" which is Perfect, as memories are so often misty, hazy, unintentionally embroidered. I have CHILDHOOD MEMORYs that can't possibly have happened (at least not exactly the way I remember them). Reading Proust (which I am) makes you hyperaware of what a weird web memory is, and how it's (inevitably) sustained and maintained over time by our own imaginations and (self-serving) storytelling tendencies. "Popeye" is definitely a CHILDHOOD MEMORY. As an adult, I discovered that "Popeye" was a comic before it was a cartoon, a comic created by occasional crossword answer E.C. SEGAR that evolved out of another comic called "Thimble Theatre." This is a little like "Nancy" evolving out of a Jazz Age flapper comic called "Fritzi Ritz"—a side character becomes extremely popular and basically steals the whole damn show. Wow, OK, I've drifted. Revisiting CHILDHOOD MEMORYs will do that. Back to the puzzle.
Relative difficulty: Very Easy
Word of the Day: Rafael DEVERS (25D: Rafael ___, All-Star third baseman for the Red Sox) —
Rafael Devers Calcaño (/ˈdɛvərz/ DEV-ərz; born October 24, 1996) is a Dominican professional baseball third baseman for the Boston Red Sox of Major League Baseball(MLB). He made his MLB debut in 2017. Devers won the Silver Slugger Award in 2021 and 2023 and was an All-Star in 2021 and 2022. [...] On January 3, 2023, Devers and the Red Sox agreed to a $17.5 million salary for the 2023 season. On January 11, Devers and the Red Sox signed a ten-year contract extension worth $313.5 million, which will take effect in the 2024 season. [...] Devers was given the nickname “Carita,” which means “baby face,” because he was so happy and smiling as a child. He used the nickname for Players' Weekend in 2019. (wikipedia)
• • •
[VERA, Chuck, and Dave]
So let's pretend it's Friday, because this is a pretty wonderful Friday puzzle. Little bit of struggle for traction up front and then like fireworks I went exploding out of the NW. That corner has the front ends of two grid-spanning answers, so [Boom!] and [Boom!]
Two trouble spots today. The first one was AIMEE (17A: ___ Lou Wood, "Sex Education" actress). I've watched that damn show (the first two seasons, anyway) and still had no idea what that name was, or which character, or anything. I mostly remember Gillian Anderson. Thank god the name was spelled AIMEE and not AYMEE, as I briefly feared—I never have any idea if it's SHYEST or SHIEST. The first one is the one that looks right, but thank god my brain was like "No! AYMEE is not a thing!" and so we (me and my brain) went with the "I." Good choice. The other trouble spot was ... well, speaking of "spots," it was DIE, or the answer that I thought was DIE. A DIE is a [Small cube] (with spots!) so ... yeah, that was one trap I fell right into, face first. I guess ONE x ONE x ONE = ONE, so ONE is a "cube" in the mathematical sense. Beyond those two answers, I had only rudimentary and minor trouble. OCH before ACH (4D: Interjection in Innsbruck), SHOUTED before SHORTED (5D: Blew a fuse, say), that kind of (small) stuff.
Explainers and other note-type things:
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- 1A: 16th-century coinage of geographer Gerardus Mercator (ATLAS) — well I knew it was gonna be map-related, but that didn't help much. At least not until I got a few crosses. I opened today with LODE OCH SMOOCH SH(Y/I)EST.
- 24A: A.M.A. member? (ASK) — I think "A.M.A." was a phenomenon that started on reddit. It means "Ask Me Anything." Celebrities would do "A.M.A." sessions, sometimes as part of some charitable endeavor (here's one with Will Ferrell from eleven years ago). Now people say "AMA" on social media all the time, mostly facetiously. For example.
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| [OK so he doesn't use the abbr. "AMA" here but he should have] |
- 13A: It's bigger than a peck (SMOOCH) — did you write BUSHEL? I have no idea how big a bushel or a peck is, but I had enough crosses in place not to fall for BUSHEL.
- 19A: Final track on Beyoncé's "Cowboy Carter" ("AMEN") — first of all, great album. Second of all, I could not have told you what the final track was, but the "final" part made it easy to infer.
- 39A: Classic tune used as an ice cream truck jingle, with "The" ("ENTERTAINER") — I did not know that ice cream trucks played this. Have they always? I know this song from The Sting (1973).
- 42A: Marching band syllable (PAH) — probably the worst thing in the grid, but you're allowed a stray 3-letter clunker here and there. I wanted OOM here. Right idea, wrong ... tuba sound part.
- 10D: Oppenheimer's creation ... which "Oppenheimer" certainly wasn't (A-BOMB) — this clue should absolutely positively have a "?" on it, since there is a hyphen in the first (actual bomb) meaning and not not not in the second (movie) meaning. It's a cute cluing idea (the movie "Oppenheimer" was certainly not a flop, i.e. A BOMB), but come on, editors. Get it together.
- 21D: Person who consumes a ritual meal to absorb wrongdoings of the dead (SIN-EATER) — this has made one other NYTXW appearance (in 2021), which remains the only other time I've heard this term in my life, I think. But it's real enough.
- 35D: Untruthfully? (ON A DARE) — a properly Saturday clue, for once. It's a bit of a stretch, but it's playing on the slumber party game "Truth or Dare." If you don't choose "Truth," then you have to do something ... ON A DARE. The clue is bonkers and only barely holds together, but that's what makes it charming, I think. I like your moxie, weird "?" clue! You stay in the picture!
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