Constructor: John Ewbank
Relative difficulty: Easy/Medium (Top-left corner Very Hard)
THEME: Logical fallacies — There is a list of logical fallacies, with the revealer LOGICAL FALLACIES.
Word of the Day: MORDOR (113A: Home of Mount Doom in "The Lord of the Rings") —
Relative difficulty: Easy/Medium (Top-left corner Very Hard)
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THEME: Logical fallacies — There is a list of logical fallacies, with the revealer LOGICAL FALLACIES.
Word of the Day: MORDOR (113A: Home of Mount Doom in "The Lord of the Rings") —
In J. R. R. Tolkien's fictional world of Middle-earth, Mordor (pronounced [ˈmɔrdɔr]; from Sindarin Black Land and Quenya Land of Shadow) is the realm and base of the evil Sauron. It lay to the east of Gondor and the great river Anduin, and to the south of Mirkwood. Mount Doom, a volcano in Mordor, was the goal of the Fellowship of the Ring in the quest to destroy the One Ring. Mordor was surrounded by three mountain ranges, to the north, the west, and the south. These both protected the land from invasion and kept those living in Mordor from escaping.
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Theme answers:- NO TRUE SCOTSMAN [All crossword fans love this puzzle; anyone who doesn't love this puzzle can't be a *real* crossword fan!]
- CIRCULAR REASONING [Why was this chosen as today's puzzle? Because it's great! What makes it great? I mean, it was chosen for publication!]
- CHERRY PICKING [I sent this crossword to 100 friends, and two of them really liked it!]
- POST HOC ERGO PROPTER HOC [What's more, one of those friends won the lottery right after solving it — coincidence? I think not! ]
- SLIPPERY SLOPE [If you criticize this puzzle, where will it end? Before long, you'll be criticizing your mother's cooking!]
- APPEAL TO AUTHORITY [Besides, The New York Times said it was good!]
- LOGICAL FALLACY [Part of a flawed argument, examples of which are seen throughout this puzzle]
Here is one thing that did not make me happy, though: this puzzle's theme. Sure, the meta-ish clues were fun, but at its core this is simply a list puzzle. Every theme entry is just in the "list of fallacies" Wikipedia page (yes, it's a real Wikipedia page). It was pretty easy for me to catch on to what was going on, and I filled in almost every theme answer immediately with no crosses (except NO TRUE SCOTSMAN, we'll get to that corner later). Maybe I'm just particularly well-versed in my logical fallacies? But where is the wit? Where is the wordplay? The joy, the creativity, the ingenuity, etc.? I feel like a list puzzle needs some additional layer, maybe a clever revealer, maybe some extra constraint, maybe even just a list that is tighter, or more interesting, or celebrating something that's not often celebrated in crosswords, or ... something. But the cute meta clues didn't quite do it for me today.
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| This is what an OKAPI looks like |
Let me complain a bit more, and then I will say nice things. It's always nice to end with nice things. But for now ... complaining! Let's start with the elephant in the room, which is that IZZATSO is absolutely, definitively, resoundingly, etc., not a thing. Not even close to a thing, sadly. It Googles really poorly, and it's just kinda so laughably WTF. That corner was rough since NO TRUE SCOTSMAN was ??? to me, IZZATSO is obviously also ???, this STU angle was new to me, the OZONE clue was hard. There were a few other clunkers (UNPC, TACET, et al.) but overall I thought the rest was pretty clean for a Sunday.
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| Yum, ROTINI |
Okay, that's out of my system. Now we can say nice things! Some fun non-theme entries here in BIONIC MEN, ONION RING, LET'S PARTY, POP-UP BOOK. Many Sundays will have not even one (1) fun entry like this, so I appreciated seeing these in the chonky corners of the grid. Even things like STIPEND, SPOILER, TENSE UP, WISCONSIN, while not super flashy, are super solid and evocative entries IMO.
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| The ROOK is my favorite chess piece, based purely on vibes |
Well .. the "nice things" section is a lot shorter than the "not nice things" section ... but it's not my fault that it's so much more fun to complain than to say nice things!
Bullets:
[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]
Bullets:
- GAS [Beetle juice?]— It took me forever to get this clue. It's Beetle as in the car, and juice as in fuel. So gas = gasoline = car fuel. Clever!
- MUSH [Sled dog command] — This one I actually don't get. Some sledding jargon I guess? Let me know if there's something else going on here that I missed.
- MT DANA [13,000+-foot peak in Yosemite]— I've been to Yosemite a few times, but don't think I'd heard of this.
- AWS [Sympathetic sounds] — Not to be a Tech Shill, but I'd love to see this clued as Amazon Web Services some day, which I understand might not be very well-known to tech or tech-adjacent people but which serves one third of the global cloud market.
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