Constructor: Howard Neuthaler
Relative difficulty: Medium-Challenging (*for a Tuesday*)
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THEME: CHANGO (23D: "Presto ___!" ... or a hint to 17-, 28-, 41- and 52-Across) — familiar phrases have their last letters "changed" from "E" to "O," creating wacky phrases, which are clued wackily ("?"-style):
Bullets:
Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld
Relative difficulty: Medium-Challenging (*for a Tuesday*)
Theme answers:
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I was kind of with this one at first. TYPE to TYPO and HERE to HERO both had just the one letter change *and* the one sound change, which is really a sound addition—it's like you're just adding an "O" to the end. But then NOT QUITO comes along and ... well, that answer didn't feel quite-o right-o. Because now you've got additional sound changes (notably the first vowel sound in "QUITO," but also the initial consonant sound ("kw" to "k")), so instead of having this cool, lean, simple, elegant thing going on, you've got a clunker. LIME to LIMO also clunks in this same fashion. It would've been better if the simple change in the first two themers had continued with the last two—or if the more complicated change of the last two had been operative from the beginning. Something about switching apparent logic midstream made this one feel not smooth, not quite (!) worked out. Now, you can argue that this puzzle's execution of the theme is actually the most simple and elegant, in that all that has changed, in every case, is the final letter. That's it. "E" to "O." What could be simpler? But I don't just look at words, I hear them, and the pronunciation inconsistencies feel like a glitch. Another thing that feels like a glitch—not having both halves of the incantation "Presto CHANGO" in the actual grid. So odd to just have "CHANGO" on its own, in that weird (completely arbitrary) position. Also—and this isn't the puzzle's fault—"CHANGO" looks like it should rhyme with "tango" or "mango," so somehow looks extra-ridiculous without its "Presto" to give it context. PRESTO and CHANGO have the same number of letters, so could (theoretically) have been arranged symmetrically in the grid. That would, admittedly, have been tougher to pull off, but PRESTO on the left of the grid, CHANGO on the right, that would've been better, or more aesthetically pleasing, at any rate.
- BLOOD TYPO (17A: "AB negatve" or "B poditive"?) (from "blood type")
- SAME HERO (28A: Odysseus vis-à-vis Ulysses?) (from "same here")
- NOT QUITO (41A: Surprising answer to the question "What is Ecuador's most popular city?") (from "not quite")
- LEMON LIMO (52A: Prom transport that keeps breaking down?) (from "lemon-lime")
Clyde Austin Drexler (born June 22, 1962) is an American former professional basketball player who currently works as the commissioner of the Big3 3-on-3 basketball league. Nicknamed "Clyde the Glide", he played 15 seasons in the National Basketball Association (NBA), spending a majority of his career with the Portland Trail Blazers before finishing with the Houston Rockets. He was a ten-time NBA All-Star and named to the NBA's 50th and 75th anniversary teams. Drexler won an NBA championship with Houston in 1995, and earned a gold medal on the 1992 United States Olympic team known as "The Dream Team". He was inducted twice into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame, in 2004 for his individual career and in 2010 as a member of the "Dream Team". Drexler is widely considered one of the greatest basketball players and greatest shooting guards of all time. (wikipedia)
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I actually think "NOT QUITO" is the best of the bunch, in that it is the wackiest, the most wacky, the king wackadoodle themer of the day, for sure. Which is to say it's the most daring and the most inventive. Also, twenty bucks* to anyone who can, without looking, name the actual most populous city in Ecuador. It's got 2.7 million people (to Quito's 1.8) and I've never heard of it. Give up? You should give up. The answer is Guayaquil. Put that in your grid and smoke it! Zero NYTXW appearances for GUAYAQUIL, you'll be unsurprised to learn. You can't exactly call Guayaquil "obscure," though. No city that big can properly be called "obscure." It's the 17th biggest city in South America, and the 7th biggest outside Brazil. Man, Brazil has So Many cities of 3+ million people. Campinas? Salvador? After Rio and Recife (why do I know Recife!?), I'm pretty much out. Ooh, São Paulo, I know that one from crosswords (SÃO!). You're all probably way better at world geography than I am. Maybe you all knew (or at least had heard of) Guayaquil. Not me. News to me. I'm staring at this list of the 50 largest cities in South America (all with populations over a million) and just shaking my head at my own ignorance. Anyway, NOT QUITO is right. It's not Quito. It's Guayaquil. And now you know. Or you already knew, and now you know how little I know, which is pretty much the daily theme of this blog.
Back to the theme. Another thing I would've liked, that would've made it ... nicer ... is if there were no other "O"-ending words in the grid. At all. Let your theme shine by eliminating the static, the competing "O" noise. No OPPO or ALPO or AGO or CAMEO or SLO-MO or "UM, NO" or BUONO. Just TYPO HERO QUITO LIMO and out. One last thing on the theme: there really should be an extra "?" in the NOT QUITO clue (41A: Surprising answer to the question "What is Ecuador's most popular city?"). All the others have "?" as a wackiness indicator, but this one just has the regular old interrogative "?" that I guess is supposed to double for the wackiness indicator, but wackiness indication is an entirely separate role, so a second "?" (outside the quotation marks) seems appropriate. This is maybe the smallest criticism I've ever had of a clue, but I notice what I notice and I want what I want, smallness be damned.
The fill is interesting in places, ugly in others. The SW corner is particularly ugly. EHUD INUK DEKES ... that is high levels of grim packed into one tiny corner. On the other hand, I like that there's a Q SCORE alongside CUE TIPS but *no* Q-TIPS in sight. Somewhere on the sidelines, Q-TIPS is shedding a single tear. "Am I not ... good enough?" I had more trouble than I usually have on Tuesdays, which is to say I had some non-zero amount of trouble. The very nature of the theme meant you had to kind of think about those answers, and then, well, there was "WELL, GEE" (the "WELL" part was not immediately apparent), and "UM, NO" (not "UH, NO," as I first thought) (26D: "That's just completely incorrect"), and then I had EASES before CALMS, that was an unforced error, for sure (39A: Soothes). Oh, and that BARBELLS clue got me good (37D: People are often spotted pressing them). I came at it from below and even after I got BELLS all I could think was "well, DOORBELLS doesn't fit!" It's a great clue, with both "spotted" and "pressing" having weightlifting meanings—double wordplay!
Bullets:
- 22A: Dessert drink made from frozen grapes (ICEWINE)— drove past a lot of vineyards in southern Ontario this summer that seemed to specialize in ICEWINE. And oh look, there's a reason for that: "Canada is the world's largest producer of icewine, producing a greater volume of icewine than all other countries combined with Ontario producing over 90% of Canada's icewine, followed by Germany" (wikipedia). I don't know that I've ever had it.
- 1D: Texter's "Hang on a sec" (BRB)— "be right back"
- 36D: Abandon one's social plans (BAIL)— nice modern colloquial clue on this one, love it.
- 4D: Cloying (TOO SWEET) — had the "T" and actually tried TREACLEY (a variant spelling that I invented solely for this answer).
See you next time.