Constructor: Jesse Guzman
Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium
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THEME: DOUBLE / REVERSE (62A: With 63-Across, tricky football play ... as represented by this puzzle's shaded squares?) — each theme answer contains two sets of shaded squares in which the correct letters are reversed, resulting in a plausible answer ... that doesn't fit the clue:
Theme answers:
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Started with a bang! Boom! PANACEA! (1A: Wonder drug). First thing in the grid! Me: "Yes! Nailed it! OK! Here we go! ... Here we ... Here ... Wait, isn't it LON Kruger? (5D: Longtime college basketball coach Kruger). Or maybe LEN, I forget, but definitely not CON. And how is [Makes a note of] gonna start with an 'E'? That doesn't work. Aw, man, is it not PANACEA? Well, that's deflating." Dispiriting, really. Just an embarrassing way to open, all full of confidence and certainty, only to fall flat on your face. Luckily, there were a bunch of gimmes in that NW corner to help hoist me back up, but once I had the corner all finished, I still had no idea why CRUELLA was right. I was trying to make the shaded squares mean something (RULLA?). And then the unshaded squares (CE?). Maybe run the shaded squares backwards (ALLUR?). I'm sure if I'd kept at it for a while, I would've gotten there, but tick tock, I gotta puzzle to solve, so I just moved on, assuming future themers would be more forthcoming ... and sure enough, the next one I got to was way more transparent. The only [Command to a getaway driver] I could think of was "STEP ON IT," and I looked at an answer that clearly had to be SET POINT ... and I saw it: the "STEP ON IT" hidden inside SET POINT. You just reverse the shaded squares and voilà! The whole thing ended up being a fairly typical Thursday experience: flail around until you grasp the gimmick, then just walk easily home. After SET POINT, there was nothing that would constitute real trouble the rest of the way.
Pretty easy puzzle overall, especially outside the themers. I might've spelled KIROV wrong at first pass (KIREV?) (24D: Russian ballet company), I don't remember. I couldn't remember the kind of LAP I was dealing with at 58A: Final circuit in a track race (BELL LAP). LAST LAP seemed right, and it fit, but ... no (also, GO LAST (i.e. GLOATS) was already in the grid). But the grid was just too full of gimmes for me ever to get significantly bogged down: ASSANGE ANGELOU OATES ANN KOTB ... the puzzle's just handing out freebies today. The one amusing (and nearly fatal) wrong answer I had today was RAT (25A: Something found near a trap). In retrospect, this clue was obviously written to elicit precisely this wrong answer, so RAT is less an anomalous personal pitfall than a predictable design feature (and therefore less amusing), but still, I did get a half-second or so of "What the hell biblical figure is this!?" before reading the *entire* clue, seeing Faulkner, and realizing my error. Again, they really make it easy on you today with the cluing. Oh, and if LAT doesn't make sense to you yet—it's a muscle (short for latissimus dorsi), as is "trap" (short for trapezius).
Bullets:![]()
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Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium
Theme answers:
- CRUELLA (i.e. CURE-ALL) (1A: Wonder drug)
- GLOATS (i.e. GO LAST) (8A: Have the final turn)
- SET POINT (i.e. STEP ON IT) (32A: Command to a getaway driver)
- TARNATION (i.e. TARANTINO) (35A: Three-time nominee for Best Director (1994, 2009, 2019)
- LAS VEGAS (i.e. SALVAGES) (39A: Rescues)
Sara Beth Bareilles (/bəˈrɛlɪs/ bə-REL-iss; born December 7, 1979) is an American singer, songwriter, and actress. She has sold over three million albums and over 15 million singles in the United States. Bareilles has earned various accolades, including two Grammy Awards, as well as nominations for three Primetime Emmy Awards and three Tony Awards. In 2012, VH1 named her one of the Top 100 Greatest Women in Music.Bareilles rose to prominence with the release of her second studio album, Little Voice (2007), which was her first recording for a major record label (Epic). The album included the hit single "Love Song", which reached number four on the Billboard Hot 100 and earned her a nomination for the Grammy Award for Song of the Year.
Bareilles made her Broadway debut when she composed music and wrote lyrics for the 2015 musical Waitress, for which she earned nominations for the Tony Award for Best Original Score and the Grammy Award for Best Musical Theater Album. She subsequently received Olivier Award nominations for its 2019 West End transfer production. She released the 2015 studio album What's Inside: Songs from Waitress, in which she performs many of the musical's songs as well as some that didn't make it into the show. She has gone on to be involved with Broadway productions, including the 2016 musical SpongeBob SquarePants and a revival of Stephen Sondheim's Into the Woods, both of which earned her Tony nominations. (wikipedia)
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These theme answers involve interesting word and phrase quirks, but I don't know how fun they were to figure out. I guess I had to work a little for SALVAGES (i.e. LAS VEGAS) because [Rescues] feels like it applies to a person, whereas SALVAGES ... doesn't. So I needed some help from crosses there, but the others (after CRUELLA, of course) were obvious. But that didn't make them total duds. I was kinda curious about what the unclued surface answer was going to be each time, so that, at least, was a surprise, and there was still the revealer to look forward to ... but that ended up being kind of a let-down. I mean, that is a football play, and it does literally explain what's going on with the shaded squares, but it's actually a little too literal. To be interesting. There's something anticlimactic about the explanation being so plain. There's no clever wordplay. Yes, there's a reverse ... twice ... a DOUBLE / REVERSE. I guess I wanted something more colorful, a repurposed colloquial phrase or something. DOUBLE / REVERSE felt too straightforward. Kinda dull. Maybe if I liked football more, I dunno...
Pretty easy puzzle overall, especially outside the themers. I might've spelled KIROV wrong at first pass (KIREV?) (24D: Russian ballet company), I don't remember. I couldn't remember the kind of LAP I was dealing with at 58A: Final circuit in a track race (BELL LAP). LAST LAP seemed right, and it fit, but ... no (also, GO LAST (i.e. GLOATS) was already in the grid). But the grid was just too full of gimmes for me ever to get significantly bogged down: ASSANGE ANGELOU OATES ANN KOTB ... the puzzle's just handing out freebies today. The one amusing (and nearly fatal) wrong answer I had today was RAT (25A: Something found near a trap). In retrospect, this clue was obviously written to elicit precisely this wrong answer, so RAT is less an anomalous personal pitfall than a predictable design feature (and therefore less amusing), but still, I did get a half-second or so of "What the hell biblical figure is this!?" before reading the *entire* clue, seeing Faulkner, and realizing my error. Again, they really make it easy on you today with the cluing. Oh, and if LAT doesn't make sense to you yet—it's a muscle (short for latissimus dorsi), as is "trap" (short for trapezius).
Bullets:
- 22A: Civil rights leader ___ B. Wells (IDA)— any opportunity to mention my cat (IDA), I'm gonna take. She was technically named after Lupino, but I call her "IDA B." a lot:
- 43A: What has posts all around a site (FENCE)— man, that clue is tortured. The surface meaning *wants* to sound like its internet-related, but just ends up sounding like some Uncanny Valley / AI-produced gibberish.
- 3D: Sudden riser in status (UPSTART) — again, such an ugly / weird clue. Recognizable words in an order no human would put them. "Riser" here is a ... person who is rising.
- 28D: "Wake word" for an Apple device (SIRI) — I've owned an iPhone since 2012 and have never, not once, used SIRI. Don't trust her. I'm sure she's still listening and telling her overlords everything I say, but I'm not "waking" her voluntarily. Afaic, she can stay dead. I think Apple devices should make you say SIRI three times, like "Beetlejuice." I still wouldn't use it, but that seems like it would at least be fun. Maybe they can rush a "Beetlejuice" setting for Halloween. Surely there's a lucrative movie tie-in here ... somewhere.
- 15A: Prominent feature of Hello Kitty (HAIR BOW) — I like all Hello Kitty answers because they remind me of the fact that Shortz once rejected a puzzle with HELLO KITTY in it (an Andrea Carla Michaels puzzle, I think), because he had never heard of it and didn't think people would know it. And then he read about it in an in-flight magazine immediately thereafter, and now it's everywhere, all over the grid. We even had the company that created Hello Kitty—SANRIO—in the puzzle last week, though that caused a lot of consternation because of its intersection with another not-too-familiar proper noun, LEO Rosten. So it looks like Natick now has a mayor: LEO SANRIO. Long may he reign.
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