Constructor: Willa Angel Chen Miller
Relative difficulty: Easy
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THEME: none
Word of the Day: CALL option (18A: ___ option) —
When I solve themeless puzzles, I put a premium on the longer answers, the marquee answers. These are the things you seed the grid with, your deliberate choices (in themed puzzles, it's the themers that seed the grid). So most longer answers are there because you really want them to be there. This is why I don't understand a puzzle like today's. With the exception of the SE corner, which had a nice pair of complementary colloquial marquees (NOT A LITTLE, GOOD ENOUGH), and SHAVED HEADS, which I liked for highly personal reasons (I shaved mine just last night!), I don't get actually wanting most of these long answers in your grid. UBER RATING is probably a debut, but as I've said a million times, Not All Debuts Are Good. I've seen a number of UBER answers and this has to be the most boring. (I know UBER's not paying the NYTXW, but sometimes it feels that way). And I practically fell asleep in the middle of writing BOARD SEATS ("seatszzzzz...") and DIRECT DEPOSIT. GRANDCHILD and SEA MONSTER are fine, but not headliner stuff. I like NO GREAT SHAKES as an answer, but today it takes us into triple-negative territory with the marquees, as we already have NOT A LITTLE, and "IT'S NOT A RACE" (which is the real problem, that duped "NOT A" being rather conspicuous today). There just wasn't enough zing here. BOARD SEATS, oof, more like "bored seats." It's a thing, but not a thing that livens up a grid. Not bad, this one, just bland.
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Relative difficulty: Easy
THEME: none
Word of the Day: CALL option (18A: ___ option) —
In finance, a call option, often simply labeled a "call", is a contract between the buyer and the seller of the call option to exchange a security at a set price. The buyer of the call option has the right, but not the obligation, to buy an agreed quantity of a particular commodity or financial instrument (the underlying) from the seller of the option at or before a certain time (the expiration date) for a certain price (the strike price). This effectively gives the buyer a long position in the given asset. The seller (or "writer") is obliged to sell the commodity or financial instrument to the buyer if the buyer so decides. This effectively gives the seller a short position in the given asset. The buyer pays a fee (called a premium) for this right. The term "call" comes from the fact that the owner has the right to "call the stock away" from the seller.
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| [48D] |
The puzzle was very easy, so I didn't have much time to dwell on my disappointment. There were several things I didn't know, but the surrounding fill filled itself in so quickly that I blew right through every roadblock. ONE is a horizontal line in Chinese writing? Crosses say "yes," so yes. ANITA Borg is somebody? (14D: Borg who co-founded the Institute for Women in Technology). Kinda sounds familiar. Sure, why not? Crosses say "yes," so yes. Same with Douglas Carter BEANE (38A: Playwright/screenwriter Douglas Carter ___). He has written (or worked on) the book for big Broadway adaptations of movies like Sister Act and Xanadu. It's true he is a screenwriter, but I only see a single credit on his wikipedia page (To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar (1995)). He has had a big successful career, but I feel less bad not knowing him after reading his cv. Not sure how I'd know his name from any of it. Did you know who wrote the book for Sister Act? If so, congrats. Anyway, BEANE was a name, a worthy name I didn't know, and it only held me up for a few seconds, so no biggie. The one answer that really had me going "???? is that right?" was 18A: ___ option (CALL). Is that some kind of Wall St. / stock exchange term? Or poker slang? Well, I looked it up (as you can see—see Word of the Day above), and my eyes glazed over the same way they did with BOARD SEATS and DIRECT DEPOSIT (and IPO, frankly). My first guess was (roughly) correct. Commodities trading. I'm sure these answers are getting someone excited, but it ain't me.
Toughest part of the puzzle today was SUSSing out "IT'S NOT A RACE!" (6D: "Take your time!"). The clue is a totally non-judgmental, reassuring statement, whereas the answer is a highly judgmental substitute for "slow the f*** down!" so the cluing, needless to say, did not really work for me. I (mentally) tried a bunch of "IT'S NO —" answers, then at some point (literally) tried "IT'S NOT A RUSH!" before I finally arrived at the correct answer. On its own, it's a good answer. With that clue, and amid two other "NO/NOT" marquee answers, it loses some of its luster. I also struggled ("struggled") with GRANDCHILD because I weirdly insisted on making her a GRANDNIECE at first (going with NIECE of CHILD in this circumstance is an obvious symptom of Crossword Brain—NIECE beats CHILD 257 to 52 in overall crossword appearances, because of its preponderance of common letters, so the NIECE reflex just kicked in—never mind that GRANDCHILD is a thousand times more common a term than GRANDNIECE. Then there was the Great GRAHAME Spelling Adventure. I think my first pass looked something like GRAEHAM. Again, crosses ultimately made this problem insignificant.
Bullets:
Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld
- 19A: Narrow passage: Abbr. (STR.) — short for "strait" (a (relatively) "narrow" waterway)
- 35A: First Pixar film with a female protagonist (BRAVE) — first thought: Finding Nemo! But Nemo is not "female." I'm just remembering Ellen Degeneres's prominent role (as Dory, the blue tang with short-term memory loss)
- 39A: First capital of Alaska (SITKA) — flexed my crosswordese muscle here. I would've said "you used to see this a lot more in the olden days," but I just looked at its frequency chart and honestly, it appears as much now (infrequently, but regularly) as it ever did. Oddly, no significant abatement in the modern era (not so with most answers I'd tag as "crosswordese").
- 50A: 2011 hit by Jay-Z and Kanye West that samples a 1966 soul performance ("OTIS") — never heard of this "hit," got it entirely from the helpful "1966 soul performance" part:
- 48D: ___ Tokarczuk, winner of the 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature (OLGA) — absolutely loved Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead. I've got Empusium sitting here on my (figurative) to-read pile. I'll get to it right after I finish this first book in the Reykjavik Noir trilogy by Lilja Sigurðardóttir (Snare) ... and the next book in the magnificent 10-book Martin Beck series by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö (I'm up to number 6: Murder at the Savoy) ... and Box Office Poison and Miss May Does Not Exist and and and. But I will get to it.
See you next time.
P.S. Last week during my yearly fundraising drive I decided to add Zelle as a payment method on the last day, which worked fine ... until it didn't. Several contributions were mysteriously rejected. It is not a big deal, but if you contributed that way, it's possible it didn't go through (this applies to only like a dozen of you). The problem was on my end ("MY BAD!"). I apologize. The bank and I have spoken. I should have the kinks ironed out for next year. For now, it's still just PayPal, Venmo, and snail mail. Thanks!
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