Constructor: Ernest Lim
Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium
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THEME: none (though for a bit there I thought it was something about "newspapers"...)
Word of the Day: The Treachery of Images (9D: English translation of a paradoxical line in a Magritte painting) —![]()
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Most of the marquee answers don't really seem up to the job today. There's an adequate blandness that spreads over this thing, a blandness highlighted by the one answer that is truly unbland—easily the best thing in the grid—and that is "THIS IS NOT A PIPE." I'd've really flipped for CECI N'EST PAS UNE PIPE, but that wouldn't fit in a regular 15x15 grid, so that will have to wait for some ambitious Sunday constructor, I guess. But "THIS IS NOT A PIPE" was the one time during this solve where I really sat up and went "hey, nice." Everywhere else just felt like ... how to say it ... quotidian and workaday and kind of blah. Full of the worldly ho-hum workaday-world concerns of someone who is PRESSED FOR TIME, or who has to BEAR THE EXPENSE of something. Time & money. Yesh, they are problems for all of us, but yawn. There's no doubt that MAKES HEADLINES and LATE EDITION are real things, but as successive answers, following EXIT POLLS, the puzzle really felt like it was going to be themed ... some kind of boring "news" theme? ... but then no, those are just three longish newsy answers. There is no theme. This made me happy (I don't want themes on F / Sat), but also sad, in that those answers now seemed kind of purposeless. Like an abandoned or aborted theme. Not really up to the task of being marquee answers in a puzzle that desperately needs them. But here nonetheless. Just not enough zing today. But that Magritte painting line, that I dug.
I also dug STATE PEN, though I don't understand why there was no abbrev indicator in the clue (4D: Sing Sing, e.g.). COLMAN Domingo was nominated for a Best Actor Academy Award yesterday for his performance in Sing Sing (2024). If he wins (which seems like a pretty good bet—he won the Golden Globe), then expect to see COLMAN in the grid more often (he has so far appeared once, as [___ Domingo, Best Actor nominee for 2023's "Rustin"]. At that point, I hadn't heard of Domingo or Rustin. I'm up to speed now).
Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium
Word of the Day: The Treachery of Images (9D: English translation of a paradoxical line in a Magritte painting) —
The Treachery of Images (French: La Trahison des images) is a 1929 painting by Belgian surrealist painter René Magritte. It is also known as This Is Not a Pipe, Ceci n'est pas une pipe and The Wind and the Song. It is on display at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
The painting shows an image of a pipe. Below it, Magritte painted, "Ceci n'est pas une pipe" (pronounced [sə.si ne paz‿yn pip], French for "This is not a pipe".)
The theme of pipes with the text "Ceci n'est pas une pipe" is extended in Les Mots et Les Images, La Clé des Songes, Ceci n'est pas une pipe (L'air et la chanson), The Tune and Also the Words, Ceci n’est pas une pomme, and Les Deux Mystères. [...]
On December 15, 1929, Paul Éluard and André Breton published an essay about poetry in La Révolution surréaliste (The Surrealist Revolution) as a reaction to the publication by poet Paul Valéry "Notes sur la poésie" in Les Nouvelles littéraires of September 28, 1929. When Valéry wrote "Poetry is a survival", Breton and Éluard made fun of it and wrote "Poetry is a pipe", as a reference to Magritte's painting.
In the same edition of La Révolution surréaliste, Magritte published "Les mots et les images" (his founding text which illustrated where words play with images), his answer to the survey on love, and Je ne vois pas la [femme] cachée dans la forêt, a painting tableau surrounded by photos of sixteen surrealists with their eyes closed, including Magritte himself.
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| [Coincidentally, I taught Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics just yesterday] |
I also dug STATE PEN, though I don't understand why there was no abbrev indicator in the clue (4D: Sing Sing, e.g.). COLMAN Domingo was nominated for a Best Actor Academy Award yesterday for his performance in Sing Sing (2024). If he wins (which seems like a pretty good bet—he won the Golden Globe), then expect to see COLMAN in the grid more often (he has so far appeared once, as [___ Domingo, Best Actor nominee for 2023's "Rustin"]. At that point, I hadn't heard of Domingo or Rustin. I'm up to speed now).
My disappointment today wasn't just rooted in bland marquees. There were several moments where the fill made me wince, or in the case of CEDAR WOOD, laugh outright. Oh, CEDAR WOOD, you say? As opposed to what, CEDAR METAL? CEDAR PLASTIC? CEDAR MARBLE? CEDAR PASTE? What are we doing here? Then there's RETINT and COTENANT, who are fighting the Battle of Who Can Be The Worst Prefixed Answer. Or so says my SEXTANT (40D: Seafarer's device). That's quite a trio, RETINT COTENANT and SEXTANT. The -NT Boys! Why would you put a cutesy "?" clue on possibly the worst answer in your grid (10D: Change one's tone again?). I have never understood constructors/editors wanting to call attention to bad fill this way. Then we've got some absurd plurals—a cadre of KATES and a bunch of ... BLEUS? Do I have that right? (31D: Some stripes on drapeaux français). Yee + ikes. That bit of French hasn't seen the light of day (crosswordwise) since Nineteen Hundred and Sixty-Three, where it was clued [Cordons ___]. No editor after Farrar would touch BLEUS. Until today. So it's a historic moment ... in the history of desperate fill. Not the way I'd choose to make history, but different strokes etc. BLEUS was about the only answer I had any trouble with, due solely to the fact that I forgot "drapeaux" meant "flags"—I (perhaps unsurprisingly) translated it as "drapes." I was like "How the hell should I know what French interior decorators get up to??"
Had the usual bout of single-square confusion. Always unsure of EMEND v. AMEND. "THESE Men" before "THOSE" (56A: "___ Magnificent Men and Their Flying Machines" (1965 film)). ELOTA before ELOTE (truly dumb mistake, I've eaten ELOTE and seen it in puzzles and everything). Had "Give it a READ!" before "Give it a REST!" LOL, I like my wrong answer. Someone pushing a book recommendation on you is nicer than someone telling you to shut up, I think. Briefly thought the 1845 immigrants were IRANI (true crossword brain there) (28D: Like many immigrants to the U.S. beginning in 1845). All those mistakes were my fault. My bad. On me. But there was one "mistake" which I want to go back and put in the grid as an act of protest and defiance. That is, I want to reinstate OPEN-ENDED, which is the only acceptable answer to 55A: Type of question not asked in 20 Questions. I plunked in OPEN-ENDED so fast, and that had to wonder who was attending commencement with a letter pattern like -DS (53D: Commencement attendees). For a brief, harrowing moment, I thought they were going to try to make me believe that GDS was an acceptable abbr. for "grads." But no. Worse (or almost worse), they are trying to make me believe that an OPEN-ENDER is a thing. Look, I get not wanting to use SDS, it's crosswordese of a decidedly bygone variety, but this "solution" to the SDS problem only makes matters worse. People ask OPEN-ENDED questions, they do not as OPEN-ENDERs. SRS is better than SDS, yes, somewhat, but OPEN-ENDED is better than OPEN-ENDER by an amount that is near-infinite. So suck up SDS or else rewrite that corner entirely.
Bullets:
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| [Students for a Democratic Society] |
Bullets:
- 20A: Green-skinned god of the afterlife (OSIRIS)— got this off the "O." I forgot he was green-skinned. I just remember he looks like ... a dog, right? No, damn, that's ANUBIS (who is, in my defense, the "god of funerary rites, protector of graves, and guide to the underworld" (wikipedia). Man, those Egyptians were death-obsessed.
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| [OSIRIS] |
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| [Anubis] |
- 35A: Florida city with the U.S.'s largest equestrian center (OCALA) — this was "Florida city..." and then the voice of the teacher in the "Peanuts" cartoons. I wrote in OCALA real easy. More of that old-school crosswordese.
- 45D: Give a run for your honey? (ELOPE)— oof, even the "?" clues are tired today. This is a really awkward variation on [Take the honey and run?], which is a classic (i.e. already-been-done, don't-do-it-again) ELOPE clue. The clue on UTERI (49A: Development sites?) falls into the same category—tired wordplay. Seen it before. 14 different uses of "development" in UTERI clues in the Shortz Era. This very clue has been used four times now (two have "?" and two don't ... so there's literally no logic to the "?"). Gotta be more creative with your cutesy cluing of crosswordese (did you know: UTERI appeared just once in pre-Shortz puzzles, but has appeared 37 times under his leadership?; also, did you know: UTERUS did not appear in the grid at all until 2007?; also, did you know: UTERUS is an anagram of SUTURE ... I'm learning so much today).
- 38A: TV family you "meet" in the show's theme song (FLINTSTONES)— You know: "Meet Fred Flintstone .... His pet, Dino ... Daughter Pebbles ... Wilma, his wife!" No, wait ...
- 41A: Temperature gauges, sometimes (TOES) — I liked this one. Had no idea, needed all the crosses, then thought "ah, good one." That's how a tricky clue is supposed to go.
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