Constructor: Jacob Stulberg
Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium
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THEME:PG THIRTEEN (60A: Somewhat family-friendly ... or a title for this puzzle, as suggested by the completed grid?) —two-letter string "PG" appears thirteen times in the grid
Word of the Day: APGAR (70A: ___ score (neonatal measure)) —
Wow. This one. Uh ... OK, so the long Downs are actually pretty nice. But the rest, hoo boy. I mean, there's no way to say this except to just say it: the fill is really, really, really bad. Objectively. Like a war crime coupled with a natural disaster coupled with tofurky. I have one screenshot from early on entitled "Not Promising":
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You can smell Terrible early, and this smelled terrible. But, improbably, it immediately got worse. The very next answer I filled in was AAR ... and then ... well, a minute or so later I literally exclaimed "WHAT IS HAPPENING?," which then became the title of the next screenshot:
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I claim that that northern section, where CMII sits on ASSN and crosses MSGR *and* ISAO *and* INSUM, is the worst northern section ever found in any mainstream puzzle anywhere. Ever. Consider that a dare. The density of junk there is black-hole-ish. That section is nearly but not quite equaled by its counterpart in the south (SOUTH!—one of the puzzle's rare reasonable words), where IPSO and STLEO double-team ERSE OTOS in one of the most repulsive crosswordese orgies ever seen by human eyeballs. And that's just two small sections of this thing. I count a full two dozen (!) answers that I would put in the "avoid if at all possible" category. Stuff you want to keep to a bare minimum. Maybe you can accept six or so of these kinds of answers per puzzle. But... 6 < 24. 6 x 4 = 24. But on the plus side, it's got a terrorist? Man ... man oh man. Is this really what gives you pleasure, mainstream crossword-solving audience? Is this it? Wading through a crosswordese oil spill to find 13 PGs, most of which are huddled together in fear and/or shame? I just can't believe it. Or, I can, but then I drink to forget.
Happy Tuesday.
Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld
[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]
Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium
THEME:PG THIRTEEN (60A: Somewhat family-friendly ... or a title for this puzzle, as suggested by the completed grid?) —two-letter string "PG" appears thirteen times in the grid
Word of the Day: APGAR (70A: ___ score (neonatal measure)) —
Virginia Apgar invented the Apgar score in 1952 as a method to quickly summarize the health of newborn children. Apgar was an anesthesiologist who developed the score in order to ascertain the effects of obstetricanesthesia on babies. // The Apgar scale is determined by evaluating the newborn baby on five simple criteria on a scale from zero to two, then summing up the five values thus obtained. The resulting Apgar score ranges from zero to 10. The five criteria are summarized using words chosen to form a backronym (Appearance, Pulse, Grimace, Activity, Respiration). From each column in the table below, the infant is given a score of 0, 1 or 2. The scores are added up and the total is their Apgar score. (wikipedia)
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Wow. This one. Uh ... OK, so the long Downs are actually pretty nice. But the rest, hoo boy. I mean, there's no way to say this except to just say it: the fill is really, really, really bad. Objectively. Like a war crime coupled with a natural disaster coupled with tofurky. I have one screenshot from early on entitled "Not Promising":
[I thought maybe if I followed ANWAR across the grid to his last name, the fill might get better over there ... but no. Oh, no.]
You can smell Terrible early, and this smelled terrible. But, improbably, it immediately got worse. The very next answer I filled in was AAR ... and then ... well, a minute or so later I literally exclaimed "WHAT IS HAPPENING?," which then became the title of the next screenshot:
[I need a PRIE-dieu to beg god "No, god please, no"]
I claim that that northern section, where CMII sits on ASSN and crosses MSGR *and* ISAO *and* INSUM, is the worst northern section ever found in any mainstream puzzle anywhere. Ever. Consider that a dare. The density of junk there is black-hole-ish. That section is nearly but not quite equaled by its counterpart in the south (SOUTH!—one of the puzzle's rare reasonable words), where IPSO and STLEO double-team ERSE OTOS in one of the most repulsive crosswordese orgies ever seen by human eyeballs. And that's just two small sections of this thing. I count a full two dozen (!) answers that I would put in the "avoid if at all possible" category. Stuff you want to keep to a bare minimum. Maybe you can accept six or so of these kinds of answers per puzzle. But... 6 < 24. 6 x 4 = 24. But on the plus side, it's got a terrorist? Man ... man oh man. Is this really what gives you pleasure, mainstream crossword-solving audience? Is this it? Wading through a crosswordese oil spill to find 13 PGs, most of which are huddled together in fear and/or shame? I just can't believe it. Or, I can, but then I drink to forget.
Happy Tuesday.
Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld
[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]