Relative difficulty: Challenging
THEME: Parse a phrase into three separate words.Hi, Andrea Carla Michaels here, along with PuzzleGirl, filling in for Rex. He finally got on his plane to Florida after a two-day snow delay. If you are freaking out about the delay in the blog’s posting time, it’s bec I’m holding down the fort on the West Coast, PuzzleGirl is back East, while Rex goes South. While Rex has a travel day, I’ll write this up overnight, and PG’ll do her best to make sense out of it first thing in the morning. Relax, it’s New Year’s Eve’s eve. The fact you are even reading this means you may have bigger issues than posting times!
I love getting the chance to sub for Rex, but today he left one big airline seat to fill. Was totally up for subbing, practically begged, and then pleased Rex handed the reins to PuzzleGirl and me. But when I saw it was Joe Krozel and that half the clues were blank spaces, I panicked. I felt like a cross between Arnold Horshack ("Ooh, ooh, pick me, Mr. Kotter, pick me!") and Eminem in his so-last-year’s "Careful what you wish for":
So be careful what you wish for
'Cause you just might get it
And if you get it then you just might not know
What to do wit' it, 'cause it might just
Come back on you ten-fold
What can I say? This was one tough puzzle, as most Joe K’s are…took me almost an hour and I’m no SLO bunny. He’s tricky and not always my fave as a solver, tho I have enormous respect for him as a constructor and innovator. I remember loving his last one, both as a constructor and a solver, so I tiptoed in. In the end, I think it was worth it. That is to say, it was more than just OTAY. Actually, OTAY (41A: “Our Gang” approval) was my first entry and I sort of cringed, as I tend to be to the left of PC (when it suits me). I worried that it seemed mildly retroactively borderline racist, as anything having to do with Buckwheat does. Plus, I’m a gal who likes to start at 1A and go across, and do my little areas, which wasn’t helpful today since 1D was "Rent-___." I incorrectly filled in A-Car. My mistake became clear immediately by 2D: SHULS, as I was confident, as a Jew from (but not in) Minnesota, that I knew the Yiddish for "Synagogues." But "RL" as the first two letters of 20A would have been ugly… so I erased A-Car (for A-COP) and began to skip around.
So, a little STEVIE here, some Suze ORMAN there, a correct guess on KWAI (58D: River in a 1957 hit film). Yet the theme didn’t hit me till more than half way through…got it at 59/61A:NOTRE SPAS SING = NO TRESPASSING (59A: "Warning to intruders").
Ok, the theme (there are seven entries!!!!) is to take a phrase and split it up into three words, forming totally different words than are in the phrase, but cluing it as a whole. Got that?
Yet the theme didn’t hit me till more than half way through … got it at 59/61A.
Ok, the theme (there are seven entries!!!!) is to take a phrase and split it up into three words, forming totally different words than are in the phrase, but cluing it as a whole. Got that?
- 12A: One in on the founding of a company (CHARTER MEMBER) [chart term ember]
- 20A: Production site chief (PLANT MANAGER) [plant t-man ager]
- 27A: One getting a bouquet? (WINE TASTER) [win etas ter]
- 37A: Workplace where there are many openings (OPERATING ROOM) [opera tin groom]
- 43A: Song played at the dance in "Back to the Future" (EARTH ANGEL) [ear than gel]
- 50A: Officially (FOR THE RECORD) [fort here cord]
- 59A: Warning to intruders (NO TRESPASSING) [notre spas sing]
I will suspend with the Word of the Day, but mine would have been my last fill: APIA, which turns out to be the capital of Samoa. APIA shares three of its four letters with AsIA … so not a ridiculous guess for 33A: Headquarters for Polynesian Airlines.
APIA/AsIA … I can almost feel hands going up on that one. And I can also almost hear SethG (coincidentally a Jew in, but not from, Minnesota) screaming about the NOTRE/FRERE crossing! While dk (a decidedly non-Jew in, but not from, Minnesota) is tittering over TITTER (44D: Nervous laugh).
If I may get even more insider-y for a moment … If it were not for the regulars on this blog, I would not have been able to get the whole Northeast corner! For example, Retired_chemist (religion and state unknown to me) wrote about IMAGO being his favorite wrong answer of the day for that GHOTI puzzle last week … and here it malapopped into this one today! (8D: “Big bug”) And easily my favorite right answer of the day was CALEB at 19A: Spy sent by Moses into Canaan which I’d NE’ER have gotten otherwise because of that crazy 10D: "Thomas Moore's "___ Ask the Hour" … and I was determined not to Google.Every constructor male and female, young and old, Monday thru Sunday seems to have a little crush on young Caleb … even my friend Laura Levine who took this cute photo of him as he searched for a gift for Will Shortz in her Mystery Spot shop in Upstate, NY.
OK, back to the puzzle. The theme is super clever, splitting up words in an uber-parsed manner. Perhaps Joe Krozel’s inspiration was Rex’s creation of OOXTEPLERNON, which came into being by reading one line of another puzzle straight across.
The only one of the six theme entries that did not work for me 100% was WIN ETAS TER. I liked the definition a lot (27A: One getting a bouquet?) but both TER and ETAS are a bit of a stretch to begin with. Neither entry barely stands on its own when it has a definition, much less when it does not. TER is either "Thrice, medically" or "Gerard ___ Borch." ETAS is defined either as an awkward plural of a Greek letter or maybe (more appropriately given the national weather scene) as airline board abbreviations. But the bigger iffy-ness to this entry is that both WIN and NO-WIN are in the grid. A classic WIN/NO WIN situation.
As long as I’m at it, I wasn’t crazy about ARNO/ORNO and TNT/NTS, but I’ll let others scream about OUSE, EMPT and KIAS Sorento. (As a professional namer, I object. It’s one thing to add a letter to a name to coin it, but to drop a letter of a real word just looks illiterate and careless). Enough of what I didn’t like, as it is minor in the overall picture. There was a lot more to like.
I liked that there was a lot of bodies-of-water imagery: ARNO, OUSE, KWAI, EVIAN (on Lake Geneva) plus young fish from the Sargasso Sea, not to mention a "sea menace" ORCA swimming by. Loved piecing together and learning that OOLONG was Chinese for "black dragon"! (I plan to slip that into a conversation (over tea!) before oolong.)
Lots of music: OPERA, SING, STEVIE Wonder, EARTH ANGEL, PIANO, OHS, Schubert’s NONET (my first try: etude) … and as a major Beatles lover I closed my eyes (ORBs?) trying to envision 18A Record label for "Ain’t She Sweet." (…but eventually had to open them wide to get all the crossings. ATCO?!! ATCO??!)
The biggest kick out of the puzzle is looking back across and seeing how every line starts to look like it could be a theme. FIS COOL ONG. ASH SLOP IAN O. Hmmm. Maybe not.
Alright, I’ll give it one last try … How about STEVIE OR NO?
So, well done, Joe Krozel … and Happy New Year, everybody!
[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter]
No comments:
Post a Comment