Elon
Denver
I did not love this one because of the entire bottom third--no single egregious moment, but just a lot of not-so-hot-ones hanging out together and throwing themselves a mediocrity bash. BRUH/BLAM almost requires crosses to resolve, as does AMER. MARPLE was obscure to me (the only Agatha Christie detective I could come up with was POIROT), although I am sure a gimme for many. Add in yet another "how do you spell IDINA?" moment. Why not? ADA seemed to me like crossword garbage compounded by a not great clue. KIMBAP is obscure. DIERESIS and SECULAR--okay, but not improved by the muddy crosses. Unless I am missing something, the worst offender here is GREEK ELEMENTS, though. Was WATER like the Stu Sutcliffe or Pete Best of EWF?
@Nora Very fair point. The crosses made it so easy that I didn't give it much thought, but I think what you are saying about the precision of the clue is very valid.
@John Ezra The story I know from somewhere (maybe having taught an SAT class in Pittsburg, TX, many years ago) is that the because there was so much variation in the use of 'h' in the various Pittsburg/Pittsburghs around the country, the USPS instigated a requirement of a standardized no 'h' spelling to avoid confusion. However, the OG largest former Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania had enough political clout to have its 'h' restored, while other, smaller Pittsburgs in the U.S. remained H-less. I am aware that a quick Google would likely solve reveal the facts of history (and that the existence of a Pittsburgh, Kansas, would put the lie to the story), but I think that here it's best to not let the truth get in the way of a good story.
Sure would be nice if there was a better way to notate the outside the box squares on the computer, since without a notation even after figuring out the theme pretty fast, I did not appreciate that the extra squares followed a pattern. Overall, I did mind this puzzle, but even allowing for a puzzle that leaned difficult, I could have done with one less of PELOTONS, TAUTENS, LIVETH and TOOKADIGAT. I'm sort of surprised that no one has complained about this last one; I was totally unaware that this was a thing people actually say.
I did not care for the cluing in this one at all. Combine that with what were for me quite a few obscure references (LANA, RAYE, GRACEHOPPER, a quote from Jane Eyre, HAW flakes?), and it made for a really unpleasant slog of a puzzle. CANIS MAJOR, liquid gold, Caught Red-handed. Ugh. Does anyone look at PLAYMONEY and think to themselves, "this seems to be worth something?
@Mean Old Lady My context for the ASTI clue was 'Asti Spumante.' I also had to play with the NW corner for a while with some of the same variations as you, plus wanting 'pastel' for "baby blue" where the the switch to singular was, as you say, just cruel.
I did not love the "Erika" -- "Miss M" cross, since one is obscure and the other susceptible to crosswordese renderings. E.g. "Mrs. Em." It took at least this solver some annoyed staring, knowing one answer and completely without clue as to the other, after everything else had yielded easily.
So, to solve this puzzle you needed to have with pretty high certainty two out of three of knowledge (1) of how to spell LHASA, (2) that LIMA is a city in Ohio, and (3) of what "yeets" means. I had only (2), and that without much certainty, so was left at the end of a pretty straightforward puzzle resolving a natick-adjacent 56 Down, which wasn't that hard, but which was also irritating, not very fun, and a bad note to end on because cluing HURLS this just seemed gratuitous to me.
I thought this was a tough but fair puzzle. I don't understand why we are gushing over POD for "SEAL team" in Wordplay when a group of seals isn't a pod at all. This clue seemed totally misbegotten to me. I might have felt done dirty by the ARIEL/TIMON pair if not for the clever pair of clues. I mean, is it actually the same name if it is pronounced two different ways? I am also not sure why we are supposed to see Phoenician letters and associate to their Greek equivalents (a recurring theme in the NYT puzzle). Like, would we be cool with it if the answer were KHA after the Cyrillic letter that also looks like an X?
It seems to me this puzzle could have gotten very hard if not for RICEARONI, ESCAPEARISTS, PREBOOKING, and OPENBOOKTEST, which gave me plenty to work with on the theme. I really liked that the theme worked both across and down, and a lot of the long stuff was good. What I liked less was that having words "inside" the worm holes doesn't seem to me to make sense to with the theme (oblique Deep Space Nine reference notwithstanding). Also, the title: worms and bugs--not the same thing.
Nice puzzle. The one thing I did not love was the ROS/STPATS clue. Does anyone call it Saint Pats? Any variation on Saint Paddy's or Patty's seems fine, but St. Pats (especially sneaking in the abbreviation)--maybe not so much. I did not love that, especially because ROS Asquith seems relatively obscure to me.
@Calypso One person's obscure is another's wheelhouse! I mean, once I saw Miss Marple, I realized it was banging around in my memory somewhere, but the only Christie protagonist I could supply unprompted was Poirot (absurd from Masterpiece Theater, maybe? )
@Red Carpet As an interesting example of YMMV in crosswords, I found the clues on 7D to 13D to be so easy that I was gifted BASELINE/BALINESE and KIMONOS/MONOSKI, which made the revealer unusually redundant, especially with the clue for 18A mentioning an Indonesian island (you are geographically better off than I if you can name an Indonesian island that is not Bali, Java or Sumatra, so there was only one possibility even though I did not know Balinese was a kid of cat). Yet I still (briefly) used the theme to fill EVIL GRIN and STANDUP, which I found to be kind of redemptive
@Ken Burk Glad A to Z animals.com is working for you. I don't think I've ever heard anyone call a group of seals a pod and, FWIW, I worked as a seal keeper in my 20s. I do see the internet tubes does suggest that the word is technically correct, but as a matter of ordinary usage... You completely missed the point on Timon, which had to do with pronunciation rather than spelling It's TIE-MON of Athens in the Shakespeare play, but the meerkat in the Lion King is Ti-MOAN.
@Kevin I think your point is well taken. It would be nice if the puzzle could, where possible, err a bit more on the side of specific but perhaps obscure clues in place of "foreign language quiz." That's why DESI doesn't bother me at all, and there are plenty of reasons to know the term even if you're not a member of the community--I think I first became specifically aware of it from some combination of the book and movie of The Namesake. But, by the same logic, I think APPA was a missed opportunity for a quality flying bison reference. Similarly, I'd like to have seen CREE clued with something to suggest a specific group's name to make a cleaner break with 'band' which also felt logical there to me. (On the way back from a hike recently, there was a couple heading up the trail when they heard me give my dog her command for getting in the car "yip yip." They did a bit of a double take and then pointed at their dog and said "his name's Appa." IKYK.
@Alexis Or this puzzle (and, apparently some of the solvers) got 'twee' confused with 'fun.'
I understand what these two comments are getting at but I think they both miss the original point because scandies and nordics are (I think) non-overlapping sets because of, respectively, Finns and Icelanders. So, no, not like trees:oaks/maples. I'd never thought about whether crossword clues imply 'all' when they speak to categories. The fact that "some" is often made explicit (the edit I think Jack is maybe proposing here) does sort of imply that they do.
@JayTee I appreciate your concern that I may not have adequately appreciated the technical mastery on display in this puzzle. But worry not—I did. If you reread my comment above, you’ll find (I think) that it still holds even with “bookworm,” “ear worm”and so on in the holes. As always with crosswords ymmv.
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