Ken W.
Tampa Bay, Fla.
PAH isn’t in my dictionary — but I’m here to complain specifically about ANNE (MEARA), who you’ve either heard of or you haven’t (I haven’t) crossing TENREC, an obscure term you can’t deduce from the clue if you don’t happen to know it. Obscure fill is something you expect when puzzling; it can even be fun when you can lean on knowledge of word roots, etc., to suss out. A construction that uses proper names and obscure fill as answers to matter-of-fact clues that cross like this isn’t a puzzle, tho’. That’s a quiz, and a clear sign the author painted themselves into a corner that the editor couldn’t get them out of.
UNCANNY VALLEY is incorrectly clued. It’s not a term used to describe robots that seem “too lifelike” — if it were, after all, we perfectly lifelike humans would all reside there, not just robots. Robotics professor Masahiro Mori coined the term to describe the valley-shaped section of a graph charting our emotional response to robots as they become more lifelike — a steep dip into near-revulsion followed by steep improvement as their appearance becomes lifelike enough to the same empathy we feel toward other humans. The robot designs in the uncanny valley are not “too human”; they are exactly not human enough.
In the immortal words of David St. Hubbins and Nigel Tufnel, it’s such a fine line between stupid and clever — and once again, David Kwong has tried to be too clever and crossed it.
Another puzzle comes down to trial and error, gaming the app by entering a series of letters because I don’t happen to know who Chelsea PERETTI or TAIO Cruz are — but the constructor decided their best option was to allow two proper nouns to intersect.
Lots to like here, but I kind of feel like ADU and AKEE shouldn’t be fill in the 15x15 grid. (I have yet to figure out what ADU is short for.)
Too many proper nouns. It’s a puzzle, not a quiz.
The clue for ANTECEDENT didn’t need to specify “for her”; it would have been just fine (and at least equally clever) as simply [Explicit subject].
@CRTH Setting aside the fact that yes, ARNE Slot actually is a more familiar name to me these days than ANNE Meara, you miss my point. Sure, one could complete every other cell in a grid and then try a series of letters at that intersection until the app signaled success; in fact, I did. That’s a tactic for gaming the app, tho’, not a solution deduced from clues. Say I wrote an algorithm that ignored the clues entirely and instead tried every possible combination of letters across the entire grid? It’s technically feasible. Would it make me a good crossword puzzler? Does trying a series of combinations make me a good safe-cracker? A good test for a fair puzzle is imagining how you’d feel solving with pen and paper. Would you look at TENREC and feel happily confident you’d learned a new word — because even though it wasn’t in your vocabulary, it was the _only_ possible entry that could fit all the clues? Or, without the app to play its little tune, would you have to wait for the solution to see whether your gamble — educated, maybe, but still a stab — happened to be a winner? I’ve posted this on here before, but a construction that relies on proper names is unfair by nature (those are quiz show questions, not puzzles), and only careful selection of crosses, clever cluing, and a good edit can change that. Those are typically hallmarks of NYT puzzles; it’s just unfortunate they were all missing today.
Not every business reversal is an UPTURN, tho’ — just like EAT IT isn’t synonymous with taking an L.
41D was an eyebrow-raiser — it could have been clued [Literally no one thinks this is a word, but I need it for my fill.]
THE EVENING NEWS might not be a “Gotta catch” for everyone — but it’s not an “’em” for anyone.
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