Hunks of plastic? / FRI 3-29-24 / Enlightened Buddhist / Sweet message bearer / Emoji that might be used in response to a funny text / One of the Minecraft protagonists / Computer acronym since the 1960s / Question asked while tapping

Friday, March 29, 2024

Constructor: Jake Bunch

Relative difficulty: Medium


THEME: none 

Word of the Day: ARHAT (2D: Enlightened Buddhist) —

 

In Buddhism, an arhat (Sanskrit: अर्हत्) or arahant (Pali: अरहन्त्, 𑀅𑀭𑀳𑀦𑁆𑀢𑁆) is one who has gained insight into the true nature of existence and has achieved Nirvana  and liberated from the endless cycle of rebirth. [...] Mahayana Buddhism regarded a group of Eighteen Arhats (with names and personalities) as awaiting the return of the Buddha as Maitreya, while other groupings of 6, 8, 16, 100, and 500 also appear in tradition and Buddhist art, especially in East Asia called luohan or lohan. They may be seen as the Buddhist equivalents of the Christian saint, apostles or early disciples and leaders of the faith. (wikipedia)
• • •

We've entered the Age of ARHAT, I guess. This is the dawning of the Age of ARHAT. Age of ARHAT. Honestly had to stop and take a deep breath after writing in ARHAT for the second day in a row (!?!?). Six years since that word's appeared at all, and now we've got it on back-to-back days!? And today, it was the first answer I confidently wrote in, so the initial impression this puzzle made on me was far from favorable. ARHAT next to (not ASAP but) STAT, crossing PASSER, crossing (not NONET but) OCTET—that's two unrewardingly ambiguous short answers + ARHAT. Not exactly a winning opening number. Luckily, things improved. The marquee answers are solid (all the long Acrosses, I mean), but there aren't enough of them, so what you get as your primary experience is a lot of shorter and midrange stuff, which the puzzle tries to make interesting with a lot of try-hard cluing, especially cluing that tried to force a younger / pop culture profile on the whole thing. See clues on SKULL (9D: Emoji that might be used in response to a funny text)*, GOT ("Game of Thrones"), and especially STEVE, dear lord, what!? I thought you just built stuff in Minecraft, I didn't know there were "protagonists." Billions of STEVEs in the world (give or take) and this is what you give me? Could be any guy's name. FRANK. PEDRO. BILLY. Why not? No way I'm gonna know, no way I'm (ever) gonna care. In general, I think it's "good to learn things," but Minecraft, LOL, no. I know it exists. That's enough. On the other hand, the clue on KENS was outstanding (26A: Hunks of plastic?) ("hunks" as in "handsome / fit guys")—the best thing in the puzzle. Weirdly tough and then ... bam. Perfect. Big "aha," instead of [blank stare] or "ugh" or "oh ... [eyeroll]." Reminds me of a video I've watched several times this week—David Ehrlich's "Top 25 Movies of 2023," which is basically a giant music-video-style tour through all of his favorite films from last year. I actually saw 13 of his 25, so there were lots of good movie memories in there for me, but whether you've seen the movies or not, this is highly entertaining (and occasionally very funny) (trigger warning: prepare to have Celine Dion stuck in your head for days):
Judging from where the blue ink is on my printed-out puzzle (I really need to get new green felt-tips...), looks like the bottom of the puzzle was much easier for me than the rest of it, but overall, and even down below, I had lots and lots (and lots) of initially wrong answers. WHIM before WANT (48D: Fancy). WAVED TO and WAVED AT before (ugh) WAVED HI (35D: Greeted someone across the room). The aforementioned ASAP before STAT (3D: "Don't delay!") and NONET before OCTET (18A: Large combo). HYPOS before KILOS (26D: Contents of a drug shipment). TIED UP before TOSS-UP (15D: Anyone's game)*. BARK AT before TALK AT (?!) (15A: Lecture). Hardest thing to parse, by far, was FELT UP TO (12D: Was ready for). "Was ready for" gets nowhere near the context implied by a phrase by FELT UP TO, which suggests you've been ailing in one way or another. It's not an inaccurate clue, but it's vague in the extreme. FELT UP TO was always going to be hard to parse, and the overly general clue just made it harder. The CANNIBALS joke didn't land because of the "you" (me?) part of it (13D: Ones who might roast you). None of us, literally zero solvers, will ever be roasted by CANNIBALS, so please stop. I get that you're trying to be funny, and that you wanted me to think of a comedy roast (mission accomplished), but the "you" takes this into preposterous territory. The cluing today ... sometimes it lands (KENS!) but too often you can feel the *effort*, which rarely leads to anything genuinely funny. 


I don't even know what [Drag racer?] is getting at. Because you ... drag your SLED up the hill? [I’m told this is supposed to refer to dog sledding. As with most things, this clue needs more dog-specific content] And [Place for bucks at the bar?]?? I understand the answer (a MECHANICAL BULL bucks and you might find one at some (Texas?) bar), but I don't know what the surface meaning of the clue was supposed to refer to. What wordplay or pun is that? Are "bucks" one dollar bills. Am I supposed to think of a cash register till? The "?" clue on SUN, on the other hand, makes sense (4D: High light?). It's playing on the term "highlight," but it's giving you a light that is actually high (in the sky). [Hunks of plastic?] also works, in that I know what actual "hunks of plastic" are ... but then "hunks" ends up having a different / unexpected meaning. Real hit-and-miss "?" action today.


ONLSD is somehow worse than ONPOT, largely because if you absolutely have to use the prepositional phrase, the only one that seems standalone valid is ONACID (20D: Tripping). Otherwise, you just open up the floodgate for any drug phrase: ONUPPERS, ONLUDES, ONSPEED, ONBENZOS, ONCOKE (can you tell I only know about drugs from '70s crime films?) ONSHROOMS, ONMDMA etc. ON ACID at least has some standalone currency. Unlike ONLSD. Or GON. I have nothing to say ONGON except I wish it were gone. In short, the thin stacks of long answers up top and down below work just fine (52A: Question asked while tapping ("IS THIS THING ON?"), in particular, is excellent), but there needs to be like twice this much marquee fill, and the rest of the grid, while mostly very reasonably filled, was clued in a way that too frequently felt off (off my wavelength or just off the mark). 

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld 

*I feel like the phrase "anyone's game" is mostly used adjectivally, roughly synonymous with "too close to call," so the noun "TOSS-UP" didn't quite track for me, though I see how it's defensible.

P.S. how in the world is this the top result when I search "STEVE" on Google???


Who the hell even is that?! (some financial crimes guy featured in The Wolf of Wall Street!?). How much is he paying to be First STEVE? What a degraded piece of junk Google is as a search engine.

P.P.S. OMG if you google [STEVE] (I can't believe this is my life, googling [STEVE]), almost all of the "Images" are Minecraft STEVE!? Just a wall of Minecraft STEVEs, with a smattering of Jobs and Harvey.


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*a SKULL 💀 emoji signifies that your joke was so funny that the listener has (figuratively, hopefully) died

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Nirvana achiever / THU 3-28-24 / Shade-tolerant perennial / Dustin's sweetheart on "Stranger Things" / Songwriter Barry who once had six consecutive #1 hits / Iberian greeting

Thursday, March 28, 2024

Constructor: Dominic Grillo

Relative difficulty: Medium-Challenging


THEME: POTATO / HEAD (1D: With 58-Down, classic toy that dropped gendered titles in 2021) — circled squares contain the various "body" parts of (formerly Mr. or Mrs.) POTATO HEAD, all positioned in the wrong places because, as the puzzle says, on the toy, those parts are INTERCHANGEABLE (59A: Like the parts of this puzzle's toy, as depicted throughout the grid)

Parts:
  • SMILE (up top where the HAT should be)
  • NOSE and HAT (are these supposed to be EARs or HANDs, I cannot tell)
  • EAR (I think this is the NOSE's place? Maybe EYES?)
  • EYES (How did they get both EYES to go in the single NOSE hole? Or are the EYES one piece with this toy?)
  • HAND (down below where the SMILE should be ... I think)
Word of the Day: "The Story of ADÈLE H" (57A: "The Story of ___" (1975 film by François Truffaut)) —

The Story of Adèle H. (French: L'Histoire d'Adèle H.) is a 1975 French historical drama film directed by François Truffaut, and starring Isabelle AdjaniBruce Robinson, and Sylvia Marriott. Written by Truffaut, Jean Gruault, and Suzanne Schiffman, the film is about Adèle Hugo, the daughter of writer Victor Hugo, whose obsessive unrequited love for a military officer leads to her downfall. The story is based on Adèle Hugo's diaries. Filming took place on location in Guernsey and Senegal.

20-year-old Isabelle Adjani received much critical acclaim for her performance as Hugo, garnering an Oscar nomination for Best Actress in a Leading Role, making her the youngest Best Actress nominee ever at the time. The Story of Adèle H. also won the National Board of Review Award for Best Foreign Language Film, the French Syndicate of Cinema Critics Award for Best Film, and the Cartagena Film Festival Special Critics Award. (wikipedia)

• • •

I guess it's a joke. The body parts are in the wrong place. Or am I just not looking at it from the right perspective? I don't know. I haven't seen a (Mr.) POTATO HEAD in four decades. I didn't know they still existed (beyond the Toy Story movies). The black squares toward the center form a kind of potato silhouette, and then the circled squares are placed in relation to that. As a piece of grid art, it's inventive. As a puzzle to actually solve, it wasn't really my thing. I've never had much patience for puzzles that are architectural stunts, largely because the solving experience so often seems not to be a consideration, and the fill often seems to suffer (as it does, in many places, today). But my main problem here is I don't think the architectural element is that good. It's sloppy-seeming. I tried (half-heartedly, I'll admit) to figure out what body parts were supposed to go where, and I couldn't figure it out. No idea where the HAND slot is *supposed* to be. Where's the other EAR? The other HAND? Why are there apparently two EYES in (apparently) the NOSE place, a place that wouldn't (would it?) have two holes? (looks like the toy's EYES might actually come in one piece, but in the grid, that is not how they appear). There's an admirable stab at whimsy here, but visually it all seems a bit of a mess. I mean, beyond the intentional mess of mixed-up body parts. The mess is a mess, is what I'm saying.


Segmentation of the grid, particularly the extreme isolation of the center part (with only the narrowest of pathways in), made the puzzle somewhat difficult to travel through, and made that center section way harder than it would've been otherwise. You can only get in there via two answers: SEDIMENTS (which has a "?" clue, which meant that it was initially no help to me) (31A: Bank deposits?) and CHINESE YUAN (48A: Currency once pegged to the U.S. dollar). Luckily I knew the latter. I knew SEDIMENTS was probably something to do with river "banks," but SILT was the only word I had in my head, so I had to work from inside the potato before I got SEDIMENTS. And what do we have inside the potato? The plural of "poetry," LOL, I teach poetry (literally; later today, in fact) and I have never used the plural POETRIES in my life (I'm probably exaggerating, but not by much). If you were going to use it, you certainly wouldn't use it the way the clue has clued it, by reference to what are basically GENRES. [It can be epic or lyric] = POETRY. That would work. [They can be epic or lyric]? Hell no. Maybe (maybe) you might talk about the various POETRIES of the world—using it as a word for various poetic traditions. But mainly it's just poetry, man. No plural needed (or wanted). As for knowing names of poker guys, ugh, I remembered PHIL IVEY with a few crosses, but I can't say I enjoyed it (24D: Winner of 10 World Series of Poker bracelets). There's a dumb spelling game in here (37A: Synonym found after deleting half the letters of EXHILARATE) and a Britishly-spelled MITRE and the wholly underwhelming bonus (?) theme answer OVOID (46A: Shaped like this puzzle's subject). Also, I know PCP only as a drug and have never used that term to refer to my doctor, though I recognize that it's a valid abbr. (for "primary care physician"). So the middle part was the hardest part was the most unpleasant part.


But PHIL IVEY was not the fill that made me wince the most. That honor goes to ADELE H, truly the worst crossword name partial of them all. Let me tell you all the ways it is bad. First, it's a partial. It's not the movie's title—it's a part of the movie's title. It is hyperspecific—there is no other way to clue ADELE H, and no other ADELE H in the universe to help you as an analogy. Like, I might not know a particular TIM or BOB or SUZIE (13A: Dustin's sweetheart on "Stranger Things"), but I can at least recognize those names as names that humans have. ADELE H, not so much. Further—that movie is exceedingly Not famous. It's nearly 50 years old and somehow, though I watch hundreds of movies a year, most of them on the Criterion Channel, and I read lots of writing about film, this film never comes up. It's a 50-year-old minor film by a major director, but (I'm pretty sure) most solvers will not have heard of it (let alone seen it) unless (like me) they learned about it from crosswords. Further, and worst of all, if you're a solver who doesn't know the film, then you don't have any idea that ADELE H is actually two words, or two parts: an ADELE part followed by the initial "H." ADELEH looks like one name in the grid. "Who the hell is ADELEH?" I can almost literally hear thousands of solvers asking in unison today. This is only the fifth time ADELEH has appeared in the NYTXW, and only the third during my blogging tenure (since '06). And all because of a terminal "H" occasioned by the placement of the HEAD in "POTATO HEAD." Stunningly, all appearances of ADELEH come from the Shortz (now Shortz/Fagliano) Era. The 1970s, when this movie at least had some currency, didn't want anything to do with ADELEH a crossword answer, and neither should you. Delete it.


Other stuff:
  • 57D: Pulitzer-winning author whose name is found in nonconsecutive letters of "page turner" (AGEE) — this may be the stupidest clue I've ever seen in my life. "Nonconsecutive?" I hope you wrote in PETE and just left it there in defiance of this stupid clue. 
  • 25D: Deeply asleep, hyperbolically (COMATOSE) — one way to rescue your puzzle from excessive grimness (see also the clue on UZI).
  • 38A: Taiwanese president ___ Ing-wen (TSAI) — really should commit this to memory, but so far no luck. Had THAI here (?!?!) until SIGNAL BOX helped me out.
  • 15A: O-O-O part (TAC) — as in the game Tic-TAC-Toe
  • 45A: "Be mindful when clicking," in brief (NSFW) — Not Suitable For Work. Clue isn't really specific enough, since you should be mindful when clicking in many, many situations, not just when your buddy sends you porn.
Off to teach the POETRIES. See you next time.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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