Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium (very easy but for the NW corner, which is more medium)
THEME: "OH. FUDGE." (62A: What you might cry upon recognizing this puzzle's ingredient list?) — first words of theme answers (shaded), taken together, are a basic fudge recipe, I guess:
Theme answers:
MILKSOP (17A: Coward)
COCOA BEACH (20A: City on Florida's Space Coast)
BUTTERFINGERS (32A: Nickname for a clumsy person)
SUGAR SNAP PEAS (42A: Some stir-fry vegetables)
VANILLA ICE (54A: Rapper with the hit 1990 album "To the Extreme")
Well the revealer clue was almost right, except replace "cry" with "say flatly." Oh. Fudge. Now I see what was going on there. Huh. I endured all ... that (gestures at everything about "OH FUDGE") for ... a fudge recipe? Let's just grant you that turning the mild oath "OH FUDGE!" into the imagined solver reaction "OH! FUDGE!" is clever. There remain the minor (not minor) problems of how to execute the theme and how to fill the grid. On the first count, the answers aren't all that exciting, but that's not a big problem. Between recipe and symmetry restrictions, it's a tough needle to thread. And BUTTERFINGERS has some zing. But MILKSOP is borderline archaic ("milquetoast" seems the more likely term), and COCOA BEACH ... has a population of 11,539. That is the one and only fact about it in the entire opening paragraph of its wikipedia entry, beyond the fact that "[i]t is part of the Palm Bay–Melbourne–Titusville, Florida Metropolitan Statistical Area" (wikipedia), and that ... that doesn't help me at all. It's a minuscule town ("city?" come on...) inside a metro area I've never even heard of. Total desperation fill. Not hard to get / infer—crosses are easy, and since COCOA butter is a sun tan lotion ingredient, there's at least a vague association between COCOA and BEACH. But COCOA BEACH is not a crossworthy place. It sounds like a famous place. I'm sure lots of solvers were like "oh, yes, COCOA BEACH, I should've remembered that!" but no, it's nowhere. And COCOA BEACH takes us to the heart of this puzzle's problem, which is SOPOR (7D: Abnormally deep sleep)—a bizarrely obscure word (I know it only as a prefix for -IFIC) that is also the anchor holding the two weakest theme answers in place (MILKSOP / COCOA BEACH). You can see how it's grid design that gets you SOPOR in the first place. You've got MILKSOP and COCOA BEACH locked in as themers, but the resulting --PO- in the Down really narrows your choices. And so you end up not only with the completely unlikeable SOPOR, but also ARCTICS (1A: Waterproof overshoes), whatever those are (the term hasn't appeared in the NYTXW since 1951). The ugliest bit of fill, and the only real Unknowns for me in this puzzle, all glued together in one spot. That is the kind of wonkiness that should make a constructor lose sleep and tear up the grid the next day.
There's also the rest of the grid, which is full of short, unappealing, frequently subPAR fill. From the grimness of ODS (19A: Some poison control center cases, in brief) and doomsday preppers stockpiling AMMO (yeesh), to all that ARCTICSSOPORCOCOA BEACH nonsense I just went over, to the avalanche of crosswordese: CELS TSK INS UPS ISTO INON TSARINA GTOS TEEPEE TEHEE SHO SOLI FUM UTE. You may as well consider OOF a kind of second revealer. It sits atop "OH FUDGE" like a commentary. While I did not "cry" "OH FUDGE," I definitely did cry OOF. Several times.
Notes:
25A: Bassist Meyer (EDGAR) — the one thing outside of SOPOR Junction that I didn't know. I thought briefly "oh, I've heard of him," but I think I'm thinking of EDGAR Winter. Meyer is an incredibly accomplished classical, bluegrass, and jazz bassist, as well as a composer, and he's not that much older than I am, so I'm surprised his name doesn't ring a bell. Gonna check him out. Thanks, puzzle.
23D: Having a baby bump, slangily (PREGGO) — leaving aside how cringe this term is, the clue is bad. It's redundant. "Baby bump" is slang, so "slangily" is completely unnecessary. [With child, slangily], [Expecting, slangily], those make sense. But here, no, you can (should) ditch it. Or rewrite the clue entirely. Or tear up your grid and get rid of PREGGO altogether. For some reason PREGGO is worse even than PREGGERS, and I can't put my finger on why. Maybe because PREGGO feels like a slangy degradation of a perfectly good Italian word.
34D: Fiddlehead producer (FERN) — one of the symbols of New Zealand. Speaking of which, I gotta get my wife to the bus station by quarter to 7 this morning so she can get down to the city to visit her mother, who flew in from NZ two days ago. So that's all, folks.
THEME: RINGS A BELL (57A: Sounds familiar ... or performs an action associated with 16-, 23-, 35- and 47-Across?) — people (real and fictional) who ring bells:
Theme answers:
WILLY LOMAN (16A: Door-to-door salesman in a classic Arthur Miller play)
SANTA CLAUS (23A: Whom a Salvation Army volunteer might dress as)
QUASIMODO (35A: Victor Hugo character who works at Notre Dame)
IVAN PAVLOV (47A: Nobelist who conditioned dogs to salivate)
Word of the Day: LUSAKA (17D: Capital of Zambia) —
Lusaka (/luːˈsɑːkə/; loo-SAH-kə) is the capital and largest city of Zambia. It is one of the fastest-developing cities in southern Africa. Lusaka is in the southern part of the central plateau at an elevation of about 1,279 metres (4,196 ft). As of 2019, the city's population was about 3.3 million, while the urban population is estimated at 2.5 million in 2018. Lusaka is the centre of both commerce and government in Zambia and connects to the country's four main highways heading north, south, east, and west. English is the official language of the city administration, while Bemba, Tonga, Lenje, Soli, Lozi, and Nyanja are the commonly spoken street languages. // The earliest evidence of settlement in the area dates to the 6th century AD, with the first known settlement in the 11th century. It was then home to the Lenje and Soli peoples from the 17th or 18th century. The founding of the modern city occurred in 1905 when it lay in the British protectorate of Northern Rhodesia, which was controlled by the British South African Company (BSAC). The BSAC built a railway linking their mines in the Copperbelt to Cape Town and Lusaka was designated as a water stop on that line, named after a local Lenje chief called Lusaaka. (wikipedia)
• • •
Quick write-up today, as I have to give a final exam at the ridiculous (for them) hour of 8am. I wake up before 4am every day, so no problem here, but our class meeting time is normally 11:40am, so 8am (a time assigned randomly, as far as I know) feels cruel. Like an added layer of difficulty. Anyway, though I'm awake, I am in a bit of a morning time crunch. So, quickly: I spent most of the solve grimacing and wincing at the fill, both genuinely ugly stuff like ALTI- and (and!?) API- and ISA and AGERS, and stuff that's just particularly unappealing to me, like race-baiting creep Lee ATWATER (why are you still putting him in puzzles? I mean besides the fact his name is full of common letters?) to MENSA (the one ultracommon xword answer I'd love to never see again, IQ-based orgs. be gone!) to the THE in THE ALAMO (arbitrary THE inclusion, not my fav) to EARLAPS (man that word wants an "F"), to WAVED HI (again, the past tense makes it awk), to HAUL UP ("UP!?" I had "IN" because that's what you do to a perp, or so TV has taught me). I also half-failed the geography quiz (big ???? on LUSAKA)—that's not the puzzle's fault, and it's good that I can now place Zambia on a map, but doubling down on the geography quiz element with PALAU (even though I knew it, after getting the "U") felt like overkill (44A: Micronesian nation made up of hundreds of islands). The theme revealer, once I got there, did salvage things somewhat. More of an "Oh, OK" than a true AHA, but I actually think the theme is just fine. But the road to theme comprehension was a rocky and largely unpleasant one.
I never saw the PEALE clue, but that is a pretty way to clue a fairly obscure proper noun, tying it to the (bell) theme like that (54A: Charles Wilson ___, George Washington portraitist whose name is apt for this puzzle's theme). I also really like the word QUANDARY (how could you not?), and while neither HAPPY nor "I'M SAD" does much for me on its own, when you put them one atop the other, they make a funny contrasting mood pair. Actually, they might make one mood: "HAPPY I'M SAD" does get at a certain kind of paradoxical feeling inherent in wistfulness and nostalgia. Anyway, thumbs up to those two. Also, I always love a New Zealand shout-out (42D: Like New Zealand vis-à-vis New Jersey, by population = SMALLER—and by a lot, 5.1 million vs. 9.3). My mother-in-law arrived in NYC from Dunedin, NZ (via Auckland) last night, and my wife's going down to spend time with her (and our daughter Ella) in the city tomorrow and then bringing her mom back here on Sunday, where Penelope (my wife) will spend several days taking her mother to places where she is most likely to see ___ [fill in the blank with any number of North American birds that are ordinary to us but will be exotic to her—bald eagles, maybe!].
I completely blanked on QUASIMODO ... or, rather, when confronted with Victor Hugo, my brain leapt to and would not leap away from Les Misérables, and when the answer wasn't Jean Valjean, I was like "how many damn characters from Les Mis do they really expect me to know, yeesh!" Also, was really looking for a full name (i.e. first and last), not a one-named figure. Speaking of first and last names, I did not know PAVLOV's first name. You could've told me it was OLGA and I'd ... OK, no, I wouldn't have believed you, but IGOR, maybe, yes. I'm gonna leave you to contemplate the VEINY LANCE juxtaposition on your own. See you next time.
A long time ago, I was solving this puzzle and got stuck at an unguessable (to me) crossing: N. C. WYETH crossing NATICK at the "N"—I knew WYETH but forgot his initials, and NATICK ... is a suburb of Boston that I had no hope of knowing. It was clued as someplace the Boston Marathon runs through (???). Anyway, NATICK— the more obscure name in that crossing—became shorthand for an unguessable cross, esp. where the cross involves two proper nouns, neither of which is exceedingly well known. NATICK took hold as crossword slang, and the term can now be both noun ("I had a NATICK in the SW corner...") or verb ("I got NATICKED by 50A / 34D!")
.png)
