Monday, May 16, 2016

Monday, May 16, 2016, Sam Buchbinder

5:04

Can a puzzle be categorized as "late Tuesday/early Wednesday"? I'm not complaining about difficulty. But I don't think this is really a Monday level puzzle. Witness 1A: Picking out of a lineup, informally (IDING). I don't like the answer at all, but having it at 1A on a Monday is unusually complicated to say the least. I give it a D.

Another example is 10A: Former "Meet the Press" host Marvin (KALB). Huh? Who? I see he's a fairly important person (who I've never heard of), but more to the point, he hosted this show for one year! I remember Robb NEN, who pitched from 1993-2002, but I imagine many had not heard of him either.

Anyway, the theme is good, in that I had no idea what the connection between the four initial answers would be, and the revealer, a common phrase (WEREALLSET) is a great twist. It's also nice that each item uses a different definition of the word "set".

I also enjoyed some of the down answers in the corners, including IMBEAT, LIBELED, SPAMMED.

On the other hand, LEOI. Also ELSAS.

Huh.

- Colum

5 comments:

  1. 8:29
    I thought this ran a little tough for a Monday, also. I starred 25A Piece of sports equipment that's spiked (VOLLEYBALL) since it's kind of clever. However, I never heard of KALB or NEN. Despite its bad points (like, I agree, IDING), I thought that this was a nice, challenging Monday. AMENABLE is a great word, and I liked seeing BEETLES in there, even though it's plural, crossing OLDS. More good than bad today.

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  2. 6:22 (FWOE)

    I had KABaB and didn't think twice about MaNET. Nevermind that his name was "Edouard"...

    I, too, loved this interesting theme.

    INONIT "Part of a prank, say" is odd. I wonder if that's the first time that's been used? ** Nope. It's the sixth time. BROKENBONE and WEREALLSET, however, appear for the first time in a NYTX today. (If you've never looked at the analytics over at XWordInfo, you really ought to. They are kind of amazing.)

    If you start to look around you see a lot of weird, iffy stuff, but the theme elevates it enough to stay on the good side. I agree with Huygens' assessment. Also - I thought he might complain about misreading NOTIT. (Too much?)

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  3. Methinks you are too young. Newsmen Marvin KALB and ROGERMUDD (yesterday) are both quite well known to me.

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    Replies
    1. The point is not whether he is well known or not. The point is that cluing him on the basis of a show he hosted for one (!) year seems pointlessly challenging for an early week clue. Interestingly, his cohost that year on the show was Roger Mudd. Who knew?

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