NEWSFLASH : Mr. Huynh absolutely crushes his NYT crossword debut, with a highly entertaining offering featuring one of the most inventive uses of the rebus I've ever seen! As I worked through the grid, it was apparent that there was going to be some sort of rebus action, as several of the Down clues seemed to lead to answers that wouldn't fit in the grid; e.g. 6D: "Actress MacDowell", which has to be ANDIE but there are only three squares to put it into. Wherever there was this sort of uncertainty, I just left the area blank and motored on. The time came when there was little else to fill in, and by then it was apparent what was going on. The four long Across clues begin or end in repeated rebuses, which doesn't make sense at first, until you read them differently, and the penny drops:
16A : "1995 Coolio song in 'Dangerous Minds'" : GANGSTAS[DIE][DIE] --> GANGSTA'S PAIR O' DICE --> GANGSTA'S PARADISE. Extra marks for the use of DICE as the plural of DIE, without it actually appearing in the answer!
23A : "'This statement is false', for one" : LOGICAL[DOC][DOC] --> LOGICAL PARADOX. I especially liked this one because, like 16A, the answer isn't a plural.
46A : "'The Good Samaritan' and 'The Prodigal Son', for example" : [BULL][BULL]OFJESUS --> PARABLES OF JESUS. Punny!
57A : "Effecting fundamental changes to perceptions" : SHIFTING[DIME][DIME] --> SHIFTING PARADIGMS. This one was my first in, and led quickly to all the others.
Part of the cleverness, of course, was finding crossing answers in which to hide the rebuses. The DIMEs are hidden in RUDIMENT and SEDIMENT, side by side - very cheeky to have such similar words alongside each other!
.jpg/1200px-Cate_Blanchett-0547_(cropped).jpg "THE GREAT CATE BLANCHETT")
The grid as a whole was rock solid, with interesting tidbits; e.g. I did not know that squid was part of an ORCA's diet, or that the William Tell Overture is in the key of EMAJ. Aside from the theme, my fave was 36A : "Like Canadian provinces vis-a-vis U.S. states" , which gave me pause as a Canadian. NICER maybe? Surely not in a NYT xword. (It's FEWER, which is undeniably, uncontroversially true)
Crosswords like this are really what keep me coming back. Take a bow, Mr. Huynh!!!
-philbo
Beautiful! The penny finally dropped when I *knew* the University of Georgia team: the BULLdogs, and JESUS saved me with His parables -- or pair o' BULLs. Loved this one a lot...took me forever but it was a really enjoyable time.
ReplyDeleteThis one took me a while too, even though I had the two [DIE] rebuses in the first minute or so of the solve! The logical paradox gave me the theme, but still, the bottom took me forever! Fun stuff.
ReplyDelete