For a moment there, I actually had my 47-Across “1989 Milli Vanilli hit” as “GIRL I’M GONNA PISS” in today’s puzzle (wasn’t that an R. Kelly tune?) before realizing that 50-Down was “MEOWED,” not “PURRED.” Just as I had thought to myself that there was no other, ahem, “band” that I’d be more content to never hear a single mention of ever again, 61-Across was a clue about Hootie & the Blowfish.
I picked up the Times last night and didn’t get the chance to look at this crossword until today, but even then it was rather startling to think of how fast David J. Kahn cranked this one out.
Rex Parker did some reasonable nitpicking after finishing it:
How in the world are you “honoring” MICHAEL JACKSON if leave out “Off the Wall” and “Bad” but give *four* answers over to the manifestly crappier “DANGEROUS?” I understand that “GONE TOO SOON” has a nice tributey sound to it, but it was not what you’d call a memorable hit. Stuffing the partial “ASK ME” into the middle of the puzzle is a pretty ugly move — again, that’s not even close to a memorable or significant MJ lyric. I mean, if you Google “Don’t you ask me for no favors dangerous” you get — crossword blogs. As a feat of construction, this puzzle is indeed something else, but it does not feel like it was constructed by someone who had any sense of MICHAEL JACKSON’s musical significance at all. I didn’t even know there *was* an album called “FOREVER, MICHAEL.” What the hell is on that?
I’ve still got a tremendous amount of respect for Kahn’s work. Earlier this year, his “Making History” puzzle right before Inauguration Day was incredible, but I still associate him with another tribute that he did back in 2003 for the late caricaturist Al Hirschfeld.
The “Drawing Power” solution I’m linking to doesn’t include the number 16 that was after Kahn’s name in the byline, a sly indication that he was honoring Hirschfeld’s trademark of putting a number after his signature to indicate how many times the name of his daughter “Nina” appeared. It’s hardly a surprise that Kahn said it was “the biggest reaction of any puzzle I’ve ever written.”
Great minds think alike regarding yesterday’s crossword:
27D: Chantilly’s department (Oise) — “Chantilly” makes me think of only one thing.
Indeed. Big Bopper rules.
Once you had 17-Across, today’s timely crossword basically filled itself in.
My co-worker incorrectly wrote in a “C” to form “CANDY” for 1-DOWN (“2005 #1 Album for Coldplay”), which was bugging me. I never bought “X & Y,” so I blame my failure to correct the guess on that.
But something else about the syndicated puzzle seemed a little off …
Oh, “small songbirds.”
Right …
Because some jerk-off always takes the Arts section out of the New York Times on Mondays at my local 7-11, I didn’t see the new KenKen puzzle for the first time until yesterday. I’m still not quite sure how much I like it yet.
Most of my time with yesterday’s paper was surprisingly spent with the Science Times section’s tributes to Charles Darwin. It was unexpectedly enjoyable reading yesterday afternoon.
This is the crossword I was filling out (I had three of the five 15-letter clues) and ultimately got me suspended today—which is fine, of course, because now I get to go here tomorrow. And we might go here on Sunday.
Weather permitting, I can’t wait to thank my boss and tell him what a great weekend off he just gave me.
And then I’ll promise not to do the puzzles at the bar anymore. But for now, God wants me in Ohio.
I’m not the type to bust out a stopwatch when I do the puzzles in the newspaper, but I wish I had at the very least seen what time I started this puzzle at. While I’m aware of the difficulty level we’re talking about here (it is Monday, after all), the only spot that slowed me down was 22 Across (Fed. auditing agency), where I originally had IRS.
Nonetheless, the whole thing couldn’t have taken more than a few minutes and each region filled itself in from left to right, top to bottom, making my reaction at the end very similar to Rex’s:
Holy smoke, this is a great Monday puzzle. Never saw the theme til I was finished, but that’s par for the course with Mondays. Took me a few seconds to understand the theme-revealing answer, but once I got it, I was impressed. Simple, elegant, gorgeous, just like the majority of this grid.
