Boy Meets Boy

by Abigail Rapp & Shannon Rapp

• Play it ↗
• Difficulty: easy

It's the first day of a new month and I've got a partner solve to match a partner construction. Unfortunately, today's puzzle doesn't inspire much in the way of commentary. It's a fairly boring themeless.

But hey, there is one thing I can thank this grid for. ERA clued as "'Reputation' or 'Red,' e.g., for Taylor Swift" finally allows me to reset the days-since Taylor Swift counter. Who would've thought we'd make 27 days?^[1]

Considering this puzzle is a themeless, the fill is very mid with a surprising amount of crosswordese. AESOP, ATARI, ERR, and ERIE are all in the not-great category; they're made even worse by quite a few otherwise boring fills: ERODE, AROMA, HONOR, SESH. I could go on here but the outlook would be rather BLEAK.

The cluing is absolutely lacking in the wordplay category. We're given one question mark clue and it's a crossword cliché: "Fabled author?" (AESOP). The remaining clues all fall into the trivia/definition/reference category. That said, Elizabeth was a fan of "Dog breed whose ears seem to big for its head" (CORGI), it engenders happy puppy images.

"[...] pronoun pair in some Snapchat profiles" has me worried that the younger generation still uses Snapchat. Better than TikTok, I guess?

Send your comments to [email protected].