Consider enjoying this puzzle with some pale ale

by parker

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• Difficulty: hard

What a tough puzzle.

The theme is words that rhyme with "pale ale", with RAILTRAIL, SNAILMAIL, and FAILWHALE. There's a zero percent chance I would've recognized this during the solve if I didn't hint at RAILTRAIL. Up to that point I was convinced the grid was themeless!

Speaking of RAILTRAIL, is this a thing? What a brutal piece of fill. Not only do I not recognize the word, its clue is a wordplay definition: "Former 'training' site now used for physical activity?" I can see how one might arrive at RAILTRAIL without prior knowledge thanks to the "training" hint, but unfortunately that requires a level of wit far beyond my meager capabilities. How about giving me "train-ing" instead?

FAILWHALE and SNAILMAIL are fun, even if I messed up the latter by filling HATEON instead of HATING for "Expressing undue negativity". Another bit of bad solving on my part, not recognizing the "ExpressING" part of the clue. Yeesh.

My worst solving area was slotting OLD for "No longer hip", which I recognize may be a little ageist but certainly also represents how I feel with every coming year of my life. With an LP at the end of "Absolutely loved" I was completely screwed in that corner with no hope of success. If I were smart, I would've recognized LP as the final two letters for a word that does not exist, but instead I stuck to my guns and burned through my time trying to fit the fill around it. Oof.

Despite coming away from this puzzle with a few wounds to my pride, I enjoyed the cleverness in the clues. "Auto-maintenance?" for SELFCARE is pretty good, as is "Long car's short name" (LIMO). The cluing did get in the way of my solve in quite a few areas, like in "Use two needles to make fiber art" where I spent too much time second-guessing KNIT since I don't colloquially think of yarn as "fiber".

Shoutout to MARG, the cocktail abbreviation that only appears in crosswords because if you said it in real life you'd recognize just how ridiculous it sounds.

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