them's crossing words

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Midday Teatime

by regularjinks

I enjoyed this puzzle quite a bit, even if I have some reservations towards the theme. The clues have a good bit of personality to them without going overboard on the anecdotes and the difficulty curve of the solve is nice and satisfying.

The theme is tea, with MATCHA, ASSAM, and CHAI hidden in the three themers, UNMATCHABLE, BASSAMP, and TCHAIKOVSKY. I discovered the theme almost immediately when working through UNMATCHABLE; as soon as I had TCHA in place MATCHA was an easy guess. Knowledge of tea paid off dividends for the other two themers.

The problem I have with the theme is that the choice of tea references seem a bit all over the place. ASSAM is a kind of black tea, named after the region of its production. MATCHA almost fits, even though it's technically green tea that is finely ground (MATCHA tea is made from the same leaves as Gyokuro). CHAI is the weird one, where it either refers to tea generically (e.g. CHAI is just a word for tea) or refers to Masala chai, which isn't a kind of tea at all but really a blend of tea and spices. To fit ASSAM, shouldn't all three be tea varietals? Or to fit MATCHA and CHAI, shouldn't all three bit drinks ordered in a cafe? I'm thinking about this too hard.

I got hung up on BASSAMP crossing MARV, GRAIN, and ANGORA, easily the hardest part of the puzzle for me. "Bit of teff or truth" had me searching my memory banks for idioms with "truth" since I've never heard of a "teff", and "Fine, fluffy fiber" was giving me no hints towards ANGORA. I got out of this bind by looking at the TCHAI___SKY that I had slotted for the themer and extrapolating KOV since "that sounds Russian enough".

There are lots of great clues in this grid. "YouTube genre that'sss a real sssensssation?" is pretty fun, even if it sounds more like a channel about snakes than ASMR. "Muppet ironically never acknowledged by the Academy?" (OSCAR) had me chuckling. Did I mention I like wordplay clues?

I also lucked out with the few IT/programming references. "Client's counterpart, in computer networks" (SERVER) and "Coding language named after the mathematician who wrote the first computer program" (ADA) were both easy plonks.

Anyway, excellent debut. Till next time.

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