Pick a Side
by rafa
- Play it ↗
- Difficulty: easy
Easy and breezy. Not a ton to say about this crossword other than I enjoyed the
flow. It's one of those puzzles where I filled probably 70% of the acrosses on
my first pass, albeit some of them incorrectly. I had PLAIN for "easy to
notice" and THE for "your order is on ___ way", the latter I assume to be
an intended misdirection (though I'm interested in what most people think of
first).
The theme isn't really noteworthy for this grid since most folks will solve past
it without thinking about it, but it's an apt pair with LEFTOVERS and
RIGHTAWAY. Left/right provides the two sides for the title: "Pick a side".
"Toe bean site" had me thinking that there was an entire website dedicated to looking at cat toes ("site" instead refers to the location of the toe bean anatomically). With some people's weird obsession with corgi butts I wouldn't be surprised. Honestly the term toe bean makes me a little uncomfortable, it's too close to toe jam and conjures up the wrong images. Unless we're talking about ToeJam and Earl, obviously.
Speaking of uncomfortable, how do people feel about the abbreviation MARG?
That's ironic, right? I mean, I can call a sandwich a "sando" and that's cool,
but a margarita a MARG? No thanks.
There's an interesting technique for solving an easy crossword like today's for those who want to spice things up: solve using only one of the clue directions, across or down. Generally downs-only is the better option because themers are traditionally acrosses (this puzzle is an exception), so solving downs-only creates a meta-puzzle of piecing together the themers without knowing how they're clued.
Puzzmo has no indication of difficulty for a given weekday (as far as I know), so it's hard to know when to apply downs-only. For NYT, give it a go on your next Monday solve.
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