Proof of Concept

by Amie Walker & brooke

• Play it ↗
• Difficulty: hard

Today's "Proof of Concept" might be the weirdly longitudinal grid that is gracing the solver with 6 corners instead of the usual 4. At least, that's what it felt like when solving on my phone and dealing with the teeny-tiny boxes.

The actual reason for the title is the apt pair: REDWINESUPERNOVA and CHAMPAGNEPROBLEMS. Both are kinds of alcohol (REDWINE/CHAMPAGNE) and both... appear in music, I guess? I really don't see how SUPERNOVA and PROBLEMS relate, I mean, unless the SUPERNOVA is the cause of the PROBLEMS, in which case I suppose that's understandable. The apt pair falls a bit flat for me.

After 7 minutes of solving my partner joined me to finish the grid and I was amazed at her mechanical precision in filling in all of the gaps that I had left. It probably would've taken me twice as long if I had finished by myself.

Once we finished the grid and started reading the post-solve blurb my partner let out a deep sigh, "Can we just stop talking about Taylor Swift?" Amen to that. Look, I'm sure the constructors were very excited to talk about their music interests together, but man my level of not-caring could not be any greater.

Anyway if my dislike of Taylor Swift and total ignorance of Chappell Roan make me feel old, fill like FEELD makes me feel ancient. First Bumble, then Tinder, now FEELD? What is it with crossword puzzles and expecting me to be up-to-date on the latest dating app sensation? There's some good fill in this grid but FEELD and ALOO are the odd ones out.

Speaking of me being old, DREAMCORE is a made up term, I'm telling you. I'm so over the trend of taking a noun, adding "core" to it and pretending like its a new thing. Cottagecore is bad enough. Next they'll be telling me Witchcore is a thing. Wait a minute...

I'm proud for flexing my Mahjong knowledge and plonking EAST for "Position assigned to the highest-rolling player at the start of a mah-jongg game". Mahjong is a great game, just sayin'. At least, once you get past memorizing the ten pages of scoring combinations.

I'm also surprised by the programming references in this grid. There's both README, "Instructions file in a GitHub repository" and TEST, "Bit of code written to catch bugs". Now, I'm a little offended at the clues: TESTs are written to prevent bugs, not catch them, and READMEs predate Github. But hey, still cool to see.

I'm still waiting for the day that someone uses STOIC in a crossword and doesn't have it clued as a synonym for emotionless. If you find one such puzzle, let me know.

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