them's crossing words

about - archive - rss

Te Encanto

by Madeline Kaplan

Well, that was certainly a puzzle. Holy moly I don't even know where to begin. I'm about 25/75 towards liking/hating this puzzle. Let's start with what I liked.

Plonking TEETERTOTTER was the highlight of my day. After flowing through the grid two times over and only catching a couple words, TEETERTOTTER comes streaming in and fills up the entire 12-length column. A triumph!

My enjoyment peaked with the upper-right corner. There's a good blend of tough clues and esoteric trivia, but it feels achievable. Nothing is too far out there. I was floored that my guess EUCHRE was correct, and eventually stumbled into TRUCES/ENLIST after thinking about the clues long enough. I filled SET, even if my interpretation of the wordplay was totally off. I was thinking "Collection of games?" was a reference to the card game/NYT puzzle, but turns out it's actually a tennis thing. Eh, close enough.

As for the rest of the grid, we've got our obligatory Beyoncé reference and a theme built on a song for a Disney movie I've never seen. Oh boy. Honestly, I think the song choice here is bad. It strikes me as impossible to guess without context of the movie: WEDONTTALK and ABOUTBRUNO. How was I supposed to know BRUNO was a character in the movie? I used hints on both of the themers and even then I was just stumbling around with letters, trying random combinations. "Is ABOUTBRUNO right? Iunno, let's just ship it and see what happens".

Some of the other fill in this grid is borderline offensive. "Peeled grapes" for EYES? Say what? How about "Another name for an ascot" as CRAVAT? Considering "Some Circuit City (RIP) purchases" as TVS I'm thinking we've got a grid filled with Boomer references.

As for "When many start receiving Slack notifications" as ATNINE, I'm guessing the constructor was going for a 9-5 work week thing here. But let me tell you, as someone who has used slack for the last 6 years the real answer to this clue is Friday at 4:50 PM. "Hey, just wanted to quickly check in before next week that everything's going as planned with project X?" Way to ruin an evening, PM.

Send your comments to [email protected].