Old name for Tokyo / MON 4-7-14 / San Diego baseballer / Canals Michigan/Ontario separator / First Arabic letter
THEME: 2 — lots of two-related stuff, plus a 2-ish image in the center of the grid (made out of black squares)
Theme answers:
- 16A: High-stakes wager (DOUBLE OR NOTHING)
- 59A: Boeing 767, for one (TWIN-ENGINE PLANE)
- 13D: More, at a meal (SECOND HELPING)
- 14D: Someone who's so nice you almost want to smack him (GOODY TWO SHOES) (this clue is insane; excessive niceness is Not what's behind this term. No reasonable person wants to "smack" another person simply for being nice. The clue misses the essential smugness / unctuousness required to invite smacking)
- 28A: See 68-Across
- 68A: One of a couple for the Roman god JANUS (FACE)
- 45A: One of a couple in a 767 (AISLE)
In ancient Roman religion and myth, Janus (Latin: Ianus, pronounced (ˈiaː.nus)) is the god of beginnings and transitions, thence also of gates, doors, passages, endings and time. He is usually depicted as having two faces, since he looks to the future and to the past. The Romans named the month of January (Ianuarius) in his honor. (wikipedia)• • •
Sometimes you have a tight, well-conceived, expertly executed theme, and sometimes you have a general idea and you just throw everything but the kitchen sink at it. Today, the latter. Not sure what the occasion for all the 2-ness is (it would be nice if it had a clear context, point of reference … something). But the theme answers seem really arbitrary. The JANUS cross-referenced stuff is oddly placed, esp. considering the other 4s in the corners are all specifically doubles. Which of these four is not like the others: PAIR, DYAD, DUAL, FACE? FACE! You are correct! GOODY TWO SHOES has nothing to do with doubleness at all. Yes, there are two shoes, but absolutely nothing about that expression relates to doubleness. AISLE? There are a gajillion things that come in pairs, and … AISLE? I see that it's connected to TWIN-ENGINE PLANE, but … why? Nothing's connected to DOUBLE OR NOTHING, so … I'm not getting the structural logic here. That said, I liked that the grid was unusual looking—don't really care about the "2" in the middle, unusualness is always good on a Monday. And some of the fill was quite nice. Conceptually, it's all just too loose for me. But it's not bad, by any means.
There were exactly three places during the solve where I either faltered or had to think a little bit. First, right away, at 1-Across. Wanted DYAD for (Couple). A reasonable answer, it turns out. Then at 39D: Split with an ax I had the "C" and wrote in CHOP UP instead of the correct CLEAVE. Lastly, I didn't quite grasp what (One of a couple in a 767) was going for, so had to fall back on the crosses until it became clear. Otherwise, I was pretty much filling in answers as fast as I could read the clues.
Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld
More posts from
