Wiener Frauen composer / FRI 7-11-14 / Like 1938 Andrew Jackson stamp / What Kramer often called Seinfeld / He had 1948 #1 hit w
THEME: none
Word of the Day: BARÇA (49A: Spanish soccer club, for short) —
Futbol Club Barcelona (Catalan pronunciation: (fubˈbɔɫ ˈkɫub bərsəˈɫonə), also known as Barcelona and familiarly as Barça, is a professional football club, based in Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain. (wikipedia)• • •
I think I liked this. It's hard to tell since I blinked and it was over. Under five minutes—super fast for me on a Friday. I was faster than every currently posted time at the NYT, including people who normally Krush me, which leads me to wonder … why? Where was the difficulty? Was it in and around POPO (28A: Cops, in slang) and DEMI-JOHN (12D: Cousin of a carafe)? I loved POPO but thought, as I was writing it in, "Is this something the average NYT solver knows?" I'm not exactly sure how I know it. Rap, probably, but now middle-class white folks trying to sound street use it quasi-ironically, so … who knows? I wanted to spell DEMI-JEAN thusly, but I think I was just confusing it with Sean Jean. Aw … nope. That's JOHN too.
But those 15s? Gimmes. Got them both at first glance, with just a few letters in place each time, and I doubt I'd've needed a single cross in either case. Those clues are transparent. I thought the same about 1A: Displeases one's buds? (TASTES BAD) and 1D: Scary little sucker (TSE-TSE), so I was off to a propulsive start right from the get-go. Let's see … I had a little struggle there for a few seconds when I thought it might be a SEWER PIPE instead of a SEWER LINE (15A: R.V. park hookup option). I wrote in ELGAR instead of LEHAR (due entirely to having only -AR in place when I saw the clue) (30A: "Wiener Frauen" composer"). Needed all the crosses to get FEAR (34D: What chickens have). Just didn't know BARÇA, so had to solve around it (thankfully, not hard at all). There were some other clues that held me up a little, but not such that the struggle is worth relating.
This puzzle won't be terribly memorable, but I thought it was quite solid.YEASTS are not things I'd normally think of as pluralizable—but that answer isn't bad/wrong, and there's nothing here to really gripe at. In sum: Fine work from this pair.
Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld
P.S. article out today in online version of the Atlantic about the future of the crossword puzzle. I am quoted extensively. My words are twice misrepresented (I must have been unclear somehow: mea culpa): I am not "suspicious of making crosswords more accessible." I am suspicious of the claim that apps do that. Big difference. Also, I'm not a "print loyalist," in that I almost never solve on actual newsprint. Still, worth reading.
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