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Today's puzzle from Brendan Quigley was one that even after completing it, I spent a long time looking at it. Just kind of staring at like it was a magic eye puzzle, waiting for something to pop out at me. Specifically, I was looking for his name, which according to his Twitter (@fleetwoodwack) is hidden somewhere in the grid. I haven't found it yet, though! To be fair, I also can't do magic eye puzzles.
In all seriousness, the grid layout itself is beautiful, looking almost like an ancient rune carved into stone in some long-forgotten, grown-over cave. It's as much a piece of art as the wonderfully-clued answers within. Speaking of answers, this puzzle had some really good ones. As much as I want to jump right to my favorite, there are a few worth mentioning first.
At 14A we have the clue "Words from someone preparing to knock back a few" which solves to the delightfully rough-around-the-edges LINEEMUP.
I was thinking naval (ships, washed-up messages) when it came to 35A's "Things kept in bottles" but after getting the answer, now I can't kept a certain Disney tune out of my head. Indeed, you'll never have friends quite like GENIES.
A favorite of crossword constructors, Ava DuVernay, appeared at 45A only in the clue this time instead of the grid, which was refreshing. The answer there was looking for her Academy Award-winning film SELMA.
The 90's kid in me got a swift kick in the nostalgia at 46A which called back to the "Beverage brand with with a lizard logo." I rode my skateboard down to the local CVS to pick up a SOBE or two back in the day.
Two of my favorite clue-and-answer combos came from the southern half of the grid. In the SW quadrant we had 51A's "One getting in on the hustle?" a very clever way of pointing me to DANCER. And in the SE corner 41D's "One found among the reeds" brought me back to high school music class with the answer OBOIST.
Of the 6 three-letter answers, two of them threw me for a loop. The first at 20A "Temple offering: Abbr" is looking for DEG. My thought process for this clue was that it was referring to a Jewish synagogue, and I was coming up empty. Thankfully I was able to fill it completely on the crosses, and only after the fact considered it meant Temple University in Philadelphia who offer classes in exchange for DEGrees. 38A was looking for "Dr. Jekyll['s] creator['s] inits." Again the crossing clues filled the answer for me, although I did a quick Google to find that Robert Louis Stevenson... or RLS... was indeed the author of the famous novel.
Today's longest answers were a nice mix of everything a solver can expect from an expertly crafted crossword: something topical, a bit of trivia, a good pun, and a little general knowledge. Starting at the end of the list we have:
36A "Squiggly musical symbols" which solves to QUARTERRESTS
31A "Woman of the word?" looking for MOTHERNATURE
21D "Long-running fictional hero [...] in Call for the Dead" is British spy GEORGESMILEY
And the best answer of the day, (6D ... IMO), came from 7D's "Informal name for Vespa mandarinia." Despite reading on these loathsome creatures seemingly every day since they first rocketed to media attention in early 2020 (as if we didn't have enough to deal with this year), I had no idea of their scientific name. Still, a few crossing letters was all it took to piece together that this big answer was looking for an equally big insect: the MURDERHORNET.
The entire NE corner was a toughie for me. Strangely, I found the long answers simple having filled in 12D's "Amazon and others" ... ETAILERS ... and 13D's "Reason not to go swimming in the ocean" ... REDTIDE ... in my first pass through the clues. 11D's "Occasion for smoking" ... BARBEQUE ... was another quick solve after getting QED ("Letters for a proof reader) from those two crossings.
For some reason I just wasn't clicking with the rest of the answers. Two of them, 16A's IDEATE and 18A's TETRAD, went over my head, but after a pause to think I picked up 8A's "Like many a yoga master" to mean LIMBER and the vertical crosses fell into place (LIT, IDED, and METED respectively). When the golden grid popped up on my screen, it showed a personal best for a Saturday of 18:34. Slow by some solver's standards, but I was proud of it.
How did today's puzzle treat you? Did you finish faster than me? Leave a comment below.
If your brain is spent after tackling this difficult puzzle, I recently added some easy minis to the site which you can find here. I hope you enjoy.
And of course... the answers:
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