December 31: "In a Sarlacc Pit, but Emotionally" (August Miller, lost for xwords)
March 20: Pet Theory (Ben Wilson, zerofiftyone)
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"In a Sarlacc Pit, but Emotionally" (August Miller)
It's true, December 31 was a long time ago. But I'd been sleeping on August Miller's blog until a couple of recent AVCX puzzles and a profile in Daily Crossword Links inspired me to work through the recent backlog. Not only am I very late to covering this one, Quiara Vasquez's new Substack has already covered it, and that Substack promises to do basically the same thing as my highlight roundups, except much more comprehensively and with much better writing.
Still, I liked this puzzle a lot and therefore I'm going to talk about it! One thing I like about it is that, like many of August's puzzles, this one features triple stacks of 15s, which are way less popular than they used to be because they tend to involve significant sacrifices in fill quality (or at least they did in their heyday). August's triple stacks are consistently good, both in terms of the 15s themselves and in the short fill crossing them. But in this puzzle, I particularly want to highlight two entries: DORITOS ROULETTE and EMO KYLO REN. These are both phrases that will be totally unknown to a lot of solvers, and it's worth taking a look at how August chose to clue them. EMO KYLO REN is at least partly self-explanatory: it's a version of Kylo Ren who's emo. But with no context, that's still going to be pretty baffling to solvers who aren't already familiar. Cannily, August clues it as [Who tweeted "i get all my winter clothes from Hoth Topic"], which not only shouts out a great pun, but concisely tells the baffled solver that EMO KYLO REN is a parody Twitter account, without having to explicitly spell it out. Contrast that with the clue for STONED APE THEORY in another of August's puzzles that I recently solved: [Disputed hypothesis that ingestion of psilocybin mushrooms helped to catalyze the deevlopment of art and language among early humans]. That's a great entry that I've being hoping to use as a 15 for a while, but it's also totally opaque to someone who's not already familiar. So opaque that a glancing clue like the EMO KYLO REN clue wouldn't land; you've really gotta go straightforward with this one.
DORITOS ROULETTE, finally, is less transparent than EMO KYLO REN in a vacuum. But it's certainly one of the very few obvious potential meanings for the phrase, so the clue doesn't actually have to be so explicit at all. [Gamble with chips?] is a perfect piece of wordplay, but it's also perfect as a disambiguator of the meaning of DORITOS ROULETTE: it confirms that, yes, it probably means Russian roulette with dangerously spicy Doritos instead of bullets. (I mean, I guess it could also be a game of actual roulette with Doritos instead of balls, but... how would that even work?)
Pet Theory (Ben Wilson)
A lot of crosswords I've highlighted on here over the years have been Schrodinger puzzles, in which certain squares have multiple correct entries that work with the crossing entries. After all, Schrodingers are a staple of the hard crossword niche, and it's always impressive when they're pulled off well, without clues that feel too stretchy. So it's funny that my favorite recent Schrodinger puzzle isn't actually a Schrodinger puzzle (or should I say, both is and isn't a Schrodinger puzzle). Instead, it's got a mini-theme with SCHRODINGER'S CAT as an entry; the other entry is BOX-AND-WHISKER PLOT.
When I finished solving, I thought "Cute! Two science-y theme answers that are related to cats" and moved on with my life. But later in the shower I realized that, of course, the connection is much tighter: the Schrodinger's cat thought experiment involves a cat in a box, so Schrodinger's scheme could literally be described as a box-and-whisker plot. That's a beautiful reinterpretation of the phrase, remarkably affecting the meanings of both "box" and "whisker" (and even, metaphorically, "plot"). Cap it off with a perfect title and you've got the platonic ideal of a mini-theme.
