Relative difficulty: Challenging (*for a Monday*)
THEME: MIX TAPE (37A: Homemade music compilation) — four contiguous circles inside four theme answers feature rearrangements of the letters T-A-P-E
Word of the Day: SHERE Khan (13D: ___ Khan ("The Jungle Book" tiger)) —
Shere Khan is a fictional tiger of the Indian jungle, named after an Afghan Prince (Sher Shah Suri, The Lion King or The Tiger King) Kipling encountered on his trips to Afghanistan. The word Shere translates to "Tiger" in Urdu/Hindi/Punjabi, and "khan" translates as "sovereign," "king" or "military leader" and so forth in a number of languages influenced by the Mongols, including Pashto. Shere Khan is the chief antagonist in two of Rudyard Kipling's Jungle Book stories featuring Mowgli. (wikipedia)
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This was pretty rough. Didn't like the theme—those are easy letters to mix up and find inside other words and phrases, and the resulting phrases aren't that interesting. Circled letter strings should break across different words, or at least different word parts, so THREEPEATS is an outlier here—also an outlier because, for non-sports people, that clue + that answer will equal ???. (THREEPEAT = string of three championships; a play on the word "REPEAT"). That's a fine clue-answer pairing, but not on a Monday. Also not Monday-like: that NE corner. Ugly partial foreign weirdness. SHERE crossing "A-DALE" is flat-out terrible. Something out of last century's crosswordese torture box. There's absolutely no reason for a corner that small, with anchor / theme letters that unchallenging, should have fill that unappealing. Should've been sent back to the drawing board there. A 78-worder on a Monday should be much, much smoother than this.Theme answers:
- 20A: 1990s runnings of the Bulls? (THREEPEATS)
- 11D: Groups battling big government (TEA PARTIES)
- 29D: Watch (KEEP TABS ON)
- 53A: Some gymwear (SWEATPANTS)
People complain all the time about the NYT's liberal bias—not today. Sure, there's a Kennedy (ROSE) and a gay married couple (MUPPETs), as well as a Che/Gaga mash-up (ICON), but the memorable political answers here are TEA PARTIES (which I hate in the plural, but whatever) and "Sarah Palin's ALASKA" (46D: Sarah Palin's ___" of 2010-11 TV). Really like that last clue. Very fresh. Also, I did (really) appreciate the fact that the puzzle itself acknowledged that PHAT is "dated" (32A: Excellent, in dated slang). It really is, though so is most of the slang that finds its way into crosswords: NEATO, EGAD, uh ... NERTS, etc. On the whole, though, the puzzle is not polished enough. No reason for A LOON and A-DALE or weak partials in general when your grid is this undemanding. Just because you're done doesn't mean you're Done. Monday grids should be scrubbed within an inch of their lives, esp. when the theme isn't exactly sparkling.Not sure how long I took to do this one (did it on paper, away from a clock), but it felt much, much longer than my avg. Monday. Same thing for wife, who is decidedly non-sports and so had trouble not only with THREEPEATS but with RGS as well :( And like me, she found that NE corner rough going. My wife would also like you to know that a TACOS are not "sandwiches" and PIES and cobblers are different from one another in many substantial ways.
Oddly enough, I've never (or barely) heard of the Kipling character SHERE. SHERE Hite, on the other hand, would've been a gimme. Wouldn't have minded this SHERE if he hadn't been cruelly caged in small, dirty confines with Alan and the ARTES liberales. Fittingly, I was slowed down in the SE corner by 61A: "Hold your horses!". Had the "W" and so my brain went easily, effortlessly from "horses" to WHOA, as in "Whoa, it's not WHOA?"
Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld
[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter]
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