NYT Crossword: Wednesday, Aug. 5

NYT Crossword 8/5 – 11:49

This crossword adopts an ambitious theme and asks the player to accept awkward cluing down in exchange for especially satisfying solutions across the puzzle.

Off to a hot start, I got 1 and 6-Across right off the bat, as well as a quick 15 and 16. It wasn’t all breezy from there: For 32-Across, I got briefly stuck on CARBON CAPTURE rather than the correct STORAGE. Similarly, for 59 and 60 across started with the more common COUNTS HEADS rather than COUNTS NOSES. Even post hoc, I’m not totally sure I get the pun involved with “Temple services?” as HEAD MASSAGES, nor why LON would be an “apt name for a groundskeeper?” And for some reason, despite reading a half dozen accounts of Larry Page and Sergey Brin’s genius search-engine innovation – my favorite comes in Steven Strogatz’s “The Joy of x” – my mind lingered on PAGE VIEWS rather than PAGE RANKS. My favorite solve of the whole puzzle was the invincible INDIANA HOOSIERs of 1976.

The cluing down, as I mentioned earlier, is justifiably a bit clumsy in service of an exciting overall puzzle structure. But constraints breed creativity: I learned about ERTÉ thanks to 27-Down, “Some Deco works,” and went down a minor Wikipedia rabbit hole. His Harper’s covers from the early 1920s are beautiful, and it’s fun to picture him galavanting around Hollywood in the mid-1920s – Louis B. Mayer hired him to work on his film Paris, but amidst multiple delays, Erté worked as a set and costume designer on set for a multitude of films, the most famous of which was Ben-Hur. It’s easy to see his influence in the costuming for Carmel Myers: it’s easy to see the sinuous figures of his Harper’s designs (blended with a dash of Orientalism) in the ornate dress.

After being stuck on that PAGE (VIEW/RANK)S region of the puzzle for far too long, I tracked down a YouTube clip of the 2015 CABER world champion (“Pole tossed in a Scottish game”) and wow does that clue undersell the size of that pole. These guys are basically lifting whole trees and throwing them – they’re 16-20 feet tall and weigh 90-150 pounds!

Anaïs NIN also makes it into the cluing for 20-Down – my mind would go to Trent Reznor first, but to each their own. She married Rupert Pole in Los Angeles while already married to Hugh Guiler in New York and kept what she called a “bicoastal trapeze” afloat for over a decade, claiming that “I tell so many lies I have to write them down and keep them in the lie box so I can keep them straight.” For a person who led such a bohemian and romantic life, the double-marriage scheme ultimately collapsed for mundane reasons: both Guiler and Pole attempted to claim Nin as a dependent on their tax returns.