Great! Bravo!! Bravissimo!!!
Milo Beckman's gimmick puzzle has it all...
It's got a groovy theme with v. good answers. Yes to THE BIG APPLE (and to the clue)! Yes to HELGA PICTURES! Yes to STRIKING A POSE! Yes to SINGAPOREAN (the weakest of the lot, but great for me since I was just there--I had some subconscious sense about the Straits of Johor and originally filled in MALAYSIAN)! Yes to the very pretty and also punchy, smack at you reveal!
It's got misdirection. I screwed up the NE fabulously by putting in TCBY for IHOP, BOATMAN for OARSMAN, SANTE for ANNEE, and IM AOL for EMAIL...I wanted CARAMBA for HOT DAMN and something like TCACTIS for ICED TEA. Cleaning up the mess was great fun. Also, I wanted something to do with the first heart transplant and the Jarvik artificial heart instead of THE PILL for the 1967/2010 Time covers clue. Great stuff!
It's got a fun-to-debate naked crossing with the funky RATTAT and the crosswordese ANSE. Had that right, but was gettting the incorrect signal (from having the typo STRI[N]ING A POSE down below), so I followed my "It's okay to google when you've been at it for 30 minutes" cheater logic and checked on ANSE.
It's even got a helpful online warning that made me mellow in advance about my likely problems doing the timed solving. Because of the fill in the B[lank] Wheel of Fortune puzzle recently, I glommed on to the idea that you wanted to put in a G for the GAP squares
Rex and commenters, you gotta love this one, right? Let's go find out...am v. v. curious...
Ok...Rex is going on about tech problems w/ the NYT...all v. true and useful if not exciting. In fact, he's v. tech-y today...
He notes the dupes of TEA in the puzz and how that is usually considered v. bad form. Okay...let me see what he means...yep, there's TEA TASTER...nice clue, btw...and then there's ICED TEA...also a nice clue. I get it. And it's absolutely fine, no?! This is the 21st c. and we're not in Kansas anymore, right!?
He also notes the repetitition of THE. Okay...there's THE BIG APPLE (and no THE in HELGA PICTURES...that semi-inconsistency did surface in my mind and bother me a smidgeon as I solved...I see Wikipedia has an entry under HELGA PICTURES, so the phrase is not a GREEN PAINT invention...phew)...and then there's MIND THE GAP...okay...yep, that was okay even in the Maleskan 20th c. that MetaRex and other dinosaurs who yet live grew up in.
Now the commentariat...They're kinda focusing on tech, in the spirit of our leader Rex...with the exception of Carola, no one really shares MetaRex's "this is great!" reaction, though a few folks note the excellence of the theme while also expressing ambivalence about the NW corner and/or the tech. All good...the thing I like perhaps most about MetaRexing is appreciating the reax of Rex and others who are as good as (or in the case of Rex and some of the commenters better than) I in their connoisseurdom when their reax differ from mine.
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