Type "floppy di." into google and see what predictive text gives you. May the New Year bring you, and me, better Sunday puzzles. You can see it all over, from ARP to SOLER to OTERO. I won't bother enumerating all the tired, hackneyed short stuff here. But still, fool me with cleverness, if you're gonna fool me. I'll give A HINT one thing-it's stronger than A LION (!?!) ( 37D). But to get snagged by a fill-in-the-blank partial? It's just not fun. It's one thing to be fooled into a wrong answer by a clever clue, when the answer itself is at least a real, even if not particularly interesting, word. I had AH-N- and without hesitation wrote in A HAND. Other major slow-down came, unfortunately but somewhat predictably, at a very weak answer-the partial A HINT (92A: "Give me _").
MAD CAPO and CAM GEAR therefore gave me more trouble than all the other themers by far (because I didn't know they were themers). Also, I was not looking for a theme answer on those seven-letter Downs-not when you've got nine-letter Downs that *aren't* themed. Is "camo gear" a real phrase? That feels phenomenally weak as a self-standing phrase. And then of course there's the CCC / CWT thing right there. Toughest part for me was the NW, where NOSE BLEED ( 3D: Result of a haymaker, maybe) and STEALTH ( 19D: Good hunting skill) and TROOP ( 31D: Batch of Brownies?) (all abutting one another) all were clued in ways I couldn't decipher. it's all so contemptuous of solvers who care about (not to mention pay for) the "greatest puzzle in the world." Constructors should sniff out bad crosses like this, and editors *especially* should sniff them out. And when you give it the remarkably lazy and vague clue. Let me be clear: it's not that it's not "worth knowing." It's that it's generally not at all well known any more. The idea that people in 2017 should know the Civilian Conservation Corps is absurd. The only reasonable thing to do if you absolutely insist on going to press with a CCC / CWT crossing is to clue CCC as a Roman numeral. I honestly couldn't tell you what either CCC or CWT stand for, and the *only* reason I guessed the letter there successfully is that I'd seen CWT somewhere in a puzzle before. And *especially* don't do it when neither abbr.
Ever cross answers at a letter that is an abbr. Though the theme is weak, the worst part of this puzzle-the memory that so many are going to be left with-is the unforgivably atrocious crossing of 4A and 4D. Until then, loyalists will continue to create OK puzzles and the rest of the time, we'll get. Up the pay to $3000 for a Sunday (a tiny drop in the bucket compared to what they make off a single Sunday puzzle), give the puzzle the editorial care it deserves, and maybe some of the talent you've lost in the past few years will start to come back (there are Big Names you haven't seen in forever. And then the fill: ERLE, BAIO, SPOSE, NEH, ENS, and on and on and on. When your theme concept is this thin (add/subtract a single letter), and is entirely reliant on the wackiness really *landing*, then you better step up and make those themers and clues hum. But instead: for FLOPPY DISCO!? That's it? That's your clue? And SEVEN DAYS IN MAYO gets ? Can you not feeeeeel how boring that clue is. The slimmest, frailest of concepts-it's a play on "ring," get it!?-is supposed to carry you through an entire 21x21 grid? Perhaps with a truly talented clue writer, a concept like this might be salvaged, might be carried out over a giant grid without becoming supremely tiresome. in 2017, with as much constructing talent as there is out there, it's baffling. (wikipedia)Īdd a letter, drop a letter, wacky wacky wacky, piles of crosswordese. Over the course of its nine years in operation, 3 million young men participated in the CCC, which provided them with shelter, clothing, and food, together with a small wage of $30 (about $547 in 2015 ) per month ($25 of which had to be sent home to their families).
Maximum enrollment at any one time was 300,000. The CCC was designed to provide jobs for young men and to relieve families who had difficulty finding jobs during the Great Depression in the United States.
Roosevelt's New Deal that provided unskilled manual labor jobs related to the conservation and development of natural resources in rural lands owned by federal, state, and local governments. The CCC was a major part of President Franklin D. Robert Fechner was the first director of the agency, succeeded by James McEntee following Fechner's death. Originally for young men ages 18–25, it was eventually expanded to young men ages 17–28. The Civilian Conservation Corps ( CCC) was a public work relief program that operated from 1933 to 1942 in the United States for unemployed, unmarried men.