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Constructor: Luke K. Schreiber
Relative difficulty: Easy (Downs-Only, no sweat)
THEME: “IT’S ME AGAIN!” (62A: “I’m back!” … or a hint to 17-, 24-, 38- and 51-Across) — theme answers both have “ME” in them twice, once at the beginning and then … again, later:
- MEGAMERGER (17A: Union of two major companies)
- METACOMET (24A: Wampanoag chief of the 1600s also known as King Philip)
- MEAT THERMOMETER (38A: Temperature measurer for turkeys and roasts)
- METRONOME (51A: Ticking item that helps musicians keep time)
Word of the Day: METACOMET (24A) —
Metacom, (born c. 1638, Massachusetts—died August 12, 1676, Rhode Island), sachem (intertribal leader) of a confederation of indigenous peoples that included the Wampanoag and Narraganset. Metacom led one of the most costly wars of resistance in New England history, known as King Philip’s War (1675–76).
Metacom was the second son of Massasoit, a Wampanoag sachem who had managed to keep peace with the English colonizers of Massachusetts and Rhode Island for many decades. Upon Massasoit’s death (1661) and that of his eldest son, Wamsutta (English name Alexander), the following year, Metacom became sachem. He succeeded to the position during a period characterized by increasing exchanges of Indian land for English guns, ammunition, liquor, and blankets. He recognized that these sales threatened indigenous sovereignty and was further disconcerted by the humiliations to which he and his people were continually subjected by the colonizers. He was, for example, summoned to Taunton in 1671 and required to sign a new peace agreement that included the surrender of Indian guns.
Metacom’s dignity and steadfastness both impressed and frightened the settlers, who eventually demonized him as a menace that could not be controlled. For 13 years he kept the region’s towns and villages on edge with the fear of an Indian uprising. Finally, in June 1675, violence erupted when three Wampanoag warriors were executed by Plymouth authorities for the murder of John Sassamon, a tribal informer. Metacom’s coalition, comprising the Wampanoag, Narraganset, Abenaki, Nipmuc, and Mohawk, was at first victorious. However, after a year of savage fighting during which some 3,000 Indians and 600 colonists were killed, food became scarce, and the indigenous alliance began to disintegrate. Seeing that defeat was imminent, Metacom returned to his ancestral home at Mount Hope, where he was betrayed by an informer and killed in a final battle. He was beheaded and quartered and his head displayed on a pole for 25 years at Plymouth. (britannica.com)
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Doesn’t seem like a sufficiently restrictive concept. Theme answers start with “ME” … and then “ME” appears “again,” somewhere? You mean, like in MEDICINE MEN? MEANTIME? “MEET ME IN ST. LOUIS” (15!)*? There are probably a bunch more. This just doesn’t seem like a very high bar, or even a very interesting lexical quirk. And it’s not as if the themers are really giving you any sizzle. They’re fine, but … this seems pretty … meager, as theme concepts go. Also, seems like the least you could do, if you’re gonna make a big deal about the “ME”s in the themers, is not to have *any* other “ME”s in the grid, anywhere. But there’s one in MESAS and there’s another in MESSI and there’s another in SMELT. It just doesn’t seem like this puzzle is doing enough. Throw in the fact that the fill is something less than Just OK, with a couple of prime long Downs totally wasted on misfires, and you’ve got a rather listless Monday offering. It’s a Meh from Me, I’m afraid. It took me a while to figure out what the basic premise was. I thought I saw a pattern developing with MEGA- then META- … but MEAT- threw that all out of whack, and then METRONOME didn’t even have two parts (at that point, I still thought METACOMET was a META-COMET … you know, some kind of supercomet, or … like, a comet that is commenting ironically on its own cometness, somehow—totally forgot it was a person). Figured out the double-ME thing just before the revealer. As for the revealer … yeah, I guess people say that. Seems fine. But getting to that revealer was a pretty underwhelming experience. Easy puzzles don’t have to be underwhelming, they truly don’t.
I know METACOMET has nothing to do with the prefix META– but it was still somehow distracting as hell to have META in the puzzle. Felt like a dupe. DEFROSTED and STALEMATE are solid entries, but MAGIC BEAN, oof and argh, that is rough in the singular. Jack has magic beans, plural. No one ever talks about a single MAGIC BEAN. Can’t believe that the wordlist couldn’t cough up something better than the singular MAGIC BEAN. Similarly disappointing: STAIR STEP. You mean … a step? Or a stair? “Watch out for that last STAIR STEP!,” shouted no one. Why are you bothering to distinguish a STAIR STEP from … other steps. Steps on a ladder? Dance steps? It’s not that STAIR STEP doesn’t compute, it’s just clunky and redundant-feeling. I actually had ATTIC STEP in there at first, as I was solving Downs-Only. ATTIC and STAIR share two letters in the same places, and two *more* of ATTIC’s letters made sense in the crosses (AREA instead of ARES, SANTA instead of SANA’A). It’s only because of the undeniability of METRONOME that I didn’t trip on the ATTIC STAIR. The “R” cross from that last themer forced me to see the reality of STAIR. Nothing else in the Downs-only solve caused any real trouble. I had HAM & Cheese before [MAC and cheese], but that’s just a bad guess, and it was easily corrected. Getting every letter in METACOMET was probably the hardest task of the day, and that wasn’t that hard.
This puzzle does have PANKO, which is tasty, and which I wouldn’t mind seeing a lot more often. Five-letter words are so often Dullsville, and PANKO … isn’t. There’s something fitting, if likely totally coincidental, about RAW appearing directly under MEAT THERMOMETER, and METRONOME crossing ON TIME, and (especially) DALI on LSD (while his paintings have certainly been likened to drug-induced hallucinations, he himself apparently didn’t do drugs; his famous quote: “I don’t do drugs, I am drugs!”)
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| [Les Trois Sphinx de Bikini, 1947] |
Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld
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