![]() Real trouble with the -CRAT part of EUROCRAT because wow what a stupid word. I struggled most in the BLANK CDS area, unsure of the "B" in LOEB (who?) ( 13D: Auto racing champion Sébastien) and needing every other cross to be able to see BLANK CDS. This one didn't feel like it was trying hard enough. YES AND NO *and* NO HIT (practically on top of each other). Really hard to appreciate something like EUROCRAT, yuck ( 64A: Brussels administrative official, informally). I could not appreciate most of the rest of this. That was brutal in a way that I could ultimately appreciate. I think I was most impressed by the clue on BLANK CDS (28A: Pirate fodder, once). Just added a feeling of slogginess to an already inherently unhappy experience. The puzzle tried to compensate for this easiness by making the clues on the non-theme fill harder, and I wish I could say this was pleasing, it mostly wasn't. Also, the nature of the theme made the theme answers all very, very easy to get. But still, that title makes the whole endeavor feel even more remedial and phoned-in. Not that the theme would've been hard to unravel-it's not exactly complicated. ![]() And, not that it matters, but the title absolutely gives the whole game away, before you've ever even started. It's very tired, dad-joke-level wordplay, and I realized, as I filled that first themer in, that nothing awaited me in that vast, vast, yawningly empty grid but more of the same. It feels very much a like a theme that might've played 25 years ago, that I might've actually seen 25 years ago. This *exact* kind of corny wordplay, this one "joke," over and over and over. I grasped the gimmick and suddenly realized that I would have to endure a Sunday-sized expanse of this corny wordplay. ![]()
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