9 Things Your Parents Taught You About knowledge management tools

Posted by Atilano on June 13th, 2021

THURSDAY PUZZLE — I will confess that I had to do a major reframing of Peter Collins’s theme in my mind after I solved it in order to appreciate it.

But it’s one of those times where I had to remind myself that this is just a puzzle, and that there is an entertaining aspect to it even though the theme revealer startled me. The theme is fun and there’s some good, nontheme stuff in here: QUIZ SHOW is very nice; SLUGGER is fun; and it’s always nice to have a BORZOI race through the grid and a KAZOO humming away.

In three places in Mr. Collins’s grid, groups of four circled squares spell out words when read clockwise. In addition, those words are physically connected to theme entries that describe those words when you mentally add “Four” to them.

For example, at 23A, the knowledge sharing process four circled squares spell out TOPS, as in the musical group the Four TOPS. The clue reads “Second set of circled letters,” and the answer is MOTOWN SINGERS, with the T and the O of TOPS part of MOTOWN.

I’ll leave you to figure out the other two theme entries. Because what I really want to talk about is Mr. Collins’s revealer.

Maybe it’s the times we are going through. Maybe it’s what I know about the phrase “GANG OF FOUR” and their role in the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Maybe it’s the irony that intellectuals were severely persecuted at the hands of these people and that a crossword puzzle like this might not have even seen the light of day during that time. But really? That’s the revealer you wanted to go with, Mr. Collins?

You know me; I’m not a complainer. [LOL. — Ed.] And I don’t have any useful suggestions about how else Mr. Collins might have hinted at his theme. But I know what kind of reaction I had to it, and while I enjoyed the idea behind his puzzle, I did not enjoy the revealer.

■ 11A: Great Scrabble word, QAT.

■ 34D: “Things in pools” are not rafts or pool toys in today’s puzzle. Today, we’re talking about the GENE pool. (The actual answer is GENES.)

■ 41D: I really had to think about this one. You thought of pasta sauce, didn’t you? Me too. “Lacking sauce?” in today’s puzzle, however, refers to lacking booze and the answer is SOBER.