"New England Chatter," 4/30/17

YOU GUYS. This puzzle was an unmitigated disaster for me. I'd like to think it's also a disaster for the NYT, the crossword community, and the world at large.

Time to finish/time I gave up: 1:23:39. I did finish the puzzle, but only because Jamie looked at the answer and helped me with the end. And even then we had 4 letters wrong. It was ugly.

Commentary:
The sad thing is, I actually liked this theme when I started out and got SPOCKPLUGS. I thought it was kind of funny. The bottom half of the puzzle basically went fine. And then it went south in the north. (Ha.)

Instead of my usual post sections, I thought I would just list for you all the things that I didn't know or generally went awry with this one.

• Let's start with the the clue that makes me think the apocalypse is nigh: ACALLTOOMS (24A Yoga teacher's invitation?) No one in their right mind pronounces "om" as "ahm." Rex blasts this failure, of course. Even the official NYT commentator gently says that this clue "falters a bit in [her] opinion because OMS is typically pronounced with a long O." You think???

We did eventually sort out that section of the puzzle (2nd last part we got.) The part I was so lost on that I needed help to finish was the center.

• PASSINGMOCK (69A Ridicule shouted out of a moving car?) "Passing mark" is barely a phrase. Using the word "mark" for "grade" seems old-fashioned to me. We had the MOCK part filled in, understood it meant "mark," and still couldn't come up with anything.
• So, struggling mightily, I got no help from any of these crosses. Maybe I should have known some of them, but I didn't.
• EUTERPE Sister of Erato
• SACCO 1920's anarchist in a prominent trial. Ok, in hindsight I think I learned about this in 11th grade.
• EFS Buffet centerpiece. I actually considered the little "trick" going on here and still didn't understand that it was supposed to be EFS. I thought about EFF, but that didn't work. I also considered EYE (center of a buffeting wind?) and EGG (a giant chafing dish of scrambled eggs?)
• TALIA Shire of Rocky
• END Squash.This one is a "maybe" on the scale of whether I would have eventually figured it out.
• AGITA Aggravation. I looked up this word. It's not even related to agitate, which is a word I know. Efs you, agita.
• To recap, not knowing any of this horsepoop left me with _A_______MOCK. Hard to believe I couldn't get it from that.

Moving on. Here are some of the other bad things. I honestly can't list all the things I had wrong at one point or another without breaking Blogger with an infinitely long post.

• Roster shortener ETALII. Et al, I know. This was two letters beyond my ken, and both of them were I. Not easy to guess. Especially when the cross is...
• First daughter of the 1960's LUCI. Granted, I didn't even know the answer, but why didn't she spell it Lucy like everyone else by that name?
• Inclined ASLOPE. Blech.
• Flower arrangement RACEME. According to Wikipedia, a raceme is an unbranched, indeterminate type of inflorescence bearing pedicellate flower. Must have missed that day in...herbology.
• Where Einstein was born ULM. "Germany" was too long, so that was the end of that for me.
• Strict Sabbath observer of old ESSENE. Now I know.
• Chrissie HYNDE is from The Pretenders. She looks like a badass. 
• ___-turn NOU. For a long time I thought this was going to be YOU, as some sort of terrible non-pun. While I'm glad it's not that, I still hate this one. I think the ___- construction is confusing. So, that was stopping me from getting ASNAP (also lame), and it didn't help that I didn't know...
• ANGELA Cartwright was the real name of one of the von Trapp children. Who knows this? It looks like she has done some other projects, so maybe that's why people know her, but it would take a real die-hard fan to know all the kids' names.
• In case you didn't look it up--she was Brigitta, who was the books one. Not to be confused with Louisa, who was a nasty trickster.
• Mother of Helios THEA. I have really got to study mythology one of these days if I ever hope to be a giant in the crossworld.
• Nitwits SIMPS. Neither of these words is useful.
• Shere HITE wrote Women and Love, which I have not read, but perhaps that's my own fault.
• I will admit that I had no idea how to spell MOHEL. Would have guessed MOYLE. In fact, did guess that, and spent a long time being wrong in that part of the puzzle.

And there you go. Taking all of that into account, I'm actually glad I finished in under an hour and a half. Oh wait, I didn't finish, I had to cheat. Well, at least tomorrow is Monday. Oh wait, Mondays are the worst. There is nothing good left in the world.

Fritz out!