So today is one of the days I definitely should've looked. In fact, you can't see them all at a glance. The tunnel vision is a product of solving on screen as opposed to paper-much harder to see *all* the clues. That is, I have this tunnel vision when I'm solving, as well as a bad habit of not even looking at longer clues until I have some crosses. In retrospect, I could've done so much better if I'd just looked around. Now I'll get to the less pleasant thing that the puzzle was: humiliating. So in addition to being brilliant, this puzzle was very surprising. This kind of top-shelf thematic hot sauce? No. I'm used to seeing crisp and clean but relatively straightforward themeless puzzles from Natan and the JASA crew. EGO checking ID = IMPULSE CONTROL = a wild idea you might have, but executing it? Forget about it. One of the best Thursday gimmicks I've seen in a long time, possibly ever. But what thing? Well the first thing that I should say that it was was brilliant. Goldberg received many honors in his lifetime, including a Pulitzer Prize for political cartooning in 1948, the National Cartoonists Society's Gold T-Square Award in 1955, and the Banshees' Silver Lady Award in 1959. He was a founding member and first president of the National Cartoonists Society, which hosts the annual Reuben Award, honoring the top cartoonist of the year and named after Goldberg, who won the award in 1967. He is the inspiration for international competitions known as Rube Goldberg Machine Contests, which challenge participants to create a complicated machine to perform a simple task. The cartoons led to the expression " Rube Goldberg machines" to describe similar gadgets and processes. Goldberg is best known for his popular cartoons depicting complicated gadgets performing simple tasks in indirect, convoluted ways. Reuben Garrett Lucius Goldberg (J– December 7, 1970), known best as Rube Goldberg( / ˈ r uː b/), was an American cartoonist, sculptor, author, engineer, and inventor. Here's part of a subreddit entitled "Worst Drug Brand Name" (which I lifted from this article on weird prescription drug names in Philadelphia magazine): If you think OREOCONE is a silly name for a prescription drug, brother, you haven't been anywhere near the pharmaceutical ad universe. Have I not seen a pharmaceutical ad for an eczema treatment called OREOCONE? Seems plausible. Is the cone made of Oreo? Is there an entire frozen dessert product called the OREOCONE? The more you look at it, the more it looks like a steroid. All I know is that once again, as with 1-Across, the puzzle is back to trying to get its "relevance" and "currency" from corporations-in this case, by just mining every damn product in the OREO line. And as for OREOCONE, I have no idea what that even is. I mean, it's a cute coincidence, but that's all it is. Loved seeing POMODORO, but OLIVEOIL is the equivalent of EPEE where eight-letter answers are concerned, so I don't know that the corner is really elevated by pretending that you meant for those two answers to be thematically complementary. It tries to do a little pasta dance there in the NE, but for me all that does is detract from from the only really interesting Down in the whole puzzle. Nothing really wrong with this puzzle (besides the repulsive 1-Across). And it opens so badly-with a faux-chummy corporate slogan for a company whose dystopian "smart devices" essentially have much of the world voluntarily treating a powerful surveillance company like a friendly household assistant-that the puzzle would've needed a whole lot of oomph to recover. Not enough marquee punch to really get off the ground. Two good answers ( "THE SKY'S THE LIMIT!" / "YOU WON'T REGRET IT!") with a lot of Yawn in between.
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