Image on oscilloscope / SAT 9-7-19 / Angle measured by astrolabe / 1980s arcade character with propeller beanie / Norman 1983 Pulitzer-winning playwright / Cactus with edible fruit / Fixture in church sanctuary / Monogram on L'Homme products / Ancient Roman writer of comedies

Constructor: Trenton Charlson

Relative difficulty: Easy (4:48) (second fastest Saturday on record, fastest since January)

THEME: none (thank goodness)

Word of the Day: ETS (41A: A.P. exam inits.) —

Educational Testing Service (ETS), founded in 1947, is the world's largest private nonprofit educational testing and assessment organization. It is headquartered in Lawrence Township, New Jersey, but has a Princeton address.

ETS develops various standardized tests primarily in the United States for K–12 and higher education, and it also administers international tests including the TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language), TOEIC (Test of English for International Communication), Graduate Record Examination (GRE) General and Subject Tests, HiSET and The Praxis test Series—in more than 180 countries, and at over 9,000 locations worldwide. Many of the assessments it develops are associated with entry to US tertiary (undergraduate) and quaternary education (graduate) institutions, but it also develops K–12 statewide assessments used for accountability testing in many states, including California, Texas, Tennessee, and Virginia. In total, ETS annually administers 20 million exams in the U.S. and in 180 other countries. (wikipedia)

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Whoa. Solved straight out of bed, with absolutely no expectations of speed, and ended up with my second-fastest Saturday of the year (multiple minutes faster than yesterday's misplaced, misbegotten atrocity). If you correctly guess 1-Across right out of the box, then you're usually in good shape, and if that 1-Across is JVSQUADS—loaded as it is with high-value Scrabble tiles—then it turns out you're in Very good shape (1A: H.S. teams mainly with freshmen and sophomore players). I had JVSQUADS / AZIMUTH inside of 15 seconds. A J, V, Q, and Z before the party has really even begun. Those letters were all huge legs up (legups?) for the crosses, and the NW corner was done before I could blink thrice. I dropped QUE, UNDID, AZIMUTH, and SLUR immediately off of JVSQUADS, then ran the other long Acrosses back, no problem, then dropped all the long Downs, no problem (well, I wanted SPILL OUT before SPILLAGE (3D: Overflow), but that wasn't *much* of a problem). Helps to know a PRIE-DIEU is a thing (16A: Fixture in a church sanctuary). I've seen parts of that word in xwords for so long that I had no problem when the whole thing showed up today. Then it was IMPROV CLASS, GAVE UP, ANIMAE (misspelled but basically right), EMILE, TERENCE, ITASCA ... just slicing through that corner like it wasn't there (helped very much by knowing who TERENCE is, and by being a New Yorker w/ Minnesota friends and family—and thus knowing my ITASCA from my Ithaca). The PANCREAS clue was probably supposed to be tricky, but I didn't even see it until most of PANCREAS was filled in. The biggest stumbling block in the entire upper half, for me, was the last letter in PAW (31A: Shake on it!). I hate that type of clue generally (an unquotationmarked familiar phrase where the "it" is the thing you are going for) and here, "on" is a million times wrong. You're looking for "with." [Shake on it!] would be a fine clue for DANCE FLOOR or FAULTLINE but not PAW. No no. Woof. Bad dog.


The puzzle got noticeably weaker toward the bottom, with things changing quite rapidly around the equator. SAPID is, ironically, yuck (37A: Palatable). ETS is tolerable as a plural for aliens but horrid as a plug for a company that not everyone knows (not even close) (41A: A.P. exam inits.). It's *especially* bad crossing SNELLS, a very technical term (42D: Tackle box accessories). I've done enough puzzles to know both those answers, but the clue on ETS is just gonna wreck a bunch of people, needlessly. So so so so much better to come up with an entertaining clue for the aliens than to just dump a dull trivia clue about boring monolithic monopolistic ETS. Truly a terrible editorial decision, one that affects both the aesthetics and the solvability of the puzzle in potentially large and bad ways.


The bottom was mostly as easy as the top. Shout out to The PRICKLY PEAR, a southwestern restaurant in Ann Arbor (which may be long gone by now, for all I know, but it was there when I was in grad school, so, today, lucky me!) (57A: Cactus with an edible fruit). Again, as in the NW corner, the high-value Scrabble tiles came easily in the SE. Got ATLANTAN off the -TL- and then PIX-STIX off just the "T" (38D: Candy sold in straws)—couldn't remember if it was PIXI or PIXY, but YSL took care of that (56A: Monogram on L'Homme products). SW was the last to fall, and it always feels dicey backing into a themeless SW at the very end of a solve—you're so close, but you've gotta come in from the back ends of the Acrosses, and you've got nothing in there yet to help ... things can fall apart. But today, they didn't. All fell quickly. Last letter was the second "A" in MARSHA Norman (47D: ___ Norman, 1983 Pulitzer-winning playwright). In the end, I liked the highs of this one—there were probably a few too many lows, but overall I enjoyed the experience more than I didn't (huge asterisk by this assessment, since, as I've said many times, solvers tend to be too lenient on puzzles they crush and too harsh on puzzles that crushed them).

Peace.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

P.S. hey, looks like The Prickly Pear is still there. Cool.

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