WEDNESDAY, May 21, 2008 - Dave Mackey (BAND WITH THE 1987 SINGLE "DEAR GOD")

Relative difficulty: Medium

THEME: Make-up - five theme answers feature cosmetics-related words used in non-cosmetics-related context

First, BLUSH and ROUGE are the same thing. I repeat - same thing. Further - same thing.

Second, OAK TAG (66A: Poster stock)??? I think you have to troll A.C. Moore or Michael's or some other artsy craftsy store a lot to know WTF this is. I'm surprised this passed the sniff test. I see that it's been used in at least two puzzles in recent years. That does not mean it should ever be used again.

Third, TAG is in the clue for AS IS (40D: Tag sale proviso)

Third, this puzzle needed a [6-letter word] SHADOW answer. Weird to have 2 words begin with makeup words and then three words end with it. ROUGE would have been easy in the same amount of space: MOULIN ROUGE. SHADOW ... a lot tougher.

So despite an impressive number of theme squares, this puzzle felt really rough to me. I have to say, however, that I am very sympathetic to the roughness. The difficulty level for filling a puzzle rises exponentially when you have so many long theme answers. Some day I will illustrate this by showing you two different grids I did for a puzzle - one with four long theme answers and a short central fifth, the other (same theme, basically) with five long theme answers. I am partial to the latter, as completing it felt like a greater accomplishment, but objectively, the fill in the former is smoother overall.

Theme answers:

• 17A: Solitaire card game (rouge et noir) - I didn't know this. I know this phrase from the Stendhal novel, and possibly from roulette.
• 24A: Pugs in gyms, at times (shadow boxers) - "Pugs" is one of my least favorite slang terms. Pugs are dogs. Pugilists are boxers.
• 37A: Good thing to build on (solid foundation)
• 50A: Initially (at first blush)
• 59A: Cunard fleet member (luxury liner) - no idea what "Cunard fleet" is. I'm just out of sync with this puzzle today. Completely.

I had one mistake in this puzzle, which was kind of funny. Without even blinking I put in ARCH for 68A: Kind of support. This gave me UAR for 60D: Mideast federation: Abbr. - which, by the way, is not wrong. UAR is reasonably common crossword fill. So I was irked at the stupid answer ARMLEA for 47D: Decorative band. "It's a meadow ... for your arm!" Not sure what finally clued me in, but I fixed it before I went desperately looking for ARMLEAs on the internets.

More:

• 19A: Sapphic work (ode) - You're never going to get to use her to clue LESBIAN, so why not bring her out for ODE. You could get LESBOS into a puzzle, though, I'm pretty sure (cruciverb says 'yes'). Maybe I'll try that.
• 28A: Forcefully, in music (furioso) - shouldn't there be a rule about how many times you can go to musical score terminology in one puzzle? We already have LENTO (7D: Slowly, on a score). FURIOSO could have been clued via Ariosto's 16th-century epic "Orlando FURIOSO."
• 44A: Gentle opening? (soft G) - I am soooo on the lookout for this kind of crap that I didn't hesitate for one second here.
• 45D: Quebec's southern neighbors (états) - I thought they were called "les ETATS Unis."
• 53A: 1983 Keaton comedy ("Mr. Mom") - Mmm, Teri Garr. The Laura Linney of my youth.
• 58A: Word repeated in the "Whiffenpoof Song" refrain (baa) - no idea. Again, this puzzle and I are from different planets. Again, I have to ask, why is a puzzler required to know so damned much about Yale? It's kind of sickening.
• 12D: Good Samaritan (aider) - I kill words like this. Maybe I'd get more grids done if I let in words that hurt my ears. I would let in AIDER if it got me, say, KATZENJAMMER crossing ELVGREN. Otherwise, no.
• 28D: Something to kick up (fuss) - I know this is picky, but you kick up "A" FUSS. Just reads wrong without the indefinite article.
• 35D: Off-Broadway's "_____ Baltimore" (Hot L) - total, complete, utter crutch word. Again, notice how provincial the puzzle is. It is completely regionally self-indulgent. HOT L is the new new RELO.
• 36D: "A Loss of Roses" playwright (Inge) - I see "playwright" in four letters and it's AGEE or INGE. I like the idea that millions of people know these guys' names from crosswords, and yet hardly any of said people could name more than one play by either. INGE and AGEE and ODETS will live forever on the strength of their particular vowel/consonant configurations. At least I can name a play by Odets ("Waiting for Lefty"). I had a teacher once who looked eerily like Clifford ODETS.
• 48D: Astigmatic's view (blur) - I forget if the thing I have is an astigmatism or some other anomaly. I just know that one of my lenses is TORIC! (awesome crossword word)
• 61D: Band with the 1987 single "Dear God" (XTC) - the one part of this puzzle that hits me where I live. This song is off the album "Skylarking," which is one of the most important albums of my life - on my personal Top Ten list, easy. "Dear God" is about the least interesting thing on it (too caught up in juvenile cynicism), despite being the only song on the album that anyone's likely to know. I love that the puzzle included "Dear God," however, because I'm pretty sure it would not pass the breakfast test for some readers (unless you like a wholesale denunciation of God with your cereal). Ready? 1-2-3 ... Culture War! (just kidding):

Dear god,
Hope you got the letter,
And I pray you can make it better down here.
I don't mean a big reduction in the price of beer,
But all the people that you made in your image,
See them starving on their feet,
cause they dont get enough to eat

From god,
I can't believe in you.

Dear god,
Sorry to disturb you,
But I feel that I should be heard loud and clear.
We all need a big reduction in amount of tears,
And all the people that you made in your image,
See them fighting in the street,
cause they cant make opinions meet,
About god,
I can't believe in you.

Did you make disease, and the diamond blue?
Did you make mankind after we made you?
And the devil too!

Dear god,
Don't know if you noticed,
But your name is on a lot of quotes in this book.
Us crazy humans wrote it, you should take a look,
And all the people that you made in your image,
Still believing that junk is true.
Well I know it ain't and so do you,
Dear god,
I can't believe in,
I don't believe in,

I won't believe in heaven and hell.
No saints, no sinners,
No devil as well.
No pearly gates, no thorny crown.
Youre always letting us humans down.
The wars you bring, the babes you drown.
Those lost at sea and never found,
And its the same the whole world round.
The hurt I see helps to compound,
That the father, son and holy ghost,
Is just somebodys unholy hoax,
And if youre up there youll perceive,
That my heart's here upon my sleeve.
If there's one thing I don't believe in...

Its you,
Dear god.

Did I mention that a child sings the opening part? It's a nice touch.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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31-syllable Japanese poem / SAT 4-30-22 / 1977 Sex Pistols song written after a record-contract termination / Delectable made with grass / Olds that was once in the news / Claudio or Gio father and son players for the US men's national soccer team / String of typographical symbols, like @%$&!, to represent an obscenity

Constructor: Joe DiPietro

Relative difficulty: Medium-Challenging

THEME: none 

Word of the Day: TANKA (25A: 31-syllable Japanese poem) —

Tanka (短歌, "short poem") is a genre of classical Japanese poetry and one of the major genres of Japanese literature. // Originally, in the time of the Man'yōshū (latter half of the eighth century AD), the term tanka was used to distinguish "short poems" from the longer chōka (長歌, "long poems"). In the ninth and tenth centuries, however, notably with the compilation of the Kokinshū, the short poem became the dominant form of poetry in Japan, and the originally general word waka became the standard name for this form. Japanese poet and critic Masaoka Shiki revived the term tanka in the early twentieth century for his statement that waka should be renewed and modernized. Haiku is also a term of his invention, used for his revision of standalone hokku, with the same idea. // Tanka consist of five units (often treated as separate lines when romanized or translated) usually with the following pattern of on (often treated as, roughly, the number of syllables per unit or line):

5-7-5-7-7.

The 5-7-5 is called the kami-no-ku (上の句, "upper phrase"), and the 7-7 is called the shimo-no-ku (下の句, "lower phrase").

• • •

This was a weird and often unpleasant puzzle. It's got a few surprising bright spots, but mostly it was just hard, and hard for the wrong reasons. The longer answers, the grid-spanning 15s that cross the grid three times, were all a cinch. Just needed a few crosses to get the top and the bottom ones, and wouldn't have needed any to get the middle one: GAME SHOW NETWORK (36A: Its slogan "Get Smarter Now" matches its initials). Those 15s are all good answers, and they make a nice trellis to hang the rest of the grid on ... but the trellis was too often ratty, and what made the solving experience dreary was that the difficulty didn't come with any payoff because it all came around short, gunky stuff. I spent most of my time in two very small areas, unable to come up with 3-, 4-, and 5-letter answers because a. names, of course, or b. deliberately tenuous cluing, but again the real problem wasn't just the difficulty (it's Saturday, after all), it's that when I overcame the difficulty, I was rewarded with ... AVI? The bird prefix? And ACTII? Oof. There was no "ooh" or "aha," just "ugh, well at least that's over." So while there are some definite high points to the grid, it mostly seemed crosswordesey (ABET ERNST STENO the unwelcome return of ALERO etc.), and hard in all the wrong places, for all the wrong reasons. So I'm left not thinking "wow, GRAWLIX, that was cool!" but instead "how ... is OVER ... [During]? ... oh ... like, 'OVER the weekend,' 'OVER Christmas break,' that kind of [During]? ... [sigh], OK." 

It also seemed kinda oldish. The STENO ALERO SKAT-type short stuff was a big part of that, but very few of the longer answers seemed of-this-century either. The GAME SHOW NETWORK is built on nostalgia for the mid-late 20th century. POT BROWNIEs still exist, I assume, but I associate them with a similarly bygone era, for sure (8D: Delectable made with grass). Very 70s / 80s. The cultural center of gravity here is somewhere around when the Sex Pistols were popular. Or when "ALFIE" was popular. ALFIE is my cat's name, so I love ALFIE, but you get my point—the puzzle seemed like it was for someone sitting around eating POT BROWNIEs and watching OATERS on late-night TV. But the retro vibe isn't a problem, exactly, and I might not even have noticed it if the short fill had been stronger, and I might not even have noticed that the short fill wasn't that strong if I hadn't been forced to spend so much time with it. As I said, the bulk of my time was spent trying to figure out tiny sections that ended up containing precisely zero in the way of satisfying payoff. The first such section was the very first section, right at 1A: Certain archaeological site (BOG). Of course I wrote in DIG. This is what I don't get: designing traps so that the solver will have to linger over gunky stuff like AVI- (14A: Flying start?). Anyway, BOG over AVI, just brutal, and much more brutal before I finally got GIVEN NAME, which ... I don't really see what that clue has to do with "Americans" (scores of other countries have first names as GIVEN NAMEs). That "Americans" just felt cheap. Could just as well have been "among the French" or something, what the hell? And of course GIVEN gave me the "G" which "confirmed" DIG, so I wrong in DING (DING!) for 1D: When doubled, attention-grabbing (BANG). I also had WENT DIM before GREW DIM at first, but that was one of the first things about the section I actually managed to fix (20A: Faded). When I finally put in BOG, I didn't feel a whoosh of success; I felt like I'd been conned.

The other small section to absolutely bring me to a halt was at the bottom of the grid. Speaking of last century ... BROWSER WAR? The first one? How many were there??? I lived through that period of tech history and yet had no idea, even with BROWSER in place, what might come after. BROWSER ... W- ... BROWSER WEB? Just no clue on those last three letters (eventually two letters), and unfortunately those letters went right into the very hardest part of the puzzle for me: some soccer name I've never heard of (in fact, a name I've never seen at all, in any context) underneath a [Musical segment] that looks technical and maybe Italian but ends up just being the dumb common answer ACT II. As with "Americans" and GIVEN NAME, here we have a seemingly narrow clue being used to define an exceedingly general thing. There are ACT IIs in lots of works. [Musical segment] is so vague it's stupid. You can't tell it's a stage musical (which is probably the point), but even then ... ugh. It's like having [Part of a 1995 Lamborghini Diablo] and having the answer be TIRE or AXLE. In that same section, I had ARCH before ARTY (53D: Affected), and it took me forever to understand what (or who) the "toaster" was in the STEIN clue (50D: A toaster might hold one) (toaster = one who gives a toast, so the STEIN is ... full of beer ... I guess). So what sticks with me about this puzzle is almost exclusively BOG/AVI and ACTII/REYNA—not the greatest aftertaste. It's not that I didn't know stuff that bothers me. I didn't know TANKA, and felt only too happy to learn about it. Why? Why did TANKA play sweet and REYNA sour? Because the puzzle didn't use TANKA to bog me down in a tiny corner of the puzzle. I got it as part of the puzzle flow. You solve, you hit difficulty, you work around it. Flow! BOG/AVI and ACTII/REYNA, by contrast, made me feel trapped and suffocated. Backed into an airless corner. It was like the puzzle wanted me to learn TANKA, but wanted to make it torture for me to even get close to REYNA.

JETÉ before LUTZ (10D: Leap with a twist) and GOING FAST before GOING ONCE (33D: About to be sold). The rest of the puzzle was (I'm recalling, as I look over it now) pretty decent. I really liked HARD PASS (4D: "That's a big 'no thanks'"). That and GRAWLIX are my favorite answers of the day (GRAWLIX is a debut) (23D: String of typographical symbols like @%$&!, to represent an obscenity). I think I might be an outlier, not only in my love for the word, but in my even knowing what the word means. I teach a course on Comics, so it's right in my wheelhouse, but it's a pretty technical term (or so I thought). I have no idea how well-known it is, generally. I remember being so happy to learn that there was even a term for the swearing symbols in comics! I later learned that expressive lines that emanate from a cartoon character (like wavy stink lines) are called EMANATA, and the "drops of sweat that spray outwards from a cartoon character under emotional distress" are called PLEWDS. I doubt you'll ever see either of those in the grid, but now you know.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld 

P.S. Speaking of comics, I wish today's SOREL had been Edward SOREL (13D: Philosopher Georges). You've seen his work a lot, probably. Here's his cover for the 1966 Esquire that contained Gay Talese's famous essay, "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold":

He's been astonishingly prolific, over a long career. Lots of political cartoons, lots of New Yorker covers. As for [Philosopher Georges] ... I got nothing. Apparently there is also a French historian named SOREL—Albert SOREL. He was the preferred SOREL of the Maleskan era. I also see that there is apparently a Canadian city named SOREL—Maleska liked that clue too. But Maleska wasn't done there. He would like you to know that SOREL is also a type of cement (!?!?) and that Agnès SOREL was a "favorite of Charles VII" (whoever that is). The protagonist of Stendahl's Le Rouge et le Noir (1830) is named Julien SOREL. So those are some SOREL facts for you today. Since 1998, Shortz has made the cartoonist his go-to SOREL clue, but he also brought in today's "philosopher," Georges, and has kept him around as his secondary, tougher SOREL option. Wikipedia tells me that "Sorelianism [!!!] is considered to be a precursor to fascism," so that's fun. Basically I'm saying please give me cartoonists, every chance you get. Thank you.

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

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