WEEKLY WRAP-UP: April 28 - May 4, 2008

Rarely does Tuesday provide most of the week's fireworks, but this past Monday featured one of the most absurd SE corners in Tuesday puzzle history. SYZYGY, which, SethG tells me, is the name of the Carleton women's ultimate frisbee team, sat next to the ultra-odd FERULE, and both were crossed by the rare SFC. My biggest problem, though, was not being able to spell SOYUZ. Haven't been so soundly defeated by a Tuesday puzzle since last year's infamous PFUI puzzle. Crosscan, after having cleverly suggested on Monday that I should change my name to ReChrist (so as not to offend the Lord), summed up my feelings about FERULE quite succinctly: "FERULE goes into my NABES file." Jim in Chicago had trouble in another part of the puzzle. His comment about 1A: No stranger to the slopes (ski bum): "All I can say is that I wrote in SHERPA for 1A and it was all downhill from there." That made me laugh, until I realized that the "downhill" part was supposed to be a cutesy play on words - referring to "ski bum," and then my laughter turned to wincing. SHERPA as a dreadfully wrong answer is funny in itself - doesn't need the cutesy additive of a play on words.

Friday's puzzle brought out some great comments, including Howard B's off-the-cuff performance of Skee-Lo's "I Wish" (such as his brain could remember it):

"I wish I was a little bit taller.
I wish I was a baller.*
I wish...something something rabbit in a hat..
..something something Impala."**

Why is even that much still swimming around in my head?!? Any idea, Rex? I'm stumped.
It was catchy, though.

* (basket, not melon)
** (paw-la?)

Here's the actual song, in case you want it to get stuck in your head too.

Wade offered an apt description of the awkward pseudo-clever cluing of both PAVER (2D: One of a lot of workers?) and UNBURNT (36D: Still "well," but not beyond): "It was kind of like watching a drunk guy play charades." And Byron was very quick to answer my plea for a Chris Rock riff on the Jeremiah Wright controversy:

Chris Rock on Jeremiah Wright: "[He's a] 75-year-old black man who doesn't like white people. Is there any other kind of 75-year-old black man?" When asked to respond to the quote at his National Press Club speech, Wright retorted "I think it's just like the media. I'm not 75."

On Saturday karmasartre shared a helpful mnemonic for spelling Lee IACOCCA's name:

I
Am
Chairman
Of
Chrysler
Corporation (of)
America

While meandering around the internets I came across an old (pre-Shortz) article about the NYT crossword, which contained a piece of a letter from former NYT Sunday Times Magazine editor Lester Markel to the woman who would become the NYT Crossword's first editor, Margaret Farrar. With the looming recession, I thought it was eerily relevant:

I don’t think I have to sell you on the increased demand for this kind of pastime in an increasingly worried world. You can’t think of your troubles while solving a crossword …

So whatever else happens to the world, at least crosswords will thrive. Friday also taught us that another word for "gunman" (of the criminal / hitman variety) could be TORPEDO. Here is a fabulous glossary of hard-boiled terminology. Well worth reading, and maintained by a very knowledgeable guy: "Twists, Slugs and Roscoes"

With YENTL's appearance in today's puzzle (yet again), I thought it worth directing your attention to a link I added late to Saturday's write-up: Nelson Muntz (the main bully on "The Simpsons") singing (in painful earnestness, just as the composer surely intended) "Papa, Can You Hear Me?"

And your word of the week...

Well, this week was a toughie. FERULE (47D: Punishing rod - from Tues.) looked to be a shoo-in, as it is probably the rarest word we've seen all week, and it @#$#'d me up good - and on a Tuesday, no less. But then, just as the puzzle week neared its end, a dark horse came riding up from out of the mist ... a word so silly that it could not be denied. A word so silly that my brain neglected to register it when I did my write-up. That's right, I speak of none other than:

BLAT! (95D: Be noisy - from Sun.)

At first glance, it looks like little more than an overly creative Batman sound effect. But look more closely:

vi 1: to cry esp. like a calf or sheep: BELLOW, BLEAT {the calf blatted in fear as it was borne to the ground - F.D. Davison} 2a: to make a senseless or raucous noise {like an oboe blatting ... inside a barrel of feathers - R.P. Warren} b: to talk loudly and often foolishly {someone has to be constantly blatting around the house - Wilder Hobson} ~ vt: to utter (as an opinion) loudly and often foolishly or unthinkingly: BLURT {you don't want to go blatting this all over town - Mary S. Watts}

What I learned from the above definition is that BLAT came into existence because groups of people repeatedly failed to find the word they were actually looking for and ended up saying "BLAT." It is some kind of unholy hybrid of BLEAT and BLAB, but much, much funnier (and more fun to say) than either of those. I love the oboe quote too. Whoa, added bonus: just now, I found out (via the OED) that my favorite author once used the word - from Raymond Chandler's The High Window:

I went up the stairs. The radio I had heard over the telephone was still blatting the baseball game. I read numbers and went up front. Apartment 204 was on the right side and the baseball game was right across the hall from it. I knocked, got no answer and knocked louder. Behind my back three Dodgers struck out against a welter of synthetic crowd noise. I knocked a third time and looked out of the front hall window while I felt in my pocket for the key George Anson Phillips had given me.

Of course, if you want to combine FERULE and BLAT into one sentence, you really can't beat Orange's suggestion:

"If you don't quit that infernal blatting, so help me, I'll thwack you with my trusty ferule!"

-RP