SATURDAY, July 19, 2008 - Todd McClary (HERO/GIANT CREATED BY RABELAIS / RECORDING STUDIO SOUND SHIELDS)

Relative difficulty: Medium

THEME: None (or maybe "failure" with the crossing of YOU CAN'T WIN 'EM ALL and MET ONE'S WATERLOO)

Hi, all. Wade here for Rex, who, for those of you who might have been out of the loop lately, is in New Zealand. The backup team is PuzzleGirl, super-nifty gee whiz kid; Seth the boy genius; and me, the wealthy industrialist who bankrolls their crime-solving efforts and lets them drink all the Sunny D they want to in my opulent mansion. PuzzleGirl heads to Costa Rica this weekend, I'm here from Houston today, and Seth will be here tomorrow from Minneapolis to take your nothing day and suddenly make it all seem worthwhile. (Don't forget your hat, Seth.)

I'm doing this write-up on Friday night because my dad has come down to stay with me a few days during my temporary bachelorhood and help me build an office in the garage. It's hard to get my dad to come to the city--he's afraid he'll get shot--but I've found that if you present him with a project the idea is more palatable to him, so I asked him to come help me build an office. (I have a three-and-a-half car garage but only one and a half cars.) My wife is nervous about the idea, I can tell by her voice, but she's in Scotland and can't do anything to stop us. She had no problem with the idea when I brought it up several months ago--"Yes, dear, sounds nice, dear," that sort of thing--probably thinking it would go the way of my other ideas, like moving to Portland or building a time machine (Seth and I have a plan), little realizing that this idea would fall into the infinitesimal percentage of stuff I say I'm going to do that actually gets done. So what you're reading was actually written last night between about 10 and 3 a.m. [I originally had midnight here, but PuzzleGirl went to bed and left me in the lurch to do my own formatting], with breaks for Chips Ahoy! (That's not me being overly excited about Chips Ahoy!, though I do love them; the exclamation point is part of the product's name, just like Dr Pepper's periodlessness.)

I have mixed feelings about this puzzle. I don't really have a "typical" Saturday solving experience. I might finish one in fifteen minutes, an hour, or in any other time frame or not at all. This one took me about 45 minutes probably, though I stopped the clock at 35:16 with nine blank squares in the NE and got up and had some Chips Ahoy!, the original ones, not the chewy ones or peanut butter ones or ones with M&M's or any of the other gimmicky ones, just your plain goddamned basic Chips Ahoy! we've all been eating since we were old enough to eat cookies and I don't know why people have to keep messing with stuff that works fine the way it's always been, which seemed to clear my head, and when I came back I saw GAINS staring at me (9D: Results of bull markets) in that wonderful, mystical crossword way of things, and quickly polished off the rest of the nine squares and a couple more Chips Ahoy! With milk, of course! [sic]

I started the puzzle with high hopes when it flattered my intelligence with 17A Hero/giant created by Rabelais (GARGANTUA), an answer I knew, probably from crosswords. I thought we were in for another top-notch puzzle like the ones we've had pretty much all week. I thought this puzzle was going to prove I was a genius for a day, which is what crosswords are supposed to do. It didn't. In fact, it sort of seemed to resent that I knew GARGANTUA so effortlessly. Do you ever suspect that a crossword sometimes changes itself out of spite after you've started doing it, that a correct answer you've entered pisses it off so much that it rewrites itself so that your next answer, correct when filled in, is made no longer correct? I'm pretty sure that's what this puzzle did, because after GARGANTUA the next answer I filled in, with great confidence, was TEEN (31D: Selective service registrant). I'm sure that was the right answer when I entered it, but by the time I'd gotten to the downs the puzzle had rewritten itself so that the new correct answer was now MALE, and that's what totally boogered up the NE, and that's why the puzzle, cornered and confused and almost undone by its own malevolence, had to conspire to invent the word GOBOS (9A: Recording studio sound shields), which wasn't a word when I started doing the puzzle but now the dictionaries say really exists.

Still, the puzzle and I wound up on good terms by the end of it. We learned to accept each other's differences and, in the process, I think, learned something about ourselves. I saw grudging respect when I filled in that double A in CANAANITE (56A: Language group including Hebrew). For the double B in BB GUN (1D: Plinking weapon) I was rewarded with a smile. When I got to the end of YOU CAN'T WIN 'EM ALL (8D: Words of consolation), the music swelled, the puzzle looked at me and said quietly, "Wade, well done." Then it shot my dad.

Noteworthy stuff, or at least noted stuff:

• 16A: "Avoid extinction, say" (ADAPT) – The "say" clue is underrated. I hate the "say" clue, but somehow still it's underrated.
• 22A: "___ sequence" (DNA) – The fill-in-the-blank clue can bite you in the ass like no other unless it's a title or some other type of unique proper noun. I filled in INA here on my first pass, which was a really stupid guess and only coincidentally one letter off from the actual answer, which proves what I've been saying all along: God despises me.
• 26: "Some pinball targets" (RAMPS) – We need a name for this irritating type of clue. It reminds me of conversations I used to have with an old girlfriend. "You'll never guess what I saw on my way to work." "You're right, I won't." "I'll give you a hint. They're some pinball targets." "Some pinball targets." "Yes!" "That could be anything. It could be anything a pinball hits." "Tries to hit. I'm not saying anything more!" "It's ridiculous. Just tell me what you saw on your way to work." "I told you! Some pinball targets!" "But it could be anything a pinball hits! Tries to hit, I mean! And I don't even know anything a pinball hits! Tries to hit, I mean!"

  
  
  
  

• 35A: Grandson of Noah (MAGOG) – Biblical names are the new Dylan. (Remember when there were kids named Jimmy? I had a friend named Jimmy. So did you.) I don't think anybody named Magog, however, will need to start using his middle initial any time soon.
• 36A: Suffered defeat (MET ONE'S WATERLOO) – Seth was disgrunteld with this answer; he says it gets only two Google hits, both on a Japanese translation site. Me, I was gruntled. The clue is straight down the middle of the plate, unassailable really, and the phrase is pleasing to me, probably because it makes me think of the first time I heard the word "Waterloo." Stonewall Jackson (the country singer, not the Civil War general who died across the river and through the trees) recorded a semi-novelty song of that title back in the fifties, and my mother had it on a 45 she'd owned since she was a girl. It was my little sister's favorite song when she was about four and I was six. Neither of us knew what it was about; we just liked the word and the tune. My favorite song was "Running Bear" by Sonny James. It was about an Indian boy and girl whose respective tribes are enemies and are separated by a river. Running Bear jumps into the river to swim across to White Dove, and she comes to meet him, and they both drown, but now they'll be together forever "in their happy hunting ground." My mother would play one and then the other, one and then the other, and sometimes she'd play Homer and Jethro singing "How Much is that Doggie in the Window?" which we liked because it had actual dogs barking on the chorus. This was in a rattlesnake- and yellow-jacket-infested old farmhouse we rented at the end of a dirt road near a town called, really, Scotland. There was nothing else to do but stick grasshoppers through their thoraxes on barbed wire fences and watch them try to push themselves off the barb. I did that too. No telling how many grasshoppers I slaughtered as a kid.
• 1D: Plinking weapon (BB GUN) – It's all fun and games til somebody loses an eye. ("Plinking" though? "Plinking"?)
• 3D: Five-sided pods (OKRAS) – So they are. I'd never counted. We pronounced it "okry." My grandpa wouldn't eat okra because, he said, it was a gourd. Like that settled it.
• 15D: Kraft offering in a can (PARMESAN) - At my house we pretty much inhale this stuff. I wonder what it is.
• 24D: Braking maneuvers for skaters (T-STOPS) - I didn't know this, of course--nobody did. Liar. But I should mention that one of the reasons I'm building an office in my garage is because I just moved my new official office to the Galleria for reasons that make sense except that I HATE WORKING IN THE GALLERIA! I literally work in the mall now. When I go downstairs, there are all the people I don't like, all in one place at the same time. The Galleria is like a little custom-made hell just for ol' Wade. Anyway, there's an ice-rink in the mall, which is why I bring it up.
• 34D: Trattoria offering (OSSO BUCO) – They eat a lot of this at Artie's on The Sopranos. I still can't spell it right if left to my own devices.
• 47D: One-stanza poem (HAIKU) – Took me a long time to get this. I'm a cinquain man myself.
• 52D: "Creator of 1867's 'Grand Caricatura'" (NAST) – "This is sure to spark a revival in interest of our great-great-great-uncle Tom's work!" think the descendants of Thomas Nast. No, kids, it won't. We just need his letters. (Got NASTY in the grid, too: (23A: Foul). I guess if you draw like Nast your caricatures could be described as Nasty.)
• 55D: "Had an uneventful day" (SAT) – What, nothing happens when you're sitting down? The Easter Bunny begs to differ.

Seth tomorrow, Rex or maybe pot luck on Monday.

Wade