1970s Robert Young TV role - TUESDAY, April 14, 2009 — Barry Boone (Congos name before 1997 / Simpsons teacher who was called Mrs. K)

Hi. Andrea Carla Michaels filling in one last time for Rex. As some of you eagle-eyed folks noted yesterday, yes, it's true, I was actually the blonde dancing around in the Rick Astley video. I get residuals every time "Never Gonna Give You Up" is played on YouTube … so after yesterday's Rickrollin' good times, I now have enough to retire to ZAIRE (10D: Congo's name before 1997). Thank you, everyone!

So it's nice to go out on a solid Tuesday Barry Boone puzzle. Many of you may recall Barry was "retired" after accusations of "alleged" steroid use, helping him to set some sort of baseball record, but now a repentant BB works off his community service sentence by writing crosswords for the NY Times.

THEME: True to his name, Barry Boone has hit a home run in constructing a puzzle with a boon of theme answers: "Hidden Gems" — Five sets of gems are "hidden" in long phrases with consecutive letters circled in addition to the explanatory phrase HIDDEN GEMS, thus creating a "playing field" of 60 squares of theme answers: His "diamond" has answers the lengths of 10, 11, 9, 9, 11, 10!

Theme answers:

• 17A: 1985 Glenn Close/Jeff Bridges thriller ("Jagged Edge" = jade)
  
• 21A: Mail service made obsolete by the transcontinental telegraph (Pony Express = onyx)
  
• 32A: Simple swimming stroke (dogpaddle = opal)
  
• 40A: Widening in a highway, maybe (toll plaza = topaz)
  
• 53A: 1970s Robert Young TV role (Marcus Welby = ruby)
  
• 59A: What the long Across answers with circles have (HIDDEN GEMS)
  

He has traded one diamond field for a field of diamonds … or something like that! You would never realize it was the same person, but he sneaks in signature clues like 26A: Most Little Leaguers (BOYS), 38D: World Series org. (MLB), and 54D: Catch and throw back as fly balls (SHAG). Barry was very clever not to have clued SHAG with an Austin Powers reference where we would then have to brace ourselves for sniggering comments by ACNED BRATs (ACH!) about its double entendre meaning in the other English-speaking nation.

Instead, we get some nice back and forth … 42A: Lenin's "What IS TO Be Done?" seems to be answered by the other Lennon's 44D: "Let IT BE." (Actually, it was written by Paul … but still!) 50D: Tree with "catkins" (whatever the hell they are) is sweetly paralleled with the theme answer DOGPADDLE. And for every highbrow, sophisticated clue/answer such as 34D: Andrei Sakharov in the Soviet era, e.g. (DISSIDENT) there's a less highbrow 63D: "Evil ERNIE" (comics series).

Some of the interesting pairings are even self-contained in the clues, e.g. 44A: Eisenhower and Turner (IKES) is so visually evocative — I can totally picture DDE and Mamie across a candlelit table from Ike and Tina on a double date … from hell! Speaking of DDE, if I had any nits to pick about this puzzle, it would be that there were an abundance of three letter initials: BLT, ETO, EKG, GRE, MLB, LPS as well as ten (count 'em, ten!) fill-in-the-blanks with partials such as INOR, ISTO, ITBE, ASTAR, TOSEE. Although there is something I like about TOSEE, it feels like a cross between Tushie and Watusi.

Speaking of which, I'd like to take this opportunity (as it's my last blog before I watusi my way to the Congo) to complain that I get the letters WATUSI on my Scrabble rack at least once a game, which is illegal to play in Scrabble, and yet is almost impossible to make another word out of. On a positive note, however, this puzzle was very Scrabbly with a nice sprinkling of Zs,Xs, Ks, and a J. If only AGUA (28D: Contents of the Spanish Main) had been AQUA, the puzzle would have been one F away from a pangram! (And only one clue away from having NO gratuitous Simpsons references! 56D: "The Simpsons" teacher who was called Mrs. K (EDNA)! D'oh!)

It's now after 1 a.m. so I'd like to put this blog to bed to the dulcet tones of my favorite answer "LOLA" (37A: In a Kinks hit s/he "walked like a woman and talked like a man"):


Aw c'mon, now, I needed 37 more cents to get to Zanzibar … ciao ciao, rafiki!