Hebrew letter before nun / WED 5-22-13 / 1972 Slade song Take Me Back / Cohort of Athos / Firth of Clyde port / Arabian Nights menace / Sicko documentarian / Winter's Bone heroine Dolly

Constructor: Kevin Christian

Relative difficulty: Easy

THEME: -X + -CKS — homophonic phrases where first word ends -X and last word ends -CKS

Theme answers:

• 17A: Complaints about a Kentucky fort? (KNOX KNOCKS)
• 36A: Place a levy on pushpins? (TAX TACKS) 
• 42A: Security for smoked salmon? (LOX LOCKS)
• 62A: Piles of old soul records? (STAX STACKS) 
• 11D: Say no to some pro basketballers? (NIX KNICKS)
• 35D: Critic Reed does major damage? (REX WRECKS)

Word of the Day: AYR (63D: Firth of Clyde port) —

Largest of the Clyde Coast holiday towns, Ayr lies in the very centre of the famous Firth of Clyde playground, 32 miles South-West of Glasgow, it looks out on the glorious panorama of the Firth, with the majestic peaks of Arran in the foreground and the Mull of Kintyre in the background. The beautiful Ayrshire countryside provided the inspiration for some of the finest verses of the National Bard of Scotland, Robert Burns. // Undoubtedly Ayr is an old town—the most zealous of historical researchers cannot say just how old. Its story is writ large on the pages of Scottish history. Many of its landmarks bear the indelible stamp of its antiquity. But in every other respect the Auld Toun is the modern home of a modern-minded and thriving community who are well aware of the need to keep abreast of the times, not only for their own sakes but for the benefit of the many thousands who come annually to make holiday. (www.ayr.org)

• • •

This is a Monday puzzle. With the exception of a few deliberately amped-up clues (e.g. 23A: "Winter's Bone" heroine ___ Dolly or 24A: Hebrew letter before nun), this thing has no speed bumps. Once you grok the theme (which doesn't take long), the rest of the theme answers reveal themselves instantly. I didn't have to think more than one second about any of them. Gimme after after gimme after gimme. That's a lot of long gimmes. So it's misplaced on a Wednesday. I nearly broke three minutes, which maybe I've done once in my life on a Wednesday. Typically I'm more than a full minute slower. But that's not a fault of the puzzle's. And yet it is, because the theme is terribly obvious, and one that I have to believe has been done before, many times. It does have the up-side of giving us lots of Xs and Ks, but since all answers were so easy to get, there's not much pleasure to be had in solving. Then there's the fill, which ... well, at this point, I doubt I have to tell you. Another day, another dire situation. I won't bother enumerating the damage, but there's at least half a dozen to maybe ten answers here that I would try desperately to eliminate if I were constructing. At least three in each of the tiny SE and NW corners alone. So, six, right there. And there's more. Plus, in addition to short junk, there's problems with the longer stuff. IN A TREE and RETOTAL are *total* wastes of good long-Down real estate (though I will say that most of the other 7s are just fine). "Good enough" just isn't good enough. Surely people can sense how *tired* a puzzle like this is. Adequate, passable, defensible, but at best Just OK. Something you might've seen 30 years ago, not in that the fill's old, but in that it seems to come from an era when puzzles underwent less scrutiny, when there was less basis for comparison, and when standards of polish and zest were generally much laxer. The idea appears to be "Playful theme + defensible fill = all you need." But it's not enough any more. I don't know why we're still seeing Just OK puzzles in the NYT, but I'm grateful that more and more people seem to be noticing. As they say: write your congressperson.

How about a 12-step program for people addicted to bad fill? We could name it after the 5th row of this puzzle: REEMEMANON. "Hi, my name is ..."


Bullets:

• 10A: Strained-at-bug, in an idiom (GNAT) — I am not familiar with this idiom. It's from Matthew 23:24, "Ye blind guides, which strain at a gnat, and swallow a camel." That last part must be tricky.
• 24A: Hebrew letter before num (MEM) — the only MEM I know is [Grizzlies, on a scoreboard]
• 9D: Keebler cracker brand (ZESTA) — the snack preferred by both Perle MESTA and the hearth goddess VESTA.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld