Dr. Larch's drug in Cider House Rules / WED 9-11-13 / Joyous Cosmology subj / Life-size likeness of Elvis maybe / Former Giant Robb / How many bootlegs are sold

Constructor: Patrick Blindauer

Relative difficulty: Medium

THEME: Autumn? — circled squares for a WARM-to-COLD word ladder


Theme answers:

• 16A: Endothermic (WARM-BLOODED)
• 23A: Birth place (MATERNITY WARD)
• 37A: Life-size likeness of Elvis, maybe (CARDBOARD CUTOUT) 
• 47A: A fan might need one (EXTENSION CORD)
• 58A: Unaffected by emotion (COLD-HEARTED)

Word of the Day: "PEYTON Place" (28A: "___ Place") —

Peyton Place is a 1956 novel by Grace Metalious. It sold 60,000 copies within the first ten days of its release and remained on the New York Times best seller list for 59 weeks. It was adapted as both a 1957 film and a 1964–69 television series.

The fictional Peyton Place is a composite of several real New Hampshire towns: Gilmanton, Gilford, Laconiaand Manchester. Grace Metalious and her husband George first considered Potter Place (the name of a real community near Andover, New Hampshire). Realizing their town should have a fictional name, they looked through an atlas and found Payton (the name of a real town in Texas). They combined that with Place and changed the "a" to an "e". Thus, Peyton Place was created, prompting her comment, "Wonderful—that's it, George. Peyton Place. Peyton Place, New Hampshire. Peyton Place, New England. Peyton Place, USA. Truly a composite of all small towns where ugliness rears its head, and where the people try to hide all the skeletons in their closets." (wikipedia)

• • •

Odd. This one is just odd. A four-step word ladder. I feel like I'm missing some twist or trick. I am so used to Patrick's puzzle's having some brilliant or devilishly clever element that I keep waiting to see something like that here. But I think it's just WARM becoming COLD in four steps. Fill is quite run-of-the-mill, with the possible exception of FORT MYERS, which I wouldn't exactly call "good"—just somewhat unusual. Unless there is something I'm missing, I'd say this is pretty a workmanlike effort. I like the central answer—CARDBOARD CUTOUT—but not much else about this puzzle really stood out.

I had an odd lot of trouble getting started. Just couldn't see JAWS of Life even with the JA- in place. I kept moving away and coming back to it—maybe two or three times—before something clicked. FORT MYERS also took many crosses to see. Went with AYE instead of NOD at first—that held me up a bit. But my biggest screw-up happened around what eventually became the CARDBOARD area. First, I had PARE for 28D: Clip (PACE). Seemed a perfectly good answer. Then, stupidly, with the -OM- in place, I wrote in ROME for 25D: Final "Romeo and Juliet" setting. It didn't *feel* right, but the letter pattern seemed to ask for it, and it's Italian, after all, so I just threw it down. This left me with the very interesting RARDEOAR- as the opening to the Elvis answer. I don't know much, but I know that unless there is some very complex theme involving ciphers or backwardsness, RARDEOAR- is not the beginning of anything. I think I got TOMB, after getting MATERNITY, and then RARDBOARD quickly became CARDBOARD. Nothing after that held me up much. Felt slow, but ended up 26 seconds faster than last week, i.e. with a pretty normal Wednesday time (4:03)

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld