Foreign relief org created by JFK / WED 5-28-14 / Kingly name in Norway / Aladdin's monkey pal / Singers Green Jardine

Constructor: Tim Croce

Relative difficulty: Medium

THEME: animal similes —

Theme answers:

• SICK AS A DOG
• BLIND AS A BAT
• SLY AS A FOX
• BALD AS A COOT
• FAT AS A COW
• BIG AS A WHALE
• BUSY AS A BEE

Word of the Day: LESLEY Gore (27A: Gore who sang "It's My Party," 1963) —

Lesley Gore (born Lesley Sue Goldstein, May 2, 1946) is an American singer. At the age of 16, in 1963, she recorded the pop hit "It's My Party". // Gore was born in New York City. She was raised in Tenafly, New Jersey, in a Jewish family. Her father, Leo Gore, was a wealthy manufacturer of children's clothes and swimwear.

Lesley was a junior at the Dwight School for Girls in nearby Englewood when "It's My Party" became a #1 hit. It was later nominated for a Grammy Award for rock and roll recording. It sold over one million copies and was awarded a gold disc. (wikipedia)

• • •

Another puzzle with impressive theme density. This one's stronger than yesterday's, but still wobbles a bit in couple theme answers, and still has that spotty fill that theme-dense puzzles often seem to have. I thought I would sail through this in record time once I saw the theme was just animal comparison idioms, but then a couple things happened. First, when I got to 49A: Quite cunning, I had no idea it was a theme answer (I'd already encountered two Downs and could see another Down in the center, so the Across took me by surprise). Thus, I never considered the now-obvious fox answer, and so that corner was a tad (tod?) harder than it would've been otherwise. But the big slow down, for me, was the central themer—an idiom I have never heard. I did not even know a "coot" was an animal (a bird, for my fellow ignorant folk). None. Zero. I know coots as codgers. Foolish old men. Perhaps this meaning was only ever an extension of the baldness of the damned bird-coot, but that original, avian coot-ness is something I did not know existed. Jarring to go from such ultra-familiar expressions as SICK AS A DOG and BLIND AS A BAT to BALD AS A COOT. I had BALD AS A COO- and honestly didn't know what letter went there. "Are coons bald?" I wondered, knowing the answer.

I see that the coot idiom is a real thing, though the fact that it's not Nearly in-the-language as most of the others is, as I say, jarring. Worse for me, though, was FAT AS A COW. I can imagine someone's being called a "fat cow," but FAT AS A COW could just as easily have been FAT AS A PIG, FAT AS A HOG, or FAT AS A WHALE (which googles better than all the others I just mentioned combined). BIG AS A WHALE has significantly less currency than FAT AS A WHALE, though I have no problem with BIG AS A WHALE because of the special B-52s dispensation.


TRASH CAN before BIN. DECAMPS before ENCAMPS for some reason. No idea Monet painted anything with SNOW in the title (13D: Monet's "___ Scene at Argenteuil"). Barely heard of an OSAGE orange. I think that's it for hiccups. Overall a decent puzzle, but kind of like a balance beam routine with several significant wobbles and a not-totally-stuck landing.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld