Mount Charley Weaver's home town / SAT 10-4-14 / Lane London Theater locale / To whom Charles Darwin dedicated Different Forms of Flowers / Pioneer in literary realism / Southeastern fruits with large thick spines / Nonhuman Earth orbiter of 1961 / Sister brand of CorningWare

Constructor: Julian Lim

Relative difficulty: Medium

THEME: none

Word of the Day: AGOB (25D: Oodles) —

[Nope … wait … I think that's two words … A GOB … can that be right?]

• • •

There are pockets of niceness here. Stack in the NW, nice. All the longer Downs in the middle, pretty nice. Acrosses down south, at a minimum, decent. So I think that overall it's at least a Pass. It's solid. I object mildly to ABOUT TURNS (of course I wrote in the far superior ABOUT FACES) and I object like the dickens to AGOB (or A space GOB, it seems). I know, ATON and ALOT show up ALOT, but those are so commonplace that I have come to accept them (if not (at all) like them). AGOB is, first of all, not a thing anyone would say. Second of all, I don't really need a second of all. Putting an "A" before a word is dicey in general, and this instance is just fug-ugly. ABUNCH I would not like. AHEAP I would not like. Not with AMOUSE or in AHOUSE would I like it. GOBS, weirdly, I would accept. No one says it, but it's a word, and while no one says it, far more people say it than say "A GOB."


RIAA and IDY are the only other answers that I really want to kick, though I'm no fan of whoever this ISIAH person is. Well, he's probably fine as a human being, but "Veep" doesn't exist to me. I live in a world where "Veep" isn't. So ISIAH isn't. I look forward to his acting in my world some day.

This one started in the NW for me, where MY PRECIOUS was a massive gimme. I got every answer that crossed it *except* GO TO RACK AND RUIN, which, unlike AH SO, is *actually* "old-timey" (3D: Org. that, when spelled backward, is an old-timey exclamation) => OSHA). AH SO is only "old-timey" insofar as it was OK to be racist against Asians in the "old times." Can we not agree that AH SO and all references thereto are forever banned forever and ever to the Land of Agob? I don't think this is too much to ask. I tried to get into the NE without any help and that didn't work at all, so I had to go down to DAG (easy) and build up from there. E and SE were by far the easiest parts of the grid. Done in a flash. Worked my way up to the rather dull NE, and then just had SW left to do. I kept putting in and taking out RIB. MIDAIR was my one sure thing down there until I figured the [Gold-certifying grp.] was probably an "association," so plunked an "A" in front of that "H" down there at 57A: "Really?", thus setting up the aha moment of OH YEAH! I put that corner away pretty quickly after that. Had to hunt down a typo, which was a drag, but a drag of my own making.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld