Olive to Ovid / THU 11-13-14 / Praise of Chimney Sweepers essayist / Stage name for 2012 singing sensation Park Jae-sang / Botanical opening / Between innings feature on Jumbotron / Ottawa based media inits / John who played Joshua in Ten Commandements

Constructor: Tracy Gray

Relative difficulty: Medium

THEME: ON — Five clues begin "Literally, with X-Across" and the answer is missing an "ON" because the first part of the answer is "literally" ON the other one, so SEAS *ON* PASSES etc.

Theme answers:

• SEAS(ON) PASSES (17A: Literally, with 20-Across, ski resort purchases)
• CARS(ON) CITY (16A: Literally, with 19-Across, a Western state capital)
• SURGE(ON) GENERAL (35A: Literally, with 39-Across, head doctor)
• CORD(ON) BLEU (59A: Literally, with 63-Across, distinguished chef)
• HARRIS(ON) FORD (55A: Literally, with 62-Across, longtime action star)

Word of the Day: SAHEL (23D: Semiarid region of Africa) —

The Sahel is the ecoclimatic and biogeographic zone of transition in Africa between the Sahara Desert to the north and the Sudanian Savanna to the south. Having a semi-arid climate, it stretches across the southernmost extent of Northern Africa between the Atlantic Ocean and the Red Sea. The Arabic word sāḥil (ساحل) literally means "shore, coast", describing the appearance of the vegetation found in the Sahel as being akin to that of a coastline delimiting the sand of the Sahara.

The Sahel covers parts of (from west to east) the Gambia, Senegal, southern Mauritania, central Mali, Burkina Faso, southern Algeria and Niger, northern Nigeriaand Cameroon, central Chad, southern Sudan, northern South Sudan and northern Eritrea. (wikipedia)

• • •

Again, we have an example of a good theme idea marred by ungreat fill. Here's the thing about fill–It's Most Of The Puzzle. We are very definitely, solidly, in an era at the NYT when fill quality really doesn't matter. Interesting theme ideas are accepted and overall grid quality gets little to no attention. I see claims (occasionally) that fill standards are higher now, but I see almost zero evidence of this. Instead I see corners with ALII and OLEA and RIAS. Sorry, that's one corner, not multiple corners. One, little, nothing corner (the symmetrical corner has ELIA / SDAK issues). I do like KISSCAM, but that corner is already compromised by your theme. So the one bit of interesting fill the puzzle does have ends up crushing the surrounding fill until it squeals. AAHEDAT is a train wreck. I can barely look at it. In fact, the whole area there feels clunky. TEASELS and SAHEL … it's like the grid is *barely* holding together. With AAHEDAT, I'd say it's not really holding together at all.


Now this puzzle is, both thematically and fill-wise, superior to yesterday's puzzle, but this is the problem. The bar is So Low. People will enjoy this at least in part because it's better by comparison with yesterday's. That, coupled with a truly interesting theme concept, means this one will probably mostly pass muster with solvers. But the fill still needs work. I enjoyed working out the ON answers, but once you grok the concept, they're all pretty easy to get. What's most distressing about the fill quality is this is not a hard grid to fill. It looks like the central theme pairing really put some strain on the grid, but the other four pairs are isolated and have mostly short answers around them. I wonder if it wouldn't have been easier to build a grid where your connecting answer isn't the one ending in -GA (here, RUTABAGA, the root (!) cause of the fill issues in that area), but perhaps one that ends -EL. You'd have to rebuild the grid some, and refill it from nearly the ground up, but more things end -EL than end -GA. Seems like you might buy yourself some freedom. At any rate, the SAHEL / TEASELS / AAHEDAT area, coupled with the OLEA and ELIA areas, really diminished my enjoyment of this one. Theme gets a B, fill gets a C-.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld