Puppet lady of Mister Rogers Neighborhood / WED 4-29-15 / Limey's drink / Rose song from Music Man / Bear's Wall Street partner / Excels over in slang / Mixing male female characteristics slangily / Dead: prefix

Constructor: Daniel Landman

Relative difficulty: Medium-Challenging

THEME: POLYGON (39A: ELK, EARL, LEAK or GEAR, geometrically)— each circled (or otherwise marked) letter in the grid is a VERTEX (or point where two lines converge) in a different kind of POLYGON. Connecting the letters in the the different words in the POLYGON clue will get you different POLYGONs. Which POLYGONs, you ask? Here you go:

Theme answers:

• RIGHT TRIANGLE (20A: ELK, geometrically, in the finished puzzle)
• TRAPEZOID (28A: EARL, geometrically)
• RECTANGLE (48A: LEAK, geometrically)
• PARALLELOGRAM (58A: GEAR, geometrically)

Word of the Day: VERTEX (52D: What each of this puzzle's circled squares represents) —

noun

1. 1. 

   the highest point; the top or apex.

   synonyms:

   apex, peak, pinnacle, zenith, crown, crest, tip, top "a line drawn from the vertex of the figure to the base"
2. 2. 

   GEOMETRY

   each angular point of a polygon, polyhedron, or other figure.

• • •

There's a reason I don't do sudoku. Nobody cares about where the 1or the 8 or the 6 goes in any given section. There's no meaning there. There's nothing to say. In fact, the numbers don't even have to be numbers. My daughter had some version called colorku (kolorku?) where marbles were nine different colors. Same idea. My point is that ELK and EARL and LEAK and GEAR are arbitrary arrangements of letters. The meanings of those words are irrelevant (though it is relevant, I think, that they are words—that adds at least one layer of difficulty / elegance to the whole endeavor). In the end, shapes. Geometry. I like geometry fine. But there's no meaning her. No (real) wordplay. And so if you like drawing on your grid, or are really turned on by shapes, then there's pleasure here for you. Otherwise, the theme is a kind of irrelevance. I never did anything with the finished grid, and just inferred the various shapes base on pattern recognition once I got a few crosses. Theme was more distraction to me than an interesting, intrinsic part of the solving experience. But here, look—in the native NYT app, apparently you can make a pretty picture like this:

[screenshot courtesy of S. O'Neill]

I feel like this puzzle is the prettier cousin of yesterday's puzzle. Or handsomer. Or smarter if those other comparative adjectives are somehow too superficial or demeaning to you. No, I'm going back to prettier. Fill is less constrained by demands of the theme, so there are fewer outright painful moments. But there's not a ton of excitement in the fill either, and with a kinda-just-lies-there theme with straightforward answers, the fun factor was on the lowish side for me today. Uncharacteristically, I think my favorite part was the NW, i.e. the first bit I filled in. I'm lukewarm on ANDRO-, and ACHS is the worst thing in the grid, but the rest of that section, over to FERRET and down to MOAN, is all pretty solid and even unusual in places (from COOING ON A DATE to drinking GROG in a HANGAR in SHAHDOM). Toughest part for me was LIDA. I don't know my "Music Man" songs that well, I guess.  Needed every cross. I also stumbled a bit in the SW, where BACKACHE preceded BACK PAIN, causing problems and even briefly making me reconsider how I was spelling Bear STEARNS. But I had the good sense to pull ACHE out pretty quickly, so damage down there was minimal. A curious puzzle that, for me, was (like all 2D geometrical figures) flat. I give it a B FLAT. Because it be flat.

Greater: SHAHDOM, DOGGONE, BACK PAIN
Lesser: ACHS, LIDA, NENA, GTE, OVO, CRO, LIRR, ETNA, EEK

Good night.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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