First obstacle in 1967 R&B hit / TUE 9-15-15 / Daily diary american dream sloganeer / First monument on monument avenue Richmond / City at confluence of Rhone Saone / Product of Nucor Corporation / Jack Ryan's teaching post

Constructor: Iain S. Padley

Relative difficulty: I don't know. Pretty easy if you know the song, otherwise, who knows...?

THEME: "Ain't No Mountain High Enough" —theme answers are parts of the chorus to that song. Obstacle, obstacle, obstacle, goal

Theme answers:

• MOUNTAIN HIGH (20A: First obstacle in a 1967 R&B hit)
• VALLEY LOW (34A: Second obstacle)
• RIVER WIDE (45A: Third obstacle)
• GETTING TO YOU (57A: Objective in the 1967 R&B hit) 

Word of the Day: William OTIS (60D: William ___, inventor of the steam shovel) —

A steam shovel is a large steam-powered excavating machine designed for lifting and moving material such as rock and soil. It is the earliest type of power shovel or excavator. They played a major role in public works in the 19th and early 20th century, being key to the construction of railroads and the Panama Canal. The development of simpler, cheaper diesel-powered shovels caused steam shovels to fall out of favour in the 1930s. (wikipedia)

• • •

Ah. Tuesday being Tuesday again, I see. For several reasons, this puzzle is a No. Let's start with the fact that building an entire puzzle around a nearly 50-year-old song is a dicey proposition to start with. It's a great song, and it will certain be very familiar to a certain core NYT solver audience, but old is old and next time you complain about cultural references you don't get, imagine an Entire Puzzle built around one. But I'll let that issue slide—it's a great song, it's a classic song, and so, fine, let's go. But there's one big problem with the theme. The noun-adjective thing is terrible. They can't stand alone like that. The obstacle is not a "MOUNTAIN HIGH." It's a theoretical, non-specific mountain. In fact, it's a mountain that doesn't exist. Because the whole point is that no mountain is high *enough*, no valley is low *enough*, no river is wide *enough*, to keep Marvin or Tammy from getting to Tammy or Marvin. I think the constructor conflated (as I did, trying to piece this theme together) this Tammy and Marvin duet with another classic R&B song from just one year earlier: "River Deep, Mountain High" by Ike & Tina Turner.


There, both the "River Deep" and the "Mountain High" are stand-alone noun phrases, w/ that weird, semi-archaic syntax thing where adjective follows (rather than precedes) noun. Now, in that song, those things aren't obstacles, but they do stand alone and have not been ripped from grammatical context. So this puzzle is just ... inaccurate and unfaithful to the grammar of the song. Even in the non-chorus part, where Marvin goes "Ain't no mountain high, ain't no valley low, ain't no river wide enough, baby," he's still just holding the "enough" ... the "enough" applies to all three parts. Nowhere but nowhere is a MOUNTAIN HIGH an "obstacle." Seriously, this thing is broken at the level of grammar. Re: the themers, my constructor friend put it much more succinctly than I have: "they're just 4 partial phrases wrongly clued."


Further, the fill is atrocious. I kept taking pictures of it because I needed to document the parts that made me stop and go "ugh." There was ... well, right away—there's no reason for ACER and ARCO up there, yuck.

And then again, when I got doubled-up by ESME *and* ESAI. I mean, come on. One or the other, max. Never both. That's just mean (lazy).

Then there was the FLOR next to the OBI ...

I stopped the exercise at that point. No fun. LRON, no fun. TABULA on its own, no fun. ABAR ENE EST. Theme just isn't demanding enough to warrant all this old old old school stuff. It's not that it was hard. I got it. It's all just so unwelcome and stale. MOTHS, indeed.


Most interesting moment was trying to figure out how DON could be right for 12D: Person behind the hits? Took me a few seconds to get that it was a mafia thing. There was not much else interesting about this puzzle.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

P.S. this thing where non-themers are longer than shortest themers? No. No-no. Don't do that *unless* you are running the longer answers Down (or opposite direction from whichever direction your themers are going in), in which case it's not a distraction. 

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