Golf Channel analyst Nick / THU 1-21-16 / Chocolate treat since 1932 / PC task-switching shortcut / Ford aircraft of 1920s-30s / Outburst accompanying facepalm / It's below C V B N M

Constructor: David Phillips

Relative difficulty: Beyond Easy

THEME: SIDE / BARS (35A: With 44-Across, off-the-record discussions ... or 12 answers in this puzzle?) — the two columns running along either SIDE of the grid contain words that must be followed by "BAR" to make sense of their clues:

Theme answers:

• SNACK / DIVE / SAND
• POWER / OPEN / TACO
• TOOL / CLAM / SPACE
• MARS / TIKI / SALAD 

Word of the Day: Nick FALDO (21D: Golf Channel analyst Nick) —

Sir Nicholas Alexander Faldo MBE (born 18 July 1957) is an English professional golfer on the European Tour, now mainly an on-air golf analyst. A top player of his era, renowned for his single-minded dedication to the game, he was ranked No. 1 on the Official World Golf Ranking for a total of 97 weeks. His 40 professional wins include 30 victories on the European Tour and six major championships: three Open Championships (1987, 1990, 1992) and three Masters (1989, 1990, 1996). // Faldo has since become a television pundit for major golf championships. In 2006, he became the lead golf analyst for CBS Sports. In 2012, Faldo joined the BBC Sport on-air team for coverage of the Open Championship. (wikipedia)

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This took me less than five minutes, and I don't have much interest in spending much more time than that writing it up. It's a theme, and it makes a kind of sense. It doesn't seem NYT-worthy, and it certainly doesn't seem very well conceived, in terms of delivering some kind of pleasurable experience to the solver. At core, there's wordplay, as there often is. SIDE BARS becomes (somewhat) literal, as the left and right sides of the grid have words that must be followed (in your mind) by BAR in order to make sense. SIDE BARS. Fine. But there are three main problems here. One, this is boring. Two, your definition of "side" is pretty arbitrary. Once you move in one column on either side (to 2 and 14, as opposed to just 1 and 15), and you make those Downs "BAR" answer as well, you are stuck in no-man's land, "side"-wise. You've left the true "side" behind, but in every case you've got banks of *three* Downs on the "side" (all of the same length), and you've only decided to "BAR" two of them? This makes your definition of "side" seem particularly arbitrary. Structurally defective, this grid is. One column (along the "side") would make sense. Three would also make sense (since the three columns on either side are *exactly* the same in terms of dimensions). Two ... is ridiculous. Neither here nor there.


Third, and this is the worst part: once you tumble to the gimmick, the grid just fills itself in. Yawn. Here, I'll show you. I pieced together the NW, lucking into PASTA as my wrong answer at 2D: High-carb bite, which gave me the "P" that got me SPLICE that eventually got me Everything. Once SNACK went in, I saw what was going on. Adjacent POWER, same thing. And ... the rest is history. This is what my grid looked like after about a minute:

This is far too much territory to just give away. Far far too much. An absurd amount. The only place I even had to work a tiny bit to get the "SIDE" answers was in the NE, where TOOL bar took me a second. Otherwise ... just fill those answers in. Twitter agrees (well, this random unscientific sampling of three agrees):

 

And it's not like the rest of the grid was spectacular, fill-wise. This whole puzzle feels like something that should've been kept in your puzzle notebook until you'd figured out exactly how to execute in a way that would be clean, special, memorable. This incarnation merely rises to the level of "it'll do." Not NYT-worthy. 

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]