Best Picture subject nine inches shorter than actor who portrayed him / THU 1-26-17 / Le Duc decliner of 1973 Nobel prize / Whisky first produced for King George VI's 1939 visit to Canada / Supervillain in 2015's Avengers sequel / Subject of 1820 compromise / Sports star with signed jersey in Vatican / Feature of many minion in Despicable Me

Constructor: Hal Moore

Relative difficulty: Challenging

THEME: A LITTLE BIRDIE (36A: Secret's source ... that can be found four times in this puzzle) — rebus puzzle where a "birdie" name is made "little" (i.e. squooshed into a single square) four times.

Theme answers:

• BAL[LOON]IST / C[LOON]EY
• FRA[TERN]ITY / E[TERN]AL
• T.E. LA[WREN]CE / LO[WREN]T
• [CROW]N ROYAL / IN [CROW]D 

Word of the Day: Le Duc THO (20A: Le Duc ___, decliner of the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize) —

Lê Đức Thọ ( listen; 14 October 1911 – 13 October 1990), born Phan Đình Khải in Hà Nam Province, was a Vietnamese revolutionary, general, diplomat, and politician. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize jointly with United States Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in 1973, but he declined it. [...] Thọ and Henry Kissinger were jointly awarded the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize for their efforts in negotiating the Paris Peace Accords. However, Thọ declined to accept the award, claiming that peace had not yet been established, and that the United States and the South Vietnamese governments were in violation of the Paris Peace Accords:

However, since the signing of the Paris agreement, the United States and the Saigon administration continue in grave violation of a number of key clauses of this agreement. The Saigon administration, aided and encouraged by the United States, continues its acts of war. Peace has not yet really been established in South Vietnam. In these circumstances it is impossible for me to accept the 1973 Nobel Prize for Peace which the committee has bestowed on me. Once the Paris accord on Vietnam is respected, the arms are silenced and a real peace is established in South Vietnam, I will be able to consider accepting this prize. With my thanks to the Nobel Prize Committee please accept, madame, my sincere respects.

The ceasefire would not last, with the war ending when Saigon fell in 1975 and North Vietnam captured South Vietnam. (wikipedia)

• • •

Hard as hell because of the nature of the rebus—even when you know it's a rebus, and even when you know it involves A LITTLE BIRDIE, you have no possible way of knowing which of hundreds of birds it might be, or where the rebus squares might be (though at some point you can infer that there will be one per corner). Cluing was also slanted hard, especially in the rebus answers. Since the theme itself isn't that clever, there's not much to this but its challenge, which is OK. It's nice to have a challenge once in a while. And the birds, though hard to turn up at times, did provide a kind of "aha" moment when they appeared. So it played like a Saturday, and that was kind of irritating, and the concept is no great shakes, but I had an OK time, as frustrating solves go. I have to say, though, that I was predisposed to be irritated by this puzzle because Yet Again (seriously, this happens a couple times a month, it seems), the NYT puzzle site had a glitch. This time, it just wasn't providing the .puz file. Not there. This was what I got:

So I had to solve in the applet, directly on the site, and I ****ing hate that interface. Since it doesn't behave quite like the AcrossLite interface, I fumbled with the cursor a lot more than I do normally. Unwieldy. Blecch. The NYT makes massive profit on the puzzle, continues to pay constructors abysmally, and yet can't manage to deliver its product on time without technical glitches for what seems like more than a few weeks at a pop. Embarrassing.

[Cover of a Bon Iver song]

Fill on this one is OK, though THO is a no imho (20A: Le Duc ___, decliner of the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize). I mean it's bad fill. Even if you'd clued it as shortened "though" it's bad, but here, it's massively dated and pretty obscure. So even worse. And -IZE is terrible, but there's really not much else that's inherently unpleasant. Aside from the many many missteps, e.g. NECK for NAPE (8D: Common spot for a sunburn), MAN for IT'S (11D: "___ alive!"), RAH for AYE (12D: Word of support), ORBS for ASPS (5D: Ancient symbols of sovereignty), HERB for C[LOON]EY (3D: Rosemary, for one), which is as obviously-by-design a trap as I've seen in a while. I also had trouble with the proper nouns. Couldn't bring up SAPPHO from that clue (1D: Plato's "tenth Muse"), couldn't remember ULTRON (kept thinking VOLTRON), no idea who BEA Benaderet is (I'm guessing she's at least as old as Le Duc THO), and KIERAN Culkin was a name I eventually halfway remembered, but from where, I don't know. I do know I couldn't pick him out of a line-iup. The toughest part, though, was the birds, and that LO[WREN]T / T.E. LA[WREN]CE was far and away the hardest to find. Parsing either of those without the bird is tough. That was my last square, though I briefly thought it was T.H. LAWRENCE (because of T.H. White, probably). The LOON was the second-most elusive bird, followed by the CROW (my first bird, which was the last square I got in that corner, but the first bird I actually found). TERN was probably easiest to turn up, though it came second for me, and I knew to look out for birds by then. Once again, the puzzle plays old, but the challenge was in general a welcome one.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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