Office restoration / SUN 10-15-17 / Bit from Sunshine Biscuits / Nozzles into blast furnaces / Cork popper / Ones holding down things?

Constructors: John Guzzetta & Michael Hawkins

Relative difficulty: Slightly harder than average

THEME: “Wise Move” - Two-word base phrases whose first words each end in a Y with a long E sound; that sound has been moved to the end of the phrase. In other words, the “Y’s move”.

Theme answers:

• GRAVE TRAINEES (23A: Interns at a cemetery?)
• TWEET BIRDIES (38A: Take to social media following a good round of golf?)
• DOG TREATIES (61A: Pacts between packs?)
• STUD ROOMIES (73A: Ones sharing quarters at the most macho fraternity?)
• SMART PANTIES (98A: Stylish underwear?)
• GROCER STORIES (114A: Things swapped at a convention of supermarket owners?)
• JUICE PARTIES (15D: Social gatherings where fruit drinks are served?)
• COUNT FAIRIES (60D: Take attendance in a magical forest?)

Word of the Day: TUYERES (83A: Nozzles into blast furnaces) —

A tuyere or tuyère (French pronunciation:  [tɥijɛʁ]; English: /twiːˈjɛər/) is a tube, nozzle or pipe through which air is blown into a furnace or hearth.

Air or oxygen is injected into a hearth under pressure from bellows or a blowing engine or other devices. This causes the fire to be hotter in front of the blast than it would otherwise have been, enabling metals to be smelted or melted or made hot enough to be worked in a forge. This applies to any process where a blast is delivered under pressure to make a fire hotter. (Wikipedia)

• • •

Rex is off celebrating his wife’s birthday, so you have a guest post today. And I just got home from watching the (problematically named) Edmonton Eskimos beat the Toronto Argonauts in a thrilling CFL game, so you have a guest poster in an unusually good mood. Which is fortunate for this puzzle, because even though the theme is pretty stale, I ended up kind of liking it. There is one obvious problem — GRAVE TRAINEES and TWEET BIRDIES don’t really work as answers, because the base phrases (“gravy train” and “Tweety Bird”) are never pluralized. Actually, I guess there are two obvious problems, the other being that none of these are really LOL funny (104A: It doesn’t mean “lots of love”). They’re more like “mildly amused smile” funny. I liked JUICE PARTIES and SMART PANTIES, but mainly because the base phrases (“juicy parts” and “smarty pants”) are fun to say.

(Okay, three problems, because the clue for TWEET BIRDIES made me think of the current U.S. President and his dual obsessions with golf and Twitter, and making me think about Trump is an automatic strike. I’m tempted to make a joke about how he might TWEET BIRDIES, but if he golfs as badly as he negotiates with Congress, administers disaster relief, runs a health care system, hires staffers, responds to hate crimes, and generally avoids behaving like an enormous garbage mound masquerading as a human being, then he’s never had a birdie in his life.)

If you’re going to do this theme, I think you need really killer theme answers — otherwise, you run the risk of the solving process becoming tedious. But while these weren’t great, they weren’t terrible either. I’d call it a serviceable theme that never quite wore out its welcome (it helped that I jumped around a lot more than usual, and didn’t actually figure out the theme until halfway through solving).

There’s some unusually poor fill here, like TOMTIT (?), POTSY (?!?!), IN AS (37A: Lead-in to much), NEEDER (!!!), and the worst part of the entire puzzle: the stupidly esoteric TUYERES crossing the defunct five-letter acronym US RDA right on top of ADA crossing EARLE. That’s going to be a point of failure for some people. So the bad fill was really bad, but the good news is that there’s a lot of rather good fill — POWER NAP, AWAY GAME, MEDIA STORM, SCORSESE, GET MOVING, SOUR MASH, and so on. I’m willing to forgive a lot of short crud and even a few outright clunkers when there’s some fun long stuff to keep me entertained. The stacks of 7’s in the NE and SW corners were also good, including ONE TO GO (118A: “Just about done”) and NOSE JOB (11A: Bridge work?). However, I did raise an eyebrow at the clue for MAIN MAN (112A: Homie) given the NYT crossword’s iffy history on race. I thought some of the cluing was quite fun, and in many cases harder than I’m used to on Sundays. My favourites were the deceptive 19D: Drawn (EVEN STEVEN), 62D: Routine problem, for short (OCD), and 99D: Cork popper (TOY GUN). And it’s always nice to see the funniest comedian on television, Samantha BEE, referenced in the puzzle.

A few shorter points:

• I’m an English teacher and I didn’t know that the plural of “iamb” was IAMBI (40D: Some feet), so that slowed me down a lot in getting the last themer.
• 67D: Watches via Netflix, say for STREAMS — how unexpectedly modern!
• I rarely drink, so I never knew that NO TIPS was a 87A: Policy at a wedding’s open bar, maybe. That seems kind of mean, actually!
• Not sure why I like 103D: Like much mouthwash (MINTY) so much. Maybe it’s the alliteration.
• STONE TOOL (33D: Paleolith) is a weak answer — very green painty.
• Apologies for any weirdness in the formatting — today I learned that Blogger really doesn’t like it when you try to post with an IPAD.

That should do it. Not a perfect puzzle, but enough good fill and amusing clues to keep me entertained while figuring out a simple but acceptable theme.

Signed, Ben Johnston, Tutor of CrossWorld

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