Wisest and justest of all centaurs in Greek myth / THU 7-12-18 / Pro wrestling star John / Some addenda in research papers / 1973 Jim Croce hit / Lux composer of 2012

Constructor: Joe DiPietro

Relative difficulty: Challenging (11:47 ... third slowest time for Any puzzle in the last three months—and the two slower times were Sundays) 

THEME: HANDS DOWN (34D: Easily ... and a hint to four answers in this puzzle) — Four theme answers turn Down at one point before continuing Across again *on the original line*; the part of the answer that turns Down, taken on its own, is a word that can precede "HAND" in a familiar word or phrase:

Theme answers:

• DEFOREST (1A: Clear of trees)
• EVA LONGORIA (22A: "Desperate Housewives" co-star)
• ENVIRONS (38A: Surrounding area)
• TREASURE MAP (51A: It often features an "X")

Word of the Day: CHIRON (29D: "Wisest and justest of all the centaurs," in Greek myth) —

In Greek mythology, Chiron (/ˈkaɪrən/ KY-rən; also Cheiron or Kheiron; Greek: Χείρων"hand")^[1] was held to be the superlative centaur amongst his brethren, as he was called as the "wisest and justest of all the centaurs" [come on, man, wiki-cluing is lazy] [...] A great healer, astrologer, and respected oracle, Chiron was said to be the first among centaurs and highly revered as a teacher and tutor. Among his pupils were many culture heroes: Asclepius, Aristaeus, Ajax, Aeneas, Actaeon, Caeneus, Theseus, Achilles, Jason, Peleus, Telamon, Perseus, sometimes Heracles, Oileus, Phoenix, and in one Byzantine tradition, even Dionysus. (wikipedia)

• • •

I napped on couch for better part of an hour immediately before solving: NOT a recommended solving strategy. That was brutal for me. I picked a bad day to start at 1-Across, I guess. I just poked at the grid a bit until I realized I'd better go hunting for some kind of revealer. So I delved into the SE corner, and eventually got all of it. That corner wasn't terribly hard—but that's because it's HANDS FREE (there's a revealer someone should try to build a puzzle around!). As for the rest of the grid, oof. Three of the four hands screwed me up something awful. First one I got was EVA LONGORIA, and never having watched a single episode of "Desperate Housewives," I figured the answer was just some EVA I couldn't remember. MENDES didn't fit, so I was stuck. Didn't help that that corner also had 16A: Joined (WED), which I had as MET, and 6A: Smack-dab (SPANG) (!?!?!), which I had as SPANK. I think I was thinking of "brand spankin' new" ... all I know is SPANG is garbage (albeit garbage I think I've seen in a puzzle before at least once). So, hurray, I got my first "hand" (FORE!), surely I'm on my way! ... Nope. 


Could not remember the damned centaur's name (CHIRON) and had no idea the "hand" would be in his name, so the whole middle was a disaster. Instead of ENVIRONS I had, let's see: AURAS, then EDGES, then EAVES (!?). So rough. The NW wasn't much better. FORENSICS is "the art or study of argumentation or formal debate" to me, not whatever happens on "CSI" (forensic science?). TABLES as research paper addenda was baffling. EL CHEAPOS??? Who says this and where (in the world) did the EL part come from? Also, do I want to know? I had trouble with even the non-theme stuff in the NW: EPIC, ROCK, ESS (wanted "EGO-") (40A: Self-starter?). Just a disaster. Finally limped into the SW and ... crushed it. By that point, I guess, I had things pretty well sussed. But it was still a humiliating overall experience.

I wonder if anyone is going to get Naticked by the CENA / CHIRON crossing today. If you don't know at least one of them, that "C" is not exactly inferrable. I've heard of both, but I can easily imagine a reasonably accomplished solver who has heard of neither. 

One of the roughest / strangest things about this theme is that one of the "hands" doesn't go *all* the way "down"—IRON, LONG, and SURE all go down til they hit bottom (a black square or the puzzle's edge). But FORE just hangs there, bouncing back up before it comes anywhere near bottom. Would've made more sense to find a 1-Across answer that contained a "hand" that could've been dropped down in the position now held by SHUL (4D: Synagogue). 



I know the phrase "burn rubber" a lot better than LAY RUBBER (57A: Accelerate a vehicle suddenly); I like "burn" roughly 100000x more than LAY, but I'm not the king of Valid Idiomland, sadly. One odd thing about this theme is there are tons and tons of "hands" that didn't make the cut. FARM, SLOW, BACK, FREE... This theme might've made more sense in a Sunday-sized puzzle (though man that would be one tough Sunday). I've seen this exact theme type before (where part of an answer just drops Down), but the revealer gives it a new twist. Overall this is a worthy, challenging effort, light on junk and heavy on butt-kicking.

Please do yourself a favor and go get the new suite of Vowelless Crossword Puzzles from Peter Broda. Perfect for stocking your clipboard in advance of your impending summer vacation to That Place with Your Family. If you've never done Vowelless Crosswords before, they are great fun, and make for very good pattern-recognition practice. They will divert you and consume large swaths of time, what more could you ask for? Seven puzzles, pay what you want! Get it get it.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

P.S. watched my wife finish her puzzle this morning, which reminded me of something:

If you've never seen AQI (and I had never seen it until it jumped out of a crossword at me several years ago), then you're in trouble (61A: Atmospheric pollution meas.). You have to talk yourself out of ANI, either by figuring out that "Q" might stand for "quantity" (no) or "quality" (yes) and "N" can't stand for anything reasonable, *or* by reasoning that you've seen ANI for years, in all kinds of cluing incarnations, and if it were some kind of pollution abbr. you probably would've seen it by now.

P.P.S. shout-out to everyone who wanted their salmon to be COHO (I learned NOVA ... from crosswords ... though I've since seen it in the wild) (19D: Salmon variety).

P.P.P.S. last thing, re: EL CHEAPOS. First, forgot to note the utter ridiculousness of having "EL" (singular definite article) precede plural CHEAPOS. Second, here's an article by Jane H. Hill that highlights the ubiquity *and* questions the innocence of mock Spanish in the U.S. It suggests there's something at least vaguely racist about the mock honorific "el cheapo," and o-suffixing in general, esp. to suggest inferiority (thanks to Ben Zimmer for the reference):

Mock Spanish itself is a system of four major strategies for the ``incorporation'' of Spanish-language materials into English. These strategies yield expressions that belong to a pragmatic zone bounded on one end by the merely jocular, and on the other by the obscene insult. They include (1): ``Semantic derogation'': the borrowing of neutral or positive Spanish loan words which function in Mock Spanish in a jocular and/or pejorative sense; (2) ``Euphemism'': the borrowing of negative, including scatological and obscene, Spanish words, as euphemisms for English words, or for use in their own right as jocular and/or pejorative expressions, (3) ``Affixing'': the borrowing of Spanish morphological elements, especially el ``the'' and the suffix -o, in order to make an English word especially jocular and/or pejorative, and (4) ``Hyperanglicization'': absurd mis-pronunciations, that endow commonplace Spanish words or expressions with a jocular and/or pejorative sense and can create vulgar puns. (Jane H. Hill, "Mock Spanish: A Site For The Indexical Reproduction Of Racism In American English," 1995)

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