Middle-earth area under Misty Mountains / TUE 8-7-18 / Louisiana Purchase region from 1838 to 1846 / Roman emperor of AD 69 / Onetime Mets manager Hodges

Constructor: Alex Eaton-Salners

Relative difficulty: Medium (3:22)

THEME: BEER INGREDIENTS (37A: What's found hidden inside 16-, 23-, 47- and 59-Across) — HOPS, WATER, MALT, YEAST

Theme answers:

• SHOPSTEWARD (16A: Union representative)
• IOWATERRITORY (23A: Louisiana Purchase region from 1838 to 1846)
• ANIMAL TRAINER (47A: Job at a circus)
• HAPPYEASTER (59A: Spring greeting)

Word of the Day: MORIA (14A: Middle-earth area under the Misty Mountains) —

n

1. folly or excessive frivolity

2. (Medicine) a mental impairment affecting intellectual functions (thefreedictionary)

Also

In the fiction of J. R. R. Tolkien, Moria was the name given at the beginning of the late Third Age to an enormous and by then very ancient underground complex in north-western Middle-earth, comprising a vast network of tunnels, chambers, mines and huge halls or mansions, that ran under and ultimately through the Misty Mountains. (wikipedia)

• • •

No. No to all this. No to the truly limp revealer, no to MORIA URBS OTHO ARYA SWAMUP, no no no. EKES and STS and HUP and EGAD!, this is grating. The revealer is the worst thing. It is a boring phrase that involves no wordplay and would never qualify as a valid crossword answer were it not (limply, I say) describing the"ingredients" found in the theme answers. The whole puzzle feels like an excuse to use IOWATERRITORY, which is probably the only phrase in existence that contains WATER broken across two words. SAW A TERMITE! WOODROW ATE RICE! See, not easy. But who cares? This puzzle is not sufficiently beery, and the lack of wordplay in the themer is just killer. Deadens the puzzle. We need something cute to sell this slim concept, and instead we get a mere description. Blargh. And MORIA, come on, that is not valid. This is only the second appearance of this "word" in the NYTX For A Reason. No one says URBS. Make more judicious fill choices!


Almost all of my slowness, such as there was, was a result of the Terrible clue on STUN, which does not suggest STUN at all (35D: Bring to a standstill, say). Only if I am a perp trying to flee from a cop and she STUNs me with a stun gun does this dumb clue apply. I had the ST- and thus STOP, which, as you can see, actually fits the clue. I then went on to go with IWIN over IWON (39D: "Victory is mine!") (always a stupid, stupid decision to have to make—no way to know what verb tense this is; clue is in present so I went with present, Silly Me). I also went with ECRU for 40D: Window shade? (EAVE). I was thinking ... well, I was thinking it was four letters, starting with "E," and maybe the window shade was the shade of ECRU. Many window shades are ECRU, aren't they? Maybe not. At any rate, the eastern seaboard was a disaster. The rest of this was pretty easy, MORIA notwithstanding. Tuesday, bluesday. Bring on tomorrow!

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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