Philosophical argument for belief in God / SUN 12-23-18 / Arabic name that sounds like polite affirmative / Lee singer with 2011 #1 album Mission Bell / Alcorn creator of Pong / Modern prefix with tag

Constructor: David Alfred Bywaters

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium (9:23)

THEME: "Labor Contract(ion)s" — familiar phrases have the letter string "ion" either added or taken away, i.e. they are either ion-ized or UNIONIZED (70A: Like some factories ... or, in a different sense, like 90-, 109- and 119-Across (but not 24-, 32- and 53-Across)?)

Theme answers:

• WITH ONE ACCORDION (24A: How polka bands get their start?)
• PAPAL BULLION (32A: Pontiff's gold treasure?)
• IS THAT A FACTION? (53A: Query about the Freedom Caucus or Berniecrats?)
• MISS IMPOSSIBLE (90A: Nickname for a hard-to-please girl?)
• FILLING STATS (109A: Data maintained by competitive dentists?)
• RHETORICAL QUEST (119A: Speakers' searches for just the right words?)

Word of the Day: PASCAL'S WAGER (4D: Philosophical argument for belief in God) —

noun

PHILOSOPHY

unpunctuated: Pascals wager

1. the argument that it is in one's own best interest to behave as if God exists, since the possibility of eternal punishment in hell outweighs any advantage of believing otherwise. (google)

• • •

So weird. First, extremely weird to give away the theme in the title. You'd think "Labor Contractions" would be fine, but to go ahead and parenthesize the "ion," what the hell? This isn't preschool. Let the people figure stuff out on their own. Second, this theme doesn't know what it's doing. It's trying to do two things and it ends up doing nothing very interesting. IONIZED is really the operative word. Certain words are IONIZED, in that they have "ION" added to them—a gimmick that is not at all interesting, but is at least consistent. But this revealer adds a new bit of wordplay to the mix by giving us UNIONIZED, a real word that is also, now, the fake (is it fake?) word UN-IONIZED, or de-ionized (if that's a word, which, who knows?). So the UNIONIZED words are the ones that ... (does the double negative math) ... don't ... have the ION. And then the others are the others. And after all of that, you're left with wacky phrases that aren't very funny, and a mostly run-of-the-mill grid that is rather heavy on the old-skool crosswordese (Et tu, ATTU!?). Can you do something with multiple accords? That base phrase seemed off. It seems like such a basic theme should've yielded tons and tons of possible answers, some of which surely must be funnier, or have funnier cluing possibilities, than any of these. Really like CLICKBAIT, and (even though I've never heard of it) PASCAL'S WAGER, but even something interesting like STAGE MOTHERS seems fumbled ("stage moms" is the phrase I know). It's not that the answer is invalid, it just doesn't ... pop. It's OK. It DIDOK. Unlike DRACONIC, which didn't do anywhere near OK (the word is DRACONIAN— it's IANIZED) (38D: Unduly harsh)!


Jeez louise in what world am I supposed to know the first name of the guy who invented Pong!? This one, apparently, but what a hellaciously stupid clue for Edgar Poe's middle name. The puzzle was mostly very easy, but I got slowed right down there toward the end, in the SW, when I couldn't get COMELIER to save my life, despite knowing very well what "pulchritudinous" means. Starts with "C" ... no idea. None. Perhaps because, like many things in this grid, No One Says This. I also botched the AMIE answer because ... the grid was already so crosswordesey that my brain somehow thought this clue was to do with "ABIE's Irish Rose," which ... look, I'm not going to go in to it, for fear of waking that answer from the dead, but it was a thing that used to appear in crosswords. Maybe my brain thought "ABIE's Irish Beau"? Dunno. Also, the SAMANTHA clue is garbage (91D: Bee, e.g.), in that you would never clue KANYE [West, e.g.] or WILL [Smith, e.g.]. Write a damn clue, for bee's sake!


On a technical level, you can see how theme answer placement gets the constructor into trouble in the south, where themers end up requiring a four-letter word that both starts and ends with "I"—unlikely. Choices are exceedingly limited right off the bat. So we get crosswordese, INRI, and also crosswordese STENO and crosswordese ASTI, and then this weird answer DOSO.

Let's see, what else? I had MARROW before YARROW, probably because my brain thought I was writing MALLOW (that's a plant, right?) (105D: Flowering herb also known as devil's nettle). In case you didn't know, HERA lost a beauty contest in which there were two other contestants: Athena and Aphrodite. Paris was the judge and he chose Aphrodite, for which he was "rewarded" with Helen, and the rest is ancient history (namely, the Trojan War). OK, enough with the mythology lessons—Happy Christmas Eve Eve!

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld (Twitter @rexparker / #NYTXW)

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