Island WSW of Kauai / FRI 3-8-19 / 1912 Olympics locale / Song that hip hop rivalry might inspire / President until 2011 / W.W.E. legend John

Constructor: David Steinberg

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium (I think—again, untimed in the comfy chair, just waking up)

THEME: none

Word of the Day: NIIHAU (54A: Island WSW of Kauai) —

Niʻihau (/ˈniːhaʊ/; Hawaiian: [ˈniʔiˈhɐw]) is the westernmost and seventh largest inhabited island in Hawaiʻi. It is 17.5 miles (28.2 km) southwest of Kauaʻi across the Kaulakahi Channel. Its area is 69.5 square miles (180 km²).^[3] Several intermittent playa lakes provide wetland habitats for the Hawaiian coot, the Hawaiian stilt, and the Hawaiian duck. The island is designated as critical habitat for Brighamia insignis, an endemic and endangered species of Hawaiian lobelioid. The United States Census Bureau defines Niʻihau and the neighboring island and State Seabird Sanctuary of Lehua as Census Tract 410 of Kauai County, Hawaii. Its 2000 census population was 160; Its 2010 censuspopulation was 170. (wikipedia)

• • •

Hey there, it's early-morning solving time again for me. Printed this baby out and sat down with my cup of green tea (coffee is gone ... Lent ... don't ask ...) and my clipboard and went at it. Very civilized way to solve, I must say. I can see the virtue in not trying to race the timer, I really can. I mean, I'm not going to stop racing the timer, because it's mostly fun, but early in the morning, such speeding feels more and more like trying to do something physically demanding, like sprinting or playing basketball, first thing in the morning, i.e. dangerous and bad. Gotta warm up. I'm probably fitter than I've ever been in my life, but still, 20-year-old me, who subsisted on cigarettes, diet coke, fried burritos, and irony, could've bounced out of bed and leaped down stairs and played tennis from a cold start and been fine, whereas 49-year-old-me, with his (relatively) "healthy lifestyle," has to shuffle in the morning to keep from tripping and dying and needs at least an hour before he can even move like something that doesn't seem undead. I just imagine Now Me, trying to will himself into a standing position, shouting at Bad-Choices Young Me as he runs off to the dining hall to eat six bowls of Cinnamon Toast Crunch, "Hey! ... Ya smug jerk! ... I can bench press ... more than you ... whipper ... snapper!" Anyway, where was I? Oh, this puzzle. The grid was great, I thought. Yeah, good stuff.


Alllll of my trouble was up top, and almost all of that was caused by the CULTURE part of RAVE CULTURE (17A: Phenomenon characterized by electronic dance music). You have a culture, now, do you? Well la-di-dah. What year is it? Are there still raves? That seems so sadly retro. Anyway, I had RAVE C- and quite confidently wrote in RAVE CONCERT, though even then I thought, "that seems pretty high-culture terminology for whatever raves are." The problem: I think of "phenomenon" as a discrete event, not some nebulous concept like a "culture." Defensible clue, sure, but ugh. And I'd read "The Shallows" by Nicholas CARR, and that worked with CONCERT, so yeah I got nice and stuck for a bit. But I was easily able to get going again in the NE, swung back around to the NW via VERA WANG, saw clearly I was dealing with some kind of "TV" at 7D: Product from Panasonic (HDTV), and figured it all out from there. After that, the only problem was having both JEWISH and JUDAIC before MOSAIC in MOSAIC LAW (27A: Source of rules for keeping kosher), and then not knowing NIIHAU at all. Given how ridiculously small it is (see Word of the Day, above), my ignorance here is not something I feel particularly bad about.


I had BUDS before PODS (1A: Things cotton pickers pick), something ending -ING before ON A DIET (2D: Slimming down), and nearly wrote in MEGALOPOLIS before deciding I should probably actually look at the clue for 51A: Condition whose first two letters are oddly appropriate (MEGALOMANIA). Speaking of not looking at clues, I feel like it happens more when I solve on paper. I think I can just see or feel the whole grid a bit better, so somehow my guesses are more confident. Never saw clues on SUSHI RICE or AFCNORTH, for instance. I feel about dead-tree solving the way I feel about dead-tree reading—I have a better sense of the whole and a greater sense of control and understanding when I'm dealing with paper than when I'm dealing with its digital counterpart. The screen limits my brain in a way, and I get disoriented, not having a tactile sense of a thing's parameters. It's much much more efficient for me to solve on screen, but it's not a superior experience.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

P.S. here is the greatest puzzle error of all time, or at least this year:

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