Toy company that made Etch A Sketch a success / WED 12-16-20 / 2002 musical that won eight Tonys / Iditarod pace setter / Home of Minoan civilization

Constructor: Ed Salners and Alex Eaton-Salners

Relative difficulty: Medium (untimed)

THEME: GOVERNMENT BONDS (59A: Treasury notes ... or what the two sides of 17-, 23-, 37- and 52-Across are joined with?) — two-word phrases, each with a three-letter "government" agency embedded inside (in circles), spanning ("bonding?") both of the phrase words:

Theme answers:

• AIRCRAFT CARRIER (17A: Place to land that's not on land) (Federal Trade Commission)
• HAIRSPRAY (23A: 2002 musical that won eight Tonys) (Internal Revenue Service)
• SCREEN SAVER (37A: Very picture of idleness?) (National Security Agency)
• NEAT FREAK (52A: Felix of "The Odd Couple," for one) (Alcohol, Tobacco & Firearms)

Word of the Day: OHIO ART (2D: Toy company that made Etch A Sketch a success) —

The Ohio Art Company is an American toy manufacturing company founded in 1908. Based in Bryan, Ohio, the company is principally engaged in two lines of business. The first line of business is the sales, marketing, and distribution of toys. The second line of business is the company's Diversified Products segment which manufactures custom metal lithography products for food container and specialty premium markets. Examples of these are food tins, enclosures, DVD cases, and nostalgic signs. [...] In the late 1950s, a French electrician named André Cassagnes created a drawing toy that used a joystick, glass and aluminum powder. The combination, which he called the "Telecran", gave users the ability to draw a picture and also erase it. After much collaboration with many individuals, the system they developed in the late 1950s is the same one used today. The name of the product was Etch A Sketch. (wikipedia)

• • •

Sorry, short write-up today. Forgot to set the alarm. Woke up at 3 something because my legs were all cramped because the kitty cat (we got a second kitten, did I ever mention that?) was asleep right next to me and I couldn't roll over without squishing her so, yeah, cramped, and anyway I thought "well, it's 3 something, and I'm up, looks like I'm getting an early start on the puzzle," and then bang it was almost 6 and I had apparently forgotten to set my alarm for 5 and then I had to feed the cats before they mauled me to death from hunger panic and now well here we are. Giant opening sentence. Still: short write-up. I can't think of anything duller than government agencies—they're a necessary evil in crosswords, as they tend to be useful / necessary for caulking up little three-letter crannies in the grid structure, but no one likes them. Initialisms, specifically government initialisms, are tedious. Yawn. Now here's an entire puzzle based on them! Enjoy! In these answers, they're really government *agency* bonds. "Governments" are things like "republics" and "monarchies" and, uh, ochlocracies and so on. The concept was thematically uninteresting to me, and the three-letter agencies were arbitrary. Except NEAT FREAK, answers they resulted in weren't that interesting. Also, again, the editor or someone decided it would be cute to use a "?" clue on a themer when other themers aren't clued that way. Always awful. Never not an awful decision. Unless your theme requires "?" clues for *all* the themers, get your "?"s out of your system with the fill—there's so much of it! Putting a "?" on one themer and not the others just confuses matters. Boo.

OHIO ART is awful. I am sure I have seen this before and complained about it before, but it's simply not famous. Maybe it was, but it's not. Also, you had one toy hit in the '50s and we're supposed to remember your ridiculous, long, not intuitive 7-letter name? Nothing about the Etch A Sketch says OHIO and hardly anything about it says ART. If you're desperate enough to need it, at least, I don't know, have something in the clue that indicates there's a midwestern state in there or something. "... named after the state it's based in," something. Old and arcane and taking up a ton of real estate. Yuck. Send INAREA back to wherever it came from to (55A: How Russia ranks first among all countries). Truly terrible. Surprised it's legal. INHEIGHT? INWEIGHT? INPOPULATION? You see how dumb this is, right? Makes INOT look like good fill (it isn't). First thing I got in the grid was PAREN (oof) and that was clearly a bad omen. Or a trendsetter, I guess, as the rest of the puzzle was about that interesting. Most of the grid actually holds up fine, to be fair, but there was no joy to be had today. ACT NICE I almost like (25D: Show decorum). Oh, LEAD DOG, I do love dogs, that was nice (42D: Iditarod pace setter). And NEAT FREAK, as I said, is good. But I don't know what you'd want to take one of the more boring aspects of solving crosswords (i.e. negotiating 3-letter gov. agencies) and make a whole puzzle about it, let alone one with an absolutely anti-scintillating revealer like GOVERNMENT BONDS. Harrumph. Gonna go play with kitties. Have a nice day.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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