Small flat-bottomed boat / WED 3-10-21 / Title matchmaker in 1815 novel / Start of a saying about getting in the way / Polysemous words have multiple of these

Constructor: Nancy Stark and Will Nediger

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium

THEME: SPOILER ALERT (54A: Warning you might give before revealing the endings of 20-, 29- and 45-Across) — theme answers are the front ends of familiar adages, the back ends of which all begin with SPOIL(S):

Theme answers:

• TOO MANY COOKS (spoil the broth) (20A: Start of a saying about getting in the way)
• ONE BAD APPLE (spoils the whole bunch) (29A: Start of a saying about negative influence)
• SPARE THE ROD (spoil the child) (45A: Start of a saying about parental discipline)

Word of the Day: Bob SEGER (32A: Rocker Bob) —

Robert Clark Seger (/ˈsiːɡər/; born May 6, 1945) is an American singer, songwriter and musician. As a locally successful Detroit-area artist, he performed and recorded as Bob Seger and the Last Heardand Bob Seger System throughout the 1960s, breaking through with his first album, Ramblin' Gamblin' Man (which contained his first national hit of the same name) in 1968. By the early 1970s, he had dropped the 'System' from his recordings and continued to strive for broader success with various other bands. In 1973, he put together the Silver Bullet Band, with a group of Detroit-area musicians, with whom he became most successful on the national level with the album Live Bullet (1976), recorded live with the Silver Bullet Band in 1975 at Cobo Hall in Detroit, Michigan. In 1976, he achieved a national breakout with the studio album Night Moves. On his studio albums, he also worked extensively with the Alabama-based Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section, which appeared on several of Seger's best-selling singles and albums.

A roots rocker with a classic raspy, powerful voice, Seger wrote and recorded songs that dealt with love, women, and blue-collar themes, and is an example of a heartland rock artist. He has recorded many hits, including "Night Moves", "Turn the Page", "Still the Same", "We've Got Tonite", "Against the Wind", "You'll Accomp'ny Me", "Hollywood Nights", "Shame on the Moon", "Like a Rock", and "Shakedown", the last of which was written for the 1987 film Beverly Hills Cop II and topped the Billboard Hot 100 chart. He also co-wrote the Eagles' number-one hit "Heartache Tonight", and his recording of "Old Time Rock and Roll" was named one of the Songs of the Century in 2001.

With a career spanning six decades, Seger has sold more than 75 million records worldwide, making him one of the world's best-selling artists of all time. Seger was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2004 and the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2012. (wikipedia)

• • •

This was a ride. I went from "WHY am I getting only the front ends of adages!?" to "WHY in the world would anyone want to 'spoil' and adage, or think that was something it was even possible to do!?" to "Ohhhhh ... *spoil* ... I see ... hmm ... yeah, that weirdly works." This is definitely the direction you want your feelings to go in over the course of a solve. Much better than "This seems nice" followed by a series of potholes and finally your car skidding off the road into a ditch. Understanding the theme really does require mentally finishing all of the adages, so hopefully you knew ... those? I never know with adages like these whether they have currency any more with younger people. "TOO MANY COOKS" was the title of a viral video a while back, though I don't think anyone in the video ever finished the adage. The Osmonds version of "ONE BAD APPLE" is the version of the adage that lives in my head, and that song actually reverses the adage ("ONE BAD APPLE don't spoil the whole bunch, girl..."), but the "spoil" part comes through all right. SPARE THE ROD seems most likely to be dated, i.e. least likely to be familiar to younger readers, though like all adages with which I'm familiar, they don't seem to belong to time, exactly, so who knows. Certainly a maxim exhorting the value of beating children is less likely to find a friendly audience today than in the past, for good reason. All the adages were familiar to me, though, so the "spoil" part of the joke was able to land properly. 


The fill is mostly clean, and the symmetrical drinking establishments (IRISH PUBS / SPORTS BAR) was a nice touch. The clue on GLOB seemed a little lazy. I could trip on virtually anything on the floor, and FLOOR MAT is not a tripping hazard that immediately comes to mind. I'm not even sure what they mean by FLOOR MAT. Mats come in "door" or "welcome" varieties. Oh, there's a bath mat, certainly. But FLOOR MAT, as a thing around your house (which is where I just assumed the tripping would occur), that didn't hit home for me ... even though, now, as I look around, I notice I have two decorative pieces in my home office, painted by my grandmother, which could only be described as FLOOR MATs, and I've almost certainly tripped over them at least once ... whatever, I put FLOOR RUG here, thinking a rug the most likely tripping culprit. ERRATA should be only for books—tedious to put the logically correct answer for the clue, ERRORS, and then have to erase it. Especially tedious when your thought on entering ERRORS was "man, I hope they don't want ERRATA here, that would suck." My least favorite of the clues, though, was the one on MENTAL (1D: Like solving crosswords), because again, in attempting to get cute and winky, you make things vague and unpleasant. Most things you do are MENTAL, even when they're physical, and crossword puzzles are physical as well (ask a speed solver about the importance of grid navigation technique). So the puzzle is all "tehee, I'm being meta" but all I am thinking is "you've swapped aptness for cutesiness, bad call." 

Still, the only real trouble I had with the puzzle came in the west, where ALLOW was hard for me to get to (the usage described by the clue here feels slightly old-fashioned, so it didn't spring to mind quickly). Actually WASH was probably the toughest element over there, since "Draw" can mean a lot of things, and I'd use "draw" more for a specific contest, but WASH for more of an overall situation ... I wouldn't say a match ended in a WASH, is what I'm saying. But the clue is apt enough, just tough. Then there's the cutesy "?" clue on WASP, which doesn't quite land for me, as the "center" part of the clue doesn't really refer to anything specific. But maybe the sting is "centered" (by definition?) in the WASP itself, I dunno. Anyway, I bumbled (!) through that corner. The rest of the grid, no problem.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld 

P.S. happily watching the "Too Many Cooks" video (above) and had a genuine record-scratch moment when I noticed what was on the coffee table in this shot:

So ... the crossword contains TOO MANY COOKS and
"TOO MANY COOKS" contains crosswords. Nice.

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