Eponym for a ship in a famous thought experiment / SAT 7-20-24 / Characters in "300" / David Grammy-winning French D.J. / Touring show for figure skaters / Punish like Montressor does Fortunato in "The Cask of Amontillado" / ___ Wood, portrayer of the Bond girl Plenty O'Toole in "Diamonds Are Forever"

Constructor: Ricky J. Sirois

Relative difficulty: Medium (Hard, then Easy)

THEME: none 

Word of the Day: Ship of THESEUS (21D: Eponym for a ship in a famous thought experiment) —

The Ship of Theseus, also known as Theseus's Paradox, is a thought experiment and paradox about whether an object is the same object after having had all of its original components replaced over time, typically one after the other.

In Greek mythology, Theseus, mythical king of the city Athens, rescued the children of Athens from King Minos after slaying the minotaur and then escaped onto a ship going to Delos. Each year, the Athenians would commemorate this by taking the ship on a pilgrimage to Delos to honour Apollo. A question was raised by ancient philosophers: After several hundreds of years of maintenance, if each individual piece of the Ship of Theseus was replaced, one after the other, was it still the same ship?

In contemporary philosophy, this thought experiment has applications to the philosophical study of identity over time, and has inspired a variety of proposed solutions and concepts in contemporary philosophy of mind concerned with the persistence of personal identity. (wikipedia)

• • •

[at Point Pelee National Park, Ontario, Canada]

Oof, I am out of practice. When I go on vacation I Go On Vacation, which means I haven't so much as looked at a crossword puzzle since my last write-up on Whenever That Was (last Sunday, I think). I'd planned to blog throughout the week, but then the internet at our lake house turned out to be spectacularly bad, and so my stand-ins mercifully stood in and I got to take the week off. Genuinely off. It was great. I stared at Lake ERIE (4) from my back deck and watched the birds and listened to Barry Manilow and Dan Fogelberg and the Bee Gees and George Benson and Ambrosia and whatever other mellow childhood radio tunes my best friends decided to play on their little outdoor speaker cube thingie. Drank cocktails, read books, walked around quaint little towns eating gelato. Zero puzzles done. 

[MARI'S Gelato in Kingsville—a must]

And then I come back to a Saturday! Thrown in the deep end. I floundered around the NW corner of this one like a total incompetent, though, to be fair, some of the clues were dumb (who has bungee jumping on their BUCKET LIST!? Is bungee jumping still a thing? Feels like an "extreme sport" from the '90s—I wanted the answer to be ESPN ... something—"Hey, you wanna watch bungee-jumping?" "No." "Cool, I'll just turn on ESPN X-TREME." "I said 'no.'") (I think I also just hate the term BUCKET LIST, the way it sounds, the very idea of it ... just do the things you want to do, you don't need some mythical list, which almost certainly is not an actual "list" anyway). "STARS ON ICE?" (17A: Touring show for figure skaters). That feels made-up. ICE CAPADES is a very real and well-known thing. "STARS ON 45," also a very real thing, and once well known. "STARS ON ICE?" Maybe it's super famous and I just can't think of anything I'd want to go to less except maybe a monster truck rally (do they still have those?). I went to grad school in Michigan and know the names of all the little colleges there (my good friend taught at Adrian College for a while), and I *knew* ALMA, but couldn't retrieve it. Access denied. No idea about the Spanish province, forgot or blanked on the Hangul writing system. Entire NW, a washout. I had YDS and LAN and TREAT, and I wasn't really certain about those last two. Pitifully, shamefully, my first toehold came from the completely ordinary and unremarkable YDS / STAT cross-reference. Got STAT because I had YDS (and the "A" from TREAT) in place. Tried "I WAS NOT!," which, while not correct, was 5/7 correct, which was enough to get me into the PEN TENOR RAPPER section, and then things began to open up a little.

Part of my NW flubbery was (somehow) not even seeing the clue at 19A: Actors Feldman and Haim (COREYS), which would've been a gimme ... if I'd been able to spell. I thought COREY was CORY, and so for my plural, I had (logically!) CORIES, LOL. I was like, "Is that right? Is that how you pluralize Y-ending names? 'I wonder how many GARIES I know...' No, that looks bad." Sigh. But I figured it out, and I (somehow!) knew David GUETTA, despite being able to name absolutely nothing he's done (32A: David ___, Grammy-winning French D.J.). I just remembered seeing "ft. David GUETTA" on a bunch of song titles earlier this century, or maybe it's "David GUETTA, ft. [someone else]" (yes, that's it—he's collaborated with a ton of singers, including AKON, who shows up in puzzles sometimes, or did, once).

I also totally forgot about the Ship of THESEUS, which made getting into the NE corner very, very hard. Well, harder than it could've/should've been. Thought maybe the ship was "THE something," like "THE ZEUS" or "THE DEUS" (deus = Lat. for "god"). Speaking of "THE," THE EYE (26A: A bad look) was rough, both because it’s hard to parse ( “THEE-?”), and because it really wants to be THE Evil EYE or THE Stink EYE. I don't think of THE EYE as a "bad look," exactly. If you give someone THE EYE, you're checking them out in an at-least-semi-horny fashion ("to look at someone in a way that shows sexual attraction" — merriam-webster dot com). Thank god I knew window shades were PLEATED, because the NE might've been inaccessible otherwise. PLEATED gave me EXPAT gave me EXXON, and I was able to get up into the corner from there. After that, the puzzle got remarkably easy. Followed ALGEBRA into the SE and, with the help of NAPE PATH PABST (all easy), got all the long answers down there, no sweat. And the SW was even easier. Lit that part up like it was dry grass. Whoosh. NO CAN DO + PROTIP + GADOT, gimme gimme gimme and ... done. 

Bullets:

• 16A: ___ Wood, portrayer of the Bond girl Plenty O'Toole in "Diamonds Are Forever" (LANA) — we're still doing Bond Girls of Yore? With so many good (and actually famous) LANAs to choose from? Boo. 

Lana Turner has collapsed! 
I was trotting along and suddenly
it started raining and snowing
and you said it was hailing
but hailing hits you on the head
hard so it was really snowing and
raining and I was in such a hurry
to meet you but the traffic
was acting exactly like the sky
and suddenly I see a headline 
LANA TURNER HAS COLLAPSED!
there is no snow in Hollywood
there is no rain in California
I have been to lots of parties
and acted perfectly disgraceful
but I never actually collapsed
oh Lana Turner we love you get up 

    ([Lana Turner has collapsed], Frank O'Hara, 1964)

• 42D: Characters in "300" (ZEROS) — a "letteral" clue, but for numerals, which are "characters" ("a graphic symbol [...] used in writing or printing" (merriam webster dot com); here the character in question is "0" (which is in "300," twice, along with "3," obviously)
• 9D: Small denomination (SECT) — well, the misdirect worked; I was thinking currency. But are SECTs "small," by definition? Smaller than the group they broke from, sure. But if they're a full-blown "denomination," then "small" seems ... misleading. Possible, but not definitive.
• 25D: Punish like Montressor does Fortunato in "The Cask of Amontillado" (ENTOMB) — I had the "EN-" part and thought "... is ENWALL a word?" But I decided to go with the more recognizable ENTOMB. Great story, that one.
• 34D: Indigenous people of the Pacific Northwest (NEZ PERCE) — my mom grew up in northern Idaho, in St. Maries (just north of the original NEZ PERCE territory), so NEZ PERCE is probably one of the first Native American tribal names I ever learned.

[Green = original territory, brown = reservation]

• 38D: Have to shave one's head, perhaps (LOSE A BET) — I had LOSE and wrote in HAIR. That's why I shaved my head. "Yes, THAT TRACKS," I thought. But no.
• 
  36D: Horses around? (CAROUSEL) — the highlight of the puzzle. Just a great clue. I live in the CAROUSEL City. Well, it's actually called "The Parlor City," but it's also known as "The CAROUSEL Capital of the World." Seriously. George F. Johnson (of Endicott-Johnson shoes) built parks for his workers all over the area, including CAROUSELs, some of which are still operational (including one in Rec Park, just a stone's throw (give/take) from my house). The local minor league team here (a Mets Double-A affiliate) is called the Binghamton Rumble Ponies (an olde-tymey name for CAROUSEL horses). 

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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