Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium if you knew FOUNTAINS OF WAYNE, probably harder if you didn't (3:32 on an oversized 16x15 grid)
THEME: ALTER EGO (9D: Secondary identity ... or what can be found in 18-, 27-, 40-, 54- and 66-Across) — familiar phrases clued as if they related to comic-book hero ALTER EGOs:
Theme answers:
DUKE OF KENT (18A: Superman's fist?)
STARK NAKED (27A: Iron Man without any clothes?)
FOUNTAINS OF WAYNE (40A: Batman's water springs?)
NOSY PARKER (54A: Spider-Man not minding his own business?)
I'm laughing this morning (in a friendly manner—more chuckling, really) at all the solvers out there looking at FOUNTAINS OF WAYNE and wondering "what, the, hell?" I know the band name well, as do millions of other people, but I Guar-An-Tee you a bajillion folks, mostly older (probably), will never have seen it before. Pretty big name in music... if you're under 50. Not a top 40 band, though, so whole chunks of the population just won't have any familiarity. I really feel like at least one of the members of the band is into crosswords—like I have a vague memory of having seen something on Twitter one time—but my brain could be making this up [updated: well, one of the members follows me on Twitter, so congrats to my brain for correctly, if fuzzily, remembering that]. This whole puzzle was pretty much up my alley, so even though it *felt* kinda harder-than-normal, I came in with a very normal time, and then was surprised to (finally) notice that the grid was oversized, which meant my time was actually a little on the fast side. I had one main problem solving this puzzle, which was that I totally misread the first theme clue (as [Superman's *first*?] instead of [Superman's fist?], which meant when I got the answer (finally), I didn't understand it fully, which meant all I was doing for the rest of the themers was getting crosses and looking for comic-book ALTER EGOs and trying to make phrases out of them—not really paying attention to the exact wording of the clues. I got FOUNTAINS OF WAYNE off just the -YNE, without ever looking at the clue. I'd just see the hero in the clue, and then I'd think of the ALTER EGO, look at whatever I had in the grid, and rolodex through phrases that might contain the name and fit in the grid. Worked fine.
Fill was hit and miss, with one of the misses being really awfully big—the kind of big that sticks with you and ruins an otherwise pleasant memory of your solve. I'm talking about INARABIC. A thousand times no. No. No. 998 more Nos. INARABIC is the GREENPAINT of language-related phrases. If you let in INARABIC, then you let in every single IN-[a language] phrase imaginable. I mean, INDUTCH, come on. Even INFRENCH or INENGLISH is patently stupid. Nothing else in the grid was this glaringly off. There was a buncha crosswordese, and I don't think PASEOS is really Tuesday-level fill (51D: Leisurely strolls), but I think the grid mostly held up just fine. Loved HEAT MAP, my favorite non-theme answer (34D: Colorful image in a weather report).
Weird, we get a My Chemical Romance clue (45A: My Chemical Romance genre => EMO), but ... NO WAY?*
[*Gerard WAY is the lead singer for My Chemical Romance]
Two things about this puzzle are startling. First, the theme, which is so conceptually remedial, I have a hard time imagining its running in any majoy daily, let alone the "gold standard" puzzle. You just take WAY out? To get tepid phrases that are sometimes actual things and sometimes non-things? ONE STREET? That's funny? That's ... what is that? This is a puzzle you make early in your career and it gets rejected and then you learn to make your themes more interesting. When I got to the revealer ("NO WAY!"), I thought, "That ... that can't be it. Is that it?" It was it. And the resulting answers: HIGH ROBBERY, not a thing (unless you smoke pot and then knock over a bank, I guess), SUBSTATIONS, absolutely a thing, ONE STREET, a thing but not a standalone thing ... and then there's RUN A TRAIN. This is where I really, really wonder if anyone took any time editing this thing. The *only* reaction to this puzzle that I saw on Twitter last night involved this answer. Go ahead and google RUN A TRAIN (in quotation marks) if you don't know what that phrase means in common parlance. Let's just say that if the NYT does indeed have a "breakfast test" for its answers, this one proooooooobably doesn't pass. Surely Will's younger assistants know the slang meaning of this phrase. I wonder if the constructors thought they were being cute, or had a bet, or something. "We'll never get this by him!" "Let's try!"
I found the puzzle really easy except for the far north, where BRETT (???) (6A: Lady ___ Ashley, Jake Barnes's love in "The Sun Also Rises") and BOBBER (it's not just "bob"?) (6D: Tackle box item) and especially RUBADUB (who doesn't love a partial nonsense phrase!?) (7D: Start of a children's rhyme) really gummed things up. The SW also slowed me down, as all that Cockney nonsense was unintelligible to me. Neither LONDONER (37D: Cockney, e.g.) nor 'ERE (68A: "Listen ___!" (Cockney cry)) came into view easily. I thought maybe the Cockney person (?) was saying "Listen 'A ME!" Ugh. Oh, and I forgot what a "jewel case" was (oh, these modern times!) and so CD-ROM (bygone!) was rough for me as well (53A: Jewel case insert). Also got thrown by the theme-length answer with the "?" clue that was *not* a themer (I really hate that sort of junk). CEMENT MASON is as long or longer than all themers and (like the themers) has a "?" clue, so I went looking for a missing WAY. To no avail. But the rest was a cinch and even these problem areas weren't tough to work out. But overall, this was unpleasant, in more ways than one.
A long time ago, I was solving this puzzle and got stuck at an unguessable (to me) crossing: N. C. WYETH crossing NATICK at the "N"—I knew WYETH but forgot his initials, and NATICK ... is a suburb of Boston that I had no hope of knowing. It was clued as someplace the Boston Marathon runs through (???). Anyway, NATICK— the more obscure name in that crossing—became shorthand for an unguessable cross, esp. where the cross involves two proper nouns, neither of which is exceedingly well known. NATICK took hold as crossword slang, and the term can now be both noun ("I had a NATICK in the SW corner...") or verb ("I got NATICKED by 50A / 34D!")
.png)
