THEME: GO BANANAS (61A: Flip out ... or a hint to the beginnings of 17-, 27-, 39- and 51-Across) — first words of theme answers can follow "banana" in a familiar phrase:
Theme answers:
BOATHOUSE (17A: Crew building)
BREAD BOX (27A: "Is it bigger than a ___?")
SPLIT DECISION (39A: Close boxing match outcome)
SLUGFEST (51A: All-out boxing match)
Word of the Day: "GIRL" (32A: Beatles song with the lyric "She promises the earth to me") —
"Girl" is a song by the English rock band the Beatles from their 1965 album Rubber Soul. It was written by John Lennon and credited to Lennon–McCartney. "Girl" was the last complete song recorded for that album. "Girl" is considered to be one of the most melancholic and complex of the Beatles' love songs. [...] In early 1966, "Girl" was issued as the B-side of "Michelle" in several European countries, reaching number one in Finland. It was also released as the A-side of a single in Italy, backed by "Nowhere Man", which reached number seven on the nation's Musica e Dischi singles chart.
• • •
A very straightforward and old-fashioned theme with a mildly kooky revealer. I liked it fine. It's a little too heavy on the short stuff—so lots of nooks/crannies, lots of 3-4-5s, but there are also a bevy of long Downs to brighten up the grid, so ... things balance out a bit. The long Downs were the most challenging part of the grid, from a Downs-only solving perspective. Actually, a few of them were gimmes (I BEFORE E, MERMAIDS), but STEP COUNTER took me some time because I (stupidly) guessed CAMINO instead of CASINO—I mean, of course it's CASINO, why would it be CAMINO, that's so much less likely!? The toughest of the long Downs to get (with very little help from inferred crosses) was "I'LL START" (41D: "Let me go first!"). As you can see by the cursor placement in the grid printout above, "I'LL START" is the very last thing I got. The "I" and the "S" and the "A" were the only things I knew for sure, and I kept wanting it to start "I'M" or "IT'S." Finally realized the only thing SHE- was likely to be was SHEL. SHEL helped me see "I'LL" as a possible opening, and from there "I'LL START" seemed obvious. My only other issues were minor. Wrote in ELKS instead of GNUS at first for 6D: African antelopes—again, a truly bad guess. That clue on HIND is a toughie (18D: Female red deer). I know the term from 17c. poetry, but yikes, you'd think on Monday you'd just go with [Rear] or [Posterior] or [___ legs] or something like that. In fact, that's what every constructor has done with HIND since 2005. This is only the third HIND-as-female-deer clue in the entire Shortz Era (and both the others were on Sundays). Bizarre choice. But the puzzle is still Monday-easy overall, so why not go with a deep cut for HIND, I guess.
Speaking of deep cuts ... I know this will come as a surprise to Baby Boomers, but not everybody knows every word to every Beatles song ever (anymore?). I never saw the clue on "GIRL" because I solve Downs-only, but if I had, I'd've been baffled. I know the song, it turns out, from years of classic rock radio-listening as a teenager, but that lyric, yeesh—it does nothing. "GIRL" was not even released as a single in the U.S.—it was the B-side of "Michelle," which I just learned was also not released as a single in the U.S. (!?!?!?!?!?!), which seems impossible, since it's iconic—also, it won the Grammy Award for Song of the Year in 1967. But nope, not a single in the U.S. So "GIRL" was a B-side to a single released only in various European countries (not the UK!?) and New Zealand. If you had to name two dozen Beatles songs, you would not name "GIRL." No, shh, you would not, please stop. As with HIND, the clue on "GIRL" today is baffling. More baffling. But as with HIND, the crosses are all fair, and easy, so ... whatever.
Bullets:
47D: To be, in Barcelona (SER) — Spanish words have been a mainstay of U.S. crosswords for a while now, but ... how many is too many? I'm gonna say four (4!) is too many (SER, ISLA, ENERO, SI SI). If I left one out, that means there are more than four (4!), which would still be too many. More so.
34D: Word hidden, aptly, in "teen's language" (SLANG) — from relatively obscure deer terminology and minor Beatles B-sides to this—child's placemat-level gimmes. Boo. Also, if you really want your puzzle to seem old, make a quaint joke about "teen's language"
51D: Animal that sleeps upside down (SLOTH) — wanted KOALA. Actually wanted BAT but as you can see, doesn't fit. Doesn't a SLOTH do everything upside down? "[T]ree sloths spend most of their lives hanging upside down" (wikipedia). Let's see if this is true ... yep, checks out.
51A: All-out boxing match (SLUGFEST) — it's a minor thing, but I think it would've been better to take this clue away from "boxing" specifically, since the preceding themer is already using "boxing match." A high-scoring baseball game is often called a SLUGFEST, you could go that direction.
That's all for today. See you next time.
Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld
[all proceeds go to WFMU, the best listener-supported radio in the whole dang world]
[Follow Rex Parker on BlueSky and Facebook and Letterboxd] ============================= ❤️ Support this blog ❤️:
THEME: BEST ACTRESS (60A: Academy Award category ... or a hint to the starts of the answers to the starred clues) — first words of theme answers are also last names of women who won BEST ACTRESS Oscars:
Theme answers:
(Sally) FIELD HOCKEY (16A: *Outdoor sport with sticks (1979, 1984))
(Emma) STONE AGE (25A: *Period for Fred, Wilma and Pebbles (2016, 2023))
(Jodie) FOSTER DOG (35A: *Temporary guest from a canine shelter (1988, 1991))
(Halle) BERRY PIE (51A: *Popular fruit dessert (2001))
Word of the Day: EFREM Zimbalist, Jr. (55A: Zimbalist Jr. of "77 Sunset Strip")—
Efrem Zimbalist Jr. (November 30, 1918 – May 2, 2014) was an American actor and theatre producer. Known for his "mellifluous voice and air of sophistication," he was known to television audiences for his starring roles on the crime drama series 77 Sunset Strip (1958–64) and The F.B.I. (1965–74), his recurring role as "Dandy Jim" Buckley on Maverick (1957–58), and as the voice of Alfred Pennyworth in the DC Animated Universe. He also appeared in numerous films and on the Broadway stage. He was a Golden Globe Award winner (out of four total nominations) and a two-time Primetime Emmy Award nominee.
Let me tell you about the nine-year EFREM Zimbalist drought of the late 20th century. It was the mid-80s. Ronald Reagan had just been re-elected and everyone figured that Zimbalist, who had campaigned for Goldwater 20 years earlier, would soar to even greater crossword prominence in Reagan's America. But as Reagan's second term wore on, EFREM found himself and his father, a famous violinist of the same name, snubbed from the grid, year after year. Some said the EFREM name was blackballed after it got out that Zimbalist Jr. had supported John Anderson in 1980. Some say it was because he made joking comments about "jellybeans" and "astrologers" when asked about Reagan for a 1985 Playboy interview. Some say his disappearance from the grid was a total coincidence. I say those people have no imagination. Anyway, the EFREM Zimabalist Jr. blackout continued under George H.W. Bush, lending more credence to the idea that the Great EFREM Erasure was indeed political payback. After Clinton was elected, EFREM's fortunes changed. Clinton, an avid solver himself, saw an opportunity to leave his mark on the crossword landscape, and one of the first things he did was restore EFREM to crossword prominence. Thus EFREM finally reappeared in 1993 after a nearly nine-year absence, and went on to appear nine (9) more times in the Clinton Era. After that, George W. Bush., as if attempting to outdo Clinton while simultaneously distancing himself from his father's legacy, supported the Zimbalist revival with even greater fervor: EFREM made a whopping twelve (12) appearances during W's presidency. Since then, and particularly following Zimbalist's death in 2014, EFREM enthusiasm has waned, though we've never seen anything close to the nine-year EFREM drought of the late '80s / early '90s. (Note: some of the above is verifiably true—the crossword stats, mostly; and the Goldwater part; the rest, who knows? Maybe)
I want to thank today's puzzle for ... well, reminding me that EFREM Zimbalist Jr. once existed (and that I couldn't pick him out of a line-up on a dare), as well as for reminding me that the Oscars are coming up (Sunday, Mar. 15). As for this theme, it's OK, I guess. A first-words theme. Feels like the kind of thing that's been done before, not terribly imaginative. But timely! I wish there were more to it. I wish the revealer were snappier instead of just literal and explanatory. I wish the fill were a little less ye olde (TET ARS URSA ... EFREM for god's sake). But all in all it's a totally acceptable Monday puzzle. The longer Downs aren't all that long, but they are solid, and even though its letters aren't terribly exciting, I really liked "SEE HERE!" I like quaint indignation. "I say! SEE HERE! That's not cricket!" I had a blarghy feeling about the fill after the NW corner (URSA AOL ESP already had me teetering, and then UNFED tipped me into mild gag territory). But things evened out. I don't really believe BERRY PIE is a thing. What Kind Of Berry!? No way I'm ordering some mystery "BERRY" PIE. That was the one answer that made me grimace when it came into view. But I love FOSTER DOG a ton, and UPSELLS is also pretty fab, so I come out on the thumbs-up side today.
So weird to find out today that so many of the Best Actress Oscar winners who fit this theme (i.e. whose last names are also ordinary words) are also multiple Best Actress Oscar winners. I'd forgotten that Sally Field won two. I can name every movie referred to in today's theme clues except the one Field won for in 1984—I remember the infamous speech ("You like me, you really like me..."), but I'll be damned if I can remember what she won for. Was it Places in the Heart!? [checks with the internet]. It was! Ha! Thank you, brain! Good ol' brain, still working. For now. For the record, the movies referred to today are:
Sally Field: Norma RAE (of crossword fame!!) (1979); Places in the Heart (1984)
Emma Stone: La La Land (2016); Poor Things (2023)
Jodie Foster: The Accused (1988); TheSilence of the Lambs (1991)
Halle Berry: Monster’s Ball (2001)
Stone is nominated again this year for Bugonia, though I think it's something of a foregone conclusion that Jessie Buckley is going to win for Hamnet (a movie I have no interest in seeing ... I can't really explain it ... I like Shakespeare ... I love Paul Mescal ... Jessie Buckley is fantastic ... I think I'm just allergic to Oscar Bait). I just saw Halle Berry in Crime 101, which made me wonder why she isn't in more things. Or maybe she's been in a ton of things and I just missed them all. She is charming in Crime 101 as an insurance agent specializing in "high-wealth" customers who finds herself devalued by her bosses because she's "old" and (therefore?) (allegedly?) losing her ability to hook clients with sex appeal. This is the least plausible part of the movie, as Halle Berry looks stunning at all times. Hard to look at anyone else when she's on screen. But whatever, she plays the part really convincingly and endearingly, and she has an odd and compelling chemistry with Mark Ruffalo (a cop who figures out that Berry has gotten involved in some criminal shenanigans).
Bullets:
64A: Vietnamese holiday with a palindromic name (TET) — did we really need the "with a palindromic name" part? TET is one of the most common crossword words there is. Even if you're a total crossword novice and have never heard of TET, those crosses are all easy. No need to do so much handholding, NYT! I know it's Monday, but yeesh.
10D: They go to a higher court (APPEALS) — pretty straightforward, but from a Downs-only perspective, this was not so easy for me. The hardest answer of the puzzle, maybe. It just felt like there was some kind of mild trickery going on. Like, maybe the court was a basketball court or a tennis court, or a food court. Maybe "court" was being used to mean something like a "story" in a building and the answer was something like "escalators" or "elevators" or "stairways." Thankfully, none of these fit, and eventually I was able to infer some of the crosses and get to APPEALS.
11D: Round up, as cattle (WRANGLE) — again, easy enough, but with no letters in place I couldn't think of this word at first. The only thing that came to mind was RUSTLE, which wouldn't fit.
38D: Biceps, boastfully (GUNS) — this was great. Much more fun to think of arms than to think of ... arms.
54D: Group assisting a sheriff (POSSE) — this was grim. Made me think of lynching. I'll take a hip-hop POSSE over a sheriff's POSSE any day.
That's all. See you next time.
Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld
[Follow Rex Parker on BlueSky and Facebook and Letterboxd] ============================= ❤️ Support this blog ❤️:
Constructor: Jeff Jerome and Andrea Carla Michaels
Relative difficulty: Medium, maybe a little tougher (solved Downs-only)
THEME: BUNK BEDS (59A: Camp sleeping spots ... or a hint to this puzzle's circled letters) — BED appears over BED in three pairs of sequential circled letters:
Theme answers:
DISROBED
SUBBED (18A: Prepared to bathe + 23A: Filled in (for), for short)
HOBNOBBED
STUBBED TOE (24A: Schmoozed (with) + 28A: Slight injury from tripping)
DUBBED FILM
BEDAZZLED (46A: Foreign-language movie that you don't have to read subtitles for / 52A: Enchanted)
Word of the Day: NTSB (25D: Crash-investigating org.) —
The revealer is completely anticlimactic. If you solve top-down, you can see that there is BED over BED, three times, so BUNK BEDS comes as no real surprise. There's no wordplay, no cute turn of phrase. The revealer just tells me what is pretty obvious. I was thinking "double bed," but BUNK BEDS, yes, that's better, but not exactly a surprise. The concept seems solid but not particularly clever or exciting. 5/6ths of the "BED"s are past tense verbs (even if two are being used adjectivally), which gives the themer set a kind of monotony. BEDAZZLED is the best themer by far, and it's the only one that bucks the "-BED"-as-past-tense trend. The adjacent double letters necessitated by the theme results in some of the grid's less pleasing fill. Mostly, the results are boring (DDE, DDAY), but you also get into murky proper noun territory (esp. with TUBB—not a name I'd expect to see on a Monday ... I'm not 100% sure who he is, though the name is familiar), and then there's FLEEK, which ... has anyone said "on FLEEK" since 2017? (11D: On ___ (looking great, in slang)). "Eyebrows on FLEEK" was a social media phenomenon for a hot second in the mid '10s, and then poof, gone—like so many hyper-brief faddish expressions. Remember "6-7." It's already dead. No adult had even heard of it before this past summer, but by October it was getting all kinds of press—some short-sighted dictionary even made "6-7" its Word of the Year. But now ... pfft. The entire life cycle of that non-expression was less than six months. Anyway, I guess maybe "on FLEEK" is still around somewhere, being used unironically by someone, but it feels real dated. Like, prehistoric, as social media-inspired slang goes. Constructors would be well-advised to yeet FLEEK (YEET has a strange staying power, don't ask me why). To give you an idea of how old FLEEK is ... it started with a Vine. Remember Vine? LOL. Wow.
Note: The phrase on fleek originated in a posting to the video-sharing platform Vine on June 21, 2014, by Kayla Lewis, a sixteen-year-old girl with the user name Peaches Monroee. In later interviews Ms. Lewis said that she had made up the word fleek on the spot when the video was shot. However, it has been reported that fleek appeared prior to 2014 on the Urban Dictionary website: in 2003 a contributor defined fleek as "smooth, nice, sweet," with the example sentence "That was a fleek move you pulled on that chic[k]." Another contributor entered the word in 2009, defining fleek as "awesome," as in "That was a fleek game." For background see "How 'on fleek' went from a 16-year-old's Vine to the Denny's Twitter account," by Constance Grady, posted on the website Vox on March 28, 2017; and "Geeking Out On 'Fleek,'" by Neal Whitman, posted on visualthesaurus.com on February 23, 2015. (merriam-webster.com)
Apparently Ariana Grande also did a Vine (is that what you do? Do a Vine? Is that the lingo?), where she basically sang the text of Monroee's original Vine, and that sent the phrase into pop culture stratosphere ... for a while. I can pretty much pinpoint the moment that "on FLEEK" started to die. It's right ... here:
If there's currently a FLEEK Renaissance afoot, I am unaware.
This grid is fine, if not particularly on FLEEK. Lots of cheater squares* today—two of them in each of those Utah-shaped blocks of black squares (the two black squares above PIBB and below FALA), and then the black squares above TBAR and below KIDD. With that many cheaters, I'd expect a cleaner grid—not so much ARTOO ARESO ARI NTSB ENYA TBAR ASA RES INE (!?) IMO DAS THO action. TERM LIMIT feels strange in the singular. There are TERM LIMITS, and a governor / president / etc. might be TERM-LIMITED, but TERM LIMIT isn't as common. "IT'S ABSURD" is colorful but also a bit absurd, in that the clue (3D: "Ridiculous!") is really just a clue for "ABSURD!" The "IT'S" part feels completely tacked on. Plus, "THAT'S ABSURD!" feels like the better, more familiar phrase.
Solving Downs-only, my biggest fail today was forgetting (and I mean forgetting—spectacularly, catastrophically forgetting) how to spell the name of TOULOUSE-Lautrec. When I look at it now, I can't imagine why I wanted to spell it any other way than the correct way. And Yet. TOLOUSSE. TALOUSSE. TALLOUSE, TOLLOUSE. Between that, not being certain of ARESO (2D: "You ___ right!"), and the difficulty parsing "IT'S ABSURD," the NW was certainly the most challenging part today. Elsewhere, I thought FALA was LALA (as in, "FA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA"), and utterly blanked on Tim WALZ, LOL. That was fast. VP candidate one moment, gone from my brain the next. I actually wrote in KANE, thereby misspelling Tim KAINE's name, forgetting that KAINE was a senator (although he had also been governor), and putting KAINE on a presidential ticket eight years after the fact. Triple fail! I also wrongly imagined that a SEDAN and not a COUPE had two doors (50D: Two-door auto). And I thought TUBB was WEBB (38D: Ernest in the Country Music Hall of Fame). Surely there's a WEBB in the Country Music Hall of Fame ... yep, here we go, looks like WEBB Pierce (1921-91) was inducted posthumously in 2001. And then there's Jimmy WEBB, who, despite winning a Grammy in 1986 for Best Country Song ("Highwaymen"), and despite being in the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame, does not appear to be in the Country Music Hall of Fame. Dude wrote "Wichita Lineman" and "By the Time I Get to Phoenix" and "Galveston"!? And "MacArthur Park"!? That's range.
As for Ernest TUBB—well, among his many accomplishments, he was the first singer to record a hit version of "Blue Christmas."
That's all for today. Let's move on to 🌲🐈Holiday Pet Pics🐕🌲! First up is Koko, seen here rooting for my "local" team (nevermind that Buffalo is ~4 hours away—you still see Bills gear everywhere). You can tell this is a "Holiday" photo because Koko is staring down the word "Christmas" like it's a sausage.
[Thanks, Anne!]
Then there's Riley, seen here chewing on a toy, which was the price of getting Riley to pose for this photo in the first place. At least I think it's a toy. Could be a mouse, I guess. Or a meatball, though I doubt a dog would hold a meatball in its mouth that gingerly.
[Thanks, Laura!]
Here's Willow, enjoying the Ithaca snow. She's wearing a GPS collar because she apparently likes to go on little "side adventures." Rescuing avalanche victims, no doubt.
[Thanks, Adam!]
We've got kind of a "Where's Waldo?" situation going on here with Lulu. It's like she wandered into a Home Goods photo shoot and got lost among the Holiday cheer. Where's Lulu? Oh, there she is, on the bed, where you'd expect.
[Thanks, Bonnie!]
Astro does not appreciate your holiday sense of humor one bit.
["Is this a joke? Is this supposed to be funny?"] [Thanks, Amanda!]
And lastly, there's Moose. Moose knows how Astro feels. Actually, I think Moose just wants to go out and play with the other very handsome dog who would surely be his friend. Poor Moose.
[Thanks, Pamela!]
See you next time.
Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld
*Cheater squares are black squares that do not add to the overall word count, usually added to the grid solely to make filling the grid easier for the constructor(s).
[Follow Rex Parker on BlueSky and Facebook and Letterboxd] ============================= ❤️ Support this blog ❤️:
Constructor: Kevin Christian and Andrea Carla Michaels
Relative difficulty: Easy
THEME: ACS (65D: Summer coolers, for short ... or a hint to the answers to the starred clues) — theme answers are familiar phrases/names with the initials "A.C.":
Theme answers:
ACCESS CODE (17A: *PIN, e.g.)
ALLEY CAT (26A: *Stray feline)
AMBULANCE CHASER (40A: *Overly eager personal injury lawyer, derisively)
AL CAPONE (52A: *Gangster a.k.a. Scarface)
ALARM CLOCK (66A: *Morning waker-upper)
AREA CLOSED (10D: *Warning sign that might be seen on a chain-link fence)
ALBUM COVER (30D: *Record art space)
Word of the Day: ART Fleming (24A: Fleming who was the original host of "Jeopardy!") —
Arthur Fleming Fazzin (May 1, 1924 – April 25, 1995) was an American actor and television host. He hosted the first version of the television game showJeopardy!, which aired on NBC from 1964 until 1975 and again from 1978 to 1979. [...] After leaving the Navy, Fleming became an announcer at a radio station in Rocky Mount, North Carolina. Here, he changed his name to "Art Fleming". His radio career later took him to Akron, Ohio, and back home to New York. He was the first announcer to deliver the slogan "Winston tastes good, like a cigarette should" for Winstoncigarettes. [...] Fleming also appeared in many television commercials, in addition to anchoring the eleven o’clock news on WNBC. He was first spotted by Merv Griffin on a commercial for Trans World Airlines. Griffin thought Fleming was "authoritative, yet warm and interesting", and Fleming was invited to audition to be the host of Griffin's new game show Jeopardy!. Fleming won the job, and hosted the show during its original run of March 30, 1964, to January 3, 1975, and again from October 2, 1978, to March 2, 1979. Rather than describe him as the "host" of the program, announcer Don Pardo introduced him by saying, "and here's the star of Jeopardy!, Art Fleming". Fleming would immediately return the favor and thank Pardo during his introduction. As "the world's greatest quiz show's" first host, Fleming earned two Emmy Award nominations. While he was host of Jeopardy!, Fleming never missed a taping. (wikipedia)
• • •
This doesn't seem like much of a theme. Or, rather, it seems like a theme from thirty years ago. Having phrases with all the same initials is an old and perfectly acceptable theme type, but you expect something more from a revealer these days than just ACS. That is, more than just the initials themselves. There's zero cleverness here, nothing beyond the most rudimentary wordplay. If there were something that made ACS particularly *appropriate* beyond the initials, or if "AC" had been part of a longer, more colorful, more interesting revealer phrase. But as it is, there's none of that. I mean, you could've at least run this one at the peak of summer heat, so that ACS would've felt seasonally appropriate. But instead it runs at the time of year when everyone is finally putting their window AC unit away after weeks of putting it off (just me? seriously, that's on today's to-do list). You can see how this theme type could be done infinitely. An MCS puzzle. A PCS puzzle. A DAS puzzle. And on and on. But why? Conceptually, this is quite flat. What this one lacks in originality it makes up for in volume, with seven (!) theme answers crisscrossing the grid. Are some of them interesting? Yes, AMBULANCE CHASER is interesting, and it knows it, as it has decided to take center stage. The rest are just ... there. ALBUM COVER is nice. But mostly the themers aren't here to be exciting; they're here to fulfill their "A.C." duties and that is all. At least the themers are solid—well, all except AREA CLOSED, that one did not feel ... great. I had AREA and no idea what the AREA was supposed to be doing (or, in this case, not doing). Anyway, AREA CLOSED definitely seems like the weakest themer to me. It's always the seventh themer that trips you up. Thematic hubris. Greek tragedians warned us about this.
I have a little side-eye today for AXEMAN. It caught my attention because it looks like an "A.M." answer in a sea of "A.C." answers and I thought it was probably more elegant not to have any stray two-word phrases that started with "A." but whose second word did not start with "C." But then I thought, no, AXEMAN is probably one word, not two. Which is true. The problem is that AXEMAN isn't how you spell this "word" at all. It's AXMAN. Merriam-Webster dot com doesn't even list AXEMAN as a variant spelling. [actually, if you search "axeman" separately, it does say "variant spelling of AXMAN"—why isn't that variant listed in the AXMAN entry?]. The word is just AXMAN. Like "taxman," without the "t." There have only been six AXEMANs in all of NYTXW history, and today is the first time the clue has swung guitarward (in all other cases, the context is lumber). Eighteen years ago, there was an AXEMEN, plural, that had a guitar clue, but that's the last time anyone heard from that particular plural. What's weird to me is that for every iteration of this word (AXMAN/AXMEN, AXEMAN/AXEMEN) there has, to date, been one and only one guitar clue. All the other clues involve guys chopping trees. More oddly, given that AXMAN is the only correct spelling, and AXMAN is shorter (which means it should have more opportunities to appear in puzzles over time), is the fact that AXMAN does not appear that much more frequently. AXMAN beats AXEMAN by just 10 to 6. And AXMEN beats AXEMEN by 7 to 4. Which is to say that the NYTXW treats them as equally valid. But they aren't. The only good axman is an e-less axman. I'd rather see E-LESS in a puzzle than AXEMAN (that's not true, but it was fun to write).
As a Downs-only solve, this was astonishingly easy. The only slow-downs came, predictably, on the longer theme answers, particularly AREA CLOSED. I also hesitated at ALBUM cover, mainly because the clue seemed so inscrutable: 30D: *Record art space. I know all those words, but what they were doing in that order, my brain could not compute. It felt like three random words, or like a long lost collaboration between Yoko Ono and Sun Ra: RECORD / ART / SPACE (I'd listen to that album). "Record" has multiple meanings, obviously, and that was throwing me. But not for long. And every other clue I looked at, I got instantly, or nearly so. Maybe I hesitated for a few seconds (at MESA v. YUMA, for instance) (27D: Arizona city or Native American tribe), but a moment's hesitation was the closest I ever got to stuck.
If I'd been solving the regular way (i.e. using the Across clues), I think I might've been slower, if only because I wouldn't have known ART Fleming right off the bat. The name rings a bell, but he was Jeopardy! host way before my time. I was happy to learn about him, though, as I found his wikipedia bio most entertaining. It seems I have seen ART Fleming before but just didn't remember: "Fleming reprised his role as host of Jeopardy! in the 1982 movie Airplane II: The Sequel and in "Weird Al" Yankovic's music video "I Lost on Jeopardy". Fleming was also often called upon to host mock versions of Jeopardy! at trade shows and conventions." I like '80s ART Fleming. He'll do anything.
[from Airplane II: The Sequel]
He'll also say anything. This bit is gold. Go off, ART!:
Fleming declined an offer to reprise his role as Jeopardy! host when Merv Griffin began developing a revival of the show in 1983. As a result, Alex Trebek (a personal friend of Fleming's) took the position instead and continued to host the program until his death in 2020. In interviews conducted in the early years of the Trebek version, he stated that he disliked the show's new direction and the various changes that the revival's producers had made. He disapproved of moving production from his native New York to Los Angeles, suggesting to a Sports Illustrated journalist in 1989 that filming in California made the show feel superficial and anti-intellectual:
[Fleming] hates the glitz, the polish. "It's not part of the real world." he says, "it's part of Hollywood." In his day, the show was filmed in Manhattan. "People are more intelligent in New York," says Fleming, a native of the Bronx. "New Yorkers are alive, with-it. They know what's going on in the world. In California there's no mental stimulation. A typical conversation consists of 'I've got a new diet. How's your tennis game? Are those clothes from Gucci?' And then you look at each other."
— Franz Lidz, "What is Jeopardy!",Sports Illustrated(May 1, 1989) (wikipedia)
"And then you look at each other"!! LOL I don't even know what that means, but I love it. Laugh-out-loud-at-4-in-the-morning love it. I grew up in California and I couldn't be less offended. You tell 'em, ART. I miss this kind of harmless regional prejudice. I think I'll let ART have the last word today. "New Yorkers are alive, with-it." Amazing. See you next time.
Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld
[Follow Rex Parker on BlueSky and Facebook and Letterboxd] ============================= ❤️ Support this blog ❤️:
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)
_crop.jpg)
