Relative difficulty:North of Medium by a little bit (i.e. Medium-Challenging *for a Monday*)
THEME:MR. IN-BETWEEN (37A: "Don't mess with" him, per an old song lyric ... or a hint to 18-, 20-, 55- and 58-Across) — "MR." is "IN BETWEEN" (i.e. straddling) two words in two-word phrase:
Theme answers:
BOTTOM ROW (18A: 64-, 65- and 66-Across, in this puzzle)
STEAMROLLER (20A: Heavy vehicle that smooths a road surface)
PALM READING (55A: Means of fortunetelling)
AM/FM RADIO (58A: Audio feature that comes standard on cars)
Word of the Day:Walter LANTZ(17A: Walter who created Woody Woodpecker) —
There's a fairly standard, reasonably solid theme concept here. Not great that it relies on a non-title phrase from a song that the clue doesn't even bother to name, but let's leave that aside for now. You put "MR." as a bridge between words in two-word phrases. OK. Problem one: this theme is infinitely replicable. It's not tight enough, not special enough. DORM ROOMS, ALBUM REVIEWS, FILM REELS, FOAM RUBBER, FARM-RAISED, WARM REGARDS, RUM RAISIN, GRIM REAPER ... I'm not even trying here. If the theme answers that were chosen were particularly fantastic—really scintillating examples of the form—then maybe? But they're not. They are just phrases. So the theme just doesn't cohere enough, and the chosen answers are flat.
Then there is the much much bigger problem of fill quality. It's quite poor. This is a 74-worder—that is low for a Monday. I Do Not understand why this grid wasn't built in a more accommodating, good-fill-friendly manner. Bring it up to 76 or 78 words, pull the themers apart a little, or at least add some corner cheaters in the NW and SE. *Something*. That NW corner is in excusable—and it's where people's first impressions of the puzzle come from. Will or Joel could refill that thing cleanly inside of 10 minutes, guaranteed. So why didn't they? I am baffled. We have to endure a partial, a foreign partial, a Latin phrase word, a single BEATLE, a tired golfer name, and (most improbable of all) *crossing* *old-timey* *names*. That square will Natick more than a few people guaranteed. It nearly got my wife. It got one other person I've heard back from already. This problem is—I can't stress this enough—utterly foreseeable. LANTZ is not and will never be a Monday name, no matter what it crosses, but crossing it with ARNESS.... (3D: James of "Gunsmoke") ... that is baffling. People who have been doing the puzzle forever and ever might not be troubled at all by either of those names, but man, look this puzzle over—from the theme, to every corner (but especially the NW corner), it's basically telling people under 40 to f-off.
The grid is both poorly filled and unacceptably narrow in its cultural frame of reference. Cleaning up that NW corner *alone* would've made this puzzle 2x as good. There are fill problems throughout, but virtually *everything* from ABANG down to MMLI is objectively not good, so a quick clean-up there would've made a huge difference. I do like the NE and SW corners on this one, with all those long Downs alongside one another. But they're not worth the pain we have to endure elsewhere. I mean, MAAMS plural? SRIS plural? You can't let puzzles go out like this—unpolished, unfinished. It's not fair to the constructor, and it's especially not fair to the solvers.
THEME: "Keep Going!" - theme answers are four phrases encouraging someone to continue doing ... whatever it was he/she was doing ...
Word of the Day: COVEY - n., pl.-eys.
A family or small flock of birds, especially partridge or quail. See synonyms at flock1.
A small group, as of persons.
Dan Feyer, are you listening? Don't post your times on Facebook any more. I knew before I ever started this puzzle that Dan had finished in under two minutes. And on paper, not the computer, which is just ... sick. So I went in thinking it must at least be on the easy side. And like all Mondays, it was easy enough, but my speed-solving skills clearly aren't up to snuff. I was well over four minutes on this one. I was just completely out of sync with the puzzle from the get go - figured the theme would involve repeating initial words after I got TRY TRY AGAIN. Wrong. Never considered CADENCE for 23A: "Sound off - one, two ...," e.g. until I had virtually every cross. That clue sounds more like a COMMAND than a CADENCE. Had the initial "C" at 23D: Small flock and could think only of COVEN ... a clearly wrong answer that nonetheless got (falsely) confirmed in letter after letter, even though I could see that the final "N" couldn't be right. That "Y" in COVEY may have been the last thing I filled in. TIA MARIA is something I've never had, so huge hole there (46A: Coffee liqueur brand). Then I misread the clue at 32D: Easily torn bands of tissue (ligaments) as [Easily torn brands of tissue] and got completely stymied. Didn't look like any brand of tissue I'd ever heard of.
Now, with the exception of CADENCE, which seems poorly clued ("Sound off" etc. exhibits a cadence, as all rhythmic speech does - that does not make it CADENCE, per se), all of the above is just bad luck for me. Nothing to sneer at. But BOOKMAN (51A: Bibliophile)!?!?! Really? That answer just Kills an already half-lame puzzle. In a puzzle where the theme answers are this ... unremarkable, you need your non-theme fill to be sound. BOOKMAN is not. It is a very popular name for bookstores and also appears to be a reasonably common surname, but nobody but nobody says "Oh, I'm a BOOKMAN." How about SNOWMAN? DOORMAN? Hell, I rewrote this corner in less than 30 seconds using IRON MAN. Come on. I love the letter "K" more than most other people, more than is natural, perhaps, but when all it gets you is a half-made-up word like BOOKMAN (no attestations in the cruciverb.com database!) and crosswordese like IKE, you need to trade it in for something else.
Theme answers:
17A: "Keep going!" ("Try, try again") - this is not a self-standing phrase. It is the tail end of an adage: "If at first you don't succeed..."
11D: "Keep going!" ("Hang in there!")
25D: "Keep going!" ("Don't stop now!")
58A: "Keep going!" ("Never say die!")
There is one clue I didn't not understand until well after the puzzle was solved and I'd had a chance to think about it for a while: 30D: It might go from 0 to 60 minutes (meter). This made zero sense to me. My guess, now, is that it refers to the METER in a taxi. Is that it? That does not seem like Monday cluing to me. I had no idea that METERs had defined upper limits like that. I figured they just ran. That range seems arbitrary (though going over the hour would require another digit on your METER ... if you wanted the time to read in hours and not just minutes). Oh crap, I Just Realized the type of METER in question. Ugh. HA ha. Whoops. Man, I was going to plead geographic ignorance (as I hardly ever see a taxi meter), but the METER in question is something I see every day:
Still, there's something yucky and clunky about that clue. Definitely not Monday smooth. Other problems include having ENURES where INURES was supposed to go (48D: Hardens), and having fabric ignorance issues at 65A: Decorative upholstery fabric (toile). The word just never comes easily. Always feels like there are many options. TUILE. That's a thing, right?
14A: Domed domicile (igloo) - do all IGLOOs look lie they do in cartoons? Are they all domed? I guess that's the most efficient shape, for a number of reasons.
29A: Neighbor of an Azerbaijani (Armenian) - no-looked this one. Sometimes you can tell from the crosses that the answer can be only one thing. Warning: no-looking an answer can cause abysmal, embarrassing failure.
31A: Cheap seat cover material (vinyl) - weird, interesting clue
33A: Pizazz (elan) - easy, but what's with the spelling on "pizazz?" I think the preferred spelling is with four Zs, and yet I see that it has three accepted spellings. The four-z model, and then two 3-z models (two "z"s in the middle or two "z"s at the end). How hard would it be to make a decisions!?
56A: Baby food (whose name is an anagram of 55-Across) (puree) - never saw this clue, which is good, because, as my wife said, "Do I really need to be told it's an anagram of RUPEE?" Just write a good clue. Leave the anagram detection up to us. I would have loved to acknowledge the interesting succession of RUPEE and PUREE, but the puzzle has obnoxiously shouted its own cleverness at you already.
5D: Best Actress for "Two Women" (Loren) - No one will win "Best Actress" for "Watchmen," which I saw yesterday, but the guy who played Rorschach (Jackie Earle Haley) was Amazing. Perfect. By far the best thing about the movie.
24D: Licorice-tasting seed (anise) - only recently realized how common this word is. If it weren't, in its way, a completely ordinary word, I would start calling it crosswordese.
54A: "Positive thinking" Norman Vincent _____ (Peale) - very interesting inclusion given today's theme. Nice.
8D: Where Springsteen was born, in song (U.S.A.) - actually, it's THE U.S.A., but OK. My initial thought: "... somewhere in Jersey."
18D: Village People hit whose title completes the line "It's fun to stay at the ..." ("Y.M.C.A.") - the Village People (or actors who look like them) are *in* "Watchmen"'s opening title sequence (another good part of the movie).
47D: Dick was his running mate in '52 and '56 (Ike) - in "Watchmen," Dick is still president in 1986 because we got rid of term limits after we won in Vietnam. Our not-so-secret weapon = the newest version of the A-bomb: a giant blue guy who obliterates things just by pointing at them. If you like viscera, this is the movie for you.
Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld
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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!")
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