Ancient Hebrew liquid measure / SUN 10-25-15 / Cribbage one-pointers / Eponym of hot dog chain / Turbaned sort / Stimpy's TV pal / Like some Roman aphorisms / Gamer's prefix with pets / Petty braggart / Party straggler / Actress Kedrova / Common sitcom rating / Noted remover of locks

Constructor: Bill Zais

Relative difficulty: Easy

THEME: "Halloween Costumes" — words are added to beginnings of famous people's names to create spooky names, or, I guess, theoretically costumed famous people, though who would go trick-or-treating as "EYE OF NEWT," I have no idea...

Theme answers:

• WEREWOLF BLITZER (23A: Halloween costume for ... a CNN anchor?)
• TOMBSTONE PHILLIPS (39A: ... a former "Dateline" host?)
• EYE OF NEWT GINGRICH (58A: ... a onetime House speaker?)
• GRAVEDIGGER PHELPS (85A: ... an old Notre Dame basketball coach?)
• GHOSTBUSTER KEATON (104A: ... a silent film star?) (No—is he dressed up as a "ghost"? Or a Ghostbuster? By logic of the puzzle, the latter, but that is absurdly out of step with the rest of the more generic, decidedly non-corporate "costumes" in this puzzle...)
  
• BLACK CAT STEVENS (122A: ... a pop/folk singer with numerous 1970s hits?) 

Word of the Day: GUCK (87D: Slimy stuff) —

noun

 North American informal

noun: guck

1. a slimy, dirty, or otherwise unpleasant substance.

   
   

   "he got mud and cow guck all over his white jersey"

• • •

Honestly, I'd rather go watch "Top Gun" then write about this puzzle (much much rather...), so that's what I'm going to do. Or, rather, I'm going to be brief here. This is an Old Idea. Simple. QUAINT. Shrug. It's 6 days early ... I think it would've been better as a day-after-Halloween puzzle than a 6-days-before-Halloween puzzle, but honestly, I wouldn't have liked it then, either. The concept is tired, the fill is terrible. Really. I doubled over and winced at ORECAR, and that was before I'd even seen TID or SEEPY (the worst dwarf), and all of that was before I Ever Got Out Of The NW. OY(S)! NOBS! Lots of IFFY fill, for sure (7D: Doubtful). What the heck is up with that POOH clue?! (73A: "Tush!"). "Tush!"? Do you shout that when you see someone with a nice ass? I hope not. That would be rude. I kept interrupting my solve to gripe about it, so I have no idea how long this would've taken me under normal, unbroken solving circumstances, but I never struggled much at all, and the themers were all super duper easy, so ... Easy. OOMPAH, TRALA, I'm done. Perhaps you have some deep insights into the mysterious nuances of this puzzle. Not me. I'm out. Me and my PITMEN are gonna take the ORECAR downstairs to "Top Gun" land. Danger zone! I've only been drinking a little.


Good night/day. Boo!

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

PS, just noticed (just now, for first time) HIN (119A: Ancient Hebrew liquid measure) ... wow. Really? Unreal. That is ... wow. How ...? OK, yeah, I'm done.

PPS, you might enjoy this lovely article by Lesléa Newman, a reflection on how crosswords connect her to her mother, who recently died. Check it out: "Always a Crossword between Us"

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

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THURSDAY, Jun. 25 — Spirited cries / Red remover maybe / Hinged pair of pictures / Craggy crest / Tee follower

Constructor: Bill Zais

Relative difficulty: Medium
THEME: Number of the Down clue is first word in five theme answers, e.g. 3D: <--- Plastered (sheets to the wind) —> signifying familiar phrase "THREE SHEETS TO THE WIND" (i.e. "drunk"). Repeat same effect at 5-, 7-, 20- and 40-Down

Word of the Day: EPISTLE to Philemon — The Epistle to Philemon is a prison letter from Paul of Tarsus to Philemon, a leader in the Colossian church. It is one of the books of the New Testament of the Christian Bible. The epistle is the most important early Christian writing dealing with forgiveness. (wikipedia)

Late start this morning as normally I rely on the bustle of wife and kid getting ready for work/school and dogs generally spazzing out to wake me up completely, but this morning — last day of school year for wife, third day of summer for daughter, dogs ... uncharacteristically mellow. Not yet hot or bright enough in the morning to force me out of bed (for which I should probably be grateful). At any rate, I don't have tons to say about this puzzle anyway. It's an interesting, odd little construction. The conceit — where the clue number is part of the answer — is something I've seen before, and recently. I think Brendan Emmett Quigley did a puzzle remarkably similar to this over at his site recently. I could be misremembering badly, but I know I've seen this trick some time in the past few months. Anyway, it's clever, though in this case it involves creating a weirdly shaped grid with huge black chunks at top and bottom, likely a byproduct of getting the Downs involved in the theme answers (3, 5, 7, 20 and 40D) to line up in symmetrical fashion. I rated the puzzle Medium mostly because it went from Hard ("What the hell are these damned arrows supposed to mean?") to Easy ("Oh, 3 SHEETS TO THE WIND ... got it") as soon as I grasped the theme. I don't like the arrows in the theme clues, as they confuse more than they clarify. I still don't quite see how they work. I guess they are supposed to be saying "this number is the first word in the answer." Not sure how else you'd indicate the concept, though, without a theme-revealing answer. Maybe the arrow was the best option.

Theme answers:

DOWN

• 3. <--- Plastered (sheets to the wind)
• 5. <--- Gambling game (card stud) — hate the clue here. Something more lively, please. Nearly all these clues today are dull and lifeless. Why didn't KINKS get a music clue (69A: Garden hose problems)? Why (dear god why?) didn't "MAD MEN" get a TV clue!? (29A: Psychos)
• 7. <--- Sherlock Holmes novel, with "The" ("Percent Solution") — not one of his better known works.
• 20. <--- One starting a career, perhaps (something)
• 40. <--- Work period (hour week) — least favorite, as the phrase, in my head, is "40-hour WORK week"; Google seems marginally to back me up on this, though there's plenty of attestation for the "WORK"-less version as well. Alabama votes "WORK"-less!

[first Google hit!]

Lots of plural ugliness today. I can tolerate the plural OTS (35D: What buzzer beaters may lead to, briefly), but RAHRAHS, ETTES, and SYSTS ... less so. RAH is a spirited cry. RAHS would have worked. RAHRAHS (10A: Spirited cries) just sounds stupid. And abbreviating suffixes and (many) abbrevs. is never ideal. Avoid if you can help it. Toughest part of the grid for me was the SW, where EPISTLE would not come. I kept thinking Philemon was some character from mythology or Greek tragedy. Not having EPISTLE kept HOP IN (maybe the best answer in the grid) from showing his face. For reasons I don't quite get, I couldn't see SHEAR even with all letters but the "H" in place.

Bullets:

• 1A: Formal club: Abbr. (assoc.) — "formal" threw me badly. "Formal?" OK.
• 16A: Red remover, maybe (eye drop) — clever. Wanted HUAC or something like it.
• 38A: Hinged pair of pictures (diptych) — very familiar to me from my days as a medievalist.
• 45A: Either of two emcees (cohost) — oh man I wanted a real name here. Kept trying to think of famous hosts who were related to each other.
• 47A: Where "wikiwiki" means "to hurry" (Hawaii) — that's just obvious, right? I mean, even if you don't *know* it, just saying the clue out loud pretty much tells you the answer. "Wikiwiki" even looks like "Waikiki."
• 1D: Craggy crest (arete) — crosswordese 201. I usually look for the word "ridge" in my ARETE clue, so I didn't get this instantly. Just almost instantly.
• 14D: 20-vol. work (OED) — or you can access it online, where there are no volumes. That is what you will be doing in the fyooture, if you aren't already.
• 12D: Rarely read letters (spam) — looking for actual letters here, and while many of us ignore spam, LOTS of people read it. If there were no efficacy to SPAM, it wouldn't exist. Plus, sometimes you don't know something is SPAM *until* you read it.
• 13D: Race before a race (primary) — wanted PRELIM...
• 46D: Tee follower (hee) — wanted VEE. HEE goes nicely (i.e. ridiculously) with HOO (11D: Part of a sob).

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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** Moliere's Harpagon, e.g. **: SUNDAY, Feb. 10, 2008 - Bill Zais

Relative difficulty: Medium

THEME: "Reverse English" - all theme answers are structured as "x's y," where "x" and "y" are opposites / antonyms.

I found this puzzle dull and clunky. The theme answers have no sizzle, no pop - they're just awkward possessive phrases. Another problem: the "opposite" words involved often do not feel like natural pairs at all. Specifically, I have issues with GO'S RETURN, CASH'S CHARGE, and PARK'S DRIVE. GO's natural opposite is COME, CASH'S natural counterpart is CREDIT (notice I say "counterpart" and not "opposite" at all - some people still use "checks," despite the pressure from the obnoxious Visa Check Card commercials). And as for PARK, it has no natural opposite. If PARK is an action, then you have to DRIVE to do it. If it's a gear, then somebody ought to tell REVERSE he no longer matters. Poor REVERSE. My main problem, though, was that the phrases are both meaningless and unfunny. They have no sense of humor, and that possessive "S" - something about it - it's like the tape holding a pair of old glasses together at the bridge. Distracting and unbecoming. There are several things to like about this puzzle (more below) but the theme is not one of them.

Theme answers:

• 22A: Part of a blouse that touches the waist? (top's bottom) - I hit this theme answer first, and early, and, not realizing it was a theme answer, I got so irked that I actually stopped my puzzle to look up "top's bottom" - and "topsbottom." No such thing. After a few grimacing moments, it dawned on me that this weird nothing answer might in fact be part of today's theme. More grimaces ensued.
• 23A: The real scoop about lipids? (fat's skinny)
• 33A: Underage child of a military officer? (major's minor) - took me a while to see MAJOR because O My God I had No Idea that MALPH was RALPH's last name (33D: "Happy Days" character). I watched "Happy Days" religiously as a child, and I thought that a. they were calling him RALPH MOUTH, and b. whatever they were calling him, it was a nickname, not his Actual Name. Yipe.
• 38A: Nonsense of a market pessimist? (bear's bull)
• 53A: Toil of a Broadway show? (play's work)
• 55A: Match for a bad guy? (heavy's light) - I had the "H" and wrote in HEEL'S ... not sure what word I was waiting for. TOE?
• 78A: What can produce a "boing!"? (spring's fall)
• 82A: Ardor of a new employee? (hire's fire) - this clue should have had something to do with the new employee's being an arsonist.
• 93A: Comeback of a Japanese game? (go's return)
• 95A: Singer Johnny's gallop? (cash's charge) - man I hate the "gallop" part of this clue. A "gallop" is a CHARGE!? How about [Singer Johnny's cry of "J'accuse!"]?
• 113A: Privilege of liberals? (left's right)
• 115A: Road in Yellowstone? (park's drive)

So many theme answers. I should be impressed, but I just feel beleaguered.

The rest:

• 10A: Puzzle page favorite (rebus) - first of all, my "puzzle page" doesn't have one of these. Second, I challenge that the REBUS is anybody's "favorite." Pleasant diversion, perhaps. "Favorite," no.
• 20A: Communist's belief (utopianism) - hmmm ... don't all governments think their way is the most awesome? I understand that there is an idealized vision driving Communism (one that has never come close to being realized), and yet this clue seems somehow unfair. A belief that a free market economy will create the best of all possible worlds is its own kind of utopianism (perhaps a preferable one, but still... I'm just sayin').
• 25A: Portion of a drag queen's wardrobe (boas) - I feel like BOA is the new EMU. Feels as if it's in half my puzzles these days.
• 26A: Bumptious (pushy) - "Bumptious" sounds like a made-up word, the kind where you can infer the meaning based on how it sounds, i.e. a "bumptious" person will "bump" you. I'm not sure I knew that "bumptious" was an actual word.
• 27A: Toy company that launched Rubik's Cube (Ideal) - ah, the 80s. Watched "Sixteen Candles" last night with my wife (who had never seen it). Few movies were as formative of my ... what should we call them ... sensibilities? My manner of speaking? Seeing the world? I think that movie (along with "The Breakfast Club," "National Lampoon's Vacation," "Manhattan," and "Dazed and Confused") affected my sense of humor a lot, down to the intonation of my voice. It was weird to watch the movie and think "I've been stealing from this movie every day of my life for the past quarter century." So if you've got a problem with my style, blame John Hughes. While you're at it, please ask him to explain what hellish desperation drove him to make "Baby's Day Out."
• 31A: Professional with an x-ray machine: Abbr. (DDS) - that's your clue for DDS?! An x-ray machine? Ugh.
• 47A: Biblical birthright seller (Esau) - I feel like he's not frequenting the puzzle as much as he used to. I sort of miss him.
• 51A: Pianist Dame Myra (Hess) - no clue
• 52A: Missy Elliott's "_____ What I'm Talkin' About" ("Dat's") - this title should at least be consistently colloquial and drop the "A" in "About."
• 60A: Italian port on the Adriatic (Bari) - aargh. Totally forgot about this place. Had the BAR-, and am just glad that the "I"-crossing, BAHAIS (38D: Believers in the spiritual unity of all people), was familiar, in that I remembered it from Yesterday's Puzzle.
• 62A: Sam's Club competitor (Costco) - We had these in Fresno, but I haven't seen one since moving away from California.
• 75A: E-mail directive (fwd) - FWD is a "directive" ...yeah, I guess.
• 84A: Bookstore sect. (biog.) - Quite an ugly abbreviation, like PHOTOG.
• 98A: It can be measured in gigs (RAM)
• 105A: Moliere's Harpagon, e.g. (Miser) - I would break into the scene from "The Breakfast Club" wherein Johnny opines that "Molay" really "pumps my nads," but I've done that before. Instead I'll just say that I read Molière a lot in Mr. Cardella's French classes in high school, and that, truth be told, Mr. Cardella and Mr. Berglund (English) were probably at least as influential in my life as John Hughes films. Probably. The fact that my life included John Hughes films and Molière, side-by-side, pretty much says it all.
• 119A: Darlin' (sweetie pie) - had SWEET HEART, which fits, ugh. I call my wife "SWEET HEART," but she would (rightly) laugh in my face if I called her "SWEETIE PIE."
• 122A: Reason to take Valium (tenseness) - In America, we call this TENSION! I can barely even say "tenseness," it feels so wrong.
• 2D: Accidents (haps) - this answer hurts too. Not as much as tenseness, but enough.
• 10D: Patriot Putnam of the American Revolution (Rufus) - one of my biggest searches yesterday (when people apparently start doing the Sunday puzzle); [Patriot Putnam] has been a clue before, hence yesterday's (and likely today's) Google traffic.
• 12D: Equivocator's choice (both) - hmmm ... isn't that really the glutton's choice?
• 15D: City WNW of Stillwater (Enid) - so iconic is ENID in the world of puzzles that you can hide it behind a completely bland and unspecific clue like this.
• 13D: Child-raiser's cry (upsy-daisy) - well that's just brilliant. No sarcasm there. A seriously great clue.
  
• 16D: Francois Truffaut's field (ciné) - I'm not the biggest fan, though "Shoot the Piano Player" was pretty good.
• 26D: Literally, "fish tooth" (piranha) - I like "fish tooth" better. It's a name I am now hankering to call someone, as part of a sarcastic phrase, e.g. "smooth move, fish tooth!"
• 29D: Lewis Carroll creature (snark) - Twas brillig etc. SNARK is a great word.
• 35D: Villain in "Martin Chuzzlewit" (Jonas) - needed all the crosses, as I usually do for Dickensian clues.
• 37D: Turkish hospice (imaret) - high-end stuff. Haven't seen it for a while.
• 49D: Refuse holder (ash can) - are these the names of the things outside of buildings where the top functions as an ASH tray and the underneath part is a trash CAN?
• 63D: It's kept within the lines, usually (crayon) - I think this is probably verifiably false. In fact, once you get old enough to color consistently within the lines, you are probably too old to want to be coloring with crayons any more.
• 65D: Sully (smirch) - the word "smatch" is used in "Julius Caesar," and during class the other day, I liked the sound of the word, and the feel of it in my mouth, so much that I found as many opportunities as I could to say it. Here's Brutus, just before his acrobatic suicide:

I prithee, Strato, stay thou by thy lord:
Thou art a fellow of a good respect;
Thy life hath had some smatch of honour in it:
Hold then my sword, and turn away thy face,
While I do run upon it. Wilt thou, Strato?

Smatch! SMIRCH is uglier, but in the ballpark. Then there's the little-known month between March and April, SMARCH. Lousy SMARCH weather!

• 80D: Ukulele activity (strumming) - true enough.
• 87D: Erymanthian _____, fourth labor of Hercules (Boar) - super proud to have remembered this. I went through a Hercules phase a little while back ... long story.
• 106D: "The Lay of the Host of _____" (old Russian epic poem) (Igor) - I like my IGORs Frankensteinian.
• 112D: 1,000 smackers (gee) - much much better than ["____ whiz!"].
• 102D: Moola (gelt) - Now this is one ugly word. Is it a welt, is it a kind of fish you eat at seders, is it a castrated horse ... who can tell?

Whew. Done.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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SUNDAY, Jul. 1, 2007 - Nancy Salomon and Bill Zais

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium

THEME: "Diamond Jubilee" - circles form a diamond, with HOME, FIRST, SECOND, and THIRD appearing in the circles that correspond to their location on a baseball diamond. Further, there are atrocious baseball puns, symmetrically arranged, in the four corners of the puzzle

This puzzle was great in terms of concept and execution, or would have have been, if not for the horrible baseball punnery. Why did you have to go and mar a perfectly good puzzle? There's such a thing as Trying Too Hard. I'm impressed, in a way, at the symmetricality of everything, but I hate cutesy wordplay like nobody's business, and having so much of it (and none of it very clever) in my Sunday puzzle was unpleasant. It was all the more annoying because, as I've said, the constructors had a very good thing going with the whole "diamond" concept.

Theme (or "base") answers:

At FIRST, we have...

• 69A: Classic Abbott and Costello bit ("Who's on FIRST")
• 71D: New in theaters (FIRST run)

At SECOND...

• 26A: Supported (SECONDed)
• 26D: Peerless (SECOND to none)

At THIRD...

• 66A: Commoners (THIRD Estate)
• 49D: Precede the cleanup spot (bat THIRD)

And at HOME...

• 112A: "Get out of here!" ("Go HOME!")
• 77D: Object of tornado destruction (mobile HOME)

Not sure how I feel about two of those clues being baseball-specific (seems like there should have been four - one for each base - or none). As for the baseball plays-on-words ... well, you know how I feel. Here they are:

• 22A: Casue of some baseball errors? (field trips)
• 23A: Texas ballplayer? (park ranger)
• 116A: Diamond border? (grass skirt)
• 121A: Complaint about a baseball playing area? (ground beef)

Just to get it out of the way, here's the other stuff in this puzzle I don't like:

102D: Isolate, in a way (enisle) - I know it's a word, but ... it's feeble. The only people I know who have been ENISLED are Napoleon and Ariadne.

Not that thrilled about seeing GRES (112D: Some coll. tests) and SAT (99D: Kind of score) in the grid together. . .

And now the good stuff:

• 33D: Lack of adornment (bareness)
• 101A: Painter's subject (nude)

Hurray for nudity in the Sunday puzzle! Which reminds me of another answer I didn't particularly care for: 50A: Hägar creator Browne (Dik). That may seem crass, but at least I didn't add WOOD (95A: Iron alternative) and LENGTHIER (16D: More protracted) to the pile.

The two 10-letter Downs in the NW are spectacular: 2D: Racecar-generated air current (slip stream) and 3D: Temporary residence (pied-à-terre). For entertaining arcana, we have 44A: 1980s Geena Davis sitcom ("Sara") and 14D: Actress Gibbs (Marla). There wasn't too much in the way of obscurity, but there were a few answers that came close, including 21A: Many an Alessandro Scarlatti work (opera seria), 86D: "John Brown's Body" poet (Benet), 36D: Trans-Siberian Railroad city (Omsk), 11D: W.W. I French fighter plane (spad) and 35D: Andy Hardy player, in 1930s-'40s film (Rooney). I have a movie poster featuring ROONEY right behind my desk chair (i.e. right behind me, right now) - he is shouting and threatening to beat me with a gun butt.

In addition to DIK, there were a number of semi-unusual names, like NGAIO (32D: Mystery writer Marsh), KUHN (114D: Former baseball commissioner), LOEW (52D: MGM co-founder) and RHEA (63D: Perlman of "Cheers").

I finished in under 20 minutes, Finally, though I should tack on two 10-second penalties because at one point my wife was looking over my shoulder and suggested that maybe DOVELETTES was NOVELETTES (125A: Longish stories) - had GDP instead of GNP at 116D: Econ. yardstick; wife also later fed me NETS (47D: Takes home) when I balked at it the first time.

Alright, I'm done.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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