Rex Parker Does the NYT Crossword Puzzle: Bob Benson

Hi, everyone, it’s Clare for the last Tuesday in March! Hope it’s been getting warmer wherever you are — I start to feel more like a real person once it’s spring. My Monday was hectic because I had a court filing due today for an asylum hearing in a couple of weeks and I have a client’s green card interview in the morning… so I got to unwind with some sports on in the background and a crossword puzzle on my laptop. The rest of my family is into the Miami Open tennis, but I’m obsessed with the women’s college basketball. Namely: UConn. (I love Paige Bueckers. Who doesn’t love Paige Bueckers?)

In other news, my puppy is five months old! She’s over 28 pounds and is getting smarter (in annoying ways — like faking out that she was going to run down the stairs so I’d follow her… just so she could sprint into the other room to eat my sister’s dog’s food). My puppy gate is now practically useless because my puppy can figure it out any which way, and she’s learned how to jump into our giant bathtub. Puppies!

Anywho, on to the puzzle!

Constructor: Bob Benson

Relative difficulty: Slightly harder than an average Tuesday

THEME: Phrases that end in a word that relates to film and/or TV

Theme answers:

PLASTIC FILM (17A: "The Lego Movie"?)
SPACE PROGRAM (23A: "Star Trek"?)
WATER FEATURE (52A: "Finding Nemo"?)
WORLD SERIES (62A: "Planet Earth"?)

Word of the Day: SAD SACK (26A: Schlemiel) —

Sad Sack is an American comic strip and comic book character created by Sgt. George Baker during World War II. Set in the United States Army, Sad Sack depicted an otherwise unnamed, lowly private experiencing some of the absurdities and humiliations of military life. The so-called "unnamed private" was actually Ben Schnall, a true-life private in the US Army during World War II, member of Yank magazine and good curmudgeonly friend of Sgt. George Baker. The title was a euphemistic shortening of the military slang "sad sack of shit", common during World War II. The phrase has come to mean "an inept person" or "inept soldier". (Wiki)

• • •

I’ll get to the puzzle — with its cute theme answers and kinda meh fill that was a bit harder than a usual Tuesday — in a minute. But first, did anyone suffer from an apparent puzzle glitch (or horrible new design)? I somehow came out unscathed, as did my sister, who solved the puzzle on the app, but for my poor dad (and, it seems, many others) who were solving the puzzle on the webpage, there was a problem: What appeared to be an iPhone keyboard covered half the page. My dad, of course, immediately texted my sister and me to blame us for doing… something. We, of course, blamed him for being technologically inept. Then, we learned that a lot of people were having similar issues. Whoops!

So now that we’ve talked about that (I hope it didn’t affect too many times or solves), we can move on to other, brighter things — like this being a good debut from constructor Bob Benson. I liked the theme answers and appreciated them the more I thought about them. It’s quite clever how the constructor combined specific movies/TV shows (“The Lego Movie,” “Star Trek,” “Finding Nemo,” and “Planet Earth”) with words that are synonyms for movies/common phrases that have to do with movies and TV shows (FILM, PROGRAM, FEATURE, and SERIES). That might’ve been obvious, but it occurred to me a bit after finishing the solve. (I’m also running a little bit on fumes, so make of my epiphany what you will!)

CACKLE (18D: Laugh like a witch) was fun. The clue/answer for 45D: Spirit guide? as BAR MENU made me chuckle (not CACKLE, though). SAD SACK (26A) is a fun expression that I didn’t know the origin of. I liked seeing Eeyore in the puzzle at 14A: Like Eeyore in "Winnie-the-Pooh," even if I’d say he leans a bit more toward being depressed than just SOMBER. SOAP BOX (50A: Political platform, perhaps) is an interesting visual. And I liked the use of SIGN (26D: Communicate with the hands) and KOKO (34D: Gorilla that famously learned to 26-Down) together.

Still, the puzzle did seem to skew a tad old. FRIAR’S CLUB (11D: Locale famous for roasts) is pretty old-fashioned. VOLARE (9D: Hit 1958 song officially titled "Nel Blu, Dipinto di Blu") is an old-timey song. RICOH (47A: Tokyo-based company that produces cameras and office equipment) was a hot company… in the ’90s? And even though I liked SAD SACK (26A), it’s from a comic that debuted more than 80 years ago.

I usually like my long downs, but other than FRIAR’S CLUB, the only one we’ve really got is DEPARTMENT (28D: Cabinet division), which is a bit boring. Having both IRE (30A: Fury) and IRA (19A: Oldest Gershwin brother) in the puzzle feels lazy. There’s also 12D: Alternative name for planet earth in the puzzle and then 62A: “Planet Earth”? I can’t think of a good reason why that would’ve been intentional. It’s also probably a stupid complaint, but STIES (37D: Complete messes) is an ugly, ugly word, and I hate it.

But overall, this was a promising debut for the constructor — in a puzzle that seemed to focus on theme over fill.

Misc.:

26D: Schlemiel reminds me of how my dad used to be a reporter for the Wall Street Journal and once wrote a feature about sailing across the Atlantic in a 42-foot boat as a crew member in a race, having never sailed before. Just about everything possible went wrong over the 27 days at sea (according to him, 12 days of near-constant storms, 65-knot winds, 70-foot waves, signs that the boat was breaking up, and all sorts of other fun stuff.) So his lede was a play on Moby Dick: “Call me Schlemiel.”
I used to love playing HEARTS (49D: Game in which players tend to avoid the queen of spades) on our old desktop computer, and I was quite good at it! Granted, I was playing against computers, and I think I chose the difficulty, but who’s counting?
Both my sister’s and dad’s ALMA (21A) maters (Cal and Michigan State) are out of the women’s NCAA tournament; I guess we’ll have to root for the Spartans in the men’s tournament. (Yes, the Yale men lost to Texas A&M in the first round.)
WAGON (52D: Oregon Trail vehicle) makes me think of when I was in maybe third grade and played this sort of strategy game in our computer class that was loosely based on the trip many people took across the U.S. I probably died of dysentery a thousand different times.
My puppy keeps closing my computer as I’m trying to type. Maybe she’s telling me to go to sleep. Or maybe she’s saying she wants me to stop what I’m doing and take her to a PET SPA (5D: Places where puppies are pampered). Though I think she gets pampered enough at home!