Barksdale drug dealer on Wire / SUN 6-11-17 / One of pair of best friends in greek legend / When repeated Polynesian getaway / Dead Sea Scrolls sect

Constructor: Charles M. Deber

Relative difficulty: Medium

THEME: "Think Twice" — words that can be part of one group of things and also another group of things because language is funny that way...

Theme answers:

• Honestly, there's no way I'm typing all these dumb clues out

Word of the Day: Len CARIOU (41D: Len of stage and screen) —

Leonard Joseph "Len" Cariou (born September 30, 1939) is a Canadian actor, best known for his portrayal of Sweeney Todd in the original cast of Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, which earned him a Tony award. He currently plays the patriarch, Henry Reagan, NYPD Police Commissioner (retired), in the multi-generational television series Blue Bloods on CBS. (wikipedia)

• • •

This is LOL bad. Delete your puzzle bad. We're-functionally-a-monopoly-so-our-product-sucks-whaddya-gonna-do bad. Whose ides of a good time is this? "Think Twice" is a dumb title. It should be called, "Look all over the grid for *&%^ you don't care about that isn't clever or funny or entertaining in the slightest." Cross-reference after cross-reference after cross-reference, and for what? Words that can have (gasp!) TWO different meanings!? Yeah, it's the *&%^ing English language—it does that. Tedium doesn't begin to get at this solving experience. I mean ... one of the actual answers in this grid is WEATHER WORDS. Just let it sink in. Let that answer pour all over you. Let it bathe your skin in its glory. Sorry, GLORIES. Sincerely, did no one think of what it would be like to solve this. To encounter themers that simply made you stop solving and have to look all over hell and gone for two answers and then figure out how they're alike and then etc.? In a way that had absolutely Zero humor, Zero entertainment value? It's astonishing. BRIDAL THINGS IS AN ANSWER IN THIS PUZZLE. Unless you write letters, this is what you get, from now until eternity—Sunday puzzles as joyous as stubbing your toe and tripping and falling hard on your elbow and then trying to get up but your head hits the counter and when you finally do get up your dogs are looking at you like "???" and you forgot why you came in the kitchen in the first place. That joyous.


Also, the fill does Nothing to mitigate the thematic horrors. The west in particular is pretty rich. REARER!? Oh, sure, that came right to mind (?) (50A: Silver, for example, in the opening to TV's "The Lone Ranger"). And FLEETED!? Sorry I'm late. I FLEETED here, but apparently not flast enough. Florgive me. The AGEES is the band you get when the Bee-Gees aren't available. AURI is abysmal. A professional designer absolutely does not "need" TASTE, which is massively subjective and also have you seen some "professionally designed" hotel lobbies? No. My favorite part of this puzzle is the most out-of-place, ridiculous, "why-am-I-here?" answer in the whole puzzle: HORNY (95D: "Me So ___" (1989 rap chart-topper)).  "Uh ... is this the right address? ... they said y'all needed a stripper, but ... this ...this appears to be an Old Country Buffet ... I've done some weird gigs, but ... I'm gonna call the home office, make sure I got the right address ..." Bah. The end.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

P.S. In case you missed it, here's the Jun. 6 article by Adrianne Jeffries entitled "The NYT Crossword Is Old and Kind of Racist," for which I was interviewed (there's audio of the interview). 

P.P.S. Looks like they told the HORNY clue to go home after all (in the online version):

 

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

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1996-2001 show featuring home videos / SUN 2-9-14 / Cellphones in Britain / Attractive legs in slang / Battleship Potemkin locale / City on Seine upstream from Paris / King in 1922 news / Frist's successor

Constructor: Charles M. Deber

Relative difficulty: Easy

THEME: "It Was 50 Years Ago Today" — celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Beatles' first live television performance in the US on "The ED SULLIVAN Show" (2/9/64). Circles make the rough outline of a GUITAR, and the circles spell out the names of THE FAB FOUR, with "Paul McCartney" and "John Lennon" running down the left side and "Ringo Starr" and "George Harrison" running down the right.

Other theme answers:

• 3D: Craze caused by this puzzle's subjects (BEATLEMANIA)
• 17D: Song sung by this puzzle's subjects on 6-Down's show on 2/9/64 ("SHE LOVES YOU")
• 86D: Song sung by this puzzle's subjects on 6-Down's show on 9/12/65 ("YESTERDAY")
• 70A: Much of the audience for 6-Down's show on 2/9/64 (TEENAGERS)
• 110D: 1965 and 1966 concert site for this puzzle's subjects (SHEA)

Word of the Day: LOLLOP (32A: Move in an ungainly way) —

intr.v., -loped, -lop·ing, -lops.

1. To move with a bobbing motion.
2. Chiefly British. To lounge about; loll.

[Alteration of LOLL.]

Read more: http://www.answers.com/topic/lollop#ixzz2smHUmQXc

• • •

Probably the most impressive part of this grid is the way TEENAGERS lies across the center of the GUITAR in the middle of the grid. But that intense thematic density also highlights the very weakest part of the grid, fill-wise: AAU crossing NEUER! Yikes. I don't really know what AAU is (Assoc. of Amer. Universities?? Nope, Amateur Athletic Union) (66D: Junior Olympics org.), so that "U" was an educated guess based on my (crossword) knowledge that NEU is "new" in German. So … NEUER, sure, why not? (76A: More modern, in Munich). Anyway, this puzzle was far, far, far too easy. I've been seeing this anniversary heralded in print and on television for weeks now, so theme-wise, nothing made me think. I just filled in the blanks as fast as I could. Got the theme from the title and got most of the theme answers with very few or no crosses. Slowed up the most in the SE, where I just couldn't get SAFARI off the "S" (128A: Kind of jacket with pockets on the chest) or (more understandable) TROYES off the "T" (131A: City on the Seine upstream from Paris). Otherwise, cake. Fastest Sunday solve of all time, or close to it. Didn't hate it, but didn't love it. The circle-drawing is more sitar than guitar—fitting, if the time in question were later in the Beatles' career. But sure, GUITAR, why not? I'm sure some GUITAR somewhere has roughly those dimensions.


LOLLOP and "REALTV" were the big "????"s of the day. I'm sure I've seen LOLLOP before, but that didn't keep me from checking and rechecking all the crosses to make sure I wasn't missing something. There is a bunch of short fill one could complain about, but I don't think it matters much today, first because it's not Sooo bad (compared to NYT norms) and second because the crud didn't add to the difficulty in any way. Only thing worse than bad fill is bad fill that makes the puzzle harder to solve because of its badness. Do you just wear one EARPHONE? (67A: Announcer's ear) … OK, so it appears that "headphones" is always plural because it's essentially two EARPHONEs? I think of the things over your head as "headphones" and the thing in one ear as an "earpiece." But EARPHONE is a thing, because I looked it up, so … this has been "Musings on the Nature of the EARPHONE" by R.P.


Puzzle of the Week! This week was competitive, with Peter Broda continuing to kill it at his site with "Freestyle #28" and Jeffrey Wechsler bringing an impressive variation on the "answers-change-direction" theme to the latest Fireball puzzle ("Following Directions"). But the win, for cleverness as well as timeliness, has to go this week to Brendan Emmett Quigley for "X Word." It's not pornographic, despite the potential implications of that title. It's a basic theme concept, but it's done Just Right. I won't tell you any more so you can do it yourself.

Lastly, a big public thank-you to Cynthia and Olivier Kaiser who sent me a financial contribution all the way from France and then asked that instead of a thank-you card, I send my thanks via my Sunday blog post. So that is what I am doing. Right now! And while I'm at it, a big shout-out to all my International Herald Tribune solvers, wherever you may be.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

PS, in the battle of the tribute puzzles, I think this wins: Merl Reagle's "Beatles, on the Flip Side."

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New Jersey town bordering Rahway / SUN 2-5-12 / Critter whose name comes from Nahuatl / Site of Greek tragedy / Starch-yielding palm

Constructor: Charles M. Deber

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium

THEME: "State Annexation" — Theme clues are all cross-referenced to other answers in the grid, and all phrased "[Cross-referenced clue] near [some US city]?"; you have to take the answer to the cross-referenced clue, add the state code of whatever state that [some US city] is in, and that will give you a word that functions as the clue for the theme answer. So, e.g., 25A: 124-Across near Dover? = 124-Across (SPA) + state code for Delaware (DE), which makes SPADE, which clues the answer to 25A: GARDEN TOOL

Word of the Day: ADL (17D: B'nai B'rith grp.) —

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) is an international non-governmental organization based in the United States. Describing itself as "the nation's premier civil rights/human relations agency", the ADL states that it "fights anti-Semitism and all forms of bigotry, defends democratic ideals and protects civil rights for all" while it "[advocates] for Israel [...] with policymakers, the media and the public" and "defends the security of Israel and Jews worldwide". // Founded in October 1913 by The Independent Order of B'nai B'rith, a Jewish service organization in the United States, its original mission statement was "to stop, by appeals to reason and conscience and, if necessary, by appeals to law, the defamation of the Jewish people. Its ultimate purpose is to secure justice and fair treatment to all citizens alike and to put an end forever to unjust and unfair discrimination against and ridicule of any sect or body of citizens." The ADL has 29 offices in the United States and three offices in other countries, with its headquarters located in New York City. Since 1987, Abraham Foxman has been the national director in the United States. The national chairman in the United States is Robert Sugarman. (wikipedia)

• • •

An easy enough theme to figure out, but a bear to describe clearly; sorry about that.

Lots of cross-references do not make for an especially enjoyable solve. The *idea* here is an imaginative one, but the execution is problematic. The phrase "near [whatever city]?" doesn't really work as a clue to add a state code to the end of the answer. I figured it out, so it wasn't utterly unclear, but it's highly inexact. A city is not a state. The cross-referenced answer has to be imagined as, literally, "near" (as in "right next to") a state code. A city is a poor substitute for a state code. Also, "annexation" doesn't feel quite right. If you "annex" a territory, you take it over, but here, you aren't taking over so much as supplying from your imagination. The whole set-up ended up feeling fiddly and imprecise. Also, as I've said many times before, I'm not big on the whole "answers are really clues"-type theme, and that's essentially what this was. My description has the cross-ref'd answer + state code as the "clue" for the theme answer, but really it's the answer for which the theme "answer" is really the clue. Ugh, the more I describe this puzzle, the more I dislike it, so I'll stop.

Fill was average, maybe slightly below. Lots and lots and lots of very short stuff, but oddly that wasn't where I had problems. It was stuff like AS TO COST (!?!?!) (5D: Regarding the price). This is as much a valid answer as REGARDING SALARY or CONCERNING BONUSES (i.e. not valid); or AS A MAN (54A: How Shakespeare's Rosalind dresses), an answer I've seen and disliked before; or ISELIN (30A: New Jersey own bordering Rahway), the kind of icky NE provincialism that makes most of America shrug (at best) or say "WTF?!" or something else (see also TRURO).



Theme answers:

• 22A: 45-Down near Baton Rouge? = "hoopla" = (EXCITEMENT)
• 25A: 124-Across near Dover? = "spade" = (GARDEN TOOL)
• 38A: 117-Down near Salem? = "tenor" = (OPERA SINGER)
• 58A: 1-Across near Hartford? = "extract" = (CONCENTRATE)
• 78A: 114-Down near Boise? = "rapid" = (SPLIT-SECOND)
• 95A: 76-Down near Springfield? = "lentil" = (PODDED PLANT) — easily my least favorite theme "answer"; you can see POTTED looking on (69D: In one's cups), going, "man, that's my phrase."
  
• 111A: 61-Across near Phoenix?  = "topaz" = (BIRTHSTONE)
• 113A: 9-Across near Boston? = "dogma" = (MORAL TENET)
• 33D: 6-Across near Indianapolis? = "satin" = (SMOOTH FABRIC) 
• 43D: 119-Across near Albany? = "bunny" = (EASTER ANIMAL) 

Looking over these theme answers, I realize that I didn't even check the cross-references on ... let's see ... three of these (tenor, rapid, topaz). In fact, almost all the difficulty in this puzzle lay in getting started, and then in having to wait (in some cases) for the cross-referenced answers to appear in the grid. The rest of the puzzle was easy. Had issues with ISELIN, and then got stuck on SOLARII / IDS vs. SOLARIA (70A: Sun spots) / ADS. Both IDS and ADS seemed valid for [Spots], and I wasn't thinking hard enough about my Latin neuter plurals. The "A" won out, eventually. I've never seen ODEUM except in crosswords (91D: Site of a Greek tragedy). I expect the singular of the Greek theater to be ODEON, perhaps because I've seen modern theaters called that. I wrote in STAGGER for STARTLE (88D: Shock). That's it for significant resistance.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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SUNDAY, Apr. 5, 2009 - C Deber (Hungarian patriot Imre / Noble Lombard family name / Booth or Drood)

Relative difficulty: Easy

THEME: "Taking Care of Business" - theme answers are common phrases from the world of business and investment with "?" clues that imagine the phrases having different, wacky meanings


Word of the Day: RECREANT -

adj.

1. Unfaithful or disloyal to a belief, duty, or cause.
2. Craven or cowardly.

n.

1. A faithless or disloyal person.
2. A coward.

When I think of this word, it's being used by one medieval knight to insult another. Maybe it was in one of the thousands of medieval poems I read in grad school. Or in "Monty Python and the Holy Grail."

Business-speak is not the most exciting source of theme answers, especially when they aren't being tweaked or parodied, but being delivered straight. Still, the imaginative clues were clever and all the answers made sense. At first I though the puzzle would be nautical (PORT FOLIOS crossing PARTNER SHIP) but that pattern didn't pan out. Overall, this seems a solid puzzle, except for one thing - one square, which I found hugely grating and somewhat inexplicable. Though it was definitely gettable, it is, in many ways, a paradigmatic violation of the Natick Principle. Crossing proper nouns is always a dicey proposition, because one person's gimme is another's "WTF." We've seen that time and time again. And yet it happens all the time, and is generally not a problem because usually one of those nouns is very very well known, or the letter at the crossing of the nouns is easily inferrable. Such is not the case at the intersection of EGGAR (89D: Samantha of "The Collector," 1965) and EVA (105A: "Deliver Us From _____" (2003)). I am going to go out on a limb and bet that many people put an "E" in that place. While EVE does not have the two syllables required to make it a good play on the word "EVIL," "EVA" is most famously (in the case of Gabor) pronounced Ay-vuh or Eh-vuh, and therefore does not have the requisite vowel sound in the "E" to make it a good play on EVIL either. Therefore, I have a hard time seeing how this vowel is inferrable, if, like most solver (I'm guessing), the movie and the actress are unknown to you. I actually remembered the movie (or, rather, commercials for the movie), as "Deliver Us From Evie," so I tried a "Y" in there briefly, but eventually just guessed EVA because EVE just sounded slightly off. Good guess. Actually, more like a lucky guess. Even if you knew who Samantha EGGAR was, there's still a good chance you'd speller her name EGGER. There is at least one other actress I know named EGGER. OK, her name's EGGERT, but that's pretty close. I'm just saying that EGGER could plausibly be someone's last name. This intersection is terrible. Relatively obscure proper nouns that intersect at an innocuous vowel - bad, bad form.

Theme answers:

• 25A: Cruise brochures? (port folios)
• 27A: Founding of a hip replacement clinic? (joint venture)
• 43A: New radials at 6 a.m.? (early re-tire-ment) - my favorite clue/answer pairing
• 60A: Purchase of a vault? (safe investment)
• 77A: To sell organic or not? (marketing decision)
• 94A: Blueprints for a 50-mile grazing stretch? (long range plans)
• 109A: Mortgage no one cares about? (low-interest loan)
• 130A: Surfers' reunion? (board meeting)
• 133A: Activity of duvet makers? (down sizing)
• 3D: Yacht in a time-share? (partner ship)
• 85D: Exchange for 007? (Bond trading)

The EVA / EGGAR intersection was about the only truly irksome thing about this puzzle. Otherwise it was smooth - very much on the easy side, but still offering some areas of vocabularic interest. I guess COLLEENS in Ireland (79D: Irish girls) are like SHEILAS in Australia - just a generic term for girls? Maybe I've heard that before - don't remember. Anyway, I liked it, though it took me several crosses to get. I had a bear of time (relatively speaking) with a single letter in the NE - the "G" in GENOME (16D: Modern map subject) and GABLE (16A: Kind of window). I do not know my window types - bay ... dormer ... oriel? is that something? - so it could have been CABLE as far as I knew, but CENOME seemed wrong. I think I started running through the alphabet and luckily hit GENOME pretty quickly. Excellent clue. I was imagining images in an atlas until the bitter end. CAREEN (32D: Lurch) and SCREAM (52A: Sound on a roller coaster) go very nicely together, as do DODO (92A: Bye-bye birdie?) and INDO (98A: _____-European), for completely different reasons. I wanted something golf-y on that "birdie" clue. PAR or BOGIE, maybe.

One interesting feature of the grid are its narrow escape routes. I got the whole NW and then couldn't get out. I got as far as the Green Twins, ECO (31A: Green: Prefix) and NADER (36A: Green candidate for president, 1996), and couldn't play off of them to escape the NW. Had to reboot elsewhere in the grid. I don't like doing that unless I Absolutely have to. Work with what you've got and you're bound to go faster - until you get genuinely stuck; then you gotta move. I made up for my faltering coming out of the NW by nailing a word that no one in his/her right mind should ever nail: ENTRAIN (28D: Get on board). It's a word I didn't know existed before xwords, and one that I refused to believe existed after I saw it the first time. "I'm going to ENTRAIN now." Really? Anyway, it's a completely acceptable technical term, and I love that it's gone from "????" to gimme in such a short period of time. ENTRAIN is a section-connector, and nailing it really helped open the NE up.

Bullets:

• 1A: Certain fraternity activity (caper) - ????? I see lots of words used around campus to describe frat activities. This is not one of them. A bank job is a CAPER.
• 6A: Gourmand's request (more) - is a gourmand always such a #$!@ing pig? Taking pleasure in food doesn't necessarily mean wanting to shove as much as you can down your gullet.
• 23A: Faster than larghetto (adagio) - educated guessing!
• 29A: Noble Lombard family name (Este) - like ENTRAIN, unfamiliar to me at one point, a gimme to me now.
• 40A: Card taker, for short? (ATM) - sadly, needed two crosses to get this (!?)
• 69A: Zager & _____, 1960s pop duo (Evans) - complete and utter mystery to me. Searching for video now ... oh Man, THESE guys:

• 85A: Strong suit, slangily (bag) - love the clue. Also love "slangily"
• 89A: Booth or Drood (Edwin) - who's the Booth guy? Oh right, he's the 19th-century actor who was the brother of John Wilkes Booth. I was listening to someone on Jimmy Fallon the other night talking about the status of Edwin Booth at the time his brother shot Lincoln - he said something like "It would be like if Robert DeNiro's brother shot the president."
• 101A: Hungarian patriot Imre _____ (Nagy) - learned from crosswords. Would be unknown to many of us were he not in crosswords.
• 115A: City NNW of Robins Air Force Base (Macon) - clues like this may as well just read [City]
• 6D: "But love's a _____ without a cure": Dryden ("malady") - kind of a banal observation. I'm sure Dryden wishes some other section of his vast literary output had been quoted.
• 10D: California community in sight of Mount Soledad (La Jolla) - tough until I got the "J" - then easy
• 26D: Jazz Drummer Hakim and others (Omars) - a new OMAR. Cool.
• 52D: Word maven William (Safire) - something about the word "maven" rubs me the wrong way. It looks too much like mauve, I think. It evokes, for me, a persnickety older lady in a mauve suit, opining about high culture or where the salad fork's supposed to go. I think the image comes from my (1970s) Clue board game depiction of Mrs. Peacock.
• 65D: Pressure situation for a pitcher (two on) - looks awesome in the grid - TWOON! I love this clue as it reminds me that it's Opening Day (first game tonight, I think, though the baseball season officially begins tomorrow)
• 81D: Monte Carlo mainstay (casino) - Monte Carlo is like some mythical place to me, one that only exists in mid-century spy movies.
• 97D: _____ Corrasable Bond (old typing paper) (Eaton's) - !?!?!? I guess EATON'S is a big name in paper, now that I think of it. But "Corrasable!?!" Hey, BOND is in the answers and the clues! Actually, I don't care. Just pointing it out.
• 119D: Olympic skating champ of 1928, 1932 and 1936 (Henie) - most common skater in the grid due to the preponderance of vowels in her name.
• 124D: Flag, horticulturally (iris) - I'm not sure what this means. I see that various flowers are called "flag irises." Maybe that's it.
• 129D: Author of the Books of Chronicles, by tradition (Ezra) - my first guess after misreading the clue at first and thinking CS LEWIS.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

LAT Sunday (syndicated) puzzle is an entertaining Will Nediger creation. Orange's write-up here.

To get the LAT puzzle every day, simply join cruciverb.com (basic membership is free), and you can download the puzzle directly from their website every day.

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SUNDAY, May 6, 2007 - Charles M. Deber

Relative difficulty: Medium

THEME: "Making Amends" - long theme answers simply have an "A" added to them to make strange new phrases, which are then clued.

Sorry I'm so late posting today. Had a 7:30 a.m. doctor's appt. (yes, on a Sunday). Not an emergency, just some stupid imaging. So I went to bed early and got up early and now here I am. This puzzle was ... OK. Once you picked up on the theme, it was quite easy to get long theme answers with only a couple crosses in place. My grid had this weird look for a while where it was largely empty except for a couple of long, grid-crossing entries that I managed to get. Here are the theme answers:

• 20A: Where smart shoppers shop? (mensAwear departments) - the answer wherein I figured out the theme. Got the answer off the first five letters.
• 34A: Plight of an overcrowded orchestra? (three men in a tubA) - this just makes no sense. I submit that no matter how crowded an orchestra got, you would never see THREE MEN IN A TUBA. Whatever happened to verisimilitude!?
• 52A: Introduction to opera? (first AidA kit) - this almost makes up for the TUBA answer. Genius. SERGEI (12D: Composer Prokofiev) completes the classical music trifecta in the upper half of the grid.
  
• 68A: Locale of Hoosier beaches (IndianA Ocean) - uninspired
• 83A: Bit of winter exercise? (a walk in the parkA) - nice
• 101A: Geraldo rehearses his show? (a RiverA runs through it) - clever, but it forced me to think of Geraldo, so points off...
• 1D: Dish for an Italian racing champ? (checkered pastA) - I had CHECKERED and was still in "????"-land. Only phrase I could think of was CHECKERED CAB.
• 48D: Sandwich that can never be finished? (bottomless pitA) - my finest puzzle moment: I got this answer with only the final "A" in place.

I had one very hilarious wrong answer that I caught only when going over the puzzle just now: For 94A: Burmese gathering? (cat show) I had CATSLEW, as in ... a SLEW of CATS. This required that I have LEX for 96D: A bit of spelling? (hex) - LEX, LEXicography ... I figured maybe it was just some word-related word I didn't know. Plus, I had INCISER for INCISOR (68D: Canine neighbor). I was prepared to be very incensed about CATSLEW and LEX ...

New Comic Book Day was a great success. I'm really impressed with the generally high quality of stuff they give out, including special editions of work by Charles Schulz (who shares a birthday with me) and Lynda Barry (My Hero), as well as lesser known "alternative" comics writers. There was plenty of superhero action too, and Sahra picked up a Mickey Mouse and a "L'il Archie" book. I read and teach this stuff and am always trying to convince non-converts of the astonishing breadth of vision and artistic innovation one can find in contemporary comics (and older stuff too - it's just that, like crosswords, comics are in a kind of Golden Age right now). As there is no comics content in today's puzzle (not even KRAZY KAT!), I will stop with the comics talk and go back to the puzzle.

63A: _____ "Inferno" ... is officially the lamest way DANTE has ever been clued (actual answer is DANTE'S). It's weird ... would you clue VIRGIL'S as [_____ "Aeneid"]? I will admit that somehow, colloquially, DANTE'S "Inferno" is an in-the-language phrase in a way that other such possessive formulations are not. And yet I hate it. Wanted answer to be DISCO. Speaking of, during my MRI this morning, I had a choice of music, and my options included the soundtrack to "Saturday Night Fever." I nearly went with the "Grease" soundtrack (you know how I love Sandy), but in the end I played it safe, went with an unspecified "Beatles" disc and it was exactly what I needed. Short, poppy, passionate, simple, familiar, great. Perfect MRI music, IMOO (except for "Yesterday," which should not be allowed anywhere near a medical setting).

18A: Team supporter's suction cup-mounted sign (fan wave) - This one bugged me almost as much as CATSLEW, only this one's worse because it's the actual answer. I actually started second-guessing some of my crosses, including crossword standard EVA (11D: Stowe girl), but in the end, I just crossed my fingers and went with it. I was expecting this item to be a cut-out of an actual hand, waving, but no (or not always). A FAN WAVE looks like this:

Have we met? (Answer: no)

4D: Dame Edith who was nominated for three Oscars (Evans)
1A: Tribe with a sun dance (Crees) - as with DANTE'S, I'm not fond of the "S" here...
14D: French Bluebeard (Landru) - Does not ring a bell. LANDRU crosses RAT, which was easy enough to get from the clue (32A: Tell), but which is annoying as all git out because of the repetitive appearance of RATTIER (106A: More run-down) on the other side of the grid. On the LANDRU / RAT connection, I'm going to quote Crossword Fiend here without her permission (from a private e-mail); hope she doesn't mind: "I would rather have had some fake-ass abbreviation AAT where RAT is, so LANDAU could be there instead of a French serial killer nobody's ever heard of." Amen, sister.
15D: Cultural/teaching facility (art lab) - first of all, I can barely read that clue. A slash? What is that? Are conjunctions just too elusive for you today? Second, is this some 60's term? I'm never heard of an ART LAB. I've heard of ART. And LAB. ART CARNEY. SKY LAB. Not ART LAB. Sounds Soviet.
27A: A person doing a duck walk grasps these (ankles) - yikes! I can't even picture this. I guess "doing a duck walk" is better than any alternative phrase that might go in there.
45D: Iowa and Missouri (Siouans) - I wish I actually knew something about Native American tribes instead of just making semi-blind stabs once I get a couple crosses, which is my normal M.O. (Hey, MO ... Missouri. Get it? Of course you do, it's not that clever...)
59D: Thick-bodied fish (chub) - is this where the term "CHUBby" comes from? Or vice versa? I know that one can CHUM the waters, but I don't think I know anything about CHUB. There was a rapper from the early 90's called CHUBB ROCK. Please, somebody, put him in the puzzle. Look at that first name. How can you resist? You could even use him to clue ROCK. So much better than [Chris _____] or [The _____].
64A: Lilylike plant (hosta) - this crosses CHUB at the "H," so I had to guess. I'm not really into foliage. Except for my local chinese restaurant, which is called FOLIAGE. I'm into that.
62D: Denver's _____ Gardens (Elitch) - My sister lives near Denver, and I've visited her there many times, but I've never heard of this place.
86D: Birthplace of Aaron Burr (Newark) - How ... unglamorous and forgettable.
102D: Historic Heyerdahl craft (Ra I) - really wanted KON-TIKI. Neeeever heard of RA I.



Proud of myself that I pulled LEICA (66D: German camera) from ... the bottom of the ocean of my mind. Had one of those moments where I refused to leave and come back to it because I knew that I knew it - and sure enough, a little word association, a little talking to myself, and tada, LEICA. ELIA - pen name of Charles Lamb - sneaks its way back into the grid in an odd fashion, through the rather vague 77A: "Essays of _____." Sticking with literature, I love me some Ben JONSON (93A: "Drink to me only with thine eyes" poet) but did Not know that O RARE were words that were frequently applied to him (69D: Words often applied to 93-Across). Is there a physicist of any stature who can't be clued as 93D: Eponymous physicist (Joule)? TESLA got this very same clue a while back. Where are the non-eponymous physicists? Don't really know HEDDA Hopper (110A: Hopper of Hollywood), but I know her name, and that's enough. DENNIS wouldn't fit, so HEDDA - better known for her gossip column (see tools of the trade on her head, right) than for her acting. Lastly, all hail the return of RAFFIA (44D: Basket material) to the grid. I got baffled by this answer once before. No longer. I feel like I should be keeping a running tally in the great basket-weaving material crossword face-off between RAFFIA and OSIER. You win this round, RAFFIA...

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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