Rex Parker Does the NYT Crossword Puzzle: Company whose mascot is Sonic Hedgehog

Constructor: Lynn Lempel

Relative difficulty: Medium-Challenging (just means it played like a Tuesday, don't freak out)

THEME: uh ... "Did things to celebrities," I guess — familiar (?) two-word phrases that are clued as if they were past tense verb phrases wherein something was done to someone famous ... thus:

MOLDED GLASS is 18A: Had a big influence on Philip's music?
HAMMERED STEEL is 29A: Harshly criticized Danielle's novels?
PETRIFIED WOOD is 49A: Scared the daylights out of Elijah in "The Lord of the Rings"?
CRUSHED ROCK is 63A: Trounced Chris in a comedy competition?

Word of the Day: NORTH SEA (39D: Watery expanse between England and Scandinavia) —

The North Sea is a marginal sea of the Atlantic Ocean located between Great Britain, Scandinavia,Germany, the Netherlands, and Belgium. An epeiric (or "shelf") sea on the European continental shelf, it connects to the ocean through the English Channel in the south and the Norwegian Sea in the north. It is more than 970 kilometres (600 mi) long and 580 kilometres (360 mi) wide, with an area of around 750,000 square kilometres (290,000 sq mi). (wikipedia)

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Don't usually see these kinds of "?" theme answers on Monday. The rest of the grid was a snap, but those answers all required substantial crosses. In fact, I was well over halfway thru the puzzle before I had any inkling what the theme might be. To be honest, PETRIFIED WOOD is the only one of the phrases that means anything to me (and I had TERRIFIED WOOD there at first...). If I had to put a dozen adjectives before GLASS, I would never hit MOLDED. Ditto HAMMERED before STEEL and CRUSHED before ROCK. Anyway, that's it. Fill = super easy, theme answers = odd and slightly tough to pick up.

Bullets:

4A: Ice-grabbing tool (TONGS) — my ice-grabbing tool is my hands. Salad bar ingredients = TONGS.
36A: Starch from a tropical palm (SAGO) — a word I know only from xwords.
70A: Rightmost number on a grandfather clock (III) — as III clues go, that's a good one.
73A: Charge for a bang-up job? (TNT) — don't think of TNT as a "charge." I thought this referred to dent repair, so I had something like "FEE" at first.

8D: Eruption that might elicit a blessing (SNEEZE) — I guess it *is* an eruption. In that air and spit particles erupt from your face. Sure.
13D: Speak with a gravelly voice (RASP) — Not [Speak with a 63-Across voice]?
26D: Company whose mascot is Sonic the Hedgehog (SEGA) — not SAGO. Also, not SONY (my first inclination, despite knowing better).

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

PS I almost forgot—you should get in on the puzzle contest that Puzzlewright Press is holding. Solve a fun/challenging word puzzle, send in answer by noon, Eastern time, TUESDAY March 13, 2012, and earn a chance to win one of three copies of "Brain Games for Word Nerds" by Francis Heaney. I did the puzzle—doable, but definitely a bit of a work-out. Get the .pdf HERE.