SUNDAY, Feb. 18, 2007 - David Kwong and Kevan Choset

Solving time: 21:10

THEME: "Magic words" - Theme is explained by 70A: Magic words ... or a hint to the other long answers in this puzzle ("NOW YOU SEE IT, NOW YOU DON'T"); The word "IT" is inserted into and taken out of familiar phrases to make new, odd phrases, which are then clued, e.g. 25A: Einstein's asset (Great Brain) or 27A: Acerbic rock/folk singer (Biting Crosby).

I didn't enjoy solving this puzzle, though in the end I had to admire its cleverness as well as its architectural elegance, with the 21-letter explanatory theme answer (70A) running right through the center of the grid. I could see very early on that the theme had something to do with "IT," but it took me a Long time to get 70A, because of a mistake that I had early on, and actually never bothered to correct: 74D: Words with house or move (on the). I had IN THE (guess I saw the "house" but not the "move" part of the clue), which made 70A end -OWYOUDINT (I forget exactly how many of those other letters I had in place when I made the error) and I was thinking "is this some kind of horrible slang, some botched approximation of black slang, e.g. "O no you dint!", an expression of offended disbelief wherein DINT is a contraction of DIDN'T!?!?!?" So, as I said, I didn't get 70A until almost the very end. I just went around guessing theme answers ("put IT in or take IT out"). The whole experience felt slow, and clunky, and awkward. I got no kind of rhythm. There were times where I just stared at the grid and felt very much in free fall - THEN I spent 3-5 minutes searching for a mistake in the grid (two, it turns out - the one I already mentioned [DINT for DON'T] and another to be discussed below). And STILL my time was respectable. That is, no worse than my average Sunday.

104A: Person at court (baron)

How is this? Is this because a BARON has a court? Of his own? Like a king has a court? Or is he a person at a king's court? The "court" part of this clue seems arbitrary and off. I understand that a BARON may have a court of his own, but if you search "court" at the Wikipedia entry for BARON, the only word it hits is "courtesy," as in "courtesy title," as in a BARON without a "court" to speak of.

1D: Modern workout system (Tae Bo)

Really? Still? I haven't seen Billy Blanks on my TV screen in a while.

80D: Georgia and others, once: Abbr. (SSRs)
81D: Sen. McCarthy ally (HUAC)

It's getting very Cold War over in the "Carmel-by-the-Sea" portion of the grid. And very Abbreviated as well. Nice little sub-thematic juxtaposition.

43D: Boxer nicknamed "Hands of Stone" (Duran)
44D: Año starter (Enero)

What month was it when Sugar Ray Leonard made Roberto DURAN say "No mas!"? Was it, by chance, ENERO? No, it was NOVIEMBRE.

59D: First name in comedy (Whoopi)

Oh, I'm sorry, I thought you said "comedy."

34A: Graf _____ (Spee)

The Admiral Graf SPEE was a German battleship that served in the early stages of WWII. This answer is known to me Only from crosswords, and even then, not very well; I remembered that it was S-EE, but couldn't remember what letter went in that second place. So it's time to play "Better Know Your S-EE Words"

1. SHEE = [Irish fairy people (Var.)]
2. SKEE = [_____-ball, arcade game]
3. SMEE = [Hook's helper]
4. SNEE = ["Snick or _____": knife-fighting]
5. SPEE = see above
6. SWEE = [Popeye's Little _____ Pea]

Problem Fill

• 61D: Hammer user (nailer) - true enough, but such a crappy word - one of the horrible "Odd Jobs" I like to gripe about - that it would not come to me even after I had most of its letters
• 99D: Beams (girders) - I have no idea why this answer took so long to come, as it seems quite ordinary now that I look at it. I just know that I took many, many passes at it before it came into view. I think I thought the word was a verb.
• 6D: French film director Allégret (Marc) - didn't actually give me problems because I never saw it. Good thing, because I have Never heard of this guy.
• 50A: Faulkner character _____ Varner (Eula) - sadly, I did see this one. No idea. Never heard of her (it's a her, right?). Why is that? Because I've read but one Faulkner novel in my entire life: As I Lay Dying - I don't remember the plot of that book, and I know next to nothing about the plots of his others. Best line from As I Lay Dying: "My mother is a fish." That is, literally, all that I remember about that book. EULA Varner is a character in The Hamlet, a novel which, I swear, I had never heard of until just now. It was made into a movie called The Long, Hot Summer in 1958, starring Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, and featuring Lee Remick as EULA Varner. If my cursory research is correct, EULA kills herself with a pistol. I guess I should have said "Spoiler Alert."
• 41D: Word in many a Nancy Drew title (Clue) - I was happy to see the "C" there and immediately entered the obvious CASE - forgetting, of course, that CASE was already taken by The Hardy Boys (one of whom was played on TV by Parker Stevenson, as I established in a recent entry and / or comment).
• 85D: Literally, "instruction" (Torah) - I'm embarrassed to say I had no CLUE about this answer, even with the "T" in place. Wasn't until I had the terminal -AH that it became obvious.
• 78A: Percolate (leach) - never in my wildest dreams would I have put these two words in the same universe. STEEP seems more closely related to both of them than they are to themselves, if that pronoun pile-up makes any sense. I think LEACH is how Robin spells his name. I would have spelled it LEECH on a spelling test.
• 125A: "_____ Dream" ("Lohengrin" piece) (Elsa's) - I blew an ELSA clue a few months back, so I sort of remembered her this time. Sort of. I should say that that ELSA clue, the one I muffed, resulted in an avalanche of hits to this website from people searching for her name. Common fare to crossword pros, a mystery to hacks (sadly, I'm still more latter than former).
• 38D: Dagger (dirk) - a perfectly good word that was stored away in my brain from my D&D days (circa 1981). Unfortunately for me, it was stored away so well that I actually couldn't retrieve it. It wasn't 'til I got AIKMAN (62A: 1993 Super Bowl M.V.P.) that the "K" dropped into place and DIRK became visible. I like that DIRK intersects 48A: The Henry who founded the Tudor line (VII), mostly because DIRK seems like a word that would have been in common parlance in that era. Unlike now, when it's best known as the first name of the NBA's greatest German.
• 22A: Sinatra's "Meet Me at the _____" (Copa) - My era = COPA Cabana. In the future, please clue this word via Manilow.
• 102D: _____ Society (English debating group) (Eton) - so, so, so many ways to clue ETON, and this is what you give me. A school, a collar, "The _____ Rifles," etc. I would have preferred them all.
• 123D: What barotrauma affects (ear) - aaargh. Simple little answer. Since a barometer measures atmospheric pressure, I figured barotrauma affected the AIR. I swear that it makes a kind of sense.
• 115D: Citation of 1958 (Edsel) - I'm guessing that the Citation was a make of car. I think Citation is better known as a racehorse. My god, how did I know that? The weird detritus that floats around in my head... Speaking of HORSES (109A: Engine capability, slangily (horses))... that's it, just that clue, right there. I got it fast, for which I was very proud of myself, considering I know less than nothing about cars (or other things that might have engines).

Always happy to see John Kennedy TOOLE in the puzzle (47D: "A Confederacy of Dunces" author) because that novel is great. It reminds me of my mom, who gave me my first copy when I was young(er). Something about the "North Carolina" portion of the puzzle is making me happy today, specifically, the pile-up of multiple-word phrases, where IN TURN (56D: Sequentially), ON THE (74D: Words with house or move), NO SIR (75D: Polite refusal), and TWO P.M. (Soap time, maybe) all intersect ERE NOW (79A: Heretofore) and NOT SO (88A: "Baloney!") - not to mention NOW YOU SEE IT, NOW YOU DON'T. TWO PM is precisely the time that my soap, As The World Turns, comes on. When I discuss As The World Turns with Andrew (who has been watching Way longer than I have) we abbreviate the show to ATWT - which, I forgot to mention in a recent puzzle, occurs occasionally in puzzles as an abbr. of Atomic Weight. I'd really really like to see ATWT clued with reference to the soap, which I believe would be legal, as the only sites that come up on a Google search of [ATWT] are soap-opera-related.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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FRIDAY, Feb. 9, 2007 - Eric Berlin

Solving time: 16:50

THEME: none

What a horrible, horrible feeling. I ran through this puzzle like a hot knife through butter ... until I hit the NW, and then I went into what felt like an eternal free-fall. Nothing. I couldn't get a damn thing. Well, that's not true. I would get something, and then it wouldn't work, so I'd erase it - over and over and over. There were two major problems that prevented my getting into that NW quadrant (besides an ignorance of "country" music - who the !@#@ is Joe ELY? (1D: Country rocker Joe and others (ELYS)). And those problems were:

9D: Masters topics (sex lives) - I had the LIVES part and had no idea what this could be. Didn't know if LIVES was its own word, or part of a longer word, or what. Knew that the "Masters" in question wasn't "Master's exams" - that has an apostrophe in it - but the only other Masters I could think of was the golf tournament. What ends in -LIVES and concerns championship golf? Answer: NOTHING. Turns out the question refers to ancient sexperts Masters & Johnson. Here is something I didn't know (from "Discovery Health" website):

Masters and Johnson initiated a project that ultimately included direct laboratory observation and measurement of 700 men and women while they were having intercourse or masturbating.

Wow. Who volunteered for that? Maybe they paid well. Did they ever consider that people doing it at home, or wherever, might be quite different from people doing it in a lab, knowing they're being watched. This is like having cameras in the courtroom (which I'm against) - no one can be completely unselfconscious with a camera trained on him. Then there's the inevitable probes or cathodes or who knows what other Clockwork Orange-type gadgets. Maybe their interest was more purely physiological than sociological. This is way too much space to devote to this damn answer, which thwarted my entry (!) to the great Northwest. Oh, and the other roadblock?

22A: A, B or C, often: Abbr. (Ans.) - such a little answer! How could it possibly cause any harm? Well, I'll tell you. I did not have ANS. I had the good, perhaps better, ANSwer: APT. That's right APT! As in "Apartment," not the word APT, though my ANSwer was, in fact, APT, dammit. APT! And then that gave me a "P" at the end of 5D: Admit, which I was sure would have to be OWN UP, despite the fact that OWN UP was very discordant with its parallel neighbor, AVE MARIAS (4D: Parts of some services). So what did I do? Naturally, I erased AVE MARIAS (or, more precisely, I erased the AVE M- part). In the end, though, I have to give ANS. all the credit for my being able to solve this puzzle at all. After many, many minutes spent completely blanking out on everything in the NW, I finally saw that APT. could be ANS., I changed it, and the puzzle, including the very APT answer AH YES (6D: "I understand now"), was done inside of a minute. Oh, so 5D: Admit was not OWN UP, but LET IN (which, for the record, I botched again before getting it right, thinking the answer was SEE IN, ugh). In the end, if I only could have remembered the name of the very memorable tune, YAKETY SAX (17A: Polka heard frequently on "The Benny Hill Show"), all those Scrabbly letters would have helped me knock the NW out quite quickly (see 20A: 1950's political slogan ("I Like Ike"), which has the Scrabbly "K"s and which I got right away). But no. No no no.

Gimme gimme gimme

God bless the following answers, for giving me precious life when all the other answers were playing hard to get:

18A: Part of a chronicle (annal) - I've dated more than one historian in my lifetime. Well, no, just the one, actually. Anyway, this is a fairly common term, especially in medieval and early modern history. I also once read a dreadfully boring book called Annals of the Parish when I was in Scotland. It was written by a man named John Galt (1821). When I returned to the states, I would occasionally see these bumper stickers that read "Who is John Galt?" and I couldn't figure out why people wanted to know about a 19th-century Scottish novelist. Turns out the question is from Atlas Shrugged, which I have never read, but which my mother owns a signed copy of, for some reason. Who is John Galt? Here is John Galt.
27A: Hunter of literature (Evan) - second time he's been in the puzzle since September. I know because he's a name I remember. He is better known as the best-selling crime writer Ed McBain. Here is one of his 50's paperbacks (I've shown this before, but it's been over four months, so who's gonna remember?):
30D: Actress Sobieski (Leelee) - this girl is giving TERI POLO a run for her money as the (so-called) Actress clue of the 21st century. She was in another puzzle I did in just the past couple of days. Expect to see more of her. Coincidence: the last message I received in my email inbox was from a former student named, I kid you not, Li Li.
58A: "He seemed like such ____ boy" (a nice) - super-gimme for all! And right on top of another gimme: 60A: When to see la luna (noche)!
53D: Cartoonist Walker (Mort) - "Are you the creator of 'Hi & Lois,' because you are making me laugh." - Comic Book Guy, "The Simpsons" [note: this quote must be uttered with deadpan sarcasm]. See also: "If you are waiting for the 'Hi and Lois' signing, you are too late. It has been moved to the Springfield Colosseum."
36A: Doesn't puff idly (inhales) - piece of cake! Thanks, Clinton (god I irrationally love that man)
37D: TV witch (Samantha) - are you kidding? My cat is named for her evil cousin! Hey, somebody stole my idea!

What I Didn't Know

• 38A: Subject of the biography "All or Nothing at All" (Sinatra) - well, I know who SINATRA is, just not in reference to this particular book. Is the title a lyric from "My Way"? No, it's an actual song title. Sadly (very sadly) "All or Nothing at All" makes me think not of Sinatra but of O-Town. Have they been crossword fill? Because OTOWN looks like it could come in quite handy in a pinch.
• 29D: Bearer of catkins (alder tree) - first of all, I have NO idea what a "catkin" is. Is it anything like a kitten? No, they're just these sort of cone-y, fuzzy, probably seed-bearing thingamajigs. Isn't the addition of TREE here a bit ... superflous. I mean, I've seen the answer ALDER a few times, I'm pretty sure. Of course it's an ALDER TREE. Is there an ALDER FOX? ALDER DOLPHIN? ALDER BUS? What other kinds of ALDER are there?
• 49D: Like some stocks (no par) - again, if you need financial advice, please look elsewhere. Business and commerce-related fill stumps me almost as much as the damned Bible (although, today, I owned the Bible! Take that, ENOCH (47D: Methuselah's father)!
• 45D: Heavens: Prefix (Urano-) - inferrable, in a way, but outside my ken (not my CATKIN).
• 46D: Nervine, for one (tonic) - once again, inferred, not known. TONIC is also a terrible, terrible band. One of those generic white guy bands from the 90s whose name you know and whose songs are bland but very, very familiar, in a generic kind of way. Warning: you will find yourself humming and / or tapping your feet if you are not very careful. Infectious, in the way that pernicious diseases are infectious.

I like that OUTEREAR (44A: One end of a canal) and FRONT END (50A: Frequent area of auto damage) sit one atop the other, as it gives your REAR and FRONT in close proximity to one another. My favorite fill from this puzzle is all kind of negative, if not outright morbid. 21D: How a snake may be caught? had me thinking IN A PIT (too literal), but the real answer, IN A LIE, was so much better. I did not know what "anacusis" was in 39A: Develops anacusis, but with the last three letters in place I was pleasantly (?) surprised to see that the answer was GOES DEAF. ("Anacusis" reminds me of "ailurophobia" for some reason - perhaps because they are both disorders that start with "A," and I learned them both from crosswords: "ailurophobia" = fear of cats, which I do not have. See Serena, above). Lastly I enjoyed the frankness of 40D: A bad way to be left (for dead), which is how the puzzle nearly left me. But I had an AWAKENING (10D: Realization) and persevered.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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FRIDAY, Jan. 12, 2007 - Sherry O. Blackard

Solving time: 2:31!!! (just kidding - somewhere in the 10-15 minute range?)

THEME: A Night At The Opera (or, none)

I tend not to solve puzzles on the applet on Thursday and Friday nights. In general, I don't function well, mentally, after 10pm, so the whole release-time of the puzzles is a drag (I like to be in bed at 10pm - I would be So Thrilled if the Times could push back the release time even one hour, hint hint, wink wink, elbow elbow, nudge nudge). And since Friday and Saturday puzzles can be terrors, I like to take them to bed and work on them there, mainly because I don't like the idea of gnashing my teeth in my (home) office as time ticks by and my prospective sleep time gets shorter and shorter. It's also a nice way to relax and Enjoy the late-week puzzles, which tend to be worth enjoying. That said, I really really wish I had solved this on the applet, as I think my time would have been superfast (for me). I don't push forward quickly when I solve in bed. If I had been pushing, I'm sure I could have done this puzzle in under 10. It was delightful, but not hard. Very much on the easy side for a Friday. I'm going to type my grid into the applet just to double check that everything's right. So if you see my time there, and it seems super-fast, remember that it's fake. Admittedly fake (actually, I submitted the grid at just under 10 minutes, which may be wishful thinking, but it's not Terribly fake).

This puzzle looks daunting, with its 3 stacks of 3 fifteen-letter answers, and then another 15-letter answer cutting straight down through the grid - so much white space to fill in. But these types of puzzles don't give me nearly as much trouble as the ones with all the nooks and crannies that are hard to work your way into; plus, you can often get a 15-letter answer off of just 3 or 4 consecutive letters, which tends to open the whole grid right up. These kinds of puzzle seem like they are much harder on an a constructing scale than a solving one.

7D: Where "Otello" premiered (Milan)
24A: Verdi's "Un _____ in Maschera" (ballo)
57A: Longtime La Scala conductor (Arturo Toscanini)
49D: Cabriole performer's wear (tutu)


OPERA! OK, that last one is ballet, but still, it's in the musical performance realm. Some interesting things about this set of clues/answers: I was very proud of getting BALLO (not knowing Italian and never having heard of the Verdi work in question) with just one or two letters. The word, which means "dance" or "ball," is memorable to me because I publicly destroyed the Spanish version of the word ("baile") in a crime fiction course I was teaching once by repeatedly pronouncing the word like the English "bale" (it's properly pronounced something like "bye'-yay"). There was a chapter in Dorothy Hughes's Ride the Pink Horse that was titled "Baile," I believe - the whole novel was set in a U.S. border town - and after I had mauled the word a few times, a student politely if vaguely contemptuously corrected me. Memo to would-be teachers and other people who get caught out publicly in a massive error - admit your mistake good-naturedly and then move on. Do not engage in self-flagellation, do not get defensive or flustered. Laugh at your mistake and then plow forward as if your manifest ignorance were in fact no big deal. I've drifted away from the puzzle.

Oh, another thing: I got ARTURO TOSCANINI and one of his long parallel counterparts down there, 61A: Summer resort area famous for recreational boating (Thousand Islands), without ever seeing the clue(s). I was fortunate enough to somehow get 60A: It can take a lot of heat (cast-iron skillet) very quickly, and then I did some Downs (starting with the semi-gimme 43D: Grammy-winning Jones (Norah)), and by the time I looked back at those long crosses, they just sort of filled themselves in. I love that CAST-IRON SKILLET sits right underneath ARTURO TOSCANINI. Why? Well, look closely - ARTURO TOSCANINI is actually an anagram of CAST-IRON ... well, not SKILLET, but ... well, the following:

• CAST-IRON IRON TAU
• CAST-IRON RAIN-OUT
• CAST-IRON RIO TUNA
• IN A CAST-IRON ROUT
• I OUTRAN CAST-IRON
• CAST-IRON I.O.U. RANT
• CAST-IRON OAT RUIN
• AIN'T OUR CAST IRON?
• CAST-IRON U.N. RATIO

... and such-'n'-such.

3D: "Do the Right Thing" pizzeria (Sal's)
18A: Old roadside name (Esso)

Gimme both of these! Especially the first, as I love that movie and have seen it many, many times. "Roadside name" = ESSO. Pure and simple. These answers were my first toehold in the puzzle. Didn't know the Jackie Wilson song (1D: "Am _____ Man" (1960 Jackie Wilson hit) [I the]) - wanted I YER or I HER, but once I got I THE, those 15-letter crosses came very quickly - first to go: 17A: Be in a very advantageous position (hold all the cards) - wanted IN THE CATBIRD SEAT, but it's too long and, well, just wrong. Slowed up a bit in the far NE, where SIRUP (13D: Some cough medicine: Var.) is spelled ridiculously and I forgot that eBay does things on Pacific and not Eastern time (23A: Deadlines on eBay are given in it: Abbr. (PST)).

Ridiculous Fill

OK, my first thought is that architecturally insane puzzles like this are Bound to have some ridiculous fill - how else are you gonna coordinate this many abutting (and intersecting!) 15-letter answers? So, I'm not faulting the puzzle - just pointing out the groaners that went into its making. It was worth it.

• 10D: Hot (ired) - this word is not a word until you add an "F" to its front end
• 31D: Transfuse (endue) - where you don't want to step at the dog park
• 2D: Cramped urban accommodations, for short (SRO's) - SRO is perfectly good, even Pantheonic, fill but this clue is misdirective in a very forced way. TTH! (Trying Too Hard) [I take it all back - I misunderstood meaning of SRO, thinking it short for "Standing Room Only" (theater sign), when here it refers to "Single-Room Occupancies," which are indeed "Cramped urban accommodations"]
  
• 22D: Falling-out (set-to) - ordinary fill, but the clue suggests not speaking to one another, while the answer suggests a rumble à la Jets and Sharks, as in "I SET my knife TO his throat, Maria!"

Is that it? It is - man, that's hardly any iffiness at all. Very, very impressive.

26D: Actor who roared to fame? (Lahr)

What's (not so) hilarious about this is that the last time he showed up in a puzzle, I wrote about how I can never remember his name, how I know it ends in -HR but I always want BEHR or BAHR, etc. And yet I still haven't learned my lesson, clearly, as I blanked on his name again. There is a movie that this used to happen with ALL the time when I was in grad school. I would challenge myself to remember its name, and yet never, NEVER, could I remember it. In fact, I'm only typing right now as a stall to give myself time to remember the name of the movie I'm talking about, because it's gone yet again. Want to say Living in Oblivion, but that's not it. It had Lily Tomlin and Ben Stiller in it and maybe ... what's her name who "stars" in the TV "hit" "Medium" ... nope, had to look it up: Flirting with Disaster. I guarantee you that I will forget this movie's name again by tomorrow. Why is Living in Oblivion so much easier to remember? - maybe because it's both less clichéd as a phrase and a better movie. LAHR, why won't you stay in my head, you lovable lion!

35D: Village, in Würzburg (dorf)
36D: Tennis star _____ (Anke)
37D: It flows in Flanders (Yser)

Behold, Western Europe in the far eastern portion of the puzzle! There is something to love in each of these answers. Dorf. Dorf! I got this only because of Düsseldorf, which I assume is a "village" in Germany or its environs. The only Dorf I know (you can see where this is going, right? ...) is a golf instructor.


Don't know what part of my brain ANKE Huber was hiding in - I initially spelled her ANKA, but that's pretty damned close for a first guess with no crosses. I'm not sure "star" adequately describes Ms. Huber, though her mom might disagree. When I read the clue [It flows in Flanders], I wanted to shout, "The blood of a true Christian!?"

Final Thoughts

You gotta love the NYT puzzle - where else is Verdi gonna rub elbows with "F Troop" (39A: "F Troop" role (Sergeant O'Rourke))? 21A: Physics units (dynes) might be a little tricky / arcane, but its pretty crossword-common and, as I've said before, I got an A+ in Physics in college, so the vocabulary has stuck around a bit, if the actual concepts / definitions / real knowledge hasn't. See also 34D: Kidney secretion (renin), which is from some long, lost bio class. With HONORS (30D: It's good to graduate with them) is an abominable Joe Pesci vehicle (redundant?) that I was stupid enough to watch on a mid-90s plane trip. Andrew can tell you how great its Madonna theme song was, though, I'm sure. Andrew does not live IN L.A. (53D: On Wilshire Blvd., say) but he sure lives near it. DOG LEG (21D: Sharp turn) is a word whose etymology I am totally going to look up later this week (when will my unabridged dictionary finally get here?!). I guess a dog's leg does have that pointy, reverse knee thing going on. I once co-taught a class with a short man, and as I am a tall man, some of the students took (very carefully and with much good humor) to calling us Mario and LUIGI (27D: Brother of Nintendo's Mario). I ... forget which one I was. From this pic, apparently LUIGI. I initially wrote in TNT for 42A: Old cable inits. (TNN), but AT THE LAST SECOND (8D: Almost too late), I realized my error and fixed it.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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SUNDAY, Nov. 5, 2006 - Derrick Niederman

Solving time: 45:36

THEME: "Missing Links" - Theme answers are clued with familiar two-word phrases with a "_____" in between; answers are a chain of words linking one word in the clue with the other. E.g. 59A: Orange _____ Bowl (JuliusCaesarSalad) => Orange Julius, Julius Caesar, Caesar Salad, Salad Bowl.

Don't like fussy grids, and this one is very fussy. Too many little words, too many nooks and crannies, corners with little narrow one-square-width openings that are hard to work your way into. I did, however, like this theme, which is odd because usually I don't like theme answers that are, well, fussy, like this one, where middles of long answers are dependent not on the clue itself but on words in the grid that are built off the clue. I do wish the theme had been more elegantly expressed. I thought at first the answers were all going to be two-word phrases, like 25A: White ____ House (Christmas Tree), and would thus look like ordinary fill in many ways [also loved that the White House has a Christmas tree, the ceremonial lighting of which is a TV staple every year]. Many answers were like this, but others, like the "Orange ____ Bowl" example above, were longer. That's fine, I guess, but then there's 98A: e ____ Bay (G-Strings UpSet Back), which has two problems, or at least inconsistencies. First, eBay is not a two-word phrase (neither, by the way, is 106D: Buck ____ eye (Private), the answer to which, by the way, should have been NAKED). Second, UP functions as a single word in the phrase STRINGS UP but as the first syllable in a compound word in UPSET. They aren't terrible, these anomalies. In fact, I guess they aren't anomalies. The theme just involves linking parts of phrases with other phrases, and "part" is broadly construed. OK. Not sure why I wanted greater elegance and a higher degree of constructor difficulty, but I did. Still, as I said, I really enjoyed the process of figuring out the theme answers (though it was slower going than I would have liked).

Saw Flushed Away yesterday with Sahra after her karate practice. The movie was recommended to me recently by Someone I Know, and it turned out to be a pretty good recommendation. The story was pretty dumb, but everything involving music was seriously entertaining, and the animation was astounding (though I'm getting used to that by now). There are recurrent singing slugs in this movie, which function something like a Greek chorus, and somehow I Never got tired of them. There's also a Tom Jones impersonation, hilarious if cheaply JINGOistic anti-French comedy, and Ian McKellen as a Creepy Toad who keeps his Many tadpole offspring in jars of, er, water, I guess, around his compound (though it felt not paternal but ... more like when Howard Hughes went crazy and began saving his urine in jars around the house). I was somehow a little bit attracted to the female lead in this movie. She was a rat. In my defense, I think my attraction was based largely on her British accent, which reminded me of my lovely wife's pseudo-British Kiwi twang. Yes. Yes, that's a plausible excuse.

27A: Moved to and fro (wigwagged)

Yuck yuck yuck. This gets 10,300 Google hits, where ZIGZAGGED gets over 200,000. For good reason. Nobody says WIGWAGGED. Nobody nowhere notime. A WIGWAG is a railroad crossing signal with pendulum action, which must be where the ridiculous verb comes from. These signals have not been used in new installations for over 60 years (alternating red lights became the new, presumably more effective norm). Now that I know the word is based on an actual piece of machinery, and isn't just rank silliness, I feel a little better. But not much. Is this where the term "To Wig Out" comes from? I lived in a dorm called WIG once. I assume it was some rich donor's name.

39D: Singer Mann (Aimee)

LOVE her. Own many of her albums. She used to be the singer of 'Til Tuesday, which had one major hit in the 80's called "Voices Carry." Her solo work is fantastic. I highly recommend I'm With Stupid and Bachelor No. 2. Mann is married to Michael Penn (at least she was last I checked), who is the brother of the other famous Penns, including the one that died recently of a heart attack at the very early age of 40. If that is depressing, so is Ms. Mann's music. But it's gorgeous and moving and not mopey and annoying. Listening to "I've Had It" right Now. Mmmm, soundtrack-y.

42A (THEME): Double _____ play (CrossWord)

Tee hee! Good one! Very meta.

53A: Ultrapatriot (jingo)

Perhaps it seems obvious to others, but I've never thought of this as a stand-alone word. I know JINGOism and JINGOistic, but I don't know that I've ever heard anyone called a JINGO (sounds like a racial epithet, somehow). Here is the definition from the OED:

3. A nickname for those who supported and lauded the policy of Lord Beaconsfield in sending a British fleet into Turkish waters to resist the advance of Russia in 1878; hence, one who brags of his country's preparedness for fight, and generally advocates or favours a bellicose policy in dealing with foreign powers; a blustering or blatant ‘patriot’; a Chauvinist.

The term "Jingo" seems to have gained its modern meaning from a very specific music-hall song of the late 19th century that supported Britain's going to war vs. Russia. Lyrics: "We don't want to fight, yet by Jingo! if we do, We've got the ships, we've got the men, and got the money too." No relation to the popular party game JENGA.

69A: Bruin (UCLAn)

I know a number of people who have attended UCLA. I nearly went to grad school there myself. I have not heard a student or grad of that university referred to as a UCLAN (if, as I assume, it is meant to be pronounced "Yoo'-klan" - which makes me think of one of my favorite baseball players, and favorite baseball names: Kevin YOUKILIS!! He is a dead ringer for one of those thick-necked, badly shaven, cigar-chewing construction workers in old Bugs Bunny cartoons, specifically "Homeless Hare"; or one of the cheating, thuggish ball players from "Baseball Bugs"). Maybe it's meant to be pronounced letter by letter. There is a reason that people from UCLA are referred to as Bruins. I mean, you don't call a USC student an USCAN. It's Trojan. Bruin. Wolverine!

76A (THEME): Easter ____ bunny (Seals Off Key Chain Saw Dust)

Very nice - my problem here was that I am apparently exposed to too much contemporary, pseudo-hip-hop slang, and so when I had OFF ___ CHAIN, I thought for sure that the link was THE, as in the expression "OFF THE CHAIN," which succeeded "OFF THE HOOK" as a way of denoting that a party or game or other event was most excellent indeed.

95A: Skater Slutskaya (Irina)

Started with ELANA here and then corrected myself as needed. She has the word SLUT in her name. I just felt like pointing that out. Makes me giggle.

106A: Alternatives (Plan B's)

Though this probably isn't that clever or unusual, I love it ... although it's one of those phrases that sounds odd pluralized, like it should be PLANS B, like COURTS MARTIAL. Speaking of PLAN B, it is the name of an semi-apocalyptic novel by the late, great writer Chester Himes. Himes ditched the US in the 50s to live in Europe where, as a disaffected African-American, he had much more success and experienced much less day-to-day racism than he had in the States. Strangely, his success in France with his crime novels about Harlem detectives Coffin Ed and Gravedigger Jones ignited his American popularity, and his books came out in mass-market paperback editions here through the 1960s. His final, posthumously-published novel, Plan B, (fore-?) told of a society where racism could be overcome only by (very) violent rebellion. "Can't we all just get along?" Apparently not.

114A: Thickening agent (agar)

Thank god for this solidly Pantheonistic word, because it was about the only way I was going to weasel my way in to that troublesome SW corner, where 114D: Fleet of ships (argosy) was hiding behind the (wrong) ARMADA, and obscure legalese - 116D: One who suspends an action, at law (abator) - intersected numismatics - 134A: Like the 1915 San Francisco Mint $50 gold coin (octagonal). This corner is also about to teach me what a "bola" is: 115D: Bola user (gaucho). Ooh, the definition is cool (from Wikipedia):

Bolas (from Spanish bola, "ball", also known as boleadoras) are a throwing weapon ... made of weights on the ends of interconnected cords, designed to capture animals by entangling their legs... Gauchos use bolas to capture running cattle or game.

Here we see someone lovingly fondling GAUCHOS' bolas. Which one(s) will (s)he choose?
10D: Where streets meet: Abbr. (COR)

Ew, this one stinks. COR, I'm sure. Who abbreviates a street corner "COR?" This answer can only be INT for INTersection. COR is forced horridness.

13D: Contents of some patches (pawpaws)

As far as I know, the PAWPAW patch is a mythical place from some nursery rhyme I can't identify. So let me see what I've been missing... OK, so they are some kind of fruit, and seem particularly popular in Australia. This man, from Perth, seems to love his pawpaws quite a bit - maybe even more than the person pictured above loves his/her bolas.
16D: Darns (sews)

Maybe I would like the Sunday puzzle better if my printer didn't make everything so tiny. Numbers on the grid are hard to read, and lowercase "rn" can Easily look like an "m," which is what happened here. So, because I had ZIGZAGGED instead of WIGWAGGED (see above) I initially had SEZS here, and could not figure out what kind of dams those could be. Were they the kind of dams that held back water? Were they animal mothers of some kind? No, no. I just couldn't read the damned cramped type. "Darns" = SEWS = Monday puzzle stuff.

64D: "The Thin Man" pooch (Asta)

"Arf! I'm back! Arf! I'm everywhere! Arf! You thought you'd take me for a "ride in the country" and that would be the end of me? Arf! Stupid human! You can't kill me! I'm ASTA! Arf!"

126D: U-shaped river bend (Oxbow)

This was tricky, as I had the very reasonable-seeming ELBOW there for a good long time. The only thing I know about OXBOW is that there was an "Incident" there, once, I think, in a novel or movie.

127D: Civvies (mufti)

This makes me laugh because there was a mythical group around the five-college campuses called MUFTI whose sole purpose, it seems, was sticking enigmatic bumper stickers all over campus without being detected. Legend had it that the only way to become a member of MUFTI was to catch a member of MUFTI in the act of MUFTI-zing college property. I never saw the draw. Why natural selection didn't kill them off I'll never know. For all I know they still exist. Or else one very lonely professor continues to propagate the myth of their existence because particle physics or Peloponnesian History has long ceased to give his life its needed sizzle.

131D: When repeated, a top five hit of 1968 or 1987 (Mony)

OK, since you mentioned 1987 (year I graduated from high school), I am required (by my own set of internal laws) to comment. As I understand it, Billy Idol lost his virginity (possibly in the back seat of a car) while this song was on the radio, and that is why he decided to cover it later in his life. It is not my favorite Billy Idol song, but it'll do when no other Billy Idol song is around. "White Wedding" is very nice, but my favorite may be "Dancing With Myself," which, despite the fact that the title may in some way contain a not-so-thinly veiled reference to masturbation, is (coincidentally) the opening musical number in Flushed Away. You may now all admire the fabulous symmetry of this puzzle commentary.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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THURSDAY, Nov. 2, 2006 - John Farmer

Solving time: 7:42

THEME: Math! (rather than explain, I'll just give you the theme clues and answers)

20A: Step One: For every answer in this crossword, count this (Number of letters)
38A: Step Two: Take the figure you get for Step One and do this (Multiply by three)
56A: Step Three: Your Step Two result is the letter count for ...! (Each answer's clue)

And yes, 3x=number of letters in the clue, where x=number of letters in the answer. Wow, that was easier to explain than I'd imagined.

iTunes has seen fit to start me off with the Grease soundtrack this morning, so I'm feeling Very Good. John: "I got chills / They're multiplyin' / And I'm loooooooosin' control / 'Cause the power you're supplyin' / It's Electrifyin'!!!!" Then Olivia, singing to me, not John: "You better shape up / 'Cause I need a man / And my heart is set on you. . ." Whatever you say, Olivia, as long as you wear the poodle skirt and not that street-walker get-up Rizzo somehow convinced you to wear at movie's end.

What is up with the last two days' puzzles? I have absolutely torched them (by Rex standards), breaking Rex records for Wednesday and Thursday puzzles on back-to-back days. I even did today's puzzle on screen, with the Across Lite ap, which normally slows me down - but today I entered the first six Across clues one after the other, all (it turns out) correctly. [iTunes has "Chicago" by Sufjan Stevens on now ... do you know it? I LOVE it. Soundtrack-worthy. A kind of shout-out to my Chicago reader(s)]. Plus, this puzzle was math-tacular, and the second theme answer came very easily and intuitively after I'd solved the first. Nice that this math-related puzzle also has 1A: Pre-calc class (Trig) and 61A: SAT component (Math) in the grid, in addition to the three long theme answers. Oh, and it's got 59D: P's, to Pericles (rhos), which I'm sure must be mathematical symbols of some sort... anyone? Anyone? Bueller?

This morning, I got to read the gigantic Halloween story that Sahra's class (collectively) had written earlier in the week. It was hanging on several gigantic pieces of yellow lined paper tacked up to the wall (12 sq. ft. of story!). The story was awesomely structure-free with monsters chasing kids chasing monsters into homes and out of homes and down to Spooky River (!) and then it was all a dream but then it wasn't but then the mummies and vampires and witches all died and the kids slept well because they were full of candy. The End.

10A: Dandy fellows (fops)

A great, under-utilized word, perhaps because FOPS seem to be a time period-specific (and British) phenomenon. The word originally referred to socially aspirant men who aped the dress and manners of the aristocracy in very showy, flowery, excessive ways. Wigs and ruffles and rouge and lisping and what not. I just now learned (from Wikipedia) that there was an early 80s phenomenon known as "Fop-Rock," which included the likes of Adam Ant and Falco. I own(ed) albums by both of them. I did not know that their anachronistic love of castles, stagecoaches, and Vienna made them "foppish." Although, looking back at the "Goody Two-Shoes" video ... I mean, he's chasing a hot chick, but he is quite pretty and ruffly and made-up himself. But those early-80s New Wave, New Romantic pop stars - they all loved their hair and make-up and flouncy clothing. Girly guys chasing girls. I could dig it.

14A: Old VCR format (Beta)

HA ha, this is rich. It reminds me of my dad, who would always buy the latest electronic gadgets. He was especially drawn to those gadgets that cost monstrous sums of money and then became obsolete two years later, and BETA was one of them. The Gigantic Laser Disc (album-sized) was another. He has scores of (not cheap) movies on Laser Disc that he will never be able to watch again unless he dusts off that old player, which was the size of a small spaceship. I joke about it, but that Laser Disc player made my adolescence a blast. I will always remember it fondly, because it was how I watched great movies like Night Shift and Michael Nesmith's Elephant Parts and The Making of Michael Jackson's "Thriller". Why my dad thought it was cool for a 12- and 9-year old to watch (Repeatedly) a comedy about the organization of a hookers' union is beyond me, but thank god he did. I mean, come on - this is how I knew Shelley Long (before I ever saw a single episode of Cheers):OK, I'm going to stop reliving the psycho-sexual dynamics of my adolescence now. Adam Ant and Shelley Long are enough for one day.

41A: Footnote abbr. (ibid.)

The one place I stumbled in the puzzle. I had ET AL. In fact, so much do I want this to be ET AL., I even just now entered it as the correct answer in the bold heading of this entry. ET AL. gave me NUTS for 33D: Central parts (Nubs), which seemed fine to me. Eventually I realized that one does not FLAP A COIN (34D: Decide by calling heads or tails), and the problem was fixed.

42A: A foot wide? (EEE)

This, like OOOO (as exclamation), SSSS (as a hissing sound), AAA, and the like, always seems slightly cheap to me. I mean, why not go to EEEEE. That's a foot width, too (I think). My wide feet make foot-width clues quite obvious to me. I have been a bit foot-obsessed lately, as I pronate like crazy, and I now have to wear orthotic inserts in my shoes. More information on my feet in coming episodes, I'm sure.

4D: Star of "Ninotchka" (Garbo)

OK, I'm off to find the hottest head-shot in the history of movie-dom. Hang on... Oh, yeah, I want this for my birthday. I saw this hanging in my local frame shop and I believe I just stood and stared at it for many minutes. I don't think I've ever seen a Garbo movie, but I intend to.

6D: Put away, crypt-ically? (entomb)

And the Halloween fun continues. See also (sort of) 16A: Peek follower (a-BOO!).

9D: "Garfield" foil (Odie)

"Foil," that's awesome. Like he's a secondary character in a Shakespearean tragedy. Rich. Have I mentioned Sahra's absurd passion for Garfield, particularly the recent Bill Murray movies? Oh yeah. You have a kid, and you want it to have good taste, so you expose it to the things you love, hoping some of it will take. And then a bloated, computer-generated, 20-years-past-his-prime cartoon cat comes along. And then all of your best-laid plans go pffft as you watch your child double-over in tearful laughter while trying to tell you about Garfield's encounter with a bidet. To her credit, however, Sahra loves all things Looney Tunes and knows the name of Wile E. Coyote's favorite mail-order catalog (given here in the plural): 52D: Ultimate heights (Acmes).

55A: Joy of the morning? (Behar)

QUESTION MARK, indeed. The irony runs deep, as she brings Joy to no one.

56D: Actor Morales (Esai)

"Mr. Morales, it's the Pantheon on line 1. They want to know if you'll be able to attend the induction ceremony ... I don't know, something about your freakishly vowel-ridden name."

57D: "I get it," jokily (Ah, so)

Is "racistly" an adverb? Because I'm pretty sure you have to say "AH, SO" with your eyes squinted, while bowing slightly. It's something Richard Dawson not only would, but did say, from time to time, on Match Game. You might want to follow up AH, SO with "Confucius say..." or "Ancient Chinese secret." Then start saying your R's as L's, and you're ready to take your Asian-baiting show on the road! "Ah, So" was a catch phrase of Mr. Moto in old films. Moto was played, yellow-facedly, by the otherwise amazing Peter Lorre. He was supposed to be Japanese, for the record. I much prefer Lorre as the child murderer in M, or, better yet, as the decidedly FOPPISH Joel Cairo in The Maltese Falcon.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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TUESDAY, Oct. 31, 2006 - Patrick Blindauer

Solving time: 7:03

THEME: Dracula's least favorite ...

Happy Halloween! Today's puzzle was ... well, it was a little scary, although all the theme clues involved things that would repel Dracula, so the puzzle seemed to be trying to diminish rather than augment the fear (factor). Still, there were some scary words. EVIL-EYED (34D) is pretty spooky, and both SLITS (49D) and EXCISE (10D) can be horrific in the proper context. A SATYR (46A) isn't very scary ... unless he is an excited mood, and looking at you. An OCTOPUS will scare you if he's giant and attacking your submarine. I don't remember Disneyland's Enchanted TIKI Room (47D) as being very scary. The word SCAR is pretty scary (one letter away, actually) but it lies embedded over there in the not-so-fearsome ESCARGOT (39D). And then there's always ASPS (56D), but, alas, not On A Plane. ASPS are such frequent haunters of the crossword grid that they're about as scary as non-black cats. They should take some time off to plan their Next Big Thing, because their capacity to frighten (or even hold interest) died with Cleopatra. Give me VIPERS, COBRAS, SERPENTS, even BOAS, for god's sake. There are a TON of viable anagrams in ASPS, so I challenge constructors to use those, and give ASPS a rest. Then bring them back for Halloween 2026 and / or the Apocalypse, when we will be truly happy / horrified to see them. In defense of ASPS, however, this painting is Hot:
In honor of Halloween (my favorite time of year, if not necessarily my favorite day - the trick-or-treaters get ruder every year!), I will make all of today's pictures very scary.

1A: Clear of stale odors, maybe (aerate)

I would have liked AIR OUT here better. Don't you AERATE crops or fields or something? YES, you AERATE lawns, dammit, and presumably not to "clear" them of "stale odors" (from the body you buried there?). Want to AERATE your lawn? Find out how.

13A: Catastrophic (ruinous)

I had HEINOUS here, having come at the answer backwards (had the -NOUS first), which ended up being, yes, RUINOUS for me, time-wise (note the seven squares that I inked all to hell in the NW). This answer sat just underneath AERATE and atop 16A (THEME): Dracula's least favorite citations? (cross references), and I initially had Wrong answers for all three (with 16A I had the same solving backwards problem, so with -FERENCES in place, I prefixed DIF-). All this was compounded by my ridiculous entry of CHILLY for 1D: Frigid (Arctic) based solely on the "H," which I had from the (wrong) HEINOUS. So the puzzle was a little scary.

7A: Early Ford (Model A)

Knowing nothing about cars, I had MODEL T here. So, for my edification, and possibly yours, here are (Scary!) pictures of the (counterintuitively) earlier MODEL T (circa 1919):
And the more car-like MODEL A (circa 1928)
They're scary because they are from out of the past. Ghost cars! (OK, not as scary as The Ghost Whisperer or Ghost Dad, but I gotta work with what's in front of me)

23A: Cozy inn, briefly (B-and-B)

This little jerk is showing up far more often than he ought to. Twice in the past week. I'm sure a B-AND-B has been the site of more than a few horror movies, but I can't think of any to quote or grab pics from off hand. Imagine your own script.

26A: Historian Thomas who wrote "The French Revolution" (Carlyle)

I was thrown here by the slightly misleading "Historian." I was picturing some slightly portly, bespectacled, possibly combed-over, short-sleeve-button-down-wearing dork of a modern professor, or one of the more tweeded and pipe-smoking early 20th-century variety. Thomas CARLYLE was a Scottish essayist, satirist, and (yes) historian of the Victorian period. Unlike many things about this puzzle, Carlyle's writing was scary, in that his firm belief in Heroic Leadership gave philosophical underpinning to later fascist movements. Once he was a pal of liberals like John Stuart Mill, but towards the end of his life he was suggesting slavery never should have been abolished. Nice (and scary). The best, best, best fact about The French Revolution, if Wikipedia can be said to contain facts, is this:

After the completed manuscript of the book was accidentally burned by the philosopher John Stuart Mill's maid, Carlyle had to begin again from scratch.

What the hell? Did she use it for kindling? "Blimey, this neatly-stacked pile of paper with ink scribbles all over it will make for a loverly fire. I could use a spot of tea just now, I could .... gov'nuh." I just want to know what happened immediately after Carlyle found out. I'm sure that was scary. For the maid. Here's a scary portrait of Carlyle by Whistler:

22D: Robert of Broadway's "Guys and Dolls" (Alda)

I think I knew that Alan Alda grew up in a stage-acting family, but lately I don't tend to pay close attention to what Alan Alda says unless I'm rewatching a 1990s Woody Allen movie or I happen across one of those PBS specials on how the brain works, which Alda hosts. Very cool. Anyway, Robert is Alan's dad. He has a very, very, very long list of movie and TV credits, to say nothing of the stage. For today, however, I choose to remember him thusly:
29D: "Miracle" team of 1969 (Mets)
52D: Home to the 29-Down (Shea)

See, this would have all worked out so much better, timing-wise, if the Mets had at least been in the World Series this year, as they were supposed to be. But instead, we get the Cardinals. And thus FOX gets an early Halloween scare when it sees its TV ratings plummet:

The Cardinals' five-game victory over the Detroit Tigers averaged a record-low 10.1 television rating and 17 share, Fox said Sunday. This year's rating dropped nine per cent from the previous bottom, an 11.1 for a four-game sweep by the Chicago White Sox over the Houston Astros last year.

(thanks to Andrew for foisting that quotation on me, though I'm not sure of its source)

55A: Director Kurosawa (Akira)

This amazing director's career spans several decades (six of them, actually) and includes an astonishing variety of films, from adaptations of Shakespeare in Ran and Throne of Blood to the hugely influential samurai films Seven Samurai and Yojimbo, which provided the imaginative spark for so many American Westerns of the 1960s (and thus Clint Eastwood's early career). One of Kurosawa's greatest films, which is one of my, let's say, TEN favorite films of all time, is a little noir crime drama he made just after the end of WWII, during the American occupation. It's called Stray Dog and it is an astonishingly gripping story, as well as a melancholy assessment of all that Japan had lost and would continue to lose, culturally, in the grip of Americanization. It also features a very young and very sexy Toshiro Mifune, the Legendary Japanese actor, before anyone knew who he was. Please see this movie.

57A (THEME): Dracula's least favorite time? (Daylight savings)

[late addendum: reader "Andrew" claims that Daylight Savings (plural) Time is technically incorrect. It's in common parlance, however, and puzzles make use of colloquialisms all the time. It seems also that "Daylight Savings" - as a shortened way of saying "Daylight Saving Time" - is not uncommon. See this FOX News "article" (first and last time you'll hear me say that), which has "Daylight Savings" in the title, but "daylight-saving [hyphen!] time" in the body of the article. NPR slips up and uses both the "S" and non-"S" version in its discussion of Daylight Saving(s) Time. Curious.]

Now this is the best theme answer of the lot, because, since Daylight Saving Time just ended this past weekend, the clue suggests that we now have reason to fear a resurgence in Dracula's power. While there have been many powerful Draculas over the years, my B-movie predilections prevent me from honoring any one but the camp-tacular Christopher Lee.
Pleasant dreams!

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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SUNDAY, Oct. 8, 2006 - Fred Piscop

Last night was the best baseball moment since October 2004. I celebrate the Yankees' annual demise with all the giddy excitement of a kid on a Halloween candy bender. But that was last night. And today is today. And this puzzle ate me alive. Maybe I'm being punished for reveling in others' misery. If that's true, it was totally worth it.


TIGERS BEAT THE ARROGANT SMIRK OFF OF YANKEE FANS EVERYWHERE, DEFEATING YANKEES 8-3 to WIN THE ALDS. NEXT UP: WHO CARES?! YANKEES LOSE!



Solving time: 54:24

THEME: "Turnabout is Fair Play" (familiar phrases structured "_____ in the _____" have their first and last words reversed through clever cluing; see 95A, below)

Honestly, this puzzle made me angry. Again, I appreciate how difficult it must be to construct one of these babies, but I really did not enjoy much about this puzzle. It was horribly uneven. The theme was banal, even silly, and once understood, made it very easy to fill in "in the" in the middle of themed answers even before you'd looked at the clue. So, on the one hand, not clever and too easy. On the other hand, the puzzle was Impossibly hard for me in parts because of all the ridiculous tiny words and abbreviations and a lot of what seemed very off or forced cluing (see 124A, below). Of course, if I'd only known that "Ahab" was Jezebel's wife, things might have ended very differently for me. I am very proud, I must say, that I finally managed to conquer the Northern region of the puzzle (we'll call it "Winnipeg"), where my solving ended, and where I spent what must have been 8-10 minutes staring at a chunk of about 15 empty squares. Patience won out, and Somehow it all came together. The same cannot be said for my experience in the Due East ("Richmond"), which was very crash-and-burn - both my missed squares live in Richmond. Now, the autopsy:

1A: Fink on (rat out)

Love it. Beautifully colloquial in a hard-boiled way that I enjoy. Any answer that I can imagine coming out of the mouth of Jimmy Cagney is alright by me. And I guessed it right off. Only somehow I left it there, blank, and went off to start the puzzle elsewhere (at 113A: ____ morgana (mirage) [fata] - which by the way is badly clued, the "(mirage)" part being entirely unnecessary in a Sunday puzzle). By the time I got back to it, the memory of early happiness and hopefulness was like ashes in my mouth. In fact, my nailing "rat out" was a bit like Posada's 9th-inning home run last night: belated and thus meaningless. (side note: I have decided that though I hate the Yankees, I have developed a certain admiration for Jeter and Posada, who bleed pinstripes and never quit - if only they could shed Sheffield, A-Rod, and Giambi and pick up, say, TEN hungry young talented players to replace them, I think the Yankees could regain their resolve and become what they were in the late 90s: fearsome. Not that I *really* want to see that. I'm just sayin'...)

Let's do this by region - first, "Winnipeg"

7A: _____ Reid (the Green Hornet) [Britt]

The "r" and first "t" in this name were the very last squares I filled in. Curse you, "Winnipeg!" I have no idea what the "Green Hornet" was all about (60's TV show, before my time), but if this picture is any indication, it was gayer than even the 60's "Batman" TV show.




26A: Assaulted verbally (rant at)

Easy, right? Ugh, not for me, not today. This was part of the whole "Winnipeg" disaster. And I had the "ra" ... but I kept thinking "rail at," and the "i" just made no sense. Once I wrote out R A _ _ _ _ in the margin and started plugging in anything I could think of, I eventually hit the right answer. Didn't help that I was uncertain about ALL the intersecting down clues, including the next entry:

10D: Fife players (tootlers)

This word has such a ring of informality and implied incompetence to it that I hereby take offense for fife players everywhere (even if, somehow, fife players actually refer to themselves as "tootlers," which could very well be - to my knowledge, I do not know a fife player).

Now, "San Francisco"

53A: "American Idol" judge (Simon)

Of course I had "Abdul" here at first, because names are LAST names unless clue suggests otherwise, dammit! For me, of all people, to tank the "American Idol" clue right out of the box ... well, it's just unnatural. I'm a loyal viewer! You can see why this puzzle had me seeing red all over. Take the intersecting clue:

53D: Unrespectful sort (snip)

"Unrespectful?" "UNrespectful?" Why not "derespectful" or "misrespectful" or "antirespectful" or something equally tortured. The word is "disrespectful."

68A: Row C, maybe: Abbr. (Ind.)

By this time, I was annoyed by the swarm of abbreviations in the puzzle. Throw in the horrible "maybe" - which may as well be one of those cheeky question marks of which I am *so* fond - and then add on the somewhat tenuous logic of the answer (Row A= Dem, Row B= Rep, Row C=Ind), and you have one unamused solver.

Now, onto "Richmond":

48D: Popular block puzzle first put out in 1969 (soma)

I was born in 1969, so how could I not know this answer? Was it popular for like three months early in the year, before I was born? Was it a flash-in-the-pan, like mood rings or pet rocks? (But I have heard of those, at least!). Apparently this is the puzzle that Luddites favor 2-to-1 over the Rubik's Cube. Oh, and I missed the last letter in this answer, giving a second "o" instead of the proper "a." Thanks a lot, Luddites.

52A: _____ scale (mohs)

Total guess on my part. Dumb luck. Never heard of this (or if I did, I forgot it pretty quickly). Mohs is a scale of mineral hardness developed by Frederich Mohs (1773-1839). I'm sure there's a joke about penile tumescence here somewhere, but this puzzle has taken the puerility right out of me.

65A: Jezebel's husband (Ahab)

Must the puzzle routinely humiliate me? I should know my Bible much better than I do. I had "Ohae" here, which I'm sure I could pass off as a Biblical name if I had to: "that reminds me of the story of Ohae and his six goats of plenty" or whatever. Biblical spellings get all crazy. You know how it is. Come on, you know what I'm talking about. I'm trying to find a way to make my failure understandable. Help me out! To me, there is one Ahab, and he looks like this:
67D: Oscar title starter (best)

Simple enough when you see it, but the clue made NO sense to me when I was staring at four blank squares. I thought it was the first word of the title of a movie that won an Oscar, so I imagined "Gone" here ... and then I put "East" here, imagining (erroneously) that "East of Eden" had won an Oscar for Best Picture (it wasn't even nominated, though Jo Van Fleet won for Best Actress in a Supporting Role). "East" as a wrong answer meant that I also blew 74A: U.K. bestowal (O.B.E.). I had "oba," which is one letter off from "obi," which is a sash for a kimono and a definite Pantheon word ... all of which has nothing to do with the Order of the British Empire. So it turns out I had three squares wrong, not two. 50% more failure!

Two last comments:

95A (THEME):Test for a needed hosiery change? (nose in the sock)

Get it, "sock in the nose" becomes "nose in the sock?" I pronounce it the most whimsical jape of the season! Strangely, it took me a good long while to get this one right, as I could not think of anything to sock but the jaw or the gut ... although as I was doing this puzzle I sure wanted to sock something. Why am I so contrary this morning? I must have expended all my joy supply last night while reveling in the Yankees' demise. Ah, yes, just reflecting on it is making my mood lighten.

124A: Place to play Ping-Pong (rec hall)

First, why is Ping-Pong capitalized? Is it a copyrighted name like Xerox or Kleenex? If so, I did not know that. Second, "rec HALL?" The better answer here is "rec ROOM" (I entered this very confidently after getting "rec"). These people, for instance, are clearly playing in a "rec ROOM," not a "rec HALL": If you Google "rec hall," you get about 143,000 hits. If you Google "rec room"? Nearly 2.5 MILLION. "Rec room" wins. Hands down. "Mess hall," "rec room," those are the appropriate phrases, just as God intended. Amen.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

PS Warm thanks to "lhoffman" and "kratsman" for the kind, enouraging words about This Here Blog; and also to "howard b," for being the first reader to offer up substantive puzzle commentary of his own. We should all know as much as he does about "meniscus" - and now we can.

Rex Parker loves lurkers, but encourages comments - it makes him happy to know that someone besides his mom is reading what he writes.

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