Physicist who studied supersonics / WED 8-7-13 / Sarcastic remark upon hearing bad news / Phil who sang Draft Dodger Rag / Oil-rich nation invaded in 1990 / Rte with terminus in Key West / Tierra surrounded by agua / conventionality is not morality

Constructor: Erik Wennstrom

Relative difficulty: Easy

THEME: TWIST OF LEMON (23D: Drink garnish ... or a hint to five letters in the answer to each starred clue) — theme answers contain rearrangements of the letters L, E, M, O and N:

Theme answers:

• 4D: *Precious, brief time with a loved one (STOLEN MOMENT)
• 20A: *What paper profits aren't (REAL MONEY)
• 31A: *Photo gear with variable focal lengths (ZOOM LENSES)
• 42A: *Titularly (IN NAME ONLY)
• 53A: *Sarcastic remark upon hearing bad news ("KILL ME NOW")

Word of the Day: Sam RAIMI (12D: "Spider-Man" director Sam) —

Samuel M "Sam" Raimi (born October 23, 1959) is an American film director, producer, writer and actor, best known for directing the cult horror comedy Evil Dead series, the superhero film Darkman, and the Spider-Man trilogy; his most recent work is 2013's fantasy film Oz the Great and Powerful. Raimi is also the producer of several successful television series. He is also the founder of Renaissance Pictures. Recently, he worked as the producer of The Possession, and the 2013 remake of Evil Dead. (wikipedia)

• • •

This is a very nice puzzle. Revealer is a fresh phrase as well as an apt play on words. The LEMON rearrangements are impressively varied. The one small flaw in the execution here is that the LEMON letters aren't implicated in every word in every theme answer, as (ideally, most elegantly) they should be—IN NAME ONLY is the outlier in this regard. Still, the theme is dense and there are tons of Scrabbly letters and there's very little in the way of bad fill, so thumbs up. What I'm most obsessed by here is the failure to use "V." It shows such glorious, almost perverse restraint to pull up one letter short of a pangram—and not even a difficult-to-shoehorn letter like "Q" or "J." I mean ... I can put a "V" in here easy, with absolutely no damage to the quality of the overall fill. And so, likely, could the constructor. But he didn't. God bless him, he didn't. I want to shake his hand. Pangrams are, still, for suckers.

"KILL ME NOW" is the highlight of this grid. I balked at NEW DAD (59A: One passing out cigars, maybe) as I was filling it in, but about a second later did a 180 and decided it was just fine. Weird experience, that. I tore through this puzzle somewhere in the lowish 3s. Felt as if getting EYRE from crosses and (thus) JANE as a freebie really catapulted me (7D: With 2-Down, book that includes the line "Conventionality is not morality"). Everything just fell into place. The one area I flailed around slightly was in the SW, where I finished. That "Q" didn't come into view easily. With several of the 5s down there, I didn't get them at first glance. And yes, on a Wednesday, with letters in place, I do generally expect to get a 5 at first glance. Missing several in a row can definitely feel like a dead stop, even if the reality is only a lost 10 seconds or so. Oh, I got a little disoriented by the ERNST / MACH connection (13D: With 61-Across, physicist who studied supersonics). I got ERNST from crosses. Then when I got to MACH I thought "whose name is MACH? That's not a name?" I was thinking *first* name, probably because I know ERNST best as a last name (of artist Max ERNST). When you sail through a puzzle in just over 3, small anomalies and glitches like this stand out.

\Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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Bond Girl Green of Casino Royale / WED 7-24-13 / One of two characters in Fox in Socks / Porphyria's love poet / Charlotte's Web actress / Symbol after I on many bumper sticker / Tropical food that is poisonous if eaten raw / Scooter Plame affair figure

Constructor: Erik Wennstrom

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium

THEME: Famous people clued as if their last names were present participles

Theme answers:

• 20A: "Charlotte's Web" actress on a hot day? (DAKOTA FANNING)
• 28A: "A Brief History of Time" author doing sales? (STEPHEN HAWKING)
• 46A: "Porphyria's Lover" poet with a pan of ground beef on the stove? (ROBERT BROWNING)
• 55A: "Tom Jones" novelist playing baseball? (HENRY FIELDING)

Word of the Day: "NCIS: LA" (49D: CBS drama featuring LL Cool J) —

NCIS: Los Angeles (Naval Criminal Investigative Service: Los Angeles) is an American television seriescombining elements of the military drama and police procedural genres, which premiered on the CBS network on September 22, 2009. In the USA, the series airs following NCIS on Tuesdays.

NCIS: Los Angeles is the first spin-off of the successful NCIS, which itself was a spinoff of another CBS series, JAG. On October 7, 2009, CBS gave the series a full-season pickup, extending the first season to 22 episodes. The season was extended again on November 4, 2009, when CBS announced its order for an additional two episodes. [...] On March 27, 2013, CBS renewed NCIS: Los Angeles for a fifth season. (wikipedia)

• • •

Liked it. Seems like an old concept, but it's executed pretty nicely here. Weirdly, all the difficulty in this puzzle came from how unexpectedly straightforward it was. That is: it's Wednesday, and there are "?" clues, so I expect wordplay. So even after I get DAKOTA I expect that the second half of the answer will be a play on the word "fanning"—not the Actual Word FANNING. That's just how my brain works, given lots and lots and lots of experience with these kinds of puzzles. Also, "doing sales" in the STEPHEN HAWKING clue somehow didn't create any kind of immediate association. I can see how they are defensibly equivalent, but you'd never substitute one for the other. The phrasing's just weird. Anyway, this is all just to say that I looked for the curve and got a fastball over the plate. Once I caught the theme, the rest was super-easy (didn't even look at the clues for the second two theme answers). But that off-balance part at the beginning put things in plausibly Wednesdayish territory, overall difficulty-wise.

Here's something odd—I don't like BIZKIT (3D: Rock's Limp ___). And I don't just mean "the sound of that band's music makes me sad." I mean that, as much as I love Zs and Ks, this answer can only ever be a partial and can only ever have one clue, one frame of reference. That makes it limited, doomed to forever be a know-it-or-you-don't bit of (partial) trivia. And with every passing year, the frame of reference just gets sadder and dimmer. Also, "Rock" called, and it would like to deny the association. On the other hand, I kind of love "NCIS: LA," partly because it has the virtue of being a *complete* answer, and partly because it just looks nuts in the grid. Hot initialism-on-initialism action. Also, I learned that it's a spin-off of a spin-off that is Going To Spawn Its Own Spin-off this fall. This raises many questions, one of which is "what is the record length of a spin-off chain?" The "NCIS: LA" spin-off would put the chain length at four, which I've just Never heard of. But then again I've never seen a single ep of "JAG" or "NCIS" or "NCIS: LA," either, so what do I know?


Bullets:

• 42A: Bond girl Green of "Casino Royale" (EVA) — Bond Girls just aren't as name-famous as they once were. I can name ... Ursula Andress. I think that's it. Wait, who played Pussy Galore? Ah, Honor Blackman. I knew there was an "Avengers" connection in there somewhere.
• 51A: One of the two characters in Dr. Seuss' "Fox in Socks" (KNOX) — did not know that. Don't think I know this story at all. Pretty sure I was limited to "One Fish, Two Fish...," "Green Eggs and Ham," and the Dr. Seuss Dictionary. No Lorax, no Yertle ... I have weird, big Seuss gaps.
• 62A: One-volume works of Shakespeare, e.g. (TOME) — I misread and continue to misread this clue. There are many one-volume works of Shakespeare. I have tons on my shelves at school. "The Tempest," that's one volume. "Hamlet," that's another. Etc. I see what the clue is trying to say (i.e. one-volume *complete* works of Shakespeare), but it did Not compute. 

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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Dolly matchmaker / WED 3-30-11 / Foreman portrayer House / Illness caused eating Cheetos / Newspapers read by royalty

Constructor: Erik Wennstrom

Relative difficulty: Medium-Challenging

THEME: RED-SHIFTED (47A: Lie light from stars moving away from us ... or like the answer to this puzzle's starred clues?) — familiar two-word phrases where first word is a color that is re-colored by the addition of red, i.e. BLUEPRINT becomes BLUE+red PRINT, or PURPLEPRINT


Word of the Day: Atacama (69A: Like the Atacama=SERE) —

The Atacama Desert is one of the few deserts on Earth that does not receive any rain. It is a plateau in South America, covering a 600-mile (1,000 km) strip of land on the Pacific coast of South America, west of the Andes mountains. The Atacama desert is, according to NASA, National Geographic and many other publications, the driest desert in the world, due to the rain shadow on the leeward side of the Chilean Coast Range, as well as a coastal inversion layer created by the cold offshore Humboldt Current. The Atacama occupies 40,600 square miles (105,000 km²) in northern Chile, composed mostly of salt basins (salares), sand, and felsic lava flows towards the Andes. (wikipedia)

• • •

The theme and much of the fill here was simply way, way outside my wheelhouse. Never heard of ... ugh, so much of this stuff. Never seen or heard the phrase RED-SHIFTED before, first of all. Never. And since I didn't know if 30D: ___-Grain cereal bars was NUTRA or NUTRI, and since "SHAFTED" seemed (possibly) related to light, I was kind of screwed there for a bit. The theme phrases just did not feel natural or funny or ... anything. PINK WASHED? (29A: *Like a baby girls' laundry?) I got that and thought "I don't get it." Had PURPLE and wrote in PURPLE PROSE. It really seemed to fit the clue (11D: *Newspapers read by royalty?=>PURPLE PRINT). And then ORANGE FEVER—that just killed me. First, I misread "Cheetos" as "Cheerios" in the clue (25D: *Illness caused by eating Cheetos?), so I was never going to get ORANGE, though Cheerios box is yellow, so ... thought that was related somehow. But that whole section was brutal to me. Didn't see how [Done for] = GONE. If you're done for, you're a goner, but the clue/answer pair here didn't work for me. Never heard of Atacama (or I have and just couldn't place it), and even if I had, it would've taken some time/thought to get SERE. Never heard of Dolly LEVI (apparently the protagonist of "Hello, Dolly"!?!?) (60A: Dolly the matchmaker). Nooooo idea what kind of "Vista" AMER. could be a part of. Apparently Vista is an acronym (lack of capital letters notwithstanding—what the hell!?), standing for "Volunteers in Service to AMERica." Pfft. OK. Painful all around. Theme concept seems interesting, actually, but with the revealer meaning nothing to me, with the theme answers being not really funny or clever, and with so many answers bafflingly clued, I didn't enjoy the puzzle at all. I mean, even DVORAK flummoxed me (23A: Typewriter keyboard format). I know one keyboard. QWERTY. Just not my day, I guess.


Started out pretty easy as I moved diagonally through the grid, but the theme stuff just didn't make any sense to me for the longest time. Also, let me tell you that when you are looking at an answer that reads ---TNT, you are bound to doubt the accuracy of your answers. MUSTN'T, ugh. Clue did nothing for me, yet again (a theme!) (52A: "___ touch!"). I only hope that others liked this more than I did. My distaste is much more a matter of, well, taste than it is a matter of truly poor construction.

Bullets:

• 22A: Foreman portrayer on "House" (EPPS) — "How am I supposed to know the characters on ... oh, right, that's the one with Omar EPPS. Nevermind." He's the ESAI Morales of the 21st century (which will probably be news to ESAI himself, who is still working, as far as I know).
  
• 43A: Often-mocked cars of the past (YUGOS) — another clue that took me way too long to solve. My mocked car list had one model on it: EDSEL.
  
• 51A: Opportunities for discussion (FORA) — another toughie. Unusual plural.
  

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter]

ANNOUNCEMENT:

West-coasters should consider coming out and supporting the Crosswords L.A. Tournament on Sunday, May 1, 2011, at Loyola-Marymount University. It's a charity tournament that benefits "Reading to Kids." This year the tournament will feature all original puzzles commissioned specifically for the tournament by some amazing constructors (I know—I've seen/tested the puzzles). You can compete as an individual or as part of a pair, and those who would rather not compete can register as a spectator. But really, you should compete. Don't worry if you don't think of yourself as "competitive." Most people will be there to have fun, solve good puzzles, and socialize. The vibe is very laid-back (it's practically on the beach, after all). For more information, and to register, go here. Better yet, go here, to the "Frequently Asked Questions" page. Very thorough. And spread the word.

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