Relative difficulty:Challenging (**for a Tuesday**) (time: over 4 minutes)
THEME: (SA- thru SU-) x 2 — two-word phrases where both words start with "S" and the subsequent letter in each case is a vowel, starting with "A" in the first theme answer and ending with "U" in the last:
Theme answers:
SATURDAY SABBATH (17A: Jewish observance)
SESAME SEED (22A: Hamburger bun topper)
SIMPLE SIMON (33A: Nursery rhyme character "going to the fair")
SOLID SOUTH (49A: Voting bloc from Reconstruction to the 1960s)
SURGE SUPPRESSOR (55A: Power strip part)
Word of the Day: Bronko NAGURSKI (37D: N.F.L. Hall-of-Famer Bronko ___) —
Bronislau "Bronko" Nagurski (November 3, 1908 – January 7, 1990) was a Canadian-born American football player. He was also a successful professional wrestler, recognized as a multiple-time world heavyweight champion. (wikipedia)
• • •
America: we are all supposed to know who Bronko NAGURSKI is. I know, I know, it's not fair, but this is Obama's America, so love it or leave it or something. I first griped about the obscurity of this guy earlier in the month, in an indie puzzle (I think), but then some kid taunted me by saying it was a gimme, but I wrote that off to the kid's being a show-off (pfft, kids). But now here we are. From never-seen-him to seen-him-twice inside a month. I can see how his name would have a certain allure for odd name fetishists, i.e. most crossword constructors. I still think he's as far from a Tuesday answer as Ceres is from Mercury, and that placing him in that particular place (37D), where his name is the *only* way into the top part of the SE, was particularly cruel (and had an even greater De-Tuesdaying effect). But Bronko NAGURSKI is the new normal. I am learning to live with it.
The theme … I didn't notice until I was done. Well after I was done, actually. Immediately after, I went to google to confirm that SURGE SUPPRESSOR is baloney, or at least not the thing one first thinks of when confronted with the phrase "SURGE ___." And I was right. Tell 'em, google:
I wanted PROTECTOR. Everyone wanted PROTECTOR. Yeah you did. Shut up, you did so. That answer and SATURDAY SABBATH (which I always thought was just SABBATH) both felt forced, especially compared to the others, which were tight—though, full confession, I flat-out Did Not Know SOLID SOUTH. Never heard of it. I took US History. And yet … I had nothing. Run NAGURSKI through SOLID SOUTH and SUPPRESSOR (which this puzzle does) and you can see where I spent most of my time floundering. That SE was like it's own little mud pit. Muddy because difficult and muddy because kinda ODORiferous, fill-wise (USTEN EMOTER OOP … and TOE SIN: The Lowest Sin Of All). The rest of the grid felt pretty clean.
P.S. To "AT" "SS" and "ME" at the Albert E. Jenner, Jr. Law Library at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign—I'd love to reply to your thoughtful, handwritten letter, but I'll need more than just your initials.
THEME: GOLD NUGGETS (38A: Valuable finds suggested by the circled letters) — circled letters spell out gold if you read them … well, it looks like sometimes clockwise, sometimes counterclockwise …)
Word of the Day: "AGON" (65A: Stravinsky ballet) —
Agon (1957) is a ballet for twelve dancers, with music by Igor Stravinsky and choreography by George Balanchine. Composition began in December 1953 but was interrupted the next year; work was resumed in 1956 and concluded on April 27, 1957; the music was first performed on June 17, 1957 in Los Angeles conducted by Robert Craft, while the first stage performance was given by the New York City Ballet on December 1, 1957 at the City Center of Music and Drama, New York (White 1979, 490). The composition's long gestation period covers an interesting juncture in Stravinsky's composing career, in which he moved from a diatonic musical language to one based ontwelve-tone technique; the music of the ballet thus demonstrates a unique symbiosis of musical idioms. The ballet has no story, but consists of a series of dance movements in which various groups of dancers interact in pairs, trios, quartets etc. A number of the movements are based on 17th-century French court dances – saraband, galliard and bransle. It was danced as part of City Ballet's 1982 Stravinsky Centennial Celebration. (wikipedia)
• • •
Coincidentally, I was reading about Charlie Chaplin just before starting this puzzle.
There are a host of problems here. With the exception of SOBE, the puzzle feels about a million years old, with crosswordese (NLERS RIATA AAR … those are consecutive!) and olde-timey names (MAGDA, AKINS, SLOANE, etc.) and then stuff like HE-GOAT and SLIPSLOP (!?) that I just didn't know what to make of. The puzzle was not well slotted on a Tuesday—too wide-open, too tough. But the main problem was that the grid-filling was not up to the challenge posed by the ambitious theme. That NLERS RIATA AAR line alone tells you, first, that the grid was hand-filled (you can malign computers all you like, but they help keep less expert constructors out of Junk City), and second, that it was hand-filled according to OLD-LINE standards. UNSTOW? BLATS? This is very, very rough. The core concept is OK—it would've been more elegant if the nuggets all read in one direction or the other, I think, but the theme isn't the problem. It's what the theme does to the fill that's the problem. The grid is just too demanding. The limitations imposed by the nuggets coupled with dauntingly wide-open corners just set the bar too high, and the puzzle couldn't get over.
Bullets:
28A: Jazz great named after an Egyptian god (SUN RA) — the names were just *tough* on me today. I know who SUN RA is, but off the "S" I had no idea, and that corner also has SLOANE (unknown to me) and ALDO (also, weirdly, unknown to me), and an YSER clue that I didn't find easy at all (10A: W.W. I's Battle of the ___). Proper nouns beyond my ken really gummed things up.
43D: Roone who created "Nightline" and "20/20" (ARLEDGE) — a name I know, but just screwed up badly today. For some reason I wanted "ALRIDGE" … "L" before "R" at any rate. And with SLIPSLOP next door (again I say "???"), and uncertainty about whether EASES or ALL'S were even right, well, proper names strike again. I wouldn't have minded so much if the fill had been (much) better.
65A: Stravinsky ballet ("AGON") — stunning to me a. that this word is even in a Tuesday puzzle, and b. that this clue is considered Tuesday-appropriate. Proper nouns here aren't just beyond me—they're dated, marginal, and (most importantly) unnecessary. I'll take "AGON" as a a Stravinsky ballet on, say, a Friday or Saturday, if it's helping hold up a lovely stack or corner. Otherwise, pass. Especially on Tuesday, pass.
Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld
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A long time ago, I was solving this puzzle and got stuck at an unguessable (to me) crossing: N. C. WYETH crossing NATICK at the "N"—I knew WYETH but forgot his initials, and NATICK ... is a suburb of Boston that I had no hope of knowing. It was clued as someplace the Boston Marathon runs through (???). Anyway, NATICK— the more obscure name in that crossing—became shorthand for an unguessable cross, esp. where the cross involves two proper nouns, neither of which is exceedingly well known. NATICK took hold as crossword slang, and the term can now be both noun ("I had a NATICK in the SW corner...") or verb ("I got NATICKED by 50A / 34D!")
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