Rex Parker Does the NYT Crossword Puzzle: Image on ET poster

Constructor: Bill Thompson

Relative difficulty: Medium-Challenging

THEME: ECLIPSE — puzzle note: "The seven circled letters reading from top to bottom describe an event occurring at four locations in this puzzle." Four black squares are "eclipsing" the word SUN (in the Across answer) and MOON (in the Down).

Word of the Day: LEMAY (65A: W.W. II general nicknamed "Bombs Away") —

Curtis Emerson LeMay (November 15, 1906 – October 1, 1990) was a general in the United States Air Force and the vice presidential running mate of American Independent Party presidential candidate George Wallace in 1968.

He is credited with designing and implementing an effective, but also controversial, systematic strategic bombing campaign in the Pacific theater of World War II. During the war, he was known for planning and executing a massive bombing campaign against cities in Japan and a crippling minelaying campaign of Japan's internal waterways. After the war, he headed the Berlin airlift, then reorganized theStrategic Air Command (SAC) into an effective instrument of nuclear war. (wikipedia)

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Strange puzzle. Felt hard, though I finished in fairly normal time. I picked up the theme eventually (I didn't read the note, but noticed that the circled squares I had in place appeared to be spelling out ECLIPSE), but finished it without really seeing the full extent of what was happening. I know MOONs and SUNs were involved, but I didn't realize until after I was done that the black (eclipsed) squares were blocking, in each instance, both a SUN and a MOON. This is a very cool idea. The execution is slightly odd, mainly because the blocked MOON is always the full word "MOON" whereas the blocked SUN is always part of a two-word phrase (this confused me early on; I thought the "eclipse" square actually represented the word "SUNDER" at one point, because of the way the theme answers were sundered). Now, the different treatments of SUN and MOON are not surprising. Hard if not impossible to hide moon inside another phrase, let alone break it across a two-word phrase (PRIMO ONESIES? "I'M OONA!"?). So I don't really see a problem with the disparity. I see some not-so-great fill, but nothing terribly out of the ordinary, and considering the fairly demanding theme, I can overlook a "CERO" or "IAMA" here and there.

Theme answers:

DRES [sun] IFORM / [moon] SHOT
CHOCOLATE [sun] DAE / "PAPER [moon]"
GOE [sun] DERGROUND / [moon] LIGHT
LEAVE [sun] SAID / FULL [moon]

Didn't get bogged down anywhere in particular. I have to believe that someone somewhere is going to get crushed by the MRAZ / ROEG intersection (I want to say "R" is the only reasonable guess, but if you don't know Jason MRAZ, that name seems impossible) (53D: Singer Jason / 60A: Director of "The Witches," 1990). And if you don't know MR. MIYAGI (53A: "Man who catch fly with chopstick accomplish anything" speaker), well you are well and truly ****ed in that corner. That's a lot of pop culture names in one little section. Never saw "Monsters, Inc." but somehow could picture the character in question, so ONE EYE was remarkably easy (47D: Feature of Mike Wazowski in "Monsters, Inc."). Got a couple of theme answers without realizing they were theme answers. "SHOT? ... I guess ... CHOCOLATE? ... does Dairy Queen just serve CHOCOLATE? ... OK." Crosswording experience got me R.U.R. (27A: Classic play whose title is an abbreviation) and ALI G (11D: Character with the tagline "Booyakasha!") pretty easily (the former should be easy for any constant solver, the latter probably a little less so). And I have an odd affection for the highly dated clue on DAVID SPADE (32D: Kato Kaelin portrayer on "S.N.L."), even though I don't remember his portrayal at all. Clue on FERN was hard / nuts (69A: Crayola color since 1998). Aside from LEMAY, of whom I'd never heard, nothing besides the general difficulty of the theme answers slowed me up much.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld