Famed Broadway restaurateur / SUN 1-29-17 / Linc's portrayer in 1999's Mod Squad / Composer Max who was called father of film music / Last mustachioed president

Constructor: Jim Hyres and David Steinberg

Relative difficulty: Normal / Medium

THEME: "Hit the Deck" — a visual representation of "TWENTY-ONE" (i.e. Blackjack) (69A: Game depicted in the circled squares) with imagined PLAYER hand on left side (1A: One side of a  69-Across showdown) and DEALER hand on right (14A: Other side of the showdown), with the PLAYER hitting twenty-one ("I WIN") (123A: 1-Across's cry) and the dealer going BUST.

Word of the Day: Max STEINER (87D: Composer Max who was called "the father of film music") —

Maximilian Raoul "Max" Steiner (May 10, 1888 – December 28, 1971) was an Austrian-born American music composer for theatre and films. He was a child prodigy who conducted his first operetta when he was twelve and became a full-time professional, either composing, arranging, or conducting, when he was fifteen. [...] Steiner composed over 300 film scores with RKO Pictures and Warner Bros., and was nominated for 24 Academy Awards, winning three: The Informer (1935); Now, Voyager (1942); and Since You Went Away (1944). Besides his Oscar-winning scores, some of Steiner's popular works include King Kong (1933), Little Women (1933), Jezebel (1938), Casablanca (1942), The Searchers (1956), A Summer Place (1959), and Gone with the Wind (1939), the film score for which he is best known. // He was also the first recipient of the Golden Globe Award for Best Original Score, which he won for his score to Life with Father. Steiner was a frequent collaborator with some of the most famous film directors in history, including Michael Curtiz, John Ford, and William Wyler, and scored many of the films with Errol Flynn, Bette Davis, Humphrey Bogart, and Fred Astaire. A lot of his film scores are available as separate soundtrack recordings. (wikipedia)

• • •

 

Hard to concentrate on / care about this puzzle right now, with immigrant families being literally torn apart as I write. Yep, that's blackjack ... there it is. PLAYER v DEALER, I WIN v. BUST ... cute. Shrug. Even if I weren't depressed at the thought of living in a racist police state for four more years, I don't think this puzzle would've amused me much. Buncha face card / numbers in circled squares ... I'd hardly call those proper theme answers. It seems like a pleasant enough diversion, but pretty old-fashioned and largely boring. Some of the fill was irksome, but mostly it was serviceable. It's "Gimme five!" not "GIVE ME FIVE" (which is what aliens say, with perfect enunciation, when imitating human life forms). GRAU is OFFAL. But the worst is SUM TO. I have no idea how that's even used. Does it mean "come to," as in "add up to"? Blargh, IMO.

[SKA BAND]

Circled squares made "themers" easier, but the N and ENE sections of the puzzle were really hard for me, so the whole thing evened out to average difficulty. LOB, OMAR EPPS, and TVSPOT were all really hard for me to see, and so were TOOL BAR and VAMOOSE (without the "TV" part of TVSPOT, very hard to see the long Acrosses up there). And then the SUMTO (ugh) DAY TRADER part was also really hard for me. Lots and lots of methodical hacking in those parts to get them to work out. The rest flew by pretty easily.

Bullets:

• 54A: Jane Rochester, nee ___ (EYRE) — guess who's back? Back again. (See yesterday's puzzle) (Charlotte Brontë wrote "Jane EYRE" under the pen name Currer Bell ... but you knew that)
• 101D: City that's home to the Firestone Country Club (AKRON) — forgot about their association with rubber. Kept thinking of Flintstones.
• 88A: Investment seminar catchphrase (CASH IS KING) — ??? This has some specific context of which I am unaware. Wikipedia entry on it is murky and mentions "investment seminars" not at all.
• 57A: Matchmaker of myth (EROS) — this makes him sound more like a dating service. He hardly puts happy couple together.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

P.S. looks like a federal judge just ordered a temporary stay of the stupid immigration ban Executive Order, at least for those in transit / detained at airports. Small victory. I'll take it. Good night.

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

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Sicilian resort city — WEDNESDAY, Sep. 2 2009 — Anne of HBO's "Hung" / Contents of hoedown seat / Available as London limo

Constructor: Jim Hyres

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium

THEME: Midtown Manhattan Map — grid depicts Broadway (spelled out by circled letters) "crossing" 5th through 8th Avenues

Word of the Day: SCHAEFER (18A: "The one beer to drink when you're having more than one" sloganeer) — Schaefer Beer is a brand of beer from the United States.

Schaefer was, at one point during the first half of the 20th century, the world's best selling beer. By the 1970s, however, it had ceded the top spot to Budweiser. [...] A popular advertising campaign for Schaefer was the tagline, "Schaefer is the one beer to have when you're having more than one." This was put to music and used as a jingle from the 1950s-70s. The music was written by Jim Jordan of BBDO, on his son's xylophone. Louis Armstrong once performed the jingle in a television advertisement campaign. Music composer Edd Kalehoff also appeared in a 1973 advertisement showing off his Moog synthesizer.

-----

I'm sitting here wondering how I've never heard of a beer that used to be "the world's best selling beer." From the world's best-selling beer in the 60s to completely off-cultural-radar by the mid-70s. Talk about dying a hard and fast death. This beer registers a big zero in my consciousness, and I've been seeing / watching beer ads since the mid-70s. Pabst Blue Ribbon and Schlitz malt liquor and Hamm's and "Tonight let it be Lowenbrau" and all that ... no SCHAEFER. The slogan is so goofy (might as well read "Ask for SCHAEFER — the beer alcoholics prefer!") that I thought for a few moments that the beer might be fictional. I'm not complaining about the answer at all — just marveling at how fast a brand can go from everywhere to nowhere on a dime like that.

[Ladies Love George Benson]

A very creative puzzle today, even if BROADWAY doesn't actually "cross" EIGHTH or FIFTH in this grid. What's nice about the circled squares is BROADWAY actually does hit EIGHTH at a "circle" — Columbus Circle. I also like the snakiness of BROADWAY in the grid, which does a good job of mimicking the actual path BROADWAY takes across Midtown. Compromise fill — a common byproduct of fancy themes like this — is present but not excessively so. ASASON is at the top of my "To Go" pile (60A: How a particularly close nephew may be treated) — it's about as legit as IN A BAG or TO A PARTY or WITH SOME CAKE. The RE-twins aren't much prettier. REOPEN is a great word (22A: Come back following renovations, say), but the far uglier REWOVE (19A: Fixed, as a tapestry) is wearing the same RE-dress and standing far too close to REOPEN, compromising her splendor. Finally, I'm not an ADORER of ADORER (17A: Rabid fan). Else, good.

Theme answers:

• 9D: Superfluous person (FIFTH wheel)
• 24D: Intuition (SIXTH sense) — also known as "Avenue of the Americas sense"
• 13D: Like some Adventists (SEVENTH Day) — there are other kinds of "Adventists?"
• 27D: Quaver (EIGHTH note) — hardest of the themes, for me. I learned this meaning of "quaver" from xwords, so I eventually pulled it out.

I sailed through this until the SW, where I came to a dead stop at CHO-S-E- (58A: Stir-fried entree). That looked like Nothing to me. Plus, I don't think I've ever had CHOP SUEY (it's some Americanized noodle thing, right?). Anyway, all three crosses were screwy for me. I had the wrong meaning of [Ticked off] in my head for 42D (was thinking about marking items on a checklist, for some reason) but was wondering about the legality/plausibility of ANNOTED (ended up being ANNOYED). I wanted SPAT where SUIT was supposed to go (53D: Dressy attire for a man), and then I misread the clue at 46D: Certain filers as [Certain fliers]. When I ended up with RASPS, I thought maybe the answer was WASPS and TETRAD (45A: Foursome) was wrong. Bah. Anyway, I think I spent half my time in this corner and still ended up with a good Wednesday time.

Bullets:

• 1A: Source of the music for a 2001 theatrical hit (ABBA) — a really oblique way to come at ABBA ... and yet I got it no problem.
• 49A: Contents of a hoedown seat (hay) — "Contents" sounds weird here. The seat is made of HAY. It is HAY. I mean, there's twine involved, I guess. Maybe the whole clue is designed not to use the giveaway word "bale."
• 54A: Available, as a London limo (on hire) — Did the UK rename the American 80s crime drama to "Spenser: On Hire"?
• 16D: Anne of HBO's "Hung" (Heche) — this is about a man with a big penis who becomes a male prostitute when he falls on hard (!) times. 9 episodes have aired to date. I know this only from reading the shows Wikipedia page.

• 28D: Dog doc (vet) — ours told us yesterday that our chocolate lab tested very positive of Lyme's (despite being on flea/tick meds, !@#@@!@%) and so now she has to take copious antibiotics for a month. Every day this dog is inventing new ways of getting sick / trying to bankrupt us. Her sister, on the other hand, is unbreakable. Even pitbull maulings can't keep her down for long.
• 44D: Lady Lindy (Earhart) — she is a featured character in the Vertigo comic book "Air," which I read.
• 57D: Sicilian resort city (Enna) — I wonder how many people put in ETNA and then wondered why anyone would want to treat his nephew AS A SOT.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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TUESDAY, Jan. 27, 2009 - Jim Hyres (Nation once known as Dahomey / Game with "Out of Gas" cards / Big name in retail jewelry / Myopic Mr.)

Relative difficulty: Medium

THEME: "BORN" homophones - four theme answers end with them

Word of the Day: PROWL CAR - a car in which policemen cruise the streets; equipped with radiotelephonic communications to headquarters (freedictionary.com) - since all police cars today (I think) have radiotelephonic communications to headquarters, you can tell the word originated in an earlier time period. It's not used as much today, but I encounter it every time I read Chandler's "The Long Goodbye":

He hadn't mentioned the girl again. Also, he hadn't mentioned that he had no job and no prospects and that almost his last dollar had gone into paying the check at The Dancers for a bit of high class fluff that couldn't stick around long enough to make sure he didn't get tossed in the sneezer by some prowl car boys, or rolled by a tough hackie and dumped out in a vacant lot.

Today's puzzle is very light on the theme answers - only 40 squares of coverage in all. The homophones are fine - every possible one appears to have been used. It's almost an add-a-letter type of theme - BORN, BORNE, BORNES ... but then JASON BOURNE comes along and breaks the that trend's neck with his sexy, stealthy, special ops training. I was wondering as I solved this whether MILLE BORNES is terrifically well known. I barely know it - I think I knew one family once who had it among their games, and so I have vague recollections of playing. And I've seen it at least once in xwords before. But it doesn't strike me as universally known the way "Monopoly" or "Clue" might be.

Theme answers:

• 17A: Game with "Out of Gas" cards (Mille Bornes)
• 11D: Heir to the throne, typically (first born)
• 33D: Like the dust in a dust storm (wind-borne)
• 58A: Robert Ludlum protagonist (Jason Bourne)

There were a few answers in the grid that felt a bit wobbly to me, the wobbliest of which was AIR TASER (21A: High-voltage weapon). I have heard of TASERs, but not AIR TASERs. Are there SEA TASERs? I googled "AIR TASER" just now and there wasn't a ton of clear action. I see that there are "high-voltage weapons" for sale that have that name, so it's a real item, but does anyone who doesn't own one know them by this name? I was thinking also that maybe there could be a limit on lawn-related clues - maybe one per puzzle? Neither SODDED (43A: Like newly laid lawns) nor RESEED (64A: Start over with, as a lawn) is an answer you want to call attention to, and when you double-lawn it, that's exactly what you do. TABSET felt like a much uglier cousin of PROWLCAR, in that its heyday was probably well over thirty years ago (5D: Typewriter formatting feature). Further TABSET crossing TEASET (5A: China shop purchase)? That's ... one more SET than should be in the grid, probably. Lastly, ENERGIES ... it's a valid word, but the way its clued makes it seem odd and hard to imagine in context (9D: Vigorous feelings). [Gas, electricity and steam, e.g.] might have worked.

Bullets:

• 20A: Spots for spats (ankles) - "spats" should have been my word of the day. Again, as with PROWLCAR and TABSET, I feel like I'm in 1954. Are they supposed to keep mud out of your shoes, or just look cool?
• 34A: Big name in retail jewelry (Zales) - I see their (horrible) commercials, but I have no way of gauging if they are local, regional, or national. We're not big jewelry consumers. No, wait, it's the De Beers commercials I can't stand. This one looks like an ad for a horror film. If only there were real bloodshed ...

• 40A: AOL alternative (MSN) - on top of SODDED. This tiny section would not have been hard to rewrite. You could get rid of corp. abbr., plural abbrev. (DEMS) and, well, SODDED, in one swoop. What about TAWNY over ERIK over MEN over PADDED? Or you could change DEMS to DERN and MSN to REN, but that pop culture swerve might make some folks nauseous. I'm just saying ... there are other options here.
• 41A: Nation once known as Dahomey (Benin) - this one fell out of my brain some time in 7th grade, I think. Needed several crosses.
• 62A: Larry who won the 1987 Masters (Mize) - when you grow up as a sports-loving kid, all kinds of names stick in your head, even from sports you pay no attention to.
• 39D: Rugrats' outbursts (tantrums) - I guess the plural here couldn't very well be TANTRA without causing serious confusion.
• 42D: Myopic Mr. (Magoo) - Watch him dance...

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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TUESDAY, May 29, 2007 - Jim Hyres

Relative difficulty: Easy

THEME: BAR (38A: It can precede the starts of 16-, 26-, 43- and 58-Across and 10- and 33-Down)

Well, I guess I picked a good week to start scaling back the size of this blog, because I have Nothing to say about this puzzle. It is completely unremarkable, as far as I can tell. 6 kinds of BARs, 4 horizontal, 2 vertical, with BAR sitting in the center of the grid, clued in the ungainly fashion I love so much. Here are your theme answers:

• 16A: #1 hit (chart topper)
• 26A: Some 1960s-'70s attire (bell bottoms)
• 43A: Watch (keep an eye on)
• 58A: However (nonetheless)
• 10D: Playground game (hopscotch)
• 33D: Manhattan Project and Operation Overlord (code names)

That last one was pretty tricky, and actually held me up a bit. The only name I could think of was OPPENHEIMER, and then, even with CODE in place, I still had no idea what the clue was going for. Aside from that, the only interesting thing that happened to me on the way to solving this puzzle was working MISHIT (42A: Faulty shot, as in tennis) backwards and giggling to myself when the answer read --SHIT.

I will now force myself to do a Featured Five, though this puzzle is giving me very little to work with.

15A: Ending with pay or plug (ola) - Do I even want to know what PLUGOLA is???

20A: Summer coolers (ades) - if you play online Boggle (and I know some of you do), then you know that the program does not recognize ADE as a word. I remember, almost 20 years ago, seeing ADE in the puzzle for the first time and thinking that it was ridiculous as a stand-alone word. As far as I was concerned, ADE was a suffix that went with LEMON-, maybe LIME-, and possibly GATOR-. And yet many years later I had gotten used to it, such that Boggle's refusal to accept it made me angry.

40A: Alan of "Betsy's Wedding" (Alda) - If it's Alan _____ in four letters, it's ALDA, so why not throw down the most ridiculous piece of work on his CV? Oh, maybe Alan _____ in four letters could be LADD. But I don't think their careers overlap, so distinguishing between them shouldn't be too difficult.

13A: W.W. II conference site (Yalta) - I had MALTA. You'd think I'd know the difference by now.

2D: Sounded content (aahed) - While I recognize this as a marginally valid word, nothing can change the fact that this "word" looks stupid when written out. The only words I care to see in the grid that begin AA are AARDVARK and A.A. MILNE. I will say, though, that the constructor makes a valiant effort at redeeming this "word" by including a version of its counterpart on the other side of the grid: OOH (59D: "La-la" preceder).

In parting, allow me to share my miscues (in addition to the MALTA/YALTA confusion):

• 21A: Comforting words ("It's OK") - I had "I CARE" for a while
• 10A: In (hot) - I had HIP
• 52D: _____ fixe (prix) - I had IDÉE
• 44D: Mourning of the N.B.A. (Alonzo) - spelled it with an "S," causing me to make my next error:
• 62A: Skyrockets (zooms) - I had SOARS

I'll end by saying something nice - BERET has never been clued better than it was today: 63A: Prince's "Raspberry _____".

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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