Like old-fashioned railroad crossing signs / MON 12-26-22 / Landslide of wet sediment / Princess who says into the garbage chute flyboy / 97.5% of a penny / Bitter part of an orange /

Constructor: Kurt Weller

Relative difficulty: No Idea (did it Downs-Only to escape potential boredom)

THEME: CLOCKWORK (59A: Epitome of precision ... or a description of 20-, 34- and 43-Across?) — familiar phrases that also sound like verb phrases related to "working" on a "clock":

Theme answers:

• MAKE A FACE (20A: Stick your tongue out, say)
• SWITCH GEARS (34A: Move onto a new topic of conversation, metaphorically)
• CHANGE HANDS (43A: Pass to a different owner, as a business)

Word of the Day: "The Wall" (3D: Pink Floyd's "The Wall," for one => ROCK OPERA) —

The Wall is the eleventh studio album by the English progressive rock band Pink Floyd, released on 30 November 1979 by Harvest/EMI and Columbia/CBS Records. It is a rock opera that explores Pink, a jaded rock star whose eventual self-imposed isolation from society forms a figurative wall. The album was a commercial success, topping the US charts for 15 weeks and reaching number three in the UK. It initially received mixed reviews from critics, many of whom found it overblown and pretentious, but later received accolades as one of the greatest albums of all time and one of the band's finest works. [...] The Wall is one of the best-known concept albums. With over 30 million copies sold, it is the second best-selling album in the band's catalogue (behind The Dark Side of the Moon), the best selling double-album of all time, and one of the best-selling albums of all time overall. Some of the outtakes from the recording sessions were used on the group's next album, The Final Cut (1983). In 2000, it was voted number 30 in Colin Larkin's All Time Top 1000 Albums. In 2003, 2012, and 2020, it was included in Rolling Stone's lists of the greatest albums of all time. From 2010 to 2013, Waters staged a new Wall live tour that became the highest-grossing tour by a solo musician. (wikipedia)

• • •

This seemed like a pretty remedial theme at first—parts of a watch, big whoop. But then I read the revealer clue a little more closely and realized that the theme answers didn't just have watch parts as their final words, they appeared to specific things one might do while "working" on a "clock"—someone engaged in such CLOCKWORK might MAKE A (clock) FACE or SWITCH (clock) GEARS or CHANGE (clock) HANDS. This gives the theme a little something extra. Not that it made it any more interesting to solve, but conceptually, at least, it's got the kind of next-level ambition and elegance that you'd hope to find every day in your NYTXW themed puzzles. I can't really speak to what it was like to solve normally, as I solved it very abnormally—by looking only at the Down clues. Downs-only solving puts you into a whole other world, one where you avoid the help—and the pitfalls—that Across clues normally provide. So you can go very very fast, but also, you can get very, very stuck. I did a little of both today. The hardest thing was probably (to my mind) the iffiest thing in the grid: MUDFLOW. Uh, what? What is ... that? Is it ... mud ... that flows? I was not aware that that was a phenomenon noteworthy enough to be its own answer. I've damn sure heard of MUDSLIDES, but just MUDFLOWs? Mmm, no. And since I couldn't get ZINC (7D: 97.5% of a penny) I was trying to make the first themer into MAKE A .... DATE? Something like that. Really not a fan of the MUDFLOW.

The other main Downs-only issue I had was ANTITOXIN (36D: Venom neutralizer, e.g.). My brain was like "ANTIVENOM!" and I was like "look, brain, 'venom' is in the clue, it can't be ANTIVENOM" and then brain was like "ah well, can't help you, gonna think about Pink Floyd's 'The Wall' now" and I said "oh come on, brain" but it plugged its ears and started shout-singing: "We Don't Need No / ANTIVENOM!" So childish, sometimes, brain is. Probably the funniest part of Downs-only solving was getting PENI- (!) over EREC- (!!) there in the SW corner and thinking "well, I've gotta have an error there ... I hope I have an error there ... because ... OK, what is happening!?" I couldn't think of anything that could complete PENI- and also be allowable in mainstream crosswords. Crosses were leading me to PENIN but all I could think was "well, that's not a word." Then I thought "oof, it could be an awful partial." And then I thought, oh, it's just a verb phrase ... OK, then." Remarkably hard, from a Downs-only standpoint, was 30D: Bitter part of an orange (PITH). You think, "how many four-letter answers can there be?" Well three, at least, I can tell you from experience. I had PEEL at first (back when I wanted CHANGE HANDS to be CHANGE LANES). Then I thought, "well, if it's not that, then maybe ... RIND?" Maybe, but also maybe not. Sigh. Your brain really has to work in weird ways to suss out these Down-only dilemmas (or trilemmas). 

I've never really heard anyone say "CLOCKWORK" unless they said "like" first, or happened to be discussing a very famous Kubrick film. But that's alright. It's a word, you can't dispute that. Overall, the experience was entertaining, though I think most of the entertainment came from the self-imposed Downs-only restriction, rather than from anything inherent in the theme or fill. Putting together those long Across themers with absolutely no clues was an adventure: MAKE A DATE! CHANGE LANES! CLONE WARS! (before CLOCKWORK, LOL). SWITCH GEARS was the only themer that really wanted to stay put. 

I'm leaving Dunedin tomorrow and will be in transit for a few days, so after your regular monthly Clare Tuesday tomorrow, you'll have Mali one of the days and I think Eli the other two. Then I'm back for good on Saturday. I'll fill you in a bit on my NZ adventures then. Here's a picture of me today at the beach, where it was sunny and 75 degrees and ice cream trucks had long lines and a seal kept trying to play with all the surfers who were out there floating, waiting for waves. Then the seal tried to play with people just walking on the beach and that was a little less fun, a little more frightening. But everyone gave Mr. Frolic Seal a lot of room and he headed back to sea. Good times. 

Oh and then a seagull got on my car and said 'hey'; slightly menacing, but mostly just ... close. 

Oh, and since [A rainbow may be seen as a good one] is in the puzzle today (OMEN!), here's an incredible full rainbow I saw walking home from Christmas lunch at my mother-in-law's yesterday:

OK, enough pics. See you later this week.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

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Serfs of olden days / THU 10-29-20 / Large urban area in Normandy France / Biblical companion of Moses / Bug's sensory appendage / Wariest animal

Constructor: Kurt Weller

Relative difficulty: Medium (6-ish, first thing in the morning)

THEME: NOT NOW (71A: "I'm busy!" ... or, if read in four pieces, an aid in solving several clues here) — several clues need to be read as if they contain NO "T" and NO "W":

Theme answers:

• FREEZE (1A: Twice over) (so, Ice over)
• AMALGAMATE (17A: Tallowy) (so, Alloy)
• NO MATTER WHICH (37A: Tawny) (so, Any)
• FAST ASLEEP (62A: Twin bed, perhaps) (so, In bed, perhaps)
• RAM (2D: Wariest animal) (so, Aries animal)
• COARSE (12D: Wrought) (so, Rough)
• CAVIAR (47D: Wrote) (so, Roe)
• EGO (64D: Freudian "wit") (so, Freudian "I")

Word of the Day: "SUPERCOP" (56A: Jackie Chan police film) —

Supercop (Chinese: 警察故事３超級警察; Cantonese Yale: gíng chaat gu sih sāam: Chīu kāp gíng chaat), also known as Police Story 3: Super Cop, is a 1992 Hong Kong action film starring Jackie Chan and Michelle Yeoh. Jackie reprises his "Kevin" Chan Ka-Kui character, a Hong Kong cop from Police Story and Police Story 2. It is the first in the Police Story series not to be directed by Jackie, with Stanley Tong taking over the helm. It is also the last appearance in the series for Maggie Cheung as Jackie's girlfriend, May. (wikipedia)

• • •

An easy puzzle with these weird, occasional clues that made no sense. Got a bunch of the mystery answers fairly easily, from crosses, and eventually stumbled upon the revealer, also easy, and then that made figuring out the mystery clues much easier. So this is basically a very easy, very boring puzzle, with a theme element that causes some delays up front ... unless you did the smartish thing, which is look for the revealer first, and work backward. I always find this much easier to do on paper, where I can just move my eyes to the final Across clues, where I'll usually find something that looks like a revealer clue (look for a longish clue with an ellipsis, or just look at the last long Across clue ... though today I did that and missed the revealer, which is weirdly in the Very last Across clue). I get tunnel vision when I solve on screen, and only look at the clue that is directly above the grid, i.e. the one that my cursor is on. This is great for avoiding eye movement time loss (a real thing in speed-solving), but on Thursdays, I should probably be slightly more disciplined about taking at least a few seconds to try to find the revealer. I didn't really enjoy the puzzle, because there wasn't much in the way of good fill, nothing interesting happening at all outside of the theme, and the theme was invisible for most of the solve. Just answers I got without knowing why. Getting NOT NOW made me go single-O "Oh," not double-O "Ooh!" I also didn't like how the arrangement of the theme material meant that the NW was by far the hardest part of the puzzle to get, simply because of the theme density, i.e. the *three* theme answers up there. While I could work out the isolated themers from crosses, I couldn't work out FREEZE / RAM / AMALGAMATE at all, and had to wait til the end to get those. Had -ALGAMATE and honestly wasn't sure I had all the letters right. I don't really know from alloys, and wasn't gonna risk anything until I knew what was going on. I also thought the CDC was the [Federal vaccine agcy.]. That didn't help.

OSMO- is some kind of terrible, as prefixes go (59D: Odor: Prefix). Not sure I've seen it standing alone like this—not a look I'd recommend to it. I *know* I had no idea it meant "odor." Luckily I'd seen CAEN very recently (58D: Large urban area in Normandy, France), so I had no trouble with it, or APPLET, or PEW, and thus the SE was much much easier than the NW (that's probably due in part to the fact that the revealer clue was pleasantly literal). The real issue today isn't that the theme isn't clever (it is), but that that cleverness doesn't translate to much of a solving experience. Also, the way the grid is constructed, there's virtually no interesting fill, no longer answers to add color to the grid. There's "SUPERCOP" and ROADHOG (21D: Driving nuisance) and that's about it. Consequently ... or coincidentally ... there's a preponderance of short overfamiliar stuff. Was glad to remember HELOTS today (13D: Serfs of olden days), a word I know best from a very memorable scene in one of my favorite movies, "Meet John Doe" ("a lotta heels!"):

See you tomorrow, everyone. 

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld 

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

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