Beersheba's region / THU 5-4-17 / Comics character who was perpetually 19 / What dowsing rod or sling shot has / Hit 2002 animated film

Constructor: Loren Muse Smith and Tracy Gray

Relative difficulty: Medium-Challenging

[16-wide / oversized grid]

THEME: BLACK ICE (44A: Winter driving hazard ... or a literal hint to four squares in this puzzle) — in order for several clues to make sense, four different "black" squares have to represent the word "ice"

Theme answers:

• ADVICE COLUMN (21A: "Miss Manners," for one) / POLICE VAN (4D: Patrol wagon)
• NO DICE (29A: "Ain't gonna happen!") / SERVICE DOG (14D: Helping hound)
• OFFICE TEMP (41D: Crunch time helper, maybe) / "ICE AGE" (59A: Hit 2002 animated film)
• ARMISTICE DAY (66A: 11/11) / MR. NICE GUY (50D: Generous, affable sort)

Word of the Day: IDEM (67D: Footnote word) —

adverb

adverb: idem

1. used in citations to indicate an author or work that has just been mentioned.

   
   

   "Marianne Elliott, Partners in Revolution, 1982; idem, Wolfe Tone, 1989" (google)

• • •

Conceptually, this is probably the most solid thing we've seen in a while. It's an old idea, the black square rebus, and I'm kinda surprised this incarnation hasn't been tried before—it looks like BLACK ICE has actually never appeared in an NYT crossword *at all* before today. That is super weird. So there are four patches of BLACK ICE. That's really it here. Not exciting, but not the faceplants we've been seeing of late, either. Fill is rougher than it should be. Not sure why NW / SE corners weren't just turned into black squares. In the SE, you've just got plurals, so who cares. Make 'em singular. And in the NW, you get rid of the awk/awful YAWPS / YSHAPE and just give yourself ASPS / SHAPE–sooooooooooo many more cluing possibilities, and, you know, real words are better than jury-rigged goofiness. Plus changing WOLVES to SOLVES gives you a chance to do one of those winky self-referential clues, if that's your thing.


I started out very badly, largely because I thought it was Wednesday. Not kidding. When I got stuck in the NW, I couldn't understand how that was even possible on a Wednesday. Then when I got POL for 4D: Patrol wagon, I just stared at it resentfully for a bit. Eventually, I looked at the puzzle byline and saw the date. Then my brain shifted into the correct gear and things got better. Cluing was still old / out of my wheelhouse much of the time, so it wasn't exactly fun to solve. Most depressing / annoying moment was the cluing of JOAN (10D: "Mad Men" femme fatale). I love "Mad Men" and I love (Love) film noir and I had no idea what this clue was asking for. I guess colloquially "femme fatale" means something ... wrong, now? In my world, that "fatale" is *kind* of important. Joan was curvy and gorgeous and ambitious and smart ... but she's no more "fatale" than Peggy is. The idea that there's anything in JOAN that Leads Men To Their Doom ... is preposterous.

I had FLEECING for BLEEDING (13D: Extorting from), and I really really really like mine better. Also had BEER for LEER (34D: It might precede a pickup line), and, again, I prefer to live in my world of wrongness. Where I come from an OFFICE TEMP is just a TEMP, so that themer was tough for me to get. Last letter in was the "R" in LORE (65D: It's passed on) and METER (73A: One collecting money on the sidewalk?). Couldn't make the clues compute. That's all, I think. Overall quality here is what *should* be average NYT. But in the NYT's current state, esp. for themed puzzles, it's above average.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

P.S. Time and ... TEMP? (64D: Time's partner, informally). Not in my lifetime.

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

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Country singer Williams / MON 11-2-15 / Finnish tech giant / Auto pioneer Ransom E / Prefix with pathetic

Constructor: Loren Muse Smith and Andrea Carla Michaels

Relative difficulty: Medium (normal-ish Monday time)

THEME: BOOBY TRAPS (58A: Dangers for the unwary ... or a hint to the starts of 17-, 23- and 47-Across) — first words are also bra types:

Theme answers:

• PADDED CELL (17A: Place to put someone who might hurt himself)
• MIRACLE WORKER (23A: 1962 film about Helen Keller, with "The")
• PUSH UP DAISIES (47A: Baby grand, e.g.) 

Word of the Day: LUCINDA Williams (25D: Country singer Williams) —

Lucinda Williams (born January 26, 1953) is an American rock, folk, blues, and country music singer and songwriter. // She recorded her first albums in 1978 and 1980 in a traditional country and blues style and received very little attention from radio, the media, or the public. In 1988, she released her self-titled album, Lucinda Williams. This release featured "Passionate Kisses", a song later recorded by Mary Chapin Carpenter, which garnered Williams her first Grammy Award for Best Country Song in 1994. // Known for working slowly, Williams recorded and released only one other album in the next several years (Sweet Old World in 1992) before her greatest success came in 1998 with Car Wheels on a Gravel Road, an album presenting a broader scope of songs that fused rock, blues, country, and Americana into a more distinctive style that still managed to remain consistent and commercial in sound. It went gold and earned Williams another Grammy while being universally acclaimed by critics. Since Car Wheels on a Gravel Road, she has released a string of albums that have also been critically acclaimed, though none has sold in the numbers of her 1998 breakthrough. She was also named "America's best songwriter" by TIME magazine in 2002. (wikipedia)

• • •

Seemed a pretty ordinary Monday puzzle for a while. Then I got to PUSH UP DAISIES and thought, "Ooh, I like that answer" (even though, as my wife points out, the only version of that phrase anyone ever actually uses is "pushing up daisies"). Then I got to the revealer, and ... mixed feelings. Very mixed. I love the whole bra concept, but don't love the juvenile slang "BOOBY." It's like an 8-year-old boy came up with the revealer. I see that various breast cancer awareness groups are using the word "boobies" in their names, but this doesn't make me like it any more. Grown women don't, as a rule, call them BOOBIES. None that I know, anyway. Weirdly, "boobs" seems fine. Normal. Grown women use that term. There's something about that added "y" that takes it into kiddie-language territory. So, to sum up: Love the idea of a crossword about bras / breasts, do not like BOOBY TRAPS as a revealer because of the implied tee-hee tone. Like I said. Mixed feelings. Conceptually, I think the theme works quite well.


I was a little slow today because of a series of mistakes. Had PADD- and went with PADDY WAGON (it fit!) for 17A: Place to put someone who might hurt himself. Also, I own many (most) LUCINDA Williams albums, and still needed many crosses to get her name. I would never clue her as "country," though that's certainly a genre in which she sings. But as you can see from the wikipedia description above, it's not primarily how she's known, despite the fact that she routinely wears a cowboy hat in promotional photos. I saw her in concert a decade or so ago, in Manhattan. The very special guest that night was not a country music star. It was Elvis Costello. So, yeah, "country" is not inaccurate, but not spot-on. I also had LOAN for LEND (38D: Furnish temporarily), which caused a surprising amount of trouble for such a small-seeming mistake.

The fill is stale and generally not good, but no one's really gonna notice that.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

P.S. Annabel was feeling under the weather tonight, which is why she's not blogging the first Monday puzzle of the month (as she normally does). She'll be here next Monday. Or tomorrow. Or whenever she can fit it in her busy college schedule.

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

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Little Bighorn conflict / THU 11-28-13 / Horror film director Alexandre / Canadian-born comedian once featured on cover of Time / Mother of Nike in myth / Anti-apartheid activist Steve / Joe Louis to fans /

Constructor: Loren Muse Smith and Jeff Chen

Relative difficulty: Medium-Challenging

THEME: "SNAKES ON A PLANE" (61A: Cult classic whose title is depicted four times in this puzzle) — ASP appears on top of different kinds of PLANEs in the grid. What kinds of planes? Well, a BOMBER, a GLIDER, and a JET (also, the PLANE of the theme answer):

Theme answers:

• 15A: Joe Louis, to fans (THE BROWN BOMBER)
• 34A: One interested in current affairs? (HANG GLIDER)
• 42A: Gang Green member (NEW YORK JET)

Word of the Day: Alexandre AJA (40D: Horror film director Alexandre ___) —

Alexandre Aja (born 7 August 1977) is a French film director who rose to international stardom for his 2003 horror filmHaute Tension (known as High Tension in the US, and known as Switchblade Romance in the UK). He has also directed the horror films The Hills Have Eyes (2006), Mirrors (2008) and Piranha 3D (2010). (wikipedia)

• • •

Mixed feelings here, though this is definitely a step up from T and W. The theme type is one that is invisible until the end, so the feel when solving is kind of blah. Straightforward (except that clue on HANG GLIDER, which is clever, but I hate when just one theme answer has a "?" clue—all or none; feels weird otherwise). There's basically no theme, not even an appearance of one, until the revealer. When this is the case, the reveal has to be great. Today, it's OK. Maybe good. Different snakes would've been great. Just ASP = less so. Fact that ASP is itself crosswordese doesn't help me love it. But I will say that this is a cute use of the movie title. "Cult classic" is a massive stretch. I've never heard it called that, and do not believe that anyone ever actually still watches this film. But it is a movie with some fame and some campy currency, so it's certainly revealer-worthy (fun fact: my friend Christa Faust wrote the novelization of "SNAKES ON A PLANE").

[PROFANITY ALERT—if easily offended, just don't press "Play"]
There's still far too much crud in the fill. This is largely by design—not that the plan was to glut the grid with crosswordese, just that when you make a grid like this, with such a preponderance of 3-to-5-letter stuff, and when you try so desperately to Scrabble up your grid, well, there will be blood. Won't list it all, but the ISPS / RIAA / IRR is ugly and AMS / ASSNS isn't making any friends either, and for this we had to (again) have cheater squares?* You probably noticed that the grid is a weird shape: 14x16 (on account of the revealer's length). About this, I have no opinion.

Found the puzzle very hard. At times, it felt like the puzzle was trying too hard to make things tough. You've got a Tue-Wed.-looking grid, and you're having to Thursday it up. So solvers have to struggle to get rather unremarkable results. Not a satisfying feeling. AJA is crosswordese. Cluing it via some horror director doesn't change that. Whole western part of the grid was brutal to me, largely because both CALYX and SIOUX WAR were big ???s. Had CAL- and S-OU--A-. I own an iPhone and SYNC didn't click for me. SPAWN could've been SCION. Or a host of other things. Rough. SIOUX WAR is a lovely answer, though. I wouldn't call anything else "lovely," but neither would I call the fill, in the main, any worse than average. In fact, average is about right. Xs are nice, but the ESPY EEW ENYA stuff kind of negates whatever glory is gained by those Xs.

[Again, PROFANITY ALERT—avoid "Play," avoid complaining]

Gotta run. Expecting my friend and fellow (much superior) speed-solver Katie Hamill and her daughter *any* second now. They have had a day-long bus odyssey/ordeal, so I have to prepare the bourbon.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

*black squares that do not add to word count but make puzzle (often much) easier to fill (here, the black square next to the "8" square and before the "70" square)

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