WEDNESDAY, Dec. 20, 2006 - Nancy Salomon

Solving time: 9:44

THEME: SNL sarcasm - theme answers are sarcastic catch phrases from SNL bits gone by, e.g. 17A: Words of admiration - NOT! (Isn't that special?)

Nice to add to the theme-y-ness by including Wayne's World in the theme clues. Andrew, remember when Madonna was on Wayne's World, and said "NOT!"? Which is to say, remember, uh, 1992? Good times ... not.

I am not familiar with 57A: Words of congratulation - NOT! (Nice going, genius), at least not in an SNL context. I'm going to guess that it has something to do with Bill Murray and Gilda Radner. Hang on ... well, no, I'm not getting Any significant hits for ["nice going genius" snl] and only 85 hits period for ["nice going genius"]. What gives?

Also, who decided how many "U"'s would go into 37A: Words of apology - NOT! (Well, excuuuuse me)? Steve Martin pronounced the word as if it had four syllables, so maybe two extra "U"'s would have made sense. Three extras ... that seems pretty arbitrary. But the very idea is cute enough that I'm not going to call a foul. Searching around the "internets," as I am doing right now, it seems that the four-U spelling is pretty standard. I am looking for something like a track listing on a comedy album, but can't find one. And now that I'm saying the phrase to myself, in my head, over and over, I'm thinking maybe it does have five syllables. What a weird thing to have to fact-check.

WRONG FILL

• DIAL for AMFM (10A: Radio switch)
• ROAN for RUST (2D: Reddish-brown)
• NERD for WONK (22A: Bookish sort, slangily) - I don't like WONK here at all
  
• FIVE, then NINE, for NOON (35A: Factory whistle time)
• AVG for EST (43A: Plus-or-minus fig.)
• GELDS for SPAYS (42A: Neuters)
• LORDS for GENTS (62A: Ladies' men) - despite having seen this exact clue / answer pairing just one day earlier

8D: Area that may have stained glass (apse)
21A: Architectural molding (ogee)

Two architectural terms I know only from doing the puzzle, both Pantheon or Pantheon-caliber words, and here, finally, they are made to intersect. Would you find an OGEE in or near an APSE? Well, you find them all over churches, so yes, I guess so. Where else can you find an OGEE? Glad you asked:
65A: Popular theater name (Odeon)

Back-to-back days with variations on this answer. Don't wear it out! Other Pantheonic fill includes 40A: Slippery swimmers (eels) - have I mentioned how pleased I am that I haven't seen ASPS for a while - and 26D: They're carried by people in masks (epees). I am pretty happy with recent cluings of EPEE(S), as they have been cleverly deceptive. We had [Arm-waving activity] (or something to that effect) recently, and now mask-wearing. Which brings us to an unwritten Pantheon rule: if you are going to use a word over and over, you should dress it up in different costumes from time to time. See also 26A: Company whose name is pig Latin for an insect (ebay). Keepin' it fresh and spicy! Nobody likes stale EBAY. Last thought: I have seen many bank-robbery movies where robbers wear crazy masks - rubber president-head masks, panty-hose masks, etc. Why not EPEE masks? They're pretty scary. I know it would be hard to knock over a bank using just swords, but still - your look would be original. And isn't that what it's all about? You know you're gonna be on camera...

4D: "O.K., back to work" ("Duty calls")
27D: Pull off a high-risk feat (Bell the cat)
30D: Company publication (House organ)

Of the (amazing) six 9- and 10-letter, unthemed, vertical answers in this grid, these three deserve special mention for their unusualness. The only time hackneyed phrases can make me happy is when they appear as long fill in my crosswords, and such is the case with DUTY CALLS. I would never say this phrase - sounds too much like something you'd say if you had to use the toilet (or is that NATURE CALLS) - and yet the quoted cluing is spot-on. Perfect. In-the-language. Hard to see before it's there, obvious once it gets there. HOUSE ORGAN grosses me out a little, the way that ORGAN MEAT does (now that should be an answer). BELL THE CAT - that is what is called Getting Medieval (well, if you're like me and have read Piers Plowman a number of times - and who hasn't?). In Piers Plowman, William Langland borrows from Aesop, actually, in imagining a group of mice and rats (just wrote "rice and mats," much to my own amusement) who are afraid of the cat (duh) and want a way to protect themselves from him. Everyone agrees that belling the cat is a good idea, but no one wants to do it. I think Langland was using this as an allegory for the necessity of checking royal authority over both the people and the Church, but I'm not sure and I can't be bothered to look it up right now. "Talk amongst yourselves"!

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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TUESDAY, Dec. 19, 2006 - Sarah Keller

Solving time: 7:46

THEME: N=>KN = very punny - familiar phrases starting with "N" have a "K" tacked on to the beginning and are then clued, e.g. 21A: Sweater selection? (knit-picking)

Further, every new "KN" word has a different vowel sound: KNIT, KNIGHT, KNOT, KNEW. Did you know that in medieval England, the "K" had not yet gone silent and was still pronounced in words like "knight?" It's true. Or so my training taught me. Perhaps my teachers were just making @#$ up. Anyway, one of the joys of reading Chaucer aloud (as I'll do in my classes from time to time) is hitting that hard "K" before the "N." Freaks kids out.

This was a pretty innocuous theme. Clever clues, I suppose, in the theme entries. I got totally flustered / floored / flummoxed by 50A: Was familiar with a summertime allergen? (Knew mown hay), in part because I had the middle and later parts of the answer first and the letter combinations looked insane, and in part because I was looking for POLLEN or RAGWEED or something like that (had just done a puzzle in one of my little Shortz books where the theme was "nothing to sneeze at" or something like that and theme answers involved puns on words like POLLEN and PEPPER and SNUFF and other things that make you sneeze - cute). Who mows hay!?!?! People who do these puzzles don't live on farms or in the 19th century. Hay? Really? OK. Now if the answer had been KNEW MOWN LAWN (1D: Homeowner's pride) - well it wouldn't have fit and I still would have struggled to see it, but at least the end result would have applied to my universe.

WRONG FILL

ANGER for WRATH (17A: Rage)
CLUB for ODDS (6A: What a tout may tout)
TBAR for LBAR (61A: Beam with a 90 degree bend)
NOSTICK for NONOILY (41D: Greaseless)

29D: Singer Lenya (Lotte)
38D: Polish-born author Sholem (Asch)

Blogged 'em before, so I'll blog 'em again. These two both return to the puzzle for the second time this month. I'd never heard of either of them before they showed up in my puzzle, though Ms. Lenya is apparently a puzzle stalwart. Can we get some new blood in the puzzle? Yes - there's Heidi KLUM ("As you know, in fashion, one moment you're in, and the next ... you're out!") (40D: Supermodel Heidi), Carrie Chapman CATT (23D: Women's suffrage leader Carrie Chapman _____) - honey, little help with that one... - Jim BACKUS (10D: Jim of "Gilligan's Island" fame), and ERLE Stanley Gardner (34D: Writer _____ Stanley Gardner), among others. Do constructors know that ERLE wrote a ton of books under the pen name A.A. FAIR? If so, why haven't I seen that answer lately (if ever)? Surely the opening double-A must come in handy sometimes, and when you're tired of A.A. MILNE and AARDVARK, why not try [E.S. Gardner pen name]?

25A: Mal de mer symptom (nausea)
62A: Bacteria in an outbreak (e-coli)

Thanks a lot for the morning (or bedtime) imagery, puzzle. Just what I want to be faced with as I'm winding down my day - disorders of the digestive tract. Breakfast table test! Actually, if these answers hadn't appeared on the same day, I'm sure I wouldn't have stopped to notice the pathology.

5D: Wisconsin city on Lake Winnebago (Oshkosh)

Little shout-out to my cheese-head friends Michelle and Jeff up in Oshkosh, even though they (like many of my friends) don't know of this blog's existence. Go ... UW-Oshkosh mascots! My mom used to love to dress me in OSHKOSH B'gosh overalls, but whose didn't? Every two-year-old looks adorable in those things.

55D: Comics dog (Odie)
42D: Old-fashioned music halls (Odea)

Surely there is some crazy theme entry crying out for construction here. Let's see... [Technological bird?] => A.V. AVIAN. ["Cuban kid off the port bow!"?] => ALEE ELIAN! ["Who wants to see my belly button?"?] => INNIE ANYONE? And [Garfield's least favorite theaters?] => ODIE ODEA. I have no idea what you call that theme, but there it is.

And lastly, I don't think I really knew 48D: Prefix with fluoride (tetra). The end.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

PS In keeping with yesterday's theme of CHRISTMAS / HANUKKAH / KWANZAA, I'd like to call your attention to this fantastic holiday music video treat (one of the best musical parodies I've ever seen - thanks, Steve). Andrew says I should warn you, though: it's a little ... blue. No nudity, one "swear" bleeped out (repeatedly), but ... adult content is fairly high.

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SUNDAY, Dec. 17, 2006 - Joe DiPietro

Solving time: just under an hour (in pen)

THEME: "Lay of the Land" - rebus puzzle where postal codes for states are entered in various spaces according to the region in which that state would be found if the grid were in fact a map of the U.S.A.

Pretty brutal for a Sunday. I am embarrassed to say that it took me over half an hour to understand what, precisely, the theme of the puzzle was. I had 114A: This puzzle's southern border? (Mexico) well before I had any other theme-related answer. So ... there was about 30 minutes of puzzle-solving without a Single Rebus Square's getting filled in. The MEXICO answer has a nice symmetrical counterpart in CANADA (21A: This puzzle's northern border) near the top of the grid, but because I had multiple wrong crosses up there - ERST for PAST (14D: Onetime), for example, and BUG for CAR (12D: Beetle, e.g.) - I didn't even enter CANADA for a long time, even though the answer really couldn't have been anything else. I was literally forced, bludgeoned, into seeing the rebus at 105A, where I had _EWAT for Attacked in a rage. I plugged in Every Letter in the Alphabet, and nothing worked. "This should be FLEW AT... FL ... oh, that's a state. Oh ... OH." With the rebus in mind, the rest of the (up to that point brutal) puzzle started to fall, though not as quickly as I would have liked. Frankly, I'm still not sure there isn't an error somewhere in my grid. But it got done. There's some rough fill in here, but it's a pretty masterful feat of puzzle architecture, so I'm not inclined to gripe too much.

I would like to cry PLAGIARISM! But I can't. See, I have made a habit at this site of talking about regions of the grid as if they were the relative places on a U.S. map - usually I do cities, not states, but still. Just yesterday I talked about the "Albuquerque" section of the puzzle. So, were it not for the fact that this puzzle was surely submitted well before I started blogging, I would demand recognition and satisfaction. As it is, I'll just be happy that my habit of describing the puzzle grid as a U.S. map has been confirmed as reasonable if not brilliant by greater puzzling minds than mine.


Can't write much today. It's Very late, and I've done Nothing - actually, I've eaten breakfast, finished watching Wordplay, finally, taken the dog for a walk in the woods, and made coffee. But nothing that one could call "productive." Watching Wordplay was surreal, as all these people who had been only names suddenly had faces and voices and what not. It was a bit like watching family, in one sense: I kept alternating between thinking "oh my god, there's no Way I could be related to these people!" and "oh my god, these nerds are Just Like Me." So Stamford will be odd, but fun. Think I'll go incognito - you know, get into the pool on My terms rather than have others splash water all over me. That metaphor went nowhere, but it made sense to me.

Last thing before (brief) commentary. Local paper ran very locally story on what kids want for Christmas. One child stood out. I don't know why, but I really feel that you can tell she's got ... something. Beauty, yes, but there's a fiery brilliance there too. Again, I have No Idea who she is, but you can tell there's something special there. Here's the picture the paper ran, along with the brief Q&A.

Best thing about Christmas: "You get lots of presents and toys."
What she'd like to see under the tree: "Barbies and a horse."
Naughty or nice?: "I've been a little bit of both."
How was she naughty?: "I tell people something over and over again."
How was she nice?: "I'm good at solving problems and helping people."

Telling people something over and over again. Well who doesn't do that from time to time? And solving problems and helping people - really, what else is there? This kid's clearly going places.

42A: Kind (s[OR]t)
2D: Crater creators, e.g. (impact[OR]s)

Good scary and bad scary. The good scary is the total fakeout on "Kind." Any solver worth his salt is going to see three letters, enter ILK, and move on. But hiding SORT inside a rebus, ugh. UGH. Good one. Bad scary = IMPACTORS. Even typing that word hurts. Bad enough that you have an -OR word in the clue, you gotta double the misery with an -OR word in the answer - and buried in a rebus, no less. Just mean. Brutalizing me is one thing - brutalizing the language in order to brutalize me is quite another. BTW I love PIE PLATE up here in the NW corner (3D: Makeshift Frisbee). Grrrreat fill. I think the Frisbee was in fact invented with the pie plate as a model. I do not have the energy to look this up. Oh, and 32A: Key-signature preceder (G Clef) really f-ed me up because I thought the clue had something to do with punching in security codes. Nice that G CLEF intersects 4D: One taking a big bow (bass fiddle).

53D: Hater (loather)
95A: Eye openers? (di[LA]tors)

More Odd Jobs. Add IMPACTORS (above) and you have a three-part set, with two of these clunky contraptions masked by rebuses! I mean, they're all words, and so fair, whatever. I just ... I mean, think about how often I am doing Odd Jobs segments on this commentary. Feels like every other day now. I realize how useful the -ER / -OR ending can be for constructors, but I am Taking Points Off for over-reliance. You're on notice. Criminy, I didn't even mention 87A: Receiver's counterpart (passer). Rein it in!

40D: Ancient Roman financial officer: Var. (questor)

Back-to-back days where long arcana have been gimmes for me. First ASTARTE, now QUESTOR - and a "Var." no less. I think QUAESTOR might be the more conventional spelling, although they Google with almost equal success.

49D: Discuss business at a social occasion (tal[KS]hop)
67A: Vulnerable point (wea[KS]pot)

Right where you'd expect Kansas to be: the dead center of the puzzle. Good job. I also like that both crosses are fresh, everyday two-word phrases. My WEAK SPOT - in that it annoys me no end - is when people TALK SHOP at parties. This is a Pervasive problem with academics, who seem particularly challenged when it comes to discussing anything besides a. their research, or b. departmental or university politics. As Paula Abdul once said, "Shut Up and Dance."

62D: Satellite of 1962 (Telstar)
75A: Restaurateur Toots (Shor)


Whoa, intersecting prehistoric clues ("prehistoric" meaning "before 1969" - the year I was born). TELSTAR was, I'm told, the "first active communications satellite." In this picture, it looks like a remarkably close relative of R2-D2. Toots SHOR ran a famous restaurant in NYC in the 30s-40s that had some famous clientele, including many members of the New York Yankees (that's right, booooo!). Speaking of the Yankees, it's time to introduce the next big thing in crossword fill:

His name is Daisuke Matsuzaka, but you can call him "DICE," as that is what he will be doing to your vaunted but ultimately anemic line-up.

STUFF I DIDN'T KNOW

Where to begin? I'll start with 4A: Center of emotions (bosom) and 9A: Mountain top? (ski cap) not because they are unknown words, but because holy crap I could not seem them until they were Right On Top of me. I didn't even know I had a BOSOM. And I'm wearing a SKI CAP right Now, but because I don't live on a mountain, I never thought of it as particularly mountainy. Speaking of made-up -Y adjectives, I sort of choked on 35D: Like baba (rais[IN]y) - I barely know what "baba" is, and I hate raisins in my desserts (though I love them on their own). Again, hard fill + rebus = unnecessary roughness. 10D: Unstable subatomic particle (kaon) is new to me, as is 91D: It's used to check septic systems (dye test), although the latter is easy enough to puzzle out. 115A: Antarctica's _____ Coast (Adelie) also puzzled me - have you ever looked at a map of Antarctica? For how few things live there, it's shocking how many parts of it have names. Always seems weird to think of Antarctica's having "coast," as the "coastline" must shift constantly, what with the freezing and unfreezing of surrounding waters. Speaking of Antarctica - Do see: March of the Penguins. Do not, under any circumstances, see Happy Feet. Lastly, I did not know 73A: Mosaic flooring (terr[AZ]o), and once Again a relative obscurity has its pain quotient compounded by being rebusized. Thankfully I was familiar with the rebus cross, 66D: Strong women (Am[AZ]ons), both from my recent Xmas gift orders from amazon.com and from my multiple readings of Chaucer's Knight's Tale, which begins with Theseus's conquering the Amazons and marrying their queen, Hippolyta.

OK, really really last thing: in scanning the puzzle just now for anything I might have missed or messed up, I saw 15D: Spots for some shirts, which I have filled as POLOADS, and I thought to myself, of course, "what the hell is a POLOAD? Is it like a Po' Boy? Did I screw up a cross?" Googled POLOAD to no avail. Then, THEN, I imagined a space between "O" and "A" - that's some good cluin'. OTAY! (63D: Approval on "The Little Rascals")

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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FRIDAY, Nov. 3, 2006 - Manny Nosowsky

Solving time: 20:28 (on screen)

THEME: "The" (or, none)

Though there is no real theme to this puzzle, there is a crazy [prepositional phrase + definite article] mash-up in the dead center of this puzzle, resulting in some interesting letter patterns. First,the "T," "H," and "E" in 38A: Floor it (Gun THE engine) also make up parts of the definite article "THE" in their respective crosses (all of which have "THE" in prepositional phrases: 21D: Mediocre (Run OF THE mill), 7D: Exactly (Right ON THE money) and 8D: Over there (ACROSS THE way)). Plus, both the "T" in 7D and the "H" in 8D intersect a second crossing "THE" at 34A: "Well, looky who just came in!" (Speak OF THE devil). Further, the "T"s from the various "THE"s create a SW-to-NE run of three "T"s through the center of the puzzle, which is weirdly paralleled by a run of "O"s just to the NW. The "T"s all come from "THE"s, and the "O"s all come from prepositions (OK, the "ON" in 31A: Longtime musical group with a world capital in its name (KingstON Trio) is not technically a preposition, but it's so Close!) Anyway, the main point is that I've never seen such definite article density in a puzzle in my life. Probably not what Mr. Nosowsky intended to be the most striking aspect of the puzzle, but my mind sees what it sees. I would also like to acknowledge the white-square density of the grid. 201/225 of the squares are white, making for lots of long and longish answers, and thus some inventive, ingenious fill and cluing. Here we go:

1A: Santa _____ (Monica)

So warm. So much good food. Home to many celebrities and pseudo-celebrities. Home to Bongo Comics (publishers of all of my Simpsons Comics). Also, home to my second-most faithful reader.

7A: Like an absent-minded professor, maybe (rambling)
14D: Eccentric sort (geezer)

These answers intersect at the "G" in the NE corner. As a sometime absent-minded professor, this concerns me. Is there an implied connection? While I am frequently 7A, I hope my days of being a 14D are far, far in the future ... although ... I am frequently tempted to address my students with sentences beginning, "In my day..." e.g. "In my day, we didn't have the 'Internet' - we had books. Dusty books. And you had to get off your ass and go to this place called the 'Library' to read them." "In my day, we didn't have cell phones. If you wanted to call your friend, you had to cup your hands around your mouth and yell real hard." And so on.

18A: Winter race vehicle (ice canoe)

"Canoe Canoe?" Anyone? Defunct ad campaign. Sorry. As far as this answer goes, I want to Challenge, as ... ICE CANOE reminds me of something that the boy Wonder Twin would turn into when he and his sister activated their Wonder Twins Powers: "Form of, an Ice Machine Gun!" Is the canoe made of ice? Or does it navigate ice? Hang on... Google me! Well, it looks like ... a canoe. I guess it's specially built for navigating ice-filled waters. I would have preferred to find images of canoes sculpted out of ice, but this'll have to do:
20A: Breathing aid (airhole)
25A: Crackers (nutsy)
9D: Not fine (mealy)

This was an unfortunate confluence of answers. For the first two of these clues, I had AIRHOSE and NUTSO, respectively (and I still think the latter is better than its "correct" alternative). This left me with the befuddling MEASO as an answer for 9D, which I didn't really want to change because it was making me laugh (if you say "MEASO," and are of a certain age, you will be nearly unable to keep yourself from saying "Horny" immediately thereafter - thank you, 2 Live Crew. Or perhaps you would be inclined to follow MEASO with "Soup"; doesn't make me titter, but OK). I nearly left MEASO, thinking it some piece of Friday arcana that I would just have to look up. But I persevered. "NUTSY" is terrible, but the white-square density factor prompts me to give it a "pass."

42A: Cabinet acronym, once (H.E.W.)

Was this obscure to anyone else? I looked at it thinking "that can't be right." But it is: it stands for the "Department of Health, Education and Welfare," which was a cabinet-level post from 1953 to 1979, when it was HEWn - or cleft, rather, in two: the Department of Education went independent, and the remainder of H.E.W. was renamed the Department of Health and Human Services. This cabinet-level reorganization was revolutionary, as it ended up solving all of our country's education and health problems.

58A: How déjà vu often occurs (spookily)

The puzzle is not ready to give up on Halloween yet. Other Evil Entries include OGRES (43A), STREP (39A), NICOTINE (3D), and ONION DIP (2D).

1D: Units of work (man-weeks)

What? Is this some economics or Department of Labor stat? Sounds like the plural form of a summertime festival in Provincetown or San Francisco. "Are you going to Man-Week this year?" "Girl, you know I am." / "What happens at Man-Week stays at Man-Week." / etc.

33D: Riddle-me- (ree)

This is from a nursery rhyme of some sort? I wanted "THIS, BATMAN," but alas, the answer was far too short.
50D: Noted 19th-century French illustrator (Doré)

This week's puzzles have now featured both artists I have used in my courses this term: first Goya, now DORÉ. Why DORÉ? Well, despite the fact that the course I teach is called "British Literature I," I spend half our time teaching classical and early medieval writing that is not British at all. Why? Because British Literature came from somewhere; it didn't just spring fully formed from the head of Queen Elizabeth (or Chaucer, or whoever wrote Beowulf). So we just finished Dante's Inferno, and DORÉ did a very famous set of gorgeous, horrifying illustrations to accompany a 19th-century edition of Dante's magisterial poem. DORÉ does good monsters. Clearly, I refuse to let Halloween die.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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