SUNDAY, Feb. 18, 2007 - David Kwong and Kevan Choset

Solving time: 21:10

THEME: "Magic words" - Theme is explained by 70A: Magic words ... or a hint to the other long answers in this puzzle ("NOW YOU SEE IT, NOW YOU DON'T"); The word "IT" is inserted into and taken out of familiar phrases to make new, odd phrases, which are then clued, e.g. 25A: Einstein's asset (Great Brain) or 27A: Acerbic rock/folk singer (Biting Crosby).

I didn't enjoy solving this puzzle, though in the end I had to admire its cleverness as well as its architectural elegance, with the 21-letter explanatory theme answer (70A) running right through the center of the grid. I could see very early on that the theme had something to do with "IT," but it took me a Long time to get 70A, because of a mistake that I had early on, and actually never bothered to correct: 74D: Words with house or move (on the). I had IN THE (guess I saw the "house" but not the "move" part of the clue), which made 70A end -OWYOUDINT (I forget exactly how many of those other letters I had in place when I made the error) and I was thinking "is this some kind of horrible slang, some botched approximation of black slang, e.g. "O no you dint!", an expression of offended disbelief wherein DINT is a contraction of DIDN'T!?!?!?" So, as I said, I didn't get 70A until almost the very end. I just went around guessing theme answers ("put IT in or take IT out"). The whole experience felt slow, and clunky, and awkward. I got no kind of rhythm. There were times where I just stared at the grid and felt very much in free fall - THEN I spent 3-5 minutes searching for a mistake in the grid (two, it turns out - the one I already mentioned [DINT for DON'T] and another to be discussed below). And STILL my time was respectable. That is, no worse than my average Sunday.

104A: Person at court (baron)

How is this? Is this because a BARON has a court? Of his own? Like a king has a court? Or is he a person at a king's court? The "court" part of this clue seems arbitrary and off. I understand that a BARON may have a court of his own, but if you search "court" at the Wikipedia entry for BARON, the only word it hits is "courtesy," as in "courtesy title," as in a BARON without a "court" to speak of.

1D: Modern workout system (Tae Bo)

Really? Still? I haven't seen Billy Blanks on my TV screen in a while.

80D: Georgia and others, once: Abbr. (SSRs)
81D: Sen. McCarthy ally (HUAC)

It's getting very Cold War over in the "Carmel-by-the-Sea" portion of the grid. And very Abbreviated as well. Nice little sub-thematic juxtaposition.

43D: Boxer nicknamed "Hands of Stone" (Duran)
44D: Año starter (Enero)

What month was it when Sugar Ray Leonard made Roberto DURAN say "No mas!"? Was it, by chance, ENERO? No, it was NOVIEMBRE.

59D: First name in comedy (Whoopi)

Oh, I'm sorry, I thought you said "comedy."

34A: Graf _____ (Spee)

The Admiral Graf SPEE was a German battleship that served in the early stages of WWII. This answer is known to me Only from crosswords, and even then, not very well; I remembered that it was S-EE, but couldn't remember what letter went in that second place. So it's time to play "Better Know Your S-EE Words"

1. SHEE = [Irish fairy people (Var.)]
2. SKEE = [_____-ball, arcade game]
3. SMEE = [Hook's helper]
4. SNEE = ["Snick or _____": knife-fighting]
5. SPEE = see above
6. SWEE = [Popeye's Little _____ Pea]

Problem Fill

• 61D: Hammer user (nailer) - true enough, but such a crappy word - one of the horrible "Odd Jobs" I like to gripe about - that it would not come to me even after I had most of its letters
• 99D: Beams (girders) - I have no idea why this answer took so long to come, as it seems quite ordinary now that I look at it. I just know that I took many, many passes at it before it came into view. I think I thought the word was a verb.
• 6D: French film director Allégret (Marc) - didn't actually give me problems because I never saw it. Good thing, because I have Never heard of this guy.
• 50A: Faulkner character _____ Varner (Eula) - sadly, I did see this one. No idea. Never heard of her (it's a her, right?). Why is that? Because I've read but one Faulkner novel in my entire life: As I Lay Dying - I don't remember the plot of that book, and I know next to nothing about the plots of his others. Best line from As I Lay Dying: "My mother is a fish." That is, literally, all that I remember about that book. EULA Varner is a character in The Hamlet, a novel which, I swear, I had never heard of until just now. It was made into a movie called The Long, Hot Summer in 1958, starring Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, and featuring Lee Remick as EULA Varner. If my cursory research is correct, EULA kills herself with a pistol. I guess I should have said "Spoiler Alert."
• 41D: Word in many a Nancy Drew title (Clue) - I was happy to see the "C" there and immediately entered the obvious CASE - forgetting, of course, that CASE was already taken by The Hardy Boys (one of whom was played on TV by Parker Stevenson, as I established in a recent entry and / or comment).
• 85D: Literally, "instruction" (Torah) - I'm embarrassed to say I had no CLUE about this answer, even with the "T" in place. Wasn't until I had the terminal -AH that it became obvious.
• 78A: Percolate (leach) - never in my wildest dreams would I have put these two words in the same universe. STEEP seems more closely related to both of them than they are to themselves, if that pronoun pile-up makes any sense. I think LEACH is how Robin spells his name. I would have spelled it LEECH on a spelling test.
• 125A: "_____ Dream" ("Lohengrin" piece) (Elsa's) - I blew an ELSA clue a few months back, so I sort of remembered her this time. Sort of. I should say that that ELSA clue, the one I muffed, resulted in an avalanche of hits to this website from people searching for her name. Common fare to crossword pros, a mystery to hacks (sadly, I'm still more latter than former).
• 38D: Dagger (dirk) - a perfectly good word that was stored away in my brain from my D&D days (circa 1981). Unfortunately for me, it was stored away so well that I actually couldn't retrieve it. It wasn't 'til I got AIKMAN (62A: 1993 Super Bowl M.V.P.) that the "K" dropped into place and DIRK became visible. I like that DIRK intersects 48A: The Henry who founded the Tudor line (VII), mostly because DIRK seems like a word that would have been in common parlance in that era. Unlike now, when it's best known as the first name of the NBA's greatest German.
• 22A: Sinatra's "Meet Me at the _____" (Copa) - My era = COPA Cabana. In the future, please clue this word via Manilow.
• 102D: _____ Society (English debating group) (Eton) - so, so, so many ways to clue ETON, and this is what you give me. A school, a collar, "The _____ Rifles," etc. I would have preferred them all.
• 123D: What barotrauma affects (ear) - aaargh. Simple little answer. Since a barometer measures atmospheric pressure, I figured barotrauma affected the AIR. I swear that it makes a kind of sense.
• 115D: Citation of 1958 (Edsel) - I'm guessing that the Citation was a make of car. I think Citation is better known as a racehorse. My god, how did I know that? The weird detritus that floats around in my head... Speaking of HORSES (109A: Engine capability, slangily (horses))... that's it, just that clue, right there. I got it fast, for which I was very proud of myself, considering I know less than nothing about cars (or other things that might have engines).

Always happy to see John Kennedy TOOLE in the puzzle (47D: "A Confederacy of Dunces" author) because that novel is great. It reminds me of my mom, who gave me my first copy when I was young(er). Something about the "North Carolina" portion of the puzzle is making me happy today, specifically, the pile-up of multiple-word phrases, where IN TURN (56D: Sequentially), ON THE (74D: Words with house or move), NO SIR (75D: Polite refusal), and TWO P.M. (Soap time, maybe) all intersect ERE NOW (79A: Heretofore) and NOT SO (88A: "Baloney!") - not to mention NOW YOU SEE IT, NOW YOU DON'T. TWO PM is precisely the time that my soap, As The World Turns, comes on. When I discuss As The World Turns with Andrew (who has been watching Way longer than I have) we abbreviate the show to ATWT - which, I forgot to mention in a recent puzzle, occurs occasionally in puzzles as an abbr. of Atomic Weight. I'd really really like to see ATWT clued with reference to the soap, which I believe would be legal, as the only sites that come up on a Google search of [ATWT] are soap-opera-related.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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SATURDAY, Feb. 10, 2007 - Bob Peoples

Solving time: untimed

THEME: 6D: With 22-Down, disgruntled remark about a failed partnership? ("He got the mine / I got the shaft")

That's not really a theme, just extensive, symmetrical fill that anchors the puzzle, but it's far closer to a theme than most Saturday puzzles ever get. There are many detectable subthemes in this grid as well (see below). But first:

OK, this is me, in the present, talking to me 20 minutes ago:

Paying attention, past-me? OK. This is a SOREL:

This is a MOREL (18A: It has a cap in the kitchen):


Any questions?

There were two squares I was unsure of when I'd finished this puzzle, and it turns out the one square I had wrong ... was a third, totally different square. What's worse, I have purchased, cooked, and eaten MOREL mushrooms in the not-too-distant past. Why in the world my brain went "CORER ... BORER ... no wait, it's the mushroom, SOREL!" I'll never know. Apropos of nothing: SORREL with two "R"s is a kind of horse, I think. Yes. Also an herb.

1A: Top in a certain contest (wet T-shirt)
39D: Ones doing push-ups? (bra pads)
39A: Brest friends (bons amis)

OK that last one doesn't technically have anything to do with breasts, but the others sure do. I'm almost surprised that this level of boob-action passes muster with the Times. While WET T-SHIRT contests aren't really my scene, I love everything about that clue. Is "Top" a verb? A noun referring to the contestant? No, it's something you wear. Well, probably not you, exactly, but you see what I mean. The "push-ups" clue made me think BRA immediately. I entertained CUPS for a while, but PADS is more apt. Apt! Boobs are one of many subthemes in this puzzle. What's next?

9D: Ancient vessels (triremes)
15A: Reply on a ship ("Aye aye, sir")
21A: Coastal feature (ria)
61A: One of the five major circles of latitude (Antarctic)

No one aboard a TRIREME would ever have said AYE AYE, SIR, not least because TRIREMES were manned by ancient Greeks, not the crew of the Pequod. Still, the sailing theme is pretty strong here (I originally thought 66A: Coasts, say was SAILS, which would have been great, theme-wise; sadly, the answer was SLEDS, which I guess you could do in ANTARCTICa after you sailed there on your TRIREME). RIA is a handy word to know, and I'm surprised I don't see it a lot more often in puzzles. It means a submerged or "drowned" valley, where sea levels have risen or coastal levels have fallen. The South coast of England has a number of RIAs, and apparently the San Francisco Bay is a RIA. If global climate changes continue, expect the word RIA to enter more and more people's vocabularies. I could use a little Global Warming right now, as we (here, where I live) have been in a total Ice Age for three weeks, with only one hour (!) spent above freezing in that time. Last subtheme:

10D: Glen Gray's "Casa _____ Stomp" (Loma)
11D: Rock genre (emo)
57D: "Trionfo di Afrodite" composer (Orff)
49A: Key of Brahms's Fourth (E Minor)
8D: Score abbr. (rit.) - the return of RIT.! I was so proud of getting this
51A: "Peter _____ Greatest Hits" (1974 release) (Nero's)
40D: 1959 Neil Sedaka hit ("Oh, Carol")
36A: "_____ Her Go" (Frankie Laine hit) ("I Let")
27D: With 5-Down, match, in a way (lip / sync)

I just realized that I get Neil Sedaka and Paul Anka confused. Looking at their names, you can see why. If they got married, their kids could have the awesome hyphenated name ANKA-SEDAKA. It's like Abracadabra, only with more "K"s. Anyway ... these answers (just above) are all, disparately, musical. Is it my imagination, or did we not just have a reference to Peter NERO in a puzzle. Something like [Peter and the Wolfe?], where the answer was NEROS? I still have No Idea who Peter NERO is! Oh, he plays piano. I can't quite tell what kind of music he makes. He currently directs the Philly Pops. I also have no idea who Glen Gray is! Hmmm, a jazz saxophonist and the leader of the Casa LOMA Orchestra - well, that would have been nice to know.

(More) Things I Didn't Know

• 24A: _____ Bank (U.S. loan guarantor) (EXIM) - stands for Export-Import Bank of the U.S. Thank god I remembered the name of the "M" cross, 25D: French Impressionist Berthe (Morisot), or who knows what I would have put in that square.
• 34A: Artist on the cover of a 1969 Life magazine (Peter Max) - I thought I would nail this: ROCKWELL came to mind. But I must say that I've barely heard of PETER MAX. I sure know his "style," though. Garish and unfortunate. Fake happy. Drug-addled. Everything that nauseated me about the 70s-80s. The "X" from 14D: Oppressive measure that helped spark the French Revolution (Salt Tax) made PETER MAX much easier to piece together than he would have been otherwise.
• 43A: TV producer Don (Hewitt) - I don't even care enough to look him up
• 63D: Height in feet of the Statue of Liberty, expressed in Roman numerals (CLI) - that's way shorter than I would have guessed.
• 7D: Alpine feeder (Isere) - yet another stupid European river I don't know.
• 52D: 10-century emperor known as "the Great" (Otto I) - inferrable, but ... don't a lot of emperors or tsars or other rulers fit this description?
• 45D: Annuity scheme (tontine) - I know what a TONTINE is (Abraham Simpson was in one once), but I did not know it was an "annuity scheme"
  

I was a little surprised by (and thankful for) a handful of gimmes in this puzzle, including 32A: Georgetown athlete (Hoya), 47A: Prefix with -stat (rheo-), 4D: Inventor's inits. (T.A.E.), and 11D: Rock genre (emo) - EMO should be in the Junior Pantheon, for words that are very hot but relatively new: see also, TERI POLO, Eric BANA, etc. EMO has an equally hip cousin in the grid: IMO (31A: "I think," succinctly) - I tried "I AM" here, but it didn't work. In case you are not up on chatroom abbreviations, IMO = "In my opinion." It's often written (obnoxiously, IMO) as IMHO (the "H" standing for "humble" - which the user of said abbreviation normally is not). Speaking of computer lingo, I have to GO OFFLINE now (65A: Become disconnected) and get my personal and professional life in some kind of order today.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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MONDAY, Jan. 29, 2007 - Fred Piscop

Solving time: 4:46

THEME: words that end -PPER? - all theme clues are two-word phrases that, well, end in -PPER, like I told you, e.g. 17A: Popular grilled fish (red snapper) [addendum: Just found out from Crossword Fiend's blog that the vowel that precedes -PPER changes with each answer, and does so in alphabetical order, no less: -APPER, -EPPER, -IPPER, -OPPER, -UPPER]

It is early in the morning, and I can't remember - was there a clue in this puzzle that refers to the theme and explains it more elegantly than I did? I know what you're thinking: "You have the puzzle in front of you ... right now! Why don't you look for yourself?" Good question. I'm tired. There are a lot of clues. I'm not in the mood to read fine print right now. I just want to glance at the grid, see an answer, and write the first thing that comes to mind. No time or energy for close analysis this a.m. Assuming I haven't missed something, this theme is pretty tepid, though some of the fill is pretty fancy and lively. Favorite theme answer was THE GIPPER (37A: 1940 Ronald Reagan role - I mentioned Reagan in yesterday's commentary, and voilà, here he is today, back from the dead, ready for puzzle action, sir), followed closely by DR PEPPER (24A: Soft drink since 1885). Note that there is no "." (or "period") in the "DR" of DR PEPPER. Why am I telling you this? To spare you the annoyance of having some know-it-all correct you should you ever have occasion to write about DR PEPPER. It's like one, big public service announcement, this blog.

Multiple-Word Phrases

• 15A: Wash gently against, as the shore (lap at) - love it
• 28A: China, Japan, etc. (Far East) - see also TOKYO (57A: City trashed by Rodan); as opposed to the Near East, where you would find the DINAR (23A: Jordanian cash), though probably not in the pocket of an ISRAELI (46D: Ehud Barak or Ehud Olmert)
• 66A: Started a cigarette (lit up) - reminds me of when I first solved a Times crossword, back when my diet consisted almost entirely of cigarettes, Diet Coke, and fried burritos; God bless college (and a 20-year-old's metabolism)
  
• 45D: Close to its face value, as a bond (near par)
• 11D: Take some pressure off (let up on)

I [heart] multiple-word phrases in my crossword grid, and these are all fairly vibrant. Why do I love multiple-word phrases in general. Something about the way they exploit the possibilities of the grid in unexpected ways - I think the brain instinctively, for however split a second, takes in the blank row / column as a single unit. My brain likes when that unit has subunits, finding out where the breaks between words are, etc. Plus, multiple-word phrases tend to swing toward the colloquial (as opposed to the dusty dictionary) end of the language, which I appreciate.

Odd Jobs

12D: Opposite of dividers (uniters)
24D: Inventor (deviser)
25D: Speaker with a sore throat, say (rasper)

Every Monday puzzle, it seems, brings with it an assortment of verbs that are tortured into becoming nouns, although these jobs aren't that odd, in the end. Well, the last one is pretty icky, but the first two I can actually imagine someone's using in conversation. Nice UNITER / divider juxtaposition. Timely, without being catty. Toward the President. In case that wasn't obvious. In other made-up word news, REBOLTS (42D: Makes tighter, in a way) is kinda gross, but it does have a certain Frankensteinian aura that makes it vaguely tolerable.

59D: Nile slitherers (asps)
26D: Actress _____ Dawn Chong (Rae)

They're back! Haven't seen either of these Pantheon members for a while (or so it seems). I was just thinking yesterday that I haven't seen ASPS or EERO in a long time, and here I get a visit from ASPS - if they keep their appearance frequency to about once a month, I'll tolerate them quite fine.

7D: PC program, briefly (app)
8D: Al Capp's Daisy _____ (Mae)

One of the weird things about solving a Monday puzzle, for me, is that I never set eyes on a significant number of clues. When you know all the Acrosses, you never see the Downs, and vice versa. So it was in the Far North of this puzzle, where I only just now noticed these two little words - and I'm glad I missed them, because I have a feeling that I would have botched / misspelled them if I'd gone at them in their blank state. I would have looked for some acronym for the first one, and spelled the second one MAY, probably, despite my alleged affection for / knowledge of comics.

41D: Overlay material (acetate)
49A: Sicilian seaport (Palermo)

These seem pretty fancy words for a Monday. I'm not sure I'd know ACETATE if it bit me, or if it were sitting on my desk right now. For all I know, it is. No, it isn't, but you get my point. Was CARLA (40A: "Cheers" waitress) Tortelli from PALERMO? I don't know. I do know that I misspelled her name on my first pass through the grid - spelled it with a "K," which is how my dissertation adviser spelled her own first name. Also botched 44A: "National Velvet" author Bagnold (Enid) - don't remember what I put in, but it was probably something like EDIE. Let's go back to Italy for 4D: Puccini opera (Tosca) and then over to GAM (60D: Pinup's leg), just ... because, and then we'll close it out with my favorite book, the OED (27A: Brit. reference work), which I own in the single-volume edition, the one you are supposed to read with a magnifying glass, but which I read without aid (my eyes are one of a select number of body parts that are Not showing their age ... yet). Sadly, I have deferred getting the Webster's Unabridged Dictionary that I really, really wanted, for financial reasons (i.e. we bled money over the Holidays and are trying to stop the bleeding before we make any large-ish expenditures). Someday my dictionary will come. Til then, I'll make do with my (very) old standby, the OED.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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MONDAY, Jan. 15, 2007 - David Pringle

Solving time: 5:21

THEME: TRAFFIC LIGHT (54A) - Three long theme answers contain colors RED, YELLOW, and GREEN (reading from top to bottom, in the same order the colors would appear on a traffic light): 20A: Special occasion (red letter day), 29A: Beatles movie (Yellow Submarine), 44A: Winner of the first Super Bowl (Green Bay Packers)

Ooh, the north of this puzzle was murder on me (I mean, for a Monday ... Monday Murder). I would say it was a Manic Monday and that I wished that it was Sunday, but in fact it was Sunday (evening) when I solved this puzzle, and nobody remembers the Bangles anyway, sadly. RED LETTER DAY is not a phrase I use or hear much, if ever. The other two theme answers were easier and easiest (for me), both answerable immediately without my knowing the theme. There were a lot of Scrabbly letters in here (again, for a Monday), resulting in a lively grid that felt almost Tuesday-ish to me (though my time improved 6 seconds from last week, which was up 5 seconds from the week before: impryooovement!). One objection to this puzzle. It is totally out of season. YULE (7D: Christmastime) was fine, unremarkable; but NOEL (38D: Christmas song) was pushing it - I mean "Christmas" in both clues, come on!; but what really tore it was EGGNOG (47D: Holiday quaff). Oh "Holiday" quaff, eh? Well, at least you didn't say "Christmas quaff," I guess, which would have combined redundancy with cute alliteration to create Angry Rex. Christmas is SO 2006. I give this out-of-season nonsense a CATCALL (43D: Raspberry).

In addition to calling for a halt to Christmas clues, I would like to call a halt to all constructors named DAVID. What the hell, do you guys have some kind of club or union or secret agenda for Daviding the planet? My middle name is David, so I'm a fan, in theory, but there are too many Davids in CrossWorld. I'm calling for quotas. We'll grandfather Benkof, Kahn, Quarfoot, Sullivan, and now Pringle, but the rest of you will have to apply, to me, for special dispensation. Moving on.

1A: Church recess (apse)

Ah, APSE. My beloved APSE. Sweet Pantheon gimme. It is in the Pantheon, right? (This year's new Pantheon line-up will be released later today, in honor, by total coincidence, of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.). So the first clue was easy. Second, however, was Not. 5A: Wallop in the boxing ring (kayo). This is all kinds of icky, and especially grating given the nearby presence of 12D: "Thumbs up" (A OK) - I've made my feelings known about words that sound silly when uttered one after the other (side note: I kind of like that there is a "Thumbs up" clue in a puzzle that also features EBERT as an answer - 40A: Film critic Roger). Criminy, if you say KAYO A OK, you have some kind of sonic palindrome. You also have an anagram of OO, KAYAK! This is all to say that I had some reasonable synonym of "punch" in there, and it was wrong, and the odd letters in KAYO for some reason took a (Monday) while to unearth from the crosses. One of these crosses, off the "O," was the great (but hard to see without the "O") OPERA BOX (8D: Area from which to hear an aria). OPERA BOX has puzzle symmetry with LEAP FROG (39D: Spring game?), which pleases me for reasons unknown to me. Maybe because they are very colorful answers from entirely separate universes.

25A: Arctic bird (auk)
39A: Unilever soap brand (Lux)


These two little buggers gave me small fits. Why can't you be more like your three-letter cousin, BOA, i.e. obvious (24A: _____ constrictor)? I have heard of, but could not define, picture, or perform the appropriate bird call of the AUK. I provide a picture here for my edification as well (perhaps) as yours. Like AUK, LUX is another answer I have heard of, but not often. It's from another era, right? Like, my mom used it to wash ... things ... in the 60's, maybe? AUK and LUX are what happens when you try to cram a lot of Scrabbly letters into a Monday puzzle (see also DANKE [19A: German word of appreciation], RUBIK [32D: Hungarian cube maker], WIZ [26A: Oz musical, with "The"], and "Q's - The Good and The Bad," below).

4D: 1928 Oscar winner Jannings (Emil)

Oh, right, 1928. I remember it well. No, wait, I don't. My GRANDMOTHER probably doesn't remember it well. I want to know what EMIL Jannings is doing in my Monday puzzle! It's not like he's there to pick up some tricky, odd letters. He's an anagram of LIME, for god's sake - surely you could have cleaned up this corner and gotten the musty silent movie star off stage - rest up for Thursday, EMIL!

5D: Acts obsequiously (kowtows)
43D: Raspberry (catcall)

Though KOWTOWS took me way too long to get - see my anti-KAYO screed, above - it is a great, colorful word, and has sizzling symmetry with CATCALL. I'm happy with today's puzzle pairings, for the most part. Makes it seem as if some serious thought went into grid construction.

46D: First (primal)

Untrue to its name, this was not anywhere close to the "first" answer I got. In fact, it was nearly last. For some reason it was nearly impossible for me to see it even though I had _R_MAL. Looks very wrong. I seriously entertained AROMAL before PRIMAL ever came into view. PRIMAL, to me, describes an urge, an atavistic craving, not the "first" of anything. I know that it means "first" in some contexts (math contexts?), but not in any contexts in which I find myself on a regular basis.

51A: Dadaist Jean (Arp)

God I love his name. I am a big fan of crazy-ass 20th-century art, esp Dadaism. I have a special Dada edition Swatch watch (Andrew is my wondertwin - we bought our watches together, which is possibly a more romantic purchase than anything my wife and I have ever made, save our wedding rings - and I lost my wedding ring almost two years ago. My Dada Swatch, however ... safe and sound!). Arp did a lot of abstract and blobby paintings and sculptures, many of which I find strangely beautiful. I get him confused with Calder for absolutely no good reason. ARP is his real name, which is great because it sounds just like something absurdly made-up, like he renamed himself in honor of the sound of a dog barking, which is something a Dadaist might do.

Q's: The Good and the Bad

GOOD:

9A: Catcher's position (squat)
10D: Waterfront site (quay)

I especially like the first of these, as I got it instantly, with no crosses. I would have preferred that it be clued 9A: Jack _____, but baseball is a good way to go too. I am indifferent to the word QUAY and include it here only because it's the "Q" crossing.

BAD:

57D: Figs. averaging 100 (IQ's)
62A: Capital of Ecuador (Quito)

Were this a Wednesday+ puzzle, I would be filing this under "GOOD," but that "Q" was blank for more seconds that I care(d) to count. I am very bad on South American capitals, in that I know most of them, but easily forget which countries they belong to. LA PAZ = Bolivia .... and it sort of breaks down from there. I know SUCRE is down there somewhere. Oh, SANTIAGO, that's easy. Is RIO the capital of Brazil? Anyway, QUITO would not quome (cwm?) to mind for many, many seconds. Some might say that this blank-out on my part is at least somewhat ironic, as I slowed down on a clue whose answer involved IQ. I would humbly disagree.

67A: S-shaped molding (ogee)

Again, this puzzle has ingenious symmetry, and this is the ingeiousest of all. Start with APSE (church architecture), end with OGEE (church architecture). Amen. Alpha and Omega. I'm sure God approves. Now if only you could have provided the appropriate symmetrical companion for EBONY (21D: Piano key wood). "EBONY and EXCEL (40D: Do well (at))" isn't nearly as catchy as "EBONY and IVORY."

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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SUNDAY, Jan. 14, 2007 - Harvey Estes

Solving time: 22:57

THEME: "Sounds of Old" - all theme answers are familiar phrases, which originally contained "OLD" but which have had the "OLD" part respelled as a homonym, creating strange phrases which are then reclued, e.g. 37D: Rang true? (tolled it like it is)

Average Sunday for me. Maybe slightly above average - certainly way faster than last week's debacle. My nemesis at the Times applet beat me, though, and has beaten me two days in a row, after I flattened him/her the vast majority of the time over the past two weeks. I'm trying to get that competitive spirit going for Stamford in two months (my competitive spirit, for better or worse, needs very little coaxing to show itself). The theme itself was kind of blah, but much of the non-theme fill was fun and spicy (and tricky). I started out very, very slowly, with hardly anything coming together in the northern climes of the puzzle, and so - for the first time that I can remember, I worked my way through the puzzle diagonally, moving on a nearly perfectly straight NE-to-SW line, so that the whole center region of the puzzle was the first part I substantively finished. I think I really picked up (speed-wise and mood-wise, when I hit the dead center of the puzzle and discovered my newly-beloved DOGLEGS, which has shown up recently and, in conjunction with yesterday's DOGSBODY, caused of lot of DOG-word musing over the past few days by me and other readers (thanks, btw, to the etymology hounds out there, especially the one who provided the Sex Pistols' "Anarchy in the U.K." reference for DOGSBODY: "I wanna be anarchy! / No dogsbody!" Hot.

1A: Eponymous physicist (Tesla)

I wrote in FERMI. That was the wrong foot on which I got off. I thought for sure that FERMI was some kind of eponym, and he's very crossword-friendly, and he fit, so voila. Shmoila. I got the next Across, 6A: Mary Kay rival (Avon), but the crosses would not come. 10A is clued in reference to another clue so I skipped it. Then hit the NW corner where finally things started coming together. 15D: First name in horror (Lon) was a gimme, as was 17D: Small topper (beanie). They gave me crosses to get 14A: Corroborator, maybe (alibi), and then the rest of the NW came together, only even with the entire first part of the 15-letter 16D (THEME) Comment about suddenly thinner mares? filled in, I had NO idea what the clue was going for. I would solve this later, only after FOURTEEN of the squares were filled in: initially had I KNOW THE-D FOALED - which made no sense. Changed KNOW to KNEW (stupid Bambi! - 31A: "Bambi" character (Ena) - not Ona), and then saw the verb tense / contraction the answer wanted. I KNEW THEY'D FOALED. The "Y" came from 57A: "Funny Girl" composer (Styne), which made me reflect on my as-yet terrible dearth of knowledge about popular composers of the 20th century.

77A (THEME): Played tenpins in officers' uniforms (Bowled as brass)

Took me forever, as I was unfamiliar with the phrase (or thought I was). Had BOWLED ADDRESS for a while and wondered what the hell that meant. My life would have been easier had I known 70D: "Serpico author" (Maas), which would have given me the "A" in BRASS. A whole series of words coming off of this theme answer gave me trouble. SICK CALL (80D: Line of soldiers needing medical attention) isn't really a word I know (and my dad was a doctor in the Army!), and I thought I knew my ankhs, having seen so many stupid ankh tattoos on people (especially women, for some reason) in the 90s, but I somehow neglected the LOOP aspect (116A: Ankh feature). LOOP crosses SICK CALL at the second "L" - and this whole Louisiana region of the puzzle was screwed up (for me) by a tiny, tiny, harmless-seeming answer: 108A: Familiar sigh (Ah, me), which I understandably, and far more in-the-language-ly, had as OH MY. This caused me to take an Eternity to see 97D: Clean up, in a way (bleep!), which sat for many precious seconds as BLYED in my grid, the "D" coming from the stupid "Ankh" clue, which I had not as LOOP but as ROOD (as in "Dream of the ROOD," as in an old-fashioned word for cross, which is essentially what an ankh is ... right?). And so, for a while, nothing happened. BLEEP is a great answer, by the way, however much it tripped me up. It is great in part because if my solving experience had been on TV /radio, the FCC would have had to BLEEP a lot of my language at precisely the moment I was entering that answer.

I finished the puzzle in the NW - where I had my oh-so-inauspicious start. How bad was my second stab at the NW. Consider this: here are the clues for 1D, 2D, and 3D, followed not by their correct answers, but by the answers that I entered off the top of my head (all wrong):

1D: Chuck (hurl)
2D: Parrot (copy)
3D: SeaWorld performer (Orca)

These words do not like to be near each other, I assure you. I don't think the NW would ever have come together if I hadn't finally gotten the last (which was actually, on paper, the first) of the theme answers: 27A: Like shoes made in St. Louis and finished in New Orleans? (soled down the river) - an excellent clue that I only just now gave my full attention. So HURL became TOSS and COPY became ECHO and ORCA became SEAL, bam bam bam. Hit "Done" at that point and found out I'd left a square unfilled - the poor little "A" at the 65D: Kazakhstan's _____ Sea (Aral) / 71A: Certain finish (matte) crossing.

Stuff I didn't know

• 23A: Hat with a plume (shako) - this is one of those tall, ridiculous, impractical European military hats. What's the etymology on THIS one? Hang on ... Oh I don't wanna run downstairs and get my barely adequate dictionary. Here's a picture instead:

• 8D: Pearl Buck heroine (Olan) - ugh, Pearl Buck, my most hated of Bucks. She must have a novel on the Modern Library's 100 Best Novels list, which means I'll have read at least one thing of hers by the end of the year. Nope, nothing by her on there. Guess I'll have to continue to piece together my knowledge of her solely through solving crosswords.

• 60D: "Blame it on the Bossa Nova" singer, 1963 (Gormé) - yep, officially way before my time, but I've at least heard her name before.

• 68A: Moon of Uranus (Ariel) - This is a Sylvia Plath book to me - that, or the sprite or whatever he is in Shakespeare's The Tempest. Or, oh yeah, the little mermaid in The Little Mermaid. RE: Uranus, I won't comment on the fact - I'll just point out - that this grid has ASS, HOLE, and ANNAL (26A: One year's record) in it.
• 9D: Elementary particle (neutrino) - I put this here because I got it with just the "N" in place, but I'd be lying if I suggested I could tell you anything even semi-substantive about a NEUTRINO. I'd heard of it, it fit, there it is.

I am not fond of the convention of cluing AMORAL as 11D: Making no value judgments. This makes non-judgmental-ness sound like soullessness. AMORAL is scary to me, while reserving or withholding judgment seems a decent life skill.

Lastly, congratulations to Harvey ESTES, not only for writing a very entertaining puzzle, but for managing to work his name into the grid - subtle (30D: Opera singer Simon _____). It is a measure of his (no doubt) considerable humility and self-deprecating nature that he made his name cross with both 44A: "Gr-r-ross!" ("Yecch!") and 46A: Got a facial piercing (holed one's nose).

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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FRIDAY, Jan. 12, 2007 - Sherry O. Blackard

Solving time: 2:31!!! (just kidding - somewhere in the 10-15 minute range?)

THEME: A Night At The Opera (or, none)

I tend not to solve puzzles on the applet on Thursday and Friday nights. In general, I don't function well, mentally, after 10pm, so the whole release-time of the puzzles is a drag (I like to be in bed at 10pm - I would be So Thrilled if the Times could push back the release time even one hour, hint hint, wink wink, elbow elbow, nudge nudge). And since Friday and Saturday puzzles can be terrors, I like to take them to bed and work on them there, mainly because I don't like the idea of gnashing my teeth in my (home) office as time ticks by and my prospective sleep time gets shorter and shorter. It's also a nice way to relax and Enjoy the late-week puzzles, which tend to be worth enjoying. That said, I really really wish I had solved this on the applet, as I think my time would have been superfast (for me). I don't push forward quickly when I solve in bed. If I had been pushing, I'm sure I could have done this puzzle in under 10. It was delightful, but not hard. Very much on the easy side for a Friday. I'm going to type my grid into the applet just to double check that everything's right. So if you see my time there, and it seems super-fast, remember that it's fake. Admittedly fake (actually, I submitted the grid at just under 10 minutes, which may be wishful thinking, but it's not Terribly fake).

This puzzle looks daunting, with its 3 stacks of 3 fifteen-letter answers, and then another 15-letter answer cutting straight down through the grid - so much white space to fill in. But these types of puzzles don't give me nearly as much trouble as the ones with all the nooks and crannies that are hard to work your way into; plus, you can often get a 15-letter answer off of just 3 or 4 consecutive letters, which tends to open the whole grid right up. These kinds of puzzle seem like they are much harder on an a constructing scale than a solving one.

7D: Where "Otello" premiered (Milan)
24A: Verdi's "Un _____ in Maschera" (ballo)
57A: Longtime La Scala conductor (Arturo Toscanini)
49D: Cabriole performer's wear (tutu)


OPERA! OK, that last one is ballet, but still, it's in the musical performance realm. Some interesting things about this set of clues/answers: I was very proud of getting BALLO (not knowing Italian and never having heard of the Verdi work in question) with just one or two letters. The word, which means "dance" or "ball," is memorable to me because I publicly destroyed the Spanish version of the word ("baile") in a crime fiction course I was teaching once by repeatedly pronouncing the word like the English "bale" (it's properly pronounced something like "bye'-yay"). There was a chapter in Dorothy Hughes's Ride the Pink Horse that was titled "Baile," I believe - the whole novel was set in a U.S. border town - and after I had mauled the word a few times, a student politely if vaguely contemptuously corrected me. Memo to would-be teachers and other people who get caught out publicly in a massive error - admit your mistake good-naturedly and then move on. Do not engage in self-flagellation, do not get defensive or flustered. Laugh at your mistake and then plow forward as if your manifest ignorance were in fact no big deal. I've drifted away from the puzzle.

Oh, another thing: I got ARTURO TOSCANINI and one of his long parallel counterparts down there, 61A: Summer resort area famous for recreational boating (Thousand Islands), without ever seeing the clue(s). I was fortunate enough to somehow get 60A: It can take a lot of heat (cast-iron skillet) very quickly, and then I did some Downs (starting with the semi-gimme 43D: Grammy-winning Jones (Norah)), and by the time I looked back at those long crosses, they just sort of filled themselves in. I love that CAST-IRON SKILLET sits right underneath ARTURO TOSCANINI. Why? Well, look closely - ARTURO TOSCANINI is actually an anagram of CAST-IRON ... well, not SKILLET, but ... well, the following:

• CAST-IRON IRON TAU
• CAST-IRON RAIN-OUT
• CAST-IRON RIO TUNA
• IN A CAST-IRON ROUT
• I OUTRAN CAST-IRON
• CAST-IRON I.O.U. RANT
• CAST-IRON OAT RUIN
• AIN'T OUR CAST IRON?
• CAST-IRON U.N. RATIO

... and such-'n'-such.

3D: "Do the Right Thing" pizzeria (Sal's)
18A: Old roadside name (Esso)

Gimme both of these! Especially the first, as I love that movie and have seen it many, many times. "Roadside name" = ESSO. Pure and simple. These answers were my first toehold in the puzzle. Didn't know the Jackie Wilson song (1D: "Am _____ Man" (1960 Jackie Wilson hit) [I the]) - wanted I YER or I HER, but once I got I THE, those 15-letter crosses came very quickly - first to go: 17A: Be in a very advantageous position (hold all the cards) - wanted IN THE CATBIRD SEAT, but it's too long and, well, just wrong. Slowed up a bit in the far NE, where SIRUP (13D: Some cough medicine: Var.) is spelled ridiculously and I forgot that eBay does things on Pacific and not Eastern time (23A: Deadlines on eBay are given in it: Abbr. (PST)).

Ridiculous Fill

OK, my first thought is that architecturally insane puzzles like this are Bound to have some ridiculous fill - how else are you gonna coordinate this many abutting (and intersecting!) 15-letter answers? So, I'm not faulting the puzzle - just pointing out the groaners that went into its making. It was worth it.

• 10D: Hot (ired) - this word is not a word until you add an "F" to its front end
• 31D: Transfuse (endue) - where you don't want to step at the dog park
• 2D: Cramped urban accommodations, for short (SRO's) - SRO is perfectly good, even Pantheonic, fill but this clue is misdirective in a very forced way. TTH! (Trying Too Hard) [I take it all back - I misunderstood meaning of SRO, thinking it short for "Standing Room Only" (theater sign), when here it refers to "Single-Room Occupancies," which are indeed "Cramped urban accommodations"]
  
• 22D: Falling-out (set-to) - ordinary fill, but the clue suggests not speaking to one another, while the answer suggests a rumble à la Jets and Sharks, as in "I SET my knife TO his throat, Maria!"

Is that it? It is - man, that's hardly any iffiness at all. Very, very impressive.

26D: Actor who roared to fame? (Lahr)

What's (not so) hilarious about this is that the last time he showed up in a puzzle, I wrote about how I can never remember his name, how I know it ends in -HR but I always want BEHR or BAHR, etc. And yet I still haven't learned my lesson, clearly, as I blanked on his name again. There is a movie that this used to happen with ALL the time when I was in grad school. I would challenge myself to remember its name, and yet never, NEVER, could I remember it. In fact, I'm only typing right now as a stall to give myself time to remember the name of the movie I'm talking about, because it's gone yet again. Want to say Living in Oblivion, but that's not it. It had Lily Tomlin and Ben Stiller in it and maybe ... what's her name who "stars" in the TV "hit" "Medium" ... nope, had to look it up: Flirting with Disaster. I guarantee you that I will forget this movie's name again by tomorrow. Why is Living in Oblivion so much easier to remember? - maybe because it's both less clichéd as a phrase and a better movie. LAHR, why won't you stay in my head, you lovable lion!

35D: Village, in Würzburg (dorf)
36D: Tennis star _____ (Anke)
37D: It flows in Flanders (Yser)

Behold, Western Europe in the far eastern portion of the puzzle! There is something to love in each of these answers. Dorf. Dorf! I got this only because of Düsseldorf, which I assume is a "village" in Germany or its environs. The only Dorf I know (you can see where this is going, right? ...) is a golf instructor.


Don't know what part of my brain ANKE Huber was hiding in - I initially spelled her ANKA, but that's pretty damned close for a first guess with no crosses. I'm not sure "star" adequately describes Ms. Huber, though her mom might disagree. When I read the clue [It flows in Flanders], I wanted to shout, "The blood of a true Christian!?"

Final Thoughts

You gotta love the NYT puzzle - where else is Verdi gonna rub elbows with "F Troop" (39A: "F Troop" role (Sergeant O'Rourke))? 21A: Physics units (dynes) might be a little tricky / arcane, but its pretty crossword-common and, as I've said before, I got an A+ in Physics in college, so the vocabulary has stuck around a bit, if the actual concepts / definitions / real knowledge hasn't. See also 34D: Kidney secretion (renin), which is from some long, lost bio class. With HONORS (30D: It's good to graduate with them) is an abominable Joe Pesci vehicle (redundant?) that I was stupid enough to watch on a mid-90s plane trip. Andrew can tell you how great its Madonna theme song was, though, I'm sure. Andrew does not live IN L.A. (53D: On Wilshire Blvd., say) but he sure lives near it. DOG LEG (21D: Sharp turn) is a word whose etymology I am totally going to look up later this week (when will my unabridged dictionary finally get here?!). I guess a dog's leg does have that pointy, reverse knee thing going on. I once co-taught a class with a short man, and as I am a tall man, some of the students took (very carefully and with much good humor) to calling us Mario and LUIGI (27D: Brother of Nintendo's Mario). I ... forget which one I was. From this pic, apparently LUIGI. I initially wrote in TNT for 42A: Old cable inits. (TNN), but AT THE LAST SECOND (8D: Almost too late), I realized my error and fixed it.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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THURSDAY, Dec. 14, 2006 - Ed Early

Solving time: unknown

THEME: "FSH" (69A) - WHAT DOES ONE CALL (17A) A FISH WITH NO EYES (28A)? FOR THE ANSWER SEE (46A) SIXTY-NINE ACROSS (60A). . .

This puzzle has 4 X's. As for the theme - it's not really my style. I especially don't like puzzle fill that is essentially directions, although I have to say, working the instructions for solving the riddle into the grid itself stands out as a remarkable and impressive constructing feat. The little SE corner, site of the "riddle's" answer, was the very last thing to fall - in fact, I was very frustrated, staring at it for a good long while before I changed an answer I'd been sure of and the whole corner fell into place. I've learned good, humbling lessons lately about my own solving certainty. When you've exhausted all other options, change what you "know" to be right.

Here, the answer to the riddle was the obvious FSH. I say obvious because it was the first thing to cross my mind when I saw the whole riddle laid out ... and Yet! Yet! I was "certain" that 58D: A lot of Eurasia, once: Abbr. (SSRS) was USSR, which put an "R" in the second position of the riddle answer (69A), which made me think, "well, good, at least the answer's not as obvious as FSH." Crossing obscurities in this SE corner did Not help me: 56A: Wagner heroine _____ of Brabant (Elsa) runs into 59D: Writer Sholem (Asch) at the "A"- as I'd heard of neither of them, and neither of their names is particularly common, I was in trouble. Didn't help that ELSA had an erroneous "U" in it for a while. Actually, the way I finally got this corner was to rethink 66A: Penciled-in eyebrow, e.g. (arc) from scratch, without the (again, erroneous) "S" in the middle position. Seemed like a clue I should get. Tested ARC, then saw the possibility of SSRS rather than USSR, and ta da.

20A: Diva _____ Te Kanawa (Kiri)
21A: Tic-tac-toe loser (XOO)
22A: Line on which y=0 (X axis)

A very great complete horizontal line of the grid. 3 of the 4 X's, plus the K. Nice. Feels like the puzzle is returning to opera with a vengeance lately, but that may just be coincidence. Crosswords have always loved opera (much to my opera-ignorant chagrin). "Opera" used to be the definitive Rex-Doesn't-Know-It category in any trivia game, esp Jeopardy. I'd see "Opera" and think "well I'm dead." "What is ... the fat lady sings?" KIRI Te Kanawa is a Kiwi, so I have a spousal obligation to mention her. "Tic-tac-toe loser" is pretty much crutch fill, but when you put it in this se-X-y context, it seems quite permissible. X-AXIS returns ... right? We just had this answer in plural (X-AXES) - wait, those might have been Y-AXES. Don't remember. Yes, Y-AXES. I remember someone's comment, somewhere, that he didn't know what a YAX was. Awesome.

23A: Start of Massachusetts' motto (Ense)

This is a new Latin word to me. Means "by the sword," apparently, as Massachusetts's motto reads thusly: "Ense petit placidam sub libertate quietem" - (By the sword we seek peace, but peace only under liberty) [not my translation]. Massachusetts remains the hardest state to spell, by far. No matter what you type, it looks wrong.

29D: Page in an account book (folio)

Muffed this one and ruined the "Oregon" portion of the grid for a while. Off of the "L" from 38A: Lena of "Polish Wedding" (Olin), I entered SALES. Two other initially wrong entries in this region held me up. Had TIES TO instead of TIES IN at 18D: Connects, and TEE instead of LIE at 42A: Golfer's concern. Then there was the entry that I flat out didn't know: 28D: _____ von Baeyer, 1905 Chemistry Nobelist (Adolf). Even with the Pantheon-tastic ICIER (30D: More treacherous in the winter) slicing right through this region, it took me some time to work out.

2D: Like some educ. publishing (El-Hi)
9D: Poetic contraction (e'en)
33D: Ed Sullivan, e.g. (emcee)
51D: Attention-getter (psst!)

Speaking of Pantheon-tastic, here we see last-minute bids to get on the ballot from some very worthy entries. Add the aforementioned SSRS and ICIER, and you can really see the density of crosswordese. Yet nothing seems particularly egregious. EL-HI is my least favorite of the bunch, for no particular reason.

3D: Shakespeare's "very foolish fond old man" (Lear)
6D: Anna's lover in "Anna Karenina" (Alexei)

Mmmm, two of the greatest works of literature ever written (no hyperbole). Anna Karenina is probably my favorite novel of all time ... and Still ALEXEI was not a gimme. I was like "Oh, I can see him, he's young and hot ... dammit!" ALEXEI was quite a SMOOTHIE (8D: Glib romancer), back when that word meant a smooth-talker and not, as it does now, a yogurt-and-juice drink. LEAR, like Anna, loses his mind a bit and spirals downward into a kind of madness. I'm trying to reverse the depressing turn this entry has taken, but it's hard to end on an up note when one of the characters you're writing about ends up alone after the death of his beloved daughter, and the other throws herself under a train.

49A: Dugout shelter (abri)

Wow. Really really didn't know this. Sounds like some rare crosswordese that long-time solvers have some familiarity with, but short-time solvers (which I still consider myself) will just stare at blankly. But I think that's the last of the truly troubling fill (beyond what I already mentioned). All the crosses were easy to confirm, so no harm done. I am almost certain to forget this word, ABRI, possibly by the time I finish writing this entry.

55D: Swenson of "Benson" (Inga)

Yes. Yes, this answer I like. I haven't seen or even thought about Inga Swenson, aka Gretchen Kraus, the stern housekeeper in the Governor's mansion on TV's "Benson," for about 20 years, I think. Ever since "Benson" went off the air. This show should be in syndication more. It was a staple of my 80's childhood, in that weird period when the sitcom was kind of dead: "M*A*S*H" and "Happy Days" were aging, "MTM" and "Rhoda" and other great 70s shows were gone, and Cosby hadn't come along and resuscitated the genre yet. Very innocuous stuff, "Benson," but fun. Now that I look at it, "Benson" is basically the primary precursor to Michael J. Fox's 1990s sitcom hit "Spin City," only replace the governor with a mayor and replace Robert Guillaume with Michael J. Fox and then replace the Governor's mansion with city hall. Robert Guillaume is beloved to me for two reasons. First, his work on "Sports Night," which I loved despite its high degree of mockability. Second, he cut a record or two in his youth, one of which I own (a gift from Andrew). Where is a picture... Oh Yeah, here we go. This rules!
Great packaging! You gotta love the little inset of Guillaume as Benson inside the "O" in "BOB" - "BOB," HA ha. Guess that hip moniker, like Bob's music career, didn't really take.

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TUESDAY, Dec. 12, 2006 - Stephen Manion and Victor Fleming

Solving time: 8:42 (it's true)

THEME: "Bitter End" - theme answers end with word that can be described as "bitter," e.g. 3D: *Person with whom one will always fight (sworn enemy)

First, my sucky time. I have no good excuse. The grid seemed fair (though the theme has issues, see below). I was slow out of the gate (in the N and NW), and then locked up somewhere around the southern Nevada region of the puzzle and limped my way to the end. Most of my problem was mental. Usually I never even notice the ticking clock right over the grid, but this time I became Very conscious of it, to the extent that next time I am clearly going to have to put tape or something on the screen to block it.

Now, the theme. It's not very strong, for a number of reasons. Some of the "bitter" things are bitter by nature (LEMON), other by way of their use in an idiomatic expression (TRUTH). The TRUTH in 28D: *It's no baloney (plain truth) did not come to me for a while and was a big reason for my super-slow SW corner. Wanted something like PLAIN WORDS or PLAIN SPEECH (despite the fact that Google says PLAIN TRUTH is the far more common expression). But I digress. This whole puzzle seems propped on the cute idea of literalizing the phrase BITTER END (64A: R? ... or a hint to the answers of the five starred clues). But it's too cute for my blood. Or not cute enough. If all the theme words could have been preceded by BITTER in a phrase, I might have gone for it, but do you say BITTER LEMON? Oh, I'm told it's a soft drink of some kind? OK. Hmm. Yeah, still not thrilled. It's fine, I suppose. I think the fact that the theme entries themselves are kind of blah is making me not as excited or impressed as I might be. Plus I'm really not liking SWORN ENEMY, since it's so very close to the thematic reading BITTER ENEMY. Maybe that's it - there's not enough pop in the twist. Inserting BITTER before the final word in theme answers doesn't really do much. The answers just lie there. Mere curiosities. I will say that I loved 17A: *Absolutely (stone cold), though I had always thought of STONE COLD as an adjectival phrase, e.g. "She was a stone cold fox!" A quick Google search of "stone cold," however, yields a site titled "Stone Cold Pimpin'," so clearly it has adverbial uses as well. My mistake.

Congratulations to my namesake, Chicago Bears quarterback Rex Grossman, for not sucking last night on Monday Night Football. It's true that your play was mostly just OK, and the Special Teams really won that game for you, but still, you did not humiliate yourself, as you had for the previous 4 or so games, and so you shut your critics up, for the moment. I am a Seahawks fan, but if they lose in the playoffs, as I know they will, I will be rooting for you, Rex-y, based solely on your name and on no particular love for the Bears or the city of Chicago (no offense, guys).

20A: Hurler (thrower)
5D: Corset tightener (lacer)
56D: Abacus user (adder)

It's time for another segment of Odd Jobs, wherein we examine all the weird nouns that have been unnaturally forced into existence by the addition of an -ER ending to a verb. "Hurler" and THROWER are both OK, since you hear them enough in baseball talk, but THROWER's intersection of LACER, at the "E" no less, forces me to call an excessive -ERage penalty. It's like hand-checking your opponent in basketball - do it a little, no one's going to care; do it a lot, you're going to get a whistle. Here the foul is flagrant, as we have intersecting "-ER" answers, a foul additionally compounded by the astonishingly weak LACER. What the hell is that? Was there a position in noble households called LACER, whose sole job was to tighten her mistress's corset? Maybe LACER is some arcane name for the part of the corset ... with the laces? Anyway, whether the problem is awkwardness or antiquity, this answer reeks. Lastly, the answer to 56D should have been NO ONE. Or, the clue should have been "Snake."
63A: Song from Verdi's "Un Ballo in Maschera" (Eri Tu)
35D: 63-Across, e.g. (aria)

Yet another night at the opera (please see yesterday's entry, All About Aida, and the news links I added regarding yesterday's second performance of Aida at La Scala and the onstage meltdown of the male lead - Verdi, verdi embarrassing). Another reason my SW was so slow was because I somehow convinced myself that I "don't know opera," forgetting that, when you have ERI TU in your arsenal, sometimes you don't have to know opera. Is it five letters? Perfect. Shove ERI TU in there and move on. In the SW, I had 57A: San Francisco and environs (Bay Area) - helped that I was born there - and I had one Down cross, 58D: Johnson of "Laugh-In" (Arte), but nothing else was coming quickly. Had A-ONE for 57D: Primo (best) (A-ONE is clearly the superior answer here, BEST being too absolute - I mean just Try substituting BEST for PRIMO in a sentence, without using the definite article "The" before BEST ... that's right, doesn't work; whereas A-ONE slides into the PRIMO slot quite nicely). Had YIKE for YIPE despite the fact that YIKE is meaningless. Couldn't figure out what "Mar. honoree" could be abbreviated to five letters (A: ST PAT). Compounded my confusion with stifling self-awareness (tick, tick, tick) and so lost some minutes.

14A: Grp. bargaining with GM (UAW)
70A: Shadings (tones)

Here are two more instances where I entered wrong answers. I lived in Michigan for eight years and yet still couldn't come up with UAW, preferring AFL and then CIO. Ugh. Had TINTS for TONES. Didn't help that they have three letters in common - also doesn't help my ego that TONES is the better answer. I was thinking "shading" as in "blocking the sun," thus TINTS, like you'd get on your car windows. Yeah, I know, it's still wrong.

55D: Lotte of film (Lenya)

I'm sure this is an old-time crossword gimme, and I'm equally sure I've seen it before. And yet ... nothing. In the past 10 days or so I have learned of the existence of two LOTTEs, a Lehmann and a LENYA. Lehmann, a 20th century soprano, has a 19th century counterpart named LILLI. I'm just saying this stuff out loud in the desperate hope that it will all somehow stick. Another answer I didn't know: 65D: Nigerian native (Ibo).

MISCELLEANEOUS

Wrote HOORAY for HOORAH (22D); misread the clue for 6D: Ethically indifferent (amoral) as "ethically different," which yielded nothing, obviously; am deeply suspicious of / repulsed by the 44A: Sorts (ilks) - that word Really doesn't want to be pluralized; and still don't know what the "P" and "L" are in 34D: P. & L. preparers (CPAS). If the puzzle was a bit of a pain, the experience was alleviated somewhat by the entertaining presence of super-critic Roger EBERT (67A - again with the Chicago-based answers), Popeye's girlfriend Olive OYL (26A), and the voice of Bugs Bunny, MEL Blanc (7D).

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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MONDAY, Dec. 11, 2006 - David J. Kahn

Solving time: 4:46

THEME: Rita Moreno answer to 59A: Star born on 12/11/1931

Happy 75th Birthday, Rita Moreno! What a great idea for a puzzle - if I were she, I would be blown away with honor (if that's an expression).

Today's puzzle = The Wrath of Kahn, Part II (see Part I, yesterday). But this time, less wrath, more pure puzzle pleasure. An amazing SEVEN symmetrically arranged theme answers, including a 15-letter answer across the middle. This is my favorite Monday puzzle of all time. Or of all time since I started writing this blog. I have very strong feelings about the long theme answer - ELECTRIC COMPANY (36A: Album for which 59-Across won a Grammy, 1972, with "The"). It's the children's show to which I am, by far, the most deeply attached. That show represents a time when TV didn't hate kids (so much) and the people at the CTW believed that learning could and should be fun and that the best way to reach kids is Not To Insult Their Intelligence. Rita Moreno! Bill Cosby! (see 38D: Comedian Bill, informally (Cos) - nice touch! He even intersects ELECTRIC COMPANY!), Morgan @#$#-in' Freeman as Easy Reader! Crazy skits and kids in ridiculous outfits dancing and singing about the "CH-" sound. Occasional appearances by Spiderman. And then their own homegrown superhero, Letterman! THE Letterman! So much fun for a kid's brain. This kid's brain, anyway. I learned to read and count and love TV from watching the ELECTRIC COMPANY. My mom loves to tell the story of how every time I heard those kids shout "Hey You Guys...!" (at the beginning of most episodes), I would come Running from wherever I was in the house and stand, close and unblinking, right in front of the TV set, and would remain standing for the whole half hour unless my mom physically backed me up and sat me down. This is when I was 2, 3, 4 years old. Everything I Need To Know I Learned From The ELECTRIC COMPANY. In fact, this blog, now that I think of it, is deeply indebted to the ELECTRIC COMPANY. Why? Because the very idea that being intellectual and being fun and irreverent might go together - I got that from ELECTRIC COMPANY (Not "Sesame Street," which, no offense, I thought was a show for slow kids). You can take your fun seriously without compromising the fun - all with a spirit of inclusion and freedom and liberty and justice for all. If anything about the 70's was worthwhile, it was the ELECTRIC COMPANY (see also "Schoolhouse Rock"). Sincerely, Ms. Moreno, wherever you are, Happy Birthday, and thanks for the inspiration.

22A: Having a ghost (haunted)
24D: Phantom (specter)

Is there a theme here? A subtheme? These two 7-letter answers, which kiss each other in the upper center of the puzzle, are just two examples of the fabulous long(er) fill (6+ letters) in this puzzle (nice to see on a Monday). I especially like CARHOP (7D: Server at a drive-in) and DEARIE (47D: Little loved one) because they feel like visitors from another era. I'M LOST (46D: "This is not making sense to me") is great, though not apt for this reasonably easy puzzle. The symmetrical long Downs STATE TREES (3D: Ohio's buckeye, California's redwood, etc.) and HEAVY LINES (29D: Map borders, usually) play nicely off one another, both because they are twin 5+5 / adj + pl. noun answers, and because they sound like they could be the names of some indie rock band and its debut album (whether the band would be the TREES or the LINES, I don't know).

Speaking of musical acts, it's good to see rap stars L-RON (53D: Scientologist _____ Hubbard) and T-NUT (57D: Carpenter's metal piece) out promoting their new album, RARIN' (48D: _____ to go (eager)). Look for it in stores tomorrow.

STUFF I DIDN'T KNOW

Always bad not to know stuff on a Monday. Never heard of TEMA (35A: Melodic subject, in music), which I'm guessing is just some foreign word for "theme." You know, I think that's it for today. Not bad. Actually, I probably inferred and / or never looked at T-NUT. Don't know that I could pick one out of a line-up.

Along with TEMA, we get some other nice Classical Music answers here, including 53A: Milan opera house (La Scala), 54D: Opera set in the age of pharaohs (Aida) [presumably not these pharaohs], and 32A: Debussy's "La _____" (Mer) (which I think I'll put on ... now). Wow ... AIDA and LA SCALA intersect in this puzzle, and AIDA opened the 2006-07 season at LA SCALA just four days ago! Niiice.

[late addendum: this breaking AIDA news is awesome! Thanks to Andrew for pointing it out. See also these pictures from opening night.]

57A (THEME): Play for which 59-Across won a Tony, 1975 (The Ritz)

The only one of the theme answers I'd never heard of (well, I've heard of The Ritz, but usually in relation to hotels, I think). Oh, but I do know the song "Puttin' on the Ritz," of course. The Taco version. Whatever happened to Taco? While I'm sure Ms. Moreno was Fabulous in "The Ritz," It's hard to believe she could ever top her work on THE MUPPET SHOW (25A: TV program for which 59-Across won an Emmy, 1977). That's a pretty high bar.
Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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