MONDAY, Jul. 20 2009 — Oh bushwa / Stop a prevailing trend / Alice's mate on The Honeymooners / One who mounts and dismounts a horse

Constructor: PANCHO (48A: Mexican revolutionary _____ Villa) Harrison

Relative difficulty: Easy

THEME: Parts of PLANT (57A: Factory supervisors ... or a hint to the starts of 20-, 36- and 42-Across => PLANT MANAGERS)

Word of the Day: BUSHWA — noun

rubbishy nonsense; baloney; bull: You'll hear a lot of boring bushwa about his mechanical skill.

Also, bushwah.

Origin:
1915–20; perh. repr. bourgeois ¹ , from its use in political rhetoric, the actual sense being lost; taken as euphemism for bullshit
(dictionary.com)

As an amalgam of "bourgeois" and "bullshit," BUSHWA is one of my new favorite words.
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I did this puzzle as fast as I could, with virtually no impediments, and yet didn't come close to a record time. Weird. Still, the puzzle was very easy — easier than most Mondays, even. I wasn't sure if I was supposed to think of ROOT, STEM, and LEAF as MANAGERS as well as parts of a PLANT. That seems a stretch, and yet the clue on PLANT MANAGERS suggests that the whole answer is a "hint," not just the first part. That ambiguity is a little odd, but the puzzle is solid enough, fill-wise, for a Monday, and I have to give props to PANCHO for getting his own name in there. I'm all for shameless self-promotion, especially for constructors who, even when paid the highest going rate, still aren't paid enough for their labor. I also enjoy the PLANT-related answers throughout the grid: a couple of lovely symmetrical pairs. One who TOILS (8D: Works long and hard) in the garden might, among other labors, STREW seed (53D: Spread, as seed) ... and one who PRUNEs plants (23A: Lop off, as branches) might have a horrible accident: "MY EYE!" (54A: "Oh, bushwa!").

Theme answers:

• 20A: What the love of money is, they say (ROOT of all evil)
• 36A: Stop a prevailing trend (STEM the tide)
• 42A: Quickly turn the pages of (LEAF through)

I had a couple of questioning moments while solving this puzzle. First, I would have though WEBBED FEET, not WEB FEET (5D: Duck features), though that answer was certainly easy enough to get, and I can see from just tooling around the internets that the phrase "WEB FEET" is certainly in use. I also puzzled over 35D: Make lemons into melons, e.g.? (transpose), because I was thinking that the two switched letters would be adjacent. So I at first thought the answer was inaccurate, that the rearrangement in question was more anagram than transposition. Then I saw that no, it simply involved transposing two letters that were not adjacent. Sometimes my observations are less than scintillating.





Bullets:

• 1D: It may hang out in a sports stadium (tier) — NOW I know why I didn't break any speed records today. I stumbled right out of the box by entering TARP here, and then (shortly thereafter) not being able to get STATUS right off the bat (4D: Condition of affairs). Slightest hesitation or bit of wrongness, and a sub-three time (for me) just slips away.
• 25D: _____ a beet (red as) — had the first beets out of our own garden last night, and they were delicious. And I have historically claimed not to like beets at all. Honestly, I think anything out of my own backyard tastes perfect, in that it tastes super fresh (and virtually free).
• 33D: Alice's mate on "The Honeymooners" (Ralph) — "mate"? Yuck. They were married. He was her husband. Or is the puzzle trying to save ink? Or is "husband" in the grid somewhere? .... nope. I think I lost a few second here too, looking at --LP- and thinking it looked really, really implausible. The only name coming to mind Instantly with this clue was Kramden. RALPH was right behind.
• 43D: Ellington's "Take _____ Train" (The A) — never saw the clue. Notice that I had the answer THEA in place and thought "that's an odd name to see early in the week," forgetting that this partial existed.
• 45D: One who mounts and dismounts a horse (gymnast) — this word interests me because of that -AST suffix. Weird to me when words end in "AST" and not the more common "IST." Harder to come up with "-AST" words, but when I do come up with them, they are invariably awesome. Well DYNAST sucks, but ICONOCLAST is good, and ECDYSIAST is very, very good.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter]

P.S. Special L.A. Times puzzle today ... my write-up here.

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TUESDAY, Mar. 24, 2009 - P Harrison (Clanton at the O.K. Corral / Brother of Little Joe on '60s TV / Bargains for leniency)

Relative difficulty: Medium/Challenging

THEME: POLICE (62A: They can be found in 20- and 55-Across and 10- and 26-Down) - slang words for the POLICE are found at the beginning or end of non-police phrases

Word of the Day: ALGID -

1. CHILL, COLD
2. marked by prostration, cold and clammy skin, and low blood pressure - used chiefly of a severe form of malaria

Yesterday at the new L.A. Times crossword blog, I wrote about a Pancho Harrison puzzle that was, in many ways, the opposite of his NYT puzzle today. That puzzle had a very rudimentary, almost non-descript theme, but the fill was solid and uncringeworthy and even had some sparkle here and there. This puzzle has a Hot theme - one I did not pick up until very late, when I had to pick it up (in order to figure out what the hell was going on in my SE corner). The non-theme fill, however, is really rough in a few places. The SE was by far the weirdest.

First, I had trouble grasping the clues. None of the long Acrosses (all fine words) came to me at first, even with their first two letters in place. Is (0,0) necessarily the ORIGIN on a graph (59A: (0,0) on a graph). Do all graphs ORIGINate at that point? Or maybe that's just the technical term for that particular point. I guess that's it. No matter, ORIGIN did not spring forth. PO- did not give me POLICE, though I didn't spend much time contemplating what the theme answers had in common at that point. And SOLDER ... I was expecting an actual alloy name here, like, say (US) STEEL (21D: J.P. Morgan co.); instead I get a more general noun that means "Any of various fusible alloys, usually tin and lead, used to join metallic parts" (answer.com).

I have no complaint about the long Acrosses down there - I think they were clued at a slightly higher-than-Tuesday level of difficulty, but that's a very subjective call. What's not subjective is the horrid monstrosity that is ALGID (49D: Chilly). Never seen it, never heard of it, never. I already have a -GID word to describe cold, and that word is FRIGID. Why anyone thought we needed a second word is beyond me. I muddled my way to a slowish 5-minute-flat solving time, and then spent something close to 20 seconds just staring at the intersection of what turned out to be ADS (49A: Some Super Bowl Sunday highlights) and ALGID. The only letters I considered putting there for a while were "Y" and "T" (YLGID? TLGID?), both of which were clearly wrong (though when I finally put in "A," I wasn't exactly confident of that answer either). Football abbrev. in -DS is (almost?) always YDS or TDS. I checked every cross in ALGID (at that point, I hadn't really looked to see how POLICE was correct). Then started sticking in vowels, and ADS seemed right, so boom. Or thud. The end. I would like ALGID next to DEICE for their reverse takes on heat, but both words are phenomenally ugly, so I have to pass.

There was one other clunker section in the grid: the far east. IS AN (28D: "This ____ outrage!") next to NARD (29D: Source of a fragrant oil) next to GUTE (30D: "_____ Nacht" (German words of parting)) is aesthetically unpleasant. Here's the NARD rule. If you have a super ugly word, one that sounds and looks bad, like NARD, then you have to dress its neighbors up in ribbons and bows and Sunday finery, or else the Ugly will expand exponentially. Luckily, in this case, the Ugly was contained by the stalwart STAN THE MAN (10D: Musial's nickname).

Theme answers:

• 20A: Adolescent boy's growth (peach FUZZ)
• 10D: Musial's nickname (Stan THE MAN)
• 26D: Dehydration may help bring this on (HEAT stroke) - another clue whose answer did not come easily
• 55A: Bargains for leniency (COPS a plea) - had noun/verbtigo here at first and put an "S" at the end of the answer at first, thinking "Bargains" was a plural

If you can make it out of the ugly patches, there's some wonderful stuff here. The theme I already LAUDED (1A: Wrote an ode to). It's hard not to love colorful stuff like KANGAROO (39D: Emblem on the Australian coat of arms) and ALSO-RANS (57A: Dukakis in 1988 and Dole in 1996) and DOOFUS (6D: Goofball), though that last one took some work. I also, inexplicably, love the clue on DASHING (27A: "Jingle Bells" starter), perhaps because it evokes an entire song with just one word - a song that makes me happy and nostalgic as we now start to leave This Brutal Winter in the rearview mirror. I also have nostalgia for Joan JETT (41A: Joan of the Blackhearts), as I used to hang out at Round Table Pizzeria playing Donkey Kong and listening to "I Love Rock and Roll" over and over. Easily the best thing about 1982 for me.



Rubber Bullets:

• 16A: Brighton bye-bye (ta-ta) - TA-TA would seem to have more to do with age than geography at this point. Feels antiquated, quaint. Do younger people in Britain say it?
• 17A: Augments (adds to) - ugh, didn't know it immediately so put an "S" at the end. What's a DOSFUS!?
• 25A: "I Pity the Fool" star (Mr. T) - "I Pity the Fool" was a TV show for about a minute in 2006. A reality series about MR. T. It's also MR. T's most famous catchphrase, which he originated as Clubber Lang in Rocky III.
• 2D: Tree with catkins (alder) - never can remember this. The NW was another place that slowed me down a bit, though that was mainly the faulty of #$#ing U.N. DAY (3D: It's observed on Oct. 24). I demand to know who "observes" it. No one I know.
• 9D: Clanton at the O.K. Corral (Ike) - well, I never heard of him, but he sounds reasonably famous, and the crosses were easy, so no complaints.
• 52D: Al who created Fearless Fosdick (Capp) - yay, a comics gimme. Best of all - he's with the POLICE.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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