Made for moments sloganeer / WED 7-19-17 / Line from Student Prince appropriate to this puzzle / Early 2000s apple product / anti-doping target, informally / Descriptive of los Andes / Hold aside for year as college athlete

Constructor: Michael S. Maurer and Pawel Fludzinski

Relative difficulty: Easy

THEME: DRINK DRINK DRINK (32A: Line from "The Student Prince" appropriate for this puzzle) — this puzzle contains various toasts from around the world

Theme answers:

• TO YOUR HEALTH!
• DOWN THE HATCH!
• SALUD!
• L'CHAIM!
• TIRAMISU!
• AMALFI!
• KANPAI!
• NEHRU!
• PROST!
• ROID!

Word of the Day: "The Student Prince" (See 32A) —

The Student Prince is an operetta in four acts with music by Sigmund Romberg and book and lyrics by Dorothy Donnelly. It is based on Wilhelm Meyer-Förster's play Old Heidelberg. The piece has elements of melodrama but lacks the swashbuckling style common to Romberg's other works. The plot is mostly faithful to its source. // It opened on December 2, 1924, at Jolson's 59th Street Theatre on Broadway. The show was the most successful of Romberg's works, running for 608 performances, the longest-running Broadway show of the 1920s. It was staged by J. C. Huffman. Even the classic Show Boat, the most enduring musical of the 1920s, did not play as long – it ran for 572 performances. "Drinking Song", with its rousing chorus of "Drink! Drink! Drink!" was especially popular with theatergoers in 1924, as the United States was in the midst of Prohibition. The operetta contains the challenging tenor aria "The Serenade" ("Overhead the moon is beaming"). (wikipedia)

• • •

This is terrible. Truly not good, on every level. So bad it makes me almost never want to drink again. We can start with the boring, basic, nothing theme. Let me get this straight—the theme is ... toasts. That's it. Just toasts. And there are just four of them (?). Four ... toasts from around the world. Oh, and then a "formal" and an "informal" ... toast (in English). These latter toasts are at least mildly colorful, but still ... toasts. And the revealer ... wow. Like most of this puzzle, it is out of the past (and not in the good, film noir way). I have no idea what "The Student Prince" is. None. Never seen the movie, wasn't alive during Prohibition to see the operetta. No idea. Didn't matter, as the answer was obvious, but how ridiculous to have a revealer that old and marginal, and on a Wednesday.


Speaking of old and marginal, let's move on to the other reason this puzzle is bad—the fill. I thought we'd finally gotten rid of much of this junk: KCAR? ROK? IDI? ARNE? *&$^ing ALER!? Gah, this is a mess. A mid-20th-century mess. A NEHRU jacket-era mess. Then there's the truly-bad-in-any-era EMAC (40A: Early 2000s Apple product) and SERIE (59A: Something to watch on la télé). Then there's merely bad ALTOS IMIT HOSP. Then there's the complete lack of anything interesting (besides maybe REDSHIRT) (35D: Hold aside for a year, as a college athlete). I mean, C'MON, man. Round these undead answers up and send them back to the tombs whence they came. In the end, the puzzle's only virtue was its short life span—I drove a stake through its heart in less-than-Tuesday time.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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Theorbos eg / FRI 3-10-17 / Covent Garden architect Jones / Shia who's not muslim / Pioneer in heliocentric theory / Euro forerunner

Constructor: Pawel Fludzinski

Relative difficulty: Medium

THEME: none 

Word of the Day: LABEOUF (11D: Shia who's not a Muslim) —

Shia Saide LaBeouf (ⁱ/ˈʃaɪ.ə ləˈbʌf/; born June 11, 1986) is an American actor, performance artist, and filmmaker. He became known among younger audiences as Louis Stevens in the Disney Channel series Even Stevens, a role for which LaBeouf received a Young Artist Award nomination in 2001 and won a Daytime Emmy Award in 2003. He made his film debut in Holes (2003), based on the novel of the same name by Louis Sachar. In 2004, he made his directorial debut with the short film Let's Love Hate and later directed a short film titled Maniac (2011), starring American rappers Cage and Kid Cudi. // In 2007, LaBeouf starred in the commercially successful films Disturbia and Surf's Up. The same year he was cast in Michael Bay's science fiction film Transformers as Sam Witwicky, the main protagonist of the series. Despite mixed reviews, Transformers was a box office success and one of the highest-grossing films of 2007. LaBeouf later appeared in its sequels Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (2009) and Transformers: Dark of the Moon (2011), both also box office successes. In 2008, he played Henry "Mutt Williams" Jones III in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, the fourth film in the Indiana Jones franchise. His other films include Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps (2010), Lawless (2012), The Company You Keep (2012), Nymphomaniac (2013) and Fury (2014). Since 2014, LaBeouf has pursued a variety of public performance art projects with LaBeouf, Rönkkö & Turner. (wikipedia)

• • •

A mix of wonderful and godawful. On the one hand, DUMPSTER FIRE—nice (32A: Unmitigated disaster, in slang). On the other hand, no one wants to see ETERNE and OID and KIP and AT IT and ECU and ACAN and EEE. Like, ever. I solved this upon waking *and* it was out of my wheelhouse (in several places); neither one of those facts was conducive to smooth solving. Every trick clue got me. I actually finished the puzzle thinking that LABEOUF was a word for some strange type of Muslim, and *baffled* they hadn't used the actor in the clue. Yes. It was *that* kind of solve. And then, later, the SE was a total, let's say, DUMPSTER FIRE for me. Couldn't get into it at all. Blanked on Nash's field of mathematics (GEEE-OMETRY!?); couldn't remember which one "cosmology" was, the universe one or the beauty school one; couldn't make sense of 67A: Went door to door? (SIDE-SWIPED) until the bitter, bitter end because it crossed LUTES (???) DO LOOP (???) and ELI (??????). I like the SIDE-SWIPED clue, but I've never heard of ELI (as clued—63D: "My God!," as cried by Jesus), never heard of "Theorobos" (thought he might be a LUTER) and never ever heard of DO LOOP (47D: Bit of computer programming executed repeatedly), which was the one answer that was the biggest problem because of its prime, corner-rounding position. I dropped ETERNE and STAYED easy, but without DO LOOP, the SE was unenterable. I should've gotten ARI for the Cardinal home when STL didn't fit. I just wasn't firing on all cylinders.


Anyway, I forget the rest of the puzzle, but it seemed fine. Oh, and the big big problem, beyond DO LOOP, for me, was that I couldn't get MALL (51A: D.C. tourist destination). Two issues. One, thought it would be abbr., like "D.C."; and two, I think of destinations as actual places (museums, monuments, etc.), not just a giant strip of land. "Does D.C. have a MOMA?" was an actual question I asked myself.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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Variety of pasture grass / WED 5-11-16 / Speedsters of old autodom / Bibliophile's prize

Constructor: Pawel Fludzinski

Relative difficulty: Easy

THEME: dos and bes and please don't make me explain it —

Theme answers:

• TO BE OR NOT TO BE (20A: Words from Shakespeare)
• TO BE IS TO DO (28A: Words from Socrates)
• TO DO IS TO BE (41A: Words from Sartre)
• DOOBY DOOBY DOO (52A: Words from Sinatra)

Word of the Day: REDTOP (1D: Variety of pasture grass) —

Agrostis gigantea, known by its common names black bent and redtop, is a perennial grass of the Agrostis genus. // It is native to Europe, but in the cooler areas of North America was widely used as a pasture grass until the 1940s. Although it has largely been replaced by soybeans and more palatable grasses, it still gets some use in poor soils. It was one of the grasses planted in areas disturbed by the Trans-Alaska Pipeline. It generally does well in response to fires, due to survival of rhizomes and seeds.
It can be found in open woodland, rough grassland, hedgerows, roadsides and waste ground, and as a weed on arable land. (wikipedia)

• • •

This is unacceptable on many levels. First, this is a tired, pre-existing, non-original bit of wordplay, i.e. NOT a product of constructor cleverness, wit, thoughtfulness, etc. If anything, the whole gag is botched by the constructor's addition of TO BE OR NOT TO BE, which is some which-of-these-four-is-not-like-the-others nonsense. Leaving that answer aside, the others are part of a sequence that you can find on plaques and mugs and, I don't know, cross-stitches or whatever, at any of your finest novelty gift shops. Here look:

And so forth. Not sure how "Nietzsche" and "Kant" came to be "Sartre" and "Socrates" in today's gag, but I'm guessing the creation of an all-S cast was thought to a choice bit of cleverness.


And if that's not bad enough (and it is), the fill, hoo boy. Unless you are literally Merl Reagle and you are literally in the movie "Wordplay,"* REDTOP = no. No no. ENTR' crossing a single ARREAR? ON LATE crossing ONE ONE? ... note that I haven't even left the NW yet. STLO ABED! It's ruff. Not bottom-of-the-barrel rough, but down there. After two nice puzzles to open the week ... this. AGEE? GEES-us H! I want to fault this one for being way too easy as well (nearly broke the 3 min. mark???), but considering how little I liked it, I'm actually pretty grateful it took no effort. OSSO STET! SSTS and REOS in my OLEO! If you tore absolutely everything out of this puzzle except the longer Downs, you'd have ... not much, but you'd be sort of on your way to a decent themeless (seriously, this thing has only 72 words, which is themeless territory). I don't know what's going on here. I'll see you back here tomorrow, where hopefully I'll get a puzzle that at least *aspires* to be NYT-worthy.

["...shot down in May ... back on top in June"]

*Merl put REDTOP in a puzzle he constructed on camera in "Wordplay." Worth nothing—it bugged him so much that by the time that puzzle actually appeared in finished form, he had replaced REDTOP with PILEUP (the movie doesn't bother to tell you that :). This is all to say that constructors are supposed to agonize over their weak fill—not make it the leader of a bad fill parade.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

PS here's an article by my student, Clare Gilroy, about the Independent Study she did with me this semester re: crosswords.

PPS of course the attributions in today's theme clues are all b.s.—here's more than you'd ever want to know about the actual origins of this dooby-do gag, which dates to 1968 (h/t Ben Zimmer).

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Mae (government lender) / MON 11-9-15 / Campus in Troy, N.Y. / Band aide / Disgorges / Chaney of chillers

SURPRISE ANNABEL MONDAY!!!! Sorry I was sick last week (don't worry, it wasn't that FOUL, I'm fine!) but I'm back.

Constructor: Pawel Fludzinski

Relative difficulty: Medium

THEME: QTs — Theme answers were two words, one starting with Q and the other starting with T.

Theme answers:

• QUALITY TIME (18A: Period of undivided attention, as with a spouse or child)
• QUANTUM THEORY (32A: Noted Max Planck contribution to physics)
• QUICK THINKING (39A: Skill useful for handling an emergency)
• QUARTER TONE (57A: 1/24 of an answer)
• CUTIES (61A: Babies (aww...) ...or an aural hint to 18-, 32-, 39-, and 57-Across 

Word of the Day: BOIS (56D: ____ de Boulogne (Parisian park) ) —

The lower lake in the Bois de Boulogne

The Bois de Boulogne (French pronunciation: ​[bwa.d(ə).bu.lɔɲ]) is a large public park located along the western edge of the 16th arrondissement of Paris, near the suburb of Boulogne-Billancourt andNeuilly-sur-Seine It was created between 1852 and 1858 during the reign of the Emperor Louis Napoleon.^[1]

It is the second-largest park in Paris, slightly smaller than the Bois de Vincennes on the eastern side of the city. It covers an area of 845 hectares (2090 acres)^[2] which is about two and a half times the area of Central Park in New York and slightly less (88%) than that of Richmond Park in London. 

• • •
(Wikipedia)

So, what was it about the Across clues for this puzzle? I was afraid this puzzle would take me AGES, because I only got six of them at first. I'm guessing Down-only solvers had a good time this week; the Down clues weren't so bad. Fill was decent other than that initial difficulty; my only complaint was that, while I love Portman, they could've come up with a more original clue for NATALIE. I love when the puzzle seems like the constructor seemed like they had a few things in particular on their mind; in this case, music (ASSAI, QUARTER TONE, and INTROS) and French (GENET, BOIS, NÉE, and -ETTE). French music maybe? Like this classic piece:


The theme was, well, cute! It took me a couple clues to pick up on, which was nice. I think I'm not alone in first seeing QUARTER NOTE where I should have seen QUARTER TONE, which is a bummer because I've always thought about myself as knowing at least some things about music, as well as making me CONFUSED about the rest of the theme ("Maybe the T just has to be a part of the second word!"). I like looking back on the puzzle and seeing CUE and IQS. I think

Anyway, speaking of cuties, remember that dog my mom got to replace me? Well................

...........honestly can you blame her?

Bullets:

• GIANT SQUID (3D: Creature that attacked the Nautilus in "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea") — Can we just pause to talk about how cool giant squid are?!? Their eyes are the size of a human head, they grow up to 43 feet long, and in Googling them I just found out two years ago scientists actually captured video of a live one and basically I'm losing it right now here's the video!!!
 

• EBENEZER (55A: Mr. Scrooge) — Did anyone else used to get absolutely terrified by A Christmas Carol? When I was little, every time it came on TV I would sort of pretend to be brave and enjoy the film when in actuality I was trembling because I knew the Ghost of Christmas Future could show up at any moment. He was so creepy! He didn't even have a face! What was he doing hanging out with the nice ghosts like the sweet young lady and the guy with the beard? You know what, I bet he didn't hang out with them. I bet he just sat off by himself somewhere, staring off into the distance and listening to sludge metal. What a jerk.
• FRAU (21D: Mrs. in Munich) — No words, just:
• NASA (10A: Curiosity rover launcher) — Alright I'm ending this article now after seeing this clue because I can feel a geeky pagelong tirade about how much I loved The Martian coming on. (Maybe I'll leave one in the comments later? It's just a really good movie please watch it)

Signed, Annabel Thompson, tired college student.

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

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Broccoli-like vegetable / SUN 10-12-14 / French port just up coast from Boulogne / First steamship with planned circumnavigation of globe / Locale that Hillary made famous / Two-time role for Chris Hemsworth /

Constructor: Pawel Fludzinski

Relative difficulty: Easy

THEME: "Inner Workings" — phrases that have follow pattern "___ in ___" are represented literally in the grid:

Theme answers:

• COAL CANARY MINE (23A: Leading indicator?)
• ROUND SQUARE PEG HOLE (31A: Misfit)
• CANDY KID STORE (49A: One who's enthralled, metaphorically)
• MILLION NOT YEARS (66A: Never)
• TEA TEMPEST POT (84A: Much ado about nothing)
• HAND GO TO HELL BASKET (97A: Deteriorate rapidly)
• HAY NEEDLE STACK (112A: It's hard to find)

Word of the Day: ARGO (58A: First steamship with a planned circumnavigation of the globe) —

Argo was an iron screw steamer launched in 1853. She was the first steamship to intentionally circumnavigate the earth. (wikipedia)

• • •

This (NYT) puzzle is just a bigger version of this (NYT) puzzle, from 2011. Today's puzzle even has three of the same theme answers as the 2011 puzzle. This puzzle should never have been accepted, for this reason as well as several others—most notably that the 2011 version wasn't the first time this puzzle had been done, either (earliest example I could find was from the L.A. Times in 2003, which a basic cruciverb.com database check of theme answers would've turned up). Also, once you get the theme, the whole solving experience becomes a bit of a snore, especially in a puzzle this big (the 2011 and 2003 versions were 15x15s, by comparison). It's unoriginal. It's a bit boring. The fill is average—not terrible, not noteworthy. Even the title is dull. The puzzle's failure really isn't the constructor's fault—he should've been told, "No thanks, I've already run a puzzle like this recently." But clearly that didn't happen. No one but no one should be shocked by this.


I think this will be one of those puzzles that people like insofar as they were able to do it, where normally they cannot. Perhaps someone finished a Sunday puzzle for the first time today. If this is the case for you, you should certainly congratulate yourself. It is a big deal, no matter the quality of the puzzle. I certainly couldn't tell you whether the first Sunday puzzle I solved was "good" or not. But I damn sure remember finishing (when, where, who with, etc.). So take whatever pleasure you can from this and pray for / hope for better Sundays to come. It's possible.

• REWON
• RELIT
• REDYED

Yesterday I learned TRAVE. Today I learned SONDE (19D: Atmospheric probe).

I was fooled a couple of times today, most notably by the "Hillary" part of 45A: Locale that made Hillary famous (MT. EVEREST). I thought the clue was referring to our next president. I think that's what the clue wanted me to think. In that, at any rate, this puzzle was successful. I enjoyed remembering TIM Howard's performance in the World Cup this summer, and I enjoyed seeing RAPINI, as well as FAT CHANCE and TRIFECTA. That is the full extent of my enjoyment today.


Does the NRA endorse guns? Are they anti-NERF? I'm not sure what kind of joke that clue was going for. I'm also not sure how [24/7] = ANY TIME. "Come up and see me 24/7!" is not a phrase I can imagine someone's saying. "We're open 24/7" = "We're open *all the time*," not "... ANY TIME." But I'll stop the critique there, as this puzzle, as I've said, is D.O.A. and a critique is not really worthwhile. As I tell my writing students, "If you don't put any effort into writing your paper, I'm certainly not going to put any into grading it." Here's hoping we get something better than lukewarm leftovers next week.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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Pulitzer winning biographer Leon / THU 6-26-14 / 2008 action thriller with Liam Neeson / Blues rocker Chris / Radiant light around head / Quimby Beverly Cleary heroine / Reagan cabinet member who was previously counselor to the president

Constructor: Pawel Fludzinski

Relative difficulty: Medium-Challenging

THEME: IN BED (40A: How breakfast may be served … or how the answers to the eight starred clues should be entered?) — starred clues refer to words that are embedded inside the letter string "BED" (the result of which is a new, entirely unclued answer in each case)

Theme answers:

• BLOCKED (3D: *Bit of hair) (LOCK)
• BROACHED (17A: *Motel) (ROACH)
• BRUSHED (11D: *Bit of excitement) (RUSH)
• BLASTED (42D: *Like Pisces, in the zodiac) (LAST)
• BALLOTED (58A: *Divide up) (ALLOT) 
• BROOMED (38D: *Leeway) (ROOM)
• BROKERED (49A: *Longtime TV weatherman) (ROKER)
• BRANCHED (24A: *Dressing choice) (RANCH)

Word of the Day: AURICLE (10D: Outer ear) —

n.

1. Anatomy.
   1. The outer projecting portion of the ear. Also called pinna.
   2. See atrium (sense 2).
2. Biology. An earlobe-shaped part, process, or appendage, especially at the base of an organ.

[Middle English, auricle of the heart, from Old French, little ear, from Latin auricula, ear, earlier diminutive of auris, ear.]

Read more: http://www.answers.com/topic/auricle#ixzz35i1yCNqu

• • •

Not [Fortune addendum]?

Didn't care for this one much. Results of the em-BED-dening are just random, unclued words, and (monotonously) past tenses of verbs in Every Case. BED is always divided at the same place, between B and E. Why these words? Is this hard to do? Why isn't IN BED in the center?  Why is the non-theme fill so poor? EDEL ADDONS ERENOW AUREOLE EDMEESE ABOO ALERTER (!?) ASSTDA OATSEED AMBS AWS ALB ISS LYS — all far less than ideal. There's just not an entertaining coherent theme here. Each themer was a little word puzzle, which is fine, in some Games-like magazine or non-crossword context, but the purposelessness of IN BED, the way the resulting answers just hang out there, all naked and arbitrary and without cluing, means that there's no clear identity or point to the puzzle. Move letters around. Put words in grid. Ta da? I found it hard to care.


All of the difficulty in the puzzle is related to uncovering the theme, which you (probably) needed IN BED to do. I gummed it all up from the get-go by having ALT at 1D: It's between B.C. and Sask. instead of the ALB abbrev. that was called for. This meant I had TR-ACHED for the [*___ Motel] clue (nonsense, obviously), and even after I got IN BED, my lack of "B" there (from ALB) meant that I couldn't see what was going on until I saw ROKER inside whatever was happening at 49A: *Longtime TV weatherman. From there, I pieced the theme together, changed ALT to ALB, and got through the rest of the puzzle pretty easily.


BROOMED is a word? If you have to resort to that strange a B-ED word, try try again. BROILED, BRAIDED … honestly, it feels like you could go on forever (part of the theme's problem—the utter arbitrariness of the themers). Today's wrong answers (besides ALT) included CAROMS for SERUMS (19A: Some shots), EERIER for EDGIER (28D: More out there), and, best of all, SIREN for SIDE B (7D: Rod Stewart's "Maggie May," for one). I liked ROUNDER (as clued) (29D: Habitual drunkard) and the parallel adjacency of YOKO ONO and LENNON. There wasn't a lot else to recommend here.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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Impulse carrier / THU 7-12-12 / Symbol of the planet Neptune / "The forbidden fragrance" / Orange TV character

Constructor: Pawel Fludzinski

Relative difficulty: Medium

THEME: You Choose, You Lose — Three similar idioms describing two forces that present someone standing "between" them with a difficult choice.  Each idiom is split into multiple entries and is clued the same way ("With X and Y, difficult things to be 'between'").

Word of the Day: NYNEX (19A: Former Baby Bell) —

NYNEX Corporation (/ˈnaɪnɛks/) was a telephone company that served five New England states (Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island and Vermont) as well as most of New York state, except the Rochester area, from 1984 through 1997.

Formed January 1, 1984, as a result of the Bell System Divestiture, NYNEX was a Regional Bell operating company made up of former AT&T subsidiaries New York Telephone and New England Telephone. Hence, the name NYNEX stood for New York/New England, with the X representing the unknown future (or "the uneXpected"), but the X is also widely believed to mean eXchange. NYNEX merged with Bell Atlantic on August 14, 1997, in what was, at the time, the second largest merger in American corporate history. (Wikipedia)

• • •

Greetings from Philadelphia, crossword fans.  I'm Evan Birnholz, filling in for Rex during his family-imposed EXILE to New Zealand.  You might remember me from such blog post comments like the one I made on March 20, 2012, or on December 11, 2011.  Okay, so I might have a flimsy claim to crossword fame.  Actually, that's not entirely true.  If you go to Rex's Facebook page, you'll notice that his cover photo depicts a dinosaur pointing a shotgun at a completed puzzle.  Why a dinosaur holding a shotgun?  It was in honor of Michael Sharp's debut puzzle in the New York Times on August 17, 2010, where the theme answers were based on the cry "S.O.S."  The dinosaur is shown holding the answer to 17-Across ("Weapon for Clyde Barrow").  The artwork was titled "The Tyrannosaurus Rex Parker Destroying the Puzzle with a Sawed-Off Shotgun."  The purpose of all that backstory is to reveal that *I* am the artist of that picture.  It was nice to discover that the King of CrossWorld put my eight-year-old-like drawing skills on display for the world to see.  Whoever said that artists are not appreciated during their lifetimes? (Answer: Every Artist Ever)

Onto today's puzzle, the NYT debut of Pawel Fludzinski.  It's undeniably impressive that all three themed idioms have identical meaning and could be placed symmetrically throughout the grid.  This could only be achieved by splitting the idioms into partial phrases and cross-referencing them in multiple clues, and even by intersecting two pairs of theme answers with each other.  Normally, partial phrases + multiple cross-referenced answers don't equate with the most enjoyable solve for me, but all of the theme answers are solid and are connected in a neat way that I didn't appreciate until after finishing the puzzle (more on that in a bit).

Having said that, it wasn't all smooth sailing throughout the grid.  The impressive symmetry of the theme led to some concessions in the fill with a fair number of meh answers like HEMI, A SIGN, the aforementioned NYNEX, IN HIS, DAUB, REE, ETNAS, AGRI, ESSEN, IDEATE, and RES.  In the putting-lipstick-on-a-pig department, the clue for CVII (21D: Roman numeral that's an anagram of part of Caesar's boast) gives a tiny bit of sizzle to an answer that makes an un-sizzling second appearance in the NYT since 1993.

There were a couple of minor slip-ups mid-solve.  I instinctively threw down AMINO at 23D (Kind of acid), but the C of SCAR gave me the correct OLEIC without too much resistance.  Being a transplanted Midwesterner living on the East Coast, WATTS (22D: Part of Los Angeles) was completely out of my wheelhouse, but I got it with all of the crossings.  20A: Club was a pretty cryptic clue for CIRCLE, but with the help of the initial CI-, that too fell after only a brief struggle.  All of that pushed me to my normal time for a Thursday, hence the Medium rating.

Theme answers:

• 24A + 37A + 46A (THE DEVIL AND / THE / DEEP BLUE SEA)
• 3D + 30D (A ROCK AND A / HARD PLACE)
• 10D + 33D (SCYLLA AND / CHARYBDIS) — In Homer's Odyssey, the choice between Scylla and Charybdis was literally a choice between the devil inside a rock (Scylla) and a hard place inside the deep blue sea (Charybdis).  I wish I were smart enough to have realized this long ago.  I'm not.

Bullets: 

• 9D: Source of the line "Each of us bears his own Hell" (AENEID) — A bonus theme answer that reminds us how in Greek mythology, everything in life sucked -- constant war, monsters that could swallow you whole, dangerous waters that could also swallow you whole.....it was a pretty rough life.  Gotta like how SCYLLA falls in between AENEID and IONIA (11D: Ancient land SE of Lesbos).
  
• 21A: Dion who didn't sing with the Belmonts (CELINE) — Great clue.  Even though her full name appeared as an answer in September 2010, this is actually the NYT debut for her first name only -- surprising, given the Scrabble-friendly combination of letters.
• 25D: What Fred Astaire danced with (EASE) — A cute but sorta bizarre clue-answer combo.  I suppose Astaire made difficult dance moves look easy, but I doubt he would say it was easy to practice and perform them, not after spending several years honing his craft.  I originally wanted a physical object that he might have danced with in one of his umpteen-million videos, so with -ASE, I dropped in VASE.  Well, if he could do it with a hat rack, why not a vase?




• 43D: Bully, by nature (ABASER) — The friendlier cousin of the ABUSER, which was my first guess.  Can't say I was crazy about the correct answer, nor its crossing the less-than-commonly-used EARLAP (51A: Cap add-on).
• 44A: Something that's not hard to drink? (ALE) — Wanted ADE, which made me like ADVISED for the correct ALERTED (41D: Given a tip).

• 44D: Four-time Pro Bowler ___ Samuel (ASANTE) — A gimme if, like me, you're A) a big football fan and/or B) a Philadelphia resident who has heard countless hours on sports talk radio devoted to complaining about how the former Eagles cornerback could make the most amazing interceptions but could not tackle anybody.  Otherwise, this one might have been a real head-scratcher.
• 55A: Champion wannabe (CONTENDER) — I went about this all wrong at first.  The correct way to read the clue is "person who wants to be a champion."  I originally read it as "champion of all wannabes."  For anyone who had the same confusion, DANE COOK didn't fit.

Signed, Evan Birnholz, Earl of CrossWorld

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