Laura Bush biographer Ronald / FRI 1-21-11 / Bygone NYC punk club / Appassionata von Climax / Writer known as Old Possum / Epoch bats first appeared

Constructor: Pete Mitchell

Relative difficulty: Medium

THEME: none


Word of the Day: CBGB (CLUE) —

CBGB (Country, Blue Grass, and Blues) was a music club at 315 Bowery at Bleecker Street in the borough of Manhattan in New York City. // Founded by Hilly Kristal in 1973, it was originally intended to feature its namesake musical styles, but became a forum for American punk and New Wave bands like Ramones, Misfits, Television, the Patti Smith Group, Mink DeVille, The Dead Boys, The Dictators, The Fleshtones, The Voidoids, The Cramps, Blondie, The Shirts, and Talking Heads. In later years, it would mainly become known for Hardcore punk with bands such as Agnostic Front, Bad Brains, Murphy's Law, Cro-Mags, Warzone, Gorilla Biscuits, Sick of It All, and Youth of Today performing there. [...] The club closed in October 2006. The final concert was performed by Patti Smith on October 15. CBGB Fashions (the CBGB store, wholesale department, and online store) stayed open until October 31 at 315 Bowery. On November 1, 2006, CBGB Fashions moved to 19-23 St. Mark's Place, but it subsequently closed in the summer of 2008. (wikipedia)

• • •

This one felt fairly easy, but my time says "normal" or maybe even a shade higher. Nothing stumped me for very long, but I didn't speed through much of it either. Slow, steady progress. Pinwheel shapes (like the one formed by this grid) create relatively separate segments (here, quadrants), such that blowing through the grid quickly is tough to do ... which is just fine for a Friday. Ideal, even. Gave me time to SAVOR some of the better answers (51D: Make last, maybe). I liked a lot of this one. The banks of long answers are all good-to-great; I especially like the NE (the last section to fall), with its triumvirate of HUMBLE PIE (12D: Crow), MANGANESE (13D: Iron's preceder on the periodic table), and SLOBBERED (14D: Acted like a baby, in a way). Had a little trouble getting in there because I had CPLS instead of CPOS (31D: Navy equivalents of S.F.C.'s), which meant I couldn't see POISE at all (that "O" was the last letter in the grid, actually) (41A: Cool). Luckily, CBGB bailed me out and I was able to piece together the long Downs from there. Got a note from Pete (today's constructor) just before starting the puzzle—subject line read "Don't open this email until AFTER you've done Friday's puzzle"—and he referred me to an old write-up of mine from nearly three years ago, which he said was the inspiration for this puzzle. Took me a while to figure out what he meant, but then I stumbled on this:

32A: Company with a spokesduck (Aflac) - annoying. I feel sad to have lived long enough to see "spokesduck" enter the language.

Somehow I don't feel the same annoyance today, perhaps because it's much harder to get mad at SPOKESDUCK (1A: Aflac ad figure, facetiously) when it's livening up your grid by comically sitting on the head of TINA LOUISE (15A: She played Appassionata von Climax in Broadway's "Li'l Abner"). I liked the run-down quality of the symmetrical answers FIXER-UPPER (36A: Homebuyer's "bargain") and BAD HAIR DAY (42A: Result of a permanent failure? — great clue). All in all, I just liked it. Fine Friday fare.


[I have no frame of reference for this]
There were several things I didn't know in this puzzle, some of them dangerously close to one another. Let's start with CSTAR (9D: ___ Optics (telescope maker)) and KESSLER (10D: Laura Bush biographer Ronald). The former I pieced together from the fact that a C-STAR is a thing, and CSTAR sounds like "See Star," which is what you might do with a telescope. No way to get KESSLER except through crosses, which were all fair. Not sure I've heard EFAX said out loud or seen it in print, but I can at last imagine what it is (37D: High-tech transmission). I thought maybe Byron wrote "MAUD" (wrong—that's Tennyson), and if I even knew "LARA," I forgot (63A: Byron poem). A partial from a Thomas the Tank Engine story!? That's nuts, but kind of inspired (57A: "___ on the Line" (Thomas the Tank Engine story) ("A COW"). Words like EOCENE (30A: Epoch when bats first appeared) and CHELA I know from puzzles gone by. Ditto UIES, which I had the good sense to change from UEYS fairly early on (8D: They're hung across roads).

Bullets:

• 17A: Chinchillas and boas, e.g. (EXOTIC PETS) — a great answer. My wife had occasion to refer to chinchillas earlier this evening. I forget why. Oh, her student is interning in a kindergarten classroom, and got superexcited because it was Zoomobile day!
  
• 19A: "The Gene Krupa Story" title role player (MINEO) — Got this easily, which is weird, as I've never seen the movie. He's pretty common in crosswords (see also SELA, 60D: One of Swoosie's co-stars on "Sisters"). Plus, I probably had the -EO before even seeing the clue.
  
• 27A: Ace pitcher's reward? (SALE) — someone else out there had to have had SAVE, right? This made 28D: Many an interrogee *very* interesting. "VIAL? What the...?"
  
• 5D: Writer known as Old Possum, and his family (ELIOTS) — as in T.S. Gimme. "Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats" was the basis for ... "Cats!"
  
• 54D: Wankel engine part (ROTOR) — wanted MOTOR, but that didn't really seem like a "part"...
  
• 56D: Secretaries' charges: Abbr. (DEPTS.) — oh, "Secretary" as in "Secretary of the Interior." Gotcha. I had APPTS. here at first.
  

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter]

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SATURDAY, Oct. 11, 2008 - Pete Mitchell (Old-time actress Haden / Two-time NOW president Eleanor / Anne Rice's Brat Prince)

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium

THEME: none

Well, there is a kind of theme: proper nouns. I'm not sure I have ever seen a puzzle with such a high percentage of them. And not just proper nouns, but people's names in particular. The puzzle is packed to the gills with them. Maybe it's not their number (my recent VP debate-themed puzzle, for instance, had 14 names by my count), but their length. We get all of

• WAYNE GRETZKY (19A: Winner of eight consecutive M.V.P. awards)
• JOAN JETT (28A: One of only two women on Rolling Stone's list of "100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time") - the other is Joni Mitchell

• ENRIQUE IGLESIAS (35A: Singer with the 1999 #1 hit "Be With You") - the song sounds like this:
  
  
  ... but all I could hear in my head was this:
  
  

• MAE WEST (8A: Who said "A man's kiss is his signature") - this is where I started the puzzle. I knew this almost instantly, not because I'd heard the quotation before (I hadn't), but because the phrasing of the clue seemed deliberately gender neutral, so instead of some noted lothario like CASANOVA or VALENTINO or whatever, I thought woman - and the Only woman I thought of was MAE WEST. Probably because she was always highly quotable. With MAE WEST in place, the NE fell in about ten seconds.
  

All in all, a fine Saturday affair. Not as wide open as I normally like my late-week grids, but full of enough entertaining fill and tough clues to make it interesting.

Round-up:

• 17A: Play or movie starring William H. Macy ("Oleanna") - absolutely no desire to see this, though I am, in general, a Mamet fan (see yesterday's clip from "Glengarry").
• 18A: The Green City in the Sun (Nairobi) - no idea. Crosses made it easy.
• 23A: It was made to fall in 2001 (Mir) - took me many stares and puzzled, head-cocked looks to figure out.
• 26A: Southwestern resort community (Taos) - like the TAOS WACO pairing on this line (27A: Dr Pepper museum locale). WACO is famous for some crazy @#$#.
• 37A: Anne Rice's Brat Prince (Lestat) - he's the prince of German Sausage?
• 38A: Active Ecuadorean volcano (Cotopaxi) - winner of today's "Mash Face Into Keyboard" Answer of the Day Award.
• 39A: Where you might be among Hmong (Laos) - since FRESNO wouldn't fit, this was the next logical answer.
• 41A: Every, to a pharmacist (omn) - o man that's terrible as an answer. Almost as bad as JQA (32D: First three-letter White House monogram).
• 44A: Two-time NOW president Eleanor (Smeal) - you know when you know a name - well - and then you are asked to recall it and you can see the face and hear the voice but Can't Remember The Name At All? Yeah, that's what happened here.
• 51A: Bachelorette party attendees (gal pals) - I abhor "Sex and the City," but I love this answer. Every bachelorette party should be required, by law, to play "MR. LEE" (43D: 1957 hit for the Bobbettes) - a song on the "Stand By Me" soundtrack, which I now realize was hugely influential on my musical tastes. It spurred a nearly two-year boycott on my part (in the mid-80s) of nearly all contemporary radio. I spent my junior and senior years listening almost exclusively to stations that were, even then, considered "oldies" stations.

• 56A: Where Arabic and Tigrinya are spoken (Eritrea) - a country whose existence I learned of from crosswords. Sad but true.
• 58A: Reversible silk fabrics (damasks) - a Shakespearean-sounding word that I got quickly, despite knowing crap-all about fabric.
• 1D: 19th-century abolitionist (Stowe) - piece of cake ... OK, maybe I needed one cross, but that's it. She wrote the most popular novel of the 19th century.
• 2D: Shakes in the grass? (hula) - awesome clue.
• 6D: "_____ Pow! Enter the Fist" (2002 spoof film) ("Kung") - that just hurts. Why? Why would you go there? That movie ("film," HA ha) was well and (mercifully) gone from everyone's consciousness.
• 8D: Cousin of a cockroach (mantis) - are there non-praying MANTISes?
• 10D: Ballet dancer Bruhn and others (Eriks) - like COTOPAXI, neh-ever heard of him.
• 12D: Old Far Eastern capital (Edo) - not a unit of currency, thank god.
• 13D: Person in a tree, briefly (sib) - saw through this "tree" very quickly, just as I can now see through the trees out my window - brilliant orange but sparsing up fast.
• 25D: Martini's partner (Rossi) - easy, but just now it occurred to me that OLIVE would have fit too.
• 34D: Runabout or Royale (REO) - hmmm, they sound like olde-fashioned car models. Three letters = REO.
• 45D: It's north of Libya (Malta) - my thought: "lots of things."
• 50D: Old-time actress Haden (Sara) - no idea. None. I'm sure she's been in the puzzle before, but clearly I've forgotten about her.
• 53D: Sch. whose teams play at the Pete Maravich Assembly Center (LSU) - on my list of least fav. abbrs. -> "sch." Just seems so unnecessary.

Pete Mitchell has two reasons to be happy this morning: a fine NYT puzzle and a Red Sox victory in Game 1 of the ALCS. Enjoy the feeling, Pete. I hope it lasts.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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FRIDAY, Jul. 6, 2007 - Pete Mitchell

Relative difficulty: Medium

THEME: none

This has not been a great week for puzzles. Today's is an improvement over Th and W, but it still had flaws. Speaking of FLAWS, I had one Major one today. The NYT applet kept rejecting my grid, over and over and over, and I Googled just about everything, double-checking all my answers that were even remotely iffy. Nothing helped. Of course the second I emailed Crossword Fiend for help, my error sprang forth. It was hidden within an answer that was so solid in my mind that I couldn't even see its wrongness. I was so proud when 33A: The last novel featuring him was "Stopover: Tokyo" ended up being a virtual gimme that I never ever stopped to consider that I had @#$#ed up the spelling, typing MR. MOTA instead of the correct MR. MOTO. I have a MR. MOTO book on my shelves! Unh! The cross was completely plausible to me: 14D: Result of cross-fertilization within a population gave me GENE FLAW. I figured "Well, sure ... inbreeding will do that." And GENE FLAW got many Google hits. GENE FLOW (the "correct" answer) - Lord only knows what that is (I mean, besides crappy fill).

My other great wrong answer (one that I rooted out much more quickly) was at 36D: Hammer activator. First of all, I was trying to imagine "hammers" that one could "activate." Was it some arm-related answer, like WRIST or something? Was the Hammer involved MC Hammer? So I worked from crosses ... only I got the verb tense wrong on 55A: Punish publicly, perhaps (make an example of) and wrote MADE instead of MAKE. Then I got the wrong Patty/i at 60A: Rocker Patty who married John McEnroe and wrote in SMITH. So in the end, for 36D: Hammer activator, I had PIANO DEI - The Piano of God!!! "Feel his musical wrath as he brings the hammer down ... literally!"

Kwik Kuts:

1A: Actor whom People magazine erroneously declared dead in 1982 (Abe Vigoda) - a great clue and answer. I must have Googled his name several times during my desperate error search, as the "I" in VIGODA just seemed wrong. But it wasn't. ABE VIGODA gets whacked at the end of "The Godfather." And he was in "Barney Miller."

15A: Persian's gift (nine lives) - can I get a question mark for this clue, please? Please!? I first considered that "Persian" referred to a cat, but then decided that cats don't really give gifts, so started considering various Iranian products / delicacies...

17A: Basis of "America" ("God Save the Queen") - is "America" the song that starts "My Country 'Tis of Thee..."? Aha, it is. OK, that makes sense - all I could hear in my head was Ray Charles singing "Oh beautiful for spacious skies etc."

22A: Turkey dough? (liras)
41D: Dough must be squeezed out of them (misers)

Double "dough?" D'oh! I say no. If you're going to play the "dough" trick, play it once. Twice is overkill / laziness.

46A: He served between Hubert and Gerald (Spiro) - my SPIRO Agnew watch hangs on a bulletin board not two feet from me. One of my favorite possessions. Thanks, mom! I really should get it fixed and wear it.

50A: Pizzeria chain since 1943, informally (Uno's) - thank god for this clue. Sahra likes to eat here whenever we go to the movies, so I know this restaurant well. Really helped open up the SW corner.

52A: Val d'_____ (French ski resort) (Isere) - Looks wrong. There is a river called the YSER and so I wanted ISERE to begin with a "Y."

4D: Line of motor scooters (Vespa) - briefly considered MOPED, but then VESPA presented itself to me, in all its obviousness. Like UNO'S, this was a gimme that really helped open up a potentially tough corner.

33D: Melvin of the Orioles (Mora)

Briefly considered MOTA ... ironic, considering my MR MOTO/MOTA error, doubly so when you consider that MORA and MR. MOTO intersect at their first letters. So I wanted MOTA twice and got it ... zero times. Where's Manny MOTA when you need him?


42D: Distinctive director (auteur) - hmmm. OK. I've heard this word used in film theory, as a way of describing an approach to film criticism that treats the director as the AUTEUR or author of the movie (as opposed to a vision of film-making as a kind of collaborative "authorship" among director, writer, actors, etc.). Never thought of it as applicable to a particularly "distinctive" director, but ... I guess it makes sense.

49A: "Affiction" star, 1998 (Nolte) - can we please retire this clue for Mr. NOLTE. He's done a TON of movies, and yet "Affliction" continues to be the go-to reference. Next time, I vote for "Down and Out in Beverly Hills."

53D: Graphic artist Nolde (Emil) - not sure why "graphic" is in the clue. Most artists who draw / paint are "graphic" artists. He's an artist. And a good one. His stuff is unnervingly wild and smeary and creepy. I wish NOLDE could have been in the grid with NOLTE. They make a nice pair.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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