Lohengrin's love / MON 3-26-12 / Singer/actress Deanna of 1930s-40s / Violinist Mischa

Constructor: Ray Fontenot

Relative difficulty: Medium-Challenging (i.e. this was a Tuesday)

THEME: MOVING / VAN (7A: With 58-Down, vehicle for people on the go? ... or a hint to five strategically placed answers in this puzzle) — "VAN" "moves" thru five theme answers, diagonally, right thru the center of the grid

Word of the Day: Mischa ELMAN (5D: Violinist Mischa) —

Mikhail [originally Moses or Moishe^[1]] (Mischa) Saulovich Elman (Russian: Михаи́л (Ми́ша) Сау́лович Э́льман; January 20, 1891, Talnoye, Kiev Governorate, Russian Empire – April 5, 1967, New York, United States) was a Russian violinist, famed for his passionate style and beautiful tone. (wikipedia)

• • •

Very choppy for me, for a Monday. Flat-out didn't know two answers, which is more apt to happen to me on a Thursday or Friday than a *&^ing Monday. One of those answers, ELMAN, was particularly exasperating because it brought back memories of a messed-up clue from days gone by—specifically, from this puzzle, where [Violinist Mischa] was used to clue AUER, only *Leopold* AUER was the violinist, not Mischa. Mischa was an actor. Aaaaaaaanyway, ELMAN, eh? DURBIN, eh? (27A: Singer/actress Deanna of the 1930s-'40s) Ugh. OK. Not Monday fare for me, but OK. I love the long Downs on this one, but my main (big) problem with this grid is how invisible the theme answers are. There are so many other Across answers of the same length that they don't stand out. For some reason I find this phenomenally annoying. I'm impressed at how straight the VAN drives, but that's all I'm impressed by, theme-wise. The placement of MOVING / VAN is absurd. It's an OK puzzle, misplaced on a Monday.


Theme answers:

• 13A: Alternative to chocolate (VANILLA)
• 21A: Sir Walter Scott novel ("IVANHOE")
• 36A: Native of Cuba's capital (HAVANAN) — not your loveliest / most plausible adjective
• 49A: State of bliss (NIRVANA)
• 61A: Desert procession (CARAVAN)

Screwed up by going with LAMÉ over LACE (2D: Fabric that doesn't block much light). Got completely befuddled by 53D: Long-haired uglies (HAGS). Had H-GS and definitely considered HOGS. NEW ERA was like pulling teeth (18A: Time of change). I made up some time at the end because I knew the crosswordy stuff like ELSA (33D: Lohengrin's love) and DAKAR and NOOR. All in all, 1m 20s longer than last week's Monday, and just a few seconds shy of last week's Tuesday.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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TUESDAY, Aug. 12, 2008 - Ray Fontenot (Co-panelist of Cowell / ADEN'S LAND / SAINTED FIFTH-CENTURY POPE)

Relative difficulty: Easy

THEME: TV Game Shows that have had the first letters of the last words in their titles changed from "L" to "W"

This theme was oddly clever. Simple, cute, fine. This puzzle was the easiest NYT puzzle I've done in a Long time. Beat yesterday's time by better than ten seconds, which is odd, considering that yesterday the puzzle itself bragged about being so easy. Don't know what my record time is for a Tuesday, but 3:30 has to be close. There's simply nothing I can see that should significantly slow people down - but sometimes you just get lucky with the order in which you solve answers, and never end up seeing the clue that could have given you fits. How many people will do the old "what the hell is RANDB?" act today (18A: Musical genre for Destiny's Child)? Maybe TIVOLI sounds Italian so you'd never put it in Copenhagen (2D: Copenhagen's _____ Gardens). Maybe you've never seen the word ODEA (19A: Concert halls of old) or enjoyed the musical stylings of Steve EARLE (52D: Country rocker Steve). Maybe you don't know what an "oenophile" is. Doesn't take much to derail even a good solver. Today, however, for me, there was not a speed bump to be found. You'd think I'd be elated, but it's hard to be thrilled at having aced a Tuesday puzzle. If I'd gotten in under 3 minutes, that might have done it. But as it is ... meh.

Theme answers:

• 20A: TV game show that places spouses at risk? ("You Bet Your Wife")
• 37A: TV game show that quizzes oenophiles? ("What's My Wine?")
• 55A: TV game show that eliminates coy contestants? ("The Weakest Wink") - easily the best of the three

Today's puzzle is a bit heavy in the spoorish fill: ESAI, AVER, AMEBA (15A: Amorphous critter - really, "critter?" Did it get into your pickinick basket?), NENE, EMUS (36A: Outback avians), ERST, EROS, ESS (36D: Pothook shape), LEO I (10D: Sainted fifth-century pope), ESL, ENOLA, SYNE (59D: January 1 song word). The whole puzzle pretty much rests on the strength of the theme entries, and thankfully these hold up quite well. There's always something wrong with the Tuesday puzzle, and if that thing is merely difficulty level, and maybe a bit too much crosswordese, I'll take it and consider the puzzle a Success.

Short List:

• 5A: Rice dish (pilaf) - OK, I take it back: one speed bump. I had SUSHI here.
• 14A: Oscar winner Kedrova (Lila) - no idea who this is. Thankfully, never saw the clue, as I got all the Downs in the NW, 1-2-3, off of STAG alone (1A: Just for guys).
• 16A: Ultimatum's end (else) - I'm sure the clue's been used before, but I still like it.
• 60A: Super server (acer) - this clue meant Nothing to me. I had the wrong picture of both "super" and "server" in my head. I think I was imagining some kind of urn out of which you'd dispense coffee for the guy responsible for the upkeep of your apartment building.
• 62A: Nair competitor (Neet) - does it repel insects like DEET?
• 31D: Aden's land (Yemen) - hmmm, I think I hesitated here, forgetting where the hell Aden was (strangely enough, it's on the Gulf of ADEN)
• 65A: Gabor and Longoria Parker (Evas) - she's not really calling herself "Longoria Parker" is she? Why would you mar a mellifluous name like EVA Longoria?
• 8D: Co-panelist of Cowell (Abdul) - you either watch "American Idol" or you don't. I am most definitely a member of the former camp, so this was cake.

• 11D: Former inamorato or inamorata (old flame) - great answer, but do we really need both genders in the clue?
• 66A: Colon, in an emoticon (eyes) - great clue.
• 33D: Coin whose front was last redesigned in 1909 (cent) - you mean the penny, right?
• 38D: Hardly ruddy (wan) - I put in TAN...

That's all. Must take advantage of puppy nap to have coffee in peace...

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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WEDNESDAY, Nov. 28, 2007 - Ray Fontenot

Relative difficulty: Easy

THEME: Driving to an unfamiliar place - theme answers are all things one does when one gets lost while driving somewhere. Bonus feature today is a NW-to-SE diagonal clue!

I have a dentist appointment in exactly 50 minutes, which means I've got about half an hour to write this up, tops. So sorry. A thousand pardons.

I sailed through this puzzle without having Any Idea what the theme was, or even reading a single theme clue, until I was nearly half done. Interesting that in a puzzle about getting lost and taking shortcuts, I solved this in such an oddly circuitous fashion. Somehow, after flubbing the NW corner completely, I got STEER (4D: Be in control) and the "R" gave me TORTE (24A: Rich dessert), and then I was off and running - sprinting, almost - on a nearly perfectly southeasterly diagonal. I hit the SE, solved it, and then went due W, and solved everything in my path - still no sign of a theme (I'd blown right through that 15-letter theme answer in the middle of the puzzle without looking). Finally I hit the completely inscrutable 55A: What you might do next?, which, initially, I did not know was a theme clue. BUY A what now? I then saw 39A: What you might do next? and figured that this was the theme - all answers would have something to do with the word NEXT ... BUY A what? I don't get it. Then I Finally got around to looking at the "first" theme clue, and it all became semi-clear.

Theme answers:

• 22A: What you might do while driving to an unfamiliar place (get lost)
• 39A: What you might do next? (find a gas station)
• 55A: What you might do next? (buy a MAP!)

It was not until after I'd solved the puzzle completely that I noticed that (in AcrossLite format) this puzzle had Notepad instructions:

• DIAGONAL: What you might do eventually to make up for last time (take the shortcut)

In the end, I really liked the puzzle. It was frustrating to solve it from the bottom up and thus have the theme obscured for so long, but, frankly, that might actually have helped. My brain was undistracted by theme-thought and I just solved the clues in front of me, 1, 2, 3, boom, boom, boom. Even with the theme confusion - and a totally botched NE corner - I came in under 6 minutes.

By way of explaining some of my beefs about yesterday's puzzle (whose author, by the way, appears to be a thick-skinned sweetheart ... all politeness and humility ... sickening, really) let me praise today's short fill, which, while not shocking or even terribly unfamiliar, is yet, on the whole, somewhat more colorful than yesterday's. Somehow, odd letter combinations tend to please me even if the words are common in crossworld - words like RHEE (68A: South Korea's first president), which crosses the cleverly clued BARR (55D: Roseanne, again). Or SIOUX (54D: Victors at Little Bighorn) crossing my beloved SKUA (67A: Gull-like predator). Of course, it helps that this puzzle also has a Discernible (and enjoyable) theme.

Can't believe I blanked on 1A: "Jabberwocky" start ("Twas...") both because it's in the puzzle a lot and because my wife knows that poem well and can recite parts of it off the top of her head. She's weird like that. I absolutely love the symmetricality of WHOLE HOG (5D: All out) and TROOPERS (41D: Smokeys), for reasons that maybe you can explain to me. I've narrowed it down to two possibilities. Either 1. it's because HOG is slang for a motorcycle, which a TROOPER might ride, or 2. it's because a HOG is kind of PIG, and PIG is pejorative slang for a COP, of which TROOPER is one variety.

Didn't know:

• 17A: Zuider Zee sight (dike) - I would rather see ZUIDER ZEE in the grid than in the clue, even though I've no idea what / where it is.
• 50D: Be too good to (spoil) - can't figure out the syntax here ... and I just did. F@#$! It's obvious. I thought "to" was an infinitive verb waiting to happen... "Too good to WHAT!?"
• 12D: Publican's stock (ales) - I had AMMO. I then went to 13D: Made rhapsodic (sent) and entered SANG. Hence my above comment about a botched NE corner.
  

And other assorted oddities:

• 36A: Vintner's prefix (oeno-) - told ya so
• 43A: Garland's "cowardly" co-star (Lahr) - STILL pausing over this guy's name Every time it comes up: BAHR? BEHR? LEHR? Every Time!
• 40D: Relevant, in law (ad rem) - despite many years of Latin, I completely forgot the accusative form of RES and entered ... RES. "BUY A SAP!? Are we going to knock someone out on the way to gramma's house?"
• 46D: Emulates Daniel Webster (orates) - I'm just happy that I got this from the clue alone, without even looking at the grid. Feels like I'm developing finer and finer puzzle reflexes.

See you tomorrow,

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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WEDNESDAY, Aug. 15, 2007 - Ray Fontenot

Relative difficulty: Super-Easy

THEME: Newspaper headline about a workplace mishap (long quip)

Here's the quip:

20A: Newspaper headline about a workplace mishap - MAN WHO FELL INTO
34A: Headline, part 2 - UPHOLSTERY
42A: Headline, part 3 - MACHINE NOW
51A: End of the headline - FULLY RECOVERED

Normally don't like quip puzzles, and didn't especially like this one. I was shocked at how quickly I could get through the grid even with the relative disadvantage of the quip theme (which are sometimes slow-going because you often can't get the parts of the quip until you get a hell of a lot of crosses). AIDA, OSLO, ESSO, ISLE, SOD, ESNE (41A: Feudal serf), ETA, AMINO, EDENS, ULNA, ALOES, ECRU, SOAP, CLIO, ELLA, IRE, EWES, OKRA, WOKE, ELAN, DAIS, ERECT, OHIO, METE, EGO, SRI, SLAT, ETC, etc. - it's all So Low Rent.

But THEN, there are these oddities - to my mind fairly obscure stuff - that stick out like very sore thumbs, ESPECIALLY in the "Mid-Atlantic" region of the grid. First, ILO (24A: U.N. workers' grp.)?! Never heard of it. Couldn't guess what it stood for. Turns out it's "International Labour Organisation." I can tolerate an obscure abbreviation in my puzzle, but hitting this answer after Sailing across the boring straight long flat roads of the rest of this puzzle - well, it was jarring. Next, AMIR (37A: Mideast ruler: Var.)!? My distaste for this ugly variant is mitigated only by the fact that it spared me yet Another bit of tired crosswordese: EMIR. But the worst answer in the puzzle - "worst" both because it's an insane bit of foreign couture and because it was not adequately confirmable by crosses - is TREWS (33D: Close-fitting tartan pants). I have been to Scotland several times, wrote one of my dissertation exams on Scottish literature, and yet this word has somehow never entered my vocabulary. What's more, the "W" in TREWS could (as far as I was concerned) just as easily have been a "T" - in fact, the quip reads better with a "T" in place of the "W," I think.

MAN WHO FELL INTO / UPHOLSTERY / MACHINE NOT / FULLY RECOVERED

The "NOT" part jibes with the clue for the quip - 20A: Start of a newspaper headline about a workplace mishap. The "NOT" gives a nice potential double-meaning to "mishap," I think. Is the "mishap" that the guy fell in, or that the upholstery machine didn't do its job very well? Having "NOW" there ... the quotation remains a one-dimensional pun.

So this was a criminally easy puzzle, with rare, odd, unpleasant hard bits thrown in. Like eating a rather tasteless cream pie where occasionally you bite down on a screwhead or little rocks - boring, then suddenly painful.

Besides ILO (which really wishes it were J-LO), I didn't know the abbreviation DSC (25A: Mil. decoration) - the Distinguished Service Cross. Also didn't know 12D: Broadway's _____ - Fontanne Theater (Lunt), or that ESSO meant "it" in Italian (13D: Brand name that's coincidentally Italian for "it"). I enjoyed seeing Tycho BRAHE in the puzzle (30D: Astronomer Tycho _____). He strikes me as perfect Wednesday fare, and his name is a nice, unusual combination of common letters. 46A: I, in old Rome (ego) was nicely tricky, as "I" looks like it's being used as a Roman numeral (suggesting an answer of UNA), when really it's being used as a pronoun.

I think I'm stopping now.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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TUESDAY, Jun. 26, 2007 - Ray Fontenot

Relative difficulty: Easy

THEME: "All-Day Film Festival" - four theme answers contain words that refer to various parts of the day, progressing from "SUNRISE" to "SUNSET"

This was the easiest puzzle I've done in a while. Had exactly the same time as I did on yesterday's puzzle - which makes it a near-record Tuesday time. Liked the theme a lot - hell of a lot better than yesterday's grammatical disaster. I had never even heard of two of the four movies involved - in fact, I'd never heard of two of the seven-letter answers either - and yet I still enjoyed myself.

Theme answers:

• 20A: First showing at an all-day film festival? (1988) ("Tequila SUNRISE") - I feel that this movie was terrible, but I may be getting it confused with the Redford/Pfeiffer movie where she plays a reporter ... "Up Close and Personal"
• 25A: Second showing (1970) ("Red Sky at MORNING") - Never heard of it. The Fixx had a song called "Red Skies at Night"; I've heard of that
• 44A: Third showing (1975) ("Dog Day AFTERNOON")
• 49A: Final showing (2004) ("After the SUNSET") - what the hell movie is this? 2004? That just happened.

And why no reference to two very good movies, "Before Sunrise" or "Before Sunset?" And why don't the final three theme clues have "?"s after them?

I had never heard Joe DiMaggio referred to as simply (simply?) DIMAG (27D: Joltin' Joe). If you saw those letters together and had no context, I doubt you would know what the hell a DIMAG was supposed to be. Still, it's a cool, colloquial baseball answer, so I like it (even though it involves the Yankees - I can be impartial from time to time). ESAU is back in the puzzle, this time accompanied by two other four-letter words that end in "U" - ECRU (8D: Neutral shade) and FRAU (42D: Herr's mate). Oh, and MENU (60A: Beanery handout), but that's not very exotic.

Mysteries in seven letters:

15D: Self-important sorts (tin gods) - I really like the phrase a lot; just never heard it (or if I have, I forgot about it)

43D: Biblical liar (Ananias) - Hey, I just started my year-long Bible-reading marathon. We don't get to the Gospels for a long, long time (well into 2008, I'm guessing)

Not much else here to speak of. Had some wrong stuff, like GET IN instead of MOUNT (30D: Climb onto), TEN TO instead of TEN OF (29D: A little before the hour), and IRAN instead of IRAQ (3D: It includes Mesopotamia). That last one's a little embarrassing. Clearly I was going too fast to bothered with thinking very hard (no, wait, I just looked it up, and technically parts of southern IRAN are included, so not as bad an answer as I'd imagined). So it goes.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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