Rex Parker Does the NYT Crossword Puzzle: Rick Astley

Hi! Andrea Carla Michaels here, helping PuzzleGirl who's helping Rex who is helping himself to sunblock, I hope. Today we have a crossword by palindromic whiz-kid Natan Last and I almost fainted when I saw it. I don't know quite where to begin…

I myself have done a couple of puzzles where there are five one-vowel switches (through the miracle of the Internet, I can verify I had HACK, HECK, HICK on 11/26/07 and PACK, PECK, PICK on 8/25/08) so I recently submitted one with RACK, RECK, RICK. By bizarre coincidence, it was rejected This Morning, with a note saying the theme was ok, but the fill was a "total bore" (ouch!) and that I could try again if I'd like! Then I sit down to solve this puzzle, and it was that exact theme!!!!!!! And I mean, exact. Of five theme entries, 3.5 of mine were identical to Natan's: RACKETEER, RECKLESS, ROCK BAND (he had ROCK STAR), and RUCKSACKS! Only our middle entry was dissimilar … He has RICKROLLING and I had RICKEY HENDERSON (I thought that extra "e" in Rickey was a godsend, making his name a perfect 15 letters).

By the way, you MUST check out this video of Mr. Henderson's early-career "youthful indiscretion."

Gotcha! Now you know what RICKROLLING is! As the clue states, it's a 37A: Widespread Internet prank involving a bait-and-switch link to a music video. According to Wikipedia:

Rickrolling is an Internet meme typically involving the music video for the 1987 Rick Astley song "Never Gonna Give You Up." The meme is a bait and switch: a person provides a web link that he or she claims is relevant to the topic at hand, but the link actually takes the user to the Astley video. The URL can be masked or obfuscated in some manner so that the user cannot determine the true destination of the link without clicking. When a person clicks on the link and is led to the web page, he or she is said to have been "Rickrolled" (also spelled Rickroll'd).

So that is where Young Natan and I part company … and I have to admit, his fill was much better than mine could have ever been with stacks of six and seven letters running down along the sides.

My only trip up was starting to write PRIMPS for PREENS (10D: Prettifies oneself, as in a mirror) and having to leave 1A: Best-selling computer game of the 1990's (MYST) blank initially, which I hate doing, as I love to start at 1A and march across. But if you start with a computer word, I'm gonna think, "NEXT!" and move on. For those of you who, like me, were wondering what MYST is, here's a video that explains it:

HA! Gotcha again! Now you have been officially rickroll'd … twice!

But the computer game at 1A was hardly the only reference to that world. There were several other computer clues:

9A: Unwanted e-mail (SPAM)
29A: Computer whiz (TECHIE)
33A: Jobs at Apple (STEVE)
30D: "2001" computer (HAL)

I can only assume it was an intentional subtheme (as STEVE and HAL certainly could have been clued as "Comedian Harvey" and "Mark Twain portrayer actor Holbrook").

Ha! Got you again, that actually WAS Hal Holbrook as Mark Twain!

What else to say? I'm sure MR. BURNS (1D: Owner of the Springfield Nuclear Power Plant on "The Simpsons") was a shout-out to our own dear Rex, perhaps becoming Mr. Burns himself on some beach in Costa Rica. (Not to be confused with 52A: Caribbean vacation spot ARUBA.)

Crossing MYST with MR. BURNS was a tipoff that we were in Young Boy Country, but then we get 6D: "The ABA Daba Honeymoon" which was a popular song in 1914!!! Okay, it was actually a hit record by Debbie Reynolds in 1950, but I am guessing that precedes Young Natan by at least 40 years. Hell, I predate Young Natan by close to 30 years, and yet when I met this delightful boy genius at the ACPT last year, I had to quickly remind myself that if I said or did anything even mildly flirtatious, I would have been immediately arrested and carted away to Cougar Country.

Did you know that cougars and pumas are actually the same thing? What would Hillary have to say about that!? Oh, I almost forgot, here is "The Aba Daba Honeymoon."

Oh no! You didn't just fall for that again, did you?!!!!

Well, as for the real "ABA Daba..." (not to be confused with Fred Flintstone's 1964 hit "Yabba Dabba Do" or Dick Cheney's 2002 Hit "Abu Ghraib Blue"), I'll let Greene take it from here!

So Young Natan beat me to the punch with my own style of Monday puzzle. Lest you think (40D) "The lady doth protest too much, methinks" (GERTRUDE), I'll just say "Hootchy-Koo," and see you tomorrow!

But not before I leave you with one more video, this one from (54A) Mick Jagger and Bruce Springsteen: