SATURDAY, Apr. 28, 2007 - Sherry O. Blackard

Relative difficulty: Easy to Medium

THEME: nope

There are many surprising aspects to this puzzle.

Returning Obscurities

15A: Cosmetics dye: Var. (eosine)
41D: Russia's Rostov, e.g. (oblast)

OBLAST was in the puzzle just last week - I know because I blogged it after it came from outer space to wreak havoc on my world. O-BLAST will be the first superpower I give my as yet uncreated superhero avatar. EOSINE ... I know I've seen it recently. It was in the NE of some puzzle, and I had to guess at the "S." I was prepared for both of these jerks. It's always nice not to get bitten twice.

Pantheonic Words Aplenty

Since when is this much crosswordese allowed admission to the Saturday puzzle? I'd expect maybe one little word - something that couldn't quite be avoided, clued in an insane way so as to hide its commonness, like a zit under concealing powder. But here, we're not talking one zit - we're talking a full-on breakout, and all the genius cluing in the world couldn't hide it if it tried. First there are successive Pantheon members of the Highest Order:

• 23A: Louvre Pyramid designer (Pei) - the very first entry I ever wrote, way back on September 25, included a write-up of this guy and his Louvriciousness. He is A-List Pantheon material (though I currently have him as C-List ... that will have to change).
• 24A: First name in courtroom drama (Erle) - little harder to see than PEI, but one of the few proper nouns that is actually more Pantheonic than Pei. Possibly the most Pantheonic proper noun (and yet ... he is not in the Pantheon! Massive oversight. That will have to change).

In addition to these two chums, there is the near-Pantheon TYPE-A (37A: Far from laid-back), the surprisingly widespread ESTERS (44D: Lactates, e.g.) and then, with ESTERS, two more lackluster entries in the SE that you could have filled in in their entireties with only the gimme letters from "Wheel of Fortune" (R, L, S, T, N and E): 56A: Secondary (lesser) and 58A: Joins (enters). Ugh, I just noticed that TYPE-A intersects STEREOTYPE (8D: Cast in a certain role) at the "P" - ugly.

General Lack of Scrabbliness

Just look at how many sizeable answers are overwhelmingly "WOF" (new word for a word that can be completely deciphered from the aforementioned "Wheel of Fortune" letters):

• 7A: Gauged (assessed)
• 14D: Something a loser may skip (dessert) - that "loser" bit is a bush-league attempt at a fake-out
• 6D: Catfish Row in "Porgy and Bess," e.g. (tenement) - really like the clue, though
• 35D: Feeler (tentacle) - also a virtual gimme
• 28D: Victorious soldier in May 1775 (Ethan Allen) - super-easy to guess with just the first couple letters in place, but goes nicely with the other Revolutionary-era clue in the puzzle (and also one of the randomest partials ever), 7D: "What _____ of the face is here!": Thomas Paine, "Common Sense" ("a slap")
  

Now I realize that RLSTNE are perfectly good letters, and I'm not suggesting in any way that they are to be especially avoided. But, when they take over the grid like kudzu ... especially on a Saturday ... well, I think you have a problem.

A 13-Letter Gimme

Today's IDENTITY THEFT (32A: Wallet loser's concern) is possibly the longest straight-up gimme I've ever encountered. It must surely be the very first phrase that pops into most folk's minds upon reading the clue, and it fits, and it's the most crucial answer in terms of giving you access to all parts of the puzzle. I love the phrase here, but it needed to be clued at a higher level of difficulty.

The Rest

I enjoyed the intersection of 34D: Sommer of "The Prize" (Elke) and 45A: Three-time speed skating gold medalist Karin (Enke) because, together, their names sound like the title of a comic strip about a couple of precocious and possibly super-powered children who fight evil-doers somewhere in Germany. TRIVET (1A: Table saver) is a nice, semi-unusual word I haven't seen in the grid lately, if ever. Sadistic constructors who want to use TRIVET in the future might think of cluing it via Nicholas TRIVET, a prolific and important (though now barely known) scholar and chronicle-writer of early 14th-century England. DPS (21A: Twin killings, in baseball: Abbr.) was a gimme (short for "double plays"), and the first thing I entered in the grid. Don't know if the Red Sox turned any DPS in their demolition of the Yankees last night. I'll have to check. INUIT (29A: Language from which "kayak" comes) was yet another gimme in this puzzle, bringing the total now up to something like half a dozen! 54A: Lévi-Strauss of France (Claude) - yet another gimme, especially for those who have gone to graduate school in the humanities or social sciences since 1980.

For all my grousing about the puzzle, it does have some admirable features. First, I learned a new word in ISOGON (3D: Rectangle or square) - so much prettier than yesterday's math-related ADDENDS. I may have seen TABLAS (48A: They may accompany sitars) before, but if so, I forgot it, and had to make an educated guess as to that second "A" - where TABLAS crossed the unknown (to me) Harry LAUDER (43D: Knighted Scottish singer Harry). I figured LAUDER was more likely than LEUDER or LOUDER, etc. Thanks to ESTEE LAUDER for establishing name precedent. Don't even know who Little Nell is, let alone that her last name is TRENT (31A: Last name of Dickens's Little Nell), but this clue is better than [Council of _____]. I would also have accepted [QB Green].

Two great female figures of pop culture make appearances today in ROWENA Ravenclaw (2D: Miss Ravenclaw, who co-founded Hogwarts School) and EVE ARDEN (55A: Player of Principal McGee in "Grease"). We have just begun reading the Harry Potter books to our 6-year-old at bedtime and she is intrigued, if somewhat worried that things will get excessively scary at any second. And long-time readers of the blog will know my affection for all things "Grease" (the 1978 movie, that is), mostly having to do with my life-long crush on Good Sandy (not the leathered tart at the end of the movie). 50D: Early copter (giro) looks odd - that "I" really wants to be a "Y." My favorite word in the puzzle just may be DICKERED (33D: Did some horse trading) - there's something pleasingly old-fashioned about it. Lastly, there are two very cute "?" clues: 42D: Top of a closet? (blouse) and 32D: Cry after falling hard? ("I'm in love!"). I'll leave you on that ecstatic note. Enjoy this spring Saturday, even if it's gloomy and rainy like it is here.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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SATURDAY, April 14, 2007 - Sherry O. Blackard

Relative difficulty: Easy

THEME: none

Buenos días. Just got up after traveling all day yesterday, so don't expect much. Flew Cancun to Philadelphia to Syracuse, and after it looked for a bit like we were going to be so delayed in Cancun that we'd miss our connecting flight, miraculously (in a way I've never seen in the States), the stated 1hr+ delay evaporated and we left only a little late and actually got into Philadelphia early. I spent most of the day as I did most of my days in Mexico - nose-deep in Maura Jacobson puzzles (from her New York Magazine puzzle omnibus #1), devouring Sunday-sized puzzle after Sunday-sized puzzle. Jacobson's puzzles are fun, and good vacation fare: reasonably easy (so you can do them while half-drunk and mildly sun-addled), but with lots of little thorny parts that seem to come out of nowhere and bite you, so you won't get bored. I should get to today's puzzle ... I'll provide more details of my trip as they seem relevant. And I will definitely write a mini-essay on in-flight crosswords, sudoku, and other puzzles in the coming week some time.

I like that on my first day back on blogging patrol, I get a puzzle by the author whose name is most pirate-like. Having just returned from the Caribbean, the coincidence seems appropriate. The Caribbean had pirates once, right? It has parrots, that's for sure - and whose shoulders would parrots sit on if not pirates'? Hey, "parrots" and "pirates" ... sound alike ... OK I'm clearly out of practice at this witty observation thing. I'm sure things will improve.

You all seem to have enjoyed yourselves while I was gone. I hope it was fun, because my second reign of tyranny begins ... now.

1A: Dessert preference (à la mode)
4D: Kids' concoctions (mud pies)

Nice intersection here in the NW. I prefer my pie with whipped cream, not ice cream. I ate so much pie in Mexico that I don't even like to think about it. My gigantor family was at one of those all-inclusive resort-type dealies where food is just ... there. As much as you want of an insane variety of foods, three times a day. I am a bit heavier than when I left, and if it hadn't been for pilates classes every morning and yoga classes every afternoon, I'd be another 5-10 pounds heavier, easy. No MUD PIES, though the kids did do a lot of sand piling, and some of the desserts I didn't eat sure looked liked MUD PIES, though in a few cases I would substitute a far grosser word for mud. I didn't eat those.

14A: They're clean (non-users)
17A: Proof provider (acid test)

Another nice NW juxtaposition. Presumably NON-USERS would pass an ACID TEST if what they were Not Using was Acid.

19A: Spa employee, generally speaking (pamperer)

I got to know one spa employee in Cancun very intimately. His name was Fabian. My stepmom booked massages for the whole family the first day we were there, and though my wife, who loves me and knows what I like, was present for the booking, I still somehow ended up getting massaged by a man. Now everyone who reads this blog knows by now that it's very pro-gay and occasionally even flaming. That said, aside from occasionally hugging male relatives, I have zero experience being touched pleasurably by a dude. So there was mild trepidation. But in the end (!), my brother-in-law and I agreed, if Fabian wanted to touch us like that again, we would not be likely to say 'no.' He PAMPERED me good. The worst part was being face down for so long - the pressure on my forehead from the horrid face-hole became quite painful by the time it came time for me to turn over. The best part was lying there on my back at the end with a towel overy my face in utter quiet, and then suddenly hearing, Right By My Ear, in an alarmingly sexy and heavily accented whisper: "we are finished." I left money on the bedside table. Seriously.

20A: So-so series (octave)

A very, very nice misdirective clue. I was thinking "last year's World Series?" but no. "So" = a note on the scale, with "So-so" being G to G on a C Major scale (I think).

49A: Need for a quiet report? (silencer)

Great Clue, Deadly Clue.

21A: Benjamin's love in "The Graduate" (Elaine)

It helps that Dustin Hoffman literally shouts this name, repeatedly, in the movie's climactic scene (pounding on the glass wall looking down on the altar in the church where Elaine is about to marry someone else). A true gimme for anyone who's ever seen the (fantastic) movie, this answer was the very first thing I entered in the grid.

1D: Like some poetic feet (anapestic)

NOW we're talking. It's about time some of the non-iambic feet got some action. An ANAPEST is unstressed-unstressed-stressed, like the beginning of the theme from Rossini's William Tell Overture (or the word "seventeen"). ANAPESTIC is a great word, reminding me for some reason of both snakes and disease (see also SEPSIS - 42A: Toxic condition).

5D: Belgian port (Ostend)

I have to admit, I guess, to never having heard of this place before. It was the one true mystery answer in the whole grid (most of which was filled with common words, terms, and phrases). Belgium is probably the European country I understand least well of all.

7D: It's spoken in Stornoway (Erse)

"Stornoway" sounds Irish. Nope, Scottish. Sorry, Scotland - I know how you hate that Irish-Scottish confusion thing ... Holy Mother of Pearl - Stornoway is way the hell and gone out on the island of Lewis in the far NW of Scotland ("Outer Hebrides"). I've never gotten north of Aberdeen, myself. ERSE = Gaelic, in case you were wondering. Great, old-skool xword fill, like ESNE or ADIT.

8D: Classic novel with the heroine Alexandra Bergson ("O Pioneers")

A Willa Cather novel I've never read (making it like every other Willa Cather novel except "Death Comes for the Archbishop"). This one took me too long because I kept misreading the ending as -NERS instead of -NEERS, making me think only of "DubliNERS," which had to be wrong. And was.

9D: Novel price, way back when (ten cents)

Since I'm a big fan of disposable fiction, you'd think I'd like a reference to the dime novel, and yet somehow the phrasing on the clue and the wording of the answer both bother me. "Way back when"??? What the hell kind of vague, folksy cluing idiom is that? WHEN is right. WHEN? The turn of the 20th century is hardly "Way Back" in the scope of time, or even in the history of the novel as a genre. Plus, the phrase was never the "Ten Cent Novel" - it was the "Dime Novel." So I'm oddly disappointed.

15D: Rulers (straight edges)

I was very proud for getting this off of just the STR- and thus breaking the puzzle wide open. But then I immediately had this eerie sense of déjà vu, like I had seen this exact clue / answer pairing, possibly in this very same puzzle position, before. This took some of my elation away. If any of you had the same experience, please let me know.

27D: Gilda's father, in opera (Rigoletto)

There was no way in hell I was getting this based on any info in the clue besides "opera" - RIGOLETTO is one of those names floating around in my head for unknown reasons, so once I had a few crosses, it seemed a good enough guess, so I went with it, and ta da!

32D: Sinatra or Capra (Sicilian)

Whoa. Didn't see that coming. Is this by blood or by birth? Or both? Well, Sinatra was born in Hoboken, so I guess that answers that.

36D: "Fanfare for the Common Man" composer (Copland)

Like ELAINE, this one was a gimme, even though I've never heard (to my knowledge) "Fanfare for the Common Man" - I saw a great performance of "Appalachian Spring" performed by the Cayuga Chamber Orchestra the night Pope John Paul II died (total coincidence - just memorable is all). This puzzle ended up having a lot more musical answers than I'd noticed in my initial perusal of the finished grid. I might have delineated a kind of subtheme if I'd been observant enough. But I'm happy enough with this entry, for a first entry after vacation. Two complaints. The Rex Parker Variant Rule = only one "Var." clue per puzzle. This puzzle has two. So, frowny face. Also, this puzzle has a ridiculous number of ODD JOBS (i.e. nouns ending in -ER):

NON-USERS
PAMPERER
ANIMATERS (doubly offensive, as it's also a "Var." - 3D: Producers of some shorts: Var.)
REGRETTERS (27A: They'd like to take things back)
SIGHERS (32A: Some relieved people)
RECTIFIER (29D: Device for converting alternating current into direct current)
SILENCER
SENDERS (51A: Things are often returned to them)

Other than that, a nice, relatively easy way to ease my way back into blogging. I want to thank all my guest bloggers - Robert Loy, Colman deKay, Linda G, Howard Barkin, and Dave Sullivan - for their inspired, unpaid labor. I am most grateful, as are many readers, I'm sure.

See you tomorrow.

Signed (once again), Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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FRIDAY, Jan. 12, 2007 - Sherry O. Blackard

Solving time: 2:31!!! (just kidding - somewhere in the 10-15 minute range?)

THEME: A Night At The Opera (or, none)

I tend not to solve puzzles on the applet on Thursday and Friday nights. In general, I don't function well, mentally, after 10pm, so the whole release-time of the puzzles is a drag (I like to be in bed at 10pm - I would be So Thrilled if the Times could push back the release time even one hour, hint hint, wink wink, elbow elbow, nudge nudge). And since Friday and Saturday puzzles can be terrors, I like to take them to bed and work on them there, mainly because I don't like the idea of gnashing my teeth in my (home) office as time ticks by and my prospective sleep time gets shorter and shorter. It's also a nice way to relax and Enjoy the late-week puzzles, which tend to be worth enjoying. That said, I really really wish I had solved this on the applet, as I think my time would have been superfast (for me). I don't push forward quickly when I solve in bed. If I had been pushing, I'm sure I could have done this puzzle in under 10. It was delightful, but not hard. Very much on the easy side for a Friday. I'm going to type my grid into the applet just to double check that everything's right. So if you see my time there, and it seems super-fast, remember that it's fake. Admittedly fake (actually, I submitted the grid at just under 10 minutes, which may be wishful thinking, but it's not Terribly fake).

This puzzle looks daunting, with its 3 stacks of 3 fifteen-letter answers, and then another 15-letter answer cutting straight down through the grid - so much white space to fill in. But these types of puzzles don't give me nearly as much trouble as the ones with all the nooks and crannies that are hard to work your way into; plus, you can often get a 15-letter answer off of just 3 or 4 consecutive letters, which tends to open the whole grid right up. These kinds of puzzle seem like they are much harder on an a constructing scale than a solving one.

7D: Where "Otello" premiered (Milan)
24A: Verdi's "Un _____ in Maschera" (ballo)
57A: Longtime La Scala conductor (Arturo Toscanini)
49D: Cabriole performer's wear (tutu)


OPERA! OK, that last one is ballet, but still, it's in the musical performance realm. Some interesting things about this set of clues/answers: I was very proud of getting BALLO (not knowing Italian and never having heard of the Verdi work in question) with just one or two letters. The word, which means "dance" or "ball," is memorable to me because I publicly destroyed the Spanish version of the word ("baile") in a crime fiction course I was teaching once by repeatedly pronouncing the word like the English "bale" (it's properly pronounced something like "bye'-yay"). There was a chapter in Dorothy Hughes's Ride the Pink Horse that was titled "Baile," I believe - the whole novel was set in a U.S. border town - and after I had mauled the word a few times, a student politely if vaguely contemptuously corrected me. Memo to would-be teachers and other people who get caught out publicly in a massive error - admit your mistake good-naturedly and then move on. Do not engage in self-flagellation, do not get defensive or flustered. Laugh at your mistake and then plow forward as if your manifest ignorance were in fact no big deal. I've drifted away from the puzzle.

Oh, another thing: I got ARTURO TOSCANINI and one of his long parallel counterparts down there, 61A: Summer resort area famous for recreational boating (Thousand Islands), without ever seeing the clue(s). I was fortunate enough to somehow get 60A: It can take a lot of heat (cast-iron skillet) very quickly, and then I did some Downs (starting with the semi-gimme 43D: Grammy-winning Jones (Norah)), and by the time I looked back at those long crosses, they just sort of filled themselves in. I love that CAST-IRON SKILLET sits right underneath ARTURO TOSCANINI. Why? Well, look closely - ARTURO TOSCANINI is actually an anagram of CAST-IRON ... well, not SKILLET, but ... well, the following:

• CAST-IRON IRON TAU
• CAST-IRON RAIN-OUT
• CAST-IRON RIO TUNA
• IN A CAST-IRON ROUT
• I OUTRAN CAST-IRON
• CAST-IRON I.O.U. RANT
• CAST-IRON OAT RUIN
• AIN'T OUR CAST IRON?
• CAST-IRON U.N. RATIO

... and such-'n'-such.

3D: "Do the Right Thing" pizzeria (Sal's)
18A: Old roadside name (Esso)

Gimme both of these! Especially the first, as I love that movie and have seen it many, many times. "Roadside name" = ESSO. Pure and simple. These answers were my first toehold in the puzzle. Didn't know the Jackie Wilson song (1D: "Am _____ Man" (1960 Jackie Wilson hit) [I the]) - wanted I YER or I HER, but once I got I THE, those 15-letter crosses came very quickly - first to go: 17A: Be in a very advantageous position (hold all the cards) - wanted IN THE CATBIRD SEAT, but it's too long and, well, just wrong. Slowed up a bit in the far NE, where SIRUP (13D: Some cough medicine: Var.) is spelled ridiculously and I forgot that eBay does things on Pacific and not Eastern time (23A: Deadlines on eBay are given in it: Abbr. (PST)).

Ridiculous Fill

OK, my first thought is that architecturally insane puzzles like this are Bound to have some ridiculous fill - how else are you gonna coordinate this many abutting (and intersecting!) 15-letter answers? So, I'm not faulting the puzzle - just pointing out the groaners that went into its making. It was worth it.

• 10D: Hot (ired) - this word is not a word until you add an "F" to its front end
• 31D: Transfuse (endue) - where you don't want to step at the dog park
• 2D: Cramped urban accommodations, for short (SRO's) - SRO is perfectly good, even Pantheonic, fill but this clue is misdirective in a very forced way. TTH! (Trying Too Hard) [I take it all back - I misunderstood meaning of SRO, thinking it short for "Standing Room Only" (theater sign), when here it refers to "Single-Room Occupancies," which are indeed "Cramped urban accommodations"]
  
• 22D: Falling-out (set-to) - ordinary fill, but the clue suggests not speaking to one another, while the answer suggests a rumble à la Jets and Sharks, as in "I SET my knife TO his throat, Maria!"

Is that it? It is - man, that's hardly any iffiness at all. Very, very impressive.

26D: Actor who roared to fame? (Lahr)

What's (not so) hilarious about this is that the last time he showed up in a puzzle, I wrote about how I can never remember his name, how I know it ends in -HR but I always want BEHR or BAHR, etc. And yet I still haven't learned my lesson, clearly, as I blanked on his name again. There is a movie that this used to happen with ALL the time when I was in grad school. I would challenge myself to remember its name, and yet never, NEVER, could I remember it. In fact, I'm only typing right now as a stall to give myself time to remember the name of the movie I'm talking about, because it's gone yet again. Want to say Living in Oblivion, but that's not it. It had Lily Tomlin and Ben Stiller in it and maybe ... what's her name who "stars" in the TV "hit" "Medium" ... nope, had to look it up: Flirting with Disaster. I guarantee you that I will forget this movie's name again by tomorrow. Why is Living in Oblivion so much easier to remember? - maybe because it's both less clichéd as a phrase and a better movie. LAHR, why won't you stay in my head, you lovable lion!

35D: Village, in Würzburg (dorf)
36D: Tennis star _____ (Anke)
37D: It flows in Flanders (Yser)

Behold, Western Europe in the far eastern portion of the puzzle! There is something to love in each of these answers. Dorf. Dorf! I got this only because of Düsseldorf, which I assume is a "village" in Germany or its environs. The only Dorf I know (you can see where this is going, right? ...) is a golf instructor.


Don't know what part of my brain ANKE Huber was hiding in - I initially spelled her ANKA, but that's pretty damned close for a first guess with no crosses. I'm not sure "star" adequately describes Ms. Huber, though her mom might disagree. When I read the clue [It flows in Flanders], I wanted to shout, "The blood of a true Christian!?"

Final Thoughts

You gotta love the NYT puzzle - where else is Verdi gonna rub elbows with "F Troop" (39A: "F Troop" role (Sergeant O'Rourke))? 21A: Physics units (dynes) might be a little tricky / arcane, but its pretty crossword-common and, as I've said before, I got an A+ in Physics in college, so the vocabulary has stuck around a bit, if the actual concepts / definitions / real knowledge hasn't. See also 34D: Kidney secretion (renin), which is from some long, lost bio class. With HONORS (30D: It's good to graduate with them) is an abominable Joe Pesci vehicle (redundant?) that I was stupid enough to watch on a mid-90s plane trip. Andrew can tell you how great its Madonna theme song was, though, I'm sure. Andrew does not live IN L.A. (53D: On Wilshire Blvd., say) but he sure lives near it. DOG LEG (21D: Sharp turn) is a word whose etymology I am totally going to look up later this week (when will my unabridged dictionary finally get here?!). I guess a dog's leg does have that pointy, reverse knee thing going on. I once co-taught a class with a short man, and as I am a tall man, some of the students took (very carefully and with much good humor) to calling us Mario and LUIGI (27D: Brother of Nintendo's Mario). I ... forget which one I was. From this pic, apparently LUIGI. I initially wrote in TNT for 42A: Old cable inits. (TNN), but AT THE LAST SECOND (8D: Almost too late), I realized my error and fixed it.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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SATURDAY, Nov. 25, 2006 - Sherry O. Blackard

Solving time: 16:54

THEME: none

Spending bulk of the day in Ithaca - with pre-birthday lunch @ Olivia's and birthday dessert pick-up @ Sarah's Patisserie - so this entry will be brief. In case I run out of time and have to cut the entry shorter than I would like, I want to say straight off that I loved this puzzle. The best Saturday puzzle not authored by someone named Quarfoot that I've seen in recent months - and I have generally been very fond of all the Saturdays. Who is this Sherry O. Blackard? Her last name suggests a cruel, callous person (or a musician who plays with Joan Jett), but I felt nothing but sweet love while solving this puzzle. Usually the love feeling comes after, but I knew in the middle of solving it that this puzzle was something special. It's true that I got the 15-letter fill very quickly, with very few crosses, but relative speed of solving has little to do with my pleasure here. Answers were tricky in that they were clever, not (especially) obscure, though I did learn a couple of new terms. Ultimately, this puzzle did what the ideal Saturday puzzle should do: make me work, but make the work entertaining. I want to sweat like the souls in Purgatorio sweat - knowing they're going somewhere good in the end, no matter how long it takes. I don't want to sweat like an ESNE - breaking my back with no promise of joy or release, and with only a silly name as my reward. There was so much A- and B-grade pop culture knowledge (e.g. 59A: 1979 #1 song with the chorus line "Turn the other way" (Sad Eyes)), and so much cool colloquialism (e.g. 33A: Claims (has dibs on)), afoot in this puzzle that the whole thing felt like a (pre-)birthday gift, written just for me, and even though it wasn't, I'm thankful.

Writing this blog has been totally worth all my time and effort if only for the vast improvement that I have seen in the quality of the greeting cards I receive from family. It's as if, by writing, I have given my family a better sense of who I am (never been terribly outgoing - "introverted" is the polite term, though "surly" is my sister's term of choice), and so the birthday cards feel like they were selected just for me instead of for "generic male relative number 5." Birthday cards from family are generally very bland, tepid affairs - nice, thoughtful, but not especially memorable in and of themselves. Yesterday, however, I got two birthday cards in the mail (one from my aunt, one from my grandma) that made me laugh out loud. Two! What are the odds? First, from my grandma, a card that features three of my greatest loves: irony, revenge, and rainbow-colored mobs:Sahra, who is six and had a princess piñata at her birthday party, loved this picture and read it out loud over and over, with increasingly professional inflection in her voice. The second card was from my aunt Nancy, and, well, it doesn't really need explanation:How Nancy managed to travel into the future to get a photo of me on my 65th birthday, I'll never know. The card came with an enclosed check, making my aunt this show's first official underwriter, god bless her.

1A: See people (bishops)

Thought about it for a few seconds, and then got it. Always nice to nail 1A right off the bat. This enabled me to get 2D: Staff-produced (in-house) with just the "I," and though I had both 1D and 3D wrong initially - thought 1D: Novelty race vehicle (bath tub) had something to do with beds and was ever surer that 3D: Prepared for bad news, say (steeled) was SAT DOWN - I quickly surmised the 1970 B.B. King hit that cut across the entire top half of the puzzle ("THE THRILL IS GONE"), and then the Down clues began to fall quickly.

8A: Like Baylor University (Baptist)
16A: Either of two track stars (Al Unser)

Strange that these two are in the Northeast, because they reek of the South. As for Baylor, knew the answer was some Christian denomination, and for some reason BAPTIST would not come into view. I had LUTHERAN, METHODIST ... but no BAPTIST. As for the UNSERs, that clue is rough, both because "track stars" suggests runners, not auto racers, and because the "two" part is a bit cryptic. Must be something to do with a family name, but nothing about the clue says "family," explicitly. Throw in the fact that you end up getting a full name, not the more typical last name only, and a perfectly ordinary answer like ALUNSER becomes very hard to find indeed. Thank god for my nerdy friends, who unknowingly helped me get the short but useful 11D: "Star Trek" series preceding "Voyager," for short (TNG), which helped me begin to crack the BAPTIST / ALUNSER code.

22A: English agriculturist and inventor (Tull)

First, "agriculturist?" I would have said "agriculturAList" (in the imaginary world wherein I have occasion to speak of such things). Who is this guy? Let's see... O My God it's JETHRO TULL, after whom that crazy flute-music prog rock band must have been named. The 18th-century inventor referred to in this clue is one of a long line of people who invented an efficient machine (in this case, a sowing machine) to do the work of laborers he resented having to pay. In your face, laborers!

35A: Faux family name in rock and roll (Ramone)
56A: Destroyed little by little (ate into)

These answers have a lot in common, though they may not seem alike on their surfaces. First, I got tricked by both clues and entered wrong answers. I wanted 35A to have something to do with Sly and the Family STONE (had the -ONE part), even though STONE was one letter short. With 56A, I confidently entered ATE AWAY. Wrong. Trappy. Tough but fair. Both these clues/answers have a certain horror-movie quality to them. If you have ever seen pictures of Joey RAMONE (or any of them, really), then you know it's not a stretch to imagine him as some kind of zombie or other kind of monster whose flesh has somehow been EATEN INTO. Vivid yet horrifically pallid fill that reminds me simultaneously of Dawn of the Dead and Rock 'n' Roll High School.

46A: Actress Lords (Traci)
57A: Galley of yore (trireme)

OK, these answers - even more apparently dissimilar than the RAMONE / ATE INTO answers - have things in common as well. First, they alliterate. Second, I love them both, in very different ways. Ms. Blackard was very kind not to put quotation marks around "Actress" in the TRACI Lords clue, or to add "Porn" to the beginning of the clue. TRACI Lords was an underage porn star (!) who went on to a campy career in both non-porn film - beginning with the John Waters-directed Johnny Depp vehicle Cry Baby - and pop music, wherein I get her confused with Samantha Fox. Apparently her 1995 album "1000 Fires" was not as bad as I think it was. Reader Andrew will likely chime in on this matter shortly. TRIREME is one of those great words you learn in one of only two ways: reading Homer or doing crosswords. I enjoy both. Lucky me. Thanks again, Sherry O'Blackheart!

Signed, Rex Parker, King of Crossworld

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