THEME: HEAD FAKE (57A: Basketball feint ... or a hint to 17-, 24-, 36- and 46-Across?) — theme answers are fake parts of heads, clued with wacky "?" clues:
Theme answers:
GLASS EYE (17A: Socket replacement?)
DENTAL CROWN (24A: Canine covering?)
FALSE LASHES (36A: Batter's additions?)
POWDERED WIG (46A: Old rug in a courtroom?)
Word of the Day: Doctor DE SOTO (62A: Alliterative "Doctor" of children's literature) —
Doctor De Soto is a picture book for children written and illustrated by William Steig and first published in 1982. It features a mouse dentist who must help a fox with a toothache without being eaten.
Doctor De Soto was also recognized as a Newbery Honor Book. At 32 pages it is one of the shortest to be honored in that awards program. (wikipedia)
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Never warmed up to this one. If you describe the theme, maybe it sounds OK, but solving it was mostly unpleasant. The "?" clues were bizarre to me. There's no rhyme or reason to them. There's no pattern to the wordplay or phrasing. It's just "let's try to mask the answer a little, just to add some other level to the puzzle." Are the clues supposed to be another example of a "fake"? Like a "fake-out"? Like, "haha, you thought we were talking about pancake batter, but really it's an eyelash batter ... say TOUCHÉ now!" I dunno. The whole cluing logic was lost on me. And the DENTAL CROWN clue wasn't even a fake, really. Not sure it even needed a "?". The cluing phrases aren't good misdirection. They don't sound like actual things at all. [Socket replacement?] makes me think of ... nothing. [Old rug in a courtroom?] is just nonsense. It's like you had a potentially great revealer (HEADFAKE) and then didn't know what to do with it exactly and so ended up with this. Constructors, please take my HEADFAKE Revealer Challenge and make a better HEADFAKE-themed puzzle. I believe it's out there, the Platonic Ideal of the HEADFAKE puzzle. But this one just doesn't have the zip and zing and thoughtfulness it should. And the fill was truly grating in many places, from the "just 'cause it's in your enormous wordlist doesn't make it good" PIECEWISE to the "that's not an exclamation, that's a chemical formula, at best" WOAH, to the always unwelcome ETAIL sitting alongside the far more unwelcome NONPC (which somehow manages to be worse than UNPC, which is itself a bogus term used by bigots who mistakenly believe they are free-speech warriors whose truth-telling the libs just can't handle!). AS IF I CARE is original but it's also just not what people say. "SEE IF I CARE!" would be a Great phrase. "LIKE I CARE" is definitely in-the-language. AS IF I CARE ... sigh, sure, maybe some people say that, but when two better phrases come to mind, maybe your phrase isn't really the one you should be going with.
I had all my trouble in and around the latticework of PIECEWISE / WOAH / FALSE LASHES / LLC / ASIFICARE, which seems like a lot of trouble, but actually there were just pesky patches. Not sure why I can't keep my LTDs and LLCs straight, but here we are in 2021 and sadly I still can't. I think the "cousin" in 33D: Inc. cousin made me think, like, "your cousin overseas ... Ian ... the British cousin," and so I went with LTD ... which is, in fact, British Inc. (or so crossword clues have told me over the years ... so I guess I feel less bad about writing in LTD now. I just misunderstood the way "cousin" was being used. No other difficulties with the puzzle, just questions. Like, what the hell is up with DOOR ONE (38D: "Let's Make a Deal" choice). I really (really) feel like there should be a "number" between those two words. Google thinks same.
"Let's see what's behind DOOR *NUMBER* ONE" is how I remember the phrasing (from back when I occasionally watched that show, which was when I was a child, which feels like the show's intended audience, but what do I know). The most puzzling answer of all, though, was COARSE. How ... how is the answer here not HOARSE (53A: Roughly speaking?)!?!?!?! I don't associate COARSE with "speaking" at all, but HOARSE, wow perfect. The phrase "roughly speaking" suggests approximation, but you turn it around via the "?" clue and give us an answer that means "speaking roughly," great! But that answer should be HOARSE, which literally means "(of a person's voice) sounding rough or harsh" (Google/Oxford Languages) (my emph.). COARSE is wrong here. Bad. Flat-out ... just no.
I was stunned to learn that Doctor DE SOTO was famous enough to warrant crossword inclusion (62A: Alliterative "Doctor" of children's literature). Pleasantly stunned. When DOOLITTLE obviously wasn't going to fit, I was stuck, but when DE SOTO came into view, I was reminded of reading that book to my daughter a lot when *she* was a child. I'd forgotten that Doctor DE SOTO was a William Steig creation. Man, that guy couldn't miss. Hey, why is "Doctor" in quotation marks in this clue? That mouse is a Doctor of Vulpine Dentistry, show him some respect! Anyway, to sum up, Doctor DE SOTO, D.V.D., good, the rest of this puzzle, pass. Thanks for listening, bye.
A long time ago, I was solving this puzzle and got stuck at an unguessable (to me) crossing: N. C. WYETH crossing NATICK at the "N"—I knew WYETH but forgot his initials, and NATICK ... is a suburb of Boston that I had no hope of knowing. It was clued as someplace the Boston Marathon runs through (???). Anyway, NATICK— the more obscure name in that crossing—became shorthand for an unguessable cross, esp. where the cross involves two proper nouns, neither of which is exceedingly well known. NATICK took hold as crossword slang, and the term can now be both noun ("I had a NATICK in the SW corner...") or verb ("I got NATICKED by 50A / 34D!")
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