French wave / SUN 12-2-12 / Small rented farms in Britain / Woodcutter of legend / 1957 #1 R&B hit for Chuck Willis / Nuuanu Pali Lookout locale / 11th century king of Denmark / Belarus neighbor

Constructor: Steven E. Atwood

Relative difficulty: Medium

THEME: "Lo and Behold" — "LO" is added to familiar phrases, creating wacky phrases, which are clued "?"-style

Word of the Day: Clive BARNES (11D: Critic Clive) —

Clive Alexander Barnes CBE (May 13, 1927 – November 19, 2008) was a British-born American writer and critic. From 1965 to 1977 he was the dance and theater critic for the New York Times, the most powerful position he had held, since its theater critics' reviews historically have had great influence on the success or failure of Broadway productions. (wikipedia)

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A simple theme that yields pretty decent results. Lots of white space meant lots of 7+-letter answers meant a Sunday puzzle that felt a little tougher than usual. Some of the LO-answers were easy to come up with (e.g. LOIN JOKE), others took some effort (e.g. GLOAMING TABLE). A puzzle with some teeth that is mostly clean in terms of fill—that's enough to make me happy most Sundays, including today.

Only a few unappealing areas. Don't like A BUST and A PEST, especially so close to each other. The SE corner, with its IDAS / DSCS / SYNS mash-up, is awfully ugly. AS FAR / AME / SHAR isn't much better. I'm surprised at the foreign words required today—neither PUER not ONDE (31A: French wave) strikes me as something your average, or even your reasonably well-educated, solver would/should know (I knew both, but I also have a Ph.D. in medieval literature, so I oughta know both). Otherwise, I got nothing to fault this puzzle for. Had trouble putting together longer stuff like FOLK HERO and LIVORNO (42A: Italian port on the Tyrrhenian Sea) early on. Had no idea ALI BABA cut wood (20A: Woodcutter of legend). Was sure that the "Facebook" part of the clue at 5A: A pop group might have one on Facebook indicated something internet-specific, namely FAN PAGE. Later, FAN SITE. But no ... it's just a FAN CLUB. Don't like the disingenuousness of that clue, then, I guess, but again, that's a pretty minor quibble. None of the theme answers really tickled my funny bone except LOIN JOKE, though I do like the idea of FLOAT TUESDAY. I would participate in that particular celebration, with pleasure.


Just a few missteps and struggles. At first, I thought 1D: Loan figs. (PCTS) were APRS (?) and, as a result, that 19A: Head of a family (CAPO) was PAPA. Never heard of the place in the clue for OAHU, but it seemed Hawaiian, and in four letters, it's almost always gonna be OAHU or MAUI  ... maybe HILO. LATVIA (9D: Belarus neighbor) was hard to see because of my FAN PAGE and FAN SITE errors. "C.C. RIDER" is always a tricky one to uncover (14D: 1957 #1 R&B hit for Chuck Willis). Maybe I should remember to associate it with this Chuck Willis guy I've never heard of. Needed almost every letter to get AKRON, which is just embarrassing. Less embarrassing is not being able to come up with CROFTS (95D: Small rented farms, in Britain). Not a lot of small rented British farms around these parts.


Theme answers:

• 23A: Consideration in choosing a deli? (THE LOX FACTOR)
• 28A: Part of a butcher's stand-up routine? (LOIN JOKE)
• 35A: Laundry basket of just colors or just whites? (CLASSIFIED LOAD) — I don't think I quite get the "classified" here. [Top secret] would've hit the "classified" part more clearly (and entertainingly)
• 46A: Wise lawmaker most likely to be re-elected? (FAVORITE SOLON)
• 61A: Artistic expression on the slopes? (SLALOM DANCING)
• 67A: Causing Election delays? (SLOWING VOTERS)
• 84A: Chart indicating the progression of darkness after sunset? (GLOAMING TABLE)
• 93A: Power in Hollywood? (DIRECTOR'S CLOUT)
• 103A: Paintball weapons? (BLOB GUNS)
• 113A: When there might be a two-for-one special on ice cream drinks? (FLOAT TUESDAY)

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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Pile of glacial debris / THU 3-1-12 / Kansas mil. post built in 1853 / Fly-catching birds / Peer of Ellington / Native parka wearer / Like unlucky encierro participant / Fish of genus Moringua

Constructor: Steven E. Atwood

Relative difficulty: Challenging

 THEME: AFFIX (1A: Add-on to the start or end of a word stem (as in 17-, 25-, 35-, 49- and 57-Across) — theme answers are imaginary portmanteau words combining two words with the same "word stem," i.e. "proverb" + "verbiage" = PROVERBIAGE. Etc.

Word of the Day: MORAINE (30A: Pile of glacial debris) —

n.
An accumulation of boulders, stones, or other debris carried and deposited by a glacier.

[French, from French dialectal morena, mound of earth, from Provençal morre, muzzle, from Vulgar Latin *murrum.]

Read more: http://www.answers.com/topic/moraine#ixzz1npdZDFzg

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Found this confusing and slightly awkward, starting with 1-Across. I had no idea AFFIX was a noun, presumably referring to either a prefix or a suffix (?). "Hey, nice AFFIX," he hollered. Doesn't sound right. But it's a word, alright. Plus the clue was so convoluted that it was essentially useless as a key to understanding the theme. I eventually saw that the answers were two words smushed together, so I just went with that. Theme answers thereafter weren't that hard to get (except PERSISTERLY ... the "sister" part was easy, but then there were these extra spaces ...). What was hard was the fill. I got hung up all over the place, both with odd words (FT. RILEY? MORAINE? PHOEBES?) (2D: Kansas mil. post built in 1853 + 30A: Pile of glacial debris + 46A: Fly-catching birds) and non-words (TYGER) (31A: When repeated, words before "burning bright" to start a William Blake poem) as well as barely-words (GERMIER) (43D: More likely to make you sick, say) (I had GROSSER and then WORMIER) and ambiguously-clued words (ROUTS) (51D: Runaways). This is the kind of theme that you could replicate indefinitely, right? Why not a Sunday? Pays (much) better.



Theme answers:

• 17A: Unnecessary words cluttering wise sayings? (PROVERBIAGE)
• 25A: Threat in "Armageddon"? (DISASTEROID) — a little spot-on
• 35A: Good place for a picnic? (REPASTURE)
• 49A: Like a tenacious sibling? (PERSISTERLY)
• 57A: "We've taken the city, but can we defend it?"? (CONQUESTION) — shouldn't this clue have an "e.g." after it. Otherwise, the grammatical equivalency required in the clue/answer relationship is shot. Technically, cluing on TYGER is also grammatically screwed— "When repeated" has to modify something ... and it can't be "words" ... Why not [Word repeated before "burning bright" at the start of a William Blake poem]?
  

Some of the difficulty today came through genuinely clever cluing. I was baffled by 11A: Players who spend most of their time on the bench, briefly (DHS), probably because no one would refer to a DH as "on the bench"; that phrase specifically means "not in the game." But here, it's literal, so ... OK. Also flummoxed by 15A: Peer of Ellington (BASIE), with "Peer" making me think British peerage, as I'm sure it was supposed to. I was lucky enough to know the STORK Club and to remember that the stupid Italian TV channel was a number (TRE), and of course every solver worth his/her salt knows crosswordese like ALEUT (62A: Native parka wearer) and ARETE (63A: Sharp-crested ridge). But put "words" like "Moringua" or "encierro" in the clues, and I am in trouble (16A: Fish of the genus Moringua = EEL / 66A: Like an unlucky encierro participant = GORED). My slowest Thursday in a while. I gauge my times by two different A-level solvers on the NYT applet. Today, one beat me by a good two minutes but the other was a good two minutes behind, so I'll be surprised if this doesn't play at least somewhat harder than average for most people.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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1862 battle site / TUE 12-6-11 / Fruit named after town in Turkey / Christiania today / Elevator pioneer Otis

Constructor: Steven E. Atwood

Relative difficulty: Medium

THEME: -ISH — ordinary adjectives ending in -ISH are clued literally, but with an example that plays on the pre-ISH part of the word.

Word of the Day: "SCTV" (1D: Onetime "S.N.L."-type show) —

Second City Television (SCTV) is a Canadian television sketch comedy show offshoot from Toronto's The Second City troupe that ran between 1976 and 1984. (wikipedia)

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This was kind of a chore. It's like a joke that's mildly funny the first time, but then you go on to repeat it six more times, and it's less funny each time, largely because the pattern is so predictable. The one thing that made it unpredictable in a couple places also made it annoying. FLOURISH and CHERISH involve repronunciations of FLOUR and CHER, and thus the whole play on words thing is lost. I know that there is consistency at the orthographic level, but that's somehow not enough. Further, this is a very light theme—seven theme answers, but only 45 total squares [aha ... I see there are actually nine theme answers. I missed two. That's how interesting they were]. It's not clear to me why such an undemanding theme should yield such a dull, lifeless grid, with literally *no* good answers. I mean, they're mostly fine, adequate ... but because the theme answers are all just ordinary, unremarkable words, and because the grid is so highly segmented that there's not much room for longer fill, we get no interesting answers. Anywhere. At all. The few 7+-letter answers are all lifeless. HASHANAH is weak on its own (see also CARTA, DU LAC). And SCOOPERS ... well, no -ERS-ending word is ever really "good," and do you really want the most original word in your grid to be one that makes people think of dog poop? I don't know. This puzzle just didn't work for me.





Theme answers:

• 4D: Extravagant, like a W.C.? (LAVISH)
• 20A: Disappear, like a moving vehicle? (VANISH)
• 18A: Be healthy, like a type of meal? (FLOURISH)
• 39A: Love, like a popular singer? (CHERISH)
• 48D: Do away with, like a 1950s car feature? (FINISH)
• 56A: Hurt, like a groan-inducing joke? (PUNISH)
• 60A: Wave menacingly, like a red-hot iron? (BRANDISH)  
• 24A: Obtrusively bright, like a needlefish? (GARISH) 
• 49A: Touch up, like a candidate for office? (POLISH) 

This started out tough. Both SHILOH (1A: 1862 battle site) and CASABA (14A: Fruit named after a town in Turkey) took some work to uncover (clues weren't transparent), and since I wasn't expecting to see theme answers that were a. six letters long and b. up in the NW corner, it took a little bit before I figured out what those clues were going for with their question-markiness. "Familiar" hardly seems strong enough, or specific enough, for AMIE (34A: Familiar femme). I have no idea who Sarah RAMOS is (42A: Actress Sarah of "Parenthood"). "Parenthood" is some show I've barely heard of and (obviously) don't watch. In fact, I assumed the clue was referencing the movie of the same name. How would you know? Couple of interesting crosswordese moments today. We see OTIS in the puzzle a lot, but rarely (or far less often) do we see his first name, ELISHA (63A: Elevator pioneer Otis). I remembered it, though I wanted it to be ELIJAH at first. Then there's OSLO—that clue is tougher than your average OSLO clue, but somehow I remembered that little bit of trivia about its formerly being called "Christiania" (8D: Christiania, today). FILCH is a word that always sounds NASTY to me—perhaps because of its resemblance to a (slang) word that *is* truly NASTY, which I will refrain from repeating here.




Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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THURSDAY, Mar. 1, 2007 - Steven E. Atwood

Solving time: untimed - I'd rate this puzzle medium-to-easy for a Thursday
THEME: "Mean(s)" - Every theme clue is [Mean] or [Means]. That's it. There are sixteen such clues.

This wasn't much fun. An impressive number of theme clues, but half the fun of doing puzzles is getting to experience clever cluing, and here - well, it was like I was being bludgeoned. "Oh, [Mean] again ... great." The one real hard part of the puzzle, for me, was the great Northeast: I'll start there, give a few additional observations, then stop, as I am super-pressed for time this a.m.

11D: Prefix with -hedron (icosa-)

..... ..... ???? .... [scratch head, scratch head] .... [make unamused, disappointed face] ....

This answer - Andrew, please to be explaining for el presidente, because that is not a prefix I recognize. My -hedron prefix vocabulary runs out at dodeca-. I just found out from a quick Google that ICOSA- is a prefix meaning "twenty." This is a prefix Apple would use if it sponsored the mafia. (I hope you got that - I swear it makes sense, if only in my head). This "answer," if you wanna call it that, absolutely torpedoed my NE corner for a while. I wanted (correctly) 8A: Facility in Phila. or Denver to be US MINT and 19A: Mean to be DENOTE, but that gave an I-O-- to 11D, and that just seemed nuts. Eventually I just wrote US MINT and DENOTE in for the hell of it, to see what would happen, and other answers started to fall into place (including 10D: "Whew!" ("Man!"), which I really like for unknown reasons). I have tiny quibbles with a couple of other answers up there. First NET WT (12D: Contents meas.) - I don't like that constructors can apparently decide arbitrarily whether this abbreviation has an "E" in it or not. I have seen this phrase abbreviated more often (I think) as NT WT. I like it that way. Also, something about the phrasing of 25A: Some standardized coll. exams (LSATS) bothers me. They aren't really "coll. exams," the LSATS. You may or may not take them when you are in "coll." And you take them not to get into "coll." (in the generally understood meaning of that term: an undergraduate institution), but to get into a post-graduate university. And I know that many law schools are probably called "College of Law," but still. Icky phrasing.

More things that made me wince a little:

41A: Surplusage (overs) - clue and answer equally yucky
42D: "Et _____!" (voilà) - a huge stretch as a phrase any English speaker might use. VOILA, yes. "Et?" Eh? Eh? NON (15A: Oui's opposite)
50D: Playing loudly (ablare) - "And the rockets' red aglare, the bombs bursting ablare" - I'm sure this word is legal, and I got it quickly enough, but it's not a pretty word to my eyes / ears
65D: "Oh wad some power the giftie _____ us": Burns (gie) - while I normally love All Things Scottish, Burns's poetry tends to make me Cringe. This is far too far to have to go to get GIE. If you have to go to GIE, you should really think about rewriting the grid.

Here's a infelicitous pairing of intersecting abbreviations:

63D: Genealogical abbr. (desc.)
73A: Short and detached, in mus. (stac.)

They intersect at the "C" - the letter in the far SE of the puzzle. This just highlights the fact that you couldn't get a real word to fit down here, which highlights a certain straining the whole grid seems to have - all to accommodate the dictatorial theme. Was it worth it? I don't know. As an experiment, it's kinda cool. But if the little things about a puzzle aren't right, I'm not apt to appreciate the big things as much as I should.

I'm outta here. Work calls.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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