SUNDAY, Jun. 21 2009 — Invader of Europe in 1241 / Scottish hillsides / Pot grabber / McCain residence for 5 1/2 years

Constructors: Matt Ginsberg and Pete Muller

Relative difficulty: Medium-Challenging

THEME: "Famous Last Words" — 12 famous people are clued by their last words


Word of the Day: Exsiccate (56D: PARCH) — intr. & tr.v., -cat·ed, -cat·ing, -cates.

To dry up or cause to dry up.

[Middle English exsiccaten, from Latin exsiccāre, exsiccāt- : ex-, ex- + siccāre, to dry (from siccus, dry).]

A very doable puzzle, but one that took a lot of effort to get through because of the nature of the theme. The clues (the last words) provide only oblique hints as to what famous person they belong to, and even then, those hints are usually only really obvious in retrospect. I mean, is there anything about "I'm going to heaven!" that really screams "BO DIDDLEY?" Not that I didn't enjoy the puzzle; I did. Some of the last words were oddly apt, or funny, though only GROUCHO's last words were easy to attribute to their speaker.



Theme answers:

• 1A: (With 13-Across) "My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One or the other of us has got to go" (Oscar / Wilde)
• 27A: "Die, my dear? Why, that's the last thing I'll do!" (Groucho Marx)
• 32A: "That was the best ice cream soda I ever tasted" (Lou Costello)
• 53A: "Where is my clock?" (Salvador Dali)
• 71A: "Leave the shower curtain on the inside of the tub" (Conrad Hilton)
• 87A: "I've had 18 straight whiskies. I think that's the record" (Dylan Thomas)
• 94A: "Don't let it end like this. Tell them I said something" (Pancho Villa)
• 110A: (With 113-Across) "I've had a hell of a lot of fun and I've enjoyed every minute of it" (Errol / Flynn) — yesterday would have been his 100th birthday. See lovely tribute here.
  
• 20D: "I have not told half of what I saw" (Marco Polo)
• 48D: "Eva is leaving" (Eva Peron)
• 46D: "I live!" (Caligula)
• 68D: "I'm going to heaven!" (Bo Diddley)

Biggest struggle was in middle of the puzzle, for three reasons. One, no idea who CONRAD HILTON was, though I could have guessed he had something to do with the Hilton hotel chain. The CONRAD part ... not forthcoming. Add to that the insane-looking and (to my mind) fairly useless abbrev. or James, JAS. (64A: Madison or Monroe: Abbr.), and then throw in my complete inability to recall a movie I actually saw, "JUNO" (64D: 2007 film that won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay). That "J" was the very last letter I filled in. Also had crazy trouble in the NW, where my refusal to believe OMIT was the answer for 1D: Strike out kept me from getting a good toehold. If I leave something out, I have OMITted it. I see that OMIT can mean "remove what has already been set down," but I would use the word CUT, and the puzzle would usually use the editorial word DELE. Bah. Otherwise, it was just bad luck on my part up there. MAORI seemed an improbable answer for 18A: Kapa haka dancer, so I didn't commit to it, and SASH (2D: Tiara go-with), COLE (3D: Porter, for one) and RISE TO (5D: Meet) were all oddly elusive. I wasn't stumped so much as I was stumbling. Feels like I went at that corner several times before it fell. In fact, I'm pretty sure I had to get WILDE in the NE in order to get OSCAR in the NW, which finally broke things open. Oh, and I almost got Naticked by the GANT / NWT crossing (51D: Eugene _____, hero of "Look Homeward, Angel" / 63A: Yellowknife is its cap.). Yikes. NWT = Northwest Territories.

Bullets:

• 19A: "I, Robot" extras (automata) — so ... robots, then.
• 30A: Pair in an ellipse (foci) — learned this from crosswords.
• 47A: Scottish hillsides (braes) — a handy Scotticism to have in your arsenal.
• 57A: Fleischer and Onassis (Aris) — I keep looking at this answer and wondering what an "ARIS" is.
• 79A: Pot grabber (narco) — oh, man. Love the clue, though I hate the word NARCO (we say "NARC!").
• 82A: Ones sharing Durocher's astrological sign (Leo) — I don't get it. His name is LEO. Is he really named for his own astrological sign?
• 107A: Korean carmaker (Daewoo) — still don't see these much. Hyundai and Kia, I see.
• 9D: Invader of Europe in 1241 (Mongol) — went looking for a specific person here.
• 112A: Supreme leader? (Ross) — oddly enough, this was part of a joke on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon just two nights ago (topicality = Iran).
• 10D: McCain residence for 5 1/2 years (Hanoi) — "Residence?" Really? I gotta say, if I'm being held against my will and tortured, I'm probably not going to think of the place where that's happening as my "residence." Am I getting mail there? No? Ok, not a "residence."
• 11D: U.S. island occupied by Japan during W.W. II (Attu) — learned it when I learned ATKA (the other crosswordy Alaskan island of note).
• 21D: 1970 N.F.L. M.V.P. John _____ (Brodie) — no idea. Little worried about that "D" for a few seconds until I figured out the cheesy trick at 31A: Red ball? (edam).
• 45D: Magician's name suffix (-ini) — this clue seems odd / dated / nuts.
• 86D: Hipster's persona (Mr. Cool) — :( ... JOE Cool, I know. Mr. Clean, I know. This guy, "???"
• 97D: Contents of Pandora's box, except for hope (ills) — very nice. And informative.
• 100D: Ford role, familiarly (Indy) — wrote in CLEO without even thinking, as hers was the only name that came to mind when I got ASPS at 99D: Phobia of 100-Down. INDY here = Indiana Jones. Ford = Harrison.
  

So I've started using Twitter fairly regularly now, and one of my favorite things to do is troll the Twitterverse for mentions of the word "crossword," just to see how people talk about puzzles. Some things I'm learning: lots of people solve USA Today and People crosswords (sorry, it's true); lots of people do the crossword at work (and apparently have very little "work" to do at work); and Lots of people associate puzzle-solving (fairly or not) with being a. old, b. nerdy, or c. bored/boring. I'll leave you with a small sampling of this week's

"Puzzle Tweets"

• chimpocalypse I'm so boring I downloaded a crossword app for my iPhone. Now I just need a knitting app and a complaining about the kids of today app
• KBFina Why am I still doing xwords at 4 am? I think there needs to be an intervention.
• ThinkSideways Day 12 of Turning 40: I now like doing crossword puzzles. What's next, bingo?
• OdeToCode Passed a guy on the highway who was clearly holding a crossword puzzle and pen at the steering wheel. HELLO!! 5 letter word. Starts with m.
• sylviegreen69 I'm sick of living in the sticks, we don't get newspapers and our Town Criers shit. You should hear him trying to cry the crossword.
• paullemat I'm in the NY Times Crossword Puzzle Today - 6 Down! Yeah!!!! http://tinyurl.com/ly9ram [my favorite by far]
  

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter]

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SATURDAY, Jun. 20 2009 — Dilbert character reincarnated as his own clone / Blackmailer in 1850 novel / 1924 co-defendant / Old Fenway nickname

Constructor: Brad Wilber

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium

THEME: none


Word of the Day: EOLITH (31A: Prehistoric stone tool) —An eolith (from Greek "eos", dawn, and "lithos", stone) is a chipped flint nodule. Eoliths were once thought to have been artefacts, the earliest stone tools, but are now believed to be naturally produced by geological processes such as glaciation. (wikipedia)

This one was very easy for me, as Saturday puzzles go. Finished this one more than two minutes faster than I did yesterday's puzzle. There are the usual assortment of "???" answers that you typically find on a Saturday (esp. a Brad Wilber Saturday), but crosses took care of them all easily. Started with TIE GAME (13D: Outcome disallowed by the N.H.L. in 2005), which was so obvious that I was sure it was wrong. But then 16A: Bagels, essentially confirmed the "I" (TORI), and 10A: Not much confirmed the "T" (A BIT), and that was that. NE done in about fifteen seconds. When I didn't fly out of that corner, I tried the NW corner and wanted DIET PLATE right away at 1A: Reduced fare?, but wasn't sure if ERIS confirmed that final "E" or not (9D: Solar system discovery of 2003), so I didn't write it in. Then I noticed the Beatles clue and got it instantly: 19A: "_____ Blues" (track on the Beatles' "White Album") ("Yer"). The next part is weird. I thought, "if DIET PLATE is right, then ... could 1D: Certain hauling fee really be DRAYAGE???" Turns out it could, and was.

[intermittent explosions outside office window = scary electrical problem ... wife calling power company ... I'm outside now, writing from the laptop ... waiting for the explosions to happen again ... power company on the way]

I can see this puzzle giving solvers a proper noun headache. IONESCO is a name I know (2D: "The Bald Soprano" playwright, 1950). T.C. BOYLE is a name I know but not for the title in question today (45D: "Drop City" novelist, 2003). TENIERS, I didn't know at all (8D: Surname of three generations of Flemish old masters), which is depressing, given how many damned many of them there apparently are. They're like the @#$!ing Bachs, those guys. Yeesh. Longtime readers of this blog will not be surprised to hear that I dropped ASOK with one swift punch (22A: "Dilbert" character who was reincarnated as his own clone). ASOK and I had an encounter a while back that didn't go so well for me. Revenge! No idea who this LEMAT guy is (6D: Paul who won Golden Globe for "American Graffiti"). Had LUMET at first. The "Andrew" in MERRY ANDREW can apparently be capitalized or not. Also, OED says MERRYANDREW can be a verb. I'd never heard the term before today (55A: Clown). LOEB (54A: 1924 co-defendant) and HEEP (64A: Blackmailer in an 1850 novel) were no problems, given their shortness and fame. FT RILEY, on the other hand, took some scratching and clawing to get hold of (27D: Kansas mil. reservation with the U.S. Cavalry Museum).

[update: intermittent explosions are coming from power lines that cut through neighbor's enormous tree ... how are we the only ones in the neighborhood who appear to be noticing this? It sounds like a gang war, with odd stretches of silence]

Bullets:

• 17A: Going bonkers for the British? (Anglomania) — Beatle-mania I've heard of. Anglophilia, I've heard of. I don't know what this is.
• 20A: Response to being elbowed, maybe ("Was I snoring?") — excellent. I was proud when, with just the "-ING" in place, I wrote in STOP SNORING.
• 28A: Companion for Pan (Dryad) — fee for hauling a dead woodland creature out of the woods: DRYADAGE.
• 38A: Bruiser's display (machismo) — at first I thought "Bruiser" was a dog.

• 10D: Maker of the Lynx and Jaguar systems (Atari) — back-to-back days, one clue harder than the next.
• 15D: Victim of terrible teasing (Tantalus) — wow, that's some ruthless cluing. I was imagining some poor kid on a playground. Or having a flashback.
• 29D: Old Fenway nickname (Yaz) — Carl Yastrzemski, legendary Red Sox left-fielder. 18-time (!!!!) All-Star. Still, I suppose it's possible the YAZ / ZUNI crossing got a few people today (37A: Kachina doll makers).
• 53D: Option at Sleepy's (Serta) — like ATARI, SERTA returns.
• 61D: Interrogator's red-flag raiser (lie) — I didn't like this at first, but I think I understand now. If someone is lying, then that raises a red flag regarding the possibility of that person's culpability in whatever matter it is you are investigating. OK.

[Fire trucks are here now !? so I'm gonna go...]

If you missed it yesterday, there's still time to check out my "Last-Minute Father's Day Gift Ideas" post here (or just scroll down if you are on the main page).

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter]

PS Orange's write-up of today's LA Times puzzle can be found here.

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