Great Plains tunneler / THU 8-20-15 / Siblinig duo in Lady Be Good 1924 / 1970s TV series set at 165 Eaton Place / German boy's name meaning wealthy / Edgar Bergen's dummy of old radio / Like breeds Kerry Hill English Leicester /

Constructor: Jules P. Markey

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium (for a rebus)

THEME: COMPRESSED [AIR] (29D: Gas station supply ... or what acan be found eight times in this puzzle) — The letter string "AIR" is "COMPRESSED" (i.e. rebusized) into 8 different boxes in the grid.

Word of the Day: Bagatelle (BAUBLE (1A)) —

noun

noun: bagatelle; plural noun: bagatelles

1. 1.

   a thing of little importance; a very easy task.

   
   

   "dealing with these boats was a mere bagatelle for the world's oldest yacht club"
2. 2.

   a game in which small balls are hit and then allowed to roll down a sloping board on which there are holes, each numbered with the score achieved if a ball goes into it, with pins acting as obstructions. (google)

• • •

Wow. It's been a big week for Adele Astaire. Which says everything about the NYTX's cultural center of gravity of late. (73A: Sibling duo in "Lady, Be Good!," 1924)

The theme concept here is solid. Nice revealer that literally explains what's going on the grid. But once you turn up the trick, the puzzle is a slog—a longer-than-average slog, as this grid is 'roided up to 16x15 (likely to accommodate that central themer with the two rebus squares, "UPSTAIRS, DOWNSTAIRS", which, at 14 squares long, can't sit squarely in the middle of a standard 15x15 grid). Fill is not horrendous, but it's once again overly familiar, prone to datedness and arcana, full of SCH ENE ERGS-type stuff. ESO NOS. INE crossing the -INE of OVINE. Just lots of little things that add up to a certain joylessness. AIR is sometimes (properly) hidden / buried, sometimes not. I'm looking around for something remarkable or noteworthy. I'd say the most noteworthy thing, besides (but related to) the grid's bigness, is the word count. 83!? That's nutty. Max on a 15x15 is 78. I'll give you a full three extra answers for your additional row, that gives you 81. Max. 83 ... may be part of the reason the puzzle plays so dull. Hard to do much that is interesting when your grid is chopped all to hell and you have mostly 3s, 4s, and 5s to work with. Result: reliance on good ol' reliable tried and true seen-it-seen-it-seen-it stuff.


Anything happening on the clue front? Not really. 17A: Great Plains tunneler is *almost* a good misdirection, in that "Great Plains" is a descriptor I'd associate with people, not animals, but what kind of people tunnel on the plains? No kind, I think, is the kind. There's at least some attempt at cleverness at 27A: They rarely cover more than two feet in one day (PAIR OF SOCKS). I had SHOES, so ... at least my forward progress was stopped for a bit. I weirdly liked the clue for OVINE (32A: Like the breeds Kerry Hill and English Leicester) because I had to think about it. I forget that there are breeds of sheep as there are dogs, cattle, etc. And OVINE usually gets some dumb clue like [Sheepish?]. There's some trivia, if you're in to that. Didn't know OTTO meant "wealthy," didn't know UPTON SINCLAIR wrote anything called "Dragon's Teeth"—seriously, I can name a bunch of his novels ... oh, no, crap. I'm thinking of SINCLAIR LEWIS. OK, no, I know only "The Jungle" by UPTON SINCLAIR. So, "Dragon's Teeth" ... interesting. I wonder if it is about a dragon's teeth. Oh, no, it's about Nazis. Alrighty, then...


A friend of mine just hypothesized on Twitter that one of the crosses in today's puzzle might pose a problem for some solvers: "For tomorrow's NYT crossword: I have a hunch that the cross between 42-Across [DADO] and 23-Down [SNERD] is really gonna stump people." My guess is that he is right, but mainly for under-40s who have no real experience with Mortimer SNERD. Also, DADO is not a common word for most folks (outside the crossword). But the core NYT solving demographic will have no problem: even if they don't know DADO, SNERD will come marching creepily forth, as dummies will. Maybe we can try to make *this* meaning of SNERD happen...


Hey, did you see the great crossword retort to Slate's attack on the NYT's "Mini" crossword yesterday? Joel Fagliano, who makes the Minis, responded to the Slate article "The New York Times 'Mini' Crossword Is an Utter Disgrace to the NYT Crossword Brand" with this neat little custom-made puzzle. See if you can see the hidden message:

The author of the Slate piece, Ruth Graham, to her enormous credit, immediately recognized the brilliance of Joel's reply, tweeting this:

... and then writing this appreciation of Joel's Mini-puzzle rebuttal. I love that both Ruth and Joel are so passionate about puzzles that they took the time to get mad, and get even, respectively. The whole back-and-forth made me irrationally happy. Now I'm gonna do the Mini regularly just to find the hidden messages. Don't Disappoint Me, Joel!

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

PS If you are a fan of Hayley Gold's webcomic about the NYT Crossword Puzzle, "Across & Down," you should know that she is considering stopping, since she will no longer be able to get the puzzles early. She is listening to feedback and suggestions about what she should do going forward. Here's her initial plea for advice, and here's her first post thereafter. Oh, and here's her webcomic (the latest one's about today's puzzle!), which, if you don't know about it yet, you might enjoy.

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Japanese sword sport / WED 8-19-15 / Oregon city named for furrier / Egg-laying animals / Indira Gandhi's ill-fated son / Vaulter's hurdle / Instrument similar to cor anglais

Constructor: Timothy Polin

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium but with two hard bits (for me)

THEME: WATER / FALLS (5A: With 68-Across, what the groups of circled letters are famous examples of) — circled squares (or however they appear in your paper) form the names of five waterfalls. Circles also mimic waterfalls, in a way, by running level then falling (i.e. going down)

Word of the Day: KENDO (26D: Japanese sword sport) —

noun

noun: kendo

1. a Japanese form of fencing with two-handed bamboo swords, originally developed as a safe form of sword training for samurai. (google)

• • •

Somewhat strange solve. Blew through the middle of this thing, running from NW to SE (with a little hiccup there as I tried to figure out how to spell the end of RIBBIT (31D: Croaking sound)). I waved as I went right past YOSEMITE—a familiar national park that I grew up not too far away from. I didn't stop to think about what it was doing in those circles, and even if I had, I wouldn't have gotten it. I know there are waterfalls in YOSEMITE National Park, but when I think of the park I think of Half Dome ... I don't think I could've told you there was such a thing as YOSEMITE Falls. See also (eventually) RHINE and ... no, just those two. I knew there was an ANGEL Falls, but I couldn't have told you where (until just now, when I looked it up—Venezuela. It's the highest waterfall in the world at 3000+ feet, which make its relative tininess and very short "fall" in this grid adorably ironic).


So no trouble, until trouble. A little, at first: I am sure I've seen this ENGEL guy before, but I never ever remember him. I completely blanked on KENDO. As you can see, KENDO and ENGEL are next to each other, so that was problematic, but the KRAKEN was friendly today and got me out of trouble (25A: Sea monster of Norse myth). But then the NE: no. Just stopped cold because OVIPARA = not in my vocabulary (10D: Egg-laying animals), so no way into that little section, and then both BAR and OIL had (to me) unobvious clues. Also I forgot what a cor anglais was and tried LUTE as the answer there. VAIN was clued "?"-ishly. So that tiny section cost me probably 1/4 of my total solving time. I think of vaulters vaulting vaults. That's a gymnastics event, right? The vault. A *pole* vaulter vaults a BAR. Anyway, I remembered eventually that there was not a Suez or a hostage crisis in 1973, but an OIL crisis (12D: Subject of a 1973 crisis), and then that area resolved itself. OVIPARA is probably something I should know, but from a constructor's point of view, that is not great fill, or even good. That is "lord help me get out of this section" fill. Things get understandably iffy in and around the waterfalls. From TIAMO to ENGEL. But as iffiness goes, that section wasn't bad. OTOH OMRI TABU, also around a waterfall, also not great. You can just look around the grid and see this happening with all the falls.


When you build your grid in a way where you are forced into a terminal-V situation, well, you really Really limit what you can do, which may be why the last section I finished, over there in RAJIV land (33D: Indira Gandhi's ill-fated son), played so rough for me. I forgot Indira Gandhi's son's name I wanted RAJ...AH? But I also wanted the "30 Rock" actor to be JONAH Friedlander. [Sad trombone sound!] Wanted I LOSE to be the much-more-likely-to-be-said I GIVE. And then there's the manifestly not-great OCULI (34D: Eye-shaped openings) and then ... MEDOC. "And then there's MEDOC!" (35D: French red wine)


Fill remains bland, and these falls are at least partially arbitrary, and WATER/FALLS is *not* two words, but still, this beats Monday and Tuesday, I'll give it that.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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