Garden plant also called stonecrop / TUE 7-23-19 / Facial hair for Sam Elliott Wilford Brimley / Nonsense word in Stephen Foster's Camptown Races./ 1981 hit with lyric we can make it if we try / Compound with fruity scent

Constructor: Kyle Dolan

Relative difficulty: Medium (slightly faster than usual, but it's a narrow (14-wide) grid)

THEME: "JUST THE TWO OF US" (54A: 1981 hit with the lyric "We can make it if we try" ... or a possible title for this puzzle) —the letter pair "US" appears twice in each themer:

Theme answers:

• "EXCUSES, EXCUSES!" (16A: "Spare me your lame reasons!")
• MARCUS AURELIUS (26A: Roman emperor who wrote "Meditations")
• WALRUS MUSTACHE (42A: Facial hair for Sam Elliott and Wilford Brimley)

Word of the Day: SEDUM (41A: Garden plant also called stonecrop) —

Sedum is a large genus of flowering plants in the family Crassulaceae, members of which are commonly known as stonecrops. The genus has been described as containing up to 600 species updated to 470. They are leaf succulents found primarily in the Northern Hemisphere, but extending into the southern hemisphere in Africa and South America. The plants vary from annual and creeping herbs to shrubs. The plants have water-storing leaves. The flowers usually have five petals, seldom four or six. There are typically twice as many stamens as petals. (wikipedia)

• • •

first themer I got

The theme works. The phrasing on the revealer is a *bit* of a stretch, in that it's hard to imagine someone using the "two of ___" phrasing (where the blank is just one word). The "of" wants a "the" to follow it. If I were ordering two plain bagels, I might say "two plain" but almost certainly not "two of plain" (or "two of bagel(s)"). There are two items *in* US, not two USes. Anyway, the idea that "two of us" could mean "two appearances of the letter pairing US" is grammatically a stretch, but we're in puzzleland, where wordplay magic is in effect, so sure, whatever, two USes, grammar be damned. Not super thrilling that one of the themers was just the same word twice—seems a cheap way to get your two USes in there, but "EXCUSES, EXCUSES!" is certainly a legitimate stand-alone phrase, so, as with the somewhat awkward grammar implied by the revealer, I'll allow it. Theme: acceptable. Less acceptable is the grid, which is chock-a-block with crosswordese and a few really unfortunate answers. The best place to see what I'm talking about is the mid-Atlantic section of this grid—everything in the east between the central two themers. That is a hellhole of junk, with the noises UHHUH (tolerable) crossing HEHE (completely intolerable, what is that?), abutted by SEEME, all lost in a field of something called SEDUM (!?). How bad is SEDUM? How completely out of place is that little bit of desperation fill? This is only the *second* time it's appeared in the Shortz era. It hasn't been in the puzzle for *sixteen* years. Thus, though it's possibly I've run into it in some other puzzle, I have never encountered, not once, in the 13 years I've been blogging the NYT. And ... it's Tuesday?? I'll give you SEDUM if you really, really need it. But in this morass of crosswordese, in a not-hard-to-fill grid, on a Tuesday? No. No, I will not give you SEDUM.


Clue on "EXCUSES, EXCUSES!" is bad (stop using "lame" this way, please) (it's especially bad here, as the phrase "lame reasons" makes absolutely no sense—the phrase is "lame excuses," which, again, I wouldn't use at all, but if you can't use "excuses" in your clue, then jeez, change the adjective you use in the grid; don't use the adjective that goes *only* with "excuses") ("terrible reasons?" "terrible justifications?") (be creative, just lose "lame"). LOL at the idea that most "book clubs" really get down to THEMES, like it's a college course or something (6D: Topics for book clubs). I teach English *and* have been in book clubs, and was baffled by this clue/answer pairing. Clue on SOCCER BALL was pretty bad, in that you can score "goals" in a lot of sports, so there's nothing very soccery about the clue (3D: Necessity for achieving one's goals?) (ACHIEVEONESGOAL (15)) (please don't put that in your crossword, thanks). Also, the fact that SOCCER BALL had a "?" clue made me think it was a themer. Confusing. I forgot YODELS existed (haven't thought about them since middle school). I forgot Bizet was a GEORGES (thought the only GEORGES I knew was Seurat). My favorite part of the puzzle was when I looked at what turned out to be the revealer and saw that what I had in place was —WOOFUS. My first thought was "what kind of nonsense phrase is this going to be? DOOFUS WOOFUS?" Alas, no. Even more embarrassingly, I didn't write in the last letter of 14A: Nonsense word repeated in Stephen Foster's "Camptown Races" because I thought the answer might be DOODAW (Like GEWGAW? ... which is *not* a nonsense word, somehow!).

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

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Fairy tale question / MON 7-22-19 / Strong-smelling cheese made in England / Louisiana's avian nickname

Constructor: Lynn Lempel

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium (2:51)

THEME: RUM PEL STILT SKIN — clue to the revealer says it all: 61A: Fairy tale question whose answer is spelled out in the starts of 18-, 24-, 40- and 51-Across ("WHAT'S MY NAME?")

Theme answers:

• RUMMAGE SALE (18A: Yard event to clear out the attic)
• PELICAN STATE (24A: Louisiana's avian nickname)
• STILTON (40A: Strong-smelling cheese made in England)
• SKINNY DIPPER (51A: One barely in the water?)

Word of the Day: EUROPA (66A: Mythical beauty who lent her name to a continent) —

In Greek mythology, Europa (/jʊəˈroʊpə, jə-/; Ancient Greek: Εὐρώπη, Eurṓpē, Attic Greekpronunciation: [eu̯.rɔ̌ː.pɛː]) was the mother of King Minos of Crete, a Phoenician princess of Argive origin, after whom the continent Europe is named. The story of her abduction by Zeus in the form of a bull was a Cretanstory; as classicist Károly Kerényi points out, "most of the love-stories concerning Zeus originated from more ancient tales describing his marriages with goddesses. This can especially be said of the story of Europa."

Europa's earliest literary reference is in the Iliad, which is commonly dated to the 8th century BC. Another early reference to her is in a fragment of the Hesiodic Catalogue of Women, discovered at Oxyrhynchus. The earliest vase-painting securely identifiable as Europa dates from mid-7th century BC. (wikipedia)

• • •

This puzzle might very well have been even easier than I've rated it. I say that because I absolutely drove the car into the ditch in one answer—total and complete incompetence and negligence on my part. Some bad luck, but mostly just idiocy (mine, and ironically, at an answer that crosses IDIOTPROOF (30D: Impossible to mess up): instead of coming down the middle of the grid, from left to right, like a normal, I did this dumb thing where I followed a solving path off the end of PELICAN STATE and then straight down the east of the grid via IDIOTPROOF (so proud to get that off of just a couple letters ... insert maxim about pride here). In following this path, I ended up in the position of having to come back into the center of the grid upside-down and backward, i.e. from bottom right toward the upper left. Fine, doable, except what happened was a. when I looked at 49A: Ledger entry on the minus side, I had one letter in place (the final "T"), and b. when I read the clue, my eyes never got past the "Ledger entry" part and I wrote in .... ASSET. So not just wrong, but spectacularly wrong. Couldn't-be-wronger. And if I hadn't had that "T," I probably wouldn't have screwed up and jumped the gun, and if I'd just read the clue to the end, I certainly would've gotten DEBIT. But see "T" write ASSET biff bam boom. And then, predictably, I immediately stalled. No hope for PIPE and BISECT to say nothing of OPED and STUDY. I got so flustered that I couldn't figure out how to clean up the mess and just started up again back in the NW and worked my way back down, at which point the error quickly became obvious. Still, I probably lost 15-20 seconds with that screw-up, which means I *should've* been in the 2:30s, not the 2:50s, and 2:30s, for me, is very fast. Not record, but record-adjacent. But what about the theme!? Was the puzzle good!? Tell me what to think!?!?! Easy. We're getting there.


Lynn Lempel's name doesn't pop up in NYT crossword bylines as much as it once did (back in the mid/late '00s. Back then, Ms. Lempel was averaging 8 puzzles a year or so for a while. Of course back then, the NYT was publishing considerably more woman-authored puzzles (nearly 50% more than now!), but more on that some other time (i.e. the next time I think about it, maybe tomorrow). She has a well-deserved reputation for sparkling M/T puzzles: tight, clever themes, clean grids. This one's no exception. Theme type here is a reasonably common one, and the revealer didn't land for me the way it probably did for others (that question makes me think more Snoop Dogg than Stilt Skin), buuuutt the revealer questions does tie nicely into the theme, in that it forces you to sound out his name (and, uh, keep your first-born child, I guess). In an odd coincidence, I had a stilton cheese sandwich this afternoon. Eeeeeeerie.


Thanks to Christopher Adams for filling in for me last-minute yesterday—it did not occur to me until quite late that going to a concert at night, 90 minutes away from my home, might seriously interfere with my ability to produce the Sunday write-up in a timely fashion. His generosity allowed me to enjoy Blondie and Elvis Costello without that "youregonnahavetoworkwhenyougethome" feeling nagging at the back of my mind all night.

Sometimes when you go to concerts, there are crossword constructors there (Mike Nothnagel says 'hi')

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

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