SATURDAY, Dec. 2, 2006 - Bob Klahn

Solving time: 51:34

THEME: none

I have it on good authority that Bob Klahn is "pretty much the hardest there is," and after last night's 15-round bout with the Saturday puzzle, I'm inclined to agree. I won the bout, in a split decision, but it was something of a Pyrrhic victory. I'm bruised and bloodied, and partially BOWed. It's especially humbling to look at a completed grid that has just slapped you around for something close to an hour and realize "wait a minute ... this doesn't look that hard. What the hell just happened?" I respect a puzzle that can beat me up with minimal esoterica. There are about three answers here that I think are a bit out-there, but that's not very many for a Saturday.

Blogger is fritzing like crazy again - I'm currently composing this entry using two browsers simultaneously. I feel, therefore, that today, I will be brief, if only to keep from smashing my computer (luckily, all humanity besides myself is currently out of the house, so if I do lose it - no witnesses but the animals).

15A: "The Green Hornet" trumpeter (Hirt)

I have got to get my hands on episodes of this show, because between HIRT and KATO (the Hornet's manservant?), it's all up in my puzzle on a routine basis. I was very grateful for this tiny 4-letter gimme (a gimme only because I've seen it twice in other puzzles recently). There were, let's see ... about six true gimmes in the puzzle, all of them sadly short. I got 51A: Actress Petty of "A League of Their Own" (Lori), 45A: Alexander Pope's "Solitude," e.g. (ode), 21A: Battle of Endor fighter (Ewok) ("Nerd!"), 46A: Unlocked? (bald), and 25A: Anita Loos's autobiographical "A _____ Like I" (Girl) with no problem, though I got that last one only through inference, not from any great familiarity with the literary corpus of Ms. Loos. You'd think with six gimmes in a Saturday, you'd be on the road to victory, and not hell.

37A: Saxophonist great, familiarly (Trane)

This is what I'd call a near-gimme, as the first thing I thought was TRANE ... but then I reflected on my appalling ignorance of jazz and hesitated a bit. Finally, as I had almost nothing entered on the entire grid, I put in TRANE, just to feel a sense of accomplishment. Luckily, I was right. I don't have any Coltrane handy, so I'm going to put on Dexter Gordon. . . there we go. Haven't blogged to jazz saxophone before. It's kind of nice. I don't feel nearly as murderous as I have lately.

26A: Lots (a good many)

Straightforward. Eventually I had AGOOD-, so how hard could it be to fill out? Very, when the only phrase your head can possibly imagine going there is AGOODDEAL. Not sure which sounds more priggish and old-fashioned - think I'd call it a tie - but -MANY is at least as common, if not more so, than -DEAL. So I ended up playing my own private, sad (though mercifully Mandel-free) version of Deal or No Deal? The only thing keeping me from writing in DEAL was 27D: Kind of bean: I had a 4-ltr word ending -UNG, and -DEAL would have given me DUNG, which is not a bean I'd eat. I knew it had to be MUNG, and yet ... A GOOD M-, A GOOD M-, A GOOD M-; I said it aloud and still couldn't find the right phrase. So implausible, and yet true.

18A: Roosevelt Island locale (Antarctica)

I had only one thought upon solving this: "Mae West was imprisoned in ANTARCTICA!?!?!" (see 53A here)

19A: Boxer on the cover of "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" (Liston)

Can you find him? I think he's on the far left there. I love this answer for two reasons. First, I love any time I learn some new piece of pop-culture-y trivia. Really, if you haven't guessed by now, the pop culture references in NYT puzzles are my bread-and-butter, so the more I know the stronger I am. The second reason I love this answer: it crosses with 1D: Name shared by a Grace and a Muse (Thalia). So what? you ask. What's so meaningful about that? Well, let me put it another way: LISTON gets crossed in the head by TH ALI A.

47A: Hybrid women's clothing (skorts)

First thing I thought of was PANTSUIT, for some reason. Then I thought SKORT, but not imagining a plural, I abandoned it for a while. There were two others that I knew and abandoned (34A: Light housecoats (dusters) and 34D: Toaster setting? (dais)) - and somehow all of these answers connect, in my mind, to my friend Shaun (female). How? Well Shaun owned at least one SKORT. I know that I learned the word in the 90's sometime because I probably commented, "What the hell are you wearing? I can see up your skirt, but this time it's just no fun." OK, fine, but where do DUSTERS and DAIS come in? Well, they don't, exactly, but the reason I would not enter either one was because of the evilest clue/answer in the puzzle (for me, a non-card-player): 36A: Third highest trump in card games (basta). I wanted DAIS so bad, but that would have put (rightly, it turns out) an A in the second position of the trump answer, and I knew that there are no five-letter words for a playing card that have an "A" in that position: the only candidates, in my feeble mind, were THREE, SEVEN, EIGHT, and QUEEN. Clearly BASTA was not on my radar, which is why this intersection on the grid, where NE divides into SE and SW (always bad when someone stops in the middle of an intersection!) was the last thing in the puzzle to fall. Oh, right, how does this connect to Shaun? Well, in searching for BASTA after completing the puzzle, I came across a page detailing the game of "Ombre" (card game with trumps, like Spades or Hearts) that is played in Alexander Pope's "The Rape of the Lock." Shaun studied Restoration and 18th-c. literature in grad school, so when I think of Pope (like it or not, Shaun), I think of her.

28A: Musical notation pioneer (Guido)
25D: English composer of the opera "The Perfect Fool" (Gustav Holst)
47D: GE Building muralist (Sert)
12D: One making excuses (Alibi Ike)

Well here's an interesting cast of characters, only one of whom (HOLST) I was familiar with before this puzzle (though I have a nagging suspicion that I have seen SERT lurking in a corner of my crossword before). I will confess now that I did not know HOLST was English. I knew he wrote "The Planets," and that is that. I probably heard GUIDO's name once while listening to lectures on early music (part of a great set of lectures on CD that my mom once gave me). Didn't help me here. My favorite of this little posse of relative obscurities is ALIBI IKE. I Like ALIBI IKE. Holy moses it's the name of a movie about baseball... hang on ... it's a Ring Lardner short story-turned-1935 movie starring Olivia de Havilland! Description, from imdb:

Rookie pitcher Francis "Ike" Farrell comes seemingly out of nowhere to help the Cubs go for the pennant. His idiosyncratic ways, which include excuses and alibis for everything, drive his manager and fiancee crazy in this baseball farce.

And thus the United States survived the Great Depression with a smile. I do think that ALIBI IKE needs to be remade as a modern kid ("this century's Dennis the Menace") who weasels his way out of blame for the increasingly criminal things he does. "That hobo was dead when I got here, ma. Honest!"

52A: Park Avenue retailer? (auto dealer)
50D: Grand finale? (dee)
54A: Not the biggest thoroughfare in town (stop street)

Curse all of these answers! I entered that SW corner (eventually), with the front ends of three of the 10-ltr crosses in place, but only solved one of them. Had the AUTO- in AUTODEALER and the STOP- in STOPSTREET, and thought it looked like some kind of car theme was going on, but damned if I could figure it out. I have never heard the expression "stop street," and as of this second don't know exactly what it means. Turns out to be very banal and obvious: "A street intersection at which a vehicle must come to a complete stop before entering a through street" (freedictionary.com). But even when I had the whole puzzle filled in, I couldn't figure out the logic of AUTODEALER or DEE? There are auto dealers on Park Avenue? And what the hell is a GRANDDEE? Of course a "Park Avenue" is a make of AUTO (a Buick) and DEE is the @#$#-ing last letter, or "finale," of "grand." Doesn't help much to discern the logic After the puzzle is over. That's all; I'm off to smoke an EL ROPO (39D: Cheap cigar, slangily) over a tasty meal of SWISSCHARD (5A: Leaves for dinner), followed by a WINECOOLER (16A: Mixed drink?) and AMARETTO (33D: Alabama slammer ingredient) in quick succession - "sweet liquor eases the pain."

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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FRIDAY, Dec. 1, 2006 - Mike Nothnagel

Solving time: around 25 minutes

THEME: none

Another crossword constructor whose name sounds suspiciously like a pseudonym. "Nothnagel" is also an anagram of HANG NOLTE! NOLTE is a not infrequent Guest of the Grid (he was here just a few days ago). I'm quite pro-NOLTE, so naturally I'm a little suspicious of Mr. "Nothnagel's" true motivations. Luckily for him, his puzzle has done nothing to rankle me. It's really tough in parts, but (mostly) fair, and even, in parts, impressively clever. The NW and SE were nearly disastrous for me - the shape of the damned grid is such that you can work your way into those corners only through the narrowest of, uh, straits. Hallways. Corridors. Whatever. Ends up feeling like I'm working three nearly self-contained little grids (NW, SE, rest of puzzle). There are also a LOT of trappy clues - more than I've experienced in a single grid in recent memory. This phenomenon is best demonstrated by my experience in the NW, so let's start there.

1A: Hit Japanese TV import (Iron Chef)

Having spent much of the day preparing the syllabus for my Comics course next semester, my mind was thinking of totally different kinds of Japanese imports: I thought, "wow, what a coincidence: I'm putting Osamu Tezuka's Astro Boy on my syllabus, and that same day the animated TV show adaptation of the comic is the answer to 1A!? What are the odds?" Answer: none. ASTROBOY just felt so right, so perfect, so serendipitous. But I ended up being pretty sure that 8D: Comic collected in "The Chickens Are Restless," with "The" was FARSIDE, which meant an "F" where the "Y" was in ASTROBOY. Perhaps I would have seen IRONCHEF sooner, if it hadn't been for further fake serendipity lurking right around the corner...

2D: Stick alternatives (roll-ons)
26A: _____ case (in no)
30A: Follower of Mao? (Tse)

In what must be some kind of record for size of a PLAUSIBLE wrong-fill pile-up, I managed to put together three closely interlocking Wrong answers in the nadir of the northwest quadrant. Since AUTOMATICS did not fit in the space allotted for "Stick alternatives," I knew that the answer had to be the Ingenious CARROTS. The "S" at the bottom of CARROTS made 30A easy: "Follower of Mao?" was clearly IST. Nice. The kicker, though ... the coup de grace ... the icing ... was the thrill I got when I noticed that, at four letters, and with a "T" in the second position (from CARROTS), "_____ case" could only be the legendary ETUI. Revenge of the ETUI! I had kept him out of the Pantheon, and here he was, serving notice of his relevance. Good for him. ALL OF MY ANSWERS WERE WRONG. I'm not even going to bother relating how I figured that out. Let's just say it took me a while. Oh, I will say that part of my problem was that I could Not convince myself that the answer to 15A: Celebrated smiler was really MONALISA. "Too obvious," I thought. "That's a trap." ... said the already trapped solver to the Gimme that was trying to rescue him. Ugh. (that's a good "Ugh," though - I'm happy to flail around if the reason for my flailing is true cleverness, as it was here)

So that was the rocky northwest coast. Let's move on to the equally difficult swampy southeast.

39D: Comment when no one is up ("It's a tie")

Brutal. Looks so obvious in the light of day, but something about my brain does Not want to read "is up" as "leads," as in a baseball game. I had ITS-, and the problem was that the rest of the answer was what would take me through the narrow corridor (of which I spoke at the beginning of this commentary) into the otherwise self-contained SE corner. Without the rest of the answer, I couldn't get in, and with the exception of a couple of little gimmes, nothing in the SE was coming together. Actually, those little gimmes - 57D: Gasteyer of "Mean Girls" (Ana) and 58D: FedEx pickup: Abbr. (pkg.) - because of their proximity, helped me finally get a longer cross - 60A: One-room schoolhouse features (inkwells), the initial "I" of which got me the penultimate letter "I" in ITSATIE, which then helped me eventually get all the three long crosses at the bottom of the SE.

So, game over, right? Oh no no no no. Here we come to my only beef with this otherwise tricky-but-fair puzzle: my most hated of puzzle phenomenon: abutting geographical obscurities. I am sure that champion solvers do not blink when they see 46A: Town SE of Sacramento (Ione) and (lord help me) 49A: Ukrainian hub (Lvov), but the only IONE I know is SKYE, and the only LVOV I know is that choking sound my dog makes sometimes. Throw in that one of the Down crosses was Very dubious - 43D: Coin part (reverse) - and you can see that I was slowed to a halt by this morass of unfamiliarity (and so close to the finish!). Oh, and the worst part, which luckily for this puzzle ended up being so genius that I nearly forgot my pain, was the following clue: 42D: Blip, ending in -ALY. For far, far too long, I was trying to think of how "Blip" could be a @#$#-ing adverb. THEN I remembered that adverbs with "A" as the penultimate vowel will typically have TWO "L"s (e.g. "vocally"). THEN I tried to think of a word that ends in "-LY" and is somehow NOT an adverb. Oh, and that means "Blip!" Answer: ANOMALY - it's horribly perfect.
In closing, I'd like to create a mini-parade of all the answers in this puzzle that I either thought of or actually wrote in a Wrong answer for (that's a really inelegant sentence, with lots of prepositions in awkward places, but I've no time to fret about such details right now - sorry):

1. ASTROBOY for IRONCHEF
2. CARROTS for ROLL-ONS
3. ETUI for INNO (especially great as they have NO letters in common)
4. IST for TSE
5. TURF for CLAY (5D: Grass alternative)
6. TACOS for TARTS (32D: Foods with fillings)
7. HAR for HEE (33D: Part of a snicker)
8. ON A LINE and
9. ON A WIRE for ON A ROPE (36D: Tethered)

That's a lot of wronganswery. But I worked it out.

I enjoyed the comics component of the puzzle: in addition to the non-existent ASTROBOY, who did not belong there, and the previously mentioned FAR SIDE, there was also 44A: "Herman" cartoonist Jim (Unger). Found 59A: Begin operating, datewise (open on) a little icky on both sides of the equation ("datewise" is an unappealing little word that would make a great name for a parody of NBC's "Dateline" - and OPEN ON just sounds like a poker term. Plus the juxtaposition of "operating" and OPEN makes it sound like you've taken your date to the O.R. for a fun night of surgery). But the clunkers were few in comparison to the good-to-great fill. Any puzzle that crosses ALTO SAX (12D: Cannonball Adderley played it) and CEMENT MIXER (It goes around at a construction site) at the "X" deserves at least a solid pat on the back.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

PS one of the answers on today's grid could feasibly have been clued "Blogger Parker, in reality" - I'll let you guess which one.

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