TUESDAY, Jun. 2 2009 — Divine showbiz nickname / Arabesque actress 1966 / Italian archaeological locale / Glazier's sheet

Constructor: Patrick Blindauer

Relative difficulty: Medium (I did it on paper in bed at 1 am after staring at a computer screen for hours, so I really don't know ... seemed Tuesdayish enough)

THEME: "SNL" (68A: TV staple for over 30 years (and a hint to 17-, 21-, 32-, 41-, 54- and 61-Across) - theme answers are two-word phrases where the first word starts with "S" and the second word starts with "L"

Word of the Day: INGEMAR Johansson (8D: Former heavyweight champion Johansson) - "Jens Ingemar Johansson (September 22, 1932 – January 30, 2009) was a Swedish boxer and former heavyweight champion of the world. He defeated Floyd Patterson by TKO in the third round, after flooring Patterson seven times in that round, to win the World Heavyweight Championship. As a result, Johansson won the Hickok Belt as top professional athlete of the year in 1959 and was named the Associated Press Male Athlete of the Year and Sports Illustrated magazine's "Sportsman of the Year"." - Patterson would win a rematch a year later, thus becoming "the first man to recover the world's undisputed heavyweight title." (wikipedia)

I stayed up way too late last night and thus have next to no energy or focus this morning. My apologies. I'll keep this short and try to do the puzzle justice. My first thought was "there are such things as S&Ls ..." But then that petty thought floated away and I noticed the elegance and intricacy of the puzzle. All theme answers are familiar and snappy phrases or names, which is good, but what's impressive is a. there are six of them, and b. there are *four* Downs that have to cross *three* answers each (ODDS ARE, POMPEII, ROMANIA, AT A TILT). The grid has a lot of black squares (40) and thus looks like an easy grid to fill, but I doubt it was easy to construct the foundation - the basic arrangement of black squares that allows this theme to be pulled off at a Tuesday level. There's virtually no forced fill. A few odd rhyming patches (see STAB / TAB and the INGEMAR / OMAR / MAR trio), but those are kind of amusing. MESSRS (66A: Abbr. preceding multiple names) is the only answer that grates at all, and that's, what? ... one answer? And a real abbreviation. So fine. Good. Patrick Blindauer continues to show that he can make solid, entertaining puzzles at every level of difficulty. Given the historical iffiness of Tuesday puzzles, I'll take PB2 on a Tuesday any day (well, specifically Tuesday, I guess - MAN (38A: "Holy Toledo!"), I told you I was tired).

Theme answers:

• 17A: Mountain shelter (ski lodge)
• 21A: Time off, to a sailor (shore leave)
• 32A: Endangered feline (snow leopard)
• 41A: "Arabesque" actress, 1966 (Sophia Loren)
• 54A: Highway posting (speed limit)
• 61A: Where rupees are spent (Sri Lanka)

Bullets:

• 1A: Recorder input: Abbr. (mic) - I just stared at this for a few seconds, trying to figure out what could be meant. Recorder? What kind? You can put a tape in a recorder. If you're playing a recorder, maybe you put in AIR. Needed crosses, is what I'm saying. Thankfully, the fabulous MISS M (1D: "Divine" showbiz nickname) was there to guide me through.
• 16A: Setting for C. S. Lewis's "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" (Narnia) - The Chronicles of NARNIA are among my wife's favorite books from childhood. Daughter liked them too a couple years back, when we read them together as a family. Back when the first movie came out. Back when this came out:

• 36A: Name before Cool or Camel (Joe) - great clue. Thankfully, no "The Plumber."
• 50A: 99 and 86, on "Get Smart" (agents) - another great clue. The "Get Smart" part makes it a Tuesday clue. Having just [99 and 86, e.g.] or [TV's 99 and 86, e.g.] would put the clue in different, tougher difficulty categories.
• 65D: Apostrophized preposition (o'er) - ugly clue. "Apostrophize" means "To address by or speak or write in apostrophe," a figure of speech whereby an actor addresses some abstract concept or absent person. Maybe "O'ER" appears in a famous instance of "apostrophe" somewhere... though I'm guessing that here it just means "having an apostrophe added between the O and E"
• 33: Alliance since '49 (NATO) - SEATO and NATO and OAS are the alliances I see most often. Or so it seems.
• 55D: Glazier's sheet (pane) - maybe I should have made "glazier" my Word of the Day, as I'm not sure I can define it. Someone who works with glass? A window-maker? Yes, "one who cuts and fits glass, as for doors and windows."
• 49D: Elusive Himalayan creature (Yeti) - "elusive" ... I guess that is one way of getting around something's non-existence. Nice.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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MONDAY, Jun 1 2009 — "Think" sloganeer / Insurance provider since 1850 / Norse race of gods / Suffix with ball

Constructor: John Farmer

Relative difficulty: Medium

THEME: "THE TONIGHT SHOW" (58A: With 59-Across, TV home for this puzzle's five featured TV personalities) - five full names of former and current "Tonight Show" hosts are placed throughout the grid

Word of the Day: Thomas H. INCE - "Now often forgotten [that's for sure], Thomas Ince was a giant in the early days of silent films. He began directing shorts in 1911 and was particularly known for his Westerns, many starring cowboy star William S. Hart [...] Ince is also known for his untimely 1924 death aboard the yacht of William Randolph Hearst; officially he died of heart trouble, but Hollywood rumor of the time suggested he had been shot by Hearst in a dispute over actress Marion Davies. [...] The Cat's Meow, a 2002 Peter Bogdanovich film based on the death of Ince, starred Cary Elwes as Ince and Kirsten Dunst as Marion Davies. [ELWES was clued via "The Cat's Meow" just a few days ago!]

Tonight will be CONAN O'BRIEN'S first night hosting the "Tonight Show" after the departure of Jay Leno, so this is a timely commemorative puzzle. What an amazing discovery it must have been to find that the first and last names of three of the hosts are identical in length to each other — you're half way to symmetry without even trying. The shuffling of the remaining answers to get them into symmetrical order is the really impressive feature of this puzzle. That, and, and then getting the whole extremely theme-dense grid to work at all. 66 squares, with no section of the puzzle free from the theme's influence. Every nook and cranny has at least one theme answer slicing through it. A fine construction for this momentous (to some) occasion. If you liked Jay, don't worry. NBC will be changing its name to "The Jay Leno" network and bringing safe, bland, and cheap "entertainment" to you @ 10pm every weekday. It's the scheduling move that inspired their new network slogan: "We Give Up." (They still have "The Office" and "30 Rock," so I can't revile them too much)

Theme answers:

• 1A: With 66-Across, first in a series of live TV personalities (1954-57) (STEVE / ALLEN)
• 6A: With 65-Across, second in a series of five TV personalities (1957-62) (JACK / PAAR)
• 17A: Fifth in a series of five TV personalities (starting June 1, 2009) (CONAN O'BRIEN)
• 19A: With 22-Across, fourth in a series of five TV personalities (1992-2009) (JAY / LENO)
• 34A: With 35-Across, third in a series of five TV personailities (1962-92) (JOHNNY / CARSON) - rightly at the center of the grid.

To get this theme-dense beast to get up an run, some compromises had to be made to the overall quality of the non-theme fill. First, there are just a Ton of abbrevs. Too many to list. But the really noticeable problem areas were the Ohio region, where the utterly unMondayish and unknown (to me) INCE (29D: Early film director Thomas H. _____) abuts the very desperate partial A MEAN (24D: "He doesn't have _____ bone in his body"). AESIR isn't the most Mondayish of answers either (24A: Norse race of gods), but it should at least be familiar to constant crossworders. I once built an entire puzzle around the word AESIR - but after one rejection (a wonderful, helpful rejection from Patrick Berry), before I could get it resubmitted, a puzzle with the same basic concept got published in New York Sun [shakes fist at sky and shouts "Joon!!!!"] and so it's just sitting on my computer somewhere. I might publish it here someday. It was probably the most solid, least teetery puzzle I've constructed so far.

The other part of the puzzle that was manifestly not so hot was the far SW. My wife still isn't quite over her consternation at OON (61A: Suffix with ball). "OON? .... Really, OON? It's a suffix??" We first tried to guess what the suffix meant, and then tried to think of other words that used it. POLTROON? MAROON? PONTOON? Ooh, does it mean 'floating?' What does "OON" mean? OON over NOS is yuck, so it's a good thing the whole mess is shoved down in the corner, where few are likely to notice it (I didn't see it at all, for instance, as I dropped those 6-letter Downs 1-2-3).

Bullets:

• 40A: Scot's cap (tam) - part of a millinery sub-theme that also includes BEANIE (11D: Close-fitting cap) and STL (60D: Letters on a Cardinals cap)
• 43A: Despise (abominate) - a perfectly good word that no one ever uses. ABOMINATION, yes. ABOMINATE ... less so. "I abominate you!" Hard to take seriously.
• 4D: U.S. broadcaster overseas (VOA) - Voice of America. I started to write in USO at first...
• 10D: How quips are delivered (in jest) - true enough, and yet quips can (I think) be quite withering, where "IN JEST" implies a certain harmlessness or lack of seriousness.
• 52D: Insurance provider since 1850 (Aetna) - had the "A" and went with ... AFLAC. Spokesduck!
• 50A: Taunt (gibe at) - as in "let's go GIBE AT that guy we ABOMINATE"

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

My write-up of today's LAT puzzle is here.

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