Word of the Day: NED Land (18D: Land in a nautical adventure) —
"Canadian whaler and master harpoonist Ned Land," a character in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne (wikipedia)
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Wide open, smooth, and wicked easy (except for the NW, which I finished last and which gave me brief but discernible fits). It started oddly, with ALOU being the only thing I could muster in the NW. And then there was the out-and-out, absolute, I-can't-believe-anyone-doesn't-think-this-is-a *gimme* at 29A: Breakfast dish with hollandaise sauce (EGGS BENEDICT). I had crab cake benedict just last weekend in Minneapolis, but I think I would've nailed this regardless. So after a little bit, my grid looked very, very strange:
I usually build on the answers I already have, and I almost never get a long answer with no crosses in place. So the above grid is freakish-looking to me. Then it gets slightly weirder, as I manage to drop BIERCE (gimme) (30D: "The Devil's Dictionary" author) and LENTIL SOUP (gimme) (28D: Food that Esau sold his birthright for) and then move straight into the SE. So ... strike out in the NW, and then *torch* the puzzle from the middle, down, and over.
[I am pretty PASTY. I am not (I hope) "cadaverous"]
You can see how WENCES got me quickly into that SW corner. That is a gimme for those who are Xers or older, probably, but just as probably baffling and arcane to younger folk. An answer like that can probably be the difference between breezing through a corner and struggling a little. Also, WENCES is never going to look right to you if you don't know it. But I knew it, so ... hurray? Got the brilliant L'ETAT, C'EST MOI and moved easily up the grid and into the NE. That left just the NW, which, as I said, was a totally different puzzle for me. Those two "?" clues side by side meant that I had to work much harder up there, despite having ALOU, and EGGS-, and correctly guessing ERRED and MEDLEY (though I kept doubting the latter). I had the back end of STAGNATION, but couldn't find the front. [Threads] looks plural, though even after guessing it referred to clothing, I could think only of WEAR (?). [Material problem] is exceedingly vague clue for TEAR. Wasn't sure what "Base" meant in [Base players], or what "bill" meant in [It's read for a bill]. But the real toughies were the "?" clues, 2D: You again? (ALTER EGO) and 3D: Fits on a hard drive? (ROAD RAGE), good and great clues, respectively. Good way to slow me down is to bunch up your "?" clues. Drives me mad. With Rage. Of the non-road variety. But the puzzle was undeniably lovely overall.
Very uneven. Unusual and ambitious, but also, at heart, just a boring old word ladder. From WARM to COLD. Why? And why in tiny boxes? Don't know. It definitely required some effort to piece together, that's for sure. Couldn't see the theme at all, or even fill in all the rebus squares properly, until the grid was completed, and I could work backward from COLD—CORD—WORD. Some of the rebus answer clues were almost no help. [Renaissance fair props] for SWORDS??? Ha, no. I could've guessed all day long and not solved S-S. Further, I had no idea what kind of BODY was called for at [Any old person], and I was convinced that ___UP was CUE UP (1D: Get ready to play). I've heard of BIRD'S EYE VIEW, but never ever WORM'S, and EAR ___ made me think only of EAR CANDY. Even after I figured out it was EAR WORM, I thought there was something going on with BIRD'S EYE VIEW and EAR WORM, i.e. a rebus where the crossing elements ... act out adages? The early BIRD catches the WORM? Honestly, I was giving this serious consideration for a while. So I had to work for it, which is great. It's just that figuring out that it was all for the sake of ... a word ladder? That was something of a let-down.
The fill was also uneven, with a bunch of stuff giving me great joy (INFERNO! OTTO DIX! BESTIARIES! SCREEN SHOT!) and some stuff leaving me wondering "what?" AZOTH? NITRILE? (41D: Latex-like glove material). Those two and TRASK (7D: "East of Eden" family name) I would've tried desperately to ditch if this had been my puzzle. Still, overall, I think the good outweighs the bad. It was important that the non-rebus fill be pretty gettable, because you need it to fill in the areas around and eventually *find* the rebus squares. It was pretty clear early on that a rebus was in play. Here's what my grid looked like a couple minutes in:
At this point I've located the first two rebus squares, but still have no idea what goes in them, how many there are going to be, etc. Once you know they're out there, you end up looking for them everywhere, including places they're not (which, today, included the NE and SW corners). I just noticed that the rebus squares today are symmetrical. I generally don't think much of symmetrical rebuses—too easy to find. Better to make people really look, and let maximal grid smoothness dictate where the rebus square goes (rather than forcing the grid to accommodate a fixed rebus square). But today I clearly didn't even notice the symmetry, and the grid doesn't seem to have suffered too much. So symmetry seems neither plus nor minus.
Bullets:
5D: The P.L.O.'s Arafat (YASSER) — Spelled it YASSIR, one of a string of misspellings today that included PADMA for PADMÉ (56D: "Star Wars" queen) and WOPNER for WAPNER (55A: Judge of 1980s-'90s TV)
38D: "___ the light!" ("I SAW") — I went with "I SEE." I'm not sure what context is intended in either case.
14D: 2003 OutKast hit that was #1 for nine weeks ("HEY YA") — I'm happy to be reminded of this catchy song. Given its popularity and its five-letterness (i.e. shortness) and its vowel-endingness, I'm kind of surprised I don't see it in puzzles more often. I'm kind of horrified by how the old the song is now. Still feels current to me :(
A long time ago, I was solving this puzzle and got stuck at an unguessable (to me) crossing: N. C. WYETH crossing NATICK at the "N"—I knew WYETH but forgot his initials, and NATICK ... is a suburb of Boston that I had no hope of knowing. It was clued as someplace the Boston Marathon runs through (???). Anyway, NATICK— the more obscure name in that crossing—became shorthand for an unguessable cross, esp. where the cross involves two proper nouns, neither of which is exceedingly well known. NATICK took hold as crossword slang, and the term can now be both noun ("I had a NATICK in the SW corner...") or verb ("I got NATICKED by 50A / 34D!")
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