Surfboard stabilizer / SUN 10-2-16 / Big name in medical scales / Two-time NL batting champ Willie / Beatles girl who made fool of everyone

Constructor: Zhouqin Burnikel

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium

THEME: "Paper Jam" — rebus puzzle with paper names "jam"med into single squares throughout the grid

Theme answers:

• FREEDOM OF THE PRESS / DEPRESS
• HUEY LEWIS AND THE NEWS / RENEWS
• BEHIND THE TIMES / AT TIMES
• JUST FOR THE RECORD / PRISON RECORD 
• WHAT IN THE WORLD / SMALL WORLD
• THE CHECK IS IN THE MAIL / DEAD MAIL (I don't know this term; I know "dead letter"/ dead letter office)
  
• FIRST PAST THE POST / GOALPOST 

Word of the Day: SKEG (74A: Surfboard stabilizer) —

noun

noun: skeg; plural noun: skegs; noun: skag; plural noun: skags

1. a tapering or projecting stern section of a vessel's keel, which protects the propeller and supports the rudder.

   • a fin underneath the rear of a surfboard. (google)

• • •

In the end, this is a very basic concept. "In the end...," get it? 'Cause all the rebus squares are at the ends of their answers!? Yes, that's a terrible joke. Anyway, it really is just a rebus of various things a newspaper might be called, including "NEWS." No real interesting elements to it beyond the rebus, but there are some good longer answers in there, and the grid shape is highly unusual (different is Good), even if it is Awfully SEGmented (if not SKEGmented), so, so, so I liked it fine, I think. Some of these newspaper names are very familiar (e.g. New York TIMES, Washington POST) but others I'm harder pressed to come up with examples for. I know the Detroit NEWS and the Detroit *Free* PRESS. Only MAIL I know is British. Only WORLD I know is defunct (New York). I know no RECORDs. Which brings me to one of the weirdest elements of this puzzle, from a constructor's perspective. I (and I am not the only one) have had puzzles rejected because the rebus element was "too long," which generally meant 5+ letters. But today: PRESS, WORLD, and whoa nelly RECORD. Is that the longest rebused word in NYT history? What is the longest rebused word? (Please, constructors, do not take this question as a dare.)


Theme became clear very quickly, given the 16-square gimme HUEY LEWIS AND THE [NEWS] (1D: Hit band heard on the soundtrack of "Back to the Future"). It was just a matter of figuring out what part of their name was going to be rebused. Worked my way down the length of the answer to find that it was the very end that would be squished. FREEDOM OF THE [PRESS] is a bit spot-on for a theme answer containing newspaper names. Usually, constructors try to come at theme-related words in oblique, non-theme ways, if possible. BENCH [PRESS] would be a good example for a puzzle like this. Or FRENCH [PRESS]. You get the idea. A non-news-related PRESS. But in this case, that obliqueness is probably not essential. I nearly got Naticked by LAST IN (54D: Part of LIFO, to an accountant) / WTO (67A: International commerce assn.). I have no idea what LIFO, though I eventually inferred it was "LAST IN, first out." Is that right? Ha, it is. That one's new(s) to me. And WTO ... I mean, yes, World Trade Organization, but there are so many damn 3-letter agency initialisms that they get muddled in my head. WMF, IMF, WWF, WWE, etc. But I guessed "T" and "T" it was. I've also never heard the phrase FIRST PAST THE [POST] (107A: Like a simple-majority voting system). Seriously. It's ... horse-racing? Clearly, despite HD RADIO and ELI ROTH and SHONDA Rhimes, this one is playing in a cultural world slightly behind and a little to the side of me. These things happen.


SANTA HAT crossing SAINT NICK near its top is pretty cute. DETECTO is a funny scale name (29D: Big name in medical scales). I mean, it's telling your weight, not solving a crime. Oh, I invented a new term today. It's called the "ick line." Please see the row that begins with 80-Across to see what I mean. When it's coast-to-coast junk—it's an ick line. OOXTEPLERNON is the paradigmatic ick line.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

P.S. RADIO is in the grid (HD RADIO) and clues (107D: Most music radio stations). This fact doesn't make me nearly as mad as the answer to 107D: FMS. Come on, man. Use it in a sentence you can't the end.

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Read more...

1982 international chart-topper by Trio with repetitive title / SAT 10-1-16 / Roman soldier who became Christian martyr / Hoarder's squalor / Headliners at Palais Garnier / Brand once advertised with line they never get on your nerves / Where mud engineer works

Constructor: David Woolf

Relative difficulty: Medium

THEME: none 

Word of the Day: Edward Gorey's "The Gashlycrumb TINIES" (18A) —

The Gashlycrumb Tinies: or, After the Outing is an abecedarian book written by Edward Gorey that was first published in 1963. Gorey tells the tale of 26 children (each representing a letter of the alphabet) and their untimely deaths in rhyming dactylic couplets, accompanied by the author's distinctive black and white illustrations. It is one of Edward Gorey's best-known books, and is the most notorious amongst his roughly half-dozen mock alphabets. It has been described as a "sarcastic rebellion against a view of childhood that is sunny, idyllic, and instructive". The morbid humor of the book comes in part from the mundane ways in which children die, such as falling down the stairs or choking on a peach. Far from illustrating the dramatic and fantastical childhood nightmares, these scenarios instead poke fun at the banal paranoias that come as a part of parenting. (wikipedia)

• • •

An exercise in Adequacy. Boring, acceptable, occasionally marginal fill, and only 2-3 interesting answers in the whole grid (namely, ASSANGE and STRESS EATS, and possibly BMX BIKE). That double [___ deck] business was garbage, esp. ORLOP (?). Things get very 1-point tile-ish through IRON ORE / I REST / EELERS (ugh) / AEON. I think maybe HAHAHA hovering over "DA DA DA" is supposed to be funny. Maybe if the "International chart topper" (wth is that?) were more Something, I would like it better (I can hear the tune in my head ... actually, just the DA DA DA part ...). I do not accept TINIES as a thing except insofar as it is that thing that I occasionally call my dogs (true story). ONE TO TEN should've been clued as [Scale type] if it was to be clued as anything (not fond of it as an answer at all). But most of the rest is, as I say, serviceable. Just blah.

[A "chart-topper" ... in Austria, New Zealand, South African, and Switzerland only]

Also, right now, I am quite worried that I am supposed accept that when two people are "spooning" one of them is called the BIG SPOON and I cannot and will not accept this ever. I swear to you that I just assumed there was some form of the word "cuddle" (v.) that I just didn't know, involving a BIG SPOON. Maybe like "muddle" (v.) ... maybe you do it for cocktails ... "Step 2: cuddle the mint with a BIG SPOON." I don't know. But after looking up "cuddle" and "cuddler" several times and coming up with nothing involving muddling stirring or mixing of any sort, I was forced to come back to the strong possibility that the puzzle wants me to accept that there are BIG SPOONs and (!?) little spoons involved in the act of spooning. Never mind that actual spoons that nest together are the Same Damned Size. Never mind that the physically bigger person might be spooned. Ugh. Please tell me there is some non-spooning way to understand this stupid answer.

Here is a short podcast that constructor / solving phenom Erik Agard recorded yesterday re: yesterday's GHETTOBLASTER (which, apparently, Shortz tried to pre-emptively defend yesterday on the NYT's house blog—you can find the link on Erik's Soundcloud post). Succinct and smart and strident.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Read more...