Old swing digger - FRIDAY May 22 2009 - M Nosowsky (Lens grinding Dutch philosopher / Celestial neighbor of Scorpius / 100ths of a krona)

Relative difficulty: Challenging

THEME: none

Words of the Day:

• FWIW (10D: E-mail disclaimer) => "For what it's worth..."
• TMI (49A: "I didn't need to know all that!," informally) => "Too much information!"

An old-fashioned beat-down. I took one look at the puzzle constructor's name and jumped right in, thinking, "this should be fun ... no, wait, I mean hard ... I mean ... oh ... oh, man ... O DEAR (47D: "_____ Cassio!": Othello) ... why is my puzzle so blank?" I probably got a little psyched out, as Manny Nosowsky is not only legendary for wildly inventive and thoughtful and entertaining puzzles, he's also legendary for tough ones. This took me twice as long as last week's Friday, for instance. In fact, after a good handful of minutes, I had the NE corner done, but virtually nothing else. I was literally gawking at the rest of the grid, where all I could muster were sad, thin strands of answers here and there. A wisp of L RON (48A: Hubbard of science fiction), a smattering of ACEY (51D: _____-deucy), a hint of RETAG (26D: Change the price on), a trace of OBIE (that one was wrong - turned out to be TONY -> 46A: Accolade for a great play). I had PHINEAS and CO-STAR locked down in the NW, only a. the answer was PHILEAS ... and b. even with those two answers in place, none of the nearby answers seemed to want to come out of hiding (I just discovered that my wife made the PHINEAS-for-PHILEAS error too - I wonder how common that misconception is). I couldn't even make sense of the clue for 1D: Old swing digger. Yikes. Sounded like it wanted a construction machine, only there was already a construction machine in the SE (43D: LOADER), though I had no idea which kind yet. So ... flailing. Genuine concern. Something like panic.

And then, out of the clear blue sky, a bolt from the Crossword Gods - PILTDOWN MAN came crashing down upon me (4D: Its teeth were actually a chimpanzee's). PILTDOWN MAN is a century-old paleontological hoax that I learned about ... from crosswords. I had to look it up and blog about it once because it was an entirely new concept to me. So I was very pleased to be rescued, today, by something intimately tied to my crossword-solving past - to past ignorance, in fact. Made me feel like a good solver again. The puzzle went down in slow but steady fashion from there. [Old swing digger] = HEPCAT! Wow. "Hey, man, dig that old swing ... it looks pretty rickety. Hey, I dare you to swing on it! Crazy!" And [_____ bread] => RAISIN!?!?! Thanks for the help, clue. Really narrows things down. Yeesh. Rough. The horrible irony about struggling so much in the NW is that the very first word that entered my head upon reading 1A: Magazine since 1850 was HARPER'S! I mean, I'm a @#$#ing subscriber. And yet I didn't / wouldn't write it in. Maybe because I couldn't get any of the short Downs to work off of it. Never heard of the "Port Huron Statement" (7D: Port Huron Statement grp. => SDS), barely know about ELEA (5D: Home of Parmenides) and thought REAR (6D: Can) should be STIR, from the phrase IN STIR, meaning in jail, i.e. in the "can" - not to be confused with INSTR. (8D: Music producer: Abbr.).

Bullets:

• 15A: Accepted PayPal payments, e.g. (e-tailed) - by far the worst thing about this puzzle, in that I didn't actively dislike *anything* else. It's enough that I have to accept the concept of E-TAIL. But the verbing? Oh, the verbing!
• 23D: Ocean, in Mongolian (Dalai) - like HARPER'S, guessed it straight off, but refused to trust my instincts.
• 29D: "Under Two Flags" novelist, 1867 (Ouida) - wouldn't have believed a person with such a name existed had it not been for prior crossword experience with this woman. OUIDA is the pen name of Maria Louise Ramé. "Under Two Flags" is about the British in Algeria.
  
• 18A: Lens-grinding Dutch philosopher (Spinoza) - no idea he ground lenses, but I had the "IN" part of this one, so he was easy to uncover.
• 23A: Scandalmonger's love (dirt) - one of the handful of gimmes in this puzzle.
• 24A: Goal-oriented superstar? (Pele) - it annoys me when something is a gimme but I don't even see it until I have nearly all the letters. Waste of a gimme!
• 25A: Ravel's "Bolero" calls for one (tenor sax) - I don't recall this at all. Must listen ... now.

• 32A: It may be striking (union) - had the -ION and could come up with nothing. The only word I could even think of that fit was SCION. Ugh.
• 37A: Celestial neighbor of Scorpius (Norma) - that's a very uncelestial sounding name. No offense to the NORMAs out there.
• 55A: It's heard before many a face-off ("O, Canada") - that's good.
• 56A: Sluggard's problem (inertia) - the only word that would come to mind here for a while was ENNUI ...
• 11D: Consistently defeat, in slang (own) - the first thing I entered in the NE. I wavered for a moment, thinking the answer might be PWN - just discovered that the Wikipedia entry for "PWN" has been nominated for deletion, and there's a long, occasionally interesting thread where people argue about the merits of "PWN" as an entry. See it here.
• 12D: It was NE of Bechuanaland (Rhodesia) - heard of the answer, Never heard of the place in the clue.
• 20D: Cardinal that looks the same when viewed upside down (sixty-nine) - oh, "cardinal" number ... ok. Man, you really want to make this difficult, don't you?
• 24D: Of fraternities and sororities collectively (pan-Hellenic) - took me way, way too long to get, considering I've spent most of my adult life in close proximity to fraternities and sororities.
  
• 27D: World's first carrier with a transpolar route (SAS) - Scandinavian, so that makes sense.
• 34D: Where pit stops are made to get fuel? (coal mine) - cool clue. I had COAT MINE for a second, as I mistakenly thought that ETON had the sports teams called the Phoenix (45A: ELON).
• 36D: Provider or wearer of some hand-me-downs (sis) - I wrote it in, but only tentatively, mainly because there is nothing in the clue signifying abbrev. Also, thought it could be SIB.
• 40D: Stand-in for unnamed others (et alia) - man, cold. No indication of Latinity or anything.
• 42D: It has a twin city in the Midwest (Urbana) - because of LRON (the "R"), I never even considered ST PAUL, which seems the obvious choice.
• 54D: Questionnaire check box option (Mrs.) - like [_____ bread], this could have been a million things.
• 55D: 100ths of a krona (ore) - KRONE/A was once my Word of the Day. I think I mentioned ORE then. Did it help me here? No.

I realize it's hard to tell from the write-up, but I Loved This Puzzle. Not all agonizing struggles are bad.

Signed, bruised, but happy, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

Much easier LAT puzzle today - my write-up is here.

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Pawnbroker in slang - THURSDAY, May 21 2009 - P Blindauer (Name of Lord Rubble's feudal estate / Rio crosser / Ruhr industrial hub)

Relative difficulty: Medium

THEME: A final twist ... - theme answers are familiar two-word phrases where the last two letters of the second word are transposed, creating a wacky phrase, which is clued, "?"-style

Word of the Day: SYSOP - n.

A system operator.

Truth be told, this probably took me a little longer than the average Thursday, so I considered rating it Medium-Challenging, but a review of the grid shows that there is only one pocket that gave me significant trouble - the rest felt pretty spot-on for a Thursday. I came out blazing by easily taking down the two musical clues in the NW corner - "ABC" (1A: 1970 hit for the Jackson 5) and ABBA (1D: "Money, Money, Money" band), but stalled at 3D: Hot dog coating at a county fair (corn bread). I immediately thought CORN DOG, but I would never have thought to call that coating "BREAD." Anyway, I got BARNEY FIEF shortly thereafter, but thought that meant that there was something to do with puns or homophones around a particular theme. A feudal theme? Who knew? It wasn't until I hit BORDER LIEN that I understood that the issue today would be transposed letters - homophones would simply be coincidental.

Theme answers:

• 17A: Name of Lord Rubble's feudal estate? (Barney Fief) - "Lord Rubble," HA ha.
• 26A: Air in a sooty shaft? (coal mien) - took me a few beats to figure out the connection between "air" and MIEN.
• 33A: Sly little dog? (sneak Peke) - I wrote in SNEAKY and then tried to think of a three-letter dog that rhymed with PETE. Don't like "sneak" as an adjective.
• 46A: Celebration of a Disney dwarf? (Happy fete) - if I had to name all the dwarves, I think Happy would be the last one I remembered.
• 51A: Bamboozle a "Fargo" director? (snow Coen) - indefinite article is weird here. There's only one "Fargo" director. (sorry - only one *credited* director (Joel) - the reality, it seems, is that Joel co-directed it with his brother Ethan - they also co-wrote the screenplay, which won an Oscar)
  
• 65A: Property claim along the Rio Grande? (border lien) - "feels like I'm going to lose my mien ..."

Biggest problems today were in the NE, where there were two answers I didn't know crossing another answer I didn't know. I am certainly not familiar enough with Paris to know that there is a suburb called Choisy-LE ROI (11D: Choisy-_____ (Paris suburb)), and though I've never been in a pawn shop, I've read about them in crime stories before (at least I think I have), and can't recall the term "UNCLE" in anything I've ever read (12D: Pawnbroker, in slang). These answers crossed ARCS (19A: Slurs, in music), which I just didn't get, and in fact couldn't understand until well after I'd solved the puzzle. "ARC" had zero musical definitions, so I was flummoxed. Turns out that a slur is signified (on sheet music) by a diacritical mark in the shape of an ARC. And that is the story of how slurs are ARCS.

Bullets:

• 15A: Rio crosser (puente) - had PUENTO, which is ridiculous for many reasons, not least of which is my familiarity with the works of Tito PUENTE.

• 28A: Removed roughly (torn out) - total disaster. Had TORE OFF.
• 44A: Charles _____, "Brideshead Revisited" protagonist (Ryder) - because the truck rental company would be too easy for Thursday?
• 48A: "The Mikado" wardrobe item (obi) - which gave me the first letter of BOMBAY (49D: City visited in "Around the World in 80 Days"), which, even with BOM-, I couldn't get, largely because that place is not called "BOMBAY" any more. Debritification!
• 57A: Picasso/Braque movement (cubism) - took an embarrassingly long time to get this, considering I've seen art by these guys in museums all over the world. In NYC just a few months ago, in fact.
• 61A: Title heroine described in the first sentence of her novel as "handsome, clever and rich" (Emma) - Austen! You can't go wrong.
• 70A: Mungojerrie or Skimbleshanks, in a musical (cat) - another long clue for a very (in this case, VERY) basic answer.
• 73A: P.G.A. Tour Rookie of the Year after Singh (Els) - a three-letter golfer? Yeah, you've got just about one option there. If the golfer is male, that is. Se Ri PAK is a great golfer as well, but a woman (i.e. plays on the L.P.G.A.)
• 13D: Ruhr industrial hub (Essen) - the crosswordiest town in Germany. See also EMDEN.
• 23D: Month before Tishri (Elul) - attack of the Hebrew months. Why do I so steadfastly refuse to commit them to memory?
• 25D: Convex cooker (wok) - we should really use ours more often. We keep it in the basement because it just takes up too damn much room in our already crowded kitchen.
• 31D: Sysop, for one (techie) - love this, despite having No Idea what "sysop" meant for a good long while.
• 34D: Place to overnight in an RV (KOA) - read this as [Place to overnight an RV] - that's one big package.
• 37D: Meadow voles (field mice) - why I love the word "vole" I don't exactly know. Maybe because I enjoy encouraging my dogs to chase the "mice and stoats and voles and weasels" in the woods (I'm pretty sure there are no weasels there, but I like saying "weasels" anyway).
• 45D: Enormous birds of myth (rocs) - I didn't know there were many. I thought it was like the Phoenix - unique.
• 52D: White-cap wearer (nurse) - really? Still?

• 60D: _____ Dubos, Pulitzer winner for "So Human an Animal" (Rene) - no way. No shot. No idea. But at least his name is a familiar enough name.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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

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