2001-02 Nickelodeon sitcom / SUN 9-23-12 / Soviet author Ehrenburg / Onetime Time competitor / 1965 title role for Ursula Andress / Dweller along Volga / Actress Martha who played Sinatra's love interest in Some Came Running / Most excellent modern slang

Constructor: Matt Ginsberg

Relative difficulty: Medium-Challenging

THEME: "Breath-Taking" — dedicated to ELIZA / DOOLITTLE (28A: With 78-Down, character commemorated in the answers to this puzzle's starred clues). Clues are for wacky phrases that contain words that start with "H"—in the grid, a la Eliza's pre-tutored speaking style, the "H" is dropped, and the result is ... just a familiar phrase.

Word of the Day: ENOUNCE (20A: Set forth) —

tr.v., e·nounced, e·nounc·ing, e·nounc·es.

1. To declare formally; state.
2. To pronounce clearly; enunciate.

Read more: http://www.answers.com/topic/enounce#ixzz27F4mLFCC

• • •

There is the germ of a clever idea here. But wackiness is always a mildly dicey proposition to start with (gotta be done really well if it's done at all), and here, it's not even on paper—just in your head. So most of the time you end up figuring out familiar phrases, mostly from crosses, and then backtracking to what the wacky H-containing phrase must've been. And your grid is not wacky. And in fact, outside the theme answers (which seem to have no relationship to one another), the grid is in fact mostly dull, occasionally painful. The theme is very dense, so I understand that the fill is going to be a bit boxed in, maybe a bit compromised or limited here or there. But this grid has literally NO interesting answers outside the theme answers, and mostly it feels as if it was filled either by machine or (related) someone to whom all words are roughly equal in interest and quality, so a valid answer is a valid answer. One INRE = one ERSE = one ROIL = any four-letter word. No sense of craft or discrimination. Take virtually Everything on a diagonal from ANET down to HYER (89D: Actress Martha who played Sinatra's love interest in "Some Came Running"). There's just so much rot. And I thought I hated ALIENEE more than any word that length—and then I met ENOUNCE. You'd have to hold a gun to my head to get me to let that thing into my grid. There's just a [shrug] "sure, whatever" attitude in the fill. "Well ... it's a word. Good enough—next!" It's dispiriting. When corners are hard, you want the work to be worth it. When the payoff involves ENOUNCE and/or ALIENEE, then you are left feeling badly ripped off.


Theme answers:

• 24A: *Male pattern baldness? (AIRLINE TRAVEL)
• 32A: *Baying? (NIGHT OWLS)
• 51A: *Cardiologist's concern? (STATE OF THE ART)
• 67A: *Caries? (ARM TO THE TEETH)
• 83A: *Marriage in 2004, divorce in 2011? (SEVEN-YEAR ITCH)
• 102A: *Conduct classes? (OLD SCHOOL)
• 113A: *Petrified wood? (FOREST OF ARDEN) — this doesn't make sense in wacky mode (the Forest of Harden!?!?), so boo.
• 14D: *Stable hands? (ALTAR BOYS)
• 3D: *Endless bagpipe tune? (LONG ISLAND SOUND)
• 48D: *Gold-plated forceps? (EYEBROW TWEEZERS)

Bullets:

• 13A: Most excellent, in modern slang (BADDEST) — Hmm. Stretching the meaning of "modern" pretty thin here. In related news, Michael Jackson's "Bad" just celebrated its 25th anniversary (Aug. 31).

• 75A: Occupants of the lowest circle of Dante's hell (TRAITORS) — I like to keep about half a dozen copies of "Inferno" on hand at all times, 'cause ... you never know.

• 91A: Inventor after whom a Yale residential college is named (MORSE) — Because there aren't enough Yale-oriented clues in the world. Insane clue for a very familiar answer. See also the clue on JUNEAU (95D: Gold prospector Joe with a state capital named after him).
• 93A: Soviet author Ehrenburg (ILYA) — oh, sure, who could forget ... that thing ... he wrote.  
• 8D: Kellogg offering, briefly (MBA) — so, some university's b-school is named "Kellogg" ... aha, Northwestern. I did not know that. My only associations with Kellogg are cereal-related. Or basketball analyst-related.
• 39D: French composer of "Vexations" (SATIE) — no one really expects you to know what he composed (though I recommend "Gymnopédies"). You just need to know French composer, 5 letters, boom: SATIE (maybe someone else too, but I'd try SATIE first).

• 43A: Extinct emu-like birds (MOAS) — in the plural. You don't see that too often. I only wish "emu-like" could've been in the grid instead of just the clues.
• 50D: Onetime Time competitor, briefly (US NEWS) — ... and World Report. It seems to still exist in some form—online, and as a ranker of colleges and universities. I guess it just isn't in Time's league any more?
• 64D: 1965 title role for Ursula Andress (SHE) — I know the H. Rider Haggard novel. With the answer at three letters, I just made an educated guess here.
• 70D: Dweller along the Volga (TATAR) — Oddly easy. Had the "T" and just thought "what's the crosswordesiest thing I can think of?"
• 76D: 2001-02 Nickelodeon sitcom ("TAINA") — the biggest "WTF!?" of the day, by far. Never heard of it, which is stunning given its longevity and lasting cultural resonance.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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Seinfeld holiday that begins with airing of grievances / SAT 9-22-12 / Short-billed marsh bird / One caught on grainy film / Show set in outer-outer borough of New York / Dodgers manager before Mattingly / Defendant in much-publicized 1920s trial

Constructor: Kristian House

Relative difficulty: Medium

THEME: none

Word of the Day: NGO Dinh Diem (48A: Vietnam's ___ Dinh Diem) —

Ngô Đình Diệm (January 1901 – 2 November 1963) was the first president of South Vietnam (1955–1963). In the wake of the French withdrawal from Indochina as a result of the1954 Geneva Accords, Diệm led the effort to create the Republic of Vietnam. Accruing considerable U.S. support due to his staunch anti-Communism, he achieved victory in a 1955 plebiscite, which was fraudulent.

A Roman Catholic, Diệm pursued biased and religiously oppressive policies against the Republic's Montagnard natives and its Buddhist majority that were met with protests, epitomized in Malcolm Browne's Pulitzer Prize winning photograph of the self-immolation of Buddhist monkThích Quảng Đức in 1963. Amid religious protests that garnered worldwide attention, Diệm lost the backing of his U.S. patrons and was assassinated, along with his brother, Ngô Đình Nhu byNguyễn Văn Nhung, the aide of ARVN General Dương Văn Minh on 2 November 1963, during acoup d'état that deposed his government. (wikipedia)

• • •

A clean little 72-worder (maximum word count for themelesses). Reasonably entertaining, but not thrilling. The odd thing about this puzzle, for me, was that it was extremely easy in parts, and then quite hard in others. This strange unevenness manifested itself in my slicing clean through the puzzle from NW to SE, with hardly a hesitation. SEMI to INNER to NOT SO HOT to TWIT to TORRE (51D: Dodgers manager before Mattingly). That's a long unbroken string, for a Saturday. So it was easy from NW to SE, but the chunks on the sides were harder, and then the stupid little throwaway sections in the NE and SW ended up being the hardest. Not painfully hard, just hardish. Or maybe they just felt that way because my expectation was that they'd just fall and they didn't Maybe those central chunks were actually more time-consuming. They are bigger, after all. Whatever. The difficulty level was highly uneven, and the pattern of that unevenness was curious to me.

FESTIVUS was a massive gimme, not least because it was in the puzzle some time in the past month (1A: "Seinfeld" holiday that begins with the Airing of Grievances). Having a nice long gimme at 1A gave me a nice push start into the grid. But I had trouble when it came to getting the two long Downs that connect middle to top in the NE and middle to bottom in the SW. SISTER- came easily enough, and I eventually worked out HOOD (after I worked my way around the CRANE-for-CRAKE fiasco) (40A: Short-billed marsh bird), but SASQUATCH took a bit longer (37A: One "caught" on grainy film), and it was only with that "Q" that I was able to move up into the NE via "AVENUE Q" (9D: Show set in an "outer-outer borough" of New York). The FIRE part of FIRE TRUCK took some work to bring into view (10D: What comes out when things go up?). The west part of the grid featured several missteps, including the giant misstep, PARK BENCH. Seemed a reasonable, if slightly strange, answer for 41A: What a construction worker may bolt down (SACK LUNCH). I also had NCO instead of YEO, which is odd, because what I *meant* to write in was CPO (still wrong, but more understandable, I think) (47A: Naval petty officer, briefly). In the SW, I had FATTED for 58A: Like some turkeys and geese, to cooks (BASTED), which made me doubt IT GIRL, even though that's what I wanted from the start (63A: Young celebrity socialite). Thought briefly that ---RAY might be BLU-RAY, but couldn't make the clue fit no matter how hard I tried (65A: Holder in front of a tube => TV TRAY).

Bullets:

• 17A: 25-Across-interrupting cry ("GET A ROOM!") — best answer in the grid, and I knew even before I looked at the clue or how many letters were involved that PDA would be the answer at 25-Across.
• 44A: Summer threshold? (SCREEN DOOR) — great clue. Confused me badly. I had the DOOR part and all I could think of was "Autumn's ... door?"
• 61A: Genre for Iggy Pop (PUNK ROCK) — great fill. Easy clue.

• 7D: Japanese vegetable (UDO) — not a crossword staple, but definitely on the crossword menu from time to time. A delicacy. Except delicacies are supposed to be good, and this is merely tolerable.
• 23D: Pull funding from (DISENDOW) — had the DI- and really wanted some form of DIVEST. Slowness ensued.
• 32D: Defendant in a much-publicized 1920s trial (SACCO) — another gimme. I'm teaching Crime Fiction, and we start in the '20s, and even though the SACCO and Vanzetti trial was not fiction, I am well aware of it. Italian anarchists, convicted of murder and eventually executed. There's still substantial controversy about the fairness of the trial and accuracy of the verdict.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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