There appears to have been miscommunication with my substitute blogger today. I am leaving town now, so I have no time to do a proper write-up. This puzzle was hard for me. Took me and my wife a long time to grok the theme. Wasn't til I got to the LOOK OUT FOR NO ONE that I saw that the theme wasn't just lopped off letters—it was abbreviations (that could be read as words themselves). Puzzle also clued hard. Not the most satisfying solve, though core idea is clever.
Gotta go. You may get a fuller write-up from my sub in a few minutes (or hours). Or you may not. I don't know.
THEME: ONE-THIRTY (24D: Setting depicted by this puzzle's grid) — The minute hand is pointing straight down, the hour hand is that little three-square diagonal run in the NE.
Word of the Day: "RAMONA" (5D: Title heroine of an 1884 Helen Hunt Jackson novel) —
Ramona is an 1884 American novel written by Helen Hunt Jackson. Set in Southern California after the Mexican-American War, it portrays the life of a mixed-race Scots–Native American orphan girl, who suffers racial discrimination and hardship. Originally serialized in the Christian Union on a weekly basis, the novel became immensely popular. It has had more than 300 printings, and been adapted four times as a film. A play adaptation has been performed annually outdoors since 1923. // The novel's influence on the culture and image of Southern California
was considerable. Its sentimental portrayal of Mexican colonial life
contributed to establishing a unique cultural identity for the region.
As its publication coincided with the arrival of railroad lines in the region, countless tourists visited who wanted to see the locations of the novel. (wikipedia)
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You gotta ignore a Lot of black space to make this "theme" work, but whatever. It's a funny-shaped grid. Nothing wrong with that. Actually, the four-square black segments at 12, 3, and 9 O'CLOCK are likely intended to be part of the clock face itself, so ... not a bad facsimile. Before I got ONE-THIRTY (O'CLOCK???) I thought the setting depicted by this puzzle's grid was POKER CHIP or some kind of island or Pac-Man or something. I could've guessed all day long and never come up with ONE-THIRTY (O'CLOCK). The column of 15s is remarkably solid. Things get a little dicey in those wide-open spaces, but that's utterly predictable and probably mostly unavoidable—if you want to do stunt puzzles with lots of white space, you're gonna pay for it somehow. It's not really worthwhile covering the less lovely parts. I actually think the puzzle hits more than it misses. There's just one answer I find laughable and baffling. Laffabling. I wonder if you can guess. I wonder if you too were left staring at it thinking "Oh, man, that's not a word? What do I have wrong?" When I finished, I fully expected not to get the happy "Congrats, you finished" message. And yet there it was. And so I returned to the scene of the crime that is ... DAST (15D: Dare, colloquially). That answer is almost as ILLIN' as ILLIN'. Actually, way more, in that I have actually heard someone "Colloquially" use ILLIN'. Look here:
["Small Fries, BIG MAC!"]
I cannot imagine this DAST being said by anyone ever. I've heard of (archaic) "durst." "Daren't." But DAST? Apparently it's in "Death of a Salesman," but the tense is wrong. There, it means "dares," not "dare." I mean, tense is not really my problem with this answer, but it's an added problem. Hmmm, cruciverb says it has been used once. 21 years ago. Clued as [Dare, in Dogpatch]. So it's AlCappian? Ugh. All I know is that it is AT REAR of my favorite answers today (just behind AT REAR).
There's some unusual, inventive stuff in here. DOMECAR! I don't know what that is, or didn't, but I can imagine it. "I CAN RELATE" is a fantastic (and actual!) colloquialism. I am getting a lot of laugh mileage out of parsing 26-Down as ASS TATED. I know TATED is meaningless, but that's part of the joy. Otherwise, all I can say is this could've been much worse. As pointless experiments in grid manipulation go, this one isn't bad.
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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