South American rodents / SUN 9-20-15 / Swillbelly / Journalist Flatow / Pioneering Arctic explorer John / Bo's cousin Dukes of Hazzard / Pursuer of Capt Hook / Museo contents / Hip hop name modifier / Modern-day hieroglyph

Constructor: Jason Mueller and Jeff Chen

Relative difficulty: Easy

THEME: "Put A Lid On It!" —famous people and their hats, with the hat type sitting directly on top of the famous person's name, as a "topper"

Theme answers:

• INDIANA JONES (23A: Fictional archaeologist) wearing a FEDORA
• CALAMITY JANE (28A: Famed frontierswoman) wearing a STETSON
• CHE GUEVARA (40A: Subject of "Guerillero Heroico") wearing a BERET
• CHARLES DE GAULLE (58A: Leader of the Free French) wearing a KEPI
• STAN LAUREL (83A: He helped move a piano in "The Music Box") wearing a BOWLER
• BUSTER KEATON (95A: Star of "Sherlock Jr." and "Steamboat Bill Jr.") wearing a PORKPIE
• CHEF BOY-AR-DEE (102A: Italian pitchman of note) wearing a TOQUE 

Word of the Day: VENINS (8D: Poison compounds produced by snakes) —

n

1. (Biochemistry) any of the poisonous constituents of animal venoms

[C20: from French ven(in) poison + -in] (thefreedictionary.com)

• • •

This will have to be somewhat brief, as I have a houseful of 15-year-old girls and it's very, let's say, distracting (lovely as they are). My daughter is having her 15th birthday party tonight—really more of a get-together with four of her friends that involves snacks and dinner and hanging out watching "Key & Peele" videos and prank-calling WalMart (we stepped in there) and, ultimately, watching the season premiere of "Doctor Who." Not a sleepover, though, so mercifully I will have my house back before midnight. For the time being, though, it's weirdly loud in this house, and things keep happening that require attention, so ... I'm gonna try to crank this out quickly.

["Present"]

The theme is cute but utterly transparent. I knew it was hat-related just from reading the title, and the way the theme is set up, you get a lot of squares for free if you know the particular famous person you are dealing with. I knew all the people and all the hats, so, piece of cake. Too much of a piece of cake. Like I say, you pretty much get the hats for free, and yet ... those hats (ironically) are oddly costly, in that they really really compromise the fill. If you highlight all the unlovely fill in the grid, you will see that it (unsurprisingly) tends to congregate around the stacked hat-on-person answer sets. TOQUE alone is responsible for a whole weird section of grid design, where a bunch of cheater squares (extra black squares before TOQUE and under QBS) are introduced in order to, uh, handle that "Q." If you don't have a "U" to stack that "Q" on, your options run low very, very quickly. Elsewhere, you get sketchiness in the west with IGOTO alongside COWAN (who?), and in the north with VENINS (?) crossing ANILS (crosswordese plural!). AUER ARTE EEKS haunts the BUSTER KEATON section. And all over the place you have much more subpar fill than you would (probably) have in a less exacting grid. Those "hats" really really lock you in, fill-wise. So, because the theme was ultra easy, and because the fill skewed downward, I wasn't thrilled with this, despite being a fan of many of the people in the grid (esp. BUSTER KEATON) and despite liking the basic thematic premise.


Here's a list of other stuff I would, for varying reasons, keep out of my grid if I could (keep in mind that the point isn't that any *one* of these answers is inherently unacceptable, but that in the aggregate, they become wearying):

• AORTAE
• REATA
• ANNEALS
• ANILS
• VENINS
• ANNO
• ALLA
• AGOUTIS
• IGOTO
• FRISCH
• COWAN
• AUER
• OSIER
• UNKEYED
• TSR
• EEKS
• ANDERS
• SBA
• ESTS
• RES
• RAE
• TUA
• OSA
• LETT
• EMAJ

There wasn't enough on the other side of the ledger (Wonderful Stuff) to balance things out, but I did enjoy SEEN IT! (49A: Nixing phrase on movie night) and EMOJI (69A: Modern-day hieroglyph) and AFRIKANER (79D: Literature Nobelist J. M. Coetzee, by birth), for sure.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

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Central Honshu volcano / SAT 9-19-15 / Lepore of women's fashion / Movie plotter / Tongue with six phonetic tones / dromedaries carob trees / Longtime maker of model rockets / satay sauerbraten / Vulture lookalikes of falcon family

Constructor: Kevin Adamick

Relative difficulty: Challenging

THEME: none 

Word of the Day: ASAMA (10A: Central Honshu volcano) —

Mount Asama (浅間山 Asama-yama^?) is an active complex volcano in central Honshū, the main island of Japan. The volcano is the most active on Honshū. The Japan Meteorological Agency classifies Mount Asama as rank A. It stands 2,568 metres (8,425 ft) above sea level on the border of Gunma and Nagano prefectures. It is included in 100 Famous Japanese Mountains. A cruiser class of the Imperial Japanese Navy was named after it, including lead ship Asama. (wikipedia)

• • •

Another entry from the Big Database School of Constructing. It's been so nice not to have seen one of these in a while. I guess their return was inevitable. Sigh. I took one look at this grid and said "No way. There are only a few people on the planet I would trust to fill *that* grid (58 words!?) well. This is going to go poorly." With my expectations set super-low, the puzzle surprised me by not being ultra-terrible, but it still had most of the problems that low word-count stunt grids have. The bad fill is not as plentiful as I would've expected, but when it was bad it was awful. I keep looking at ASAMA on top of UCLAN and wondering how much contempt you have to have for solvers to do that. But my main issue here isn't how bad the fill is. It's that grids like these are made with an eye to showing off, not to ENTERTAINing. "Will it fit" takes precedence over "Is it cool? Is it fresh? Will it produce nice feelings in the  pleasure centers of the human brain." I wish constructors would spend time becoming good puzzlemakers before they tried their hands at stunt grids. Actually, I wish constructors would rarely, if ever, try their hands at stunt grids, because they aren't generally designed with solving pleasure in mind. They're designed for hanging on your wall or getting you in some imaginary record book.

The truth is that anyone with a massive enough word hoard (i.e. database) and patience can produce a workable low word-count themeless grid. Database management is not the same thing as constructing. To this puzzle's enormous credit, that NW corner *is* actually pretty entertaining. It's also remarkably smooth (the smoothest of the four maddeningly isolated quadrants). But TESTATORS and TOYERS and ESTES MANAT ESSES etc. is not my idea of a good time. I look forward to themeless weekends because, with the restraint of the theme lifted, the constructor can prioritize fantastic words and phrases and make the grid (mostly) extra-squeaky clean. There's no excuse for it not to be. Unless, of course, you decide self-impose a word-count of 58.

Lots of wrong turns today:  

• DIETS for VICES. (1D: Subjects of New Year's resolutions)
• GASSY for INANE (I was trying anything at that point). (2D: Like folderol)
• ESPERANTO for CANTONESE. (17A: Tongue with six phonetic tones)
• PREEN for ADORN. (5D: Opposite of uglify)
• Some kind of SHARKS for SEA SNAKES. (21A: Reef swimmers with no gills)
• MOTOCADES for AUTOCADES (?). (10D: They're often escorted by police)
• FATTED for BASTED. (35A: Like some geese and turkeys)
• ANNOY for CHAFE. (41D: Vex)
• ANNETTE for NANETTE (??). (34D: Lepore of women's fashion)
• Some kind of BIRDS for CARACARAS. (25D: Vulture lookalikes of the falcon family)
• EBOLA for ECOLI. (39A: It has some bad strains)

When I google UCLAN, literally every hit relates to The University of Central Lancashire. CARACARAS (?) reminds me of "Cara Mia" by Jay and the Americans, which I just today learned is one of my daughter's favorite bands. I knew the teenage years would bring weird disclosures, but this ... this was surprising.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

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