Queen Gertrude's alas in Hamlet / TUE 8-21-18 / South Asian mixed rice dish / MASH transport informally / Comedy rock duo featuring actor Jack Black / Self-important minor official

Constructor: John Lieb and Andrea Yañes

Relative difficulty: Medium-Challenging to Challenging (3:48) (my third-slowest Tuesday of the past four months)

THEME: DARWIN (69A: Evolution theorist ... or what the circled letters are evolving toward?) — circled squares pick up a new letter and spell out a new word with each subsequent theme answer, going from D to DARIN ... and then DARWIN there at the end:

Theme answers:

• TENACIOUS D (21A: Comedy rock duo featuring actor Jack Black)
• DA ALI G SHOW (26A: Sacha Baron Cohen program of the early 2000s)
• STEELY DAN (36A: "Reelin' in the Years" band)
• DARN TOOTIN' (47A: "Abso-lutely!")
• BOBBY DARIN (55A: 1950s-'60s teen idol who sang "Dream Lover" and "Splish Splash")

Word of the Day: TENACIOUS D —

Tenacious D is an American comedy rock duo, formed in Los Angeles, California in 1994. It was founded by actors Jack Black and Kyle Gass, who were part of The Actors' Gang theater company at the time. The duo's name is derived from "tenacious defence" - a phrase used by NBA basketball sportscaster Marv Albert. [...] Critics have described their fusion of vulgar absurdist comedy with rock music as "mock rock". Their songs discuss the duo's purported musical and sexual prowess, as well as their friendship and cannabis usage in a style that music critics have compared with the storyteller-style lyrics of rock opera. (wikipedia)

• • •

Was dismayed by how arbitrary all the letter-adding seemed, until I got to DARWIN. That answer gave the theme the hook it really needed. It's a super-duper pop culture-dependent puzzle—a really dicey trait for a Tuesday puzzle. Tons of people won't even know who TENACIOUS D are, I guar-an-tee you. DA ALI G SHOW will be more familiar because ALIG is in puzzles occasionally. STEELY DAN and BOBBY DARIN are legit famous, no problem there. The fill, sadly, is quite bad in many places, with several short answers you should never use except in a terrible emergency (and esp. not on a Tuesday): NMI, TAUR, ERL (!), ORY (!!), and OME (!?!?!). Queen Gertrude's "alas"!?!?!?!?!? I teach Shakespeare every year and I had no idea what this clue was even trying to get at. As if Gertrude is somehow famous for saying "O [comma] ME." Ha ha, no. That is soooo bad. I didn't even understand there was an implied comma in that answer until after I was done. OME is bad fill never use it ever, ok? ok. And ETA is not good and neither is ETD, so you're gonna wanna just blow by them, not create a whole cluster**** of crossreferencing jokiness around them at the center of your grid. Next time, I mean.


The NE and SW corners were so wide open, which, again, made the puzzle harder than a normal Tuesday. But the most challenging was the SE, I think, where the GOD part of TIN GOD was a mystery to me, and GO GRAY (a good answer) was tough, as was ONE ONE (as clued), and then there's BIRYANI (44D: South Asian mixed rice dish), which I have never seen on a menu despite having been to many Indian restaurants in my life. Rough. I think it's been in the puzzle before, but again, it's Tuesday, so yikes. I really liked GAP YEAR (3D: Hiatus between high school and college) and IRON MAN (2D: Avenger in a red-and-gold costume) next to each other up there in the NW. Besides the SE corner, my main struggle involved parsing DA ALI G SHOW, first because of O comma ME, and second. because I spelled it Kunta K*E*NTE. Oy, proper nouns crossing at vowels. So dangerous.


Had a wonderful time this past weekend at Lollapuzzoola 11 in NYC (run by Brian Cimmet and Patrick Blindauer). Huge success. New venue on the Upper West Side and they packed the joint—maxed out at 400 contestants. Lots of first-time tourney-goers were there, many of them (apparently) competing in the Pairs division. My wife and I came in fourth this year (out of 63 teams!) which is not bad. A couple teams who didn't compete last year were very strong, and my friend Neville Fogarty and his mother did amazingly well, coming in 2nd in Pairs. The overall winner of the tournament was Stella Zawistowski, who managed to finish a very tough finals puzzle ahead of Glen Ryan and Sam Ezersky. I met a ton of new people and got to see many old friends. Again, this tournament and Indie 500 (in D.C. in the late spring) are the only ones I reliably attend—because they are in cool cities and they are run by cool people and the puzzles are of a very high quality and the vibe of the tournaments is relaxed and fun. You should make a point of trying out Lollapuzzoola 12 next year, but you'll want to keep an eye out for it and register early. Its popularity increases every year.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

P.S. here's an embarrassingly self-congratulatory article in which the NYT basically calls a bunch of you (commenters on this blog) trash, without even having the courage to name this blog directly.

"Commenters often respond with attacks on puzzle makers." Just chew on that sentence for a while. Worth noting that the NYT didn't even have its own (self-praising) blog until after Diary of a Crossword Fiend and then my own blog proved very popular, allowing for people other than His Highness to dictate public perception of the crossword. So now the NYT has not one but *two* house blogs (xwordinfo is *not* independent) to create the illusion that there are two kinds of blogs: "mean" blogs (not theirs) and "nice" blogs (theirs). I would've let this stupid puff piece blow right by, but they decided to totally mischaracterize my blog without even deigning to name it. I guess this hokey, feel-good nonsense is how they distract solvers from the embarrassingly low constructor pay, the sexist / racist fill that the editor has included and defended over the years, et cetera et cetera. Pettiness appears to be a winning financial strategy for them, though, so I guess I can't blame them.

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

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Desert beast / MON 8-20-18 / Brand that "nobody doesn't like" / Person not getting credit for a brave act

Constructor: Peter Gordon

Relative difficulty: Easy

THEME: Meat entrees — Each theme answer is a different meat dish named after a city

Theme Answers: 

• CHICKEN KIEV (17A: Meat entree in Ukraine)
• VIENNA SAUSAGES (28A: Meat entree in Austria)
• BEEF WELLINGTON (47A: Meat entree in New Zealand)
• LONDON BROIL (62A: Meat entree in the United Kingdom) 

Word of the Day: LAHTI (51A: Emmy winner Christine) —

Christine Ann Lahti (born April 4, 1950) is an American actress and filmmaker. She was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for the 1984 film Swing Shift. An eight-time Golden Globe nominee and six-time Emmy Award nominee, she won a Golden Globe for the 1989 TV movie No Place Like Home, and won a Golden Globe and an Emmy in 1998 for her role as Kate Austin in the CBS series Chicago Hope (1995–99). She also had recurring roles on Law and Order: Special Victims Unit (2009–11), Hawaii Five-0 (2012–16), and The Blacklist (2015–17).

• • •

Hi y'all! I'm Matthew, a recent college grad, newly-employed public radio producer and budding crossword enthusiast filling in for Rex as he rounds out the Lollapuzzoola weekend. I made my puzzle tournament debut at Boswords last month (s/o Laura Braunstein, whose guest blog appearance inspired me to sign up!), and I can say — if Lolla's musical guest was half as entertaining as the Boston Typewriter Orchestra, then it surely was a great weekend for all involved.

But on to the puzzle!

I started attempting the puzzle every day on my morning train commute last summer. And like all of us in our early days of solving, I really struggled with Wednesday puzzles onward each week. Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays were complete no-gos altogether. So I really looked forward to Mondays: my weekly opportunity to rekindle any nascent excitement for puzzling that had been snuffed out by midweek discouragement.

In my humble opinion, this week's Monday accomplishes half of the Monday constructor's mission. On the plus side — the grid is clean, there's not a lot of obscurity to bog down novice solvers, and the crosswordese — ANKA, ALDA, ENE and company (7D: "My Way lyricist Paul / 57A: Alan who wrote the book "If I Understand You, Would I have This Look on My Face?" / Direction from Mo. to Me.) — are few and far-between.

On the other hand (that's OTOH, for you newbies) — the puzzle is just flat-out uninspiring. Little about it feels exciting or invigorating. UNSUNG HERO (11D: Person not getting credit for a brave act) crossing PHAT (35A: Excellent, informally) is nice. The cluing on AUTO (55a: Jam ingredient?) is interesting and requires some extra thinking (although "ingredient" seems a bit of a stretch). But IN TOTO (49D: Like members of the band who blessed the rains down in Africa) —


 ... Ahem ...  I digress. IN TOTO (49D: Counting everything), this is a tepid grid anchored by a very straightforward, bland theme. There's nothing wrong with it, per se (except that VIENNA SAUSAGES is the only plural of the bunch for no apparent reason?). But there's no payoff. Filling in meat entree after meat entree (clued oh-so plainly as such, nonetheless) doesn't spark the feeling of triumph that completing a puzzle (especially as a beginner) so often brings.

This could be someone's only real shot at solving the puzzle until next Monday! This could be someone's first successful solve in their young, soon-to-be prodigious crosswording career! It feels like we owe it to all the aspiring solvers to be a bit more creative and dynamic to start off the week. *steps off soapbox* *hands microphone back to Rex*
Bullets:

• INFIELD FLY (29D: Pop-up that results in the batter being called out even if the ball isn't caught) — As a lifelong Chicago Cubs fan and all around baseball nerd, this made me smile. Baseball answers seem to come up all the time (lookin' at you, ALOU) but this felt refreshingly original.
• AT LARGE (46D: Like a prison fugitive) — Can anything else be AT LARGE besides fugitives? I'm drawing a blank.
• STAR (32D: Symbol on the Texas state flag) — Yes, I'm a Dallas lifer, and yes, I believe this is the only way STAR should ever be clued.
• WHALES (48D: Moby Dick and others) — Moby Dick, Shamu and Free Willy are the only three famous whales I can think of. Help me complete my cetacean Mount Rushmore!

Signed, Matthew Stock, CrossWorld rookie in for Rex

[Follow Matthew Stock on Twitter for podcast musings and Cubs fandom]
[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

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