Rex Parker Does the NYT Crossword Puzzle (2024)

Constructor: Will Treece

Relative difficulty: Easy (with wide variations probable)

—OR—

If you solved in the actual newspaper, this:

[Note the much cruddier western section, which they realized was TOO cruddy TOO late to make changes in the paper version. TOO BAD]

THEME: Overzealous copyediting (?)— musical acts (with oddly spelled names) spelled like they sound:

Theme answers:

• DEAF LEOPARD (3D: *"Hysteria" group, to an overzealous copyeditor?)
• THE BEETLES (18A: *"Rubber Soul" group,to an overzealous copyeditor?)
• LUDICROUS (23A: *"Chicken-n-Beer" rapper,to an overzealous copyeditor?)
• LINCOLN PARK (26D: *"Meteora" band,to an overzealous copyeditor?)
• BOYS TO MEN (53A: *"Evolution" group, to an overzealous copy editor?)
• MOTLEY CREW (60A: *"Dr. Feelgood" band,to an overzealous copyeditor?)

Word of the Day: Linkin Park—

Linkin Parkis an Americanrockband fromAgoura Hills, California. Formed in 1996, the band rose to international fame with their debut albumHybrid Theory, which was certifiedDiamondby theRIAAin 2005 andmulti-platinumin several other countries.Their following studio albumMeteoracontinued the band's success, topping theBillboard200album chart in 2003, and was followed by extensive touring and charity work around the world.In 2003,MTV2named Linkin Park the sixth-greatest band of the music video era and the third-best of the new millennium.Billboardranked Linkin Park No.19 on the Best Artists of the Decade chart.The band was recently voted as the greatest artist of '00s in a Bracket Madness poll on VH1.In 2014, the band was declared as theBiggest Rock Band in the World Right NowbyKerrang. (wikipedia)

• • •

Love this theme, though I'm not sure I like the cluing—presumably even overzealous copy editors are familiar with proper nouns and the fact that they might be spelled all kinds of ways. Also, if the copy editor has never heard of The Beatles … I wouldn't trust her to feed my goldfish, let alone edit my writing (she'd probably have the album as "Rubber Sole," too, btw). But the cluing makes its point effectively enough, I suppose—all the band names (and the one rapper's name) look, in their proper forms, like misspellings, and an overzealous copyeditor would zealously "fix" all misspellings, so … OK. Cluing aside, this is a great concept. Not sure why ONE wasn't built into the center of the grid (where ICE currently sits). It's clued thematically (47A: Chart position reached by all the albums seen in the starred clues in this puzzle), so … yeah, that's weird. I think I'm realizing now why I don't like the theme cluing—seems like the cluing could've been a *lot* funnier (or, funny, period) if the musical acts were clued in relation to their (often ridiculous) copy-edited names. I want a good DEAF LEOPARD clue! Just having them all end "… to an overzealous copyeditor" is monotonous and humorless. Still, I am down with this concept of "properly spelled" band names. Fresh, fun, contemporary, playful, good. Helps that the fill is pretty good. Slightly above average for an easy puzzle, I'd say, EHS and AHH and OLA and EDUC and AND notwithstanding.

CHEESES made me laugh, solely because it's in almost the exact grid location that the much-loathed (by me) SWISSES was in a few days ago. DARFUR did not make me laugh (4D: Region next to Chad), but I like it as fill. I had ERROR instead of TO ERR and WINE instead of WINO for a bit (41D: Grape nut?), but no other missteps, resulting in a very fast solve. I think many will not find the puzzle so easy, but only because of musical ignorance, i.e. I think it highly likely that many solvers won't ever have heard of LINKIN PARK. They're nearly too recent for me (I actually couldn't tell you a single thing they've done, but I've seen their name a lot). Many won't know Christopher Brian Bridges, aka Luda, aka LUDACRIS either, even though he's been crazy prolific for well over a decade. Won't surprise any of you that rap is a blind spot for your average crossword solver. But then so is contemporary music generally. I know that feeling locked out of a puzzle's cultural playing field can be frustrating, so I'd understand if this puzzle were less than thrilling for some of the less pop-musically inclined. But I liked this a lot.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

PS Looks like dead-tree edition has different clues in the west. Well, that's … idiotic. Two words: regime change.

Constructor: Jules P. Markey

Relative difficulty: Medium

THEME: CORNERSTONE(36A: Where one might find a date … with a hint to this puzzle's theme)— rebus puzzle with "STONE" in every [… wait for it …] corner.

Theme answers:

• STONEWALLS / STONEHENGE
• STONEMASON / GEMSTONE
• TOUCHSTONE /STONE AGE
• RHINESTONE / GRINDSTONE

Extra theme answers

• INSCRIPTION (30A: Writing on a 36-Across)
• TIME CAPSULE (43A: Something found behind a 36-Across)

Word of the Day:ISTRIA(44D: Adriatic peninsula shared by Italy, Slovenia and Croatia) —

Istria(/ˈɪstriə/;Croatian,Slovene:Istra;Italian:Istria;Istriot:Eîstria;German:Istrien), formerlyHistria(Latin), is the largestpeninsulain theAdriatic Sea. The peninsula is located at the head of the Adriatic between theGulf of Triesteand theBay of Kvarner. It is shared by three countries:Croatia,Slovenia, andItaly(wikipedia)

• • •

While I can't find a CORNERSTONE puzzle in the cruciverb database, the CORNER-type theme is old, old hat. There's a CORNERLOT puzzle in the NYT a few years back, with "HOUSE" in every corner (that was pretty good). There's a New York Sun puzzle from a while back (god I miss that puzzle…) that used FOUR CORNERS as its revealer and put the two-letter postal codes of the states involved (UT, CO, NM, AZ) in all the corners. So, it's been done, often, and usually more interestingly than this. This incarnation of the corner-theme is just too basic. The revealer gives away too much. "So … I just put 'STONE' in every corner? … OK." The attempt to liven it up with bonus theme answers only adds excessive pressure to the grid, which (not surprisingly) buckles. Repeatedly. The fill is good in places, but deeply unpleasant in others. OSA CRIT ISTRIA / TOPE POEME / TER SIMI SAMI LIENOR ISH / ET ALII ITO. Lots of ugly groupings. Long Downs look pretty great, but they aren't nearly enough. Dullish theme and subpar fill keep this one from passing.

I also didn't know CORNERSTONEs were so intimately associated with TIME CAPSULEs. This is a phenomenon of which I was unaware (though piecing together the answer wasn't hard at all). What else was I unaware of? ISTRIA's existence, for one. I have a hard time being happy learning new things when those things are so obviously desperation fill. Will try to be grateful for the new geographical knowledge, but it's not going to be easy. No idea what "Idiotest" is, either, so GSN was slow in coming (24A: Cable channel that has "Idiotest," for short). Not amusing that there is not one but two channels in the puzzle (see also TBS at9D). There oughta be a limit. Thought LAC was MER, but didn't have too much wrong-answer trouble, otherwise.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

Constructor: Patrick Berry

Relative difficulty: Medium-Challenging

THEME: none

Word of the Day: TBILL(9A: Single-price auction purchase, informally) —

United States Treasury Securitiesaregovernment debtinstruments issued by theUnited States Department of the Treasuryto finance thenational debt of the United States. Treasurysecuritiesare often referred to simply asTreasuries. Since 2012 the management of government debt has been arranged by theBureau of the Fiscal Service, succeeding theBureau of the Public Debt.

There are four types of marketable treasury securities:Treasury bills,Treasury notes,Treasury bonds, andTreasury Inflation Protected Securities(TIPS). There are also several types of non-marketable treasury securities including State and Local Government Series (SLGS), Government Account Series debt issued to government-managed trust funds, andsavings bonds. All of the marketable Treasury securities are veryliquidand are heavily traded on thesecondary market. The non-marketable securities (such assavings bonds) are issued to subscribers and cannot be transferred through market sales. […]

In 1929, the US Treasury shifted from the fixed-price subscription system to a system ofauctioningwhere 'Treasury Bills' would be sold to the highest bidder. Securities were then issued on apro rata systemwhere securities would be allocated to the highest bidder until their demand was full. If more treasuries were supplied by the government, they would then be allocated to the next highest bidder. This system allowed the market, rather than the government, to set the price. On December 10, 1929, the Treasury issued its first auction. The result was the issuing of $224 million three-month bills. The highest bid was at 99.310 with the lowest bid accepted at 99.152. (wikipedia)

• • •

Started this puzzle on a bummer because I woke up to find David Carr had died. I always liked his writing, and he was the only good/memorable thing about "Page One" so R.I.P. to that guy for sure.

[This. All day long. This.]

Been a while since I've found a Patrick Berry Friday anything but easy, but this one had some teeth, mainly because of Thesaurastretch, i.e. the tendency to clue words by "synonyms" that are valid but not exactly close or obvious. First two Acrosses are good examples. [Stew] for SEETHE, [Campaign] for PUSH—both took me multiple crosses to figure out. I slot "stew" with fretting or worry, and "seethe" with anger, so connections didn't come fast there. Then there's odd clues for common stuff, like [Oxi Complete detergent]. That clue means zero to me. How should I know? May as well say [Detergent]. Again, none of this is unfair—I'm just trying to assess where slowness/difficulty was coming from. Now some parts of the puzzle went down pretty fast. Most of the bottom, for instance. Got OBSESSION from the "O" (33D: A lot of thought goes into it) and RAY LIOTTA came shortly after, so no trouble in the SE, and after I sussed out NADER (48D: Critical Mass Energy Project founder) (?!?), SW also proved easy. RAM for RAT briefly kept me from getting down into the SW, but once I did, and once NADER got out of the way, I was done. The real resistance was up top, both in the NW, where even with UKES and TAKE A LOOK I had some trouble getting traction, and then, much worse, in the NE, where … well, we'll get to that. Here's how things started:

When I got here, I was happy, because a. the puzzle had made me put up a fight, and b. the fight was worth it. That is a fantastic corner. The opposite of EXECRABLE. Studly. A thing of beauty. Study it, ye aspiring constructors. May all your corners have that combination of smoothness and crunchiness (as with most of my favorite foods, it's textural contrast that creates the magic). So, where to go from there. Well, if you're me, it's RAM (strike) and KEPT … something. How about UP (strike) or AT (strike)? I got saved here by the feminine principle (Not For The First Time) … i.e. YIN, which handed me EYE DOCTOR on a platter, which was all I needed to get into that SE corner. So not too much later my grid looked like this:

[Note the wrong KEPT AT at 22A]

Now I head into the NE, and man oh man that place is trouble. I figure I'll throw some short stuff across those longer answer, then pick them off one by one, badda bing etc. Only I can't seem to throw any short stuff down. The whole western side of that NE section proves completely recalcitrant (a word favored by P.D. James, I'm finding out, as I work my way through Innocent Blood (1980) … but back to the puzzle …). At 11D: Like the sun god Inti, I put in AZTEC (strike) and then INCAN ("confirmed" by ENOS, which was a guess), and then hail-maryed LLANO in there at 12D: Vast prairie. And I swear to god if it hadn't been for that INCAN/LLANO pairing tipping me to the CAR in ECONOMY CAR, I might still be wildly swinging up there in that damned corner:

[God bless you, ECONOMY CAR]

[Continue noting the wrong KEPT AT at 22A]

I drove that lucky little car to the precipice of victory, but then I met the cross that is the worst thing about this puzzle—the thing that sent me into total Guessland. T-ILL (9A:Single-price auction purchase,informally) vs. -OYLE. Now lets get -OYLE out of the way: no idea. None. Zero. First letter could be many things. Many many. B, C, D, F etc. But, you know, that's why they call them *cross*words so … but … [Single-price auction purchase, informally] means even less to me than [Philosopher Robert who wrote "The Sceptical Chymist"]. I of course *want* the answer to be T-BILL, because that's a Thing that I've seen Before. But I figure the weird auction clue means it *has* to be some other strange expression from the world of auction houses where people raise little paddles and bid on art like in that one scene in North by Northwest (that scene is vintage Cary Grant comedy, by the way). So I STEW (that is, seethe) for a while before deciding on the only guess that makes sense: I opt for the answer that is a Thing that I've seen Before (T-BILL), having no idea why I'm doing so. Fast forward to Correct! And then I look up what a T-BILL is and somewhere in the fifth wikipedia paragraph or so is that bit about auctioning that I quote up top. So the most memorable part of an otherwise beautiful puzzle is now the part where I had to guess, and then read deep into a boring wikipedia article about the technicalities of finance (zzzz) before finally understanding. Final lesson for the day: treat your obscure proper nouns (in this case BOYLE) carefully. Cross them fairly. Save your overly cute clues for other parts of the grid.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

Constructor: David Steinberg

Relative difficulty: Medium-Challenging

THEME: none

Word of the Day: Olivia D'ABO(52D: Olivia who won a Razzie for "Bolero" and "Conan the Destroyer") —

Olivia Jane d'Abo(/ˈdɑːboʊ/; born 22 January 1969)is an Englishactress,singer-songwriter, andvoice artistbest known for portraying the rebellious teenage sister Karen Arnold inThe Wonder Yearsand recurring villainNicole WallaceinLaw & Order: Criminal Intent. […]D'Abo's film debut was in the supporting role of Princess Jehnna inConan the Destroyer, released in June 1984.Two months later, she appeared in the supporting role of the peasant girl Paloma inBolero(1984). [whoa, rough start]

From 1988, d'Abo was in the main cast ofThe Wonder Yearsin the first four seasons. Her character, Karen Arnold, was thehippiesister. In 1992, she guest starred in theStar Trek: The Next Generationepisode "True Q" as Amanda Rogers. As therecurringvillainNicole Wallace, she made five appearances over six years on television crime-dramaLaw & Order: Criminal Intent. On theSci-Fi ChannelseriesEureka, she has the recurring role of Abby Carter, the ex-wife of SheriffJack Carter. (wikipedia)

• • •

This is great work once again from Mr. Steinberg. Smooth, sparkling, wide-ranging, fascinating grid. There is one gratuitous bit of pop culture ephemera that I'm not that fond of as a longer crossword answer, but I am sort of fond of it as a song, so … I'm gonna allow it:

[Spin it for your valentine!]

When I saw David's byline, I thought "Oh, yeah, I can do this." Meaning: I tend to be on DS's wavelength much of the time. It's one of the few remaining things that keeps me deluded about how old I am. That, and being vaguely familiar with Flo Rida's oeuvre. But today, I had to fight for my right to party, much more than I usually do with a DS puzzle. But, like yesterday, almost all my trouble came in one section. And, like yesterday, that section was the NE. I started (like yesterday, like virtually every day) in the NW, where, like a bull in some kind of shop, I just crashed my way headlong into the direction of correct answers, making a terrible mess along the way. Maybe "bulldozer" is the better metaphor. You want to know how I brought that section down? (yep, bulldozer is better). Check this out. This is how I uncovered JAVASCRIPT (1A:Language introduced in 1995):

There are fully three wrong answers in there, but that -IPT was enough. SCRIPT! JAVASCRIPT! Unh! [spikes football]. Wasn't long before MAIDENFORM made TINKERED impossible and I realized how lucky that my wrong answer there had that "T" up front. *Maybe* I would've seen "SCRIPT" in all that mess without it, but I doubt it. Wrong answer for the win!

[See your MAIDENFORM"stockist"!]

So, I got out of there and into the center, which proved oddly easy. After flirting with ESPNEWS at 29A: It names an annual Sexiest Woman Alive, I realized that 30D: Like Confucius, often was QUOTED, and the "Q" made ESQUIRE obvious. Whole center done fast. From there I went into the NE but got stuck (more on that later). So I rode the ONE-TON pick-up into the SE, where I picked up NED and spun some DECCA records and then hit another wrong-answer bonanza. I mentally made the [Big name in scales] SELECTO and got CHUM TOKE OPES, 1 2 3. Turns out the scale was DETECTO, but whatevs, I was in business!

[Yes … the NE … we're coming to that …]

OK, so CHUM wasn't right, but once again (third time!) a wrong answer was right enough to get me some much-needed traction. Half-right. Wrong CHUM got me right KARATE CHOP. You take your luck where you find it. Anyway, I was not down there long, but I knew I had to go back to the NE, a move I was dreading because Man was I stuck up there. And look at the layout of that corner—it's really, really cut-off from the rest of the grid. There's just these teeny little one-square gateways in and out of that thing, so if you get stuck, no one's coming to your rescue. You're on your own. And the "P" from PRETEXT did nothing to help me get in to the bottom part of that corner, so I was back fighting with the top, where PETERS (20A: Old sitcom family name) and ORCA (18A: Major menace) were killing me, only I didn't know that. I just knew that *something* was wrong. MASS ONEL ORCA PETERS—I had an error in there (two, it turns out). PETERS seemed like the only name that would work, and wasn't that the name of the family on "The Dick Van Dyke Show" (oh man, thank god I at least had the show right)? And I was weirdly confident about ORCA. I kept pulling MASS, even though, in retrospect, it seems the most obviously correct of those four Acrosses. Anyway, eventually I remembered the name was PETRIE (!), and when that didn't crack things with the Downs, some combination of pulling answers out and putting them back gave me a glimpse of this pattern at 12D: Top-selling app of 2010: AN-RY… and then I had the biggest "D'OH!" moment I've had in a while. The ubiquitous ANGRY BIRDS! How did I not know!? Self-loathing … rising. ANGRY SOLVER!

From there, there was just the SW, which proved *so* much easier than its symmetrical counterpart. Went in there like pow pow pow because of my deep knowledge of "blunts" ("deep" in that I know that you smoke them … that's about all I know). So: CIGARS. Then ACME. Then ODIC NORM ELLE. All in about 10 seconds.

Couldn't recall the exact title on the Flo Rida song, then went with CINEMA IDOL (!?!) at 27D: Cary Grant or Betty Grable. So that left only one hope … and it's all I needed. I love waffles, and ice cream, and even though I never order the WAFFLE CONE, it came readily to mind. After that, puzzle was as good as done. Lots of fighting, no wincing—that's a good Saturday. Whoa, wait, what (the hell) is ACI!?!? (58D: Handel's "___, Galatea e Polifemo"). Wow. Good thing I didn't see that, because I would've winced for sure.

Aside from not picking up ANGRY BIRDS earlier, the most annoying failure of the day was not remembering Nellie BLY, a figure I've discussed at length with my wife (who has a Ph.D. in US History and who specialized in the damn Gilded Age, i.e. BLY's time period). Here's the deal. At three letters, and with that clue (31A: "Ten Days in a Mad-House" muckraker), all my brain wanted was IDA Tarbell. Damn you, common three-letter muckraking crossword names! IDA Tarbell and Nellie BLY are roughly the same age and known for very similar things. But the clue was obviously calling for a last name, so, with IDA sitting in my brain and not going anywhere, I was just stuck. Never mind that I was confusing IDA Tarbell with IDA B. Wells (jeez louise, they practically rhyme). Gah. A lot of superficial knowledge is a dangerous thing.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

Constructor: Ellen Leuschner and Jeff Chen

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium

THEME:"Split Ends"— famous phrases that end "___ OR ___"; pre-"OR" slot filled by word that runs normally Across, post-"OR" slot filled by word running Down off the last letter of the preceding word in the phrase. Thus "BE THERE [OR] BE SQUARE" at 1A reads BE THERE and then SQUARE runs Down from the "E" in "BE"…

Theme answers:

• BE THERE[OR]BE SQUARE (1A: "Everyone who's anyone is attending!")
• GO BIG[OR]GO HOME (8A: Shoot of the moon)
• "THE LADY [OR]THE TIGER" (13A: Much-anthologized Frank R. Stockton short story)
• HALF FULL[OR] HALF EMPTY (54A: Proverbial matter of perspective)
• IS IT LIVE[OR] IS IT MEMOREX? (60A: Question asked in classic 1970s ads)
• YOUR MONEY[OR] YOUR LIFE (79A: Stickup line)
• "SHOULD I STAY[OR] SHOULD I GO" (115A: Song by the Clash on Rolling Stone's "500 Greatest Songs of All Time" list)

Word of the Day: William HOWE(112A: William ___, British general in the Revolutionary War) —

William Howe, 5th Viscount Howe,KB,PC(10 August 1729 – 12 July 1814) was aBritisharmy officer who rose to becomeCommander-in-Chief of British forcesduring theAmerican War of Independence. Howe was one of three brothers who enjoyed distinguished military careers. […]He resigned his post as Commander in Chief, North America, in 1778, and returned to England, where he was at times active in the defence of the British Isles. He served for many years in Parliament, and wasknightedafter his successes in 1776. He inherited theViscountcy of Howeupon the death of his brotherRichardin 1799. He married, but had no children, and the viscountcy was extinguished with his death in 1814.(wikipedia)

• • •

Strangely, I have Valentine's Day plans (or, rather, plans that happen to fall on Valentine's Day), so this will briefer than usual. I said some time ago that the NYT had become very, very reliant on a small group of reliably good constructors, without whom the average quality of the puzzle would fall precipitously. We've seen nearly all said constructors over the past three days (Berry, Steinberg, now Chen). And, predictably, thankfully, mercifully, all three have been delights. I've definitely seen this theme type before (where a themer either heads Down or heads in two directions), but never executed quite this way. Grid symmetry is changed from rotational to mirror, presumably to better accommodate the theme, which is admirably dense but does not overwhelm the grid. The areas without theme material (far SW and SE) make up for it by having a bevy of interesting long Downs. YO LA TENGO! I know for a fact that IRA Kaplan of YO LA TENGO is a crossword solver and fan because he co-constructed a puzzle with ed. Ben Tausig for American Values Crosswords a little while back (if you aren't a subscriber, then you aren't doing one of the very best crosswords in the country—more info here).

The fill in this one has some weak spots, but I didn't notice them nearly as much as I noticed the sparkly medium- and longer-range stuff. Third day in a row with an EYE answer (today, DEADEYES) (89D: Straight shooters?). I don't know what that means. Probably nothing. Except that I noticed. What were the other two… SLEEPY-EYED was yesterday and … oh, right, EYE DOCTOR was the day before that. As you can see, I'm fresh out of interesting observations, so good night.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

Constructor: David J. Kahn

Relative difficulty: Easy

THEME: Presidents Day— Note: "The last names of eight U.S. presidents are hidden in this puzzle's completed grid, reading across, back, up, down and diagonally, word-search style"

Theme answers (sort of):

• TIRE TRACK (17A: Imprint on a dirt road)
• OUT OF ORDER (29D: Not working)
• DREAM ABOUT (11D: Have fantasies about)
• TEMPT FATE (54A: Flirt with disaster)

Word of the Day: BOURG(31A: French market town) —

noun

historical

1. a town or village under the shadow of a castle.

   • a French market town. [what is a non-market town?] (wikipedia)

Poor Bob Dole—it's like this puzzle is taunting him... I still have a hard time accepting that "Presidents Day" is a thing. In my day … we had Washington's birthday and Lincoln's birthday and sometimes we combined them for holiday purposes but no one was ever forced to think of TAFT. And we liked it that way. But sure, why not, as a "holiday"- (so-called) themed puzzle goes, this is fine. Certainly Monday easy (took me roughly four times as long to find all the presidents as it did to solve the thing), and the yuck stuff (BOURG? ODORED!?) wasn't exactly obstructive, so fine. This works. I don't enjoy word searches, but some do, and if I didn't want to do it, I sure didn't have to, so … "Happy""Presidents Day"!

• 38A: N.F.L.'s Manti ___ (TEO)— I'd already started to forget him. In college, he was the subject of a very weird fake-girlfriend story. And then I stopped paying attention. To be honest, I wasn't paying much attention to begin with.
• 39D: New ___, site of the 1988 Republican convention (ORLEANS)— I only just this second got why there was a convention site twofer in today's puzzle (see 6A: CHI). Me: "That's weird … wait, no it isn't."
• 52A: Six-time Tony winner McDonald (AUDRA)— she's from Fresno, CA. As am I. As was Philip Levine (R.I.P.). He didn't grow up there, but he lived there for the last 30 years. My mom said earlier today: "I loved seeing him at the farmers market in Fresno. He always had such a wonderful smile." I have many of his books. I was sad to hear of his death yesterday.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

Constructor: Bruce Haight

Relative difficulty:Easy-Medium

THEME:"WHO LET THE DOGS OUT"(22A: 2000 novelty hit … or a hint to the answers to the nine starred clues) — starred clues are words that are also dog breeds. Black squares at center of the grid form a dog profile (see 1A: Enemy of the pictured animal (CAT))

Theme answers:

• CHOW (1D: *Grub)
• POM (11A: *Fruit juice brand)
• BOXER (4D: *One working on a canvas?)
• BLOODHOUND (53A: *Relentless pursuer)
• HUSKY (66A: *Like Lauren Bacall's voice)
• BEAGLE (10D: *Darwin's ship)
• SETTER (34D: *Volleyball position)
• PUG (56D: *___ nose)
• POODLE (47D: *Kind of skirt or haircut)

Word of the Day: POM—

POM Wonderful,LLCis a private company which sells an eponymous brand of beverages and fruit extracts. It was founded in 2002 by the billionaire industrial agriculture coupleStewartandLynda Rae Resnick.ThroughRoll Global, their holding company, they are also affiliated withTeleflora,FIJI Water, pesticide manufacturer Suterra, and Paramount Agribusiness.As a private company, POM Wonderful does not disclose its profits. In 2006,Newsweekhas estimated that the company sales have increased from $12 million in 2003 to $91 million in that year.In recent years, the company has long been the subject of government prosecution due to its illegal marketing schemes. (wikipedia)

• • •

If Tuesday's not a disaster, I'm happy, so I'm happy. I mean, the fill is pretty bad all over the place (AMAH ORA OONA CRAT TYR ASA NTHS (?!!) ANEEL DONEE ORTO ENNE), and the "novelty song" in question is best left in the dustbin of history where it belongs, but I'm having trouble resisting the picture of the doggie. Apparently grid tricks are now good enough to placate me on a Tuesday. The dog breeds … well, there they are. Hither and yon. But the random placement of the dogs fits somewhat with the spirit of the puzzle. I mean, when you let the dogs out, they don't line up symmetrically in your yard. If they do … something deeply troubling is going on. I'd run. Fast.

If you can't decide whether to READ TO OR TO SAY HI TO TOTO, why not do both. And hey, TOTO's a dog, so that's kind of a bonus answer, as is RCA (with that "His Master's Voice" dog) and TYR(63D: Norse god of war), who is "destined to kill and be killed by Garm, the hound dog of Hel" (wikipedia). Don't say you never learned anything from the Rex Parker blog. I'm chock full of canine-related information.

[Sun ___ Moon]

My time was pretty normal, despite the biggish white spaces in the E and W. The puzzle is oversized by a column (16x15), so I figure if my time was normal despite the puzzle's being beefier, the overall difficulty must be somewhat easier than normal. Your experience may vary according to whether or not you recognize the STREET as a [Curb's place]. I don't. I think of the STREET as curb-adjacent, just as Della STREET is Mason-adjacent. SAMOAN is an anagram of A MASON. I would READ TO you from a Perry Mason if I had one handy, but I don't. Nope, wait; I lied. I collect vintage paperbacks, so I am actually adjacent to scores of Perry Mason paperbacks as we speak. "The card was in Della Street's handwriting and said, 'C.B. CAME IN. GOT CHECK $100. LOTS OF VISITORS—OFFICIAL—WAITING.'" That's from The Case of the Cautious Coquette. There are other Perry Mason cases which involve dogs, I'm sure, although the only ones I can see without digging too far into my collection are ones involving a crying swallow, a fan-dancer's horse, and a caretaker's CAT—Bam! Full circle. 1-Across! Didn't think I was making it back to the puzzle, did you?

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

P.S. you probably shouldn't have [Box up] as a clue when you've got BOXER in the grid. Probably.

Constructor: Ed Sessa

Relative difficulty: Medium

THEME:SCRIPT THE FLIP— ___ THE ___ phrases where post-THE and pre-THE words switch places, resulting in HIGH-larity

Theme answers:

• BABY THE ROCK (17A: Mollycoddle Dwayne Johnson?)
• BOOKS THE COOK (22A: Enters charges against a restaurant employee?)
• QUESTION THE DUCK (36A: Try to find out what's what at a pond?)
• BLAME THE BEAR (46A: Shift responsibility for some missing campsite food?)
• DECK THE SWAB (56A: Kayo Popeye?)

Word of the Day: STANDEE(23D: One who can't find a seat, say) —

Astandeeis a large self-standing display promoting amovie, product or event. They are typically made ofcardboard, and may range from large self-standingpostersto three-dimensional devices with moving parts and lights. (wikipedia)

[also…noun

1. a person who stands, especially in a passenger vehicle when all the seats are occupied or at a performance or sporting event.] (google)

• • •

Pass. As in "I'll pass," not as in "I give this a passing grade," because I don't. This one has problems aplenty. First, you could do this theme forever, which means you could do this theme with far, far better theme answers than this. Second, while BOOKS THE COOK is actually the solidest reversed phrase of the bunch, that third-person "-S" really plays havoc with consistency. One thing that made this thing "Medium" instead of easy was That inconsistency—I had BOOK and immediately wrote in THE because … well, that's how all the other theme answers go. So, ding. Not ding as in "hey, good one," but ding as in "mark against you." OK, so third, and this is the biggie: these phrases are not at all good in their original form. "Rock the cradle" is a stand-alone, solid phrase. "Rock the baby"… is not. It's a verb phrase, sure, but it is not tight. "Cook the books"—tight. "Swab the deck"—solid. The others … yeah, not so much. QUESTION THE POPS, yup, that works. Duck? Here's what google thinks of that:

Now, maybe if "Duck Dynasty" hadn't put out a stupid Christmas-themed book of some sort, the results would be different, but still, no "the question." It's a real phrase, it's just … not bam pow stick-the-landing real. And BLAME THE BEAR? Better to BLAME THE SHOULDER. Here's what Google thinks of "Bear the blame":

Put the blame on Mame, or shoulder, or somewhere besides the bear. Google hates "rock the baby" most of all:

OK, I'm surprised "cradle" and "vote" didn't come up there ("vote" actually did just come up right now, so maybe my Google is haunted), but still, BABY THE ROCK is just off. CRADLE THE ROCK is soooo good. Should've tried harder to make that (and all the others) work. Themers should be better, solider, funnier, etc. The only difficulty in this puzzle came from the theme answers being all wonky. Had QUESTION THE… and BLAME THE… and still couldn't close the deal, so the entire SE portion had to be opened up from within. Not hard. Just slower than solving might otherwise have been. Point isn't the time, though. Point is the miserable theme answers.

Fill is boring and not good, but that's not news.

VOID THE FILL!

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

Constructor: Jason Flinn

Relative difficulty: Medium

THEME: LOOPS(51A: What the paths of three answers in this puzzle include) — three answers go up in a loop (signified by circled squares) before returning to the answers' original plane of existence:

Theme answers:

• PAPERAIRPLANE (26A: Classroom projectile)
• ROLLER COASTER (60A: Theme park part)
• SHOELACE (62A: It may be on the tip of the tongue)

Word of the Day: OCTAVO(52D: Book size) —

noun

1. a size of book page that results from the folding of each printed sheet into eight leaves (sixteen pages).

   • a book of octavo size.

     plural noun:octavos(google)

• • •

This puzzle does what most PAPER AIRPLANEs actually do—kind of fly off weakly and then nosedive or hit the dog in the ass or something else similarly unceremonious and unimpressive. There's just three themers, first of all, so there's not a lot to admire, even if the concept itself were admirable—which, in a way, it is. It's kooky fun. It's just … PAPER AIRPLANEs mostly don't loop, and a SHOELACE is not ever "on the tip of the tongue" [of the shoe]. Look at the tip of your shoe's tongue—go ahead, I'll wait. [hums "I Love You, Honeybear" while he waits for you…]. OK, see? The tip is sticking up there all proud and SHOELACE-free. The laces are on the tongue, over the tongue, for sure, but not "on the tip." No sir. Then there's the biggest problem: PAPER AIRPLANE—or, rather, PAIRPLANE, which is the answer you get in the Across. That … is nonsense. The other theme answers give you non-nonsense: a SHOE is a thing, a ROASTER is a thing. A PAIRPLANE is gibberish. So theme idea is cool, but execution is weak and wobbly. Add a loop answer, clean up the cluing, and then maybe. It's a hard theme to pull off because you have to depart from *and return to* a letter in the answer (i.e. the lowest answer in the 'loop' gets used twice). But if you can't do it right, then just don't do it.

["Everything is doomed / And nothing will be spared / But I love you, Honey Bear…"]

The fill here is average, maybe slightly better than average. Fewer wince-y moments than I've become used to, of late (LAE, as always, is The Worst thing in whatever grid it's in; today, it's just below AWW). WENT COLD, FIRE AWAY, DOTCOM, BITCOIN, GOES BAD, NAUSEATE, ATYPICAL… I like all of those. ANNA SUI I'm cool on (27D: Chinese-American fashion icon). In her full-name form, she's pretty fresh fill. But her name always makes me think "crutch fill." All the common letters and vowels … I don't know, I just can't get excited. It's like AMARNA. Valid, but crutchy. I like R. CRUMB, though (50D: "Keep in Truckin'" cartoonist). Hell, I'm teaching R. CRUMB next week. Double hell, I ordered a collection of his comics just today (as a reward to myself for refraining from buying the $350 Complete Zap Comix Box Set, which I may still cave in and buy… someday). He's one of the greatest cartoonists of all time, even if his work has a real capacity to NAUSEATE, at times.

TAE BO is not an [Exercise option] unless it's 1997.

See you tomorrow.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

Constructor: David Woolf

Relative difficulty: Medium

THEME: THEME— DESCRIPTION

Word of the Day: LEHR(55A: Glassmaker's oven) —

Alehris a temperature-controlledkilnforannealingobjects made ofglass. The name derives from the German verblehrenmeaning to teach and is cognate with the Englishlerealso meaning to learn or acquire knowledge of (something).

Rapid cooling of molten glass generates an uneven temperature distribution in the body of the glass which results in mechanicalstresssufficient to cause cracking before the object has reached ambient temperature, or to result in susceptibility to cracking in later use, often resulting fromthermal shock. To prevent this, objects manufactured from molten glass are annealed by cooling gradually in a lehr from a temperature just below the solidification point of the glass. Anneal cooling rate depends on the thickness of the glass, and can range from several tens of degrees Celsius per hour for thin sections to a fraction of a degree Celsius per hour for thick slabs or castings.

In glass manufacture, a lehr is typically a long kiln with a temperaturegradientfrom end to end, through which newly made glass objects such as glasses or vases are transported on aconveyor belt. However, the same effect can be obtained in a small kiln by controlling the cooling rate with an electronic temperature controller. (wikipedia)

• • •

Overall quality of the grid is not bad but I do not understand, and I mean do Not understand, how you do this pseudo-theme thing where you link two long answers in the NW … and the SE … and the SW … and … that's it. You just leave the NE hanging? What the hell is that? Are you doing the Thing or are you not doing the Thing? What a weird, oddly maimed concept. I also don't understand how you go to press with -EOUS in your grid. That is quite possibly the single worst suffix in the history of crossword answers. Look at it. Go on. Jeez louise. Wow. It hurts. It makes ADES look like ZYZZYVA, that answer. Horrific. Most of the other terrible fill is neatly contained and harmless. SNEE and OLIOS cause very little discomfort. ETAGE is mostly BENI(g)N. And I had a pretty good (toughish) time puzzling out the double-stacked answers in the NW and SE. I'd say that overall I actually enjoyed this. It's just flawed in slightly maddening ways. Between BIG-BREASTED (1A: Buxom)and the Bond girl (ANYA), the puzzle feels slightly leering . . . and I'm almost 100% certain the original clue on 13D was different. In a way that relates to the leeringness I'm talking about. But it's certainly not offensive so I'll try to ACT NORMAL.

I like APPLEID(45A: Need for an iTunes Store account) even though it looks like a typo of "applied." I forgot LEHR was a thing, so that was awkward. Four-letter ovens … let's see, I've got KILN, and … OAST and … I'm out. My giggles sound more HEEHEE or TEEHEE than HEHE (?), but I think that's some kind of industry-accepted variation. Considered TEHE but LETR seemed pretty wrong. I had Steve Jobs at YALE and BARD before I placed him correctly at REED. I also had [HuffPo's parent] as NYT (?) before AOL. I am having a hard time accepting SAME-AGE as an adjective (that is, as it is clued) (40A: Like George W. Bush vis-à-vis Sylvester Stallone). But they really are the same age—exactly, not just roughly (7/6/46). It's weird to me how confident I was in IDAHO as the answer to 51D: Home to Shoshone Falls. My mom grew up in IDAHO, and my grandma still lives there, so maybe the name just sunk in somewhere along the line—I can't tell you where it is, or what it's near, or anything. But at five letters, I plunked IDAHO down immediately. If you don't know the word PELOTA you should learn the word PELOTA because that thing will come back at you. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon, and for the rest of your life.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

Constructor: Doug Peterson and Brad Wilber

Relative difficulty: Medium-Challenging

THEME: none

Word of the Day: UDINE(46D: Italian city near the Slovenian border) —

Udine[…]Friulian:Udin,Slovene:Videm,German:Weiden,Latin:Utinum) is a city andcomunein northeasternItaly, in the middle of theFriuli-Venezia Giuliaregion, between theAdriatic Seaand theAlps(Alpi Carniche), less than 40 kilometers (25 miles) from theSlovenianborder. Its population was 100,514 in 2012, and that of its urban area was 176,000. (wikipedia)

• • •

This is pretty high-grade stuff from my favorite co-constructing team, but I struggled more than I normally do with their puzzles, and while most of this struggle had a good payoff, there were some rough edges, and perhaps somewhat more pure trivia than I normally like—which is, I guess, another way of saying there were a lot of proper nouns from the realm of entertainment that were clued in either a straight trivia sort of way (see KAREL, 58A: Reisz who directed "The French Lieutenant's Woman") or were clued in a way that made no real sense even after the answer became clear (see HELLO KITTY, 39A: Animated character who's five apples tall). In this group I'd also throw Anastasia STEELE, Jule STYNE, Carson DALY, and "I'M TOO SEXY" and Bess MYERSON—that "Y" was the last thing into the grid, despite the fact that Ms. MYERSON(21D: Former Miss America who ran for the U.S. Senate in 1980) died recently and I'd read the obit and everything… her name just did not come to me at all. And that clue for SYN! (24A: Loads, for many: Abbr.) Great, great stuff; saved me from being annoyed at not having remembered MYERSON. I don't include INDY or RALPH NADER or ROSA PARKS in the list of trivia answers because there's at least some misdirection / cleverness w/ the INDY clue, and the RALPH NADER clue gives us a quote from which we can infer the answer (I actually got it off just the -PH-), and the ROSA PARKS clue was the closest thing to a flat-out gimme this puzzle had (31D: She wouldn't take an affront sitting down).

The RHOMB / KAREL / STYNE stack made me frown a bit. But I realize now I'm most just annoyed at KAREL. Which is a name. One might have. The name-on-name action there is mildly annoying. But it's holding all the beautiful Downs in place, and all crosses are more than fair. Less pretty, I thought, was the UDINE section. Well, just UDINE. I mean, an UDINE-free puzzle would've made me very happy. U-DINE sounds like some latter day automat. That city is not big enough to be puzzle-worthy. It's "urban area" is half as populous than my "urban area," and if you could see my "urban area," you'd see how nuts it is that something that small and that is noteworthy primarily for its Slovenia-adjacenetness is allowed to be in the grid. Throw in the fact that I wanted HYPERLINK—not HYPERTEXT (61A: It connects two pages)—and then LESE and SCH and DALY/DALE, and that SE corner made me something less than happy.

Tough start in the NW because back ends of Acrosses were easy, but they were no help with the front ends. Eventually figured out it was LATE TEENS for Nancy Drew, and that + CIA got me CLOCK, and I came out of there semi-triumphant:

Went from there into the SW, and then into the center where I got stalled. Had to reboot in SE. Wanted PSALTER for 40D: Prie-dieu feature (KNEELER). Pretty sure I'm the only one in the country who wanted that. Totally guessed LESE (what else was it going to be?), and ATOP, and finally DALY came to me (after I'd been through "… who's that guy? … Gloria Vanderbilt's son … Anderson Cooper! Nope, it's not him. What about the generic guy who hosts everything, from "American Idol"… Seacrest! Nope. Damn it. Oh, oh, it's the guy who used to do "TRL" on MTV and then got his own late-night show for a bit … o man … what is his name!? …"). And then once I worked out that UDINE nonsense, I was good.

Since I was blocked at the SYN / MYERSON intersection, I was worried I wasn't going to get into the NE very easily, as I'd have to come at it from underneath. But I guessed OGRE(34A: Brute) and SICS(30A: Unleashes (on)) and that was really all it took. I went from this:

… to done in like 20 seconds.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

Constructor: Patrick Berry

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium

THEME:"Flip-Flops"— overlapping theme answers have letter strings that sit atop one another (signified by circled squares), and they flip-flop, i.e. the top letter string goes "down" and the bottom letter string goes "up"; the letters in these strings are clued by clues appended to each theme clue, such that the letter string makes sense as a free-standing answer if you supply the "down" or the "up" (respectively). Thus SALIERI over TENDER-HEARTED becomes, in the grid, SAENDRI over TLIEER-HEARTED because END has gone "up" and LIE has gone "down"—with END [UP] and LIE [DOWN] clued by the bracketed clues at the ends of their respective theme clues (in this case [finally become] and [go to bed]). Whole thing tied together by central answer: 65A: What each group of circled words in this puzzle does (GOES UP AND DOWN)

Themeanswers:

• SAENDRI (23A: Narrator of "Amadeus" [go to bed])
• TLIEERHEARTED (26A: Compassionate [finally become])
• RECATCHAS (21A: Turnpike turnoffs [intimidate, in a way])
• PURINASTAREOW (24A: Pet food brand [recover lost ground])
• ELACTPAD (45A: Skateboarder's safety item [salaam])
• STALBOWITE (53A: Point at the ceiling? [misbehave])
• ARUNUS (51A: Goodbyes [abate])
• BDIEETTE (55A: She's not light-headed [amass])
• WARIDEPAPER (85A: Office trash [resign])
• STSTEPNT (90A: Loud and harsh [start crowding the crotch])
• PRIMUSEG (83A: Activity done in front of a mirror [clearly define])
• NAPINA (89A: Upset stomach [consume])
• SCROPMOUNTAIN (114A: Granite dome in Georgia [moderate])
• ATONEEOLIS (119A: Athens landmark [arise])
• SELFRESTANTET (109A: Control of one's actions [fall in great quantities])
• BRAINRS (117A: Converses à la Tracy and Hepburn [pay in advance])

Word of the Day: PAOLO Uccello(17D: Painter Uccello) —

Paolo Uccello(Italian pronunciation:[ˈpaːolo utˈtʃɛlo]; 1397 – 10 December 1475), bornPaolo di Dono, was anItalianpainter and a mathematician who was notable for his pioneering work on visualperspectivein art.Giorgio Vasariin his bookLives of the Artistswrote that Uccello was obsessed by his interest in perspective and would stay up all night in his study trying to grasp the exact vanishing point. He used perspective in order to create a feeling of depth in his paintings and not, as his contemporaries, to narrate different or succeeding stories. His best known works are thethree paintingsrepresenting thebattle of San Romano(for a long time these were wrongly entitled the "Battle of Sant' Egidio of 1416").

Paolo worked in theLate Gothictradition, and emphasized colour and pageantry rather than the Classical realism that other artists were pioneering. His style is best described as idiosyncratic, and he left no school of followers. He has had some influence on twentieth-century art and literary criticism (e.g., in the "Vies imaginaires" byMarcel Schwob, "Uccello le poil" byAntonin Artaudand "O Mundo Como Ideia" byBruno Tolentino). (wikipedia)

• • •

This was way harder to describe than it was to grasp. I could see very quickly that the letter strings had swapped places, but I didn't get the relationship to the appended, bracketed clues until I got to this point:

Aha, STARE "down"! So … CATCH "up"! Then I looked back at the NW and there it was: END "up" / LIE "down." After that, this thing was a cake walk. I had exactly two places where I encountered resistance: in and around TWIT (which I only ever use in noun form) (38A: Ridicule) and at the DOGIES / DANA crosses (don't know DANA, forgot "motherless or neglected *calves*" were called DOGIES—was wondering who allowed this horrible perversion of "doggies" into the grid…) (80A: Four-legged orphans / 80D: Writer Richard Henry ___). Thought the relocation of those letter strings throughout the grid would at least put some speed bumps into the solving, but the themers were often long enough to give me enough information to get the right answer before I even dealt with the circled parts, and since the Downs all worked normally, I could often just drive Downs through the circles and the themers would jump right out.

Despite the apparent presence of nonsense in the grid (i.e. BDIEETTE = !?!?), the fact that I can just look "up" or "down" where appropriate and have the answer work out means that I am not as bothered by this as I might otherwise be. My only issue with this puzzle is that the fill wasn't more interesting—there's not much great, marquee fill. I like the conceit, and the grid is Berry-clean, but I rarely went "ooh, good one" in my head. ELBOW PAD / STALACTITE was probably the nicest long pairing. The rest were just OK—they were answers that worked. This puzzle wasn't about dazzling fill; it was about a pretty neat idea, nicely executed. Wish it had more bite, but I'll take smart and clean any day. And dense. I left out dense. There's Soooo much theme here. Pretty impressive.

Bullets:

• 33D: "Taxi" character Elaine (NARDO)— at first I just saw "Elaine" and thought "… well, it's BENES … why don't these crosses work?" Then I thought PARDO. You could pretty much feel the hamsters in my brain spinning away.
• 11D: Physicist Rutherford after whom rutherfordium is named (ERNEST)— oh, *that* physicist Rutherford. Gotcha.
• 37D: Estrangement (RIFT)— have we seen "Oculus RIFT" yet? If not, we will…

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

Constructor: Joel fa*gliano

Relative difficulty: Easy

THEME: LEAVE A BAD TASTE(53A: Not sit well … or what eating 20-, 32- or 41-Across might do) — stuff that's rotten, sour, and bitter:

Theme answers:

• ROTTEN TOMATOES (20A: Online aggregator of movie reviews)
• SOUR GRAPES (32A: Fox's feeling in an Aesop fable)
• BITTER PILL (41A: Hard-to-accept consequence)

Word of the Day: MEGAN Fox(17A: Actress Fox of the "Transformers" movies) —

Megan Denise Fox(born May 16, 1986) is an American actress and model. She began her acting career in 2001, with several minor television and film roles, and played a regular role on theHope & Faithtelevision sitcom. In 2004, she made her film debut with a role in the teen comedyConfessions of a Teenage Drama Queen. In 2007, she co-starred asMikaela Banes, thelove interestofShia LaBeouf's character, in theblockbusteraction filmTransformers, which became herbreakout role. Fox reprised her role in the 2009 sequel,Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. Later in 2009, she starred as theeponymouslead in the black comedy horror filmJennifer's Body.Fox is also considered one of the modern femalesex symbolsand has appeared in magazines such asMaxim,Rolling StoneandFHM. (wikipedia)

Well you don't "eat" pills, you take them, so [sad video game death noise] Game Over. Thanks for playing. Also, presumably ROTTEN TOMATOES and SOUR GRAPES just taste bad. Like, up front. "Leaving" is irrelevant. The themers do have a few interesting things about them. They are all metaphors … well, not ROTTEN TOMATOES … so maybe I take back the "interesting" part. Actually, one interesting thing = 14s. You don't see 14s very often. They're notoriously annoying to handle, grid-construction wise. You pretty much have to do what Joel's done here: run black squares under/over the short end of the answer and/or run multiple long Downs through that same short end. That lone black square on the end of a 14 really is more of a nuisance than it seems. But, of course, as "interesting" things go, 14s qualify only if you are a constructor. It's a wonky thing to notice. Most people won't. They'll probably notice the anomalousness of BITTER PILL, or the anomalousness of ROTTEN TOMATOES, or the overall decent fill quality, or the sad semi-redundancy of ART MUSEUM, or the boringness and tenuous legitimacy of STATE DEBT, or the unexpected zippiness of short stuff like "OH, YOU" and "I'M GAY!" But 14s—unlikely.

I did this puzzle in under 2:30 while under the considerably influence of whiskey, so … it really Really must've been easy. I have to go pretend to care about the Oscars until I fall asleep well before they're over. Enjoy your February 23rd.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

Constructor: Elizabeth A. Long

Relative difficulty: Medium

THEME: [Shades of Grey?]— this is the clue for three completely nonsensical answers:

Theme answers:

• EARL'S SUNGLASSES
• LADY JANE'S BLINDS
• ZANE'S LAMP COVERS

Word of the Day:AMBULANT(38D: Able to walk) —

adjective

MEDICINE

1. (of a patient) able to walk around; not confined to bed. (google)

• • •

This is what we in the business call "Tuesday being Tuesday." Actually, I made that up, but that *is* what's happening. This puzzle lost me fast. Had me looking at it sideways before I ever left the NW, and was dead to me almost immediately thereafter—and that was *before* I got to the icky, ridiculous theme. Here's where I parted ways for good with this thing (I actually stopped to take a picture—this never happens on early-week puzzles, but my reaction was so certain and dramatic, I thought, "Why not capture the moment!?"):

[PIELIKE???]

It was bad enough when I had to change ENDOW (a reasonable word that people use) to ENDUE (ew), but then to have to see encounter its near-duplicate (UNDUE) so soon afterward? Ugh. When the next "word" I got was the loathsome, lazy DAN'L, I stopped caring right there. By the time I got the theme, I was just shaking my head wondering how this got accepted. Is it supposed to be topical? Ironic? You know EARL's not his first name, right? Right? I mean, the whole theme is broken, but at least LADY JANE'S BLINDS has "Jane" in it, to make a kind of sense. EARL'S SUNGLASSES!? Earl is a title, not a first name. I … why am I even explaining this? Fill is poor, theme is ridiculous and plays off of pop culture phenomenon that even smirking and irony can't redeem. If you wanna teehee (tehe?) over your socially acceptable fake-p*rn, go right ahead, but dear lord keep that crap out of my puzzle, please. The fact that I even have to hear about the existence of that stupid movie is enough. More than enough. This puzzle crosses YESES with ESSES. It's also got LENO'S (?) and ABU and ENA and both AROLL and ATIE, as well as AMBULANT (where a normal human would just use AMBULATORY). Come on. I've seen NYT rejects that look like Van Gogh next to this.

OFF. BLAH. RAGE. BLEEP.

At a bare minimum, that central answer should've been JENNIFER'S BLINDS. You already have a titled person in one of your themers. Mix. It. Up.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

Constructor: Michael Shteyman

Relative difficulty: Easy

THEME: Some Midwest capitals

Theme answers:

• DES MOINES, IOWA (15D:Midwest capital #4)
• LANSING, MICHIGAN (22A: Midwest capital #1)
• LINCOLN, NEBRASKA (37A:Midwest capital #2)
• ST. PAUL, MINNESOTA (46A:Midwest capital #3)

[Arranged in the order in which I solved them—here's how I got into the grid:]

Word of the Day: Trevor ARIZA(49D: Trevor of the N.B.A.) —

Trevor Anthony Ariza(born June 30, 1985) is an American professionalbasketballplayer who currently plays for theHouston Rocketsof theNational Basketball Association(NBA).

• • •

I like this. I liked this from 1A: Part of "rico" or "roja" (ROLLED R), which I got immediately and thought was pretty original. I liked it even more after the weird trivia clue on ONE-EARED (14A: Like the praying mantis, anatomically [weird, but true]). I liked it even after figuring out that "oh, there's not really a theme, it really is just a bunch of Midwest capitals …"Despite ITTO and -EAL and the whole blah NE. Despite ADD IN instead of ADD ON (23D: Computer extra). I just really liked the NW and SE corners, and I finished in the oddly delightful SW corner, where, perhaps because the grid was not already loaded with names, I was charmed to find Trevor ARIZA hanging out with the PAGAN and the NUTMEG. The NBA is rife with crossworthy names. Surprised we don't see AMAR'E STOUDEMIRE (15!) more—his first name, anyway. He's a six-time All-Star. Anyway, hey there, Trevor ARIZA. I like you at least as well as the Hyundai AZERA. You're welcome.

I feel like my reaction today is slightly upside-down. I don't tend to like constructor-centric puzzles, where the trick is some structural discovery (here, that there are this many Midwest capitals that are also 15s (!) and that can be arranged in this pattern that is multiply symmetrical (rotational, axial … are there others? arborEAL? orthogonal? petrochemical?). I like themes that focus on solver delight, not feats of construction for their own sake. But this one has the virtue of simplicity, i.e. the constructor's formal gimmick was not annoying or forced or opaque. And the fill surrounding it was frequently interesting or interestingly clued. Plus … I just love the midwest. It's adorable. I mean that sincerely, not patronizingly. I probably would've mean it patronizingly as a kid, but then I lived there for eight years. It always felt friendly and … substantial … to me. Warm. I mean, cold, but warm. I loved California, but what I remember most is sun and freeway. Maybe if I'd lived coastal, like my parents do now. Anyway, I remember some of my coastal peers in arborEAL Ann Arbor actively not enjoying the Midwestern lifestyle, but it was all right by me. From day one. "Hey, the shopkeeps are talking to me. And they're friendly … all right, Midwest, I'm not eating your weird jello-mold concoctions, but you got me. I like it here." Which is exactly how I felt about this puzzle.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

Constructor: Caleb Emmons

Relative difficulty: Medium

THEME:Half words— theme answers end with "half ___," represented in the grid by only the first *half* of the missing word; thus:

Theme answers:

• KENNEDY DOL (for "Kennedy half-dollar") (17A: Coin first minted in 1964)
• SUPER BOWL TI (for "Super Bowl half-time") (24D: Occasion for a much-hyped performance)
• GOING OFF COC (for "going off half-co*cked") (10D: Acting rashly)
• FLYING AT MA (for "flying at half-mast") (54A: Signaling remembrance, in a way)

Word of the Day: Deborah ADAIR(48A: Soap star Deborah) —

Deborah Adair(bornDeborah Adair Milleron May 23, 1952 inLynchburg, Virginia) is anAmericantelevision actress, primarily known for her roles in soap operas. […]In total, Adair has appeared in seven different projects produced by Aaron Spelling;Dynasty,Matt Houston,The Love Boat,Finder of Lost Loves,Hotel(in which she played four different roles between 1984–87),Melrose Placeand the television movieRich Men Single Women(1990). She has also appeared in a variety of other primetime series such asMurder, She Wrote,Blacke's MagicandMacGyver. She also played a supporting role asKate Chasein the Emmy Award-nominated miniseriesLincoln(1988).

• • •

I was deep into this one before I understood the theme. Got KENNEDY DOL and thought "well, DOL is a cruddy abbr. for "dollar," so this should be interesting," forgetting that there is no such thing as a "Kennedy dollar." Got the whole center of the grid and then finished the tail end of SUPER BOWL TI and that's when the dime dropped. Ah … Half. Half-time. Half-dollar. OK then. I like the concept, though it makes for an ugly grid, with those nonsensical themers. It also just looks like the answers got lopped off. The visual impact is poor. But the concept is solid. I wish it had been possible for all the themers to come out looking like actual phrases, a la FLYING AT MA! Maybe they could each have had their own wacky clues.FLYING AT MAcould be [Like one involved in a family squabble?] GOING OFF COC is one letter shy of being fantastic. [Becoming celibate, perhaps?]. At any rate, relative ugliness of themers aside, the fill is remarkably solid, and the longer non-theme answers interesting and vibrant.

This was a pretty easy puzzle, but I got slowed by a couple of things. First, I couldn't tell which longer answers were and weren't theme answers. Long Acrosses both are and aren't themers. Long Downs both are and aren't themers. Because both 31A: Crazy place? (FUNNY FARM) and 38A: Company with a lot of bean counters? (STARBUCKS) ended with question marks, I thought they were in on the theme wackiness (failing to note that KENNEDY DOL did not have a "?" clue…). Also, answers that could've been clued in very familiar ways were given rather obscure clues. No Red ADAIR today. No [Comedian Degeneres], either (ELLEN). Those were both super-tough for me. I also found the partials a bit rough. Who says "JUDO chop"? And what is an ANNO mundi? A year of the world? What is that? I should know, I guess, but I don't. I also didn't know bees WAGGLED, or that waggling was dancing. But I did know IGGY. I'll cling to that.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

PS here's a nice article re: the upcoming charity crossword tournament in Ithaca (where I'll be next Saturday, Mar. 7). Lots of crossword folks were interviewed for this. Check it out.

Constructor: Julian Lim

Relative difficulty:Medium (Medium-Challenging for me because Tiredness/Stupidity)

THEME: none

Word of the Day:SHOGI(22D: So-called Japanese chess) —

Shogi(将棋shōgi^?)(/ˈʃoʊɡiː/,Japanese:[ɕo̞ːɡi]or[ɕo̞ːŋi]), also known asJapanese chessor theGenerals' Game, is a two-playerstrategyboard gamein the same family asWestern(international)chess,chaturanga,makruk,shatranjandxiangqi, and is the most popular of a family ofchess variantsnative toJapan.Shōgimeans general's (shō将) board game (gi棋).

The earliest predecessor of the game, chaturanga, originated inIndiain the 6th century, and sometime in the 10th to 12th centuries xiangqi (Chinese chess) was brought to Japan where it spawned a number of variants. Shogi in its present form was played as early as the 16th century, while a direct ancestor without the "drop rule" was recorded from 1210 in a historical documentNichūreki, which is an edited copy ofShōchūrekiandKaichūrekifrom the lateHeian period(c. 1120).

• • •

My normal strategy of throwing down all the short Downs as fast as I can, first answers that come to mind, and then looking back and seeing if I can pick out the long Acrosses with the help of pattern recognition … did not work today, despite the fact that many of my first guesses for the Downs were correct. RISE and ASIA. PEP. RONA and IF AT—all good. But any hope of seeing correct Acrosses was somehow stymied by MAKE (for COST) and ALEC (for ERIC) and a botched Mass. motto word (always sucks to trip on the worst bit of fill in the puzzle) (ENSE). Also, I couldn't remember parliament of OWLS, despite the fact that that was the name of a Batman arc only a few years back (actually, "Court of OWLS"), and despite the fact that my boy Chaucer wrote "The Parliament of FOWLS." Actually, I think it's because of the Chaucer title that I didn't get OWLS, despite the rhyming. Result was sadness and then doubt—I started pulling different little words, some of which were correct. I also forgot that "Spinal Tap" was actually called "THIS IS SPINAL TAP" (14A: Classic 1984 film in which most of the dialogue was ad-libbed), so despite thinking of that movie first, I didn't write it in because, of course, in my head, it "didn't fit." So that whole up-top experience made the puzzle tougher than average for me. But maybe not for more alert people. Here's where I (finally) got started:

Courtesy of the gimme GARP (32A: Robin Williams title role). From here, the bottom was done in under a minute. Seriously. It was the mirror image, the opposite, the world upside down, compared to the north. Probably helped that STEPHEN JAY GOULD(52A: Evolutionary biologist who wrote "The Panda's Thumb") spoke at my college when I was a senior, so I got him off the -LD. Yes, that definitely helped. But after SHALL WE went in (48A: "Ready to go?"), Every Single Short Down off of that was obvious, so the bottom was Monday for me. Ended up getting SPARE THE ROD without ever reading the clue.

From here, the west was easy, but I briefly ran into the problem I feared—not being able to get up into that top part. The problem: MELISMA (20A: Musical phrase in which a single syllable is sung over several notes). Vaguely familiar, now that I look at it, but not in my knowledge base. So I got as far as PSYCHIC and then worried a little. I had wanted TRAMP earlier for 14D: Galumph, so I tried that. Same with ROSEATE. But still … it all felt a bit dicey. But once I got PHONES, finally, this happened.

From there it was ERIC and OWLS and quickly all was done.

This was a good puzzle, I think. I would say that this is *in spite* of its design, which looks cool, but which loads up the puzzle with short answers. And while those have their share of predictable ugliness today [shakes fist at ENSE!], overall, they're pretty clean. The central chunks are chunkily varied, and the long Acrosses up top and down south are nice (nicer up top, so I was happy to end there).

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

Constructor: Barry C. Silk

Relative difficulty: Easy

THEME: none

Word of the Day: BELA Balázs(53A: "Bluebeard's Castle" librettist Balázs) —

Béla Balázs(Hungarian:[ˈbeːlɒ ˈbɒlaːʒ]; 4 August 1884,Szeged– 17 May 1949,Budapest), bornHerbert Bauer, was a Hungarian-Jewishfilm critic,aesthete, writer and poet. […]He is perhaps best remembered as the librettist ofBluebeard's Castlewhich he originally wrote for his roommateZoltán Kodály, who in turn introduced him to the eventual composer of the opera,Béla Bartók. This collaboration continued with the scenario for the balletThe Wooden Prince. (wikipedia)

• • •

This puzzle was just OK. I was put off by a series of wonky words that were perhaps supposed to be quaint or trigger some sort of nostalgia, but that struck me as simply WEARISOME. The only thing I enjoy about TITFER(49D: Bit of headwear, in British lingo) is saying "TITFER TOT" (the two words conveniently sit next to one another). Otherwise, that strikes me not as cute but as desperate. PONS… I gotta believe PONS could've been avoided there. It's such a stupid-looking technical term. And anyway, you'd only want to use something like that to hold a great bank of longer answers together, and that's just not what PONS is doing here. It's sitting in a perfectly reworkable area. Then there's FRYOLATOR (67A: Greasy spoon appliance), which I think I'm supposed to find charming and retro. But it feels made-up. Is it a brand name. I eat in greasy spoons from time to time—never heard of it. I feel like it must be what normals call the "fryer" or "deep fryer." Is that right? [...checks…] Ha! Yes! It's listed as an alternate name under the "Deep fryer" entry at wikipedia. Even if I liked that answer, and I don't, too many of the crosses are dreary: SMELTER and SMEARER and ALERO and UTIL and SAN REMO are all zzzzzz. In fact, the only entries I truly enjoyed today were BAZOOKA (14D: "Stovepipe of W.W. II) and PHOTOBOMB (48A: Laugh-inducing pic). Everything else was adequate to dull.

[In the '80s, we didn't have BLU-RAY. We had this.]

[R.I.P. Leonard Nimoy]

My greatest solving coup today came very early, via a (normally unloved) cross-referenced clue. I read 5D: Last name on a 40-Down and decided to check 40-Down. Once I saw that 40-Down was [Holder of many a diorama], I instantly thought SHOEBOX, which instantly suggested MCAN as a possibility. So I'd only just begun, and this is what my grid looked like:

I wasn't sure the guessing was going to pay off, but crosses (iron and otherwise) eventually confirmed I was right. This meant that I was going to be starting the grid in earnest from the SW corner—a scenario that almost never occurs. That "X" was the obvious starting point, and sure enough EXERT was easy to get, and that corner was done quickly. Soon, I was into the TITFER PONS morass:

From here, the fire of my solving prowess spread very quickly through the SE and up the east coast. I zagged back across the grid into the NW and had no trouble sweeping right through it, counterclockwise, back around to DANK. That left just the NE to attend to, and while for a second or two things looked dicey (-MAN -ERS and -OKA weren't looking promising…), I rode to victory on the most '80s answer up there:

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

Constructor: Finn Vigeland

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium

THEME:"Noted Anniversary"— Get it? "Noted"? 'Cause of the notes!? It's a "(THE) SOUND OF MUSIC" puzzle with a bunch of related theme answers and a DO RE MI FA SOL LA TI DO music scale running, rebus-wise, from SW to NE

Theme answers:

• SALZBURG, AUSTRIA (24A: Setting of 118-Across)
• JULIE ANDREWS (31A: Star of 118-Across)
• "THE HILLS ARE ALIVE…" (49A: Opening lyric of118-Across)
• RODGERS AND HAMMERSTEIN (68A: Duo behind118-Across)
• BEST PICTURE OSCAR (91A: Honor for118-Across)
• THE VON TRAPPS (108A: Family upon whom118-Across is based)
• "THE SOUND OF MUSIC" (118A: Movie that opened 3/2/1965)

Word of the Day: HEGIRA(88D: Flight from danger) —

noun

1. Muhammad's departure from Mecca to Medina in AD 622, prompted by the opposition of the merchants of Mecca and marking the consolidation of the first Muslim community.

   • the Muslim era reckoned from the Hegira.

     noun:Hegira; noun:Hejira; noun:Hijra

     "the second century of the Hegira"

   • an exodus or migration.

     noun:hegira; plural noun:hegiras(google)

• • •

The best part about this was going from thinking "that is the lamest title ever" to "Oh … got it." Still not sure I like the title, but it's not nearly as bad as I first thought, and that simple sensation has helped dispose me mostly favorably toward this thing, despite the fact that it's too straightforward for my taste. The rebus adds a neat wrinkle, but even that is transparent. I've seen some version of the DO RE MI rebus thing in other puzzles, so the second I figured out the "DO" square in the SW, I knew where things were going (though I initially thought the notes might not keep getting higher in the grid, but might instead form a mountain, as in climb EV'RY. That scenario would've put SOL where that "D" is in HARD C, and so forth, back down into the SE corner. But this set-up is, of course, infinitely preferable. Well, preferable. I'm oddly fond of my briefly-imagined notes-make-a-mountain scenario.

The theme was not hard to figure out at all. I got it this fast:

Then, while working the crosses on the movie title there, I encountered the weirdness that turned out to be the rebus square "DO" at TO[DO] / [DO]ORS. And that was pretty much that. This puzzle had that thing that I don't really like about tribute puzzles, where the answers are really just assorted trivia that happen to fit into rotationally symmetrical places. Once you grasp the theme, it's just amateur trivia night. Ho-hum. As I say, the scale-rebus added value for sure, and the grid is pretty solidly filled, but overall it was a lowercase "l""like" for me. Hard to stay mad at a beloved picture, JULIE ANDREWS, etc., especially when one is never actually mad in the first place. I'm sure most solvers will enjoy this well-made puzzle that causes them to enjoy a classic American movie on this first (not 2nd, but close) day of March, when thoughts turn to spring, and the possibility of warmth. Good vibes.

[124A: "Wailing" instrument]

I didn't like the answer BEST PICTURE OSCAR, which feels contrived. It won BEST PICTURE. Yes, technically, this answer is literally true, but BEST PICTURE is a better crossword answer, just as VON TRAPPS is better than THE VON TRAPPS. This is what I mean about answers being chosen for symmetricality rather than optimality. But it's all defensible. And the constructor gets in some great answers in the line of rebus fire. Never thought I'd be thrilled by OPERA BUF[FA], but I was, and the meta-crosswordical [SOL]VING TIME also gave me a smile (60A: Important factor in a crossword tournament). THE HILLS ARE ALIVE … is a fragment. Absurd. But who cares!? I'm picturing twirling JULIE ANDREWS, so all is right with the world.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

P.S speaking of important factors in a crossword tournament, the 3rd Annual Finger Lakes Crossword Competition is next week—Saturday, Mar. 7, in Ithaca, NY. I'll be there. If you're an upstater, you should be too. All info here.

P.P.S. very important news for aspiring constructors and hardcore fans who want insight into the craft of crossword construction. The best constructor on the planet, Patrick Berry, is now offering his "Crossword Constructors Handbook" (formerly Crossword Puzzle Challenges for Dummies) as a .pdf from his website for a mere $10. This deal includes 70 (*seventy*) puzzles in both .pdf and .puz format. Puzzles cover a wide range of difficulty and theme types. Patrick's "For Dummies" book has been infamously out of print (and thus prohibitively expensive) for a long time, so I'm thrilled that now, when someone asks me "Can you recommend a good book on constructing?" I can name a title that's now actually accessible. Seriously, in the world of "books about crosswords," this is the top of the heap. No lie. Get it. Give it. Love it.

Constructor: Kyle Mahowald

Relative difficulty: Challenging

THEME:none

Word of the Day: ORGANA(40D: "Star Wars" surname) —

TheHouse of Organa, also known as theRoyal House of Alderaan, theRoyal Family of Alderaan, or simplyHouse Organa, was anAlderaanian Noble Housethat dated back to the earliestdaysofAlderaan's colonization. Throughout history, the Organa dynasty was the one that ruled over theirhomeworldthe longest. Throughout several millennia of existence, the House Organa sired many well-known figures of the pan–galacticpolitics. Two of its most renowned scions wereViceroyBail Prestor Organaand his adopted daughter,PrincessLeia Organa. Following thedestructionof Alderaan in0 BBY, the name of Organa died out. (wookieepedia)

• • •

This seems a fine puzzle, but it is radically misplaced on Friday. This was the hardest puzzle I've done in a very long time. I got stopped cold at least three times, the last time resulting in my staring at a smallish patch of grid for something like five minutes. Cluing difficulty overall was jacked way up, and there were a couple crucially placed WTF? proper nouns that made both the NW and the SE (or parts of them) seem like death traps. Also, FLECHE? Only vaguely familiar to me as a French word, and I had seven years of French. Other things I just didn't know:

• KILOBAR (got the KILO—and then just got the rest from crosses) (4D: Metric pressure unit)
• ATS (I'm never going to remember this cruddy thing) (9D: Cadillac model that debuted in 2012)
• POGOS (it's a dance now?) (26D: Dances by jumping in place)
• JAMAL (after the "-AL" I actually "knew" it, but kept doubting it and taking it out when I couldn't get crosses to work; more on that in a bit) (23D: Crawford who won the 2014 Sixth Man of the Year Award)
• ANNE Hutchison (no hope) (34D: Colonial heretic Hutchison)
• FLECHE (as I said) (46A: Fencing move that means "arrow" in French)
• AIR BOAT (got the BOAT—and then it was just a guess; had no idea those boats w/ giant fans were called that) (42A: Everglades transport)
• LTGEN (honestly didn't know that was even a rank; can't remember ever seeing it in crosswords) (45A: Geo. Washington was the U.S.'s first)
• CITRON (that's a real fruit?) (39D: Fruit historically used for medicinal purposes)
• "THE CAT" (hahahaha no) (20D: 1960s Robert Loggia series about a burglar-turned-bodyguard)
• ORGANA (hahahaha no) (40D: "Star Wars" surname)

I got this far without too much difficulty:

[You can just ignore that stray, incorrect ACT up there in the NE—that's just a reflex entry from seeing the phrase "When Romeo says…" in the clue]

As you can see, I couldn't make the turn out of the NW and so had to start over completely in the SW, where HEROD was a gimme (or so I hoped when I wrote it in) (43D: Villain in a Nativity play), and HATRED was a good guess, and I gained traction from there. Once I finished the SW and threw THIS OLD THING across, I figured I was good to go.

But … no. I ended up with two Spots of Brutality: the J-SHAPED / "THE CAT" (!?!?!?!) crossing, and the single answer, ORGANA. In the first case, there was a pile-up of problems. J-SHAPED(23A: Like many hooks) was totally unexpected and the JS- looked wrong, so JAMAL went in and out a lot. "THE CAT"… I can't even say. Utter unknown. Blank. Ridiculous obscurity. But I was able to infer it, eventually, so … fairish? Then there was the brutal clue on nearby PALETTES (26A: Studio mixing equipment), which also made this little part hard to solve. I totally fell for the fake-out in that clue (imagining a music studio, not an art studio), so even with much of the answer filled in, I had no idea what was going on. Not knowing PALETTES meant I kept taking out and putting back in the "P" in POGOS. GOGOS? Who knows? So that section was a face-slap.

But the SW corner was worse. I was sure I had it. SCOURGES and TUBE TOP went in and I figured everything in their grasp would be mine. But the AIR- in AIRBOAT, no; LTGEN, no (out of desperation I almost tried USSEN, even though I knew a. that was wrong and b. that is not an acceptable abbr.). If I listed a million fruits, CITRON would not be one. I was running fruits like mad: CHERRY? CRAISIN? Is that a fruit? Gah! Could Not think of a fever-producer ending in "-O" (I wasn't considering abbrs., I guess, because no such thing was indicated). The worst thing here, though, is ORGANA. I wager than something way south of 5% of solvers had any idea there. I had none. Zero. I have a framed "Star Wars" poster on my living room wall. I'm guessing that this ORGANA crap is predominantly if not exclusively in those SCOURGES now labeled "Episodes I, II, III." Anyway, zero hope there. Only way I solved that corner was by finally shoving in ERAT and SNAP and *refusing* to take them out. Then I tried --GEN for the Washington answer, then just *guessed* that LTGEN was a thing. Can't believe I couldn't remember my cigarette brands, esp. a brand as familiar as SALEM(S). That might've made a big difference. But with AIRBOAT LTGEN CITRON ORGANA all barely or not at all known to me, hoo boy, that was rough.

Again, I think the grid is pretty solid. Lots of colloquialisms. Lots of zip. I am biased against this thing because it was misplaced on Friday and because its difficulty came excessively from proper nouns that I either had no way of knowing ("THE CAT"!?) or should not have to know because all "Star Wars" prequels are utter garbage (ORGANA).

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld