Rex Parker Does the NYT Crossword Puzzle

Constructor: Herre Schouwerwou

Relative difficulty: Medium-Challenging

THEME: Famous people (or, once, a fictional character) + other word (except in the case of HERR KERR, where the pattern's reversed for some reason) = wacky phrase that sounds like actual phrase. Oh, and they all rhyme with "air" (again, HERR KERR seems like an outlier here, but I guess "KERR" = "CARE," which I would never have guessed). Looks like all the (alleged) "-air" sounds are spelled differently. Was that the goal? — I don't really know if that's an accurate description, but it's the best I got.

Theme answers:

POEHLER BARE (polar bear)
CHER WEAR (shareware)
BELLE HEIR (Bel Air)
HERR KERR (hair care) (??)
THOREAU FAIR (thoroughfare)

Word of the Day: NON-METAL (41D: Any of about 18 elements on the periodic table) —

In chemistry, a nonmetal (or non-metal) is a chemical element that mostly lacks metallic attributes. Physically, nonmetals tend to be highly volatile (easily vaporised), have low elasticity, and are good insulators of heat and electricity; chemically, they tend to have high ionization energy and electronegativity values, and gain or share electrons when they react with other elements or compounds. Seventeen elements are generally classified as nonmetals; most are gases (hydrogen, helium, nitrogen, oxygen, fluorine, neon, chlorine, argon, krypton, xenon and radon); one is a liquid (bromine); and a few are solids (carbon, phosphorus, sulfur, selenium, and iodine). (wikipedia)

• • •

No time for a full write-up today.

This was a weird one. I found it hard, despite the fact that when I look over the grid now, there's nothing hard-seeming about it, except that theme, which is bizarre. FREAKY, even. Fill is pretty clean, which, as you know, I like. But the theme … it doesn't hold together well at all. I like its wacky spirit, but despite the "-air" rhyme thing, it's got virtually nothing holding it together. The people involved aren't even all people. The non-people words are all different parts of speech, and one of them comes first (HERR KERR), where every other time they come second. People don't have anything in common besides being reasonably well known (again, for the third time, HERR KERR is an outlier—I had no idea what that guy's name was. I think he's from a generation before mine. I couldn't tell you his first name. All I want to say is "Jerome"… it's "Graham"). Grid is strangely built, with giant corners and ultra-choppy middle. No harm done there, as those big corners are cleanly filled. They did add some difficulty to the solve.

So the theme is very loose and inconsistent. It is also responsible for most of the difficulty (big corners and tough cluing responsible for rest—lots of one-worders and vagueness). If theme had made more sense, I would've enjoyed this one.

Greater: EGGHEAD, FREAKY, CODERED

Lesser: EMEER, ESSA, RETAR

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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Constructor: David Steinberg

Relative difficulty: Easy

THEME: none

Word of the Day: Calvin PEETE (48D: Calvin of the P.G.A.) —

Calvin Peete, whose life traced one of sport’s most triumphant arcs — a school dropout with a crooked left arm who did not pick up a golf club until his 20s, did not join the pro tour until his 30s, and still became one of the leading players of his era and the most successful black professional golfer before Tiger Woods — has died. He was 71. (from PEETE's NYT obituary, published yesterday)

• • •

A writer friend of mine wrote me yesterday:

... can you explain why anyone gives a crap about symmetry in crossword puzzles? This is a really odd phenomenon, to me. I don't see how it adds anything except a very faint sense of order and elegance, but it seems to me it comes at enormous expense.

What expense? Well, the need, for example, to have "corners," which often mean a lot of short clues or whatever. Not being a constructor, I am ignorant here, really, but wouldn't all sorts of creativity be opened up if we gave up the rawther stuffy conceit of symmetry?It seems to me to be the equivalent of rhyme to poetry, only way less satisfying.

I print this query here both because I think it's worth thinking about what purpose conventions serve, and because today's puzzle is itself a convention-breaker. Like rotational symmetry, the 15x15 grid size (Mon-Sat) is a convention. The size convention, though, has at least some practical basis, namely that the crossword, having been (and still, for many, being) a part of a newspaper environment, it must fit within a designated, limited space. Now, as puzzles move increasingly to the digital realm, this size constraint is likely to seem more and more anachronistic—a convention based on limitations that no longer exist. But as long as the crossword is made for publication in newspapers, size will matter. Still—why 15? why not 16? Today's puzzle reminds us of how arbitrary the 15x15 convention is. Expand the grid by one column, and an entire new universe of answers opens up. We sometimes see the wider (or narrower) grid in themed puzzles, where the conceit, or some marquee themer, makes the expansion (or contraction) necessary. But we don't see it in themelesses. I'm not saying we never have, but I can't remember when we have. And today's puzzle makes a good argument for opening the 16 floodgates. Think of all the damn 15 stacks we've seen over the years. Maybe it's not the stack itself that's played out—maybe it's the reservoir of available answers. Actually, I think all long stacks are at least slightly dangerous—they're likely to get you into similar problems with overall fill quality, so maybe my enthusiasm should be slightly qualified. But think of the 16 as a vast reservoir that has yet to be tapped. A precious, non-renewable resource that we can exploit for our immediate gratification. I welcome the New Age of the 16-wide themeless. I am certain to eat those words in the not-too-distant future, but for now, lead on, young pioneer Steinberg. Even if it ends up not being any better than the 15-wide, there's no reason it should be any worse, and if nothing else, it's different. Different Is Good.

That said, MONTE CARLO CASINO has "green paint"* painted all over it. But then, *that* said, the rest of this grid is Fantastic. All the other 16s are Good to Great, and though you have some (predictable) wincers in the short crosses (quoth the raven, MNEMvermore), the trade-off is more than worth it. FEROCIOUS ANGEL DUST livens up the center (which, mercifully, doesn't feature a third 16 stack), the grid even manages to squeeze in some interesting longer Downs like JESUS ALOU and HOT SPRING and JAM JAR, which, OK, isn't "longer," but it's still cool. Only real downside for me today was how easy this thing was. I got Downs 1 through 4 in quick succession, with no hesitation, and that pretty much blew open the top section. From there I found it really easy to send out long tentacles into all the sections of the grid. Here's a pic of my progress just after the 1/3 mark:

I didn't know the "S" is "lasik" was SITU, and I didn't get that "Brit" was a first name, and so I had a brief moment of "???" at SITU / HUME, but otherwise, this thing flew by. After I sewed up the middle, driving down into the bottom was simply no problem at all:

At that point I hadn't even looked at the 16s down below. Look how much of a jump I have on them. Needles to say, they were easy to pick off. So this could've been tougher, but otherwise, it was delightful. Unleash the 16s! (Oh, and if you're so inclined, let me know what you think about the symmetry question I opened with)

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

*"green paint" is the term for a crossword answer that is more arbitrary word pairing than solid, stand-alone answer.

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Constructor: Barry C. Silk

Relative difficulty: Medium-Challenging

THEME: none

Word of the Day: TEKTITE (38D: Meteorite impact product) —

noun
GEOLOGY
a small black glassy object, many of which are found over certain areas of the earth's surface, believed to have been formed as molten debris in meteorite impacts and scattered widely through the air. (google)

• • •

A fine, tough puzzle. I actually don't care for the GOOGLEPLEX / GOOGOLPLEX thing, even though it really helped me out a lot (had the first in place, and then, by inference, got the second off just the "X"). I'd rather a wholly different interesting word go in place of one of those plexes. Also, I didn't know GOOGLEPLEX was a place. I wanted GOOGLEDOME. Sounds much cooler / more sinister. Like Thunderdome or Terrordome or Astrodome. But no big deal. One answer sacrificed to unnecessary cuteness. Rest of the puzzle is smooth, if oddly dull in the longer stuff (except ROY ORBISON). Mainly you get common phrases, which are decent, but not exciting. But the vagueness and toughness of cluing made for a not unpleasant grind. The kind of grind I don't mind on a Saturday.

Had tough time getting started, as I tried MESTA at 1A: Socialite who wrote "How to Catch a Man, How to Keep a Man, How to Get Rid of a Man" (GABOR). You know you know too much crosswordese when MESTA is the first thing that leaps to your mind in *any* situation. So I was screwed in that corner. Abandoned it for adjacent area in the north. No luck there. Finally got traction by guessing AGED at 10A: Acquired wisdom, per a saying, then guessing ANNIE (close!) at 10D: "Pretty in Pink" heroine, and then getting ELEC / DETECT / ENURES in pretty quick succession. Was really surprised that worked, as I wasn't certain about any of the stuff that got me going. From there it was most a slowish, steady clockwise trip down, over, and back up again to finish in the NW. Actually, I finished in the far north. Here's the exact square, where I was stopped cold:

I had no idea. At all. None. As far as I knew, there *was* no word that followed the pattern -LEATE, so I figured I had an error. But I ran the alphabet and then SOAP slipped into view. OLEATE… OK then.

Bullets:

6D: Seat of Monterey County (SALINAS)— I was just in Monterey County last month. Still needed many crosses to pick this one up.
48A: Divorced title couple of ilm (KRAMERS)— just watched "Kramer vs. Kramer" earlier this year. It holds up OK, though courtroom scenes, like, apparently, all courtroom scenes in movies, were Preposterous. Also, Streep's whole "I'm just abandoning my child to go find myself" thing felt really poorly motivated and explained, and thus unsympathetic. Still, she was great. But it's mainly a hero-dad picture.
37A: Thou (G-NOTE)— Not convinced this a real thing. Do people really say it. C-NOTE, sure. But a. that's a much rarer "note," and b. no reason a "Thou" should come in a single "note." I wanted GRAND. Then, at GNO-E, I wanted GNOME. Not really. I just like the idea that the puzzle was saying to me "Thou art a GNOME!"

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

Constructor: Dan Schoenholz

Relative difficulty: Medium-Challenging

THEME:"Non-starters" — No "N" starters, i.e phrases starting with "N" have the "N" dropped, creating wackiness that goes on for days and days (actually, just seven answers)

Theme answers:

A NOOK OF THE NORTH (23A: Arctic hideaway?)
EAR TO ONE'S HEART (34A: Neck-stretching yoga position?)
ORMAN CONQUEST (45A: Big win for a prominent TV financial adviser?)
ARROW-MINDED (65A: Like makers of one-way street signs?)
OISE POLLUTION (85A: Environmentalists' concern in northern France?)
ICE PIECE OF WORK (96A: Igloo, e.g.?)
EURO TRANSMITTER (111A: One sending money from France or Germany?)

Word of the Day: BHOPAL (105A: Locale of a 1984 industrial disaster) —

The Bhopal disaster, also referred to as the Bhopal gas tragedy, was a gas leak incident in India, considered the world's worst industrial disaster.
It occurred on the night of 2–3 December 1984 at the Union Carbide India Limited (UCIL) pesticide plant in Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh. Over 500,000 people were exposed to methyl isocyanate (MIC) gas and other chemicals. The toxic substance made its way into and around the shanty towns located near the plant.
Estimates vary on the death toll. The official immediate death toll was 2,259. The government of Madhya Pradesh confirmed a total of 3,787 deaths related to the gas release. A government affidavit in 2006 stated that the leak caused 558,125 injuries, including 38,478 temporary partial injuries and approximately 3,900 severely and permanently disabling injuries. Others estimate that 8,000 died within two weeks, and another 8,000 or more have since died from gas-related diseases.
The cause of the disaster remains under debate. The Indian government and local activists argue that slack management and deferred maintenance created a situation where routine pipe maintenance caused a backflow of water into a MIC tank triggering the disaster. Union Carbide Corporation (UCC) contends water entered the tank through an act of sabotage. (wikipedia)

• • •

Sundays have become mildly annoying, because difficulty level appears to have been amped up of late, which would be fine, if puzzle quality had also been amped up, which it hasn't. This is about the most bare-bones, basic, infinitely replicable theme imaginable, and while it might yield hilarious results, I suppose, today it did not. EAR TO ONE'S HEART? [Impossible yoga position?], maybe. Man that clue was irritating. Here I thought "oh, the answer will have something to do with yoga. I got this." But no. Absurd. All the themers are absurd. Cutesy, without actually being cute. Far from hilarious. Not much to say about this one beyond "no." This theme could probably be done all over again, with completely new themers, and be mildly entertaining. But these merit only the mildest of chuckles, at best.

Forgot what APGAR was (56A: ___ score (newborn health measure)), so DONE UP was wicked, wicked hard for me (30D: Beautified). See also REDLINES. I had RE-LINES and had no idea (29A: Strikes). Ran the alphabet. DONE UP and BHOPAL (never heard of it) were total outliers, difficulty-wise. I mean, the whole thing was clued pretty tough, but DONE UP was weirdly, ridiculously resistant to my solving machinations, and BHOPAL crossed LIAO (106D: Chinese dynasty of a thousand years ago), which made it treacherous. Wife knew, when I asked about BHOPAL, what it was, vaguely. I have no memory of it at all. I was 14 when the chemical spill or whatever it was happened. I have never seen BHOPAL in crosswords or encountered it anywhere ever. I accept that it's crossworthy, but crossing LIAO (!?) makes it rough. Chinese dynasties are crapshoots, and among the lowest form of fill there is. I guessed "L." I guessed right. I hate when any square is the result of guessing.

Overall fill is fine. Not great. OK. What the heck is a TIM MARA? Yikes? (18A: New York Giants founder who's in the Pro Football Hall of Fame) Needed all the crosses there. Massive outlier, familiarity-wise. Luckily the crosses were all solid (unlike BHOPAL, gah). I am three sheets to the wind (actually one julep to the wind, but man, my wife made it powerful), so I'm gonna go eat some Derby Pie (pecan, chocolate, bourbon, heaven) and sober up. Hope you enjoy your Sunday.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Hey, guys, it's Annabel! Please wish me luck on APs this week. (Or, if there's anyone out there who wants to give me a crash course in BC Calculus...)

Constructor: Zhouquin Burnikel

Relative difficulty: Easy

THEME:"Step Mama— The center word is STEPMOM, and circled squares repeatedly spell out MAMA in a way that looks like a "step."

Theme answers:

HAM A ND EGGS (17A: Traditional breakfast combo)
LLAMA (20A: Long-necked pack animal)
STEPMOM (39A: Wicked relative of Cinderella...or what each set of circled letters represents?)
SAM ADAMS (48A: Brew with the slogan "For the love of beer")
ROMA (51A: Locale of the Città del Vaticano)
I AM A CAMERAMAN (64A: Hit 1951 play that inspired "Cabaret")
DRAMA (67A: "Game of Thrones," e.g.)

Word of the Day: I AM A CAMERA (64A: Hit 1951 play that inspired "Cabaret") —

I Am a Camera is a 1951 Broadway play by John Van Druten adapted from Christopher Isherwood's novel Goodbye to Berlin, which is part of The Berlin Stories. The title is a quote taken from the novel's first page: "I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking." The original production was staged by John Van Druten, with scenic and lighting design by Boris Aronson and costumes by Ellen Goldsborough. It opened at the Empire Theatre in New York City on November 28, 1951 and ran for 214 performances before closing on July 12, 1952.
The production was a critically acclaimed success for both Julie Harris as the insouciant Sally Bowles, winning her the first of five Tony Awards of her career for Best Leading Actress in a play, and for Marian Winters, who won both the Theatre World Award and Tony Award for Featured Actress in a Play. The play also won for John Van Druten the New York Drama Critics' Circle for Best American Play (1952). However it also earned the famous review by Walter Kerr, "Me no Leica".

• • •

It's good to be writing you guys again! And on a puzzle that I could actually complete without too much difficulty! Fill highlights included NADIR, ENERO, and EROICA; I'd say the fill overall was pretty great for a Monday. I'm ready to be done with clues that end in "to a poet" (as in "Before, to a poet" for ERE); I mean, surely there is a more original way to clue for ERE?

The theme was really cute! I didn't even get "step-mama" until after I had finished filling out the whole puzzle and realized that the MAMAs looked like steps. I will say that the fact that I got STEPMOM well before I even got to any of the MAMAs was a little bit of a letdown. I was feeling all Rex-y about it until my mom reminded me that Mondays are for beginners. Anyway, Cinderella's wicked relative is awesome.

Shout-out to my STEPMOM (who I love and who is not even a little bit wicked) btw!

Bullets:

SINE (66A: ___ qua non) — This clue reminds me too much of calculus. I should be studying right now...
SEX ED (70A: School health course, informally)— Reminds me of 8th grade, when my teacher put a condom on her arm up to her elbow and the entire class freaked out. She certainly made a point though. Unlike this dude.

ARC (10D: Pigskin path) — Okay, I'm convinced. Someone is deliberately putting these calculus-themed clues in this puzzle to stress me out! ...I'm going to go study now.

Signed, Annabel Thompson, tired high school student (until June 5!!)

Constructor: Martin Ashwood-Smith

Relative difficulty: Easy

[You can see where I wrote "CARAN…, up top, in my bid to parse CAR ANTENNA (5D: One getting the show on the road?)… you can also see that I wrote "Wow!" for that clue, as well as for 25D: Fitting entertainment at an arcade? (TETRIS)]

THEME: none

Word of the Day: Bandar SERI Begawan (35D: Bandar ___ Begawan (Brunei's capital)) —

Bandar Seri Begawan /ˌbaːndə sɨˌriː bɨˈɡaʊən/ ba(h)nd-ə sə-ree bə-gow-ən (Jawi: بندر سري بڬاوان ; Malay: [ˌbanda səˌri bəˈɡawan]) with an estimated population of more than 200,000 (in 2014), is the capital and largest city of the Sultanate of Brunei. (wikipedia)

[Not sure what red line indicates—cruise? pirate adventure?]

• • •

I always (and I mean Always) forget where Brunei is. So the map is for me than it is for you. I mean, you can look at it if you want, but my principal edification target is me. I solved on paper today for some reason. I think I just got sick of screens. Sometimes it's nice to be able to look back over a grid and really See where you screwed up (erasures, write-overs, etc.). Or where you got annoyed / aggrieved (note all the little :( faces and "?"s and what not on my grid). I missed the ACPT this year, so I haven't had to solve on paper in a long time, but I'm headed to The Indie 500 Tournament in D.C. on May 30, and since tournament solving is always done on paper, I kind of need to get back into paper-solving shape. It really is a different beast in a lot of ways, though the harder the puzzle gets, the less important the difference is between on-screen and paper—on-screen is much faster when you're dealing with easy puzzles. But ANYway… paper! I like making little marginal annotations as I go. I usually do this after I print out a completed puzzle, but it's kind of nice to record my notes as I solve, rather than retrospectively; more … authentic, somehow.

[18A: Like many 911 calls]

I thought this puzzle was fine. As quadstacks go, totally average. It has all the usual infelicities in the short fill, but somehow today these are not offset by charming / interesting stack-answers. BEATING A RETREAT has a bit of life, but the rest are common-letter-heavy snoozers. I thought SALES ASSISTANTS was a joke among constructors, as it is oft-used and saturated in 1-pt Scrabble tiles. Maybe I'm thinking of a different phrase, but SALES ASSISTANTS is close. *All* those "S"s enable soooo many plurals. Makes filling a grid like this soooo much easier (not easy—but easier). ALTERNATE ROUTES has about as much charm. NO INTEREST LOANS. Seriously, these are all phrases from a tedious business meeting where people sit around a conference table and vie to impress the CEO w/ business speak jargon. What did we NET? How do we lower our TAX liability? Do we still have that fleet of SSTS in Bandar SERI Begawan or did we sell those? CAN TEEN consumers get their parents to say YES to buying them this year's hottest fashion, "UTE RAGS"? Where's PAT? Get PAT in here. She'll want in on this."ETC.

Here's a recent New Yorker cartoon with (yet another) bullshit grid.

Have you noticed how incapable advertisers / cartoonists / all humans are of depicting American crossword grids accurately? Dear editors: here are the Basics: 1. all-over interlock (i.e. no unchecked squares) 2. no answers of fewer than three letters 3. rotational symmetry (or some kind of symmetry). Please share with any friends you have who are or might some day be responsible for the visual representation of American crossword grids. Thanks!

Here's another bad one:

["MYSTERY" is right …]

And another:

[Now *that* is a terrible theme]

So at this point, it looks like I'm a collector.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

Constructor: Michael Blake and Andrea Carla Michaels

Relative difficulty: Medium-Challenging (**for a Tuesday**) (time: 4:08)

THEME: ADDIE (69A: Girl's name that's a two-part hint to 1/20-, 27-, 45- and 53-Across) — put -IE on the ends of familiar phrases. You get wacky phrases.

Theme answers:

SWEET / GEORGIA BROWNIE (1A: With 20-Across, chocolaty Atlanta treat?)
BAR STOOLIE (27A: One ratting out a group of lawyers?)
RARE BIRDIE (45A: What the duffer shot on a hole, surprisingly?)
SHOCKING PINKIE (53A: Little finger that makes you go "Oh my God!"?) [What? Even with ample wackiness leeway, that clue makes no sense.]

Word of the Day: DAEWOO (10D: Bygone Korean automaker) —

Daewoo Motors was a South Korean automotive company established in 1982, part of the Daewoo Group. It sold most of its assets in 2001 to General Motors, after running into financial trouble, becoming a subsidiary of the American company and being renamed GM Daewoo. In 2011, it was replaced by GM Korea. (wikipedia)

• • •

Don't know a single person named ADDIE, real or fictional, so puzzle feels massively contrived. Actually, I think I might know of one. Hang on (… goes to wikipedia…); yes, the basis for the movie Paper Moon was a novel entitled ADDIE Pray by Joe David Brown. My friend Shelah taught me this 20+ years ago (she loved the novel, as I recall). Why I remember this factoid 20+ years later, I don't know … maybe because No One Else In The Universe Is Named ADDIE. So anyway, the theme is odd. The theme *type* is super-basic. The add-a-sound / letter thing is older than God, and here, the wackiness results are just so-so. I don't what "shocking pink" is. Is it a kind of pink? A shade of pink? I know of "hot pink," but not "shocking pink," so SHOCKING PINKIE is strange to me. All in all, this is a placeholder puzzle. Fill is stale but serviceable, and concept is stale but adequately executed. There are cheater squares* in the E and W (black squares below EARL and above WEAR, respectively), lord only knows why. Tiny sections like that are not hard to fill. Cheaters also follow WATER and precede VIRAL. Theme does not seem so demanding that you have to black-square it to death like this. Whole puzzle feels tired and slapdash. And, most importantly, ADDIE? Shouldn't a name you base an entire puzzle on be a name someone actually has (my apologies if that's your name—the only ADDIE I know is a guy, and he doesn't spell it that way).

Because of the multiple cross-referenced clues, and the very narrow connecting passages between N and S parts of the grid, and some odd, yucky, initially inscrutable fill like ECCLES (?), my time was way slower than normal. I had to recall DAEWOO, which was odd / unpleasant. I also had to go up against the Law Offices of ILO ESSE ESTO ESAI ERI and OLE (they're not good, but they'll bury you in paperwork). Honestly, this puzzle feels just plain lazy. The puzzle equivalent of a shrug. Not enough thought or care went into make this an entertaining, fresh, 21st-century puzzle. It'll do, but it won't do well. Where are SHARPIE? JUNKIE? MOUNTIE? ARCHIE? This could've Easily been a Sunday (and if the theme answers were a lot funnier, it could even have been a tolerable Sunday).

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

*cheater squares = black squares that do not change the word count (added only to make filling the grid easier)

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Constructor: Joe Krozel

Relative difficulty: Medium-Challenging

THEME: SEASONS (35A: Noted quartet) — circled letters spell out seasons …

Word of the Day: LADINO (44D: Judeo-Spanish) —

noun
noun: Ladino; plural noun: Ladinos
1.
the language of some Sephardic Jews, especially formerly in Mediterranean countries. It is based on medieval Spanish, with an admixture of Hebrew, Greek, and Turkish words, and is written in modified Hebrew characters.
2.
a mestizo or Spanish-speaking white person in Central America. (google)

• • •

Wow. A decorative non-theme (seriously, there are no theme clues … just some circled words … so, as I say, decorative; insubstantial; no there there). And the fill was laughable in many parts. Not just iffy, but hilariously subpar. It's all Es and Ss in the middle and then ANNA LEE (?!) ALUMINA (lol) LADINO (…) in the corners. IIIIIIIIIIIII can't believe it's not b(e)tter. Whoo boy. Yeesh. The arbitrariness of TEN TONS, the ISH-ness of EEEE, the minimal HAIs, the abundant PLO(w)s, the IN SHAPE of IN ALL IN ESSENCE GET IN ON! IT'S IN like NIN! This is headshakingly amateurish. You can see how poorly planned and sloppy the execution is just by looking at LADINO. That is obscure fill. It is. It really is. And it's totally unnecessary. I *guarantee* you, if you are somehow a LADINO-lover, that that word was not not not not planned. That's accident fill. How do I know? Because the obvious "fix" is LATINO, but There Is A Reason LATINO can't go there, namely that would put TIE at 53A, and TIE is already in the grid at 10D: Reason for extra play (TIE GAME) (not sure why a duped TIE should bother someone who puts "IN" in the puzzle 5 (!!!!) times, but there you go). So LADINO is a sad attempt at salvage. Now, in corner already burdened with ATRIP and HAI and TAI and the weirdly iffy NOTATES, LADINO should've set off the "intolerable" alarm. Corner should've been redone. But it was Band-aided. IIII! EEEE! this was TEN TONS of baloney.

["I, I, I, I…"]

Honestly, the end. Since there's no theme to comment on, the end. I got nothing to work with here. See you tomorrow.

No, one more thing: a moment of silence, please, so we may reflect upon the fact that this grid has both EEEE and IIII in it. Surely that is some kind of record in Repeated Vowel Achievement. We are all witness.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Facebook and Twitter]

Constructor: Tracy Gray

Relative difficulty: Medium

THEME: GOING GREEN (59A: Reducing one's carbon footprint … or a hint to this puzzle's theme)— the … prefix? … ECO is squished into tiny boxes seven times in this grid.

Word of the Day: YAKOV Perelman (13A: ___ Perelman, prolific Russian science writer) —

Yakov Isidorovich Perelman (Russian: Яков Исидорович Перельман; December 4, 1882 – March 16, 1942) was a Russian and Soviet science writer and author of many popular science books, including Physics Can Be Fun and Mathematics Can Be Fun (both translated from Russian into English).
Perelman was born in 1882 in the town of Białystok, Congress Poland. He obtained the diploma of forester from the Imperial Forestry Institute in Saint Petersburg, in 1909. After the success of "Physics for Entertainment", Perelman set out to produce other books, in which he showed himself to be an imaginative populariser of science. Especially popular were "Arithmetic for entertainment", "Mechanics for entertainment", "Geometry for Entertainment", "Astronomy for entertainment", "Lively Mathematics", " Physics Everywhere", and "Tricks and Amusements". (wikipedia)

• • •

Feels like it's been a while since I've seen a Thursday rebus. Rebuses often provide a nice challenge, but they also have a way of sucking thematic life out of a puzzle, and of being repetitious; both these things happen today, a little. There's just one theme answer (kinda like yesterday …) and then there's a bunch of rebus squares, all the same, which are just letter strings. I mean, this is what a rebus is—a letter string condensed into a single box—so I'm not pointing out anything startling, just noting that there's nothing content-wise or even clue-wise about this puzzle that relates to GOING GREEN. Just seven ECOs. Since ECO- is just a prefix, the whole concept is a bit odd. Would've made a nice Umberto ECO tribute, maybe. The puzzle certainly isn't terrible as is. It's straight-over-the-plate rebus. Vanilla rebus. Adequately done. Actually, in the longer ECO-containing answers, perhaps better than adequately done. Definitely got some joy out of uncovering / discovering WILE E. COYOTE and PENTECOSTAL.

Less pleasure in the short stuff, which is somewhat subpar today, sadly. UAL and NSC are never good fill, and somehow crossing them with LAC and EOLIC (!), respectively, made them harder to take. EDER's back … wait … I think I'm confusing EDER and EDEL again. Since neither is good, maybe it doesn't matter. ERLE EDIE SKEE EOLIC NSC is By Far the roughest patch, there in the SE. Rest of the grid comes out around average, I guess. Why do I associate ENGRAM with some kind of cult? Is there some Scientology crap that involves a something-GRAM? Anyway, didn't know ENGRAM was a legitimate thing, so that took time, as did the somehow not-YAKOV-Smirnoff YAKOV. That Perelman dude is old and obscure. Is there any reason a modern US reader should know him? Seems a long way to go for YAKOV. Also, seems horribly forced. We all know there's just one YAKOV. It's Smirnoff. Contriving a "new" clue for YAKOV only makes people think harder about YAKOV Smirnoff (and when has that ever been a plus?). Right now, a million solvers are thinking "But I only know *one* YAKOV…" I hear you, Million Solvers! In Soviet Russia … crossword solve you. Here's how I know there's just one YAKOV:

When your YAKOV is less searched-for than Stalin's eldest son (whom I only just learned existed), then your YAKOV is probably not crossworthy. Seriously, Yakov Yurovsky and Yakov Sverdlov google better than YAKOV Perelman. What? You don't know who the YAKOVs Yurovsky and Sverdlov are?! I can't believe etc.! Outrageous. (Trivia: Yurovsky was chief executioner of Emperor Nicholas II of Russia (aka The Tsar), and Sverdlov was a Bolshevik party leader).

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

Constructor: Ian Livengood

Relative difficulty: Easy

THEME: none

Word of the Day: HALITE (16A: Melter on winter sidewalks) —

noun
sodium chloride as a mineral, typically occurring as colorless cubic crystals; rock salt. (google)

• • •

This one was pretty sweet. Smooth and practically groaner-free. Nice mix of contemporary names and common words/phrases. I think I'm becoming one of Those People who doesn't like to see a ton of brand names in the grid. I don't mind them, I just … have limits. And when you lead with SNAPCHAT over KETEL ONE, part of me's like "easy there, Pitchy McAdman." But the commercial density of the rest of the puzzle was less intense. The puzzle also flirted with my indeterminate but very real Proper Noun Limit, generally, but managed to stay a safe distance from Insufferable Territory. Proper nouns can be boring you-know-it-or-you-don't exercises in trivia … or they can be 12D: Fox hunt leader of old (SIMON COWELL), which is some kind of genius clue. Playful yet literal, and spot-on (the "Fox" is the TV network and the "hunt" is "American Idol"). My only complaint was that it was too easy. SNAPCHAT was a gimme (1A: Instagram alternative), and that set me up to knock out the NW and then flow easily into the west and center of the grid. Thusly:

The openness of the grid—that is, the multiple access points that every section has—made consistent progress easy. I didn't get significantly held up at all. I wrote in SHOO for SCAT (36D: "Beat it!"), and that took some time off the clock, but that's a pretty minor hiccup.

I often find cross-referenced clues annoying, but today I found one very helpful. As I moved from one answer to its counterpart across the grid (the way one might move, say, from the Conservatory to the Lounge in Clue), I thought "Oh, this is what cross-referenced clues are supposed to do. Neat." Fortuitously, I got the --K at 48A: Official 18-Across of Utah and immediately saw it had to be ELK, which meant 18A: See 48-Across was probably ANIMAL. So I abandoned the ELK corner for the ANIMAL corner and worked my way methodically down and around, back to the ELK region, with the "E" in NESTED my final letter. Here's the key moment of cross-grid / cross-reference transition:

Really liked COACH K as fill. Not sure if it's completely original, but it's fresh and unusual and very much in-the-language, sports-talk-wise. I remembered what HESSIANs were, which was my big memory coup of the day. HESSIAN is a word I learned from crosswords. Not sure how they eluded me in US History class, but so many other things did, I can't be that surprised. I forgot who the hero of the 1960 World Series was, so thank god that "Z" cross was easy—as soon as I got it, I remembered Bill Mazeroski. Not sure I knew people called him MAZ (the way people called Carl Yastrzemski "YAZ"), but I do like that "Z" there. Much better than the "E" that would've taken its place otherwise (probably) (you can put a couple other letters there, but they're not great).

A nice, novice-friendly Friday.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

Constructor: Kristian House

Relative difficulty: Easy

THEME: none

Word of the Day: AGENA (61A: It was boosted by Titan) —

noun, Rocketry.
1.a U.S. upper stage, with a restartable liquid-propellant engine, used with various boosterstages to launch satellites into orbit around theearth and send probes to the moon and planets:also used as a docking target in the Geminiprogram. (dictionary.com)

• • •

Mostly enjoyable, totally acceptable Saturday puzzle that also serves as a mini-primer in old-school crosswordese (the kind that you see somewhat less now than you did, say, a couple decades ago—god bless you, computers). I didn't mind the crosswordese this time—it was lightly sprinkled around the grid, and it was a bit like meeting old friends. Or former enemies who have now grown up and moved on and have kids and you're like "Hey, how's it going, long time no see, I don't hate you any more because we've both grown up and moved on to other things." Like that. I mean how am I gonna be mad at AMAH? She hardly gets out any more. And AGENA? Poor guy barely gets work these days. Even AGHA and OGEE are mostly retired. Now MOATED is borderline nonsense, and REHONE is All The Way nonsense, so them, I resent a little. But I'd sit down for a beer with AMAH and AGAH. Talk over the good/bad old days. Sounds like a good time.

There's some decent long fill here, though I would've appreciated a greater "Wow" factor. I likely feel this way largely because I am jaded—or, rather, experienced; I have seen MUFFIN TOP (1A: Effect of tightening an extra-tight belt, maybe) and BATARANG (12D: Weapon for the Caped Crusader) and DOCTOR WHO (58A: Long-running show about a Time Lord) and most of the rest of the grid's bouncy fill before. If not in the NYT, other places. So if I were a less constant solver, this might have impressed me more. AS IF I CARE, ironically, was the answer I cared about most: love it. And I really like most of the 8+-letter fill, though at first I didn't think things were going to go well. Here's what my grid looked like, right out of the gate:

So it's enough of a Thing that I got it instantly, but also enough of a non-Thing that I stopped to take its picture. I stopped again at REHONE because … well, because REHONE. You don't see that every day. Just like yesterday, I was fortunate to hit a cross-reference clue at Just the right moment, such that, instead of holding me up (as such clues usually do), it propelled me into another part of the grid. Crosses gave me D-RW-- at 42A: Champion of 11-Down, and without even looking at 11-Down, I wrote in DARWIN (what other name fits that letter pattern?). Quick glance at 11D: Change of life let me know the answer was EVOLUTION, which opened up the whole NE.

Hang-ups were few today. Forgot that NATAL was a port, and that it meant "Christmas," so I needed crosses there. ISADORE was a guess based on having the IS- and then getting the "D" from DUTCH (56A: Reagan nickname). Had WAY for FAR (47A: Considerably), as in "my dog's WAY better than yours." Oh, and I had MATURE before MUTATE (29A: Undergo change). But I still finished in just over 7, and that's with the clock still running while I took multiple screen shots. So, yeah, Easy.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

Constructor: Jacob Stulberg

Relative difficulty: Medium-Challenging

THEME:"Literary Circles" — "THE LOCUST TREE IN FLOWER" (3D: 1935 poem with one word per line … as spelled out by this puzzle's circled letters) a poem by WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS (15D: Writer of 3-Down), is spelled out, in its entirety, in circles in the grid:

Theme answers:

CUCAMONGA
OFTEN
GREENING
MASTIFF
RESOLD
ALBRIGHT
BROKEN RIB
BRANCH OFF
BECOME
EGG WHITE
"LIFE IS SWEET"
MAY I SEE
OVER AGAIN

Word of the Day: GLIA (33D: Cells that protect neurons) —

noun
ANATOMY
the connective tissue of the nervous system, consisting of several different types of cell associated with neurons. (google)

• • •

This made me kind of hate poetry, which is weird, as I've been getting really into poetry of late. Like, I'm currently reading "Lives of the Modern Poets" by William H. Pritchard (haven't made it to the WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS chapter yet, though), and I just started "How to Be Drawn," the new book of poems by Terrance Hayes (which arrived in my mailbox two days ago). Earlier this year, I devoured "Citizen" by Pomona College professor Claudia Rankine (worth it for the Serena Williams poem/essay alone), as well as "Why Brownlee Left" by Paul Muldoon and "Brown Girl Dreaming" by Jacqueline Woodson. I am teaching 17C poetry right now (final exam on Tuesday). So, I thought I liked poetry. And I think I still do. But this puzzle, man … OK, first: this poem is not famous enough to carry a Sunday puzzle. Sorry, WCW aficionados, it's just not. WCW's wikipedia page doesn't even mention this poem. When you google "William Carlos Williams," here's what google suggests... :

… because google knows what's crossworthy, and what isn't. Now maybe you're thinking "Well, of course it's not FAMOUS, that's the point … if it were famous, people could just fill in the circles …" Well, true. But then it seems like the bar is pretty low, fame-wise, for what you can build a puzzle around. This poem is designed to make WCW fans grin with smugness, and make most others think "I've never heard of this poem and this poem makes no sense." And here we get to the puzzle's biggest fault—this poem as represented in the grid is the SECOND VERSION [grrrrr…] SECOND VERSION, I SAY, of this poem. Now, true, I'd never heard of this poem at all, so it wouldn't have mattered to me, solving-wise, whether you labeled it appropriately or not, but if you're gonna be all "You Should Know This Poem, You Illiterate Cretin," then you have a certain obligation, I think, to make the clue accurate. The FIRST VERSION of this poem reads much, much more like a poem:

The Locust Tree in Flower (First Version)

Among
the leaves
bright

green
of wrist-thick
tree

and old
stiff broken
branch

ferncool
swaying
loosely strung-

come May
again
white blossom

clusters
hide
to spill

their sweets
almost
unnoticed

down
and quickly
fall

again (from poetry foundation)

Infinitely superior, IMHO, but I am a troglodyte when it comes to chic poetic tastes, so who knows? Anyway, the nonsense second version is a SECOND VERSION so say "second version," else wrong (or at least inaccurate / misleading) [n.b. arguably the clue has nothing to apologize for because it *said* 1935, the date of the second version, not 1933, the date of the first version, you ignoramus. And yet my objection stands]. But, BUT: here's the thing (another thing, the last thing). I probably would've forgiven all the artsy poetry in-joke baloney because, hey, one word per line, that's a neat novelty, and how can you turn away from the pure serendipitous coincidence that not only do WCW and the poem's title have the same number of letters in them, but that number is also the exact width of a standard Sunday puzzle! Fine, leeway granted. But the fill. Oh, god, it's the OPPOSITE of poetry. It's a red wheelbarrow to the groin. ANGERERERERERERER? SALIENCES? IRONERS? EIDERS? ELLIOTTOTTOTTS? So many ugh-some plurals—and soooo many cheater squares, you'd think filling the grid well would've been possible. This thing is hyper-black-squared, and yet I'm still left to deal with a mess of ANAT GST AAA MSN etc etc etc. I've literally never been to an ANGELO'S pizzeria, despite their alleged "common"-ness.

I appreciate the desire to bring some poetry into the grid. I do. Hurray for the spirit of the thing. But the thing itself. Forgive me. It was inedible. So bitter. And so cold.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Facebook and Twitter]

Constructor: Joe DiPietro

Relative difficulty: Easy

THEME: Mall of America / Wall of Sound / All of Me / etc.— theme answers follow the following pattern: "-ALL OF whatever"

Theme answers:

CALL OF DUTY (16A: Shooter video game franchise)
BALL OF FIRE (29A: Very lively sort)
HALL OF FAME (45A: Cooperstown or Canton destination)
FALL OF ROME (61A: Empire collapse of A.D. 476)

Word of the Day: ERICH Fromm (26D: Psychoanalyst Fromm) —

Erich Seligmann Fromm (German: [fʀɔm]; March 23, 1900 – March 18, 1980) was a German social psychologist, psychoanalyst, sociologist, humanistic philosopher, and democratic socialist. He was associated with the Frankfurt School of critical theory. […] Beginning with his first seminal work of 1941, Escape from Freedom (known in Britain as Fear of Freedom), Fromm's writings were notable as much for their social and political commentary as for their philosophical and psychological underpinnings. Indeed, Escape from Freedom is viewed as one of the founding works of political psychology. His second important work, Man for Himself: An Inquiry into the Psychology of Ethics, first published in 1947, continued and enriched the ideas of Escape from Freedom. Taken together, these books outlined Fromm's theory of human character, which was a natural outgrowth of Fromm's theory of human nature. Fromm's most popular book was The Art of Loving, an international bestseller first published in 1956, which recapitulated and complemented the theoretical principles of human nature found in Escape from Freedom and Man for Himself—principles which were revisited in many of Fromm's other major works. (wikipedia)

• • •

You'll pardon me if I don't spend a lot of time on this one. The theme is nothing. The grid is adequate. I like that the constructor took advantage of the thin theme (just four 10-letter answers) to give us a couple of interesting long Downs (GENE SISKEL, SMALL WORLD). I didn't like ENWRAP (48D: Bundle up). It seems to mean "wrap." Also, no one ever uses it. So it's yucky, especially in an *easy*-to-fill grid like this. But otherwise, except for SNOOKI (an answer that already feels embarrassingly dated), there's nothing off-putting here. It's all familiar. I think I would've appreciated a more ambitious grid here—maybe a MALL OF AMERICA across the middle. But that would've made filling the grid cleanly much harder, and no one who cares about complexity of theme or density or any of that stuff really pays much attention to Mondays anyway. I think if I were trying to make this puzzle as elegant as possible, I'd've eliminated other "-ALL" words from the grid (SMALL WONDER, WALL-E). But no matter. It's a placeholder puzzle. EASY. Fine. Moving on…

I have circled (in pencil) the three parts of the grid where I hesitated or otherwise lost momentum. Only one of these parts is interesting. The two non-interesting parts: I blindly wrote in JPG where GIF was supposed to go (before I'd even finished entering JPG, I knew it was wrong and GIF was right; crosses confirmed this) (10A: Internet image file, familiarly); also, I had -UFFY at 46D: Common cat name and could think only of SCRUFFY, which didn't fit, and then SCUFFY, which I don't thin is an ACTUAL cat name. But WALL (of) E got me FLUFFY. Which brings me to my one interesting screw-up: I'm flying through the grid, not noticing any theme (typical for a Monday) when I come to an answer that ends -FROME (61A). So naturally (well, naturally to me), I didn't even look at the clue; I just wrote in ETHAN. I mean, what else ends in "-FROME," I ask you.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

Constructor: Paul Hunsberger

Relative difficulty: Medium (Normal Tuesday)

THEME: ELASTIC BAND (56A: Office item suggested visually by this puzzle) — circled letters B, A, N, D get farther apart in each subsequent theme answer, until the final theme answer, where the circles (though not the letters B, A, N, D) SNAP back into place…

Theme answers:

URBAN DESIGN (18A: Layout of city streets, parks, etc.)
HAREBRAINED IDEA (23A: It's so crazy it just might work)
BROADMINDED (37A: Tolerant)
WHIPPERSNAPPERS (48A: Presumptuous sorts)

Word of the Day: ASHLEY (65A: ___ Wilkes, obsession of Scarlett O'Hara) —

George Ashley Wilkes is a fictional character in Margaret Mitchell's 1936 novel Gone with the Wind and the later film of the same name. The character also appears in the 1991 book Scarlett, a sequel to Gone with the Wind written by Alexandra Ripley, and in Rhett Butler's People by Donald McCaig. […] In a sense, he is the character best personifying the tragedy of the Southern upper class after the Civil War. Coming from a privileged background, Ashley is an honorable and educated man. He is in clear contrast to Rhett Butler, who is decisive and full of life but is vulgar and distasteful as well. Rhett is both ruthless and practical, and is willing to do whatever he must to survive. In contrast, Ashley is often impractical (even Melanie admits this on her deathbed), and would resist doing many things Rhett would do because they aren't "proper" or "gentlemanly". Ashley fights in the Civil War, but he does it out of love for his homeland and not a hatred of the Yankees, who he actually hopes will just leave the South in peace. As a soldier he shows enough leadership to be promoted to the rank of Major, and survives being imprisoned at the Rock Island Arsenal in Illinois (a notorious prisoner-of-war camp) for several months. He eventually returns home, still able-bodied. Ashley could have lived a peaceful and respectable life had the War never taken place. The War that changed the South forever has turned his world upside down, with everything he had believed in 'gone with the wind', a phrase composed by the poet Ernest Dowson. (wikipedia)

• • •

I'm not entirely certain what this puzzle is supposed to represent. That is, I don't know what act is being performed on the ELASTIC BAND (which most of humanity—by a 13-to-1 margin, acc. to Herr Google—calls RUBBER BAND, but we'll worry about that later*). Is it around something, like, I don't know … what do you put rubber bands around in an office anymore? … and then you idly pull it back and snap it, so that it resumes its original position/shape? Are you snapping it so that it flies across the room? Are you pulling it so far that band eventually SNAPs apart? Since the BAND has become the word SNAP at the end, and since circled-letter positionality is never clear/consistent in the grid, I don't know. It's true that, visually, the word BAND is elasticized over the course of three theme answers—I don't know how hard it is to do that, but I can't imagine it's that hard. Spacing increases in the word BAND are consistent (i.e. the letters B, A, N, D are symmetrical in relation to one another throughout), but the BANDs (+ SNAP) are wonky in relation to each other. This seems like a cute idea that got a wobbly, makeshift, "Good enough!" execution, i.e this seems like a quintessential Tuesday. Poor Tuesday.

Puzzle felt very easy, but my time was totally normal. Why? I think the main issue was ASL / ASHLEY, the latter because I'm not that familiar with all the characters of "Gone With the Wind," and the former because I haven't seen a person signing in the corner of my TV screen since, I want to say, the '70s (59D: What might be seen in the corner of a TV screen: Abbr.). Maybe close-captioning obviated the need for this? I don't know. All I know is I got ASL entirely from crosses and didn't know what it was, so far was my mind from sign language. The other slow-down was REEARN… for obvious reasons (I hope). Fill today is below average, but not terrible. Mostly just stale. ANGIO is a weak standalone. My dad was a radiologist, and I heard the word "angiogram" a lot growing up. The ANGIO referred to here is (I'm guessing) and angioplasty, but I was not aware that, like AMNIO, it could stand alone. ITA crossing CASITA is bad, no matter how you clue ITA. Not much else to say.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

*"How the $@&! is "elastic band" an office item?! Does he mean "rubber band"? Because elastic bands are in underwear, not desks."— unsolicited, valid indignation from one of my Twitter followers last night

[Follow Rex Parker on Facebook and Twitter]

Constructor: Jeffrey Wechsler

Relative difficulty: Easy

THEME: ORSON WELLES (61A: Noted director/actor born in May 1915) — his name is in the puzzle and then the names of some of his movies / roles / radio shows are also in the puzzle the end.

Theme answers:

19A: Directorial triumph for 61-Across (CITIZEN KANE)
24A: Film featuring 61-Across (THE THIRD MAN)
32A: 61-Across's role in 24-Across (HARRY LIME)
39A: With 43-Across, panic inducing production of 61-Across (THE WAR OF / THE WORLDS)
52A: 1958 film by 61-Across (TOUCH OF EVIL)

Word of the Day: ISCHIA (5D: Tourist island in the Gulf of Naples) —

noun
plural noun: ischia
the curved bone forming the base of each half of the pelvis.

Ischia (Italian pronunciation: [ˈiskja]) is a volcanic island in the Tyrrhenian Sea. It lies at the northern end of the Gulf of Naples, about 30 kilometres (19 miles) from the city of Naples. It is the largest of the Phlegrean Islands. Roughly trapezoidal, it measures approximately 10 km (6 miles) east to west and 7 km (4 miles) north to south and has about 34 km (21 miles) of coastline and a surface area of 46.3 square kilometres (17.9 sq mi). It is almost entirely mountainous, the highest peak being Mount Epomeo at 788 metres (2,585 feet). The island has a population of over 60,000 people. Ischia is the name of the main comune of the island. The other comuni of the island are Barano d'Ischia, Casamicciola Terme, Forio, Lacco Ameno and Serrara Fontana. The main industry is tourism, centering on thermal spas that cater mostly to European (especially German) and Asian tourists eager to enjoy the fruits of the island's natural volcanic activity, its hot springs, and its volcanic mud. (wikipedia)

• • •

Had a rotten day yesterday and so went out and drank and had woodfire oven pizza at this new place called Citrea—spring onion pizza! Astonishingly good, especially for this area. Anyway, I came home and found out, after about five pages of Far From the Madding Crowd, that there was no way I was staying awake past 9pm (!?), and since the puzzle comes out at 10pm … here I am at 6:30am, doing the write-up. Rested and ready! … and disappointed. First, the puzzle was easy if you've been paying attention to the news or use social media at all. ORSON WELLES's 100th birthday was actually a few days ago, so the world gave me a big Heads-Up on this one. Do the puzzle on the right day or don't do the puzzle. Come on. But the (much) bigger issue is how dull and uninspired the concept is. I'm astonished that the NYT is even doing these exceeding straightforward "tribute" puzzles anymore. Just putting a person's name in a puzzle and adding a bunch of movies he made, or starred in, or songs he sang, or books he wrote, doesn't feel like a tribute. It feels like "Today, we've actually Lowered the bar for puzzle standards, just so we could boringly list an arbitrary number of The Honored Person's works." The layering of THE WAR OF over THE WORLDS was pretty nifty. Else, blah. He deserved more than this.

This puzzle is 81 words. Why is this puzzle 81 words? Oh, it's 16 wide, I see. That makes sense now. Let's see, what to say … I do like KITTENISH. Not much else in the "Like" column, though (except the WELLES movies, of course—"THE THIRD MAN" is one of my favorites). Fill is probably average (with some THC baked in). When the lead answer (1A) is ALKA, well, that is not promising, but things improved slightly from there. I'm guessing many of you still don't know who NEYO is. Hell, I had to stop and flip through my mental rolodex of still-alive four-letter singers until he popped up, as the song title in the clue is meaningless to me. ISCHIA seems like a profound outlier today. Never heard of it. Turns out it's pretty damn small. But it's bigger than adjacent CAPRI, which I *have* heard of. Also bigger than adjacent PROCIDA, which I haven't. So ISCHIA (5D: Tourist island in the Gulf of Naples) made me laugh with its desperate exoticness. So at least I laughed. Once. SHA LA LA (la).

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Facebook and Twitter]

Constructor: Kameron Austin Collins

Relative difficulty: Medium (except I failed, but … if you aren't stupid like me, Medium)

THEME: BURST OUT / LAUGHING (30A: With 37-Across, lose it … or what 12 answers in this puzzle appear to do) — "HA" must be imagined "bursting out" of the sides of the grid, i.e. some words (symmetrically arranged throughout the grid) are missing a final "-HA" or an opening "-HA"

Theme answers:

HALFMAST
YOU BETCHA
HANGER
BERTHA
HAIRY LEGS
WAUKESHA
HASSLE
HAVE WE MET?
HALCYON
"TABITHA"
APOCRYPHA
YAMAHA

Word of the Day: FERRERO (35D: Noted Italian chocolatier) —

Ferrero SpA (Italian pronunciation: [ferˈrɛːro]) is an Italian manufacturer of branded chocolateand confectionery products and is the biggest chocolate producer in the world. It was founded in 1946 in Alba, Piedmont, Italy by Pietro Ferrero, a confectioner and small-time pastry maker who laid the groundwork for the Nutella and famously added hazelnut to save money on chocolate. The company saw a period of tremendous growth and success under Pietro's son Michele Ferrero, who in turn handed over the daily operations to his sons. His son Pietro (the founder's grandson), who oversaw global business, died on April 18, 2011, in a cycling accident in South Africa at the age of 47. Reputation Institute's 2009 survey ranks Ferrero as the most reputable company in the world. Ferrero SpA is a private company owned by the Ferrero family and has been described as "one of the world's most secretive firms". The Ferrero Group worldwide – now headed by CEO Giovanni Ferrero – includes 38 trading companies, 18 factories, approximately 21,500 employees and produces around 365,000 tonnes of Nutella each year. Ferrero International SA's headquarters is in Luxembourg. Its German factory is the largest of all and Pasquale Giorgio is its current CEO. (wikipedia)

• • •

I love chocolate. I buy ridiculous amounts of ridiculously expensive chocolate (mostly special-order from Taza, but also from the supermarket—TCHO and Theo are favorites). So it is semi-hilarious to me that I have not really heard of the company wikipedia calls "the biggest chocolate producer in the world." The name FERRERO… I feel like I've seen it, maybe, on foil-wrapped something something-or-other, in the faux-fancy chocolate section of Wegman's (i.e. where the Lindt is). Maybe. But honestly, I just don't know the name. Throw in the fact that BARETTA looks and feels totally right to me, and you arrive at my failure: FERRARO / BARETTA. I looked the puzzle up and down for my error. Really thought it would have something to do with the WAUKES(HA) (?) / NYE (!?!?) crossing, or maybe one of the letters in ART BRUT (!?!?) (15D: Paintings outside the mainstream, per Jean Dubuffet), but no. I just got totally blind-sided by an A-for-E mistake in two crossing proper nouns. Sigh. Not fun. Weird that I imagined my mistake was at one "E" crossing of two proper nouns I wasn't sure of, when it was really at another. Ah well, it's always the last place you look.

[Ahhh … the show was called "BARETTA"… no wonder I was confused. I feel less bad now.]

I have mixed, but mostly positive, feelings about this puzzle. I got the basic conceit very early and easily. Here is where I got it:

It was (HA)NGER that tipped me. (HA)LFMAST and (HA)SSLE became obvious immediately thereafter. So … HAs. But the rest of the puzzle was just more HAs, so … no variety, and no real theme *content*, but still, it was fun hunting the HAs (though, since they were symmetrical, they weren't that hard to find … or half of them weren't, anyway). The revealer was really nice. A real phrase that brings the whole puzzle together via clever wordplay. Good job there.

Puzzle did make me feel stupid, though. Aside from not knowing FERRERO/BERETTA, I had never heard of ART BRUT (needed every cross and still wasn't sure …) and I still, as of right now, have no idea what the clue to NOUNS means (32D: All but the fifth and sixth words in "Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo"). Hmm, it's this thing: "a grammatical sentence in American English, used as an example of how homonyms and homophones can be used to create complicated linguistic constructs" (wikipedia). Which I couldn't make sense of even when it was translated for me. Turns out that I, a reasonably normal human being, would've put a "that" in there to start the restrictive clause, i.e. Buffalo buffalo [that] Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo. Doesn't really matter here. I've just never heard of this alleged sentence. Lost on me. Sad face. So, yeah. Harrumph. Mr. Collins (today's constructor) is getting his Ph.D. from Princeton; I feel like this puzzle put me in my non-Ivy place.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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Constructor: David Phillips

Relative difficulty: Medium-Challenging

THEME: none

Word of the Day: Forever ALONE (5D: Forever ___ (Internet meme)) —

[some crap I tried to look up but it was something something 4chan reddit god-knows-what and I couldn't bother, sorry (it appears to be a big dumb ugly face … you can google it yourself, I assume)]

• • •

Memes seem like, nay, are, highly transient phenomena. Sic transit memes. They're also terribly insidery, and, generally, terribly youth-oriented, no matter how apparently widespread. I'm not sure memes make the best crossword clues/answers. In fact, I'm sure they don't. Memes age fast, and when your puzzle takes forever to come out (as the NYT does), it can't handle memes in a timely enough fashion. This one ("Forever ALONE") appears to have originated in 2010, which is like … 1878 in Internet Time. This is all to say I have no idea what "DARK ANGEL" is (looks like something someone who's destined to be forever ALONE would watch…) (1A: 2000s James Cameron cyberpunk/sci-fi series), so I'm old, I guess, but I also don't know what INA CLAIRE is (14A: Co-star of Greta Garbo in "Ninotchka"), so I'm not old enough. THE CARS, I know. Well. I am exactly that old. I am THE CARS years old. The real, real, actual main issue—in the NW, at any rate—is a yucky surfeit of proper nouns. All the long Acrosses, five of the Downs, yuck. I don't like when constructors mistake "names names names" for fresh / youthful / interesting. If you don't vary your fill, and especially if the fill you don't vary is names, you run the risk of having your puzzle become annoying and alienating to a lot of people. I was only alienated by the NW, though. The rest seemed pretty good.

There were some ick-ceptions (™). ATTIRER goes right into the Bad Fill HOF. RERATES = rough. I've heard of TO SCALE, but not IN SCALE. Barfy back-to-back Windows clues at SUITES and NTS :( I still don't believe AD-AWARE's good fill, as it's a specific brand name that I've still never seen in the wild—plus it's crutch fill masquerading as hip fill. AD-AWARE is really just a lot of useful letters and a "W." Puzzle has a good number of Longer Answers That Are Almost All RLSTNEA (see TRESPASSES, STRASSE, RERATES). Other tired stuff = SION (die die die) SES DEI ATOI DIK. But otherwise it's reasonably smooth and interesting. Despite my aversion to excess commercialism in puzzles, I really liked ADD TO CART (19A: Online shopping button), and the DATA PLANS / OLIVE TREE stacking provides a nice modern/ancient contrasting juxtaposition. SYNTHETIC and GIGAHERTZ make attractive grid lynchpins. This is a marginally appealing Friday puzzle, on the whole. Plus, I learned something semi-valuable, i.e. how to spell KIM-JONG UN. I had a "U" where the "O" goes. I know a woman whose last name is JUNG, so I'll blame her. Or else I'll blame Erica JONG, who I assumed couldn't possibly share a name part with the North Korean dictator. Why I assumed that, I have no idea.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

PS Brendan Emmett Quigley's latest puzzle ("The Other Way Around") is a good example of what a midweek (i.e. Wed.) themed puzzle should look like. Go do it.

[Follow Rex Parker on Facebook and Twitter]

Constructor: Byron Walden

Relative difficulty: Medium

THEME: none

Word of the Day: RED DIAPER BABIES (31A: Children of American Communists) —

In their book Red Diapers: Growing Up in the Communist Left, Judy Kaplan and Linn Shapiro define red diaper babies as "children of CPUSA members, children of former CPUSA members, and children whose parents never became members of the CPUSA but were involved in political, cultural, or educational activities led or supported by the Party".
More generally, the phrase is sometimes used to refer to a child of any radical parent, regardless of that parent's past partisan affiliation (or the affiliation of the child). Red Diaper Baby is also the title of an autobiographical one man show and book by monologist Josh Kornbluth, and a 2004 documentary film by Doug Pray. (wikipedia)

• • •

Delightful, except for one crossing: SPANG / SPINEL. I … do not know those words. At all. I'm especially stunned by SPANG (43A Exactly, informally), as anything clued "informally" should be something I'm at least passingly familiar with. I'm quite informal. I traffic in informalisms all the time. Why, just today, I wrote "gonna," which is an informal way to write "going to" (in case you didn't know). SPANG sounds like something that requires an "!". It's not word so much as sound effect. Like, when you drain a 3 right in some guy's face, you shout "SPANG!" I thought I knew a baseball player named Denard SPANG, but it's just Span. I'm gonna call him "SPANG!" from now on, though. My only point is that I blindly guessed at that "P"—though I guess the guess wasn't totally blind. Process of elimination eliminates (fancy that) many potential letters. Not sure why the "P" was the one I went with. I probably *have* seen both SPANG and SPINEL (38D: Rubylike gem) before. but I don't remember them. I guarantee that cross is going to be blind for a Lot of other people as well, so that's kind of not cool, i.e. not something you want in an otherwise stellar construction. I mean, you don't want NARIS or PENNI, either, but those guys are totally tolerable when they're fairly crossed and holding together really beautiful answer arrangements.

I got lucky right out of the gate. Guessed OSLO then LEAN-TO then PRATE then REMORSE. Couldn't believe I got them all right. I mean, I didn't: LEAN-TO was actually GROTTO, but you can't be lucky if you're not bold, and luck won't matter if you're not mostly right, so … I'm sure there's a solving maxim in there somewhere. The upshot is, I felt like I stumbled into success right here:

So I got NW corner pretty easily, but didn't know RED DIAPER BABIES, but I successfully guessed AVERAGES OUT, and then, with TAT and TUBES on one end, and AIL and AGAIN on the other, I somehow managed to squeeze the middle of this grid into shape. One major issue was the CLOSET ROD / NARIS cross. I just couldn't convince myself of the right letter there, my Latin having slipped into a quite sorry state. And CLOSET-O- didn't suggest anything to me for a while, despite the "hang" in the clue. CLOSET MOP was the only phrase I had, and that's nonsense. But once I guessed ROD, I got HINDU GOD instantly and had no problem finishing off that SW corner (SPANG/SPINET notwithstanding). With the front ends of all the long Downs in place, SE corner was Easy as well. Then I moved up to the NE and got LEAKING off the "L" and UPDATED off the "U," so, despite not knowing STINGO, that corner was also Easy. Despite the easiness of much of this puzzle, the whole thing still felt pretty medium to me. NARIS and SPANG/SPINEL, and the hacking it took to get the center into shape, all kept the puzzle reasonably thorny. BULLY FOR HIM and SLEPT AROUND make nice central pillars.

I was a little surprised by the grim clue on GULAG (44D: Place bereft of happy campers?). Black humor. You don't usually see cutesy wordplay when the subject is forced labor with high mortality rates. I don't hate the clue—it's clever—but the NYT usually treads solemnly and/or lightly where the suffering of those in internment camps is concerned (perhaps for good reason).

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

Constructor: Joe Krozel

Relative difficulty: Very, very easy

THEME:"To-Do List (Abridged)"— theme answers are clued as to-do lists, wherein the terms overlap, i.e. the noun at the the end of the first item becomes the verb at the beginning of the second.

Theme answers:

WIND A WATCH A PLAY A PRANK (23A: Set time / Go to theater / Engage in tomfoolery) [i.e. wind a watch / watch a play / play a prank]
THUMB A RIDE A WAVE A FLAG (33A: Hitchhike / Surf / Show patriotism)
DO A FLIP A COIN A PHRASE (54A: Somersault / Start football game / Invent some language)
RUN A LIGHT A FIRE A SHOT (75A: Not stop at intersection / Warm up / Use rifle)
MAKE A CATCH A BUS A TABLE (89A: Play baseball / Take public transportation downtown / Clean up after diners leave)
FILE A RETURN A BOOK A TRIP (108A: Finish taxes / Visit library / Plan vacation)

Word of the Day: ANDREA del Sarto (92D: Renaissance artist ___ del Sarto) —

Andrea del Sarto (Italian: [anˈdrɛːa del ˈsarto]; 1486–1530) was an Italian painter from Florence, whose career flourished during the High Renaissance and early Mannerism. Though highly regarded during his lifetime as an artist senza errori ("without errors"), his renown was eclipsed after his death by that of his contemporaries, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Raphael. (wikipedia)

• • •

I just watched a movie called "Heart Beat" (1980), starring Sissy Spacek, Nick Nolte, and John Heard. It was about the relationships among Jack Kerouac and Neal and Carolyn Cassady in the '50s and '60s, mostly before On the Road was published. The movie's not readily available, but you can rent it on Amazon, so that's what I did. It's a weird little movie with big stars. I've never read Kerouac or any of the so-called beats, despite having a "Beat Generation" movie poster on my living room wall. I bought that poster on eBay in the late '90s, back when people still used dial-up, so the timing of the last-minute bidding always felt very precarious. I was going through a pretty heavy Mamie Van Doren phase, and I was spending a lot of money I didn't have on all manner of mid-century vintage crap—mostly paperback books with lurid covers (3,000 or so of which sit just to my left here in my home office). So late-grad school depression + vintage culture obsession + Mamie fandom led me to this poster—and it really is beautiful.

I like how the main painted figure at the center is either one face (looking at you) or two faces (with the nearer one in profile) depending on how you choose to look at it. If it's two faces, it's a white guy and a black guy. The mouth becomes a cigarette ("tea") in profile. And then it's got the word "Beatniks" on it, and that's Louis Armstrong way up top there, and then of course Mamie herself, in some Mondrian-inspired wrap. Amazing. But, as I say, my first-hand experience with actual "beat" writing is nil. I know SAL Paradise from crosswords. I once had a student who wrote a letter to Lawrence Ferlinghetti at City Light Bookstore as part of her final project (He wrote back—a postcard—telling her he couldn't possibly answer all of her questions; I told her that was a Win). Why am I telling you all this? Because I'd rather do anything than talk about this puzzle. Seriously, anything. I don't do drugs, but if you had some, I'd sooner do them than talk about this puzzle.

Briefly: the theme is joyless and repetitive and phenomenally easy to pick up. If you really tried, you could probably get most of the theme answers without filling in a single cross (once you figured out the gimmick, that is). There is nothing to recommend this puzzle except easiness—except that it will certainly make some people who routinely struggle to finish Sundays feel like *****ing geniuses for once. And that's valid. Some Sundays should be Easy. But Easy doesn't have to mean lifeless. It really doesn't. If I weren't Rex Parker (i.e. if I didn't have to write ... this), I would not have bothered finishing this one. The good news (the only good news) was that I lost just 9 minutes of my life. But I've spent at least three times that writing this post. Well, at least 2/3 of it was spent writing about things I cared about. KARENS and MARCS of the world! Demand better puzzles. You deserve them.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Facebook and Twitter]

Constructor: Joe Krozel

Relative difficulty: Challenging

THEME: none

Word of the Day: Charley LAU (41A: Charley who caught Warren Spahn's 1961 no-hitter) —

Charles Richard Lau (April 12, 1933, in Romulus, Michigan – March 18, 1984) was an American catcher and highly influential hitting coach in Major League Baseball.
He was signed by the Detroit Tigers as an amateur free agent. After spending three seasons with the organization (1956, 1958–1959) he was traded (with Don Lee) to the Milwaukee Braves for Casey Wise, Don Kaiser, and Mike Roarke. After the Baltimore Orioles purchased him from the Braves in 1962, he adopted a contact hitter's batting stance (feet wide apart, bat held almost parallel to the ground). That season he had a .294 batting average with six home runs and thirty-seven runs batted in.
After hitting .194 in 23 games, he was sold by the Orioles to the Kansas City Athletics on July 1, 1963, hitting .294 in Kansas City and having a batting average of .272 in 92 games. On June 15, 1964, he was traded back to the Orioles for Wes Stock. On May 31, 1967, he was purchased by the Braves, now located in Atlanta, and on November 27, 1967, he was released by the Braves.
On April 28, 1961, Lau caught the second of Warren Spahn's two career no-hitters. (wikipedia)

• • •

[opens puzzle] [sigh "stunt grid" sigh deep sigh pffffffffff … OK, shake it off, Rex. Shake It Off. You can do this. Clear eyes, full heart, solve puzzle!]

Some good things did happen. After falling flat with DOGWOOD at 1A: Tree with white flowers, I got LEKS (not proud) and PDS and remembered that CATALPA was a kind of tree (that I've seen only in crosswords, but still…). So crossword info retrieval system was in nice working order today. Also, very early on, things looked very promising when out of the blue, what did I see but a genuinely interesting, bold, entertaining 15: STINK, STANK, STUNK! (17A: "The three words that best describe" the Grinch, in song). I liked that so much, I took a picture:

This ended up being the highest of high highlights in the puzzle, but at least it happened. Ironically, the answer that STINK, STANK, STUNK the very least in this puzzle was … this one. After that, I just had to hunker down and fight my way through what I knew was coming: odd names, old names, weird plurals, foreignisms, and whatever VETOER is. Oh, and I played a little game with myself called "Where's the ONE'S"—any time you get a ton of 15s in a puzzle, there's a good chance you're gonna get yourself at least one ONE'S, and today did not disappoint. "Where are you ONE'S … I know you're out there … come on out, I won't hurt you …" And then bam! There it was:

Good ole ONE'S.

What did I learn? I learned that CONDIMENTS come in AISLEs now, and that Juli INKSTER spells her first name without an "e" (which makes me stunned that she hasn't appeared more as four-letter fill). I learned that "OH, KAY!"… exists. I learned the Italian singular for "flower" (39D: Rosa, lilla or tulipano) (FIORE). I don't think I learned anything else. But I did get the chance to test my seldom-used run-the-alphabet skills, which was the only was I managed to finish this puzzle. You see, I came to a crashing, screeching, seemingly terminal halt at the very end when it came time to sew things up in the SW. Neither of the 15s computed and mystery names and "?" clues were conspiring to keep me baffled. Here's what I was staring down:

Now, you can see that I've got an error in the crosswordese plural name (ugh Ugh UGH) at 28D: Writing brothers Leon and Abraham (EDELS). So that's problem 1. Problem 2 is failure to parse TRINITR-T… I'm thinking "trinitron"… which was a Sony product, maybe? A television brand? But that makes no sense. Problem 3 is Charley who? and problem 4 is the inscrutable (to me) "?" clue on 2D: One doing the rounds very quickly? Eventually I figure out the EDERS/EDELS problem, but that just leads to Problem 1B: making sense of the "?" clue at 35A: Subtractions from divisions? Nothing makes sense. I finally figure out that 3D: Something to level with is TNT, and I think it's TRINITROTOLUENE, but since that doesn't result in immediate finishing of puzzle, I'm not sure. In the end, I have to run the alphabet at the second letter in 35A: A--LS. And just as I'm despairing, as I near the end of the alphabet, the "W" slips in and my brain goes "nope, nope, nope ... WAIT A MINUTE!" And then AWOLS WEAPON LAU the end. I assume anyone who struggled struggled in this same place or not at all, but maybe you got stuck around MITA and PACAS or up in "OH, KAY!"-ERMA'S-land. Who knows? Well, you do. Anyway, I struggled, I won, now I move on.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

PS Hey check out this nice newspaper profile of my monthly guest blogger, Annabel Thompson.

[Follow Rex Parker on Facebook and Twitter]

Offspring of Beauty / THU 4-30-15 / Paige of Broadway London's West End / Galloping Gourmet in Germany / Clothing line from Oscar-winning singer

Orwellian drudge / FRI 5-1-15 / Big tech review site / Dunsinane disavowal / Phencyclidine colloquially / Surrey carriage / Youngest of baseball trio / Holman early basketball great

Meteorite impact product / SAT 5-2-15 / Pretty in Pink heroine / Computer data structure / Old German duchy name / Lulu opera composer / Corporate headquarters in Mountainview Calif / Flower-bearing shoot

Locale of a 1984 industrial disaster / SUN 5-3-15 / Archetypal postwar suburb / New York Giants founder who's in Pro Football Hall of Fame / Constellation next to Scorpius / Benefit offsetter / Epitome of attention to detail

Qatar's capital / MON 5-3-15 / Beethoven's Third / Bullet with a trail / Commercial lead-in to bank / Start of a Mexican calendar

Japanese for finger pressure / SAT 4-11-15 / He struck Caesar like a cur / Big letters in bowling alleys / Mauritian money / Rule ending in 1947 / Renowned 1920s raider / 1990s collectible

Bygone Korean automaker / TUE 5-5-15 / Small house in Latin America / Shoes named for antelope / Vera of haute couture / Vivacious wits /

Judeo-Spanish / WED 5-6-15 / Processed bauxite / Longtime General Hospital actress / Peculiar sundial numeral / Hobo transporter / French legislative body

European blackbird / THU 5-7-15 / Insect's resinous secretion / Rishi in Hinduism / Perelman prolific Russian science writer / 1932 Ford featured in american graffiti / AA rival / Miami area informally / Slapstick trio member / Pulitzer-winning critic Richard / Toon foil

Instagram alternative / FRI 5-8-15 / 1960 Pirates World Series hero familiarly / Participant in Battle of Saratoga 1777 / Gentlemen this is vodka sloganeer / Masago at sushi bar / Melter on winter sidewalks / Space in paper available for journalism instead of ads / Japanese import set in kitchen

First human character on Sesame Street / SAT 5-9-15 / First name among 1991 divorcees / Hamstrings kneecaps / John's accompanier / Royal who toured US in late 1970s / Main antagonist in Disney's Hercules / Marine mollusk named for its earlike tentacles

Shooter video game franchise / MON 5-11-15 / Jersey Shore pal of JWoww / Palmtop organizers for short / Onetime colleague of Roger Ebert

Pitch-selecting gesture / TUE 5-12-15 / House smaller than villa / eyes potion ingredient at Hogwarts / City NW of Munchen / Dancer in club down in old Soho

Tourist island in Gulf of Naples / WED 5-13-15 / Marijuana psychoactive component / Donna of Clinton's cabinet / Piedmont wine / Akio who co-founded Sony / Alternative to boeuf or jambon / Bake as shelled egg / Eyelashes scientifically / zoom zoom sloganeer

Paintings outside mainstream per Jean Dubuffet / THU 5-14-15 / Noted Italian chocolatier / Hindrances for competitive swimmer / Wisconsin city near Lake Michigan / Largest county in Nevada / Part of Cuban combo

Late media journalist David / SUN 5-17-15 / Iconic figure in Warhol work / Cubemeister Rubik / Egg-shaped tomato / Post-deluge sight / Many old monitor in brief / City in 1965 headlines