1960-62 home of Lee Harvey Oswald / SAT 10-3-15 / Old alternative to Rabbit / Close-Up competitor once / Center of Cyclades / Semiprecious pendant option / Craft for amphibious operations for short / Signature attire for Archie / Super rare feat in baseball lore / 1968 hit by Dells time place girl face / Oil ink additive / I Married 1987 ABC sitcom

Constructor: Barry C. Silk

Relative difficulty: Challenging (for me)


THEME:none 

Word of the Day: OYES (57A: Cry for silence and attention) —

Almost impossible for me to finish. Tough overall, but that's what I expect on a Saturday. Whole puzzle skews before my time, but that also happens. I mean, NYNEX? I can never remember that. The Dells? I listen to lots of old music, still didn't know that. LE CAR? More oldeyness. Silk's puzzles tend to be anchored in the '60s ('60s music, '60s TV, '60s Oswald), when I wasn't yet born, so I routinely find it hard to find footing in his puzzles. But this wasn't what made this puzzle miserable to solve. It all ended up coming down to OYES, which I can't remember ever seeing, and DRIER, which I still don't understand (56A: Oil or ink additive). Secondary problems were NO BET, which I now get but which I had no hope of seeing even with NO-E- in place (I wanted NOTED), and DELOS, which I had has DOLOZ and then DOLOR and then (after I attempted the horrendous but correct OYES) DOLOS, and then I finally realized that the answer to 47A: "Aha!" wasn't "I KNOW IT!" but "I KNEW IT!" And that's where it ended: with a could-be-either vowel crossing a minor Greek island crossing whatever alternate olde-timey junk OYES is. I like challenges! I don't like (at all) when the challenge ends up at the gunkiest, worst-conceived part of the puzzle.


As for DRIER? I just don't know. You add DRIER to oil? DRIER is an additive? My language skills just break down here, as they broke down trying to understand what the hell "provision" meant in 46D: Password provision (ENTRY), as they broke down trying to understand both "Metro" and "line" in 44A: Metro line: Abbr. (RTE). I was staring at this for so long, wishing I could just make the '60s TV sidekick be TONTO, which was the only sidekick I could think of:

I think the only way I pulled out of this was to just start forcing the issue, typing in random things that seemed right but weren't working, and then somehow I shoved ENTRY into 46D and it all came together. The only one I felt bad about not getting more quickly was ROBIN. But man, DRIER. Man. That was the real killer. Still means nothing to me. So that clue on DRIER I really don't like, but I guess I can forgive. The whole I KNEW IT / DELOS / OYES (!?!?) thing. No. That's just bad. DELOS / OYES is bad, and having the mystery vowel in I KNEW IT be inside DELOS is bad. Everything boils down to OYES, which is supremely bad. I think you all are imagining that DELOS is a *lot* more famous than it is. I mean, I recognize it. Now. But ugh. And OYES. Seriously, imagine you struggle with a puzzle only to find out that what you were snagged on was OYES, a terrible, bottom-barrel piece of fill (problem one) that you thought could be spelled only two ways: OYEZ (yes) and OYER (which is, in fact, a part of a legal term—oyer and terminer—but which doesn't, apparently, apply here). OYES? ONO. Boo. I don't really even care about or remember the rest of the puzzle, except COFFEE RUSH is not a thing and QUADRUPLE PLAY is not a thing (even though it is the one thing that broke my puzzle wide open, finally):

From LSTS to OYES. That was my puzzle. LSTS and OYES: appropriately ugly bookends for a puzzle I am happy to put behind me.

Good day.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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