Perpendicular to ship's midline / TUE 10-20-15 / Ambient musician Brian

Constructor: Sam Buchbinder

Relative difficulty: No idea (see below)

THEME:ROULETTE— "Note: The circled letters in this puzzle provide a hint to the starts of the answers to the four italicized clues"; those circled letters spell ROULETTE, and the starts of the answers to the four italicized clues are all bets one can make at a ROULETTE table (I think):

Theme answers:

• BLACK GOLD (17A: Oil, informally)
• RED SNAPPER (28D: Colorful Gulf Coast fish)
• EVEN-HANDED (10D: Fair)
• "ODD, ISN'T IT?" (61A: "Weird, huh?")

Word of the Day: SPIKE (53D: Feature of a punk hairdo) —

Spike is the 12th studio album by the British rock singer and songwriter Elvis Costello, released on compact disc as Warner Brothers 25848. It was his first album for the label. It peaked at No. 5 on the UK album chart. It also reached No. 32 on the Billboard 200 thanks to the single and his most notable American hit, "Veronica," which reached No. 19 on the Billboard Hot 100 and No.1 on the US Modern Rock chart. (wikipedia)

Well, this was an adventure. For those of us who do the puzzle right when it comes out at 10pm, well ... it didn't. Well, the .puz file wasn't available, and the applet wouldn't work, so I printed out the newspaper facsimile version in PDF form, but that cut off all the numbers of the Acrosses (from 1- to 33-), so solving was ... interesting. At least Sam (the constructor) had a good sense of humor about it all:

So I have no idea how "difficult" it was, as I solved under highly abnormal conditions. Felt maybe possibly slightly tougher than normal, just 'cause of those big open corners in the NE / SW. I can't evaluate this gimmick very well, as I'm not too familiar with ROULETTE. It involves a wheel and spinning and numbers and red and black. I think I described the concept correctly, above. If I missed something, sorry. I assume there is something to the positioning of the theme answers (in a kind of ... wheel ... -ish ... arrangement?). Certainly the arrangement of the letters in ROULETTE has a wheelness about it. Whole thing feels maybe not as spot-on as it should be, but it's reasonably coherent. Fill is pretty average, with MIXTAPE (11D: Personal music compilation) and NICE TRY (45D: "Almost got me!") rising somewhat above the herd (that metaphor feels mixed, but I'm gonna leave it). I am failing the puzzle, though, for one answer alone: TIPI (30A: Home on the range: Var.). I cannot accept that. Under any circumstances. I'd've torn the puzzle back as far as I had to to lose that answers. I'd've burned my puzzle to ground to get rid of that thing. It's an abomination, even among "Var."(iants). [UPDATE: So ... it appears that some time since my childhood the preferred spelling of "TIPI" has changed. At least in some quarters. Wikipedia has it as the primary spelling (with the 3-E and 4-E versions as variants). Yet dictionaries still list it as "Var.," and I've literally never seen this spelling (TIPI) outside of crosswords, and even in crosswords, only irregularly. Not just irregularly—virtually never. FOUR instances, total, in the cruciverb database, and none since 2006. I can't really strongly believe in the "authenticity" of any one spelling, as they are all Anglicizations (right?), and I can't stop thinking of TIPI as junky, as crossword fill goes. But the situation appears to be ... fluid? Debatable? I don't know.]

[We now return to our original write-up, already in progress...]

Also, in what I am taking as a giant middle finger (accepted!), [Homie]'s back. Back again. Oh, BRO. . . My kingdom for BRA / DAME! Sigh.


Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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