Stola woman / FRI 11-27-15 / Halluces / Follower of Able / Supports for gypsum boards / Adventurer in Grouchland in 1999 film / Onetime Ice Cube collaborator informally

Constructor:Peter Wentz

Relative difficulty:Medium (tilting toward Easy)


THEME:none 

Word of the Day:PETARD(40D: Small bomb used for breaking down gates) —

Started out crushing it, as I often do with Wentz freestyles, but then got repeatedly stymied, sometimes by my own mistakes, sometimes by genuinely puzzling / tough stuff. Maybe it's the alcohol or the pie or the seconds I had of both alcohol and pie. Maybe the puzzle is actually very easy and my brain was just in a feast-induced fog. But I don't think so. Thanksgiving dinner already feels like it happened a million years ago. Or yesterday, at least. The whole early eating thing is lovely when it's happening, but disconcerting later. All night, I kept wondering how it could be as early as the clock was telling me it was. I've been falling asleep early lately, it's true, but ... 7pm? My body was like "Yes!" but my brain was like "Bad idea." And my brain won. Anyhow, eating and drinking are both far enough in the past that I don't think they played a role in any solving slowness. Plus, I've had a Ton of coffee, so alertness is not an issue. No, I think this one was a pretty normal Friday, difficulty-wise. Quality-wise, I think it was solidly above average.


I was a bit clunky out of the gate, as I wrote in ZINS for CABS (1A: Napa options, informally), and had trouble convincing myself that Sublime were really SKA. But once I got LURK (15A: Browse without comment) and changed ZINS to CABS, those Downs started to drop and after just a minute or so I was already here:

It probably helped that I'm a huge John O'HARA fan and that I'd seen that exact clue on M.I.A. very recently (19A: "Bad Girls" rapper) and that I eat BOK CHOY with reasonable frequency (22A: Chinese cabbage). From here, it looked like I was going to sail easily into the NE—SNAP ON, in, TODAY, in, and then ... 7D: "Goodness!" I had ---Y and went with "OH, MY!" And that, right there, was probably the difference between Easy-Medium and Medium for me. A dumb little four-letter answer, but it kept me from getting Any of those Acrosses up there. Total stymification. So I went down and got RESPECTS and followed it further down into the SW corner, which seemed pretty easy until I got to AVERAGE ... what? I wrote in JOE at first, but there are multiple reasons why *that* was obviously wrong (51A: Regular joes). I wrote in MEN but took it out because AVERAGE MEN is not a phrase. And yet ... there it is. That is easily the most disappointing thing in the grid. I wrote in "AVERAGE JOE" for a reason—because that's the phrase. I'd also accept AVERAGE GUY. But MEN? Blargh.



I managed to crawl up the central passage to the NW, where I finally got OH, MY changed to I SAY!, and then that just left the SE, which was weirdly full of pitfalls. Dropped ENGINE ROOM no problem (28D: Scotty's domain on "Star Trek"), but other stuff proved harder. Got vocabbed to death there with both "stola" and "halluces" being huge WTFs for me. Even with -OG- in place at 35A: Stola : woman :: ___ : man (TOGA), my only thought was "... DOGE?" And [Halluces] had me thinking (perhaps not surprisingly) "hallucinates." Wrong. Also, the (awesome) clue on TEXT was tough to see through (35D: Exchange between cell mates?). Finally ended it all by conceding that the MEN in AVERAGE MEN had to be right. Is BAKER part of some radio alphabet or something. "Able, BAKER ... Candlestickmaker?" Who knows? All I know is that I got the Happy Pencil. Game over. Had a great birthday/Thanksgiving. Looking forward to a long weekend of leftovers and lollygagging.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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