Quito quaff / THU 12-17-15 / Trouble in Yiddish / Racy books named after Victorian garment / Oenophile's concern / Pupil of a snake's eye / Dogpatch creator / Indian-born writer of 1981 Booker Prize

Constructor:David Kwong

Relative difficulty:Easy-Medium


THEME:DICE— theme answers contain the letter string "DICE," which is represented by two contiguous "DIE" squares (plural "DIE" = "DICE"). In the Downs, each "DIE" square is simply the letter string "DIE"...

Theme answers:

• PRIDE AND PREJU (DIE! DIE!) (17A: 1813 novel made into a 2005 film)
• CAN (DIE! DIE!) BERGEN (25A: Five-time Emmy-winning actress)
• BO (DIE! DIE!)-RIPPERS (46A: Racy books named after a Victorian garment)
• LONG ISLAN (DIE! DIE!) TEA (59A: Alcoholic drink so named because of its color, not its content)

Word of the Day:TSURIS(64A: Trouble, in Yiddish) —

[Here is the part of the write-up where I say "HEIL is a problematic word to have in any puzzle, but particularly when it's crossing TSURIS." (So many OYS ...)]

The hardest part by far was working out the nature of the rebus. I knew very quickly that 17A: 1813 novel made into a 2005 film was "Pride and Prejudice," but I mistakenly thought TIDY worked at 13D: Cleaned (up) (as you can see, wrong tense...) and so very mistakenly thought I was dealing with an "ICE" rebus. When EDDIES was the only thing that made sense at 14D: Things going down the drain?, I thought I was dealing with a weird rebus where ICE crossed DIE ... for some reason. If you ICE someone, they DIE? Who knows? I figured the answer would be revealed in time. But I ended up with GOAYS for 21A: Drives (GOADS), which let me know something was very wrong, which made me have to take a hard look at that NE corner, which made me, eventually, sort it out. After that, the puzzle was pretty easy overall. Took every cross to figure out STINK (50A: Perform lousily), so getting into the SW corner was slightly delayed, but with ICED TEA in place, the LONG ISLAND part ended up being a gimme, and so bing bam boom done.


Speedy and mostly enjoyable solve. The fill gets a bit wonky in places, notably in the middle (ASSOC LAH GRO) and SE (ADUE CTRL HEIL ASA). I like that, with the "DIE" squares, "DIE" only functions as a stand-alone word once (DIE OUT). Where themers are concerned, LONG ISLAND ICED TEA is something of a "which of these things is not like the other?" in that it's the only answer to have "DICE" broken across two words (all the others have "DICE" at the end of a word (PREJUDICE, CANDICE, BODICE). The clue on BIKINI kind of male-gazes this thing up. It's not an offensive clue by any means (BIKINIs can certainly "attract" attention), but I might've cross-referenced my clue here with ARUBA. Maybe something more generally about beachwear. Just to keep the ogling down. I liked the aptness of SPEEDIEST—that answer led to the SPEEDIEST"DIE" discovery of the day. I knew there were "DIE" squares a foot, and I looked at 44D: First to break the tape, and I had "SP-", and in went SPEEDIEST. Speedily.

Are LONG ISLAND ICED TEAs the color of ... Long Island? (59A: Alcoholic drink so named because of its color, not its content) That does not sound ... appetizing.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]