Fragile fabric made from certain plant fibers / FRI 2-26-16 / 1991 Scorsese De Niro collaboration / Pioneering labor leader samuel / My response was informally / Yellow-flowered plant procuing sticky resin / Barber five-time Pro Bowler from Tampa Bay Buccaneers

Constructor:Paula Gamache

Relative difficulty:Medium-Challenging


THEME:none 

Word of the Day:ALOE LACE(15A: Fragile fabric made from certain plant fibers) —

Hvar: agave or aloe lace

Hvar lace is unique in that the thread is collected from the aloe leaves of agave plants that grow on the island. The leaves are picked at a certain time of the year and are then specially processed to produce a thin, white thread. // The Benedictine nuns in the town of Hvar are the only ones who make the Hvar lace, which is also called "aloe lace". (wikipedia, buried deep, deep in the entry for "Lacemaking in Croatia")

This seemed pretty good, and pretty hard, but I'm not sure about either judgment because I solved it while watching and Tweeting about the GOP debate last night. Looking over the grid, I'll stand solidly by the "pretty good" part. There were a couple of plant-based answers that were from outer space (ALOE LACE being the more hilariously outlandish cousin of GUM WEED (21D: Yellow-flowered plant producing a sticky resin), whatever that is), and there were a few unfortunate short answers, but otherwise it's mostly vibrant, colloquial, current, and (especially for a 66-worder) smooth. If I went strictly by my solving time, I'd have this in the Challenging category, but I have to factor in my debate distraction, as well as the time I spent getting a couple of mid-solve screengrabs, so ... Medium-Challenging. The distinction hardly matters. It played harder than average. Those NW and SE corners, because they have the little-answer footholds, were easy enough to polish off, but I found everything from the NE to the SW to be Saturday-hard. Thought I was gonna cut into the middle with ease after ESCAPE KEY came effortlessly out of the bottom part of the NW corner, but it got me precisely nothing.

Tried all the Down crosses, came up empty. Never heard of CUT TIME, so I was at a real advantage there (36D: 2/2, to Toscanini). Thought 24D: Noisy recreation vehicles would be some kind of BIKES ... maybe? (no). Had to reboot with SOU (48D: Trifle) in the SW, which got me USERFEES and RAF and on from there. SE was probably the easiest part of the grid for me.

But again those teeny tiny openings into mid-grid made breaking this thing open very tough. Somehow, from -------US, I got BETWEEN US (29A: "Mum's the word"). I think that "N" seemed probably based on my sense that 11D: Adds with a whisk would probably end in "IN" (it did), so I went with it. And then BE PATIENT jumped out from the B-P------ pattern and I had the traction I needed. Love "I'M LIKE" since it's ubiquitous and yet I (almost?) never see it in crosswords. Hate Y'ERS, as no one ever ever ever ever said that. No one even knows what Gen Y is. It goes Boomers, Gen X'ers, Millennials, and then ... Freegans, I think. I forget. What the everloving fudge is Gen Y anyway? Let alone this alleged "Y'ERS" thing. Yikes. I wonder if the fill was originally NEWTON over OXHIDE over TAILED. Not that the resulting ODER or NEDS would be great or even good ... it's just that the NEWTON / NEDS version seems like a more plausible way to go than NEW TOY (kinda "green paint") and Y'ERS (atrocity). But these are minor issues in an overwhelmingly solid puzzle.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

P.S. wait, who the hell is PA BARKER? (32D: His wife and sons were Depression-era criminals). I keep googling and finding squat. Did anyone actually call this non-criminal guy "PA BARKER?" When I google "pa barker" in quotation marks I get, first hit, some old episode of "The Untouchables" TV show (?), and then a bunch of Pennsylvania-related things. Image search is worse. Just pictures of houses (??). PA BARKER seems pretty spurious. 

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