Green Lantern's archenemy / SAT 3-19-16 / Surrounded old-style / Good name for girl who procrastinates / Patron for desperate / Magpie Grainstack / Comedican Marc who recorded memorable podcast with President Obama

Constructor:Byron Walden

Relative difficulty:Easy-Medium (that threatened several times to become Challenging)


THEME:none 

Word of the Day:SINESTRO(49A: Green Lantern's archenemy) —

Thaal Sinestro is a fictional supervillain appearing in American comic books published by DC Comics. The character was created by John Broome and Gil Kane, and first appeared in Green Lantern (vol. 2) # 7 (August 1961). // Sinestro is a former Green Lantern who was dishonorably discharged for abusing his power. He is one of the Green Lanterns' most enduring enemies, though he occasionally has acted in anti-heroic roles as well. In 2009, IGN ranked Sinestro as the 15th Greatest Comic Book Villain of All Time. (wikipedia)

Delightful, and a little scary. Those corners are like scary little dark rooms that threatened No Escape many times, but I somehow managed to Houdini my way out of them the couple of times I felt caught. The fill in this thing is bananas, mostly in a (very) good way. I mean, no one likes ENGIRT or MII or NO SEE, but it seems pretty narrow-minded to pick on those few answers when there's nothing else nearly that absurd in the whole grid, and when so many other answers are just dazzling. NUDISTS on a LOVE SEAT! A TREE-HUGGING ZELDA FITZGERALD! A PROPOSAL *and* "A WEDDING." And the MAGIC CHARMS of SINESTRO! Wide-ranging and entertaining material. Difficulty level was very hard to gauge because the feel of the puzzle kept alternating between breezy and stone-hard. Luckily for me, the stone-hardness didn't last long, and the puzzle finished (in the SW) very very quickly, so overall this came out on the easy side for me. Tons of fun. Let's see how it all went down. To start, well, I feel like I got very lucky, but maybe I think my instincts were just on. I didn't know the [Patron for the desperate] at 1-Across, but I guessed "ST." something-or-other, and that was enough to get me THEODORE (2D: Presidential first name), which I confirmed with A DASH, and off we go:


Biblical suffix -ETH at 5-Down and that got me MONETS, and from there, the NW didn't last long. Once I dropped the "Z" from SCHMALTZ (1D: Bathos), ZELDA FITZGERALD went right in (30A: "Save Me the Waltz" novelist, 1932)—huge gimme, and probably the single biggest reason this puzzle played on the easy side. When a grid-spanner just falls in your lap, things open up quick.

After MICHELLE WIE, I tried to drop into the SE, but to no (and I mean No) avail. So I followed NON-CITIZENS up to the NE, where I found the NUDISTS (they stand out), and managed to clean up there pretty nicely, despite some pretty brutal cluing with highly misdirective cluing, namely 11D: Main passage for SEAWAY and 26A: Brace for DYAD. "Main" meaning the "sea" (not "primary") and "brace" meaning "pair" (not "support"). I wanted LOVE NEST instead of LOVE SEAT (15A: Couples' soft spot?), and I misspelled SCALIWAG (like that), I overcame those mistakes without too much trouble.

The real struggle came in the SE, where an Altman movie starting "AW-" had me stymied (and a little angry at myself; I thought I knew the Altman corpus pretty well). None of the other Downs would come either, so I had to dive down and pick up JANIE (thank god for JANIE) (45D: Who's "got a gun" in a 1989 Aerosmith hit). But then ... I really had to work by inference again. Got nowhere until I just put in the -ED ending at 31D: Came back strong. Simply doing that gave me -ED---S at 54A: Rush relatives, which I immediately recognized as SEDGES (yet another misdirection in the cluing, this time with "Rush"). From that "G" I inferred the -ING ending on what ended up being "A WEDDING" (32D: 1978 Robert Altman comedy with Desi Arnaz Jr. and Carol Burnett). The "N" in "-ING" gave me WIENIE, and things came together from there, but that corner was easily the hardest.


Thought I might have trouble getting into the SW, as I couldn't figure out what the last word was in LOSING THE P--- (15D: Getting totally confused, idiomatically). "Page"? I didn't think I knew the phrase. Eventually stumbled on PLOT, but then saw the -MT ending on one of the Acrosses and thought "well that can't be right ... unless it's UNDREAMT." And then I looked at the clue and whaddya know (51A: Yet to be imagined). That corner came together in like 30 seconds. And ... SCENE! (40A: "And ... ___!").

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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