Retired Steeler Taylor / SUN 9-4-16 / School in Oxford informally / Spanish prefix with lineas / Multicolored candy in yellow package / Beverage since 1922 / One of two in adidas logo / Surrounder of la grande jatte / Giggle syllable

Constructor:Tom McCoy

Relative difficulty:Easy-Medium


THEME:"One By One"— I don't really understand how the title relates, but the theme is two letters in one square, functioning as sequential letters in a word, in the Down, and as "[letter] AND [letter]" in the Across:

Theme answers:

• B & O RAILROAD / ELBOWS
• R & B ALBUM / MOTOR BIKES
• GETS A LITTLE R & R / NOT TO WORRY
• Q & A SESSION / QATAR
• PEANUT M & MS / LEMMA (hardest one)
• S & P FIVE HUNDRED (uh, "500," I think)
• TEXAS A & M / STREAMLINE
• A & W ROOT BEER / HAWKS 

Word of the Day:la Grande Jatte(49D: Surrounder of la Grande Jatte = SEINE) —

The Ile de la Jatte or Île de la Grande Jatte is an island in France, in the river Seine, at the very gates of Paris, in the communes of Neuilly-sur-Seine and Levallois, Hauts-de-Seine. It is 7 km distant (in a straight line) from the towers of Notre Dame and 3 km from the Etoile. It has about 4,000 inhabitants and is nearly 2 km long and nearly 200 m wide at its widest point. Its name translates as "Island of the Bowl" or "Island of the Big Bowl". // It is best known as the setting for Georges Seurat's pointillist oil painting, Un Dimanche après-midi à l'Île de la Grande Jatte (A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte) (1884-6 and 1889) and also for the Stephen Sondheim musical, Sunday in the Park with George. (wikipedia)

Mixed bag. The theme feels old, and isn't terribly interesting. Not inherently, anyway. Some of the theme answers / intersections, though, are pretty inventive and colorful. I liked discovering QATAR, as I knew that they were the host country for World Cup 2022, but they didn't fit, so I got a little miffed, then doubted my own knowledge, *then* remembered the theme. Also, despite much flailing, despite its being the very last thing I entered in the grid, I liked finding PEANUT M&Ms. I can't say I *liked* finding LEMMA, as it's not a terribly likeable word, but I did appreciate the toughness there. Mostly, today, toughness was lacking. There are some nice longer answers, so I was in no way bored or put off by this. Conceptually it just felt a bit ho-hum, and there was more irksome fill than I can comfortably abide on a Sunday. OPEN ON can *&%$ off, IN A TUB needs to be drowned and eliminated from all wordlists, UNUSE hurts just to look at, and SMALLA is acceptable only as a colloquial form of "smaller" (and no, not even then). Some words were never meant to be pluralized; namely, PEYOTES and KEROSENES. Unfortunate, those. Further, I never met a [Giggle syllable] I liked. GET 'EM out of my grids. Please. Seriously. STOP IT.


Got the theme early because, well, there it is, a theme square, way up in the NW corner. Tried ELAN, then pulled it, then flailed around, then put ELAN back, and finally realized "BO" had to go in one square. With some crosses, got B&O RAILROAD, and that was that: theme, unlocked. One of the weirder things about this solve was my having so much trouble with 85A: Footnote material. I'm familiar with what goes in footnotes. My dissertation had scores of them. Naturally, I went looking for an answer that had something, anything, specifically to do with footnotes. But after getting 5/6 of the crosses and ending up with -ETAIL, I had to concede that the answer was DETAIL. You put ... DETAILs in footnotes. Apparently. Unless of course your DETAILs are worth reading, in which case they are in the body of your work, so ... I hate this clue/answer pairing on professional grounds.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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