Alternative to boeuf poulet / SUN 9-11-16 / Tavern tap handle / Buttonless garment / London home to many John Constable paintings / Galway bay locale to locals / Tryster with Tristan / on cards classic 1949 book / Geographic eponym of insurance company / Record six-time David di Donatello Award winner for Best Actress

Constructor:Ned White and George Barany

Relative difficulty:Easy


THEME:Sack Time— it's about beds, and there's a vaguely bed-shaped black-square element in the middle of the grid:

Theme answers:

• COVER STORY (22A: Magazine's lead)
• PILLOW TALK (24A: Rock Hudson/Doris Day romantic comedy)
• BLANKET STATEMENT (32A: There are no ifs, ands or buts about it)
• SLEEP OVER (49A: Pajama party)
• SAW LOGS (64A: Snore loudly)
• MONSTER (70A: What a child may think is under the [puzzle's central image])
• DUST BUNNY (86A: What a parent may thin is under the [puzzle's central image])
• CAME DOWN IN SHEETS (101A: Rained cats and dogs)
• MESSAGE PAD (115A: Item on a telephone stand)
• AND SO TO BED (118A: Line at the end of a day's diary)

Word of the Day:New Mexico's SANDIA National Laboratories(85D) —

The Sandia National Laboratories, managed and operated by the Sandia Corporation (a wholly owned subsidiary of Lockheed Martin), are two major United States Department of Energy research and development national laboratories. // Their primary mission is to develop, engineer, and test the non-nuclear components of nuclear weapons. The primary campus is located on Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque, New Mexico and the other is in Livermore, California, next to Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Sandia is a National Nuclear Security Administration laboratory. (wikipedia)

There's a cuteness to this idea, particularly the MONSTER under the bed. Actually, that's my favorite part. The rest of it, however, has a ton of problems. First, theme answers both are and are not about beds; this kind of inconsistency is irksome. If you're going to bury your bed words in non-bed answers (and that's the ideal) then do it all the way. PAD, SHEET, COVER, BLANKETS ...are all used in non-bed contexts, but the PILLOW in PILLOW TALK is not a non-bed pillow. I can give a little more leeway to the answers that are proximate to the [bed] image, but the bed-part answers, no. Clunk. Further, the clue on DUST BUNNY does not ring true. No "parent""may think" there's a DUST BUNNY under the bed. That is not a thing that a parent does. You might find one there, sure, but you don't *imagine* the bunny. You clean under the bed. The bunny itself is not something you think on, not nearly the way a kid thinks on the potential MONSTER. Attempt at parallel cluing there rings totally false. PAD doesn't seem that beddy to me, though I guess a *mattress* PAD is indeed often found there. AND SO TO BED is nobody's diary entry but Pepys', so that clue also rings false. Mostly, there is just too much bed stuff going on. Stuff above the bed does not relate to the below-the-bed-stuff, so thematically this feels like not clearly conceptualized enough. The cool central gag is dwarfed by a bunch of incidental, only vaguely bed/sleep-related stuff. Deadens impact of the "joke." Also, what is up with that title ("Sack Time")? What is ... that? A pun? That is not a phrase. No one says "sack time." If you google it in quotation marks, you will get a crossword blog among your first hits, so ... ?


Not thrilled with non-theme Across answers as long as or even dwarfing themers. Distracting. On top of that, TATE MUSEUM is not exactly a thing. It's the TATE GALLERY or the TATE MODERN. There are many Tate museums, but TATE MUSEUM is ... imprecise. Let's keep going, this time, to full-on inaccuracy: 1D: Big feature of Popeye, informally (BICEP). You'd think my complaint would be about BICEP (not a word), and yeah, it's icky, but the real problem is with the clue, in that it's factually incorrect. And people noticed. Right away:


I can't wait for the retraction on that one. Classic. Moving on, the fill had nice moments (e.g. PASTICHE, ADD TO THE MIX, WISEACRE), but too many ugh-ish moments. NW sets the tone with BICEP ASONE EIRE RTS ENURE (lots of mediocre stuff in small space), and then it goes on from there. VIVACE ANODE LST; CIO ICEE OKRAS plural!; ULE ALETA!! (a cross that broke at least one person I know). It's a grid w/ lots of short answers, and we get pummeled with them. Finally, there's the very terrible cross, the close-to-textbook Natick, of SCARNE / SANDIA (93A: "___ on Cards," classic 1949 book / 85D: New Mexico's ___ National Laboratories). Yeesh. SANDIA???? I have vaguely heard of SCARNE, but SANDIA? No. Crossing proper nouns like this, at a fairly unguessable letter... how do you see this and not go "Nope, back to the drawing board"? I guessed correctly; others won't. Here's my solution: change SANDIA (!?!) to SANDRA and clue R-NE in relation to a U.S. Senator of note.

I'll take R-NE over IN E any day. IN E is a suffix posing as a short phrase. Not a fan. Stop falling back on the dull tried-and-true stuff. Be inventive! And above all, for pete's sake, police your Naticks.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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