Hindi for palace / Arabic patronymic part / SAT 11-19-16 / juris of legal age / His gravestone says simply PLAYWRIGHT

Constructor:Mary Lou Guizzo and Jeff Chen

Relative difficulty:Easy

THEME: none 

Word of the Day:Trent LOTT(32A: Former minority whip in both the House and Senate) —

Chester Trent Lott, Sr. (born October 9, 1941) is an American politician. A former United States Senator from Mississippi, Lott served in numerous leadership positions in both the United States House of Representatives and the Senate. He entered Congress as one of the first of a wave of Republicans winning seats in Southern states that had been solidly Democratic. He became Senate Majority Leader, then fell from power after praising Strom Thurmond's 1948 segregationistDixiecrat presidential bid. (wikipedia)

This feels pretty half-hearted. OK, you've got the latticed 15s, fine, but they are an uneven collection at best—ULTRA-FASTIDIOUS?—and there's really nothing else of interest. Glut of short fill means glut of tired stuff (PSST ISON IBN IPO IHOP ERGO TTOP UHOH UFW SUI SRTA SETI SETTO and on and on and on). And then there's the smarmy self-regard of the answer THE NEW YORK TIMES (11D: It sold for a penny at its 1851 launch). Blargh. Also, NO DAY AT THE BEACH ... is a phrase (I googled it), but NO WALK IN THE PARK is so much better. Doesn't fit, but it's so so so much more the answer to that clue (3D: Hardly a piece of cake). I don't really get NO DAY AT THE BEACH. At least walking in the park is an act, so it makes sense as an easy thing. But a day at the beach isn't an act. It's just ... nice, I guess, if you like beaches (a day at the beach would be NO DAY AT THE BEACH for me, frankly). Dunno. Just don't like it. It's like NO PICNIC. More "unpleasant" than "not easy." More legitimately unlikable is that SE corner. Crossing NOBLESSE with ESSE is grosse. Bad form. ESSE is terrible enough fill on its own. Here, it's got that terrible going for it as well as the added terrible of being a dupe of the last four letters of an answer it crosses. You gotta do better than that. (See also TINGE / INGE)


Here's how I got in:

Tried a bunch of wrong things at 1D: Inclination, like TILT and LEAN. Also tried TETON for 4D: Name on a range, I'm not even joking. But by running all the short Downs up top (and toggling from TETON to AMANA), I was able to see ANOMALIES (14A: Blips). It wasn't too long after that that I got the answer that broke the whole grid open:

Now I've got it spelled wrong here (it's KERRY, not KERRI), but that hardly matters (8D: Lead actress on TV's "Scandal"). Getting a central grid-spanner very early is a huge solving boost. The grid's structure was such that the grid-spanner allowed me to make short work of all the short fill in the middle and bottom, and from there, expanding out into the rest of the grid was a walk on the day at the park beach picnic, for real.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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