Targets of naphthalene / SAT 12-17-16 / Andy Taylor Homer Simpson for two / Pop group whose name is exclamation / Reading material for French fashionistas / Brett who directed Rush Hour / Ben legendary Washington Post editor / Omnivorous lizard or its genus

Constructor:Zhouqin Burnikel

Relative difficulty:Easy

THEME: none 

Word of the Day:SAMP(51A: Corn porridge) —

noun

 US South African

noun: samp

1. coarsely ground corn, or porridge made from this. (google)

Feels like it's been a while since the Saturday puzzle (or any NYT puzzle) has been truly hard. Maybe there's been a kind of dumbing-down at the high end of difficulty, in order to broaden the puzzle's appeal. Or maybe I'm just better at puzzles. That last part is undoubtedly true, but I've been making my way through a forthcoming book of Fireball Crosswords this week (ed. Peter Gordon), and those puzzles (true to their name) will go past you before you can swing, or else come right up around your chin and knock you down. Sometimes they get their difficulty primarily from obscure/minor names, and that's infuriating, but mostly the clues are just pitched hard All the Time, in every way. If you know someone who just doesn't feel Challenged enough, you might consider a volume of Fireball Crosswords as a holiday gift (there are many to choose from). Or a digital subscription—those are nice too. Anyway, this puzzle was very nice—its construction likely aided by what appears to be a very robust wordlist. I fumbled around in the NW a bit, largely because "Andy Taylor" (1D: Andy Taylor and Homer Simpson, for two) means something very different to me than it does to most of you (you think, rightly, "The Andy Griffith Show"; I think, wrongly, the guitarist for Duran Duran) (sadly, not a joke—I sincerely had VIRGOS in there at one point). So the NW was a bust, initially, but once I ran SOARS ERROR SALAMIS SERRANOS, I had the SW pinned in and I was off and running steadily after that.


Ambiguity was the only real problem for me today. Went back and forth on many possible answers to clues like 20A: Makes advances (LENDS) (LOANS? LEERS?) and 22A: Ready to serve (DONE) (ONE A? A ONE? ABLE?) and 48D: High (STONED) (didn't even try to guess what meaning of "High" this was until I got a bunch of crosses). Never heard of SAMP, but all the crosses were easy so I barely noticed it. Had BRADLEE spelled with a "Y" for a short whyle (8D: Ben ___, legendary Washington Post editor). Don't really know anything about TEANECK (14D: New Jersey town near the George Washington Bridge), but I've heard of it, and I had that terminal "K" from the (dumb) answer ECOFREAK (33A: One who's extremely green?), so getting into the NE ended up being easier than it looked like it would be. Always hard to enter a section from the back ends of the longer answers. So a konveniently-placed "K" can do a lot for you. Overall, this is what I think an average Saturday should be (except for the difficulty, which should probably be ramped up a bit). As it is, given the current state of things, this is an above-average Saturday.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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