Bandleader Eubanks familiarly / SUN 3-26-17 / Monastery head's jurisdiction / Title creature in 1958 #1 Sheb Wooley hit / Onetime acquisition of G.E. / Lyre-plucking muse / zen master's query / Biggest employer in Moline Ill / Dystopian film of 1971

Constructor:Tracy Gray and Jeff Chen

Relative difficulty:Easy-Medium

THEME:"Mixed Results"— colors replaced by crossing colors (in circled letters) that, when combined, create the original color:

Theme answers:

• WHITE PANTHER SHOW / RED CADILLAC
• BAD, BAD LEROY RED / HASH GREENS
• RED PEOPLE EATER / BLUE HEARTS
• "A CLOCKWORK YELLOW" / MANDARIN RED

Word of the Day:KOHLRABI(8D: Cabbage variety) —

Kohlrabi (German turnip or turnip cabbage; Brassica oleracea Gongylodes Group) is an Biennial vegetable, and is a low, stout cultivar of cabbage. Kohlrabi can be eaten raw as well as cooked. Edible preparations are made with both the stem and the leaves. (wikipedia)

This was oddly joyless. Not terrible, but without any moments of genuine pleasure, either in the fill or in the clues. Concept is blah, and oddly executed—YELLOW + BLUE = GREEN is a far far far far far (etc.) more iconic color equation than the utterly-new-to-me RED + GREEN = BROWN (???). And then there are really only four colors, and once you know the color gimmick, the themers are way too easy to pick up. Plus the fill has few highlights and the clues just sit there. Nothing clever or interesting. RAZOR WIT has a kind of charm, but otherwise, there's nothing much here of interest.


1A: Martin Van Buren was the first president who wasn't one (WASP) completely killed the puzzle for me, right off the bat. What a no-good, terrible, confusing, stupid clue for a perfectly good insect. Does WASP mean "white Anglo-Saxon Protestant" here? If so ... WTF? No one used that term in the 19th century, so ... I mean, "inapt" doesn't even begin to cut it. I can only guess that this is the information at play in the non-WASP designation here:

Martin Van Buren was born on December 5, 1782, in the village of Kinderhook, New York about 20 miles (32 km) south of Albany on the Hudson River. Van Buren was the first President not born a British subject, or even of British ancestry. He was a descendant of Cornelis Maessen of the village of Buurmalsen, near the town of Buren in the Netherlands, who had come to North America in 1631 and purchased a plot of land on Manhattan Island; his son Martin Cornelisen took the surname Van Buren. (wikipedia)

Who the hell knows or cares about this? No, wait, forget who knows or cares—even if you knew and cared, in what universe do you take your knowing and caring and turn it into a clue for, of all things, WASP, which is a pretty generic, and in my experience, at least mildly pejorative, term? Baffling. That was at 1-Across ... and the sourness never went away. A good puzzle might've made me forget that WASP nonsense, but this puzzle did not make me forget. Instead it gave me SATNAV crossing KEV and TANK UP instead of PACK UP (5A: Get ready for a long drive)—in short, a handful of nuisance moments strewn about a field of blandness. Is this the second ABBACY of the month? That can't be a good sign. Better luck next time; this thing clunked.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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