Titular Salinger girl / FRI 6-30-17 / Designer behind Dolly Girl perfume / Only word spoken in Mel Brooks silent movie / Tower of classic math puzzle / Coin introduced by Louis IX

Constructor: Damon Gulczynski

Relative difficulty: Medium

THEME: none

Word of the Day: NADIA Petrova (33D: Tennis's Petrova)—

Nadezhda Viktorovna Petrova (Russian: Надежда Викторовна Петрова; born 8 June 1982) is a Russian retired professional tennis player. // Overall, she has won 37 WTA Titles, 13 in singles and 24 in doubles. In singles, Petrova reached a career-high ranking of world no. 3 in May 2006, and reached the semifinals of the French Open in 2003 and 2005. In doubles, she won the year-ending Sony Ericsson Championships in 2004 with Meghann Shaughnessy, and in 2012 with Maria Kirilenko. With Kirilenko, she also won the bronze medal in the women's doubles at the 2012 Summer Olympics. (wikipedia)

Great long Downs on this one, but the rest is just OK. Heavy on the crosswordese for a Friday, for sure. Found it 75% easyish, but then I stalled out badly in the SE, for reasons both understandable and dumb. The dumb is what's bugging me. I seem to have this thing where I get "stuck" (at least my brain tells itself it's "stuck") before I've actually looked at every clue in a section. I get "stuck" feeling, and get frustrated, and keep banging my head against answers I think I *should* be able to get ... and then seconds or minutes later I look at a clue to a nearby four-letter answer, say (today, it was 29D: Feeling that everyone's having fun without you, in modern lingo (FOMO)), and it's a gimme and all of a sudden the section I've been "stuck" in opens right up. Sigh. This is a dumb and tenacious solving habit that I haven't quite figured out yet. I think it's pig-headedness. Like, if I feel like "I've got four of this answer's eight letters, how do I *not* have it yet!?" then I will dig in instead of leaving it and looking at everything else around it. I refuse to accept defeat ... and meanwhile just get more and more defeated by the puzzle. Anyway, FOMO made the SW suddenly far less hard than it had been, though SEA CALF was weird / unknown to me, and I still don't really know what [Noodge] means, and I never saw "Silent Movie," and SLIVER was clued hard (44D: Dieter's piece of cake?), etc. That *was* the toughest corner, but I shoulda brought it down faster. Still, all in all, I think the puzzle was pretty average in terms of difficulty.


SOPPY is blawful. Grawful. [Excessively sentimental] for sure 100% dead-on-the-money means SAPPY. SOPPY!? That's croppy. HAHA FUNNY isn't haha funny, but it's funny (20D: Humorous as opposed to strange). CHARM OFFENSIVE is the best thing in the grid by far (16D: Campaign of flattery). RAM HOME took me a long time—the RAM part I had to get all from crosses. Still to this day I have only ever see ANNA SUI in crosswords. Nowhere else. That clue on "I LOVE L.A." is for sure recycled (60A: 1983 song that begins "Hate New York City"). Total gimme. I thought the French coin was a SOU and that the phrase was ARS gratia, at first. There is a coin called the SOU (or an amount, anyway) and "ARS gratia artis" is the MGM motto, so I wasn't entirely wrong. Just wrong for this puzzle. Which, sadly, is all that counts. Flawed but OK puzzle, overall.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

P.S. just add an "of" and you've got the quite the movie title there...


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