1943 French novella / SUN 7-23-17 / Pacific capital / The Big Pineapple / Dance craze 2010s / Agency Human Genome Project / Bert who sang "If I Only Had the Nerve" / 1990 Nobelist Octavio

Constructor: Caleb Madison

Relative difficulty: Easy (16:36)



THEME:"Back on the Charts"— Names of musical artists are "back" -- i.e. at the end of the entries -- and on the charts -- i.e. in the grid.

Theme answers:

• 30A: Title character in a 1943 French novella [6] (LITTLE PRINCE)
• 47A: The Big Pineapple [4] (HONOLULU)
• 66A: Like some lawyers' work [4] (PRO BONO)
• 86A: "Why are you looking at me?" [4] (WHAT'D I DO)
• 100A: 11th-century campaign [4] (FIRST CRUSADE)

  First Crusade

• 3D: 17,000+-foot peak near the Equator (MOUNT KENYA)  
• 5D: Make airtight, in a way [4] (HEATSEAL)
• 10D: Healthy [4] (IN THE PINK)
• 12D: Nightshade family member [4] (MANDRAKE)
• 13D: Prized possession [5] (CROWN JEWEL)
• 26D: One doing routine office work, informally [5] (PEN PUSHER)
• 51D: Dave of jazz [4] (BRUBECK)
• 63D: One leading the exercises, for short? [4] (PE TEACHER)
• 70D: Fruity spirit [6] (PEAR BRANDY)
• 73D: Vain, temperamental sort [7] (PRIMADONNA)
• 77D: Band member's main squeeze? [4] (ACCORDION)
• 82D: 1940 Disney release [3] (FANTASIA)*
• 87D: Pulling off bank jobs [5] (HEISTING)

* Depending on your preferred cultural frame of reference, this could have also been early 80s synth-rock band ASIA (with their chart-topping hit "Heat of the Moment") or third-season American Idol champion FANTASIA (with her chart-topping hit "I Believe"). Also, dude. DAVE BRUBECK. Take Five and take him back to the charts.

Word of the Day: AGOUTI (69A: Guinea pig relative) —

The term agouti (Spanish: agutí, pronounced [aɣuˈti]) or common agouti designates several rodent species of the genusDasyprocta. They are native to Middle America, northern and central South America, and the southern Lesser Antilles. Some species have also been introduced elsewhere in the West Indies.^[1] They are related to guinea pigs and look quite similar, but are larger and have longer legs. The species vary considerably in colour, being brown, reddish, dull orange, greyish or blackish, but typically with lighter underparts. Their bodies are covered with coarse hair which is raised when alarmed. They weigh 2.4–6 kg (5.3–13.2 lb) and are 40.5–76 cm (15.9–29.9 in) in length, with short, hairless tails. (Wikipedia) [Them are cute rodents. (Me)]

Hello, CrossWorld! Rex is on a well-deserved vacation, so you get me, Laura, blogging the puzzle through next Sunday. Be confident there will be no disruptions in your regularly scheduled crossword blogging service. Between you and me, I didn't find this a terribly exciting Sunday with which to start our week together. I wanted the theme to do more than just hide the names of chart-topping popular musical artists -- in fact, I even spent a little time browsing the Billboard charts to see if there was any correlation between, say, the entry number and the artist's chart position re their biggest hit -- but, no, unless I'm missing something. (Mansplain at me in the comments, if so.) A few of the artists are hidden beautifully in the entries (86A: WHAT'D I DO, 26D: PEN PUSHER [wait, don't we usually say PENCIL PUSHER? or PAPER PUSHER?]) but others were more than obvious (30A: LITTLE PRINCE, 10D: IN THE PINK). Also -- and this is likely a function of cramming so many (eighteen!) themers into the grid -- we've got some oldies in there -- Dion! Lulu! -- who are outliers from the rest of the late-1980s-to-the-present playlist.


Fill-wise ... wow, lots of little words. I'm working hard on improving my own constructing skills, and I struggle the most with limiting the inclusion of three-letter entries that are abbreviations or tired crosswordese. It's difficult to do this well, and this grid suffers a bit with EST, WTO, AEC, NIH, DSO, DOA, OTB, FCC, CNN, NEA and the like.

Bullets:

• 89A: Inverse trig function (ARCTAN)— One of my crossword twitter friends (who is also a fine constructor) goes by the handle @ArctanPrime. Being a humanities person/librarian who hasn't taken math since my first year of college, I didn't quite remember what this meant. Now I know! Raising a glass in your general direction, Chris!
• 99A: Lewis ___, 1848 Democratic candidate for president (CASS)— Is he the most famous CASS out there? Not Ellen Naomi "Mama CASS Elliot" Cohen? Or legal scholar CASS Sunstein? Anyone?

• 55A Bert who sang "If I Only Had the Nerve" (LAHR)— But I could show my prowess/ Be a lion, not a mowess/ If I only had the noive ...

See you tomorrow! And the day after that. And a few more after that!

Signed, Laura Braunstein, Sorceress of CrossWorld

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