Garfield waitress / SUN 7-28-13 / Business titan born July 30 1863 / Texas athletic site / Feeling Good chanteuse / NFL owner who moved Cleveland Browns to Baltimore in 1996 / He wrote I exits that is all I find it nauseating

Constructor: Andrew Reynolds

Relative difficulty: Easy



THEME: "Fast Work"— puzzle celebrating HENRY FORD's 150th birthday (5D: Business titan born July 30, 1863) with a tribute to his innovations in mass production, specifically, the ASSEMBLY LINE (57D: 5-Down innovation). Circled letters are added one at a time as you descend the puzzle, going from "M" at the top to, finally, "MODEL T" at the bottom (116A: 5-Down unit). Other assorted theme answers include:

• 16D: Feature of a 57-Down (CONVEYOR BELT)
• 62A: Like the 116-Across (MASS-PRODUCED)
• 78D: 116-Across, colloquially (TIN LIZZIE)

Word of the Day: Chuck LORRE (94D: "The Big Bang Theory" co-creator Chuck) —

Chuck Lorre (born Charles Michael Levine; October 18, 1952) is an American television writer, director, producer and composer. Lorre has created many of America's hit sitcoms including Grace Under Fire, Cybill, Dharma & Greg, Two and a Half Men, and The Big Bang Theory. Lorre also served as an executive producer of Roseanne and Mike & Molly. (wikipedia)

Celebrating American capitalism's most notorious anti-semite! Huzzah! Happy birthday, buddy.

I've been reading a lot of 1923 newspapers lately and speculation about a possible Ford presidential run is rampant. But then Harding dies and Coolidge takes over and there goes 1924. Anyway ... Ford!


This puzzle was very easy and very loose. There's no real revealer, just a lot of theme entries that are confusingly cross-referenced. I guess HENRY FORD is the closest thing to an anchor in this puzzle, along with the finished MODEL T. Anyway, it's pretty clever, the whole "literally building a MODEL T" aspect of the puzzle. Fill is solid. Clue on LORRE is super-weird—a total outlier, familiarity-wise, compared with every other answer in the grid. You can clue Peter LORRE hard, you know? Not that this LORRE isn't worth inclusion. Those are big shows he's created. It's just nutty to have a name that unfamous in an otherwise phenomenally easy puzzle.

Really like the pairing of HOMELAND (3D: 2012 Emmy winner for Outstanding Drama Series) and TIMESLOT (83D: Bit of TV real estate)—good answers with both rotational and TV-related symmetry. Also like ART MODELL—the fact of the name in the grid, not the human. I could not care less about the human, ART MODELL. He moved the Browns, so he's usually seen as a kind of villain, except to people who care about the Ravens (the geographically limited few). I suppose he's a hero to them. If they can embrace Ray Lewis, they can embrace anyone (95A: N.F.L. owner who moved the Cleveland Browns to Baltimore in 1996).

I wrote in METEORITE instead of METEOROID, just like you (or most of you, anyway) (76D: Space rock, maybe). I loved and was a bit flummoxed by the clue onSLEEP MODE (73A: A computer may be in it). Otherwise, this puzzle offered almost no resistance. I finished in under 10—Very Fast for me on a Sunday.

Bullets:

• 52A: Texas athletic site (ALAMO DOME) — nice answer. This answer helped me change OUTER to the more confrontational OUTED (34D: Exposed).
• 114A: "Feeling Good" chanteuse (SIMONE)— got this easily, though this is not a song I associate readily with her. I listen to her a lot. Maybe this once just escaped my particular record collection.

• 47D: He wrote "I exist, that is all, and I find it nauseating" (SARTRE) — lots of great, bitchy stuff about SARTRE (and a hell of a lot of other people) in the new book "My Lunches With Orson." Highly recommended.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld