Civil rights pioneer Du Bois / MON 10-9-17 / Google viewer tool for charting word frequncy over time / 1974 John Updike novel / Homer simpson's favorite beers

Constructor: Joe Deeney

Relative difficulty: Medium-Challenging (for a M)


THEME:CALENDAR REFORM (52A: The change from Julian to Gregorian ... or what would be needed to make 20-, 31- and 40-Across possible?)— themers are just odd phrases related to days, weeks, months...

Theme answers:

• "EIGHT DAYS A WEEK" (20A: 1965 Beatles hit that starts "Ooh, I need your love, babe")
• "LAST WEEK TONIGHT" (31A: HBO show hosted by John Oliver)
• "A MONTH OF SUNDAYS" (40A: 1974 John Updike novel) 

Word of the Day: NGRAM (28D: Google ___ Viewer (tool for charting word frequency over time)—

The Google Ngram Viewer or Google Books Ngram Viewer is an online search engine that charts frequencies of any set of comma-delimited search strings using a yearly count of n-grams found in sources printed between 1500 and 2008 in Google's text corpora in English, Chinese (simplified), French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Russian, or Spanish; there are also some specialized English corpora, such as American English, British English, English Fiction, and English One Million; the 2009 version of most corpora is also available. // The program can search for a single word or a phrase, including misspellings or gibberish. The n-grams are matched with the text within the selected corpus, optionally using case-sensitive spelling (which compares the exact use of uppercase letters), and, if found in 40 or more books, are then plotted on a graph. (wikipedia)

This one felt unusually tough for a Monday, but my time was 3:08, which is only just "tough." I tripped right out of the gate—despite knowing very well who W dot E dot B dot Du Bois is, I would never ever have expected him to be used in a clue for WEB, so I thought "Whoops, a civil rights pioneer I don't know, probably an AVA or something ... next!" And then I could not see WIRE at all (1D: Electronic money transfer). So I was flailing from the jump. I follow baseball pretty closely, but in no way could I have gotten ROD CAREW from that clue without a bunch of crosses (17A: Only major-league player to enter the 3,000-hit club in the '80s). I've only ever seen REVERSI in crosswords, so I put it in only tentatively, and really couldn't commit to that last letter until the the cross went in (10D: Classic game with black-and-white discs). And NGRAM, forget it. I've (vaguely) heard of the Google NGRAM Viewer, but no way I was getting there from that clue. Needed every cross.


The theme ... well, the revealer doesn't mean much to me, so it was neither "aha" nor "haha." And the answers ... I think only "EIGHT DAYS A WEEK" really fits the (putative) theme. You talk about last week tonight, so that's not inconceivable. I guess one could imagine a calendar month where every day was Sunday, but that's not really what the expression is suggesting ... shrug. The grid seems oddly built. 74 words is pretty low for a Monday, which may be why it played harder than usual. There are some unpleasant plurals here, namely AHOYS and (especially) DUFFS (43D: Homer Simpson's favorite beers). Ugh, "beers," it hurts. It's his favorite beer, not "beers"! This is coming from someone who owns and wears a Duff t-shirt, so please trust me here.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

P.S. NEW YORK is the "title city" of "NEW YORK, NEW YORK" (7D: When repeated, Frank Sinatra title city); its being "repeated" has nothing to do with its being the "title city"; it's the "title city" and it's repeated; it's not the "title city" *because* it's repeated.

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