Honey brand since 1921 / TUE 12-5-17 / Resource in Masabi Range / Instrument with cane blades / Sister brand of Baby Ruth

Constructor: Harry Smith and Zhouqin Burnikel

Relative difficulty: Medium

THEME: odd (TV newsy?) jobs— clues are jobs, but the "?" on the clue indicates wacky wordplay, so the answers are not what you'd expect:

Theme answers:

• 17A: Anchor man? (POPEYE THE SAILOR) — because he has an anchor tattoo, I assume
• 25A: Sound technician? (MARINE BIOLOGIST) — as in "Puget Sound"—the one theme answer that is, in fact, a job
• 48A: Beat reporter? (ALLEN GINSBERG) — a "beat" poet — I guess he was a "reporter" in that he documented / gave voice to the "Beat Generation"
• 65A: Executive producer? (WHARTON) — business school at U. Penn—it "produces" some of our *finest* "executives" (/sarcasm)
  

Word of the Day: OH HENRY (62A: Sister brand of Baby Ruth) —

Oh Henry! is a candy bar containing peanuts, caramel, and fudge coated in chocolate. It was first introduced in 1920 by the Williamson Candy Company of Chicago, Illinois. (wikipedia)

Saw someone post a sub-3-minute time on Twitter just before I solved this one, so naturally I was way over my average. I *hate* seeing other people's times before I solve, and normally I either solve right at 10pm, so that this doesn't happen, or I deliberately avoid social media until I'm done. This time, it was only 10:05 and I so I (complacently!) checked Twitter. UGH. Anyway, it was going very well, very easily, until I tried -AR-S (18D: Hard-to-believe stories) and my mind drew a total blank. This meant that when I looked at the first theme answer (the clue for which I didn't understand) I saw POPE ... somebody. Without that "Y" from YARNS, that answer just looks nuts. I also wrote ICK for UGH (double UGH!) (7D: "Yuck!"), so I got slowed way down. I ended up rebooting in the NE, which was not a great idea. Had PUTT for CHIP (10A: Golf shot near a green), no idea about HALE, no idea about IRON (12D: Resource in the Mesabi Range). Just fussed a lot. After that, all the non-theme stuff was fairly easy (except HATTIPS) (56A: Quaint gestures of gratitude). The theme, I never really got. It seems thin and strange, with very arbitrary clues / answers. The grid shape is interesting, but it's a result of not really trying hard to get a solid set of rotationally symmetrical answers. Sometimes, all you can get are a bunch of answers you can center, and so you go with mirror symmetry. Anyway, didn't care for the theme at all, but the grid is (mostly) impeccably filled. Only the tilde-less ANO (52A 2017, por ejemplo): is at all irksome (I have vowed never to clue ANO as if it were AÑO again, unless the cross is also Ñ—the world doesn't need another asshole).


Harry Smith is a TV journalist, so this is kind of a vanity puzzle. I guess it makes sense for these celeb collabs to be centered on the celeb's celebness. I mean, why else do this celeb thing? It has nothing to do with making good puzzles (though often the puzzles are, in fact good). It's a marketing gimmick. Something to get social media buzz. I'm pretty cynical about it all, but there is some weird thing about the celebrity collaboration that makes the constructor halves of the pairings do really good work. Doug Peterson / Lisa Loeb was good. Quigley / Lithgow too. This one ... sure, good. More for the overall quality of the grid, rather than the theme, but good is good (*especially* on a Tuesday, which has the worst track record of all of the days).

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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