1/20 of a ton abbr. / SUN 12-31-17 / County in New Mexico Colorado / Three-foot 1980s sitcom character / Hip-hop's Shakur / Film director C Kenton / Historic Mesopotamian city / Kyrgyz city / Result of French powdered drink shortage

Constructor: John Lampkin

Relative difficulty: Medium

THEME:"Ring Out the Old, Ring in the New"—themers are wacky phrases where "O"s have been removed (in the top half) or added (in the bottom half) to ordinary phrases ... "Happy" New Year!

Theme answers:

• LAST TANG IN PARIS (22A: Result of a French powdered drink shortage?)
• CELL RECITAL (35A: List of things said by Siri?)
• POL GROUNDS (55A: Washington, D.C.?)
• I NEED A HUGO (76A: Struggling sci-fi writer's plea for recognition?)
• URANIUM OREO (96A: Treat that gives a glowing complexion?)
• SEVEN DAYS IN MAYO (113A: Weeklong Irish vacation?)
• SUM WRESTLER (15D: One having trouble with basic arithmetic?)
• FLOPPY DISCO (64D: Some loose dancing?)
• CAM GEAR (34D: Photog's bagful?)
• MAD CAPO (65D: Godfather after being double-crossed?)

Word of the Day: CCC (4A: New Deal org.) —

The Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) was a public work relief program that operated from 1933 to 1942 in the United States for unemployed, unmarried men. Originally for young men ages 18–25, it was eventually expanded to young men ages 17–28. Robert Fechner was the first director of the agency, succeeded by James McEntee following Fechner's death. The CCC was a major part of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal that provided unskilled manual labor jobs related to the conservation and development of natural resources in rural lands owned by federal, state, and local governments. The CCC was designed to provide jobs for young men and to relieve families who had difficulty finding jobs during the Great Depression in the United States. Maximum enrollment at any one time was 300,000. Over the course of its nine years in operation, 3 million young men participated in the CCC, which provided them with shelter, clothing, and food, together with a small wage of $30 (about $547 in 2015^[2]) per month ($25 of which had to be sent home to their families). (wikipedia)

I tried, you guys. I really did. I went in to this like, "Damn it, I am going to *like* a Sunday puzzle. This has been a terrible, terrible year for Sunday puzzles, but by gum (!), I'm gonna enjoy this one." And then the puzzle proceeded to hold up its middle finger at me for 11-12 minutes. It's inexplicable, this incredible decline. This grotesque charade. This completely uninventive and unclever and sad thing that the Sunday puzzle—the marquee puzzle of the week!—has become.

Add a letter, drop a letter, wacky wacky wacky, piles of crosswordese ... in 2017, with as much constructing talent as there is out there, it's baffling. The slimmest, frailest of concepts—it's a play on "ring," get it!?—is supposed to carry you through an entire 21x21 grid? Perhaps with a truly talented clue writer, a concept like this might be salvaged, might be carried out over a giant grid without becoming supremely tiresome. But instead: [Some loose dancing?] for FLOPPY DISCO!? That's it? That's your clue? And SEVEN DAYS IN MAYO gets [Weeklong Irish vacation?]? Can you not feeeeeel how boring that clue is. When your theme concept is this thin (add/subtract a single letter), and is entirely reliant on the wackiness really *landing*, then you better step up and make those themers and clues hum. You need to work. Care. Craft. Something! Anything! But no. It's all workmanlike. And then the fill: ERLE, BAIO, SPOSE, NEH, ENS, and on and on and on. Up the pay to $3000 for a Sunday (a tiny drop in the bucket compared to what they make off a single Sunday puzzle), give the puzzle the editorial care it deserves, and maybe some of the talent you've lost in the past few years will start to come back (there are Big Names you haven't seen in forever ... for a reason). Until then, loyalists will continue to create OK puzzles and the rest of the time, we'll get ... this.


Though the theme is weak, the worst part of this puzzle—the memory that so many are going to be left with—is the unforgivably atrocious crossing of 4A and 4D. Never. Ever. Ever cross answers at a letter that is an abbr. In Both Directions. And *especially* don't do it when neither abbr. is a common term. I honestly couldn't tell you what either CCC or CWT stand for, and the *only* reason I guessed the letter there successfully is that I'd seen CWT somewhere in a puzzle before. That's all. That's it. The only reasonable thing to do if you absolutely insist on going to press with a CCC / CWT crossing is to clue CCC as a Roman numeral. It's 300. The idea that people in 2017 should know the Civilian Conservation Corps is absurd. Let me be clear: it's not that it's not "worth knowing." It's that it's generally not at all well known any more. And when you give it the remarkably lazy and vague [New Deal org.] clue ... it's all so contemptuous of solvers who care about (not to mention pay for) the "greatest puzzle in the world." Constructors should sniff out bad crosses like this, and editors *especially* should sniff them out.

Toughest part for me was the NW, where NOSE BLEED (3D: Result of a haymaker, maybe) and STEALTH (19D: Good hunting skill) and TROOP (31D: Batch of Brownies?) (all abutting one another) all were clued in ways I couldn't decipher. And then of course there's the CCC / CWT thing right there. Is "camo gear" a real phrase? That feels phenomenally weak as a self-standing phrase. Also, I was not looking for a theme answer on those seven-letter Downs—not when you've got nine-letter Downs that *aren't* themed. MAD CAPO and CAM GEAR therefore gave me more trouble than all the other themers by far (because I didn't know they were themers). Other major slow-down came, unfortunately but somewhat predictably, at a very weak answer—the partial A HINT (92A: "Give me ___"). I had AH-N- and without hesitation wrote in A HAND. Pfffffft. It's one thing to be fooled into a wrong answer by a clever clue, when the answer itself is at least a real, even if not particularly interesting, word. But to get snagged by a fill-in-the-blank partial? It's just not fun. I'll give A HINT one thing—it's stronger than A LION (!?!) (37D). But still, fool me with cleverness, if you're gonna fool me. I won't bother enumerating all the tired, hackneyed short stuff here. You can see it all over, from ARP to SOLER to OTERO. May the New Year bring you, and me, better Sunday puzzles. This Is My Sincere Wish.


Happy New Year, everyone.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

P.S. "Floppy disk" is spelled With a "K" ... it really is. Type "floppy di..." into google and see what predictive text gives you. Go ahead, I'll wait. No, I won't wait—it's all "disks." Therefore FLOPPY DISCO is, to borrow a phrase from yesterday's puzzle, NOT VALID. I have no idea what this puzzle thinks it's doing.

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