Ulysses star 1967 / MON 1-8-18 / Antlered Yellowstone denizens / Hypnotist's command / Michigan Ontario border river / Container for oolong chai

Constructor: Sam Ezersky

Relative difficulty: Medium-Challenging (just a bit on the slow side, for a Monday, for me)

THEME: O, Hey!— themers all end in the with two-syllable "O [c] AY" sound, where [c] represents a consonant (or digraph, in the case of "sh")

Theme answers:

• "IS THAT OKAY?" (17A: "Would you mind?")
• GLASS OF OJ (22A: Informal breakfast beverage order) (we'll just ignore the fact that "orange" is in the grid (41D))
  
• "YOU WILL OBEY..." (33A: Hypnotist's command)
• MILO O'SHEA (51A: "Ulysses" star, 1967)
• CAFÉ AU LAIT (57A: Cappuccino relative)

Word of the Day: KLATCH (11D: Coffee get-together) —

noun

North American

noun: klatch; plural noun: klatches; noun: klatsch; plural noun: klatsches

1. a social gathering, especially for coffee and conversation.

Hello, solvers. It's early January, which means it's time for my once-a-year, week-long pitch for financial contributions to the blog. The idea is very simple: if you read the blog regularly (or even semi-regularly), please consider what it's worth to you on an annual basis and give accordingly. To be clear—there are no major expenses involved in writing a blog. There's just my time. A lot of it. Every day (well, usually night), solving, writing, hunting down pictures and videos of various degrees of relevance and usefulness, chatting with folks and answering puzzle questions via email and social media, gathering and disseminating crossword-related information of various kinds, etc. It's a second job. My making this pitch means I'm all in for another calendar year of puzzle revelry with all y'all. I'm excited about the year. I've got my own crossword construction project I want to get off the ground, and I'm hoping to take a more active role (along with some crossword friends) in recruiting and mentoring new and aspiring constructors. But the bulk of my work will be the same as ever: I'll be here with a new post every single day. Solve, write, repeat. Despite my occasional (or, OK, maybe frequent) consternation with the State of The Puzzle, the crossword community continues to give me great joy, and I'm proud to run an independent, ad-free blog where people can find someone to commiserate with, someone to yell at, or, you know, someone who'll just give them the damn answers. Some people refuse to pay for what they can get for free. Others just don't have money to spare. All are welcome to read the blog—the site will always be open and free. But if you are able to express your appreciation monetarily, here are two options. First, a Paypal button (which you can also find in the blog sidebar):

Second, a mailing address:

Rex Parker c/o Michael Sharp
54 Matthews St
Binghamton, NY 13905

All Paypal contributions will be gratefully acknowledged by email. All snail mail contributions (I. Love. Snail mail!) will be gratefully acknowledged with hand-written postcards. This year's cards are "Women In Science"—Rachel Ignotofsky's beautiful cartoon portraits of women scientists from antiquity to the present. I've heard of a few of these women (mostly crossword names like ADA Lovelace, Marie CURIE, MAE Jemison) but most of these names are entirely new to me, so I'm excited to learn about them as I write my thank-you notes. Please note: I don't keep a "mailing list" and don't share my contributor info with anyone. And if you give by snail mail and (for some reason) don't want a thank-you card, just say NO CARD.  As ever, I'm so grateful for your readership and support.

Now on to the puzzle!

I like this theme a lot—I like Monday themes that are essentially loose, dopey, sound-driven things where the themers are bouncy and the rest of the grid is clean and interesting. But I really don't like crossword clues that can be many things, or several things, or two things and you have to wait for crosses ... and man did I trip over some of those today. Let's start with AHAS!, for which I entered OHOS! No, not OHOS! but yes, UHOH, and DODO, and (improbably) HIHOS! (plural??), to say nothing of ORTHO (which is a prefix or a mattress to me, not a branch of dentistry). So between AHAS and HIHOS I fell on my face like thrice, at least. But the real stumbling block was that central themer. Had the initial couple of letters, took one look at the clue—33A: Hypnotist's command—and immediately wrote in "YOU'RE SLEEPY..." Worse, even after I figured out that was wrong, and got the YOU WILL OBE- (!), I kept misreading it as "YOU WILL BE..." and I was like "you will be ... a single letter!? What will you be!?" Also, lastly, I would never have put "YOU WILL OBEY" with "hypnotist." Ever. What kind of creepy hypnotists are y'all going to. I just want to quit smoking.*


I find that the things I trip over most are colloquial equivalency clues; you know, the ones where the clue is a spoken phrase, in quotation marks, and the answer is another spoken phrase that's allegedly a match. So stuff like ["Would you mind?"] can drive me bonkers because lots of phrases present themselves, and sometimes little vagaries of phrasing—inclusion / exclusion of prepositions, contractions and what not—can send me sprawling. I don't dislike these clues; they can be fun. I just wipe out on them a lot. Also, I will never remember who MILO O'SHEA is. I remember his *name* fine, 'cause, you know, I've been doing crosswords for a million years. But I am a TCM addict—for real: over 200 movies watched in 2017 (yes, I keep track. What?)—and I could not tell you what he looks like. Also, "Ulysses"? That's a movie? Man, with some notable exceptions, that decade from like '57 to '67 is a trough, movie-wise. Flickchart gives you a bar graph of every movie you've watched by decade, and on mine there's this massive dip at the 1960s. 80% of what I watch is either '40s/'50s or '70s/'80s. Where was I? Oh yeah, Milo. Uh oh. Hiho. Goodbye.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

*jk I don't smoke please no letters

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