Eric of old CBS news / WED 1-10-18 / Bowery boozer / Beauty product line with slogan Ageless / Site of 1955 pact / Punta del Uruguayan resort / Filler ads in brief

Constructor: Sen. Joe Donnelly and Michael S. Maurer

Relative difficulty: Medium-Challenging (a tick on the tough side, for a Wednesday)

THEME: basketball terms with wacky, non-basketball clues

Theme answers:

• BANK SHOT (15A: Warning during a heist?)
• ALLEY OOPS (18A: Gutterball?)
• FAST BREAK (37A: Dinner at the end of Ramadan?)
• FREE THROW (57A: Rug store promotion?)
• FOUL LINE (64A: Something bleeped out for television?)

Word of the Day: Eric SEVAREID (33A: Eric of old CBS News) —

Arnold Eric Sevareid (November 26, 1912 – July 9, 1992) was an American author and CBS news journalist from 1939 to 1977. He was one of a group of elite war correspondents hired by pioneering CBS newsman Edward R. Murrow, and thus dubbed "Murrow's Boys". He was the first to report the fall of Paris when it was captured by the Germans during World War II. Traveling into Burma during World War II, his aircraft was shot down and he was rescued from behind enemy lines by a search and rescue teamestablished for that purpose. He was the final journalist to interview Adlai Stevensonbefore his death. After a long and distinguished career, he followed in Murrow's footsteps as a commentator on the CBS Evening News for 12 years for which he was recognized with Emmy and Peabody Awards. (wikipedia)

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!

These kinds of themes, where terms from some field are given wacky clues unrelated to that field, can be fun. But this wasn't. Usually, when we have one of these "celebrity" / constructor pairings, the constructor can be relied upon to build a workable grid and make sure that the theme, even if it's fairly straightforward or simple, really comes off. This grid, however, is a mess. This is a Monday or Tuesday concept that's running on a Wednesday, it seems, largely because the grid is really poorly built, and so theme answers get visually buried and and the whole solve just comes off clunky. There's some pretty terrible fill in there too (OPCIT, GIE!?), but it's this 74-word grid, with its oddly large NW and SE corners, and its strange placement of themers in the NE and SW corners, that's really the problem. This should've been a clean, quick, easy puzzle. Instead—well, it's reasonably easy, but it's fussy, and just doesn't highlight the theme the way it should. For example, look at BANK SHOT. Why is that themer right on top of another non-theme answer with just as many squares (ORNATELY), and right *under* an answer that's nearly as long, and is somehow also "?"-clued (WISE ASS) (7A: Smart farm animal?)? Theme answers are supposed to stand out, especially in a simple theme like this. But this one (BANK SHOT) looks too much like the answer above it (both are "?"-clued) and too much like the one below it (both the same length). Even SEVAREID and LINSEEDS are kind of crowding the central themer, FAST BREAK. Let the theme answers stand out and breathe, esp. on a conceptually simple theme like this. This current layout is just ... Bizarre.


Because of the weird plural on ALLEY OOPS, it took me forever even to see the theme. I thought the "S" had been added for comic effect. Add an "S," get a goof. But no, it's just a straight basketball term. Pluralized. The puzzle took forever (for me) to come together as a *basketball* theme, so stuff like BANK SHOT and FOUL LINE, given their "?" clues, were hard to come up with, or even fathom. Do people really fire warning shots during heists, outside of the movies? I thought the law were the ones who fired "warning" shots. Grid needed to be better, clues needed to be snappier. Fine concept, but execution was rough. But hey, you got ASS andARSE in the same grid, so that's something.

Bullets:

• DIALOG (1A: Exchange of words) — a personal idiosyncacy: I *hate* this "UE"-less spelling with the power of several suns (but not SSTARS, as those are "cool," as I understand it)
• SEVAREID (33A: Eric of old CBS News) — knew the name. Did not know how to spell the name. So I had SEVER EID. Oh, hey, look at that, the celebration to mark the end of Ramadan (Eid) is sitting right on top of [Dinner at the end of Ramadan?]. This is by far the greatest thing about this puzzle.
• RIFLE (38D: Part of N.R.A.)— I had ASSOC., largely because I had [Dinner at the end of Ramadan?] as FAST BALLS for an embarrassing period of time.
• CAKE (32D: One might say "Happy Birthday"— that is a damn good trap. I can't be the only one who got the initial letter or two and wrote in CARD.
• GMC (28A: Yukon or Sierra) — I had SUV. But the Sierra is a pickup. FYI, a TAHOE (which is in the Sierra Nevada) is an SUV ... so there. 

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

PS the more I think about the clue on WISEASS (7A: Smart farm animal?), the more it bugs me. That's more a theme-type clue, not a normal "?" clue. Normal "?" clues have wordplay, sure, but they're interpretable in way that is ultimately literal. [The end of the British monarchy?], for instance, isn't the Greatest clue for ZED, but you can see that it's interpretable literally, i.e. ZED is, literally, the "end" of the alphabet for the British monarchy, as well as all other Brits, presumably. Likewise, 1D: Works with pupils?, despite looking like it's about teaching, is actually literally accurate  (in an ophthamological context) as a clue for DILATES. Whereas [Smart farm animal?] gives you know way to get to the actual term WISEASS. It's just an imagined different meaning. I guess you could say a WISEASS is "Smart" in the sense of sass-mouthed, but ... that still leaves a *&$^ing farm animal sitting there. Plus "Smart" seems to be just standing in as a synonym for "wise," so ... yeah, this clue isn't as cute or good as someone clearly thought it was.

PPS nice doubling of that [The end of the British monarchy?] clue. ARSE ZED!

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