Italian castle town / SUN 1-14-18 / Comics superhero with filed-off horns / Connecticut city near New Haven / Steinbeck novella set in La Paz / Creator of Planet Money podcast

Constructor: Joel Fagliano

Relative difficulty: Easy


THEME:"Supreme Intelligence" — central answer is OBSTRUCTION OF JUSTICE (67A: Illegal interference ... or what can be found in ths puzzle's 1st, 3rd, 7th, 15th, 19th and 21st rows?). The idea is that on all the lines mentioned in the central answers's clue, you can find the complete name of a Supreme Court justice—a name that gets "obstructed" (interrupted by black squares) twice.

Theme answers:

• line 1: ANTONI / N SC / ALIA
• line 3: ABE / FORT / AS
• line 7: EARL / WAR / REN
• line 15: ELEN / A KA / GAN
• line 19: SONIA / SOTO / MAYOR
• line 21: STEP / HEN / BREYER

Word of the Day: Mike D'ANTONI (1A: Mike who was the 2017 N.B.A. Coach of the Year) —

Michael Andrew D'Antoni (born May 8, 1951) is an American-Italian professional basketball coach who was formerly a professional basketball player. He is currently the head coach of the Houston Rockets of the National Basketball Association (NBA). While head coach of the NBA's Phoenix Suns, he won NBA Coach of the Year honors for the 2004–05 NBA season after the Suns posted 33 more wins than the previous season. He coached the New York Knicks starting in 2008 before resigning in 2012. He was hired by the Lakers after seven games into the 2012–13 season. D'Antoni, who holds American and Italian dual citizenship, is known for favoring a fast-paced, offense-oriented system. On June 1, 2016, D'Antoni was named as the new head coach for the Houston Rockets. (wikipedia)

THANK YOU to all who contributed to my blog this past week. It's been lovely to hear from so many different people from around the country (the world, even). I have no good way of gauging how many readers I have or where they are, so it's nice to have a week where people check in from all over. You are of course free to contribute at any time during the year—you can always find the PayPal button and snail mail address in the sidebar of this blog. But this is the last time I'll put this info in the body of my write-up until 2019:

As one of my favorite readers wrote me this week, "Here's to a Natick-free 2018!" May the puzzles get better and your solving skills get stronger. Now—onward. Puzzleward!

This is a show-off puzzle—it's designed entirely to be looked at once it's completed, and in no way designed to be enjoyable while you are actually solving it. Or, rather, it is intermittently enjoyable, in the way that a large themeless puzzle might be, but without any theme answers save that central one ... it's like there's no there there. Or, rather, there is a there there, but while you're actually doing the activity of solving, it's largely if not entirely invisible. It's possible—just possible—that you got so bogged down in that SW corner that you *needed* to discover what the theme was in order to complete this thing, but it seems like most people would just solve the thing without paying much attention to the theme or bothering to stop to figure out what was going on. I almost didn't see that the *first* names of the justices were involved, and, in fact, would *never* have seen it if BREYER hadn't been un-"obstructed." That made me notice STEP / HEN, which then made me realize that all the justices were complete names. That, of course, made the puzzle more impressive, architecturally. Sadly, I could not go back in time and make it relevant to my solving experience in any way. Not yet, anyway! Crossword Time Machine still has kinks.


Weirdly small grid. Well, "weird" in the sense of "rarely seen." It actually makes perfect sense for this theme, since OBSTRUCTION OF JUSTICE is 20 squares. Thus the grid is 20x21 instead of the standard 21x21. All of my fill complaints / questions involve highly thematic portions of the grid—the most complaint-worthy of which is the SW, where "TO HELEN,"OTRANTO, and ANSONIA (!?) team up to make a weird proper noun Bermuda non-triangle. HOP STEP also eluded me—and I've been watching a Ton of NBA Channel (118A: Evasive basketball move). I thought it was "jump step," but maybe when it's tiny it's a HOP STEP. Anyhoo, that corner, yikes. I know the gothic novel "The Castle of OTRANTO," so I was able to navigate the corner OK, but it definitely felt dicey. Oh, and I also know GANYMEDE pretty well from mythology (less well from astronomy). His name appears early on in the Aeneid as one of the many indignities Juno has had to endure (Jupiter lusted for young Ganymede and so raped him, which was kind of Jupiter's thing). Only a couple of other proper nouns seemed likely to cause trouble: IBANEZ (whom I know better as a former baseball player, though that's IBAÑEZ) and ORIENTE (which ... I got entirely from crosses. Never heard of it) (59D: Cuban province where the Castros were born).


Bullets:

• "Supreme Intelligence"— I don't really understand the title of this puzzle. I get "Supreme" alright, but "Intelligence"? How is that relevant?
• 53A: "I knew that would happen!" ("CALLED IT!") — I had "NAILED IT!," which feels at least slightly defensible as an answer.
• 105A: Hooded cloak (CAPUCHIN) — I know the monkey, and the monks (... hey ... I just got that! ... oh, no, wait, they're technically friars ... nevermind), but did not know the hood thing. It looks like the friars wore "sharp, pointed hoods," and yet the garment definition of CAPUCHIN reads: "a hooded cloak for women" (my emph.). No word on what the monkeys prefer to wear. 
• 107D: What has casts of thousands? (IMDB)— probably the toughest answer for me to get, and it's a "gateway" answer (i.e. one of those answers that gives you access to an entirely new section), so I had to jump into the SE corner and work my way back out.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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