Trigger to cylinder connection / SAT 1-27-18 / Title girl in 1961 Ricky Nelson hit / Pulpy refuse / Coconuts to maroon on island maybe

Constructor: Mark Diehl

Relative difficulty: Easy

THEME: none

Word of the Day: POMACE (20D: Pulpy refuse) —

noun

1. (especially in cider making) the pulpy residue remaining after fruit has been crushed in order to extract its juice. (google)

Wow, this was a lovely, brisk, bracing way to wake up. Usually if I'm up and solving before 6am, my solving brain is not fully warmed up and I stumble and slog through the grid in a most ungainly fashion, but I guess I gave myself a big enough pause between waking and solving—let the dog out, pet the dog, talked to the dog, made tea, read some stupid stuff online—that by the time I dug into the puzzle, I was on full alert. I usually don't try to *speed* on Fri and Sat because there are too many potholes and bad things happen and anyway it stresses me out a bit. But today I was like, "just try to pick up the pace a little." I mean, my walking speed is still pretty fast, but I wanted to try to Move a little today. And this puzzle was amenable to the experiment. Mark Diehl's stuff is usually pretty damn thorny (for me), but this one went down pretty easily. Not too easily—there were still some moments where I had to work for it—but much easier than most Diehls. More importantly, it was a delightful grid, with only a handful of clunkers and a ton of interesting fill, plus good clues. It was the kind of puzzle that was very satisfying to solve: clean, bright, and entertaining, sufficiently difficult but ultimately defeatable. A light, satisfying workout. Thumbs up.


How to start a themeless: for me, I attack the short answers, usually in the NW corner—good to start where you might get the *front* end of both Across and Down answers. Letters at the front of answers tend to be more revealing of the whole answer than letters toward the back (except when you luck into a terminal "V," say, which would sharply narrow all possibilities for the cross). Today, I threw down quickly the following: DINGER, MAC, DENT, CROW. Then I looked at the Acrosses. And despite two of those initial answers being dead wrong, the correct "D" and "C" tipped me to MID-MARCH (1A: When St. Patrick's Day is celebrated). I had looked at that clue with no letters in place and gotten nothing, which is how I know the "D" and the "C" were the key. I could somehow see the pattern through the gunk of the wrong answers. And I took off from there.


I resisted the BLOOD of BLOOD-BORNE because it seemed a little ... like it wouldn't pass the breakfast test (34A: Like the hepatitis B and C pathogens). NYT tends to avoid both bodily fluids and diseases, and this clue/answer has both. But I guess now that I've had to deal with VOMIT in a puzzle, anything goes. Anyway, BLOOD-BORNE is a perfectly fine answer that I can't imagine anyone's objecting to (unlike VOMIT). Two other answers were briefly perplexing, in different ways. I could *not* figure out what the castaway was doing with the damn coconuts (23D: Coconuts, to a maroon on an island, maybe). I kept thinking of how in movies people spell out "SOS" or some other message. I also misremembered Wilson (from "Castaway") as a coconut and so ... if your coconut could be your island companion, maybe it could also be your STEADY DATE?? Seemed kind of a dark, cruel place to go, but again I refer you to yesterday's VOMIT. And I won't be the only one, not by a long shot, to go with TEAM SPORTS instead of TEAM EVENTS at 55A: Curling and rugby, but not boxing, in the Olympics. Throw in URN for TUN (31A: Wine container) and TABU for TREF (46D: Forbidden, in a way) and that pretty much covers my mistakes. Finished with the first "A" in JANEANE, whose name I know well, though JENEANE also looks right (36D: Witty Garofalo). PAWL is not a word I know well at *all* (40A: Trigger-to-cylinder connection), but I at least knew it wasn't PEWL, so, success.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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