Ron nine-time all star from 1960s 70s Cubs / SAT 3-3-18 / Riesling alternative familiarly / So-called Father of Zoology / Wire stickup man

Constructor: Damon Gulczynski

Relative difficulty: Easy

THEME: none

Word of the Day: Ron SANTO (19A: Ron ___, nine-time All-Star from the 1960s-'70s Cubs) —

Ronald Edward Santo (February 25, 1940 – December 3, 2010) was an American Major League Baseball (MLB) third baseman who played for the Chicago Cubs from 1960 through 1973 and the Chicago White Sox in 1974. In 1990, Santo became a member of the Cubs broadcasting team providing commentary for Cubs games on WGN radio and remained at that position until his death in 2010. In 1999, he was selected to the Cubs All-Century Team. He was inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 2012. (wikipedia)

Aha, so this is what happened to my Friday puzzle. It got lost and ended up on Saturday. Yesterday took me over 10 minutes, today: just over 6. As I said yesterday, yesterday was a Saturday. Today is a Friday. Both are fine puzzles, but slotting them on their proper days would have been ... let's say, nice. But I covered the manifestly commercial reasons for the mis-slotting yesterday, so—moving on. This puzzle was lovely, I thought, though we have to talk about the terrible, godawful cluing decision that the editor made on 1A: Display, as an image, using only a small number of different tones (POSTERIZE). That was not the constructor's clue. And I knew immediately after I got it that the clue wasn't the constructor's. No way. No one, least of all Damon (who makes pretty fresh puzzles, I think) is going to clue POSTERIZE in that clunky, technical way (I'm told it's a common command in Photoshop (?!)—all I know is that the clue is essentially lifted from wikipedia). No, POSTERIZE is basketball term. A common, nay, ubiquitous basketball term. It means "to dunk on someone in a way that is worthy of being depicted on a poster" (see picture, left). Google it and then hit "News" and look at all the articles, all of them about basketball, none of them about Photoshop. Search it in Twitter and see a pretty dense stream of basketball tweets. 100% basketball tweets. As a basketball term, it is dynamic, current, totally in-the-language, original, fantastic. With this (again, truly ugly) clue, it's pretty blah. Also, TONE is both in the grid (37D: Shade) and in the clue for 1A. Seriously, the editorial override on 1A was a terrible call. Should've been STETTED.


There is one pretty ugly part of the grid: it's then NE, where crosswordese ARHAT crosses crosswordese STETS and supercrosswordese TARAS (!?). MOL is up there too. Rough, rough, rough patch. Rest of the grid has a stray clunker or two, but largely stays clean. I flew through this with very few problems. Most trouble was right up front. ARKS for 1D: Bible supporters, often (PEWS). USDA for 2D: Org. with inspectors (OSHA). But R.E.M., IPO, and ZORA Neale Hurston were all gimmes, and I fixed the NW from there. "R.U.R." = gimme. ALI / ZAIRE = gimme. "SAY, SAY, SAY" = gimme. Slow spots included the SCENE in NUDE SCENE (43A: Hot take?), Ron SANTO (I have a real baseball blind spot from Maris's 61 to Fisk's home run, which seems to include almost the entirety of SANTO's career), and the last letters of EDER (9D: Linda of Broadway's "Jekyll & Hyde"), SALUD (30D: "Gesundheit!"), and SHIRE (12D: Ending with Oxford or Cambridge), respectively (for that last one, I honestly wrote in SHIRT).

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

P.S. 15A: Way out in space is a Great clue for ESCAPE POD.

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