Dr Lester portrayer in Being John Malkovich / SAT 3-10-18 / Bygone skating spectacle / Noah Wallace of old films / Warner Bros cartoon series of 1990s / Like some bad pitches in baseball lingo / Iago vis-a-vis Jafar / common material in tutus

Constructor: Ryan McCarty

Relative difficulty: Easy


THEME: none

Word of the Day: ORSON BEAN (43A: Dr. Lester portrayer in "Being John Malkovich") —

Orson Bean (born July 22, 1928) is an American film, television, and stage actor, as well as a stand-up comedian, writer, and producer. He appeared frequently on televised game shows from the 1960s through the 1980s and was a long-time panelist on the television game show To Tell the Truth. [...] Bean was a regular on both Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman and its spin-off, Fernwood 2Nite. He also portrayed the shrewd businessman and storekeeper Loren Bray on the television series Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman throughout its six-year run on CBS in the 1990s. He played John Goodman's homophobic father on the sitcomNormal, Ohio. He played the main characters Bilbo and Frodo Baggins in the 1977 and 1980 Rankin/Bass animated adaptations of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit, and The Return of the King. He also played Dr. Lester in Spike Jonze's 1999 film, Being John Malkovich. Bean appeared as a patient in the final two episodes of 7th Heaven's seventh season in 2003. In 2005 Bean appeared in the sitcom Two and a Half Men, in an episode titled "Does This Smell Funny to You?," playing a former playboy whose conquests included actresses Tuesday Weld and Anne Francis. He appeared in the 2007 How I Met Your Mother episode "Slapsgiving" as Robin Scherbatsky's 41-year-old boyfriend, Bob. In 2009 he was cast in the recurring role of Roy Bender, a steak salesman, who is Karen McCluskey's love interest on the ABC series Desperate Housewives. At the age of 87, Bean in 2016 appeared in "Playdates," an episode of the American TV sitcom Modern Family. (wikipedia)

I liked most of this very much, though it does have two of the worst entries I've seen in a grid in some time: HAD A LISP (random verb phrase if ever there was one) and BEERYS (I've seen some plural names in my time, but this is the plural name-iest). But put those aside, and the rest of the grid really holds up. NW and SE are OK, but I really like the huge swath that makes up the rest of the grid—the stretch from SW to NE, with loads of longer, colorful answers, including two baseball answers that really tapped into my current preseason mania. I spend a good portion of my day reading detailed articles about my sure-to-be-dismal team (the Tigers). And not about the starters, either. I'm reading about pitching coaches, prospects, middle relievers ... I'm clearly thirsty. For baseball. In my head, the announcer calls a high and outside pitch "up and away" ... "Up and away, ball one," I hear him saying. Or maybe "high and outside.""Up and in," for sure. Whatever: HIGH AND AWAY is certainly legit, but it's not ... dead on. I'm just dialed in right now. The Tigers will not have any BIG BATS this year unless somehow Cabrera has an unexpected return-to-form year. Oh, what do you care? Back to this puzzle ...


Opening gambit: FIESTA, OMENS, TISN'T, RAPT. Pretty much done from there. Two narrow passageways in the grid were daunting. ICE CAPADES was enough to get me clean through the first one, as I somehow guessed the seemingly made-up word CADENCED, then got DE SADE (39A: He wrote "It is always by way of pain one arrives at pleasure") and PET BIRD (35D: Iago vis-à-vis Jafar, in "Aladdin"), and then, improbably, ORSON BEAN (I can barely picture the guy, and I certainly don't remember him from "Being John Malkovich," but the "NB" letter sequence called his name straight to mind). Only two answers that gave me any real trouble today were GAS TAP and GEAR TRAINS—technical terms, the second word of which just wouldn't come. I normally like G&Ts, but I did not care for these. ESPY for GAPE was my only other hiccup. My weekly sacrifices to OOXTEPLERNON* paid off today, as ELIA and ERMA were both delivered unto me. "Aunt ERMA's Cope Book" was an ERMA clue staple back in the day ... and apparently is still with us (37A: "Aunt" of a 1979 best seller).

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

*The god of bad short fill, who first revealed himself to us in the center Across line of this grid.

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