Certain red dye / MON 5-14-18 / End of drinking hose / Fowl raised for food / Rapper with 1996 double-platinum album Hard Core / Banned pollutant in brief

Constructor: Andrea Carla Michaels

Relative difficulty: north of Medium (3:20)

Theme answers:

• BITE VALVE (17A: End of a drinking hose)
• KICKSTART (21A: Get going, as an old motorcycle or a new company)
• SCRATCH AND SNIFF (39A: Like some magazine perfume ads)
• PUNCH BOWL (52A: Party vessel with a ladle)

Word of the Day: POULT (9A: Fowl raised for food)—

noun

FARMING

1. a young domestic chicken, turkey, pheasant, or other fowl being raised for food. (google)

This is a distressingly bad puzzle. Please understand that I say this with no animosity, no grudge, no nothing but extreme disappointment that the editor is not doing his job. The theme itself is pretty basic, nothing remarkable, but not terrible. Based on their relevance to the word "fight," the first words form a kind of "club"—a slight stretch, maybe, but within the bounds of crossword convention, for sure. I have no idea what a BITE VALVE and even less (far less) of an idea what a "drinking hose" is. "Fetch me my drinking hose! No, that's a garden hose! No, those are pantyhose!" Etc. I do think themers (especially on a Monday) should be reasonably familiar terms, and the things in their clues should also be reasonably familiar things, and neither my wife nor I (two Ph.Ds between us) know what BITE VALVEs or "drinking hoses" are. So maybe a different themer there would've been preferable. But still, theme-wise, this is all mere wobbliness. Not all themes can be great. Some are just OK. Let's say this theme, and its execution, are just OK.


What's not OK is the fill. There is no excuse, when you have a veteran constructor, and a veteran editor, and extremely talented young constructors working in-house, that any of us should have to deal with ****ing EOSIN in a Monday puzzle. See also POULT. See also the egregious and intolerable OBLA. Editors should edit. You could tell the constructor: "Nice theme. Fix this fill and we'll run it." Or—OR—just fix it yourself. I guarantee at least two of the people who work there could fix the junkiness in this grid in not a lot of time. I just need people to understand that this is substandard. Objectively. EOSIN and POULT on a Monday are Ridiculous because they're unnecessarily obscure (EOSIN being radioactive crosswordese most folks won't touch unless desperate). OBLA is terrible any day, anywhere, any time. OBLA crossing OFA. I mean ... this is amateur hour, only None Of The People Involved In The Making Of This Puzzle Is An Amateur. I'm not even gonna touch the heaping helping of crosswordese in this puzzle, i.e. most of the 3- and 4-letter fill. That's not unforgivable. But EOSIN should make any constructor, especially one making a breezy Monday, go "Nope!" Ditto POULT. And OBLA—OBLA should get your constructor card revoked.

I cannot promise that I haven't screwed something up here—repeated a word, or made something worse—but this *extensive* refill (from SW to NE) took me like 10 minutes, and it *feels* like a considerable improvement.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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