Eponymous cartoonist Guisewite / THU 6-7-18 / Like happening party in slang / Fool in British slang / Feast that might include lomi lomi salmon / Bygone ford make informally

Constructor: Bruce Haight

Relative difficulty: Challenging (7:32, with an error—see below)

THEME: BUBBLES UP (33D: Rises, in a way) — Down themers are all carbonated beverages, and the "bubbles" (i.e. the "O"s in the answer) have "bubbled up" to the top of the answers:

Theme answers (all clued [Carbonated beverage, spelled as 33-Down might suggest?]):

• 3D: OO LEMN SDA (lemon soda)
• 37D: OO CKE ZER (Coke Zero)
• 7D: OO CHAMPAGNE CLER (champagne cooler)
• 9D: OO JLT CLA (Jolt Cola)

Word of the Day: ALMA (57D: Michigan college town) —

Alma College is a private liberal arts college in Alma, Michigan. It enrolls approximately 1,400 students and is accredited by the Higher Learning Commission. It is affiliated with the Presbyterian Church (USA). (wikipedia)

Promising theme, but exceedingly painful to solve. Like torture. Just gruesome. EEE WIDTH? No, go home, that is bad. It really is. EEE ... WIDTH? What the hell else is EEE going to be? There is no EEE length or height.  Jeez louise. And riddles ... are never ... ever funny. I hate them so much. "?" clues I can take, when done right. But riddles, man. [hard sigh]  Riddles are the kind of "humor" or "puzzle" that I have been ignoring or actively wadding up and throwing in the trash since I was a kid. "Hey, what has a this but doesn't do that?" Me: already out of the room 'cause I don't care. And this riddle is sooooo ... ooooo .... [takes a drink] ... ooooo dumb. In what universe can a WICK be "tall"? "Look at the tall WICK on that candle!" said the complete idiot and/or non-native English speaker. The "old riddle" part is particularly galling. You torture us with an "old riddle" (are there any other kind?) and then also have the nerve to put OLD GAG (gag!) in the grid? And old names aplenty. And old slang that actually No One Ever Said (can we kill ABES today, please?). There was nowhere to turn for joy in this one.
The most offensive thing about this puzzle, though, is the theme—offensive in that it's one thing to have a bad theme, and then it's another, much worse thing to have a *good* theme idea and just trip over your own feet and smash your precious theme on the ground. The main issue is the answer set. It needs to be better. It's so arbitrary and strange. Three soft drinks, one ... not. Two generic drinks, two specific drink brands (I pray that you know / remember (?) what Jolt Cola is, because otherwise it is possible that you had AMAS (24A: Word in a Latin 101 lesson) and OOJLSCLA and were wondering when J-LO got into the cola-making business). The worst screw-up, though—the thing that makes the whole thing truly inelegant—is that there is this lovely consistency, with two Os rising in every beverage, and in every case, one O comes from the first drink word and one O comes from the second ... except with *&$^&% "champagne cooler," where CHAMPAGNE is just sitting there with its finger up its nose, contributing no Os, while "cooler" has to vomit up two of its Os. In the hands of a committed constructor / editor, I can imagine this theme's being delightful. Of course the fill would have to be polished and the clues totally rewritten so as not to be irksome. But that's what dedicated craftspeople do. They polish their work, and they make the solver's experience the most important consideration. It's nice when it happens.


Oh, my error. I almost forgot. Today (the day on which I am solving this, Wednesday, Jun. 6) is DDAY. So I've been reminded about DDAY frequently throughout the day, and so when I got to 27D: Annual celebration, for short, I didn't even blink: DDAY. Even though "celebration" isn't quite right, and even thought DENNET doesn't look like anyone's name (though come on, unless you're a Senate nerd or live in Colorado, you know you didn't know Michael BENNET) (27A: Colorado senator Michael). Anyway, that was a mistake I should not have made, and while the DDAY coincidence thing definitely screwed me up, I should've figured it out. Instead I was sure my error was at 6D: Part of a competition (INIT). I just stared at that and stared at that wondering how that could be the right answer. That's an abbr. for "initial" ... or it's two words ... but neither made sense, until I realized the two-word parsing is the correct one: if you are part of a competition, you are IN IT (to win it, maybe). It's a poor clue, in that "part of competition" is not specific enough. We talk about teams being IN IT when they still have a chance to win. Simply being "part of the competition" doesn't mean you're IN IT. I competed at the Indie 500 Crossword Tournament this past weekend, but despite doing pretty well by my own personal standards, I was never credibly IN IT. My kingdom for a careful clue-writer!!!! Ugh, good night.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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