Cleveland Browns’ defense / SUN 7-29-18 / Lévesque of Quebec / Pelvis-related / Reza shrine / Big Baird / Funny Fey / Singer Morissette / Macbeth tomorrow / Muhammad’s daughter

Constructor: Will Nediger

Relative difficulty: 20:52 (Sunday average: 23:01; Sunday best: 6:47 [my own puzzle])



THEME: Three in One — Single words are reparsed as three words, then clued as if the three words together make a wacky phrase.

Word of the Day: SHUTE (75D: “On the Beach” novelist Nevil) —

Nevil Shute Norway (17 January 1899 – 12 January 1960) was an English novelist and aeronautical engineer who spent his later years in Australia. He used his full name in his engineering career and Nevil Shute as his pen name to protect his engineering career from any potential negative publicity in connection with his novels, which included On the Beach and A Town Like Alice.

On the Beach is a 1957 post-apocalyptic novel written by British-Australian author Nevil Shute after he emigrated to Australia. The novel details the experiences of a mixed group of people in Melbourne as they await the arrival of deadly radiation spreading towards them from the Northern Hemisphere following a nuclear war a year previously.

I solved this puzzle while out on the town at a purveyor of beverages in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the night before Boswords. Puzzle friends Jesse Lansner, Bruce Ryan, and Ben Smith (a fellow Diary of a Crossword Fiend blogger and also a Eurovision Song Contest podcaster) were my companions. We solved together, and let me tell you, for all of us, YOINK! it was over our usual times. There were some exclamations of frustration, and universal agreement that [44A: Sound of something rushing by]: WOOSH needed an extra H after the W. But: It was in the context of respect for the constructor's skill in finding seven candidates for themers for this gimmick. The frustration was generated from an understanding of the theme's mechanism, coupled with an inability to predict exactly what form that mechanism would take. YOINK! If you catch my drift, which may be explained by an explication of the ...

Theme answers:

• [24A: Former supporter of seabirds]: EXTERNALLY. Ex tern ally
• [38A: Spray the monarch to keep him cool]: MISTAKING. Mist a king
• [40A: Prosecutor who's sympathetic to the defendants in a witch trial]: PROPAGANDA. Pro pagan DA
• [58A: Bridle strap utilized only on sidewalk surfaces]: REINFORCEMENT. Rein for cement
• [84A: What a dog groomer might charge]: PERPETRATE. Per pet rate
• [86A: Result of wearing a fedora at the beach]: MANHATTAN. Man hat tan
• [100A: Result of accidentally throwing a Frisbee into a campground]: DISCONTENT. Disc on tent
  

ITEM ONE [50A: Agenda starter]: while I and my drinking buddies social companions understood the mechanism of the gimmick right away, it was tough to predict what the successive themer entries might be -- which, when you're solving, is a crucial step in filling in the rest of the grid: being able to predict future themers, or possibilities for the set, once you've sussed out the way the puzzle's main entries work. So it took more time, and YOINK! I ended up getting almost all of the themers from the crosses, and then went back and parsed the themers to fit the clues, upon which I thought, "ah, clever!" Re-parsing is a fun linguistic trick; pro pagan DA is probably my favorite. But reparsing, if that's all you're doing (and the constraint here is only that each entry is split into three), is not formulaically predictable from the solving perspective.

Fill thoughts: Some opportunities in the long downs in all four corners: ARMANI SUIT, ON A SAD NOTE, TABLE D'HOTE, and ROMA TOMATO are all phrases that made me sit up a little straighter. My social companions drinking buddies suggested SHUTE (Word of the Day, above) and [49D: Carol Ann ___, U.K. poet laureate starting in 2009]: DUFFY as entries that might be out of the purview of the average solver. Stuff that seemed fresh: SEXYTIME, YOINK!, THANX.

Bullets:

• [53A: Liqueur akin to sambuca]: ANISETTE— This almost feels like a portmanteau of [45A: Singer Morissette]: ALANIS
• [73A: Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta, with "the"]: PRAIRIES— I see you, Canadian constructor.
• [91A: Item smashed by the original Luddites]: LOOM— Ned Ludd, who ostensibly smashed a loom in the 1770s and became a legend among textile workers and labor activists for an ensuing century, was likely fictional. But now we invoke him to disparage anyone who appears skeptical about technological progress. 

And that's all I've got. It's been a lovely week standing in for Rex, and I hope that he's had a lovely vacation, away from public puzzling discourse. If you've liked what I've written here, you can find me blathering about crossword puzzles on a regular basis at Diary of a Crossword Fiend. Please say "hello" or whatever greeting is appropriate at Boswords if you'll be there today, or at Lollapuzzoola, Saturday, August 18, in New York City. The puzzle community rocks, folks -- fun, smart, kind people. Keep that going. THANX!

Signed, Laura, Sorceress of CrossWorld

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