Duchamp contemporary / FRI 9-14-18 / Six-time Grammy winner who is half of the group Gnarls Barkley / Novelist Ephron / Reddit Q&A sessions, briefly / "My baby at my breast," to Shakespeare's Cleopatra / 1974 Abba hit / Member of the 1920s Murderers' Row / Sarah who hosted the podcast "Serial"

Constructor: John Guzzetta

Relative difficulty: Easy (or maybe a bit harder depending on one's familiarity with proper names)



THEME: None

Word of the Day: DAX (45A: Shepard of "Parenthood") —

Daximus ‘Dax’ Randall Shepard (born January 2, 1975) is an American actor, comedian, writer, and director. He is best known for his work in the feature films Without a Paddle (2004), Zathura: A Space Adventure (2005), Employee of the Month (2006), Idiocracy (2006), Let's Go to Prison (2006), Hit and Run (2012), and CHiPs (2017), the last pair of which he also wrote and directed, and the MTV practical joke reality series Punk'd (2003). He portrayed Crosby Braverman in the NBC comedy-drama series Parenthood from 2010 to 2015. (Wikipedia)

Hi, CrossWorld. This is Evan Birnholz. It's been a while since I last subbed here but I write the Sunday crossword for the Washington Post Magazine these days. Most of the time my puzzles there are standard crosswords, but this weekend's puzzle will be .... not standard. That's all I'll say about it for now.

I enjoyed today's puzzle for the most part. I solved it on paper and it seemed pretty easy for a Friday, and then I saw multiple people on Crossword Twitter posting screenshots of blazing fast electronic-solve times, so it appears I'm not alone in that assessment. I had a couple of hiccups here and there, like writing CABS instead of VANS at 3D: Circlers at airports, and failing to see the correct month in 35A: Natl. Library Card Sign-Up Month despite having ??P in place -- I think my brain started cycling through the months and then, after going through JAN/FEB/MAR in one second, threw in the towel and said "Nope, other clues will be easier than this." They were, in fact, not easier than that; I would have benefited from spending a few extra seconds to come up with SEP., the only three-letter abbr. for a month that ends with P. Stupid Impatient Solving Brain.

My only major difficulty was in the southeast corner; it took a while to dredge up THAT'S GENIUS and there are some tougher-than-normal proper names down there like DEIRDRE, KOENIG (though I got her name quickly from remembering "Serial"), and (especially for me) DAX. I've never heard of him, I've never watched "Parenthood," and ..... well, Dax is probably somewhere between the 2,475th and 7,984th three-letter names I would have guessed if you just asked me to guess his name straight-up, though I unironically love that it's short for Daximus. A friend pointed out to me that he's married to Kristen Bell, and I know her from "The Good Place," so that's interesting. I'm a bit leery about the DAX/XKES crossing, though. I'm not much of a car buff, so I only know XKES from doing crosswords (47D: Classic Jaguars). If the XKE and DAX Shepard aren't in your wheelhouse, something like DAN/NKES could look pretty tempting. It's probably a fair crossing for a Friday, but still, that could be a trouble spot for some solvers. FILA (23A: Reebok rival) crossing FETT (23D: Boba ___, "Star Wars" bounty hunter) could be a tough crossing for some, too, although I'd argue that "Star Wars" is *so* famous as a franchise that I wouldn't call it unfair.



Putting on my Crossword Constructor Hat™ for a minute: Whenever there are stacks of three long answers in a themeless, my general rule is that at least two of them need to be winners and the crossing fill needs to stay relatively clean for it to be a successful stack (ideally all three answers will be fun and fresh phrases, but that can be quite tough to pull off and still keep the fill smooth). Or, if the stack features only one really sparkly phrase while the other two are just serviceable, having a really fun clue or two can liven things up. So maybe it's helpful to look at each stack one by one:

• Northwest corner: WAVELENGTHS (1A: Differences between colors), IMAGINE THAT, (15A: "Well, what do you know?!"), DANGER MOUSE. (17A: Six-time Grammy winner who is half of the group Gnarls Barkley). The latter two are really nice answers; not everyone will be familiar with DANGER MOUSE, but both he and CEE-LO GREEN are very accomplished musicians in their own right. I have to admit my mind went a slightly different music route in that I started humming the tune to the British cartoon show "Danger Mouse" when I got that one ("He's the greatest / He's fantastic / Wherever there is danger he'll be there ...").
  
  
  
  Anyway, I'd say at least two of those long answers are fun, and WAVELENGTHS is solid if not super-exciting. The crossing fill is fairly good too, marred a tad by small stuff like -ESS and THU. But thumbs-up for that corner overall.
• Northeast corner: ABOVE IT ALL (12D: Supercilious), ROTISSERIE (13D: Spit spot), PASS THE BAR (14D: Become legally certified). All of them are good, and ROTISSERIE has a nice near-rhyming clue. The worst crossing stuff is probably OTS (I don't like it as a plural abbreviation), but all else seems okay to me. Thumbs-up for that corner.
• Southwest corner: SWISS CHARD (25D: Leafy vegetable related to a beet), HONEY HONEY (26D: 1974 Abba hit), TRIPLE TIME (27D: Mazurka meter). This corner didn't do as much for me as the others, but that's probably just personal preference. I'd never heard of the Abba song (it only hit No. 27 on the Billboard Hot. 100) and I feel like SWISS CHARD is more commonly just called CHARD. These aren't bad answers at all; they just felt more workmanlike than the others. Still, I can understand if others dug those entries more than I did. For the crossing fill, I didn't love SEP., and I always dread IN IT even though it's bailed me out of several jams, but all else looks fine to me. Let's call this corner a push.
• Southeast corner: HUNT AND PECK (49A: Type unprofessionally), IT'S A MIRACLE (53A: "Hallelujah!"), THAT'S GENIUS (55A: "Brilliant!"). I wasn't really convinced while solving that THAT'S GENIUS is really in-the-language; I suppose I could imagine someone saying it, though it felt a little arbitrary in the same way as THAT'S SMART or THAT'S CLEVER. Even so, the other two phrases are great and it's neat how the two one-word praising clues for IT'S A MIRACLE and THAT'S GENIUS stack on top of each other. I didn't like DECI- or the DAX/XKES crossing in that little 4x3 area, but LATE HIT and BABE RUTH are interesting answers if you're into sports. I'll call this corner a win, though I liked the NW and NE corners a bit better.

Bullets:

• BARB (34A: Offensive line) — Neat re-purposing of a football term.
• SYLLABUS (38A: Course outline) — Shout-out to all my friends in academia who will be forced to tell at least one student who can't be bothered to look up what they're supposed to read for next week that "It's on the syllabus."
• CHEATER (41A: School copier, maybe) — I had C?EATER in place and I thought it was going to be CREATER, which isn't spelled correctly, but it still made sense in my head; a Xerox machine would create copies, right? The correct answer is much better (and it has a very nice clue, to boot).
• HOTTER (43A: Like Mercury vis-à-vis Mars) — Hey whoa whoa whoa, New York Times. Way to insert your own opinion into the eternal "Who was hotter: Freddie Mercury or Bruno Mars" debate. (I'm kidding, y'all. This clue's about the planets. Although if we are going to take sides in this debate I just made up, I'd probably be on Team Freddie as well though it'd be a tough call.)
• HAS-BEENS (10D: Distant stars?) — Nice. The NYT ran this clue ten years ago, but that's more than enough time for a clue to pass from most solvers' memories and it's still a good clue besides.
• PAN (51D: It might receive zero stars) — It's worth noting that the "zero stars" clue is what appears in the puzzle's electronic version. In print, the clue looks like this: 
  The electronic clue feels a tad off because of the word "receive." The film receives zero stars. A critic might pan the film by giving it zero stars in the review, but the clue makes it sound like the review itself is what gets zero stars rather than the film itself (if that makes sense).

Signed, Evan Birnholz, Postmaster General of CrossWorld

[Follow Evan on Twitter (@evanbirnholz) and Facebook]