Early-blooming ornamental / THU 9-27-18 / Dr Foreman player on House / Brand name derived from phrase service games / Word that sounds like state when accented on second syllable rather than first

Constructor: Daniel Kantor

Relative difficulty: Easy (5:16, and that's with every theme answer essentially unclued; see below)

THEME: dunno ... some visual clues, I guess; here's what the grid looked like on the app:


Theme answers:

• FILL IN THE BLANKS
• SHADES OF GRAY
• INSIDE THE BOX
• BETWEEN THE LINES

Word of the Day: SEA LEGS (49A: Good standing in the Navy?) —

noun

1. a person's ability to keep their balance and not feel seasick when on board a moving ship. (google)

Once again, the puzzle tries to get fancy with some gimmick that my software won't accommodate. Once again, I don't think the gimmick is worth it at all. This is a Monday puzzle playing dress-up. All non-theme answers are short and boring, and the themers aren't much to look at either. The fact that I could finish this in just over five minutes, having absolutely no information about the theme answers (my theme clues all read SEE NOTEPAD), tells me it was way too weak for Thursday. Further, now that I look at the intended grid, the one with all the visual cues, it's weird-looking, and the difference between the "box" and the "lines" is barely perceptible. You'd think you'd want to do something more visually dramatic, something that would clearly differentiate one theme line from the next. Only the SHADES OF GRAY one is at all interesting, and even then, well, the themers are all inconsistent, parts-of-speech-wise. First one is a command, the second describes the boxes in the answer, and then the third and fourth are prepositional phrases indicating where you write the answer. It's a train wreck. An easy train wreck. Welcome to my midnight metaphoring.


Five things:

• 9A: Zombie's domain (SCI-FI) — that's more horror than SCI-FI, come on
• 21A: Word that sounds like a state when accented on the second syllable rather than the first (MISERY)— I mean, it's true, but I did not spend any time trying to work it out. I need a term for a clever clue that is somehow also way too long and involved and therefore nothing I'm going to bother with.
• 9D: Card letters (STL) — embarrassed it took me five seconds to grok this one, instead of the one second it ought to have taken (STL are the letters on the baseball cap of any given Card, i.e. St. Louis Cardinal)
• 25D: Org. whose first-ever presidential endorsement was Ronald Reagan (NRA) — f*** this white supremacist terrorist org. A decent editor woulda changed this answer to KIA.
• 49A: Good standing in the Navy? (SEA LEGS) — probably the best thing about this puzzle. Certainly the thing that gave me the most trouble (I had SEAL and thought there was some other term for Navy Seals ... which you would have to be in "good standing" ... to belong to? )

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

P.S. Happy 15th anniversary to my [Lambchop] wife, who is the best

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