Rapidly cooled as metal / FRI 1-11-19 / Music style associated with George Clinton informally / Creature with 17-month gestation period / Pioneer in hydrostatics / Viking king of note

Constructor: Jim Horne and Jeff Chen

Relative difficulty: Easy (untimed—solved on paper, on my clipboard, early in the morning, in front of my Christmas tree, which, yes, it's still up, I love it)

THEME: none

Word of the Day: P-FUNK (34A: Music style associated with George Clinton, informally) —

P-Funk (also spelled P Funk or P. Funk) refers to the repertoire, musical style, and/or group of performers associated with George Clinton. The term is variously known as an abbreviation of Parliament-Funkadelic, Psychedelic Funk, Pure Funk, or Plainfield Funk.

The P-Funk groups had their heyday in the 1970s and continue to attract new fans thanks both to the legacy of samples they bequeathed to hip hop and the live shows that the bands continue to perform. Their music was very aspirational, which is symbolized by their Mothership that has since been acquired by the Smithsonian. Notable P-Funk albums include Funkadelic's Maggot Brain and Parliament's Mothership Connection. The differing styles of these albums showcase the wide range of P-Funk's music. "Maggot Brain was an explosive record" of Jimi Hendrix inspired rock while Mothership Connection was an "album of science-fiction funk." While this rock/funk differentiation is what normally separated Funkadelic from Parliament, the bands consisted of many of the same members and performed live on tour together. Hence, the two groups are often described under the one moniker Parliament-Funkadelic.

P-Funk recordings have been 'extensively' sampled in rap and hip-hop music, especially by Dr. Dre and other West Coast acts, beginning in the late 1980s and being particularly associated with the G-funk style of rap. (wikipedia)

Hello! It's the first full week after New Year's Day and that means it's time for my annual pitch for financial contributions to the blog, during which I ask regular readers to consider what the blog is worth to them on an annual basis and give accordingly. As you know, I write this blog every. Single. Day. OK, two days a month I pay young people to write it, but every other day, all me. OK sometimes I take vacations and generous friends of mine sit in, but otherwise, I'm a non-stop blogging machine. Seriously, it's a lot of work. It's at least as much work as my day job, and unlike my day job, the hours *kinda* suck—I typically solve and write between 10pm and midnight, or in the early hours of the morning, so that the blog can be up and ready for you to read with your breakfast or on the train or in a forest or wherever it is you enjoy the internet. I have no major expenses, just my time. As I've said before, I have no interest in "monetizing" the blog in any way beyond simply asking for money once a year. I hate ads in real life, so why would I subject you all to them. I actually considered redesigning the site earlier this year, making it slicker or fancier somehow. I even got the process partly underway, but then when I let slip that I was considering it, feedback was brisk and clear: don't change. Turns out people don't really want whistles and bells. Just the plain, internet-retro style of a blogger blog. So that's what you're getting. No amount of technical tinkering is gonna change the blog, which is essentially just my voice. My ridiculous opinionated voice yelling at you, cheerfully and angrily, about how much I love / hate crosswords. I hope that this site has made you laugh or taught you things or given you a feeling of shared joy, or anger, or failure, or even given you someone to yell at. I'm fine with that. I also hope I've introduced some of you to the Wider World of Crosswords, beyond the NYT. I am passionate about puzzles and I (mostly) adore the people who solve them—so many of my friends, and the thousands of you I've never met. I can't stop, and I won't stop, and I hope you find that effort worth supporting.

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Rex Parker c/o Michael Sharp
54 Matthews St
Binghamton, NY 13905
All Paypal contributions will be gratefully acknowledged by email. All snail mail contributions (I. Love. Snail mail!) will be gratefully acknowledged with hand-written postcards. This year's cards are illustrations from "Alice in Wonderland"—all kinds of illustrations from throughout the book's publication history. Who will get the coveted, crosswordesey "EATME!" card!? Someone, I'm sure. You, I hope. Please note: I don't keep a "mailing list" and don't share my contributor info with anyone. And if you give by snail mail and (for some reason) don't want a thank-you card, just say NO CARD.  As ever, I'm so grateful for your readership and support.

Now on to the puzzle!


Well I have no idea how easy this was officially, since I solved on paper, nowhere near a timer, and wasn't trying to go particularly fast, but I didn't encounter any real sticking points. I had a few wrong turns, but I was able to find the correct path again without too much trouble. The grid felt very smooth and the cluing almost rudimentary—I don't mean that in a bad way, I mean this would be a Great day for someone who had never conquered a late-week puzzle before to try it out. There's nothing in the grid I hadn't heard of, nothing that seems particularly uncommon or strange, no bizarre names. I mean, when P-FUNK is the bizarrest name you've got in your grid, you are on very safe ground (note: P-FUNK is nowhere near bizarre). I took one look at the grid, instinctively went to the short Downs at the top, got the first three I looked at (CAPO, ALES, TOT), and shot out of that section from there (I say "shot," but it maybe wasn't so triumphant—I wrote in OP-ED PIECES for 16A: Slanted writing (OP-ED COLUMN), then all my progress stopped, which let me know, quickly, that PIECES was wrong; pulled it, worked the Downs, and off we went again...). I thought this was a clean, crisp, groan-free experience. I had some trouble with QUENCHED (as clued), and CLOT (as clued), and I wrote in "PURPLE RAIN" instead of "PURPLE HAZE" at 11D: #2 on Rolling Stone's "100 Greatest Guitar Songs of All Time," so if there was any difficult area, it was in the east. But HAZE to RAIN wasn't terrible hard—again, as with OP-ED PIECES, things ground to a halt quickly, so I knew I had something wrong quickly. Finished up down south, with my final Wrong Guess for the Tail End of and Answer: NESTEA instead of NESTLE (43D: Company that makes Coffee-mate).


Five things:

• 34A: Music style associated with George Clinton, informally (P-FUNK) — TIL (Today I Learned) that P-FUNK is a style, not just a band. I knew it only as short for Parliament Funkadelic.

• 36A: Put on (LADE)— I have a frowny face next to this. It's a totally acceptable word, I just ... something about it. Do you ever just have an aversion to certain words, no good reason. I only ever see LADE in crosswords (since I don't hang out at the docks much), so something about my never seeing it IRL and its being very susceptible to deceptive cluing (as here) makes it irksome to me. 
• 55A: Character in "All's Well That Ends Well" and "A Midsummer Night's Dream" (APOSTROPHE)— it's not that I haven't seen this type of clue before, I definitely have, but I still thought this was cute. I was probably pre-inclined to like it since I could pretty much tell the answer was APOSTROPHE (from crosses) before I ever saw the clue, so the clue itself functioned as the aha moment, not the answer. Fun.
• 57A: Viking king of note (OLAV)— note: there is no way to keep all the OLAVs and OLAFs in the world straight. But if it's four letters and seems Scandinavian and you get an O or L or A or F/V in any of the right places, just go with it.
• 55D: Product of Fender (AMP) — me, with the "A" in place, having just gone through the Jimi Hendrix / Prince confusion in the NE: "AXE! ... wait, what's a XARSLANDER? ... sounds like someone who follows OLAV ..."

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld (Twitter @rexparker / #NYTXW)

P.S. Hey, Jeff Chen (co-constructor of today's puzzle) has a book out next week! Congrats to him. It's a middle-grade book (grades 3-7) called Ultraball, and appears to be the first in a series. It's a scifi, post-apocalyptic sports story. School Library Journal says "Fart jokes and cheesy banter makes this well suited for a middle school audience.” Read more about it (and Pre-Order It) here. 

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