Trilogy of tragedies by Aeschylus / WED 2-20-19 / Rigel Spica by spectral type / Mark longtime game show partner of Bill Todman / Ancient kingdom in modern day Jordan / PM who inspired 1960s jacket

Constructor: Byron Walden

Relative difficulty: Easy (like, really easy—oversized grid, and I still set a personal record for a Wednesday) (3:01)

THEME: EDU (7D: URL ending associated with the beginnings of the answers to the six starred clues)— "blank AND blank" phrases where the first word is also the name of a well-known university:

Theme answers:

• BROWN AND SERVE (12A: *Instructions for premade dinner rolls)
• DUKE AND DUCHESS (14A: *Noble couple)
• RICE AND BEANS (31A: *Latin American side dish that combines two food staples)
• "DRAKE AND JOSH" (34A: *Title pair in a 2004-07 Nickelodeon sitcom)
• SMITH AND WESSON (53A: *Eponymous founders of a Massachusetts-based firearms manufacturer)
• PENN AND TELLER (58A: *Duo of magicians who are the longest-running headliners in Las Vegas history)

Word of the Day:"DRAKE AND JOSH" (34A) —

Drake & Josh is an American sitcom created by Dan Schneider for Nickelodeon. The series follows stepbrothers Drake Parker (Drake Bell) and Josh Nichols (Josh Peck) as they live together despite having opposite personalities. The series also stars Miranda Cosgrove, Nancy Sullivan, and Jonathan Goldstein.

After actors Bell and Peck previously appeared in The Amanda Show, Schneider decided to create Drake & Josh with them in starring roles. The series ran from January 11, 2004, to September 16, 2007, totaling 56 episodes in 4 seasons. It also had two TV films: Drake & Josh Go Hollywood(2006), and Merry Christmas, Drake & Josh (2008). (wikipedia)

I hope you appreciate how loopy this theme is *and* how clean this (very thematically dense!) grid is. Just gorgeous work. I solved it so fast that I actually missed the university aspect of the theme. I thought it was just ___ AND ___ phrases ... for some reason. Some reason I would find out later. And actually I never found out. That is, why ... why the "AND ___" part?! Who knows? Honestly, who cares? Everything about this is so zippy and smooth that the just-because aspect of the theme answer structure doesn't bother me at all. Nor does the weirdness of having EDU (in such an inconspicuous position) as your revealer. When your craftsmanship is so tight, you can get away with all kinds of stuff. The only trouble I had with this grid was getting the front end of "DRAKE & JOSH," a show I am dimly aware of, but clearly not aware of enough to remember its damn name. 2004-07 Nickelodeon show falls smack between my pop culture heyday (which pretty much ends with the 20th century) and my daughter's (she'd have been a bit too young to care about this show). I think the last answer I wrote in was EERIE, which is a very weird location to finish up an easy puzzle. Usually easy puzzles follow a pretty regular top-to-bottom solving path, but my path today was oddly circular: across the top, down the east coast, around and up again. But I had the CAN-DO BANJO MOJO working for me today, and so the unconventional route didn't slow me down at all.


There were a few places I could've gotten held up. I am never quite sure about the second vowel in AMARETTO, and ENDO could've been ENTO (?), maybe, and I can see how GOODSON might've caused a struggle for some people, but I watched way way way way too many 70s-80s-era game shows not to know the phrase "a Mark GOODSON-Bill Todman production." I think the word BURGLE is silly and I probably would've changed it to BUNGLE, but that would give you PEN in the cross, and since PENN is already in the grid ... maybe BURGLE is the better choice. As opposed to the BETTOR choice, which Byron clearly made when he decided to put BETTOR ... into the grid. OK, it's late and 'SCOLD (my newfangled contraction for "it's cold"), so I'm off to bed.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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