Onetime maker of Matchbox cars / TUE 3-5-19 / Where Johnny Cash shot a man in song / Yellow white meadow flower / Quite contrary girl of rhyme / Home with dome in Nome

Constructor: Joe Deeney

Relative difficulty: Medium-Challenging (4:11)

THEME: seeing spots — every theme clue relates to "spots" somehow:

Theme answers:

• PARKING LOT (16A: It has spots)
• LEOPARD PRINT (22A: It has spots)
• COMMERCIAL BREAK (35A: It has spots)
• DOGGY DAYCARE (48A: It has Spots)
• TEASER VICE (57A: It has spots)

Word of the Day: DOLMA (7D: Stuffed grape leaves) —

noun

1. a dish consisting of ingredients such as meat and spiced rice wrapped in vine or cabbage leaves, popular in the Balkans, the Caucasus, and the eastern Mediterranean. (google)

Didn't work for me on many levels. Humor is corny, both in the theme and in some of the "jokey" clues (see especially that IGLOO clue, oof) (44D: Home with a dome (in Nome?)). The cloying cutesiness of the DOGGY DAYCARE answer is made worse by the fact that it just makes no sense. My guess is that the average number of "Spots" at the average  DOGGY DAYCARE on any given day is hovering right around zero. Closer to zero (by far) than one, for sure. Spot is with Rover and Fido in DOGGY HEAVEN, let's be honest. The very notion that dogs are still called "Spot" (outside of old Dick & Jane primers) helps give this puzzle a very musty feel, despite the desperate bid for youthiness represented by NOOB and (probably) DARTH. Cultural center of gravity is way back, when VCRs roamed the land and "LET IT BE" was a hit and you DIALed your friends on your rotary phone and said, "HI HO!," and if someone disrupted your TEA SERVICE, you shouted, "HEY, you BIG APE!" Speaking of TEA SERVICE, it's the weakest of the straightforward [It has spots] clues, for sure, and also I know I'm not the only one who, while solving it, was parsing it as TEASER ___ and ended up with TEASER VICE. Not the answer's fault; just another way this puzzle was annoying.


The grid is weirdly choppy and conspicuously black-square heavy, with two cheater squares* in each of the weird giant "S"-shaped blocks of black. This results in an unpleasantly segmented grid, laden with short fill. IONE is crosswordese, and she crosses tilde-less ANO, which is also crosswordese. That cross is kind of an emblem for the grid. I mean, check the symmetrical cross: OKRA / EKE. See what I mean? Iconic crosswordese ... crossing. What is with that QURAN spelling? It's a valid spelling variant, but that is an astonishingly gratuitous "Q." Somewhere Roberto DURAN is shaking his head going "Come on!" There are so many different ways to go up there without having to resort to an alt-spelling of KORAN. And again, any time I see aspirational "Q"s and other Scrabbly letters mucking up a grid, I wonder about the constructor's priorities. I'm AT A LOSS. Also, all things "IQ" irritate me. Racist nonsense, that test. And don't get me started on the puzzle's love affair with *&$^ing MENSA. But I digress. I knew DOLMA but couldn't spell it (DALMA!) (like the DALMAtian ... which has spots!). Literally no idea who this LIAM guy is. I tried SEAN and SIAN and then just gave up (22D: Writer O'Flaherty). Is TYCO a toy company? Are they bygone? Yyyyyyup. Throw another answer on the ash heap of history. Sigh. (60A: Onetime maker of Matchbox cars)

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

*cheater squares = black squares that don't affect word count and are only there to make filling the grid easier. Here, the black squares above "25" and "15," as well as their symmetrical counterparts

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