Visitor to King Mongkut / THU 6-6-19 / Hawaiian entree for short / Direct-to-customer beef retailer / Navajo dwelling made of logs mud

Constructor: Fred Piscop

Relative difficulty: Easy (4:56)

THEME: D-DAY (59D: Its beaches begin five answers in this puzzle) — yep, those are the five beaches of D-DAY:

Theme answers:

• OMAHA STEAKS (17A: Direct-to-customer beef retailer)
• GOLD ORE (40A: Calaverite or sylvanite)
• SWORD DANCER (66A: Performer with a weapon)
• JUNO PROBE (11D: NASA spacecraft orbiting Jupiter)
• UTAH STATE (36D: The Aggies of the N.C.A.A.)

Word of the Day: LEE Krasner (42D: Abstract Expressionist Krasner) —

Lenore "Lee" Krasner (October 27, 1908 – June 19, 1984) was an American abstract expressionist painter, with a strong speciality in collage, who was married to Jackson Pollock. This somewhat overshadowed her contribution at the time, though there was much cross-pollination between their two styles. Krasner’s training, influenced by George Bridgman and Hans Hofmann, was the more formalized, especially in the depiction of human anatomy, and this enriched Pollock’s more intuitive and unstructured output. 

Krasner is now seen as a key transitional figure within abstraction, who connected early-20th-century art with the new ideas of postwar America, and her work fetches high prices at auction. She is one of the few female artists to have had a retrospective show at the Museum of Modern Art. (wikipedia)

I guess I don't have much to say about this. It's a fairly staid first-words-type theme. I don't know why it feels weird to commemorate such a bloody day with wordplay, but it does. Mostly I'm disappointed that I didn't get a proper Thursday puzzle. I mean, congrats on putting the D-DAY puzzle on actual D-DAY, but boo for bumping the tricksy / ambitious puzzle I've come to expect on Thursday. Best themed day of the week and poof, gone, not here. All so that we can trudge solemnly through a pedestrian theme with theme answers that feel mostly boring (GOLD ... ORE? UTAH ... STATE!? That's the best you can do with those!?!?!). SWORD DANCER is just ... what is that, actually? Well, in addition to being Horse of the Year in 1959, looks like it's ... a semi-militaristic phenomenon in other parts of the world that I know next to nothing about (Here's a not-terribly-helpful wikipedia page about it). JUNO PROBE is a cool and somewhat timely answer (it reached Jupiter just 3 years ago). I liked that, and the cluing of LEE as the artist Krasnick, and not a ton else.


It was all over pretty quickly, though the clues on BIT and BETS held me up a bit (!) in the east (I think of "memory units" as BYTES and I thought agreeing to "make things interesting" was maybe BIDding (not BETting). SE was hardest part for me, largely because of the DANCER part of SWORD DANCER, but also because the clues down there were often toughly vague (see clues on EVENT, CAST, TESTS, for example). Also took a while to get SHEDDER (25D: Labrador retriever or Alaskan malamute, notably) (I have a chocolate labrador retriever, and shedding isn't really an issue most of the time, so I can't relate to this clue), and the PISMO clue was hard (and I've been to PISMO Beach) (53D: ___ clam (mollusk found off the coast of California)). That's all, folks.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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