Old boosted rocket stages / SAT 6-22-19 / Media big Zuckerman / Either constituent of table salt / They might work on something for 60 seconds / Sci-fi autho Simmons with 1989 Hugo-winning novel Hyperion

Constructor: Joe Deeney

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium (6:19)

THEME: none

Word of the Day: AGENAS (43D: Old boosted rocket stages) —

noun Rocketry.

a U.S. upper stage, with a restartable liquid-propellant engine, used with variousbooster stages to launch satellites into orbit around the earth and send probes to the moon and planets: also used as a docking target in the Gemini program. (dictionary.com)

This puzzle, with its perfectly reasonable, occasionally entertaining grid, was totally ruined by poor editing. Well, it's partially ruined by the constructor, who never ever ever should've included the obscure crosswordese AGENAS in the grid—a grid otherwise so mercifully free of this kind of junk. In fact, ironically, the puzzle suffers precisely because this answer is suuuuuch an outlier, quality-wise. The obvious fix here (and why did no one see it) is to make it ARENAS and then change SORTA to TORTA (and please, please don't tell me TORTA is obscure, because, I guarantee you, using whatever metric of obscurity you want, it is not more obscure than AGENAS!). So you could've had TORTA / TAR / ARENAS. Bing bang boom, done. But no. It's AGENAS. Ugh. OK, so even then, it's not sooooo bad. All you have to do is give SAG a reasonable clue. That's a common word, shouldn't be too hard. What? What's that you say? You think it's very very cute to duplicate successive Across clues (even though many / most solvers don't solve by reading clues in order)? And you would like to do that little cutesy gimmicky thing here? Here? Where you're already dealing with the AGENAS Situation (as it has come to be known)? You love Reagan soooooo much that you want to do a little two-clue tribute to him? Here? Here? Honestly, the bad judgment is mind-boggling.  Bad enough to think a very fine word like HIRES should be clued as HI hyphen RES (ugh x 1000) (26D: Crystal clear, as an image), now you want to clue SAG as an acronym? (Screen Actors Guild). This is negligence. To misjudge the situation this badly, to overestimate the power of your own cleverness so profoundly, after failing to see the TORTA Solution (as it has come to be known) in the first place. Exceedingly, painfully, predictably, the first Twitter comments on this puzzle (negative *and* positive reviews) go Right To This Part of The Grid and flag it as a problem. Everyone can see it. Why can't the editor? Lesson for constructors: give your editor as little room to f*** up as possible by not putting gunk like AGENAS in any puzzle you make ever, thank you.


I really hope you know your opera terms, because I can easily see someone's deciding that 40A: Handles with care? (PET NAMES) is PEN NAMES. I knew RECITATIVE (24D: Operatic song-speech), so no problems for me, but it's not exactly ARIA-level familiar to the general population, so it's possible people got tripped. Anytime you try to pull out that "?" clue, it better land beautifully. I don't think [Handles with care?] does, particularly. I honestly first thought that it had to do with actual pets ... for whom, of course, you care. But no, you give someone you *care* about a pet name (perhaps). Not sure why "Come on!" is in the "ASK ANYONE!" clue (25D: "Come on! It's common knowledge!"). Really confused me. I was it was going to be an exhortation to ASK the speaker another, harder question because the first one was a gimme (?). And I really didn't understand the clue 28D: Clickable message at the start of an online TV show (SKIP INTRO). It's not really a "message." It's an option. I'm not being given new information. I'm being given the option of moving ahead. Subtle, important difference. Clue on KICK is dumb because all kinds of proofs of alcohol have KICKs. 100-proof is arbitrary. 80-proof has plenty of KICK (which is about as specific a term as "spiciness"). So, to wrap, grid good, editing less so.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

PS someone on Twitter just confessed to thinking SOMETIMES Y (16A: Addendum to a common pentad) was one word, pronounced like "old-timey," and now I want it to be a word. "My love for crosswords is SOMETIMESY ... it comes, it goes ..."

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