Silo filler, in brief / THU 7-4-19 / Figure skater Midori / Olympic champion Ohno / Squaresville

Constructor: Jim Hilger

Relative difficulty: Easyish (5:51 for me)



THEME: CONCISELY — Theme answers are three-word phrases where the last letter of one word is the same as the first letter of the next, but the repeated letter is only written once and shared by the two words.

Theme answers:

• AIR (R)AID (D)RILL (17A: Civil defense measure, concisely?)
• SHORT (T)ERM (M)EMORY (23A: Recollection of something that just happened, concisely?)
• PAY (Y)OUR (R)ESPECTS (50A: Make a polite visit, concisely?)
• BEST (T)IME (E)VER (59A: "That. Was. A. Blast!," concisely?)

Word of the Day: Al CAPP (38D: Cartoonist who created Fearless Fosdick) —

Alfred Gerald Caplin (September 28, 1909 – November 5, 1979), better known as Al Capp, was an American cartoonist and humorist best known for the satirical comic strip Li'l Abner. ... Li'l Abner also features a comic strip-within-the-strip: Fearless Fosdick is a parody of Chester Gould's Dick Tracy. It first appeared in 1942, and proved so popular that it ran intermittently over the next 35 years. Gould was personally parodied in the series as cartoonist "Lester Gooch"—the diminutive, much-harassed and occasionally deranged "creator" of Fosdick. The style of the Fosdick sequences closely mimicks Tracy, including the urban setting, the outrageous villains, the galloping mortality rate, the crosshatched shadows, and even the lettering style. In 1952, Fosdick was the star of his own short-lived puppet show on NBC, featuring the Mary Chase marionettes. (Wikipedia)

Hi all, it's Matt Levine substituting for Rex today. Normally I write a daily financial column for Bloomberg Opinion, and I am honored and nervous to be spending my day off writing for Rex. I was particularly nervous when I signed up to do today's puzzle because I wasn't sure if I was in for more of a Thursday puzzle (harder, rebus-y) or more of a Fourth of July puzzle (easier, fireworks-related).

And the answer was kind of ... neither? The puzzle is Fourth-free, and the theme and overall difficulty didn't feel that Thursday-like. I barely even noticed the theme; I filled in "AIRAID__" from crosses, thought "huh that looks like AIR RAID but isn't," and then just sort of accepted it being AIR RAID and went from there.

It is one of those themes that you probably appreciate more as a constructor than as a solver. (I am not a constructor.) From a construction perspective, it is a challenge to find workable phrases in which each word after the first starts with the last letter of the previous word. My own unscientific efforts to come up with examples to throw into this review suggest that that's harder than it sounds, as does the randomness of this puzzle's theme answers. (Was the AIR RAID DRILL the BEST TIME EVER?) You'd have a tough time doing this theme with phrases that are linked by anything else, making the theme about meaning as well as structure. INDEPENDENCE EVE EXCITEMENT. GLIB BARBECUE EVENT. KNOCKOFF FIREWORKS SHOW. None of those fit a grid obviously.


But when you're solving, the theme just feels like "oh you leave out a couple of letters, okay." It's not that concise. I do appreciate a theme that ends on its own positive review. BESTIMEVER, you're supposed to say when you finish. The puzzle is easy enough that a lot of people probably will.

There is some perfectly pleasant longish fill, more SOLEMN and SERENE than anything that EXCITES too much, but SPECTRAL and HOROSCOPE and ONAWHIM and DUSTMOP and MARACAS are nice. The pop-culture references never get any more current than AGUILERA. I am not convinced PRICERS are a thing. The shorter fill is pretty crosswordy, ONTO and ITO and EYETO and SEATO. Do you enjoy reading E.A.P. of of E'EN? That's a good clue for PASSÉ (50D), "No longer either hot or cool?," the only ? clue in the puzzle; otherwise the cluing is pretty straight-ahead.

Bullets:

• 22D Whale constellation - CETUS — Latin for whale. "Any large sea animal, a sea-monster; particularly a species of whale, a shark, dog-fish, seal, dolphin, etc.," says Lewis & Short, and it is pleasant to think of a more enchanted and less precise world in which, when you saw a big animal, you'd be like "ooh look it's a monster." The constellation does not look much like a whale? Apparently it's supposed to look like a monster.
• 34D Old Roman course - ITER— Latin for way, journey or road. Beowulf uses "whale-road" as a kenning to describe the sea, but that is Anglo-Saxon, not Latin, never mind.
• 46D Southernmost active volcano on earth - EREBUS — It's in Antarctica. In what might possibly be overkill, after my 2-year-old daughter asked me a few times "why is it raining," I went out and bought an earth science textbook and read it straight through, so I learned a lot about volcanoes before getting to the part about rain. "Because warm saturated air rises, expands and cools until the water condenses," I tell her now, unhelpfully. 
• 49D Silo filler, in brief - ICBM — I was briefly misdirected. I wanted CORN or something. I don't know why that would be "in brief," but in my defense the theme here is Very Slight Abbreviation. ICBM is a regular old abbreviation though, intercontinental ballistic missile, the other kind of silo.
• 54A Christina on Rolling Stone's list of "100 Greatest Singers of All Time" - AGUILERA— I like when the clue goes out of its way to say something nice about the person. "Singer Christina" would have been a perfectly adequate clue. I do the New Yorker's crossword and notice it editorializing in the clues a lot more than the Times does. "Trump administration official," the Times might say, but the New Yorker will say something like "Trump administration official, who is bad." 
• 58A Fifth Avenue concern - SAKS — "Concern" is a good old-timey way to say "business," and a little bit of misdirection.
• 61D Wall St. news - IPO— As a financial writer, I sometimes get annoyed at Rex for getting annoyed at the puzzle for including financial jargon. An IPO is a real thing, an initial public offering, and IPOs are in the news all the time these days, much more so than ITOs or ITERs. It's not amazing fill or anything but it's fine, it's fine. 

Signed, Matt Levine, hanging out in Crossworld for a day
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