Cause of typos, humorously / FRI 7-5-19 / Deposits in some banks / Synthetic fiber, for short / Activity for which you need a fair amount of wiggle room

Constructor: Freddie Cheng

Relative difficulty: Medium (7:38)


THEME: Freestyle / Themeless (70 words)

Word of the Day: ASE'S ("__ Death," movement from "Peer Gynt") — Peer Gynt, Op. 23, is the incidental music to Henrik Ibsen's 1867 play of the same name, written by the Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg in 1875. It premiered along with the play on 24 February 1876 in Christiania (now Oslo).^[1]
Grieg later created two suites from his Peer Gynt music. Some of the music from these suites have received coverage in popular culture; see Grieg's music in popular culture. (Wikipedia)

"The Death of Ase" (Åses død), also transliterated "The Death of Aase" and "Aase's Death," is the final movement from Act III of Peer Gynt by Edvard Grieg. The highly-recognizable "In the Hall of the Mountain King" (Act II) and "Morning Mood" (Act IV) also originate from this work.




Hello fellow puzzlers! My name is Jonathan, and it is my pleasure to be filling in for Rex today. I am a math Ph.D. student at Tulane University, and I also enjoy solving and constructing crosswords (though no NYT publication yet!). I chose to fill in on a Friday because it is usually my favorite day of the week for NYT crosswords -- the constructor has the opportunity to maximize liveliness and clever cluing.

Today I tried going through somewhat quickly, and got caught up by some easy mistakes: LIKE I CARE for AS IF I CARE (16A: "Doesn't concern me"), FIGHT for ARGUE (54A: Contend), and the one that tripped me up the most, TINGE for TINCT (50A: Touch of color). That last one made the SW the last part of the grid to fall for me.

Each of the grid's corners has a 3x9 stack, where the showcase entries are -- each stack has lively and lovely fill, with my favorite being the SE (PHARMA REP, AUDIOTAPE, SLEEPOVER) and no especially weak long entries. I usually see FAT FINGER in the plural (or the adjective, fat-fingered), but it was nice to fill it in off of the "F."FREECYCLES (9D: Gives away to a better home, in modern coinage) was new to me, but highly inferrable.


The shorter entries groan a bit under the load, a little more than I would expect them to. Some of the less-common crosswordese examples include ASE'S (the word of the day!), TALI (50D: Anklebones), AEROS (19A: Former Houston hockey team) (its friend AERIES makes an appearance, too!), and DELED (39A: Struck out) in the past tense, which hasn't been seen in the NYT since 2007. I could see a potential Natick in the crossing of ASE'S and ERTE (37A: Big name in Deco design) if you didn't recall the artist's name.



Bullets:

• DAY TRADER— (32D: One who gives a lot of orders) This is a nice clue; at first I was thinking line cook.
• FRAT — (9A: Rush home?)  Clever misdirection; it even sounds like it's looking for a verb.
• ARTY— (38A: Hipsteresque, in a way) "Hipsteresque" is such a hipsteresque word.
• RETROCOOL — (10D: Back in again)  Also new to me, but completely inferrable. Google results for "retrocool" mostly refer to Retrocool Energy Services, Inc., a cooling-related energy conversation company based in (...wait for it...) Natick, MA!

Overall, the stacks were solid, which is important, but the rest was a bit shakier than I would have liked. It averages out to a normal and pleasant Friday.

Thanks to all the loyal readers of Rex's blog for staying tuned today, and thanks to Rex for letting me fill in! It was a blast.

Signed, Jonathan O'Rourke, Visitor of CrossWorld

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