Deep-sea fishing nets / TUE 8-13-19 / Flight amenity that costs extra / Bill killer's position

Constructor: Lynn Lempel

Relative difficulty: Easy (3:14)

THEME: STAR-CROSSED (23D: With 38-Across, like Romeo and Juliet ... and like the circled words)— words that can precede "star" in common phrases "cross" one another four times in the grid:

Theme answers:

• ROCK (1D: Alternative to rap and R&B) / CHILD-PROOF (16A: Safe for youngsters)
• LODE (15A: Rich supply of ore) / MORNING DEW (10D: Droplets seen early in the day)
• LEAST OF ALL (28D: Lowest in importance) / FILM (63A: Old camera need)
• STRIKE GOLD (61A: Hit the jackpot) / LONE (57D: Solitary)

Word of the Day: KATIE Ledecky (19A: Ledecky who has been named World Swimmer of Year five times) —

Kathleen Genevieve Ledecky (/ləˈdɛki/; Czech pronunciation: [ˈlɛdɛtskiː]; born March 17, 1997) is an American competitive swimmer. She has won five Olympic gold medals and 15 world championship gold medals, the most in history for a female swimmer. She is the current world record holder in the women's 400-, 800-, and 1500-meter freestyle (long course). She also holds the fastest-ever times in the women's 500-, 1000-, and 1650-yard freestyle events.

In her international debut at the 2012 London Olympic Games as a 15-year-old, Ledecky unexpectedly won the gold medal in the women's 800-metre freestyle. Four years later, she left Rio de Janeiro as the most decorated female athlete of the 2016 Olympic Games with four gold medals, one silver medal, and two world records. In total, she has won 34 medals (28 golds, 5 silvers, and 1 bronze) in major international competitions, spanning the Summer Olympics, World Championships, and Pan Pacific Championships. During her career, she has broken fourteen world records.

Ledecky's success has earned her Swimming World's Female World Swimmer of the Year a record-breaking five times. Ledecky was also named Associated Press Female Athlete of the Year in 2017, international female Champion of Champions by L'Équipe in 2014 and 2017, United States Olympic Committee Female Athlete of the Year in 2013, 2016 and 2017, and Sportswoman of the Year by the Women's Sports Foundationin 2017. Ledecky's 11 individual gold medals at the World Aquatics Championships and 15 combined individual titles at the Olympics and World Aquatics Championships are records in women's swimming. (wikipedia)

This felt so easy that I was slightly surprised that my time wasn't faster—a fast time, for sure, but twenty seconds off my recorded best. Truly felt like a Monday, and played like one. The weird off-centered cross-referenced revealer, plus a few hesitations elsewhere (one of them fairly significant), was enough to inflate my time to merely Regular Easy, as opposed to Spectacularly Easy. The theme seems pretty solid to me—nothing very twisty or wordplayish going on, but the execution is consistent. The whole thing feels very well crafted, and the fill, while light on sparkle, stays clean throughout the grid. This is a good example of a how a puzzle can feel "old" (or "old-fashioned") but still be good; the frame of reference here is decidedly not current, and much of the fill is very familiar crosswordy stuff, but the grid never drifts into crosswordese (e.g. names you never see outside crosswords), and has very little in the way of abbrs., partials, marginal foreign words, obscurities, etc. Feels like a fine Tuesday puzzle from the '90s (the clue on KATIE is the only thing that marks this thing as a 21st-century product). "Polished" is the word that comes most readily to mind as I look over this grid. I wish more constructors took the time to make *every* corner of their grids this neat.


Don't have much to say about this one. I'm not sure about the revealer—why cross STAR and CROSSED? I mean, I get it, there's a whole "cross" theme going on, but the themers cross for very specific reasons, following a pattern that the revealer does not follow itself. And since the revealer cross is wonkily off-center, it kind of makes the whole thing weird. It's an added flourish that actually adds little and creates inelegance. This is a minor criticism, but I think about these things. Maybe you could've done the cross with STAR crossing the central "S" in CROSSED, thus forming a kind of cross? No, that would be a "T," and a top-heavy one at that. STAR is probably in a fine place, all things considered. It just messes with the tidiness of the "cross" theme a little.


My slowness came almost entirely from the bottom half of LEAST OF ALL. Everything after LEAST was ???? since LEAST seemed to encompass the entire meaning of the clue, 28D: Lowest in importance. Even LEASTO- didn't help. And then when I went for help with crosses, I got a misleading clue at 51A: Flight amenity that costs extra (WIFI). That clue *needs* "usually* at the end of it, as several airlines, including Emirates and JetBlue, offer free WIFI. Even with the terminal "I," I didn't know what was up. Considered TAXI (??!). Also really couldn't see FILM, which tells you a bit about how old I am (63A: Old camera need). "Old"! How dare you! Lastly, as far as that corner is concerned, why in the world would you use Desdemona, of all people, as the clue WIFE (51D: Desdemona, to Othello). Me: "well MURDER VICTIM doesn't fit, so ...?" Of all the WIFEs in the world (so many), this paradigmatic example of domestic violence is your example? I'm in no way offended. Just baffled. [Lucy, to Desi] [Marge, to Homer] [Penelope, to Odysseus] etc etc etc. any of those would've worked. Not a strangulation among them.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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