Boss of Oompa-Loompas / WED 12-4-19 / Appliance company acquired by Raytheon in 1965 / Head in classic Hasbro toy / Group concerned with things that are NSFW

Constructor: Evan Mahnken

Relative difficulty: So easy it was obviously misplaced. The whole world is setting personal records. I was groggy and typed *horribly* and still solved faster than most Tuesdays (3:27)


THEME: I think so: these appear to be logical fallacies, clued in the style of the argument that they represent (?), and containing the subject matter that they *appear* to represent, if you take their idiomaticness literally. Sigh. Themes that take this much explaining should maybe rethink their reason for being

Theme answers:

• STRAW MAN FALLACY (17A: "Scarecrow thinks the only thing one needs is a brain. It's not!") — without context, it's hard to see that this is what it says it is, i.e. that this clue is an example of the the answer it's cluing. This goes for all of these themers, really. Maybe the scarecrow *actually* argued that the only thing one needs is a brain, How Would I Know?
• SLIPPERY SLOPE (28A: "If we let our kids go sledding, what's next? Extreme skiing?") — this one works
• CHERRY PICKING (43A: "As you can tell from these few examples, Bings are better than maraschinos") — doesn't work, for so many reasons, not least of which is no one making a CHERRY PICKING argument would tell you that they have cited only a "few examples," and anyway, how many damn cherries Do you have to eat to know that Bings are better!? I mean, those are really really Really different cherries. In fact, maraschinos are a treated cherry, not a variety like Bings. "A maraschino cherry [...] is a preserved, sweetened cherry, typically made from light-colored sweet cherries such as the Royal Ann, Rainier, or Gold varieties." (wikipedia) What's the logical fallacy where you compare apples and oranges called? BOOOOOO!
• MOVING GOALPOSTS (58A: "Expanding the bleachers isn't enough. We need to relocate the whole stadium") —again, without context, no way to tell this is actually an example of an argumentative fallacy

Word of the Day: DEBRA Winger (9A: Actress Winger) —

Debra Lynn Winger (born May 16, 1955) is an American actress. She starred in the films An Officer and a Gentleman (1982), Terms of Endearment (1983), and Shadowlands (1993), each of which earned her a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actress. She won the National Society of Film Critics Award for Best Actress for Terms of Endearment, and the Tokyo International Film Festival Award for Best Actress for A Dangerous Woman (1993). Her other film roles include Urban Cowboy (1980), Legal Eagles (1986), Black Widow (1987), Betrayed (1988), Forget Paris(1995), and Rachel Getting Married (2008). In 2012, she made her Broadway debut in the original production of the David Mamet play The Anarchist. In 2014, she received the Lifetime Achievement Award at the Transilvania International Film Festival.

She currently stars as a series regular in the Netflix original television series The Ranch. (wikipedia)

Er. Uh. I guess your friends on the debate team might think this is cute? I just found it tiresome. But luckily I didn't really have to find it anything at all, because it was stupid easy. Like, how-is-this-even-Wednesday easy. I had a teeny bit of trouble getting off the ground (wrote in JIBES before JESTS because I don't know my JIBES from my GIBES (1D: Joking remarks); also, took some amount of working to see FALLACY instead of ARGUMENT), but after that, any resistance was created by my terrible early-morning typing and grid navigation. By the time I finished, I had no idea what this puzzle was supposed to be about. Just looked like idioms that someone was taking literally, and imagining it was somehow funny to do so, which is a child's idea of humor. But it turns out the idioms are all from the same world (argumentation), clued as a version of what they are ... which, I'll grant you, is layered, but in this smug aint-I-a-stinker kind of way that is just annoying. Give the solver a revealer. If what you are doing here is any good, it should a. announce itself clearly (it doesn't), or b. be announced clearly by a good revealer (it isn't). The grid is choppy and full of easy 3- to 5-letter answers, i.e. there's just nothing of interest here outside of the themers. Also, MOVING GOALPOSTS sounds weird to my ears. I'm sure that's the technical term for that particular logical fallacy, but I've heard it only with the "THE" in it. People will have good will toward this puzzle because it was ego-boostingly easy. But they shouldn't.


Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

P.S. here's a huge list of fallacies, if you somehow care (note that here it is indeed MOVING *the* GOALPOSTS)
P.P.S. I do like the clue on OSHA (35D: Group concerned with things that are NSFW?); just thought I'd try to end on a hight note
P.P.P.S. Happy birthday, JAY-Z. You are now my age.

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