Cartoonist Hollander / THU 4-9-20 / Group HQ'd in Ramallah / Trick to increase one's efficiency in modern lingo / Sea creatures that move by jet propulsion / Frost formed from fog

Constructor: Alex Eaton-Salners

Relative difficulty: Easy (untimed, but with very few problems)

THEME: MORSE CODE (58A: Method of communication needed to understand 17-, 25-, 36- and 49-Across) — clues require that their dots and dashes be read as letters; looks like "." represents "e" and "-" represents "t" in MORSE CODE, so if you swap those symbols out for their respective letters, you get a regular old clue with a regular old answer:

Theme answers:

• PUT ON HOLD (17A: -able)
• SCHNOZZOLA (25A: Big nos.)
• MADE A CHOICE (36A: Op-ed)
• ROAD MARKER (49A: Mil. post, say)

Word of the Day: NICOLE Hollander (12D: Cartoonist Hollander) —

Nicole Hollander (born April 25, 1939) is an American cartoonist and writer. Her daily comic strip Sylvia was syndicated to newspapers nationally by Tribune Media Services. [...] During the 1970s, she was the graphic designer of a feminist publication, The Spokeswoman, where she had the opportunity to transform the newsletter into a monthly magazine. While designing pages, she occasionally added her own political illustrations. "Around 1978," she created a comic strip, The Feminist Funnies, later introducing the character who became Sylvia. Selections from The Feminist Funnies appeared as a calendar, Witches, Pigs and Fairy Godmothers: The 1978 Feminist Funnies Appointment Calendar, and in her 1979 book, I'm in Training to Be Tall and Blonde. The book's success led Field Newspaper Syndicate to distribute Sylvia to newspapers as a daily comic strip starting in 1981. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Hollander drew comics for Mother Jones magazine. Many of these did not include the Sylvia character. (wikipedia)

The theme left me a little cold. Something about MORSE CODE feels musty and bygone and played out (a bit like the bowling theme felt yesterday)—even the theme answer SCHNOZZOLA feels like something no one has said since the '50s—and whatever aha-moment there was was weak and came early. I had to hack my way to PUT ON HOLD, having (at that point) no idea how you got there from [-able] (which, side note: having an apparent suffix as your clue, not thrilling). I decided to hunt the theme clue early, just in case it gave me any help. At first, it didn't—or, I didn't figure out the correct "method of communication" right away, but at least I had an Idea of what I was looking for. Then before I tried to work my way out of that NW corner, my eye caught 12D: Cartoonist Hollander (NICOLE), which was thrilling for me, as she is a really wonderful and important comics artist and I rarely see those in the puzzle (beyond the usual suspects) and I almost Never see women comics artists, so the thrill of recognition led me into the NE. That corner fell fast, and then, with --HN---OLA in place, I took one look at [Big nos.] and realized it was supposed to mean [Big nose] and thus SCHNOZZOLA. Then I went back and looked at [-able], finally saw that [Table] could mean PUT ON HOLD, and bam—I went down and wrote in MORSE CODE. So I was basically done with the theme and any interest it might hold ... here:

Now it's always possible that a theme might still hold surprises for you even if you know the basic gimmick. You can look forward to the clever ways the theme might play out. But the nature of this theme means that I am basically "looking forward" to abbrs. and hyphens, so ... nothing very thrilling was gonna happen in those theme clues. Theme answers could've been strong on their own, just as stand-alone answers, but MADE A CHOICE and ROAD MARKER just fizzled. Undoubtedly there is cleverness to this concept, and it's executed just fine, so there's nothing really Bad happening here. It just felt quaint. And adequate. Not the Thursday sizzle I might've hoped for.


Luckily there are some more exciting moments in the fill. I hate the *term* LIFEHACK, but as a crossword answer, I really like its currency and liveliness (40A: Trick to increase one's efficiency, in modern lingo). Genuine moment of audible happiness as I threw that one down. And I've been *waiting* for PLUOT to come into my grid and fill it with deliciousness, just as it fills my recent summers with deliciousness (62A: Hybrid fruit). The plum / apricot hybrid world is fascinating to me. There are PLUOTs, plumcots, apriums, apriplums ... pretty sure you can't go wrong with any of them. Anyway, the odd letter combo in PLUOT has had me thinking for a while that it would make a nice 5-letter crossword answer. And here it is! Cool. I am going to grudgingly admire CARAD as well, even though I'm half-mad that I could not parse it At All (33D: It might be shot on a winding seaside road). No way I was looking for a two-word answer in a five-letter space. Even though the exact image that came into my head when I read the clue was very CAR AD-ish, my brain insisted on trying to find a word, not a phrase. Had CARA- and instead of just moving on, I stubbornly ran the alphabet, completely missed that "D" might work, angrily stared at CARA-, and then suddenly got it. Way way Way more of an aha-moment than the theme ever provided.


Five things:

• 43A: "That one's on me" ("MY FAULT") — ick to the stilted clue phrasing here, double ick because the stiltedness is so obviously the result of the clue writer wanting to mislead you (into thinking, perhaps, that someone is buying someone else a drink, maybe)
• 8D: Berries, for breakfast cereal, e.g. (ADD-INS)— This is not a cereal term. This is a froyo term. You can put berries on your cereal, and thus "add" them "in" to your cereal, I guess, but you would never call them ADD-INS. Like, ever. "Billy, do you want any ADD-INS for your oatmeal?" No.
• 25D: Where to get a polysomnogram (SLEEP LAB) — easy enough, unless (like me) you read this as the clue for *26*-Down, where you have CO-A in place and think "Holy *&^% is this COMA!? Wow... dark."
• 38D: Eschew dinner company (EAT ALONE)— two days in a row for "eschew" clues (yesterday, in reference to AMISH and military service). I like the word as much as the next person, but it wears out its welcome pretty quick. 
• 51D: Big ___ (MAC)— I haven't been to McDonald's for like two decades ... no, wait, I did pop in for some fries once when I was on the road, and definitely tried to evoke some kind of nostalgic feeling a year or two ago by getting a Shamrock Shake (warning: don't do this—they are horribly synthetic tasting, the wrong kind of green ... just not the '80s-era green glop I was looking for). Annnnyway, my point is that, faced with [Big --C] I had nothing. Even when I got to [Big -AC] my first thought was "What's a Big SAC? That can't be a baseball thing, I'd know it ... is it a spider thing? Do spiders have big sacs? ..." But it was an iconic sandwich, after all.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

P.S. ETS = Educational Testing Service, yuck, give me the extra-terrestrials any day (57D: H.S. exam org.)

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