Scandinavian goddess of fate / SAT 12-14-13 / Husband of Otrera / Ottoman ruler nicknamed Lion / Quattro relatives / Protagonist in David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest / Forrest Tucker's F Troop role / Cagney classic of 1935

Constructor: Martin Ashwood-Smith

Relative difficulty: Medium

THEME: none

Word of the Day: NORN (27D: Scandinavian goddess of fate) —

Norn¹

n

(Myth & Legend / Norse Myth & Legend) Norse myth any of the three virgin goddesses of fate, who predestine the lives of the gods and men

[Old Norse] (thefreedictionary.com)

Martin Ashwood-Smith appears to do only quad stacks. That's it. I can't remember the last time I saw his byline and the puzzle wasn't a quad stack. I guess if you have a shtick and it's working for you, then … keep going? This one feels pretty average, quad-stack wise. Don't like any of those grid-spanners particularly. First two are boring, don't know the reference for the third (Jumbo?), and recoil at the fourth because it's one of the dreaded, cliché ONE'S answer (the locus classicus being A LOT ON ONE'S PLATE). Also, this puzzle seems astonishingly reliant on proper nouns. Both the top 15 and the bottom 15 feel not-that-famous, and while I knew TERENCE MCNALLY, being under 60 I have never seen a single episode of "F-Troop," so SERGEANT O'ROURKE (52A: Forrest Tucker's "F Troop" role) was a big "?". Also a big "?"—four (4!) adjacent Downs that were also proper nouns: ALI PASHA (17D: Ottoman ruler nicknamed "The Lion"), FILIPPO (23D: ___ Brunelleschi, Italian Renaissance architect who developed linear perspective), VANESSA (25D: 1958 OPERA by Samuel Barber), and EILEEN FORD (31D: Big name in modeling agencies). At least the puzzle was well constructed enough that I could work them out via crosses and inference. Still, generally a good puzzle is going to balance things out a bit, proper noun-wise.


I know they have nothing to do with each other, etymologically, but I do not like SARGENT and SERGEANT in the same grid. Pronounced the same, so … the same. Fair, yes, but distracting and inelegant (unlike SARGENT's work, which is phenomenally elegant). The puzzle has some genuine ugliness because, well, it's a quad-stack puzzle, and so we see the usual rat's nest of short crosses: AFTA NORN CRAT! Actually, it could've been, and has been, much worse. Things get a little morbid at the bottom there, but I don't mind that. Had EAP before ERB (Edgar Rice Burroughs). ERAT before AMAT. "GMAN" before "GMEN." None of these errors are that interesting. My movement through the puzzle was pretty much guided by my familiarity with the major proper nouns involved. Knew MCNALLY, so top was pretty easy. Didn't know that chunk of Downs in the middle, so that was a bit slower, and then the front half of the bottom grid-spanner (SERGEANT, inferable from a few crosses) was easy, where the latter (O'ROURKE, being much less inferable) was not.

Good day.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld