Constructor: David J. Kahn
Relative difficulty: Medium
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THEME: CAPITAL / GAINS (38A: With 31-Down, proceeds from the sale of an asset ... or a hint to understanding six answers in this puzzle)— regular crossword answers have the names of world capitals added to them, creating other, longer, unclued answers:
Theme answers:
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Haven't seen David J. Kahn's byline in years. He's a veteran with a penchant for trickery, and I have often had trouble getting on his cultural wavelength, so I braced myself for ... mischief, I guess. Mischief and struggle. And, yeah, I got a little of both, but only a little. Mostly what I got was a genuinely brilliant theme concept. CAPITAL GAINS! It sits so nicely there in the middle, crossing itself, and it does what it says it does. It's about as straightforward a revealer as you're likely to see—a great play on words that does not leave you in the dark about how it's going to work: regular old answers will "gain""capitals." Now, those capitals will not be clued At All, and you won't be able to tell very well (at least not initially) which answers are doing this capital-gaining, so you're going to have to just ... wade in and figure it out. For me, this actually didn't take that long. Right away you can see something is wrong with those long Down in the NW (assuming you start in the NW, like a normal person). I threw those short Acrosses down, 1 2 ... well, not 1 2 3, as my brain has trouble accepting SOG as a verb, or a word at all, but MAR and OBI went right in. Oh, the other reason I balked at SOG was ... well, I had RI- at 3D: Writer Morrison ... well, this makes no sense, but it happened: I had RI- and wrote in RISONMOR, imagining that for some reason her name started mid-answer and then looped back around to the front ... but "Morrison" is *in the clue* LOL. Completely ridiculous move that only the broken, tired brain of a veteran solver could make. Also, I wanted something about MOS- or MODUS OPERANDI and I had MO- up front but no idea how to make anything fit. I fiddled around in that corner until I finally put together RIGATONI and QUASH got me MOSQUITO and there it was—cities added to answers For Some Reason. Shortly thereafter I hit the revealer, and the Reason became clear—it's all a play on the phrase CAPITAL GAINS. Unclued answers, unclued capitals, but it's all quite doable and it all works. Nice.
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Relative difficulty: Medium
Theme answers:
- MOSQUITOS (1D: Criminal patterns, in brief) (MOS "gains""capital" of Ecuador)
- RIGATONI (3D: Writer Morrison) (TONI "gains""capital" of Latvia)
- TIMBERLINES (18A: What "x" might mean) (TIMES "gains""capital" of Germany)
- BAKING STONE (59A: Sweetheart) (BAE "gains""capital" of Jamaica)
- PARISHES (39D: Fellows) (HES "gains""capital" of France)
- LOS LOBOS (41D: Some corp. takeovers) (LBOS "gains""capital" of Norway)
A leveraged buyout (LBO) is one company's acquisition of another company using a significant amount of borrowed money (leverage) to meet the cost of acquisition. The assets of the company being acquired are often used as collateral for the loans, along with the assets of the acquiring company. The use of debt, which normally has a lower cost of capital than equity, serves to reduce the overall cost of financing the acquisition. The cost of debt is lower because interest payments often reduce corporate income tax liability, whereas dividend payments normally do not. This reduced cost of financing allows greater gains to accrue to the equity, and, as a result, the debt serves as a lever to increase the returns to the equity. (wikipedia)
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Lucked out by knowing ONI (37A: Demon in Japanese folklore). If I hadn't, that corner would've been Much harder. ABOUNDIN was already hard to parse, plus you've got two themers up there, and the eerie mysterious SOG. Really thankful for that ONI, for sure. The great thing about this theme was that I was genuinely curious to see what other capitals would appear, and where, so even though I had the concept early, the puzzle was still fun to work through. The only off-putting thing about the theme was that the base answers were often the kind of short dreck that no one wants to see. HES? LBOS? And yet the theme transforms those ugly answers, via the magic of added capitals, into beautiful butterflies. Plus a surprise guest appearance by LOS LOBOS! Good stuff. ALTAMONT does evoke some unpleasantness, namely the considerable violence associated with the concert in question (40D: California concert site featured in the documentary "Gimme Shelter"), but it was a culturally momentous event, it's a solid 8-letter answer, and this puzzle is bright enough to withstand the occasional bad vibes. Speaking of bad vibes ... nobody really wants to see BEN / SASSE, a feckless and intellectually dishonest senator who occasionally wagged his finger at political bad actors but voted with them every time and generally did nothing to stem the tide of conspiracy-theory thinking and white RACIAL animosity that engulfed his party. So now he's the president of a university, I think. Yep, University of Florida. Probably wagging his weary wagging finger at the "woke mob" as we speak. Yawn. Good riddance. And yet even his unwelcome presence in the grid did little to deplete the joy I felt while solving this puzzle.
ELASTIC METONYM is the best band name I've seen in a while. I think they used to open for LOS LOBOS back in the late '80s. All the names in this puzzle were familiar to me*, even Jeannette RANKIN, about whom I thought "I have no idea," but then, after the RA-, I thought "it's RANKIN, how do I know it's RANKIN? I just do (46D: Jeannette who was the first woman elected to Congress (1916)). The "name" that gave me the most trouble was actually COSMO (58A: Mag that began endorsing political candidates in 2014). I don't think of that as a "mag" that still exists. I miss mags. Remember mags? Or "magazines," as we sometimes laboriously called them? Newsstands with huge arrays of mags. Whole stores mostly given over to mags. It's how you got your pictures and words before this stupid internet thing you're on now. Sigh. Good times. Anyway, COSMO feels like it belongs to a bygone era. And yet here it is, trying to stay relevant, I guess, by endorsing political candidates. Thank god! Just in time to save us from impending fascism. Hey, I learned something new today, which is that the helicon is an instrument in the TUBA family (7D: Helicon, e.g., musically speaking). I know Helicon as the mountain location of the spring that is sacred to the nine Muses, but ... also a TUBA! Did you know Terpsichore played the TUBA? She didn't, but it's fun to imagine she did. Much funnier than that lyre she's always toting around.
