Flat-bottomed boat / THU 1-15-15 / Ottoman honorific / Nearly blind jazz great / Fashionable 1980s item resembling bit of astronaut's attire / Popular recreational watercraft / Sussex river where Virginia Woolf tragically ended her life

Constructor: Herre Schouwerwou

Relative difficulty: Medium


THEME: Quote by Ogden Nash, with punctuation included:

Theme answers:

• "I COULD HAVE / LOVED NEW YORK / HAD I NOT LOVED / BALTI-MORE"

Word of the Day: DORY (41A: Flat-bottomed boat) —

The dory is a small, shallow-draft boat, about 5 to 7 metres or 16 to 23 feet long. It is usually a lightweight boat with high sides, a flat bottom and sharp bows. They are easy to build because of their simple lines. For centuries, dories have been used as traditional fishing boats, both in coastal waters and in the open sea. Variant spellings are doree and dori. (wikipedia) [note to constructors: please immediately forget that you ever saw those variant spellings, thank you]

Hi all. It's time for my week-long, just-once-a-year-I-swear pitch for financial contributions to the blog. If you enjoy (or some other verb) this blog on a regular or fairly regular basis, please consider what the blog is worth to you on an annual basis and give accordingly. In making this pitch, I'm pledging that the blog will continue to be here for your enjoyment (or some other noun) for at least another calendar year, with a new post up by 9:00am (usually by 12:01am) every day, as usual. I'm in my ninth (!) year of writing about the puzzle every single day, and while there are occasions when the daily grind gets a little wearisome, for the most part I've been surprised by how resilient my passion for solving and talking about crosswords has been. It's energizing to be part of such an enthusiastic and diverse community of solvers, and I'm excited about the coming year (I have reason to be hopeful … mysterious reasons …). Anyway, I appreciate your generosity more than I can say. This year, said generosity allowed me to hire a regular guest blogger, Annabel Thompson, who now brings a fresh, youthful voice to my blog on the first Monday of every month. So thanks for that. As I said last year, I know that some people are opposed to paying for what they can get for free, and still others really don't have money to spare. Both kinds of people are welcome to continue reading my blog, with my compliments. It will always be free. I have no interest in cordoning it off, nor do I have any interest in taking advertising. I value my independence too much. Anyway, if you are so moved, there is a Paypal button in the sidebar, and a mailing address here:
Rex Parker
℅ Michael Sharp
54 Matthews St
Binghamton NY 13905

And here: I'll stick a PayPal button in here for the mobile users.

I assume that worked.
For people who send me actual, honest-to-god (i.e. "snail") mail (I love snail mail!), this year my thank-you cards are "Postcards from Penguin"—each card a different vintage Penguin paperback book cover. Who will be the lucky person who gets … let's see … "Kiss, Kiss" by Roald DAHL? Or "The Case of the Careless Kitten" by ERLE Stanley Gardner? Or the Selected Verse of Heinrich HEINE? It could be you. Or give via PayPal and get a thank-you email. That's cool too. Please note: I don't keep a "mailing list" and don't share my contributor info with anyone. And if you give by snail mail and (for some reason) don't want a thank-you card, just say so. No problem. Anyway, whatever you choose to do, I remain most grateful for your readership. Now on to the puzzle …

Here's the thing about quote puzzles—the quote amuses you or it doesn't. That's pretty much that. There's nothing to think about or plan, from the constructor's end. Sure, you have to worry about layout, but here the constructor cleverly / cheatingly (depending on your point of view) fudges things to get the layout to work, so with that settled … yeah, you either enjoy the quote or you don't. I thought it was OK, I guess. Not Nash's finest hour. I really do think the "punctuation" angle is cheap rather than interesting. I mean, who cares about a hyphen? It doesn't add anything. It's "clever" only insofar as it allowed the constructor to pull off quote symmetry. It has no other cleverness. And other, less fortunate punctuation marks go sadly unacknowledged. "What about me?" cries ILLSAY. "When will I get full representation!?" wails EER. The LIL TMEN are probably saying something too. I'm just saying there's no value added w/ that damned hyphen square. I was fully prepared to leave that square blank, until I went back and read the theme clue more closely. I'm bugged by the fact that the quote doesn't appear to be a poem—it has no rhyme, no metricality. Or maybe you elide the second "I", which would leave you with something vaguely iambic. Also, I'm not sure why loving BALTIHYPHENMORE precludes your loving New York. I myself am municipally polyamorous. Don't judge.

[More]
Speaking of cities, UTICA. That was my first entry. Clue says it's a city in New York, it's five letters long … UTICA! Good ol'UTICA. Gateway to … somewhere north of here, I'm sure. After I got going there in the NW, I sort of sidled down the west side of the puzzle and then up into the middle until I had shot through much of the quotation. Then I inferred (most of) the quote and finished the remaining couple of corners thereafter. Cluing seemed toughish in parts, perhaps because it had to be to keep this thing at all Thursday-worthy. For some reason [Sports division] seemed a really vague clue for EAST, and I had to start running the alphabet to get the "B" at 52A: Trust fund? (BAIL) / 52D: Exhibit some immodesty (BRAG). I'm not familiar with Stephenie MEYER. She really, really sounds like the person who wrote "Twilight," but I suspect not. Oh … wait, she *is* the author of "Twilight," and I totally misread the clue. I somehow processed ["The Host" author Stephenie] as ["The View" host Stephenie]. Well … that was disturbing. I wonder what other massive emendations my brain is engaged in on a daily basis.


Though I didn't care for the theme today, I do admire the way the constructor handled the long Downs. Lovely pairs in the middle and then longer bookends in the NE / SW. All colorful and interesting. Grateful for the '80s throwback MOON BOOT (37D: Fashionable 1980s item resembling a bit of astronaut's attire). I'd forgotten those existed. Would've been better in the plural, but I'll take this. It offsets the clue/answer pair at 6D: Bamboozle (EUCHRE), which I nominate for the olde-timiest puzzle entry ever. EUCHRE's already a pretty marginal / bygone card game, but slang for "bamboozle," which is itself pretty olde-timey?! That's … nuts. When was the last time anyone used EUCHRE to mean "bamboozle," keeping in mind that I won't believe you if your answer is any later than 19-aught-5.

Knock knock. OUSE there? Good night.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld