Time for Debussy's faune / FRI 1-16-15 / Hemoglobin carrier / Picturesque subterranean spaces / Journalist who wrote 1943 book here is your war / Alcopop alternative / Like tarantella dancers

Constructor: Michael Wiesenberg

Relative difficulty: Medium


THEME: none

Word of the Day: ERYTHROCYTE (55A: Hemoglobin carrier) —

Red blood cells (RBCs), also called erythrocytes, are the most common type of blood cell and the vertebrate organism's principal means of delivering oxygen (O₂) to the body tissues--via blood flow through the circulatory system. RBCs take up oxygen in the lungs or gills and release it into tissues while squeezing through the body's capillaries. (wikipedia)

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 …

Hey, this is pretty good. I like this grid shape; my one NYT themeless puzzle had a very similar shape. It gives you four showcase areas, four stacks/groupings where you can take cool, longer fill out for a spin. What I like most about this grid is the breadth of subject matter. Science! French music! Hybrid punctuation!  I gagged a bit on EGOISTICAL. Try saying it in a way that doesn't make you sound like an affected, tea-drinking whist-player. I don't know why you're drinking tea, but you are, and I don't really know what "whist" is, but it sounds like you're saying it when you say EGOISTICAL. EgoWHISTical. Normals say "egotistical," of course. Gotta let that one off on a (dictionary) technicality, but don't gotta be happy about it. But nothing else clunked for me. Clues were gritty without being inedible. A fine time was had by all (of me). Here's what that time looked like. Let's start with the opening:

As you can see, I was following the time-worn tactic of drilling down the short stuff first and then seeing what your brain can do, pattern-recognition-wise, with the longer Acrosses. I had *just* enough after my first pass at the Downs to pick up SWEET POTATO (even though I had half of 1D wrong). A bit later, when I couldn't make headway, I took out AM and tried DO SO, and when that didn't work, I think I got SEE YOU LATER and IS SO simultaneously. That corner fell from there. When I hit a wall trying to move into the SW, I headed to the east, which proved most tractable. STIR IN, FATTEST, SOLOISTS, all easy pick-ups, and so the NE went down without much trouble. Soon I had a grid that looked like this:

Again, drilled down through the long Acrosses and waited for pattern recognition to do its thang. Thank god (!) for OBSERVANTLY because those other two Acrosses in the SE were not going to cough up their secrets very easily. But with OBSERVANTLY in place, the little Downs in the far SE fell easily, and after virtually all their crosses were in place, first NATURE TRAIL and then ERYTHROCYTE came into view. Big stroke of luck that JUICE BAR was so easily inferable from just the -BAR. "J" helped me take care of the whole middle, and then there was just the SW. Here's what happened there:

Hurray for the '80s. Do people still drink WINE COOLERs? (26D: Alcopop alternative) They sure did when I was in high school. I mean, I didn't—I was a total square who was too terrified to break any law (until college, when I started knocking over banks). But Bartles & James were practically folk heroes in the '80s. Anyway, again, I just needed that little bit of help from the crosses and boom went WINE COOLER. All you need is one of those long answers in any given quadrant to get serious traction. A minute or so later, I was done.

Bullets:

• 8D: Restrain, as one's breath (BATE) — OK, upon reflection, there are some clunkers in here.  Breath might be (figuratively, floridly) "bated," but nobody BATEs their damned breath. Nobody SOEVER. DEUT ITI ATA LEB NRC also aren't great, but that's a pretty small handful. And the longs are generally good, so I'm not too disturbed. 
• 30D: ___ Beach, Calif. (PISMO) — my dad took me and my sister to PISMO Beach in the summer of '78. In an RV. This trip was weirdly memorable. It was the trip on which I was introduced to baseball cards (Topps had this solitaire game you could play with the cards—basically a game recreation type thing—and I sat at the RV table and played and played and played … I can still see Jim Rice's big smiling mug …). My sister tripped over a parking curb while holding an ice cream cone and went right over onto the pavement … but maintained total control of the cone (she was 6). And this song was very, very popular: (Also, within a month my parents would be divorced. But … this song!)

• 4D: Brew ingredient from a 2-Down (EYE) / 2D: See 4-Down (NEWT) — This was wicked confusing ("Brew" being highly ambiguous), but when it came together, the phrasing all checked out. I like my cross-references spot-on and close together (check and check).

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

PS Look what I got in the mail today! Fan art! Very sweet… (it's a magnet!)