1983 Joel Schumacher film / SAT 1-17-15 / Johann opponent of Martin Luther / Gossipy affair / Michaels of rock reality TV / Figure also called crux ansata / Hip-hop's tha Kyd / First one opened in Garden City Mich 1962

Constructor: Josh Knapp

Relative difficulty: Medium-Challenging


THEME: none

Word of the Day: SYD tha Kyd (39A: Hip-hop's ___ tha Kyd) —

Sydney Loren Bennett, known by her stage name as Syd tha Kyd or more recently Syd (born April 23, 1992) is a singer, producer and DJ from Crenshaw, Los Angeles, California. She is one of the main producers in Odd Future and a singer, producer and mixer in the Neo soul group The Internet with Matt Martians. She is the main producer for fellow Odd Future rapper Mike G and the older sister of non-musical Odd Future member Travis "Taco" Bennett. (wikipedia)

Hi all. It's the LAST DAY in 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 …

Oh, man, sometimes Friday nights / Saturday mornings are The Worst, blog-wise. If I come home wiped out and just want to go to sleep, I can't, or, I can, but then I'm looking at having to blog a *Saturday* puzzle straight of bed in the morning. If there is one kind of puzzle that you shouldn't do with foggy just-out-of-bed brain, it's a Saturday puzzle. This took me probably twice as long as it should have. I honestly have no idea how difficult it was on a normal fully-awake-human scale. Felt hard (for reasons I'll get to). But maybe less hard than I made it on myself. So "Medium-Challenging" is a best guess. First off (or, second off at this point, I guess), let me say the grid looks great. All kinds of fun stuff popping off all over the place. But it was the cluing on this thing that made it really hard to process. Well, that, and my two small but absolutely lethal errors. And the fact KAZAKH never crossed my mind (until the second "K" and "Z" showed up … late).

It's weird: I started and finished in the NW. When I finished, it all went down quite easily. When I started, I got nowhere. I blame this entirely on 6D: It might have decorative feet, and more specifically I blame it on my wrong answer, ODE. I thought there was something tricky going on with "feet" there. Because on Saturday I look for tricky. And I teach poetry. Bad combo (today). ODE made me want 1A: Polishes to end in ON. But then the Fibonacci clue made no sense and neither did anything else and I just sat. Stumbled around til I found BRET Michaels (which, I suspect, is how a lot of people find BRET Michaels), and though I didn't feel good about latching onto him (see previous parenthetical comment), he got me started. NE was my first corner. Then I couldn't do a thing with the middle. Well, I got FORCE MAJEURE (a phrase recently running around my brain because of the very cool-looking Swedish movie of the same name that I am definitely going to see). But otherwise, the middle was shot through with holes. I was able to ride CORIANDER down to the SW and (easily) finish off that quadrant, but then there I sat, with a grid that looked something (i.e. exactly) like this:

Look at cute little ODE up there, ****ing everything up. Adorable. You can see he has been joined in Errorsville by his younger sister, JOIN (34D: Come together). That—that right there, 34D—is a trap By Design. Clue is written to be valid for JELL but also to apply to a different, more common "J" word (JOIN). And, 6 in the morning, I fell in. And right next to invisible KAZAKH. Ugh. Disaster. I should also remark on RICHTER SCALE at this point, which is a great answer, with a Great clue (40A: Provider of shock value?), but even with this much filled in, I couldn't see it to save my life. Things that floated through my brain: RICHARD SCARY (misspelled), RICHELIEU, RICHIE RICH… I mean, JOIN wasn't helping, but still, you'd think I could pull it out of the fire with that much in place. No. I had to diver into the SE with no crosses (dicey) and try to find new footing. Wanted ACE, didn't trust it, then (luckily!) tested NICE and got a NEPAL crossing. New hope! At this point I retried ACE and then KEEPS ON (wrong, but a good start), and then, aha, it's KOJAK, with another good but Brutal clue (52D: Noted Greek officer). I *own* the first season of "KOJAK" and took forever to get this. So then, from KOJAK, I get the SE corner, which means I get KLATCH, which means I get JELL *and* LIONIZE *and* KAZAKH, bang bang bang. Then up to DECAMP ERIE FIGLEAF and we're as good as done. And it's URN. An URN might have decorative feet. Not an ODE, whose feet are without decor, it seems.


Hard clean fun. Well, less than "fun" for me, but that's not on the puzzle. That's on 6am.

See you tomorrow.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld