Mollycoddle Dwayne Johnson / WED 2-18-15 / Onetime Microsoft encyclopedia / Letters on Soyuz rockets / Baseball's oldest-ever rookie age 42 / tea party crasher of fiction / Weapon with bell guard

Constructor: Ed Sessa

Relative difficulty: Medium


THEME: SCRIPT THE FLIP — ___ THE ___ phrases where post-THE and pre-THE words switch places, resulting in HIGH-larity


Theme answers:

• BABY THE ROCK (17A: Mollycoddle Dwayne Johnson?)
• BOOKS THE COOK (22A: Enters charges against a restaurant employee?)
• QUESTION THE DUCK (36A: Try to find out what's what at a pond?)
• BLAME THE BEAR (46A: Shift responsibility for some missing campsite food?)
• DECK THE SWAB (56A: Kayo Popeye?)

Word of the Day: STANDEE (23D: One who can't find a seat, say) —

A standee is a large self-standing display promoting a movie, product or event. They are typically made of cardboard, and may range from large self-standing posters to three-dimensional devices with moving parts and lights. (wikipedia) 

[also … noun

1. a person who stands, especially in a passenger vehicle when all the seats are occupied or at a performance or sporting event.] (google)

Pass. As in "I'll pass," not as in "I give this a passing grade," because I don't. This one has problems aplenty. First, you could do this theme forever, which means you could do this theme with far, far better theme answers than this. Second, while BOOKS THE COOK is actually the solidest reversed phrase of the bunch, that third-person "-S" really plays havoc with consistency. One thing that made this thing "Medium" instead of easy was That inconsistency—I had BOOK and immediately wrote in THE because … well, that's how all the other theme answers go. So, ding. Not ding as in "hey, good one," but ding as in "mark against you." OK, so third, and this is the biggie: these phrases are not at all good in their original form. "Rock the cradle" is a stand-alone, solid phrase. "Rock the baby"… is not. It's a verb phrase, sure, but it is not tight. "Cook the books"—tight. "Swab the deck"—solid. The others … yeah, not so much. QUESTION THE POPS, yup, that works. Duck? Here's what google thinks of that:


Now, maybe if "Duck Dynasty" hadn't put out a stupid Christmas-themed book of some sort, the results would be different, but still, no "the question." It's a real phrase, it's just … not bam pow stick-the-landing real. And BLAME THE BEAR? Better to BLAME THE SHOULDER. Here's what Google thinks of "Bear the blame":

Put the blame on Mame, or shoulder, or somewhere besides the bear. Google hates "rock the baby" most of all:

OK, I'm surprised "cradle" and "vote" didn't come up there ("vote" actually did just come up right now, so maybe my Google is haunted), but still, BABY THE ROCK is just off. CRADLE THE ROCK is soooo good. Should've tried harder to make that (and all the others) work. Themers should be better, solider, funnier, etc. The only difficulty in this puzzle came from the theme answers being all wonky. Had QUESTION THE… and BLAME THE… and still couldn't close the deal, so the entire SE portion had to be opened up from within. Not hard. Just slower than solving might otherwise have been. Point isn't the time, though. Point is the miserable theme answers.


Fill is boring and not good, but that's not news.

VOID THE FILL!

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld