Dinosaur in many Nintendo games / SAT 6-27-15 / Godfather of gangsta rap / Twain's Tom Canty / US built route that's mostly outside US / Bluegill crappie / Rice variety used in rice pudding / Handsome surgeon's nickname on Grey's Anatomy / Relatives of recitatives

Constructor: Tim Croce

Relative difficulty: Medium


THEME: none 

Word of the Day: PONY CAR (62A: Mustang, e.g.) —

Pony car is an American class of automobile launched and inspired by the Ford Mustang in 1964. The term describes an affordable, compact, highly styled car with a sporty or performance-oriented image. (wikipedia) 

I was a bit worried when I started, as fat corners can be hard to fill well, but I think my eyes were playing tricks on me—the corners aren't that fat. In fact, this is a 72-worder (maximum for a Fri/Sat themeless), and those higher word-count puzzles usually yield pretty tasty results. And I did indeed end up enjoying the taste of this one, mostly. Didn't look like there were going to be many (any?) marquee answers—nothing longer than 8 in the grid, and only four of those—but puzzle gets a Lot of mileage out of those 8s, and the 7-laden corners come in pretty clean and occasionally sparkly. I definitely had to struggle a little with this one; with only narrow passageways in, those corners can go south on you real quick. But I was able to whack my way through the often tough cluing and finish in normal Saturday time. Satisfying work, overall.


Despite needing lots of help with both PAN FISH (?) and PAR FIVE, I got my claws into that NW corner pretty readily. Here's the opening gambit:

IRAS first (5D: They can roll over, briefly), and then, when TAPIOCA didn't work, somehow ARBORIO leapt right to mind. (I know TAPIOCA is not "rice"—why do you still insist on logic from me?) NBCNEWS followed shortly, and that was enough traction to get through the NW. Entire center felt very easy. Blew right through it. But the path into the NE was a little ... fraught. Wasn't sure the JOKE part of SICK JOKE was right. And I totally botched 8D: Leave an online game in a huff. Not a gamer, so when presented with -QUIT, I went with HATEQUIT, which I quite like. And since the "A" was right and gave me ARAL SEA, I got stuck for a bit. Luckily I knew ALCAN MATTY and NANO, so I worked RAGE QUIT out without too much trouble. Moved into SE where I forgot the SOUL part of KIA SOUL, but somehow remembered YOSHI, or at least the latter 3/5 of him (trust me, that "-SHI" mattered). Another corner down:

That left the SW, where I for sure had the most trouble. First, as I have never watched "Grey's Anatomy," I misremembered the guy's nickname as DR. DREAMY (38A: Handsome surgeon's nickname on "Grey's Anatomy"). Weirdly, ILE got me out of that ("CL-" yes, "RL-" no at 39D: Born Blonde brand). But this corner was tougher. MISHAPS just didn't come, even with MIS---S. Cluing ARIZONA as simply a "Brand name" was borderline cruel. HIT AT is always awkward to me. Didn't know if it was TICK or TOCK. Wrote in PONY CAR then felt like I'd just made it up, so took it out. Took some self-convincing to put it back. Got EASY-E but spelled it thusly. So between TICK and EASY-E, I "finished" with the "Brand name" as ARISINA:

Getting from there to the end didn't take much mental effort.

Have a nice day. Probably won't be as nice as Friday was, but we can always hope.


Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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