Bygone Chinese money / SUN 7-5-15 / Westernmost island of Aleutians / Indiana city where auto manufacturing was pioneered / Smack That singer / Art of flower arranging / Onetime Nair alternative

Constructor: Elizabeth C. Gorski

Relative difficulty: Easy


THEME:"Heads of State"— a Mount Rushmore puzzle. Nicknames of four presidents on Mount Rushmore appear as long Down answers, in the order (left to right) that the appear on the monument. Flanking the names are long, orienting answers: KEYSTONE, SOUTH DAKOTA / HOME OF MOUNT RUSHMORE

Theme answers:

• AMERICAN CINCINNATUS (22D: *Nickname for George Washington)
• THE MAN OF THE PEOPLE (4D: *Nickname for Thomas Jefferson)
• HERO OF SAN JUAN HILL (33D: *Nickname for Theodore Roosevelt)
• THE GREAT EMANCIPATOR (9D: *Nickname for Abraham Lincoln)

Word of the Day: TAEL (91D: Bygone Chinese money) —

noun

noun: tael; plural noun: taels

1. a weight used in China and East Asia, of varying amount but fixed in China at 50 grams (1 3/4 oz.).

   • a former Chinese monetary unit based on the value of a tael of standard silver. (google)

Sooo happy to see Liz Gorski's name when I opened my puzzle this evening. She told me she still had a few NYT puzzles coming out, and I guess the day after the Fourth of July is a reasonableish place to put this one. Only two of them are considered Founding Fathers, but one of them wrote the damned Declaration of Independence, so I'm gonna say this counts as a kind of bonus holiday weekend puzzle. I always think of Liz's puzzles as architectural and monumental—big ideas, artfully executed. She did the amazing Guggenheim Museum puzzle several years back. This one isn't as ambitious, and is in many ways straightforward, but I still found it mostly delightful. Also, I discovered that I am *terrible* at presidential nicknames. Just awful. I had filled in huge chunks of several nicknames and still couldn't land any of them. Look at this:

Actually, it's clear from this snapshot that Jefferson is THE MAN OF THE PEOPLE, but I must've just got that "PE-" because before that, no idea. I guessed the CINCINNATUS part of AMERICAN CINCINNATUS only because I remember looking up who CINCINNATUS was a few months ago and remembered that he was some kind of model Roman statesman. Did not know that was Washington's nickname. I couldn't even remember the name of Teddy Roosevelt's damn hill. Brain was blocked with BUNKER HILL. Also, SAM HILL, as in "What in SAM HILL is the answer to this clue?!?"


This grid structure results in a lot of short stuff, and that short stuff gets a little dicey at times. TAEL and ATTU reek of the crypt. A crypt that smells like pre-1993. And I nearly crashed the ship on the shoal of HOTE / AKON. And there's a lot of run-of-the-mill OREM OTOO NEET-type stuff, but it only made me EWW a little. Decent big idea, lively theme answers, some nice longer stuff like IKEBANA and KINSHASA and GROUND CREW, and I'm reasonably happy.

Bullets:

• REDINK— to dink again. The clue can tell me this is RED INK all it wants (5D: Debt, symbolically), but my brain knows what it knows.
• SPHERIC— AL had the day off (81A: Ball-like)
• ARIL / URAL— originally ANIL / ARAL. They all sound like "kinds of sex" to me now.
• AUDIE (61D: Cornish of NPR) — honestly, when I filled in her name, I said "Awww" out loud, like she was my daughter and she'd just won a ribbon or something.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

P.S. Julie Delpy, for the win, for now, and for always. (28D: "The ___ Breathe" (2007 drama with Kevin Bacon and Julie Delpy))

[Follow Rex Parker on Facebook and Twitter]