Neanderthal accompanier in cartoons / FRI 8-7-15 / Like inopportune months to eat oysters / Best-selling 1970s poster subject familiarly / Its English offshoot launched in 2006 / Old/new food regimen

Constructor: Peter Wentz

Relative difficulty: Easy


THEME: none 

Word of the Day: TORIC (5D: Like bagels) —

adj. of or resembling JOE TORRE, which seems kind of mean, but hey, I didn't write the dictionary.

OK, so between having dinner guests, and the first GOP debates, plural! (yes, I watched them both), and then also the final "Daily Show" (an hour long!), I, uh, don't really have a lot of time/energy for this write-up. Also, write-ups for the next few days could get a little dicey, as I am heading tomorrow to Lollapuzzoola 8 in Ye Olde Manhattane (you should go), and am not getting back til Monday. There will be drinks and puzzles and more drinks and foods and Yankee Stadium and drinks and, randomly, a Minnesota friend who just happens to be in NYC unrelated to crossword stuff, and probably some other stuff in there. So, yeah, the write-ups might suffer. Or they might improve. This is all a matter of perspective. At any rate, this puzzle ruled even though it was way too easy. Please give Peter Wentz all the Friday puzzles. Or half. Other half to Patrick Berry. Then other people when those guys need a day off. That would be nice.

["Circus life / Under the BIG TOP world / We all need the clowns / To make us cry"]
My favorite clue of the day was [Food channel] for GULLET. My least favorite answer was AOKS because honestly when is that Ever plural. RLESS can also suck it. But otherwise, mwah, big kiss for this thing. I knew things were gonna fly when I zinged a couple of longish answers right off the bat:

Usually I use short answers to build to the long ones, which is kind of what happened here, except I needed just one short answer (CLUB) to get things going. From here I finished the NW quickly and then circled the central black squares quickly, in a counterclockwise ovalish shape like so:

... leaving just some filling in in the SE, and then the NE and SW corners, which I solved, easily, in that order. I got a tiny bit worried about getting into the SW corner, 'cause you gotta come into it from the back ends of just a few answers, which can be tricky, but then this happened:

I think my last answer was LCDS. I don't really get the clue on RON PAUL, which is to say I don't really get the significance of the anagram, and I don't generally like clues that use anagrams (he's famous, why are you doing that?). I enjoyed seeing ZIPLINES as I was just on some in the mountains of British Columbia last week. I learned from one of the women in our party (a Minnesotan) that they have a ZIPLINE in the Mall of America (true fact!). My stepbrother (along with the rest of my family) was in the mountains with me. I mention him here only because he had that FARRAH poster on his wall when he was a teenager. 1979. I remember it well.
See you tomorrow and throughout my crossword weekend. Again, there's still time to register for Lollapuzzoola 8, the funnest and now only NYC crossword tournament. See you there, or here, or both.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

PS [Texan's rival] is COLT because of football. It's a football thing.

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