Onetime Coors alcopop / WED 8-26-15 / Sculptor who pioneered Dadaism / Canadian airline with directional name / Israeli novelist Perfect Peace / Hoops legend with statue in Philadelphia / Religion founded in 19th-century Persia / Image in Timberland logo / Black hues in Shakespeare /

Constructor: Ian Livengood

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium


THEME: HUMP DAY (53A: Middle of the week ... or an appropriate title for this puzzle) — circled squares make form of a "hump" in the grid (four times) and spell out CAMEL

Word of the Day: John OSBORNE (58A: Playwright John who wrote "Look Back in Anger") —

John James Osborne (12 December 1929 – 24 December 1994) was an English playwright, screenwriter, actor, known for his excoriating prose and intense critical stance towards established social and political norms. The success of his 1956 play Look Back in Anger transformed English theatre. // In a productive life of more than 40 years, Osborne explored many themes and genres, writing for stage, film and TV. His personal life was extravagant and iconoclastic. He was notorious for the ornate violence of his language, not only on behalf of the political causes he supported but also against his own family, including his wives and children. Osborne was one of the first writers to address Britain's purpose in the post-imperial age. He was the first to question the point of the monarchy on a prominent public stage. During his peak (1956–1966), he helped make contempt an acceptable and now even cliched onstage emotion, argued for the cleansing wisdom of bad behaviour and bad taste, and combined unsparing truthfulness with devastating wit. (wikipedia)

By far my favorite part of this solve was getting to 26D: They're blown for good luck and then looking at my grid and realizing I had this:

I haven't literally LOL'd mid-solve in a long time. That was fun. But the puzzle itself, let's see... I'm not sure I fully understand it. That is, I feel like I must be missing something. I know Wednesday (today) is commonly known as HUMP DAY, and I know camels have humps, and I see the word "camel" in the form of a hump four times in the grid. So there's some layers here. But the revealer feels a bit anemic, in that the "day" part isn't really relevant to all the camel business. And there are four humps ... just because. Arbitrary number. That's how many would fit, I guess. And there is no other thematic material, so ... it's kind of like a themeless, only with not terribly interesting longer answers. This is an interesting but kind of conceptually ragged puzzle. Fill is also slightly less great than I've come to expect from Ian. But those "camels" cannot have been easy to build a grid around. Not cleanly. And really it's just a few answers that feel off (EBONS, most notably).


Fill is oddest / worst / weirdest in and around the revealer. POL POT, ugh, man, I'd do Anything I could to avoid that guy. HITLER is banned from crossword grid, but *this* guy's OK? I guess POL POT's only responsible for the deaths of 1-3 million people, so maybe he is "better than HITLER," but still, yikes. Not loving OSBORNE (?) or WESTJET (??) either. Middling / obscurish proper nouns taking up a lot of real estate, while also creating the conditions for crud fill like OUSE and ANE. Also I stared at LIMBS as the answer for 47D: Post-storm detritus and thought "damn, that's pretty gruesome." Then I realized the limbs were from TREEs. At least I hope they are.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]