Dutch branch of Rhine / SAT 9-12-15 / Knoxville hockey squad / Taxonomic designation like rattus rattus / singer/songwriter Sands

Constructor: Damon Gulczynski

Relative difficulty: Medium


THEME:none 

Word of the Day: Knoxville ICE BEARS (37D: Knoxville hockey squad) —

The Knoxville Ice Bears are a professional ice hockey team. The team competes in the Southern Professional Hockey League. They play their home games at Knoxville Civic Auditorium and Coliseum in Knoxville, Tennessee. The Ice Bears are coached by Mike Craigen, a former Ice Bears fan favorite.^{[peacock term]} He is in his 5th season as head coach. The Ice Bears have made the playoffs in all 13 years of their existence. In 2006 the Ice Bears defeated the Florida Seals to take their first President's Cup. The Ice Bears won back to back Presidents Cup Championships in the 2007-08 and 2008-09 seasons. On April 18, 2015, the Ice Bears defeated the Mississippi RiverKings 4-2 to sweep the 2015 SPHL Finals and win their 4th Presidents Cup. (wikipedia)

The majority of this puzzle was amazing. The end ... well, we'll get to that, but, excluding the SE, everything about this puzzle stands head and shoulders and sternum above most of the tame, dull, old-fashioned, safe, arcane fare we've seen too often in 2015 NYT puzzles. Answer after answer made me stop and go "wow." Scads of stuff that is current or fun or both. Even the clue on the three-letter GIL made me happy (I was staring at his name on my bookshelf the other day thinking, "really gotta get him into a puzzle..."). How often do three-letter answers do anything but either just sit there or make you miserable. So, from FAUX FUR (great clue) to BI-CURIOUS to CHRISTIAN MINGLE (hurray!), I was enjoying myself plenty. Funniest moment early on was (mis-)reading the clue for CHRISTIAN MINGLE (34A: Forum for seekers for faithful partners?) and immediately thinking ASHLEY MADISON! "So timely!" I thought. I also wanted EGG for 7D: Part of many a sci-fi film (CGI). In my defense, when presented with -G- and that clue, EGG is a totally valid answer.

Started in the NW, which is pretty typical, and after dropping the gimme LARUE (3D: Lash in old westerns) and then entering and pulling GAFFS a few times, I saw LUIS (though I needed the presumed terminal "S" from 6D to remember his name) (24A: ___ Suárez, player suspended during the 2014 World Cup for biting another player), then got UNI, and with the two "U"s in place, managed figure out FAUX FUR (19A: Vegan wrap?).

Wasn't long after this I got BLAXPLOITATION (which would've been a 14-letter gimme if I'd just looked at the clue earlier) and then moved across the top and got BICURIOUS LILLIAN HELLMAN! I'm teaching Hammett and reading a Hammett biography right now, so she's been somewhat on my mind. Gonna be hard to find better pillars to hold up your puzzle than BLAXPLOITATION (4D: Genre of the 1970s movies "Foxy Brown" and "Three the Hard Way") and LILLIAN HELLMAN (15D: "Toys in the Attic" playwright, 1960).

Thank god for the relatively easy stuff I knew, because there are some obscure, back-of-the-dictionary curiosities ladled in here (perhaps to satisfy the needs of the solver who just wants his/her vocabulary / knowledge tested). GALBA! And TAUTONYM, yikes! I wrote in TAUTOLOGY (a relatively obscure word I actually *did* know ... but it didn't fit). Throw in OTALGIA (which I pieced together from root words, but which I wanted to be OTITIS), and yeah, things get a little dicey in an old-school kind of way. But the surrounding material pulled me up and out. Moved down the grid to my very favorite wrong answer of the day—staring at C--- (42D: Vint ___, one of the so-called "fathers of the Internet"), I was like "I know that guy!" and dropped in ... CINQ. Vint CINQ! Whaddya mean, "Who?" You know, the guy ... has that Benjamin Button-type disease where he's eternally 25 ... Vint CINQ! (It's CERF, of course).

But now we get to the SE, where I finally, actually struggled, which would be just fine on a Saturday, except the struggle resulted from insane proper nouns, so that when you finally got them, the feeling was "WTF?" and not "Oh!," the way you want breakthroughs to feel. If it weren't for Tony OLIVA (gimme), I might still be lost down there. Here's where I finally crawled to:

That [Dutch branch of the Rhine] at 43D could've had *any* letter, as far as I knew. I see know that "Dutch" kind of tells you "look out for Js," but ... no. And then there's ICE BEARS, which is so obscure it's kind of hilarious. I don't think it even has a pretense to crossworthiness. I imagine that answer going "Heyyy guys, sorry, but they really really really needed me so I'm standing in for where a real answer would normally be. Please don't be too mad." The "Southern Professional Hockey League" is a thing? I love that it contains a team named the Florida Seals, because ICE SEALS was my first guess here. And as you can see, I did the DUH-for-DOH thing, a completely predictable mistake that made JOB LOSS just impossible to see. I ran the alphabet at -AVER and missed RAVER somehow (probably because they were RAVE KIDS in my 1990s). Ugh. So, geographical obscurity meets massive sports obscurity across the DUH/DOH bridge, and I am screwed. I have to say, though, that it was ICE BEARS that eventually pulled me out, in that I just kept inserting things that felt like they could be team names. First SEALS. Then BEARS. And there it was.


So, the lesson: more puzzles like this, please. Except the SE. I mean, we get it. You're into hockey (see also SABRES at 6D). But indulge your hobbies more sparingly.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

P.S. one of today's commenters asks the very valid question, "Why not change RAVER / SCORE into RAVEN / SCONE?" I have to agree that the "N" option seems in every way superior. Also, fun fact: RAVENSCONE was my Sorting Hat designation! RSCONES4LIFE!

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