South American rodents / SUN 9-20-15 / Swillbelly / Journalist Flatow / Pioneering Arctic explorer John / Bo's cousin Dukes of Hazzard / Pursuer of Capt Hook / Museo contents / Hip hop name modifier / Modern-day hieroglyph

Constructor: Jason Mueller and Jeff Chen

Relative difficulty: Easy


THEME:"Put A Lid On It!"—famous people and their hats, with the hat type sitting directly on top of the famous person's name, as a "topper"

Theme answers:

• INDIANA JONES (23A: Fictional archaeologist) wearing a FEDORA
• CALAMITY JANE (28A: Famed frontierswoman) wearing a STETSON
• CHE GUEVARA (40A: Subject of "Guerillero Heroico") wearing a BERET
• CHARLES DE GAULLE (58A: Leader of the Free French) wearing a KEPI
• STAN LAUREL (83A: He helped move a piano in "The Music Box") wearing a BOWLER
• BUSTER KEATON (95A: Star of "Sherlock Jr." and "Steamboat Bill Jr.") wearing a PORKPIE
• CHEF BOY-AR-DEE (102A: Italian pitchman of note) wearing a TOQUE 

Word of the Day: VENINS (8D: Poison compounds produced by snakes) —

n

1. (Biochemistry)any of thepoisonousconstituents of animalvenoms

[C20:fromFrenchven(in) poison + -in] (thefreedictionary.com)

This will have to be somewhat brief, as I have a houseful of 15-year-old girls and it's very, let's say, distracting (lovely as they are). My daughter is having her 15th birthday party tonight—really more of a get-together with four of her friends that involves snacks and dinner and hanging out watching "Key & Peele" videos and prank-calling WalMart (we stepped in there) and, ultimately, watching the season premiere of "Doctor Who." Not a sleepover, though, so mercifully I will have my house back before midnight. For the time being, though, it's weirdly loud in this house, and things keep happening that require attention, so ... I'm gonna try to crank this out quickly.


The theme is cute but utterly transparent. I knew it was hat-related just from reading the title, and the way the theme is set up, you get a lot of squares for free if you know the particular famous person you are dealing with. I knew all the people and all the hats, so, piece of cake. Too much of a piece of cake. Like I say, you pretty much get the hats for free, and yet ... those hats (ironically) are oddly costly, in that they really really compromise the fill. If you highlight all the unlovely fill in the grid, you will see that it (unsurprisingly) tends to congregate around the stacked hat-on-person answer sets. TOQUE alone is responsible for a whole weird section of grid design, where a bunch of cheater squares (extra black squares before TOQUE and under QBS) are introduced in order to, uh, handle that "Q." If you don't have a "U" to stack that "Q" on, your options run low very, very quickly. Elsewhere, you get sketchiness in the west with IGOTO alongside COWAN (who?), and in the north with VENINS (?) crossing ANILS (crosswordese plural!). AUER ARTE EEKS haunts the BUSTER KEATON section. And all over the place you have much more subpar fill than you would (probably) have in a less exacting grid. Those "hats" really really lock you in, fill-wise. So, because the theme was ultra easy, and because the fill skewed downward, I wasn't thrilled with this, despite being a fan of many of the people in the grid (esp. BUSTER KEATON) and despite liking the basic thematic premise.


Here's a list of other stuff I would, for varying reasons, keep out of my grid if I could (keep in mind that the point isn't that any *one* of these answers is inherently unacceptable, but that in the aggregate, they become wearying):

• AORTAE
• REATA
• ANNEALS
• ANILS
• VENINS
• ANNO
• ALLA
• AGOUTIS
• IGOTO
• FRISCH
• COWAN
• AUER
• OSIER
• UNKEYED
• TSR
• EEKS
• ANDERS
• SBA
• ESTS
• RES
• RAE
• TUA
• OSA
• LETT
• EMAJ

There wasn't enough on the other side of the ledger (Wonderful Stuff) to balance things out, but I did enjoy SEEN IT! (49A: Nixing phrase on movie night) and EMOJI (69A: Modern-day hieroglyph) and AFRIKANER (79D: Literature Nobelist J. M. Coetzee, by birth), for sure.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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