Like a wet blanket / SAT 9-26-15 / Frothy drinks with tapioca balls / Excellence, in modern slang / Old-school rapper? / Hirelings of old / Carry before delivering / How Viola dresses in "Twelfth Night"

Constructor: David Woolf

Relative difficulty: Medium-Tedium



Word of the Day: FERULE (Old-school rapper?)—

fer·ule

ˈferəl/

noun

historical

noun: ferule; plural noun: ferules

1. a flat ruler with a widened end, formerly used for punishing children.

...children and crossword solvers, amirite? Lena Webb here, literally filling in for Rex. It took me a while (an hour) but I filled it in and, well, it was:

I've solved some puzzles lately that make good use of staggerstacks, and the first couple steps down this puzzle's stairway are solid but the ground floor collapsed under the multiple awkwardnesses of VILLAINESSES. Yes, RADIO SILENCE and PUT A RING ON IT are lively, crisp, sparkling, dripping in DOPENESS, etc., but I felt pretty meh about CAMERA LENSES despite the "heroin chic" clue (38A: Shooter's bagful) and then VILLAINESSES. What, ESNES wasn't good enough? CameraLENSES, even! Why not throw in ESSES (?D: What this puzzle does not need more of). Personally, I've moved beyond the tacking on of "-ess" to women who are just doing a normal job... or being a normal villain-- let alone pluralizing them in a crossword. Stewardesses? Flight attendants. Waitresses? Servers. Villainesses? Villains. "Oh, Villainess! Can you grab me a can of whoop-ass from the fridg--"POW! 

LATTE ART and CILANTRO were very nice, PALTRIEST got some side-eye from me, and I didn't like THE MOB or AS A MAN (there is some unspoken crossrule that makes "the" best implied and not seen, and ASAMAN is just another arbitrary source of "gentle letters," as I like to call them).

The LATTE ART is not amused

And was the marquee-- an appropriately French word-- worthy of the additional life-giving square that makes this puzzle 15x16? I'm sorry, but no. The whole time I was thinking "jeez, everything is so vertical! Am I a boring, horizontal kind of lady?" Maybe. I will admit to feeling constrained by the single black square blocking my entry to the "mini-puzzles" in the  NW and SE-- but back to France. I love French. I gleefully pencil in all those French crossword answers you probably hate. But APRES MOI LE DELUGE was too much. Perhaps it is my own naiveté that had me thinking this would be something we might hear tossed around, say, the Republican debates but no. I got Seven Years' War-shamed on this one. Louis XV. Was he huge? I just figured this would have been a phrase that is used in modern political shenanigans. C'est dommage!

Despite what I've said, NO FUN is too harsh. I like that this grid flips the NYTimes' 15x15 table, and I know what it's like to have dynamite seed entries demand some compromises, so please join me in thanking David for constructing a grid for us to solve and discuss.

HUAC! Sorry I had to cough.

Bullets:

• 27A: Travel mag advertiser (B AND B)— My boyfriend and I know this as the cocktail  "Bénédictine and Brandy," rather than that B&B on the Cape (point is, "and" seems weird with the already abbreviated "B")
• 20A: Out-of-this-world settlement (MOON BASE)— Is there a moon base? Not yet.
• 52A: Photographer's support (UNIPOD)— Selfie stick or the pics didn't happen. (Selfie stick in Wikipedia is described as a MONOPOD omg)

Signed, Lena Webb, Court Jester of CrossWorld

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