THURSDAY, Feb. 8, 2007 - Dan Reichert

Thursday, February 8, 2007

Solving time: unknown

THEME: "CH" => "SH" - theme answers are familiar two-word phrases where a "Ch-" sound at the beginning of one of the words has been changed to a "Sh-" sound, creating a wacky new phrase, which is then clued, e.g. 18A: Web listings for an old western? (Shane links)

Don't have much time today, so I'll be (uncharacteristically) brief. Fell asleep last night before puzzle time, so did the puzzle this morning as I milled about the house, eating and what not. The puzzle seemed very easy - for the third day in a row. I wish I'd done it online, as I'm pretty sure I would have beat my best Thursday time - felt like I could have done it in under 8, maybe closer to 7, but I'll never know.

The theme was OK - nothing awe-inspiring, but cute and fun. The most tepid of the theme answers was 46A: Part ownership in a bar? (lounge share) - no sparkle, no flare, no fun mental picture; the best of the theme answers, on the other hand, was 56A: Comment on a woman from Copenhagen? ("She's Danish") - there's something about the terseness and colloquiality of the phrase, as well as its complete reorienting of the meaning of DANISH, that pleases me tremendously. I imagine that there's this woman doing something awfully strange, like eating potato salad with her hands, and when Guy 1 sees her, he turns to Guy 2 and asks, "What's her problem?" Guy 2 replies "Who? Her? Oh, SHE'S DANISH."

Danger, Danger

Here is some fill that is creeping into the grid a lot - too much, perhaps. Thus, I feel a need to put out a warning before the fill becomes totally overexposed and I become (more) peevish.

10A: Damage assessment grp. (FEMA) - unless this is clued [Grp. formerly headed by "Brownie"] or [Infamously incompetent grp. of 2005], I'd rather not see it.
29A: More remote (icier) - this little bit of fill is awfully uppity for a five-letter word (and a comparative adjective at that). If the Pantheon weren't averse to comparatives, ICIER might have a place somewhere just underneath ENOLA in the Pantheon 5-letter pecking order.
44D: Like most music in record stores nowadays (on CD) - we Just had this answer, didn't we? Although last time I think it was clued as something like [How most people buy their music nowadays], which comes closer and closer to being untrue with each passing year. This clue is accurate, but ON CD ... needs a mini-vacation. For a similar problem (not featured in this grid) see IPOD.
33D: Equine color (roan) - this comes up a lot a lot a lot. It was one of the most searched answers at my site at one time, when it was clued via some obscure bit of trivia from, I believe, Shakespeare's Henry V. KOAN, yes; ROAN, no (or at least dial it back a bit).
63A: Syrian leader (Assad) - he's OK, but he appeared very recently, clued the same way, so I'm just putting out an early warning signal here.
48D: Sea eagles (ernes) - [squawk!] They're everywhere! Three times this month already! But I take it back. I love my ERN(E)S. I want to make them the official mascot of my site, but that's treading too close to Stephen Colbert territory, so I'll just admire them from a distance (which is apparently the best way to admire them - they are not, er, friendly creatures).

Thorniness

There wasn't much thorniness, but there were a couple of moments where I pulled up short. I cascaded down the grid until I hit 42A: Beaut, which I had --ACH. As BEAUT is an abbreviated form of the word BEAUTiful, I was thinking the answer would be something similarly truncated, and nothing would come to me. This made the Down cross 39D: Biology topic (heredity) very hard to see, with just the "H" sitting there and all those blanks squares spread out before it. I had to restart in the deep SE with the semi-gimme 64A: Days of _____ (yore) (THUNDER wouldn't fit) and then work my way back up the grid, solving HEREDITY from its tail end and then, finally, seeing PEACH, an answer I'm not too fond of, giving its cluing, but I guess it's fair.

An other slight slow-down for me occurred in the general region of the HOSEA (50D: Book after Daniel) / ROOTED OUT (52A: Expunged) intersection. HOSEA wouldn't come to me, despite my having the "H," because, once again, as I've said, if it's Biblical / Hebraic, I'm a dead man. ROOTED OUT took forever to come to me, especially considering I had the -EDOUT part of it quite quickly. I do not think of ROOTED OUT and "Expunged" as being very close synonyms. One is something done to something hidden or buried, like ROOTS, and the other is done to something on the surface, like graffiti or chalk. So :-(

While we're on the subject of badly clued fill, I'd like to register my objection to 47D: Seemingly forever (on end) - I'm trying to substitute "seemingly forever" into a phrase containing ON END, and I'm not getting anywhere.

Ironically, one of the last squares to get filled in was in the name of someone I am very, very well aware of. 7D: "Movin' Out" Tony winner looked like a clue I'd have No way of getting without crosses, and since that's what I believed, that became the truth, despite the fact that the actual answer, Twyla THARP, is someone whose name I own quite well. I own a book by her. I've blogged her before. She Attended My Alma Mater, for god's sake. And even after I solved it, I thought "Wow, I only know one THARP - I wonder who this guy [yes, guy!] is." Yikes. Weird brain slip.

Final observations: Totally spaced on the Bushes' dog - was thinking MILLIE, from the first Bush administration, not BARNEY (45A: Bush White House dog), from this one. CECE Winans (34D: R & B's Winans) has a very weirdly spelled name. I could not have spelled it correctly before this puzzle. But then again, I can't spell CEMETERY. I mean, I just did, but I spent many minutes yesterday, my mind wandering while in traffic, wondering how in the World one spelled CEMETERY. All answers seemed wrong. Surely there's an "A" in there ... yet there's not. On and on my brain pondered the weirdness of CEMETERY (I live near a couple of them, so the word comes more readily to mind than you'd think). For my feelings on Lindsay LOHAN's reappearance in the grid (46D: Actress Lindsay), please see the subsection of yesterday's blog entry, "Some notes on the word 'Actress.'"

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

12 comments:

Anonymous 11:42 AM  

Bush on Iraq: "I will not withdraw even if Laura and Barney are the only ones supporting me."

- John

Anonymous 12:25 PM  

For the sake of the tournament you might want to scan a list of the books of the Hebrew Bible, and both Old and New Testaments, including the Apocrypha, of both Protestant and Catholic Bibles. And, for the same reason, consider a quick read of a book of Bible stories for children. A well-educated liberal arts grad ought to be acquainted with this literature and its putative authors and characters.

Hopefully helpfully yours,
Faithful fan

Anonymous 1:21 PM  

One funny experience I had with today's puzzle was trying to suss out "Bush White House dog" with "_ _ _ N E Y" sitting there. I sure was hoping against all hope that the missing CHE letters would fall in with the crossers...

Orange 1:28 PM  

Almost everything I know about the bible, I learned from crossword puzzles and from a single viewing of Jesus Christ Superstar during college, possibly while drunk. I get by all right with that...

Anonymous 2:03 PM  

For all my Biblical queries, I refer to this quote from a renowned Bible scholar:

"If the Bible has taught us nothing else--and it hasn't--it's that girls should stick to girls' sports, such as hot oil wrestling, foxy boxing, and such and such."
--Homer Simpson

Anonymous 2:11 PM  

That's one way (or two ways). But the number of puzzles with biblical content likely to be encountered randomly between now and the tournament would seem to be limited. Can you recommend any specific puzzle books or online puzzles that could help REx become more familiar with some of the bible-related terms that might be in tournament puzzles? He has indicated that he is lacking in that area. No disrespect intended.

As for me, I'm not competing. My interest is strictly as a well wisher to Orange and Rex both. I'm a fan of both.

As ever,
Faithful fan

Rex Parker 2:14 PM  

O I'm "acquainted" with all that stuff. But like acquaintances, the names (and their spellings) tend to slip very easily from my mind.

Forget "well-educated liberal arts grad" - how 'bout "Ph.D. in Medieval Literature" ...

RP

Rex Parker 2:35 PM  

First - the string of comments that runs from evad's CHENEY comment, through Orange's Jesus Christ Superstar comment, to Anonymous's Homer quote is the single greatest run of comments I've ever received here. Highly quotable - I laughed out loud at all of them.

Second - at first I felt condescended to, but now I feel moderately touched by Faithful Fan's genuine concern about the lacunae (zing!) in my Bible knowledge. S/he's even asking better solvers to help me; it's almost as if s/he were related to me... and trying to help me get into the right college.

Your faithful blogger,
RP

Anonymous 7:44 PM  

Didn't you write in an earlier blog that an aunt was funding a "tournament scholarship for you?

Orange 8:55 PM  

It takes a village to raise a crossword tournament contestant.

Anonymous 10:40 AM  

51 D: ISLA as in Madonna's song LA ISLA BONITA from the late 80's.

51 D Spanish Vacation site

Anonymous 12:15 PM  

Just signed up for the online version. May continue to make a few comments on puzzles and blog posts from six weeks ago as I do the puzzles as they come to me in my daily paper.
I enjoyed Amy's apparent nod to Robert Fulghum, author of "All I Really Need To Know I Learned In Kindergarten" and...a (probably retired) Unitarian minister. The following quotation is from...Anonymous: "All I really need to know about the bible I learned at the Unitarian church..."
To me, this was funny on many levels...

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