Farmer-turned-con man in 1960s sitcom / MON 12-20-10 / Self-description someone surprised / Nancy Drew's beau / 1960s-'70s R&B singer Marilyn

Constructor: Donna Hoke

Relative difficulty: Medium-Challenging

THEME: Animal's Something — two-word idiomatic expressions where the first word is the possessive form of some animal


Word of the Day: CADGE (7D: Bum, as a cigarette) —

intr. & tr.v., cadged, cadg·ing, cadg·es.
To beg or get by begging.

[Perhaps back-formation from obsolete cadger, peddler, from Middle English cadgear.]

• • •

This was much more of a struggle than your average Monday, which I know is a weird thing to say about a puzzle that took me 3:17, but that's better than 40 seconds slower than my time last week, and on Monday, 40 seconds is an Eternity. At 76 words, with many 6- and 7-letter Downs, and with a good amount of white space up top and down below, this grid ended up having more interesting fill than most early-week grids—and only once did "more interesting" mean something very bad. I'm speaking, of course, of "MR. HANEY" (25A: Farmer-turned-con man in a 1960s sitcom). I needed every cross to get him, and I still couldn't place him once I was done. Lucy's boss was MR. MOONEY ... who the hell is MR. HANEY??? Well, wikipedia tells me he is some secondary (if not tertiary) character on "Green Acres!" Who the what the?! I'm going to go out on a limb and say that that is Not a Monday answer (Friday or Saturday, maybe). 30 years ago, maybe. But today ... wow. Wow. Talk about your outliers. But as I say, that's the only answer that stunk, and it stunk mainly by (massive) contrast with how good the rest of the grid is. CADGE and OZMA (37D: Princess in L. Frank Baum books) and ROTUNDA (10D: Capitol feature) and EZ PASS (39D: Modern toll-paying convenience) and AIR SHOW (45D: Event for stunt pilots) and OSPREYS (even in the plural) (42D: Fish-eating birds) gave this puzzle a good amount of sparkle.

The theme ... is fine. Absolutely standard Monday stuff. No strong feelings there. Wife claimed not to know what MONKEY'S UNCLE was, but a. she's from NZ and b. when I prefaced it with the phrase "Well I'll be a..." she said "Oh ... yeah, maybe ..." I had more trouble with ELEPHANT'S EAR, despite having seen [Elephant's ear] as a clue for TARO very recently. I wrote in ELEPHANT ROOT. This made MEASLY (49D: Pathetically small) even harder to see than it might have been otherwise (wife had MEAGER, a reasonable wrong answer).

Theme answers:

• 17A: Game played with strings looped over the fingers (CAT'S CRADLE)
  
• 22A: Self-description of someone who's surprised (MONKEY'S UNCLE)
  
• 36A: Long time (DOG'S AGE)
  
• 50A: Taro (ELEPHANT'S EAR)
  
• 60A: What a greedy person may grab (LION'S SHARE)
  

Bullets:

• 5A: 1960s-'70s R&B singer Marilyn (MCCOO) — I feel like I have a special connection with Ms. MCCOO. I watched her often in my youth when she was co-host of "Solid Gold" with Andy Gibb ...

... and she was also the singer of the #1 song in the country on the day I was born ...


... plus I just really like this song ...

• 30A: Oklahoma city named for the daughter of its first 4-Down (ADA) — wow ... that is one of the oddest cross-referenced pair of answers I've ever seen ... so ADA had a POSTMAN before it was named? Or the guy who named the city after his daughter later became POSTMAN? That must be it. Oh, and by the way, hated the clue on POSTMAN only because "in an old movie" overlooks the (at least as famous) book by James M. Cain. Plus, only one "old book" has the title "The POSTMAN Always Rings Twice," while there are at least two "old movies." It's a book, is what I'm saying.
  
• 58D: Nancy Drew's beau and others (NEDS) — important crossword trivia; know your NEDS! (Rorem, Flanders, Beatty, etc.)
  

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter]