Relative difficulty: Medium
THEME: "Cagey Answers" — Gs (following Ns) in familiar phrases become Ks, resulting in wacky phrases, clued "?"-style
Word of the Day: GUSSET (42A: Reinforcing bracket) —
In sewing, a gusset is a triangular or square piece of fabric inserted into a seam to add breadth or reduce stress from tight-fitting clothing. Gussets were used at the shoulders, underarms, and hems of traditional shirts and chemises made of rectangular lengths of linen to shape the garments to the body. // Gussets are used in manufacturing of modern tights or pantyhose to add breadth at the crotch seam; these gussets are often made of breathable fabrics for hygiene when wearing pantyhose without panties. (wikipedia; perhaps the first WOTD related to not wearing panties—another milestone!)
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I found this one clungy, which really should be a word, perhaps to describe something that is clingy, but in a really unflattering way. But back to the puzzle: the theme is very simple, but there is not a lot of thematic payoff, and the non-theme fill is really subpar in many places. Many, many.
A theme this simple needs to be perfectly consistent *and* scintillating. You Must Stick The Landing. And yet only a few of these theme answers strike me as winners; I particularly like LADY SINKS THE BLUES, though I'd have had a woman NHL player scoring a series-ending goal rather than a countess bankrupting the team. A few of the others are cute, but then there's ONE THINK AT A TIME, which is nauseatingly ungrammatical, or at least far far out of the language in its use of "THINK"; and KINK OF THE ROAD, which is just bland. But worst of all is BIG BANK THEORY. It is the one inconsistent theme answer, and its inconsistency is twofold. First, every other theme answer is -ING->-INK. To have *just one* that goes -ANG->-ANK is really annoying. Second, uh, there's a stray "G" there. In "BIG." So your title all of a sudden becomes a false ... false ... falsity (I'm channeling Norman Bates here; god I love that scene, with him and Marion and the *&%^ing stuffed birds everywhere—maybe one of the best scenes in that, or any, movie). Your Gs are Ks or they're not. Maybe, just Maybe, if every answer had been -INK, I could've forgiven that outlier. But that's for some alternative universe to know. In this universe: boo.Theme answers:
- 24A: How organized philosophers deal with ideas? (ONE THINK AT A TIME)
- 30A: Highway S-curve? (KINK OF THE ROAD)
- 51A: Countess bankrupts St. Louis N.H.L. team? (LADY SINKS THE BLUES)
67A: Warning before driving past the town dump? (THIS MAY STINK A LITTLE)- 85A: Wayne Gretzky? (THE LORD OF THE RINKS) — a pun I've seen before, specifically in a WSJ puzzle from earlier this year
- 103A: Being too large to fail? (BIG BANK THEORY)
- 116A: Singles bar pickup strategy? (A WINK AND A PRAYER)
Lots of Jewishish clues today, with Ehud BARAK and "Fiddler"'s YENTE, and the O.T.'s EDOM and SARAH and ONYXES (65D: Biblical breastplate stones). I had no idea about the ONYXES, but they're an important feature of the high priest's breastplate in Exodus, from what I can gather. I also had no idea about CLANTON (49D: Ike or Billy at the O.K. Corral). Not a name I recognize at all. Would've guessed CLAYTON if HEY had made any sense as an answer for 66A: Cackler (HEN). Other things I didn't know included GUSSET—never seen or heard the word before—and the you've-gotta-be-kidding-me answer of the day, LINN (70D: Philatelist George, founder of the largest weekly newspaper for stamp collectors). I was surprised to find that the Oscar-winning Frank today was not CAPRA but LLOYD (71D: Frank ___, two-time Oscar-winning director).There was some stuff that I loved, including not one but two ampersandwiches (RANDR, XSANDOS), DUKAKIS (4D: Loser of 1988) curled up with a
SPY NOVEL, and the not-heard-from-in-25-years PAM DAWBER (110A: Onetime Robin Williams co-star) (I like that the clue doesn't throw you the "Mork & Mindy" bone but forces you to use crosses to go hunting through *all* Williams's co-stars). ASTHMATIC is nice too (29A: Bronchodilator user). But there was just too much little junk. Everywhere, gunking up the system: EAN, ABRA (99D: Incantation opener), LINN, AIN (93A: French river or department), LINEARA (!?) (98A: Ancient Cretan writing system), ASOK (!!!), ADAIR, TMS, NTS, ADE, ISE, EASER (...). Etc. I do like "OH, GEE" crossing OGDEN, as "O" and "G" are the first two letters, and OGDEN seems like a place where an expression like "OH GEE" might still have some currency ("O.G." also stands for "Original Gangster," which I'm guessing there are precisely none of in OGDEN).Bullets:
57A: Actor Wilson (OWEN) — FLIP!? Is it FLIP!? No? Dang.- 114A: So-called Mother of Presidents (OHIO) — "Mother of Presidents" sounds almost like a slur.
- 119A: Flying monster of film (RODAN) — always want to spell this guy like the sculptor.
- 6D: Animals with black-tipped tails (STOATS) — wanted OKAPIS, which, when you think about it, makes almost zero sense. I knew STOATS were weasels, but black-tipped tails—that, I did not know.
- 90D: Wives in São Paulo (SENHORAS) — One of my few Portuguese gimmes.
- 100D: Hybrid clothing for women (SKORTS) — one of the great modern portmanteaus.
- 102D: Actresses Best and Purviance (EDNAS) — Purviance? Really? Let's see ... what era, what era? I'm gonna guess she was big in the '40s ... [Googling] ... whoa, off by 20 years. She was in a bunch of Chaplin films in the teens and '20s. She would have fit right in in Friday's puzzle ...
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