First Friday

My first Friday.  It’s fine Friday fare, nothing fantastically fabulous, but I feel it’s fairly fun.  With its publication, I now only need a Wednesday puzzle to complete the New York Times “cross cycle” (a puzzle published on each day of the week).  For the past year or so, I’ve been submitting puzzles I think are Wednesday worthy, but they either get rejected or they run on a different day.  I have a puzzle set to appear in a few weeks that I thought -- nay, prayed -- would run on Wednesday, but it’s going to be a Thursday.  Dang!  C’mon, Mr. Shortz, help a fella out!

Anyway, although I feel my best themeless puzzles are still in the queue, I like this one okay.  It’s got a nice debut entry (NOTAGBACKS), a few other zippy long answers (e.g., WHATAJERK, WAXESPOETIC), and not a ton of crud (with one notable exception, discussed below).  What else can you ask for?  I have a feeling the “too many proper nouns!” / “who’s ever heard of x?!” / “crossword puzzles aren’t supposed to be trivia contests!” crowd is not going to be particularly fond of this one.  So I've formulated a preemptive response to these anti-name scolds: (a) the proper nouns in this puzzle are at least spread out over many different aspects of culture; you’ve got Shakespeare, classical music, pop music, world leaders, sports, TV, art, and literature – they cut a pretty broad swath, no?; (b) I like proper nouns in my puzzle; (c) despite (b), I have made a concerted effort to limit the amount of proper nouns I use in my puzzles; this one was submitted before I received any feedback from my previous puzzles and before I had a puzzle rejected for the express reason that it contained too many names.

The non-proper noun NOTAGBACKS was my one and only seed entry in this puzzle.  SKINFLICKS came next off the K.  I like this crossing, because it takes me back to my childhood.  NOTAGBACKS because I have fond memories of playing tag in my neighborhood (we used to say, “back back no tag backs” for some reason); SKINFLICKS because I also have fond memories of going to the video store and trying to pick out the raciest movie I could find that my parents would still let me rent.  It was a simple joy, a delightfully tricky challenge of which kids today will never know.  I mean, I don't think video rental stores even exist anymore.

My success rate of scoring genuinely dirty movies was essentially nil, but that didn’t stop me from trying.  The best I ever did was I once convinced my parents to rent Revenge of the Nerds.  But there was one big catch: They insisted on watching it with me.  To this day, those two hours still rank quite highly on my “Most Awkward Moments of My Life” list.  Also, Revenge of the Nerds is a terrible movie with an awful message.  A group of nerds are rejected by the jocks and the hot chicks who date the jocks, so they respond with some hilarious high-jinks, like setting up secret cameras in a sorority so that they can record women disrobing.  Funny!  You just have to ignore the fact that in real life that's stalking, and it's actually a very serious crime.  And then at the end of the movie the main nerd rapes the main jock’s girlfriend, but everything is cool, because she thought he was really good in bed!  This is actually what happens.  Arthur Chu wrote a really good article a few years back that touches on this.  It is still worth a read.

So renting Revenge of the Nerds turned out to be a failure, and I don't remember scoring any other off-color rentals.  The skin flick I was always most intrigued by was Flesh Gordon.  (With a name like that, how could I not be?)  I used to stare at its cover -- always to the left of Fletch in the comedy section -- in wonder.  I knew my parents would never let me rent it, so I told myself that once I was old enough, I would get it for sure.  But, of course, once I actually was old enough to rent it on my own, I had little desire to do so – just like I also didn’t want to eat an entire box of Garfield Fruit Snacks and drink a case of Hi-C...  You know, I wonder if Flesh Gordon is available on Netflix.  Maybe I’ll rent it sometime.  Maybe it will be really campy and funny.  Or maybe it will be terrible, and I’ll wish I had spent those precious hours of free time doing something I actually enjoy.  Yeah, that one is much more likely.

Alright, I think I’ve gone far enough astray from the ostensible topic of this post (my puzzle).  Let’s hit a few bullet points and call it a day.

• Overall the cluing feels a bit musty me -- too straightforward.  It needs a little more pizzazz, some zig and some zag.  I was going to blame Will and Joel for this, but in looking at my original submission, I see they changed a relatively small percentage of the clues.  The mundanity is almost entirely on me.
  
• The counter to my point above is that I've found solvers rarely complain about clues that are too straightforward.  The opposite reaction is much more common, whereby solvers complain clues are too clever by half or trying too hard or too obscure.  When in doubt, play it down the middle.  But I think it's possible to be too down the middle.  It's a tricky balancing act, and I don't think I quite got it right with this one.  Live and learn.
  
• My least favorite entry in this puzzle is APIE, by far.  I think it and SSR are the only big liabilities in the puzzle.  Jeff Chen at XWord info disagrees, also calling out AME, INICE, LALA, and ESO.  I see these more as neutral, or, at least, something between neutral and liability.  Although, I would like to see La La Anthony get some puzzle love (my clue for LALA) -- a person with 500K Google hits is much better than nonsense syllables, in my mind.
  
• Actually, INICE is a liability too, if only because ONICE is such a more frequently used phrase.  In this particular instance, it is especially unfortunate because it crosses GILLS ("Half-cup measures"), leading to a possible GOLLS/ONICE error.  (A few people, including Jeff, said they made this very mistake.)  What happened is that I tried for a clever clue for GILLS ("Measures for people whose cups are half-full?"), but Will/Joel nixed the pun.  That's fine, but in that case, I'd much, much rather go with a clue that references fish, so that it's something the solver knows for sure.
  
• Actually actually, in retrospect, I would probably do away with GILLS altogether and make it GOLDS.  That would give us the superior ONICE, but it would also require changing ULNAS to EDNAS, which is a downgrade.  (Plural names = meh.)  The main reason I didn't do this is because I didn't want the dupe ONICE and ONEND so close together, but this is a silly reason as solvers rarely notice/care about dupes like this.  Live and learn.
  
• In my previous puzzle, I used WILLACATHER, so it was cool to get OPIONEERS into this one.  I would love to tell you I’m a huge Willa Cather fan and have read all her work, but the truth is I had never even heard of her prior to her inclusion in my last puzzle.  I did, however, read her Wikipedia page, which, although surely not as substantial as the novels she wrote, is still pretty interesting.
  
• Speaking of writers.  I'm a wannabe writer myself.  In fact, I recently wrote a book about baseball that word nerds might enjoy.  (It's got a review on Amazon!  And I don't think it's from a family member!)  You should buy it, even if you have no interest in the subject -- just put it on your bookshelf.  It looks nice; the cover is very close to ETON blue.

Until next time...

PS -- I notice there is some debate about "real trooper" vs. "real trouper".  I think the former is correct for the purposes of a standalone idiom.  Perhaps it should be trouper, grammatically, but the phrase "real trooper" has been co-opted by the general public, in a way that "real trouper" hasn't.  See the screenshot below:

I rest my case.