Fashion designer Perry / MON 11-12-12 / Helen of Troy's mother / Rombauer who wrote Joy of Cooking / Scat queen Fitzgerald / 1980s actor with mohawk / exclamation in Frankenstein / One-named New Age singer

To contact us Click HERE
Constructor: Randall J. Hartman

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium



THEME: KROOZ — theme answers all end with KROOZ homophones

Theme answers:

• 17A: City with a boardwalk on Monterey Bay (SANTA CRUZ)
• 27A: General Motors sedan (CHEVROLET CRUZE)
• 49A: Vacation on the Caribbean, maybe (CARNIVAL CRUISE)
• 65A: Chain gangs, e.g. (WORK CREWS)

Word of the Day: "Beau GESTE" (54A: "Beau ___") —

Beau Geste is a 1924 adventure novel by P. C. Wren. It has been adapted for the screen several times. (wikipedia)

• • •
Just back from a student-faculty potluck dinner, so I am chock full of an alarmingly random assortment of food. Surprisingly, I feel fine. It's weird to be in a place where most people still know me only as "that medievalist we hired a while back" (if they know me at all). Crosswords didn't come up once. The student who invited me was delightful and amongst all the adequate food I was able to score a quinoa & fall vegetables salad that was clearly made by someone who knew what she was doing. Delicious. Someone just bought a grocery store pumpkin pie and it was just sitting there on the dessert table, still in its plastic container. I was happy to see that it was still there, intact and untouched, two hours later. My daughter's ginger snaps, on the other hand, were mostly gone. The president of the university spoke briefly. Mostly platitudes, but that's sort of his job. The real hero of the night was Al Vos, faculty master of Hinman College, who is a hero and a saint. I've never met anyone who has such unfeigned enthusiasm for teaching and advising undergraduates. Humbling and inspiring—qualities I too rarely associate with academics.


Then I came home and there was a puzzle. I've often (or at least occasionally) wondered why CRUZE doesn't appear more frequently in the puzzle. I remember thinking, the first year Chevy started making that model, "well that's going to get some airplay." But you really don't see it that often. I think today's puzzle was the reason the CRUZE was invented—so someone could pull off this theme. Really wouldn't be the same with just the three, although you could do interesting things with the other theme answers if you made them all names: HARRY CREWS (author), VICTOR CRUZ (football player), PABLO CRUISE (70s recording artist) ... Anyway, this seems a fine theme. Really puts that "Z" in CRUZ to good use with the double-Z DAZZLE cross. Also, this puzzle has CLAPTRAP (10D: Mumbo-jumbo), which is never not a good answer. Much better than ROT or BOSH or NONSENSE or even PSHAW (a word my mom used to like to say, and we used to like to mock her for). My wife has never seen or heard the expression ALL WET before (50D: Completely wrong); I don't know how I know it except maybe from 50s-60s sitcoms (?). It's definitely a bygone idiomatic phrase. Puzzle's kind of heavy on the four-letter lady names today: IRMA *and* EDNA? (37A: Rombauer who wrote "Joy of Cooking" / 69A: Poet ___ St. Vincent Millay)You so rarely see them in the same room together. Throw in ENYA and LEDA and LENA and ELLA and ... well, that's six four-letter ladies. Plus Little EVA. And MR. T. Now I'm just listing names. I'll stop.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld