MONDAY, May 3, 2010 — Nancy Salomon

THEME: [Warm welcome for an old friend] — same clue for three theme answers


Theme is blah, but the fill is decent. I especially like EYE-POPPING (28D: Amazing to behold). Wish grid were moreso. One big complaint: "LOOK WHO THE / WIND BLEW IN" feels much weaker (i.e. less in-the-language) than the other two answers. LOOK WHO THE CAT DRAGGED IN out-googles the WIND answer by a nearly 8-to-1 margin. I guess you wouldn't say LOOK WHO THE CAT DRAGGED IN to an old friend. Well, I would, but *you* probably wouldn't.

Spent Saturday at Loyola-Marymount University as a judge/scorer for the "Crosswords L.A." charity tournament. I'll do a full write-up of the experience at some point later in the week — it's Sunday as I write this, and I'm about to leave to go experience DUDAMANIA! — i.e. see the L.A. Philharmonic in action, woo hoo! My best friend from college is a season ticket holder, god love him. I will say this about the "Crosswords L.A." tournament now, though: great fun. Warm, interesting people who are not afraid to geek out about puzzles in public. Elissa Grossman is the hardest-working woman in the crossword tournament organizing business. She is very pregnant, and was still running the show (including dealing with a number of unforeseeable glitches) like a champ.

[Me, PuzzleGirl, Doug Peterson]

Contestants were way chattier and generally warmer than the (much larger) crowd at the Brooklyn tournament tend to be. Don't know why. I think the whole atmosphere in L.A. was more intimate, less daunting, which made conversation among strangers pretty easy. I *loved* being a judge. Had some great profanity-laden shouting matches discussions about crosswords, contestants' handwriting, wrong answers, good and bad clues, etc. with my fellow judges, especially Tyler Hinman, Doug Peterson, Alex Boisvert, and Todd McClary. We spent much of the day in a windowless room wrestling with scanning/scoring software, which ended up being much more entertaining than it sounds. Elissa's dad David and brother Mike were handling the tech — lovely people to work with (I'm partial to father/son pairs named David and Michael, for personal reasons). Elissa is the queen of corporate swag, so she had So Many Prizes available, even after official prizes were handed out, that she had to raffle them off to contestants at the end. I think half the crowd walked out of there with some book or giant gift basket or something. Randomest freebie: giant poster of Russell Crowe as "Robin Hood" — [Unnecessary self-important epic movie, 9 letters].

[What the hell am I doing with my hands?]

Theme answers:

• 17a. With 59-Across, warm welcome for an old friend ("LOOK WHO THE / WIND BLEW IN")
• 27a. Warm welcome for an old friend ("HELLO STRANGER")
• 43a. Warm welcome for an old friend ("LONG TIME, NO SEE")

Crosswordese 101: KIR (32D: White wine apéritif) — Kir is a popular French cocktail made with a measure of crème de cassis (blackcurrant liqueur) topped up with white wine (acc. to wikipedia). I'd never heard of it until I started doing crosswords seriously. I knew a Lady Miss Kier, lead singer for the band Deee-Lite, because their song, "Groove is in the Heart," was the most ginormous hit of my late college career. I have never seen KIER in a puzzle.

• 42a. Flower associated with Holland (TULIP) — had the -LIP part and completely reflexively wrote in OXLIP — an instinct only a constant solver would make.
• 55d. Boo-boo, in totspeak (OWIE) — the "word" "totspeak" must die. I don't believe it is a word. Plus, furthermore, additionally. BOO-BOO in "totspeak" is BOO-BOO. It's *already* "totspeak." Yeesh.
• 44d. Reject (NAY-SAY) — so NAY-SAY is a transitive verb? Well that's a new one to me.

See you Friday,
~RP

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