Word of the Day: Brian ALDISS ( 13D: Hugo-winning "Hothouse" author Brian) -īrian Wilson Aldiss OBE ( / ˈ ɔː l d ɪ s/ 18 August 1925 – 19 August 2017) was an English writer and anthology editor, best known for science fiction novels and short stories. ELIZABETH WARRIN' (57A: Massachusetts senator wagin' conflict?).OWIN' WILSON (51A: Bein' in debt to a "Wedding Crashers" co-star?).ABRAHAM LINKIN' (34A: The Great Emancipator sharin' URLs on his blog?).KEVIN BAKIN' (21A: "Footloose" star cookin' a fresh batch of brownies?).HOLDIN' CAULFIELD (17A: Cradlin' a Salinger protagonist?).THEME: PUNS - famous people whose first or last names end in -N are clued as if their first or last names actually ended "-IN'" (that's "I" "N" "apostrophe," as if the "G" were yokelishly dropped from an "-ING" ending"): Signed, Whit Vann, Pretender to the Baronage of the Southwest Corner of CrossWorld 44D: Scan options for the claustrophobic ( OPENMRIS) - Who isn't claustrophobic in an MRI machine?.I might have been more pleased if I'd taken the all-downs approach. There's some meat to the down answers and the puzzle can stretch its legs there. ( ANNOTATION) - I realize I haven't really talked about any of the downs, and I think that's because I mostly solved this on the across clues. I know that I paid 99 cents for a phone app and then immediately gave up trying to learn.
Apparently Go is one of the hardest games in the world to master. 68A: Chess:check::go:_ ( ATARI) - I did not know that was where the word Atari comes from.He lives in Celesteville, and his wife is named Celeste, so I like to imagine that there is a complicated matriarchal power structure in Elephantland and Babar is a puppet king. Always happy to see Babar floating around the world. 65A: Kid-lit character with a green suit and gold crown ( BABAR) - Babar rules.And, like, that's half the reason you'd pick up that book to start, right? Tell me about how I can get one of those in my name! (Turns out he just decided to do it. I read Phillip Hoare's ( HOAR - 14A Frost) biography a few years back and very much enjoyed it, though he only addresses the one thing everyone knows about Noël Coward - that funny little diacritic - very obliquely. And the theme answers themselves were all pretty good - I liked RACEHORSE and ARTTEACHER (I'm just writing out the actual word here, it looks silly otherwise.) I picked DRYMARTINI as the word of the day because I a) love martinis and b) love to see Coward get a shout-out in the crossword. Still a trick, but more on the clever side than I expected. Each clue on the across is missing the same letter, and put together, those missing letters spell: M-A-R-G-I-N. But I will tip my hat, because there's more going on with those missing letters than I first realized.
And I get kinda testy with crosswords when I know the answer but I can't make it fit. The approach - slicing off those first and last letters for the theme answers - usually feels less like a feat and more like a trick. I confess that I don't care for this type of puzzle. This took me 18 minutes, give or take, which is on the high end of my stats for a Thursday.
RTTEACHER (20A Educator in a Smock - ARTTEACHER).HIMO (10A Classic Jumbotron Shout-out - HIMOM).
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