Saturday, 11/11

NYT 5:46
Newsday 4:57
LAT 4:53
CS 3:06

Reagle 8:14

After Ellen Ripstein tipped me off to another sighting of yours truly in the special features on the Wordplay DVD, I watched the segments with the constructors talking about their featured puzzles (included in a booklet inside the DVD case). They were all interesting, but I was a bit put out by Elizabeth Gorski's name being misspelled on screen as "Gorsky." (Spelling counts!) My son made me play the Gary Louris music video over and over—I must say I'm glad my six-year-old rock fan never got into the Wiggles, because three rounds of "Every Word" has got to be far more tolerable than even one listen of "Fruit Salad."

The Saturday NYT is by Brendan Emmett Quigley, who plays guitar (correction: he now plays keyboards) in a Boston band. Whether he plays a GIBSON guitar, I don't know. (My husband's new guitar is a Breedlove.) My favorite clues and fill here included [Spanish uncle?] for NO MÁS (as spoken by Roberto Duran when he quit during a boxing match against Sugar Ray Leonard), [Term paper?] for CONTRACT, [Slammed] for LIT INTO, STONERS, and YECCH. For the Gateway Arch designer, I had EADS in my mind—he's actually the engineer who designed the Eads Bridge across the Mississippi in St. Louis, whereas the Arch is by Eero SAARINEN. (Major props to BEQ for including Eero's last name for a change. First time in the NYT, according to the Cruciverb database.) The Death of Marat is in a BATHTUB, of course (thank you, art history class). Have you ever recreated that scene at home just for fun? Me neither. '80s pop culture gets a couple shout-outs, with THE CARS and REPO MAN, which costarred Harry Dean Stanton, who was recently profiled in Entertainment Weekly. Sure, he's 80 years old now, but he still parties with his Hollywood neighbors and is Mr. Cool. From '50s pop culture comes the song, C.C. RIDER, which apparently transformed R&B singer Chuck Willis into the King of the Stroll. What, pray tell, is the Stroll? A line dance from the '50s, apparently. I'm not a big ESPN fan, especially not a "Baseball Tonight" fan, o WEB GEMS was new to me—and new to crosswords, almost certainly. Never heard of AIRMADA, but it makes sense for [Fleet of warplanes], doesn't it?