Film comedy bomb of 1994 / SAT 8-15-20 / Word whispered by quiet old lady in Goodnight Moon / Worms 1980s toys / Internet marketing metric

Constructor: Joe DiPietro

Relative difficulty: Challenging (I was too tired to start a Saturday, should've just done it in the morning)

THEME: none 

Word of the Day: NAT Sherman cigars (51A) —

Nat Sherman is the brand name for a line of handmade cigars and "luxury cigarettes." The company, which began as a retail tobacconist, continues to operate a flagship retail shop now located on 42nd Street, off Fifth Avenue, in New York City. Corporate offices are now located at the foot of the George Washington Bridge in Fort Lee, New Jersey. [...] Sherman advertised during New York Giants radio broadcasts. Every major play during the game, Giants commentator Bob Papa exclaimed "Get that man a Nat Sherman cigar!". / Slang terminology for a PCP-laced tobacco cigarette is a "sherm" or "sherman", named for the brand.

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Sometimes trying to write this blog in the 10pm to 7am window just ... doesn't quite work out. I get too tired too early, fall asleep on the couch, wake up in a kind of no man's land, and have to decide, "OK, solve and blog now, or set the alarm for 4am and solve and blog then?" I was fully prepared to go with the latter, but after I'd brushed my teeth I thought, "well, I'm up, let's just do this." Tonight, that was Not the right call. I haven't been this off a puzzle's wavelength in a long time, and I just found almost every part of this solve grueling and unpleasant. It was especially unpleasant because except for the center, the grid looks like a Monday or Tuesday grid—lots of black squares, lots of short stuff. And let me tell you, there is something particularly awful about having to wade through so much short stuff that is clued at nth-degree difficulty. I'll take my difficulty almost any other way, but, like, brutal clues on crap like MSG and GLO and (ugh) SIDE A, you can shove all of that. The SW was pretty tractable, but the rest, oof. I kept stopping, which is not something I normally do during a solve. The center stack actually looks OK, but who in the world is going to be excited by techno-corporate garbage like ADCLICKRATE and SALES and AOL ("pioneer"?) and ETRADE even OPEN A NEW TAB. Did a sales algorithm with a LA QUINTA loyalty card write this puzzle? And speaking of OPEN A NEW TAB ... and GET A SHOCK, and MADE A NEST ... again, oof. Big "ATE A SANDWICH" energy. Indefinite article abuse. This was just SOUR NOTE after SOUR NOTE, but the main issues were: too much short stuff (so, lots of fussy difficulty for zero payoff) and too much stultifying fill. Again, those three longer Across answers in the middle are nice. But man I did not enjoy myself one bit with this one.

Also unpleasant—how reliant I was on crosswordese just to get a toehold in this thing. First things I wrote in were stuff like NCR and OREM and ODE and DOER. Had THAT (at 8D) and no idea about the rest (THAT IS SICK). Had GET (at 9D) and no idea about the rest (GET A SHOCK). So moving between parts of the grid ... I just got repeatedly stymied by what ultimately seemed like pretty arbitrary phrases (you'd probably say "THAT'S SICK," honestly, and again, the whole "A" in the middle of so many phrases (like GET A SHOCK) just kept making me shake my head. 

Here are some Selected Problems:

Problems (selected):

• SIDEA (2D: Finer cut, usually) — "Finer cut" is ugh. No. It's the radio-friendly cut, perhaps, but that doesn't make it finer. Just horrible misdirection.
• RITA (14A: Romance novelist's award) — probably seen this before, but ... blank. At one point wanted EDNA
• ARABS (1D: About 5% of the world's population) — if you say so. Totally random. No life in the clue at all. Horrid.
• BEHESTS (20A: Commands) — archaic / formal / almost never seen outside of a prepositional "at" phrase ... no idea. Had INSISTS.
• ARKS (6D: Asylums) — first, it's asyla, and second, I barely know what this means. Ah, I see the third def. is "place or thing furnishing protection; refuge"; this feels about as in-the-language as plural BEHESTS
• ARCHER (15A: One taking a bow) — I had ANCHOR. . . because ... "bow" is nautical, maybe? I don't know. Again, I'm very tired.
• CAN'T GO (5A: Terse invitation to an invitation) — weirdly equivocated over that "G," thinking it might be a "D" (I mean, if CAN DO is a thing...)
• MSG / GLO / AOL — just a rough ugly corner, that NE. Because of the quot. marks, I had "No MAS"; no idea what these alleged "1980s toys" are .... GLO Worms, you say? I had SNO Worms at one point
• DUO (19A: Smallest possible band) — well this is a lie. I direct your attention to the phrase "one-man band." 
• NAT (51D: ___ Sherman cigars) — no idea none zero. Cigars ... LOL yep if you wanted a topic farthest from me, that's the one. Just no hope here.
• LINEN (40D: Scrim material)— by this point, I disliked the puzzle so much that my brain kind of shut off. It was all I could do to put together Any kind of "material" from the letters I got from crosses. Sure, LINEN totally makes me think of "scrims" and vice versa, awesome. Whatever.
• ROLLS UP TO (32D: Arrives at in a vehicle) — I had PULLS UP TO, though as errors go that one was not bad; easily fixable
• LANA (25A: One of the film-directing Wachowskis) — I wanted MIRA, why? Is the other one MIRA??? Dammit, it's Lilly. Where the hell did MIRA come from?
• CEE (33D: Artichoke heart?) — this was the worst. Saw right through it ... but in the wrong way. I wrote in ICH. You see. You see how that works, right? That's *at least* as "good" as (ugh) CEE. 

Good riddance.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

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