Constructor: Matt Ginsberg
Relative difficulty: Easy
THEME: "Fitting Rearrangements" — names or phrases that are aptly described by their own anagrams (both the name/phrase and its anagram appear in the grid—sometimes intersecting, sometimes symmetrical); I believe the term is APTAGRAM
Word of the Day: ORNIS (
71A: Local bird life) —
ornis [ˈɔːnɪs]
n(Life Sciences & Allied Applications / Zoology) a
less common [emph. added] word for
avifauna[from Greek: bird] (freedictionary.com)
• • •
This was fun. Please understand, though, that these aptagrams are *found*, not *invented* by the constructor. You can find any of these aptagrams out there on various anagram sites. The puzzle was pleasant to solve, but the fact that it involved no particular ingenuity on the part of the constructor means I can't bring myself to ooh and aah that much. Feels a little bit like passing someone else's cleverness off as your own. Getting some of the anagrams to cross is impressive, but it also introduces a major stylistic inconsistency: some pairs cross, some are simply symmetrical (mere symmetricality is much easier to pull off). Still, as I say, it was an interesting challenge to figure out the aptagrams. I'd certainly never seen any of them before today, so the fact that the answers are pulled from pre-existing anagram lists didn't affect my enjoyment at all.
Fill gets dicey in places, but overall seems pretty smooth. My only problem was with
ORNIS (!?!?!). I also got a bit slowed down in some of the gunkier little nooks and crannies. The
CTR / TRAM / RABE nexus, for instance, or the
SETA / ABORC corridor. Everything else seemed to fall quickly into place. No, wait, I spoke too soon. The clue on
AIDA? Yeesh (
6A: Memphis belle?). I had -IDA and couldn't see it. Memphis was, of course, an ancient city of Egypt. Nothing about "belle" said "slave girl" to me, so good thing I could figure out that
6D: Grant, e.g. was
AID, or I might have thought the belle was VIDA or LIDA or god knows what and just assumed it was some character I'd never heard of. Oh, I also wrote in EXIT LANES for
SLOW LANES (121A: They're on the left in Britain).
Theme answers: 
- 31A: Procrastinators' enablers (SNOOZE ALARMS) / 3D: ALAS, NO MORE ZS
- 24A: College student's place (DORMITORY) / 116A: DIRTY ROOM
- 55A: "Decision Points" author (GEORGE BUSH) / 30D: HE BUGS GORE
- 79A: Galileo, for one (ASTRONOMER) / 54D: MOON STARER
- 42A: Visa offering (DEBIT CARD) / 94A: BAD CREDIT (this one is kind of lame, in that a lot of people with good credit have debit cards)
- 103A: "Great" 1666 conflagration (FIRE OF LONDON) / 63D: INFERNO OF OLD
I got off to a pretty quick start (after I figured out that the cobbler was
SOLING and not SHOING). Got
ARSENAL off the "A," which felt like a major accomplishment (
26A: British soccer powerhouse). I like when I just know stuff without having any good reason to. I also like when I remember stuff that has stumped me before—today, that was
EMILES (122A: "South Pacific" protagonist and namesakes) and
EZER (123A: Former Israeli president Weizman). Would've remembered
90A: Opera character who sings "Largo al factotum" but didn't have to. Had enough of the answer that "opera character" alone was more than enough to get it (
FIGARO). I always forget that
CORDELIA is a
[Legendary queen of the Britons immortalized by Shakespeare], probably because she is never queen in "King Lear." She dies before the king. So ... not sure what's up there. Am I remembering that right? Lord I hope so.
If nothing else, I learned something about Anaïs
NIN today (
52A: Novelist who had two spouses simultaneously). And TV's McCloud (!?) (
45D: Hometown of TV's McCloud => TAOS). And
ABERDEEN (15D: Scotland's "Granite City"), where I once attended a conference. Gorgeous, but then I've never been anywhere in Scotland I didn't like.
Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld
P.S. in case you missed it yesterday, check out
my conversation with constructor Matt Gaffney about a 1989 Sunday NYT puzzle over at David Steinberg's "Pre-Shortzian Puzzle Project" website.
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