Loosely woven fabric with rough texture / SUN 8-27-17 / Gangnam style hitmaker / Candy that fizzes in mouth / Facial feature of Bond villain Ernst Blofeld / Old Russian ruler known as moneybag / Antiparticle first observed in 1929 / Backflow preventer in drain

Constructor: Jeff Chen

Relative difficulty: Medium-Challenging

THEME: "Location, Location, Location" — four clues read [some other clue, literally?], and that other clue doesn't exist—rather, the numeration is embedded inside some other answer. Thus:

Theme answers:

• 29A: 23-Across, literally? = LAST PLACE (because if you go to 23-Across (which is actually *inside* 22A: Astonishing March Madness success, e.g. (CINDERELLA STORY)), you will find the word LAST sitting there. So 23-Across is a PLACE you find LAST, or LAST PLACE)
• 43D: 56-Down, literally? = DEAD SPOT (because DEAD has a SPOT inside 42D: Contributed to the world (MADE A DIFFERENCE))
• 55D: 60-Down, literally? = TEST SITE (because the SITE of "TEST" is inside 14D: New Hampshire (THE GRANITE STATE))
• 106A: 118-Across, literally? = CANAL ZONE (because the ZONE occupied by CANAL is inside 116A: Detective in a lab (FORENSIC ANALYST))

Word of the Day: RATINÉ (9D: Loosely woven fabric with a rough texture) —

n.

A loosely woven fabric with a rough nubby texture. (freedictionary.com)

• • •

Architecturally interesting, but a straight-up drag to solve. Fussy and unenjoyable. Any theme whose entire premise is cross-referencing is already on shaky ground, and then add in the essentially unclued theme answers (blah blah, literally?), and the fact that you have to get those longer answers even to begin to see what the theme answers are referring to ... yeah, no. You made your little piece of art, but from a solving standpoint, there's no fun here. Well, FUN FACT is kinda fun (95D: That the sum of the numbers on a roulette wheel is 666, e.g.). But not much else. In addition to the "?" clues on all the themers, there seemed to be a ton of "?," which really added to the difficulty level. I'm only counting seven of them, but more than half of them were impossible for me to get without many crosses. Not unfair, though it would've been nice if more of them had really hit the mark. 79A: Disaster film? (OIL SLICK) is the only one I really like. The others are just OK.

By a long long long shot, the hardest part of the grid for me was the entire MADE A DIFFERENCE section (and thus the nearby DEAD SPOT section). Everything was made worse by my having FIELDING instead of WIELDING at 64D: Handling well. I don't associate "well" with the mere fact of WIELDING; hence my initial answer. I just had to pepper that area with short stuff until it started to cohere, which seemed to take forever. I also booted LILI (wrote in GIGI) (70D: 1953 Leslie Caron film). Not much else was really beyond my ken today, except RATINÉ, which ... wtf?  I kept wanting GOES LONG for 34D: Runs for a long pass, say (GOES DEEP), even though "long" is clearly already in the damn clue. Oh, and even though I was actually *in* Fort Collins this summer, I saw the clue 118D: Sch. in Fort Collins (CSU) and wrote in ... TCU. Maybe I was thinking Fort Worth (which is weirdly where TCU actually is ... though I could not have told you that before doing this write-up). Anyway, that's all. That's it. Not a bad puzzle, but one that I found grating, just because of its architecture and basic premise.

[97A: ___ Lenoir, inventor of the internal-combustion engine]

New episode (004) of "On the Grid" (my crossword podcast with Lena Webb) is out now (on Soundcloud and iTunes) so if you've got 37 minutes to spare in the coming days, check it out. Thanks.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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