Derrick

Just wanted to thank folks for their kind comments and to address a couple of questions that I saw in the queue: Someone asked about Joel's eleventh-hour edit, and the answer is that he removed ROUGH/ROUGE (Abrasive powder) from the bottom left and relocated the H/E pairing (to PATH/PATE -- Trail/head). Why? Because he was concerned that (Carol) Heiss, the figure skater who defined the crossing entry, might not be sufficiently well-known nowadays. As to the nitpicks vis-a-vis DUTCH/DITCH, they are absolutely right: It's syntactically awkward. Yet I found it irresistible, especially given that it doubled-up the upper right corner. (Whose other entry was originally ZANE/MANE, as in Grey hair, as opposed to ZANY/MANY.) And COLT/VOLT is indeed a slight abuse of "power," but this puzzle required some artistic license. The TOAST repetition didn't faze me at all, given that the word is only part of the answer and it's being used differently, but the RACKS dupe was indeed real. CD RACKS came out of Joel's late effort, as WINE RACK already existed in the NE corner. I suggested replacing it with WIN A RACE, but CARED then would become CAR AD and we had a few cars already, including within a theme clue. Finally, my original puzzle had thirteen slashes (unworkable online), which was a faint clue of the pangram -- which I in turn hoped would be a genuine solver's aid as they progressed through the puzzle (what letters haven't appeared yet). Oh, well. Thanks again to all.

You never know what you're going to find/learn while rummaging through the comments, do you? I had no idea that SAUTERNE had an "s" at the end, and my pitiful excuse -- that I've had wine maybe three times in my life -- may not help my cause! I've certainly seen it without the closing "s" any number of times, but that excuse may be no better than my first one. Sigh. My bad. Was a little surprised to hear about the aversion to proper names. Sure, as a constructor, I have reworked many a corner to reduce its dependence on names, even well-known ones, but you've got me here: This was a theme built entirely on proper names, so I guess it was doomed at the outset for many of you. Did the names skew to the old side? Maybe, but the majority are at least still alive (hooray for Barbara Eden!), and it's always hard to generate a well-rounded set -- and even if you do, the person who knows Bill Withers and Tom Waits may not be familiar with Elle Fanning, etc. On that note, I'll close with one that I wasn't able to fit into the puzzle: "Divas ____ performances become more popular." No scrolling down to find the answer. I'm counting on the collective wisdom of this thread to prevail. DCN

Fantastic puzzle. The LONG ODDS/LONG O'S pairing was out of this world.

I thought "Present Time" was absolutely brilliant and I'm more than a little surprised, based on a quick reading of this thread, that I appear to be in the minority. I guess rebuses aren't for everybody . . . and I also guess that that's an understatement!