Nickelodeon's parent company / TUE 8-31-10 / Cremona craftsman / Flier with 10-foot wingspan / Start of either syllable in ginger

Constructor: Paula Gamache and Ed Stein

Relative difficulty: Medium

THEME: Crossing Twins* — words that are spelled the same but pronounced differently intersect at five different points in the grid*

*unless I'm wrong, pronunciation is not at issue, and they're really just words that are spelled the same but mean different things — central crossing is the big question mark

*now I'm told it's just noun/verb pairs, with pronunciation being a non-issue. That seems correct. Not exciting, or interesting, but correct.


Word of the Day: VIGGO Mortensen (51D: "The Road" star Mortensen) —

Viggo Peter Mortensen, Jr. (born October 20, 1958) is a Danish actor, poet, musician, photographer and painter. He is best known for his roles as Aragorn in Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings film trilogy, Tom Stall in David Cronenberg's A History of Violence, and his Academy Award-nominated role as Nikolai Luzhin in Cronenberg's Eastern Promises. He also starred in the film adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's novel The Road, as "The Man". (wikipedia)

• • •

I am simply assuming that the golf meaning of ADDRESS is pronounced with the emphasis on the first syllable. I don't play, and can't imagine someone's saying the word. [first reply from a friend re: the two ADDRESSes: "No, they're pronounced the same. Addressing the ball is like addressing the audience. Stress on the second syllable." I hope s/he is wrong, because if this is so, the theme is *&^ed] The other crosses all feature different pronunciations, so I assume that central one does too. Can't say I cared for this one much. Like it more once I caught on to the different pronunciation angle, but still — once you get the gimmick (right away, likely), that's a lot of real estate you can fill in with very little effort. The easiness was offset for me today by a couple of missteps — DROPS for DRAMS (40D: Small amounts) and VEEGO for VIGGO (51D: "The Road" star Mortensen). But still, the only interest here is the theme — the rest is dull to dreadful. Look at the north. I have never seen so many abbrev. crammed in such a tiny section. ESTH., PFCS, TLC, and HOSP. That's a train wreck. The rest of the grid—except NCAAS (48A: Big tournaments for university teams, informally), yuck—is OK, if loaded with a lot of short and overly familiar fill. Hard to generate much sizzle when your longest entry is seven letters (and five of your answers are simply duplicated).

Theme answers:

• EXPLOIT (20A: Bit of derring-do + 4D: Take advantage of)
  
• ADDRESS (25D: Prepare to drive, as a golf ball + 39A: Lincoln's famous one was just 272 words)
  
• PRESENT (10D: Show, in a show-and-tell + 22A: Here and now)
  
• INCENSE (56A: Aromatic sticks + 44D: Make boiling mad)
  
• CONSOLE (47D: Say "There, there" to, say + 58A: Home entertainment centerpiece)
  

Write-ups might get a little shorter, especially on Tuesdays and Thursdays, as school starts up for me again this week. Luckily, I don't have much else to say today, except that ODETTE (26A: "Swan Lake" swan) seems an oddly esoteric word for a Tuesday—but I've seen it in puzzles enough that it didn't present a problem at all.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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