Company behind game Battlezone / TUE 12-28-10 / Mentalist Geller / Four-lap runners / Distance runner's skirt / Military sandwich

Constructor: Robert A. Doll

Relative difficulty: Easy

THEME: Unprefixed — familiar words have their prefixes moved to the end, creating wacky phrases, which are clued "?"-style


Word of the Day: CANAPE (29D: Cocktail hour nibble) —

n.
A cracker or a small, thin piece of bread or toast spread with cheese, meat, or relish and served as an appetizer.

[French, from canapé, couch, from Medieval Latin canāpēum, mosquito net. See canopy.] (answers.com)

• • •

Supremely easy. The theme was utterly nonsensical to me until many seconds after I had finished. I was trying to figure out what the starts or ends of the theme answers had to do with one another, and then noticed that MARINESUB was just SUBMARINE flipped. Then noticed that the others were similarly flipped. Ta ... da? Theme is very thin (compare yesterday's six theme answers), and MINI doesn't stand alone very well, and two of these started out as nouns and two as adjectives ... and this theme seems like it could be spun out ad infinitum; or, rather, that virtually any word with these suffixes might have sufficed. Why not a LARGE EXTRA or GOLF MINI or etc.? The basic idea is kind of cute, but somehow the execution feels slightly SUB par.



Theme answers:

• 20A: Distance runner's skirt? (MARATHON MINI)
  
• 34A: Military sandwich? (MARINE SUB)
  
• 45A: Outstanding crowd scene actor? (FINE EXTRA)
  
• 55A: Valuable truck? (PRECIOUS SEMI)
  

Did this one in under three, but there were a few slight sticking points. Tried SLUR for SLAM (1D: Verbal assault). Blanked on CANAPE at first, though it's a perfectly familiar word—I get very impatient with my brain on Mon. and Tues. sometimes. Luckily nearby ARCHIE made that section a cinch — daughter has a Massive ARCHIE Comics collection that she's amassed over the past few years, so I know more about the Riverdale gang than I could ever have imagined (30D: Jughead's buddy). Went with TINTS over TONES in the NE (16A: Color variations), which probably created the most trouble given the 3/5 rightness of the wrong answer. But "trouble" is a relative concept, and today, there really wasn't much of any. Only real question was: EBAN or EBEN (it's the former) (32D: Abba of Israel).



Not much to Bullet today, so I'll just sign off. My flight isn't until Wednesday evening, so I'll be here again tomorrow.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter]

P.S. this will hurt your soul if you have one...