Rex Parker Does the NYT Crossword Puzzle

Constructor: Dan Caprera

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium - about my average Wednesday

THEME: Pirate Treasure Map— Theme answers spell out directions to find where there is buried treasure in the grid, starting at a skull and crossbones in the first square. The puzzle's only X marks the spot.

Theme answers:

START AT THE SKULL (16A: [Piratey jargon clue])
EAST TWELVE PACES (22A: [Piratey jargon clue])
SOUTH SEVEN STEPS (49A: [Piratey jargon clue])
WEST FIVE THEN DIG (58A: [Piratey jargon clue])

Honorable mentions:

PRIZE (53D: Pirate's booty, say)
SEIZE (65A: Grab, as booty)

Word of the Day:TRUNCHEON(10D: Officer's Baton)

A baton or truncheon is a roughly cylindrical club made of wood, rubber, plastic or metal carried by law-enforcement officers, correctional staff, security guards, and military personnel.

• • •

David Harris here, filling in for Rex today—and looks like today's puzzle is a debut from Dan Caprera, so congrats, it's a whole day of folks you've never heard of before!

I'm guessing that there will be a mix of opinions on this one, between the "whimsical and different" camp and the "puzzles shouldn't have homework" crew. Personally, I think it works nicely enough—the premise is goofy, and the cluing really leans into that, which gets the puzzle across the line into "cute" territory. Opening up the grid knowing I was blogging, and seeing a special little icon in the corner, actually gave me a small scare—just my luck if it was going to be something confusing, or a grid that couldn't be expressed in the app. Once I then started looking at the theme clues, though, which are long and very much not reproduced above, I saw that the themers would be instructions and relaxed a bit. It's nice that the design team will add little (largely) aesthetic touches for specific puzzles, even for the app solvers.

But on the downside, the clues were so long, and I knew the instructions would be somewhat arbitrary, so I basically decided to start by ignoring the themers until they started to take shape. Looking back at them afterwards, I see that the themers rhyme as part of clue couplets, and that there are actually some hints to make the answers less arbitrary, like an instruction in 22A to "turn toward the dawn" being a hint about going east. So the clues absolutely do serve a purpose, and thought went into them, not just goofy pirate speak. But looking at them initially, they just seemed like a lot of work to parse and deal with. I was relieved that this didn't end up being a theme with dot-connecting after the solve or other homework, but the theme definitely took a back seat for me until the end, which isn't ideal. Seems totally fair to not be in love with this one, or to find it kind of charming, your mileage may vary.

And overall, congrats to Dan Caprera for having a memorable puzzle with an unexpected theme and some clever construction—not too shabby for a constructor's debut.

On the fill, there's a bit of classic glue like suffix ENE (13A: Suffix with acetyl), the perennial IRAE (36A: "Dies ___" (hymn)), the partial NUEVA (63A: ___ York (biggest city in los Estados Unidos)), and the usually-regrettable SSS (67A: Sound from a punctured tire). But given 60+ theme squares, it didn't feel like a ton. I can see more of them if I go hunting in the grid, but they were less of a presence during the solve, which is what I care about. Some of the cluing caught me off-guard, as I wouldn't normally consider ESME (12D: Salinger heroine) to be a "heroine" per se, given the story, and ORB for (30D: Magic 8 Ball, e.g.) makes me nervous that the 8-Ball may actually be magic. I'd probably give minor-to-moderate sideeye to DISCI (42D: Things hurled at the Olympics) as a plural. I also resisted putting in TEAL (48A: Pond swimmer), as it took me a minute to remember that it's a term for a duck, so that one's on me.

Balancing out some of the glue, there were definitely enough happy-making entries and clues, including some longer fill, that helped to balance it out. I was kind of neutral on ENTENTES (38D: Diplomatic arrangements)and MARQUISES (31D: French noblemen or noblewomen), but some other stuff to like:

Clues of the Day:

ASPHALT— 26D: It covers a lot of ground. Nothing you could do about this joke, it just happens to you.
TIMEOUT— 23D: Preschool punishment. My brain immediately wanted this, even though the clue doesn't telegraph it especially hard—just some good fill.
DELVES— 47D: Looks closely (into). A word that you probably either never hear, or hear way too often because that one guy uses it in every meeting.
BETHESDA— 5D: Where the National Institutes of Health is headquartered. It seemed like random trivia that I'd get from crosses, but Bethesda *does* actually make me think of hospitals, so I ended up appreciating this one.
BOT— 35D: Spam generator. Nice clue, succinct but decidedly modern.

Finally, as Donald Faison just showed up on my TV while I was solving this, I've got to close with a shout-out to CARLA (14A: "Scrubs" nurse married to Dr. Turk). Best wishes to the Turkletons!

Signed, David Harris, King for a Day of CrossWorld

[Follow David Harris on Twitter]
[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Constructor: Patrick Merrell

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium - below my average, but I was trying *very* hard

THEME: Alphabetical — Theme clues were just lists of letters that appeared (in order, but not necessarily consecutively) in the answers, with no other context or hint given.

Theme answers:

ABSCONDED (17A: ABCDE)
AFGHANI (21A: FGHI)
JUNKPILE (26A: JKL)
HEISMANTROPHIES (38A: MNOP)
SQUAREST (46A: QRST)
PURVIEW (55A: UVW)
OXYGENIZE (62A: XYZ)

Word of the Day: ANITA (33A: Who sings "America" in "West Side Story") —

Rita Moreno won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her role as Anita in the 1961 movie version of West Side Story. She would go on to be the third person to win the EGOT, and is still tearing it up at 87 years old.

• • •

Hi, I'm George. I'm a professional technical writer and amateur trivia competitor / podcaster who has absolutely no idea how I got this gig, but onward!

My style is Chaotic Good -- difficult to describe, but generally (eventually) effective. I tend to look at 1A and 1D first and then proceed from there based on which one I get. SHOE (1A: Card holder at a casino) and SPAM (1D: Food invention of 1937) came quickly enough, and I bounced around the top a little, getting WILCO (18A: "Got it, I'm on it," in radio lingo) and ALLAH (11D: Figure also called "the Creator,""the King" and "the All-Seer") and HOWIE (13D: TV host Mandel) to have the northeast quadrant filled in soon enough.

Then I caught the theme, with AB_CO____ (17A: ABCD) making it apparent that the clued letters would be in the answer, and probably in order (I didn't think "ABDCO____" would be a thing). I had thought of ORSO (3D: Qualifying phrase) but wasn't confident enough, even with O__O there, but plugging it in gave me ABSCO____, which led me right to ABSCONDED.

Having JOHN (26D: Doe, a Deere?) and UKES (27D: Some of them come in "pineapple" and "soprano" varieties, informally) (a guess, but one that made sense) and SKYS (23D: "The ___ the limit") and FOGUP (15D: What bathroom mirrors may do) (I still don't know why that popped right into my head) led to JUNKPILE (26A: JKL). That let me cross a few more to get to HEISMANTROPHIES (38A: MNOP), which I rolled my eyes at -- every time I've heard someone speak of multiples of the award given to the most outstanding college football player by the Downtown Athletic Club, they speak of "Heismans". But that broke open most of the puzzle, so I'll let it go.

Oh dang look at all those HEISMANTROPHIES.
Fight on.

SPASM (49D: Uncontrolled jerk) and ERROL (51D: Flynn of "Captain Blood") and ANIME (40D: Cartoon genre) left P_R__E_ (55A: UVW) with not much wiggle room to plug in the theme letters, so PURVIEW was quick enough, and 46A: QRST more or less had to be SQUAREST, even without any crosses.

I messed myself up a little because I always (twice this week alone) mess up which seasons are in Daylight Time and which are in Standard Time. In my defense, the U.S. currently spends longer in Daylight Time, and that doesn't make sense. So I had MDT (52A: Winter Wyoming hrs.), and therefore had DW_R_ (53D: Symbol of power), so I naturally thought it was DWARF.

tom hiddleston loki GIF

That threw me off of the crosses, and I spent way too long running through possible Irish names before giving up on 57D: Douglas ___, first president of Ireland. Eventually, I rethought my Daylight/Standard prejudice and realized that it was 52A was MST, and that the 53D would have to be SWORD.
Animated GIF

From there, my Scrabble-brain saw OX__E___Z_ and summoned up OXYGENIZE (62A: XYZ).

I went back up to the northeast to finish up AFGHANI (21A: FGHI), which I will note for the record is the money of Afghanistan, while a person from Afghanistan is typically called an "Afghan".

The dross fill at the end was limited to CEN (58A: Long life: Abbr.) and NEED (60D: Kitchen, for a chef). Neither of those really sang to me, especially when all I had left was the cross between them to finish that corner.

But the wasted seconds at the very end were my own fault: I read "Accepted" as a verb, even after I had U_AGES right in front of me, and "Temperature test, of a sort" just didn't land, even with _IP. so I stared at that and rolled through the alphabet for a bit until S fell into place.

I liked this one. The fill was good, with nothing that was too egregious or overly crosswordy. The theme really fell into place, especially with good crossing words. It took me 8:02, slightly closer to my best (5:28) than my average.(11:44). Thursday is a weird point in my week (as I put it to Rex when he scheduled me, "I swear more at the Thursday puzzles."), but this one was mostly smooth for me.

Favorites:

INDIA (43A: Powerhouse in cricket) — I work at a software company, and I have a lot of coworkers of Indian descent. Every time there's a big cricket match, we get an all-hands email reminding everyone not to stream the match at their desk because it overloads the network. I'll give you one guess whether that works.
PUPPY (50D: Small part of a pound?) and MYLES (67A: Standish on the Mayflower) — I didn't remember that it wasn't "MILES", so I had PUPPI for a second there before I got the joke.
XII (63D: Common clock topper) — Second time in three days, and I don't remember the last time it was used before that. Seems odd. But I like this clue more than "Midnight, on a grandfather clock".

Signed, George Stankow

My other puzzling/quizzing passion is LearnedLeague, the Greatest Trivia League In All the Land. I co-host an extremely lo-fi podcast about it, available on Apple Podcasts and other platforms. If you'd like to hear a couple of A/B rundlers discuss each day's questions, search for "LearnedLag".

[Follow George on Twitter or on Twitter]

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Constructor: Andrew J. Ries

Relative difficulty: Very Easy (8:29, my fastest Friday time by over three minutes)

THEME: none

Word of the Day:PAPAW (7D: Fruit in the custard apple family) —

Asimina triloba, the papaw, pawpaw, paw paw, or paw-paw, among many regional names, is a small deciduous tree native to the eastern United States and Canada, producing a large, yellowish-green to brown fruit.

• • •

Hi all! Resident radio nerd Matthew here subbing in for Rex — now from St. Louis, where I'm taking a break from pub media and starting a yearlong fellowship teaching math at East St. Louis Senior High! My crossword solving obsession and constructing ambitions — supported in large part by the lovely folks at this blog — have become my de facto ice breaker fun facts, so we'll see how many friends I make among my fellow teachers with my trusty cruciverbalist know-how in my back pocket. To the puz!

I'm surely biased by how little resistance I encountered in this PR solve, but I thoroughly loved almost everything about this puzzle. The grid is wide-open and aesthetically pleasing (contrast with last Friday's, which felt awkwardly segmented). The short fill is all clean and clued on the easier side (looking at you, WAS IOU CPU SYR ... ETC ...), which allows lots of the longer answers to drop right in without any second-guessing. It's a relief to come across a Friday that presents its challenges but doesn't feel like it's constantly out to get you.

I particularly enjoyed the cluing on the mid-length answers — there's a lot of 6- to 8-letter stuff in there, and clue-wise, there are a *lot* of winners. Doubling up on "Put on the line" with both AIRDRIED(16A) and WAGERED (34A) is some A+ wordplay™. "Character raised in 'Rosemary's Baby'" (APOSTROPHE(36A)) made me smile. All told, there are also a bunch of places where answers could go either way (read: ORCHESTRA in for MEZZANINE at 44A) that I just got lucky with whichever option I was able to throw down quicker.

All of the 11-letter downs get high marks in my book, but most of all STEGOSAURUS(23D: Colorado's official state dinosaur). If you know any dinosaur fun facts, PLEASE SHARE IN THE COMMENTS because animal fun facts are the best fun facts (besides crossword-adjacent fun facts, of course ... right?)

Re: dinos, I learned a bunch from this episode of 99% Invisible ... and ... of course ...

You're welcome, and you're welcome.

Bullets:

48A: BBQ offering (BURGER) — As a native Texan, it is my obligation to say that the circles in the Venn diagram of burgers and barbecue don't overlap. That's it. That's the bullet.
22A: Important thing to know, if you will (ESTATE LAW) — Estate law sounds incredibly boring, but I enjoyed its place in this puzzle entirely thanks to brilliant cluing.
5D: First podcast to win a Peabody Award (2015) (SERIAL) — Podcast love! I have never listened to Serial, but I am pretty sure that everyone I have spoken to in the last four years has recommended it to me. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
57A: Ill will (RANCOR) — Before I knew that this was actually a ~word~ found in the ~real world~, I knew from my definitely very cool ~children's Star Wars encyclopedia~ that Jabba the Hutt's grotestque, carnivorous cave giant from Episode VI is called a Rancor. I almost led with this as Word of the Day for this reason, but hey — I did have to leave y'all something to look forward to.

TGIF, Matthew Stock, Mos Eisley Cantina bandmate of CrossWorld

P.S. Shoutout to my two intrepid friends who made their crossword competition debut at BosWords last weekend! Proud of y'all.

[Follow Matthew on Twitter]
[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Constructor: Ryan McCarty

Relative difficulty: Average

THEME: None

Word of the Day: SS MINNOW (Vessel in a famous 1960s shipwreck) —

The S. S. Minnow is a fictional charter boat on the hit 1960s television sitcom Gilligan's Island.
The ship ran aground on the shore of "an uncharted desert isle" (in the south Pacific Ocean), setting the stage for this popular situation comedy. The crew of two were the skipper Jonas Grumby and his first mate Gilligan, and the five passengers were millionaire Thurston Howell III, his wife Lovey Howell, movie star Ginger Grant, professor Roy Hinkley, and farm girl Mary Ann Summers.

• • •

So sit right back and you'll hear a tale, a tale of an okay grid..

Doc Daneeka, filling in for Rex. This clocked in just under my average Saturday solve, and would have been a breeze if I hadn't hit a brick wall in the NE corner somewhere between SALADA and OCTAVO and AAONLINE. I stared blankly for an eternity and, rather than help me solve the damn puzzle, my mind playfully conjured Wile E. Coyote waving the white flag.

My biggest gripe is the center. POWER STATION and SMOKED CIGARS are not the most idiomatically exciting phrases in the English Language, and when they make up the meat of your grid, the meat of your grid looks more like what you'd find in a Lunchables tray. Maybe you're thinking NAG, NAG, NAG, but it's a themeless, and so unless the grid itself is a feat of constructing ingenuity, the fill is the main attraction. (Rex is also probably unimpressed with most feats of constructing ingenuity.) On a separate and undeservedly self-righteous note, when can we start referring to SAME SEX MARRIAGE as just marriage?

There are some playful moments, like DEVIL DOG and OPERA HAT and COW TOWN. And any time you can incorporate Michael SCOTT into your puzzle, you're on the right track -- although I will never be Officially Impressed until someone throws DWIGHT K SCHRUTE or DUNDER MIFLIN in the mix. Accordingly:

Finally, if you've never waded through a pea-soup fog of cigarette smoke to watch people play PAI gow at 2 AM in an off-brand casino far away from The Strip, are you even living your best life?

Bullets:

COLMES— I could not remember how to spell the name of the clownishly token faux Democrat that Fox News used to parade around every evening like the cheerful village idiot of the right-wing news circuit.
OPOSSUMS— O, possums! What fray was here?
AMAZONIA — If you're looking for something amusing to distract you from the horror of runaway deforestation under the Bolsonaro junta, Wikipedia defines the Amazon as a "moist broadleaf forest", which is both charming and gross at the same time.
I SAID SO— Classic parenting mistake. "Because I said so" is a sign of weakness, and they know it early on. Make up something complex and irrational instead -- it takes them many more years to untangle faulty logic.

Signed, Doc Daneeka, Surgeon General of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Constructor: Will Nediger

Relative difficulty: Easy (8:59)

THEME: Constant Consonants — themers are nonsense two-word phrases where both words have the same consonants in the same order, yes that's it, no, yes, I am sure, yes, stop asking...

Theme answers:

BRONTOSAURUS / BRAIN TEASERS (22A: With 105-Across, "What walks on four dino legs in the morning, four dino legs at noon and four dino legs in the evening?" and other riddles?) (if the "joke" here makes no sense to you ... here)
MISQUOTES MOSQUITOES (35A: Says "Quack" instead of "Buzz"?)
FRONTIER FURNITURE (51A: Tables in an Old West saloon, e.g.?)
SCARFACE SACRIFICE (75A: Chess gambit employed by gangster Tony Montana?)
OVERSELLS VERSAILLES (86A: Claims that Louis XIV's palace is better than all the other buildings in France combined?)

Word of the Day: FROLLO (68A: Claude ___, villain in "The Hunchback of Notre-Dame") —

Monseigneur Claude Frollo (French: [klod fʁɔlo]) is a fictional character and the main antagonist of Victor Hugo's 1831 novel The Hunchback of Notre-Dame (known in French as Notre-Dame de Paris). He is the Archdeacon of Notre Dame. (read more about him here)

• • •

Hi everyone. I am freshly returned from Vacation the Second (this one to Montreal), and I can say with confidence that, whether you like it or not, I am back on full-time blogging duty for the foreseeable future (except of course tomorrow, which is an Annabel Monday, and Tuesday, which is a make-up Clare Tuesday ... but after *that*, back on the grind). Montreal is a gorgeous city, the most diverse and cosmopolitan city I've ever been to, and I want to go back immediately, if only for the croissants and bandes dessinées and dizzying French/English swirl that's in the air most everywhere you go (though French definitely dominates). I bought my weight in Québécois comics and graphic novels (what's up, Drawn & Quarterly and La Pastèque?), ate my weight in pastry, and walked all over hell and gone for day after day after day. Many, many thanks to my friend Kate G (whom I got to meet for the first time IRL!) for showing me around Mile End and Outremont and the whole area around Mount Royal. So exciting. Gonna go back en hiver so I can see the city in a completely different guise (iced up and cold af). I just loved everything about it. And I didn't do a single crossword while I was there, so it was nice to sit down tonight and knock this one out in under 9. I felt sloppy and unpracticed, but (relatively) I've still got it! Sadly, my happiness at finding my solving skills relatively undiminished was not accompanied by a commensurate happiness at finding the puzzle itself ... you know, good. It just lies there. It's ... didja ever order pancakes, and, you know, they're brown but only pale brown, and they're warm but not hot, and they're a little on the thick side and the butter's not melting very readily and the syrup is a little too cloying, and, you know, it's pancakes, so you're not gonna kick it out of bed, but ... you had something nicer in mind. Something genuinely pleasurable, as opposed to just blandly sufficient? Well, didja?

I don't see the appeal here. Same consonants in same order. Is this an accomplishment? I don't know. It doesn't seem hard. Maybe it is. But the point is / should be—why do this? What is the result of doing this? How does it *play* for a solver in terms of entertainment value? Are these phrases funny? Do they yield funny clues? If [Tables in an Old West saloon, e.g.?] is funny to you, or does anything for you at all, then you are fortunate, I guess, because every one of these answers and clues felt flaccid to me. And the remainder of the puzzle, the non-theme stuff, was fine. OK. Didn't like a few things, liked a few things, just plodded through the rest. I don't understand why people run with concepts when the yield is so poor. And the title doesn't even make sense, or follow the rules of the game, or anything. Dull as dirt. Not the fancy kind of dirty either. Nothing loamy* or bug-filled. Just the unamusing, forgettable kind of dirt.

Five things:

111A: Nickname for the capital of the Peach State (HOTLANTA) — I am told by natives that no one actually calls it that, but OK
103D: South, in Brazil (SUL) — I did not know that. You'd think after nearly 30 years of solving, I'd've known this by now, but ... no. Can't recall ever seeing it. (note: looks like this is just my third time seeing it in the NYT ... ever; between 1985 and 2010 it didn't appear at all)
12D: Aligned (TRUED UP) — I have only so much patience for the verb+preposition thing. LUGS IN is a little much. This one's OK. But this one has its UP crossing the UP in UPTOP (41A: "High-five!"), so [raspberry!]
87D: Portmanteau for a TV addict (VIDIOT) — No. Come on. No. It's not 1983. And even then, to the extent that it was used at all, it was surely made up by some "kids these days..." numbskull. So it's dated and bad. So no. Please feel free to put "VIDEODROME" in your puzzle, though. That would be cool.

32D: Trig ratios (COTANS) — Oof. I am making a face. You can't see it. But I am definitely making it.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

P.S. a gajillion thanks to all the people who filled in for me this past week, many of them first-timers. I'm lucky to have such generous and eloquent readers.

*n.b. I am not a dirt expert. Please send all your indignant dirt emails elsewhere.

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Constructor: Tracy Gray

Relative difficulty: Easy

THEME: Downward Dog— Theme answers were Down clues of two or more words where the second word is a dog breed.

Theme answers:

SHADOW BOXER (3D: Air-punching pugilist)
THE GOOD SHEPHERD (7D: 2006 Matt Damon spy film)
CHEMISTRY LAB (9D: Place with beakers and Bunsen burners)
LASER POINTER (21D: Lecturer's implement with a light at the end)
DOWNWARD DOG (28D: Popular yoga pose...or a literal hint to the ends of 3-, 7-, 9-, and 21-Down)

Word of the Day: LATH (5A: Plasterwork backing) —

A lath or slat is a thin, narrow strip of straight-grained wood used under roof shingles or tiles, on lath and plaster walls and ceilings to hold plaster, and in lattice and trellis work.^[1]
Lath has expanded to mean any type of backing material for plaster. This includes metal wire mesh or expanded metalthat is applied to a wood or metal framework as matrix over which stucco or plaster is applied, as well as wallboardproducts called gypsum or rock lath.^[2] Historically, reed mat was also used as a lath material.
(Wikipedia)

• • •

Hi everyone, it's another Annabel Monday! My summer is going pretty great. I need to get outside more though, I spent this whole weekend vegging out, LOL. Oh well, Mondays are the day when I go to the farmer's market! *Sigh* I love being an adult. You get to go to farmer's markets.

I found this puzzle pretty middle-of-the-road. Nothing particularly stood out as amazing, and there were no discernable "mini-themes", but there was also a blessed lack of baseball and I didn't find any overused clue/word combos. Can't even fault it for how hard a time it gave me looking for a word to use as Word of the Day, since it's a Monday and it's okay to not use rarer words! I just hope I won't be ACHY or TEEMing with anything bad after staying up to write this. And that I won't SPRAIN my hand or feel the ONSET of POX. I guess words evoking pain are a little bit of a mini-theme after all then.

I lloved the theme--I really like dogs and I also really like Monday themes that incorporate downs, it's boring to see across-onlies all the time. However, Rex pointed out (very ASTUTEly?) that this theme was actually used just last week (July 31st) in an American Values Club crossword constructed by Steve Faiella:

if you're looking for the relevant DOWNWARD DOG it's 19-Down

Rex assures me this is just a weird coincidence. Which, yeah. It's just kind of unfortunate for both constructors. Or not--great minds think alike, after all!

Bullets:

CHEMISTRY LAB (9D: Place with beakers and Bunsen burners) — OK since we're drawing attention to the "Lab" part of the answer I need to post my awesome lab Rosie!!! We got her as a tiny baby puppy and now she's eleven and loves to yell at you until you pet her.

SHOE (59D: Pump or oxford) — I just wanted to relay one of my favorite comments I've heard at this job: "I just got back from a library conference. I've never seen so many pairs of sensible shoes in one place!" I love librarians and their shoes--yet another reason to become one; I hate heels!!
AMBER (71A: "For ___ waves of grain" [line in "America the Beautiful"]) — Did you know the author of "America the Beautiful" was a Wellesley grad?! Her name was Katharine Lee Bates and we sing it at, like, every Wellesley event. Except we replace "brotherhood" with "siblinghood"! Because we're cool like that.
SIESTA (34D: Nap south of the border)— Sounds very similar to another word, as Sesame Street, also ASTUTEly, pointed out in 1994:

Signed, Annabel Thompson, tired twentysomething.

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

[Follow Annabel Thompson on Twitter]

Hi, everyone! It's Clare — and I'm writing on the first Tuesday of the month this time around. Hope everyone managed to stay cool during the record-breaking heat in July. I'm learning that summer in DC is very different from what I'm used to in California — the humidity is ridiculous! Anywho, onto the puzzle...

Constructor: Jon Olsen

Relative difficulty: Quite hard

THEME: BLUE ON BLUE (61A: 1963 Bobby Vinton hit... or a hint to both halves of 18-, 23-, 37- and 54-Across) — Both parts of the theme answers fit with the word "blue" after them.

Theme answers:

BABY POWDER (18A: Bottom coat?)
ARCTIC OCEAN (23A: Habitat for a walrus)
ROYAL NAVY (37A: Its motto, translated from Latin, is "If you wish for peace, prepare for war")
COBALT STEEL (54A: Drill bit alloy)

Word of the Day: CASCA (5A: Co-conspirators with Brutus and Cassius) —

Publius Servilius Casca Longus (84 BC – c. 42 BC) was one of the assassins of Julius Caesar. He and several other senators conspired to kill him, a plan which they carried out on 15 March, 44 BC. Afterwards, Casca fought with the liberators during the Liberators' civil war. He is believed to have died by suicide after their defeat at the Battle of Philippi in 42 BC. (Wiki)

• • •

Well, I had a hard time with this puzzle. In fact, the solve had me feeling a bit blue (if you'll pardon the cheesy pun — my brain is a bit fried after trying to work this puzzle out). A lot of my trouble may have come from the fact that the puzzle is very much OLD TIME (11D). The longer answers didn't really click with me while I was solving, and a lot of the puzzle is stuff I wasn't expecting to see in a Tuesday puzzle, so I wasn't quite in the right mindset while solving.

The theme was clever enough. It didn't help with the solve, but it was somewhat fun to go back after the fact and see how BLUE ON BLUE worked with the theme answers. My color knowledge from those giant Crayola crayon boxes from elementary school came in handy because I actually knew all these different shades of blue! Probably my favorite of the theme answers was BABY POWDER (18A), which gave me a good laugh when I figured it out. The other theme answers were fine. I just didn't particularly enjoy them because the rest of the puzzle gave me trouble.

Probably my least favorite of the fill was DATSUNS (42D: Old Nissan Autos). Yes, I'm pretty young, but I've never heard of these cars before in my life. Same with Esther ROLLE (52A: Esther of "Good Times"), AEC (50A: Early nuclear org.), SYD (33D: Guitarist Barrett), or AJA (64D: Best-selling Steely Dan album). It's 100 percent fine to put these in a puzzle, but to see all of these (and more) words/phrases on a Tuesday?

The constructor did have clever clues/answers in the puzzle, too. I particularly enjoyed EVE (60A: Good name for a girl born on December 24?) and ALPHA (9D: Leader of Athens?), which were good uses of clues with question marks at the end. Likewise, I found SLEEVED (12D: Like LPs and some dresses) fun; same with CLAUSE (51D: A dependent one might start with "that"). I weirdly didn't find KLEENEX (45D: Something that may be used before a blessing) all that amusing, which I'm going to attribute to the fact that I solved that corner last and was very, very ready to just be done with the puzzle at that point. Also, some of the short fill answers were clued differently than usual, which was nice.

Bullets:

Maybe I couldn't come up with CHELSEA (25D: Posh neighborhood of London or New York) because it's not Liverpool. (And we all know that Liverpool has the best men's soccer team, of course. Chelsea is mediocre — at best!)
Sorry, OONA Chaplin, you were great in GOT, but your character, Talisa, was done dirty in the show.
My sister tells me that TWEED (56D: Jacket material) is going to be very "in" this fall! Who needs Vogue when you've got the Rex Parker crossword blog?
I got a kick out of LENS (65A: Focusing aid), because I was literally solving the crossword while my glasses sat on top of my head... unused. Oops!
In my opinion, Dennis QUAID (28A) has a much better resume than his brother, Randy (including The Parent Trap and The Rookie, two amazing movies I've seen way too many times), and Randy seems to have turned into a bit of a kook. So I'd give the point in the Battle of the Brothers to Dennis!

Signed, Clare Carroll, a melting DC law clerk

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Constructor: Jeff Chen

Relative difficulty: Challenging (6:07) (second slowest Wednesday of the year)

THEME: PIG LATIN (66A: "Language" that explains the answers to the six starred clues) — answers don't fit clues, but if you think of them being PIG LATIN answers, then sure, they fit

Theme answers:

EARTH DAY (i.e. dearth) (17A: *Scarcity)
ENTREE (i.e. "Tron") (23A: *Futuristic film of 1982)
UNDERWAY (i.e. wonder) (25A: *Amazement)
ASHTRAY (i.e. trash) (40A: *Lay waste to)
EAGLE RAY (i.e. regal) (53A: *Magnificent)
OUTLAY (i.e. lout) (55A: *Oaf)

Word of the Day: CHITIN (8A: Main component of a crab shell) —

Chitin (C₈H₁₃O₅N)_n (/ˈkaɪtɪn/ KY-tin), a long-chain polymer of N-acetylglucosamine, is a derivative of glucose. It is a primary component of cell walls in fungi, the exoskeletons of arthropods, such as crustaceans and insects, the radulae of molluscs, cephalopod beaks, and the scales of fish and lissamphibians. The structure of chitin is comparable to another polysaccharide—cellulose, forming crystalline nanofibrils or whiskers. In terms of function, it may be compared to the protein keratin. Chitin has proved useful for several medicinal, industrial and biotechnological purposes. (wikipedia)

• • •

This was very hard for me, largely because there are two themers in the (tiny) NW corner (where I always start), and I spent far too long up there trying to make something happen. Even the non-theme stuff up there, e.g. BRAIN (2D: Hard drive, essentially) and REDPEN (5D: Grader's tool), wasn't computing for me. Eventually I must've gotten the theme from EARTHDAY or ENTREE or ASHTRAY, and things picked up a little, but not (at all) a lot. Never heard of CHITIN, so that hurt. Never heard of EAGLE RAY, so that also hurt (had EARL GRAY there at one point—only two letters off!). Knew the name BOTHA (48D: Louis ___, South Africa's first P.M.), but only the later one (P.W., the *last* P.M. of South Africa, it turns out) (I guess they went with the Boer War hero guy (Louis) over the more-closely-associated-with-Apartheid guy, but I'm not sure that makes the name any more appealing). Kinda sorta heard of YUZU (42D: Yellow citrus fruit used in Japanese cuisine) but still needed all the crosses to be sure (had it as YUZO at one point). And then there were a bunch of "?" clues I had trouble parsing, e.g. the clues on PAN (39A: Go for the gold?) and INORGANIC (35D: Lifeless?). So my first impression was "hard," which was also my abiding impression, difficulty-wise. My other impression was "anticlimactic"—that revealer revealed nothing; it was just telling me something I already know. I was glad for the gimme, but from a solving standpoint, blecch. I already figured that *&$% out.

The difficulty isn't a problem, though. This probably should've been a Thursday (by my time, anyway), but it's fine as a tough Wednesday. The problem is ... well, its manifold. First, the theme is just plain. Ordinary. So what? But worse than that, I had an immediate feeling of "I've seen this theme lots of times." Feels like something that's been done and redone in various forms. And while sometimes these things happen, in this case, the theme is so basic, so unremarkable, that ... it feels like something the constructor should've checked against the databases. Now if you use only the constructor's *own* database (the one affiliated with his blog, which is affiliated with the NYT, which ... there's so much conflict of interest there, but let's leave that alone for now) ... as I say, if you just look at the NYTXW database, you'd say "nope, never been done before." But if you did a teeny bit more research, just opened up cruciverb.com's database and ran some of your themers, or even just your revealer, through a basic search, well then bam and bam. Done and done. There they are. Two recent puzzles with exactly the same theme. Both in the past few years (once earlier *this* year). Both times by women. Both with themers shared by today's puzzle. In short, this constructor didn't do his minimum due diligence and ended up rehashing the work of other constructors. But because he did it in the *Times* ("the greatest puzzle in the world!"), he can pretend (as we all can) that this is original, and as far as most Times solvers are concerned, it will be. I have no real problem with theme concepts being redone, if a. a lot of time has passed and / or b. the theme is executed in a newish, original way. But neither a. nor b. applies here. A veteran constructor should know better, and do better. It's especially galling that a man's gonna get credit for a theme that two *women* thought of and executed and published before him.

Here are those other PIG LATIN grids, btw: the first, "Pork Tongue," by MaryEllen Uthlaut, published by Universal, 4/12/19, and the second, untitled, by Robin Stears, published by the LA Times, 12/18/15

Have a nice day!

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Constructor: Timothy Polin

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium (5:24)

THEME: THINK / TWICE (60A: With 19-Across, reconsider ... or a hint to the starts of the five starred clues) — starred clues start with a word that you have to double in order to make sense of the clue:

Theme answers:

WILD PITCH (17A: *Boo during a baseball game)
COMIC STRIPS (25A: *Tin has been in them since 1929)
DENTAL HYGIENIST (37A: *Tar remover)
LOGIC PUZZLE (51A: *Ken, for one)
HIGH KICKS (62A: *Can components)

Word of the Day: PEPE (1A: José, to amigos) —

One story, I guess nobody can say whether this is true or not, is that Pepe comes from the initials P.P. from the Spanish term "padre putativo" (putative father) an old way of referring to Joseph, the husband of Mary from the Bible.

A more believable explanation is that José entered Spanish as Josef or Josep.From Josep to Josepe (to avoid a final /p/) to Pepe is not a big jump as it is not uncommon for names in Spanish to form nicknames from the last phonemes of the original: e.g. Felipe to Pipe, Enrique to Quique, Guillermo to Memo, Santiago to Diego (now a name of its own).

From Pepe we have also Pepito (i.e. little Pepe), Chepe (that's how people called my father) and Chepito. (Rafael Nájera, in response to Quora question, "Why is 'Pepe' a nickname for 'Jose'?")

• • •

Bizarre solving experience, where I had no idea what the theme was and just sort of meandered around the grid is a sad, lost way, but not in a desperate Oh-God-Help way, just in a kinda "I know the light switch is here ... somewhere ..." way, and sure enough, when I'd wandered all the way to the bottom of the grid (interlocking answers the whole way down), there it was: the switch. HIGH KICKS. So "Can" is actually "can-can." And instantly, all the other themer clues made sense, and the Thursday became a Monday, and I tore this thing apart. Scorched it. But slow start meant just a somewhat better-than-average time. The theme is so-so (!). At times, the cluing was super-clever, with great misdirection (e.g. 17A: *Boo during a baseball game). At other times, the cluing was sad and weird, with terrible misdirection (e.g. 25A: *Tin has been in them since 1929—this is not a plausible clue for anything involving the element "tin"). What took this from middle-of-the-road into negative territory for me was the revealer. That's just such a godawful, puzzle-wrecking way to place your revealer—split and upside-down. Bad enough to get a [See...] clue anywhere, ever, but to have it be up top, and yet the *second* part of the revealer, with the first part down below ... it's so ugly. So inelegant. And so (seemingly) unnecessary. Build a grid where your revealer is displayed in the order that English-reading humans actually read, preferably with pride of place in your grid—central or final, or maybe symmetrical top-to-bottom ... something, anything, but this ungainly mess.

No clue, none, that PEPE was a familiar form of José. Thought a DOG or CAT made the muddy footprint. Weird to claim a PAW made a footprint. Feet make footprints. You're thinking of a paw print. But OK. POLER and POLEBEANS should not not not be in the same grid. I have real beef with the clue for COMIC STRIPS, largely because I think of "strips" as "those things in newspapers that are actually in the form of strips," and I've never seen "Tintin" presented like that. Certainly never ever ever in American COMIC STRIPS. In the U.S., those stories come exclusively in complete book form. In the most general sense of COMIC STRIPS as just ... comics (i.e. sequential art), then sigh, fine, this clue works. I teach this stuff, so I'm definitely overthinking it, but ... "Peanuts" and "Cathy" and "Curtis" and "Baby Blues" are COMIC STRIPS. "Tintin" is something else, imho. Remembered MATTBIONDI somehow, so yay me (30D: Winner of five swimming gold medals at the 1988 Olympics) ... but had ACT before OPT at 9D: Not dither despite already having ACT in the grid (6D: Be dramatic?), so boo me. Boo-boo me, in fact.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

P.S. 14A: Company with a for-profit foundation? is AVON because AVON is a make-up company and therefore a manufacturer of ... foundation. I'm assuming.

P.P.S. 13D: Hearts that don't beat very much? ... is a very good clue (the reference is to cards, in case that somehow eluded you)

P.P.P.S. Hey, next weekend (Sat. Aug. 17) is Lollapuzzoola, one of the biggest annual crossword tournaments in the country, and the only one (that I know of) in NYC. There are still some spaces left for those who want to participate in some hardcore, in-person nerddom (actually a very fun tournament with a low-key vibe and hundreds of lovely people). But if you just want to see what tournament puzzles are like without the fear of public humiliation*, then there's also the Solve At-Home Division of the tournament, which you should get in on. Lolla and Indie 500 (in DC) are my favorite tournaments, and the only ones I participate in regularly. So come solve and say hi. Or solve at home and wish you had. Whatever. Just sign up! INFORMATION HERE.

*there's no public humiliation except that which you heap on yourself, trust me

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Constructor: John Guzzetta

Relative difficulty: Easy (5:19)

THEME: none

Word of the Day: BEREA (15D: Greek city visited by Paul before Athens) —

Berea or Beroea was a city of the Hellenic and Roman era now known as Veria (or Veroia) in Macedonia, northern Greece. It is a small city on the eastern side of the Vermion Mountains north of Mount Olympus. The town is mentioned in the Acts of the Apostles, where the apostles Paul, Silas and Timothypreached the Christian gospel.
Paul, Silas and Timothy travelled to Berea by night after fleeing from Thessalonica, as recorded Acts 17:10. They 'immediately' went to the synagogue of the Jews to preach, and the Bereans were very accepting: the writer of the Acts of the Apostles noted the difference between the Thessalonians' response to the gospel and the Bereans' response: the Bereans were 'open-minded' ^[1] or 'fair-minded' and willing to 'examine the scriptures to see if Paul and Silas were teaching the truth'. Many of the Bereans believed, both men and women, but when the Jewish Thessalonian non-believers heard about this, they came to Berea, stirring up crowds, starting riots, and ensuring that Paul, Silas and Timothy could not preach. Then the believers sent Paul to the coast, while Timothy and Silas stayed behind. Paul was taken to Athens, and word was given to Timothy and Silas to join him as soon as possible. (Acts 17:10–15) (wikipedia)

• • •

[here are some ARPs I saw at the Musée
des beaux-arts in Montréal last week]

Thought I might be headed to a Friday record on this one after I tore through the NW and SW. Was headed up and over to the east with a pretty good pace but then I did the thing that always turns out to be the primary reason I slow way way down: I put in a wrong answer. And a long one, too. Faced with -OO----- at 35D: Clear choice for auto buyers, I put in GOOD DEAL. And that was the end of my potentially record-setting sprint. Tried to convince my self that some of the crosses "worked," like ... thought maybe 49A: Org. that penalizes carrying (NBA) was the D...EA? But mostly I just came to a shocking halt. Didn't help that stupid seldom-used dumb alleged word EMBAR (booo) (48D: Hinder) was ungettable to me from just the "E," thus preventing me from coming at that corner from the other side. ABHORS (57A: Detests) and ARP (57D: One of the first artists to incorporate random chance) ended up pulling me out of that rut. Had to change AH, ME (ugh) to OH, ME (somehow even more of an ugh) (54D: "Heavens to Betsy!"), and then I resumed my fairly torrid clip for the rest of the puzzle. But my great time was shot, and I ended up with just a good time. I get the intended wordplay on the MOONROOF clue (35D: Clear choice for auto buyers), but, uh, MOONROOFs are tinted, so I don't really love "clear" there. Yes, "clear" can mean simply translucent, but you want your "?" clues to land clean and pure and strong. When it comes to car windows of all kinds, "clear" is in fact the opposite of (or the alternative to) "tinted," so it's a boo from me, and Not just because I didn't see the wordplay the first time. The wordplay is off in this automotive context. Thank you for allowing me this time to air my picayune clue wording concerns.

This grid has a couple keepers (DEATH STARE—which I paused over, thinking it might be DEATH GLARE; "HOW RUDE"; and ULTRAHD) but overall it's pretty tepid. There's not a lot here to get excited about. Not a lot that's new or current or colloquial. TWITTERATI probably thinks it's ... something, but I've seen it before and it already feels dated (like something someone might've said in '09), and I'm not convinced people say it (or said it) much at all. Anyway, I don't think it's as hip or current or original as it thinks it is. There's nothing much wrong with the grid. It just doesn't hum and sing and dance the way a great themeless should. More ambition and creativity, please. The only difficulty I had with this puzzle, I already went over, though SWAB / IOWA was hard for me too. Again, I'm going to object to the wannabe tricksy cluing, this time on SWAB (29D: Stick in a cabinet, say). I knew immediately that 'stick' was a noun, not a verb, so the wordplay wasn't great ... I just couldn't think of what kind of "stick" (beyond maybe deodorant) one would find in a cabinet. The part of the SWAB that matters isn't the "stick" part, which is just a handle: it's the cotton part, which is decidedly non-stickish. No one would refer to SWABs as "sticks." Sigh. This clue is defensible, but still grating. Make your "?" clues perfect!! [Do a school visit, in a way?] is a pretty perfect clue for SNORKEL, for example.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

P.S. I'm learning from Twitter that a lot of people don't know what BRACE means in today's clue context (47A: Pair). A BRACE of something is a pair of it. Two of it. This word feels ... not common, to be sure, but ... I just thought it was fairly normal. It's possible that a quarter century of teaching Shakespeare has skewed my concept of "normal."

P.P.S. Hey, next weekend (Sat. Aug. 17) is Lollapuzzoola, one of the biggest annual crossword tournaments in the country, and the only one (that I know of) in NYC. There are still some spaces left for those who want to participate in some hardcore, in-person nerddom (actually a very fun tournament with a low-key vibe and hundreds of lovely people). But if you just want to see what tournament puzzles are like without the fear of public humiliation*, then there's also the Solve At-Home Division of the tournament, which you should get in on. Lolla and Indie 500 (in DC) are my favorite tournaments, and the only ones I participate in regularly. So come solve and say hi. Or solve at home and wish you had. Whatever. Just sign up! INFORMATION HERE.

*there's no public humiliation except that which you heap on yourself, trust me

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Constructor: Anna Gundlach and Erik Agard

Relative difficulty: Medium-Challenging (8:42) (at least a minute of that was self-inflicted: a dumb wrong letter that I entered, dumbly—a mistake no one else could possibly have made; anyway, I'm not factoring that minute into "difficulty")

THEME: none

Word of the Day: TYPE-A flu (51D: Most serious kind of flu) —

• • •

Loved this one, though the way it's glutted with teenspeak made me literally laugh out loud. It's like, we get it, youths. You're youthful. I got TURNT and thought, "What's next, LIT?" And thennnn ... bam, IT'S LIT. Cool. No one is going to be able to convince me that OPPS is a thing, mostly because it doesn't sound plausible. Sounds like too many other words. People would just be saying "What? Your hops? Your pops? Are you a British person trying to say APPS?" every time you tried to use it. It's a not-good bit of fill that is trying to pretend it's cool. But no matter. It's inferrable, and if not all the colloquialness lands, most of it does. There's very little not to like here. YELPER and E-SPORTS and UPSOLD are all fresh and fun. This puzzle made me feel like I still had some connection to modern youthful slang, because I knew all the terms (except OPPS, which we've established is made-up and/or dumb), but, real talk, I am an old and the way you know that I am an old is that my first answer, the first one I put into this here grid, was EWELL (3D: Tom ___, co-star of Marilyn Monroe in "The Seven Year Itch").EWELL YELPER AESOP was how I got going. How I got *stopping* (ugh) was by being very stupid and somehow, after getting almost all of 19A: Parody (IMITATE) from crosses, deciding to write in an "N" in the second position. In my head, I was spelling INITIATE, which ... doesn't even make sense for the clue. Did you ever do something so dumb you can't even make sense of it to yourself? Well that's what happened here. INITATE. So I (fittingly) had NO USE at the beginning of 20D: Arrow on a screen (MOUSE POINTER) for a minute (figuratively and possibly literally). That stupid mistake inflated my time pretty badly. But I don't think the actual difficulty here was too bad. Saturday-worthy, for sure, but quite doable.

Loved POWER MOVE as an answer, and loooved the clue on DEAR SANTA (62A: Start of an anti-coal petition—I sincerely wrote in DEAR EARTH at first, like ... someone was writing a letter to the earth apologizing for polluting the *&^! out of it). Why is your RES. on your "business" card? (44A: Business card abbr.) And why does ERNESTINE have such a terrible clue (60A: Woman's name that's an anagram of INTERNEES). I mean, terrrrrible. Not only could not not think of a single ERNESTINE, but you decided to conjure up internment camps as part of your clue? Oh, no. No. Weird. Was confused by LAS at first, since I figured the Los Angeles Sparks would be ... LOS; but of course L.A. Sparks, LAS. Makes sense. Had GAIA for 10A: Goddess of spring and rebirth (MAIA), so thank goodness for fair crosses, and thank goodness GUTT is not a real word (10D: Unlikely entrant in a Westminster show) (MUTT). My big accomplishment of the day was getting HALTERTOP from just the "H" (57A: Article of summer wear), and good thing, because, as I've suggested, NO USE was making that SW corner a bear. This was my kind of Saturday. Fresh, fun, hard. Knocked me around just the right amount.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Constructor: Alex Eaton-Salners

Relative difficulty: Medium (9:31)

THEME:"Bird Play" — Four answers have circled squares that literally represent some bird idiom (those idioms are also theme answers):

Theme answers:

SC(OFF) (41A: Jeer) over POPU(LAR K)IDS (49A: In-group at school)
HILARY(SWAN)K (19A: Best Actress winner of 1999 and 2004)
THE PLOT T(HICKEN)S (25A: "Curiouser and curiouser ...")
(E)V(A)N(G)E(L)IZ(E) (52A: Preach the gospel)

which represent:

OFF ON A LARK (81A: What's depicted by the circled letters in 41-/49-Across)
SPREAD EAGLE (84A: ... in 52-Across)
HEADLESS CHICKEN (106A: ... in 25-Across)
SWAN DIVE (116A: ... and in 19-Across)

Word of the Day: ELENA of Avalor (118A: Princess of Avalor, in children's TV) —

Elena of Avalor is an American computer-animated adventure television series that premiered on Disney Channel on July 22, 2016, and moved to Disney Junior on July 14, 2018. The series features Aimee Carreroas the voice of Elena, a young Latina princess. (wikipedia)

• • •

Underneath all the technical / architectural glitz of this one is just a bunch of groany dad puns. Visual dad puns. There's nothing theme-y about any of this except the HILARY (SWAN)K answer, which makes it a wicked outlier. None of the other themers have anything funky going on with them at all. They're just straight clue/answers with circled squares in the answers. The SWAN DIVE is a real anomaly. Another anomaly (that bugged me more) was the non-bird circled squares OFF, used as part of the visual representation of OFF ON A LARK. All the others are birds (or, I guess, partial birds, in the case of HICKEN). OFF is not a bird. So boo to that. Also, if you want to go full groan-joke, it's OFF on *A* LARK not U LARK. But the real issue is circled OFF. I mean, whatever, it's all just wackiness and who cares, on one level, but it was a bit too wobbly in the execution for me, and the payoff wasn't great. Was nice to find the bottom half of the grid so easy, though. Once you've got those circled squares in place, it's real easy to see what phrases they represent. This is my fifth (recorded) Sunday in a row where I've finished in under 10 minutes. Not sure if they've gotten easier or I've gotten faster, but this one only felt fast in the second (lower) half. The first (upper) half felt normal, maybe even slightly tougher than normal.

Speaking of tougher than normal, we need to discuss the one truly inexcusable part of this puzzle: the cross at 33D: ___ Nurmi, 1920s Olympic runner nicknamed the "Flying Finn" (PAAVO) / 46A: Part of a three-in-a-row (TAC). Now I know PAAVO because ... well, I've been doing xwords a long time, so even though he's well before my time, I've seen that name enough that it stuck. He's certainly crossworthy. But with proper nouns, especially ones that are likely to be outside many people's ken, you really have to make sure all the crosses are fair, especially if the proper noun in question is not an inferrable name. Like, if the missing "A" had been in DAVID, I wouldn't have much sympathy for you if you couldn't just guess it. But today, the name was PAAVO, and the cross was complete ambiguous; that is, there are two totally accurate responses to 46A: Part of a three-in-a-row: TIC and TAC (unless three-in-a-row *isn't* tic-tac-toe, in which case I don't know what to say). TIC is right. TAC is right. Now obviously only TAC is *truly* right since only PAAVO is correct. But you should not leave solvers with two possible right answers at a cross that is a. a vowel b. in the middle of a foreign and very uncommon name. PAIVO? I mean, why not? PAAVO's a name. This is all to say that a decent editor would've indicated that the answer was the *Second* part of three-in-a-row. Non-fans of Finnish runners of antiquity would still have wondered (possibly aloud) what the hell PAAVO was, but they could've gone to all the crosses, found them indisputable, and moved on. As is, a good chunk of solverdom will just wipe out at that cross. Very, very bad editing.

Five things:

53D: Diaper, in Britspeak (NAPPIE)— whoa. Not sure I've ever seen this word in the singular. Really wanted -Y ending.
27D: Ocelli (EYE SPOTS)— to me, this is the thing that happens when you see spots ... like maybe ... floaters, or other things in your field of vision. I thought they were eye-shaped ... something. Windows? Buuuuut no; it turns out they are the spots that resemble eyes, "as on the tail feathers of a male peacock" (?!).
59A: Chinese liquor made from sorghum (MAOTAI) — reforgot this. I look forward to reforgetting it again many times before I finally remember that it's just MAITAI misspelled.
70D: See the future with a crystal ball (SCRY) — you know that's not a real thing, right? [See the future with a crystal ball] = SCAM. But SCRY is a funny word so I'm not too mad.
118A: Princess of Avalor, in children's TV (ELENA) — hard "Whaaa?" Give her a movie so she can be a legit, crossworthy "Disney princess." Or don't, whatever. I guess any new ELENA clue is a good ELENA clue.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

P.S. Hey, next weekend (Sat. Aug. 17) is Lollapuzzoola, one of the biggest annual crossword tournaments in the country, and the only one (that I know of) in NYC. There are still some spaces left for those who want to participate in some hardcore, in-person nerddom (actually a very fun tournament with a low-key vibe and hundreds of lovely people). But if you just want to see what tournament puzzles are like without the fear of public humiliation*, then there's also the Solve At-Home Division of the tournament, which you should get in on. Lolla and Indie 500 (in DC) are my favorite tournaments, and the only ones I participate in regularly. So come solve and say hi. Or solve at home and wish you had. Whatever. Just sign up! INFORMATION HERE.

*there's no public humiliation except that which you heap on yourself, trust me

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Constructor: Jeffrey Wechsler

Relative difficulty: Medium (2:59)

THEME: O, B— all the themers begin with the sounds of those letters being said aloud:

Theme answers:

OBIE AWARD (17A: Theatrical honor)
OBI-WAN KENOBI (24A: "Star Wars" role for Alec Guinness)
OBEDIENCE SCHOOL (38A: Where education is pursued doggedly?)
OB/GYN DOCTORS (49A: Delivery people?)
"OH, BE QUIET!" (62A: "Hush, you!")

Word of the Day:"Blue SKIES" (22D: Irving Berlin's "Blue ___") —

"Blue Skies" is a popular song, written by Irving Berlin in 1926. // The song was composed in 1926 as a last-minute addition to the Rodgers and Hart musical Betsy. Although the show ran for 39 performances only, "Blue Skies" was an instant success, with audiences on opening night demanding 24 encores of the piece from star Belle Baker. During the final repetition, Ms. Baker forgot her lyrics, prompting Berlin to sing them from his seat in the front row.
In 1927, the music was published and Ben Selvin's recorded version was a hit. That same year, it became one of the first songs to be featured in a talkie, when Al Jolson performed it in The Jazz Singer. The song was recorded for all of the major and dime store labels of the time. Another version of the song was recorded by Benny Goodman and his Orchestra in 1935 (Victor 25136). 1946 was also a notable year for the song, with a Bing Crosby/Fred Astaire filmtaking its title along with two recorded versions by Count Basie and Benny Goodman reaching #8 and #9 on the pop charts, respectively. Bing Crosby and Danny Kaye performed the song in 1954's White Christmas. Crossing genres, Willie Nelson's recording of "Blue Skies" was a #1 country music hit in 1978. It was a major western swing and country standard already in 1939, by Moon Mullican, and in 1962 by Jim Reeves.
Thelonious Monk's 1947 composition "In Walked Bud" is based on the chord changes to "Blue Skies."
"Blue Skies" is one of many popular songs whose lyrics use a "bluebird of happiness" as a symbol of cheer: "Bluebirds singing a song—Nothing but bluebirds all day long." The sunny optimism of the lyrics are undercut by the minor key giving the words an ironic feeling. (wikipedia)

• • •

Pffffffft, no, not really, no. Just a bunch of the same sounds? There's not a real progression, no climax, no revealer, the central answer has the stress on the "B" unlike all the others, OB/GYN DOCTORS is hella redundant and also said by no one. Just a big "what the hell?" sigh from me. Not sure what is ailing this paper that it can't deliver on Mondays Every Single Week. I mean, for how much they talk themselves up, they should deliver every day, but a disappointing Monday is a particularly sad sight, somehow. The fill on this one is supremely, unnecessarily mediocre and stale. AABA should not be in any puzzle unless the situation is desperate. Rhyme schemes aren't great, and this one in particular, ugh. ACTUATE is a gross word that is gross, bury it in the yard. MOPEDS just gets [Two-wheelers]?!?! Doesn't exactly conjure up MOPEDS. Motorcycles, bicycles, some luggage ... all [Two-wheelers]. At least *try* to make your clues interesting. LOWLIT ... just looks wrong to me every time I see and/or say it (5D: Darkish, as the interior of a restaurant). This puzzle has no ear at all for the English language. I mean, [Sperm targets]!? That is definitely defensible, on a literal level, but why? Why would you? ELEC ASIN EIRE ESTEE WEENY OCOME!? OCOME on! BOO! (45A: "You stink!") Be more entertaining!

I really want the clue on OBEDIENCE SCHOOL to be [Where education is doggedly pursued?] instead of [... pursued doggedly?]. My way gets eight times more google hits. Also, if you google "pursued doggedly" in quotation marks, your first hits all refer to this here puzzle, which suggests awkward phrasing. I guess from a "comedic" (cough) standpoint, maybe you want to hit that "pun" (cough) word last? But I think the "joke" (...) comes across just fine with the actually sounds-better phrasing. Do SAGAS have "chapters"? That seems like a feature of novels, to me. I guess in the metaphorical sense of "chapter," sure. Still, that was one moment that slowed me down, especially since that answer contained the mystery which-bomb-is-it!? letter (N!? H!? Nope, it's A!) (12D: Detonation of 7/16/45) (actually the H-BOMB wasn't tested (by the US) until the '50s, so I guess that possibility was out from the jump, but who's thinking in such specific terms on a Monday!? Go go go!). Oh, um, just realized that the "A" in A-BOMB, that ... that stands for ATOM, right? Or "atomic," which contains ATOM. Right? The same ATOM that is actually also in this grid?? (27D: Quark's place). Ugh, this puzzle is fired!

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Constructor: Lynn Lempel

Relative difficulty: Easy (3:14)

THEME: STAR-CROSSED (23D: With 38-Across, like Romeo and Juliet ... and like the circled words)— words that can precede "star" in common phrases "cross" one another four times in the grid:

Theme answers:

ROCK (1D: Alternative to rap and R&B) / CHILD-PROOF (16A: Safe for youngsters)
LODE (15A: Rich supply of ore) / MORNING DEW (10D: Droplets seen early in the day)
LEAST OF ALL (28D: Lowest in importance) / FILM (63A: Old camera need)
STRIKE GOLD (61A: Hit the jackpot) / LONE (57D: Solitary)

Word of the Day: KATIE Ledecky (19A: Ledecky who has been named World Swimmer of Year five times) —

Kathleen Genevieve Ledecky (/ləˈdɛki/; Czech pronunciation: [ˈlɛdɛtskiː]; born March 17, 1997) is an American competitive swimmer. She has won five Olympic gold medals and 15 world championship gold medals, the most in history for a female swimmer. She is the current world record holder in the women's 400-, 800-, and 1500-meter freestyle (long course). She also holds the fastest-ever times in the women's 500-, 1000-, and 1650-yard freestyle events.
In her international debut at the 2012 London Olympic Games as a 15-year-old, Ledecky unexpectedly won the gold medal in the women's 800-metre freestyle. Four years later, she left Rio de Janeiro as the most decorated female athlete of the 2016 Olympic Games with four gold medals, one silver medal, and two world records. In total, she has won 34 medals (28 golds, 5 silvers, and 1 bronze) in major international competitions, spanning the Summer Olympics, World Championships, and Pan Pacific Championships. During her career, she has broken fourteen world records.
Ledecky's success has earned her Swimming World's Female World Swimmer of the Year a record-breaking five times. Ledecky was also named Associated Press Female Athlete of the Year in 2017, international female Champion of Champions by L'Équipe in 2014 and 2017, United States Olympic Committee Female Athlete of the Year in 2013, 2016 and 2017, and Sportswoman of the Year by the Women's Sports Foundationin 2017. Ledecky's 11 individual gold medals at the World Aquatics Championships and 15 combined individual titles at the Olympics and World Aquatics Championships are records in women's swimming. (wikipedia)

• • •

This felt so easy that I was slightly surprised that my time wasn't faster—a fast time, for sure, but twenty seconds off my recorded best. Truly felt like a Monday, and played like one. The weird off-centered cross-referenced revealer, plus a few hesitations elsewhere (one of them fairly significant), was enough to inflate my time to merely Regular Easy, as opposed to Spectacularly Easy. The theme seems pretty solid to me—nothing very twisty or wordplayish going on, but the execution is consistent. The whole thing feels very well crafted, and the fill, while light on sparkle, stays clean throughout the grid. This is a good example of a how a puzzle can feel "old" (or "old-fashioned") but still be good; the frame of reference here is decidedly not current, and much of the fill is very familiar crosswordy stuff, but the grid never drifts into crosswordese (e.g. names you never see outside crosswords), and has very little in the way of abbrs., partials, marginal foreign words, obscurities, etc. Feels like a fine Tuesday puzzle from the '90s (the clue on KATIE is the only thing that marks this thing as a 21st-century product). "Polished" is the word that comes most readily to mind as I look over this grid. I wish more constructors took the time to make *every* corner of their grids this neat.

Don't have much to say about this one. I'm not sure about the revealer—why cross STAR and CROSSED? I mean, I get it, there's a whole "cross" theme going on, but the themers cross for very specific reasons, following a pattern that the revealer does not follow itself. And since the revealer cross is wonkily off-center, it kind of makes the whole thing weird. It's an added flourish that actually adds little and creates inelegance. This is a minor criticism, but I think about these things. Maybe you could've done the cross with STAR crossing the central "S" in CROSSED, thus forming a kind of cross? No, that would be a "T," and a top-heavy one at that. STAR is probably in a fine place, all things considered. It just messes with the tidiness of the "cross" theme a little.

My slowness came almost entirely from the bottom half of LEAST OF ALL. Everything after LEAST was ???? since LEAST seemed to encompass the entire meaning of the clue, 28D: Lowest in importance. Even LEASTO- didn't help. And then when I went for help with crosses, I got a misleading clue at 51A: Flight amenity that costs extra (WIFI). That clue *needs* "usually* at the end of it, as several airlines, including Emirates and JetBlue, offer free WIFI. Even with the terminal "I," I didn't know what was up. Considered TAXI (??!). Also really couldn't see FILM, which tells you a bit about how old I am (63A: Old camera need). "Old"! How dare you! Lastly, as far as that corner is concerned, why in the world would you use Desdemona, of all people, as the clue WIFE (51D: Desdemona, to Othello). Me: "well MURDER VICTIM doesn't fit, so ...?" Of all the WIFEs in the world (so many), this paradigmatic example of domestic violence is your example? I'm in no way offended. Just baffled. [Lucy, to Desi] [Marge, to Homer] [Penelope, to Odysseus] etc etc etc. any of those would've worked. Not a strangulation among them.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Constructor: David J. Kahn

Relative difficulty: Easy (3:39)

THEME: WOODSTOCK (63A: Iconic August 1969 music festival, four of whose performers appear in answers to 17-, 36-, 46- and 55-Across) — non-consecutive circles contain names of performers at this festival, just like the clue says ... also THE CATSKILLS (20A: Upstate New York area where 63-Across was held) is in here too:

Theme answers:

BAKED ZITI (Joan BAEZ) (17A: Casserole dish in a trattoria)
SANTA MONICA (SANTANA) (36A: West Coast city with a popular pier)
CLOCK TOWERS (Joe COCKER) (46A: Structure in some old town squares)
JOB APPLICANT (Janis JOPLIN) (55A: Interviewee, maybe)

Word of the Day: ODIC (56D: Keatsian, e.g.) —

: of, relating to, or forming an ode (m-w.com)

• • •

Why do a tribute puzzle if you're not going to make it interesting. The non-consecutive circle gimmick? That tired thing? Why? Four random musical acts whyyyyyyyy? You know, you're not *required* to do a tribute if you don't really have any good ideas. You can just ... let it go. The world did not need a WOODSTOCK tribute puzzle, and it For Sure did not need this one. There is nothing here. This is as programmatic and pro forma as they come. Is boomers' good-vibes nostalgia, along with a surfeit of theme answers (6 long ones!), supposed to be enough to make this one palatable? I just don't know why you do a tribute puzzle if you don't have a good idea in you. "Wow, you mean the letters in SANTANA can be found inside SANTA MONICA!?!?!" Who is the solver that is exclaiming this in his head, and, more importantly, is he (still) high? Conceptually, this is a gigantic miss. A colossal "who cares?" Take THE CATSKILLS and CHOKEHOLDS and RAZE the rest.

I have nothing else to say today. I can't say anything when there's no there there. A non-theme *and* I had to endure ARB and ODIC and SINKSAPUTT!?!? The NYTXW knows it has no real competition in the world of daily subscription puzzles, so like all monopolies it's gonna give you mediocre junk and you're just gonna take it and like it. This puzzle's reputation is running on nostalgia, and nowhere is that more evident than in this puzzle, which, ironically, can't even do nostalgia justice. ADIEU!

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Constructor: Andrew Zhou

Relative difficulty: Medium (6:00)

THEME: REVERSE ENGINEER (55A: Take apart in order to reproduce ... or a hint to what's hidden in 17-, 23-, 34- and 46-Across) — you can find the names of famous "engineers" backwards (or "reversed") inside of the themers (bracketed numbers after each clue indicate how many letters long each engineer's name is):

Theme answers:

TRUE OR FALSE TEST (17A: Easy quiz to grade [5]) (Nikola Tesla)
MALE BONDING (23A: Bromantic activity [5]) (Alfred Nobel)
NO SIDE EFFECTS (34A: Drugmaker's claim [6]) (Thomas Alva Edison)
LUCILLE BALL (46A: TV star with a museum in Jamestown, N.Y. [4]) (Alexander Graham Bell)

Word of the Day: GELÉE (33D: Aspic-like dish) —

1: a cosmetic gel gelée skin cleansers

2: a jellied food : an edible jelly peach gelée (merriam-webster.com)

• • •

Really like this theme, and the fill is largely solid, so congrats to the constructor. The editor, however ... let's just get the embarrassing stuff out of the way right off the bat. There is no reason to clue ESTATES like that (13D: Jamaica ___, N.Y. (childhood home of Donald Trump)). Why would you do that? Why drag the most influential white supremacist in the world, the one currently torturing and terrorizing child refugees and working to end *legal* immigration for "takers" (i.e. brown people), why are you waving at him? Do you think, Will, that it's cute. That it's funny to troll "sensitive" solvers (the, uh, ones who hate racists and sexual assailants)? The word was ESTATES. It's a common word you can clue a million ways. It wasn't IVANKA, an answer you can clue just one way. It's ESTATES. ESTATES. And you decided you'd do a little nostalgic trip to the childhood home of the guy who inspired recent mass shootings with his nativist "invasion" rhetoric? Like, for funsies? If it was the constructor's clue, you should've changed it. If it was yours ... I don't even know. I don't understand your love affair with this terrible human being. Inclusion of him here is gratuitous and therefore disgusting.

[34A: NO SIDE EFFECTS]

This felt very easy for the most part, but hoo-boy did I get stymied by the whole RICES / OCEANAUT / GLUES / GELÉE mash-up in the NE. I had RIVES for 16A: Splits into bits (RICES), which kept the already-hard OCEANAUT very very hidden from me (11D: Sub tenant?). And though apparently GELÉE has been in the puzzle multiple times in the nearly 13 years I've been blogging, it's hardly ever had a food-related clue. Before today, just two. Here's the list of GELÉE clues:

[from xwordinfo]

So it's "Aspic-like" but also an aspic modifier in the dish "Aspic GELÉE?" Apparently lots of things are gelée and it's just a culinary term I didn't know. But the "aspic" stuff through me off badly. So I probably lost a minute or two trying to unknot all that ricing and gluing and what not.

Five things:

4D: Filled and steamed bun, in Chinese cuisine (BAO) — I cannot believe I actually made a pitch for these to appear more often in crosswords earlier this summer, and yet when one appeared, I actually totally blanked at BA-. Wanted BAP for a second. I think (Korean!!!) Bee-Bim-BOP got in my head (I eat BAO at this Asian fusion place). Ugh, so embarrassing.
35D: Eclipse (OUTRIVAL)— I just want to say how dumb I think this word is. I wanted OUTSHINE. You both try to shine, but one outshines the other. You both try to play, but one outplays the other. You both try to ... rival??? It's weird.
60A: ___ Mongolia (INNER) — I had OUTER, of course
34D: Attention-getting phrase (NOTA BENE) — oof, also very hard. I was looking for something like PSSSSSST. I guess that's not a phrase. How about PSST AHEM?
3D: So, humorously (THUSLY)— aw, I kinda like good old THUSLY. Don't laugh at poor THUSLY. He means well.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

P.S. I laughed hard at 4A: Apt hairstyle for a gunslinger? (BANGS). I neeeeeed pictures.

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Constructor: Ori Brian

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium (6:05)

THEME: none

Word of the Day: LAD MAG (9A: Maxim, e.g.) —

n
(Journalism & Publishing) a magazine aimed at or appealing to men, focusing on fashion, gadgets, andoften featuring scantily dressed women (thefreedictionary.com)

• • •

The fill here is OK. Nothing I particularly love. Solid C. Fine. Acceptable. Workmanlike—emphasis on the "man" because hoo boy, this thing is comically heavy on testosterone. It's basically muscle cars and AMMO and ... yeah, with the ACNE and the BEER KEGS it's got a very fratty vibe. Also a very ogley vibe, what with the LAD MAGs and Phoebe CATES clued via her role as an iconic image of teenage-boy masturbatory fantasy. There are five ... five! ... different male-gendered words in this grid: MALE (from MALE EGO), LAD, DUDES, MEN (from MAILMEN), and MAN (from MANBUN). It feels like a parody of the fairly typical guy-skewing, exclusionary content that is not untypical of NYT crosswords (considering that they remain overwhelming constructed by male lad dudes). But I don't think the puzzle is having a laugh. I think it's just ... not thinking much about offering a a broader (!) view of the world. I liked seeing ABUELA, and, you know, Jackie JOYNER-Kersee is a cool entry, but even LARA CROFT fits right into the highly sexualized male-gaze vibe of this puzzle. Her sex appeal (particularly to young men) is a huge part of her fame. This is just a fraction of the "Sex Symbol" section of her wikipedia page:

"Publications such as Play, GameTrailers, and PlayStation Magazine listed big breasts as one of the character's most famous attributes. After interviewing players in 1998, Griffiths commented that players regularly mention Croft's breasts when discussing her. In 2008, the character was first and second on two UGO Networks lists of hottest video game characters. GameDaily placed Lara Croft number one on a similar list that same year, and PlayStation: The Official Magazine awarded her honourable mention for Game Babe of the Year." (for more, go here)

The whole "game babe" angle would not have occurred to me were she not (today) swimming in a swamp of dicks up there in the NE. It's good to be aware of the overall balance of answers in your grid, and to correct for ridiculous overrepresentation.

Thought I was going to storm this one, but got significant held up trying and failing to parse DOORDIE (47A: Critical). Also got held up trying to get ADMIT, which just wouldn't come until I had A-MIT, ugh. So that SW corner roughed me up, as did my total inability to understand the basic grammar, let alone the significance, of the clue at 32D: Helps for short people, for short (ATMS). Is "helps" a verb or noun, is "short" a matter of stature or money? I really was thinking "short" as in "small," so even with AT--, I was puzzled. Thought UM, NO was UH, NO, and was ready to accept that ATHS was just some weird short-person-helping thing I didn't know. Luckily, I came to my senses. EROS, also not really a thing I knew. I kept thinking the FILTER of INSTAGRAM FILTER must be wrong because surely this is something to do with EGOS ... but no (34D: Freudian focus). Never think of a reed having "keys," so clue on OBOE threw me. Blanked on the "C" in COB. Still felt on the easy side. Oh, yeah, and lastly, I had no idea (or forgot) that ROGET was a PETER. Had PETER (actually had TETER 'cause I thought 24D: Impertinent sort (SNIP) was a SNIT), and then had no idea. What is this "awful lot of commas"?? That is some weird colloquial phrasing. "Awful." What kind of one-off homespun nonsense is that? Odd.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Constructor: Michael Hawkins

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium (somewhere in the 7s, and that's with the timer going for at least 30 seconds before I even started, and with me reading some of the clues aloud to my wife, and also I've had four drinks ... so it must be easyish)

THEME: none

Word of the Day: FOLIE À DEUX (58A: Shared delusion, from the French) —

Folie à deux, shared psychosis, or shared delusional disorder is a psychiatric syndrome in which symptoms of a delusional belief and sometimes hallucinations are transmitted from one individual to another. The same syndrome shared by more than two people may be called folie à trois, folie à quatre, folie en famille ("family madness"), or even folie à plusieurs ("madness of several"). (wikipedia)

• • •

Hi from NYC, where I am holed up in a hotel on the Upper West Side trying to crank out a blog post before I pass out from exhaustion. Been a long day—drive over the Beacon, then train down, then walk from Grand Central to hotel to Harlem (so a Lot of walking) and then a big meal and lots of wine and then a subway down to Chelsea for a margarita with other friends, and then another bar one block over where literally dozens of crossword people were already hanging out, and another beer, and so much loud talking (over the music) that now voice is messed up, and then a subway back to the hotel. And here I sit. Oh, right, I'm here in NYC for Lollapuzzoola crossword tournament tomorrow—probably should've led with the context. Four drinks is three drinks more than I normally have so things might be a little shaky tonight. This puzzle felt good, though maybe that's just because I was expecting to do terrible and instead I crushed it. Neither my wife nor I likes SCREENAGER *at all*—first I'm hearing it, boo (17A: Modern young person vis-à-vis video games and smartphones). It sounds like SCREAMAGER, and also it describes ... like, nothing. Look around. Everyone's a SCREENAGER. Stop.

I will take any opportunity I can to mention the fact that I was the first person to put AMY POEHLER in a crossword. This is one such opportunity. I feel like this puzzle either got real easy or real hard depending on where you come down on the FOLIE À DEUX question. Me, I got it off the "F"—leapt right to mind. The whole SE corner actually felt like a Monday or Tuesday to me. The NW (where I started) was probably the toughest to get. All the other long answers fell really quickly. Not too much crosswordese today. Just ANYA, a handy name to know. Oh, and MERL, which, I'm sure, is, in fact, a "Blackbird" but which should, by law, always have to be clued via the late great crossword constructor/editor MERL Reagle (whom you know if you saw "Wordplay," or the "Simpsons" episode about crosswords, both of which he was in). I need to sleep so I can solve puzzles tomorrow. Byyye.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Constructor: David Steinberg

Relative difficulty: very easy (5:15)

THEME: "Revolutionary" — four balls in the grid rotate around from left to right; four long down answers through those balls use all four letters instead of just going straight through

Theme answers:

GOES FOR A SPIN (24A: Drives around awhile ... as suggested by this puzzle's shaded squares?)
TURN TURN TURN (119A: 1965 #1 Byrds hit ... as suggested by this puzzle's shaded squares?)
GETS THE BALL ROLLING (3D: Kicks things off)
THE HOTL BALTIMORE (20D: 1973 play featuring a sign with a burned-out "E")
ALL BARK AND NO BITE (49D: Full of empty talk)
SMALL BUSINESS OWNER (42D: Baker or dry cleaner, maybe)

Word of the Day: POTLATCH (23A: Celebratory Native American feast) —

A potlatch is a gift-giving feast practiced by indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest Coast of Canada and the United States, among whom it is traditionally the primary economic system. This includes the Heiltsuk, Haida, Nuxalk, Tlingit, Makah, Tsimshian, Nuu-chah-nulth, Kwakwaka'wakw, and Coast Salish cultures. Potlatches are also a common feature of the peoples of the Interior and of the Subarctic adjoining the Northwest Coast, although mostly without the elaborate ritual and gift-giving economy of the coastal peoples (see Athabaskan potlatch). A potlatch involves giving away or destroying wealth or valuable items in order to demonstrate a leader's wealth and power.

Potlatches went through a history of rigorous ban by the Canadian federal government, continuing underground despite the risk of criminal punishment, and have been studied by many anthropologists. Since the practice was de-criminalized in the post-war years, the potlatch has re-emerged in some communities.

The word comes from the Chinook Jargon, meaning "to give away" or "a gift"; originally from the Nuu-chah-nulth word paɬaˑč, to make a ceremonial gift in a potlatch. [Wikipedia]

• • •

Christopher Adams here once again, filling in for Rex while he's in NYC enjoying Lollapuzzoola (and taking home third place in the pairs division!). Meanwhile, from Twitter, I've got a bunch of FOMO, but I've also heard lots of good things about the puzzles, though, and I'm looking forward to solving them at home (and highly encourage you to do the same).

Speaking of good puzzles: this is one, even though I'm pretty sure I've seen this theme before, as well as some other things. Sure, it's a little weird to not have the balls in the center of the puzzle—but they're all lined up, all rotate clockwise, and the starting point rotates one position each time you move from left to right, which is the sort of small detail that tells me some thought went into this. And sure, it's a little weird to have two sorta-superfluous reveals when one of your long theme answers (GETS THE BALL ROLLING) does a much better job at that, but they're not bad, and something has to go there. And sure, the puzzle certainly feels like a 15x puzzle blown up to a 21x size—cut out the two reveals, shorten the theme answers, and maybe arrange the balls in a square, rather than on one line, and a constructor who is as good as David is could probably fit this in a 15x.

And yet, this doesn't really bother me. What I'm more concerned about is whether the puzzle is done well, whether the fill is good, and most importantly, whether it was fun to solve. And this one checks all those boxes. Very little about this puzzle is difficult—almost no iffy fill, FHA, SLR, ABO, ENS, and the slightly painty TEN AM aside. And almost no tricky clues; even the few ? clues that do show up are more playful than tricky, and easily figured out (e.g. Ones generating buzz in the music world? for KAZOOS, which brought a smile to my face).

ANITA (40D: Baker with the 1986 hit "Sweet Love")

But yeah, the solving experience was very smooth and very enjoyable. There wasn't much in the way of debut entries—besides the four theme answers and the first reveal, only APPARATED, NOT SORRY, and KOTB were new, and only a few others had only appeared once or twice before. But that's not the only way to good, fun fill—things like IT GIRL, BRAVADO, UPSTARTS, KIRSCH, ROOMBA add flavor to the puzzle, even though they've been used before. And with so much of the fill being solid / good *at worst*, the overall impression gets even better.

To be fair, the grid is somewhat defensively designed, without too many large open areas or entries with lots of constraints. But I don't hold that against either David or the puzzle: part of being a good constructor is knowing how to make a grid that lets you fill it so that the solver can enjoy it, and I'll take a well-constructed, clean, enjoyable puzzle any day of the week.

Olio:

I CHECK (8A: What 13-Down [KNOCK] means in poker) — Presumably this comes from casinos; unambiguous hand motions are a lot easier to detect by the eye in the sky, and thus it's a lot easier to settle debates. Still, all that aside, can we acknowledge the inherent weirdness of televised poker being a thing?
ABLE (61A: Beginning of the Joint Army/Navy Phonetic Alphabet) — This predates the NATO alphabet (which was designed to have as little chance of confusion between letters as possible) and is also the source of "roger" (as in "roger that", meaning "message received").
OBI (66D: Something you might take a bow for in the theater?) — One of the rare difficult things in this puzzle; especially crossing ABO. It's not a bad clue, but it does stick out; especially for a crosswordese answer like this, I'd've preferred to see a more straightforward clue.
SENATE (125A: Topic of Article I, Section 3 of the Constitution) — It gives the Senate the "sole Power to try all Impeachments", and notes that "when the President of the United States is tried, the Chief Justice shall preside".

Yours in puzzling, Christopher Adams, Court Jester of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Constructor: Peter Gordon

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium (3:08 on an oversized 16x15 grid)

THEME: ARTIE (71A: *Clarinetist Shaw ... or, when said aloud, the only two consonants in the answers to the starred clue) — theme answers contain both "R" and "T," and only "R" and "T," as their consonants:

Theme answers:

TEETER TOTTER (21A: *Seesaw)
TROT OUT (30A: *Bring forward for display)
RITA ORA (47A: *British hitmaker on Iggy Azalea's "Black Widow")
"TORA, TORA, TORA!" (57A: *1970 war film about the attack on Pearl Harbor)
TOO TRUE (4D: *"Sadly, you're right")
REITERATE (35D: *Say again)
ROTO ROOTER (29D: *Plumbing company whose jingle says "away go troubles down the drain")
RAT TERRIER (9D: *Vermin-hunting dog)
TREATER (46D: *Trick-or-___ (kid on Halloween))
TRATTORIA (11D: *Pasta-serving cafe)

Word of the Day: RITA ORA (47A) —

Rita Sahatçiu Ora (born Rita Sahatçiu; 26 November 1990) is an English singer, songwriter and actress. She rose to prominence in February 2012 when she featured on DJ Fresh's single "Hot Right Now", which reached number one in the UK. Her debut studio album, Ora, released in August 2012, debuted at number one in the United Kingdom. The album contained the UK number-one singles, "R.I.P." and "How We Do (Party)". Ora was the artist with the most number-one singles on the UK Singles Chart in 2012, with three singles reaching the top position.
Ora’s second studio album, Phoenix, was released in November 2018. The lead single, "Your Song", reached the UK top ten, and the subsequent singles, "Anywhere" and "Let You Love Me", reached the top five in the UK; the latter single made Ora the first British female solo artist to have thirteen top ten songs in the United Kingdom. (wikipedia)

• • •

That's eleven (11!) theme answers, if you count the revealer, which you should, so ... that's a lot. That's all I can say about this theme. It's a lot. Putting a lot of words that have just R's and T's in them into the grid ... seems like a very crosswordy thing to do. I mean, that's going with the flow as opposed to against it. Grids are naturally chock full of the RLSTNE (aka "Wheel of Fortune" or WOF letters), so this one is just ... more so? I don't see the point. It's an interesting architectural feat, getting a grid to work with so many multiply intersecting themers, but solving it wasn't terribly exciting. Because of the theme density, and the inherently crosswordesey nature of the theme, the grid tended toward the crosswordesey. Crosswordese *already* tends to be heavy on those letters (ERTE, RETE, TROU, ad infinitum), and then with the theme pressure, the crosswordese of all stripes starts coming out: EVEL, ANI, RARA, EULER, ERNO, three-R'd BRRR, ORNE (oof) and the unforgivable -TION, just to name the most obvious. Some of the themers were interesting answers in their own right (esp. RAT TERRIER), but there's not a lot of genuine word-sparkle here. And letter sparkle isn't a thing, even if R's and T's were sparkly, which they're not.

I think the word "roll" in 51D: Doughnut-shaped roll (BAGEL) really threw me because I had the "B" and wanted only BIALY. Looks like BAGELs and BIALYs are frequently sold together—here are two recent usage examples from merriam-webster.com (who defines BIALY as "a flat breakfast roll that has a depressed center and is usually covered with onion flakes"):

I had most trouble today with 6A: Disparaging remark (SLUR) because I wrote in BARB, and 14A: ___ box (computer prompt) (DIALOG), both because I barely know what that is and because I spell DIALOGUE thusly. I happened to know who RITA ORA is, but I don't think of her as Monday-famous on this side of the pond at all, and LOL to the idea that using Iggy Azalea in your clue is going to help your typical NYTXW solver figure out the answer. If you don't know who RITA ORA is, seems like an Iggy Azalea hint is likely to be meaningless to you too.

Thank to Chris Adams for filling in for me yesterday. Good thing he did, too, 'cause I drank more than I've drunk since I was in my 20s and was in no condition to write a blog either last night or this morning. Mezcal margaritas! What a revelation. I drank a great deal more than I normally do, but somehow managed to avoid sickness or hangover, so self-high-five for that. I was enjoying the city and being out with friends I get to see only once or twice a year. Oh, and I was celebrating this:

[3rd Place, Pairs Division, Lollapuzzoola 12]

So nice to see so many old friends, and to see so many readers, who were all so kind. I'm a somewhat introverted person who gets easily overwhelmed by crowds, but by and large crossword crowds rule. Plus, they understand if you just need to go stand in the corner and be by yourself for a few minutes to recharge your battery. My favorite moments came when meeting people who didn't know I was "Rex Parker" (I compete under my given name, Michael Sharp). I competed all day at a table with a lovely couple (Pat and Daren), and we chatted quite a bit, and then late in the day, my wife heard Pat say to Daren, "I think that was Rex Parker who just walked by." When my wife intervened to tell her, "Um, Michael [points to me] is Rex Parker," her reaction ... well, I feel lucky to have been there to see it. So special. She was crying/laughing, and then so was I, and it was all perfect. By the time she squeaked out "Thank you for your work," I was practically on the floor. I'm lucky to know so many kind and thoughtful and appreciative people because of this shouting into the cybersphere that I do every day. Even when I am no longer in any way competitive, I'm still gonna go to these tournaments because the company is so *&$^ing great.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Article 1

Article 0

Colorado's official state dinosaur / FRI 8-2-2019 / Locks that might not be totally secure? / Ones flying in circles / Zymurgist's interest

Article 0

Pioneering silent director Weber / SUN 8-4-19 / Says Quack instead of Buzz / Relative of guinea pig / Animal with flexible snout / Onetime fad with replacement seeds / Old game console for short / Melodic opera passages / Claude villain in Hunchback of Notre Dame

Letter after sigma / MON 8-5-2019 / Measure of light's brightness / Smidgen / Horace, as a poet / Slangy "sweetheart"

Something to believe in / TUES 8-6-19 / Ballet leap / Home of Anne of Green Gables / Bygone kind of tape

Yellow citrus fruit used in Japanese cuisine / WED 8-7-19 / Certain German wheels informally / Main component of crab shell / Talking tree of Tennyson poem / Futuristic film of 1982

Philistine-fighting king / THU 8-8-19 / Tin has been in them since 1929 / Angola's northern neighbor once

Faux brother of popular rock group / FRI 8-9-19 / Greek city visited by Paul before Athens / Rare-earth element named after where it was discovered / Carrier to Tokyo / Gambling card game that up to 10 may comfortably play at once

Fad game of 1990s / SAT 8-10-19 / Certain online food critic / Enemies in slang / Body parts that sound like some units of measure

Nurmi 1920s Olympic runner nicknamed Flying Finn / SUN 8-11-19 / Diaper in Britspeak / Chinese liquor made from sorghum / Missile first used in Yom Kippur War / Mathematician taught by Bernoulli / Swimmer in Himeji castle moat / Best Play Tony winner with geographical name / Fairy tale alter ego

Sharp's counterpart / MON 8-12-19 / Image in Jurassic Park logo informally / Mountaineering spike

Deep-sea fishing nets / TUE 8-13-19 / Flight amenity that costs extra / Bill killer's position

Capital whose name derives from Ojibwa word for traders / WED 8-14-19 / West Coast city with popular pier / Repeated cry from Richard III / Casserole dish in trattoria

Aspic-like dish / THU 8-15-19 / Filled steamed bun in Chinese cuisine / Bromantic activity / Travelocity mascot

Fictional raiding archaeologist / FRI 8-16-19 / Craft shop item with seemingly redundant name / Best-selling author who used awful lot of commas / Foes of Fido, stereotypically / Hit 2016 film set partly at sea

Shared delusion from French / SAT 8-17-19 / Maternity option involving pool

Leave off, as the last word of a / Sea creatures that may employ camouflage when hunting / Beginning of the Joint Army/Navy Phonetic Alphabet / Celebratory Native American feast / "___ quam videri," state motto of North Carolina / Home of the Marine Corps University

French river to English channel / MON 8-19-19 / British hitmaker on Iggy Azalea's Black Widow / Doughnut-shaped roll / Clarinetist Shaw / Mathematician once pictured on Swiss money