Rex Parker Does the NYT Crossword Puzzle

Constructor: Timothy Polin

Relative difficulty: Medium (actually slow for me at 3:17 because of a couple wrong short answers)

THEME: MOUSTACHES (60A: Archetypically villainous features possessed by the answers to the starred clues) — sigh, whatever

Theme answers:

DR. FU MANCHU (18A: *Sinister genius in a series of Sax Rohmer novels)
YOSEMITE SAM (23A: *Quick-tempered, gun-toting, rabbit-hating toon)
SNIDELY WHIPLASH (38A: *Dudley Do-Right's enemy in old TV cartoons)
CAPTAIN HOOK (51A: *Chief pirate in Neverland)

Word of the Day: BOLA (17A: Gaucho's weapon) —

: a cord with weights attached to the ends for throwing at and entangling an animal (merriam-webster.com)

• • •

This is a weak theme with terrible fill. Seriously, the short stuff is overwhelmingly yuck. Inexcusably hackneyed and tired. And the theme, sure, if you are an older person who likes remembering ... things ... then yay, there's SNIDELY WHIPLASH, I guess, but the very premise of this theme is absurd in 2020. Or even 1980. Tom Selleck would like a word, is what I'm saying.

[every dude on this show had a mustache!]

I guess this puzzle is fueled by pop culture nostalgia ... of some kind. I don't get it. MOUSTACHES is a dud of a revealer. Also, in American English, it's more (or very) commonly "mustaches." Look it up!

So much of this puzzle is "of old." You can start with the entire set of themers. But then "I'M A PC" is old (and not even iconic, frankly), the very idea of an AD WAR, or a HI MOM sign, seems old. Even the remake of the old movie feels old (7D: Title role for Jude Law in a 2004 remake) (ALFIE). But mostly the fill just feels stale and tired or odd. A single MADLIB? The absurd "laugh"TEHEE. ATON of ETTA and ONAIR and EST SHO ETAIL PSST ACCT YEP OUTTA SOPH AGLOW SWM ALMA. The best thing in the grid is IDLE THREAT, which I had a ton of trouble getting because I had ASAP at 47A: "Right away!" ("STAT!"). Man, it really hurts when you make a mistake you would never have made if you didn't have that *one* letter in place (in this case, the "A") that just happens to be shared by the correct answer and your wrong answer. Anyway, stared at IDLE P- for too long before realizing the "P" was wrong. Weird that the thing that held me up the most was the thing I liked the most, but there you are. Not much else to say. A shrug of a theme with a dud of a revealer and fill from Olde-Timey Mediocrity Land. I will admit to being in something of a bummer of a mood because of the death of LAKER legend Kobe Bryant and his 13yo daughter, Gianna, as well as another family, in a helicopter crash on Sunday. News that Kobe died stunned me. News that his daughter also died broke me a little. I don't have anything profound to say about all this. Just trying to give context to my solving / blogging mood. Take care, everyone.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

UPDATE: On second thought, maybe "villainous" isn't soooo wrong...

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Constructor: Trenton Charlson

Relative difficulty: Easy (untimed clipboard solve)

THEME: FINAL FOUR (62A: March Madness quartet ... or, collectively, the second parts of 17-, 25-, 37- and 51-Across?) — second parts of themers are W, X, Y, and Z, respectively, i.e. the FINAL FOUR letters of the alphabet:

Theme answers:

COMPOUND W (17A: "The wart stops here" sloganeer)
MALCOLM X (25A: Civil rights activist with a Harlem thoroughfare named after him)
GENERATION Y (37A: So-called "millennials")
CONTROL-Z (51A: Keyboard shortcut for "undo," on a PC)

Word of the Day: NRA (43A: New Deal inits.) —

The National Recovery Administration (NRA) was a prime New Deal agency established by U.S. president Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR) in 1933. The goal of the administration was to eliminate "cut throat competition" by bringing industry, labor, and government together to create codes of "fair practices" and set prices. The NRA was created by the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) and allowed industries to get together and write "codes of fair competition." The codes intended both to reduce "destructive competition" and help workers to set minimum wages and maximum weekly hours, as well as minimum prices at which products could be sold. The NRA also had a two-year renewal charter and was set to expire in June 1935 if not renewed. (wikipedia)

• • •

How hard would it have been to run this on a Tuesday in, let's say, March? I know the theme doesn't have anything to do with college basketball, but with a revealer clue like that, running the puzzle in any month but March just seems silly. You've got at least four Tuesdays in March, right? I doubt you've already got four March-specific Tuesday puzzles lined up for 2020, so why not hold this one? First Tuesday in March? Would've made the revealer much punchier, much more Aha! Oho! AHH. One of those. Running it in January is a bit of a GROANER. But that's not the puzzle's fault, obviously, and I think as Tuesday puzzles go, this one was fine. And it was Very easy, so people are going to enjoy it for that reason if for nothing else. The letter string gimmick feels slight—you could do it with other letter strings—say A, B, C, D or L, M, N, O, P—though the revealer gives it some cohesiveness (yet Another reason to run this thing in the correct month—that revealer has to do a lot of work: help it out!). I found the start of the solve slightly off-putting—allHOODOO and warts—but after that, with the exception of the occasional short gunk you get with almost every puzzle, the fill on this was smooth and even vibrant at times (OPEN MRI, TOPOLOGY, GRANDEUR, THE SAME, COYOTE ... I like all canids). And the themers were also interesting—though I've never used CONTROL-Z in my life and no one uses GENERATION Y. Still, those are valid phrases. Overall, very acceptable work.

The only speed bumps today came early on with the perennial "is it AAH or AHH????" question right off the bat at 1A: Sigh of satisfaction (AHH), an (ironically) unpleasant way to begin. I always want AAH for the relaxation sound, as the vowel should be drawn out (to my ear), but today, AHH it is. Then just figuring out HOODOO took most of the crosses (2D: Jinx). Thought there might be something about "hoax" in there, and then even after getting HOOD- thought, "HOODED?" Then since I thought 24A: Zoom up was something you do on your motorbike, not your airplane (SOAR), well, I think I spent more time with that answer than I spent with the entire bottom half of the grid. I didn't even see some of the Acrosses in the SW (where I finished up). Glad I didn't see NRA—I'm grateful they didn't use the gun clue, but if you throw a random Alphabet Soup clue at me, I'm just going to be confused. Do you have any idea how many [New Deal inits.] there are?? But I lucked into getting all the crosses and never actually seeing the clue. Hurray! I think I had RAVED before I had RAN ON (15A: Yakked and yakked)—I definitely wanted one past-tense word—but nothing else in the grid proved an obstacle for even a moment after I got out of the N/NW. Tight theme, smooth fill, easy clues. I've done (much) worse Tuesdays.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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Constructor: Jeremy Newton

Relative difficulty: Challenging (for me ... some names were ???? and the cluing was horrendous all around)

THEME: [Want an actor...]— actors whose last names + FOR can mean "want" are used as objects of desire in phrases that pun on their names:

Theme answers:

LONG FOR NIA (17A: Want an actress from "Soul Food")
PINE FOR CHRIS (23A: Want an actor from "Wonder Woman")
JONES FOR JANUARY (36A: Want an actress from "Mad Men")
YEN FOR DONNIE (44A: Want an actor from "Rogue One")
HOPE FOR BOB (55A: Want an actor from "Here Come the Girls")

Word of the Day: Donnie Yes (44A) —

Donnie Yen Ji-dan^[2] (Chinese: 甄子丹; born 27 July 1963) is a Hong Kong actor, martial artist, film director, producer, action choreographer, stuntman and multiple-time world wushu tournament champion ("Wushu" is the Chinese term for "martial arts" (武 "Wu" = military or martial, 術 "Shu" = art).) (wikipedia)

• • •

Not to put to fine a point on it, but ... this was bracingly terrible. Not gonna spend much time writing about it because I liked literally no part of it ... [scans grid] ... FINE POINT, maybe I liked FINE POINT? ... but that's it (3D: Common kind of pen for illustrators). The theme is corny and gets thinner as you go on. The themers are all so much from the same universe, being actors, so that's not great from an exclusionary standpoint (i.e. big movie fans in, others can f off), and they're also from the Same Damn Kind of *&$^% Blockbuster Franchise Sequel Movie I Have Given Up Watching. Two superhero movies *and* a Star Wars universe movie (*and* you want me to choke down ULTRON too? Come on) (59A: Robotic supervillain in the first "Avengers" sequel). When I talk about having "balance" in your grid, this ... decidedly Is Not It. Also never heard of Donnie Yen, which doesn't mean he's not worth knowing, just that his name familiarity is an outlier and I would've liked to meet him maybe in a regular clue for YEN first. Also, YEN is not a verb (no, stop, put your dictionary away, be real, it's not. You have a YEN for someone, you don't YEN for them. You don't). Also, why did you exhume Bob Hope for this. There are outliers and then there are ooouuuutttttlllliiiieeeerrrrrsssss. Also, "HOPE FOR" is even weaker than "YEN FOR" in that "hope" doesn't even come close to evoking the same kind of desire as the other verbs. EFS all around for the theme (also, an ef for EFS, which is bad).

Had RAISE and thought ??? Then it ended up being ... A BET??! Just ... RAISE A BET!?!?! ugh that is about as real and solid as PARK A CAR and anyway you've already got your stupid POKER clue over there in the center, stop bludgeoning me. OLA is bad, CrapOLA is so much worse (though it does describe this puzzle). All the tricky or "?" clues were torture, and not the good kind of torture where you finally get it and think "ah, good one." The bad kind, where you have to struggle and are ultimately left only with a disappointed "oh" or a "what?!" [The buck stops here] is a horrible clue, and I mean horrible clue, for BANK. Not even a "?" on that stupid thing??? It's not literally true! What am I, an 8-year old in 1964 taking a single dollar bill to the BANK? Ugh. I actually had to run the alphabet at 39A: They're often lit (_OTS) because oh we're still making fun of alcoholics with cutesy clues, and also, until I got JANUARY there was no way on god's green that I was going to think PJS was a [Nightcap go-with, in brief]. Never. If you'd added [, maybe], then ... maybe. But otherwise, those aren't sufficiently related to qualify for "go-with." You went to [Danish coins] for ØRE, why why why? Foreign coinage and diacritically marked letters (like Ø and Ñ) are things you steer away from, not smash into. The EPA no longer seeks clean skies, or clean anything, please stop pretending. Its current leader is *literally* opposed to limits on greenhouse gas emissions. Stop. Pretending. BYA BYA BYA! I mean, bye.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

P.S. an ARIA = "bars" (musical passages) for a "single" (i.e. soloist), hence (16A: Single's bars?).

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Constructor: Emily Carroll

Relative difficulty: Easy (time irrelevant as I still don't have the rebus-function on my solving software down pat yet, so I had to figure out the keystroke pattern and kept getting it wrong ... so I restarted time but at that point I was about a quarter done with the grid ... I dunno, rebuses are weird, time-wise depending on how you're doing the multiple-letter thing; point is, it was not hard)

THEME: PLAY HIDE AND SEEK (40A: Participate in a common children's game, as illustrated in this puzzle) — IT is in the NW corner, ME is in the SE corner, and various squares in between contain temperatures representing the relative distance of that square from ME (farthest away = COLD; next closest = COOL, next closest = WARM; closest = HOT)

Theme answers:

IT COUPLE / "IT'S A JOB"
GO COLD / COLD SHOWER
"BE COOL" / COOLIO
WARM UP / WARMS TO
RED HOT / HOT TEA
"LEAN ON ME" / COVER ME

Word of the Day: CURARE (2D: Arrow poison) —

1: a complex poison of South American Indians used on arrow tips that causes muscle relaxation and paralysis, includes various substances of plant and animal origin, and typically contains an alkaloid extracted from one of two South American vines (Strychnos toxifera of the family Loganiaceae or Chondodendron tomentosum of the family Menispermaceae) as the primary active ingredient (wikipedia)

• • •

Got the rebus thing instantly with IT COUPLE. Well, "got" may be an overstatement, as I wasn't entirely sure, but IT COUPLE was my first guess, and though I didn't get the "IT'S A JOB" cross right away, IT felt like a probably opener. After that, the rebus squares seemed like random words to me. I got COOL next and had no idea what COOL had to do with IT ... although, I guess IT is cool, in the sense of IT COUPLE. Like ... people think they're cool!? OK. Puzzle's not giving me any trouble yet, so I just roll with it. Then I get the COLD square and I really give up on understanding this thing. Even After Getting The Revealer, I had no idea what the rebus squares are about, which leads me to the one big thing that keeps this puzzle from working: the whole COLD, WARM, HOT thing has (and I can't say this strongly enough) *nothing* to do with playing hide-and-seek. This puzzle conflates two related but decidedly different games: hide-and-seek and some variation of hunt-the-thimble (where an *object* is hidden and someone tries to find it while being given the familiar temperature clues). Yes, you could say that figuratively the seeker (IT) is cool, warm, etc., but that is definitely not not not part of the game. It's too bad that it's off, because I like the idea. It's a cute and ambitious concept, and it's pretty neatly executed. It's a nice variation on the rebus puzzle. But the fact that hide-and-seek just doesn't work this way is really hard to see past.

Too bad the theme clunks, because the grid looks pretty good. Pretty good except for:

Issues:

EDILE (59D: Official of ancient Rome)— fine, it's a term, but it's a bit of an obscurity and reeks of the Maleskan era. Really stands out (badly) in a grid that's otherwise pretty free of old crosswordese.
TEHEES (10D: Snickers) — I will never come around on even the singular TEHEE, to say nothing of the plural. I've only ever heard the vowel sounds in the first and second syllable as the same, a long "E," so that one-"E"'d first syllable is always going to feel wrong to me.
NON-PC (52A: Like much stand-up comedy)— as *I* have said, for years now, the concept of PC, and the answers UNPC and NONPC, are guh-arbage. The term "PC" was made up by racist sexist homophobic ****s who wanted to continue to be able to say racist sexist homphobic things while never hearing criticism. Someone is only being "PC" when they're put off by something *you're* not put off by. But your sensitivities are probably just fine. Manly and patriotic, even. Whatever. You can shove allllll the "PC"-related answers very very far ... away.

Nothing else bugged me that much.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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Constructor: John Guzzetta and Michael Hawkins

Relative difficulty: Easy (untimed, clipboard solve)

THEME: none

Word of the Day: ALDO Leopold (21A: Environmentalist ___ Leopold, author of the best-selling "A Sand County Almanac") —

Aldo Leopold (January 11, 1887 – April 21, 1948) was an American author, philosopher, scientist, ecologist, forester, conservationist, and environmentalist. He was a professor at the University of Wisconsin and is best known for his book A Sand County Almanac (1949), which has sold more than two million copies.
Leopold was influential in the development of modern environmental ethics and in the movement for wilderness conservation. His ethics of nature and wildlife preservation had a profound impact on the environmental movement, with his ecocentric or holistic ethics regarding land. He emphasized biodiversity and ecology and was a founder of the science of wildlife management. (wikipedia)

• • •

This was OK. Fine. No strong negative or positive reactions from me. I wish there had been more remarkable fill. GRYFFINDOR was nice (28D: Potter's house). MIND BLOWN is an expression that already feels trite and annoying, but crossword puzzle-wise I guess it counts as "fresh" (12D: [Jaw hits the floor]) Everything else was just sort of TETRIS-y, i.e. the pieces fell into place, and that's that. I was surprised at how easy it was. Usually when I solve just upon waking, there are still some cobwebs and my solve feels a little sluggish, at least initially. But here, it was SPARS to REI to INDIA and on and on, without a single hesitation until the entire NW was done and I was way down in the SW—first clue I looked at where I didn't guess the answer instantly was 32D: Temptation to steal (WILD PITCH). I had WIL- in place and no idea. But a few seconds later I had the next two letters from crosses and I was off to the races again. First annoyance came at 52D: Jon who wrote and illustrated "Palindromania!" (AGEE). This is some crosswordese that is supposed to appeal to puzzle / word people but for me does the opposite. You've got AGEE in your grid. Just go with James. You want to add difficulty to your puzzle, make the clues for the other stuff harder. Don't lard the grid with short names you decided to get cute with—today, not just AGEE but COE (who?) and ALDO (same). Because the grid is on the bland side, my most lasting impression of the puzzle was "why are all these dudes of marginal fame in this grid?"

I thought the palindrome dude was gonna mess me up pretty bad because neither 56A: D-day (GO TIME) nor 60A: Noted figure in Raphael's "School of Athens" (EUCLID) came to me from their first few crosses, but MIL gave me the fourth cross for both answers, and both answers then became clear and again I was off. Slowest part of the puzzle for me was the SE because I unhesitatingly wrote in UNFRIEND at 61A: Spurn on social media (UNFOLLOW). It's a much bigger deal to UNFRIEND someone than to simply UNFOLLOW them. I also wanted BOLD (correct!) DEED (nope!) at 58A: Bit of derring-do (BOLD MOVE). My answer seems correcter. DEED seems more apt for the swashbuckling suggested by "derring-do."BOLD MOVE could apply in any context. But the answers in the grid aren't wrong. They just trapped me, temporarily. Didn't take me too long to climb out, and then it was smooth sailing to the end in the NE, where only ALDO gave me any pause. I didn't know the COWGIRLS song (whereas I know at least two songs where BIGGIRLS don't cry), but I never fell for BIG because the CO- was already in place. Not sure why the clue doesn't mention the artist: Brooks & Dunn (feat. REBA!) are big names in country music (27A: Ones who "Don't Cry," according to a 2008 country hit). Looking back over the grid, I'm really glad I never saw the COE clue (!?) (26A: George ___, original cast member of "S.N.L."), and I'm really glad the shoe guy (MCAN) was a gimme (23D: Last name on a shoe box), because otherwise that MCAN / COE cross could've been treacherous. That is all.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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Constructor: Mark Diehl

Relative difficulty: Easy (except for ... well, you'll see) (untimed, clipboard solve)

THEME: none

Word of the Day: ANNAM (13D: Former kingdom of central Vietnam) —

Annam (Vietnamese: An Nam or Trung Kỳ, alternate spelling: Anam) was a French protectorateencompassing the central region of Vietnam. Before the protectorate's establishment, the name Annam was used in the West to refer to Vietnam as a whole; Vietnamese people were referred to as Annamites. The protectorate of Annam became in 1887 a part of French Indochina. Two other Vietnamese regions, Cochinchina (Nam Kỳ) in the South and Tonkin (Bắc Kỳ) in the North, were also units of French Indochina. The region had a dual system of French and Vietnamese administration. The Nguyễn Dynasty still nominally ruled Annam, with a puppet emperor residing in Huế. In 1948, the protectorate was merged in the Provisional Central Government of Vietnam, which was replaced the next year by the newly established State of Vietnam. The region was divided between communist North Vietnam and anti-communist South Vietnam under the terms of the Geneva Accord of 1954. (wikipedia)

• • •

Well this one was full of surprises. When I saw the constructor's names, I thought, "uh oh, this one's gonna be tough, you're never on this guy's wavelength, good luck." Diehl's puzzles always strike me as ... I'd say old-fashioned tough. But not bad. Just a grind. For me. So the first surprise of the puzzle was absolutely tearing through it. AWNS SUE THOU and then WHATLLITBE (15A: Line at the bar) and *then* OBSTRUCTS (9D: Plugs up). So before I even finished filling in the NW, I was already down into the center. It was wild. Like being on a hot streak, where every shot you take goes in, every move you make is the right one, every step you take I'll be watching you. . . no, that's the Police. Where was I? Oh right, just shredding this puzzle. I kept waiting for the catch ... surely there was some trap door or some Minotaur or something that was gonna come along and stop me cold. But no, right down the west coast, into the center. Ironically, the first thing to cause me any trouble was an answer I *knew* but couldn't remember: the last name of the guy from One Direction. He's not Harry Styles famous, but he's very famous (with a certain demo), and I damn sure have seen his name many times, but ... blank. And since I also didn't know how PENTO- was going to end (30D: Puzzle piece made up of five squares) (?), no way I was getting into the SE. So I just went up and around. Tiny hesitation at 30A: Spear carrier?, even with PICK- in place, but then bam, PICKLEJAR, giving me the high-value "J," making DIY PROJECT very easy to get. Really closing in on it now...

Instead of finishing off the NE, I went down the ANGLE PARKING. Now here was the second surprise (well, third, if you count my totally forgetting Zayn MALIK's name): I don't know what GANTRY means. I know Elmer GANTRY and that is all I know about GANTRY, so I needed every single cross and even when I was done, I didn't know why the clue was right (38A: Cape Canaveral sight). I'm guessing it's something to do with rocket launches ... yup. The "2a" def of GANTRY at Merriam-Webster is a movable structure with platforms at different levels used for erecting and servicing rockets before launching." So if you didn't know, now you know. I wish it were just some dude named GANTRY. "Who's that over there watching the launch?""Oh, that's old man GANTRY. He's always here." Anyway, GANTRY! Blew through it 'cause the crosses were easy (thank goodness). Headed into the SE with trepidation, but CLIME GUITAR PARKING just opened it right up. Zero trouble finishing it, despite never having heard of a PENTOMINO and despite the probably not-great proper-name crossing of MALIK and ALEK (who is like IMAN and EMME in that they are four-letter models who show up occasionally to help constructors keep their grids from falling apart) (44D: Supermodel Wek). But if you think MALIK / ALEK was a not-great crossing, well ... you ain't seen nothing yet.

So I head up to the NW to polish this thing off, feeling very triumphant, and there, at the very end, is the trap door / Minotaur / pick your damned metaphor. A Natick. A textbook Natick. A Natick the likes of which I haven't seen since I gave the Natick its name (when the"N" in NATICK crossed the "N" in "N.C. WYETH"). You know the cross I'm talking about. You probably came here hoping to see me complain about it. Well here you go: The 11A/13D crossing. Is. Inexcusable. Absurd. Ridiculous. Why? Well, crossing 1. two proper nouns 2. of non-universal fame 3. at a vowel 4. that is completely uninferrable—that is the recipe for the perfect Natick, and that is exactly what we've got here. Naticks are *unfair*; there are ways to stump people that are fair, and then ... there are Naticks. I've literally never heard of ANNAM. I am not that old, and while I knew Vietnam was part of what was once called French Indonesia, ANNAM ... never made it into my brain. So _NNAM ... you could've convinced me of anything. And the dude on the Argo!?!?! I've read The Voyage of the Argo and taught classical literature and I *still* couldn't remember that dude. *Only* the fact that I *had* read the work and *had* been around the classics and classicists my whole life saved me at this crossing. I plugged the "A" in and thought "... yeah, IDAS feels right. It looks *insane*, but it feels right. IDAS / ANNAM ... gotta be it." Closed my eyes, pressed the button, and bingo. I guessed right. But literally everyone, me, you, every solver talking about this puzzle on Twitter right now, *everyone* knows that's a bad cross. How did the constructor not know? The editor? Editor's helpers?? Not going to blame the proofers, who *surely* knew, because WS is known for ignoring their concerns. Why would you do this? Once you "get" it, you can't even be sure you've "gotten" it without looking stuff up, which is, lemme tell you, the most dissatisfying way to end things.

I do think the "A" is the best guess there at ID-S / -NNAM) ... you can eliminate the "E" and "O" because those are answers that would've been clued other ways in the Across (i.e. IDOS and IDES, being familiar things, would never get clued this way). So you're left with "A""I" and "U" ... actually "A" probably feels the *least* classical-namey of all those options, but INNAM and UNNAM look truly insane. I don't know. The point is, no solver should be in the position of engaging in this kind of stupid guesswork. Again, no one is saying IDAS on its own shouldn't be in puzzles (although ... it shouldn't really, it's bad, don't). And no one is saying ANNAM shouldn't (sigh ... if you must). But recognize that they are both patently obscure, and treat them that way—with totally fair crosses. Crossing them at "A," wow. No. Absolutely not. That's editorial incompetence. Or negligence. At any rate, it's bad. And for the constructor ...you make this *whole* puzzle, most of which is just fine, lovely even, but now the only thing anyone's gonna remember is IDAS / ANNAM and the residual icky feelings it caused. Why would you do that? This is an editing fail of the highest order. Jaw-dropping. That is all.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

P.S. a Twitter reaction sampler:

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Constructor: Brian Herrick and Christopher Adams

Relative difficulty: Easy (very—7:21, a new personal record for Sunday)

THEME:"Audubon Society" — not a great title, but the revealer makes up for it: "LADY BIRD" (115A: 2017 film nominated for Best Picture ... or a hint to the answers to the eight starred clues)—themers are all women (ladies) whose last names are types of birds:

Theme answers:

SHERYL CROW (23A: *"Soak Up the Sun" singer, 2002)
SCOUT FINCH (25A: *Fictional protagonist who attends elementary school in Maycomb County)
SIGOURNEY WEAVER (38A: *Actress in "Alien" and "Avatar")
RITA DOVE (112A: *First African-American U.S. poet laureate)
PAMELA SUE MARTIN (43D: *Portrayer of Fallon Carrington Colby on "Dynasty")
TAYLOR SWIFT (49D: *Singer with the most American Music Awards of all time (29))
MARION CRANE (50D: *Janet Leigh played her in "Psycho")
CLARICE STARLING (46D: *"The Silence of the Lambs" protagonist)

Word of the Day: APOLUNE (42A: Farthest orbital point from the moon) —

: the point in the path of a body orbiting the moon that is farthest from the center of the moon (merriam-webster.com)

• • •

Really feeling powerful this weekend. First I crush the Saturday puzzle while most of the solving world (apparently) struggles with it, then the next day (i.e. today) I set a personal Sunday record by a good 20+ seconds. If only I'd been able to spell LINGUINE correctly (not an -INI!?), who knows, I might've managed to break 7. Puzzle was just easy, but also the themers were all very much in my wheelhouse, or at least my ... I don't know, cultural orbit. I embarrassingly struggled to remember SCOUT's last name (and this was *after* I knew it was a bird theme), I non-embarrassingly struggled to remember PAMELA SUE MARTIN's name (but I *did* watch a lot of "Dynasty" as a teenager, so she rang a bell) and I weirdly struggled to remember CLARICE's last name because I conflated her and a novelist I remembered from my college / grad school days named Clarice Lispector. I wanted CLARICE ... SPECTOR, or something like it. Then I couldn't think of any "S" birds but "swallow" for a little bit. But I finally got there. And anyway, all of this struggle was actually taking place at a pretty fast clip, since wherever I ran up against an obstacle, the crosses were able to get me past it pretty easily. The theme feels very basic, and like something I've done before (and there have, in fact, been bird-last-name puzzles before), but the revealer gives this one a nice coherence. It's far too easy, and a little simple / straightforward, themewise, but that's really the only knock I have to give this one. The theme is tight and well executed, and the fill is overwhelmingly smooth, with only APOLUNE making me go "whaaaa?" and only ON POT making me go "Ok, dad."

I now know what an APOLUNE is but what I don't know is what ... object ... orbits ... the moon? Is this a term we apply to *any* moon, because the Merriam-Webster def says "the" moon, which makes me think our moon, which makes me wonder what objects are orbiting it such that we would have to invent a word for where those objects are in orbit? When I google image search APOLUNE, *this* is the first image that comes up ... it's really not helpful:

As usual, the parts I struggled most with were names. Gave up the NFL a few years back, so TALIB was unknown to me (though I've definitely heard the name) (65A: Aqib ___, five-time Pro Bowl cornerback), and I also didn't know LYN St. James, though she sounds like she's probably worth knowing, if only for future crossword purposes (121A: ___ St. James, first female Indianapolis 500 Rookie of the Year). I did know RAHAL, though, so that helped (2D: Bobby in the Motorsports Hall of Fame of America). I don't think there was much that stood out as spectacular, fill-wise, but I did like GO ROGUE and "YOU ROCK!" and "NO REASON." This is a really theme-dense puzzle, which means most of the interest lies there. They've designed the grid interestingly and cleverly, so there are lots of longish answers but none of them cross or even really crowd each other, which allows for the fill to be smooth. Usually the denser the theme, the rougher the fill (because dense themes just put a lot of pressure on the grid). The grid was well designed. I think grid design is a really underrated talent.

I did some good non-NYTXW puzzles this week (Patrick Berry's New Yorker was especially good), but I don't really have much for my "On the Clipboard" segment this week, although I do want to shout out the Saturday USA Today by Mark McClain (ed. Erik Agard). Its themer set was MERCHANT VESSELS, MERE COINCIDENCE, and MEREDITH WILSON, which is not exactly stunning, conceptually, until you notice that the title of the puzzle is ... MERLOT. That is an exquisite visual pun. A Mer- lot. A lot of Mer-s. MERLOT. I only wish it had been the revealer and not the title. Oh well. Still intensely clever. Point is, there are lots of ways to make a puzzle (even a very easy / basic puzzle) fun!

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

P.S. happy birthday, dad

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Constructor: Michael Schlossberg

Relative difficulty: Easy

THEME: Animal Anatomy — Theme answers are in the format "[body part] of the [animal]."

Theme answers:

EYE OF THE TIGER (20A: Theme song for "Rocky III")
THE BEES' KNEES (28A: Heights of excellence, metaphorically)
HAIR OF THE DOG (46A: Hangover remedy in which one continues drinking)
THE MONKEY'S PAW (57A: Classic horror tale by W.W. Jacobs)

Word of the Day: ALEE (10D: Sheltered, at sea) —

situated on the side of a ship that is sheltered from the wind.
"he motioned for them to move to the alee side"
(of the helm) moved around to leeward in order to tack a vessel or to bring its bows up into the wind.
"she was veering around when the helm was alee"

(Google)

• • •

Hi, it's Annabel Monday! I'm writing this on Sunday 2/2 which is Groundhog Day and also my dad's birthday, so everyone say happy birthday to my dad! I've been at my job at a nonprofit for a month, and it's going amazing--I love everyone there and I'm really committed to the work we're doing. It is SO weird to think that I started guest blogging in high school, because that now feels like an EON ago. Yes, I know that word isn't in the puzzle, but it's in like 90% of the Mondays I've done, so close enough.

Speaking of this week's puzzle, I think it's the first one that I've finished at anything close to a competitive time--okay, still at least twice Rex's average, but you have to understand that's very good for me, and part of that time was spent watching the Super Bowl. My point is, it was easy, which is fine for a Monday. Not a whole lot of exciting fill, but who AM I to judge? Embarrassingly, I knew KO'S from video games, not from boxing, but I can at least say that I've never used the HAIR OF THE DOG hangover cure, even in college. It was so cool to see AIMEE Mann get a shoutout! She's one of my faves, although I'm not including her in bullets because her music is...Often kind of a bummer.

Theme was pretty straightforward, easy to figure out and easy to get answers from once you had it figured out. There's not a lot to say about a well-done and simple Monday theme. I wish it had done a little more, maybe used some sayings that were a little more obscure, but then I guess that would have defeated the whole purpose of having an easy Monday.

Bullets:

DRY HEAT (38A: Feature of a 95° day in Phoenix, but not Miami) — I gotta say, I'm almost as sick of people complaining about not having dry heat as I am of not having dry heat. I get it! It's very humid and wet here and where you came from it's a nice little oven! We're both in Maryland and we know how the weather is now. Bah humbug.
LARD (14A: Fatty ingredient in pie crust) — I had to incredulously ask my stepmom, "Do you use lard in pie crusts?" She responded, "Well, I don't!"
ZIN (24A: Red wine choice, for short) — Oh, I had BIG for this. I thought everyone loved big reds! They're delish.
SHA NA NA (44D: Doo-wop rock band that performed in the movie "Grease") — Morning earworm time!

Signed, Annabel Thompson, and I'm not very tired anymore honestly, so I'm taking suggestions for a new signoff.

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

[Follow Annabel Thompson on Twitter]

Hi, everyone, it's Clare — this time for the first Tuesday of the month! Now that the football season is over (nice win, Chiefs), it's time for some baseball! Just 50 days until Opening Day. And even fewer days until the preseason, when a guy in one of my law school classes will almost certainly pull up every Mets game again, full screen on his laptop right in front of me. I do worry that my Giants will suck again this year, especially without MadBum, but at least no one can accuse them of cheating! Anyway... on to the puzzle...

Constructor: Alex Eaton-Salners and Queena Mewers

Relative difficulty:Medium

THEME: MUSIC (65A: What the ends of 17-, 23-, 36-, 47 and 57-Across make) — Each theme answer ends in a type of instrument that can be used to make music.

Theme answers:

SHOEHORNS (17A: Crams (in))
LOVE TRIANGLES (23A: Some romantic entanglements)
CHAMPAGNE FLUTES (36A: Things clinked on New Year's Eve)
TAPE RECORDERS (47A: Interviewing aids)
SEX ORGANS (57A: Subjects of health class diagrams)

Word of the Day: NEVIS(51A: St Kitt's island partner)

Nevisis a small island in the Caribbean Sea that forms part of the inner arc of the Leeward Islands chain of the West Indies. Nevis and the neighbouring island of Saint Kitts constitute one country: the Federation of Saint Kitts and Nevis. Nevis is located near the northern end of the Lesser Antilles archipelago, about 350 km east-southeast of Puerto Rico and 80 km west of Antigua. Its area is 93 square kilometres (36 sq mi) and the capital is Charlestown. (Wiki)

• • •

I found this to be a middle-of-the-road Tuesday puzzle — nothing particularly objectionable but not a ton to love. The theme was rather straightforward, and the revealer itself was pretty obvious. That being said, I did like some of the words that were used as the theme answers. I've watched many TV shows/movies and read many books with a LOVE TRIANGLE (though they're only really fun when the couple you're rooting for makes it; #MerDer for life). I also recently adopted SHOEHORNS into my vocabulary when my professor used the word about 12 times in one class, and I've enjoyed using the word since then. I did try to put CHAMPAGNE"glasses" instead of FLUTES before realizing that: a) it had too many letters; b) the puzzle was apparently fancier than I was expecting; and, well, c) it didn't fit the theme! I did think cluing SEX ORGANS as "subjects of health class diagrams" was odd. And, looking back on the theme answers, it feels a bit disjointed to have all of the theme answers be two words (with the second word being the one that "makes music") but have a one-word answer, SHOEHORNS, in there.

I may have just run out of steam by the end, but I tripped up some in the SE corner. I had trouble with SEX ORGANS because of the weird clue. I tried putting "NSA" in at first, instead of CIA, for 53A: Org. with code-named programs. It took me a bit to get INRI (54D: Letters on a crucifix), and RAM and GNU didn't jump out to me as the most obvious answers for, respectively, 58D: Animal in a flock and 59D: Animal in a herd. I did like the repetition in those back-to-back clues, though.

The repetition I didn't like happened in two other instances. One was with 9D: So many and 50D: So many. There just isn't anything clever about that repetition. And, 007 is used twice in the puzzle — at 10D and also at 57D. Again, this repetition just seemed half-baked.

I liked some of the longer downs — a couple favorites were CHICANERY (32D: Deceitful doings) and OK I'LL BITE (11D: "Sure, try me"). My liking those words was somewhat balanced out, though, with my strong dislike for IDNO (48D: Fig. on a driver's license or passport) and then CUBER (35D: Expert solver of a Rubik's toy). I've certainly never heard of a Rubik's CUBER before.

I found a little theme of my own within the puzzle: "bests." We've got the best male tennis player of all time — Roger Federer (27D) as the clue for SWISS; the best James Bond of all time — Daniel CRAIG (10D); and the best First Lady of all time — Michelle OBAMA (24D).

Bullets:

Do yourself a favor and go down the Internet rabbit hole of looking at pictures of BANFF National Park. It's legitimately stunning.

I definitely think of 14A: Olympics symbol as being the rings (not a TORCH).
Is it just me, or do we get way more UBERs than "Lyfts" in crossword puzzles?
Speaking of James Bond and Daniel CRAIG... that Superbowl teaser ad for the new movie looks incredible! I cannot wait.
I can't see the word ITSY (1D: Teeny-weeny) without automatically singing, "The itsy bitsy spider went up the water spout..." in my head.
CITI(35A: Bank with M.L.B. naming rights, for short) may be false advertising. Are the Mets still in the MLB? They sure looked like a minor league team to me on the laptop screen of that guy in front of me:)

Signed, Clare Carroll, a hopeful Giants fan

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Constructor: Ross Trudeau

Relative difficulty: Mediumish (untimed, clipboard solve)

THEME: USED FURNITURE (52A: Some garage sale goods ... or what the answers at 15-, 19-, 33-, 41- and 62-Across have done) — circled squares inside each theme answers contain (or "use," I guess) pieces of furniture:

Theme answers:

CATCH AIR (15A: Get some major hang time, in snowboarding lingo)
ONE NIGHT STAND (19A: Brief hookup)
WORKS OF ART (33A: "The Scream" and "The Kiss," for two)
DO-BE-DO-BE-DO (41A: Nonsense line sung by Frank Sinatra in "Strangers in the Night")
SLAM POET (62A: Verses-vs.-verses competitor)

Word of the Day: P-WAVE (24D: Something a seismograph detects) —

A P-wave is one of the two main types of elastic body waves, called seismic waves in seismology. P-waves travel faster than other seismic waves and hence are the first signal from an earthquake to arrive at any affected location or at a seismograph. P-waves may be transmitted through gases, liquids, or solids. // The name P-wave can stand for either pressure wave (as it is formed from alternating compressions and rarefactions) or primary wave (as it has high velocity and is therefore the first wave to be recorded by a seismograph). (wikipedia)

• • •

one angry sagehen

I do not understand the decision even to have AL COWLINGS in your wordlist, let alone put him in a puzzle. Here's something I never want to see in my crosswords: a white Bronco clue. I don't want to be reminded of the brutal murders, or, rather, I don't want to have the clue just drive by those murders as if they didn't happen, as if "white Bronco" were just some random part of our historical memories and didn't evoke a whole scene of extreme violence and domestic abuse. I mean, dear lord, even if you (somehow) actually believe "OJ is innocent!" ... the physical and mental abuse of his wife was real enough. And you want to put his pal's full name in my grid? Pass. Hard pass. Like, f*** allllll of this. Once you've dropped the white Bronco in my puzzle, I'm not gonna enjoy another second. All I am thinking now is "What the hell were *you* thinking?" Too sensitive? Too bad. You're not gonna casually evoke extreme violence (esp. toward women) and not hear about it. I don't care if I am the only one standing here shouting that friends of extreme domestic abusers can all stay the **** out of my puzzles, thank you very much. Just me? Fine. Just me. Now you know. "Famously" drove a white Bronco?! That is some kind of whitewashing. That corner was already kinda ugly, with the stupid weekday letter-string MTWTF (9D: Daily run, for short?), but that white Bronco clue is its own special brand of ugly.

Didn't care for the theme. NIGHTSTAND is hilariously not hiding in its answer. I mean, technically none of the furniture is hiding, because the circled squares flag their positions, but at least all the other furniture is pretty discreetly buried inside their respective theme answers. But with poor NIGHTSTAND ... All those circled squares ... it's like watching a bear trying to hide behind a tricycle. "DO-BE-DO-BE-DO" was spelled weird, to my ear (eye?). But mainly I just didn't care. Here's some furniture. Shrug. Fill-wise, things were a little rough. ALL RED feels ... odd. Off. Antiquated? Not sure. I get it, you're blushing, you're ALL RED. But I've never heard someone actually say it (66A: Totally embarrassed). P-WAVE is the kind of thing you put in your grid because you really want to debut an answer, but you've mistaken firstness for goodness. P-WAVE isn't good for a host of reasons, not least of which is that, once you get it, if you've never heard of it (and that's gonna be a lot of you–it was definitely me), you have no idea what the "P" even means. Like, it's a useless fact that's not graspable in any way without looking it up. Not everything new is good. P-WAVE seems fine if you're desperate on a Saturday, say, but just dropping it in a Wednesday is some ostentatious "look-at-my-wordlist!" nonsense. Fair hiring is good, but [Fair-hiring initials] will always be bad fill, not just because EEO is ugly desperate all-vowel fill, but because EOE also fits the clue. Same clue can be used for two equally uninspiring initialisms. Blargh. I will never not mention that TMC is not a channel anyone cares about and is nowhere near HBO *or* SHO in its importance or fame. Also, The Movie Channel *is owned by* Showtime Networks, sooooo ..... "alternative" is true only insofar as yes, TMC and Showtime are different channels, technically. The point is, TCM yes, TMC no. This is my one true prejudice. Sorry not sorry.

SLAM POET is a nice answer. HOTFOOT as well (20D: Hurry, with "it"). And my alma mater is in the grid, which is fun. So it wasn't all low points. But that first low point was So Low.

That's all.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Constructor: Jake Halperin

Relative difficulty: Medium, I think (time was somewhere in the 7s, but I was going slowly, taking notes, so the clock doesn't tell me much)

THEME: a chore and more — themers are all ... kind of rhyming puns? ... which all end with some phrase meaning "and the rest" and start with a word that is a (near) homophone of some word in that final phrase. Thus:

Theme answers:

LIKES AND THE LIKE (15A: Reactions to social media posts?)
SETTERS ET CETERA (21A: Breeds of hunting dogs?)
ALI ET ALII (33A: Boxing champs of the 1960s-'70s?)
KNOTS AND WHAT NOT (47A: Things that scouts earn badges for?)
UDDERS AND OTHERS (54A: Cows' various glands?)

Word of the Day:"Hobbs & Shaw" (14A: Title partner of Hobbs in a hit 2019 film) —

Hobbs & Shaw (also known as Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw or Fast & Furious: Hobbs & Shaw) is a 2019 American action film directed by David Leitch and written by Chris Morgan and Drew Pearce, from a story by Morgan. It is a spin-off of the The Fast Saga franchise set in between the events of 2017’s The Fate of the Furious and 2020’s F9. It is the ninth full-length film released overall. The film sees Dwayne Johnson and Jason Statham reprise their roles from the main series as Luke Hobbs and Deckard Shaw respectively, and also stars Idris Elba, Vanessa Kirby, Eiza González, Cliff Curtis, and Helen Mirren. The plot follows the unlikely pairing of the titular characters as they team up with Shaw's sister (Kirby) to battle a cybernetically-enhanced terrorist (Elba) threatening the world with a deadly virus. (wikipedia)

• • •

This is obviously not good. I want to say it's a cute idea, but I'm not sure it's even that. I think the theme holds up for maybe two of the five themers (SETTERS ET CETERA, ALI ET ALII), but it really starts unraveling with the others, with other words and syllables getting in the way and making what little charm the theme might have had disappear. UDDERS is particularly bad, since it's a pun and not an attempt at an exact homonym like the others. With LIKES AND THE LIKE and especially KNOTS AND WHAT NOT you don't even feel the theme, really. That is, where ALI ET ALII announces its wordplay pretty forcefully, with those other two it's like "what ... is even happening here? What are the THE and the WHAT doing there? and ... oh, was I supposed to notice that KNOTS and NOT rhyme? Nope. Those words are too ordinary and far apart." These are five phrases that are all 15 letters long; that seems to have been a more important consideration than theme consistency or solving pleasure or anything else. Clunk clunk clunk. The grid is choppy as hell and full of staleage (TANGELO, ADEN, OATER, etc.). What is "staleage"? It's a word I made up. It means "stale stuff." Which brings me to OWNAGE (46A: Domination, in slang), which ... really should've been PWNAGE, imhop (in my humble opinion pancakes).

PROUDER (38D) / UGH (8D)

VERANDAED is so bad it's SUABLE, which is also not a word. You dig? 'Cause I DIG (13A: "Point taken,"'60s-style). Did you know you build verandas with TBEAMs? Well, you probably don't, I just wanted to bring up TBEAM, yet another answer from outer space. Honestly, this puzzle lost me from the second it expected me to know anything about "a series of James Patterson novels" (1A: Employer of Detective Lindsay Boxer in a series of James Patterson novels). There was nothing very remarkable about how I solved this. I just puttered around the grid until it was done. If I got stuck, I just moved and came back and then I was unstuck. Not even an epic battle to recount. Just putt putt putt yep all the squares are filled in. I had a single moment of 'wow' and that was when my eyes WIDENed and I thought "wow ... really? VERANDAED?" Great, not my brain is singing this answer to the tune of Boston's "Amanda." And now, if I'm doing my job right, your brain is doing the same. Good day.

["You put a porch upon your house / Then sit and watch the cows / VERANDAED! It's what I did to my estate / And I just think it's great / VERANDAED!"]

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Constructor: Mary Lou Guizzo and Erik Agard

Relative difficulty: Medium-Challenging (trivia just not in my wheelhouse) (high 6s)

THEME: none

Word of the Day: Sue (?) (15A: Sue at Chicago's Field Museum, e.g. => T-REX) —

Sue is the nickname given to FMNH PR 2081, which is one of the largest, most extensive, and best preserved Tyrannosaurus rex specimens ever found, at over 90% recovered by bulk. It was discovered on 12 August 1990, by Sue Hendrickson, an explorer and fossil collector, and was named after her. After ownership disputes were settled, the fossil was auctioned in October 1997, for US $8.3 million, the highest amount ever paid for a dinosaur fossil, and is now a permanent feature at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, Illinois. (wikipedia)

• • •

Well, first off, that is not how you spell William S. Burroughs (17A: Seminal William S. Burrows novel, 1959 => "NAKED LUNCH"). It's not as bad as claiming that Harold Ramis directed "Ghostbusters" (which the NYTXW also did recently), but it's pretty bad. I will admit that I missed the error, as I was solving quickly. But then it's not my *job* to catch the error. So. Yeah. Quality control. Look into it. OK. Moving on.

This seems like a reasonably well put-together puzzle, but it just wasn't for me. The proper name trivia was (mostly) out of my wheelhouse and somewhat dully clued, and I just never got that exhilarating "ooh, cool" feeling I get with the best Fridays. I set the bar pretty high for Friday, as it is a hard day to botch. I think of Friday as breezy / fun themeless day (as opposed to grinding maybe-fun Saturday). I just couldn't find the handle on this one. Got it done in reasonable time, but only perked up at "NAKED LUNCH" and "I BLAME MYSELF." Clues often felt like they were straining for novelty / cleverness, which just left them awkward and opaque. E.g. [Ring bearers] = TOES. I mean, yeah, sure, OK, people put rings there, and I see that you're playing on the concept of "ring bearer" at, like, a wedding ceremony, but *getting* that left me feeling more "really? ... I guess ..." than "ooh, good one!" I want "ooh, good one!" as often as possible. So often the problem with NYTXW is the cluing voice (which is ultimately the editor's, though the constructors' original clues do set the tone). Clues were drab or else weirdly involved, but to no great effect. I mean, a paragraph for a CALVIN clue that wasn't even that funny? (49A: Comics title character who says "Getting an inch of snow is like winning 10 cents in the lottery"). I don't see the point. Mostly, though, this was just a bad fit. I don't care at all about reality TV, for instance (though I somehow ultimately knew PADMA LAKSHMI's name—not sure how) (5D: Emmy-nominated host of "Top Chef"), and I don't know Sue the TREX, and I forgot that those actresses played UHURA, and on and on. So I do, largely, BLAME MYSELF for my dissatisfaction today.

The most hilarious moment of my solve wasn't so hilarious when it was happening to me, but a few minutes later, in retrospect, upon reflection, with some distance, I could look back and laugh. That moment was the very last square I filled in. I looked at E_HIBITA and thought "that ... is not a thing ... that cannot be a thing ... ECHIBITA? EPHIPBITA? What in the ...? And what could someone named 'Sue' be with the letter pattern TRE_? Is she TREF? omigod is she a TREE? EEHIBITA? That can't be right ... [checks all crosses] ... nothing else is wrong, what is Happeninggggg ... . . . . oh." It's an X. X marks the spot. T [dash] REX / EXHIBIT [space] A. Wow, parsing that cross, where both answers have single-letter parts (the T in TREX, the A in EXHIBIT A) and where both answers have (to me) confusing clues ... that was a bizarrely perfect pothole. Thankfully, when I got it, I *understood* the answers in both directions, so at least I had a satisfactory feeling of completion. Sometimes you struggle and then you get your answer but you don't really *get* it, you know? It's actually amusing to me how bad I screwed that last box up. I only wish the rest of the solve was as entertaining as my own incompetence. QUIERO strikes me as too long for a foreign word. Do you JAPE ... something? (26D: Say mockingly) I think of it as an intransitive verb (or a noun, actually).

There's not really anything in the clue for "WE'RE ALL SET" that indicates the "WE'RE" part—in fact, "ALL SET" would work perfectly as an answer for that clue all on its own—so that was a mild bummer (28D: "Good to go!"). I had ATWIRL instead of AWHIRL at first, which was awkward but not terribly consequential (43A: Spinning). EQUABLY looks like it's missing letters (i.e. I want it to be EQUITABLY, which would also mean [In an even manner]). Hoping for somewhat more joy tomorrow. See you then.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Constructor: Hemant Mehta

Relative difficulty: Medium (6:50)

THEME: none

Word of the Day: HOT-DESKING (3D: Office-sharing system, in modern lingo) —

Hot desking (sometimes called "non-reservation-based hoteling") is an office organization system which involves multiple workers using a single physical work station or surface during different time periods. The "desk" in the name refers to an office desk being shared by multiple office workers on different shifts as opposed to each staff member having their own personal desk. A primary motivation for hot desking is cost reduction through space savings—up to 30% in some cases. Hot desking is especially valuable in cities where real estate prices are high. Research has demonstrated that while there may be cost savings in office space hot desking has significant negative impacts on both productivity and staff morale. (wikipedia)

• • •

Enjoyed this one despite never having heard of HOT-DESKING, which turns out to be one of these horrid dehumanizing workplace efficiency capitalist bulls**t things that I wish didn't exist, but oh well. You gotta get your "modern lingo" from someplace, I guess. I couldn't even make sense of the clue on that one, honestly. I figured it was some app-related thing like Slack, where coworkers shared ... work things ... or maybe there was some other app or weird office system whereby you share gossip or trash the boss or whatever. I dunno. I do know that at one point I absolutely had HOT DESTINY written in there. By the way, if anyone develops an intra-office gossip app and tries to call it HOT DESTINY, me and my non-existent lawyers are coming for you. Who is Chris O'DOWD? (21D: "Bridesmaids" co-star Chris). Is he that guy I've seen in *lots* of things but I still somehow don't know what his name is? The Irish guy? Who's in the TV version of "Get Shorty?" Or in that one show ... the show ... I watched once ... damn it, what was that? (looks it up) "Family Tree!"? Yes! He was also in "The IT Crowd," which Netflix really really Really wants me to watch, but which I have never watched. Annnnnyway, yeah, I know his face very well. His name, apparently not so much. Thus, NW corner was a bit of a bear for me. NE wasn't much better until I used EDEN to get HOOD and SITE and SHARP and then REUP OIL UP (not so great, the UP/UP crossing) and FLOP and finally whooshed down the grid with SLIP OF THE TONGUE (7D: Possible insight for a psychologist). Things were much easier from there on out.

Stayed at the bottom and took care of the SW, then went up to the center and *dammit* why didn't I look at the long central Across clue earlier!?!?!? (35A: Musical alter ego of Donald Glover). Total Gimme!! Gah! If I'd somehow *started* there, who knows how much quicker I could've slayed this thing. CHILDISH GAMBINO, kapow! Then down into the SE where only RANDI (???!? ugh more modern biz-ness billionaire tech Facebook-adjacent stuff I don't care about, it's ****ing dystopic, I swear) slowed me down (44D: Businesswoman Zuckerberg, sister of Mark) (if she's legit famous, you do not need that "sister of Mark" bit). Finally finished up back in that little nook in the west, at the bottom of HOT-DESKING, where two little wrong answers, stacked (EENY over SAG instead of TINY (37A: Minute) over SOG (!?) (39A: Go soft, in a way)), had to be sorted out, and then I was done. Normal time.

[be sure to check out GRIM FANDAGO's new EP, "HOT DESTINY"]

Overall, there's very little junk in this one, and lots of fun to be had in the medium-range and longer answers, particularly WEIRDED OUT, DEPLORABLE (wink!), KNEEBOARDS, JOKE WRITER, STRIKES OUT, etc. ANDCO is a FLOP, IMHO, but very few other things made me wince (20A: End of some business names). Thorniest clue, for me, was actually 11D: Packed with plasticware, perhaps (TOGO). I imagined "Packed with" meant "Chock full of" and I couldn't imagine anything just crammed full of plasticware except maybe the upper drawer in my kitchen by the Brita. That seemed an unlikely crossword answer, though. OK, that's all, see you Sunday.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

P.S. the Bucks are the NBA team from Milwaukee, in case the NBA AGENTS clue was inscrutable to you (34D: They get big bucks from big Bucks).

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Constructor: Brian Kulman

Relative difficulty: Easy (8:28)

THEME:"The Emoji Movie" — movies clued via emojis (or so I'm told—Across Lite just gave me [bracketed explanations of emojis]," LOL):

Theme answers:

"KING / KONG" (1A: With 115-Across, [gorilla] [woman] [building])
"ELF" (16A: [Santa] [city at night] [present])
"THE LORD OF THE RINGS" (23A: [jewelry] [elf] [volcano])
"HER" (26A: [man] [heart] [smartphone])
"TITANIC" (38A: [ship] [painter] [iceberg])
"CITIZEN KANE" (42A: [newspaper] [money bag] [sled])
"DUMBO" (55A: [elephant] [mouse] [circus])
"PLANET OF THE APES" (60A: [rocket] [primate] [Statue of Liberty])
"SPEED" (72A: [bus] [construction sign] [bomb])
"MARY POPPINS" (82A: [umbrella] [handbag] [merry-go-round])
"DRACULA" (87A: [coffin] [bat] [castle])
"BIG" (101A: [boy and man] [piano] [crystal ball])
"A LEAGUE OF THEIR OWN" (102A: [baseball] [female symbol] [crying face])
"TED" (112A: [bear] [beer] [cigarette])
"PAN" (30D: [fairy] [skull and crossbones] [crocodile])
"ALI" (88D: [boxing glove] [butterfly] [bee])

Word of the Day: LORISES (68A: Bug-eyed primates) —

Loris is the common name for the strepsirrhine primates of the subfamily Lorinae (sometimes spelled Lorisinae) in the family Lorisidae. Loris is one genus in this subfamily and includes the slender lorises, while Nycticebus is the genus containing the slow lorises. // Lorises are nocturnal and arboreal. They are found in tropical and woodland forests of India, Sri Lanka, and parts of southeast Asia. Loris locomotion is a slow and cautious climbing form of quadrupedalism. Some lorises are almost entirely insectivorous, while others also include fruits, gums, leaves, and slugs in their diet.
Female lorises practice infant parking, leaving their infants behind in nests. Before they do this, they bathe their young with allergenic saliva that is acquired by licking patches on the insides of their elbows, which produce a mild toxin that discourages most predators, though orangutans occasionally eat lorises. (wikipedia)

• • •

Well, I'm guessing this was probably better (in the sense of "more to design specifications") in the app and on the website, because in AcrossLite (how I get all my crosswords), the theme cluing involved a comical translation of emoji back into text (the clues as I list them, above, are exactly as they appeared in my clue list). I think the text-based clues likely made this puzzle even easier than it would've been, which I'm guessing was pretty easy to start with. All the movies are super familiar mainstream hits. Slightly weird to have "STAR TREK" (also a movie) in here when it's not a themer, but no big deal. As for the theme ... it wasn't bad? It also wasn't terribly exciting. Mainly what it was was A Lot. 16 themers!?!?! It felt like the puzzle was anxious that the theme wasn't strong enough, so it tried to compensate for its one-note-ness by just *cramming* the grid with themers, many of them so short that they don't really feel like themers. Only five of these things are eight letters or longer, which is the typical minimum length of a themer, especially on a Sunday. But as I say, the films are all pretty mainstream and thus gettable. The only one I struggled to understand was "PAN"—I don't remember that as a movie title. I get that it's the story of Peter Pan, but I forgot there was a movie called just "PAN." The rest were cake. Maybe the puzzle seemed more interesting if you just had the emojis to go on. Maybe there was humor in there. From my perspective, it was just easy and not particularly cute or funny. The grid overall was smooth and I don't have any real objections to any of it. The full impact of it just didn't land, and I'm having trouble imagining that even *with* the intended emoji clues it was that joyful. But people like emojis, I guess, so ... if you loved it, fantastic! My "LOTR"-loving wife wife would like you to know, however, that [jewelry] [elf] [volcano] is an awful clue, as "THE ELF DOES NOT THROW THE JEWELRY IN THE VOLCANO." Also, what is up with the clue on "A LEAGUE OF THEIR OWN" (102A: [baseball] [female symbol] [crying face])? The quote—the very famous quote—is, "There's *no* crying in baseball!" That's the quote. It's iconic. There should be a 🚫 symbol in that clue!

Weird to base your puzzle on a movie that was by all accounts horrendous. "The Emoji Movie" won Worst Picture, Worst Director, and Worst Screenplay at the 2017 Razzies ... And yet it made over $200 million. ANYway ... I did a weird Chutes & Ladders solve because of KING / KONG. Started in NW as usual, but when I figured out the second half of the answer was going to be KONG, way on the other side of the grid, I went down there to fill it in and ... never came back. I just solved my way up from there. Felt like I was all over the map, solving scattershot, rather than my usual orderly self, but the puzzle was so easy that solving path and solving style and all that really didn't matter. My main difficulty with this puzzle was LORISES. The difficulty arose from my forgetting that there was any animal called LORISES. Even after I got it, it looked wrong. There's nothing else that caused me the least bit of difficulty. One important final comment: you can take notorious racist dips**t NIGEL f***ing Farage and shove him ... wherever you like. Just not in any future grids, that would be fantastic. As a clue writer, and especially as an editor (the one with final say over clues), you have a choice of NIGELs. Your choice of this particulary NIGEL tells me you make bad choices. Get bent.

On the Clipboard:

Some really interesting puzzles this week outside of NYTXW-ville.

Anna Shechtman's Monday New Yorker puzzle had some wonderful answers, like PICKUP LINE and PINKWASH, but I especially loved it for RACHEL CUSK, whose book of essays, Coventry, I was, coincidentally, in the middle of reading when I solved the puzzle. Such a great writer. Thumbs up for Anna's puzzle *and* RACHEL CUSK.
Monday's Universal puzzle was by Joon Pahk and Ann Haas, and I thought it was the best themed puzzle of the day—very simple, with familiar phrases imagined as bad Yelp reviews, e.g. [Bad Yelp review for a malt shop?] = NO GREAT SHAKES, [Bad Yelp review for a bakery?] = BUNS OF STEEL. I was thrilled to find out later that Ann is Joon's goddaughter, a high school student, and this puzzle was her debut!
The Fireball this week was entitled "Fifteen Divided by Five," by editor Peter Gordon. Premise: every themer is 15 letters long and made up of five three-letter answers. I thought the puzzle was OK, but what I really liked were my wrong answers on a couple of the themers. [Longtime British television series presented by Phil Drabble featuring lots of sheep] is apparently "ONE MAN AND HIS DOG"; I thought (given the sheep), it was "ONE MAN AND HIS RAM"! Also, apparently Lillian Jackson Braun wrote a 1986 novel titled "THE CAT WHO SAW RED"—I thought it was "THE CAT WHO SAW GOD" (mine's better, imho)

The Amerian Values Crossword Club (AVXC) puzzle was called "Swingers" and had the names of monkeys hidden inside wacky theme answers (with the revealer MONKEY IN THE MIDDLE). Now, hidden (or embedded) word puzzles aren't anything new, but usually the word you're hiding is something short. This puzzle was remarkable for how outlanding the hiding monkey names were. MACAQUE is hidden inside the ridiculous answer TAYLOR MAC AQUEDUCT. Then TAMARIN is hidden inside GUATAMA RINGTONE. I always say that with "wackiness"-driven puzzles, you need to go big or go home. Well, you might love or hate this one, but it definitely went very big in the wackiness department. BATMAN DRILL BITS!
On a much less wacky but still elegant note, the Tuesday Feb. 4 USA Today ("Toymaking" by Karl Ni) sneaks up on you with its simplicity. Themers don't really seem to cohere until you get to the revealer, BUILD-A-BEAR, and realize that the last words in all the themers combine to make ("build") a very famous bear: PAD, DING, TON! I love artful easy puzzles, and this was definitely one of those.
Lastly, a puzzle that was both beautiful and infuriating. The Chronicle of Higher Ed. puzzle by Joanne Sullivan ("Switch-Hitters") featured famous titles clued as having come out in two different years. Turns out the different dates relate to when the title came out as a book (earlier date) and as a film (later date). The revealer is the real stunner here: you get ___ CLUB, and both BOOK and FILM work (i.e. the Downs are all plausible when either BOOK or FILM is in place). The infuriating part was the themer clue, which was impossible to parse—just horribly written, so instead of having the great aha moment that the puzzle deserved, I had ... no moment. Had to go look up what the clue was getting at at crosswordfiend.com. Such a shame to ruin a brilliant puzzle with a botched revealer clue. So important to stick the landing. But still, conceptually, this was great work from Joanne.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

P.S. that NIGEL clue was *not* the constructor's, which is *not* surprising 🙁

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Constructor: Bruce Haight

Relative difficulty: Medium for me (maybe slightly harder-than-usual for some, tho ... this fill, yeesh)

THEME: corny movie puns—maybe a nod to the Oscars (happening roughly now, i.e. Sunday night) — familiar non-movie phrases clued as if they related to movies (i.e. wackily):

Theme answers:

WORTH A SHOT (17A: Suitable for moviemaking?)
A LITTLE EXTRA (23A: Movie munchkin, maybe?)
CREW CUT (37A: Movie clip where the grips, boom operator and gaffer all appear?)
SETTLE A SCORE (47A: Finalize the music for the movie?)
DOUBLE TAKE (57A: Redo of a movie scene?)

Word of the Day: ALEC Waugh (63A: Author Waugh) —

Alexander Raban Waugh (8 July 1898 – 3 September 1981), was a British novelist, the elder brother of the better-known Evelyn Waugh and son of Arthur Waugh, author, literary critic, and publisher. His first wife was Barbara Jacobs (daughter of the writer William Wymark Jacobs), his second wife was Joan Chirnside and his third wife was Virginia Sorenson, author of the Newbery Medal–winning Miracles on Maple Hill. (wikipedia)

• • •

Wow this is quite poor. If its release didn't roughly coincide with the Oscars, it would be truly inexplicable. It's just corny film puns. You can do this kind of thing ad infinitum with other words, like SET or CAST or what have you. But why would you? Why? Also, why is the fill this bad? This stale? This unpolished and implausibly carelessly clued. For instance, if you're going to put a very-much *not* "Big name athletic shoes" in your puzzle, first, don't say it's a "Big name," and second, don't cross that last letter with the last letter of a very very very unfamous author when that last letter could easily (Easily) be an "X." The only people who have ever heard of ALEC Waugh are people who have been solving puzzles for decades, i.e. from well before ALEC Baldwin was legit famous ... but then there was always ALEC Guinness, so I have no idea how ALEC Waugh ever, ever convinced anyone that he was puzzle-worthy. I mean, look at the first paragraph of his wikipedia page (above). The writer basically gives up on defining him in relation to any "writing" you've actually heard of and resorts instead to defining him in relation to three (3!) other authors, all of whom are more accomplished, two of whom Are From His Own Damn Family. Clue should've been [Third most successful Waugh]. The point is, cluing ALEC as a Waugh in *this* particular spot (i.e. crossing ETONIC at the "C") is objectively bad editing. It's Monday! Please pay attention to what you're doing.

Everything about this puzzle is just old, in the sense of stuck and stale. What the !?!?! is MOIL?! Fittingly, it is [Drudgery, in older usage]. This puzzle knows a lot about drudgery, as well as older usage. Everything from CABIT to AIWA to EKES to ALEC to ETAIL to ETONIC to ESAU feels musty. AWS just feels bad. The whole top row is garbage, and THUG is a problematic word that you can *easily* avoid (6A: Mafia enforcer, e.g.). UNGER is also something familiar much much more to older than to younger solvers (12D: Felix of "The Odd Couple"). Totally fine to put "Odd Couple" in your puzzle, but ... there's just not a lot here for anyone under 60. But if yesterday's emoji-based puzzle was just too youthful for you, well, here's your antidote, I guess. Me, I'll take the disease

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Constructor: Neil Padrick Wilson and Jeff Chen

Relative difficulty: Medium (in the mid/high 3's)

THEME: FLYING / COLORS (33A: With 35-Across, complete success ... or a hint to 18-, 23-, 46- and 51-Across) — things that feature literal FLYING / COLORS:

Theme answers:

LASER SHOW (18A: Lighting display at many a rock concert)
RAINBOW FLAG (23A: Symbol of pride)
GLITTER BOMB (46A: Comeuppance for a package thief)
PAINTBALL (51A: Sport that can leave you with welts)

Word of the Day: GLITTER BOMB (46A) —

Glitter bombing is an act of protest in which activists throw glitter on people at public events. Glitter bombers have frequently been motivated by, though not limited to, their targets' rape apologism or opposition to same-sex marriage.
Some legal officials argue glitter bombing is technically assault and battery. It is possible for glitter to enter the eyes or nose and cause damage to the cornea or other soft tissues potentially irritating them or leading to infection, depending on the size of the glitter. Whether a prosecutor would pursue the charges depends on a number of factors. (wikipedia)

• • •

[Comeuppance for a package thief]???? Please see the Word of the Day definition, above, to understand why this was the clue I struggled with the most today. I know glitter bombing only as a form of political protest. Are there really people who devote time to turning the foiling of porch pirates into a lavish art project? What insanely narrow context is this and why not just go with the much more common meaning of this word, especially since it's a modern / new term. Does the package literally explode in their face... with glitter? That still sounds dangerous. Bizarre. Seriously, just google [define glitter bomb] and every page will tell you it's a form of political protest. Too bad they bricked this clue so badly—the theme is actually very inventive. [update: I'm told this is some genre of youtube prank video ... ok] The fill in this puzzle, however, is all over the place. The long Downs give the grid much needed pizzazz, though the most original long Down, IT'S A BIG IF, feels out of tune (5D: "Things may well not happen the way you suppose")—you'd say THAT'S A BIG IF in response to someone else's "if." That may seem a small distinction, but not to my ear. I like what that answer was trying to do, though. Did not like the garbage dump of fill in the NW (ADWARE LEERAT singular ARREAR), but once you get out of there, things even out, and the objectionable stuff is less dense. Ultimately, this one is wobbly, but it holds up.

I've been in universities, and English departments specifically, for my whole adult life, and I can count the number of times I've heard the term "Lit CRIT" to describe a "class" (or, really, anything) on no hands. OK, maybe one, but honestly, it's not a thing. I promise you. It keeps showing up in crosswords because of inertia (this is suuuuuuuuuuch a common phenomenon), but it's good to reality-check your clues and answers every decade or so, and every time I see this clue on CRIT, I wince. I also wince because CRIT is just bad fill. So, double wince. There's a rapper called Big K.R.I.T. Maybe try him.

Jarring also to be told that I'LL BET is a thing when two-to-three hundred times a year (roughly) I'm asked to believe that I BET is a thing. What's next, I WILL BET! I SHALL BET! BET SHALL I! I WILL PUT A NOT INSIGNIFICANT WAGER ON THIS EVENT! Another word no one uses ever: OATEN (57A: Like granola, largely). We all tacitly agree to let it go 'cause we've seen it before and are 99% sure it's in a dictionary somewhere, and maybe we're just secretly glad it's not OATY (yes, OATY happens). But OATEN is a THUD for me. Every time. POPO is real enough slang, but somehow in the "mouth" of the puzzle it always feels ... well, like this:

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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Constructor: Rich Proulx

Relative difficulty: Easy (3:23, first thing in the morning)

THEME: GOD (62A: What each set of circled letters is, relative to the first word in its answer) — non-consecutive circled letters contain name of the god of [first word in the answer]. Thus

Theme answers:

LOVE CONQUERS ALL (17A: Optimistic maxim from Virgil) contains VENUS
DEATH AND TAXES (27A: Reliable things, to Ben Franklin) contains HADES
THUNDERSTORMS (43A: They make loud noises during showers) contains THOR
WAR TO END ALL WARS (54A: Overly optimistic 1910s appellation) contains ARES

Word of the Day: TENT SHOW (6D: Circus) —

noun
an exhibition or performance, especially a circus, presented in a tent. (dictionary.com)

• • •

Definitely a step up from most non-consecutive-circled-letter puzzles, because of the added first-word element, but those ragged circles are still ragged circles, and finding words like that inside of long phrases just has never impressed me very much. I think the theme is good enough, but the execution has some bumpiness. You've got a very Eurocentric GOD assortment, with the Norse god really standing out like an odd duck among the Greek/Romans. Also, your revealer is just .... GOD? That's it? There has to be a better way to do this. This is one of those days when having a *title* on weekday puzzles would really really help. Then you can suggest the whole GOD thing in the title without having to spoil everything with a painfully straightforward revealer and its clunky clue. Or ... maybe this one would still need a revealer, even with a title ... but if so, it needs something better than what it's got. Also, smaller issue, but it's *THE* WAR TO END ALL WARS, and the clue for it should definitely have "with 'The'" tacked on to the end. And speaking of clunky clues—that one (54A: Overly optimistic 1910s appellation). The word "appellation" would like to object to being used in this vague, absurd way. So would "1910s." I'm sure it's hard to clue this answer without using the word "WAR," but try harder. Oh, and one more thing about themer clues: DEATH AND TAXES are "certain" (in the Ben Franklin quotation), not merely "reliable." Also also, "Ben." Why the informality. Just say "Franklin" or use his full first name, unless the shortening has something to do with the answer. Pay more attention to cluing!

Clue on TENT SHOW is bad, in that a [Circus] is a *kind* of TENT SHOW. [Circus, for one] would work. The editing has not been tight at all lately. Not that big a fan of a single ALTOID, but I guess it's fair. Better than CERT (is that the singular of CERTS?), and definitely better than, say, ARREAR. Fill gets a little ragged in places, esp. the SW (EPI ALLA ATAD REA AMO), but I very much liked BAT GUANO and SIDELONG. I guess I've heard THE OLDS before (8D: Parents and grandparents, in teen lingo), but thankfully my own teen daughter (who is, let's be clear, a big fan of giving me s***t for all kinds of reasons) has never used that horrible condescending phrase. Well, not around me, anyway :) Lost time trying to parse that phrase, and also writing in ETNA instead of OSSA (26D: Mount near Olympus) (nice sort-of GOD tie-in!). Not much else to slow me down here. Struggled most with the last answer (why does this always happen!?), which was "I MEANT" (59A: "Let me try that again ..."). Nothing in the clue suggested the act of speaking, so I had to run all the short Downs in that SW corner to finally put the final nail in this one. Overall, a qualified thumbs-up.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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Constructor: Amanda Chung and Karl Ni

Relative difficulty: Medium (6:06, very much not trying to speed ... I can't speed-solve before 6am, and it's not even 5)

THEME: ROLL THE DICE (56A: Take a chance ... or a hint to the letters in the circled squares) — letters D, I, C, E appear in the "cube"-shaped circled squares, in a different configuration each time (because the DICE is "rolling") ... each "DICE" configuration is part of a long Across that enters the "cube" at the lower left corner, jumps up to pick up the top two letters, then comes down for the bottom right letter before continuing Across (well, one answer just ends there at the "cube")

Theme answers:

IN-SERVICE DAYS (17A: Times when teachers go to school but students don't)
SAUCE DISH (23A: Vessel for dipping at a dinner table)
REVERSE DICTIONARY (36A: Reference that arranges words by concept rather than alphabetically)
SHAVED ICE (51A: Cousin of a sno-cone)

Word of the Day: BELAY (31A: "___ that order!" ("Star Trek" command)) —

2. nautical : STOP, CANCEL
belay that last order (merriam-webster.com)

• • •

Really wanted to like this one. Have enjoyed work from these constructors before, so was excited to dig into this, but while there is fun to be had along the way today, I found this one clunked as much as it hummed. We can start with the theme itself, which feels like something I've seen before, conceptually, but ... that's not too big a deal, maybe the constructors will make it new and interesting. But just spinning four letters like this, and (I'm pretty sure) even the DICE thing has been done, so as soon as I get that revealer and realize all those square configurations are just gonna be DICE boxes, I'm already a little let down. Actually, I was let down earlier on two fronts. First, SAUCE DISH. That is ... not exactly a sizzling start. I can kind of imagine what one of those is, but it feels like such an odd, generic, non-specific phrase ... one that I basically inferred from SAUC- ... I can't really dispute the thingness of SAUCE DISH, but it was a disappointment. I like for themers to elicit a "ooh, good one!" not just an "uh, sure, OK." Which brings me to the next let-down, which is that I got the theme concept *immediately*. Very easy to figure out what was going on with SAUCE DISH when SAUCI- wasn't going to go anywhere, and those circles are basically screaming "look at us!" I was hoping the remaining circle configurations were going to hold new things, but then I got the revealer and realized it was just gonna be DICE. And they were gonna roll. I feel like there's some kind of REVERSE AHA MOMENT here, where I get the gimmick early, am not terribly intrigued by it, but still have the rest of the damn puzzle in front of me. The one thing I kinda liked about the theme—the fact that the answer went up and over each "DICE"—was the one thing that didn't seem in keeping with the "DICE" theme. The "rolling" happens as the "DICE" rotates one click counterclockwise at each stage as it "rolls" down the grid. NO IDEA how the up-and-over theme answer thing is DICE-y, but I'll take the added theme feature, since it's kind of fun. I also like how the "DICE" letters are always broken across two words in the themer. Nice added touch.

The last truly disappointing thing today was the phrase IN-SERVICE DAYS. I've been married to a NYS high school teacher for the better part of two decades and I have never heard this term. She definitely has "teacher conference days," where students are off but teachers meet for various reasons, and maybe I've heard "service days" (maybe...) but IN-SERVICE DAYS, sigh, no. I'm sure someone somewhere calls them that, or this answer wouldn't be here. But that answer clanked for me worse than SAUCE DISH. That was (consequently) the last and toughest part of the grid for me. Oh, and the grid ... so choppy and fussy. So much short stuff, which meant so much not-great stuff like -EAN and EINK and RGS and AER and on and on. I actually didn't dislike this puzzle as much as this first paragraph would suggest, but the execution was just off on this one, for me.

[PRIMA is HEP]

I have never seen a REVERSE DICTIONARY, and am not sure why you would use one, but I still liked that answer better than any of the others. It's snappy. And original. And I like how, in general, the clues were spiced (i.e. toughened) up in the short fill (probably because an abundance of short fill tends to make puzzles very easy, and the gimmick today isn't terribly hard to uncover, but it's Thursday, which is supposed to be a toughish solving day, so ... spicy! I actually had to think about the clues on little things like RIPE, NINTH, SALTS, HDTV, CENSUS, TED, etc. Really wanted to like SCIFI BOOK, and I see that that is a term people use, but it's SCI FI NOVEL, or should be, esp. where Clarke is concerned, even if he did occasionally publish a collection of short stories (8D: Many an arthur C. Clarke work). The clue says "work," singular, and the name of the "work" is not "book," it's "novel." If you look at his wikipedia page, the "Works" section is broken down into "novels,""short story collections," and "non-fiction," not "books"). Today really was mostly about my being irked that so many things felt off—not horrible, just wide of the mark.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Constructor: Daniel Larsen

Relative difficulty: Easy (very) (4:16)

THEME: none

Word of the Day: KORN (33D: Grammy-winning metal band with a tasty-sounding name) —

Korn (stylized as KoЯn) is an American nu metal band from Bakersfield, California, formed in 1993. The band is notable for pioneering the nu metal genre and bringing it into the mainstream. [...] The band first experienced mainstream success with Follow the Leader (1998) and Issues (1999), both of which debuted at number one on the Billboard200. The band's mainstream success continued with Untouchables (2002), Take a Look in the Mirror (2003) and See You on the Other Side (2005). [...] As of 2012, Korn had sold more than 35 million records worldwide. Twelve of the band's official releases have peaked in the top ten of the Billboard 200, eight of which have peaked in the top five. Seven official releases are certified platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), two are certified double platinum, one is certified triple platinum, one is certified five times platinum and two are certified Gold. [...] Korn has earned two Grammy Awards out of eight nominations and two MTV Video Music Awards out of eleven nominations. (wikipedia)

• • •

Whoa, there's an *OLD* WELSH? I'm a medievalist and I did not know that. Good thing I have the capacity for inference! I liked this puzzle a lot but then again I *destroyed* this puzzle so I'm not sure how much my warm feelings are due to the intrinsic goodness of the puzzle and how much are due to any solver's natural affection for a Friday puzzle they can take out easily. Do I like you 'cause you're good or 'cause you're easy? That is the question. I'm pretty sure the puzzle is just good, though. Lots and lots of varied, interesting longer fill, from science fiction (HOME PLANET over SPACE OPERA! So good...) to physics to math to music. It's the music that is probably going to separate the very fast solves from the merely normal fast solves, and nothing is going to put solvers into different speed camps faster than 1A: Rock and Roll Hall of Fame band led by Iggy Pop (THE STOOGES). Pop culture is always a potential divider, and since this one's in such a prime position, getting it right away is particularly valuable. For me, it was a total gimme, and I got six Downs off of it right away (THIS HINT ETTA ORCA EDSEL SEE). Between knowing that and knowing KORN, I feel like I had a distinct pop cultural advantage today. LONI Anderson and "LA BAMBA" and ELENA Ferrante, also in my wheelhouse. This one just sang to me. I even got the Beaufort Scale answer lickety split, and I wasn't even sure DEAD CALM was a real category, but look at that: real (27A: 0 on the Beaufort Scale). I just got lucky today. Everything fell my way.

["There's no escape / Without a scrape ..."]

Here were my struggles and my irks: I really think the phrase trips off the tongue best as THERE'S NO ESCAPE. "THERE IS" feels oddly formal and off. PALSY is pretty olde-timey and probably needs "-WALSY" to be complete and anyway, it looks more like an affliction than a term meaning "Chummy," so that's mildly depressing. I didn't think we could go lower on the ALEC scale than Waugh, but here's Douglas-Home! Actually, I think he outranks Waugh, as he actually did something noteworthy. But I'm always happy to discover new ALECs. Add him to Guinness and Baldwin and the kid from "Black Stallion" (I think .... [looks it up] ... yessssss!!! Man, I haven't seen that clue for ALEC in eons but somehow that little fact still lives in some dark corner of my head; weird). I can't believe I fell for the old "Capital" misdirection gag, but boy did I (28D: Capital of Latvia) (EURO). That's a pretty cheap gag, as Latvia's actual capital is also four letters (RIGA), but I guess you gotta try to throw speed bumps in here where you can. SUMP is a very ugly word and I hope I never see it in my puzzle again (34A: Basement feature). I actually had AUDIO BOOMS in there at first for 32A: Some road trip entertainment (I think I was thinking "equipment" instead of "entertainment," like maybe some TV show goes on the "road" and brings along boom mikes? I dunno. But KORN saved me. Anyway, that's all. Good work, everyone. Wait, nope, one more thing. ONER is was and always will be atrocious (56D: Remarkable person). Retire, ONER! OK, now we're done.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Constructor: Randolph Ross

Relative difficulty: Easy (5:39 at a leisurely, non-speed pace)

THEME: none

Word of the Day: TORTOLA (18A: Largest of the British Virgin Islands) —

Tortola /tɔːrˈtoʊlə/ is the largest and most populated of the British Virgin Islands, a group of islands that form part of the archipelago of the Virgin Islands.^[2] It has a surface area of 55.7 square kilometres (21.5 square miles) with a total population of 23,908, with 9,400 residents in Road Town. Mount Sage is its highest point at 530 metres (1,740 feet) above sea level.
Although the British Virgin Islands (BVI) are under the British flag, it uses the US dollar as its official currency due to its proximity to and frequent trade with the US Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico. The island is home to many offshore companies that do business worldwide. Financial services are a major part of the country's economy.
On 6 September 2017, the British Virgin Islands were extensively damaged by Hurricane Irma. The most severe destruction was on Tortola. News reports over the next day or two described the situation as "devastation". (wikipedia)

• • •

Bob KEESHAN

This puzzle felt like maybe the constructor was reliving the '60s and maybe I really didn't need to know all the details. Like maybe he went AWOL during Vietnam and then met a girl at a diner and they agreed to hook up later at a party ("IT'S A DATE") and then it's all kind of a blur of FREE LOVE and PHONE SEX and lots and lots of HASHEESH and TEA, i.e. smoking cigarettes and watching Captain K-angaroo (Bob KEESHAN!) and honestly don't ask me how SUCK DRY and VEINY SALAMI are involved because I don't want to think about it. This thing felt so conspicuously and deliberately hotted up that when I got to 20D: What are depicted in some blue prints? and had THE SMU- filled in, I knew "blue prints" was a misdirection, but I was certain, *certain*, that that misdirection involved SMUT! If it's "blue" it's gotta be ... THE SMUTTS!? THE SMUTTY!? THE SMUT FX!?" By the way, I do not recommend googling [THE SMURFS smut], as you are (probably?) not going to like what you find. Anyway, despite the high TMI levels in this puzzle, it was probably about as much as I've ever liked a Randolph Ross puzzle, even if it was almost painfully rooted in times of yore. Still, there were too many awkward crosswordy answers and alt-spellings for the puzzle to be truly enjoyable. I felt like I tore through it simply because I'd been doing puzzles for thirty years, i.e. things like SELENE and EOCENE and TAPIR and ACTA and ADE and ESTERS and what not were reflex fills for me. I do enjoy destroying a Saturday puzzle, and the sex and drugs definitely woke me up, but it's still a mixed bag overall, I think.

["... smokin' cigarettes and watching Captain (kang) KAAAANGaroo, now don't tell me ..."]

Watched a character on "Ozark" OD on OPIOIDS last night, so that answer was weirdly fresh (48A: 21st-century health menace). I saw someone online mention that MEASLES fit in that same space, which is depressing (the fact that you might consider MEASLES for this clue, not the fact that it fit). Does Randolph Ross know a guy name "LEV" and is it his birthday because he's getting a lot of leverage out of that letter string today, especially in the SW where it's a LEVfest. Enjoy the FREE LEV, everyone. LEVIES! LEVERETS! ALEVELS! And then later, just when you thought you were LEV'd out: ELEVENTH! Happy birthday, Lev, wherever you are.

I will confess that I had no idea what TORTOLA was and I would've guessed food if you'd just showed me the word. Needed every cross but it didn't matter because that NE corner was so easy. I got in there off of just the -EX in PHONE SEX and took it all down in no time. PELAGE gave me a little more trouble because I really thought that was another word for the sea. The adjective "pelagic" comes to mind. What am I thinking of ... (consults dictionary) ... well, I'm right about "pelagic": "of, relating to, or living or occurring in the open sea: OCEANIC" (m-w). And PELAGE does indeed mean what the puzzle says it means ("the hairy covering of a mammal"). Weird that those words are etymologically unrelated: PELAGE from Latin via Middle French poil (hair) and "pelagic" ultimately from Greek pelagos (sea). That's all for today, students. See you tomorrow.

[CHRISSIE!]

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Gaucho's weapon / MON 1-27-20 / Utah city of more than 100,000 / Avian hooter / Culinary concoction much used in French cuisine / Title role for Jude Law in 2004 remake

March Madness quartet / TUE 1-28-20 / Branch of mathematics concerned with Möbius strips Klein bottles / Keyboard shortcut for undo on PC / Disposable drink receptacle popular at parties / Parlor ink for short / Body scan for claustrophobe

Nightcap go-with in brief / WED 1-29-20 / Robotic supervillain in first Avengers sequel / Spanish table wine / Female compadre / Drooping flower feature

Official of ancient Rome / THU 1-30-20 / Arrow poison / Gift that comes in pieces / Star Wars Jedi familiarly

Environmentalist Leopold / FRI 1-31-20 / Command from director's chair / Jon who wrote illustrated Palindromania / Noted figure in Raphael's school of athens / treat whose name means literally flash of lightning

Former kingdom of central Vietnam / SAT 2-1-20 / Grain bristles / Home away from home sloganeer / Wine often paired with Roquefort cheese / Champagne-fueled song finale /

Farthest orbital point from moon / SUN 2-2-20 / Lone female argonaut / Fictional protagonist who attends elementary school in Maycomb County / Grace's partner on Netflix / Onetime come hungry leave happy sloganeer / Asian island divided between two countries

Chinese region dubbed the "Vegas of Asia" / MON 2-3-2020 / Help-wanted inits. / World faith founded in Persia / Singer Mann

Deceitful doings / TUES 2-4-19 / Jerry's partner in ice cream / 007, for one / Minotaur's island

Daily run for short / WED 2-5-20 / Something seismograph detects / Impulse transmitter / Infotainment show with exclamation point in its name

Domination in slang / THU 2-6-20 / Fragrance since 1932 / Title partner of Hobbs in hit 2019 film / In Old Mexico In Old Santa Fe / Target for holistic healing / Portmanteau fruit / Port SSE of Suez Canal / Travel for bigheaded person

Seminal William S. Burrows novel 1959 / FRI 2-7-19 / Intensifying suffix in modern slang / Fictional Ethiopian princess / Certain PR in two different senses / Role for Nichelle Nichols Zoe Saldana

Office-sharing system in modern lingo / SAT 2-8-20 / Easy kill in Fortnite say / They get big bucks from Bucks

Bug-eyed primates / SUN 2-9-20 / New York city where Mark Twain was married buried / Energy-efficient Navajo structure / Cruise line that owned the Lusitania

Drudgery in old usage / MON 2-10-20 / Big name in athletic shoes / Mississippi port city with Air Force Base

Comeuppance for package thief / TUE 2-11-20 / Ballet position on tiptoe / Actress Merrill of "BUtterfield 8"

Optimistic maxim from Virgil / WED 2-12-20 / Lorena who was #1 female golfer for 158 consecutive weeks / parents grandparents in teen lingo / Overly optimistic 1910's appellation / Team sharing arena with Flyers informally

noun

Onetime truth in engineering sloganeer / THU 2-13-20 / Relative of jaguarundi / Reference that arranges words by concept rather than alphabetically / Noted painter of scenes in Napoleonic wars / Super Mario bros character with mushroom head

Successor language to Common Brittonic / FRI 2-14-20 / Automotive sponsor of Wagon Train in 1950s / Rebus symbol for everything / Grammy-winning metal band with tasty-sounding name

Bob of old children's TV / SAT 2-15-20 / Chanel fragrance with French name / Epoch when modern mammals arose / Benchmark test for British students / Third largest city of Ottoman Empire