Rex Parker Does the NYT Crossword Puzzle

Constructor: Christina Iverson and Scott Hogan

Relative difficulty: Medium

THEME:"Movin' On Up"— "ON" at the end of one familiar phrase is "moved""up" and attached to the end of another familiar phrase directly above it—the "ON"-ing and de-"ON"-ing create wacky phrases, which are clued wackily (i.e. "?"-style)

Theme answers:

'TIS THE SEAS-- (74D: Response to "Why art thou queasy?") / FRUIT BATON (3D: Banana wielded by a maestro in a pinch?)
STORE COUP-- (83D: Retail takeover scheme?) / WARM-UP TOON (6D: Animated short before a Pixar movie?)
BOXING LESS-- (76D: What Amazon retirees enjoy most?) / TRASH CANON (9D: Give a scathing review of a major camera brand?)
HEART SURGE-- (78D: Result of love at first sight?) / TACO BARON (13D: Mexican street food mogul?)
WELCOME WAG-- (79D: What a dog greets its returning family with?) / MAIN DRAGON (16D: Smaug, in "The Hobbit"?)

Word of the Day: John CALE (20A: Rocker John whose surname sounds like a leafy vegetable) —

John Davies Cale OBE (born 9 March 1942) is a Welsh musician, composer, singer, songwriter and record producer who was a founding member of the American rock band the Velvet Underground. Over his six-decade career, Cale has worked in various styles across rock, drone, classical, avant-garde and electronic music.
He studied music at Goldsmiths College, University of London, before relocating in 1963 to New York City's downtown music scene, where he performed as part of the Theatre of Eternal Music and formed the Velvet Underground. Since leaving the band in 1968, Cale has released 16 solo studio albums, including the widely acclaimed Paris 1919 (1973) and Music for a New Society (1982). Cale has also acquired a reputation as an adventurous record producer, working on the debut albums of several innovative artists, including the Stooges and Patti Smith. (wikipedia)

• • •

Something about the verticality of this theme was mildly disorienting. The other disorienting thing was that not only did the long Down themers have "?" clues, but the very first long Across had a "?" clue as well, meaning that all three of the first long answers I encountered had "?" clues, so I had no idea what the theme was doing or which way it was going. That is, STUD FARMS (23A: Where some stable relationships form?) really looked like it was a theme answer, somehow, so ... yeah, disorienting, as I said. Somehow the first themer that I actually got in full was "TIS THE SEAS!"; I had picked up the "ON" at the end of FRUIT BATON, but did not yet know that was the answer. When I saw the "ON" and recalled that the title of the puzzle was "Movin' On Up," I immediately went down to the longish answer just below the "ON" and, noticing it too was a "?" clue, figured the "ON" had been moved "up" ... so this lower themer would be lacking the "ON" (where the upper themer had gained it). I did not expect that literally every themer would have the "ON" either taken from or added to its tail end, but that's what ended up happening, making it very easy to just put "ON"s into all the upper themers while also imagining them missing from the lower ones. Solving it felt pretty programmatic. Some of the wackiness landed—I liked "'TIS THE SEAS" and WELCOME WAG and the idea of a TACO BARON (whom I wanted to be a TAPA (?) BARON at first). But there wasn't enough cleverness or hilarity here to sustain a Sunday-length solve. This is always the challenge of Sunday—something that might, theoretically, delight in a 15x15 becomes kind of a drag when carried out over an entire 21x21. And the fill wasn't making any friends today either, so after Saturday's grueling but carefully crafted masterpiece, this felt much more conventional, and was something of a let-down.

There are a lotta "Why?"s in this grid. Like, why are there two "UP"s in the grid, especially in a puzzle where "UP" is in the title and relevant to the whole concept? One of the "UP"s is even in a themer (WARM-UP TOON) (the other is in ACTS UP). Why isn't there a second question mark in the clue for "'TIS THE SEAS!" (74D: Response to "Why art thou queasy?")—you need one "?" for the normal interrogative, but you need another to cue the thematic wackiness. All the other themers get wacky "?"s at the end, that one needs one as well. More whys. Why would you needlessly add yet more Harry Potter content (RITA) to a puzzle that already has a necessarily Pottery answer (SNAPE)?! There are a million (give or take) ways to clue RITA, so why are you leaning into the Rowlingverse, exactly? (95A: Journalist Skeeter in the Harry Potter books). Yuck. Why is there an "ON" in a Down answer that does *not* move "up"? (15D: Defunct company of accounting fraud fame => ENRON). And lastly (I think), why is there a (horrible) singular SCAD (114D: Large amount) when you could've just made it a SCAM? Maybe SCAM or TEEM is already in the grid somewhere and I'm just not seeing it, but oof, singular SCAD, just say 'no,' esp. when it's easy to say 'no.' Oh, one more why—why is the clue on MILAN [Where 122-Across can be found] when 122-Across is merely SCALA. It is super-awkward to tell me to look at an answer and then not have the answer itself be enough—the answer is just a partial. You need to read the clue *and* the answer to make the MILAN clue make sense. Ungainly. Don't do this. Not worth it.

No significant mistakes to speak of today. I had Smaug as a REAL DRAGON at first. Balked at DAGNABIT because I thought it had two "B"s. Balked at BROUHAHA because I thought it had two "O"s. Wasn't sure if it was BRIER or BRIAR. Had MAD before WAY (94D: Very, colloquially). Took (seemingly) forever for me to figure out why STU was right for 66A: Artless nickname? (take the "art" out of "Stuart" and you get STU). I kinda wish the clue on NIGHT had started with [When repeated...] (99A: "Sweet dreams!" => "NIGHT!"). That's all I got in the way of commentary today.

Hey, I need to remind you that another installment of the Boswords Crossword Tournament is headed your way later this month. Or, if you're local, maybe you're headed its way (it's in person *and* online this time) (in-person at The Roxbury Latin School in West Roxbury, MA). Anyway, here's the info from tourney organizer John Lieb:

Registration is now open for the Boswords 2022 Summer Tournament, which will be held on Sunday, July 24. This event will be both In-Person and Online. Solvers can compete individually or in pairs. To register, to see the constructor roster, and for more details, go to www.boswords.org, where past tournament puzzles are also available for purchase.

Take care. See you tomorrow (or next week, if you're one of those Sundays-only folks)

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

P.S. I was so very much thrown by the clue on WAS (79A: Second word of many a limerick) since the main limerick I know begins "There once WAS a man from Nantucket..."—with WAS in the third position.

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Constructor: Roy Greim

Relative difficulty: Easy

THEME: FINGER PAINTS (51A: Materials for a preschool artist ... or a hint to 20-, 32- and 40-Across)— theme answers contain both colors and hand parts, and so suggest the theoretical results of finger-painting:

Theme answers:

WHITE-KNUCKLE (20A: Like a ride that has one holding on for dear life)
BLUEPRINTS (32A: Architectural diagrams)
GREEN THUMB (40A: Knack for gardening)

Word of the Day: PANKO (49D: Japanese bread crumb coating) —

NOUN
(in Japanese cooking) breadcrumbs with a light, flaky texture, typically used as a coating for fried or baked food. (lexico.com)

• • •

Short write-up tonight because my daughter is home for just 24 hours and I love you all but the Monday write-up is not my top top priority at this very moment. You understand. I actually think this theme is adorable, though yeesh how the hell did you get paint on your *knuckles*, kid? That's some creative painting. Sure, there's some redundancy here (your THUMB has both a PRINT and a KNUCKLE, probably), but the theme is so tight, and narrow, that I don't care much about either anatomical redundancies or improbable paint application techniques. The theme works: non-finger-painting answers that the revealer asks us to reimagine as finger-painting answers: just fine! My guess is that most people won't even notice the theme (much) because they'll be too busy crowing about their record Monday times. This really was, very, very easy, even for a Monday. I couldn't even come up with a decent Word of the Day candidate. I had to reuse (I think) PANKO, which is the most "obscure" thing in the grid (not actually obscure). It's worth noting that this puzzle is not just extremely easy, it is extremely clean, from end to end. No wincing. Very careful attention to making the fill smooth. You don't get a lot of non-themer pizzazz, but HOTWIRES and SHIP'S LOG and NPR NEWS are solid longer answers, and I can't say enough good things about a grid that doesn't make me wince even once. NAE is the closest to Wincetown, and meh, I've seen it too much to be bothered, and anyway, if a single NAE is as bad as it gets, count yourself very lucky.

Errors? Trouble spots? No, not really. I got a bit stalled / distracted by the specificity of the clue on MARRED (26A: Damaged, as a surface). Like, wtf is "as a surface" doing there, besides making me overthink the answer? [Damaged] is quite enough, thanks. My brain can take it from there. The link between MARRED and "surface" feels very slight, and anyway, the addition of "surface" here is not obviously clarifying. Just weird, that bit. I also don't know why Shakira was added to the SHE clue—maybe it's just a fun little bit of trivia, and that's enough, but once you give me Cyndi Lauper and "-Bop," I'm good. I got it. I see that there's a similar cluing technique used with ARENA, where two examples are used in the clue in order to highlight some similarity between those examples (in the ARENA clue, it's the "Nicks""Knicks" homophone). I guess since it's Monday, and there's not a hell of a lot else going on, why not have a little wordplay fun. But the "fun" feels a little anemic today. I wish the clues had a little more life in them, as well as a little more teeth. Tiny teeth. Tiny Monday teeth. Woulda been nice. But this is OK, too. Good day.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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Constructor: Karen Steinberg

Relative difficulty: Slightly to the harder side of Tuesday (mostly because the first longer answer was basically unclued and the second one ... I know only vaguely)

THEME: SLEEP-WAKE CYCLES (57A: Body's internal clock patterns, regulated by the phenomenon seen in the circled letters) — circled squares form a wave across the grid that spells out CIRCADIAN RHYTHM. You also get the answer TWENTY-FOUR HOURS at the top of the grid (16A: Approximate length of 57-Across), as well as DAY up top (5A: Light time) and NIGHT down below (66A: Dark time)

Word of the Day: circadian rhythm (spelled out in the wavy circle-line across the grid) —

A circadian rhythm (/sərˈkeɪdiən/), or circadian cycle, is a natural, internal process that regulates the sleep–wake cycle and repeats roughly every 24 hours. It can refer to any process that originates within an organism (i.e., endogenous) and responds to the environment (entrained by the environment). These 24-hour rhythms are driven by a circadian clock, and they have been widely observed in animals, plants, fungi and cyanobacteria.
The term circadian comes from the Latin circa, meaning "around" (or "approximately"), and diēm, meaning "day". Processes with 24-hour cycles are more generally called diurnal rhythms; diurnal rhythms should not be called circadian rhythms unless they can be confirmed as endogenous, and not environmental.
Although circadian rhythms are endogenous, they are adjusted to the local environment by external cues called zeitgebers (German for "time givers"), which include light, temperature and redox cycles. In clinical settings, an abnormal circadian rhythm in humans is known as a circadian rhythm sleep disorder.

• • •

What does the wave represent? I am not quite understanding the visual representation. It looks like an EKG or other hospital monitor ... but are circadian rhythms measured this way? If you do a google image search on [circadian rhythm], all the visuals you get are basically dial-shaped, like a clock face (not surprisingly), showing day on one side and night on the other, or something like that. Something like this, actually:

or this:

You do have the DAY / NIGHT thing going on, but those answers are so small they hardly register. As for the "circadian rhythm" wave: there's no doubt that a "wave" is a common enough representation of a cycle, but the connection between the visual (the puzzle's whole reason for being) and the word it contains just seems weak. Also, I know the phrase primarily in the plural: circadian rhythms. That's how it appears in the title of this page at UCLA Sleep Disorder clinic, for instance, and it must be the way the phenomenon is commonly talked about, otherwise I'm not sure why it would exist in the plural in my head. Its appearing in the singular here certainly isn't an error or inelegance, just a grid-fitting tweak that jarred my ear a bit. Notice that while "rhythm" is in the singular, the revealer is in the plural. More grid-fitting. Notice also that the wave isn't exactly regular, i.e. flattens out at the top of its cycle (for two squares) but then spikes at the bottom. Again, the grid is a harsh taskmaster, so you make your theme material work however you can. I don't think any of the grid accommodations here are egregious or disqualifying, but when you make a visual element into the marquee event, little glitches and incongruencies stand out (if you bother to look and don't just get on with your day like a normal person).

The fill was rough, especially through the wave, which is not surprising. As I've said before, trying to fill a grid neatly around a word that runs on diagonals is very hard. If you put TWENTY-FOUR HOURS in your grid, well, it just sits on one line and behaves itself and you just have to do the normal amount of architectural work to accommodate it, whereas when a phrase does what "circadian rhythm" does, hoo boo are you in for a rough ride. Seems like it should be the same amount of trouble—same number of letters as TWENTY-FOUR HOURS, after all; but when you leave the straight plane of the Across, now you're involving all the other Across planes in your shenanigans and the grid will really start to buck and thrash on you. This is why you get FAA and DOFOR and AONE and RAE all clumped in a wet bunch there in the middle, and then the OTTO OHM OHH wad in the east, oof, that was probably the roughest part of the grid for me. I'm never good at those [Good name for someone who works in some profession]-type answers, and having the "O" at 38A: Apt name for a car mechanic? (OTTO) all I could think of was "... OILY? Are people named OILY?" And then I wanted ERGO for THUS (40D: Start of a conclusion). And *then*, after I got THUS, I really Really wanted AHA for 44A: ""Now" I get it!" ("OHH!"). Oof, that one answer, "OHH!," gave me more trouble than anything else except the revealer, which I needed almost every cross for (that WAKE part was ???). I wanted OHM for 41D: Physicist Georg with electrifying discoveries? but AHA wasn't letting me go with it. And even when I went with it, I ended up with "AHH!" for 44A: ""Now" I get it!," which, come on, seems at least as right as "OHH!" Just a wreck, and a wreck happening on some of the junkiest fill in the grid. Not too much fun. I did run into a classic example of a kealoa* today, though, which wasn't fun either, but it does allow me to illustrate the phenomenon rather neatly with a grid shot:

The only way this could be a more perfect example of the type is if the word "Observatory" were not in the clue. Maybe it's supposed to help you decide between LOA and KEA, but not being an observatory aficionado, it didn't help me at all. And as you can see, I had the "A"—which also didn't help me at all. That is the hallmark of the kealoa*—there's no way to decide between two (or more) options until you get some crosses ... and then you get one (or more) ... and it *still* doesn't help you. This happens with a bunch of common crossword answers: ATON v ALOT, ELUDE v EVADE, etc. A kealoa is a little hassle, not a Natick**-level catastrophe. See you tomorrow.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[UPDATE: the thing about having smart readers is, well, you will hear about it if you go crashing ignorantly into their specialities. Thankfully, I have not only smart but (mostly) kind readers. So thank you to reader Bill L. for sending me the following email this morning:]

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*kealoa = a short, common answer that you can't just fill in quickly because two or more answers are viable, Even With One or More Letters In Place. From the classic [Mauna ___] KEA/LOA conundrum. See also, e.g. [Heaps] ATON/ALOT, ["Git!"] "SHOO"/"SCAT," etc.

**Natick = an impossible crossing (see blog sidebar for full definition)

Constructor: Addison Snell

Relative difficulty: Medium

THEME: I AM— people associated with phrases that contain the words "I am" (or "I yam"):

Theme answers:

JEAN VALJEAN (24A: "Who Am I?")
GLORIA / GAYNOR (37A: With 39-Across, "I Am What I Am")
RENÉ DESCARTES (49A: "I think, therefore I am")
POPEYE (55A: "I yam what I yam")
YAHWEH (56A: "I Am that I Am")

Word of the Day:"I Am that I Am" (56A) —

"I Am that I Am" is a common English translation of the Hebrew phrase אֶהְיֶה אֲשֶׁר אֶהְיֶה‎‎ (’ehye ’ăšer ’ehye; pronounced [ʔehˈje ʔaˈʃer ʔehˈje])– also "I am who I am", "I will become what I choose to become", "I am what I am", "I will be what I will be", "I create what(ever) I create", or "I am the Existing One". The traditional English translation within Judaism favors "I will be what I will be" because the imperfective aspect in Modern Hebrew is normally used for future tense and there is no present tense with direct object of the verb "to be" in the Hebrew language. // אֶהְיֶה אֲשֶׁר אֶהְיֶה‎ (’ehye ’ăšer ’ehye) is the first of three responses given to Moses when he asks for God's name in the Book of Exodus. The word אֶהְיֶה‎ (’Ehyeh) is the first person form of hayah, 'to be', and owing to the peculiarities of Hebrew grammar means 'I am', 'I was', and 'I will be'.^[3] The meaning of the longer phrase ’ehyeh ’ăšer ’ehyeh is debated, and might be seen as a promise ('I will be with you') or as statement of incomparability ('I am without equal'). (wikipedia)

• • •

Only two of these five "I (Y)AM" phrases resonated for me at all, so this had no real chance of being a puzzle I'd enjoy much. I guess I can see how there might be something amusing about lining up a bunch of different "I (Y)AM" phrases like this, but for me the solve was slightly awkward, slightly confusing. The first problem was not the puzzle's, but my software's—it can't do italics and so all the theme clues were in quotation marks, which meant *double* quotation marks on every clue (since the clues are all quotations to begin with). But leaving that technical glitch aside, there are a few other problems. The main one, the huge one, the absolutely glaring one, is that GLORIA / GAYNOR is famous for precisely one song, and that song is not "I Am What I Am" but another, much much (much much much ad inf.) more famous "I" song: "I WILL SURVIVE." I lived through the "I WILL SURVIVE" era. That song was, and remains, iconic. It was a juggernaut. It went to No. 1 on the US charts. It won the Grammy for Best Disco Recording in 1980 (the only year that award was given). It's the queen of female empowerment anthems (OK, maybe co-queen with Aretha's version of "R-E-S-P-E-C-T"). So ... "I WILL SURVIVE" has Cartesian, Popeysian levels of fame. Whereas "I Am What I Am" ... doesn't. That song ... peaked at No. 102 (!!!!) on the US Hot 100. In 1983. It did hit No. 3 on the US Dance charts, and No. 13 overall in the UK, but when you line that song up against the likes of "Les Misérables," Descartes, Popeye, and (!) Yahweh ... it falls a *little* short on the recognizability scale. "I WILL SURVIVE" has indeed survived, and to this day it is the only GLORIA / GAYNOR song 99% of the population, including me, can name. "I Am What I Am," on the other hand, sounds like a confession / apology: "Hey, I'll admit, I'm no 'I WILL SURVIVE,' but I Am What I Am, alright? Give me a break." So even if you thought this theme was cute, you gotta admit, one of these five is not like the others. Jarringly so. Not knowing the JEAN VALJEAN song and being only kinda sorta familiar with that YAHWEH phrase, those are personal blindspots, but that GLORIA / GAYNOR song, that's everyone's blindspot. The singer's name is famous (again, because of that *other* song), so the obscurity of the song in question doesn't affect the puzzle's doability much in the end. But it's weird to have your *central* theme clue be *this* much less famous than all the others (as well as this much less famous than the song that actually made the answer famous in the first place).

Outside the theme, the puzzle feels like it was made in OBAMA's second term, when hashtag TEAMJACOB and PABLO Sandoval were peaking, famewise. To see them here was mildly time-warpy. Original "Twilight" fans (TWIHARDS? Are we still doing that?) are pushing middle-aged now (I kid! You're very young!), and that whole franchise, and particularly the "fan debate" about Jacob v. Edward, feels very much of the past (last book came out in '08, last film in '10). And I love seeing PABLO Sandoval here, actually, but if "two-time All Star" is the only bar you gotta clear for crossword fame, hoo boy have I got some names for you. Let me put this in perspective: Mike Sweeney, Jimmy Key, and Travis Fryman are all *five*-time All-Stars, and unless you really really follow baseball, you don't know who those are. Sandoval was in the league more recently than any of those guys (through last year), but still, his last All-Star appearance was in 2012. Again, I'm not mad at PABLO's being here; open the baseball floodgates, by all means. Just ... be prepared for chaos if a mere two All-Star appearances, neither of them very recent, is the only criterion for crossword inclusion.

Outside of a few of the themers, there were no real trouble spots for me today. Wanted SHEEP and maybe STEED (?) before STEER (35A: Ranch animal). I know LA SALLE more as a University than an explorer, but crosses helped jog my memory (8D: French explorer of the Great Lakes). If you don't know OLY (short for "Olympia") by now, you really should pack it away in your crossword beer cooler (9D: Classic beer of the Pacific Northwest, familiarly). It's not exactly common, but you do see it regularly. All three-letter brands are gonna show up here eventually. Not much else of interest going on in the fill, so I'll stop here. Have a nice day, see you tomorrow.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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Constructor: Alan Arbesfeld

Relative difficulty: Easy to Easy-Medium

THEME: H2O (69A: Fire fighter, familiarly ... or a phonetic hint to this puzzle's theme) — simple letter swap: "H" goes "to""O," wackiness follows:

Theme answers:

AFTER SOAVE (18A: Seeking a dry Italian wine?) (from "aftershave")
MARCO MADNESS (29A: Fervor over Senator Rubio?) (... "March Madness")
FIRESIDE COAT (46A: Blazer worn next to a blaze?) (... "Fireside Chat")
POD PROGRAM (59A: TV show about a group of whales?) (... "Ph.D. program")

Word of the Day: Roger KAHN (66A: Roger who wrote "A Season in the Sun") —

Roger Kahn (October 31, 1927 – February 6, 2020) was an American author, best known for his 1972 baseball book The Boys of Summer. (wikipedia) // [On A Season in the Sun (1977)] In 1976 Roger Kahn spent an entire baseball season, from spring training through the World Series, with players of every stripe and competence. The result is this book, in which Kahn reports on a small college team's successes and hopes, a young New England ball club, a failing major league franchise, and a group of heroes on the national stage. (Google Books)

• • •

There are a lot of "ugh"s and frowny faces in the margins of this one. The theme itself is so slim that the funniness payoff needs to be big, and it isn't. This is a simple letter swap—a theme as old as the hills. Very 20th century. And I don't mind a throwback theme if you can do something great with it, if you can make your tiny changes yield genuine LOL wackiness. But these answers are all pretty limp. I don't know how hard it is to find words that will let you change them into other words by making an "H" an "O," but I'm guessing pretty hard. Still, you gotta do better than AFTER SOAVE or POD PROGRAM. You especially have to do better than AFTER SOAVE and POD PROGRAM when the rest of your grid is so lumpy and stale. This was one of those where I knew I was in for a rough ride before I even got out of the tiny NW corner. TAD ASAHI OHOHOH REHEM OMANI is *not* promising stuff, especially when that section of the grid isn't even compromised by a theme answer. And sure enough, the short fill continued in this vein, despite the theme's not being particularly dense or otherwise tricky to pull off. TAD and SLEW and ALOT. If we could find ATON and SCAD, we'd have a Crosswordese Amounts basketball team! You've got General MEADE and his STENO and of course MNEMENEMEMEMENMO or whatever Her name is, wow, yeah, and then the TEA RAT, yuck, those are the worst, I take my tea without rats, thanks. OMNI ANNO ONIT NAW. Truly an onslaught. You get one good longer answer, "I CAN'T EVEN!" and you get Natalie PORTMAN (who I forgot ever won an Oscar, sorry, Natalie, my bad), and then you get, what, HONOREE? CAR LOAN? Somebody named BEA HERO? Oof, BE A HERO, that has some big EAT A SANDWICH energy (BE A HERO! EAT A SANDWICH! There's your new slogan, delis of the world! It's all yours!). The only difficulty in this puzzle was coming up with the themers, which are somewhat hard to see when you don't know the gimmick yet, as the grid phrases are nuts and the base phrases can only be grasped after you've filled in the grid phrases. Beyond that little bit of resistance, the grid doesn't put up much of a fight.

I thought the muse was MNEMO (41A: Muse of memory), which is what happens when your brain crosses "mnemonic" with Mets outfielder Brandon NIMMO. Actually, MNEMO is just the first five letters of "mnemonic," so it felt right. Wrong. Ah well, SLEW to the rescue, I guess. I had trouble with DEAF because I didn't know what the "signers" were signing (I figured contracts). I had trouble with NONRANDOM because the clue just doesn't seem correct (35D: Like the results of loaded dice). The "results" of dice throws ... are they truly random? Obviously your odds of throwing certain numbers are greater than those of throwing other numbers, but I'm probably confusing mathematical concepts here. Anyway, whatever the clue, kind of hard for me to like NONRANDOM. I thought KAHN was a songwriter and "A Season in the Sun" was a song from some musical. This despite owning Roger KAHN's "The Boys of Summer." Last little screw-up came at the very end, where I figured the [Valuable diamond] was ICE. But it was ACE. You know, playing cards.

Probably shouldn't have clued PORTMAN via the Oscar, since "Oscar" is part of EGOT (57D: Feat for a performer, in brief). And was there no other MARCO you could've gone with in that MARCO MADNESS clue!? I mean, just the weakest, bootlickingest twerp there is in the Senate. Let the former president just push him around. I mean, I almost had respect for him when he was"calling Trump a "con artist" and saying that Trump is "wholly unprepared to be president of the United States" but then he gave the bully all his lunch money and told him what a great man he was. Anyone with integrity and self-respect would've broken with his party. But no. Huge embarrassment. It's bad enough I gotta suffer through the resurrection of Reagan/Bush propagandist Peggy NOONAN (36A: Political columnist Peggy), but to have her crossing Rubio, ugh, it's A LOT to take in one puzzle. I know the puzzle feels very strongly about right-wing representation, but show some restraint. Anyway, I hope you digital solvers didn't have 2 much trouble entering the "2" into the grid today. And I really hope you enjoyed this a hell of a lot more than I did. Good day.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

P.S. good morning to my readers in São Paolo, Tel Aviv, and Beirut. I see you! (Google Analytics is fun sometimes ...)

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Constructor: Matthew Stock and Nam Jin Yoon

Relative difficulty: Medium

THEME: well, there's a "LEFT" / "RIGHT" thingie going on, but basically "none"

Word of the Day: PUPUSA (42A: Thick tortilla that's the national dish of El Salvador) —

A pupusa is a thick griddle cake or flatbread from El Salvador and Honduras, made with cornmeal or rice flour, similar to the Venezuelan and Colombian arepa. In El Salvador, it has been declared the national dish and has a specific day to celebrate it. It is usually stuffed with one or more ingredients, which may include cheese (such as quesillo or cheese with loroco buds), chicharrón, squash, or refried beans. It is typically accompanied by curtido (a spicy fermented cabbage slaw) and tomato salsa, and is traditionally eaten by hand. (wikipedia)

• • •

Not the kind of all-over fire I'm used to from Nam Jin Yoon, but still pretty good. This is more of a two-answer show, and though all the other answers are solid, and occasionally snappy, nothing comes near the slangy, colloquial heights of those two 14s: "WHAT ELSE IS LEFT?" / "YOUR OTHER RIGHT." But the highlight ends up also being something of a lowlight, in the sense that ... the phrase is "YOUR OTHER LEFT." It just is. I don't know why it is, but it is. If you're going to do a theme (or a coy "theme," like this one) on a Friday, then there better be good reason and that theme better *land*, and "YOUR OTHER RIGHT" just doesn't quite land. I was giddily typing in "YOUR OTHER LEFT" when I realized it wasn't going to reach. Then thought "well, I guess it's RIGHT, but that isn't ... right?" So then I looked it up, and if you google both phrases in quotation marks "right" wins by a mile, but that's only because "YOUR OTHER RIGHT" might appear accidentally in a ton of other contexts, whereas "YOUR OTHER LEFT" ... is unique to this particular gag (which is probably what makes it the funnier / more established option). Don't believe me? Here is the "YOUR OTHER LEFT" (not "RIGHT") entry from tvtropes dot com:

If ever in a comedy somebody tells a character or a group of characters to move/turn left, you can bet the character/one or more of the group will go right instead, prompting the phrase, "Your other left!" (Or they correctly turn left, at which point the first character realizes that they actually meant to say "right" and tries to cover with the same phrase.)
If this doesn't happen, it's usually replaced with a confused exchange about "My left or your left?", even if the characters are facing the same way. [...] To be entirely fair, though, it's not like this doesn't actually happen with an alarming regularity in real life. We're just talking about its predictable appearances on TV. For some reason, it's always "your other left," never "your other right", even though you'd think both occur equally often in Real Life [...]. A likely explanation is that most people, being right handed/right dominant, will default to the right when confused, prompting "The other left". (tvtropes.com) (emph. mine)

So I like / love the energy of the answer, but primarily it's the energy of the answer that isn't actually there, the correct one, the "LEFT" one. And as for "WHAT ELSE IS LEFT?" ... it's a plausible question, yes, but it does quite crackle with slangy specificity of, say "WHAT ELSE IS NEW?" I actually wanted "WHAT ELSE IS THERE?" to go in here, but as with "YOUR OTHER LEFT," it just didn't fit. What I'm saying is that there's a nice colloquial feel here, but the whole "theme" angle ... it doesn't really feel like they nailed it.

The NW corner is dull by comparison to the rest. I love RESCUE DOGs, but the NE corner isn't doing a hell of a lot either. Things get much more interesting down below—also a little trickier. I really had to hang on to my hat there at the end, with SLUICE sluicing down through *three* blank squares to complete the grid. I don't think of the LINK as the "invite"—it takes you *to* the invite, but the LINK itself doesn't really invite you. Never heard of PUPUSA but after reading about them (above) they're all I want to eat right now. As for Buck O'NEIL, once again I apologize to him for not knowing for sure if he's an -AL O'Neal or an -IL O'NEIL (also couldn't have told you for sure if he's a one-L O'NEIL or a two-L O'NEILL ("he's a beast!"). Blanked on LUNA, which seems absurd, in retrospect, since they're practically handing you the sun/moon thing in the clue (34D: Sibling of Sol, in Roman myth). Thought 11D: Cross was a verb and so had ANGER before ANGRY ... which doesn't even make sense, now that I think of it. If you cross someone, sure, they might get angry, but "to cross" doesn't mean "to anger." Sigh. Wanted TRASH FIRES before TIRE FIRES (54A: Utter disasters), since those are the metaphorical fires I've seen referred to most on social media this past decade, but TIRE FIRES are also metaphorical disasters, so thumbs up to that answer, as well as SPACE/TIME, immediately above it (51A: Warped fabric, it's said).

Not sure why, but I'm finding "HI ALL!" an adorable (and original) little 5 (53A: Friendly start to a group email). Always nice to find a way to bring some fresh, conversational energy to short fill. And I like the clue on SLURPEE, in the sense that I like the idea of the central answer of the puzzle just making a really disruptive noise. All the artsy intellectual types and SOCIALITEs are sipping their ROSÉ and eating canapés off of TOOTHPICKs and there's probably, I don't know, some light classical playing, maybe an actual string quartet, and then in walks some leather-clad / torn-jeans rebel who plays by their own rules, fresh from the 7-11, and right in the middle of, let's say, Vivaldi's "Spring"— "SLURRRRRRRRRP!" Cue affronted glares from the liter- and glitter- and possibly even Twitterati. End scene. What, doesn't everyone create elaborate if hackneyed movie/TV scenes from the answers in their crosswords? Ah well. I yam what I yam (to quote a famous sailor, and a recent crossword). And with that, the [Early morning caller]s are calling, so it's time to take my coffee to the porch and say hello to them: Good day.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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Constructor: Kameron Austin Collins

Relative difficulty: Medium to Medium-Challenging (pop culture might get ya)

THEME: none

Word of the Day: The BARNES (28A: Philadelphia art museum, with "the") —

The Barnes Foundation is an art collection and educational institution promoting the appreciation of art and horticulture. Originally in Merion, the art collection moved in 2012 to a new building on Benjamin Franklin Parkway in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The arboretum of the Barnes Foundation remains in Merion, where it has been proposed to be maintained under a long-term educational affiliation agreement with Saint Joseph's University.
The Barnes was founded in 1922 by Albert C. Barnes, who made his fortune by co-developing Argyrol, an antiseptic silver compound that was used to combat gonorrhea and inflammations of the eye, ear, nose, and throat. He sold his business, the A.C. Barnes Company, just months before the stock market crash of 1929.
Today, the foundation owns more than 4,000 objects, including over 900 paintings, estimated to be worth about $25 billion. These are primarily works by Impressionist, Post-Impressionist, and Modernist masters, but the collection also includes many other paintings by leading European and American artists, as well as African art, antiquities from China, Egypt, and Greece, and Native American art.
In the 1990s, the Foundation's declining finances led its leaders to various controversial moves, including sending artworks on a world tour and proposing to move the collection to Philadelphia. After numerous court challenges, the new Barnes building opened on Benjamin Franklin Parkway on May 19, 2012. The foundation's current president and executive director, Thomas “Thom” Collins, was appointed on January 7, 2015. (wikipedia)

• • •

I enjoyed a lot of this. Definitely a solving adventure, definitely worthy of its Saturday position (difficulty-wise). It's a very musical puzzle, and a culturally wide-ranging puzzle, with as many answers from pop culture (esp. pop music) as there are from what you might call "high culture" or "fancy shmancy culture" (you know, ballet, theater, art, classical music, ART FILMS, NASCAR, that kind of stuff). Pretty funny / fitting to put METHUSELAH over DEAR OLD DAD—I like little touches like that, even if they are accidental. The only answer that really made me shake my head "no" was (ironically?) START A BLOG. That is an answer that is going to and EAT A SANDWICH as soon as the show is over—a Hail-Mary kind of blank-A-blank phrase. Although ... maybe that's just self-hatred coming through. The more I stare at the answer, the more it looks standalone-worthy. GRABABITE, EATAPEACH, STARTABLOG ... nah, still a little on the weak side for me. Actually wrote in START A BAND at one point, which seems stronger. I just couldn't get "post" to mean anything musical, sadly. Bjork had an album called "Post," as did Paul Kelly, but ... well, back to the puzzle. Oh yeah, one other thing about the puzzle I didn't entirely groove on, and that's the clue on SWIM (1D: Get in the ___), and I'm realizing now that it's because I really really want the phrase to be "get in the SWIMof things," and that is because I (I think) am confusing SWIM with SWING. Are they different expressions, those? Different in meaning, I mean? That answer gave me a lot of trouble right up front, and was a big part of why I was a slow starter today. That, and I forgot the Ariana Grande song and had God not as a WOMAN but as a COMIC, which is Elvis Costello, and not even correct on that front, because the Elvis Costello song is "God's Comic," so God has a comic, rather than is one. But I (Truly) Digress.

I had to leave the NW to get any real traction, and finally ended up finding some in the north, after trying SALADS and YAP, I tried MACARONI (only half rings!) before using ALOHA to get CALAMARI (13A: Some rings on a plate) and then I backed my way back to the NW from there.

After this, the puzzle went from being Challenging to being something more like Easy-Medium for me. I knew The BARNES despite never having been there (saw a documentary about it once, maybe?). I knew the "DC" in question at 28D: Emergency device in DC (BATPHONE) was the comics and not the capital. I am reading a (wonderful) new novel ("Mecca," by Susan Straight) where at least one of the characters meditates on the lyrics to "Route 66," so BARSTOW was very fresh in my head (31D: California city in the Mojave Desert). ONE-ACTER felt too informal for the Wilde play, but it worked (47A: Oscar Wilde's "Salome," e.g.). I guessed the COLOR part of TONE COLOR'cause it seemed ... music-y. No idea who HAYLEY Atwell is*, but I do know THOTH, so I worked it out (38D: God with the head of an ibis). And then I just kind of whooshed through the SE and up to the NE from there. Slight trouble with the SE but Mariah came to the rescue (I may or may not have owned a CD single, or "Ka-dingle" as my friend used to say, of "DREAMLOVER" when I was in grad school) (which means I probably still own it) (25D: "Someone to comfort and hold me," in a #1 Mariah Carey hit). I loved seeing HOT COMB here. There's a wonderful set of short story-comics by Ebony Flowers called HOT COMB, all of them focused on Black women, Black families, and especially Black hair. Can't recommend it enough. And well, what else is there to say? ... HYPERBOLIC DOG SLOBBER! I'm into it.

A few things left to say:

14D: Very, informally (MAD) — I hope at least one person in the blog-reading universe out there remembered that I wanted MAD a few days ago for this very same clue, when the answer was WAY. I actually found myself sitting here trying to Remember My Own Blog so that I could get this answer, LOL.
43D: Supergroup at Woodstock, familiarly (CSNY)— Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, just in case that was unclear.

33A: Blast from the past (A-TEST)— A or N or H work, but only "A" works after the "B" from BARNES, so for once, no trouble with the blank-TEST answer.
17A: Name synonymous with longevity (METHUSELAH)— just admitting that I had a spelling uncertainty here at the second "E," but now that I look at the name, "E" is pretty obviously the right option, in that SELAH can stand alone, and so just looks ... more right than SALAH.
49A: World Wide ___, nickname of an N.B.A. power broker (WES)— I never actually saw this clue. I thought this was a reference to Russell WEStbrook. It's not. It's to a guy named William Wesley, Executive Vice President and Senior Basketball Adviser to the Knicks who gets name-checked in a lot of rap songs. He is a big deal, but it is ... weird not to have any part of his actual name, or employer's name, in the clue, considering he's not exactly Ariana- or Mariah-famous. Cool nickname, though. Knickname!

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

*I've actually seen HAYLEY Atwell in a Marvel movie or two. I can't keep any of them straight, so please don't ask me which ones. Anyway, she plays Agent Peggy Carter in the MCU. I probably saw her in the first "Captain America" movie (2011), if I had to guess.

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Constructor: Greg Slovacek

Relative difficulty: Shrug ... hard, easy, I dunno

THEME:"It's All On the Table" — this puzzle apparently depicts a hypothetical game of Texas Hold 'Em, a variety of poker ... well, here, I'll let the puzzle notes explain:

So there are, I think, four "hands" laid out in the grid (each hand consisting of two cards appearing in the same Across answer), and then there are five communal cards laid out diagonally in the center of the grid. The best hand among the four is the hand in 123-Across, where a King and Jack of hearts can combine with the Queen, Ace and 10 of hearts in the communal cards to make a ROYAL FLUSH (39D: 123-Across's holding that wins this puzzle's game). There's also a cutesy little reference to the two-card "hands" in this variety of card game (42D: Indicator on a clock ... or one of four in this puzzle?) (MINUTE HAND). Then there's a reference to a movie that "featured" Texas Hold 'em (???) (131A: 1998 Matt Damon film featuring this puzzle's game) ("ROUNDERS"). There's probably other stuff crammed in here too that I'm just not seeing right now. Anyway, in case it wasn't clear, each "card" in this "game" is a rebus square where the suit works for the Down answer and the value (e.g. 2, 10, King, etc.) works for the Across.

The "hands":

QUEEN (of clubs) ANNE'S LACE (of spades)
NETWO (of hearts) RKING (of clubs) EVENT
SURFACE (of clubs) TEN (of spades) SION
SMOKING (of hearts) JACK (of hearts) ETS

The communal cards:

TEN (of hearts) DS BAR
SMITTEN (of clubs)
PLACE (of hearts) BO
7 (of diamonds) SEAS
WHITE QUEEN (of hearts)

Word of the Day:"ROUNDERS" (131-Across) —

Rounders is a 1998 American drama film about the underground world of high-stakes poker, directed by John Dahl and starring Matt Damon and Edward Norton. The story follows two friends who need to win at high-stakes poker to quickly pay off a large debt. The term rounder refers to a person traveling around from city to city seeking high-stakes card games.
Rounders opened to mixed reviews and was moderately successful at the box office. Following the poker boom in the early 2000s, the film became a cult hit. (wikipedia)

• • •

Hey, hey, you know what? You know what I'd do if I wanted to play poker? Well, first, I'd ask myself "self, are you feeling OK? You haaaaaaaaate poker and that whole early-'00s TV poker culture gambling casino dudes ugh you ****ing hate it, are you OK?" but once I'd established that I was indeed OK and that I just wanted to play some poker, you know what, you know what I'd do? Well I'll tell you what I would not do, and that is, solve a crossword. This thing may indeed be an architectural marvel of the first order, I have no idea, and I have no idea because the Only reason I solved this puzzle At All was because, well, it's my job. I have to. I have never, ever not wanted to *start* a puzzle. Even when I see a byline that makes me go "well, this probably isn't going to be for me," I also think, "hey, you never know, today might surprise you!" But today, the Puzzle Notes alone would've made me shut my computer and walk away. And sure enough, the solving experience was as much of a tedious ordeal as I expected. Moreso. It took me like half an hour just to describe the puzzle (above) and *incompletely* type out all the card-related stuff. Pfffffff, wow. You'd have to Really like poker to like this one, I'd think. Again, on a technical level, I can't speak to "quality." The "quality" of the construction was entirely irrelevant to me, as the very topic, to say nothing of the process of working through it, was 100% of no interest to me. Non-theme answers appear to be a substantial part of this grid, but I don't remember any. I was too busy trying to figure out, completely against my will, how to play Texas Hold 'em. I thought the three cards in the very middle were the communal ones, but no, it's all five on the diagonal there. Once I figured that out, the rest was pretty easy. Four Across answers containing two "cards" each, those are the four "hands." And SMOKING JACKET wins. Congrats to SMOKING JACKET, a true hero, I hope he goes on to appear on ESPN6 some day.

Mostly this was a slog. That is, it was slow-going because I had to keep checking to see which rebus was working in which direction. It was complicated, but not complex, or particularly difficult. The hardest "card" for me By Far was the 2 of hearts, specifically HIGH-EARTH (!?!?!). Yeeesh. I didn't even know that was ... a thing (12D: Like a geocentric orbit in which the orbital period is more than 24 hours). Based on how long and highly specific the clue is, I'm guessing that is a thing only to the NERDIER among you (38A: More versed in esoterica, maybe). Not sure what else there is to comment on here. I had SLOVAK before SLAVIC, that was fun (80A: From Serbia or Croatia, say). Big geographical blind spot when it comes to central Europe. I remember during the Balkan crisis in the early '90s, my head just refused to take in all the names and places. Just ... wouldn't process it. But to be fair my brain wouldn't do much in the early '90s except wonder why I decided to go Michigan instead of Texas where it was warm and they had actually offered me funding (I eventually got a tuition waiver and stipend at Michigan, too, but not after ... let's just say, some heavy mental and emotional dues). So I remember CNN's Lynne Russell saying "Bosnia-Herzegovina" a lot, and not much else. Can you feel me not wanting to write about the actual puzzle today? Can you? DOEST thou feel it?! The kindest thing I can say today is that it seems like it took a lot of thought and work to make this. And I am simply not the audience this puzzle is looking for. I hope this puzzle finds its fans. Good day.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

P.S. if you're wondering what the hell you're supposed to enter in the "card" squares in order to preserve your streak on the app or whatever, it looks like the first word of the card value should work. When I hit "reveal all" in my software, that's what showed up (see posted grid). There's also this:

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Constructor: Phoebe Gordon

Relative difficulty: Medium (possibly on the tougher side of Monday, solely because of the "?" theme clues) (if your time was slower than usual, that's probably because the grid is oversized (16x15))

THEME: [preposition] [plural noun] AND [other plural noun] — idiomatic phrases that follow precisely that grammatical pattern, clued both literally and wackily ("?"-style), as if they related to a field implied by the plural nouns:

Theme answers:

AT SIXES AND SEVENS (17A: In a state of confusion, as in math class?)
BY LEAPS AND BOUNDS (40A: Very rapidly, as in a ballet studio?)
ON PINS AND NEEDLES (63A: In suspense, as in a tailor shop?)

Word of the Day:"OZZIE and Harriet" (67A: Harriet's hubby on old TV) —

The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet is an American television sitcom that aired on ABC from October 3, 1952 to April 23, 1966, and starred the real-life Nelson family. After a long run on radio, the show was brought to television, where it continued its success, initially running simultaneously on radio and TV. In terms of seasons, it was the longest running live-action sitcom in US television history until It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia surpassed it on December 1, 2021 (though it still retains the record in terms of total episodes produced: 435). The series starred the entertainment duo of Ozzie Nelson and his wife, singer Harriet Nelson, and their sons, David and Ricky. Don DeFore had a recurring role as the Nelsons' neighbor "Thorny". (wikipedia)

• • •

Full disclosure: this is the debut puzzle from the daughter of someone I know and like—longtime constructor and editor Peter Gordon. I would not have discovered this before solving, but I accidentally looked at Twitter, and Peter was, understandably, bragging about it, which is adorable. Anyway, even if I'd hated this thing, I wouldn't have said so, or wouldn't have put it in such harsh terms. Luckily, I didn't hate it at all. It's a perfectly delightful little Monday ... although "little" is literally incorrect, in that the grid is actually an oversized 16x15! I mean "little" only in the sense that the theme is not particularly dense or complicated—fairly normal for a Monday puzzle. But it does have this sort of ... extra quality, where it's got both literal *and* wacky clues to it, and it's the wackiness that both adds to and complicates things a bit. "?" clues will tend to throw you into figurative thinking (or overthinking) mode, and that happened to me today, a little bit, even though the literal, normal clue is Right There (in the first, precomma portion of the clue). The postcomma part involves both reading more and (inevitably) thinking more, and so thematically this felt somewhat tougher than a typical Monday. More Tuesdayish. But because the literal clue is right there, we aren't talking about too much added difficulty. The postcomma part of the clue appears to exist largely to give a stronger impression of thematic consistency than the puzzle would have without it. "Please imagine this wacky non-literal context implied by the words in the answer" is a nice way to add to the otherwise merely grammatical / syntactical parallels among the theme answers. It's a great find, this set of three themers—all following precisely the same phrasing pattern, all 16 letters long. The rest of the grid is right over the plate. Nothing showy, nothing horrific. Lots of crosswordese, but the type that you can abide just fine, not the type to make you wince and roll your eyes and wonder what the hell. Plus you get (step one: take drink from) CUP HOLDER and (step two, pick up drink, *sip*, hear something funny, and ...) SPITTAKES in the bargain. Oh, and "LADY BIRD" and STARGAZE to boot. A lovely quartet of long Downs. It's a neat and polished Monday. Kind of textbook (in the best sense of the word). A promising debut.

Hmm, what else? Well, I would like to quash the crooked letter fetish, for sure (two sets of double-Zs!), but since nothing at all is sacrificed in the pursuit of said letters, I cannot be justifiably mad. Get all your Js and Zs and Qs on, by all means, as long as doing so does not lead to my also seeing adjacent Garbage. Hard to call anything in the vicinity of RAZZ or OZZIE"Garbage." The only answer I really hate in this puzzle is NHLER (49A: Jet or Shark, in sports lingo). See also NLER, ALER, NBAER and ... is MLBER a thing? Oof, I hope not. MLSER? WNBAER? I mean, where does it end? It's possible that NHLER is the most common of all these forced initial-based -ER terms. I dunno. I just know they all look and feel kinda awful. But again, it's one word, whatever, no biggie. I had no trouble with anything in the grid, though I weirdly blanked at S---- for 48D: Part of an act (SCENE). I say "weirdly" because I teach plays with acts and SCENEs on a regular basis. I think my brain just wanted something like SKIT (too short) or SKETCH (too long). Oh, and I not surprisingly took longer on the "?" clue for LIDS than on any of the other clues (69A: Jar heads?). I think I like the wordplay-ness better if you make "Jarhead" one word, as you would when referring to a marine. I mean, if that's the term you're punning on (and it is) why not just put them together. The "?" tells me that you are ****ing around, so it's fine. OK, that's enough for today. Hope this was a nice cool-down from yesterday's tire fire / barn burner (depending on your perspective). See you Tuesday. And congrats, Phoebe.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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Constructor: Andy Kravis

Relative difficulty: Easy

THEME: [body part] THE [noun] — familiar phrases that follow this pattern, with the body part serving as a verb:

Theme answers:

FOOT THE BILL (18A: Pay for something expensive)
FACE THE MUSIC (26A: Confront unpleasant consequences)
SHOULDER THE BLAME (40A: Take responsibility for a misdeed)
BACK THE FIELD (49A: Bet on every competitor but one)
TOES THE LINE (62A: Conforms to expectations)

Word of the Day: Stephen Vincent BENÉT (56D: Writer Stephen Vincent ___) —

Stephen Vincent Benét /bɪˈneɪ/ (July 22, 1898 – March 13, 1943) was an American poet, short story writer, and novelist. He is best known for his book-length narrative poem of the American Civil War, John Brown's Body (1928), for which he received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, and for the short stories "The Devil and Daniel Webster" (1936) and "By the Waters of Babylon" (1937). In 2009, The Library of America selected his story "The King of the Cats" (1929) for inclusion in its two-century retrospective of American Fantastic Tales edited by Peter Straub.

• • •

It's not uncommon for me to not care for a theme but find much to love in the fill. Today, world upside-down. I really like this theme a lot. Like yesterday's, there's an elegant simplicity—it took a while for the gimmick to fully sink in, but somewhere around SHOULDER it did, and then even though I had it, I was still left curious what body parts were left to make fitting phrases with. There's a bit of a cheat there at the end with the pluralization of TOES (yes, you do have multiple toes, but you also have multiple feet, and shoulders (probably) and those appear here in the singular). But that particular pluralization is one of those "brain notices, heart doesn't care" moments you experience when your good will toward a puzzle is too strong to allow nits to undermine it. But then there's the fill, which ... wasn't so much horrible as it was surprising (to me) in its old-fashionedness, its old-schoolness, its "play the OLDIES" vibe. So many things that I have only (and often) seen in crosswords, things I wouldn't even know if crosswords didn't exist, like where OPORTO is and who Stephen Vincent BENÉT is. These proper nouns will give long-time solvers a leg up today and, conversely, possibly make things a little slower going for people who've only been solving a few years. But that's just the tip of the repeater iceberg. IONE and ENLAI are hanging out together in a very small back booth there in the NW, both of them looking at her ACER laptop, for some reason. Cat videos, probably. Meanwhile, in a nearby booth, ALBEE and AHAB and BIL KEANE are soberly discussing the EEC (gonna give BIL a pass today since he appears in full-name form, though—that takes him out of the routine category) (uh oh, just noticed that BIL crosses BILL. Judges? ... no foul! Phew, that was close). There's a TSAR and Cousin ITT and two (?) different hesitation sounds (UMM, ERS), the hairy pair of ESAU and OSO studying for their LSATs, there's "The APIAN TABU," which is a fantasy fantasy novel I just made up, and well, finally the H- I mean N- I mean A-TESTS take us out with a crosswordesey bang. The gang is all here. Except ENO and ONO. Total no-shows. The point is, this one felt deliberately dialed back (in time). I solved puzzles back then (in time), so all this fill feels perfectly ordinary. Just 1993 ordinary, is all.

[Many OLDIES are great—'60s girl groups, for instance!]

But enough about the short fill, what about the long fill. It's good. Varied, colorful. I got SAUERKRAUT off the SAUE- without even looking at the clue, so that was fun (29D: Ingredient in a Reuben). I have never seen a DOG HOTEL but I believe that they exist. I wanted DOGSPA at first (which is also a thing that somehow exists), but it wouldn't fit. No FLEAS in a DOG HOTEL, I bet. That would be a major ISSUE. I've seen RAGEQUITS before (37D: Angrily stops playing a game, in modern parlance)—it's possible that I learned it from crosswords years and years ago—and I like it, since, well, let's just say, "rage-quitting: it's just just for video games anymore!" [cue photo of Any Number of people abandoning Sunday's puzzle]. And then there's AIR BUBBLES, which are literally bubbly. This quartet definitely alleviated some of the short-fill malaise.

I reacted so negatively to the "dad joke" that my eyes ran away from it holding only the phrase "four seconds" and then used crosses to make something vaguely related to that phrase (CLOCK) (my fingers are now refusing to type out the full clue, sorry). Interesting choice to clue KUBLAI that way (23A: ___ Khan, Yuan Dynasty founder) instead of via Coleridge, though Coleridge is almost certainly the reason the vast majority of solvers know who KUBLAI Khan is.

According to Coleridge's preface to Kubla Khan, the poem was composed one night after he experienced an opium-influenced dream after reading a work describing Shangdu, the summer capital of the Mongol-led Yuan dynasty of China founded by Kublai Khan (Emperor Shizu of Yuan). (wikipedia)

Haven't read Coleridge for a while so I'm gonna have Ian McMillan read him to me now while I format this post. Take care, everyone.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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Constructor: Josh Kindler

Relative difficulty: Mediumish, though felt like slow going for me

THEME: pock the cah at hahvad yahd or whatever— wacky "Boston" accent versions of familiar phrases:

Theme answers:

DOC ("dark") COMEDY (17A: Jokes at Massachusetts General Hospital?)
MISSING THE MOCK ("mark") (28A: Late to a Harvard Lampoon meeting?)
PICK A COD ("card"), ANY COD (44A: Invitation at Beantown fish markets?)
LOAN SHOCK ("shark") (58A: Unexpectedly high interest rate for a borrower from a Boston bank?)

Word of the Day: STAFFA (24D: Scottish island home to Fingal's cave) —

Staffa (Scottish Gaelic: Stafa, pronounced [ˈs̪t̪afa], from the Old Norse for stave or pillar island) is an island of the Inner Hebrides in Argyll and Bute, Scotland. The Vikings gave it this name as its columnar basalt reminded them of their houses, which were built from vertically placed tree-logs.
Staffa lies about 10 kilometres (6 miles) west of the Isle of Mull; its area is 33 hectares (82 acres) and the highest point is 42 metres (138 feet) above sea level.
The island came to prominence in the late 18th century after a visit by Sir Joseph Banks. He and his fellow-travellers extolled the natural beauty of the basalt columns in general and of the island's main sea cavern, which Banks renamed 'Fingal's Cave'. Their visit was followed by those of many other prominent personalities throughout the next two centuries, including Queen Victoria and Felix Mendelssohn. The latter's Hebrides Overture brought further fame to the island, which was by then uninhabited. It is now in the care of the National Trust for Scotland. (wikipedia)

• • •

Ah, the Boston accent theme. I guess they gotta bring this one back every five or ten years or however often, since someone somewhere won't have seen a version yet. Pronunciation themes are always dicey because the way people pronounce and even hear words varies so widely from region to region. Nothing about this set of wacky answers feels particularly "Boston" to me. This may be why I had no idea what the theme was supposed to be until well over 1/3 of the way into the puzzle. I didn't even know what DOC COMEDY was supposed to be doing. Both "doc" and "comedy" are related to movies ... I really thought there was supposed to be a "dot com" pun going on there, but the "C" (from TECH) would not budge, so ... DOC COMEDY? OK. Took me until the very end of MISSING THE MOCK to come up with the basic premise (wouldn't you be missing the "mockery," really? I also don't think of "late to" and "MISSING" as being synonymous, but that's another story). Anyway, my reaction is mainly "seen it" and "these don't really sound Boston-y at all." A simple -ARK to -OCK change doesn't give me anything, or only gives me a hint of what would be going on in the mouth of a (hypothetical) Bostonian. The vowel still doesn't sound right. The accent isn't that simple. Anyway, I'm lukewarm on this whole concept, though I do like the "if you're gonna do chaos, do chaos" energy of PICK A COD, ANY COD. When in doubt, throw fish around.

I studied abroad in Scotland and have been there a couple times since and yet I have never heard of STAFFA. My wife is from New Zealand, which has a fern as its national symbol, and yet I have never heard of a FERNERY. These two facts made the STAFFA / FERNERY crossing ... interesting. Luckily, I was able to infer(n) FERNERY because, well, "ferns" are plants and plants are what you'd find at a "botanical garden," tada. Still, kind of a wicked cross for any day, let alone a Wednesday. I got bad vibes off the grid right away when it opened with ZITI / ZOD. Not that I mind that particular cross—it's great. But ... my thought was "oh, no, someone's gonna get enamored of crooked letters and the Scrabble-f***ing is gonna get unbearable." And, well, no Qs or Js, so Scrabble-f***ing wasn't really the problem, but the fill was a bit UGH throughout. ONKP is a real warning sign (very old skool). IPOS IPSO, MORRIE NONCOM, ABES OCHRE, UAE YAYS (plural?) ... really that whole SE corner, just dripping with gunky fill. No idea why you go with LEW / WILE over, say, LET / TILE. Is that "W" so important to you?? You really narrow your cluing options with the "W." You also get options that take you way way out of common speech. A single WILE? One of like two or three famous LEWs that ever existed (or, in the case of LEW Archer, "existed")? LET / TILE may seem "more boring" but it's so much cleaner and allows for so many many many more kinds of clues: straightforward, funny, hard, easy, whatever. LEW / WILE just backs you into an ugly corner. As I say, I don't get it.

FERNERY

More things:

29D: 1990 #1 rap hit that ends "too cold, too cold" ("ICE, ICE, BABY")— the one answer in the puzzle (besides the double COD one) that I can really get behind. A lovable low point in rap history. Curious to see Vanilla Ice and LIL KIM in the same grid, but apparently they've shared the stage before: at a Gathering of the Juggalos in 2010 (still waiting to see JUGGALO(S) in my grid, #NYTXW editors, come on!)

4D: Facing ruin, say (IN CRISIS)— this answer and "NICE SHOT!" give the grid some pep as well. The short stuff kinda LIMPS today, but the longer stuff does alright.
53A: Waves, perhaps (SAYS "HI") — I had LAPSAT ... because waves ... lap at ... the shore?
63A: ___ O's (breakfast cereal) (OREO)— I like how this answer sits above TATS. Only the hardest of hardcore crossword fans ... or OREO fans, I guess ... would get OREO TATS. Gonna search the internet for OREO TATS now, pray for my eyes ... oh these aren't so bad. Some of them appear to be pet memorial tattoos :(

Now I want a little B&W furball to call OREO! All I've got are these weird needy shedding tabbies ... oh who am I kidding I love them ... and they need to be fed, so good day!

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Constructor: Anne Marie Crinnion and Eric Bornstein

Relative difficulty: Very Easy

THEME: DROP DOWN MENU (46A: Options at the top of a computer window ... as seen three times in this puzzle?) — three familiar answers "drop down" for their last four letters, and those letters spell out different types of "menu" (FILE, EDIT, VIEW) that live at the top of your computer screen, in your operating system or web browser or whatever, see:

Theme answers:

HIGH PROFILE (20A: Attracting much publicity)
SCHOLARLY REVIEW (27A: Commentary on a scientific article)
STORE CREDIT (56A: Alternative to a refund, often)

Word of the Day: OCELOTS (37A: Cats with the unique ability to turn their ankle joints around) —

The ocelot (Leopardus pardalis) is a medium-sized spotted wild cat that reaches 40–50 cm (15.7–19.7 in) at the shoulders and weighs between 8 and 15.5 kg (17.6 and 34.2 lb). It was first described by Carl Linnaeus in 1758. Two subspecies are recognized. It is native to the southwestern United States, Mexico, Central and South America, and to the Caribbeanislands of Trinidad and Margarita. It prefers areas close to water sources with dense vegetation cover and high prey availability.
Typically active during twilight and at night, the ocelot tends to be solitary and territorial. It is efficient at climbing, leaping and swimming. It preys on small terrestrial mammals, such as armadillos, opossums, and lagomorphs. Both sexes become sexually mature at around two years of age and can breed throughout the year; peak mating season varies geographically. After a gestation period of two to three months the female gives birth to a litter of one to three kittens. They stay with their mother for up to two years, after which they leave to establish their own home ranges.
The ocelot is listed as Least Concern on the IUCN Red List, and is threatened by habitat destruction, hunting, and traffic accidents. Populations are decreasing in many parts of its range. The association of the ocelot with humans dates back to the Aztec and Incancivilizations; it has occasionally been kept as a pet. (wikipedia)

• • •

It's got the structural weirdness of a Thursday, but the difficulty level of a Tuesday. That is the main thing I have to say about this puzzle. It felt like "Thursday for beginners." The fill is basic, straightforward, almost totally devoid of popular culture or proper nouns of any kind—feels like there's more animals than people in this grid (not necessarily a bad thing). There is absolutely nothing to trip you up, and there's really nothing in the way of your discovering the gimmick, either. I mean, your answer runs out of room, and there's really only one way for it to go. The unclued Down segments are basically neon arrows confirming that "The Rest Of Your Across Answers Go Here." The placement of the revealer is super-weird (position 3 out of 4?). It's neither at the top, where an actual DROP DOWN MENU lives, nor at the bottom, where a typical revealer lives. But for the purposes of the particular way this theme was executed, it just *fits* best where it is. That's fine. This is a perfectly decent theme idea, but I'd've liked it much better on a Wednesday. I need something much thornier and more surprising, more *involved*, on a Thursday. The toughest part of the puzzle for me was the SW, where VETOPOWER dropped in easily, but neither PARK IT nor DRYING wanted to drop, and so that corner took some fussing around with before I could get it going. I think DART GUN came to the rescue (67A: Nerf product that might be used to bother a sibling). So it was the toughest corner, but could only be credibly called "tough" if it were, say, Tuesday. Just no bite to this one today.

My main revelations in solving this were weird and personally idiosyncratic. Like, apparently I can't spell CHISEL (18D: Icebreaker?). I wanted the word, I had the first few letters, but somehow ... CHISLE? CHISTLE? Honestly, when I got the -EL I thought "well that's obvious," but, well, nothing else that sounds that way ends that way in English, really, so ... it's weird. BRISTLE ... that's got more "S" sound in it. Usually that "Z" sound means "Z"s, as in FIZZLE. So CHISEL just looks weird to me, man. Also I thought ERE was a preposition. And it is. But it's also a conjunction. Schoolhouse Rock did not tell me about ERE. The lyrics to "Conjunction Junction" aren't "And, But, and ERE / Get you pretty far." I feel betrayed. Apparently ERE (like "Before") can be both preposition and conjunction. "Before" is a preposition when it's used to mean "in advance of a specific time" (e.g. "before breakfast") or "in front of something / someone," and a conjunction if it means "in advance of the time when" (e.g. "before they got married) or "in preference to." Prepositions take objects, conjunctions connect clauses or phrases. And OCELOTS have freaky feet, apparently.

INES and GREENE could've been clued as people's names but ... weren't. The clue on GREENE was so weird that I refused to write in GREENE even though it was the only answer that I wanted and seemed to make sense. The quotation marks around "colorful" in the clue tell you "not an actual color, maybe sounds like a color?" Famous people have the last name GREENE, but we get weird vague county trivia. I don't get it, but ... it's different, I'll give it that. Maybe the idea is that alongside GARR, GREENE needed to be something other than a specific person's name, for fear of name overkill. But two is not overkill. They're not even intersecting, and the crosses are simple. Oh, there's LON on the other side of GREENE, didn't see him tucked down there. For this puzzle, that's a veritable name avalanche. OK, counties it is. Don't think I've seen CTO before. Not fond of the insane proliferation of business abbrs. along the lines of CEO (CFO, COO, CIO). I'm not even sure how the CTO's job is different from the CIO's. Also, I should stress, I don't really care (here's the answer if this is somehow of interest to you). The intersecting CHI and CHI (from CHISEL) directly on top of the intersecting HIGH (from HIGH PROFILE) and HIGH (from THIGH) is ... well, a lot of repeated and overlapping letter strings. Wow, very same section, you also get OOH on OOH (from POOH). MIC on MIC as well! (though neither of those MICs is standalone, so you're not apt to notice). Repeated 3 and 4-letter strings are fine when they aren't near each other. When they're on top of each other, that gets noticeable. And when several sets of repeated letter strings are absolutely piled on top of each other in one little section, it's possible you should polish that section a little more. Looking forward to more of a challenge tomorrow. See you then.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Constructor: David Steinberg

Relative difficulty: Challenging (Mediumish overall, but two tiny sections stopped me cold for longish periods of time)

THEME: none

Word of the Day: CARAWAY (23D: Relative of fennel) —

1: a biennial usually white-flowered aromatic Old World herb (Carum carvi) of the carrot family
2: the pungent fruit of the caraway used in seasoning and medicine
— called also caraway seed (merriam-webster.com)

• • •

Never really found my grip with this one. Something about the cluing wavelength—mainly that I was nowhere near it, at any time. Occasionally this felt like a good Friday, but that whooshing of wonderful answers, that flow, that pop pop of good surprises—that never came today. Felt like I was working for everything, and without much "aha" payoff. WHOOPEE CUSHION is kinda funny, but even there, the awkward syntax of the "?" clue made it feel a bit forced. Also, I spelled WHOOPIE like that, so that's no good. I kept waiting for something to really kickstart the party, but I kept getting just OK stuff like LEMON SAUCE and WORK OF ART and CARAWAY and BRAIN GAME—you can't fault any of those things, but there's no standout there. Very much enjoyed seeing WHITNEY HOUSTON, but that may very well be because I got that answer so much easier than most other things in this puzzle. But the real truth is I don't remember much of the top 2/3 of this puzzle. I hacked away at it, made progress, plowed through ... not terribly remarkable. But the bottom was a complete disaster, and the worst kind of disaster, which is to say that the cluing on short fill made it impossible (for me) to see, and I came to total standstills, twice (this normally doesn't happen even once on a Friday).

The less significant standstill was in the SW, where AHOY THERE was a promising gateway to the far corner, but then ... oof. HAS A ___ (40D: Flips). Really seemed like it should be HAS A COW. The puzzle was so devoid of good colloquialisms that I thought, "ah, here we go." So ... HAS A COW. You'd think the short fill in that corner would've helped me fix that error quickly, but no. I have no idea where saffron comes from, really, and instead of the "O" from COW seeming wrong, the "R" from AHOY THERE seemed wrong, because OMAN seemed ... a plausible saffron producer (it's kinda near IRAN, is my defense) (56A: World's leading saffron producer). TEXT had an inscrutable "?" clue on it (59A: Comment from one who's all thumbs?). TAX clue was super ambiguous (53D: Line on a receipt). The FETA I've eaten doesn't usually come in "slices" (52A: Slice in a salad, maybe). Wanted CUKE there. The only answer I felt pretty sure of down there was ANT, and it wasn't helping. It was so bad that I sincerely doubted AHOY THERE, which does seem awfully ... informal. Would you really have to add "THERE"? I dunno. It was all gummed up. But eventually I pulled COW and thought and thought and then tried FIT and voilà, problem solved.

The next dead stop, though, was much longer, and caused by something much tinier (ultimately). And again, the problem is due entirely to the clue trying Very hard to be a pain in the ass. So, this is what I was looking at:

In retrospect, of course, I'm thinking "well, just write in TOY, dummy" (50D: Barbie, e.g.). But here's the problem. I actually wasn't looking at this version of the grid most of the time. What I was looking at was just the one blank, above the "O." The other blank I had confidently filled with a "C" because ACES is the only correct answer for 58A: Pros. I really don't understand trying to engineer your puzzle for difficulty in this way. You've already put in the completely absurd ORE clue right next door (one that, thank god, I knew from having solved crosswords for decades) (51D: Unit of the Swedish krona). It's like the puzzle *wants* this specific, tiny area to be a pain to get through. But the clue on AYES, I resent, mostly because it so nakedly wants you to think ACES. It's infinitely more appropriate for ACES. I don't know what my reaction was supposed to be when I found out it was AYES. "That's clever"? My reaction was "I can't believe I wasted minutes of my life for so little. I will admit that I overthought the Barbie clue, but with the kind of cluing this puzzle was throwing at you, you can't really be blamed for overthinking. My mind was racing around for other kinds of "Barbies," but after Australian barbecues, I was out of ideas. And I didn't actually see the Barbie clue until *after* the "C" was (I thought) safely nestled in place at the end, inside of ACES. But when things didn't work, I started questioning everything. I was never fully sure of "LISTEN TO ME!" I started doubting HOMES (which has its own really awkward / non-intuitive clue) (45D: Divisions of subdivisions). And POPES, ugh, once I got it, I didn't doubt it, but do they really "love" Latin? (42D: Latin lovers, officially speaking?). "Officially speaking" is doing a lot of weird and unclear work there. Eventually I patiently ran the alphabet for the Barbie clue and saw TOY and then saw AYES and then shook my head very slowly and disappointedly. If the puzzle had given me delight in the longer answers, I would resent this fussiness and over-striving in the short-fill cluing a little less (side note: there are *Eight* (8) question-mark ("?") clues in this one, which is ... a lot). But as it is, I spent almost all my time on these little disasters, and so frustration and annoyance are all I'm really left with in the end.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Constructor: John Lieb

Relative difficulty: Easy

THEME: none

Word of the Day: WILEY POST (31A: First person to fly solo around the world (1933)) —

Wiley Hardeman Post (November 22, 1898 – August 15, 1935) was a famed American aviator during the interwar period and the first pilot to fly solo around the world. Also known for his work in high-altitude flying, Post helped develop one of the first pressure suits and discovered the jet stream. On August 15, 1935, Post and American humorist Will Rogers were killed when Post's aircraft crashed on takeoff from a lagoon near Point Barrow in the Territory of Alaska.
Post's Lockheed Vega aircraft, the Winnie Mae, was on display at the National Air and Space Museum's Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center from 2003 to 2011. It is now featured in the "Time and Navigation" gallery on the second floor of the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. (wikipedia)

• • •

Your sense of difficulty will likely depend heavily on your familiarity with the (considerable amount of) names in today's puzzle, but for me, this was a cinch. Far easier than yesterday's. Much easier (and more pleasurable) for me to work around a name I don't know (or in the case of WILEY POST, only vaguely know) than to have to wonder what a lot of trying-too-hard clues are doing with their awkward wording and trickery. I do think this one is mayyyyybe a little heavy on the names, though that may simply be because names are in such marquee positions (e.g. 1-Across, 2/5 of that center stack). In fact, it's really the stack of COTILLARD and WILEY POST, not far from EDWARD I and PANETTA, that creates the illusion of overall name-iness. I don't think the puzzle actually has any more names than your average puzzle. But today's are long names, in crucial positions, so they might've factored heavily in whether you sailed through the puzzle (like me) or didn't. I once wrote an article on "Braveheart," so EDWARD I was a gimme at 1A: "Braveheart" villain, and as so often happens, a 1-Across gimme heralded an easy puzzle.

I did that NW corner about as fast as I've done any themeless corner ever. ILE RHINO NARWHAL and the whole thing just fell. Was not confident that the momentum would continue, given how utterly cut off that section is from the rest of the grid, but I just guessed the SCIENCE part of DATA SCIENCE, and then, as with EDWARD I, I just *knew* COTILLARD, and SOLFEGE, and I was off and (really) running. WILEY POST was by far the biggest stumbling block for me, but even there, once I got some crosses, despite not really knowing who he was, his name drifted into consciousness, and I never felt anywhere close to legitimately stuck.

Despite the fact that DATA SCIENCE crossing LOGIC GATE tried very hard to put me to sleep, I thought most of this was [CHEF'S KISS]! Front-page article about New York POT FARMs in my paper yesterday, so [Joint venture?] was totally transparent to me. I only know the phrase CABS IT from doing the NYTXW. Seems a very NYC thing. A very last-century NYC thing. But one of the perks of doing this damn puzzle over decades is you pick up a lot of regionalisms and slang and place names and what not, which you then end up encountering again solely in crosswords, which creates a kind of crossword-produced, imaginary, composite NYC, made up of all the NYCs that ever were since about the '20s. I wonder what would happen if I tried to draw an NYC map if I only knew about NYC from crosswords. Let's see, there's the BQE and MOMA and ... NEDICK'S on every corner, maybe? Anyway ... CABS IT! And if someone asks you to look after their cab while they're out of town, well then you CAB SIT. Sounds made up, yes, but so does NEDICK'S, so ... CAB SIT. "I was cabsitting outside the Nedick's at 88th and Lex when this pug* named Roscoe ..."— and all of a sudden you've got yourself a Damon Runyon story!

This puzzle could've used a little more oomph in the cluing, if only because it feels at times like a trivia test. There are a few "?" clues (a few is the appropriate number, btw), and they're solid, but most of what you get today in the clue department is exceedingly straightforward. I like that the "monodon monoceros" (NARWHAL) is crossing the RHINO(ceros). Horny-faced creatures of the world, unite! The weirdest moment of the solve for me was a malapop—this is a term for when you want an answer that ends up being wrong ... but then that wrong answer ends up being *right* elsewhere in the grid! I think Andrea Carla Michaels coined that term a long time ago. Sounds like a niche term, but it happens an Awful lot. Today, I considered "AW DANG!" at 4D: "Oh, darn!" ("AW RATS!"), and that "G" made me think DREG for 26A: Bottom of the barrel (LEES). Fast forward to—11D: Remnant (DREG). DREG is such a weird word to see in the singular that this particular malapop feels deeply strange. But there it is! Overall, I enjoyed this suitably Saturday-level solving experience, even if the trivia (right in my wheelhouse) failed to really put me through the WRINGER (3D: Metaphor for a difficult ordeal) (which I sometimes quite enjoy on a Saturday). See you tomorrow.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

*"pug" is old-timey slang for "pugilist" or "boxer," but if you want it to be a dog, I think the story still works.

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Constructor: Jessie Trudeau and Ross Trudeau

Relative difficulty: Easy

THEME:"Going Somewhere?" — various famous roads go Down, where they intersect (at the "E") with answers that end in the letter string "ROME"; the revealer is ALL ROADS LEAD TO ROME (115A: Aphorism that's visually depicted five times in this grid):

Theme answers:

MASS PIKE (7D: Easternmost leg of I-90, familiarly) / BICHROME (51A: Two-colored)
PENNY LANE (24D: Where all the people that come and go stop and say "hello," in a 1967 hit) / AERODROME (68A: English landing spot)
RODEO DRIVE (37D: Noted shopping mecca) / ETHAN FROME (88A: Edith Wharton's "ruin of a man")
EVERGREEN TERRACE (13D: Home of the Simpson and Flanders households) / IMPOSTER SYNDROME (98A: Habitual fear of being exposed as a fraud)
PENNSYLVANIA AVENUE (20D: One side of D.C.'s Federal Triangle) / ALL ROADS LEAD TO ROME

Word of the Day: Andrea BOCELLI (94D: Of whom Celine Dion said "If God would have a singing voice, he must sound a lot like ...") —

Andrea Bocelli OMRI OMDSM (Italian: [anˈdreːa boˈtʃɛlli]; born 22 September 1958) is an Italian operatic tenor and multi-instrumentalist. He was born visually impaired, and was born with congenital glaucoma, and at the age of 12, Bocelli became completely blind, following a brain hemorrhage resulting from a football accident. After performing evenings in piano bars and competing in local singing contests, Bocelli signed his first recording contract with the Sugar Music label. He rose to fame in 1994, winning the 44th Sanremo Music Festival performing "Il mare calmo della sera".
Since 1994, Bocelli has recorded 15 solo studio albums of both pop and classical music, three greatest hits albums, and nine complete operas, selling over 75 million records worldwide.^[4] He has had success as a crossover performer, bringing classical music to the top of international pop charts. His album, Romanza, is one of the best-selling albums of all time, while Sacred Arias is the biggest selling classical album by any solo artist in history. My Christmas was the best-selling holiday album of 2009 and one of the best-selling holiday albums in the United States. The 2019 album Sì debuted at number one on the UK Albums Chart and US Billboard 200, becoming Bocelli's first number-one album in both countries. His song "Con te partirò", included on his second album Bocelli, is one of the best-selling singles of all time. The track was licensed to feature in a series of television commercials for TIM in the late 1990s, which eventually became very popular in Italy. (wikipedia)

• • •

Dang, it even says "CARD"
right there in the comic! Gah!

The first thing a proofreader or editor ought to have caught is that the "aphorism" in question is not "depicted five times in this grid"; it's depicted once. ALL ROADS LEAD TO ROME ... that's the theme. That describes all the themers taken as a group. There are five examples of roads leading to ROME, but ALL ROADS are not depicted "five times," as the clue claims. I don't care that it's a minor point—it's in the most major part of the puzzle, the revealer clue, so the phrasing ought to be Precise. [Aphorism represented visually by five answers in this puzzle], something like that; that would be accurate. The five long Downs together represent the aphorism. Once. Not separately five times. Yes, NERD, I know. Whatever, the phrasing on the revealer clue is nails + chalkboard to me. Aside from that hitch, the theme is interesting. Well, the grid is interesting, for sure—mirror symmetry along the NW to SE axis. The intersecting themers end up forming a kind of nesting arrowhead pattern, with all long answers meeting at their very tips (the "E" in "ROME" in each case). Structurally innovative. I was not a fan of the weird long non-themers just hanging on there non-thematically, but I guess that's the price you pay for this particular architectural gambit. WORSHIPPER with two "P"s is weird to me because I'm not British and the clue is not tagged as British. RORSCHACH CARDS was extremely weird to me because after TESTS and BLOTS I was completely out of ideas. I literally teach a comic with a protagonist named RORSCHACH who literally takes a RORSCHACH Test (in Book VI, administered by Dr. Malcolm Long, whose mind RORSCHACH just wrecks), and yet CARDS was absolutely brutal for me, even with the "C" in place. If it hadn't been for YODELS, I think that CARDS section would've destroyed me. I had TACK for FORK, largely because it's a way better answer for that clue (74A: Stick with it!). Had ORS instead of IFS (are ORS a thing???) (87A: Some coding statements). Just a disaster in there. Anyway, the cards are real things, just ... not the first thing that comes to mind when you see RORSCHACH (as Google here can tell you):

The British call airports "airports," so I had no idea what 68A: English landing spot was going for. I thought ... maybe the English landed ... on Plymouth Rock? I dunno. AERODROME is an odd one, as is BICHROME. Just not words I ever see or use or really ... know. See also LEESHORES (?) (80D: Downwind locales for ships). But as for AERODROME and BICHROME: you do what you gotta do to make your theme work, I guess. Outside the themers, the fill is pretty ordinary. The runaway highlight of the day for me was EVERGREEN TERRACE! That's gonna be a gimme or a lotta work, depending on your level of "Simpsons" fandom (mine: high). I liked that answer, and I thought the revealer itself was cute.

A few more things:

94D: Of whom Celine Dion said "If God would have a singing voice, he must sound a lot like ..." (BOCELLI) — I knew this pretty quickly but ... could not decide if it was two "C"s one "L" or two "L"s one "C." As for who has the voice of God ... I'm gonna stick with Marianne Faithfull's assessment on this one:

I have to tell you, the voice of God, if you really want to know, is Aretha Franklin.

43A: One looking for missing persons (TRACER)— awkward way to clue this, but I guess it allows you to avoid the more probably bullet clue, so OK
124A: Apply (to) (REFER) — why doesn't this make sense to me? I'm sure there's an equivalency somewhere in the dictionary, but I can't really make this work in everyday speech.
1D: Rosebud ravager (APHID) — soooo hard for me. I was like "uh ... TIME? SNOW? FIRE? I haven't seen the movie in a long time!"

98A: Habitual fear of being exposed as a fraud (IMPOSTER SYNDROME) — still haunted by IMPOSTOR ... which is how the NYTXW told me it was spelled two months ago.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Constructor: Michael T. Buerke

Relative difficulty: Normal Monday

THEME: PR- [vowel sound]— vowel (sound) progression where theme answers more through the cycled "pray pree pry pro prue"

Theme answers:

BIRDS OF PREY (17A: Eagles, falcons, hawks, etc.)
GRAND PRIX (24A: Major Formula 1 race)
"I DIDN'T MEAN TO PRY" (39A: "Sorry for being so nosy!")
TENNIS PRO (49A: Instructor with a racket)
ANNIE PROULX (61A: Pulitzer Prize-winning author of "The Shipping News" and "Brokeback Mountain")

Word of the Day: Isle ROYALE (58A: Isle ___, national park in Lake Superior) —

Isle Royale National Park is an American national park consisting of Isle Royaleand more than 400 small adjacent islands, as well as the surrounding waters of Lake Superior, in the state of Michigan. Isle Royale is 45 mi (72 km) long and 9 mi (14 km) wide, with an area of 206.73 sq mi (535.4 km²), making it the fourth-largest lake island in the world. In addition, it is the largest natural island in Lake Superior, the second-largest island in the Great Lakes (after Manitoulin Island), the third-largest in the contiguous United States (after Long Island and Padre Island), and the 33rd-largest island in the United States.
Isle Royale National Park was established on April 3, 1940, then additionally protected from development by wilderness area designation in 1976, declared a UNESCO International Biosphere Reserve in 1980, and added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2019 as the Minong Traditional Cultural Property. The park covers 894 sq mi (2,320 km²), with 209 sq mi (540 km²) of land and 685 sq mi (1,770 km²) of surrounding waters.
The park's northern boundary lies adjacent to the Canadian Lake Superior National Marine Conservation Area along the international border. With 25,798 visitors in 2018, it is the least-visited national park in the contiguous United States.(wikipedia)

• • •

I could tell this was gonna be bumpy before I ever left the NW. When one crosswordesey Disney princess crossed another crosswordesey Disney princess, I had a sense that things were not going to go well, and then when LO-RES (?) showed up in that same section, along with AROAR, well, it was all rough enough that I stopped to take a picture, so I could remember just when I knew for certain that this one was gonna be rough all over.

It's Monday. There is no day where the short fill should be cleaner than on Monday. This is not a demanding theme. Yeah, it's got five themers, which is a little on the dense side, but there's just no reason for things to get this clunky, right out of the gate. It's a completely unremarkable little corner, and it should be easy to fill unremarkably (at a minimum). Of course the fill never got better, because why would it? The longer Downs are OK, but for the most part filling this one in felt like a chore, albeit a brief one. ORIT EEL EON THE RNA EER TATAR DRU LIL NEO ONO BLAH RERUN YETIS etc. ... this stuff is fine, but only in much smaller doses. AT NOON, oof, very rough. Also, it's a BREAD BOX—"is it bigger than a bread box?" Not "BREAD BIN" ... it was a whole thing. BREAD BIN? Bah. BIN shmin. In this household (literally, in *this* household) we have a bread *box*. Also, it's "I DON'T MEAN TO PRY, but..." That's when you hear that phrase. What is up with this strange past-tense version? Yes, people might say it, but it doesn't feel On The Nose. What it feels is "15 letters long," which is what it has to be to make the theme answers work out symmetrically today. With a theme that is this old-fashioned (one of the oldest theme types there is), I expect some serious polish in the fill. Actually, I expect some outright flair. Pray pree pry etc. isn't much. The theme answers are fine, but you aren't winning any friends with TENNIS PRO. When I was done, I thought the theme was "silent X" at first (ANNIE PROULX is the real winner of the bunch, though isn't her name *E.* ANNIE PROULX!? When did she drop the "E"?) (the "E." is for EDNA, I just learned, so ... there's a new EDNA clue for you, folks). Anyway, the theme was just so-so and the fill did not hold up its end of the bargain.

I found the puzzle pretty much normal Monday levels of Easy. I got thrown on the first theme clue by all the birds, which all looked like sports teams. So I used crosses to figure it out, and even though it looked very much like BIRDS OF PREY, I kept expecting there to be some pun or wordplay or something (BIRDS OF PLAY? Because they're sports teams???), so really did use every cross to get that. Once I realized that the clue was just straightforward (not "?"-tricky), then I got back into a Monday groove. Very much slowed down at the end by ONE BY ONE (41D: Individually) crossing Isle ROYALE, which ... how is the "least-visited National Park in the contiguous United States" a Monday answer? Battle ROYALE. ROYALE with Cheese. These are the ROYALEs of Monday. I'm sure Isle ROYALE is gorgeous, but save it for Thursday, Michigan. Could *not* believe the puzzle was trying to get me to choke down AREEL when it had already served me AROAR (*and* ARIEL). I as agog and annoyed. BITTER END and TVDINNER give the grid some much-needed non-thematic personality. I've certainly had worse Monday experiences, but it costs nothing for constructors and especially editors to insist on cleaner fill than this, particularly in early-week grids.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Constructor: Lillian Simpson

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium

THEME: FRIED EGGS (58A: Breakfast order visually suggested three times in this puzzle's grid)— two eggs ("O"s) appear atop ("over") the words HARD, MEDIUM, and EASY ... thus you get your eggs over hard, over medium, or over easy, just like in a diner

Theme answers:

HARD CIDER (17A: Apple product that's not suitable for kids)
PRINT MEDIUM (29A: Newspapers, books or magazines)
EASY TARGETS (45A: Ideal marks for scammers)

Word of the Day: RIFFLE (46D: Leaf (through)) —

verb (used with or without object), rif·fled, rif·fling.
to turn hastily; flutter and shift: to riffle a stack of letters; to riffle through a book.
Cards. to shuffle by dividing the deck in two, raising the corners slightly, and allowing them to fall alternately together. (dictionary.com)

• • •

I liked the way this one unfolded, in that the eggness (egghood?) of the whole thing didn't announce itself to me at all with the first two themers. If I had said what I was seeing, literally, out loud ("two Os over hard, two Os over medium", I might've noticed the theme. But it was all so Tuesday-easy that I didn't bother to stop and process. I like that EASY comes last of the three, since "over EASY" is by far the most common way to order your fried eggs, so that answer functions almost like a pre-revealer ... even though that's not how I actually experienced it (I hit the real revealer first and then backed into EASY TARGETS ... which I had first as SOFT TARGETS, since it seemed to fit the clue (45A: Ideal marks for scammers) and also seemed kinda eggy (over easy yolks are indeed soft). This is a cute theme, simple and neatly executed. I appreciate the OVER HARD representation, since that's how I order my eggs (unless I am eating bibimbap, runny yolks make me gag a little). I also really liked the clue on that theme answer—HARD CIDER (17A: Apple product that's not suitable for kids). It sounds like it's going to be an Apple product that only streams porn, or an Apple sex toy, but instead it's just an alcoholic beverage. Nice use of that initial capital letter, and the phrase "Apple product," to suggest the company and mask the actual fruit, is what I'm saying.

It would be nice never to see LEONA Helmsley or the derogatory term WINO ever again. Both those answers were hard bumps in the road today. The fill is mostly fine, overall, though things get a little rough in the SW, with USONE and ALOU and LEMMA, which ... is a term I would never ever know if my best friend in college hadn't been a mathematician (56A: Helpful theorem, in math). Doesn't seem like a Tuesday-ish answer. It's NYTXW history is weird. It's relatively rare (this is just its sixth appearance since 2004—we actually went 11 years (!!) without seeing it at all (2004-2015)), but when it does appear, it appears on Monday and Tuesday as often as it does on Friday and Saturday. It's always weird to me the math stuff I don't remember learning despite having had math through Calc II. There are lots of math folks in crosswords, which might make it more grid-familiar than real-life familiar. The plural is "lemmata"—how/why did I remember that? My friend's mathiness must've rubbed off in odd, unpredictable, sporadic ways. But back to the fill. Really don't like APRS in the plural (34A: Credit figs.). Hadn't seen ALEUT in so long that I actually had No Idea what 52D: Language related to Inupiaq and Yupik was supposed to be, even with the "A" in place. You used to see ALEUT everywhere. You'd also see ATKA sometimes. Or even ATTU. Alaska was a crosswordese goldmine, is what I'm saying. Anyway, ALEUT frequency has been dialed back considerably, so now it's just a fine, regular term. One I semi-forgot. I also semi-forgot RIFFLE, which just sounds silly. I can't imagine saying it, and yet ... "riffling through a magazine" ... I guess that sounds OK. It sounds like a brand of toilet paper, though I may be crossing Charmin's Mr. WHIPPLE with the potato chip brand RUFFLES ("RIFFLES has ridges!"—that would be quite a slogan for a toilet paper brand).

[seriously what was wrong with people in '80s TV commercials!?

The first guy in this ad, yeesh ...]

More things:

9A: Audible response of contempt (SNORT) — I wonder how many times in my life I have tripped all over the SNORT SNEER SNOOT nexus of answers. Luckily, "audible" helped me out today.
47D: Expecting a baby, in slang (PREGGO)— interesting intersection of EGG and EGG here; pregnancy adds a whole new dimension to the "egg" theme (!). I prefer PREGGERS, since it makes me think of neither waffles (Eggos!) nor spaghetti sauce (Prego!). Actually, I think I prefer "pregnant." Just "pregnant" is fine.
25A: Certain spousal state (WIFEHOOD)— got the WIFE part easily enough, but ... WIFEDOM? WIFENESS? WIFERAGE? WIFEIOWA? Thank god for those thematic "O"s.
36D: Rock-paper-scissors, by another name (ROSHAMBO) — A WHILE (!) back there was a NYTXW puzzle with a ROSHAMBO theme and many people complained that they had never (ever) heard that term used for "rock paper scissors." Well, here you go—your hard-won crossword knowledge finally pays off! If Rambo worked for OSHA ... ROSHAMBO! It's a fun word.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Constructor: Enrique Henestroza Anguiano

Relative difficulty: Easy (extremely)

THEME: fashion is critical! — articles of clothing (real or imaginary) that act as negative metaphors for a kind of "person":

Theme answers:

SCAREDY PANTS (20A: Cowardly person)
BLACK HAT (27A: Villainous person)
EMPTY SUIT (35A: Ineffectual person)
TURNCOAT (49A: Traitorous person)
STUFFED SHIRT (54A: Pompous person)

Word of the Day: TRAPS (1A: Shoulder muscles, in gym lingo) —

The trapezius is a large paired trapezoid-shaped surface muscle that extends longitudinally from the occipital bone to the lower thoracic vertebrae of the spine and laterally to the spine of the scapula. It moves the scapula and supports the arm.
The trapezius has three functional parts: an upper (descending) part which supports the weight of the arm; a middle region (transverse), which retracts the scapula; and a lower (ascending) part which medially rotates and depresses the scapula. (wikipedia)

• • •

OK, when I say "SCAREDY" you say "___"! SCAREDY! ___! SCAREDY! ___!

If you said "CAT!"—hello, we are of the same ILK.

The whole "wait, it's not CAT?" thing was a fiasco, but it was also the only part of the grid that gave me any difficulty whatsoever. This played like a Tuesday shading into Monday. I kinda wish I were still timing myself, because I wasn't really trying to speed and I still think I would've broken 3 minutes today (extremely, near record-breakingly fast for me on a Wednesday). I wrote in DELTS at 1A: Shoulder muscles, in gym lingo (TRAPS), that slowed me down for a few seconds right out of the gate. DELTS is a perfectly good answer for that clue, it's just ... well, lots of muscles connect to the shoulder, it turns out. But TOT got rid of DELTS and RNA got me TRAPS and then after getting waylaid in PANTSville for a bit, nothing else stood in my way. And even getting waylaid in PANTSville wasn't so bad, as all those long Down PANTS crosses were super easy. Or the Acrosses were super easy, and so the Downs were easy. I wrote in "THERE!" instead of "TRY IT!," that cost me maybe five seconds (29D: "Have some!"). But everything else was transparent. Most of the fill was common, repeater-type stuff (APED and ANAIS and ATIT and the like), but it was clean enough. As for the theme, I think it's pretty lovely. The metaphors got somewhat more familiar to me as the grid went on, with BLACK HAT and EMPTY SUIT being semi-familiar but not terms I'd use, and TURNCOAT and STUFFED SHIRT being familiar terms I wouldn't hesitate to use myself. There's a great consistency to this set, as the phrases don't just *end* with clothing (like endings being a conventional thematic premise), but stand, as a whole, for a kind of person. Clothing metonyms! Actually, only some of these are metonyms (where an attribute of a thing stands for the thing). BLACK HAT, EMPTY SUIT (actually, "SUIT" = "executive" is a paradigmatic example of metonymy). STUFFED SHIRT is more a metaphor, and actual SCAREDY PANTS don't even exist ... anyway, I'm in the weeds now. These are all clothing-based metaphors used to describe kinds of (flawed) people. The end. Nice.

I wish there were more to talk about. I could go off about what a great actress GENA Rowlands is and how much I always enjoy seeing her, even if you could argue her name falls under the general rubric of "Crosswordese." Greatness transcends "Crosswordese," imho. This is why I can never really be that mad at CHER or ADELE, no matter how many times I see them. I was reading about the rise of Tiki culture in California in the mid-20th century and the writer (Kevin Starr) dug back to its 19th century roots, when America's fascination with Polynesia began. Why is this relevant? Because he brought up Melville's classic tales of the South Seas, "OMOO" and "TYPEE," and honestly I nearly teared up because I hadn't seen them in so long. Those titles used to be All Over the grid. If you started solving in the last century, then one of the first things you learned, if you didn't know it already, was that Melville wrote "OMOO" and "TYPEE" and they were going to be your constant companions on your journey into griddom. Now ... they've gone the way of the ASTA. And that's good, I guess. It's good that grids got fresher and more diverse, and it's good that I lived long enough to actually get *nostalgic* for "OMOO" and "TYPEE." So "OMOO" and "TYPEE," if you're out there, I miss you guys. Call or write some time. Well, write. You probably don't have phones. MESSAGE in a bottle, maybe? Anyway, think about it.

Last things:

45D: Put a ring on it (EAR) — I think you'd probably say "in" rather than "on," but you want your Beyoncé reference, I get it.
6D: Represent, as a designer at a fashion show (WEAR) — I liked this and SLITTED (40D: Open to the thigh, as an evening gown) and CAFTAN (8D: Traditional garment in West Africa), which I saw as nice accompaniments (accessories?) to today's theme. It's warm out, why not WEAR a SLITTED CAFTAN!
30D: Glace after melting (EAU) — I had to scan and rescan this clue because I kept thinking I was misreading the first word. Then I thought "why don't I know that word?" And then a bit later I realized I did know that word—it's just a French word (for "ice"). French crossing French here (ETOILE) is probably not ideal. But not likely to trip many people up, I don't think.

See you tomorrow.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Constructor: Bill Pipal and Jeff Chen

Relative difficulty: Easy

THEME: CUT (CORNERS) (69A: With the circled letters, a hint to solving seven Across clues) — seven Across clues turn (Down) and at the "corner" where they turn is a square that gets "cut" out (or skip); those "cut" letters spell out CORNERS (you pick up the letters in CORNERS from the downward-headed part of the Across answer, which is clued as a regular Down). So for all seven theme answers, there's the cut-corner version (the answer that's clued), then the Down segment of each answer (clued as a regular Down), and then the *uncut* Across segment (which is its own unclued answer, e.g. ANTIC, ADO, HOMER, etc.):

Theme answers:

ANTI-(C)AGING (1A: Like some face creams and serums, supposedly)
AD(O) RATE (6A: Cost for a commercial)
HOME(R) EC (9A: Class now known as Family and Consumer Sciences, informally)
"HAVE(N) ONE" (28A: "Go ahead, try this!")
DON(E) KING (35A: Rumble in the Jungle promoter)
LIVE(R) AID (47A: 1985 benefit concert watched by nearly two billion people)
AS(S) WELL (53A: To boot)

Word of the Day: LIVE AID (47A) —

Live Aid was a benefit concert held on Saturday 13 July 1985, as well as a music-based fundraising initiative. The original event was organised by Bob Geldof and Midge Ure to raise further funds for relief of the 1983–1985 famine in Ethiopia, a movement that started with the release of the successful charity single "Do They Know It's Christmas?" in December 1984. Billed as the "global jukebox", Live Aid was held simultaneously at Wembley Stadium in London, UK, attended by about 72,000 people and John F. Kennedy Stadium in Philadelphia, US, attended by 89,484 people.
On the same day, concerts inspired by the initiative were held in other countries, such as the Soviet Union, Canada, Japan, Yugoslavia, Austria, Australia and West Germany. It was one of the largest satellite link-ups and television broadcasts of all time; an estimated audience of 1.9 billion, in 150 nations, watched the live broadcast, nearly 40 percent of the world population. (wikipedia)

• • •

This puzzle lost my love quickly because of the hyphen in ANTI-AGING. I got the whole missing-letter thing fast, but that first missing letter ("C") is sitting Where A Hyphen Should Be, and I assumed this was going to be some clever part of the theme—making use of hyphens, which (like all punctuation) normally don't get represented in crossword grids. Cool, let's do a hyphen-based theme, let's go! Thought for a bit about what having a "C" in the hyphen square might mean. Was excited to find out where this hyphen-replacement concept was gonna go. But then AD RATE ... doesn't have a hyphen. And neither does HOME EC. So the concept I was looking forward to never materialized *and* I was left to contemplate the jarring inconsistency of ANTI-AGING ... if you give me empty space between words, fine, it's empty, but if that space is normally filled with a hyphen I Am Going To Fill Your Empty Space With A Hyphen Or Expect The Hyphen Be Relevant Somehow. But no. This didn't slow me down at all. Just massively disappointed me. And then, with the "C" and "O" in place and without ever looking at the revealer, the "CORNERS" gimmick became immediately obvious, so much so that I could go through and write in every single theme answer, no problem ... well, one problem: I wrote in FARM AID instead of LIVE AID (didn't yet grasp that the uncut Across segment had to make a word ... LIVER is a word, whereas FARMR is not).

So the theme wasn't as cool as I thought it was going to be *and* the puzzle ended up being depressingly easy (esp. for a Thursday). All the architectural gimmickry here did nothing to create an entertaining solving challenge. Ended up being about as much fun as connect-the-dots (which I loved as a four-year-old, but ... less so as a six-year-old). If you take the whole hyphen shenanigans out of the equation, the idea that I, the solver, "cut corners" to make the themers work is indeed a cute thematic concept, and the fact that those corners *spell* corners is a nice revelation. But it all reveals itself so early and so easily that there's no struggle, no real aha at the end when you hit CUT, no ... just no Thursday fun. Or, there is Thursday fun, but it exhausts itself one meager burst right away, and all that's left to do thereafter is programatically fill in the grid, which has no more surprises or treats.

I had no problem with any part of this puzzle, but there are two name crosses that gave me slight pause. I think they're OK, but ... it's gotten so that proper noun crosses really set off warning signals in my head now, since they are the basis of so many Naticks. ADUBA / DIANA is unlikely to flummox too many people, since even if you routinely misspell ADUBA's name (for me, today, ADUBO, sigh, sorry), DIANA is really the only cross that makes much sense there, though LIANA and TIANA are, in fact, names one might have. ANGUS / UNGER also seems slightly dangerous, especially if you have no idea who the Odd Couple are (as many younger (than me) solvers won't). But again, ANGUS is a familiar Scottish name, and nothing else but the "G" makes sense there. Ooh, but if you don't know SITKA (wasn't I just talking about Alaskan crosswordese recently...) then you won't have the "A" in ANGUS either, and then things might get dicey. It's weird trying to imagine how others might go wrong. Anyway, I think this grid AVOIDs true Naticks today. This has been a test of the Emergency Natick System. This was only a test.

Could not get the HOGS part of BEDHOGS for some reason, because hogging the covers and being a BEDHOG seem like slightly different things. BEDHOGS take up excess space, while cover hogs (like my wife, or, in her opinion, me) do not, necessarily. But I like the word, certainly the most colorful thing in the grid (besides maybe DON KING). What else? SALLOW is a funny word. I'm aware of it, but never use it, which is odd, as [Opposite of ruddy] sure sounds a lot like me. Hmmm, looks like SALLOW means "having an unhealthy yellow or pale brown color"—well that's not me either. I'm just straight up pale. With freckles. If you are SALLOW and experiencing ASS SWELL, consult your doctor. That's all for today. Back here tomorrow, and then, after a travel day (Christopher Adams fills in for me on Saturday), I'll be blogging the puzzle from the blissful shores of Lake Michigan. Sad to leave the kitties, but our house sitter is lovely so they'll be fine. Bye for now.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Constructor: Robyn Weintraub

Relative difficulty: Medium

THEME: none

Word of the Day: TAMRON Hall (25A: ___ Hall, former "Today" host with a self-titled daytime talk show) —

Tamron Hall (born September 16, 1970) is an American broadcast journalist and television talk show host. In September 2019, Hall debuted her self-titled syndicated daytime talk show, which earned her a Daytime Emmy Award. Hall was formerly a national news correspondent for NBC News, daytime anchor for MSNBC, host of the program MSNBC Live with Tamron Hall, and a co-host of Today's Take, the third hour of Today. She hosts Deadline: Crime on Investigation Discovery channel. In summer 2016, Investigation Discovery premiered the TV special Guns on Campus: Tamron Hall Investigates, which commemorated the 50th anniversary of the tower shooting at the University of Texas at Austin.

• • •

My grid screenshots usually feature a highlighted word, which has no significance beyond the fact that it's usually the last answer I got (the software highlights whatever answer you're working on). This is why so often the highlighted word appears at the bottom of the grid—I tend to solve from top to bottom, you know, like normal people. And usually this highlighted word, this last word I got, is a short word. Longer answers may be tough to get a grip on at times, but they also tend to topple with only a few letters in place, and certainly when you've got the vast majority of a long answer, unless it's a proper noun you've never heard of with an uninferrable spelling, that answer typically reveals itself quickly. But today, hoo boy. OK, let me back up and say that I think this is a good puzzle, with amazing marquee answers, all the colloquial, chatty goodness I expect from a Robyn Weintraub puzzle ("IT'S ME AGAIN!""I SPOKE TOO SOON!""DRINKS ARE ON ME!""COME ON DOWN!""APRIL FOOLS!"). Vibrant, lively stuff. It seemed like there was just ... more short fill today, or maybe the clues on it were just almost-all-over tricky / fussy, or maybe I just missed the cluing wavelength, but the solve felt a little more plodding, a little less whoosh-whoosh than Robyn's puzzles often feel. But "plodding" is too harsh—I mean plodding by comparison to that fantastic longer stuff. Anyway, highly enjoyable, as usual. Until the end, when I came to a dead stop: two blank squares and no IDEA.

Unsurprisingly, the primary problem involved interpreting a "?" clue, sigh. I've got -O-A PARTIES at 25D: Fun times between the sheets? and I cannot for the life of me figure out what word that is up front. Worse, I've got TAMRON as CAMRON (25A: ___ Hall, former "Today" host with a self-titled daytime talk show) and RAGES as RAVES (31A: Blows wildly), so my first answer there ends up being COVA PARTIES, which sounds like, what, parties where your friends come over and intentionally catch COVID from you? Are there "sheets" because you are all in bed sick? I have no idea. At some point I managed to both pull the "C" from CAMRON *and* imagine RAGES as a possibility instead of RAVES, and so finally I saw TOGA, but honestly, before that, I was like, "... SOFA PARTIES? What is happening!?" Do people still have TOGA PARTIES? I feel like that fad peaked 45 years ago, with "Animal House," and has been slowly and/or quickly waning since. TOGA PARTIES are a phenomenon that (apparently) completely dropped off my radar.

Mistakes? Yes. ENOS before AMOS (22D: First Hebrew prophet to have a biblical book named for him). Wait ... that might be the only actual mistake until the TOGA fiasco at the end. I definitely struggled a bit here and there. Didn't comprehend the AKA clue at all (24D: Lead-in to a street name, perhaps) until I realized "street" was metaphorical (i.e. "street name" as in "alias," as opposed to "given name"), and not, like, Elm Street or something. I read "autumn" as "aluminum" in 42D: Candy brand with autumn-colored packaging and still got REESE'S easily, though I did make a "huh? strange..." face, I'm pretty sure. I don't think I knew that BOLO was anything except a string tie, but (unfortunately) I *have* been to a SBARRO or two in my life, so BOLO didn't buh-low up the puzzle up for me. Oh, and I wrote in ABET instead of ASST for some reason. Instinct, probably. My fingers just got ahead of my brain (2D: One who helps out briefly). Something about helping out, starting "A" and ending "T"? No way you're going to keep my hands from trying ABET, even if it isn't even the right part of speech for the clue.

I've seen the [Hall of fame] clue for DARYL (and ARSENIO et al) before, so the [Hall of fame collaborator?] clue was transparent to me, but it's still cute. I don't love the punctuation on it. It seems to be in a kind of grammatical no-man's-land, which explains the "?." I also don't love that "Hall-of-Fame collaborator" doesn't really mean anything, as a base phrase, collaborating not being a thing there is a Hall of Fame for. And yet I love Hall & OATES (who I guess prefer to be called by their official name, Daryl Hall & John OATES?—I learned this from Mark Goodman (probably) on Sirius XM's "80s on 8" channel): "Though they are commonly referred to as Hall & Oates, Hall has been adamant about the duo being called Daryl Hall & John Oates – its official name" (wikipedia). So there you go. Christopher Adams will be with you tomorrow, and then I'll be rejoining you from the shores of Lake Michigan on Sunday. See you then.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

P.S. Breakout was an actual video game, which is the key to (fully) understanding 1A: Breakout company of the 1970s (ATARI).

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Japanese bread crumb coating / MON 7-11-22 / Piece of greenery for a winner's wreath / Like a ride that has one holding on for dear life / Venue for Stevie Nicks or the Knicks / Coconut oil and butter for two

NOUN

Danish shoe manufacturer / TUE 7-12-22 / Apt name for a car mechanic? / Puccini opera set in Rome / Potato salad ingredient for short / Counterpart of rouge in roulette

Classic beer of the Pacific Northwest, familiarly / WED 7-13-22 / French explorer of the Great Lakes / Feature on the right side of the Apple logo / Healthful cereal component / Family name on TV's Dallas / Salmon plancha fish dish

Double the speed of sound / THU 7-14-22 / Kirin alternative / Seeking a dry Italian wine / Actress Alexander of Living Single

Harriet's hubby on old TV / MON 7-18-22 / Shape of an intellectual's head it's said / Modern convenience at many movie theaters / Messy slapstick reactions / Nickname for Louise

Iberian wine city / TUE 7-19-22 / Angrily stops playing a game, in modern parlance / Gate marvel of Babylonian architecture / Upscale boarding kennel

Herringlike fish / THU 7-21-22 / Destination in Hercules' 12th labor / Relative of a chimpanzee / Dish in which ingredients are cooked at the table / Nerf product that might be used to bother a sibling

Foe of Skeletor in Masters of the Universe / FRI 7-22-22 / French phrase with a grave accent / Unit of the Swedish krona / World's leading saffron producer / Latin lovers officially speaking / Japanese-based electronics giant

Monodon monoceros more familiarly / SAT 7-23-22 / First person to fly solo around the world 1933 / Gesture signifying perfection / Animal whose name literally means nose

Rosebud ravager / SUN 7-24-22 / Downwind locales for ships / English landing spot / First pope to be called the great / NFL star Elliott to fans / Where all the people that come and go stop and say "hello," in a 1967 hit

Guofeng successor to Mao / MON 7-25-22 / Early Mongol invader of Europe / 1990s R&B group Hill / Isle national park in Lake Superior / Backside as the Brits call it

Helpful theorem in math / TUE 7-26-22 / Language related to Inupiaq and Yupik / 1982 film inspired by Pong / Certain spousal state / Apple product that's not suitable for kids

Fastidious roommate of classic TV / THU 7-28-22 / Rumble in the Jungle promoter / 1985 benefit concert watched by nearly two billion people / Engaged in some amorous behavior

Machete-like knife / FRI 7-29-22 / Ma Belle 1970 #5 hit / Acoustic flourishes during a comic's set / Liquid weapon or a solid one / Dishes served in the final scene of Titus Andronicus / First Hebrew prophet to have a biblical book named for him / Fun times between the sheets