Rex Parker Does the NYT Crossword Puzzle

Constructor: Jill Singer

Relative difficulty: Medium-Challenging (***for a Monday***) (just a tad on the slow side is all)

THEME: "WHAT'S BUGGING YOU?" (36A: "Why the troubled look?" ... or a hint to 17-, 24-, 48- and 58-Across) — metaphorical insect phrases signifying disturbance:

Theme answers:

BUTTERFLIES / IN MY STOMACH (17A: "With 58-Across, "I'm so nervous! There are ...")
BEE IN MY BONNET (24A: "I can't stop thinking about it! There's a ...")
ANTS IN MY PANTS (48A: "I can't sit still! There are ...")

Word of the Day: SOBA (1D: Japanese buckwheat noodle) —

Soba (そば or 蕎麦, "buckwheat") is a thin Japanese noodle made from buckwheat. The noodles are served either chilled with a dipping sauce, or hot in a noodle soup. The variety Nagano soba includes wheat flour.
In Japan, soba noodles can be found in a variety of settings, from "fast food" places to expensive specialty restaurants. Markets sell dried noodles and men-tsuyu, or instant noodle broth, to make home preparation easy. A wide variety of dishes, both hot for winter and cold for summer, uses these noodles. (wikipedia)

• • •

Gonna have to be a quick one today because despite the "extra" hour I am somehow strapped for time this evening. Conceptually this theme is very good. As for the execution, I wasn't so into it. Really didn't care for the split first themer, mostly because it slowed me down considerably, but also because splitting a themer that badly (putting part 2 wayyyy on the other side of the grid) kind of deadens its effect. I don't *want* to go all the way over the other side of the grid in the middle of solving my Monday puzzle. So I don't. I just wait. Which means I just get BUTTERFLIES. Which isn't terribly interesting. Also, I don't know how great the whole cluing conceit is. The use of imagined quotations, where we're supposed to complete the elliptical phrases ... I guess all those theme clues are supposed to be *responses* to the central question "WHAT'S BUGGING YOU?," but again, everything is so out of order that the theme just doesn't have the impact that it should have. It truly wasn't until I was all the way done with the puzzle that I was able to go back and see how everything was supposed to work. It felt a bit labored and awkward in execution. But I do think the core concept is very clever.

The fill, however, yikes, I remain baffled that constructors aren't held to higher standards, aren't ordered back to the drawing board to make the fill smoother, cleaner, more polished. That BUTI ENTO IONO ECRU UNUM ESE center is pretty much inedible, and much of the shorter stuff all over the grid isn't much better (MTS ICET PHYS YAYAS APRS (!!?!!?!) etc.). I liked MASTODON, especially because it's having a (social media) moment right now as untold numbers of people flee The Bird Site. Bye bye, TWEETs! (I'm on MASTODON now @rexparker@mastodon.online, by the way, not that you should care in the slightest) (10D: Extinct megafauna species whose name derives from the Greek for "breast tooth"). I liked BY MISTAKE as well—that's a prepositional phrase I can get behind. I was slow today because of UDON before SOBA and ISH before EST (4D: Approx.). Also ENDO- before ENTO- and ATMO- before IONO- and absolutely no idea about BORN until I get Every Single Cross, what a weird clue (38D: Created). That's it.

Oh, and one last thing: please go see DECISION TO LEAVE (2022), both because it's great and because I have questions.

Oh, and one *last* last thing: Happy 30th birthday, Andrew. Keep solving crosswords with your awesome girlfriend, Sophie—she sounds like a keeper!

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Constructor: Enrique Henestroza Anguiano

Relative difficulty: Easy

THEME: EYE-OPENERS (67A: Enlightening experiences ... or what 18-, 26-, 41- and 54-Across have, phonetically speaking) — four theme answers all "open" with a homophone of "eye":

Theme answers:

"AYE, CAPTAIN!" (18A: Affirmative at sea)
"I, CLAUDIUS" (26A: Hit BBC series of 1976)
AI WEIWEI (41A: Award-winning Chinese artist/activist)
"AY, CARAMBA!" (54A: Bart catchphrase on "The Simpsons")

Word of the Day: AI WEIWEI (41A) —

Ai Weiwei (Chinese: 艾未未; pinyin: Ài Wèiwèi, English pronunciation: (help·info); born 28 August 1957) is a Chinese contemporary artist, documentarian, and activist. Ai grew up in the far northwest of China, where he lived under harsh conditions due to his father's exile. As an activist, he has been openly critical of the Chinese Government's stance on democracy and human rights. He investigated government corruption and cover-ups, in particular the Sichuan schools corruption scandal following the collapse of "tofu-dreg schools" in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake. In 2011, Ai Weiwei was arrested at Beijing Capital International Airport on 3 April, for "economic crimes". He was detained for 81 days without charge. Ai Weiwei emerged as a vital instigator in Chinese cultural development, an architect of Chinese modernism, and one of the nation's most vocal political commentators.
Ai Weiwei encapsulates political conviction and his personal poetry in his many sculptures, photographs, and public works. In doing this, he makes use of Chinese art forms to display Chinese political and social issues.
After being allowed to leave China in 2015, he has lived in Berlin, Germany, in Cambridge, UK, with his family, and, since 2021 in Portugal. (wikipedia)

• • •

[still from CITY OF FEAR (1959)]

Well, that's a better revealer than what I was expecting, which was "FOUR EYES!" With "EYE OPENERS" you get both a revealer *and* a fifth themer (i.e. it describes the conditions of the theme *and* satisfies those conditions, "opening," as it does, with "EYE"). Whereas with "FOUR EYES!" you'd get a rude expression as well as a fifth ... eye, rendering the revealer itself nonsensical. Annnnyway, hi. How are you? This puzzle started rough for me, as the fill seemed (as it has often seemed lately) somewhat clunky. ILIAC, which for me completed the INTL ISIT NOLA SOAMI ILIAC cranny up top, was the answer that actually made me stop and take a picture.

There just wasn't a thing in the NW to be interested in (AREPAs and DOLMA are tasty, but not interesting enough on their own to hold up a whole corner). Doesn't help that the first themer is also the most boring / crosswordesey of the bunch (ay ay ay, it's AYE again!). Even when I dropped down and got all of the NW corner (including ACADEMIA and the decent ENERGY USE), there just didn't seem much to be interested in. And the first themer wasn't too promising. And I don't know that the fill really ever got off the ground. EREADER ESME ADIEU GOTTI DEE IOTAS ALTOS CARTA OSTER YEESH OARED ... I'm looking for any part that seemed particularly clean or any (non-theme) answer that seemed particularly entertaining, and ORNERY is the only thing that actually made me smile—I love the countrified quaintness of that term. AREPA ARENA AMANA, NONA NOLA—the fill isn't horrific, by any means, but it just ... gets by.

The theme, however, ended up being solid, and the themers that followed "AYE, CAPTAIN!" were all far more lively and welcome. I was so happy to see AI WEIWEI, a crossworthy figure whose crossworthiness I was pushing for ten years ago. I actually misremembered debuting his name in the NYTXW—he must have just been in an early draft of one of my puzzles. I searched and found the record of me asking my more experienced crossword friends (in 2012) if AI WEIWEI was OK as a puzzle answer:

Despite AI WEIWEI's international fame at that point, it was not a given that the NYTXW would deem him well known enough to appear in a puzzle. In the same Facebook conversation pictured above, a veteran constructor revealed that Shortz "once singled out HU JINTAO as an obscure entry in one of my puzzles. You know, the president of China." Anyway, AI WEIWEI ended up debuting in the NYTXW in 2014. I can't remember if I used him in a puzzle for another outlet or not. The point is, he feels like a friend to me, and I was happy to see him (he's also the reason this puzzle is 16 (instead of the usual 15) wide—in order for an answer with an even-numbered letter count to sit dead center, the grid has to be an even number of columns wide). He was the best answer in a good set of themers, and, as I said up front, the revealer really was a winner. Nice to end on a high note (even though I apparently technically *literally* ended on TERROR!)

Notes:

10D: Fine writing paper (VELLUM) — this is news to me. I wrote in VELOUR (!), which was semi-obviously wrong, but it fit. I teach pre-modern literature and in that context VELLUM is indeed something you write on, but it's the specially treated animal skin that forms the pages of manuscripts (pre-printing press). "Fine writing paper," it isn't.
24A: 12 parts of a dodecagon (ANGLES) / 33A: 12 parts of a dodecagon (EDGES) — my brain didn't fully process these clues: I got the answers easily enough, but as I was writing them in, I was imagining *dodecahedrons*, specifically a 12-sided die such as one might use in "D&D." This reminded me of some graffiti I saw recently which maybe was supposed to be commemorating some couple's love for one another, but it really looks like a gaming slogan:

14D: Dispatches (SENDS) — had the "S"s, wanted SLAYS!

Enjoy the rest of your Tuesday. See you tomorrow.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Constructor: David Tuffs

Relative difficulty: Easy

THEME: "same characters" — famous movies are clued as having the "same characters" as some other movies (or TV shows), only in this case the clues (obviously) mean "characters" as in "letters (in the titles),," not "roles (in the shows themselves)"

Theme answers:

"FATAL ATTRACTION" (17A: 1987 thriller featuring the same characters as TV's "Californication"?)
"SISTER ACT" (23A: 1992 comedy featuring the same characters as the film "Secretariat"?)
"TOTAL RECALL" (39A: 1990 action film featuring the same characters as the film "Collateral"?)
"DAREDEVIL" (54A: 2003 Marvel movie featuring the same characters as TV's "Riverdale"?)
"SINGIN' IN THE RAIN" (61A: 1952 musical featuring the same characters as TV's "Stranger Things"?)

Word of the Day:"GOTTI" (22A: Travolta film with a 0% rating on Rotten Tomatoes) —

Gotti is a 2018 American biographical crime film about New York Citymobster John Gotti, directed by Kevin Connolly, and written by Lem Dobbsand Leo Rossi. It stars John Travolta as Gotti, alongside his real-life wife Kelly Preston as Gotti's wife Victoria in her penultimate film. [...] Gotti underperformed both critically and commercially; it grossed just $6 million against a $10 million production budget and received universally negative reviews from critics, who lamented the writing, aesthetics and performances, although its use of makeup and Travolta's performance received some praise. It is one of the few films to hold an approval rating of 0% on the website Rotten Tomatoes. (wikipedia)

• • •

As for the theme, I never saw it. That is, as I was filling in the last themer ("SINGIN' IN THE RAIN"), I thought "wait, there's no revealer clue? ... what is this theme?" Then I noticed that the theme clues had information in them beyond "1987 thriller" and "2003 Marvel movie" (which had been all I'd needed to get the answers). So the first themer clue I actually read all the way through was the last one. I of course knew instantly that "SINGIN' IN THE RAIN" and "Stranger Things" don't share any characters, so I knew instantly that "characters" meant "letters." And that was that. I'm kinda glad I spared myself that revelation until the very end because it meant that as I was solving I at least had some *hope* that a clever revealer was on its way. If I'd seen the "character" pun first thing, well, the puzzle would've been even harder to endure than it was, and it was pretty hard to endure, *in spite* of being *exceedingly* easy to solve. Once again (this is happening an awful lot lately), I couldn't even make it out of the NW corner without thinking "that's a lot of subpar fill for one small corner, I hope it's not all gonna be like this." But it was. ADE to ATT to ITT to OER to OBI to ETE to IDA (crossing IDAHO). And I'm leaving a lot of other sad repeaters off that list. The fill was so complacent. So yesteryear. I don't understand the total lack of emphasis on clean grids at this establishment. The theme is (apparently) everything, and all you have to do is get the fill into plausible "yeah I've seen that before" shape. I will say that the SE corner is 10x better than the NW corner, and "I CAN'T SEE!" is an unexpected answer, lively in its urgency (41A: "It's too dark in here!"). But for the most part, filling this grid in was a dreary exercise. I was writing in answers almost as fast as I could read the clues: still dreary.

There's something depressing about wasting one of the longer answers on a cross-reference that sends the solving clear to some other part of the grid for the other part of the answer, which ends up just being bad short fill they're trying to dress up (in this case, the DEE from DEE / REYNOLDS). That's like someone noticed "Hey, we've got this cruddy DEE sitting here, maybe we can spruce it up by tying it to REYNOLDS?"). But you're not "sprucing" anything, you're just making the solve more clunky and awkward (and not fooling anyone: DEE is DEE is DEE, below average). MAPLE / TREE was also a disappointing crossref. I have to go back to my left to get a second word as obvious and semi-redundant as TREE? Come on.

[MIRIAM!]

Back to the theme. I don't know how hard it is to find movie / TV titles that share "characters," let alone find movie titles you can do that with that also fit symmetrically in a grid. But I don't know if it matters. The concept, done once, sort of merits an "oh, cute." But turned into a theme, the cuteness wears off. Or, in my case, you don't even notice it because the movies are so easy to guess without the theme part. I thought the theme was going to have something with "ACT" at first (after "FATAL ATTRACTION" and "SISTER ACT"). Something about ACTing ... in movies ... I dunno. Anyway that's not where it went. It went to "characters." OK. I think using TV show titles is a glaring inconsistency. If TV shows had also been among the theme answers, *or* if all the titles in the clues had been TV shows, I wouldn't have cared, but as is, it looks like your movie theme just wouldn't work so you cheated and went to TV a few times ("Californication,""Riverdale,""Stranger Things"). I like movies, and I like seeing them in my grid, and I like "The Well-Tempered CLAVIER," so maybe I'll try to take whatever joy that offers me and head into my Wednesday. Thanks for reading. See you tomorrow.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Constructor: Dan Caprera

Relative difficulty: Easy

THEME: PLOT (62A: What's spelled out, appropriately, after mapping the coordinates indicates by this puzzle's circled letters) — theme answers contain letter strings (in circled squares) that serve as plot coordinates, and those coordinates (N2, A9, D1, and K7) lead you to the letters P, L, O, and T, respectively:

Though you do need the actual coordinates in your grid in order to "solve" the theme part (my software doesn't show them—here's what the puzzle grid looked like online):

Theme answers:

STUNTWOMAN (16A: Lucy Lawless had one on "Xena: Warrior Princess")
CANINE TEETH (26A: Fangs)
INDONESIAN (42A: Rupiah spenders)
BREAKS EVEN (55A: Neither wins nor loses)

Word of the Day: Dmitri MENDELEEV (32D: Dmitri ___, formulator of the periodic law) —

Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleev (sometimes transliterated as Mendeleyev or Mendeleef) (English: /ˌmɛndəlˈeɪəf/ MEN-dəl-AY-əf; Russian: Дмитрий Иванович Менделеев, tr. Dmitriy Ivanovich Mendeleyev, IPA: [ˈdmʲitrʲɪj ɪˈvanəvʲɪtɕ mʲɪnʲdʲɪˈlʲejɪf] (listen); 8 February [O.S. 27 January] 1834 – 2 February [O.S. 20 January] 1907) was a Russian chemist and inventor. He is best known for formulating the Periodic Law and creating a version of the periodic table of elements. He used the Periodic Law not only to correct the then-accepted properties of some known elements, such as the valence and atomic weight of uranium, but also to predict the properties of three elements that were yet to be discovered. [...] A very popular Russian story credits Mendeleev with setting the 40% standard strength of vodka. For example, Russian Standard vodka advertises: "In 1894, Dmitri Mendeleev, the greatest scientist in all Russia, received the decree to set the Imperial quality standard for Russian vodka and the 'Russian Standard' was born"^[65] Others cite "the highest quality of Russian vodka approved by the royal government commission headed by Mendeleev in 1894". // In fact, the 40% standard was already introduced by the Russian government in 1843, when Mendeleev was nine years old. It is true that Mendeleev in 1892 became head of the Archive of Weights and Measures in Saint Petersburg, and evolved it into a government bureau the following year, but that institution was charged with standardising Russian trade weights and measuring instruments, not setting any production quality standards, Also, Mendeleev's 1865 doctoral dissertation was entitled "A Discourse on the combination of alcohol and water", but it only discussed medical-strength alcohol concentrations over 70%, and he never wrote anything about vodka.(wikipedia)

• • •

[28D: Eliot Ness and co.]

Baffled by this—not so much by the fact that you would go to all this architectural fuss for a thematic element that doesn't affect the solve one iota, but that the end result of said fuss would be so astonishingly anticlimactic. It's like some kind of anti-puzzle, a joke about puzzles, a send-up of puzzles. Is it art? I have no idea. I just no that you *told me* that PLOT was what I would get if I plotted ... so why ... would I bother ... to plot, then? Couldn't I just take your word for it? There should, at the very least, have been *some* element of revelation to this thing—even if we do end up with some non-answer like "PLOT," at least Let *Us* Arrive At It. Make this a contest puzzle or something, where solvers have to actually *find* something. This is like handing a kid a connect-the-dots puzzle or a maze that has already been solved—have fun, kid! From where I was sitting, this was just an undersized, extremely easy (i.e. non-Thursday) puzzle with black bars on two sides ... for some reason. My software was screaming at me "There are notes! We can't replicate some of the grid elements! Do it onliiiiiine!" but as usual I ignored my software and plowed forward, only to find out that I didn't need those grid elements At All except to figure out some post-puzzle thing that the puzzle had actually already figured out for me. Seriously, what are we doing here?

The puzzle was very easy, which I think is the new way of appeasing solvers, of distracting them when there's no there there—when you're high on success, you're far less apt to be critical of the puzzle. I was slow in only a couple of places. ENTRAP, for some reason (27D: Set up, in a way). Just took me forever to see. And then I still don't know what the hell kind of "exercise"TOETAPS are supposed to be (23D: Core-strengthening floor exercises). I'm tapping my toes right now. [Looks at core] ... Not seeing it. I guess I need to be on the "floor." Anyway, slowish there. And then I couldn't quite spell MENDELEEV's name right. I think I thought he was some other scientist guy. A geneticist, maybe? Ah, here we go: Gregor MENDEL. That's what my brain was thinking. Ah well, not like the answers crossing the end of his name were hard. The doubling of the letter string "INCA" was really distracting, mostly because they are side-by-side just one column apart (in INCAS and INCANT). Since both of them run through the always horrible UNPC, I think I'd've torn allllll of that section out and rethought it. I like MADELEINE (10D: Small shell-shaped confection), and I really like the MADELEINE / MENDELEEV symmetry. Mellifluous. TATAS in the plural, on the other hand: hard no (17D: Farewells). My only true mistake was STORK for OTTER (2D: Animal with webbed feet). Special thanks to the OMNI for being a familiar friend (first thing in the grid!) despite the fact that as far as I know I've never seen an OMNI irl. It's a mythical place to me. I imagine the fancier ORCs stay there. See you tomorrow.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

P.S. the term is STUNT DOUBLE. Lucy Lawless had a STUNT DOUBLE. Of course that STUNT DOUBLE was (I'll take your word for it) a STUNTWOMAN. But when you phrase it [Lucy Lawless had one ...], the only reasonable answer there is STUNT DOUBLE.

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Constructor: Brooke Husic and Erik Agard

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium

THEME: none

Word of the Day: ESMÉ Weijun Wang (20A: Writer ___ Weijun Wang) —

Esmé Weijun Wang is an American writer. She is the author of The Border of Paradise (2016) and The Collected Schizophrenias (2019). She is the recipient of a Whiting Award and in 2017, Granta Magazine named her to its decennial list of the Best of Young American Novelists. (wikipedia)

• • •

Saw right through 1A: Launch party? and so dropped NASA ARK ROCK and then OVER into the grid in quick succession, right off the bat. Seemed like a precursor to certain success with all those long Downs up there in the NW, only ... SECOND LINE was the only thing that went in clean (3D: Dance section of a 33-Across brass-band parade). AVO- seemed like it wanted to be AVOCADO-something, but I couldn't figure out how in the world AVOCADOs heated anything (I was picturing an AVOCADO-green ... oven??) (2D: Option for high-temperature cooking). But the real hold-up in this section was my absolute certainty that the answer to 1D: "You bought it? It's yours" was "NO RETURNS!" I mean UDDER worked, SINGED worked ... so I thought maybe there was some nickname for New Orleans *besides* NOLA (ROLA? RULA?), and as for 37A: Introspective question ... maybe the LINE part of SECOND LINE was wrong and the answer was "NOW?" But that's not very "introspective," really. *Then* I thought "oh god there's some kind of theme involving letter switches, and the "RN" in RETURNS turns to "NM" for some reason (at *that* point I thought the [Introspective question] was MOI!?). But that didn't really make sense. And then I just gave in to NOLA and erased everything after "NO RE-" and I saw REFUNDS immediately. What a stupid hole to step into. A stupid, deep, sticky hole. "NO RETURNS!" ... so certain-seeming! After that, it was back go Very Easy and whoosh whoosh all over the place, and by the time I hit GIDDY-UP I was (appropriately) really flying:

There were many strong spots today, but my favorite moment was probably the clue on WISH LIST (nice to have your apex clue go with your marquee, dead-center answer). That clue is baroque ... and perfect (38A: Noun phrase that's present perfect indicative). A WISH LIST ... is a list of things one would like to receive, so it indicates ... perfect ... presents—just a great repurposing of the grammatical mood ("present perfect indicative"). The puzzle's main strength wasn't so much scintillating answers as overall smoothness and subject variety. This puzzle goes a lot of places, and it goes there so deftly and unclunkily. When I think about what *polished* grids look like, this is something like what I have in mind. It's not that there are *no* repeaters or otherwise familiar crosswordy answers (NOLA LEIA ESME ALOE ECO OLAY ... you see these all the time, of course). It's that a. there are relatively few, b. they are propping up gorgeous longer answers, which are the things that really grab your attention, and c. even as repeaters go, they are real, solid, familiar things. AUK is definitely a Crossword Bird, but it's also just a bird, a real thing, so it doesn't play as tiresome, and it especially doesn't play as tiresome when it's not offered up in a glut of other superfamiliar short stuff. Choose your repeaters wisely, spread them out if you can, and for god's sake let them be in the service of longer, more impressive stuff. Today's puzzle does all this perfectly.

The difficulty returned, a little, at the end of the solve, specifically in the SE corner, which, like the NW corner, gave me some trouble, though this time the trouble came not from my making a highly intractable mistake, but from plain old toughness. The first issue was ... well, it was also a mistake: MEAL for MENU at 30A: Chef's creation. That wrong answer gummed up the works, since those two wrong letters would've provided the first letters in two of the long Downs in that section. Crucial letters ... wrong letters. Sigh. After that, there was a crush of sports trivia that I struggled with to varying degrees. Had to stare at the phrase "sports theater" a while to figure how to get from there to anything that might fit at blank blank E. The staring worked, thankfully, but it definitely caused a solving lull. Then there was TIM Anderson, whom I know very well, but somehow, out of context, and with such a plain last name, I blanked on him. Then there was KAY Adams, whom I didn't know at all because football shmootball (57A: Sportscaster Adams who hosted "Good Morning Football"). Thought she might be a FAY. Anyway, between the incorrect MEAL and the proper noun sports answers, things were slower going in here. Other issues in this section: an owl says what now? ("WHOO!"). Is that ... canonical? I had the "W" and then no idea. That seems like a stretch, and also like a clue that's *designed* to make you write in a wrong answer, namely HOOT. Not thrilled about that. I love SMOKEY EYE as an answer but it still took me a while to pick up. Also, the only association I have with the concept comes from a very stupid controversy involving an innocent joke about a putrid right-wing politician ... so I like it as an answer even though it forces me to remember said putrid human being (never fun).

Just a few other missteps. Empty NETTER before Empty-NESTER (66A: Empty ___). PRESS OP (?) before PRESSER (11D: Event for journalists, informally). Overall, this was a fun, flowing Friday, easy but with enough spice and kick to make things interesting. See you tomorrow.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Constructor: Billy Bratton

Relative difficulty: Very Easy

THEME: none? (none)

Word of the Day: TIA Carrere (25A: Grammy-winning actress Carrere) —

Althea Rae Duhinio Janairo (born January 2, 1967), known professionally as Tia Carrere (/kəˈrɛərə/), is an American actress, singer and former model who got her first big break as a regular on the daytime soap opera General Hospital.
Carrere played Cassandra Wong in the feature films Wayne's World and Wayne's World 2; Juno Skinner in True Lies; Nani Pelekai in the Lilo & Stitchfilms and TV series; Queen Tyr'ahnee in Duck Dodgers; Richard Lewis's girlfriend, Cha Cha, in Curb Your Enthusiasm; and starred as Sydney Fox in the television series Relic Hunter, as well as Lady Danger opposite RuPaul in Netflix's AJ and the Queen. Carrere also appeared as a contestant in the second season of Dancing with the Stars and the fifth season of The Celebrity Apprentice. In addition to acting, Carrere has won two Grammy Awards for her music [ed.: Best Hawaiian Album! Twice!]. (wikipedia)

• • •

Ah, here's my Friday puzzle. Themeless, breezy. Very much the kind of thing one expects to find on a Friday. A Saturday puzzle, this is not. I cannot do Saturday puzzles with virtually no hesitation on any answer anywhere at all in the whole grid, and that is what the solve was like today. If I were still timing my solves and speed-solving, I am confident I could've brought this one in under 4, and that would record territory for me, for a Saturday, for sure. Didn't know two of the names, but LAURIE was obviously LAURIE (after a few crosses) (36A: Hernandez of TeamUSA gymnastics) and KOFI also went right in via crosses, bang bang bang. Helped that one of my best students this term is named KOFI (my students, I'm pretty sure, don't read this, so hopefully he doesn't hear this compliment and let it go to his head just yet) (9A: Actor Siriboe of "Queen Sugar"). Beyond those two names, there's just ... nothing in the way of resistance here. It's a little startling. Gave me this creepy feeling like "what is happening? what am I doing wrong? what terrors await me around the next corner?" But the terrors never came. Hard to get too excited about a themeless puzzle that doesn't even seem to want you to spend any time with it. I went coast to coast on this thing without blinking an eye (in the blink of an eye? yeah, that's the better expression here, I think. Or I could just stop trafficking in clichés). Look at this start:

That's HAT AT HAND RDS HOT WAR OTRA ATOM TRACTS all in quick succession. And then I looked up and saw WACO sitting there and just wrote in TEXAS without even needing to look at the clue (Snickers? And Dr Pepper!? What a city!). The whole NNW section went in no sweat and then I just rode the STALAGMITE Highway down to the bottom. Or, rather, I dipped my STALAGMITE toe into the waters down below, seeing if it was safe to go in. Took me a few seconds of thinking to get TSAR (42A: Peter or Paul, but not Mary), and then I was off and running again in the SE—a bizarre transgrid symmetrical start to my solve (I don't normally spread out like that, but you gotta go where the energy takes you). Cleaned up the SE corner and then took the PASSING LANE back up again. Lots and lots of whoosh whoosh today:

I assumed that the SW and NE corners were gonna give me at least a little roughing up, but my fears were unfounded. The center was a piece of cake (cliché again, sorry!), and then the "Y" and the "Z" from YOGA and ZOOM made the SW corner easy to get into and conquer, and that just left the NE corner, which was maybe the hardest, in that it was chock full of trivia, but it wasn't hard at all (KIWI to the rescue!) (9D: Fuzzy fruit that's technically a berry). While I enjoyed the feeling of ZOOMing around the grid, as answers go, only DIPPIN' DOTS (21D: "Ice Cream of the Future") and "KINDA SORTA" (52A: "Uh ... in a way ...") felt truly inspired. Nothing wrong with any of the rest of it, but if you're not gonna have a ton of surface sizzle, you gotta give me something fun or tricky in the clues. I liked the clue on GUILT TRIP a lot (49A: "Travel" for someone who's feeling bad?). Could've used more of that playfulness today. Yes, I'm actually *asking* for more "?" clues, which never happens. Maybe not more "?" clues per se, but more liveliness in the cluing for sure.

Notes:

4D: Refuse to squeal (NAME NO NAMES) — speaking of "Refuse to," I "refused to" write in this answer at first (as you can see in the last grid posted above), because it is ridiculous and my brain said "Nope, I will not be complicit in this." You name NAME NAMES, for sure. I've seen that in crosswords before and liked it fine because it is an actual tight phrase. NAME NO NAMES ... oof, I don't know what that is. You either did or didn't NAME NAMES. It's hard to imagine anyone actually saying NAME NO NAMES. "Don't name names, Rocko, or it's a Chicago overcoat for you!""Don't worry, boss, I will NAME NO NAMES.""Why are you talkin' all weird and formal like that, Rocko!? You worry me! You're my nephew, and I love you, but you worry me!" [end scene]
21A: LED component? (DIODE) — OK maybe this is the answer that gave me the most pause. I had to work around it. The "?" was throwing me. I thought it was going to be something really tricky, but it's just the "D" in LED.
54A: Supergirl, e.g. (ALIEN)— had the "AL-" and wrote in ALIAS, which works perfectly. That's the kind of mistake that can really get you stuck, but not in this puzzle. The obvious IDES (50D: November 13, e.g.) lifted me right out of the hole and back on track.
34A: Time when it helps to be flexible (YOGA SESSION)— got this easily, but do not like it. Is this a one-on-one tutorial? There's YOGA CLASS and YOGA PRACTICE, but SESSION, while plausible, gives the answer an eerie, off quality, a la NAME NO NAMES.
6D: Pop open, perhaps (UNCAP) — had the "UNCA-" and was all prepared to be mad at UNCAN, but then it was UNCAP, which is the mot juste here. UNCAN is what you do with your herbal organic antioxidant vitamin healing water after your YOGA SESSION. You UNCAN it from the can and then drink it from a lotus flower while you sit in silence, NAME-ing NO NAMES. Namaste.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Constructor: Samuel A. Donaldson

Relative difficulty: Medium

THEME: FRANKENFOOD (62A: Lab-engineered fare, facetiously ... or a hint to the six crossings of shaded squares) / BUMPER CROPS (73A: Bountiful harvests for farmers ... or another hint to the crossings of shaded squares) — there are six different "crop" collisions, or "crossings" in the grid; the crops appear as letter strings inside circled squares inside ordinary puzzle answers.

The FRANKENFOOD / BUMPERCROPS:

OLIVE / RICE
SQUASH / OAT
MANGO / BANANA
TOMATO / CORN
LIME / CHIVE
BEET / MELON

Word of the Day: "HEY, MR. DJ!" (49D: 1993 R&B hit with the lyric "Keep playin' that song all night") —

"Hey Mr. D.J." is a song by American R&B group Zhané, recorded for their debut album, Pronounced Jah-Nay (1994). It was released as the group's debut single in August 1993 and also features a rap from Rottin Razkals member Fam. The song samples "Looking Up to You" by singer Michael Wycoff. The single peaked at number six on the Billboard Hot 100 and was certified gold by the RIAA for selling 500,000 copies domestically. In Australia, it peaked at number nine, while reaching number 20 in New Zealand. Originally, the song was recorded and released on the 1993 compilation album Roll Wit tha Flava. // Zhané (/ʒɑːˈneɪ/ zhah-NAY) was an American R&B duo, best known for their 1993 hit "Hey Mr. D.J.", which reached No. 6 on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100. Other popular hits include "Groove Thang" (U.S. No. 17) and minor hit "Sending My Love", both released in 1994. The group was part of Queen LATIFAH's Flavor Unit collective [!!?]. (emph. mine) (wikipedia)

• • •

Never good to finish the puzzle with "holy s***, that is Awful!" but that is exactly how this one concluded. That SW corner is ... I dunno. ACTIVES???? Is that short for ... "active ingredients"???? I was wholly willing to believe that [Some skin care ingredients, informally] were ACTIVOS, as I had regular crosswordese ODESSA at 120A: Mesopotamian metropolis instead of godawful crosswordese EDESSA. Throw in the never-seen-it-in-the-singular VAGARY, and you have one untasty soup down there. Makes TOMATO/CORN sound downright tasty. Which brings me to one of my main problems with this theme: FRANKENFOOD suggests something, well, horrifying, or at least unappetizing, and, well, MANGO and BANANA go great together, actually, as do OLIVE and RICE and TOMATO and CORN. And FRANKENFOOD is, as the clue says, "lab-engineered"... which has nothing to do with crossing two pre-existing foods. BUMPER CROPS makes *much* more sense as the revealer here, since, in every theme answer instance, two "crops" sort of "bump" into each other and ricochet off at a ninety-degree angle. The FRANKENFOOD thing probably seemed like a cool idea, and certainly gives the puzzle a highly unusual double central reveal, but it doesn't really make sense. It's decorative, and so inapt that it's a distraction. Basically, this is an OK theme if you ditch FRANKENFOOD—it's a cool answer, sure, but it's just not an accurate reflection of what's going on in the theme. I actually couldn't even see the theme until I got BUMPER CROPS. That is, despite having three of the six "crossings" in place, FRANKENFOOD didn't help me see the "foods" that were involved at all. But BUMPER CROPS. Mwah. There it is. The only true revealer.

The fill on this one seemed fine. Except for that egregious SW corner, I don't really have any complaints. And it wasn't a breeze, either. Not hard, but I definitely had to work in places (unlike yesterday's Tuesday-posing-as-Saturday). I had PECAN before PAPAW (1D: Tree of the custard apple family). I needed a bunch of crosses to get LASER TAG (33A: Game typically played in the dark). I have never, ever heard of AERObiology (and don't understand calling attention to your crosswordese by turning it into something semi-obscure like this, but whatever) (69A: Prefix with biology). Again, it seems like the editor was inexplicably smitten with the idea of duplicate cluing (see 81A: Prefix with biology = ASTRO). Almost always makes one of the clues feel really clunky ... and yet he persists with this conceit that most people don't notice and no one really enjoys. The whole eastern section was by far the hardest part for me. AXE HEAD??? (48A: It might be stuck on the chopping block). I had HEAD but zero idea what could come before it. I only ever think of the "chopping block" as something metaphorical. Also, ITTY!?!? Ugh. I had EENY (ugh) and ITSY (also ugh). Just an awful little (!) "word" to get held up on. Was unsure of both TONES and FILM, and LATIFAH was reasonably well hidden, and HARD G was doing what it always does (ugh) (78A: What gorillas have that giraffes lack?), so yeah, that whole section was a wrestling match, and not a terribly fun one. Everything else felt pretty normal, difficulty-wise.

This puzzle had one great answer, and here it is:

I got JIF and thought "... terminal 'J'!?!!? Seven letters ending in 'J'!? What the hell can that possibly be!?" And then I took one look at the clue and thought "Oh, wow, yes, Yes. Now we're talking!" A great answer that I came at from just the right angle. The rest of the grid is solid enough, but nothing comes near the dizzying high of "HEY, MR. DJ!"

Had TORRENT before TORNADO (89D: Relative of a waterspout). Hilariously, wrote in LON before LIZ (52A: Politico Cheney). That NFL TEAM clue is really not good, considering only one person on the "TEAM" actually does any "hiking" (86A: Hiking group?). In case you were worried that there was some progressive politician you'd never heard of called FLO, don't worry (83D: Longtime Progressive spokeswoman). It's capital-P Progressive, and she's just the longtime spokesperson for that particular insurance agency. Binghamton grad! We're very proud. Have a nice day. And happy birthday to my mother, without whom I would literally physically actually be nothing. See you in a week, mom!

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Constructor: Taylor Johnson

Relative difficulty: Medium (i.e. normal Monday)

THEME: PIZZA PARTY (62A: Social event hinted at by the ends of 18-, 28- and 48-Across) — theme answers end in CRUST, SAUCE, and CHEESE, respectively:

Theme answers:

UPPER CRUST (18A: High-society, metaphorically)
WEAK SAUCE (28A: Something unimpressive, slangily)
"SAY CHEESE!" (48A: "Smi-i-i-i-le!")

Word of the Day: Joan JETT (39A: Rock's Joan ___ & the Blackhearts) —

Joan Jett (born Joan Marie Larkin, September 22, 1958) is an American singer, guitarist, record producer, and actress. Jett is best known for her work as the frontwoman of her band Joan Jett & the Blackhearts, and for earlier founding and performing with the Runaways, which recorded and released the hit song "Cherry Bomb". With The Blackhearts, Jett is known for her rendition of the song "I Love Rock 'n Roll" which was number-one on the Billboard Hot 100 for seven weeks in 1982. Jett's other notable songs include "Bad Reputation", "Light of Day", "I Hate Myself for Loving You" and her covers of "Crimson and Clover", "Do You Wanna Touch Me (Oh Yeah)" and "Dirty Deeds". [...] Joan Jett & the Blackhearts were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. (wikipedia)

• • •

This felt a little WEAK SAUCE, a little thin ... crust, a little weak TEA. Let's stick with the "thin crust" metaphor for now ... actually, no, scrap that, thin crust can be delicious. The theme seemed thin. Just three answers. And not all of them really hid / repurposed the pizza ingredients adequately. UPPER CRUST did a great job (that "crust" has nothing to do with pizza), but WEAK SAUCE is a little ... weaker, in that sauce is sauce is sauce, and ditto the "cheese" in "SAY CHEESE!" I think BIG CHEESE or something more obviously metaphorical like that might've been better. But even if the theme answers had been perfect, the puzzle remains fairly thin—just a three-part, last-words-type puzzle. From a structural perspective, the grid feels very poorly built, in that TIME BOMBS and DON'T LEAVE are exactly as long as the theme answers they abut, so they really really look like / feel like / wanna be theme answers ... but aren't. Major distraction. Makes the theme look denser than it is. I actually thought DON'T LEAVE was a theme answer for a bit ... but then I realized I was thinking LEAF, as in BASIL leaf. Which leads me to the next problem: am I supposed to buy BASIL as some kind of bonus theme answer? It does sit dead center, and you do find BASIL on pizzas from time to time. So let's just say that I formally reject BASIL as theme-related. I also reject that an "Italian mojito" (!?!?!) is a thing (41A: Italian mojito). That is, I'm sure it's a thing to someone, somewhere, but what a completely ridiculous way to clue BASIL. Mojitos are Cuban. Conceptually and execution-wise, this one feels a bit of a mess, which seems very strange for a puzzle with a theme that is really very straightforward and basic. I don't even really get the "PARTY" angle. Is it a "PARTY" just because you've "invited" three ingredients into the grid?

As for the fill, it's fine, if you enjoy shooting SLO-MO TAE BO on your GOPRO. I kid, it's fine. Except for WHAP, what is that? This is like when the puzzle tried to convince me that OWLS say WHOO! Remember that? Of course you do, it was two days ago. I spell BLECH with two "C"s (at least), so that was weird (37D: "Disgusting!"). GEN Z'ER, ugh, no (47D: Many a TikTok user, informally). XERs have the "-ER" but ZER!? Oof, doesn't work. The wikipedia page for "Generation Z" begins, "Generation Z, colloquially known as zoomers..." So there you go. That is what they are called, if they are called anything. GENZER is just a desperate attempt to debut a new term [checks database ...] Yep, it's a debut. Not sure what else to say here. I wanted CLAROS for 26D: Some quality cigars. I knew that some fancy cigars came from Cuba, but I was looking for a cigar type, not a cigar place of origin, is the problem. I learned "claro" from crosswords. A "claro" is a "light-colored usually mild cigar" (merriam-webster.com). That's your cigar lesson for the day.

A STROBE light figured prominently in a (beautiful) movie I just saw in the theater today called "Aftersun" (d. Charlotte Wells, 2022). The STROBE appears to be part of some kind of dance party but that "party" seems also maybe to be the afterlife or else some point of emotional connection between the father and daughter in the story. You should see the movie and explain it all to me. I understood all the non-STROBE parts perfectly, and as I say: beautiful.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

P.S. who says "Attitude check!"??? So weird ... (14A: "Watch you ___!" ("Attitude check!") (TONE))

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Constructor: Sandy Ganzell

Relative difficulty: Medium-Challenging (***for a Tuesday***)

THEME: "OLD MACDONALD" (51A: Children's song featuring the animals and sounds in this puzzle) — theme answers contain farm animals featured in the song, and directly underneath said animals in the grid are their sounds. The grid also contains the song's refrain: "EIEIO" (56A: Refrain in 51-Across that accompanies the sounds at 24-, 37- and 47-Across):

Theme answers:

"DON'T HAVE A COW" / MUU MUU (20A: "Just chill!" / 24A: Loose-fitting Hawaiian dress)
SHEEPSHEAD / BABA (31A: Game fish whose face resembles that of a herd animal / 37A: Rum-soaked cake)
WHITE HORSE / NAE NAE (41A: Capital of the Yukon / 47A: Hip-hop dance move popular in the 2010s)

Word of the Day: SHEEPSHEAD (31A) —

Archosargus probatocephalus, the sheepshead, is a marine fish that grows to 76 cm (30 in), but commonly reaches 30 to 50 cm (10 to 20 in). It is deep and compressed in body shape, with five or six dark bars on the side of the body over a gray background. It has sharp dorsal spines. Its diet consists of oysters, clams, and other bivalves, and barnacles, fiddler crabs, and other crustaceans. It has a hard mouth, with several rows of stubby teeth – the frontal ones closely resembling human teeth – which help crush the shells of prey.
Sheepshead Bay in Brooklyn is named after this fish. (wikipedia)

• • •

I want to start with the good, though this puzzle did not start good. Damn it, I'm starting with the bad again. OK, the good: I had a genuine "aha""oh, that's what's going on""very cute" moment when I read the revealer clue and saw that there were *sounds* involved as well as animals. To that point, I just thought NAE NAE and BABA were just your run-of-the-mill repetitive crosswordese (probably because this puzzle had a Lot of crosswordese). It was very pleasant to find out that those answers had a thematic reason for being there, and a crucial thematic reason as well (see also the revealer, "EIEIO," which is an ultra-common ultra-unwelcome bit of fill in most puzzles ... but here, magically, voilà, it's a vital component of the puzzle and not the cat hair on your blouse that it usually is. So, thematically, this was pleasing. The revealer revealed the way it was designed to reveal. In Shortzland, that is considered enough—the theme is everything and the rest be damned. Or, more accurately, the rest be Whatever, Shrug, We Don't Care. If the fill is great, great, if it's only barely passable, great. The only requirement with the fill is that it look fill-like. Overall fill quality appears not to matter to the editors, and so some days we get beautiful, highly polished grids, and some days ... we get what we got today.

In the puzzle's defense, the theme is dense, or denser than it looks, with stacked elements in all four of the themers (including the revealer, with its shadow revealer right underneath). But still. Still. -IÈRE!?!?! In this day and age, that is close to inexcusable. Maybe I'm supposed to be grateful they didn't use the old palindrome "Able was I ERE I saw Elba," as the clue, but that is expecting far too much charity from me. If -IÈRE were the only real rough spot, even though it's a Very rough spot, fine, maybe it's a footnote in this write-up. But instead it's a harbinger, and the "hits" just keep coming. Actually, the I had already taken a bunch of "hits" before I even got to -IÈRE, which is to say, before I ever got out of the NW: RELO ETON RETIE ... you wouldn't pick on these individually, but when they come in a dense cluster, and *then* the puzzle hits you with -IÈRE!?!? ... that's just cruel. You know I'm far away from where I should be as a solver when all I'm doing is stopping to take screenshots of the subpar fill:

I was so distracted by how olden the fill is that (as you can see) I imagine that the [1980s sitcom E.T.] is ELF! I screenshotted four bits of fill roughness, but you can count a lot more if you care to. The grid is just thick with repeaters, many of them Of Yore, and since I didn't know MUUMUU and NAE NAE were themers until the end, they felt like part of the problem. HSBC is never good—just a series of letters I can never remember and have no hope of telling you what they stand for. And what the actual hell is up with the repeated sound answers. In the theme material, I get it, it's necessary: MUUMUU, BABA, NAENAE. But ... "USA! USA!"? "NOEL, NOEL!"?! Were those supposed to be a joke joke? The puzzle was a drag to fill in. I was grateful to witness the burst of thematic cleverness at the end, when I fully comprehended the theme—that was a nice moment, but it couldn't fully redeem the rest. There's just no reason that the road to your revealer should be an unpleasant endurance test.

The puzzle played harder than usual for me because I had no idea that SHEEPSHEAD was a fish and I completely blanked on WHITEHORSE. The HEAD part of SHEEPSHEAD was giving me fits because of HAH (ugh, more crosswordese) (32D: "Pshaw!"). My ELF error made things worse. I had HEH, and even wanted FEH! at one point. Really glad the clue for SHEEPSHEAD had the "face" part in it, so I could (eventually) get to -HEAD. I also had trouble with UNWORN (25D: Like brand-new tires) (me: "UN ... BALD?"), and CHOIR (I wrote CROWD at first) (16A: Group that may stand on risers). I never know how LOOIE is going to be spelled; I feel like it changes spelling based on whether it's slang for a "lieutenant" or slang for a Canadian coin or slang for a Canadian comedian (actually, LOUIE Anderson is from Minnesota, so scratch that) (and the Canadian coin is actually a LOONIE so just scratch this whole sentence). That's all the trouble spots, I think. Really liked the theme, really disliked the fill. See you tomorrow. AONE AWOL AWL ENID goodbye.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Constructor: John Hawksley

Relative difficulty: Medium-Challenging

THEME: It's all Greek (or Latin) to me... — obscure words with familiar suffixes are clued both as what they mean and what they do NOT mean ... the NOT part is what helps you figure out the spelling of the word:

Theme answers:

TYPOMANIA (17A: Obsession with being published ... NOT a flurry of transcription errors)
ARCTOPHILE (24A: Lover of teddy bears ... NOT a devotee of polar regions)
PANTOPHOBIA (35A: Fear of everything ... NOT a fear of trousers)
MANDUCATES (50A: Chews ... NOT elaborates condescendingly to a female)
METROLOGY (59A: Science of measurement ... NOT the study of urban areas)

Word of the Day: DIANE Rehm (41A: Journalist/podcaster Rehm) —

Diane Rehm (/ˈriːm/; born Diane Aed; September 21, 1936) is an American journalist and the host of Diane Rehm: On My Mind podcast, produced at WAMU, which is licensed to American University in Washington, D.C.. She also hosts a monthly book club series, Diane Rehm Book Club, at WAMU. Rehm is the former American public radio talk show host of The Diane Rehm Show, which was distributed nationally and internationally by National Public Radio. The show was produced at WAMU.
Rehm had announced her plans to retire from hosting the show after the 2016 elections. The final program was recorded and distributed on December 23, 2016. Rehm announced she was going to host a weekly podcast, which she began doing in January 2017.
Rehm is the co-producer, narrator, and interviewer of When My Time Comes, distributed by PBS stations across the country. Her book by the same name was published in 2020 by Knopf. The Washington Post describes Rehm as a leading voice in the right to die debate. (wikipedia)

• • •

Did not think much of the theme at first, but somehow warmed to it as the puzzle went on—that is fairly rare. Usually the arc of feeling runs in the other direction: a puzzle strikes me as cute or interesting and then just wears thin by the end. My first thought was "so it's just obscure words that look like they mean something different than what they mean?" And yes, that is it. But there's something I ended up liking about the idea that giving me *wrong* information is actually *helping* me solve the puzzle. There's an odd consistency to it, or near consistency: their opening parts all look deceptively familiar (i.e. they look most like very familiar things ... that have nothing to do with the actual meaning of the word); they all have very familiar suffixes, which help us piece everything together (I thought these were all suffixes of Greek origin, but the -DUCATES part of MANDUCATES is from the Latin ... but I think the familiarity, not the etymology, is the important thing); and, maybe most importantly, their apparent (i.e. NOT) meanings are almost all entertainingly silly, with the silliest of them all, PANTOPHOBIA, sitting dead center, in pride of place, where it belongs. Even though I warmed to the idea as I went on, I think the themers are a little weaker on the bottom—neither MANDUCATES nor METROLOGY has the crystal clear NOT meaning that the first three themers have. MANDUCATES looks more like it means "educates a man" than "educates (a woman) *like* a man. I get that the clue is trying to make an analogy from "mansplaining," but that feels a bit forced. As for METROLOGY ... that's the only one of these five answers where I might actually have guessed the correct meaning. It definitely looks like it could mean "the study of urban areas," but it just doesn't have the "what the hell!?" wackiness or deceptive quality that the others do. Still, conceptually this works, and piecing together the odd words ended up being oddly enjoyable.

The puzzle played a little slow to me, largely because of the weird theme words. The piecing together just took some time. ARCTOPHILE took the most time, as I realized, early and with alarm, that despite having seen Timothée CHALAMET in several movies and knowing his name very well, I somehow knew how to spell his (unusual) *first* name but had neglected to register what all the vowels were in this *last* name (5D: Timothée of "Beautiful Boy" and "Dune"). This is to say I thought maybe CHALOMET ... which, now that I look at it, seems improbable, but that's where I was at. And then I had COS at 22D: Sin : y-axis :: ___ : x-axis but started to doubt it when it really seemed like the clue wanted me to think "Arctic," i.e. ARCTI-, i.e. "I" not "O." So now I'm doubting my 11th-grade trigonometry memory and things are getting to be a bit of a mess. Eventually the "O" became undeniable, but that answer gave me minor fits, and the NE corner in general wasn't helping me along. Utter blank on SPADAY. Needed every cross. Do people still say "Staycation"? Or SPADAY? When I see [Staycation option] I think "... couch?" The worst thing about that corner, though, was of course E-BILL, which is so bad I literally laughed out loud. Actual LOL. Just the worst E-answer I've ever seen (please, constructors, don't use EANSWER, that was not a suggestion).

Mistakes? Well, I wrote in MASTICATES at first for that fourth themer because it's a word that means "Chews" (how many words for "Chews" do we need!?). No other out-and-out mistakes, but I struggled with SITSKI (1D: Para alpine sport equipment). I think if "Para" had been attached to "alpine" in some way I might have figured it out sooner, but I did not get the disability angle from stand-alone "Para" somehow. If I'm shopping, I think of a "find" as an item that I am purchasing, not the tag *on* that item, so the clue on SALE TAG was tough for me today (45A: Fun find for a bargain hunter). That's it for struggles. None of the struggles amounted to much; they just put me a little on the slow side. I think the fill on this one stays largely clean and largely interesting, even outside the themers. Strong Downs in all the corners. You've got crosswordese here and there (you know, RESOD, ENIAC, etc.), but there's not much, and anyway it's just functioning as glue, holding ample good stuff in place. There's something old-fashioned-seeming about this theme, and even the overall fill, but it's a delightful kind of old-fashioned. I'm into it. See you tomorrow.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

P.S. One big gripe that I left out, re: the MANDUCATES clue: "to a female"!?!?! "... elaborates condescending to a female"!?!?! Unless you're elaborating condescendingly to your pet or a farm animal, that should really be "woman." Maybe there was some idea of not wanting the clue to contain any form of "MAN" (even "wo-MAN") since "MAN" was part of the (fake) cluing concept, but ... calling women "females," oof, whatever kind of feminist intent this clue was supposed to have really backfired there.

P.P.S. I'm now looking at CHALOMET and thinking it seems *reasonable* so I don't think my uncertainty about spelling his name was so unreasonable after all.

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Constructor: Hoang-Kim Vu and Jessica Zetzman

Relative difficulty: Medium

THEME:"LEAVE ME / OUT OF IT" (45D: With 42-Down, "I don't want anything to do with this!" ... or a hint to the answers to the starred clues) — you have to ignore all the "ME"s in the grid in order to make sense of the answers in which they appear; that is, "ME" has been added to a number of words, creating phantom (unclued) words—if you "leave ME out of it" ... now all your clues make sense:

Theme answers:

LINEMEN (4D: *Flax fabric)
REMEDIAL (20A: *Call again, on a rotary phone)
MEAD (24A: *Promo)
MELEE (18: *Spike ___)
LO MEIN (26A: *Cut of pork)
MENORAH (37A: *Grammy-winning Jones)
EMENDS (22A: *They may be split or bitter)
FOMENTS (10D: *Courier and Papyrus for two)
DEEMED (48A: *Important closing document)
"I'M HOME!" (51A: *Lead-in to texter's perspective)
NAMES (59A: *#5 on Billboard's Best Rappers of All Time list)
MERV (64A: *One parked at a park, in brief)

Word of the Day: SERRA da Estrela (25D: ___ da Estrela (Portuguese mountain range)) —

Serra da Estrela (Portuguese pronunciation: [ˈsɛʁɐ ðɐ (ɨ)ʃˈtɾelɐ]) is the highest mountain range in Continental Portugal. Together with the Serra da Lousã it is the westernmost constituent range of the Sistema Centraland also one of the highest in the system. It includes mainland Portugal's highest point at 1,993 metres (6,539 feet) above mean sea level (although the summit of Mount Pico in the Portuguese Azores islands is higher). This point is not a distinctive mountain summit, but rather the highest point in a plateau, being known as Torre ("Tower" in English). Torre is an unusual summit in that it is accessible by a paved road. The peak has a topographic prominence of 1,204 m (3,950 ft) and its parent peak is Pico Almanzor, in Spain. [...] The Cão da Serra da Estrela (Estrela Mountain Dog) is a breed of livestock guardian dog that takes its name from this region.

Queijo Serra da Estrela (Serra da Estrela cheese) is a soft cheese from the region of Serra da Estrela. The recipe is more than 2000 years old. It is made from cardoon thistle, raw sheep's milk and salt. The cheese is soft and gooey. The cheese becomes harder and chewier as time goes by. (wikipedia)

• • •

One of those puzzles where I was tempted to go down and find the revealer early, just so I could get the gimmick quicker and move things along. Actually, I *did* go down to find the revealer, but I just looked at the clue, saw it was long and complicated and two-part, and just went back to hacking away at the grid up top. Puzzles with unclued answers are always (well, often) a bear of a challenge. You kinda sorta expect the clues to play fair, and for the answers to match the clues. The answers do, of course, match the clues ... eventually ... once you figure out the whole "ditch ME" angle. But getting started without any guidelines—rough. I knew something very gimmicky was afoot pretty early, as the NW corner was super easy and then ... nothing. Thankfully, the stars on the relevant clues let me know that the answers I couldn't get were tough *for a reason*. A truly tough version of this puzzle wouldn't have bothered to star the clues. I think I would've respected that version more, but it definitely would've taken me longer. As for the theme, well, there's a lot of it. I'd put this in the category of More Constructionally Impressive than Fun To Solve, though it wasn't a drag, by any means, and there was something ... original and engaging about the particular challenge of seeing around the ME's. Mostly adding ME's doesn't really add any enjoyment—it just changes the word—but there was one big exception: "I'M HOME!" I actually laughed at that one. That is some very creative, completely transformative ME-adding. You've really gotta break up the "real" answer (IMHO) and repunctuate it and turn the letters into actual words and everything. Just Add "ME" and watch your overfamiliar texting initialism take exciting new form! I also kinda liked the conversion (!) of NORAH Jones.

There are no uninvolved (i.e. non-thematic) ME's in this grid, which is nice. Gives the puzzle a nice consistency. A stray "ME" would be distracting. And this is one of the few times you're ever going to see clues for two-letter words—because they appear in the grid as ordinary-looking four-letter words (MEAD, MERV). So that's another interesting feature of this puzzle. Don't care much for the gotta-read-it-backwards quality of the revealer, so I'm currently just reading it the regular way, L to R, in Yoda-voice: "OUT OF IT, LEAVE ME!"

Almost all of the difficulty in this puzzle was in uncovering / discovering the theme. I don't know when I figured it out. Hang on, I took a screenshot shortly thereafter, let's have a look:

I must have seen that REDIAL was "hidden" or involved in some way in 20A: *Call again, on a rotary phone (REMEDIAL), and then seen that ME's were also involved in the NE part of the grid as well, though when I took this screenshot, I hadn't worked it all out perfectly (you can see I have AMENDS instead of EMENDS in there—probably just a hasty first stab). Once the theme dropped, the difficulty dropped as well. There were a few things I didn't know, but they didn't hold me up much. Never heard of that Portuguese mountain range, or of LOLA Kirke (50A: Actress Kirke of "Mozart in the Jungle"). LOLA had me slightly worried for a bit, since four-letter women's names can go All Kinds of Ways, and she appears in a thickly thematic area *and* crosses another answer I was having trouble seeing (48D: Put out = DOUSED). But it all came steadily together. I just circled that section until the letters were undeniable, and then finished up in the SE, where ... look, I know I have complained in the past about duplicate clues (where often one of them feels forced) and cross-references (which can awkwardly send you all over hell and gone just to find the second part of your answer), so this may sound weird, but I can't believe that the clue on ENVY didn't get the same treatment as the clue on EMMY (67A: Award that sounds like two letters of the alphabet). I mean, they cross each other. They both sound like two letters of the alphabet. That's a paired cluing opportunity made in heaven. But instead of [Sin that sounds like two letters of the alphabet], ENVY just gets the dullish [Member of a noted septet]. I can't believe the puzzle has me out here advocating for cutesy clue twinning, but times are strange, what can I say? See you tomorrow.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

P.S. Apparently I was supposed to see EMMY as some kind of "bonus" theme answer (?) (M + E). Not sure how that works, except to remind you of the relevant letters. Anyway, obviously the potential theme-iness of that answer never crossed my mind.

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Constructor: Robyn Weintraub

Relative difficulty: Medium (3/4 very easy, 1/4 something about a frog????)

THEME: none

Word of the Day: ROSA Bonheur (53A: "The Horse Fair" artist Bonheur) —

Rosa Bonheur (born Marie-Rosalie Bonheur; 16 March 1822 – 25 May 1899) was a French artist known best as a painter of animals (animalière). She also made sculpture in a realist style. Her paintings include Ploughing in the Nivernais, first exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1848, and now in the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, and The Horse Fair (in French: Le marché aux chevaux), which was exhibited at the Salon of 1853 (finished in 1855) and is now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. [...]
Bonheur was openly lesbian. She lived with her partner Nathalie Micas for over 40 years until Micas's death, after which she began a relationship with American painter Anna Elizabeth Klumpke. (wikipedia)

• • •

Well this all came down to the frog clue. I don't know if you know how brutal that clue is if you don't just *know* that the Latin American version of Kermit is "La Rana RENÉ." It's not just that I didn't know his name. I don't know lots of names, most names, and I manage to push through them every day. ROSA Bonheur! Didn't know her, but I knew I was looking for a human name (key!) and the crosses were very obliging. But with La Rana RENÉ, I have absolutely no idea I am looking for a human name. I know it says "Kermit's name" right in the clue, but I figured it was "name" in the sense of "thing we call him," something adjectival!!!! Like "The Sad Frog" or "The Slow Frog" or "The Depressing Frog." And as I don't know much Spanish, I was absolutely dead in the water, because as far as I was concerned, that adjective could've been anything ("What's Spanish for 'green'!? Isn't it VERDE?! Why won't it fit?!"). And then it wasn't even an adjective—just a random name! "RENÉ the Frog!" Sigh. So I had -ENE and zero ****ing idea. Worse, I had no idea what 23A: It's equivalent to a cup (TROPHY) was getting at. Just none. ("Equivalent to a cup? ... TWO PTS"!?!? Wait ... [counts on fingers] ... that's not right" etc.). And then that RENÉ / TROPHY section connected to the NE, which I botched for reasons that were 95% my own DOM fault. Here's what I was staring at at the end of my solve:

I know the term TRASH PANDA very well! So I have no idea why the clue [11D: Raccoon, humorously] made me think of literal actual pandas, but it did. And GIANT PANDA fit perfectly, "lucky" for me! So dumb. All the Acrosses up there would've been hard *without* my mistake, but with it, yeesh. I don't know why it took me so long to really look at 10D: Shipment that might include a note saying "Miss you!" I think that in my first pass at it, I only picked up the "Shipment" part and since I already had PACKAGE, I didn't have the necessary information. Sometimes I fail to read to the end of the clue. Mostly this works just fine. With CARE PACKAGE, it was disastrous. Anyway, I got it all worked out via CARE PACKAGE—changed CTRS to CTRL (10A: Part of many commands: Abbr.), figured out what dumb Vegas hotel we were dealing with, figured out what the LAPS clue was trying to get at, what tool looked like a zester, etc. the end. Anyway, this was a great, zoomy, whoosh whoosh puzzle semi-ruined by a very hard and clunky corner there at the end. The frog clue was malevolent. But the trouble with TRASH PANDA was entirely my fault. So I'm half mad at the trash frog and half mad at myself for a good, breezy puzzle semi-spoiled by late unpleasant fumbling and awkwardness.

But before that, it was pure Robyn goodness, ALL OVER THE MAP! (25A: Here, there and everywhere). The moment it really kicked in came early, after the NW went in smoothly and then the first exhilarating drop came with the great clue/answer pair at 8D: Roger's relative? ("COPY THAT!").

From here I had trouble seeing any of the "COPY THAT!" crosses (and of course the stupid frog next door), so I just kept going, down down down, all the way to the bottom of the grid, and then I cleaned up down there:

After that, it was "HERE WE GO AGAIN" across the grid to the SW, and then, of course, the aforementioned brutal last stand in the NE. It really was an ideal Friday solving experience until about the 80% mark.

Notes:

39A: A glengarry is one in the shape of a boat (HAT) — well now I wanna know what the shape of a Glen Ross is! Hmmm ... well, here's the shape of a Glenn Ross:

Glenn Ross (born 27 May 1971) known by his nickname "The Daddy", is a Northern Ireland former International Strongman and Powerlifter who has represented Northern Ireland and the UK in several World's Strongest Man competitions and various World Grand Prix and European Team competitions. (wikipedia)

56A: St. ___ (destination in a rhyming riddle) (IVES) — wanted to spell it YVES. I think we have some facial scrub in the shower that's St. YVES brand ... nope, that's IVES as well. No idea why I'm spelling it like YVES Montand.

21D: Title for a Benedictine monk (DOM) — wanted FRA at first, which can also be a title for a monk, but is more closely associated (I think) with friars.
45A: Spent some time in the Outback, perhaps (DROVE) — loved this. Double misdirect! Me: "LOL what is the five-letter word for 'Ate a Bloomin' Onion'!? But it wasn't Outback Steakhouse, it was the Subaru Outback. Nice.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Constructor: Benji Goldsmith

Relative difficulty: Easy

THEME: none, unless the grid is supposed to look like Frankenstein's monster, such that the grid CREATES A MONSTER (17A: Isn't able to control the outcome of one's actions)

Word of the Day: CETE (5D: Pride : lions :: ___ : badgers) —

noun

a number of badgers together. [First recorded in 1400–50; late Middle English, of obscure origin; perhaps variant of Middle English cite “town,” a usage suggested by similarity of Middle English forms for borough and burrow] (dictionary.com)

• • •

A very easy walk from AT ONE WITH NATURE to "IS THIS SEAT TAKEN?" That is the best spin I can give on this solving experience. Nice longer answer up top, a non-grueling journey down the grid, and another nice longer answer down below. If I describe it that way, I leave out some perfectly fine bits but also a bunch of winces and head-tilts and head-shakes and other general unpleasantness. The dangers with these grid-spanning 15 is always the cruddiness of the crosses, and while I don't think today's crosses were, on the whole, any cruddier than you usually get with stacked 15s, there also wasn't enough interesting fill in the grid to lift it out of humdrumitude. Further, there were some cluing moments that were a little "ugh." When your overall grid is stacked with great answers, a stray "ugh" in the clues for short stuff isn't going to mean much. But when there aren't a lot of highlights, then the lowlights shine forth with unfortunate brightness. The first jarring bit is of course CETE, which is the kind of "you'll-never-use-it-or-see-it-outside-crosswords" obscurity that used to be much more common back when I started solving in the early '90s. It's the kind of desperation you only bring forth when you have set yourself a challenging architectural goal, the kind of answer you convince yourself is OK but it's in the dictionary. See also "OH, ME," which is bad even in "AH, ME" form. As "OH, ME" ... oh my ("oh my" being an actual expression one might use). The rest of the short fill (except maybe -INI) isn't actually bad, but too much of the cluing either tries to be cute and misses or tries to get tough and just annoys. For example, the clue on INA (which is, actually, pretty bad fill). Cluing a two-word partial as a (singular) "preceder" (4D: Preceder of word or sense)!? Why are you going out of your way to call attention to a piece of fill you can't possibly want anyone to dwell on? Cluing OTTER as a paint shade? I think of odds being EVEN (no "S"), so the clue on EVENS (plural) feels particularly clunky (42D: Erroneous answer to "What are the odds?"). In what context would you even make that “erroneous answer”?? Again, if there were more whiz-bang answers in this thing, I probably wouldn't even remember this stuff. It would be a sideshow at best. But when there are few highlights, I tend to notice every little creak.

For me the puzzle missed with its marquee answer, CREATES A MONSTER. It's not just that the clue feels ... not quite on the money ("outcome of one's actions" doesn't really get at MONSTER), it's that CREATED A MONSTER is so so so so so much better as a standalone answer that I'm super-distracted by the fact that it isn't, in fact, the answer. "I've created a monster," that's the meaty phrase that everyone knows. CREATES (?) A MONSTER is ... well, a MEAT ALTERNATIVE by comparison. Speaking of MEAT, what the hell is up with the answer to that [Paleo, e.g.] clue!?! DIET FAD!? LOL, last I checked they were called FAD DIETs. It's this kind of tin-eared, close-enough, uncanny-valley quality that makes the puzzle less than fully enjoyable today. I google CREATED A MONSTER and I get all kinds of stuff: song titles, books, definitions, etc. I google CREATES A MONSTER and I get ... "Paper Mario CREATES A MONSTER"!? (four hits, all at the top of the results). What the hell even is that!?

There were some other moments that I liked, though. The "?" clues worked today. [Fed on the sly?] is NARC because a NARC is a federal employee who works undercover, i.e. "on the sly." Pretty good disguising of "Fed" there (with the capital masked by appearing in the first position, where all first letters are capitals). [Show up in labor?] also has good misdirection on both "show up" and "in labor" (OUTWORK). Not as thrilled with [Question asked without reservation?] since "IS THIS SEAT TAKEN?" is not a question you'd ever ask in a situation where one normally has a reservation. Usually you're in a movie theater or at an event of some kind where there's general admission, or maybe the bar, or maybe you want to take a seat from another table that doesn't appear to be using theirs ... I like the cleverness of the clue, but the contextual aptness isn't really ... precise. There was one other little cluing moment I liked, and that was the successive clues at 26- and 27-Down (26D: British ___ / 27D: Whitish). It's a small thing, but something about the way they echo each other suffixially made me smile.

Wanted DIALS BACK at 30A: Moves from 9 to 5, say. There doesn't really seem to be anything in the clue suggesting an "IT," but I do like the phrase DIALS IT BACK well enough. I also like the clue on SMALL TALK (33A: It's sometimes weather-related), as it is perfectly accurate while having nothing on its surface to signal its relationship to talk. Not a big aha there, but a fairly substantial "hey, that's true!," which is something. Wish there'd been a few more moments like that. Enjoy your Saturday, see you tomorrow.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Constructor: Joe Deeney

Relative difficulty: Easy

THEME:"Fan Club"— familiar phrases are reimagined as verb phrases done by "___-philes" (i.e. by lovers or "fans" of ... whatever some made-up word with semi-familiar Greek roots indicates):

Theme answers:

LOVE TRIANGLES (21A: "Geometrophiles...")
PRIZE DRAWING (31A: "Imagophiles...")
FANCY RESTAURANTS (46A: "Gastrophiles...")
GET OFF ON THE RIGHT FOOT (63A: "Dextropodophiles...")
DIG THEIR OWN GRAVE (79A: "Autotumulophiles...")
GO FOR THE GOLD (94A: "Aurophiles...")
LIKE CLOCKWORK (109A: "Chronomechanophiles...")

Word of the Day: WHATNOTS (82D: Shelves for knickknacks) —

A what-not is a piece of furniture derived from the French étagère, which was exceedingly popular in England in the first three-quarters of the 19th century. It usually consists of slender uprights or pillars, supporting a series of shelves for holding china, ornaments, trifles, or "what nots", hence the allusive name. In its English form, it is a convenient piece of drawing room furniture, and was rarely valued for its aesthetic. (wikipedia)

• • •

I guess the theme is consistent enough, but it just doesn't come off as very entertaining. I guess the star attraction is supposed to be those preposterous Greek-rooted words in the clues, the ones indicating which kind of "lovers" or "fans" we were dealing with. In that sense, the puzzle ended up feeling like a vocabulary test: "Do you know your Greek word roots?!" Imagined -philes somehow didn't really light my fire. The wordplay is interesting, in that all the first words in the familiar phrases are reimagined as very verbs or verb phrases meaning, roughly, "enjoy" or "are a fan of" (LOVE, PRIZE, FANCY, etc.). I liked the top half much better in this regard, since there seemed to be a consistency there, a specific shift of the meaning of the first words from adjectives to verbs. But once you get to the middle that consistency goes away and you get a series of phrases that are verb phrases by nature—the clues just change the meaning of the verbs. I liked it better when the reimagining involved a change both in meaning and in part of speech. But like I say, at a general level, the gimmick is consistent enough. The made-up clue word angle did nothing for me, but some of the reimagined phrases are at least a little funny, esp. GET OFF ON THE RIGHT FOOT. Foot fetishry in the marquee position of the Sunday NYTXW! Bold. The rest of the puzzle: not nearly so bold. Wait, those clue words are made up, right? I thought "Gastrophile" was a real thing ... [looks it up] ... it is! "One who loves good food." But "autotumulophile"!? That can't be real! ... [looks it up] ... nope, it absolutely is not. Search that word and you get crossword sites (sites referring specifically to this crossword). Hmm, that's another ding against this thing. Ding for "gastrophile"—make up all the "-phile" words or don't bother with the gimmick.

The longer answers in this puzzle often felt wasted, in the sense that ITALIAN HERO just felt ... redundant. It's a HERO. That's enough. ITALIAN HERO is ... meh. And as for TSETSE FLIES and JAI ALAI, that's just extended crosswordese. Crosswordese: The Unexpurgated Version. Too much real estate to give to overfamiliar stuff. ARMY LIFE feels original, and I like "DEAR JOHN" pretty well too (esp. the clue: 79D: Announcement of a split decision?). But THE NILE!? THE NILE!? Oof. More extended crosswordese, and a painful definite article insertion to boot. THETHAMES, THERHONE, THESEINE, THEMISSISSIPPI ... you see how dumb this is, right? Don't give NILE a pass just because it's short and (from a crossword perspective) hyperfamiliar.

Puzzle was very easy except for WATSON (74A: To whom it is said "You have a grand gift for silence .... It makes you quite invaluable as a companion"). Needed every cross to figure out who the hell that quotation was supposed to be about, particularly because of the awkward "To whom it is said" construction. I get it now, you didn't want to tell me that Sherlock was doing the saying, but oof, that passive voice is Painful. "UGLIES" is apparently some YA "trilogy" stuff my daughter somehow missed (the "YA fantasy trilogy"-type book was all my daughter seemed to read for like 7 years or so). The "UGLIES" was supposed to be the first book in a trilogy, but then it got up to four installments and I think there are more coming, I dunno, I don't really wanna go back and read the wikipedia page that thoroughly. Anyway, that was one of the only things in the puzzle I didn't know. That and WHATNOTS, what the *&$%?! (82D: Shelves for knickknacks) Me: "Do they mean ETAGÈRES, and if so, why won't that fit!?" I know WHATNOTS only as ... well, "knickknacks." And apparently that is how WHATNOTS (the furniture) got their name—because they were designed to display your assorted ... WHATNOTS? Bizarre. So ... WATSON / WHATNOTS gave me some grief in the SE, but otherwise, the puzzle was exceedingly straightforward. A bit flat. It looks and feels like a perfectly ordinary Sunday puzzle. Cute but innocuous wordplay at its thematic core, solid if unremarkable fill throughout. I could use something more ambitious or daring on Sundays. They're just too big to sustain a just-OK premise.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Hello, everyone, it’s Clare for this random Monday in November, filling in for Rex! Hope everyone is having a great November and you’re staying warm wherever you are. As usual, I’ve been busy watching ALL the sports, with tennis, football, skiing, basketball, and now the Men’s World Cup on TV! I’m not at all happy this World Cup is being held in Qatar given the numerous human rights issues, and I absolutely despise FIFA and its rampant corruption, but I find myself happy for the players, as I can only imagine how much this means to them, and they didn’t have any say in where they’d be playing. So, I shall watch some and root on the U.S. men’s team, even though I could probably only name three of the players and think we’re gonna lose very badly.

Anywho, on to the puzzle…

Constructor:Brandon Koppy

Relative difficulty:Easy

THEME:WORLD CUP (64A: International event where 17-, 28- and 48-Across can be heard) — each of the theme answers relates to the men’s World Cup

Theme answers:

VUVUZELA (17A: South African horn that produces only one note)
OLE OLE OLE OLE OLE (28A: Repetitive cry of encouragement)
GOOOOOOOOOOOOAL (48A: Reeeeeeeeally long celebratory cry)

Word of the Day:NEALON(62A: Kevin ___, former "Weekend Update" anchor on "S.N.L.") —

Kevin Nealon (born November 18, 1953) is an American comedian and actor. He was a cast member on Saturday Night Live from 1986 to 1995, acted in several of the Happy Madison films, played Doug Wilson on the Showtime series Weeds, and provided the voice of the title character, Glenn Martin, on Glenn Martin, DDS. (Wiki)

• • •

My thoughts on the puzzle can be summarized easily: Nooooooooooooooooooo! The theme is obviously timely, with the Men’s World Cup starting yesterday and with the U.S. playing today (at 2 p.m. EST), but the execution was disappointing, especially given how much room there was to have fun with this theme! You’ve even got GHANA (48D: Accra's country) already there in the puzzle. They’re in this World Cup and were also in the World Cup in the iconic 2014 group with the U.S., Germany, and Portugal, where the U.S. just made it out of the group before losing in the first elimination game to Belgium when Tim Howard almost saved the whole game by just about standing on his head. I digress. You also have EPIC WIN (26A: Victory of all victories) in the puzzle; how easy would it be to give that a World Cup clue? I can name half a dozen off the top of my head. Maybe put some team nicknames in there (Belgium are the Red Devils, England are the Three Lions, Canada are the Canucks — all of which could be pretty easily clued). Or, talk about some players (more than a few people know Messi, Mbappe, Neymar).

I know GOOOOOOOOOOOOAL (48A) is fun to say (and sounds even better in Spanish, particularly when announcer Andrés Cantor does his trademark version, which lasts 20 seconds or more and, after a breath, is repeated for even longer). But just throwing a random number of “O’s” in a theme answer (it’s 12; I counted) feels lazy. And using the crosswordese OLE and throwing it in as an across five times feels lazy, too. I do like the word VUVUZELA (17A) and remember seeing those in the World Cup in 2010; I still have nightmares about how obnoxious the sound is and how loud they were. But as a whole, a theme that had so much potential but was boring is as bad as a failed panenka.

Beyond the theme, the rest of the puzzle didn’t fare a whole lot better, in my opinion. It’s never a good sign when you have to clue your crosswordese off each other like with 27D: Co. honchos as CEOS and 35A: The "E" of 27-Down, for short as EXEC. I also never love clues with quotation marks where it feels like any number of words/phrases could work as the answer, and we had a seemingly uncommonly high number of these in the puzzle today with 2D: "My turn!", 11D: "Unacceptable!", 46D: "___ regret that!", 63D: "___ it on me!", and 15A: "Be quiet!".

There were still some good spots in the puzzle. 56A: Salsas, e.g. … or salsa moves as DIPS is a cute clue/answer. Same with 71A: What was all about Eve? as EDEN. ESOTERIC (39D: Requiring rare knowledge) is one of my favorite words, so that was nice to see there in the puzzle. I also liked ARCANE (66A: Requiring rare knowledge) and thought EYE CONTACT (30D: Something to maintain during a conversation) was a pretty decent phrase. RUN WILD (9D: Go crazy) is something you don’t usually see in a puzzle, so I, of course, liked that.

Misc.:

I learned today how to spell VUVUZELA (17A). I was convinced that it was spelled “vuvuzuela,” and that’s how I’ve been pronouncing it, too.
With 25D: Latte art medium as FOAM, I remember when I had my first waitressing job and had to learn how to make lattes and the like, because I’m not at all a coffee drinker. The first time someone ordered an Americano, I immediately left the table and Googled what that was. Thankfully, it was quite easy to make.
My only experience with the EURAIL (12D: Train service to 33 countries) system was when my sister and I were fortunate enough to take a trip across Europe. We did have one miserable experience trying to get our tickets, and another time we had to sleep outside a train station because we couldn’t get a ticket. But, on the whole, the system was pretty great!
If you want to see a true GOOOOOOOOOOOOAL, I’ll share one of the greatest in recent memory. My team (Liverpool) was on the cusp of qualifying for the Champions League and had to win all of our remaining games. We were tied. On the final play of the game, Liverpool had a corner kick. Our goalie — yes, you read that right — came all the way up and scored one of the most beautiful headers ever, and I still don’t think I’ve ever screamed louder. Anyway, here it is so you can all marvel at it, too. (Don’t ask me how many times I’ve watched this clip.)

Signed, Clare Carroll, a USAUSAUSAUSAUSAUSAUSAUSAUSAUSAUSA soccer super fan

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Constructor: Wendy L. Brandes

Relative difficulty: Medium

THEME: CUTTING THE CARDS (7D: Part of a blackjack dealer's ritual ... or what this answer is doing vis-à-vis the answers to the starred clues) — 7-Down literally "cuts" (through) five types of "cards" (that is, words that can precede the word "card")

Theme answers:

17A: *1971 film about coming of age in a small, one-cinema Texas town, with "The" ("LAST PICTURE SHOW")
22A: *Eloquence said to be acquired by kissing the Blarney Stone (GIFT OF GAB)
33A: *Exams that value analysis and understanding more than rote memorization (OPEN-NOTE TESTS)
43A: *Van Morrison song aptly featured in "An American Werewolf in London" ("MOONDANCE")
50A: *Owning, as an achievement (TAKING CREDIT FOR)

Word of the Day: LUCIAN (19A: One-named satirist of ancient Greece) —

Lucian of Samosata (c. 125 – after 180) was a Hellenized Syrian satirist, rhetorician and pamphleteer who is best known for his characteristic tongue-in-cheek style, with which he frequently ridiculed superstition, religious practices, and belief in the paranormal. Although his native language was probably Syriac, all of his extant works are written entirely in ancient Greek (mostly in the Attic Greek dialect popular during the Second Sophistic period). (wikipedia)

• • •

Hey all. I'm on (Thanksgiving / birthday week) vacation, so in order to spend maximum time with my family (whom I actually like), I'm gonna be microblogging for the next few days. Is that a term, "microblogging?" I feel like I've heard it. And now I'm doing it. Speaking of "Is that a term?": POLLER. Is POLLER a term? Well, funny story: I took a poll. Because I'm solving out of my element (i.e. at my mom's house, i.e. not in my office), I just decided to solve wherever I could get space, which meant the dining room table, which is less than shouting distance from the living room, which was where all my family was sitting. So I hit POLLER early (third answer I got), and I inaudibly groaned and sank in my chair, and then I asked my family, "Hey, what do you call [One sampling public opinion]!?" And my sister goes "... POLLSTER?" at the same time that my wife also goes "POLLSTER" and then I say "thank you!" and then my wife looks at me in horror and asks "omg did they try to foist POLLER on you!?" Yes. Yes they did. Therefore, because of this dramatic polling incident, I can say, with confidence, with the unbiased backing of at least two other reasonably intelligent people, that POLLER is a garbage non-word.

I also asked the room, "Hey, for [Part of a blackjack dealer's ritual], how would you fill in the blank on the following phrase: 'CUTTING THE ___'"? I got three "DECKs." So again I say, with confidence, that today's puzzle is not [dramatically removes sunglasses] dealing fairly! These mots are not the mots justes. And the fill in general was a little subpar, a little xwordesey, a little hard to take (EIRE ETNA ÊTES etc etc). This is all too bad, as the theme is kinda cute. And of course it has to be "CARDS," not "DECK," or the entire premise doesn't work. So that's fine, actually. Just not a phrase I'd use for blackjack. Maybe clue it as part of a card trick? I dunno. Anyway, the theme works great. I don't really know what a PICTURE CARD is ... but I assume it's something, so ... thumbs up to the theme.

[You can see that the wikipedia entry is for "Cut (cards)" but when I add
"blackjack" to the search terms, predictive texts wants "deck"]

OK, this blogging is not micro- enough for my (and possibly your) tastes, so let's move quickly to ...

Five Bullet Points:

19A: One-named satirist of ancient Greece (LUCIAN) — this seems an extremely non-Tuesday name. I barely know this guy, and I've spent a good deal of time around classical literature. This answer and XIANG (30A: Chinese dialect spoken mainly in Hunan province) really upped the level of difficulty today, though both answers were easy enough to get from crosses, and the rest of the puzzle was no harder than a normal Tuesday.
29A: Lustful, informally (RANDY) — I can't stop laughing at "informally." Is "Lustful" formal? When you're black-tie horny: Lustful. When you're casual-Friday horny: RANDY.
14A: Words of sudden recognition ("OH, IT'S YOU") — we interrupt this broadcast for a very necessary and relevant playing of "Escape (The Piña Colada Song)":

49A: Careless or carefree (BLITHE) — a perfectly reasonable word, but I struggled to come up with it. Since the two clue words seem miles apart from each other, I couldn't grab hold of a word that seemed to fit.
11D: Gritty residue in a chimenea (ASH) — whoa, I'm only noticing just now that the clue does not say "chimney"! I have never, ever heard of this term! "A chimenea /tʃɪmɪˈneɪ.ə/, also spelled chiminea (from Spanish: chimenea which derive from French cheminée, "chimney"), is a freestanding front-loading fireplace or oven with a bulbous body and usually a vertical smoke vent or chimney." (wikipedia). I didn't know these had a name! I'm just glad I saw it in a clue before I got run over by it as an answer!

OK, that's all, see you tomorrow.

[Longmont, CO: The morning view from mom's dining room window]

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Constructor: Erica Hsiung Wojcik and Matthew Stock

Relative difficulty: Medium

THEME: colored rings and then more colored rings — first themer is clued as ["Red and yellow circles"] and then each subsequent theme clue adds a colored circle until you end up with five colored circles:

Theme answers:

MASTERCARD LOGO ("Red and yellow circles")
TRAFFIC LIGHT ("Red, yellow and green circles")
TWISTER MAT ("Red, yellow, green and blue circles")
OLYMPIC RINGS ("Red, yellow, green, blue and black circles")

Word of the Day: PIRELLI (7D: Italian tire company) —

Pirelli & C. S.p.A. is a multinational tyre manufacturer based in Milan, Italy. The company, which has been listed on the Milan Stock Exchange since 1922, is the 6th-largest tyre manufacturer and is focused on the consumer production of tyres for cars, motorcycles and bicycles. It is present in Europe, the Asia-Pacific, Latin America, North America and the Post-Soviet states, operating commercially in over 160 countries. It has 19 manufacturing sites in 13 countries and a network of around 14,600 distributors and retailers. In 2015, China National Chemical Corp. Ltd. (ChemChina) took controlling interest of Pirelli - with the Chinese state-owned company agreeing to maintain the tire company's ownership structure until 2023. (wikipedia)

• • •

I just had a big delicious pricy meal which included cocktails *and* port and while this has put me in a pretty good mood, I think it also has something to do with the fact that this puzzle just didn't do much for me. I could process the concept fine, but it just didn't ... land. I see what's happening. I see that there is a steady progression, new colors added at each phase, etc. It's an ... interesting discovery, I guess. There's definite thematic consistency. My reaction is "huh, curious." But that's about it. It wasn't amusing, and I didn't have much of a feeling of revelation. The TWISTER MAT is not iconic to me at all—I know it has colored circles, but I have no idea what those colors are. I must never have actually played Twister. You could've told me they are any number of colors and I would've believed you. What color are the OLYMPIC RINGS? I might've been able to guess, but I don't know. The rings are iconic, that there are five, that seems iconic, but I don't think of the *colors* as particularly iconic. So when I got the answers, I just thought "oh, is that so?" Not, "aha!" I'm not even sure I could tell what color the Mastercard circles are. I sincerely would've told you that one of them is orange. But red and yellow, you say? OK. I know that the traffic light is red yellow green. *That* is iconic. The others are true enough, so the puzzle is valid enough. But it just didn't have any zing to it. More like an odd kind of trivia test. I do love the grid shape—the unusual mirror symmetry, the unusual 16x14 dimensions. But the only answer that really made me sit up and say "ooh" was DEATH GRIP (33D: Super-tight grasp). The theme is very interesting, but it wasn't funny or exciting to solve. Curious. Interesting. Those are the only words I have for it.

I had -STER MAT and still no idea. "Is there a ... TOASTER MAT?" But I also had -IC RINGS and no idea, which is less explicable. I blame the port. But honestly the "black" ring was what got me. I just couldn't fathom how "black" fit in. So I was slowish. I was also slowish on a bunch of two-part answers where the first parts seemed like they could've been a lot of things. Like "AW, NUTS" and "WHY, YES" and DART OFF. I also had issues with WAR DRAMA, which ... hmm. I know "war movies," that seems like a genre. But most of those are dramas, right? There really aren't that many war comedies or war horror films. I think the "drama" is kind of implied by the "war," so WAR DRAMA feels slightly off, slightly redundant. "War movie" googles much better. But WAR DRAMA googles reasonably well too. I dunno. I do know that HAHAS remains absurd as a plural, but overall this grid is very clean. The only thing I flat-out didn't know was PIRELLI, which I actually do know, or have at least heard of, but I wrote in BORELLI, which I think is a kind of pasta. It's at least pasta-adjacent. AW, NUTS, it's "Barilla" pasta. Is there a famous *singer* BORELLI? Ah, man, that's Andrea BOCELLI! Which rhymes with "vermicelli," which brings us back to pasta.

My family is having a voluble conversation about religion and death and glass-blowing so I have to go see how all those things fit together. Sorry I didn't feel the Zing with this one. I hope you did.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Constructor: Pao Roy

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium

THEME: DOT THE I'S (56A: Pay attention to details ... or a hint to filling in seven of this puzzle's squares) — a "DOT" rebus in which the "DOT" square always appears above the letter "I"; in the Acrosses, the letters "DOT" are part of the answers, but in the Downs, the "DOT" is just supposed to represent an actual dot (i.e. "."):

Theme answers:

[DOT][DOT][DOT] (10A: And so on)
PALE BLUE [DOT] (20A: Iconic Voyager 1 photograph taken 3.7 billion miles from Earth)
POLKA [DOT] DRESSES (26A: They're spotted on Lucille Ball and Minnie Mouse)
CONNECTS THE [DOT]S (43A: Begins to see a pattern)
[DOT] COM CRASH (Turn-of-the-century financial crisis)

Word of the Day: PANGAEA (9D: Landmass once surrounded by the superocean Panthalassa) —

Pangaea or Pangea(/pænˈdʒiː.ə/) was a supercontinent that existed during the late Paleozoic and early Mesozoic eras. It assembled from the earlier continental units of Gondwana, Euramerica and Siberia during the Carboniferous approximately 335 million years ago, and began to break apart about 200 million years ago, at the end of the Triassic and beginning of the Jurassic. In contrast to the present Earth and its distribution of continental mass, Pangaea was centred on the equator and surrounded by the superocean Panthalassa and the Paleo-Tethys and subsequent Tethys Oceans. Pangaea is the most recent supercontinent to have existed and the first to be reconstructed by geologists. (wikipedia)

• • •

Hello once again from Thanksgiving Vacation. My mom is busy in the kitchen roasting pecans for the pie and trying figure out the recipe for cranberry sauce, and since the kitchen is basically adjacent to my writing space, I can see I am going to have some difficulty keeping myself focused on the puzzle. I just heard my mom say to her longtime partner, "I need to keep my mind focused on what I'm doing," and, well, yes, same. I'll do my best. And yet I keep hearing him making "suggestions" to my mom about how to cook things, did he just meet her!? (reader, he did not). I mean, you can talk to my mom about anything, she is very open-minded, but the last thing you wanna do is offer unsolicited advice over her shoulder as she's cooking. Vermouth in the cranberries!? This is no time for improvisation! The woman knows what she is doing and is Not about to take suggestions from the peanut gallery. Now mom is making fun of the "certified biodynamic" label on the cranberry packaging, good for her. OK, sorry, I know, puzzle, puzzle, OK, here we go ... puzzle! Nope, her partner is now singing "Alice's Restaurant," so I'm gonna have to pause for a bit until that subsides. . . OK, here we go. . . now!

The theme was very easy to uncover, and as soon as I uncovered it, I thought "Oh I've definitely seen this theme before. And recently too." Turns out I was both right and not quite right. The DOT THE I'S theme we got earlier this year (Thursday, Feb. 10, 2022) was not i-dentical to this one, but it was close. In that one, the letter "I" turned completely into a "DOT" (so "dotting the i's" meant literally turning i's into "DOT"s). Here, of course, the "DOT"s appear above the i's, which makes more sense on a literal level, but was not nearly so interesting as the weirder, more complicated February version. What both puzzles have in common, admirably, is that the theme applies to literally every "I" in the puzzle, not just the "I"s that appear in specially designated theme answers. But in this one, "DOT" always appears as the word "dot," whereas in the February one, the letters "DOT" were mostly buried inside longer answers (like YOU DO THE MATH and TORPEDO TUBE). Today's puzzle just gave you phrases with the word "DOT" in them. Less interesting, though DOT COM CRASH is pretty snazzy, and DOT DOT DOT is a nice thematic flourish (even if you would never actually do the "I" in IRA (always a capital) (10D: Nest egg option, for short). Overall, this puzzle was fine, but it felt like a pale (blue dot) version of the very very similar puzzle that came out earlier this year.

Speaking of déjà vu, did we not just have this clue for LOLA (14A: Actress Kirke of "Mozart in the Jungle")?? (we did); and HSBC in exactly the same grid position!? (we did). I thought we had PALE BLUE DOT very recently as well, but that was actually well over a year ago now. My favorite thing about today's puzzle was either WEIRD AL, or seeing the word HORNY (13A: Aroused, informally) just one day after I used the word "HORNY" in my discussion of RANDY. I also like that PALE BLUE DOT very nearly T-bones PANGAEA. Those two have a nice whole-wide-world kind of synergy. I also like seeing that it still remains next to impossible for clue writers to lay off the cutesy "?" clues for ELOPE (64A: Not get reception?). Some things never change. Like mom's Thanksgiving dinner. Never changes. Always perfect. I need to go prepare (i.e. sleep / fast). Enjoy your day, whatever you eat.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

P.S. CSNY stands for Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young (52D: Folk-rock quartet whose name derives from its members' last initials)

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Constructor: Simon Marotte

Relative difficulty: Easy

THEME: none

Word of the Day: ADIA Victoria (51D: ___ Victoria, singer known or her "gothic blues" style) —

Adia Victoria (born July 22, 1986) is an American singer and songwriter. In addition to playing and writing music, she also writes poetry. She is currently based in Nashville. [...] Victoria is sometimes associated with Americana music, she has distanced herself from the genre, saying, "I’m not an Americana artist. I have no interest in being appropriated by that genre." However, her position seems to have softened as, in 2022, she performed at a nominations event hosted by the Americana Music Association and was nominated for their Emerging Artist of the Year award at their 21st awards ceremony. [...] Rolling Stone describes her as "PJ Harvey covering Loretta Lynn at a haunted debutante ball." (wikipedia) [it's pronounced 'uh-DEE-uh' I believe]

• • •

I am way too full of Thanksgiving to be of much use to anyone, for anything, but I'll give this a (short) shot. It thought it was decent. Just fine. Very easy. All of the difficulty came from a couple of single-letter errors that I made along the way. The first, and worst, of these was writing in PANCHO, as in "PANCHO & Lefty," rather than PONCHO, as in raincoat, at 39A: Garment that's pulled over the head. That "A" absolutely killed me, as I took one look at MSA- at 33D: Annual bodybuilding competition won 10 times by Iris Kyle and wrote in MS. AMERICA. Sounded right, felt right, and ALIT (60A: Came down) "confirmed" the last "A," so I was really locked in. Total amount of time spent extricating myself from this whole probably didn't amount to much, but considering how easy the puzzle was otherwise, it felt like a major hold-up. I also wrote in IPAD instead of IPOD (of course) (32A: Touch, for one), so I had 27D: Performer whose face is rarely seen as a BAD-something or other (instead of the correct BODY DOUBLE). Beyond that, the only issues I had were parsing / spelling problems on the slangier answers. I DON'T felt straightforward, so I was a little hesitant with WANNA, but it worked out (6D: Whiner's "You can't make me!"). Later, I couldn't stop reading the answer at 11D: "Beats me" as "I GOT NO ___," and since the blank was four letters, I wanted only CLUE or IDEA, both of which were clearly wrong (the answer was "I GOT NOTHIN'"). I also had some hesitancy / uncertainty in that same corner with [___ party] (POOL) and the front end of 10D: Enlist (ROPE IN). I think I wrote SIGN IN at first. But these were all really minor frustrations. Mostly I tore through this, even with the Thanksgiving Torpor upon me.

Really hate seeing SCUM at all, ever (45A: Film about fish tanks?). It's just a repulsive word, no matter the clue. A jarring tone shift in an otherwise light and breezy puzzle. Loved seeing PRAIRIE DOG, as I have loved seeing PRAIRIE DOGs all week here in Colorado. We've been walking in various nature preserves and around various lakes and any time there's a large expanse of flat open ground: prairie dogs. Highly social, highly alert, highly adorable, occasionally hilarious. One of them started screaming loudly as I came walking up the path in its direction, but the other PRAIRIE DOG who was with him just looked up from his digging, took one look at me, and went "nah, that's nothing," and went back to digging. So the first guy stopped screaming, but he did not stop staring. Extreme "I'm watching you, mister" stare. There are very large raptors in the area, so those prairie dogs have a lot to watch out for. Speaking of raptors, we saw any number of hawks, not one but two bald eagles, and, best of all, a great horned owl that looked just like part of a tree until its head moved. Eventually we got too close and it took off in silent, gorgeous, probably murderous flight. Spectacular. Anyway, it's back to Binghamton tomorrow, where there are no PRAIRIE DOGs, though there are bald eagles, and probably owls, if I'm just attentive enough to notice. Last word on the puzzle: nothing really Grabbed me, but it was a solid overall effort, and I really admired the clue on NIGHT SHIFT(30D: Late assignment). Perfect clue, perfect misdirection. I don't think anything requires any special explanation, so I'll sign off now. See you tomorrow, assuming all my plane stuff goes OK.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

P.S. OK, a few explanations, just in case: "bones" are slang for "dice," hence 14A: Funny bones? = LOADED DICE. And IAN FLEMING created James Bond, hence the [Bond issuer?] clue. Swim and track MEETs have different segments or "heats," which makes a MEET (today) a [Heated competition?]

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Constructor: Kanyin Ajayi

Relative difficulty: Very Easy

THEME: maybe?— there are some suggestive symmetries, but theme? I don't think so ...

Word of the Day: Paulo COELHO (35A: Paulo who wrote "The Alchemist") —

Paulo Coelho de Souza (/ˈkwɛl.juː, kuˈɛl-, -joʊ/, Portuguese: [ˈpawlu kuˈeʎu]; born 24 August 1947) is a Brazilian lyricist and novelist and a member of the Brazilian Academy of Letters since 2002. His novel The Alchemist became an international best-seller and he has published 28 more books since then. (wikipedia)

• • •

A literary puzzle for me, a literature professor, on my birthday (true story). I absolutely crushed this puzzle, as many of you will have as well, since it is basically a Tuesday / Wednesday-level themeless. Hmmm, perhaps if you are completely unfamiliar with "WIDE SARGASSO SEA" (16A: Jean Rhys novel that's a response to "Jane Eyre") and "THINGS FALL APART" (56A: Chinua Achebe novel that's a response to "Heart of Darkness"), the puzzle might've played more like a Saturday for you, but those titles are CANTERBURY TALES-level familiar to me, so whoosh, I lit them up. I really liked the literary pairing there, one grid-spanning post-colonial novel echoing the other. But that wasn't the only symmetrical echo. HIT OR MISS gets paired with RIDE OR DIE, and then there are the TWOSOMES who TIE A KNOT. I know, technically the term is "tie the knot," but I still choose to see this as a mini matrimonial theme, which gets TIE A KNOT a pass on its EAT A SANDWICH-ness. TIE A KNOT is (k)not good, but as part of a matrimonial twosome with TWOSOMES, it magically becomes good. So you've got yourself a themeless puzzle here, but there's a certain attention to symmetrical pairings that gives it some semi-thematic playfulness. I really liked it, on the whole.

LOOPER was by far the hardest thing in this grid (45D: Key piece of an overlock sewing machine). I wrote in LOOMER at first because .... uh .... "sewing machine" and LOOM seemed to have something to do with one another, clothing production-wise. Thankfully, I knew that the Chinua Achebe title was not "THINGS FALL ... A MART!" so I was able to change LOOMER to LOOPER—which is a reasonably well-known movie, directed by Rian Johnson, whose "Glass Onion" just opened this weekend (so excited to see it!). I would've loved a movie clue for "LOOPER," but instead we get this somewhat obscure sewing machine terminology ... and it still doesn't really slow me down in any appreciable way. There were some other things I didn't know. Gemma CHAN, for instance (40A: "Crazy Rich Asians" actress Gemma). But crosses made it clear it would be CHEN or CHAN, and then COCOA sealed the deal (it's CHAN!). I had SAN before SAO, but that didn't last long. I had COEHLO before COELHO, but that didn't last long. I forgot Kyle LOWRY existed, but then I remembered (couldn't tell you a thing about him, but I follow basketball enough to know his name) (26A: Six-time N.B.A. All-Star Kyle). If there were other pauses or hesitations in my solving experience, they were minor. Overall, this puzzle was SASSy and I enjoyed it.

Bullet points:

1A: Influential book sellers? (BLURBS)— this is a very good clue. I hate (most) BLURBS—they're (mostly) embarrassingly similar in their hyperbolic / cliché language. And do they really "sell" books!? Sigh. OK. Anyway, my feelings about the blurb industry aside, this clue is good.
23A: Finish that's rough to the touch (STUCCO) — sincerely tried to make STUBBLE work.
3D: Locale in Dante's "Inferno" (UNDERWORLD) — so ... Inferno, then. "Inferno" means "Hell," which is the UNDERWORLD. So this is like cluing HELL as [Locale in Dante's "Hell"]. Unless Dante's "Inferno" is really a story about the criminalUNDERWORLD and I've been teaching it wrong all these decades ... entirely possible.
44A: Bugs's archenemy (ELMER)— OK, you're stretching "arch-" pretty thin here. ELMER is a dope who never poses any genuine threat to Bugs. This is like saying The Harlem Globetrotters'"archenemy" is The Washington Generals. Come on.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Extinct megafauna species whose name derives from the Greek for "breast tooth" / MON 11-7-22 / Why the troubled look / Stage name for rapper Tracy Lauren Marrow / Like thick-crust, rectangular pizza / Kind of phone signal that's nearly obsolete

Colombian cornmeal cake / TUE 11-8-22 / Award-winning Chinese artist/activist / First noble gas alphabetically / Activity tracked by the Nest or mySunPower app / Bad-tempered and combative

Mattel acquisition of 1997 / WED 11-9-22 / Prophetess in the Torah / 1987 thriller featuring the same characters as TV's "Californication" / 1990 action film featuring the same characters as the film "Collateral"

Beekeeper Shavitz who lent his name to a popular lip balm / THU 11-10-22 / Small shell-shaped confection / Dmitri formulator of periodic law / Radisson competitor / Ugluk or Gorbag in The Lord of the Rings / Rupiah spenders

Certain cookie spinoff / SAT 11-12-22 / Travel for someone who's feeling bad / Actor Siriboe of Queen Sugar / Southwestern city that produces most of the U.S.'s Snickers bars / Platform for a modern job interview

Lab-engineered fare, facetiously / SUN 11-13-22 / 1993 R&B hit with the lyric "Keep playin' that song all night" / Mesopotamian metropolis / Tree of the custard apple family / Brand name-checked in Paul Simon's "Kodachrome"

Warp drive power source on Star Trek / MON 11-14-22 / Many a TikTok user informally / Italian mojito garnish / Sidekick of Mario and Luigi / What choosy moms choose according to ads / Playback option in brief

Journalist podcaster Rehm / WED 11-16-22 / Indie band known for their high-concept viral music vidoes / Obsession with being published / Biblical unit of weight / Venue with a token-based currency / Giant Brain in 1946 news

Toy from a place that no longer exists / FRI 11-18-22 / La Rana Kermit's name in the Latin American version of Sesame Street / Resort hotel with the slogan This is how we Vegas / Woodworking tool similar to a kitchen zester / Twin daughter on Black-ish / Raccoon humorously

Grenade in gaming lingo / SAT 11-19-22 / Whirling toon familiarly / Fed on the sly? / Quirky old fellas / Birds that rarely swim despite having webbed feet / Half of a Polynesian locale

Autotumulophiles / SUN 11-20-22 / Shelves for knickknacks / Word repeated in a classic Energizer slogan / Old The beer of quality beer sloganeer in brief

Goddesslike pop or opera star / MON 11-21-22 / Requiring rare knowledge / Musical symbol resembling an ampersand / QB protection squads

One-named satirist of ancient Greece / TUE 11-22-22 / Moth's cocoon phase / Chinese dialect spoken mainly in Hunan province

TV's Grey and House for short / WED 11-23-22 / TV series with a Time Lord informally / Test taken in a tube in brief

Victoria singer known for her gothic blues style / FRI 11-25-22 / Coffee-brewing portmanteau / Biryani base / Site of 2022's Woman Life Freedom protests / Costumer's measurement / Annual bodybuilding competition won 10 times by Iris Kyle / Title girl of a 1957 Dale Hawkins hit

Six-time N.B.A. All-Star Kyle / SAT 11-26-22 / Key piece of an overlock sewing machine / "Crazy Rich Asians" actress Gemma / Mountain whose name means I burn / The first Black American sorority in brief