Rex Parker Does the NYT Crossword Puzzle

Constructor: Adam Wagner

Relative difficulty: Medium

THEME:"Going Off on a Tangent"— the five theme answers are BENT OUT / OF SHAPE (85D: With 86-Down, very upset ... like the answers to five of this puzzle's clues?). That is: the themers have two elements: the clued element literally goes off on a tangent (i.e. zags diagonally up and to the right at the end); the unclued element continues straight (like a conventional Across answer) *and* spells out a shape (CIRCLE, HEART, TRIANGLE, STAR, SQUARE). So the bent (clued) answer literally gets BENT OUT / OF SHAPE (i.e. appears to emerge from a word that is also a shape ("shape" words are in red below):

Theme answers:

INNER CITY (22A: Urban area typically with the tallest buildings) / INNER CIRCLE
OPEN HEARING (38A: Public court proceeding) / OPEN HEART
RIGHT TRACK (61A: What you're on when you're making progress) / RIGHT TRIANGLE
SUPERSTORM (83A: Major concern for a meteorologist) / SUPERSTAR
LEMON SQUEEZER (101A: Certain juicing need) / LEMON SQUARE

Word of the Day: KEENAN Allen (43D: Star N.F.L. wide receiver Allen) —

Keenan Alexander Allen (born April 27, 1992) is an American football wide receiver for the Los Angeles Chargers of the National Football League (NFL). He played college football at California before leaving after his junior year. He was drafted by the Chargers in the third round of the 2013 NFL Draft. Allen won multiple rookie honors after setting Chargers' records for receptions and receiving yards by a rookie. In 2017, he was named the NFL Comeback Player of the Year. [ed: He's also a 5x Pro Bowler] (wikiepdia)

• • •

Maybe there's some kind of letdown that I'm having here at the tail end of Thanksgiving vacation / birthday week, because wow I found this one very, very tedious. There are individual answers here and there, like WHIZBANG and maybe BONG HIT, that offer some entertaining moments along the way, but for the most part this was a slog. The theme was so depressingly void of interest, so impossibly one-note. So ... these Across answers go (per the title) "off on a tangent"—that is, they kick up to the NE, on a diagonal, at their tail ends. But ... why? To what end? Those "tangents" are just ... nothing. They're random letters. The letters do not spell anything. They do not relate to one another. They are completely random and arbitrary letters, as far as I can see (-TY! -ING! -ACK!). If those tangent-going letters do anything ... anything at all, I apologize for being unable to see it. So there's this inherent pointlessness. Or seeming pointlessness. Then there's the unclued answers that just keep heading Across; that is, only the "off on a tangent" answer is clued—the regular only-horizontal answer is just ... a plausible answer. With no clue. None. Zero. This is fun how? I guess the revealer is supposed to tell us how—all of the "bent" answers (the clued answers) arise out of a word that is also a "shape"—that is, the clued answers are bent (got it) "out of (a) shape" (i.e. the bend gives you one answer, but the continuing (unclued!) Across answer turns into a shape (CIRCLE, HEART (!?!), TRIANGLE, STAR (!?!?!), SQUARE ). This concept was totally invisible to me until well after I'd started this write-up. I thought BENT OUT / OF SHAPE was just another (redundant) way of expressing that the clued themers went "off on a tangent." The presence of actual shapes in the (unclued) straight-Across answers ... just didn't register. Probably because, as I've said, many time, parenthetically and unparenthetically, those straight-Across themers are Un Clued! So how *can* they make an impact!?!? If you immediately grasped the "out of shape" bit, you are a more perspicacious solver than I am. Or you're just less full of cocktail / chocolate cake.

That corner with the revealer ... woof. Tough, precisely because of the revealer (a two-part cross-reference in a tightly enclosed space). If you don't know the revealer (and how could you without considerable help from crosses), it's difficult to get traction. PAVED ROAD was way too generically (and boringly) clued (104A: Residential construction project). Then I wanted EATS for SUPS (!?!) (109A: Has a meal) (nothing in that clue quite gets at the quaintness of SUPS). And if the Bruins aren't UCLA, shrug, no idea (I *have* heard of the BOSton Bruins, just ... less so). But the difficulty of the corner is truly beside the point—the point is, this theme (at least the "shape" angle) is a tree falling in a forest with no one to hear it. And then when you do hear it, it sounds mostly like a sad trombone.

DANK memes? Whaaaaat year is it? I haven't heard that expression in what feels like a decade, but is probably just five years or so. But five years may as well be *two* decades in Internet Time. Woof. AGAPE and AGHAST are not only both in the grid, but practically on top of each other. And ugh x 100 to the very concept of "don't yuck my yum," which is for sensitive babies who can't bear the fact that some people don't like what they like. Grow up. And stop talking baby talk. Also, more importantly, YUCKED, in the past tense, is about as ugly a thing as I've ever seen in a grid. Just nonsense. The worst thing about the fill, though, was the EWAN / VAN crossing. Why in the world would you cross names at a vowel like that, when neither of the names is household, and one of the names (VAN) could Easily have been clued in a non-name way!? That square pretty much had to be an "A" since is the only name you can plausibly make out of EW-N, and I can kinda picture VAN Jones, now that I think of it (I LOATHE 24-hr news and stopped watching it completely after the 2016 election). But it's an awful editorial decision to clue VAN as a name there, esp. if your EWAN is of the non-McGregor variety.

No idea what a "Pitch Perfect" film series is, so I needed every cross for KAY (43A: ___ Cannon, creator of the "Pitch Perfect" film series). Looks like these were exceedingly popular movies of a type I would never ever see. Sometimes I am in touch, but frequently I am out. Ah well. I know ELENA Ochoa (golfer) but this not-quite ELENA (i.e. ELLEN) Ochoa, that name threw me (14D: Discovery astronaut Ochoa) (ha, joke's on me: the golfer is actually LORENA Ochoa). As for UPZONE ... is "urban planning lingo" actually a lingo that we're supposed to know now? Seems astonishingly, uh, narrow. What is it "up" from? What does "up" mean here? You can't even infer it very easily. Is "more high-density housing and mixed-use development" good? It sounds pretty good? Is it ... up? There are surely answers to these questions, but this is a term that is both too specialized and not immediately clear enough in its meaning. Just because it appears in some wordlist / dictionary doesn't make it good. The first hit I get when I google it says "Upzoning is just what it sounds like: growing a little taller to have more homes and businesses in our communities." But the clue says nothing about height (of buildings). I would never have considered that the UP in UPZONE meant "growing a little taller," i.e. literal height. The clue is no help. If you're going to introduce professional argot of a highly specialized type, the least you could do is clue it in a way that makes the term make sense. This write-up was exhausting. Just explaining the theme, ugh. I need sleep. See you Monday.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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Constructor: Chloe Revery

Relative difficulty: Challenging (for a Monday!)

THEME: HOPPING MAD (62A: Really miffed ... or a hint to the circled letters) — words meaning "mad" (appearing inside circled squares) "hop" over a black square, from the end of one Across answer to the beginning of the successive Across answer:

Theme answers:

GHOST CHILI / VIDI
PARFUM / INGENUES
SHEBANG / RYE SEED
AU REVOIR / AT EASE

Word of the Day: AMFAR (5A: Org. for H.I.V. prevention and study) —

amfAR, the Foundation for AIDS Research, known until 2005 as the American Foundation for AIDS Research, is an international nonprofit organization dedicated to the support of AIDS research, HIV prevention, treatment education, and the advocacy of AIDS-related public policy. (wikipedia)

• • •

Loved this nifty, tight, Monday-type theme, but wow this did not play "Monday" for me at all. The theme, yes, the content, yipes. Trouble all over the top of the grid. I'll start with AMFAR, which I remember, vaguely, from a long time ago, when A.I.D.S. was more regularly in the news, but I have not seen that acronym in what feels like forever. Totally valid answer, but not Monday-easy for me. GHOST CHILI, also tough for me. CHILI, OK, but I never think about the GHOST CHILI ... feels almost mythical. "1 million on the Scoville scale"!? Not an everyday thing, by a long shot. Again, fine answer, but I had to struggle for it. FBI FILE, toughish to parse (7D: Certain collection of criminal evidence and documents). Even AT CAMP (one of the weaker answers) felt tough to come up with without a bunch of crosses (5D: Spending time away from parents for the summer, say). I am way more familiar with the MARS ROVER than the MOON ROVER, so that was also tough (3D: Wheeled vehicle designed to function in low gravity). But the toughest, and ugliest, and absolute worst of all non-Mondayness was SIG EP (1D: Skull-and-crossbones fraternity, for short). Ugh. A frat? An abbreviated frat? At 1-Down!? On a Monday!? So yucky. I wrote in SIGMA and figured that had to be it. Good enough. But *nope*. SIG EP? I'm sure I've seen it before, but fraternities and sororities ... maybe it's my particular aversion, but I just can't keep any of them straight or make myself care at all about my inability to keep them straight. The idea that I should know the slang term for some frat ... something about the very idea sets my teeth on edge (is that the expression? "teeth on edge"?). Truly a terrible answer on any day, but especially off-putting at the beginning of a Monday puzzle.

The thing is ... you can see how the constructor got trapped into SIG EP. You can't start filling your puzzle with --G-P in place and not feel at least a little trapped. If it had been me, I'd've made it DIG UP and started filling From There (I see that DIG appears elsewhere in the current grid, but that's an easy fix). The entire NW would likely have been different, but it would've been worth it just to make the egregious SIG EP disappear. I did a quick teardown and rebuilt with DIG UP in that same place, but with those two themers locked in, and MOON ROVER pretty well stuck in place, your options up there (short of a complete teardown) are very limited. My version has APHRA Behn in it—she's the most important English woman writer / playwright of the 17th century and in a just world, both her first and last names would appear much, much more often in crosswords ... but I freely admit that APHRA is not Monday-worthy either. Still, I much prefer this.

Anyway, it wasn't the tougher-than-usualness that was annoying, it was specifically SIG EP that I wanted to smash into pieces and throw in the garbage. But the theme, mwah, it's very good. So well conceived (as opposed to WELL AIMED, which I don't really believe is a very strong standalone thing (34D: On the mark, as an insult or a dart)). Beyond SIG EP, the fill is at least average in quality. Nothing much to complain about there. This puzzle appears to be a debut, and at least at the level of theme concept and execution, it's impressive. Those. circled words do mean "mad" and those letters do "hop," so what more do you want?

Seemed like the grid was pushing the French a little hard: PARFUM *and* AU REVOIR in themer positions, plus the French-ish INGENUES. I'll allow it, but that's about as much French as you wanna throw at a solver on a Monday with a not-specifically-French theme. I could do without seeing SNAPE or any Potter stuff ever again, but we've been over this. I thought FIONA was MOANA, my bad. Again, I should really read clues all the way to the end (58A: DreamWorks princess who remains an ogress after true love's kiss). You can't tell me the owl says WHOO one week and then turn around a couple weeks later and tell me it's WHO again, come on (34A: Owl's question?). Not much else to say about this one; the theme was great, and though the NW corner showed some grid strain (from the theme) and felt overly tough for a Monday, the rest of the grid played just fine. Promising work, for sure. See you tomorrow.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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Constructor: David Rockow

Relative difficulty: Easy (very)

THEME: FEATHER (37A: Element of plumage ... and a feature shared by every answer crossing this one) — seven BIRDS (1D: Tweeters) form a makeshift FLOCK (51D: Gathering of 1-Down, like that found in the center of this puzzle) at the middle of the grid:

The FLOCK:

FALCON (37D: Its peregrine variety is the world's fastest avian)
WREN (28D: Small brown passerine that holds its tail upright)
RHEA (24D: Ratite featured on Uruguayan currency)
KESTREL (25D: American raptor that's the size of a mourning dove)
HAWK (38D: Iconic metaphor for keen-eyed watchfulness)
NENE (35D: Goose that might nest on volcanic ash)
CONDOR (19D: Its Andean variety has the largest wingspan among all raptors)

Word of the Day: KNOSSOS (22A: City in ancient Crete with renowned labyrinth) —

Knossos (also Cnossos, both pronounced /(kə)ˈnɒsɒs, -səs/; Ancient Greek: Κνωσός, romanized: Knōsós, pronounced [knɔː.sós]; Linear B: 𐀒𐀜𐀰Ko-no-so) is the largest Bronze Age archaeological site on Crete and has been called Europe's oldest city.
Settled as early as the Neolithic period, the name Knossos survives from ancient Greek references to the major city of Crete. The palace of Knossos eventually became the ceremonial and political centre of the Minoan civilization and culture. The palace was abandoned at some unknown time at the end of the Late Bronze Age, c. 1380–1100 BC; the reason is unknown, but one of the many disasters that befell the palace is generally put forward.
In the First Palace Period (around 2000 BC), the urban area reached a size of as many as 18,000 people. (wikipedia)

• • •

Well this is weird, so it's got that going for it. I do love birds—love them—and so I am always going to be generally warmly inclined to a bird-themed puzzle. This one is mainly just ... a bunch of bird names smushed together. And a couple of those bird names (RHEA, NENE) are straight-up crosswordese, such that you'd never really recognize them as thematic elements. I want to say they don't count ... but of course they do. It's just that you're not apt to see them as special, given that you see them all the time. It's weird ... nothing in this theme feels particularly thematic *except* the smushing. I mean, what've you got, fill-wise? BIRDS? FLOCK? FEATHER? And then the birds, of course, but only one of those gets up to even seven letters long (which is also my favorite bird in the grid—KESTREL! Pretty sure we saw one just last week in central Colorado, sitting on top of a leafless tree ... watching ... Raptors!). My point is that none of the thematic stuff really feels thematic except through the process of smushing, which this puzzle is calling a FLOCK, but LOL the KESTREL scoffs at the idea of flying in FLOCKs with these other birds. Hell, the KESTREL would eat a damn WREN (probably). But then I guess you couldn't very well have your FLOCK be WREN WREN WREN WREN WREN WREN WREN now could you? It's a funny idea, this rag-tag FLOCK. I don't like that FLOCK (the last Across answer) comes after BIRDS (the first). Feels backwards. Also, really don't like that BIRDS is clued as [Tweeters]. None of the birds in that FLOCK is a "Tweeter." Again, the KESTREL scoffs, as she will. Don't like SEED thrown in as "bonus" answer (better and more elegant to keep the non-theme parts of your grid bird-free), just as I don't like trying to pass off PEACE CORPS and URBAN AREAS as bird-related (a strettttttttttch). Oh, and your longest answers (grid-spanners!) have *nothing* to do with the theme? Weird. But I do love those answers, so maybe I'll just think of this as an easy themeless with a dense bird center, and for a Tuesday, that's enough.

I did think, about halfway through this puzzle, before I had any idea of the theme, "man this is a birdy puzzle, the constructor must really like birds, cool." Hey, did you know that in "HORSE WITH NO NAME" (10D: Desert wanderer's mount in a 1972 hit by America) the wanderer is in a desert where there are "plants and BIRDS and rocks and things"!? ("things" always makes me laugh, wtf, did you just run out of vocabulary?). Seems like if you really Really wanted, you could've clued that one as a themer as well. It's at least as bird-y as URBAN AREAS, come on. COOL AS A CUCUMBER might've been harder (3D: Unruffled). Hmm. [Kestrel-like]? I don't know. Harder to turn that one birdward. (Unless "Unruffled" already suggests FEATHERs ... hmmm ...)

Didn't hesitate much at all while solving this one. I took a beat or two to remember KNOSSOS. I wrote in IBEX before ORYX (31D: African antelope) and SUET before SEED. CUSP probably gave me more trouble than anything else in the grid, and the kind of trouble I'm talking about there was negligible (52D: Edge). The grid seems very clean, especially considering how thematically dense it is in the middle. CONED was the only thing that made me squint and tilt my head dubiously (43D: Funnel-shaped), but it's word-y enough. Despite the strangeness of theme execution—or maybe because of it—I ended up enjoying this one more than not. I'll take this over a standard punny / corny / weak-laugh Tuesday any day (especially Tuesday).

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

P.S. I forgot to praise "SAY WHEN!," my actual favorite answer in the grid (27A: Words from a pourer). Some good colloquial zing amidst all the bird kerfuffle.

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Constructor: Addison Snell

Relative difficulty: If there were a day *before* Monday, that is how easy this was ... bizarre

THEME: 4K? K4? — four examples of what "K" can stand for:

Theme answers:

STRIKEOUT (20A: K, in baseball)
THOUSAND (27A: K, in a salary listing)
BLACK INK (!?) (42A: K, on a printer cartridge)
POTASSIUM (53A: K, on the periodic table)

Word of the Day: STANDPIPE (34D: Vertical water conduit) —

In North America, a standpipe is a type of rigid water piping which is built into multi-story buildings in a vertical position, or into bridges in a horizontal position, to which fire hoses can be connected, allowing manual application of water to the fire. Within the context of a building or bridge, a standpipe serves the same purpose as a fire hydrant.
In many other countries, hydrants in streets are below ground level. Fire trucks carry standpipes and key, and there are bars on the truck. The bar is used to lift a cover in the road, exposing the hydrant. The standpipe is then "sunk" into the hydrant, and the hose is connected to the exposed ends of the standpipe. The bar is then combined with the key, and is used to turn the hydrant on and off. (wikipedia)

• • •

This may be one of those days where someone else has to show me some cool thematic element that I missed, because sitting here now, at 4:30am, just after finishing the puzzle, all I see are "four things 'K' can stand for," and that just doesn't seem like much. Worse, the theme is not just thin, it's got one theme answer that feels very, very forced—very "Which of these Four is Not Like The Other"—i.e. BLACK INK. The other three "K"s are iconic ... whereas I have replace BLACK INK in my (two!) printers for *decades* and never noticed that "K" stood for anything. I'm absolutely guessing here, but I bet that if you ask any ordinary person to name four things that "K" can stand for, they can probably name ... three. The three non-BLACK INK answers that are in this puzzle. But BLACK INK, yeesh. OK, if you say so. That is, I'm sure you're right, but ... no. But even that weird version of "K"—hell, even STANDPIPE (no idea)—couldn't get this puzzle up to a respectable level of difficulty. I was stunned at how easily I moved through the grid at first. I got every clue I looked at, without hesitation, from 1A: Target of modern splicing (GENE) all the way to here:

That is, I wrote in SEEKS at 22A: Looks (SEEMS) and quickly found out I was wrong—but even *that* wasn't "hesitation" so much as a brief erasure and correction. I didn't actually completely balk at an answer until I was staring at -STY (48D: Maybe too amorous). My brain went "TASTY?" And then I shrugged and kept going. STANDPIPE was by far the oddest thing in the grid (I wanted both STEAM PIPE and STOVE PIPE before I got it), and even it did very little to stop my hurtling forward momentum. As usual, the "word with / before / after / before and after"-type clue baffled me (43D: Word with spare or sea = CHANGE) so I couldn't flow easily into the SW, but I just jumped in, got OMAN no problem, and was done a few seconds later. I have no idea what was supposed to make this a Wednesday as opposed to a Monday. Maybe BLACK INK? STANDPIPE? BERM!? (I don't know how I even know that term) (38A: Road shoulder). This was a ho-hum, 20th-century grid, at both the thematic and overall fill levels, and it was easier than any NYTXW Wednesday should ever be. I know they're deliberately making the puzzle easier over time (that has become self-evident), probably so that more of their many many subscribers can feel "successful" on a regular basis, and OK, capitalism, whatever ... but it's starting to feel a little shameful.

There's not even any interesting fill to comment on. I liked BUZZSAWS and DIRT CHEAP very much. The rest of it was mostly just there. Clean enough, no strong complaints. Just kind of 3-4-5 Blah, all over.

Happy end of November!

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

P.S. Lots of people weighed in on the alleged technical inaccuracy of yesterday's clue for DNA (6D: Molecule whose structure was discovered by Rosalind Franklin). The most level-headed of such responses came to me via email, and here it is:

Hey Rex,
Scientist here. The clue for DNA (6 dn) "molecule whose structure was discovered by Rosalind Franklin" is wrong. Besides the sort of pedantic point that structures are not 'discovered', Franklin took an X-ray of DNA that was important and for which she certainly deserved to have been given more credit. But she didn't solve the structure, as far as anyone knows. I suppose you could argue that giving a woman more credit than she deserves is ok karma-wise and that taking some credit away from James Watson is even better. But in the end I think keeping to the historical record as best we can is the right approach. My three cents. ~T.B.

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Constructor: Daniel Mauer

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium (very easy theme, with somewhat challenging fill at times)

THEME: ANTICI / PATION (1A: First half of this puzzle's theme ... / 65A: ... and the end of the theme (finally!))— phrases associated with anticipation:

Theme answers:

"ALMOST THERE ..." (24A: ...)
"WAIT FOR IT ..." (33A: ...)
"NOT QUITE YET ..." (51A: ...)

Word of the Day: BASKing shark (63A: Behave like a certain surface-feeding shark) —

The basking shark (Cetorhinus maximus) is the second-largest living shark and fish, after the whale shark, and one of three plankton-eating shark species, along with the whale shark and megamouth shark. Adults typically reach 7.9 m (26 ft) in length. It is usually greyish-brown, with mottled skin, with the inside of the mouth being white in color. The caudal fin has a strong lateral keel and a crescent shape. Other common names include bone shark, elephant shark, sail-fish, and sun-fish. In Orkney, it is commonly known as hoe-mother (sometimes contracted to homer), meaning "the mother of the pickled dog-fish". (wikipedia)

• • •

Well, ironically ...

The whole premise gets blow apart pretty early if you are able to see what the "first half" of the puzzle's theme is the first half *of*. Turns out not many things begin ANTICI-, so once you've checked all your crosses to make sure that ANTICI- is in fact right ... you're in business. Anyway, all of the anticipatory phrases don't really make sense when the sequential, orderly, top-to-bottom solving that the second revealer clue relies upon does not come to pass. Not only doesn't come to pass, but happens in reverse. The 1-Across "first half" revealer fairly *begs* you to figure out the ending first. Surely someone must have, uh, anticipated this. And yet we PRESS ON with the charade that this is happening in predictable order. I like the creativity here—breaking the revealer is an original idea, and refusing to clue the themers with anything but ellipses adds a nice dimension to the theme. "WAIT FOR IT" is the best of the themers, as it feels the most anticipatory as well as the strongest in its stand-aloneness (the others are fine but might just as easily have been shorter things, i.e. "ALMOST ..." and "NOT YET ..."). "IT'S A NOGO" runs weird interference in this puzzle, appearing to abort whatever process the theme has gotten underway (it seems to be in a theme-like position early on ... and then you get "HOUSTON..." which makes me think "we have a problem" and maybe have to scrub the mission ... But of course I'm just seeing things there. The theme is conceptually very interesting, but it's just not gonna play right for anyone but the most methodical, sequential solver.

All the themers filled themselves in pretty easily via crosses, so despite being essentially unclued (...), they added very little difficulty. Only real difficulty for me came in the SW, where I completely blanked on ANTARES (40D: Giant star in Scorpius), and had no clue initially which NEO- genre they thought Yoko Ono was involved in (39D: One of many genres for Yoko Ono). Seemed like you could throw any number of four-letter words in there and have a shot. Worst of all for me, though, was that I'd somehow never heard of a BASKing shark, and so that BASK clue was bonkers to me (63A: Behave like a certain surface-feeding shark). All the definitions suggest that they "appear to be basking" in the sun / warmer water, but that "appear" is doing a lot of work. The clue says that BASKing is their actual"behavior." I think they're just being sharks, doing normal shark things, and only look like they're BASKing from our perspective. A fine distinction, but, I dunno, respect shark agency, I guess. Not sure why you went to a shark to clue a totally non-shark word—it's a wild stretch. I thought maybe the shark was MASKing at one point. Had to really hack at this whole SW area to get it to fall. Most of the rest of the fill felt normal-to-easy, difficulty-wise.

Bullet points:

10A: Sky: Fr. (CIEL)— kind of a deep cut where foreign words are concerned. I can read French, so no problem here, but I don't think I'd cross this one with Yet Another French Word (LES) if there were any other way to do things (13D: Article in Paris Match). And with NOUS at 31A: Toi et moi. Dial it back, peut-être?
43D: Chinese American fashion designer with a Dolly Girl line (ANNA SUI) — proud to have (finally!) semi-remembered her. Less proud that I wanted to spell her last name like "feng shui" (i.e. ANA SHUI, [sad trombone sound])
48D: Joe-___ weed (PYE) — LOL what? No idea. Less than no idea. Figured it must be JOE-POE since that at least rhymes.
9D: Hit the road with roadies, perhaps (GO ON TOUR)— cool answer if you parse it right. If not, well, you're on the GOON TOUR, and that could get ugly.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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Constructor: Scott Earl

Relative difficulty: Easy (once again, Very easy)

THEME: none

Word of the Day: MELBA toast (1D: Toast opening?) —

Melba toast is a dry, crisp and thinly sliced toast, often served with soup and salad or topped with either melted cheese or pâté. It is named after Dame Nellie Melba, the stage name of Australian opera singer Helen Porter Mitchell. Its name is thought to date from 1897, when the singer was very ill and it became a staple of her diet. The toast was created for her by chef and fan Auguste Escoffier, who also created the Peach Melba dessert for her. The hotel proprietor César Ritz supposedly named it in a conversation with Escoffier.
Melba toast is made by lightly toasting slices of bread under a grill, on both sides. The resulting toast is then sliced laterally. These thin slices are then returned to the grill with the untoasted sides towards the heat source, resulting in toast half the normal thickness. Thus, it can be described as a thrice-baked food (see rusk).
Melba toast is also available commercially, and was at one time given to infants who were teething as a hard food substance on which to chew.
In France, it is referred to as croûtes en dentelle. (wikipedia)

• • •

Really loved this grid but once again the puzzle was way too easy. The clues didn't seem to be really trying. There was a name I didn't know (if the TASHA isn't Yar, I'm out) (46A: Actress Smith of "Why Did I Get Married?"), but I steered around that no problem, and everything else went in about as fast as I could read the clues. I am *not* getting better at crosswords, just to put that theory to rest. If anything, I am at the ONSET of my "slowing-down" phase. I gave up speed-solving for the most part and now just walk through the grid ... and yet even at a walking pace I was done in no time. I won't go on about the commercially-driven easing-up of difficulty at the NYTXW today, but it's definitely a thing. Maybe they'll at least reserve Saturday as a Genuinely Tough day (please?). Or else we just continue the slow descent into Everyone Gets a Ribbon—A-ticket rides as far as the eye can see. I took one look at 1A: 1962 #1 hit that the BBC once deemed "too morbid" to play and immediately thought "MONSTER MASH" and almost as immediately thought "well, that's ridiculous, can't be right." But then I decided, "eh, just test it." And sure enough:

After that, the whole NW corner went down with only the NEATO for NIFTY hiccup (not super-thrilled to actually run into NEATO later on—it's like successfully avoiding someone you don't want to see and then rounding a corner and running smack into them: "Oh ... hi there ... I ... bye!"). I tried to make the first live broadcast of the House of Representatives happen on ESPNU, so that was weird (it's CSPAN, of course). Kinda wanted 44A: Silly ones (GOOFS) to be GEESE except I already had GOO- in place, so I tried GOONS (?) for maybe a second or two. Hesitated on what word was gonna come after PHOTO at 62A: What a camera emoji in an Instagram caption often signifies (PHOTO CREDIT). I have now covered literally every part of the puzzle that gave me even the slightest problem. Speed-solving me might've set a Friday record with this one, or come close, anyway.

It's too bad the puzzle didn't make me slow down at least a little, because then I might've gotten to really get that aha feeling of discovery when I got all the good stuff, like that fantastic "I CAN'T WATCH!" / "NO SPOILERS!" pairing in the middle of the grid (30A: Comment made with eyes closed, perhaps / 42A: "Don't tell me what happens yet!"). And with HATES ON as the creamy center in between! That is such a great screen-watching onslaught of terms (I assume the viewer is at the movies with a friend who has already seen the movie, and they're watching a horror movie with a lot of jump scares, and she ends up hating—your internal narrative may vary). There are no weak parts of this grid (well, I never like ETERNE, but that's just one answer). No thrown-away, phoned-in corners. Brightness everywhere you turn, from LIFETIME BAN (17A: Highest bar?)* in the north to RECENCY BIAS (58A: Inclination to prioritize new events over historical ones) in the south, with a lot of lesser but still plenty-bright moments in between. Just tighten up the clues a bit, would you? It should take me more than five minutes to solve a Friday at my normal strolling pace.

Bullet points:

12A: Supplements supplier (GNC) — I always—always—have a "GMC?" moment with GNC (and vice versa)
20A: Like Chicago, geographically (UPSTATE) — I was not aware that anyone but New York had an UPSTATE. People like to argue which parts of New York are included in the term UPSTATE. It's a very boring argument.
56D: Banks who coined the term "smizing" (TYRA)— TYRA Banks is the creator and host of "America's Next Top Model" (although it looks like one recent season was hosted by crossword stalwart Rita Ora!). "Smizing" is ... well, here, I'll let her tell you:

["smiling with the eyes"]

See you tomorrow.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

*I assume [Highest bar?] both because a LIFETIME BAN is the "highest" (or "longest") amount of time that they can "bar" you for, and also probably because the reason you got banned was because you were the "highest" person in the "bar" and ... mistakes were made.

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Constructor: Kate Hawkins

Relative difficulty: Medium

THEME: none

Word of the Day: ASMR (25A: Brain-tingly feeling that may come from hearing whispering or crinkling, in brief) —

Autonomous sensory meridian response (ASMR) is a tingling sensation that usually begins on the scalp and moves down the back of the neck and upper spine. A pleasant form of paresthesia, it has been compared with auditory-tactile synesthesia and may overlap with frisson.
ASMR signifies the subjective experience of "low-grade euphoria" characterized by "a combination of positive feelings and a distinct static-like tingling sensation on the skin." It is most commonly triggered by specific auditory or visual stimuli, and less commonly by intentional attention control. A genre of videos intended to induce ASMR has emerged, over 25 million of which had been published on YouTube by 2022 and a dedicated category of live ASMR streams on Twitch. (wikipedia)

• • •

I don't know if this was a proper Saturday or if it just feels like a proper Saturday because yesterday's puzzle was a Monday, but either way, I appreciated the fact that it put up a fight. The puzzle is doing its best to skew younger today, with three short answers in (or near) the NW corner that are likely to make a lot of solvers cock their heads questioningly (or some more extreme reaction). The first of these was MOTO, which ... a phone ad campaign from, what, the aughts? (3D: "Hello ___" (classic ringtone)). When was that? I had zero idea that "Hello, MOTO" was actually a "ringtone"—I can remember ads that started "Hello, MOTO" or something like that; I assume they were ads for ... a phone ... maybe a Motorola ... something or other? Razr, is that a phone? Anyway, the "Hello, MOTO" voice always creeped me out because it sounded artificial / put-on, and kinda reminded me of someone evoking the yellowface portrayal of Mr. MOTO in old detective films (he was played by Peter Lorre, doing basically the same voice he uses for Joel Cairo in The Maltese Falcon... I thought MOTO was played by Warner Oland, but that was another yellowface detective performance: Dr. Fu Manchu ... but I (seriously) digress...). But if you got a cell phone when you were a young person in the aughts, then this "ringtone" is likely Superfamiliar to you (and has zero associations with the Japanese detective). This video has over 3 million views wtf!

So that answer seems aimed at Millennials (who are now actually middle-aged, I guess) and younger folk, as does "MY B" (for "my bad!") and ASMR, which I had never heard of until some time in the last decade. How did the term (an initialism where most people including me don't know what the letters even stand for) go mainstream? Well, I direct your attention to the last sentence of the "Word of the Day" wikipedia quotation, above: "A genre of videos intended to induce ASMR has emerged, over 25 million of which had been published on YouTube by 2022 and a dedicated category of live ASMR streams on Twitch." I'm so out of touch I thought ASMR stood for the actual sounds, not the feeling they induced. Anyway, people soothe themselves with YouTube and Twitch. I will never get it, but there you are. It's very very much a thing. But if those three answers skewed young, it's not like there weren't Golden Oldies to offset them: even in the 20th century, I couldn't accept that anyone had ever TOPEd or been IN A PET, and I certainly can't accept it any more now, but boy are those familiar crossword terms of yore. So overall the puzzle has a nice range, covering lots of topics, varied in its generational familiarity. It's also chock full of vibrant longer answers, the best of which came right up front:

APOLOGY TOUR over "NO TAKEBACKS" is a beautiful two-stack (14A: Guilt trip? / 17A: "Too late to change your mind now!"), and the other three such pairings in the grid aren't bad either. Not EVEN A LITTLE bad. I like MARASCHINO / OVER THE TOP because you might put a MARASCHINO cherry OVER THE TOP of your sundae, or even your cocktail, but For God's Sake don't use those cheap-ass pinkish garbage cherries you get at most ice cream parlors (or in the sundae fixins' aisle of the supermarket). It's Luxardo or get out!

I also liked HEE HEE over JOLLITY (for hopefully obvious reasons), and, well, there's not a lot I didn't like. I didn't like the metaphorical VIRGINS clue (34A: Newbies), which ... I mean, I don't know that I'd like the literal VIRGINS clue either, but something about snickering about a "newbie" being a "virgin" is ... unnecessarily sexualizing or something. It's just a metaphor that I wouldn't use. It's normal and fine. It just always gives me bad vibes is all.

I had some trouble moving between the N and W half of this puzzle into the S and E half, but I ended up throwing a weird word-rope into the void, and the rope kept going, and it got weirdly long, and I figured some of it must be wrong, but it wasn't (!?).

So I linked JIBS to "COULD IT BE?" and just kept building, and somehow all the answers stuck. Not sure why I got stuck on the back half of HOLE PUNCH (28A: Inefficient confetti-making tool) (funny clue btw). It's a perfectly normal "tool." I have one sitting here within arm's reach, but all I could think was "HOLE ... maker?" Bizarre. MY B! I also had some trouble getting the back end of PHONE CALL (I figured the "phone" itself had a "ring to it," so what else was needed, I didn't know). Also couldn't get TREATY ("Compact" means sooooo many thing), STAMENS (I thought maybe "tunnels"?) (38D: Carpels' counterparts), or IN A PET, so the SE was briefly elusive, but then PATSY Cline came riding to the rescue, bringing the PEP I needed to finish things off. Overall, a delightful romp, this one, with a little youthful flavor here and there ... you know, for kids!

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Constructor: Gustie Owens

Relative difficulty: Medium

THEME:"Gossip Session" — gossip-related verb phrases clued as if the subjects were engaged different activities / members of different professions:

Theme answers:

SHARES AN ACCOUNT (23A: "A lover of gossip, the Netflix user ...")
HAS ALL THE JUICY DETAILS (41A: "The smoothie bar worker ...")
SPILLS THE TEA (59A: "The Boston Harbor worker ...")
STIRS UP DRAMA (72A: "The cooking show contestant ...")
AIRS THEIR DIRTY LAUNDRY (89A: "The athlete in the locker room ...")
WANTS TO HEAR MORE (114A: "And the up-and-coming trial judge...")

Word of the Day:AMERICANAH (14D: Best-selling Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie novel whose protagonist leaves Nigeria for a U.S. university) —

Americanah is a 2013 novel by the Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, for which Adichie won the 2013 U.S. National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction.^[1] Americanah tells the story of a young Nigerian woman, Ifemelu, who immigrates to the United States to attend university. The novel traces Ifemelu's life in both countries, threaded by her love story with high school classmate Obinze. It was Adichie's third novel, published on May 14, 2013 by Alfred A. Knopf. A television miniseries, starring and produced by Lupita Nyong'o, was in development for HBO Max, but then was later dropped. (wikipedia)

• • •

It's an interesting idea of a theme, but the execution didn't quite work for me. A few of the phrases felt a bit forced in terms of their phrasing. "HAS"!? HAS ALL THE JUICY DETAILS—that's a weak verb compared to the rest of them. SHARES AN ACCOUNT doesn't really convey *gossip* as heavily as the other phrases. And WANTS TO HEAR MORE isn't like the other answers at all. Every other themer subject is dishing, but this trial judge just wants to hear? The answers just don't land as perfectly as they should. The grid feels like it's trying to make up for a fairly straightforward, fairly light theme with a pretty toughly-clued grid, heavy on odd / ambiguous cluing and *especially* heavy on proper nouns. Crossing two figures from the hip-hop / R&B realm is about as good an idea as crossing two figures from any realm, i.e. not a good idea. Crossing names are always a potential problem, but ideally the names at least come from different fields, especially if the fame of at least one is not universal. Now, CARDI B is exceedingly famous, so even if you didn't know CIARA (you're forgiven), you should probably have been able to figure out that "C"—but still, this puzzle is not at all careful with proper nouns. What on god's green earth is going on with the SHAKA SIGN / SERKIS crossing. First of all, SERKIS?! No idea (29A: Andy who voiced Gollum in "The Lord of the Rings"). Also, not a name I've ever known anyone to have, so no part of it is inferable. Second, the SHAKA part of SHAKA SIGN!?!? I have no idea where I pulled the term from. The only SHAKA I really know is from the movie title "SHAKA Zulu" ... wait, is that even a movie? And is that even how it's spelled? Hang on ... looks like it was a mid-'80s TV miniseries. But the Zulu kingdom was in southern Africa, whereas I thought "Hang loose" was associated with Hawaii and surf culture (it is), so I'm very confused. Anyway, SHAKA / SERKIS, yikes and yipes. And with the not-exceedingly-famous AMERICANAH running right through the same area!? Rough stuff. There's no name that shouldn't be here, but you gotta watch how you dole them out. Crowding names together is a recipe for unpleasantness.

I really thought AMERICANAH was AMERICAN (space) AH, like ... maybe the protagonist's family name was AH, or maybe it was about a dentist, or both, I dunno. Surprised we saw this title before we saw the author's name (ADICHIE), which seems like it would be very grid-friendly (i.e. easy to work with if you're a constructor). The only other thing in the grid I flat-out didn't know was IDLI, which was just a series of random letters to me (31D: Savory rice cake of southern India). I have tried so hard to tuck away rafts of short fill related to Indian cuisine (ATTA, ROTI, NA(A)N, LASSI, DOSA, CHAPATI ... the last of which I haven't seen yet, but I'm ready!). But IDLI caught me off-guard. Crosses are fair, so ultimately no problem, but that definitely slowed me down but good. SEED for ARIL also really, really put a wrench in the works. Oh, and RUNS OUT for RUNS DRY, oof (11D: Gets fully depleted). I kinda resent the clue on PROUST. I just looked up this "questionnaire" and I still don't actually understand it. It sounds banal as f***. And yet it comes from PROUST's own notebooks? And is used by interviewers? Yeeeeesh. Would've liked the clue to have been ... PROUSTier. Or mentioned anything even vaguely PROUSTy. Seriously, this "questionnaire" ... why ... is it? "Favorite color"? Sigh. What are we doing here? These look like the questions to the least revealing interview of all time.

Bullet points:

22A: "Gotcha," more informally ("I'M HIP")— Is it? Is it "more informal." I think "more quaintly" or "more bygonely" might work, but "more informally" feels factually untrue. You don't get much more "informal" than "Gotcha!"
63A: Denim jacket adornment (PATCH) — really struggled with this one. No idea what the context is. Is it ... a biker? What year is it? Is this an iron-on PATCH? I guess I just don't see denim jackets much any more, and if I do, they're somehow PATCH-free.
85D: Syd tha ___, onetime hip-hop moniker (KYD)— if it's "onetime," maybe you should respect that and move on to other KYDs ... like Thomas! Everyone loves revenge tragedies, right? Right!?

102D: Nightmarish address, for short (ELM ST.) — "Nightmarish" because of the movie "A Nightmare on ELM ST." ... which you've probably figured out by now.
103D: Slangy thing that may be "dropped" in a serious relationship (L-BOMB) — not everything has to be a "bomb." F-BOMB, L-BOMB ... sigh. I really wanted this to be TROU (literally the only time I have ever wanted the answer to be TROU)

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Constructor: Tracy Gray

Relative difficulty: Easy

THEME: "MY BAD!" (62A: "Oopsie!" ... and a hint to the ends of 18-, 25-, 39- and 50-Across) — theme answer ends with words that *can* mean "error" (but don't in the themers themselves):

Theme answers:

OLE MISS (18A: 'Bama rival)
DEPOSIT SLIP (25A: Bit of banking documentation)
SAN ANDREAS FAULT (39A: Cause of many California earthquakes)
HONEY BOO-BOO (50A: Former moniker of reality TV child star Alana Thompson)

Word of the Day: CHAPPAQUA (11D: Town in Westchester County, N.Y., where the Clintons live) —

Chappaqua (/ˈtʃæpəkwɑː/ CHAP-ə-kwah) is a hamlet and census-designated place in the town of New Castle, in northern Westchester County, New York, United States. It is approximately 30 miles (50 km) north of New York City. The hamlet is served by the Chappaqua station of the Metro-North Railroad's Harlem Line. In the New York State Legislature it is within the New York State Assembly's 93rd district and the New York Senate's 40th district. In Congress the village is in New York's 17th District.
Chappaqua was founded by a group of Quakers in the 1730s and was the home of Horace Greeley, New-York Tribune editor and U.S. congressman. Since the late 1990s, former President Bill Clinton and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have lived there. (wikipedia)

• • •

First of all, congrats to the NYTXW on three days in a row with puzzles by solo women. In a just world, this would mean the NYTXW had SHOT PAR (three to four solo women in a week being roughly what one ought to expect), but given their terrible track record, well, good for them. And as for today's puzzle, yeah, OK, this'll do. It's not the most thrilling theme concept, but it's got a cool / unusual mirror symmetry layout, with OLE MISS being in a particularly unexpectedly thematic position, so that was a fun thing to discover. Funny that we just had "MY B!" for an answer on Saturday, and then bam, here it is, in its longer (more "formal?") incarnation, as the Monday revealer. I cringed at HONEY BOO-BOO because that show just seems like the worst kind of exploitation TV, and I'd rather not remember it, but I don't know what other answer is out there that ends with BOO BOO, or some slangy equivalent, so I can tolerate a small cringe in a coherent and interestingly presented themer set. The fill comes in a little on the stale side, but not inedibly so. And though I don't give a damn where the Clintons live, I think CHAPPAQUA is a colorful geographical entry—a very nice use of a longer Down.

I wouldn't like to find a SALTY LUMP in my food, and I'm a bit concerned that the puzzle has both a LUMP and SPOT (and one on top of the other—you really oughta get that checked out!), but (taking this idea of serendipitously juxtaposed answers further) I like the idea of making up for your mistake by not only saying "MY BAD!" but then telling the people you wronged that "drinks are ON ME." Oh, and ARROW KEY and AEROSOLS seem to be asking you to clap as well, so go ahead and do that. I also like the SEE SPOT succession. My daughter learned to read, in part, with some very old-fashioned Dick & Jane book that my grandmother got her, so there was a lot of "SEE SPOT this" and "SEE SPOT that" in her early childhood. I wonder when "TÀR" is finally going to get a movie clue. Shouldn't be long now, as that movie is likely to garner a bunch of Oscar nominations in the next month or so (whenever those come out). Speaking of movies, we saw "The Menu" today and while I don't think it's as good as "TÀR" it was nonetheless very entertaining. And it's got Judith Light in it, which is as good a reason to see a movie (or TV show) as any. There's some sudden and fairly graphic violence in "The Menu," but if you can handle that, it's really a very thoughtful and surprisingly funny movie. Nice to see it with a (smallish) crowd that legit laughed, a lot.

["Please don't say 'mouthfeel'"]

Back to the puzzle for a bit. I tried to get cute and wrote in ADOBE at 20A: Mexican marinade made with chili peppers without (obviously) looking at the clue. I figured "ADOB-, what else could it be?" Touché, puzzle. No other stumbling blocks today. I think I needed a few crosses to finally see LEAKS, but that's the closest thing to "work" I had to do today (46A: Ways reporters get some secret information). A proper Monday, in that sense. That's all, I suppose. See you tomorrow.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Constructor: Ross Trudeau and Wyna Liu

Relative difficulty: Medium

THEME: Crossword Lady Ladder — it's basically a word ladder, where one letter changes at each "rung", only here the "word" that's changing is a three-letter woman's first name. Because of their vowel-consonant-vowel structure and short length, the first names that make up the ladder tend to appear in crosswords a lot:

Theme answers:

INA GARTEN (18A: The Food Network's "Barefoot Contessa")
IDA B. WELLS (22A: Civil rights leader who co-founded the N.A.A.C.P.)
ADA LOVELACE (29A: Mathematician regarded as the first computer programmer)
ANA DE ARMAS (35A: Portrayer of the nurse Marta Cabrera in "Knives Out")
AVA DUVERNAY (47A: Director of the miniseries "When They See Us")
EVA MENDES (54A: "Girl in Progress" star with a line of cosmetics)
EVE ENSLER (59A: "The Vagina Monologues" playwright)

Word of the Day: IDA B. WELLS (22A) —

Ida B. Wells (full name: Ida Bell Wells-Barnett) (July 16, 1862 – March 25, 1931) was an American investigative journalist, educator, and early leader in the civil rights movement. She was one of the founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Wells dedicated her lifetime to combating prejudice and violence, the fight for African-American equality, especially that of women, and became arguably the most famous Black woman in the United States of her time. [...] In the 1890s, Wells documented lynching in the United States in articles and through her pamphlets called Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in all its Phases, and The Red Record, investigating frequent claims of whites that lynchings were reserved for Black criminals only. Wells exposed lynching as a barbaric practice of whites in the South used to intimidate and oppress African Americans who created economic and political competition—and a subsequent threat of loss of power—for whites. A white mob destroyed her newspaper office and presses as her investigative reporting was carried nationally in Black-owned newspapers. Subjected to continued threats, Wells left Memphis for Chicago. She married Ferdinand L. Barnett in 1895 and had a family while continuing her work writing, speaking, and organizing for civil rights and the women's movement for the rest of her life. (wikipedia)

• • •

Sam Spade consoles Iva Archer on her
exclusion from this puzzle

On the one hand, there's a weird whimsy to this theme that I kinda like. I mean, it's fun to say their first names in quick succession, and there's a kind of insidery winky thing going on where the puzzle is showing you All The Same Names It Always Shows You, Every Day, but this time the names are in a carefully curated and crafted arrangement. It's a crosswordese parade, or maybe a crosswordese flash mob—same old faces, only suddenly there's a dance routine and everyone is moving in precise order. Plus, they've got fancy dress on (i.e. they appear in full-name, not just the usual three-letter first-name, versions). On the other hand ... well, the puzzle is showing you All The Same Names It Always Shows You. So, I guess your feelings about the puzzle are going to depend on whether you see the theme as a dazzling new dish or reheated leftovers. I thought it was cute, though it wore a bit toward the end. I didn't catch the word ladder angel until the end, when I was trying to make sense of the themer logic, i.e. why these names, why this order, what about UMA Thurman and UTA Hagen, etc. The one thing that didn't work for me was EVE ENSLER, which is a real clunker, especially as the final themer, considering she's the only one out of terminal-A rhythm. I guess you could see her name as putting an emphatic final exclamation point on the name series ("INA IDA ADA ANA AVA EVA EVE!"). And that seems a reasonable reading. But when I was actually solving, my brain made that record needle scratch sound. I wanted them all to be tra-la two-syllable names ending in "A." But instead we get one syllable (the only such answer). And an "E" ending (the only such answer). Again, it's all a matter of taste. That finale is either rhythmically perfect or jarringly out of sync ... or else you didn't even notice. Anyway, there's a basic thoughtfulness and cleverness and creativity here that I mostly enjoyed. It's also at least ... plausible? ... that the puzzle isn't just a word ladder, but one with specific thematic content. I mean, it goes from INA GARTEN ... to EVE ... so ... if it helps to read that progression biblically, why not go ahead and do that?

The fill made me wince maybe a little more than it should. Some of it was because of improbable plurals (AMNIOS but *especially* EASTERS ...), but most of it was from a slight excess of crosswordese (ECOLI and ENEWS and EELIEST *and* EERIE **and** EPEES, etc.), as well as abbrevs. I have just never liked or heard people actually use (specifically CRIT and VID). In a theme this dense (seven long names!), it's probably hard to keep your fill whistle-clean throughout. There are a number of longer Downs, but none of them ELEVATEs the fill quality much. They're mostly solid, though there's a mild dreariness to the sheer number of preposition-ending phrases (SNARL AT, STEAM UP, KNEEL ON), and a definite dreariness to RATLIKE and BEATDOWNS (the latter of which is both the most original bit of non-theme fill and the most violent and depressing). The theme is the thing today, and as I say, it mostly delivered for me. Oh, I almost forgot "WELL, DUH!" Was that a high point for me? Well ... yes.

No real difficulty today if you solve crosswords regularly (grid is 16 wide, so if it played a little slow, maybe that's why). Name themes are often real dicey for segments of the solving population, depending on what field / era the names are drawn from, but as I say these names should all be super-familiar to the daily gridder. The fill didn't seem tough at all, and the cluing was pretty transparent. The toughest part for me was trying to navigate the vowels in DUVERNAY. I first put it in as DUV-RN-Y. Thank god for fair crosses. See you tomorrow.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Constructor: Karen Steinberg

Relative difficulty: Easy? (6:30)

THEME: Words that mean different things in different languages

Theme answers:

Vintage car, in German ... or veteran, in English-- OLD TIMER
High school, in Danish ... or building for indoor sports, in English-- GYMNASIUM
Competition, in French ... or agreement, in English-- CONCURRENCE
Plywood, in Dutch ... or theater with several screens, in English-- MULTIPLEX
Vacation, in Swedish ... or half of an academic year, in English-- SEMESTER

Word of the Day: MRES (G.I. food packs) —

Some of the early MRE main courses were not very palatable, earning them the nicknames "Meals Rejected by Everyone,""Meals Rejected by Ethiopia" (during the 1983–1985 famine in Ethiopia), or "Meals Rarely Edible." Some individual portions had their own nicknames. For example, the frankfurters, which came sealed in pouches of four, were referred to as "the four fingers of death." Although quality has improved over the years, many of the nicknames have stuck. MREs were sometimes called "Three Lies for the Price of One ... it's not a Meal, it's not Ready, and you can't Eat it."

• • •

Good morning, squad! Today's another Malaika MWednesday, and I am peering out of a thick World Cup Haze in order to write this post. I hardly know what day it is or what time it is. I'm still recovering from the Japan PKs and the Morocco PKs. I'm considering tattooing Mbappe's face onto my forearm. Today is the first day in seventeen days that there will be no games for me to watch and I'm already going through withdrawal. I haven't even written a paragraph yet and I'm already switching to another tab to watch the Richarlison goal for the one hundredth time.

Anyway, let's talk about this puzzle. The theme is not my favorite type... I'm always disappointed when there's no revealer. This was sort of "collection of things that have a thing in common, but you didn't know what that thing was." I was hoping I'd put in one of the answers and be like "Oh yeahhhh, I remember learning that MULTIPLEX meant plywood..." (or whatever) but nope. I basically said "Huh, okay" five times and that was the puzzle.

I wonder if I would find the double meanings more impressive if I hadn't just watched Richarlison's bicycle kick but to be honest there is very little that can impress me after that. That's not the puzzle's fault. My bar has been set impossibly high.

I'm very intrigued by the layout of this puzzle! Those stacks in the corners and the four pyramids of black squares are what I'd associate with a themeless puzzle. Kameron Austin Collins is always busting out the pyramids. This layout is probably influenced by the central answer which is 11 letters long-- it forces a lot of blocks into place. I think my favorite non-theme entries were SAMOSA and SWOOSH. What about y'all?

Bullets:

[Six-time M.L.B. All-Star Mookie] for BETTS-- I KNEW THIS ONE!! ATTENTION FOLKS! THERE WAS A BASEBALL CLUE THAT I, MALAIKA HANDA, KNEW THE ANSWER TO! BOW DOWN, PLEASE!!!
[Tooth holder] for JAW-- I had "gum" and then I had "saw" for sooo long
Little EVA, who sang "Locomotion"-- Let me tell you, I made it through this whole freaking puzzle and was like "Aww man was it really only men??" and then got to this clue and was like "Phew!!"

xoxo Malaika

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

THEME: [It may be represented by an X] (6)

Dear readers,

The New York Times Guild is on STRIKE today and I do not, as a rule, cross picket lines, so no puzzle today, no puzzle write-up today. The blog will return to a regular schedule on Friday, Dec. 9, at which time I will also solve today's (Thursday's) puzzle and add basic information about it to this post.

Please consider supporting the strike by not engaging with the NYT on any platform today.

If @NYTimesGuild members don't have a deal soon, we’re asking readers to not engage in any @nytimes platforms tomorrow and stand with us on the digital picket line! Read local news. Listen to public radio. Pull out a cookbook. Break your Wordle streak. pic.twitter.com/gzQCL58ir7
— NYTimesGuild (@NYTimesGuild) December 7, 2022

You can read a full story about the strike here:

A 24-hour strike at The New York Times, a historic demonstration in which more than 1,100 employees are expected to participate, will take effect Thursday at midnight. Here's my full story: https://t.co/FtT30FaNXw
— Oliver Darcy (@oliverdarcy) December 8, 2022

Thanks for your patience and understanding. See you tomorrow.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Constructor: Brooke Husic and Hoang-Kim Vu

Relative difficulty: Medium-Challenging

THEME: none? I think?

Word of the Day: Gwen VERDON (45D: Tony-winning actress Gwen) —

Gwyneth Evelyn "Gwen" Verdon (January 13, 1925 – October 18, 2000) was an American actress and dancer. She won four Tony Awards for her musical comedy performances, and served as an uncredited choreographer's assistant and specialty dance coach for theater and film. Verdon was a critically acclaimed performer on Broadway in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, having originated many roles in musicals, including Lola in Damn Yankees, the title character in Sweet Charity and Roxie Hart in Chicago. She is also strongly identified with her second husband, director-choreographer Bob Fosse, remembered as the dancer-collaborator-muse for whom he choreographed much of his work and as the guardian of his legacy after his death. (wikipedia)

• • •

This feels like one of those Friday puzzles with a stealth theme that I just don't see because I am not looking for it (it's Themeless Friday, after all) and because I am still IN A STUPOR from having only recently woken up. Speaking of "UP," what the hell? "UP" is probably the primary reason I feel like I'm missing something. I mean, four (4) "UP"s!?!?! I GOTTA SAY, under normal circumstances, that's about two "UP"s too many, at least. And it's hard *not* to notice the pile-"UP" when they appear in three crossing answers, two of which intersect *at the "UP"* (UPON x BUYING UP x POP-UP SHOP). By the time I hit "DON'T GET UP," I was definitely thinking "OK, what's the gag?" But I don't see a gag. Oof, you wanna know what feels awful? Staring at a grid that you *think* is hiding a theme from you. It's bad enough when you *know* it's hiding a theme from you (as in a meta-crossword, like Matt Gaffney's Weekly Crossword Contest). But when you aren't even sure if the theme is actually there ... you can convince yourself that lots of things *look* thematic ("... well there's this odd mirror symmetry on the diagonal, is that something? Is the grid an arrow pointing "UP" ... and to the right? RED STATE *is* clued [It's right on a map], so maybe ... that means something?" etc.). But the answer to the question "Is there a theme here?" is a (tentative) NOPE (42A: Hit 2022 film ... or a possible response to whether you've seen it) (great clue there, and great film—read a great (great!) review of it yesterday in the new Cinéaste ... also a great review of the great film The Banshees of Inisherin, but that's probably beside the point).

This played far more Saturday than Friday for me, either because it's hard, or because I've gotten so used to the NYTXW throwing me softballs on the weekends that I'm out of practice or because, well, see my IN A STUPOR comment, above. Managed to get YETI ERTE DNA (wrong) and TAY-TAY (hyphenated??) at first pass, but I wasn't sure about any of it, and that "R" for "D" error at DNA meant parsing PRAYER MAT was tough (after WELCOME MAT, I was out of ideas). PSI clue was brutal (1D: Abbr. at a pump) (not a gas pump but a tire pump), as was the ambiguous clue on RUG (2D: Runner, e.g.). No idea re: MOSSY (7D: Lime some stream banks—actually thought "stream banks" was some kind of internet thing. Even when I finally got going, I never got that whoosh-whoosh momentum, though eventually "APOLOGY ACCEPTED" dropped and that flowed easily into "LET'S DO THAT AGAIN," and that was sorta fun. The grid is solid but didn't have as many high points as I was expecting. Again, this makes me wonder if I missed a theme. Lots of crosswordese in that SW corner (incl. ELENA ENERO SRO), but mostly the grid stays clean and the cluing stays properly tough. Would've liked this better tomorrow, since I expect a slower, thornier experience on Saturday. But the puzzle doesn't decide when it runs, and it's not that much harder than an average Friday. Just harder than most Fridays have been lately.

After the NW, there were no specific trouble spots, just an overall feel of toughness. Every clue seemed tricky or vague (and thus tricky), except the proper nouns, which (by the grace of god) I happened to actually know today. All of them: TAY-TAY, NOPE, IFILL, ERTE, ELENA, and VERDON (though I misspelled her VERDUN at first). If I left a proper noun out of that list, oh well, I knew that too. I absolutely botched LOGOS because when reading the clue (30D: Greek for "word") my brain rendered "Greek" as "Latin" what the f*&$!? Seriously, just looked at the clue now and was startled to see that "Latin" wasn't in there at all, LOL. That's not IN A STUPOR, that's ... I don't know what that is. A ridiculous misreading. I kept trying LEX... something. So SWAB / BOTTOM / LOGOS was a choke point that really stopped my flow cold. SWAB and NUDES were both effectively hidden from me by make-up clues that I mostly (SWAB) or completely (NUDES) failed to understand. I had NEONS before NUDES (46A: options in some eye shadow palettes). Ooh, I just noticed that PEELER is a nice nod to NOPE, which is directed by Jordan PEELE and rated "R", which makes it ... a PEELE "R" ... and now I'm back to wondering if there's a theme again. Ah well, probably better just to leave it here and let one of you tell me what I missed (if anything).

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Constructor: Sid Sivakumar

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium (Challenging ... then suddenly very easy)

THEME: none

Word of the Day:Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry (44A: Mildred D. ___, author of "Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry," 1977) —

Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry is a 1977 novel by Mildred D. Taylor. Part of her Logan family series, it is a sequel to her 1975 novella Song of the Trees. It won the 1977 Newbery Medal.
The novel is the first book in the Logan family saga, which includes four sequels (Let the Circle Be Unbroken (1981), The Road to Memphis (1992), The Gold Cadillac (1987), and All the Days Past, All the Days to Come (2020)) and three prequels (The Land (2001), The Well: David's Story (1995), and Song of the Trees (1975)) as well as two novellas (Mississippi Bridge (1990) and The Friendship (1987)). In the book, Taylor explores struggles of African Americans in 1930s Mississippi through the perspective of nine-year-old Cassie Logan. The novel contains several themes, including Jim Crow segregation, Black landownership, sharecropping, the Great Depression, and lynching. (wikipedia)

• • •

Well this was really all about the NW for me, at least in terms of struggle. I spent as much time there, at the beginning, as I did with the rest of the puzzle. More, probably. When 1-Across is easy the puzzle tends to skew easy and vice versa and today, WOOF (!), I had tons of trouble with 1-Across (1A: Eye exam you need to pass? => IRIS SCAN). Never got where they were going with "pass" and couldn't parse the phrase to save my life. With STAKES and SUPER and CRED nailed down, I kept wanting it to be something that broke between the second "S" and the "C," like CLASS ... something. You have to "pass" tests in school, so CLASS ... felt ... possible. I am always terrible with "word that can follow or precede or that goes with X"-type clues and today was no different. [Word with...] gives you no indication how it is "with," whether the answer comes before or after or what, so AIR shmair for me, for sure. ESCAPE ROOM was transparent (my god crossword people seem to love these things, I do Not understand—virtually any room I'm in with more than two people for any length of time quickly becomes an ESCAPE ROOM, so I do not understand subjecting yourself to forced enclosure with other nerds like you (and me), but hey, enjoy). But even having ESCAPE ROOM didn't help much with parsing ICE STORM and REST AREA (the rare 8-letter crosswordese!). CENTURIES was one of those words that I didn't know until I saw it and then I thought "oh yeah, right" (I know jack about cricket, but my wife is from NZ and they care a whole bunch, so I've picked up terminology by osmosis, mostly based on the handful of trips we've taken there, the next of which begins next week, woo hoo!).

Thank god for NEOPETS (has anyone ever said That before?) (8D: Website with adoptable virtual creatures), because getting out of that corner was also dicey. Took me nearly to the end to see MATCHES (29A: Exact hits). And SOLES, yikes, I had no idea until nearly all the crosses were in place (14D: Flat bottoms). Singular "flat" for "shoe" was rough. I was thinking first that "flat" was an adjective and then that "flat" was an apartment. Anyway, that NW corner was not the hardest corner I've ever done, by a long shot, but it was hard, and way way Way harder than the rest of the puzzle. I went from getting very little traction at all to running a full lap around the SE before I'd even really started trying:

After that, there were a few things I didn't know, like TAYLOR and FELDSPAR, but it seemed like I had toeholds everywhere, so the SE played like the Evil (or Good, or ... Opposite) Twin of the NW, and then the SW, like the NE before it, ended up being very easy, almost incidental—though it did contain my two favorite clue/answer pairings of the day: 30D: Let-them-eat-cake occasion? (CHEAT DAY) crossing 43A: Mug shot subject? (LATTE ART). I hate the idea of diets, so I hate the idea of CHEAT DAYs, but I can't deny the cleverness of that clue. I also hate (or don't love) the whole "take a picture of your food" phenomenon, but again, the clue is masterful in its wordplay and misdirection. I couldn't pull my brain away from the idea of "mug" as "face," so that even when the answer seemed to end in ART, I was thinking, like, face tats, or maybe an injection that you get in your face, like botox, I don't know. LATTE ART (pleasantly) surprised me.

Notes:

18A: Flour ground in a chakki (ATTA)— Didn't know "chakki" but didn't need to because "flour" = ATTA. See also 43D: Bhikkhu's teacher (LAMA)—"teacher" was enough.
20A: The Father of ___, moniker for the inventor Leo Baekeland (PLASTICS)— wow that is an awful clue. Couldn't get more trivia-y and dull if it trued. I guess we're supposed to recognize this dude's name by its resemblance to "bakelite" (which he invented), but yeah no that didn't happen. Father of [absolutely random word] as far as I was concerned.
28A: G, in C (SOL) — do re me fa SOL la ti do ... if you're playing in the key of C, then SOL is the musical note G ... I think I have that right.
38A: Rock-forming mineral that makes up over half of the earth's crust (FELDSPAR) — really sounds like a brand name. Has that nightmarishly dull corporate ring to it: "FELDSPAR: Tomorrow's Agriculture Today!" or "FELDSPAR: Business Growth Solutions!" or some such nonsense. Also, SPAR crossing SPAR (in MAKESPAR) was ... below par (or above par ... whichever one you think is worse).

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Constructor: Laura Taylor Kinnel

Relative difficulty: Medium

THEME:"Step on It!"— a bug rebus:

Theme answers:

PYTHAGOREAN THEOREM / LEAN-TO (23A: Hypotenuse-finding formula / 9D: Simple shelter)
ABOVE REPROACH / BROACHES (40A: Having an impeccable reputation, say / 35D: Brings up, as a subject)
DESIGNATED DRIVER / SIGNATURE (43A: One drinking soft drinks at a party, perhaps / 31D: Ink on a contract)
CELTIC KNOT / STICKS (67A: Symbol of Irish heritage / 60D: Adheres)
INSPECTOR CLOUSEAU / SILK BLOUSE (89A: "The Pink Panther" character / 63D: Shiny top)
IN LIKE FLYNN / BRIEFLY (92A: Having successfully made it, slangily / 72D: In a few words)
LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN / BEECH (110A: Composer who studied under Joseph Haydn / 112D: Stately shade tree)

Word of the Day: NSC (94A: Top-level foreign-policy grp.) —

The United States National Security Council (NSC) is the principal forum used by the President of the United States for consideration of national security, military, and foreign policy matters. Based in the White House, it is part of the Executive Office of the President of the United States, and composed of senior national security advisors and Cabinet officials.
Since its inception in 1947 by President Harry S. Truman, the function of the Council has been to advise and assist the President on national security and foreign policies. It also serves as the President's principal arm for coordinating these policies among various government agencies. The Council has subsequently played a key role in most major events in U.S. foreign policy, from the Korean War to the War on Terror.
The NSC has counterparts in the national security councils of many other nations. (wikipedia)

• • •

Before I get to the meat of the puzzle, a word about the title. Well, three words: I hate it. Like, viscerally. It's a vicious, stupid, and ultimately inapt title. Why the &$#! are you stepping on bees? Or any insect, really. First of all, insects are living creatures, so leave them be. Second, stepping on a louse will do nothing. Like, if that is your method for getting rid of lice, I have Big News for you, and it's not good. Third, gnats? You're trying to step on gnats? What are you even doing? You look silly. The title is both casually and cruelly human-centered *and* stupid as hell on a literal level—even if you got your jollies squashing insects, a good hunk of these just aren't plausibly killable with your stupid foot. Just a terrible editorial decision, that title. As for the puzzle itself, it's pretty fun, and very ambitious. Some of those insects are really ... long. I mean, putting an ANT in a box, no problem, but putting a whole damn ROACH or LOUSE in there, that's a little more impressive. In general, I enjoyed discovering the insects, and many of the insect-containing phrases were long and colorful in their own right. The Across themers are something close to impeccable. After I got over the initial rebus-discovery hump, only two of the bugs really gave me trouble. I couldn't find that damn FLY because I had BRIEF as my answer to 72D: In a few words, so I kept wondering "How does this work? is LYN an insect? YNN?" Started thinking maybe the phrase was actually "IN LIKE FLINT" (a '60s spy comedy whose title is a pun on the actual answer). Then realized that 72D wanted an adverb: BRIEFLY. Aha. Worse for me, struggle-wise, was CELTIC KNOT. I found the TICK quick ... but what was supposed to follow "CELTIC," I had No Idea. CELTIC K-O-!? I thought I had an error. Couldn't get the "N" because ERWIN!?!?! (47D: Physicist Schrödinger)! Really? Wow, news to me. Also, DIATOMIC is not a word I really know (52D: Like carbon monoxide) and the clue on WAIT ON was super-ambiguous (56A: Serve), so that whooooooole area was just jacked for a while.

Oh, and as you can see, I couldn't see WAIT ON because I had an "I" where the "O" should be. Always love to be tripped up by the absolute worst piece of fill in the grid, ugh (VASO!? Vas-no!). So the area around TICK and the area around FLY were pesky, but everything else fell pretty easily.

I thought we agreed that PEPE LePew was a sexual harasser / assailant and no longer welcome in the grid. No? OK. I have been on college campuses my whole life and have never heard anyone refer to their class as meeting SEMI-WEEKLY (78A: Common frequency for college classes). Is that every other week? Like, once every other week? Pretty cushy. Or is it twice per week? Because that is pretty normal ... but again, no one but no one calls it that. We somehow make do with "twice a week." Same number of letters, fewer syllables.

People confuse MANET and Monet's *names*, but no one is going to confuse their actual paintings—no one who is paying attention, at any rate. I mean, does this woman like a haystack? Does she?

Hmm, maybe. There is something kind of ... triangular about her. Let's compare.

OK, I take it back, they're very similar.

I read [Onetime auto make...], looked at -EO, and wrote in REO. The REO Prizm, LOL, someone design that, please. The '20s / '90s hybrid no one is asking for! Anyway, GEO, man, forgot about that. It's like Saturn or YUGO. Bye bye bye. Bygone. Which ... gives it at least one thing in common with the REO. OK, that's about enough of that. Hope you enjoyed your bug-hunting escapade. See you tomorrow.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Constructor: Anthony J. Caruso and Zhouqin Burnikel

Relative difficulty: Medium (normal Monday)

THEME: GO FETCH (39A: Dog command ... or a hint to the starts of the answers to the four starred clues)— things a dog can fetch:

Theme answers:

BALL OF FIRE (16A: *High-energy person, metaphorically)
BONE CHINA (10D: *Some fine porcelain)
STICK TO IT (33D: *"Don't quit now!")
PAPER TRAIL (63A: *Documentation leading to proof)

Word of the Day: BONE CHINA (10D) —

Bone china is a type of ceramic that is composed of bone ash, feldspathic material, and kaolin. It has been defined as "ware with a translucent body" containing a minimum of 30% of phosphate derived from animal bone and calculated calcium phosphate. Bone china is the strongest of the porcelain or china ceramics, having very high mechanical and physical strength and chip resistance, and is known for its high levels of whiteness and translucency. Its high strength allows it to be produced in thinner cross-sections than other types of porcelain. Like stoneware, it is vitrified, but is translucent due to differing mineral properties. (wikipedia)

• • •

Pretty dull example of an old-fashioned theme. It's true that each of the fetched items have been clued as unfetched items (i.e. this STICK is not a fetched STICK, this PAPER is not a fetched (news) PAPER, etc.), but that's pretty standard. There's nothing here you couldn't have seen 20+ years ago, except maybe EMOPOP, which is maybe the worst thing in the grid, since the word is just EMO, they call it EMO, just EMO. Crosswordese abounds (IBIS TAT ALOE ALBA I haven't even left the SW corner but you get the idea). It's not that the puzzle is terribly made, it's just ... hard to find anything positive to say about it. Frankly, it's hard to find anything to say about it—it's about as drab a piece of work as I've seen in a while. I've seen puzzles I really disliked that had more imagination and ambition than this one. I love a simple, snappy theme, but this isn't that. It's a tired first-worder. I couldn't even find a very interesting word to be Word of the Day today, so you're stuck with BONE CHINA, sorry. A BALL OF FIRE, this isn't. Speaking of BALL OF FIRE, have you seen it? The 1941 Howard Hawks movie with Barbara Stanwyck as a showgirl hiding out from the mob in a big house with fuddy-duddy lexicographers (including Gary Cooper)? Yes? No? Well, if no, you should fix that. It's in the Criterion Channel's "Screwball Comedy" collection this month. Yes sir, Barbara Stanwyck and Gary Cooper, a can't-lose combination. (This is how I amuse myself when the puzzle does nothing for me—remembering great movies).

Speaking of screwball comedies currently showing on the Criterion Channel—I just (re-)watched Easy Living (1937), which opens with cranky steel magnate Edward Arnold throwing his wife's extremely expensive fur coat from the top of his Manhattan home onto the street below, where it lands on the head of poor Jean Arthur as she passes by on a double-decker bus. When she looks around to see What The Hell just happened, the man seated behind her looks at her intently and says, in a rather ominous voice: "KISMET"! (50A: Fate). And yes, kismet, fate, that fur coat drives the whole damn case-of-mistaken-identity plot, complete with misunderstanding after misunderstanding after misunderstanding, and two big dogs, and Ray Milland and even a crossword puzzle—you think I'm kidding? Look:

Again, highly recommended. OK, yes, the puzzle. Uh ... I bought a portable cassette / CD player literally just today (to replace my old one, which is still sitting here on my home desktop, broken), so to the clue on CDS I say "obsolescent, shmobsolescent"! (31A: Obsolescent music purchases, in brief). Not much trouble solving this one today, but it didn't feel any easier than Mondays usually feel. I don't think CABINs are by definition "cozy," so I had an unusual amount of hesitation straight out of the gate (1A: Cozy home in the woods). I thought the dice were CUBED as opposed to CUBIC (1D: Shaped like dice). I had CHINA and kept wanting it to be FINE CHINA despite the fact that "fine" was right there in the clue and therefore obviously off-limits for the answer. I had the BEA- at 23D: Snoopy and Gromit, for two and, well, I confess I did not know Gromit was a beagle, so I could only imagine some kind of BEASTS, BEASTIES, something like that. I am now very much out of things to say about this puzzle. Hope you found much more to enjoy about it than I did. I'll be away for a few days while I relocate myself to the other side of the globe. But you'll be in good hands. See you soon.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Constructor: Julietta Gervase

Relative difficulty: Medium

THEME: Theme answers are flowers, clued wackily

Theme answers:

BABY'S BREATH (20A: What might smell of Gerber products?)
WOLF'S BANE (33A: The third "little pig," with his house of bricks?)
GOLDENROD (40A: Award for a champion angler?)
LADY SLIPPER (50A: Object found by Prince Charming after the clock struck midnight?)

Word of the Day: PINYIN (44A: Chinese transliteration system) —

Hanyu Pinyin (simplified Chinese: 汉语拼音; traditional Chinese: 漢語拼音; pinyin: hànyǔ pīnyīn), often shortened to just pinyin, is the official romanization system for Standard Mandarin Chinese in China, and to some extent, in Singapore and Malaysia. It is often used to teach Mandarin, normally written in Chinese form, to learners already familiar with the Latin alphabet. The system includes four diacritics denoting tones, but pinyin without tone marks is used to spell Chinese names and words in languages written in the Latin script, and is also used in certain computer input methods to enter Chinese characters. The word Hànyǔ (simplified Chinese: 汉语; traditional Chinese: 漢語) literally means "Han language" (i.e. Chinese language), while Pīnyīn (拼音) means "spelled sounds".^[1]

• • •

Hello hello! It's Rafa here filling in for Rex Parker. Sometimes when I finish solving a puzzle I think: This puzzle was great, but it wasn't for me! This puzzle as very much in that category! When I finished solving, I couldn't quite figure out what the theme was so I googled the theme answers and realized they were all flowers. Aha! The fact that I knew 0/4 of these flowers says a lot more about me than about the puzzle, but unfortunately it did make it so the theme didn't feel quite satisfying during the solve. I wonder if I'm a flower-illiterate odd-one-out, or whether this theme eluded others too ... let me know in the comments!

As for the theme clues, they felt like a bit of a mixed bag to me. WOLF'S BANE was my favorite -- fun and evocative and just the right amount of wacky. BABY'S BREATH felt a bit weaker because it seems like "baby's breath" could quite plausibly be a phrase used to describe ... a baby's breath. So the wackiness didn't land as nicely.

According to The Internet™, these are some Viking runes

Luckily, though, there was plenty of other fun stuff in the grid: HOUSE PARTY, EVIL GENIUS, PAST LIFE, PINYIN, etc. I appreciated the clue echo on RAGER and HOUSE PARTY, as well as the fun trivia in the clue for ANTEATER. The fill was mostly clean but there were a few dings like SHER, NEHI, CIRRI. (I have only ever seen or heard of NEHI in crossword puzzles and just found on 30 seconds ago it's pronounced "knee high" -- FYI if that's also news to you.) A"ding" in the fill is subjective thing, but one metric I like to use when thinking about fill for early-week puzzles is: Is this something solvers would reasonably have encountered outside of crossword puzzles? Of course, we all live wonderfully diverse lives, but have any of you had a conversation about CIRRI clouds?

Check out these CIRRI clouds

Not much else to say about this one! Nice and mostly smooth early-week debut.

Bullets:

HANOI (45D: Home to the Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum) — I have been to the Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum in HANOI!
AREA (8D: Word with gray, play, or Bay) — This was a fun clue for AREA. I've lived in the Bay AREA for 9 years and appreciated this angle.
SAUL (47A: Title role for Bob Odenkirk in a "Breaking Bad" spinoff) — My confession for today is that I haven't watched a single episode of Breaking Bad! I feel like there's too much to catch up on and I never have the willpower to start it, but everyone always tells me it's worth it. One day...
ETTA (54A: James in both the Blues and Rock & Roll Halls of Fame) — My good friend and longtime crossword solver told me recently she only just realized all the clues about this Jazz star James were about a woman named Etta James and not about some dude named James Etta! So this is a PSA to anyone else who mindlessly fills ETTA thinking it's some dude.

Signed, Rafa

[Follow Rafa on Twitter]

Constructor: Matthew Stock

Relative difficulty: Medium (8:05)

THEME: LUCKY BREAKS — Classic lucky charms are split across several words / black squares

Theme answers:

NUMB / ERSE / VENOM
RETRAIN / BOWL CUT
GRISHAM / ROCKIER
ABHOR / SESH / OEUF

Word of the Day: BRET Easton Ellis ("Less Than Zero" writer) —

Bret Easton Ellis (born March 7, 1964) is an American author, screenwriter, short-story writer, and director. Ellis was first regarded as one of the so-called literary Brat Pack and is a self-proclaimed satirist whose trademark technique, as a writer, is the expression of extreme acts and opinions in an affectless style. His novels commonly share recurring characters.

• • •

Good morning, besties! Surprise Malaika MWednesday because our CrossWorld King is on vacation. I am a biiiig fan of this type of theme, where the words break across black squares. Shameless self-promotion alert, the first puzzle I ever received payment for had this theme, you can solve it here. This theme works best when there's an apt revealer, and Matthew nailed it here!

All four of the lucky charms he selected are well-known-- RAINBOW is maybe the weakest link for me, but I do still think it works. And I appreciate how they are arranged in symmetrical rows, even if the theme content itself isn't symmetrical. (Generally, I don't have any strongly-held morals inre symmetry.)

With "five" theme answers (sort of more, actually), it's tough to get fun long answers that have no relation to the theme. (We typically call these "bonus answers.") It's even tougher when the central answer isn't 15 letters long, because it locks in some black squares in the central row. But Matthew still gave us PARABLE and CRONUTS and even PANERA.

Time for a Soup Interlude!! I went through a phase (6th-ish grade) where my main activity was going to the mall with friends and ordering potato soup in a bread bowl from Panera. I feel like we should bring back bread bowls. I don't see them anywhere anymore, or maybe I'm just in a too-hipster part of Brooklyn. Today I have only eaten soup: French onion soup, while watching the Croatia/Messi, I mean, Argentina game, and then ramen for dinner. Please leave your four favorite soups in the comments.

Not much else to say about this puzzle-- Matthew Stock sure makes them easy to love! Or did I miss one of your gripes? Let me know below

xoxo Malaika

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Constructor: Bruce Haight

Relative difficulty: medium? idk, i was way more than three sheets to the wind and still finished in under four minutes [ETA: also apparently it's slightly larger than usual at 15x16, which just means it's an extra dose of "why am I slogging through this"]

THEME: VICHYSSOISE— theme entries are just ingredients in the soup? and the clues are just instructions on how to make this? tbh who the fuck cares? is this what passes for a $750 puzzle in the new york times these days? hard fucking pass

Word of the Day: VICHYSSOISE (Soup made with this puzzle's ingredients) —

Vichyssoise, also known as potage Parmentier, velouté Parmentier, or crème Parmentier, is a thick soup made of boiled and puréed leeks, onions, potatoes, cream, and chicken stock. It is traditionally served cold, but it can be eaten hot.

Recipes for soup made of pureed leeks and potatoes were common by the 19th century in France. In 19th-century cookbooks, and still today, they are often named "Potage Parmentier" or "Potage à la Parmentier" after Antoine-Augustin Parmentier, the French nutritionist and scholar who popularized the use of potatoes in France in the 18th century. The French military cookbook of 1938 includes a recipe for "Potage Parmentier for 100 men" using milk instead of cream but with proportions and directions that are similar to the recipe for "Vichyssoise Soup" given later by Julia Child.

The origins of the name Vichyssoise are a subject of debate among culinary historians; one version of the story is that Louis XV of France was afraid of being poisoned and had so many servants taste the potato leek soup that, by the time he tried it, the soup was cold, and since he enjoyed it that way it became a cold soup. Julia Child called it "an American invention", whereas others observe that "the origin of the soup is questionable in whether it's genuinely French or an American creation".

• • •

You ever open a puzzle and react like "ah shit, here we go again"? That was me opening today's puzzle. There's a reason I don't solve the NYT puzzle most days; in general, it's not good! And this is one of the constructors that I dread solving and that, tbh, I wouldn't solve if I hadn't already volunteered to blog this puzzle.

I had some hope halfway through this puzzle that the reveal would, you know, actually be a reveal, and tell me some cute and/or clever wordplay relating to the themers that I hadn't yet noticed. In all honesty, I don't really solve the NYT any longer, because 90+% of the puzzles are not worth solving; if anything, they're worse than puzzles you can get from (e.g.) the AVCX, Universal, USA Today, LA Times, etc., and imo this is 110% related to the editor and what they prioritize, and increasingly it's clear that the NYT is (pardon the pun) behind the times on catering to solvers who are online and/or actually constructors (rather than, say, your average syndicated solver in the middle of nowhere, Upper East Side and/or flyover country, USA).

Anyway, tl;dr, no, this puzzle did not have a clever reveal. I thought it might, because in the past italicized clues have generally been used to indicate some mischievous wordplay or something, but no, this is a puzzle whose theme clues could've just used an asterisk. It's a recipe, nothing more, nothing less, and all I have to say is: who the fuck cares? Is this what passes for a goddamn theme these days at the (alleged) standard-bearer of crosswords? (I notice that, on xwordinfo, the constructor notes that "I'm pretty sure I will have zero in the queue" after this puzzle, to which I can only say: thank fucking god.)

Theme answers:

Two pounds, peeled and chopped [NEW POTATOES, which, WTF, has anybody ever said this in their fucking life]
Five cups, after lengthy simmering [CHICKEN STOCK, at least this is a valid phrase]
One cup, after cooling [HEAVY CREAM, sure, I guess rolls eyes at the clue; at least the answer's fine]
Four cups, cleaned and sliced [SAUTEED LEEKS, again with the green paint here, this is not a valid entry by any stretch of the imagination]
Soup made with this puzzle's ingredients [VICHYSSOISE, which, good luck spelling this correctly without crossing letters, and again let me reiterate: who the fuck cares? Why are you going to the crossword for your recipes when there's an entire section of the website (that they charge too much for) to give you such recipes (that probably don't rely on green paint phrases like NEW POTATOES or SAUTEED LEEKS, although I can't be arsed to look up any actual recipes on the NYT website for this)]

Anyway, I really have nothing nice to say about this. Absolutely nothing. Do yourself a favor for the holiday season: you have my permission to solve other puzzles. I listed a few above, but like really, anything that's made by and/or for people under forty years old (if not younger). At worst, they're more fun than this; at best, even with references to current pop culture / things some solvers might know, they're still constructed so that the solver has a fun time. (And if you're not sure where to look, then let me (once again) promote the daily crossword links newsletter.)

OLIO:

CLIO [Mythical figure often pictured holding a book] — I actually liked this because I learned something here; you usually only see CLIO clued w/r/t the advertising award, so it's nice to learn something (while at the same time being able to figure it out from context w/ the "mythological figure" part; educational yet guessable / inferable; contrast w/ "mountain nymph" for OREAD, which is a boring-ass clue for a boring-ass answer)
LEE [Surname derived from the Chinese word for "plum"] — Ditto for liking this because it's something that I didn't know but do now, and like the above answer, you can still infer it / easily get it from crossings; a rare fun fact in a sea of not-so-fun clues.
I...really don't have anything else here? Almost every clue is obscenely short and boring (and incredibly straightforward—where's the fun? where's the wordplay?) and again, if I did not have to blog this puzzle, I wouldn't have just quit in the middle of it—I would not have started solving this. It's not a good puzzle by any stretch of the imagination. Like, if you were trying to get a friend or loved one into solving crosswords, would you give this puzzle to them? Absolutely not, because it's not interesting in any way, shape, or form, nor by any stretch of the imagination. It's almost actively (and aggressively) anti-crosswords.

Yours in puzzling, Christopher Adams, Court Jester of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Constructor: Kameron Austin Collins

Relative difficulty: Very challenging (slowest Friday of the year for me!)

THEME: None

Word of the Day: RED MASS (17A: Annual Roman Catholic service for members of the legal profession) —

A Red Mass is a Mass celebrated annually in the Roman Catholic Church for all members of the legal profession, regardless of religious affiliation: judges, lawyers, law school professors, law students, and government officials, marking the opening of the judicial year. Through prayerful petition and thanksgiving the Red Mass requests guidance from the Holy Spirit for all who seek justice, and offers the legal community an opportunity to reflect on the God-given power and responsibility of all in the legal profession.

• • •

Hi all, it's Rafa again -- hope you all didn't miss me too much in the last two days. This puzzle felt very much like a Saturday puzzle to me: an open grid design with chonky corners, some challenging (to me) names, devilishly tricky cluing. I wonder what sort of puzzle we're getting tomorrow ... are we in store for an ultra-hard Saturday? Or did Shortz et al. switch the Friday and Saturday puzzles? We'll see...

BAD JUJU was a fun way to start things off, though I had BAD lUck there for a long time, making the rest of that corner very hard to break into. AQUINAS was cool to stack with BAD JUJU for added scrabbliness, but I was not a fan of GUN BORE! I don't like guns IRL ... I don't like guns in my crossword ... I don't like wordplay about guns. I'd also never heard of DUNK TANK (in my defense, I have never been to a county fair...) but my friend (hi Adam!) tells me it was a fun answer and I believe him.

BOLT CUTTERS made me think of this critically acclaimed Fiona Apple album (which I confess I've never listened to!)

The NE was the only corner that fell easily, probably because I knew Sharon OLDS (the only proper in this puzzle I knew immediately, I think). Cute clue on GAMERTAGS[Handles made to be played with], which, on a Friday, I would have expected to come with a question mark. But ... we already established this was secretly a Saturday puzzle.

Anyhoo ... what else? Just a lot of tough clues! Many of them really nice and satisfying, but hard! [Spells] for TRANCES, [Used car business] for RESALES, [Unnamed alternative] for OR ELSE, [Cause of a game's end] for TILT, etc etc. I had to ask a friend (hi Rebecca!) to explain that last one to me -- turns out it's about pinball. There are so many games! And they can end in so many ways!

Oh look, it's a jam! If only we had figured out a way to avoid this! Maybe we could make people live close to shopping, leisure, and work spaces. Maybe we could even have one big vehicle that could take a bunch of people around! Wow, that would probably help with pollution too, huh? Someone should look into this idea...

My favorite fill was BAD JUJU, SO RANDOM, VODKA CRAN. Loved the angle on NET ZERO. The ELENORE / OLY cross was a guess for me, but L seemed like the most plausible letter there. Oh, it also felt mean to clue FRA as just [Brother] without a "in Italian" or "for a monk" or whatever qualifier. Sometimes a challenge is nice though, so I'm not too mad about having to work harder on a Friday. But I wish there'd been a bit more zingier stuff in the fill.

Bullets:

GINZA [52A: Posh shopping district of Tokyo] — I have been to GINZA in Tokyo!
USEFUL [7D: Advantageous] — I feel like USEFUL and advantageous aren't quite synonyms but ... it's a Saturday puzzle (yes, I'm committing to this bit) so I guess I can't complain
KID A [37D: 2000 #1 Radiohead album] — I learned this album existed just a few months ago (please don't come for me in the comments; I was 5 in 2000) so it was cool to see it in a puzzle
RED MASS [17A: Annual Roman Catholic service for members of the legal profession] — It's really funny to me that there's a special mass for legal professionals...

Signed, Rafa

[Follow Rafa on Twitter]

City in ancient Crete with renowned labyrinth / TUE 11-29-22 / Hit BBC series since 1963 informally / Ratite featured on Uruguayan currency / Goose that might nest on volcanic ash

Vertical water conduit / WED 11-30-22 / K on a printer cartridge / Online competitor of US Weekly

Modern digital asset in brief / THU 12-1-22 / McKenzie of the musical comedy duo Flight of the Conchords / Giant star in Scorpius / Behave like a certain surface-feeding shark / Chinese American fashion designer with a Dolly Girl line / Joe-___ weed / Source of iridescence in many mollusks

1962 #1 hit that the BBC once deemed "too morbid" to play / FRI 12-2-22 / Banks who coined the term "smizing" / Inclination to prioritize new events over historical ones / What a camera emoji in an Instagram caption often signifies

Carpels' counterparts / SAT 12-3-22 / Brain-tingly feeling that may come from hearing whispering or crinkling, in brief / Inefficient confetti-making tool / That's on me slangily / Alternative to a blind in poker

Former moniker of reality TV child star Alana Thompson / MON 12-5-22 / Onetime manufacturer of the Flying Cloud and Royale / Makeup of a muffin top

Dissolute man, from the French / TUE 12-6-22 / Bellicose humanoid of Middle Earth / "Girl in Progress" star with a line of cosmetics / Portrayer of the nurse Marta Cabrera in "Knives Out"

Northernmost capital in continental South America / WED 12-7-22 / Six-time M.L.B. All-Star Mookie / It might say "Scam Likely"

THU 12-8-22 / NEW YORK TIMES GUILD WALKOUT

Mononymous artist who designed dresses at age 6 / FRI 12-9-22 / Monster called Miche in Tibetan / Part of a flower's gynoecium / Bird that can recognize itself in a mirror / Lawyer/voting rights activist Sherrilyn

Flour ground in a chakki / SAT 12-10-22 / Cricketer's 100-run streaks / Website with adoptable virtual creatures / Rock-forming mineral that makes up over half of the earth's crust / Bhikku's teacher / Geographical heptad

Internet star Majimbo known for her comedy videos / SUN 12-11-22 / Having successfully made it slangily / Symbol of Irish heritage / Invertebrate with floral eponym / Mane character in Wizard of Oz / Onetime auto make with Metro and Prizm models / Voting rights matriarch Boynton Robinson

High-energy person metaphorically / MON 12-12-22 / Basketball rebound play / Snoopy and Gromit for two / Fliers that may consume thousands of insects in an hour / Obsolescent music purchases in brief

Order for a birthday party or wedding reception / TUE 12-13-2022 / Ways to escape a dilemma / Ab-toning exercise / Words after get or sleep / Leftover morsel

Cousin of a cassowary / WED 12-14-2022 / Short meeting? / Avatar of Vishnu

Mythical figure often pictured holding a book / THU 12-15-2022 / Surname derived from the Chinese word for "plum" / Soup made with this puzzle's ingredients / Start of a classic question in Shakespeare / Pulling up pots in Chesapeake Bay, say

Fallout from a hex, perhaps / FRI 12-16-2022 / Commonly farmed fish / Firecracker personalities / Went out for a while / Last resort for a locksmith