Rex Parker Does the NYT Crossword Puzzle

Constructor: Kelly Richardson

Relative difficulty: Medium

THEME: NOT MY CUP OF TEA — how I feel about this theme; there's (only) two tea-related puns, three stacked entries inside black squares that resemble a teacup (although I was hoping the grid art here would be something to do with martinis, given the shape closer to the top)

Word of the Day: SKIES (22A: "Blue ___", classic Irving Berlin tune) —

"Blue Skies" is a popular song, written by Irving Berlin in 1926.
"Blue Skies" is one of many popular songs whose lyrics use a "bluebird of happiness" as a symbol of cheer: "Bluebirds singing a song/Nothing but bluebirds all day long." The sunny optimism of the lyrics are undercut by the minor key giving the words an ironic feeling. [wikipedia]

• • •

Hey hi hello and howdy, Christopher Adams here filling in for Rex for the first time in (checks watch) too long. Good to be back, wish it was with a puzzle I liked more than this. Didn't dislike it, but again, not my cup of tea. I can absolutely see why some people would really love this; I just found it hard to ignore how minimal the theme was (only two punny entries plus a little bit of grid art around three short entries), especially when parts of it didn't fully connect with me.

Theme answers:

[1959 Marilyn Monroe film ... or what can be said of the drink featured in today's puzzle?] SOME LIKE IT HOT
[What someone might remark after drinking the blend at the heart of this puzzle?] NOT MY CUP OF TEA
I'm not typing out the clues but PEACH PEKOE and ASSAM are all clued as teas (w/r/t to their origins) and stacked inside the teacup at the center

Honestly the nicest thing about the theme (to me, at least) was the stacking of PEACH, PEKOE, and ASSAM in the central cup, which does not runneth over. Crossings were nicer than I'd expect from stacking three answers; ALCOA and REHEM are the worst of the five but are still pretty decent, and much better than I'd've expected given three entries stacked + major constraints from grid art, so they get a pass from me today.

That said, the idea of mixing three different types of tea in one cup...bleargh. Makes sense why you would say "not my cup of tea" after drinking that, but that's a bit stretchy because it is your cup of tea, you made it, and why would you mix those all together unless you knew you liked it? And if you didn't make it, then the reaction's more "no thanks" or "disgusting" or something else. IDK, I'm ~~maybe~~ definitely overthinking this terrible pun, and plenty of people will like it and find it fine and not think about it for anywhere near as long as I have. But not me; like the cup of tea at the center of this puzzle, it's leaving a bad taste in my mouth.

KNICK [New York basketball player]— Misread that as "baseball player" at first, saw it was five letters, and was like "oh god, not NYMET, that's awful fill and also dupes the clue" before realizing the error. Anyway, I'm wearing this shirt while writing this; let's go Mets baby love da Mets.

On the other hand, the Marilyn Monroe themer hit home perfectly for me. Yes, some people do like it hot, while some prefer to drink ice(d) tea**. Wish there were more theme clues that were this solid. Even if there was only one more themer like this, I'd like this puzzle a lot more. But when there's only two punny theme entries outside of the grid art, they've both got to be super spot-on.

**Include or delete that D as you see fit in reading this; I'm not discussing whether it's ICE TEA or ICED TEA, but feel free to make your opinion known in the comments, and know that there's one (1) correct answer to this debate.

In the end, only one good theme clue isn't enough to make me like it. But that one good clue, plus two theme entries that would be great assets in a themeless, as well as a few other entries like HOUSE CAT and THAT'S THAT—that's enough for me to not dislike it. And YMMV—like I said, it's somebody's cup of tea, but not mine. I suppose my take on this puzzle is like a cup of tea that's sat out too long—in the end, neither hot nor cold, but lukewarm.

Olio:

STEVE [Martin of "Only Murders in the Building"] — I think it's well known that Martins Steve and Short are both in the show and share that part of their name; why I'm including this here is my habit of solving the first row and then immediately switching to the downs to solve a bunch of entries with starting letters already in place...and even having the first letter in place didn't disambiguate this.
TRICK [Group of cards in hearts or bridge] — I don't know why "group" bothers me so much here; perhaps it's how vague it is, although at the same time I don't know what word I'd replace it with (short of rewriting the whole clue).
OVERSLEPT [Didn't wake up in a timely manner] — I know the NYT is pretty lax on dupes between clues and entries in the grid, but the overlap here with AWAKEN at 11A is too much to ignore.
THAT'S THAT! ["End of discussion!"]— And that's that for today's writeup!

Yours in puzzling, Christopher Adams, Court Jester of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Constructor: Alex Eaton-Salners

Relative difficulty: Medium-hard (I printed this off, and my copy didn't include picture clues, so I had to get six answers from the crossings. Honestly didn't realize I was missing clues until a third of the way through it, and then it seemed like every clue I wanted to look at after that had the clue missing, but I was still able to power through this because the missing clues were also thematically tied and not just random words and phrases.)

THEME: AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE — six of the clues are given in ASL, and their answers are all common words and phrases you'd use in conversation.

Word of the Day: OPI (17A: Nail polish brand with colors like "Berry Fairy Fun" and "Aurora Berry-alis") —

OPI, originally named Odontorium Products Inc., was a small dental supply company purchased by George Schaeffer in 1981. Shortly after taking over the company, Schaeffer was joined by Hungarian-born Suzi Weiss-Fischmann, OPI's Executive Vice President and Artistic Director. Schaeffer and Weiss-Fischmann partnered with R. Eric Montgomery, a biochemist, and created an acrylic system that Schaeffer sold door-to-door to local nail salons. They closed the dental sales and focused entirely on nail products changing the name to OPI Products Inc.
In 1989, OPI expanded its portfolio to nail lacquers and later other products. In 2003, OPI created a Legally Blonde 2 collection that was also featured in the film. Collaborations that have followed include Ford Mustang, the 2010 film Alice in Wonderland, and Dell (2009). [wikipedia]

• • •

Hey hi hello and howdy, Christopher Adams here filling in for Rex for the first time in (checks watch) twenty-four hours. Liked this puzzle more than yesterday's, despite having no theme content to work with due to printing issues. But it was a fun solve that had more flavor than yesterday's, and I enjoyed the challenge of trying to figure out what clues I was missing before I actually got to the reveal. I didn't guess the theme right before seeing the reveal, but the fact that they're all conversational phrases helped. And it was nice to have that extra layer on top of the theme; it feels more cohesive that way (contrast with, say, this last Sunday's puzzle, which I hated hated hated in part because the theme was so loose).

Theme answers:

YOU'RE WELCOME
I LOVE YOU
PLEASE
THANKS
HELLO
SORRY

So yeah, didn't have a theme to work with throughout, but in addition to the (fun) challenge of trying to figure out why clues were missing and what those answers were, also had lots of fun clues (OPI, PYRO, ROUGH UP, COLLEGE, more below in olio) and good fill (EAST BERLIN, HONEY LEMON, GOT CAUGHT), and overall it just had a good vibe and personality and felt like it was actually constructed by a single person, rather than (over)edited down to fit the publication voice.

Also, now that I've had a chance to look at the images post-solve, I think I would've still enjoyed the solve for mostly the same reasons, but also a few new reasons. Like, some of the images are more helpful to me than others; I wouldn't have gotten the same fun from puzzling out those answers without any clues, but I would've gotten a new fun from being able to translate the pictures into answers.

Olio:

DESK [Work station] — If you know anybody in the Iowa area who is looking to get rid of furniture (especially a desk and/or a couch), put them in touch with me. I'm open to other items of furniture as well, but desks and couches are the only things that are more needs than wants.
TEN [Largest of the three-letter numbers] — Can you find a way to express the number ten, using each of the other three-letter numbers exactly once?
STEAK [For which you might tell a chef "Well done!"] — No no no no no no no no. If you want your steak well done, order something else instead.
SHOELACES [They often take bows]— Great misdirect, especially since it's next to [Allegro or adagio] to put you in a musical mindset. Could've done without the cross-reference at 51-Down, though; never a fan of cross-references that go all the way across the grid.
ST LUCIA [Caribbean country whose capital is Castries] — This clue brought to you by the letter C; also, side-eye at the abbreviated spelling when "Saint Lucia" is more common in my experience.
PSI [Greek consonant hidden in the names of two Greek vowels] — Epsilon and upsilon, also this is just a cool find to include in a clue.
MOOSE [Mammal whose babies can outrun humans at only three days old] — Love me some fun animal facts, cervine megafauna, and fun animal facts about cervine megafauna.

Yours in puzzling, Christopher Adams, Court Jester of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Constructor: Kareem Ayas

Relative difficulty: EASY-MEDIUM - I suppose it could play harder if you don't get the theme, but this seems like a pretty gettable gimmick.

THEME: WORMHOLES — Three astronomically themed answers in the top row continue from one circled square to another to form a longer answer because... I honestly don't know.

Word of the Day: PARAMUS (50A: New Jersey borough known for its shopping malls) —

Paramus (/pəˈræməs/ pə-RAM-əs^[20]) is a borough in the central portion of Bergen County, in the U.S. state of New Jersey. A suburban bedroom community of New York City, Paramus is located 15 to 20 miles (24 to 32 km) northwest of Midtown Manhattan and approximately 8 miles (13 km) west of Upper Manhattan. The Wall Street Journal characterized Paramus as "quintessentially suburban".^[21] The borough is also a major commercial hub for North Jersey (home to Garden State Plaza and various corporate headquarters).

• • •

Hi Crossworld, it's Eli again! I usually look froward to Thursday puzzles. I like a good gimmick theme and seeing what constructors can throw my way that I'm not expecting. Today was... not for me. Like, I see that the starts of the theme phrases are space-related, but why these phrases? Is there any reasoning behind which circled square goes to the next? Why are the "receiving" wormholes isolated squares? Why, if you remove that wormhole square, do two of the answers make readable (if incomplete) phrases but the third one doesn't? I sincerely hope I'm missing something here because this feels both flimsy and frankly, boring.

Theme answers:

STAR***T YOUR ENGINES (1A: Indy 500 directive / 23D: ---)
COMET***O JESUS MOMENT (5A: Epiphany that precedes a major change / 21D: ---)
NOVA***CANCY (10A: Neon sign outside a motel / 55D: ---)
WORMHOLE (39D: Portal represented by each pair of circled letters in this puzzle)

You also have ASTRONAUT (33A: One on a mission) hanging out around the middle there, but it's more theme-adjacent than actually a part of anything. Also, sitting there above UVA (40A: Charlottesville sch.) instead of EVA (which is a space-related acronym - Extravehicluar Activity) without too much reworking feels like a missed opportunity. When the theme is this thin, why not pad it out some? Oh, I see SAGAN (71A: Carl who wrote "Cosmos") hanging out down in that bottom corner. More theme-adjacency.

25A, from Marvel's Inhumans

I'm honestly struggling to think of much to say about this one. It's theme-light, but the fill doesn't take advantage of the extra space. OR IS IT (11A: Question that casts doubt) looks interesting in the grid, visually, but I think you could find a flashier clue there. I like Anita ODAY (38D) and I enjoy an ALPACA (3D: Domesticated relative of the vicuña), but neither is terribly exciting. Hey, a Muppet! (ERNIE (68A: Muppet with a distinctive snickering laugh)). I'll never complain about the presence of a Muppet. Here's a video of a Bert and Ernie outtake. Watching Muppeteers improvise with each other is one of my favorite things.

Bullets:

ARLEN (66A: Harold who composed "Over the Rainbow") — Nothing against the composer or the song, but Arlen always means one thing to me:

MAUL (7D: Badly rough up) and ANI (62A: Small change in party parity?) — Both of these could have been clued as Star Wars (Darth Maul and Anakin Skywalker, respectively). I don't think Star Wars uses wormholes extensively, but I still see them there.
UVA (40A: Charlottesville sch.) and OVA (35D: Products of oogenesis) — I wonder what it would be like if you introduced them? Do I get to use this clip in 2 blogs in one month? You bet I do!

That's all I've got for today. I need to STOP (44D: "Enough!").

Signed, Eli Selzer, False Dauphin of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook

]

Constructor: Jacob McDermott

Relative difficulty: Hard (19:06 with a couple "Check Puzzle"s)

THEME: none

Word of the Day: ODOR (What "waftaroms" represent in the comics) —

The Lexicon of Comicana is a 1980 book by the American cartoonist Mort Walker. It was intended as a tongue-in-cheek look at the devices used by comics cartoonists. In it, Walker invented an international set of symbols called symbolia after researching cartoons around the world (described by the term comicana).

• • •

Hey squad! What a treat to review a themeless puzzle for once! I like my puzzles easy and themeless, and this one hit one of the marks. I really struggled to get a start on this-- absolutely fell into the [It might turn red or blue] trap, and dropped in "litmus test." (I also, slightly more embarrassingly, initially had "rizz" instead of GAME for [Flirting ability, in slang].) I made it about fifteen minutes, and then after staring at the lower corners for several minutes had to start guessing and checking a little.

Also-- there were two places where I had to fully guess. The crossing of WON / LAW took me a second because I couldn't crack that fiendishly clever clue [Appealing subject?], and while I guessed that "jeon" was Korean, I totally blanked on the currency. I also didn't know the crossing of SIENA / CANA, although I guessed correct on my first try.

Looking over the grid, nothing stands out as particularly hard (I was able to plop in some of the non-ideal stuff like IN OT and YER just because I've done lots of puzzles), so I'm trying to figure out why I got such a slow start. I think it's because the cluing was trivia-heavy.

To me, trivia, more than anything else, can stretch the range of a puzzle's difficulty. Trivia is the thing that makes a puzzle a breeze to some and a struggle to others. ("What about proper nouns??" you might ask. And to you I say-- those are often a subset of trivia!) Obviously sometimes trivia is fully necessary, but here we got trivia clues for entries that could have been clued otherwise, like OPERA (Setting of a date for Edward and Vivian in "Pretty Woman") and SIENA (New York college known for opinion polling) and ODOR (What "waftaroms" represent in the comics) (Did the grammar feel weird on that to anyone else? I really wanted a plural.) and BURPEE (Physiologist whose namesake exercise is part of an Army fitness test) and NILE (River traveled by passenger boats known as dahabeahs) and NORTH POLE (Locale with the ZIP code 88888) and even BALI (Neighbor of Java) and YAM (Sub-Saharan crop). That seemed like a lot to me!!

There were also some puns that worked and others that didn't. I already mentioned [Appealing subject?] as a win. On the other end of things was [Things that are head and shoulders above the rest?] for PROFILE PICS, whose wordplay just didn't land-- I've had plenty of profile pics which feature below my shoulders... or aren't even a picture of me at all. Spinning 180 again, I'll devote several sentences to [What might prompt you to flip the bird?] for OVEN TIMER, which is one of the best clues I can remember in a long time. Changing the meaning of both "flip" and "bird" is so genius, and the "Aha!" moment was incredibly delightful and satisfying. I'll be keeping this one in my back pocket the next time I'm teaching someone how to write the perfect Question Mark Clue.

I'm running out of room in this review, so I'll close by flagging my two favorite entries-- LOVE POTION and IM ON A ROLL. The former is just so evocative and almost poetic; the latter selfishly reminds me of a puzzle I wrote from a couple months ago.

Lots of bullets today:

[Upon which a dragonfly frequently lays its eggs] for POND— This phrasing was bonkers to me!! I have never seen phrasing for a clue like this before, and for a moment I thought this was going to be a themed puzzle.
[Boyfriend of Nancy Drew] for NED — I was a huge reader but I never read these! In terms of mysteries, I preferred The Boxcar Children. If you're trying to buy a mystery for a kid you know, I highly recommend the Truly Devious series.
[Farmers business: Abbr.] for INS— Please, someone, tell me what this means
[Holiday time, informally] for VACAY — Does anyone else spell this "vaycay"? Actually, as I'm typing it, that looks dumb. Never mind.

xoxo Malaika

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Constructor: Ricky J. Sirois

Relative difficulty: Medium (Hard, then Easy)

THEME: none

Word of the Day: Ship of THESEUS (21D: Eponym for a ship in a famous thought experiment) —

The Ship of Theseus, also known as Theseus's Paradox, is a thought experiment and paradox about whether an object is the same object after having had all of its original components replaced over time, typically one after the other.
In Greek mythology, Theseus, mythical king of the city Athens, rescued the children of Athens from King Minos after slaying the minotaur and then escaped onto a ship going to Delos. Each year, the Athenians would commemorate this by taking the ship on a pilgrimage to Delos to honour Apollo. A question was raised by ancient philosophers: After several hundreds of years of maintenance, if each individual piece of the Ship of Theseus was replaced, one after the other, was it still the same ship?
In contemporary philosophy, this thought experiment has applications to the philosophical study of identity over time, and has inspired a variety of proposed solutions and concepts in contemporary philosophy of mind concerned with the persistence of personal identity. (wikipedia)

• • •

[at Point Pelee National Park, Ontario, Canada]

Oof, I am out of practice. When I go on vacation I Go On Vacation, which means I haven't so much as looked at a crossword puzzle since my last write-up on Whenever That Was (last Sunday, I think). I'd planned to blog throughout the week, but then the internet at our lake house turned out to be spectacularly bad, and so my stand-ins mercifully stood in and I got to take the week off. Genuinely off. It was great. I stared at Lake ERIE (4) from my back deck and watched the birds and listened to Barry Manilow and Dan Fogelberg and the Bee Gees and George Benson and Ambrosia and whatever other mellow childhood radio tunes my best friends decided to play on their little outdoor speaker cube thingie. Drank cocktails, read books, walked around quaint little towns eating gelato. Zero puzzles done.

[MARI'S Gelato in Kingsville—a must]

And then I come back to a Saturday! Thrown in the deep end. I floundered around the NW corner of this one like a total incompetent, though, to be fair, some of the clues were dumb (who has bungee jumping on their BUCKET LIST!? Is bungee jumping still a thing? Feels like an "extreme sport" from the '90s—I wanted the answer to be ESPN ... something—"Hey, you wanna watch bungee-jumping?""No.""Cool, I'll just turn on ESPN X-TREME.""I said 'no.'") (I think I also just hate the term BUCKET LIST, the way it sounds, the very idea of it ... just do the things you want to do, you don't need some mythical list, which almost certainly is not an actual "list" anyway). "STARS ON ICE?" (17A: Touring show for figure skaters). That feels made-up. ICE CAPADES is a very real and well-known thing. "STARS ON 45," also a very real thing, and once well known. "STARS ON ICE?" Maybe it's super famous and I just can't think of anything I'd want to go to less except maybe a monster truck rally (do they still have those?). I went to grad school in Michigan and know the names of all the little colleges there (my good friend taught at Adrian College for a while), and I *knew* ALMA, but couldn't retrieve it. Access denied. No idea about the Spanish province, forgot or blanked on the Hangul writing system. Entire NW, a washout. I had YDS and LANand TREAT, and I wasn't really certain about those last two. Pitifully, shamefully, my first toehold came from the completely ordinary and unremarkable YDS / STAT cross-reference. Got STAT because I had YDS (and the "A" from TREAT) in place. Tried "I WAS NOT!," which, while not correct, was 5/7 correct, which was enough to get me into the PEN TENOR RAPPER section, and then things began to open up a little.

Part of my NW flubbery was (somehow) not even seeing the clue at 19A: Actors Feldman and Haim (COREYS), which would've been a gimme ... if I'd been able to spell. I thought COREY was CORY, and so for my plural, I had (logically!) CORIES, LOL. I was like, "Is that right? Is that how you pluralize Y-ending names? 'I wonder how many GARIES I know...' No, that looks bad." Sigh. But I figured it out, and I (somehow!) knew David GUETTA, despite being able to name absolutely nothing he's done (32A: David ___, Grammy-winning French D.J.). I just remembered seeing "ft. David GUETTA" on a bunch of song titles earlier this century, or maybe it's "David GUETTA, ft. [someone else]" (yes, that's it—he's collaborated with a ton of singers, including AKON, who shows up in puzzles sometimes, or did, once).

I also totally forgot about the Ship of THESEUS, which made getting into the NE corner very, very hard. Well, harder than it could've/should've been. Thought maybe the ship was "THE something," like "THE ZEUS" or "THE DEUS" (deus = Lat. for "god"). Speaking of "THE," THE EYE (26A: A bad look) was rough, both because it really wants to be THE Evil EYE or THE Stink EYE. I don't think of THE EYE as a "bad look," exactly. If you give someone THE EYE, you're checking them out in an at-least-semi-horny fashion ("to look at someone in a way that shows sexual attraction"— merriam-webster dot com). Thank god I knew window shades were PLEATED, because the NE might've been inaccessible otherwise. PLEATED gave me EXPAT gave me EXXON, and I was able to get up into the corner from there. After that, the puzzle got remarkably easy. Followed ALGEBRA into the SE and, with the help of NAPE PATH PABST (all easy), got all the long answers down there, no sweat. And the SW was even easier. Lit that one up like it was dry grass. Whoosh. NO CAN DO + PROTIP + GADOT, gimme gimme gimme gimme and ... done.

Bullets:

16A: ___ Wood, portrayer of the Bod girl Plenty O'Toole in "Diamonds Are Forever" (LANA) — we're still doing Bond Girls of Yore? With so many good (and actually famous) LANAs to choose from? Boo.

Lana Turner has collapsed!
I was trotting along and suddenly
it started raining and snowing
and you said it was hailing
but hailing hits you on the head
hard so it was really snowing and
raining and I was in such a hurry
to meet you but the traffic
was acting exactly like the sky
and suddenly I see a headline
LANA TURNER HAS COLLAPSED!
there is no snow in Hollywood
there is no rain in California
I have been to lots of parties
and acted perfectly disgraceful
but I never actually collapsed
oh Lana Turner we love you get up

([Lana Turner has collapsed], Frank O'Hara, 1964)

42D: Characters in "300" (ZEROS) — a "letteral" clue, but for numerals, which are "characters" ("a graphic symbol [...] used in writing or printing" (merriam webster dot com); here the character in question is "0" (which is in "300," twice, along with "3," obviously)
9D: Small denomination (SECT) — well, the misdirect worked; I was thinking currency. But are SECTs "small," by definition? Smaller than the group they broke from, sure. But if they're a full-blown "denomination," then "small" seems ... misleading. Possible, but not definitive.
25D: Punish like Montressor does Fortunato in "The Cask of Amontillado" (ENTOMB) — I had the "EN-" part and thought "... is ENWALL a word?" But I decided to go with the more recognizable ENTOMB. Great story, that one.
34D: Indigenous people of the Pacific Northwest (NEZ PERCE) — my mom grew up in northern Idaho, in St. Maries (just north of the original NEZ PERCE territory), so NEZ PERCE is probably one of the first Native American tribal names I ever learned.

[Green = original territory, brown = reservation]

38D: Have to shave one's head, perhaps (LOSE A BET) — I had LOSE and wrote in HAIR. That's why I shaved my head. "Yes, THAT TRACKS," I thought. But no.
36D: Horses around? (CAROUSEL) — the highlight of the puzzle. Just a great clue. I live in the CAROUSEL City. Well, it's actually called "The Parlor City," but it's also known as "The CAROUSEL Capital of the World."Seriously. George F. Johnson (of Endicott-Johnson shoes) built parks for his workers all over the area, including CAROUSELs, some of which are still operational (including one in Rec Park, just a stone's throw (give/take) from my house). The local minor league team here (a Mets Double-A affiliate) is called the Binghamton Rumble Ponies (an olde-tymey name for CAROUSEL horses).

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Constructor: John Ewbank

Relative difficulty: Easy/Medium (Top-left corner Very Hard)

THEME: Logical fallacies — There is a list of logical fallacies, with the revealer LOGICAL FALLACIES.

Word of the Day: MORDOR (113A: Home of Mount Doom in "The Lord of the Rings") —

In J. R. R. Tolkien's fictional world of Middle-earth, Mordor (pronounced [ˈmɔrdɔr]; from Sindarin Black Land and Quenya Land of Shadow) is the realm and base of the evil Sauron. It lay to the east of Gondor and the great river Anduin, and to the south of Mirkwood. Mount Doom, a volcano in Mordor, was the goal of the Fellowship of the Ring in the quest to destroy the One Ring. Mordor was surrounded by three mountain ranges, to the north, the west, and the south. These both protected the land from invasion and kept those living in Mordor from escaping.

• • •

Theme answers:

NO TRUE SCOTSMAN [All crossword fans love this puzzle; anyone who doesn't love this puzzle can't be a *real* crossword fan!]
CIRCULAR REASONING [Why was this chosen as today's puzzle? Because it's great! What makes it great? I mean, it was chosen for publication!]
CHERRY PICKING [I sent this crossword to 100 friends, and two of them really liked it!]
POST HOC ERGO PROPTER HOC [What's more, one of those friends won the lottery right after solving it — coincidence? I think not! ]
SLIPPERY SLOPE [If you criticize this puzzle, where will it end? Before long, you'll be criticizing your mother's cooking!]
APPEAL TO AUTHORITY [Besides, The New York Times said it was good!]
LOGICAL FALLACY [Part of a flawed argument, examples of which are seen throughout this puzzle]

Hi friends, it's Rafa today! Rex is still in vacation mode, so you get another Rexplacement. It's been a few weeks since I Rexplaced. I hope you've all been having a wonderful summer. Today, it was cold (65) here so I drove 45 minutes south where it was hot (85) and that made me very happy. May this be a reminder to also do things that make you happy! You deserve it.

Here is one thing that did not make me happy, though: this puzzle's theme. Sure, the meta-ish clues were fun, but at its core this is simply a list puzzle. Every theme entry is just in the "list of fallacies" Wikipedia page (yes, it's a real Wikipedia page). It was pretty easy for me to catch on to what was going on, and I filled in almost every theme answer immediately with no crosses (except NO TRUE SCOTSMAN, we'll get to that corner later). Maybe I'm just particularly well-versed in my logical fallacies? But where is the wit? Where is the wordplay? The joy, the creativity, the ingenuity, etc.? I feel like a list puzzle needs some additional layer, maybe a clever revealer, maybe some extra constraint, maybe even just a list that is tighter, or more interesting, or celebrating something that's not often celebrated in crosswords, or ... something. But the cute meta clues didn't quite do it for me today.

This is what an OKAPI looks like

Let me complain a bit more, and then I will say nice things. It's always nice to end with nice things. But for now ... complaining! Let's start with the elephant in the room, which is that IZZATSO is absolutely, definitively, resoundingly, etc., not a thing. Not even close to a thing, sadly. It Googles really poorly, and it's just kinda so laughably WTF. That corner was rough since NO TRUE SCOTSMAN was ??? to me, IZZATSO is obviously also ???, this STU angle was new to me, the OZONE clue was hard. There were a few other clunkers (UNPC, TACET, et al.) but overall I thought the rest was pretty clean for a Sunday.

Yum, ROTINI

Okay, that's out of my system. Now we can say nice things! Some fun non-theme entries here in BIONIC MEN, ONION RING, LET'S PARTY, POP-UP BOOK. Many Sundays will have not even one (1) fun entry like this, so I appreciated seeing these in the chonky corners of the grid. Even things like STIPEND, SPOILER, TENSE UP, WISCONSIN, while not super flashy, are super solid and evocative entries IMO.

The ROOK is my favorite chess piece, based purely on vibes

Well .. the "nice things" section is a lot shorter than the "not nice things" section ... but it's not my fault that it's so much more fun to complain than to say nice things!

Bullets:

GAS [Beetle juice?]— It took me forever to get this clue. It's Beetle as in the car, and juice as in fuel. So gas = gasoline = car fuel. Clever!
MUSH [Sled dog command] — This one I actually don't get. Some sledding jargon I guess? Let me know if there's something else going on here that I missed.
MT DANA [13,000+-foot peak in Yosemite]— I've been to Yosemite a few times, but don't think I'd heard of this.
AWS [Sympathetic sounds] — Not to be a Tech Shill, but I'd love to see this clued as Amazon Web Services some day, which I understand might not be very well-known to tech or tech-adjacent people but which serves one third of the global cloud market.

Signed, Rafa

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Constructor: Laura Dershewitz

Relative difficulty: Easyish (solved Downs-only)

THEME: POST-IT NOTES (50A: Sticky yellow squares ... or. description of the circled letters and what they follow?) — phrases in which "notes" (specifically, "do,""re," and "mi") follow the word "IT":

Theme answers:

BREAK IT DOWN (21A: Explain something in steps)
KEEPS IT REAL (31A: Acts like one's true self, colloquially)
PUT IT MILDLY (40A: Was understated in one's description)

Word of the Day: KonMari Method (63A: What the KonMari Method leaves you with) —

Marie Kondo (近藤麻理恵, Kondō Marie, pronounced [kondoː maɾie], born 9 October 1984), also known as Konmari (こんまり), is a Japanese organizing consultant, author, and TV presenter.
Kondo has written four books on organizing, which have collectively sold millions of copies around the world. Her books have been translated from Japanese into several languages, and her book The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up (2011) has been published in more than 30 countries. It was a best-seller in Japan and in Europe, and was published in the United States in 2014. [...] Kondo's method of organizing is known as the KonMari method, and consists of gathering together all of one's belongings, one category at a time, and then keeping only those things that "spark joy" (Japanese language ときめく tokimeku, translated as equivalent to English "flutter, throb, palpitate"), and choosing a place for everything from then on. Kondo advises to start the process of tidying up by "quickly and completely" discarding whatever it is in the house that doesn't spark joy. Following this philosophy will acknowledge the usefulness of each belonging and help owners learn more about themselves, which will help them be able to more easily decide what to keep or discard. She advises to do this by category of items and not their location in the house. For example, all the clothes in the house should be piled up first, assessed for tokimeku, and discarded if not needed, followed by other categories such as books, papers, miscellany, and mementos. Another crucial aspect of the KonMari method is to find a designated place for each item in the house and making sure it stays there.
Kondo says that her method is partly inspired by the Shinto religion. Cleaning and organizing things properly can be a spiritual practice in Shintoism, which is concerned with the energy or divine spirit of things (kami) and the right way to live (kannagara):
Treasuring what you have; treating the objects you own as not disposable, but valuable, no matter their actual monetary worth; and creating displays so you can value each individual object are all essentially Shinto ways of living. (wikipedia)

• • •

Well, the revealer is a winner, I'll give it that. I was very much not enjoying this puzzle before I hit the revealer, but the revealer really ... Revealed, you know? Like, I saw the "IT"s and I saw the "notes" but I sort of thought the "IT"s were a coincidence and I had no idea what the notes were doing (besides helping make my Downs-only solve easier—once I got the "RE," the "DO" seemed likely, and then the "MI" was a gimme). And then eventually POST-IT NOTES and I thought "damn it, that's good. That almost makes the rest of the puzzle worth enduring." Actually, "enduring" is a little strong. It was just extremely blah, with overfamiliar and dull fill everywhere (EKES, NE-YO, MS/DOS, zzz), and no real zing to break the monotony (except MAD SKILLS—that's plenty zingy) (33D: Crazy talent, slangily). I also really Really hated, in an admittedly nitpicky but nonetheless vehement way, the fact that the second themer was a third-person indicative verb phrase, where the others were just ... verb phrases. BREAK IT DOWN, PUT IT MILDLY, but ... KEEPS (sssss) IT REAL. Nails + chalkboard to my ears / eyes / soul. I know, I know, you have to have symmetry in the themers, as well as the proper note sequence, so it's only fair to make a little allowance for phrasing incongruities / anomalies, but look, I winced, that's just what happened. Whether it should have happened, that's not my concern. But as I say, that revealer is a real redeemer. It brought me all the way back to ... neutral on this puzzle. Dislike + Love = somewhere in the gray middle, feeling-wise.

My one big mistake (solving Downs-only) was getting the tense of LOST SLEEP wrong. I wrote in LOSE SLEEP. I have no idea why. Just stupid. It gave me GEE (instead of GET) in that cross, so I couldn't clearly see the error. Dumb brain glitch. Otherwise, no serious trouble. My worst mistake was probably imagining that ALGERIA was the [Northernmost country in Africa]. I was close! And it fit! And ended -IA! Ugh. That's the answer that slowed me down the most. I definitely did NAAN before ROTI, but those crosses looked bad pretty quick, and luckily I knew enough to keep my eye on the NAAN in case it turned into ROTI—and it did (22D: Indian flatbread). I learned that NOVA was the name for [Smoked salmon] from doing crosswords, so as I was writing it in, I was pretty tentative. "NAVI? No, that's the Avatar people. NOVI? NEVA? Oh, it's NOVA! That's right, I remember, it's a word that could definitely have a different clue ... but doesn't." Had IN A ___ at 43D: Stuck, with no easy way out, which left me stuck, with no easy way out, or way in to the SE, especially since I had the very appropriate "OOH!" instead of the not-really-a-"reaction"AWE at 59D: Reaction to seeing the Northern Lights, perhaps. A "reaction" is something something you do or say. AWE is a feeling. Blah blah blah I'm sure you word lawyer / AWE defenders are right in some technical sense, but boo. [Feeling upon seeing the Northern Lights, perhaps]—that, I like. "Reaction," I don't. Also in the "Don't Like" column: LESS as an answer for 63A: What the KonMari Method leaves you with. Way, way, way too vague. Not KonMari-specific enough, at all. True, you do get rid of shit, but the point of the "Method" is tidiness—it's right there in the title of the damn book (The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up).

So ... cool revealer, cool MAD SKILLS, the rest ... SPLAT. Net grade: middling. Some scheduling news: I'm here for the rest of July, then in early August I head west to see my dad and extended family, so I'll be out for a week again, during which my trusty substitutes will substitute once more. Thanks to them for their able work this month, and prethanks to them for that same work next month. I'll be spending early August in Santa Barbara, making several trips into the L.A. area, so if you live down there and I owe you a visit or you want to buy me a drink, just remind me or let me know, whichever applies. See you tomorrow.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Constructor: Sarah Sinclair and Amie Walker

Relative difficulty: Medium (normal Tues.)

THEME: CHORAL GROUP (62A: What the ends of 17-, 31-, 37- and 48-Across are, collectively) — theme answers end with SOPRANO, ALTO, TENOR, and BASS, respectively:

Theme answers:

TONY SOPRANO (17A: Role for which James Gandolfini won three Emmys)
PALO ALTO (31A: Silicon Valley city whose name translates to "tall stick")
EVEN TENOR (37A: Stable temperament)
ROCK BASS (48A: Freshwater fish named for its shoreline habitat)

Word of the Day: THE Ohio State University (10A: Article that Ohio State University surprisingly managed to trademark in 2022) —

Ohio State University has received a trademark for one of the most common words in the English language, one that the school’s supporters often forcefully emphasize when uttering its name: “The.”

While athletes from other schools may simply say they went to Michigan or Penn State, a Buckeye rarely cuts corners: “The Ohio State University,” they’ll say, usually adding a dramatic pause after stressing the “the.” The school’s players, alumni and supporters often speak its name in that consistent cadence, as football fans who have watched N.F.L. starting lineups introduce themselves on Sundays or Monday nights have most likely heard

To Ohio State’s supporters, the tradition is cherished and sets the school apart from the rest. (To Ohio State’s rivals, it’s nauseatingly pompous. To each their own.)

The trademark, issued on Tuesday by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, won’t unleash heavy-handed lawyers in search of anyone using the word “the” — its protections are limited to a narrow set of circumstances that people are unlikely to cross unless they are selling knockoff Ohio State merchandise. But it gives the university some protection against unlicensed sellers, and adds to the school’s efforts to link itself to the very common word. (NYT) (6/23/22)

• • •

Stopped to take a deep breath about five seconds into this one when not one but two of the long answers in the NW were pop culture trivia. And not exactly universally known pop culture trivia, either (in that I didn't know either one off the top of my head). You want to lean into a pop culture thing that you like here, or there, that's fine, that's normal, but two answers, right out of the box, both of them among the longer answers you have in the puzzle ... off-putting. Off-putting to clue MATTHEW that way (via Succession) when you've already got an HBO (now Max?) show as one of your themers—the very themer that is *crossing* MATTHEW. Crossing HBO answers ... feels like shilling. As for GENOVIA, I actually saw (and enjoyed) The Princess Diaries at some point, but shrug, the fake country name was not a bit of info that I retained. Both MATTHEW (1D: Actor Macfadyen of "Succession") and GENOVIA (3D: Fictional country in "The Princess Diaries") are easy enough to suss out from crosses, but cramming the opening section of a puzzle with your pet trivia feels slightly obnoxious. I know many of you are Succession fans, so your experience of the trivia here may be very different. I have never understood why anyone would want to watch a show about billionaires. I can't think of people I'm less interested in. I'm *quite* sure the writing and acting on that show is phenomenal, you don't have to convince me. But the subject matter is a hard pass. But this is beside the point, the point being: spread your pop culture trivia out. Please and thank you (I say this as a huge fan of The Sopranos, always happy to see James Gandolfini's name, go watch Nicole Holofcener's Enough Said (2013), with Gandolfini and Julia Louis-Dreyfus) (actually, maybe I'll do that today...).

But what about the meat of the puzzle, the theme? Well, it's OK. The concept is very basic (a straightforward "Last Words"-type puzzle), and the revealer was a bit of a let-down. I could see very quickly, after the second themer, that we were doing the voice type thing with the last words, but instead of getting some funny or punny or wacky or wordplay-based revealer, we just get plain-old CHORAL GROUP. A flat, literal description. Ho hum. It's important, but not hugely remarkable, that all the theme answers feature the voice types in non-voice contexts. I probably should mind that BASS is pronounced differently in its answer (where the other voice types aren't), but I don't. ROCK BASS does bother me for a different reason, though. Well, first, for outlier reasons, i.e. what the hell is a ROCK BASS? Feels like the constructors were desperate for a four-letter word to precede BASS (because the whole answer needed to be 8 letters, for symmetry's sake), and so ROCK BASS won because ROCK BASS ... exist? But I have to believe that (nearly) everyone has heard of the other themers, whereas bunches of us will have no idea what a ROCK BASS is (besides a fish). The clue tried to help me with the "ROCK" part by saying something about the fish's "shoreline habitat," but that did Nothing for me. Needed most of the crosses to get ROCK. And speaking of ROCK, if you're going to have it in your grid, and especially if you're going to have it as your least-likely-to-be-known word in your theme answer set, you probably (almost certainly) shouldn't dupe the word in the clues (10A: Rock-climber's notch => TOEHOLD). Overall, the theme is fine, but it runs a bit to the dull side.

Outside of the pop culture up front and the ROCK business, the puzzle was pretty easy, pretty straightforward. Pet and Dog and CATSPAs remain way, way (way x infinity) more popular in the crossword grid than they are in real life. Kinda tired of seeing variations on that answer at this point. But these animal SPAs appear so frequently now that it's hard to be too mad about it. Just another thing that xwords over-represent, like the character names on "Game of Thrones" or the enduring popularity of the BAHA Men. Never happy to see WOAH. In retrospect I think GENOVIA is a fun answer—possibly because it's the most original thing in the grid. It also doubles the Julie Andrews content—never a bad thing (Andrews is in The Princess Diaries ... and then we get 25D: Title for Julie Andrews or Maggie Smith). Every puzzle could use more Julie Andrews. Most situations in life could use more Julie Andrews. I know I mention Julia Louis-Dreyfus a lot (esp. for someone who never really cared for Seinfeld), but I highly recommend listening to the recent episode of her podcast "Wiser Than Me" where she interviews Andrews. Actually, the one where she interviews Carol Burnett is great, too. Oh, and the one where she interviews Bonnie Raitt (though she mostly cries through that one because she's so overcome by her fandom ... it's adorable). Anyway, Julie Andrews rules, is my point, today and always.

Bullets:

57D: Hillsboro ___, minor-league baseball team with a mascot named Barley (HOPS) — as with ROCK BASS, I had no idea what the answer was *and* the clue designed to help me get there did not help at all. Both "Barley" and HOPS are beer ingredients. OK. But "Barley" is just a grain, used in lots of things. Nothing about the clue screams "beer" to me. I don't even know where Hillsboro is, unless it's North Carolina. That's my guess. Final answer ... Oof, nope. Oregon. Oregon? LOL, that's about as un-North Carolina as a state can get, besides maybe Alaska or Hawaii. I don't mind this clue, but it's a bizarrely obscure piece of trivia for a Tuesday.

47D: Length from fingertip to fingertip (ARM SPAN) — I had ARM and then no idea. Just blanked. WINGSPAN is a front-of-the-brain term. ARM SPAN, apparently, not.
53D: Tangle (SNARL)— I had SNARE. SNARL is better, but they still seem remarkably, confusingly close in meaning. Kinda like their cousins, EVADE and ELUDE.
30D: Pickle, to a Brit (GHERKIN) — huh. I thought GHERKIN was just a type of pickle. "A small prickly fruit used for pickling" (m-w.com). I don't really eat pickles, i.e. the pickled cucumbers that come in jars, except when my local sandwich shop throws one in the bag. GHERKIN gives me old TV ad memories ... I think a pelican was involved ... oh, yeah, Vlasic. Why a pelican? What is the pelican/pickle connection? Oh, wait—it's a stork, not a pelican. A stork! I see, OK, that's ... no, I still don't get it. Although ... this (hilarious/insane) ad really leans into the stork business. Nothing sells pickles like ... an unexpected pregnancy joke!

I guess there is some connection between "pregnant women get weird food cravings" and "pickles," but still, this ad's whole "pregnancy scare" / "babies are pickles now" concept is ... bold.

See you next time.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Constructor: Shaun Phillips

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium

THEME: CLAW MACHINE GAME (35A: Joystick-controlled contraption depicted in this puzzle) — black squares in the upper middle are supposed to be the "claw" and I guess the "+"-shaped black square formation is supposed to be one of the prizes in the machines. Maybe the black square formations on the bottom are involved too, I don't know ... Also:

Theme answers:

"HOLD ON A MINUTE" (5D: "Wait!" ... or hopeful words while playing a 35-Across?)
CRANE OPERATOR (10D: Professional who might expect to do well with a 35-Across?)
AMUSEMENT ARCADE (54A: Setting for a 35-Across)

Word of the Day: NUDIE Cohn (49D: Fashion designer Cohn with an eponymous rhinestone-encrusted suit) —

Nuta Kotlyarenko (Ukrainian: Нута Котляренко; December 15, 1902 – May 9, 1984), known professionally as Nudie Cohn, was a Ukrainian-American tailor who designed decorative rhinestone-covered suits, known popularly as "Nudie Suits", and other elaborate outfits for some of the most famous celebrities of his era. He also became famous for his outrageous customized automobiles. [...] Cohn's designs brought the already-flamboyant western style to a new level of ostentation with the liberal use of rhinestones and themed images in chain stitch embroidery. One of his early designs, in 1962, for singer Porter Wagoner, was a peach-colored suit featuring rhinestones, a covered wagon on the back, and wagon wheels on the legs. He offered the suit to Wagoner for free, confident that the popular performer would serve as a billboard for his clothing line. His confidence proved justified and the business grew rapidly. In 1963 the Cohns relocated their business to a larger facility on Lankershim Boulevard in North Hollywood and renamed it "Nudie's Rodeo Tailors". //

Many of Cohn's designs became signature looks for their owners. Among his most famous creations was Elvis Presley's $10,000 gold lamé suit worn by the singer on the cover of his 50,000,000 Elvis Fans Can't Be Wrong album. Cohn created Hank Williams' white cowboy suit with musical notations on the sleeves, and Gram Parsons' infamous suit for the cover of the Flying Burrito Brothers' 1969 album The Gilded Palace of Sin, featuring pills, poppies, marijuana leaves, naked women, and a huge cross. He designed the iconic costume worn by Robert Redford in the 1979 film Electric Horseman, which was exhibited by the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City. // Many of the film costumes worn by Roy Rogers and Dale Evans were Nudie designs. John Lennon was a customer, as were John Wayne, Gene Autry, George Jones, Cher, Ronald Reagan, Elton John, Robert Mitchum, Pat Buttram, Tony Curtis, Michael Landon, Glen Campbell, Michael Nesmith, Hank Snow, Hank Thompson, and numerous musical groups, notably America and Chicago. ZZ Top band members Billy Gibbons and Dusty Hill sported Nudie suits on the cover photo of their 1975 album Fandango!. (wikipedia)

• • •

There's not nearly enough pictorial oomph here to make this endeavor worthwhile. You've got a kind of claw at the top of the grid, but nothing else evokes "claw machine," and the claw just looks like an ordinary black-square formation anyway, so ... I dunno. Very little visual impact, and very slight resemblance to the "game" in question. And that's the next big problem. "Game." It's a "claw machine." That's what it's called. The wikipedia entry: "Claw machine." It appears to be "crane machine" in some contexts, but mostly, it's a "claw machine." It is decidedly not a "CLAW MACHINE GAME." Yes, you need "game" to get you to a grid-spanning 15 letters, but oof you gotta get the terminology just right or Don't Do The Puzzle. This problem—the "slightly off" / "extra word" problem—kept happening, over and over with the themers today. Every. Single. One of the themers has a word in it that doesn't quite work or relate or make sense. Actually, CRANE OPERATOR is OK. I had OPERATOR and no idea what the first word could be (SMOOTH?), but when I got CRANE, I thought "OK, yeah, I guess that works." But "HOLD ON A ___?" Why MINUTE? You definitely don't need to hold on that long. Arbitrary. And then there's AMUSEMENT. What in the world is an "AMUSEMENT ARCADE?" It's an ... arcade. Maybe it's a video arcade? A penny arcade? Looks like "AMUSEMENT ARCADE" is in fact the title of the wikipedia entry on the general category of arcades, but I've never heard that term used, so I had ARCADE and literally no idea what was supposed to come before it. Forever. I had -EMENT before AMUSEMENT occurred to me. I don't think. AMUSEMENT ARCADE is a foul, since it's a real term, but it's not being terribly in-the-language added to my overall feeling that the themers were slightly to very ... off. Everywhere. All the time. And worst of all in the revealer itself, with the addition of the extremely redundant "GAME."

Fill-wise ... well, a lotta names. Right out of the box, once again (as with yesterday), we're inundated with proper nouns. STUBHUB over PIER ONE crossing UEFA, followed quickly by JOANN over O'SHEA. That's five names before you ever get out of the NW (I'm not counting OSLO as a name since OSLO has pretty much achieved the status of background noise in crossword puzzles). I knew all the names, including STUBHUB (which I got immediately, with no crosses in place), so I flew through that part, but I could tell that it was gonna be thorny for some. The NE corner was less name-y but also less clean, with the crosswordesey EENIE and ESAU and the improbable MINISUB (20A: Small vessel in the deep ocean) and the apostrophe-S-less PEET (22A: Alfred for whom a coffee chain is named) and the awkward RERINSE. And why doesn't TECHIES have something in its clue implying slang (8A: Some experts on viruses)? You wanna abbreviate to TECHIES, the clue should indicate that you're going slangy, and it doesn't. Sigh. The rest of the puzzle was solid enough. Highlight for me was NUDIE, for sure. Great new (and non-porno) clue for that one. I learned about the NUDIE Suit by listening to "A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs," specifically the episodes about Gram Parsons. I went from "how the hell am I supposed to know designers!?" to "OMG the NUDIE Suit! Yes!" pretty quickly on that one. Those suits are flash. They scream Americana. All performers should wear them (contemporary artists like Lady Gaga, Kesha, Taylor Swift, and crossword favorite Lil Nas X all have). Love love love. The rest of the puzzle didn't do nearly so much for me.

Not much difficulty today for me. Misread 7D: "Cool ___!" as merely ["Cool!"]—that is, somehow didn't see the blank space following "Cool"—and was So Mad that the answer was BEANS. "The expression is 'Cool BEANS!,' not just 'BEANS!' Who is saying just 'BEANS!'? Have we shortened it to just 'BEANS' now!? Damn slang changes, I can't keep up mutter mutter mutter." But no, my eye just missed the blank space. Not reading clues correctly has caused me more pain over the years than simple ignorance ever did. Had AJAR before A TAD, that was weird (42A: Ever so slightly). I guess my brain just supplied "open" at the end (or beginning) of that clue. Balked at spelling CAROTID, even though, looking at it now, I'm not sure how else I would've spelled it. I left the first two vowels blank because I didn't want to F' up and I figured the crosses would take care of things. And they did. Had "IS IT?" before "IT IS?," since "IS IT?" reads way more question-y on its surface than "IT IS?" does. "IS IT?" has question syntax, whereas you need to mentally supply the question mark to make "IT IS?" a question. Anyway, this created minor havoc around the awful (truly awful) Biz OPS (60A: Biz ___ (corporate team, informally)). Are "corporate" people never embarrassed by this jargon? BizOPS sounds like '90s hip-hop slang that got "bygone" real quick. Like a variation on "bops" that someone tried to make happen in late '95 and that maybe caught on at a handful of east coast radio stations for like three months. "We got some phat bizops comin' at ya in the next hour..." Or if Biz Markie had a spy movie-inspired alter ego: Biz OPS! That would've been cool. As "corporate" lingo, though, it's just sad.

Bullets:

15A: Longtime home decor chain with a name that anagrams to PIONEER (PIER ONE) — always hate the "anagrams to" clues, but I guess PIER ONE is sufficiently bygone now that people need help. Not sure why, but I was leafing (digitally) through a list of "chains that no longer exist" just the other day and there was PIER ONE and I thought "wait, that's not still out on the Vestal Parkway?" Like, literally, we had one in town and I just assumed it was still there. If a PIER ONE disappears from the Parkway, does it make a sound? Apparently not. Circuit City, that disappearance registered. But PIER ONE ... poof, just gone. I bought some really ugly blue-tinted wine glasses there once. That is my PIER ONE memory. What's yours!? [side note: it's really "Pier 1," numeral "1" ... I was trying to figure out why PIER ONE looks so bad. And that's why. This spelling issue makes today's clue actually wrong. Flat-out wrong. You can represent a number as a word in the puzzle, but anagramming is a very specific thing involving the actual characters of the actual name, so ... [annoying buzzer sound!] this clue is DQd]

3D: Soccer org. that runs the Champions League (UEFA)— knew this one but my first spelling of it came out UIFA. Like FIFA and UEFA had a baby: Baby UIFA. I think I was under the influence of other famous UI-starting words, like the UINTA Mountains of Utah, or ... uh ... (do not say "UIES" we all know that is not and has never been a thing no matter how many times the crossword tries to make it so)
32D: "Your" of yore (THY) — I just like this clue. I like its lilting rhyminess. I also just like the phrase "of yore." As you're (!) probably aware of by now.

See you next time.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Constructor: Damon Gulczynski

Relative difficulty: Easy (as rebus puzzles go)

THEME: GOES OUT WITH A BANG (37A: Finishes in grand style, like the answers to the starred clues?)— theme answers are brand names and titles and slogans that end (or "go out") with a "!"; that "!" (which, like all punctuation, would normally not be represented in a crossword answer) is represented by the letters "BANG" in all the crosses. So, it's a rebus puzzle where you have "!" in the Across and "BANG" in the Down:

Theme answers:

CHIPS AHOY! / SHEBANG (21A: *Nabisco cookie brand / 9D: The whole ___)
YAHOO! / SLAM-BANG (25A: *Major fantasy sports platform / 14D: Exciting in a noisy or violent way)
O, PIONEERS! / BANGLES (53A: *Willa Cather novel set in 1880s Nebraska / 57D: Rigid bracelets)
JEB! / HEADBANGS (61A: *Slogan in the 2016 Republican presidential primary / 44D: Rocks out to heavy metal, say)

Word of the Day:"ALOUETTE" (39D: Classic children's song about a lark) —

"Alouette" (pronounced [alwɛt]) is a popular Quebecois children's song, commonly thought to be about plucking the feathers from a lark. Although it is in French, it is well known among speakers of other languages; in this respect, it is similar to "Frère Jacques". Many US Marines and other Allied soldiers learnt the song while serving in France during World War I and took it home with them, passing it on to their children and grandchildren. [...] "Alouette" has become a symbol of French Canada for the world, an unofficial national song. Today, the song is used to teach French and English-speaking children in Canada, and others learning French around the world, the names of body parts. Singers will point to or touch the part of their body that corresponds to the word being sung in the song. (wikipedia)

• • •

This one mostly worked for me, though the nature of the theme made it Awfully easy. All the rebus squares come at the ends of their Across answers and all those squares are "BANG!"s. Once you pick up the gimmick (which was not terribly hard), you aren't likely to be tortured by the potentially destructive presence of hidden rebus squares. You know they're out there, and you know they're "BANG!"s, so if a corner isn't coming together as easily as it should, you just have to ask yourself, "could a 'BANG!' go somewhere in here," and voila! Actually, I never really had to ask. The "BANG!"s seemed to announce themselves, loudly, as you might expect (they're "BANG!"s, after all, not whimpers). I had CHIPS AHOY and then extra square—checked the cross on that square and could see clearly that the answer was SHEBANG. And that was that. Well, at that point, I didn't know the theme concept—I didn't know why we were doing "BANG!"s—but like 20 seconds later the revealer showed up, and that cracked it. "BANG!"s ahoy! There's something slightly monotonous about the theme, and the revealer was kind of anticlimactic (it explained, but it didn't surprise) ... and yet whatever slightly tired feelings I was having about the theme were all blown away by one glorious, bygone slogan; a mere syllable that sent my jaded heart soaring. That slogan, that syllable, that short burst of low-key energy that is perhaps the only amusing memory I have of the 2016 presidential race? Why, it's JEB!, of course. JEB! I laughed for real. The guts you gotta have to bring that one back. The confidence that anyone will remember! I am surprised by how much I loved remembering the delightful quaintness and completely ineffectual "enthusiasm" of that slogan. Man ... good times. Dude had no idea what hit him. Then the election happened and we were all JEB! Oof. See, I don't like remembering the whole 2016 SHEBANG. I prefer remembering *just* the plucky, go-get-'em slogan. The three letters least likely to precede an exclamation point. J-E-B! The little engine that couldn't, god bless him.

[it hurts to watch]

Oh, look at that, the puzzle is 16 wide. Didn't even notice. I guess your options were: go with GO OUT... and a narrow 14 or go with GOES OUT... and expand to 16. Wise choice. Give yourself room.

I was a little disappointed in patches with the short fill, which ran a little olden, especially olden-namey: ALEC ESTEE IVOR LORNA, 20th-century stalwarts all. There was also APERS and ITTY and ATSEA and AGAR and ODED and other hardcore repeaters of various levels of irksomeness. But the theme was strong enough to carry the day, and some of the longer answers had real pizzazz. I do enjoy a MOCHA LATTE and I especially enjoy PETER LORRE (30D: First actor to portray a Bond villain (Le Chiffre, 1954)) whose name I was happy to see in full today (Have you seen M, you should see M ... also The Maltese Falcon ... but I digress). I had no idea (or forgot) that "ALOUETTE" was about a lark. I think it was the name of a cheese when I was growing up, so the whole "plucking" thing didn't quite make sense in French class, at first. Yeah, here we go: a cheese spread, actually:

As for the song: it's an oddly jaunty and sunny tune considering the topic of the lyrics appears to be bird torture. Probably one of those things you're just not supposed to think too hard about.

Bullets:

46A: Get more of the same, maybe (REORDER)— there used to be a kind of rule (a soft rule, but a reasonable rule, I think) that you weren't supposed to repeat letter strings of longer than, say, 4 letters. It's hard to imagine someone even noticing let alone caring about having PARAGON and AGONY in the same grid, for instance, but get over 4 letters and the duplicated letter strings can start to become conspicuous. I mention this because I found "ORDER" crossing "ORDER" (i.e. REORDER crossing BORDERED) kind of jarring. If they hadn't been crossing, I probably wouldn't have noticed. But they were and I did.
26A: Feature of "woulda,""coulda" or "shoulda" (SILENT L) — I love this clue. It's such great misdirection. Gets you looking at the slanginess of those "a" endings and then hits you with "Psych! I was the 'L' I was talking about all along! Yeah, I coulda (!) just used 'would,''could,' and 'should,' but where's the fun in that!?" Brilliant.

22D: Counsel: Abbr. (ATT.) — I was telling myself this was short for "attaché" right up until I started writing this bullet point, when I realized "oh it's just 'attorney,' duh."
35D: Oscar-winning Hathaway (ANNE) — as you know if you read the P.S. on Tuesday's blog, I was inspired by the puzzle to watch The Princess Diaries on Monday and it was indeed enjoyable. Yes there are tiresome Disney qualities to it, and the treatment of high school is, like most movie treatments of high school, eye-rollingly simplistic and caricatured, but ANNE Hathaway and Julie Andrews and especially Heather Matarazzo (as the best friend) are all super charming and funny. Oh, and Hector Elizondo is in it! He makes everything better. And he and Andrews are kinda hot together (Andrews is the widowed queen of Genovia (!) and Elizondo's her bodyguard / driver who becomes a kind of low-key love interest ... they dance ... it's nice). Mandy Moore is also in it. Garry Marshall directs. There's lots and lots and lots of shots of San Francisco. It's not Vertigo or Bullitt, but you could do worse.

See you next time.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Constructor: Andy Kravis

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium

THEME: none

Word of the Day: ANGIE THOMAS (59A: Best-selling author of 2017's "The Hate U Give") —

Angie Thomas (born September 20, 1988) is an American young adult author, best known for writing The Hate U Give (2017). Her second young adult novel, On the Come Up, was released on February 25, 2019. [...] Thomas' initial intention was to write fantasy and middle grade novels; however, she was worried that her stories would not matter. While querying her first manuscript, she began another that would soon turn out to be her first novel, The Hate U Give. While she was a college student, one of her professors suggested that her experiences were unique and that her writing could give a voice to those who had been silenced and whose stories had not been told. During this time, Thomas also heard about the shooting of Oscar Grant on the news. This story, compounded by the deaths of Trayvon Martin, Tamir Rice, Michael Brown, and Sandra Bland, was a major influence on the novel. [...] The Hate U Give, originally written as a short story, debuted at number one on the New York Times Best Seller list for young adult hardcover books within the first week of its release in 2017. The Hate U Give was written, as Thomas says, to bring light to the controversial issue of police brutality and the Black Lives Matter movement. The book's plot follows a teenage girl, Starr Carter, and how her life is impacted by the death of her friend, Khalil, an unarmed black teen shot by a white police officer. The Hate U Give deals with the effect of police brutality on the communities of those around the victim. (wikipedia)

• • •

I think I'm just tired. I mean, moreso. I ran the second part of the Broome County Parks 5K Series yesterday, and while 5K is a pretty short distance, I am not (I mean *not*) used to running at any time except the morning and this race took place at 6:30PM. That's *PM*. That's basically a night race for me. My body was like "OK what are we doing here? We should be finished with dinner and watching 'Love Boat' right now." It was perfect weather for a run, and I finished somewhere in the middle of the pack (respectable!), so I enjoyed myself, but by the time I finished the race, cooled down, drove the half hour home, and had a celebratory / "cool-down" drink, it was basically my bedtime. But I wasn't tired. So my bedtime was late ... but the alarm, she goes off at 3:45am no matter what. So I'm staggering around this morning, mentally and physically. More than usual. This is the excuse I'm giving myself for blanking on something as easy as BARTLEBY (27A: Melville character with the mantra "I would prefer not to"). I Own A Damned BARTLEBY-themed T-Shirt And I Still Just Stared At BAR- like ????? Sigh. I also had SLAM D-N-- at 36A: Jam session? (SLAM DUNK CONTEST) and could think only of slam-dancing. "SLAM DANCE ... PARTY? No, that's only 14 letters. Uh ... PARTAY?" The brain was not warmed-up to "puzzle-solving" standards. And yet the whole thing still felt pretty easy. When the only hang-ups you have are on things you actually know but that your brain refuses to retrieve or put together, then the problem is you, not the puzzle.

The puzzle felt a little tepid to me. Plenty of whoosh, but the answers themselves rarely felt that exciting to me. Solid, but plain. If ANGIE THOMAS had meant more to me, I might have felt differently. I saw The Hate U Give on the new/popular YA shelf at the front of my local bookstore every time I went in there for what felt like years. It may still be there. But who wrote it somehow never registered with me. She's the "Word of the Day" today in part so that I can make her name stick. YA is not my thing, but she is a very big deal. I can see how seeing her name in the grid would excite some solvers. So that answer was original / different / interesting. But not enough of the rest of the grid was. For me. But again, I am willing to chalk my less-than-excited response up to night race-induced sleep deprivation brain fog. It's 4:30am and I haven't eaten more than a handful of nuts/raisins since noon yesterday! Basically if anything f's with my routine, I fall apart and forget how to live. I don't even know how to end this paragraph. It's bad. Let's get me to coffee, quickly, OK? OK.

I had several quibbles today. I am really not a fan of the CITY, COUNTRY answer, so LIMA, PERU felt bad to me (5D: Capital city whose main governmental building is known as the "House of Pizarro"). I get that you built yourself a grid where you require an 8-letter "U"-ending word, but the whole CITY, COUNTRY thing always feels so arbitrary. Of course LIMA, PERU. What other LIMA is it gonna be? Seems unlikely that the "House of Pizarro" would be in LIMA, OHIO. I'd be mad at PARIS, FRANCE too, the way I'm mad at ERIEPA every time I see it. Feels contrived, somehow. Also, I've been in English departments ... forever, basically, and I swear I have never heard the term "LIT CRIT" irl (30D: Rhyming subject for an English major). Every time I see CRIT clued this way, I cringe, and seeing the full LIT CRIT was no better. CRIT is a crossword contrivance. Bah. Plus the whole answer creates a really unpleasant "IT" pile-up in the eastern part of the grid. Call it the LIT CRIT GIT PIT. And hey, are OLIVEs really "divisive" (63A: Divisive pizza topping). Anchovies, sure, that's canon, but OLIVEs? More than other toppings? Weird. OLIVEs rule, though it's true I rarely have them on pizza. If I found them on my pizza, however, I would not mind. "Divisive"? You folks are weird.

Other things:

18A: Departure announcement ("I'M OUTTA HERE")— wrote in "I'M OUT OF HERE" and was mad it wasn't the more properly colloquial "I'M OUTTA HERE" ... but then it was. It was ... that. More evidence of a brain on Power Save mode.
55D: Subatomic particle named for a Greek letter (PION) — I went with MUON, which is also a Subatomic particle named for a Greek letter, so I don't feel too bad.
33D: Feat on a beat (SCOOP) — another one where my brain just didn't have the processing power. "Beat" made me think "cop" ... or else "music" ... and I had S-OOP before I had any idea what was happening. It's a news beat. You probably knew that by now.
10D: "I didn't see you there!" ("OH, HI!") — a fine answer, but it dupes the "OH" in "OH, BEHAVE!" (38D: Catchphrase for Austin Powers). I figure you get one "OH" per puzzle. That seems like plenty.
58D: Mother of the Titans (GAEA) — I never know if it's GAEA or GAIA. That's because there's no way to know. Same figure from classical mythology, different spellings ... just 'cause.
37D: Fan associated with a red, white and blue skull logo (DEADHEAD)— me: "Wait ... fans of The Punisher have a name!?!?" All I could picture were those awful "Back The Blue"-type stickers that dudes put on their trucks to look tough. I guess they generally lack a red component, but that skull logo is a fan of the flag-wavey types, so ... yeah, this one confused me. The Dead, like YA literature, is really not my thing, though I'm vaguely aware of the skull thing.

[No]

[Yes]

46A: Breed once known as the "Tax Collector's Dog" (DOBERMAN)— this is a grim, grim way to clue the poor pooch. Economic oppression and violence against the underclass: not the image I'm looking for on a breezy Friday. See also the colonialist clue on LIMA, PERU. Lots of ways to clue LIMA without name-checking the guy most closely associated with the Spanish conquest of the Inca Empire.

45D: Two-piece? (DUET)— I wanted DYAD. Again, as with MUON, I don't feel too bad about the mistake.
49D: "... oops, my mistake" ("... OR NOT") — This clue rings wrong to my ear. There's absolutely nothing about "... OR NOT" that suggests apology or acknowledgment of error. Tonally, the clue and answer here are on completely different planets.
1A: Letters of coverage (SPF) — first clue I looked at, and immediately there was sputtering. First, IOU. As in "I will cover this bet ... later." No. Wrong. Ooh, OK, how about cell phone coverage? LTE! ... no. Damn. I was so proud of that one. Then, just before I abandoned the answer all together, sunscreen coverage came to me. SPF! I used a 50 SPF sunscreen before the race yesterday. I'm unsunburned, but, as we've seen today, perhaps not entirely undamaged.

See you tomorrow.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Constructor: Barbara Lin and Matthew Stock

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium

THEME: none

Word of the Day: LUCIA (45D: Swedish holiday in which crowns of candles are worn, familiarly) —

Saint Lucy's Day, also called the Feast of Saint Lucy, is a Christian feast day observed on 13 December. The observance commemorates Lucia of Syracuse, an early-fourth-century virgin martyr under the Diocletianic Persecution. According to legend, she brought food and aid to Christians hiding in the Roman catacombs, wearing a candle-lit wreath on her head to light her way, leaving both hands free to carry as much food as possible. Because her name means "light" and her feast day had at one time coincided with the shortest day of the year prior to calendar reforms, it is now widely celebrated as a festival of light. Falling within the Advent season, Saint Lucy's Day is viewed as a precursor of Christmastide, pointing to the arrival of the Light of Christ in the calendar on 25 December, Christmas Day.
Saint Lucy's Day is celebrated most widely in Scandinavia, Italy and the island nation of Saint Lucia, each emphasising a different aspect of her story. In Scandinavia, where Lucy is called Santa/Sankta Lucia, she is represented as a woman in a white dress symbolizing a baptismal robe and a red sash symbolizing the blood of her martyrdom, with a crown or wreath of candles on her head. (wikipedia)

• • •

OK, much more alert this morning than yesterday morning, but I wish I could reverse things, i.e. I wish I'd been more alert yesterday than today, because yesterday's puzzle, in well-rested retrospect, seems better than I originally thought it was, whereas today's puzzle ... I wouldn't have minded being less alert for. Maybe then I wouldn't have noticed or cared about or even noticed so many of its unpleasant aspects. Or maybe I'd've noticed and cared about them more, who knows? All I know is that I did not DIG this one much at all, except for BARBIECORE(16A: Hot-pink fashion aesthetic), which really seems like the only reason for this puzzle to exist, and the good of which is almost completely undone by the odd gender-binary nonsense of FEMININE SIDE (20D: It might be expressed with emotion), my god I hate the concept. You'd only ever use it of men, first of all, and it's such a horrid idea—that emotion is "feminine." This is why men are broken (not you, you're great, I'm sure). Your Emotions Are Not Feminine, They Are Just Human, Feeling Things (Besides Anger) Is Human, Try It Some Time. Sigh. Is sighing "feminine?" Whatever. Moving on. Actually, let's rewind and start with the very worst thing about this puzzle—an absolute dealbreaker about which everyone involved should really be ashamed: the duplication of "EVEN" (EVENER, "I CAN'T EVEN"). That dupe is so jarring that when it came time to drop EVEN down into the SE, I just ... couldn't. "No way, they wouldn't," I thought. I mean, I already had to endure EVENER, which is barely a word (42D: Level, essentially), and now you want me (do you?) to write in "EVEN" ... again? Can't be. But it could be and did be. Awful. Not even sloppy, because surely everyone involved noticed. They just didn't care. That's malpractice, especially at the editorial level.

Fill-wise, the thing that irked the most was the name barrage, once again. The puzzle was very very easy, in general, getting (almost) all of its "difficulty" (for me) from name grenades. For me, these were FELIX, VAL and KIVA (!?), with FELIX (because of its position), being the worst damage-doer of all. Just couldn't flow up and into the NE corner because FELIX was 80% blank (F----!). I was able to push through VAL and KIVA by overwhelming them with the surrounding fill. But I was lucky. I actually had at least heard of ETONIC and NORA and Nick NOLTE and WIM Wenders and TIG Notaro (the last of which was a *huge* help—first letters of all the long Downs in the SE!). But I can easily imagine other solvers not knowing one or many of those. I don't care so much about the fact of the names, which I think are mostly gettable, as I do about the fact that there were so many and that they were the only real speed bumps in this thing. Cluing was not that clever or thoughtful today. So it played like a triviafest—never my favorite kind of puzzle. But back to KIVA for a second ... I've never heard of it (55A: Big name in small loans). It is really well known. Merriam-webster dot com defines KIVA as "a Pueblo Indian ceremonial structure that is usually round and partly underground," so they're no help. Looks like it's a San Francisco-based microloan nonprofit. I will confess that financial stuff is really Really not my specialty, so I wouldn't be shocked if I was just part of an ignorant minority today. But as financial terms and names go, when the answer wasn't FICA (which I actually entertained, despite knowing full well it was wrong), I had nothing. KIVA sounds like a god, or something you'd name your SPCA rescue dog. I finished on the -IVA / -EG square and actually had to run the alphabet. I mourn for the people who both didn't know KIVA and had never heard of a KEG stand. I can only assume you wrote in "LEG stand" here. My condolences.

The puzzle started out like a Monday or Tuesday for me. Had those first three Acrosses in the NW done inside of five seconds (yes, really), and then in another ten seconds or so, I had the whole NW in place:

I hesitated on the word following STEM. Wanted SCIENCE, but it would've fit. Blanked on the golf apparel, but it eventually came to me, and I was off and running. The only real trouble spot for me today, besides the FELIX dam, was the spot just east of the TOWER part of LEANING TOWER. Speaking of "east"—that was one of the problems there. I had the "-T" part of 37D: Left, in a way (PORT) and blithely wrote in EAST. I mean WEST. Damn it, my E/W dyslexia is so bad I can't even explain myself right. I definitely *thought* about a map, visualized it in my head, and wrote in WEST. WEST is "left," EAST is "right"—never gonna get over the fact that we *say* "east/west" (i.e "north south east and west,""from the east to the west, I love you the best," etc.) and "east/west" are the alphabetical order, but on the map, reading L to R, it's "west/east," ugh. Annnnyway, WEST screwed me up. Also, I couldn't figure out what 36A: Lap, say could be if it wasn't OUTRUN. I even tried OUTSWIM. Bah. Wanted LOOK AT at 41A: Check out, but the "K" seemed dicey, so I briefly tried LOCATE (?!). Before I had TOWER, I had no idea about WRENS (44A: Birds that can emit a "teakettle, teakettle, teakettle" call). So even though I guessed the TATS part of FACE TATS right (48A: Decorations for a mug?), I was stuck for a bit trying to make the SE happen. But everywhere else in this puzzle, I CRUISED.

Notes:

22A: Small crater in auto-body paint (FISH EYES) — not familiar. Didn't know if they were EYES or EGGS, and neither one of those options was any help in pushing through FELIX.
56A: One meaning of 👍 ("I NEED A RIDE") — The emoji does not mean that—an actual human thumb held out by someone on the roadside means that—so this was confusing.
23D: He passed Babe in 1974 (HANK) — as in Aaron, as in "All-Time Home Run Leader." Bonds eventually passed Aaron in 2007, when he hit number 756, finishing up his career with 762 (a record that still stands, with or without an asterisk, whether you like it or not).

See you next time.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

P.S. here is an explanation of the "-CORE" suffix (as seen in BARBIECORE), in case it's unfamiliar to you

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Constructor: Paolo Pasco

Relative difficulty: Easy (Ultra-Easy, maybe the easiest Sunday of all time)

THEME: "The Big Five-O"—a puzzle depicting the OLYMPIC FLAG (114A: This puzzle's subject) — Five olympic rings are represented by colored squares; every answer that forms a part of a ring has, as its first word/first part, the color of that ring:

BLUE:

-PRINT (36A: Detailed plan of action)
STATE (45D: Democratic stronghold)
"BAYOU" (79A: Signature hit for Linda Ronstadt)
-BIRDS (43D: Thy fly somewhere over the rainbow)

BLACK:

MAGIC (38A: Malevolent sorcery)
-MAILS (47D: Extorts from, in a way)
OLIVE (81A: Supreme pizza topping)
SHEEP (46D: Ostracized family member)

RED:

ROBIN (40A: Restaurant chain with an avian mascot)
SCARE (50D: Phenomenon allegorized in "The Crucible")
ALERT (82A: "Danger! Danger!")
PANDA (48D: Raccoonlike mammal of China)

YELLOW:

PAGES (59A: Obsolescent book)
BELLY (65D: Milquetoast)
CARDS (98A: Results of some fouls in soccer)
-STONE (63D: National park since 1872)

GREEN:

GIANT (60A: Brand in the frozen food section)
SALSA (69D: Dip made from tomatillos)
-HOUSE (100A: What has a lot of room to grow?)
RIVER (67D: Creedence Clearwater Revival song named after a place "where cool water flows")

Bonus themers:

RING BEARER (17A: Wedding role ... or a description of 114-Across?)
COLOR WHEEL (20A: Artist's diagram ... or one of five for 114-Across?)

Word of the Day: JOSÉ Rizal (28A: ___ Rizal, national hero of the Philippines) —

José Protasio Rizal Mercado y Alonso Realonda (Spanish: [xoˈse riˈsal, -ˈθal], Tagalog:[hoˈse ɾiˈsal]; June 19, 1861 – December 30, 1896) was a Filipino nationalist, writer and polymath active at the end of the Spanish colonial period of the Philippines. He is considered a national hero (pambansang bayani) of the Philippines. An ophthalmologist by profession, Rizal became a writer and a key member of the Filipino Propaganda Movement, which advocated political reforms for the colony under Spain.
He was executed by the Spanish colonial government for the crime of rebellion after the Philippine Revolution broke out; it was inspired by his writings. Though he was not actively involved in its planning or conduct, he ultimately approved of its goals which eventually resulted in Philippine independence.
Rizal is widely considered one of the greatest heroes of the Philippines and has been recommended to be so honored by an officially empaneled National Heroes Committee. However, no law, executive order or proclamation has been enacted or issued officially proclaiming any Filipino historical figure as a national hero. He wrote the novels Noli Me Tángere (1887) and El filibusterismo (1891), which together are taken as a national epic, in addition to numerous poems and essays. (wikipedia)

• • •

This is a clever and seemingly intricate construction—what with so much theme content, and so much of it interlocking, plus the revealer and the two bonus theme answers—but as a solving experience, it was pretty ... hollow, I guess. I mean, it was slight. It was like a mini, blown up to maxi proportions. Lots of five-letter answers, all of them extremely easy to suss out. Once you grok the concept—and it ain't hard—then chances are you can immediately get all or most of the way to here (as I did):

I got [BLACK]MAGIC, thought "Oh, is that it?," kept solving like normal for a bit, then thought, "What the hell..." and tried to get every answer in every ring. And succeeded. I had to think for a second about [GREEN]HOUSE (100A: What has a lot of room to grow?), but otherwise, everything went right in. When you just hand readers the first part of That many answers, a lot of the fun and All of the challenge goes right out the door. This is a bright, shiny thing, a good-looking thing, a cute thing, but it's not much of a puzzle. I mean, its purpose seems to be primarily decorative. There's nothing really to figure out. Filling in the answers almost feels beside the point. Superfluous. Even the revealer feels pretty redundant. It's obviously the OLYMPIC FLAG. I can see that. You're describing the obvious. So while this is well made, it feels like it's made for a child's placemat. A precocious child, I guess. But still. There's no heft to this. I neither enjoyed nor unenjoyed it. I hardly had the time to work up any feeling at all.

So, yeah, the Olympic Games started this week in Paris, so the puzzle is at least timely. I'm really struggling to find anything to say about it. The bonus themers are pretty clever, as puns go? Uh ... I like the BRA clue? (1A: Word following "push-up" that anagrams to a word following "pull-up") (it's "pull-up bar," which I assume you've figured out by now) (they can't say "bar" because BAR is an answer elsewhere in the puzzle) (65A: Cheers, for one). I was just thinking today how great Cheers was. Actually, I was remembering what a huge crush I had on Diane as a kid. Actually actually, what I was thinking about was the 1982 movie Night Shift, and how much Bruce Willis, in the first season of Moonlighting (which I've started rewatching) often appears to be channeling the voice and mannerisms and occasionally exact expressions of Michael Keaton's character (Bill) in Night Shift (a 1982 movie about two guys—Keaton and Henry Winkler who decide to run a prostitution ring out of a morgue). And then I thought of Shelley Long because she's also in Night Shift (as the quintessential "hooker with a heart of gold"). And then I thought of Cheers. And then I did this puzzle. And here we are. If Star Wars was the most formative moviegoing experience of my childhood, Night Shift was the most formative movie-watching experience of my adolescence—can't say "moviegoing" because I only ever saw it on "laser disc," which were those giant, LP-sized discs that were precursors to DVDs. My dad was always an early adopter of gadgetry. I mean, we had a damned Betamax player. We eventually got a VHS player, like normal people, but mostly, in the early/mid-80s, we watched movies on laser disc, and we watched Night Shift over and over and over and over. I'm sure (quite sure) the movie is dated and politically ... uh, questionable on many, many levels. But Michael Keaton in that movie was ... just ... iconic for me. Bill Murray and Steve Martin were the obvious comedy heroes of boys my age, but for me, in terms of movie performances, it was Keaton in Night Shift. The gold standard. "Call Starkist." If you know, you know. Anyway, as I was saying: BAR ... is an answer in this puzzle.

Probably the most interesting answer in this puzzle is RANGE WAR (37D: Cattle-driving dispute). I like it because it's original and because it makes me think of old westerns, which I both love and love to hate (racism against Native Americans is *pretty* standard, as is rather cruel treatment of the stunt horses, but I love me some handsome dudes strutting around trying to outdude each other, especially if Angie Dickinson or Grace Kelly or Barbara Stanwyck or Joan Collins is nearby). I also like PAN-ARAB, TAKE THE BAIT, and "I'M HUNGRY!" (41D: What "Meow!" might mean) ("Kitties! I just fed you! You want more? OK. What? What is it, Ida? You want me to physically carry you to your food bowl? Hmm. Alright. Seems fair. Whatever you need"). Like I say, the puzzle is not poorly made. Not at all. It just didn't have any fight in it. I didn't know JOSÉ Rizal, but otherwise, there wasn't a single answer that gave me any real trouble. EAR CANAL, maybe a little, but that's it (83D: Channel that gets audio only?).

Not sure about that "only" in the EAR CANAL clue. I guess in the sense of "not video," then yes, audio only. But it can also get, I dunno, pain, in circumstances. And wax. Definitely gets wax ("cerumen," it's called, I just learned) (don't click on that link if you don't want to see earwax, yikes, definite trigger warning there). Speaking of canals, on tonight's episode of The Love Boat (the back end of a two-parter from early in season 4), the Pacific Princess sailed through the Panama Canal. So many locks! So exciting! Donny Most! Erin Moran! Charlene Tilton! Peter Graves! Debbie bleeping Reynolds! So much fun. Well, except when Gopher got left behind in a Panamanian prison because police mistook him for an illegal drug dealer because Doc sent him ashore on a (legal) drug-buying errand in order to get Gopher out of the way so that Doc could have more time alone with the two comically, exaggeratedly, performatively flirty ladies (Dawn Wells! Ann Jillian!) who were the judges in some kind of wedding contest (it was a group wedding cruise, don't ask). But more on that another time. Don't worry. Gopher's fine.

Explainers:

9A: Israeli desert (NEGEV)— this sometimes appears as NEGEB. Never commit to that last letter without a crosscheck, even though it's far more likely to be NEGEV (32 appearances in the Shortz/Fagliano Era, versus only one for NEGEB (back in 2008))
28A: ___ Rizal, national hero of the Philippines (JOSÉ) — OK, back to this guy. Whenever I see a name like RIZAL (i.e. short, belonging to an allegedly famous person, completely unfamiliar to me), I think "Why haven't I seen this name in crosswords before?" Well, if you solve only the NYT crossword, then the last time you saw RIZAL would've been [drumroll] 1953! I was gonna say "that's a longggggg time between appearances," but of course RIZAL didn't appear today. JOSÉ did. I wonder if we'll ever see RIZAL again. If you remember solving the puzzle with the one and only appearance of RIZAL, you have an amazing memory, especially for someone who is at least 90 years old, congrats.
22A: Multipiece furniture purchases (OTTOMAN SETS) — this answer felt normal to me but my wife insisted it was weird so I ended up looking up OTTOMAN SETS last night on my phone just before bedtime and ... I guess you buy matching ottomans ... as a set? But also there are chair and ottoman sets, so when you search "OTTOMAN SETS" you get a jumble of things. I did not know ottomans came in sets, though I guess if you have a space where multiple ottomans are called for and you like things matchy-matchy, it makes sense.
68A: Letters after Lucasfilm (LTD) — what an odd and hyperspecific way to come at LTD. I was not at all sure. And there's a bit of a tricky clue on one of the crosses: [It's not long.] for LAT. (i.e. "latitude," which is not long- ... itude).

73A: Round up at the start? (PRELIMS) — an excellent trick clue. "Round up" looks like a verb but no, "Round" is a noun, as in a round of a tournament. PRELIMS come early ("up at the start") of some tournaments.
81A: Supreme pizza topping (OLIVE) — hey, the allegedly "divisive" pizza topping (see Friday's puzz) is back! Non-divisively. Could also have clued ONION this way too, but the puzzle went with [Fried rice add-on] instead.
93A: Concerning egg cells (OVULAR) — no problem with this answer, though I do have a slight problem with duping "cells" in the clue (which already appears in the grid in FUEL CELLS (85A: Power sources for some electric cars))
106D: Negative Nancy words? (NONS) — Nancy is a city in France. "Noes" (the plural of "no") are "negative words." So "Negative words" in "Nancy" are NONS (the plural of the French word for "no"—"non"). Pretty creative clue for a pretty ugly answer.
75D: Spice Girl Chisholm, casually (MEL) — if you're going to be that specific, including the last name and all, the answer really should be MEL C. That is how she typically appears in the grid (seven NYTXW appearances), to distinguish her from her colleague, MEL B (two NYTXW appearances). Not sure why you wade into Spice World when the answer is just MEL. Lotsa plain-old MELs in the world.

57D: ___ Oyu, sixth-highest peak in the world (CHO) — should've made this the word of the day. Never heard of it. It's in the Himalayas, on the Nepal/Tibet border. CHO Oyu means "Turquoise Goddess" in Tibetan.
99D: "The ___ true for ..." (SAME'S) — I just have "oof" written next to this one. This is a thematically load-bearing answer, and there aren't a lot of good options. Still, oof.
95D: Part of a woman's anatomy named for Dr. Ernst Gräfenberg (G-SPOT) — trying to imagine some guy getting the "G" and going "Wait ... anatomy? Women's anatomy? ... I don't ... GRÄFE? ... is it GRÄFE? Do women have GRÄFEs? How did I not know this? GRÄFE?? What does it do? Honey!... Come here a minute. I have questions ..."

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

P.S. back to Love Boat for a sec—I just looked up Peter Graves and I am now the same age he was in Airplane! Howwwwwww? When it came out, I was the same age as this kid!:

[TIME AND TIDE]

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Constructor: Jeffrey Lease

Relative difficulty: Easy

THEME: first things first (and last)— three-word phrases where the first and last words are identical:

Theme answers:

"ENOUGH IS ENOUGH" (16A: Cry from someone who has finally had it)
"SORRY NOT SORRY" (26A: Sarcastic non-apology)
"NEVER SAY NEVER" (48A: Perennial optimist's motto)
LITTLE BY LITTLE (63A: Way to make incremental progress) (not STEP BY STEP? BIT BY BIT? DROP BY DROP?)

Word of the Day: SARAH Silverman (38A: Comic Silverman) —

Sarah Kate Silverman (born December 1, 1970) is an American stand-up comedian, actress, and writer. She first rose to prominence for her brief stint as a writer and cast member on the NBC sketch comedy series Saturday Night Live during its 19th season between 1993 and 1994. She then starred in and produced The Sarah Silverman Program, which ran from 2007 to 2010 on Comedy Central. For her work on the program, Silverman was nominated for a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series.
She has also acted in television projects such as Mr. Show and V.I.P. and starred in films, including Who's the Caboose? (1997), School of Rock (2003), Take This Waltz (2011), A Million Ways to Die in the West (2014), and Battle of the Sexes (2017). She also voiced Vanellope von Schweetz in Wreck-It Ralph (2012), and Ralph Breaks the Internet (2018). For her lead role in I Smile Back (2015) she was nominated for a Screen Actors Guild Award. She released an autobiography The Bedwetter in 2010 which she adapted into an off-Broadway musical in 2022.
Her comedy roles address social taboos and controversial topics, including racism, sexism, homophobia, politics, and religion, sometimes having her comic character endorse them in a satirical or deadpan fashion. During the 2016 United States presidential election, she became increasingly politically active; she initially campaigned for Bernie Sanders but later spoke in support of Hillary Clinton at the 2016 Democratic National Convention. She hosted the Hulu late-night talk show I Love You, America with Sarah Silverman from 2017 until late 2018. (wikipedia)

• • •

For the second day in a row, the puzzle is truly giving me nothing. Scratch that—at least yesterday I got a pretty picture of Olympic rings and a theme concept that was intricate and impressive (if simple and one-note). Today ... ___ [some word] ___. That's it. There is nothing else. I mean, there is really nothing else. No interesting fill outside the four themers, which aren't that exciting themselves. The longest non-theme answer is six letters long, and none of those are interesting in the slightest. A non-EVENT, this puzzle. AYESIR ABEL OMANIS ENOS NCIS OOHS ASHE EELS NYSE USERID MELEE and on and on with the same tired fill you've been seeing since you started solving (however old you are). All that (!) and the puzzle manages not only to dupe "UP," but to cross those dupes (BANG-UP, UPENDS). Oh, and then there's duped "NY" abbrevs. (NYSE, NYC). Just a depressing offering, all around. The theme concept isn't restrictive enough to be interesting in the first place. FIRST THINGS FIRST. HEART TO HEART. BLONDE ON BLONDE. GAME RECOGNIZE GAME (look it up). I'm not even trying and yet I can rattle off alternative themers no problem. For days. What are we doing here?

At first I thought "ENOUGH IS ENOUGH" was going to be EIGHT IS ENOUGH, which would've been an astonishing coincidence, as last night's Love Boat (the first part of a season 4 two-parter—what is it with this season and two-parters?) featured not one but two members of the case of EIGHT IS ENOUGH: Dick Van Patten (the EIE patriarch) as some friend of Captain Stubing's who tries to entice the Captain away from his captainship with a lucrative job offer at Van Patten's mysterious and frankly ominously-named company, CDI (Captains Do It? Cake Decorating Industries? Cruel Death, Incorporated?); and Lani O'Grady (the eldest EIE sister, Mary) as an insanely jealous fiancée of some generic guy who thinks Julie is trying to steal her man. You never see LANI O'Grady in crosswords*. It's always LANI Guinier or ... I think that's it, actually. Anyway, the answer was "ENOUGH IS ENOUGH," not EIGHT IS ENOUGH, sadly. "ENOUGH IS ENOUGH" does, however, evoke the whole early '80s EIE / Love Boat era, in its (musical) way...

As for the Downs-only solve: no problem. I guess I needed a bit to get COOLER (3D: Where beers can be found at a tailgate party) and [GASP!] (7D: [Oh, no!]), and I thought maybe the OOHS were AAHS for a half second (12D: Audibly reacts to fireworks). I had OSAGE before OZARK (18D: Missouri's ___ Mountains), that was my one actual flub. But that was easily fixable when I was left with SEUS at 21-Across (SEUS not being a thing I've ever heard of—not without another "S" on the end, anyway). So out with the "S" and then obviously in with the "Z" for ZEUS. No other issues. None. Not anywhere. I want to call the puzzle "vanilla" but I like vanilla too much to do that. This is more ... unflavored. Unflavored what, you ask? Good Question.

Hoping for something more substantial next time (July really has been kind of a dumping ground). See you then.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

*spoke too soon. LANI was clued as LANI O'Grady (and not Guinier), exactly once, back in late '95 ([O'Grady of "Eight Is Enough"]); before that (in the Pre-Shortz Era), all LANIs were clued as [Wool: Prefix] or [Wool: Comb. form], and then once, in 1957, as [Famous diva.] (!?!?!). One weird thing I noticed is that Mel Taub (!?) appears to have been editor of the NYTXW for a hot second somewhere in the (very small, I imagine) gap between Maleska and Shortz. I had no idea. I just know he's listed as the ed. for the Sep. 12, 1993 puzzle (where LANI is clued [Wool: Comb. form]). Looks like Taub was interim editor from Sep. '93 until the first puzzle of the Shortz Era, two months later (Nov. 21, 1993—a rainbow-themed Sunday puzzle by a young Peter Gordon ("Spectral Analysis")):

[image: xwordinfo]

INDIGO GIRLS were in the very first NYTXW puzzle Shortz edited ... and then they appeared in the documentary about him 13 years later. Adorable.

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Constructor: Jeffrey Martinovic and Will Nediger

Relative difficulty: Easy

THEME: RSVPING (60A: Acknowledging and invitation ... or a hint to the starts of 19-, 32-, 39- and 49-Across) — the letters R, S, V and P precede "-ING" in the first word of each theme answer; so the puzzle itself is RSVPING, in a way; it's "R"ing, then it's "S"ing, then it's "V"ing, then it's "P"ing ... (!)

Theme answers:

RING ANNOUNCER (19A: "And in this corner..." speaker)
SING BACK-UP (32A: Use non-lead pipes?)
VING RHAMES (39A: Actor who plays Luther Stickell in the "Mission: Impossible" franchise)
PING-PONG BALLS (49A: Projectiles tossed into cups of beer, in a drinking game)

Word of the Day: Beer pong (the "drinking game" in the clue for PING-PONG BALLS) —

Beer pong, also known as Beirut, is a drinking game in which players throw a ping pong ball across a table with the intent of landing the ball in a cup of beer on the other end. The game typically consists of opposing teams of two or more players per side with 6 or 10 cups set up in a triangle formation on each side. Each team then takes turns attempting to throw ping-pong balls into the opponent's cups. If the team "makes" a cup - that is, the ball lands in it, and stays in it - the contents of the cup are consumed by the other team and the cup is removed from the table. The first team to eliminate all of the opponent's cups is the winner. [...] The game was originally believed to have evolved from the original beer pong played with paddles which is generally regarded to have had its origins within the fraternities of Dartmouth College in the U.S. in the 1950s and 1960s, where it has since become part of the social culture of the campus. The original version resembled an actual ping pong game with a net and one or more cups of beer on each side of the table. Eventually, a version without paddles was invented and the names Beer Pong and Beirut were adopted in some areas of the United States sometime in the 1980s. In some places, Beer Pong refers to the version of the game with paddles, and Beirut to the version without. // Bucknell University's student-run newspaper, The Bucknellian, claims Delta Upsilon fraternity members at Bucknell created "Throw Pong", a game very similar to beer pong, during the 1970s, and that "Throw Pong" was then brought to Lehigh University by fraternity brothers who visited Bucknell and this led to the creation of the version of beer pong that is played today. // The origin of the name "Beirut" is disputed. A 2004 op-ed article in The Daily Princetonian, the student newspaper at Princeton University, suggested that the name was possibly coined at Bucknell or Lehigh University around the time of the Lebanese Civil War. Beirut, the capital of Lebanon, was the scene of much fighting during the war, particularly mortar fire. (wikipedia)

• • •

Easy but not boring, with a revealer that does what it's supposed to do—reveal, in a surprising way. I could see the "-ING" repetition but thought "that is not a theme, what are we even doing here?" And then I hit RSVPING and had a sincere "ohhhhhhhh, OK" moment. It's silly, but it works, and I don't know that I want anything more out of my Tuesday revealer than that. It's R'ing, it's S'ing, it's V'ing, it's P'ing, it's here it's there it's everywhere, ing ing ing, ding ding ding, great. And if the RING and SING answers aren't *that* exciting, the SING and VING answers make up for it. Well, let's start with the VING answer, because it seems like there *aren't* any other VING answers besides this one. I don't know if VING RHAMES was the inspiration for this puzzle, but he's certainly the person you can't make this puzzle without. The necessary ingredient. I assume he's a household name by now—I've known his name for three decades, ever since his Extremely Memorable performance as Marcellus in Pulp Fiction (1994). The plot with him and Bruce Willis is extremely violent (Rhames tries to kill Bruce Willis, but then they both get taken hostage in the basement of a pawn shop ... very bad things happen ...), but what I remember most about his performance in that movie is the back of his neck. The first time you see him, the camera is trained on the back of his very thick neck and bald head for a very long time, as he sits at a table in a bar. Makes him seem very cool and imposing. His neck has a band-aid on it, which apparently inspired a ton of fan theories ("the devil takes your soul from the back of your neck""he cut himself shaving" etc.).

I rewatched the movie recently, which is to say I sat next to two guys (one right next to me, another one row up) who were both watching the movie on an airplane, and so I kept jumping back and forth between screens, watching the movie without sound. It's amazing how much I didn't need sound. It all came back. Great movie. VING RHAMES is also fantastic in one of the other great crime films of the '90s: Steven Soderbergh's Out of Sight (1998), where he plays George Clooney's longtime partner in crime (the crime being heists, mostly banks). Apparently, he's also in the Mission: Impossible franchise. That, I'm less familiar with. But I didn't need the clue today: I no-looked his name just from letters I already had in place (I tend to work short crosses before I ever even look at longer answers). As I say, not many things start with "VING."

The other themer I enjoyed was SING BACK-UP. It's an original answer *and* it has a wicked trick (32A: Use non-lead pipes?)—one of the only challenging moments of the puzzle. Not the element lead, as the clue implies, but "lead" as in "lead singer," and not "pipes" as in plumbing but "pipes" as a metaphor for one's singing voice. Late-week trickery on a Tuesday. I like it. So, as for the theme—it was too thin ... until it wasn't. Revealer to the rescue. I wonder why they went with PING PONG BALLS and not PING PONG TABLE. Is "BALLS" just an inherently funnier word? I think I just answered my own question. There's something about the BALLS portion of this grid that is both messy and interesting. A pile-up of consonants and odd letter juxtapositions, with RSVP running through NHLMVP (44D: Hart Memorial Trophy recipient, for short) running through THX (48A: Text of appreciation), with the odd "XL" in OXLIP (45D: Yellow primrose) and the odd "-SI" ending on TARSI (48D: Ankle bones), all with the very smooth and original AIR MILES running through it. Like it or not, it's got character, that corner. Does it also have BALLS? Well, literally, yes. You can see that.

If I look at my Mac keyboard ... well, actually, it's a wireless keyboard, not the one on my actual Mac (laptop). I was gonna say, if I look at my keyboard, I see "ALT" printed just above "option," so I can see easily that they're the same key. But the key on my actual laptop just says "option." This is all to say I could've guessed ALT (1A: Option : Mac :: ___ : PC), but I cheated and looked down, just to be sure. Is Voodoo Ranger a known beer!!? (4A: Voodoo Ranger, e.g., for short). I got IPA easily from crosses but remember thinking "what the hell is that?" (as you know, I'm more a cocktail drinker; cocktails, wine, beer, in that order (order of preference, obviously, not order of consumption, that would be ... a lot)). Interesting clue on TL;DR today (3D: "To recap," in an initialism). I first knew the initialism as a dismissive comment made in response to some other commenter's longwindedness (it stands for "too long; didn't read," after all). It was created to ridicule, but has apparently morphed into a more neutral summing-up term. Language is funny.

Bullets:

6D: Soprano Netrebko (ANNA)— kind of a big deal. She is a Russian who made some comments at the start of the Ukraine invasion that got her into trouble. They don't seem terribly controversial, tbh (she condemned the war but thought artists should be allowed to be apolitical and not be forced to speak out against their homeland), but the blowback was harsh. Performances were canceled, etc. Then she opposed the war more clearly and forcefully and was denounced as a traitor by Russia. I am just now discovering that "Netrebko made a cameo appearance as herself in the 2004 film The Princess Diaries 2: Royal Engagement" (wikipedia), so having recently waded into the whole Princess Diaries universe (one week ago today), I may have to check this one out. It still has Julie Andrews, right? OK, good. I own one Netrebko album and while I'm no opera expert, I think she sounds sensational.

51D: Brooklyn squad (NETS) — I hesitated at -ETS, but I'm not sure why. The NETS are in Brooklyn, the METS are in Queens, and the JETS ... I dunno, New Jersey somewhere, I think. Those, Ladies and Gentlemen, are your New York -ETS!
42A: Uber- relative (MEGA) — really should've taken that dash into consideration. I didn't write in LYFT here, but I definitely considered it.

See you next time.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Constructor: Jackson Matz and Ben Matz

Relative difficulty: Easy

THEME:"UNDER THE SEA" (59A: Song from "The Little Mermaid" that's a phonetic hint to interpreting the answers to the starred clues) — four Down answers have "C" appended to the beginning (giving you different, wrong-looking answers in the grid); so the actual answer to the clue appears (literally) under the "C":

Theme answers:

Word of the Day: Manx (inspired by the clue for BLOKE—6A: Man, on the Isle of Man) —

Manx (endonym: Gaelg or Gailck, pronounced [ɡilɡ, geːlɡ] or [gilk]), also known as Manx Gaelic, is a Gaelic language of the insular Celtic branch of the Celtic language family, itself a branch of the Indo-European language family. Manx is the historical language of the Manx people.
Although few children native to the Isle of Man speak Manx as a first language, there has been a steady increase in the number of speakers since the death of Ned Maddrell in 1974. He was considered to be the last speaker to grow up in a Manx-speaking community environment. Despite this, the language has never fallen completely out of use, with a minority having some knowledge of it as a heritage language, and it is still an important part of the island's culture and cultural heritage.
Manx is often cited as a good example of language revitalization efforts; in 2015, around 1,800 people had varying levels of second-language conversational ability. Since the late 20th century, Manx has become more visible on the island, with increased signage, radio broadcasts and a Manx-medium primary school. The revival of Manx has been made easier because the language was well recorded, e.g. the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer had been translated into Manx, and audio recordings had been made of native speakers. (wikipedia)

• • •

This was kind of echo of yesterday's puzzle. Yesterday, I went from "what the hell is this weak theme?" to "Oh, ha ha, good one." Today, I went from "what the hell is this inscrutable theme?" to "Oh, ha ha, good one." This is to say that the revealer did its job both days. "Huh?" to "Oh!"—that is the trajectory you want to follow from the beginning of a puzzle to the moment you hit the revealer. Today's theme is definitely trickier than yesterday's—yesterday, the only mystery was what was linking all the answers, while today there was real mystery as to how in the world the answers fit the clues at all. But overall yesterday's puzzle felt cleaner. Leaner. And the revealer was slightly funnier (or loopier). Also, there's one major problem with the execution of this theme, to my eyes, which is that in two of the theme answers (COVER CHARGE, CLEAN-CUT), there are actually two (2) "C"s. So the answer is, in fact, under the "C" ... but only the first one. When your answer has two of them, the elegance of the whole design suffers. The extra "C"s don't cause any real confusion at the solving level, but they diminish the force of the revealer. "UNDER THE SEA ... get it? under the "C" ... no not that "C," the other one. Just ignore that one." Still, the revealer did give me a little pop of "aha," instead of a sad slap of "oh" or "ugh" or "oof," so on the whole I'd still put this one in the Thumbs-up column. The ideal version of this theme would have no "C"s but the thematically relevant "C"s, but ... this is fine.

The theme answers were about the only thing in the grid causing any difficulty today, at least for me. I have almost no ink on my printed-out grid, which means that there was both very little in the way of toughness and (more sadly) very little in the way of real interest. I had HULU before ROKU (42A: Video streaming giant) and GO ON before GUSH (56A: Rave (about)), but that's it for missteps or even serious hesitations. I wanted (C)LOSING TIME to be (C)LOSING GROUND for more than a few seconds, but of course it wouldn't fit. Otherwise, the puzzle was pretty straightforward and the fill a little on the dull side. Liked seeing BRAD PITT; hated seeing FOIE GRAS, as always (for animal cruelty reasons) (39D: Duck delicacy). I was contemplating seeing Tarantino's Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood at Tarantino's own New Beverly Cinema when I'm out in Southern California next week—BRAD PITT is great in that—but I decided I'd use my one New Beverly visit on a matinee screening of The Godfather, Part II instead). I.B. Technicolor 35mm. I've never seen it on the big screen, with an audience. Can't wait. But back to the puzzle. I kinda wish BROADCASTER (17A: Television pro) had been thematic somehow—would've made the theme symmetrical. Really feels like it's occupying a thematic position, but it isn't, oh well. I also wish they hadn't duped "UP," especially considering one of the "UP's appears in a theme (i.e. marquee) answer (OPENS UP, (C)RAMPS UP).

What else?:

19A: "... ___ lack thereof" ("OR A")— I don't usually use an indefinite article when I say this. That is, "or lack thereof" feels like the right phrase. No "a." Obviously, you can say it that way. But I don't.
20A: Passionately discuss minutiae, with "out" (NERD) — I think I wanted HASH here but the crosses wouldn't allow it. This is a decent / original clue for NERD.
6A: Man, on the Isle of Man (BLOKE) — since the (historical) language of the Isle of Man is Manx (see "Word of the Day," above), I really thought this was going to be some Isle-of-Man-specific thing, maybe a slang term derived from Manx, but it's just ... a general British word for "man."
1D: Vaccine, informally (JAB)— this also feels British. Are we calling it the JAB now, too?
3D: What it would be a mistake to write twice? (BOO) — can't decide if this is great or awful. If you write BOO twice, it *is* literally a (word meaning) mistake: BOO-BOO. I can't argue with that.

Gotta go get the coffee started and then get to the gym, where I think it probably is a LEG DAY (48D: Gym session devoted to squats, dead lifts, etc.). Thanks for reminding me, puzzle. See you all tomorrow.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Constructor: Rajeswari Rajamani

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium

THEME: RIPPED ABS (61A: Many a gymgoer's goal ... or what the starred clues in this puzzle must have for their answers to make sense?) — you have to "rip" the "abs" (i.e. the letters "ab") from the starred clues to make sense of them:

Theme answers:

EXPONENTS (17A: *They're found next to cabarets [carets])
PONZI SCHEMES (24A: *Viable [Vile] investment plans)
EMAILS (38A: *They might be marked as absent [sent])
ORALLY (40A: *Baby [By] talk)
BELOW THE BELT (49A: *Like some nasty habits [hits])

Word of the Day: Junipero SERRA (67A: Junipero ___, known as the "Apostle of California") —

Saint Junípero Serra Ferrer O.F.M. (/huːˈniːpəroʊ ˈsɛrə/; Spanish: [xuˈnipeɾo ˈsera]; November 24, 1713 – August 28, 1784), popularly known simply as Junipero Serra, was a Spanish Catholic priest and missionary of the Franciscan Order. He is credited with establishing the Franciscan Missions in the Sierra Gorda, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. He founded a mission in Baja California and established eight of the 21 Spanish missions in California from San Diego to San Francisco, in what was then Spanish-occupied Alta California in the Province of Las Californias, New Spain.
Serra was beatified by Pope John Paul II on 25 September 1988 in Vatican City. Amid denunciations from Native American tribes who accused Serra of presiding over a brutal colonial subjugation, Pope Francis canonized Serra on 23 September 2015 at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, D.C., during his first visit to the United States. Serra's missionary efforts earned him the title of "Apostle of California".
Both before and after his canonization, Serra's reputation and missionary work during the Spanish occupation have been condemned by critics, who cite alleged mandatory conversions to Catholicism, followed by abuse of the Native American converts. (wikipedia)

• • •

I made this harder than it had to be by resolutely refusing to go down to the bottom of the grid and figure out the revealer early. I thought about it, after the first two themers didn't quite seem to match their clues, but the puzzle was so easy to fill in that I thought, nah, just let the revealer be the revealer—wait for it. And I did. And it was RIPPED ABS. Which did, in fact ... well, it "explained" more than "revealed." Is there a difference? I would say the effect of a true "revealer" is "wow" or "ooh" or some kind of at least low-key amazement or impressed reaction, whereas an "explainer" just has you going "oh, OK, I see now." As in "Oh, OK, I see now, I just take the "ab" parts out of the starred clues ... yes, that does help." The idiomatic use of RIPPED didn't quite work for me. Rip out? Rip off? "Rip" can mean copy (as when you "rip" a CD to your computer). But "Rip" meaning simply "steal" or "take" just feels slightly off to my ears. Maybe it's a recent IDIOM that just missed me. It feels right, I get it, but on some fundamental level it feels off. Otherwise, the concept here is pretty straightforward. The "ab"-less clues are sometimes a little awkward (e.g. "by talk" for ORALLY) but it's no surprise if they're a little contrived—it takes some contrivance to make all your fake clues contain an unnecessary "ab" but still look like plausible clues. The one weird thing about solving, pre-revealer, is that the original clues occasionally seemed to *almost* fit a couple of times. Like, I got PONZI SCHEMES and thought, "hmmm, those are 'investment plans,' I guess ... but 'Viable'? ... is the theme 'Sarcasm'?"). BELOW THE BELT also felt *close* to its original clue (49A: Like some nasty habits). The nastiness is there, at any rate. So the theme "works" just fine, but it didn't wow me, mainly because the revealer didn't quite stick the landing (didn't help that my first thought for the type of "ABS" a gymgoer might want was WASHBOARD ABS ("washboard" being way more ab-specific than mere "ripped," which can apply to a gymgoer's entire body).

I didn't groove too much on the fill today. It's a pretty dense theme today, so there's not a lot of room to do other interesting or fancy things. The longer answers are OK but not sparkling. The weirdest of them is probably VIA MEDIA, which I know only as a religious concept (I think)—the middle way, the middle path. But that's Buddhist, so ... not sure it would be expressed in Latin, ever. Oh, look, it's a more broadly religious concept—(but it still doesn't mean "middle ground," as we would use the term "middle ground.""VIA" is a road or path. So VIA MEDIA is more a "way" than a "place." It's a way of living that is between extremes, a way of moderation. Somehow "Middle ground" doesn't quite get at that. I'm just really mad at "ground" today. I'm not mad at much else, because nothing is really trying hard to make me mad. I didn't like the fact that NDAS and PDA were in the same grid. All those letters mean completely different things, so there's no real violation here, I just don't like it. If RDA and ADA were in the puzzle, maybe you'd begin to feel why. It's one thing to have a lot of abbrevs, and another (worse) thing to have them be so close to each other. I also didn't like the duped "E-" prefix (EMAILS, EFILE). It's a tiny thing ... but it's a thing. Any other grievances? Well, I'm not too big a fan of the "stylized" soda name (48D: Stylized name for a caffeinated soft drink). I know those are the letters on the can / bottle / box, but MTNDEW looks like you slammed your face on the keyboard—there's nothing lovely about it. Also, it has me imagining what "Mutton Dew" would taste like (It ain't good). I had the initial "M" here and wrote in MR. PIBB (which was sometimes "styled" as "Mr. PiBB" but which is now "Pibb Xtra" ... you know, for the kids! Kids can't relate to "Mr.," man ... they like names with "X" in them! 'Cause it's Xtreme!).

Outside the theme, the puzzle was Very easy. I made things harder on myself by misreading "cabarets" (in 17A: *They're found next to cabarets [carets]) as "cabernets," but I doubt it mattered much—"cabarets" wouldn't have gotten me any closer to EXPONENTS, at that point. Let's see, what else?

What else?:

7D: Spare, perhaps (LET LIVE)— I had LET FREE. I also had CITE before CLIP (36D: Excerpt). These are not very exciting mistakes, you're right. Let's move on.
43D: Where you might find yourself on edge? (ICE RINK?)— I don't get it. Is the idea that you are on the "edge" ... of the blade ... of your skate? Or are you hugging the edge of the rink because you know if you go more than a few steps out on the ice you're just gonna fall down?

39D: Fraud (IMPOSTER)— oh the ways I wanted to spell this. First, I imagined it was IMPOSTEUR (!?). That didn't fit (thank god), so I assumed it was IMPOSTOR. Something about IMPOSTER just seems wrong. Possible because POSTER has a completely different pronunciation as a standalone word. If it's spelled "POSTER," then I want to pronounce it "POSTER," but that's not how it's pronounced in IMPOSTER. Why does the "POST" in "IMPOSTER" rhyme with the "PAST" in "PASTA"? It's so weird. I object.
64A: [$@#%!] ("BLEEP!")— I thought I was supposed to write a swear word (or a word meaning "swear word"), not the sound covering the swear word. Grawlixes (those swear-word symbols in comics) aren't the same as BLEEPs. BLEEPs are used by censors; grawlixes are written/drawn by the artists themselves. BLEEPS are an audio effect; grawlixes are graphic. I guess they both hide or stand in for profanity, so OK. But also boo.

Need to go start my day. Gonna go make the coffee ... or chug some Mutton Dew, whichever. See you tomorrow.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

P.S. RIDGY? RIDGY? (42A: Like corduroy fabric). Apparently this is a perfectly valid word, appearing in dictionaries near you. Feels ridiculous, and I'd call corduroy fabric RIDGED, or even RIBBED, before I'd call it RIDGY (which, to be clear, I would never call it). But yes, it's an actual word.

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Constructor: Kate Chin Park

Relative difficulty: Medium

THEME: none

Word of the Day: TAI (45D: Language group of Southeast Asia) —

The Tai, Zhuang–Tai, or Daic languages (Thai: ภาษาไท or ภาษาไต, transliteration: p̣hās̛̄āthay or p̣hās̛̄ātay, RTGS: phasa thai or phasa tai; Lao: ພາສາໄຕ, Phasa Tai) are a branch of the Kra–Dai language family. The Tai languages include the most widely spoken of the Tai–Kadai languages, including Standard Thai or Siamese, the national language of Thailand; Lao or Laotian, the national language of Laos; Myanmar's Shan language; and Zhuang, a major language in the Southwestern China's Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, spoken by the Zhuang people (壯), the largest minority ethnic group in China, with a population of 15.55 million, living mainly in Guangxi, the rest scattered across Yunnan, Guangdong, Guizhou and Hunan provinces.

• • •

This one felt hard, but I think that's because I've been plowing through Easy after Easy for so long that I forgot what Normal felt like. Most of my trouble today involved getting started—as usual, the back half was much easier than the front, the top much harder than the bottom. But once I did get started, the answers started to pop like pop corn. You know how when you start popping popcorn (I'm thinking microwave here, but however you make it) and at first there's nothing. No pops. And then you get one, and then three, and then a whole bunch in rapid succession. That's what solving felt like today. Is it ever gonna pop!? And then it did a little. And then it did a lot. And much of what was popping was indeed tasty, which made the initial struggles seem mostly worthwhile. I tried working the short stuff in the NW at first, and got nowhere. 1A: Carrier letters (USS) did nothing for me (much later, when I had U-S in place, I still wanted a wrong answer: UPS). Then in the next block over, the only short thing I could get for certain was OBI (6D: Adornment for a kimono). I inferred the "S" at the end of 8D: Decides to leave and from there wrote in SPA DAYS at 26A: They might be booked for getaways (SITTERS); that was brutal. First long answer I put in the grid and it's wrong. But it got me SPY (27D: Plant with bugs, say) ... but then that got me SEEDY, which was also wrong (34A: Run-down = RATTY). So my first two answers of over four letters were both wrong. Nice! Luckily I figure this out reasonably quickly and from SIC (21D: Bracketed qualification) and CATNAP (31A: Forty winks) I start to make progress, and then eventually pop! pop! I got POINT TAKEN (10D: "Fair enough") and "I'M NOT A ROBOT" (9D: Testament to human nature?), huge helpers which were also huge winners. From there, it felt like I had my bearings and the rest of the puzzle was not such a struggle. I took a weird route (NE, NW, SE, SW), but I never really got stuck again.

I love that the boldest answer of the day is sitting dead center. "IS PEPSI OK?" feels risky, somehow. It's so situation-specific, so on the edge of "is this a thing?" I'm glad she pulled the trigger on it, though, 'cause I think it's great. Like, when I imagine the situation (someone ordering a Coke at a non-Coke-having restaurant), that response from the waitress (or waiter, server, whatever ... in my head it's a waitress) is dead-on. Perfect. Exactly what she would say. And then the customer either says "sure," or sighs sadly and says "sure," or else makes a disgusted face and says "god no" and orders a Sprite. Some people are Very particular about Coca-Cola, what can I say? I don't get it, but I respect it. The colloquialness felt less apt at 20A: "I'll take the blame"("IT'S ON ME"). The basic idea definitely tracks, but the phrase I hear in my head is "THAT'S ON ME." Whereas "IT'S ON ME" still feels like a treating phrase—something you say when you pick up the tab. Also, while I don't think it's wrong, I am unfamiliar with however ITERATE is being used today (42D: Develop through experimentation). ITERATE to me conveys repetition, not experimentation. I guess that you repeat ... experiments. And you bring out different iterations of products, presumably making them better as you develop them. But the connection between clue and word felt tenuous, or like a step was missing. ITERATE = repeat. If you don't have the idea of "repetition" somewhere in your ITERATE clue, I'm not gonna get it. I had ITER- and stared like "well, it can only be ITERATE but ... I better wait and see."

There was the usual handful of Things I Don't Know today. The only one of these I actively resented was 18A: Stanley Tucci's character in "The Devil Wears Prada" (NIGEL). A secondary character in an eighteen-year-old movie I never saw in the first place? Bah. TUCCI I know, NIGEL no. But at least it was a name I could infer (which I did, off of --G-L). Didn't know the ROSEN guy either (61A: Nathan ___, physicist who collaborated with Einstein on a theory of wormholes). Wanted to put BOSON in there, thinking of (maybe?) the Higgs-BOSON particle, is that a thing? ... Yes! Though it's just Higgs boson or Higgs particle, and BOSON is not a guy's name, sigh. I did not know Maya Angelou's "STILL I RISE" was a "classic poem," but I guess it fits. I know about the poem primarily from the Clinton inauguration, though maybe it's been featured in ads or other things I've seen on TV. The only Angelou I've ever read is I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. My ignorance of modern poetry, and "STILL I RISE" in particular—that's on me (!). Way more mad at NIGEL than I am at "STILL I RISE" (at which I'm not mad at all).

4A: Stuff of substance? (ATOMS)— really hurt me. Just couldn't make anything out of it for a while. It's in a SUPER-important position—a short answer at the front ends of a bunch of other short answers that cross the longer answers in the NW—and getting it would've been huge. But nope. Locked out. For a while.
50A: Part of a violin quartet? (PEG) — not really sure why there's a "?" on this clue. There are four PEGs on a violin. A group of four is a quartet. I get that you're doing a misdirection thing (playing on the idea of a "quartet" as a piece of music), but you're going to misdirect a lot more effectively if you just leave the "?" off. The clue is literally accurate with it off, so leave it off.

55A: Preference for long-legged types, maybe (AISLE) — as a long-legged type myself, I have historically preferred the AISLE, it's true, but you have to have a pretty high tolerance for being run into by the drink cart etc. as well as a high tolerance for getting up and down as you let the other people in your row get up to use the bathroom. My general experience with airplane seats is that they're all uncomfortable so it doesn't really matter. I often sit in the middle seat because my wife prefers the window, and I have no real preference.
5D: 10-digit no. (TEL.) — anyone else want SSN and then count it out and realize you're off by one? No one? Oh well.
13D: Card letters (STL) — one of those old trick clues that I saw through instantly, which gave me a Desperately Needed toehold in the NE. The St. Louis Cardinals (also called "the Cards") have the letters STL on their (baseball) caps.
63A: Something made for a dinner, for short (RES) — short for "reservation." Seriously (if briefly) thought "What the hell kind of food is RES?"
8D: Decides to leave (STETS)— "STET" is an editorial mark, reversing a deletion. I like that STETS is alongside SIC (21D: Bracketed qualification). "Leave it as it was" alongside "I left this as it was, I know it's a mistake, don't blame me, it's the original author's error."
53D: Alt tab? (LSD)— is the idea that a "tab" of LSD alt...ers your perception? That LSD is a mind-"alt"ering drug? It's a stretch, but as with "IS PEPSI OK?," I have to admire the daring on this one. Nice surface level misdirection, clever wordplay. I'll take it.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Constructor: RICH NORRIS

Relative difficulty: MEDIUM

THEME: None - Happy Saturday!

Word of the Day: AMAHL (2D: Title hero of a Menotti opera)—

Amahl and the Night Visitors is an opera in one act by Gian Carlo Menotti with an original English libretto by the composer.^[1] It was commissioned by NBC and first performed by the NBC Opera Theatre on December 24, 1951, in New York City at NBC Studio 8H in Rockefeller Center, where it was broadcast live on television from that venue as the debut production of the Hallmark Hall of Fame. It was the first opera specifically composed for television in the United States.^[2]

• • •

Hello Crossworld! Rex is back on vacation so you've got Eli again, today and tomorrow, then more Rexplacements the rest of the week. I'm not sure if it's because I was paying extra attention knowing I had today's blog, but the puzzle played a little harder than usual for me. I fumbled around quite a bit before getting a toehold on this one. Fittingly, that toehold came with ON LITTLE CAT FEET (57D: Virtually silently, in a classic poem). I was able to drop it in off of just a couple of crosses, but I imagine if you're not familiar with Robert Frost's poem Fog, this one will play even harder for you.

Even though I made it my word of the day, AMAHL was pretty much the only thing I was able to put in confidently in the north of the puzzle my first pass through, along with the crossing LYNX (21A: Minnesota W.N.B.A. team). I couldn't remember if a Buckwheat noodle (9D) was UDON or SOBA, so I needed some crosses that just weren't coming. I got a little bit of traction on ST. TROPEZ (31A: French resort town) entirely because of personal history. St. Tropez is the setting for the musical La Cage Aux Folles (which is also the basis of the movie The Birdcage), which I acted in after college. Drag performing was a unique experience for a cisgender straight man, but I had a blast. Drag is not a crime.

Ever lift a grown man on to your shoulders in 3 inch heels? I have.

Thankfully, my poetry brain kicked in and got me 57A and I was off and running. Looking at the grid as a whole, the only long across that doesn't really do much for me is ACCESS TIME (5A: Retrieval speed of a computer). I spend a lot of time on computers, and this wasn't a phrase I knew off-hand. It's legit, but it's a bit of a snooze as answers go. I liked the cluing on PIANO TUNER (16A: Professional pitcher?), and it made me put "AD" (as in "Ad Executive") in for way too long. CARE TO ELABORATE (17A: Request for details) is snappy and very natural language, and both I DON'T GET IT (60A: [shrug]) and LONGEST DAY (62A: 1962 war epic loaded with A-listers, with "The") are both solid entries.

On the whole, I liked the puzzle. Pretty straightforward, not too flashy, but solid.

Stray thoughts:

40A: Home run, informally (DINGER) — If you've been paying attention to my write-ups, it will come as no surprise that the first thing this makes me think of is a Simpsons reference.

27D: Sticks figure (YOKEL) — Sigh. Do I have a choice?

51D: Drinks mistakenly invented by a Dairy Queen owner in 1958 (ICEES) — I liked this trivia! It's mostly surprising to me because it feels like an Icee, which is just syrup and crushed ice, would pre-date Dairy Queen. I feel like a Blizzard is a modern smartphone to the Icee's fax machine.
22A: Cousin voiced by Snoop Dogg in two films (ITT) — The original Addams Family TV show is well before my time, but I don't remember Cousin Itt speaking in it. Didn't he just kind of chirp or something? I guess he talks now, and he apparently talks like Snoop.

Enjoy your Saturday, and I'll see you all again tomorrow!

Signed, Eli Selzer, False Dauphin of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Constructor: SCOTT HOGAN and KATIE HALE

Relative difficulty: EASY-MEDIUM

THEME: Weather, Man!— The theme answers are meteorological terms defined using silly phrases and synonyms

Word of the Day: TYSON'S (135A: ___ Corner, suburb of Washington, D.C.)—

Tysons, also known as Tysons Corner,^[5] is a census-designated place (CDP) in Fairfax County, Virginia, United States, spanning from the corner of SR 123 (Chain Bridge Road) and SR 7 (Leesburg Pike).^[6] It is part of the Washington metropolitan area and located in Northern Virginia between McLean and Vienna along the I-495.^[7]^[8]
Tysons is home to two super-regional shopping malls, Tysons Corner Center and Tysons Galleria, and the corporate and administrative headquarters of Alarm.com, Appian, Booz Allen Hamilton, Capital One, Freddie Mac, Gannett, Hilton Worldwide, ID.me, Intelsat, M.C. Dean, Inc., MicroStrategy, and Tegna Inc.

• • •

Hello, it's Eli again, bringing you your Sunday puzzle fix. Today's theme is what we'll call a "classic" style (which I'm using as a polite way of saying old-fashioned). Nothing wrong with that, but this specific kind of theme has never been my personal cup of tea. Let's mix up a MAI TAI (7A: Tiki bar cocktail) and jump right in. I make a very good mai tai.

Why, yes, that is homemade orgeat. Thank you for noticing.

Like I said, the "punny definition of a common phrase" theme has never been a favorite of mine. It's fine, I'm just rarely wowed by it. Today was no exception. It wasn't a bad puzzle at all, just not for me. The answers were all legitimate weather forecast phrases (one bumped for me just a bit; see below), the clues were fun (if not really funny), and that's all there is to it.

Theme answers:

SHOWERS LIKELY (23A: High chance of parties celebrating a baby's arrival?)
MOSTLY CLOUDY (42A: Like one's mental state before morning coffee?)
HEAVY SNOW (52A: Terrible TV reception?)
ISOLATED SPRINKLES (71A: What you might find on the counter after making ice cream sundaes?)
WINTRY MIX (94A: Eclectic holiday party playlist?)
MORNING FROST (103A: "The Road Not Taken" enjoyed over breakfast?)
DAMAGING WINDS (125A: Smashing clarinets and oboes?)

Wow, that's a lot of theme. Mostly these work fine. I have a minor quibble with Isolated Sprinkles, just in that it feels like the one I haven't heard before. It seems legit, but isolated showers is what I hear more often. I get that you already have Showers Likely, but that's another one that feels more arbitrary. Neither of those really hurts the puzzle, just where my eyebrows raised a bit. I also like Mostly Cloudy, but I think of my pre-coffee mornings as more of a haze or a fog than a cloud. Clouds and coffee only takes my brain one place:

The theme density doesn't leave much room for flash in the fill. Not a lot stood out to me, good or bad. On a personal level, I have a distaste for ODEA (117D: Greek theaters) and it's singular friend "odeon." I was a theater major, I love ancient Greek theater, but for some reason this word just leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Conversely, YEET (45D: Forcefully throw, in modern slang) is one of my favorite recent words. It always makes me laugh a bit. I also like that Y-AXES (80D: Lines for which x = 0) looks like "Yaxes," which makes me imagine some unread Dr. Seuss story. And hey, look! It's UDON (122D: Noodle used in shabu-shabu). I had too many crosses by the time I saw this so I wasn't able to confuse it with SOBA. But anyone who read my post yesterday will know it could have been a problem. Maybe I should post the Uma/Oprah video again, introducing Udon to Soba... nah, I'll spare you this time.

Parting thoughts:

1D: Sounds from a mat (OMS)— Do people actually use "om" as a mantra, or is it just a stereotype? I meditate daily, though not in a form that requires a mantra. I've just never actually witnessed this.
27A: Casino fixture (ATM) — Vegas tip: don't use the ATMs in the casino unless you're ok throwing even more money away on fees. Bring cash with you. I wish someone had told me this before I went to Vegas for the first time.
81A: ___ for Sore Eyes (punny name for an ophthalmologist's office) (SITE)— These feels like a business that would open next to Bob's Burgers. No complaints from me; I love that show.

5D: Title role for Fran Drescher (THE NANNY)— Something I think about a lot is that I have trouble remembering peoples' names and new information, but for some reason I still know every word to the theme song to The Nanny. Memory can be weird.

Well, now that's back in my brain. Yay. It's been a long day, and I'm not sure I have the energy to think about the puzzle anymore. Hope you all enjoyed it; enjoy your Mali Monday tomorrow!

Signed, Eli Selzer, False Dauphin of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Princess who helped Theseus escape the Minotaur / TUE 7-16-2024 / London-based cosmetics giant / "United States of America" channel / Major metals manufacturer

Greek consonant hidden in the names of two Greek vowels / WED 7-17-2024 / Sandwich whose "California" version contains avocado / Caterpillar roll ingredient

Name on a AAdvantage credit card / THU 7-18-24 / An "e-" one was first developed in 2003, for short / Oldest major TV network in the U.S. / "___ is long, life is short" (Greek aphorism)

What "waftaroms" represent in the comics / FRI 7-19-24 / Physiologist whose namesake exercise is part of an Army fitness test / Final Fantasy and others, for short

Fills, as a moving van / SUN 7-21-24 / River through the Black Forest / Previously, poetically / Mammal endemic to the Democratic Republic of the Congo / Leaf opening / Enlightened state in Zen Buddhism

Crazy talent, slangily / MON 7-22-24 / What the KonMari Method leaves you with / Stuck, with no easy way out / Early PC platform / Lady ___ "Shallow" singer / R&B singer with the 2006 #1 hit "So Sick"

Fictional country in "The Princess Diaries" / TUE 7-23-24 / Pickle, to a Brit / Freshwater fish named for its shoreline habitat / Cipher machine of W.W. II / Ken's Mojo Dojo ___ House (redundantly named dwelling in "Barbie" / Rock climber's notch

Ticketmaster alternative / WED 7-24-24 / Fashion designer Cohn with an eponymous rhinestone-encrusted suit / Small vessel in the deep ocean / Alfred for whom a coffee chain is named / Joystick-controlled contraption depicted in this puzzle

Garment for a vaquero / FRI 7-26-24 / Feat on a beat / Fan associated with a red, white and blue skull logo / Breed once known as the "Tax Collector's Dog" / Radiohead's highest-selling single / Letters of coverage

Restaurant chain with an avian mascot / SUN 7-28-24 / Phenomenon allegorized in "The Crucible" / Raccoonlike mammal of China /

Sarcastic non-apology / MON 7-29-24 / Solar energy collector / Perennial optimist's motto

"To recap," in an initialism / TUE 7-30-24 / Fashion brand founded by an Australian surfer / Uber- relative / Use non-lead pipes? / Actor who plays Luther Stickell in the "Mission: Impossible" franchise

Sluglike "Star Wars" bad guy / WED 7-31-24 / Increases sharply / Video streaming giant / Like 10%-fat beef / Man, on the Isle of Man / Duck delicacy / What it would be a mistake to write twice? / Vaccine, informally / Passionately discuss minutiae, with "out"

Stylized name for a caffeinated soft drink / THU 8-1-24 / They're found next to cabarets / Viable investment plans / Shows signs of mythomania / Cocktail served in a copper mug, familiarly / Isaac Newton from the age of 62 onward / Approximate recipe measure

Server's question after a drink order / FRI 8-2-24 / Stuff of substance? / Part of a violin quartet? / Classic poem whose subject is "a black ocean, leaping and wide" / Adornment for a kimono / Preference for long-legged types

Virtually silently, in a classic poem / SAT 8-3-24 / 1962 war epic loaded with A-listers, with "The" / M.L.B. team that's played in three different stadiums since its inception in 1962 / Abbr. in French business names

German word that sounds like a number in English / SUN 8-4-24 / Wonderland bird / Place to get a pricey cab