Rex Parker Does the NYT Crossword Puzzle

Constructor: John Kugelman

Relative difficulty: Easy

THEME:"Is There an Echo in Here?"— clues are repeated sounds, words, or numbers, and answers are punny descriptions of those repetitions:

Theme answers:

DOUBLE-CLICK (21A: "Tsk, tsk"?)
SECOND MATE (23A: Buddy-buddy?)
RAP DUO (44A: [Knock, knock]?)
ONE AFTER ANOTHER (45A: 11?)
THIS BEARS REPEATING (64A: Pooh-pooh?)
THE MUMMY RETURNS (88A: Tut-tut?)
ALLOWS (93A: "Ow! Ow!"?)
BACK-UP COPY (110A: "OK, OK"?)
PAIR OF PANTS (114A: "Hubba, hubba!"?)

Word of the Day: PARIS, TEXAS (18A: City with a cowboy hat-wearing replica of the Eiffel Tower) —

Paris is a city and county seat of Lamar County, Texas, United States. Located in Northeast Texas at the western edge of the Piney Woods, the population of the city was 24,171 in 2020. [...] Following a tradition of American cities named "Paris" (named after France's capital), the city commissioned a 65-foot-tall (20 m) replica of the Eiffel Tower in 1993 and installed it on site of the Love Civic Center, southeast of the town square. In 1998, presumably as a response to the 1993 construction of a 60-foot-tall (18 m) tower in Paris, Tennessee, the city placed a giant red cowboy hat atop its tower. The current Eiffel Tower replica is at least the second one; an earlier replica constructed of wood was destroyed by a tornado. [...] In the late-19th and early-20th centuries, several lynchings were staged at the Paris Fairgrounds as public spectacles, with crowds of white spectators cheering as the African-American victims were tortured and murdered. A Black teenager named Henry Smith was lynched in 1893. His murder was the first lynching in US history that was captured in photographs sold as postcards and other trinkets commemorating the killing. Journalist Ida B. Wells said of the incident "Never in the history of civilization has any Christian people stooped to such shocking brutality and indescribable barbarism as that which characterized the people of Paris, Texas." (wikipedia)

• • •

These puns are hit-and-miss, though I will admit that I grudgingly stopped and admired THIS BEARS REPEATING. You gotta mentally insert an apostrophe for the pun to work, but that's fine. Better than fine. Really imaginative. The pun is (for once) good. The bear (Pooh) is indeed repeating. There's a lot of cleverness on display here, and occasionally some welcome lunacy. ALL "OW"S! ONE AFTER THE OTHER! When I say wackiness needs to go big or go home, that's what I mean. But the themers kind of peter out there at the bottom. BACK-UP COPY and PAIR OF PANTS are the only ones I actively don't like. First of all, I get that "OK" means "copy" (in RADIOSPEAK?), but only one of the "OK"s can be the BACK-UP COPY. The other one is just a "COPY," so the answer does not make sense for the clue. I think this critique extends to SECOND MATE, where only one of the "buddies" is actually "second." The first "buddy" is ... first, so again, the answer simply doesn't work for the clue. Compare those two answers to DOUBLE-CLICK, which refers to both "clicks" i.e. both "tut"s, not just the second one, or THIS BEARS REPEATING or THE MUMMY RETURNS, where the repetition itself is the subject. No, BACK-UP COPY and SECOND MATE just don't work, since those answers directly refer only to the *second*, repeated part of the clue, and not the original, first part as well. And as for PAIR OF PANTS, er, I would not describe a "hubba" as ... well, as an anything, but certainly not a "pant." I get that "hubba-hubba!" is what you say when you are panting (libidinously), but the hubba-pant equation feels awful. But in the main, this punny puzzle does better than most punny puzzles, and there's enough zany variety to cover a Sunday-sized grid without leaving me feeling exhausted by a beaten-into-the-ground concept. It's a mild thumbs-up from me, which is a pretty big accomplishment considering that it's a Sunday (so so often a no-funday).

The fill was pretty decent overall, but there were more than a few answers that grated. A lot of the longer answers felt overly nichey, or like things that were barely things. RADIOSPEAK seemed off (25A: What "Ten-four" and "Over" are used in). Doesn't seem like a very real word. When I google it, I get "radio lingo" and "radio terminology" sites. E-BILL is up there with the worst E-things I've seen in a grid (38A: Paper-saving invoice). It's just a bill, or an invoice. The norm is electronic now, so to specify E-BILL feels E-BAD. "EGADS! Have you seen this E-BILL! It's E-GREGIOUS!" Boo. The STARKILLER thing is just annoying (102A: George Lucas's original surname for Luke Skywalker). If Lucas didn't use it, then it's not a thing. How in the world should I know that dumb bit of trivia? Completely stupid to think that it's an acceptable answer. My god fandom can addle some people's brains. Or else overstuffed wordlists are doing the addling, I don't know, but STARKILLER—hard boo. I got it easily enough, by inference, but still, it's bad enough to have to remember so much damn "Star Wars" universe trivia from the *actual* movies. Asking me to know things that didn't even make it in = bridge too far. For reference:

Luke's original surname was "Starkiller", and it remained in the script until a few months into filming. It was dropped due to what Lucas called "unpleasant connotations" with Charles Manson, who became a "star killer" in 1969 when he murdered the well-known actress Sharon Tate. Lucas replaced the problematic name "Starkiller" with "Skywalker". (wikipedia)

I don't go to enough carnivals, it seems, because SPACE SHOT was a ???? to me (15D: Carnival attraction that propels its riders sky-high). MOON SHOT is really a much nicer answer, why aren't they called that? Also not familiar to me, as a term: NIGHT BIRD (58A: Owl or whippoorwill). I know that many birds are nocturnal, and I've heard of NIGHT OWL, and NIGHTHAWKS, of course, but just ... NIGHT BIRD? Meh. I'm sure some people say this, but do people who know anything about birds say this? Feels too vague, too general. I guess a BRAIN DUMP is a thing I've heard of, but it's so ugly as a term that I can't pretend I'm happy to see it (117A: Outpouring of ideas). Some "originality" = unwelcome. And RAGE ROOMS, lol, whatever (71A: Places to let out anger by smashing objects). I've seen this before, but *only* in crosswords (once, also in the plural, last year). It's hard to believe these rooms exist. How bad are you at feeling your feelings that you need a room to smash? Bizarre. It's too weird a thing to use in a grid, especially once it's already been used. Ten-year moratorium on RAGE ROOMS starting now, OK? OK. Copy? Copy.

There are also some patches of regular-old short fill that are really, really dire. Well, one in particular. It goes from SRTA in the far east and then sorta trickles down to form a sludge puddle right around the AERO / ARO crossing (crossing two homophones that are only one letter apart—not great). So SRTA OUTTA "UH, NO""OHH" OTRO ARO AERO EGADS ... that is one unpleasant short-answer slurry. But much of the rest of the grid is solid to strong: PARIS, TEXAS, TIME-LAPSE, FOUL TIP, EYE MASKS ... there's a wide variety of interesting fill, and not too much garbage. I loved STEADICAM, esp. the way it was clued (75D: Filming innovation used in "The Shining"), but I'm a *little* concerned that people will spell it STEADYCAM (as I did at first pass) and leave the "Y" in, believing that that is how ELY Manning spells his name. If you are not into sports, this seems like a very plausible error. But then maybe you've all been doing crosswords for so long that even if you couldn't tell ELI Manning from ELI Wallach, you know for sure that it's ELI with an "I." Let's hope so.

What else?:

28A: Honnold who was the first to free-solo climb El Capitan (ALEX)— shrug. The only Honnold I know was the namesake of the college library at my alma mater (Pomona). At least I think that's how it was spelled, Honnold. Hmm, looks like it's the Honnold/Mudd Library but we just called it "Honnold" in the olden days. Speaking of my college, there's an article on their English department that is ... well, it's a ride. It's called "When a Department Self-Destructs," if that gives you any idea. (It's been over 30 years since I was an English major there, so I don't know any of the parties involved.)
31A: Sight at Sydney's yearly Festival of the Winds (KITE) — four letters so I *kinda* wanted OBOE. Then I had the "K" and I *kinda* wanted KOALA (sadly, not four letters).
79A: Queer identity, for short (ARO) — short for "aromantic." Soon, this answer will have become as common as Brian ENO and I will stop feeling the need to explain it to people.
31D: Nine credited roles in "Barbie" (KENS) — normally plural names are suboptimal, as fill goes, but Barbie has made KENS an exception. So many KENS ...

56D: State with a five-sided flag (OHIO) — I see "five-sided flag," I think NEPAL, so this is interesting. If I knew this about OHIO's flag, I forgot it, but luckily there are only so many four-letter states.

[Nepal]

[OHIO]

99D: Haggard fellow? (MERLE)— first thought: "... the Horrible? Mr. The Horrible?" But that's Hägar (the comic strip Viking), not Haggard (the country legend). Happy to see Haggard instead of HUNTER HAYES today (Saturday solvers know what I mean...). Haggard is the best of the "H" country stars. Here's some more "H"s in his honor.

See you next time.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Constructor: Zachary David Levy

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium (solved Downs-only) (finished with an error, though)

THEME: TRIPLE WORD SCORE (58A: Coveted Scrabble space ... or the sheet music for 16-, 21-, 34- or 51-Across?) — song titles where a single word is tripled:

Theme answers:

"GIMME GIMME GIMME" (16A: Abba hit of 1979)
"BYE BYE BYE" (21A: 'N Sync hit of 2000)
"GIRLS GIRLS GIRLS" (34A: Mötley Crüe hit of 1987)
"FUN FUN FUN" (51A: Beach Boys hit of 1964)

Word of the Day: NAMIB (4D: Coastal African desert) —

The Namib (/ˈnɑːmɪb/ NAH-mib; Portuguese: Namibe) is a coastal desert in Southern Africa. According to the broadest definition, the Namib stretches for more than 2,000 kilometres (1,200 mi) along the Atlantic coasts of Angola, Namibia, and northwest South Africa, extending southward from the Carunjamba River in Angola, through Namibia and to the Olifants River in Western Cape, South Africa. The Namib's northernmost portion, which extends 450 kilometres (280 mi) from the Angola-Namibia border, is known as Moçâmedes Desert, while its southern portion approaches the neighboring Kalahari Desert. From the Atlantic coast eastward, the Namib gradually ascends in elevation, reaching up to 200 kilometres (120 mi) inland to the foot of the Great Escarpment. Annual precipitation ranges from 2 millimetres (0.079 in) in the aridest regions to 200 millimetres (7.9 in) at the escarpment, making the Namib the only true desert in southern Africa. Having endured arid or semi-arid conditions for roughly 55–80 million years, the Namib may be the oldest desert in the world and contains some of the world's driest regions, with only western South America's Atacama Desert to challenge it for age and aridity benchmarks. (wikipedia)

• • •

This is one I definitely appreciated more when I got the revealer *and* looked at the theme-answer clues. Before that, solving Downs-only, it was just a lot of repeated-word phrases, and even when I got TRIPLE WORD SCORE, I didn't see the musical connection. But now, seeing that all the theme answers are songs, the "SCORE" pun becomes clear. I think of "SCORE" as music composed for a movie, but it's also just the "copy of a musical composition in printed or written notation" (merriam-webster dot com). I also think of "sheet music" as primarily orchestral—it's definitely not a phrase I'd put anywhere near Mötley Crüe, for instance—but there's "sheet music" for all kinds of music (even "GIRLS, GIRLS, GIRLS"), so even though the "sheet music" bit feels a *little* preposterous, on a technical level, it works. The theme is, by its nature, repetitive, and those theme answers were (therefore) really easy to get solving Downs-only, but still, conceptually, with *that* revealer, it's pretty good.

The fill on this one seemed far far less good. I tripped all over myself trying to make sense of the NAMIB / IN-APP / GAEL / ALY part as I started the puzzle (and really winced at ALY, considering I'd *just* written in ALI). And oof, the partials. A LEAK!? Trying to make sense of that when I couldn't see the Across clues was painful. It would've been painful, if somewhat easier, even if I could've seen the clue—it's really a horrible partial, and then we get *another* very bad-feeling partial?!? ("I'M OF"). Why the hell does a supremely easy Monday puzzle have two egregious partials? The craftsmanship really should be better—the fill much smoother—on early-week puzzles. But I had to stumble through stale and bygone fill of all kinds. "I CAME"? Ugh, I'm calling that a "partial" too, that makes three, that's too many. LUV, PRE, SCI, GAR ... OLA!? OXO? There's way way too much subpar stuff. ORES and OARS, ABUT and ATOP, SSW and SFPD ... these are innocuous on their own, but today they're part of a tidal wave of gunk. When my Downs-only adventures left me with T-SHAPE (!?!?!?), I sincerely thought I had something wrong.

There was almost no part of the solve where I thought things looked polished, bright, and clean. And after suffering through all the unloveliness, I ended up with an error, ugh. I had RIP BY instead of ZIP BY because RUMBA looked so good (in a way that ZUMBA, which I haven't heard anyone refer to in well over a decade, absolutely does not). I guess ZIP BY is more of a real phrase than RIP BY, but RUMBA > ZUMBA (in my head). Also, the "quickly fly past" in the clue made it seem like the clue was referring to time, and the years really do RIP BY as you get older, so honestly, I didn't really blink at that "R." Bah and humbug.

Bullets:

14A: Popular dance fitness program (ZUMBA) — is it, though? Popular? It seems about as "popular" as TAE BO, which I *also* encounter exclusively in crosswords (and thrift stores that sell VHS tapes from the '90s). I get whatever "fitness" I have from going to the gym (2x/week) and running. I ran my first 10K yesterday. Very slowly (finished 9th out of 11 in my gender/age category), but I did it.

43A: Pennsylvania governor Josh (SHAPIRO) — it took a Vice Presidential sweepstakes for me to learn the name of the governor of the Giant State Located About Ten Miles South Of My House. Even though SHAPIRO wasn't Harris's ultimate choice, seems like his profile was raised quite a bit this summer. And yet not so much that he's the Top SHAPIRO in my brain. Since I solved Downs-only, I couldn't see the SHAPIRO clue, and so I assumed (given the NYTXW's eternal love for all things NPR) that the SHAPIRO in question would be Ari.
4D: Coastal African desert (NAMIB) — putting this together without Acrosses was rough. I just had a hard time convincing myself that NAMIB was a thing. I wrote it in and then stared at it like "er ... uh ... I dunno ... am I misremembering that? It looks ... bad." But nope, it's good. The trivia-retrieval part of my brain is still minimally operative. Good to know.
24D: Man's name that's a fruit spelled backward (EMIL) — All the MULPs out there are like "Damn! It's EMIL again. Some day ..."
39D: Athleisure lead-in to "lemon" (LULU)— If there's an uglier fashion word than "athleisure," I don't know what it is. It sounds like an affliction, not a clothing type. Like lesions you get from athletics, maybe. I know LULUlemon (one word? ... yes, one word) as a popular brand of yoga apparel. I guess they've branched out. The LULU really doesn't stand on its own. If you need a self-standing LULU, may I suggest ...

60D: Kitchen brand with a palindromic name (OXO) — at least we're spared the "Losing tic-tac-toe" line of cluing today. Small blessings.

See you next time.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Hello, everyone! It’s Clare for the last Tuesday in August. I’m currently recovering from jet lag (and sickness) after a lovely trip to the south of France last week! My sister and I managed to pack our quick trip with beaches and cliffs in Cassis, the streets of Marseilles, a lavender field in Aix-en-Provence, wine tasting in Nîmes, and a gorgeous chateau in Redessan for a friend’s wedding. (Side note: French weddings last a loong time. We didn’t even get on the dance floor until after midnight, and we got back to our hotel around 4 a.m.) Still, the best part of the trip was that my body tolerated the gluten (wheat is somehow less processed in Europe), so I ate my weight in bread and pastries. But now, it’s back to work I go in what is an especially hectic time for me. But oh, well, at least I have crosswords (and endless sports, of course) to keep my mind off things.

Anywho, on to the puzzle…

Constructor:Julia Hoepner

Relative difficulty:Easy-medium

THEME: BAD BREAKUP (68A: Messy end to a relationship, with a hint to this puzzle's shaded squares) — The shaded squares are synonyms for “bad” that are broken up by black squares

Theme answers:

MANDELBROT — TENT
AGNOSTIC — KYOTO
POEM — ALIGN — ANTI
MY HAT — EDNA MODE
RONA — STYLE GUIDE

Word of the Day: MANDELBROT (17A: Mathematician Benoit ___, coiner of the word "fractal") —

Benoit B. Mandelbrot was a Polish-born French-American mathematician and polymath with broad interests in the practical sciences, especially regarding what he labeled as "the art of roughness" of physical phenomena and "the uncontrolled element in life". He referred to himself as a "fractalist" and is recognized for his contribution to the field of fractal geometry, which included coining the word "fractal", as well as developing a theory of "roughness and self-similarity" in nature. (WIKI)

• • •

That was a rather cute puzzle, especially considering it’s the constructor’s debut. The revealer was a nice payoff and really solidified my feelings about the puzzle. I still didn’t love all of it — it seemed that there was a little more crosswordese than usual to make the theme (and construction) work. But overall, I thought it was a great debut, and the theme made up for some of the other aspects I was prepared to be more meh about.

This puzzle was one of the rare occasions where the theme actually helped me with the solve. I also think it’s visually appealing that the puzzle is sort of, kind of symmetrical. You just have to slice it in half horizontally and rotate the bottom 180 degrees. Easy peasy. In terms of the theme answers, I really liked the way MALIGNANT is split twice in the long, marquee spot. I think HATED worked the least — it seems to be the odd one out because the other words are much more commonly used as adjectives. (I do acknowledge that the Baltimore football team’s name has become the HATED Ravens.)

My favorite answers were some of the longer ones. ESCAPE ROOM (14A: Social activity that one tries to get out of?) was clever and funny. I will always like anything and everything with EDNA MODE(50A: Fashion designer in "The Incredibles") in it; she’s an icon. STYLE GUIDE (63A: Copywriter's handbook) worked really well, and my sister is literally a copy editor, so I’ve heard about the AP Stylebook a million and one times (and have even asked her to consult it for me as I’m doing these write-ups). And even though I didn’t know who Benoit MANDELBROT (17A) was before today’s crossword, that’s a cool name, and I now know a lot more about fractals.

Another answer I liked was EGBDF (35D: Musical staff letters), which looks all sorts of ugly and confusing but actually makes a lot of sense and is fun. (My piano teacher taught me the mnemonic device “Every Good Boy Does Fine” to remember the bass clef notes.) Having IMHO (52A: Start of a texter's two cents) and CHIME IN (55A: Give one's two cents) as mirror clues that sit on top of each other was nice. AREPA (36A: Cornmeal cake in Colombian cuisine), which I mentioned in my last write-up three weeks ago, is back in the puzzle, and that’s a word (and a food) I will always love. PERUSE (15D: Read carefully ... or leisurely) is a great word; I’d never really thought about the fact that it’s a contronym that can mean to read either carefully or in a leisurely way.

I flew through this puzzle to start but then slowed. I had a hard time with GUT FLORA (10D: Micro-organisms in the digestive tract) because apparently, I don’t take good enough care of my gut. I didn’t know LBO (65D: Wall St. acquisition) because apparently, I don’t follow the stock market enough (or at all). I’d forgottenHOTH (56D: Ice planet in "The Empire Strikes Back") until I got the first two letters from the acrosses (apparently, I should rewatch “Star Wars”). I thought the answer was “seedy” instead of NEEDY (28D: Down-and-out). I also hate “RONA” (62A) as slang for COVID-19, so my brain refused to see that as an option for a while.

Some of the rest of the puzzle wasn’t overly exciting, such as TEN TO (31D: Fifty minutes past the hour) (which could have been “ten of”) or MADE DO (4D: Worked with what's available). And clue/answers such as ERM (66D: Indecisive sound) could truly have been many different three-letter words. ABET, AIDE, ANTI, LSAT, CEL, ORB, TITLE, etc., just did nothing for me. But even some of the more basic answers — such as PRE (33A: Lead-in to algebra or calculus), NOR (7D: "Water, water, every where, / ___ any drop to drink": "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner"), and GENE (12D: Apt name for a DNA expert?)— seemed clued in slightly different ways than the norm, which I appreciated.

Misc.:

You’d best believe I got EARL (25A: Rank above viscount) in a split second because of the number of historical romances I’ve read (and watched).
Weirdly enough, I got THISBE (49D: Pyramus' beloved, in myth) pretty quickly because of a YA romance book I read years ago called “Along for the Ride,” where the main character’s father is obsessed with Greek mythology and names her half-sister THISBE. So once I had a couple of letters filled in, I was golden.
When my sister and I were in France, we rented a car and checked — and checked again and again — that the car we were getting was automatic and not MANUAL (51D: Not automatic). Thankfully, it all worked out. And driving in France wasn’t too bad, except that there were so many roundabouts. Like, we really couldn’t go more than a kilometer without a roundabout. And at most of them, we just continued straight anyway.
Gotta say I’m glad that I took the LSAT (2D: Future J.D.'s exam) when the logic games were still a section on the test. They were by far my favorite (and best) section. And I confess that I still randomly do logic games like these to this day and time myself because I think they’re really fun.

Signed, Clare Carroll, whose body is saying it’s 6 a.m. in France even though the brain knows it’s midnight in DC.

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Constructor: Jesse Goldberg

Relative difficulty: Medium-Challenging

THEME: answers embedded in clues— theme clues are presented with consecutive letters missing: those letters, in each case, form the *answers* to the clues:

Theme answers:

THIGH (1A: Chicken par_ ____ in fat) (Chicken part high in fat)
OTHER (17A: Referring t_ ___ _est) (Referring to the rest)
ORALS (9A: Hurdles for doct____ _tudents) (Hurdles for doctoral students)
DEATH (19A: I___ __at terrifies thanatophobes) (Idea that terrifies thanatophobes)
ATONED (32A: Made amends for wh__ ___ _id) (Made amends for what one did)
SHOVERS (39A: They pu__ ____ _tuff) (They push over stuff)
KLINGON (41A: "Star Tre_" ____ _ot heard on the original series) ("Star Trek" lingo not heard on the original series)
RASCAL (48A: Another word fo_ _ ____awag) (Another word for a scalawag)
DRAIN (61A: Street feature needed after a har_ ___) (Street feature needed after a hard rain)
STAKE (69A: It'_ ____n on a vampire hunt) (It's taken on a vampire hunt)
NINTH (65A: Pitcher's positio_ __ __e lineup, historically) (Pitcher's position in the lineup, historically)
STORM (71A: Tempe__ __ _onsoon) ("Tempest or monsoon")

Word of the Day: ROENTGENS (10D: Units of X-ray exposure) —

The roentgen or röntgen (/ˈrɛntɡən, -dʒən, ˈrʌnt-/; symbol R) is a legacy unit of measurement for the exposure of X-rays and gamma rays, and is defined as the electric charge freed by such radiation in a specified volume of air divided by the mass of that air (statcoulomb per kilogram). In 1928, it was adopted as the first international measurement quantity for ionizing radiation to be defined for radiation protection, as it was then the most easily replicated method of measuring air ionization by using ion chambers. It is named after the German physicist Wilhelm Röntgen, who discovered X-rays and was awarded the first Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery. (wikipedia)

• • •

[ALFIE& Ida]

I have one word written at the top of my puzzle and that word is "painful." The concept here (undoubtedly clever) becomes tedious and contrived when stretched out over so many clues and answers. Further, the theme is entirely in the clues, not the grid, which always feels ... backward to me. You've got a fairly boring grid, and then clues that are made tortured and inscrutable just for the sake of this theme. And five-letter themers? Who wants that, over and over and over, all the small corners choked with *two* of these absurd missing-letter clues. And that's another thing: you've got So Much Theme. Twelve theme answers? Twelve times I have to do this!?!? I would much (much much) prefer a theme concept that's interesting x 4 than a theme concept that's clunky and awkward x 12 (12?!). More is not better. More is slower, though—the themers frequently slowed me down because who would ever speak or write this way? Who would call "Klingon" a "lingo" (It's A Language) and who would call *anything* SHOVERS? SHOVERS? A total non-word—and in the plural?! SMH. So I was noticeably slower today than I would normally be on a Wednesday, if only because the small corners—areas that would normally take the least amount of time to blow through—were thickly laden with theme gunk. Also, I completely forgot the word ROENTGENS. The entire front end, just ... nothing. Had to work every cross. My Father Was A Radiologist. SMH. Unpleasant *and* slow—never a great combo.

The longer answers have nothing thematic to do, so they just ... hang out there. In a puzzle like this, with almost all the thematic interest in the short(er) stuff, those longer answers have a kind of moral obligation to be dazzling, but (perhaps because there are So Many Themers clogging up the grid), they are just average. Not bad, not great. ROENTGENS may be the most interesting of the lot. On the whole, it's a very plain, average-to-below-average grid. I want to complain about HOR ISON ACER AMNIO and other overfamiliar short stuff, but honestly there's not more of that in this puzzle than there is in your typical NYTXW puzzle. This grid isn't bad, it's blah. Well, it's bad in that it's urine-soaked—it's got both PEE *and* a pee-allusive clue on JOHNS (66A: Going places?) (i.e. places for going, i.e. places for going to the bathroom). The fact that PEE is (cryptically) clued as a letter (44A: Snap back?, i.e. the "back"–or last letter—of the word "snap"), doesn't remove the PEE stain. When you're looking at a grid and see PEE in there, you're not thinking "ooh, the letter 'P'"; you're thinking "great, urine, just what I wanted in the middle of my puzzle." Again, if the JOHNS clue hadn't steered directly into the bathroom, then PEE would've been more innocuous. But the JOHNS clue couldn't lay off the toilet "joke," and so now the two answers seem like a subtheme. A very unfortunate subtheme.

[Glynis JOHNS]

The only real difficulty came from putting the themers together, but as I said, there was so much putting themers together that the whole puzzle became (relatively) slow. This puzzle lost me on the first themer, which came *immediately* at 1-Across. I have never thought of chicken thighs in terms of their fat content. Also, I saw "Chicken par-" and thought for sure that the answer was going to have something to do with "chicken parm." Alas, no. Hardest part of the grid for me to get into was the west, as I couldn't get AT HOME from -ME (35A: Comfortable) and couldn't get SHOVERS at all because there's no such thing as SHOVERS what the hell? Also, "shoving" and "pushing over" are different things, the latter being way more extreme than mere "shoving." My god that answer is bad on every level. Outside the theme, there was just my blanking on the ROEN- part of ROENTGENS and then ... I dunno, STIR? (59D: Energize). That clue was weird. Not sure I know how STIR = "energize." If I STIR ... something, I don't energize it, really. If I STIR someone, I move them, maybe, emotionally, but "energize?" I guess the act of stirring does involve the addition of energy (in some basic sense) to the mix, but that clue was opaque to me. Nothing else terribly tricky going on here today. Getting through that theme is enough of a challenge.

[ALFIE, age 2 mos., 2020]

Notes:

15A: Bronx politician with a noted 2018 upset, familiarly (AOC) — she's such an established figure now that I totally forgot that her initial victory was an "upset."
16A: Clay figure in Jewish folklore (GOLEM)— you should watch Alex Edelman's comedy special Just For Us (on Max). It's not about GOLEMs or folklore at all, but it is very much Jewish, and very much hilarious. I watched it yesterday after hearing Edelman on Conan's podcast ("Conan O'Brien Needs a Friend"), and ... well, if I explain it too much, I'll ruin it. Basically ... Jewish guy goes to a white nationalist get-together and lives to do a comedy special about it—that's the premise. I cackled alone on my couch for an hour+. Good stuff.

67A: Smoothie bar supply (ICE) — lose the "Smoothie" part. Like, "Smoothies" does not really evoke ICE and you don't even need that word in the clue. It's totally, utterly, completely superfluous. Like a fly in your soup. Look: [Bar supply] = ICE. See how nice that is. So clean, so pleasant, so direct. Tidy. Elegant. I can't believe "smoothie bar" is still a thing. I can barely bring myself to say "smoothie." The only bar I want to have anything to do with serves cocktails, and if I want a thick, sweet drink, I'll order a shake or a malt like a normal person.

Good day! See you next time.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Constructor: Simeon Seigel

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium (if it felt slow, keep in mind the grid is an oversized 16x15)

THEME: FOLLOW DIRECTIONS (40A: What one must do using the circled letters to solve this puzzle) — each of the four circled squares contains one of the cardinal "directions" (north south east west); the answers containing those squares change direction at the circled square, in the direction indicated by the circled square, i.e. the answer turns north after the NORTH square, west after the WEST square, etc.:

Theme answers:

MINOR THIRD (22A: Musical interval like C to E flat)
"SO WHERE DO WE STAND?" (5D: Question from an impatient negotiator)
HOLDS OUT HOPE (53A: Keeps the faith)
IKEA STORE (42D: Furniture outlet with an average size of 300,000 square feet, or five football fields)

Word of the Day: ARI Emanuel (16D: Businessman Emanuel) —

Ariel Zev Emanuel (born 1961) is an American businessman and the CEO of Endeavor, an entertainment and media agency that owns the UFC and WWE. He was a founding partner of the Endeavor Talent Agency and was instrumental in shaping its June 2009 merger with the William Morris Agency. [...] Emanuel is the brother of former mayor of Chicago, Presidential Chief of Staff and U.S. Ambassador to Japan Rahm Emanuel, American oncologist and bioethicist Ezekiel Emanuel, and sister Shoshana Emanuel. [...]
Emanuel's relationships with his clients, coupled with his stature in the industry, has led to various homages and parodies over the years, including Bob Odenkirk's character Stevie Grant on The Larry Sanders Show, and Ari Gold, played by Jeremy Piven on the HBO television show Entourage. In 2011, Emanuel co-founded TheAudience with Sean Parker and Oliver Luckett.
An April 2002 lawsuit by agent Sandra Epstein against Endeavor Agency brought forth accusations by Epstein and other Endeavor employees against Emanuel. In the court filings, Emanuel is alleged to have allowed a friend to operate a pornographic website out of Endeavor's offices. According to Epstein, Emanuel made racist and anti-gay remarks and prevented her from sending a script about Navy SEALs to actor Wesley Snipes, saying: "That is the dumbest thing I've ever heard. Everyone knows that blacks don't swim." Emanuel disputed these accusations at the time. Emanuel settled Epstein's claims for $2.25 million. (wikipedia)

• • •

Interesting idea, poor execution. If you're going to have a NEWS premise, a weathervane premise, a map premise, then those directions better line up. The concept demands a certain elegance that this jumble of asymmetrical circled squares does not deliver. Visually ugly. But again, the *idea* is good, and it was semi-entertaining to discover the trick, and work out the theme answers ... though once you discover the trick, the theme answers pretty much work themselves out. Took me a while to figure out what those circled squares were doing, but once I found NORTH, the EAST- SOUTH- and WEST-containing answers were instantly obvious, and the puzzle went from normal Thursday-tricky to Tuesday-simple. I did get a good 'aha' out of "SO WHERE DO WE STAND?," by far the most inventive answer in this grid. I had many letters in place but couldn't make any sense of it until the "directions" concept dropped. The revealer did a good job of revealing the premise, which became clear with the "NORTH" in MINOR THIRD, and then I looked over, plugged in "WEST," and (finally!) got "SO WHERE DO WE STAND??," so I had kind of an "oh ... Oh!" reaction. Like a double revelation. As for the other direction-answers, HOLDS OUT HOPE is a nice solution to the "SOUTH" problem, and IKEA STORE ... well, that one sucks (feels kinda redundant), but they can't all be winners (probably). I've seen direction-changing themes A Lot, and this one ... yeah, it's an interesting variation. Aesthetically sloppy, but conceptually solid.

Perhaps because the theme was architecturally demanding, the fill got a little iffy in places. Lots of places. If I could throw one answer into the sea and then retrieve said answer and shoot it into the sun, that answer would be EDUCE (12D: Extract, as from data). I have a grudge against this dumb-ass word (a word I only ever seen in crosswords). It's not that it's not a word, it's that it's so displeasing to the eye and ear. Also, arbitrary Latin plurals bug the hell out of me ("arbitrary" in the sense that yes, that is how you pluralize the word in Latin, but we're not speaking Latin, are we? So stop). I'm looking at you, TOGAE, lol what a dumb-looking word. Really hated "SAY AAH," because the length of "AAH" and the "A"-to-"H" proportions, again, totally arbitrary. I've seen "SAY AH" in puzzles a bunch (24 times!). But now we can also apparently say "AAH" (this is the 3rd time). So far no "SAY AHH," as "AHH" is generally the way you spell the sound of satisfaction or pleasure, not the sound you make at a doctor's exam, although AHH was once clued [Something to say to a doctor], so you never know. What I do know is that "SAY AAH" makes me roll my eyes. Roll out as many "A"s as you want I guess, why stop at two? Other unpleasant moments included OLAFI and CDR and lots of plurals of things that you don't normally think about in the plural. BOS'NS, for instance (34D: Cap'n's subordinates). Have you ever seen more than one at a time? Ever. I think I've only ever seen one ... in The Tempest ... and I'm not even sure I saw him. I just know shouts the word early on. And OKRAS? Never a fan of that plural. We're having fried okra, not OKRAS. And we're drinking Stoli, not STOLIS, come on. From awkward plurals we go to the rarely seen awkward singular: E-SPORT. Your forte is E-SPORT? Which sort of sport, Mort? One where you teleport? From court to court? I think you mean E-SPORTS, plural, which is the name of the category in question. That is the thing. E-SPORT is like ... a single ARREAR (thankfully, this puzzle brought more than one) (IN ARREARS (38D: Financially behind)).

I had a couple major vowel hesitations. Was it PRIME or PRIMO!? (36D: A-one). Gotta check the crosses to find out (it's PRIMO). And as for SUGAR MOMMA ... wow, no (61A: Spouse to a trophy husband, perhaps). It's SUGAR MAMA, right? MOMMA looks so weird. The only time I'd ever use that spelling is when referring to the long-running 20th-century comic strip "MOMMA." Looks like "SUGAR MAMA" googles about 3x better than "SUGAR MOMMA," but my problem today wasn't MOMMA v. MAMA but MOMMA v. MAMMA, which also seemed possible. Isn't that how it's spelled in "MAMMA MIA!"? Yes, yes it is. Did you know that the phrase "SUGAR MOMMY" googles best of all the "SUGAR [slang for mother]" options? It's true. It googles slightly better than "SUGAR MAMA," though that may be because it is (apparently!) the title of a song.

Bullets:

58D: Had the best time, say (WON)— wow I did not understand this for many seconds after I got it. The clue is not referring to "having a good time" as in "enjoying oneself" but rather "having the best time in the race you are competing in."
65D: Very basic cleaner (LYE) — "basic" here refers to pH level. LYE has a pH level around 13 or 14—anything over 7 is "basic"; don't normally love the "successive paired clues" gambit, but I did like how the meaning of "basic" changes from one answer (63D: Basic cleaner: MOP) to the next.
37A: Aunt, in Italian (ZIA) — reflexively wrote in TIA. I figured "Italian, Spanish, both romance languages, how different can they be?" Did not see that "Z" coming. Luckily I have some (vague) idea who ZOROASTER is (37D: Founder of a Persian religion)

See you next time.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Constructor: Colin Adams

Relative difficulty: Easy

THEME: none

Word of the Day: DEIRDRE (41D: Tragic heroine of Irish mythology) —

Deirdre (/ˈdɪərdrə, -dri/ DEER-drə, -⁠dree, Irish: [ˈdʲɛɾˠdʲɾʲə]; Old Irish: Derdriu [ˈdʲerʲðrʲĭŭ]) is a tragic heroine in the Ulster Cycle of Irish mythology. She is also known by the epithet "Deirdre of the Sorrows" (Irish: Deirdre an Bhróin).
Deirdre is a prominent figure in Irish legend. American scholar James MacKillop assessed in 2004 that she was its best-known figure in modern times. (wikipedia) //
In Irish mythology, a tragic heroine (Deirdre of the Sorrows) of whom it was prophesied that her beauty would bring banishment and death to heroes. King Conchubar of Ulster wanted to marry her, but she fell in love with Naoise, son of Usnach, who with his brothers carried her off to Scotland. They were lured back by Conchubar and treacherously slain, and Deirdre took her own life. (Oxford Reference)

• • •

A great puzzle if you are a lover of God and colloquialisms. Pretty average puzzle otherwise. Truly surprised to see "DEAR GOD!" after already having ""OH LORD!" in the grid. I kinda like that one is clued as taking the Lord's name in vain (30D: "Good heavens!" = "OH LORD!") and the other is clued as the [Opening words of a prayer], presumably a prayer to God that He not be mad that you just took his name in vain. Seems like these answers could've provided the perfect occasion for repeat cluing—they both look like [Opening words of a prayer] to me. Certainly some prayers begin "OH LORD...," right? Or is it just "O"? I think I've seen the prayer opening primarily as "O LORD." Is the "O"-alone version for praying and the "OH" version for exclaiming? Yeah, I think "O" alone has vocative power, whereas "OH" is just a surprised sound. Who knew so much was riding on an "H"? Oh (!) look, someone has written about this very question. Anyway, lots of reference to the Big Guy in the SKY today. And colloquialisms—this thing is ostentatiously bedecked in them! Have you ever YOINKED a GRODY FROYO? PROBS, right? This one's really trying to lean into What The Kids Say, and by kids I mean "kids in the '80s" (which is the last time I heard GRODY, probably followed by "to the max!"). YOINKED and esp. PROBS are actually of more recent vintage—I don't remember people saying those things so much in the 20th century. All these expressions give the grid some much-needed life. "Much-needed" because the grid is pretty light on the marquee answers. The NW corner has some juice—I particularly like BRA STRAPS, which seems an odd thing to say on its face, but ... it's a good answer! REFUSENIK and UNREALITY are also worthy answers in my book. The opposite corner ... meh. Acceptable, but flat. And there are no other answers over 7 letters long in the whole dang grid—not the kind of grid architecture that's hospitable to zip, sparkle, or whoosh.

The lack of grid sparkle was made up for, somewhat, by some occasionally brilliant cluing. [Marked Twain?] really threw me off, which it shouldn't have—that "T" is capitalized, after all, which screams "the author's name!"—but I took "Twain" as "a pair" and went looking for, I don't know, twins who had been famously scarred or branded or something. But no, you're "marking" your place in the cheap paperback copy of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by dog-earing the page (I made it a cheap paperback copy because otherwise why, why would you dog-ear?—grab a bookmark, a receipt, a strand of your hair, anything). If you've DOG-EARED the book, then you've "marked""Twain." Nice. I also enjoyed the "?" clue on DRYER (51D: Alternative to hanging out?). A laundry clue that looks like a socializing clue (or a wardrobe malfunction clue). I also liked the way VEEP was clued today (46A: Lead-in to stakes)—felt (relatively) timely, given what a VANCE/WALZ month it's been. Better for WALZ than VANCE, I'd say. Pretty sure that's objectively true by every metric. Speaking of WALZ, we should be seeing that name in crosswords in 3, 2, 1 ... well, soon, anyway.

Had a buncha mistakes today, but none of them very devastating. SUN before SKY, GROSS before GRODY, DISC before DISK (honestly not sure what the difference is), and then my two favorites: COAT before COAL (37A: Traditional Scottish New Year's gift, representing warmth for the year to come), and PENSION before PIT STOP (8D: Occasion for retirement?). Only thing I was truly unfamiliar with today (besides traditional Scottish gift-giving practices) was DIERDRE; luckily the name was easy to piece together. Oh, I forgot that LEIA ever wore an "iconic gold bikini" (28D: Film character with an iconic gold bikini). That should've meant something to me as a Star Wars-loving teen (which is what I was when Return of the Jedi came out), but I think I thought it was corny, and it just didn't leave much of an impression. Also, it seemed gross (if not grody), since the only time she wore it (iirc) was when she was Jabba's slave? But the clue didn't say "meaningful to me," just "iconic," which seems true enough. My mind went to Goldfinger (someone wears a bikini in that, surely), and then to this musical bit of cinematic history ...

Notes:

24A: Mittens might fiddle with one (CAT TOY)— I guess some people name their cats "Mittens," but honestly this clue looks like you typo'd "Kittens"

["We're not interested in your toys, buddy. Keep walkin'..."]

26A: Animal found on either end of a scale (DOE) — as in "a deer, a female deer." I don't love this clue, but I don't hate it either. It's not boring, at least.
45A: Psyche's lover, in Greek myth (EROS)— I know the couple as "Cupid & Psyche" but that may be due primarily to the Scritti Politti album (Cupid & Psyche 85). Cupid = Amor (L.) = EROS (Gr.), so the clue is not wrong.

1D: Historic figure grouped with Judas in Dante's "Inferno" (BRUTUS) — if I have a "wheelhouse," this is it. The ninth ring of hell is it. Satan chewing eternally on Cassius, BRUTUS, and Judas at the very pit of hell, in the middle of the ice lake Cocytus ... is it. Now *that* is "iconic" (to me)

[Gustave Doré, ca. 1860s]

See you next time.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Constructor: Sam Ezersky

Relative difficulty: Medium-Challenging

THEME: none

Word of the Day: WARREN G (44A: Rapper who shares his name with the 29th president) —

Warren Griffin III (born November 10, 1970) is an American rapper, record producer, and DJ who helped popularize West Coast hip hop during the 1990s.^[2] A pioneer of G-funk, he attained mainstream success with his 1994 single "Regulate" (featuring Nate Dogg). He is credited with discovering Snoop Dogg, having introduced the then-unknown rapper to record producer Dr. Dre.
His debut studio album, Regulate... G Funk Era (1994), debuted at number two on the US Billboard 200, selling 176,000 in its first week. The album has since received triple platinum certification by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), signifying sales of three million copies. "Regulate" spent 18 weeks within the top 40 of the BillboardHot 100, with three weeks at number two, while its follow-up, "This D.J.", peaked at number nine. At the 37th Annual Grammy Awards, both songs received nominations for Best Rap Performance and Best Rap Solo Performance, respectively. (wikipedia)

• • •

If nothing else, this puzzle was suitably challenging, for once. There were at least two times (NE, SW) where I experienced significant stoppage, significant "WTF!?"-age. And there were enough tiny traps along the way (INES v INEZ, ADD-ONS v ADD-INS, etc.), that solving became a truly interesting and engaging endeavor. Hurray for stopping the slow dumbing down of the crossword puzzle (which I assume the NYT will eventually phase out as the fan base dies and the rest of their subscriber population becomes addicted to their other little, shorter, far less demanding games with names like "Blorp" or "Chunk" or "Spelling Bee"). But today, I got an old-fashioned Saturday workout, though not with old-fashioned fill. Well ... scratch that. There was definitely some old-fashioned fill gunking up the grid here and there. I mean, Aunt ELLER dancing GALOPS (46D: Dances in duple time), yee-haw, my eyes definitely widened and then squinted suspiciously at that cross, just as they had when I reluctantly filled in ENSILE (which I was not entirely sure wasn't ENSILO—if you wrote ENSILO, my condolences, hope you enjoyed your OCHO DOT ... eight dots, that's good value!). NIHIL(O) pleasure in ENSILE. In addition to harboring some occasionally ugly answers, the puzzle was not exactly filled with my favorite things (venture capital and vaping, right out of the box?! LOL, it's like there was a bouncer at the door telling me "this puzzle ain't for you, bub."). And yet even though I might not groove on it, the fill in this puzzle definitely has a lot of energy and originality. It doesn't just lie there, like yesterday's grid (mostly) did. VAPE JUICE and VC MONEY! (1A: Liquid found in some pens / 1D: Some start-up funding, in brief). They don't make me happy as *things*, but they are original, and (more importantly) they took *work* and *thought* to piece together. And the cluing, yikes, what a minefield, but a ... good minefield? Basically what I'm saying is that there was an enjoyable unpleasantness to this puzzle that made it consistently engaging and interesting. It's the same enjoyable unpleasantness I experience when I drink a cocktail with Suze in it. Have you ever had Suze? "Jeezus this tastes like bitter grass and dirt and vinegar, like cough medicine for rabbits ... wait, no, don't take it away, I wasn't complaining!"

OK, let's hit the trouble spots. Lucked out on my first pass at the NW, where I did my usual "work the short crosses first" thing and all three short crosses came up correct!

EMU JAG UGG! Right off the bat, bang, we've got traction! I had no idea there were four specific, named (!) shapes of MCNUGGETS. I thought they were just random blobs, but then I haven't eaten them since high school, so I'm certainly no Nugficionado. No Nuggeteer, I. All I know is "-UGG-" gave me MCNUGGETS and I was on my way. That corner was tough, but gettable, with the S/Z question at 7D: Name that's another form of Agnes (INEZ) being the only real potential puzzle-killer. I wouldn't even know INES was a name if crosswords hadn't taught it to me, whereas INEZ was my grandmother's name. I wrote in INES but STI-wasn't giving me any ideas at 19A: 10-point play and then I realized "oh, we're doing the Scrabble thing again." Yet another way this puzzle is interested in things I'm not interested in. But I do know that a Z-TILE is worth ten points, so ... there we go. Seems like there's a non-zero chance that at least one solver out there ended up wondering how the hell STILE was a [10-point play]. If that person is you, I see you, and I understand.

So there were minor struggles, but the first Major struggle came in the SW, which I was sure I was going to sail through. I'd already thrown down LOUNGEWEAR (great answer) and WARREN G (I was like "WARREN G!? Jesus H! The pop culture / rapper haters are gonna be mad today!"), and I had the "WHAT?" part of what really seemed like it was going to be some version of "SAY WHAT?," so I was feeling pretty good. But then "SAY WHAT?" wouldn't fit. And "O, SAY WHAT?" felt preposterous. "O SAY can you see...," sure, but "O, SAY WHAT?," that felt wrong. The "O" was rock solid, but those other letters, yikes.

What kind of bar serves hot shots? I racked my brains for bar types. TAPAS bar? TAPA bar? Is IS BIG wrong (it's certainly ugly, but I couldn't get IS BIG to be anything else, so it had to stay). Of course I was reading the opening of [Risky bond designation] as one sound, a "BR-" sound, like in "bread," and not a letter ("B") and then another word (RATING), which is what it was. And then JET for [Spurt] ... I guess I just avoid thinking about spurting and its related word cloud as much as possible. Honestly, I wanted JAG, but already had JAG up top. I think I eventually stumbled on "OKAY" as a thing that could fit at the opening of 48A: "Uh ... did I hear that right?!"and that made me see the SAKE BAR (38D: Establishment serving hot shots), and boom, done. But before the "boom," ugh, stuckness. Probably didn't last too long, but dead stops are so rare that it felt like an eternity.

Worse, though, was the NE, where ... looks like I managed to get Z-TILE and KOOL-AID, but that's as far as I could press into that section at first. Momentum just died. Couldn't see ALASKANS because wow, that clue (26A: They're on their own time). I think I just didn't know Alaska had its own time zone (is that right?). Even with the first "A" and "K" in place, nothing. And ECHO DOT, forget it (30A: Smallish smart device from Amazon). I don't know what these stupid devices are all called. Too many, can't keep track, don't want any gadgets in my house spying on me for Big Algorithm (any more than there already are—god save me from "smart" devices). And that brings me to the other longer answer that could've given me access to that corner, but didn't. And it's the worst answer in the grid. By far. I mean, the worst. And that answer is FRESH SALAD. I *had* the SALAD part, so how hard could the answer be!? Answer: extremely. Because who would guess that the answer would be something as inane and generic and not-a-thing as FRESH SALAD. What is that? What are these unfresh salads that people (implicitly) consume? I was like "PASTA SALAD? GREEN SALAD? ... CHEF'S SALAD? BERRY SALAD!?" The answer may as well have been TASTY SALAD for all that FRESH SALAD makes any standalone sense. I don't think I've ever resented a crossword answer this much. All that work, all that added difficulty, so that I could get ... FRESH?! And the clue. That "Leaves" trick is old as the hills, that wasn't a problem. The problem was "just in time for dinner" did nnootthhiinngg to indicate the idiocy that is FRESH. But I managed to conquer that corner by the grace of a very real and non-idiotic green food—that's right, by the grace of AVOCADO, hallowed be its name (11D: The Mexican state of Michoacán produces 5.5+ billion pounds of this annually). Really got me out of a jam there. Is there anything AVOCADO can't do? Truly a miracle ... fruit? (It's a fruit, right?)

Bullets:

10A: [I can't hear you!] ("LA LA...")— you have to imagine someone plugging their ears and saying may more "LA"s for this clue to fully make sense, but it's still kind of clever
53D: Teacher's handwritten note by an awkward sentence (REDO) — I've never (hand)written this "note" in my life, and I've graded a lot of papers. The industry standard in this situation is not REDO, but AWK. You should probably be more specific, but sometimes, you just throw your hands up and write AWK.
57A: Line outside a box office ("ONE, PLEASE") — I had the "PLEASE" but held back on writing in the number because I held out some hope that the moviegoer had a date. But sadly, no. Or happily no (I *love* to go to the movies alone, though mostly I go with my wife, which I also love—we saw Between the Temples yesterday (darker—and infinitely socially awkwarder—than I thought it was gonna be, but still delightful, and genuinely funny), and we're seeing Blink Twice today)

35D: One party to 2020's Abraham Accords: Abbr. (UAE) — I had the "U" and wrote in USA. I don't know what these Accords are. I'm guessing the "Abraham" was supposed to indicate to me that Israel was involved. Yes? [looks it up]. Yes. They involve Arab-Israeli diplomatic relations.
27D: Drink once sold as Fruit Smack (KOOL-AID) — I had the "-L-ID" part and while the answer should've been obvious, I initially went looking for some kind of FLUID. I love that the original name of KOOL-AID had the slang term for heroin right in the name. "Yeah, your kids are gonna love it, Really love it, and yeah, it's horrible for them, but they're still gonna want it, a lot, like ... a lot, so ... well, good luck with that."

See you next time.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Constructor: Chandi Deitmer and Matthew Stock

Relative difficulty: Easy

THEME:"Product Integration"— shaded squares (three sets of 2x2 squares) contain numbers. Adjacent numbers must be multiplied in order for their answers to make sense. Each set of shaded boxes makes a kind of TIMES (get it!?) SQUARE (131A: Midtown Manhattan hot spot ... or each of this puzzle's three shaded regions):

Theme answers:

PAC 3x4 (i.e. PAC-12) (37A: West Coast N.C.A.A. conference that lost 10 teams in 2024)
SWEET 4x4 (i.e. Sweet 16) (3D: Coming-of-age celebration)
7x4 DAYS (i.e. 28 days) (44A: Typical length of February)
3x7 GUN SALUTE (i.e. 21-gun salute) (38D: Military honor with fired artillery)

CLOUD 3x3 (i.e. Cloud 9) (76A: Location of elation, in an idiom)
FRESHMAN 5x3 (i.e. Freshman 15) (22D: Weight gained at the start of college, informally)
5x8 WINKS (i.e. 40 winks) (71A: Short nap)
8x3-HOUR GYMS (i.e. 24-hour gyms) (72D: Always-open workout spots)

HANG 5x2 (i.e. hang 10) (99A: Surfing move with all of one's toes off the board)
FANTASTIC 2x2 (i.e. Fantastic 4) (50D: Squad with the Invisible Woman and the Thing)
4x2-BIT (i.e. 8-bit) (106A: Like old Nintendo consoles)
5x4 PENCE (i.e. 20 pence) (100D: One-fifth of a British pound)

Word of the Day: KVASS (69A: Fermented Russian drink) —

Kvass is a fermented cereal-based low-alcoholic beverage of cloudy appearance and sweet-sour taste.
Kvass originates from northeastern Europe, where grain production was considered insufficient for beer to become a daily drink. The first written mention of kvass is found in Primary Chronicle, describing the celebration of Vladimir the Great's baptism in 988. In the traditional method, kvass is made from a mash obtained from rye bread or rye flour and malt soaked in hot water, fermented for about 12 hours with the help of sugar and bread yeast or baker's yeast at room temperature. In industrial methods, kvass is produced from wort concentrate combined with various grain mixtures. It is a popular drink in Poland, Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Moldova, as well as some parts of Finland, Sweden, and China. (wikipedia)

• • •

This probably seemed like an interesting concept on paper, but in practice, it's over before it begins. It's a one-note theme stretched over a Sunday-sized grid. Once you grasp the theme (not hard), the themers are all instantly gettable. You gotta spend a few seconds figuring out what numbers are going to be used to arrive at the product, but basically you can do all the themers with no help from crosses. I know because that's what I did:

And that's it. Once you know numbers are involved, it's over. Except for the revealer, which is clever, but if I hadn't had to finish this puzzle (because it's my job), I don't think I would have. Once the theme stuff is all done, there's not much left. An ordinary Sunday-sized grid. Ho-hum. If the theme had put up any kind of fight, then I might have noticed the quality and texture and flavor of those theme answers, many of which would've made fine answers in a regular crossword. FRESHMAN FIFTEEN (15!), for instance, would be perfect as a grid-spanning answer in a regular Friday or Saturday puzzle. But today, it was just one of the number answers, interesting only because it's involved in a "TIMES SQUARE." There's no trick, no gimmick, no wordplay. Just children's math. What's more, some of the theme answers seem pretty weak or contrived. 28 DAYS? 20 PENCE!?!?! An arbitrary amount of money? That seems flimsy. I'm sure it was tough getting all these number-containing answers to work out (symmetrically!). The grid is architecturally impressive. Congrats on that. But from a solver standpoint, this felt underwhelming. You don't have to be a solving genius to have this all figured out almost immediately. And then you're just sweeping up—not a lot of fun in that.

What remains, after the theme stuff, is a halfway decent themeless puzzle. In a way, the whole puzzle is themeless, in that there's nothing but the multiplication gimmick giving any unity to the themers. I didn't see much of note in the non-thematic parts of the grid—nothing that seemed particularly original or interesting or challenging or infuriating. I enjoyed seeing MARIE CLAIRE (19A: Magazine with "Maison" and "Enfants" spinoffs) and "IS IT TRUE?" and FAKE NAILS, but then you've got wobbly things like STAR PITCHERS (really wanted to add "-ting" to STAR) (125A: Aces), and boring things like FINANCIAL AID and awkward things like DELEGATEE, plus your usual host of ASDOIs and APSOs and RSSs and UGGs (again!) and SOOTY (again!?) (actually SOOTY > yesterday's SOOTS, for sure). YENNED is kind of awful, since of course you want YEARNED (a word people actually use) there (68D: Longed (for)). But I can't say any other answer in this puzzle made much of an impression, good or bad. I did not know SAMBAR (12A: Lentil-based stew from 42-Down [INDIA]) and am only vaguely familiar with lip STAIN as a beauty product (60A: Long-lasting lip makeup), but that's about it in the "new-to-me" category. Oh, and VIC (5D: Jazz Trombonist Dickenson). I'd never heard of VIC Dickenson, but I'm really glad to make his acquaintance—his music sounds great.

Went to see Blink Twice yesterday (fascinating, funny, and deeply disturbing—the only movie I've ever seen with a trigger warning (re: sexual violence)). Every time I go to the movies, I take a little notebook with me and write down all the basic data: date, showtime, theater, theater no., concessions I ate (usu popcorn/butter/salt and that's it), how many other people are there, what they look like, anything memorable they do/say, and finally, the trailers. What trailers did I see? I'm telling you all this because yesterday I saw a trailer for a new Christmas movie featuring some very beloved actors. The movie is called Red One, and it stars Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson and ubiquitous, Oscar-winning character actor J.K. SIMMONS in the title role: you see, Red One is code name for ... Santa Claus. And he's been kidnapped. By ... well, bad guys, I assume, and his security team (led by Johnson) has to rescue him. It's a tongue-in-cheek action film that has a lot of fancy computer animation and looks expensive as hell [just looked it up, and yep: the budget is a 1/4 billion]. Annnnyway, I solved this puzzle only a few hours after I saw the Red One trailer, so J.K. SIMMONS was fresh on my mind. I always forget the initials of two-initial people (see, notably, N.C. Wyeth), but I had the "JK" before I ever even looked at the clue today. Worried (briefly) that it was gonna be another, much worse "JK," but it wasn't. You wanna see the Red One trailer, don't you? OK, fine.

A few more things:

43A: Newark alternative, in brief (LGA) — LaGuardia Airport, of course. This would've been way more exciting—and tougher, for sure—if the clue had just been [EWR alternative]. Concise. No need for writing out "Newark" and adding "in brief." Airport code for airport code. Let's tighten things up a bit. Come on. My way's more elegant, and solvers can handle it.
93A: Source of a sleep-inducing narcotic in the "Odyssey" (LOTUS TREE) — currently teaching Virgil's Aeneid, so the Odyssey (the most important antecedent and model for Virgil) is fresh on my mind. If you wanna know what I'm teaching next, and I know you do: it's DANTE (56A: Writer whose work is hell to get through?)
18D: Surfer's hand sign (SHAKA)— this puzzle is weirdly into surfing (see also HANG 5x2). I know SHAKA exclusively from crosswords. I'm more of a Chaka guy, myself:

[this needle drop in Blink Twice is, let's say, memorable]

41D: Hilton ___, Pulitzer-winning critic for The New Yorker (ALS) — a great writer who should be the preferred clue for ALS. So much better than [Gore and Pacino, for two] or the like. He wrote a book on Prince! The New Yorker recently did an Archive Issue where it printed exclusively articles and reviews and cartoons from previous years, and there's a 1999 piece in there by ALS about Richard Pryor (and Lily Tomlin) that is mesmerizing. Very much worth your time (as all of his writing is, I assume)
62D: Wake-up times, for short (AMS) — leaving aside that it's not a great plural, one tiny thing. Like, very tiny. Nitpicky, even, but it would've bugged me if this had been my puzzle: I wouldn't put "times" in the clue since it is (crucially) in the grid—not just in the grid, but in the revealer, i.e. the most important part of the grid. I know, I know, no one noticed, no one card. But when I edited a puzzle recently, a certain test-solver (who is also an accomplished constructor) caught a similar dupe. Her (very nice) note: "truly doesn't bother me at all, especially bc contexts are so different, just noting in case!" But even though she said it didn't bother her, and I kept telling myself it didn't bother me, I definitely got up in the middle of the night one night and fixed it. Once I see the dupe, I can't unsee it, it's gotta go. The point is: test-solvers are vital to the health of puzzles. So thank you to ... whoever that test-solver was (wink!).
92D: Lynne Cheney portrayer in 2018's "Vice" (AMY ADAMS) — I like this energy. Go deep into that filmography! Make me work for these famous people. My reaction to uncovering AMY ADAMS here was "Wow, really?" Almost makes me want to watch a movie about the Cheneys.
109D: Starchy side, familiarly (TOTS) — as in "tater" (small children: not that starchy, it turns out)
127D: Suffix with doomer or consumer (-ISM) — kinda tough. Not sure I've heard "doomerism," though I can guess what it means. I wanted -IST here for a bit (completely unsurprising).
108D: Exclamation after misunderstanding some Gen Z slang, say ("I'M OLD") — first, I think this would be more "Weary admission" than "Exclamation." Second, I really (really) thought that the answer was going to be a reaction to some specific bit of Gen Z slang. That is, I thought I had to figure out what the slang was, and then figure out what you'd exclaim if you misunderstood it. That is, I thought the exclamation was something you made before you realized you'd misunderstood. Like if someone said "no cap!" and you exclaimed "but my head is cold!" Something like that.

See you next time.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Constructor: Sala Wanetick and Emily Biegas

Relative difficulty: Easy (solved Downs-only)

THEME: HOP SKIP AND A JUMP (65A: Short distance to travel, with a hint to 17-, 27- and 49-Across) — things that hop, skip, and jump, respectively:

Theme answers:

PETER COTTONTAIL (he hops) (17A: Song character who comes "down the bunny trail")
BROKEN RECORD (it skips) (27A: Someone who says the same thing again and again, metaphorically)
FIGURE SKATER (she jumps) (49A: One having an ice time at the Olympics?)

Word of the Day: AISHA Hinds (14A: Actress Hinds of "9-1-1") —

Aisha Hinds is an American television, stage and film actress. She had supporting roles in a number of television series, including The Shield, Invasion, True Blood, Detroit 1-8-7 and Under the Dome. In 2016, she played Fannie Lou Hamer in biographical drama film All the Way. She has also appeared in Assault on Precinct 13 (2005) and was cast as Harriet Tubman in WGN America period drama Underground. Beginning in 2018, Hinds stars in the Fox procedural drama series 9-1-1. (wikipedia) // 9-1-1 is an American procedural drama television series created by Ryan Murphy, Brad Falchuk, and Tim Minear. The series had aired on Fox and currently airs on ABC. The series follows the lives of Los Angeles first responders: police officers, paramedics, firefighters, and dispatchers. // The series currently stars Angela Bassett, Peter Krause, Oliver Stark, Jennifer Love Hewitt, Ryan Guzman, Aisha Hinds, Kenneth Choi and Gavin McHugh. The series premiered on January 3, 2018. 9-1-1 is a joint production between Reamworks, Brad Falchuk Teley-Vision and Ryan Murphy Television in association with 20th Television. In May 2023, the series was canceled by Fox and was renewed for a seventh season at ABC. The seventh season premiered on March 14, 2024. In April 2024, ABC renewed the series for an eighth season which was set to premiere on September 26, 2024. (wikipedia)

• • •

Yeah, OK. This seems like a fine Monday theme. HOP SKIP AND A JUMP is a common colloquial phrase, and those theme answers hop, skip, and jump, for sure. Nothing stunning here, but it all seems perfectly solid and acceptable. I have only two quibbles with the execution of the theme. First, the phrase really really wants to be *A* HOP SKIP AND A JUMP. You'd never use the phrase without that initial "A," and it seems obvious / likely / probable that the "A" would be here if it weren't for symmetry considerations, i.e. PETER COTTONTAIL is 15 so HOP SKIP AND A JUMP has to be 15 (also, 15 is the conventional width for a daily crossword puzzle). I feel that missing "A" a little, is what I'm saying. Also, I really Really feel the missing "hopping" in the clue for PETER COTTONTAIL. [Song character who comes "down the bunny trail"]!?!?!? He (famously) "comes ... *hopping* down the bunny trail." So weird to pretend that he's just ... coming down the trail in some kind of non-hop fashion. I mean, I get why "hopping" is not in the clue (HOP is a part of the revealer), but still ... there have to be better ways to clue PETER COTTONTAIL, ones that don't involve awkward / botched / partial quotations. So that theme clue as well as the revealer felt like they clanked a bit. But just a bit. As I say, on the whole, this is fine.

Very happy I solved Downs-only today because I missed the two marginal pop culture clues entirely. I can't imagine watching network TV anymore. I have no idea what is on there. It all seems the same. Three hundred and eighty-six shows about cops or firemen or paramedics or medical investigators or lawyers or I don't know what. I do not get it. So if you'd asked me to name *anyone* in the cast of 9-1-1, I'd've asked "Do you mean Reno 9-1-1? That was a pretty funny show. I know the faces, but I'm not sure about the names. Let's see, there's that lady who went on to be in The Goldb-" And after you'd patiently explained to me that no, you didn't mean Reno 9-1-1, you meant plain old 9-1-1, I'd've stared at you blankly, wondering "...that's a thing? They couldn't think of a better title than that?" So, yeah, never heard of AISHA Hinds or that TV show. I don't feel bad about not knowing the TV show, but Hinds has done a lot of other stuff, so I feel slightly bad about not even recognizing her name. But solving Downs-only, all I have to know is that AISHAis a name, a name I know exists, and since the Downs all work ... we're good! I've at least heard of Vanderpump Rules, but again, hard LOL that I'd know the names of anyone on it. TOM Sandoval, you say? OK. Neither of these TV clues seem like easy Monday fare. I would say the same about LEONA Lewis if she weren't virtual crosswordese by now (her crossword presence is hardly proportionate to her actual fame) (47A: "Bleeding Love" singer Lewis). But again, solving Downs-only, I just sailed right by all that name nonsense. Ignorantly, blissfully.

No real problems with the Downs-only solve today. Kinda wanted IN RE at 3D: Regarding (AS TO), but "RE" is related to "Regarding," so I shouldn't even have entertained that idea. Then there was THE LIKE, which I really ... uh, like. It's a strange standalone phrase. I mean, it looks weird on its own, and not at the end of sentence, following "and." Plus it's got a strangely phrased clue: 4D: Others similar. My brain had to take a few seconds to process that one, grammatically. After I got THE, I wanted THE SAME, but no, THE LIKE is better, THE LIKE is good, I like THE LIKE. I still somehow haven't added INUK to my database of things I know, so that was probably the hardest answer in the grid for me ... OK, I looked it up, and I now feel less bad about struggling to recall it. This is only the second appearance ever of INUK, the first being some time last year. An INUK is a "member of the Inuit people." INUIT, I've seen a gajillion times. INUK ... still getting used to that one. Just one other misstep today: LEDGE before ROOST for the [Pigeon's perch].

Short fill is a little shaky today, but the longer (non-thematic) stuff is pretty nice. Do ORGANISTs GO ON TOUR. Seems like it would not be an EASY JOB (48D: Gravy train gig), lugging your cathedral-sized organ from gig to gig. I like GO ON TOUR because it looks like GOON TOUR. I guess if a guy OFFS people for the mob, and he has to do a lot of ... offing ... around the country, maybe you could call that a GOON TOUR. That's enough fanciful reading of the grid. Need coffee. Happy Labor Day. See you tomorrow.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Constructor: Alex Eaton-Salners

Relative difficulty: Way Too Easy, even for a Tuesday

THEME: TWO-PARTY SYSTEMS (38A: Political configurations suggested by the answers (and their circled letters) at 17-, 24-, 50- and 61-Across?) — theme answers are one kind of "party" and the word spelled out by their circled squares is another kind of "party":

Theme answers:

TUPPERWARE (17A: Brand of kitchen storage containers)
SOCIALIST (24A: The second "S" of U.S.S.R.)
HALLOWEEN (50A: When the skeletons in one's closet might be brought out)
FEDERALIST (61A: Alexander Hamilton, politically)

Word of the Day: CHOU (13A: Clown role in Chinese opera) —

Peking opera, or Beijing opera (Chinese: 京劇; pinyin: Jīngjù), is the most dominant form of Chinese opera, which combines instrumental music, vocal performance, mime, martial arts, dance and acrobatics. It arose in Beijing in the mid-Qing dynasty (1644–1912) and became fully developed and recognized by the mid-19th century.^[1] The form was extremely popular in the Qing court and has come to be regarded as one of the cultural treasures of China. Major performance troupes are based in Beijing, Tianjin and Shanghai. [...]
The Chou (丑) is a male clown role. The Chou usually plays secondary roles in a troupe. Indeed, most studies of Beijing opera classify the Chou as a minor role. The name of the role is a homophone of the Mandarin Chinese word chou, meaning "ugly". This reflects the traditional belief that the clown's combination of ugliness and laughter could drive away evil spirits. Chou roles can be divided into Wen Chou, civilian roles such as merchants and jailers, and Wu Chou, minor military roles. The Wu Chou combines comic acting and acrobatics. Chou characters are generally amusing and likable, if a bit foolish. Their costumes range from simple for characters of lower status to elaborate, perhaps overly so, for high-status characters. Chou characters wear special face paint, called xiaohualian, that differs from that of Jing characters. The defining characteristic of this type of face paint is a small patch of white chalk around the nose. This can represent either a mean and secretive nature or a quick wit.
Beneath the whimsical persona of the Chou, a serious connection to the form of Beijing opera exists. The Chou is the character most connected to the guban, the drums and clapper commonly used for musical accompaniment during performances. The Chou actor often uses the guban in solo performance, especially when performing Shu Ban, light-hearted verses spoken for comedic effect. The clown is also connected to the small gong and cymbals, percussion instruments that symbolize the lower classes and the raucous atmosphere inspired by the role. Although Chou characters do not sing frequently, their arias feature large amounts of improvisation. This is considered a license of the role, and the orchestra will accompany the Chou actor even as he bursts into an unscripted folk song. However, due to the standardization of Beijing opera and political pressure from government authorities, Chou improvisation has lessened in recent years. The Chou has a vocal timbre that is distinct from other characters, as the character will often speak in the common Beijing dialect, as opposed to the more formal dialects of other characters. (wikipedia)

• • •

This is a very clever theme, but unfortunately it's sitting in one of the easiest and (worse) dullest grids I've ever seen. I checked out early on this one. Whenever a puzzle throws garbage at me repeatedly, before I've even gotten out of the NW, I resent it. Here's the point at which I started resenting today's puzzle:

TUPLE? Why in the world is this awful suffix in a Tuesday puzzle with an undemanding theme structure? After I'd already had to endure CHOU ... and before I even hit the tidal wave of stale stuff that was to follow. Every old crossword name in the book, it felt like. I hit ELIA and PEI just a few seconds later and then ABEL ETTA SERTA TSAR ELI ABBA EDAM TERI ESPY ARLO. And that's just the names. The rest of the fill (outside the long Downs, which are fine) is just as exhausting in its overfamiliarity: VIDI TCELL TMI MELEE MIL AMIE DALAI ESIGN YER. Too many 3-4-5s, all of them clued far too plainly and easily. The only reason I don't flat-out hate this puzzle is that a. as I said, the theme is actually clever, and b. it was all over very fast. In general, I think being *this* easy is bad for any puzzle (esp. a non-Monday puzzle), but today I was grateful to get out of there quickly.

There was one (slightly) challenging thing about the puzzle, for me, and that was: figuring out the theme concept. Now that I look at it, it seems transparent. But it took me a few seconds to see it. But then I'm slightly ILL (a cold, I think / hope), so my processing capabilities may be slightly diminished. But I needed hardly any processing capabilities to actually solve this thing. Every answer went in immediately, with only a few exceptions: CHOU, EVENS (don't really know the rules of roulette) and HAVES (just hard to pick up from the initial letters ... was really wondering how a HAVEN could be understood as a [Privileged group]). I don't see where anyone could've had any difficulty with this one. Well, hmmm ... I take it back. It's possibly slightly harder for people who didn't spend their formative solving years knee-deep in crosswordese. All the short answers, all the names I mentioned in the above lists of gunk, those are all reflex answers at this point. Filler. Repeaters from way back. The answers you swat away like gnats. There are always a few gnats to swat away, but today: a swarm. Hard to properly see, let alone appreciate, the pretty theme through the swarm.

No complaints about the theme, though. Probably wouldn't have used "politically" in the FEDERALISM clue when "Political" is the first word of the revealer clue. Obviously "parties" are gonna run "political" at times, but you can vary your clue language. I don't really know HEN Party. At all. I thought it was a group of women gossiping, but The Internet tells me it's just another name for a bachelorette party, although it looks like it's been extended to mean "any all-woman party." Seems like it's also more British than American. I can't imagine wanting to call yourself a hen. "Stag," I get. Majestic creatures, stags. But "hen"? "Majestic" is not the word I'd use.

Bullets:

39D: Baseball franchise with a bell in its logo (PHILLIES) — that Taco Bell sponsorship has really gone too far*
47A: Force of nature? (GRAVITY) — nice play on words. Less nice was the phrasing on the HALLOWEEN clue ([When the skeletons in one's closet might be brought out]). It's the "be brought" that feels unnatural. Why not just use "come out" and maybe put a "?" on the end of the clue if you think it's not literal enough. If you're playing on the idea of metaphorical skeletons in one's closet (which this clue certainly is), then it seems more likely that you'd refer to their coming out (usually against your will, since you've been hiding them) than their being "brought out." Basically, "brought out" ruins any misdirection possibility here by making it obvious that you're talking about literal things in a literal closet.
32D: Student-run class? (GYM)— in that students ... run ... in GYM class. Or they used to. Sometimes.
62D: Name found in "Yale library," appropriately (ELI) — look, if you're new, or newish, to solving, then you may as well prepare yourself for an onslaught of Yale shit. The puzzle cannot lay off. Half the constructors went there, I think. The reason "appropriately" is in this clue is that a Yalie (a word you'll see in crosswords eventually) is sometimes known as an ELI (a word you are currently seeing in crosswords), based on the first name of the college's namesake: ELIHU (which you've seen in crosswords twice this year already). ELIHU Yale was a Welsh merchant who gave a considerable amount of money to the school, so they named the school after him, and, well, that's the root of all this Yale madness. Speaking of "root," there's also an ELIHU Root (no relation, and no connection to Yale that I know of).

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

*yes yes the clue actually refers to the Liberty Bell, smart guy, we know

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Constructor: Kareem Ayas

Relative difficulty: Medium, 12:45 (I clocked the rebus very quickly, but some vocab slowed me down)

THEME: SEMICIRCLES [First- and third-quarter moons, e.g. … or a hint to this puzzle's theme]— The letters SEMI appear in three circles scattered throughout the grid

Theme answers:

[It will change the way you see yourself] for FUNHOUSE MIRROR
[Honorific for a Catholic cardinal] for HIS EMINENCE
[Floral bubble tea flavoring] for ROSE MILK
[Caregiver for a pregnant woman] for NURSE MIDWIFE
[Warhead carriers] for CRUISE MISSILES
[Red-haired toon who is always seeing red] for YOSEMITE SAM

Word of the Day: ELAND (Spiral-horned antelope) —

An adult male is around 1.6 m (5.2 ft) tall at the shoulder and can weigh up to 942 kg (2,077 lb) with a typical range of 500–600 kg (1,100–1,300 lb). Females are around 1.4 m (4.6 ft) tall and weigh 340–445 kg (750–981 lb). It is the second-largest antelope in the world.

• • •

Good morning friends, it's Malaika here for your regularly scheduled Malaika MWednesday. I solved today's puzzle while eating a "brownie cookie" and listening to every single version of Nothing Compares 2 U. Which is your favorite version? Mine is probably The Chicks'. Also, the "brownie cookie" was to die for. Spectacular texture, and the recipe is done in under an hour, cannot recommend enough. (You do need a hand mixer though.)

The first thing I noticed was all the names straight out of the gate! HOFFA, JONAS, ODOM, MARCEL, UZI, and OLAF. I've been conditioned to think of names as intrinsically hard entries, but since watching my friends solve, I've realized names (that they know!) are often where they are able to start off. When I'm constructing a puzzle, deciding which names to put in is a way for me to decide who I want the puzzle to be easy for. I knew every single one of these immediately (I was only 90% sure about ODOM, but I put it in and was correct), which made for a very fast start. But if you didn't.... sheesh that top left corner must have been impossible!

During my first pass through this puzzle, I didn't get a single one of the theme answers. I suspected the first one would include the word "mirror," but the circles made me wonder if I'd run into a rebus, so I didn't put any letters. Indeed, on my second pass through, I was able to plop in FUNHOUSE MIRROR. This led to me, in a rush of ego and poor spelling, plopping in JASEMINE when I hit the next circle. Luckily I was able to correct it almost immediately.

I loved this rebus execution, with a cute and appropriate revealer. I've heard people indicate that they think a rebus puzzle should have four of them. Obviously, I am incredibly biased because my debut NYT puzzle had only three. But something else to think about (and something I considered while constructing my puzzle!) is the length of the relevant answers. A "standard" themed puzzle has four or five long, thematic answers. Some rebus puzzles, like this one, will have four-ish long answers that are crossed with four-ish short ones. Some, like this one, will have a smattering of short and long ones throughout. This puzzle had six long answers-- that's more than a "standard" themed puzzle!

Loved to see SLIMES as a verb, btw

My biggest note were a couple of the two-word phrases that don't seem to be Real Things. These phrases tend to crop up in constructors' word lists (the tool from which we pull fill for our crosswords) simply because they've appeared in puzzles before, not because anyone says or uses them. AIR ACE, LYE SOAP, ALE TAP. If you are a real live human who uses these phrases, please sound off in the comments so I can retract my critique.

Bullets:

[Operate, as a program] for RUN— I interpreted this as a coding reference, but I suppose other programs (like, a foundation or a project) can be operated by someone who runs them as well!
[Work on Broadway, say] for ACT — What is your favorite show you've seen this year? I have zillions on my To Watch List (Oh, Mary!, Stereophonic, The Outsiders), but my favorite so far has been Hell's Kitchen. Bawled my eyes out, then came home and listened to Alicia Keys for a week straight.
[Symbol seen on eight national flags (though, ironically, not the U.S. flag)] for EAGLE — I could only name two of these (Mexico and Albania) off the top of my head. The others are Egypt, Kazakhstan, Moldova, Montenegro, Serbia, Zambia, and Zimbabwe.

Hmm, this appears to be nine. I think the bird on the flag of Zimbabwe is unofficially an eagle?

[London's Royal Academy of ___] for ARTS — This clue made me think of series 16 of Taskmaster, where it's a bit of a running joke that one of the contestants (Susan Wokoma) attended the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts (or RADA). They're different things, though.

xoxo Malaika

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Constructor: Joe Deeney

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium

THEME:"These answers look funny..." — theme answers are familiar verb phrases where the first word (the verb) is taken adjectivally and represented visually (by changes in the shape or complexion of the actual boxes):

Theme answers:

[waved] TO THE CAMERA (the boxes have wavy edges) (16A: Tried getting on a Jumbotron, say)
[curled] UP WITH A BOOK (the boxes have curly edges) (27A: Enjoyed some cozy reading)
[tilted] AT WINDMILLS (the boxes all tilt) (43A: Attacked imaginary enemies, in an idiom)
[lined] ONE'S POCKETS (the boxes are lined, like a notebook) (57A: Made money dishonestly)

Word of the Day: ZEDONK (12D: Equine hybrid with striped legs) —

A zebroid is the offspring of any cross between a zebra and any other equine to create a hybrid. In most cases, the sire is a zebra stallion. The offspring of a donkey sire and zebra dam, called a donkra, and the offspring of a horse sire and a zebra dam, called a hebra, do exist, but are rare and are usually sterile. Zebroids have been bred since the 19th century. Charles Darwin noted several zebra hybrids in his works. // Zebroid is the term generally used for all zebra hybrids. The different hybrids are generally named using a portmanteau of the sire's name and the dam's name. Generally, no distinction is made as to which zebra species is used. Many times, when zebras are crossbred, they develop some form of dwarfism. Breeding of different branches of the equine family, which does not occur in the wild, generally results in sterile offspring. The combination of sire and dam also affects the offspring phenotype. [...] A cross between a zebra and a donkey is known as a zenkey, zonkey (a term also used for donkeys in Tijuana, Mexico, painted as zebras for tourists to pose with them in souvenir photos), zebrass, or zedonk. Donkeys are closely related to zebras and both animals belong to the horse family. These zebra–donkey hybrids are very rare. (my emph.) (wikipedia)

• • •

Good concept, so-so execution. Actually, I'm only really balking at the "WAVED" answer, since the adjectival form is "wavy." Those boxes are wavy. "TILTED" and "LINED" are very natural ways to describe the boxes involved in the lower theme answers today. You could argue that "curly" is a better way to describe the boxes involved in UP WITH A BOOK, but "curled" is more than defensible, so no real problem there. It's just WAVED ... I wouldn't say "the boxes are WAVED," I'd say they're wavy. You can definitely have "waved hair," so there's some adjectival evidence there, but even there, if you google "waved hair" you get asked "did you mean 'wavy hair'?" The relative weakness of "WAVED" isn't a deal-breaker, it just ... stands out. Probably better to focus on how *good* the last two themers are, in terms of nailing the execution, than dwell too much on the wonkiness of the first themer. But I'm a dweller. It's what I do. I dwell. I always look at puzzles the way I would look at my own puzzles—ruthlessly. What's the stuff that would bug *me* if I were making this? But I think the "WAVED" answer is good enough, and the overall set is solid. My ear is definitely missing the "GOOD" in "[curled] UP WITH A BOOK"—really wants it to be "WITH A GOOD BOOK." As you can see, it's what predictive search wants as well:

But as you can also see, predictive search acknowledges the existence of curling up with a (mere) book, so as with the whole "WAVED" thing, the answer feels slightly off, but not catastrophically off. It's a very easy gimmick to work out—I like a little more challenge on Thursdays—but as beginner-friendly Thursdays go, this is a pretty good one. Wait. Wait. Go back to the predictive search results. I'm ... what ... what (the hell) is "curled up with an earl"!? I'm gonna look it up now, and it better not be some gross sex thing. Hang on [...] OK LOL it's not gross, but it *is* a sex thing. Is it weird that I feel an urge, bordering on a need, to read this right now, today, this afternoon?:

The Byronic Book Club! So Many Serifs! I want to join....

I thought the fill really held up today. It was at least trying. It didn't just lay there in a puddle of boring 3-4-5s, and it didn't get super-ugly or forced. That ARCCOS section is not exactly pleasing to the eyes: A TAD, a single ROLO, ADHOC crossing ARCCOS (the ugliest trig function I've ever seen in the grid), and then a YOU where a YA should be (in "SEE YOU!"). Throw in the fact that I only dimly dimly barely remembered what SOYUZ was, and that whole section definitely becomes my least favorite, but luckily it stands out by contrast with the rest of the grid, which is lively and fun. Great long Downs ("WHY AM I HERE?!?," ONE-POT MEAL ... a good one-pot meal is definitely a solid reason for me to be here, or there, or anywhere). Love "DOWN, BOY!" (33A: "Easy there, Fido!"). And while you get some crosswordese here and there (EDSEL, ETON), the important thing is that it's here and there, and not everywhere. Overall, the fill stays smooth and nicely varied. After SOYUZ, the only answers I had trouble with were MALAGA (sounded right, but also sounded like the video game GALAGA, so I was suspicious) (40A: Spanish city on the Costa del Sol) and then ZEDONK, which ... I see that you're having fun here with the whole portmanteau thing, but this is a debut For A Reason. Zebra-donkey hybrids are (per wikipedia) "extremely rare," and of all the names for zebra-donkey hybrids, on wikipedia's list, ZEDONK comes last, after "zenkey,""zonkey," and "zebrass"! I demand that, in the name of zebra-donkey name equality, you add "zebrass" to your database right now, constructors. This instant. ZEDONK is an absurdity that no one would tolerate if it didn't have a kind of "bad science fiction name" charm about it.

Not great to have "money" in the clue for "[lined] ONE'S POCKETS" (57A: Made money dishonestly), when you not only have MONEY in the grid, but have it running directly through "[lined] ONE'S POCKETS" (see OLD MONEY, 35D: Like the Rockefellers, Roosevelts and Rothschilds). No other complaints. I had a couple of screw-ups today, one of them minor and forgettable (I AM TOO for I DO TOO) (11D: "Ditto!"), and the other major and hilarious—I put the secretary of commerce THIRD in the U.S. presidential line of succession (14A). Half my brain: "Gee, that high?" Other half: "What the hell are you doing!?"

Explainers:

9D: Horse-drawn carriage (SHAY) — being a veteran solver means knowing your carriage vocabulary. Your shays, your drays, your surreys and landaus and phaetons and carioles and troikas and broughams, etc.
32A: Aetna alternative (HUMANA)— insurance co. I don't know HUMANA so well, so this one took a few crosses.
41D: National spirit of England (GIN)— so "spirit" in the liquor sense
46D: The long way there? (LIMO) — because LIMOs are ... long. This one also required some crosses.
62A: What Comic Sans is "sans" (SERIF) — Comic Sans is a notorious font. "Sans" means "without" (Fr.). Sans serif is a category of font. A category lacking in ... serifs.
39D: Trumpet (TOUT) — it's a verb, not a horn today.
15A: "To" words (ODE) — because many ODEs have titles that begin "To...,” as in "To a Mouse,""To a Louse," or ... here's a nice one: Keats'"To Autumn":

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,

Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;

Conspiring with him how to load and bless

With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;

To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees,

And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;

To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells

With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,

And still more, later flowers for the bees,

Until they think warm days will never cease,

For summer has o'er-brimm'd their clammy cells.

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?

Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find

Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,

Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;

Or on a half-reap'd furrow sound asleep,

Drows'd with the fume of poppies, while thy hook

Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:

And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep

Steady thy laden head across a brook;

Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,

Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.

Where are the songs of spring? Ay, Where are they?

Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,—

While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,

And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;

Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn

Among the river sallows, borne aloft

Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;

And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;

Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft

The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;

And gathering swallows twitter in the skies. (from poetryfoundation.org)

See you next time.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Constructor: Adrian Johnson

Relative difficulty: Medium

[ignore the little blue eyeballs—I had to "Reveal > Entire Puzzle" because I stupidly cleared my finished grid (so I could print a puzzle for my wife) before taking a screenshot]

THEME: none

Word of the Day: DIANA (63A: Roman goddess of childbirth) —

Diana is a goddess in Roman and Hellenistic religion, primarily considered a patroness of the countryside and nature, hunters, wildlife, childbirth, crossroads, the night, and the Moon. She is equated with the Greek goddess Artemis, and absorbed much of Artemis' mythology early in Roman history, including a birth on the island of Delos to parents Jupiterand Latona, and a twin brother, Apollo, though she had an independent origin in Italy.
Diana is considered a virgin goddess and protector of childbirth. Historically, Diana made up a triad with two other Roman deities: Egeria the water nymph, her servant and assistant midwife; and Virbius, the woodland god.
Diana is revered in modern neopagan religions including Roman neopaganism, Stregheria, and Wicca. In the ancient, medieval, and modern periods, Diana has been considered a triple deity, merged with a goddess of the moon (Luna/Selene) and the underworld (usually Hecate). (wikipedia)

• • •

Not a lot of whoosh on this one, for me, but the grid is loaded with good answers, and it put up a properly Friday fight, so I had a good time. The whooshiest moment probably came here, early on, when I threw this answer across the grid, not certain, but hopeful, that it was right:

The other long central answers came fairly easily as well, so you'd think that would give me the exhilarating zoom-zoom whoosh feeling I'm always looking for on Fridays. But I just didn't navigate from section to section that easily. The puzzle is overall a little too ... quadranted? ... to make for good whoosh. After a slow start, I kept getting bogged down in corners (most notably, the NE and SW), so my experience was one not of flying but of grinding. Plus, it's hard to get a joyful whoosh feeling when you're riding an answer like BIG PHARMA (ugh), or when you throw down MEAT PATTY instead of BEEF PATTY, or when most of the long Acrosses in the NE and SW do *not* come easily at all. The puzzle wasn't Hard hard, but every part that was *not* the center took some working out. So the feeling was one of being stuck in corners, not one of flying around the grid from explosive answer to explosive answer. Still, as I say, the quality of the fill is generally high, and I enjoyed the ride, even if I never got much above the 55mph speed limit.

It's a very first-person grid, with "I""ME" and "MY" answers all colliding near the center of the grid. I like that "THAT WASN'T MY IDEA, / I PROMISE" feels like one complete statement, though I will say there is something *slightly* off about "THAT WASN'T MY IDEA." I think it's the "THAT." If I just google ["wasn't my idea"], all the hits I get are either "IT WASN'T MY IDEA" or just "WASN'T MY IDEA" (both of which feel more colloquially correct). "THAT WASN'T MY IDEA" feels like someone trying to overstuff a wordlist. It's a perfectly comprehensible phrase, but it just doesn't land as perfectly as it ought, to my ear. Not nearly as perfectly as, say, "IT MEANS A LOT TO ME." The only thing that actively bugged me about the puzzle was BIG PHARMA + CITI, particularly that clue on CITI (31D: "___ Never Sleeps" (banking slogan)). It's not that the clue's inaccurate, it's just that it combines with BIG PHARMA to give the puzzle a creepy Blade Runner-esque corporate dystopia vibe. Maybe CITIshould sleep. "CITI Never Sleeps" is a half step from "Big Brother is watching you." Also, about BIG PHARMA—I think "familiarly" is maybe missing the vibe. I'd say "contemptuously" is probably closer to reality. No one is saying "BIG PHARMA" with affection, is what I'm saying. It's either someone (rightly) complaining about profiteering and irresponsible marketing, or someone (wrongly) railing against vaccines. I know the puzzle is never gonna sneer at Big Business the way I think Big Business deserves, but, still, I can't imagine voluntarily putting something like BIG PHARMA in your grid. Is anyone going to be happy to see that?

On the other hand, I was happy to see TEEN VOGUE (59A: Youth-centric magazine spinoff). That publication seems (generally) like a force for good, and it also helped me tremendously in getting through that SW corner, where I had PUCE as PLUM (55D: Shade akin to mauve) and had no idea what kind of RACE or SALE I was dealing with, and where the clue on ONCD was entirely inscrutable (53D: Ready for a drive, perhaps?) (I mean, I get it now, but not then). I also loved seeing "Kia ORA" down here (a phrase you'll hear if you ever fly Air New Zealand, which I have, many times), and, I mean, who doesn't love AREPAs (45D: Relative of a pupusa). I had my first AREPA at Hola AREPA on Nicollet in Minneapolis. I was visiting my best friends, Shaun & Steve, and then my friend Rob Ford, who calls games for the Astros, was also in town (because the Astros were in town), and so we all went to Hola AREPA ... I think it might've even been Rob's birthday (!?). All the stars were weirdly aligned to make the debut of AREPAs in my life a memorable one. And today's constructor lives (or at least went to school) in the Twin Cities, so it's all ... it's all coming together. I really want an AREPA. It's 5:11a.m. ... Patience.

The hardest section of the puzzle for me was the NE, without question. Started with my stupid MEAT PATTY mistake, but switching to BEEF PATTY only helped a little. I had no idea PIN was a chess thing, so I was out there, and of course I couldn't remember the OCH v. ACH distinction (7D: Frankfurter's cry), so I left a square blank there, and I wasn't certain about CATHY v. KATHY, and I got completely fooled by the mashed potato / chicken clue, and wow, yeah, SKA BANDS are not a front-of-the-brain thing for me, so parsing that one = yikes (5A: They often have multiple horns). No idea how to take "horns" in that clue. So that corner verged on Saturday difficulty for me, but everything else was solidly Friday, with the center being more Tuesday or Wednesday.

[multiple horns!]

More Points:

63A: Roman goddess of childbirth (DIANA) — this flummoxed me, as DIANA is so strongly associated with virginity that "childbirth" seemed ... an unlikely bailiwick for her. I mean, she's really into virginity. Demands it of all her followers. She favors and watches over Camilla, the virgin warrior who has a prominent role in the Aeneid. She banished the nymph Callisto from her inner circle when she discovered Callisto was pregnant (by Jupiter, who "seduced" or "raped" her, depending on whom you read). So in my mind, DIANA => virginity, and since virginity does not (except in one famous case) lead to childbirth, I resisted DIANA for as long as I could.
32A: Rembrandt and Sargent, notably (PORTRAIT ARTISTS) — wrote in PORTRAIT PAINTER even though the answer is obviously plural. Just a reflex. That's the phrase I want. The opening paragraph of Sargent's wikipedia page features a quotation calling him the "leading portrait painter of his generation." Sargent is the artist who first got me to see portrait painting as something other than static and boring. As I've probably said before, I stood in front of this painting for ... well, it was probably 15 minutes or so, but it felt like hours. I was mesmerized. I kept noticing new details. Everything about it was engrossing. I love you, Lady Agnew of Lochnaw!

1D: Hindu gentleman (BABU) — no idea. I had BABA in there at one point.
57D: Burrell of the Food Network (ANNE)— less than no idea. Isn't there a Ty Burrell who is ... someone? Oh yeah, look at that, he's the dad on Modern Family. As for ANNE Burrell ... wow, she was born on the same day (not the same date, but the same damn day) as my best friend Shaun, who is now making her second appearance in this write-up. September 21, 1969! It's an auspicious birthday, Sep. 21. It's the Earth, Wind & Fire birthday!

See you next time,

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Constructor: David P. Williams

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium

THEME: None

Word of the Day: BITTORRENTS (31A: Methods for sharing pirated material) —

BitTorrent, also referred to simply as torrent, is a communication protocol for peer-to-peer file sharing (P2P), which enables users to distribute data and electronic files over the Internet in a decentralized manner. The protocol is developed and maintained by Rainberry, Inc., and was first released in 2001.
To send or receive files, users use a BitTorrent client on their Internet-connected computer, which are available for a variety of computing platforms and operating systems, including an official client. BitTorrent trackers provide a list of files available for transfer and allow the client to find peer users, known as "seeds", who may transfer the files. BitTorrent downloading is considered to be faster than HTTP ("direct downloading") and FTP due to the lack of a central server that could limit bandwidth.
BitTorrent is one of the most common protocols for transferring large files, such as digital video files containing TV shows and video clips, or digital audio files. BitTorrent accounted for a third of all internet traffic in 2004, according to a study by Cachelogic. As recently as 2019 BitTorrent remained a significant file sharing protocol according to Sandvine, generating a substantial amount of Internet traffic, with 2.46% of downstream, and 27.58% of upstream traffic, although this share has declined significantly since then. (wikipedia)

• • •

When I finished this puzzle, which I liked just fine, I looked at the constructor name and thought, "Wait, is this the guy ...?" And then I went and looked it up, and it is, in fact, the guy. What guy, you ask? This guy:

Do you notice a pattern? Well, do ya, punk!? Literally, a pattern. The same grid pattern for Every Single One of his NYT crosswords. Is it art? Is he doing a bit? Well now we've all seen the bit. Can it be over now?* I can't say I haven't enjoyed the bit. Well, not the bit, per se, but the puzzles themselves (before I knew there was a bit). I think I've come down more positive than negative on these puzzles. So perhaps I shouldn't care what shape the grid is, or that this constructor seems to be unable (or unwilling) to work with any other grid pattern. But now that I've seen it, I can't unsee it, and if I see it again, it will officially be in beat-a-dead-horse / eyeroll territory. Still, though, if it's working for you ... I mean, I get it. They keep accepting them, why stop? Let me suggest a reason: dignity. Dignity. That's why. The talent is obviously there. Move some black squares around!!! Or just rotate your pet grid 90 degrees! Baby steps!

Besides an "OUT" dupe and a "___ TO" dupe (LOAN TO, SOAR TO) and a probably excessive reliance on foreign words (ORA, PERDU, DENTE, POCO, SEL), I liked this puzzle quite a bit. I wonder how many people fell into the STRIKE trap right away (1A: Labor tactic). That's certainly the first place my brain went, but then I checked the "K" cross and kouldn't do anything with it (5D: Whizzes). Then I just toggled: "Labor ... what's another 'labor'? ... aha." And in went LAMAZE and down went ZIPS, and then ENO, and well I felt very pleased with myself. Mission ... started. And pretty soon, I dropped a line all the way to the bottom, and I was off! Everything was, indeed, coming along great:

The clues were definitely punching with Saturday force, but for whatever reason I never got significantly bogged down. I had a flicker of panic in the NE when I couldn't push into that corner from either side at first (besides LOAN TO), but eventually I had a moment of self-recognition (DOOFUS!), and that got me to UPTAKES, and down that corner went. Speaking of UPTAKES (11D: Moments of comprehension, in an idiom), that's one of two answers today that really don't feel great in the plural. The other, much less great-feeling plural is BITTORRENTS. I had no idea you could pluralize that. I thought it was proprietary. On the "BitTorrent" wikipedia page, there's not one instance of the term in the plural. So it feels awkward—like something you maybe shouldn't have stuffed in your overstuffed wordlist in the first place. I'm sure one of you nerds (at least!) will tell me why it's just fine. Stuff a DONGLE in it, nerds! (37D: Computer accessory). Nah, I'm just kidding. Tech talk is slightly beyond my purview, so whatever you say, nerds. I'm happy to concede. There are worse things than awkward plurals, anyway.

Do you ever get mad—actively mid-solve mad—at yourself for not knowing something you feel you should know? A vocabulary word, for instance? For me, today, it was "Apologue," which I thought for sure meant a "defense." I knew that's what "apologia" meant, so ... how different could they be!? Well, plenty, apparently, because FABLE, I did not see coming (20A: Apologue). "A moral fable, especially one with animals as characters." The word appears just once in the "Aesop's Fables" wikipedia page, but it's there. I thought maybe the Fables were actually called "Apologues" in the original Greek, but no, the original title is Aesopica. (Are you having fun? Are these FUN FACTS!?). Also, if you google "Aesop," you get not the famous fabulist, but ... this. We're sorry, Aesop. You deserve better than to come in second place to this:

[Thanks, google! Your algorithms are enriching all our lives tremendously!:]

I was just on my game today. From grokking the LAMAZE trick early, to remembering ATUL Gawande's name somehow (42D: Surgeon/writer Gawande), to no-looking NITTY-GRITTY (!) (the letter pattern I had in place was undeniable) (32A: Details), I was just humming. Mad at myself about the "Apologue" / FABLE thing, and then re-mad at myself about forgetting the French word for "French toast" ("pain PERDU," literally "lost bread"), but those were the only real moments of frustration, and they were minor. Again, it's not as if everything was Easy—it was just steadily gettable.

More stuff:

48A: Fast-food chain with palm trees on its packaging (IN-N-OUT) — great answer, even if it does look pretty stupid in the grid (without its hyphens).

49A: First word in the opening crawl for "Star Wars: Episode I" (TURMOIL) — 10 demerits for forcing me to think about this movie for even one second. Also, huge LOL that I care about its completely non-ICONIC "opening crawl." The opening crawl for (so-called) "Episode IV" (i.e. the original Star Wars)—that is ICONIC. Who the hell remembers the "Episode I" crawl? (shut up, nerds!)
51A: Where you might say "That's the spirit!" (SEANCE) — wanted "bar" or the equivalent here (TAVERN?), but got to SEANCE quickly. Clever wordplay.
35A: Mediocre, in modern slang (MID) — so much Z/Alpha/TikTok slang is goofy and unusable, but this one really works. I like it a lot. Witheringly concise. Good stuff.
29A: Deep fears? (SEA SERPENTS) — look, SHARKS, sure, but is anyone out there on the ocean like ".... you guys, you guys ... I'm really afraid?""Of what?""Of ... don't laugh, OK? ... of SEA SERPENTS!" [Explosive laughter] "I said don't lau—Aaaaaaah, what's that what's that!?!?""That's kelp, buddy.""Oh. OK. You guys, you guys ... can we go back on shore now?" Seems like more of a mythical (like, actual Greek and Roman mythical) "fear" than a real fear.

See you next time.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

*Apparently he is, indeed, doing a bit. Here’s the notes from the first time he published a grid with this pattern—I’m sorry, “topology”:

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Constructor: Meghan Morris

Relative difficulty: Easy

THEME:"Life Milestones"— various ages (from 5 to 100) are described by punny phrases:

Theme answers:

AMATEUR STANDING (24A: Age 1) (because one-year-olds are new to standing (up))
FIRST IN CLASS (37A: Age 5) (because five-year-olds go to school for the first time)
DRIVING CRAZY (48A: Age 16) (because sixteen-year-olds are eager to drive)
GIVE IT THE OL (!?!?!) COLLEGE TRY (66A: Age 18) (because eighteen-year-olds go to college (sometimes)) (I was 17, but whatever)
BAR ADMISSION (63A: Age 21) (because twenty-one-year-olds can get into bars)
FINISH THE JOB (98A: Age 65) (because sixty-five-year-olds retire (sometimes))
CENTENNIAL STATE (110A: Age 100) (because one-hundred-year-olds are in a state of being one hundred years old)

Word of the Day: Janelle MONÁE (74A: Award-winning Janelle) —

Janelle Monáe Robinson (/dʒəˈnɛl moʊˈneɪ/ jə-NEL moh-NAY; born December 1, 1985) is an American singer, songwriter, rapper and actress. She has received ten Grammy Award nominations, and is the recipient of a Screen Actors Guild Award and a Children's and Family Emmy Award. Monáe has also been honored with the ASCAP Vanguard Award; as well as the Rising Star Award (2015) and the Trailblazer of the Year Award (2018) from Billboard Women in Music. [...] Monáe's third studio album, Dirty Computer (2018)—also a concept album—was released to widespread critical acclaim; it was chosen as the best album of the year by several publications. The album peaked within the top ten of the Billboard 200, and was further promoted by Monae's Dirty Computer Tour. It was accompanied by the science fiction film of the same name. In 2022, she wrote the cyberpunk story collection, The Memory Librarian: And Other Stories of Dirty Computer, based on the album. Her fourth studio album, The Age of Pleasure (2023) was nominated for Album of the Year at the 66th Annual Grammy Awards, becoming her second nomination in the category as a lead artist. // Monáe has also ventured into acting, first gaining attention for starring in the 2016 films Moonlight and Hidden Figures. For portraying engineer Mary Jackson in the latter, she was nominated for the Critics' Choice Movie Award for Best Supporting Actress. She has since starred in the films Harriet (2019) and Glass Onion (2022), and the television series Homecoming (2020).

• • •

[the view from my mother's house in ... Colorado]

OK, first of all—and I probably should've made this the "Word of the Day"—what in the hell is CENTENNIAL STATE???!?! (110A: Age 100). 55 years old come November and I have no idea on god's decreasingly green earth what this means. [Looks it up] OK, OK ... OK, I feel both more and less bad for not knowing this. More bad because it's the nickname of the state where my mom and sister live (Colorado), and less bad because Who The Hell Knows State Nicknames? I mean, this deep. Colorado? People know the nickname of bleeping Colorado??? Sigh. Just the weirdest thing to make it to theme answer status. Of all the "___ State" nicknames, The CENTENNIAL STATE has to be the least well known / most obscure. Looking up a lot of state nicknames right now and I've at least heard of many of these: First State (Delaware), Palmetto State (South Carolina). Turns out lots of states are named after their state university mascots (or, more likely, vice versa): Tarheel State, Cornhusker State, etc. But CENTENNIAL STATE? That's a state nickname only dogs and hardcore Coloradophiles can hear. This isn't the only forced themer, but it's certainly the most forced themer. I don't get leaving the "D" off of "OLD" in GIVE IT THE OLD COLLEGE TRY (this is the first thing my wife commented on when she solved the puzzle, god bless her). I threw that across and then came up one letter short ... only to have it be correct, just "D"-less. Something about BAR ADMISSION and DRIVING CRAZY feels clunky. I mean, those specific phrases feel clunky, like they don't quite want to stand alone (certainly the latter). And FIRST IN CLASS ... I guess I know that phrase from, what, car advertisements? I want it to be "BEST IN CLASS," but you get what you get, I guess. I think AMATEUR STANDING is the real winner of the group today. Extremely clever wordplay. Anyway, this is cute, conceptually, but in general, it plays out kind of awkward.

ADD-ON and "ADD ME"—the duping is getting really shameless under this newish administration. Looks like constructors are learning that it doesn't matter and not policing themselves. Ah well. One more thing to say "In my day...." about. ADD-ON was one of the very few missteps I made with this exceedingly easy puzzle (I had ADDED) (23A: Extra). I also had WAVY LINES for WAVY ARROW (52D: Symbol for a winding road), but nothing else in the whole big grid was genuinely tricky or misleading or challenging. I confidently and quickly wrote in AMA (!?!?) at 6D: Letters aptly found in "Obamacare" (ACA) (the "Affordable Care Act"—actually had to look up what the letters meant just now ... I thought for sure the first "A" would be "Americans," like with the "ADA"). I think my brain went "Ooh, Obamacare, that's the one about healthcare ... medicine ... doctors ... AMA! American ... Medical Act! Wow, I'm a real pro at legislative initialisms, ask me anything!").

Don't see much in the puzzle that I wasn't familiar with. I knew all the names except AMY (72A: Political analyst Walker). Looks like she's been political analyst for the PBS NewsHour during the exact length of time that I have been deliberately disengaged from all TV coverage of politics (i.e. since 2015 ... I think I bowed out completely the day after the 2016 election). Now that I look at her picture, I've definitely seen her before, but her name didn't ring. But all the other names, from HENRI to CORFU to MONÁE to DANO to ELIA, I knew pretty much cold. Hey, did you know Paul DANO's partner is the (crossword-solving) grand-daughter of ELIA Kazan? It's true. ZOE Kazan. She's been a puzzle answer twice—three times if you count the time she was used in a clue for her grandfather ([Actress Zoe Kazan's grandfather], Sep. 16, 2022). Paul DANO, OTOH, has appeared nine times, first in 2011, before finally supplanting his Hawaii Five-0 ("Book 'em, DAN-O!") and soap opera (Linda DANO) predecessors once and for all in 2016. Weird ... the NYTXW appears to have accepted both DANNO and DANO as a "Hawaii Five-0 nickname"; I guess if you never see it written down on the show, you can spell it however you want. Anyway, just some light pop culture crossword trivia for you on this lazy late-summer Sunday. I know you like that sort of thing...

Additional material:

28A: Modern-day alternative to a cash till (IPAD)— this one baffled and is still baffling me. I've definitely seen IPADs used as cash registers, but the till itself? The place where cash is stored? To me, a till is a specific part of a register. The part that holds the cash. I don't see exactly how an IPAD does ... that. Maybe the new IPAD 74 Air does that—magically produces physical cash, or converts to a till, or something. They're probably running out of new stuff for IPADs to do.
74A: Award-winning Janelle (MONÁE) — man, that is a bad clue. A lazy, terrible clue. "Award-winning"!?!?! That could describe literally millions of people, and almost all famous people. Give us *some* sense of her career. Music, movies ... there's a lot to choose from! I just rewatched Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery on Wednesday (because Blink Twice (2024)—directed by another Zoe (Kravitz)—has sent me back to all earlier "evil rich guy / stuck-on-an-island / we're all in danger!"-type movies), and there was Janelle MONÁE playing two roles (twin sisters). I know her primarily as a musician, but she can act, for sure.

35D: Name rhymed with "says" in Taylor Swift's "Betty" (INEZ) — and the Swiftification of the NYTXW continued unabated ... (I actually like this clue, since you can suss out the answer even if you've never heard the song. Clever.).
91D: Flowing movement between yoga poses (VINYASA) — most of the yoga I've practiced over the years has been Iyengar or Iyengar-adjacent, and so VINYASA isn't a huge part of it (it's more of an Ashtanga, yoga-as-exercise thing), but that doesn't mean I didn't love seeing this answer today—as I suspected, a debut.
3D: Country that counts the French president as a co-prince (ANDORRA) — a country I learned about in 7th-grade geography and then never heard from again (but never forgot, either). It's in the Pyrenees, has a total population just north of 80,000, and, at ~181 sq. mi., is one of the smallest countries in the Europe (though now that I think about it / look it up, Lichtenstein, Malta, Monaco, San Marino, and Vatican City are all even smaller)
106D: School with the mascot Big Al, for short ('BAMA) — he's an elephant. Because a "Crimson Tide" would be pretty hard to render in mascot form.

See you next time.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Constructor: Tim D'Alfonso

Relative difficulty: probably tougher than the usual Monday (solved Downs-only)

THEME: THROW SHADE (63A: Make a subtle insult, or a hint to four highlighted groups of letters in this puzzle) — shaded squares (inside theme answers) contain words that mean "throw":

Theme answers:

SANDCASTLE (18A: Beach project that rarely survives high tide)
CHUCKLEHEAD (23A: Numbskull)
HOG HEAVEN (39A: State of total happiness)
LOBSTER ROLL (56A: Sandwich speciality of Maine)

Word of the Day: POLENTA (48D: Italian cornmeal dish) —

Polenta (/pəˈlɛntə, poʊˈ-/, Italian: [poˈlɛnta]) is an Italian dish of boiled cornmeal that was historically made from other grains. It may be allowed to cool and solidify into a loaf that can be baked, fried, or grilled.
The variety of cereal used is usually yellow maize, but often buckwheat, white maize, or mixtures thereof may be used. Coarse grinds make a firm, coarse polenta; finer grinds make a soft, creamy polenta. Polenta is a staple of both northern and, to a lesser extent, central Italian, Swiss Italian, southern French, Slovenian, Romanian and, due to Italian migrants, Brazilian and Argentinian cuisine. It is often mistaken for the Slovene-Croatian food named žganci. Its consumption was traditionally associated with lower classes, as in times past cornmeal mush was an essential food in their everyday nutrition. (wikipedia)

• • •

Oh, cool, the theme is good. Conceptually, yes, this works. One thing that would've elevated it—and that probably would've been required of such a theme in days of yore—those "shade" words should all break across two words, or at least touch every word in the theme answer. You aren't really probably burying / hiding the shaded words in the theme answers here. CAST is in CASTLE, CHUCK is in CHUCKLE, HEAVE is in HEAVEN, LOB is in LOBSTER, which means SAND, HEAD, HOG, and ROLL are basically unoccupied, unthematically involved, just taking up space. Ideally, the buried word touches all the involved words (and word parts) in the themer. Like, "THE AVENGERS" would be a good way to hide HEAVE—because "HEAVE" is involved in both parts of the phrase: "THE" and "AVENGERS." Admittedly, you set a much higher bar when you insist on this standard, and something like CHUCK, well, that's virtually impossible to break across two words. And it's Monday, and who cares, but the gold standard is "touch 'em all," i.e. the hidden word should touch all words in its base phrase. Here's a "hidden word" grid that obeys the rules:

And here, you can see all the circled words are broken across the words in their base phrases:

But as I say, this is a high standard, and not all themes are up to it, and on a Monday, in a simple puzzle, maybe it doesn't matter so much. Anyway, this puzzle's concept is very good and the execution is, if not ideal, not objectionable either. The theme answers are plenty colorful, so I'm reasonably pleased.

[JELLO BIAFRA]

The rest of the fill gets pretty iffy in places (most notably the middle, which is a disaster: ETCH-A should be completely off limits, what a horrible partial, and NCOS and OER aren't helping much either), but the NW and SE corners are big and add some interest, and ON THE GO is kinda fun, so yeah, on the whole, this is a decent Monday, I'd say.

As for the Downs-only solve, those NW and SE corners were a bit daunting. I whiffed at my first pass at the NW and ended up finishing the puzzle up there. The SE went down a little more easily, though NULL SET gave me a minor fit (49D: { }, in math). All I saw was BRACKETS, and that wouldn't fit. Plus the answer had to start with "Y" or "N" (because ESP-), so pfft. But the ROLL part of LOBSTER ROLL went in and then TOWEL seemed undeniable, which gave me N-LL--- and that's when I saw NULL SET. The one other answer that gave me fits, in a slightly different way, was GONE, which I had at least two other things before I found my way to GONE (32D: Departed). Pretty sure I started with LEFT. Then DEAD. Then I had DONE, which seemed ... off. That's when I realized LODGER might in fact be LOGGER. Finally decided that yes, GONE was better than DONE and that was that. Good decision. Had EN ROUTE for ON THE GO (11D: Currently traveling), but that's pretty much it for mishaps—all minor.

[54A: Rocker Reed]

OK, that'll do for today. See you next time.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Constructor: Daniel Bodily

Relative difficulty: Easy

THEME: CONSONANTS (51A: Group whose members are represented completely (with no repeats) in 21-, 26- and 43-Across) — circled squares in those three answers represent a complete set of the CONSONANTS in the English language:

Theme answers:

HEMINGWAYESQUE (21A: Straightforward and unadorned, as literary prose)
EXECUTIVE BOARD (26A: Corporate management group)
JFK PLAZA (43A: Philadelphia landmark named for the 35th president, in brief)

Word of the Day: JFK PLAZA (43A) —

LOVE Park, officially known as John F. Kennedy Plaza, is a public park located in Center City, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States. The park is across from the Philadelphia City Hall and serves as a visual terminus for the Benjamin Franklin Parkway. The park is nicknamed LOVE Park for its reproduction of Robert Indiana's 1970 LOVE sculpture which overlooks the plaza, one of three located in Philadelphia.
Despite municipal bans and renovations designed to limit the activity, LOVE Park became one of the most famous and recognizable skateboarding spots in the world in the 1990s and 2000s. (wikipedia)

• • •

And sometimes "Y"! No one ever says that about CONSONANTS, I guess because "HMNGWSQXCTVBRDJFKPLZ and sometimes Y" is a less catchy and much less useful slogan. Still, interesting look today for "Y," which I always mentally group with the vowels (a habit reinforced by my daily Wordle habit, where "Y" is often a later-guess "vowel" (after I've eliminated other, more common vowels)). Here's what I'll say about this theme: it makes for some interesting longer answers. I mean, EXECUTIVE BOARD is never gonna be anything but snoresville, but HEMINGWAYESQUE and JFKPLAZA really liven things up. Those have some pop, some juice. I liked HEMINGWAYESQUE because it reminded me of the funny part in Wordplay where Trip Payne has so much trouble coming up with ZOLAESQUE, and when he finally gets it, he shouts out "Oh, Good God!" (politespeak for "are you ****ing kidding me!?"). I generally disdain the "pangram" as a puzzle-constructing feat ("Hey, look at me, I put all the letters in the grid!""Did that make the grid better?""No, but ... look at me!"), but if you're gonna do a pangram, this is the (or a) way to do it: with some kind of core rationale. Inside the theme answers, it's each of the CONSONANTS, exactly once. Add vowels as needed ... and all the vowels are, in fact, needed. Cool cool.

But here's another thing that I'll say about this theme: that revealer is about as anticlimactic as they come. Like, "Be Sure To Drink Your Ovaltine" anticlimactic. I was expecting ... I don't know what. Wordplay? Punning? Some clever turn of phrase? But no, it's just the most literal description possible of the letters in the circles. Felt like someone explaining a joke to me. I don't know how else you could "reveal" what's going on in this puzzle, but I have to believe there's a better way. I think the worst part is that the clue just ... explains it. There's nothing to "get." Not so fun to get spoonfed the meaning of the theme, esp. in a puzzle that was basically spoonfeeding you Every non-theme answer in the grid—the difficulty level was sub-beginner throughout. I have two little orange scritches on my print-out, indicating the most minor of hesitations: I had "I'M ON" instead of "I'M UP" (29D: "That's my cue!"). I hesitated at ERI-A, unsure of "C" v. "K" (26D: Novelist Jong); I didn't get ACTUAL instantly off the first "A" (in today's puzzle, that counts as a hold-up); and ditto AXING, which was the last thing I put in. Otherwise, I filled this one fast as I could type, with the themers the only resistance (and not much of it).

A third thing I'll say about this puzzle is that it ended up being way better (way way better) than I thought it was going to be when I started out in the NW, which was a disaster. Well, that may be hyperbolic, but not very. I stopped dead in my tracks after just three entries, thinking "dear lord is it gonna be one of *these* days." The crosswordese comes fast and thick and unallayed:

And I took this screenshot *before* I hit RASTA (the very next answer into the grid). A spate of crosswordese up front is a very bad omen for the overall quality of the fill, so I was very happy to see the puzzle pull out of the nosedive. The short stuff keeps coming at you, but its quality at least gets back to acceptable, inoffensive, average, mediocre (which is about all that 3-4-5s can do, for the most part—not induce groans or eyerolls). I'd never heard that young Einstein failed MATH, so I missed that misconception. I always hesitate when spelling NYUK, because the Stooges say it more than spell it (22D: Three Stooges laugh sound). I'm teaching five Hitchcock films this semester (Rear Window the first week, Vertigo this week ...), so PSYCHO has been much on my mind ... but then it often is—I've probably watched it more than any movie besides Dazed & Confused, which I watched roughly weekly during the years 1994 and 1995 (I watch PSYCHO at least once a year, every Halloween, but it's gonna take a lot of Halloweens to catch Dazed). I like "NOT V" today because it seems like something someone might hastily and mistakenly say in reaction to the claim that all the CONSONANTS are represented in the theme answers today: "All of them!? Ha! NOT V! Oh, wait, there it is, nevermind."

Only one "?" clue today (27D: Basic plot lines? = X AXES). That is ... very low. I don't know what the average is, but one is ... light. I'm not exactly begging for more—when those clues miss, they can be painful—but they would've / might've given this grid some much (much much)-needed bite. Clues didn't really seem to be trying today. Kinda flat, overall. But there's a certain cleverness to the theme, which I liked, and the longer non-theme answers (LAST WISH: STAMPEDE DJ BOOTHS ... what a weird last wish!) are more than ADEQUATE (11D: Good enough).

See you next time.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Constructor: Barbara Lin

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium to Medium

THEME: Phrase of turn — first and last words of familiar words swap places, creating wacky phrases, clued wackily (i.e. "?"-style):

Theme answers:

LIFE OF JAWS (17A: Swim around, scare some people, ram a boat ...?)
LOVE OF LABORS (22A: Good quality for a midwife?)
FORTUNE OF CHANGE (37A: What the world's largest piggy bank holds?)
LIONS OF PRIDE (51A: Heroes in L.G.B.T.Q.+ history?)
ARMS OF COAT (59A: Jacket sleeves?)

Word of the Day: 14D: Angela's successor as German chancellor (OLAF) —

Olaf Scholz (German: [ˈoːlaf ˈʃɔlts] [...]; born 14 June 1958) is a German politician who has been the chancellor of Germany since 8 December 2021. A member of the Social Democratic Party (SPD), he previously served as Vice Chancellor in the fourth Merkel cabinet and as Federal Minister of Finance from 2018 to 2021. He was also First Mayor of Hamburg from 2011 to 2018, deputy leader of the SPD from 2009 to 2019, and Federal Minister of Labour and Social Affairs from 2007 to 2009. [...] After the Social Democratic Party entered the fourth Merkel government in 2018, Scholz was appointed as both Minister of Finance and Vice Chancellor of Germany. In 2020, he was nominated as the SPD's candidate for Chancellor of Germany for the 2021 federal election. The party won a plurality of seats in the Bundestag and formed a "traffic light coalition" with Alliance 90/The Greens and the Free Democratic Party. On 8 December 2021, Scholz was elected and sworn in as Chancellor by the Bundestag, succeeding Angela Merkel. (wikipedia)

• • •

This was slower-starting than it should've been. That's how it felt anyway. Completely broke down right out of the gate because of STELLA Parks (1D: Parks whose cookbook "BraveTart" won the James Beard Award), whose first name could've been any name in all of namedom as far as I was concerned. Looking her up just now, she seems to be known primarily for the one book (the title of which is only reminding me how much I hated Braveheart). I guess if you're a serious Serious Eats fan (where she wrote for a time), then her name may be quite familiar, but otherwise she seems kind of obscure, as crossword-famous people go. I mean, I don't know *lots* of names, but usually when I look them up, it seems like they're legit famous and I just missed them. Didn't quite seem that way with this name. And so my whole NW corner just caved in. Got SOB but then couldn't confirm it with any of the Downs and after a stab or two at some other things, I just abandoned the corner and went over to the adjacent section, where I got traction: TOO OAF OLE OLAF etc., but even there things were a little on the slow side, as it took me Every Single Letter to get that first theme. Nothing about the phrase seemed familiar. What is the pun? I wondered. I wanted, like, a Life of Pi pun, but no. Life of Riley? Sincerely, I had LIFE OF -AWS and thought maybe a giant tiger was ramming the boat (still on Life of Pi, I guess), and that the answer was going to be LIFE OF PAWS (!?!?!). Then IN JEST gave me LIFE OF JAWS and I just stared for a few seconds, not seeing it. Then I saw it—swap "LIFE" and "JAWS" and you get JAWS OF LIFE (a recognizable phrase!). So ... that's it. It's a word swap puzzle. Swap words, get wacky. Puzzle got a lot easier from there on out.

But did it get more enjoyable? Yes and no. Yes, in that I knew what I was dealing with, and there was a lot less flailing, and there was nothing else in the puzzle that stumped me like STELLA. The theme, though, feels slight. Well, it's simple, for sure, but you can do big things with simple things if you really nail the execution. If every themer is a Truly Wacky banger, then who cares if the trick itself is rudimentary? But only two of these seem to rise to the appropriate wacky standards. The animal ones. I like both of those. LIFE OF JAWS (esp. its clue) is pretty funny, and LIONS OF PRIDE is pretty good too, though frankly I like it better (in my mind) if the LIONS are actual, feline lions and not just "lions" in the metaphorical "bigwig" sense. Queer lions, proudly marching in the parade, that is what I want to see (and am seeing, in my mind's eye, right now). The other themers are just OK. LOVE OF LABORS is weird with LABORS in the plural. FORTUNE OF CHANGE is kind of boring on its face, and anyway, it would be a fortune in change (not "of"). And ARMS OF COAT is ridiculous because it just gives you a literal ordinary thing, like "hem of dress" or "laces of shoe" or something. The "wackiness" just doesn't land with that one. So ... it's so-so, on the whole.

After I got LIFE OF JAWS worked out, as I say, the puzzle got a lot easier. No real hang-ups, and eventually backed my way into that initially disastrous NW corner, picking up THEN (12A: Not now) and "OH COOL" (2D: "That's pretty nifty!") and BEHAVIORAL (3D: Like problems a schoolteacher might deal with) and other things that had eluded me. Speaking of that corner, really loving the LOVE OF LABORS / COITUS / ALIBI, "laboring" being a common euphemism (at least in 17c. poetry) for COITUS, and ALIBI being something you'll need, maybe, if your COITUS is of the illicit kind. Gotta get that COITUS ALIBI straight, for sure. "Did you do the COITUS!?""No, I have an ALIBI!""Well ... good, then." But back to difficulty (if any). I tried to spell Whoopi Goldberg's Oscar-winning role like the nail polish brand—well, not OPI MAE, but ODI MAE, for sure (49D: Whoopi's Oscar-winning role in "Ghost" => ODA MAE). I also had FUSS before FUTZ (54D: Mess (with)), and took what felt like an awful long time to get TOMATO (47D: Part of a club) (the "club" is a sandwich, it turns out). Otherwise, any part of the puzzle I haven't mentioned—piece of cake. The whole thing came out feeling just about right, difficulty-wise, for a Wednesday.

Bullet points:

57D: Lazarus with a sonnet on the Statue of Liberty (EMMA)— had the "E" and wrote in ... EZRA. I think the "z" in Lazarus, coupled with certain crossword-name reflexes, just ... pushed me in the wrong direction. Of course it's EMMA. Of course of course. EMMA is ... better than EZRA. EMMA is ... good:

23D: Usually dry streambeds (ARROYOS)— not a fan of froyo, but I am a fan of ARROYOS, as a word as well as a geographical feature. Would I eat froyo in an arroyo? Well first, I have questions about how I got in the arroyo in the first place, and second, no, I would not eat froyo in an arroyo. Just ice cream for me, thanks. I would eat gelato in a grotto, though, in case you were wondering.
52D: Statement of defeat ("I LOST")— I don't really have anything here, but the "LOST" part reminded me of this performance, which I became aware of only yesterday—one of the most improbable, jaw-dropping cover songs I've ever heard (do not press play unless you've got the 8 minutes to spare, because it's an experience you can't really shortcut): it's Kasey Chambers covering the Eminem classic "Lose Yourself" (from the movie 8 Mile):

Enjoy your day. See you next time.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Constructor: Parker Higgins

Relative difficulty: no idea, i solved this without looking at the theme entries; hooray for themes where the entries are valid words + phrases in the grid, so you can fill them in from crosses

THEME: it's actually not a hard theme; phrases of the form "X and Y" are repurposed with Y as the clue and the entry being "X + (word that means "companion")"; see below

Word of the Day: RAIN [Petrichor is the aroma produced by this] — look, I'm not gonna post a definition per se here, but "petrichor" is my favorite word, and tbh I'd go so far as to say it's the prettiest word in the English language; anyway, it comes from the Greek words "petra" (rock) and "ichor" (this is a crossword staple, you already know it's the blood of the gods), which tells you just how beautiful that scent really is, and why I love both the scent and the word...

• • •

Hey hi howdy hello, Christopher Adams once again filling in for Rex on a Thursday where the theme is...well, it's not what I would've thought for a Thursday. Could pass for a Wednesday, maybe a Tuesday even. I wonder if OTAKU is the reason why this is a Thursday; to me it's not a difficult word, but YMMV wildly there, and Will Shortz is definitely not the target demographic for it, so I can see why this was a Thursday puzzle on the logic that "it's harder than Wednesday", even if (a) I don't agree and (b) it's not the usual sort of trickiness one would expect from a Thursday.

Theme answers:

[LIMB] for LIFE PARTNER
[FOREMOST] for FIRST MATE
[READY] for GOOD BUDDY
[DINE] for WINE PAIRING

Gonna be honest, I don't remember most of the solve; words filled themselves in, clues didn't offer much resistance, and I was at the right level of tired that I skipped over clues I couldn't fill in immediately. Hence the figuring out of the theme post-solve; if this were a trickier puzzle, I would've had to stop and figure things out, but very little in this puzzle put up a resistance, and even the parts that did got much easier once I had a letter or two in place from clues that really were that easy.

And still, a fun puzzle, a nice aha moment deciphering the theme post-solve, some fun phrases (AM I TOO LATE, ALASKA ROLL, some theme entries) scattered throughout, as well as fun clues (BRAT, NFL, OGRE, etc.). Even the clues that were straightforward often felt fun and (more importantly) felt like they were written by an actual constructor: BERET, RAIN, PETS, etc. Overall an enjoyable puzzle; it's not at all what I wanted or expected from a Thursday, but when it's a fun, clean solve, you can't complain too much about it not being tricksy or difficult.

40A: [Insert, as a video in a post]

52D: [2024 Charli XCX album with a lime green cover] BRAT (but brat summer is over, so now we're pumpkin that; also, per charli, "kamala is brat", please register to vote, and vote for kamala)

Olio:

RISES [Gets ready for the national anthem, maybe] — The "maybe" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. I do not care to have the national anthem played at sporting events. To put it bluntly: it's jingoistic. It has no place at domestic sporting events, full stop, and I hate how it's been co-opted and turned into a big deal in a post-9/11 world. It's the same sort of "patriotism" (there needs to be more quote marks there) that gave us a certain strain of country music that I also abhor and also wish would go away. I fully support those who refuse to stand for the national anthem (especially in a country that often does not stand for or support you), and even more fully support movements to stop playing the damn thing, period.
BELOW ["Fathoms ___" (opening song of "The Little Mermaid")] — Did not know the title of this song, but I love the clue because it's fun, you learn something, and you can get the answer immediately even without knowing it; it's the sort of thing I enjoy including when I write trivia, for those reasons.
OCTET [Large wedding band, say] — Gonna be honest, filled in the -ET at the end immediately and let the downs disambiguate between OCTET and NONET and anything else it might've been.
SPAYS [Neuters] — How many of you read this clue/answer pair in Bob Barker's (or Drew Carey's) voice?

Yours truly, Christopher Adams, Court Jester of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Constructor: Boaz Moser

Relative difficulty: Medium-Challenging

THEME: none

Word of the Day: XENOMORPH (36A: Extraterrestrial menace in 5-Down) —

The xenomorph (also known as a Xenomorph XX121, Internecivus raptus, or simply the alien or the creature) is a fictional endoparasitoid extraterrestrial species that serves as the titular main antagonist of the Alien and Alien vs. Predator franchises. [...] The xenomorph's design is credited to Swiss surrealist and artist H. R. Giger, originating in a lithograph titled Necronom IV and refined for the series's first film, Alien. The practical effects for the xenomorph's head were designed and constructed by Italian special effects designer Carlo Rambaldi. Species design and life cycle have been extensively augmented, sometimes inconsistently, throughout each film // Unlike many other extraterrestrial races in film and television science fiction (such as the Daleks and Cybermen in Doctor Who, or the Klingons and Borg in Star Trek), the xenomorphs are not sapient toolmakers — they lack a technological civilization of any kind, and are instead primal, predatory creatures with no higher goal than the preservation and propagation of their own species by any means necessary, up to and including the elimination of other lifeforms that may pose a threat to their existence. Like wasps or termites, xenomorphs are eusocial, with a single fertile queen breeding a caste of warriors, workers, or other specialist strains. The xenomorphs' biological life cycle involves traumatic implantation of endoparasitoid larvae inside living hosts; these "chestburster" larvae erupt from the host's body after a short incubation period, mature into adulthood within hours, and seek out more hosts for implantation.

• • •

I have awakened / awoken with an absolutely terrible headache neckache jawache, lord knows why, but lord, thy vassal doth not deserve this, truly. Anyway, I'm quite certain this has colored my solving experience, and maybe made the puzzle seem tougher than it was. All three of the short Acrosses in the NW were totally inscrutable to me, which made starting the puzzle ... difficult. Short crosses are supposed to come through for me, and those ... didn't. Even (finally) guessing ACME at 1D: Summit didn't help much. No idea what "jackknives" are or what they "cut," would never (ever) say "CRAP out" (I had CONK), and as for a cob ... I guess that's a male swan (?) ... yes, my crossword memory is telling me that's correct ... but I couldn't get off corn, or ... I wanna say "salad," but I know that's the two-B "cobb." Since I had CONK (not CRAP, ugh), the "bit of foam" in 13D: Bit of foam, perhaps (PEANUT) remained a mystery, even though I knew immediately that it was *packing* foam. I wanted KERNEL, gah. Abandoning this section and moving one over gave me ALIEN and ALAMO and LAX and IMF and (after a few beats) VALID, but "DO-" as a 8D: Enthusiastic assent??? No idea. "D'OH!? That's not an assent," I correctly reasoned. Oof. So just getting the ball rolling today was ... well, I got the ball rolling the way Sisyphus got the ball rolling, basically. Rough.

After that, things settled into normalish Friday territory, but I was still thrown off repeatedly by a cluing style or voice, and a cultural frame of reference, that I just didn't connect with. I had the SH- at 23D: Improve, as an argument, and was certain it was SHORE UP ... only to find out it was SHARPEN. Had the -MORPH part of the Alien answer but absolutely no idea what the first part should be. Eventually reasoned XENO- from my knowledge of what that prefix means (namely, "alien"), and assumed (then) that XENOMORPH was a generic term for "alien life form" ... only to find out (Word of the Day!) that it's a franchise-specific life form found exclusively in Alien properties. Huh. Not a franchise I've spent a lot of time with, so ... shrug. No idea what this alleged country "standard" is ("Old SHEP"), and no idea who SHANE Gillis is, so that cross was ... fun! (Though absolutely not a Natick—"S" is the only good guess there, though it would've been hilarious (to me and my headache) if it had been "Old WHEP" and WHANE Gillis, which sounds like a comedy duo to rival Wayland Flowers and Madame.

I don't know what you call this particular clue style: 49D: A good way to feel / 34A: Bad thing to be out of (or why one of those clues starts with an indefinite article and the other doesn't), but it's not my favorite. It could be bad to be out of ... TIME, LUCK, YOUR MIND, TOILET PAPER ... sigh. That SEEN / DEN crossing was oddly hard for me, as I thought the ottoman itself had a setting (low?) or else we were dealing with actual historical Ottomans, and thus some location in the Middle East (or its time zone?). Do homes still have DENs? It's such a funny word. It's just a room with a couch and a TV, possibly a fireplace? What any of that has to do with bears, I have no idea. Speaking of bears, I liked SALMON RUN, as well as "DON'T ANSWER THAT" and "CITATION NEEDED," though those are the only answers that rise to the zingy standards I have for marquee answers on a Friday. SIX FIGURES and ACTION POSE aren't bad, or at least they seem original, but SIX FIGURES is kind of off-putting (innocent enough, but my brain keeps hearing it in the voice of a certain kind of guy who likes to talk about what he earns and what other people earn ... he's not a pleasant guy), and ACTION POSE ... not sure why I'm neutral on that one. I think it's a standard enough term from drawing and comics. A static rendering of a body in movement. I guess one could pose *as if* one were performing an action, that might count too. I dunno ... answer's fine, just not exciting the way the more colloquial stuff, and the grizzly bear stuff, was.

Bullets:

9D: Account of a wild night out? (TAB)— if you have a wild night out of drinking, then you might end up with a sizable bar TAB (an actual, financial "account" of your drinking)
48A: Sources of high-quality wool (ALPACAS) — read this as "high-quality wood" and was briefly flummoxed. "AL...DERS? AL...ABAMA?"
9D: Numbers 1 through 36 are found in it (TORAH) — lol no idea. Baffled. Completely got me. Even when I got it, I didn't get it. Figured that my not being Jewish was the problem here, but ... no. No specialized knowledge required, really. There are 36 chapters in (the Book of) Numbers, which is one of the first five books of the Bible, i.e. the TORAH.

[Warning: aggressively sentimental dog death]

33A: Sch. in Ypsilanti whose mascot is an eagle, not another large bird (EMU) — Eastern Michigan University, right down the street from where I went to grad school (Go Blue). YPSI has been in the puzzle just once, but I would welcome it back with open arms.
45D: Eyed food, informally (TATER) — read this as "Eye food," which I assumed was something like "eye candy" (!??), and thought "do we call hot people TATERs now? What TikTok trend did I miss this time!?" Did I mention I woke up with a headache? Ugh.

Gonna go eye some (non-potato) food now. Actually, first coffee, then sit in "DEN" do Wordle, later food. Good day.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Coastal African desert / MON 8-26-24 / Athleisure lead-in to "lemon" / Popular dance fitness program

Pyramus' beloved, in myth / TUES 8-27-24 / "You're the One That I Want," for one / Hawaiian goose / Stark daughter on "Game of Thrones"

Title role of 1966 and 2004 / WED 8-28-24 / Units of X-ray exposure / Chicken par_ ____ in fat / Onetime studio with a broadcast tower in its logo / Participants in a 140.6-mile race / Clay figure in Jewish folklore / Bronx politician with a noted 2018 upset, familiarly / Smoothie bar supply

Smallish smart device from Amazon / SAT 8-31-24 / 10-point play / Liquid found in some pens / Rapper who shares his name with the 29th president / Some start-up funding, in brief / Franchise that moved back to Vegas in 2021 / Reach for the cars? / Drink once sold as Fruit Smack

Actress Hinds of "9-1-1" / MON 9-2-24 / Symbol in Tinder's logo / Gravy train gig / Sandoval of "Vanderpump Rules" / Gummy candy shape / Lodge group since 1868 / Pollution portmanteau / Engineered embankment

Clown role in Chinese opera / TUE 9-3-24 / Baseball franchise with a bell in its logo / Fanged menaces / Second part of a notable Latin boast

Call that might precede "first service" / WED 9-4-24 / Its parent company is Hyundai / Asteroids made a big impact on it in the 1980s

Equine hybrid with striped legs / THU 9-5-24 / Aptly named novelist Charles / Attacked imaginary enemies, in an idiom / Unit equivalent to 16.5 feet / Spanish city on the Costa del Sol

Relative of a pupusa / FRI 9-6-24 / Hyperbolic ordinal / Hindu gentleman / Frankfurter's cry / Youth-centric magazine spinoff / Shade akin to mauve / Crimean town in 1945 headlines / What female llamas do to show disinterest in a mate / Spy's assumption

Italian cornmeal dish / MON 9-9-24 / Sandwich speciality of Maine / Actress Fisher of "Eighth Grade" / Fleas and flies / Currently traveling

Swim around, scare some people, ram a boat...? / WED 9-11-24 / Parks whose cookbook "BraveTart" won the James Beard Award / 1998 animated film set in Central Park / Angela's successor as German chancellor

2024 Charli XCX album with a lime green cover / THU 9-12-2024 / Petrichor is the aroma produced by this / "Fathoms ___" (opening song of "The Little Mermaid")

Comic Gillis / FRI 9-13-24 / Boon for grizzly bears / Old ___ country standard performed by Johnny Cash and Elvis Presley / Numbers 1 through 36 are found in it / Extraterrestrial menace in 5-Down / Eyed food, informally / Sch. in Ypsilanti whose mascot is an eagle, not another large bird