Rex Parker Does the NYT Crossword Puzzle

Constructor: Zhouqin Burnikel

Relative difficulty: Extremely easy (like a Tuesday or Wednesday)

THEME: none

Word of the Day: POORI (6D: Indian fried bread) —

Puri, also poori, is a type of deep-fried bread, made from unleavened whole-wheat flour, originated from the Indian subcontinent.
Puris are most commonly served as breakfast or snacks. It is also served at special or ceremonial functions as part of ceremonial rituals along with other vegetarian food offered in Hindu prayer as prasadam. When hosting guests it is common in some households to serve puri in place of roti, as a small gesture of formality. (wikipedia)

• • •

A zippy little puzzle, but maybe too zippy. I blew through it like it wasn't there, like walking through smoke, just ... no resistance, anywhere. Even when I didn't know something, or immediately recall it (as with POORI), I seemed to flow right over and around it via adjacent answers and crosses without any apparent speed-drop or extra effort. I think the first time I actually pulled up, once I got started, was way down in the SE corner, when I couldn't get BUFFET off the "BU" ... and honestly, in retrospect, that should've been obvious. Before that, I'd basically tumbled down the grid, from NW to SE, seemingly by sheer force of gravity as opposed to any real cogitation on my part. First guesses were going right in and proving correct every time. I mean, I even remembered every damn letter in LGBTQIA, in order, on my first try (29A: Initialism that precedes "+"). I guess it's really only those last two that are (somewhat) hard to come up with, since they're latecomers to the letter string, and anyway it seemed unlikely to be "AI" since all that does is evoke our dystopian robot-controlled future (which is to say, present), so "IA" it was! And this happened over and over—I'd throw down the first thing that came to me and damned if it wasn't right. HIDEY HOLE off the "IDE" (16A: Place to conceal oneself), TYPE 'A'S off the "Y" (14D: Go-getters, often), the GIRL part of DREAM GIRL (8D: Certain romantic ideal), the HERO part of ITALIAN HERO (are there other HEROs? and how is this different from an "Italian sub," which definitely sounds more familiar?) (11D: Long lunch?)—even stuff I didn't really know, like AESOP ("is it ... AESOP? it is!? ha ha, look at me, remembering beauty product stuff!") (34D: High-end skin-care brand). It all just went right in. Overall, the puzzle was very smooth and very easy, but it wasn't terribly exciting. The marquee answers are fine, but as with lots of Fridays lately, there wasn't a ton of sparkle. Nothing I was really thrilled or surprised to see. But still, it all holds up. A not unpleasant experience, for sure.

There's one square that seems potentially problematic—one where I can imagine solvers making a bad guess (because most of them will not have heard of one of the answers, for sure). That square is the "E" in the WEN / AU NATUREL crossing. I'm sure Liu WEN is a big deal in her profession (56D: Liu regarded as China's first supermodel), but in this grid, she's the least familiar name (at least to me), and proper nouns are always dangerous, especially at the vowels, so the "E" here is a potential "yikes" moment. Yes, you should probably know that it's AU NATUREL, not AU NATURAL (59A: In the buff) ... but I feel like people (mis)pronounce it "NATURAL" all the time (with the last syllable accented and sounding like a guy named "AL"). And yes, WAN is less probable as a name, especially considering that it's a perfectly ordinary English word and would likely get clued that way. But WAN is a name—a Chinese name at that—so if you don't know the supermodel here (and I know a lot of you, like me, didn't), then WAN wouldn't be a bad guess. I'm just saying that this is the one and only square in the puzzle that made me go "yeesh, I am not 100% here... oh well, fingers crossed." Ideally, there should be zero of those squares in a puzzle.* Then again, I'm on record as not giving a damn about "supermodels" and having no real knowledge of that world, so it's possible Liu WEN is like Cindy Crawford-famous and I'm alone, or nearly alone, in even hesitating at this square.

It's a debut for POORI, which is cool, but it's a little weird that we got POORI before PURI, if only because four-letter answers are generally more plentiful than 5s. Actually, PURI was in a puzzle once ... in 1976, as a [Hindu pilgrimage center]. Maybe it appears more often on Indian menus in America as POORI? Yes, based on this single randomly selected menu from an Indian restaurant in Milwaukee, it looks like POORI is the preferred menu spelling in this country.

[Antique Indian Restaurant]

Explainers:

1D: Speed reading, for short (MPH)— maybe the hardest part of the puzzle, in that it was the second clue I looked at (after getting MWAH immediately), and ... well, I had no idea what was going on here. I didn't know "speed reading"had an initialism or acronym or whatever. Turns out, the clue isn't about speed reading (as in, reading quickly) at all; it's the "reading" of your "speed" on your speedometer (or the cop's radar gun, or any speed measuring device). And (car) speed is, in fact (in this country, anyway), measured in miles per hour (MPH).
5A: Tablet that's impossible to swallow? (IPAD)— I like the "?" here. Like ... someone somewhere is definitely thinking "'Impossible,' eh? ... hold my beer..."
44A: Business name abbr. (LLC) — had the "C" and went with INC. This is what passes for "difficulty" today.
23D: What often carries a U.S.D.A. seal (ORGANIC BEEF) — really wish this clue had been more BEEF-specific. I mean, ORGANIC anything might carry this seal, right? Yes, pretty much. The USDA website has a subsection labeled "Honey, mushrooms, pet food," and uses "organic dill" (!) as an example at one point. Did anyone guess ORGANIC DILL here? PORK? FIGS? DUCK? My point is, if you're gonna have a BEEF answer, get a BEEF clue.

43A: Once, for one (NUMERO) — "Once" is Spanish for the number (NUMERO) "eleven."
15D: So-called "explosion shot" from a sand trap (BLAST) — this one tried to confuse me with golf lingo but joke's on you, clue—I had the "-AST," took one look at "explosion," and had my answer. This clue could've just been [Explosion]. But I guess the golf demographic must be served.
57D: Apt letters missing from __ipper_ (SLY) — first, "Apt letters missing" feels all kinds of grammatically wrong. "Letters aptly missing," maybe? Second, there was at least a couple seconds where I was thinking "What is SLS?" But then I got saved by GEN Y. Speaking of ...
62A: Demo for many parents of Alphas (GEN Y) — ugh no one calls it that. Only crosswords call Millennials "GEN Y." It goes Boomers, Gen X, Millennials, Gen Z, and, I guess, Alphas (a default reset so we could start over at the beginning of the (Greek) alphabet??). But GENY? GENY?

50A: Acrobat displays (PDFS) — Acrobat is software (from Adobe) that allows you to view and manipulate PDF files.
54D: Cannes "confirm"? (OUI) — clue of the day. If you "confirm" something in Cannes, you might simply say OUI. It's a pun on "Can confirm" (a common affirmative reply, esp. online).

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

*It's at least theoretically possible that solvers might botch the CIARA / SABRA crossing as well (36A: Frequent Missy Elliott collaborator / 20D: Big name in hummus). Two not-universally-famous propers crossing at a vowel—never not dicey.

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Constructor: Natan Last

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium

THEME: none

Word of the Day: BAYARD RUSTIN (5D: Political activist who organized 1963's March on Washington) —

Bayard Rustin (/ˈbaɪ.ərd/ BY-ərd; March 17, 1912 – August 24, 1987) was an American political activist, a prominent leader in social movements for civil rights, socialism, nonviolence, and gay rights. Rustin was the principal organizer of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963.
Rustin worked in 1941 with A. Philip Randolph on the March on Washington Movement to press for an end to racial discrimination in the military and defense employment. Rustin later organized Freedom Rides, and helped to organize the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to strengthen Martin Luther King Jr.'s leadership; he taught King about non-violence. Rustin worked alongside Ella Baker, a co-director of the Crusade for Citizenship, in 1954; and before the Montgomery bus boycott, he helped organize a group called "In Friendship" to provide material and legal assistance to people threatened with eviction from their tenant farms and homes. Rustin became the head of the AFL–CIO's A. Philip Randolph Institute, which promoted the integration of formerly all-white unions and promoted the unionization of African Americans. During the 1970s and 1980s, Rustin served on many humanitarian missions, such as aiding refugees from Vietnam and Cambodia.
Rustin was a gay man and, due to criticism over his sexuality, usually advised other civil rights leaders from behind the scenes. During the 1980s, he became a public advocate on behalf of gay causes, speaking at events as an activist and supporter of human rights. [...]
On November 20, 2013, President Barack Obama posthumously awarded Rustin the Presidential Medal of Freedom. (wikipedia)

• • •

Hey, wanna see someone luck out? Watch:

Ha ha, look at those first two answers, 1-Across and 1-Down. Wrong and wrong ... And Yet! Somehow that "Y" in TYNE ended up in the right place, which was all I needed to get "YOU FOOL!," which I then confirmed with FBI LAB. When I took the above screenshot, I had no idea I had any wrong answers; I was just documenting my progress, as I often do on late-week puzzles. "Look at me, coming out of the gate on fire!" Little did I know I was literally on fire, i.e. my first two answers were a mini trash fire. Luckily I was able to put that fire out real quick—probably ten seconds after I took the screenshot. But I just wanted to show you how skill is great and all, but you can't beat dumb luck. Wrong answers ... lead to right answers ... and the puzzle opens right up. Amazing. Thank you, OOXTEPLERNON (He's the God of Short Bad Fill, but I assume his purview extends to all things crossword-related—when He's angry, you get lots of EER and EEN and EEK thrown at you, but sometimes he exhibits generosity and blesses even your FLUBS).

100% of the difficulty in today's puzzle came from proper nouns. Natan makes puzzles for the New Yorker, and this felt a lot like a "Moderately Challenging"New Yorker puzzle—i.e. a themeless that's somewhat heavy on proper nouns I've never heard of, ones for which I sometimes have to work every cross. Today, the "yipes" proper noun, for me, was BAYARD RUSTIN. When I read his bio, I think, "jeez, how do you not know him, you should really know him—he was a central figure in the civil rights movement." Then I see that he was gay and (therefore, in a more homophobic era) worked largely behind the scenes. Still, he's a huge deal, Presidential Medal of Freedom and all that, so ... can't complain about his presence here. Happy to learn (or possibly relearn) his name. But man, every single cross I needed! I don't know any BAYARDs or any RUSTINs. At all. Those are not names on my list of name possibilities. BAYARD has appeared six times in the NYTXW, but ... well, here's the complete list of clues for those BAYARDs:

[xwordinfo.com]

Gotta be honest, every single one of those clues is gibberish to me. "Legendary horse"? Who's "Rinaldo"?

Bayard (Modern French: [bajaʁ]; Dutch: Ros Beiaard or just Beiaard; Italian: Baiardo) is a magical bay horse in the legends derived from the medieval chansons de geste. These texts, especially that of The Four Sons of Aymon, attribute to him magical qualities and a supernatural origin. He is known for his strength and intelligence, and possesses the supernatural ability to adjust his size to his riders.

Looks like "Rinaldo" is one of the Four Sons of Aymon. LOL I went to grad school for medieval literature and didn't know any of this! (Don't blame UM, though, I was really a very lazy student). So that's a brief crossword history of BAYARD. What of RUSTIN? Any RUSTINs? Hey, wow ... looks like Bayard RUSTIN has appeared in the NYTXW before ... once, way back in February of 1984! Clue: [Bayard ___, Washington March organizer: 1963]. I can't believe the crossword discovered him and then mislaid him for forty years. Welcome back, buddy!

Other proper nouns of my not-knowing: well, LYME, you saw that. I was thinking of Newcastle-Upon-TYNE, which is another Newcastle-___-___ place in England (how many are there!?) (1A: Newcastle-under-___, Staffordshire, England). Then there was SOSA, which gave me a bit of a fright because I had SO-A and no idea what letter to put there. This is because I didn't know LYME and so had LY-E, which gave me -OBBO-S for 3D: Don, and I absolutely Could Not parse it. Brain kept trying to make -OBBO-S into one word. Thought maybe the Argentinian singer was SONA (25A: Mercedes ___, icon of Argentine folk music). Certainly never expected SOSA, since the only SOSA I know is the late-'90s, PED-enhanced baseball slugger. But eventually my brain kicked in with the "hey, maybe it's two words" wisdom and I got through (MOB BOSS). Later on, there was MONSTRO—no idea (32D: Name of the whale in "Pinocchio"). I didn't see the recent Guillermo del Toro remake of Pinocchio, and I never cared much for that whole story when I was growing up, so once you get past the whole "I wanna be a real boy" / nose-growth stuff, I'm kind of tapped out on Pinocchio lore. I guess that's mostly it for proper nouns, except for THISBE (12D: Lover of Pyramus, in Ovid), ROME (37A: W.H. Auden's "The Fall of ___"), BIALIK (36D: Post-Trebek "Jeopardy!" host), and MARSEILLE (32A: Oldest city in France), which I'd at least heard of, and The LAST BATTLE, which I actually knew (again, dumb luck—I happen to be married to world's foremost reader of The Chronicles of Narnia; those books pretty much define her childhood. Please don't tell her I initially confused two of the books today and wrote in The LAST PRINCE) (8D: Seventh and final "Chronicles of Narnia" book, with "The").

Outside the proper nouns, almost zero trouble today. If there was stuff I didn't know, I was able to flow right around it. And "flow" is a good word for what this puzzle had. Really enjoyed whooshing around the grid, particularly through that lovely, creamy center. There's nothing flashy in there, but it's all incredibly smooth and lively, especially given how dense the long answers are there. Had a little trouble dropping into the SE corner, only because at 21D: It's nothing new, I wanted SAME OLD SONG or SAME OLD SAME OLD, neither of which fit. But I thought "maybe STORY?" and yes, that was it. Finished up easily from there.

Notes:

16A: Beer whose name means "morning sun" (ASAHI) — ASAHI, the official beer of crosswords. When in doubt, guess ASAHI (esp. if it's five letters and you already have the "A")
18A: Feature of Garamond or Perpetua (SERIF)— Garamond and Perpetua are fonts.
44A: Double duty? (STUNTS) — my proudest moment of the day. Got this off the first "S"! The "duty" of a stunt double is ... yeah it's right there in the name: STUNTS. I think I wanted "STAND IN" at first, but it didn't fit.
7D: Erroneous justification for a 2003 invasion, for short (WMD) — it's great when a clue can be factually accurate while also being, at the same time, a great "fuck-you" to an entire lying, warmongering administration. [Chef's kiss] to this clue!
34D: Penalty taker's lament ("I MISSED") — "Penalty" here is a "penalty shot" (as in football, which is to say, "soccer").

35D: Chest bump? (PEC) — nice cross with DIP (33A: Bodyweight exercise). A wide-grip DIP can help build your PECs.
41D: Cheek ('TUDE) — short for "attitude.""Cheek" here means "sass,""backtalk," etc.
48D: Whirl, so to speak (TRY) — As in, "Give it a whirl!" Like this clue a lot.
17A: Pitches low and inside? (SUBWAY ADS) — best clue of the day, a word-perfect misdirection. Looks like baseball ... isn't baseball. (Congrats to the New York Metropolitans for advancing to the NLDS ... maybe we'll get a Subway Series this year, but that is not my wish: go Tigers!)
33D: Epitome of completeness (DOTTED i) — unsurprisingly, CROSSEDT has never, not once, appeared in the NYTXW. Eight DOTTEDIs in the last decade, but no CROSSEDTs! I am officially waging a complaint on behalf of all of T-dom.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Constructor: John Kugelman

Relative difficulty: Easy

THEME:"Teacher's Marks"— familiar phrases are clued as if they are teacher responses to grammatical mistakes on a student paper:

Theme answers:

"DON'T QUOTE ME ON THIS" (22A: Mrs. B you'll die when you hear what happened to "me" this summer.)
"YOUR MONEY'S NO GOOD HERE" (37A: So we're at the convenience store and WOW I find a 5$ dollar bill on the floor)
"HALT, WHO GOES THERE" (45A: Surprise surprise! Whom should walk in? Just my best friend ever!)
"DON'T START WITH ME" (64A: Me and Jamie ask if we can get a couple of scratchers)
"ALL YOU NEED IS LOVE" (83A: My mom buys them, and she knows how much I loooooooove lottery tickets)
"PULL YOURSELF TOGETHER" (92A: "Scratch them your self girls," she says, so we do")
"YOU CAN'T WIN THE MALL" (i.e. "THEM ALL") (111A: OMG can you believe it! We won the mall!!!)

Word of the Day: SHEENA, Queen of the Jungle (54A: "Queen of the Jungle," in comics) —

Sheena, Queen of the Jungle, is a fictional American comic book jungle girl heroine, originally published primarily by Fiction House during the Golden Age of Comic Books. She was the first female comic book character with her own title, with her 1941 premiere issue (cover-dated Spring 1942) preceding Wonder Woman #1 (cover-dated Summer 1942). Sheena inspired a wealth of similar comic book jungle queens. She was predated in literature by Rima, the Jungle Girl, introduced in the 1904 William Henry Hudson novel Green Mansions.
An orphan who grew up in the jungle, learning how to survive and thrive there, she possesses the ability to communicate with wild animals and is proficient in fighting with knives, spears, bows, and makeshift weapons. Her adventures mostly involve encounters with slave traders, white hunters, native Africans, and wild animals. (wikipedia)

• • •

Awkward from start to finish. Speaking of the finish, let's start there—what is this ridiculous post-solve Post-It that appears on my grid after I've (successfully!) completed the puzzle (see screenshot, above). "C+ / Fix"??? If only the editor had put that Post-It on this puzzle the first time he saw it. It's not even funny, or apt. Why "C+"? And what the hell does "Fix" mean, exactly? No teacher, however bad at their job, would affix this Post-It note, with this particular message, to any paper at any time. It's nonsensical. "Fix!" LOL. OK! Could you be more specific? Yeesh. As a solver who (again, successfully) completed this damn puzzle (and in good time too), I don't know where the puzzle gets off slapping a "C+ / Fix" Post-It on my finished grid. Just bizarre. And intrusive. And again, in no way funny. There's no ... joke. No wordplay. Nothing. A corny tacked-on gimmick that can't possibly have been part of the original puzzle design. I envy you dead-tree solvers who didn't have to endure this little "extra."

But back to the theme. The whole thing is forced. That is, the phrases just don't work (for the most part) as teacher comments. "DON'T QUOTE ME ON THIS"? ON THIS? "Don't quote 'me' in this (sentence)," maybe, but "ON" this is just ludicrous phrasing, from a teacher-note perspective (Also, sidenote: really feel like the more common phrase is "DON'T QUOTE ME ON THAT"). "YOUR MONEY'S NO GOOD HERE" actually works pretty well, but the "HALT" part of "HALT, WHO GOES THERE," doesn't really make sense, and as for "DON'T START WITH ME," sigh, the problem isn't the starting with 'me,' it's the using of 'me' at all. That is, if your sentence read "Jamie and me ask if we can get a couple of scratchers," you wouldn't be starting with 'me,' and yet It Would Still Be Wrong ('me' is the objective case, but as the subject of the sentence, obviously the nominative 'I' is called for here). The next two work OK ("ALL YOU NEED IS LOVE,""PULL YOURSELF TOGETHER"), but then the themer set ends on a severe clunker, which I think is supposed to be the "hilarious" grand finale, but ... all the other answers make sense as written, whereas "YOU CAN'T WIN THE MALL" requires you to retain the spacing in "THE MALL" in order for the teacher's comment to make sense. Luckily, I realized early on that I didn't need to read the clues at all—they were convoluted and obviously only going to annoy me, so I just waited for familiar phrases to come into view and then wrote them in, never even glancing at the theme clues. Really easy. Really really easy.

There were so many other things I wanted to correct about these stupid sentences. Where's the comma after "Mrs B" or "your self"? Why is WOW all-caps? Why no question mark at the end of "OMG can you believe it!"? Also, from a crossword editor perspective, why is there a full stop at the end of the first imagined sentence but no end-of-sentence punctuation on any of the others (except the exclamation points on that last one)? So many things about the puzzle feel unpolished an un-thought through. And the fill ... it's oof all around. So many bad short plurals. ORDS! OYS! OOHS! SYNS! An entirely unwelcome "meme currency" clue on the regular old Italian title DOGE. A (to me) obscure Joyce short story ("ARABY") (??) (44A: James Joyce short story set in a bazaar). ECOL when it should be EVOL (I mean, you invoked Darwin, for god's sake, come on!) (106D: Darwinian subj.). The nonsensical DEMONICAL (we dropped the "AL" a long time ago) (119A: Devilish). LIPASE? MEINE? MAZY!? It was hard to find a reason to smile today. I should be grateful that ... what, almost half of the themers kinda worked? MUSCLE CARS and JOE WALSH and ABLE SEAMAN add some manly musk, I suppose. SWEAR JARS, OK, good. But overall, this wasn't a ton of fun to solve. And then to "reward" my successful solve with that absurd Post-It, ugh. Fix!

Bullets:

8A: John Singer Sargent portrait that scandalized Paris in 1884 (MADAME X)— I have an idea which portrait this is, but let's see if I'm right ... [sound of search engine whirring] ... yep, that's it. You've seen it around, probably. Like a fine art version of a Gorey cartoon. So much lithe ennui.

80A: They might be said to be dancing or raging (FLAMES) — I've said a fire is "raging," maybe. FLAMES, I dunno. This one was oddly hard for me (but then "word that can precede / follow X & Y" clues always are)

79A: "Licensed to ___" (Beastie Boys album) ("ILL") — I've known about this album forever—their debut album, a seminal album of my Gen X teendom—and it was only today that I learned it was "Licensed," not "License."

67D: Thick plank of a ship (WALE) — I know this as a corduroy term. Also, a rapper. According to wikipedia, "A wale is one of the strakes of wooden planking that forms the outer skin of the hull of a ship, but substantially thicker than the other strakes." You're gonna have to look up "strakes" yourself. (note: STRAKE(S) has appeared in the NYTXW 13 times (!), but all of those times were 1986 or earlier)

Lead-in to coin, for a meme currency (DOGE) — I don't want to dwell on this, but since a lot of you will be wondering wtf, here you go:

Dogecoin (/ˈdoʊ(d)ʒkɔɪn/ DOHJ-koyn or DOHZH-koyn, Abbreviation: DOGE; sign: Ð) is a cryptocurrency created by software engineers Billy Markus and Jackson Palmer, who decided to create a payment system as a joke, making fun of the wild speculation in cryptocurrencies at the time. It is considered both the first "meme coin", and more specifically the first "dog coin". Despite its satirical nature, some consider it a legitimate investment prospect. Dogecoin features the face of Kabosu from the "doge" meme as its logo and namesake. It was introduced on December 6, 2013, and quickly developed its own online community, reaching a peak market capitalization of over US$85 billion on May 5, 2021. As of 2021, it is the sleeve sponsor of Watford Football Club. (wikipedia)

See you next time.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Constructor: Desirée Penner and Jeff Sinnock

Relative difficulty: Very easy (solved Downs-only)

THEME: TIME AND TIME AGAIN (39A: Repeatedly ... or what can precede both halves of the answers to 19-, 25-, 53- and 63-Across) — both halves of the theme answers can follow "time" in a familiar phrase:

Theme answers:

SLOT MACHINE ("time slot,""time machine") (19A: For which 7-7-7 might be a jackpot)
STAMP CARD ("time stamp,""time card") (25A: Something a loyal customer may redeem for a free drink)
OFF LIMITS ("time off,""time limits") (53A: Taboo)
PERIOD PIECE ("time period,""time piece") (63A: Historical drama, e.g.)

Word of the Day: LAMAR Jackson (16A: ___ Jackson, N.F.L. M.V.P. in 2019 and 2023) —

Lamar Demeatrice Jackson Jr. (born January 7, 1997) is an American professional football quarterback for the Baltimore Ravens of the National Football League (NFL). He played college football for the Louisville Cardinals, winning the Heisman Trophy in 2016, and was selected by the Ravens with the final pick (No. 32) in the first round of the 2018 NFL draft. Intended to serve as a backup in his rookie season, Jackson became the Ravens' starting quarterback after an injury to the incumbent Joe Flacco. He went on to clinch a division title with the team and became the youngest NFL quarterback to start a playoff game at age 21.
Known for his dual-threat play style, Jackson led the NFL in touchdown passes in 2019 while setting the single-season record in rushing yards for a quarterback.For his success, Jackson became the second unanimous NFL Most Valuable Player(MVP) and the fourth black quarterback to win the award. Jackson followed up his MVP campaign by becoming the first quarterback to have multiple seasons with 1,000 rushing yards and led the Ravens to a third consecutive playoff appearance. Following the 2022 season, he signed a five-year contract worth $260 million. In 2023, Jackson led the Ravens to the top seed in the American Football Conference (AFC) and was named NFL MVP for the second time, en route to the team's first AFC Championship game since 2012. (wikipedia)

• • •

Really enjoyed this one. It was one of those days where all the Downs-only magic was flowing my way. SLAMS ERICA CASHMERE right out of the gate, then double back to get PIVOT (after inferring the "P" in SPEC). Slight hesitation at STAMP CARD ("is that a thing? ... oh, right, yes, yes it is") and then up and through SLOTM-, which couldn't be anything but SLOT MACHINE ... so I was flying, whooshing, without even looking at a single Across clue. But with two themers down, I still couldn't tell what the theme was supposed to be, so I tumbled down into the center of the grid (ASTI AIM LIP ATM DUE), and then, from "-EANDTIM-" ... bam, right across the grid.

What a rush to pick up a grid-spanner from just the middle chunk, and a bigger rush to have that grid-spanner clearly, concisely, and perfectly reveal the theme to me. Didn't need to read the clue on TIME AND TIME AGAIN to know exactly what it meant. I thought "OK, if that's the revealer, then there's going to be two ... times ... probably." And sure enough, I look up, and yup, that checks out (time slot, time machine; time stamp, time card). Something about the exhilaration of flying through the grid on just the Downs coupled with the clear and clever wordplay on the revealer phrase made this one a lot of fun to move through. And the remaining themers were still fun to get because, even knowing the gimmick, I still had to pick them up without their clues. Got to experience another no-look whoosh moment later in the solve when I threw down PERIOD PIECE off of just a tiny chunk of central material ("-IOD-"):

Confirmed that answer with PAN (64D: Sweeping camera movement), and from there, it was a fairly easy trip over to the SE corner and ... done. Ended on SRSLY, and yes, SRSLY, despite some less-than-great fill here and there, I liked this one a bunch. The "both halves"-type themes can often yield two-part themers that feel at least a little bit forced, but all four of today's offerings were rock solid—rock solid as standalone answers, and rock solid as two-part "time" followers. Since "time flow" is a thing (isn't it?), I had a moment where I thought AIRFLOW was a themer (29A: What adequate ventilation provides). But then I looked at the symmetrical answer (NY STATE), and couldn't make sense of "time NY" or "time state" (although that kind of sounds like a thing). Also (going back to AIRFLOW), though "air time" is a thing, "time air" is not. So no, those 7-letter Acrosses have nothing to do with the theme. Just the four themers today—clean and clear and thematically perfect.

Moments I could have done without: OBI crossing OBIE (not a dupe, but feels like a dupe); NY STATE (I live in it but it doesn't feel like a solid phrase to me—NYS is an abbr. I've seen, but NY STATE seems to be trying to have it both ways (abbr. and non), and it just feels off); and then, because I had to stop and work for for FIERY, my attention was called to the crosses on that one, which are ... not good. Weird to write in FIERY and know it has to be right but really want it to be wrong because MII and ATRAS look so bad. They really want to be MOI and ATLAS ... but FIERY> FOELY, I'm afraid, so I just had to wince and move on. Those minor infelicities, however, did very little to dampen my overall enjoyment of this one. We also get a couple of decent long downs. CASHMERE ... so soft. And who doesn't love Paul GIAMATTI? I will confess I did not care for The Holdovers, but American Splendor is one of the best biopics I've ever seen (and I don't even like biopics!). GIAMATTI is a perfect Harvey Pekar. Perfect Pekar, I say! If you haven't seen it, treat yourself!

See you next time.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Constructor: Justin Werfel

Relative difficulty: Very easy

THEME: MAKE ENDS MEAT (62A: summary of the phonetic puns at 17-, 31-, 38- and 45-Across?)— familiar phrases have their final words ("ends") turned (homophonically) into meat:

Theme answers:

"FEAR THE WURST!" (17A: "Beware of this sausage!"?)
ON THE LAMB (31A: Like unshorn wool?)
RAISE THE STEAKS (38A: Breed beef cattle?)
"WHAT A BOAR" (45A: Charlotte's first draft for "Some Pig"?)

Word of the Day: Howard ASHMAN (46D: "Little Shop of Horrors" lyricist Howard) —

Howard Elliott Ashman (May 17, 1950 – March 14, 1991) was an American playwright, lyricist and stage director. He is most widely known for his work on feature films for Walt Disney Animation Studios, for which Ashman wrote the lyrics and Alan Menken composed the music. Ashman has been credited as being a main driving force behind the Disney Renaissance. His work included songs for Little Shop of Horrors, The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, and Aladdin. Tim Rice took over to write the rest of the songs for the latter film after Ashman's death in 1991. [...] Over the course of his career, Ashman won two Academy Awards* (one posthumous) out of seven nominations. *[for "Under the Sea" (The Little Mermaid) and the title song from Beauty and the Beast] (wikipedia)

• • •

Second day in a row with a 16-wide grid, second day in a row with a clever revealer. Yesterday's required you to figure out what was going on (TIME AND TIME AGAIN = both parts of the theme answers could follow "time" in familiar phrases). Today's pretty much spells it all out. You literally make the ends (of the familiar original phrases) into meat. I like that the revealer itself follows its own pun logic: MEET into MEAT. This is a tight and reasonably funny theme. I didn't LOL at "FEAR THE WURST!" but I came close. It's just absurd enough to be genuinely amusing. The LAMB and STEAKS puns are kind of ho-hum, but "WHAT A BOAR!" brings the absurdity roaring back. The clue on that one is somehow simultaneously my most and least favorite of the bunch. It's such a creative and unexpected way to come at "WHAT A BOAR!," via a Charlotte's Web-based parallel. Truly inventive. And yet ... would anyone, even a fictional spider, ever look at a piglet and call it a "boar"? I guess technically (if Merriam-Webster dot com is to be believed, and why not...) a "boar" is simply an "uncastrated male swine," and, I mean, while I don't have any specific memory of Wilbur's testicles, I'm going to assume he did fall in the "uncastrated" category. And yet BOAR to me is a much different animal, esp. the BOAR that you eat as meat (which is wild; otherwise it would just be called "pork," right?). Annnnnnyway, enough about Wilbur's testicles. I would never think to call Wilbur a "BOAR," but we're talking crossword puns here, and in pun world, absurdity pays. "WHAT A BOAR!"—ironically!—keeps the themer set from sliding into bo(a)ring territory. On the whole, I thought this was a solid Tuesday theme.

This puzzle really was gauged too easy today, even for a (typically easy) Tuesday. The puns were a piece of (beef?)cake and as for the fill, it was point-and-shoot the whole way. Hmm, that metaphor sounded good coming out of my brain, but I'm not sure it works on a technical level. But you know what I mean. It was easy. Point (my eyes at the clue), and then shoot (the answer into the grid). OK, now I do like the metaphor. Welcome to My Brain Writing In Real Time. This will not become a regular feature of the blog, as it is far too ridiculous. But back to the easiness. Too much of it. Too easy. Zero hesitation. Well, almost. There was one hesitation, which felt like a brick wall compared to the rest of the puzzle. I had no idea who Howard ASHMAN was. I'm sailing along with absolutely no resistance and all of a sudden this pop culture proper noun comes crashing into my puzzle. From outer space, or so it seemed, compared to the very ordinary and familiar contents of the rest of the grid. I had -MAN and absolutely no idea what to do with those first three letters. And that, ladies and gentlemen, constituted 100% of today's puzzle difficulty, just as AT A GUESS constituted 100% of my flinching at unpleasant answers. I have never heard anyone use that phrase, to my knowledge. "AS A GUESS," maybe, but AT A GUESS feels weird. AT A GALLOP, yes, AT A GUESS ... unless you are AT A GUESS clothing outlet ... no.

["Hey, man, I'm finished shopping, can you come pick me up?""Sure, man, where are you?]

Notes:

21A: Balaam couldn't move his (ASS)— truly the Bible's worst dancer (though not its wurst dancer ... I don't think the Bible has one of those)

28A: Small drum (TABOR)— it was a good day for knowing your short crossword words. Would I know what a TABOR is without crosswords? Maybe ... maybe not. Would I know SPA was an actual Belgian town. Mmm, possible. But I'm fairly confident I learned this fact from crosswords (where I get most of my SPA facts, having never, to my knowledge, been to a SPA ... although ... hmmm ... that may not be true. I've gotten a massage on vacation a couple of times, and those might have taken place in or around SPAs. AEGIS was another word that came easily because of crosswords (52A: Name of Athena's shield). I knew ENBY (from "N.B." i.e. "nonbinary") before I ever saw it in crosswords, but I know that every time that word appears, someone somewhere is learning it for the first time (20A: Genderqueer identity, informally). This is the third appearance for ENBY (there have also been two ENBIES). The term has only been appearing in the NYTXW since 2022, so if you're just getting the memo, don't feel too bad.
41D: Actor McGregor (EWAN)— coincidentally, just watched an EWAN McGregor movie yesterday—a 2011 Stephen Soderbergh flick called Haywire that I stumbled into while browsing The Criterion Channel (hallowed be its name). It's an action thriller starring real-life MMA star Gina Carano as an extremely badass black ops agent who gets in lots of beautifully choreographed and impressively violent fights with a lot of dudes, some of them big stars (Channing Tatum! Michael Fassbender!). EWAN McGregor plays Carano's employer/handler. To say any more would spoil it. It's a tight, taut, fun film. Very much worth it if you've got 90 minutes to burn.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Constructor: Jeffrey Lease

Relative difficulty: Easy

THEME: LIGHTNING BOLT (37A: What's formed by connecting this puzzle's circled letters from A to F and then back to A) — four things that feature a LIGHTNING BOLT ... and then you draw a picture of a LIGHTNING BOLT, if you want (in the app, there's a little animation of the bolt being formed and flashing)

Theme answers:

CAMERA FLASH (18A: Photography option commonly represented by a 37-Across)
CHARGERS (23A: N.F.L. team whose helmet features a 37-Across)
GATORADE (50A: Drink with a 37-Across in its logo)
HARRY POTTER (56A: Character with a 37-Across on his forehead)

Word of the Day: "'TIS the Voice of the Lobster" (12D: "___ the Voice of the Lobster" (Lewis Carroll poem)) —

"'Tis the Voice of the Lobster" is a poem by Lewis Carroll that appears in Chapter 10 of his 1865 novel Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. It is recited by Alice to the Mock Turtle and the Gryphon. // "'Tis the Voice of the Lobster" is a parody of "The Sluggard", a moralistic poem by Isaac Watts which was well known in Carroll's day. "The Sluggard" depicts the unsavory lifestyle of a slothful individual as a negative example. Carroll's lobster's corresponding vice is that he is weak and cannot back up his boasts, and is consequently easy prey. This fits the pattern of the predatory parody poems in the two Alice books. [...] As published in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1867):

[After the Gryphon and the Mock Turtle have sung and danced to the Lobster Quadrille, Alice mentions the poems she has attempted to recite, and the Gryphon tells Alice to stand and recite "'Tis the voice of the sluggard", which she reluctantly does] "but her head was so full of the Lobster Quadrille, that she hardly knew what she was saying ..."
'Tis the voice of the lobster; I heard him declare,
"You have baked me too brown, I must sugar my hair."
As a duck with its eyelids, so he with his nose
Trims his belt and his buttons, and turns out his toes.
[The Gryphon and the Mock Turtle interrupt with a brief exchange about what this unfamiliar version of the poem means, and then insist that Alice continue:]
I passed by his garden, and marked, with one eye,
How the owl and the oyster were sharing a pie—
[Alice's recitation is cut short by the Mock Turtle, who finds the poem "the most confusing thing I ever heard".]

• • •

Usually the themes get more interesting and complex as the week goes on, but today, after two puzzles with very clever concepts and revealers on Monday and Tuesday, we get this, which is blandly straightforward. The illustration / animation / connect-the-dots is, I guess, supposed to be some kind of bonus or value-added, but there's nothing particularly eye-popping or elegant about it, and from a solving standpoint, it does nothing. It's a cheap piece of glitz slapped on at the end to make you think something special has happened, when really all that has happened is that you've written in four things that feature LIGHTNING BOLTs, which the puzzle spells out for you, with a revealer that's merely descriptive. No wordplay, no trickery, nothing to figure out. And yes, those four theme answers do indeed feature LIGHTNING BOLTs, can't argue with that ... although I can argue with the phrase CAMERA FLASH, which felt painfully redundant. I had the FLASH part and thought "... but that's it ... the bolt represents the flash ... what is this extra stuff in front of flash?" After a couple of crosses got me the so-obvious-it's-difficult CAMERA, I thought "your clue says 'photography,' of course it's a CAMERA, yeesh." And since that was the last themer I got, that was how I ended the puzzle—at its weakest point, thematically. When I first worked out "flash," I thought the answer was going to have something to do with the DC superhero THE FLASH, whose symbol is also a LIGHTNING BOLT, I'm pretty sure (yes—see picture). Speaking of "flash," that's about how long it took me to figure out the theme:

Got CHARGERS easily and since I know very well what the CHARGERS helmet looks like, the puzzle essentially handed me the revealer right there. This left me with a "that's it?" feeling right there. The suspense, gone. All that's left is just the deflating prospect of finding other LIGHTNING BOLT things, and, of course, drawing on my puzzle like some kind of child. BRAH! Come on, BRAH! I did not hate this puzzle, but (despite the slapped-on decorative element) it felt awfully plain compared to the puzzles that preceded it this week.

For someone who has (fairly recently) watched every Friends episode, I had an oddly awkward start today at 1D: Friend on "Friends" (MONICA) when I (mentally) wrote in PHOEBE and then tried (briefly) to convince myself that maybe RuPaul's Drag Race aired on ... PBS? (1A: "RuPaul's Drag Race" airer (MTV)). Seemed ... unlikely. I mean, maybe someday that is where it will air, but not in these times. Probably. I also tried to make the "I'm on vacation" message be BRB, which is now making me laugh—"Be right back! In just two weeks! Please hold!" But no, it's OOO ("Out of Office"), which you'd use in business settings, in texts or in business communication apps like Slack. But these opening hiccups were just that—slight delays, not real obstacles, and there's not one other part of this grid where I struggled even a little. The puzzles have been almost absurdly easy this week.

Notes:

8D: Soldier for hire, in brief (MERC)— never saw this clue (the puzzle was so easy that some of the answers just filled themselves in from crosses), but I have a question. A pronunciation question. If MERC is short for "mercenary," which has a soft "c," then do you pronounce MERC with a soft "c" as well, so that it ends up sounding like "murse," or do you go with the hard, manly hard-"c" sound, so that it sounds like ... Merck? As in "The Merck Manual"? Or is this word only for writing, and you're not supposed to actually pronounce it? It just seems awkward any way you slice it. The Chicago Mercantile Exchange Center is known as "The MERC," and there, the pronunciation is unambiguous (because of that hard "c" in "Mercantile"). Same with MERC as an abbreviation of the bygone car brand, "Mercury." I just can't imagine calling some (theoretically) tough dude a "murse." And yet "merk" also seems wrong ... [fiddles with internet] ... OK, well, Merriam-webster dot com is telling me it's "merk." Rhymes with "Herc." Or "jerk." Not a fan of this "c" sound switch, but I (obviously) don't make the rules.

63A: Drink aptly found within "social event" (ALE)— condescendingly easy, especially for a Wednesday. Adds to the "child's placemat" quality of this connect-the-dots puzzle. Also, I don't know that ALE is more "apt" to be consumed at a "social event" than any other beverage. Tea coffee wine cocktails. Maybe your breakfast beverages, your milks and your juices, and not particularly social, but most of the rest of the beverage category goes that direction. I don't think of ALE as iconically "social."
30D: What might be out for a spell? (WAND) — hands down, far and away the best clue in the puzzle. A real bright light in an otherwise (ironically) unflashy puzzle.
51D: Was part of a series (ACTED) — I said I had no trouble after the small trouble in the NW, but I did have some more small trouble here. "Series" was sufficiently ambiguous that I needed several crosses to realize it was a television series.
39D: Common clown name (BOBO)— I just don't believe that there are "common" clown names. If you are a named clown, then your name should be unique. I mean, how many clowns can you even name? Bozo, Krusty ... Ronald McDonald? Pagliacci? How many BOBOs are there, exactly? And how many would you need in order for the name to be clown-common? Two?

See you next time.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Constructor: Grant Boroughs

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium

THEME:"W" OR "D" CHOICE (58A: Author's concern that, when parsed as four parts, provides a hint to this puzzle's theme) — six circled squares can contain either a "W" or a "D" and still work (i.e. still make plausible answers, in both directions)

Theme answers:

COW / COD (1D: Major food source animal)
WASHBOARDS / DASHBOARDS (15A: Instrument panels)
PAW / PAD (9A: Dog leg terminus)
WITHER / DITHER (11D: Fail to act decisively in the face of a challenge)
WRY HUMOR / DRY HUMOR (28A: Trademark of deadpan stand-ups)
WINED / DINED (28D: Lavishly regaled, in a way)
WELLS / DELLS (33A: Areas that are lower than their surrounding terrain)
FLEW / FLED (21D: Raced, as away from danger)
SOW / SOD (52A: Do some garden work)
PLOW / PLOD (39D: Move forward resolutely)
WAY AHEAD / DAY AHEAD (44A: What lies before you, with "the")
WISHES / DISHES (44D: Things listed on a wedding registry)

Word of the Day: WASHBOARDS (15A)

n.
1.
a. A board having a corrugated surface on which clothes can be rubbed in the process of laundering.
b. Music A similar board used as a percussion instrument.
2. A board fastened to a wall at the floor; a baseboard.
3. Nautical A thin plank fastened to the side of a boat or to the sill of a port to keep out the sea and the spray.
adj.
Having rows of ridges or indentations similar to those of a washboard:washboard abs; a washboard dirt road.

• • •

This one really tries to impress you with volume. Volume volume volume! That is certainly ... a lot of D/W squares. Six squares, twelve clues that have to work both ways (that is, for "D" and "W" versions of the answers). That's ambitious, and it creates a *very* thematically dense grid—twelve themers plus the revealer, with hardly any answers not crossing some bit of fixed thematic material (as a constructor, you "fix" your themers in place before you fill the rest of the grid). So, architecturally, this one is ... really going for it. But the problems of "really going for it" are all on display here, and very predictable. Two big issues: forced cluing and strained fill. As for the cluing, you have to really (really) play on the margins of word meanings at times to make those clues work for both words. DAY AHEAD works great for its clue (44A: What lies before you, with "the"). WAY AHEAD really, really doesn't. WAY FORWARD, maybe? If you were cluing WAY AHEAD normally, you would never, ever use the clue that's used today. In fact, you'd probably go with a different sense of WAY AHEAD entirely ([Leading by a lot], [Up big], something like that). Time and again, one of the two D/W answers works great, the other ... uh, not so much. See especially WELLS for its clue (33A: Areas that are lower than their surrounding terrain), and especially WASHBOARDS for its clue (15A: Instrument panels). I was done with the puzzle and looking up WASHBOARDS before I realized that "instrument" must indicate the musical instrument type of "washboard," the kind played in jug bands, say, which is really just ... an actual washboard, right? The kind used for scrubbing clothes before washing machines came along? I guess WASHBOARDS are "panels" ... of a sort. Still, [Instrument panels] is some ... let's be generous and say "inventive" cluing. Certainly works for DASHBOARDS. But for WASHBOARDS ... I dunno, man. Pushing it.

And then there's the fill. No surprise that it creaks—it's under a lot of thematic pressure. But it really creaks, and that's after the constructor has added not one but two pairs of cheater squares (black squares that don't increase word count, added to make filling a grid easier)—just before ACES and just before PA(W/D), and then their symmetrical equivalents. I had a "oh it's gonna be one of these days, is it?" moment very (very) early on:

You will never (ever) see the word ODIC anywhere but crosswords. I studied Keats and other ODISTs (another crossword favorite), and I never saw the word ODIC in the wild, to my knowledge. ODIC makes ODIST look like everyday language. ODIC. That's what I'd call someone who looked and acted like ODIE from "Garfield." Someone dim-witted and annoyingly happy, with their tongue hanging out all the time. To encounter ODIC at literally step two, that was deflating, and ominous. See also ENUF, and not one but two crossword honorifics (SAHIB, BWANA). Plus, dear lord, HAH and HAH!? HAH HAH!?!? No one says "HAH HAH!" Laugh syllables are already the lowest form of crossword fill, but here you've gone and combined them in some new and unholy way, why!?!? For 19A: Syllables of laughter, I wrote in "HA HA HA," as did all nice normal decent and good people. The fact that those mutant HAHs also crossed DAH (!?) ... it's all a little much. I mean, I know I said laugh syllables are the lowest form of crossword fill, but I forgot about Morse Code. ENUF said (oof, ENUF ... you're killing me, puzzle).

The revealer itself ends up feeling forced, too, when you read it as four parts. "You have a 'W' or 'D' choice!" It doesn't really trip off the tongue. But on a clunky, hyperliteral level, it works. The whole thing works, but it clunks, and it wasn't particularly fun to solve. Once you get the gimmick, the puzzle actually gets easier, as you can fill all those circled squares, and with "W" and "D" options, you can get all those crosses really quickly. Only trouble for me today came with the whole HAH HAH-not-HA HA HA fiasco. That corner also had PELHAM, which I did not know and would never have heard of were it not for one of the greatest movies of all time, The Taking of PELHAM 1-2-3 (the original, 1974 version, with Matthau). It's about the hijacking of a subway car. Do yourself a favor and watch it. Right now, today. It's perfect. I wish I were watching it right now. But PELHAM wasn't clued via the movie, it was clued how it was clued (9D: ___ Bay, neighborhood of the Bronx), so I was at a loss. I also had LONGEST instead of LARGEST for a bit at 40A: Like the femur, among all bones in the body. The femur is, in fact, that LONGEST bone in the body, so if you faltered there too, you have nothing to be ashamed of.

Bullets:

36A: Toss out (SCRAP) — I wrote in SCRAP but then figured no, it has to be SCRUB, because no way they'd use SCRAP when "SCRAPpy-Doo" is in the clue for UNCLE, which crosses this answer (at the "C") (29D: Scooby-Doo, to Scrappy-Doo). But SCRUB was a bad fit for the clue and the crosses didn't work, so it was back to SCRAP. Bah.

30A: Lou Grant's wife on "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" (EDIE)— we did a complete "MTM" rewatch last year, so this answer made me smile. EDIE is very likable, but ... she's not on many episodes, really. I feel like over seven seasons I saw her maybe half a dozen times? (Looks like it was just five!). But Lou does talk about her a lot. They get divorced! She gets remarried! (spoiler alert). Anyway, this seems like it would be very hard for most people, especially the youngs. You just work crosses and wait for something namelike to appear, I guess. We all have to do that sometimes.

60D: Private sleeping accommodations? (COT) — sleeping accommodations for a "Private" in the Army
51D: What makes a sticker stickier? (AN "I") — you had the letter "I" to "sticker" and bam, "stickier"
20D: Melancholy Musketeer (ATHOS) — I've known ATHOS forever, for crossword reasons, but it occurs to me now that I have never read The Three Musketeers or, as far as I can remember, seen any film version of their story. So this "Melancholy" bit is news to me. I had no idea. But again, I didn't need to—"Musketeer," five letters, ATHOS, moving on ... (the other Musketeers are ARAMIS and ... POTHOS? ... [looks it up] ... dammit, PORTHOS! So close. Ah well, doesn't matter, you're never gonna see PORTHOS in crosswords anyway (well, you might, but it's been 16 years, so don't hold your breath).

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Constructor: Billy Bratton

Relative difficulty: Medium

THEME: none

Word of the Day: kri-kri (19A: Island home of a goat known as the kri-kri (CRETE)) —

The kri-kri (Capra hircus cretica), sometimes called the Cretan goat, Agrimi, or Cretan Ibex, is a feral goat inhabiting the Eastern Mediterranean, previously considered a subspecies of wild goat. The kri-kri today is found only in Greece: specifically on Crete and on three small islands off its coast (Dia, Thodorou, and Agii Pantes); as well as on the island of Sapientza (Messenian Oinousses) off the southwestern coast of Peloponnese, where it was brought in great numbers in order to protect the species from extinction. [...] The kri-kri is not thought to be indigenous to Crete, most likely having been imported to the island during the time of the Minoan civilization. It was once common throughout the Aegean but the peaks of the 2,400 m (8,000 ft) White Mountains of Western Crete are their last strongholds—particularly a series of almost vertical 900 m (3,000 ft) cliffs called 'the Untrodden'—at the head of the Samaria Gorge. This mountain range, which hosts another 14 endemic animal species, is protected as a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve. In total, their range extends to the White Mountains, the Samaria National Forest and the islets of Dia, Thodorou, and Agii Pandes. Recently some were introduced onto two more islands. // By 1960, the kri-kri was under threat, with a population below 200. It had been the only meat available to mountain guerillas during the German occupation in World War II. Its status was one reason why the Samaria Gorge became a national park in 1962. There are still only about 2,000 animals on the island and they are considered vulnerable: hunters still seek them for their tender meat, grazing grounds have become scarcer and disease has affected them. Hybridization is also a threat, as the population has interbred with ordinary goats. Hunting them is strictly prohibited. [...] The kri-kri is a symbol of the island, much used in tourism marketing and official literature. // As molecular analyses demonstrate, the kri-kri is not, as previously thought, a distinct subspecies of wild goat. Rather, it is a feral domestic goat, derived from the first stocks of goats domesticated in the Levant and other parts of the Eastern Mediterranean around 8000-7500 BCE. Therefore, it represents a nearly ten-thousand-year-old "snapshot" of the first domestication of goats.

• • •

This was a decidedly unpleasant puzzle, not because it's poorly made (the grid seems fine, for the most part), but because it's just loaded with the worst people and things. BOOBIRDS and EDGELORDs and CON ARTISTS and the angry mobs with TORCHES shouting "I'M MAD" and "THAT'S A LIE!" and then the REEK and the STANK and the JELLO SHOTS, like ... this is not the vibe I want on Friday. Not at all. If the parade of awfulness doesn't bug you, there are other potential turnoffs. Maybe you dislike the puzzle because it's loaded with sports (or, in the case of poker, "sports"): ANTE (46D: Alternative to blinds) and SINBIN (40D: Penalty box, in hockey slang) and at least three (3) American football clues (RTS, Andy REID, GOES DEEP). Or you might be put off by the preponderance of pop culture: BATWOMAN and OUTKAST and Taylor Swift (again) and LASSIE—actually, that doesn't seem like that much pop culture—none of it bothered me, but I know how some of you are. Anyway, there are lots of avenues to dislike. Choose your own adventure! Or, maybe all the negativity (or sports, or pop culture) really floated your boat. If so, that's cool. I'm happy for you. But I found this a downer. I mean, the marquee answer is WASTED POTENTIAL! Lord knows I am no fan of relentless positivity, or positivity for positivity's sake, but yeesh. This was depressing.

And then there's VINY (3D: Ivy descriptor). I have never described ivy as VINY. I've never heard anyone describe anything as VINY, I don't think. Something overgrown with vines might be VINY, perhaps, but ivy simply is a vine. It's not VINY. It's ... vine. A vine. A type of vine. Fun fact (sorta): the wikipedia page for "ivy" contains not a single mention of the word "vine" (to say nothing of "VINY"). Luckily, VINY is the only answer that made my eye twitch today. The grid is actually pretty smooth overall. It's just smoothly filled with offputting stuff. I was happy to have to work a little today—puzzles have been running easy, and even if this one occasionally seemed to be Trying Too Hard (TTH) where "clever"/misleading cluing was concerned, I didn't mind that much. Weirdest mistake I made all day was reading 4D: Concourse info, in brief (ETA) as [Course intro, in brief], and then writing in APP ... you know, you order APPs before the main ... course (!?!?!). Luckily "AM I TOO LATE?!" would not be denied, and then I relooked at 4-Down and read it correctly. Oof.

Definitely had to think a bit to get CON ARTISTS (16A: Builders of pyramids, perhaps) (those pyramids are made of "schemes," I guess). First real mistake came at 21A: Dish topped with lime, basil and hoisin sauce (PHO), where I had the "H" and wrote in ... AHI! What can I say: crossword reflexes sometimes fail you. I also (briefly, and strangely) had SECOND MENU (?) before SECRET MENU (24D: What might have sandwiches under wraps?) and LOAD (??) before LOAN (29D: Floated sum). On that last one, I think I was thinking of a different realm of finance, namely mutual funds. I dunno, I'm going so fast that who knows what logic my brain is using? Anyway, LOAD made the ENSUES clue (already hard) much harder (39A: What hilarity often does, it's said). I forgot the title of DFW's first novel (The BROOM of the System); he taught for a time at my (and Joel Fagliano's) alma mater, and he was a major author, but I never could get into him. I really liked his essays, but the fiction never hooked me. Still, I am familiar with his titles, and was mad at myself that BROOM didn't come to me more quickly. Everything else in the grid was pretty easy for me today.

Bullets:

15A: Musician's pitch? (DEMO) — when you are pitching (as in "selling" or "shopping" yourself) around as a musician, you might give people a DEMO tape of your music.
35A: Shells out for dinner, say (PASTA) — this is part of that Trying Too Hard (TTH) thing I was talking about. The "shells"-for-pasta misdirection is old as the hills, but the addition of "out" here makes the whole thing awkward. Great on the (fake-out) surface level, i.e. it definitely makes you think "pays for," but the out is completely gratuitous on the PASTA-meaning level. I guess they are "out" in that they are ... out ... on the table, ready to be eaten? It's bad. Clue needs a "?" to justify itself.
9D: Called out on Instagram, informally (ATTED)— is there a "formal" calling out on Instagram? Like, a black-tie version of letting someone know about the cat video you just posted? ATTED is great from a "modern! In-the-language!" perspective but truly awful from a word aesthetic perspective. Some terms weren't meant to be written out. (ATTED comes from the at-sign (@), which you put in front of someone's handle in a post if you want them to be notified about it. Replying to others' posts is also a form of atting. "Don't AT me" is a common statement of defiance (often facetious) from someone expressing an opinion they believe will be highly unpopular).
11D: They're set for a night of drinking (JELLO SHOTS) — Jell-O has to "set," i.e. firm up.

46D: Alternative to blinds (ANTE) — this is all the research I'm willing to do for you, so little do I care about poker: "Blinds are forced bets posted by players to the left of the dealer button in flop-style poker games. The number of blinds is usually two, but it can range from none to three. When there are two blinds they are called the small blind and the big blind." (wikipedia)
20D: Array on a trolley (TEA) — I wanted something to do with luggage. Then something to do with sushi (!?). You know, where you sit at the sushi bar and the items come around on a little conveyor belt ... I thought maybe that was called a "trolley." I have never seen tea on a trolley. Desserts, yes. TEA, no. But then the amount of time I have spent in tea houses is somewhere near nil.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Constructor: Katie Hoody

Relative difficulty: Medium to Medium-Challenging

THEME: none

Word of the Day: Anna MAGNANI (39D: Anna ___, first Italian to win an acting Oscar) —

Anna Maria Magnani (Italian: [ˈanna maɲˈɲaːni]; 7 March 1908 – 26 September 1973) was an Italian actress. She was known for her explosive acting and earthy, realistic portrayals of characters.
Born in Rome, she worked her way through Rome's Academy of Dramatic Art by singing at night clubs. During her career, her only child was stricken by polio when he was 18 months old and remained disabled. She was referred to as "La Lupa", the "perennial toast of Rome" and a "living she-wolf symbol" of the cinema. Time described her personality as "fiery", and drama critic Harold Clurman said her acting was "volcanic". In the realm of Italian cinema, she was "passionate, fearless, and exciting", an actress whom film historian Barry Monush calls "the volcanic earth mother of all Italian cinema." Director Roberto Rossellini called her "the greatest acting genius since Eleonora Duse". Playwright Tennessee Williams became an admirer of her acting and wrote The Rose Tattoo (1955) specifically for her to star in, a role for which she received an Academy Award for Best Actress, becoming the first Italian – and first non-native English speaking woman – to win an Oscar.
After meeting director Goffredo Alessandrini, she received her first screen role in The Blind Woman of Sorrento (La cieca di Sorrento, 1934) and later achieved international attention in Rossellini's Rome, Open City (1945), which is seen as launching the Italian neorealism movement in cinema. As an actress, she became recognized for her dynamic and forceful portrayals of "earthy lower-class women" in such films as L'Amore (1948), Bellissima (1951), The Rose Tattoo (1955), The Fugitive Kind (1960) and Mamma Roma (1962). As early as 1950, Life had already stated that Magnani was "one of the most impressive actresses since Garbo". (wikipedia)

• • •

A real up-and-down, high-and-low experience, this one. Those stacks are really nice—clean, crisp, clear, colloquial. Often, with stacks of long answers like that, the short answers holding them in place can get pretty dicey, but generally, I thought those (mostly) short answers held up. There's nothing that made me go "absolutely not!," at any rate. So just in terms of filling the grid, the top and bottom seem very nice. The middle of the grid is less flashy, less interesting, choppier, but it generally holds up. I could be very happy not seeing the word DECOCT ever again in my life, but we all have our burdens to bear, and I can bear that one. The middle does have the great "AM I NUTS?," so ... you take the good, you take the bad, as they say (in the theme song for The Facts of Life, among other places, probably). My problem today wasn't with the fill so much as the absurdly (at one point, literally laughably) trivial and technical cluing on some of these answers. Just arcane stuff from all these different areas about which my knowledge is not exactly deep. Areas like "Mountain biking moves" (they have "moves"?) and oil drilling (MUDS!?) and Slavic lore—that's the one that really got me. I have "RIDIC" written in the margin next to RUS (21A: Brother of Lech and Czech in Slavic lore). RUS is already bad fill, the kind you want solvers to just ignore, so your only good option there is some clue for the actual country of RUSsia. "Slavic lore," LOL. Sure, Jan. I watch so many (So Many) movies (~1/day since COVID made a cinephile out of me), but all my viewing did not prepare me for a character played by an actor I've never heard of (Kieron Moore?) in a movie I've never heard of (David and Bathsheba?). URIAH filled itself in easily from crosses, but yeeeeesh. ANTARCTIC mountains (3D: Like Mount Terror and Mount Terra Nova) ... non-Guevara CHEs (22A: ___ Thai (Vietnamese fruit cocktail)) ... Insectoid Moon Dwellers (!?!?) (11D: Insectoid moon dwellers in H.G. Wells's "The First Men in the Moon"). Trivia trivia trivia ... it was really really really leaning on trivia for the "difficulty." There's still a healthy dose of tricky wordplay, but this puzzle felt slightly old-fashioned in the amount of arcana it wanted you to come up with. RUS, LOL. It's like when you used to have to know three-letter European rivers of no note. Lots of love for the stacks today, but a handful of UGHS for some of these clues.

This puzzle felt very hard at first. With stacks like this, I generally make a pass at all the (mostly) short Downs before I ever look at the Acrosses, and that strategy paid off today. I had what felt like almost nothing after my pass at the Downs up top. In fact, I had just five, most of them non-adjacent, and only one of which (HOTH) I was dead certain of. And yet from just those five answers ... bam!

[forever doomed to misspell BIALY!]

I left out a sixth answer there, actually, because it was wrong: I had OOO ("out of office") tentatively (and erroneously) written in at 12D: Texter's "off-line" (IRL) (short for "in real life"). But even with that wrong-o in there, I was able to see "THAT'S IMPOSSIBLE"—my highly ironic gateway answer! Totally blocked trying to come out of the NW. For all I knew those mountains at 3D: Like Mount Terror and Mount Terra Nova were ANT...ILLEAN? ANTIPODEAN? ANT-RIDDEN? Maybe they're the mountains where the SELENITES live, I dunno. Couldn't see SHAMED or TEAM UP (me: "TEAM...ER? A TEAMER? That's not a thing!"). So I abandoned that area, and, as you can see (from where the cursor ended up in the screenshot of my finished grid), didn't return to that area until the very end. There's no other part of the grid that really stopped me in my tracks, but I definitely had to work for it today. There's only one square that looks like it could end up in Natick territory. I had -UDS at 39A: Lubricants used in oil drilling and was fully prepared to believe ... well, anything. SUDS. Those seem ... lubricantish. Just lucky that I knew who Anna MAGNANI was (39D: Anna ___ first Italian to win an acting Oscar). I don't know that I've seen her in anything (the '50s in general and non-crime / non-Giallo Italian cinema in particular being a couple of major holes in my cinema experience), but hers is a name I've heard a lot. MUDS / MAGNANI seems like it has wipe-out potential (MUDS MAGNANI, also a great potential gangster nickname). I don't see any other wipe-out squares, but with this much trivia, this many names, it's always possible I'm missing something.

Explainers / Complainers:

15D: Blissful patch (EDEN) — is it just a "patch"? I always imagined EDEN as somewhat more ... extensive. Maybe it's being used metaphorically. Not the EDEN, but an EDEN, i.e. any idyllic place.
18A: Put down (SHAMED) — in pretty typical Saturday fashion, the cluing really leans into word ambiguity today. Easy to read "Put down" in the sense of "put down your gun!" or "put down an uprising" etc. The "Lofty" passages at 41A: Lofty passages are literally lofty, and not metaphorically "lofty," like poetic passages, as the phrase implies. The "Set" in 23A: Set against? (NAYS) are a "set" of people who are "against" something, i.e. a noun, not a verb. The "flashers" aren't perverts in the park, but the things on your car that WARN other drivers that there's a car stopped in an unexpected place. The "drafted" in 34D: No longer drafted, say (SENT), is not a professional sports "drafted" but a correspondence "drafted" (i.e. "drafted" as in "written"). The "Lead" in 56D: Lead follower: Abbr. (DET.) is not an element, or or even just the word "Lead," but a thing a detective might follow in order to solve a case. The "figures" in 14D: Corporate figures (LOGOS) could've been anything: people? financial figures? This ... is Saturday.
20A: First name in classic horror (LON) — more old movies. In a bizarre coincidence, I watched LON Chaney earlier this week in Tod Browning's The Unknown (1927), where he plays an (apparently) armless knife thrower in the circus who falls in love with a woman (young Joan Crawford!) who can't stand being touched by men. To tell you any more would be to give away crucial surprises. It's only about an hour long, on the Criterion Channel. Bizarre as hell, and worth it!

40A: Zest for life: Abbr. (SYN) — "Zest" and "life" are (in some contexts) SYNonyms.
22D: Pair of accessories? (CEES) — as in, there are a "pair" of CEES in "accessories"—they're really bringing out every clue trick in the book today!
47A: Invite qualifier, for short (BYO) — Bring Your Own (usually Beer, but can refer to any alcohol, really)

50D: Online home services marketplace (ANGI) — née "Angie's List"; I saw ads for this once and thought "Oh, god, we're gonna see ANGI in the grid at some point, aren't we?" So ... no problems for me, but maybe problems for thee.
43D: Melodramatic cry of appreciation ("MY IDOL!")— man this really Really wants to be "MY HERO!" That is the cry, specifically from melodrama—save the girl tied to the train tracks, and the first thing she exclaims is "MY HERO!" Absolutely standard melodrama stuff! I just don't think "MY IDOL!" gets "cried" nearly as much, and certainly not in "melodramatic" situations.

See you next time.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

P.S. Selene is the ancient Greek goddess of the moon, which was how you were supposed to be able to infer SELENITES, if you didn't know it outright. I knew the goddess, so the SELEN- part was OK, but I had them as SELENIANS ... a much cooler, more sci-fi-worthy name, imho

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Constructor: Gary Larson and Doug Peterson

Relative difficulty: Easy

THEME:"Manual Dexterity" — familiar phrases clued as hypothetical titles for "manuals" of various types, where the first part of the phrase is a rough synonym of "Understanding" ...

Theme answers:

KNOWING THE SCORE (23A: Title for a tutorial on musical composition?)
GOING OVER THE TOP (41A: ... a primer on playing dreidel?)
PICKING UP STEAM (57A: ... a volume on vapor dynamics?)
LEARNING CURVES (83A: ... a step-by-step guide for throwing breaking balls?)
GETTING YOUR GOAT (97A: ... a handbook on raising kids?)
TACKLING DUMMIES (120A: ... a D.I.Y. manual on other D.I.Y. manuals?)

Word of the Day: EVA Le Gallienne (91A: ___ Le Gallienne, star of 1920s Broadway) —

[in title role of Peter Pan]
Eva Le Gallienne (January 11, 1899 – June 3, 1991) was a British-born American stage actress, producer, director, translator, and author. A Broadway star by age 21, in 1926 she left Broadway behind to found the Civic Repertory Theatre, where she served as director, producer, and lead actress. Noted for her boldness and idealism, she was a pioneering figure in the American theater, setting the stage for the Off-Broadway and regional theater movements that swept the country later in the 20th century.
Le Gallienne devoted herself to the art of the theater as opposed to the show business of Broadway. She felt strongly that high-quality plays should be affordable and accessible to all people who wanted to see them. She ran the Civic Repertory Theatre for seven years (1926–1934), producing 37 plays during that time with a company whose actors included Burgess Meredith, John Garfield, Norman Lloyd, J. Edward Bromberg, Paul Leyssac, Florida Friebus, David Manners, Josephine Hutchinson, Alla Nazimova, Joseph Schildkraut, and Leona Roberts. [...] Le Gallienne starred as Peter Pan in the production that opened at the Civic Rep on November 6, 1928. The flying effects were superbly designed, and for the first time Peter flew out over the heads of the audience. The critics loved "LeG," as she became known, and more than a few favored her performance over that of Maude Adams, the first to play the role on Broadway. The Civic Repertory Theatre presented Peter Pan 129 times. [...] Le Gallienne was a lesbian, and was as open about her love of women as it was possible to be in her day. Robert Schanke, who published a biography of Le Gallienne in 1992, claimed that she struggled with her sexual orientation throughout her life. But, such assertions are contradicted by Le Gallienne's own letters and diaries, in which she wrote confidently about her romantic relationships with women. (wikipedia)

• • •

Blew through this with very little sense of what was happening. It took a while to register that these were hypothetical manual titles—the puzzle title didn't really register, so all I could see was a bunch of punny stuff happening. But you have a fairly tight and consistent theme here: the themers are all gerund phrases where the gerund can be a rough synonym of "understanding" and the object of the gerund is some noun that has (for the purpose of the pun) changed its original meaning (e.g. you have to reimagine the meaning of SCORE, THE TOP, etc.). On a very technical level, there's a certain amount of inconsistency when it comes to the pun changing the meaning of the terms in the base phrase. For instance, the KNOWING in KNOWING THE SCORE doesn't change meaning in the pun, only THE SCORE does, whereas the GOING OVER in GOING OVER THE TOPdefinitely changes meaning. The objects of the gerunds all change meaning in the puns except STEAM, which remains water vapor in the base phrase and the pun phrase. Ideally, both gerund and object of gerund change meaning in the pun, and that's what happens ... mostly. Well, two-thirds of the time. I told you this was all "very technical"! I think because the theme isn't terribly exciting, the technical inconsistencies are standing out to me. I will say that punwise, I really liked GOING OVER THE TOP, and I loved the punchline—that final themer is far and away the best themer, in that it's kind of a meta-themer, and it (appropriately) gets the place of honor there at the very end (bottom) of the puzzle. DUMMIES™ is a very popular series of instructional reference books, and yes, we all know it as the "FOR DUMMIES" series, but (technically!) the brand name is just "DUMMIES." Hey, according to wikipedia: "A spin-off board game, Crosswords for Dummies, was produced in the late 1990s." Anyone own that? (I'm almost certain Shortz does, but anyone else!?).

[That does, in fact, look dumb]

As for difficulty or sticking points today ... my printed-out / marked-up grid has almost no ink on it, which means nothing (much) happened. Nothing of note. There were no weirdnesses or slow patches or anything. I winced at the "word"ACTUATE (36A: Put into motion), but I don't have any other strong negative feelings. I don't have too many strong positive feelings either, though I do think a lot of the longer non-theme phrases are really solid. OIL CHANGE, "BELIEVE ME," INGRATES, CUE CARDS. The puzzle's got good, if not particularly sparkly, bones. It just didn't make much of an impression on me one way or the other ... though there are a few moments that stood out. The very elaborate clue on NONE, for instance (31A: How many elements of the periodic table have the letter "J" in their names). This is the most useless trivia of all time—I love it! Why not? Make it strange! It's not like that clue slowed me down—only NONE FOUR FIVE and NINE would even fit in the space, so it's not like this clue's going to hold you up for very long ... any answer but NONE would've hardly seemed worth the clue. I guess at N-NE you could've thought, "I dunno, might be NINE," but come on: you can't name one ('cause there aren't any), and you think there might be NINE? Implausible. Calling attention to boring answers by making them super-hard: boo. Calling attention to them by making them weird as hell: hurray!

[61D: Water brand whose name is an adjective in reverse (EVIAN)]

Other answers that stood out include TILT AT (as in windmills, as in Don Quixote, which technically isn't "medieval," though DQ is certainly imitating knights from the medieval romances he reads, so ... it works) (100D: Attack, medieval-style) and SAAG paneer (high-fived myself for remembering that one without any help from crosses) (25D: ___ paneer (Indian dish)). Earlier today, in a different puzzle, I also remembered that ALOO (on an Indian menu) meant "potato"—two for two with the Indian menu terms, despite not having had Indian cuisine in what feels like an awfully long time. NAAN (flatbread) ROTI (also flatbread) DAL (lentils) LASSI (yogurt drink) ATTA (flour)–these are your Indian food crossword staples, but occasionally you get a SAAG (spinach or other leafy green) or an ALOO (potato) or a BIRYANI (a seasoned rice dish) (three appearances, though one of those was spelled BIRIYANI, just FYI). PANEER, a type of curd cheese, has not yet appeared in the NYTXW, but now you're prepared for when it (inevitably) does.

Bullets:

50A: On which Maya Rudolph has played Kamala Harris, in brief (SNL)— "On which" is such a weird way to start a clue. Could you really not afford the ink (or real estate) it would take to write "Show on which..."?
91A: ___ Le Gallienne, star of 1920s Broadway (EVA) — the one true "WTF" of the day. But relative obscurities are highly tolerable when they don't hold me up for that long, and when they end up being as fascinating as EVA Le Gallienne (see "Word of the Day," above). She was cover-of-Time big. Fame is bizarrely fleeting, even for the very famous. A few generations, and poof. Gone. Think about this the next time you're tempted to say, to someone much younger than you, "How could you not know ___?"
104A: It's going around (ORBITER) — one of the few clues that took some work on my part. Nice misdirection, in that the clue looks like it wants a disease of some kind, but no, just something ... going around ... another thing (presumably a heavenly body of some sort).
10A: Train in the Washington-Baltimore area (MARC) — Maryland Area Rail Commuter. News to me. The only MARC I know is painter MARC Chagall and painter Franz MARC. OK, I know a few more, but I had to look them up to remember.

[Blue Horses, by Franz MARC (1911) (It's at the Walker in Minneapolis!? How exciting (to me). Definitely making a point of seeing this baby next time I'm in the Twin Cities (December!). I've been to Mpls dozens of times, how have I never been to the Walker? Crazy]

1D: Texter's shrug (IDK) — after IRL yesterday and IDK today, I feel like I should hold a mini-textspeak tutorial (like the Indian food tutorial, above). Maybe soon... (these tutorials are as much for myself as they are for you, frankly)
59D: King maker? (SERTA)— they (presumably) make "king"-sized mattresses.
116D: ___ Owl, one of the superheroes in "Watchmen" (NITE) — First, love the reference to one of the greatest works of sequential art ever produced. One of my favorite books of the 20th century (that includes all books, not just comics). Second ... well, sorry (not sorry) to bring this up, but ... uh, technically ... I mean technically technically ... NITE Owl (like Batman) is not a superhero. He's just a guy. No superhuman powers. See, the whole point is that the Watchmen are just ordinary humans who are inspired (by comics) to become masked crimefighters IRL. Eventually, because of a laboratory accident, a nuclear scientist (Dr. Jon Osterman) is radically transformed into a being (later named Dr. Manhattan) who does have superpowers, but those powers are so super that they actually make him scary af—beyond human comprehension, and ultimately uncontrollable—so the whole notion of what "super" means, and how "power" is used, really gets called into question by ... OK, see, I told you it was technical. Nevermind. Sure, NITE Owl is a "superhero," whatever, man. Close enough.

See you next time.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Constructor: Dana Edwards

Relative difficulty: Very easy (solved Downs-only)

THEME: QUADRUPLE DOUBLE (54A: Statistical feat achieved four times in N.B.A. history ... or what the answers to the starred clues contain, letter-wise) — three theme answers contain four (4) double-letters each:

Theme answers:

ACCESS HOLLYWOOD (17A: *Entertainment news show since 1996)
MISS MISSISSIPPI (24A: *Winner of an annual Southern pageant)
"WELL, WHOOP-DEE-DOO!" (41A: *"Yeah, so what? Big deal.")

Word of the Day: QUADRUPLE DOUBLE (54A) —

When a player reaches double figures in four of the five statistical categories — points, rebounds, assists, steals and blocks — he or she has achieved a quadruple-double.
For example, if a player has 10 points, 10 assists, 10 rebounds and 10 blocks, this would be a quadruple-double.
The NBA’s official definition for triple-doubles notes that “reaching double figures in steals or blocks is extremely rare,” which explains why there have only been four quadruple-doubles throughout NBA history.
It’s worth mentioning that no NBA player has ever recorded 10 blocks and 10 steals in the same game. Hakeem Olajuwon came the closest against the Seattle SuperSonics on March 10, 1987, finishing with 38 points, 17 rebounds, 12 blocks, and 7 steals. He’s the only player in NBA history to record at least 7 blocks and 7 steals in the same game. (sleeper.com)

• • •

Is that how you spell WHOOP-DEE-DOO? I wrote it in without too much trouble, but then stared at it like "that doesn't look quite right?" I mean, who knows how you "spell" these things that people were only ever meant to say, but still, I thought possibly the "DEE" part was supposed to be shorter, like a "DI" or a "DE." And in fact ("fact" being the good people at merriam-webster dot com), the top-of-the-dictionary-entry spelling is WHOOP-DE-DO—no double-E and no double-O (in the last syllable). Even the "variant" that's listed only doubles the "O"; the "E" remains single. Single-E Single-O (in "DO") appears to be the standard across the board, dictionary-wise, though wiktionary opts for "DOO" in the last syllable. It's not like you can't find the "DEE" spelling in use all over the place ... well, in several places, anyway. There's a "kid-friendly variety show" with that name, and that spelling. Several memes spell it that way. Seems like people are just going their own way and spelling it how they want, and some of them want DEE. My main point in all this is that one of these answers (ACCESS HOLLYWOOD) felt surprising and interesting (mainly because the quadruple-double aspect sneaks up on you—the double letters aren't as ostentatious because only one of them is a vowel), while the other two felt contrived, and the "misspelled" exclamation is part of what screams "contrivance."MISS MISSISSIPPI also feels like a stretch. I'm sure she exists, every year, in whatever pageant she's in, but she's an oddly singular entity, one among fifty such oddly singular entities, where ACCESS HOLLYWOOD is just a mainstream show, and even WHOOP-DE(E)-DO(O) is just a regular old expression that anyone might say. The revealer itself is a bit out of the ordinary as well—by its own admission, an exceedingly rare thing. I don't mind it, but I wish it had yielded more interesting results than these. I confess that, spelling aside, I kinda like "WELL, WHOOP-DEE-DOO!" I like its jaded, deflating, not-having-any-of-your-fake-enthusiasm energy. And yet my first feeling upon seeing it in the grid was, "um, I think you have it confused with 'Zip-a-DEE-DOO-Dah?'"

As a Downs-only solve, this one was remarkably easy. If you can't imagine how Downs-only can be done, just look at this one. First three Downs, NCAA ARCS PECK, all gimmes. SWEARS IN is maybe a little harder (4D: Formally admits to office), but I just pictured the "formality" of it all and the phrase came right to mind. Anyway. WASABI ASHY LAO SNL, again, all gimmes. At that point, ACCESS HOLLYWOOD is obvious, as are the "H" in WALSH and the "A" in ASANA, and with HAL- at the beginning of 9D: Give 50% effort on, slangily, can HALF-ASS be far ... behind? It's very easy to go on like this today, getting short gimmes and then inferring Acrosses. There were precisely two (2) Downs in the entire puzzle that gave me more than a moment's hesitation. The first was 10D: Formal confession ("IT WAS I")—I was looking for a word that meant "formal confession," not an actual example of a "formal confession"—and the second was, strangely, 48D: Default camera mode (AUTO)—and I had the "AU-!" I just have no conception of AUTO as a "setting." AUTO what? Focus? I was like "AURA? ... Do they have an AURA setting on cameras now?" But the "RA" from AURA wouldn't work. E-RE wanted to be only ÊTRE or ÉIRE, and "I" made no sense (no camera setting or any other thing starts "AUI-"), so "T" was the only option, and once you've got AUT-, "O" is really your only option there. That "O" wants to be an "E" (since I've seen and said DEER a million times more than I've seen on said DOER, a word that seems to exist primarily in crossword grids), but again, AUTO obviously beats AUTE. Assuming you know what a MEET-CUTE is (and I do) there's nothing else among the Downs to cause any trouble today.

[3D: Small smooch]

If DOER seems to exist primarily to show up in crossword grids, I could say that goes double or triple or even quadruple for CAT CAFE (50A: Establishment with kittens and cappuccinos), a phenomenon I'm aware of solely because of human interest stories about Japan and repeated CAT CAFE appearances in the NYTXW. According to wikipedia:

The world's first cat café, "Cat Flower Garden" (貓花園), opened in Taipei, Taiwan, in 1998 and eventually became a global tourist destination. The concept spread to Japan, where the first one named "Neko no Jikan" (lit. "Cat's Time") was opened in Osaka in 2004. Due to Japan's land size and population, many residents live in small apartments or condominiums which do not allow pets, making cat cafés a very popular destination for young workers looking for the companionship and comfort offered. Tokyo's first cat café, named "Neko no Mise" (Cat's Store), opened in 2005. After this, the popularity of cat cafés boomed in Japan. From 2005 to 2010, 79 cat cafés opened across the country.

I didn't think they'd caught on in the States so much—I've never seen one—but it looks like I need to get out more because Google tells me there are at least three within a reasonably short drive from me, in Syracuse, Ithaca, and someplace called Plains, PA. I know bodegas have cats, and I love it when bookstores have cats, so I assume I would enjoy a CAT CAFE. Then again, I actually have cats, so I don't need to go out to have cats with my coffee (🎵"cats with my coffee and..."🎵)

Bullets:

5A: Guitarist Joe of the Eagles (WALSH)— the puzzle really needs to get a new WALSH. That's twice in eight days for Joe WALSH (who appeared as his full name back on Sun., Oct. 6). What's wrong with M. Emmet WALSH? One of the greatest character actors of all time—absolutely deserving of occupying the WALSH chair once in a while. Watch Blood Simple, you'll see. Forget your Eagles guitarists and your Super Bowl-winning football coaches and your America's Most Wanted hosts ... It's M. Emmet! Best WALSH, hands-down. RIP, Mr. WALSH (d. Mar. 19, 2024):

40A: Princess in the Mario games (PEACH) — damn games have been around for decades and I still don't know the characters beyond Mario, Luigi, and maybe Wario (?). I see "princess" and "(video) game," I think ZELDA. Grateful that I wasn't even looking at Across clues today.
13D: Parents known for bad puns (DADS) — weird phrasing on this clue. At first, I was looking for a couple, like the RAYS or the LEES or whatever, some couple with a three-letter last name. I was like "Who are these famous parents known for their bad puns?"
10A: Summertime specification at Starbucks (ICED) — first of all, I have learned that ICED coffee people drink it all year round. People coming into the cafe (maybe even the CAT CAFE), middle of winter, ordering ICED drinks. I'm not even surprised by it any more. I get asked, in January, "you want that hot?" I wanna just point to the ice and snow outside and say "what do you think?" but instead I just accept this stupid world where "hot" is not the default and say "yes, thanks." Second, this puzzle is really going for it with the clue alliteration today. [Summertime specification at Starbucks], [... kittens and cappuccinos] [Barbecue bite with a bone] ... but it's really the "S"s that are out in force today: [Superlative suffix], [Sport with skulls], [Small smooch], [Stifle, as a sound], [Sloshed, in slang]. Guess you gotta do something to amuse yourself on these easy days.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

P.S. Happy birthday, sweetheart* :)

*if it's your birthday, just go ahead and assume I'm talking to you

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Constructor: Lindsay Rosenblum

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium

THEME: SWIPE RIGHT (60A: Show interest on a dating app ... or what 16-25-, 36- and 51-Across must do to be successful?) — theme answers are things that involve swiping (the "RIGHT" in SWIPE RIGHT means "correctly")

Theme answers:

CREDIT CARD (16A: Visa, for one)
PICKPOCKET (25A: Thief at work in a bustling crowd)
INSULT COMIC (36A: One might be found at a roast)
MMA FIGHTER (51A: Modern combat athlete, informally)

Word of the Day: BUTTE, Montana (69A: Montana city nicknamed "The Richest Hill on Earth") —

Butte (/bjuːt/ BEWT) is a consolidated city-county and the county seat of Silver Bow County, Montana, United States. In 1977, the city and county governments consolidated to form the sole entity of Butte-Silver Bow. The city covers 718 square miles (1,860 km²), and, according to the 2020 census, has a population of 34,494, making it Montana's fifth-largest city. It is served by Bert Mooney Airport with airport code BTM.
Established in 1864 as a mining camp in the northern Rocky Mountains on the Continental Divide, Butte experienced rapid development in the late 19th century, and was Montana's first major industrial city. In its heyday between the late 19th and early 20th centuries, it was one of the largest copper boom towns in the American West. Employment opportunities in the mines attracted surges of Asian and European immigrants, particularly the Irish; as of 2017, Butte has the largest population of Irish Americans per capita of any U.S. city.
Butte was also the site of various historical events involving its mining industry and active labor unions and socialist politics, the most famous of which was the labor riot of 1914. Despite the dominance of the Anaconda Copper Mining Company, Butte was never a company town. Other major events in the city's history include the 1917 Speculator Mine disaster, the largest hard rock mining disaster in world history. (wikipedia)

• • •

I've definitely seen SWIPE RIGHT (or LEFT) puzzles before. In fact, there was a puzzle a few years back that had both SWIPE RIGHT and SWIPE LEFT as revealers (where either the "left" or the "right" word in a two-word phrase was a homophone for a word that could mean "swipe" ("steel""kop""knick""Lyft"). I assume we will see future iterations where either an "R" or an "L" is dropped from a word to create wackiness (or to eliminate wackiness), if they haven't already appeared in some other outlet. The phrases SWIPE LEFT / RIGHT seem incredibly ripe for crossword exploitation. Punniness potential abounding. Today's version of the theme is cute; to make sense of the themer set, you just have to imagine that "RIGHT" means "correctly" or "properly" or "effectively." An MMA FIGHTER must swipe (i.e. punch) well, a good d is good at taking (figurative) "swipes" at people, a successful PICKPOCKET is good at swiping your wallet, or items from your purse, or whatever, and a CREDIT CARD is something you have to swipe correctly in order for it to work, although these days it's mostly "tap" (or "insert") ... I haven't swiped my card in a while. The CREDIT CARD answer is weakest, not because swiping one's card is (mildly) outdated, but because the CREDIT CARD doesn't do the swiping. A fighter swipes, a comic swipes, a thief swipes, but a card doesn't swipe—someone else has to swipe it. But otherwise, I thought the theme worked fine—reinterpreting the revealer phrase lets you see a unity among the theme answers that you wouldn't see otherwise. A fine Tuesday concept.

The fill on this one ... that's another story. Felt like it should've been sent back for a revision or two. ICHOR on a Tuesday? And GESTS? Hmmph. There's your usual regrettable repeaters (AGEE, ACETEN, LAH, IGA etc.) and then clunky small phrases like OFF OF and NO TIP. I let out an "oof wow that's bad" at the plural DASANIS, the same way I would at EVIANS or FIJIS or AQUAFINAS or POLAND SPRINGS (although I would accept FIJIS if the clue was apple-related) [update: Dammit, the apples are FUJIS, not FIJIS! Nevermind…] DASANIS is particularly grim as a plural, worse even than all those other water brand plurals. It just sounds awful and seems improbable (i.e. can't imagine a plausible context in which someone would say DASANIS (whereas COKES or SPRITES or something like that doesn't bother me nearly as much). Man, I hate DASANIS as fill. If you're a constructor, you really gotta talk yourself into that one, and if you're talking yourself into anything, chances are something's bad and wrong and you should stop.. Then there are the UPs. Three UPs, which might be ... tolerable, except two of them are crossing, which (to my eye / ear / soul) is a huge NOPE. If you need to use that many of the same two-letter word, spread 'em out. No crossing allowed. ADD UP crossing UP LATE made me wince almost as bad as DASANIS did.

And then there's UPROSE (55A: Revolted) ... it's a word, sure, but you'd say "rose up," wouldn't you? "The people UPROSE ..." I just can't imagine someone saying / writing that. Sounds archaic. I also semi-resent OK CUPID being in the grid today. Is it supposed to be a themer? Do you "swipe" in that particular "dating" app? If SPECTRE were also a dating app, and you swiped in both dating apps, you'd really have something here, but as is, OK CUPID just seems stranded—like a would-be themer that doesn't have the courage of its convictions. In or out, OK CUPID!? (Update: looks like swiping l/r is a feature common to virtually all "dating" apps, so yes, there is swiping in OK CUPID ... there's also apparently an app called Down where you swipe up (!) if you're interested in more serious dating, down (!) if you're just interesting in hooking up) (i.e. if you're dtf, or "down to f***," which is the whole reason the app is called "Down," I assume); you swipe left for "not interested" and apparently swiping right is simply not an option) (that was not a paid promotion for Down, though if the good people at Down wanna send me cash, I''d be down with that).

Notes:

44A: Dodge Charger, e.g. (SEDAN)— I really thought the Charger would be in a totally different class of car from, say, the Honda Accord. I think of the Charger as kind of muscly, less familyish than SEDAN implies. Looks like the Charger was originally created as a pony car (sporty, coupe or convertible, not a SEDAN), but then time passed ... twenty years, in fact. The Charger was not produced at all from the mid-80s until 2006, when it reappeared ... as a four-door SEDAN. Hence this clue.
10D: Uncreative studio project, perhaps (REMAKE)— look, I resent the glut of sequels and IP and REMAKEs as much as the next person, but there's no reason a REMAKE should be any less "creative" than any other kind of movie. Just because I have no interest in seeing most REMAKEs doesn't mean they're not "creative."Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1979), for instance, was a fantastic REMAKE. This clue needs to grab some popcorn and chill out.

37D: Actress Jeffries of "Percy Jackson and the Olympians" (LEAH)— speaking of movies I have no interest in seeing. No, wait. This is apparently a TV show. On Disney+. Shrug. Infinite shrug. Pop culture for teens and tweens is gonna be brutal for me from now to the grave.
69A Montana city nicknamed "The Richest Hill on Earth" (BUTTE) — the word "BUTTE" always makes me laugh because of a story my sister told me about being on a road trip with her family and the GPS voice was set to "British lady" and she kept pronouncing "Crested BUTTE" as "crested butt," which, as you can imagine, made her small children crack up no end.
62D: Tennis champ Swiatek (IGA) — I lumped IGA in with crosswordese (above), but I will say I like this IGA more than the grocery chain IGA. Hers is a name worth committing to memory. She has won five Grand Slam singles championships. Arthur ASHE, by comparison, won just three, and he appears in the grid seemingly every other day. (True, his cultural importance transcends tennis, but still, IGA Swiatek is gridworthy and has a right to recurrence, is what I'm saying)
30A: Favor precursor? (POR)— as in the Spanish phrase "POR favor" ("please")
61D: "Wednesday's child is full of ___" (nursery rhyme) ("WOE") — as a Wednesday child myself, I always resented this particular "nursery rhyme"; I can never remember exactly how it goes. I can start it ("Monday's child is full of grace") but then I lose the thread on Tuesday and end up breaking into Madonna's "Vogue" ("Tuesday's child ... gave good face?"). Oh no, it looks like it's actually Tuesday's child who is "full of grace," and Monday's child is actually "fair of face" (so the "Vogue" thing, not far off, actually). Thursday's child has far to go. Friday's child likes pork & beans, Saturday's child makes horrid scenes, and Sunday's child goes "wee wee wee" all the way home ... something like that.*

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

*nothing like that, actually

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Constructor: Hanh Huynh

Relative difficulty: Medium

THEME: BEGINNER SPANISH (39A: Introductory foreign language class suggested by this puzzle's theme) — what look like regular two-word clues are really two separate clues; the first word of the clue (i.e. the "BEGINNER") must be answered in SPANISH, the second in English, and together they form an unrelated compound English word:

Theme answers:

TRESPASSES (17A: Three tickets) (Spanish word meaning "three" (tres) + English word meaning "tickets" (passes))
CONTENDER (26A: With money) (con + tender)
MASSACRED (51A: More revered) (mas + sacred)
LOCOMOTIVE (60A: Crazy reason) (loco + motive)

Word of the Day: DACA (10A: U.S. immigration policy, familiarly) —

Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) is a United States immigration policy. It allows some individuals who, on June 15, 2012, were physically present in the United States with no lawful immigration status after having entered the country as children at least five years earlier, to receive a renewable two-year period of deferred action from deportation and to be eligible for an employment authorization document (work permit).
On November 9, 2023, an appeal was brought before the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit to determine whether a September 2023 federal district court order that would terminate the codified form of DACA, based on its being a violation of federal law, will be upheld and implemented. Oral argument in the case was heard on October 10, 2024. (wikipedia)

• • •

This is a great theme. Consistent, tight, clever. I balked, though, at the phrasing on the revealer. My ear / brain / heart wants BEGINNERS or BEGINNER'S or BEGINNERS' ... it wants the "S." It's weird how much the lack of this single letter bugs me ... I'm not mad at the puzzle; I can see that the "S"-less version exists online in many places. But my brain just keeps rejecting it, adding the "S," the way so many books and other resources do. Actually, it's a bit of a free-for-all out there, spellingwise. I can find all four versions (the puzzle's + the 3 "S" versions) without looking very hard at all, but the apostrophe-S or the S-apostrophe appear to be the most common. But then only BEGINNER SPANISH is 15, which is the width of a conventional American crossword puzzle grid, so here we are. I'm seeing some BEGINNING SPANISH out there too. What a world—five different forms of "begin" seem to be at least reasonably acceptable. But only one fit. My main point here is that I would have loved for the revealer to be tighter, indisputable, more on-the-nose. Conceptually, it works fine. It just clanks in my ear hole, despite its apparent validity.

A heavy dose of pop culture and a few tricky clues put this one in fairly normal Wednesday difficulty territory. You've got the ROSS / JOEY conundrum right out of the gate (1A: Friend on "Friends") (recalling the MONICA / PHOEBE / RACHEL conundrum of a little while back ... which also appeared right out of the gate, in the NW corner, if I remember correctly). You've got the ordinary English word JET clued as a martial arts movie star, just as you've got the ordinary English word PURGE clued as a dystopian horror film of 2013 (15A: Dystopian horror film of 2013, with "The"), and the ordinary word EDEN clued as a bygone prime minister (43A: First British P.M. appointed by Queen Elizabeth II). Namification!—it means gimmes for some and bafflement for others. I know Dolly PARTON, obviously, everyone does, but that album title did nothing for me (18D: Singer with the 2008 album "Backwoods Barbie"), so I needed like half the crosses before I went "d'oh! it's just Dolly." The clue on SHADY was hard because of crisis-level ambiguity (38D: Suspect). Between the verb and the noun and the adjective meaning of "Suspect," that clue could've been annnything. So I got slowed down there. See also the clue on SHOPS, which sounds backwards (53D: Looks to sell). After all, if you "shop," you are (presumably) looking to buy. But here you have to see SHOPS as something an agent does for your book or screenplay or record—shop it around to potentially interested buyers (publishers, producers, record labels).

I initially misspelled LOCAMOTIVE (thusly) and so had some trouble with DRONE (54D: It might go way over your head). I had -ANE and so wanted the answer to be PLANE. But the PLANE was already going over Tattoo's head on Fantasy Island (67A: Object of finger-pointing on "Fantasy Island"), so I bypassed PLANE and went for CRANE (?) (works for either the bird or the construction equipment!) before finally realizing my spelling error. I had ANYHOW before ANYHOO because the clue didn't seem to contain a clear indication of slanginess (42D: "Alrighty, then. As I was saying..."), but I guess "Alrighty" is the slang, so ... that's fair. So there was some stuckness, some of it caused by the puzzle, some of it self-inflicted, but in the end—a fairly typical Wednesday workout.

[shouldn't the answer really be DE PLANE?]

Notes:

41D: "The Office" role (PAM) — another sitcom role? You already got JOEY, maybe move to a different field of interest besides "nostalgic binge-watching" (I say this as someone who has watched every episode of both shows)
10A: U.S. immigration policy familiarly (DACA) — I knew about the policy but never thought about what the letters stood for. Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals. "Daca" in Spanish means "give it here!" or "give it to me!"
33A: Onetime Houston athlete whose helmet featured a derrick (OILER) — Look, I'm no fan of the "In my day..." people, but in my day, Houston's team had way better uniforms and helmets. Love that powder blue...

["The NFL in the Year 2000" LOL, nice predictions, 1979!]

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Constructor: August Lee-Kovach

Relative difficulty: On the easy side for a Thursday

THEME: ALTERCATION (56A: Punny summary of the battle between editor and writer seen in 17-, 24-, 35- and 46-Across) — ordinary phrases clued as if they related to a fight about ALTERing a piece of writing (if you're wondering how "-CATION" is "punny," You Are Not Alone)

Theme answers:

PERIOD DRAMA (17A: Much ado about some punctuation?)
RUN ON FUMES (24A: Anger over a grammatically incorrect sentence?)
TENSE EXCHANGE (35A: Harsh words regarding the past and the present?)
TITLE FIGHT (46A: Brawl over what to call a piece of writing?)

Word of the Day: Thomas "TAD" Lincoln (6D: Thomas Lincoln, familiarly) —

Thomas "Tad" Lincoln (April 4, 1853 – July 15, 1871) was the fourth and youngest son of the 16th President of the United States Abraham Lincoln and his wife Mary Todd Lincoln. // Thomas Lincoln was born on April 4, 1853, the fourth son of Abraham Lincoln and Mary Todd. His three elder brothers were Robert (1843–1926), Edward (1846–1850), and William (1850–1862). Named after his paternal grandfather Thomas Lincoln, he was soon nicknamed "Tad" by his father, for his small body and large head, and because as an infant he wiggled like a tadpole. Tad's first name has occasionally been erroneously recorded as Thaddeus. // Tad was born with a form of cleft lip and palate, which caused him speech problems throughout his life. He had a lisp and delivered his words rapidly and unintelligibly. Often only those close to Lincoln were able to understand him. For example, he called his father's bodyguard, William H. Crook, "Took," and his father "Papa Day" instead of "Papa Dear." [...] On Saturday morning, July 15, 1871, Lincoln died at the age of 18 at the Clifton House hotel in Chicago. The cause of death has been variously referred to as tuberculosis, a pleuristic attack, pneumonia, or congestive heart failure. In an obituary, John Hay affectionately referred to him as "Little Tad." (wikipedia)

• • •

[My question, exactly]

Gonna be quick about it this morning because I'm kinda angry about this puzzle's revealer, and, you know ... don't write angry. Is that common advice? It certainly should be. Definitely don't post angry, don't tweet angry, don't reply angry. So I'm gonna try to put my objection to this puzzle plainly and then just move on. See, it's one thing for me to finish a puzzle and have no idea what the theme is. That happens from time to time. Usually, I just have to look around the grid and think about it a little, and then I see it. Once in a very blue moon, I honestly don't get it, and usually I'll just tell you so. Sometimes I'll look elsewhere on the internet to see if someone else knows. But today is a special kind of frustration Perfect Storm because I finished the puzzle and thought "... I don't get it. I mean, I see the ALTER part ... and the answers are about ALTERing manuscripts, so ... that makes sense, but ... what the hell am I supposed to do with -CATION?" I sat there and looked at the letters in "CATION." I said it out loud, trying to hear what the pun was. I said the whole word, ALTERCATION, trying desperately to hear something "punny" that I was missing. In the end I went searching for answers online. And ... it seems that the CATION does nothing. I had already discovered the "punny" part in "ALTER," and then kept looking for punniness even though there was none left to find. Fruitless searching for promised punniness—I can't think of a worse way to spend my (crossword) time, especially when it's my responsibility to know this stuff, and I'm on the clock (i.e. my window for writing this blog in the morning is pretty tight). If we're dealing with drama about periods, fumes about run-ons, exchanges about tenses, and fights about titles, then why aren't we dealing with ... something, Anything, about ALTER(ing)? Or why aren't we altering ... something. We could be altering something. I really thought we were altering something... something that sounds like "CATION." The problem is, nothing sounds like CATION. Sigh.

Also, what is this Wednesday-type theme doing in my Thursday puzzle? I expect real trickery on Thursday, not just half-assed "pun" themes (CATION being the half of the ass that's not pulling its weight). You can tell the puzzle knows the theme is not tricky enough because it tries to lard the puzzle with difficulty via the cluing, which means that the theme feels pretty remedial and the solve ends up being a bit of a slog. Not Thursday-hard, just ... plodding. The fill is also less than great in many places: RDA EARLAP NANCE ADSALE INRE DRU AMI IFS OTOH ... I've seen worse, but I've seen better. The NE corner has a certain elegance and class with a BECOMING FLORENCE alongside FINESSE, and the opposite corner is at least interesting. TO DIE FOR is a fun phrase (as well as a great movie) and BATLIKE is weirdly entertaining. But between the inadequate revealer and the early-week theme type, I was a little disappointed today.

[38D: Tall and pointy, as ears]

My big holdups today were actually quite small, in that they involved just two squares in the NE and just one in the center of the grid—dead center, in fact. I had a hell of a time parsing TENSE EXCHANGE because I had 32D: Big feller? not as AXE (you might "fell," or cut down, a tree with an AXE) but as APE (!?), which left me trying to make something out of -EEP CHANGE. In the NE, I had the Hebrew name as ARI (16A: Hebrew name meaning "my God" (ELI)). Not an exciting or interesting error, but it slowed me down a bit. Otherwise, as I say, there was nothing like the typical trickery of a Thursday puzzle on display here today, so I anticipate that people will have better-than-average solving times across the board.

Notes:

15A: One who might make a comeback? (ALUM) — an ALUM might "come back" ... to their alma mater ... for a class reunion. Pretty sure that's the intended context.
21A: Only city that entirely surrounds a country (ROME) — funny that that "country" is the only country with "city" in its name: VATICAN CITY. 0.19 square miles!
30A: Hunting cap feature (EARLAP) — I remember the first time I saw this word (in a crossword, of course) and thought "where ... where's the 'F'? What did they do with the 'F'?"
5D: What Alexander Graham Bell suggested as the standard telephone-answering greeting ("AHOY") — most of what I know about American history, I learned from "The Simpsons"; please enjoy this video montage of Mr. Burns answering the phone:

12D: First city in Europe with paved streets (1339) (FLORENCE) — FLORENCE and ROME, lah-di-dah! My daughter, a theater production manager, has a new gig coordinating the building and installation of theaters on board cruise ships, and those ships are being put together somewhere just outside ... Venice. Most of her work is actually done remotely (meetings meetings meetings), so she's in the States for now, but come January ... Italy. Not a bad perk.
24D: Half-baked? (RARE) — think steak.
14A: Hercule's creator (AGATHA)— think Christie
27D: Consonants articulated with the tongue against the upper teeth (DENTALS)— technical linguistics terminology! I don't mind it! Has FRICATIVE ever been in the grid? No!? And not FRICATIVES either? What's the hold-up!?

See you next time.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Constructor: Jesse Cohn

Relative difficulty: Medium

THEME: none

Word of the Day: É-D-O-U-A-R-D MANET (27A: Artist whose full name anagrams to A MAN DETOURED) —

Édouard Manet (UK: /ˈmæneɪ/, US: /mæˈneɪ, məˈ-/; French: [edwaʁ manɛ]; 23 January 1832 – 30 April 1883) was a French modernist painter. He was one of the first 19th-century artists to paint modern life, as well as a pivotal figure in the transition from Realism to Impressionism.

[Un bar aux Folies Bergère, 1882]

Born into an upper-class household with strong political connections, Manet rejected the naval career originally envisioned for him; he became engrossed in the world of painting. His early masterworks, The Luncheon on the Grass (Le déjeuner sur l'herbe) or Olympia, "premiering" in 1863 and '65, respectively, caused great controversy with both critics and the Academy of Fine Arts, but soon were praised by progressive artists as the breakthrough acts to the new style, Impressionism. Today too, these works, along with others, are considered watershed paintings that mark the start of modern art. The last 20 years of Manet's life saw him form bonds with other great artists of the time; he developed his own simple and direct style that would be heralded as innovative and serve as a major influence for future painters. (wikipedia)

• • •

This one definitely got better as I went along. After that first corner, my main feelings were "RAGE ROOM? Again? Please stop" and "ESP is not real, why does it have a f***ing Greek name like it's an actual scientific phenomenon?" and "wait, not INSEAM?" (1D: Clothing line) and "really, you expect me to know the line-up of the Allman Brothers band beyond the Allman Brothers? This clue is Todd HAYNES erasure." So I was happy to get out of there. EYE CANDY is OK, but otherwise, happy to see that corner go. Then, instead of taking the obvious route (straight down the middle, I tiptoed across via ESPN (nice clue) (20A: It's often playing games), and up into the NE corner via Marc COHN, whose name I knew (though I did hesitate at COHN v. COEN) (8D: "Walking in Memphis" singer Marc). There I found Jamie Lee CURTIS starring in (well, on) a ONE-ACT play, as well as some soothing HOT TEA, a Star Wars reference I both knew and spelled correctly. Halloween (1979) and Star Wars (1977) made a perfect introduction to RETRO VIBE, which was the first answer that actually made me stop and relax and think "There we go! The Friday puzzle I've been waiting for has arrived. I don't think I actually BEAMED, but I was close. After that, I got the very quick trans-grid 1-2 whoosh-whoosh of PAINT-BY-NUMBERS* and "MYSTERY SOLVED!" which left me in a good position to polish off the remaining corners down south.

The SW corner was the one part of the puzzle that gave me real pushback. I dropped GINGER ALE in there OK, but neither AUDIENCE (33D: Market) nor POOR SOUL (32D: Sad sack) was computing—I mean, I got the POO- alright (!) but I wanted something like POOPER ("party pooper?"); even when I got the POOR part, SOUL did not follow intuitively. And I certainly didn't get CLAUSES off just the CL-. I forgot Sharon's first name (that's on me, grrr), I always suck at those "word before" clues, so USER was a bust (46A: Word before friendly or name), I thought the geometry figure was a literal figure, like a triangle or sphere or something, and, worst of all, I assumed that the [Checkout screen option] at 50D (TIP) was TAP. "Insert or TAP" [your credit card]—a very common option! All of that plus a tough (but very good) clue on SLEEPS (55A: Accommodates, in listing-speak) (as in "this Airbnb SLEEPS eight"). If I'd only remembered ARIEL, maybe this corner would've been a cinch, but as it was, it definitely leaned toward Saturday difficulty. Nothing else in the grid put up that much of a fight, but the grid was sufficiently scrappy overall to make for a very Friday-level Friday puzzle.

Please indulge me while I BOO AT some of these clues and answers... namely BOO AT, which I don't mind, or didn't, at first, until I hit POKE AT. Then I thought "too many blank-ATs!" It's appropriate, very appropriate, that BOO AT was directly underneath ROWR, because I definitely booed at that. The [Playful snarl] is RAWR. We've established this. There is ample crossword precedent for RAWR (four NYTXW appearances). Sadly, however, there is also precedent for ROWR, though not as ample (just two appearances before today). I hate that the crossword thinks you can go either way on this, when the correct spelling seems to me quite clear: RAWR is the playful snarl, ROWR is a typo. The more you bend the spelling, the more obviously you are in "playful" territory, so RAWR > ROWR by a country mile, case closed, stop using ROWR, it's ****ing awful. Another thing I would like you to NOT DO is NOT DO. Please do NOT DO that, and by "that" I mean "put NOT DO in your grid."NOT DO crossing NOVO (?) is making a mockery of the otherwise glorious NO NOTES (56A: "That was perfect—I don't have any feedback"), because notes ... I have them—for that corner, for sure. Here are some more notes:

Notes:

1A: Juice provider (CHARGER)— me, looking at the first clue of the puzzle at 4am: "uh ... JUICER?"
27A: Artist whose full name anagrams to A MAN DETOURED (MANET) — such a bizarre way to clue him, but it's a bizarreness I like. You've gotta extract a last name from a full-name anagram. Anagram extraction! I pulled MANET out pretty easily, but then thought "wait, those other letters don't spell out CLAUDE" (that's because CLAUDE is the first name of MONET, not MANET, which I should know by now). This MANET is in my eyeline (in refrigerator magnet form) every morning as I write this blog:

[Devant la glace, 1876]

12D: First pitcher, maybe (ICE WATER) — I see that you are trying to do that "identical sequential clue thing" with this clue and the next Down clue, 13D: First pitcher (STARTER), but it really only works for one of the clues (i.e. STARTER) (this is extremely typical with the "identical sequential clue thing," which is why it's a gimmick that should be used sparingly). The "First" part doesn't quite make sense for the ICE WATER pitcher. If you're talking about a pitcher of ICE WATER that might be brought out "first" at a restaurant ... I dunno ... "First" implies that there are going to be other, different pitchers to follow, and unless you are in a restaurant called "Pitchers" where all items on the menu come in pitcher form, I don't think more pitchers are likely. Do people drinking pitchers of beer typically open with a pitcher of ICE WATER? Maybe that's it. I admire the ambition and weirdness here, but when you have to lawyer your way to a defense of the clue, it's probably not a clue you should use.
21D: Eucharist plate (PATEN) — I knew this. How did I know this? Moreover, why has the word PYX just entered my brain? [Looks it up] Ha! PYX is the "small round container used in the Catholic, Old Catholic, Lutheran and Anglican Churches to carry the Eucharist, to the sick or those who are otherwise unable to come to a church in order to receive Holy Communion" (wikipedia). Hurray partial memory!
52D: This is what it sounds like when doves cry (COO) — now this is a perfect clue. Absolutely NO NOTES:

32A: Digital art? (PAINT-BY-NUMBERS*)— at first I was mad because I assumed the crossword was doing its whole "'digital' = related to the fingers, tee-hee, aren't we clever?" thing, and I was like "finger painting and PAINT-BY-NUMBERS* are not the same thing!" Well, of course they're not. The "digital" here refers simply to the numbers (or "digits") ... by which one ... paints. Assuming "digital" + "?" = finger-related ... that's peak crossword brain.
42D: Scrolls from right to left? (TORAH) — because Hebrew is read right to left, as are Arabic and Persian. Together, these are the "most widespread RTL writing systems in modern times" (wikipedia).
49A: Beethoven's "Hammerklavier," for one (SONATA)— lucked out here. I probably would've put together SONATA pretty easily anyway, but it helped that I've been listening to this specific SONATA a lot in the past month, in a new recording by Marc-André Hamelin. Enjoy.

See you next time.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

*oof, looks like the actual answer in the grid is PAINT-BY-NUMBER, singular, not NUMBERS. The singular feels bad / wrong. My brain was clearly protecting me by having me misread it.

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Constructor: August Miller

Relative difficulty: No idea (felt hard, but I'm up late with a stupid stupid head cold, so everything feels hard)

THEME: none

Word of the Day: RICK STEVES (58A: "Travel as a Political Act" author, 2009) —

Richard John Steves Jr. (born May 10, 1955) is an American travel writer, author, activist, and television personality. His travel philosophy encourages people to explore less-touristy areas of destinations and to become immersed in the local people's way of life. Starting in 2000, he hosted Rick Steves' Europe, a travel series on public television. Steves also has a public radio travel show called Travel with Rick Steves (2005−present) and has authored numerous travel guides, the first of which was the popular Europe Through the Back Door. In 2006, he became a syndicated newspaper columnist, and in 2010, his company released a mobile phone application called "Rick Steves’ Audio Europe" containing self-guided walking tours and geographic information. (wikipedia)

• • •

I didn't get a cold for *four years*—from the beginning of COVID to the beginning of this year—but now accounts are being settled, as I'm on my third this year and second in the past few months. The two from earlier this year just stayed in my throat, never resulted in the tissue tornado that so often attends the middle and tail ends of colds, but this one, this current stupid cold, jumped from throat to nose fast, so my breathing is all f'd up and I'm having trouble sleeping. Plus I just feel generally sicker than I have since that one bout with COVID however many years ago. Annnnnnnyway, boo hoo, poor me. The relevant info here is that I do not trust myself to assess the difficulty level, or even to assess the quality level much. I was definitely slower than usual, that much I know. And it really felt like there were a ton of names and other proper nouns, more than I'd expect or generally enjoy, possibly because I had never heard of so many. For instance, RICK STEVES. I have never not heard of a name more than I have not heard of RICK STEVES. Can't remember the last time I just flat-out hadn't heard of a name this long (a 10-letter entry). I kept thinking, "surely this next cross will help me see a name that is at least semi-familiar..." But no. And crossing ADA TWIST? ... so rough. I totally blanked on ADA TWIST. But at least when I eventually got it (after trying ADA SWIFT, ADAM WATT, and even, god help me, ADAM WEST), ADA TWIST did in fact ring a bell. Unlike RICK STEVES, who rang nothing.

That SE corner was like a separate puzzle, 5x harder than the rest of it for me. Is it AUGER or AUGUR? Couldn't remember. That clue on MERIT, ugh, I have read and written about Pope (back in college)—no help. I thought it was MERIT, but it seemed a long, weird way to go for MERIT, so I left parts of it blank. I thought [Priors, e.g.] were part of a criminal record, so that was fun. I had BEAUTS (44D: Real wowers), but in trying to parse the answer for 56A: Plant matter? (so hard!), that "U" seemed impossible, so I ended up rethinking BEAUTS: "is it BEASTS???" (it was not). And then TEL. as a "C.V. listing" did not compute—I was thinking about education and work experience. So even though REST / AREA and ANKA and COVE and TACHandPEABODY were all really easy, that corner still murdered me. Once I got out, everything seemed easy, but not easy easy. Just normal "moving through a Saturday" easy.

This was one of those puzzles that opened with a total bust in the NW. Just ... nothing. I could do nothing. I was sure that the "Lab" in 1A: Lab evidence, perhaps (PAW PRINTS) was dog-related, but DOG HAIR or SHEDDING wouldn't fit, so ??? But the main issue was all those short Downs. None of them computed. Well, nothing from 1D: Premium outlet? to 5D: Hit with another water balloon, the latter of which I wrote in as REPELT, thinking "wow, that's awful" (note: RESOAK is not much better). Bizarrely, the very first thing I wrote in the grid was IPAD MINI. I was in no way sure, but it was the first thing that came to me and it fit. Could not remember the capital of Greenland, though, so I couldn't confirm IPAD MINI, until, magically, SUED led to KNEE and SUN-UP and DUES, and, well, here is my highly atypical opening gambit (who starts in the center?):

NUUK! There was a brief time I thought it was NYUK, but that's a Three Stooges laugh, I think. I got a few more things off of this chunk of answers, but then ended up stuck again and had to restart, which I did, with AUG-R (42D: Portend), which was my pathway into the SE, which ... see above. Eons later, I emerged from the SE. One of the weirder things about this solve was that I got the long answers in the NE easily, from their back ends, whereas the same (symmetrical) answers in the SW, I couldn't see at all despite having their front ends. Usually, it's much easier to get at an answer from its front than its back, but in the case of those long Downs in the NE/SW, not today. Got PICTIONARY off the "-RY" (12D: Game that involves drawing lots?), which got me MAPS, which then got me ABOUT-FACED (off the "A .... ED") (11D: Did a 180). The MACBETH / THANE pairing felt super-remedial—that "Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow" speech is one of the more famous in all of Shakespeare, and they say the word "THANE" roughly a billion times in MACBETH ("THANE of Glamis,""THANE of Cawdor," etc.). But in addition to having taught MACBETH before, I had another advantage today, as I actually saw a live performance of MACBETH just last week.

[they did the whole thing with just five actors—very inventive]

I finished up ... where I began, in the pesky NW, which seemed a lot less pesky when I returned (via the back ends of all those long Acrosses). Still, UFO REPORTS was hard to parse (14A: Some tabloid fodder). As for PRE-CODE ERA, that was a highlight for me. I watch a lot (lot lot) of movies and "PRE-CODE" is a common term for anything made pre-1934—the year when the (extremely restrictive) Production Code went into effect. So I loved seeing this term today, but the clue (19A: "Anything goes" period in early Hollywood history) ... I don't know what the quotation marks around "anything goes" are doing. What is that a quote from? I've never heard anyone use that term to describe the PRE-CODE ERA. Because despite the fact that those early films could get pretty racy (compared to the movies of the subsequent 3+ decades (!)), "anything goes" is inaccurate, or at least a huge exaggeration. Restrictions on depictions of sex, violence, etc. were just ... laxer, and not officially imposed. Coincidentally, and somewhat ironically, the Cole Porter musical Anything Goes debuted in 1934 (the first year of the Motion Picture Production Code), but when it made its way to the big screen two years later, the PRE-CODE ERA was over, and guess what? Anything did not go:

The film required revisions of Cole Porter's lyrics to pass Production Code censors. Only four of his songs remained: "Anything Goes", "I Get a Kick Out of You", "There'll Always Be a Lady Fair" and "You're the Top". "You're the Top" contained substantially revised lyrics, and only the first line (sung by Ethel Merman during the opening credits) was retained from the song "Anything Goes". (wikipedia)

So I loved PRE-CODE ERA, but the clue kind of threw me. Seems like a hard answer if you're not a cinephile.

Bullets:

21A: Beyoncé's 2009-10 ___ Tour (I AM) — a fifteen-year-old tour name? No hope. Well, some hope—once I got the -AM, I figured it out. I mean, it's probably not gonna be the SAM Tour or the PAM Tour, right? JAM seemed off. GAM would be racy, in a PRE-CODE ERA sort of way, but unlikely. Beyoncé had a 2008 album titled I Am ... Sasha Fierce, so that's one way people might have known / remembered the tour name.

41A: Six-time U.S. Open champion, familiarly (SERENA) — was looking for a nickname here, not just a first name. Also, since there's a U.S. Open in golf as well as tennis, I was not sure of this answer until I got to "S---NA"
1D: Premium outlet? (PUMP)— "Premium" as in gasoline. The gas angle definitely occurred to me right away, but didn't get me anywhere near the answer.
48A: Dialect in the Black community, in brief (AAVE) — African-American Vernacular English
37A: Actress Day of "The United States vs. Billie Holiday" (ANDRA) — another tough name for me, despite the fact that I *know* I've seen, and possibly written about, her crossword-friendly name before. See, here we go—just last year, she was my Word of the Day (Sep. 15, 2023). Maybe this time, the name will stick.
24D: Parts of many science museums (PLANETARIA) — had "PLA-" and wanted PLAY AREAS or something like that. Then, when I got the whole thing (from crosses, mostly), I thought it said PLANET ATRIA and was like "what the hell are those?" Did I mention that I have a cold?
34D: Hit bottom, maybe (SANK) — it occurs to me that SINK would work just fine for this clue, which would give you ANDRI DAY, which, honestly, seems like a plausible name. ANDRA sems more namelike, for sure, but if you wiped out on the rocky shores of ANDRI, I sympathize, for sure.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Constructor: Jerry Miccolis

Relative difficulty: Easy

THEME:"Triple Features" — each answer is an imagined "Marquee at the Tri-Plex" featuring three movie titles, which, together, seem to describing a fourth, different movie:

Theme answers:

BIG GIANT MONSTER (23A: Marquee at the Tri-Plex mistaken as a promo for ... "Godzilla"?)
WITNESS ALIEN ARRIVAL (37A: ... "E.T., the Extra-Terrestrial"?)
HANCOCK SIGNS THE PAPER (54A: ... "Independence Day"?)
TANGLED FROZEN TRAFFIC (75A: ... "Rush Hour"?)
WIRED SLEEPERS MISERY (91A: ... "Insomnia"?)
MANHATTAN HOOK-UP (110A: ... "Sex and the City"?)

Word of the Day:HANCOCK (see 54A) —

Hancock is a 2008 American superhero comedy film starring Will Smith as an amnesiac, alcoholic, reckless superhero trying to remember his past. The film is directed by Peter Berg based on a screenplay by Vince Gilligan and Vy Vincent Ngo. The film also stars Charlize Theron and Jason Bateman.
The story was originally written by Vy Vincent Ngo in 1996. It languished in development hell for years with various directors attached, including Tony Scott, Michael Mann (who would later co-produce the film), Jonathan Mostow and Gabriele Muccino, before being filmed in 2007 in Los Angeles with a production budget of $150 million.
In the United States, the film was rated PG-13 by the Motion Picture Association of America after changes were made at their request in order to avoid an R rating, which it had received twice before. Columbia Pictures released the film in theaters in the United States on July 2, 2008. While Hancock received mixed reviews from critics, who found it promising, but let down by the mid movie change in tone, it grossed $629.4 million worldwide, becoming the fourth highest-grossing film of 2008. (wikipedia)

• • •

Still fighting off a head cold, so this write-up might not be as elaborate, or coherent, as you have come to expect (or at least hope for). I really gotta polish this off and get some sleep. So ... movies! I like movies. It took me a bit to figure what was going on here because after I got BIG GIANT MONSTER, I thought all the answers were going to be "three movie titles that are all synonyms of one another.""BIG GIANT" is pretty bad here. Unmotivated redundancy. The other answers work, more or less. It's a cute idea—three movie titles that suggest another movie title. But that's twenty-four (24!) movie titles you're being asked to know, or be at least vaguely aware of: six theme clues with a movie in each clue and then three movies in each answer. 6 times 4 = 24. Were you familiar with all of them? I was ... almost. Couldn't place WIRED. Had to look it up. It's the biopic about Belushi (1989), based on the Bob Woodward book of the same name. It is by far the least successful movie of the twenty-four. According to wikipedia, it made just over $1 million on a $13 million budget. I only kind of remember SLEEPERS ... is that the one from the '90s about a group of criminals, or maybe hackers? [looks it up] Well, it is from the '90s (1996), and it does involve criminals, but the core story involves a group of men who, as boys, served time in a juvenile detention facility and experience terrible abuse. So the movie is about the aftermath of that. I don't know where I got "hackers" from. I think I was thinking about not SLEEPERS but SNEAKERS (1992), which is about a group of security specialists (though not computer security, I don't think). Annnnyway, WIRED and SLEEPERS seem like outliers, fame-wise. I would've said the same about HANCOCK, but it turns out that movie grossed over $600 million, so ... clearly somebody saw it! Oh, THE PAPER, that wasn't that big of a hit, was it? As I recall, it was about this thing that used to exist called a "newspaper." Ask your parents.

The one other outlier was GIANT, in that it's the only pre-1979 movie in the puzzle. Well, that and GODZILLA, but GODZILLA, as a creature, is iconic, whereas GIANT ... if you didn't know the plot of that movie, you could easily think it was about a giant. It's not. It's a 1956 western/drama, famous in large part for being James Dean's last film. MONSTER is that movie about the female serial killer, right? [looks it up] Yes. I think I've actually seen only about a quarter of these movies, but that didn't matter. Even if the theme answers were the hardest part of the puzzle (hard because wacky and strange), the puzzle overall was still remarkably easy. Maybe the idea was that, with so many movie titles, the crosses needed to be very easy. And they were. I've never heard the term "Tri-Plex" before. Looks like there's one in Great Barrington, MA (wherever that is). But I can infer that it's a place that has three screens, shows three movies—hence today's hypothetical marquees. Oh, last movie observation—I had no idea Sex & The City was a movie. It is, first and foremost and most famously, a TV show. So that was weird. But it looks like, yes, there was a reasonably successful 2008 movie adaptation, so OK, it's a movie.

The rest of the grid was largely forgettable and occasionally awkward. AZURE BLUE? (76D: Sky shade). Is AZURE BLUE here to keep BIG GIANT company? AZURE BLUE ... what else is AZURE gonna be? Is there an AZURE ORANGE I'm unaware of? Bizarre. That next to MEMOIRE (?!) crossing the awkward EMAILER crossing the ungainly and overly wordy SOLD AS IS ... that was definitely my least favorite part of the grid. I don't like BAES in the plural. I don't like OBE ever, but especially in the plural (29A: Honors for David Beckham and Leona Lewis: Abbr. = OBES). NYETS, truly terrible in the plural (104A: Overseas refusals). I do not like the idea of cluing ORCA as a "menace" (38D: Marine menace). The ORCA's just living its life, man, too bad your yacht got in its way. Or maybe the idea is that ORCAs menace ... seals? Penguins? Apex predators have to eat! "Menace," bah. Just 'cause you can alliterate ([Marine menace]) doesn't mean you should.

The hardest part of the puzzle today was ... nowhere, really. I had some very minor trouble picking up the SPLIT (in SPLIT VOTE (16D: Cause of a hung jury)). Beyond that, I didn't have any significant hesitation until the very (and I mean very) last square of the puzzle. I sincerely stared at SPA-/ADA- for a while. Well, a few seconds, at any rate. I have never heard of the novelist ADAM Johnson, but ADAM seemed like the only viable answer (he won the Pulitzer in 2013 for his novel The Orphan Master's Son). As for SPAM ... er ... that's not a good clue (107D: Overcommunicate, say). First, I don't think of boner pill ads as a form of "communication." Second, the spammer is "communicating" just the right amount for the spammer, I presume. Yes, spam involves mass mailing / texting / whatever, but the "over" in "Overcommunicate" implies there is some good or right amount of advertising that I want to be subjected to, and I assure you there is not.

Bullets:

5A: Italian sauce whose name sounds like a French stew (RAGÚ)— the French stew is "ragout"
71A: Suitor of Christine in "The Phantom of the Opera" (RAOUL) — no idea. Just waited for a name to appear. Phantom was a tremendously popular Broadway production and like most tremendously popular Broadway productions not named Hamilton, I never saw it.
85A: Modern H.R. initiative (DEI) — Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. It's a concept that drives racists crazy. They have appropriated it as a racial slur; it's how a certain class of losers insult Black success now. See also their obsession with being "anti-woke." Dear god these people are boring. Bitter and boring. Can't decide which is worse.
38D: Actor-turned-policeman Estrada (ERIK) — wait, he didn't actually become a cop IRL, did he? ... OMG he did! And here I thought he was just a fictional cop on CHiPs.

Estrada became a reserve police officer for the Muncie, Indiana Police Department, depicted on Armed & Famous. From there, Estrada moved to Virginia, where he was an I.C.A.C. (Internet Crimes Against Children) investigator for eight years in Bedford County, Virginia. As of July 1, 2016, he was a reserve police officer in St. Anthony, Idaho. In the course of his duties, Estrada has been filmed patrolling on a police motorcycle.

101A: ___ Sidle, longtime role on "C.S.I." (SARA) — no idea. Less than no idea. I couldn't name any "roles" on any of the C.S.I.s or N.C.I.S.s or JAGs or whatever. Network dramas of the 21st century ... nothing. I got nothing.
14A: It can bust one's bracket (UPSET)— "bracket" is part of a multi-round single elimination tournament. If you have filled your "brackets" with predicted winners, as many do for the NCAA basketball tournament, then an UPSET can "bust" your bracket (unless you predicted it, then you're good!)
28A: Something seen framed in a Zoom background, perhaps (AWARD) — ew, who does this? I've got a framed signature of Muhammad Ali here that my dad got when he was an Army doctor in the early '70s. I've got a framed movie poster for a schlocky Mickey Rooney / Mamie Van Doren film. Seems a little self-important to make an AWARD part of your Zoom background.

31A: Bandmate of Keith for 60+ years (MICK) — Keith Richards, MICK Jagger, The Rolling Stones...
63A: Liturgical vestment (STOLE) — lol I had no idea. Sounds pretty fancy. My "liturgical vestment" vocabulary begins and ends with ALB (a common answer in crosswords of yore)

See you next time.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Constructor: Neil Padrick Wilson

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium (solved Downs-only)

THEME: ELMER'S GLUE (58A: What a kid might use to hold 17-, 24-, 35- and 47-Across together)— I have no idea what this kid is trying to make, tbh. Is it a face?

Theme answers:

PAPER PLATE (17A: Disposable BBQ dish)
COTTON BALLS (24A: Doctor's office jarful)
MACARONI NOODLES (35A: Elbows in a grocery store)
PIPE CLEANER (47A: Makeshift twist-tie)

Word of the Day: DANA Carvey (6A: Carvey who portrays Biden on "S.N.L.") —

Dana Thomas Carvey (born June 2, 1955) is an American stand-up comedian, actor, podcaster, screenwriter and producer.
Carvey is best known for his seven seasons on Saturday Night Live, from 1986 to 1993, which earned him five consecutive Primetime Emmy Award nominations.
Carvey is also known for his film roles in comedies such as Tough Guys (1986), Opportunity Knocks (1990), Trapped in Paradise (1994), and The Master of Disguise (2002), as well as reprising his role of Garth Algar in the SNL spin-off film Wayne's World (1992) and its sequel Wayne's World 2 (1993). (wikipedia)

• • •

I have to say, I don't really get this. It's a child's art project of some kind, but why you'd glue all these things together, I don't know. I mean, I can see that it's some kind of PAPER PLATE art, but what it's supposed to represent, I can only guess. And my guess is: a face. COTTON BALLS for hair, MACARONI NOODLES for ... whatever, and maybe a PIPE CLEANER for a mouth? Did ELMER'S GLUE sponsor this puzzle? It's all so strange. Vague. Odd. Doesn't seem like a tight enough theme. Surprised it met NYTXW standards, but who knows these days. Anyway, that's it: a list of items in a child's art project. If there's something more here, I'm not seeing it. Hard to get excited about any of it. MACARONI NOODLES feels horribly redundant. MACARONI is noodles. You don't have to say "NOODLES." We know. Because that's what MACARONI is. Figuring that one out got a definite "ugh, no" out of me. Speaking of redundancy, yesterday we had the absurd AZURE BLUE, which, like MACARONI NOODLES, is clearly redundant, and here we are, one day later, and whaddya know? There's AZURE, all on its own (52D: Sky blue). It's almost like you don't even need the BLUE part. . .

This puzzle started out very easy. Remarkably easy. I wrote in PAPAW like "I dunno ... not sure about that one" (1D: Oblong yellowish fruit). But then every other Down checked out and very quickly I was here:

The long Downs, while providing the only real points of interest today, also provided the only real resistance. ROPE TRICK was easy enough (got it with no crosses whatsoever), but NOT SO FUN, hoo-wee (hooey? hoo-whee?), that was NOT SO FUN to parse (8D: Unenjoyable, to put it mildly). I'm not sure the clue goes that well with the answer. The clue seems to suggest something very Very "unenjoyable," but NOT SO FUN does not convey very Very. Or even just very. If you are going for "deeply ironic understatement," OK, but NOT SO FUN does, in fact, seem mild. About the same mildness as "Unenjoyable." So the clue really threw me. Plus it's just hard to parse a three-word answer, especially since "Unenjoyable" is just one word. I was prepared for two words (maybe "NO something"), but three surprised me a little. When I finally tried NOT SO FUN and realized that all the crosses would work OK, I just had to cross my fingers and go with it. Was not at all certain I had it right, but it was the best I could do. A little less tough, but still a bit of a struggle, was NAKED LIE (37D: Obvious untruth). I basically got that one by trying out LIE at the end and then mentally testing "N" words in front of it. I had a teeny bit of trouble with PLOT HOLES, but only because I assumed (wrongly) that the only letter that the only thing VI-LA could be was VILLA. Also, once I got ELMER, I figured I'd be looking for some guy named ELMER. A Fudd or a Gantry, something like that. So I had to make GLUE appear via the Down crosses, which, thankfully, weren't that hard to turn up. The end.

Other things:

24D: Truck radio user (CBER)— that's an entry I'd tear my grid APART to get rid of, especially on a Monday. It's not hard so much as it is ugly. It reeks of olden crosswordese. Another answer I'd ditch is PAP. This is more a matter of personal taste. Nothing wrong with PAP, technically. I just find the answer repellent ... texturally. Pre-mushed food? Only in the case of a crossword emergency. Change YIP to GIN and everything's golden. GIN > PAP every time.
12D: Tired and predictable (BANAL) — really wanted this to be TRITE. Really really wanted it to be TRITE. And then I really wanted it to be STALE. Really really wanted it to be STALE.
32A: Family member who usually goes by one name (PET)— first of all, Santa's Little Helper. Second of all, does anyone in a family go by more than one name? What strangely formal family is this where they're all calling each other by their full names? I didn't look at Across clues while I was solving, but when I did look at this clue (just now), my first thought was "MOM?"

55A: Performer prone to theatrics (DIVA)— was wondering "when are we gonna see DIVA clued as [___ cup]?" (mainly because we're rewatching the first season of Hacks, which has a recurring DIVA cup joke in one episode). But then I went and looked it up and it turns out that while DIVA has not been clued this way before, DIVACUP has actually already appeared in the NYTXW, courtesy of none other than my First-Wednesday-of-Every-Month fill-in, Malaika Handa. Here's my write-up of that puzzle (Aug. 15, 2023). Did not expect to be dwelling on the menstrual potential of answers today, but I watch the TV shows I watch, and my brain goes where it goes.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Constructor: Barbara Lin

Relative difficulty: Medium (i.e. normal for a Tuesday)

THEME: Dial "S" for "PantS" — familiar phrases have an "S" tacked to the end—the "S" turns the final word into clothing you wear on the lower half of your body, and every theme answer gets some kind of "wacky pants" clue:

Theme answers:

LONG STORY SHORTS (17A: Bottoms decorated with characters from the "Odyssey"?)
SLEEP TIGHTS (27A: Close-fitting pajamas?)
BILLIE JEANS (48A: Offering in Eilish's clothing brand?)
CUT ME SOME SLACKS (62A: Request to a custom tailor?)

Word of the Day: Billie Eilish (see 48A) —

Billie Eilish Pirate Baird O'Connell (/ˈaɪlɪʃ/ EYE-lish; born December 18, 2001) is an American singer and songwriter. She first gained public attention in 2015 with her debut single "Ocean Eyes", written and produced by her brother Finneas O'Connell, with whom she collaborates on music and live shows. In 2017, she released her debut extended play (EP), Don't Smile at Me. Commercially successful, it reached the top 15 of record charts in numerous countries, including the US, UK, Canada, and Australia. [...] Eilish has received multiple accolades, including nine Grammy Awards, two American Music Awards, twenty Guinness World Records, seven MTV Video Music Awards, three Brit Awards, two Golden Globe Awards, and two Academy Awards. She is the second artist in Grammy history to win all four general field categories—Record of the Year, Album of the Year, Song of the Year, as well as Best New Artist—in the same year. Eilish is also the first person born in the 21st century to win an Academy Award and the youngest ever two-time winner. She was featured on Time magazine's inaugural Time 100 Next list in 2019 and the Time 100 in 2021. According to the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and Billboard, Eilish is the 26th-highest-certified digital singles artist and one of the most successful artists of the 2010s. She was honored as one of the BBC 100 Women in December 2022. (wikipedia)

• • •

I went from "wait, so we're just adding 'S'?" to "wow, this theme is good" pretty quick. That is, as quick as it took me to get the second themer. After LONG STORY SHORTS, I couldn't see where the theme could possibly go, and if it was just gonna involve adding an "S," I was pretty sure I was not interested. LONG STORY SHORTS is kinda funny on its own (I now desperately want some Middlemarch shorts), but it didn't seem like the basis for a tight or coherent theme. Well, I was wrong. Along came SLEEP TIGHTS and all of a sudden we had a simple, elegant "wacky legwear phrases" theme. Add "S," get some kind of bottomwear. Regular phrase becomes wacky phrase. It all works really nicely. The only glitch is not really a glitch but an anomaly—CUT ME SOME SLACKS is an outlier in that it's not some cool new *kind* of bottomwear, like the Odyssey shorts or the SLEEP TIGHTS or the Billie Eilish-brand jeans. Instead we get a verb phrase related to plain old slacks. But again, I don't really mind this blip in consistency because the overall concept is so fresh and fun.

When the theme is solid, all the fill has to do is hold up, and the fill today did that just fine. We actually get six (6!) long Downs for our solving pleasure, and though there's lots of 3-4-5s, they never become particularly irksome. They lie low and stay largely inconspicuous. I kinda frowned at "UM, YEAH," because it's yet another one of these recently proliferating colloquialisms ("UH, SURE,""OH, OK," etc.) that are hard to get just right in the cluing. To my ear, the tones of "Well, duh!" and "UM, YEAH" are different, though I guess if I mentally added an "!" to "UM, YEAH!" then I might get closer to the naked contempt of "Well, duh!" I also frowned at OCHRE because I'm not Canadian and the puzzle isn't either so what the hell (52A: Earth tone). What the hell is up with this stupid color that can be spelled either -ER or -RE? Merriam-webster dot com has "-ER" as the main spelling and "-RE" as the variant. Being a good red-blooded American, I went with the "-ER" spelling and was not rewarded. Fixing this "mistake" created the only other slow spot in my solve. Almost all the "difficulty" today came in figuring out the wacky themers.

Bullets:

5A: Vegetarian's protein source (TOFU) — it's a "protein source" for whoever eats it. I eat a lot of TOFU. I am not a vegetarian. TOFU is a staple of plenty of non-vegetarian cuisines around the world. Also, there are plenty of vegetarians who don't eat TOFU. This clue would feel better if they just dropped the apostrophe-s.
17A: Bottoms decorated with characters from the "Odyssey"? (LONG STORY SHORTS) — gotta admit to a certain amount of disappointment when I discovered this clue was *not* about ass tattoos. Scylla on one cheek, Charybdis on the other. It could work.
9A: So-called "Las Vegas of the East" (MACAO) — since "Las Vegas" is American I assumed "East" meant "Eastern America," like Atlantic City or something. Then I got the answer to M-C-- and thought "MECCA? Pretty sure they don't gamble there." Then remembered MACAO, which is a fairly common 5-letter crossword place name.

["Like taking candy from a baby" (it's sung)]

16A: Hard core exercise? (PLANK) — a very good "?" clue, though not as good as 66A: Place for grape nuts? (NAPA), which wins the "?" clue sweepstakes today.
47A: "Ability" for Johnny Carson's Carnac the Magnificent (ESP) — congrats to the NYTXW on acknowledging, for once, that ESP is, in fact, a quote-unquote ability and not an ability.
26D: Flavor enhancer in Doritos, for short (MSG)— congrats also to the NYTXW for not making the tried and true (and tired) reference to Chinese food here.
5D: Cylindrical alternative to a French fry (TATER TOT) — I guess they are cylinders, aren't they? They're so squat, and ... rough-surfaced? ... that I wouldn't usually think of them that way.
50D: They can cause sour experiences for car owners (LEMONS) — this got me wondering about the use of "lemon" to describe a defective car. So I looked it up: "Its first attribution to mean a problematic car was in a Volkswagen advertisement created by Julian Koenig and Helmut Krone as part of an advertisement campaign managed by William Bernbach, all advertising executives with the firm Doyle Dane Bernbach in 1960, which was a follow-up to their Think Small advertising campaign for VW."

[Ad copy]: "The Volkswagen missed the boat. The chrome strip on the glove compartment is blemished and must be replaced. Chances are you wouldn't have noticed it; Inspector Kurt Kroner did.

There are 3,389 men at our Wolfsburg factory with only one job; to inspect Volkswagens at each stage of production. (3,000 Volkswagens are produced daily; there are more inspectors than cars.)

Every shock absorber is tested (spot checking won't do), every windshield is scanned. VWs have been rejected for surface scratches barely visible to the eye.

Final inspection is really something! VW inspectors run each car off the line onto the Funktionsprüfstand (car test stand), tote up 189 check points, gun ahead to the automatic brake stand and say "no" to one VW out of fifty.

This preoccupation with detail means the VW lasts longer and requires less maintenance, by and large, than other cars. (It also means a used VW depreciates less than any other car.)

We pluck the lemons; you get the plums."

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Constructor: Matthew Stock and Brooke Husic

Relative difficulty: Medium (maybe a little north of that, for me)

THEME: A MATTER OF DEGREE (54A: Not distinguished by large differences ... or an apt title for this puzzle?) — clues look like university degree abbreviations ([[degree letters] in [some field of study]?]); answers are items that have the same initials as the degree in question and have some relationship to the indicated field of study:

Theme answers:

BRAILLE ALPHABET (16A: B.A. in Communications?)
MICROSCOPE SLIDE (26A: M.S. in Biology?)
POCKET HARD DRIVE (42A: Ph.D. in Computing?)

Word of the Day: EPL (57D: Soccer org. for Chelsea and Manchester) —

The Premier League is a professional association football league in England and highest level of the English football league system. Contested by 20 clubs, it operates on a system of promotion and relegation with the English Football League (EFL). Seasons usually run from August to May, with each team playing 38 matches: two against each other team, one home and one away. Most games are played on weekend afternoons, with occasional weekday evening fixtures. [...] The Premier League is the most-watched sports league in the world, broadcast in 212 territories to 643 million homes, with a potential TV audience of 4.7 billion people. For the 2018–19 season, the average Premier League match attendance was 38,181, second to the German Bundesliga's 43,500, while aggregated attendance across all matches was the highest of any association football league at 14,508,981, and most stadium occupancies are near capacity. As of 2023, the Premier League is ranked first in the UEFA coefficient rankings based on performances in European competitions over the past five seasons, ahead of Spain's La Liga. The English top-flight has produced the second-highest number of European Cup / UEFA Champions League titles, with a record six English clubs having won fifteen European championships in total. (wikipedia)

• • •

Well, if you have an advanced degree in a STEM field, have I got a puzzle for you. Hard drives and MATH TEAMs and website DEVs who all probably went to UNI at YALE (in Crossworld, everyone goes to YALE—it's mandatory). The theme is pretty clever and works pretty well, but it wasn't really MEANT for me. I don't even know what a POCKET HARD DRIVE is. Now, I can guess. I'm guessing it's a hard drive ... that's portable. [looks it up] Yep, that's exactly what it is, though (according to my search returns) they seem to be typically marketed as just that: "portable hard drives." I'm sure it's a common term in some worlds. But not mine. So since the answer couldn't be POCKET PROTECTOR (which would've been right on the money, in '80s computer geek iconography), I had no idea. I even stared at POCKETHARD for a bit, wondering if I was parsing it wrong ("... pocké-thard?"). Eventually I inferred the DRIVE part (shouldn't have taken me that long). The DRIVE area—therefore—ended up being the hardest part of the puzzle for me. DRIVE wasn't there to help out (for a while), and none of the Downs coming off of SLIDE were computing either. I had DEDUCE for DERIVE in there for a bit (30D: Obtain through logic). I basically finished the rest of the puzzle and then backed up into that section via ADDRESS (41D: Speak to). Then the HARD DRIVE part became obvious, *then* I polished off that DEV / DERIVE section. I enjoyed the concept today, though ... a couple things. One, BRAILLE ALPHABET ended up seeming like something of an outlier, since MICROSCOPE SLIDEs and POCKET HARD DRIVEs seem like things directly associated with the fields of study in their clues, whereas the field of "Communications" has nothing to do with Braille. The word "Communications" there is taken much more broadly. It's a minor thing, but a noticeable thing. There was something less-than-snappy about the themers, including the revealer, but I can't argue with the basic logic of the thing. Themewise, I think this holds up reasonably well.

As for the fill, the puzzle opens with a high and tight fastball—a real keep-you-on-your-toes clue at 1A: Birth day party? (DOULA, i.e. a "party" (i.e. one of the people present) at a birth)— so I went in prepared for a fight, but it all played at a fairly normal Wednesday level for me (the hard drive fiasco notwithstanding). Felt a little name-y in places, but probably not any namier than your usual puzzle, and anyway, I mostly knew the names. Naomi OSAKA and DEB Haaland are practically crosswordese by now. I've never read (or seen) Life of Pi but I somehow knew PATEL (and anyway, PATEL is a very common surname—not hard to infer from a few crosses) (I'm wondering now whether DEV / PATEL wasn't originally a cross-referenced pair of clues). The only episode of How I Met Your Mother I ever saw was the one that Will Shortz was on, so TED schmed, but crosses took care of things there. Hey, speaking of Will Shortz, there's a fascinating (and very encouraging) interview with him in the October/November issue of Brain & Life, all about his stroke earlier this year and his current recovery process (thanks to reader Mike S. for sending it to me).

The only answer in the whole puzzle that really made me wince was EPL (57D: Soccer org. for Chelsea and Manchester United). I have watched Premier League soccer a bunch over the years (idly, because it was there ... I can get sucked into sports, even sports I know nothing about, really ridiculously quickly if you put them in front of my face ... ask me about literally every Olympics event I've ever watched; doesn't take long for me to get invested). Anyway, Premier League ... Premier League ... that is the term. That is the only thing I've ever heard it called. I got the "E" today and thought "European ... something something? I thought Chelsea and Man U were Premier League teams." And they are. EPL (apparently) stands for English Premier League. This is news to me. It's apparently also news to whoever wrote the (vast) wikipedia entry on the Premier League, since the abbreviation "EPL" appears not one time in the entire thing. EFL appears in the first paragraph, but EPL, nowhere. So I'm just gonna trust that EPL is common online, in headlines, on ESPN and other sports channels and sports sites, etc. (it is, I just went and looked). But yeesh. I don't understand going out of your way to debut that one. Is Crossworld improved by the addition of Yet Another 3-letter abbrev., one that isn't even in common parlance? You actually say NFL, NHL, NBA ... but do you really say EPL? No, you say "Premier League." One thing that's come out of all this is that I now know that EPL also stands for Employment Practices Liability, a type of insurance you get if you're a business interested in violating your employees' rights. When you get sued for wrongful termination, discrimination, or harassment, EPL is there for you—the business, the real victim.

Bullets:

10A: Pick up the tab (BUY)— had the "Y," wrote in PAY. D'oh!
47A: "___ Mubarak!" (greeting around Ramadan) (EID)— Like DEB Haaland, this one should be a gimme for you by now. Amazing that EID didn't appear in the puzzle until 2019 (!?). If you think it's a marginal holiday (or, god help you, "obscure"), tell that to the two billion Muslims currently inhabiting the planet. What's truly fascinating is that EID actually did appear in the puzzle a bunch, in the olden days (1957-89) ... just not in Muslim festival form. [Image: Comb. form]? [Oath: Ger.]?? [Canton in Norway]??? [Leif ___, former news commentator]!?! Man, the pre-Shortzian world was wild.
7D: Hissing tire's problem (LEAK) — saw that the answer was four letters, wrote in FLAT with no hesitation.
44D: Pot (REEFER) — "Man, someone's tokin' some REEFER..."

See you next time.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Speed reading, for short / FRI 10-4-24 / Liu regarded as China's first supermodel / Indian fried bread / High-end skin-care brand / Frequent Missy Elliott collaborator / Cannes "confirm"? / Acrobat displays / Demo for many parents of Alphas / Onetime home of the world's largest pineapple plantation

Charlotte's first draft for "Some Pig"? / TUE 10-8-24 / Name of Athena's shield / Genderqueer identity, informally / "Little Shop of Horrors" lyricist Howard / "Beware of this sausage!"? / Belgian town known for its mineral baths / Balaam couldn't move his / Two up quarks and a down quark

Melancholy Musketeer / THU 10-10-24 / Like many Keats works / Swahili honorific / Indian honorific / Lou Grant's wife on "The Mary Tyler Moore" show / "Educated insolence," per Aristotle / Sufficient, informally

Train in the Washington-Baltimore area / SUN 10-13-24 / Texter's shrug / Attack, medieval-style / _ Le Gallienne, star of 1920s Broadway / _ Owl, one of the superheroes in "Watchmen" / Flood-prone area

Charming first encounter in a rom-com / MON 10-14-24 / Entertainment news show since 1996 / Give 50% effort on, slangily / Winner of an annual Southern pageant / Default camera mode / Condiment often faked with green dye in sushi restaurants / Parents known for bad puns

Blood of the gods, in Greek mythology / TUE 10-15-24 / Montana city nicknamed "The Richest Hill on Earth" / Actress Jeffries of "Percy Jackson and the Olympians" / Tennis champ Swiatek / Uncreative studio project, perhaps

Cryptaesthesia, more familiarly / FRI 10-18-24 / Accommodates, in listing-speak / Eucharist plate / Attention-grabbing visuals / Artist whose full name anagrams to A MAN DETOURED / Juice provider / First pitcher, maybe / "Star Wars" planet that's home to womp rats / "There, there" accompanier

Oblong yellowish fruit / MON 10-21-24 / Unenjoyable, to put it mildly / Mushy food for babies / Disposable BBQ dish / European ___ (Anguilla anguilla) / Green eggs go-with / Doctor's office jarful

So-called "Las Vegas of the East" / TUE 10-22-24 / Offering in Eilish's clothing brand? / Bottoms decorated with characters from the "Odyssey"? / Close-fitting pajamas? / Cylindrical alternative to a French fry / Flavor enhancer in Doritos, for short

Birth day party? / WED 10-23-24 / Website that contributed to the decline of road atlases / Plastic option, for short / Pi's last name in "Life of Pi" / Ph.D. in Computing? / Soccer org. for Chelsea and Manchester / Genre for James Baldwin's "Giovanni's Room," familiarly