Issa who stars on HBO's insecure / MON 9-11-17 / Titular California district in Steinbeck novel / Animal whose name is synonym of parrot / Pitchfork-shaped letter

Constructor: Erik Agard and Paolo Pasco

Relative difficulty: Easy

THEME: LALA / LAND (53D: With 58-Down, head-in-the-clouds place ... or a hint to each answer that has four circles)— two-word themers where both words contain letter pairing "LA":

Theme answers:

• MALAY PENINSULA (16A: Kuala Lumpur's locale)
• TORTILLA FLAT (22A: Titular California district in a Steinbeck novel)
• LAKE PLACID (29D: 1980 Winter Olympics host)
• WALLA WALLA (31D: Washington city with a repetitive name) 

Word of the Day: Dominque DAWES (30A: Dominique ___, 1996 Olympic gymnastics gold medalist) —

Dominique Margaux Dawes-Thompson (born November 20, 1976) is a retired American artistic gymnast. Known in the gymnastics community as 'Awesome Dawesome,' she was a 10-year member of the U.S. national gymnastics team, the 1994 U.S. all-around senior National Champion, a three-time Olympian, a World Championship silver and bronze medalist, and a member of the gold-medal-winning team "Magnificent Seven" at the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta. [...] She is also one of only three female American gymnasts, along with Muriel Grossfeld and Linda Metheny-Mulvihill, to compete in three Olympics and was part of their medal-winning teams: Barcelona 1992 (bronze), Atlanta 1996 (gold), and Sydney 2000 (bronze). Dawes is the first female gymnast to be a part of three Olympic-medal-winning teams since Lyudmila Turischeva won gold in Mexico City (1968), Munich (1972), and Montreal (1976). Since Dawes, Svetlana Khorkina is the only gymnast to accomplish this feat, winning silver in Atlanta (1996) and Sydney (2000), and bronze in Athens (2004). (wikipedia)

I mean, the *concept* isn't exactly wow, but on a Monday, I don't care that much. As long as the theme answer's not forced and fill is not garbage and puzzle is pretty easy, I'm happy. And here, the themers are actually great, just as answers on their own, and the fill is tight. I worry about the few of you who got Naticked at DAWES / SXSW— I figure there gotta be a few of you out there. Crossing two not-enormously-famous proper nouns at a not-terribly-inferrable letter is dicey. But at DAWE-, what else is gonna go there? And honestly both DAWES and SXSW are pretty well known at this point. You should know one of them, at least, probably. I probably wouldn't have risked this cross, but I knew both DAWES and SXSW, so I have no beef. I really dig the weird-sized grid (14x16), as well as the unusual mirror (as opposed to rotational symmetry). I'm not at all surprised that this is entertaining and smooth. Both these constructors are great on their own, so together ... how are they gonna miss? Unlikely.


Blew through this very quickly, with only SOSPAD (briefly) giving me any grief. I doubted AFROED for a bit, because ... well, that's a an adjectived noun that I haven't seen in puzzles before. But then I thought "these guys ... would do that." I think the whole idea of a PERFECT GPA has lost all meaning, esp on the 4.0 point scale. High-school-aged daughter gets number grades (out of 100) and then those usually get this ridiculous bump if they're advanced classes, so you end up with grades over 100 (?), which is ridiculous. I think in lots of places, you can technically have a GPA over 4.0, so from a contemporary accuracy standpoint, not sure about PERFECT GPA (Paolo is my daughter's age, so he surely knows all this). Please notice that there is no junk fill in this grid. None. Nada. Zip. If you want to know "What Does He Want?!" when I complain about all the mediocre to shitty grids I gripe about: this. This is what I want. Try harder, older folks, because the young are outcrafting you on a regular basis (I am older than these two constructors put together!!!!!!). Good day.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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