Taboo alternative to beef / MON 12-24-18 / Dry region covering most of Botswana / Alternative to YouTube

Constructor: Brendan Emmett Quigley

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium (2:54)

THEME: HITCHING A RIDE (55A: Getting picked up by the side of the road ... or what 20-, 30- and 39-Across are literally doing?)— the letter string "RIDE" is ... hitching together two words, i.e. it's spread across the words in a two-word phrase:

Theme answers:

• HYBRID ENGINES (20A: Features of some eco-friendly vehicles)
• KALAHARI DESERT (30A: Dry region covering most of Botswana)
• GENDER IDENTITY (39A: It may or may not correspond with one's birth sex)

Word of the Day: VIMEO (52D: Alternative to YouTube) —

Vimeo (/ˈvɪmioʊ/) is a video-sharing website in which users can upload, share and view videos. It was the first video sharing site to support high-definition video. Vimeo was founded in November 2004 by Jake Lodwick and Zach Klein. It focuses on short films and movies sold with Vimeo On Demand. (wikipedia)

Nice grid overall, despite the HORSEMEAT (WHY?!? Why would you give That much real estate to That answer?). I don't think the revealer really works, though. You hitch one thing to another thing, but here, RIDE *is* the hitch, so saying that the answers are "literally"HITCHING A RIDE seems off. Wobbly at best. Also—and this is admittedly irrational—something is bugging me about ALI and IKE running through ALIKE. Like ... (!) ... both three-letter answers precisely intersect their identical three-letter strings inside of ALIKE. I mean, it's not bugging me as much as HORSEMEAT (dear lord, why?), but it's weird. It's distracting me. It looks like some kind of theme trick. But it's ... not. Another thing, about VIMEO—so, I am aware of this site and thus did not trip over it at all. Still, it feels weirdly marginal and gratuitous to me. Gratuitous VIMEO. It's a B-team video-sharing site, and a proper noun of no great fame, and it's not like this corner Needed it in order to be good. I mean, you've got ADMEN in there. No one likes ADMEN. I think you get more mileage out of VIDEO (or any actual word). Tear that corner out. I get you want to be Now and Hip or whatever, but no puzzle is improved by VIMEO. Fine when you need it, but if you absolutely don't, no point to it. Go with a more interestingly clueable word, every time.


Oh, hey, did I mention I love the clue on GENDER IDENTITY (39A: It may or may not correspond with one's birth sex). NYT often fumbles this kind of thing, but this is pretty spot-on.

I might've been ten seconds or so faster, but I ran into issues in the south. Sometimes, problems are entirely a function of the direction from which you come at a section. In this case, I came into the southern section from the east, dropped GREY down (56D: ___ Poupon mustard), and then tried to get 65A: In a pouty mood off just the terminal "Y." I wrote in MOPEY. That's pretty much the story of that section. Between that error and all the semi-odd five-letter Downs (who is NICOL Williamson? No, really...), and BY CAR :( :( :( I had a minor mess on my hands. But it's Monday and I got upright again pretty quickly. Managed to come in under three for the first time in almost two months. I expect my speed skills to slip as I age, but not so fast.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

P.S. I looked up NICOL Williamson and nope. Been solving nearly 28 years and never heard of him, never seen him. And here he (he!) is. On a Monday. Bizarre.

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