Gymnast who won all-around gold in Rio / 1972 hit with lyric you can bend but never break me / Lord Byron notably in his personal life

Constructor: Andrew Zhou

Relative difficulty: Challenging (I got annoyed and kind of bored and walked away at one point, so my time's pretty inflated) (10:34)

THEME: none

Word of the Day: XERISCAPING (28A: Design of park land requiring minimal water) —

Xeriscaping is the process of landscaping or gardening that reduces or eliminates the need for supplemental water from irrigation. It is promoted in regions that do not have accessible, plentiful, or reliable supplies of fresh water, and is gaining acceptance in other regions as access to irrigation water is becoming limited. Xeriscaping may be an alternative to various types of traditional gardening. (wikipedia)

Didn't find any of this very enjoyable. Nowhere near my wheelhouse, and full of weirdness like TROOP as a verb and M-RATING ("rated M for Mature" is the phrase from ads—M-RATING just looks wrong). SYSTEM ERROR, I.T. TEAM, ADSITE ... it's all pretty boring to me, and despite SIMONE BILES plastered right across the middle, and the not-at-all-helpfully-clued "I AM WOMAN" in the NE (16A: 1972 hit with the lyric "You can bend but never break me"), it felt very boy-y. XERISCAPING is a cool enough word but apparently I am just now learning how to spell it—I swear I thought it was ZEROSCAPING, as in "we use zero water on our landscaping." Most of the puzzle was either techy or technical, with pleasure or joy or cleverness coming only rarely. Loved SHACKED UP, for instance. But SYNFUELS? (32D: Petroleum substitutes) Again, didn't know that was a thing. Had BIOFUELS. Also not interesting. Oh, I like "I CAN SEE THAT!" even though it took me a while to get, though not as long as TRAIN MASTER (19D: To whom a conductor reports). I had the MASTER and was still like "????" I thought something like "stationmaster" or "depotmaster," thinking it would be an equivalent of "harbormaster." But no. It's just TRAINMASTER ... which sounds like some model train enthusiast's twitter handle / secret identity.


Got started, after much flailing, in the SW, of all places, where I was just throwing anything at the wall to see if it would stick, and finally some of it did. ARF and ESTE (crosswordese to the rescue!) then, tentatively, HOSERS, confirmed by a couple of crosses including HER (49D: "Death Becomes ___" (Meryl Streep film)). From there I got the whole bottom portion, but then, nothing. Just couldn't get back up over the middle. Even with MASTER and THAT and eventually BREAD in place at the ends of all those longer central Downs. Why is GARLIC BREAD a [Pasta dinner staple] my god how many floury carbs can you eat in one meal? Bread as a lead-in to pasta sounds insane. I'm not denying it's common, it just seems wrong. What also seems wrong: the word ROUE. ROUÉ? roo-AY? I despise this word, largely because no one actually uses it because if you did, people would go "what?" at you. And it's French and I get it confused with ROUX, which is a thickening agent, I think. It's also antiquated and stylized and ick. Totally valid word, but I just have viscerally negative responses to some words and this is one of them. No idea who ANIL is. Had ICE SHORE and ICE SHELF before ICE SHEET. Found the clues on ALARMS and LAW entirely beyond me. I mean, I get them now. But I had A-AR-S for a bit and honestly didn't know where I was gonna go. I also got very confused earlier on the EMT clue (29D: Pre-hosp. childbirth aide, often). "Pre-hosp." was the confusing part. I thought it meant "before there were such things as hospitals," so I was looking for something olde-tymey, like, say, ETHER. So, yeah, EMT was a surprise.


Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld (Twitter @rexparker / #NYTXW)

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]