Fish dish that Nobu restaurants are noted for / SUN 1-6-19 / 19000 foot Peruvian volcano / Increasingly outmoded circus roles / Bird with blood-red eyes / Things used for dumping / Sea whose wikipedia article is written in the past tense

Constructor: Zhouqin Burnikel

Relative difficulty: Easy (8:36)

THEME:"Breaking News"— theme answers are meant to be taken as self-referential, with each successive themer representing a letter in the phrase "Dear John," thus making those letters DEAR JOHN LETTERS (117A: Things used for dumping ... or a literal hint to the answers to the starred clues?):

Theme answers:

• HOLLYWOOD ENDING (22A: *Stereotypical movie outcome) ("ending" of "Hollywood" is a "D")
• EYE-OPENER (34A: *Startling disclosure) ("opener" of "eye" is an "E")
• ARCTIC FRONT (46A: *Bringer of cold weather) ("front" of "arctic" is an "A")
• RINGLEADER (53A: *Law enforcement target) ("leader" of "ring" is an "R")
• JUMP START (69A: *Battery boost) ("start" of "jump" is a "J")
• STOLE THIRD (87A: *Moved closer to home?) ("third" letter in "stole" is an "O")
• REHAB CENTER (89A: *Help for users) ("center" of "rehab" is an "H")
• ANY SECOND (99A: *Very soon) ("second" setter of "any" is an "N")

Word of the Day: Nobu (73A: Fish dish that Nobu restaurants are noted for = BLACK COD) —

Nobuyuki "Nobu" Matsuhisa (松久 信幸 Matsuhisa Nobuyuki; born March 10, 1949) is a Japanese celebrity chef and restaurateur known for his fusion cuisine blending traditional Japanese dishes with Peruvian ingredients. His signature dish is black cod in miso. He has restaurants bearing his name in several countries. (wikipedia)

Hello! It's the first Sunday after New Year's Day and that means it's time for my annual pitch for financial contributions to the blog, during which I ask regular readers to consider what the blog is worth to them on an annual basis and give accordingly. As you know, I write this blog every. Single. Day. OK, two days a month I pay young people to write it, but every other day, all me. OK sometimes I take vacations and generous friends of mine sit in, but otherwise, I'm a non-stop blogging machine. Seriously, it's a lot of work. It's at least as much work as my day job, and unlike my day job, the hours *kinda* suck—I typically solve and write between 10pm and midnight, or in the early hours of the morning, so that the blog can be up and ready for you to read with your breakfast or on the train or in a forest or wherever it is you enjoy the internet. I have no major expenses, just my time. As I've said before, I have no interest in "monetizing" the blog in any way beyond simply asking for money once a year. I hate ads in real life, so why would I subject you all to them. I actually considered redesigning the site earlier this year, making it slicker or fancier somehow. I even got the process partly underway, but then when I let slip that I was considering it, feedback was brisk and clear: don't change. Turns out people don't really want whistles and bells. Just the plain, internet-retro style of a blogger blog. So that's what you're getting. No amount of technical tinkering is gonna change the blog, which is essentially just my voice. My ridiculous opinionated voice yelling at you, cheerfully and angrily, about how much I love / hate crosswords. I hope that this site has made you laugh or taught you things or given you a feeling of shared joy, or anger, or failure, or even given you someone to yell at. I'm fine with that. I also hope I've introduced some of you to the Wider World of Crosswords, beyond the NYT. I am passionate about puzzles and I (mostly) adore the people who solve them—so many of my friends, and the thousands of you I've never met. I can't stop, and I won't stop, and I hope you find that effort worth supporting.

Some people refuse to pay for what they can get for free. Others just don't have money to spare. All are welcome to read the blog—the site will always be open and free. But if you are able to express your appreciation monetarily, here are two options. First, a Paypal button (which you can also find in the blog sidebar):

Second, a mailing address:

Rex Parker c/o Michael Sharp
54 Matthews St
Binghamton, NY 13905
All Paypal contributions will be gratefully acknowledged by email. All snail mail contributions (I. Love. Snail mail!) will be gratefully acknowledged with hand-written postcards. This year's cards are illustrations from "Alice in Wonderland"—all kinds of illustrations from throughout the book's publication history. Who will get the coveted, crosswordesey "EATME!" card!? Someone, I'm sure. You, I hope. Please note: I don't keep a "mailing list" and don't share my contributor info with anyone. And if you give by snail mail and (for some reason) don't want a thank-you card, just say NO CARD.  As ever, I'm so grateful for your readership and support.

Now on to the puzzle!

Hello! I have had a Rusty Nail, and I feel prrrretty good. Just one though. Don't blog drunk, I mostly say! Solving on one drink seems to be a recipe (wink!) for success, though, because I Lit This Puzzle Up. 8:36 is among my top five Sunday solves of the past year. I think that sometimes there's this thing that happens when I'm solving quickly ... oh yeah, it's called frustration ... that can kind of get in my head and make things worse. With one drink, that "frustration" factor seems to disappear, and not giving a bleeeeeep seems to help me lock in and fly. Alcohol can be quite terrible—devastating, even—but for some people [waves] in small quantities it can really act as a destressing agent in oddly productive ways. As always, your mileage may vary! The main thing to say about this puzzle is I finished quickly, I had no awful wincing moments, annnnnd I had no idea what the theme was all about when I was all through. It took me almost half as long again to figure out the theme as it did to solve the damn puzzle in the first place. So maybe one drink is not helpful for ALL aspects of puzzle-solving. Anyway, once I did finally "get""it," I thought it was really clever. Obviously I've seen the self-referential answer-is-indicating-a-letter thing before, but not in this way, and the revealer, with its play on "letters," really works. Neat and satisfying in ways that Sunday puzzles often aren't. And hey, our first female constructor of the new year; and for the fourth time in the past six years, that constructor is C.C.! (the name Zhouqin Burnikel actually goes by, as I understand it). Nice work, C.C.!


What were the potential problem areas? Well, right off the bat, you've got EL MISTI (1A: 19,000+- foot Peruvian volcano) crossing MOLESKINE (3D: Big name in notebooks), which might cause some people to have this feeling:

I have a lot of notebooks and I enjoy notebooks so MOLESKINE is very familiar to me (even if I did think it was spelled MOLESKIN and didn't understand why it wouldn't fit). But EL MISTI, hoo boy, I know that *only* because of crosswords, and even then needed almost every cross to get it. So it is very much imaginable to me that someone could get very, irrevocably stuck at EL -ISTI / -OLESKINE. In fact, I saw on Twitter that someone had, which is the main reason for my remarking on this cross at all. Sometimes, it helps to see things through others' eyes. I'm not mad at this cross, but I can see how one might be.


I watched "Doctor Zhivago" at least once and totally forgot that (olde-tyme crossword favorite) Lara's husband was PASHA. That answer crossing "AW, GEE!" was a minor mess for a bit. CUREL is a brand that is lost in the mists of time, for me, so I needed every cross there. I have never been to a Nobu restaurant and know nothing about their specialty so BLACK COD was new to me. I wrote in JAMES at first for JIM LOVELL (82D: Apollo 13 commander). I don't believe any human has ever been referred to as a DO-ALL. "DO ALL y'all know the name of a good DO-ALL?""Do we!?" End scene. Anyone else have INASECOND at first instead of ANYSECOND? Yeah you did. I know you did. One of you did. You, over there, in the t-shirt. You. You did.


Man, Peru's getting a lot of action today. First EL MISTI, then JORGE Chávez International Airport (69D), neither of which I knew. I clearly have to work on my Peruvian knowledge. After, uh, PERU, and LIMA, and maybe ANDES (?), or LLAMA (???), I'm out. I like learning new things from crosswords, even if I immediately forget most of them. The answers I enjoyed seeing today were PORCINI (28D: Pricey mushroom) and CUP O' JOE (81A: Morning fix, slangily). I like both of them, though usually not together. Thank you to all those who read this far. See you tomorrow!

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

P.S.

[72A: "___ makes men wiser and clear-sighted": Vladimir Putin (CHESS)]

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