Blobbish Li'l Abner creature / SUN 3-10-19 / R&B group with 1991 #1 hit I Like Way / 1993 Sant-N-Pepa hit whose title is nonsense word / Actor Gillen of Game of Thrones / Nutcracker protagonist / New York's longest parkway with "the" / Spanish speaking Muppet on Sesame Street / Founder of Egypt's 19th dynasty

Constructor: Adam Fromm

Relative difficulty: Medium-Challenging (11:45)

THEME:"Math Hysteria" — equations somehow represent the answers

Theme answers:

• 22A: L x A (LOS ANGELES TIMES)
• 39A: x - y = x - y (SAME DIFFERENCE)
• 47A: (A- or B+)/7 (SEVENTH GRADE)
• 67A: The "x" in x^2 = 666 (ROOT OF ALL EVIL)
• 86A: $$$/X (CASH DIVIDEND)
• 95A: 3.BB (THREE-POINT SHOT)
• 116A: X^Esq (POWER OF ATTORNEY)

Word of the Day: NIKI Caro (80A: Director Caro) —

Nikola Jean "Niki" Caro MNZM (born 1967) is a New Zealand film director and screenwriter. Her 2002 film Whale Rider was critically praised and won a number of awards at international film festivals. She is the second female director hired by Disney to direct a film which is budgeted at over $100 million, when helming a live-action version of Disney's Mulan. (wikipedia)

Not into it at all. From the title to the themers to the fill (which is shockingly dated and weak), this one is so caught up in its own imagined cleverness that it never really becomes an enjoyable *puzzle*. L x A = LOS ANGELES TIMES? How? LOS TIMES ANGELES, maybe, but if you're gonna go all "math hysteria" on me, your equations better be on point, not merely adjacent to point. x - y = x - y = SAME DIFFERENCE? Anything = Anything = SAME ANYTHING. Why do I care? The "x" in x^2 = 666 is the *SQUARE* ROOT OF ALL EVIL, isn't it? Sorry if I'm not up on my mathematical annotation, which I haven't thought about in three decades. Gotta love a theme that requires explanation. And why is "hysteria" in the title, by the way? What is "hysterical" about this? "Hyster-" means "uterus," which is ironic given how much this is a boy puzzle for boys. POETESS??? And you don't even mark it as "dated" or "quaint" or "bygone" or "gendered" or anything? Sappho was a poet. Full stop. And "AH, SO"!?!?!? How is this answer not dead and buried for all eternity. It will never not evoke American parody of Japanese speech. Kill it. Now. Ditch it. It's also terrible fill, so ditch it for that reason alone.


And then ELA HIFIVE VARIG ... the fill in this one is too often stale and weak. When you're hitting the *erstwhile* Brazilian national airlines, you know you've got a problem. An addiction to archaic fill. Plural ELMOS? AT STORES? (not IN?). OPA? SCALER? ECOL? STATOR? DERALTE? URANIC??? OME!?! I'm at a loss. There's almost no good fill in this one. RAMMER? Come on. Why is PENH ... just why? Why is it? Why not PENT? Is "stop" somewhere else in the grid? How in the world do you decide to go with a foreign name *part* over a normal word? There are so so so many ways to ditch 1. plural name ALIS, and 2. crosswordese INGE, and 3. foreign name *part* PENH. Here's just one. Simple. Took me very little time:

Now I haven't checked to see if this version duplicates answers (or answer parts) somewhere else in the grid, but the point is that you can scare up another version, just as clean, with very little effort. Which leads to the question: Is anyone actually Editing these? For cleanness, I mean? I get that the Theme is the Thing, but the Rest of the Puzzle should not be a Drag.


New puzzle alert! Well, not new, but newly available online: Matt Gaffney's New York magazine crossword puzzle is now available for your solving pleasure. Here's the promo copy: "The New York Crossword is finally online, appearing each Sunday night at nymag.com/crossword. Matt Gaffney’s current puzzle will alternate weeks with selections from the archives." Matt is a prolific and meticulous constructor, so this is very good news. Also, if you aren't a subscriber to Matt Gaffney's Weekly Crossword Contest (a weekly meta-crossword of varying degrees of difficulty), you are very much missing out on the fun (and occasional self-loathing). Read about recent puzzles here / Subscribe here.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]