Rowers workout machines infomrally / SAT 9-21-19 / Suckerfish / Noted film festival site since 2002 / Performer in first U.S. public radio broadcast, 1910 / Like some nonbinary people

Constructor: Joon Pahk and Erik Agard

Relative difficulty: Challenging (interrupted solve, but somewhere in the 9s, I think)

THEME: none

Word of the Day: AGENDER (37D: Like some nonbinary people) —

: of, relating to, or being a person who has an internal sense of being neither male nor female nor some combination of male and female : of, relating to, or being a person whose gender identity is genderless or neutral (merriam-webster.com)

Very tough for me. The fact that my dog wouldn't setting down and kept clacking around the hardwood floor outside my office was Not Helping (I need quiet to solve, especially tough puzzles), so I had to get up and shut the door, and then had to loudly call out "Lie Down," at which point my wife responded "it's me"'cause I guess she had just gotten up to go downstairs. ANYway, frustrating. I lost some time in there. I wish I'd enjoyed this more. The grid is very nice in places, but the cluing had a kind of forced hardness that I found sort of off-putting. By "forced" I mean that the toughness felt like it was coming by an attempt to get cute that went a little awry. At some point, after I looked at what felt like the fourth "?" clue in a row, I got a little exasperated. I'm still trying to make [Baby buggy?] work right for LARVAL. It's not the greatest fill to begin with. I get that baby bugs are larva and so if "buggy" is an adjective meaning "of or related to bugs," then ... LARVAL. But it doesn't quite hit the mark. I think it's 'cause LARVAL is not a word you can use in an everyday sentence, so it's hard to swap out, or reimagine, or something. Just awkward. I wish the fill had been more IMPRESSIVE. It's solid and clean overall, for sure, but mainly this puzzle exists to be Hard. And you can make any grid Hard with the right cluing. The only really fresh thing was AGENDER (37D: Like some nonbinary people), which, bizarrely, I don't remember ever seeing before (whereas I've seen "non-binary,""NB," and even the written-out term "enbies" (which I love) a heckuva lot). But AGENDER wasn't hard to infer, and it's a very real term that just somehow missed me. Original. Like it.


Much of my struggle came from NE, where LARVAL and the CREW part of CAMERA CREW (32A: Group that's on the take?) just wouldn't come. Also had real trouble in the SE because of (again) the "?" clue on 43A: Spot starter? (TEA KETTLE). I had TEA and guessed KETTLE but did Not like it (it "starts" TEA? Because ... you pour water from it? My "kettle" heats water. You pour tea from a tea pot. And in either case, "starter" is dubious. I actually pulled KETTLE at one point because I couldn't get Downs to work. This turned out to be because I had SURE IS! instead of SURE DO! (48A: "You got that right!") (impossible to differentiate between IS, DO, AM, ugh), and RARER instead of RIPER (54A: Tenderer, maybe). This meant the only Down I had down there was EUREKA (44D: Exuberant cry). I had TRANIS for 45D: Some Caribbean islanders (TRINIS), so I *definitely* knew something was messed up. Aren't STEP-INS women's underwear? I'm pretty sure they're women's underwear. I always thought laceless shoes were SLIP-ONS. That one was weird. Luckily, the Acrosses and the short Downs in that corner were way easier. The answer that really broke me, though, was MAJORING IN (36A: Reading, to Brits). Parsing that answer, my word. And just understanding the clue ... I assumed the trick was that "Reading" was the city or the railroad (thanks, Monopoly!). Eventually I was like "MAJOR what?" and then got it. It's a great clue / answer. Just ground me into powder. Anyway, enjoyed the struggle, mostly

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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