Bug-eyed primates / SUN 2-9-20 / New York city where Mark Twain was married buried / Energy-efficient Navajo structure / Cruise line that owned the Lusitania

Constructor: Brian Kulman

Relative difficulty: Easy (8:28)

THEME:"The Emoji Movie" — movies clued via emojis (or so I'm told—Across Lite just gave me [bracketed explanations of emojis]," LOL):

Theme answers:

• "KING / KONG" (1A: With 115-Across, [gorilla] [woman] [building])
• "ELF" (16A: [Santa] [city at night] [present])
• "THE LORD OF THE RINGS" (23A: [jewelry] [elf] [volcano])
• "HER" (26A: [man] [heart] [smartphone])
• "TITANIC" (38A: [ship] [painter] [iceberg])
• "CITIZEN KANE" (42A: [newspaper] [money bag] [sled])
• "DUMBO" (55A: [elephant] [mouse] [circus])
• "PLANET OF THE APES" (60A: [rocket] [primate] [Statue of Liberty])
• "SPEED" (72A: [bus] [construction sign] [bomb])
• "MARY POPPINS" (82A: [umbrella] [handbag] [merry-go-round])
• "DRACULA" (87A: [coffin] [bat] [castle])
• "BIG" (101A: [boy and man] [piano] [crystal ball])
• "A LEAGUE OF THEIR OWN" (102A: [baseball] [female symbol] [crying face]) 
• "TED" (112A: [bear] [beer] [cigarette])
• "PAN" (30D: [fairy] [skull and crossbones] [crocodile])
• "ALI" (88D: [boxing glove] [butterfly] [bee])

Word of the Day: LORISES (68A: Bug-eyed primates) —

Loris is the common name for the strepsirrhine primates of the subfamily Lorinae (sometimes spelled Lorisinae) in the family Lorisidae. Loris is one genus in this subfamily and includes the slender lorises, while Nycticebus is the genus containing the slow lorises. // Lorises are nocturnal and arboreal. They are found in tropical and woodland forests of India, Sri Lanka, and parts of southeast Asia. Loris locomotion is a slow and cautious climbing form of quadrupedalism. Some lorises are almost entirely insectivorous, while others also include fruits, gums, leaves, and slugs in their diet.

Female lorises practice infant parking, leaving their infants behind in nests. Before they do this, they bathe their young with allergenic saliva that is acquired by licking patches on the insides of their elbows, which produce a mild toxin that discourages most predators, though orangutans occasionally eat lorises. (wikipedia)

Well, I'm guessing this was probably better (in the sense of "more to design specifications") in the app and on the website, because in AcrossLite (how I get all my crosswords), the theme cluing involved a comical translation of emoji back into text (the clues as I list them, above, are exactly as they appeared in my clue list). I think the text-based clues likely made this puzzle even easier than it would've been, which I'm guessing was pretty easy to start with. All the movies are super familiar mainstream hits. Slightly weird to have "STAR TREK" (also a movie) in here when it's not a themer, but no big deal. As for the theme ... it wasn't bad? It also wasn't terribly exciting. Mainly what it was was A Lot. 16 themers!?!?! It felt like the puzzle was anxious that the theme wasn't strong enough, so it tried to compensate for its one-note-ness by just *cramming* the grid with themers, many of them so short that they don't really feel like themers. Only five of these things are eight letters or longer, which is the typical minimum length of a themer, especially on a Sunday. But as I say, the films are all pretty mainstream and thus gettable. The only one I struggled to understand was "PAN"—I don't remember that as a movie title. I get that it's the story of Peter Pan, but I forgot there was a movie called just "PAN." The rest were cake. Maybe the puzzle seemed more interesting if you just had the emojis to go on. Maybe there was humor in there. From my perspective, it was just easy and not particularly cute or funny. The grid overall was smooth and I don't have any real objections to any of it. The full impact of it just didn't land, and I'm having trouble imagining that even *with* the intended emoji clues it was that joyful. But people like emojis, I guess, so ... if you loved it, fantastic! My "LOTR"-loving wife wife would like you to know, however, that [jewelry] [elf] [volcano] is an awful clue, as "THE ELF DOES NOT THROW THE JEWELRY IN THE VOLCANO." Also, what is up with the clue on "A LEAGUE OF THEIR OWN" (102A: [baseball] [female symbol] [crying face])? The quote—the very famous quote—is, "There's *no* crying in baseball!" That's the quote. It's iconic. There should be a 🚫 symbol in that clue!


Weird to base your puzzle on a movie that was by all accounts horrendous. "The Emoji Movie" won Worst Picture, Worst Director, and Worst Screenplay at the 2017 Razzies ... And yet it made over $200 million. ANYway ... I did a weird Chutes & Ladders solve because of KING / KONG. Started in NW as usual, but when I figured out the second half of the answer was going to be KONG, way on the other side of the grid, I went down there to fill it in and ... never came back. I just solved my way up from there. Felt like I was all over the map, solving scattershot, rather than my usual orderly self, but the puzzle was so easy that solving path and solving style and all that really didn't matter. My main difficulty with this puzzle was LORISES. The difficulty arose from my forgetting that there was any animal called LORISES. Even after I got it, it looked wrong. There's nothing else that caused me the least bit of difficulty. One important final comment: you can take notorious racist dips**t NIGEL f***ing Farage and shove him ... wherever you like. Just not in any future grids, that would be fantastic. As a clue writer, and especially as an editor (the one with final say over clues), you have a choice of NIGELs. Your choice of this particulary NIGEL tells me you make bad choices. Get bent.

On the Clipboard:

Some really interesting puzzles this week outside of NYTXW-ville. 

• Anna Shechtman's Monday New Yorker puzzle had some wonderful answers, like PICKUP LINE and PINKWASH, but I especially loved it for RACHEL CUSK, whose book of essays, Coventry, I was, coincidentally, in the middle of reading when I solved the puzzle. Such a great writer. Thumbs up for Anna's puzzle *and* RACHEL CUSK.
• Monday's Universal puzzle was by Joon Pahk and Ann Haas, and I thought it was the best themed puzzle of the day—very simple, with familiar phrases imagined as bad Yelp reviews, e.g. [Bad Yelp review for a malt shop?] = NO GREAT SHAKES, [Bad Yelp review for a bakery?] = BUNS OF STEEL. I was thrilled to find out later that Ann is Joon's goddaughter, a high school student, and this puzzle was her debut!
• The Fireball this week was entitled "Fifteen Divided by Five," by editor Peter Gordon. Premise: every themer is 15 letters long and made up of five three-letter answers. I thought the puzzle was OK, but what I really liked were my wrong answers on a couple of the themers. [Longtime British television series presented by Phil Drabble featuring lots of sheep] is apparently "ONE MAN AND HIS DOG"; I thought (given the sheep), it was "ONE MAN AND HIS RAM"! Also, apparently Lillian Jackson Braun wrote a 1986 novel titled "THE CAT WHO SAW RED"—I thought it was "THE CAT WHO SAW GOD" (mine's better, imho)

• The Amerian Values Crossword Club (AVXC) puzzle was called "Swingers" and had the names of monkeys hidden inside wacky theme answers (with the revealer MONKEY IN THE MIDDLE). Now, hidden (or embedded) word puzzles aren't anything new, but usually the word you're hiding is something short. This puzzle was remarkable for how outlanding the hiding monkey names were. MACAQUE is hidden inside the ridiculous answer TAYLOR MAC AQUEDUCT. Then TAMARIN is hidden inside GUATAMA RINGTONE. I always say that with "wackiness"-driven puzzles, you need to go big or go home. Well, you might love or hate this one, but it definitely went very big in the wackiness department. BATMAN DRILL BITS!
• On a much less wacky but still elegant note, the Tuesday Feb. 4 USA Today ("Toymaking" by Karl Ni) sneaks up on you with its simplicity. Themers don't really seem to cohere until you get to the revealer, BUILD-A-BEAR, and realize that the last words in all the themers combine to make ("build") a very famous bear: PAD, DING, TON! I love artful easy puzzles, and this was definitely one of those.
• Lastly, a puzzle that was both beautiful and infuriating. The Chronicle of Higher Ed. puzzle by Joanne Sullivan ("Switch-Hitters") featured famous titles clued as having come out in two different years. Turns out the different dates relate to when the title came out as a book (earlier date) and as a film (later date). The revealer is the real stunner here: you get ___ CLUB, and both BOOK and FILM work (i.e. the Downs are all plausible when either BOOK or FILM is in place). The infuriating part was the themer clue, which was impossible to parse—just horribly written, so instead of having the great aha moment that the puzzle deserved, I had ... no moment. Had to go look up what the clue was getting at at crosswordfiend.com. Such a shame to ruin a brilliant puzzle with a botched revealer clue. So important to stick the landing. But still, conceptually, this was great work from Joanne.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

P.S. that NIGEL clue was *not* the constructor's, which is *not* surprising 🙁

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