Bygone smartphone / TUE 4-7-20 / Breakout role for Robin Williams / Classic catalog for air passengers

Constructor: Trent H. Evans

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium? (had a conversation while solving ... see below)

THEME: [body part, kinda] IN (or ON) THE [some place]— idioms describing various "state"s

Theme answers:

• HEAD IN THE CLOUDS (20A: Dreaming state)
• FEET ON THE GROUND (36A: Practical state)
• MIND IN THE GUTTER (49A: Crass state)

Word of the Day: TWERK (26D: Bring up the rear?) —

TWERKING: sexually suggestive dancing characterized by rapid, repeated hip thrusts and shaking of the buttocks especially while squatting (merriam-webster)

Just gonna give you the highlights today, since I expended most of my energy analyzing energy in the making of this solving video (with my friend and occasional guest blogger Rachel Fabi):


At 25+ minutes, it's about ten minutes longer than I'd like these videos to be on average, but it's a pretty tight 25. If you just want to see the actual solve and solving discussion, you can skip to about the 5:30 mark and start there. Rachel was very kind to just hop onto Zoom last night and do this "live" solve with me. Definitely the most fun I've had solving a Tuesday puzzle.


Here's a quick summary of my thoughts about this puzzle:
The theme is light, but in a good way. Just three themers, all the same grid-spanning length, all following the same basic phrasing pattern, fine. Just fine. Didn't have a revealer, didn't need a revealer. I do think the whole business with cluing each answer as some kind of "state" was a uniformity the theme actually did not need. The thing that keeps it hanging together is just the rhythm of the phrasing ("blank in/on the blank") and the fact that the first word in every phrase is a body part. That in/on inconsistency didn't really bother me. What did bother me was having the third "body part" be "MIND," both because it isn't a body part at all, and because it basically duplicates "HEAD" (unless your mind is located in some other part of *your* body, in which case ... well, you can keep that to yourself). Would've been nice to start with the HEAD phrase and end with the FEET phrase, with some kind of middle-of-the-body part (HEART? BELLY?) in the middle slot. It's an unassuming, airy, lilting little theme, no great shakes, but charming in its way. And the fill holds up OK, even if it is a little overly familiar (ALOU LAILA ONEL OMANI etc.). Only TREO made me wince a little (52D: Bygone smartphone) (soon it will not be reasonable to expect anyone to remember that bygone product name for a M or T puzzle ... by "soon" I might mean "now").

A few more things!:

• 26D: Bring up the rear? (TWERK)— this is gonna be one of those answers where constructors / editors are gonna have a Real hard time laying off the "?" clues. Butt stuff is just too tempting, I guess. Speaking of butt stuff:
• 47A: It ends with diciembre (ANO) — in the video, Rachel and I have brief but in-depth discussion about the importance (or lack thereof) of diacritical marks (like the tilde!), and why their absence only seems to rankle in this specific case (i.e. the case where "year" turns into "anus" without the diacritical mark.
• 39D: DeLorean license plate in "Back to the Future" (OUTATIME) — I balked at this because of the spelling of OUT(T)A, which I would instinctively spell with two "T"s, but the spelling of the license plate is the spelling of the license plate. It does not admit of debate. Here's proof that the clue is in fact correct:

(Bandon, OR, June 2013)

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]