When doubled 2010s dance / THU 6-24-20 / Efficiency symbol in physics / Golfer Poulter with three PGA Tour wins / 1950s-60s sitcom nickname / makes the going great old ad slogan

Constructor: Amanda Chung and Karl Ni 

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium (4:58)

THEME: GO OUT ON A LIMB (51A: Act riskily ... or what three answers in this puzzle do) — three answers go out (i.e. off the edge of the grid) on a limb (the part hanging off the edge of the grid is also the name of a limb, such as one might find on a human, or turkey):

Theme answers:

• WORKS LIKE A CH(ARM) (20A: Totally does the trick)
• "(LEG)ALLY BLONDE" (35A: 2001 comedy starring Reese Witherspoon)
• WHISTLE BLO(WING) (42A: Reporting internal wrongdoing)

Word of the Day: PLAYMAT (40D: Crawl space?) —

Noun

1. A mat (flat piece of material) designed for a young child to play upon. (yourdictionary.com, whatever that is)

I have seen "off the grid"-type themes before, for sure, but this one makes pretty good use of its revealer. A bit weird to have your limbs be arm, leg ... and wing. One of those is not like the others, no matter which animal you take the limbs from. Humans don't have wings. Chickens don't have arms. Maybe it's supposed to be a joke? I dunno. Anyway, might've been cool to do arm twice and leg twice—get all the human limbs *and* stick with one species. Also, might've been much cooler if the letters that appear in the grid were actual words. ALLY BLONDE fits the bill, but ugh WORKS LIKE ACH and WHISTLE BLO are ... rough. I guess both ACH and BLO can stand alone as crossword answers, so maybe you could say they're not total nonsense, but ... I just wince when my grid is full of nonsense. I know I know, you add the limb and poof, no nonsense. But grids should look good as is. The fact of ACH at the end of WORKS LIKE ACH really hurt me, as did the cluing of regular old SETH as some Egyptian god (!?!?!) (12D: Egyptian god of chaos). I had SETT for the god and WORKS LIKE ACT as the answer. I was certain that the theme was somehow going to involve MAGIC ... like ACT was somehow standing in for "MAGIC" (i.e. "works like magic"), since "magic act" ... is a thing. This made total sense to me as I was solving, though *exactly* how I thought this whole "MAGIC" dealie would play out, I don't remember. You know, you're solving, you get a themer, maybe you have only a vague idea of how it works, but you keep plugging and have faith that things will become clear later. Well, I finished the grid and still had SETT up there. So boo. Error. Oh well.


Hardest part for me was the mid-east, largely because I didn't really understand the theme yet (even though I was almost done) so the BLO part wasn't obvious. Also, PANAM slogans are wow, yeah, before my time (40A: "___ makes the going great" (old ad slogan)). And I thought [Dum-dum] (37A) was maybe some kind of drum because I would never spell it without the "b"s on the end (i.e. "dumb-dumb"). A Dum-dum is a (delicious) lollipop. So BOZO, couldn't get. Was proud that I remembered the NAE (NAE), and that Definitely helped me get things sorted in there (50A: When doubled, a 2010s dance). Only other snag was in the west, where I had CLOSE TO before CLOSE BY (14D: Near) and NYSE before NYNY (29D: Big Apple inits.), and both of those errors were running right through the front end of the themer ALLY BLONDE (and again, at that point I still had no idea about all the limb business). Rest of the puzzle played pretty easy.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]