Devil may care attitude in modern parlance / WED 7-8-20 / Shoe company with fish name / Tometi activist who co-founded Black Lives Matter

Constructor: Chase Dittrich

Relative difficulty: Easyish (3:20)

THEME: typography commands— familiar phrases with typography commands in theme have clues that make punny visual use of that typography

Theme answers:

• 20A: Having a meal! (STRESS EATING)
• 35A: M i l i t a r y t r a i n e e s (SPACE CADETS)
• 42A: Downward dog (STRIKE A POSE)
• 56A: "Will you marry me?" (BOLD PROPOSAL) (sorry, I always put theme clues/answers in bold, so the visual doesn't really come across here, just imagine the clue, uh, bolder)

Word of the Day: OPAL Tometi, activist who co-founded Black Lives Matter (38A) —

Opal Tometi (born August 15, 1984) is a Nigerian-American human rights activist, writer, strategist, and community organizer. She is a co-founder of Black Lives Matter. She is the former Executive Director of the United States’ first national immigrant rights organization for people of African descent – the Black Alliance for Just Immigration (BAJI).

Tometi brought attention to the racial inequities faced by Black people. Before that, Tometi was an active community organizer in her hometown advocating for human rights issues. She has campaigned for advancing human rights, migrant rights, and racial justice worldwide. (wikipedia)

This puzzle started out in a hole with me because my software was like "You need to read these notes" and was like "Nah, I hate notes, not doing it." Turns out I didn't really need them—I figured out what I was *supposed* to be seeing in the theme clues, even though my software didn't display them correctly. Sometimes I wish my software was more versatile, but 99% of the time there are no problems and I like the interface a lot, so I'm not changing. Anyway, the theme ... not for me. It's not unclever, but it's more ... I don't know, it's cute but not funny. I see what it's doing, the way I see what a canned joke with a punchline is doing. I never laugh at man walks into a bar-type jokes. "Get it!?""Yes ... amusing." Just not my style of humor. And this theme was not my style of theme. I acknowledge that it is doing what it sets out to do. That's as far as I can go. The fill is below average and slightly crusty-feeling. They put a current clue on OPAL, but all that did was highlight how uncurrent and uninteresting the rest of the fill is here. It is a grid that has been designed to maximize boring fill. It looks like an empty grid you'd get off the internet somewhere. Prefab. Four themers, nine sections, meat and two veg, suit two pair of pants. Seriously, just stare at the grid for a while and watch your mind disappear into the blandness. All 3s, 4s, 5s. Yawn.


I thought I was slow at first because I couldn't get BASS at first pass (1A: Shoe company with a fish name) and then couldn't back into that NW section via STRESS EATING (yet) and so took this weird path from the upper middle to the middle and then sort of radiating out from there, with the NW coming very late (if I'd seen the SINEAD clue earlier I might've made quicker headway up there) (4D: Singer O'Connor). My slowness was very boring today. Misread the Spanish clue as a singular, not a plural (36D: Those, to José), which seems impossible—how do you misread "Those" as singular?? But still I wanted ESTO there. Weird. Also, slow on ESTAB because yuck and also the only abbr. of that word I can accept is ESTD. There's just not a lot to like here. Very old-fashioned feeling in the fill. Feel the DRY GOODS! (10D: Textiles and sundries). Is ROLO over YOLO cute? Maybe. But it's not nearly enough.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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