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Game option represented by a flat palm / SUN 1-2-22 / Sinuous dance that emulates a creature / Daughter in the comic strip "FoxTrot" / Culinary phrase after pollo or scaloppine / Goddess who turned Picus into a woodpecker / Final Fantasy character who shares a name with a U.S. city / Bottle flipping in the mid-2010s e.g. / God sometimes depicted with green skin / Rapper known offstage as Mathangi Arulpragasam / Car model made entirely of Roman numerals / Ones doing stellar work / High on marijuana in slang

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Constructor: Paolo Pasco

Relative difficulty: Medium


THEME:"Color Mixing"— theme answers are anagrams of two colors; the clues contain both the colors and a normal clue:

Theme answers:
  • REINDEER CALVES (21A: CERISE + LAVENDER = certain baby animals)
  • DOG COLLAR (32A: CORAL + GOLD = pet store purchase)
  • GERMAN BEER (46A: AMBER + GREEN = imported brew)
  • MARINE CORPS (52A: PEAR + CRIMSON = fighting group)
  • MENTAL IMAGE (60A: LIME + MAGENTA = visualization)
  • STAR CLUSTER (74A: RUST + SCARLET = celestial group)
  • PEACE MARCH (83A: CREAM + PEACH = nonviolent protest)
  • HOT CEREAL (94A: TEAL + OCHER = breakfast option)
  • VEGETARIAN MENU (107A: MAUVE + TANGERINE = restaurant handout)
Word of the Day: M.I.A. (111D: Rapper known offstage as Mathangi Arulpragasam) —
Mathangi 
"Maya" Arulpragasam MBE (born 18 July 1975), known by her stage name M.I.A. (an acronym of "Missing in Acton"), is a British rapper, singer, record producer and activist. Her songs contain evocative political and social commentary regarding immigration, warfare and identity in a globalised world. Her music combines elements of alternativedanceelectronichip hop and world music with eclectic instruments and samples. [...] M.I.A.'s first two albums, Arular (2005) and Kala (2007), received widespread critical acclaim for their experimentation with hip hop and electronic fusion. The single "Paper Planes" from Kala reached number four on the US Billboard Hot 100 and sold over four million copies. Her third album Maya (2010) was preceded by the controversial single-short film "Born Free". Maya was her best-charting effort, reaching the top 10 on several charts. Her fourth studio album, Matangi (2013), included the single "Bad Girls", which won accolades at the MTV Video Music Awards. M.I.A. released her fifth studio album, AIM, in 2016. She scored her first Billboard Hot 100 number-one single as a featured artist on Travis Scott's "Franchise" (2020). // M.I.A.'s accolades include two American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) awards and two MTV Video Music Awards. She is the first person of South Asian descent to be nominated for an Academy Award and Grammy Award in the same year. She was named one of the defining artists of the 2000s decade by Rolling Stone, and one of the 100 most influential people of 2009 by Time. Esquire ranked M.I.A. on its list of the 75 most influential people of the 21st century. According to Billboard, she was one of the "Top 50 Dance/Electronic Artists of the 2010s". M.I.A. was appointed Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) in the 2019 Birthday Honours for her services to music. (wikipedia)
• • •

Wow, 2022 is really not working out for me so far as a crossword-solving enthusiast. I got absolutely demolished yesterday by a puzzle that seemed determined to kneecap me at nearly every turn, and today, I did it, but I don't get it. I have never, ever not liked a Paolo Pasco puzzle, so I was extremely psyched to see today's byline. But as the puzzle went on, I had an increasingly sinking feeling. The theme appeared to be just ... color anagrams? And nothing very exciting was going on with either the clues or the answers, so when I was done, all I could assume was that I had missed something vital. Some twist or joke or visual pun or something. Anything that would explain why mixing colors like this was a Sunday-worthy theme concept. Do the colors do something? Can I color this puzzle? The answers are all two-word answers, so ... if I make one word one color, and the other word the other color ... or I alternate ... colors ... I honestly don't know. The answers have no relation to the colors that I can see, nor any relation to each other, so I'm left with just a bunch of OK longer answers. Well, a bunch of OK longer answers and then whatever the hell REINDEER CALVES is supposed to be. REINDEER CALVES! LOL, I hate it so much I love it. So entirely random. What's next, ALBATROSS CHICKS? Because that makes at least as much sense as a standalone answer (seriously, though: $100 bonus to the first constructor who works ALBATROSS CHICKS into a NYT crossword somehow). The grid is constructed in a way that maximizes short fill and minimizes long fill and so there's just not much of interest outside the theme. I enjoyed AARON BURR and AL MARSALA well enough, but nothing else really brightened up the grid (I'm trying really hard not to say "the fill just wasn't that colorful" but as you can see I'm not trying hard enough). I'm realizing now that what makes REINDEER CALVES go from bad to amazing is the fact that when I look at the answer in the grid, I just imagine a bunch of reindeer whose lower legs are super-jacked. To better fly the sleigh, I assume. 


Is the NYT trying to make people tired of the PRIDE PARADE? Back-to-back appearances are pretty conspicuous for an answer this ... colorful ("colorful" is an apt adjective based on the pride flag and is in no way a corny pun based on the theme of this puzzle). Not sure how I feel about AD ASTRA and ASTRONOMERS sharing the same grid. No, turns out I am sure, and I'm agin' it. STAR CLUSTER and AD ASTRA, fine, you can hop languages, but duping the ASTR- part is going too far. The puzzle was hard today primarily to the extent that I didn't know a bunch of proper nouns: EGO RENO ELSIE AIDAN PAIGE and MEL, to be specific. The MEL miss really hurt because I am a faithful watcher of "GBBO"—turns out I never knew MEL's last name. Also, clue really should say "former co-host" since she left the show in 2016, which is many eons ago in "GBBO" time. But if proper nouns hurt, they also helped: MARA SOLANGE FAVRE ELENA and M.I.A. went straight into the grid, no problem. So: win some, lose some, normal Sunday difficulty.


I didn't know NUDE was a lipstick choice. I'd heard of it as a stocking choice but it seems like a problematic concept, given that NUDE skin is obviously *all kinds* of colors. Looks like there are all kinds of NUDE, too, so hey, great. I have never spent significant time with a makeup wearer, hence my cosmetics knowledge deficiency. Hardest part of the grid for me by far was the very beginning; took me forever to figure out PAPER (1A: Game option represented by a flat palm), and even after I got it, it took a few beats before I understood what the hell "game" was even involved (A: Rock, PAPER, Scissors), and then I totally forgot there was going to be an Olympics in PARIS (1D: 2024 Olympics host) (I wanted CHINA there, but that's *this* year, not 2024). My favorite answer (that didn't involve swole ungulates) was FADED. I just watched someone rush to Twitter to show off their answer for 56D: High on marijuana, in slang, and while the tweet did get a lot of likes, there was a small problem: the grid-poster had written in BAKED, not FADED, and in doing so had also let the world know that they thought "Nappy" was the British term for NAPKIN (105A: Nappy : U.K. :: ___ : U.S. = DIAPER). So, a small bit of advice from someone who routinely writes in wrong first guesses: don't tweet out your grid at all (come on, spoilers!) and *especially* don't tweet out your grid Before You Have Finished. 

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

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