62A What "should be made by filling a glass with gin, then waving it in the general direction of Italy," per Noël Coward - THU 3-31-22 - Marginalia - chess:check::go:_____ - reader's jottings

Word of the Day: DRY MARTINI (62A What "should be made by filling a glass with gin, then waving it in the general direction of Italy," per Noël Coward) —

The martini is a cocktail made with gin and vermouth, and garnished with an olive or a lemon twist. Over the years, the martini has become one of the best-known mixed alcoholic beverages. H. L. Mencken called the martini "the only American invention as perfect as the sonnet," and E. B. White called it "the elixir of quietude". (wikipedia)

Greetings, CrossWorld - my name is Whit and I have the honor of stepping in to blog for Rex today. It's my second time here. I suppose this came about because I was tweeting about the first time I guest-blogged, way back in 2019. When I published that blog, my wife's uncle called her up - I don't think they had ever discussed crosswords or crossword blogs before - to ask if that was her husband writing for Rex Parker. Then, a few days later, I ran into someone who works with my wife, and he also asked if that was me. He said, rather dryly, "Was that you writing on Rex Parker? I don't care for him." A loyal readership, anyway you can get it.

I'm glad to be back. Let's get to the puzzle.

Theme answers:

• ATED (1A Beat in chess - MATED)
• HIMO (10A Classic Jumbotron Shout-out - HIMOM)
• RTTEACHER (20A Educator in a Smock - ARTTEACHER)
• MEDUS (22A Figure seen on Athena's shield - MEDUSA)
• ACEHORSE (32A Thoroughbred, eg. - RACEHORSE)
• PGATOU (36A FedEx Cup Organizer - PGATOUR)
• OBLETS (46A Some drinking vessels - GOBLETS)
• NOPARKIN (48A Kind of zone in a city - NOPARKING)
• CEMAN (59A Profession in an O'Neill Title - ICEMAN)
• DRYMARTIN (62A What "should be made by filling a glass with gin, then waving it in the general direction of Italy," per Noël Coward - DRYMARTINI
• ERDY (70A Geekish - NERDY)
• EPSO (72A Big name in printers - EPSON)

This took me 18 minutes, give or take, which is on the high end of my stats for a Thursday. I confess that I don't care for this type of puzzle. The approach - slicing off those first and last letters for the theme answers - usually feels less like a feat and more like a trick. And I get kinda testy with crosswords when I know the answer but I can't make it fit. I like a clean solve, folks. But I will tip my hat, because there's more going on with those missing letters than I first realized. Each clue on the across is missing the same letter, and put together, those missing letters spell: M-A-R-G-I-N. Still a trick, but more on the clever side than I expected. And the theme answers themselves were all pretty good - I liked RACEHORSE and ARTTEACHER (I'm just writing out the actual word here, it looks silly otherwise.) I picked DRYMARTINI as the word of the day because I a) love martinis and b) love to see Coward get a shout-out in the crossword. I read Phillip Hoare's (HOAR - 14A Frost) biography a few years back and very much enjoyed it, though he only addresses the one thing everyone knows about Noël Coward - that funny little diacritic - very obliquely. And, like, that's half the reason you'd pick up that book to start, right? Tell me about how I can get one of those in my name! (Turns out he just decided to do it. Not much of a story.) 

Apart from the theme answers, though, answers were very short and kind of clunky. I liked IMAMS (40A Muslim leaders) - Ramadan starts tomorrow, Eid Mubarak - and ISLAS (18A Sorna y Nublar, en "Jurassic Park") because dinosaurs chomping on people is fun to think about, but other than that, the fill didn't have much kick. RATON (43A Get into trouble, in a way) is clunky. TOYOU (53A Two-word tribute) is clunky. CANI (69A "Pretty please?" is clunky. And the way the grid was laid out meant that everything felt tight.

Man, I think I'm kinda down on this puzzle.

But I'm not down on the blog! This was fun to write and it was fun to think about the puzzle this way. I hope Rex will have me back again.

Bullets:

• 65A: Kid-lit character with a green suit and gold crown (BABAR) — Babar rules. Always happy to see Babar floating around the world. He lives in Celesteville, and his wife is named Celeste, so I like to imagine that there is a complicated matriarchal power structure in Elephantland and Babar is a puppet king.
• 68A: Chess:check::go:____ (ATARI) — I did not know that was where the word Atari comes from. Apparently Go is one of the hardest games in the world to master. I know that I paid 99 cents for a phone app and then immediately gave up trying to learn.
• 21D: Reader's jottings, e.g. (ANNOTATION) — I realize I haven't really talked about any of the downs, and I think that's because I mostly solved this on the across clues. There's some meat to the down answers and the puzzle can stretch its legs there. I might have been more pleased if I'd taken the all-downs approach.
• 44D: Scan options for the claustrophobic (OPENMRIS) — Who isn't claustrophobic in an MRI machine? 

Signed, Whit Vann, Pretender to the Baronage of the Southwest Corner of CrossWorld

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