Plastic __ Band / WED 4-20-2022 / Word before "...wanna go home," in calypso / Football carriers: Abbr.

Theme answers:

• Aptly named Olympic sprinter-- USAIN BOLT
• Aptly named six-time All-Star first baseman-- PRINCE FIELDER
• Aptly named tennis great-- MARGARET COURT
• Aptly named NBA MVP, in a manner of speaking-- TIM DUNCAN

Word of the Day: BAT (Animal that symbolizes good fortune in Chinese culture) —

Chinese art is rich with images of bats. Bats fly joyously across fabrics and tapestries, jewelry and porcelain, and are carved into jade and ivory, and adorn the columns and facades of palaces and the thrones of emperors. As symbols of good luck and happiness, bats have few rivals in Chinese culture, and their admiration for bats is ancient. The Chinese word for bat is ‘fu,’ pronounced the same as the word for good fortune.

Hey besties! Off-schedule Malaika MWednesday as Rex handles his power outage. Hope everyone in a similar situation is safe and warm! 

Really intrigued to see what you folks think of this puzzle! (Unrelated to anything, my manager's manager called me out on how I over-use the word intrigued and now it is all that I hear myself say.) I think it will depend greatly on whether you know the people in it. Puzzles where the theme answers are people's names can be polarizing that way. This theme was able to slightly avoid that because "sprinter" clues BOLT and "first baseman" clues FIELDER and etc, but still, some of the sizzle is gone when you've never even heard of the person being mentioned. (I'm one for four, and found this pretty meh as a result.)

I didn't like how the last theme entry broke the pattern with a sudden switch to homophones (DUNCAN sounds like "dunk in," is what the clue gets at)-- to me it just felt like the constructor couldn't find anything better.

There's not a ton of theme content in this puzzle-- that's the kind of thing I never would have noticed before I started constructing!! But now that I'm more grid-savvy, I see that sort of thing and expect some fun long non-theme answers. I liked PRISTINE, GEMSTONE, PLUS ONES, and TWINKLES, even though that last clue (Puts out light, as a star) felt pretty tortured. I don't like that whole "as a ..." construct in cluing. [Use a beam on, as for cutting] was another instance, for LASE. Why not just say [Cut using a beam] ???

There were also some fun medium-sized answers-- HELP ME, ZIPS IT, EEYORE. I liked the clue for RASTA mentioning "I and I," which was new to me. 

Bullets:

• I didn't finish this puzzle. My i-had-one-margarita brain saw [Decide] instead of [Decided] and put "opt" instead of SET-- "I.R.O." felt like it could be a valid agency, and "cup" is a word
• Also I had "on a" instead of ONO. I've never heard of the term HMOS so those first three letters could have been anything
• Why clue PAIN as a word in French when it is a word in English?
• My Spanish teacher was a big fan of Almodovar, so we watched "Todo Sobre Mi MADRE" in class, and at least one other of his movies. I can't remember which one had gazpacho in it... but then we made gazpacho. Excellent.
  
• I never thought I would see the day where YAS queen was in a Times puzzle. Phew.
• Any Youths (TM) out there with thoughts on SIP TEA?? It sounds so very very "How Do You Do Fellow Kids" to me.... Like, "tea" can be gossip... sure..... but no one is like "Yes I am ready to sip tea right now!!" It's more like "What's the tea?"

Blaze it,

Malaika

P.S. I didn't want to put this in the main write-up since it's so specific and unrelated but Rex has made the decision to give me platform, so here I am, using it. I adored the Oz books when I was younger. There are about a dozen of them, and I read them multiple times. I'd lug them back from a library in a tote back that was practically splitting at the seams. In those books, Oz is real. In the way that, like, Narnia is real, or H*gwarts or etc.

And it's so cool! There's fun world-building stuff, like how no one ever starves because you can plant anything. Like if you plant a biscuit in the ground, it will grow a biscuit tree. And eventually Dorothy comes to the very valid conclusion that life sucks on Earth, and so she should bring her family to Oz where they can enjoy a life of luxury. And... she does!! And it rocks!

So I freaking hate how in the movie it's a dream. I feel like that wrecks the whole point of the series which is that.... magic is real and fun and exciting and whimsical! And that dumb ZEKE clue reminded me of that. But I will be an adult and admit that most people do not share these opinions and so for y'all it was probably a fun reminder of a fun movie. Okay that's all.

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