Late singer with a food name / TUE 6-14-22 / Ocean invertebrate with a round translucent body / Plains figure replaced by Monticello on U.S. nickels / Book-loving Disney princess in a yellow gown / Hot dish that sounds cold / Community card between flop and river in hold'em

• • •

Is that the right BlackRock, the asset management corporation? (see "Word of the Day," above). I mean, is that what I'm supposed to think of when I say "Black Rock" at the end of this puzzle, when I'm adding ROCK AND / or ROLL to all the theme answer parts? Because I had no idea this "asset manager" BlackRock was a thing. If you wanted to play the evil corporation in a cheesy Hollywood thriller, you could do worse than to call yourself BlackRock. It's like an off-the-cuff approximation of "Death Star" that was supposed to be a placeholder name but ended up sticking. It's depressing that I'm supposed to know the names of famous (?) "asset management corporations" in order to solve my Tuesday puzzle. But maybe this isn't the intended BlackRock. Maybe the intended Black Rock is the only Black Rock I actually know, the titular Black Rock from the glorious Technicolor (actually Eastman Color) 1955 Noir-Western, Bad Day at Black Rock, starring a gruff and redoubtable Spencer Tracy, and co-starring every tough guy who ever toughed his way through Tough Town, including Robert Ryan (King Bad Guy), Lee Marvin (Cool Bad Guy), and Ernest Borgnine (who I think won a Best Actor Academy Award for Marty that same year). Eddie Muller just screened Bad Day at Black Rock on TCM's "Noir Alley" a few weeks back. See it if you like trains, sunbaked landscapes, barely inhabited near-ghost towns, anti-racism message films, or lots of dudes just standing around laconically. Yes, this is the "Black Rock" that I will imagine this puzzle is referring to. Asset management, shmasset shmanagement. 

This is one of those "Both Halves"-type puzzles that you used to see more often. The concept is old, but this one puts something of a new twist on it by having "Both Halves" of the answers be able to follow not a single word (the most common variation) but two different words. The revealer's first word goes with first halves, and the second with second. That's an interesting variation on what can be a kind of dull theme. The trouble with this kind of theme is you walk a very narrow beam—there may be a lot of words that can follow "rock," and a lot of words that can follow "roll," but there are going to be Very Few phrases that you can make out of one word from column A and another from column B. It's tempting to try to come up with your own ... although maybe that's only true for NERDS. Anyway, for instance, ACID TEST might work if people were familiar enough with the concept of a "test roll" (from photography). How about PETSPIDER? I think that one is definitely viable, but it's hard to get a phrase that makes sense on its own *and* makes sense as parts of two other, different phrases—you're really working with three phrases for every one that appears in the grid. So there are only three themers in the grid, but there are six shadow answers floating behind it. I'm not sure it's the most rewarding kind of puzzle to solve, but it has construction complexity that might not be readily apparent to solvers.

Overall, the puzzle was very easy, with my only hesitations coming at COOL (was thinking actual cucumbers), BISON (I am numismatically challenged, I'll admit), and ORS (I wrote in IFS, which is definitely the less probable of those two options). Oh, and I needed a ton of crosses to remember the JELLY part of MOON JELLY. I liked that the puzzle was bookish today. Actually, I liked that the NERDS were bookish. So often they are more STEM-ish mathy techy nerds. Although maybe today's NERDS are "bookish" because they're reading software manuals, I don't know. But in my head, they are reading TSE's"The Wasteland" (literally me this week) and Shakespeare's Macbeth (32A) (me earlier in the year) and tales of Sherwood FOREST and maybe a bio of Toulouse-LAUTREC. We see the NERDS we are. Be the nerd you want to see in the world! Enjoy the rest of your day! Shout-out to BOONIES, which is a good answer! OK, I'm off to drink a whole damn pot of BLACK COFFEE, bye.

P.S. the fill could be much, much cleaner on this one. I promise you that you, yes you, can make a better NE corner than the one that's currently there (ABU ESS SLOE). You can get real words and familiar abbrs. in there instead of name parts and "feminine suffixes" and old-school crosswordese like SLOE. Here's a simple, clean version I cooked up quickly. Doable!

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