Some arcade habitués / SAT 8-6-2022 / For whom the gymnast Nadia Comaneci won gold in 1976 / 1984 #3 hit with the lyric "Ain't no law against it yet" / Sheltie shelterer, in brief / Worker who processes wool

• • •

Solving this puzzle was an emphatically fine experience. An okay time was had by all. Throughout, the grid largely contained what felt to me like fresh fill, relatively speaking (if nothing else, LIESL got another day off, bless her heart). There was also minimal crosswordese to tangle with. But, at the same time, I wouldn't so much call this a particularly entertaining puzzle. And Byron Walden's previous NYT puzzles have, in my experience, been generally delightful solving events (if at times maddeningly challenging), so my expectations were perhaps unfairly high. That said, I'll go ahead and call in some of the hard PASSes I had to dole out in this one.

First off, DESK PERSON??? I just... I can't with it. Nor do I want to with it. DESK PERSON is the kind of fill that seems to have been designed specifically to torpedo an otherwise potentially lively puzzle. The cluing PRETTY straightforwardly signaled (in what for me didn't read in a very buzzy way) that the answer was going to be a job involving, well, something other than standing. (I initially just wrote "sitting" but I guess there are also jobs where you're, like, lying down... a lot? Like... a mechanic? Is there such a thing as a professional sleeper? That would be a great job. I would like to be that when I grow up please.) But really, DESK PERSON? I could honestly rant about this one answer for my entire post, but y'all get it. I don't want to become a one-note BORE straight out of the gate.

Other "nope" moments for me included THE NFL (get out of my crossword if you're already taking up this much real estate in my daily news pls & thx), JUICE BAR (just... blah), and BUBBA, or, more specifically, the arguably stale (and a lot less lighthearted in the #MeToo era) cluing for BUBBA [27A: Nickname for Bill Clinton]. Vanderpump Rules watchers, assemble! (IYKYK.)

It would also, I think, offend exactly no one if the NYT would just give SSN and OLE a rest already, even if only a temporary one. I know, I know, pigs sooner flying, etc. I can at least appreciate the unexpected cluing for OLE [44A: "Still the Same ___ Me" (George Jones album)] this time around. But E-TAIL can fully go ahead and get laid out on a pyre and be set on fire and pushed out to sea and maybe it'll eventually be like it was never even here.

High points, and there were a few, included JUMP FOR JOY [5A: Jubilate] (clue-into-answer alliteration? and with J's, no less? *chef's kiss*) and PÈRE [25A: ___ Noël], but the Christmas season is one of my favorite things in life, so maybe I'm biased. I also really liked the clever cluing for MEDIUMS [7D: Dead ringers?] and FALL ISSUE [37A: It's bound to run in the third quarter]. (Full disclosure: I 100% spent the bulk of today's solving time forgetting that baseball doesn't do "quarters" and consequently trying to come up with the name of whatever baseball position it would be that would, idk, be doing this running at this part of the baseball game?).

Additionally, with IUD seemingly have been made to shoulder the entire [26A: Form of birth control] cluing brunt for *checks watch* ever, VASECTOMY shows up here as both flashier, more interesting fill as well as an example of topical fill that isn't a) so blandly on the nose, like THE NFL, or b) connotative of something especially, as Rex put it on Thursday in reference to TASE, violently off-putting.

Yet even with the occasional amusements interspersed throughout the grid, it felt like the puzzle as a whole was sort of weighed down by a larger proportion of insipid answers and/or cluing. In my opinion, the down answers suffered more from this than the across ones did, as when the lineup of two-word down answers in the NE corner (JUICE BAR OSCAR BID YES DEAR) spilled over into the SW corner (CHAT LINE LEFT ENDS) before essentially petering out into similarly unremarkable shorter fill (TROOPED BATTENS FULLER). I mean, regardless of whether or not it lands for you personally, at least BIDENOMICS has unfamiliarity/newness working for it. 

On the other hand, ENDOWMENTS will likely never be the thing that successfully elevates a puzzle, and PUTS ON HOLD isn't bringing much to the [43A: Tables] either. Elsewhere, instances of more compelling fill (SHE BOP SONORA, for example) are, to some extent, diminished, whether it be by irksome parallel answers, like ULTRAS, or by crosses with a watering-down effect, like BORE ORAL PASS. These occurrences of, for lack of a better way of describing it, canceling-out exacerbate this puzzle's kind of global "meh" quality, resulting in the shining bits of fill being too often overshadowed.

To wrap up, I'd say that this week's Saturday issue was somewhat easier than others we've seen in recent weeks. However, there were some answers that I was only able to get because I knew enough of the crossing fill (GUSTAV, ROLLO, DEL SARTO, BOK). Unsurprisingly, all are names; indeed, all are names that, with the exception of DEL SARTO, could have been clued in more engaging ways. Why you'd forgo the chance to involve a Viking in your puzzle is, frankly, a question I don't care to know the answer to.

This is... one of the stranger music videos I've seen in a while? If you have ~5 minutes, I'd definitely recommend giving it a watch. And if you've got an hour to spare, you can watch it twelve times.

Variety acts:

• 29A: Make sound (REPAIR) — Not, in fact, as in: (transitive) "make" [an] "audible sound." Yeah... idk, -PEAL ended up as guess fill early on for some reason after I inexplicably ran with this incorrect interpretation of the clue, and it took ages to identify it as the root of that problem area.
• 36A: A whole bunch (RAFTS) — I was today years old when I first heard about this meaning of this word. Is that just by random chance? Or has every other person encountered this sense of "raft" before? (In my defense, until last year, I'd spent the better part of the past decade as a medieval lit grad student. And the OED clocks this meaning of "raft" as entering the language in the 1820s, i.e., basically at least four centuries too late for me to have been able to notice it. Yep. Sticking to that excuse.)
• 10D: Excited reaction at trivia night (OH OH) — I'm sorry, but two disembodied OHs do not an excited reaction make. This answer seems to be popping up frequently-ish lately, clued in various iterations, though perhaps most commonly in a classroom, "call on me" type context. Which, actually, at least makes sense, whereas I've never been to a trivia night that entailed having to be called on in order to answer.

Signed, Amy (writing from the hotel room I moved into after the first hotel room was already occupied by ants, a SITCH that did not seem to faze the front DESK PERSON like, at all, which of course isn't worrisome in the least)

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