Young Salmon / SUN 8-7-22 / The whole package, colloquially / Like the Xbox One X vis-à-vis the Xbox One / Nigerian city of 3.5+ million / Jazz singer born Eunice Kathleen Waymon / Crystal-clear

THEME: LETTERPLAY— Theme answers feature multiple letters or repeating patterns of letters that are cross-referenced as "hints" in other clues in the grid.

Theme answers:

• AT AN ANGLE (25A: Not true?)
• TRIPLE A (68A: Top credit rating ... or a hint to 25-Across)
• UNIQUE USER (27A: Visitor to a website, in analytics lingo)
• DOUBLE U (71A: 23rd in a series ... or a hint to 27-Across)
• SAM ADAMS (42A: Beer named for a founding father)
• TWO AM (52A: D.S.T. starting time ... or a hint to 42-Across)
• HUSH HUSH (97A: Secretive)
• FOUR H (90A: Club for farm kids ... or a hint to 97-Across)
• VOODOO DOLL (115A: Spelling aid?)
• FIVE-O (89A: Cops ... or a hint to 115-Across)
• OIN OIN ONE (118A: Baseball announcer's call on a home run. As in "Going, Going, Gone," because...)
• ZERO G (54A: Weightlessness ... or a hint to 118-Across).

Word of the Day: SMOLT (100D: Young Salmon) —

Smolt may refer to:

• a juvenile salmon, having reached the stage of adulthood, that is ready to migrate to sea for the first time.
• Smolt (Linux), a project aimed at hardware information collection

Hello once again! It's Eli Selzer, filling in for Rex as he vacations (checks Twitter) in my home town! Excited to be tackling a Sunday, though I was a little nervous because Friday and Saturday knocked me out this week. I enjoyed both puzzles and am a fan of all the constructors, and I'm not even sure they were actually HARD, but my times were well above average on both. Turns out I needn't have worried; this one played decidedly easier for me.

It looks like this is the NYT debut for Tina Labadie, so congratulations! I don't recognize the name from any other outlets, but it's always refreshing to see a non-male name on the byline (seriously, NYT, check out the amazing constructors for other puzzles and ask yourself why your gender disparity is still so stark). Ok, rant over, on to the puzzle!

So. The theme. It's perfectly fine conceptually, but I have a couple of issues. First, DOUBLE U looks ugly. Maybe it's a personal thing, but I've never seen the letter W written out that way. On top of that, the letter U appears THREE TIMES in UNIQUE USER. I suppose it means that the answer has two words that both start with the letter U, but it seriously bumps for me. And I'm not sure an analytics based clue is interesting enough to justify the stretch.

Second, the ZERO G / OIN OIN ONE pairing just doesn't fit the pattern. None of the other themers require you to remove letters or create a nonsense phrase to make them work. Maybe it was intended to be a bit of a "gotcha" on the last theme entry, but to me it feels less like a trick and more like cheating. If there had been other patterns that worked like this (or even if ALL of them were this style), I might have enjoyed it more. As it is, all I can see in 118A is "Oi Noi," making me think of Lily Sullivan's fake Australian accent on Comedy Bang Bang. (Seriously, say "Oh no" like this; it's fun!)

The other issue with the theme is that it's so dense the rest of the puzzle never really goes anywhere. I'm really struggling to find fill that stands out to me. There's a lot of history/geography TRIVIA (125A: "Jeopardy!" fodder) that wasn't really in my wheelhouse: IBADAN, SAUD, SIDRA. Nothing that slowed me down, just not things that came to mind readily. That plural ETNAS isn't doing the puzzle any favors, and I doubt many people are excited about LIMPID. I've definitely had lag on video calls, but I don't know that I've ever seen it referred to as TIME LAG. I can find the clued definition for STOW IT (though it's not one I've ever used), but Google strongly favors storage options for the phrase. 

All right, I don't want this to be too much of a downer; let's find some positives!

Bullets:

• 7D: The "you" of the song lyric "I'm begging of you, please don't take my man"(JOLENE) — Like I need an excuse to listen to Jolene.

• 3D: Jazz singer born Eunice Kathleen Waymon (NINA SIMONE) — See Jolene comment above.

• 80D: The art of music? (ALBUM COVER)— I like the clue, but the answer is so generic that all I can think of is this:

• 104D: Hit 1979 musical in which a character's mistress is one of the main roles (EVITA)— I'm not sure I'd call Peron's Mistress a MAIN character, but she's certainly featured. Anyway, I'm a musical theater guy, and I like Evita.

• Speaking of TRIVIAand its clue, I recently auditioned for Jeopardy (again) and am back in the contestant pool for the fifth time. Maybe they'll actually call this time? Fingers crossed!

Signed Eli Selzer, False Dauphin of Crossworld

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