Constructor: Michael Paleos
Relative difficulty: Easy
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THEME: [SIC] (69A: [not my typo]) — Clues for famously misspelled names have "[69-Across]" after them, and 69-Across is [SIC], the notation for when you are indicating that "yes, I know the word appears misspelled, but that's how it appears in the original, don't blame me":
Theme answers:
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So this one was weird primarily because no one would write [SIC] after any of these names except maybe AMERICAN PHAROAH, whose fame was very short-lived and whose name really might seem like a typo to an ordinary reader (an ordinary reader who knows how to spell "pharaoh"). Actually, it kinda feels like the only reason people remember AMERICAN PHAROAH at all (outside the ever-decreasing ranks of horse-racing fandom) is precisely because of that misspelling. Whereas with BOSTON RED SOX ... that name is so long-established that I, a fan of baseball for coming up on half a century, never really thing of the name as a misspelling of "socks." That is, it doesn't even register as a misspelling, the way that DEF LEPPARD and FROOT LOOPS at least do—I know how to spell the band and the cereal, but those names at least register as wacky intentional misspellings, whereas SOX does not. The idea that you'd write SIC after the horse, I can buy, but after BOSTON RED SOX? Preposterous. I doubt anyone out there is going to think "don't you mean Deaf Leopard?" either. Anyway, these are famously "mis"-spelled names, so that's an interesting theme premise ... I just don't know if the SIC thing is really the best way to go about bringing it all together. I'm sure the use of SIC as a revealer here is supposed to be jokey / facetious, so the fact that you wouldn't *actually* use it for these names is (maybe) supposed to be beside the point. Still, the fact that I might in fact use it for some (horse) but never for others (baseball team) makes the theme set feel weirdly uneven, and the revealer feel like a punch line that doesn't quite land.
Some more notes:
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Relative difficulty: Easy
Theme answers:
- FROOT LOOPS (17A: Breakfast cereal with a toucan mascot [69-Across])
- BOSTON RED SOX (23A: Team that broke the "Curse of the Bambino" in 2004 [69-Across])
- AMERICAN PHAROAH (39A: Triple Crown winner of 2015 [69-Across])
- MORTAL KOMBAT (48A: Video game franchise featuring Sub-Zero and Sonya Blade [69-Across])
- DEF LEPPARD (61A: "Pour Some Sugar on Me" rockers [69-Across])
Raymond Allen Liotta (Italian: [liˈɔtta]; December 18, 1954 – May 26, 2022) was an American actor and film producer. He was known for his roles as Shoeless Joe Jackson in Field of Dreams (1989) and Henry Hill in Martin Scorsese's Goodfellas (1990). He was a Primetime Emmy Award winning actor and received nominations for a Golden Globe and two Screen Actors Guild Awards.Liotta first gained attention for his role as Ray Sinclair in the Jonathan Demme film Something Wild (1986), for which he received a Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actor - Motion Picture nomination. He continued to star in films such as Unlawful Entry (1992), No Escape (1994), Cop Land (1997) Hannibal(2001), Blow (2001), Narc (2002), John Q (2002), Identity (2003), Killing Them Softly (2012), The Place Beyond the Pines (2012), Kill the Messenger (2014), Marriage Story (2019), and the Sopranos prequel theatrical film The Many Saints of Newark (2021).
He was also known for his television work in ER for which he received a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Guest Actor in a Drama Series in 2004. He starred as Frank Sinatra in the television film The Rat Pack (1998) and Lorca and Tom Mitchell in Texas Rising (2015) for which he earned Screen Actors Guild Award nominations. He starred in the drama series Shades of Blue (2016–2018) with Jennifer Lopez and had a prominent voice acting role as Tommy Vercetti in the video game Grand Theft Auto: Vice City (2002). (wikipedia)
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["One lump or two!"]
Speaking of misspellings, I was happy to see WHOA spelled correctly, but then I realized that the encroaching WOAH spelling (shudder) is not for this particular meaning of WHOA (3D: "Easy there!"), but for the exclamation you might make if you are surprised or left speechless by something. Today's WHOA is horse WHOA, not omg/wow WHOA. I think the move from WHOA to WOAH for the "omg/wow" exclamation is generational, but I don't know. Surely someone has written on this (... googling ...) yeah, looks like exceedingly-online folks are more apt to use WOAH (a misspelling that started as a message board phenomenon in the '80s, per this article). To me, WOAH is always gonna look like a chemical formula, and my brain is always gonna pronounce it like NOAH, e.g. "Noah's Ark contained a pair of every animal on earth, whereas WOAH's Ark contained only AMERICAN PHAROAH and hasn't been seen or heard from since 2015."
Some more notes:
- 13D: Big name in shapewear (SPANX) — there's a SPANX store in the relatively small Delta terminal at LAX. Crummy restaurants, a couple of those candy / snack / sad-small-rack-of-books-and-magazines stores, and ... a SPANX store. It seemed odd. But I guess shapewear emergencies might arise anywhere.
- 41D: Supermodel Wek (ALEK)— correct on the first guess! This is the first time I've landed ALEK's name with no problem! I am supermodelly challenged, but I'm working on it! I took this picture in one of those aforementioned candy / snack / sad-small-rack-of-books-and-magazines stores at the Delta terminal, just so that I could remember a name I feel sure is coming to a grid near me very soon:
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| [YUMI NU] |
- 7D: "Not true what you say about me!" ("I DO SO!") — wrote in "I DON'T!" and did Not want to remove it.
- 14A: "Nasty!" ("UGH!")— wrote in "ICK!" which says "nasty!" to me far more than "UGH!" does. "UGH!" indicates a kind of resigned / exasperated revulsion, whereas "ICK!" feels more truly grossed out. (This may only apply in writing about crosswords, I don't know.)
- 59D: Like many of Horace's works (ODIC) — I didn't go on about the weak short fill today because sometimes I just get weary of saying the same thing day after day, but I wanted to say something about ODIC because it is an entirely self-inflicted wound. ODIC is pretty pure crosswordese. Not gonna find a lot of defenders for that never-seen-outside-crosswords, use-only-in-case-of-emergency fill. But today, the constructor has made it so that there aren't really any other options there. When you lock yourself into -D-C with your themers ... well, maybe consider a different solution. Swap FROOT LOOPS and DEF LEPPARD, move SIC ... something. -D-C leaves you with nowhere to go but ODIC. Why build crosswordese into your grid like this if you don't have to?
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