What "waftaroms" represent in the comics / FRI 7-19-24 / Physiologist whose namesake exercise is part of an Army fitness test / Final Fantasy and others, for short

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Hey squad! What a treat to review a themeless puzzle for once! I like my puzzles easy and themeless, and this one hit one of the marks. I really struggled to get a start on this-- absolutely fell into the [It might turn red or blue] trap, and dropped in "litmus test." (I also, slightly more embarrassingly, initially had "rizz" instead of GAME for [Flirting ability, in slang].) I made it about fifteen minutes, and then after staring at the lower corners for several minutes had to start guessing and checking a little.

Also-- there were two places where I had to fully guess. The crossing of WON / LAW took me a second because I couldn't crack that fiendishly clever clue [Appealing subject?], and while I guessed that "jeon" was Korean, I totally blanked on the currency. I also didn't know the crossing of SIENA / CANA, although I guessed correct on my first try.

Looking over the grid, nothing stands out as particularly hard (I was able to plop in some of the non-ideal stuff like IN OT and YER just because I've done lots of puzzles), so I'm trying to figure out why I got such a slow start. I think it's because the cluing was trivia-heavy.

To me, trivia, more than anything else, can stretch the range of a puzzle's difficulty. Trivia is the thing that makes a puzzle a breeze to some and a struggle to others. ("What about proper nouns??" you might ask. And to you I say-- those are often a subset of trivia!) Obviously sometimes trivia is fully necessary, but here we got trivia clues for entries that could have been clued otherwise, like OPERA (Setting of a date for Edward and Vivian in "Pretty Woman") and SIENA (New York college known for opinion polling) and ODOR (What "waftaroms" represent in the comics) (Did the grammar feel weird on that to anyone else? I really wanted a plural.) and BURPEE (Physiologist whose namesake exercise is part of an Army fitness test) and NILE (River traveled by passenger boats known as dahabeahs) and NORTH POLE (Locale with the ZIP code 88888) and even BALI (Neighbor of Java) and YAM (Sub-Saharan crop). That seemed like a lot to me!!

There were also some puns that worked and others that didn't. I already mentioned [Appealing subject?] as a win. On the other end of things was [Things that are head and shoulders above the rest?] for PROFILE PICS, whose wordplay just didn't land-- I've had plenty of profile pics which feature below my shoulders... or aren't even a picture of me at all. Spinning 180 again, I'll devote several sentences to [What might prompt you to flip the bird?] for OVEN TIMER, which is one of the best clues I can remember in a long time. Changing the meaning of both "flip" and "bird" is so genius, and the "Aha!" moment was incredibly delightful and satisfying. I'll be keeping this one in my back pocket the next time I'm teaching someone how to write the perfect Question Mark Clue.

I'm running out of room in this review, so I'll close by flagging my two favorite entries-- LOVE POTION and IM ON A ROLL. The former is just so evocative and almost poetic; the latter selfishly reminds me of a puzzle I wrote from a couple months ago.

Lots of bullets today:

• [Upon which a dragonfly frequently lays its eggs] for POND— This phrasing was bonkers to me!! I have never seen phrasing for a clue like this before, and for a moment I thought this was going to be a themed puzzle.
• [Boyfriend of Nancy Drew] for NED — I was a huge reader but I never read these! In terms of mysteries, I preferred The Boxcar Children. If you're trying to buy a mystery for a kid you know, I highly recommend the Truly Devious series.
• [Farmers business: Abbr.] for INS— Please, someone, tell me what this means
• [Holiday time, informally] for VACAY — Does anyone else spell this "vaycay"? Actually, as I'm typing it, that looks dumb. Never mind.

xoxo Malaika

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