Restaurant chain with an avian mascot / SUN 7-28-24 / Phenomenon allegorized in "The Crucible" / Raccoonlike mammal of China /

• • •

I got [BLACK]MAGIC, thought "Oh, is that it?," kept solving like normal for a bit, then thought, "What the hell..." and tried to get every answer in every ring. And succeeded. I had to think for a second about [GREEN]HOUSE (100A: What has a lot of room to grow?), but otherwise, everything went right in. When you just hand readers the first part of That many answers, a lot of the fun and All of the challenge goes right out the door. This is a bright, shiny thing, a good-looking thing, a cute thing, but it's not much of a puzzle. I mean, its purpose seems to be primarily decorative. There's nothing really to figure out. Filling in the answers almost feels beside the point. Superfluous. Even the revealer feels pretty redundant. It's obviously the OLYMPIC FLAG. I can see that. You're describing the obvious. So while this is well made, it feels like it's made for a child's placemat. A precocious child, I guess. But still. There's no heft to this. I neither enjoyed nor unenjoyed it. I hardly had the time to work up any feeling at all.

So, yeah, the Olympic Games started this week in Paris, so the puzzle is at least timely. I'm really struggling to find anything to say about it. The bonus themers are pretty clever, as puns go? Uh ... I like the BRA clue? (1A: Word following "push-up" that anagrams to a word following "pull-up") (it's "pull-up bar," which I assume you've figured out by now) (they can't say "bar" because BAR is an answer elsewhere in the puzzle) (65A: Cheers, for one). I was just thinking today how great Cheers was. Actually, I was remembering what a huge crush I had on Diane as a kid. Actually actually, what I was thinking about was the 1982 movie Night Shift, and how much Bruce Willis, in the first season of Moonlighting (which I've started rewatching) often appears to be channeling the voice and mannerisms and occasionally exact expressions of Michael Keaton's character (Bill) in Night Shift (a 1982 movie about two guys—Keaton and Henry Winkler who decide to run a prostitution ring out of a morgue). And then I thought of Shelley Long because she's also in Night Shift (as the quintessential "hooker with a heart of gold"). And then I thought of Cheers. And then I did this puzzle. And here we are. If Star Wars was the most formative moviegoing experience of my childhood, Night Shift was the most formative movie-watching experience of my adolescence—can't say "moviegoing" because I only ever saw it on "laser disc," which were those giant, LP-sized discs that were precursors to DVDs. My dad was always an early adopter of gadgetry. I mean, we had a damned Betamax player. We eventually got a VHS player, like normal people, but mostly, in the early/mid-80s, we watched movies on laser disc, and we watched Night Shift over and over and over and over. I'm sure (quite sure) the movie is dated and politically ... uh, questionable on many, many levels. But Michael Keaton in that movie was ... just ... iconic for me. Bill Murray and Steve Martin were the obvious comedy heroes of boys my age, but for me, in terms of movie performances, it was Keaton in Night Shift. The gold standard. "Call Starkist." If you know, you know. Anyway, as I was saying: BAR ... is an answer in this puzzle. 

Probably the most interesting answer in this puzzle is RANGE WAR (37D: Cattle-driving dispute). I like it because it's original and because it makes me think of old westerns, which I both love and love to hate (racism against Native Americans is *pretty* standard, as is rather cruel treatment of the stunt horses, but I love me some handsome dudes strutting around trying to outdude each other, especially if Angie Dickinson or Grace Kelly or Barbara Stanwyck or Joan Collins is nearby). I also like PAN-ARAB, TAKE THE BAIT, and "I'M HUNGRY!" (41D: What "Meow!" might mean) ("Kitties! I just fed you! You want more? OK. What? What is it, Ida? You want me to physically carry you to your food bowl? Hmm. Alright. Seems fair. Whatever you need"). Like I say, the puzzle is not poorly made. Not at all. It just didn't have any fight in it. I didn't know JOSÉ Rizal, but otherwise, there wasn't a single answer that gave me any real trouble. EAR CANAL, maybe a little, but that's it (83D: Channel that gets audio only?). 

Not sure about that "only" in the EAR CANAL clue. I guess in the sense of "not video," then yes, audio only. But it can also get, I dunno, pain, in circumstances. And wax. Definitely gets wax ("cerumen," it's called, I just learned) (don't click on that link if you don't want to see earwax, yikes, definite trigger warning there). Speaking of canals, on tonight's episode of The Love Boat (the back end of a two-parter from early in season 4), the Pacific Princess sailed through the Panama Canal. So many locks! So exciting! Donny Most! Erin Moran! Charlene Tilton! Peter Graves! Debbie bleeping Reynolds! So much fun. Well, except when Gopher got left behind in a Panamanian prison because police mistook him for an illegal drug dealer because Doc sent him ashore on a (legal) drug-buying errand in order to get Gopher out of the way so that Doc could have more time alone with the two comically, exaggeratedly, performatively flirty ladies (Dawn Wells! Ann Jillian!) who were the judges in some kind of wedding contest (it was a group wedding cruise, don't ask). But more on that another time. Don't worry. Gopher's fine.

Explainers:

• 9A: Israeli desert (NEGEV)— this sometimes appears as NEGEB. Never commit to that last letter without a crosscheck, even though it's far more likely to be NEGEV (32 appearances in the Shortz/Fagliano Era, versus only one for NEGEB (back in 2008))
• 28A: ___ Rizal, national hero of the Philippines (JOSÉ) — OK, back to this guy. Whenever I see a name like RIZAL (i.e. short, belonging to an allegedly famous person, completely unfamiliar to me), I think "Why haven't I seen this name in crosswords before?" Well, if you solve only the NYT crossword, then the last time you saw RIZAL would've been [drumroll] 1953! I was gonna say "that's a longggggg time between appearances," but of course RIZAL didn't appear today. JOSÉ did. I wonder if we'll ever see RIZAL again. If you remember solving the puzzle with the one and only appearance of RIZAL, you have an amazing memory, especially for someone who is at least 90 years old, congrats.
• 22A: Multipiece furniture purchases (OTTOMAN SETS) — this answer felt normal to me but my wife insisted it was weird so I ended up looking up OTTOMAN SETS last night on my phone just before bedtime and ... I guess you buy matching ottomans ... as a set? But also there are chair and ottoman sets, so when you search "OTTOMAN SETS" you get a jumble of things. I did not know ottomans came in sets, though I guess if you have a space where multiple ottomans are called for and you like things matchy-matchy, it makes sense.
• 68A: Letters after Lucasfilm (LTD) — what an odd and hyperspecific way to come at LTD. I was not at all sure. And there's a bit of a tricky clue on one of the crosses: [It's not long.] for LAT. (i.e. "latitude," which is not long- ... itude). 

• 73A: Round up at the start? (PRELIMS) — an excellent trick clue. "Round up" looks like a verb but no, "Round" is a noun, as in a round of a tournament. PRELIMS come early ("up at the start") of some tournaments.
• 81A: Supreme pizza topping (OLIVE) — hey, the allegedly "divisive" pizza topping (see Friday's puzz) is back! Non-divisively. Could also have clued ONION this way too, but the puzzle went with [Fried rice add-on] instead.
• 93A: Concerning egg cells (OVULAR) — no problem with this answer, though I do have a slight problem with duping "cells" in the clue (which already appears in the grid in FUEL CELLS (85A: Power sources for some electric cars))
• 106D: Negative Nancy words? (NONS) — Nancy is a city in France. "Noes" (the plural of "no") are "negative words." So "Negative words" in "Nancy" are NONS (the plural of the French word for "no"—"non"). Pretty creative clue for a pretty ugly answer.
• 75D: Spice Girl Chisholm, casually (MEL) — if you're going to be that specific, including the last name and all, the answer really should be MEL C. That is how she typically appears in the grid (seven NYTXW appearances), to distinguish her from her colleague, MEL B (two NYTXW appearances). Not sure why you wade into Spice World when the answer is just MEL. Lotsa plain-old MELs in the world.

• 57D: ___ Oyu, sixth-highest peak in the world (CHO) — should've made this the word of the day. Never heard of it. It's in the Himalayas, on the Nepal/Tibet border. CHO Oyu means "Turquoise Goddess" in Tibetan.
• 99D: "The ___ true for ..." (SAME'S) — I just have "oof" written next to this one. This is a thematically load-bearing answer, and there aren't a lot of good options. Still, oof.
• 95D: Part of a woman's anatomy named for Dr. Ernst Gräfenberg (G-SPOT) — trying to imagine some guy getting the "G" and going "Wait ... anatomy? Women's anatomy? ... I don't ... GRÄFE? ... is it GRÄFE? Do women have GRÄFEs? How did I not know this? GRÄFE?? What does it do? Honey!... Come here a minute. I have questions ..."

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld 

P.S. back to Love Boat for a sec—I just looked up Peter Graves and I am now the same age he was in Airplane! Howwwwwww? When it came out, I was the same age as this kid!:

[TIME AND TIDE]

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