Printer resolution spec / THU 4-3-25 / "First Blood" tough guy / Big attraction at MoMA / Words on a U-Haul storage container / Lead-in to many a side thought / Fifth-century invader of Europe / 1980s arcade game with a cube-jumping character / Soft drink rival of Mug / Hounds with fine, silky hair / Market checkout option, for short / Country ruled by the al-Khalifa royal family since 1783 / Agent Smith's foe in "The Matrix"

Constructor: Hanh Huynh

Relative difficulty: Easy (might take a little longer to enter all the special squares, but it's still easy to solve)

THEME: STAR-CROSSED (62A: Ill-fated ... or a hint to six squares in this puzzle) — a rebus puzzle where you have to enter a "star" in six squares—the "star" functions as a symbol in the Downs (specifically, an asterisk), and as letters "STAR" in the Acrosses:

Theme answers (ACROSS):

• CO-[STAR] (9A: One sharing the credits?)
• THE [STAR]RY NIGHT (17A: Big attraction at MoMA)
• RE[ST AR]EA (28A: Stop at the side of the road)
• NON-[STAR]TER (36A: Idea that's dead on arrival)
• CU[STAR]D (47A: Egg tart filling)
• LO[ST AR]TS (48A: Using cursive and writing thank you notes, e.g.)

Theme answers (DOWN):

• *NSYNC (11D: Band with the 2000 11x platinum album "No Strings Attached")
• Q*BERT (13D: 1980s arcade game with a cube-jumping character)
• M*A*S*H (25D: Show with the most-watched episode in scripted TV history)
• E*TRADE (40D: Online investment firm founded in 1991)

Word of the Day: DPI (23D: Printer resolution spec) —

Dots per inch (DPI, or dpi) is a measure of spatial printing, video or image scanner dot density, in particular the number of individual dots that can be placed in a line within the span of 1 inch (2.54 cm). Similarly, dots per millimetre (d/mm or dpmm) refers to the number of individual dots that can be placed within a line of 1 millimetre (0.039 in). (wikipedia)

• • •

I feel like I just solved a puzzle (in the past week?) where I was supposed to count an asterisk as a "star" ... oh yeah, Sunday, look at that. The * is having a good week, I guess. As for this puzzle, the M*A*S*H bit is kind of spectacular. Like, "oh, do you like theme!? Here ... have some!" It's got the marquee position, too, because it knows it's the best thing about the puzzle—maybe the puzzle's entire reason for being (look, I know what "raison d'être" means, I just can't bring myself to use it). The doubleness of the theme is also provocative, with the puzzle squeezing two different meanings out of one little "*": it's a visual component of the puzzle in the Downs, but a stand-in for letters ("STAR") in the Across. STAR ... CROSSED. Yes, that works. Still, though, the puzzle is pretty one-note, and (once you discover the gimmick) neither particularly challenging nor particularly exciting. And the fill, yeesh. The short fill in particular is a bit musty today. I'd barely started and already had EBT and SRO in place, which definitely set off the "uh oh" alarm, and before I'd even really left the top-left portion of the grid, BAHT, AVI, and two-M UMM and DPI had joined the gunky get-together. DPI was the answer that seemed most grievous. It's a real spec, but while solving, in real time, I could not remember what the letters stood for ... scratch that, I couldn't remember what the first letter stood for, which meant I was not 100% certain I had it right, and since DAZE could easily have been HAZE, given its clue (23A: Foggy state), I had to make a "D" v. "H" call there. Thankfully, "H" seemed extremely wrong, and "D" rang a bell, so I wasn't too too worried, but boo to ugly initialisms, that's for sure. They can get you into trouble. Anyway, EFT PAREN "ADIA" etc., the fill on this one verged on actively bad at points, without much (beyond the themers) to counteract it.

If you went to arcades (or in my case, local pizza parlors, or Chuck E. Cheese, or 7-11, or ...) in the '80s, or you had a home video game system (in our case, Intellivision), then there's a good chance you got the theme concept very early, because Q*BERT was a Thing for a few years there. Not really my thing (my thing being 1. Donkey Kong, 2. Frogger), but you got to know the adjacent games, wherever and whatever you were playing. The thing about Q*BERT is that it has only five letters, but today's answer was six, so .... "they're doing an asterisk bit, probably." In fact. And I've seen THE [STAR]RY NIGHT, just in the past couple of years, I think (maybe during that Van Gogh "Cypresses" exhibit at the Met?), so bam bam, theme sorted. Of course at that point, I didn't know if maybe I'd be dealing with other typographical symbols, but I ran into M*A*S*H real fast, and so knew that it was all stars from there on out.

The one big revelation of the day was that *NSYNC starts with an asterisk! I definitely would've placed that thing between the "N" and the "S"—in fact, I did place that thing between the "N" and the "S," which caused the only real struggle I experienced in the entire puzzle. I was desperately trying to think what [Fifth-century invader of Europe] could end in "-STAR." Never heard of a HASTAR ... are they related to the Visigoths? I wanted HUN, of course, but the "*" was in the way. But once I got the "H" from CHEER ON, I entertained the idea that maybe I had the "*" in the wrong place, wrote in HUN and whoosh, the whole corner fell into place. Smooth sailing the rest of the way. 

[58D: Great ___]

Assorted notes:

• 26A: Lead-in to many a side thought (PAREN) — triply had for me. First, it was in the NE corner, which, as we've established, I was already struggling with because of the erroneous N*SYNC. Second, "Lead-in" made me think it was going to be a spoken phrase, like "by the way" or "fun fact" or something. And third, PAREN? Who says / writes that? It's like a typo for "PARENT" or "KAREN"
• 47A: Egg tart filling (CU[STAR]D) — fun fact: CURD and CU[*]D are both things one might find in a tart, and both are four letters long—sharing three letters! No CURDs in an egg tart, though, so it shouldn't have been as confusing to me as it was—only briefly confusing, though, as E*TRADE came to the rescue very quickly.
• 70A: #23 of 24 (PSI) — the 23rd of 24 letters of the Greek alphabet, the order of which I will someday commit to memory. Someday. Gotta have goals.
• 6D and 49D: Certain "Top Gun" jet(s) (MIGS / TOMCAT) — MIGS was a cinch. I was less sure about TOMCAT (esp. as TOMCruise was the star of that movie, and that just seemed a little too on-the-nose). I saw Top Gun on the first (double) date I ever went on. It's possible she did not consider it a date, but I was sitting next to a girl I liked, so ... date! Anyway, R.I.P. Val Kilmer.

And, since it was filmed at my alma mater, one more:

See you next time.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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Rocket ___, character in "Guardians of the Galaxy" / WED 4-2-25 / Beethoven's birthplace / ___ Flatow, longtime host of public radio's "Science Friday" / New Deal program in which workers planted more than 3.5 billion trees, in brief

Constructor: Daniel Bodily

Relative difficulty: Hard

THEME: FINISH STRONG — [Go out with a bang, or a hint to the theme answers] The final word of each two-word phrase is a synonym for strong

Theme answers:

• [Frame, apron, molding, etc.] for WINDOW TRIM
• Guys I've been doing a lot of home improvement and I'm not good but I'm slowly learning and I immediately knew "apron" was about windows and I'm really proud of myself 🥺
• [Like some photos of yesteryear] for SEPIA TONED
• [Collected hot wheels?] for CAR JACKED
• [Means of fiscal savings] for BUDGET CUT
• [What the glass slipper was on Cinderella's foot] for PERFECT FIT
• This clue felt a little wordy and strangely phrased. Maybe it could have been [Desired feature of a wedding dress] ?
• [Armchair athlete, e.g.] for SPORTS BUFF

Word of the Day: ICE BEER (Brew that generally has a higher-than-usual alcohol content) —

Ice beer was developed by brewing a strong, dark lager, then freezing the beer and removing some of the ice. This concentrates the aroma and taste of the beer, and also raises the alcoholic strength of the finished beer. This produces a beer with 12 to 15 per cent alcohol. In North America, water would be added to lower the alcohol level. [wiki]

• • •

Hello folks, and welcome to another Malaika MWednesday. I've been listening to Joan Baez all day today, and during this puzzle I was comparing her recording of "House of the Rising Sun" to Monica Barbaro's version from the recent biopic. Both excellent, in my opinion! Before I dive into the puzzle, let me remind all of you that this Friday morning I will be at Crossword Con in midtown Manhattan, and this Friday evening I will be at ACPT in Stamford! If you see me (I am very tall and will be wearing a crossword themed outfit), please say hi :)

This grid was absolutely stuffed to the gills with theme answers-- six plus a revealer intersecting is something I would simply never try. I was a fan of all of them except CAR JACKED which, while technically grammatically correct, still sounded a little odd to me. Would you ever use it with that construction? "He car jacked the car".... Hmm. You would said "I got carjacked" but that doesn't match the clue's tense.

"Jacked" was probably my favorite synonym for "strong," though, and it has that nice Scrabbly J, so I can see why the constructor included it. With synonym themes like this, it can sometimes be hard to find the synonyms, but here there were even some to spare! Ripped or built could have fit in nicely here, and I wonder if the editors considered having this stretch to a Sunday-sized grid.

TRIM, TONED, JACKED, CUT, FIT, BUFF, etc

The result of a packed grid is a pretty heavy amount of non-ideal entries like FIFE, REAIR, RDA, BONN, ENT, SRO, CCC, PAN IN (I hear "pan out," but never its opposite), ACU, and BBS. A couple of these would have been grid-killers for me, if I were making this puzzle. We also get USED POT (no one says this lol, you smoke pot) duping POTS which is the kind of thing NYT (and I!) don't really mind, but some of the commenters will surely shout out, and a plethora of proper nouns. I think I would have removed the "Guardians of the Galaxy" ref on RACCOON to make that center section with CCC / ACU a little easier.

Where this puzzle really stood out, though, was in the cluing. There were so many unique angles and tricky clues that were fun instead of just being hard. I've seen (and gotten!) feedback that reviews often forget to highlight clues in favor of describing the grid, so I'm trying to change that. We saw a couple of clues here that I think would have typically had a question mark, like [Scout camp craft] for CANOE ("craft" referring to "boat" as opposed to arts-and-crafts) or [Pans' partner] for POTS which made me think of the Greek deity. [Grounds keeper?] for BARISTA was fantastic, referring to coffee grounds.

Cheese Island, discussed at length below

Bullets:

• [Join up with at church?] for WED — Good clue
• [Parmesan shelfmate] for ASIAGO — I don't know why this struck me as such odd phrasing. I think it's because "shelf" made me think of a shelf in a regular grocery store aisle, but parm would be in the refrigerator section? In my grocery store, the cheeses are in like a round sort of island that you can access on all sides. Although I guess that has shelves.... I do think they should have put "Parmiggiano" to hint at this being an Italian cheese. The longer I go on writing this explanation the more insane I sound. Moving on....
• [Knighted, one-named rock star] for BONO — My friend recently saw Bono on the street, which led to us discussing whether I would be able to identify Bono if I saw him in the street (I would not) 
• [What's the catch?] for SNAG — Good clue
• [Condé Nast women's magazine] for SELF — This is another proper noun clue that I would have rephrased to not reference a proper noun

xoxo Malaika

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