Work parodied by Umberto Eco's "Granita" / SUN 8-16-26 / Member of the N.F.L.'s "Big Blue," in brief / Astonished, informally / Place for a sailor's anchor, informally / Fiber also knowns as viscose / Title that becomes loftier when an E is added / "Diminutive" Greek letter / Dizzying gallery works / Invention originally developed as a yellow dye / Infraction at an arcade

Constructor: Sam Brody

Relative difficulty: Easy

[33D: Ewoks' home moon]

THEME: "Take the Edge Off" — theme clues are words that are missing their "edges" (i.e. their first, or last, or first and last, letters); answers are familiar phrases that act as punny representations of those "edgeless" words:

Theme answers:

• DOCTORS WITHOUT BORDERS (23A: _ATSO_ and _EKYL_) ("Watson" and "Jekyll," both famous fictional "doctors," lack "borders" (i.e. first and last letters))
• NEEDS NO INTRODUCTION (36A: _RAVES) (the word "craves," which (kinda) means "needs," has "no introduction," i.e. no first letter)
• NEVERENDING STORY (56A: SAG_) (the word "saga," which is a kind of "story," never ends—because it lacks its last letter)
• HEADLESS HORSEMAN (79A: _NIGHT) (the word "knight," which is a kind of "horseman," is lacking its first letters, or "head")
• NOT COMPLETELY HONEST (99A: FRAN_) (the word "frank," which means "honest," is not complete)
• UNLIMITED TALK AND TEXTS (116A: _IALO_) (the word "dialog," a term which indicates either "talking" or "texting," has no "limits" (i.e first and last letters))

Word of the Day: Granita (1A: Work parodied by Umberto Eco's "Granita" = LOLITA) —

[man, I have no idea—when you search [Eco granita], mostly what you get is automated crossword answer sites, giving you the answer to this clue. There's hardly anything online about this ... looks like a short story, or a sketch of some time, written in the '50s in Italian but published in English in the '90s ... all the references to it (and there are hardly any) are from, like, somebody's private Tumblr accounts. There are a couple of very brief references to it in the NYT and Guardian—it appears to be a story about one "Umberto Umberto" (playing on the name of LOLITA's protagonist, Humbert Humbert) who develops a thing for geriatric women, whom he calls "Nornettes" (playing on Humbert's term for the young girls he's sexually attracted to, "nymphets"). Anyway, I think it's fair to say that this "work" of Eco's is very obscure—here's the summary from one of those aforementioned Tumblr accounts (it squares with what google's A.I. is trying to tell me): "Umberto Eco wrote a hilarious parody of Lolita that he called Granita. In his version of the story, a young man falls in love with an old lady. It would seem that the sight of her marbled flesh, glimpsed through a window as she removed her stockings, drove him wild with uncontrollable lust. When he runs away with her, he has to travel by bicycle (he doesn’t have a driver’s license yet) and pedals away with “Granita” holding on for dear life. The story appears in Eco’s anthology Misreadings." ]

• • •

I've seen this kind of thing before. A bunch. Basically a reverse cryptic, where the answer is the clue and the clue is the answer. It's a giant shrug from me. Not very clever. Pretty rudimentary stuff, as cryptic clues go. Ugly gibberish for theme clues. OK but unremarkable theme answers. UNLIMITED TALK AND TEXTS is just wrong, though. The pluralized TEXTS, specifically. There are "unlimited talk & text" plans, for sure, but they are most definitely "talk & text" plans, not "talk & texts." It's not just that the theme was dull—it's that it was almost beside the point. I got the first themer without even looking at the clue:

After getting it, I looked up, saw the clue, knew instantly what the conceit was, and decided the only way this solve was going to be anything close to interesting was if I challenged myself not to look at any of the theme clues ever again. And I didn't. And it didn't make a bit of difference. Maybe it added a minute or so to my solve, I don't know, but I did not miss those clues. You can write them yourself once you get the answer. Nothing special about them. The whole thing was fantastically dull. And the fill didn't do much to liven things up. This was just one big 21x21 SLAB of a puzzle; there was some cleverness in the cluing, it turns out (the doctors clue, for instance), but for the most part the puzzle doesn't really have much to recommend it. I'm kind of surprised it was accepted. I PLODded through, but it never once gave me a reason to smile or wonder or struggle or ... anything. It's just there. Taking up space.

["Maybe another drink will take the edge off!"]

Does anything even need explaining, beyond the theme? The clues and answers all felt so straightforward. "Granita" was the only thing in the whole dang puzzle that made me go "huh?," that made me curious, that seemed to be trying to stretch the boundaries of the Totally Ordinary. I did laugh once, but that's only because I tried to give that wrestler guy ONE ARM instead of ONE LEG (100D: Feature of Anthony Robles, a 2011 N.C.A.A. national champion wrestler). Guy's only got one leg and now here I am trying to take his arm away as well? Not cool. Are there one-armed wrestlers? There was a one-handed Major League pitcher once, and a good one (Jim Abbott), so why not? I guess it would be especially hard to grapple with one arm, but wrestling with just the ONE LEG, that also seems impressive. I'm looking around this grid and trying to find anything, literally anything worth remarking on, and fran-ly I'm not having much success. It's all so, so plain. I think two stars might be too generous, but I'm just gonna leave it; perhaps it has virtues I just can't appreciate, for some reason.

Bullets:

• 27A: Astonished, informally (SHOOK) — this was the one moment where the puzzle seemed to be alive and living in the 21st century. This slangy use of SHOOK already seems to be on the wane, but it's at least familiar as a recentish expression. Anything with some life in it was welcome today.
• 53D: London park (HYDE) — this seems like a little NOD AT Dr. Jekyll (or Dr. -EKYL-, I guess).
• 64A: Place for a sailor's anchor, informally (BICEP) — hey, a bit of misdirection! Not a lot of misdirection, but some. Sometimes I think puzzles are trying too hard with the cluing, but hoo boy today is not one of those days. Speaking of sailors, I finally saw The Odyssey today. There was a SCYLLA, as I predicted (see yesterday's puzzle). But no anchor tattoos for Odysseus (that I could see). I think that's strictly a Popeye thing ... although no ... Popeye's anchor tattoo is on his forearm, not his BICEP:

• 118D: Park place? (LOT) — because you park ... your car ... there.
• 49D: Female rapper with a longtime feud with Foxy Brown (LIL KIM) — OK, this probably should've been my "Word of the Day." I know LIL KIM from ... the '90s? Can't say I've seen her name or thought about her for decades. Here is a long and embarrassing description of said feud., which started sometime in ... yep, the '90s. The last relevant incident in this recap happened in 2013, so I don't know what the state of their relationship is now. Nor do I care. There has to be a better, more dignified way to clue LIL KIM. How about this team-up? This was fun:

Sorry I don't have more to say about this puzzle. It's not giving me much to work with. I really hope you enjoyed it more than I did. For those of you who struggle on Sundays, this one should've been pretty doable, at least. Maybe you broke your Sunday speed record? If it made you happy, then as they say (or Sheryl Crow says), it can't be that bad. All it did for me, though, was make me wish I were reading a book, so I'm gonna go do that now. See you next time.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on BlueSky and Facebook and Letterboxd]
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Fabulous collection / SAT 8-15-26 / Dressing group / Leftmost star of the Summer Triangle / One from "Japan's kitchen" / Challenged on X, say / Cut out the middleman, for delivery / Patient privacy law, in brief / Gamgee player in "Lord of the Rings" / French Baroque artist Nicolas / Classic 1926 novel often published with a bull and a matador on its cover / French Baroque artist Nicolas / Charybdis's man-eating opposite, in myth

Constructor: Blake Slonecker

Relative difficulty: Medium (Easyish except for the NW corner)

THEME: none 

Word of the Day: DROP-SHIP (1D: Cut out the middleman, for delivery) —

Drop shipping is a form of retail business in which the seller accepts customer orders without keeping stock on hand. Instead, the seller transfers the orders and their shipment details either to the manufacturer, a wholesaler, another retailer, or a fulfillment house, which then ships the goods directly to the customer.

The seller is responsible for marketing and selling the product, but has limited control over product quality, storage, inventory management, or shipping. It avoids the costs of maintaining warehouses or even a storefront, purchasing and storing inventory, and employing necessary staff for such functions.

Drop shipping has become a popular business model as it requires minimal initial investment and overhead costs. A drop shipping operation can be managed from any location with an internet connection. However, drop shipping also has its drawbacks, including lower profit margins, less control over the quality of the products sold and an increased risk of shipping delays or supply chain issues.

• • •

This puzzle started out very unpromisingly. ERAS, NIK, DENEB, OSAKAN ... I'd barely gotten off the ground and already I was laden with the kind of crosswordese I associate with puzzles from 30+ years ago. And then, just when I thought I was going to pick up speed and escape that NW corner ... nope. I whiffed on every. Single. Down. Let's start with DROP-SHIP. OK, that's enough about DROP-SHIP. I've never heard this term. I'm not mad about it. I'm not thrilled about it. It's a bland retail term that I just didn't know. So there's that. Then there's "WHAT A PAL!"—I kinda wanted it to be that, but for some reason the phrase "WHAT A GUY!" seemed more in the language. "BE A PAL," "WHAT A GUY!," that's how the phrases wanted to go, in my brain. As for the [Patient privacy law, in brief], I was (kinda) saying it right on my head, but turns out I was confusing it with another "health" acronym: HEPA. You know, from HEPA filters (High Efficiency Particulate Air filters). So the sound of HIPAA was in my head, but the spelling, yeesh, no. And I can't remember what it stands for, hang on ... Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. Oof. No wonder it's an acronym. If you like retail jargon and dealing with health insurance, you'll love the NW corner of this puzzle. But we've yet to mention the coup de grâce up there, the answer that held me up more than any other, the truly Outer Space-ian piece of niche vocab. I've heard of Aesop's Fables, we've all heard of Aesop's Fables, but ... AESOPICA!? Um ... what? What completely uncurated construction software wordlist coughed that thing up? If Mike Lupica were suffering from alopecia while reading Milton's Areopagitica, I'd still never in a million years have dreamed that AESOPICA was a word. I thought -ANA was the suffix for "collection." AESOPIANA (which also looks insane) is something I might at least have pieced together. But AESOPICA. That one really sticks in my AESOPIGUS. Gruesome. Oh, and I forgot the extremely online term ATTED (@'d) a horrid-looking "word" that drags an Elon Musk property into the mix. A repulsion twofer. I don't know how you go to press with this NW corner. It's a real tear-it-down-start-over situation.

[54A: Classical figure in an 1898 Gustav Klimt oil]

There were other things happening in this puzzle besides the NW corner, but I kinda forget them. Oh, right, those long answers through the middle were pretty interesting. TEXAS TWO-STEP, "I CAN'T HEAR YOU," good stuff. Since I got the NE corner early (following the NW corner debacle), those long Downs fell very easily, one two three. Might've gotten THE SUN ALSO RISES with no help at all, but as it was I had THE SU- in place (7D: Classic 1926 novel often published with a bull and matador on its cover). VINAIGRETTES is a lot easier to see when you've already got the VIN- part locked down (8D: Dressing group). The whole puzzle, outside the NW, was smooth and familiar. Not exciting, but very much up my alley. I've taught Hemingway, and Mickey SPILLANE, and Homer (finally going to see The Odyssey today—I'm assuming SCYLLA will be in it somewhere) (14D: Charybdis's man-eating opposite, in myth). I just saw Christina RICCI in 200 Cigarettes, a 1999 movie about New Year's Eve of 1981 starring so many still-famous people it will make your head spin. Paul Rudd and Courtney Love!? Together!? I was like "why didn't this happen more often?" They're fun together. Also appearing: Martha Plimpton, Dave Chappelle, Ben and Casey Affleck, Janeane Garofalo, Gaby Hoffmann, Kate Hudson, and Elvis Costello, who drops in for a cameo out of nowhere, as if he just materialized out of his music (there's a lot of it). The movie got bad reviews but I really enjoyed it. RICCI and Hoffmann play friends with amazing, exaggerated, borderline comical Long Island accents. I'm telling you, it's a good time. A hangout movie. A nostalgia movie. I saw it on Criterion Channel. Maybe it's still there?

Bullets:

• 41D: French soccer superstar Kylian (MBAPPÉ) — perfect timing for this debut, as MBAPPÉ just won the Golden Boot (most goals scored) at the 2026 World Cup. That's back-to-back Golden Boots (he also won in Qatar in 2022, when France won it all) [correction: France won in 2018; Argentina won in 2022]. There is arguably a lot of proper noun trivia in this grid, including two World Cup answers (this and ENG) (29A: World Cup team nicknamed "The Three Lions": Abbr.), but none of it seemed "obscure." Maybe POUSSIN qualifies??? (26D: French Baroque artist Nicolas). But MBAPPÉ does not qualify. He's one of the most famous football players in the world and arguably one of the greatest of all time. If you call MBAPPÉ "obscure," that's a red card, goodbye.
• 45A: Oil wells? (PORES) — jeez, how oily are your PORES? 

[Your PORES]

• 22A: 7/ (JUL) — that’s the month of July, frequently written “7” slash whatever day it is (e.g. 7/4 = Independence Day)
• 34A: Intermezzo and trou normand dishes, essentially (PALATE CLEANSERS) — nice answer. I don't know what "trou normand" means. I know that "trou" means "hole." Let's see what the [squints] Normandy Tourism website has to say:

Originating from the verdant countryside of Normandy, le Trou Normand (literally, “a Norman hole”) is a delightful custom that embodies the rich cultural heritage and gastronomic pleasures that France is renowned for! This french culinary tradition involves serving a small glass of Calvados, local apple brandy, or Calvados-soaked apple sorbet between courses. More than a refreshing and invigorating pause in the meal, the “trou normand” is an art of living.

Well, I do like Calvados. I had a Diamondback cocktail just last night. 

• 39D: Prince of Monaco beginning in 2005 (ALBERT) — I should not be required to know princes in the 21st century, ffs. OK, William and Harry, but that's it. Monaco? Be serious. So many good ALBERTs out there and this is what you give me? Bah.

That's all for today. See you next time.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on BlueSky and Facebook and Letterboxd]
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❤️ Support this blog ❤️: 

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