Typeface that sounds like the name of a Disney princess / TUES 3-31-26 / Venue for a boss fight / List in Ariana Grande's "Thank U, Next" / Colorado Plateau people

Hi, everyone, it’s Clare for the last Tuesday of March — and the last day! Spring is here (aka the cherry blossoms are going gangbusters in D.C.), and it feels like I’m coming out of hibernation. I’m writing this from my new apartment, which is about three blocks from my old apartment. So: My pup doesn’t have to get used to a new dog park, and I got to pack haphazardly, meaning a bunch of trips with my things (and I have way more things than I realized!). I’ve been loving watching March Madness (go, UConn women) and rooting on the Penguins to a playoff spot. But, I’ve buried the lede! BTS is back!!! Here’s a link to their new single, “Swim,” which just debuted at No. 1 on Billboard, along with their No. 1 album “Arirang.” And here’s my favorite song from the album. Enjoy! 

Anywho, on to the puzzle…

Constructor: Ryan Patrick Smith

Relative difficulty: Medium

THEME: FANTASY LAND (64A: Utopian expanse ... a map of which might include 17-, 27- and 48-Across?) — Each answer was a fantastical word combined with a geographical feature

Theme answers:

• MYSTIC RIVER (17A: 2003 crime drama adapted from a Dennis Lehane novel) 
• MAGIC MOUNTAIN (27A: Six Flags location that was the first amusement park to offer 20 roller coasters) 
• UNCANNY VALLEY (48A: Concept explaining why certain humanoid robots look so unsettling)

Word of the Day: REMY (36D: Rapper ___ Ma) —

Reminisce Kioni Smith, known professionally as Remy Ma, is an American rapper. Discovered by the late rapper Big Pun, she came to prominence for her work as a member of Fat Joe's group, Terror Squad. Her debut solo album, There's Something About Remy: Based on a True Story (2006), sold 37,000 copies in its first week. Ma's most commercially successful songs include "Lean Back", "Conceited", and "All the Way Up.” She is one of five multi-time winners of the BET Award for Best Female Hip-Hop Artist, which she won in 2005 and 2017. Ma is the recipient of two Vibe Awards, two Source Awards, and has been nominated for four Grammy Awards. (WIki)

• • •

Well, that was a puzzle. A pretty good puzzle? A slightly harder than usual Tuesday puzzle? A somewhat boring puzzle? All of the above? The theme didn’t grab me — I guess I don’t spend much time thinking about fantasy lands — even though one of my favorite phrases was in the puzzle: UNCANNY VALLEY (48A). Such as, “So-and-so actor is looking like they’ve had some sort of work done on their face, and I can’t pinpoint what, but they don’t look like themself. There’s something UNCANNY VALLEY going on.” It’s a phrase that might’ve stumped some people, but I thankfully got it immediately. 

The puzzle did have some other particularly fun words and phrases. I love the word LOLLOP (51D: Bound along clumsily). Do I use that word much in my day-to-day life? No. Should I? Yes. Am I going to? I hope so! GAS GUZZLER (29D:Vehicle with low fuel efficiency, in slang) is a great phrase and incorporates some fun — and possibly tricky — Zs into the puZZle. I like the word TAVERN (8D: Establishment where a D&D party might refuel and pick up new leads). And UPTOWN GIRL (11D: Billy Joel title character who's "been living in her white bread world") is a great song; the movie “UPTOWN GIRLs” is incredibly fun, too, with Brittany Murphy and Dakota Fanning. (If anyone has a spare Blumarine dress from the opening scene, let me know.) My favorite clue was for ARIAL (39A: Typeface that sounds like the name of a Disney princess). I don’t like beer, but my sister and dad do, and HAZY IPA (52A: Cloudy craft beer) is also a fun answer. 

HOLST (1A: "The Planets" composer) felt a bit hard for a Tuesday, especially as the default first clue in the puzzle. I stared at that for a good while before realizing I could get the down, HOME (1D: "E.T. phone ___"), and just move on. HOLST (1A) crossing LASE (3D: Produce coherent light) was a bit challenging. RAN AWAY (25A: Fled the scene) was particularly hard for me to get for some reason — I wanted “getaway” or “got away” or something along those lines. I couldn’t for the life of me remember how to spell NAIAD (22D: Water nymph of Greek myth). One clue/answer I didn’t like at all was TRI (5D: Muscle strengthened by dips, familiarly). Like, are you going to go do a TRI dip on one side and work out a single muscle? No, I’m pretty sure you’ll work out your TRIs (plural). 

The rest of the fill was pretty… fine. I liked SIT SKI (4D: Piece of equipment for a Winter Paralympian), showcasing the Paralympics. DIRE (42A: ___ wolf (extinct canine once prevalent across North America)) wolves is fun — even if the ending of Game of Thrones (showcasing DIRE wolves) wasn’t. Kenan & KEL (63A: Kenan's bestie on a 1990s sitcom) is a show I haven’t thought about in a long while but had fun remembering. But, ORE, ERIE, UNE, MAR, PIN, NAG, RIM, etc. don’t inspire much of anything. 

I might just be tired and grumpy (moving is hard work!). But I just don’t have much of anything else to say about this mostly meh puzzle.

Misc.:

• My sister tells me that TAE Bo (19A: exercise regimen popularized via VHS tapes) is having a huge comeback right now I may have to forgo the VHS tapes and see if I can find some workouts online somewhere! 
• AS IF (7D: "Dream on!") definitely makes me think of “Clueless,” a phenomenal movie. Come on, we can all just picture Cher saying “Ugh! AS IF” in that disgusted and wonderful tone of hers. 
• 2020 might’ve been the year of THE RAT (9D: What 2020 was a year of, in the Chinese zodiac), but this is the year of the horse — specifically, the fire horse. 
• Does anyone actually still say LMAO (59A: "hahaha!")? I like to think of myself as fairly hip and in the know, but while “lol” has made a comeback (which I use basically as punctuation), I truly don’t see LMAO written anywhere. 
• I haven’t read many books this month because I’ve been busy moving, but my favorite was “Star Shipped,” by one of my favorite authors, Cat Sebastian. Highly recommend — 5/5!

And with that, I'll see you in April!

Signed, Clare Carroll, currently living in BTS land!

[Follow Rex Parker on BlueSky and Facebook and Letterboxd]
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California city with a humble-sounding name / MON 3-30-26 / Kenya's second-largest city / Endless TikTok scrolling or Tetris playing, e.g. Like the original Broadway cast of "The Wiz" / Longtime record label or Beastie Boy / Major drags on a team's progress, metaphorically / Onetime AT&T competitor / Caustic paint stripper

Constructor: Gary Cee

Relative difficulty: Medium (solved Downs-only)

THEME: BACKED UP (64A: Went into reverse ... or what the ends of 17-, 20-, 38- and 59-Across might be) — last words of theme answers are things that might be backed up:

Theme answers:

• TIME SINK (17A: Endless TikTok scrolling or Tetris playing, e.g.)
• CIRCULAR FILE (20A: Wastebasket, jokingly)
• DRUG TRAFFIC (38A: Illegal distribution of narcotics)
• BAGGAGE CLAIM (59A: Where to pick up luggage at an airport)

Word of the Day: MOMBASA (42D: Kenya's second-largest city) —

Mombasa (/mɒmˈbæsə/ mom-BASS-ə; also US: /-ˈbɑːsə/ -⁠BAH-sə) is a coastal city in southeastern Kenya along the Indian Ocean. It was the first capital of British East Africa, before Nairobi was elevated to capital status in 1907. It now serves as the capital of Mombasa County. Buildings in the Central Business District are blue and white, representing the Indian Ocean.^] It is the country's oldest (c. 900 A.D.) and second-largest city after Nairobi, with a population of about 1,208,333 people according to the 2019 census.

• • •

Pretty bland outing today. Nothing particularly wrong with it. Just blah. A bog-standard "last words"-type puzzle. Those last words all can get backed up, it's true. Can't argue with that. There's absolutely no sense of playfulness or cleverness about the revealer—just an ordinary phrase that happens to literally describe the theme. Conceptually, this is the opposite of yesterday's ambitious, inventive, daring puzzle. Now I expect Monday puzzles to be easy, and I expect themes to be relatively simple, but that doesn't mean they can't be executed with some flair or humor or ... something. I can't fault the puzzle for much; it's not doing anything particularly wrong or even unappealing. I don't love how choppy the grid is, how chock full o' 3s the grid seems to be because of the black-square arrangement, and (relatedly) I don't love the imbalance between the relatively wide-open NE and SW corners and the short answer-laden rest of the grid. It's aesthetically wonky, imbalanced, odd. But this is mostly a matter of personal taste; my objections don't have much to do with the theme concept or how the grid was filled. It's just blah to me. The four long Downs are pretty decent, though, especially INSIDE SCOOP and DEAD WEIGHTS. Beyond that, there was nothing I was particularly happy to see. But, again, there was nothing I was particularly sad to see, either. A real ho-hummer, this one. But professionally made. Fine. Reasonable. Forgettable, but acceptable [well, mostly ... see the first bullet point, below]

The Downs-only solve today was also pretty average, very doable, but tricky in precisely the places you'd expect a grid like this to be tricky for the Downs-only solver—namely, the NE and SW corners (the aforementioned "wide-open" corners, with lots of longer Downs running through them. Three parallel longer Downs in each corner. That can make it hard to get traction if you're solving Downs-only, as longer answers are simply harder to come up with if you have no letters in place and no crosses to help out (unless you're able to infer them). I managed to get through the NW pretty easily, largely because I grew up in the Central Valley of California and so know MODESTO well (well, I know the name well—I can't remember ever having gone there). The letters in MODESTO helped make the Acrosses up there easy to infer, which then helped me get INSIDE SCOOP (which I definitely needed a bunch of crosses to see). 

I had much more trouble in the SW, where MODESTO's symmetrical counterpart, MOMBASA, proved far (far) more elusive (42D: Kenya's second-largest city). I know precisely one Kenyan city (also seven letters!), but sadly (for me), that city is the first-largest, not today's second-largest. The only way I ended up getting MOMBASA was through testing letters from the crosses and seeing if they sounded like anything. It also took some doing to get ENCASES, which was not an obvious answer to 43D: Boxes up securely. As my wife said Sunday evening after she'd finished the puzzle: "There's nothing particularly 'secure" about ENCASES." I wanted RETAPES at first (!?). The only way I got to ENCASES was by finally guessing ONE SEED (instead of my previous guess, RYE SEED) as the answer to 48A: Top placement in a bracket, for a March Madness team, and then by guessing ASHAME from --HAME (63A: Regrettably unfortunate). Once I floated ENCASES as a possible answer, MEWLS and MCI went in (the one a near certainty, the other an educated guess), it was only the second-to-last letter of MOMBA-A that remained elusive. The whole time I was building MOMBASA, I honestly felt like I was just making up a name. I considered BETTER / MOMBABA at one point, but then MOMBASA occurred to me, and it just sounded right. Perhaps because it sounded like "Mufasa." Or "Mumbai," I don't know. I just know the puzzle gave me a "Congratulations" message and I was done. 

Bullets:

• 39D: Take advantage of (USE) / 12D: Of no help (USELESS) — You can't do this. You cannot. This is a DQ (that's "disqualification," not Dairy Queen). You can argue up and down that USE is presented as a verb, not a noun, and so USELESS isn't just the same word plus a suffix, but come on, man, even you don't believe the words that are coming out of your mouth. USE is USE is USE. You cannot put a word in your grid and then put the same damn word in your grid again with a suffix attached to it like some kind of fake mustache and pretend it's not a dupe. It's a dupe. Boo! 

• 13D: California city with a humble-sounding name (MODESTO) — this is incorrect. It *looks* humble (because it's got "modest" in there), but it doesn't *sound* humble. It's mo-DEST-o, not MOD-est-o. Maybe "MODESTO" is Spanish for "modest," and so the city really is "humble-sounding" in Spanish, but for the regular-ass American pronunciation, the "sounding" part does not apply. 

[Few small cities get a song this good written about them.]

• 40D: Like the original Broadway cast of "The Wiz" (ALL-BLACK) — interesting answer. Missed opportunity for some good NZ content, but The Wiz is good too, I like The Wiz.

• 48A: Top placement in a bracket, for a March Madness team (ONE SEED) — timely! Looks like UConn beat Duke on a buzzer-beater last night, which kept the Final Four from being 75% ONE SEEDs. But still, two remain: Arizona and Michigan. Those two play each other next week for a place in the Championship (vs. the winner of UConn/Illinois). Needless to say: Go Blue* 

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

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

*This applies to the Michigan women's team too, who are playing ONE SEED Texas today for a spot in the Women's Final Four—pretty good year for Wolverines basketball

[Follow Rex Parker on BlueSky and Facebook and Letterboxd]
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