"Santa Claus in Camp" artist, 1863 / SAT 7-25-26 / One of a nursery rhyme quintet / Unprofessional letters? / 1980s Chrysler innovation / The so-called "hurricane bird" / Second person seen in "Hamlet" / Ambient sound said to be more soothing than its "white" counterpart / Emmy winner Ann of "The Handmaid's Tale" / Waft fragrant smoke around / Co-founder of the A.C.L.U.'s Women's Rights Project, familiarly / Actor/playwright Davis who wrote "Purlie Victorious"

Constructor: Katie Hoody

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium

THEME: none 

Word of the Day: PINK NOISE (33D: Ambient sound said to be more soothing than its "white" counterpart) —

[sleepfoundation.org] 

Pink noise, 1/f noise, fractional noise or fractal noise is a signal or process with a frequency spectrum such that the power spectral density (power per frequency interval) is inversely proportional to the frequency of the signal. In pink noise, each octave interval (halving or doubling in frequency) carries an equal amount of noise energy.

Pink noise sounds like a waterfall. It is often used to tune loudspeaker systems in professional audio. Pink noise is one of the most commonly observed signals in biological systems.

The name arises from the pink appearance of visible light with this power spectrum. This is in contrast with white noise that has equal intensity per frequency interval. [...]

• • •

[1A: Fashionable spots?]

The themelesses were good again this week. Very good. One of the best late-week 1-2 punches I've seen recently. What I loved about this one was that it felt like a Friday—wide-open grid, lots of flow, marquee answers slashing this way and that—but with the cluing clearly tightened up a notch or two. Every single clue seemed to be trying to mislead me at least slightly. Well, not most of the proper nouns—they seemed to be there to give me mild traction. But the ordinary words and phrases hardly ever seemed to have a straightforward clue. This is my ideal Saturday, actually. It's a Friday+. A simple difficulty augmentation, that's all I want. All the other fun stuff that a good Friday offers should stay the same. Could this puzzle have been harder? Yes. Should it have been? Maybe, but as with yesterday, I thought the puzzle at least cleared the minimal difficulty standards for its day of the week. The only things I outright didn't know were PINK NOISE (33D: Ambient sound said to be more soothing than its "white counterpart") and DOWD (21A: Emmy winner Ann of "The Handmaid's Tale"); the clue helped me infer the former while the crosses took care of the latter. So the difficulty today came entirely from cluing—which is, generally, as it should be. Today, we get two big bursts of colloquial goodness, right across the middle. The first one sent me shooting out of the NW corner and clear across the grid:

The second ("I'M IN THE SAME BOAT") was slower to arrive, but only because I actually didn't look at the clue until I had most of the crosses locked into place. The answer was no less delightful for coming into view more slowly. The rest of the longer fill was strong, or at least solid, but the real joy today came from hacking my way through all the slightly tricky clues. The ones on POLKA DOTS (1A: Fashionable spots?) and GARAGE SALE (17A: What might provide you an opportunity to walk in someone else's shoes?) are obviously trying to mislead you (that's what the "?" on the end of the clues is trying to tell you), but it was the ambiguously-worded clues that were really fun today. [Coach's lack, often] ends up having nothing to do with a coach (human) but instead refers to passenger status on an airplane. The [Second person seen in "Hamlet"] is not a character but pronoun category (THOU). You don't "check a box" by putting a check in a box (as on a survey) but by literally checking (with your eyes) the mailbox (40D: One might check a box for it = MAIL). Etc. Etc. Sometimes I was braced for trickiness that never came, which is another way that a Saturday puzzle can push me off-balance. Like, I thought the "sisters" in 52D: What some sisters become were nuns, but they were just ... sisters (AUNTS). And [Predigital recording devices] had me first thinking of fingers and toes (that kind of "digital"), and then had me wondering what meaning of "recording" I wasn't considering. But no, you record (or "write things down") with PENS, a technology that precedes modern digital (electronic) recording of any kind. Sometimes I saw right through this trickery (the other meaning of "shingles" (and "nails") in the ITCH clue, the other meaning of "lab" in the PET clue). But whether the misdirects were hard or easy, they were entertaining. The puzzle seemed to be trying to give me a good time, and I appreciated it.

I often feel guilty when some obvious bit of crosswordese or other sort of short gimme is the first thing I'm able to get. Like, the NW was crushing me and would've kept crushing me had the combined forces of LEROY, KCAR, OSSIE, and SELA not eventually, finally, given me enough assistance to get over the hump. I was coming up blank on everything else up there, esp. the long stuff. So the crosswordy names were conspicuous up front because I desperately needed them, but after that, I was able to ride the momentum of "THAT DOESN'T COUNT" and didn't feel as dependent on the old standbys—plus, there were just fewer of them. ANYA and ABBA and ROTH and RUBIO were the only remaining name gimmes (could've done without that last one, but we'll let that one go for now). NAST was maybe the crosswordesiest name in the grid today, the one that is most likely to provide traction to veteran solvers like me while simultaneously baffling many others (64A: "Santa Claus in Camp" artist, 1863). Thomas NAST might be considered the official cartoonist of crosswords, in that he has been a grid staple for ages and I rarely see him discussed outside crosswords. He's famous for popularizing the Democratic donkey and the Republican elephant as political symbols, and for lampooning the 19c. Democratic political machine of Tammany Hall and "Boss" Tweed (a notoriously corrupt politician). NAST is also credited with the first depiction of the modern Santa Claus (I think "Santa Claus in Camp" might in fact be that depiction). Because I knew this, I was able to get NAST simply from the fact that the answer was four letters. Again, it felt slightly like cheating to know this stuff I probably wouldn't know if I hadn't been solving (and writing about) crosswords for decades. But oh well, what good is experience if you can't benefit from it, I suppose. 

Bullets:

• 18A: Group with the hits "Honey, Honey" and "Money, Money, Money" (ABBA) — this answer was ... a gimme.

• 1D: One of a nursery rhyme quintet (PIGGY) — never thought of the toe-counting game as a "nursery rhyme," but I suppose it qualifies. Also, we have ten piggies ... but I guess the song only covers five of them, so the clue is technically fine.
• 61A: The so-called "hurricane bird," because of its reputation for seeking shelter from storms at the last possible moment (IBIS) — yes, if you are going to give me IBIS for the umpteenth time, make it interesting—write a novel-length clue about it, why not!? When I thought TESTY was TENSE (50D: Easily set off), I thought the "hurricane bird" was a TERN.
• 55D: Pool set? (GENE) — you know the phrase "gene pool"? Well then you probably understand this clue, moving on ...
• 29D: Where an annoying person might be told to go? (AWAY) — I don't know who's responsible for this clue, but it made me laugh, so thanks. Extremely anticlimactic. It works.
• 19A: Something won by successful Olympians (GLORY) — so yeah, no, not MEDAL
• 66A: Like koalas, in Australia (GREY) — maybe my favorite misdirect of all. The qualifier "in Australia" seems so bizarre, since koalas are native exclusively to Australia. So my first thought was "uh ... HOME?" Then I got GREY, mostly from crosses, and thought "wait ... aren't they GREY everywhere? What does Australia have to do with it?" Then I remembered that GREY is actually spelled GRAY in the U.S. It's only spelled GREY in Britain and Commonwealth countries ... like Australia. It's a spelling clue! Bah! But also wow. Good one.

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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Tropical fruit with white flesh and a deep-red rind / FRI 7-24-26 / Guru's honorific / Cookware sometimes used over campfires / Group with defining traits? / Recipient of Emmys in different categories for the same role / Criminals in the oil industry? / Aperitif with black currant liqueur / Component that may emerge from Earth's asthenosphere

Constructor: Geoffrey Schorkopf

Relative difficulty: Easy

THEME: none 

Word of the Day: MANGOSTEEN (49A: Tropical fruit with white flesh and a deep-red rind) —

Mangosteen (Garcinia mangostana), also called mangostan or purple mangosteen, is a tropical evergreen tree with edible fruit native to the Malay Peninsula and Borneo. It has been cultivated extensively in tropical Asia since ancient times. It is grown mainly in Southeast Asia, southwest India and other tropical areas such as Colombia, Puerto Rico and Florida, where the tree has been introduced. The tree grows from 6 to 25 m (19.7 to 82.0 ft) tall.

The fruit of the mangosteen is sweet and tangy, juicy, somewhat fibrous, with fluid-filled vesicles and an inedible, deep reddish-purple colored rind (exocarp) when ripe. The fragrant edible flesh that surrounds each seed is the endocarp, i.e., the inner layer of the ovary. The seeds are of similar size and shape to almonds.

The genus Garcinia also contains several less-known fruit-bearing species, such as the button mangosteen (G. prainiana) and the charichuelo (G. madruno). (wikipedia)

• • •

Here we go—a puzzle right out of the Robyn Weintraub playbook (high compliment). Fifteen (15!) marquee answers (8+ letters long) zipping here there and everywhere, with a grid built for flow. Those NW and SE corners are a little cut off from everything else, but otherwise, the puzzle has a wide-open feel, giving you lots of opportunities to come at any one section. Some late-week grids feel claustrophobic, and some feel airy, and this one definitely belonged to the latter group. Further, the marquee answers were all at least solid, and occasionally sparkly. A ton of flashy long stuff, with the short stuff just holding it in place without calling too much (bad) attention to itself—that's what I like in a Friday puzzle. Again, things are generally coming in way too easy on Fridays these days, but this one was at least regular-easy, maybe even Easy-Medium. I had to wrestle with it a little, here and there, and as long as there's a little fight in a Friday puzzle, I'm good. The brightness and whoosh are the important things, and this puzzle had those in abundance.

HERE'S THE THING ... seriously, here it is. That's it. That's the thing. I love these little colloquial tidbits, intro phrases that drift off into an ellipsis ("HERE'S THE THING...," "BEFORE I GO..."), or urgent demands ("PUT THAT DOWN!") or even cliché aphorisms, if they're not too cloying ("LIFE'S TOO SHORT"). I like a puzzle that feels alive with the human voice. Attuned to slang (BINGE-WATCHING, WORD NERDS). Maybe a little silly (CLOWN NOSE). This puzzle has many moods—don't like one, keep going, there's another one around the bend. I was listening to an interview with crossword constructor (and crossword book author) Natan Last yesterday, on the podcast Feedback (with Ira Madison III), and he was emphasizing the virtue of building grids that cover a wide range of interests. One of the phrases he used was "a full meal"—the puzzle should feel like a full meal. It's a decent metaphor—different courses, different food groups, different textures and flavors, maybe a cocktail or wine or an aperitif (or digestif), dessert, coffee, after-dinner mint. A taste odyssey. When a puzzle stays in one SEAM, or seems to lean into only one time period (old or current), or when the vocabulary is just ... vocabulary, just ordinary (or arcane) words from the dictionary, then meh, I'm not as interested. But today ... I can put up with a decent number of stray KIRs and SRIs and CNETs when the meat of the puzzle is this tasty.

Started out bad with XRAY at 1A: Bit of radiological work (SCAN). Too specific! My dad was a radiologist, so I got carried away. When is ANGIOGRAM going to be in the puzzle!? Oh, look, it already was—once, in 2018. One of the funniest bits of ephemera preserved from my childhood is a piece of paper on which I've written (age 6?) a kind of permission slip allowing one of my stuffed animals to go home from the hospital. The title, if I remember correctly: "Doggy's ANGIOGRAM: slip to go home." Impressive vocabulary for a small child, but maybe not for the small child of a radiologist. Before you get too impressed, please keep in mind that one of the vital statistics on said "angiogram" was "Heart Bumps." Apparently no one had taught me the word "pulse" yet. 

I thought the [Silly sorts] at 7-Down were ASSES but then they ended up being GEESE but then, immediately thereafter, an ASS appeared (9D: Jack of jenny)—the fastest malapop* I've ever experienced. The only real trouble I had up top involved writing in BAN instead of "BUT..." at (27A: Start of a protest). "BAN the Bomb!" was the kind of "protest" I had in mind. I can't be the only person who made that error today. Those two little (wrong) squares really gummed up both of the long Downs they cross ("PUT THAT DOWN!," DUTCH OVENS). I was like "'EAT THAT ... something'? BENCH OVENS?" No and no. I would never put DUTCH OVENS and campfires together in the same mental universe, but that's probably just because I haven't been camping in thirty years and our dutch oven is by Le Creuset and way Way too heavy to bring on a camping trip. Now that I'm looking at pictures, yes, I've seen pots like this suspended over fires.

I had "PUT THAT AWAY!" before "PUT THAT DOWN!" though that didn't last long thanks to LEANN Rimes. The one thing that really got me today, besides BUT (not BAN), was MANGOSTEEN (49A: Tropical fruit with white flesh and a deep-red rind). I had MANGO and thought, "well ... there's your tropical fruit, what more do you want, clue!!?" But apparently the mango has a relative. Last name Steen. Lives on the Malay Peninsula or else in Borneo. Funny (in an ironic and slightly mocking sort of way) that MANGOSTEEN is under WORD NERDS today, since this word nerd did not know it at all. 

[Jan Steen (no relation)]

Bullets:

• 35A: Spanish diminutive suffix (-ITO) — we were discussing Spanish diminutive suffixes just yesterday, with "fonditas." This caused me to write in "-ITA" before quickly remembering that Spanish suffixes have genders, and so I pulled the final vowel and waited for the cross.
• 53A: 2019 Grammy-winning album for Tyler, the Creator (IGOR) — "Described by critics and Tyler himself as an album blending hip-hop, neo soul, R&B, funk, and pop, critics have also noted the album's use of synthesizers and lo-fi vocals. Thematically, Igor follows a narrative of a love triangle between the titular character and his male love interest. The album employs the "Igor" literary archetype to explore themes associated with love, such as heartbreak, loss, and jealousy." (wikipedia). It's a good album, and it's got a very memorable cover:

There are also alternative covers, same color scheme, equally memorable:

• 28A: "Mark Twain" biographer Chernow (RON) — he is perhaps slightly better known as the Alexander Hamilton biographer. For reasons.
• 38A: Drinks are on me! (BAR CAR) — my favorite clue of the day. The drinks are more likely "in" than "on" the BAR CAR, but since you're "on" board a train at that point, I think "on" is fine.
• 34D: Gay ___ (1970s movement) (LIB) — the only time I've ever heard used "LIB" irl, when it wasn't coming out of some mouth-breathing extremely-online dipshit conservative guy's mouth, is in the phrase "Women's LIB." If people were ever saying "Gay LIB," it was before my time / out of my earshot. 
• 47D: "Is the whole world against me?" ("ET TU?") — kind of a clever and slightly toughish way to clue this particular bit of crosswordese. "The whole world" and "you (tu) specifically" are very different things, obviously, but the sentiment in the clue and answer here are basically the same.
• 44D: Recipient of Emmys in different categories for the same role (ASNER) — just noticing how crosswordesey this SE corner really is. ADELE and ASNER, side by side, two seats down from ETTU. Again, I didn't really have a chance to notice this because the more beautiful parts of the puzzle were all I could think about. ASNER won three Supporting Actor Emmys for playing Lou Grant on The MTM Show, and then won two more Emmys, this time in the Best Actor category, for playing the same role in the spinoff, named simply Lou Grant.

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

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

*a "malapop" is when you enter a wrong answer that ends up being a correct answer somewhere else in the grid  

[Follow Rex Parker on BlueSky and Facebook and Letterboxd]
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