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]
=============================
❤️ Support this blog ❤️: 

• Venmo (@MichaelDavidSharp)]

=============================
✏️ Upcoming Crossword Tournaments ✏️

• American Crossword Puzzle Tournament (Stamford, CT, Apr. 10-12, 2026) (registration closed!)

=============================
📘 My other blog 📘:

• Pop Sensation (vintage paperbacks)

Read more...

Stickler for military discipline / SUN 3-29-26 / Turn into logs / Internet-influenced writing genre / Gertrude who swam the English Channel / Common vessel for a cosmopolitan / Tired old advertising mascot? / Pertaining to genetic copies / Leader ousted in 1955 / "The Office" accountant who kept a cat in her desk drawer / Religious title that translates to "ocean monk" / In Norse myth, world held up by the branches of Yggdrasil

Constructor: Michael and Oliver Schlossberg

Relative difficulty: Medium-Challenging

[51D: "Star Wars" title (DARTH)]

THEME: Roundabouts — the grid has five "roundabouts"; one answer enters the roundabout from the west and stops right there; three other answers are extensions of that first answer, and they "exit" the roundabout at the south, east, and north, respectively, and you have to follow the the letters in the roundabout to make the answers make sense:

First roundabout:

• MART (37A: Convenience store)
• MARTIALART (48D: Kendo or aikido)
• MARTINET (40A: Stickler for military discipline)
• MARTINIGLASS (5D: Common vessel for a cosmopolitan)

Second roundabout:

• BUT (42A: Nevertheless)
• BUTTIGIEG (52D: "Mayor Pete")
• BUTTOCKS (43A: Rear end)
• BUTTONFLIES (14D: Alternatives to zippers on blue jeans)

Third roundabout:

• BAL (68A: The Orioles, on a scoreboard)
• BALLGOWN (73D: Fancy dress)
• BALLOTS (69A: They're cast in November)
• BALLOONANIMAL (25D: Entertainer's creation at a child's birthday party)

Fourth roundabout:

• MICH (101A: Wisc. neighbor)
• MICHELLE (107D: One of the Obamas)
• MICHELOB (102A: Brand from Anheuser-Busch)
• MICHELINMAN (72D: Tired old advertising mascot?)

Fifth roundabout:

• ARM (103A: Branch)
• ARMANIS (110D: Some expensive suits)
• ARMAGNAC (104A: French brandy)
• ARMAGEDDON (75D: It's the end of the world)

Word of the Day: MARTINET (40A) —

 

[merriam-webster.com]

• • •

I completed this puzzle without fully understanding the gimmick. I could see that answers were entering and emerging, but I tried to make that little arrow-circle square at the middle of each "roundabout" mean something—I thought it represented letters, somehow, and I couldn't understand why it seemed to be representing different sets of letters for each answer. Over time, I could see that the answer going south had no letters added, the one going east seemed to have just one, and the one headed south had two, but I was solving at a reasonable clip and never really stopped to try to figure it all out. I kept waiting for a revealer to explain it all to me, but ... it never arrived. Perhaps if the roundabouts were circles (like actual roundabouts) and not squares (wtf????), the whole "roundabout" concept would've been clearer to me earlier, I don't know. No "roundabout" I have ever been in has ever had ninety-degree angles like that. I go through traffic circles like that nearly every day, all of them circular. So I'm not a fan of the visual representation of the roundabouts, but I am a fan of the concept in general. It is elaborate and kinda wild and really well executed. Also, that giant open section in the north features some of the most inventive grid-building I've seen. You've got the back end of BALLOON ANIMAL shooting up into the center of that section, and then a bunch of stellar long non-theme answers filling the spaces around it, including TRIVIA APP, PRICELINE, DALAI LAMA, ON VACAY (!) and always adorable RED PANDAS. OK, you also have the decidedly ugly CLONAL (8D: Pertaining to genetic copies), but hey, it's a small price to pay for the rest of it. This theme is so architecturally complex and so dense that it must've been an adventure filling the grid At All, let alone filling it so creatively. Maybe the one (high difficulty level) begat the other (extreme inventiveness). Whatever. This is the rare Sunday puzzle that seems worthy of the real estate it takes up. And one of the rare "architectural feats" that was actually interesting to solve (even if my aha moment came very, very late).

Two parts of the puzzle seemed particularly treacherous. The first was MARTINET. I know the word ... but it's not exactly an everyday word, and because it was involved in the first "roundabout" I came to, and I didn't really understand who the "roundabout" worked, I wasn't entirely sure MARTINET was even right. What if it was something like, uh, MARINE VET, and I just wasn't seeing how the theme was working? I think of MARTINETs as being stern, but I don't associate the word with specifically "military" discipline, so I hesitated there. And I knew EDERLE! (crosswordese to the rescue!) (31D: Gertrude who swam the English Channel). Seems like MARTINET might've been even harder to pick up without EDERLE to help you confirm it. Aside from MARTINET, the other yikes part of the grid was CRONUS (71A: Father of Zeus). This is because my brain hiccuped and I wrote in URANUS (so many shared letters ...) without blinking, without hesitating, instantly. But URANUS was not Zeus's father, but his grandfather. Close, no cigar! Anyway, URANUS gave me "OH, LARDY" at 56D: "Good heavens!," and I was totally prepared to accept "OH, LARDY" as some horrid phonetically-spelled regionalism (actually thought to myself, "'OH, LAWDY' would be better”). The only way I caught the URANUS error was by (luckily) noticing that I had INUA as the answer for 62D: Early empire builder (INCA). No such thing as INUA (I'm pretty sure). So in went INCA and LARDY (!) became LORDY (better!) and that was the very last thing I wrote in the grid.

I kept wanting the letters inside the roundabouts to spell something or mean something ... and of course they did "mean" something, ultimately—you have to follow them around in order to make sense of all three answers that exit from the roundabout. Which brings me to the only part of the theme that doesn't quite work: that first answer, the one that enters but does not leave the roundabout. If you enter a roundabout you have to leave the roundabout. You do not stop on a roundabout. Have you ever been behind someone who stopped on a roundabout?! Chaos. Nightmare scenario. You have to keep moving and you have to (eventually) leave. So in order for three of the theme answers to work beautifully, one of them has to kick things off by awkwardly driving into the roundabout and ... stopping. I'm trying not to cling too hard to roundabout realism today. You can't have three answers exit if you don't first have one answer enter. A little unrealism is just the price you pay for the overall effect. I'm OK with that. I'm much more bothered by the square roundabouts than I am by the non-exiting answers.

Outside the theme answers, things look pretty good. I'm not too bothered by the doubling up of UP—I just wish one of those UP answers wasn't SAW UP, what in the world!? (93A: Turn into logs). What are we doing here? Who's supposed to be saying this, a cartoon pioneer? "After I SAW UP some wood I'm gonna scare up some grub!" SAW UP appears to be on a cycle, reappearing in the grid every thirty years like some kind of strange crossword comet (1965, 1996, 2026). I hope I live to see its next appearance, and yet I also hope I never see it again. The other "up" phrase is LACES UP, a perfectly fine phrase. If there's another "up" phrase I've missed, clearly it's not bothering me.

Bullets:

• 50D: Tots' pops (DADAS) — this is a ridiculous plural. I know it seems like an acceptable plural, but no tot would ever say DADAS. Just the one. There are mamas and there are papas but there are not DADAS. I suppose if a child had two dads, then DADAS is theoretically possible, but even then, I just don't see her describing them collectively. By the time she got the whole plural-with-an-S thing down, I think she'd be past the "dada" stage. Strange that I've seen DADAS so many times (fourteen since I started this blog), and this is the first time it struck me as absurd. 
• 90A: Classic Andy Warhol subject (MARILYN) — hey, did you know that SOUP CAN and MARILYN have the same number of letters?! It's true! Ask me how I know!

• 94D: Leader ousted in 1955 (PERON) — I had to keep shouting at my brain, "No, not PEROT! The other guy ... the Evita guy ... come on!"
• 27A: "The Office" accountant who kept a cat in her desk drawer (ANGELA) — I laughed just remembering ANGELA. The clue-writing today was really colorful and entertaining, on the whole. The groaner clue on U.C.L.A. (122A: What you do when you tour a certain SoCal campus, phonetically?). The bizarro trivia clue on UFO (125A: Purported sighting recorded by Puritan governor John Winthrop in 1639). I mean, 54A: Heart on one's sleeve, perhaps, in brief (TAT)!?! What a great literalization of a common idiom (in case you were unaware, a "sleeve" is a large tattoo covering most or all of a person's arm). And [Tired old advertising mascot?] for MICHELIN MAN!? That's primo stuff right there.

["Tired!"]

• 89A: Predator that might hunt by electrolocation (EEL) — I love that "electrolocation" is a real thing (I did not know that) and that I could use the word to infer EEL (via "electric EEL")
• 79D: Purple smoothie add-in (AÇAI BERRY) — there's something decadent about getting the whole BERRY when normally (quite normally—regularly, constantly) we just get AÇAI. Amplified crosswordese. I like it.
• 29A: Internet-influenced writing genre (ALT-LIT) — I have never heard of this genre. I don't really believe it's a genre. "Alternative literature brings together people with a common interest in the online publishing world" (wikipedia). Wait, is this ALT-LIT? Am I ALT-LIT? Are we ALT-LIT?

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

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

P.S. I'm going to see John Mulaney today! His stand-up tour ("Mister Whatever") is, improbably, coming through Ithaca, so we're going. No idea why I'm telling you; I'm just excited is all. Big names (that I want to see) rarely come to my neck of the NY woods. Fun fact: MULANEY (7) has never appeared in the NYTXW. So, if you're playing at home, that's three SAWUPs, zero MULANEYs. Also zero OZUs, btw. But you knew that. I've said that many (many) times before. 

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

• Venmo (@MichaelDavidSharp)]

=============================
✏️ Upcoming Crossword Tournaments ✏️

• American Crossword Puzzle Tournament (Stamford, CT, Apr. 10-12, 2026) (registration closed!)

=============================
📘 My other blog 📘:

• Pop Sensation (vintage paperbacks)

Read more...