Traditional circular dwelling / MON 5-4-26 / Culinary personality Lakshmi / Suddenly feels repulsed by a romantic partner / Slogan encouraging the use of seatbelts / Simple game requiring steady hands / Fasten, as a ship's rope / 2017 Pixar film set in Mexico

Constructor: Kate Schutzengel

Relative difficulty: Easy? (I once again failed the Downs-only solve bec. wtf is an AMENITY KIT lol)

THEME: GETS THE ICK (58A: Suddenly feels repulsed by a romantic partner ... or a hint to 17-, 23-, 37- and 48-Across) — there are two "ICK"s in each theme answer

Theme answers:

• CHICK FLICK (17A: "Sleepless in Seattle" or "Legally Blonde," informally)
• BRICK BY BRICK (23A: Methodical way for something to be built)
• CLICK IT OR TICKET (37A: Slogan encouraging the use of seatbelts)
• PICK UP STICKS (48A: Simple game requiring steady hands)

Word of the Day: SKYE terrier (56D: Scottish terrier breed) —

 

Skye terrier, breed of dog that was originated as a hunter on the Isle of Skye, Scotland, and has remained relatively unchanged for about 400 years. In the 19th century the Skye was one of the most popular terriers and was used as a working dog as well as the pet of the nobility. It is characterized as sturdy, alert, and good-tempered. It has a large head, long body, and short legs, and its ears are either erect or hanging. The long, straight coat ranges from black to pale yellowish brown. Adult height is 9.5 to 10 inches (24 to 25 cm); weight is about 24 pounds (11 kg). (britannica.com)

• • •

Two problems. One is a me problem, I guess: I have never heard of this expression. It's so ... depressing, somehow. People get suddenly repulsed by their romantic partners??? I mean, I get that things can go sour, but sudden repulsion? When did people start saying this? It's awful. Anyway, I'll just assume that everyone's been saying it for years and I am hopelessly old and happily married and therefore out of the loop, fine. But there's the second problem, which is much, much more of a problem: how does the revealer work, exactly? I mean, there are two "icks" in each theme answer, I see that, but how does GETS THE ICK "hint" at that fact, exactly. You aren't adding "ick" to anything; the icks are just ... there. In the words that they are in. There's no "getting" of anything. And there are two icks ... why? The revealer is GETS THE ICK, singular. But there are two. For no particular reason that I can see. So it's off on two counts: the "gets" part makes no sense, and there's more than one "ick." If the phrase were GETS THE ICKS ... well, we'd be closer to a functional revealer, but still not there. It's honestly bizarre to me that this puzzle was accepted, as it simply doesn't ... work. The theme answers themselves are colorful enough, with CLICK IT OR TICKET being particularly lively, and definitely middle-of-the-grid-worthy. But conceptually, this thing is D.O.A. 

Also D.O.A.—my attempt to solve this thing Downs-only. I laughed out loud, and continue to laugh out loud, at AMENITY KIT, a phrase I am learning Just Now, despite my having literally spent Thursday and Friday nights in a hotel! I was mentally scanning the hotel room and bathroom while trying to imagine what ___ KIT could be. The only KIT I could think of was a SHAVING KIT. Also, I (wrongly) inferred LUMEN instead of LUMET at 30A, and that "N" really added to my troubles. There finally ended up being too many letters that I had to infer that weren't clearly inferable, and none of them were helping me see AMENITY. G-PS, A-AT, L-NA, LUME-, -RS ... I couldn't fill any of these GAPS (!!!) confidently enough to begin to get a handle on AMENITY. Ah well. That's the danger of Downs-only solving; sometimes you crash and burn. I just wish I'd crashed and burned on something more interesting than AMENITY KIT (a debut answer, unsurprisingly). [validation!—I went downstairs and saw that my wife, also a Downs-only Monday solver, had the entire puzzle finished ... except AMENITY KIT]

SKIPS SCHOOL sounds more natural to me than SKIPS CLASS (29D: Plays hooky), but ... maybe I'm just responding to the alliteration. SKIP(S) CLASS is definitely a thing. Way more of a thing than AMENITY KIT. Besides AMENITY KIT, I didn't have any trouble with the Downs-only solve. Just little stuff. BLAST for BLARE (25D: Play loudly, as from a speaker). MCAT saved me from inferring POP TOP instead of MOP TOP (47D: Exam for a future doc), which would not have occurred to me. Not much left to talk about in this grid besides the short overfamiliar stuff (of which there is a lot). Oh, and IT'S LIT, an expression that somehow already sounds dated. LIT on its own, in this modern sense of "exciting" or "excellent" ("fire"), seems fine on its own, but somehow "IT'S LIT" sounds contrived, like a parent trying to convince their teenager to go to church because the pastor plays guitar or something. "You'll love it, honey. All the kids say that it's really lit!" Now that we've established that it sounds corny, I really want to teach an introductory literature course called "IT'S LIT!" We will read exclusively about things that are on fire (Fahrenheit 451!), or else people who are drunk (Gatsby!). Or maybe, ironically, we'll read "The Little Match Girl." Too morbid? Possibly.

Bullets:

• 17A: "Sleepless in Seattle" or "Legally Blonde" (CHICK FLICK) — still not the hugest fan of this term, which sounds like a derogatory thing guys say about movies that they wouldn't be interested in because they're "for girls." Sleepless in Seattle and Legally Blonde are both good movies. It would not occur to me to call either a "CHICK FLICK."
• 26D: Traditional circular dwelling (YURT) — "Traditional" not really giving you a lot. Maybe add an adjective or something ("Mongolian!"), if only for color.
• 64A: Fasten, as a ship's rope (BELAY) — it gets a little nautical down below, with BELAY following hard on the heels of MAST (62A: Pole on a sailboat). BELAY is obviously the much more technical term. I think it's a rock-climbing term, too, isn't it? Yes.
• 1D: 2017 Pixar film set in Mexico (COCO) — I'm learning that COCO is by far the dominant four-letter animated film in crosswords. You'd think it would be ELIO, but ... I guess that movie wasn't popular enough. 

• 39D: Reassurance after a loud crash, say ("I'M OK!") —maybe the best clue I've seen for "I'M OK." Paints a vivid picture.
• 48D: Culinary personality Lakshmi (PADMA) — "Culinary personality" is such a weird phrase. "Hey, I met this new woman and I really like her! She's beautiful!" "What's her personality like?" "Uh ... culinary?" "Is she a chef?" "... maybe?" Lakshmi is the creator, host, and executive producer of Taste the Nation with PADMA Lakshmi.

• 7D:  Sound effect for a bop on the head (BOINK!) — maybe my favorite part of the puzzle. I have a smiley face drawn next to it. I'm also fond of YOINK!

That's all. See you next time.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on BlueSky and Facebook and Letterboxd]
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"Why, why, why?!" / SUN 5-3-2026 / Org. for J. Robert Oppenheimer / World Golf Hall-of-Famer Mark / Chewy chocolate candy brand / German actress Berger with a career spanning eight decades

Constructor: Mark Diehl

Relative difficulty: not hard, especially if you've seen all the terrible fill before and recognize the cluing angles from older puzzles



THEME: "What Are The Odds?" — some entries spell out words / phrases with their odd letters, and those are then used to clue nearby entries

Theme answers:

• [Moisture barrier supplies] for PLASTIC SHEETS, odd letters spell out PATCHES, which is used as the clue for GIVES A DARN
• [A hard job] for NO EASY TASK --> NESTS --> STICKY PADS
• [Fictional diary writer] for BRIDGET JONES --> BIG TOE --> LOW DIGIT
• ["One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" author] for KEN KESEY --> KNEE --> CHILD SUPPORT
• [Conan and others] for BARBARIANS --> BRAIN --> THINKPIECE
• [Client's sales agent, in brief] for ACCOUNT REP --> ACUTE --> NOT QUITE RIGHT

Word of the Day: SENTA (German actress Berger with a career spanning eight decades) —

Senta Verhoeven (née Berger; born 13 May 1941) is an Austrian-German actress. She received many award nominations for her acting in theatre, film, and television; her awards include three Bambi Awards, two Romys, an Adolf Grimme Award, both a Deutscher Fernsehpreis and a Bayerischer Fernsehpreis, and a Goldene Kamera. [I briefly got excited when I saw Wikipedia listed her father-in-law as Paul Verhoeven, but it's not the "RoboCop" director, just another dude that happens to share his name.]

• • •

Hard to tell where to begin with this blog; so many things I could complain about, and a much smaller, non-positive number of things that I enjoyed. Christopher Adams here, filling in for Rex, and really hoping that the wish from past me for a good Sunday was actually fulfilled. Instead, we get this puzzle, which, I honestly cannot say if any part of this proves that this puzzle wasn't made twenty years ago—so much of this gives off that vibe, and the solving experience sure felt like the slog of picking a random archived puzzle from back then. 

Maybe the closest we get to a modern thing in this puzzle is BROCODE, which isn't great and feels pretty dated and icky as is. I'm not counting the clue for WINONA as a modern thing from a constructing viewpoint, btw; you could easily imagine that entry put in a puzzle that's older than I am, with that clue being an edit to try to make it feel more modern. Even if that's the case, attempt failed—so, so much terrible fill that I will inevitably miss some in the following list: OKED, HOR, OSE, INRE, PHYS, TENHUT, AEC, TASS, RET,  SENTA, IS AT, PARI, CIRC, THE RAP (as far as I'm concerned, this is essentially a six letter fill in the blank clue even if not formatted as such). Plus clue/entry pairs that felt like Eugene T. Maleska was back in the land of the living: ERIN, ELIA, TAU, KEEN (especially bad, and especially when juxtaposed with the "how do you do fellow kids" feeling from ROFL—which, now that I think about it, might beat BROCODE for the newest thing in this puzzle, but also feels old and outdated).

[a clip from "Bridget Jones", mostly chosen because at 0:22, there's a brief cameo of Mark Goodliffe, of "Cracking the Cryptic" fame, and if you're interested in sudoku, I make those too]

But this is all to bury my biggest problem with this puzzle, which is that the words/phrases spelled out by the odd letters are being used as clues, when they fit much better as answers. In a way, I'm reminded of those old-timey themes (that you don't see much these days, for a good reason) where all the theme clues are [Spot] or something equally dull and boring, and the entries in the grid aren't really answers, but clues, and everything feels backwards. Same feeling here—[Gives a darn?] would be an excellent clue for the answer PATCHES, but that works because you're putting the slippery, fun part in the clue, and alerting the solver that something tricky is afoot with the question mark; on the other hand, having [Patches?] as a clue for GIVES A DARN as an answer does not work as well, and similar for the rest of the theme entries.

Olio:

• ACC [Stanford and Cal joined it in 2024] — actually, this might be the worst clue/entry in the puzzle, if only because it reminded me of the travesty that college sports is right now; I cannot wait for the Big Ten to become so big that it naturally splits into a Midwestern and Pacific division, and then back into the old Big Ten and the Pacific (pick a number), as it should be.
• TCU [The Horned Frogs of Ft. Worth] — there are much better ways to signal "abbreviation" than writing Fort Worth like that (and, imo, this clue does not need an abbreviation signal in the clue, given that the abbreviation is way, way more common than the full, unabbreviated name).
• TOOTIN ["Yer darn ___!"] — I didn't actually dislike this entry by itself, but putting this right next to GIVES A DARN was certainly a choice.
• KEN KESEY ["One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" author] — The movie based on this book is one of the many Oscar Best Picture winners with six words in its title, but that's not the most words in the title of a Best Picture winner. In fact, there's two with more than six words in their title; can you name them?
• CHOCTAW [One of the so-called Five Civilized Tribes] — There is an essay to be written about how awful the word "civilized" is here; I'm not going to write it, but I will say that it says a lot about the editing process for using a very controversial term that inherently frames things with a white superiority complex, and that is very much not used by the tribe in question because of how problematic the terminology is (and it's not like info about this being controversial is hard to find or anything).

Yours truly, Christopher Adams, Court Jester of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on BlueSky and Facebook and Letterboxd]
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