Guitar player's percussive technique / FRI 3-13-26 / Chuck who created "Young Sheldon" / Holly or Monty, for Queen Elizabeth II / Aids for competitive marathon runners / Implement with mousse or pudding / Showed subservience, in a way / The 1930s-'40s, to a jazz aficionado / Scandinavian woman's name meaning "blessed" / President whose wife was nicknamed "Lemonade Lucy" for refusing to serve alcohol in the White House / Piece that can't movie to a different-colored square

Constructor: James McCarron and Rachel Souza

Relative difficulty: Easy

THEME: none 

Word of the Day: Lucy Ware HAYES (18A: President whose wife was nicknamed "Lemonade Lucy" for refusing to serve alcohol in the White House) —

Lucy Ware Hayes (née Webb; August 28, 1831 – June 25, 1889) was the wife of President Rutherford B. Hayes and served as the 19th first lady of the United States from 1877 to 1881. Opposed to alcohol, she never served it in the White House, a move that was highly controversial. She died of a stroke aged 57 after her husband's presidency. She was also, while her husband was governor, First Lady of Ohio. She served in this position two non-consecutive times, from 1868 to 1872, and again from 1876 until 1877, when her husband was elected as President of the United States. He resigned the governorship effective March 2, 1877, and was sworn in in the next day.

Hayes was the first First Lady to have a college degree. She was also a more egalitarian hostess than previous First Ladies. An advocate for African Americans both before and after the American Civil War, she invited the first African-American professional musician to appear at the White House. She was a Past Grand of Lincoln Rebekah Lodge, a body of the International Association of Rebekah Assemblies, the women's auxiliary of the Independent Order of Odd Fellows, together with her husband.

Historians have christened her "Lemonade Lucy" due to her staunch support of the temperance movement. However, contrary to popular belief, she was never referred to by that nickname while living. It was her husband who banned alcohol from the White House. (wikipedia) (my emph.)

• • •

A reasonably sparkly but (once again) way too easy puzzle. Lots of Friday whoosh, but maybe too much. Puzzle seemed over before it began. I guess I had to do some fiddling to get the NW in order, but after that, yikes. I came rocketing out of that corner. Both the long Downs that come out of there (DESSERT SPOON and T-SHIRT CANNONS) were gimmes off their first letters. That initial "TS-" is kind of a head-scratcher at first, but once you accept that both the "T" and the "S" are unimpeachable, well, there aren't a lot of directions an answer starting "TS-" can go. T.S. Eliot ... TSE TSE flies ... T-SHIRT something ... and there you are. I feel like I used TSHIRTCANNON(S?) in a puzzle one time. Not an NYTXW puzzle. I don't remember, but it feels real familiar. Anyway, it's not an NYTXW debut—or, rather, it is in the plural, but it's been used two times before in the singular (one of those times it even had the same clue, or almost the same clue: [Top Gun] — the theme involved movie titles taken literally). It's a fun answer, but here, a very very easy answer (once you have the first two letters), so the middle of the puzzle opened right up and I just branched out from there into one corner after another. The quality of the longer fill picked up after that. I smiled at POETS' CORNER and actually said "nice" when I got ONE-HORSE TOWN (again, not a debut, but it's been 26 years, so it may as well be). Also really enjoyed "CAN YOU NOT?" (third NYTXW appearance). The grid seemed light on gunk and the cluing was sufficiently interesting (teetotaling First Ladies! Royal CORGIs!), so I was happy (despite its all being over far too quickly).

If I could UNLADE any answer, it would be ... guess. Guess which one. If you guessed UNLADE, congratulations, smart guy/gal! UNLADE has an ODOR. Definitely the LEPER of the puzzle. No doubt it's a real term, but it's also a real ugly term, so FIE and/or bah (46D: "Bah!," to Lady Macbeth) (would Lady Macbeth really not say "Bah!"? Had they not invented "Bah!" in 1606? "Bah"and "Fie" feel equally olde-tymey to me, but I guess Lady Macbeth said only one of them?). Nothing else bothered me on an aesthetic level so much as UNLADE. I was disappointed to get a Chuck LORRE and not a Peter LORRE today. I suppose Chuck is the less-famous (and therefore harder-to-get?) LORRE, but I'll take "remembering M or The Maltese Falcon" over "remembering Young Sheldon" any day. Wasn't there a game show host named Chuck LORRE in the '70s? LOL I just realized I'm probably thinking of Chuck Woolery, wow. Hard nevermind.

I had a single parsing adventure today, and it came at BENT THE KNEE (27A: Showed subservience, in a way). I don't know if I love the phrase, but I know I love it way way more than what I thought it was going to be at first. I could see KNEE was going to be involved and that the answer started with -ENT, but instead of going with BENT, I kept trying WENT ... so I wanted some version of "went down on one knee," just, you know, shorter. "WENT TO ONE KNEE? Nope, still too long. WENT TO A KNEE? Lord, I hope not." There was a second or two there where I legit thought the answer was going to be WENT ON A KNEE and I had an "EAT A SANDWICH" comment all cued up (one knee being my preferred stance for eating a sandwich at a picnic, something like that). So you can see how BENT THE KNEE might look very good after what I thought the answer was going to be.

Bullets:

• 5D: Oranges, but not apples (ORBS) — Hmm. OK. I think I might've gone with a (far) less ORB-y fruit than an apple here. [Oranges, but not bananas], say. Apples are at least vaguely spherical, is all I'm saying.
• 31A: Film character who says "Not all treasure is silver and gold, mate" (JACK SPARROW) — pretty banal movie quote, but I guess you get the "mate" part in there to cue the pirate-ness, so it's a useful quote if not a very profound one.
• 48A: The 1930s-'40s, to a jazz aficionado (SWING ERA) — surprisingly, this is a debut. It only took 80+ years to get here, but SWING ERA finally got here. A genuinely tough clue would've left "to a jazz aficionado" off entirely.
• 1D: Piece that can't move to a different-colored square (BISHOP) — a chess clue so easy even I could get it (instantly).
• 11D: Dangerous item whose first six letters are an anagram of DANGER (GRENADE) — partial anagrams ... can't say I'm a fan. Something either anagrams or it doesn't. My brain had trouble (at speed) even understanding what the clue was saying. I can usually take in clues at a glance, but that one was like a wrench in the gears of my poor brain.

• 32D: Aids for competitive marathon runners (PACERS) — I was imagining some kind of device, but the "aids" here are just other runners who help the competitive runner keep their pace and morale during a long race. 
• 40D: Scandinavian woman's name meaning "blessed" (HELGA) — an OK clue, but it got me wondering "Are there no famous HELGAs?" Isn't Hagar the Horrible's wife a HELGA? Yes. Yes she is. There's also a character in the animated series Hey, Arnold! named HELGA G. Pataki. So apparently all famous HELGAs are cartoons. Weird. Oh,  yeah, there's the subject of the Wyeth paintings. She's a HELGA. Still famous only in two dimensions, though.

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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Doraphobe's fear / THU 3-12-26 / Citrus portmanteau / Celebrity supercouple of the 2000s / Activist/scholar known for her work in the prison abolition movement / Mad scientist in a 1964 Kubrick title / Sticks around for a demo? / Sultanate that once controlled Zanzibar / Lush hair's quality / Some double-headed drums

Constructor: Joe Marquez

Relative difficulty: Easy

THEME: FALLEN ANGEL (26D: Heavenly outcast ... or a hint to something found three times in this puzzle) — the letter string "ANGEL" "falls" in three different Across answers (merging with three different Down answers):

Theme answers:

• BRANGELINA / CHANGE LANES (17A: Celebrity supercouple of the 2000s / 3D: Move to pass, perhaps)
• TANGELO / ANGELA DAVIS (23A: Citrus portmanteau / 24D: Activist/scholar known for her work in the prison abolition movement)
• LOS ANGELES / STRANGELOVE (21A: Second-most-populous city in the U.S. / 9D: Mad scientist in a 1964 Kubrick title)

Word of the Day: ANGELA DAVIS (24D) —

Angela Yvonne Davis (born January 26, 1944) is an American Marxist and feminist political activist, philosopher, academic, author and social theorist. She is Distinguished Professor Emerita of Feminist Studies and History of Consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Davis was a longtime member of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) and a founding member of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism (CCDS). She has been active in movements such as the Occupy movement and the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign.

Davis was born in Birmingham, Alabama; she studied at Brandeis University and the University of Frankfurt. She also studied at the University of California, San Diego, before moving to East Germany, where she completed some studies for a doctorate at the Humboldt-University of Berlin. After returning to the United States, she joined the CPUSA and became involved in the second-wave feminist movement and the campaign against the Vietnam War.

In 1969, she was hired as an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). UCLA's governing Board of Regents soon fired her due to her membership in the CPUSA. After a court ruled the firing illegal, the university fired her for the use of inflammatory language. In 1970, guns belonging to Davis were used in an armed takeover of a courtroom in Marin County, California, in which four people were killed. Prosecuted for three capital felonies—including conspiracy to murder—she was held in jail for more than a year before being acquitted of all charges in 1972. [...] 

In 2020, she was listed as the 1971 "Woman of the Year" in Time magazine's "100 Women of the Year" edition. In 2020, she was included on Time's list of the 100 most influential people in the world. (wikipedia)

• • •

Really thought this was a rebus. All the way to the end, I figured the ANGEL was crammed into one box in those Across answers (BR[ANGEL]INA, T[ANGEL]O, LOS [ANGEL]ES), and that (for whatever reason) the "ANGEL" boxes were just an "A"s in the Downs. "A is for ANGEL? What the hell kind of theme is this?" When I got FALLEN ANGEL I thought "'Fallen' how? Those rebus squares are going Across, not Down." And only then did I see that the "ANGEL"s were not crammed into boxes, but rather merged with the Down answers that they crossed. I should've figured this out earlier, esp. when I tried to rebus "ANGEL" inside DR. STRANGELOVE and it wouldn't work. I even tried spelling it DOCTOR STR[ANGEL]OVE. No dice. At any rate, my not fully comprehending the theme until the end did nothing to slow me down, as this puzzle was extremely easy. The theme was not hard to uncover at all, and the rest of the grid played like a Tuesday. What's more (worse), the rest of the grid is pretty dull. All 3-4-5-6s, with only a couple of dramatic 8s to spice things up (HARDCORE, PURE EVIL). Luckily, the theme material in this one is really quite colorful. Would you believe I was thinking of BR[ANGEL]INA just yesterday!? I was watching this documentary on HBO called The Power of Film (a kind of rudimentary explainer of the basic thematic and structural elements of popular Hollywood movies), and there was a whole segment on Brad Pitt and I thought to myself "What ever happened to BR[ANGEL]INA? Did I dream that? That was real, right?" And so it was slightly eerie to have this be the moment I "got" the theme:

From here on out, the puzzle was a cinch. Loved seeing ANGELA DAVIS and STRANGELOVE, and HARDCORE and PURE EVIL are doing their damndest to spice things up, but the bulk of the puzzle felt a little flat to me. Still, the theme is interesting. Just not particularly tricky. Or, rather, it's tricky, but the trick is pretty transparent.

I booed when I got LOS [ANGEL]ES because that seems like cheating. LOS [ANGEL]ES literally means "the angels." Seems pretty cheap to "hide" your "angel" inside a word meaning "angel," especially after the much more clever angel-burying examples of BR[ANGEL]INA and T[ANGEL]O. I had no other strong negative reactions to this one. The "X" and the "Z" had me thinking "oh, I see we're Scrabble-f***ing today, why?," but those are small corners and the cramming of high-value Scrabble tiles into those sections doesn't really hurt anyone. Those corners remain solid. Doesn't feel like we sacrificed fill quality for the rather thin pleasure of merely having an "X" or a "Z" in the grid. So no harm done. The only part of the grid where I "struggled" was at FUR / RASPS. The clue on FUR is bonkers (26A: Doraphobe’s fear). "Doraphobe?" Do you all know that word? I had no idea what "Dora-" could possibly mean. Also ... people are afraid of FUR? Like, when humans wear it, or are you just afraid of all animals or what? HARDCORE way to come at FUR, that's for sure. And I've never thought of RASPS as [Barely speaks]. You can speak in a rasp just fine. "Rasp" means "utter in a raspy tone," and "raspy" just means "harsh" or "grating"—nothing in there about "barely." I nearly wrote GASPS in here, but I figured there was probably no such thing as a fear of FUG (a great word, but not a likely phobia source)

Bullets:

• 25A: Sticks around for a demo? (TNT) — as in "demolition." Nice clue.
• 38A: Sultanate that once controlled Zanzibar (OMAN) — I had no idea. Also, I have forgotten exactly what "Zanzibar" was. I feel like it was part of North Africa ... hmmm, not quite. It's a Tanzanian archipelago. So ... East Africa, not North.

• 33D: Stanley of "Conclave" (TUCCI) — also [Stanley of "The Devil Wears Prada"], which I watched for the first time earlier this week in anticipation of the sequel, which comes out later this year. The actors (TUCCI! Streep! Hathaway!) are all fantastic—charming, funny—even if the story was ultimately kind of flat and grotesquely glorified workplace abuse. "I endured my boss's bizarre sadism but wow what a great learning experience." Ugh. "Whiplash for girls" was my three-word Letterboxd review. Still, I can't say I didn't enjoy myself, and I'm definitely seeing that sequel.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on BlueSky and Facebook and Letterboxd]
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