Mind-reading scan, in a way / THU 6-18-26 / Bona fide numbskull / Employee after working hours, on "Severance" / Chemical agent used to make frosted glass / Follower of "4" on a love note / Adrenaline surge providers / Big name in archery equipment / Chemical agent used to make frosted glass

Constructor: Scott Hogan

Relative difficulty: Easy

THEME: remedial cryptic clues — theme clues are words referred to (cryptically) by the answers themselves:

Theme answers:

• BROADWAY OPENING (17A: Bro?) ("Bro" is the "opening" part of the word BROADWAY)
• VISITOR CENTER (35A: Sit?) ("Sit" is the "center" part of the word VISITOR)
• FAIRYTALE ENDING (54A: Ale?) ("Ale" is the "ending" part of the word FAIRYTALE)

Word of the Day: FMRI (52A: Mind-reading scan, in a way) —

Functional magnetic resonance imaging or functional MRI (fMRI) measures brain activity by detecting changes associated with blood flow. This technique relies on the fact that cerebral blood flow and neuronal activation are coupled: When an area of the brain is in use, blood flow to that region increases. (wikipedia)

• • •

A very easy puzzle where you never really had to figure out the theme if you didn't want to because the crosses were easy enough that it didn't matter. I'm not sure I ever saw the clue for the last two themers. In a puzzle like this, with completely inscrutable theme clues. I just hack at the short stuff and wait for something to happen. Today, the short stuff, and most of the longer (non-theme) stuff came very easily, like it was Tuesday, and so despite having no idea what was going on with the theme for a long while, I was able to move through the grid really easily. Here's a snapshot of my initial travels:

It's possible that I got a turbo boost there at the beginning because I just happened to remember that line from Keats's "La Belle Dame Sans Merci" about the SEDGE (5D: "The ___ is wither'd from the lake": Keats). The poem opens like this:

[poetryfoundation.org]

SEDGE is a weird enough word that, as you can see, the poetryfoundation website has helpfully highlighted it (if you click on it, you get a definition; in this case: "Grasslike or rushlike plant that grows in wet areas"). I used the SEDGE as a catapult ... although looking at it now, it didn't give me that much. I think OUTIE probably did more to propel me into the puzzle (14A: Employee after working hours, on "Severance"). At any rate, starting was easy, and once I got going, as you can see, I just drifted right across the grid, top to bottom, no problem. I was probably half done or more before I finally inferred the OPENING part of BROADWAY OPENING, and then ... that was pretty much it. I do cryptic crosswords every day, so this kind of self-referential way of referring to letter strings (today, "bro" "sit" "ale") is really familiar to me. What we get today is basically a clue/answer reversal—the clue is the indicated letter string ("Bro," etc.), and the answer acts as the cryptic clue for that letter string. It's a cute idea, but would not be very theme-worthy were it not for the progression that the puzzle sets up: OPENING, CENTER, ENDING. That gimmick gives the theme some much-needed coherence. The execution of the theme is neat and elegant. Not dazzling, but ... tidy. Would've been nicer if the puzzle had had teeth, if it had made getting those themers more of a battle by making the fill more challenging. But maybe this was the kind of thing where people really Really needed to be given ample opportunity to get those themers from crosses. Maybe the theme remained indecipherable to some people even after they'd completed it. Seems possible. If you had to come here to understand the theme, that doesn't make you a CLASS-A MORON, a term which I don't believe exists in the first place (surely if you really felt you needed to insult someone like this, you'd say GRADE-A, not CLASS-A). Apparently 30 Rock popularized the CLASS-A version, since it's all I'm seeing when I google it (there's an episode where the Post calls Jack a CLASS-A MORON). I never really watched 30 Rock, but I did watch the Simpsons, a lot, which (maybe) explains my ears' preference for GRADE A:

Though the puzzle was very easy today, there were several things I didn't know. [Big name in archery equipment]?? I don't even know a small name in archery equipment. Why would I or any non-archer have any idea about brands of archery equipment? The only HOYT I know is HOYT Wilhelm (although wow, if you google "Hoyt" it's archery as far as the eye can see). Now that I think of it, bowhunting is a reasonably popular pastime, so maybe the name is more familiar than I think; just not to me. Also unfamiliar to me: the answer directly next door to HOYT: ONO (8D: Fuyumi ___, author of the "Twelve Kingdoms" fantasy novels). Fantasy novels, like archery, not part of my daily existence, though I do read a reasonable amount and am in bookstores not infrequently, so I'm slightly surprised the name doesn't ring a bell. You'd think adjacent proper-noun unknowns might derail me, but nope, inferring both was easy. I also have no idea what the depressing-sounding Beautiful Boy is, so METH took some work (43A: Downfall of the boy in 2018's "Beautiful Boy," in brief) (spoiler alert!). METH, like fantasy novels and archery, also not part of my daily existence, though movies definitely are, so ... Beautiful Boy? (starring Steve Carell? Timmy C?!). Not sure how, but it missed me. 2018? What even was 2018? Feels like a fictional year. FMRI was the last of my mystery answers. Thankfully, the "F" cross was fair, otherwise, yikes, not sure how I would have come up with that "F"—had to look up what it stood for (see "Word of the Day," above).

Bullets:

• 36D: Chill way to take things (IN STRIDE) — big frowny face next to this one. Without "take (it)," this looks ridiculous.
• 3D: Absolut alternatives (STOLIS) — look, I'll give you one plural brand name like this per puzzle, but I will not give you two. Sorry, PEPSIS (9D: Colas in the "cola wars").
• 19D: Chemical agent used to make frosted glass (ETCHANT) — what are we doing here? ETCHANT should make you strongly reconsider tearing the grid down and starting over. Longer answers should not be wasted on obscurities. The "frosted glass" part of the glue had me briefly considering ETCH ART, but that didn't sound very "chemical agent"-y.
• 27A: Word rhymed with "flash" in "A Visit From St. Nicholas" (SASH) — one of the first poems I ever knew by heart, or close to it. I certainly don't know it by heart now, but I remember that my mom read it to me many times when I was very young. It's almost certainly the first place I ever heard "SASH" used in this way (in reference to windows). The lines in question are: "Away to the window I flew like a flash, / Tore open the shutters and threw up the SASH." The poem also famously contains the complete list of non-Rudolph reindeer:

More rapid than eagles his coursers they came,

And he whistled, and shouted, and called them by name:

"Now, Dasher! now, Dancer! now Prancer and Vixen!

On, Comet! on, Cupid! on, Donder and Blitzen!

• 38A: Alfred ___, co-creator of the original I.Q. test (BINET) — ah, the eugenicists' favorite test. Did you know that "moron" used to refer to those with an I.Q. score between 51 and 70 (one step up from "imbecile"!). I'm not sure if a CLASS A MORON is a higher or lower scoring moron. Might be one of those golf-type situations where lower is better (i.e. more moronic). If I never saw another I.Q. or MENSA clue again, I would not mind at all.
• 58A: Follower of "4" on a love note ("EVER") — the "4" (for "For") had me thinking the latter part would also be funnily "spelled," so I was like "4 EVAH?"

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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British glam rock band of the 1970s / WED 6-17-26 / Rival of a Raven / Folkie DiFranco / Disney film set in a fictional Colombian village / Like Tom Cruise as Jack Reacher, some say / Casino maneuvers carried out three times in this puzzle? / Fast-paced scam, such as the shell game / "___ the Day" (Thomas Pynchon's longest novel) / "Just What I Needed" band, with "the" / Geraldo Rivera uncovered his "vaults" on live TV

Constructor: Jonathan Raksin

Relative difficulty: Medium-Challenging

[5D: Disney+ series whose name sounds like a compound conjunction = ANDOR]

THEME: RIFFLE SHUFFLES (43A: Casino maneuvers carried out three times in this puzzle?) — first four letters of theme answers in the top half of the puzzle are "(riffle??) shuffled" into the last four letters of their respective answers to make the theme answers in the bottom half:

Theme answers:

• STONEPIT --> SET POINT (41A: BEFORE (Deck 3): Quarry / 46A: AFTER (Deck 3): Crucial moment in a tennis match)
• CONSOLES --> COOLNESS (20A: BEFORE (Deck 2): PlayStation and Switch / 55A: AFTER (Deck 2): Noted quality of the Fonz)
• GOOFOFFS --> GOOFOFFS (16A: BEFORE (Deck 1): Slackers / 73A: AFTER (Deck 1): Slackers)

Word of the Day: AGAINST the Day (72A: "___ the Day" (Thomas Pynchon's longest novel)) —

 

Against the Day is an epic historical novel by Thomas Pynchon, published on November 21, 2006. The narrative takes place between the 1893 Chicago World's Fair and the time immediately following World War I and features more than a hundred characters spread across the United States, Europe, Mexico, Central Asia, Africa and "one or two places not strictly speaking on the map at all," according to the book jacket blurb written by Pynchon. Like its predecessors, Against the Day is an example of historiographic metafiction or metahistorical romance. At 1,085 pages, it is the longest of Pynchon's novels to date. (wikipedia)

• • •

This was probably closer to a two-and-a-half-star puzzle for me, but I bumped it up for the final "joke" (i.e. the revelation that a shuffled GOOF-OFFS is also GOOF-OFFS). I should probably take that half star back for the duping of "OFF" in OFF-PUT (itself a pretty awkward verb ... or is it an adjectival phrase? Who can tell, when the only terms anyone actually uses for this phenomenon are PUT OFF (v) or OFF-PUTTING (adj.)) (32D: Repelled). But I like the goofy joke well enough to keep the rating where it is. If you're going to break crossword convention (in this case, repeat an answer), there better be a good reason, and today I think there is. Still, the very concept here is kind of a snore. And the revealer is a silly phrase that means nothing to me. I have heard of shuffling, of course, but not riffle-shuffling, which is ... just shuffling? Where the half-deck in one hand merges with the half-deck in the other hand in alternating-card fashion? Casino terminology, as you know, not my thing. A bigger issue, for me: the theme reeks of "a computer program helped me find these words." It's like someone wrote some code that could take a wordlist and determine which of the (8-letter) words in that list could turn into other 8-letter words if you did this. The non-GOOF-OFFS themers are a big shrug to me. I don't want to mentally shuffle longer words to that extent. I also don't really have to, as the theme clues are easy enough that you don't really have to pay attention to the theme. This puzzle feels like it's in some kind of thematic no-man's-land between Wed. and Thu. It's structurally complex ... but not that complex; not such that you really have to think about it. It took me a little longer than usual. I can write some of that off to the oversized grid, but those giant NW and SE corners had something to do with it as well—much harder to get traction in all that white space than it is to get traction in a typical M-Th corner. 

One other potentially OFF-PUTting thing about this puzzle is that it is positively drowning in pop culture clues. I can handle a pretty decent amount of movies / music / TV shows in my puzzles, but this puzzle was testing even my patience in this arena. It starts with Tom Cruise. MISCAST? Do people say that? That clue was lost on me, as those Reacher movies held zero appeal for me (1A: Like Tom Cruise as Jack Reacher, some say). They held appeal for someone, though, as the two of them made close to half a billion dollars at the box office, so I guess the MISCASTing wasn't such a problem. After Cruise, we get (deep breath): ANDOR, Paul MESCAL, The CARS, TOTAL Recall, "Werewolves of London" (SOHO), Nick at NITE, SLADE, Booker T & the MGS, The Fonz, ENCANTO, Spielberg's EGOT, Jay LENO, NIA Vardalos, ANI DiFranco, AL CAPONE (clued via Geraldo) and PERU (clued via The Emperor's New Groove). That is Yeeeesh levels of pop culture. I didn't even count the sports clues in there, or the (not exactly 1st-tier) Pynchon. What's odd is that so many of those answers were needlessly pop culturefied. TOTAL, PERU, CARS, NITE, SOHO. Just shift the cluing on those and you have something closer to a reasonable balance. As is, I kept rolling my eyes going "again?" Except with Paul MESCAL, whom I love and who can do no wrong. Put him in every puzzle, I won't mind. 

The difficulty for me today lay in those big corners, where I just had to work harder than usual for traction. Otherwise, the difficulty level felt about normal for a Wednesday. I didn't have any real mistakes, though there was a bunch of stuff I didn't know. I've read a couple late-ish Pynchons (the most recent one, Shadow Ticket, which features a character known as the AL CAPONE of Cheese, and Inherent Vice), and I know the titles of his more famous works (V, Gravity's Rainbow), as well as the novel that One Battle After Another was based on (Vineland), but AGAINST the Day? That one got past me. I also didn't know if the common football score was going to be ONE-ONE or ONE-NIL (52D: Final score of at least 10% of professional soccer matches) (yesterday's World Cup matches were 3-1 (France-Senegal), 4-1 (Norway-Iraq), and 3-0 (Argentina-Algeria)), and I've never used or heard anyone use the phrase DOG IT in my life (59D: Give minimum effort), so that SE corner took some time. Similar problems in the NW, with MISCAST being hard to pin down, and then INTONE being oddly/vaguely clued (and just being an odd word to begin with) (2D: Vocalize), and SCAN IN being needlessly prepositionally awkward ("Digitize" = SCAN, no IN needed) (3D: Digitize, as a document).. No real trouble elsewhere in the grid.

Bullets:

• 19A: Fast-paced scam, such as the shell game (SHORT CON) — this is a fun term. I think I learned it (and LONG CON) from The Grifters. With "CONS" highlighted in CONSOLES, the CON in SHORT CON kind of feels like a dupe, even though it isn't.

• 57A: ___ With Friends (WORDS) — does anyone still play this? This feels very ... aughts. Huh, looks like it's an exceedingly popular mobile game. Or at least it was as of 2017 ("the most popular mobile game in the U.S." as of May 2017) (wikipedia). No one I know plays (or talks about playing it, if they do). I do So Many word games and puzzles every day. This just isn't one of them.
• 25D: Gathering, informally (SESH) — I will never like this awful shortening, though I will say that SESH is much, much more tolerable than UNFORCH, which is a shortening I encountered in a puzzle this past weekend, UNFORCH.
• 62A: Telepathy, e.g. (PSI) — I ... don't really know this term. Are supernatural abilities called "PSI"s? Apparently yes, though it's not a countable noun, i.e. PSI is just the collective term for "parapsychological psychic phenomena or powers"_which are fictional, of course, as the clue for nearby ESP kind of gets at with its scare quotes (71D: "Ability" that's hard to believe, for short).

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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❤️ Support this blog ❤️: 

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