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Ceremonial Maori dance / TUE 10-13-26 / Greek goddesses of the seasons / Wolf in "The Jungle Book" / Tropical cocktail with bananas, strawberries, rum and coconut cream / Jazz singer Sylvia / Whole that's greater than the sum of its parts, from the German / Second-largest city in Northern Ireland / Polynesian brew
Tuesday, October 13, 2026
Constructor: Gia Bosko
Relative difficulty: Medium-Challenging (**for a Tuesday**)
Theme answers:
I love the concept here—much more architecturally interesting than most Tuesday puzzles—but the execution ... maybe not as disastrous as that one GENDER REVEAL party in Mexico where the stunt pilot died, or that other GENDER REVEAL party that started the El Dorado fire, burning over twenty-two thousand acres and killing a firefighter, but semi-disastrous nonetheless. I have a huge "UGH" written next to GENDER / REVEAL—a corny, culturally conservative, and sometimes stupidly dangerous practice that I really thought we were past. You can't reveal "gender," only "sex," and even then, intersex children exist, and even then, why? Why all this pink / blue, boys like guns / girls like flowers bullshit? When the person who pioneered the party format tells you you should Stop, you should maybe consider stopping:
- GENDER / REVEAL (21A: Shindig for someone to announce whether they're having a boy or a girl)
- HOUSE- / WARMING (36A: Shindig for someone settling into a new home)
- BRIDAL / SHOWER (52A: Shindig for someone who's about to tie the knot)
A gender reveal party is a party held during pregnancy to reveal the baby's sex to the expectant parents' family and friends, and sometimes to the parents themselves. Prenatal sex discernment technology furnishes the necessary information. The practice originated in the United States during the late 2000s.It is distinct from, but sometimes combined with, a baby shower, where the primary activity is giving expecting parents gifts for their future child. The gender reveal party often involves gender stereotypes such as pink and blue denoting girls and boys, respectively.
The practice has been criticized for the use of elaborate and dangerous special effects, which have directly contributed to multiple deaths, injuries and large-scale forest fires, namely the 2017 Sawmill Fire and the 2020 El Dorado Fire. The practice has also been criticized for reinforcing gender stereotypes and the gender binary. [...] Overall, the practice reinforces stereotypical gender roles, often utilizing polarizing gender dichotomies in party materials such as "Guns or Glitter", "Pistols or Pearls", or "Wheels or Heels". Critics say that there is no reason to assume a neat fit into the essentialist dichotomy even in the case of a cisgender, non-intersex child. In 2019, Jenna Karvunidis, considered one of the pioneers of gender reveal parties, called for re-evaluation of the practice due to how it might affect transgender and non-binary individuals, writing about her own daughter's gender nonconformity.
The practice has also been criticised for sometimes involving dangerous stunts and animal abuse. After the El Dorado Fire in 2020, Karvunidis decried the parties and pleaded for people to stop having them.(wikipedia)
• • •
In her own words, she now sees how these parties “overemphasize one aspect of a person”—reducing children to a pink-or-blue storyline before they even arrive. Karvunidis’s daughter, interestingly, now identifies in ways that challenge traditional gender norms—a reality that changed her mother’s perspective entirely. (kidsaintcheap.com) (full story at The Guardian)Hurray to babies, boo to enforced gender conformity! The other issue with this theme is much more technical. It's a GENDER REVEAL party, a HOUSEWARMING party, but it's not a BRIDAL SHOWER party. That is, BRIDAL SHOWER stands all on its own, with no need of "party" to complete it. The others don't. Well, the revealer does, but that's because it's hogging the "PARTY" part of the answer. GENDER REVEAL and HOUSEWARMING are left out to dry. You need PARTY in the WRAP PARTY answer for it to work as a revealer, which is what makes BRIDAL SHOWER feel like the awkward outlier. You usually put "party" after the first two themers, but you absolutely cannot put "party" after BRIDAL SHOWER without sounding idiotic (or just redundant—that's kinder).
I forgot the Everything Everywhere All at Once actor's name (not for the first time) (18D: Ke Huy ___, "Everything Everywhere All at Once" actor) and when one of his crosses was a clue with nothing in it (22A: —), I got a little worried. Tuesdays don't usually have empty clues like that. Eventually I was able to infer the "A" in REVEAL, and a bit later, I stumbled on the whole theme concept and the puzzle became a normal Tuesday-level puzzle once again. A few other things make this puzzle maybe a little tougher than usual. There's that clue on LAVA FLOW (26A: Tropical cocktail with bananas, strawberries, rum and coconut cream). Never heard of it, and nothing about its ingredients screams "lava." I love cocktails, but I tend to avoid the excessively fruity stuff—maybe it's more familiar to tiki drink enthusiasts, but it was a total mystery to me. Then there's QUAN and SYMS (69A: Jazz singer Sylvia) and HORAE (16A: Greek goddesses of the seasons), two of which I knew but all of which seem on the toughish side, where names are concerned (Jennifer EGAN, you really should know by now) (43A: Jennifer who wrote "A Visit From the Goon Squad"). I know the HAKA very well (having a Kiwi wife helps) (57D: Ceremonial Maori dance) but I'm wondering if there aren't going to be a few people out there today thrown by the HAKA / AKELA cross. I know AKELA only from crosswords (64A: Wolf in "The Jungle Book"). Jungle Book no longer has the cultural resonance that crosswords thinks it has, and hasn't for a while, so that "K" could flatten a solver or two. I think HAKA and AKELA are probably both too well known for that cross to be a true Natick, but we'll see.
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| [I guess there is a vague resemblance] |
Bullets:
- 46A: Cowboy's kerchief (BANDANNA) — one of those weird situations where the dictionary says one thing but every spelling I've ever seen says another. That double-"N" looks super wrong to me, but I would never spell that word any way but "BANDANA." Most of the (internet) world seems to agree. And yet Merriam-Webster.com has BANDANNA as the lead entry and BANDANA as the "variant." Lexicographers, what will it take to make you flip their statuses? (earnest question, actually)
- 3D: High-def flat screen, for short (LCDTV) — a hairball of an answer. Look what the cat coughed up: consonants!
- 7D: Whole that's greater than the sum of its parts, from the German (GESTALT) — this feels like something urban intellectuals said in the '70s. I thought it had to do with the overall vibe of something, like a culture, but I clearly have no idea what I'm talking about here, which is why I have never, ever used this word.
- 39D: "'Tis entirely likely" ("I DARE SAY") — I don't mind the answer, but that clue is tortured. Trying so hard to get around using "I" in the clue that you end up with a phrase no one would actually say.
- 53D: Second-largest city in Northern Ireland (DERRY) — I couldn't have named (with confidence) another city in Northern Ireland besides Belfast. I've heard of DERRY, but mostly because of the TV show DERRY Girls. The Derry Urban Area has only about 100K people in it. By comparison, the Binghamton Urban Area has ~150K. Doesn't feel that big, but stats are stats.
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