Fried cornbread concoctions / SUN 7-26-26 / Total heat content of a thermodynamic system / Striking feature of Jessica Rabbit / Classic kids' toy weapon / Yoga style in which each movement is synchronized with a breath / What this puzzle's subject uses to travel to a new location / Shoe style with a small opening in the front / Mount ___, highest peak in the Rockies / Some film noir figures, for short / Best-selling Irish solo musical artist

Constructor: Kim Alswager

Relative difficulty: Easy? Medium? Let's split the difference: Easy-Medium

THEME: "Down the Tubes" — it appears to be a puzzle about MARIO from the Super Mario Bros. universe; I have no idea what specific game is being referenced visually here (I think it's the original Super Mario Bros.), but it apparently involves WARP PIPES—"pipes" (pictured inside black square configurations) into which two thematic answers enter and from which they emerge (14D: What this puzzle's subject uses to travel to a new location):

The "pipe" answers:

• FIREF/LOWER (82D: With 31-Down, power-up that lets this puzzle's subject throw flames)
• MUSH/ROOM (87D: With 30-Down, power-up that supersizes this puzzle's subject)

Mystery Block contents:

• COIN (4D: Collectible item from the box below)
• VINE (7D: Green transport from the box below)
• ONE-UP (64D: "Extra life" item from the box below)

Other related answers:

• PRINCESS PEACH (24A: Whom this puzzle's subject must save!)
• BOWSER'S CASTLE (110A: Enemy lair where 24-Across is held captive)
• WARIO (88A: Antagonist of this puzzle's subject)
• YOSHI (38A: Green friend of this puzzle's subject)
• LUIGI (122A: Brother of this puzzle's subject)
• "MAMMA MIA!" (86D: Catchphrase of this puzzle's subject)
• NES (71A: Platform with a "Super" popular character, in brief?)
• "IT'S-A-ME, MARIO!" (41D: Catchphrase of this puzzle's subject)

 Word of the Day:  Jupiter HAMMON (40D: Jupiter ___, first African American poet published in North America) —

Jupiter Hammon (October 17, 1711 – c. 1806) was an American writer who is known as a founder of African-American literature, as his poem published in 1761 in New York was the first by an African American man in North America. He subsequently published both poetry and prose. In addition, he was a preacher and a commercial clerk on Long Island, New York.

Born into slavery at the Lloyd Manor on Long Island, Hammon learned to read and write. In 1761, at nearly 50, Hammon published his first poem, "An Evening Thought: Salvation by Christ with Penitential Cries". He was the first African-American poet published in North America. Also a well-known and well-respected preacher and clerk-bookkeeper, he gained wide circulation for his poems about slavery. As a devoted Christian evangelist, Hammon used his biblical foundation to criticize the institution of slavery. (wikipedia)

• • •

[120A: Striking feature of
Jessica Rabbit]

I don't know what to say. I have never played any game in the Mario Bros. universe (despite playing its precursor, Donkey Kong, endlessly when I was in middle school), so I can't tell you if the puzzle looks right, or if the pipe gimmick here is at all interesting or accurate or reflective of actual gameplay. It's one gigantic, oversized, 21x21 shrug from me. Everything I know about Mario Bros, I learned from crosswords. This includes the fact that "IT'S-A-ME, MARIO!" is an anagram of "Marisa Tomei" (thank you, Erik Agard). I guess the "?" boxes are things that you get and they contain mystery bonus items or power or whatever? Again, I have literally never played this game. I mean, if I had played the game, and could explain it to you in detail, would that change your experience of the puzzle? Probably not. This puzzle could not have excluded me more completely if it tried. At least I could finish it. I weirdly "know" a surprising amount of things about Super Mario Bros, just from solving crosswords. WARIO, NES, LUIGI ... probably seen BOWSER before, though I had no idea he had a CASTLE. PRINCESS PEACH sounds vaguely familiar (she was apparently Princess Toadstool in the original version). So I got through it. And the pipe gimmick was easy to figure out, since the clue basically tells you where the second halves of both the affected answers emerge. Maybe the puzzle is visually interesting, but it seems kind of boring. Just a bunch of (mostly short) trivia about the Mario Bros universe. The three "?" squares that items "pop out"of and the pipe-affected answers are the only things that seem at all innovative. But maybe there's a powerful nostalgia factor for people here. And maybe that's enough. For those people. For me, there's nothing here. Hard to rhapsodize about a puzzle built entirely around a piece of popular culture I've never experienced. 

Outside the theme, the puzzle felt average to slightly below average. HOE CAKES will always make me laugh, though (5D: Fried cornbread concoctions). I know they're real—I first learned about them from the 1987 movie Hollywood Shuffle. I forget why they were featured in that movie, but they were. Ah, here we go:

Anyway, the name is inherently funny. Beyond that, there wasn't a lot that spoke to me today. VINYASA is a nice, original answer (22A: Yoga style in which each movement is synchronized with a breath). But stuff like A DAY AGO and AS A JOKE are kind of tepid, and ODORED ... well, the less said about that, the better. I have no idea what a POTATO GUN is (83A: Classic kids' toy weapon). The puzzle tells me it's "classic," but ... what, you make a gun out of a potato? We had cap guns, but I don't know anything about POTATO GUNs. Oh, looks like the potatoes are the ammo. The gun is more like a cannon, and it launches potatoes. To what end, I don't know.

A potato cannon, also known as a potato gun or potato launcher, is a pipe-based cannon that uses air pressure (pneumatic), or combustion of a flammable gas (aerosol, propane, etc.), to fire projectiles, usually potatoes. A simple design consists of a pipe sealed on one end, with a reducer on the other end to lower the diameter of the pipe, which has the corresponding lower-diameter pipe attached to it, called the barrel. Generally, the operator loads the projectile into the barrel, then utilizes a fuel or air pressure (or sometimes both) to propel the projectile out of the cannon. (wikipedia)

That just doesn't sound like a "toy," exactly. But I guess if young people "play" with them, then it's in the general category. But POTATO GUN was just one more thing that meant nothing to me today. See also ENTHALPY (69A: Total heat content of a thermodynamic system), a word that seems to be screaming "you've made a typo," but somehow, no. That is, in fact, the spelling. Happy NYTXW debut to ENTHALPY! I think I left this puzzle's wavelength immediately after I got 1A: "Joanie Loves ___" ("Happy Days" spinoff) ("CHACHI"). Total gimme. After that, almost nothing up my alley. Puzzle was still pretty easy, but again and again I ran into things that either fell out of or never entered my memory. Mount ELBERT? (99D: Mount ___, highest peak in the Rockies). PEEP TOE shoe? (89A: Shoe style with a small opening in the front). And LOL that clue on DEREK (34A: Hough of "Dancing With the Stars" fame). Who? The phrase "'Dancing With the Stars' fame" is killing me. That is not a thing. You've already buried me in Mario stuff, couldn't you at least just give me a normal, famous DEREK. Jeter, or Bo? ___ and the Dominoes? Come on. Be a pal.

Bullets:

• 86A: Bialik of "The Big Bang Theory" (MAYIM) — glad I could remember her name (and how to spell it) today because she crossed both "pipe" answers and I wasn't entirely sure about either (esp. FIREF/LOWER). Side note—seems like a flaw in the execution that FIREF stands alone. LOWER is a real word, as are MUSH and ROOM, but FIREF??? Weird anomaly.
• 111D: "?!?!?!?!" ("WHAT?") — my sentiments exactly (I actually wrote in "WHA-?" here and left the last square blank because I thought there might be some colloquial spelling happening here, like "WHAA?" or something like that).
• 17A: Encase in protection (COCOON) — I had a crazy hard time parsing this. Stared at C-C-ON like "WHAA?" Finally got HOUR (2D: Short hand?) (tough one!) and that got me over the COCOON hump. Just in case it's unclear, on a watch, the "short hand" shows the HOUR while the long hand shows the minutes.
• 100A: ___ Davis, actor and eulogist for Malcolm X (OSSIE) — back-to-back days for OSSIE. Just one appearance in all of 2025, one appearance in all of 2024, no appearances in 2023 ... and here we are. In just two days, he's appeared as much as he has in nearly four years! Crosswordese can go through some real boom/bust cycles.
• 7A: Peddles (VENDS) — has anyone ever said "VENDS." The only way I've ever heard "VENDS" irl is in the terms "vendors" and "vending machine." VENDS as a straightforward synonym for "peddles"—never. And yet I recognize it as a real word. Some "real" words exist only in captivity (i.e. in crosswords). Just ask ODORED. 

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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"Santa Claus in Camp" artist, 1863 / SAT 7-25-26 / One of a nursery rhyme quintet / Unprofessional letters? / 1980s Chrysler innovation / The so-called "hurricane bird" / Second person seen in "Hamlet" / Ambient sound said to be more soothing than its "white" counterpart / Emmy winner Ann of "The Handmaid's Tale" / Waft fragrant smoke around / Co-founder of the A.C.L.U.'s Women's Rights Project, familiarly / Actor/playwright Davis who wrote "Purlie Victorious"

Constructor: Katie Hoody

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium

THEME: none 

Word of the Day: PINK NOISE (33D: Ambient sound said to be more soothing than its "white" counterpart) —

[sleepfoundation.org] 

Pink noise, 1/f noise, fractional noise or fractal noise is a signal or process with a frequency spectrum such that the power spectral density (power per frequency interval) is inversely proportional to the frequency of the signal. In pink noise, each octave interval (halving or doubling in frequency) carries an equal amount of noise energy.

Pink noise sounds like a waterfall. It is often used to tune loudspeaker systems in professional audio. Pink noise is one of the most commonly observed signals in biological systems.

The name arises from the pink appearance of visible light with this power spectrum. This is in contrast with white noise that has equal intensity per frequency interval. [...]

• • •

[1A: Fashionable spots?]

The themelesses were good again this week. Very good. One of the best late-week 1-2 punches I've seen recently. What I loved about this one was that it felt like a Friday—wide-open grid, lots of flow, marquee answers slashing this way and that—but with the cluing clearly tightened up a notch or two. Every single clue seemed to be trying to mislead me at least slightly. Well, not most of the proper nouns—they seemed to be there to give me mild traction. But the ordinary words and phrases hardly ever seemed to have a straightforward clue. This is my ideal Saturday, actually. It's a Friday+. A simple difficulty augmentation, that's all I want. All the other fun stuff that a good Friday offers should stay the same. Could this puzzle have been harder? Yes. Should it have been? Maybe, but as with yesterday, I thought the puzzle at least cleared the minimal difficulty standards for its day of the week. The only things I outright didn't know were PINK NOISE (33D: Ambient sound said to be more soothing than its "white counterpart") and DOWD (21A: Emmy winner Ann of "The Handmaid's Tale"); the clue helped me infer the former while the crosses took care of the latter. So the difficulty today came entirely from cluing—which is, generally, as it should be. Today, we get two big bursts of colloquial goodness, right across the middle. The first one sent me shooting out of the NW corner and clear across the grid:

The second ("I'M IN THE SAME BOAT") was slower to arrive, but only because I actually didn't look at the clue until I had most of the crosses locked into place. The answer was no less delightful for coming into view more slowly. The rest of the longer fill was strong, or at least solid, but the real joy today came from hacking my way through all the slightly tricky clues. The ones on POLKA DOTS (1A: Fashionable spots?) and GARAGE SALE (17A: What might provide you an opportunity to walk in someone else's shoes?) are obviously trying to mislead you (that's what the "?" on the end of the clues is trying to tell you), but it was the ambiguously-worded clues that were really fun today. [Coach's lack, often] ends up having nothing to do with a coach (human) but instead refers to passenger status on an airplane. The [Second person seen in "Hamlet"] is not a character but pronoun category (THOU). You don't "check a box" by putting a check in a box (as on a survey) but by literally checking (with your eyes) the mailbox (40D: One might check a box for it = MAIL). Etc. Etc. Sometimes I was braced for trickiness that never came, which is another way that a Saturday puzzle can push me off-balance. Like, I thought the "sisters" in 52D: What some sisters become were nuns, but they were just ... sisters (AUNTS). And [Predigital recording devices] had me first thinking of fingers and toes (that kind of "digital"), and then had me wondering what meaning of "recording" I wasn't considering. But no, you record (or "write things down") with PENS, a technology that precedes modern digital (electronic) recording of any kind. Sometimes I saw right through this trickery (the other meaning of "shingles" (and "nails") in the ITCH clue, the other meaning of "lab" in the PET clue). But whether the misdirects were hard or easy, they were entertaining. The puzzle seemed to be trying to give me a good time, and I appreciated it.

I often feel guilty when some obvious bit of crosswordese or other sort of short gimme is the first thing I'm able to get. Like, the NW was crushing me and would've kept crushing me had the combined forces of LEROY, KCAR, OSSIE, and SELA not eventually, finally, given me enough assistance to get over the hump. I was coming up blank on everything else up there, esp. the long stuff. So the crosswordy names were conspicuous up front because I desperately needed them, but after that, I was able to ride the momentum of "THAT DOESN'T COUNT" and didn't feel as dependent on the old standbys—plus, there were just fewer of them. ANYA and ABBA and ROTH and RUBIO were the only remaining name gimmes (could've done without that last one, but we'll let that one go for now). NAST was maybe the crosswordesiest name in the grid today, the one that is most likely to provide traction to veteran solvers like me while simultaneously baffling many others (64A: "Santa Claus in Camp" artist, 1863). Thomas NAST might be considered the official cartoonist of crosswords, in that he has been a grid staple for ages and I rarely see him discussed outside crosswords. He's famous for popularizing the Democratic donkey and the Republican elephant as political symbols, and for lampooning the 19c. Democratic political machine of Tammany Hall and "Boss" Tweed (a notoriously corrupt politician). NAST is also credited with the first depiction of the modern Santa Claus (I think "Santa Claus in Camp" might in fact be that depiction). Because I knew this, I was able to get NAST simply from the fact that the answer was four letters. Again, it felt slightly like cheating to know this stuff I probably wouldn't know if I hadn't been solving (and writing about) crosswords for decades. But oh well, what good is experience if you can't benefit from it, I suppose. 

Bullets:

• 18A: Group with the hits "Honey, Honey" and "Money, Money, Money" (ABBA) — this answer was ... a gimme.

• 1D: One of a nursery rhyme quintet (PIGGY) — never thought of the toe-counting game as a "nursery rhyme," but I suppose it qualifies. Also, we have ten piggies ... but I guess the song only covers five of them, so the clue is technically fine.
• 61A: The so-called "hurricane bird," because of its reputation for seeking shelter from storms at the last possible moment (IBIS) — yes, if you are going to give me IBIS for the umpteenth time, make it interesting—write a novel-length clue about it, why not!? When I thought TESTY was TENSE (50D: Easily set off), I thought the "hurricane bird" was a TERN.
• 55D: Pool set? (GENE) — you know the phrase "gene pool"? Well then you probably understand this clue, moving on ...
• 29D: Where an annoying person might be told to go? (AWAY) — I don't know who's responsible for this clue, but it made me laugh, so thanks. Extremely anticlimactic. It works.
• 19A: Something won by successful Olympians (GLORY) — so yeah, no, not MEDAL
• 66A: Like koalas, in Australia (GREY) — maybe my favorite misdirect of all. The qualifier "in Australia" seems so bizarre, since koalas are native exclusively to Australia. So my first thought was "uh ... HOME?" Then I got GREY, mostly from crosses, and thought "wait ... aren't they GREY everywhere? What does Australia have to do with it?" Then I remembered that GREY is actually spelled GRAY in the U.S. It's only spelled GREY in Britain and Commonwealth countries ... like Australia. It's a spelling clue! Bah! But also wow. Good one.

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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