1972 hit for Tanya Tucker / TUE 4-21-26 / Wild West way of settling disputes / Cool, in '90s slang / Literary friend of Finn / Starbucks alternatives from the Golden Arches / Dual degrees for physicians / Haitian currency unit / "___ dat" (slangy agreement)

Constructor: Victoria Fernandez Grande

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium

THEME: FLYING START (57A: Early advantage ... or a hint to the beginnings of 17-, 25-, 36- and 49-Across) — familiar phrases where the first word (or "start") is also the name of an airline:

Theme answers:

• SPIRIT GUIDE (17A: Mentor from the beyond)
• UNITED WAY (25A: Major charity whose recipients include the Red Cross and Salvation Army)
• FRONTIER JUSTICE (36A: Wild West way of settling disputes)
• "DELTA DAWN" (49A: 1972 country hit for Tanya Tucker)

Word of the Day: GOURDE (18D: Haitian currency unit) —

The gourde (French: [ɡuʁd]) or goud (Haitian Creole: [ɡud]) is the currency of Haiti. Its ISO 4217 code is HTG and it is divided into 100 centimes (French) or santim (Creole).

The word "gourde" is a French cognate for the Spanish term "gordo", from the "pesos gordos" (also known in English as "hard" pieces of eight, and in French as "piastres fortes espagnoles") in which colonial-era contracts within the Spanish sphere of influence were often denominated. (wikipedia)

• • •

A standard "first-words" theme-type, solidly executed. Strangely, the one place that I struggled (slightly) in this puzzle was with the FLYING part of FLYING START (57A: Early advantage...)—I had the START and the only word I could think of to precede it was RUNNING. Since that wouldn't fit, my brain was left going "blank-ING START, blank-ING START ... I know there's another phrase here, what is it?" If I'd just looked at the "beginnings" of all the theme answers, like the clue told me to, I probably could've figured it out quickly, but instead I just threw crosses at it until I got it. It was probably the "Y" from SAWYER that gave it to me. Anyway, the themers do indeed "start" with companies that specialize in "flying" so ... nothing very tricky going on here. Very straightforward wordplay. This is the kind of phrase that's tailor-made to be a revealer—any phrase with "start" or "end" or an equivalent synonym of either is a potential theme provocation. Like ... you could do COLD OPEN, and have the theme be phrases where the first word is something cold. If you've been solving crosswords for any length of time, you've seen scores of variations on this theme type, which is never going to wow you, but which can be enjoyable if the theme phrases are colorful enough, and today's are pretty good. Well, the last two are, anyway. FRONTIER JUSTICE does evoke certain grim images (lynchings come to mind), but it's a great phrase, and "DELTA DAWN" ... I mean, who doesn't like "DELTA DAWN?" Put it in every puzzle, I'll never be unhappy to see it. (I grew up with the Helen Reddy version, so that's the version you're getting)

The fill on this one was a little above average for a Tuesday, I thought. I could've done without two foreign currencies (few things reek of crosswordese like foreign currencies), and I'm not sure crossing FLYING with FLY was the best idea, but otherwise I didn't wrinkle my face at the grid much at all, and generally enjoyed making my way through the grid (often a chore in early-week themed puzzles, where the fill often feels like an afterthought). The fact that the grid was fun to move through is particularly impressive given that there are only a small handful of answers more than six letters long: just two 8s and two 7s. Normally, the longer answers are the thing giving the grid life, but today's puzzle relies on an army of 6s to get the job done. The effects are particularly nice in the SW corner. I don't love the idea of plural MCCAFES (I've only ever seen one, that I remember, and that was in NZ), but otherwise, in addition to the always lovely "DELTA DAWN," we get SEX and CLIMAX (!) as well as the musical stylings of CELINE Dion and the consonantal onslaught that is MD/PHDS. Did CELINE ever cover "DELTA DAWN"? Not that I can find. She does sing something called "New Dawn," but it's a pretty boring gospel song, so here's the VH1 Pop-Up Video version of that song from Titanic instead, enjoy:

Bullets:

• 56A: "But Daddy I Love ___" (Taylor Swift song) ("HIM") — I never saw this clue, so I can't really complain, but I'm gonna complain anyway—no need to shoehorn Taylor Swift into yet another puzzle, esp. for a completely ordinary word like "HIM." And, I mean, if you really want to do a musical fill-in-the-blank clue with a song containing "HIM," there are sooooooooo many to choose from. Branch out! 

• 29D: Left-wing protest group (ANTIFA) — feels fresh, but it's not new—this is actually the fifth appearance of ANTIFA (which debuted in 2018). This answer always makes the fascists mad, so I like it.
• 10D: Female form of the animal that outnumbers humans in Iceland (EWE) — this feels forced. As a clue for SHEEP, I'd love the Iceland trivia, but as a clue for EWE, it's ungainly ... the whole "Female form of the" part makes it wordy and awkward. 
• 46D: Literary friend of Finn (SAWYER) — This clue makes it sound like Tom was bookish. Remember how Tom got out of painting that fence so he could go off and read Dostoevsky? Classic.
• 57D: Cool, in '90s slang (FLY) — I was there (the '90s, that is), and I still hesitated here, even with the "F"—my brain went "... FAT ... wait, isn't it PHAT?" The "FLY Girls" were dancers on the popular early-'90s sketch show In Living Color. J-Lo was a FLY Girl. The word came out of hip-hop culture and was everywhere for a while. If I could bring back any '90s slang, I'd bring back FLY. Beats PHAT by a country mile.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on BlueSky and Facebook and Letterboxd]
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Filtered food for whales / MON 4-20-26 / Move in a hurry, old-style / "I need to use the bathroom" / Sweetie, to Brits / Bathroom, informally / What coins are exchanged for at an arcade / "Sauer" hot dog topping

Constructor: Freddie Cheng

Relative difficulty: Easy (even though I failed my Downs-only solve)

THEME: NATURE CALLS (53A: "I need to use the bathroom" ... or what the shaded squares spell?) — animal calls are "hidden" in shaded squares inside longer answers:

Theme answers:

• TWO OF HEARTS (16A: Low red card in a deck) (dog!)
• CHOO-CHOO TRAINS (21A: Locomotives, to kids) (owl!)
• "THIS SUCKS" (28: "The worst!") (snake!)
• METRO AREA (38A: City and its surroundings) (lion!)
• "NO TROUBLE AT ALL" (43A: "Don't mention it — it was easy") (sheep! wait, goat?)

Word of the Day: KRILL (32D: Filtered food for whales) —

Krill (Euphausiids) (sg.: krill) are small and exclusively marine crustaceans of the order Euphausiacea, found in all of the world's oceans. The name "krill" comes from the Norwegian word krill, meaning "small fry of fish", which is also often attributed to species of fish.

Krill are considered an important trophic level connection near the bottom of the food chain. They feed on phytoplankton and, to a lesser extent, zooplankton, and are also the main source of food for many larger animals. In the Southern Ocean, one species, the Antarctic krill, makes up an estimated biomass of around 379 million tonnes (418 million tons), making it among the species with the largest total biomass. Over half of this biomass is eaten by whales, seals, penguins, seabirds, squid, and fish each year. Most krill species display large daily vertical migrations, providing food for predators near the surface at night and in deeper waters during the day.

Krill are fished commercially in the Southern Ocean and in the waters around Japan. The total global harvest amounts to 150,000 to 200,000 tonnes (170,000 to 220,000 tons) annually, mostly from the Scotia Sea. Most krill catch is used for aquaculture and aquarium feeds, as bait in sport fishing, or in the pharmaceutical industry. Krill are also used for human consumption in several countries. They are known as okiami (オキアミ) in Japan and as camarones in Spain and the Philippines. In the Philippines, they are also called alamang and are used to make a salty paste called bagoong.

Krill are also the main food for baleen whales, including the blue whale. (wikipedia)

• • •

LOL I think Morse Code heard me when I insulted it last week because today it got its revenge. I have no idea what dots and dashes and dits and dahs are supposed to be because I am not a 19th-century telegraphy expert or whatever kind of nerd and/or military person uses Morse Code, so [...---... in Morse] meant nothing to me. I thought it was a single letter at first and so wrote in ESS. Then, when that wouldn't work (no such thing as PTAE!), I changed the "E" to "S," giving me "SSS." Three dashes, three of the same letter ... made sense to me. (I was reading the "..."s as ellipses!) Why you'd want to hiss like a snake using Morse Code, I don't know, but who knows what kind of role-playing hijinks and shenanigans Morse Coders (?) will get up to? Not me, that's for sure. So, ESS to SSS and that was that. PTAE made me see my first error, but there was no way for me to see my next error, since PROMS looked like (and is) a perfectly good word. So I failed the Downs-only solve, felled by PROMS / SSS. Ah well. It was bound to happen some time. 

As for the theme ... toilet euphemisms are extremely not my thing, so the revealer didn't give me the giggle or chuckle or whatever that it likely gave many of you. I was more "EWW" or "THIS SUCKS" than haha there, that's for sure. And NATURE CALLS crossing LAV? Show that one to your 8yo, they'll probably laugh (once you explain what LAV means). I appreciate that the puzzle at least tried to make the revealer clever. And you do get a lot of theme for your money today. But I've never been that impressed with thematic portion size, as a puzzle value—the theme either pleases me or it doesn't, so More doesn't necessarily mean Better. I like the idea of all the animal sounds, but the execution here was a bit lackluster. The themers themselves are fine, with "NO TROUBLE AT ALL" and "THIS SUCKS!" being particularly vivid. But the rest of the grid is mostly short stuff and grimly dull. And also: style points deductions for not having the "hidden" word touch all the elements in the base phrase (i.e. the "HEARTS" in TWO OF HEARTS and the "NO" and "ALL" in "NO TROUBLE AT ALL" don't touch an animal call at all—I guess this is true of the first CHOO as well, but I'm being generous and counting CHOO-CHOO as one word). The perfect embedded- (or hidden-) word theme is one where the embedded element touches all the words in the base phrase. But sometimes you sacrifice perfection for just Making It Work. I get it.

TORO was on my mind because I had a whole TORO bullet point yesterday. I would've gotten TORO anyway, but the coincidence of having it appear again the day after I discussed it gave me a little jolt of "hey! there it is again!" Yesterday we got the fatty tuna type of TORO. Today, we get a decidedly more Monday TORO. There were no really tough parts of the Downs-only solve for me today (beyond the Morse Code disaster). I did not (at all) like PLAYS as the answer for 12D: What coins are exchanged for at an arcade. Coins buy PLAYS, if that's what you want to call them, but "exchanged?" That's an awkward, unnatural way to put it. I really wanted some equivalent of TOKENS here. I had no idea what the last word of ["Sometimes you just gotta ___"] was gonna be. DANCE? PAUSE? SAY 'F*** IT'? Needed a bunch of crosses to get "LAUGH," but they weren't hard to come by. I also screwed up and wrote in SEGA instead of SONY (33D: PlayStation maker) and KRULL instead of KRILL (32D: Filtered food for whales). Why? I blame being an adolescent boy when this movie came out:

I think that'll do 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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