Snackable seaweed / WED 4-15-26 / Veg out in a spa? / Indian P.M. of the 1990s / Genre for Blink-182 and Sum 41 / When and where, in slang / Toy inventor Rubik / Hunter's attire, informally / Tokyo-based brewery / Destination for Frodo in "The Lord of the Rings"

Constructor: Adam Wagner

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium

THEME: do stuff with bold letters — theme answers are familiar phrases that describe what you, the solver, literally do when you [Put all the bold letters in this clue together?] (different clue letters are bolded each time)

Theme answers:

• MAKE A STINK (17A: Put all the bold letters in this clue together?) (bold letters = "odor")
• CREATE A MONSTER (Put all the bold letters in this clue together?) (bold letters = "brute")
• FORM AN ALLIANCE (Put all the bold letters in this clue together?) (bold letters  = "pact")
• BUILD-A-BEAR (Put all the bold letters in this clue together?) (bold letters = "Pooh")

Word of the Day: P.V. Narasimha RAO (42D: Indian P.M. of the 1990s) —

 

Pamulaparthi Venkata Narasimha Rao (28 June 1921 – 23 December 2004) was an Indian independence activist, lawyer, and statesman from the Indian National Congress who served as the prime minister of India from 1991 to 1996. He was the first person from South India and the second person from a non-Hindi speaking background to be prime minister. He is known for his role in initiating India's economic liberalisation following an economic crisis in 1991,^[2][3][4] a process that has been sustained and expanded by every successive prime minister of the country. (wikipedia)

• • •

The theme is kind of charming, and there are some nice longer Downs, but this has to be the worst fill I've seen on a puzzle in a long time, and that is (really) saying something. Staggering waves of 3-4-5s that never seem to end. It's the kind of puzzle where I get bad vibes right from the start, where I stop and take a screenshot of exactly the moment my brain goes "uh oh ... this is not gonna go well." Here's where that happened today:

The ominous feeling actually started a little earlier, with that ASAP ASAHI SIA combo, but I was like, "maybe it's a fluke, let's keep going." And then immediately OPED EDAM and (ugh) Morse code DAH piled on, and I was like "OK, OK, yeesh" and I took the screenshot. If I stop to take that screenshot, it means I'm making a kind of bet that the whole grid is going to suck. I just want to document the precise moment at which I knew. And actually, I had no idea, because this grid was relentless. ASAHI SIA ASAP OPED EDAM DAH GIBE OBOE IBIS EEK ERNO NINO ANSEL ORO CNET RAO AMO AROD ARLO ALT and a bunch more that I'm not including because of the mercy rule. I know there can sometimes be a cost if you want to get in a bunch of flashy long Downs, and while I appreciate those Downs, I really do, the cost today was far, far too steep. Nice theme, nice long Downs, but dear god give some attention to the rest of the grid (which, after all, is the bulk of the puzzle). 

But back to more positive things. Took me a while to warm to the theme, but the deeper I got, the better it seemed. It's a clever idea to begin with, having themers that describe what I, the solver, am doing. Then to have all the theme clues be the same, with only the boldness shifting from answer to answer? That's pretty neat work, to come up with a clue that sounds completely natural but that also contains the correct letters, in the correct order, to make four different variations of bolding make sense. And then the final answer actually makes nice use of the capital "P"—it's capital by position, but if the "p" had been lowercase, the clue simply wouldn't have worked. Gotta be "P" or else you just get pooh, which is not a bear: it's one half of a dismissal. I assume everyone knows what the BUILD-A-BEAR workshop is. If not, the phrase BUILD A BEAR is gonna seem awfully strange. 

It was a pretty easy puzzle overall. Working out the themers was probably the biggest challenge. I got slowed down by the Morse code answer, duh could've been ... what's that other one, DIT? Yeah, DIT. The crossword is going to single-handedly keep dits and dahs alive in the popular imagination forever and ever, it seems. Nevermind that this pleases no one—until another meaning of DIT or DAH comes along, we're stuck. It's a minor inconvenience, so no big deal. Just low-key annoying. The one part of the puzzle where I got slightly bogged down was in and around CASE, which had a clue I didn't understand until after I'd finished the puzzle and thought about it for a bit (40D: Suit, e.g.). I was like "suit ... case ... yes, those two words go together ("suitcase!") but a suit is not a kind of case, what the hell?!" It wasn't til however many minutes later that the legal significance of "suit" dawned on me. "Suit" as in "lawsuit." A legal case. At least I think that's what the clue is after. If I'm wrong, shrug, I tried. Sorry. In the same vicinity as CASE, I had SKATE ROCK before SKATE PUNK (18D: Genre for Blink-182 and Sum 41) and no real idea about the front end of MT. DOOM (not a big LOTR fan) (44D: Destination for Frodo in "The Lord of the Rings"). Do you really abbreviate it like that? Does Tolkien? Seems oddly informal for something so horrible-sounding.

Bullets:

• 12D: Apt letters missing from ret__ement pl_n) (IRA) — hated this clue. You're already doing the whole "spell things using letters from the clue" thing in your theme! We don't need more. We truly do not. Let the theme be the theme and clue IRA in one of the infinitely available other ways.
• 4D: When and where, in slang (THE DEETS) — not a big fan of definite articles before nouns unless it's absolutely necessary, but here, I don't mind. "DEETS" is short for "details."
  
• 40A: Veg out in a spa? (CUKE) — this is pretty clever. Context:

• 15A: Musical instrument whose second syllable sounds like a part of other musical instruments (OBOE) — this clanked. First, I was trying to think what kind of instrument has an "O" (broke the syllable in the wrong place). Second, I just don't think of the "bow" as "part of" the violin. Obviously it's required to play the violin (not always, but for the most part). But it's a separate entity, not a "part."

That's all. See you next time.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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Whiskey portion of a boilermaker / TUE 4-14-26 / Cincinnati trio? / "Just so you know," online / Chatted via Teams, say / Tail-less cat breed / Locale of a lab rat / Defense grp. since 1949 / Automaker with a six-star logo / Done with boozing / Lederhosen typically end above one / Board game set in a mansion / Count in the cereal aisle

Constructor: Mark Diehl

Relative difficulty: Easy

THEME: AEIOU (62A: Quintet seen in order in 16-, 26-, 44- and 57-Across) — theme answers contain the letters "A" "E" "I" "O" and "U" (each once and only once) in order:

Theme answers:

• "WHAT'S NEW WITH YOU?" (16A: "Been a while! Any updates?")
• HASHES IT OUT (26A: Talks through a sticking point, say)
• APPLE ICLOUD (44A: Online storage option since 2011)
• WATERING TROUGHS (57A: Ranch fixtures for livestock)

Word of the Day: boilermaker (43A: Whiskey portion of a boilermaker = SHOT) —

A boilermaker is either of two types of beer cocktail. In American terminology, the drink consists of a glass of beer mixed with a shot of whiskey. In England, the term boilermaker traditionally refers to a half pint of draught mild ale mixed with a half pint of bottled brown ale. // The American cocktail originated in Butte, Montana in the 1890s. It was originally called a Sean O'Farrell and was served only when miners ended their shifts. // When the beer is instead served separately as a chaser, that is often called simply a shot and a beer. In Scotland, the serving of a half pint of beer alongside a "wee hauf" glass of whisky (one-quarter gill, 36 ml) is called a half and a half. [...] There are a number of ways to drink an American beer chaser:

Traditionally, the liquor is consumed in a single gulp and is then "chased" by the beer, which is sipped.

The liquor and beer may be mixed by pouring or dropping the shot into the beer. The mixture may be stirred. If the shot glass is dropped into the beer glass, the drink can also be known as a depth charge. (wikipedia)

• • •

I rarely say this, but I don't understand how this puzzle got accepted. The theme is completely uninspired. I mean, you get a couple of nice-ish phrases out of it (the first two), but ... AEIOU?! That's it? That's your revealer?? Just ... the vowels themselves? ABSTEMIOUS has all the vowels appearing exactly once, in order, is that interesting? (A: no). TRADE DISCOUNT? MACRONUTRIENT? AMBIDEXTROUS? GATHERING CLOUDS? HALF-SERIOUS? (these were all actually used in previous NYTXW clues for AIEOU). I just don't get it. Like, I don't get how this "theme" was deemed special enough to run. I feel like I must be missing something, some hook that elevates this above what it appears to be, which is just ... answers with the vowels in order. That's it. End of story. It's baffling. It's not bad, it's just not ... enough. Not sophisticated enough, not clever enough. The fact that these answers have this one feature is, at best, a curiosity, a polite "huh, interesting." As for the fill, it's mostly stale, with little to offer in the way of genuine interest, and the cluing is plain and straightforward. SNATCHED UP and ON THE WAGON are perfectly solid long Downs, but the rest of it is really quite dull, and loaded with overfamiliar repeaters. AAHS AWW NTH IMED INHD and on and on, including the always hateful but somehow undying (if not UNDEAD) IRES (no one says this) (32A: Angers). I can't think of when I've had less to say about a puzzle. It's just not giving me ... anything. Not even truly terrible stuff, or weird stuff, new stuff. It's just bog-standard puzzle stuff that (with the exception of APPLE ICLOUD) feels like it was made decades ago. In fact, I thought, "surely this has been done before, in the olden days." And in fact, yes. At least twice (in '96 and '03) puzzles have had theme answers where every vowel appears just once, but not in order (!?), and then one other time ('07) there was a puzzle (a Sunday-sized puzzle) with this exact theme. Identical. Even uses one of the same examples ("watering trough"). On the one hand, the theme hasn't been done in almost 20 years, so who cares? On the other hand, yes: Who Cares? 

I had almost no trouble at all with this one. My biggest hangup came from an early wrong answer, when I wrote in MAZE instead of CAGE at 21A: Locale of a lab rat. After that, only a few answers gave me even a moment's hesitation: USE ON, which I had originally as RUB ON (30D: Apply to, as an ointment);"OH, DANG," which is one of those arbitrary exclamations you have to piece together from crosses (20A: "Oof, that's rough"); and IONIAN, which I simply didn't remember (45D: ___ Sea, body between Sicily and Greece). 

Bullets:

• 38A: Force of habit, for some, in brief (OCD) — Kind of a weird clue. I guess the idea is that you take the generic phrase "force of habit" (which is not in any way OCD) and imagine it literally? Like, OCD is a "force" behind certain (often debilitatingly) habitual behaviors? Don't love it.
• 47D: Cincinnati trio? (ENS) — a "letteral" clue—the clue refers to the "N"s (ENS) in the name "Cincinnati." 
• 51D: "Just so you know," online (FWIW) — "for what it's worth."

That's all for today. Sorry. I told you I didn't have anything to say about this puzzle. It's just not giving me anything to work with, or even be curious about. I do think it's kinda funny (in a wry, ironic sort of way) that SHOT (43A: Whiskey portion of a boilermaker) and BREW (49A: Batch of ale) both cross ON THE WAGON. I'm also now amusing myself by imagining Count CHOCULA's Tinder bio: "UNDEAD, UNWED." But I think I'm done entertaining myself, though. Gonna try to go back to sleep. See you next time.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on BlueSky and Facebook and Letterboxd]
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