Traditional Vietnamese garment whose name means "long shirt" / THU 5-21-26 / timiL / Fish more formally known as a batomorph / Philanthropic group with a clock face in its logo / The so-called "pineapple isle" / Large-eyed African antelope with a duplicative name / Changed my mind in editing notation / 2000 Eminem single with lines from his "biggest fan" / Something tickled on a piano

Constructor: Zhou Zhang and Mallory Montgomery

Relative difficulty: Easy

THEME: Change clothes — articles of clothing are clued using visually cryptic clues:

Theme answers:

• BACKWARDS CAP (20A: timiL) (word meaning "cap" is spelled backwards)
• CUT-OFF TEE (35A: Golfer's suppor-) (definition of "tee" gets cut off)
• MINISKIRT (42A: Evade) (word meaning "skirt" is miniaturized)
• STRIPED SOCKS (55A: P | u | n | c | h | e | s) ("stripes" inserted into a word meaning "socks")

Word of the Day: ÁO DÀI (16A: Traditional Vietnamese garment whose name means "long shirt") —

Áo dài (English: /ˈaʊˈzaɪ/; Vietnamese: [ʔaːw˧˦ zaːj˨˩] (North), [ʔaːw˦˥ jaːj˨˩] (South), lit. “long tunic”) is a traditional Vietnamese outfit consisting of a long split tunic worn over silk trousers. It can serve as formalwear for both men and women.

There are inconsistencies in the term áo dài. The currently most common usage is for a Francized design by Nguyễn Cát Tường (whose shop was named "Le Mur"), which is expressly a women's close-fitting design whose shirt is two pieces of cloth sewn together and fastened with buttons. A more specific term for this design would be "áo dài Le Mur". Other writers, especially those who claim its "traditionality", use áo dài as a general category of garments for both men and women, and include older designs such as áo ngũ thân (five-piece shirt), áo tứ thân (four-piece shirt), áo tấc (loose shirt), áo đối khâm (parallel-flap robe), áo viên lĩnh (round-collar robe), áo giao lĩnh (cross-collar robe), áo trực lĩnh (straight-collar robe). (wikipedia)

• • •

[3D: "Bingo!"]

Startled by this puzzle initially because I couldn't believe how easy it was. I should not be able to move through a Thursday grid with this little resistance. It took so long today before I hit a clue that made me hesitate even a bit. In fact, I was literally this far into the grid before I hit a clue I didn't know instantly:

I was thinking of the wrong kind of "interest" and couldn't figure out why ACCRUE wouldn't fit. "IMBUE ... that's not a word for interest." So I switched to crosses, got PIQUE, and off I went again. The puzzle was 90% Monday-easy, on what should be the trickiest day of the week. Now, the theme did make you have to think a little, that's for sure, but when you can work every cross of every theme answer so so easily, you don't really have to sit there thinking—you can just quickly hack your way to a nearly complete answer and then reason it out from there. So my main take away from the puzzle, sadly, was that the editor should've tightened this thing up—a lot. It's insultingly easy for a Thursday. You have to give regular, longtime solvers something to chew on late in the week, come on.

The overall easiness of the puzzle made the one truly original and unfamiliar answer in the puzzle very jarring. Like, you're just feeding me MAA and LLAMA and ORE etc. and then you throw an ÁO DÀI at me!  Yikes. I was like "what are you doing here? you've stumbled into 'Intro To Crosswords'—you want the Advanced Class, down the hall." I was thrilled to have a bit of a struggle and learn a new term, if briefly terrified that the crosses would suddenly fail me and I'd be left with a DNF on what had been, to that point, the easiest Thursday puzzle in the history of the universe. Actually, getting the "correct" answers was particularly reassuring, as AODAI is not a letter string that inspires confidence in an English speaker who is completely ignorant about Vietnamese fashion. "Am I spelling Maggie MAE right? Dear god I hope so." The coolness of ÁO DÀI is, sadly, completely offset by the horrificness of AIS, which crosses it. AIS is never going to fly as a plural. Delete it from your wordlists now, constructors, I'm begging you. First of all, no one wants AI in their crossword. It's being shoved down our throats in every other aspect of our lives, so it would be great if you could not aid and abet the sickening ubiquity, thanks. Also, AIS ... just look at it. On its face, a truly ugly three-letter answer. Detonate it now, you won't regret it.

As for the theme ... I like that the grouping is tight (i.e. the answers to the visual-madness clues are all articles of clothing). I don't think all themes require revealers, but this one probably could've used one simply because ... why? The articles of clothing are arbitrary. They seem to make a nearly-complete outfit, but ... whose? Why not do [Jerks] for HIGH HEELS, for instance?* There's no real logic to the items in clothing, and a clever revealer might've given a greater sense of coherence to the whole endeavor. Also, I'd probably keep all other clothing answers out of my clothing puzzle (sorry, TUXEDO, I know you're a cat, but you're obtrusive. Yeah, and take DIADEM with you). The actual visual trickery in the clues is pretty clever. But I'm having trouble believing in BACKWARDS CAP. I mean, you might wear your baseball cap backwards, sure, but a BACKWARDS CAP is not an article of clothing. It's just a cap ... that you have chosen (why, dudes, why?) to wear backwards. "Yes, excuse me, miss, does this store sell BACKWARDS CAPs?" You see what I mean. The backwardness is not intrinsic. You could, however, buy a CUT-OFF TEE or a MINISKIRT or STRIPED SOCKS, though you probably made your CUT-OFF TEE at home, and if you did, is that really what you call it? I think of "cut-off" as being for jeans and "crop(ped)" as being for shortened tees. A CUT-OFF TEE is a kind of "crop-top," isn't it? Is it? Anyway, those first two themers felt slightly less on-the-money than the second two, but I have to admit that I kinda liked working all the clothing answers out, so ... despite the disheartening easiness and the mild imperfections of the theme, I had a good time.

Bullets:

• 24A: Fish more formally known as a batomorph (RAY) — had the "R" and thought "ROE! ... wait, that's not a kind of fish, that's fish eggs. So ... R- ... R- ... Ruh-roh." And then it came to me. I grew up never thinking of RAY as a standalone word. It was always preceded by stuff like "manta" or "sting" and so RAY never leaps to mind when I see "fish." Just some dude's name.

[There was a brief time in the late '70s when this guy was a cultural phenomenon. No one remembers why. Future archaeologists and/or aliens are going to be like "what the f—?"]

• 46A: Legal boundaries? (ELS) — a "letteral" clue (referring to a letter (or letters) in the clue itself)—the ELS ("L"s) are the first and last letters (i.e. "boundaries") of the word "Legal." To someone who does cryptic crosswords literally every day (i.e. me), this clue is transparent.
• 8D: Philanthropic group with a clock face in its logo (ELKS) — I had no idea. I figured it just had an elk in its logo. Big building with BPOE (Benevolent and Protective Order of ELKS) written on it downtown, never noticed any logo or clock face. Let's have a look:

[Holy cow that is most definitely a clock face. "Elks: We Know What Time It Is!" "Elks: Closed from 5 to 7" "Elks: The Real Plural Is 'Elk,' We Know, We Know"]

• 9D: The so-called "pineapple isle" (LANAI) — thought maybe KAUAI. I was on Maui once and they definitely had pineapples there, too.
• 48D: Large-eyed African antelope with a duplicative name (DIK-DIK) — if this answer was as mysterious to you as ÁO DÀI, I understand. But as a longtime solver, my antelope lexicon is oddly vast (NYALA, ELAND, ORYX, ORIBI, etc.), and so DIK-DIK came to me quickly. Did you know that an auto rickshaw is called a TUK TUK (onomatopoetic for the sound of its two-stroke engine)? Well if not, now you know (TUK TUK = two previous NYTXW appearances) (DIK-DIK: five ... though this is the first in almost 50 years! I must've seen it in other puzzles...).

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

*"heel" is another word for "jerk" in the sense of "bastard," "asshole," "rat," etc.  

[Follow Rex Parker on BlueSky and Facebook and Letterboxd]
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"Drink" for vocal critics / WED 5-20-26 / Epitome of slowness / Protagonist of "That '70s Show" / Musical notation that means "with vigor" / Boardroom bigwig, in brief / European city that "waits for you," in a Billy Joel tune / Establishment that serves zombies, perhaps / "Essential" product used as an anti-acne treatment / Spot to drink a matcha with a Manx / Florence-based fashion house

Constructor: Kathleen Duncan

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium

THEME: "ISN'T THAT SPECIAL!" (58A: Condescending rhetorical question ... or what you might say about 16-, 26- and 44-Across) — three things that might be called "special":

Theme answers:

• OFF-YEAR ELECTION (16A: Nontraditional time for voting someone into office)
• SOUP OF THE DAY (26A: What a waiter might offer to start you off)
• VISUAL EFFECT (44A: Bit of movie magic)

Word of the Day: Zombie (1A: Establishment that serves zombies, perhaps = TIKI BAR) —

The zombie is a tiki cocktail made of fruit juices, liqueurs, and various rums. It first appeared in late 1934, invented by Donn Beach at his Hollywood Don the Beachcomber restaurant. It was popularized on the East coast soon afterwards at the 1939 New York World's Fair. // Legend has it that Donn Beach originally concocted the zombie to help a hung-over customer get through a business meeting. The customer returned several days later to complain that he had been turned into a zombie for his entire trip. Its smooth, fruity taste works to conceal its extremely high alcoholic content. Don the Beachcomber restaurants limited their customers to two zombies apiece because of their potency, which Beach said could make one "like the walking dead." // According to the original recipe, the zombie cocktail included three different kinds of rum, lime juice, falernum, Angostura bitters, Pernod, grenadine, and "Don's Mix", a combination of cinnamon syrup and grapefruit juice. // Beach was very cautious with the recipes of his original cocktails. His instructions for his bartenders contained coded references to ingredients, the contents of which were only known to him. Beach had reason to worry; a copy of the zombie was served at the 1939 New York World's Fair by a man trying to take credit for it named Monte Proser (later of the mob-tied Copacabana). [...] The cocktail is named in the lyrics for the song "Haitian Divorce" on the 1976 album The Royal Scam by Steely Dan. (wikipedia)

• • •

Well, this one started out hot—strong cocktails, right out of the gate...

... and then you get a few crosses, layer in some HATERADE (14A: "Drink" for focal critics), and then boom, there goes the first themer (which I actually got without having to look at the clue) (you solve Monday puzzles Downs-only for long enough, and you get real good at pattern recognition):

And then you cross all that with "IT FIGURES..."? Yes, I was pretty happy coming out of the NW corner (not something I say a ton). The puzzle sort of faded from there, though. It didn't crash and burn; it just kind of ... wilted. The fill gets extremely weak in that central choppy section (all 3-4-5s)—it was like falling down stairs, moving through that section, and when I landed at the bottom of the stairs, I turned around and took a picture (for insurance purposes—those are faulty stairs!):

You start out firmly in crosswordese territory with LIRE / ODIN, and then, once you round the corner into the middle of the grid, you go CFO NOLO HOOHA YOM HODA DEL ALEAP, clunk clunk clunk clunk, hitting your head on every step. It was like those answers were sounds I was involuntarily uttering with each impact. The rest of the fill holds up OK (your EKEs and your SLOs notwithstanding), but the good vibes of the NW become a kind of distant memory, and the theme ... sigh (he SIGHED). I want to like it, and I think there's a cleverish idea here, but the specials are inconsistently special. For the first and third, "Special" can simply precede the last word in the phrase in order to describe what you're talking about, e.g. an OFF-YEAR ELECTION is a "special election," a VISUAL EFFECT is a "special effect." But SOUP OF THE DAY works differently. That's just a "special." Unless it's supposed to evoke the phrase "special of the day," but ... that phrase tends to refer more to entrees. A SOUP OF THE DAY is not the "special of the day." It's just ... a special—an example of an offering not typically on the menu. I think the thing that's bugging me most about the theme, though, is VISUAL EFFECT.  All "special effects" are visual. So VISUAL EFFECT feels like just a dumb adjective swap-out (VISUAL for "special"), and a bad one, in that VISUAL EFFECT feels the less natural-sounding term. "Special effects," common phrase; "VISUAL EFFECTs," less so. Those two phrases are basically synonyms, whereas the other themers are examples of a type. An OFF-YEAR ELECTION is a kind of special election. SOUP OF THE DAY is a kind of restaurant special. VISUAL EFFECT is just a weaker way of saying "special effect." (although according to this wikipedia entry on "visual effects," they're actually increasingly distinct from "special effects," with "special" referring to mechanical effects and "visual" referring to digital). There's just something slightly off, slightly loose and clunky, about the way the theme is executed. But like I say, the core idea is at least interesting ... and we'll always have that NW corner.

Pretty easy solve today. I have no idea what SAGE OIL is, so that took some hacking (48A: "Essential" product used as an anti-acne treatment). I've heard of TEA TREE OIL, but not SAGE OIL, but then I've never had much of an acne problem, so this is really beyond my purview. Took me a bunch of crosses to see MOLASSES (it's perfectly clued, I just couldn't think beyond tortoise ... why is the tortoise and the hare story stuck in my head?) (38D: Epitome of slowness). The worst mistake I made today—maybe the only true mistake—was writing in TAKE POWER instead of TAKE POINT (32D: Be in charge, informally). TAKE POINT is apparently a military term, which is funny to me, as I always assumed it came from basketball (since the point guard typically runs the team's offense). And I know the phrase, when used metaphorically, as "run point." TAKE POWER really felt right, and as you can see, it has all but three of the same letters as the actual answer, so that slowed me down. The clue does say "informally," and there's nothing particularly "informal" about TAKE POWER, so I probably shouldn't have pulled the trigger on it. But I had TAKE PO-! How was I supposed to lay off?

Bullets:

• 15A: European city that "waits for you," in a Billy Joel tune ("VIENNA") — this song has a funny history. It never charted—I don't think it was even released as a single—but it became one of the most popular songs in Joel's repertoire and is somehow now a certified triple platinum record (!?). Apparently the movie 13 Going on 30 (2004), which featured "VIENNA," really caused the song to blow up. Anyway, it's a charming song. 

• 64A: Words a teenager might say with an eye roll ("YES, DAD") — the "eye roll" got me; I was expecting a lot more surface sass. Something slangy, maybe. But no, just a straight phrase of assent, dripping with teen exasperation.
• 1D: Mustachioed president who succeeded another mustachioed president (TAFT) — four-letter mustachioed president = TAFT. The mustache is all you need to know "not BUSH." Oh, crap, I forgot about POLK! POLK did not have a mustache—just really high collars and (by the looks of it) a need to consume human blood. 

[POLK! (p.s. the other "mustachioed president" mentioned in the clue was T.R.)]

• 9D: Careful, this might be hot! (MIC) — gah, a hot MIC. I was like "MAC ... because MAC & cheese ... is hot?"
• 62A: John in the sketch "The Fish Slapping Dance" (CLEESE) — this was way harder than it should've been because I read the clue as [Join in the sketch "The Fish-Slapping Dance"] and could not fathom how one might do that.
• 25D: Spot to drink a matcha with a Manx (CAT CAFE) — do they really have purebred cats in CAT CAFEs? I've still never been in one. I love cats, obvs, but something about trying to drink / eat around that many strange cats gives me ... paws.

That's all. See you next time.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on BlueSky and Facebook and Letterboxd]
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