Literally, "rumbling ghost" / THU 3-26-26 / It's found in a Nook / Mushroom sold in clusters / British actor and broadcaster Stephen / One inside the Trojan horse

Constructor: Alex Murphy

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium

THEME: FLIP THE BIRD (58A: Make a rude gesture ... or a hint to answering 17-, 23-, 33- and 50-Across) — shaded squares in theme answers contain names of birds; those squares must be "flipped" in order to make sense of the relevant clues:

Theme answers:

• POLEGRETIST  (i.e. poltergeist) (17A: Literally, "rumbling ghost")
• FALLCRANEHES (i.e. fallen arches) (23A: Flat feet)
• GOLDETERNRIEVER (i.e. golden retriever) (33A: Pet renowned for its agreeableness)
• MARHAWKLBERG (i.e. Mark Wahlberg) (50A: "The Departed" actor)

Word of the Day: RENEE Rapp (63A: Actress Rapp of "Mean Girls") —

Reneé Jane Rapp (born January 10, 2000) is an American singer-songwriter and actress. She gained recognition for starring as Regina George in the Broadway musical Mean Girls (2019–2020). She reprised the role in the 2024 musical film adaptation and also contributed to its soundtrack. Rapp has also acted in the HBO Max comedy series The Sex Lives of College Girls (2021–2024). She released her debut EP, Everything to Everyone, in 2022, which was followed by her full-length studio album, Snow Angel, in 2023. Rapp's second album, Bite Me, was released on August 1, 2025. (wikipedia)

• • •

I think I dislike this puzzle as much as I do in part because I love birds. "It's a bird puzzle!" If someone had told me that before I'd started, well ... a. I'd be like "spoiler alert!" but also b. I'd think "sounds amazing." Just yesterday I (finally) set up my Merlin (bird identification) account and started an official bird "life list." I use the app all the time to identify birds by their song, but I had resisted going "full birder" and starting a damn life list but apparently something kicks in when you are deep into middle age and so yesterday, I fully succumbed. First "life list" bird—the bird that inspired me to finally start the damned list—a common raven (actually uncommon in my neck of the woods this early in spring) (note: I did not see it in a neck or any other part of the woods, but on top of the tallest building on campus, yelling its heart out—I think I saw its friend fly away moments earlier). Anyway, one thing COVID shut-down gave me was birds (the other is cocktails—would also expect to love a cocktail-themed puzzle, tbh). So, yes, birds, more please. Only ... where to start? The birds give me grid gibberish, for starters. I get that the whole point is that if I "flip" them then I won't have gibberish anymore, only in the actual grid as I'm actually solving I do actually have gibberish, which is unpleasant both to solve and to look at. A great puzzle could overcome this aesthetic deficit, but ... such greatness was not forthcoming.

Look, I have been known to swear. I swear. I do. I try to keep it down, esp. outside the home, but ... well, I'm pretty sure I said "f*ck" in class just yesterday (I was talking about John Donne, whaddyagonna do, the guy likes to f*ck, or at least the narrator of "The Flea" does). So I'm not prudish when it comes to bad words. And yet a "rude gesture," esp. this rude gesture, as my revealer!? That was incredibly off-putting. Imagine you're waiting on the revealer to see how it's going to make sense of the theme, and you finally get there, and the puzzle flips you off? (which is what I would call it, btw; FLIP THE BIRD always sounded cornily euphemistic to me). There was something really off-putting about it. But somewhere between my figuring out the "bird" part of the puzzle and the puzzle flipping me off, that's where things really GET UGLY, because the fill on this ... was probably actually more off-putting than the middle finger awaiting me at the end. Which is to say I was really primed to hate that revealer, because the puzzle had already been giving me garbage. 

It's been a while since I endured anything as awful as the triple-"E" combination of ECIG, EINK, and EBATES. When I (finally) got EBATES, it's possible that I actually said "f*ck you*, so maybe the puzzle was within its rights to flip me off, I don't know. I just know that ECIG is a wince (37D: Vape pen), but a regular wince, a normal wince; EINK is an abomination (36D: It's found in a Nook), and EBATES is smushed and rotting somewhere underneath EINK (47D: Some online discounts). If any two of those had appeared in the grid together, I'd've been furious. EINK alone is nearly unbearable. EINK plus ECIG plus EBATES? A plate full of vomit. I do not understand caring that little about the basic surface-level appearance of your grid. Throw in a bunch of short gunk and the awful ASEASY, as well as a weird fascination with social outcasts (LEPER, PARIAH) and a bizarre cluster of proper nouns, including the unnecessary proper nounification of FRY, and I'm left just shaking my head. And as I was shaking my head, as I finally got to the end, the puzzle decided to flip me the bird. At that point, the "rude gesture" felt on-brand. Disappointing, but in keeping w/ the grid's personality. (You're probably thinking, "you know, there are actually four E-words in this puzzle—you forgot about ‘EMAIL ME,’” to which I say "why are you like this? Just let me move on!")

There were a few sticking points today, but not many. I was saved by ENOKI (crosswordese can be your friend!) in the north after I gummed things up with MANIA instead of ANTIC (7D: Zany behavior). That answer goes through the shaded squares in the first themer, and at that point I had no idea why the letters in there were rearranged the way they were, so things got stickier than they might have otherwise. Beyond that, all my trouble was in the FRY / RENEE / EBATES part of the puzzle (i.e. the south). No idea who RENEE Rapp is (perhaps because I never saw any of the newer incarnations of Mean Girls and also because RENEE Rapp hasn't been on the planet that long—she's my daughter's age). Also, instinctively wrote in Stephen REA at 58D: British actor and broadcaster Stephen (FRY). Live by the crosswordese, die by the crosswordese, I guess. I also weirdly struggled with YEARS. The clue doesn't exactly put you in regular-old earth time (66A: Solar revolutions). I was looking for something more ... space-y. More technical. Similar struggle with ARTERY. Normal enough word, just wasn't coming to me quickly from the clue (49D: Important route). Probably the worst moment of the puzzle, which ended up being a false alarm, was when I wrote in "MOI?" for 54A: Cry from Miss Piggy while simultaneously (soft-) shouting "Noooooooo!" because "MOI" had already been used earlier in a clue (26D: "Moi! Never!"). Turns out it's not "MOI?," it's "OUI," a "cry" I do not associate with Miss Piggy at all. 


Bullets:

• 43A: One inside the Trojan horse (SPARTAN) — I teach the Aeneid every semester. The entirety of Book II is about the Trojan horse and the fall of Troy. And yet I had No Idea what this answer was supposed to be until the crosses made it undeniable. If Virgil mentions Sparta by name even once, I don't remember it. No one would ever say there are SPARTANs in the horse. "Beware Spartans bearing gifts"? No. Menelaus is in there, I think, and he's a SPARTAN king, so the clue isn't technically wrong, but it is wildly misleading. I'm not sure about the full cast of Greeks in the horse. I don't know that they are ever all named. But I know that they are not defined by their SPARTAN-ness, but by their general Greek-ness (the Trojan War involved the whole of Greece, not just Sparta). Hell, Odysseus is in that damned horse, and he's famously from Ithaka, not Sparta. You could've just said [Menelaus, for one]. That would've been accurate, and it would've made sense in context. 
• 56D: Billy who had a #1 hit with "Mony Mony" (IDOL) — I know this guy and this song well, but for some reason initially called him Billy IDLE. Surely there's the germ of a puzzle theme idea here. ["White Wedding" singer between gigs?]?

• 8D: Dish that's often fermented before eating (POI) — three letters so I just took a guess and got it right. Crosswordese, back to the rescue!!! And it crosses ENOKI! (15A: Mushroom sold in clusters). A real crosswordese feast up there. 
• 42A: Bottle Caps flavor (COLA) — the one big smiley face moment, for me. I have loved Bottle Caps since I was little. They used to come in these little green paper pouches with this freaky looking bottle cap creature on the cover, and I would rip the pouch open and pour out the Bottle Caps and then organize them by flavor and eat them in reverse hierarchy; that is, I'd eat the fruity ones first, as they were just OK (cherry, then orange, then grape) and then I'd get to the good stuff, the top-tier caps: COLA and root beer. If I were a dragon I would sleep atop not a pile of treasure, but a pile of COLA and root beer Bottle Caps. And good luck to any Hobbit who tried to get close.

That's all for today. See you next time.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

P.S. thanks to everyone who wished my wife safe travels back from NZ. Despite mayhem in NYC (TSA shortages, I.C.E. presence, airport-closing crash at LGA), she made it through JFK and back here to central NY without a hitch.  

[Follow Rex Parker on BlueSky and Facebook and Letterboxd]
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Swahili for "journey" / WED 3-25-26 / Suffers no damage / Sea urchin, to a sushi chef / Something a commuter might need to catch / Sedative in a zookeeper's dart, informally / Cocktail made from gin, vermouth and Campari / Longtime U.K. record company

Constructor: Jeff Stillman

Relative difficulty: Easy (possibly harder, depending on your familiarity with the movie titles)

THEME: Sequels — four movie sequel subtitles, hinted at by reference to the "grid art" (black squares that form the Roman numeral "II"):

Theme answers:

• FREDDY'S REVENGE (3D: A Nightmare on Elm Street [see grid art])
• HERE WE GO AGAIN (15D: Mamma Mia! [see grid art])
• LOST IN NEW YORK (7D: Home Alone [see grid art])
• BACK IN THE HABIT (11D: Sister Act [see grid art])

Word of the Day: Jules VERNE (34A: Captain Nemo's creator) —

Jules Gabriel Verne (/vɜːrn/; French: [ʒyl ɡabʁijɛl vɛʁn]; 8 February 1828 – 24 March 1905) was a French novelist, poet, and playwright.

His collaboration with the publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel led to the creation of the Voyages extraordinaires, a series of bestselling adventure novels including Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864), Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas (1870), and Around the World in Eighty Days (1872). His novels are generally set in the second half of the 19th century, taking into account contemporary scientific knowledge and the technological advances of the time. [...] 

Jules Verne has been the second most-translated author in the world since 1979, ranking below Agatha Christie and above William Shakespeare. He has sometimes been called the "father of science fiction", a title that has also been given to H. G. Wells and Hugo Gernsback. In the 2010s, he was the most translated French author in the world. In France, 2005 was declared "Jules Verne Year" on the occasion of the centenary of the writer's death. (wikipedia)

• • •

I really want to like this one, and I guess I do, but with reservations. I really enjoyed figuring out what the hell was going on, and this was one of the very few times that "grid art" ever did a damn thing for me. The "art" was simple, apt, and (ultimately) self-evident, and I actually used it! After trying to make Freddy Krueger stretch to fit the space by spelling his name FREDDIE KRUEGER (in my defense, Freddy can be pretty stretchy), I realized the KRUEGER part was never going to work, so eventually I got it to FREDDY and thought "what the hell?" Then I looked at the "grid art," saw the "II," and immediately realized I was going to be dealing with sequels. Now, that didn't give me REVENGE right away, but it helped me infer REVENGE pretty quickly from crosses. This brings me to one of two big problems I have with the theme execution today, namely that three of the subtitles have "sequel"-ness built into them, but one does not. That is, FREDDY'S REVENGE, HERE WE GO AGAIN, and BACK IN THE HABIT (the one subtitle I actually knew) all suggest a "return" to something ("revenge," "again," "back"), whereas LOST IN NEW YORK ... pfft. That just fits the space. Nothing particularly "sequel"-y about it. Why is this important? Well, two reasons. One is, not everyone (not even close to everyone) is going to know these subtitles off the top of their heads. The originals, sure, they're all famous (probably why they got sequels), but the sequel subtitles? No. Having some word indicating "sequel" in the subtitle is a giant help to solvers, who can then infer what they don't know. It also gives the themer set a sense of cohesion, the lack of which is the other big problem I have. The grouping here is totally arbitrary. Why these movie subtitles? Because they fit symmetrically is the only answer I can come up with, and that's not enough. Having "sequel"-ness baked into the subtitle at least gives the themer set *some* kind of unifying principle, however slight. With LOST IN NEW YORK in there, though ... now you've just got four random subtitles. Far less elegant.

Speaking of elegance, you've got a movie theme, so ideally (for me) you'd ditch all other explicitly movie stuff, all the stuff that's not part of the theme. No KATNISS, no MIRREN. And you'd need a new clue for MEL (54D: Brooks of film). Of these three film answers, only KATNISS was the outright distraction (since KATNISS was not just in The Hunger Games but in the sequels as well). I'm looking for a sense of careful construction, of theme cohesion, of execution that makes the theme really pop against the background of the fill. Movie content in the fill today feels like ... leakage. I was more dismayed by ugliness like DOTER and SLEEKEN, though. And OMAHANS. That's one of those words like UTAH(A)NS that is never gonna look right to me, only ... at least UTAH(A)NS applies to a whole state full of people. OMAHANS feels like it's missing a letter of syllable. Why not OMAHANIANS? You know, like Bahamas / Bahamians. Otherwise... how do you even pronounce "OMAHANS?" "O-MAH-hans"? "O-muh-HANS?" Do you sneak a little extra syllable in there when no one's looking?: "O-muh-HA-uns?" Truly, the awkwardest demonym. OGREISH is an OK word but it looks insane written out, like an Irish name (O'GREISH!). As for LAST BUS ... I wavered on it for a bit, but now I think I like it. It's no LAST TRAIN (to Clarksville or elsewhere), but it's a real phenomenon, and the "need" in the clue really sells it (7A: Something a commuter might need to catch).

Bullets:

• 1A: Swahili for "journey" (SAFARI) — should've been a gimme, I think, but I had DAS instead of AGS at 2D: Chief prosecutors, in brief, which put a "D" in the second "SAFARI" position :( I also had TAD before SOU up there (1D: Paltry amount). SOUs are the official currency of Crossworld, as decreed by OOXTEPLERNON, the God of Bad Short Fill (hallowed be His name). I have to remember to celebrate OOXTEPLERNON Day on October 30, for that is the day (in 2009) when OOXTEPLERNON revealed himself unto us, in grid form. How to celebrate? Simple. You sacrifice an Oreo (if you sacrifice it by feeding it to a NENE, even better ... for you. Probably not for the NENE)

• 20A: Sedative in a zookeeper's dart, informally (TRANK) — wrote in the TRAN- and then waited on the cross. Thought it might be a "Q" (both TRANK and TRANQ had five NYTXW appearances in the Modern Era ... before today. Now TRANK's ahead. Stay tuned for further information on the great TRANK/Q wars as it becomes available.
• 58A: Cocktail made from gin, vermouth and Campari (NEGRONI) — mmm. It's almost NEGRONI Season. When is NEGRONI Season? No one really knows. That's the beauty of NEGRONI Season.
• 47D: Suffers no damage (IS OK) — hoo boy, if any answer in this puzzle gave me trouble, it was this one. ISOK? ISOK?! Talk about four letters that do not look ... OK. ISOK??? Didn't she write Out of Afroca? You know, ISOK Dinoson!? The NYTXW once (maybe more than once) tried to convince me that I should know a Dilbert character (!?) named ASOK. ISOK makes me almost miss ASOK.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on BlueSky and Facebook and Letterboxd]
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