Texter's "just a sec" / WED 5-6-26 / First word from a wedding officiant / Flower found at the end of a rainbow?

Constructor: James Mattina

Relative difficulty: Hard (11:40)

THEME: CROSS POLLINATION — Hybridized, botanically … or like four pairs of answers in this puzzle (and the circled letters they intersect on)?

Theme answers:

• BLUEBELL and HIBISCUS intersect at the B
• ASTER and PEONY intersect at the E
• VIOLET and AZALEA intersect at the E
• PRIMROSE and DAISY intersect at the S
• The "crosses" create a "pollinator" (bees)

Word of the Day: HAMM (Soccer great Mia) —

Mariel Margaret "Mia" Hamm (born March 17, 1972) is an American former professional soccer player who played as a forward and midfielder for the United States national team from 1987 to 2004. She competed in four editions of the FIFA Women's World Cup, winning in 1991 and 1999. She won gold at the Olympic Games in 1996 and 2004, and won silver in 2000. She was a founding player of the Women's United Soccer Association (WUSA)—the first U.S. professional women's soccer league—where she played for the Washington Freedom from 2001 to 2003. She played college soccer for the North Carolina Tar Heels, helping the team win four NCAA Division I Championship titles. [wiki]

• • •

Hey squad! Welcome to another Malaika MWednesday. I solved this puzzle while taking the train home from seeing Mother Mary with Anne Hathaway. That girlie is in so many movies this year! 

I respected this theme a lot as a constructor. Puzzles where the theme answers cross are deceptively tricky to make. And some people may complain that there are no long theme answers (well, there's the revealer), but six medium-length answers that intersect are way harder to deal with than four long entries all going horizontally. You can see that James cordoned off each of the pairs in the corners as best he could, although HIBISCUS does have to intersect with the revealer as well. 

I love when foods are known by different terms. When I buy dried hibiscus from my grocery store in Crown Heights (I use it to make cocktails) I ask for sorrel, but when I get an agua fresca at a taqueria, I order jamaica. 

The fill didn't suffer too much, although OTS, ELAN, and MOOLA weren't great. I have always seen it spelled "moolah" and there was no "Var" tag on the clue so I really hesitated to fill that one in. I loved ODD NUMBERS and HOLY TOLEDO-- that central section almost felt like a themeless puzzle!

I appreciated the extra layer that the circled letters added. I was actually expecting some sort of turning theme or rebus, but seeing what they spelled out was a cute second reveal. I think it would have been enough to have flowers intersect, so it's nice to see the theme elevated one step more. Ultimately, I finished this with a smile on my face because it's warm today and I love flowers and I got to drink a margarita in the sun for Cinco de Mayo and this puzzle felt like spring spring spring spring spring and I have a tattoo of beautiful roses on my leg that I finally get to release from its Jeans Prison. What did you guys think? What's your favorite flower? Any flower tattoos from any of you guys?

Bullets:

• [Airdrops?] for MIST — Nothing much to say except that this is a great clue
• [Bloom whose toxic nectar is one source of "mad honey"] for AZALEA — I read a Jodi Picoult book called Mad Honey which was a collaboration with Jennifer Finney Boylan. I loved it but I love all of Picoult's books, as long as I read them spaced out.
• [Besties] for PALS — This one gave me pause because those two words are not the same thing to me! My bestie is a very very close friend, and my pal is a casual aquaintance. 
• [Company man?] for ACTOR — Is this referring to the show Company?

xoxo Malaika

P.S. I gave an interview about crosswords! You can read it on page 25 here. There's a themed puzzle there as well, which you can either print out or solve online here.

[Follow Rex Parker on BlueSky and Facebook and Letterboxd]
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Prohibited in Islam / TUE 5-5-26 / MLB stadium demolished in 2009 / Flightless bird from South America / Intermittently offered fast-food pork sandwich / 2016 Ariana Grande love song / Motorcyclist's invitation / Figure in a school pep rally / Media misinformation

Constructor: Max Schlenker

Relative difficulty: Challenging (***for a Tuesday***)

THEME: It's a snap, a cinch, etc. — phrases meaning "it's easy" that follow the [It's a ___] pattern are meant to be taken literally, so that the answer is a literal example of whatever fills in the blank in [It's a ___]:

Theme answers:

• LADYFINGER (18A: It's a piece of cake)
• SIMON SAYS (27A: It's child's play)
• HEADLESS HORSEMAN (42A: It's a no-brainer)
• TRADEWIND (52A: It's a breeze)
• NATURE HIKE (67A: It's a walk in the park)

Word of the Day: RAMBO (53D: Title role for Sylvester Stallone) —

Rambo is an American media franchise centered on a series of action films featuring John J. Rambo. The five films are First Blood (1982), Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985), Rambo III (1988), Rambo (2008), and Rambo: Last Blood (2019). Its titular protagonist is a United States Army Special Forces veteran played by Sylvester Stallone, whose Vietnam War experience traumatized him but also gave him superior military skills, which he has used to fight corrupt police officers, enemy troops and drug cartels. First Blood is an adaptation of the 1972 novel First Blood by David Morrell.

Though critical reception was mixed, the film series has grossed $819 million in total, $300 million of which is from the most successful film, Rambo: First Blood Part II. Sylvester Stallone is the only actor to have appeared in all five films in the franchise. Stallone co-wrote the screenplays of all five films, and directed Rambo (2008), the fourth film of the series. The franchise also spawned an animated series, as well as comic books, novels and video games. (wikipedia)

• • •

I think the theme is actually fine. Tougher than the usual Tuesday theme by its very nature—the actual answers don't have anything in common and you have to think figuratively every time, finding a single element inside a very broad category each time—but clever. Would've been right at home on a Wednesday, I think, but I'm not mad about the above-average Tuesday difficulty of the theme. What I am mad about is ... well, two things, and if you can't guess what those two are, then you must be new here, welcome, hello, this is a crossword blog that I write every day. So, firstly, the fill—this may be the worst-filled puzzle I've seen this year, not because any one answer is so bad (well ... there's one, but we'll get to that), but because once the crosswordese avalanche gets going, it never ever ever stops. It just picks up steam, rolling all over the grid, from top to bottom, and seemingly getting bigger along the way. Usually if the fill is so weak that I stop to take a grid picture early, that's a bad sign. Today, I stopped not once, not twice, but three times, because I couldn't believe that every single nook and cranny of this puzzle was going to be stuffed with tired repeaters, and yet ... the puzzle kept surprising me. I could've stopped very early, in the NW corner, where ORAL ARAL TADA LLAMA were already crowding the grid with their mustiness, but I decided to let it ride. But then, after HOOHA and then, on the other side of the grid, ODESSA and SKEE, I'd had enough.

Later, after the NARC ONCD and the ASHY RHEA, I re-had enough:

And then re-re-had enough down below, where the avalanche finally buried me alive, such that I couldn't even see the theme any more. The theme didn't matter because the short fill had suffocated me.

They brought back the IKEA MCRIB for this thing!? And an EPEE? And this is before the puzzle closed out with a NEATO ETUDE at the REN fest, not to mention the EMCEE ETS. And that middle. TSO THY LOOS. Ruthless. This puzzle was ruthless with its short gunk. How is anyone supposed to enjoy the interesting theme when the (oversized!) grid has not been properly attended to and cared for? 

But the real dealbreaker today was FAKE NEWS (26D: Media misinformation). F*** that guy and his stupid f***ing catchphrases and the whole right-wing project to discredit journalists and destroy journalism as a resource in this country. F*** him and SARAH Palin and Sylvester f***ing Stallone and his RAMBO bullshit. There is no neutral way to clue FAKE NEWS. That is a phrase popularized by one dude—one singularly amoral and incompetent dude—and then amplified by the worst bunch of sycophants this country has ever seen. As for Palin: there are many many SARAHs out there, and so few of them are national embarrassments, why not use one of those? I was gonna let that clue slide, though, until I hit FAKE NEWS, which I will never let slide. And then at the end of the puzzle, to run across one of the most famous megafans of the current White House resident—and in his stupid fake-he-man RAMBO costume no less—too much. I normally wouldn't have given RAMBO a second thought, but today? After the intentional rightwing boosterism? No. All too much. Hard no. I don't solve the puzzle in a vacuum. I solve it as an American citizen alive and kicking in 2026, so yeah, smearing that guy and his lackeys all over the puzzle does in fact make a difference as to how I feel about the puzzle. Overreacting?Too sensitive?  Great. I'm fine with those accusations. Someone should be sensitive.

DATUM!? Rueful LOL. Sorry, the fill, it just hurts so much. DATUM is one of those "words" that will occasionally (recently?) trip me up when I play Quordle because I forget that it is, in fact, a "word." I didn't struggle much with DATUM, but I did struggle elsewhere a bit. FAVE for GOTO (1A: Tried-and-true choice, informally). I balked at both OLYMPIAD and HARAM, the former because OLYMPIAD didn't seem particularly mathy-sciencey—aren't the regular Olympics called an OLYMPIAD?—and the latter because even though my brain wanted HARAM, I didn't trust it. "Are you just making up a word that kinda / sorta sounds like HALAL, brain?" Apparently not. HOMERUNS was a bit of a toughie as clued (23D: Undeniable successes). Took me several crosses to get the MASCOT part of TEAM MASCOT (31D: Figure in a school pep rally). KETTLES, also tricky (35A: Ones always blowing off steam?). These clues, and the oversized grid, made sure that my time was much slower than usual today (I don't actually time myself anymore, I could just tell).

Bullets:

• 10A: Motorcyclist's invitation ("HOP ON!") — one of the few breaths of fresh air among the short fill. A nice, zippy, colloquial phrase. "HOP ON! We're going to IDAHO!" (a beautiful place—where my mother grew up and where my grandmother lived her whole life)
• 46A: 2016 Ariana Grande love song ("INTO YOU") — another thing that slowed me down. If I've heard this song, I've forgotten it. What I know about ARIANA GRANDE is that both halves of her name appear in crosswords a lot, particularly the shortened form of her first name (ARI). 

• 72A: "OMG, same!" ("TOTES!") — are people still saying this? Did they ever? Real "IT'S LIT" energy here. 
• 73A: About 50.7% of all Americans (WOMEN) — reflexively started writing in ASIAN here until I looked at the clue a little closer. Subset of "Americans" + super-common five-letter answer = ASIAN. Or so says brain, anyway, when brain is on autopilot.

That's all for today. Happy Cinco de Mayo. See you next time.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on BlueSky and Facebook and Letterboxd]
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